Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)

by Henry S. Whitehead

  ‘I’m merely one enormous bruise,’ said Wilkes, ‘and I’m a bit surprised that either of us is – ’

  ‘Alive at all,’ I finished for him, and we nodded, rather dully, at each other.

  ‘Yes, after that last dash they gave us,’ added Wilkes. Then, slowly: ‘What do you suppose it’s all about, Canevin? Who, what is it? Is it – er – Allah – or – what?’

  ‘I’m none too agile myself,’ I said, after a pause spent going over various muscles and joints. ‘I’m intact, it seems, and I’ve got to agree with you, old man! I don’t in the least understand why we’re not in small fragments, “little heaps of huddled pulp”, as I once heard it put! However, if It can use a typhoon to move us about, of course It can temper the typhoon, land us gently, keep us off the ground – undoubtedly It did, for some good reason of Its own! However, the main point is that we’re still here – but where are we now?’

  It was not Wilkes who answered. The answer came – I am recording precisely what happened, exaggerating nothing, omitting nothing salient from this unprecedented adventure – the reply came to me mentally, as though by some unanticipated telepathy, quite clearly enunciated, registering itself unmistakably in my inner-consciousness.

  ‘Sit tight!’ it said. ‘I’m with you here on this end of things.’

  And the ‘voice’ which recorded itself in my brain, a calm, efficient kind of voice, a voice which reached out its intense helpfulness and sympathy to us, waifs of some inchoate void, a voice replete with reassurance, with steady confidence, a voice which healed the raw wounds of the beleaguered soul – was the voice of Pelletier.

  Pelletier standing by! I cannot hope to reproduce and set down here the immeasurable comfort of it.

  I stood up, Wilkes rising groaningly at the same time, a laborious, painful process, and, reeling on my two feet as I struggled for and finally established my normal balance, looked about me.

  We stood, to my mounting surprise, on a stone-flagged pavement. About us rose inner walls of smoothed stone. We were in a room about sixteen by twenty feet in size, lighted by an open doorway and by six windows symmetrically placed along the side walls, and unglazed. The light which flooded the room through these vents was plainly that of late afternoon. Simultaneously we stepped over to the wide-open doorway and looked out.

  Before us waved the dignified foliage of a mahogany grove, thickly interspersed with ceiba trees, its near edge gracious with the brave show of flowering shrubs in full blossom – small white flowers which smelled like the Cape jessamine. I had only just taken in these features when I felt Wilkes’s grip on my arm from where we stood, just behind me and a little to one side. His voice was little more than a whisper.

  ‘We’re – Oh, God! – Canevin! Look, Canevin, look! We’re back on earth!’ His whispered words broke in a succession of hysterical dry sobs, and, as I laid my arm about the poor fellow’s heaving shoulders, I felt the unchecked tears running down my own face.

  We stepped out side by side after a minute or two, and stood here, once more on true earth, in the pleasant silence of late afternoon and with the fragrance of those flowering shrubs pouring itself over everything. It was a delicate aroma, grateful and refreshing. We said nothing. We spent this quiet interval in some sort of silent thanksgiving.

  And, curiously, Wilkes’s oddly phrased question came forcibly into my mind: ‘Is it Allah – or what?’ I remembered, standing there in that pleasant, remote garden with its white flowers, an evening spent over a pair of pipes in the austere study of an old friend, Professor Harvey Vanderbogart, a brilliant young Orientalist, since dead. Vanderbogart, I remembered very clearly, had been speaking of one of the Moslem theologians, Al Ghazzali. He had quoted me a strange passage from the magnum opus of that medieval Saracen, a treatise well known to scholars as The Precious Pearl. I could even call back into my mind with the smell of the tobacco and the breeze blowing Vanderbogart’s dull reddish window curtains, the resonance of his serious, declaiming voice.

  ‘ . . . the soul of man passeth out of his body, and this soul is of the shape and size of a bee . . . The Lord Allah holdeth this soul of man between His thumb and finger, and Allah bringeth it close before His eyes, and Allah holdeth it at the length of His arm, and Allah saith: “Some are in the Garden – and I care not; and some are in the Fire – and I care not . . . ” ’

  Poor Vanderbogart had been dead many years, a most worthy and lovable fellow and a fine scholar. May he rest in peace! Doubtless he is reaping his reward of a blameless life, in the Garden.

  And here, somewhere on earth, which was, for the time being, quite enough for us to know, stood Wilkes and I, also in a garden, tremulously grateful to be alive, and on our Mother Earth, glad indeed of this respite as it seemed to us; free, for the time being, of the malevolent caprice of that Power from Whose baleful control, we, poor fools, supposed that we might have been, as it were carelessly, released.

  Our momentary illusion of security was strangely shattered.

  Without any preliminary warning of any kind, those great trees before us on the other edge of the row of flowering bushes made deep obeisance all together in their deeply rooted rows, in our direction, as a great wind tore rudely through them, hurling us backwards like chips of cork before a hurricane, whipping us savagely with the strong twigs of the uprooted shrubs pelting us, ironically, with a myriad detached blossoms. This fearsome surge of living air smote us back through the wide doorway and landed us in the middle of that compact stone room, and died as abruptly, leaving us, almost literally breathless, and reeling after our dislocated balance.

  There was, it occurred to me fragmentarily and with a poignant acuteness, a disastrous certainty brooking no mental denial, none of the benign carelessness of Allah about this Adversary of ours! His was, plainly enough, an active maleficence. He had no intention of allowing us quietly, unobtrusively, to slip away. If we had been landed once more on earth, it was in no sense a release – no more than the cat releases the mouse save to add some infinitesimal mental torture to that pitiful little creature’s dash for freedom, ending in the thrust of those ruthless retractile claws.

  Brief respites, the subsequent crushing of our very souls by that imponderable Force!

  We pulled ourselves together, Wilkes and I, there in that austere little stone room, and, in the breathless calm which had followed that astounding clap of air-force, we found ourselves racked to a very high degree of nervous tension. We stood there, and pumped laboriously the dead, heavy air into our laboring lungs in great gasping breaths. It was as though a vacuum had, for long moments, replaced the warm fresh air of a tropical midafternoon. The stone room’s floor was thickly sewn with those delicate white blooms, their odor now no longer refreshing; rather an overpowering additional element now, in the sultry burning air.

  Then the center of the rearmost end wall began to move, revealing another doorway the size of that which led outside into the little garden now denuded of its blooms. As the first heavy, grating crunching ushered this new fact into our keyed-up joint consciousness, we turned sharply toward that wall, now parting, moving back as though on itself.

  We looked through, into what seemed an endless, dim-lit vaulted arena of some forgotten worship, into the lofty nave of a titanic cathedral, through dim, dust-laden distances along a level floor of stone to where at an immense distance shimmered such an altar as the Titans might have erected to Jupiter, an altar of shining white stone and flanked by a chiseled figure of a young man, kneeling on one knee, and holding poised on that knee a vast cornucopia-like jar, for all the world, as I envisaged it, like a statute of zodiacal Aquarius.

  Greatly intrigued, Wilkes and I walked through the doorway out of our stone anteroom, into the colossal structure which towered far, far above into dimness, and straight across the stone-flagged nave toward this unexpected and alluring shrine; glowing up ahead there in all the comeliness of its ancient chaste beauty.

  That the architecture here, including the elab
orate ornamentation, was that of those same early Mayas concerning whom Pelletier had discoursed so learnedly, there could be no possible question. Here, plainly, was a very ancient and thoroughly authentic survival, intact, of the notable building propensity of that early people, The First Mayas of the High Culture, the founders of the predecessors of the present surviving and degenerate inhabitants. Here, about us, remained the work of that cryptic civilization which had so unaccountably disappeared off this planet’s face, leaving their enduring stone monuments, their veritable handiwork, developed, sophisticated, with its strange wealth of ornamentation behind them as an insoluble riddle for the archeologists.

  That this stupendous structure was a survival from a hoary antiquity there was all about us abundant and convincing evidence. I knew enough of the general subject to be acutely aware of that, that this represented the building principles of the earliest period – the high point, as I inderstood the matter, of the most notable of the successive Maya civilizations. That the building had stood empty and unused for some incalculable period in time was equally evidenced by various facts. One of these, unmistakable, was the thick blanket of fine dust which lay, literally inches thick, over everything; dust through which we were obliged to plod as though over the trackless surface of some roofed and ceiled Sahara; dust which rose in choking clouds behind and about us as we pressed forward toward that distant altar and its glorious statue.

  That figure of the youth with his votive jar towered up ahead of us there, white, glistening, beautiful – and the dust of uncounted centuries which lay inches thick upon its many upper, bearing, surfaces such as offered support to its impalpability, caused the heroic figure to stand out in a deeply enhanced and accentuated perspective, lending to it strange highlights in shining contrast to the very dust’s thick, quasi-shadows; a veritable perfection of shading such as no sculptor of this world could hope to rival.

  We walked, necessarily rather slowly, on and forward toward the altar and statue, their beauty and symmetry becoming more and more clearly apparent as our progress brought them closer and closer within the middle range of our vision.

  Naturally enough, I had pondered deeply upon the whole affair in which we were involved, in those intervals – such as our long night walk – as had been afforded us between the various actual ‘attacks’ of the Power that held us in its grip. I had, of course, put two and two together again and again in the unceasing human mental process of effort to make problematical two-and-two yield the satisfying four of a solution.

  This process, had, of course, included the consideration of many matters, such as the possible connection between the existence of the Great Power and that same ancient Maya civilization; the basic facts, the original reasons back of the terror of those massed aborigines swarming in their forest cover all about the tree-circle; the placing in their appropriate categories of the phenomena of the Great Body; that mechanical regular pulsation which could only be the throbbing of Its circulatory fluids – Ichor was the classical term, I remembered, for the blood of a god; the ‘ravines’ which crossed each other like shallow valleys and which were the ‘lines’ upon that primordial palm; the hirsute growth adorning that titanic forearm which had glistened like metallic tree-boles as the morning sun shone down that slope, and which moved their tapering tops in the breeze from the cosmic nostrils.

  All such as these, and various other details, I had, I say, attempted mentally to resolve, to adjust to their right and logical places and settings; to work, that is, mentally, into some coherent unity, literal or cosmic.

  The process had included the element of worship. The gods and demigods of deep antiquity had had their worshipers, their devotees diabolic or human, and this as an integral part, an essential, of their now only vaguely comprehended existence; since day and night struggled for primordial precedence in the dim gestation of time.

  That those prehistoric, highly civilized Maya forebears might have been worshipers of this particular Power (which, as we had had forced upon our attention, had somehow localized Its last stand here in these modern times – that Great Circle; the tree in its center as Its bridge to and from this world of ours) was a possibility which had long since occurred to me. That such a possibility might have some bearing upon that scientific puzzle which centered about their remote and simultaneous disappearance, had, I am sure, also occurred to me at that time. To that problem, which had barely come under my mental scrutiny because it was not central in terms of our predicament, I had, I am equally sure, given no particular thought.

  That there could, in the nature of the case, be any evidence – ‘documentary’ or merely archeological – had not entered my mind. I did wonder about it now, however, as we two plodded forward through those choking dust clouds, slowly yet surely onward toward what seemed to have been a major shrine of such forgotten worship, if, indeed, what I suspected had ever had its place upon this planet.

  For one thing, the worshipers themselves would by now have been dust these twenty centuries; perhaps, indeed, the once-animated basis of this very powder which swirled and eddied about us two, up from underfoot as we pushed forward laboriously toward the shrine. There, in its forgotten heyday, that worship had sent swirling and eddying upward in active spirals incense compounded of the native tree-gums; the balsams and olibana, the styrax and powdered sweet-leaves of the environing forests; incense bearing upward in its votive clouds the aspirations of an antiquity as remote as that of the Roman Augurs, and to a deity fiercer, more inscrutable, than Olympian Jove.

  It would, indeed, have been a relief to us to see some worshipers now, human beings, even though, devoted as they might be to their deity in Whose hostile power we were held, such personages should prove correspondingly hostile to us. This unrelenting, unrelieved god-and-victim situation was a truly desperate one. Within its terms – as I have elsewhere tried to make clear – we felt ourselves helpless. There was nothing to strike against! A man, however resolute, cannot, in the very nature of things, contend with a Power of this kind! Use-less mere courage, fortitude. Even the possession of a body stalwart, inured by exercise and constant usage against conflict and the deadly fatigue of intensive competitive effort, is no match for hurricanes – powerless against a Force which could be mistaken for a major geographical division of land!

  Despite the fact that we had gone without rest or sleep, to say nothing of food and water, for a much longer period than was our common custom; apart, too, from the fact that these sound bodies of ours were just then rather severely strained and racked from the cosmic manhandling to which we had been subjected; leaving wholly out of consideration the stresses which had worn thin our nervous resistance – taking into consideration all these factors which told against us, I know that both of us would have welcomed any contact, even though it should involve conflict of the most drastic kind, with human beings, people like ourselves. They might be, for all of us, out of any age, past or present; of any degree of rudeness, of any lack of civilization, in any numbers – just so that they be human.

  We did not know then – certainly I did not, and Wilkes was saying nothing – what lay in wait for us, just around the corner of time, so to speak!

  We had by now traversed about half of the distance between the anteroom and the altar. Behind us, a heavy, weaving, tenuous cloud of the fine dust we had disturbed hung like a gray, nebulous curtain between us and the towering rearward end wall of that enormous fane. Ahead now the altar glowed, jewel-like, in the slanting rays of a declining sun, rays which appeared to fall through some high opening as yet invisible to us. The genuflecting figure I have named Aquarius gleamed, too, gloriously, in its refined, heroic contours – a thing of such pure beauty as to cause the beholder to catch his breath.

  About us all things were utterly silent, a dead stillness, like the settled, lifeless quiet of some abandoned tomb. Even our own footfalls, muffled in the thick dust of marching centuries, registered no audible sound.

  An then, with the rude abruptne
ss which seemed to characterize every manifestation of that anachronistic divinity, that survival out of an unfriendly past, there came without any warning the deep, soul-stirring, contrapuntal beat of a vast gong. This tremendous note poured itself into this dead world, this arid arena of a forgotten worship; the sudden, pulsing atmosphere of renewal, of life itself.

  We stopped there in our tracks and the fine dust rose all about us like gray cumulus. We looked, we listened, and all about us the quickening air became alive. Then the vibrating, metallic clangor reverberated afresh and the atmosphere was electrified into pulsing animation; an unmistakable, palpable sense of fervid, hastening activity. We stood there, in that altered environment, tense, strained, every nerve and every faculty aroused as though by an unmistakable abrupt challenge. The altar seemed to coruscate in this new atmosphere. The zodiacal figure of Aquarius gleamed afresh in the sun’s slanting rays with a poignant, unearthly beauty.

  The slow, shattering sub-bass of the gong reverberated a third time, its mighty, overtonic echoes jarring the revived air with a challenging summons; and, before these had wholly died away and silence above the dust clouds established itself, out from some point beside and beyond the altar there emerged a slow-moving procession of men in long, dignified garments, in hierarchical vesture, walking gravely, two and two.

  We watched breathlessly. Here, at long last, was the fulfilment of that half-formulated wish. Human beings! Here were worshipers: tall, stalwart men; great, bearded men, warriors in seeming; bronzed, great-thewed hierophants, bearing strange instruments, the paraphernalia of some remote ritual – wands and metal cressets; chained thuribles, naviculae, long cornucopiae, like that upon the flexed knee of Aquarius; harsh-sounding systra, tinkling triangles, netted rattles strung with small, sweet-chiming bells; salsalim, castanets, clanging cymbals; great rams’ horns banded with plates of shining fresh gold; enormous, fanlike implements of a substance like elephants’ hide; a gilt canopy, swaying on ebony poles, ponderous, its fringes powdered with jewels, sheltering a votive bullock, its wide horns buried beneath looped garlands. This procession moved gravely toward the altar, an endless stream of grave, bearded men, until, as we watched, stultified, wondering, the space about it became finally filled, and the slow-moving, endless-seeming throng, women and girls among the men now, turned toward us, pouring deliberately into the forepart of the nave.