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

by Henry S. Whitehead

  Inquiry at the Government offices had elicited the fact that old Lawyer Malling, a survival of the Danish reégime, who lived in Christiansted and was invaluable to our Government officials when it came to disentangling antique Danish records, was in charge of Gannett’s. Herr Malling, interviewed in turn, was courteous but firm. The house could not be rented under any considerations; such were his instructions – permanent instructions, filed among his records. No, it was impossible, out of the question. I recalled some dim hints I had received of an old scandal.

  Over a glass of excellent sherry which hospitable Herr Malling provided, I asked various questions. The answers to these indicated that the surviving Gannetts were utterly obdurate in the matter. They had no intention of returning. Repairs – the house was built like a fortress – had not, so far, been required. They had assigned no reason for their determination to keep their Christiansted property closed? No – and Herr Malling had no option in the matter. No, he had written before, twice; once in behalf of the rector of the English Church, just recently; also, ten, eleven years ago when a professor from Berlin, sojourning in the islands, had conceived the idea of a tropical school for tutoring purposes and had cast a thickly bespectacled eye on the old mansion. No, it was impossible.

  ‘Well, skaal, Herr Canevin! Come now – another, of course! A man can not travel on one leg, you know; that is one of our sayings.’

  But three years after this interview with Herr Malling, the old house was opened at last. The very last remaining Gannett, it appeared, had gone to his reward, from Edinburgh, and the title had passed to younger heirs who had had no personal connection, no previous residence in the West Indies.

  Herr Malling’s new instructions, transmitted through an Aberdeen solicitor, were to rent the property to the best advantage, to entertain offers for its disposal in fee simple, and to estimate possible repairs and submit this estimate to Aberdeen. I learned this some time after the instructions had been transmitted. Herr Malling was not one to broadcast the private and confidential business of his clients. I learned thereof from Mrs Ashton Garde, over tea and small cakes in the vast, magnificent drawing room of Gannett’s, a swept and garnished Gannett’s which she had taken for the season and whose eighteenth-century mahogany she had augmented and lightened with various furniture of her own in the process which had transformed the old fortress-like abode into one of the most attractive residences I have ever been privileged to visit.

  Mrs Garde, an American, and a widow, was in the late forties, a very charming and delightful woman of the world, an accomplished hostess, incidentally a person of substantial means, and the mother of three children. Of these, a married daughter lived in Florida and did not visit the Gardes during their winter in Santa Cruz. The other children, Edward, just out of Harvard, and Lucretia, twenty-four, were with their mother. Both of them, though diversely – Edward, an athlete, had no particular conversation – had inherited the maternal charm as well as the very striking good looks of their late father whose portrait – a splendid Sargent – hung over one of the two massive marble mantelpieces which stood at either end of the great drawing room.

  It was quite near the end where the portrait hung, low because the mantelshelf, lacking a fireplace under it, stood two feet higher than an ordinary mantelshelf, balancing a ceiling fifteen feet in height, that we sat upon my first visit to the Gardes, and I noticed that Mrs Garde, whose tea table was centered on the mantelpiece, as it were, and who sat facing me across the room’s width, glanced up, presumably at the portrait, several times.

  I am of an analytical mentality, even in small matters. I guessed that she was trying out the recent hanging of this very magnificent portrait ‘with her eye’, as people do until they have become accustomed to new placements and the environmental aspects of a new or temporary home and, my attention thus drawn to it, I made some comment upon the portrait, and rose to examine it more closely. It repaid scrutiny.

  But Mrs Garde, as though with a slight note of deprecation, turned the conversation away from the portrait, a fact which I noticed in passing, and which was emphasized, as I thought of it later, by her sidelong glances, upward and to her right, in the intervals of pouring tea for a considerable group of company, which kept going up there again and again. I gave to these facts no particular interpretation. There was no reason for analysis. But I noted them nevertheless.

  I saw considerable of the Gardes, for the next few weeks, and then, because I had planned some time before to go down the islands as far as Martinique when the Margaret of the Bull-Insular Line which plies among the upper islands should go there for several days’ sojourn in dry dock, I did not see them at all for more than two weeks during which I was renewing my acquaintance with Martinique French in the interesting capital town of Fort de France.

  I ran in to call on the Gardes shortly after my arrival on Santa Cruz at the conclusion of this trip, and found Mrs Garde alone. Edward and Lucretia were playing tennis and later dining with the Covingtons at Hermon Hill Estate House.

  I was immediately struck with the change which had taken place in Mrs Garde. It was as though some process of infinite weariness had laid its hold upon her. She looked shrunken, almost fragile. Her eyes, of that dark, brilliant type which accompanies a bistre complexion, appeared enormous, and as she looked at me, her glances alternating with the many which she kept casting up there in the direction of her husband’s portrait, I could not escape the conviction that her expression bore now that aspect which I can only describe by the somewhat trite term ‘haunted’.

  I was, sharply, immediately, surprised; greatly intrigued by this phenomenon. It was one of those obvious things which strike one directly without palliation, like a blow in the face unexpectedly delivered; an unmistakable change, hinting, somehow, of tragedy. It made me instantaneously uneasy, moved me profoundly, for I had liked Mrs Garde very much indeed, and had anticipated a very delightful acquaintance with this family which centered about its head. I noticed her hand quite definitely trembling as she handed me my cup of tea, and she took one of those sidelong glances, up and to the right, in the very midst of that hospitable motion.

  I drank half my tea in a mutual silence, and then, looking at Mrs Garde, I surprised her in the middle of another glance. She was just withdrawing her eyes. She caught my eyes, and, perhaps, something of the solicitude which I was feeling strongly at the moment, and her somberly pallid face flushed slightly. She looked down, busied herself with the paraphernalia of her circular tea tray. I spoke then.

  ‘Haven’t you been entirely well, Mrs Garde? It seemed to me that, perhaps, you were not looking altogether robust, if you don’t mind my mentioning it.’ I tried to make my tone sufficiently jocular to carry off my really solicitous inquiry lightly; to leave room for some rejoinder in somewhat the same vein.

  She turned tragic eyes upon me. There was no smile on her drawn face. The unexpected quality of her reply brought me up standing.

  ‘Mr Canevin – help me!’ she said simply, looking straight into my eyes.

  I was around the tea table in two seconds, held her shaking hands, which were as cold as lumps of ice, in mine. I held them and looked down at Mrs Garde. ‘With all my heart,’ I said. ‘Tell me, please, when you can, now or later, Mrs Garde, what it is.’

  She expressed her thanks for this reassurance with a nod, withdrew her hands, sat back in her rattan chair and closed her eyes. I thought she was going to faint and, sensing this, perhaps, she opened her eyes and said: ‘I’m quite all right, Mr Canevin – that is, so far as the immediate present is concerned. Will you not sit down, finish your tea? Let me freshen your cup.’

  Somewhat relieved, I resumed my own chair and, over a second cup of tea, looked at my hostess. She had made a distinct effort to pull herself together. We sat for some minutes in silence. Then, I refusing more tea, she rang, and the butler came in and removed the tray and placed cigarets on the table between us. It was only after the servant had gone and closed the drawing ro
om door behind himself that she leaned forward impulsively, and began to tell me what had occurred.

  Despite her obvious agitation and the state of her nerves which I have attempted to indicate, Mrs Garde went straight to the point without any beating about the bush. Even as she spoke it occurred to me from the form of her phraseology that she had been planning how, precisely, to express herself. She did so now very concisely and clearly.

  ‘Mr Canevin,’ she began, ‘I have no doubt that you have noticed my glancing up at the wall space above this mantel. It has grown, one would say, to be a nervous habit with me. You have observed it, have you not?’

  I said that I had and had supposed that the glances had been directed toward her husband’s portrait.

  ‘No,’ resumed Mrs Garde, looking at me fixedly as though to keep her eyes off the place over the mantelshelf, ‘it is not at the picture, Mr Canevin. It is at a place directly above it – about three feet above its top edge to be precise.’

  She paused at this point, and I could not help looking toward the point she had indicated. As I did so, I caught sight of her long and rather beautiful hands. They were clamped against the edge of the low table, as though she was holding on to that as if to something solid and material – an anchor for her nerves – and I observed that the knuckles were white with the pressure she was exerting.

  I saw nothing but a wide space of empty, gray sanded wall which ran up cleanly to the high ceiling and out on both sides of the portrait, a clear space, artistically left vacant, one would surmise, by whoever had possessed the good sense to leave the Sargent alone with its wide blank background of gray wall space.

  I looked back at Mrs Garde and found her gaze fixed determinedly on my face. It was as though she held it there, by a sheer effort of the will, forcing herself not to look up at the wall.

  I nodded at her reassuringly.

  ‘Please continue, if you will, Mrs Garde,’ I said, and leaned back in my chair and lighted a cigaret from the silver box on the table between us.

  Mrs Garde relaxed and leaned back in her lounge chair, but continued looking straight at me. When she resumed what she was saying she spoke slowly, with a certain conscious effort at deliberation. My instinct apprised me that she was forcing herself to this course; that if she did not concentrate in some such fashion she would let go and scream aloud.

  ‘Perhaps you are familiar with Du Maurier’s book, The Martian, Mr Canevin,’ and, as I nodded assent, she continued, ‘You will remember when Josselin’s eye began to fail him, he was puzzled and dreadfully worried by discovering a blind spot in his sound eye – it was emphasized by the failure of the other one, and he was vastly distressed – thought he was going stone blind, until the little Continental oculist reassured him, explained the punctum caecum – the blind spot which is in the direct line of vision with the optic nerve itself. Do you recall the incident?’

  ‘Perfectly,’ said I, and nodded again reassuringly.

  ‘Well, I remember testing my own blind spots after reading that when I was quite a young girl,’ resumed Mrs Garde. ‘I dare say a great many people tried the experiment. There is, of course, a line of vision outside each blind spot, to the left of the left eye’s ordinary focus and, correspondingly, to the right of that of the other eye. In addition to this variation of ordinary vision, as I have ascertained, there is another condition, especially evident in the sight of the middle-aged. That is that the direct line of ordinary vision becomes, as it were, “worn”, and the vision itself, in the case of a person especially who has used his or her eyes a great deal – over embroidery, or reading, or some professional work which requires concentrated looking, I mean – is somewhat less acute than when the eyes are used at an unaccustomed angle.’

  She paused, looked at me as though to ascertain whether or not I had been following the speech. Once more I nodded. I had listened carefully to every word. Mrs Garde, resuming, now became acutely specific.

  ‘As soon as we had arrived here, Mr Canevin, the very first thing that I had to attend to was the suitable hanging of this portrait of Mr Garde.’ She did not look toward it, but indicated the portrait with a gesture of her hand in its direction.

  ‘I looked over that section of the wall space to ascertain the most advantageous point from which to hang it. I found the place that seemed to me suitable and had the butler drive in a nail in the place I indicated. The picture was then hung and is still in the place I selected.

  ‘This process had required considerable looking, on my part, at the blank wall. It was not, really, until the portrait was actually hung that I realized – that it occurred to me – that something – something, Mr Canevin, which had gradually become clearer, better defined I mean, was there – above the picture – something which, within that outside angle of vision, outside the blind spot of my right eye as I sat there and looked up and to the right, became more evident every time I looked up at the wall. Of course, I looked at the picture many times, to make quite sure I had it in the right spot on the wall. In doing so the outside vision, the portion of the eye which was not worn and more or less dimmed from general usage, took in the place I have indicated. It is, as I have mentioned, about three feet above the top of Mr Garde’s portrait.

  ‘Mr Canevin, the thing has grown – grown!’

  Suddenly Mrs Garde broke down, buried her face in trembling hands, leaning forward upon the table like a child hiding its eyes in a game, and her slim body shook with uncontrollable, dry sobs.

  This time, I perceived, the best thing for me to do was to sit quietly and wait until the poor, overwrought lady had exhausted her hysterical seizure. I waited, therefore, in perfect silence, trying, mentally, to give my hostess, as well as I could, the assurance of my complete sympathy and my desire and willingness to help her in all possible ways.

  Gradually, as I had anticipated, the spasm of weeping worked itself out, minimized itself and finally passed. Mrs Garde raised her head, composed herself, again looked at me, this time with a markedly greater degree of calmness and self-possession. The gust of hysteria, although it had shaken her, had, in its ordinary effect, done her good. She even smiled at me a little wanly.

  ‘I fear that you will think me very weak, Mr Canevin,’ she said finally.

  I smiled quietly.

  ‘When it is possible, it would be of assistance if I could know of this matter as exactly as possible,’ I said. ‘Try, please, to tell me just what it is that you see on the wall, Mrs Garde.’

  Mrs Garde nodded, spent a little while composing herself. She even used her vanity box, a trifling gold affair with the inevitable mirror. After this she was able to smile herself. Then, suddenly quite serious again, she said simply: ‘It is the head and part of the body – the upper, forward part, to be precise, Mr Canevin – of what seems to be a young bull. At first only the head; then, gradually, the shoulders and neck. It seems quite utterly grotesque, absurd, does it not?

  ‘But, Mr Canevin, extraordinary as that must seem to you, it is – ’ she looked down at her twitching hands, then, with a visible effort, back at me, her face now suddenly ghastly under the fresh make-up which she had so recently applied to it. ‘Mr Canevin, that is not the terrifying part of it. That, indeed, might, perhaps, be construed as some kind of optical illusion, or something of the sort. It is – ’ again she hesitated, looked down; then, with a greater effort than before back at me – ‘it is the – expression – of the face, Mr Canevin! It is, I assure you, quite human, terrifying, reproachful! And, Mr Canevin, there is blood, a thick single stream of blood, which runs down from the center of the forehead, over the creature’s poor nose! It is – somehow, pathetic, Mr Canevin. It is a very frightful experience to have. It has utterly ruined my peace of mind. That is all there is to it, Mr Canevin – the head and neck and shoulders of a young bull, with that blood running down from its forehead, and that expression . . . ’

  At once, upon hearing this salient particularization of Mrs Garde’s extraordinary optical experienc
e, that analytical faculty of mine began forthwith to run riot. There were points of contact with previous knowledge of the spectral beliefs of the blacks and similar phenomena of our West Indies in that picture, affairs wherein I am not wholly without experience. The bull, as at once it occurred to me, is the principal sacrificial animal of the main voodoo cults, up and down the islands, where the old African gods of ‘Guinea’ prevail.

  But a bull, with such an expression on its face as my hostess had briefly described, with blood running down its nose, up there on the wall space above the high mantelshelf in Gannett House – this was, truly, a puzzler! I shifted, I remember, forward in my chair, raised a hand to command Mrs Garde’s attention. I had thought of something.

  ‘Tell me, if you please, Mrs Garde,’ said I. ‘Is the appearance which you have described close against the wall, or – otherwise?’

  ‘It is well out from the wall itself,’ replied Mrs Garde, striving to express herself with precision. ‘It seems, I should say, to be several feet away from the wall proper, toward us, of course – not as though behind the wall, I mean – and, I omitted to say, Mr Canevin, that when I look at it for any considerable length of time, the head and shoulders seem to sag forward and downward. It is, I should say, as though the animal were just freshly hurt, were beginning to sink down to its death.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said I. ‘It must have been a considerable ordeal to tell me about it so clearly and exactly. However, it is very simple psychology to understand that the process has done you good. You have shared your strange experience with someone else. That, of course, is a step in the right direction. Now, Mrs Garde, will you permit me to “prescribe” for you?’

  ‘Most assuredly, Mr Canevin,’ returned Mrs Garde. ‘I am, frankly, in such a state over this dreadful thing, that I am prepared to do anything to secure some relief from it. I have not, of course, mentioned it to my children. I have not said a word to anybody but you. It is not the sort of thing one can discuss – with anybody and everybody.’