Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (41 page)

He found the boat-deck deserted. A slight breeze, the very north-ernmost edge of the early-morning Trade, freshly blowing, was just beginning to make itself felt. Above, in a perfectly cloudless sky, the great stars flamed and glowed. There was no moon, but the reflection of Venus lay to starboard like a thin, unbroken bar of faint moonlight along the smooth sea. The
Bonaventure
forged steadily onward, her engines throbbing monotonously in their incessant, sustained beat.

Somewhat bewildered now, he walked farther forward along the boat-deck. He paused under a broad canvas awning just below the extension of the bridge on the port side. There was no motion except the slight, undulating pitch of the vessel as she responded to the long Atlantic swell of Latitude 28. In the soft and silent calm of this subtropic night the footfalls, regular and unhurried, of the slowly pacing officer on duty came delicately to his ears. It would be Mr Sills, the Third Officer, at this hour.

Reuter spoke hesitantly up the bridge companionway.

‘Good morning, Mr Sills.’

The officer on the bridge paused in his steady walk. Doubtless he would think it somewhat strange for a passenger to be up on the boat-deck at this unusual hour. That bell!

‘Good morning, Mr Reuter,’ came Sill’s voice. ‘Very bright starlight this morning. Did you notice Venus?’

‘Remarkably clear – yes! I was noticing Venus particularly. Shows up quite like a regular little moon, doesn’t she?’

The officer remained to chat for a moment, then resumed his duty-tramp along the bridge, his tread leisurely – no indication here of anything out of the ordinary. Disaster!

Reuter glanced down at his life-preserver, dangling awkwardly from his arm. He hoped Mr Sills had not noticed it. The life-preserver seemed an incongruity on this perfect night.

That bell!

Could this, perhaps, be one of those cases such as one read about occasionally – an assumed, reassuring calm on the part of the officers, a professionally false calm to keep the passengers from a stampede in the face of imminent danger? No! Hardly that, here, under these circumstances. There were only two or three passengers aboard the tramp besides himself, all men. He was alone on this deck where the lifeboats, stood, still in their chocks, belted down, their rigging coiled as though no one ever expected to disturb it. This, of course, was no passenger ship. The ringing of the alarm-bell at this time of night could have no possible meaning except public and necessary announcement of disaster. Even on passenger vessels boat-drills always came day-times at convenient hours. The wording of the sign was explicit and unmistakable.

To Reuter’s now thoroughly alert mind only one explanation was possible. He must have dreamed, vividly, of the bell’s ringing. Such an explanation seemed absurd, ridiculous. But that would at least account for its silence after he had switched on his light and noticed that it was ringing no longer. Perhaps, he reminded himself, the sign had made, in his state of preoccupation about poor Morrison, an absurdly strong impression on his mind. It was curious, though, that the
note
of the bell, as he had heard it – in his sleep, if that were the true explanation – had exactly corresponded to its actual note; the sound it had given out when he had rapped it with his ring. He had never tried ringing it before. He had no previous knowledge of the gong’s note.

He remained there on the boat-deck a few minutes longer, greatly puzzled. He looked out at the slightly phosphorescent sea and upward at the serene stars. Disaster! Well – it had been a very queer experience for him, in his matter-of-fact existence; something to think about, surely – it would supply him with a story to tell . . .

He went below, almost reluctantly, now, because of the charm of this warm night out here on deck, and the soft early-morning breeze, which was now coming in little puffs from the West, the land side – somewhere off Florida they would be now – back to his cabin. He looked first at the sign and the bell, half fascinated, his brows heavily puckered in his deep puzzlement. He did not tap the bell again before putting out the light and turning in. Contrary to his expectation, for he felt very completely awake, he fell asleep immediately. He slept straight through until the arrival of the steward with the morning coffee aroused him at seven.

After his shower and breakfast he settled himself in a deck chair on the shady starboard side of the boat-deck, away from the blazing morning sun. Idly he ran through the unread portions and even the advertisements of a magazine hastily purchased just before coming aboard four days before. It was here, about the middle of the morning that the wireless operator found him and handed him a message just received. It was from St Thomas, from the Chief Municipal Physician, at the hospital, Commander Joseph Carver of the Navy. The message was explicit and terse, Navy style.

Morrison died three this morning. – Carver.

Poor old Morrison! Always careful and considerate, Morrison. He, of course, had provided for the sending of this message in case he was called West before Reuter’s ship arrived.

He would not even be able to get there in time for the funeral! Two full days, possibly a third, must necessarily intervene before the
Bonaventure
could tie up to the West India Docks in St Thomas harbor. In the Islands they buried people, usually, the same day on which they died. Reuter looked at his watch. It was ten thirty-three now. Morrison had been dead more than seven hours.

He had gone out at three o’clock! Abruptly it flashed into Reuter’s mind – that was when he had heard the ‘disaster’ bell. He could feel little chills now running up and down his spine . . .

He pulled himself together. He stood up, thrust the wireless message into the pocket of his drill coat. There would be a tremendous lot for him to attend to when he arrived. Too bad he could not be at the funeral! That could not be helped. Thinking of the endless details that would be piled up for him on his arrival, an anxious frown on his forehead, he walked aft, descended the ladder, and entered his stateroom.

The sign took his first glance, held it. He stood there, just inside the stateroom door, looking at it fixedly, as though fascinated. Had it actually rung or not? Would he ever, really, know? He walked the length of the room and looked closely at the bell. It was, of course, no more than an inanimate thing, a mechanical device, glistening in its white ship’s paint. He could recall, as though it were only a few moments ago, the precise tone of it, as it had sounded, recording itself in his sleep-ridden brain; that had been nearly eight hours ago, just at the time when Morrison had passed out, hundreds of miles away down there in St Thomas.

Abruptly he reached up and inserted his index finger under the gong’s heavy spherical clapper. As he tried to raise it he encountered a stiff resistance. He thrust a little harder with a muscular finger. He saw that he was only bending the wire by which the globular copper ball was attached to the make-and-break electrical appliance which rang the gong. Then, very carefully, he straightened the bent wire. He took hold of the rectangular piece of metal to which the wire was attached at its other end. He tried to force this up. Again he encountered resistance. It would not budge.
The gong was not in working order
! He stepped on the metal railing of the lower bunk. He peered at the apparatus, his head bent close.

Successive coatings of the ship’s paint had fastened down the gong’s clapper rigidly. Reuter took out his knife and pried under the paint, hard now as cement. Flakes of it came away under the knife blade. He had the clapper entirely freed now. Probably it had not rung the gong since its original installation. It moved stiffly, grating back and forth reluctantly under his hand. He lifted it up forcibly, then let it fall back into place upon the gong’s rim with a solid impact . . .

The gong sounded in the very middle of the note that had been ringing in his mind; the note he had been expecting; the note that had been stamped into his mind at three o’clock that morning, when Morrison had died.

Disaster.

He stepped down slowly to the stateroom’s deck, dusting off white flaked particles and chippings of ancient paint from his hands and the front of his coat. He stood in the middle of the room, his feet wide apart, and read the sign through once more. Unconscious of his own action, he shook his head, doubtfully. He remained standing there for a long time, balancing himself to the ship’s slow roll, in a musing daze.

At last he lowered his eyes, turned, and walked slowly out of his stateroom, mounted to the deck, resumed his chair, and picked up the abandoned magazine.

But he did not open the magazine. Instead he laid it across his knees to serve as a writing desk. It had occurred to him that he ought to jot down as many things as he could think of – it would be wise to have them clearly in mind – the many things that would have to be attended to as soon as the
Bonaventure
had made fast alongside the West India Company’s docks in St Thomas.

Bothon

Powers Meredith, at his shower-bath before dinner in the bathroom adjoining his room in his New York City club, allowed the cake of soap to drop on the tiled floor. Stooping to recover it he rapped the side of his head smartly against the marble sidewall. The resulting bruise was very painful, and almost at once puffed up into a noticeable lump. Meredith dined in the grill that evening. Having no after-dinner engagement he went into the quiet library of the club, empty at this hour, and settled himself with a new book beside a softly-shaded reading lamp.

From time to time a slight, inadvertent pressure of his head against the chair’s leather-upholstered back would remind him unpleasantly of his accident in the shower-bath. This, after it happened several times, became an annoyance, and Meredith shifted himself into a preventive attitude with his legs draped over one of the big chair’s rounded arms.

No one else came into the library. Faint, clicking noises came in from the nearby billiard-room where a couple of men were playing, but, absorbed in his book, he did not notice these. The only perceptible sound was that of the gentle, steady rain outside. This, in the form of a soothing, continuous murmur, came through the partly-opened, high windows. He read, interestedly, on and on in his book.

As he turned over the ninety-sixth page of his book, at precisely that instant’s brief and almost unnoticed interruption of the thread of the story which this mechanical act involved, he heard a dull, overwhelmingly heavy sound, like a very large explosion plainly coming from a vast distance. It was the kind of deep booming dull roar which would accompany the destruction of several city blocks simultaneously.

Suddenly alert now, his finger holding his place in the book, he listened, horrified, for the aftermath – some stupendous crashing of falling masonry.

After several apprehensive instants, his mind entirely engaged with that keen process of listening, he heard it, almost with relief. It was a rumbling roar as though of countless tons of wrecked masonry; falling; falling; clearly, unmistakably, the remote thunder of some catastrophic ruin. He dropped his book, and, obeying his most prominent reactive impulse, literally leaped to his feet and started for the door.

He met nobody as he rushed down the stairs. At the coat-room, which he had to pass on his way to the doorway, two fellow members were chatting urbanely together as they took their checks. Meredith glanced at them, surprised at their callousness. He rushed on, to the doorway, and out into the street, where he paused. An empty street! As he shoved his way impatiently through the heavy revolving door an imperturbable doorman checked him out on the club-membership list-board beside his standing desk. Meredith thought, fleetingly, of the sentinel of Pompeii! He turned automatically, naturally, to the right, in the general direction from which that terrific sound had appeared to come. He had been visualizing streets thronged with horror-stricken people crowding westward; mad rush of fire apparatus, clanging raucously westward along crosstown streets; platoons of reserve police moving at the double in the same direction in their disciplined, orderly ranks. He half expected to see some lurid glow, searing the heavens over towards the Hudson River.

There was, strangely, as it seemed to him, disappointingly, almost startlingly – none of these things. The rain, reduced now to the merest light drizzle, made the asphalt of the street shimmer as it reflected upwards innumerable slightly distorted lights. Over towards Broadway, certainly, there was clamor. On this his expectant mind seized avidly. But, as he analyzed this automatically, it reduced itself to an accustomed note, heightened and intensified, now, by the emptying of the theaters. It was only the compound eleven o’clock bedlam of Times Square.

Along Sixth Avenue as he approached it with hurried strides, a pace just short of running, countless weaving taxicabs in a many-hued stream jockeyed for position in the maelstrom of the night-traffic about the Hippodrome. On the corner, a solitary, conspicuous figure, a rubber-coated and helmeted policeman, swinging long efficient arms like a pair of mechanical semaphores, skillfully directed the hypersensitive, crawling traffic, soundless on its multitudinous rubber tires save for the sustained, growling, compound cachinnation of shifting gears and squawking protesting brakes. Against him, as he stood now irresolutely on the curb, scores of hustling pedestrians jostled unheedingly. To his ever-increasing wonderment, all these seemed uniformly to be unmoved, to be totally unconcerned, by what, he supposed, must of necessity be one of the major destructive calamities of modern times.