Horror in Paradise Page 10

  Before Laval, fired with the mad flames of religious fanaticism, had started his holocaust of idol-breaking, there stood in the lovely Valley of Ititouiti at the foot of Mount Duff an altar dedicated to Parquitala. A small marae it had been, and not listed among the nine great maraes of the islands. No one clearly remembered why it was called Parquitala’s altar. It was said that in the dim and ancient days of cannibalism a high priest had lived called Parquitala, who tended three grotesque gods on the altar that later was to bear his name. He had been, so old rumor relates, a great soldier, a mighty warrior, as well as a powerful magician. That he must have been a man of powerful personality is certain, as only three names stand out high above the countless others that have passed in The Forgotten Isles: Maputeoa, Laval, and Parquitala.

  Now when Laval and his men were winding their way down the steep path that leads to the valley where Parquitala’s altar stood, fired with the insane zeal of impending destruction, the high priest of the little marae—who had been warned—sorrowfully gathered the three clumsy wide-eyed stone gods into his canoe. He must, of course, before he did this, have prostrated himself before the ancient shades of the gods of his people and begged them to forgive what he was about to do, since he did it only to save the magnificent memory of Parquitala. At all events he steered his canoe to the deepest part of the lagoon and there dropped the gods one by one into the inscrutable cerulean depths. When Laval and his assistants arrived, nothing was left to destroy but the terraces of the altar, which in frustrated fury he ripped apart till scarcely a stone was left where the altar had stood.

  As time went on and Catholicism replaced the idols of paganism with painted plaster effigies, the simple natives humbly accepted the substitute and immolated themselves on the altar of Laval’s mad ambition. But Parquitala, untouched by the occult splendor of the long glittering arm of the church, walked abroad unmolested by the holy water, spells, or incantations which were thrown upon his name. Perhaps he embodies the spirit of all the ancient gods and is deathless. At any rate when he chose to appear no power could be raised against him. The years passed, and the silent shadow of Parquitala moved as though Catholicism had never existed . . .

  The Polynesians reckon time by the moon, and it is on the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth nights of the moon month that the ghosts walk. The full moon has risen, and its lower rim just touches the horizon at sunset. It is an ideal time for ghosts to walk at will. Of course suggestion plays a great part in our lives, and to a simple South Sea islander the suggestion that on these nights the tupapau are abroad is extremely potent.

  However, with all my philosophy and understanding of scientific metaphysics, I will say that there is some very powerful force at work, not only on the nights mentioned but on other nights as well, especially on Manga Reva and the near-by islands. The tupapaus on The Forgotten Islands seem to possess more freedom than those of Tahiti, which rarely walk save on the three nights of the moon on which they are set at liberty from their ghostly fourth-dimensional state of confinement.

  On the island of Maupiti, one of the Leeward group of the Society Islands where I once lived for several months, I retired on the first night of my arrival on the island in a small bedroom which opened doorless from the main living room, where the family of PihauTane, my host, slept. Tired and exhausted from my trip I slept soundly. But at about two in the morning I found myself awakened by some force outside myself. Raising myself on one elbow, I looked about. Sitting in the middle of the doorway was a vague figure which slowly took the very tangible form of an old man. He was so old that his eyes had sunk to pinpoints and his long upper and lower teeth protruded beyond his gums. One hand was raised in a gesture of command and he looked straight in front of him, as though looking out the window. When I first saw him he was wavering and mistlike, but before long I saw him with absolute distinctness. Where the light came from I do not know. While I watched, wide awake but powerless to move because of the strange effect on me of this curious phenomenon, I saw shapes slowly rising from the floor. They were black shapes, half seal, half cat, with long black bodies that curled around one side of the ancient figure. They were like seals in their movements, but each animal—if that is what they were—had four very short paws, no tail, and in their catlike heads were set enormous eyes.

  This continued for some time. There seemed no end to the stream of little black monsters that rose from the floor, caressed the mummylike figure, and then circled upward and vanished into the ceiling. Although some curious things happened to me before, this was my first real occult experience in the South Seas and a sort of hypnotic terror came over me. I began to repeat a formula for the banishment of demons and the powers of darkness.

  I had scarcely started when the seated figure turned its head slowly toward me, and from what I had thought were eyeless sockets shot dark gleams, like fires glowing in a pit.

  The head grew large, the shriveled gums and protruding teeth still hideously plain, and the body assumed proportions to match the head. The arm raised in command slowly reached out till the long bony fingers were just within reach of my face.

  I had the feeling that I was being hypnotized, first into a daze and then into a deep sleep, and I sank away, dimly remembering that the demon’s head had swelled until it touched the ceiling before I lost consciousness. The black stream of animals had ceased the moment I commenced the formula. As I dropped into sleep I seemed to fall into an ancient state of being, something from thousands of years ago, so that I was terrified at first, happy at last that I could do so.

  From that day I had no trouble with my life in Polynesia. All forces, material and occult, reached out to help me in every way.

  When I told the natives some time after this about my experience, I received nothing but belief and then I was told the story of Pihau’s house.

  Pihau built his house, against the approval of every one on the island, on the site of a ruined marae, which happened to be situated on land which he owned. Now while the natives have accepted the Christianity presented to them by the missionaries, they yet have a deep-rooted fear and respect for the ancient altars of their ancestors, and to build a house on the site of one of them is sacrilege indeed.

  According to the natives the high priest of the Tieopolo has a kind of vicarious life if he finds a living person through whom he may express himself. Old Nairou, the Marquesan father of Pihau’s wife, was such a person. He saw the tupa-pau every night. In the morning he described the form under which the demon had appeared to him the night before. Sometimes he took the form of an animal; again he was a huge half animal, half human being, terrifying to behold; again he appeared as a black and uneasy cat or dog that ended his wanderings by darting from the ground suddenly straight for the sky and disappearing. Sometimes he appeared as a very old man accompanied by black animallike forms, and again he appeared as a ball of faintly luminous fire.

  The natives believed that my seeing him without warning or preparation on that first night of my island visit was a sign that I was accepted by their ancient powers. Their ancient gods were pleased with me for some unknown reason. This of course established an easy atmosphere for my work, for if you have the sympathy of the people with whom you are living you have nothing to fight against. The natives christened me “ghost cousin,” an appellation which my neighbors of Manga Reva took over, and which they seem to feel I rightly deserved.

  There is no middle ground in sympathy with that half world. One either wanders farther and farther into the intricacies of the fabulous jungles of the old Manga Revan world, or one does not. Nothing rests for a second where it was, up to that fractional margin which divides what we call the past and present understanding of time.

  That the gray guardians of the other world had listened to Tom’s plaintive desire to know more definitely the phantoms that haunted the island and his brain alike was made evident about a week after the storm and the finding of the skull.

  The night before Tom’s final acceptanc
e of the unseen had been a peculiar one for me. I slept fitfully, hearing voices and steps of people passing. Mad fancies played hide-and-seek in my mind. The dog slept uneasily, turning and twisting in her sleep, making a new bed for herself in that ancient fashion peculiar to animals, turning around and around before settling down for the night. Finally I got up, unlocked the door, and went out on the porch. The wind had blown ragged clouds across the moon. It was chill, and I felt uneasy in the dimness of the half-shrouded night.

  Suddenly beside me, close beside me, flashed a gray cat, apparently fast asleep. It lay curled up, suspended in midair. I jumped. It flew with an abrupt movement beside me, so close that it touched me. I felt it distinctly. Then it dashed around me and circled out into the vagueness of the garden beyond.

  All my adjustments, mental and emotional, were so ragged that I had difficulty in finding myself. I reentered the house, locked the door, crept into bed and deliberately slugged myself with my mind into sleep.

  Next morning as I was having my coffee Tom wandered over in his leisurely fashion. I told him what I had seen. All his features lighted up.

  “Bob, do you think it will happen again? Could I see it?”

  “Heavens, I hope not, old man! This restless flitting about of sleeping cats, without obedience to the laws of gravity, is getting on my nerves.”

  After supper that night Tom and I were smoking the last of a precious package of cigarettes. The sun had long since disappeared, yet enough light remained to shape trees and houses in a half-distinct way. We were standing on the porch, relaxed, talking about a proposed trip to Agakaouitai and the burial place of the old kings. Tom suddenly stiffened and slowly turned his head. I followed his eyes and there in the black velvet depths of the open cookhouse we saw a dimly outlined shape like a man, a half man rather, as the outline stopped at the waist. The figure was a line drawing, such a sight as a child might crudely sketch in white chalk on a blackboard, a child’s conception of what a man might be. While we watched—and it seemed an eternity—it came swiftly toward us, faster than a frightened fish in the lagoon. It seemed to be drawn upon the air, the lines not luminous but white, and though I knew that it was coming rapidly toward us I cannot tell just how I knew this. It darted around us and disappeared into the garden, as the cat had done the night before.

  Speechless and choking with emotion, Tom pointed to where it had disappeared. I was the first to come to myself.

  “Well, Tom, how about that?”

  But Tom couldn’t articulate his thoughts clearly for several minutes. Finally all his curiosity, fright, and wonder came out in jerky sentences as he asked what it was, why it didn’t stay longer, and what it meant.

  Ignoring these, I answered calmly (outwardly I was calm, though I confess I was inwardly rather shaken): “Well, are you convinced now?”

  “You bet I am!” he answered with explosive conviction. “But, Bob . . .” and on and on he wandered, asking me questions impossible to answer.

  From that night on Tom lost his puzzled look, but he liked less than ever wandering about in the night, and I always had to turn the flashlight on to the path which led to the road before he would leave my house.

  Charis Crockett

  Sejak the Witch Killer

  Charis Dennison, a Radcliffe graduate born in 1905, married Frederick Eugene Crockett. He had accompanied Commander Richard Byrd to the South Pole, and the couple spent a honeymoon among the recently reformed cannibals in western New Guinea. Of her book, The House in the Rain Forest (1942), about the experiences of these anthropologists who set up housekeeping in the jungle, Professor Ernest Hooton says in his introduction: “It is jammed with good descriptive writing, excellent anthropology, and good humor.”

  This selection asserts the former belief that death among the tribesmen is almost always assumed to be the result of the actions of an enemy, so that the person charged with the duty of revealing the murderer is an important personage.

  DOUBTLESS in the tangled growth of the Rain Forest poisonous plants exist, but the most popular method of disposing of an enemy is by a magical plant known only to graduates of the Newun. Kwi is the powdered bark of a tree; all that it requires to be fatal is to be placed on someone’s head, preferably while he is sleeping. It has another property which would endear it to the writer of detective stories: it permits the “poisoner” to establish a perfect alibi for the time of his victim’s death. All he need do is murmur under his breath the moment when the kwi is to take effect and then arrange to be innocently poking in his garden a respectable distance away at that time.

  The force of this alibi is naturally rather diminished by the fact that every Madik knows the idiosyncrasies of kwi, and also that every Madik is constitutionally averse to the verdict “death from natural causes.” When a man dies the chances are ten to one that a human or supernatural being has killed him. The murderer is nevertheless protected to some extent. Although the finger of suspicion may point at him, it probably points at a number of others also—anyone believed to have held any sort of grudge against the dead man. The laying-on of kwi cannot be traced to him without subsequent thorough investigation.

  Sejak told us about a case at which he had assisted. Nakari, his father’s sister’s husband’s brother, had waked one morning feeling very unwell. Nakari’s brother examined him closely and diagnostically. On Nakari’s forehead he saw a small black spot.

  “Oh, my brother, it is kwi,” he cried, “and the kwi is on your forehead. You must surely die.”

  Although they had little hope of saving Nakari, his relations rushed out and collected all sorts of medicines, with which they anointed him profusely, while the brother scratched away at his forehead with a loop of rattan in a forlorn effort to draw out the fatal kwi. As the day wore on, Nakari turned greener and greener and began to bleed from his mouth and nose in a ghastly symphony of color. By nightfall he was dead.

  All the most remote appendages of the family tree were assembled, including Sejak, and the usual verdict was promptly reached of murder by a person or persons unknown.

  A list was made of all the people who might feel inimically towards Nakari. There was Yakwo; he had been dunning Nakari for a piece of cloth due him for several generations, and Nakari had been too shiftless to do anything about it. And Dim; Nakari’s son had had an affair with Dim’s niece, but neither father nor son had ever shown any signs of producing the cloth which would have made an honest woman of her. Then Nakari and Shubul had recently had words—no one knew exactly why. These three men were obviously the favorites, but several less likely candidates were added for the pleasure of prolonging the oratorical discussion, airing private grudges, and the assurance of having left no stone unturned.

  The cast was now chosen; it remained to decide on the play. The Madik have ingeniously evolved two forms of murder trial, both of which simultaneously reveal and execute the murderer—a vast improvement over the cumbersome paraphernalia of our criminal law. The choice between the two trials depends on the condition of the corpus delicti Nothing ever happens in a hurry in New Guinea; to decide on a course of action, to notify the proper people, and to gather a suitable group in a suitable place at a suitable time is not the affair of a Papuan moment. It sometimes happens that by the time the stage is set the murdered man has been some time dead, and only his clean white bones remain.

  Under these conditions, and with such a reliable representative of the deceased available, the ensuing proceedings take place by the rack whereon his relics repose. While the guests wait uneasily at one side, the family build a fire. Over the coals they place big flat leaves and on them arrange a layer of the murdered man’s bones garnished with raw sago and green bananas. Once properly roasted, this macabre goulash is passed around to each of the unenthusiastic suspects. As they start to eat, the ghosts of the vicinity are called upon to see that the bones, having penetrated to the stomach of the murderer, dispatch him on the spot. And so, according to all accounts, they infallibly do. In
the meantime the pure in heart, undeterred by the unusual ingredients, are one more meal to the good, sufficient recompense for any trouble to which they may have been put.

  There was no dining off bones in the case of Sejak’s father’s sister’s husband’s brother. Sejak was about as unprocrastinating as a Madik could be, and he was eager to clear matters up as soon as possible.

  “We will have the ‘Undashulko’—the trial of the knife in the bamboo,” he said. “Blit and I will go to tap the saguer tree and you and you—go gather rattan to make the ‘guns.’ ”

  A gun is a strip of rattan which serves as the Papuan calendar, and by which meetings and future events are arranged. A knot is made for every day before the specified date. The recipient cuts off one knot each morning. When there is no knot left to cut, he realizes the set day has dawned. For a large gathering they are sent out in all directions, carefully tallied with the mother gun, which the expectant host keeps at home for his own information.

  Yakwo, Dim, Shubul, and the other suspects received their rattan invitations for the Undashulko. Such an invitation cannot very well be refused; failure to put in an appearance would be construed as an admission of guilt. The chance of supernaturally invoked punishment would immediately be replaced by a very certain volley of spears hurled by human hands.

  Sejak’s eyes always began to dance with excitement when he recounted the Undashulko. All the guests had arrived promptly and sat in a circle on the floor of Nakari’s brother’s house. In the comer stood an enormous bamboo node brimming with the liquid and mildly intoxicating results of Sejak’s labors on the saguer tree. Grouped around it were several cane saguer-drinking tubes, incised with crisscross lines and gaily stained with red. Sejak was convinced—or so he said afterwards—that it was Dim who had killed Nakari.