Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (107 page)

‘Perhaps you will oblige me by putting the whole collection in your pocket,’ suggested Mr Bellinger. Then, smiling, as Mr Callender, not unnaturally, hesitated: ‘Take them, my dear man, take them freely. They’re really mine to give, you know!’

Mr Callender stepped over to the wardrobe where his clothes hung, and placed the packet in his coat pocket. When he returned to the vicinity of the fireplace, his guest had already resumed his seat.

‘I trust,’ he said, ‘that despite the very singular – I may say,
bizarre
– character of my narrative and especially the statement with which I thought best to begin it, you will have given me your credence. It is uncommon to be confronted with the recital of such an experience as I have related to you, and it is not everybody who is – may I say privileged? – to carry on an extended conversation with a man who has been dead sixteen years!

‘My object may possibly have suggested itself to you. These men have escaped all consequences of their act. They are, as I think you will not deny, four thorough rascals. They are at large and even in positions of responsibility, trust and prominence in their several communities. You are a lawyer, a man held in high esteem for your professional skill and personal integrity. I ask you, then, will you undertake to bring these men to justice? You should be able to reproduce the salient points of my story. You have even proofs in the shape of the articles now in your coat pocket. There is the fact of my disappearance. That made a furor at the time, and has never been explained or cleared up. You have the evidence of the hotel register for my being here on that date and it would not be hard to prove that these men were in my company. But above all else, I would pin my faith for a conviction upon the mere recounting in the presence of these four, duly subpoenaed, of my story as I have told it to you. That would fasten their guilt upon them to the satisfaction of any judge and jury. They would be crying aloud for mercy and groveling in abject superstitious fear long before you had finished the account of precisely what they had done. Or, three of them could be confronted with an alleged confession made by the other. Will you undertake to right this festering wrong. Mr Callender, and give me peace? Your professional obligation to promote justice and set wrong right should conspire with your character to cause you to agree.’

‘I will do so, with all my heart,’ replied Mr Callender, holding out his hand.

But before the other could take it, there came another knocking on the door of the hotel room. Slightly startled, Mr Callender went to the door and threw it open. One of the hotel servants reminded him that he had asked to be called, and that it was the hour specified. Mr Callender thanked and feed the man, and turning back into the room found himself alone.

He went to the fireplace and sat down. He looked fixedly at the smoldering fire in the grate. He went over to the wardrobe and felt in his coat pocket in search of negative evidence that he had been dreaming, but his hand encountered the bag which had been the lining of a trousers pocket. He drew it out and spread a second time that morning on the table the various articles which it contained.

After an early breakfast Mr Callender asked for permission to examine the register for the year 1896. He found that Charles Bellinger of Biloxi had registered on the afternoon of the twenty-third of December and had been assigned room twenty-eight. He had no time for further inquiries, and, thanking the obliging clerk, he hastened to the railway station and resumed his journey north.

During the journey his mind refused to occupy itself with anything except his strange experience. He reached his destination in a state of profound preoccupation.

As soon as his professional engagements allowed him the leisure to do so, he began his inquiries by having looked up the owners of those names which were deeply imprinted in his memory. He was obliged to stop there because an unprecedented quantity of new legal business claimed his more immediate attention. He was aware that this particular period in his professional career was one vital to his future, and he slaved painstakingly at the affairs of his clients. His diligence was rewarded by a series of conspicuous legal successes, and his reputation became greatly enhanced. This heavy preoccupation could not fail to dull somewhat the sharp impression which the adventure in the hotel bedroom had made upon his mind, and the contents of the trousers pocket remained locked in his safe-deposit box undisturbed while he settled the affairs of the Rockland Oil Corporation and fought through the Appellate Division the conspicuous case of Burnet vs. De Castro, et al.

It was in the pursuit of a vital piece of evidence in this last-named case that his duties called him South again. Having obtained the evidence, he started home, and again found it expedient to break the long journey northward, at Jackson. It was not, though, until he was actually signing the register that he noted that it was the twenty-third of December, the actual date with which Mr Bellinger’s singular narrative had been concerned.

He did not ask for any particular room this time. He felt a chill of vague apprehension, as if there awaited him an accounting for some laxity, a feeling which recalled the occasional lapses of his remote childhood. He smiled, but this whimsical idea was quickly replaced by a somber apprehension which he could not shake off, and which emanated from the realization that the clerk by some strange fatality had again assigned him room twenty-eight – the room with the fireplace. He thought of asking for another room, but could not think of any reasonable excuse. He sighed and felt a positive sinking at the heart when he saw the figures written down at the edge of the page; but he said nothing. If he shrank from this room’s occupancy, this room with its frightful secret shared by him alone of this world’s company with the four guilty men who were still at large because of his failure to keep his promise, he was human enough and modern enough in his ideas to shrink still more from the imputation of oddity which his refusal of the room on no sensible grounds would inevitably suggest.

He went up to his room, and, as it was a cold night outside, ordered the fire to be made up . . .

When the hotel servant rapped on his door in the morning there was no answer, and after several attempts to arouse the occupant the man reported his failure at the office. Later another attempt was made, and, this proving equally ineffectual, the door was forced with the assistance of a locksmith.

Mr Callender’s body was found lying with the head in the grate. He had been, it appeared, strangled, for the marks of a pair of hands were deeply imprinted on his throat. The fingers had sunk deeply into the bluish, discolored flesh, and the coroner’s jury noted the unusual circumstance when they sent out a description of the murderer confined to this peculiarity, that these marks indicated that the murderer (who was never discovered) possessed very long thin fingers, the index fingers being almost or quite as long as the middle fingers.

Other Stories

The Moon Dial

Said Yussuf, the young son of the Maharajah of Kangalore, a hill-state in the north of India, looked down through the white moonlight one stifling night in July upon the moon-dial where it stood clear of the encompassing cypresses in that portion of the palace gardens which lay immediately under his window. Said Yussuf never retired without looking down at the spot where its shimmering paleness caused it to stand out clearly even on nights when only the starlight illuminated that space in the closely-shrubbed gardens.

During the day the moon-dial was only a queer, somewhat battered antique, brought from nobody knew where in the reign of the old Maharajah, Said’s grandfather, who had remodeled the gardens. But it was Said himself who had named it the moon-dial. He had got that phrase from one of the works of the English writer, George Du Maurier, which his father, who had been educated at Oxford and married an English wife, had placed in the palace library. Said’s tutor did not always approve of his private reading, but then Mr Hampton did not know just what that included. During summers, the tutor always went home to England on his three months’ vacation, and then Said took refuge in the great library and read to his heart’s content of Kipling, Dumas, Gustave Flaubert, and the English Bible. Said, instructed for reasons of state twice a week in the Koran by the Chief Mullah of Kangalore, found the heroic tales of the Old Testament and the incidents in the life of Jesus-ben-Yssuf singularly attractive by comparison with the dry works of Mohammed, the Prophet.

Said had gone up to his quarters this evening, a very hot night, as usual, at about nine-thirty. Now, an hour later, he was lying on his stomach along the broad window seat of his turreted apartment, arrayed only in a pair of European boy’s shorts, which were cooler than the orthodox pajamas these stifling nights. It was, despite the heavy heat, a really glorious night, gorgeous with the full moon, though no breath of air stirred the leaf of a single shrub or tree.

The face of the moon-dial, like very old silver, or nickel, was overscored with curious, cryptic markings which, in daylight, Said was never weary of examining. This face – for the thing was movable – he had turned very slightly, late that afternoon, towards the west; he could not have said why he had done that. It was instinct, a vague affair like that other instinct which told him surely, because of many generations of ancestors who had believed in reincarnation, that he had lived before, many, many times!

Now, there in the window, he looked down at the moon-dial, with no thought of sleep in his mind.

A French clock, somewhere, chimed eleven. A delicate, refreshing breeze, hardly more than a breath, shifted the light silk curtains. Said closed his eyes with the comfort of it, and the little breeze fanned his back, pleasurably, like the touch of soft fingers.

When he opened his eyes and looked back again at his moon-dial, he suddenly roused himself to full wakefulness and abruptly pushed his chin higher on his cupped hands. He gazed now with all his interest concentrated.

The dial seemed to be glowing, in a fashion he had never previously observed. A thin lambent, eerie flicker of light played over its ancient surface, moving oddly. Watching closely he saw the light take on something like form; a definite movement. Slanting rays seemed to flow down from some point above; and now, as he watched them gravely, they came down with greater and greater rapidity. The rays glowed like roses; they fell like a thin rain striking silently and appearing to rebound from the dial’s surface.

Fascinated, Said rose to his knees and leaned far out of the window in the pure, warm night air, drinking in this strange spectacle. He was not in the least disturbed by its unusualness. All this seemed to him a recurrence of something – the fulfilment of one of those vague, gossamer-like yearnings of his, which were wholly natural to him, but which so seldom met their realization in this life! It seemed not unnatural that rose-colored rays should pour down – they seemed literally to pour now – and break into veritable cascades there at the moon-dial . . .

He had always, somehow, felt within himself some strange, subtle affinity with the moon. He had said nothing of this. It was not the sort of thing one could discuss with Mr Hampton or even with his parents. Others than himself, he realized, would consider such an idea highly absurd.

Moonlight, and more especially the moon at her full, had always attracted his attention since his earliest recollection. Innumerable times he had watched it, cold and frosty on winter nights, pale and straw-colored in the spring, huge, orange, warmly luminous in late summer and autumn. It was orange-colored now, enormous, bafflingly exotic.

Great sheets of light seemed now to fall and shatter themselves upon the dial; light, orange and tenuous like the great rolling orb itself; light, alluring, somehow welcoming . . .

A great longing suddenly invaded Said’s mind. He wanted to go down there and stand in that light; reach his arms up into it and let it bathe him. He stirred uneasily. He had, many times, dreamed of floating, down to the lawns from his window, levitated, supported by mysterious, invisible arms! Now the longing became an almost unbearable nostalgia, a veritable yearning. The light, where it had broken and splashed off the face of the dial, was dancing luminously, softly, through the shadows of the great encircling cypress trees. It seemed to gather itself together; to roll along the ground. He shut his eyes again and buried his face in his hands.

When he looked back, for he could not for very long keep his eyes away from this spectacle, the light was hurling itself down in shafts and blocks and streams upon the dial-face, with a certain rhythm. The stream was more solid now, more continuous. It broke into whorls and sparkling, dim roulades, and swept earthward, as though redistilled from the magical alchemy of the mysterious ancient dial-face; it seemed to Said that it was circling, tenuously, and yet with a promise of continuity, of increasing power, about the dial’s stone standard.

The light stream was interrupted now and again by blank spaces, blocks of black darkness; and looking for these and watching them descend like lacunae in the orange stream, he imagined them to be living creatures and half expected to see them take firmer form and dance there, weaving through and through the flickering maze of whorls.

He wanted to float down there, and the longing made a lump in his throat.

He rose, silently opened his bedroom door, and listened. He could hear his father’s quiet breathing, through the open door of a bedroom across the hallway. His mother slept farther down the hall away from the great winding, pillared stairway which led below.