Dark Black Stone

In April of 1919, shortly after the end of World War One, Colonel James Forrest Cain of the Royal West African Frontier Force was stationed in Cameroon for a period of one year, which might be extended depending on the prevailing conditions in the territory at that time. He was to serve as the commanding officer of a garrison of 200 soldiers stationed at Douala, a port city where the river Wourri pours out into the Atlantic Ocean. 

There was some social unrest but no major uprisings during Cain’s term there so he was able to spend much of his time as he pleased. He was increasingly thinking about his financial future at that time. His wife had died two years earlier and his son Miles was only twenty-three years old and just getting started in life. Other British officers returned to England with small fortunes in gems and diamonds and other things. This was Cain’s opportunity to procure such assets for himself before his inevitable trip back home to Manchester.

At first his conscience weighed on him, but he managed to find ways to justify his actions. He had come to Africa to protect the native people and rid the presence of Germany from the continent. A debt was owed. Still, when he lined up his troops holding rifles outside of a home or a church or a temple as he inventoried the valuables inside and took what he pleased, he knew this was not honorable in the least.

One day, Cain led his men on a march to a northern part of the territory to investigate a tip about a Maka temple that contained a rare and priceless artifact. Upon arrival he was immediately disappointed to see what looked like a dilapidated old wooden hut seated at the far end of a dirt road in a small jungle village.

Cain’s interpreter, a 17-year-old native of Douala named Buntu, walked to the doorway of the small “temple” and spoke some words in a raised voice. He announced that Colonel Cain had come to the village to ensure the safety of the Maka people and to receive gifts for his protection. Then two of his soldiers armed with rifles entered the temple. A few moments later they called for Colonel Cain, telling him it was safe to enter.

Inside it was dark, smokey and smelling of strange, charred herbs, lit only by a dozen candles spread out in various locations to spread their thin luminescence. There was an open dirt floor with a few stained rugs and just before this was a strange altar composed of a mixture of wood, bone, stone, horns, antlers, and dried furs of strange and unknowable origin.

Cain approached the altar and realized there was a very small man wrapped in a dark robe seated behind it. He was barefoot, his feet filthy, the robe pulled up over his head. He was very old and his skin was sallow but his eyes shone with a certain light. He stared at Cain silently as the colonel began to inventory the items on the altar. He started at the far left and began working his way to the right, briefly inspecting the various relics along the way. There was nothing that looked at all valuable to his eye until he reached the center of the altar and saw the large black diamond seated in a hand-carved wooden display setting.

He reached for it and the old man behind the altar spoke up sharply. Buntu translated his words.

“He says you do not want that. He says you should not touch it.”

Cain gave the old man a sharp look and then slowly removed the black diamond from its wooden setting. It was roughly hewn but it was very large. There were jewelers back in Antwerp and London who could cut this stone perfectly and make it ready for sale at an optimal price. He looked at the old man again as he tucked the black diamond into his jacket pocket. The old man shook his head ever so slightly and repeated part of what he had just said in a dry and scratchy voice.

“He says you do not want that,” Buntu translated.

“Djambe!” the old man hissed.

Buntu paused for a few seconds.

“He said Djambe. It is…spirit. It is a dark spirit. Maka people very much believe in these things. It is part of their religion.”

Cain nodded at the old man silently and then waved a hand at the two soldiers standing behind him and they all walked out together.

Over the next few weeks, people around the Colonel began to report a number of strange and disturbing incidents. He began wearing his uniform in an increasingly disheveled fashion. He went from inappropriately wild laughter to manic, inconsolable sobbing in the span of less than sixty seconds in the officer's mess hall at dinner one night. And then one day, two of his fellow officers walked into the barracks hall and found him seated on the floor in only his underpants with his eyes closed tight, tears running down his face, and a .45 pistol pressed up against his temple, pulling the trigger repeatedly. The gun was loaded but it had jammed.

The following week Colonel Cain was discharged from the military and sent back home on a cargo ship to the Port of Manchester. His two travel trunks, containing all of his personal items, including the black diamond, were sent with him. Upon arrival in England he was brought to an insane asylum where he lived out the remainder of his days in a state of constant hysteria until he found a way to hang himself three months later.

**********

The two travel trunks were sent to his home in Manchester, where his son Miles went through the contents and sorted everything out. Miles knew very little about precious gems but he had a friend who worked at a jeweler’s shop, so he took all of the stones to be appraised, and he was stunned when he learned the potential value of the large black diamond. His friend called in a rare gems expert and after close inspection of the stone he was advised to have it properly cut and set as a gold necklace pendant - it was just too big for a ring - and then it would likely fetch at least £100,000 pound sterling at auction.

Miles took this advice and had the gem cut and set. It was 175 carats when it was finished. Miles kept it in a small safe in his father’s house as he awaited an auction day that never came. People around Miles, his friends and co-workers, all started to notice increasingly strange and uncharacteristic behavior from him. Then one day he stopped showing up for work. Then he stopped answering visitors at his front door. And then, after a few weeks, he stepped off the platform into the path of an oncoming train.

As Miles had no wife, no children and no last will and testament, the disposition of his estate (which largely consisted of his father’s former estate) was adjudicated by the courts, which determined that the rightful heir was his father’s only brother, Graham Cain, who had moved to Boston shortly after returning from the war in France.

Graham received notification of his inheritance from a barrister assigned by the court. The primary asset was the house in Manchester and its contents - which a local estate agent could sell for him and wire the proceeds afterward. He agreed to this and about a week later he received a telegram from the estate agent, a woman named Maggie Harlow - which read:

To: Graham Cain, Boston MA

Mister Cain,

While inventorying your brother’s house in Manchester I found most of the common items, such as furniture, kitchen items, clothing, tools, etc. Nothing of any significant value. However, in the basement I found two travel trunks filled with various exotic items and artifacts, most of which seem to be from Africa. I am not familiar with the marketing of such items and I would like to ship them to you for your review and disposal. Please advise if this is acceptable. Thank you.

Cheers,

Maggie Harlow 

Graham confirmed that this would be fine, and then he awaited the arrival of the two travel trunks. 

**********

Graham returned from the Somme in good spirits. Many of his fellow soldiers suffered from shellshock but he seemed fine. Then, three years later, shortly after he had a chance to inspect the contents of his brother’s travel trunks, he started displaying some odd behavior. He was arrested twice for wandering the streets outside his Boston home naked in broad daylight. His wife Nancy was worried that he was finally starting to show signs of mental distress from the war. A hearing was scheduled to determine if he would need to be hospitalized and he was confined to his home until the hearing date. He shot himself in the temple with his government-issued service pistol two nights prior to that hearing.

Graham’s only child, Kevin, was only four years old at the time, and Nancy had her hands full as a sudden widow. She never even looked at the two crates stored down in that dark corner of the basement. There the two trunks remained for a very long time. Kevin never once concerned himself with their contents until his mother died over two decades later and he drove up to Boston to clear out the house and prepare it for sale.

During the four days that Kevin spent packing up and cleaning out his parent’s home in the North End he had much on his mind. Things were getting sketchy at his job. Corporate had shut down four regional offices in the last six months and there were already three in the Boston suburbs at that time. Furthermore, his wife was starting to spend more and more time outside of the home, particularly at nighttime, and he was starting to become suspicious about where she was going and who she was seeing. 

And lastly, his 12-year old daughter Diane was exhibiting some alarming symptoms of depression. He noticed this on his own and tried to just tell himself that she was going through a time of change, but when the principal of her school called Kevin and his wife in for a meeting to discuss these concerns he could no longer sweep it under the rug. The source of the problem seemed to be that Diane was being bullied by some of the other girls in her grade. A girl named Katie Kellson was apparently the ringleader of a group that liked to make fun of Diane and tease her and they frequently played practical jokes on her at recess. At first she handled it with humor but as the nature of the treatment spiraled downward she soon couldn’t just laugh off the constant ostracization. Everyday became a dark day.

On the final afternoon that he spent cleaning out his parent’s house, Kevin finally got around to inventorying the two travel trunks down in the basement. There were a lot of interesting items, but inside an ornate wooden cigar box lined in blue velvet there were about two dozen small diamonds and gems, a beautiful large black gem affixed to a pendant on a gold chain, and three handwritten notes, folded up in a stack and laying there among the rest. The black stone was inside a square hard plastic container, a piece of white tape on the lid with handwritten lettering that read “Warning: Do Not Touch”. 

Kevin inspected some of the smaller loose stones and then read the first of the three notes. In faded ink, it read: “I was warned not to touch this black diamond. I did not heed that warning, and now I am become undone. Fear for the sanctity of your mind and the destiny of your immortal soul. Do not repeat my foolishness. - Colonel James Forrest Cain, 4th August 1919”

He paused for a moment, then read the next note: "I did not heed my father's warnings. Now it is too late. I don't know where I have gone. - Miles Cain, 2nd February 1921"

Kevin looked at the black diamond again for a moment and then he picked up the last note. This one read: “I thought I saw true horrors at war in the Somme, but I knew nothing of horror until I held this black diamond in my hand. I should have heeded the warnings in the other notes contained herein. I write this while I still can. I am rapidly descending into the fires of hell. - Graham Cain, 14th October 1922”

Kevin thought about what he had just read and stared at the diamond in the plastic box for a while. He quickly decided to heed the warnings. He knew how his father, uncle and cousin had all died. He closed the cigar box but removed it from the trunk and brought it upstairs and placed it in his suitcase.

At the end of that day, Kevin drove the hour ride back to his home in Carlyle. When he got there his wife was out (who knows where?) and the door to Diane’s bedroom was closed but he could see the light was on. He knocked, waited, then knocked again. A short time later she opened the door. She didn’t look at him. She looked at her feet.

“Hey Dad. What’s up?” She sounded sad.

“Nothing. I just haven’t seen you in a few days and I wanted to say hi. See how you’re doing?”

“I’m fine. Just doing some homework. What’s for dinner? I’m starving.

“Well, Mom’s out somewhere and I’m not cooking so let’s just get some take-out. Whatever you want. Sound good?”

“Yeah, sure. Let’s get pizza?”

“Just pizza? How about Chinese?”

“I just want pizza. Just get a large cheese pie from Mario’s.”

“Okay, I’ll call it in and go pick it up. I'll be back in about a half hour.”

“Okay. I’m gonna keep working on my homework until then.”

“What are you working on?”

“Just schoolwork stuff.”

She closed the door.

On a gloomy Wednesday evening two weeks later, Kevin came home from work and found his wife in Diane’s bedroom, sitting with her and consoling her quietly. Diane was crying. Katie Kellson’s big Christmas party was that Friday night and the vicious little creature had made a point of openly handing out written invitations from a paper bag to every girl in the class except Diane. When she arrived in front of Diane’s desk she said, “Oops. All out. Sorry,” and turned the empty paper bag upside down. The whole class laughed and Diane left in tears.

The following day Diane was hit and killed by a big black Lincoln Continental traveling fast down West Main Street. Katie Kellson and a group of other girls were there when it happened, and a Massachusetts State Police officer was passing by and was on the scene immediately. The girls started to walk away when he pulled up, but he ordered them to stop so he could take some witness statements, then he called in the ambulance. It was too late for the ambulance.

Katie claimed that she thought it was suicide and once that word was out of her mouth the other girls all quickly echoed it. They said that Diane was kind of a strange and sad girl and when they walked down the sidewalk she was just standing at the curb, waiting, and then she dove out in front of the car. The Statie took down all their names, addresses and phone numbers and wrote down the critical details of their statements.

Afterwards, a man came up to the officer and provided a different account. He was seated at the bus stop just across the street when it happened, and he said that the group of girls chased Diane out into the street and one of them pushed her down just before the car came through and crushed her beneath its wheels. However, that man was black, homeless, draped in an old blanket and reeking of booze and cigarettes, all of his belongings in the shopping cart by his side. The officer thanked the man but did not take a formal statement. The ambulance had arrived. He had other things to do.

The next day when school let out, Katie Kellson left by the front door with a few of her friends. She knew Diane’s father so when she saw Kevin standing there she blanched slightly at first but she shook it off of her face quickly.

“Hi, Mister Cain. I just want to say I am so sorry about what happened to Diane. It was just terrible. We were all there.”

“Thank you, Katie. I appreciate your condolences. My wife and I met with the police last night and it clearly sounds like she just brought this on herself. She was very depressed recently. We had no idea that it was this bad. We’re just stunned and trying to make sense of it.” His eyes teared up a little.

“I’m so sorry, Mister Cain. We’re all really sad too.”

“Thanks, Katie. Hey, can I just talk to you for a minute?”

He gestured at a space by the steps to the front door just ten yards away. Katie looked nervous at first but then she nodded and began walking with him, her friends waiting where they were, shooting non-discrete glances far too often.

“So, I know you were Diane’s friend and she had one really beautiful piece of jewelry that my wife and I want you to have. He withdrew a plastic box from his coat pocket with the remains of some white tape on the lid and opened it. Inside there was a large black diamond pendant on a gold chain. Kevin carefully shook out the chain first into his leather-gloved palm and then lifted the brilliantly cut stone from the container and held it up for her to see. Her eyes went wide.

“May I put it on you? I’d like to see you wearing it. It will remind me of Diane.”

She agreed, and Kevin draped it around her neck, making sure that the stone slid down her throat and onto her upper chest before he clasped it shut.

“Wow. Thank you so much, Mister Cain! I love it.

“You deserve it, Katie. Merry Christmas! Make sure to let all your friends check it out too.”

THE END