Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (29 page)

Scudding, spindrift, decks a-creaking,

Simoon’s breath on baking sands,

Buccaneers, and mission-compounds,

Wrecks, and death in distant lands.

It was little wonder that, with their imaginations so hugely intrigued by the sea’s fascination and its everlasting mystery, they had for their wedding journey engaged passage on the
Kestrel
. That was why they were in the South Pacific.

They satisfied each other profoundly, in a perfection of companionship for which the stanch old windjammer had proved to be the perfect setting. It was almost as though they had been born again, once their feet knew the swing of a deck. It seemed to them, like city-bred children drinking in the first invigorating, elusive breath of the salt sea, that it would always be impossible to encompass enough of that atmosphere. And if it was true that each felt this profound yearning for the breath of the salt winds stiffly glowing, it was true also that there ran through the fine fabric of their association something like a thin thread of somberness, almost of apprehension. It seemed to them too splendid and soul-filling to be true, or otherwise than the gossamer stuff of which dreams are made.

3

Not even a periodic missionary ever came to the tiny atoll. Most of its forty-four Polynesian inhabitants had had a hand at one time or another on the gunwales of the skiff when it was dragged through the surf of the inner reefs.

The ‘unseaworthy’ boat, the boat condemned as useless, had served Renwick and Marian well. Unconscious after that first mad ride away from the devils on the crest of a mountain of water, they had lain motionless, side by side in the boat’s bottom, and so kept her trimmed as wave after great wave had successively carried them on and on through the torn waters of the reefs to the shallows within reach of the islanders.

Renwick’s first half-conscious act when, from that fearful dream of grinding and hoarse cries of despair, and being smothered and hurled helplessly about, he awoke upon a pile of coco mats, was to reach into his pocket for the little metal box in which he carried his capsules. Then he thought of Marian, realizing dimly that he was, somehow, safe, and with a shudder, he reassured himself of her safety. She was sleeping peacefully, the sleep of utter exhaustion, on another pile of mats, near by. They were in a wattled hut. An intolerably bright sun was streaming through a low doorway and in at the lacelike interstices of the palm fronds that formed the roof.

He rose painfully to his feet, swaying with weakness, and took the little metal box out of his pocket and looked into it. There were eight of the capsules in the box.

Marian was safe. God be thanked! God was good, good, unbelievably good! Aching in every joint, Renwick stooped and passed out through the low doorway into the full, blinding glitter of the pouring sunlight.

A chirping mutter of many soft voices greeted him. The kindly islanders approached from every quarter. He saw them, bewilderedly, his hand shading his eyes from the glare.

A smiling woman placed a hat of plaited split grass upon his head. A fine, upstanding, elderly man addressed him in a strange parody of English, making him welcome. This native had been, it appeared, in the Paumotus. It was he who told what had happened: how they had come ashore; how the islanders had gone out through the surf to salvage an empty ship’s boat, driving in through the jagged reefs; how he and his
vahine
had been found in the boat’s bottom, ‘asleep’ side by side . . .

The rest of the
Kestrel’s
company had found their ‘death in distant lands’. Timber enough for several hut foundations was all that had come ashore.

Somewhere, out there beyond the distant farther reefs, lay the broken hull of the
Kestrel
; and somewhere within her submerged, inaccessible cabins, were the capsules that meant life . . .

He had eight. For one week and one day, then, he was safe. After that . . . A cold horror closed down upon him. He suddenly felt faint. Groping, overwhelmed, he re-entered the little hut. He threw himself down on the pile of mats. He covered his eyes with his hands. He tried to visualize what must happen. It had been dinned into his ears for a lifetime.

For a few days, perhaps even for a week or two, after he had taken all his tablets, there would probably be no perceptible change. Then he would begin gradually to slow down. He would find it harder and harder to awaken mornings. Then all that ghastly horror of degeneration would set in again. The new course of The Change would affect him, too, even more blastingly, if less rapidly, now that its victim was to be his adult and not his infant personality.

Marian! He groaned aloud, a groan choked suddenly by main force lest it disturb her sleeping peacefully over there on the mats in her corner of the little hut. He drew himself painfully to his feet and stood looking down upon her as she slept. It was like a farewell.

It was too much, this ravaging of all his hopes! This terrible fulfilment, in the very midst of his happiness, of all his life’s direst dreads! But he wasted little time in anything like self-pity. It was Marian who filled his thoughts. He could not tell her! In his present weakened state he visualized a frightful purgatory, stretching out before him, and before Marian, when that change of Hell should set in here on a stage from which he might not so much as step for respite into the wings; a stage upon which he must otherwise play out the part of his incredible degradation before her horror-stricken eyes. Better, far better, to destroy himself . . .

A fresh aspect of the horror loomed before him, blackly. As the terrible spell wrought itself out, his own mind’s powers would weaken, his faculties become numbed, and he would himself fail to understand the course of the disintegration that would be taking place within him. Then Marian, if unwarned beforehand, must witness with the same helpless terror that had set its mark on the lives of his young parents in those black days, his gradual and sickening change into Caliban . . .

4

Day by day he watched his capsules diminish. At the end of the sixth day, when only two were left, he suffered a revulsion. He would save these until some indications of the change appeared! When these came he would know of them before anyone else because he would be expecting them. In this way he would extend the period of his normality as long as possible, and then . . .

After that, life would be one growing terror concealed from Marian so long as his self-control should be left to him to exercise. Marian was occupied in alternations of sorrow over the loss of their shipmates and the eager happiness of a child confronted unexpectedly with an imagined paradise.

He went through one day without the thyroid: the first day within his recollection. The next day, at noon, engrained habit prevailing over his resolution, he took a tablet. The day following, after reasoning the problem out afresh, he swallowed his last tablet and flung the metal box far out among the creaming breakers of the nearest reef.

He stood, looking after it out to sea. Far beyond the breakers, beyond the great expanse of blue ocean which was their background, there swam into the scope of his vision the clear-cut outline of a spar. He lost it. He shaded his eyes with both hands against the intolerable glare. Again he picked it out standing up against the horizon. He wondered why he had not noticed it before. This was because, he reasoned, occupied with his introspections, he had glanced only indifferently out to sea. Besides, he had probably, he told himself, not looked in that precise direction. One looked out to sea from any spot on the tiny, almost circular, coral island.

Down under that spar, if chance had been only reasonably kind, lay the hull which supported it, and in the hull reposed in small, watertight cartons the thyroids which meant life, sanity, Marian!

Then, as he looked, his heart bounding with hope, all his young instincts stimulated to vigorous action, he saw, very faintly and indistinctly at that great distance, the unmistakable sign of the sea-wolves of the South Pacific – the rakish dorsal fins of great sharks. He looked long at them as they moved about in the vicinity of the spar, and shuddering, he turned inland and walked back to the hut.

Here on the island there was no means of procuring even crude thyroid. There were no animals. The atoll was utterly self-contained. Its simple inhabitants subsisted on fruit and fish. There was no settlement within hundreds of miles.

He interviewed the English-speaking islander. It had been the chance of a ship’s crew putting in for water that had taken this man on his travels. Did such crews ever put in nowadays? Very seldom. Once in a year, perhaps, or two years – who could tell? The lull was a long chance. The sharks would go away when they had cleared up what was edible from the wreckage out there. At any rate there was the possibility of a solution out there; a solution first vaguely imagined, horrifically rejected, then avidly taken up again as Renwick tossed through the interminable tropic night on his coco matting, the night of the day on which he had taken his last capsule.

There was no help to be procured. He had sounded his friend the islander on the subject of summoning the men of the settlement with their primitive outriggers to go out there and loot the wreck. But the islander had said, indifferently, that there was no hurry about that. Some of it might come in anyway, as Renwick and Marian had come in, almost miraculously, through the jagged reefs. The sharks were thick out there now, and they would remain for some time. Time enough to go out there when they had dispersed and made it possible to dive! They might remain a week or a month. Who could explain the avidity or the patience of a shark? They would follow ships day after day in these seas, apparently subsisting on nothing, waiting! There was something in that wreck they were waiting for now, and they would remain until they got it. Besides, it was far, almost too far for outriggers!

Renwick tried to argue. It was not so very far. One could see the spar. The islander only smiled. There appeared to be something unaccountably amusing to him in Renwick’s idea of distance. But he did not explain. Perhaps what was clear enough to him was beyond his limited powers of expression, and realizing this, he only smiled.

Renwick was baffled. It appeared hopeless. But he laid his plans for his last resort with a steady mind. Marian must be spared at every cost. He broached to her the possibility of his reaching the sunken hull by swimming. He said nothing of the sharks, nothing of his conversation with the islander. He opened up the subject tentatively, delicately, with every resource of his strained finesse. He set her mind easily at rest about his going by harping upon the gentleness and kindly hospitality of the islanders. She would not mind remaining alone with them for a while?

Marian acquiesced easily, admiring her man’s accustomed resource. Of course he might go out there if he wished! Why not? But he must not stay too long. He must come back soon – soon! He took her in his arms.

Four days later, as he awoke, he found that Marian was looking, smilingly, into his face. She had been shaking him. It was at least an hour after their usual time for rising.

Then he knew that
it
was beginning.

Almost at once he told Marian of his intention to swim out to the spar that afternoon. Of course she knew he was a wonderful swimmer! Wouldn’t it be rather far, though? Her attention was diverted by the approach of an amber-colored baby, who waddled toward her, soft little murmurings on its lips, its tiny hands laden with hibiscus blooms.

She went with him down to the beach, his body glistening with coconut oil, a great coconut knife hanging by a lanyard about his neck. She waved to him when he stopped to tread water, turning about and shouting: ‘Goodbye’. She could just hear his voice faintly because of the distant roar of the surf, a roar which rolled in for miles, even from the farthest breakers where a lone spar still hung aslant across the line of the horizon.

Then he swam straight out toward the spar where shadowy, black fins moved stealthily upon the mirror surface of the Pacific.

5

Once alone in the deep water, he settled himself to a steady, distance-devouring stroke. He had put everything in his past life definitely behind him. That now held for him, he knew, nothing that it was not altogether best to abandon. He would accomplish two ends in one, by failing to return. He would avoid the frightful process of disintegration and (infinitely nearer to his soul’s desire) he would thus spare Marian all that concentrated horror which had so fearfully affected the lives of his parents. He was doing her, he reasoned, moreover, no wrong in depriving her of himself. He was only forcing the exchange between a horrible and long-drawn-out deprivation, and this sudden one which by comparison was merciful and kind.

His purpose was clear and definite. He would swim straight out to where the sea wolves moved restlessly back and forth about the wreck, and kill and rend with his great knife until he was overcome. It was not even suicide! There was a possibility that the sharks might not attack him, but would disappear upon his arrival. He knew, fragmentarily, something of sharks. One could never be certain what they might do. It was also possible that, even if attacked, the killing of one or two might divert the others; just as in Siberia travelers pursued by wolves sometimes escaped by shooting a wolf or two and so delaying the pack, which would stop to tear and devour.