‘Dan Curtiss’s little boy, Truman, disappeared, late this afternoon, about sundown. Truman is five years old, a little fellow. He was last seen by some older kids coming back to town with berries from the Ridge, about suppertime. Little Truman, they said, was “with a lady”, just outside the Old Cemetery.
‘Two lambs and a calf have disappeared within the last week. Traced up there. A bone or two and a wisp of wool or so – the calf’s ears, in different places, but both up there, and part of its tail; found ’em scattered around when they got up there to look.
‘Some are saying “a cattymaount”. Most of ’em say dogs.
‘But – it isn’t dogs, Gerald. “Sheep-killers” tear up their victims on the spot. They don’t drag ’em three miles up a steep hill before they eat ’em. They run in a pack, too. Everybody knows that. Nothing like that has been seen – no pack, no evidences of a pack. Those lost animals have all disappeared singly – more evidence that it isn’t “dogs”. They’ve been taken up and, presumably, eaten, up on top of the Cemetery Ridge. Sheep-killing dogs don’t take calves, either, and there’s that calf to be accounted for. You see – I’ve been thinking it all out, pretty carefully. As for the catamount, well, catamounts don’t, commonly, live – and eat – out in the open. A catamount would drag off a stolen animal far into the deep woods.’
I nodded.
‘I’ve heard something about animals disappearing; only the way I heard it was that it’s been going on for quite a long time, and somewhat more intensively during the past month or so.’
Tom Merritt nodded at that. ‘Right,’ said he. ‘It’s been going on ever since those Persians left, Gerald. All the time they were here – six months it was – they always bought their house supply of meat and poultry alive, “on the hoof”. Presumably they preferred to kill and dress their meat themselves. I don’t know, for a fact, of course. Anyhow, that was one of the peculiarities of the “foreigners up at the Canevin Place”, and it got plenty of comment in the town, as you may well imagine. And – since they left – it hasn’t been only lambs and calves. I know of at least four dogs. Cats, maybe, too! Nobody would keep much account of lost cats in Chadbourne.’
This, somehow, surprised me. I had failed to hear about the dogs and possible cats.
‘Dogs, too, eh?’ I remarked.
Then Tom Merritt got up abruptly, off his stiff chair, and came over and stood close behind me and spoke low and intensively, and very convincingly, directly into my ear.
‘And now – it’s a child, Gerald. That’s too much – for this, or any other decent town. You’ve never lived in Persia. I have. I’m going to tell you in plain words what I think is going on. Try to believe me, Gerald. Literally, I mean. You’ve got to believe me – trust me – to do what you’ve got to do tonight because I can’t come right now. It’s going to be an ordeal for you. It would be for anybody. Listen to this, now.
‘This situation only came to me, clearly, just before I called you up, Gerald. I’d been sitting here, after supper, tied up on this Grantham case – waiting for them to call me. It was little Truman Curtiss’s disappearance that brought the thing to a head, of course. The whole town’s buzzing with it, naturally. No such thing has ever happened here before. A child has always been perfectly safe in Chadbourne since they killed off the last Indian a hundred and fifty years ago. I hadn’t seen the connection before. I’ve been worked to death for one thing. I naturally hadn’t been very much steamed up about a few lambs and dogs dropping out of sight.
‘That might mean a camp of tramps somewhere. But – tramps don’t steal five-year-old kids. It isn’t tramps that do kidnapping for ransom.
‘It all fitted together as soon as I really put my mind on it. Those Rustum Dadhs and their unaccountable reticence – the live animals that went up to that house of yours all winter – what I’d heard, and even seen a glimpse of – out there in Kut and Shiraz – that grim-jawed, tight-lipped chauffeur of theirs, with the wife that nobody ever got a glimpse of – finally that story of little Abby Chandler – ’
And the incredible remainder of what Doctor Thomas Merritt had to tell me was said literally in my ear, in a tense whisper, as though the teller were actually reluctant that the walls and chairs and books of that mellow old New England library should overhear the utterly monstrous thing he had to tell . . .
I was shaken when he had finished. I looked long into my lifelong friend Tom Merritt’s honest eyes as he stood before me when he had finished, his two firm, capable hands resting on my two shoulders. There was conviction, certainty, in his look. There was no slightest doubt in my mind but that he believed what he had been telling me. But – could he, or anyone, by any possible chance, be right on the facts? Here, in Chadbourne, of all places on top of the globe!
‘I’ve read about – them – in the Arabian Nights,’ I managed to murmur.
Tom Merritt nodded decisively. ‘I’ve seen – two,’ he said, quietly. ‘Get going, Gerald,’ he added; ‘it’s action from now on.’
I stepped over to the table and picked up my rifle.
‘And remember,’ he added, as we walked across the room to the door, ‘what I’ve told you about them. Shoot them down. Shoot to kill – if you see them. Don’t hesitate. Don’t wait. Don’t – er – talk! No hesitation. That’s the rule – in Persia. And remember how to prove it – remember the marks! You may have to prove it – to anybody who may be up there still, hunting for poor little Truman Curtiss.’
The office telephone rang.
Doctor Merritt opened the library door and looked out into the wide hallway. Then he shouted in the direction of the kitchen.
‘Answer it, Mehitabel. Tell ’em I’ve left. It’ll be Seymour Grantham, for his wife.’ Then, to me: ‘There are two search-parties up there, Gerald.’
And as we ran down the path from the front door to where our two cars were standing in the road I heard Doctor Merritt’s elderly housekeeper at the telephone explaining in her high, nasal twang of the born Yankee, imparting the information that the doctor was on his way to the agitated Grantham family.
I drove up to the old cemetery on the Ridge even faster than I had come down from my own hill fifteen minutes earlier that evening.
The late July moon, one night away from full, bathed the fragrant hills in her clear, serene light. Half-way up the hill road to the Ridge I passed one search-party returning. I encountered the other coming out of the cemetery gate as I stopped my steaming engine and set my brakes in front of the entrance. The three men of this party, armed with a lantern, a rifle, and two sizable clubs, gathered around me. The youngest, Jed Peters, was the first to speak. It was precisely in the spirit of Chadbourne that this first remark should have no direct reference to the pressing affair motivating all of us. Jed had pointed to my rifle, interest registered plainly in his heavy, honest countenance.
‘Some weepon – thet-thar, I’d reckon, Mr Canevin.’
I have had a long experience with my Chadbourne neighbors.
‘It’s a Männlicher,’ said I, ‘what is called “a weapon of precision”. It is accurate to the point of nicking the head off a pin up to about fourteen hundred yards.’
These three fellows, one of them the uncle of the missing child, had discovered nothing. They turned back with me, however, without being asked. I could have excused them very gladly. After what Tom Merritt had told me, I should have preferred being left alone to deal with the situation unaided. There was no avoiding it, however. I suggested splitting up the party and had the satisfaction of seeing this suggestion put into effect. The three of them walked off slowly to the left while I waited, standing inside the cemetery gate, until I could just hear their voices.
Then I took up my stand with my back against the inside of the cemetery wall, directly opposite the big Merritt family mausoleum.
The strong moonlight made it stand out clearly. I leaned against the stone wall, my rifle cuddled in my arms, and waited. I made no attempt to watch the mausoleum co
ntinuously, but ranged with my eyes over the major portion of the cemetery, an area which, being only slightly shrubbed, and sloping upward gently from the entrance, was plainly visible. From time to time as I stood there, ready, I would catch a faint snatch of the continuous conversation going on among the three searchers, as they walked along on a long course which I had suggested to them, all the way around the cemetery, designed to cover territory which, in the local phraseology, ran ‘down through’, ‘up across’, and ‘over around’. I had been waiting, and the three searchers had been meandering, for perhaps twenty minutes – the ancient town clock in the Congregational church tower had boomed ten about five minutes before – when I heard a soft, grating sound in the direction of the Merritt mausoleum. My eyes came back to it sharply.
There, directly before the now half-open bronze door, stood a strange, even a grotesque, figure. It was short, squat, thick-set. Upon it, I might say accurately, hung – as though pulled on in the most hurried and slack fashion imaginable – a coat and trousers. The moonlight showed it up clearly and it was plain, even in such a light, that these two were the only garments in use. The trousers hung slackly, bagging thickly over a pair of large bare feet. The coat, unbuttoned, sagged and slithered lopsidedly. The coat and trousers were the standardized, unmistakable, diagonal gray material of a chauffeur’s livery. The head was bare and on it a heavy, bristle-like crop of unkempt hair stood out absurdly. The face was covered with an equally bristle-like growth, unshaven for a month by the appearance. About the tight-shut, menacing mouth which divided a pair of square, iron-like broad jaws, the facial hairs were merged or blended in what seemed from my viewpoint a kind of vague smear, as though the hair were there heavily matted.
From this sinister figure there then emerged a thick, guttural, repressed voice, as though the speaker were trying to express himself in words without opening his lips.
‘Come – come he-ar. Come – I will show you what you look for.’
Through my head went everything that Tom Merritt had whispered in my ear. This was my test – my test, with a very great deal at stake – of my trust in what he had said – in him – in the rightness of his information; and it had been information, based on his deduction, such as few men have had to decide upon. I said a brief prayer in that space of a few instants. I observed that the figure was slowly approaching me.
‘Come,’ it repeated – ‘come now – I show you – what you, a-seek – here.’
I pulled myself together. I placed my confidence, and my future, in Tom Merritt’s hands.
I raised my Männlicher, took careful aim, pulled the trigger. I repeated the shot. Two sharp cracks rang out on that still summer air, and then I lowered the deadly little weapon and watched while the figure crumpled and sagged down, two little holes one beside the other in its forehead, from which a dark stain was spreading over the bristly face, matting it all together the way the region of the mouth had looked even before it lay quiet and crumpled up on the ground half-way between the mausoleum and where I stood.
I had done it. I had done what Tom Merritt had told me to do, ruthlessly, without any hesitation, the way Tom had said they did it in Persia around Teheran, the capital, and Shiraz, and in Kut-el-Amara, and down south in Jask.
And then, having burned my bridges, and, for all I knew positively, made myself eligible for a noose at Wethersfield, I walked across to the mausoleum, and straight up to the opened bronze door, and looked inside.
A frightful smell – a smell like all the decayed meat in the world all together in one place – took me by the throat. A wave of quick nausea invaded me. But I stood my ground, and forced myself to envisage what was inside; and when I had seen, despite my short retchings and coughings I resolutely raised my Männlicher and shot and shot and shot at moving, scampering targets; shot again and again and again, until nothing moved inside there. I had seen, besides those moving targets, something else; some things that I will not attempt to describe beyond using the word ‘fragments’. Poor little five-year-old Truman Curtiss who had last been seen just outside the cemetery gate ‘with a lady’ would never climb that hill again, never pick any more blueberries in Chadbourn or any other place . . .
I looked without regret on the shambles I had wrought within the old Merritt tomb. The Männlicher is a weapon of precision . . .
I was brought to a sense of things going on outside the tomb by the sound of running feet, the insistent, clipping drawl of three excited voices asking questions. The three searchers, snapped out of their leisurely walk around the cemetery, and quite near by at the time my shooting had begun, had arrived on the scene of action.
‘What’s it all about, Mr Canevin?’
‘We heard ye a-shootin’ away.’
‘Good Cripes! Gerald’s shot a man!’
I blew the smoke out of the barrel of my Männlicher, withdrew the clip. I walked toward the group bending now over the crumpled figure on the ground halfway to the cemetery gate.
‘Who’s this man you shot, Gerald? Good Cripes! It’s the fella that druv the car for them-there Persians. Good Cripes, Gerald – are ye crazy? You can’t shoot down a man like that!’
‘It’s not a man,’ said I, coming up to them and looking down on the figure.
There was a joint explosion at that. I waited, standing quietly by, until they had exhausted themselves. They were, plainly, more concerned with what consequences I should have to suffer than with the fate of the chauffeur.
‘You say it ain’t no man! Are ye crazy, Gerald?’
‘It’s not a man,’ I repeated. ‘Reach down and press his jaws together so that he opens his mouth, and you’ll see what I mean.’
Then, as they naturally enough I suppose hesitated to fill this order, I stooped down, pressed together the buccinator muscles in the middle of the broad Mongol-like cheeks. The mouth came open, and thereat there was another chorus from the three. It was just as Tom Merritt had described it! The teeth were the teeth of one of the great carnivores, only flat, fang-like, like a shark’s teeth. No mortal man ever wore such a set within his mouth, or ever needed such a set, the fangs of a tearer of flesh . . .
‘Roll him over,’ said I, ‘and loosen that coat so you can see his back.’
To this task young Jed addressed himself.
‘Good Cripes!’ This from the Curtiss fellow, the lost child’s uncle. Along the back, sewn thickly in the dark brown skin, ran a band of three-inch, coal-black bristles, longer and stiffer than those of any prize hog. We gazed down in silence for a long moment. Then: ‘Come,’ said I, ‘and look inside the Merritt tomb – but – brace yourselves! It won’t be any pleasant sight.’
I turned, led the way, the others falling in behind me. Then, from young Jed Peters: ‘You say this-here ain’t no man – an’ – I believe ye, Mr Canevin! But – Cripes Almighty! – ef this’n hain’t no man, what, a-God’s Name, is it?’
‘It is a ghoul,’ said I over my shoulder, ‘and inside the tomb there are ten more of them – the dam and nine whelps. And what is left of the poor little Curtiss child . . . ’
Looking into the mausoleum that second time, in cold blood, so to speak, was a tough experience even for me who had wrought that havoc in there. As for the others – Eli Curtiss, the oldest of the three, was very sick. Bert Blatchford buried his face in his arms against the door’s lintel, and when I shook him by the shoulder in fear lest he collapse, the face he turned to me was blank and ghastly, and his ruddy cheeks had gone the color of lead.
Only young Jed Peters really stood up to it. He simply swore roundly, repeating his ‘Good Cripes!’ over and over again – an articulate youth.
The whelps, with their flattish, human-like faces and heads, equipped with those same punishing, overmuscled jaws like their sire’s – like the jaws of a fighting bulldog – their short, thick legs and arms, and their narrow, bristly backs, resembled young pigs more nearly than human infants. All, being of one litter, were of about the same size; all were sickeningly blo
ody-mouthed from their recent feast. These things lay scattered about the large, circular, marble-walled chamber where they had dropped under the merciless impacts of my bullets.
Near the entrance lay sprawled the repulsive, heavy carcass of the dam, her dreadful, fanged mouth open, her sow-like double row of dugs uppermost, these dragged flaccid and purplish and horrible from the recent nursing of that lately-weaned litter. All these unearthly-looking carcasses were naked. The frightful stench still prevailed, still poured out through the open doorway. Heaps and mounds of nauseous offal cluttered the place.
It was young Jed who grasped first and most firmly my suggestion that these horrors be buried out of sight, that a curtain of silence should be drawn down tight by the four of us, fastened permanently against any utterance of the dreadful things we had seen that night. It was young Jed who organized the three into a digging party, who fetched the grave tools from the unfastened cemetery shed.
We worked in a complete silence, as fast as we could. It was not until we were hastily throwing back the loose earth over what we had placed in the sizable pit we had made that the sound of a car’s engine, coming up the hill, caused our first pause. We listened.
‘It’s Doctor Merritt’s car,’ I said, somewhat relieved. I looked at my wrist-watch. It was a quarter past midnight.
To the four of us, leaning there on our spades, Doctor Merritt repeated something of the history of the Persian tombs, a little of what he had come to know of those mysterious, semi-mythical dwellers among the half-forgotten crypts of ancient burial-grounds, eaters of the dead, which yet preferred the bodies of the living, furtive shapes shot down when glimpsed – in ancient, mysterious Persia . . .
Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) Page 26