Isabel looked up from her reading under the pale light of the lamp.
Not a kiss then, as the romantics would have it, but a sudden sharp shock! What if the frog had been out of the pond that day, hopping by Isabel’s sleeping form, when she suddenly thrashed in her dreams, struck out and hit the passing frog a blow, causing it to change into John?
But where would a frog have come from, in the first place, which had a human form locked inside it?
Isabel was no slouch when it came to puzzles. She had intelligence, she had the patience. Slowly she unravelled the mystery to her own satisfaction.
What if the frog who turned into the prince, all those centuries ago, had been with another frog before his transfiguration? What if the female he had held in amplexus in the pond in the palace garden, had spawned her three-thousand eggs and he had fertilised them all? There would be, even after his elevation to kingship, thousands of frogs with the genetic code of a human being locked in their DNA, awaiting a sudden sharp shock to release it.
And those frogs would mate with other frogs, the females spawning the males fertilising, thus over the centuries laying millions of little hopping, swimming time bombs ready to burst into mortal form at any moment.
It was an amazing and breathtaking thought that all you had to do was go down to the pond in the garden, pick up a few dozen frogs, and throw them at the nearest hard surface to produce a youth or maiden. It would be like looking for pearls in oysters. Loneliness would become obsolete, for each Jack would find a Jill, and every Sheila a Bruce. Even better, collect a jar of tadpoles, put them in the blender and hand out children to childless couples, to be loved and cherished and grow into beautiful people.
Yet—that agonizing yet—Isabel had discovered that of course after so many centuries the frog and human were too closely melded to ever separate completely. The man had been inside the frog, yet the frog would always be part of the man. It came out at the oddest times. Impossible to protect against. Perhaps a shock—a near traffic miss crossing the street, stepping on a garden rake—might have the reverse effect, with the man changing back into the frog?
Isabel shuddered. ‘I must warn my John about what might happen to him,’ she told herself, closing the book of fairy tales. ‘I must tell him what he is, where he came from, and caution him against any possible scare.’
That evening, in the privacy of their bedroom, while the children were asleep, she told him the dreadful news.
‘But I will keep you safe, my darling,’ she said to him. ‘You have really nothing to fear.’
He lay there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, and just before she fell asleep she heard him murmur, ‘So that’s why I like water so much...’
The following morning, a bright spring day, she awoke to find the bed empty beside her. Fearing the worst she put on her silk dressing gown and combed the house for her husband John. Not finding him there she went out into the garage to see if he was sitting in the car. He was not. Finally, with a sinking heart, she ran down to the pond.
There he was, her dear heart, floating face down in the water, the pond weed caressing his naked body, stroking it lovingly as if welcoming home a lost son. When she turned him over, on his face was a look of serenity, as if he had found the way to Marvell’s green shaded place where he could think cool green thoughts for ever.
The funeral was simple. She had him buried in the garden, by the pond. Special-Friend Frank came down to see her through her time of sorrow, but she didn’t need him. She had her children, who were beginning to blossom in splendid ways. They still loved going out in the car and she was pleased to drive them.
It was while she was thus engaged that she realised why her husband had been fascinated by the car, felt comfortable inside it. Being in the car, looking through the glass at grass and overhead trees, was like being under a pond looking out through the watery surface at the green world beyond.
And two of her children are now famous.
You must remember Yvonne Fairfax, the Olympic long jumper, whose extraordinary standing-jump style won her the hearts and minds of the people of Munich? And Arthur Fairfax, who swam his way to a gold in the Games at Montreal? Two brilliant sporting children, who had inherited intrinsic skills passed on to them by their deceased father.
And the third child?
Why he has a love of poetry that excels even that of his mother, whose traits he bears with vocal pride.
HAMELIN, NEBRASKA
As a child I was always fascinated by the fact that many American towns were named after European ones. The Paris of France and Texas. The Boston of Lincolnshire and Massachusetts. The Sierra Nevada mountains of Spain and the U.S.A. It is natural for me to think they may be linked I spirit as well as in name.
Midnight in the small town of Hamelin, Nebraska.
Hamelin was one of those places which seemed uniquely American. Just another sleepy hollow where people minded their own business but knew everyone else’s just the same. It boasted a doctor, and a lawyer, a school teacher, and a mayor. It also had a nasty stain on its history, like most small towns anywhere, but this had nothing to do with bigotry or hatred of strangers. No innocent Japanese immigrants had been shot to death after the attack on Pearl Harbour. No black citizens had been lynched in the heat of the night. Hamelin’s blemish occurred through positive negligence, a turning of the back against responsibility, a washing of the hands.
Hamelin’s shame, like most shame, had been born out of fear.
Sheriff Phil Watkins had sent his Deputy home and was preparing to lock up his office and make tracks for his own bed, where his wife Matty was lying awake, expectantly. Saturday night was their night of the week, since Sunday was a lazy day when neither of them had to rise early. They would have a couple of drinks in bed, watch some television on the portable set propped up by their feet, then they would turn to each other and enjoy safe middle-aged sex.
Hat in hand, Phil Watkins turned off the light, went through the open doorway into the warm night, then locked up, rattling the door to make sure it was secure. He had just removed the key, when something struck him on the head, behind the left ear, causing him to reel backwards in intense pain. He blinked rapidly, reaching up to feel a warm sticky wetness in his salt-white hair.
‘Hey. . . !’ he cried, then looked down where the object had bounced on the porch boards, saw a heavy rock. It was smeared with his own blood. ‘What the hell?’ He turned, dizzily, just as another rock struck him in the chest, immediately above the heart.
‘Jesus!’ he wheezed. Then angrily, ‘Who’s out there, goddamit? If that’s you Eb Shaffer, I’m...’
He got no further because a third hunk of stone hit him in the mouth, knocking out three teeth. Phil Watkins staggered backwards, drawing his gun, but it was only halfway out of its holster when the rocks began to come at him in numbers, catapulting out of the darkness with considerable force behind them.
Within a few minutes he had been stoned to death.
Three people died that Saturday night. One of them was the mayor and the town’s banker, Stan Fredericks, who was first silenced with a piece of fruit.
Stan lived alone and like most fat men, slept with his mouth wide open, to draw in enough oxygen to feed his massive bulk. Someone had plugged that airhole with a large apple. Thus muzzled he was then dragged bodily from his bed and drowned in his own swimming pool. Whoever had killed him left red marks around his neck where presumably they had held his head under water. His body was still on the edge of the pool, belly-up, while his head lolled back in the water.
Some of the poorer folk from the edge of town, who had at various times been threatened with foreclosure of the mortgages Stan Fredericks held on their homes and smallholdings, could not help but feel that perhaps there was some kind of divine punishment involved.
Furthermore, Mayor Fredericks had given the seal of approval to several buildings erected out of public funds, like the new town library, while Banker Fredericks provided l
oans to the construction companies that were awarded the contracts. The bank’s interest rates were surprisingly high, though Stan Fredericks maintained this was necessary to protect his clients. When the town saw him lying next to his pool barbecue, looking like a bloated suckling pig, the apple still jammed between his jaws, many of them nodded sagely.
The third death, by suffocation, had been administered to Wincy Jacobs, the lady who delivered the mail. She had been smothered by her own rose-scented pillow, the slip and cover of which she tore through with her teeth in her death throes, as she tried to gnaw her way to fresh air. There were down feathers caught in her throat, trapped in her nostrils. Her nails had splinters under them, where she had clawed at the bedhead, presumably blindly trying to find the eyes of her attackers.
‘What we have here,’ said Deputy Dan Starkly, in his ponderous fashion to a gathering of the town’s most influential citizens, ‘is a multie murderer. Hamelin (he pronounced it ‘Hammerlen’) has a killer who just likes to kill...’
David Werner, the town’s young lawyer, interrupted.
‘We don’t know that. We don’t know anything at this time. All we know is we’ve got three dead bodies.’
‘We know they was killed,’ snapped someone from behind him. ‘They didn’t just roll over and die.’
David turned in his chair and addressed the person directly.
‘Yes, we know that much, but no more. Dan talked about a multiple murderer. How do we know it was just one person? It could have been a dozen. Maybe some sort of gang passed through here in the night and are halfway across South Dakota by now? Let’s not make emphatic statements, Dan. Let’s look at what we’ve got and then make some assumptions.’
‘OK, OK,’ muttered Dan, ‘let’s look at them assumptions. Three violent killings, no weapons involved, less you count rocks, apples and pillys as weapons. I don’t. A gun’s a weapon. A knife’s a weapon. They don’t just come to hand. The instruments used here, was just things that came to hand, on the spur of the moment so to speak. Am I right Dave?’ He looked to the lawyer for approval.
‘These were opportunist tools, as you say Dan.’
‘Fair ‘nough. So I assume that what we got here is a person, or persons unknown, goin’ out not looking to murder, but taking it as it comes. Nothin’ was stole. There don’t seem to be no motive at all. Less someone had a special grudge against these three folk, which I personally can’t see any connection, we got to worry about the rest of us. When you get down to it, you got to figure Dave’s right, that there’s more’n one. Have to be a pretty strong man to drag the mayor from his bed, him weighing what he did.’
The meeting broke up shortly after that little speech, with Dan warning the townspeople that perhaps the killers would not stop at an odd number, but go on to round it up, maybe into double figures. David Werner was convinced they were looking for a Manson type gang. The state police had been alerted of course, but until the town elected a new mayor and sheriff, they had only Dan to look after them. Dan Starkly was a good solid youth who could hit things he aimed at with his thirty-eight, but as an investigative detective he would make a good short order cook.
Some people, naturally scared, were asking if the FBI could be brought in, but there was an incident in the town’s past, an ugly moment in its near history, of which others were ashamed and had no wish to reveal to outsiders. The FBI were good at uncovering such skeletons, so it was better to keep out the feds until someone absolutely insisted they be involved.
Dan Starkly and David Werner went through the clues together, retraced possible movements of the victims, tried to come up with some conclusions, but by the end of that day were no nearer to any answers. The two men had a beer together, then went home to lock their doors and windows, securely, for the first time in many years.
The next morning they found Eb Shaffer, the town troublemaker, decorated with pointed sticks. He was lying in the middle of the bridge, over the ravine at the back of town, looking like a porcupine. The bridge was one of those preserved timber affairs, with strengthened supports to take the weight of modern vehicles, of which small towns like Hamelin were proud. It gave them a sense of history.
The sticks bristling from the anatomy of Eb Shaffer weren’t much more than twigs, maybe nine inches long at the most. They had been sharpened, it seemed, on sandstone rock. Just like the twigs Eagle Scouts fashioned to spear their sausages before cooking them over a campfire. About sixty of these barbecue skewers protruded from the soft parts of Eb’s body: his throat, stomach, eyes, and his groin. Dan said the sight made him sick to his stomach, and kept subconsciously touching himself between the legs. Doc Skimmer remarked that Eb Shaffer must have been attacked somewhere out in the hills, and had staggered, blinded by two of the sharp sticks, to the bridge to die.
‘You can see the marks in the dust,’ he said, pointing with his pipe stem at the weaving tracks. ‘Poor bastard must’ve been in terrible pain. My guess is he was wanting the ravine, to kill himself quick, but God bein’ a contrary old goat, guided his feet to the bridge.’
‘Don’t cuss,’ said Dan, looking around the ravine nervously, ‘we don’t know how this is happenin’ yet.’
‘You think God’s got a hand in this?’ cried Doc Skimmer, contemptuously. ‘This is more like the work of some crazy people, out looking for vengeance. You know what I mean,’ and he took a puff on his pipe and nodded, his eyes narrowed.
David Werner took this up immediately.
‘You’re saying...by Jesus, you may be right. It makes sense. Revenge killings.’ He turned to Dan Starkly. ‘Get on to the state police. Check out the family who came through here last fall. The Williamsons, they were called.’
Dan’s thickset shoulders dropped, like they always did when he was asked to do something for which he had no taste.
‘What’ll I tell them? I have to tell them somethin’. They’ll want to know why the Williamsons have got a grudge against the town. You know how folks feel about that incident now. If it got into the national papers, why, we’d be sneered at by every son of a bitch from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.’
David Werner knew that Dan was right. Most people in the town would not approve of bringing in outside help if it meant opening a cupboard full of bones.
Several years ago a family—no one even knew where they came from— drove into the town. They had three children in the backseat of their truck, all of them sick. Doc Skimmer was unable to diagnose the fever but it appeared to be serious. He prepared some beds in the back of his surgery. Being a small town the word spread quickly, and soon a deputation of frightened citizens called on Sheriff Watkins. The sheriff then paid a visit to the doctor, telling him the family, named Williamson, had to go on to Alliance, where they had a hospital which could deal with such things.
‘Hamelin’s not equipped for highly infectious diseases, you know that Doc. Say we’re sorry, but there’s some supplies been placed by the vehicle, an’ they got to go.’
Doc had argued that Alliance was nearly two hundred miles away and that the children were very weak. The day was hot and dusty.
‘You know what you’re asking? I’ve done what I can for the moment, but they’ll dehydrate on the journey.’
Sheriff Watkins was no man to do battle with, once he had made up his mind on something. Doc Skimmer was not a native of the town, having come there from Lincoln when Doc Albertson died fifteen years previously. He was an outsider who had to be taught his place.
‘Get ’em on the road Doc,’ said the sheriff firmly, ‘or start looking for another town, someplace else.’
Doc Skimmer was old, and weary—too old to go looking for another practice elsewhere. Watkins would throw him out on his neck and still send the Williamsons to hell.
To his eternal shame, the doctor did as he was told, and had regretted it bitterly ever since. Mr Williamson had begged him to let his children stay, to treat them as best he could, but Watkins had dragged the man out to his truck and sa
t him behind the wheel. The wife had been more aggressive and had attacked both Doc and the Sheriff, first with her small fists, and when this failed, with her tongue.
‘You filthy bastards,’ she shrieked at them, ‘if anything happens to my kids I’ll come back here and tear your eyes out, I swear. How can you do this? You’re supposed to be civilised people. You’re nothing but animals.’
Doc, knowing this was true, told lies to himself and tried to pacify the woman.
‘The children need to get to a hospital. One that can deal with advanced states of fever. We can’t treat them here. This is a small town, and I’m just a general practitioner. I fix broken bones and give advice for measles, but I’m not equipped to deal with major diseases. Any responsible doctor would do what I’m doing.’
Sometimes, now, he woke in the middle of the night, sweating with guilt. He hoped the rest of the town did the same, for two of the children died on the way to Alliance, and though the rest of the family survived and went on to California, those two little souls stayed to haunt the streets of Hamelin, Nebraska, for as long as memories of the dead lived in the minds of men.
‘Right,’ said David Werner, briskly, ‘this is what we do then. Tonight the whole town stays awake. If the Williamsons are doing this, we’ll get them, we’ll catch them red handed . . . ’ He looked significantly at the other two, but they were in no mood for jokes, so he continued, ‘...we ’ll catch them ourselves. All right, we did wrong once, but I guess four deaths more than pays for that mistake. I think we’re owed, don’t you?’
Dan nodded, his eyes glittering and his hand going automatically to his gun butt. ‘Damn right,’ he said. Here was something he knew how to deal with: direct action against a known enemy. ‘I’ll get people organised,’ he said.
Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales Page 11