American Supernatural Tales (Penguin Horror)

by S T Joshi

  Was going to cut the ivy away from my windows when I got back, but decided the place looks more artistic covered in vines. Rationalization?

  Chatted with Poroths about politics. The World Situation, a little cosmology, blah blah blah. Dinner wasn’t very good, probably because I’d been looking forward to it all day. The lamb was underdone and the beans were cold. Still, I’m always the gentleman, and was almost pleased when Deborah agreed to my offer to do the dishes. I’ve been doing them a lot lately.

  I didn’t have much interest in reading tonight and would have been up for some television, but Sarr’s recently gotten into one of his religious kicks and began mumbling prayers to himself immediately after dinner. (Deborah, more human, wanted to watch the TV news. She seems to have an insatiable curiosity about world events, yet she claims the isolation here appeals to her.) Absorbed in his chanting, Sarr made me uncomfortable—I didn’t like his face—and so after doing the dishes, I left.

  I’ve been listening to the radio for the last hour or so. . . . I recall days when I’d have gotten uptight at having wasted an hour—but out here I’ve lost all track of time. Feel adrift—a little disconcerting, but healthy, I’m sure.

  . . . Shut the radio off a moment ago, and now realize my room is filled with crickets. Up close their sound is hardly pleasant—cross between a radiator and a tea-kettle, very shrill. They’d been sounding off all night, but I’d thought it was interference on the radio.

  Now I notice them; they’re all over the room. A couple of dozen, I should think. Hate to kill them, really—they’re one of the few insects I can stand, along with ladybugs and fireflies. But they make such a racket!

  Wonder how they got in. . . .

  AUGUST 14

  Played with Felix all morning—mainly watching him chase insects, climb trees, doze in the sun. Spectator sport. After lunch went back to my room to look up something in Lovecraft and discovered my books were out of order. (Saki, for example, was filed under “S,” whereas—whether out of fastidiousness or pedantry—I’ve always preferred to file him as “Munro.”) This is definitely one of the Poroths’ doing. I’m pissed they didn’t mention coming in here, but also a little surprised they’d have any interest in this stuff.

  Arranged them correctly again, then sat down to reread Lovecraft’s essay on “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” It upset me to see how little I’ve actually read, how far I still have to go. So many obscure authors, so many books I’ve never come across. . . . Left me feeling depressed and tired, so I took a nap for the rest of the afternoon.

  Over dinner—vegetable omelet, rather tasteless—Deborah continued to question us on current events. It’s getting to be like junior high school, with daily newspaper quizzes. . . . Don’t know how she got started on this, or why the sudden interest, but it obviously annoys the hell out of Sarr.

  Sarr used to be a sucker for her little-girl pleadings—I remember how he used to carry her upstairs, becoming pathetically tender, the moment she’d say, “Oh, honey, I’m so tired”—but now he just becomes angry. Often he goes off morose and alone to pray, and the only time he laughs is when he watches television.

  Tonight, thank God, he was in a mood to forgo the prayers, and so after dinner we all watched a lot of offensively ignorant programs. I was disturbed to find myself laughing along with the canned laughter, but I have to admit the TV helps us get along better together. Came back here after the news.

  Not very tired, having slept so much of the afternoon, so began to read John Christopher’s The Possessors; but good though it was, my mind began to wander to all the books I haven’t yet read, and I got so depressed I turned on the radio. Find it takes my mind off things.

  AUGUST 19

  Slept long into the morning, then walked down to the brook, scratching groggily. Deborah was kneeling by the water, lost, it seemed, in daydream, and I was embarrassed because I’d come upon her talking to herself. We exchanged a few insincere words and she went back toward the house.

  Sat by some rocks, throwing blades of grass into the water. The sun on my head felt almost painful, as if my brain were growing too large for my skull. I turned and looked at the farmhouse. In the distance it looked like a picture at the other end of a large room, the grass for a carpet, the ceiling the sky. Deborah was stroking a cat, then seemed to grow angry when it struggled from her arms; I could hear the screen door slam as she went into the kitchen, but the sound reached me so long after the visual image that the whole scene struck me as, somehow, fake. I gazed up at the maples behind me, and they seemed trees out of a cheap postcard, the kind in which paint is thinly dabbed over a black-and-white photograph; if you look closely you can see that the green in the trees is not merely in the leaves, but rather floats as a vapor over leaves, branches, parts of the sky. . . . The trees behind me seemed the productions of a poor painter, the color and shape not quite meshing. Parts of the sky were green, and pieces of the green seemed to float away from my vision. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t follow them.

  Far down the stream I could see something small and kicking, a black beetle, legs in the air, borne swiftly along in the current. Then it was gone.

  Thumbed through the Bible while I ate my lunch—mostly cookies. By late afternoon I was playing word games while I lay on the grass near my room. The shrill twitter of the birds, I would say, the birds singing in the sun. . . . And inexorably I’d continue with the sun dying in the moonlight, the moonlight falling on the floor, the floor sagging to the cellar, the cellar filling with water, the water seeping into the ground, the ground twisting into smoke, the smoke staining the sky, the sky burning in the sun, the sun dying in the moonlight, the moonlight falling on the floor . . .—melancholy progressions that held my mind like a whirlpool.

  Sarr woke me for dinner; I had dozed off, and my clothes were damp from the grass. As we walked up to the house together he whispered that, earlier in the day, he’d come upon his wife bending over me, peering into my sleeping face. “Her eyes were wide,” he said. “Like Bwada’s.” I said I didn’t understand why he was telling me this.

  “Because,” he recited in a whisper, gripping my arm, “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

  I recognized that. Jeremiah XVII:9.

  Dinner was especially uncomfortable; the two of them sat picking at their food, occasionally raising their eyes to one another like children in a staring contest. I longed for the conversations of our early days, inconsequential though they must have been, and wondered where things had gone wrong.

  The meal was dry and unappetizing, but the dessert looked delicious—chocolate mousse, made from an old family recipe. Deborah had served it earlier in the summer and knew both Sarr and I loved it. This time, however, she gave none to herself, explaining that she had to watch her weight.

  “Then we’ll not eat any!” Sarr shouted, and with that he snatched my dish from in front of me, grabbed his own, and hurled them both against the wall, where they splattered like mudballs.

  Deborah was very still; she said nothing, just sat there watching us. Thank heaven, she didn’t look particularly afraid of this madman, I was happy to see—but I was. He may have read my thoughts, because as I got up from my seat, he said much more gently, in the soft voice normal to him, “Sorry, Jeremy. I know you hate scenes. We’ll pray for each other, all right?”

  “Are you okay?” I asked Deborah, with more bravado than I felt. “I’m going out now, but I’ll stay if you think you’ll need me for anything.” She stared at me with a slight smile and shook her head. I raised my eyebrows and nodded toward her husband, and she shrugged.

  “Things will work out,” she said. I could hear Sarr laughing as I shut the door.

  When I snapped on the light out here I took off my shirt and stood in front of the little mirror. It had been nearly a week since I’d showered, and I’d become used to the smell of my body. My hair had wound itself into greasy brown curls, my beard was a
t least two weeks old, and my eyes . . . well, the eyes that stared back at me looked like those of an old man. The whites were turning yellow, like old teeth. I looked at my chest and arms, flabby at thirty, and I thought of the frightening alterations in my friend Sarr, and I knew I’d have to get out of here.

  Just glanced at my watch. It’s now quite late: two-thirty. I’ve been packing my things.

  AUGUST 20

  I woke about an hour ago and continued packing. Lots of books to put away, but I’m just about done. It’s not even nine a.m. yet, much earlier than I normally get up; but I guess the thought of leaving here fills me with energy.

  The first thing I saw on rising was a garden spider whose body was as big as some of the mice the cats have killed. It was sitting on the ivy that grows over my window sill—fortunately on the other side of the screen. Apparently it had had good hunting all summer, preying on the insects that live in the leaves. Concluding that nothing so big and fearsome has a right to live, I held the spray can against the screen and doused the creature with poison. It struggled halfway up the screen, then stopped, arched its legs, and dropped backwards into the ivy.

  I plan to walk into town this morning and telephone the office in Flemington where I rented my car. If they can have one ready today I’ll hitch there to pick it up; otherwise I’ll spend tonight here and pick it up tomorrow. I’ll be leaving a little early in the season, but the Poroths already have my month’s rent, so they shouldn’t be too offended.

  And anyway, how could I be expected to stick around here with all that nonsense going on, never knowing when my room might be ransacked, having to put up with Sarr’s insane suspicions and Deborah’s moodiness?

  Before I go into town, though, I really must shave and shower for the good people of Gilead. I’ve been sitting inside here waiting for some sign the Poroths are up, but as yet—it’s almost nine—I’ve heard nothing. I wouldn’t care to barge in on them while they’re still having breakfast or, worse, just getting up. . . . So I’ll just wait here by the window till I see them.

  . . . Ten o’clock now, and they still haven’t come out. Perhaps they’re having a talk. . . . I’ll give them half an hour more, then I’m going in.

  * * *

  Here my journal ends. Until today, almost a week later, I have not cared to set down any of the events that followed. But here in the temporary safety of this hotel room, protected by a heavy brass travel-lock I had sent up from the hardware store down the street, watched over by the good people of Flemington—and perhaps by something not good—I can continue my narrative.

  The first thing I noticed as I approached the house was that the shades were drawn, even in the kitchen. Had they decided to sleep late this morning? I wondered. Throughout my thirty years I have come to associate drawn shades with a foul smell, the smell of a sickroom, of shamefaced poverty and food gone bad, of people lying too long beneath blankets; but I was not ready for the stench of decay that met me when I opened the kitchen door and stepped into the darkness. Something had died in that room—and not recently.

  At the moment the smell first hit, four little shapes scrambled across the linoleum toward me and out into the daylight. The Poroths’ cats.

  By the other wall a lump of shadow moved; a pale face caught light penetrating the shades. Sarr’s voice, its habitual softness exaggerated to a whisper: “Jeremy. I thought you were still asleep.”

  “Can I—”

  “No. Don’t turn on the light.” He got to his feet, a black form towering against the window. Fiddling nervously with the kitchen door—the tin doorknob, the rubber bands stored around it, the fringe at the bottom of the drawn window shade—I opened it wider and let in more sunlight. It fell on the dark thing at his feet, over which he had been crouching: Deborah, the flesh at her throat torn and wrinkled like the skin of an old apple.

  Her clothing lay in a heap beside her. She appeared long dead. The eyes were shriveled, sunken into sockets black as a skull’s.

  I think I may have staggered at that moment, because he came toward me. His steady, unblinking gaze looked so sincere—but why was he smiling? “I’ll make you understand,” he was saying, or something like that; even now I feel my face twisting into horror as I try to write of him. “I had to kill her. . . .”

  “You—”

  “She tried to kill me,” he went on, silencing all questions. “The same thing that possessed Bwada . . . possessed her.”

  My hand played behind my back with the bottom of the window shade. “But her throat—”

  “That happened a long time ago. Bwada did it. I had nothing to do with . . . that part.” Suddenly his voice rose. “Don’t you understand? She tried to stab me with the bread knife.” He turned, stooped over, and, clumsy in the darkness, began feeling about him on the floor. “Where is that thing?” he was mumbling. “I’ll show you. . . .” As he crossed a beam of sunlight, something gleamed like a silver handle on the back of his shirt.

  Thinking, perhaps, to help him search, I pulled gently on the window shade, then released it; it snapped upward like a gunshot, flooding the room with light. From deep within the center of his back protruded the dull wooden haft of the bread knife, buried almost completely but for an inch or two of gleaming steel.

  He must have heard my intake of breath—that sight chills me even today, the grisly absurdity of the thing—he must have heard me, because immediately he stood, his back to me, and reached up behind himself toward the knife, his arm stretching in vain, his fingers curling around nothing. The blade had been planted in a spot he couldn’t reach.

  He turned towards me and shrugged in embarrassment, a child caught in a foolish error. “Oh, yeah,” he said, grinning at his own weakness, “I forgot it was there.”

  Suddenly he thrust his face into mine, fixing me in a gaze that never wavered, his eyes wide as if with candor. “It’s easy for us to forget things,” he explained—and then, still smiling, still watching, volunteered that last trivial piece of information, that final message whose words released me from inaction and left me free to dash from the room, to sprint in panic down the road to town, pursued by what had once been the farmer Sarr Poroth.

  It serves no purpose here to dwell on my flight down that twisting dirt road, breathing in such deep gasps that I was soon moaning with every breath; how, with my enemy racing behind me, not even winded, his steps never flagging, I veered into the woods; how I finally lost him, perhaps from the inexperience of whatever thing now controlled his body, and was able to make my way back to the road, only to come upon him again as he rounded a bend; his laughter as he followed me, and how it continued long after I had evaded him a second time; and how, after hiding until nightfall in the old cement culvert, I ran the rest of the way in pitch-darkness, stumbling in the ruts, torn by vines, nearly blinding myself when I ran into a low branch, until I arrived in Gilead filthy, exhausted, and nearly incoherent.

  Suffice it to say that my escape was largely a matter of luck, a physical wreck fleeing something oblivious to pain or fatigue; but that, beyond mere luck, I had been impelled by an almost ecstatic sense of dread produced by his last words to me, that last communication from an alien face smiling inches from my own, and which I chose to take as his final warning:

  “Sometimes we forget to blink.”

  * * *

  You can read the rest in the newspapers. The Hunterdon County Democrat covered most of the story, though its man wrote it up as merely another lunatic wife-slaying, the result of loneliness, religious mania, and a mysteriously tainted well. (Traces of insecticide were found, among other things, in the water.) The Somerset Reporter took a different slant, implying that I had been the third member of an erotic triangle and that Sarr had murdered his wife in a fit of jealousy.

  Needless to say, I was by this time past caring what was written about me. I was too haunted by visions of that lonely, abandoned farmhouse, the wails of its hungry cats, and by the sight of Deborah’s corpse, discovered by the police, pr
otruding from that hastily dug grave beyond the cornfield.

  Accompanied by state troopers, I returned to my ivy-covered outbuilding. A bread knife had been plunged deep into its door, splintering the wood on the other side. The blood on it was Sarr’s.

  My journal had been hidden under my mattress and so was untouched, but (I look at them now, piled in cardboard boxes beside my suitcase) my precious books had been hurled about the room, their bindings slashed. My summer is over, and now I sit inside here all day listening to the radio, waiting for the next report. Sarr—or his corpse—has not been found.

  I should think the evidence was clear enough to corroborate my story, but I suppose I should have expected the reception it received from the police. They didn’t laugh at my theory of “possession”—not to my face, anyway—but they ignored it in obvious embarrassment. Some see a nice young bookworm gone slightly deranged after contact with a murderer; others believe my story to be the desperate fabrication of an adulterer trying to avoid the blame for Deborah’s death.

  I can understand their reluctance to accept my explanation of the events, for it’s one that goes a little beyond the “natural,” a little beyond the scientific considerations of motive, modus operandi, and fingerprints. But I find it quite unnerving that at least one official—an assistant district attorney, I think, though I’m afraid I’m rather ignorant of these matters—believes I am guilty of murder.

  There has, of course, been no arrest. Still, I’ve been given the time-honored admonition against leaving town.

  The theory proposing my own complicity in the events is, I must admit, rather ingenious—and so carefully worked out that it will surely gain more adherents than my own. This public official is going to try to prove that I killed poor Deborah in a it of passion and, immediately afterward, disposed of Sarr. He points out that their marriage had been an observably happy one until I arrived, a disturbing influence from the city. My motive, he says, was simple lust—unrequited, to be sure—aggravated by boredom. The heat, the insects, and, most of all, the oppressive loneliness—all constituted an environment alien to any I’d been accustomed to, and all worked to unhinge my reason.