Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales

by Orrin Grey

  Next to the building was an old gas station, with a broken neon sign in the shape of a nautilus shell and a hand-painted slogan in the window—maybe intended to be ironic—that said “live bait.” The shell on the sign was a reminder that this had all been an ocean once; that archaeologists and even just kids with shovels and pails still dug up trilobites and crinoid stems on the regular. Reminders were important, because without them it would be impossible to ever believe it.

  Besides the two buildings and a pile of red boulders off in the distance, there was nothing anywhere but her car and the heat haze and the flat black snake of the road. For hours now she had been driving through this—through kilned earth and heat so intense that the air conditioner in her station wagon couldn’t keep up. Driving away from her cramped apartment, from the nursing home where her mom now languished, from everything but her memories. Now she sat still and leaned forward, shielding her eyes with her hand and feeling the heat of the sun through the windshield tightening the skin on the back of her arm.

  Reluctantly, she shut off the engine, and immediately the temperature inside began to climb. She rolled down her window, then reached across and rolled the passenger side down too, even though no breeze stirred the scorched air.

  She got out, started to shut the door, then reconsidered, left it hanging open. Not like there was anything in her car worth stealing anyway. Cans of off-brand lemon-lime soda floating in a cooler full of dirty water, empty wrappers from candy bars and beef jerky, a book of burned CDs and a Discman with one of those cassette tape converter thingies that let her play it through the car’s ancient stereo.

  She wore a stretched black Clash T-shirt—Paul Simonon smashing his bass on the stage of the Palladium—over cutoff denim shorts, sunglasses that she’d bought at a truck stop in the Texas panhandle and not enough sunscreen. Her left arm was already turning red.

  The heat that bounced back from the ground warmed the bottoms of her feet even through her sneakers as she walked around to the back of the car, opened it up. Inside, next to the army blanket and jumper cables, were a ball-peen hammer and a pair of bolt cutters with orange handles. She tucked the hammer through her belt loop, grabbed the bolt cutters, and left the back door ajar behind her. If she found what she’d come for she’d have to move everything around anyway. She would need the space.

  The place looked deserted, but she didn’t want surprises. She walked around the old gas station first—its pumps had been removed years ago, but the awning remained, casting a feeble shadow—then the low yellow building itself, knocking on every door she could find. She got no answer. No sound from inside, no flicker of movement glimpsed through the filmed-over windows. No one and nothing.

  The only windows in the low yellow building were thick horizontal slits set high in the walls, to keep the curious from peering inside without paying their nickel. The door in the back was unpainted metal, the one in front the same color as the rest of the building. It was held shut with a rusting chain, but she had expected that. It’s what the bolt cutters were for.

  Once the chain had slithered to the dirt in a puff of dust that seemed to just hang in the still air, she stepped into the dimness of the building. She had brought a small Maglight, but the grimy windows let in enough illumination that she didn’t need it, not right away. The ceilings inside were low, claustrophobic, and there was a layer of dust as thick as a coat of paint over every surface. She had to wipe it away to read the hand-painted sign that rattled off prices for admission and for sodas and snacks.

  Beyond the entryway was a beaded curtain that made the welcome sound of rain as she passed through it, and, on the other side, long glass cases like the kind watches and rings were kept in at the jewelry store. When she wiped away the layers of dust she could see that the cases held taxidermied animals and broken fossils. Some were normal—snakes and scorpions, frozen in threatening poses—while others had been subjected to postmortem vivisection to transform them into lusus naturae; a Jackalope, a trout covered in fine black fur.

  Past these cabinets of curiosities was another doorway, this one arched and covered in a black sheet turned gray by dust and years. Above it was written the same legend she had seen outside, in letters more reasonably sized this time. On the other side, she knew, there wouldn’t be any more windows. This was the main attraction. She fished the tiny Maglight out of her pocket and thumbed the black rubber button. The beam of silvery illumination seemed thin even in the dusty dimness of the outer room, but it was what she had.

  She took a deep breath before pushing past the curtain, like a diver getting ready to jump from the board. Partly to steel her nerves, partly so that she wouldn’t breathe in the cloud of dust that she knew she was about to dislodge. Then she stepped through the doorway, and saw IT.

  Abby can’t remember when she first met Sophie. In her mind, Sophie has always been the nice old lady up the street, the one who tells her stories and sends her home with jars of bread and butter pickles and apricot preserves.

  Sophie’s husband is dead—she has a picture on her nightstand, of the two of them on their wedding day, that looks to Abby like a picture from an old movie—and her daughter is grown and lives in Seattle. Since Abby is little, she doesn’t think of Sophie as old, not really. She’s simply a grown-up, and all grown-ups are essentially the same age to Abby.

  Sophie, for her part, is the only person who treats Abby like she is really there, and her light-filled house is a haven where Abby can escape the sullen silences that often descend over her house in the years before her parents’ divorce. Everyone else acts around Abby the way grown-ups always act around kids—like they’re watching a particularly clever animal that’s been taught to do a trick. But Sophie listens to Abby as if she’s a grown-up herself, and talks to her like she’s a person.

  When Abby is twelve, she finds Sophie on the floor of her back porch, a jar of preserves shattered on the floor beside her head making a growing, spreading stain that stops Abby’s heart for just a moment. She’s the one who calls 911 on the rotary phone in Sophie’s kitchen, the way her mom taught her to.

  After that, Sophie goes to live at the nursing home, a long, low building of orange brick where old people sit and wait for Death to come. Abby still goes to visit her, but not as often as she used to. Instead of just two doors down, the nursing home is fourteen blocks away, across the wooden footbridge that spans Tucker Creek and past the graveyard where many of the people from the nursing home will soon end up.

  It isn’t until after she’s in the nursing home that Sophie finally tells Abby the story. “When I was a girl,” Sophie says, “the circus came to town. It wasn’t really much of a circus—it was more what they used to call a ten-in-one, what these days we’d call a freak show—but it was more circus than I had ever seen. It didn’t come on the train; it came on trucks with wooden sides, each one painted up like a billboard for what was inside. I remember the dirt of the fairgrounds packed hard by the truck tires and the feet of the roustabouts, the smell of hamburgers and waffle cones.

  “It wasn’t a proper ten-in-one, because there wasn’t one big tent, just a lot of little ones, a barker out in front of each, exhorting you to come on in. There was a scrawny lion and an alligator in a long trough that they advertised as ‘a beast from the mists of prehistory.’ There was a bearded lady and a strongman. I don’t remember what else. All I remember is him.”

  It is at this point that Sophie takes out an old cigar box. It is wrapped and tied in ribbons, carefully, lovingly. The logo has been partly covered over in silver paint, etching stars and moons and crude drawings of fish. “The sign on the side of his truck said that he was a ‘Man from the Sea,’ and it showed a picture of something like a fish that had stood up on two legs, its fins making robes around it, like a priest. They kept him in a big glass tank, the kind that Houdini used to escape from, stood up on its side and full of water so blue that it seemed to almost glow. Or maybe it was him that glowed; I can’t seem to remember any
more.

  “He didn’t look anything like the picture on his sign. He was slender and scaled, with a ridge that ran up his back and along his arms. His hands were webbed, like baseball mitts, and his gills like flowers. He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I think now that I was in love with him, but I was a child then, and didn’t know what love was.

  “I remember walking up and putting my hand against the glass of the case. Later, my father would tell me that he wasn’t real, that it was just a person made up to look like a fish, but I always knew better. When I put my hand against the glass, he looked at me, and I know that he saw me, saw into me, and his big hand came down, pressed against the glass on the other side of mine.”

  As she talks, Sophie has been slowly, almost absently untying the ribbons that hold shut the box, and when she stops, she opens it reverently, the way a religious person would open up a holy relic, and hands its contents to Abby. Inside are papers—a handbill that has been folded and re-folded time and again, photographs that are faded with age—and a single scale that glitters with all the colors you can find on the inside of a shell.

  “The circus came all the way from Florida, at least that’s what the barkers said, and that’s where they claimed to have picked him up. When I was a grown woman, I convinced Charley to take me to Florida for one of our anniversaries, though I never told him why. I went looking for the town that the circus came from—it had been written on the trucks, and on the handbill that I folded up and kept in the pocket of my skirt—but when I found it I couldn’t learn much. There was a spring nearby, though, full of beautiful blue water, like the water in his tank, and I knew somehow that he had touched it, that he had been there. I kept a bottle of that water for years, but it eventually dried up, even with the cork in tight.”

  At the bottom of the stack of papers is a postcard with the words “What is IT?” surrounded by crude drawings of shrunken heads and scorpions and what Abby will eventually learn is called a bishop fish, and on the back a map drawn in blue ballpoint pen. “They’ll take these things away from me eventually, if I keep them here,” Sophie is saying. “I want you to have them. I found out where he is, finally, where they took him, but I never made it there. He comes to me at night now, in my dreams. He needs my help. But I’ve gotten too old, while he just stays the same.”

  The station wagon rolled, crunched to a stop in the shadow of tall trees. It was dark down where Abby was, but up high the sky was still blue, the stars only just coming out. The headlights showed the gate up ahead, corroded iron pipe plastered with signs from the state warning against trespassing and the dangers of the tides. When Abby got out of the car, she could hear the sound of the ocean way off, like wind in the trees.

  She had driven much farther than she needed to, always heading north and west. Somewhere near Reno she had seen a symbol of a Jesus fish spray-painted onto an overpass—the one that is just two curving lines that intersect—but to her it had seemed like a symbol of something else, an omen or a portent, telling her that she was going the right way. Why she had felt the need to come to this secluded stretch of beach just a few hours’ drive south of where Sophie’s daughter still lived, when there were miles of coastline to the south, Abby couldn’t say, but here she was.

  The bolt cutters were in the seat beside her now, there wasn’t any more room in the back. The body wrapped in the army blanket took up all the space back there, the station wagon turned impromptu hearse. She had wanted to keep the case that held him, but hadn’t been able to move it.

  Death had rendered him unlovely—he was a mummy now, not a merman, his skin dry and flaking, his scales dull gray—but there was no mistaking him. Those enormous webbed hands that Sophie had compared to baseball mitts, those gills, like dried flowers now. Sophie had known about his condition, had warned Abby of what she would find.

  Sophie’s whole life had been spent finding him, tracing his movements, even as she married, had a family of her own, grew old. Using her spare time to track down the heirs and surviving members of the carnival that had passed through her little town when she was a girl, finding out what had been done with him. She learned that he had died, his body preserved, passed around, sold as an oddity, to eventually come to rest in the low yellow building in the middle of the desert, so far from where he belonged. And then, when she finally knew where she had to go, what she had to do, to become too old, too fragile to do it.

  Abby felt the weight of that responsibility in the chill evening air that blew in off the sea, the burden of it and the warmth. That Sophie had loved her, had trusted her enough to leave with her the one task that mattered most. It had pushed her to keep going, even when she doubted her mission, when she assumed that at the end of her trip she would find only an empty building, or a Feejee mermaid cobbled together from fish parts and human cadavers.

  She had driven across hundreds of miles with the body in the back of the car, stopping only to fill up with gas and grab snacks from the convenience stations along the way, and as she drove she noticed his smell. Not like fish, and not like dust; not the spicy smell that books had taught her to associate with mummies. He smelled like a flower that blooms at the bottom of the sea, that’s what her mind told her, even though she had no idea what a flower like that would smell like, or how she would smell it down under the water.

  The bolt cutter snipped the chain on the gate as easily as it had the one on the door to the low yellow building, and Abby swung it wide, the headlights now shining out into deepening darkness, the ocean murmuring its lullaby somewhere up ahead.

  When Sophie dies, her daughter flies down from Seattle to take care of things, and Abby stands far away in the cemetery and watches them lower the casket down. She wishes she could get close enough to drop the glittering scale down into the coffin, but she is too afraid. She imagines Sophie telling her that it’s okay, that she’ll be going to see him soon.

  Toward the end, Sophie was having dreams. She told Abby about them. Dreams of a city down under the sea, someplace rich and strange, and the people who dwelt there, all of them rich and strange too, and eternal like the city, like the sea. “They say that we all came out of the sea once upon a time,” Abby told her, and Sophie smiled and put her light, papery hand atop Abby’s. “Then maybe it’s time for me to go back,” she said.

  Abby is sad that Sophie’s body is going into the ground, rather than into the sea. She thinks that’s what Sophie would have wanted. To be dropped into the ocean, her ashes scattered over the waves. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Sophie believed, right up to the end, that her merman was waiting for her somewhere on the other side of dreams, on the other side of death, in the only place where she could be as eternal as he was. Maybe she was with him now.

  With the station wagon parked in the sediment of the beach, Abby unloaded the body from the back and laid it on the sand. She unwrapped the army blanket from around it, because it didn’t seem right to carry it to the water that way. Not twenty feet from her, the waves beat against the nighttime shore with a sound like muffled hammers.

  When she lifted him in her arms, she was surprised anew at his lightness. He was big, his body slightly longer than a normal man’s, and if he had not been shrunken from desiccation he would have stood more than seven feet tall. It seemed, then, that even his bones should have weighed more than the burden she now carried, but what did she know about his bones? Maybe they were hollow, like a bird’s, or were made of cartilage like those of a shark.

  She felt the spray from the waves hitting her face like a soft rain, and she thought that he was growing more colorful now than he had been in the desert, though she had nothing but the lights from the car and the stars by which to see.

  Even as she waded out into the water, felt it close like a cold vise around her ankles, her calves, felt it soaking the hem of her shirt, she expected this to be nothing more than the burial at sea that she had never been able to give Sophie. Though she had admitted, there in the desert, that what she foun
d in the case in that low yellow building was not a patchwork construct but a real and true fish person, still, she had believed, ultimately, in the finality of death. That ashes turned to ashes, and dust to dust. She had driven this far because it had been a way for her to say goodbye to Sophie, and because she had nothing else to do, nothing to leave behind.

  So she was surprised when they came up from the waves and surrounded her. They were wondrous in their variety, no two of them alike. One came hooded, like the bishop fish she had seen on the postcard, another moved across the sand on two twisting legs like serpents. They were horned and finned and scaled, sampling from every creature that swam beneath the waves, but copying none of them. And each one glowed with their own light, and passed that light on to the water around them.

  Abby expected them to drown her—that was, after all, what fairy folk did in every story she knew, and she had already seen too much—but she wasn’t afraid, as she would have imagined, and when they took his body from her arms, she surrendered it silently.

  Then she watched them go, and she saw, as they departed, sank back into the deep dark, that he went with them. Carried at first, then supported, and then swimming alongside the others, gradually dimming, his glow the last thing she saw as she was left behind.

  And in that moment she wished they had drowned her, had dragged her down with them to whatever lay beyond. She wanted so badly to follow, to dive down into the dark and find the cities that Sophie had seen in her dreams. To leave behind the solid land and its disappointments, her going-nowhere job, her deteriorating relationship with her own dying mother, her string of listless attempts at romance. She longed for a place down in the deep, where none of those things had any meaning. But no matter how hard she wished, her feet remained clay.