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

by Henry S. Whitehead

  Here, in the corner, stood the wire apparatus wherein papers and light trash were burned daily. Into this, already half filled with various papers, the Colonel poured several quarts of kerosene from a large five-gallon container fetched from the kitchen, and upon this kindling we placed carefully the strange fragments from our clothes-basket. Then I set a match to it, and within ten minutes there remained nothing except small particles of unidentifiable trash, of the simulacrum of Simon Legrand.

  We returned, softly, after putting back the kerosene and the clothes-basket where they belonged, into the house, closing the kitchen door after us. Again we mounted the stairs, and went into Mrs Lorriquer’s room. We walked over to the bed and looked at her. She seemed, somehow, shrunken, thinner than usual, less bulky, but, although there were deep unaccustomed lines showing in her relaxed face, there was, too, upon that face, the very ghost of a kindly smile.

  ‘It is just as you said it would be, Mr Canevin,’ whispered the Colonel as we tiptoed down the stone stairway. I nodded.

  ‘We will need an oiled rag for the sword,’ said I. ‘I wet it very thoroughly, you know.’

  ‘I will attend to that,’ said the Colonel, as he gripped my hand in a grasp of surprising vigor.

  ‘Good-night, sir,’ said I, and he accompanied me to the door.

  The Colonel came in to see me about ten the next morning. I had only just finished a late ‘tea’, as the early morning meal, after the Continental fashion, is still named in the Virgin Islands. The Colonel joined me at the table and took a late cup of coffee.

  ‘I was sitting beside her when she awakened, a little before nine,’ he said, ‘and as she complained of an “all-gone” feeling, I persuaded her to remain in bed, “for a couple of days”. She was sleeping just now, very quietly and naturally, when I ran over to report.’

  I called the following morning to inquire for Mrs Lorriquer. She was still in bed, and I left a polite message of good-will.

  It was a full week before she felt well enough to get up, and it was two days after that that the Lorriquers invited me to dinner once more. The bulletins, surreptitiously reported to me by the Colonel, indicated that, as we had anticipated, she was slowly gaining strength. One of the Navy physicians, called in, had prescribed a mild tonic, which she had been taking.

  The shrunken appearance persisted, I observed, but this, considering Mrs Lorriquer’s characteristic stoutness, was, actually, an improvement at least in her general appearance. The lines of her face appeared somewhat accentuated as compared to how she had looked before the last ‘manifestation’ of the ‘control’. Mrs Preston seemed worried about her mother, but said little. She was rather unusually silent during dinner, I noticed.

  I had one final test which I was anxious to apply. I waited for a complete pause in our conversation toward the end of a delightful dinner, served in Mrs Lorriquer’s best manner.

  ‘And shall we have some Contract after dinner this evening?’ I inquired, addressing Mrs Lorriquer.

  She almost blushed, looked at me deprecatingly.

  ‘But, Mr Canevin, you know – I know nothing of cards,’ she replied.

  ‘Why, Mother!’ exclaimed Mrs Preston from across the table, and Mrs Lorriquer looked at her in what seemed to be evident puzzlement. Mrs Preston did not proceed, I suspect because her father touched her foot for silence under the table. Indeed, questioned, he admitted as much to me later that evening.

  The old gentleman walked out with me, and half-way up the hall when I took my departure a little before eleven, after an evening of conversation punctuated by one statement of Mrs Lorriquer’s, made with a pleasant smile through a somewhat rueful face.

  ‘Do you know, I’ve actually lost eighteen pounds, Mr Canevin, and that being laid up in bed only eight or nine days. It seems incredible, does it not? The climate, perhaps – ’

  ‘Those scales must have been quite off,’ vouchsafed Mrs Preston.

  Going up the hill with the Colonel, I remarked: ‘You still have one job on your hands, Colonel.’

  ‘Wh – what is that, Mr Canevin?’ inquired the old gentleman, apprehensively.

  ‘Explaining the whole thing to your daughter,’ said I.

  ‘I dare say it can be managed,’ returned Colonel Lorriquer. ‘I’ll have a hack at that later!’

  The Projection of Armand Dubois

  Some time before my marriage, when I was living in Marlborough House, the old mansion on the hill back of the town of Frederiksted, on the West Indian island of St Croix – that is to say, before I became a landed-proprietor, as I did later, and was still making a veritable living by the production and sale of my tales – I had a next-door neighbor by the name of Mrs Minerva Du Chaillu. I do not know whether the late Monsieur Du Chaillu, of whom this good lady was the relict, was related or not to the famous Paul of that name, that slaughterer of wild animals in the far corners of the earth, who was, and may still be, for all I know, the greatest figure of all the big game hunters, but her husband, Monsieur Placide Du Chaillu, had been for many years a clergyman of the English Church on that strange island of St Martin, with its two flat towns, Phillipsbourg, capital of the Dutch Side, and Maragot, capital of the French Side.

  The English Church was, and still is, existent only among the Dutch residents, Maragot being without an English Church. Therefore, Mrs Du Chaillu’s acquaintance, even after many years’ residence on St Martin, was almost entirely confined to the Dutch Side, where, curiously enough, English and French, rather than Dutch, are spoken, and which, although only eight miles from the French capital, has only slight communication therewith, because of the execrable quality of the connecting roads.

  This old lady, well past seventy at the time, used to sit on her gallery late afternoons, when the fervor of the afternoon sun had somewhat abated, and rock herself steadily to and fro, and fan in the same indefatigable fashion as ancient Mistress Desmond, my landlady. Occasionally I would step across and exchange the time of day with her. I had known her for several years before she got her courage up to the point of asking me if some day I would not allow her to see some things I had written.

  Such a request is always a compliment, and this I told her, to relieve her obvious embarrassment. A day or so later I took over to Mrs Du Chaillu a selection of three or four manuscript-carbons, and a couple of magazines containing my stories, and I could see her from time to time, afternoons, reading them. I could even guess which ones she had finished and which she was currently engaged in perusing, by the expression of her kindly face as she read.

  Four or five days later she sent for me, and when I had gone across to her gallery, she thanked me, very formally as a finely-bred gentlewoman of several generations of West Indian background might be expected to do, handed back the stories, and, with much hesitation, and almost blushingly, intimated that she could tell me a story herself, if I cared to use it!

  ‘Of course,’ added Mrs Du Chaillu, ‘you’d have to change it about and embellish it a great deal, Mr Canevin.’

  To this I said nothing, except to urge my old friend to proceed, and this she did forthwith, hesitating at first, then, becoming intrigued by the memories of the tale, with the flair of a quite unexpected narrative gift. During the first few minutes of the then halting recital, I interrupted occasionally, for the purpose of getting this or that point clear, but as the story progressed I quieted down, and before it was finished, I was sitting, listening as though to catch pearls, for here was my simon-pure West Indian ‘Jumbee’ story, a gem, a perfect example, and told – you may believe me or not, sir or madam – with every possible indication of authenticity. Unless there is something hitherto unsuspected (even by his best friends, those keenest of critics) with the understanding apparatus of Gerald Canevin, that story as Mrs Du Chaillu told it to him, had happened, just as she said it had – to her.

  I will add only that I have not, to my knowledge, changed a word of it. It is not only not embellished (or ‘glorified’, as the Black People would s
ay) but it is as nearly verbatim as I can manage it; and I believe it implicitly. It fits in with much that is known scientifically and verified by occult investigators and suchlike personages; it is typically, utterly, West Indian; and Mrs Du Chaillu would as soon vary one jot or tittle from the strict truth in this or any other matter, as to attempt to stand on her head – and that, if you knew the dear old soul as I do, with her rheumatism, and her seventy-six years, and her impeccable, lifelong respectability, is as much as to say, impossible! For the convenience of any possible readers, I will tell her story for her, as nearly as possible in her own words, without quotation marks . . .

  I had been living in Phillipsbourg about two years; perhaps slightly longer (said Mrs Du Chaillu) when one morning I had occasion to go into my husband’s study, or office. Monsieur Du Chaillu – as he was generally called, of course, even though he was a clergyman of the Church of England – was, at the moment of my arrival, opening one of the two ‘strong-boxes’, or old-fashioned iron safes which he had standing side by side, and in which he kept his own money and the various parish funds of which he had charge.

  The occasion of my going into his office, where he received the parishioners – you know in these West Indian parishes the Black People come in streams to consult ‘Gahd’s An’inted’ about every conceivable matter from a family row to a stolen papaya – was on account of Julie. Julie was a very good and reliable servant, a young woman whose health was not very good, and whom I was keeping in one of the spare-rooms of our house. The rectory was a large residence, just next-door to the Government House, and poor Julie did better, we thought, inside than in one of the servants’ rooms in the yard. Every day I would give Julie a little brandy. She had come for her brandy a few minutes before – it was about four-thirty in the afternoon – and I discovered that I would have to get a fresh bottle. Monsieur Du Chaillu was in the office and had the key of the big sideboard, and I had stepped in to get the key from him.

  As I say, he was just opening one of the safes.

  I said: ‘Placide, what are you doing?’ It was one of those meaningless questions. I could see clearly what he was doing. He was opening his safe, the one in which he kept his own private belongings, and I need not have asked so obvious a question.

  My husband straightened up, however, not annoyed, you understand, but somewhat surprised, because I never entered his office as a rule, and remarked that he was getting some money out because he had a bill to pay that afternoon.

  I asked him for the key to the sideboard and came and stood beside him as he reached down into the safe, which was the kind that opened with a great heavy lid on the top, like a cigar-box, or the cover for a cistern. He reached into his pocket with his left hand after the sideboard key, his right hand full of currency, and I looked into the safe. There on top lay a paper which I took to be a kind of promissory note. I read it, hastily. I was his wife. There was, I conceived, nothing secret about it.

  ‘What is this, Placide?’ I inquired.

  My husband handed me the key to the sideboard.

  ‘What is what, my dear Minerva?’ he asked.

  ‘This note, or whatever it is. It seems as though you had loaned three hundred dollars a good while ago, and never got it back.’

  ‘That is correct,’ said my husband. ‘I have never felt that I wished to push the matter.’ He picked up the note with his now free left hand, in a ruminating kind of manner, and I saw there was another note underneath. I picked that one up myself, my husband making no objection to my doing so, and glanced through it. That, too, was for three hundred dollars. Both were dated between seventeen and eighteen years previously, that is, in the year 1863, although they were of different months and days, and both were signed by men at that time living in Phillipsbourg, both prosperous men; one a white gentleman-planter in a small way; the other a colored man with a not very good reputation, but one who had prospered and was accounted well-to-do.

  Well, my husband stood there with one note in his hand, and I stood beside him, holding the other. I did a rough sum in mental arithmetic. The notes were ‘demand’ notes, at eight per cent, simple interest, representing, the two together, six hundred dollars. Eighteen years of interest, at eight per cent added on, it seemed to me, would cause these notes to amount to a great deal more than twice six hundred dollars, something around fifteen hundred, in fact. We were far from rich!

  ‘But, my dear Placide, you should collect these,’ I cried.

  ‘I have never wished to press them,’ replied my husband.

  ‘Allow me, if you please, to take them,’ I begged him.

  ‘Do as you wish, Minerva my dear,’ replied Monsieur Du Chaillu. ‘But, I beg of you, no lawsuits!’

  ‘Very well,’ said I, and, carrying the two notes, walked out of the office to get Julie her brandy, out of the sideboard in the dining room.

  I will admit to you, Mr Canevin, that I was a little put out about my dear husband’s carelessness in connection with those notes. At the same time, I could not avoid seeing very clearly that the notes, if still collectible, constituted a kind of windfall, as you say in the United States – it has to do with a variety of apple, does it not? – and I decided at once to set about a kind of investigation.

  As soon as I had supplied Julie with a brandy which Dr Duchesne had prescribed for her, I sent our house-boy after Monsieur Henkes, the notary of our town of Phillipsbourg. Monsieur Henkes came within the hour – he stayed for tea, I remember – and he assured me that the notes, not yet being twenty years old, were still collectible. I placed them in his hands, and paid him, in advance, as the custom is on St Martin, and, I dare say, in Curaçao, and the other Dutch possessions, his fee of fifty dollars for collection, instructing him that it was my husband’s desire that there should be no actual lawsuit.

  I will shorten my story as much as possible, by telling you that the note which had been given by the gentleman-planter was paid, in six months, in two equal installments, and, with my husband’s permission, I invested the money in some shares in one of our St Martin Salt-Ponds – salt, you know, is the chief export from St Martin.

  The other note, the one which had been given by the colored man, Armand Dubois, did not go through so easily. Here in the West Indies, as you have surely observed, our ‘colored’ people, as distinct from the Black laboring class, are, commonly, estimable persons, who conduct themselves like us Caucasians. Dubois, however, was exceptional. He was only about one-quarter African – a quadroon, or there-abouts. But his leanings, as sometimes happens, were to the Black side of his heredity. Many persons in Phillipsbourg regarded him as a rascal, a person of no character at all. It seems he had heard, far back, in the days when my husband accommodated his friend, the planter, of that transaction, and had come almost at once to ask for a similar accommodation. That is why the two notes were so nearly of the same date, and perhaps it accounts for the fact that the two notes were both for three hundred dollars. Negroes, and those persons of mixed blood whose Black side predominates, are not very inventive. It would be quite characteristic for such a person to ask for the same sum as had been given to the former applicant.

  Dubois made a great pother about paying. Of this I heard only rumors, of course. Monsieur Henkes did not trouble us in the matter, once the collection of the notes had been placed in his hands. It was, of course, a perfectly clear case. The note had been signed by Dubois, and it had more than two years to run before it would be outlawed – ‘limited’ is, I believe, the legal term. So Armand Dubois paid, as he was well able to do, but, as I say, with a very bad grace. Presumably he expected never to pay. The impudence of the man!

  Shortly after I had placed the notes in the hands of Monsieur Henkes for collection, Julie came to me one afternoon, quite gray in the face, as Negroes look when they are badly frightened. On St Martin, perhaps you know, Mr Canevin, servants have a custom similar to what I have read about in your South. That is to say, they invariably address their mistresses as ‘Miss’, with th
e Christian name. Why, I can not say. It is their custom. Julie came to me, as I say, very frightened, very much upset – quite terrified, in fact.

  She said to me: ‘Miss Minerva, on no account, ma’am, mus’ yo’ go to de door, if yo’ please, ma’am. One Armand Dubois come, ma’am, an’ is even now cloimbing de step of de gol’ry. Hoide yo’self, ma’am, I beg of yo’, in de name of Gahd!’

  Julie’s distress and state of fright, which the girl could not conceal, impressed me more than her words. I said: ‘Julie, go to the door yourself. Say, please, to this Dubois, that I have nothing to say to him. For anything whatever, he must address himself to Monsieur Henkes.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ replied Julie, and almost pushed me into my bedroom and shut the door smartly behind me. I stood there, and listened, as Dubois, who had now mounted the gallery steps, knocked, very truculently, it seemed to me – the creature had no manners – on the door. I could hear him ask for me, and the murmur of Julie’s voice as she delivered my message. Dubois was reluctant to leave, it seemed. He stood and parleyed, but forcing his way into a house like the rectory of the English Church was beyond him, and at last he went. Several other persons, black fellows, Julie told me, had accompanied him, for what purpose I can not imagine – it was most unusual that he should come to trouble me at all – and these all walked down the street, as I could see through the slanted jalousies of my bedroom window, Dubois gesticulating and orating to his followers.