Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (30 page)

He swam on steadily, these ideas uppermost in his mind. After what seemed a very long time, he raised himself, treading water, to make sure of his direction. He located the spar, straight in line with his course. To his surprise it seemed no nearer than when he had stood on the beach. This he attributed to the queer tricks of refraction, and resumed his swim.

After another long, steady period of progress in the same direction he repeated his lookout. Again he reassured himself as to his course. Once more he swam on, puzzled that the spar still seemed so distant. It was almost uncanny.

Suddenly, as this calamity usually comes, even to an expert swimmer, he began to tire. He rested, floating, for several minutes, and then, treading water, again oriented himself by the spar. He could perceive no difference in its appearance or nearness: For all the progress he had made he might as well have been standing on the beach! Then it came to him suddenly that his disintegration must have been making strides far more rapidly than he had imagined possible. He must have got only a little way from the island! How good it was – what a mercy – that it had this form, and not some other that would have been apparent to Marian.

Wearily he trod water again, and, locating the spar, turned himself directly around in the certainty of finding the island just at hand, his one hope being that he had got far enough away so that he might drown quietly here out of Marian’s view. He hoped she might not have remained on the beach. If so she would be puzzled at his slight progress, and would be watching him intently . . . He could never reach the spar. He could not, of course, go back. The solution rested upon his not returning, unless (how absurd it seemed!) he should, by that saving chance which by its casuistry saved his act from deliberate self-destruction, manage in some way to drive off the sharks, and, by a lucky dive, succeed in lighting upon one of his cartons . . .

He could not see the island! He shaded his eyes with his hands, and looked carefully. Could that be it? It must be. There was no other island within hundreds of miles. But – could he possibly have come so far? The island appeared to him almost low on the horizon. He must have been swimming steadily for hours. He could see the island in its entirety; perspective had made it small and compact. And he had dreaded Marian’s being on the beach to see!

Infinitely troubled, all his reasoning thrown askew, he rolled over upon his back and floated, trying to think consecutively. There was only one explanation for the apparently stationary spar. That must be the very common sea-mirage. That was what the islander had meant; what he could not explain! He, too, had seen the spar, had had it pointed out to him; and he had said it was almost too far for a company of men in the outriggers! How could he, in his decadent condition, have come such a distance as this toward it?

Then he recalled that he had been basing this present idea of decadence, of having covered only a short distance, on the fact that the spar had not appeared to grow in size. But that, as he had just rightly reasoned, was mirage! Reason allowed only one answer to the riddle. He had actually covered the great distance the time spent in the water would have permitted him to swim while in perfect condition.

He thought of his intended battle with the sharks. He shuddered, and imagined a shark just behind him, then laughed aloud at this fancy. Suddenly he sobered. He had laughed – laughed! A fitting conclusion to a perfectly normal sequence of ideas. He reasoned with himself afresh. What was the matter with him? This manner of thought, this great swim – these were not the ways of a cretin. He knew all about cretins! It was clearly, rather, what might be expected of a normal, healthily tired young man in magnificent physical condition, now floating for rest in this deep, very comfortable water, of high buoyancy; out here in the Pacific on a fool’s errand.

That errand! What had he been thinking of? To attempt to do battle with a school of sharks, armed with a coconut knife! He was a fool! To be out here when he might be on shore – with Marian!

He remembered, with a queer feeling in his head, how he had planned never to see her again. That was because of The Change which had begun to come upon him. The Change! Nonsense! There had been no change. No man could have traveled this distance from shore and kept his direction as he had done unless he were in the very pink of condition, every nerve and sinew and muscle, and a perfectly sound brain, functioning and coördinating with a precision that spelled perfection. Why, he had actually been obliged to hunt about to locate the island, he had come out so far!

He floated for a few minutes more, the soft, invigorating water lapping gently over him, his hands clasped under his head. Tentatively he rubbed himself over with his hands. Every muscle was responding, working splendidly. He was not even fagged, but only slightly winded by an exceptionally long and vigorous swim.

He began to swim back toward the island. He went slowly at first, because now it was only a question of ordinary judgment to conserve his strength.

Strength! He had almost never put out his full strength! He shook his head vigorously in sheer exuberance, blowing the water away from his mouth right and left as he cut easily and swiftly through it.

The conviction grew upon him, as he swam, it seemed, more and more easily and strongly in a straight line toward the island, that there was nothing to mark him off from any normal man – from ‘any
other
normal man’, he repeated his old phrase to himself. What if he had, all these years, been deluding himself through bondservice to a fear which had no longer any substantial foundation; fear derived from his father and his dear mother, and Dr Sturgis?

There was nothing to distinguish him from an average man – nothing, that was, except his magnificent strength, energy, and endurance. None but a normal man could possess and retain this command over himself, his mind and body. It was no wonder, though, that he had given in to it so long. It had been dinned into his ears since as long ago as he could remember. He had simply acquiesced in a wrong idea, that was all. He had been frightened of a bogle, like a child! But he would give in to it no longer. He had left that ancient bogle of the imagination out there where he had been floating and thinking; left it out there to toss about or sink to the bottom. The sharks could have it! He laughed aloud in sheer glee, knowing that he was released from that old bondage of an overstressed idea. He swam on and on.

He walked up the beach at last, slowly, and a little stiffly and wearily from the tremendous swim, the water running in crooked trickles down his well-oiled body. The knife swung awkwardly against his broad chest. It annoyed him, and he unslung it and carried it in his hand, dangling by the lanyard. Then a glint of iridescent green and blue caught his eye as something moved across an exposed rock and caught the light from the afternoon sun now slanting far down toward the western horizon. It was a huge land-crab.

He hurled the knife at it, throwing from the point. It was a long throw, but the heavy knife, whirling as it flew, struck with a metallic clash fairly among the great crab’s awkward legs. With a shout Renwick ran to his quarry, which, on its remaining sound legs, was attempting to drag itself away.

He picked it up, gingerly, and tied it to the lanyard, and then, with it swinging beside him, continued on his way.

He met Marian playing with some tiny children, her hair aureoled with flaming
flamboyant
. He held up the crab.

‘The only booty from that voyage, I’m sorry to say,’ he called out to her, ‘and I didn’t get
him
till after I was back on shore again. It was altogether too far. I’ll have to try it in an outrigger some day.’

‘Have you been swimming all this time?’ asked Marian. ‘I was beginning to worry about you a little!’

‘Never worry about me! Lord, Marian, but I’m hungry! I haven’t had a thing to eat since this morning.’

‘Bring along your crab, then,’ retorted Marian, rising from among the babies. ‘I wish I had some mayonnaise! My goodness, what a blessing it is that I’m a “natural cook”. I never saw such a caveman for food.’

Together they walked toward their hut, the great crab still struggling at the end of his string for the freedom he would never know again.

When the ‘natural cook’ had done her work and the crab, as such, had ceased to exist, Renwick, leaning back, addressed his wife.

‘I hope you won’t have to do this sort of thing very long, dear. Any time, of course, a ship may put in for water. Old “Parmenides” tells me there’s one nearly every year; and they’ve never gone longer than two years without one.’

‘But it’s perfect! I could live here forever – well, a year anyhow.’

She placed her chin on her hands and looked at him, her eyes like stars.

‘Then I’m satisfied,’ said Renwick, as he rose to stretch mightily the growing stiffness of his overtaxed muscles. ‘Let the ship sail in when she’s ready. I’m dead-tired after that swim. Do you mind if I turn in?’

‘I should think you would want to turn in, after that swim, and after last night. Do you realize that you sat out there in the moonlight, all by yourself, until after one o’clock by my wrist watch? It’s never missed a tick, all through everything.’

She shuddered a little and returned to the subject of his dissipation.

‘You may remember I had to wake you up this morning. You had only five hours of sleep!’

Just before he drifted into sleep that night he thought of the Caliban! He remembered his frightful delineation as the frontispiece of an old, leatherbound copy of
The Tempest
. It was something like that which had been at the back of his mind – his possible metamorphosis into Caliban! So he had phrased it to himself. Caliban!

And now? What was it in Ariel’s song? Something about a Change?

He hath suffered a sea change

Into something rich and strange!

The sea – the blessed sea! It had healed him, healed the wounds of his mind. He drifted into dreamless sleep with the sound of its distant thunder in his ears, like a great, kindly benediction.

The People of Pan

I, Gerald Canevin of Santa Cruz, have actually been down the ladder of thirteen hundred and twenty-six steps set into the masonry of the Great Cylinder of Saona; have marveled at the vast cathedral underground on that tropical island; have trembled under the menacing Horns of the Goat.

That this island, comparable in area with my own Santa Cruz, and lying as it does only an overnight’s sail from Porto Rico’s metropolis, San Juan, quite near the coast of Santo Domingo, and skirted almost daily by the vessels of the vast Caribbean trade – that such an island should have remained unexplored until our own day is, to me, the greatest of its many marvels. Through his discovery, Grosvenor is today the world’s richest man.

How, under these conditions, it could have been inhabited by a cultured race for centuries, is not hard, however, to understand. The cylinder – but the reader will see that for himself; I must not anticipate. I would note that the insect life has been completely re-established since Grosvenor’s well-nigh incredible adventure there. I can testify! I received my first (and only) centipede bite while on Saona with Grosvenor, from whose lips I obtained the extraordinary tale which follows . . .

‘But,’ protested Grosvenor, ‘how about the lighthouse? Isn’t there
anybody
there? Of course, I’m not questioning your word, Mr Lopez!’

‘Automatic light.’ The Insular Line agent spoke crisply. ‘Even the birds avoid Saona! Here – ask Hansen. Come here, will you, Captain?’

Captain Hansen of the company’s ship
Madeleine
came to the desk. ‘Vot iss it?’ he asked, steely blue eyes taking in Charles Grosvenor.

‘Tell Mr Grosvenor about Saona, Captain. You pass it twice a week on your run to Santo Domingo. I won’t say a word. You tell him!’

Captain Hansen lowered his bulk carefully into an office chair.

‘It iss a funny place, Saona. Me, I’m neffer ashore there. Nothing to go ashore
for
. Flat, it iss; covered down to de beach with mahogany trees – millions of mahogany trees. Nodding else – only beach. On one end, a liddle peninsula, and de automatic light. Nobody iss dere. De Dominican gofferment sends a boat vunce a month with oil for de light. Dat’s all I could tell you – trees, sand, a dead leffel; nobody dere.’

The captain paused to light a long black cigar.

Grosvenor broke a silence. ‘I have to go there, Captain. I am agent for a company which has bought a mahogany-cutting concession from the Dominican government. I have to look the place over – make a survey. Mr Lopez suggests that you put me ashore there on the beach.’

‘Goot! Any time you made de arrangement here in de office, I put you on shore dere, and – I’ll go ashore with you! In all de Seffen Seas neffer yet did I meet a man had been ashore on Saona. I t’ink dat yoost happens so. Dere iss noddings to go ashore for; so, efferybody sails past Saona.’

The captain rose, saluted the agent and Grosvenor gravely, and moved majestically toward the narrow stairs which led to the blazing sidewalk of San Juan below.

It required two weeks in
mañana
-land for Grosvenor to assemble his outfit for the sojourn on Saona. He was fortunate in discovering, out of work and looking for a job, a Barbadian negro who spoke English – the ancient island tongue of the buccaneers – and who labored under the name of Christian Fabio. Christian had been a ship’s steward. He could cook, and like most Barbadians had some education and preferred long, polysyllabic words.