Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (61 page)

I turned about, almost reluctantly, drawn somehow, in spite of myself, to the scene of combat. The grunts had ceased now, and to my ears, in the quiet of that perfect night of soft airs and moonlight, there came the even more horrible little sound of the tearing of flesh! It was gruesome, quite horrible, well-nigh unbearable. I paused again, a little shaken, it must be confessed, my nerves a trifle unstrung. I was facing in the direction of the ripping sounds now. Then there was silence – complete, tranquil, absolute!

Then I stepped towards the scene of this small conflict, my flashlight sweeping that corner of the yard nearest the small alleyway.

It picked up the victim almost at once, and I thought – I could not be quite sure – that I saw at the very edge of the circle of illumination, the scrambling flight of the victor. The victim was commonplace. It was the body, still slightly palpitating, of a large, well-nourished rat. The dead rat lay well out in the yard, its freshly drawn vital fluid staining a wide smear on the flagstone which supported it – a ghastly-looking affair. I looked down at it curiously. It had, indeed, been a ruthless attack to which this lowly creature had succumbed. Its throat was torn out, it was disembowelled, riven terrifically. I stepped back to Brutus’s cabin, went in, and picked up from a pile of them on his bureau a copy of one of our small-sheet local newspapers. With this, nodding smilingly at Brutus I proceeded once more to the scene of carnage. I had an idea. I laid the paper down, kicked the body of the rat upon it with my foot, and, picking up the paper, carried the dead rat into Brutus’s cabin. I turned up his lamp and carried it over to the bedside.

‘Do you suppose this was your animal, Brutus?’ I asked. ‘If so, you seem to be pretty well avenged!’

Brutus grinned and looked closely at the riven animal. Then: ‘No, sar,’ he said, slowly, ‘ ’Twas no rat whut attacked me, sar. See de t’roat, please, sar. Him ahl tore out, mos’ effectively! No, sar. But – I surmise – from de appearance of dis t’roat, de mouf which maim me on de laig was de same mouf whut completely ruin dis rat!’

And, indeed, judging from the appearance of the rat Brutus’s judgment might well be sound.

I wrapped the paper about it, said good night once more to Hellman, carried it out with me, threw it into the metal waste basket in which the house-trash is burned every morning, and went to bed.

At three minutes past four the next morning I was snatched out of my comfortable bed and a deep sleep by the rattle of successive shots from the wicked little automatic I had left with Brutus. I jumped into my bathrobe, thrust my feet into my slippers, and was downstairs on the run, almost before the remnants of sleep were out of my eyes and brain. I ran out through the kitchen, as the nearest way, and was inside Brutus’s cabin before the empty pistol, still clutched in his hand and pointed towards the open window, had ceased smoking. My first words were: ‘Did you get it, Brutus?’ I was thinking of the thing in terms of ‘It’.

‘Yes, sar,’ returned Brutus, lowering his pistol. ‘I t’ink I scotch him, sar. Be please to look on de window-sill. P’raps some blood in evidence, sar.’

I did so, and found that Brutus’s marksmanship was better than I had anticipated when I entrusted him with the gun. To be sure, he had fired off all seven bullets, and, apparently, scored only one hit. A small, single drop of fresh blood lay on the white-painted wooden window-sill. No other trace of the attacker was in evidence. My flashlight revealed no marks, and the smooth, freshly-whitewashed wall outside was unscathed. Unless the Thing had wings – something suddenly touched me on the forehead, something light and delicate. I reached up, grasping. My hand closed around something like a string. I turned the flashlight up and there hung a thin strand of liana stem. I pulled it. It was firmly fastened somewhere up above there. I stepped outside, with one of Brutus’s chairs, placed this against the outer wall under the window, and standing on it, raked the eaves with the flashlight. The upper end of the liana stem was looped about a small projection in the gutter, just above the window.

The Thing, apparently, knew enough to resort to this mechanical method for its second attack that night.

Inside, Brutus, somewhat excited over his exploit, found a certain difficulty in describing just what it was that had drawn his aim.

‘It hav de appearance of a frog, sar,’ he vouchsafed. ‘I is wide awake when de T’ing land himse’f ’pon de sill, an’ I have opportunity for takin’ an excellent aim, sar.’ That was the best I could get out of Brutus. I tried to visualize a ‘Thing’ which looked like a frog, being able to master one of our big, ferocious rats and tear out its inner parts and go off with them, not to mention liana stems with loop-knots in them to swing from a roof to an open window, and which could make a wound like the one above Brutus Hellman’s ankle. It was rather too much for me. But – the Reign of Terror had begun, and no mistake!

Running over this summary in my mind as I stood and listened to Brutus telling about his marksmanship, there occurred to me – in a somewhat fantastic light, I must admit – the idea of calling in ‘science’ to our aid, forming the fantastic element – that the Thing had left a clue which might well be unmistakable; something which, suitably managed, might easily clear up the mounting mystery.

I went back to the house, broached my medicine closet, and returned to the cabin with a pair of glass microscopic slides. Between these I made a smear of the still fresh and fluid blood on the window-sill, and went back to my room, intending to send the smear later in the morning to Dr Pelletier’s laboratory-man at the Municipal Hospital.

I left the slides there myself, requesting Dr Brownell to make me an analysis of the specimen with a view to determining its place in the gamut of West Indian fauna, and that afternoon, shortly after the siesta hour, I received a telephone call from the young physician. Dr Brownell had a certain whimsical cast apparent in his voice which was new to me. He spoke, I thought, rather banteringly.

‘Where did you get your specimen, Mr Canevin?’ he inquired. ‘I understood you to say it was the blood of some kind of lower animal.’

‘Yes,’ said I, ‘That was what
I
understood, Dr Brownell. Is there something peculiar about it?’

‘Well – ’ said Dr Brownell slowly, and somewhat banteringly, ‘yes – and no. The only queer thing about it is that it’s – human blood, probably a Negro’s.’

I managed to thank him, even to say that I did not want the specimen returned, in answer to his query, and we rang off.

The plot, it seemed to me, was, in the language of the tradition of strange occurrences, thickening! This, then, must be Brutus’s blood. Brutus’s statement, that he had shot at and struck the marauder at his open window, must be imagination – Negro talk! But, even allowing that it was Brutus’s blood – there was, certainly, no one else about to supply that drop of fresh fluid which I had so carefully scraped up on my two glass slides – how had he got blood, from his wounded lower leg, presumably, on that high window-sill? To what end would the man lie to me on such a subject? Besides, certainly he had shot at something – the pistol was smoking when I got to his room. And then – the liana stem? How was that to be accounted for?

Dr Brownell’s report made the whole thing more complicated than it had been before. Science, which I had so cheerfully invoked, had only served to make this mystery deeper and more inexplicable.

Handicapped by nothing more than a slight limp Brutus Hellman was up and attending to his duties about the house the next day. In response to my careful questioning, he had repeated the story of his shooting in all particulars just as he had recounted that incident to me in the gray hours of the early morning. He had even added a particular which fitted in with the liana stem as the means of ingress. The Thing, he said, had appeared to
swing down
onto the window-sill from above, as he, awake for the time being between catnaps, had first seen it and reached for the pistol underneath his pillow and then opened fire.

Nothing happened throughout the day; nor, indeed, during the Reign of Terror as I have called it, did anything untoward occur throughout, except at night. That evening, shortly after eight o’clock, Brutus retired, and Stephen Penn, who had accompanied him to his cabin, reported to me that, in accordance with my suggestion, the two of them had made an exhaustive search for any concealed ‘Thing’ which might have secreted itself about Brutus’s premises. They had found nothing, and Brutus, his window open, but provided with a tight-fitting screen which had been installed during the day, had fallen asleep before Stephen left. Penn had carefully closed the cabin door behind him, making sure that it was properly latched.

The attack that night – I had been sleeping ‘with one eye open’ – did not come until two o’clock in the morning. This time Brutus had no opportunity to use the gun, and so I was not awakened until it was all over. It was, indeed, Brutus calling me softly from the yard at a quarter past two that brought me to my feet and to the window.

‘Yes,’ said I, ‘what is it, Brutus?’

‘You axed me to inform you, sar, of anything,’ explained Brutus from the yard.

‘Right! What happened? Wait, Brutus, I’ll come down,’ and I hurriedly stepped into bathrobe and slippers.

Brutus was waiting for me at the kitchen door, a hand to his left cheek, holding a handkerchief rolled into a ball. Even in the moonlight I could see that this makeshift dressing was bright red. Brutus, it appeared, had suffered another attack of some kind. I took him into the house and upstairs, and dressed the three wounds in his left cheek in my bathroom. He had been awakened without warning, fifteen minutes before, with a sudden hurt, had straightened up in bed, but not before two more stabs, directly through the cheek, had been delivered. He had only just seen the Thing scrambling down over the foot of the bed, as he came awake under the impetus of these stabs, and, after a hasty search for the attacker had wisely devoted himself to staunching his bleeding face. Then, trembling in every limb, he had stepped out into the yard and come under my window to call me.

The three holes through the man’s cheek were of equal size and similar appearance, obviously inflicted by some stabbing implement of about the diameter of a quarter-inch. The first stab, Brutus thought, had been the one highest up, and this one had not only penetrated into the mouth like the others, but had severely scratched the gum of the upper jaw just above his eye-tooth. I talked to him as I dressed these three wounds. ‘So the Thing must have been concealed inside your room, you think, Brutus?’

‘Undoubtedly, sar,’ returned Brutus. ‘There was no possible way for it to crawl in ’pon me – de door shut tight, de window-screen undisturb’, sar.’

The poor fellow was trembling from head to foot with shock and fear, and I accompanied him back to his cabin. He had not lighted his lamp. It was only by the light of the moon that he had seen his assailant disappear over the foot of the bed. He had seized the handkerchief and run out into the yard in his pajamas.

I lit the lamp, determining to have electricity put into the cabin the next day, and, with Brutus’s assistance, looked carefully over the room. Nothing, apparently, was hidden anywhere; there was only a little space to search through; Brutus had few belongings; the cabin furniture was adequate but scanty. There were no superfluities, no place, in other words, in which the Thing could hide itself.

Whatever had attacked Brutus was indeed going about its work with vicious cunning and determination.

Brutus turned in, and after sitting beside him for a while, I left the lamp turned down, closed the door, and took my departure.

Brutus did not turn up in the morning, and Stephen Penn, returning from an investigatory visit to the cabin, came to me on the gallery about nine o’clock with a face as gray as ashes. He had found Brutus unconscious, the bed soaked in blood, and, along the great pectoral muscle where the right arm joins the body, a long and deep gash from which the unfortunate fellow had, apparently, lost literally quarts of blood. I telephoned for a doctor and hurried to the cabin.

Brutus was conscious upon my arrival, but so weakened from loss of blood as to be quite unable to speak. On the floor, beside the bed, apparently where it had fallen, lay a medium-sized pocket knife, its largest blade open, soaked in blood. Apparently this had been the instrument with which he had been wounded.

The doctor, soon after his arrival, declared a blood-transfusion to be necessary, and this operation was performed at eleven o’clock in the cabin, Stephen contributing a portion of the blood, a young Negro from the town, paid for his service, the rest. After that, and the administration of a nourishing drink, Brutus was able to tell us what had happened.

Against his own expectations, he had fallen asleep immediately after my departure, and curiously, had been awakened not by any attack upon him, but by the booming of a
rata
drum from somewhere up in the hills back of the town where some of the Negroes were, doubtless, ‘making magic’, a common enough occurrence in any of the
vodu
-ridden West India islands. But this, according to Brutus, was no ordinary awakening.

No – for, on the floor, beside his bed,
dancing to the distant drumbeats
, he had seen – It!

That Brutus had possessed some idea of the identity or character of his assailant, I had, previous to this occurrence of his most serious wound, strongly suspected. I had gathered this impression from half a dozen little things, such as his fervid denial that the creature which had bitten him was either a rat or a mongoose; his ‘Gawd know’ when I had asked him what the Thing was like.