Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (56 page)

‘I had, theoretically at least, all three of the other elements to use against Him, the same as every man has – such as a dugout of earth, out there in Kansas, against a tornado of wind; a log fire, to get over the effects of a New England blizzard. I put my mind on it, Canevin, and decided to use Fire
– to burn down the tree
! I did it, toward dusk of the second day.

‘I soaked it, all over the trunk and lower part, and as far up as I could reach and throw, with the gasoline from the plane’s tanks. I used it all. I was counting, you see, on the rescue plane following our route the next morning when we hadn’t shown up in Belize; but, if I couldn’t get you and Wilkes back I was pretty thoroughly dished anyhow, and so, of course, were you two fellows.

‘I lighted it and ran, Canevin, ran out of the shade – there wouldn’t be any left in a short time anyhow – and over to the plane and sat down under the farther wing where I could get a good look through the binoculars at those savages down yonder. I wanted to see how the idea of my fighting one element with another would strike them.

‘It struck them right enough!

‘There had been plenty of gasoline. The fire roared up the dry tree. It was blazing in every twig, it seemed, inside two minutes after I had set it going. Talk of a study in primitive fear! Psychology! I had it right there, all around me. The only kick I had coming was that I couldn’t watch it all at once. It was like trying to take in a forty-ring circus with one pair of eyes!

‘They liked it, Canevin! That much was clear enough anyhow.

‘It was a medium-sized limb, burned halfway through, which broke off and fell between me and the main blaze, that suddenly gave me the big idea. So far I hadn’t planned beyond destroying the tree, His bridge between the earth and wherever He was. But then it suddenly flashed through my mind that here was a chance to enlist those aborigines, while they were all together, and in the mood, so to speak. I went over and picked up that blazing limb. It made a magnificent torch, and, holding it above my head where it blazed as I walked in the falling dusk, I proceeded, slow and-dignified, down toward the place at the jungle’s rim where they seemed to be most thickly congregated.

‘I had the wit to sing, Canevin! Never knew I could sing, did you? I did then, all the way, the best stab I could make at a kind of paean of victory. Do you get the idea? I walked along steadily, roaring out at the top of my voice. There weren’t any particular words – only a lot of volume to it!

‘It occurred to me halfway down that out of those thousands some certainly would know Spanish. The idea took hold of me, and by the time I had got near enough to make them understand I had some sentences framed up that would turn them inside-out if it got across to their primitive minds! I stopped, and raised the torch up high over my head, and called it out like old Cortez ordering a charge!

‘For a few instants right afterwards I waited to see the effect, if any. They seemed to be milling around more or less in groups and bunches. That, I figured, would be the fellows who understood Spanish telling the others! Then – then it worked, Canevin! They prostrated themselves, in rows, in battalions, in tribes! And every one of them, I was careful to notice, still kept within the safe shelter of the woods. I had, you see, told them who I was, Canevin! I was the Lord of the Fire, that was all, the Great Friend of mankind, the Lord, the Destroyer, the Big Buckaroo and High Cockalorum of all the Elements, and pretty much everything else besides. Spanish lends itself, somehow, to those broad, general statements!

‘And then, once again, I had an inspiration. I gathered myself together after that first blast that I had turned loose on them, and let go another! This time I informed them that I was destroying my enemy the Ruler of the Air, who was their enemy as well – I gathered that, of course, from their fear of the Circle – Who had been having His own way with them for a couple of thousand years or thereabouts; that they could see for themselves that I was right here on the tabu place the Circle, and unharmed; and then I called for volunteers to come out of the woods and
stand beside me in the Circle
!

‘Canevin, there was a silence that you could have cut with a knife. It lasted and lasted, and lasted! I began to get afraid that perhaps I had gone too far, in some unrealizable way – with savages, you know: not a single, solitary sound, not a whisper, from that mob weighed down with sixty generations of fear.

Then – to a rising murmur which grew into a solid roar of astonishment – one of them, an upstanding young man with an intelligent face, stepped out toward me. I suppose that fellow and his descendants will have epic songs sung about them for the next sixty generations, nights of the full moon.

‘I had the general idea, you see, of getting this mob convinced: the new harmlessness of the ancient tabu-ground for conclusive evidence; and then enlisting them. Precisely what I was going to do with them, what to set them at doing, wasn’t so clear as the general idea of getting them back of me.

‘And right then, when it was working, everything coming my way, I very nearly dropped my authoritative torch, my symbol of the firepower! I went cold, Canevin, from head to foot; positively sick, with plain, shaking, shivering fear! Did they all suddenly start after me with their throw-sticks and blow-guns? Did an unexpected hurricane tear down on me? No. Nothing like that. I had merely thought, quite suddenly, out of nowhere, of something! The air was as calm around me as ever. Not an Indian made a hostile gesture. It was an idea that had occurred to me – fool, idiot, moron!

‘It had just struck me, amidships, that in destroying the tree, His bridge to earth, I might have cut you and Wilkes off forever from getting back! That was what made the quick, cold sweat run down into my eyes; that was what sent waves of nausea over me.

‘I stood there and sweated and trembled from head to foot. It was only by sheer will power that I kept the torch up in the air, a proper front before those still thousands. My mind reeled with the trouble of it. And then, after a sudden silence, they started yelling themselves blue once more, with enthusiasm over that champion of champions who had dared to step out on the forbidden ground; to enter the Circle for the first time in history – their history.

‘That paladin was close to me now, coming on steadily, confidently, quite nearby. My eyes went around to him He was a fine, clean-cut-looking person. He stopped, and raised his hands over his head, and made me a kind of salaam.

‘The whole yowling mob quieted down again at that – wanted to see what I’d do to him, I suppose.

‘I stepped over to him and handed him the torch. He took it, and looked me in the eye. He was some fellow, that young Indian!

‘I spoke to him, in Spanish: “Exalted Servant of the Fire, indicate to me now the direction of the other forbidden place, where He of the Wind places his foot upon the earth.” Every chance the three of us had in the world was staked on that question, Canevin; on the idea that lay behind it; on the possibility that there was more than one bridge-place like this Great Circle where we stood. It was, of course, merely a piece of guesswork.

‘And, Canevin, he raised his other arm, the one that was not holding the torch, and pointed and answered: “Straight to the south, Lord of Fire!” ’

‘Canevin, I could have kissed that Indian! Another chance! I went up to him and hugged him like a bear. I don’t know what he thought of that. I didn’t give him time to think, to make up his mind. I held him off at arms’ length as though he had been my favorite brother-in-law that I hadn’t seen for a couple of years! I said to him: “Speak, heroic Servant of the Fire – name your reward!”

‘He never hesitated an instant. He knew what he wanted, that fellow – saw this was his big chance. He breathed hard. I could see his big chest go in and out. He’ll go a long way, believe me, Canevin!

‘ “The lordship over – these!” he said, with a little gasp, and pointed with the torch, around the circle. I raised both my hands over my head and called out: “Hearken, men of this nation! Behold your overlord who with his descendants shall rule over all your nations and tribes and peoples to the end of time. Down – and salute your lord!”

A little later, when they got it, as they dropped in rows on their faces, Canevin, I turned to that fellow holding the torch, and said: “Call them together; make them sit in a circle around us here. Then the first thing you are to do is to pick out the men you want to help you govern them. After that, tell them they are to listen to me!”

‘He looked me in the eye again, and nodded. Oh, he was an intelligent one, that fellow! To make a long story short, he did just that; and you can picture us there in the moonlight, for the moon had a chance to get going long before the Indians were arranged the way I had said, the new king bossing them all as though he had never done anything else, with me standing there in the center and haranguing them – I’d had plenty of time, you see, to get that speech together – and, as I palavered, the interpreters relayed it to the rest.

‘The upshot of it all was that we started off for the place, the other place where He could “put his foot upon the earth” as I had said, the place where we found you. It took us all night, even with that willing mob swinging their machetes.’

I thanked Pelletier for his story. He had already heard the outline of mine, such as I have recounted here somewhat more fully. I let his account sink in, and then, as I have said, I was able to be myself again. Perhaps Pelletier’s very commonplace sanity, the matter-of-factness of his account, may have had something to do with this desirable effect. I do not know, but I am glad to be able to record the fact.

‘There is one thing not quite clear in my mind,’ said I, after Pelletier had finished.

‘Yes?’ said Pelletier, encouragingly.

‘That figure in the temple – Aquarius,’ I explained. ‘Just how did you happen to fasten on that? I understand, of course, why you destroyed it. It was, like the tree, one of His “foci”, a “bridge” to earth. By wiping those out, as I understand the matter, you broke what I might call his earth-power; you cut off his points of access. It’s mysterious enough, yet clear in a way. But how did you know that
that
was the focal point, so to speak? Why the statue? Why not, for example, the altar?’

Pelletier nodded, considering my questions. Then he smiled whimsically.

‘That’s because you do not know your astrology, Canevin!’ he said, propping his bulk up on one arm, for emphasis, and looking straight at me. He grinned broadly, like a mischievous boy. Then: ‘You remember – I touched on that – how important it is, or should be, as an element in a modern education! Aquarius would fool you; would puzzle anybody, I’ll grant you – anybody, that is, who doesn’t know his astrology! You’d think from his name that he was allied with the element of water, wouldn’t you, Canevin? The name practically says so: “Aquarius” – water-bearer. You’d think so, unless, as I say, you knew your astrology!’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘It’s too much for me, Pelletier. You’ll have to tell me, I’m afraid.’ It was plain that Pelletier held some joker up his sleeve.

‘Did you ever see a picture of Aquarius, Canevin, in which – stop and think a moment – he is not represented as
pouring water out
of that vessel of his? Aquarius is not the personage who
represents
water, Canevin. Quite the contrary, in fact. He’s the fellow who is getting rid of the water to make way for the air. Aquarius, in spite of his name, is the zodiacal symbol for
air
, not water, as you’d imagine if you didn’t know your astrology, Canevin! He is represented always as
pouring out water
, getting rid of it! Aquarius is
not
the protagonist of water. He is the precursor, the forerunner of air!’ As he said this, Dr Pelletier waved one of his big, awkward-looking hands – sure sign of something on his mind. I laughed. I admitted freely that my education had been neglected.

‘And what next?’ I asked, smiling at my big friend. He laughed that big contagious laugh of his.

‘Canevin,’ said he, wagging his head at me, ‘I’m wondering which of the archaeologists, or maybe some rank outsider, who will go to the top on it, and get D. Sc.’s all the way from Harvard to the University of Upsala – which of ’em will be the first to “discover” that the first Maya civilization is
not
defunct; knock the very best modern archaeological science endwise all over again, the way it’s constantly being done in every “scientific” field, from Darwin to Kirsopp Lake! An “epoch-making discovery”!’

Then, musing, seriously, yet with a twinkle in his kindly brown eyes: ‘I have great hopes of the leadership they’re going to get; that they’re getting, right now, Canevin. That was some up-and-coming boy, some fellow, that new king in Quintana Roo, the one I appointed, the new ruler of the jungle! Did you see him, Canevin, standing there, telling them what was what?

‘Do you know, I never even found out his name! He’s one of the very few, by the way – told me about it on the trek back to the Circle – who had learned the old language. It’s come down, you know, through the priests, here and there, intact, just as they used to speak it a couple of thousand years ago. Well, you heard him use it! Quite a group, I believe, keep it up, in and around Chichen-Itza particularly. He told them, he said, how fire had prevailed over their traditional air – Aquarius lying there, toppled off his pedestal, to prove it!’