by John Maclay
Well, there was nothing to be done that night. We didn’t light a fire, for fear it might find a way to get a spark out through one of the cracks and into the old cypress walls. We just went to bed and snuggled close together until we warmed up some. Then we slept.
I woke with a jerk. Something had sounded—a sharp crack of noise. I reached to switch on the light, just as Maudie said, “Unh? Whassamatta?” in her usual sleep-drugged way.
Then it was on us.
The lamp was a little night-light affair, but even it was enough to show what came surging out of the hearth in a shower of mortar and bits of brick. It looked a little like a bear, at that. But it had no fur and it had no face, and it was slimy as a snail. I tried to roll out from under as it came down on the bed, but it was no use. I stuck to it like a fly to flypaper, and I knew Maudie was in the same fix.
I could barely breathe, and that only because I had turned my face to one side. If I’d been facing up like Maudie was...maybe I’d have been luckier. She must have suffocated pretty quickly. She was gone when the thing lifted itself off us.
It must have been hungry. It might have been hibernating, or whatever it did, for the whole twenty years the house hadn’t been lived in. It ate Maudie almost entirely, right then and there. I could hear it champing her bones and grinding and slobbering away on that side of the bed.
Why didn’t I run for it while the thing was busy? There’s a good reason for that. While it was on top of me it glued me to the bed with that gunk that covered it. From the middle of my chest downward I seemed to be a part of the mattress. Nothing but my right arm and my left hand could move at all. It’s a good thing I kept this pad beside the bed for making notes on supplies when I woke in the night and thought of them. At least I can keep my mind off what’s happening.
Because when it finished Maudie it started in on me. But it’s not as hungry now. It’s been four days, and it’s not much farther up than my knees. I figure tonight it’ll get my right thigh, and tomorrow night the left one. It’d be better if I could bleed to death, but that slimy stuff seems to seal off the blood vessels, so that doesn’t work.
If I can hang on without going stark crazy, in three more nights it’ll get to a point where it’ll chomp up something I can’t live without. That’ll be damn good. I’m almost out of tablet, now. Maybe I will go off my rocker—that would make it easier. Some. I hope.
God, when we moved here I thought the Holler part of the name meant Hollow. Now I know it doesn’t. It means Holler. Like scream, you know?
I do a lot of that.
THE TUCK AT THE FOOT OF THE BED
My mother finally gave up on solving this sort of problem. No matter how hot the East Texas summer night, from the time I could sit alone I had to have a sheet over me. She’d spend ten minutes gently moving it off me, and I would sit up, eyes closed, and pull it back again. Luckily, no gray hand ever got me.
“Mama!”
“What is it, dear?” This was spoken very innocently.
“Tuck sheet! P’eese!” Two round dark eyes peered accusingly over the top edge of the sheet.
With a sigh, the mother tucked the sheet tightly beneath the side of the lower end of the mattress. “Why in the world you have to have that top sheet tucked that way is beyond me.” But it was done now, and the eyes had closed in sleep.
* * * *
“Barbara, you know you want to go. All the rest of the girls are going—Doctor Jarvis’s daughter, the judge’s girl. All the best families, too. I just don’t understand you!”
“I just don’t feel comfortable. I don’t like sleeping on the floor, and they talk all night. I don’t particularly like any of them anyway. And you won’t let Annie Wimple come spend the night with me.”
“But her people are sharecroppers!”
Barbara sighed and pretended to busy herself with her lessons. Her mother would never understand. She had to sleep in a bed, an actual bed, with the sheet tucked tightly at the lower end. Otherwise there was no rest, no security for her in the dark hours of the night. Her mother, infuriated at the illogic of her actions, would have forced her to change, but for the intervention of her father.
“Everybody’s got somethin’ they’re set on or afraid of,” he had said. “This seems like a pretty small thing. Nothing unreasonable to take care of. You just let her tuck in her sheet like she wants to.”
And that had been that.
* * * *
“Jim, I...I have to tell you something. You’ll think I’m silly. Mama always did. But before we marry I have to let you know, because it means a lot to me.”
He looked down at her, his blue eyes quizzical. “You sleep with a teddy bear!” he teased. “No? Then you have a very large dog that’s used to sharing your bed.”
“Silly!” She stood on tiptoe and kissed his chin. “No. It’s such a little thing. I have to have the top sheet tucked in tightly on my side of the bed. I have always had a terror....”—she looked about to make certain that her mother was still in the kitchen—“...of having my foot hang over the edge of the bed. Now I know! I know! It’s childish. It’s Freudian something-or-other. But I cannot go to sleep without that sheet tucked in good and tight.”
He smiled. “I think we can manage that—at least for now. Eventually I think I’ll be able to talk you into realizing what causes that particular need. Then you won’t need it any more.”
* * * *
“You’re right. I see it. It makes so much sense. Insecurity can do odd things to us, can’t it? And to think I’ve spent all these years tucking in that sheet to keep my foot on the bed! It seems so silly now.”
She sat on the bed and swung her feet onto the mattress. “It really is too hot for pulling up the top sheet too. I know you’ve suffered from the heat, even with the fan going. You’re a nice, patient person, love.”
He took his place beside her, stretching himself on the cool linen. He chuckled. “I have had many a patient who couldn’t see cause and effect nearly as soon or as clearly as you have done. Now you’re free of that little worry. I suppose I see myself actually as some sort of Great Emancipator, freeing everyone from their niggling little slaveries to fears and phobias.”
The lamp snapped off. The sound of crickets from their large lawn filled the night, and Barbara thought sleepily how good it was to have married for love and to have found money too. She dozed, her foot edging near the side of the mattress.
It slipped over.
A long, thin hand, grayer than the moonlit room, snaked up from beneath the bed. The foot moved a bit, and the ankle drooped over the edge. The hand darted upward and fastened its grip about Barbara’s leg.
She shrieked, struggling upward and clawing at Jim for stability.
“What? What’s’amatter?” he mumbled groggily, as her hand gripped his pajamas at the shoulder.
“It got me!” she screamed, and the cloth in her hand tore as she was dragged away from him, toward the edge of the bed.
Jim grabbed her hands. “I’ve got you! It’s just a nightmare!” But his words caught in his throat as he saw her pulled away from him, and he was forced forward in order to hold on.
She went over the edge. He heard no thump, and her hands grew cold in his. “Barbara!” He hurled himself toward her side of the bed and looked over the mattress. She was disappearing into a kind of hole that swirled at the edges. His hands, as if paralyzed, loosed their grip, and she was sucked away. The hole pulled inward after her, and he found himself staring at the pattern of the carpet.
He huddled on the bed, shaking. The top sheet, folded neatly at the foot of the bed, gleamed accusingly at him in the light of the waning moon.
THE EAGLE CLAW RATTLE
When Bill Pronzini was requesting stories for his MUMMY! anthology, I recalled the Plains Indian habit of putting their dead up on scaffolds, to be mummified by the arid western
air.
It was a shackledy old scaffold. You’d never catch a white man doing such a sorry job, particularly if he was planning to stick the body of one of his great men on top of it. The Sioux, though...what can you expect from a bunch of heathen Injuns who think that’s the only proper way to do the dead? Closer to the Great Spirit—hah! Any white man can tell you that the only place to put a dead man is in the ground. This scaffold business is just unsanitary, if not downright sinful.
Anyway, it was the devil and all to climb. Particularly in the dark. Even out there in the back of beyond, you never knew if one of those red-tailed varmints was there in the rocks, watching. A cautious man doesn’t rob Injun graves, mind you, but of those that do, the most wary live longest. I’ve been at it (and other things) all over the Dakota Territory for a long time, and I’ve still got my hair to prove it.
There was a tad of moon—just a toenail-trimming’s worth. A low and lonesome wind was whishing along the ground, stirring up enough dust to fog up the landscape a bit, which suited me fine. If it was also moaning and hissing around the scaffold and its burden, well, that was fine too. I figured that the day had come and gone when old Thunder-on-the-Mountain could give me any hassle.
I could see the dark, oblong shape against the stars whenever I’d look up. Mighty long and thin.... Of course, he’d been a big cuss from what I’d heard. Likely the desert air had dried the juices out of him and thinned him down. Even with all the bundled wraps they’d put around him, he looked mighty narrow. Still. I’d never seen one yet that’d rotted away to bones, not in this climate. When I first started taking orders for “Indian artifacts,” I unwrapped one or two, just to see what I was dealing with. They were just like old, still leather. Not much different from what the really old Injuns look like when they’re alive.
This one was the top of the line though. The red devils think old Thunder helped hang the moon, from what you hear around the campfires at night. Said he could shake up storms out of the mountains with that painted rattle of his. Could make the ground shake so hard it split open and let whole rivers get lost and never come out again.
I laughed. Now here he hung, with the wind singing through his teeth, not even able to spit out a mouse-sized curse at the white man who was going to make off with his fourteen-karat, hundred-proof magic rattle. And sell it, what’s more, to an Eastern fella who was fool enough to offer two hundred dollars for it.
The wind seemed to pick up the higher I got. Or maybe I was going above the shelter of the ridge of rocks that curved away to the east. I could see eagle feathers fluttering now, tied onto the scaffolding in untidy bunches. They were all but worn down to the nub by the wind and the dust, but they still spun ’round and ’round, or else flittered away at the ends of thongs.
Funny the way your imagination will rise to any occasion. I’d have sworn that I heard that corpse shift, just the way a man does when he’s been lying down too long and needs to ease his bones. It was the wind moving the deer hide wrappings, of course, but it gave me an almighty start until I figured it out.
When I came out on the narrow platform, it seemed almost light, for the moon had pulled out from behind the thin mare’s tails that were misted across the sky to the east. I could see the way the outer wrap was tied. It was buffalo hide, weathered to the toughness of wood, and the bindings had been knotted for so long that there was no way on God’s green earth you could have untied them.
I got out my boot knife and began cutting. I knocked down a couple of pots and what must have been a bundle of lances while I was moving around the edge of the platform, trying to get everything cut before I opened it up. They made a godawful clatter and crash, and I stopped for a minute and listened. Injuns have an unchancy habit of going out to forsaken places like this to sit and meditate and wait for their heathen gods to talk to them.
Still and all, if there’d been one around, I’d know it by now, and I carefully pulled back the buffalo robe. It cracked in a long split, and the section I’d lifted caught the wind and went sailing away, That left a shell-shaped something like a long narrow boat, and in it was Thunder-on-the-Mountain in person.
They’d tanned deer hide so fine that it was silky. Even in the dark I could see the beadwork twinkling in the moonlight, as I unfolded the top layer. Underneath that was a pair of dark hands. They were so well-preserved that they still looked strong enough to strangle a bear. Big, tough, long-fingered hands, they were, and they were clasped like grim death around the handle of a big gourd rattle,
And that was what I’d come for. A gourd that old, mind you, can be brittle as paper, so I tried to ease it out of those hands. It was as if they’d been glued together. I stood up for a minute to ease my back, and as I did, I looked up at the end where the face would have been, if it hadn’t been covered with deerskin.
The wind fluttered the layer of hide just a bit. Just enough so it looked like somebody was breathing underneath it. And I felt like two hot black eyes were blazing away under there, fit to burn twin holes in the pale skin.
I shook my head and laughed. Robbing graveyards—even heathen graveyards—was no business for a man who let himself get fanciful. I laughed again and went back to work.
Now, it’s not that I’m squeamish. I’ve handled more than my share of dead bodies, both fresh and mummified, and I’ve never thought a thing of it. But those hands were another matter. First off, they looked alive. They looked as if, when I laid hand to them, they just might grab hold of my wrists and throw me down off the scaffold.
As I stood there considering, it suddenly dawned on me that he didn’t smell right either. All the others had had a faint, musty, nasty odor, not strong but mighty noticeable.
This one didn’t, and it wasn’t just that the wind was carrying it off. The only smell there was tanned deer hide and old buffalo robe. Not the best of stinks, but better than mummified Injun.
The moon was way up by now, and I wasn’t done with my job, so I shook my head to get the foolishness out of it and went about my business. If the hands wouldn’t turn loose of the rattle, then, by George, they’d just have to go along with it, at least until I could figure out a way to get them off without busting my two hundred dollars all to flinders.
My boot-knife was just the ticket, and I had them off at the wrists in no time. Even then, they held onto that rattle as if they’d grown to it. And I couldn’t see that fella buying a pair of dead hands. Easterners have weak stomachs.
I cut off a bit of hide and tied it around the whole thing, rattle and all, making a loose bundle of it. As I lifted it, the eagle claws fastened to the rattle clicked sharply against its painted sides. It was shuddery—worse than a rattlesnake in a dark room.
I put things back as well as I could, for it’s just as well to avoid any trouble you can. The piece of robe that had blown away was long gone, but I fixed the deer hide back together and tied some of the fringes to keep it in place. I’ll admit that it was a relief to hide those dark wrist stumps too.
I went back down with the bundle slung over my shoulder, the rattle clashing gently away at every move. The wind was picking up too, whipping my coattails and pushing and prying at my bundle. As I reached the ground, the moon went under a cloud, and I looked up to see that the mare’s tails had moved together into a black mat that covered half the sky.
My horse was dancing around, whinnying that wild way they do when a storm is coming, and it was all I could do to calm him down enough to get mounted. I hadn’t more than got my feet settled into the stirrups when a wall of wind and dust and rain, all mixed up together, came whooping down on me.
I kneed Gray over against the rock outcrop to knock off part of the wind, and we just hunched down to wait it out. The lightning came then, sizzling down so close that I could hear the little pop that comes before the big crack. Thunder rolled down over us like a giant walking on drums, and I glanced out from under my hat brim to
see if the rain was slacking off any.
It wasn’t. It was, if anything, harder, and the continuous lightning lit it into silver sheets.
In the midst of it stood a big man. He was dressed in fine-tanned deerskin, and the rain hadn’t wet an inch of it. He was standing four paces away, just looking at me, and his eyes were big dark holes in his face. The thunder boomed right above us, shaking the air and the ground and even the rock my elbow was touching.
The Injun didn’t move. He stood there, waiting and watching, and I stared back, knowing what he wanted, but still too stubborn to admit that I had to do it.
The rain got harder; the lightning danced around us like mad fireworks, and the thunder sounded fit to shake down the sky. In a little bit, that Injun stepped forward one pace. I shrunk down into my coat, wet as it was, but I couldn’t look away.
He raised his head toward the sky, and he held up his arms. His hands were gone, but as if he had called on further powers, the storm got worse. A lot worse.
So I slowly got down from my shivering horse and tied him securely to a knob of rock. I took the bundle and put it over my shoulder again. Then I waited. I wasn’t going a bit closer to that big Injun than I was, and he sensed it right off. Between one wink of lightning and the next, he was gone.
I sighed; then I gritted my teeth. To think a white man, a Christian, could be maneuvered by a heathen Injun made my blood boil—but quietly.
I climbed the scaffold again, and the rain was ending as I reached the top. The long form lay there, and the wind hadn’t stirred a fold of its wrappings. I untied the strings, then the bundle I carried. Carefully, I fitted the hands back to the stumps of the wrists. Before I could take my fingers away, I felt...I felt the damn things flex.
The lightning, dying away to westward, lit the place by flashes. The hands lay still and dark, grasping the rattle. I shook my head and looked at the bundled shape. Might as well do the thing right, I thought.