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to be afraid of, but somehow it simply paralyses me with terror in my sleep. Queer things—dreams. I know it’s a dream all the time, and I can’t wake up from it.”
“It’s probably only fancy,” said Perera. “Den my niggers say Porroh men can send snakes. Seen any snakes lately?”
“Only one. I killed him this morning, on the floor near my hammock. Almost trod on him as I got up.”
“Ah!” said Perera, and then, reassuringly, “Of course it is a—coincidence. Still I would keep my eyes open. Den dere’s pains in de bones.”
“I thought they were due to miasma,” said Pollock.
“Probably dey are. When did dey begin?”
Then Pollock remembered that he first noticed them the night after the fight in the hut. “It’s my opinion he don’t want to kill you,” said Perera —“at least not yet. I’ve heard deir idea is to scare and worry a man wid deir spells, and narrow misses, and rheumatic pains, and bad dreams, and all dat, until he’s sick of life. Of course, it’s all talk, you know. You mustn’t worry about it… But I wonder what he’ll be up to next.”
“I shall have to be up to something first,” said Pollock, staring gloomily at the greasy cards that Perera was putting on the table. “It don’t suit my dignity to be followed about, and shot at, and blighted in this way. I wonder if Porroh hokey-pokey upsets your luck at cards.”
He looked at Perera suspiciously.
“Very likely it does,” said Perera warmly, shuffling. “Dey are wonderful people.”
That afternoon Pollock killed two snakes in his hammock, and there was also an extraordinary increase in the number of red ants that swarmed over the place; and these annoyances put him in a fit temper to talk over business with a certain Mendi rough he had interviewed before. The Mendi rough showed Pollock a little iron dagger, and demonstrated where one struck in the neck, in a way that made Pollock shiver, and in return for certain considerations Pollock promised him a double-barrelled gun with an ornamental lock.
In the evening, as Pollock and Perera were playing cards, the Mendi rough came in through the doorway, carrying something in a blood-soaked piece of native cloth.
“Not here!” said Pollock very hurriedly. “Not here!”
But he was not quick enough to prevent the man, who was anxious to get to Pollock’s side of the bargain, from opening the cloth and throwing the head of the Porroh man upon the table. It bounded from there on to the floor, leaving a red trail on the cards, and rolled into the corner, where it came to rest upside down, but glaring hard at Pollock.
Perera jumped up as the thing fell among the cards, and began in his excitement to gabble in Portuguese. The Mendi was bowing, with the red cloth in his hand. “De gun!” he cried. Pollock stared back at the head in the corner. It bore exactly the expression it had in his dreams. Something seemed to snap in his own brain as he looked at it.
Then Perera found his English again.
“You got him killed?” he said. “You did not kill him yourself?”
“Why should I?” said Pollock.
“But he will not be able to take it off now!”
“Take what off?” said Pollock.
“And all dese cards are spoiled!”
“What do you mean by taking off?” said Pollock.
“You must send me a new pack from Freetown. You can buy dem dere.
“But—‘take it off’?”
“It is only superstition. I forgot. De niggers say dat if de witches —he was a witch—But it is rubbish… You must make de Porroh man take it off, or kill him yourself… It is very silly.”
Pollock swore under his breath, still staring hard at the head in the corner.
“I can’t stand that glare,” he said. Then suddenly he rushed at the thing and kicked it. It rolled some yards or so, and came to rest in the same position as before, upside down, and looking at him.
“He is ugly,” said the Anglo-Portuguese. “Very ugly. Dey do it on deir faces with little knives.”
Pollock would have kicked the head again, but the Mendi man touched him on the arm. “De gun?” he said, looking nervously at the head.
“Two—if you will take that beastly thing away,” said Pollock.
The Mendi shook his head, and intimated that he only wanted one gun now due to him, and for which he would be obliged. Pollock found neither cajolery nor bullying any good with him. Perera had a gun to sell (at a profit of three hundred per cent), and with that the man presently departed. Then Pollock’s eyes, against his will, were recalled to the thing on the floor.
“It is funny dat his head keeps upside down,” said Perera, with an uneasy laugh. “His brains must be heavy, like de weight in de little images one sees dat keep always upright wid lead in dem. You will take him wiv you when you go presently. You might take him now. De cards are all spoilt. Dere is a man sell dem in Freetown. De room is in a filthy mess as it is. You should have killed him yourself.”
Pollock pulled himself together, and went and picked up the head. He would hang it up by the lamp-hook in the middle of the ceiling of his room, and dig a grave for it at once. He was under the impression that he hung it up by the hair, but that must have been wrong, for when he returned for it, it was hanging by the neck upside down.
He buried it before sunset on the north side of the shed he occupied, so that he should not have to pass the grave after dark when he was returning from Perera’s. He killed two snakes before he went to sleep. In the darkest part of the night he awoke with a start, and heard a pattering sound and something scraping on the floor. He sat up noiselessly, and felt under his pillow for his revolver. A mumbling growl followed, and Pollock fired at the sound. There was a yelp, and something dark passed for a moment across the hazy blue of the doorway. “A dog!” said Pollock, lying down again.
In the early dawn he awoke again with a peculiar sense of unrest. The vague pain in his bones had returned. For some time he lay watching the red ants that were swarming over the ceiling, and then, as the light grew brighter, he looked over the edge of his hammock and saw something dark on the floor. He gave such a violent start that the hammock overset and flung him out.
He found himself lying, perhaps, a yard away from the head of the Porroh man. It had been disinterred by the dog, and the nose was grievously battered. Ants and flies swarmed over it. By an odd coincidence, it was still upside down, and with the same diabolical expression in the inverted eyes.
Pollock sat paralysed, and stared at the horror for some time. Then he got up and walked round it—giving it a wide berth—and out of the shed. The clear light of the sunrise, the living stir of vegetation before the breath of the dying land-breeze, and the empty grave with the marks of the dog’s paws, lightened the weight upon his mind a little.
He told Perera of the business as though it was a jest—a jest to be told with white lips. “You should not have frighten de dog,” said Perera, with poorly simulated hilarity.
The next two days, until the steamer came, were spent by Pollock in making a more effectual disposition of his possession. Overcoming his aversion to handling the thing, he went down to the river mouth and threw it into the sea-water, but by some miracle it escaped the crocodiles, and was cast up by the tide on the mud a little way up the river, to be found by an intelligent Arab half-breed, and offered for sale to Pollock and Perera as a curiosity, just on the edge of night. The native hung about in the brief twilight, making lower and lower offers, and at last, getting scared in some way by the evident dread, these wise white men had for the thing, went off, and passing Pollock’s shed, threw his burden in there for Pollock to discover in the morning.
At this Pollock got into a kind of frenzy. He would burn the thing. He went out straightway into