Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (63 page)

The incredible possible implication of this statement of the disappearance of the ‘growth’ removed from Hellman’s body and the doctor’s question, stunned me for an instant. Could he possibly mean to imply – ? I stared at him, blankly, for an instant.

‘Yes,’ said I, ‘it is still at large, and poor Hellman is barricaded in his cabin. As I have told you, I have dressed those bites and gashes myself. He absolutely refuses to go to the hospital again. He lies there, muttering to himself, ash-gray with fear.’

‘Hm,’ vouchsafed Dr Pelletier. ‘How big would you say the Thing is, Canevin, judging from your glimpse of it and the marks it leaves?’

‘About the size, say, of a rat,’ I answered, ‘and black. We had that one sight of it, that first night. Carswell and I both saw it scuttering out of Hellman’s cabin right under our feet when this horrible business first started.’

Dr Pelletier nodded, slowly. Then he made another remark, apparently irrelevant.

‘I had breakfast this morning on board the
Grebe
. Could you give me lunch?’ He looked at his watch.

‘Of course,’ I returned. ‘Are you thinking of – ’

‘Let’s get going,’ said Dr Pelletier, heaving himself to his feet.

We started at once, the doctor calling out to his servants that he would not be back for one o’clock ‘breakfast’, and Stephen Penn who had driven us up the hill drove us down again. Arrived at my house we proceeded straight to Hellman’s cabin. Dr Pelletier talked soothingly to the poor fellow while examining those ugly wounds. On several he placed fresh dressings from his professional black bag. When he had finished he drew me outside.

‘You did well, Canevin,’ he remarked, reflectively, ‘in not calling in anybody, dressing those wounds yourself! What people don’t know, er – won’t hurt ’em!’

He paused after a few steps away from the cabin.

‘Show me,’ he commanded, ‘which way the Thing ran, that first night.’

I indicated the direction, and we walked along the line of it, Pelletier forging ahead, his black bag in his big hand. We reached the corner of the cabin in a few steps, and Pelletier glanced up the alleyway between the cabin’s side and the high yard-wall. The little toy house, looking somewhat dilapidated now, still stood where it had been, since I first discovered it. Pelletier did not enter the alleyway. He looked in at the queer little miniature hut.

‘Hm,’ he remarked, his forehead puckered into a thick frowning wrinkle. Then, turning abruptly to me: ‘I suppose it must have occurred to you that the Thing lived in that,’ said he, challengingly.

‘Yes – naturally; after it went for my fingers – whatever
that
creature may have been. Three or four times I’ve gone in there with a flashlight after one of the attacks on Brutus Hellman; picked it up, even, and looked inside – ’

‘And the Thing is never there,’ finished Dr Pelletier, nodding sagaciously.

‘Never,’ I corroborated.

‘Come on up to the gallery,’ said the doctor, ‘and I’ll tell you what I think.’

We proceeded to the gallery at once and Dr Pelletier, laying down his black bag, caused a lounge-chair to groan and creak beneath his recumbent weight while I went into the house to command the usual West Indian preliminary to a meal.

A few minutes later Dr Pelletier told me what he thought, according to his promise. His opening remark was in the form of a question; about the very last question anyone in his senses would have regarded as pertinent to the subject in hand.

‘Do you know anything about twins, Canevin?’ he inquired.

‘Twins?’ said I. ‘Twins!’ I was greatly puzzled. I had not been expecting any remarks about twins.

‘Well,’ said I, as Dr Pelletier stared at me gravely, ‘only what everybody knows about them, I imagine. What about them?’

‘There are two types of twins, Canevin – and I don’t mean the difference arising out of being separate or attached-at-birth, the “Siamese” or ordinary types. I mean something far more basic than that accidental division into categories; more fundamental – deeper than that kind of distinction. The two kinds of twins I have reference to are called in biological terminology “monozygotic” and “dizygotic”, respectively; those which originate, that is, from one cell, or from two.’

‘The distinction,’ I threw in, ‘which Johannes Lange makes in his study of criminal determinism, his book
Crime and Destiny
. The one-cell-originated twins, he contends, have identical motives and personalities. If one is a thief, the other has to be! He sets out to prove – and that pompous ass, Haldane, who wrote the foreword, believes it, too – that there is no freewill; that man’s moral course is predetermined, inescapable – a kind of scientific Calvinism.’

‘Precisely, just that,’ said Dr Pelletier. ‘Anyhow, you understand that distinction.’ I looked at him, still somewhat puzzled.

‘Yes,’ said I, ‘but still, I don’t see its application to this nasty business of Brutus Hellman.’

‘I was leading up to telling you,’ said Dr Pelletier, in his matter-of-fact, forthright fashion of speech; ‘to telling you, Canevin, that the Thing is undoubtedly, the parasitic “Siamese-twin” that I cut away from Brutus Hellman last Thursday morning, and which disappeared out of the operating-room. Also, from the evidence. I’d be inclined to think it is of the “dizygotic” type. That would not occur, in the case of “attached” twins, more than once in ten million times!’

He paused at this and looked at me. For my part, after that amazing, that utterly incredible statement, so calmly made, so dispassionately uttered, I could do nothing but sit limply in my chair and gaze woodenly at my guest. I was so astounded that I was incapable of uttering a word. But I did not have to say anything. Dr Pelletier was speaking again, developing his thesis.

‘Put together the known facts, Canevin. It is the scientific method, the only satisfactory method, when you are confronted with a situation like this one. You can do so quite easily, almost at random, here. To begin with, you never found the Thing in that little thatched hut after one of its attacks – did you?’

‘No,’ I managed to murmur, out of a strangely dry mouth. Pelletier’s theory held me stultified by its unexpectedness, its utter, weird strangeness. The name, ‘Cassius’, smote my brain. That identical blood –

‘If the Thing had been, say a rat,’ he continued, ‘as you supposed when it went for your fingers, it would have gone straight from its attacks on Brutus Hellman to its diggings – the refuge-instinct; “holing-up”. But it didn’t. You investigated several times and it wasn’t inside the little house, although it ran toward it, as you believed, after seeing it start that way the first night; although the creature that went for your hand was there, inside,
before it suspected pursuit
. You see? That gives us a lead, a clue. The Thing possesses a much higher level of intelligence than that of a mere rodent. Do you grasp that significant point, Canevin? The Thing, anticipating pursuit, avoided capture by instinctively outguessing the pursuer. It went toward its diggings but deferred entrance until the pursuer had investigated and gone away. Do you get it?’

I nodded, not desiring to interrupt. I was following Pelletier’s thesis eagerly now. He resumed: ‘Next – consider those wounds, those bites, on Brutus Hellman. They were never made by any small, ground-dwelling animal, a rodent, like a rat or a mongoose. No; those teeth-marks are those of – well, say, a marmoset or any very small monkey; or, Canevin, of
an unbelievably small human being!
’

Pelletier and I sat and looked at each other. I think that, after an appreciable interval, I was able to nod my head in his direction. Pelletier continued. ‘The next point we come to – before going on to something a great deal deeper, Canevin – is the
color
of the Thing. You saw it. It was only a momentary glimpse, as you say, but you secured enough of an impression to seem pretty positive on that question of its color. Didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said I, slowly. ‘It was as black as a derby hat, Pelletier.’

‘There you have one point definitely settled, then.’ The doctor was speaking with a judicial note in his voice, the scientist in full stride now. ‘The well-established ethnic rule, the biological certainty in cases of miscegenation between Caucasians or quasi-Caucasians and the Negro or negroid types is that the offspring is never darker than the darker of the two parents. The “black-baby” tradition, as a “throwback” being produced by mulatto or nearly Caucasian parents is a bugaboo, Canevin, sheer bosh! It doesn’t happen that way. It
cannot
happen. It is a biological impossibility, my dear man. Although widely believed, that idea falls into the same category as the ostrich burying its head in the sand and thinking it is concealed! It falls in with the Amazon myth! The “Amazons” were merely long-haired Scythians, those “women-warriors” of antiquity. Why, damn it, Canevin, it’s like believing in the Centaur to swallow a thing like that.’

The doctor had become quite excited over his expression of biological orthodoxy. He glared at me, or appeared to, and lighted a fresh cigarette. Then, considering for a moment, while he inhaled a few preliminary puffs, he resumed. ‘You see what that proves, don’t you, Canevin?’ he inquired, somewhat more calmly now.

‘It seems to show,’ I answered, ‘since Brutus is very “clear-colored”, as the Negroes would say, that one of his parents was a black; the other very considerably lighter, perhaps even a pure Caucasian.’

‘Right, so far,’ acquiesced the doctor. ‘And the other inference, in the case of twins – what?’

‘That the twins were “dizygotic”, even though attached,’ said I, slowly, as the conclusion came clear in my mind after Pelletier’s preparatory speech. ‘Otherwise, of course, if they were the other kind, the mono-cellular or “monozygotic”, they would have the same coloration, derived from either the dark or the light-skinned parent.’

‘Precisely,’ exclaimed Dr Pelletier. ‘Now – ’

‘You mentioned certain other facts,’ I interrupted, ‘ “more deep-seated”, I think you said. What – ’

‘I was just coming to those, Canevin. There are, actually, two such considerations which occur to me. First – why did the Thing degenerate, undoubtedly after birth, of course, if there were no pre-natal process of degeneration? They would have been nearly of a size, anyway, when born, I’d suppose. Why did “It” shrink up into a withered, apparently lifeless little homunculus, while its fellow twin, Brutus Hellman, attained to a normal manhood? There are some pretty deep matters involved in those queries, Canevin. It was comatose, shrunken, virtually dead while attached.’

‘Let’s see if we can’t make a guess at them,’ I threw in.

‘What would you say?’ countered Dr Pelletier.

I nodded, and sat silently for several minutes trying to put what was in my mind together in some coherent form so as to express it adequately. Then: ‘A couple of possibilities occur to me,’ I began. ‘One or both of them might account for the divergence. First, the failure of one or more of the ductless glands, very early in the Thing’s life after birth. It’s the pituitary gland, isn’t it, that regulates the physical growth of an infant – that makes him grow normally? If that fails before it has done its full work, about the end of the child’s second year, you get a midget. If, on the other hand, it keeps on too long – does not dry up as it should, and cease functioning, its normal task finished – the result is a giant; the child simply goes on growing, bigger and bigger! Am I right, so far? And, I suppose, the cutting process released it from its coma.’

‘Score one!’ said Dr Pelletier, wagging his head at me. ‘Go on – what else? There are many cases, of course, of bloodletting ending a coma.’

‘The second guess is that Brutus had the stronger constitution, and outstripped the other one. It doesn’t sound especially scientific, but that sort of thing does happen as I understand it. Beyond those two possible explanations I shouldn’t care to risk any more guesses.’

‘I think both those causes have been operative in this case,’ said Dr Pelletier, reflectively. ‘And, having performed that operation, you see, I think I might add a third, Canevin. It is purely conjectural. I’ll admit that frankly, but one outstanding circumstance supports it. I’ll come back to that shortly. In short, Canevin, I imagine – my instinct tells me – that almost from the beginning, quite unconsciously, of course, and in the automatic processes of outstripping his twin in physical growth,
Brutus absorbed the other’s share of nutriments
.

‘I can figure that out, in fact, from several possible angles. The early nursing, for instance! The mother – she was, undoubtedly, the black parent – proud of her “clear” child, would favor it, nurse it first. There is, besides, always some more or less obscure interplay, some balanced adjustment, between physically attached twins. In this case, God knows how, that invariable “balance” became disadjusted; the adjustment became unbalanced, if you prefer it that way. The mother, too, from whose side the dark twin probably derived its constitution, may very well have been a small, weakly woman. The fair-skinned other parent was probably robust, physically. But, whatever the underlying causes, we know that Brutus grew up to be normal and fully mature, and I know, from that operation, that the Thing I cut away from him was his twin brother, degenerated into an apparently lifeless homunculus, a mere appendage of Brutus, something which,
apparently, had quite lost nearly everything of its basic humanity
; even most of its appearance, Canevin – a Thing to be removed surgically, like a wen.’