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

by Henry S. Whitehead

  Schaff had been on the island five years; had earned his promotion there to be Chief Municipal Physician. He knew much about tropical mischances in his field of medicine. He looked with interest at the pustules. Cold-bloodedly he punctured several. He wanted an analysis. He left a new kind of salve, drove back to the hospital with his specimens.

  He drove back late in the afternoon, when the hospital day’s rush was over. He found Cornelis writhing in bed, his body tortured with the solid spread of the infection. Curiously, his hands and face were free of the now solidly massed red pustules. They stopped at his wrists, and again at his neck. Below the waist, at the sides, his body was free of the infection, which extended, however, down the front and back of his thighs.

  “It iss verree curious, this!” commented the doctor, speaking English on Honoria’s account. “It iss as though he had worn an infected shirt.”

  Cornelis, through his three degrees of fever, spoke to Honoria.

  “Have you discovered my shirt? You said there was a shirt gone.”

  “Ha—so-o-o!” muttered the doctor. “And where?”

  “I can not say,” said Honoria, her lips suddenly dry. She and the doctor looked at each other.

  “A servant, perhaps?”

  “It must be.” Honoria nodded. “No one else—”

  Honoria disappeared while the doctor anointed Cornelis, writhing afresh; soothed him with a long, bitter draft.

  Below, Honoria had resolutely summoned all the servants. They stood before her, expressionless.

  “The master’s shirt is to be returned this night,” commanded Honoria imperiously. “I shall expect to find it—on the south gallery by nine o’clock. Otherwise”—she looked about her at each expressionless face—“otherwise—the fort. There will be a dark room for every one of you—no food, no sleep, until it is confessed. I will have none of this in my house. That is all.”

  She came upstairs again, helped the doctor assiduously.

  At the door when he took his departure, she whispered:

  “I have ordered them to return the shirt by nine tonight.”

  The doctor looked at her meaningly, an eyebrow lifted. “So! You understand, then, eh? It is bad, bad, this Black ‘stupidness.’ Burn the shirt.”

  “Yes—of course,” said Honoria.

  At nine she descended the stairs, went out upon the south gallery among the scents of the white-flowering jessamine; the sweet grass. All was silent. The servants had left the house, as usual, about an hour before.

  The shirt hung over the stone gallery-coping. She ran down the steps, found a stick, lifted the crumpled shirt on its end, carefully, carried it into the house. It bore no marks, save the crumpling. It had been soiled before its disappearance.

  She carried it into the kitchen, carefully lowered the corner of the thin garment until it caught fire from the embers of a charcoal-pot. The thin linen flamed up, and with her stick she manipulated it until every particle of it was consumed, and then stirred the embers. A few sparks came out. The shirt was completely burned.

  Her face drawn, she returned to the bedroom above. Cornelis was asleep. She sat beside his bed for two hours; then, after a long look at his flushed face, she departed silently for her own room.

  In the morning the fever was broken. Many of the smaller pustules had disappeared. The remaining rash was going down. Cornelis, at her beseeching, remained in bed. At noon he arose. He felt perfectly well, he said.

  “All that vexation about a little prickly heat!” Honoria sighed. She had four brothers. Men! They were much alike. How often had she heard her mother, and other mature women, say that!

  That night Cornelis’ skin was entirely restored. It was as though there had been no interval of burning agony. Cornelis, apparently, had forgotten that painful interval. But the reaction had made him especially cheerful at dinnertime. He laughed and joked rather more than usual. He did not even notice Julietta as she waited, silently, on the table.

  Two nights later, at the dinner-table, Cornelis collapsed forward in the middle of a phrase. His face went deathly white, his lips suddenly dry, a searing pain like the thrust of a carving-knife through and through his chest. Sudden froth stood at the corners of his mouth. The table-edge athwart him alone kept him from falling prone. He hung there, in intolerable agony, for seconds. Then, slowly, as it had “gone in,” the white-hot “knife” was withdrawn. He drew in a labored breath, and Honoria supported him upright. She had flown to him around the table.

  As she stood upright propping him back into his chair, she saw Julietta. The brown girl’s lips were drawn back from her even, beautiful teeth, her wide mouth in an animal-like snarl, her amber eyes boring into Cornelis’ face, a very Greek-mask of hatred. An instant afterward, Julietta’s face was that of the blank, submissive housemaid. But Honoria had seen.

  At a bound her hands were clenched tight about the girl’s slender arms and Julietta was being shaken like a willow wand in a great gale. Her tray, with glasses, shot resoundingly to the stone floor, to a tinkle of smashed glass. The Fighting Macartney blood showed red in Honoria’s pallid face.

  “It’s you, then, you deadly creature, is it, eh? You who have done this devilish thing to your master! You—in my house! It was you, then, who made the rash, with your double-damned ‘magic’!”

  In the primitive urge of her fury at one who had struck at her man, Honoria had the slim brown girl against the room’s wall now, holding her helpless in a grasp like steel with her own slender arms.

  Cornelis, faint after that surge of unbearable, deadly pain, struggled to speak, there in his chair. Well-nigh helpless, he looked on at this unaccountable struggle. At last he found his voice, a voice faint and weak.

  “What is it?—what is it, Honoria, my dear?”

  “It’s this witch!” cried Honoria through clenched teeth. “It is she who has put the obeah on you.” Then, “You she-devil, you will take it off or I’ll kill you here and now. Take it off, then! take it off!”Honoria’s voice had risen to a menacing scream. The girl cowered, wiltingly, under her fierce attack.

  “Ooh Gahd—me mistress! Ooh, Gahd! ‘Taint I, ma’am, I swear to Gahd—I ain’t do it, ma’am. Ooh, Gahd—me boans! Yo’ break me, mistress. Fo’ Gahd-love leave me to go!”

  But Honoria, unrelaxed, the fighting-blood of her clan aroused, held the brown girl relentlessly.

  “Take it off!” came, ever and again, through her small, clenched teeth. The brown girl began to struggle, ineffectually, gave it up, submitted to be held against the wall, her eyes now wide, frightened at this unexpected, sudden violence.

  “What is it that you tell her to do?” This from Cornelis, recovering, shocked, puzzled.

  “It is their damnable ‘obi’,” hissed Honoria. “I will make her ‘take it off’ you or I’ll kill her.”

  ‘It is her mother,” said Cornelis, suddenly inspired.”I know about her mother. I asked. Her mother, this girl’s mother, there in the hills—it is the girl’s mother who does this wickedness.”

  Honoria suddenly shifted her desperate grip upon the girl’s numb arms. She twisted, and Julietta’s slender body, yielding, collapsed limply to the floor. With a lightning-like motion, back and then forward again, Honoria menaced her with the great carving-knife, snatched from before her husband.

  “Get up!” Her voice was low now, deadly. “Get up, you devil, and lead me to your mother’s house.”

  Julietta, trembling, silent, dragged herself to her feet. Honoria pointed to the door with the knife’s great shining blade. In silence the girl slipped out, Honoria following. Cornelis sat, still numb with that fearful reaction after his unbearable pain, slumped forward now in his mahogany armchair at the head of his table. His bones felt like water. His head sank forward on his arms He remained motionless until Alonzo, the groom, summoned from the village by the frightened, gray-faced cook who had overheard, roused him, supported him upstairs.

  The two women passed around the corner of Fairfield House,
skirted the huddled cabins of the estate-village in silence, began to mount the steep hill at the back. Through tangled brush and twining, resistant guinea-grass, a slender trail wound abruptly upward into the deeper hills beyond. Up, and always up they went, the Caucasian lady grim and silent, the great knife held menacingly behind the unseeing back of the brown girl who stepped around turns and avoided roots and small rocks with the ease of custom.

  At the head of the second ravine Honoria’s conductress turned sharply to the right and led the way along the hill’s edge toward a small clearing among the mahogany and tibet tree scrub. A dingy cabin, of wood, with the inevitable corrugated iron roof, hung perilously on the hill’s seaward edge. Straight to its door walked Julietta, paused, tapped, opened the door, and pressed close by Honoria, entered.

  A dark brown woman peered at them across a small table. With her thumb, Honoria noted, she was rubbing very carefully the side of a small waxllke thing, which glistened dully in the illumination of a small, smoky oil lamp standing on the table. The woman, her eyes glassy as though from the effects of some narcotic drug, peered dully at the intruders.

  Honoria, her left hand clenched lightly on Julietta’s wincing shoulder, confronted her, the knife’s point resting on the table beside the brown hand which held the wax. This was molded, Honoria observed, to the rough simulacrum of a human being.

  “That is my husband!” announced Honoria without preamble. “You will take your ‘obi’ off now. Otherwise I will kill you both!”

  A long blackened needle lay beside the brown woman’s hand on the table. She looked up into Honoria’s face, dully.

  “Yes, me mistress,” she acquiesced in a singsong voice.

  “You will do that at once!” Honoria tapped her knife-blade on the table decisively. “I am Fru Hansen. I was Honoria Macartney. I mean what I say. Come!”

  The brown woman laid the wax image carefully down on table. She rose, dreamily, fumbled about in the semi-darkness of the cabin. She returned carrying a shining, new tin, half filled with water. This, as carefully as she had handled the wax image, she set down beside it. Then, as gingerly, she picked up the image, muttered a string of unintelligible words in the old Crucian Creole, thickly interspersed with Dahomeyan. Honoria recognized several of the words—“caffoon,” “Shandramadan”—but the sequence she could not grasp.The brown woman ended her speech, plunged the image into the water. She washed it carefully, as though it had been an incredibly tiny infant and she fearful of doing it some injury by clumsy handling. She removed it from the tin of water, the drops running down its surface of oily wax. She handed the image, with a suggestion of relaxed care now, to Honoria.

  “Him aff, now, me mistress; I swear-yo’, him aff! I swear yo’ be Gahd, an’ help me de Jesus!”

  Honoria took the image into her hand, looked at it curiously in that dim light, made upon it with her thumb the sign of the cross. Then she slowly broke it into pieces, the sweat standing in beads on her face. She turned, without another word, and walked out of the cabin. As she proceeded down the trail, laboriously now, her legs weak in her high-heeled slippers, she cast crumbling bits of the wax right and left into the dense scrub among the bushes at the trail’s sides. Her mouth and throat felt strangely dry. She murmured inarticulate prayers.

  She limped into Fairfield House half an hour later and found Cornelis entirely restored. He asked her many questions, and to these she returned somewhat evasive answers. Yes—she had gone to Julietta’s mother’s cabin up the hill. Yes—the “stupidness” of these people needed a lifetime to realize. No-there had been no difficulty. Julietta’s mother was a “stupid” old creature. There would be no more trouble, she was sure. It was extraordinary what effects they could produce. They brought it with them from Africa, of course—stupidness, wickedness—and handed it down from generation to generation.…

  She might have her own thoughts—men were very much alike, as her mother had said—as the days wore into weeks, the weeks to the placid years which lay before her, with her man, here at Fairfield for a while, later, perhaps, in some larger house, in a more important position.

  What had caused that devilish little Julietta to contrive such a thing? Those eyes! that mouth! Honoria had seen the hatred in her face.

  She would, of course, never ask Cornelis. Best to leave such matters alone. Men! She had fought for this man—her man.

  She would give him of her full devotion. There would be children in time. She would have, to replace Julietta, a new housemaid. There was one she remembered, near Christiansted. She would drive over tomorrow. The affairs of a Santa Crucian wife!

  Cornelis plainly loved her. He was hers. There would be deviled landcrabs, sprinkled with port wine, dusted with herbs; baked in the stone oven for breakfast.…

  ACROSS THE GULF

  Originally published in Weird Tales, May 1926.

  For the first year, or thereabouts, after his Scotch mother’s death the successful lawyer Alan Carrington was conscious, among his other feelings, of a kind of vague dread that she might appear as a character in one of his dreams, as, she had often assured him, her mother had come to her. Being the man he was, he resented this feeling as an incongruity. Yet, there was a certain background for the feeling of dread. It had been one of his practical mother’s convictions that such an appearance of her long-dead mother always preceded a disaster in the family.

  Such aversions as he might possess against the maternal side of his ancestry were all included in his dislike for belief in this kind of thing. When he agreed that “the Scotch are a dour race,” he always had reference, at least mentally, to this superstitious strain, associated with that race from time immemorial, concrete to his experience because of this belief of his mother’s, against which he had always fought.

  He carried out dutifully, and with a high degree of professional skill, all her various expressed desires, and continued, after her death, to live in their large, comfortable house. Perhaps because his mother never did appear in such dreams as he happened to remember, his dread became less and less poignant. At the end of two years or so, occupied with the thronging interests of a public man in the full power of his early maturity, it had almost ceased to be so much as a memory.

  In the spring of his forty-fourth year, Carrington, who had long worked at high pressure and virtually without vacations, was apprized by certain mental and physical indications which his physician interpreted vigorously, that he must take at least the whole summer off and devote himself to recuperation. Rest, said the doctor, for his overworked mind and under-exercised body, was imperatively indicated.

  Carrington was able to set his nearly innumerable interests and affairs in order in something like three weeks by means of highly concentrated efforts to that end. Then, exceedingly nervous, and not a little debilitated physically from this extra strain upon his depleted resources, he had to meet the problem of where he was to go and what he was to do. He was, of course, too deeply set in the rut of his routines to find such a decision easy. Fortunately, this problem was solved for him by a letter which he received unexpectedly from one of his cousins on his mother’s side, the Reverend Fergus MacDonald, a gentleman with whom he had had only slight contacts.

  Dr. MacDonald was a middle-aged, retired clergyman, whom an imminent decline had removed eight or ten years before from a brilliant, if underpaid, career in his own profession. After a few years sojourn in the Adirondacks he had emerged cured, and with an already growing reputation as a writer of that somewhat inelastic literary product emphasized by certain American magazines which seem to embalm a spinsterish austerity of the literary form under the label of distinction.

  Dr. MacDonald had retained a developed pastoral instinct which he could no longer satisfy in the management of a parish. He was, besides, too little robust to risk assuming, at least for some time to come, the wearing burden of teaching. He compromised the matter by establishing a summer camp for boys in his still-desirable Adirondacks. Being devoid of experience
in business matters he associated with himself a certain Thomas Starkey, a young man whom the ravages of the White Plague had snatched away from a sales-managership and driven into the quasi-exile of Saranac, where Dr. MacDonald had met him.

  This association proved highly successful for the half-dozen years that it had lasted. Then Starkey, after a brave battle for his health, had succumbed, just at a period when his trained business intelligence would have been most helpful to the affairs of the camp.

  Dazed at this blow, Dr. MacDonald had desisted from his labors after literary distinction long enough to write to his cousin Carrington, beseeching his legal and financial counsel. When Carrington had read the last of his cousin’s finished periods, he decided at once, and dispatched a telegram announcing his immediate setting out for the camp, his intention to remain through the summer, and the promise to assume full charge of the business management. He started for the Adirondacks the next afternoon.

  His presence brought immediate order out of confusion. Dr. MacDonald, on the evening of the second day of his cousin’s administration of affairs, got down on his knees and returned thanks to his Maker for the undeserved beneficence which had sent this financial angel of light into the midst of his affairs, in this, his hour of dire need! Thereafter the reverend doctor immersed himself more and more deeply in his wonted task of producing the solid literature dear to the hearts of his editors.

  But if Carrington’s coming had improved matters at the camp, the balance of indebtedness was far from being one-sided. For the first week or so the reaction from his accustomed way of life had caused him to feel, if anything, even staler and more nerve-racked than before. But that first unpleasantness past, the invigorating air of the balsam-laden pine woods began to show its restorative effects rapidly. He found that he was sleeping like the dead. He could not get enough sleep, it appeared. His appetite increased, and he found that he was putting on needed weight. The business management of a boys’ camp, absurdly simple after the complex matters of Big Business with which he had long been occupied, was only a spice to this new existence among the deep shadows and sunny spaces of the Adirondack country. At the end of a month of this, he confidently declared himself a new man. By the first of August, instead of the nervous wreck who had arrived, sharp-visaged and cadaverous, two months before, Carrington presented the appearance of a robust, hard-muscled athlete of thirty, twenty-two pounds heavier and “without a nerve in his body.”