Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (101 page)

The head, bloodlessly, as I had anticipated, fell to the floor, landing with only a slight,
soft
sound, rolled a few feet, and came to a pause against the baseboard of the room. The decapitated body swayed and buckled toward my right, and before it gave way completely and fell prone upon the bedroom floor, I had managed two more strokes, the first through the middle of the body, and the second a little above the knees.

Then, as these large fragments lay upon the floor, I chopped them, lightly, into smaller sections.

As I made the first stroke, that just above Mrs Lorriquer, severing the
plasma
stream, I heard from her a long, deep sound, like a sigh. Thereafter she lay quiet. There was no motion whatever from the sundered sections of ‘Simon Legrand’ as these lay, quite inert, upon the floor, and, as I have indicated, no flow of blood from them. I turned to the Colonel, who stood just at my shoulder witnessing this extraordinary spectacle.

‘It worked out precisely as we anticipated,’ I said. ‘The horrible thing is over and done with, now. It is time for the next step.’

The old Colonel nodded, and went to the door, which he opened, and through which he peered before stepping out into the hallway. Plainly we had made no noise. Mrs Preston and her babies were asleep. The Colonel brought the clothes-basket into the room, and rather gingerly at first, we picked up the sections of what had been ‘Simon Legrand’. They were surprisingly light, and, to the touch, felt somewhat like soft and pliant dough. Into the basket they went, all of them, and, carrying it between us – it seemed to weigh altogether no more than perhaps twenty pounds at the outside – we stepped softly out of the room, closing the door behind us, down the stairs, and out, through the dining room and kitchen into the walled backyard.

Here, in the corner, stood the wire apparatus wherein papers and light trash were burned daily. Into this, already half filled with various papers, the Colonel poured several quarts of kerosene from a large five-gallon container fetched from the kitchen, and upon this kindling we placed carefully the strange fragments from our clothes-basket. Then I set a match to it, and within ten minutes there remained nothing except small particles of unidentifiable trash, of the simulacrum of Simon Legrand.

We returned, softly, after putting back the kerosene and the clothes-basket where they belonged, into the house, closing the kitchen door after us. Again we mounted the stairs, and went into Mrs Lorriquer’s room. We walked over to the bed and looked at her. She seemed, somehow, shrunken, thinner than usual, less bulky, but, although there were deep unaccustomed lines showing in her relaxed face, there was, too, upon that face, the very ghost of a kindly smile.

‘It is just as you said it would be, Mr Canevin,’ whispered the Colonel as we tiptoed down the stone stairway. I nodded.

‘We will need an oiled rag for the sword,’ said I. ‘I wet it very thoroughly, you know.’

‘I will attend to that,’ said the Colonel, as he gripped my hand in a grasp of surprising vigor.

‘Good-night, sir,’ said I, and he accompanied me to the door.

The Colonel came in to see me about ten the next morning. I had only just finished a late ‘tea’, as the early morning meal, after the Continental fashion, is still named in the Virgin Islands. The Colonel joined me at the table and took a late cup of coffee.

‘I was sitting beside her when she awakened, a little before nine,’ he said, ‘and as she complained of an “all-gone” feeling, I persuaded her to remain in bed, “for a couple of days”. She was sleeping just now, very quietly and naturally, when I ran over to report.’

I called the following morning to inquire for Mrs Lorriquer. She was still in bed, and I left a polite message of good-will.

It was a full week before she felt well enough to get up, and it was two days after that that the Lorriquers invited me to dinner once more. The bulletins, surreptitiously reported to me by the Colonel, indicated that, as we had anticipated, she was slowly gaining strength. One of the Navy physicians, called in, had prescribed a mild tonic, which she had been taking.

The shrunken appearance persisted, I observed, but this, considering Mrs Lorriquer’s characteristic stoutness, was, actually, an improvement at least in her general appearance. The lines of her face appeared somewhat accentuated as compared to how she had looked before the last ‘manifestation’ of the ‘control’. Mrs Preston seemed worried about her mother, but said little. She was rather unusually silent during dinner, I noticed.

I had one final test which I was anxious to apply. I waited for a complete pause in our conversation toward the end of a delightful dinner, served in Mrs Lorriquer’s best manner.

‘And shall we have some Contract after dinner this evening?’ I inquired, addressing Mrs Lorriquer.

She almost blushed, looked at me deprecatingly.

‘But, Mr Canevin, you know – I know nothing of cards,’ she replied.

‘Why, Mother!’ exclaimed Mrs Preston from across the table, and Mrs Lorriquer looked at her in what seemed to be evident puzzlement. Mrs Preston did not proceed, I suspect because her father touched her foot for silence under the table. Indeed, questioned, he admitted as much to me later that evening.

The old gentleman walked out with me, and half-way up the hall when I took my departure a little before eleven, after an evening of conversation punctuated by one statement of Mrs Lorriquer’s, made with a pleasant smile through a somewhat rueful face.

‘Do you know, I’ve actually lost eighteen pounds, Mr Canevin, and that being laid up in bed only eight or nine days. It seems incredible, does it not? The climate, perhaps – ’

‘Those scales
must
have been quite off,’ vouchsafed Mrs Preston.

Going up the hill with the Colonel, I remarked: ‘You still have one job on your hands, Colonel.’

‘Wh – what is that, Mr Canevin?’ inquired the old gentleman, apprehensively.

‘Explaining the whole thing to your daughter,’ said I.

‘I dare say it can be managed,’ returned Colonel Lorriquer. ‘I’ll have a hack at that later!’

The Projection of Armand Dubois

Some time before my marriage, when I was living in Marlborough House, the old mansion on the hill back of the town of Frederiksted, on the West Indian island of St Croix – that is to say, before I became a landed-proprietor, as I did later, and was still making a veritable living by the production and sale of my tales – I had a next-door neighbor by the name of Mrs Minerva Du Chaillu. I do not know whether the late Monsieur Du Chaillu, of whom this good lady was the relict, was related or not to the famous Paul of that name, that slaughterer of wild animals in the far corners of the earth, who was, and may still be, for all I know, the greatest figure of all the big game hunters, but her husband, Monsieur Placide Du Chaillu, had been for many years a clergyman of the English Church on that strange island of St Martin, with its two flat towns, Phillipsbourg, capital of the Dutch Side, and Maragot, capital of the French Side.

The English Church was, and still is, existent only among the Dutch residents, Maragot being without an English Church. Therefore, Mrs Du Chaillu’s acquaintance, even after many years’ residence on St Martin, was almost entirely confined to the Dutch Side, where, curiously enough, English and French, rather than Dutch, are spoken, and which, although only eight miles from the French capital, has only slight communication therewith, because of the execrable quality of the connecting roads.

This old lady, well past seventy at the time, used to sit on her gallery late afternoons, when the fervor of the afternoon sun had somewhat abated, and rock herself steadily to and fro, and fan in the same indefatigable fashion as ancient Mistress Desmond, my landlady. Occasionally I would step across and exchange the time of day with her. I had known her for several years before she got her courage up to the point of asking me if some day I would not allow her to see some things I had written.

Such a request is always a compliment, and this I told her, to relieve her obvious embarrassment. A day or so later I took over to Mrs Du Chaillu a selection of three or four manuscript-carbons, and a couple of magazines containing my stories, and I could see her from time to time, afternoons, reading them. I could even guess which ones she had finished and which she was currently engaged in perusing, by the expression of her kindly face as she read.

Four or five days later she sent for me, and when I had gone across to her gallery, she thanked me, very formally as a finely-bred gentlewoman of several generations of West Indian background might be expected to do, handed back the stories, and, with much hesitation, and almost blushingly, intimated that she could tell me a story herself, if I cared to use it!

‘Of course,’ added Mrs Du Chaillu, ‘you’d have to change it about and embellish it a great deal, Mr Canevin.’

To this I said nothing, except to urge my old friend to proceed, and this she did forthwith, hesitating at first, then, becoming intrigued by the memories of the tale, with the flair of a quite unexpected narrative gift. During the first few minutes of the then halting recital, I interrupted occasionally, for the purpose of getting this or that point clear, but as the story progressed I quieted down, and before it was finished, I was sitting, listening as though to catch pearls, for here was my simon-pure West Indian ‘Jumbee’ story, a gem, a perfect example, and told – you may believe me or not, sir or madam – with every possible indication of authenticity. Unless there is something hitherto unsuspected (even by his best friends, those keenest of critics) with the understanding apparatus of Gerald Canevin, that story as Mrs Du Chaillu told it to him, had happened, just as she said it had – to her.

I will add only that I have not, to my knowledge, changed a word of it. It is not only not embellished (or ‘glorified’, as the Black People would say) but it is as nearly verbatim as I can manage it; and I believe it implicitly. It fits in with much that is known scientifically and verified by occult investigators and suchlike personages; it is typically, utterly, West Indian; and Mrs Du Chaillu would as soon vary one jot or tittle from the strict truth in this or any other matter, as to attempt to stand on her head – and that, if you knew the dear old soul as I do, with her rheumatism, and her seventy-six years, and her impeccable, lifelong respectability, is as much as to say, impossible! For the convenience of any possible readers, I will tell her story for her, as nearly as possible in her own words, without quotation marks . . .

I had been living in Phillipsbourg about two years; perhaps slightly longer (said Mrs Du Chaillu) when one morning I had occasion to go into my husband’s study, or office. Monsieur Du Chaillu – as he was generally called, of course, even though he was a clergyman of the Church of England – was, at the moment of my arrival, opening one of the two ‘strong-boxes’, or old-fashioned iron safes which he had standing side by side, and in which he kept his own money and the various parish funds of which he had charge.

The occasion of my going into his office, where he received the parishioners – you know in these West Indian parishes the Black People come in streams to consult ‘Gahd’s An’inted’ about every conceivable matter from a family row to a stolen papaya – was on account of Julie. Julie was a very good and reliable servant, a young woman whose health was not very good, and whom I was keeping in one of the spare-rooms of our house. The rectory was a large residence, just next-door to the Government House, and poor Julie did better, we thought, inside than in one of the servants’ rooms in the yard. Every day I would give Julie a little brandy. She had come for her brandy a few minutes before – it was about four-thirty in the afternoon – and I discovered that I would have to get a fresh bottle. Monsieur Du Chaillu was in the office and had the key of the big sideboard, and I had stepped in to get the key from him.

As I say, he was just opening one of the safes.

I said: ‘Placide, what are you doing?’ It was one of those meaningless questions. I could see clearly what he was doing. He was opening his safe, the one in which he kept his own private belongings, and I need not have asked so obvious a question.

My husband straightened up, however, not annoyed, you understand, but somewhat surprised, because I never entered his office as a rule, and remarked that he was getting some money out because he had a bill to pay that afternoon.

I asked him for the key to the sideboard and came and stood beside him as he reached down into the safe, which was the kind that opened with a great heavy lid on the top, like a cigar-box, or the cover for a cistern. He reached into his pocket with his left hand after the sideboard key, his right hand full of currency, and I looked into the safe. There on top lay a paper which I took to be a kind of promissory note. I read it, hastily. I was his wife. There was, I conceived, nothing secret about it.

‘What is this, Placide?’ I inquired.

My husband handed me the key to the sideboard.

‘What is what, my dear Minerva?’ he asked.

‘This note, or whatever it is. It seems as though you had loaned three hundred dollars a good while ago, and never got it back.’

‘That is correct,’ said my husband. ‘I have never felt that I wished to push the matter.’ He picked up the note with his now free left hand, in a ruminating kind of manner, and I saw there was another note underneath. I picked that one up myself, my husband making no objection to my doing so, and glanced through it. That, too, was for three hundred dollars. Both were dated between seventeen and eighteen years previously, that is, in the year 1863, although they were of different months and days, and both were signed by men at that time living in Phillipsbourg, both prosperous men; one a white gentleman-planter in a small way; the other a colored man with a not very good reputation, but one who had prospered and was accounted well-to-do.