Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (59 page)

‘I walked on, slowly, and passed them; and they kept their faces to me as they always do. I’m used to that . . .

‘I went up the steps of the house to the front gallery, and found Mrs Iversen waiting for me. Her sister was with her, too. I remained sitting with them for the best part of an hour. Then two old black women who had been sent for, into the country, arrived. These were two old women who were accustomed to prepare the dead for burial. Then I persuaded the ladies to retire, and started to come home myself.

‘It was a little past midnight, perhaps twelve-fifteen. I picked out my own hat from two or three of poor old Iversen’s that were hanging on the rack, took my supplejack, and stepped out of the door onto the little stone gallery at the head of the steps.

‘There are about twelve or thirteen steps from the gallery down to the street. As I started down them I noticed a third old black woman sitting, all huddled together, on the bottom step, with her back to me. I thought at once that this must be some old crone who lived with the other two – the preparers of the dead. I imagined that she had been afraid to remain alone in their cabin, and so had accompanied them into the town – they are like children, you know, in some ways – and that, feeling too humble to come into the house, she had sat down to wait on the step and had fallen asleep. You’ve heard their proverbs, have you not? There’s one that exactly fits this situation that I had imagined: “Cockroach no wear crockin’ boot when he creep in fowl-house!” It means: “Be very reserved when in the presence of your betters!” Quaint, rather! The poor souls!

‘I started to walk down the steps toward the old woman. That scant half-moon had come up into the sky while I had been sitting with the ladies, and by its light everything was fairly sharply defined. I could see that old woman as plainly as I can see you now, Mr Lee. In fact, I was looking directly at the poor old creature as I came down the steps, and fumbling in my pocket for a few coppers for her – for tobacco and sugar, as they say! I was wondering, indeed, why she was not by this time on her feet and making one of their queer little bobbing bows – “cockroach bow to fowl”, as they might say! It seemed this old woman must have fallen into a very deep sleep, for she had not moved at all, although ordinarily she would have heard me, for the night was deathly still, and their hearing is extraordinarily acute, like a cat’s, or a dog’s. I remember that the fragrance from Mrs Iversen’s tuberoses, in pots on the gallery railing, was pouring out in a stream that night, “making a greeting for the moon”! It was almost overpowering.

‘Just as I was putting my foot on the fifth step, there came a tiny little puff of fresh breeze from somewhere in the hills behind Iversen’s house. It rustled the dry fronds of a palm-tree that was growing beside the steps. I turned my head in that direction for an instant.

‘Mr Lee, when I looked back, down the steps, after what must have been a fifth of a second’s inattention, that little old black woman who had been huddled up there on the lowest step, apparently sound asleep, was gone. She had vanished utterly – and, Mr Lee, a little white dog, about the size of a French poodle, was bounding up the steps toward me. With every bound, a step at a leap, the dog increased in size. It seemed to swell out there before my very eyes.

‘Then I was, really, frightened – thoroughly, utterly frightened. I knew if that “animal” so much as touched me, it meant death, Mr Lee – absolute, certain death. The little old woman was a “sheen” –
chien
, of course. You know of lycanthropy – wolf-change – of course. Well, this was one of our varieties of it. I do not know what it would be called, I’m sure. “Canicanthropy”, perhaps. I don’t know, but something – something first-cousin-once-removed from lycanthropy, and on the downward scale, Mr Lee. The old woman was a were-dog!

‘Of course, I had no time to think, only to use my instinct. I swung my supplejack with all my might and brought it down squarely on that beast’s head. It was only a step below me, then, and I could see the faint moonlight sparkle on the slaver about its mouth. It was then, it seemed to me, about the size of a medium-sized dog – nearly wolf-size, Mr Lee, and a kind of deathly white. I was desperate, and the force with which I struck caused me to lose my balance. I did not fall, but it required a moment or two for me to regain my equilibrium. When I felt my feet firm under me again, I looked about, frantically, on all sides, for the “dog”. But it, too, Mr Lee, like the old woman, had quite disappeared. I looked all about, you may well imagine, after that experience, in the clear, thin moonlight. For yards about the foot of the steps, there was no place – not even a small nook – where either the “dog” or the old woman could have been concealed. Neither was on the gallery, which was only a few feet square, a mere landing.

‘But there came to my ears, sharpened by that night’s experiences, from far out among the plantations at the rear of Iversen’s house, the pad-pad of naked feet. Someone – something – was running, desperately, off in the direction of the center of the island, back into the hills, into the deep “bush”.

‘Then, behind me, out of the house onto the gallery rushed the two old women who had been preparing Iversen’s body for its burial. They were enormously excited, and they shouted at me unintelligibly. I will have to render their words for you.

‘ “O, de Good Gahd protec’ you, Marster Jaffray, sir – de Joombie, de Joombie! De “Sheen”, Marster Jaffray! He go, sir?”

‘I reassured the poor old souls, and went back home.’

Mr Da Silva fell abruptly silent. He slowly shifted his position in his chair, and reached for, and lighted, a fresh cigarette.

Mr Lee was absolutely silent. He did not move. Mr Da Silva resumed, deliberately, after obtaining a light.

‘You see, Mr Lee, the West Indies are different from any other place in the world, I verily believe, sir. I’ve said so, anyhow, many a time, although I have never been out of the islands except when I was a young man, to Copenhagen. I’ve told you, exactly, what happened that particular night.’

Mr Lee heaved a sigh.

‘Thank you, Mr Da Silva, very much indeed, sir,’ said he, thoughtfully, and made as though to rise. His service wrist-watch indicated six o’clock.

‘Let us have a fresh swizzel, at least, before you go,’ suggested Mr Da Silva. ‘We have a saying here in the island, that “a man can’t travel on one leg”! Perhaps you’ve heard it already.’

‘I have,’ said Mr Lee.

‘Knud, Knud! You hear, mon? Knud – tell Charlotte to mash up another bal’ of ice – you hear? Quickly now,’ commanded Mr Da Silva.

Cassius

My house-man, Stephen Penn, who presided over the staff of my residence in St Thomas, was not, strictly speaking, a native of that city. Penn came from the neighboring island of St Jan. It is one of the ancient West Indian names, although there remain in the islands nowadays no Caucasians to bear that honorable cognomen.

Stephen’s travels, however, had not been limited to the crossing from St Jan – which, incidentally, is the authentic scene of R. L. Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
– which lies little more than a rowboat’s journey away from the capital of the Virgin Islands. Stephen had been ‘down the Islands’, which means that he had been actually as far from home as Trinidad or, perhaps, British Guiana, down through the great sweep of former mountaintops, submerged by some vast, cataclysmic, prehistoric inundation and named the Bow of Ulysses by some fanciful, antique geographer. That odyssey of humble Stephen Penn had taken place because of his love for ships. He had had various jobs afloat and his exact knowledge of the house-man’s art had been learned under various man-driving ship’s stewards.

During this preliminary training for his life’s work, Stephen had made many acquaintances. One of these, an upstanding, slim, parchment-colored Negro of thirty or so, was Brutus Hellman. Brutus, like Stephen, had settled down in St Thomas as a house-man. It was, in fact, Stephen who had talked him into leaving his native British Antigua, to try his luck in our American Virgin Islands. Stephen had secured for him his first job in St Thomas, in the household of a naval officer.

For this friend of his youthful days, Stephen continued to feel a certain sense of responsibility; because, when Brutus happened to be abruptly thrown out of employment by the sudden illness and removal by the Naval Department of his employer in the middle of the winter season in St Thomas, Stephen came to me and requested that his friend Brutus be allowed to come to me ‘on board-wages’ until he was able to secure another place.

I acquiesced. I knew Brutus as a first-rate house-man. I was glad to give him a hand, to oblige the always agreeable and highly efficient Stephen, and, indeed, to have so skilful a servant added to my little staff in my bachelor quarters. I arranged for something more substantial than the remuneration asked for, and Brutus Hellman added his skilled services to those of the admirable Stephen. I was very well served that season and never had any occasion to regret what both men alluded to as my ‘very great kindness’!

It was not long after Brutus Hellman had moved his simple belongings into one of the servants’-quarters cabins in my stone-paved yard, that I had another opportunity to do something for him. It was Stephen once more who presented his friend’s case to me. Brutus, it appeared, had need of a minor operation, and, Negro-like, the two of them, talking the matter over between themselves, had decided to ask me, their present patron, to arrange it.

I did so, with my friend, Dr Pelletier, Chief Surgeon, in charge of our Naval Station Hospital and regarded in Naval circles as the best man in the Medical Corps. I had not inquired about the nature of Brutus’s affliction. Stephen had stressed the minor aspect of the required surgery, and that was all I mentioned to Dr Pelletier.

It is quite possible that if Dr Pelletier had not been going to Porto Rico on Thursday of that week, this narrative, the record of one of the most curious experiences I have ever had, would never have been set down. If Pelletier, his mind set on sailing at eleven, had not merely walked out of his operating-room as soon as he had finished with Brutus a little after eight that Thursday morning, leaving the dressing of the slight wound upon Brutus’s groin to be performed by his assistants, then that incredible affair which I can only describe as the persecution of the unfortunate Brutus Hellman would never have taken place.

It was on Wednesday, about two p.m., that I telephoned to Dr Pelletier to ask him to perform an operation on Brutus.

‘Send him over to the hospital this afternoon,’ Pelletier had answered, ‘and I’ll look him over about five and operate the first thing in the morning – if there is any need for an operation! I’m leaving for San Juan at eleven, for a week.’

I thanked him and went upstairs to my siesta, after giving Stephen the message to Brutus, who started off for the hospital about an hour later. He remained in the hospital until the following Sunday afternoon. He was entirely recovered from the operation, he reported. It had been a very slight affair, really, merely the removal of some kind of growth. He thanked me for my part in it when he came to announce dinner while I was reading on the gallery.

It was on the Saturday morning, the day before Brutus got back, that I discovered something very curious in an obscure corner of my house-yard, just around the corner of the wall of the three small cabins which occupy its north side. These cabins were tenantless except for the one at the east end of the row. That one was Brutus Hellman’s. Stephen Penn, like my cook, washer, and scullery-maid, lived somewhere in the town.

I had been looking over the yard which was paved with old-fashioned flagging. I found it in excellent condition, weeded, freshly swept, and clean. The three stone servants’-cubicles had been recently whitewashed and glistened like cake-icing in the morning sun. I looked over this portion of my domain with approval, for I like things shipshape. I glanced into the two narrow air spaces between the little, two-room houses. There were no cobwebs visible. Then I took a look around the east corner of Brutus Hellman’s little house where there was a narrow passageway between the house and the high wall of antique Dutch brick, and there, well in towards the north wall, I saw on the ground what I first took to be a discarded toy which some child had thrown there, probably, it occurred to me, over the wall at the back of the stone cabins.

It looked like a doll’s house, which, if it had been thrown there, had happened to land right-side-up. It looked more or less like one of the quaint old-fashioned beehives one still sees occasionally in the conservative Lesser Antilles. But it could hardly be a beehive. It was far too small.

My curiosity mildly aroused, I stepped into the alleyway and looked down at the odd little thing. Seen from where I stopped it rewarded scrutiny. For it was, although made in a somewhat bungling way, a reproduction of an African village hut, thatched, circular, conical. The thatching, I suspected, had formerly been most of the business-end of a small house-broom of tine twigs tied together around the end of a stick. The little house’s upright ‘logs’ were a heterogenous medley of little round sticks among which I recognized three dilapidated lead pencils and the broken-off handle of a tooth-brush. These details will serve to indicate its size and to justify my original conclusion that the thing was a rather cleverly made child’s toy. How such a thing had got into my yard unless over the wall, was an unimportant little mystery. The little hut, from the ground up to its thatched peak, stood about seven inches in height. Its diameter was, perhaps, eight or nine inches.