Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (37 page)

Twenty minutes later Smith stepped out on the gallery. He looked vastly different from the beachcomber I had picked up near the St Thomas market-place the morning before. He was tall and spare, and my white drill clothes might have been made for him. He was cleanly shaved of a week’s stubble that had disfigured his bronzed face. His step was alert. Plainly, Joe Smith, Able Seaman, had taken hold of himself.

Pelletier did most of the talking. He was establishing a quick footing with Smith with a view to getting his story of the ‘buried memory’ which the fellow had mentioned to me, and which pointed, he had hinted, at Atlantis. There might be a half-hour’s entertainment in it, at the worst. At best, well, we would have to wait and see what Smith would have to say.

At the end of ten minutes or so, Pelletier surprised me.

‘What was your college, Smith?’ he enquired.

Smith’s reply knocked my preconceived opinion of him into a cocked hat.

‘Harvard, and Oxford,’ he answered. ‘Rhodes Scholar. Took my M.A. at Balliol. Yes, of course, Dr Pelletier. Ask me anything you like. This “buried memory” affair has come on me three different times, as a matter of fact. Always when I’m below par physically, a bit run down, vitality lower than normal. I mentioned it to Mr Canevin yesterday – sensed that he would be interested. I’ve read his stuff, you see, for the past dozen years or so!’

‘Tell us about it,’ invited Pelletier, and Joe Smith proceeded to do so, a tall tumbler of the iced swizzel on the table in front of him.

‘It began when I was a small boy, after scarlet fever. I got up too soon and went swimming, and had a relapse, and the next three or four days, lying in bed, and all in, I “realized” that I was
memoriter familiar
with a life of skin clothes with the fur on, and stone-headed clubs, and the ability to run long distances and go up and down trees without much effort, and all of us getting around a bear and clubbing it to death, and incidentally being dirty as a pig! The thing passed off, dimmed out, although the recollection remains quite clear, as soon as I was well again.

‘The second time was after the Spring track-meet with Yale when I was twenty-one. I had run in the 220, and then, half an hour later, I put everything I had into a gruelling quarter-mile, and won it. I was all in afterwards, didn’t come back properly, and our trainer sent me for a week’s rest to some people I knew who had their place open on the North Shore, at West Manchester, Massachusetts. I lay around and rested according to orders for a week – not even a book. There I “remembered” – not the cave-life this time – Africa. Portuguese and Negroes; enormous buildings, some of them with walls sixteen feet thick. Granite quarries and the Portuguese sweating the Blacks in some ancient gold mines. There were two rivers. I fished in them a great deal, with a big iron hook. They were called, the rivers, I mean, the Lindi and the Sobi.

‘Curious kind of place. There was one enormous ruin, a circular tower on top of a round hill which was formed by an outcropping in the granite. There was a procession of bulls carved around the pediment. Yes, and the signs of the Zodiac. Curious place, no end!’

‘Great Zimbábwe!’ I cried out, ‘in Southern Rhodesia. The Portuguese controlled it in the Fifteenth Century, before Columbus’ time. Why, man, that place is the traditional site of Solomon’s gold mines!’

‘Click!’ remarked Smith, turning an intelligent eye in my direction. ‘It was pronounced, in those days – “Zim-baub-weh” – accent on the first syllable. I’ve often wondered if it wasn’t the Romans who carved those bulls, they had the place first, called it Anaeropolis. Plenty of legionaries were Mithraists, and the bull was Mithras’s symbol, you know.’

‘And the last one, Smith,’ Pelletier cut in. ‘You mentioned Atlantis, Canevin tells me.’

‘Well,’ began Smith once more, ‘the fact that it was Atlantis is, really, secondary. There is one item in
that
“memory” which is of very much greater interest, I should imagine.

‘I don’t want to be theatrical, gentlemen! But – well, I think the best way to begin telling you about it is to show you this.’

And Joe Smith, rising and loosening his belt, pulled up his shirt and singlet, exposing the skin of a bronzed torso, and showed us something that literally drew a gasp from us both.

Beginning a half-inch above his right hip-bone and extending straight across as though laid out with a ruler across the abdomen, there ran a great, livid, inch-wide scar; the kind that would result from a very deep knife or sword-cut, provided anyone receiving such a wound should survive long enough for the cut to form scar-tissue.

‘Good God!’ I muttered, really aghast at the dreadful thing.

Pelletier laughed. ‘And – you’re alive and standing there!’ said he, almost caustically. Joe Smith tucked in his shirt, tightened his belt, and sat down again.

He lighted a cigarette, took a long sip from his tumbler of swizzel.

He crossed one knee over the other, leaned back in his chair, and looked at both of us, and blew out a reflective cloud of cigarette smoke.

‘That’s where it begins,’ said he, and, as my house-man, Stephen Penn, appeared at this moment with the dinner-cocktails, he added: ‘I’ll tell you about it after dinner.’

It was Pelletier who started things off so soon as we were settled on the gallery again, the coffee and Chartreuse on the big table.

‘I want to know, please, how you happen to be alive.’

Smith smiled wryly.

‘I never told this before,’ said he, ‘and if I was somewhat preoccupied during dinner it was because I’ve been figuring out how to put it all together for you.

‘During the course of that last “recollection” I spoke of it went through my mind – no! that trite phrase doesn’t give you the right idea. “Lived it over again” would be better. It’s hard to put into words but we’ll call it that! I was walking through a short enclosed passageway, rather wide, stone-flagged, and low-ceilinged. In front of me, beside me, and behind me walked eighteen or twenty others. We were all armed. Up in front of us in their bronze armor and closing our rear marched eight legionaries of the Ludektan army assigned to us as guards. We came out into the drenching sunlight of a great sanded arena. We followed our advance guard in a sharp turn to the right and wheeled to a right-face before a great awninged box full of the Ludektan nobles and dignitaries where we saluted, each after his own fashion with our variously assorted weapons.

‘Do you get that picture? Lemurians, gentlemen, every man jack of us! Prisoners of war – yes, and here we were after a couple of months of the hardest training I have ever known, in the Ludekta gladiatorial school; about to shed our blood to make an Atlantean holiday! Yes, Ludekta was the southwestern province of Atlantis, the cultural center of the continent. There had been innumerable wars between the Atlanteans and Lemuria. Like Rome and Carthage.

‘The really tough part of it was the uncertainty. I mean a fellow might be paired to fight to the death against some rather good pal, you know. I was one of the fortunate ones that day. I had the good luck to be paired with a Gamfron – a nearly black Atlantean mountain lion, an animal about the size and heft of an Indian black panther – Bagheera, in Kipling’s Mowgli yarn! I had been armed with a short, sharp, double-edged sword and a small, bronze buckler. I had otherwise been given choice of my own accoutrement and I had selected greaves, a light breast-plate and a close-fitting helmet with a face-guard attachment with eye-holes, which covered practically my whole face and the back and sides of my neck.

‘When it came my turn to step out on the sand and wait for my lion to be released, I asked the official in charge for permission to discard the buckler and use an additional weapon, a long dagger, in my left hand instead. I got the permission, and at the signal-blast which was made with a ram’s horn, walked slowly straight towards the cage entrance from which my brute adversary would in a moment be released. I had noted that the sun was shining directly, full against that particular iron door.

‘My strategy worked precisely as I had hoped.

‘The great lithe beast came straight out and paused blinking. Before its great cat eyes had adjusted themselves to the glare I had begun the attack myself. I launched myself upon the beast, and when I sprang away the hilt of that left-hand dagger was all that showed sticking straight up out of the Gamfron’s back, just within the shoulder attachment and in front of the foremost rib. The thirteen inches of steel were down inside that Gamfron to take up some of his attention! I had tried, you see, for a one-blow knockout – a thrust between the forward vertebrae, and I had missed it by half an inch. However, that first crack wasn’t so bad! While I gathered myself for its probable spring, for which the animal was already crouched, the Gamfron suddenly relaxed and rolled over in the sand; hoping, I suppose, in this way to dislodge that inconveniently placed annoyance. The hilt was bent over, I noticed, when this lightening-like movement had been concluded and the Gamfron was again crouched for its leap at me, right side up once more, its steel and whalebone body and legs tensed, and a hellish blaze of pure beast anger in its great yellow eyes.

‘And now it was sailing straight at me through the air, its set of enormous retractile claws protruding from its pads like menacing chisels. Its horrible red mouth with its great gleaming canine teeth seemed as big as a shark’s! I side-stepped, and slashed with the sword, making a tearing wound along the animal’s left side; but the impact knocked me spinning and the animal and I recovered ourselves at precisely the same instant, I bracing myself, and the Gamfron, spraying blood on the smooth sand, gathering itself for another of those deadly leaps.

‘In the split seconds which intervened before it launched itself at me again I could hear as though from an enormous distance the wild tumult of applause from those massed thousands; I could see that vast crowd weave as it swayed hysterically – they were all standing now – at the spectacle they were getting.

‘The effect of my tactics had shown me the virtual impossibility of disposing of the Gamfron by the side-step-and-slash method. The beast’s heavy ribs made that impracticable. I could inflict no disabling wound in this way, and, the Gamfron’s vitality being greater than mine, I realized that I should be very quickly worn down, even though all my side-stepping might be as effective as the first one had been. So I shifted my tactics.

‘I side-stepped the same as before, but instead of trying another slash as that gleaming black streak went past me, I whirled, and as the great beast slithered along the sand under the impetus of its thirty-foot leap, gathering all my forces, I threw myself upon it and, thrusting my keen, double-edged sword under its momentarily sprawled head and neck, I sawed swiftly back and forth with every ounce of energy I possessed and felt my sword bite through the soft flesh, severing the jugulars and carotids. Then, my feet and legs wedged hard with a sudden motion under the animal’s narrow flanks, and letting go the sword, I reached my bare hands under the two sides of the dew-lapped jaws and swinging backward from the fulcrum of my rigid lower legs and knees hauled the Gamfron’s head backwards towards me.

‘The snap of that tough-knit spine at the back of the neck could be heard about the arena. I could feel the great beast relax under me. I recovered my sword, stood up, placed my right foot upon the carcass and held up my sword toward the notables in a rigid salute.

‘I was virtually blind in that glare with the salt sweat streaming into my eyes. My heart was pounding so violently from that lightning-like and terrific exertion that I could hear nothing except a vague roar.

‘The next thing I was directly conscious of was a hand falling on my left shoulder. I relaxed, let down my sword, and heard the voice of the official in charge of the gladiators telling me that I was reprieved. I stumbled along beside him around the edge of the arena under a continuous shower of felt hats and gold and silver coin until I felt the grateful shade of that low-ceiling stone passage-way on my almost melting back, and a minute later, my armor off at last, I was being strigilled from head to foot after the buckets of cold water which had been dashed over me by one of the arena slaves, and quite my own man again.

‘It was perhaps twenty minutes later when the chief of the officials in charge of the gladiators came into the small stone-flagged room where I was at the moment tying the thongs of my sandals. In the interim the gigantic Black who officiated at the stone slab had thoroughly kneaded all my muscles with oil, the usual process before and after a fight. I had been washed down again with hot water, strigilled and given a drying rub, and had just finished putting on my ordinary clothes.

‘ “The people demand your presence in the arena,” announced the official from just inside the doorway. I rose and bowed in his direction. A public gladiator in Ludekta had the status of a slave. He was anything but a free man, like his modern equivalent the American professional ball player, or a matador. Then the official announced: “You have been chosen to fight Godbor as the day’s concluding event – come!”

‘Another fight! A sudden sense of hatred for those blood-lusting beasts out there surged over me. But I had no choice. The official turned on his heel and I followed him out towards the arena along the same passageway which I had traversed three quarters of an hour before.

‘Half way along it the official stopped and turned abruptly towards me. He had dropped the rough tone of his official pronouncement. He smiled at me and grasped my hand. “It was a splendid fight – that against the animal!” Then, to my infinite surprise, he thrust an arm around behind my back, drew me close against him, and whispered with earnestness and vehemence directly into my ear. And when he had finished I was a new man! Gone now were all the feelings of rebellious hatred which his announcement at the rubbing-room door had raised up in me. He turned and led the way out into the arena. And I followed him now, gladly, eagerly, my head up and my heart beating high.