The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK™, Vol. 1: Henry S. Whitehead

by Henry S. Whitehead

  “It had just struck me, amidships, that in destroying the tree, His bridge to Earth, I might have cut you and Wilkes off forever from getting back! That was what made the quick, cold sweat run down into my eyes; that was what sent waves of nausea over me.

  I stood there and sweated and trembled from head to foot. It was only by sheer will power that I kept the torch up in the air, a proper front before those still thousands. My mind reeled with the trouble of it. And then, after a sudden silence, they started yelling themselves blue once more, with enthusiasm over that champion of champions who had dared to step out on the forbidden ground; to enter the Circle for the first time in history—their history.

  “That paladin was close to me now, coming on steadily, confidently, quite nearby. My eyes went around to him. He was a fine, clean-cut-looking person. He stopped, and raised his hands over his head, and made me a kind of salaam.

  “The whole yowling mob quieted down again at that—wanted to see what I’d do to him, I suppose.

  “I stepped over to him and handed him the torch. He took it, and looked me in the eye. He was some fellow, that young Indian!

  “I spoke to him, in Spanish:

  “‘Exalted Servant of the Fire, indicate to me now the direction of the other forbidden place, where He of the Wind places his foot upon Earth.’ Every chance the three of us had in the world was staked on that question, Canevin; on the idea that lay behind it; on the possibility that there was more than one bridge-place like this Great Circle where we stood. It was, of course, merely a piece of guesswork.

  “And, Canevin, he raised his other arm, the one that was not holding the torch, and pointed and answered:

  ‘Straight to the south, Lord of Fire!’

  “Canevin, I could have kissed that Indian! Another chance! I went up to him and hugged him like a bear. I don’t know what he thought of that. I didn’t give him time to think, to make up his mind. I held him off at arms’ length as though he had been my favorite brother-in-law that I hadn’t seen for a couple of years! I said to him: ‘Speak, heroic Servant of the Fire—name your reward! ‘

  “He never hesitated an instant. He knew what he wanted, that fellow—saw this was his big chance. He breathed hard. I could see his big chest go in and out. He’ll go a long way, believe me, Canevin!

  “‘The lordship over—these!’ he said, with a little gasp, and pointed with the torch, around the circle. I raised both my hands over my head and called out:

  “‘Hearken, men of this nation! Behold your overlord who with his descendants shall rule over all your nations and tribes and peoples to the end of time. Down—and salute your lord!’ A little later, when they got it, as they dropped in rows on their faces, Canevin, I turned to that fellow holding the torch, and said:

  “‘Call them together; make them sit in a circle around us here. Then the first thing you are to do is to pick out the men you want to help you govern them. After that, tell them they are to listen to me!’

  “He looked me in the eye again, and nodded. Oh, he was an intelligent one, that fellow! To make a long story short, he did just that; and you can picture us there in the moonlight, for the moon had a chance to get going long before the Indians were arranged the way I had said, the new king bossing them all as though he had never done anything else, with me standing there in the center and haranguing them—I’d had plenty of time, you see, to get that speech together—and, as I palavered, the interpreters relayed it to the rest.

  “The upshot of it all was that we started off for the place, the other place where He could ‘put his foot upon Earth’ as I had said, the place where we found you. It took us all night, even with that willing mob swinging their machetes.”

  Chapter 18

  I thanked Pelletier for his story. He had already heard the outline of mine, such as I have recounted here somewhat more fully. I let his account sink in, and then, as I have said, I was able to be myself again. Perhaps Pelletier’s very commonplace sanity, the matter-of-factness of his account, may have had something to do with this desirable effect. I do not know, but I am glad to be able to record the fact.

  “There is one thing not quite clear in my mind,” said I, after Pelletier had finished.

  “Yes?” said Pelletier, encouragingly.

  “That figure in the temple—Aquarius,” I explained. “Just how did you happen to fasten on that? I understand, of course, why you destroyed it. It was, like the tree, one of His ‘foci,’ a ‘bridge’ to Earth. By wiping those out, as I understand the matter, you broke what I might call his Earth-power; you cut off his points of access. It’s mysterious enough, yet clear in a way. But how did you know that that was the focal point, so to speak? Why the statue? Why not, for example, the altar?”

  Pelletier nodded, considering my questions. Then he smiled whimsically.

  “That’s because you do not know your astrology, Canevin!” he said, propping his bulk up on one arm, for emphasis, and looking straight at me. He grinned broadly, like a mischievous boy. Then:

  “You remember—I touched on that—how important it is, or should be, as an element in a modern education! Aquarius would fool you; would puzzle anybody, I’ll grant you—anybody, that is, who doesn’t know his astrology! You’d think from his name that he was allied with the element of water, wouldn’t you, Canevin? The name practically says so: ‘Aquarius’—water-bearer. You’d think so, unless, as I say, you knew your astrology!”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “It’s too much for me, Pelletier. You’ll have to tell me, I’m afraid.” It was plain that Pelletier held some joker up his sleeve.

  “Did you ever see a picture of Aquarius, Canevin, in which—stop and think a moment—he is not represented as pouring water out of that vessel of his? Aquarius is not the personage who represents water, Canevin. Quite the contrary, in fact. He’s the fellow who is getting rid of the water to make way for the air. Aquarius, in spite of his name, is the zodiacal symbol for air, not water, as you’d imagine if you didn’t know your astrology, Canevin! He is represented always as pouring out water, getting rid of it! Aquarius is not the protagonist of water. He is the precursor, the forerunner of air!” As he said this, Dr. Pelletier waved one of his big, awkward-looking hands—sure sign of something on his mind. I laughed. I admitted freely that my education had been neglected.

  “And what next?” I asked, smiling at my big friend. He laughed that big contagious laugh of his.

  “Canevin,” said he, wagging his head at me, “I’m wondering which of the big archeologists, or maybe some rank outsider, who will go to the top on it, and get D.Sc.’s all the way from Harvard to the University of Upsala—which of ‘em will be the first to ‘discover’ that the first Maya civilization is not defunct; knock the very best modern archeological science endwise all over again, the way it’s constantly being done in every ‘scientific’ field, from Darwin to Kirsopp Lake! An ‘epoch-making discovery!’”

  Then, musing, seriously, yet with a twinkle in his kindly brown eyes:

  “I have great hopes of the leadership they’re going to get; that they’re getting, right now, Canevin. That was some up-and-coming boy, some fellow, that new king in Quintana Roo, the one I appointed, the new ruler of the jungle! Did you see him, Canevin, standing there, telling them what was what?

  “Do you know, I never even found out his name! He’s one of the very few, by the way—told me about it on the trek back to the Circle—who had learned the old language. It’s come down, you know, through the priests, here and there, intact, just as they used to speak it a couple of thousand years ago. Well, you heard him use it! Quite a group, I believe, keep it up, in and around Chichen-Itza particularly. He told them, he said, how fire had prevailed over their traditional air—Aquarius lying there, toppled off his pedestal, to prove it!”

  I was glad I had given the young chieftain my bronze sword. Perhaps its possession will help him in establishing his authority over those Old Ones. That giant from whose hand I originally snatch
ed it there in the temple may very well have been their head man. He was big enough, and fast enough on his feet; had the primitive leadership qualities, in all conscience. He had been mightily impressive as he came bounding ahead of his followers, charging upon us through the clouds of dust.

  * * * *

  I have kept the sliver Wilkes, poor fellow, cut from the palm of the great Hand. I discovered it, rolled up and quite hardened and stiff, in the pocket of my trousers there in the hotel in Belize when I was changing to fresh clothes.

  I keep it in a drawer of my bureau, in my bedroom. Nobody sees it there; nobody asks what it is.

  “Yes—a sliver cut from the superficial scarf-skin of one of the ancient classical demigods! Yes—interesting, isn’t it!”

  I’d rather not have to describe that sliver. Probably my hearers would say nothing much. People are courteous, especially here in St. Thomas where there is a tradition to that effect. But they could hardly visualize, as I still do—yet, fortunately, at decreasing intervals—that cosmic Entity of the high atmosphere, presiding over His element of air; menacing, colossal; His vast heart beating on eternally as, stupendous, incredible, He towers there inscrutable among the unchanging stars.

  JUMBEE

  Mr. Granville Lee, a Virginian of Virginians, coming out of the World War with a lung wasted and scorched by mustard gas, was recommended by his physician to spend a winter in the spice-and-balm climate of the Lesser Antilles—the lower islands of the West Indian archipelago. He chose one of the American islands, St. Croix, the old Santa Cruz—Island of the Holy Cross—named by Columbus himself on his second voyage; once famous for its rum.

  It was to Jaffray Da Silva that Mr. Lee at last turned for definite information about the local magic; information which, after a two months’ residence, accompanied with marked improvement in his general health, he had come to regard as imperative, from the whetting glimpses he had received of its persistence on the island.

  Contact with local customs, too, had sufficiently blunted his inherited sensibilities, to make him almost comfortable, as he sat with Mr. Da Silva on the cool gallery of that gentleman’s beautiful house, in the shade of forty years’ growth of bougainvillea, on a certain afternoon. It was the restful gossipy period between five o’clock and dinnertime. A glass jug of foaming rum-swizzle stood on the table between them.

  “But, tell me, Mr. Da Silva,” he urged, as he absorbed his second glass of the cooling, mild drink, “have you ever, actually, been confronted with a ‘Jumbee’?—ever really seen one? You say, quite frankly, that you believe in them!”

  This was not the first question about Jumbees that Mr. Lee had asked. He had consulted planters; he had spoken of the matter of Jumbees with courteous, intelligent, colored storekeepers about the town, and even in Christiansted, St. Croix’s other and larger town on the north side of the island. He had even mentioned the matter to one or two coal-black sugar-field laborers; for he had been on the island just long enough to begin to understand—a little—the weird jargon of speech which Lafcadio Hearn, when he visited St. Croix many years before, had not recognized as “English!”

  There had been marked differences in what he had been told. The planters and storekeepers had smiled, though with varying degrees of intensity, and had replied that the Danes had invented Jumbees, to keep their estate-laborers indoors after nightfall, thus ensuring a proper night’s sleep for them, and minimizing the depredations upon growing crops. The laborers whom he had asked, had rolled their eyes somewhat, but, it being broad daylight at the time of the enquiries, they had broken their impassive gravity with smiles, and sought to impress Mr. Lee with their lofty contempt for the beliefs of their fellow blacks, and with queerly-phrased assurances that Jumbee is a figment of the imagination.

  Nevertheless, Mr. Lee was not satisfied. There was something here that he seemed to be missing—something extremely interesting, too, it appeared to him; something very different from “Bre’r Rabbit” and similar tales of his own remembered childhood in Virginia.

  Once, too, he had been reading a book about Martinique and Guadeloupe, those ancient jewels of France’s crown, and he had not read far before he met the word “Zombi.” After that, he knew, at least, that the Danes had not “invented” the Jumbee. He heard, though vaguely, of the laborer’s belief that Sven Garik, who had long ago gone back to his home in Sweden, and Carrity, one of the smaller planters now on the island, were “wolves!” Lycanthropy, animal-metamorphosis, it appeared, formed part of this strange texture of local belief.

  Mr. Jaffray Da Silva was one-eighth African. He was, therefore, by island usage, “colored,” which is as different from being “black” in the West Indies as anything that can be imagined. Mr. Da Silva had been educated in the continental European manner. In his every word and action, he reflected the faultless courtesy of his European forbears. By every right and custom of West Indian society, Mr. Da Silva was a colored gentleman, whose social status was as clear-cut and definite as a cameo.

  These islands are largely populated by persons like Mr. Da Silva. Despite the difference in their status from what it would be in North America, in the islands it has its advantages—among them that of logic. To the West Indian mind, a man whose heredity is seven-eighths derived from gentry, as like as not with authentic coats-of^p arms, is entitled to be treated accordingly. That is why Mr. Da Silva’s many clerks, and everybody else who knew him, treated him with deference, addressed him as “sir,” and doffed their hats in continental fashion when meeting; salutes which, of course, Mr. Da Silva invariably returned, even to the humblest, which is one of the marks of a gentleman anywhere.

  Jaffray Da Silva shifted one thin leg, draped in spotless white drill, over the other, and lighted a fresh cigarette.

  “Even my friends smile at me, Mr. Lee,” he replied, with a tolerant smile, which lightened for an instant his melancholy, ivory-white countenance. “They laugh at me more or less because I admit I believe in Jumbees. It is possible that everybody with even a small amount of African blood possesses that streak of belief in magic and the like. I seem, though, to have a peculiar aptitude for it! It is a matter of experience, with me, sir, and my friends are free to smile at me if they wish. Most of them—well, they do not admit their be1iefs as freely as I, perhaps!”

  Mr. Lee took another sip of the cold swizzle. He had heard how difficult it was to get Jaffray Da Silva to speak of his “experiences,” and he suspected that under his host’s even courtesy lay that austere pride which resents anything like ridicule, despite that tolerant smile.

  “Please proceed, sir,” urged Mr. Lee, and was quite unconscious that he had just used a word which, in his native South, is reserved for gentlemen of pure Caucasian blood.

  “When I was a young man,” began Mr. Da Silva, “about 1894, there was a friend of mine named Hilmar Iversen, a Dane, who lived here in the town, up near the Moravian Church on what the people call ‘Foun’-Out Hill.’ Iversen had a position under the government, a clerk’s job, and his office was in the Fort. On his way home he used to stop here almost every afternoon for a swizzle and a chat. We were great friends, close friends. He was then a man a little past fifty, a butter-tub of a fellow, very stout, and, like many of that build, he suffered from heart attacks.

  “One night a boy came here for me. It was eleven o’clock, and I was just arranging the mosquito-net on my bed, ready to turn in. The servants had all gone home, so I went to the door myself, in shirt and trousers, and carrying a lamp, to see what was wanted—or, rather, I knew perfectly well what it was—a messenger to tell me Iversen was dead!”

  Mr. Lee suddenly sat bolt-upright.

  “How could you know that?” he enquired, his eyes wide.

  Mr. Da Silva threw away the remains of his cigarette.

  “I sometimes know things like that,” he answered, slowly. “In this case, Iversen and I had been close friends for years. He and I had talked about magic and that sort of thing a great deal, occult powers, manifesta
tions—that sort of thing. It is a very general topic here, as you may have seen. You would hear more of it if you continued to live here and settled into the ways of the island. In fact, Mr. Lee, Iversen and I had made a compact together. The one of us who ‘went out’ first, was to try to warn the other of it. You see, Mr. Lee, I had received Iversen’s warning less than an hour before.

  “I had been sitting out here on the gallery until ten o’clock or so. I was in that very chair you are occupying. Iversen had been having a heart attack. I had been to see him that afternoon. He looked just as he always did when he was recovering from an attack. In fact he intended to return to his office the following morning. Neither of us, I am sure, had given a thought to the possibility of a sudden sinking spell. We had not even referred to our agreement.

  “Well, it was about ten, as I’ve said, when all of a sudden I heard Iversen coming along through the yard below there, toward the house along that gravel path. He had, apparently, come through the gate from the Kongensgade—the King Street, as they call it nowadays—and I could hear his heavy step on the gravel very plainly. He had a slight limp. ‘Heavy-crunch—light crunch; plod-plod—plod-plod’; old Iversen to the life; there was no mistaking his step. There was no moon that night. The half of a waning moon was due to show itself an hour and a half later, but just then it was virtually pitch-black down there in the garden.

  “I got up out of my chair and walked over to the top of the steps. To tell you the truth, Mr. Lee, I rather suspected—I have a kind of aptitude for that sort of thing—that it was not Iversen himself; how shall I express it? I had the idea from somewhere inside me, that it was Iversen trying to keep our agreement. My instinct assured me that he had just died. I can not tell you how I knew it, but such was the case, Mr. Lee.