Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (81 page)

The impact of his prostration awakened him, shivering, in his great mahogany bed. The moonlight of the Caribbees poured through the opened jalousies of the airy bedroom high on the hillsides of Charlotte Amalia: and through the open windows came eerily – it was three o’clock in the morning – the very ghost of a little lilting refrain in the cracked voice of some aged man:

Him go back – to Trebizond.

Mr Palgrave groaned, rolled over in bed so that his better ear was undermost, sought to woo sleep again.

But now it was impossible to sleep. That tune – that devilish, that damnable tune – was running through his head again, tumultuously, to the small-drum throbbing of his heart. He groaned and tossed impatiently, miserably. Would morning never come?

In a gray dawn Mr Palgrave rose from an unrefreshing bed, tubbed himself half-heartedly. His face, as he looked at it in his shaving-mirror, wielding his Wednesday Wade & Butcher, seemed gray and drawn; there was no color in his usually choleric cheeks. The servants, at this hour, would not have arrived. There would be no morning tea ready.

At a little before seven, fully dressed, Mr Palgrave descended the staircase to his office below. He sat down at his orderly desk, listening to the shuffle of early-morning bare feet outside there on the earthen hillside roadway before his fine house; to the clipped, grave snatches of the Creole speech of the Blacks; to the occasional guffaws of the Negroes about their early-morning occasions; gravely erect; carrying trays, fruits, great tins of cistern-water, atop kerchiefed heads.

Mechanically he reached for his writing-materials, dipped a pen in an inkwell, commenced to write. He wrote on and on, composing carefully, the edge of his mind engaged in listening for the song out there on the roadway. He discovered that he was tapping out its cadence with his foot on the scrubbed pitch-pine flooring underneath his desk: oóm – bom, bom; oóm – bom, bom; oóm – bom, bom; oóm – bom, bom!

He finished his letter, signed it meticulously, blotted it, folded it twice, then heard the latch of the remote kitchen door snap. He rose, walked into the dining-room, and spoke through the inner kitchen door to Melissa his cook who had just arrived.

‘Make me some tea at once, if you please.’

‘Yes, sar.’ It was the dutiful, monotonous, unhurried voice of old Black Melissa as she motivated herself ponderously in the direction of the charcoal barrel in the kitchen’s corner.

Mr Palgrave reflectively mounted the stairs to his bed-room. He was putting a keen edge on his Wednesday razor – he used a set of seven – before it dawned upon him that he had already shaved! He returned the razor to its case. What could be the matter with him? He looked musingly into his shaving-mirror, passed a well-kept hand reflectively over the smooth cheeks into which the exercise of moving about and up and down the stairs had driven a little of his accustomed high color. He shook his head at his reflection in the glass, walked out into the upper hallway, redescended the stairs, once more entered his office.

What was this?

He frowned, stared, picked up from the desk the letter he had finished ten minutes before, examined it carefully. It was, unquestionably, in his own handwriting. The ink was barely dry. He laid it back in its place on the desk and began to pace the room, slowly, listening to Melissa’s slow movings-about in the kitchen, to the arrival of other servants. He could hear their clipped greetings to the old cook.

Wondering at himself, at this strange mental world where he found himself, he seated himself firmly, judicially, in his ample desk chair, picked up the letter, read it through again with an ever-increasing wonderment. He laid it down, his thoughts turning, strangely to Trebizond.

And Mr Palgrave could not, for the life of him, recall writing this letter.

He was still sitting there, staring blankly at nothing, his brows drawn together in a deep frown, when Claude came in to announce tea prepared in the dining-room. ‘Tea’, in St Thomas, Continental fashion, is the name of the morning meal. ‘Breakfast’ comes at one o’clock. Mr Palgrave’s cook had prepared amply that morning, but not bacon and eggs, nor even Scotch marmalade, availed to arouse him from his strange preoccupation.

After ‘tea’ he sat again at his desk alone until ten o’clock, when his privacy was invaded by two sailors from a British vessel in the harbor, with consular business to transact. He gave these men his careful attention; later, his advice. He walked out with them an hour later, turned up the hill and strolled about the steep hillside streets for an hour.

It was nearly high noon when he returned. He passed the office, going upstairs to refresh his appearance after his walk. It was blistering hot outdoors under the May noon sunlight drenching the dusty roadways.

When he went into his office half an hour later he saw the letter once more. It was enclosed now, in an official envelope, addressed, too, in his own unmistakable hand-writing, duly stamped for posting. Again, he had no slightest recollection of having done any of these things. He picked up the letter intending now to tear it across and then across again and fling the bits of paper into the waste-basket. Instead he sat with it in his hands, curiously placid, in an apathetic state in which he seemed not even to think. He ended by placing it in his coat pocket and was immediately afterward summoned to the one o’clock ‘breakfast’ in the dining-room.

When he awakened from his
siesta
that afternoon it was near four o’clock. He remembered the letter at once. He rose, and before his afternoon bath examined the coat pocket. The letter was not in the pocket. He decided to look for it on the desk later.

In half an hour, fresh and cool now after his bath, he descended the stairway and went straight into his office. The letter was on his mind, and, frowning slightly, he stepped toward the immaculately neat desk. He drew down his lip under his teeth in a puzzled expression. The letter was not on the desk.

The arrival of callers summoned him into the drawing-room. He did not give any thought to the letter again until dinner-time and then he was at the top of Government Hill at one of the British houses and could only postpone his desire to find and destroy it.

The letter failed to turn up, and the next day came and passed, and the next after it, and the days stretched into weeks. He had almost forgotten the letter. It cropped up mentally now and then as a vague, half-remembered annoyance. Things were going better these days. The song and its varied accompaniments of drum-tapping, whistling, humming of the nearly soundless tune, the encompassing annoyance it had caused him – all these things seemed to have dropped out of the hearing, and consequently out of the mind of the consul-general. He felt, as he half realized, somewhat more at home now in Charlotte Amalia. Everybody, it appeared, was perfectly courteous to him. The atmosphere of vague hostility which had vaguely adumbrated his surroundings was gone, utterly dissipated. The charm of the town had begun to appeal to this sophisticated traveler of the earth’s surfaces.

Then one morning among the letters which the Royal Mail steamer
Hyperion
had brought into the harbor the night before he discerned an official communication from his superiors in London.

He opened it before any of his other letters, as was natural.

The Under-Secretary had written granting his urgent request to be sent back to Trebizond. He was requested to take immediate passage to any convenient Mediterranean port and to proceed thence direct to the Armenian capital. It was, at the moment, agreeable to the consular service that he should be there. Suggestions followed in the letter’s text, designating various policies to be pursued.

He finished the many sheets of thin onion-skin paper, folded the letter and laid it on the desk, and sat, staring dully at his inkwell. He did not want to go back to Trebizond. He wanted to remain here. But – he had no choice in the matter. He cudgeled his brains warily. He recalled his singular apathy at the time when his letter – written, it seemed, as though subconsciously – had disappeared. He had not
wanted
to write that letter. He recalled that there had been confusion in his mind at the time – he could not, he recalled, remember the actual writing, nor sending it after it was written. There was something very strange here, something – unusual! Indubitably he had applied for transfer to Trebizond. To Trebizond he was ordered to go!

Charlotte Amalia, that coy Latin-brunette of a town with her
coquetteries
and her too-garish coloring, and her delicate beauties – Charlotte Amalia had schemed for his departure, forced his hand, driven him out. He sat there, at his desk, thinking, ruefully, of many things. Then his pride came to his rescue. He remembered the slights which had been put upon him, those intangible slights – the almost formless little tune with its absurd, gibberish words; the tapping of pans; the rattle and boom of the hill drums, those detestable night drums on which these stupid-looking, subtle blackamoors were always and forever, and compellingly, tapping, tapping, tapping.

And before very long Mr Palgrave, who did not believe in magic and who pooh-poohed anything labeled ‘eery’ or ‘occult’ as absurd; who believed only in unmistakable matters like sound beef and County Families and exercise and the integrity of the British Empire and the invariable inferiority of foreigners – Mr Palgrave came to see that in some fashion not accounted for in his philosophy Charlotte Amalia had played him a very scurvy trick – somehow.

Bestirring himself he began to examine the inventory which he kept of his household gear; many belongings without which no British gentleman could be expected to exist. He indited to the harbor-master a cold, polite note, requesting notice of the arrival of vessels clearing for Mediterranean ports or ports on the Black Sea – Odessa for choice – and he began to formulate, in his small, precise hand-writing, the list of duty-calls which must be made before his departure. In the pauses between these labors he wrote various polite, stiff notes, and in the very midst of such activities Claude summoned him to midday breakfast.

Leading the way to the dining-room after this announcement, Claude paused at the office doorway, turned a deprecating face to his employer.

‘Yes?’ said Mr Palgrave, perceiving that Claude wished to address him.

‘Yo’ is leave us, sar,’ said Claude, with courteous absence of any inflection or emphasis on his words which would indicate that he was asking a question.

‘Yes – I am leaving very shortly,’ replied Mr Palgrave unemotionally. He added nothing to this statement. He was a stiff master to his servants, just but distant. Servants had their place and must be kept in it, according to Mr Palgrave’s scheme of life.

That night, his sleep being rather fitful, Mr Palgrave noted that the drums were reiterating some message, insistently, up in the hills.

Neither Claude, who as coachman-butler had the closest contact with his employer of any of the house servants, nor, indeed, old Melissa nor any of the others, made any further remark to their employer concerning his departure. This took place three days later, on a Netherlands vessel clearing for Genoa; and Mr Palgrave was probably the very last person in St Thomas who would have asked any personal question of a servant.

Yet he wondered, when it occurred to him – and that was often – just how Claude had known he was leaving.

The Black Beast

and other Voodoo Tales

The Black Beast

Diagonally across the Sunday Market in Christiansted, on the island of Santa Cruz, from the house known as Old Moore’s, which I occupied one season – that is to say, along the southern side of the ancient marketplace of the old city, built upon the abandoned site of the yet older French town of Bassin – there stands, in faded, austere grandeur, another and much larger old house known as Gannett’s. For close to half a century Gannett House stood vacant and idle, its solid masonry front along the marketplace presenting a forlorn and aloof appearance, with its rows of closely shuttered windows, its stones darkened and discolored, its whole appearance stern and forbidding.

During that fifty years or so in which it had stood shut up and frowning blankly at the mass of humanity which passed its massive bulk and its forbidding closed doors, there had been made, by various persons, efforts enough to have it opened. Such a house, one of the largest private dwellings in the West Indies, and one of the handsomest, closed up like this, and out of use, as it transpired upon serious inquiry, merely because such was the will of its arbitrary and rather mysterious absentee proprietor whom the island had not seen for a middle-aged man’s lifetime, could hardly fail to appeal to prospective renters.

I know, because he has told me so, that the Rev. Fr Richardson, of the English Church, tried to engage it as a convent for his sisters in 1926. I tried to get a season’s lease on it myself, in the year when, failing to do so, I took Old Moore’s instead – a house of strange shadows and generous rooms and enormous, high doorways through which, times innumerable, Old Moore himself, bearing, if report were believable, a strange burden of mental apprehension, had slunk in bygone years, in shuddering, dreadful anticipation . . .

Inquiry at the Government offices had elicited the fact that old Lawyer Malling, a survival of the Danish reégime, who lived in Christiansted and was invaluable to our Government officials when it came to disentangling antique Danish records, was in charge of Gannett’s. Herr Malling, interviewed in turn, was courteous but firm. The house could not be rented under any considerations; such were his instructions – permanent instructions, filed among his records. No, it was impossible, out of the question. I recalled some dim hints I had received of an old scandal.