Munsey's Magazine/Volume 86/Issue 4/The Unwritten Story/Chapter 7

“ skull,” the old man continued, “once graced the shoulders of probably the greatest and most revered witch doctor on the whole coast of Guinea or its hinterland. Burrum Gao was what might be called the high priest of King Fuladugu, who ruled the Massabambas around Sotuba Falls on the Upper Niger. You know the history of that tribe, of course?”

“Oh—h-m!—yes, yes. Well?”

“Then you know what a powerful and populous tribe it was, about the year 1800, but what terrific inroads the bloodthirsty malice of this witch-hunting Burrum Gao made into it. Burrum instituted regular massacres and holocausts of suspects, and King Fuladugu, being completely under his control, supported him in every move.”

Old Lockwood had insensibly assumed his classroom air, as in the long ago when he had been a lecturer on anthropology at Harvard.

“Supported him in every move,” agreed Veazie. “Quite correct!”

“I am delighted to find a man, sir, who understands something of ethnology and aboriginal history! So few show any intelligent interest in these vital matters. Well, as I was saying, I suppose no African who ever lived—with the possible exception of the terrible Zulu chief Dingaan—was ever so hated and feared as the malicious possessor of this skull. As you see, Professor Veazie, it is of a low cephalic index, and indicates most immoral characteristics, though by no means a total lack of intelligence.”

“Rather an intelligent head, I should judge,” chimed in Veazie, struggling for a simulacrum of intelligence himself.

“Unfortunately so,” the old man nodded. And, holding the skull in his veined, tremulous fingers, he slowly turned it this way, then that, before the professor's fascinated and somewhat fearful glance.

An ugly-looking bit of human débris it truly was, yellowed with age and minus the lower jaw. The brow was low and retreating, yet unusually broad for an African cranium. The eye sockets were small, deep, and set close together. The upper teeth, all but three still intact, were powerful and animal-like. The resemblance to a gorilla's skull was marked, yet the brutal thing seemed to leer with a human sort of malicious cunning that gave the beholder pause. Even that insensate mass of bone, a relic of the dead past, appeared to retain a diabolical quality of evil that inspired repulsion, almost fear.

Veazie, for all his cynical materialism, shuddered slightly. The skull, it seemed, still retained uncanny and malign powers; but the professor mastered his aversion, and forced himself to say impersonally:

“Now that I think of it, Mr. Lockwood, I recall a good deal of this black witch doctor's reign of crime and bloodshed. Shocking, wasn't it?”

“Very! But I am happy to say that Burrum Gao eventually reaped the reward of his own misdeeds.” Lockwood turned the skull around. “Observe this cavity in the occiput.”

Veazie fixed his gaze on a neat round hole at the back of the skull.

“Ah, yes!” he murmured.

“That, sir, was Burrum Gao's death wound. It was inflicted by a knobkerrie in the hands of one of King Gurma's warriors, in the great battle at Wagadogo Rapids. The year, you will remember, was 1807.”

“Eighteen six, was it not?”

“No, sir—I am positive as to the date. I have followed that epoch of Upper Nigerian history with particular care. As long as Burrum Gao confined his murderous tendencies to his own tribe, no harm befell him; but when—for sheer lust of slaughter—he induced King Fuladugu to start raiding contiguous territory, a war of reprisal started.”

“Yes, yes, quite so! You're right, sir.”

“Of course I'm right! King Gurma overthrew Fuladugu, killed him and nearly all his people, including Burrum Gao himself, and carried off the witch doctor's skull as a trophy. Oddly enough, the remnant of the defeated Massabambas, once they were well rid of Burrum Gao, attributed magic powers to his skull, and tried to get it back again. Their neighbors, the Kosharis, joined with them in the attempt, and a long series of wars followed.”

“So they did, sir—so they did!”

“You're the first man I've ever found at all interested in this matter—that is, outside of professional anthropologists. The wars for the possession of the skull diminished the population so seriously as to interfere with the slave trade of the Arabs at El Waleji, in what is now the French Sudan. The Arabs took a hand, seized the skull, and put an end to the slaughter that was destroying their commerce.”

“Ah, yes, I remember! They got the skull—yes, yes!”

“After some terrific fighting,” continued Lockwood, laying the grisly relic down on the table. “Once in their hands, they found the trophy a tremendously valuable asset, and carried it on all their slave raids. Their possession of it destroyed the morale of negro tribes all the way from Senegal to Nigeria, and made them an easy prey.”

“Quite so, but—but how in the world, Mr. Lockwood, did this invaluable relic ever come into your ownership?”

“Sit down, professor, and I'll give you the outline of a most peculiar story. The full details would take too long.” The old man sat down by the fire and gestured Veazie to draw up a chair close to his own. “Abd el Abasa, a mahdi in the Rio de Oro district, captured it with much other booty from the El Waleji Arabs in a sanguinary battle at Dagana, in 1827. The Spaniards, under General Fernan Cabellera, took it from Abd el Abasa six years later. After that, it drifted here and there, and finally came to rest in a curio dealers' bazaar at Melilla.”

“Quite a come-down for a powerful witch doctor's skull, eh?” asked the professor. “Odd—very odd!”

“Not so odd as the fact that no Mohammedan ever cut the curio dealer's throat and robbed him of the skull. I can't quite account for that; but at all events, the dealer kept it, and sold it to me for fifteen hundred pesetas. That was, of course, at the time of my last exploring voyage to the African coast.”

“The time of the—ah—”

“The tragedy—yes. I was planning to make the skull one of the prizes of my collection; but news of its being aboard the Nenuphar, of its being threatened with removal from Africa, must have percolated among the Barbary pirates.” Old Lockwood removed his glasses, and dangled them by the silken cord. “It is astonishing, sir, how rapidly such news travels among people we are accustomed to regard as primitive.”

“Yes, so I've heard. Your yacht was attacked,” the professor ventured a guess, “for the purpose of recovering that skull?”

“I believe so. Merciful God, what a day! That was hell, sir—cold hell! I remember it as if it were only yesterday. My only gratitude is that my dear wife was not subjected to—”

“Of course! I can well realize what capture by Barbary pirates would have meant to her.”

The old man shivered, and stretched out his bloodless hands to the fire, as if he needed warmth.

“Her death at Alexandria, previously, spared her nameless degradation. If I had not learned, through you, that my daughter reached America, I would wish that she, too, had died there; but pardon my agitation, professor. I must be calm, quite calm, and tell you the story.”

Veazie leaned forward and laid a comforting hand on the old man's arm.

“Take your time, Mr. Lockwood—take your time!”

“I—I am better now.” The aristocrat replaced his glasses, wrinkled his gray brows, and in a firmer voice continued: “We were held in the harbor of Tangier by a cracked bearing. Our auxiliary canvas was useless, because of a dead calm—water like oil and glass, a long Atlantic swell, a copper ball of sun through the African haze. I did not think of trouble, but my captain—Jared Ransom—came to me about the middle of the afternoon, with a warning.

“Mr. Lockwood, I don't just like the look of things in the harbor here,” he said.

“What seems wrong?” I asked.

“Too many ,” he answered. “They're not honest traders, to that extent. We'd better break out whatever arms and ammunition we've got, sir.”

“The thought of my little daughter, of course, alarmed me. We prepared for trouble—and it came. There's no use going into all the details, professor. Toward evening a slight breeze sprang up from the land, and we made some headway out of the harbor; but before we rounded Punta Gorda, three feluccas closed in, and half a dozen came up astern. We had a crew of only fourteen, all told; but Captain Ransom was a hard old fighter. He stationed his men, and I took a rifle, too. Some had cutlasses. Our carpenter used an ax. We accounted for a good many of the pirates, but they boarded us. I hate to remember what happened then. Red decks—men dying in the scuppers—an awful day, altogether! I went down, too—a scimitar slash here.”

Lockwood touched his head, above the left ear.

“God knows, if I'd died then, it might have been better. That, sir, is the last I knew till night. I regained consciousness to find Spanish marines aboard, a Spanish gunboat lying at anchor a quarter of a mile off, and the pirates all gone—gone, with—”

The old man paused, with a dry gulp, his expression one of deep anguish. Veazie nodded.

“I understand,” said he, stroking his red mustache. “I understand—and sympathize with you!”

Silence held them for a moment, while a gleam of reflected sunset from a window somewhere crawled over the skull. Blood-red, it entered one open eye socket that seemed to be watching.

Lockwood made a bitter gesture toward the ghastly relic.

“And all, all for that!” he whispered.

“They didn't find it, after all?”

“No. Before they got to the packing case, down below, where it was stored, the Spanish drove them off. God, if they had only found it, and spared Marian! What a life of torment I would have escaped!”

“True!” agreed the professor. “But better times are at hand. Your daughter is still alive. Even though she has forgotten you, and doesn't even know she is your daughter, you can still reclaim her.”

“God grant it!” murmured the old man, his eyes wet.

He bowed his head, communed for a moment with himself, then breathed:

“No, not even that!” he broke off. “A woman grown—almost an elderly woman! It seems impossible to believe. I still remember her, you see, as a tiny little girl, and now—that little girl has vanished. She's become another personality. My little Marian—she's dead!”

“No—living! The same personality, only altered. And if it happened that she had a daughter of her own, might you not find in her some reminiscence of those other days?”

“Yes, yes; but even so, even if I had a granddaughter, she would be fifteen or perhaps twenty years old. Incredible! We never realize we're old ourselves till we think of others. We don't seem to change. It's always the others, and—”

“You're distressing yourself with idle fancies,” the professor smiled. “The vital thing is that your daughter is still alive, and that I can find her—and will!”

“Thank Heaven! When, and how?”

“When? I will begin at once.”

“And by what method?” The old man's eagerness might have softened any heart less indurated than Veazie's. “How will you proceed?”

“By establishing rapports with the subliminal planes, using this object that had so vital a part in the affair—this skull. Watch, now, and see!”