Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (16 page)

The car was his immediate problem, but there was no way of solving that. There was, as he well knew, no water along the shore deep enough to permit his sending it at full speed over the edge into the lake, and so hiding it effectually.

He left it directly in the road, and slunk down to the lake shore at his right in search of a canoe.

His luck held. At the very first camp he reached he found not only canoes but a St Lawrence skiff, a staunch type of boat, round-bottomed, sharp-nosed at both ends, a boat capable, like a canoe, of being managed with a light paddle, but although equally fast, infinitely stauncher and less dangerous than any canoe.

Silently he launched out into the lake, and with swift, yet noiseless paddle-strokes shot his stolen skiff out into the black darkness in the direction of the Four Brothers . . .

These islands,
‘Les Isles des Quatre Vents’
of the
voyageurs
, are old haunts of the lake smugglers. They lie, from the viewpoint of one approaching them directly from the Point shore, in the order of a mouth, nose, and two eyes, roughly speaking. The nearest, called ‘the mouth’, was sighted after a few minutes of vigorous paddling by Godard, who passed it to the right or southerly direction. It had upon it a cabin, former residence of the keeper of the gulls, which are protected by state law. Godard was not looking for the comforts of cabins! He passed ‘the nose’, a low-lying, swampy island, and paddled on to the island which would correspond to the left eye. This, the most rarely visited of the islands, infested with gulls, presents, like its fellow ‘eye’, a precipitous shore all around, and is heavily forested with evergreens and thick virgin underbrush.

Guided precisely by the noise of the gulls, which are constantly bickering, and then by his own keen eyesight, Godard carefully navigated the little island, finally landing and drawing the skiff into a tiny bay which was little more than a cleft in the guano-covered rocks. He concealed the skiff, despite the darkness, with immense cleverness, and began the difficult ascent of the cliff.

At last, bruised, spent, and befouled with guano, he reached the summit, and half walked, half crawled through the tangled underbrush toward the almost impenetrable center.

In his ascent he had disturbed countless nesting gulls, and their din, to his trained and tautened nerves, was distracting, but the increased noise did not trouble him. The gulls were always at it, day and night, and such an increase would not be heard a mile and a half away on the sleeping Point. It was, curiously enough, the spider webs that really annoyed him. Undisturbed for centuries, these midnight spinners had worked and spun and plundered the air without hindrance.

As Godard pushed his precipitous way up the rocks and then again through the almost impenetrable underbrush, he was constantly brushing away long, clinging webs, which crossed and recrossed before his face and neck, and about his scratched and bleeding hands and wrists.

As he penetrated farther and farther toward the slightly conical center of this little island, it seemed to him that both the restraining pressure and the clinging tenacity of the webs were on the increase, but his native wit assured him that this impression was due to his fatigue and the reaction from the enormous amount of bad whisky he had imbibed during the afternoon.

He was, indeed, in the very depths of reactive depression. He cursed softly and bitterly, with a despairing note of self-pity, as the webs, ever thicker and stronger, as it seemed, appeared almost to reach out after him, to bar his way to effectual concealment.

At last, trembling in every limb, the salt sweat running into his parched mouth, shaking and weak, he observed that he was stepping slightly downhill. His progress since leaving the upper edge of the cliff had been slightly ascending. He had reached the approximate center of the island.

Wearily he paused, and almost sobbing out his bitter curses, tore fretfully, with trembling fingers, at a great mass of thick, silky web that had attached itself to his mouth.

As he looked about him through the darkness, and felt with his hands for a comparatively level place on which to sit down, he almost shrieked. He had put his hand down on something feathery, soft, and yielding to the touch. He looked, horrified, at the ground. Gibbering in mortal terror, he drew a box of matches from his pocket, and, cupping his hands, cautiously drew one across the side of the box. The flare of the safety-match revealed something white. He looked closer, stooping near the ground and carefully guarding the flame of his match, and he saw that it was the body of a gull.

Something, he thought, something that seemed as big as his two fists, scampered away through the underbrush, awkwardly, a lumpish kind of a thing. A mink, or weasel, his reason reassured him.

The match went out, burning his fingers, and a pall of sudden blackness fell upon him. Terrified, less moved with the caution of a lifelong habitude for concealment, now, he struck another match and examined the gull by its yellow flare.

From the bird’s throat ran two thin streams of blood. The blood stained his hands as he picked it up. The gull was warm, living. It struggled, sinuously, faintly, in his hands. All about it, about its head and about its legs, and pinning its powerful wings close to its side, ran great, silken swaths of spider’s web. The gull muttered, squeakingly, and writhed weakly between his hands. With a scream he could not suppress he hurled it from him and attempted to rush away from this place of horror.

But now, weakened by his exertions, his forces sapped by long debauchery, his nerves jangling from the terrific stress he had put upon them that night, he could not run. All about him the underbrush closed in, it seemed to him, as though bent malignantly upon imprisoning him here among these nameless, silent, spinning demons which had destroyed the gull.

He had hurled his matches away with that same flinging motion begotten of his horror. It was utterly impossible to recover them now.

The thick blackness had closed down upon him again at the burning out of the second match. He could feel the blood suffuse his entire body, and then recede, leaving him cold. He shivered, as he suddenly felt the sweat cold against his sodden body. Chill after chill raced down his spine. He whimpered and called suddenly upon God, the forgotten God of his erratic childhood.

But God, it seemed, had no answer for him. A soft touch came delicately upon the back of his clenched right hand. Something soft, clinging and silky, passed around it. Suddenly he shrieked again, and spasmodically tore his hand loose. But even as he struggled to free his hand, a terrible pain seared his leg, a pain as though he had stepped under water upon a sting-ray; a pain as though a red-hot poniard had been thrust far into his calf; and then something soft and clinging fell upon his head and he could feel the thick strands of silk being woven remorselessly through his hair and about his ears . . .

As he sank to the ground, his consciousness rapidly waning, the first clinging, composite, deliberate strands went across his eyes. His last conscious thought was of his daughter Kathleen’s soft, silky hair . . .

It was not until nearly two weeks later that the skiff came to light, when four large rowboats slowly approached
Les Isles des Quatre Vents
from the direction of the lake side of the base of the Point. Crowded into the boats were the boys from Camp Cherokee making one of their annual boat-hikes to the four islands. Their course naturally brought them first to the island which has been called ‘The Left Eye’.

The St Lawrence skiff, loosened from its primitive fastenings by a heavy storm which had intervened, had slipped out several feet from its concealing underbrush.

‘Oh, look! Somebody’s out here already!’ shouted a sharp-eyed youngster in the bow of the foremost rowboat.

‘Can’t we land here, Mr Tanner?’ asked one of the older boys when all eyes had sought out and discovered the skiff. ‘We have plenty of time. Nobody ever comes to this island, they say, and most of us saw the others last year.’

Consulting his watch, his mind on lunch ashore, the counselor in charge of the boat-hike gave his consent, and the four rowboats drew in close to the spot where Godard had made his landing. Mr Tanner looked closely at the skiff.

‘I shouldn’t be a bit surprised,’ he remarked, slowly, ‘if that were the skiff that was stolen from down on the Point a couple of weeks ago!’

The boys chattered excitedly while the boats lay off the shore of ‘The Left Eye’, Mr Tanner considering. It was not impossible that the murderer, Godard, lay concealed on this island! No one had hitherto thought of such a possibility.

Mr Tanner came to a conclusion, after rapid thought. He would take the skiff, thus cutting off the murderer (if indeed he were concealed on the island) from any probable escape. So far it appeared a clear course.

Two reliable, older boys, placed in charge of the salvaged skiff, returned to its owners, who promptly telephoned the sheriff.

Mr Tanner conducted his protesting flotilla across to the island which has been called ‘The Mouth’ – the island on which stood the hut, and where the boys’ temporary camp-site had been planned. The oars moved reluctantly, for the boys wanted to land and ‘hunt the murderer’. Mr Tanner, whose responsibility lay in another direction than the apprehension of criminals, preferred to proceed according to schedule.

Two hours later a laden rowboat put off from the Point and approached The Four Brothers. The watching boys, thus, as it were, augmented by the authorities, could be restrained no longer.

Mr Tanner was able to manage it so that his four rowboats followed the official rowboat to ‘The Left Eye’. Beyond that he could not control his Indians!

The boys nearly swamped their boats in their eagerness to disembark . . .

In the end it was one of them who did, actually, discover Godard’s remains.

‘Gosh!’ the rest heard him shout. ‘Look here, everybody! Here’s a thing like a mummy!’

The spot was soon surrounded, the more agile boys distancing the slower-moving sheriff and constables.

Godard’s body, easily identifiable from its clothing, lay, or, more precisely, hung, in the thickest tangle of all the tangled bushes and brush which made the central, highest point of the little island almost impenetrable. At first sight, it gave the impression of a bundle of clothes rather than a human body. It was, as the boy had cried out, virtually a mummy, though sodden through the draggled clothes (which Godard’s progress through the tearing brush had greatly disarranged) by the effects of the heavy storm which had revealed the skiff.

It gave the appearance of a human body which, as though by some long process of time, had dried up to a mere fraction of its original bulk. It swayed, held free of the ground by the heavy brush, in the brisk breeze which was blowing ‘up the lake’ from the cold north.

The grayish appearance of this strange simulacrum of a human form, which at first puzzled the men when they approached to disengage it from the tangled bushes, was found to be due to innumerable heavy strands of broad opalescent silky webbing, webbing which had been wound about the head, about the hands and arms and legs, webbing now frayed and torn in places by the wind and the friction of the bushes.

One of the constables, a heavy, rather brutal-faced person, pulled at it and rubbed it from his hands on his canvas overalls.

‘Looks for all the world like spider web,’ he remarked laconically. ‘What d’you s’pose it can be, Herb?’ addressing the deputy sheriff in charge.

Herb Maclear, the sheriff, pushed his way through the brush close to the body. He, too, examined the web, touching it gingerly with his finger, and then rubbing his finger as though something uncanny, unwholesome, had touched him. The boys, sensing something dreadful, fell silent. Several pushed their way toward Mr Tanner, and stood near him.

Maclear, pale now, stooped and seemed to be looking at something near the ground. ‘Gimme that stick!’ he ordered. One of the constables handed him what he demanded, and with it the sheriff poked at something on the ground. Their curiosity overcoming the general sense of something queer about the whole proceeding, several of the boys and two of the constables shouldered through the brush toward the sheriff, now digging with his stick, his face red again from stooping and his exertions.

Those standing nearest observed that the sheriff was enlarging a hole that ran into the ground near the heavy root of one of the bushes, a hole about which were heavy wraps of the same gray, shimmering web.

The stick broke through a soft spot, and sank far into the enlarged hole.

‘My God!’ they heard the sheriff say.

He played delicately with the stick, as though working at something that the ground obscured. He twisted and worked it about in the hole.

At last he drew it up, still carefully, gingerly.

And on its end, transfixed, there came into the light of that morning a huge, frightful, maimed thing, of satiny loathsome black, like the fur of a bat, with glowing salmon-colored striping showing upon its hunched back – a spider as large as a prize peach, with great, waving, now ineffective, metal-like mandibles. They say its little burning eyes like harsh diamonds gleam once, before the sheriff, holding it on the ground with his stick, set his foot on the dreadful thing.

The wind blew cold from the north as the men, in a tight knot, half dragged, half carried the meager body of Pierre Godard hastily out through the retarding brush in silence, while a subdued and silent group of boys, closely gathered about their white-faced counselor, hurried down the declivity toward the edge of the cliff, below which they could see their boats, floating down there in the clean water.