Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (103 page)

Well, that was destined to be a bad night, Mr Canevin. I remember one of my husband’s sermons, Mr Canevin, on the text: ‘A Good Day’. I do not remember what portion of the Scriptures it comes from, but I remember the text, and the sermon too. Afterward, it occurred to me that that night, that ‘bad night’, was the direct opposite; a mere whimsy of mine, but I always think of that night as ‘the bad night’, somehow.

For, Mr Canevin, that was not all. No. I had noticed the time before I returned to bed on that occasion, and it was a little past one o’clock. I had slept for an hour, you see, after the first interruption.

When I was awakened again it was five o’clock in the morning. Remember, I had, deliberately, and in a state of full wakefulness, closed and fastened both the door from that side gallery into the dining room, and the bedroom door. The jalousies had not been touched at any time, and all of them were fastened.

I awoke with the most terrible impression of evil and horror: it was as though I stood alone in the midst of a hostile world, bent upon my destruction. It was the most dreadful feeling – a feeling of complete, of unrecoverable, depression.

And there, coming through my bedroom door –
through
the door, Mr Canevin, which remained shut and locked – was Armand Dubois. He was a tall, slim man, and he stalked in, looking taller and slimmer than ever, because he was wearing one of those old-fashioned, long, white night-shirts, which fell to his ankles. He walked, as I say, through the closed door, and straight toward me, and, Mr Canevin, the expression on his face was the expression of one of the demons from hell.

I half sat up, utterly horrified, incapable of speech, or even of thought beyond that numbing horror, and as I sat up, Armand Dubois seemed to pause. His advance slowed abruptly, the expression of malignant hatred seemed to become intensified, and then he slowly turned to his left, and, keeping his face turned toward me, walked, very slowly now straight through the side wall of my bedroom, and was gone, Mr Canevin.

Then I screamed, again and again, and Placide, my husband, bursting the door, rushed in, and over his shoulder and through the broken door I could see Julie’s terrified face, and my poor old aunt, a Shetland shawl huddled about her poor shoulders, coming gropingly out of her bedroom.

That was the last I remembered then. When I came to, it was broad daylight and past seven, and Dr Duchesne was there, holding his fingers against my wrist, counting the pulse, I suppose, and there was a strong taste of brandy in my mouth.

They made me stay in bed all through the morning, and Dr Duchesne would not allow me to talk. I had wanted to tell Placide and him all that had happened to me through the night, but at two o’clock in the afternoon, when I was allowed to get up at last, after having eaten some broth, I had had time to think, and I never mentioned what I had heard and seen that night.

No, Mr Canevin, my dear husband never heard it, never knew what had cast me into that condition of ‘nerves’. After he died I told Dr Duchesne, and Dr Duchesne made no particular comment. Like all doctors, and the clergy here in the West Indies, such matters were an old story to him!

It was fortunate for us that he happened to be passing the house and came in because he saw the lights, and could hear Julie weeping hysterically. He realized that something extraordinary had happened, or was happening, in the rectory, and that he might be needed.

He was on his way home from the residence of Armand Dubois, there in the town. Dubois had been attacked by some obscure tropical fever, just before midnight, and had died at five o’clock that morning, Mr Canevin.

Dr Duchesne told me, later, about Dubois’s case, which interested him very much from his professional viewpoint. Dr Duchesne said that there were still strange fevers, not only in obscure places in the world, but right here in our civilized islands – think of it! He said that he could not tell so much as the name of the fever that had taken Dubois away. But he said the most puzzling of the symptoms was, that just at midnight Dubois had fallen into a state of coma – unconsciousness, you know – which had lasted only a minute or two; quite extraordinary, the doctor said, and that a little later, soon after one o’clock, he had shut his eyes, and quieted down – he had been raving, muttering and tossing about, as fever patients do, you know, and that there had come over his face the most wicked and dreadful grimace, and that he had drummed with his fingers against his own forehead, an irregular kind of drumming, a beat, the doctor said, not unlike the scampering footfalls of some small, four-footed animal . . .

He died, as I told you, at five, quite suddenly, and Dr Duchesne said that just as he was going there came over his face the most horrible, the most malignant expression that he had ever seen. He said it caused him to shudder, although he knew, of course, that it was only the muscles of the man’s face contracting –
rigor mortis
, it is called, I think, Mr Canevin.

Dr Duchesne said, too, that there was a scientific word which described the situation – that is, the possible connection between Dubois as he lay dying with that queer fever, and the appearances to me. It was not ‘telepathy’, Mr Canevin, of that I am certain. I wish I could remember the word, but I fear it has escaped my poor old memory!

‘Was it “projection”?’ I asked Mrs Du Chaillu.

‘I think that was it, Mr Canevin,’ said Mrs Du Chaillu, and nodded her head at me, wisely.

The Lips

The
Saul Taverner
, blackbirder, Luke Martin, master, up from Cartagena, came to her anchor in the harbor of St Thomas, capital and chief town of the Danish West Indies, A Martinique barkentine berthed to leeward of her, sent a fully manned boat ashore after the harbor-master with a request for permission to change anchorage. Luke Martin’s shore boat was only a few lengths behind the Frenchman’s. Martin shouted after the officer whom it landed: ‘Tell Lollik I’ll change places with ye, an’ welcome! What ye carryin’ – brandy? I’ll take six cases off’n ye.’

The barkentine’s mate, a French-Island mulatto, nodded over his shoulder, and noted down the order in a leather pocketbook without slackening his pace. It was no joyful experience to lie in a semi-enclosed harbor directly to leeward of a slaver, and haste was indicated despite propitiatory orders for brandy. ‘Very well, Captain,’ said the mate, stiffly.

Martin landed as the Martinique mate rounded a corner to the left and disappeared from view in the direction of the harbor-master’s. Martin scowled after him, muttering to himself.

‘Airs! Talkin’ English – language of the islands; thinkin’ in French, you an’ your airs! An’ yer gran’father came outta a blackbird ship like’s not! You an’ your airs!’

Reaching the corner the mate had turned, Martin glanced after him momentarily, then turned to the right, mounting a slight rise. His business ashore took him to the fort. He intended to land his cargo, or a portion of it, that night. The colony was short of field hands. With the help of troops from Martinique, French troops, and Spaniards from its nearer neighbor, Porto Rico, it had just put down a bloody uprising on its subsidiary island of St Jan. Many of the slaves had been killed in the joint armed reprisal of the year 1833.

Luke Martin got his permission to land his cargo, therefore, without difficulty, and, being a Yankee bucko who let no grass grow under his feet, four bells in the afternoon watch saw the hatches off and the decks of the
Saul Taverner
swarming with manacled Blacks for the ceremony of washing-down.

Huddled together, blinking in the glaring sun of a July afternoon under parallel 18, north latitude, the mass of swart humanity were soaped, with handfuls of waste out of soft-soap buckets, scrubbed with brushes on the ends of short handles, and rinsed off with other buckets. Boatloads of Negroes surrounded the ship to see the washing-down, and these were kept at a distance by a swearing third mate told off for the purpose.

By seven bells the washing-down was completed, and before sundown a row of lighters, each guarded by a pair of Danish
gendarmes
with muskets and fixed bayonets, had ranged alongside for the taking off of the hundred and seventeen Blacks who were to be landed, most of whom would be sent to replenish the laborers on the plantations of St Jan off the other side of the island of St Thomas.

The disembarking process began just after dark, to the light of lanterns. Great care was exercised by all concerned lest any escape by plunging overboard. A tally-clerk from shore checked off the Blacks as they went over the side into the lighters, and these, as they became filled, were rowed to the landing-stage by other slaves, bending over six great sweeps in each of the stub-bowed, heavy wooden boats.

Among the huddled black bodies of the very last batch stood a woman, very tall and thin, with a new-born child, black as a coal, at her breasts. The woman stood a little aloof from the others, farther from the low rail of the
Saul Taverner
’s forward deck, crooning to her infant. Behind her approached Luke Martin, impatient of his unloading, and cut at her thin ankles with his rhinoceros leather whip. The woman did not wince. Instead, she turned her head and muttered a few syllables in a low tone, in the Eboe dialect. Martin shoved her into the mass of Blacks, cursing roundly as he cut a second time at the spindling shins.

The woman turned, very quietly and softly, as he was passing behind her, let her head fall softly on Martin’s shoulder and whispered into his ear. The motion was so delicate as to simulate a caress, but Martin’s curse died in his throat. He howled in pain as the woman raised her head, and his whip clattered on the deck boarding while the hand which had held it went to the shoulder. The woman, deftly holding her infant, had moved in among the huddling Blacks, a dozen or more of whom intervened between her and Martin, who hopped on one foot and cursed, a vicious, continuous stream of foul epithets; then, still cursing, made his way in haste to his cabin after an antiseptic, any idea of revenge swallowed up in his superstitious dread of what might happen to him if he did not, forthwith, dress the ghastly wound just under his left ear, where the black woman had caused her firm, white and shining teeth to meet the great muscle of his neck between shoulder and jaw.

When he emerged, ten minutes later, the wound now soaked in permanganate of potash, and roughly clotted with a clean cloth, the last lighter, under the impetus of its six sweeps, was half-way ashore, and the clerk of the government, from the fort, was awaiting him, with a bag of coin and a pair of
gendarmes
to guard it. He accompanied the government clerk below, where, the
gendarmes
at the cabin door, they figured and added and counted money for the next hour, a bottle of sound rum and a pair of glasses between them.

At two bells, under a shining moon, the
Saul Taverner
, taking advantage of the evening trade wind, was running for the harbor’s mouth to stand away for Norfolk, Virginia, whence, empty, she would run up the coast for her home port of Boston, Massachusetts.

It was midnight, what with the care of his ship coming out of even the plain and safe harbor of St Thomas, before Martin the skipper, Culebra lighthouse off the port quarter, turned in. The wound in the top of his shoulder ached dully, and he sent for Matthew Pound, his first mate, to wash it out with more permanganate and dress it suitably. It was in an awkward place – curse the black slut! – for him to manage it for himself.

Pound went white and muttered under his breath at the ugly sight of it when Martin had removed his shirt, painfully, and eased off the cloth he had roughly laid over it, a cloth now stiff and clotted with the exuding blood drying on its inner surface, from the savage wound.

Thereafter, not liking the look on his mate’s face, nor that whitening which the sight of the place in his neck had brought about, Martin dispensed with assistance, and dressed the wound himself.

He slept little that first night, but this was partly for thinking of the bargain he had driven with those short-handed Danes. They had been hard up for black meat to sweat on those hillside canefields over on St Jan. He could have disposed easily of his entire cargo, but that, unfortunately, was out of the question. He had, what with an exceptionally slow and hot voyage across the Caribbean from Cartagena, barely enough of his said cargo left to fulfill his engagement to deliver a certain number of head in Norfolk. But he would have been glad enough to rid his hold of them all – curse them! – and set his course straight for Boston. He was expecting to be married the day after his arrival. He was eager to get home, and even now the
Saul Taverner
was carrying as much sail as she could stand up under, heeling now to the unfailing trade wind of this latitude.

The wound ached and pained, none the less, and he found it well-nigh impossible to settle himself in a comparatively comfortable position on its account. He tossed and cursed far into the warm night. Toward morning he fell into a fitful doze.

The entire side of his neck and shoulder was one huge, searing ache when he awakened and pushed himself carefully upright with both hands. He could not bend his head nor, at first, move it from side to side. Dressing was a very painful process, but he managed it. He wanted to see what the bite looked like, but, as he never shaved during a voyage, there was no glass in his cabin. He bathed the sore place gingerly with bay rum, which hurt abominably and caused him to curse afresh. Dressed at last, he made his way up on deck, past the steward who was laying breakfast in his cabin. The steward, he thought, glanced at him curiously, but he could not be sure. No wonder. He had to walk sidewise, with the pain of his neck, like a crab. He ordered more sail, stuns’ls, and, these set and sheeted home, he returned to the cabin for breakfast.