by Various
I gave him my word. Over a week passed before I saw him again.
He sat down in his favorite kitchen chair and propped his feet on the wood-box.
“As I hoped,” he told me, “the natives shrugged it off as an early tornado spinning around near the swamp. Not a soul noticed the sky image." He chuckled. “I guess nobody stayed outdoors to watch cloud formations!” “You’ve done that research?” I asked.
He nodded. “I found some information about Iththaqua in an old volume at the Hartford library. A collection of local Indian legends. Iththaqua was supposed to be a sort of swamp demon who granted favors to Indians who made sacrifices to him—both animal and human. In return for blood sacrifices, he would protect hunters in the swamp. And—listen to this—in some cases he would grant unheard-of longevity to faithful worshipers!”
I thought back to that repulsive, bullet-riddled body on the floor of the cellar, quickly decaying before our eyes.
“That was Old Jendick, then?”
“I’m convinced of it. So far as I can figure, he would be nearly a hundred and fifty years old!”
“How do you explain that fiery face looming in the sky above us?”
“In his last extremity, old Jendick called on Iththaqua for help—and Iththaqua responded. Jendick must have been the very last of his worshipers, however, and with Jendick s death, Iththaqua’s power immediately started to wane. Iththaqua, you might say, was kept alive by the faith of his followers—and by the blood of their sacrifices, perhaps. When none of his followers remained alive, he himself could no longer exist. The best he could do was to summon up enough final strength for a kind of thunderbolt exit while he glared down at us—boiling with fury but basically impotent.” “What about—what we found in those brine barrels?”
Chris shifted uneasily. “I feel guilty about that. You know, about eight months ago, a tramp was staying in the remains of a shack in woods near the edge of the swamp. Never bothered anybody, so I let him alone. After he suddenly disappeared, I looked in the shack and found quite a cache of new canned goods, crackers, coffee, and so on. Seemed strange to me that he’d leave all that stuff, but I shrugged it off. Now I’m wondering if he wandered into the swamp and ended up as a sacrifice to Iththaqua—and subsequently an occupant of the brine vats!”
He stood up. “I’m also wondering about those hunters of years ago who were supposed to have been caught in quicksand. You’ll remember that we didn’t see any sign of quicksand, bad as the swamp was in other respects. Maybe those lost hunters were caught by the Jendicks!”
After he left, I regretted that I hadn’t asked him what he proposed to do about the pickled human flesh we had found in that charnel-house cellar. I had an answer a month or so later when he stopped by.
“I have an aviator friend at the Hartford airport,” he told me. “We took a helicopter ride over the swamp one afternoon. The Jendick house—in fact, the knoll itself—was washed away. The row of black-gum trees has disappeared. Not a stick of wood visible. The chances of recovering any brine-preserved human remains is gone forever. And I can’t honestly say I’m sorry!” I’ve tramped through the woods and meadows around Greystone Bay many times since my adventure with Chris, but I never again ventured into Jendick’s Swamp. In fact, I've been very active in all movements to preserve the marshland as a wildlife preserve. I’m not protecting it against people so much. It’s the swamp. It keeps moving south.
The Big Fish
by Kim Newman (1993)
The Bay City cops were rousting enemy aliens. As I drove through the nasty coast town, uniforms hauled an old couple out of a grocery store. The Taraki family’s neighbours huddled in thin rain howling asthmatically for bloody revenge. Pearl Harbor had struck a lot of people that way. With the Tarakis on the bus for Manzanar, neighbours descended on the store like bedraggled vultures. Produce vanished instantly, then destruction started. Caught at a sleepy stop light, I got a good look. The Tarakis had lived over the store; now, their furniture was thrown out of the second-storey window. Fine china shattered on the sidewalk, spilling white chips into the gutter like teeth. It was inspirational, the forces of democracy rallying round to protect the United States from vicious oriental grocers, fiendishly intent on selling eggplant to a hapless civilian population.
Meanwhile my appointment was with a gent who kept three pictures on his mantelpiece, grouped in a triangle around a statue of the Virgin Mary. At the apex was his white-haired mama, to the left Charles Luciano, and to the right, Benito Mussolini. The Tarakis, American-born and registered Democrats, were headed to a dustbowl concentration camp for the duration, while Gianni Pastore, Sicilian-born and highly unregistered capo of the Family business, would spend his war in a marble-fronted mansion paid for by nickels and dimes dropped on the numbers game, into slot machines, or exchanged for the favours of nice girls from the old country. I’d seen his mansion before and so far been able to resist the temptation to bean one of his twelve muse statues with a bourbon bottle.
Money can buy you love but can’t even put down a deposit on good taste.
The palace was up in the hills, a little way down the boulevard from Tyrone Power. But now, Pastore was hanging his mink-banded fedora in a Bay City beachfront motel complex, which was a real-estate agent’s term for a bunch of horrible shacks shoved together for the convenience of people who like sand on their carpets.
I always take a lungful of fresh air before entering a confined space with someone in Pastore’s business, so I parked the Chrysler a few blocks from the Seaview Inn and walked the rest of the way, sucking on a Camel to keep warm in the wet. They say it doesn’t rain in Southern California, but they also say the U.S. Navy could never be taken by surprise. This February, three months into a war the rest of the world had been fighting since 1936 or 1939 depending on whether you were Chinese or Polish, it was raining almost constantly, varying between a light fall of misty drizzle in the dreary daytimes to spectacular storms, complete with De Mille lighting effects, in our fear-filled nights. Those trusty Boy Scouts scanning the horizons for Jap subs and Nazi U-boats were filling up influenza wards, and manufacturers of raincoats and umbrellas who’d not yet converted their plants to defence production were making a killing. I didn’t mind the rain. At least rainwater is clean, unlike most other things in Bay City.
A small boy with a wooden gun leaped out of a bush and sprayed me with sound effects, interrupting his onomatopoeic chirruping with a shout of “die you slant-eyed Jap!” I clutched my heart, staggered back, and he finished me off with a quick burst. I died for the Emperor and tipped the kid a dime to go away. If this went on long enough, maybe little Johnny would get a chance to march off and do real killing, then maybe come home in a box or with the shakes or a taste for blood. Meanwhile, especially since someone spotted a Jap submarine off Santa Barbara, California was gearing up for the War Effort. Aside from interning grocers, our best brains were writing songs like “To Be Specific, It’s Our Pacific,” “So Long Momma, I’m Off to Yokahama,” “We’re Gonna Slap the Jap Right Off the Map” and “When Those Little Yellow Bellies Meet the Cohens and the Kellys.” Zanuck had donated his string of Argentine polo ponies to West Point and got himself measured for a comic-opera Colonel’s uniform so he could join the Signal Corps and defeat the Axis by posing for publicity photographs.
I’d tried to join up two days after Pearl Harbor but they kicked me back onto the streets. Too many concussions. Apparently, I get hit on the head too often and have a tendency to black out. When they came to mention it, they were right.
The Seaview Inn was shuttered, one of the first casualties of war. It had its own jetty, and by it were a few canvas-covered motor launches shifting with the waves. In late afternoon gloom, I saw the silhouette of the Montecito, anchored strategically outside the three-mile limit. That was one good thing about the Japanese; on the downside, they might have sunk most of the U.S. fleet, but on the up, they’d put Laird Brunette’s gambling ship out of business. Nobody was
enthusiastic about losing their shirt-buttons on a rigged roulette wheel if they imagined they were going to be torpedoed any moment. I'd have thought that would add an extra thrill to the whole gay, delirious business of giving Brunette money, but I’m just a poor, 25-dollars-a-day detective.
The Seaview Inn was supposed to be a stopping-off point on the way to the Monty and now its trade was stopped off. The main building was sculpted out of dusty ice cream and looked like a three-storey radiogram with wave-scallop friezes. I pushed through double-doors and entered the lobby. The floor was decorated with a mosaic in which Neptune, looking like an angry Santa Claus in a swimsuit, was sticking it to a sea-nymph who shared a hairdresser with Hedy Lamarr. The nymph was naked except for some strategic shells. It was very artistic.
There was nobody at the desk and thumping the bell didn’t improve matters. Water ran down the outside of the green-tinted windows. There were a few steady drips somewhere. I lit up another Camel and went exploring. The office was locked and the desk register didn’t have any entries after December 7, 1941. My raincoat dripped and began to dry out, sticking my jacket and shirt to my shoulders. I shrugged, trying to get some air into my clothes. I noticed Neptune’s face quivering. A thin layer of water had pooled over the mosaic and various anemone-like fronds attached to the sea god were apparently getting excited. Looking at the nymph, I could understand that. Actually, I realized, only the hair was from Hedy. The face and the body were strictly Janey Wilde.
I go to the movies a lot but I’d missed most of Janey’s credits: She-Strangler of Shanghai, Tarzan and the Tiger Girl, Perils of Jungle Jillian. I’d seen her in the newspapers though, often in unnervingly close proximity to Pastore or Brunette. She’d started as an Olympic swimmer, picking up medals in Berlin, then followed Weissmuller and Crabbe to Hollywood. She would never get an Academy Award but her legs were in a lot of cheesecake stills publicizing no particular movie. Air-brushed and made-up like a good-looking corpse, she was a fine commercial for sex. In person she was as bubbly as domestic champagne, though now running to flat. Things were slow in the detecting business, since people were more worried about imminent invasion than missing daughters or misplaced love letters. So when Janey Wilde called on me in my office in the Cahuenga Building and asked me to look up one of her Ill-chosen men friends, I checked the pile of old envelopes I use as a desk diary and informed her that I was available to make inquiries into the current whereabouts of a certain big fish.
Wherever Laird Brunette was, he wasn’t here. I was beginning to figure Gianni Pastore, the gambler’s partner, wasn’t here either. Which meant I’d wasted an afternoon. Outside it rained harder, driving against the walls with a drumlike tattoo. Either there were hailstones mixed in with the water or the Jap air force was hurling fistfuls of pebbles at Bay City to demoralize the population. I don't know why they bothered. All Hirohito had to do was slip a thick envelope to the Bay City cops and the city’s finest would hand over the whole community to the Japanese Empire with a ribbon around it and a bow on top.
There were more puddles in the lobby, little streams running from one to the other. I was reminded of the episode of The Perils of Jungle Jillian I had seen while tailing a child molester to a Saturday matinee. At the end, Janey Wilde had been caught by the Panther Princess and trapped in a room which slowly filled with water. That room had been a lot smaller than the lobby of the Seaview Inn and the water had come in a lot faster.
Behind the desk were framed photographs of pretty people in pretty clothes having a pretty time. Pastore was there, and Brunette, grinning like tiger cats, mingling with showfolk: Xavier Cugat, Janey Wilde, Charles Coburn. Janice Marsh, the pop-eyed beauty rumoured to have replaced Jungle Jillian in Brunette’s affections, was well represented in artistic poses.
On the phone, Pastore had promised faithfully to be here. He hadn’t wanted to bother with a small-timer like me but Janey Wilde’s name opened a door. I had a feeling Papa Pastore was relieved to be shaken down about Brunette, as if he wanted to talk about something. He must be busy, because there were several wars on. The big one overseas and a few little ones at home. Maxie Rothko, bar owner and junior partner in the Monty, had been found drifting in the seaweed around the Santa Monica pier without much of a head to speak of. And Phil Isinglass, man-about-town lawyer and Brunette frontman, had turned up in the storm drains, lungs full of sandy mud. Disappearing was the latest craze in Brunette’s organization. That didn’t sound good for Janey Wilde, though Pastore had talked about the Laird as if he knew Brunette was alive. But now Papa wasn’t around. I was getting annoyed with someone it wasn’t sensible to be annoyed with.
Pastore wouldn’t be in any of the beach shacks but there should be an apartment for his convenience in the main building. I decided to explore further. Jungle Jillian would expect no less. She’d hired me for five days in advance, a good thing since I’m unduly reliant on eating and drinking and other expensive diversions of the monied and idle.
The corridor that led past the office ended in a walk-up staircase. As soon as I put my size nines on the first step, it squelched. I realized something was more than usually wrong. The steps were a quiet little waterfall, seeping rather than cascading. It wasn’t just water, there was unpleasant, slimy stuff mixed in. Someone had left the bath running. My first thought was that Pastore had been distracted by a bullet. I was wrong. In the long run, he might have been happier if I’d been right.
I climbed the soggy stairs and found the apartment door unlocked but shut. Bracing myself, I pushed the door in. It encountered resistance but then sliced open, allowing a gush of water to shoot around my ankles, soaking my dark blue socks. Along with water was a three-weeks-dead-in-the-water-with-sewage- and-rotten-fish smell that wrapped around me like a blanket. Holding my breath, I stepped into the room. The waterfall flowed faster now. I heard a faucet running. A radio played, with funny little gurgles mixed in. A crooner was doing his best with “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” but he sounded as if he were drowned full fathom five. I followed the music and found the bathroom.
Pastore was face down in the overflowing tub, the song coming from under him. He wore a silk lounging robe that had been pulled away from his back, his wrists tied behind him with the robe’s cord. In the end he’d been drowned. But before that hands had been laid on him, either in anger or with cold, professional skill. I’m not a coroner, so I couldn’t tell how long the Family Man had been in the water. The radio still playing and the water still running suggested Gianni had met his end recently but the stench felt older than sin.
I have a bad habit of finding bodies in Bay City and the most profit-minded police force in the country have a bad habit of trying to make connections between me and a wide variety of deceased persons. The obvious solution in this case was to make a friendly phone call, absent-mindedly forgetting to mention my name while giving the flatfeet directions to the late Mr. Pastore. Who knows, I might accidentally talk to someone honest.
That is exactly what I would have done if, just then, the man with the gun hadn’t come through the door...
Ihad Janey Wilde to blame. She’d arrived without an appointment, having picked me on a recommendation. Oddly, Laird Brunette had once said something not entirely uncomplimentary about me. We’d met. We hadn’t seriously tried to kill each other in a while. That was as good a basis for a relationship as any.
Out of her sarong, Jungle Jillian favoured sharp shoulders and a veiled pill-box. The kiddies at the matinee had liked her fine, especially when she was wrestling stuffed snakes, and dutiful Daddies took no exception to her either, especially when she was tied down and her sarong rode up a few inches. Her lips were four red grapes plumped together. When she crossed her legs you saw swimmer’s smooth muscle under her hose.
“He’s very sweet, really,” she explained, meaning Mr. Brunette never killed anyone within ten miles of her without apologizing afterwards, “not at all like they say in those dreadful scandal sheets.”
&nbs
p; The gambler had been strange recently, especially since the war shut him down. Actually the Montecito had been out of commission for nearly a year, supposedly for a refit although as far as Janey Wilde knew no workmen had been sent out to the ship. At about the time Brunette suspended his crooked wheels, he came down with a common California complaint, a dose of crackpot religion. He’d been tangentially mixed up a few years ago with a psychic racket run by a bird named Amthor, but had apparently shifted from the mostly harmless bunco cults onto the hard stuff. Spiritualism, orgiastic rites, chanting, incense, the whole deal.
Janey blamed this sudden interest in matters occult on Janice Marsh, who had coincidentally made her name as the Panther Princess in The Perils of Jungle Jillian, a role which required her to torture Janey Wilde at least once every chapter. My employer didn’t mention that her own career had hardly soared between Jungle Jillian and She-Strangler of Shanghai, while the erstwhile Panther Princess had gone from Republic to Metro and was being built up as an exotic in the Dietrich-Garbo vein. Say what you like about Janice Marsh’s Nefertiti, she still looked like Peter Lorre to me. And according to Janey, the star had more peculiar tastes than a seafood buffet.
Brunette had apparently joined a series of fringe organizations and become quite involved, to the extent of neglecting his business and thereby irking his long-time partner, Gianni Pastore. Perhaps that was why person or persons unknown had decided the Laird wouldn’t mind if his associates died one by one. I couldn’t figure it out. The cults I’d come across mostly stayed in business by selling sex, drugs, power or reassurance to rich, stupid people. The Laird hardly fell into the category. He was too big a fish for that particular bowl.
The man with the gun was English, with a Ronald Colman accent and a white aviator’s scarf. He was not alone. The quiet, truck-sized bruiser I made as a fed went through my wallet while the dapper foreigner kept his automatic pointed casually at my middle.