Horror in Paradise Page 9

  Eskridge fully shared the companionship of latter-day dwellers in the Gambiers, and narrates more than one tale of island phantoms.

  THE three little islands, named Makaroa, Kamaka, and Manoui, are fairy kingdoms of some unhappy prince or of an exiled princess. Then the countless little motus scattered along the reef hold that sudden untenanted feeling I received from each and every island in the group. Some one had just left—but who? The answer came in a series of impressions and adventures which I narrate just as they occurred to me, without change or exaggeration.

  My house [at Rikitea, the capital] was at nighttime shared by others of less substantial mold than myself. And as for the gardens, no one save myself ever went into them at night alone.

  Even in the daytime, what with the wildness of the foliage and the ruined and gutted porches on one side of the house—two rooms only were habitable—and the hidden windows back of high unpruned oleander trees, the place had a slightly unsavory atmosphere.

  At one side of the house ran a path from the main road to the beach. Parallel to this and some little distance from the house curved the old war canal. Used in the cannibal days as a canal up which the war canoes glided to a large inland harbor, it has now become a clogged and useless channel. The inland harbor is a taro swamp, and very gay it is with great heart-shaped shiny dark green leaves rising out of the swamp morass. A thin stream flows from the mountain down through the swamp, and so to the end of the canal which near my house empties itself into the lagoon. At high tide the waters from the lagoon run upstream. So one has the impression that the little stream can not make up its mind which way it wants to flow and tries both.

  I locked up all the house except the two rooms in which I intended to live. In one I painted and slept, the other was used as a kitchen. They were not connected but were accessible from the same porch. The ancient path led right past this porch to the beach. This was, so the natives told me later, one of the oldest thoroughfares on the island. In cannibal days the war canoes stopped at the end of the path before entering the canal and unloaded, so I was told, such prisoners as had been captured in battle, either dead or alive. The preparations for the feast—of which the central dish was euphemistically called “long pig”—then took place in what was my back yard.

  Once at high tide Tom, who had been browsing on the shell-littered beach, called me out to him. A storm had washed away much of the loose sand and shells that ordinarily were not touched by the tide. Four or five inches below the top of the bank was a thick layer of ashes and the usual remains of a big fire. Several human bones lay mixed with the debris.

  Then Tom pointed to a dark brown object that at first glance had the appearance of a large round stone, the color of old ivory. I walked around it, and there, grinning at me, was the skull of a boy or young man of perhaps sixteen years of age, judging from the shape and size of the head and from the teeth.

  “Well, he was long pig. That’s certain!” said Tom, “and I wonder how he felt about it.”

  “And still feels about it!” said I, with a faint but unsuccessful effort at being facetious.

  “Let’s put him in the cook-house, so the boys won’t take him” said Tom, practically, and picked him up.

  That evening Tom and I sat discussing our beliefs about the other world.

  “You know, Bob,” said Tom, “you tell me things exist, but how do you know?”

  As this was the hundredth time Tom had put the question to me I was growing a little restless, and answered peevishly, “Well, what do you demand to prove to you that there is another world?”

  “Only to see something, actually to see something with my own eyes! I have felt slighted by Parquitala. Here I’ve been on the island for five years and he doesn’t think I’m worth cultivating! He never looked me over.”

  “If he had, Tom, you would have demanded his visiting card before you would have recognized him as a bonafide tupapau!”

  “Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps it’s in myself, whatever it is that keeps me from seeing them, yet things have happened to me here, strange things that I can’t explain any other way. The first one occurred on my first Christmas Eve on the island. The girl and the family had all gone to midnight mass at the cathedral, and I was lying down on the grass near the end of your path, listening to the quiet movement of the tide. It sounded like music at times. Suddenly about three feet over my head a thing, a black thing about as big as a cat, flew past like a shot. I was so startled I couldn’t move, and lay there motionless. Again it passed me, so close I could almost have touched it. Like a cat curled up asleep it seemed, and it moved through the air just as a fish moves through water. It flew upward to the top of the purau tree on your place, and vanished. I am absolutely convinced that it was not a bird. It had no wings.”

  “Well, if you don’t call that ‘seeing something’ just what would you call it?” I asked a trifle maliciously, and next moment regretted it. For Tom’s face took on such a look of bewilderment and struggle that it was hard to look at him.

  “That’s just it! That’s just the trouble,” he burst out. “I seemed to see it. I’m sure I did see it. If it had been something I recognized, I would never doubt it for an instant. But—could I have seen such a thing? Didn’t my eyes play some kind of trick on me?” He paused for an instant, and then went on more slowly. “You see, Bob, you can believe in these things without being afraid you are—well—going cuckoo. But for me, I live here with the natives, but I’m American after all. And if I give up everything my own people believe, and get to believing all the superstitions they have here, what will happen to me? The fact is, old man, I don’t dare believe these things, and yet I can’t get away from them!” His distress was so evident, and his dilemma so real, that I found no answer, and coaxed him back to the subject of what he had experienced.

  “Two more things occurred. I was walking out to the farm on a bit of open road that winds through the valley before you get to the girl’s land, when slowly trotting toward me I saw an enormous black dog. He passed quite close to me, and I saw him as plainly as I see you. And yet I know that there is no such dog on the whole island of Manga Reva, or any of the other islands of the Gambier. The natives of course insist that it was ‘The Black Dog of Manga Reva ’ ure ere ere, te Manga Reva.”

  “But what is that?” I interrupted.

  “Well,” said Tom, “I haven’t been able to find out exactly whose ghost he is, though some say he was once a high priest. At all events he is a friendly and goodnatured tupapau who is rather often seen both here and on the island of Marutea.

  “But to continue with my experiences. One time I had had a fight with Pindini, the girl, and walked over to the farm and put up for the night in the little ni’au shack I had built there. In the middle of the night the sound of heavy footsteps approached, and coming close to the shack stopped beside the door. I waited a while. Then the same heavy steps returned the way they had come. I got up and went out. The moon, though low on the horizon, shed light enough to see distinctly everything in the little valley. There are no high trees and you can see for at least a mile in every direction. But not a sign of anybody was there.

  “Next night the girl, feeling lonesome, came out with the dog. We made up as we always do, though I always swear the last fight will be the final one. We had gone to sleep, when I was wakened by the same footsteps approaching just as I heard them the night before. I hadn’t said a word to her about them, so her reactions were genuinely her own. She raised herself on her elbow as the steps came closer, and her eyes were wide with fear as she pressed closer to me, whispering, ‘Tupapau!’ The dog never moved, but every hair on his back was standing straight in the air and he barely whimpered, so frightened was he. The thing did exactly what it had done the night before. This time I jumped up, Pindini clutching me and begging me not to go, and ran out before the steps started away, when they seemed to come from just outside the shack. But again nobody was in sight anywhere. And the strangest thing was that
I heard the steps start again and go heavily away even as I stood staring at emptiness.

  “I forgot to mention, though I don’t know whether it had any connection with the event or not, that shortly before I heard the footsteps the first time I had dug up some human bones not far back from the shack in a spot I had picked for my onion patch.”

  So Tom described the few experiences which he could not explain by any other means than the supernatural. However, he felt far more than he ever saw, and the thing that puzzled him most was—where did this haunted feeling come from, and what created it? Was it suggestion, or was there really some occult explanation? Ever since my arrival on the island and the experience that occurred to me on my first night there, when I sensed the strangeness that lay about me, Tom had turned to me in his perplexity, and had been avidly interested in what would happen next.

  That first night I slept on my porch. The house was in such disorder that I preferred the moonlight and the heady perfume of the masses of oleander and frangipani that flourished riotously in the garden. I later learned that no native will ever sleep in the tropical moonlight, and even more decided about such matters are those white men who have gone native. Tom said he could never do it, as the house was odd enough at night even with the door shut, without asking the ghosts in by leaving it open! However, ghosts and the thought of them were far from my tired body and mind, on that first night spent in The Forgotten Islands in my new home.

  My first intimation that all was not as it usually is was a sound of voices about me early in the morning. I sat up, and still the low flow of some unknown language continued. I got up and finally located the voices near the end of the path which terminated at the beach. I walked down the path with the voices all about me talking in a low steady stream. They seemed at times to come from just beside my head, yet look as I would in the silver moonlight I could see no living thing. Puzzled and unable to discover any explanation I finally returned to the porch and slumbered fitfully till the sun rose . . .

  It was perhaps two weeks after I had been installed in the plum-colored fare that the second visit of the tupapaus occurred. It was about five in the afternoon and I had finished my evening tea. The sun had already set behind a bank of cloud, so that it was fast growing dark. All my neighbors were evidently assembled in their cookhouses enjoying the evening kai kai, cold breadfruit and fish, for I met no one as I left the garden. Yo and Soniosa had departed their separate ways hours before, and would turn up I knew when they were good and ready to do so.

  Walking across the bridge over the canal I passed on down the road in the opposite direction from the cathedral, past the tiny Protestant church that looked like an overgrown child’s toy play-house. Even the Protestant preacher, an easygoing, sweet-natured fat Tahitian, was at supper with his brood, as the gleam of a lamp shone through the bamboo slats of his cookhouse under the deep shadow of the breadfruit trees. Through the strangely patterned trees the lagoon slowly changed color. The orange light died from the tops of the coco-palms, then touched the peaks of the twin and distant islands of Akena and Akamaru, where it rested for a second, and vanished.

  The fantastic pandanus trees, with their foliage looking like a harvest of tails from green parrots, turned to black silhouettes against the now violet lagoon. Deeper blue became the sky high over the coco-palms, and slowly the perfumes of night were diffused throughout the new chilly air. The stone houses, though I knew them to have been long empty, looked darkly tenanted. I walked past a little faster. Gardens of houses long since deserted bloomed extravagantly behind tall hedges, with roses, frangipani, and hibiscus. Orange trees loaded with fruit climbed the hill back of me. One lone tree, heavily laden with oranges, clung as it seemed desperately to the top of a great gray rock which somehow caught my attention.

  I became dimly conscious at that moment that someone was walking down the shadowed road toward me. Peering as well as I could in the dim light, I made out before it reached me the figure of an elderly Chinese in soft dark clothes. He was baldheaded and very dignified in his carriage. In one hand he held, at an unmistakably Chinese angle, a long pipe, which as he came nearer I saw to be unlighted.

  “La ora na oe (good evening to you),” I wished him as he came opposite me.

  He gave no sign of having heard me, but passed on as unseeing as a carved effigy in a procession.

  I was puzzled and perhaps a trifle hurt. I had caused so much attention on my arrival that I expected more in consequence, and no native on the island but had questions to ask me, especially if he got me away from the others and alone.

  So I stood puzzled in the gloom, when slowly, the same way he had come, the aged Chinese passed again. This time I was determined not to be ignored, so as he approached I gave him “Bon soir, Monsieur,” in French, on a note of insistence.

  This time his head slowly turned, then his body, and he quietly advanced toward me, fixing me with the most extraordinary eyes I have ever seen. I cannot tell you what they were like, except that they were very dark, very piercing, and yet in some strange way entirely impersonal. They gazed at me as living eyes might gaze from a mask, for his face never varied a hair’s breadth, nor did he utter a sound. For a space of time that seemed unbelievably long he stood close to me, holding me almost hypnotized by his look. Then, still with the same expressionless face, he turned and continued on his way, his pipe still held at the same imperturbable angle.

  Oddly enough, I was not in any way put out by his gaze. On the contrary, I was conscious of a sense of well-being, combined a little with the puzzled feeling a fish must have when yanked into a foreign element. Especially I felt curiously young beside this aged figure.

  For a moment I stood in a sort of daze. Then I shook myself and turned to look after my strange companion. Although he had had time to take no more than a dozen steps he was gone as completely as though he had been a figure in my imagination. The road was empty, and it seemed to have grown chill very suddenly.

  As I returned home the natives, like the village folk in a stage play, were out chatting over the day’s happenings. Guitars and mandolins were being strummed, while Tahitian hymenes, soft and full-throated, formed an undertone to the conversation. This time I lacked neither regard nor verbal interest. Like the feudal prince I passed, nodding graciously to the assembled villagers. Not until a week or so later did I speak of my reserved friend to Tom. He and I were smoking our cigarettes and passing in review the affairs of the day when the old Chinese came to my mind.

  “Where is the old Chinese who smokes a long pipe? I saw him some days ago,” I asked.

  “What old Chinese do you mean?” countered Tom. “There is no old Chinese on these islands. There are Ah Soy and Chin who run their miserable stores, and never have even rice to sell as they haven’t the money to buy when the schooner comes. But they are not old and neither of them has a long pipe.”

  “I’ve seen them both, and it was neither. But I certainly saw this old bird, as plainly as I see you!” I insisted a little hotly.

  “No, you didn’t, old boy, as there isn’t such a person to see!”

  We would have argued half the night if Tom hadn’t suddenly been struck by some idea. He stopped in the middle of a word, his jaw still open in surprise and his eyes filled with a sudden and wild speculation.

  “By God,” he said, half to himself, “it couldn’t be he!”

  “Who are you talking about?” I asked rather peevishly. “I tell you he came right up to me.”

  “Come over to the house with me right away, and we’ll ask the girl’s father Utato. He will know whether or not it is the one I think it is. Yes. Wait . . .”

  By now my feelings were ruffled. First I had been made distinctly uncomfortable by an odd old gentleman, and now Tom doubted my story. Nevertheless I went . . .

  Tom in his slow halting way told in Tahitian my story of the meeting with the old Chinese. Hardly had the last words escaped his lips when an effect, electrical in its suddenness, took place in the
room. In the light of the kerosene lamp the eyes of Utato seemed to grow larger and took on the expression of one who has seen something that isn’t there. Pindini’s smile ceased. She leaned forward, looking at me with all the ancient belief in her ancestors’ gods written on her face. Touching her rosary the picturesque but stupid Tiare mumbled to herself.

  Suddenly Utato, in an odd jerky voice, cried out:

  “Parquitala!”

  “Yes,” said Tom. “I thought it was he, but I wanted to be sure.”

  By this time the porch was full of natives, coming from I don’t know where, and the liquid name Utato had just uttered was repeated from mouth to mouth. A hypnotic influence seemed to possess us all. I found myself reenacting the scene, just how I stood when he passed me, and how he looked at me when he turned. All this I pantomimed to the cries of “Aue, atie!”

  Then the spell was broken. Everyone started to talk at once, about Parquitala and when he had last been seen.

  “Remember, Mytea?” said Utato. “We were playing cards one night and suddenly a shadowy form appeared at the door of the hut, smiled at us, and as quietly disappeared. It was the figure of a French gendarme that no one had seen before, nor have any of us seen him since.”

  My curiosity by now knew no limits. “But who is Parquitala?”

  “Don’t you know?” came from every throat. Tom finally quieted them, and told me the story of Parquitala.