Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (28 page)

The
Kestrel
wallowed, and the plunge seemed to the Renwicks more like the plunge of a frightened animal than anything a ship might do. Then, under careful guidance, she settled into a steady drive into the wind, her auxiliary engines doing their utmost.

It was Hansen’s announced purpose to wear through until he could bear to the southward and ‘get behind’ the cyclone, and this policy he did his best to carry out. The stanch windjammer stood up bravely, and might indeed have weathered through had not the engines given out. The engines stopped. Her headway abruptly ceasing, the
Kestrel
was seized by the typhoon as though in monstrous and malignant arms and hurled and spun about in a chaos of mountainous waves.

In their cabin the two passengers were hurled together into a corner. They managed to seize and hold on to the edge of their lower bunk. They had been slung partly under it. Renwick braced his feet against the wall at the bunk’s end and by main force held himself and his wife against this firm support. Beyond a few bruises neither had been hurt. Lurch and twist now as the
Kestrel
might, they fastened like limpets, spun with her. They were dizzy and sick when the
Kestrel
by an almost impish streak of luck righted herself and began to spin along with her keel down and her bow leading her. She had, after an incredible knocking about, in the course of the upheaval, gone completely about. She righted herself slowly and heavily and then scudded away before the mounting gale, naked to her sticks.

Some time after this comparative steadiness of motion had replaced the maddening upheavals, Renwick and his wife relaxed their grip on the bunkside and reassured themselves that they were able to stand upright. Marian was very giddy, and Renwick, after helping her into the lower bunk and wedging her in with bedding, staggered to the deck in search of information.

Hansen reassured him. How the
Kestrel
had lived he was unable to understand, still less to explain, but now they had more than a fair chance, he thought, to ride it out; as good a chance as any windjammer unequipped with auxiliary power. If only he had not trusted to the engines! No one would ever know what had happened. Both the engineer and his assistant were dead. They had been remorselessly jammed and crushed by the terrible tossing, there in their tiny engine-room. The engineer was unrecognizable. Five of the crew, too, were gone, washed away by the mountains of water that had been flung athwart the exposed decks.

There was comparatively little danger now. There were no leaks, though the house, all railings, and everything above decks was gone, that is, all save the masts, and, almost a miracle, the boats. All three boats were safe and, as hasty examination showed, intact, including the small boat that had been relieved of its provisions because of its unseaworthiness.

The
Kestrel
drove on through the night, under the slowly declining force of the typhoon, now blowing itself out. Food and coffee were served but no one thought of turning in.

The moon rose a little after four bells, flooding the pursuing waters and the deck of the
Kestrel
. It was full, and the light was clear and brilliant. Renwick and his young wife, on deck again, carefully worked their way to the small boat, where they clung to the rigging of the davits and looked outboard and aft where the long waves pursued relentlessly, like angry mountains.

‘What’s the matter with the boat?’ asked Marian.

‘I suppose it’s been allowed to dry out too much. It seems sound enough to me, but naturally Hansen wouldn’t have said it was no good unless he knew what he was talking about.’

They watched it swing. The davit rigging had been considerably loosened.

‘Let’s get into it!’ suggested Marian, suddenly.

Renwick investigated. The canvas boat cover had not been replaced. There was no chock. He climbed gingerly into the boat, and with his help Marian managed it also. Then Renwick again descended to the deck and loosened the pully ropes and stays so that, with the swing of the level binnacle-lamp in his mind, the small boat might have a wider arc in which to swing and so keep them comparatively free from the pitching and tossing of the
Kestrel
.

It was a landsman’s notion, a mere whimsy. A seaman would have scoffed at it, but, queerly enough, it seemed to work. He climbed back into the swinging boat and settled down in its bottom beside Marian.

The boat was, of course, swung inboard, and being small compared to the larger boats, both of which were chocked firmly, it swung free. Renwick felt that since the boat had been condemned they might make free with it, and he pulled some old cork life-preservers out from under the thwarts and arranged them under Marian’s head and his own. It was a weird sensation, lying there side by side looking up into the clear, moonlight sky, relatively motionless as the swinging boat accommodated itself to the rolling and pitching of the
Kestrel
.

They lay there and listened to the roar of the wind and sea. Both were dozing, fitfully, when the
Kestrel
struck.

Without warning there came a fearful, grinding crash forward. The
Kestrel
shivered and then appeared to crumple, her deck tilting to an abrupt angle. In the boat the impact was greatly modified, yet it would have been enough without that shattering crash ahead to have awakened people much more soundly asleep than Renwick and his wife. The masts snapped like pipestems.

The deck stayed on its perilous slant as the vessel hung on the teeth of the barrier reef on which she had struck bow on, while the great following waves roared over her in cascades. They lifted the small boat and tore it loose from its frayed tackle and carried it far forward, as with a tremendous and irresistible heave a huge following wave, overtopping its fellows, lifted the
Kestrel’s
hull and heaved her forward for more than her own length and crushed her down upon the rocks. She parted like rotten cloth as she turned turtle and was engulfed in a mighty whirlpool of maddened water.

The small boat with two helpless wisps of humanity lying side by side upon her bottom, riding free, was borne forward on the resistless force of the rushing water.

2

When Edward Renwick’s mother died he had the satisfaction of realizing that she passed out of the world forgetful of a remembered terror that had colored her thoughts as long as he could remember. His mother, left alone early in his life, had never once relaxed her vigilance over him. Now with her death he realized rather abruptly that no one remained to share the secret of what he knew.

Renwick himself knew it only as a matter of hearsay. His own memory did not extend to what they had called the Terrible Time, because then he had been little more than an infant.

His earliest days, he had been told, were like those of any other young child. It was not until he was two years old that The Change had begun.

He had always, since birth, slept more soundly than other children. Always his mother had been obliged to awaken him from a deep sleep like the inveterate slumbers of some young, hibernating animal. His growth had been regular, but slow.

They had always spent their summers at the ranch in those days. When he was two, just after they had arrived at the ranch, The Change began.

The child first lost his power of speech. His utterance became thicker, constantly, and less intelligible. Soon there remained only a few vague mutterings. Meantime he slept more and more soundly. It became correspondingly harder and harder to awaken him. His face began to grow expressionless, then repulsive. His skin became roughened and dry, and a waxy pallor overspread it. Wrinkles appeared on his forehead. The eyelids swelled. The nostrils flattened out, the ears thickened, and the fine baby hair, which had become harsh, like rough tow, fell out, leaving little pitiful bald patches. Then the child’s teeth, which were small and irregular, blackened rapidly.

Finally, before the eyes of the distracted young parents, many miles distant from any center of even crude civilization, the child seemed to be shrinking in size, and his hands and feet to be turning in.

Nothing comparable to this shattering affliction lay within the utmost bounds of their understanding or experience. For several weeks their changeling continued to deteriorate. Then, at the end of their resources, in despair the father rode the thirty miles to the nearest telegraph office and sent an urgent message to their New York physician. The urgency of the message assured the doctor of an unusual need. He arranged his practise and journeyed to his friend.

The doctor spent several days, greatly puzzled, watching the child, now grotesquely deformed. He no longer recognized his mother. No longer had he the energy to sit upright.

Then the doctor, armed with photographs and other results of his investigations, went back to New York to consult specialists.

He did not return to the ranch, but he explained at length the findings of those whom he had consulted. The child, they said, had become a cretin. This, explained Dr Sturgis, meant that there had occurred one of those mystifying cases of failure of a gland. It was one of the ductless glands, probably the thyroid, in the lower portion of the throat. All the ductless glands were connected in some mysterious way. They operated in a human being somewhat like an interlocking directorate in business. One was dependent upon another. When anything like this silent, internal cataclysm occurred, the nicely adjusted balance was disturbed, and the victim became a monster.

What were the chances? The doctors were of the opinion that the case was not, necessarily, hopeless. He sent a preparation of the thyroid glands of sheep with directions for their administration and for the child’s care. It was, further, the opinion of the specialists that so long as the child, if he recovered this time, continued to take thyroid, so long, in all probability, would he continue to grow and be normal. But they believed (all but one) that if the supply should be cut off, then that devastating process would repeat itself; and if the medication should be stopped, then the child would degenerate again until he had become a vegetative idiot. One doctor had been skeptical, Dr Sturgis wrote. He had approved the medication but had said that there was a possibility that the wasted gland might re-establish itself.

Confronted with the terrible alternative the doctor had described, it was no wonder that the young parents had made the daily capsule young Renwick’s first duty, had impressed this upon him in season and out of season. The treatment worked. Within a few days the child’s hands and feet were less cold. Other slight changes showed themselves daily. When three weeks had passed Edward was again noticing his surroundings. Gradually, through days and nights of anguished fears and a tentative, dawning hope, the young parents watched the return to normality. The child smiled, and attempted to play. He recognized his mother and father.

His growth became rapid. The remaining early teeth appeared and were firm, even, and white. A new growth of hair came in. By the end of summer the little boy was not only as well as he had ever been, but it was as though he had, in some magical fashion, been renewed. A new soul seemed to his mother to be looking out of his clear eyes.

In October, tremulous with thankfulness, they returned to their home in New York. Their friends commented freely on the child’s remarkable growth.

When his mother died, he was twenty-five, alone in the world; alone with his queer secret. He had health and strength, a keen mind and a vigorous body. He was indistinguishable from any normal person – from any
other
normal person, as he liked to phrase the matter to himself. He could do precisely what anyone else might do. He might even marry, provided that he never omitted his daily capsule!

There was no reason, even of ordinary convenience, why he should ever omit it. Thyroid was easily procurable in these days. One could buy it in tablet form in any good drug store.

It was less than a year after his mother’s death; he was twenty-six, when he became engaged to Marian. They were married five months later.

They had been drawn together by a community of tastes and interests. They possessed that indefinable happiness of being at ease with each other.

Among their common tastes was one that amounted to a positive longing – a yearning nostalgia for the sea. They discovered this very early in their acquaintance. They found that each had for long spent many hours on the Battery, smelling the smells of shipping, watching the ships as they faded serenely into the mists of the lower bay on their way to the varied ports of the outer world.

The peculiar glamors of Joseph Conrad, and of old Samuel Baker; Kipling’s eery power to evoke a longing in his readers to go and join a ship’s crew – these and many other glimpses of sea-things had laid their several holds upon their imaginations. They envisaged in their day-dreams tropic moons and palm-ringed atolls. Creaming blue surf, and white beaches blazing against turquoise sea had, somehow, got into his blood.

Palms on blue sea’s edge of coral,

Driving gust and shrieking gale;