Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (112 page)

His father awakened him about five minutes before seven. The old man held a newspaper in his hand. He pointed to a scare-head on the front page.

‘This must have happened about the time you came in,’ remarked Mr Simon.

‘Yes – the crowd was around the drugstore when I went out to get some cigarettes,’ replied Everard Simon, stretching and yawning.

When his father was gone and he had finished with his bath, he sat down, in a bathrobe, to glance over the newspaper account. A phrase arrested him: ‘ . . . the body was identified as that of “Jerry the Wolf”, a notorious gangster with a long prison record.’

Then, lower down, when he had resumed his reading: ‘ . . . a large-caliber bullet which, entering the lower jaw, penetrated the base of the brain . . . no eye-witnesses . . . ’

Everard Simon sat for a long time after he had finished the account, the newspaper on the floor by his chair. ‘No eye-witnesses!’ He must, really, keep that imagination of his within bounds, within his control.

Slowly and reflectively, this good resolution uppermost, he went back to the bathroom and prepared for his morning shave.

Putting on his shoes, in his room, he observed something amiss. He picked up a shoe, examined it carefully. The soles of the shoes were caked with black mold, precisely like the mold from the woodpaths about his Adirondack camp. Little withered leaves and dried pine-needles clung to the mold. And on the side of the right shoe were brownish stains, exactly like freshly dried bloodstains. He shuddered as he carried the shoes into the bathroom, wiped them clean with a damp towel, then rinsed out the towel. He put them on, and shortly afterward, before he entered the subway to go over to the club for the day, he had them polished.

The bootblack spoke of the killing on that corner the night before. The boot-black noticed nothing amiss with the shoes, and when he had finished, there was no trace of any stains.

Simon did not change at De Kalb Avenue that morning. An idea had occurred to him between Church Avenue and De Kalb, and he stayed on the Brighton local, secured a seat after the emptying process which took place at De Kalb, and went on through the East River tunnel.

He sent in his name to Forrest, a college acquaintance, now in the district attorney’s office, and Forrest received him after a brief delay.

‘I wanted to ask a detail about this gangster who was killed in Flatbush last night,’ said Simon. ‘I suppose you have his record, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, we know pretty well all about him. What particular thing did you want to know?’

‘About his name,’ replied Simon. ‘Why was he called “Jerry the Wolf” – that is, why “The Wolf” particularly?’

‘That’s a very queer thing, Simon. Such a name is not, really, uncommon. There was that fellow, Goddard, you remember. They called him “The Wolf of Wall Street”. There was the fiction criminal known as “The Lone Wolf”. There have been plenty of “wolves” among criminal “monikers”. But this fellow, Jerry Goraffsky, was a Hungarian, really. He was called “The Wolf”, queerly enough, because there were those in his gang who believed he was one of those birds who could change himself into a wolf! It’s a queer combination, isn’t it? – for a New York gangster?’

‘Yes,’ said Everard Simon, ‘it is, very queer, when you come to think of it. I’m much obliged to you for telling me. I was curious about it somehow.’

‘That isn’t the only queer aspect of this case, however,’ resumed Forrest, a light frown suddenly showing on his keen face. ‘In fact that wolf-thing isn’t a part of the case – doesn’t concern us, of course, here in the district attorney’s office. That’s nothing but blah. Gangsters are as superstitious as sailors; more so, in fact!

‘No. The real mystery in this affair is – the bullet, Simon. Want to see it?’

‘Why – yes; of course – if you like, Forrest. What’s wrong with the bullet?’

Forrest stepped out of the room, returned at once, laid a large, round ball on his desk. Both men bent over it curiously.

‘Notice that diameter, Simon,’ said Forrest. ‘It’s a hand-molded round ball – belongs in a collection of curios, not in any gangster’s gat! Why, man, it’s like the slugs they used to hunt the bison before the old Sharps rifle was invented. It’s the kind of a ball Fenimore Cooper’s people used – “Deerslayer”! It would take a young cannon to throw that thing. Smashed in the whole front of Jerry’s ugly mug. The inside works of his head were spilled all over the sidewalk! It’s what the newspapers always call a “clue”. Who do you suppose resurrected the horse-pistol – or the ship’s blunderbuss – to do that job on Jerry? Clever, in a way. Hooked it out of some dime museum, perhaps. There are still a few of those old “pitches” still operating, you know, at the old stand – along East Fourteenth Street.’

‘A flintlock, single-shot horse-pistol, I’d imagine,’ said Everard Simon, laying the ounce lead ball back on the mahogany desk. He knew something of weapons, new and old. As a writer of informational articles that was part of his permanent equipment.

‘Very likely,’ mused the assistant district attorney. ‘Glad you came in, old man.’

And Everard Simon went on uptown to his club.

Across the Gulf

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’.

On the evening of the fourth day of August, healthily weary after a long day’s hike, Carrington retired soon after 9 o’clock, and fell immediately into a deep and restful sleep. Toward morning he dreamed of his mother for the first time since her death more than six years before. His dream took the form that he was lying here, in his own bed, awake – a not altogether uncommon form of dream – and that he was very chilly in the region of the left shoulder. As is well-known to those skilled in the scientific phenomena of the dream-state, now a very prominent portion of the material used in psychological study, this kind of sensation in a dream virtually always is the result of an actual physical condition, and is reproduced in the dream because of that actual background as a stimulus. Carrington’s cold shoulder was toward the left-hand, or outside of the bed, which stood against the wall of his large, airy room.

In his dream he thought that he reached out his hand to replace the bed clothes, and as he did so his hand was softly, though firmly, taken, and his mother’s well-remembered voice said: ‘Lie still, laddie; I’ll tuck you in.’ Then he thought his mother replaced the loosened covers and tucked them in about his shoulder with her competent touch. He wanted to thank her, and as he could not see her because of the position in which he was lying, he endeavored to open his eyes and turn over, being in that state commonly thought of as between sleep and waking. With some considerable effort he succeeded in forcing open his reluctant eyes; but turning over was a much more difficult matter, it appeared. He had to fight against an overpowering inclination to sink back comfortably into the deep sleep, from which, in his dream, he had awakened to find his shoulder disagreeably uncomfortable. The warmth of the replaced covers was an additional inducement to sleep.

At last, with a determined wrench he overcame his desire to go to sleep again and rolled over to his left side by dint of a strong effort of his will, smiling gratefully and about to express his thanks. But at the instant of accomplishing this victory of the will, he actually awakened, in precisely the position recorded in his mind in the dream-state.

Where he had expected to meet his mother’s eyes, he saw nothing, but there remained with him a persistent impression that he had felt the withdrawal of her hand from where, on his shoulder, it had rested caressingly. The grateful warmth of the bedclothes in that cool morning remained, however, and he observed that they were well tucked in about that shoulder.

His dream had clearly been of the type which George Du Maurier speaks of in
Peter Ibbetson.
He had ‘dreamed true’, and it required several minutes before he could rid himself of the impression that his mother, moved by some strange whimsicality, had stepped out of his sight, perhaps hidden herself behind the bed! He was actually about to look back of the bed before the utter absurdity of the idea became fully apparent to him. The back of the bed stood close against the wall of the room. His mother had been dead more than six years.