The pier groaned and a loud crack heralded a sudden tilting of the world. George fell to his knees. A long sliver of wood entered the palm of his hand, and he tried to keep from pitching forward.
Mrs. Franklin, still standing, shouted over the wind. "We came here every year to renew the bargain. Oh, it is not a good bargain. Our daughter is never with us entirely. But you would know, any parent would know, that love will take whatever it can scavenge, any small compromise. Anything less utter and awful than the grave."
There were tears running down Mrs. Franklin"s face now, silver tracks. "This year I was greedy. I wanted Melissa back, all of her. And I thought, I am her mother. I have the first claim to her. So I demanded demanded that my husband set it all to rights. "Tell them we have come here for the last year," I said. And my husband allowed his love for me to override his reason. He did as I asked."
Melissa, who seemed oblivious to her mother"s voice, turned away and spoke into the darkness of the waters. Her words were in no language George Hume had ever heard, and they were greeted with a loud, rasping bellow that thrummed in the wood planks of the pier.
Then came the sound of wood splintering, and the pier abruptly tilted. George"s hands gathered more spiky wooden needles as he slid forward. He heard himself scream, but the sound was torn away by the renewed force of the wind and a hideous roaring that accompanied the gale.
Looking up, George saw Melissa kneeling at the edge of the pier. Her mother was gone.
"Melissa!" George screamed, stumbling forward. "Don"t move."
But the child was standing up, wobbling, her nightgown flapping behind her.
George leapt forward, caught the child, felt a momentary flare of hope, and then they both were hurtling forward and the pier was gone.
They plummeted toward the ocean, through a blackness defined by an inhuman sound, a sound that must have been the first sound G.o.d heard when He woke at the dawn of eternity.
And even as he fell, George felt the child wiggle in his arms. His arms encircled Melissa"s waist, felt bare flesh. Had he looked skyward, he would have seen the nightgown, a pink ghost shape, sailing toward the moon.
But George Hume"s eyes saw, instead, the waiting ocean and under it, a shape, a moving network of cold, uncanny machinery, and whether it was a living thing of immense size, or a city, or a machine, was irrelevant. He knew only that it was ancient beyond any land-born thing.
Still clutching the child he collided with the hard, cold back of the sea.
George Hume had been raised in close proximity to the ocean. He had learned to swim almost as soon as he had learned to walk. The cold might kill him, would almost certainly kill him if he did not reach sh.o.r.e quickly but that he did. During the swim toward sh.o.r.e he lost Melissa and in that moment he understood not to turn back, not to seek the child.
He could not tell anyone how he knew a change had been irretrievably wrought and that there was no returning the girl to land. It was not something you could communicate any more than you could communicate the dreadful ancient quality of the machinery under the sea.
Nonetheless, George knew the moment Melissa was lost to him. It was a precise and memorable moment. It was the moment the child had wriggled, with strange new, sinewy strength, flicked her tail and slid effortlessly from his grasp.
The Delicate.
Jeffrey Ford.
Jeffrey Ford (1955) is an American writer whose fiction combines elements of traditional fantasy or magic realism with surrealism and horror. He studied with the novelist John Gardner at Binghamton University and he currently teaches at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey. His work has received and been nominated for many awards, including the World Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Edgar Allen Poe Award, the Hugo Award, and the Nebula Award. Although his fiction comes at the weird sideways, some of his stories, like "The Delicate" (1994), enter weird territory with complete abandon. It"s a short, sharp shock of the grotesque.
The Delicate is pale, limbs pipe-cleaner thin, with a head as shiny hard as beetle-back. Violent, in utero skull tectonics have led to a precipice of brow, a compression of matter past the point of truth. His eyes are crow eyes, and his ear holes winding tunnels to nowhere.
He comes in the latter days of afternoon, through blowing snow, dressed in black, while Schubert"s "Eighth" plays magically in the background. He comes to suck the breath out of pa.s.sing fancies and to treat the infirm of mind, the particularly annoying, to a long sleep.
"In order to take the waters," as he explains it, he comes to a resort town on the edge of reason. Beyond it, the wilderness stretches north to the frozen pole. G.o.d has never drawn breath there the domain of bat-winged demons whose skin is the ringed wood of oak trees. These creatures fly out of the forest at night to s.n.a.t.c.h up children, their little legs kicking to the moon. To live in Absentia is to live with a soul that is liquid lead.
Perhaps it is the manner in which he holds his cigarette or maybe his distinguished apparel that immediately ingratiates him to both the guests and staff of the Hotel Providence. At his request, they call him Harding Jarvis and marvel at his grace and facility with foreign language. Though his face is more a cow skull than a thing of flesh, no one seems to notice except the woman who cleans his rooms. She knows him by his aroma roses over bad meat. When he knows she knows, he wheezes into his wine gla.s.s.
No matter who Carlotta confesses her fears to, they brush her off, saying, "Herr Jarvis? Not possible. My dear, you are disturbed." She makes it a point never to enter his rooms when they are occupied. Sleep to her is death, say the toothpicks holding open her eyes. She lasts only three days before she sits down and closes them. To sleep is warm and beautiful, but the chair she sits in is at the foot of Herr Jarvis"s bed. There is so much dirt on the floor four ounces of fly meat on every windowsill.
He returns unexpectedly from an afternoon of playing whist with Madame Fesh of the colorful m.u.f.f, Barlin the local logomancer, and Meme Haspin, taxidermist to the landed gentry, and discovers Carlotta asleep in the chair. With little pomp and less circ.u.mstance, he sucks the life out of her. The process is long and painful, and he doesn"t spare her a minute of it. After hanging her withered corpse, like a wrinkled garment bag of flesh, on a peg in the closet, he sits down to smoke his clay pipe. Before long, he moves to the writing desk, where he takes up his pen and records the essence of the maid he has just ingested. The first phrase to crawl out onto paper is, "Insouciance is the engine of regret," and from there it is a smooth plunge into lyrical facility.
At first he thought it was the crab souffle he had had for lunch, but then realized, too late, that something in Carlotta"s blood was causing a strange transformation in him. With a popping of bone, a stretch of incisors, a whisper growth of fur and the shrinking of skin, he stoops to become a dog. His last oath is excremental before his words give way to growling.
The inhabitants of Absentia mention to each other the clever little hound that now wanders the streets looking for sc.r.a.ps. One boy tells how he heard it cry human, and the men who mine Mount Alfarabi are amused when the beast tries to have its way with a lady"s shinbone outside the beer hall. Meanwhile, everybody who is anybody is seeking out Harding Jarvis for a ride in the car, a game of tennis, a c.o.c.ktail party.
Pharsalus, the hunter, comes in from the wilderness with furs to sell and wild turkey feathers in his hat. With the money he makes, he goes directly to the beer hall and drinks many mugs. He tells those he hasn"t seen in three seasons about the demon he shot and about the beautiful paradise surrounded by hundreds of miles of ice. For proof of the demon, he displays a pair of gnarled horns which he pulled like teeth, with a pair of pliers, from the forehead of the creature. As for paradise, he offers only a shrug.
The days of Night fall while Pharsalus is drinking. When he steps out of the beer hall, there is a brisk wind and winter chill. He stares up at the ice-bright stars and remembers tracking white apes at twilight. They moved like ghosts among the giant pines. They died with a cough of steam and a trickle of blood.
When his memory clears, Pharsalus notices a dog sitting in the street in front of him. Because the first hours of Night each year give him a desire to speak to something other than only the earth and wind, he decides to adopt the mutt as a hunting dog. Using sc.r.a.ps of dried caribou, he lures his new companion out of town and into the uncharted wilderness.
Night in the forest is either stone silence and falling snow or the sound of something dying. Demons fly out of the trees without warning, and Pharsalus is always ready with his gun. When they jump him from behind, he uses his long, curved knife and engages them in hand-to-hand combat. The dog helps in the kill. As the demons" mauled bodies expire at his feet, he questions them about the path to the Earthly Paradise. Some of the dying offer clues, but most go quietly, their barbed tails thrashing the snow. Pharsalus writes whatever they tell him in a little notebook and then pulls their horns out with a pair of pliers.
In spring, the hunter and dog traverse a pa.s.s that leads over the mountains. The sudden return of the days of Morning brings light that blinds. In those mountains there exist hundreds of small caves formed long ago in the Ice Age. Each year, he hunts them for snapping yellow back and artifacts left behind by the ancients who had once inhabited them.
In one cave, the hunter discovers the frozen corpse of a man, sitting on a large stone at a table hewn from rock. Icicles hang from the man"s nose and frost glazes his eyes. From the worm-eaten journal laying open in front of the dead man, Pharsalus learns of his father"s search for him. The hunter puts his arms around the dog and cries.
In one entry in his father"s journal, the old man describes his love affair with a woman who lives at the bottom of a lake. Her skin is blue and her hair so long it turns into sea gra.s.s and trailing vines. He descends from his mountain perch every night to meet her on the sh.o.r.e of her lake.
They sit beneath a tall dune, the wind blowing around them. Above, stars smash into stars. He tells her how fifteen years earlier he left home to search for his son who had become a hunter in the wilderness. As he kisses her, he hears the immensity of paradise singing across the water to him.
Pharsalus dreams every night of the only beast he has any desire to hunt. It is a creature he has never actually seen, with many jumbled attributes scales, fur, talons, fangs, feathers beneath and around the hide and hair. Every night it comes vividly to him and fills him with longing to hunt it. In the dream, he always hears it flying. There is a struggle and it bites him, like a snake, in the heel. He always awakens wondering if the bird part is rooster. But since he has gotten the dog, it has become more and more difficult to envision the dream kill.
In their wandering, the hunter and companion stumble upon a beautiful garden locked in ice. At the last second the Delicate steps out of the sloughed skin of the mutt to take the hunter by the throat. Lips meet lips and breath begins leaving, begins arriving. When the hunter is blind in one eye and his left rib cage shattered by the internal pressure, he summons those years of the kill and thrusts his hunting knife into the thorax of the Delicate. Streams of agony intermingle and separate out into fields of bright color. With a simple cracking noise the monster pushes a bony finger through the hunter"s chest and turns off his heart.
But the Delicate is dying from his wound. He stumbles through the wilderness clutching his oozing side with a slim, sharp hand. He kneels and prays to heaven but nothing happens. The memories of other lifetimes swirl in his memory with an anguished forgetting of paradise. He cries for the loss of his delicate form, his exo-skeleton now a crystal meteor. If only he could change into a dog, he thinks, as life leaves him in a cascade of steam. With little conviction, he sucks it back up as it goes. In no time, he"s good as new.
Back in the town of Absentia, in the very room of the Hotel Providence where he took Carlotta, he"s now taking them two at a time. The empty husks of life pile up like fresh-cut bales of tobacco in his closet. Men catch their wives sneaking to his door. Wives catch their husbands at some shadowy rendezvous with him, and he takes them both as quick as you please. He takes the contessa from behind as she leans over to adjust her corset. Her piles of hair almost save her, but, in the end, she is as easy to draw the life out of as is Master Cley, or the mayor, or Madam Silwort, or the Grossdig Twins.
Someone notices the population of the town dwindling at an alarming rate and wires for the government to send troops, before the Delicate can snip the telegraph line with his incisors. When the army arrives and surrounds the town, he is huffing, as if taking snuff, the last few morsels of Mrs. Fleac.o.x. He realizes too late that she has long since gone bad as a soft melon even though she keeps right on talking till the end. Her pointless words infect him with flexis midocarsis, and he slowly begins to disintegrate. In his final hour, he stands upon the balcony of the mayor"s house, staring out over the wilderness, playing the violin until his fingers turn to salt and the instrument falls to the floor.
The soldiers break into Absentia, machine guns blurting out death, air cover dropping flames as if the clouds were on fire. They find the Delicate a sorry, prodigious pile of cigarette ash. Mrs. Fleac.o.x is lost between life and death, and they call for a specialist to administer the needle to the base of her spine. They collect the creature into a plastic bag and freeze-dry him. His remains are taken to Spire City in the Sunbelt where they are stored for the edification of future generations. The funding never comes through to study the crumbs of the Delicate, so he lies in a bag on a shelf and waits.
The Man in the Black Suit.
Stephen King.
Stephen King (1947) is one of the most influential post-World War II American writers of horror and weird fiction. His books have sold over three hundred and fifty million copies. Early cla.s.sics that established King"s reputation include Salem"s Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), The Stand (1978), and The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (1982). King has noted Richard Matheson, H.P. Lovecraft, and Shirley Jackson as among his many influences. He received the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2003. Other awards include the Hugo Award, O. Henry Award, and World Fantasy Award. "The Man in the Black Suit" is a beautifully written and terrifying tale of an encounter with the weird.
I am now a very old man and this is something which happened to me when I was very young only nine years old. It was 1914, the summer after my brother Dan died in the west field and three years before America got into World War I. I"ve never told anyone about what happened at the fork in the stream that day, and I never will...at least not with my mouth. I"ve decided to write it down, though, in this book which I will leave on the table beside my bed. I can"t write long, because my hands shake so these days and I have next to no strength, but I don"t think it will take long.
Later, someone may find what I have written. That seems likely to me, as it is pretty much human nature to look in a book marked DIARY after its owner has pa.s.sed along. So yes my words will probably be read. A better question is whether or not anyone will believe them. Almost certainly not, but that doesn"t matter. It"s not belief I"m interested in but freedom. Writing can give that, I"ve found. For twenty years I wrote a column called "Long Ago and Far Away" for the Castle Rock Call, and I know that sometimes it works that way what you write down sometimes leaves you forever, like old photographs left in the bright sun, fading to nothing but white.
I pray for that sort of release.
A man in his nineties should be well past the terrors of childhood, but as my infirmities slowly creep up on me, like waves licking closer and closer to some indifferently built castle of sand, that terrible face grows clearer and clearer in my mind"s eye. It glows like a dark star in the constellations of my childhood. What I might have done yesterday, who I might have seen here in my room at the nursing home, what I might have said to them or they to me...those things are gone, but the face of the man in the black suit grows ever clearer, ever closer, and I remember every word he said. I don"t want to think of him but I can"t help it, and sometimes at night my old heart beats so hard and so fast I think it will tear itself right clear of my chest. So I uncap my fountain pen and force my trembling old hand to write this pointless anecdote in the diary one of my great-grandchildren I can"t remember her name for sure, at least not right now, but I know it starts with an S gave to me last Christmas, and which I have never written in until now. Now I will write in it. I will write the story of how I met the man in the black suit on the bank of Castle Stream one afternoon in the summer of 1914.
The town of Motton was a different world in those days more different than I could ever tell you. That was a world without airplanes droning overhead, a world almost without cars and trucks, a world where the skies were not cut into lanes and slices by overhead power lines.
There was not a single paved road in the whole town, and the business district consisted of nothing but Corson"s General Store, Thut"s Livery & Hardware, the Methodist Church at Christ"s Corner, the school, the town hall, and Harry"s Restaurant half a mile down from there, which my mother called, with unfailing disdain, "the liquor house."
Mostly, though, the difference was in how people lived how apart they were.
I"m not sure people born after the middle of the twentieth century could quite credit that, although they might say they could, to be polite to old folks like me. There were no phones in western Maine back then, for one thing. The first one wouldn"t be installed for another five years, and by the time there was one in our house, I was nineteen and going to college at the University of Maine in Orono.
But that is only the root of the thing. There was no doctor closer than Casco, and no more than a dozen houses in what you would call town. There were no neighborhoods (I"m not even sure we knew the word, although we had a verb neighboring that described church functions and barn dances), and open fields were the exception rather than the rule. Out of town the houses were farms that stood far apart from each other, and from December until middle March we mostly hunkered down in the little pockets of stove warmth we called families. We hunkered and listened to the wind in the chimney and hoped no one would get sick or break a leg or get a headful of bad ideas, like the farmer over in Castle Rock who had chopped up his wife and kids three winters before and then said in court that the ghosts made him do it. In those days before the Great War, most of Motton was woods and bog, dark long places full of moose and mosquitoes, snakes and secrets. In those days there were ghosts everywhere.
This thing I"m telling about happened on a Sat.u.r.day. My father gave me a whole list of ch.o.r.es to do, including some that would have been Dan"s, if he"d still been alive. He was my only brother, and he"d died of being stung by a bee. A year had gone by, and still my mother wouldn"t hear that. She said it was something else, had to have been, that no one ever died of being stung by a bee. When Mama Sweet, the oldest lady in the Methodist Ladies" Aid, tried to tell her at the church supper the previous winter, this was that the same thing had happened to her favorite uncle back in "73, my mother clapped her hands over her ears, got up, and walked out of the church bas.e.m.e.nt. She"d never been back since, either, and nothing my father could say to her would change her mind. She claimed she was done with church, and that if she ever had to see Helen Robichaud again (that was Mama Sweet"s real name), she would slap her eyes out. She wouldn"t be able to help herself, she said.
That day, Dad wanted me to lug wood for the cookstove, weed the beans and the cukes, pitch hay out of the loft, get two jugs of water to put in the cold pantry, and sc.r.a.pe as much old paint off the cellar bulkhead as I could. Then, he said, I could go fishing, if I didn"t mind going by myself he had to go over and see Bill Eversham about some cows. I said I sure didn"t mind going by myself, and my Dad smiled like that didn"t surprise him so very much. He"d given me a bamboo pole the week before not because it was my birthday or anything, but just because he liked to give me things, sometimes and I was wild to try it in Castle Stream, which was by far the troutiest brook I"d ever fished.
"But don"t you go too far in the woods," he told me. "Not beyond where it splits."
"No, sir."
"Promise me."
"Yessir, I promise."
"Now promise your mother."
We were standing on the back stoop; I had been bound for the springhouse with the water jugs when my Dad stopped me. Now he turned me around to face my mother, who was standing at the marble counter in a flood of strong morning sunshine falling through the double windows over the sink. There was a curl of hair lying across the side of her forehead and touching her eyebrow you see how well I remember it all? The bright light turned that little curl to filaments of gold and made me want to run to her and put my arms around her. In that instant I saw her as a woman, saw her as my father must have seen her. She was wearing a housedress with little red roses all over it, I remember, and she was kneading bread. Candy Bill, our little black Scottie dog, was standing alertly beside her feet, looking up, waiting for anything that might drop. My mother was looking at me.
"I promise," I said.
She smiled, but it was the worried kind of smile she always seemed to make since my father brought Dan back from the west field in his arms. My father had come sobbing and bare-chested. He had taken off his shirt and draped it over Dan"s face, which had swelled and turned color. My boy! he had been crying. Oh, look at my boy! Jesus, look at my boy! I remember that as if it had been yesterday.
It was the only time I ever heard my Dad take the Savior"s name in vain.
"What do you promise, Gary?" she asked.
"Promise not to go no further than where it forks, ma"am."
"Any further."
"Any."
She gave me a patient look, saying nothing as her hands went on working in the dough, which now had a smooth, silky look.
"I promise not to go any further than where it forks, ma"am."
"Thank you, Gary," she said. "And try to remember that grammar is for the world as well as for school."
"Yes, ma"am."
Candy Bill followed me as I did my ch.o.r.es, and sat between my feet as I bolted my lunch, looking up at me with the same attentiveness he had shown my mother while she was kneading her bread, but when I got my new bamboo pole and my old, splintery creel and started out of the dooryard, he stopped and only stood in the dust by an old roll of snowfence, watching. I called him but he wouldn"t come. He yapped a time or two, as if telling me to come back, but that was all.
"Stay, then," I said, trying to sound as if I didn"t care. I did, though, at least a little. Candy Bill always went fishing with me.
My mother came to the door and looked out at me with her left hand held up to shade her eyes. I can see her that way still, and it"s like looking at a photograph of someone who later became unhappy, or died suddenly. "You mind your Dad now, Gary!"
"Yes, ma"am, I will."
She waved. I waved, too. Then I turned my back on her and walked away.
The sun beat down on my neck, hard and hot, for the first quarter-mile or so, but then I entered the woods, where double shadow fell over the road and it was cool and fir-smelling and you could hear the wind hissing through the deep needled groves. I walked with my pole on my shoulder like boys did back then, holding my creel in my other hand like a valise or a salesman"s sample-case.
About two miles into the woods along a road which was really nothing but a double rut with a gra.s.sy strip growing up the center hump, I began to hear the hurried, eager gossip of Castle Stream. I thought of trout with bright speckled backs and pure white bellies, and my heart went up in my chest.
The stream flowed under a little wooden bridge, and the banks leading down to the water were steep and brushy. I worked my way down carefully, holding on where I could and digging my heels in. I went down out of summer and back into mid-spring, or so it felt. The cool rose gently off the water, and a green smell like moss. When I got to the edge of the water I only stood there for a little while, breathing deep of that mossy smell and watching the dragonflies circle and the skitter-bugs skate. Then, farther down, I saw a trout leap at a b.u.t.terfly a good big brookie, maybe fourteen inches long and remembered I hadn"t come here just to sightsee.
I walked along the bank, following the current, and wet my line for the first time with the bridge still in sight upstream. Something jerked the tip of my pole down a time or two and ate half my worm, but he was too sly for my nine-year-old hands or maybe just not hungry enough to be careless so I went on.
I stopped at two or three other places before I got to the place where Castle Stream forks, going southwest into Castle Rock and southeast into Kashwakamak Township, and at one of them I caught the biggest trout I have ever caught in my life, a beauty that measured nineteen inches from tip to tail on the little ruler I kept in my creel. That was a monster of a brook trout, even for those days.
If I had accepted this as gift enough for one day and gone back, I would not be writing now (and this is going to turn out longer than I thought it would, I see that already), but I didn"t. Instead I saw to my catch right then and there as my father had shown me cleaning it, placing it on dry gra.s.s at the bottom of the creel, then laying damp gra.s.s on top of it and went on. I did not, at age nine, think that catching a nineteen-inch brook trout was particularly remarkable, although I do remember being amazed that my line had not broken when I, netless as well as artless, had hauled it out and swung it toward me in a clumsy tail-flapping arc.
Ten minutes later, I came to the place where the stream split in those days (it is long gone now; there is a settlement of duplex homes where Castle Stream once went its course, and a district grammar school as well, and if there is a stream it goes in darkness), dividing around a huge gray rock nearly the size of our outhouse.
There was a pleasant flat s.p.a.ce here, gra.s.sy and soft, overlooking what my Dad and I called South Branch. I squatted on my heels, dropped my line into the water, and almost immediately snagged a fine rainbow trout. He wasn"t the size of my brookie only a foot or so but a good fish, just the same. I had it cleaned out before the gills had stopped flexing, stored it in my creel, and dropped my line back into the water.
This time there was no immediate bite so I leaned back, looking up at the blue stripe of sky I could see along the stream"s course. Clouds floated by, west to east, and I tried to think what they looked like. I saw a unicorn, then a rooster, then a dog that looked a little like Candy Bill. I was looking for the next one when I drowsed off. Or maybe slept. I don"t know for sure. All I know is that a tug on my line so strong it almost pulled the bamboo pole out of my hand was what brought me back into the afternoon. I sat up, clutched the pole, and suddenly became aware that something was sitting on the tip of my nose. I crossed my eyes and saw a bee. My heart seemed to fall dead in my chest, and for a horrible second I was sure I was going to wet my pants.
The tug on my line came again, stronger this time, but although I maintained my grip on the end of the pole so it wouldn"t be pulled into the stream and perhaps carried away (I think I even had the presence of mind to snub the line with my forefinger), I made no effort to pull in my catch. All of my horrified attention was fixed on the fat black-and-yellow thing that was using my nose as a rest-stop.
I slowly poked out my lower lip and blew upward. The bee ruffled a little but kept its place. I blew again and it ruffled again...but this time it also seemed to shift impatiently, and I didn"t dare blow anymore, for fear it would lose its temper completely and give me a shot. It was too close for me to focus on what it was doing, but it was easy to imagine it ramming its stinger into one of my nostrils and shooting its poison up toward my eyes. And my brain.
A terrible idea came to me: that this was the very bee which had killed my brother. I knew it wasn"t true, and not only because honey-bees probably didn"t live longer than a single year (except maybe for the queens; about them I was not so sure). It couldn"t be true because bees died when they stung, and even at nine I knew it. Their stingers were barbed, and when they tried to fly away after doing the deed, they tore themselves apart. Still, the idea stayed. This was a special bee, a devil-bee, and it had come back to finish the other of Albion and Loretta"s two boys.
And here is something else: I had been stung by bees before, and although the stings had swelled more than is perhaps usual (I can"t really say for sure), I had never died of them. That was only for my brother, a terrible trap which had been laid for him in his very making, a trap which I had somehow escaped. But as I crossed my eyes until they hurt in an effort to focus on the bee, logic did not exist. It was the bee that existed, only that, the bee that had killed my brother, killed him so bad that my father had slipped down the straps of his overalls so he could take off his shirt and cover Dan"s swelled, engorged face. Even in the depths of his grief he had done that, because he didn"t want his wife to see what had become of her firstborn. Now the bee had returned, and now it would kill me. It would kill me and I would die in convulsions on the bank, flopping just as a brookie flops after you take the hook out of its mouth.
As I sat there trembling on the edge of panic of simply bolting to my feet and then bolting anywhere there came a report from behind me. It was as sharp and peremptory as a pistol-shot, but I knew it wasn"t a pistol-shot; it was someone clapping his hands. One single clap. At the moment it came, the bee tumbled off my nose and fell into my lap. It lay there on my pants with its legs sticking up and its stinger a threatless black thread against the old scuffed brown of the corduroy. It was dead as a doornail, I saw that at once. At the same moment, the pole gave another tug the hardest yet and I almost lost it again.
I grabbed it with both hands and gave it a big stupid yank that would have made my father clutch his head with both hands, if he had been there to see it.
A rainbow trout, a good bit larger than the one I had already caught, rose out of the water in a wet, writhing flash, spraying fine drops of water from its filament of tail it looked like one of those romanticized fishing pictures they used to put on the covers of men"s magazines like True and Man"s Adventure back in the forties and fifties. At that moment hauling in a big one was about the last thing on my mind, however, and when the line snapped and the fish fell back into the stream, I barely noticed. I looked over my shoulder to see who had clapped. A man was standing above me, at the edge of the trees. His face was very long and pale. His black hair was combed tight against his skull and parted with rigorous care on the left side of his narrow head.
He was very tall. He was wearing a black three-piece suit, and I knew right away that he was not a human being, because his eyes were the orangey-red of flames in a woodstove. I don"t just mean the irises, because he had no irises, and no pupils, and certainly no whites. His eyes were completely orange an orange that shifted and flickered. And it"s really too late not to say exactly what I mean, isn"t it? He was on fire inside, and his eyes were like the little isingla.s.s portholes you sometimes see in stove doors.