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

by Henry S. Whitehead

  He caught the cadence of Martin’s words, now, the same cadence, he knew instinctively, as that of the broken sentence he had been repeating to him in his half-dazed state while he was binding up those gashed fingers. Those fingers! He shuddered. The Saul Taverner was a hell-ship. None was better aware of that than he, who had largely contributed, through many voyages in her, to that sinister reputation she bore, but – this! This was something like real hell.

  ‘Yes, yes – I will, I will, I will – ’ that was the swing, the tonal cadence of what Martin was saying at more or less regular intervals in there; then the guttural, light voice – the two going on alternately, one after the other, no pauses in that outlandish conversation.

  Abruptly the conversation ceased. It was as though a sound-proof door had been pulled down over it. Pound straightened himself up, waited a minute, then knocked on the door.

  The door was abruptly thrown open from inside, and Captain Luke Martin, his eyes glassy, unseeing, stepped out, Pound giving way before him. The captain paused in the middle of his cabin, looking about him, his eyes still bearing that ‘unseeing’ look. Then he made his way straight toward the companion ladder. He was going up on deck, it seemed. His clothes hung on him now, his shirt awry, his trousers crumpled and seamed where he had lain on the floor, sat, huddled up, in the small chair where Pound had placed him.

  Pound followed him up the ladder.

  Once on deck, he made his way straight to the port rail, and stood, looking, still as though ‘unseeingly’, out over the billowing waves. It was dark now; the sub-tropic dusk had lately fallen. The ship was quiet save for the noise of her sharp bows as they cut through the middle North Atlantic swell on her twelve-knot way to Virginia.

  Suddenly old Pound sprang forward, grappled with Martin. The captain had started to climb the rail – suicide, that was it, then – those voices!

  The thwarting of what seemed to be his purpose aroused Martin at last. Behind him lay a middle-aged man’s lifetime of command, of following his own will in all things. He was not accustomed to being thwarted, to any resistance which, aboard his own ship, always went down, died still-born, before his bull-like bellow, his truculent fists.

  He grappled in turn with his mate, and a long, desperate, and withal a silent struggle began there on the deck, lighted only by the light from the captain’s cabin below, the light of the great binnacle lamp of whale oil, through the sky-lights set above-decks for daytime illumination below.

  In the course of that silent, deadly struggle, Pound seeking to drag the captain back from the vicinity of the rail, the captain laying about him with vicious blows, the man became rapidly disheveled. Martin had been coatless, and a great swath of his white shirt came away in the clutching grip of Pound, baring his neck and left shoulder.

  Pound slackened, let go, shrank and reeled away, covering his eyes lest they be blasted from their sockets by the horror which he had seen.

  For there, where the shirt had been torn away and exposed the side of Martin’s neck, stood a pair of blackish-purple, perfectly formed, blubbery lips; and as he gazed, appalled, horrified, the lips had opened in a wide yawn, exposing great shining African teeth, from between which, before he could bury his face in his hands away from this horror, a long, pink tongue had protruded and licked the lips . . .

  And when old Pound, shaking now to his very marrow, cold with the horror of this dreadful portent there on the deck warm with the pulsing breath of the trade wind, had recovered himself sufficiently to look again toward the place where the master of the Saul Taverner had struggled with him there against the railing, that place stood empty and no trace of Luke Martin so much as ruffled the phosphorescent surface of the Saul Taverner’s creaming wake.

  The Fireplace

  When the Planter’s Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi, burned to the ground in the notable fire of 1922, the loss to that section of the South could not be measured in terms of that ancient hostelry’s former grandeur. The days had indeed long passed when a Virginia ham was therein stewed in no medium meaner than good white wine, and as the rambling old building was heavily insured, the owners suffered no great material loss. The real loss was the community’s, in the deaths by fire of two of its prominent citizens, Lieutenant-Governor Frank Stacpoole and Mayor Cassius L. Turner. These gentlemen, just turning elderly, had been having a reunion in the hotel with two of their old associates, Judge Varney J. Baker of Memphis, Tennessee, and the Honorable Valdemar Peale, a prominent Georgian, from Atlanta. Thus, two other Southern cities had a share in the mourning, for Judge Baker and Mr Peale both likewise perished in the flames. The fire took place just before Christmas on the twenty-third of December, and among the many sympathetic and regretful comments which ensued upon this holocaust was the many-times repeated conjecture that these gentlemen had been keeping a kind of Christmas anniversary, a fact which added no little to the general feeling of regret and horror.

  On the request of these prominent gentlemen, the hotel management had cleared out and furnished a second floor room with a great fireplace, a room for long used only for storage, but for which, the late mayor and lieutenant-governor had assured them, the four old cronies cherished a certain sentiment. The fire, which gained headway despite the truly desperate efforts of the occupants of the room, had its origin in the fireplace, and it was believed that the four, who were literally burned to cinders, had been trapped. The fire had started, it appeared, about half an hour before midnight, when everybody else in the hotel had retired. No other occupant of the house suffered from its effects, beyond a few incidental injuries sustained in the hurried departure at dead of night from the blazing old firetrap.

  Some ten years before this regrettable incident ended the long and honorable career of this one-time famous hostelry, a certain Mr James Callender, breaking a wearisome journey north at Jackson, turned into the hospitable vestibule of the Planter’s, with a sigh of relief. He had been shut up for nine hours in the mephitic atmosphere of a soft-coal train. He was tired, hungry, thirsty, and begrimed with soot.

  Two grinning Negro porters deposited his ample luggage, toted from the railway station in the reasonable hope of a large emolument, promised by their patron’s prosperous appearance and the imminence of the festival season of Christmas. They received their reward and left Mr Callender in the act of signing the hotel register.

  ‘Can you let me have number twenty-eight?’ he inquired of the clerk. ‘That, I believe, is the room with the large fireplace, is it not? My friend, Mr Tom Culbertson of Sweetbriar, recommended it to me in case I should be stopping here.’

  Number twenty-eight was fortunately vacant, and the new guest was shortly in occupation, a great fire, at his orders, roaring up the chimney, and he himself engaged in preparing for the luxury of a hot bath.

  After a leisurely dinner of the sort for which the old hotel was famous, Mr Callender first sauntered slowly through the lobby, enjoying the first fragrant whiffs of a good cigar. Then, seeing no familiar face which gave promise of a conversation, he ascended to his room, replenished the fire, and got himself ready for a solitary evening. Soon, in pyjamas, bathrobe, and comfortable slippers, he settled himself in a comfortable chair at just the right distance from the fire and began to read a new book which he had brought with him. His dinner had been a late one, and it was about half past nine when he really settled to his book. It was Arthur Machen’s House of Souls, and Mr Callender soon found himself absorbed in the eery ecstasy of reading for the first time a remarkable work which transcended all his previous secondhand experiences of the occult. It had, he found, anything but a soporific effect upon him. He was reading carefully, well into the book, with all his faculties alert, when he was interrupted by a knock on the door of his room.

  Mr Callender stopped reading, marked his place, and rose to open the door. He was wondering who should summon him at such an hour. He glanced at his watch on the bureau in passing and was surprised to note that it was eleven-twenty. He had been reading
for nearly two hours, steadily. He opened the door, and was surprised to find no one in the corridor. He stepped through the doorway and glanced right and then left. There were, he observed, turns in both directions at short distances from his door, and Mr Callender, whose mind was trained in the sifting of evidence, worked out an instantaneous explanation in his mind. The occupant of a double room (so he guessed) had returned late, and, mistaking the room, had knocked to apprise his fellow occupant of his return. Seeing at once that he had knocked prematurely, on the wrong door, the person had bolted around one of the corners to avoid an awkward explanation!

  Mr Callender, smiling at this whimsical idea of his, turned back into his room and shut the door behind him.

  A gentleman was sitting in the place he had vacated. Mr Callender stopped short and stared at this intruder. The man who had appropriated his comfortable chair was a few years older than himself, it appeared – say about thirty-five. He was tall, well-proportioned, and very well dressed, although there seemed to Mr Callender’s hasty scrutiny something indefinably odd about his clothes.

  The two men looked at each other appraisingly for the space of a few seconds, in silence, and then abruptly Mr Callender saw what was wrong with the other’s appearance. He was dressed in the fashion of about fifteen years back, in the style of the late nineties. No one was wearing such a decisive-looking piccadilly collar, nor such a huge puff tie which concealed every vestige of the linen except the edges of the cuffs. These, on Mr Callender’s uninvited guest, were immaculate and round, and held in place by a pair of large, round, cut-cameo black buttons.

  The strange gentleman, without rising, broke the silence in a well-modulated voice with a deprecatory wave of a very well kept hand.

  ‘I owe you an apology, sir. I trust that you will accept what amends I can make. This room has for me a peculiar interest which you will understand if you will allow me to speak further, but for the present I confine myself to asking your pardon.’

  This speech was delivered in so frank and pleasing a fashion that Mr Callender could take no offense at the intrusion of the speaker.

  ‘You are quite welcome, sir, but perhaps you will be good enough to continue, as you suggest. I confess to being mightily puzzled as to the precise manner in which you came to be here. The only way of approach is through the door, and I’ll take my oath no one came through it. I heard a knock, went to the door, and there was no one there.’

  ‘I imagine I would do well to begin at the beginning,’ said the stranger, gravely. ‘The facts are somewhat unusual, as you will see when I have related them; otherwise I should hardly be here, at this time of night, and trespassing upon your good nature. That this is no mere prank I beg that you will believe.’

  ‘Proceed, sir, by all means,’ returned Mr Callender, his curiosity aroused and keen. He drew up another chair and seated himself on the side of the fireplace opposite the stranger, who at once began his explanation.

  ‘My name is Charles Bellinger, a fact which I will ask you kindly to note and keep well in mind. I come from Biloxi, down on the Gulf, and, unlike yourself, I am a Southerner, a native of Mississippi. You see, sir, I know something about you, or at least who you are.’

  Mr Callender inclined his head, and the stranger waved his hand again, this time as if to express acknowledgment of an introduction.

  ‘I may as well add to this, since it explains several matters, though in itself sounding somewhat odd, that actually I am dead.’

  Mr Bellinger, at this astounding statement, met Mr Callender’s facial expression of amazement with a smile clearly meant to be reassuring, and again, with a kind of unspoken eloquence, waved his expressive hand.

  ‘Yes, sir, what I tell you is the plain truth. I passed out of this life in this room where we are sitting almost exactly sixteen years ago. My death occurred on the twenty-third of December. That will be precisely sixteen years ago the day after tomorrow. I came here tonight for the express purpose of telling you the facts, if you will bear with me and suspend your judgment as to my sanity. It was I who knocked at your door, and I passed through it, and, so to speak, through you, my dear sir!

  ‘On the late afternoon of the day I have mentioned I arrived in this hotel in company with Mr Frank Stacpoole, an acquaintance, who still lives here in Jackson. I met him as I got off the train, and invited him to come here with me for dinner. Being a bachelor, he made no difficulty, and just after dinner we met in the lobby another man named Turner – Cassius L. Turner, also a Jacksonian – who proposed a game of cards and offered to secure two more gentlemen to complete the party. I invited him to bring them here to my room, and Stacpoole and I came up in advance to get things ready for an evening of poker.

  ‘Shortly afterwards Mr Turner and the two other gentlemen arrived. One of them was named Baker, the other was Mr Valdemar Peale, of Atlanta, Georgia. You recognize his name, I perceive, as I had expected you would. Mr Peale is now a very prominent man. He has gone far since that time. If you happened to be better acquainted here you would know that Stacpoole and Turner are also men of very considerable prominence. Baker, who lives in Memphis, Tennessee, is likewise a well-known man in his community and state.

  ‘Peale, it appeared, was Stacpoole’s brother-in-law, a fact which I had not previously known, and all four were well acquainted with each other. I was introduced to the two newcomers and we commenced to play poker.

  ‘Somewhat to my embarrassment, since I was both the host and the “stranger” of the party, I won steadily from the very beginning. Mr Peale was the heaviest loser, and although as the evening wore on he sat with compressed lips and made no comment, it was plain that he was taking his considerable losses rather hardly.

  ‘Not long after eleven o’clock a most unfortunate incident took place. I had in no way suspected that I was not among gentlemen. I had begun, you see, by knowing only Stacpoole, and even with him my acquaintance was only casual.

  ‘At the time I mention there began a round of jack-pots, and the second of these I opened with a pair of kings and a pair of fours. Hoping to better my hand I discarded the fours, with the odd card, and drew to the pair of kings, hoping for a third. I was fortunate. I obtained not only the third king but with it a pair of eights. Thus, equipped with a full house, I considered my hand likely to be the best, and when, within two rounds of betting, the rest had laid down their hands, the pot lay between Peale and me. Peale, I noticed, had also thrown down three cards, and every chance indicated that I had him beaten. I forced him to call me after a long series of raises back and forth; and when he laid down his hand he was holding four fours!

  ‘You see? He had picked up my discard.

  ‘Wishing to give Peale the benefit of any possible doubt, I declared the matter at once, for one does not lightly accuse a gentleman of cheating at cards, especially here in the South. It was possible, though far from likely, that there had been a mistake. The dealer might for once have laid down his draw on the table, although he had consistently handed out the cards as we dealt in turn all the evening. To imply further that I regarded the matter as nothing worse than a mistake, I offered at once to allow the considerable pot, which I had really won, to lie over to the next hand.

  ‘I had risen slightly out of my chair as I spoke, and before anyone could add a word, Peale leaned over the table and stabbed me with a bowie knife which I had not even seen him draw, so rapid was his action. He struck upwards, slantingly, and the blade, entering my body just below the ribs, cut my right lung nearly in two. I sank down limp across the table, and within a few seconds had coughed myself almost noiselessly to death.

  ‘The actual moment of dissolution was painful to a degree. It was as if the permanent part of me, “myself” – my soul, if you will – snapped abruptly away from that distorted thing which sprawled prone across the disordered table and which no longer moved.

  ‘Dispassionately, then, the something which continued to be myself (though now, of course, dissociated from what had been my v
ehicle of expression, my body) looked on and apprehended all that followed.

  ‘For a few moments there was utter silence. Then Turner, in a hoarse, constrained voice, whispered to Peale: “You’ve done for yourself now, you unmentionable fool!”

  ‘Peale sat in silence, the knife, which he had automatically withdrawn from the wound, still grasped in his hand, and what had been my life’s blood slowly dripping from it and gradually congealing as it fell upon a disarranged pile of cards.

  ‘Then, quite without warning, Baker took charge of the situation. He had kept very quiet and played a very conservative game throughout the evening.

  ‘ “This affair calls for careful handling,” he drawled, “and if you will take my advice I think it can be made into a simple case of disappearance. Bellinger comes from Biloxi. He is not well known here.” Then, rising and gathering the attention of the others, he continued: “I am going down to the hotel kitchen for a short time. While I am gone, keep the door shut, keep quiet, and clear up the room, leaving this (he indicated my body) where it lies. You, Stacpoole, arrange the furniture in the room as nearly as you can remember how it looked when you first came in. You, Turner, make up a big fire. You needn’t begin that just yet,” he threw at Peale, who had begun nervously to cleanse the blade of his knife on a piece of newspaper; and with this cryptic remark he disappeared through the door and was gone.