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

by Henry S. Whitehead

  ‘Then I was, really, frightened – thoroughly, utterly frightened. I knew if that “animal” so much as touched me, it meant death, Mr Lee – absolute, certain death. The little old woman was a “sheen” – chien, of course. You know of lycanthropy – wolf-change – of course. Well, this was one of our varieties of it. I do not know what it would be called, I’m sure. “Canicanthropy”, perhaps. I don’t know, but something – something first-cousin-once-removed from lycanthropy, and on the downward scale, Mr Lee. The old woman was a were-dog!

  ‘Of course, I had no time to think, only to use my instinct. I swung my supplejack with all my might and brought it down squarely on that beast’s head. It was only a step below me, then, and I could see the faint moonlight sparkle on the slaver about its mouth. It was then, it seemed to me, about the size of a medium-sized dog – nearly wolf-size, Mr Lee, and a kind of deathly white. I was desperate, and the force with which I struck caused me to lose my balance. I did not fall, but it required a moment or two for me to regain my equilibrium. When I felt my feet firm under me again, I looked about, frantically, on all sides, for the “dog”. But it, too, Mr Lee, like the old woman, had quite disappeared. I looked all about, you may well imagine, after that experience, in the clear, thin moonlight. For yards about the foot of the steps, there was no place – not even a small nook – where either the “dog” or the old woman could have been concealed. Neither was on the gallery, which was only a few feet square, a mere landing.

  ‘But there came to my ears, sharpened by that night’s experiences, from far out among the plantations at the rear of Iversen’s house, the pad-pad of naked feet. Someone – something – was running, desperately, off in the direction of the center of the island, back into the hills, into the deep “bush”.

  ‘Then, behind me, out of the house onto the gallery rushed the two old women who had been preparing Iversen’s body for its burial. They were enormously excited, and they shouted at me unintelligibly. I will have to render their words for you.

  ‘ “O, de Good Gahd protec’ you, Marster Jaffray, sir – de Joombie, de Joombie! De “Sheen”, Marster Jaffray! He go, sir?”

  ‘I reassured the poor old souls, and went back home.’

  Mr Da Silva fell abruptly silent. He slowly shifted his position in his chair, and reached for, and lighted, a fresh cigarette.

  Mr Lee was absolutely silent. He did not move. Mr Da Silva resumed, deliberately, after obtaining a light.

  ‘You see, Mr Lee, the West Indies are different from any other place in the world, I verily believe, sir. I’ve said so, anyhow, many a time, although I have never been out of the islands except when I was a young man, to Copenhagen. I’ve told you, exactly, what happened that particular night.’

  Mr Lee heaved a sigh.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Da Silva, very much indeed, sir,’ said he, thoughtfully, and made as though to rise. His service wrist-watch indicated six o’clock.

  ‘Let us have a fresh swizzel, at least, before you go,’ suggested Mr Da Silva. ‘We have a saying here in the island, that “a man can’t travel on one leg”! Perhaps you’ve heard it already.’

  ‘I have,’ said Mr Lee.

  ‘Knud, Knud! You hear, mon? Knud – tell Charlotte to mash up another bal’ of ice – you hear? Quickly now,’ commanded Mr Da Silva.

  Cassius

  My house-man, Stephen Penn, who presided over the staff of my residence in St Thomas, was not, strictly speaking, a native of that city. Penn came from the neighboring island of St Jan. It is one of the ancient West Indian names, although there remain in the islands nowadays no Caucasians to bear that honorable cognomen.

  Stephen’s travels, however, had not been limited to the crossing from St Jan – which, incidentally, is the authentic scene of R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island – which lies little more than a rowboat’s journey away from the capital of the Virgin Islands. Stephen had been ‘down the Islands’, which means that he had been actually as far from home as Trinidad or, perhaps, British Guiana, down through the great sweep of former mountaintops, submerged by some vast, cataclysmic, prehistoric inundation and named the Bow of Ulysses by some fanciful, antique geographer. That odyssey of humble Stephen Penn had taken place because of his love for ships. He had had various jobs afloat and his exact knowledge of the house-man’s art had been learned under various man-driving ship’s stewards.

  During this preliminary training for his life’s work, Stephen had made many acquaintances. One of these, an upstanding, slim, parchment-colored Negro of thirty or so, was Brutus Hellman. Brutus, like Stephen, had settled down in St Thomas as a house-man. It was, in fact, Stephen who had talked him into leaving his native British Antigua, to try his luck in our American Virgin Islands. Stephen had secured for him his first job in St Thomas, in the household of a naval officer.

  For this friend of his youthful days, Stephen continued to feel a certain sense of responsibility; because, when Brutus happened to be abruptly thrown out of employment by the sudden illness and removal by the Naval Department of his employer in the middle of the winter season in St Thomas, Stephen came to me and requested that his friend Brutus be allowed to come to me ‘on board-wages’ until he was able to secure another place.

  I acquiesced. I knew Brutus as a first-rate house-man. I was glad to give him a hand, to oblige the always agreeable and highly efficient Stephen, and, indeed, to have so skilful a servant added to my little staff in my bachelor quarters. I arranged for something more substantial than the remuneration asked for, and Brutus Hellman added his skilled services to those of the admirable Stephen. I was very well served that season and never had any occasion to regret what both men alluded to as my ‘very great kindness’!

  It was not long after Brutus Hellman had moved his simple belongings into one of the servants’-quarters cabins in my stone-paved yard, that I had another opportunity to do something for him. It was Stephen once more who presented his friend’s case to me. Brutus, it appeared, had need of a minor operation, and, Negro-like, the two of them, talking the matter over between themselves, had decided to ask me, their present patron, to arrange it.

  I did so, with my friend, Dr Pelletier, Chief Surgeon, in charge of our Naval Station Hospital and regarded in Naval circles as the best man in the Medical Corps. I had not inquired about the nature of Brutus’s affliction. Stephen had stressed the minor aspect of the required surgery, and that was all I mentioned to Dr Pelletier.

  It is quite possible that if Dr Pelletier had not been going to Porto Rico on Thursday of that week, this narrative, the record of one of the most curious experiences I have ever had, would never have been set down. If Pelletier, his mind set on sailing at eleven, had not merely walked out of his operating-room as soon as he had finished with Brutus a little after eight that Thursday morning, leaving the dressing of the slight wound upon Brutus’s groin to be performed by his assistants, then that incredible affair which I can only describe as the persecution of the unfortunate Brutus Hellman would never have taken place.

  It was on Wednesday, about two p.m., that I telephoned to Dr Pelletier to ask him to perform an operation on Brutus.

  ‘Send him over to the hospital this afternoon,’ Pelletier had answered, ‘and I’ll look him over about five and operate the first thing in the morning – if there is any need for an operation! I’m leaving for San Juan at eleven, for a week.’

  I thanked him and went upstairs to my siesta, after giving Stephen the message to Brutus, who started off for the hospital about an hour later. He remained in the hospital until the following Sunday afternoon. He was entirely recovered from the operation, he reported. It had been a very slight affair, really, merely the removal of some kind of growth. He thanked me for my part in it when he came to announce dinner while I was reading on the gallery.

  It was on the Saturday morning, the day before Brutus got back, that I discovered something very curious in an obscure corner of my house-yard, just around the corner of the wall of the three small cabins
which occupy its north side. These cabins were tenantless except for the one at the east end of the row. That one was Brutus Hellman’s. Stephen Penn, like my cook, washer, and scullery-maid, lived somewhere in the town.

  I had been looking over the yard which was paved with old-fashioned flagging. I found it in excellent condition, weeded, freshly swept, and clean. The three stone servants’-cubicles had been recently whitewashed and glistened like cake-icing in the morning sun. I looked over this portion of my domain with approval, for I like things shipshape. I glanced into the two narrow air spaces between the little, two-room houses. There were no cobwebs visible. Then I took a look around the east corner of Brutus Hellman’s little house where there was a narrow passageway between the house and the high wall of antique Dutch brick, and there, well in towards the north wall, I saw on the ground what I first took to be a discarded toy which some child had thrown there, probably, it occurred to me, over the wall at the back of the stone cabins.

  It looked like a doll’s house, which, if it had been thrown there, had happened to land right-side-up. It looked more or less like one of the quaint old-fashioned beehives one still sees occasionally in the conservative Lesser Antilles. But it could hardly be a beehive. It was far too small.

  My curiosity mildly aroused, I stepped into the alleyway and looked down at the odd little thing. Seen from where I stopped it rewarded scrutiny. For it was, although made in a somewhat bungling way, a reproduction of an African village hut, thatched, circular, conical. The thatching, I suspected, had formerly been most of the business-end of a small house-broom of tine twigs tied together around the end of a stick. The little house’s upright ‘logs’ were a heterogenous medley of little round sticks among which I recognized three dilapidated lead pencils and the broken-off handle of a tooth-brush. These details will serve to indicate its size and to justify my original conclusion that the thing was a rather cleverly made child’s toy. How such a thing had got into my yard unless over the wall, was an unimportant little mystery. The little hut, from the ground up to its thatched peak, stood about seven inches in height. Its diameter was, perhaps, eight or nine inches.

  My first reaction was to pick it up, look at it more closely, and then throw it into the wire cage in another corner of the yard where Stephen burned up waste paper and scraps at frequent intervals. The thing was plainly a discarded toy, and had no business cluttering up my spotless yard. Then I suddenly remembered the washer’s pick’ny, a small, silent, very black child of six or seven, who sometimes played quietly in the yard while his stout mother toiled over the washtub set up on a backless chair near the kitchen door where she could keep up a continuous stream of chatter with my cook.

  I stayed my hand accordingly. Quite likely this little thatched hut was a valued item of that pick’ny’s possessions. Thinking pleasantly to surprise little Aesculapius, or whatever the child’s name might be, I took from my pocket a fifty-bit piece – value ten cents – intending to place the coin inside the little house, through its rounded, low entranceway.

  Stooping down, I shoved the coin through the doorway, and, as I did so, something suddenly scuttered about inside the hut, and pinched viciously at the ends of my thumb and forefinger.

  I was, naturally, startled. I snatched my fingers away, and stood hastily erect. A mouse, perhaps even a rat, inside there! I glanced at my fingers. There were no marks on them. The skin was not broken. The rodent’s vicious little sharp teeth had fortunately missed their grip as he snapped at me, intruding on his sacred privacy. Wondering a little I stepped out of the alleyway and into the sunny, open yard, somewhat upset at this Lilliputian contretemps, and resolved upon telling Stephen to see to it that there was no ugly rodent there when next little Aesculapius should retrieve his plaything.

  But when I arrived at the gallery steps my friend Colonel Lorriquer’s car was just drawing up before the house, and, in hastening to greet welcome early-morning callers and later in accepting Mrs Lorriquer’s invitation to dinner and contract at their house that evening, the little hut and its unpleasant inhabitant were driven wholly out of my mind.

  I did not think of it again until several days later, on the night when my premises had become the theater for one of the most inexplicable, terrifying and uncanny happenings I have ever experienced.

  My gallery is a very pleasant place to sit evenings, except in that spring period during which the West Indian candle-moths hatch in their myriads and, for several successive days, make it impossible to sit outdoors in any lighted, unscreened place.

  It was much too early for the candle-moths, however, at the time I am speaking of, and on the evening of that Sunday upon which Brutus Hellman returned from the hospital, a party of four persons, including myself, occupied the gallery.

  The other man was Arthur Carswell, over from Haiti on a short visit. The two ladies were Mrs Spencer, Colonel Lorriquer’s widowed daughter, and her friend, Mrs Squire. We had dined an hour previously at the Grand Hotel as guests of Carswell, and, having taken our coffee at my house, were remaining outdoors on the gallery ‘for a breath of air’ on a rather warm and sultry February evening. We were sitting, quietly talking in a rather desultory manner, all of us unspokenly reluctant to move inside the house for a projected evening at contract.

  It was, as I recall the hour, about nine o’clock, the night warm, as I have said, and very still. Above, in a cloudless sky of luminous indigo, the tropical stars glowed enormous. The intoxicating sweet odors of white jessamine and tuberoses made the still air redolent. No sound, except an occasional rather languid remark from one of ourselves, broke the exquisite, balmy stillness.

  Then, all at once, without any warning and with an abruptness which caused Carswell and me to stand up, the exquisite perfection of the night was rudely shattered by an appalling, sustained scream of sheer mortal terror.

  That scream inaugurated what seems to me as I look back upon the next few days, to be one of the most unnerving, devastating, and generally horrible periods I can recall in a lifetime not devoid of adventure. I formulated at that time, and still retain, mentally, a phrase descriptive of it. It was ‘the Reign of Terror’.

  Carswell and I, following the direction of the scream, rushed down the outer gallery steps and back through the yard toward the Negro-cabins. As I have mentioned, only one of these was occupied, Brutus Hellman’s. As we rounded the corner of the house a faint light – it was Brutus’s oil lamp – appeared in the form of a wide vertical strip at the entrance of the occupied cabin. To that we ran as to a beacon, and pushed into the room.

  The lamp, newly lighted, and smoking, its glass chimney set on askew as though in great haste, dimly illuminated a strange scene. Doubled up and sitting on the side of his bed, the bedclothes near the bed’s foot lumped together where he had flung them, cowered Brutus. His face was a dull, ashen gray in the smokey light, his back was bent, his hands clasped tightly about his shin. And, from between those clenched hands, a steady stream of blood stained the white sheet which hung over the bed’s edge and spread below into a small pool on the cabin room’s stone-paved floor.

  Brutus, groaning dismally, rocked back and forth, clutching his leg. The lamp smoked steadily, defiling the close air, while, incongruously, through the now open doorway poured streams and great pulsing breaths of night-blooming tropical flowers, mingling strangely with the hot, acrid odor of the smoking lampwick.

  Carswell went directly to the lamp, straightened the chimney, turned down the flame. The lamp ceased its ugly reek and the air of the cabin cleared as Carswell, turning away from the lamp, threw wide the shutters of the large window which, like most West Indian Negroes, Brutus had closed against the ‘night air’ when he retired.

  I gave my attention directly to the man, and by the time the air had cleared somewhat I had him over on his back in a reclining position, and with a great strip torn from one of his bedsheets, was binding up the ugly deep little wound in the lower muscle of his leg just at the outside of the shinbone. I pu
lled the improvised bandage tight, and the flow of blood ceased, and Brutus, his mind probably somewhat relieved by this timely aid, put an end to his moaning, and turned his ashen face up to mine.

  ‘Did you see it, sar?’ he inquired, biting back the trembling of his mouth.

  I paid practically no attention to this remark. Indeed, I barely heard it. I was, you see, very busily engaged in staunching the flow of blood. Brutus had already lost a considerable quantity, and my rough bandaging was directed entirely to the end of stopping this. Instead of replying to Brutus’s question I turned to Carswell, who had finished with the lamp and the window, and now stood by, ready to lend a hand in his efficient way.

  ‘Run up to the bathroom, will you, Carswell, and bring me a couple of rolls of bandage, from the medicine closet, and a bottle of mercurochrome.’ Carswell disappeared on this errand and I sat, holding my hands tightly around Brutus’s leg, just above the bandage. Then he repeated his question, and this time I paid attention to what he was saying.

  ‘See what, Brutus?’ I inquired, and looked at him, almost for the first time – into his eyes, I mean. Hitherto I had been looking at my bandaging.

  I saw a stark terror in those eyes.

  ‘It,’ said Brutus; ‘de T’ing, sar.’

  I sat on the side of the bed and looked at him. I was, naturally, puzzled.

  ‘What thing, Brutus?’ I asked, very quietly, almost soothingly. Such terror possessed my second house-man that, I considered, he must, for the time being, be treated like a frightened child.

  ‘De T’ing what attack me, sar,’ explained Brutus.

  ‘What was it like?’ I countered. ‘Do you mean it is still here – in your room?’