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

by Henry S. Whitehead

  I remain, yours most faithfully and to command,

  Angus Gannett

  P.S. Knudsen, of course, insists that some blacks, followers of Pap’ Joseph, merely exchanged the bodies of the bullock and my half-brother, during the interval, after my shooting of the beast, in which my hall remained unvisited by any of my household.

  A. G.

  3

  I finished the account and handed it back to Herr Malling. I thanked him for his extraordinary courtesy in allowing me to read it. And then I walked straight to Gannett House to look once more at that hall where all this mysterious succession of strange affairs had taken place. I sat down, after Robertson had let me in, in the place usually occupied by Mrs Garde, and Robertson brought me a solitary tea on the great circular tray.

  I could not forbear glancing up toward the place once occupied by that board platform where a voodoo baptism had all but taken place; a strange rite interrupted just before its culmination by the collapse of long dead and gone Otto Andreas, with his unquenchable desire for the fellowship of the Snake! There are strange matters in our West Indies. Well, God was, always had been, always will be, stronger than the Snake. There would be, I felt well assured, no recurrence of that strange vision which had projected itself after all these years, of that bullock’s ‘almost human’ eyes, reproachful, pathetic, as Mrs Garde had said, looking down at the grim Scot with his steady hand leveling his great horse pistol at the point between those eyes.

  Mrs Garde returned to her hired house infinitely refreshed by her sea voyage, her mind occupied with other affairs than the horror of the wall near the portrait of her late husband.

  There was, as I had anticipated, no recurrence of the phenomenon.

  Naturally, Mrs Garde was solicitous to inquire what I had done to remove the appearance which had done so much to destroy her comfort and happiness, but I was loath to explain the matter to her, and managed never to do so. Perhaps her splendid gentility sensed that I did not wish to offer her explanations. Mrs Garde was a Boston Unitarian, and Boston Unitarians are apt to take things on an intellectual basis. Such are not likely to be sympathetically familiar with such other-worldly affairs as the exorcism of a house, routine affair as it had been to good Fr Richardson.

  Besides, I have no doubt, Mrs Garde was so pleased at the non-recurrence of the old annoyance, that she probably attributed it to something popularly called ‘eye strain’. There was nothing to remind her of that bloody-faced, pathetic-eyed bullock, drooping to its final fall. Otto Andreas Gannett was not even a memory in Christiansted. We had many delightful tea parties, and several evening dances, in that magnificent hall of Gannett House that winter in Christiansted.

  Seven Turns in a Hangman’s Rope

  I first became acutely aware of the dreadful tragedy of Saul Macartney one sunny morning early in the month of November of the year 1927. On that occasion, instead of walking across the hall from my bathroom after shaving and the early morning shower, I turned to the left upon emerging and, in my bathrobe and slippers, went along the upstairs hallway to my workroom on the northwest corner of the house into which I had just moved, in the west coast town of Frederiksted on the island of Santa Cruz.

  This pleasant room gave a view through its several windows directly down from the hill on which the house was located, across the pretty town with its red roofs and varicolored houses, directly upon the indigo Caribbean. This workroom of mine had a north light from its two windows on that side and, as I used it only during the mornings, I thus escaped the terrific sun drenching to which, in the absence of any shade without, the room was subjected during the long West Indian afternoon.

  The occasion for going in there was my desire to see, in the clear morning light, what that ancient oil painting looked like; the canvas which, without its frame, I had tacked up on the south wall the evening before.

  This trophy, along with various other items of household flotsam and jetsam, had been taken the previous afternoon, which was a day after my arrival on the island, out of a kind of lumber room wherein the owners of the house had plainly been storing for the best part of a century the kinds of things which accumulate in a family. Of the considerable amount of material which my houseman, Stephen Penn, had taken out and stacked and piled in the upper hallway, there happened to be nothing of interest except this good-sized painting – which was about three feet by five in size. Stephen had paused to examine it curiously and it was this which drew my attention to it.

  Under my first cursory examination, which was little more than a glance, I had supposed the thing to be one of those ubiquitous Victorian horrors of reproduction which fifty years ago might have been observed on the walls of most middle-class front parlors, and which were known as chromos. But later that evening, on picking it up and looking at it under the electric light, I found that it was honest paint, and I examined it more closely and with a constantly increasing interest.

  The painting was obviously the work of a fairly clever amateur. The frame of very old and dry wood had been riddled through and through by wood-worms; it literally fell apart in my hands. I left it there on the floor for Stephen to brush up the next morning and took the canvas into my bedroom where there was a better light. The accumulations of many years’ dust and grime had served to obscure its once crudely bright coloration. I carried it into my bathroom, made a lather of soap and warm water, and gave it a careful and much needed cleansing, after which the scene delineated before me assumed a surprising freshness and clarity.

  After I had dried it off with a hand towel, using great care lest I crack the ancient pigment, I went over it with an oiled cloth. This process really brought it out, and although the canvas was something more than a century old, the long-obscured and numerous figures with which it had been almost completely covered seemed once more as bright and clear – and quite as crude – as upon the long distant day when that rather clever amateur artist had laid down his (or perhaps her) brush after putting on the very last dab of vermilion paint.

  The subject of the old painting, as I recognized quite soon, was an almost forgotten incident in the history of the old Danish West Indies. It had, quite obviously, been done from the viewpoint of a person on board a ship. Before me, as the setting of the scene, was the well known harbor of St Thomas with its dull red fort at my right – looking exactly as it does today. At the left-hand margin were the edges of various public buildings which have long since been replaced. In the midst, and occupying nearly the entire spread of the canvas, with Government Hill and its fine houses sketched in for background, was shown the execution of Fawcett, the pirate, with his two lieutenants; an occasion which had constituted a general holiday for the citizens of St Thomas, and which had taken place, as I happened to be aware, on the eleventh of September, 1825. If the picture had been painted at that time, and it seemed apparent that such was the case, the canvas would be just one hundred and two years old.

  My interest now thoroughly aroused, I bent over it and examined it with close attention. Then I went into my work-room and brought back my large magnifying glass.

  My somewhat clever amateur artist had left nothing to the imagination. The picture contained no less than two hundred and three human figures. Of these only those in the remoter backgrounds were sketched in roughly in the modern manner. The actual majority were very carefully depicted with a laborious infinitude of detail; and I suspected then, and since have found every reason to believe, that many, if not most of them, were portraits! There before my eyes were portly Danish worthies of a century ago, with their ladyfolk, all of whom had come out to see Captain Fawcett die. There were the officers of the garrison. There were the gendarmes of the period, in their stiff looking uniforms after the manner of Frederick the Great.

  There were Negroes, some with large gold rings hanging from one ear; Negresses in their bebustled gingham dresses and bare feet, their foulards or varicolored head handkerchiefs topped by the broad-brimmed plaited straw hats which are still to be seen
along modern St Thomas’s concrete drives and sidewalks. There was the executioner, a huge, burly, fierce-looking black man; with the police-master standing beside and a little behind him, gorgeous in his glistening white drill uniform with its gilt-decorations. The two stood on the central and largest of the three scaffolds.

  The executioner was naked to the waist and had his woolly head bound up in a tight-fitting scarlet kerchief. He had only that moment sprung the drop, and there at the end of the manila rope (upon which the artist had carefully painted in the seven turns of the traditional hangman’s knot placed precisely under the left ear of the miscreant now receiving the just reward of his innumerable villainies) hung Captain Fawcett himself, the gruesome central figure of this holiday pageant – wearing top boots and a fine plum-colored laced coat.

  On either side, and from the ropes of the two smaller gibbets, dangled those two lesser miscreants, Fawcett’s mates. Obviously their several executions, like the preliminary bouts of a modern boxing program, had preceded the main event of the day.

  The three gibbets had been erected well to the left of the central space which I have described. The main bulk of the spectators was consequently to the right as one looked at the picture, on the fort side.

  After more than a fascinating hour with my magnifying glass, it being then eleven o’clock and time to turn in, I carried the brittle old canvas into my workroom and by the rather dim light of a shaded reading lamp fastened it carefully at a convenient height against the south wall with thumbtacks. The last tack went through the arm of the hanging man nearest the picture’s extreme left-hand margin. After accomplishing this I went to bed.

  The next morning, as I have mentioned, being curious to see how the thing looked in a suitable light, I walked into the workroom and looked at it.

  I received a devastating shock.

  My eye settled after a moment or two upon that dangling mate whose body hung from its rope near the extreme left-hand margin of the picture. I found it difficult to believe my eyes. In this clear morning light the expression of the fellow’s face had changed startlingly from what I remembered after looking at it closely through my magnifying glass. Last night it had been merely the face of a man just hanged; I had noted it particularly because, of all the more prominent figures, that face had been most obviously an attempt at exact portraiture.

  Now it wore a new and unmistakable expression of acute agony.

  And down the dangling arm, from the point which that last thumbtack had incontinently transfixed, there ran, and dripped off the fellow’s fingers, a stream of bright, fresh red blood . . .

  2

  Between the time when the clipper schooner, which had easily overhauled the Macartney trading vessel Hope – coming north across the Caribbean and heavily laden with sacked coffee from Barranquilla – had sent a challenging shot from its swivel-gun across the Hope’s bows, and his accomplishing the maneuver of coming about in obedience to that unmistakable summons, Captain Saul Macartney had definitely decided what policy he should follow.

  He had made numerous voyages in the Hope among the bustling trade ports of the Caribbean and to and from his own home port of St Thomas, and never before, by the Grace of God and the Macartney luck, had any freetrader called up on him to stand and deliver on the high seas. But, like all seafaring men of Captain Macartney’s generation, plying their trade in those latitudes in the early 1820’s, he was well aware of what was now in store for him, his father’s ship and the members of his crew. The Hope would be looted; then probably scuttled, in accordance with the freetraders’ well-nigh universal policy of destroying every scrap of evidence against them. As for himself and his men, they would be confronted with the formula – ‘Join, or go over the side!’

  A pirate’s recruit was a pirate, at once involved in a status which was without the law. His evidence, even if he were attempting the dangerous double game of merely pretending to join his captor, was worthless.

  There was no possible ray of hope, direct resistance being plainly out of the question. This might be one of the better established freebooters, a piratical captain and following whose notoriety was already so widespread, who was already so well known, that he would not take the trouble to destroy the Hope; or, beyond the usual offer made to all volunteers for a piratical crew – constantly in need of such replacements – to put the captured vessel, officers and crew through the mill; once they were satisfied that there was nothing aboard this latest prize to repay them for the trouble and risk of capture and destruction.

  The Hope, laden almost to her gunwales with sacked coffee, would provide lean pickings for a freetrader, despite the value of her bulk cargo in a legitimate port of trade like Savannah or Norfolk. There were cases, known to Captain Macartney, where a piratical outfit under the command of some notable such as Edward Thatch – often called Teach, or Blackbeard – or England, or Fawcett, or Jacob Brenner, had merely sheered off and sailed away in search of more desirable game as soon as it was plain that the loot was neither easily portable nor of the type of value represented by bullion, silks, or the strong box of some inter-island trading supercargo.

  It was plain enough to Captain Saul Macartney, whose vessel had been stopped here about a day’s sail south-south-west of his home port of St Thomas, capital of the Danish West Indies, and whose cargo was intended for delivery to several ship’s brokerage houses in that clearing house port for the vast West Indian shipping trade, that this marauder of the high seas could do nothing with his coffee. These ideas were prominent in his mind in the interval between his shouted orders and the subsequent period during which the Hope, her way slacking rapidly, hung in the wind, her jibs, booms and loose rigging slapping angrily while the many boats from the freetrading vessel were slung outboard in a very brisk and workmanlike manner and dropped one after the other into the water alongside until every one – seven in all – had been launched.

  These boats were so heavily manned as to leave them very low in the water. Now the oars moved with an almost delicate precision as though the rowers feared some mis-chance even in that placid sea. The Hope’s officers and crew – all of the latter Negroes – crowded along their vessel’s starboard rail, the mates quiet and collected as men taking their cue from their superior officer; the crew goggle-eyed, chattering in low tones among themselves in groups and knots, motivated by the sudden looming terror which showed in a gray tinge upon their black skins.

  Then, in a strident whisper from the first mate, a shrewd and experienced bucko, hailing originally from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, wise in the ways of these tropical latitudes from twenty years’ continuous seafaring: ‘God! It’s Fawcett himself!’

  Slowly, deliberately, as though entirely disdainful of any possible resistance, the seven boats drew toward the doomed Hope. The two foremost edged in close alongside her star-board quarter and threw small grapples handily from bow and stern and so hung in under the Hope’s lee.

  Captain Saul Macartney, cupping his hands, addressed over the heads of the intervening six boatloads the man seated in the sternsheets of the outermost boat.

  ‘Cargo of sacked Brazil coffee, Captain, and nothing else to make it worth your while to come aboard me – if you’ll take my word for it. That’s the facts, sir, so help me God!’

  In silence from all hands in the boats and without any immediate reply from Fawcett, this piece of information was received. Captain Fawcett sat there at the sternsheets of his longboat, erect, silent, presumably pondering what Captain Saul Macartney had told him. He sat there calm and unruffled, a fine gold laced tricorn hat on his head, which, together with the elegance of his wine-colored English broadcloth coat, threw into sharp relief his brutal, unshaven face with its sinister, shining white scar – the result of an old cutlass wound – which ran diagonally from the upper corner of his left ear forward down the cheek, across both lips, clear to the edge of his prominent chin.

  Fawcett, the pirate, ended his reflective interval. He raised his head, rubbed a
soiled hand through his beard’s stubble and spat outboard.

  ‘Any ship’s biscuit left aboard ye?’ he inquired, turning his eye along the Hope’s freeboard and thence contemplatively about her masts and rigging. ‘We’re short.’

  ‘I have plenty, Captain. Will it answer if I have it passed over the side to ye?’

  The two vessels and the seven heavily laden boats lay tossing silently in the gentle swell. Not a sound broke the tension while Captain Fawcett appeared to deliberate.

  Then a second time he spat over the side of his longboat and rubbed his black stubbly chin with his hand, reflectively. Then he looked across his boats directly at Captain Saul Macartney. The ghost of a sour grin broke momentarily the grim straight line of his maimed and cruel mouth.

  ‘I’ll be comin’ aboard ye, Captain,’ he said very slowly, ‘if ye have no objection to make.’

  A bellow of laughter at this sally of their captain’s rose from the huddled pirate crew in the boats and broke the mounting tension. A Negro at the Hope’s rail cackled hysterically, and a chorus of gibes at this arose from the motley crews of the boats grappled alongside.

  In the silence which followed Captain Fawcett muttered a curt, monosyllabic order. The other five boats closed in with haste, two of them passing around the Hope’s stern and another around her bow. It was only a matter of a few seconds before the entire seven hung along the Hope’s sides like feasting wolves upon the flanks of a stricken deer. Then at a second brief order their crews came over the rails quietly and in good order, Fawcett himself arriving last upon the Hope’s deck. No resistance of any kind was offered. Captain Macartney had had the word passed quietly on that score while the pirates’ boats were being slung into the water.

  After the bustling scramble involved in nearly a hundred men climbing over the Hope’s rail from the seven boats and which was, despite the excellent order maintained, a maneuver involving considerable noisy activity, another and even a more ominous silence settled down upon the beleaguered Hope.