Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (67 page)

Keeping my eye on the upturned shell, I stepped over to the center of the ballroom and picked up a week-old Sunday supplement rotogravure section of one of the New York newspapers, crumpled it, folded it into a kind of wad, and with this, very gingerly – for the tarantula is a fighter and no timid beast – effectually stopped up the long triangular entrance to the shell’s inside. Then, picking it up, I carried it outside onto the stone-flagged gallery.

Here things were appreciably lighter. The dawn was brightening into the tropic day every instant, and I could now see everything clearly.

I raised the conch-shell and brought it down crashing on the tessellated floor.

As I had expected, the old shell smashed into many fragments, and I stood by, my black wattle raised and ready to strike at the tarantula as it attempted to run away. I had figured, not unnaturally, that the experience of having its rocklike refuge suddenly picked up, carried away, and then crashing to pieces about itself, would, from the tarantula’s viewpoint, prove at least momentarily disconcerting, and I should have a chance to slay the loathsome thing at my leisure. But, to my surprise, nothing ran out of the shattered shell.

I bent and looked closer. The fragments were relatively both large and small, from powdery dust all the way to a few chunks as big as my two fists. I poked at one of these, of an extraordinary and arresting shape, a strangely suggestive shape, though colored a dirty pink like the rest of the conch’s lining. I turned it over with the end of my stick.

It was the hand of a Negro, which, lying palm upward, had at first seemed pink. The palm of the hand of the blackest of black Africans is pink. So is the sole of the foot. But there was no mistaking the back of that sooty, claw-like thing. It was a severed hand, and it had originally grown upon an owner who had no admixture of any blood other than that of Africa. The name ‘Tancrède’ leapt to my mind. Had he not, even among his fellow slaves, been called ‘Black Tancrède’? He had, and my knowledge of that ancient tale and the sooty duskiness of this ancient relic conspired forthwith to cause me to leap to that outrageous, that incredible conclusion. The hand of Black Tancrède – this was a right hand, and so, said tradition, was the one which had first been severed and then disappeared – or, at least, the veritable hand of some intensely dark Negro, lay there before me on the gallery floor, among the debris of an ancient conch-shell.

I drew a deep breath, for it was an unsettling experience, stooped, and picked the thing up. It was as dry and hard as so much conch-shell, and surprisingly heavy. I looked at it carefully, turning it about and examining it thoroughly; for I was alone on the gallery. Nobody was stirring in the hotel; even the kitchen was silent.

I slipped the hand into the pocket of my drill jacket, and returned to Number 4. I laid the hand down on the marble-topped table which stands in the room’s center, and looked at it. Stephen, I had noted at once, was absent. He had got up, and was now, doubtless, in his shower-bath.

I had not been looking at it very long, before an explanation, too far-fetched to be dwelt upon or even to be seriously entertained, was invading my dazed mind. Something on five or six ‘legs’ had run under that conch-shell. Nothing, save this, had been there when I smashed the shell. There were the surface facts, and I was my own witness. There was no hearsay about it. This was no black Quashee tale of marvels and wonderment.

I heard a pad-pad outside, like slippered feet, and I had the thing in my pocket again when Stephen came in, glowing from his shower. I did not want to explain that hand to the boy.

‘Good morning, Cousin Gerald,’ said Stephen. ‘You got off early, didn’t you? I heard your alarm-clock but I turned over and went to sleep again.’

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘You see, I have a lot of work to get through today.’

‘I’d have gone with you,’ continued Stephen halfway into his fresh clothes by now, ‘if you’d waked me up! I’m going to six o’clock church if I can make it.’

He dressed rapidly, and with another pleasant, hasty word or two, the boy was off, running. The ‘English Church’ is quite near by.

I got up, left Number 4 empty, crossed the ballroom diagonally, and entered Mr Reynolds’s sanctum at its western extremity. I had thought of something. I
must
do what I could to clear up, or put away forever, if possible, that explanation, the details of which were invading my excited mind, pressing into it remorselessly.

I went to the lowest shelf of one of his bookcases, and took out the three heavy, calf-bound, ancient registers of the Hôtel du Commerce. I must find out, on the off-chance that the room numbers had not been changed since then, who had occupied Room 4 at the time of Black Tancrède’s execution and cursings. That, for the moment, seemed to me absolutely the salient fact, the key to the whole situation . . .

I could hardly believe my eyes when the faded entry, the ink brown, the handwriting oddly curlycued, jumped out at me.

For all of the years 1832, 1833, and most of 1834 besides, Room 4, Hôtel du Commerce, Raoul Patit, proprietor, had been occupied by one Hans de Groot. Hans de Groot had been Governor Gardelin’s judge of the Danish Colonial high court. Hans de Groot had condemned Black Tancrède to death, by amputation of hands, pinching, and breaking on the rack.

I had my explanation . . .

If only this were a romance, I should proceed to tell how thereafter I had applied, in the traditional method for the laying of this kind of ghost – a ghost with an unfulfilled desire, promise, or curse – how I had applied for permission to restore the hand to the resting-place of Black Tancrède. I should recite the examination of old records, the location of the lime-pit in the Fort yard; I might even have the horrible thing which lay in my jacket pocket ‘escape’ to wreak devastation upon me after unavailing efforts on my part to avoid destruction; a final twist of luck, the destruction of the hand . . .

But this is not romance, and I am not attempting to make ‘quite a tale’ of these sober facts.

What I did was to proceed straight to the hotel kitchen, where fat Lucinda the cook was cutting breakfast bacon at a table, and two dusky assistants were preparing grapefruit and orange-juice against the hour for breakfast.

‘Good morning, Lucinda,’ I began; ‘is your fire going?’

‘Marnin’, Mars’ Canevin, sar,’ returned Lucinda, ‘hot, good’n hot, sar. Is yo’ desirous to cook someting?’

Both handmaidens giggled at this, and I smiled with them.

‘I only have something I wish to burn,’ said I, explaining my early-morning visit.

I approached the glowing stove, anticipating Lucinda, and waving her back to her bacon-cutting, lifted a lid, and dropped the horrible, mummified thing into the very heart of a bed of cherry-colored coals.

It twisted in the heat, as though alive and protesting. It gave off a faint, strange odor of burning, like very old leather. But within a few moments the dry and brittle skin and the calcined bones were only scraps of shapeless, glowing embers.

I replaced the stove lid. I was satisfied. I would now satisfy Lucinda, if not her very natural curiosity. I handed her with an engaging smile one of the small, brown, five-franc currency bills which are still issued by the Dansk Vestindiske Nationalbank, and are legal tender in our Uncle Sam’s Virgin Islands.

‘May t’anks, sar; Gahd bless yo’, Mars’ Canevin, sar,’ muttered the delighted Lucinda.

I nodded to them and walked out of the kitchen reasonably certain that the Jumbee of Number 4 would trouble guests no more at four o’clock in the morning, nor at any other hour; that eternity had now swallowed Black Tancrède, who, tradition alleged, was a very persevering man and always kept his word . . .

It is true, as I remarked at the beginning of this narrative, that Black Tancrède did not curse Hans de Groot, but that Governor Gardelin went home to Denmark and so escaped – whatever whatever it was that happened to Achilles Mendoza and Julius Mohrs. Perhaps the persevering shade of Black Tancrède was limited, in the scope of its revengeful ‘projection’ through that severed hand, to the island on which he died. I do not know, although there are almost fixed rules for these things; rules in which Quashee believes religiously.

But, since that morning, I, truthful Gerald Canevin, confess, I have never seen any large spider without at least an internal shudder. I can understand, I think, what that strange mental aberration called ‘spider fear’ is like . . .

For I
saw
that thing which ran along the floor of the Grand Hotel ballroom like a maimed spider – I saw it go under that conch-shell. And it did not come out as it went in . . .

The Shadows

I did not begin to see the shadows until I had lived in Old Morris’s house for more than a week. Old Morris, dead and gone these many years, had been the scion of a still earlier Irish settler in Santa Cruz, of a family which had come into the Island when the Danes, failing to colonize its rich acres, had opened it, in the middle of the eighteenth century, to colonists; and younger sons of Irish, Scottish, and English gentry had taken up sugar estates and commenced that baronial life which lasted for a century and which declined after the abolition of slavery and the German bounty on beet sugar had started the long process of West Indian commercial decadence. Mr Morris’s youth had been spent in the French islands.

The shadows were at first so vague that I attributed them wholly to the slight weakness which began to affect my eyes in early childhood, and which, while never materially interfering with the enjoyment of life in general, had necessitated the use of glasses when I used my eyes to read or write. My first experience of them was about one o’clock in the morning. I had been at a ‘Gentlemen’s Party’ at Hacker’s house, ‘Emerald’, as some poetic-minded ancestor of Hacker’s had named the family estate three miles out of Christiansted, the northerly town, built on the site of the ancient abandoned French town of Bassin.

I had come home from the party and was undressing in my bedroom, which is one of two rooms on the westerly side of the house which stands at the edge of the old ‘Sunday Market’. These two bedrooms open on the market-place, and I had chosen them, rather than the more airy rooms on the other side, because of the space outside. I like to look out on trees in the early mornings, whenever possible, and the ancient market-place is overshadowed with the foliage of hundred-year-old mahogany trees, and a few gnarled ‘otaheites’ and Chinese-bean trees.

I had nearly finished undressing, had noted that my servant had let down and properly fastened the mosquito netting, and had stepped into the other bedroom to open the jalousies so that I might get as much of the night-breeze as possible circulating through the house. I was coming back through the doorway between the two bedrooms, and taking off my dressing gown, at the moment when the first faint perception of what I have called ‘the shadows’ made itself apparent. It was very dark, just after switching off the electric light in that front bedroom. I had, in fact, to feel for the doorway. In this I experienced some difficulty, and my eyes had not fully adjusted themselves to the thin starlight seeping in through the slanted jalousies of my own room when I passed through the doorway and groped my way toward the great mahogany four-poster in which I was about to lie down for my belated rest.

I saw the nearest post looming before me, closer than I had expected. Putting out my hand, I grasped – nothing. I blinked in some surprise, and peered through the slightly increasing light, as my eyes adjusted themselves to the sudden change. Yes, surely – there was the corner of the bedstead just in front of my face! By now my eyes were sufficiently attuned to the amount of light from outside to see a little plainer. I was puzzled. The bed was not where I had supposed it to be. What could have happened? That the servants should have moved my bed without orders to do so was incredible. Besides, I had undressed, in full electric light in that room, not more than a few minutes ago, and then the bed was standing exactly where it had been since I had had it moved into that room a week before. I kicked, gently, before me with a slippered foot, against the place where that bedpost appeared to be standing – and my foot met no resistance.

I stepped over to the light in my own room, and snapped the button. In the sudden glare, everything readjusted itself to normal. There stood my bed, and here in their accustomed places about the room were ranged the chairs, the polished wardrobe (we do not use cupboards in the West India Islands), the mahogany dressing table – even my clothes which I had hung over a chair where Albertina my servant would find them in the morning and put them (they were of white drill) into the soiled-clothes bag in the morning.

I shook my head. Light and shadow in these islands seem, somehow, different from what they are like at home in the United States! The tricks they play are different tricks, somehow.

I snapped off the light again, and in the ensuing dead blackness, I crawled in under the loose edge of the mosquito netting, tucked it along under the edge of the mattress on that side, adjusted my pillows and the sheets, and settled myself for a good sleep. Even to a moderate man, these gentlemen’s parties are rather wearing sometimes. They invariably last too long. I closed my eyes and was asleep before I could have put these last ideas into words.

In the morning the recollection of the experience with the bed-being-in-the-wrong-place was gone. I jumped out of bed and into my shower bath at half past six, for I had promised O’Brien, captain of the U.S. Marines, to go out with him to the rifle range at La Grande Princesse that morning and look over the butts with him. I like O’Brien, and I am not uninterested in the efficiency of Uncle Sam’s Marines, but my chief objective was to watch the pelicans. Out there on the glorious beach of Estate Grande Princesse (‘Big Princess’ as the Black People call it), a colony of pelicans make their home, and it is a never-ending source of amusement to me to watch them fish. A Caribbean pelican is probably the most graceful flier we have in these latitudes – barring not even the hurricane bird, that describer of noble arcs and parabolas – and the most insanely, absurdly awkward creature on land that Providence has cared in a light-hearted moment to create!