Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (48 page)

Pelletier and I looked at each other, and there was no smile in the eyes of either one of us.

We sat down on the grass then as though by agreement. Again we looked at each other. I seemed to feel the tree’s derision; more openly now, less like a delicate hint, a nuance. It seemed to me quite open now, like a slap in the face! Here indeed was an unprecedented predicament. We were all ready to depart, and we had no pilot. Our pilot had merely performed a commonplace act. He had climbed a tree.

But – he had not come down – that was all.

It seemed simple to state it to oneself that way, as I did, to myself. And yet, the implications of that simple statement involved – well, what
did
they involve? The thing, barring an accident: Wilkes having fallen into a decay-cavity or something of the sort; or a joke: Wilkes hiding from us like a child among the upper branches – barring those explanations for his continued absence up there and his refusal to answer when called to, the thing was – well, impossible.

Wilkes was a grown man. It was inconceivable that he should be hiding from us up there. If caught, somehow, and so deterred from descending, at least he could have replied to Pelletier’s hail, explained his possible predicament. He had, too, gone far up into the tree. I had seen him go up agilely after my initial helping hand. He was, indeed, well up and going higher far above the lower trunk area of possible decay-cavities, when I had left him to put the lunch basket back in the plane. He had been up nearly twenty minutes now, and had not come down. We could not see him. A slightly cold sensation up and down my spine came like a presage, a warning. There seemed – it was borne in abruptly upon me – something sinister here, something menacing, deadly. I looked over at Pelletier to see if anything of this feeling might be reflected in his expression, and as I looked, he spoke.

‘Canevin, did you notice that this deforested area is circular?’

I nodded.

‘Does that suggest anything to you?’

I paused, took thought. It suggested several things, in the light of my recent, my current, feeling about this place centered about its great tree. It was, for one thing, apparently an unique formation in the topography of this peninsula. The circularity suggested an area set off from the rest, and by design – somebody’s design. The ‘ring’ idea next came uppermost in my mind. The ring plays a large part in the occult, the preternatural: the elves’ ring; dancing rings (they were grassy places, too); the Norman cromlechs; Stonehenge; the Druidical rites; protective rings, beyond the perimeter of which the Powers of Evil, beleaguering, might not penetrate . . . I looked up from these thoughts again at Pelletier.

‘Good God, Pelletier! Yes – do you imagine  . . . ?’

Pelletier waved one of his big, awkward-looking hands, those hands which so often skirted death, defeated death, at his operating table.

‘It’s significant,’ he muttered, and nodded his head several times. Then: ‘That gust of wind, Canevin – remember? It was
that
which took Wilkes’s coat up there, made him climb after it; and now – well, where is he?’

I shook my head slowly. There seemed no answer to Pelletier’s question. Then: ‘What is it, Pelletier?’

Pelletier replied, as was usual with him, only after some additional reflection and with a certain deliberateness. He was measuring every word, it seemed.

‘Every indication, so far, points to – an air-elemental.’

‘An air-elemental?’ The term, with whatever idea or spiritual entity, or vague, unusual superstition underlay its possible meaning, was familiar to me, but who – except Pelletier, whose range of knowledge I certainly had never plumbed – would think of such a thing in this connection?

‘What is an air-elemental?’ I asked him, hoping for some higher information.

Pelletier waved his hand in a gesture common to him.

‘It would be a little difficult to make it clear, right off the bat, so to speak, Canevin,’ said he, a heavy frown engendered by his own inability to express what might be in that strange, full mind of his, corrugating his broad forehead. ‘And even if I had it at my tongue’s end,’ he continued, ‘it would take an unconscionable time.’ He paused and looked at me, smiling wryly.

‘I’ll tell you, Canevin, all about them, if we ever get the chance.’ Then, as I nodded, necessarily acquiescing in this unsatisfactory explanation, he added: ‘That is, what little, what very little, I, or indeed anybody, knows about them!’

And with that I had, perforce, to be satisfied.

It seemed to my taunted senses, attuned now to this suggested atmosphere of menace which I was beginning to sense all about us, that an intensified rustle came from the tree’s leaves. An involuntary shudder ran over my body. From that moment, quite definitely, I felt it: the certain, unmistakable knowledge that we three stood alone, encircled, hemmed in, by something; something vast, powerful beyond all comprehension, like the incalculable power of a god, or a demigod; something elemental and, I felt, old with a hoary antiquity; something established here from beyond the ken of humanity; something utterly inhuman, overwhelmingly hostile, inimical, to us. I felt that we were on Its ground, and that It had, so far, merely shown us, contemptuously, the outer edge of Its malice and of Its power. It had, quietly, unobtrusively, taken Wilkes. Now, biding Its time, It was watching, as though amused; certain of Its malignant, Its overwhelming, power; watching us, waiting for Its own good time to close in on us . . .

I stood up, to break the strain, and walked a few steps toward the edge of the tree’s nearly circular shade. From there I looked down that gentle slope across the motionless short grass through the shimmering heat waves of that airless afternoon to the tree-horizon.

What was that? I shaded my hands and strained my vision through those pulsating heat waves which intervened; then, astonished, incredulous, I ran over to the plane and reached in over the side and brought out the high-powered Lomb-Zeiss binoculars which Bishop Dunn at Belize had loaned me the evening before. I put them to my eyes without waiting to go back into the shade near Pelletier. I wanted to test, to verify, what I thought I had seen down there at the edge of the encircling forest; to assure myself at the same time that I was still sane.

There at the jungle’s edge, clear and distinct now, as I focused those admirable binoculars, I saw, milling about, crowding upon each other, gesticulating wildly – shouting, too, soundlessly of course, at that distance from my ears – evidencing in short the very apogee of extreme agitation; swarming in their hundreds – their thousands, indeed – a countless horde of those dull-witted brown Indians, still named Mayas, some four hundred thousand of which constitute the native population of the Peninsula of Yucatan – Yucatan province, Campeche, and Quintana Roo.

All of them, apparently, were concentrated, pointing, gesticulating, upon the center of the great circle of grassland, upon the giant tree – upon us.

And, as I looked, shifting my glasses along great arcs and sections of the jungle-edged circle, fascinated by this wholly bizarre configuration, abruptly, with a kind of cold chill of conviction, I suddenly perceived that, despite their manifest agitation, which was positively violent, all those excited Indians were keeping themselves rigidly within the shelter of the woods. Not one stepped so much as his foot over that line which demarcated the forested perimeter of the circle, upon that short grass.

I lowered the glasses at last and walked back to Pelletier. He had not moved. He raised to me a very serious face as I approached.

‘What did you see down there, Canevin?’ He indicated the distant rim of trees.

He listened to my account as thought preoccupied, nodding from time to time. He only became outwardly attentive when I mentioned how the Indians kept back to the line of trees. He allowed a brief, explosive ‘Ha!’ to escape him when I got to that.

When I had finished: ‘Canevin,’ said he, gravely, ‘we are in a very tight place.’ He looked up at me still gravely, as though to ascertain whether or not I realized the situation he had in mind. I nodded, glanced at my watch.

‘Yes,’ said I, ‘I realize that, of course. It is five minutes to three. Wilkes has been gone up there, three-quarters of an hour. That’s one thing, explain it as you may. Neither of us can pilot a plane; and, even if we were able to do so, Pelletier, we couldn’t, naturally, go back to Belize without Wilkes. We couldn’t account for his disappearance: “Yes, Mr Commissioner, he went up a tree and never came down!” We should be taken for idiots, or murderers! Then there’s that – er – horde of Indians, surrounding us. We are hemmed in, Pelletier, and there are, I’d say, thousands of them. The moment they make up their minds to rush us – well, we’re finished, Pelletier,’ I ended these remarks and found myself glancing apprehensively toward the rim of jungle.

‘Right enough, so far!’ said Pelletier, grimly. ‘We’re “hemmed in”, as you put it, Canevin, only perhaps a little differently from the way you mean. Those Indians’ – his long arm swept our horizon – ‘will never attack us. Put that quite out of your mind, my dear fellow. Except for the fact that there’s probably only food enough left for one scant meal, you’ve summed up the – er – material difficulties. However – ’

I interrupted.

‘That mob, Pelletier, I tell you, there are thousands of them. Why should they surround us if – ’

‘They won’t attack us. It isn’t
us
they’re surrounding, even though our being here is, in a way, the occasion for their assembly down there. They aren’t in any mood to attack anybody, Canevin
– they’re frightened
.’

‘Frightened?’ I barked out. ‘Frightened! About what, for God’s sake?’ This idea seemed to me so utterly far-fetched, so intrinsically absurd, at first hearing – after all, it was I who had watched them through the binoculars, not Pelletier who sat here so calmly and assured me of what seemed a basic improbability. ‘It doesn’t seem to make sense to me, Pelletier,’ I continued. ‘And besides, you spoke just now of the “material” difficulties. What others are there?’

Pelletier looked at me for quite a long time before answering, a period long enough for me to recapitulate those eerier matters which I had lost sight of in what seemed the imminent danger from those massed Indians. Then: ‘Where do you imagine Wilkes is?’ inquired Pelletier. ‘Can you – er – see him up there?’ He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb, as artists and surgeons point.

‘Good God, Pelletier, you don’t mean  . . . ?’

‘Take a good look up into the tree,’ said Pelletier, calmly. ‘Shout up to him; see if he answers now. You heard me do it. Wilkes isn’t deaf!’

I stood and looked at my friend sitting there on the grass, his ungainly bulk sprawled awkwardly. I said nothing. I confess to a whole series of prickly small chills up and down my spine. At last I went over close to the enormous bole and looked up. I called: ‘Wilkes! Oh
Wilkes
!’ at the top of my voice, several times. I desisted just in time, I think, to keep an hysterical note out of that stentorian shouting.

For no human voice had answered from up there – only, as it seemed to me, a now clearly derisive rustle, a kind of thin cacophony, from those damnable fluttering leaves which moved without wind. Not a breath stirred anywhere. To that I can take oath. Yet those leaves . . .

The sweat induced by my slight exertions even in the tree’s shade, ran cold off my forehead into my eyes; down my body inside my white drill clothes. I had seen no trace of Wilkes in the tree, and yet the tree’s foliage for all its huge bulk was not so dense as to prevent seeing up into every part of it. Wilkes had been up there now for nearly an hour. It was as though he had disappeared from off the face of the earth. I knew now, clearly, what Pelletier had had in mind when he distinguished between our ‘material’ and other difficulties. I walked slowly back to him.

Pelletier had a somber look on his face.

‘Did you see him?’ he asked. ‘Did he answer you?’ But, it seemed, these were only rhetorical questions. Pelletier did not pause for any reply from me. Instead, he proceeded to ask more questions.

‘Did you see any ants on the trunk? You were quite close to it.’ Then, not pausing: ‘Have you been troubled by any insects since we came down here, Canevin? Notice any at lunch, or when you took the lunch basket back to the plane?’ Finally, with a sweeping, upward gesture: ‘Do you see any birds, Canevin?’

I shook my head in one composite reply to these questions. I had noticed no ants or any other insects. No bird was in flight. I could not recall, now that my attention had been drawn to the fact, seeing any living thing here besides ourselves. Pelletier broke in upon this momentary meditation.

‘The place is tabu, Canevin, and not only to those Indians down there in the trees – to everything living, man! – to the very birds, to the ground game, to the insects!’ He lowered his voice suddenly to a deep significant resonance which was purely tragic.

‘Canevin, this is a theater of very ancient Evil,’ said Dr Pelletier, ‘and we have intruded upon it.’

After that blunt statement, coming as it did from a man like Dr Pelletier, I felt, strange as it seems, better. That may appear the reverse of reason; yet, it is strictly, utterly true. For, after that, I knew where we stood. Those eery sensations which I have mentioned, and which I had well-nigh forgotten in the face of the supposed danger from that massed horde of semi-savages in the forest, crystallized now into the certainty that we stood confronted with some malign menace, not human, not of this world, something not to be gaged or measured by everyday standards of safety. And when I, Gerald Canevin, know where I stand in anything like a pinch, when I know to what I am opposed, when all doubt, in other words, is removed, I act!