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

by Henry S. Whitehead

  ‘But, there wasn’t anything about it all that he hadn’t at his very finger ends, and at first-hand, too. The man was a walking encyclopedia of the native beliefs, customs, and practises. He knew, too, every turn and twist of their speech. He hadn’t, as he had said at first, “gone native” in the slightest degree, and yet, without lowering his White Man’s dignity by a trifle, he had got it all.

  ‘That brings us to the specific happening, the “story” which, he had said, went along with his reason for coming in to the hospital in Port au Prince, to us.

  ‘It appears that his sarcoma had never, practically, troubled him. Beyond noting a very gradual increase in its size from year to year, he said, he “wouldn’t know he had one”. In other words, characteristically, it never gave him any pain or direct annoyance beyond the sense of the wretched thing being there, and increasing on him, and always drawing him closer to that end of life which the New York doctors had warned him about.

  ‘Then, it had happened only three days before he came to the hospital, he had gone suddenly unconscious one afternoon, as he was walking down his shell path to his gateway. The last thing he remembered then was being “about four steps from the gate”. When he woke up, it was dark. He was seated in a big chair on his own front gallery, and the first thing he noticed was that his fingers and thumbs were sore and ached very painfully. The next thing was that there were flares burning all along the edge of the gallery, and down in the front yard, and along the road outside the paling fence that divides his property from the road, and in the light of these flares, there swarmed literally hundreds of Negroes, gathered about him and mostly on their knees; lined along the gallery and on the grounds below it; prostrating themselves, chanting, putting earth and sand on their heads; and, when he leaned back in his chair, something hurt the back of his neck, and he found that he was being nearly choked with the necklaces, strings of beads, gold and silver coin-strings, and other kinds, that had been draped over his head. His fingers, and the thumbs as well, were covered with gold and silver rings, many of them jammed on so as to stop the circulation.

  ‘From his knowledge of their beliefs, he recognized what had happened to him. He had, he figured, probably fainted, although such a thing was not at all common with him, going down the pathway to the yard gate, and the Blacks had supposed him to be “possessed” as he had several times seen Black people, children, old men and women, morons, chiefly, similarly “possessed”. He knew that, now that he was recovered from whatever had happened to him, the “worship” ought to cease and if he simply sat quiet and took what was coming to him, they would, as soon as they realized he was “himself” once more, leave him alone and he would get some relief from this uncomfortable set of surroundings; get rid of the necklaces and the rings; get a little privacy.

  ‘But – the queer part of it all was that they didn’t quit. No, the mob around the house and on the gallery increased rather than diminished, and at last he was put to it, from sheer discomfort – he said he came to the point where he felt he couldn’t stand it all another instant – to speak up and ask the people to leave him in peace.

  ‘They left him, he says, at that, right off the bat, immediately, without a protesting voice, but – and here was what started him on his major puzzlement – they didn’t take off the necklaces and rings. No – they left the whole set of that metallic drapery which they had hung and thrust upon him right there, and, after he had been left alone, as he had requested, and had gone into his house, and lifted off the necklaces and worked the rings loose, the next thing that happened was that old Pa’p Josef, the local papaloi, together with three or four other neighboring papalois, witch-doctors from nearby villages, and followed by a very old man who was known to Carswell as the hougan, or head witch-doctor of the whole countryside thereabouts, came in to him in a kind of procession, and knelt down all around him on the floor of his living-room, and laid down gourds of cream and bottles of red rum and cooked chickens, and even a big china bowl of Tannia soup – a dish he abominated, said it always tasted like soapy water to him! – and then backed out leaving him to these comestibles.

  ‘He said that this sort of attention persisted in his case, right through the three days that he remained in his house in Léogane, before he started out for the hospital; would, apparently, be still going on if he hadn’t come in to Port au Prince to us.

  ‘But – his coming in was not, in the least, because of this. It had puzzled him a great deal, for there was nothing like it in his experience, nor, so far as he could gather from their attitude, in the experience of the people about him, of the papalois, or even of the hougan himself. They acted, in other words, precisely as though the “deity” supposed to have taken up his abode within him had remained there, although there seemed no precedent for such an occurrence, and, so far as he knew, he felt precisely just as he had felt right along, that is, fully awake, and, certainly, not in anything like an abnormal condition, and, very positively, not in anything like a fainting-fit!

  ‘That is to say – he felt precisely the same as usual except that – he attributed it to the probability that he must have fallen on the ground that time when he lost consciousness going down the pathway to the gate (he had been told that passers-by had picked him up and carried him to the gallery where he had awakened, later, these Good Samaritans meanwhile recognizing that one of the “deities” had indwelt him) – he felt the same except for recurrent, almost unbearable pains in the vicinity of his lower abdominal region.

  ‘There was nothing surprising to him in this accession of the new painfulness. He had been warned that that would be the beginning of the end. It was in the rather faint hope that something might be done that he had come in to the hospital. It speaks volumes for the man’s fortitude, for his strength of character, that he came in so cheerfully; acquiesced in what we suggested to him to do; remained with us, facing those comparatively slim chances with complete cheerfulness.

  ‘For – we did not deceive Carswell – the chances were somewhat slim. “Sixty-forty” I had said, but as I afterward made clear to him, the favorable chances, as gleaned from the mortality tables, were a good deal less than that.

  ‘He went to the table in a state of mind quite unchanged from his accustomed cheerfulness. He shook hands good-bye with Doctor Smithson and me, “in case”, and also with Doctor Jackson, who acted as anesthetist.

  ‘Carswell took an enormous amount of ether to get him off. His consciousness persisted longer, perhaps, than that of any surgical patient I can remember. At last, however, Doctor Jackson intimated to me that I might begin, and, Doctor Smithson standing by with the retracting forceps, I made the first incision. It was my intention, after careful study of the X-ray plates, to open it up from in front, in an up-and-down direction, establish drainage directly, and, leaving the wound in the sound tissue in front of it open, to attempt to get it healed up after removing its contents. Such is the technique of the major portion of successful operations.

  ‘It was a comparatively simple matter to expose the outer wall. This accomplished, and after a few words of consultation with my colleague, I very carefully opened it. We recalled that the X-ray had shown, as I mentioned, a triangular-shaped mass within. This apparent content we attributed to some obscure chemical coloration of the contents. I made my incisions with the greatest care and delicacy, of course. The critical part of the operation lay right at this point, and the greatest exactitude was indicated, of course.

  ‘At last the outer coats of it were cut through, and retracted, and with renewed caution I made the incision through the inmost wall of tissue. To my surprise, and to Doctor Smithson’s, the inside was comparatively dry. The gauze which the nurse attending had caused to follow the path of the knife, was hardly moistened. I ran my knife down below the original scope of the last incision, then upward from its upper extremity, greatly lengthening the incision as a whole, if you are following me.

  ‘Then, reaching my gloved hand within this long up-an
d-down aperture, I felt about and at once discovered that I could get my fingers in around the inner containing wall quite easily. I reached and worked my fingers in farther and farther, finally getting both hands inside and at last feeling my fingers touch inside the posterior or rear wall. Rapidly, now, I ran the edges of my hands around inside, and, quite easily, lifted out the “inside”. This, a mass weighing several pounds, of more or less solid material, was laid aside on the small table beside the operating-table, and, again pausing to consult with Doctor Smithson – the operation was going, you see, a lot better than either of us had dared to anticipate – and being encouraged by him to proceed to a radical step which we had not hoped to be able to take, I began the dissection from the surrounding, normal tissue, of the now collapsed walls. This, a long, difficult, and harassing job, was accomplished at the end of, perhaps, ten or twelve minutes of gruelling work, and the bag-like thing, now completely severed from the tissues in which it had been for so long imbedded, was placed also on the side table.

  ‘Doctor Jackson reporting favorably on our patient’s condition under the anesthetic, I now proceeded to dress the large aperture, and to close the body-wound. This was accomplished in a routine manner, and then, together, we bandaged Carswell, and he was taken back to his room to await awakening from the ether.

  ‘Carswell disposed of, Doctor Jackson and Doctor Smithson left the operating-room and the nurse started in cleaning up after the operation; dropping the instruments into the boiler, and so on – a routine set of duties. As for me, I picked up the shell in a pair of forceps, turned it about under the strong electric operating-light, and laid it down again. It presented nothing of interest for a possible laboratory examination.

  ‘Then I picked up the more or less solid contents which I had laid, very hastily, and without looking at it – you see, my actual removal of it had been done inside, in the dark for the most part and by the sense of feeling, with my hands, you will remember – I picked it up; I still had my operating-gloves on to prevent infection when looking over these specimens, and, still, not looking at it particularly, carried it out into the laboratory.

  ‘Canevin’ – Doctor Pelletier looked at me somberly through the very gradually fading light of late afternoon, the period just before the abrupt falling of our tropic dusk – ‘Canevin,’ he repeated, ‘honestly, I don’t know how to tell you! Listen now, old man, do something for me, will you?’

  ‘Why, yes – of course,’ said I, considerably mystified. ‘What is it you want me to do, Pelletier?’

  ‘My car is out in front of the house. Come on home with me, up to my house, will you? Let’s say I want to give you a cocktail! Anyhow, maybe you’ll understand better when you are there, I want to tell you the rest up at the house, not here. Will you please come, Canevin?’

  I looked at him closely. This seemed to me a very strange, an abrupt, request. Still, there was nothing whatever unreasonable about such a sudden whim on Pelletier’s part.

  ‘Why, yes, certainly I’ll go with you, Pelletier, if you want me to.’

  ‘Come on, then,’ said Pelletier, and we started for his car.

  The doctor drove himself, and after we had taken the first turn in the rather complicated route from my house to his, on the extreme airy top of Denmark Hill, he said, in a quiet voice: ‘Put together, now, Canevin, certain points, if you please, in this story. Note, kindly, how the Black People over in Léogane acted, according to Carswell’s story. Note, too, that theory I was telling you about; do you recollect it clearly?’

  ‘Yes,’ said I, still more mystified.

  ‘Just keep those two points in mind, then,’ added Doctor Pelletier, and devoted himself to navigating sharp turns and plodding up two steep roadways for the rest of the drive to his house.

  We went in and found his houseboy laying the table for his dinner. Doctor Pelletier is unmarried, keeps a hospitable bachelor establishment. He ordered cocktails, and the houseboy departed on this errand. Then he led me into a kind of office, littered with medical and surgical paraphernalia. He lifted some papers off a chair, motioned me into it, and took another near by. ‘Listen, now!’ he said, and held up a finger at me.

  ‘I took that thing, as I mentioned, into the laboratory,’ said he. ‘I carried it in my hand, with my gloves still on, as aforesaid. I laid it down on a table and turned on a powerful light over it. It was only then that I took a good look at it. It weighed several pounds at least, was about the bulk and heft of a full-grown coconut, and about the same color as a hulled coconut, that is, a kind of medium brown. As I looked at it, I saw that it was, as the X-ray had indicated, vaguely triangular in shape. It lay over on one of its sides under that powerful light, and – Canevin, so help me God’ – Doctor Pelletier leaned toward me, his face working, a great seriousness in his eyes – ‘it moved, Canevin,’ he murmured, ‘and, as I looked – the thing breathed! I was just plain dumbfounded. A biological specimen like that – does not move, Canevin! I shook all over, suddenly. I felt my hair prickle on the roots of my scalp. I felt chills go down my spine. Then I remembered that here I was, after an operation, in my own biological laboratory. I came close to the thing and propped it up, on what might be called its logical base, if you see what I mean, so that it stood as nearly upright as its triangular conformation permitted.

  ‘And then I saw that it had faint yellowish markings over the brown, and that what you might call its skin was moving, and – as I stared at the thing, Canevin – two things like little arms began to move, and the top of it gave a kind of convulsive shudder, and it opened straight at me, Canevin, a pair of eyes and looked me in the face.

  ‘Those eyes – my God, Canevin, those eyes! They were eyes of something more than human, Canevin, something incredibly evil, something vastly old, sophisticated, cold, immune from anything except pure evil, the eyes of something that had been worshipped, Canevin, from ages and ages out of a past that went back before all known human calculation, eyes that showed all the deliberate, lurking wickedness that has ever been in the world. The eyes closed, Canevin, and the thing sank over onto its side, and heaved and shuddered convulsively.

  ‘It was sick, Canevin; and now, emboldened, holding myself together, repeating over and over to myself that I had a case of the quavers, of post-operative “nerves”, I forced myself to look closer, and as I did so I got from it a faint whiff of ether. Two tiny, ape-like nostrils, over a clamped-shut slit of a mouth, were exhaling and inhaling; drawing in the good, pure air, exhaling ether fumes. It popped into my head that Carswell had consumed a terrific amount of ether before he went under; we had commented on that, Doctor Jackson particularly. I put two and two together, Canevin, remembered we were in Haiti, where things are not like New York, or Boston, or Baltimore! Those Negroes had believed that the “deity” had not come out of Carswell, do you see? That was the thing that held the edge of my mind. The thing stirred uneasily, put out one of its “arms”, groped about, stiffened.

  ‘I reached for a nearby specimen-jar, Canevin, reasoning, almost blindly, that if this thing were susceptible to ether, it would be susceptible to – well, my gloves were still on my hands, and – now shuddering so that I could hardly move at all, I had to force every motion – I reached out and took hold of the thing – it felt like moist leather – and dropped it into the jar. Then I carried the carboy of preserving alcohol over to the table and poured it in till the ghastly thing was entirely covered, the alcohol near the top of the jar. It writhed once, then rolled over on its “back”, and lay still, the mouth now open. Do you believe me, Canevin?’

  ‘I have always said that I would believe anything on proper evidence,’ said I, slowly, ‘and I would be the last to question a statement of yours, Pelletier. However, although I have, as you say, looked into some of these things perhaps more than most, it seems, well – ’

  Doctor Pelletier said nothing. Then he slowly got up out of his chair. He stepped over to a wall-cupboard and returned, a wide-mouthed specimen-jar in his hand.
He laid the jar down before me, in silence.

  I looked into it, through the slightly discolored alcohol with which the jar, tightly sealed with rubber-tape and sealing-wax, was filled nearly to the brim. There, on the jar’s bottom, lay such a thing as Pelletier had described (a thing which, if it had been ‘seated’, upright, would somewhat have resembled that representation of the happy little godling ‘Billiken’ which was popular twenty years ago as a desk ornament), a thing suggesting the sinister, the unearthly, even in this desiccated form. I looked long at the thing.

  ‘Excuse me for even seeming to hesitate, Pelletier,’ said I, reflectively.

  ‘I can’t say that I blame you,’ returned the genial doctor. ‘It is, by the way, the first and only time I have ever tried to tell the story to anybody.’

  ‘And Carswell?’ I asked. ‘I’ve been intrigued with that good fellow and his difficulties. How did he come out of it all?’

  ‘He made a magnificent recovery from the operation,’ said Pelletier, ‘and afterward, when he went back to Léogane, he told me that the Negroes, while glad to see him quite usual, had quite lost interest in him as the throne of a “divinity”.’

  ‘H’m,’ I remarked, ‘it would seem, that, to bear out – ’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pelletier, ‘I have always regarded that fact as absolutely conclusive. Indeed, how otherwise could one possibly account for – this?’ He indicated the contents of the laboratory jar.