Horror in Paradise (22 page)

But when I was transferred to the central Gilberts in 1917, I found a house that gave me quite different sensations. That was the district officer’s transit quarters on Tabiteuea, built by George Murdoch, my predecessor in the central islands. It used to stand in a rustling grove of coconut palms by the lagoon beach, a hundred yards or so north of Utiroa village and about the same distance south of the big, whitewashed island prison. It was an airily built, two-roomed shelter of local thatch and timber, a heavenly cool refuge from the ferocious glare of sea and sand beyond the grove. I found it a cheerful place, too, all through the daylight hours, with the talkative Utiroa villagers padding back and forth along the road that passed it to landward. It changed, though, when darkness fell and the village slept. An uneasiness came upon it then. Or perhaps it was I who changed—I don’t know—only I couldn’t pass a night there without being haunted by a thought that something was on the edge of happening: something so imminently near, I always felt, that if nothing but one gossamer-fold of the darkness could be stripped aside, I should see what it was. The idea would come back and back at me as I sat reading or writing. Once or twice, it pulled me up out of sleep, wideawake on the instant, thinking, “Here it is!” But if it was, it never showed itself.

Had this been all, I should never have had the place pulled down. Not even the horrifying odor that visited me there one night would have sufficed of itself to drive me to that extreme. You don’t destroy a house built by your predecessor—especially an old stager like George Murdoch—for the sole reason that it was once, for about thirty seconds in your experience, invaded by a smell you couldn’t explain. It was what George himself said to me afterwards, when I told him (among other things) how my dog had behaved, that set me looking for another site.

The dog was my terrier, Smith. He was lying in the draft of the roadside doorway one night, while I sat reading. I wasn’t deeply absorbed because I was worried about Anterea, an old friend of mine, who lay ill in the village—so ill I was sure he wouldn’t last the night. Perhaps that made me particularly susceptible to whatever it was. Anyhow, I felt myself suddenly gripped, as I sat, by a more than usually disturbing sense of that imminent something. It had never had any particular direction before, but now it seemed to impend from the roadway. I was aware, also, of having to fight a definite dread of it this time, instead of greeting it with a kind of incredulous expectancy. I sprang up, staring nervously out into the dark beyond the door. And then I noticed Smith. Hackles bristling, gums bared, he was backing step by step away from the door, whimpering and trembling as he backed.

“Smith!” I called. He gave me one quick, piteous look, turned tail and bolted, yelping as. if I had kicked him, through the seaward door. I heard him begin to howl on the beach, just as that unspeakable odor came sweeping into the room, wave upon wave of the breath of all corruption, from the road.

Plain anger seized me as I stood. That was natural, I think. I had made myself a fine figure of fun, for whoever was outside, leaping to my feet and goggling like a scared rabbit through the doorway, a glorious butt for this nasty trick. It hurt: I forgot Smith and dashed out into the road. But there wasn’t a clue for eye, or ear, or nose in the hissing darkness under the wind-blown palms. I found nobody and nothing, until my running feet brought me to the fringe of Utiroa village; and there I heard a sound that stripped me of all my anger. It was the noise of women wailing and men chanting, mixed with the rhythmic thud-thud of heavy staves on the ground. I couldn’t mistake it. A Gilbertese
bomaki
ceremony was in full swing: some villager’s departing soul was being ritually sped on its difficult road from earth to paradise. I knew then that my old friend Anterea had not lasted the night, and I lost all heart for my silly chase.

There was no taint on the air of the house when I got back. I fell asleep untroubled by anything but my own sadness. But Smith stayed out on the beach, and I couldn’t persuade him to remain indoors after dark for the few more days I spent on Tabiteuea.

The rest of the story is George Murdoch’s. He had settled down to trading on Kuria Island after his retirement from the administrative service, so I took the next chance I could of running across to tell him of my feelings about the house, and Smith’s queer behavior, and the fetid smell someone had put across me.

“So he’s been making friends with you, has he?” said George reflectively when I had finished. And, instead of answering when I asked who “he” might be, he went on, “From about the middle of Utiroa village to a bit north of the prison—that’s his beat. Aye, he’s a stinking old nuisance. But mind you, there’s no real harm in him.”

“He,” in short, according to George, was an absurd ghost known to the villagers as
Tewaiteaina,
or One Leg, whose habit for several centuries it had been to walk—or, rather, hop—that particular stretch of Tabiteuea, every night of the year without exception, scaring everybody stiff who saw him go by. George spoke of him with a sort of affectionate irritation, as if he really existed. It was too ridiculous.

“But, Mr. Murdoch,” I interrupted, “there’s a ghost for every yard of the Gilberts, if you swallow all that village stuff!”

He eyed me humorously. “But there’s only one ghost who stinks, young fella-me-lad, and that’s old One Leg. Not that he plays that trick often, mind you. Just sometimes, for friendship’s sake. Now, if you’ll stop interrupting, I’ll tell you  . . .

“I’d heard nothing about him when I had the prison and the resthouse built where they are,” he went on, “otherwise, I might have chosen somewhere else. Or I might not. What’s the odds, anyway? The creature’s harmless. So there I was one dark, still night, with a prison nicely full of grand, strong lads up the road, and myself sitting all serene in the resthouse, enjoying a page or two of the King’s Regulations. I say I was all serene, you’ll note. The house had stood three years, and I’d never been troubled by the something’s-going-to-happen notion you’ve made such a point of. Sheer nonsense that, I’m telling you straight!”

“Yes, Mr. Murdoch,” I said humbly.

“Well, you’ll grow out of it, I suppose,” he comforted me. “So there I sat, a grown man, with not one childish fancy to make a fool of me, when in from the roadway crashed that stinking thing and hit me like a wall. Solid. A fearful stench. You were right about that. Corruption and essence of corruption from the heart of all rottenness—that’s what I said to myself as I fought my way through it to the door  . . . How did I know it came from the road, you say? What does that matter—I
did
know; so don’t interrupt me with your questions.

“I’ll admit the uncanny suddenness of it gave me the shudders at first. But I was angry, like you, by the time I reached the road. I thought some son of a gun was taking a rise out of me. So I dashed back into the house, snatched up a hurricane lamp and started running hell for leather towards the prison. The reek was as thick as a fog that way, and I followed my nose.

“I hadn’t gone far, though, before I heard a patter and a rush from ahead, and a great ox of a prison guard came charging full tilt out of the darkness and threw himself at me, gibbering like a cockatoo. As I struggled out of his clutches, I caught something about someone called One Leg who’d gone hop-hopping past him into the prison yard. Well . . . there was my clue. ‘Is it One Leg that raised this stink?’ I shouted. ‘Yes,’ he screamed back. ‘One Leg. . . the ghost!’ I only stayed to call him a blanky fool and belted on.

“But I wasn’t quick enough to catch up with the trouble. When I got near the prison yard, something else had started. The whole crowd inside the men’s lockup had gone mad . . . raving mad . . . yelling their heads off . . . and the noise of them flinging themselves against the door was like thunder. I knew the padlock wouldn’t last if that went on; I heard it crack like a pistol as I came up to the yard entrance; and, begum, before you could say knife, I was down under the feet of a maniac mob stampeding out into the bush.

“I picked myself up and made a beeline for the lockup; ran halfway down the gangway between the beds, swinging my lamp around; found not a soul there; charged out again to Anterea’s house in the comer of the yard—why, what’s the matter now?”

I had sat bolt upright and exclaimed, “Anterea?” When I repeated it, he said, “Yes, the head warder. Retired before your time, but he’s still going strong in Utiroa. One of the few who never gave a damn for old One Leg. Would you believe it? He was sleeping like a baby when I got to him. Hadn’t heard a sound and said he couldn’t smell a thing, though the place was still humming fit to knock you down. But he got going quick enough when I told him the news. He and I hunted the bush for those poor idiots till the crack of dawn. They came in willingly enough at sunup—all but Arikitaua, that’s to say—and we had a fine powwow together round Anterea’s shack, waiting for him to turn up. That’s when I got all the dope about One Leg.

“They’d all seen him hopping up the gangway between the beds, so they claimed. There wasn’t a light, but they’d seen him. ‘Fiddle!’ I said to that, and Anterea backed me. So, just for the hell of it, I turned on him then, and asked him what of the smell I’d smelt and he hadn’t; and immediately about half of them butted in to say they hadn’t smelt it, either; and, by the same token, the other half had. It was all very puzzling until somebody explained that One Leg only brought his saintly odor along for the particular friends of the deceased, and then, of course, it was as clear as mud. ‘Which deceased?’ I wanted to know. ‘Oh, anyone who dies within the limits of his beat,’ says my clever friend. ‘He turns it on as soon as the soul has left the body.’

“You could have knocked me down with a feather if there had been a corpse in sight. But there wasn’t. So I said a few words and left them to think up another story. I had a mind to go and inquire in the village after our missing number,

Arikitaua . . . an Utiroa man         I liked him a lot. But I hadn’t gone fifty steps, when a new hullabaloo from the lockup stopped me in my tracks. I thought they were starting another One Leg stunt. But it was only poor Arikitaua this time. Yes . . . there he was—rolled off his bed on the floor up against the far end wall—where my lamp hadn’t reached him—quite dead. I reckon it was just heart disease.”

We sat silent a long time; then George said reflectively, “What with this and that, I’m surprised you didn’t hear of a friend’s death in Utiroa after the old stinker put it across you.”

I told him then of Anterea.

“Well . . . well . . . think of that now,” said George, “. . . and Anterea an unbeliever. Kind of friendly, I call it. There never was any real harm in old One Leg.”

He was furious when I had a new resthouse built on the other side of the island—as furious as a man might be who has led you up the garden path to his own confusion. But he never would admit he’d been pulling my leg. And then again, what was it that scared my dog so?

Florence Coombe

A woman who was brought up on the South Pacific island of Norfolk and became a worker with the Melanesian Mission produced a volume from which vignettes may be drawn of early days in such Melanesian lands as the Banks Group, the Torres Group, Tikopia, San Cristoval in the New Hebrides, and Ulawa and Bugotu in the Solomons.

“Savagery Among the Black Islands” is taken from various chapters in
Islands of Enchantment
(1912). Florence Coombe is also author of
School-Days in Norfolk Island
(1904).

Motalava, Banks Islands

THE wizard must be persuaded with money to prepare a ghost-shooter. With preparatory fasting, and the accompaniment of the inevitable magic song, the bamboo is packed with its fatal ingredients, such as dead man’s bone and leaves hot with mana. The weapon is then ready to be delivered to the man who has set his heart upon killing his enemy. It is such a little bamboo that it can be carried in the hand without attracting notice, and the open end is covered with the thumb until the unsuspecting foe is near at hand. Then with malicious triumph the hand is outstretched towards him—not in friendship! The thumb is lifted and the magic influence released in his direction. If the unlucky mortal sees the ghost-shooter he loses all power of resistance and falls to the ground. He might not die at once, but he will crawl home a doomed man whose hours are numbered. Yet nothing external has so much as touched him. Such was the power of the ghost-shooter.

A story comes from Ra of a rich man with a grudge against somebody, unknowing and unknown. All that was known was that the great man had made ready a ghost-shooter and a feast at the same time. So strong is Melanesian curiosity that all the Ra world came to the feast, while perfectly aware that among them must be the individual whose life was forfeit. The feast would be crowned by a “kill,” but who would be the victim?

The host, to make his magic stronger, fasted unwashed for so many days beforehand that the feast found him too weak to walk forth to it. The excited guests assembled in the
tinesara
for the dance which, according to custom, must precede the feast, and presently a grisly object appeared, carried between two supporters—a blackened, shrunken skeleton of a man. There they set him down, at the edge of the dancing-ground, and all saw the thin trembling arm straightened ready, holding the ghost-shooter.

The drum began to tap and the dancers to circle round, while two burning eyes from out a wasted face watched each as he passed and waited still for his opportunity. The time went on, the dancers passed ,and repassed, and the watcher’s gaze from intensity gradually gave way to bewilderment. Which was his victim? This? He raised his arm and uncovered the bamboo. Even in the midst of the dance’s whirl all saw, all felt what had happened. The wretched man who stood in the line of the magic shot fell stiff and prostrate, and the dancing stopped. The same moment the shooter became aware that he had felled the wrong man, and loudly proclaimed his distress. Friends gathered round the poor fallen one, and urged him to put out his strength to resist the magic, since there was no harm wished to him in the act. And when the fainting man understood, he revived, and presently recovered. Of what afterwards befell the unknown who had so fortunately escaped I can find no record.