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

by Henry S. Whitehead

  ‘If so, why? threw out Wilkes; and I had no answer.

  We stood staring up at the blank, unornamental, solid wall.

  ‘Curious!’ vouchsafed Wilkes again. ‘Curious, no end!’ Then: ‘Might bear out my idea, rather – you remember, Canevin? That “immortality” idea I mean. If He has them – er – preserved, so to speak, ready to be revived, started going when He wants them, or needs them, what? As you remarked, they weren’t exactly “contemporaries” of ours! He’s been going at this whole affair His own way, all through; not the way we human being would go at it. If you ask me, He – er – needed them to scrag us in there, in the temple I mean. They tried, you know! Failed, rather! We’re still on deck, Canevin! And, back of that – why, for the sake of argument, did He set us down here, on earth once more, but not at the same old stand, not where we parked the old bus, in that circle of grass, under that tree? Perhaps it’s a small matter but – well, why, Canevin? Why here, I mean to say, rather than there? It’s a point to consider at any rate. Looks to me, if you ask me, as though He were trying, in His own peculiar way, to do us in, and had, so far, failed.’

  I pondered over this long speech of Wilkes’s, the longest I had heard him make. He was, like many engineering fellows, inclined to be monosyllabic rather than garrulous. It was, I thought, a curious piece of reasoning. Yet, anything coming from this staunch comrade in a pinch such as he had proved himself to be, was worth consideration. It might be what he called ‘instinct’, or indeed, anything. It might be the truth.

  I was very far from realizing at that moment – and so, too, I think, was Wilkes himself, despite this curiously suggestive set of ideas – that within a very short time this utterly strange adventure upon which we were embarked was to give us its final, and, thoughtfully considered, perhaps its most poignant, surprise. Even warned as I should have been by Wilkes’s strange surmise, I was quite unprepared for what we found inside.

  We proceeded slowly along what I have called the inner wall of the vast structure which joined the temple at its farther end. We walked for minute after minute along beside it, always glancing up at it, constantly on the lookout for an entrance. The walls remained entirely blank, without either apertures or ornamentation. The huge building might, to all appearances, have been some prehistoric warehouse or granary.

  At last we came to its end, the end structurally joined onto the temple’s rearmost wall. We walked directly up to this point, where the two structures made a sharp corner.

  There was no entrance except, presumably, through the temple, from the inside, there behind the altar. We had had half an hour’s walk around these massive survivals of ancient architecture for nothing. It was five-three by my watch in the moon’s clear light. The clouds had retreated toward the horizon by now, as we stood there at that corner, baffled.

  We turned, rather wearily now, away at right angles from our course just finished, and plodded along the grassy ground under the towering rear wall of the temple.

  And, halfway along it, we came to an opening, an arched doorway without a door. We stopped, point-blank, and looked at each other.

  ‘Shall we . . . ?’ whispered Wilkes.

  I nodded, and stepped through, the great sword, which I had been carrying like a musket over my shoulder, now gripped, business-fashion, in my right hand.

  We stepped through into an ambulatory, a semicircular passageway behind the altar. We turned to our left, in the direction of the temple’s corner against which was built the building we had been encircling, walking once more through heaped dust such as had clogged the nave, our footfalls soundless in an equally soundless environment.

  Emerging from that semicircular course at the altar’s side, we were able to see from this coign of vantage the overhead opening through which the rays of the late-afternoon sun had streamed down the day before. This was a wide space left vacant in the roofing, far above, overhung by what seemed another roof-structure twenty or thirty feet higher up, an arrangement plainly designed to keep out the rain while letting in the rays of the declining sun.

  Now, in the moonlight of pre-dawn, both altar and statue took on an unearthly beauty. We stood rapt, looking along the altar directly toward the face of the statue.

  This time it was I who jogged Wilkes’s elbow.

  ‘It’s a quarter past five,’ I warned him. ‘If we’re going to get a look at those people, we’d better do it now, before daylight. We haven’t very long. And if they’re – well, regular people, ordinary human beings, a segregated nation and not – er – “embalmed”, or whatever it is you had in mind, we’d best take a quick glance and get away before they are awake!’

  We turned away from those shimmering, pale glories which were the altar and the statue, the one jeweled, the other shining, resplendent, toward the predicated passageway that must lead out of the temple to where its erstwhile worshipers took their repose.

  We could have told where it began if we had been blind men, by the feel of the heavily-trodden dust under our feet, dust not heaped and soft as we had experienced it – dust matted into the consistency of felt by the pressure of ten thousand feet.

  Along that carpet over the stone flooring of a wide passageway we walked, warily now, not knowing what we might confront, toward a high, wide archway which marked the entrance proper into the windowless barrack or storehouse we had so lately scrutinized.

  Here the moonlight shone scantily. We could not see very far before us, but we could see far enough to show us what kind of place it was into whose purlieus we had penetrated. We paused, just beyond the archway, paused and looked . . .

  There, in that storehouse laid out before us as far as the dim moonlight permitted our vision to reach, straight before us until their regular ranks were no longer visible except to the agitated eye of the mind, lay endless, regularly spaced rows of bodies, endless rows, rank upon serried rank; still, motionless, mummy-like, in the ineffable calm of latency; life suspended; life merged into one vast, incalculable coma. This was a storehouse indeed, in very fact: the last abiding place of those old Mayas of the first civilization, that classical puzzle of the archeologists – a puzzle no longer to Wilkes and me of all modern men; a civilization, a nation, in bond to the Power that still held us in an ironical, unrelenting, grasp – to that One Whom these very ancients worshiped and propitiated, the Prince of the Powers of the Air . . .

  Without a word we hastened out of that grim house of a living death and back into the temple, and, with no more than a glance toward the altar and statue, hurried silently back through the ambulatory and out through the doorless archway again into the breaking dawn of another day, under the fading stars of a new morning.

  And, as we emerged, toward us, diagonally across what I have called the ‘quadrangle’, in regular formation, disciplined, there marched unfaltering, resolute, a vast horde of tall, brown men, led by two figures who stepped gravely in their van, ahead of those serried thousands. He on the left was a tall, brown man of majestic carriage, bearing in his hand a small burning torch, young, yet of a commanding dignity as one used to rule. Upon the right marched beside him a heavy, lumbering figure, who walked wearily; yet not without a certain heavy dignity of his own, a figure of a certain familiarity – the figure of Pelletier!

  My immediate instinct was to cry in sudden relief, to rush incontinently forward. I felt suddenly as though my heart would burst. Pelletier, of all the men this old planet could possibly produce, here! Pelletier, the most welcome sight . . .

  I could not have done so, however, even though I had actually yielded to that impulse I have named. For Pelletier was calling out to me, in a curious kind of voice, I noted at once, with some puzzlement – in a kind of rude, improvised chant.

  ‘Steady, Canevin, steady does it, as the British Navy says! Walk toward us, both of you, side by side; stand up straight; make it as dignified as you know how – slow; like two big guns conferring a favor on the populace. Pay no attention to anybody but me. Stop in front of me. We’
ll bow to each other; not too low. Then, when He bows, put your hands on his head – like a blessing, do you understand? On this big fellow beside me, I mean. Don’t botch it now either of you. It’s important . . . Good! That’s the ticket! Keep it up now; carry the whole works through just the way I’m telling you.’

  We carried out these amazing instructions to the letter. They were, of course, apart from the general idea of making an impression on Pelletier’s inexplicable following, quite unintelligible to us. But, we went through with them precisely according to these weird, chanted instructions – like the directions of some madman, a paranoiac for choice! ‘Delusions of grandeur!’ The old phrase came inevitably into my mind. Even the young chieftain did his part, kneeling with gravity before us as soon as we had finished our salutation to Pelletier, and he had majestically returned it.

  Immediately after these ceremonial performances which were received in a solemn silence by the army – for the orderly ranks were numerous enough to deserve such a distinctive title – Pelletier drew us aside and spoke with haste tempering his gravity.

  ‘I’ll explain all this later. Tell me, first, how long have you been in this place?’

  We told him we had spent the night here and started to outline our adventures, but Pelletier cut in.

  ‘Another time,’ he said curtly. ‘This is vital, pressing. Is there anything here – I don’t know, precisely, how to make clear exactly what I mean; you’ll have to use your wits; I haven’t the time to hold a long palaver now, and we mustn’t waste a minute – anything, I mean, that would correspond to that tree you fellows went up; something, in other words, that would serve – er – Him as a bridge, a means of access to the earth? I don’t know how to make it any clearer. Maybe you catch what I mean.’

  ‘There’s a temple back of us,’ said Wilkes, ‘with an altar – ’

  ‘And a statue,’ I finished for him, ‘a magnificent thing, heroic in size; looks for all the world like the figure of Aquarius in the signs of the zodiac. Possibly – ’

  ‘Take us straight to it,’ commanded Pelletier, and turned and spoke rapidly to the brown chieftain in sonorous Spanish. He told him to detach one hundred or more of his most reliable warriors and follow us without the least delay, and to this task the young leader forthwith addressed himself. Within two minutes, so unquestioned appeared to be his authority, this picked company was following us at the double back to the temple entrance, back along the curving ambulatory, back to the vicinity of the altar and statue.

  We paused at the point where these first became visible, and Pelletier looked at the statue for a long instant.

  ‘The perfect focus!’ he muttered, and turned and addressed the chieftain once more.

  ‘Advance with us in close order,’ he commanded, ‘to the figure of the man holding the vessel. Draw up the men beside it, on this side, and when I give you the signal, push it over on its side!’

  This order, immediately passed on to the Indians, was set in motion without delay, the stalwart fellows crowding toward the statue eagerly.

  We were almost beside the statue when the sudden roar of the great gong, almost beside us, shattered the quiet air. I winced, and so did Wilkes, and the Indians stopped in their tracks. Automatically I gripped the hilt of my bronze sword as I felt Wilkes’s steadying hand close on my shoulder.

  Then Pelletier raised his great booming voice and began to sing in Spanish, something about ‘the conquering fire’! He almost literally pushed that group of Indians toward their appointed task. Not without a certain hesitation, a reluctance, I thought, they lined up beside the statue obediently, yet with rolled eyes and fearful glances in all directions, indicating that panic lay only a little way below their corporate surface of strict obedience. Then, at Pelletier’s spoken signal, the massed group heaved, all together. The great statue moved, gratingly, on its solid foundation.

  ‘Again!’ cried Pelletier, and hurled his own weight and bulk into the balance.

  The statue swayed this time, hung balanced precariously, then toppled over on its farther side in a shattering crash which detached the cornucopia and the beautifully modeled arms and hands which held it, at the very instant of the gong’s second, deep, reverberant note.

  Pelletier surveyed the damage he had wrought; turned with the rest of us toward the entering procession that came marching in from that arched opening, precisely as we had seen them enter at yesterday’s fall of dusk. It was now, however, the fresh, clear light of early morning, and in this better illumination I confess that I gasped at what I had not observed the day before.

  Upon the garments, yes, upon the very jutting, powerful features of the members of that hierarchical company gravely advancing now towards us, upon their hair and their beards, even their shaggy eyebrows, hung the clotted dust of the centuries!

  But, Wilkes and I did not hesitate over this strange sight. We knew why He had summoned once again these Myrmidons of His from their sleep-like-death in those storerooms of His, those slave pens.

  ‘Out, for God’s sake, out, as quick as you can get them going!’ I cried out to Pelletier. ‘There are thousands of them!’ And he, not hesitating now that he had accomplished what he had come here to do, over any idea of conflict against the overwhelming odds which I had indicated, passed swiftly to his Indians the word of command and retreat.

  But even this immediate response of his to my warning was not swift enough. We had been observed, and already as he shouted to the chieftain, that corporate roar of rage and fury was rising, multiplying itself, as more and more voices joined in upon its fearsome volume. Already the foremost hierophants of this now-desecrated shrine were parting their ranks to let through and at us the massed warriors who pressed eagerly to the attack.

  I was deadly weary. Yet, something of that old fighting blood call of the Canevins, some stavistic battle lust derived from those ancient fighting forebears of mine, nerved me of sudden. Those ancestors of mine had shirked no conflict, if tradition spoke truly down the ages. I swung up the great bronze sword, a strange, vague, yet unmistakable call from dim departed ages of red battle stirring my blood to fire. With a shout on my lips I stepped out before that company of ours, prepared to meet the oncoming rush, if need be, alone.

  But I was frustrated in this mad instinctive gesture – frustrated, I say, and in the strangest manner imaginable. For I was not the only one who stepped out into the open space between our group and the rush of oncoming fighting men of a revived antiquity. No. Beside me, towering tall, slender, commanding, pressed the noble figure of that young chieftain, unarmed, his long arms held straight up before him, the palms of his hands held forward in an immemorial gesture of authority.

  Then from his lips there burst a veritable torrent of some strange, sonorous speech, at the sound of which the oncoming fighting men stopped dead.

  I paused, amazed at this wholly unexpected occurrence. I lowered my sword automatically as I saw the menacing weapons brandished by the others likewise lowered.

  On and on went that authoritative speech, until of a sudden it stopped as abruptly as it had been begun, and the young chieftain lowered his hands, folded his arms, and stood facing the now silent throng of brown, bearded warriors and the priests of their strange cult behind them, all of them equally motionless before him, their massed attention directed to him alone, standing there like a group carved out of stone.

  And then, out of the midst of them, came one great bearded giant. This man, evidently their leader, walked straight toward us where we stood grouped behind the orator, paused before him, and then this statuesque warrior flung down his bronze sword, clanging, and prostrated himself. The young chieftain took two grave steps forward, and placed his sandaled foot upon the prostrate figure’s neck. Inspired, I stepped over to him and placed my own great bronze sword in his hand.

  Of how we traveled back to the Great Circle through a mahogany forest interspersed with ceiba, Otaheite, and Guinea-tamarind trees, I shall say but little. We traversed
levels and dips and toiled up slopes and skirted marshlands. We traveled faint trails which had to be negotiated single file. We passed through clearing recently cut free of the clinging bush and trailing liana vines. Occasionally small, tapir-like quadrupeds started up almost under our feet, disturbed at their early-morning browsing in that thick jungle. We stepped along now and again through stretches fragrant with the odors of frangipane blooms, and the rich, attar-like sweetness of the flowering vanilla orchid.

  And at last we came to the edge of the Great Circle once more, at a quarter before nine o’clock by my faithful wrist-watch which had not missed a tick throughout all these alarums and excursions. Here Pelletier paused, and in a brief, emphatic speech, in Spanish, took leave of and dismissed his army, which melted away, after profound salaams in our direction, into the deeper forests forming the hinterlands of that horizon of jungle. Forty or more hostages, brought with us from the company of those Ancient Ones who had accepted the overlordship of that remarkable young chief, departed with them. They were seen no more by us.

  I was far too weary – and poor Wilkes was literally tottering in his tracks – to listen very closely to what Pelletier said to the Indians. As soon as the last of them had disappeared out of our sight, the three of us started across the stretch of short grass, up the slight slope toward the center where our plane still rested on the ground. Pelletier forged ahead to get his first-aid satchel for our wounds.

  The great tree was gone!

  It was nearly ten o’clock when at last we sank down in the grateful shade of the plane’s broad wings, and the last thing that I remember before falling into the sleep from which I was awakened an hour and a half later, was Pelletier holding to my mouth one of our canteens, and feeling the comfort to my parched throat of the stale, tepid water it contained.

  It was the roar of the rescuing plane which awakened me, at eleven-thirty.