Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (55 page)

And then, out of the midst of them, came one great bearded giant. This man, evidently their leader, walked straight toward us where we stood grouped behind the orator, paused before him, and then this statuesque warrior flung down his bronze sword, clanging, and prostrated himself. The young chieftain took two grave steps forward, and placed his sandaled foot upon the prostrate figure’s neck. Inspired, I stepped over to him and placed my own great bronze sword in his hand.

Of how we traveled back to the Great Circle through a mahogany forest interspersed with ceiba, Otaheite, and Guinea-tamarind trees, I shall say but little. We traversed levels and dips and toiled up slopes and skirted marshlands. We traveled faint trails which had to be negotiated single file. We passed through clearing recently cut free of the clinging bush and trailing liana vines. Occasionally small, tapir-like quadrupeds started up almost under our feet, disturbed at their early-morning browsing in that thick jungle. We stepped along now and again through stretches fragrant with the odors of frangipane blooms, and the rich, attar-like sweetness of the flowering vanilla orchid.

And at last we came to the edge of the Great Circle once more, at a quarter before nine o’clock by my faithful wrist-watch which had not missed a tick throughout all these alarums and excursions. Here Pelletier paused, and in a brief, emphatic speech, in Spanish, took leave of and dismissed his army, which melted away, after profound salaams in our direction, into the deeper forests forming the hinterlands of that horizon of jungle. Forty or more hostages, brought with us from the company of those Ancient Ones who had accepted the overlordship of that remarkable young chief, departed with them. They were seen no more by us.

I was far too weary – and poor Wilkes was literally tottering in his tracks – to listen very closely to what Pelletier said to the Indians. As soon as the last of them had disappeared out of our sight, the three of us started across the stretch of short grass, up the slight slope toward the center where our plane still rested on the ground. Pelletier forged ahead to get his first-aid satchel for our wounds.

The great tree was gone!

It was nearly ten o’clock when at last we sank down in the grateful shade of the plane’s broad wings, and the last thing that I remember before falling into the sleep from which I was awakened an hour and a half later, was Pelletier holding to my mouth one of our canteens, and feeling the comfort to my parched throat of the stale, tepid water it contained.

It was the roar of the rescuing plane which awakened me, at eleven-thirty.

We reached Belize a few minutes before two. I had slept part of the way in the air, which is no mean feat considering the thunderous roar of the engine. I stumbled up to my bedroom in the hotel, and did not move until seven the following morning.

When I did awaken, raw with weariness, Pelletier was standing beside my bed.

‘I thought I’d better tell you as soon as possible,’ said he genially, ‘that I did all the necessary talking to that rescue party. You and Wilkes had been scouting around, making discoveries, and had got yourselves pretty well worn in the process. They swallowed that easily enough. It was ordinary engine trouble that dished us, out there where they found us. We were out of gas, too. There was the empty tank to prove it. I’ll tell you later where that gasoline went to. I’m responsible for that. You’d better stick to the same simple yarn, too. I’ve already told Wilkes.’

I nodded, and fell asleep again, after drinking without question the glassful of stuff Pelletier handed me. I do not even remember the taste, and I have no idea what the concoction was. But just before noon, when I awakened again, I was myself once more. I got up, bathed thoroughly, and gave myself a very much-needed shave. After lunch I called on the Bishop of British Honduras, and returned to him the binoculars he had considerately loaned me with the thanks of the party.

On the following morning Pelletier and I made our farewells to the splendid Wilkes, and to our other Belize friends and aquaintances. We had secured passage in a fruiter clearing that noon for Kingston, the first leg of our journey home to St Thomas.

About four p.m. that afternoon Pelletier, whom I had not seen since luncheon on board, lumbered along the deck and stopped at my chair.

‘Would you like to hear my end of it all now – or would it do better later?’ he inquired. He grinned down at me.

‘Later – in St Thomas preferably, if it’s all the same to you, Pelletier,’ I answered him. ‘I’d rather get my mind clean off it all and keep it off for the present. Later, by all means, with the home things, the home atmosphere all about me, if you don’t mind. Just now I’d rather do nothing and think nothing, and hear nothing beyond ice water, and eating fruit, and sleeping!’

‘I don’t blame you,’ threw back Pelletier as he shuffled ponderously away, the smoke from his big black cigar trailing behind him. We were making ten knots or so, with the wind abaft us, a following wind. I had spoken truly to Pelletier. I did not feel just then, nor indeed, for some time later, that I could easily bear more than casual reference to that experience, all of which, it will be remembered, had been crowded into less than two twenty-four-hour days.

I drank ice water. I ate fruit. I slept. And by easy stages, as we had gone to the coast of Central America, we came back again to the settled peace and comfort of the Lesser Antilles; to the kindly sophistication which is the lovely little city of St Thomas; to the quiet efficiency of my good servants in my house on Denmark Hill. Only then, it seemed to me, could I quite bear to open my mind again to those affairs in the deep jungle of Quintana Roo, where He had established his ‘foci’ as from time immemorial; where that had happened, with me as active participant, which the structure of our modern minds bears ill in reminiscence . . .

For it is not always good for a man to see the things that had fallen to Wilkes and myself to see; to have to do what we had done. There were times, even after I had got back and was settled into my accustomed routines, in St Thomas, when I would lie awake in bed, with the scent of the tuberoses and of Cape jessamine pouring in through my windows, and fail of ready sleep, and wonder what really had happened out there; whether or not certain aspects of that adventure were not basically incredible; whether, perhaps, my imagination had not tricked me – in other words, whether or not the whole madhouse affair had actually occurred in very truth; and if I, Gerald Canevin, occasional weaver of tales based upon the somewhat strange affairs of these islands of the Lesser Antilles, might not have suffered some eldritch change.

At such times, I found, it was salutary to change over my attention, when this proved possible, to something else, something as radically different as possible.

I played a good deal of contract bridge, I remember, during that interval of doubt and some distress mentally. I accepted more invitations than was usual with me. I wanted, in general, to be with people, sane, everyday, ordinary people, my neighbors and friends, as much as possible. I took off some weight, I remember.

It was not, I think, until Pelletier had related to me his account of how he had spent the period beginning with my disappearance up the tree – it had been removed, I remembered, on my arrival back at the Great Circle, and I had not asked Pelletier what had become of it – until he marched across that ‘quadrangle’ at the head of his army, that the whole affair, somehow, resolved itself, and ceased troubling me.

‘I’ll try to tell you my end of it,’ said Pelletier. He was in a characteristic attitude, sprawled out over the full length of my Chinese rattan lounge-chair on my cool west gallery, a silver swizzel-jug, freshly concocted by my house man, Stephen Penn, placed between us beside two greenish glasses, the ice-beads all over the outside of it; cigarettes going; myself, just after having done the honors, in another chair; both of us in fresh, white drill, cool and comfortable.

‘I had very little to go on,’ continued Pelletier, after a healthy sip out of his long, green glass and an accompanying slight grunt of creature satisfaction, ‘as you may imagine, Canevin, very little indeed. And yet, it all straightened out, cleared itself up in a kind of natural way. It was, I suppose, partly instinct, a kind of sixth sense if you like. For I had no more idea than you or Wilkes that we were running into a – well, a survival, when I looked down out of the plane and first saw that Circle sticking up to the eye out of that jungle like, like a sore thumb!

‘The first definite indication, the first clue, was of course that original crack of wind “out of the corner of hell”, as Wilkes put it. Wind is air, and my mind, naturally enough, stuck to that. It was not especially brilliant to deduce an air-elemental, or, at least to have that in my mind all the way through the various happenings; before you started up the tree I mean: that wind out of nowhere; the disappearance of Wilkes; the absence of animal and insect life; those Indians getting around us. It all fitted together, somehow, under the circumstances, and after what both of us have seen of the present-day survival of magic – two-thirds of the world’s population believing in it, practicing it: Lord, look at Haiti – well, I thought, if it
were
something supernatural, something not quite of this world, why, then, Canevin, the logic of it all pointed toward the one possibly surviving elemental rather than in some other direction.

‘For – don’t you see? – man has ousted those others, by his own control of the three other elements, earth, fire, water! The whole land surface of this planet, practically, has been subjected to human use – agriculture, mines, cities built on it – and water the same. We have dominated the element of water, reduced to its allotted sphere in this man-ruled world – ships, submarines, steam – Lord, there’s no end to our use of water! Fire, too, Canevin. We have it – er – harnessed, working for us, in every ship’s engine room, every dynamo and factory, in every blast-furnace, cook-stove, campfire, automobile.

‘And in all this civilization-long process, the one single element that has remained unsubdued, untamed, is air. We are a long way from what people smugly call “the conquest of air”, Canevin, a mighty long way, even though we have started in on that, too. Even fire is controllable. Fires do not start by themselves. There is no such thing as “spontaneous combustion”! But who, Canevin, can control the winds of heaven?

‘Maybe there’s more in what I’ve just said than appears on the surface. Take astrology for example. Modern science laughs at astrology, puts it in the same category as those Bodily Humours, the Melancholic, and the rest of them! Astronomers nowadays, scientists busy measuring light-years, the chemistry of Antares, whether or not there is barium on Mars, the probable weight of Eros, or the “new” one, Pluto – those fellows tell us the old beliefs about the stars are so much junk. Why? Well, because, they say, the old ideas of things like zodiacal groups and so forth are “unscientific”, formulated on the basis of how the stars look from the earth’s surface, merely! Artificial, unscientific! The stars must be looked at mathematically, they tell us, not as they appear from your gallery at night.

‘But, Canevin, which of those modern sharps has told us where one
should
stand, to view the heavens? And – speaking pragmatically; that’s a good scientific word! – which of them has done more than figure out weights, distances – what of them, dry approximations of alleged facts, Canevin? – a lot of formulas like the inside of an algebra book. Which of them, the modern scientific astronomers, from my good old Professor Pickering at Harvard down – for he was the king-pin of them all – has given humanity one single, practical, useful fact, out of all their up-to-the minute modern science? Answer: not one, Canevin!

‘And here’s the red meat in that account – think of this, Canevin, in the light of relativity, or the Quantum Theory if you like; that’s “modern” and “scientific” enough, God knows: the astrological approach is the normal approach, Canevin,
for the people living on this planet
. We have to view the heavens from here, because that’s where Almighty God Who made us and them put us. That’s the only viewpoint we have, Canevin, and – it works; it possesses the – er – pragmatic sanction of commonsense!

‘Well, now, to get down to the brass tacks of this thing, the thing we’ve been through together, I mean: what is it, as we human beings, constrained to live on earth and meet earth conditions know it, that upsets our schemes, plans and calculations as we deal with the three elements that we
have
brought under control, subdued? It’s air, Canevin.

‘It’s air and air alone that sends hurricanes into these latitudes and knocks out the work and hopes of decades of effort; takes crops, animals, buildings. It’s the air that just this season smashed things to pieces right nearby here, in Nicaragua; knocked old Santo Domingo City into a cocked hat. Plants can’t grow, leaf-plants especially, without air. Without air fire itself refuses to burn. That’s the principle of all the workable fire extinguishers. Without air man and animals can’t breathe, and die like fish out of water, painfully. Without air – but what’s the use of carrying it further, Canevin?

‘I had, of course, the first day and night, alone, to think in. All that, and a lot more besides, went into those cogitations of mine under that tree in the Great Circle both before and after I was there all by myself; mostly after, when I had nothing else to do but think. You see? It wasn’t so very hard to figure out, after all.

‘But figuring it out was less than half the battle. I was appalled, Canevin, there with my merely human brain figuring out the possible combinations, at what He could do, if He happened to take it into His head. His head! Why, He could merely draw away the breathable air from around us three intruders, and we’d flop over and pass out then and there. He could blast us into matchwood with a hurricane at any moment. He could – well, there’s no use going over all the things I figured that He could do. The ways of the gods and the demigods have never been the ways of men, Canevin. All literature affirms that. Well, He didn’t do any of those things. He was going at it His way. How to circumvent Him, in time!
That
was the real problem.