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

by Henry S. Whitehead

  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, di
scover 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.

  Tea Leaves

  The Spanish War had not yet broken in upon the late nineties when the great day came for Miss Abby Tucker – the day on which she deposited the last fifteen dollars which completed her Europe Fund. Five hundred dollars. At last the end of that desperate scrimping! Here was the price completed of a Cook’s Tour, and an extra hundred for presents, every expenditure planned and polished to a hard brilliancy in the imagination-mill of a frugal little New England school-teacher.

  Few people had heard of ‘nervous reactions’ in 1897, but Miss Abby had one as she stepped out of the bank. Perhaps a too-steady diet of bread and tea had something to do with it. But for all her meager little body, Miss Abby possessed a soul above nervous reactions. She stopped, and drew several deep breaths when her heart began to flutter and race, but she soon dispelled the effects of her ‘turn’ by the recollection that it was now only the beginning of the Easter vacation. She had three whole months left in which to arrange the last, fascinating detail of her tour!

  There was, for example; the Tower of London. There was also Stratford-on-Avon. There was Vesuvius, and the Temples at Paestum. Miss Abby did hope they might go to Paestum. That was culture! She had steeped her soul in culture, at second-hand, chiefly through the works of Miss Constance Fenimore Woolson, of which Sophia Granniss approved strongly. Miss Granniss, who taught English Literature at the High School, insisted, too, on the necessity of a sojourn on or near the Grand Canal, the study of the Doge’s Palace, and at least slight cultural familiarity – as she called it – with the great Church of Santa Maria della Salute. There were, too, the pigeons on the Piazza. That Piazza! Miss Abby’s thoughts carried her happily to all these, and to other, anticipated delights. There was the Campanile, and the Four Bronze Horses of San Marco. Napoleon, she knew, had either brought them there or carried them away! She never could remember which. She must look that up. Anyhow, they were there now to be gazed at. Sophia Granniss said that the glimpse one had of Monte Rosa over in Italy, as one traversed the Gemmi Pass from Spiess to Kandersteg, was ‘sublime’, and urged Miss Abby not to miss that whatever else she might do. ‘You simply must take that walk, Miss Tucker,’ she had remarked. ‘If you don’t, you’ll live to regret it. Now mark my words!’

  The nervous reaction had gone about its business. Miss Abby picked her careful way along the muddy street to her boarding-house. It would not be necessary to crimp quite so closely during the last school term before vacation in June. Miss Abby gained a pound and a quarter during that term.

  It was a happy period for her, what with its constant references to the guide-books she got in turn from the public library of the little Vermont town, the minute arrangements for her departure, and especially, the high lights of certain necessary purchases. These included a steamer-rug, a shawl-strap with a leather handle, which Sophia Granniss had insisted upon, and a new valise. Then there was finally the almost suffocating experience of drawing the four hundred dollars for Thomas Cook and Sons and sending it off in four postal money orders at one fell swoop.

  The next day after the closing of school she went to Boston to interview the agent of the steamship line about her accommodations. Sophia Granniss had insisted that ‘the personal touch’ in all such matters was absolutely necessary, and Miss Abby, feeling – a little goaded, went. She did not succeed in interviewing the steamship agent himself, although she inquired for him. She did see a very polite young English clerk, however. He was very polite indeed.

  ‘I’ve come to see about my accommodations on board the Ruritania sailing the twenty-third, from Hoboken, New Jersey,’ began Miss Abby. The clerk smiled delightfully, Miss Abby thought.

  ‘I’m sorry. There are no accommodations on board the Ruritania. That is a “one-class” ship, you know, and Cook and Sons have booked her all up.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, I know that. You see, I’m going with that – ah – group. I only wish to make the arrangements about my cabin.’

  The clerk disclaimed responsibility.

  ‘That, you see, is all arranged between the agency and the – that, ah – tou – their clients, you know. I mean to say we only make over the entire ship to them and they make the indiv
idual arrangements.’

  Miss Abby was distinctly disappointed. The ‘personal touch’ then, would involve going on to New York and interviewing Messrs Cook and Sons. That was out of the question, impossible – financially impossible. She ruminated, a gloved finger against her lips.

  ‘But I’m certain to have a cabin to myself, am I not?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘Well, you see – I mean to say – that – ah – depends! Might I venture to inquire – ah – how much – hm! I – ah – mean to say – ’

  Miss Abby relieved the embarrassment of the young Englishman.

  ‘I am paying four hundred dollars,’ she informed him.

  ‘I fear – I really am afraid – that you wouldn’t have the sole use of a cabin. These tours are very popular, you know, and there will be a good many people. Probably they will pack you in, rather.’

  Miss Abby thanked him, and took advantage of being in Boston to visit her married sister in Medford. She returned two days later, regretting the certainty that at the price she had paid she could not have the privacy of even the tiniest cabin, but resolved that, come what might, the strong-minded Miss Granniss should keep her finger out of the pie from then on! It was to be her tour; not Sophia Granniss’s. Sophia Granniss had had hers!

  At last the day of departure dawned. Several friends came to the station to see her off, proffering advice to the very last. The traveler for foreign parts sighed with relief as the train chug-chugged its deliberate way out of the railroad station with stentorian whoopings from the engine-whistle. She settled herself luxuriously to the perusal of a newly-bought magazine, but the perusal was sketchy for her heart was singing within her exultantly.

  In a kind of happy daze she braved the unaccustomed terrors of crossing New York City, of threading the mazes of an uncharted Hoboken, of finding the right pier, and finally, of making herself known to the tour conductor. If anybody had taken especial notice of Miss Abby – which nobody did – while the liner was slipping down the bay with her nose to the open sea, such person would have caught a glimpse of a perfect, whole-souled happiness.