I left my own car for the three fellows to get home in, young Jed promising to have it back in my garage later in the morning, and drove home with Doctor Merritt.
‘There was another thing which I didn’t take the time to tell you,’ said Tom, as we slipped down the winding hill road under the pouring moonlight. ‘That was that the Rustum Dadh’s servants were never seen to leave Chadbourne; although, of course, it was assumed that they had done so. The family went by train. I went down to the station to see them off and I found old Rustum Dadh even less communicative than usual.
‘ “I suppose your man is driving your car down to New York,” I said. It had arrived, six months before, when they came to Chadbourne, with both the servants in it, and the inside all piled up with the family’s belongings. The old boy merely grunted unintelligibly, in a way he had.
‘That afternoon, when I went up to your place to see that everything was ship-shape, there stood the car in the garage, empty. And, while I was wondering what had become of the chauffeur and his wife, and why they hadn’t been sent off in the car the way they came, up drives Bartholomew Wade from his garage, and he has the car-key and a letter from Rustum Dadh with directions, and a check for ten dollars and his carfare back from New York. His instructions were to drive the car to New York and leave it there. He did so that afternoon.’
‘What was the New York address?’ I inquired. ‘That might take some looking into, if you think – ’
‘I don’t know what to think – about Rustum Dadh’s connection with it all, Gerald,’ said Tom. ‘The address was merely the Cunard Line Docks. Whether Rustum Dadh and his family were – the same – there’s simply no telling. There’s the evidence of the live animals sent up to the house. That live meat may have been for the chauffer and his wife – seems unlikely, somehow. There was a rumor around town about some dispute or argument between the old man and his chauffeur, over their leaving all together – just a rumor, something picked up or overheard by some busybody. You can take that for what it’s worth, of course. The two of ’em, desirous to break away from civilization, revert, here in Chadbourne – that, I imagine, is the probability. There are many times the number of people below ground in the three old cemeteries than going about their affairs – and other people’s! – here in Chadbourne. But, whatever Rustum Dadh’s connection with – what we know – whatever share of guilt rests on him – he’s gone, Gerald, and we can make any one of the three or four possible guesses; but it won’t get us anywhere.’ Then, a little weariness showing in his voice, for Tom Merritt, too, had had a pretty strenuous evening, he added: ‘I hired young Jed Peters to spend tomorrow cleaning out the old tombhouse of the ancestors!’
I cleaned my rifle before turning in that night. When I had got this job done and had taken a boiling-hot shower-bath, it was close to two o’clock a.m. before I rolled in between the sheets. I had been dreading a sleepless night with the edge of my mind, after that experience up there on the Old Cemetery Ridge. I lay in bed for a while, wakeful, going over snatches of it in my mind. Young Jed! No deterioration there at any rate. There was a fellow who would stand by you in a pinch. The old yeoman stock had not run down appreciably in young Jed.
I fell asleep at last after assuring myself all over again that I had done a thorough job up there on the hill. Ghouls! Not merely Arabian Nights creatures, like the Afreets and the Djinn. No. Real – those jaws! They shot them down, on sight, over there in Persia when they were descried coming out of their holes among the old tomb-places . . .
Little, reddish, half-gnawed bones, scattered about that fetid shambles – little bones that had never been torn out of the bodies of calves or lambs – little bones that had been –
I wonder if I shall ever be able to forget those little bones, those little, pitiful bones . . .
I awoke to the purr of an automobile engine in second speed, coming up the steep hill to my farmhouse, and it was a glorious late-summer New England morning. Young Jed Peters was arriving with my returned car.
I jumped out of bed, pulled on a bathrobe, stepped into a pair of slippers. It was seven-thirty. I went out to the garage and brought young Jed back inside with me for a cup of coffee. It started that new day propitiously to see the boy eat three fried eggs and seven pieces of breakfast bacon . . .
Scar-Tissue
‘What is your opinion on the Atlantis question?’ I asked my friend Dr Pelletier of the U. S. Navy. Pelletier, relaxed during the afternoon swizzel hour on my West Gallery, waved a deprecating hand.
‘All the real evidence points to it, doesn’t it, Canevin? The harbor here in St Thomas, for instance. Crater of a volcano. What could bring a crater down to sea-level like that, unless the submergence of quadrillions of tons of earth and rock, the submergence of a continent?’
Then: ‘What made you ask me that, Canevin?’
‘A case,’ I replied. ‘Picked him up yesterday morning just after he had jumped ship from that Spanish tramp, the Bilbao, that was coaling at the West India Docks night-before-last and yesterday morning. She pulled out this afternoon without him. Says his name is Joe Smith. A rough and tough bird, if I ever saw one. Up against it. They were crowding him pretty heavily, according to his story. Extra watches. Hazing. Down with the damned gringo! Looks as if he could handle himself, too – hard as nails. I’ve got him right here in the house.’
‘What are you keeping him shut up for?’ enquired Pelletier lazily. ‘There isn’t anybody on his trail now, is there?’
‘No,’ said I. ‘But he was all shot to pieces from lack of sleep. Red rims around his eyes. He’s upstairs, asleep, probably dead to the world. I looked in on him an hour ago.’
‘What bearing has the alleged Joe Smith on Atlantis?’ Pelletier’s tone was still lazily curious.
‘Well,’ said I, having saved this up for my friend Pelletier to the last, ‘Smith looks to me as though he had one of those dashes of “ancestral memory”, like the fellow Kipling tells about, the one who “remembered” being a slave at the oars, and how a Roman galley was put together. Only, this isn’t any measly two thousand years ago. This is – ’
This brought Pelletier straight upright in his lounge-chair.
‘Good God, Canevin! And he’s here – in this house?’
‘I’ll see if he’s awake,’ said I, and went upstairs.
‘He’s getting cleaned up,’ I reported on my return.
‘That’s in his favor, anyhow,’ grunted Pelletier laconically.
Twenty minutes later Smith stepped out on the gallery. He looked vastly different from the beachcomber I had picked up near the St Thomas market-place the morning before. He was tall and spare, and my white drill clothes might have been made for him. He was cleanly shaved of a week’s stubble that had disfigured his bronzed face. His step was alert. Plainly, Joe Smith, Able Seaman, had taken hold of himself.
Pelletier did most of the talking. He was establishing a quick footing with Smith with a view to getting his story of the ‘buried memory’ which the fellow had mentioned to me, and which pointed, he had hinted, at Atlantis. There might be a half-hour’s entertainment in it, at the worst. At best, well, we would have to wait and see what Smith would have to say.
At the end of ten minutes or so, Pelletier surprised me.
‘What was your college, Smith?’ he enquired.
Smith’s reply knocked my preconceived opinion of him into a cocked hat.
‘Harvard, and Oxford,’ he answered. ‘Rhodes Scholar. Took my M.A. at Balliol. Yes, of course, Dr Pelletier. Ask me anything you like. This “buried memory” affair has come on me three different times, as a matter of fact. Always when I’m below par physically, a bit run down, vitality lower than normal. I mentioned it to Mr Canevin yesterday – sensed that he would be interested. I’ve read his stuff, you see, for the past dozen years or so!’
‘Tell us about it,’ invited Pelletier, and Joe Smith proceeded to do so, a tall tumbler of the iced swizzel on the table in front of him.
> ‘It began when I was a small boy, after scarlet fever. I got up too soon and went swimming, and had a relapse, and the next three or four days, lying in bed, and all in, I “realized” that I was memoriter familiar with a life of skin clothes with the fur on, and stone-headed clubs, and the ability to run long distances and go up and down trees without much effort, and all of us getting around a bear and clubbing it to death, and incidentally being dirty as a pig! The thing passed off, dimmed out, although the recollection remains quite clear, as soon as I was well again.
‘The second time was after the Spring track-meet with Yale when I was twenty-one. I had run in the 220, and then, half an hour later, I put everything I had into a gruelling quarter-mile, and won it. I was all in afterwards, didn’t come back properly, and our trainer sent me for a week’s rest to some people I knew who had their place open on the North Shore, at West Manchester, Massachusetts. I lay around and rested according to orders for a week – not even a book. There I “remembered” – not the cave-life this time – Africa. Portuguese and Negroes; enormous buildings, some of them with walls sixteen feet thick. Granite quarries and the Portuguese sweating the Blacks in some ancient gold mines. There were two rivers. I fished in them a great deal, with a big iron hook. They were called, the rivers, I mean, the Lindi and the Sobi.
‘Curious kind of place. There was one enormous ruin, a circular tower on top of a round hill which was formed by an outcropping in the granite. There was a procession of bulls carved around the pediment. Yes, and the signs of the Zodiac. Curious place, no end!’
‘Great Zimbábwe!’ I cried out, ‘in Southern Rhodesia. The Portuguese controlled it in the Fifteenth Century, before Columbus’ time. Why, man, that place is the traditional site of Solomon’s gold mines!’
‘Click!’ remarked Smith, turning an intelligent eye in my direction. ‘It was pronounced, in those days – “Zim-baub-weh” – accent on the first syllable. I’ve often wondered if it wasn’t the Romans who carved those bulls, they had the place first, called it Anaeropolis. Plenty of legionaries were Mithraists, and the bull was Mithras’s symbol, you know.’
‘And the last one, Smith,’ Pelletier cut in. ‘You mentioned Atlantis, Canevin tells me.’
‘Well,’ began Smith once more, ‘the fact that it was Atlantis is, really, secondary. There is one item in that “memory” which is of very much greater interest, I should imagine.
‘I don’t want to be theatrical, gentlemen! But – well, I think the best way to begin telling you about it is to show you this.’
And Joe Smith, rising and loosening his belt, pulled up his shirt and singlet, exposing the skin of a bronzed torso, and showed us something that literally drew a gasp from us both.
Beginning a half-inch above his right hip-bone and extending straight across as though laid out with a ruler across the abdomen, there ran a great, livid, inch-wide scar; the kind that would result from a very deep knife or sword-cut, provided anyone receiving such a wound should survive long enough for the cut to form scar-tissue.
‘Good God!’ I muttered, really aghast at the dreadful thing.
Pelletier laughed. ‘And – you’re alive and standing there!’ said he, almost caustically. Joe Smith tucked in his shirt, tightened his belt, and sat down again.
He lighted a cigarette, took a long sip from his tumbler of swizzel.
He crossed one knee over the other, leaned back in his chair, and looked at both of us, and blew out a reflective cloud of cigarette smoke.
‘That’s where it begins,’ said he, and, as my house-man, Stephen Penn, appeared at this moment with the dinner-cocktails, he added: ‘I’ll tell you about it after dinner.’
It was Pelletier who started things off so soon as we were settled on the gallery again, the coffee and Chartreuse on the big table.
‘I want to know, please, how you happen to be alive.’
Smith smiled wryly.
‘I never told this before,’ said he, ‘and if I was somewhat preoccupied during dinner it was because I’ve been figuring out how to put it all together for you.
‘During the course of that last “recollection” I spoke of it went through my mind – no! that trite phrase doesn’t give you the right idea. “Lived it over again” would be better. It’s hard to put into words but we’ll call it that! I was walking through a short enclosed passageway, rather wide, stone-flagged, and low-ceilinged. In front of me, beside me, and behind me walked eighteen or twenty others. We were all armed. Up in front of us in their bronze armor and closing our rear marched eight legionaries of the Ludektan army assigned to us as guards. We came out into the drenching sunlight of a great sanded arena. We followed our advance guard in a sharp turn to the right and wheeled to a right-face before a great awninged box full of the Ludektan nobles and dignitaries where we saluted, each after his own fashion with our variously assorted weapons.
‘Do you get that picture? Lemurians, gentlemen, every man jack of us! Prisoners of war – yes, and here we were after a couple of months of the hardest training I have ever known, in the Ludekta gladiatorial school; about to shed our blood to make an Atlantean holiday! Yes, Ludekta was the southwestern province of Atlantis, the cultural center of the continent. There had been innumerable wars between the Atlanteans and Lemuria. Like Rome and Carthage.
‘The really tough part of it was the uncertainty. I mean a fellow might be paired to fight to the death against some rather good pal, you know. I was one of the fortunate ones that day. I had the good luck to be paired with a Gamfron – a nearly black Atlantean mountain lion, an animal about the size and heft of an Indian black panther – Bagheera, in Kipling’s Mowgli yarn! I had been armed with a short, sharp, double-edged sword and a small, bronze buckler. I had otherwise been given choice of my own accoutrement and I had selected greaves, a light breast-plate and a close-fitting helmet with a face-guard attachment with eye-holes, which covered practically my whole face and the back and sides of my neck.
‘When it came my turn to step out on the sand and wait for my lion to be released, I asked the official in charge for permission to discard the buckler and use an additional weapon, a long dagger, in my left hand instead. I got the permission, and at the signal-blast which was made with a ram’s horn, walked slowly straight towards the cage entrance from which my brute adversary would in a moment be released. I had noted that the sun was shining directly, full against that particular iron door.
‘My strategy worked precisely as I had hoped.
‘The great lithe beast came straight out and paused blinking. Before its great cat eyes had adjusted themselves to the glare I had begun the attack myself. I launched myself upon the beast, and when I sprang away the hilt of that left-hand dagger was all that showed sticking straight up out of the Gamfron’s back, just within the shoulder attachment and in front of the foremost rib. The thirteen inches of steel were down inside that Gamfron to take up some of his attention! I had tried, you see, for a one-blow knockout – a thrust between the forward vertebrae, and I had missed it by half an inch. However, that first crack wasn’t so bad! While I gathered myself for its probable spring, for which the animal was already crouched, the Gamfron suddenly relaxed and rolled over in the sand; hoping, I suppose, in this way to dislodge that inconveniently placed annoyance. The hilt was bent over, I noticed, when this lightening-like movement had been concluded and the Gamfron was again crouched for its leap at me, right side up once more, its steel and whalebone body and legs tensed, and a hellish blaze of pure beast anger in its great yellow eyes.
‘And now it was sailing straight at me through the air, its set of enormous retractile claws protruding from its pads like menacing chisels. Its horrible red mouth with its great gleaming canine teeth seemed as big as a shark’s! I side-stepped, and slashed with the sword, making a tearing wound along the animal’s left side; but the impact knocked me spinning and the animal and I recovered ourselves at precisely the same instant, I bracing myself, and the Gamfron, spraying blood on the smoot
h sand, gathering itself for another of those deadly leaps.
‘In the split seconds which intervened before it launched itself at me again I could hear as though from an enormous distance the wild tumult of applause from those massed thousands; I could see that vast crowd weave as it swayed hysterically – they were all standing now – at the spectacle they were getting.
‘The effect of my tactics had shown me the virtual impossibility of disposing of the Gamfron by the side-step-and-slash method. The beast’s heavy ribs made that impracticable. I could inflict no disabling wound in this way, and, the Gamfron’s vitality being greater than mine, I realized that I should be very quickly worn down, even though all my side-stepping might be as effective as the first one had been. So I shifted my tactics.
‘I side-stepped the same as before, but instead of trying another slash as that gleaming black streak went past me, I whirled, and as the great beast slithered along the sand under the impetus of its thirty-foot leap, gathering all my forces, I threw myself upon it and, thrusting my keen, double-edged sword under its momentarily sprawled head and neck, I sawed swiftly back and forth with every ounce of energy I possessed and felt my sword bite through the soft flesh, severing the jugulars and carotids. Then, my feet and legs wedged hard with a sudden motion under the animal’s narrow flanks, and letting go the sword, I reached my bare hands under the two sides of the dew-lapped jaws and swinging backward from the fulcrum of my rigid lower legs and knees hauled the Gamfron’s head backwards towards me.
‘The snap of that tough-knit spine at the back of the neck could be heard about the arena. I could feel the great beast relax under me. I recovered my sword, stood up, placed my right foot upon the carcass and held up my sword toward the notables in a rigid salute.
‘I was virtually blind in that glare with the salt sweat streaming into my eyes. My heart was pounding so violently from that lightning-like and terrific exertion that I could hear nothing except a vague roar.
Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) Page 27