The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK™, Vol. 1: Henry S. Whitehead

by Henry S. Whitehead

  I expressed my interest in Captain O’Brien’s latest improvements, and while he was talking shop to one of his lieutenants and half a dozen enlisted men he has camped out there. I slipped down to the beach to watch the pelicans fish. Three or four of them were describing curves and turns of indescribable complexity and perfect grace over the green water of the reef-enclosed white beach. Ever and again one would stop short in the air, fold himself up like a jackknife, turn head downward, his great pouched bill extended like the head of a cruel spear, and drop like a plummet into the water, emerging an instant later with the pouch distended with a fish.

  I stayed a trifle too long—for my eyes. Driving back I observed that I had picked up several sun-spots, and when I arrived home I polished a set of yellowish sun-spectacles I keep for such emergencies and put them on.

  The east side of the house had been shaded against the pouring morning sunlight, and in this double shade I looked to see my eyes clear up. The sun-spots persisted, however, in that annoying, recurrent way they have, almost disappearing and then returning in undiminished kaleidoscopic grotesqueness—those strange blocks and parcels of pure color changing as one winks from indigo to brown and from brown to orange and then to a blinding turquoise-blue, according to some eery natural law of physics, within the fluids of the eye itself.

  The sun-spots were so persistent that morning that I decided to keep my eyes closed for some considerable time and see if that would allow them to run their course and wear themselves out. Blue and mauve grotesques of the vague, general shape of diving pelicans swam and jumped inside my eyes. It was very annoying. I called to Albertina.

  “Albertina,” said I, when she had come to the door, “please go into my bedroom and close all the jalousies tight. Keep out all the light you can, please.”

  “Ahl roight, sir,” replied the obedient Albertina, and I heard her slapping the jalousie-blinds together with sharp little clicks.

  “De jalousie ahl close, sir,” reported Albertina. I thanked her, and proceeded with half-shut eyes into the bedroom, which, not yet invaded with afternoon’s sunlight and closely shuttered, offered an appearance of deep twilight. I lay, face down, across the bed, a pillow under my face, and my eyes buried in darkness.

  Very gradually, the diving pelican faded out, to a cube, to a dim, recurrent blur, to nothingness. I raised my head and rolled over on my side, placing the pillow back where it belonged. And as I opened my eyes on the dim room, there stood, in faint, shadowy outline, in the opposite corner of the room, away from the outside wall on the market-place side, the huge, Danish bedstead I had vaguely noted the night before, or rather, early that morning.

  It was the most curious sensation, looking at that bed in the dimness of the room. I was reminded of those fourth-dimensional tales which are so popular nowadays, for the bed impinged, spatially, on my large bureau, and the curious thing was that I could see the bureau at the same time! I rubbed my eyes, a little unwisely, but not enough to bring back the pelican sun-spots into them, for I remembered and desisted pretty promptly. I looked, fixedly, at the great bed, and it blurred and dimmed and faded out of my vision.

  Again, I was greatly puzzled, and I went over to where it seemed to stand and walked through it—it being no longer visible to my now restored vision, free of the effects of the sun-spots—and then I went out into the “hall”—a West Indian drawing room is called “the hall”—and sat down to think over this strange phenomenon. I could not account for it. If it had been poor Prentice, now! Prentice attended all the “gentlemen’s parties” to which he was invited with a kind of religious regularity, and had to be helped into his car with a similar regularity, a regularity which was verging on the monotonous nowadays, as the invitations became more and more strained. No—in my case it was not the effects of strong liquors, for barring an occasional sociable swizzel I retained here in my West Indian residence my American convictions that moderation in such matters was a reasonable virtue. I reasoned out the matter of the phantom bedstead—for so I was already thinking of lt—as far as I was able. That it was a phantom of defective eyesight I had no reasonable doubt. I had had my eyes examined in New York three months before, and the oculist pleased me greatly by assuring me that there were no visible indications of deterioration. In fact, Dr. Jusserand had said at that time that my eyes were stronger, sounder, than when he had made his last examination six months before.

  Perhaps this conviction—that the appearance was due to my own physical shortcoming—accounts for the fact I was not (what shall I say?)disturbed, by what I saw, or thought I saw. Confront the most thoroughgoing materialist with a ghost, and he will act precisely like anyone else; like any normal human being who believes in the material world as the outward and visible sign of something which animates it. All normal human beings, it seems to me, are sacramentalists!

  I was, for this reason, able to thing clearly about the phenomenon. My mind was not clouded and bemused with fear, and its known physiological effects. I can, quite easily, record what I “saw” in the course of the next few days. The bed was clearer to my vision and apprehension than it had been. It seemed to have grown in visibility; in a kind of substantialness, if there is such a word! It appeared more material than it had before, less shadowy.

  I looked about the room and saw other furniture: a huge, old-fashioned mahogany bureau with men’s heads carved on the knuckles of the front legs, Danish fashion. There is precisely such carving on pieces in the museum in Copenhagen, they tell me, those who have seen my drawing of it. I was actually able to do that, and had completed a kind of plan-picture of the room, putting in all the shadow-furniture, and leaving my own, actual furniture out. Thank the God in whom I devoutly believe—and know to be more powerful than the Powers of Evil—I was able to finish that rather elaborate drawing before… Well, I must not “run ahead of my story.”

  That night when I was ready to retire, and had once more opened up the jalousies of the front bedroom, and had switched off the light, I looked, naturally enough under the circumstances, for the outlines of that ghostly furniture. They were much clearer now. I studied them with a certain sense of almost “scientific” detachment. It was, even then, apparent to me that no weakness of the strange complexity which is the human eye could reasonably account for the presence of a well-defined set of mahogany furniture in a room already furnished with real furniture! But I was by now sufficiently accustomed to it to be able to examine it all without that always-disturbing element of fear—strangeness. I looked at the bedstead and the “roll-back” chairs, and the great bureau, and a ghostly, huge, and quaintly carved wardrobe, studying their outlines, noting their relative positions. It was on that occasion that it occurred to me that it would be of interest to make some kind of drawing of them. I looked the harder after that, fixing the details and the relations of them all in my mind, and then I went into the hall and got some paper and a pencil and set to work.

  It was hard work, this of reproducing something which I was well aware was some kind of an “apparition,” especially after looking at the furniture in the dark bedroom, switching on the light in another room and then trying to reproduce. I could not, of course, make a direct comparison. I mean it was impossible to look at my drawing and then look at the furniture. There was always a necessary interval between the two processes. I persisted through several evenings, and even for a couple of evenings fell into the custom of going into my bedroom in the evening’s darkness, looking at what was there, and then attempting to reproduce it. After five or six days, I had a fair plan, in considerable detail, of the arrangement of this strange furniture in my bedroom,-a plan or drawing which would be recognizable if there were anyone now alive who remembered such arrangement of such furniture. It will be apparent that a story had been growing up in my mind, or, at least, that I had come to some kind of conviction that what I “saw” was a reproduction of something that had once existed in that same detail and that precise order!

  On the seventh ni
ght, there came an interruption.

  I had, by that time, finished my work, pretty well. I had drawn the room as it would have looked with that furniture in it, and had gone over the whole with India ink, very carefully. As a drawing, the thing was finished, so far as my indifferent skill as a draftsman would permit.

  That seventh evening, I was looking over the appearance of the room, such qualms as the eeriness of the situation might have otherwise produced reduced to next-to-nothing partly by my interest, in part by having become accustomed to it all. I was making, this evening, as careful a comparison as possible between my remembered work on paper and the detailed appearance of the room. By now, the furniture stood out clearly, in a kind of light of its own which I can roughly compare only to “phosphorescence.” It was not, quite, that. But that will serve, lame as it is, and trite perhaps, to indicate what I mean. I suppose the appearance of the room was something like what a cat “sees” when she arches her back—as Algernon Blackwood has pointed out, in John Silence—and rubs against the imaginary legs of some personage entirely invisible to the man in the armchair who idly wonders what has taken possession of his house-pet.

  I was, as I say, studying the detail. I could not find that I had left out anything salient. The detail was, too, quite clear now. There were no blurred outlines as there had been on the first few nights. My own, material furniture had, so to speak, sunk back into invisibility, which was sensible enough, seeing that I had put the room in as nearly perfect darkness as I could, and there was no moon to interfere, those nights.

  I had run my eyes all around it, up and down the twisted legs of the great bureau, along the carved ornamentation of the top of the wardrobe, along the lines of the chairs, and come back to the bed. It was at this point of my checking-up that I got what I must describe as the first “shock” of the entire experience.

  Something moved, beside the bed.

  I peered, carefully, straining my eyes to catch what it might be. It had been something bulky, a slow-moving object, on the far side of the bed, blurred, somewhat, just as the original outlines had been blurred in the beginning of my week’s experience. The now strong and clear outlines of the bed, and what I might describe as its ethereal substance, stood between me and it. Besides, the vision of the slow-moving mass was further obscured by a ghostly mosquito-net, which had been one of the last of the details to come into the scope of my strange night-vision.

  Those folds of the mosquito-netting moved—waved, before my eyes.

  Someone, it might almost be imagined, was getting into that bed!

  I sat, petrified. This was a bit too much for me. I could feel the little chills run up and down my spine. My scalp prickled. I put my hands on my knees, and pressed hard. I drew several deep breaths. “All-overish” is an old New England expression, once much used by spinsters, I believe, resident in that intellectual section of the United States. Whatever the precise connotation of the term, that was way I felt. I could feel the reactive sensation, I mean, of that particular portion of the whole experience, in every part of my being—body, mind, and soul! It was—paralyzing. I reached up a hand that was trembling violently—I could barely control it, and the fingers, when they touched the hard-rubber button, felt numb—and switched on the bedroom light, and spent the next ten minutes recovering.

  That night, when I came to retire, I dreaded—actually dreaded—what might come to my vision when I snapped off the light. This, however, I managed to reason out with myself. I used several arguments—nothing had so far occurred to annoy or injure me; if this were to be a cumulative experience, if something were to be “revealed” to me by this deliberate process of slow materialization which had been progressing for the last week or so, then it might as well be for some good and useful purpose. I might be, in a sense, the agent of Providence! If it were otherwise; if it were the evil work of some discarnate spirit, or something of the sort, well, every Sunday since my childhood, in church, I had recited the Creed, and so admitted, along with the clergy and the rest of the congregation, that God our Father had created all things—visible and invisible! If it were this part of His creation at work, for any purpose, then He was stronger than they. I said a brief prayer before turning off that light, and put my trust in Him. It may appear to some a bit old-fashioned—even Victorian! But He does not change along with the current fashions of human thought about Him, and this “human thought,” and “the modern mind,” and all the rest of it, does not mean the vast, the overwhelming majority of people. It involves only a few dozen prideful “intellectuals” at best, or worst!

  I switched off the light, and, already clearer, I saw what must have been Old Morris, getting into bed.

  I had interviewed old Mr. Bonesteel, the chief government surveyor, a gentleman of parts and much experience, a West Indian born on this island. Mr. Bonesteel, in response to my guarded enquiries—for I had, of course, already suspected Old Morris; was not my house still called his?—had stated that he remembered Old Morris well, in his own remote youth. His description of that personage and this apparition tallied. This, undoubtedly, was Old Morris. That it was someone, was apparent. I felt, somehow, rather relieved to realize that it was he. I knew something about him, you see. Mr. Bonesteel had given me a good description and many anecdotes, quite freely, and as though he enjoyed being called on for information about one of the old-timers like Morris. He had been more reticent, guarded, in fact, when I pressed him for details of Morris’ end. That there had been some obscurity—intentional or otherwise, I could never ascertain—about the old man, I had already known. Such casual enquiries as I had made on other occasions through natural interest in the person whose name still clung to my house sixty years or more since he had lived in it, had never got me anywhere. I had only gathered what Mr. Bonesteel’s more ample account corroborated: that Morris had been eccentric, in some ways, amusingly so. That he had been extraordinarily well-to-do. That he gave occasional large parties, which, contrary to the custom of the hospitable island of St. Croix, were always required to come to a conclusion well before midnight. Why, there was a story of Old Morris almost literally getting rid of a few reluctant guests by one device or another from these parties, a circumstance on which hinged several of the amusing anecdotes of that eccentric person!

  Old Morris, as I knew, had not always lived on St. Croix. His youth had been spent in Martinique, in the then smaller and less important town of Fort-de-France. That, of course, was many years before the terrific calamity of the destruction of St. Pierre had taken place, by the eruption of Mt. Pelée. Old Morris, coming to St. Croix in young middle age—forty-five or thereabouts—had already been accounted a rich man. He had been engaged in no business. He was a planter, not a storekeeper, had no profession. Where he produced his affluence was one of the local mysteries. His age, it seemed, was the other.

  “I suppose,” Mr. Bonesteel had said, that Morris was nearer a hundred than ninety, when he—ah—died. I was a child of about eight at that time. I shall be seventy next August-month. That, you see, would be about sixty years ago, about 1861, or about the time your Civil War was beginning. Now my father has told me—he died when I was nineteen—that Old Morris looked exactly the same when he was a boy! Extraordinary. The Black People used to say—” Mr. Bonesteel fell silent, and his eyes had an old man’s dim, far-away look.

  “The Black People have some very strange beliefs, Mr. Bonesteel,” said I, attempting to prompt him. “A good many of them I have heard about myself, and they interest me very much. What particular—”

  Mr. Bonesteel turned his mild, blue eyes upon me, reflectively.

  “You must drop in at my house one of these days, Mr. Stewart,” said he, mildly. “I have some rare old rum that I’d be glad to have you sample, sir! There’s not much of it on the island these days, since Uncle Sam turned his prohibition laws loose on us in 1922.”

  “Thank you very much indeed, Mr Bonesteel,” I replied. “I shall take the first occasion to do so, sir; not tha
t I care especially for ‘old rum’ except a spoonful in a cup of tea, or in pudding sauce, perhaps; but the pleasure of your company, sir, is always an inducement.”

  Mr. Bonesteel bowed to me gravely, and I returned his bow from where I satin his airy office in Government House.

  “Would you object to mentioning what that ‘belief’ was, sir?”

  A slightly pained expression replaced my old friend’s look of hospitality.

  “All that is a lot of foolishness!” said he, with something like asperity. He looked at me, contemplatively.

  “Not that I believe in such things, you must understand. Still, a man sees a good many things in these islands, in a lifetime, you know! Well, the Black People—” Mr. Bonesteel looked apprehensively about him, as though reluctant to have one of his clerks overhear what he was about to say, and leaned toward me from his chair, lowering his voice to a whisper.

  “They said—it was a remark here and a kind of hint there, you must understand; nothing definite—that Morris had interfered, down there in Martinique, with some of their queer doings—offended the Zombi—something of the kind; that Morris had made some kind of conditions—oh, it was very vague, and probably all mixed up!—you know, whereby he was to have a long life and all the money he wanted—something like that—and afterward…