Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (5 page)

I thanked the dear old lady for her information as I bowed over her withered hand at parting. Her last remark was cryptic and somewhat startling: ‘ ’Twas more than paint, belike, went into the composition of that picture, Mr Canevin!’

I called up Miss Gertrude as soon as I was back at Melbourne House.

‘I have some information about the picture and the artist,’ said I.

‘Come as early as you can manage it,’ said Miss Gertrude, and after dinner I started.

‘Oh, Mr Canevin,’ said she eagerly, when I had recounted what Mrs Desmond had told me. ‘How I wish I might see it again now at once!’

‘I had anticipated that,’ said I. ‘It lies on the table in the entryway.’

We laid it out on the mahogany centre-table and looked down at it together in silence. At last Miss Gertrude spoke.

‘What do you see now in his expression, Mr Canevin?’

I did not need inquire in whose expression.

A baffling, elusive change appeared to have taken place now that we were looking down at him under the electric light.

‘Expectation,’ said I slowly.

I hesitated. It was not quite expectation. Interest? Not quite that, either. I pondered the matter, the bizarre whimsicality of it making its natural appeal to my mind the while.

‘Hope!’ I cried at last. ‘And, coming through the hope, a wish!’

‘Yes, yes!’ cried Miss Gertrude, clasping her hands excitedly. ‘It – it seemed to me almost as though there were something – something he wanted to tell us!’

She hurried over these hesitating words and, now that they were spoken, there was a look of relief on her lovely face.

‘Your moral courage is better than mine, Miss Gertrude,’ said I. ‘For that is what was really in the back of my mind. It seemed to me too – well, too preposterous to put into words.’

Her eyes glowed with an enthusiasm almost childish. She placed her hand upon my arm.

‘Do you suppose we could find out what it is?’

Her voice was very low.

‘We could try,’ said I.

The whimsicality of the proposal had intrigued me.

‘But how?’ cried Miss Gertrude.

‘That’s what I’m puzzling my poor brains about,’ I answered. ‘One cannot converse with a little figure two and one-half inches high and made of paint!

‘No! We cannot just talk to him – and expect him to answer. He hasn’t the – the apparatus. He’s only a brittle little manikin fastened down flat on some very tender old canvas. He can’t speak and he can’t write. But, somehow, he does seem able to change his expression.

‘If there really is something in him – something besides paint, as old Mrs Desmond hinted – at least we’re not meddling with
that
for any wicked purpose, whatever Mrs Desmond’s Aunt Camilla Lanigan may have had in mind.’

‘Do you remember that paralyzed old man in
Monte Cristo
?’ inquired Miss Gertrude eagerly. ‘Noirtier, de Villefort’s father; you remember?’

‘He was one of the friends of my childhood,’ said I. ‘What about him?’

‘He could move only his eyes, and yet his granddaughter “talked” with him. She asked him questions that could be answered by “yes” or “no”, and he closed the right eye for one and the left for the other!’

‘Yes?’ said I dubiously.

‘Well!’ said she, looking down at the picture, ‘shall we try him?’

I stepped over and looked at the manikin closely.

‘I’m looking to see if Mrs Desmond’s Aunt Camilla gave him ears,’ said I lightly. ‘Apparently she put “blood” in him.’

And I proceeded to tell Miss Gertrude the incident of the carpet tack.

‘We’ll have to work out the questions very carefully,’ said she.

I looked at her in amazement.

‘Can you seriously mean it?’ I asked.

‘Look at him!’ cried Miss Gertrude and put her hands over her eyes and sank down upon the sofa.

I stepped quickly toward her, alarmed.

‘No, no!’ she cried. ‘I’m all right – only startled a little. Look for yourself, if you please, Mr Canevin.’

I looked, and for the life of me I could not escape the conviction that there was a wry smile on the manikin’s face.

‘My God!’ said I, and did not apologize.

I almost hesitate to proceed.

Well, we sat down together after that and worked the thing out. The evening was before us. The rest of the family were dining with friends and would not be home before eleven.

It was plain to us that ‘he’ could move, although he had not done so while anyone was actually looking at him. The fact that this last ‘change’ had come upon his countenance in the briefest of intervals would indicate, somehow, that he could also ‘hear’.

For it seemed plain to us in our eerie mood of that strange evening that the smile was one of satisfaction, induced by our conversation. He wanted us to try to talk to him!

We decided to formulate certain questions, ask them, then turn away and,
after a short interval,
look at the manikin again.
The method of communication we derived
from ‘Noirtier’,
as the simplest possible.

Miss Gertrude asked the first question.

‘We think you wish to communicate with us,’ said she, in a still small voice. ‘We shall ask you questions, and you are to close your right eye if the answer is “yes”, and your left if it is “no”. Will you answer?’

Then we sat, side by side, on the sofa, watching the great clock in the corner of the drawing-room ticking off the seconds of that minute which we had decided to allow to pass before looking at him again.

It was a long, long minute, that one! At first I felt like a fool, but that feeling dissipated itself as soon as we had, together, bent over the picture at the expiration of that first minute.

The right eye had drooped in a kind of leering half-wink – precisely as though Miss Camilla Lanigan had painted it so one hundred years ago.

After several long minutes of silence between us there on the sofa. I said: ‘I’m going to ask the next question, if you don’t mind.’

She nodded.

I walked over to the table. The eyes were alike again!

‘Have you more than one thing to communicate?’ I inquired.

I came back to the sofa again and sat down, my eyes once more on the clock.

Again we bent over the picture.

‘There’s a slight droop in the right eye,’ said Miss Gertrude.

The manikin had answered ‘yes’ again.

After that, somehow, we felt freer. Two questions – the real ordeal of the thing – were over and past.

There was little feeling of strangeness from then on. It was precisely as though we were talking with some person of flesh and blood like ourselves, with someone not immediately present – as though we were talking over the telephone. It was something like that.

He had two things to communicate. We took thought now how to proceed. The eyes, alike, were always open and staring straight ahead whenever we approached with a new question. And so it continued through to the end.

I thought of a necessary question.

‘Have you more than two things to communicate?’ I asked.

‘No,’ came the answer.

‘Does the first thing concern you?’ I ventured.

‘Yes.’

‘And the second thing? Does that also concern you?’

This time, when we looked for the answer, the eyes had not moved at all so far as we could tell.

I glanced up at the electric light. Our lights not infrequently change their density, go up and down, without warning. We have only the little, local electrical plants, one in each of the towns. The light appeared even enough.

We were a little nonplused, for, although I had been telling myself subconsciously all along that the whole thing was a farce, a bit of childish play, I had come by now to expect an answer!

‘Perhaps it’s because we asked him an unanswerable question,’ I suggested. ‘I’ll try to clear it up.’

‘He’s helping,’ said Miss Gertrude. ‘He’s only showing us that it was asked wrong!’

I looked down at her and smiled, and she smiled back at me.

‘Does the second thing concern more than you – that is, someone else?’ I asked the pirate.

‘Yes,’ came the answer.

‘Is Mr Canevin the other person?’ asked Miss Gertrude.

I smiled again at this. If there was anything that could be construed as an answer, I certainly expected that it would be ‘no’.

The answer was ‘yes’.

I began to feel the beginnings of a cold consternation, but I found Miss Gertrude smiling happily.

‘I thought so,’ said she simply.

Women, most of them certainly, are beyond me! It was a woman who had painted this picture!

Miss Gertrude hastened to ask another question.

‘Do you want to tell Mr Canevin what he can do for you first, and then what you’re going to do for him in return?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you wish to be released from something?’

‘Yes, he does,’ reported Miss Gertrude, who was now asking the questions, I being seated for the time being alone on the sofa.

‘Do you wish to pass out of existence?’

She nodded over to me to show that he did.

‘Can we accomplish that for you?’

‘He says we can.’

We were making progress, it appeared! She clapped her hands gaily. All her gravity had disappeared. It
was
merely a game to her, then. I had almost begun to suspect that she had been taking the thing seriously.

‘I thought it would come out more or less like that!’ she announced. Then: ‘The poor, poor man!’ said she softly, and I wondered once more.

She returned to the picture and looked down at it for a long time.

‘Is there anything else that can be done for you?’ she inquired.

There wasn’t, it seemed.

I will summarize, for brevity’s sake, the series of questions which followed and the ‘replies’.

We were to find out how to obtain the ‘reward’. Then we were to ask no further questions. I was to take the picture home, put it back on the wall, and destroy it the next morning – tomorrow.

All this seemed to me, on the sofa, grotesque, unintelligible. I was almost becoming bored with this seemingly foolish play, but nothing would stop Gertrude Maclane.

‘Is it a material reward for Mr Canevin?’

‘Yes,’ came the answer to this one. And, going over and looking down at the manikin, such is human nature – or our somewhat unstable lighting system on Santa Cruz – that it seemed even to me in that mood, that I could discern the merest ghost of a twisted grin on that strange little face beneath the looming, cruelly twisted knot of hangman’s rope.

I will bring what seemed to me an increasingly absurd performance to its conclusion. I left, with definite instructions to dig in the northeast corner of the cellar under Melbourne House – that cellar once devoted to the housing of materials for planter’s punches and sangaree, and now fallen to a low estate of habitation for spiders and perhaps an occasional scorpion thriving in its ancient dust.

My brain, I will confess it, was in a kind of whirl as I drove home that night from Montparnasse House. When I had obediently hung the picture back in its place on my workroom wall, I took a good, long, searching look at it. It seemed as wooden, as laboriously limned, as amateurish, as on that day when I had rescued it from the dustroom.

There were the strutting St Thomas gentry and merchants, a lordly group of aristocrats, who had come out to see Captain Fawcett die. There, too, were their silken and be-muslined ladyfolk; the Danish soldiers in their boxlike, Frederick-the-Great uniforms; the swarming, pop-eyed negroes; the hangman, Fawcett and his two mates . . .

I went to bed. That had been a strange, weird evening.

To dig under my own house. It was too much. And I had promised Gertrude Maclane to do so!

Promised, too, to destroy this picture the next morning. Awkward, that! Gentlemen do not build bonfires in their back yards in the West Indies.

Our very cooking is done on charcoal-pots, or on an occasional oilstove. We have no gas, and coal we know only as a commodity for fueling ships. It would have to be a coal-pot.

That is the idea I carried with me into sleep, the last thing I remembered until the sun, the bright, morning sun, saluted me awake.

‘Keep a fire in the coal-pot, Esmerelda, if you please,’ I called through the bathroom door. ‘I want to use it myself a little later.’

I stepped into the workroom to take down the picture. I had promised to destroy it, I would keep my word.

I looked at it, for the last time, under that clear, pitiless, blazing morning sunlight.

Probably the nervous strain had been heavier than I had imagined. I managed to control myself. I made no
shandramadan
– which is the black’s term for foolishness or rascality! I avoided, too, by holding on tight to the table’s edge, a
caffoon,
which means a fall.