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

by Henry S. Whitehead

  He was going to make this hive the greatest hive there was! He was going to use old, old “magic,” the way it had been done in the Old Country, for luck and for the success of a vegetable garden, and for many other good purposes, even though it was, good purpose and all, sacrilege. God didn’t mind such things. It was only the priests who objected. A little bit of the Host placed inside the hive. That was all. That would make the bees prosper, bring luck to the new hive. Over here, in America, you didn’t hear so much about doing things like that. But Kazmir knew what to do for bees. Those old-time ways were good ways. They worked. The Holy Host had many virtues. Along with garlic-flowers it was a sure safeguard from vampires. Placed in a coffin, he had heard, It kept the body from decay. With even a tiny crumb of It, wrapped tightly in a piece of clean linen, sewed into your clothes, It was sure proof against the Bad-Eye.

  There was practically no sound inside the hive. The bees on the landing board moved slowly, lethargically. If this heat held, there would be flowers soon, and he could discontinue the sugar-and-water honey. Too much of that and the bees laid off working! Bees were like humans, very much like humans, only dumber! They never took a rest, had no relaxations.

  He raised the hive’s top, carefully, leaned it against the side of the packing box on which the hive itself stood. There were the frames, just as he had placed them yesterday, a little old comb, for the bees to build onto, near the middle. That was all right. He removed the crushed bodies of several bees that had got caught when he had placed the top on the hive in yesterday’s dusk of evening. The new queen would be down inside there, somewhere, surrounded by her eager, devoted workers, the swarm that had accompanied her out of the older hive yesterday.

  Kazmir crossed himself, furtively, and glanced around. Nobody was looking; indeed nobody was, at the moment, in sight. He took the handkerchief out of his pocket, touched his right thumb and the index finger to his lips reverently, extracted the Sanctissimum and dropped It into the open hive between the frames. Then he replaced the top and went into the house. The bees should prosper now, according to all the old rules. Kazmir had never heard of putting such a charm on bees before. That was his own idea. But—if it worked as the old tales said it worked, for horses and cows and the increase of a flock of goats, why not for bees?

  It was a quarter past six by the kitchen clock. Time tor the woman and kids to be getting up for seven o’clock Mass. He went up the rough stairs to awaken his wife and their two children. This done, he returned to the kitchen to boil four eggs for his breakfast.

  * * * *

  It turned out to be a very quiet hive, the new one. Its bees, too, seemed to be stingers. He received many stings during the summer, more stings than usual, it seemed to him. He had to warn Anna and the children to keep away from it. “They got a lotta pep, them bees,” he said, and smiled to himself. It was he, applying an old idea with true American progressiveness, who had “pepped them up.” He gave the process this phrase, mentally, without the least thought of incongruity, of irreverence. The efficacy of the Sanctissimum was the last, the very last thing that Kazmir Strod would have doubted, in the entire scheme of the world’s regulations and principles.

  It was only occasionally nowadays that Kazmir worked at bricklaying. Ten years before, in the Old Country, he had learned that trade. Always a willful, strong-headed youth, independent of mind, he had flown in the face of his family custom to learn a trade like that. All his family, near Kovno, had been market-gardeners. That strong-headedness had been responsible for his emigration, too. There had been many disputes between him and his father and older brothers. The strong-headedness and the trade! There were great openings for a good bricklayer in America.

  But, since he had married—rather late in life, to this Americanized Anna of his, at twenty-two; he was twenty-seven now—with enough money to buy this place, earned at the bricklaying, he had reverted to his gardening. There wasn’t as much in gardening, even with good land like this, and sometimes Anna would nag him to take a job when a contractor offered one, but there were all the deep-rooted satisfactions of the soil; the love of it was bred deep in his blood and bones, and he had a way with tomatoes and early peas and even humdrum potatoes.

  This devotion to the soil, he felt, triumphantly, had been amply justified that August. He had an offer to go and be gardener on a great estate, a millionaire’s, eighteen miles away. The offer included a house, and the use of what vegetables he needed for his family. He accepted it, and told Anna afterward.

  Anna was delighted. He had not been sure of how she would take it, and her delight pleased him enormously. For several days it was like a new honeymoon. He spread it all over the community that he wanted to sell his place.

  He got six hundred dollars, cash, more than he had paid for it. There was a couple of thousand dollars worth of improvement he had dug into its earth, but six hundred dollars was six hundred dollars! The title passed, after a day and a night’s wrangling with the purchaser, Tony Dvorcznik, a compatriot. Kazmir and Anna and the children moved their possessions in a borrowed motor-truck.

  * * * *

  It was in October that Tony Dvorcznik killed off the bees. Tony did not understand bees, and his wife was afraid of them. He hired Stanislas Bodinski, who was one of Father Gregoreff’s acolytes, to do the job for him, for a quarter-share of what honey might be discovered within the four hives. Stanislas Bodinski arrived, with sulfur and netting. Tony and his wife stood at a little distance, watching interestedly; telling each other to watch out for stings; marveling at Stanislas Bodinski’s nonchalance, deftly placing his sulfur-candles, rapidly stuffing the horizontal opening above the landing boards, the edges all around the hive tops.

  Stanislas joined them, removing his head-net, and stood with them while the sulfur fumes did their deadly work inside the hives. Later, they all walked over to the hives, Stanislas reassuring Tony’s wife. “They ain’t no danger now. They’re all dead by now. Anyhow, they die after they sting you, but you needn’t worry none. Jus’ the same, you better keep away a little. They’s some bees was out the hives when I stopped up them cracks. They’ll be flyin’ around, kinda puzzled, now.”

  The comb was lifted out, to exclamations on the part of Tony’s wife, into a row of borrowed milk pans. It piled up, enormously, honey covering the bottoms of the pans viscidly.

  “You’d wonder where it all come from,” said Tony’s wife, again and again, “outa them little hives! You wouldn’t think they’d hold that much stuff, would ya?”

  Stanislas Bodinski arrived at the last hive, with two remaining milk pans, and proceeded to lift the top away from the hive. They saw him look in. Then he stopped and looked close. Then he stepped back, raised his arms in an amazing gesture of wonderment, sank to his knees beside the hive, and made the sign of the cross on his breast many times.

  Wonderingly, they approached, Tony’s wife murmuring:

  “What’s bitin’ him? Is he gone loony, huh?” Then: “Hey, Tony, they mus’ be somethin’ awful strange in that-there hive, huh—for Stan to ac’ that way!”

  There was indeed something strange in the hive, although there was very little honey in it. They did not dare touch it, and, after Stanislas had somewhat recovered himself, and put back the top with hands shaking, the three of them, just as they stood, Tony’s wife not even taking oft her apron, started for the rectory, to get Father Gregoreff.

  The priest came, rather grumblingly, Stanislas following half a block behind the other three. He had run into the sacristy to get the priest’s cope and a stole, and something that he had to hold onto, in his pocket, to keep it quiet! He hoped Father Gregoreff would not look behind him and see what he was carrying. He was a bit of a mystic, this Stanislas; otherwise he would not, perhaps, have continued to be an acolyte after he was nineteen. He, too, had come from near Kovno, like Kazmir Strod. Stanislas had listened to strange tales in his earlier boyhood, back there in the Old Country.

  He came in through Tony Dvorcznik’
s gate well behind the rest, furtively. They were all standing, looking at the hive, when he came around the corner of the house. He walked around them, knelt before his priest, seized and kissed his hand. He handed the amazed Father Gregoreff his stole, and the priest put it on mechanically, murmuring, “What’s this? What’s all this?” Stanislas rose, hastily invested his pastor with the white cope, and stepped over to the hive. He knelt, and turning to the others, motioned them, authoritatively, to kneel also. They did so, all three; the priest’s cope trailing on the ground, a few feet behind Stanislas.

  Stanislas, making the sign of the cross, reached his arms into the hive. Carefully, the sweat running down his facet, he lifted out a shining yellow, new-wax structure, intact, with infinite care. He turned, still on his knees, and placed what he had lifted in the priest’s hands. It was a little church, made of wax, made by the bees whose dead bodies, suffocated by sulfur fumes, now littered the dead hive.

  Then Stanislas took the sacring bell from his left-hand pocket, and, his head on the ground, rang it to indicate to all who might be within earshot that they should prostrate themselves before the Sanctissimum.

  THE LIPS

  Originally published in Weird Tales, September 1929.

  The Saul Taverner, blackbirder, Luke Martin, master, up from Cartagena, came to her anchor in the harbor of St Thomas, capital, and chief town of the Danish West Indies. A Martinique barkentine berthed to leeward of her, sent a fully manned boat ashore after the harbor-master with a request for permission to change anchorage. Luke Martin’s shore boat was only a few lengths behind the Frenchman’s. Martin shouted after the officer whom it landed:

  “Tell Lollik I’ll change places with ye, an’ welcome! What ye carryin’ brandy? I’ll take six cases off’n ye.”

  The barkentine’s mate, a French-Island mulatto, nodded over his shoulder, and noted down the order in a leather pocketbook without slackening his pace. It was no joyful experience to lie in a semi-enclosed harbor directly to leeward of a slaver, and haste was indicated despite propitiatory orders for brandy. “Very well, Captain,” said the mate, stiffly.

  Martin landed as the Martinique mate rounded a corner to the left and disappeared from view in the direction of the harbor-master’s. Martin scowled after him, muttering to himself.

  “Airs! Talkin’ English—language of the islands; thinkin’ in French, you an’ your airs! An’ yer gran’father came outta blackbird ship like’s not! You an’ your airs!”

  Reaching the corner the mate had turned, Martin glanced after him momentarily, then turned to the right, mounting a slight rise. His business ashore took him to the fort. He intended to land his cargo, or a portion of it, that night. The colony was short of field hands. With the help of troops from Martinique, French troops, and Spaniards down from its nearer neighbor, Porto Rico, it had just put down a bloody uprising on its subsidiary island of St Jan. Many of the slaves had been killed in the joint armed reprisal of the year 1833.

  Luke Martin got his permission to land his cargo, therefore, without difficulty, and being a Yankee bucko who let no grass grow under his feet, four bells in the afternoon watch saw the hatches off and the decks of the Saul Taverner swarming with manacled Blacks for the ceremony of washing-down.

  Huddled together, blinking in the glaring sun of a July afternoon under parallel 18, north latitude, the mass of swart humanity were soaped, with handfuls of waste out of soft-soap buckets, scrubbed with brushes on the ends of short handles, and rinsed off with other buckets. Boatloads of Negroes surrounded the ship to see the washing-down, and these were kept at a distance by a swearing third mate told off for the purpose.

  By seven bells the washing-down was completed, and before sundown a row of lighters, each guarded by a pair of Danish gendarmes with muskets and fixed bayonets, had ranged alongside for the taking off of the hundred and seventeen Blacks who were to be landed, most of whom would be sent to replenish the laborers on the plantations of St Jan off the other side of the island of St Thomas.

  The disembarking process began just after dark, to the light of lanterns. Great care was exercised by all concerned lest any escape by plunging overboard. A tally-clerk from shore checked on the Blacks as they went over the side into the lighters, and these, as they became filled, were rowed to the landing-stage by other slaves, bending over six great sweeps in each of the stub-bowed, heavy wooden boats.

  Among the huddled black bodies of the very last batch stood a woman, very tall and thin, with a new-born child, black as a coal, at her breasts. The woman stood a little aloof from the others, farther from the low rail of the Saul Taverner’s forward deck, crooning to her infant. Behind her approached Luke Martin, impatient of his unloading, and cut at her thin ankles with his rhinoceros leather whip. The woman did not wince. Instead she turned her head and muttered a few syllables in a low tone, in the Eboe dialect. Martin shoved her into the mass of Blacks, cursing roundly as he cut a second time at the spindling shins.

  The woman turned, very quietly and softly, as he was passing behind her, let her head fall softly on Martin’s shoulder and whispered into his ear. The motion was so delicate as to simulate a caress, but Martin’s curse died in his throat. He howled in pain as the woman raised her head, and his whip clattered on the deck boarding while the hand which had held it went to the shoulder. The woman, deftly holding her infant, had moved in among the huddling Blacks, a dozen or more of whom intervened between her and Martin, who hopped on one foot and cursed, a vicious, continuous stream of foul epithets; then, still cursing, made his way in haste to his cabin after an antiseptic, any idea of revenge swallowed up in his superstitious dread of what might happen to him if he did not, forthwith, dress the ghastly wound just under his left ear, where the black woman had caused her firm, white, and shining teeth to meet in the great muscle of his neck between shoulder and jaw.

  When he emerged, ten minutes later, the wound now soaked in permanganate of potash, and roughly clotted with a clean cloth, the last lighter, under the impetus of its six sweeps, was halfway ashore, and the clerk of the government, from the fort, was awaiting him, with a bag of coin and a pair of gendarmes to guard it. He accompanied the government clerk below, where, the gendarmes at the cabin door, they figured and added and counted money for the next hour, a bottle of sound rum and a pair of glasses between them.

  At two bells, under a shining moon, the Saul Taverner, taking advantage of the evening trade wind, was running for the harbor’s mouth to stand away for Norfolk, Virginia, whence, empty, she would run up the coast for her home port of Boston, Massachusetts.

  It was midnight, what with the care of his ship coming out of even the plain and safe harbor of St Thomas, before Martin the skipper, Culebra lighthouse off the port quarter, turned in. The wound in the top of his shoulder ached dully, and he sent for Matthew Pound, his first mate, to wash it out with more permanganate and dress it suitably. It was in an awkward place—curse the black slut!—for him to manage it for himself.

  Pound went white and muttered under his breath at the ugly sight of it when Martin had removed his shirt, painfully, and eased off the cloth he had roughly laid over it, a cloth now stiff and clotted with the exuding blood drying on its inner surface, from the savage wound.

  Thereafter, not liking the look on his mate’s face, nor that whitening which the sight of the place in his neck had brought about, Martin dispensed with assistance, and dressed the wound himself.

  He slept little that first night, but this was partly for thinking of the bargain he had driven with those short-handed Danes. They had been hard up for black meat to sweat on those hillside canefields over on St Jan. He could have disposed, easily, of his entire cargo, but that, unfortunately, was out of the question. He had, what with an exceptionally slow and hot voyage across the Caribbean from Cartagena, barely enough of his said cargo left to fulfill his engagement to deliver a certain number of head in Norfolk. But he would have been glad enough to rid his hold of them all—curse them!—and se
t his course straight for Boston. He was expecting to be married the day after his arrival. He was eager to get home, and even now the Saul Taverner was carrying as much sail as she could stand up under, heeling now to the unfailing trade winds of this latitude.

  The wound ached and pained, none the less, and he found it well-nigh impossible to settle himself in a comparatively comfortable position on its account. He tossed and cursed far into the warm night. Towards morning he fell into a fitful doze.

  The entire side of his neck and shoulder was one huge, searing ache when he awakened and pushed himself carefully upright with both hands. He could not bend his head nor, at first, move it from side to side. Dressing was a very painful process, but he managed it. He wanted to see what the bite looked like, but, as he never shaved during a voyage, there was no glass in his cabin. He bathed the sore place gingerly with bay rum, which hurt abominably and caused him to curse afresh. Dressed at last, he made his way up on deck, past the steward who was laying breakfast in his cabin. The steward, he thought, glanced at him curiously, but he could not be sure. No wonder. He had to walk sidewise, with the pain of his neck, like a crab. He ordered more sail, stuns’ls, and, these set and sheeted home, he returned to the cabin for breakfast.

  Mid-afternoon saw him, despite the vessel’s more than satisfactory speed and the progress of a long leg towards Boston and Lydia Farnham, in such a devilish temper that everyone on board the ship kept as far as possible out of his way. He took no night watches, these being divided among the three mates, and after his solitary supper, punctuated with numerous curses at a more than usually awkward steward, he went into his state-room, removed his shirt and singlet, and thoroughly rubbed the entire aching area with coconut oil. The pain now ran down his left arm to the elbow, and penetrated to all the cords of his neck, the muscles of which throbbed and burned atrociously.