Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (36 page)

I had done it. I had done what Tom Merritt had told me to do, ruthlessly, without any hesitation, the way Tom had said they did it in Persia around Teheran, the capital, and Shiraz, and in Kut-el-Amara, and down south in Jask.

And then, having burned my bridges, and, for all I knew positively, made myself eligible for a noose at Wethersfield, I walked across to the mausoleum, and straight up to the opened bronze door, and looked inside.

A frightful smell – a smell like all the decayed meat in the world all together in one place – took me by the throat. A wave of quick nausea invaded me. But I stood my ground, and forced myself to envisage what was inside; and when I had seen, despite my short retchings and coughings I resolutely raised my Männlicher and shot and shot and shot at moving, scampering targets; shot again and again and again, until nothing moved inside there. I had seen, besides those moving targets, something else; some things that I will not attempt to describe beyond using the word ‘fragments’. Poor little five-year-old Truman Curtiss who had last been seen just outside the cemetery gate ‘with a lady’ would never climb that hill again, never pick any more blueberries in Chadbourn or any other place . . .

I looked without regret on the shambles I had wrought within the old Merritt tomb. The Männlicher is a weapon of precision . . .

I was brought to a sense of things going on outside the tomb by the sound of running feet, the insistent, clipping drawl of three excited voices asking questions. The three searchers, snapped out of their leisurely walk around the cemetery, and quite near by at the time my shooting had begun, had arrived on the scene of action.

‘What’s it all about, Mr Canevin?’

‘We heard ye a-shootin’ away.’

‘Good Cripes! Gerald’s shot a
man!’

I blew the smoke out of the barrel of my Männlicher, withdrew the clip. I walked toward the group bending now over the crumpled figure on the ground halfway to the cemetery gate.

‘Who’s this man you shot, Gerald? Good Cripes! It’s the fella that druv the car for them-there Persians. Good Cripes, Gerald – are ye crazy? You can’t shoot down a man like that!’

‘It’s not a man,’ said I, coming up to them and looking down on the figure.

There was a joint explosion at that. I waited, standing quietly by, until they had exhausted themselves. They were, plainly, more concerned with what consequences I should have to suffer than with the fate of the chauffeur.

‘You say it ain’t no man! Are ye crazy, Gerald?’

‘It’s not a man,’ I repeated. ‘Reach down and press his jaws together so that he opens his mouth, and you’ll see what I mean.’

Then, as they naturally enough I suppose hesitated to fill this order, I stooped down, pressed together the buccinator muscles in the middle of the broad Mongol-like cheeks. The mouth came open, and thereat there was another chorus from the three. It was just as Tom Merritt had described it! The teeth were the teeth of one of the great carnivores, only flat, fang-like, like a shark’s teeth. No mortal man ever wore such a set within his mouth, or ever needed such a set, the fangs of a tearer of flesh . . .

‘Roll him over,’ said I, ‘and loosen that coat so you can see his back.’

To this task young Jed addressed himself.

‘Good Cripes!’ This from the Curtiss fellow, the lost child’s uncle. Along the back, sewn thickly in the dark brown skin, ran a band of three-inch, coal-black bristles, longer and stiffer than those of any prize hog. We gazed down in silence for a long moment. Then: ‘Come,’ said I, ‘and look inside the Merritt tomb – but – brace yourselves! It won’t be any pleasant sight.’

I turned, led the way, the others falling in behind me. Then, from young Jed Peters: ‘You say this-here ain’t no man – an’ – I believe ye, Mr Canevin! But – Cripes Almighty! – ef this’n hain’t no man, what, a-God’s Name, is it?’

‘
It is a ghoul
,’ said I over my shoulder, ‘and inside the tomb there are ten more of them – the dam and nine whelps. And what is left of the poor little Curtiss child . . . ’

Looking into the mausoleum that second time, in cold blood, so to speak, was a tough experience even for me who had wrought that havoc in there. As for the others – Eli Curtiss, the oldest of the three, was very sick. Bert Blatchford buried his face in his arms against the door’s lintel, and when I shook him by the shoulder in fear lest he collapse, the face he turned to me was blank and ghastly, and his ruddy cheeks had gone the color of lead.

Only young Jed Peters really stood up to it. He simply swore roundly, repeating his ‘Good Cripes!’ over and over again – an articulate youth.

The
whelps,
with their
flattish,
human-like
faces
and
heads,
equipped with those same punishing, overmuscled jaws like their sire’s – like the jaws of a fighting bulldog – their short, thick legs and arms, and their narrow, bristly backs, resembled young pigs more nearly than human infants. All, being of one litter, were of about the same size; all were sickeningly bloody-mouthed from their recent feast. These things lay scattered about the large, circular, marble-walled chamber where they had dropped under the merciless impacts of my bullets.

Near the entrance lay sprawled the repulsive, heavy carcass of the dam, her dreadful, fanged mouth open, her sow-like double row of dugs uppermost, these dragged flaccid and purplish and horrible from the recent nursing of that lately-weaned litter. All these unearthly-looking carcasses were naked. The frightful stench still prevailed, still poured out through the open doorway. Heaps and mounds of nauseous offal cluttered the place.

It was young Jed who grasped first and most firmly my suggestion that these horrors be buried out of sight, that a curtain of silence should be drawn down tight by the four of us, fastened permanently against any utterance of the dreadful things we had seen that night. It was young Jed who organized the three into a digging party, who fetched the grave tools from the unfastened cemetery shed.

We worked in a complete silence, as fast as we could. It was not until we were hastily throwing back the loose earth over what we had placed in the sizable pit we had made that the sound of a car’s engine, coming up the hill, caused our first pause. We listened.

‘It’s Doctor Merritt’s car,’ I said, somewhat relieved. I looked at my wrist-watch. It was a quarter past midnight.

To the four of us, leaning there on our spades, Doctor Merritt repeated something of the history of the Persian tombs,
a little of what he had come to know of those mysterious, semi-mythical dwellers among the half-forgotten crypts of ancient burial-grounds, eaters of the dead, which yet preferred the bodies of the living, furtive shapes shot down when glimpsed – in ancient, mysterious Persia . . .

I left my own car for the three fellows to get home in, young Jed promising to have it back in my garage later in the morning, and drove home with Doctor Merritt.

‘There was another thing which I didn’t take the time to tell you,’ said Tom, as we slipped down the winding hill road under the pouring moonlight. ‘That was that the Rustum Dadh’s servants were never seen to leave Chadbourne; although, of course, it was assumed that they had done so. The family went by train. I went down to the station to see them off and I found old Rustum Dadh even less communicative than usual.

‘ “I suppose your man is driving your car down to New York,” I said. It had arrived, six months before, when they came to Chadbourne, with both the servants in it, and the inside all piled up with the family’s belongings. The old boy merely grunted unintelligibly, in a way he had.

‘That afternoon, when I went up to your place to see that everything was ship-shape, there stood the car in the garage, empty. And, while I was wondering what had become of the chauffeur and his wife, and why they hadn’t been sent off in the car the way they came, up drives Bartholomew Wade from his garage, and he has the car-key and a letter from Rustum Dadh with directions, and a check for ten dollars and his carfare back from New York. His instructions were to drive the car to New York and leave it there. He did so that afternoon.’

‘What was the New York address?’ I inquired. ‘That might take some looking into, if you think – ’

‘I don’t know what to think – about Rustum Dadh’s connection with it all, Gerald,’ said Tom. ‘The address was merely the Cunard Line Docks. Whether Rustum Dadh and his family were – the same – there’s simply no telling. There’s the evidence of the live animals sent up to the house. That live meat may have been for the chauffer and his wife – seems unlikely, somehow. There was a rumor around town about some dispute or argument between the old man and his chauffeur, over their leaving all together – just a rumor, something picked up or overheard by some busybody. You can take that for what it’s worth, of course. The two of ’em, desirous to break away from civilization, revert, here in Chadbourne – that, I imagine, is the probability. There are many times the number of people below ground in the three old cemeteries than going about their affairs – and other people’s! – here in Chadbourne. But, whatever Rustum Dadh’s connection with – what we know – whatever share of guilt rests on him – he’s gone, Gerald, and we can make any one of the three or four possible guesses; but it won’t get us anywhere.’ Then, a little weariness showing in his voice, for Tom Merritt, too, had had a pretty strenuous evening, he added: ‘I hired young Jed Peters to spend tomorrow cleaning out the old tombhouse of the ancestors!’

I cleaned my rifle before turning in that night. When I had got this job done and had taken a boiling-hot shower-bath, it was close to two o’clock a.m. before I rolled in between the sheets. I had been dreading a sleepless night with the edge of my mind, after that experience up there on the Old Cemetery Ridge. I lay in bed for a while, wakeful, going over snatches of it in my mind. Young Jed! No deterioration there at any rate. There was a fellow who would stand by you in a pinch. The old yeoman stock had not run down appreciably in young Jed.

I fell asleep at last after assuring myself all over again that I had done a thorough job up there on the hill. Ghouls! Not merely
Arabian Nights
creatures, like the Afreets and the Djinn. No. Real – those jaws! They shot them down, on sight, over there in Persia when they were descried coming out of their holes among the old tomb-places . . .

Little, reddish, half-gnawed bones, scattered about that fetid shambles – little bones that had never been torn out of the bodies of calves or lambs – little bones that had been –

I wonder if I shall ever be able to forget those little bones, those little, pitiful bones . . .

I awoke to the purr of an automobile engine in second speed, coming up the steep hill to my farmhouse, and it was a glorious late-summer New England morning. Young Jed Peters was arriving with my returned car.

I jumped out of bed, pulled on a bathrobe, stepped into a pair of slippers. It was seven-thirty. I went out to the garage and brought young Jed back inside with me for a cup of coffee. It started that new day propitiously to see the boy eat three fried eggs and seven pieces of breakfast bacon . . .

Scar-Tissue

‘What is your opinion on the Atlantis question?’ I asked my friend Dr Pelletier of the U. S. Navy. Pelletier, relaxed during the afternoon swizzel hour on my West Gallery, waved a deprecating hand.

‘All the real evidence points to it, doesn’t it, Canevin? The harbor here in St Thomas, for instance. Crater of a volcano. What could bring a crater down to sea-level like that, unless the submergence of quadrillions of tons of earth and rock, the submergence of a continent?’

Then: ‘What made you ask me that, Canevin?’

‘A case,’ I replied. ‘Picked him up yesterday morning just after he had jumped ship from that Spanish tramp, the
Bilbao
, that was coaling at the West India Docks night-before-last and yesterday morning. She pulled out this afternoon without him. Says his name is Joe Smith. A rough and tough bird, if I ever saw one. Up against it. They were crowding him pretty heavily, according to his story. Extra watches. Hazing. Down with the damned gringo! Looks as if he could handle himself, too – hard as nails. I’ve got him right here in the house.’

‘What are you keeping him shut up for?’ enquired Pelletier lazily. ‘There isn’t anybody on his trail now, is there?’

‘No,’ said I. ‘But he was all shot to pieces from lack of sleep. Red rims around his eyes. He’s upstairs, asleep, probably dead to the world. I looked in on him an hour ago.’

‘What bearing has the alleged Joe Smith on Atlantis?’ Pelletier’s tone was still lazily curious.

‘Well,’ said I, having saved this up for my friend Pelletier to the last, ‘Smith looks to me as though he had one of those dashes of “ancestral memory”, like the fellow Kipling tells about, the one who “remembered” being a slave at the oars, and how a Roman galley was put together. Only, this isn’t any measly two thousand years ago. This is – ’

This brought Pelletier straight upright in his lounge-chair.

‘Good God, Canevin! And he’s here – in this house?’

‘I’ll see if he’s awake,’ said I, and went upstairs.

‘He’s getting cleaned up,’ I reported on my return.

‘That’s in his favor, anyhow,’ grunted Pelletier laconically.