Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (14 page)

‘It is because the power to materialize came very slowly,’ answered Carruth, ‘coupled as it undoubtedly was with the gradual breaking down of the room’s material resistance. It is very difficult to realize the extraordinary force of an unfulfilled wish, on the part of a forceful, brutal, wholly selfish personality like Forrester’s. It is, really, what we must call spiritual power, even though the “spirituality” was the reverse of what we commonly understand by that term. The wish and the force of Forrester’s persistent desire, through the century, have been working steadily, and, as you have told us, the room has been out of use for more than a century. There were no common, everyday affairs to counteract that malign influence – no “interruptions”, if I make myself clear.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mr Snow. ‘I do not clearly understand. These matters are outside my province. But – I am exceedingly grateful – to you both.’ Our host bowed courteously. ‘Anything that I can possibly do, in return – ’

‘There is nothing – nothing whatever,’ said Carruth quietly; ‘but, Mr Snow, there is another problem on your hands which perhaps you will have some difficulty in solving, and concerning which, to our regret’ – he looked gravely at me – ‘I fear neither Mr Canevin with his experience, nor I with mine, will be able to assist you.’

‘And what, pray, is that?’ asked Mr Snow, turning slightly pale. He would, I perceive, be very well satisfied to have his problems behind him.

‘The problem is,’ said Carruth, even more gravely I imagined, ‘it is – what disposal are you to make of fifty-eight pairs of assorted boots and shoes!’

And Snow’s relieved laughter was the last of the impressions which I took with me as we rode back to London in Carruth’s car, of The Coach and Horses inn on the Brighton Road.

The Left Eye

Pierre Godard was a French Canadian by descent, whose grandfather had departed the purlieus of Montreal for the good of his miserable hide in the days of Riel’s Rebellion and settled in that indefinite area of scanty-soiled farmland along the western shore of Lake Champlain between Keeseville and Plattsburg.

The degenerate stock of the Godards, long impoverished since the era of its plebeian origins in France, did not recover in the descendants of the original fugitive. Pierre, the grandson, combined in his make-up the native cussedness of the lower class ‘canuck’ with the skinflint qualities which his lifelong residence among the narrow-minded yokels with whom he consorted had readily imparted. Shiftless, furtive, mean-souled, he eked out an existence on his few barren acres of poor land which was endurable only because there was neither in his heredity nor his experience any better standard by which he could realize to the full the utter meanness of everything that conspired to make up his life’s record.

At nineteen Pierre had married Katie Burton, a flat-chested, sallow-faced slattern of his own age. At the end of five years of sordid married life, four brats of their begetting littered up the dirty kitchen of Pierre’s cabin through the long, cold days of the northern New York winter, and spent their summers rolling about in the dirt at the roadside and making faces at the occupants of the automobiles which passed in a wavering, irregular string, all day and most of the early evening, along the State road between Keeseville and Plattsburg.

That is, there were four brats – and Kathleen. To what ancestors of Pierre or Katie Kathleen could have been a ‘throw-back’ is one of those obscure ethnic mysteries which are so baffling when they emerge in the families of recognized people. In Kathleen’s case, it baffled no one, since there was no one in particular to remark this fairy among the ugly gnomes who pretended to be her brothers and sisters, this glorious little swan among the rough ducklings of the Godard brood.

Kathleen had always been utterly different from the rest. By the time she was six or seven, her positive characteristics were already strongly developed. She stood out from the rest of her sordid family like a new-minted gold coin among pocket-worn pennies. By natural choice, and habitually, she was dainty and neat. Dirt never stuck to her, somehow. The rest of the brood were different from each other only in the varying ugliness of their budding dispositions and the equally variant qualities of their general detestability of appearance and habit. All the rest, for example, would fight at the drop of the hat to gain possession of anything that turned up unappropriated, that even vaguely suggested value to their joint scrutiny. In these snarling contests, Kathleen, coolly aloof, was uninterested. The rest possessed in common that coarse, scrubby hair of indeterminate color which characterizes the children of outdoor-living peasants the world over. Kathleen’s, a shimmering glory of delicate ringlets, shone burnished copper in the afternoon sun when she swept off the rickety back porch or daintily threw a few grains of hard corn to Pierre’s scraggly hens.

At sixteen she was as coolly aloof from the blandishments of the coarse young men of her neighborhood as ever she had been to the scrambling bickerings of her family. All such advances left her wholly uninterested. What dreams and aspirations lay behind those clear blue eyes, those eyes like the blue of the Caribbean at noon, no one had ever guessed, that is, no one except the good priest, Father Tracy, who came over from one of the neighboring towns for mass every Sunday morning, and on alternate Saturday nights and before First Fridays, to hear the confessions of his outlying portion of his difficult flock. To Father Tracy it had been some time clear that the lovely body of the little Kathleen harbored one of those rare souls, delicate and fragrant, which burn with the desire to offer themselves wholly to the Love of God. Here, the good father knew, or strongly suspected, was a budding vocation for the religious life, a vocation which it was one of his rewards to cultivate and foster.

As yet Kathleen was too young to leave her home, even if that had been feasible, and enter upon a novitiate with the good sisters at Plattsburg, or, perhaps better still, in her case, with some other good sisters much farther away from the place of her sordid origins, but for this vocation, as he watched it grow, at first weak and trembling up toward the dim light of a possible fulfillment, then later with a kind of thin, but pure and steady flame, Father Tracy said many novenas of thanks-giving. It was one of his chief sources of happiness, and, as was natural in such cases, Kathleen responded to his interest in her, and through his gentle, kindly leading of her soul, was beginning, as she fulfilled her maturity, to see the distant light more and more clearly.

This vision she cherished with all her heart, and if it begot in her an almost perceptible wistfulness, it did nothing to minimize the cheerful kindliness with which she went about the performance of her daily tasks, or the cultivated discretion with which she had laboriously learned to meet and neutralize the changeable moods of her vicious father and slatternly, loose-minded mother.

The wind-swept habitation for God which she had made of her pure little heart was rudely battered on a certain Thursday morning in the month of August in her seventeenth year.

Pierre, her father, who combined with the shiftless existence of a small peasant-farmer the more adventurous and profitable avocation of a bootlegger’s runner for a Plattsburg operator, was frequently away from home at night and even for days at a time, when he was engaged in doing his part in bringing consignments of illicit merchandise down from unknown points in nearby Canada, either overland along the State road or by devious and rutted byways, or, what was an easier though somewhat less direct method much favored by ‘the profession’, ‘up’ the lake on dark nights, a process which was more lucrative because there were less people to bribe, and correspondingly somewhat more dangerous, as requiring a landing on the shores of Vermont across the lake, or somewhere on the New York side.

He had been away on one of these expeditions for two days, and had returned some time during the small hours Wednesday night. On that Thursday morning, after two nearly sleepless nights, unkempt, ugly as a bear with a sore nose, he pushed his way into the kitchen about nine o’clock and demanded something to eat.

Kathleen brought him his food and he ate in a brooding silence. She waited, sitting on the step below the open doorway, for him to finish, so that she might wash his dishes and tidy up the table after him, softly humming a tuneless little song, her mind entirely other-worldly.

Pierre, having finished his breakfast, came straight to the point of a certain matter which he had been cogitating for several weeks.

‘Come here,’ he said.

She rose and came to the table, expecting that he required another cup of coffee or something of the sort.

‘Shut the door,’ barked her father.

She closed the door leading into the small hallway out of the kitchen, wonderingly, and returned to her father’s side.

‘How old are you?’ he asked, looking at her as though he were appraising her.

‘Seventeen.’

‘Seventeen, eh?’ His eyes went over her again, in such fashion that, without knowing why, she felt suddenly choked.

‘Ah, seventeen. Old enough! Now listen. That is old enough. You are going to marry Steve Benham. I got that all fixed, see. Me an’ him, we talk about it a lot, and Steve is all right for it.’

The choking feeling nearly overcame her. The blood seemed to suffuse her whole body and then recede somewhere, leaving her icy cold and afraid. Marriage had never entered Kathleen’s mind. And Steve Benham! Benham was a brutal-faced young tough who, with greater advantages such as are offered to the denizens of great cities in their worst aspects, might have shone as a criminal of the lower type – a yegg, a killer for hire, the ready and effective tool of some brutal organized gang. As it was, he had taken advantage of such opportunities as presented themselves to his somewhat restricted field of development. He was one of Levin’s crowd in the bootlegging operations, a close associate of Pierre Godard’s.

‘What the hell’s the matter with you, now?’ roared Pierre, curbing his voice slightly in view of his desire for secrecy. This was his lookout, and none of Katie’s business. He could handle his own girl all by himself without his wife’s having any part in it. Benham had offered him two hundred dollars to put it through for him, and that two hundred he meant to have – as soon as possible, too.

‘Steve’s all right, ain’t he? What’s the matter with Steve? Now cut out this blubberin’.’ Kathleen’s lips were trembling in a colorless face, her eyes big and bright with the tears she was forcing to remain unshed. She knew the resources of this brute of a father which an inscrutably unkind Providence had inflicted upon her.

Pierre, his anger mounting by leaps and bounds, glared at her, his ugly face rendered hideous by a savage snarl, his clenched hand showing white at the knuckles as he gripped the table’s edge.

‘O daddy, I can’t, I can’t!’

Kathleen’s restraint had broken down under this unexpected and crushing blow. She sank down in a chair at the side of the table, and buried her lovely head in her hands, her body shaken with convulsive sobs.

This weakening aroused all the half-latent brute in Godard. With a savage curse, he seized Kathleen by the hair, dragging her face up from the table, and with the back of the other hand dealt her several cruel and heavy blows.

She sank, as she shrank away, to the floor, a shuddering heap of misery and pain.

Pierre rose, his anger partially allayed, and looked down at her. He kicked her, but lightly, in the side.

‘Get up out of that, an’ get to hell out of here and clean yourself up. Steve’s comin’ in about noon, an’ I’m goin’ to tell him it’s all set for him. Don’t you dast do nothin’ to spoil it, neither, you hear? Now git up, an’ beat it along an’ get yourself prettied up.’

He seized her roughly by the shoulder, dragged her to her feet and shoved her through the door into the hallway.

Upstairs in her tiny little room, she lay across the bed, bruised and shaken, trying to collect her wits. One refuge and one only occurred to her, for even under the stress of this unexpected manifestation of her father’s known brutality she had no idea of giving in to his demand and receiving Steven Benham as a suitor.

Trembling, shaken in every fiber of her delicate body, but with her almost unformulated resolve burning within her like a bright, strong flame, she dragged herself resolutely to her feet, and began painfully to change her clothes. She had decided to go to Father Tracy for protection.

An hour later, very softly, she crept downstairs. It was past ten o’clock, and she would have to manage to elude her mother. Her brothers and sister had not been about the house, she remembered, since their breakfast time. Her mother would be below. She had been out in the chicken-yard when her father had come into the kitchen for his breakfast. He had gone out immediately after she had come upstairs, probably to report progress to Benham! She shuddered, and crept down the stairs like a mouse.

She could hear her mother aimlessly pottering about in the kitchen. She slipped out of the seldom-used front door and out to the gate and along the road. As she turned the first corner, she met her sister Eunice, walking beside one of the town boys.

‘Where you goin’ all dressed up?’ enquired Eunice, her pert face alive with interest in this unexpected apparition of Kathleen in her best dress and Sunday hat. Kathleen bit her lip. This was a wholly unexpected, and entirely unavoidable, misfortune. She was utterly unused to deceit. The truth was her only resource.