Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (99 page)

That, as a few cautious questions, put diplomatically, clearly showed, was all the Colonel knew about Simon Legrand and his casino. I used up all the questions I had in mind, one after another, and, it being past three in the afternoon, and over time for the day’s
siesta
, I was about to take my leave in search of forty winks and the afternoon’s shower-bath, when the Colonel volunteered a singular piece of information. He had been sitting rather quietly, as though brooding, and it was this, which I attributed to the after-luncheon drowsiness germane to these latitudes, which had prompted me to go. I was, indeed, rising from my chair at the moment, when the Colonel remarked: ‘One element of the old casino seemed to remain – perhaps that was the haunting!’ He stopped, and I hung, poised, as it were, to catch what he might be about to say. He paused, however, and I prompted him.

‘And what might that be, sir?’ I asked, very quietly. The Colonel seemed to come out of his revery.

‘Eh?’ he said, ‘eh, what?’ He looked at me rather blankly.

‘You were remarking that one element of the old casino’s influence seemed to remain in your Canal Zone residence,’ said I.

‘Ah – yes. Why, it was strange, Mr Canevin, distinctly strange. I have often thought about it; although, of course, it was the merest coincidence, unless – perhaps – well, the idea of
suggestion
might come into play. Er – ah – er, what I had in mind was that – er – Mrs Lorriquer you know – she began to take up card-playing there. She had never, to my knowledge, played before; had never cared for cards in the least; been brought up, in early life, to regard them as not quite the thing for a lady and all that, you see. Her mother, by the way, was Sarah Langhorne – perhaps you had not heard this, Mr Canevin – the very well-known medium of Bellows Falls, Vermont. The old lady had quite a reputation in her day. Strictly honest, of course! Old New England stock – of the very best, sir. Strait-laced! Lord – a card in the house would have been impossible! Cards, in that family! “The Devil’s Bible,” Mr Canevin. That was the moral atmosphere which surrounded my wife’s formative days. But – no sooner had we begun to live in that house down there, than she developed “card sense”, somehow, and she has found it – er – her chief interest, I should say, ever since.’ The old Colonel heaved a kind of mild sigh, and that was as near as I had heard to any comment on his wife’s outrageous conduct at cards, which must, of course, have been a major annoyance in the old gentleman’s otherwise placid existence.

I went home with much material to ponder. I had enough to work out a more or less complete ‘case’ now, if, indeed, there was an occult background for Mrs Lorriquer’s diverse conduct, her apparently subconscious use of colloquial French, and – that amazing deep bass voice!

Yes, all the elements seemed to be present now. The haunted house, with that scar-faced croupier as the haunter; the sudden predilection for cards emanating there; the initial probability of Mrs Lorriquer’s susceptibility to discarnate influences, to a ‘control’, as the spiritualists name this phenomenon – the cameo – all the rest of it; it all pointed straight to one conclusion, which, to put it conservatively, might be described as the ‘influence’ of the late Simon Legrand’s personality upon kindly Mrs Lorriquer who had ‘absorbed’ it in three years’ residence in a house thoroughly impregnated by his ugly and unpleasant personality.

I let it go at that, and – it must be understood – I was only half-way in earnest at the time, in even attempting to attribute to this ‘case’ anything like an occult background. One gets to look for such explanations when one lives in the West Indies where the very atmosphere is charged with Magic!

But – my inferences, and whereunto these led, were, at their most extreme, mild, compared with what was, within two days, to be revealed to us all. However, I have resolved to set this tale down in order, as it happened, and again I remind myself that I must not allow myself to run ahead of the normal sequence of events. The
dénouement
, however, did not take very long to occur.

It was, indeed, no more than two days later, at the unpropitious hour of two-fifteen in the morning – I looked at my watch on my bureau as I was throwing on a few necessary clothes – that I was aroused by a confused kind of tumult outside, and, coming into complete wakefulness, observed an ominous glow through my windows and realized that a house, quite near by, was on fire.

I leaped at once out of bed, and took a better look, with my head out the window. Yes, it was a fire, and, from appearances, the makings of a fine – and very dangerous – blaze here in the heart of the residence district where the houses, on the sharp side-hill, are built very close together.

It was a matter of moments before I was dressed, after a fashion, and outside, and running down the path to my gateway and thence around the corner to the left. The fire itself, as I now saw at a glance, was in a wooden building now used as a garage, directly on the roadway before one of the Denmark Hill’s ancient and stately mansions. Already a thin crowd, of Negroes entirely, had gathered, and I saw that I was ‘elected’ to take charge in the absence of any other white man, when I heard, with relief, the engine approaching. Our Fire Department, while not hampered with obsolete apparatus, is somewhat primitive. The engine rounded the corner, and just behind it, a Government Ford, the ‘transportation’ apportioned to Lieutenant Farnum of Uncle Sam’s efficient Marines. The Lieutenant, serving as the Governor’s Legal Aide, had, among his fixed duties, the charge of the Fire Department. This highly efficient young gentleman, whom I knew very well, was at once in the very heart of the situation, had the crowd back away to a reasonable distance, the fire engine strategically placed, and a double stream of chemicals playing directly upon the blazing shack.

The fire, however, had had a long start, and the little building was in a full blaze. It seemed, just then, doubtful whether or not the two streams would prove adequate to put it out. The real danger, however, under the night trade wind, which was blowing lustily, was in the spread of the fire, through flying sparks, of which there were many, and I approached Lieutenant Farnum offering cooperation.

‘I’d suggest waking up the people – in that house, and that, and that one,’ directed Lieutenant Farnum, denoting which houses he had in mind.

‘Right!’ said I, ‘I’m shoving right off!’ And I started down the hill to the first of the houses. On the way I was fortunate enough to meet my house-boy, Stephen Penn, an intelligent young Negro, and him I dispatched to two of the houses which stood together, to awaken the inmates if, indeed, the noise of the conflagration had not already performed that office. Then I hastened at a run to the Criqué place, occupied by the Lorriquer family, the house farthest from the blaze, yet in the direct line of the sparks and blazing silvers which the trade wind carried in a thin aerial stream straight toward it.

Our servants in West Indian communities never remain for the night on the premises. The Lorriquers would be, like all other Caucasians, alone in their house. I had, as it happened, never been upstairs in the house; did not, therefore, have any idea of its layout, nor knew which of the bedrooms were occupied by the several members of the family.

Without stopping to knock at the front entrance door, I slipped the latch of a pair of jalousies leading into the ‘hall’ or drawing room, an easy matter to negotiate, stepped inside across the window-sill, and, switching on the electric light in the lower entrance-way, ran up the broad stone staircase to the floor above. I hoped that chance would favor me in finding the Colonel’s room first, but as there was no way of telling, I rapped on the first door I came to, and, turning the handle – this was an emergency – stepped inside, leaving the door open behind me to secure such light as came from the single bulb burning in the upper hallway.

I stepped inside.

Again, pausing for an instant to record my own sensations as an integral portion of this narrative, I hesitate, but this time only because of the choices which lie before me in telling, now long afterward, with the full knowledge of what was involved in this strange case, precisely what I saw; precisely what seemed to blast my eyesight for its very incredibleness – its ‘impossibility’.

I had, it transpired, hit upon Mrs Lorriquer’s bedroom, and there plain before me – it was a light, clear night, and all the eight windows stood open to the starlight and what was left of a waning moon – lay Mrs Lorriquer on the stubposted mahogany four-poster with its tester and valance. The mosquito-net was not let down, and Mrs Lorriquer, like most people in our climate, was covered, as she lay in her bed, only with a sheet. I could, therefore, see her quite plainly, in an excellent light.

But – that was not all that I saw.

For, beside the bed, quite close in fact, stood – Simon Legrand – facing me, the clothes, the closely buttoned
surtout
, the spreading, flaring
de joinville
scarf, fastened with the amazing brooch, the pock-marked, ill-natured face, the thick, black hair, the typical
croupier
mustache, the truculent expression, Simon Legrand, to the last detail, precisely as he appeared in the cabinet photograph of La Palma of Quezaltenango – Simon Legrand to the life.

And, between him as he stood there, glaring truculently at me, intruding upon his abominable manifestation, and the body of Mrs Lorriquer, as I glared back at this incredible configuration, there stretched, and wavered, and seemed to flow,
toward
him and
from
the body of Mrs Lorriquer, a whitish, tenuous stream of some milky-looking material – like a waved sheet, like a great mass of opaque soap-bubbles, like those pouring grains of attenuated
plasma
described in
Dracula
, when in the dreadful castle in Transylvania, John Harker stood confronted with the materialization of that arch-fiend’s myrmidons.

All these comparisons rushed through my mind, and, finally, the well-remembered descriptions of what takes place in the ‘materialization’ of a ‘control’ at a mediumistic
séance
when material from the medium floats toward and
into
the growing incorporation of the manifestation, building up the non-fictitious body through which the control expresses itself.

All this, I say, rushed through my mind with the speed of thought, and recorded itself so that I can easily remember the sequence of these ideas. But, confronted with this utterly unexpected affair, what I did, in actuality, was to pause, transfixed with the strangeness, and to mutter, ‘My God!’

Then, shaking internally, pulling myself together by a mighty effort while the shade or manifestation or whatever it might prove to be, of the French gambler glowered at me murderously, in silence, I made a great effort, one of those efforts which a man makes under the stress of utter necessity. I addressed the figure – in French!

‘Good-morning, Monsieur Legrand,’ said I, trying to keep the quaver out of my voice. ‘Is it too early, think you, for a little game of
écarté
?’

Just how, or why, this sentence formed itself in my mind, or, indeed, managed to get itself uttered, is to this day, a puzzle to me. It seemed just then the one appropriate, the inevitable way, to deal with the situation. Then –

In the same booming bass which had voiced Mrs Lorriquer’s ‘
Sapristi
’, a voice startlingly in contrast with his rather diminutive figure, Simon Legrand replied: ‘
Oui, Monsieur
, at your service on all occasions, day or night – you to select the game!’

‘
Eh bien, donc
– ’ I began when there came an interruption in the form of a determined masculine voice just behind me.

‘Put your hands straight up and keep them there!’

I turned, and looked straight into the mouth of Colonel Lorriquer’s service revolver; behind it the old Colonel, his face stern, his steady grip on the pistol professional, uncompromising.

At once he lowered the weapon.

‘What – Mr Canevin!’ he cried. ‘What – ’

‘Look!’ I cried back at him, ‘look, while it lasts, Colonel!’ and, grasping the old man’s arm, I directed his attention to the now rapidly fading form or simulacrum of Simon Legrand. The Colonel stared fixedly at this amazing sight.

‘My God!’ He repeated my own exclamation. Then – ‘It’s Legrand, Simon Legrand, the gambler!’

I explained, hastily, disjointedly, about the fire. I wanted the Colonel to understand, first, what I was doing in his house at half-past two in the morning. That, at the moment, seemed pressingly important to me. I had hardly begun upon this fragmentary explanation when Mrs Preston appeared at the doorway of her mother’s room.

‘Why, it’s Mr Canevin!’ she exclaimed. Then, proceeding, ‘There’s a house on fire quite near by, Father – I thought I’d best awaken you and Mother.’ Then, seeing that, apart from my mumbling of explanations about the fire, both her father and I were standing, our eyes riveted to a point near her mother’s bed, she fell silent, and not unnaturally, looked in the same direction. We heard her, behind us, her voice now infiltrated with a sudden alarm: ‘What is it? –
what is it
? Oh, Father, I thought I saw – ’