Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (2 page)

In Whitehead’s stories you encounter supernatural or evil beings which are unique to this kind of fiction. There is, for example the jumbee from the story of the same name; this is a corpse-like spirit that hovers in the air, and there is also a sheen who is an old woman who turns into a were-bitch. There is a kind of bizarre and unpleasant humour inherent in some of the tales, such as the unusual creature that appears in ‘Cassius’. It is a beast that looks like a gigantic frog which terrorizes a neighbourhood, and it turns out to be a partly absorbed Siamese twin which had taken on a life of its own after being surgically removed. This kind of grotesquery is found in a few other stories also. A fine example of this graphic, nightmare-type horror can be found in ‘The Lips’ in which the captain of a slave ship is bitten on the neck by an Ibo woman who whispers the word ‘
l’kindu
’ in his ear. This incident eventually causes his insanity and he commits suicide on the voyage home when it is revealed that where the wound had been there is now a mouth – complete with full lips, and a long pink tongue – which talks to him.

Many of the stories in the collection deal with hauntings by spirits of people killed long ago. The ghost in ‘The Shadows’ is of a man who was murdered while seeking eternal life. In ‘Black Tancrède’, the hand of an executed slave looks for revenge. The soul of a man is trapped in a bull during a Voodoo ceremony in ‘The Black Beast’. A pirate is imprisoned in a painting in ‘Seven Turns in a Hangman’s Rope’ when a former lover paints his soul into the picture in an act of revenge. The spirit of a vicious gambler possesses ‘Mrs Lorriquer’, turning a kind, courteous woman hostile and unpleasant when she plays cards. A witch’s curse figures in ‘Sweet Grass’, which is considered one of Whitehead’s best stories. In ‘Passing of a God’ a Voodoo god enters and animates a man’s tumour, causing the natives to worship him.

Scattered about the collection, however, are stories which, while strange and ghoulish, are set away from Voodoo territory. For example there is ‘The Fireplace’, which concerns the ghost of a murdered man who appears in a hotel in Mississippi and persuades someone to relate the circumstances of his death. ‘The Shut Room’ is about the haunting of an old English coaching inn; and ‘The Napier Limousine’ also takes place in England.

Both the long tale ‘Bothon’ and ‘Scar Tissue’ involve the lost city of Atlantis. ‘Bothon’ is particularly accomplished, beginning in modern New York with the central character at first experiencing strange noises of catastrophe and battle which only he can hear. It is a unnerving case of ‘clairaudience’.

One of Whitehead’s more ghoulish tales is ‘The Chadbourne Incident’ and it is heavily influenced by the work of Lovecraft. This story is set in the New England village of Chadbourne, which is Whitehead’s version of Lovecraft’s blighted Arkham, and tells of ghouls who eat little children.

The combination of Whitehead’s early death and the fact that his stories had only appeared in pulp magazines, is the main reason that his name and his work is not more well known. His fascinating tales are certainly as effective and meritorious as those of Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood, for example. It was over a decade after he died before his short stories were collected into book form and they now have been long out of print. Therefore this Wordsworth Edition is a treasure trove for those lovers of these strange and unsettling tales penned by a master craftsman of the genre. We hope that this will not only please those who already admire Henry S. Whitehead, but attract a whole new legion of fans.

David Stuart Davies

West India Lights

Black Terror

I woke up in the great mahogany bed of my house in Christiansted with an acute sense of something horribly wrong, something frightful, tearing at my mind. I pulled myself together, shook my head to get the sleep out of my eyes, pulled aside the mosquito-netting. That was better! The strange sense of horror which had pursued me out of sleep was fading now.

I groped vaguely, back into the dream, or whatever it had been – it did not seem to have been a dream; it was something else. I could now, somehow, localize it. I found now that I was listening, painfully, to a sustained, aching sound, like a steam calliope fastened onto one high, piercing, raucous note. I knew it could not be a steam calliope. There had been no such thing on the Island of Santa Cruz since Columbus discovered it on his Second Voyage in 1493. I got up and into my slippers and muslin bathrobe, still puzzled.

Then abruptly the note ended, cut off clean like the ceasing of the drums when the Black people are having one of their
ratas
back of the town in the hills.

Then, and only then, I knew what it was that had disturbed me. It had been a woman, screaming.

I ran out to the semi-enclosed gallery which runs along the front of my house on the Copagnie Gade, the street of hard-pounded earth below, and looked down.

A group of early risen Blacks in nondescript garb was assembled down there, and the number was increasing every instant. Men, women, small Black children were gathered in a rapidly tightening knot directly in front of the house, their guttural mumbles of excitement forming a contrapuntal background to the solo of that sustained scream; for the woman, there in the center, was at it again now, with fresh breath, uttering her blood-curdling, hopeless, screeching wail, a thing to make the listener wince.

Not one of the throng of Blacks touched the woman in their midst. I listened to their guttural Creole, trying to catch some clue to what this disturbance was about. I would catch a word of the broad
patois
here and there, but nothing my mind could lay hold upon. At last it came, the clue; in a childish, piping treble; the clear-cut word,
Jumbee
.

I had it now. The screaming woman believed, and the crowd about her believed, that some evil witchery was afoot. Some enemy had enlisted the services of the dreaded witch-doctor – the
papaloi
– and something fearful, some curse or charm, had been ‘put on’ her or someone belonging to her family. All that the word ‘Jumbee’ had told me clearly.

I watched now for whatever was going to happen. Meanwhile I wondered why a policeman did not come along and break up this public gathering. Of course the policeman, being a Black man himself, would be as much intrigued as any of the others, but he would do his duty nevertheless. ‘Put a Black to drive a Black!’ The old adage was as true nowadays as in the remote days of West Indian slavery.

The woman, now convulsed, rocking backward and forward, seemed as though possessed. Her screams had now an undertone or cadence of pure horror. It was ghastly.

A policeman, at last! Two policemen, in fact, one of them Old Kraft, once a Danish top-sergeant of garrison troops. Kraft was nearly pure Caucasian, but, despite his touch of African, he would tolerate no nonsense. He advanced, waving his truncheon threateningly, barking hoarse reproaches, commands to disperse. The group of Black people began to melt away in the general direction of the Sunday Market, herded along by Sergeant Kraft’s dark brown patrolman.

Now only Old Kraft and the Black woman who had screamed remained, facing each other in the street below. I saw the old man’s face change out of its harsh, professional, man-handling frown to something distinctly more humane. He spoke to the woman in low tones. She answered him in mutters, not unwillingly, but as though to avoid being overheard.

I spoke from the gallery.

‘What is it, Herr Kraft? Can I be of assistance?’

Old Kraft looked, recognized me, touched his cap.

‘Stoopide-ness!’ exploded Old Kraft, explanatorily. ‘The woo-man, she haf had – ’ Old Kraft paused and made a sudden, stiff, dramatic gesture and looked at me meaningly. His eyes said: ‘I could tell you all about it, but not from here.’

‘A chair on the gallery for the poor woman?’ I suggested, nodding to him.

‘Come!’ said he to the woman, and she followed him obediently up the outside gallery steps while I walked across to unfasten the door at the gallery’s end.

We placed the woman, who seemed dazed now and kept a hand on her head, in one of my chairs, where she rocked slowly back and forth whispering to herself, and Kraft and I went inside the house, where I led him through to the dining-room.

There, at the sideboard, I did the honors for my friend Sergeant Kraft of the Christiansted Police.

‘The woman’s screaming awakened me, half an hour early,’ I began, invitingly, as soon as the sergeant had been duly refreshed and had said his final ‘skoal’, his eyes on mine in the Danish manner.

‘Yah, yah,’ returned Kraft, nodding a wise old head. ‘She tell me de Obiman fix her right, dis time!’

This sounded promising. I waited for more.

‘But joost what it iss, I can not tell at all,’ continued Kraft, disappointingly, as though aware of the secretiveness which should animate a police sergeant.

‘Will you have – another, Herr Kraft?’ I suggested.

The sergeant obliged, ending the ceremony with another ‘skoal’. This libation, as I had hoped, had the desired effect. I will spare Kraft’s accent, which could be cut with a knife. What he told me was that this woman, Elizabeth Aagaard, living in a village estate-cabin near the Central Factory, a few miles outside of Christiansted, had a son, one Cornelis McBean. The young fellow was what is locally known as a ‘gallows-bird,’ in short a gambler, thief, and general bad-egg. He had been in the police court several times for petty offenses, and in jail in the Christiansfort more than once.

But, as Kraft expressed it, ‘it ain’ de thievin’ dat make de present difficoolty.’ No! it was that young Cornelis McBean had presumed beyond his station, and had committed the crime of falling in love with Estrella Collins, the daughter of a prosperous Black storekeeper in one of Christiansted’s side streets. Old Collins, utterly disapproving, and his words to McBean having had no effect whatever upon that stubborn lover, had, in short, employed the services of a
papaloi
to get rid of McBean.

‘But,’ I protested, ‘I know Old Collins. I understand, of course, how he might object to the attentions of such a young ne’er-do-well, but – a storekeeper like him, a comparatively rich man, to call in a
papaloi
– it seems – ’

‘Him Black!’ replied Sergeant Kraft with a little, significant gesture which made everything plain.

‘What,’ said I, after thinking a little, ‘what particular kind of
ouanga
has Collins had “put on” him?’

The old sergeant gave me a quick glance at that word. It is a meaningful word. In Haiti it is very common. It means both talisman and amulet; something, that is, to attract, or something to repel, to defend the wearer. But here in Santa Cruz the magic of our Blacks is neither so clear-cut nor (as some imagine) quite so deadly as the magickings of the
papalois
and the
hougans
in Haiti’s infested hills with their thousands of
vodu
altars to Ougoun Badagaris, to Damballa, to the Snake of far, dreadful Guinea. Over even so much as the manufacture of
ouangas
I may not linger. One can not. The details –

‘It is, I think, a “sweat-ouanga”, ’ whispered Old Kraft, and went a shade lighter than his accustomed sunburned ivory. ‘De wooman allege,’ he continued, ‘that the boy sicken an’ die at noon – today. For that reason she is walk into de town early, because there is no help. She desire to bewail-like, dis trouble restin’ ’pon her head.’

Kraft had given me all the information he possessed. He rated a reward. I approached the sideboard a third time.

‘You will excuse me again, Sergeant. It is a little early in the day for me. Still, “a man can’t walk on one leg!” ’

The sergeant grinned at this Santa Crucian proverb which means that a final stirrup-cup is always justified, and remarked: ‘He should walk goot – on three!’ After this reference to the number of his early-morning refreshments, he accepted the last of these, boomed his ‘skoal’, and became a police sergeant once more.

‘Shall I take de wooman along, sir?’ he inquired as we reached the gallery where Elizabeth Aagaard still rocked and moaned and whispered to herself in her trouble.

‘Leave her here, please,’ I replied, ‘and I will see that Esmerelda finds her something to eat.’ The sergeant saluted and departed.

‘Gahd bless yo’, sar,’ murmured the poor soul. I left her there and went to the kitchen to drop a word in the sympathetic ear of my old cook. Then I started toward my belated shower-bath. It was nearly seven by now.

After breakfast I inquired for Elizabeth Aagaard. She had had food and had delivered herself at length upon her sorrows to Esmerelda and the other house-servants. Esmerelda’s account established the belief that young McBean had been marked for death by one of the oldest and deadliest devices known to primitive barbarism; one which, as all Caucasians who know of it will assure you, derives its sole efficacy from the psychology of fear, that fear of the occult which has stultified the African’s mind through countless generations of warfare against the jungle and the dominance of his fetish-men and
vodu
priests.