Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (77 page)

I nodded. I did not wish to interrupt. I could see that this side-issue on a scientific by-path must have something to do with the story of Carswell.

‘Now,’ resumed Pelletier, ‘notice this fact, Canevin. Let me put it in the form of a question, like this: To what kind, or type, of
vodu
worshipper, does the “possession” by one of their deities occur – from your own knowledge of such things, what would you say?’

‘To the incomplete; the abnormal, to an
old
man, or woman,’ said I, slowly, reflecting, ‘or – to a child, or, perhaps, to an idiot. Idiots, ancient crones, backward children, “town-fools” and the like, all over Europe, are supposed to be in some mysterious way
en rapport
with deity – or with Satan! It is an established peasant belief. Even among the Mahometans, the moron or idiot is “the afflicted of God”. There is no other better-established belief along such lines of thought.’

‘Precisely!’ exclaimed Pelletier. ‘And Canevin, go back once more to Seabrook’s instance that we spoke about. What type of person was “possessed”?’

‘An old doddering man,’ said I, ‘one well gone in his dotage apparently.’

‘Right once more! Note now, two things. First, I will admit to you, Canevin, that that theory I have just been expounding never made much of a hit with me. It might be true, but – very few first-rate men in our profession thought much of it, and I followed that negative lead and didn’t think much of it, or, indeed, much about it. I put it down to the vaporings of the theorist who first thought it out and published it, and let it go at that. Now, Canevin,
I am convinced that it is true
! The second thing, then: When Carswell came into my office in the hospital over there in Port au Prince, the first thing I noticed about him – I had never seen him before, you see – was a peculiar, almost an indescribable, discrepancy. It was between his general appearance of weather-worn cleanliness, general fitness, his “smart” appearance in his clothes – all that, which fitted together about the clean-cut, open character of the fellow; and what I can only describe as a pursiness. He seemed in good condition, I mean to say, and yet – there was something, somehow,
flabby
somewhere in his makeup. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but – it was there, a suggestion of something that detracted from the impression he gave as being an upstanding fellow, a good-fellow-to-have-beside-you-in-a-pinch – that kind of person.

‘The second thing I noticed, it was just after he had taken a chair beside my desk, was his fingers, and thumbs. They were swollen, Canevin, looked sore, as though they had been wound with string. That was the first thing I thought of, being wound with string. He saw me looking at them, held them out to me abruptly, laid them side by side, his hands I mean, on my desk, and smiled at me.

‘ “I see you have noticed them, Doctor,” he remarked, almost jovially. “That makes it a little easier for me to tell you what I’m here for. It’s – well, you might put it down as a ‘Symptom’.”

‘I looked at his fingers and thumbs; every one of them was affected in the same way; and ended up with putting a magnifying glass over them.

‘They were all bruised and reddened, and here and there on several of them, the skin was abraded, broken,
circularly
– it was a most curious-looking set of digits. My new patient was addressing me again.

‘ “I’m not here to ask you riddles, Doctor,” he said, gravely, this time, “but – would you care to make a guess at what did that to those fingers and thumbs of mine?”

‘ “Well,” I came back at him, “without knowing what’s happened, it
looks
as if you’d been trying to wear about a hundred rings, all at one time, and most of them didn’t fit!”

‘Carswell nodded his head at me. “Score one for the medico,” said he, and laughed. “Even numerically you’re almost on the dot, sir. The precise number was one hundred and six!”

‘I confess, I stared at him then. But he wasn’t fooling. It was a cold, sober, serious fact that he was stating; only, he saw that it had a humorous side, and that intrigued him, as anything humorous always did, I found out after I got to know Carswell a lot better than I did then.’

‘You said you wouldn’t mind a few questions, Pelletier,’ I interjected.

‘Fire away,’ said Pelletier. ‘Do you see any light, so far?’

‘I was naturally figuring along with you, as you told about it all,’ said I. ‘Do I infer correctly that Carswell, having lived there – how long, four or five years or so – ?’

‘Seven, to be exact,’ put in Pelletier.

‘ – that Carswell, being pretty familiar with the native doings, had mixed into things, got the confidence of his Black neighbors in and around Léogane, become somewhat “adept”, had the run of the
houmforts
, so to speak – “
votre bougie, M’sieu
” – the fortune-telling at the festivals, and so forth, and – had been “visited” by one of the Black deities? That, apparently, if I’m any judge of tendencies, is what your account seems to be leading up to. Those bruised fingers – the one hundred and six rings – good heavens, man, is it really possible?’

‘Carswell told me all about that end of it, a little later – yes, that was, precisely, what happened – but that, surprising, incredible as it seems, is only the small end of it all. You just wait – ’

‘Go ahead,’ said I, ‘I am all ears, I assure you!’

‘Well, Carswell took his hands off the desk after I had looked at them through my magnifying glass, and then waved one of them at me in a kind of deprecating gesture.

‘ “I’ll go into all that, if you’re interested to hear about it, Doctor,” he assured me, “but that isn’t what I’m here about.” His face grew suddenly very grave. “Have you plenty of time?” he asked. “I don’t want to let my case interfere with anything.”

‘ “Fire ahead,” says I, and he leaned forward in his chair.

‘ “Doctor,” says he, “I don’t know whether or not you ever heard of me before. My name’s Carswell, and I live over Léogane way. I’m an American, like yourself, as you can probably see, and, even after seven years of it, out there, duck-hunting, mostly, with virtually no White-man’s doings for a pretty long time, I haven’t ‘gone native’ or anything of the sort. I wouldn’t want you to think I’m one of those wasters.” He looked up at me inquiringly for my estimate of him. He had been by himself a good deal; perhaps too much. I nodded at him. He looked me in the eye, squarely, and nodded back. “I guess we understand each other,” he said. Then he went on.

‘ “Seven years ago, it was, I came down here. I’ve lived over there even since. What few people know about me regard me as a kind of failure, I dare say. But – Doctor, there was a reason for that, a pretty definite reason. I won’t go into it beyond your end of it – the medical end, I mean. I came down because of this.”

‘He stood up then, and I saw what made that “discrepancy” I spoke about, that “flabbiness” which went so ill with the general cut of the man. He turned up the lower ends of his white drill jacket and put his hand a little to the left of the middle of his stomach. “Just notice this,” he said, and stepped toward me.

‘There, just over the left center of that area and extending up toward the spleen, on the left side, you know, there was a protuberance. Seen closely it was apparent that here was some sort of internal growth. It was that which had made him look flabby, stomachish.

‘ “This was diagnosed for me in New York,” Carswell explained, “a little more than seven years ago. They told me it was inoperable then. After seven years, probably, I dare say it’s worse, if anything. To put the thing in a nutshell, Doctor, I had to ‘let go’ then. I got out of a promising business, broke off my engagement, came here. I won’t expatiate on it all, but – it was pretty tough, Doctor, pretty tough. I’ve lasted all right, so far. It hasn’t troubled me – until just lately. That’s why I drove in this afternoon, to see you, to see if anything could be done.”

‘ “Has it been kicking up lately?” I asked him.

‘ “Yes,” said Carswell, simply. “They said it would kill me, probably within a year or so, as it grew. It hasn’t grown – much. I’ve lasted a little more than seven years, so far.”

‘ “Come into the operating-room,” I invited him, “and take your clothes off, and let’s get a good look at it.”

‘ “Anything you say,” returned Carswell, and followed me back into the operating-room then and there.

‘I had a good look at Carswell, first, superficially. That preliminary examination revealed a growth quite typical, the self-contained, not the “fibrous” type, in the location I’ve already described, and about the size of an average man’s head. It lay imbedded, fairly deep. It was what we call “encapsulated”. That, of course, is what had kept Carswell alive.

‘Then we put the X-rays on it, fore-and-aft, and sidewise. One of those things doesn’t always respond very well to skiagraphic examination, to the X-ray, that is, but this one showed clearly enough. Inside it appeared a kind of dark, triangular mass, with the small end at the top. When Doctor Smithson and I had looked him over thoroughly, I asked Carswell whether or not he wanted to stay with us, to come into the hospital as a patient, for treatment.

‘ “I’m quite in your hands, Doctor,” he told me. “I’ll stay, or do whatever you want me to. But, first,” and for the first time he looked a trifle embarrassed, “I think I’d better tell you the story that goes with my coming here! However, speaking plainly, do you think I have a chance?”

‘ “Well,” said I, “speaking plainly, yes, there is a chance, maybe a ‘fifty-fifty’ chance, maybe a little less. On the one hand, this thing has been let alone for seven years since original diagnosis. It’s probably less operable than it was when you were in New York. On the other hand, we know a lot more, not about these things, Mr Carswell, but about surgical technique, than they did seven years ago. On the whole, I’d advise you to stay and get ready for an operation, and, say about ‘forty-sixty’ you’ll go back to Léogane, or back to New York if you feel like it, several pounds lighter in weight and a new man. If it takes you, on the table, well, you’ve had a lot more time out there gunning for ducks in Léogane than those New York fellows allowed you.”

‘ “I’m with you,” said Carswell, and we assigned him a room, took his “history”, and began to get him ready for his operation.

‘We did the operation two days later, at ten-thirty in the morning, and in the meantime Carswell told me his “story” about it.

‘It seems that he had made quite a place for himself, there in Léogane, among the Negroes and the ducks. In seven years a man like Carswell, with his mental and dispositional equipment, can go quite a long way, anywhere. He had managed to make quite a good thing out of his duck-drying industry, employed five or six “hands” in his little wooden “factory”, rebuilt a rather good house he had secured there for a song right after he had arrived, collected local antiques to add to the equipment he had brought along with him, made himself a real home of a peculiar, bachelor kind, and, above all, got in solid with the Black People all around him. Almost incidentally I gathered from him – he had no gift of narrative, and I had to question him a great deal – he had got onto, and into, the know in the
vodu
thing. There wasn’t, as far as I could get it, any aspect of it all that he hadn’t been in on, except, that is, “
la chèvre sans cornes
” – the goat without horns, you know – the human sacrifice on great occasions. In fact, he strenuously denied that the
voduists
resorted to that; said it was a canard against them; that they never, really, did such things, never had, unless back in prehistoric times, in Guinea – Africa.

‘But, there wasn’t anything about it all that he hadn’t at his very finger ends, and at first-hand, too. The man was a walking encyclopedia of the native beliefs, customs, and practises. He knew, too, every turn and twist of their speech. He hadn’t, as he had said at first, “gone native” in the slightest degree, and yet, without lowering his White Man’s dignity by a trifle, he had got it all.

‘That brings us to the specific happening, the “story” which, he had said, went along with his reason for coming in to the hospital in Port au Prince, to us.

‘It appears that his sarcoma had never, practically, troubled him. Beyond noting a very gradual increase in its size from year to year, he said, he “wouldn’t know he had one”. In other words, characteristically, it never gave him any pain or direct annoyance beyond the sense of the wretched thing being there, and increasing on him, and always drawing him closer to that end of life which the New York doctors had warned him about.

‘Then, it had happened only three days before he came to the hospital, he had gone suddenly unconscious one afternoon, as he was walking down his shell path to his gateway. The last thing he remembered then was being “about four steps from the gate”. When he woke up, it was dark. He was seated in a big chair on his own front gallery, and the first thing he noticed was that his fingers and thumbs were sore and ached very painfully. The next thing was that there were flares burning all along the edge of the gallery, and down in the front yard, and along the road outside the paling fence that divides his property from the road, and in the light of these flares, there swarmed literally hundreds of Negroes, gathered about him and mostly on their knees; lined along the gallery and on the grounds below it; prostrating themselves, chanting, putting earth and sand on their heads; and, when he leaned back in his chair, something hurt the back of his neck, and he found that he was being nearly choked with the necklaces, strings of beads, gold and silver coin-strings, and other kinds, that had been draped over his head. His fingers, and the thumbs as well, were covered with gold and silver rings, many of them jammed on so as to stop the circulation.