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

by Henry S. Whitehead

  “So I waited, over there just behind you, at the top of the steps. The footfalls came along steadily. At the foot of the steps, out of the shadow of the hibiscus bushes, it was a trifle less black than farther down the path. There was a faint illumination, too, from a lamp inside the house. I knew that if it were Iversen, himself, I should be able to see him when the footsteps passed out of the deep shadow of the bushes. I did not speak.

  “The footfalls came along toward that point, and passed it. I strained my eyes through the gloom, and I could see nothing. Then I knew, Mr. Lee, that Iversen had died, and that he was keeping his agreement.

  “I came back here and sat down in my chair, and waited. The footfalls began to come up the steps. They came along the floor of the gallery, straight toward me. They stopped here, Mr. Lee, just beside me. I could feel Iversen standing here, Mr. Lee.” Mr. Da Silva pointed to the floor with his slim, rather elegant hand.

  “Suddenly, in the dead quiet, I could feel my hair stand up all over my scalp, straight and stiff. The chills started to run down my back, and up again, Mr. Lee. I shook like a man with the ague, sitting here in my chair.

  “I said: ‘Iversen, I understand! Iversen, I’m afraid!’ My teeth were chattering like castanets, Mr. Lee. I said: ‘Iversen, please go! You have kept the agreement. I am sorry I am afraid, Iversen. The flesh is weak! I am not afraid of you, Iversen, old friend. But you will understand, man! It’s not ordinary fear. My intellect is all right, Iversen, but I’m badly panic-stricken, so please go, my friend.’

  “There had been silence, Mr. Lee, as I said, before I began to speak to Iversen, for the footsteps had stopped here beside me. But when I said that, and asked my friend to go, I could feel that he went at once, and I knew that he had understood how I meant it! It was, suddenly, Mr. Lee, as though there bad never been any footsteps, if you see what I mean. It is hard to put into words. I daresay, if I had been one of the laborers, I should have been halfway to Christiansted through the estates, Mr. Lee, but I was not so frightened that I could not stand my ground.

  “After I had recovered myself a little, and my scalp had ceased its prickling, and the chills were no longer running up and down my spine, I rose, and I felt extremely weary, Mr. Lee. It had been exhausting. I came into the house and drank a large tot of French brandy, and then I felt better, more like myself. I took my hurricane-lantern and lighted it, and stepped down the path toward the gate leading to the Kongensgade. There was one thing I wished to see down there at the end of the garden. I wanted to see if the gate was fastened, Mr. Lee. It was. That huge iron staple that you noticed, was in place. It has been used to fasten that old gate since some time in the Eighteenth Century, I imagine. I had not supposed anyone had opened the gate, Mr. Lee, but now I knew. There were no footprints in the gravel, Mr. Lee. I looked, carefully. The marks of the bush-broom where the house-boy had swept the path on his way back from closing the gate were undisturbed, Mr. Lee.

  “I was satisfied, and no longer, even a little frightened. I came back here and sat down, and thought about my long friendship with old Iversen. I felt very sad to know that I should not see him again alive. He would never stop here again afternoons for a swizzle and a chat. About 11 o’clock I went inside the house and was preparing for bed when the rapping came at the front door. You see, Mr. Lee, I knew at once what it would mean.

  “I went to the door, in shirt and trousers and stocking feet, carrying a lamp. We did not have electric light in those days. At the door stood Iversen’s house-boy, a young fellow about eighteen. He was half-asleep, and very much upset. He ‘cut his eyes’ at me, and said nothing.

  “‘What is it, mon?’ I asked the boy.

  “‘Mistress Iversen send ax yo’ sir, please come to de house. Mr. Iversen die, sir.’

  “‘What time Mr. Iversen die, mon—you hear?’

  “‘I ain’ able to say what o’clock, sir. Mistress Iversen come wake me where I sleep in a room in the yard, sir, an’ sen’ me please cahl you—I t’ink he die aboht an hour ago, sir.’

  “I put on my shoes again, and the rest of my clothes, and picked up a St. Kitts supplejack—I’ll get you one; it’s one of those limber, grapevine walking sticks, a handy thing on a dark night—and started with the boy for Iversen’s house.

  “When we had arrived almost at the Moravian Church, I saw something ahead, near the roadside. It was then about eleven-fifteen, and the streets were deserted. What I saw made me curious to test something. I paused, and told the boy to run on ahead and tell Mrs. Iversen I would be there shortly. The boy started to trot ahead. He was pure black, Mr. Lee, but he went past what I saw without noticing it. He swerved a little away from it, and I think, perhaps, he slightly quickened his pace just at that point, but that was all.”

  “What did you see?” asked Mr. Lee, interrupting. He spoke a trifle breathlessly. His left lung was, as yet, far from being healed.

  “The ‘Hanging Jumbee,’” replied Mr. Da Silva, in his usual tones.

  “Yes! There at the side of the road were three Jumbees. There’s a reference to that in The History of Stewart Mc-Cann. Perhaps you’ve run across that, eh?”

  Mr. Lee nodded, and Mr. Da Silva quoted:

  “There they hung, though no ladder’s rung

  Supported their dangling feet.

  “And there’s another line in The History,” he continued, smiling, “which describes a typical group of Hanging Jumbee:

  “Maiden, man-child, and shrew.

  “Well, there were the usual three Jumbees, apparently hanging in the air. It wasn’t very light, but I could make out a boy of about twelve, a young girl, and a shriveled old woman—what the author of The History of Stewart McCann meant by the word ‘shrew.’ He told me himself, by the way, Mr. Lee, that he had put feet on his Jumbees mostly for the sake of a convenient rime—poetic license! The Hanging Jumbee have no feet. It is one of their peculiarities. Their legs stop at the ankles. They have abnormally long, thin legs—African legs. They are always black, you know. Their feet—if they have them—are always hidden in a kind of mist that lies along the ground wherever one sees them. They shift and ‘weave,’ as a full-blooded African does—standing on one foot and resting the other—you’ve noticed that, of course—or scratching the supporting ankle with the toes of the other foot. They do not swing in the sense that they seem to be swung on a rope—that is not what it means; they do not twirl about. But they do—always—face the oncomer.…

  “I walked on, slowly, and passed them; and they kept their faces to me as they always do. I’m used to that.…

  “I went up the steps of the house to the front gallery, and found Mrs. Iversen waiting for me. Her sister was with her, too. I remained sitting with them for the best part of an hour. Then two old black women who had been sent for, into the country, arrived. These were two old women who were accustomed to prepare the dead for burial. Then I persuaded the ladies to retire, and started to come home myself.

  “it was a little past midnight, perhaps twelve-fifteen. I picked out my own hat from two or three of poor old Iversen’s that were hanging on the rack, took my supplejack, and stepped out of the door onto the little stone gallery at the head of the steps.

  “There are about twelve or thirteen steps from the gallery down to the street As I started down them I noticed a third old black woman sitting all huddled together on the bottom step, with her back to me. I thought at once that this must be some old crone who lived with the other two—the preparers of the dead. I imagined that she had been afraid to remain alone in their cabin, and so had accompanied them into the town-they are like children, you know, in some ways—and that, feeling too humble to come into the house, she had sat down to wait on the step and had fallen asleep. You’ve heard their proverbs, have you not? There’s one that exactly fits this situation that I had imagined: ‘Cockroach no wear crockin’ boot when he creep in fowl-house!’ It means: ‘Be very reserved when in the presence of your betters!’ Quaint, rather! The poor souls!


  “I started to walk down the steps toward the old woman. That scant halfmoon had come up into the sky while I had been sitting with the ladies, and by its light everything was fairly sharply defined. I could see that old woman as plainly as I can see you now, Mr. Lee. In fact, I was looking directly at the poor old creature as I came, down the steps, and fumbling in my pocket for a few coppers for her—for tobacco and sugar, as they say! I was wondering, indeed, why she was not by this time on her feet and making one of their queer little bobbing bows—‘cockroach bow to fowl,’ as they might say! It seemed this old woman must have fallen into a very deep sleep, for she bad not moved at all, although ordinarily she would have heard me, for the night was deathly still, and their hearing is extraordinarily acute, like a cat’s, or a dog’s. I remember that the fragrance from Mrs. Iversen’s tuberoses, in pots on the gallery railing, was pouring out in a stream that night, ‘making a greeting for the moon!’ It was almost overpowering.

  “Just as I was putting my foot on the fifth step, there came a tiny little puff of fresh breeze from somewhere in the hills behind Iversen’s house. It rustled the dry fronds of a palm-tree that was growing beside the steps. I turned my head in that direction for an instant.

  “Mr. Lee, when I looked back; down the steps, after what must have been a fifth of a second’s inattention, that little old black woman who had been huddled up there on the lowest step, apparently sound asleep, was gone. She had vanished utterly—and, Mr. Lee, a little white dog, about the size of a French poodle, was bounding up the steps toward me. With every bound, a step at a leap, the dog increased in size. It seemed to swell out there before my very eyes.

  “Then I was, really, frightened—thoroughly, utterly frightened. I knew if that ‘animal’ so much as touched me, it meant death, Mr. Lee—absolute, certain death. The little old woman was a ‘sheen’—chien, of course. You know of lycanthropy—wolf-change—of course. Well, this was one of our varieties of it. I do not know what it would be called, I’m sure. ‘Canicanthropy,’ perhaps. I don’t know, but something—something first-cousin-once-removed from lycanthropy, and on the downward scale, Mr. Lee. The old woman was a were-dog!

  “Of course, I had no time to think, only to use my instinct. I swung my supplejack with all my might and brought it down squarely on that beast’s head. It was only a step below me, then, and I could see the faint moonlight sparkle on the slaver about its mouth. It was then, it seemed to me, about the size of a medium-sized dog—nearly wolf-size, Mr. Lee, and a kind of deathly white. I was desperate, and the force with which I struck caused me to lose my balance. I did not fall, but it required a moment or two for me to regain my equilibrium. When I felt my feet firm under me again, I looked about, frantically, on all sides, for the ‘dog.’ But it, too, Mr. Lee, like the old woman, had quite disappeared. I looked all about, you may well imagine, after that experience, in the clear, thin moonlight. For yards about the foot of the steps, there was no place—not even a small nook—where either the ‘dog’ or the old woman could have been concealed. Neither was on the gallery, which was only a few feet square, a mere landing.

  “But there came to my ears, sharpened by that night’s experiences, from far out among the plantations at the rear of Iversen’s house, the pad-pad of naked feet. Someone—something—was running, desperately, off in the direction of the center of the island, back into the hills, into the deep ‘bush.’

  “Then, behind me, out of the house onto the gallery rushed the two old women who had been preparing Iversen’s body for its burial. They were enormously excited, and they shouted at me unintelligibly. I will have to render their words for you.

  “‘O, de Good Gahd protec’ you, Marster Jaffray, sir—de Joombie, de Joombie! De ‘Sheen,’ Marster Jaffray! He go, sir?’

  “I reassured the poor old souls, and went back home.”

  Mr. Da Silva fell abruptly silent. He slowly shifted his position in his chair, and reached for, and lighted, a fresh cigarette.

  Mr. Lee was absolutely silent. He did not move. Mr. Da Silva resumed, deliberately, after obtaining a light.

  “You see, Mr. Lee, the West Indies are different from any other place in the world, I verily believe, sir. I’ve said so, anyhow, many a time, although I have never been out of the islands except when I was a young man, to Copenhagen. I’ve told you, exactly, what happened that particular night.”

  Mr. Lee heaved a sigh.

  “Thank you, Mr. Da Silva, very much indeed, sir,” said he, thoughtfully, and made as though to rise. His service wrist-watch indicated 8 o’clock.

  “Let us have a fresh swizzel, at least, before you go,” suggested Mr. Da Silva. “We have a saying here in the island, that ‘a man can’t travel on one leg!’ Perhaps you’ve heard it already.”

  “I have,” said Mr. Lee.

  “Knud, Knud! You hear, mon? Knud—tell Charlotte to mash up another bal’ of ice—you hear? Quickly now,” commanded Mr. Da Silva.

  THE SHADOWS

  I did not begin to see the shadows until I had lived in Old Morris’ house for more than a week. Old Morris, dead and gone these many years, had been the scion of a still earlier Irish settler in Santa Cruz, of a family which had come into the island when the Danes, failing to colonize its rich acres, had opened it, in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, to colonists; and younger sons of Irish, Scottish, and English gentry had taken up sugar estates and commenced that baronial life which lasted for a century and which declined after the abolition of slavery and the German bounty on beet sugar had started the long process of West Indian commercial decadence. Mr. Morris’ youth had been spent in the French islands.

  The shadows were at first so vague that I attributed them wholly to the slight weakness which began to affect my eyes in early childhood, and which, while never materially interfering with the enjoyment of life in general, had necessitated the use of glasses when I used my eyes to read or write. My first experience of them was about one o’clock in the morning. I had been at a “Gentlemen’s Party” at Hacker’s house, “Emerald,” as some poetic-minded ancestor of Hacker’s had named the family estate three miles out of Christiansted, the northerly town, built on the site of the ancient abandoned French town of Bassin.

  I had come home from the party and was undressing in my bedroom, which is one of two rooms on the westerly side of the house which stands at the edge of the old “Sunday Market.” These two bedrooms open on the market-place, and I had chosen them, rather than the more airy rooms on the other side, because of the space outside. I like to look out on trees in the early mornings, whenever possible, and the ancient market-place is overshadowed with the foliage of hundred-year-old mahogany trees, and a few gnarled “otaheites” and Chinese-bean trees.

  I had nearly finished undressing, had noted that my servant had let down and properly fastened the mosquito netting, and had stepped into the other bedroom to open the jalousies so that I might get as much of the night-breeze as possible circulating through the house. I was coming back through the doorway between the two bedrooms, and taking off my dressing gown, at the moment, when the first faint perception of what I have called “the shadows” made itself apparent. It was very dark, just after switching off the electric light in that front bedroom. I had, in fact, to feel for the doorway. In this I experienced some difficulty, and my eyes had not fully adjusted themselves to the thin starlight seeping in through the slanted jalousies of my own room when I passed through the doorway and groped my way toward the great mahogany four-poster in which I was about to lie down for my belated rest.

  I saw the nearest post looming before me, closer than I had expected. Putting out my hand, I grasped—nothing. I winked in some surprize, and peered through the slightly increasing light, as my eyes adjusted themselves to the sudden change. Yes, surely—there was the corner of the bedstead just in front of my face! By now my eyes were sufficiently attuned to the amount of light from outside to see a little plainer. I was puzzled. The bed was not where I had supposed it to
be. What could have happened? That the servants should have moved my bed without orders to do so was incredible. Besides, I had undressed, in full electric light in that room, not more than a few minutes ago, and then the bed was standing exactly where it had been since I had had it moved into that room a week before. I kicked gently, before me with a slippered foot, against the place where that bedpost appeared to be standing—and my foot met no resistance.

  I stepped over to the light in my own room and snapped the button. In the sudden glare, everything readjusted itself to normal. There stood my bed, and here in their accustomed places about the room were ranged the chairs, the polished wardrobe (we do not use cupboards in the West India Islands), the mahogany dressing table—even my clothes which I had hung over a chair where Albertina my servant would find them in the morning and put them (they were of white drill) into the soiled-clothes bag in the morning.

  I shook my head. Light and shadow in these islands seem, somehow, different from what they are like at home in the United States! The tricks they play are different tricks, somehow.

  I snapped off the light again, and in the ensuing dead blackness, I crawled in under the loose edge of the mosquito netting, tucked it along under the edge of the mattress on that side, adjusted my pil!ows and the sheets, and settled myself for a good sleep. Even to a moderate man, these gentlemen’s parties are rather wearing sometimes. They invariably last too long. I closed my eyes and was asleep before I could have put these last ideas into words.

  In the morning the recollection Of the experience with the bed-being-in-the-wrong-place was gone. I jumped out of bed and into my shower bath at half-past six, for I had promised O’Brien, captain of the U. S. Marines, to go out with him to the rifle range at La Grande Princesse that morning and look over the butts with him. I like O’Brien, and I am not uninterested in the efficiency of Uncle Sam’s Marines, but my chief objective was to watch the pelicans. Out there on the glorious beach of Estate Grande Princesse (“Big Princess” as the Black People call it), a colony of pelicans snake their home, and it is a never-ending source of amusement to me to watch them fish. A Caribbean pelican is probably the most graceful flier we have in these latitudes—barring not even the hurricane bird, that describer of noble arcs and parabolas,-and the most insanely, absurdly awkward creature on land that Providence has cared in a light-hearted moment to create!