"If you"ll all please excuse us for a moment," he says, so she knows that he"s seen, that he understands, and he puts one of his long arms around her shoulders. "I need to steal her away for just a few minutes." There"s a splash of soft, knowing laughter from the little crowd of people.
He leads her from the front parlor into what might once have been a dining room, and Tara"s beginning to realize how very empty the house is. The way it looked from the outside, she expected the place to be full of antiques, perhaps neglected antiques gone just a bit shabby, a threadbare and discrepant mix of Edwardian and Victorian. But still, she thought that it would be furnished. These rooms are almost empty, not even carpets on the floors or drapes on the tall windows; the velvet wallpaper is faded and torn in places, hanging down in strips here and there, like a reptile shedding its skin. And there"s no electricity, as far as she can tell, just candles and old-fashioned gaslight fixtures on the walls, warm and flickering light held inside frosted crystal flowers.
"They can be somewhat intimidating at first, I know that," Darren says. "It"s a pretty close-knit group. I should have warned you." But she shakes her head, smiles and tells him no, it"s fine, it"s not a problem.
"They"re probably as anxious about your being here," he says, "as you are about meeting them." He rubs his hands together in a nervous sort of way, and glances back towards the crows milling about in the parlor, whispering among themselves. Are they talking about me? Tara wonders. Are they asking each other questions about me?
"I trust you didn"t have any trouble finding the house?" Darren asks. "It"s pretty far off the beaten track. We had someone get lost once."
"No," she replies. "Finding the house was easy. With all those jack-o-lanterns, it"s almost like a lighthouse." And she thinks that"s probably exactly what it would look like to a ship pa.s.sing in the night, to fishermen or a tanker pa.s.sing on their way north or south, an unblinking lighthouse perched high on the craggy sh.o.r.e.
"The pumpkins. That"s one of the traditions," Darren says, brushing his long black bangs away from his face. It"s not exactly a handsome face, something more honest than handsome. She thinks maybe that"s one of the reasons she finds him attractive.
"One of the traditions? Are there many others?" "A few. I hope all this isn"t freaking you out."
"No, it isn"t," she replies, and turns her head towards a window, towards the moonlight shining in clean through the gla.s.s, shining white off the sea. "Not at all. It"s all very dignified, I think. Not like Halloween in the city. All the noisy drunks and drag queens, those gaudy parades. I like this much better than that. I wish you"d told me to wear black, though," and he laughs at her then.
"I don"t think it"s funny," she says, frowning slightly, still watching the moon riding on the waves, and he puts a hand on her arm. "I must stick out like a sore thumb."
"A bit of contrast isn"t a bad thing," Darren says, and she turns away from the window, turning back to him, his high cheekbones and high forehead, his long aquiline nose and eyes that are neither blue nor green.
"I think you need a drink," he says, and Tara nods and smiles for him.
"I think maybe I need two or three."
"That can be arranged," he tells her, then leads Tara back towards the crows. A few of them turn their heads to see, dark eyes watching her, and she half expects them to spread wide black wings and fly away.
"They"ll ask you questions," and now Darren"s almost whispering, hushed words meant for her and no one else. "But don"t ever feel like you have to tell them anything you don"t want to tell them. They don"t mean to be pushy, Tara. They"re just impatient, that"s all." She starts to ask what he means by that exactly, impatient, but then she and Darren are already in the parlor again. The small and murmuring crowd opens momentarily, parting long enough to take them in, and then it closes eagerly around them.
The evening proceeds, and an hour or so later, she"s looking on as members of a string quartet carefully return their sleek instruments to black violin and viola and cello cases, cases lined in aubergine and lavender velvet. They played Bach and Chopin, and there was only one piece she didn"t recognize.
"It really isn"t very fair of you, Mr. Quince," someone says. Tara turns around and sees that it"s the dapper fat man with the blue-gray ascot, the man who"s either Irish or Scottish. "The way you"re keeping her all to yourself like this," he says, and he glances coyly past her to Darren. The fat man smiles and rubs at his short salt-and-pepper beard.
"I"m sorry. I wasn"t aware," Darren says, and he looks at Tara, then, checking to be sure she"s okay before leaving her in the man"s company.
"Oh, I think we"ll be fine," she says, and Darren nods once before disappearing into the crowd.
"I am Peterson," the man says, "Ahmed Peterson." He kisses the back of her hand the same way that the tall French woman did earlier. There"s the same peculiar formality about him, about all of them, manners that ought to come across as affected, but don"t somehow. He has a walking stick topped with a silver dolphin.
"Quince tells us that you"re a marine biologist," he says, releasing her hand and standing very straight, but he"s still a few inches shorter than Tara.
"An ichthyologist, actually. I do some work at the aquarium in Monterey and teach at Cal State. That"s where I met Darren."
"How very marvelous," Peterson beams. "You know, my dear, I once came across an oarfish, a great, long, spiny thing, stranded on the shingle at Lyme Regis. The fellow I was with thought sure we"d found ourselves a sea serpent."
"I actually saw an oarfish alive," Tara says, "off the coast of Oregon about ten years ago, when I was still a grad student." She"s finally starting to relax, beginning to feel less like an outsider. This is familiar ground, swapping fish stories with the fat man. "We estimated it at almost twenty feet."
"Ah, well, mine was smaller," he says, sounding a little disappointed. Then, suddenly, there"s a jolting, reverberating crash, and Tara turns to see that one of the women is holding up a small bra.s.s gong.
"Oh my," the fat man says. "Is it really that late already? I lost track," and then Darren"s standing next to her again.
"What"s happening?" she asks.
"You"ll see," he replies, taking her hand and slipping something cold and metallic into her palm, a coin or a token.
"What"s this?" "Just hang onto it," he replies. "Don"t lose it. You"ll need it later."
So, it"s a game, she thinks. Yes, it must be some sort of party game.
And now everyone is starting to leave the parlor. She lets Darren lead her, and they follow the others, filing along a narrow hallway to a locked door near the very back of the house. Behind the door are stairs winding down and down and down, steps that seem to have been cut directly into the native rock, and damp stone walls rise up around them. Some of the guests have candles or oil lanterns. Tara slips once, and Darren catches her. He leans close and whispers in her ear, and his breath is very faintly sour.
"Watch your step," he says. "It"s not much farther, but you wouldn"t want to fall." There are cool gusts of salty air rising up from below, not the sort of air she"d expect from a cellar at all; cool air against her skin, but air tainted by an oily, fishy odor, a low tide sort of a smell, bladderwrack and dying starfish trapped in stagnant tidal pools.
"Where the h.e.l.l are we going?" she asks him, not bothering to whisper, and a woman with a conch sh.e.l.l tattooed on her forehead turns around and looks at her with a guarded hint of disapproval, and then she turns away again.
"You"ll see," Darren whispers. "In a moment you"ll see." And Tara realizes that there"s something besides the salty darkness and the light from the candles and lanterns, a softer chartreuse glow coming from somewhere below, yellow-green light that gets a little brighter with every step she takes towards the bottom of the stairway.
And now, if Darren were to ask again whether or not she was getting freaked out, now she might say yes. Now, she might even tell him she really should be going, that it"s late, and she needs to get back to the city. She could say that she has papers to grade or a test to write for her oceanography cla.s.s, anything that sounds plausible enough to get her out of the house and onto the pumpkin-littered porch, back down the trail to her rented car. She imagines her relief at being free of the house. There would be stars overhead, instead of stone. But he doesn"t ask again, so she keeps quiet. The chartreuse light grows brighter and brighter, and in a few more minutes they"ve come to the bottom.
"No one ever understands at first," Darren says. He has one hand gripped just a little too tightly around her left wrist, and Tara"s about to tell him that it hurts, about to ask him to let go, when she sees the pool and forgets about everything else.
There"s a sort of a boardwalk at the bottom of the stairs, a short path of warped planks and rails and pilings gone driftwood soft from the perpetually damp air, from the spray and seawater lapping restlessly at the wood. The strange light is coming from the water, from the wide pool that entirely fills the cavern at the foot of the stairs, coruscating light that rises in dancing fairy shafts to play across the uneven ceiling of the chamber. Tara"s stopped moving, and people are having to step around her, all the impatient crows grown quiet and beginning to take their places on the boardwalk, no sound now but the hollow clock, clock, clock of their shoes on the planks and the waves splashing against the pier and the limestone walls of the sea cave.
It"s like they"ve all done this thing a hundred, hundred times before, and she looks to Darren for an explanation, for a wink or a smile to tell her this really is just some odd Halloween game. However, his blue-green eyes are fixed on the far end of the boardwalk, and he doesn"t seem to notice.
"Take me back now," she says. "I don"t want to see this," but if he"s heard her it doesn"t show on his face, his long, angular face reflecting the light from the pool. He has the awed and joyous expression of someone witnessing a miracle. The sort of expression that Hollywood always gives a Joan of Arc or a Bernadette, the eyes of someone who"s seen G.o.d, she thinks, and then Tara looks towards the end of the boardwalk again. The crowd parts on cue, stepping aside so that she can see the rocks jutting up from the middle of the pool, from whatever depths there are beneath her feet, those stones stacked one upon the other as precarious as jackstraws. The rocks and the thing that"s chained there, and in a moment she knows that it"s seen her, as well.
"When I was five," she says, "when I was five, I found a sea turtle dead on the beach near Santa Cruz." She opens her hand again to stare at the coin that Darren gave her upstairs.
"No, dear," Ahmed Peterson says. "It was an oarfish. Don"t you remember?" and she shakes her head, because it wasn"t an oarfish that time. That time it was a turtle, and the maggots and the gulls had eaten away its eyes.
"You must be mistaken," the fat man says again, and her coin glints and glimmers in the yellow-green light, glinting purest moonlight silver in her palm. She doesn"t want to give it away, as all the others have already done. It may be the only thing still tethering her to the world, and she doesn"t want to drop it into the water and watch as it spirals down to nowhere, that see-saw spiral descent towards the blazing deep, and she quickly closes her hand again. She makes a tight fist. The fat man huffs and grumbles, and she looks up at the moon instead of the pool.
"You may not have lived much under the sea," he says.
"No, I haven"t," Tara confesses. "I haven"t."
"Perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster," he says.
She thinks about that for a moment, about brown claws boiled orange and jointed crustacean legs on china plates.
"I once tasted " but then she stops herself, because she"s almost certain having eaten lobster is something she shouldn"t admit. "No, never," Tara whispers, instead.
And the sea slams itself against the cliffs below the house, the angry sea, the cheated sea that wants to drown all the land again. Darren is lying in the tall gra.s.s, and Tara can hear a train far away in the night, its steam-throat whistle and steel-razor wheels, rolling from there to there, and she traces a line in the dark with the tip of one index finger, horizon to horizon, sea to sky, st.i.tching with her finger.
"She keeps the balance," Darren says, and Tara knows he"s talking about the woman on the rocks in the cave below the house. The thing that was a woman once. "She stands between the worlds," he says. "She watches all the gates."
"Did she have a choice?" Tara asks him, and now he"s pulling her down into the gra.s.s, the sea of gra.s.s washed beneath a harvest moon. He smells like fresh hay and pumpkin flesh, nutmeg and candy corn.
"Do saints ever have choices?"
And Tara"s trying to remember, if they ever do, when Ahmed and the woman with the conch-sh.e.l.l tattoo lean in close and whisper the names of deep-sea things in her ears, a rushed and bathypelagic litany of fish and jellies, squid and the translucent larvae of shrimp and crabs.
Saccopharynx, Stylephorus, Pelagothuria, Asteronyx.
"Not so fast," she says. "Not so fast, please."
Caulophyrne, Lasiognathus, Sqaulogadus, Abyssobrotula.
"You can really have no notion, how delightful it will be," sings Ahmed Peterson, and then the tattooed woman finishes for him. "When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea."
It"s easier to shut her eyes and lie in Darren"s arms, hidden by the merciful, undulating gra.s.s, easier than listening, easier than hearing. "The jack-o"-lanterns," he says again, because she asked him why the need for all the jack-o"-lanterns. "You said it yourself, Tara. Remember? A lighthouse. One night a year, they rise, and we want them to know we"re watching."
"Beneath the waters of the sea, Are lobsters thick as thick can be They love to dance with you and me. My own and gentle Salmon."
"It hurts her," Tara says, watching the woman on the rocks, the lady of spines and scales and the squirming podia sprouting from her distended belly.
"Drop the coin, Tara," Darren murmurs, and, somehow, his voice manages to be urgent, but not impatient. "Drop the coin into the pool. It helps her hold the line."
Drop the coin, the coin, the candy in a plastic pumpkin grinning basket.
"The reason is," says the Gryphon, who was a moment before the woman with the conch on her forehead, "that they would go with the lobsters to the dance. So they got thrown out to sea. So they had to fall a long, long way."
And the Mock Turtle who was previously Ahmed Peterson glares at the Gryphon. "I never went to him," he huffs. "He taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say."
"Someone got lost," Darren whispers. "We had to have another. The number is fixed," and the black-salt breeze blows unseen through the concealing gra.s.s. She can"t hear the train any longer. And the moon stares down at them with its single swollen jaundiced eye, searching and dragging the ocean against the rocks.
It will find me soon, and what then?
"Drop the coin, Tara. There"s not much time left. It"s almost midnight," and the woman on the rocks strains against her shackles, the rusted chains that hold her there, and cold corroded iron bites into her pulpy cheese-white skin. The crimson tentacles between her alabaster thighs, the barnacles that have encrusted her legs, and her lips move without making a sound.
"They"re rising, Tara," Darren says, and he sounds scared and stares down into the glowing water, the abyss below the boardwalk, the pool that"s so much deeper than any ocean has ever been. And there is movement down there, she can see that, the coils and lashing fins. The woman on the rock makes a sound like a dying whale.
"There is another sh.o.r.e, you know, upon the other side."
"Now, G.o.dd.a.m.n it," Darren says, and the coin slips so easily through her fingers.
"Will you, won"t you, will you, won"t you, will you join the dance..."
She watches it sink, taking a living part of her down with it, drowning some speck of her soul. Because it isn"t only the woman on the rock that holds back the sea; it"s all of them, the crows, and now she"s burned as black as the rest, scorched feathers and strangled hearts, falling from the sun into the greedy maelstrom.
And the moon can see her now.
"I told them you were strong," Darren whispers, proud of her, and he wipes the tears from her face. The crows are dancing on the boardwalk, circling them, clomp clomp clomp, while the woman on the rock slips silently away into a stinging anemone-choked crevice on her island.
"Will you, won"t you, will you, won"t you, won"t you join the dance?"
Tara wakes up shivering, lying in the gra.s.s beneath a wide gray sky spitting cold raindrops down at her, the wind and the roar of the breakers in her ears. She lies there for a few more minutes, remembering what she can about the night before. She has no recollection of making her way back up the stairs from the sea cave, from the phosph.o.r.escent pool below the house. No memory of leaving the house, either, but here she is, staring up at the leaden sky and the faint glow where the sun is hiding itself safe behind the clouds.
Someone"s left her purse nearby, Darren or some other thoughtful crow, and she reaches for it, sitting up in the wet gra.s.s, staring back towards the house. Those walls and shuttered windows, the spires and gables, no less severe for this wounded daylight; more so, perhaps. The house wears the bitter face of anything that has to keep such secrets in its bowels, that has to hide the world"s shame beneath its floors. The house is dark, all the other cars have gone, and there"s no sign of the one hundred and eleven jack-o"-lanterns.
She stands and looks out to sea for a moment, watching a handful of white birds buffeted by the gales and whitecaps. Next year, she thinks, next year she"ll be here a week before Halloween to help carve the lighthouse faces, and next year she"ll know to dress in black. She"ll know to drop the silver coin quickly and turn quickly away.
One of the gulls dives suddenly and pulls something dark and wriggling from the seething, storm-tossed ocean. Tara looks away, wiping the rain from her eyes, rain that could be tears, and wet bits of gra.s.s from her skirt. And then she begins the walk that will carry her past the house and down the sandy road to her car.
The G.o.d of Dark Laughter.
Michael Chabon.
Michael Chabon (1963) is a celebrated American writer who has written in several different genres, although best-known for novels of mainstream realism with elements of fantasy. His novels include Wonder Boys (1995), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and the alternative history mystery The Yiddish Policemen"s Union (2007). Chabon has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Hugo Award, Sidewise Award, and the Nebula Award. A fan of the weird tale, Chabon has written several stories in that mode including "The G.o.d of Dark Laughter," which contains references to Lovecraft and a nod to the work of Edgar Allan Poe. The story was first published in 2001 in the New Yorker.
Thirteen days after the Entwhistle-Ealing Bros. circus left Ashtown, beating a long retreat toward its winter headquarters in Peru, Indiana, two boys out hunting squirrels in the woods along Portwine Road stumbled on a body that was dressed in a mad suit of purple and orange velour. They found it at the end of a muddy strip of gravel that began, five miles to the west, as Yuggogheny County Road 22A. Another half mile farther to the east and it would have been left to my colleagues over in Fayette County to puzzle out the question of who had shot the man and skinned his head from chin to crown and clavicle to clavicle, taking ears, eyelids, lips, and scalp in a single grisly flap, like the cupped husk of a peeled orange. My name is Edward D. Satterlee, and for the last twelve years I have faithfully served Yuggogheny County as its district attorney, in cases that have all too often run to the outrageous and bizarre. I make the following report in no confidence that it, or I, will be believed, and beg the reader to consider this, at least in part, my letter of resignation.
The boys who found the body were themselves fresh from several hours" worth of b.l.o.o.d.y amus.e.m.e.nt with long knives and dead squirrels, and at first the investigating officers took them for the perpetrators of the crime. There was blood on the boys" cuffs, their shirttails, and the bills of their gray twill caps. But the county detectives and I quickly moved beyond Joey Matuszak and Frankie Corro. For all their familiarity with gristle and sinew and the bright-purple discovered interior of a body, the boys had come into the station looking pale and bewildered, and we found ample evidence at the crime scene of their having lost the contents of their stomachs when confronted with the corpse.
Now, I have every intention of setting down the facts of this case as I understand and experienced them, without fear of the reader"s doubting them (or my own sanity), but I see no point in mentioning any further anatomical details of the crime, except to say that our coroner, Dr. Sauer, though he labored at the problem with a sad fervor, was hard put to establish conclusively that the victim had been dead before his killer went to work on him with a very long, very sharp knife.
The dead man, as I have already mentioned, was attired in a curious suit the trousers and jacket of threadbare purple velour, the waistcoat bright orange, the whole thing patched with outsized squares of fabric cut from a variety of loudly clashing plaids. It was on account of the patches, along with the victim"s cracked and split-soled shoes and a certain undeniable shabbiness in the stuff of the suit, that the primary detective a man not apt to see deeper than the outermost wrapper of the world (we do not attract, I must confess, the finest police talent in this doleful little corner of western Pennsylvania) had already figured the victim for a vagrant, albeit one with extraordinarily big feet.
"Those cannot possibly be his real shoes, Ganz, you idiot," I gently suggested. The call, patched through to my boarding house from that gruesome clearing in the woods, had interrupted my supper, which by a grim coincidence had been a Brunswick stew (the specialty of my Virginia-born landlady) of pork and squirrel. "They"re supposed to make you laugh."
"They are pretty funny," said Ganz. "Come to think of it." Detective John Ganz was a large-boned fellow, upholstered in a layer of ruddy flesh. He breathed through his mouth, and walked with a tall man"s defeated stoop, and five times a day he took out his comb and ritually plastered his thinning blond hair to the top of his head with a dime-size dab of Tres Flores.
When I arrived at the clearing, having abandoned my solitary dinner, I found the corpse lying just as the young hunters had come upon it, supine, arms thrown up and to either side of the flayed face in a startled att.i.tude that fuelled the hopes of poor Dr. Sauer that the victim"s death by gunshot had preceded his mutilation. Ganz or one of the other investigators had kindly thrown a chamois cloth over the vandalized head. I took enough of a peek beneath it to provide me with everything that I or the reader could possibly need to know about the condition of the head I will never forget the sight of that monstrous, fleshless grin and to remark the dead man"s unusual choice of cravat. It was a giant, floppy bow tie, white with orange and purple polka dots.
"d.a.m.n you, Ganz," I said, though I was not in truth addressing the poor fellow, who, I knew, would not be able to answer my question anytime soon. "What"s a dead clown doing in my woods?"
We found no wallet on the corpse, nor any kind of identifying objects. My men, along with the better part of the Ashtown Police Department, went over and over the woods east of town, hourly widening the radius of their search. That day, when not attending to my other duties (I was then in the process of breaking up the Dushnyk cigarette-smuggling ring), I managed to work my way back along a chain of inferences to the Entwhistle-Ealing Bros. Circus, which, as I eventually recalled, had recently stayed on the eastern outskirts of Ashtown, at the fringe of the woods where the body was found.
The following day, I succeeded in reaching the circus"s general manager, a man named Onheuser, at their winter headquarters in Peru. He informed me over the phone that the company had left Pennsylvania and was now en route to Peru, and I asked him if he had received any reports from the road manager of a clown"s having suddenly gone missing.
"Missing?" he said. I wished that I could see his face, for I thought I heard the flatted note of something false in his tone. Perhaps he was merely nervous about talking to a county district attorney. The Entwhistle-Ealing Bros. Circus was a mangy affair, by all accounts, and probably no stranger to pursuit by officers of the court. "Why, I don"t believe so, no."
I explained to him that a man who gave every indication of having once been a circus clown had turned up dead in a pinewood outside Ashtown, Pennsylvania.
"Oh, no," Onheuser said. "I truly hope he wasn"t one of mine, Mr. Satterlee."
"Is it possible you might have left one of your clowns behind, Mr. Onheuser?"
"Clowns are special people," Onheuser replied, sounding a touch on the defensive. "They love their work, but sometimes it can get to be a little, well, too much for them." It developed that Mr. Onheuser had, in his younger days, performed as a clown, under the name of Mr. Wingo, in the circus of which he was now the general manager. "It"s not unusual for a clown to drop out for a little while, cool his heels, you know, in some town where he can get a few months of well-earned rest. It isn"t common, I wouldn"t say, but it"s not unusual. I will wire my road manager they"re in Canton, Ohio and see what I can find out."
I gathered, reading between the lines, that clowns were high-strung types, and not above going off on the occasional bender. This poor fellow had probably jumped ship here two weeks ago, holing up somewhere with a case of rye, only to run afoul of a very nasty person, possibly one who harbored no great love of clowns. In fact, I had an odd feeling, nothing more than a hunch, really, that the ordinary citizens of Ashtown and its environs were safe, even though the killer was still at large. Once more, I picked up a slip of paper that I had tucked into my desk blotter that morning. It was something that Dr. Sauer had clipped from his files and pa.s.sed along to me. Coulrophobia: morbid, irrational fear of or aversion to clowns.