Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (104 page)

Mid-afternoon saw him, despite the vessel’s more than satisfactory speed and the progress of a long leg toward Boston and Lydia Farnham, in such a devilish temper that everyone on board the ship kept as far as possible out of his way. He took no night watches, these being divided among the three mates, and after his solitary supper, punctuated with numerous curses at a more than usually awkward steward, he went into his stateroom, removed his shirt and singlet, and thoroughly rubbed the entire aching area with coconut oil. The pain now ran down his left arm to the elbow, and penetrated to all the cords of his neck, the muscles of which throbbed and burned atrociously.

The embrocation gave him a certain amount of relief. He remembered that the woman had muttered something. It was
not
Eboe, that jargon of
lingua franca
which served as a medium for the few remarks necessary between slavers and their human cattle. It was some outlandish coastal or tribal dialect. He had not caught it, sensed its meaning; though there had resided in those few syllables some germ of deadly meaning. He remembered, vaguely, the cadence of the syllables, even though their meaning had been unknown to him. Wearing, aching, depressed, he turned in, and this time, almost immediately, he fell asleep.

And in his sleep, those syllables were repeated to him, into his left ear, endlessly, over and over again, and in his sleep he knew their meaning; and when he awoke, a swaying beam of pouring moonlight coming through his porthole, at four bells after midnight, the cold sweat had made his pillow clammy wet and stood dankly in the hollows of his eyes and soaked his tangled beard.

Burning from head to foot, he rose and lit the candle in his binnacle-light, and cursed himself again for a fool for not acquiring a mirror through the day. Young Sumner, the third mate, shaved. One or two of the fo’castle hands, too. There would be mirrors on board. He must obtain one tomorrow. What was it the woman had said – those syllables? He shuddered. He could not remember. Why should he remember? Gibberish – nigger-talk! It was nothing. Merely the act of a bestial Black. They were all alike. He should have taken the living hide off the wench. To bite him! Well, painful as it was, it should be well healed before he got back to Boston, and Lydia.

Laboriously, for he was very stiff and sore all along the left side, he climbed back into his bed, after blowing out the binnacle-light. That candlewick! It was very foul. He should have wet his thumb and finger and pinched it out. It was still smoking.

Then the syllables again, endlessly – over and over, and, now that he slept, and, somehow, knew that he slept and could not carry their meaning into the next waking state,
he knew what they meant
. Asleep, drowned in sleep, he tossed from side to side of his berth-bed, and the cold sweat ran in oily trickles down into his thick beard.

He awakened in the early light of morning in a state of horrified half-realization. He could not get up, it seemed. The ache now ran all through his body, which felt as though it had been beaten until flayed. One of the brandy bottles from the Martinique barkentine, opened the night of departure from St Thomas, was within reach. He got it, painfully, drew the cork with his teeth, holding the bottle in his right hand, and took a long, gasping drink of the neat spirit. He could feel it run through him like liquid, golden fire. Ah! that was better. He raised the bottle again, set it back where it had been, half empty. He made a great effort to roll out of the berth, failed, sank back well-nigh helpless, his head humming and singing like a hive of angry bees.

He lay there, semi-stupefied now, vague and dreadful things working within his head, his mind, his body; things brewing, seething, there inside him, as though something had entered into him and was growing there where the focus of pain throbbed, in the great muscles of his neck on the left side.

There, an hour later, a timid steward found him, after repeated and unanswered knocks on the stateroom door. The steward had at last ventured to open the door a mere peeping-slit, and then, softly closing it behind him, and white-faced, hastened to find Pound, the first mate.

Pound, after consultation with the second mate, Sumner, accompanied the steward to the stateroom door, opening off the captain’s cabin. Even there, hard bucko that he was, he hesitated. No one aboard the
Saul Taverner
approached Captain Luke Martin with a sense of ease or anything like self-assurance. Pound repeated the steward’s door-opening, peeped within, and thereafter entered the cabin, shutting the door.

Martin lay on his right side, the bed-clothes pushed down to near his waist. He slept in his singlet, and the left side of his neck was uppermost. Pound looked long at the wound, his face like chalk, his hands and lips trembling. Then he softly departed, shutting the door behind him a second time, and went thoughtfully up on deck again. He sought out young Sumner and the two spoke together for several minutes. Then Sumner went below to his cabin, and, emerging on the deck, looked furtively all around him. Observing the coast clear, he drew from beneath his drill jacket something twice the size of his hand, and, again glancing about to make sure he was not observed, dropped the article overboard. It flashed in the bright morning sun as it turned about in the air before the waters received it forever. It was his small cabin shaving-mirror.

At four bells in the forenoon, Pound again descended to the captain’s cabin. This time Martin’s voice, a weak voice, answered his discreet knock and at its invitation he entered the stateroom. Martin now lay on his back, his left side away from the door.

‘How are you feeling, sir?’ asked Pound.

‘Better,’ murmured Martin; ‘this damned thing!’ He indicated the left side of his neck with a motion of his right thumb. ‘I got some sleep this morning. Just woke up, just now. It’s better – the worst of it over, I reckon.’

A pause fell between the men. There seemed nothing more to say. Finally, after several twitches and fidgeting, Pound mentioned several details about the ship, the surest way to enlist Martin’s interest at any time. Martin replied, and Pound took his departure.

Martin had spoken the truth when he alleged he was better. He had awakened with a sense that the worst was over. The wound ached abominably still, but the unpleasantness was distinctly lessened. He got up, rather languidly, slowly pulled on his deck clothes, called for coffee through the stateroom door.

Yet, when he emerged on his deck ten minutes later, his face was drawn and haggard, and there was a look in his eyes that kept the men silent. He looked over the ship professionally, the regular six bells morning inspection, but he was preoccupied and his usual intense interest in anything concerned with his ship was this day merely perfunctory. For, nearly constantly now that the savage pain was somewhat allayed and tending to grow less as the deck exercise cleared his mind and body of their poisons, those last syllables, the muttered syllables in his left ear when the Black woman’s head had lain for an instant on his shoulder, those syllables which were not in Eboe, kept repeating themselves to him. It was as though they were constantly reiterated in his physical ear rather than merely mentally; vague syllables, with one word, ‘
l’kundu
’, standing out and pounding itself deeper and deeper into his consciousness.

‘Hearin’ things!’ he muttered to himself as he descended to his cabin on the conclusion of the routine morning inspection a half-hour before noon. He did not go up on deck again for the noon observations. He remained, sitting very quietly there in his cabin, listening to what was being whispered over and over again in his left ear, the ear above the wound in his neck muscle.

It was highly unusual for this full-blooded bucko skipper to be quiet as his cabin steward roundly noted. The explanation was, however, very far from the steward’s mind. He imagined that the wound had had a devastating effect upon the captain’s nerves, and so far his intuition was a right one. But beyond that the steward’s crude psychology did not penetrate. He would have been skeptical, amused, scornful, had anyone suggested to him the true reason for this unaccustomed silence and quietude on the part of his employer. Captain Luke Martin, for the first time in his heady and truculent career, was frightened.

He ate little for his midday dinner, and immediately afterward retired to his stateroom. He came out again, almost at once, however, and mounted the cabin ladder to the after deck. The
Saul Taverner
, carrying a heavy load of canvas, was spanking along at a good twelve knots. Martin looked aloft, like a sound sailorman, when he emerged on deck, but his preoccupied gaze came down and seemed to young Sumner, who touched his hat to him, to look inward. Martin was addressing him.

‘I want the lend of your lookin’-glass,’ said he in quiet tones.

Young Sumner started, felt the blood leave his face. This was what Pound
had
warned
him
about;
why
he
had
thrown
his
glass
over
the
side.

‘Sorry, sir. It ain’t along with me this v’yage, sir. I had it till we lay in St Thomas. But now it’s gone. I couldn’t shave this mornin’, sir.’ The young mate made an evidential gesture, rubbing a sun-burned hand across his day’s growth of beard on a weak but not unhandsome face.

He expected a bull-like roar of annoyance from the captain. Instead Martin merely nodded absently, and walked forward. Sumner watched him interestedly, until he reached the hatch leading to the crew’s quarters below decks forward. Then: ‘Cripes! He’ll get one from Dave Sloan!’ And young Sumner ran to find Pound and tell him that the captain would probably have a looking-glass within a minute. He was very curious to know the whys and wherefores of his senior mate’s unusual request about his own looking-glass. He had obeyed, but he wanted to know; for here, indeed, was something very strange. Pound had merely told him the captain mustn’t see that wound in his neck, which was high enough up so that without a glass he could not manage to look at it.

‘What’s it like, Mr Pound?’ he ventured to inquire.

‘It’s wot you’d name kinder livid-like,’ returned Pound, slowly. ‘It’s a kind of purplish. Looks like – nigger lips!

Back in his stateroom, Martin, after closing the door leading to the cabin, started to take off his shirt. He was halfway through this operation when he was summoned on deck. He hastily readjusted the shirt, almost shame-facedly, as though discovered in some shameful act, and mounted the ladder. Pound engaged him for twenty minutes, ship matters. He gave his decisions in the same half-hearted voice which was so new to those about him, and descended again.

The bit of mirror-glass which he had borrowed from Sloan in the fo’castle was gone from his washstand. He looked, painfully, all over the cabin for it, but it was not there. Ordinarily such a thing happening would have elicited a very tempest of raging curses. Now he sat down, almost helplessly, and stared about the stateroom with unseeing eyes. But not with unheeding ears! The voice was speaking English now, no longer gibberish syllables grouped about the one clear word, ‘
l’kundu
’. The voice in his left ear was compelling, tense, repetitive. ‘Over the side,’ it was repeating to him, and again, and yet again, ‘Over the side!’

He sat there a long time. Then, at last, perhaps an hour later, his face, which there was no one by to see, now pinched, drawn and gray in the bold challenging afternoon light in the white-painted state-room, he rose, slowly, and with almost furtive motions began to pull off his shirt.

He got it off, laid it on his berth, drew off the light singlet which he wore under it, and slowly, tentatively, with his right hand, reached for the wound in his neck. As his hand approached it, he felt cold and weak. At last his hand, fingers groping, touched the sore and tender area of the wound, felt about, found the wound itself . . .

It was Pound who found him, two hours later, huddled in a heap on the cramped floor of the stateroom, naked to the waist, unconscious.

It was Pound, hard old Pound, who laboriously propped the captain’s great bulk – for he was a heavy-set man, standing six feet in height – into his chair, pulled the singlet and then the discarded shirt over his head and then poured brandy between his bluish lips. It required half an hour of the mate’s rough restoratives, brandy, chafing of the hands, slapping the limp, huge wrists, before Captain Luke Martin’s eyelids fluttered and the big man gradually came awake.

But Pound found the monosyllabic answers to his few, brief questions cryptic, inappropriate. It was as though Martin were answering someone else, some other voice.

‘I will,’ he said, wearily, and again, ‘Yes, I will!’

It was then, looking him up and down in considerable puzzlement, that the mate saw the blood on the fingers of his right hand, picked up the great, heavy hand now lying limply on the arm of the state-room chair.

The three middle fingers had been bleeding for some time. The blood from them was now dry and clotted. Pound, picking up the hand, examining it in the light of the lowering afternoon sun, saw that these fingers had been savagely cut, or, it looked like,
sawed
. It was as though the saw-teeth that had ground and torn them had grated along their bones. It was a ghastly wound.