by Gahan Wilson
I paused a little in order that my words might sink into their narrow little heads, and then I began to walk casually along the clearing path, gazing upward and smoking dreamily as I did so. I did not even watch to see how they slunk, in cowed confusion, out of my way.
The next morning, during breakfast, while I was having my second coffee and Geraldine her second herbal tea, I proposed brightly that we take a short row in the cove. I approached the whole thing in a very airy, casual fashion, but made it clear I would be saddened and a little hurt if she did not accept my whimsical invitation. Naturally I knew the whole idea would strike her as childish and that she would do it only to indulge me. She, herself, would never dream of instigating anything childish, of course. That, in our marriage, was understood to be my function.
To my relief—one never knew with Geraldine, never—she accepted with almost no perceptible hesitation. She even suggested we do it without further ado, seeing as how the sun was bright and the waters of the cove presently smooth and placid. We rose from the table and went directly to the gaily be-flagged pier.
We were the first arrivals for water sports that morning and the little puce boat with its gold stripe bobbed fetchingly as it waited for us in the water. In a rather neat piece of seamanship, I managed to get both Geraldine and myself aboard it without her realizing how tiltable a craft it was. Smiling and chatting about how extremely pleasant everything was, I rowed us to an isolated part of the cove behind a rise of the shore which put us out of sight of our fellow vacationers.
Once I had reached this point I let go of the oars, took firm hold of the sides of the boat, and gave it the tipping motion I had practiced with such great success the night before. I was highly discomfited to discover that the little craft had somehow achieved a new seaworthiness.
"Hughie," she asked, "What on earth are you trying to do?"
I looked up at her, perhaps just a little wild-eyed, and suddenly realized that it must be Geraldine's considerable bulk which was stabilizing the boat. I would have to exert a good deal more effort if I was to upset it successfully. I began to shake the boat again, this time with markedly increased determination. I was uncomfortably aware that I had begun to sweat noticeably and that damp blotches were beginning to spread from the armpits of my striped blazer.
"Hughie," she said, a vague alarm starting to dawn in her eyes. "Whatever you are doing, you must stop it now!"
I glared at her and began to shake the boat with a new energy verging on desperation.
"I've asked you not to call me Hughie,'' I told her, through clenched teeth. "For years I've asked you not to call me Hughie!"
She frowned at me, just a little uncertainly, and had opened her mouth to say something further when, with a gratifyingly smooth, swooping motion, the little puce boat finally tilted over.
For a moment all was blue confusion and bubbles, but then my head broke water and I saw the boat bobbing upside down on the sparkling surface of the cove a yard or two away from me. There was no sign whatsoever of Geraldine so I ducked my head down under the water, peered this way and that, and was pleased to observe a dim, sinking flurry of skirts and kicking feet speedily disappearing into the darker blues far below the bright and cheery green hues flickering just under the surface.
I swam up to the little inverted craft, took hold of it, surveyed the coastline to see if it was empty of witnesses, and saw this was, indeed, the case. Several gulls were circling overhead, but when I glared up at them and shook my fist in their direction, they flew away with an almost furtive air. I cried for help once or twice for effect, then pushed off from the side of the boat and swam for the shore where I staggered, gasping, up onto the hotel grounds into* the view of my astonished fellow guests.
At first the investigation proceeded almost exactly along the lines I had envisioned it would. The general reaction toward me was, of course, one of great pity and everyone, the police included, treated me quite gently. It never appeared to occur to anyone that the business was anything other than a tragic accident.
But then things began to take an increasingly odd turning as the authorities, after a highly confident commencement, found themselves unable to locate Geraldine's cadaver, and by the time I was judged able to sit warmly wrapped on the veranda and overlook their activities, they had become seriously discouraged.
I watched them as they carefully and conscientiously trailed their hooks and nets up and down the cove and in the waters beyond, observing their scuba divers bob and sink repeatedly to no effect, and seeing them all grow increasingly philosophical as Geraldine's large body continued to evade them. There was more and more talk of riptides and rapid ocean currents and prior total vanishments.
Toward the end of this period I was on the veranda consuming a particularly subtle crepes fruits de mer, and rather regretting the repast had almost come to an end, when the chain of events began which have led to my present distasteful predicament.
Startled by a sudden flurry of noise, I looked up to see a large bird perched on the railing, which I had no difficulty in recognizing as the general of the gulls. As I gaped at the creature, he hopped from his perch over to my table, gave me a fierce glare, dropped something which landed with a clink upon my plate, and then flew away emitting maniacal, gullish bursts of laughter.
When I saw what the disgusting beast had dropped amidst the remains of my crepes my appetite departed completely and has not, to be frank, ever been quite the same since. I recognized the object instantly for what it was—the wedding ring I had given my late wife—but to be absolutely sure, I rubbed the ring's interior clear of sauce with my napkin and read what she had caused to be engraved there years ago*. "Geraldine and Hughie, forever!"
I carefully wiped the remaining sauce from the ring, and deposited it in the pocket of my jacket. I heard another burst of crazed, avian laughter and, looking up, observed the general of the gulls leering at me from a far railing of the veranda. I determinedly returned to my crepes and made a great show of appearing to enjoy the remainder of my dinner, even to the extent of having an extra cafe filtre after dessert. I then strolled in a languid fashion down to the beach for a little constitutional before retiring.
It was a quiet, clear night. The Mediterranean was smooth and silvery under the full moon, and its waves rolled softly and almost soundlessly into the sand. I gazed up at the sky, checking it for birds, and when I was absolutely sure there were none to be seen, I threw the ring out over the water with all the strength I could muster.
Imagine my astonishment when with a great rush of air the general of the gulls soared out over my shoulder from behind me and, executing what I must admit was a remarkably skillful and accurate dive, reached out with his orange claws and plucked the ring from the air inches above the surface of the-water. Emitting a final, lunatic laugh of triumph, he flew up into the moonlight and out of sight.
That night I was awakened from a very troubled sleep by a sound extremely difficult to describe. It was a soft, steady, rhythmic patting, and put me so much in mind of a demented audience enthusiastically applauding with heavily mittened hands that as I pushed back my covers and lurched to my feet in the darkness of my room, my still half-dreaming mind produced such a vivid vision of a madly clapping throng in some asylum auditorium that I could observe, with remarkable clarity, the various desperate grimaces on the faces of the nearer inmates.
I groped my way to the curtains, since the sound seemed to emanate from that direction, and when I pulled them aside and looked out the window a muffled shriek tore itself from my lips and I staggered back and almost fell to the carpet, for I had suddenly given myself all too clear a view of the source of that weird, nocturnal racket.
There, hanging in the air in the moonlight directly outside my window was the large, sagging body of my wife, Geraldine. She looked huge, positively enormous, like some kind of horrible balloon. Water poured copiously in silvery fountains
from her white lace dress, and her bulging eyes, als
o entirely white, gaped out like prisoners staring through the dark, lank strands of hair which hung down in glistening bars across her dripping, bloated face.
The sound I had heard was being made by the wings of the hundreds of gulls who were holding Geraldine aloft by means of their claws and beaks, which they had sunk deeply into her skin and dress, both of which seemed to be stretching dangerously near to the ripping point. She was surrounded by a nimbus of the awful creatures, each one flapping its wings in perfect rhythm with its neighbors in a miracle of cooperative effort.
Sitting on her head, his claws digging almost covetously into her brow, was the gull general. For a long moment, he watched me staring at him and at the tableau he had wrought with obvious satisfaction and then he must have given some command for the gulls began to move in unison and the lolling, pale bulk of Geraldine swayed backward from the window and then, lifted by the beating of gleaming, multitudinous wings, it wafted upward and inland, over the dark tiles of the roof of the hotel and out of my line of vision.
I had breakfast brought up to my room the next morning for I anticipated, quite correctly as it turned out, a potentially awkward visit from the police and preferred it to take place in reasonable private surroundings.
I had barely finished my first cup of coffee and half a brioche when they arrived, shuffling into my room with an air of obvious uncertainty, the inspector looking at me with the downward, shifting gaze which authority tends to adopt when it is not quite sure it is authority.
It seemed that a local farmer hunting just after dawn for a strayed cow had come across the body of Geraldine. It had been tucked into a small culvert on his property and rather ineffectually covered with branches and leaves and little clods of earth. One particularly unpleasant feature about the corpse was that it had been brutally stripped of the jewelry which Geraldine had been seen to be wearing that morning. Her fingers and wrists and neck had been deeply scratched by the thief or thieves who had clawed her gold from her, and the lobes of both her ears had been cruelly torn.
The police could not have been more courteous with me. Their community's main source of income originates from well-to-do vacationers, and the arrest and possible execution of one of them—myself, for instance—because of murder would be bound to produce all sorts of unfortunate and discouraging publicity. They were vastly relieved at the taking of Geraldine's baubles since it suggested not only the sort of common robber they could easily understand and pursue enthusiastically, it gave their imagined culprit a clear motive for spiriting the body away from the water and later trying to hide it.
Taking my cue from them, I confessed myself astonished and saddened to learn that my wife's drowned corpse had been so grossly violated and wished them luck in apprehending the villain responsible as soon as possible. The lot of us, from differing motives, were considerably pleased to have the affair resolved so amicably, and after shaking hands all around and giving them permission to look over my suite—an action understood by us all to be a mere formality—I took my leave of them and assumed my present situation on the veranda.
Just now I've noticed that in the midst of the latest shift of gulls taking their places to observe me from the overlooking tree is the general himself, and since I gather that signifies something of considerable import is about to transpire, I've cast a sidewise glance at the doors opening out onto the terrace from the hotel's lobby.
Sure enough, I see the approaching police, all of them wearing expressions of unhappiness and great regret. Worse, I see the unmistakable glint of gold in the inspector's cupped hands. The gulls obviously paid another, quieter, visit to my rooms last night in order to leave my dead wife's pretty things behind in some craftily selected hiding place. Perhaps the general did it personally. It would be like him.
Now I have risen, a demitasse held lightly in one hand, and strolled slowly over to the railing of the veranda. There is a considerable drop to the rocks below and if I tumble directly from here to there it will surely put a quick and effective end to a very rapidly developing unpleasant situation so far as I am concerned.
I have stepped up onto the railing, which is a very solid structure built wide enough to hold trays of nightcaps or canapes and any number of leaning lovers' elbows. The police are calling out to me in rather frantic tones and I hear the soles of their large shoes scuffling and scraping on the stones of the veranda as they rush desperately in my direction.
My eyes and the general's are firmly locked as I step out into space. He lifts his wings and, with an easy beat or two, he rises from his branch.
Our paths cross in midair.
He can fly, but I can only fall.
The Casino Mirago
At the end of a very long chain of many things gone most astonishingly wrong I found myself booked out of season under an assumed name in the grandest suite of a Hotel Splendide located on the coast of Portugal.
My luggage, clothing, and papers effectively proclaimed me to be a minor member of an ancient family of power which had the very good fortune not only to have retained the bulk of its wealth, but to have added considerably to it as the centuries had passed.
The contents of my briefcase, an extravagant amount of money in various denominations and currencies and a stack of passports bearing different names, indicated my actual situation rather more directly. I was, in fact, a desperate fugitive trying to avoid the police of a number of different countries.
I had spent the last several weeks dodging across Europe, hiding out in the obscure, oft times exceptionally dismal sort of nooks and crannies favored by criminals on the lam. I was both physically and mentally exhausted and felt I had run completely out of feasible options.
I was quite literally at my wits' end and, to put it bluntly, had chosen this extravagant suite as a suicide site because I had no intention of letting the triumphant authorities discover my pathetic corpse in the sort of rat hole I had lately been frequenting.
After the porter had hung my clothes and stashed my bags I sat alone on the silken coverlet of my vast bed and contemplated the small bottle of poison I had acquired in Berlin, regarding it with something very close to affection. I had been assured it was not only instant and foolproof but that it actually possessed a rather pleasant strawberry flavor which I might enjoy in that tiny microsecond my taste buds functioned before the stuff did me in.
I uncorked the little container and had half raised it to my lips when it occurred to me that the combination of my owning this fatal elixir and my complete willingness to use it put me very effectively beyond the reach of the law. I need only conceal it about my person in some accessible fashion and I would have the means of instantly escaping any approaching official agent, even if he'd come close enough to clap his hand upon my shoulder.
After shining over me for a moment like the depiction of a heaven-sent ray in an El Greco painting of a newly inspired saint, this simple insight wafted me into a remarkably improved frame of mind.
I sang some of my favorite songs as I took a very pleasant shower, the poison bottle resting next to a bar of delicately scented soap provided by the hotel, and washed the real and imagined grime of my recent flight from my tired body and let the water's warmth ease the tension somewhat from my muscles. I then dressed for dinner, clipping the bottle neatly behind my left lapel, sauntered down the broad marble staircase to the ground floor, and settled myself comfortably in the Splendide's elegant little salon.
If one is of a quiet frame of mind, there is an undeniable charm about luxury resorts when they are thoroughly out of season. True, the weather tends to be on the dark, wet side, and diverting activities are decidedly at a minimum, but the visitor is compensated by an enormous increase in attention on the part of the staff, and there is something soothing about sharing the facilities with a small handful of people whose schedule is pretty much a matter of their own choosing rather than a great, milling multitude who must take their vacations en masse as dictated by various middle-class considerations.
I gazed unobtrusively over my aperitif at the little group presently seated in the salon and decided they were an excellent example of the sort of people one encounters in such places when the seasonal types are forced to labor in their offices and banks. They were all interesting to look on and to speculate upon, and a number of them possessed unusual, not to mention downright eccentric attributes which promised much in the way of diversion and entertainment.
The most immediately noticeable person present was an elegant elderly woman whose large, pale neck and arms were beautifully and amply bejeweled and whose brilliantly white hair was magnificently, not to say lovingly coiffed. Her fingers sparkled charmingly with many diamonds as her hands danced this way and that through the air while she described some incident which, judging from the consistent laughter of the gentleman seated to her immediate right, must have been hilariously amusing.
The laughing man was also elderly, and also elegant. His upright posture and the clipping of his iron-gray hair and beard suggested a soldierly past, and the sparkling of a magnificent medal dangling from a broad ribbon under his white tie suggested he'd been given considerable recognition for the same. His blue eyes darted alertly in my direction now and then from almost my first glance and I saw he was not a man to observe unobserved. I would not have relished being an enemy officer attempting a sneak upon his flank.
But both these intriguing individuals swiftly dimmed to unimportance, so far as I was concerned, once I'd noticed the presence of the quiet young woman who was seated next to them and formed the third member of their little group.
She immediately struck me as being extraordinary, but it took me any number of furtive glances before I was able to put my finger on what it was about her that was both so intriguing and mysterious as to be, without any exaggeration, utterly hypnotic.