Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (115 page)

But the lock offered unexpected resistance. It was inexplicable, irritating. His overtensed nerves revolted abruptly at this check. The key had slipped into the slot, as always, without difficulty – but it would not turn! Furiously he twisted it this way and that. At last he removed it and stared at it curiously. There was nothing amiss with the key. Could his father have had the lock changed?

Anger and quick shame smote him, suddenly. He looked closely at the lock. No, it was unchanged. There were the numberless tiny scratchmarks of innumerable insertions. It was the same.

Gingerly, carefully, he inserted the key again. He turned it to the right. Of course it turned to the right; he remembered that clearly. He had so turned it countless times.

It would not move. He put out all his puny strength, and still it would not turn. Hot exasperation shook him.

As he swore under his breath in his irritation at this bar to the fulfillment of his purpose, he became for the first time conscious of a rising commotion in the street below, and he paused, irresolutely, and listened, his nerves suddenly strung taut. Many voices seemed to be mingled in the excited hum that came to his ears. Bits of phrases, even, could be distinguished. Something had happened down there, it seemed. As he listened, the commotion of spoken sound resolved itself into a tone which, upon his subconscious effort to analyze it, seemed to him to express horror and commiseration, with an overtone of fear. The fear communicated itself to him. He shook, as the voice of the growing throng, a blended, corporate voice, came up to him in sickening waves of apprehension.

What if this should mean an interruption? Impatiently wrenching himself away from his preoccupation and back to his more immediate concern with the door, he thrust the key into the lock a third time, this time aggressively, violently. Again he tried to snap the lock. Again it resisted him, unaccountably, devilishly, as it seemed to him.

Then, in his pause of desperation, he thought he heard his own name spoken. He could feel his face go white, the roots of his hair prickle. He listened, intently, crouching catlike there on the empty landing before the door of his father’s apartment, and as he listened, every nerve intent, he heard the entrance-door below flung open, and the corporate voice of the throng outside, hitherto muffled and faint, came to him suddenly in a wave of sound, jumbled and obscure as a whole, but with certain strident voices strangely clear and distinct.

A shuffle of heavy feet came to his ears, as if several persons were entering the lower hallway, their footsteps falling heavily on the tiled flooring. They would be coming upstairs!

He shrank back against the door – that devilish door! If only he could get it open!

Something like this, he told himself, in a wave of self-pity that swept him – something like this, unexpected, unforeseen, unreasonable – something like this was always happening to him!

That door! It was an epitome of his futile, worthless life! That had happened to him, just the same kind of thing, a month ago when he had been turned out of his home. The events of the intervening weeks rushed, galloping, through his overtensed mind. And now, as ever since that debacle, there was present with him a kind of unforgettable vision of his mother – his poor mother, her face covered with the tears which she made no effort to wipe away – his poor mother, looking at him, stricken, through those tears which blurred her face: and there was his father, the kindly face set now in a stern mask, pale and with deep lines – his father telling him that this was the end. There would be no public prosecution. Was he not their son? But he must go now! His home would be no longer his home . . .

He recalled the dazed days that followed: the mechanical activities of his daily employment; his search, half-hearted, for a furnished room. He recalled, shuddering, the several times when, moved by the mechanism of long-established usage, he had nearly taken an Allston car for ‘home’, which was to be no longer his home . . .

He had not sent back the key. He could not tell why he had kept it. He had forgotten to hand it back to his father when he had left, and his father, doubtless unthinkingly, had not suggested its return. That was why he still had it, and here he stood, now, on the very threshold of that place which had been ‘home’ to him for so many years, about to make the restitution that would do something to remove the saddest of all the blots on his conscience – and he could not get in!

The men, talking with hushed voices, had reached the first landing. Young Phillips, caught by a sudden gust of abject terror, shrank against the stubborn door, the door which, unaccountably, he could not open. Then, his mind readjusting itself, he remembered that he had no reason for concealment, for fear. Even though he might be seen here, even though these people should be coming all the way up the stairs, it could not matter. Let him be seen: what of it? He was supposed to live here, of course. It was only a short time since he had actually ceased to live here, and his father had said nothing. No public charge had been made against him. How one’s conscience could make one a coward!

Under the invigorating stress of this reaction, he straightened himself, stood up boldly. Realizing that it might appear odd for him to be discovered standing here aimlessly on the landing, he started to go downstairs. But by now the narrow staircase was completely blocked by the ascending group. He stopped, halfway from that flight. The men were carrying something, something heavy, and of considerable bulk, it would seem. He could not see clearly in that dim light just what it was. He stopped, half-way down, but none of the men carrying the awkward bundle, covered with what looked like an automobile curtain, looked up, nor appeared to notice him. Neither did the straggling group of men, and a woman or two, who were following them.

Fascinated,
he gazed at what they were carrying.
As they approached and took the turn in the stairs, so that the electric light on the upper landing shone more directly upon it, he looked closer. It was the body of a man! It hung, limp and ungainly in their somewhat awkward grasp as they shouldered up toward him.

Something about it seemed vaguely familiar, the details presenting themselves to his fascinated gaze in rapid succession: the trouser-ends, the shoes . . .

* * *

The men turned the last corner in the winding stairway and came into full view. As they turned the corner, the leather curtain slipped and the face of the dead man was for a moment exposed to view. Roger Phillips looked at it, fascinated, horrified. Then one of the men, halting for an instant, drew the corner of the curtain over the face again, and he could no longer see it. The head rolled. The broken body had been grievously crushed.

Roger Phillips, utterly distraught, cowered, a limp heap, against the unyielding door of his father’s apartment. He had looked for one horrific instant into his own distorted, dead face!

The men, breathing hard, reached the landing. One of them, gingerly shifting his portion of the burden upon the shoulder of another, stepped forward to ring the bell of the Phillips apartment. No one answered the ring, and the man rang again, impatiently, insistently. The bell trilled inside the empty apartment. The men stood, silently, shifting uneasily from one foot to another. Behind them, a thin mutter came from the waiting stragglers who had followed them, moved by an inordinate curiosity.

‘Here’s a key sticking in the door,’ said the man who had rung the bell. ‘Guess we’d be all right if we opened the door and took the young fellow in. There doesn’t seem to be anyone home.’

A murmur of assent came from the other men.

He turned the key to the left, then to the right, and the door opened. They carried the broken body inside and carefully laid it out on the sofa in the living-room.

Sea-Tiger

Arthur Hewitt’s first intimation of the terrific storm which struck the
Barbadian
off Hatteras,
en route
for the West Indies, was a crash which awakened him out of uneasy sleep in the narrow berth of his cabin. When he staggered up to the saloon-deck the next morning after an extremely uncomfortable, sleepless night, he looked out of the ports upon a sea which transcended anything he had ever seen. The
Barbadian
, heeling and hanging, wallowed in the trough of cross seas which wrenched her lofty bridge-deck.

A steward, who was having a rather difficult time keeping his feet, fetched him a sandwich and a cup of coffee. In a little while two other passengers appeared for breakfast: one a British salesman, and the other an American ship’s officer, out of a professional berth and going to Antigua to help take off a sugar crop. The three men, warmed now by the coffee and the comfortable security of the lounge, snored and chattered intimately.

Nevertheless, a sinister foreboding seemed to hang over them. At last Matthews, the American, voiced it plainly:

‘I hope she’ll make St Thomas! Well – I’ve always heard that Captain Baird knows his business; a good sailorman, they say.’

‘Do you think there’ll be any let-up when we get into the Gulf Stream?’ This was the Englishman, breaking a long, dreary silence.

‘More likely a let-
down
, I’d say,’ replied the pessimistic Matthews. ‘She’ll be worse, if anything, in my judgment.’

This gloomy prediction justified itself the following morning. The
Barbadian
had entered the Gulf Stream, and the malevolent fury of the sea increased with daylight. Hewitt came on deck, and, leaning against the jamb of a partly opened hatch on the protected leeside, looked out upon a world of heaving gray-green water with that feeling of awe which the sea in all its many moods invariably awakened in him. A gust of wind caught his unbuttoned coat, and out of a pocket and onto the wet, heaving deck slid the morocco-bound Testament which his mother had given him years before.

He stepped out through the hatchway, cautiously, making his way precariously across the deck to where it lay caught in the metal scupper. He arrived safely against the rail, which he gripped firmly with one hand, while he stooped to recover the book with the other. As he bent forward the tail-end of an enormous overtopping wave which had caught the vessel under her weather-quarter, caught him and raised his body like a feather over the rail’s top.

But Hewitt was not cast into the sea. With a frantic, instinctive movement, he clung to the rail as his body struck violently against the ship’s side.

With the
Barbadian
’s righting herself he found himself hanging on like grim death, his body dangling perilously over the angry waters, the Testament clutched firmly in his other hand.

He attempted to set his feet against one of the lower railings, to hook his legs about a stanchion. He almost succeeded, and would doubtless have been back upon the deck in safety had not the crest of the following wave dislodged his one-hand hold on the rail. The angry sea took him to itself, while the laboring ship, bounding into the teeth of the gale, bore on, all unconcerned over his sudden, unceremonious departure.

The incidents of Hewitt’s life marched through his consciousness with an incredible rapidity. He remembered his mother poignantly – his mother dead these eight years – and a salt tear mingled with the vast saltiness of this cold, inhospitable ocean which had taken him to its disastrous embrace.

Down and down into the watery inferno he sank, weighted down with his winter boots and heavy overcoat. Strangely enough, he was not afraid, but he responded to the major mechanical impulses of a drowning man – the rigid holding of his breath, the desperate attempts to keep his head toward the surface so as to stay the sinking process, the well-nigh mechanical prayer to God.

His lungs were bursting, it seemed! Hot pain seared him, the red pain of unendurable pressures. He must resist as long as he had consciousness. He clamped his jaws desperately together.

It was calm down here, and dark! Here was no trace of the raging tempest on the surface, that tumultuous surface of lashed fury. The water seemed constantly heavier, more opaque, a vast, pervading indigo.

The pain and the burning pressure were gone now. He seemed no longer to sink. Nor did he rise, apparently. Probably he could not exhale his breath now if he wanted to. Well, he did not want to. It was no longer cold. Here was a world of calm, of perfect peace. Drowning is an easy death, after all . . .

He hoped the
Barbadian
would make St Thomas . . .

His last conscious sensation was of a gentle sinking through a vast, imponderable blueness, which seemed pervading the universe, a restful blueness to which one could yield readily. He relaxed, let himself go, with no desire to struggle. He sank and sank, it seemed . . .

He lay now upon a beach, his chin propped in his cupped hands, his elbows deep in the warm sand. It was from this warmth that he derived his first conscious sensation. A soft sea-wind, invigorating from its long contact with illimitable expanses of tropic seas, blew freshly. He felt very weary, and, it seemed, he had newly awakened out of a very protracted sleep. He turned his head at some slight sound and looked into the face of a girl who lay on the sand beside him.

He realized, as the march of events passed through his mind, that he must have gone through the gate of death. This, then, was that next world of which he had heard vaguely, all his life long. It was puzzling, somewhat. He was dead. He knew he must be dead. Do the dead lie on tropical beaches, under faint moonlight, and think, and feel this fresh wind from the sea? The dead, surely, do not dream. Perhaps they do dream. He had no knowledge, no experience, of course. He had read tales of after-death. Most of them, he remembered, revealed the surprise of the hero at the unexpectedness of his surroundings.