Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (64 page)

‘It is a terrible idea,’ said I, slowly, and after an interval. ‘But, it seems to be the only way to explain, er – the facts! Now tell me, if you please, what is that “outstanding circumstance” you mentioned which corroborates this, er – theory of yours.’

‘It is the Thing’s
motive
, Canevin,’ said Dr Pelletier, very gravely, ‘allowing, of course, that we are right – that I am right – in assuming for lack of a better hypothesis that what I cut away from Hellman had life in it; that it “escaped”; that it is now – well, trying to get at a thing like that, under the circumstances, I’d be inclined to say, we touch bottom!’

‘Good God – the
motive
!’ I almost whispered. ‘Why, it’s horrible, Pelletier; it’s positively uncanny. The Thing becomes, quite definitely, a horror. The motive – in that Thing! You’re right, old man. Psychologically speaking, it “touches bottom”, as you say.’

‘And humanly speaking,’ added Dr Pelletier, in a very quiet voice.

Stephen came out and announced breakfast. It was one o’clock. We went in and ate rather silently. As Stephen was serving the dessert Dr Pelletier spoke to him. ‘Was Hellman’s father a white man, do you happen to know, Stephen?’

‘De man was an engineer on board an English trading vessel, sar.’

‘What about his mother?’ probed the doctor.

‘Her a resident of Antigua, sar,’ replied Stephen promptly, ‘and is yet alive. I am acquainted with her. Hellman ahlways send her some portion of his earnings, sar, very regularly. At de time Hellman born, her a ’ooman which do washing for ships’ crews, an’ make an excellent living. Nowadays, de poor soul liddle more than a piteous invalid, sar. Her ahlways a small liddle ’ooman, not too strong.’

‘I take it she is a dark woman?’ remarked the doctor, smiling at Stephen.

Stephen, who is a medium brown young man, a ‘Zambo’, as they say in the English islands like St Kitts and Montserrat and Antigua, grinned broadly at this, displaying a set of magnificent, glistening teeth.

‘Sar,’ he replied, ‘Hellman’s mother de precisely identical hue of dis fella,’ and Stephen touched with his index finger the neat black bow-tie which set off the snowy whiteness of his immaculate drill house-man’s jacket. Pelletier and I exchanged glances as we smiled at Stephen’s little joke.

On the gallery immediately after lunch, over coffee, we came back to that bizarre topic which Dr Pelletier had called the ‘motive’. Considered quite apart from the weird aspect of attributing a motive to a quasi-human creature of the size of a rat, the matter was clear enough. The Thing had relentlessly attacked Brutus Hellman again and again, with an implacable fiendishness; its brutal, single-minded efforts being limited in their disastrous effects only by its diminutive size and relative dsficiency of strength. Even so, it had succeeded in driving a full-grown man, its victim, into a condition not very far removed from imbecility.

What obscure processes had gone on piling up cumulatively to a fixed purpose of pure destruction in that primitive, degenerated organ that served the Thing for a brain! What dreadful weeks and months and years of semi-conscious brooding, of existence endured parasitically as an appendage upon the instinctively loathed body of the normal brother! What savage hatred had burned itself into that minute, distorted personality! What incalculable instincts, deep buried in the backgrounds of the black heredity through the mother, had come into play – as evidenced by the Thing’s construction of the typical African hut as its habitation – once it had come, after the separation, into active consciousness, the new-born, freshly realized freedom to exercise and release all that acrid, seething hatred upon him who had usurped its powers of self-expression, its very life itself! What manifold thwarted instincts had, by the processes of substitution, crystallized themselves into one overwhelming, driving desire – the consuming instinct for revenge!

I shuddered as all this clarified itself in my mind, as I formed, vaguely, some kind of mental image of that personality. Dr Pelletier was speaking again. I forced my engrossed mind to listen to him. He seemed very grave and determined, I noticed . . .

‘We must put an end to all this, Canevin,’ he was saying. ‘Yes, we must put an end to it.’

Ever since that first Sunday evening when the attacks began, as I look back over that hectic period, it seems to me that I had had in mind primarily the idea of capture and destruction of what had crystallized in my mind as ‘The Thing’. Now a new and totally bizarre idea came in to cause some mental conflict with the destruction element in that vague plan. This was the almost inescapable conviction that the Thing had been originally – whatever it might be properly named now – a human being. As such, knowing well, as I did, the habits of the blacks of our Lesser Antilles, it had, unquestionably, been received into the Church by the initial process of baptism. That indescribable creature which had been an appendage on Brutus Hellman’s body, had been,
was now
, according to the teaching of the Church, a Christian. The idea popped into my mind along with various other sidelights on the situation, stimulated into being by the discussion with Dr Pelletier which I have just recorded.

The idea itself was distressing enough, to one who, like myself, has always kept up the teachings of my own childhood, who has never found it necessary, in these days of mental unrest, to doubt, still less to abandon, his religion. One of the concomitants of this idea was that the destruction of the Thing after its problematical capture, would be an awkward affair upon my conscience, for, however far departed the Thing had got from its original status as ‘A child of God – an Inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven’, it must retain, in some obscure fashion, its human, indeed its Christian, standing. There are those, doubtless, who might well regard this scruple of mine as quite utterly ridiculous, who would lay all the stress on the plain necessity of stopping the Thing’s destructive malignancy without reference to any such apparently far-fetched and artificial considerations. Nevertheless this aspect of our immediate problem, Pelletier’s gravely enunciated dictum: ‘We must put an end to all this’, weighed heavily on my burdened mind. It must be remembered that I had put in a dreadful week over the affair.

I mention this ‘scruple’ of mine because it throws up into relief, in a sense, those events which followed very shortly after Dr Pelletier had summed up what necessarily lay before us, in that phrase of his.

We sat on the gallery and cogitated ways and means, and it was in the midst of this discussion that the scruple alluded to occurred to me. I did not mention it to Pelletier. I mentally conceded, of course, the necessity of capture. The subsequent disposal of the Thing could wait on that.

We had pretty well decided, on the evidence, that the Thing had been lying low during the day in the little hut-like arrangement which it appeared to have built for itself. Its attacks so far had occurred only at night. If we were correct, the capture would be a comparatively simple affair. There was, as part of the equipment in my house, a small bait net, of the circular closing-in-from-the-bottom kind, used occasionally when I took guests on a deep-sea fishing excursion out to Congo or Levango Bays. This I unearthed, and looked over. It was intact, recently mended, without any holes in the tightly meshed netting designed to capture and retain small fish to be used later as live bait.

Armed with this, our simple plan readily in mind, we proceeded together to the alleyway about half past two that afternoon, or, to be more precise, we were just at that moment starting down the gallery steps leading into my yard, when our ears were assailed by a succession of piercing, childish screams from the vicinity of the house’s rear.

I rushed down the steps, four at a time, the more unwieldy Pelletier following me as closely as his propulsive apparatus would allow. I was in time to see, when I reached the corner of the house, nearly everything that was happening, almost from its beginning. It was a scene which, reproduced in a drawing accurately limned, would appear wholly comic. Little Aesculapius, the washer’s small, black child, his eyes popping nearly from his head, his diminutive black legs twinkling under his single flying garment, his voice uttering blood-curdling yowls of pure terror, raced diagonally across the yard in the direction of his mother’s wash-tub near the kitchen door, the very embodiment of crude, ungovernable fright, a veritable caricature, a figure of fun.

And behind him, coming on implacably, for all the world like a misshapen black frog, bounded the Thing, in hot pursuit, Its red tongue lolling out of Its gash of a mouth, Its diminutive blubbery lips drawn back in a wide snarl through which a murderous row of teeth flashed viciously in the pouring afternoon sunlight. Little Aesculapius was making good the promise of his relatively long, thin legs, fright driving him. He outdistanced the Thing hopelessly, yet It forged ahead in a rolling, leaping series of bounds, using hands and arms, frog-like, as well as Its strange, withered, yet strangely powerful bandied legs.

The sight, grotesque as it would have been to anyone unfamiliar with the Thing’s history and identity, positively sickened me. My impulse was to cover my face with my hands, in the realization of its underlying horror. I could feel a faint nausea creeping over me, beginning to dim my senses. My washer-woman’s screams had added to the confusion within a second or two after those of the child had begun, and now, as I hesitated in my course toward the scene of confusion, those of the cook and scullery-maid were added to the cacophonous din in my back yard. Little Aesculapius, his garment stiff against the breeze of his own progress, disappeared around the rear-most corner of the house to comparative safety through the open kitchen door. He had, as I learned some time afterwards, been playing about the yard and had happened upon the little hut in its obscure and seldom-visited alleyway. He had stopped, and picked it up. ‘The Thing’ – the child used that precise term to describe It – lay, curled up, asleep within. It had leaped to Its splayed feet with a snarl of rage, and gone straight for the little Negro’s foot.

Thereafter the primitive instinct for self-preservation and Aesculapius’ excellent footwork had solved his problem. He reached the kitchen door, around the corner and out of our sight, plunged within, and took immediate refuge atop the shelf of a kitchen cabinet well out of reach of that malignant, unheard-of demon like a big black frog which was pursuing him and which, doubtless, would haunt his dreams for the rest of his existence. So much for little Aesculapius, who thus happily passes out of the affair.

My halting was, of course, only momentary. I paused, as I have mentioned, but for so brief a period as not to allow Dr Pelletier to catch up with me. I ran, then, with the net open in my hands, diagonally across the straight course being pursued by the Thing. My mind was made up to intercept it, entangle it in the meshes. This should not be difficult considering its smallness and the comparative shortness of its arms and legs; and, having rendered it helpless, to face the ultimate problem of its later disposal.

But this plan of mine was abruptly interfered with. Precisely as the flying body of the pursued pick’ny disappeared around the corner of the house, my cook’s cat, a ratter with a neighborhood reputation and now, although for the moment I failed to realize it, quite clearly an instrument of that Providence responsible for my ‘scruple’, came upon the scene with violence, precision, and that uncanny accuracy which actuates the feline in all its physical manifestations.

This avatar, which, according to a long-established custom, had been sunning itself demurely on the edge of the rain-water piping which ran along the low eaves of the three yard cabins, aroused by the discordant yells of the child and the three women in four distinct keys, had arisen, taken a brief, preliminary stretch, and condescended to turn its head towards the scene below  . . .

The momentum of the cat’s leap arrested instantaneously the Thing’s course of pursuit, bore it, sprawled out and flattened, to the ground, and twenty sharp powerful retractile claws sank simultaneously into the prone little body.

The Thing never moved again. A more merciful snuffing out would be difficult to imagine.

It was a matter of no difficulty to drive Junius, the cat, away from his kill. I am on terms of pleasant intimacy with Junius. He allowed me to take the now limp and flaccid little body away from him quite without protest, and sat down where he was, licking his paws and readjusting his rumpled fur.

And thus, unexpectedly, without intervention on our part, Pelletier and I saw brought to its sudden end, the tragical dénouement of what seems to me to be one of the most outlandish and most distressing affairs which could ever have been evolved out of the mad mentality of Satan, who dwells in his own place to distress the children of men.

And that night, under a flagstone in the alleyway, quite near where the Thing’s strange habitation had been taken up, I buried the mangled leathery little body of that unspeakable grotesque homunculus which had once been the twin brother of my house-man, Brutus Hellman. In consideration of my own scruple which I have mentioned, and because, in all probability, this handful of strange material which I lowered gently into its last resting-place had once been a Christian, I repeated the Prayer of Committal from the Book of Common Prayer. It may have been – doubtless was, in one sense – a grotesque act on my part. But I cherish the conviction that I did what was right.

Black Tancrède

It is true that Black Tancrède did not curse Hans De Groot as his mangled body collapsed on the rack, and that he did curse Gardelin. But, it must be remembered, Governor Gardelin went home, to Denmark, and so escaped – whatever it was that happened to Achilles Mendoza and Julius Mohrs; and Black Tancrède, who always kept his word, they said, had cursed three!