by Peter Straub
The world did not tremble; the river did not burst into flame. There were none of these gaudy supernatural signs. A bull-like man in a blue knit cap threw boxy traps onto the deck of a boat. Graham watched him as if he had been put under hypnosis. Krell’s face was unreflective and flat, his eyebrows thick and black, like his beard. A man given to sudden storms, you would have said, to meteorological out-bursts; but nothing more.
Graham found that he was panting, taking in air in short quick gasps.
A small man darted out the door of the Blue Tern, gave Graham a look of startled recognition, then sloped away toward the docks. It was the scrawny ex-fisherman who had given him Pitt Burgess’ name. Graham’s stomach tightened as he saw the man weave toward the diminished pile of traps. Then the little man’s head jerked sideways and Krell stopped moving; the little man had told him something.
Now the thin old man was wandering away down the docks. Krell had stopped his work and was standing, head bent so his chin was on his chest, hands in the hip pockets of the coveralls.
Get out, get out, Graham thought: he knows!
Krell turned sideways, tilted his head, and fixed Graham to the side of the Blue Tern with his eyes.
Graham straightened up: above his panic floated the realization that ordinarily these theatrical bully’s mannerisms would have amused him.
Krell half-smiled, then took a step toward Graham, who moved out of the narrow alley to meet him on the dock, in plain view.
The man stood directly in front of him, only inches away. The odor of fish and dried sweat, chiefly the former, clung to him. He was about Graham’s height, and his muddy eyes went straight to Graham’s. A surprising quantity of suppressed gaiety lived in those eyes. A second after looking into them, Graham wondered how he had ever thought them muddy.
Graham first felt the threat of the man; a second later he felt what he could only have called charm.
“You know,” Krell said in a husky, high-pitched voice, “I can’t help myself. I’m interested.”
“Yes?” Graham said.
“Interested.” Krell nodded. “I just can’t figure out why you should come down here asking questions about me. I’ve seen you before, though, haven’t I? You were on the side of the river.”
“Yes,” Graham said. “Yes, I was.”
“Well, let me in on the secret. I don’t suppose you want to invest in a lobsterboat.”
Millions of contradictory impressions were streaming toward Graham—he sensed violence flickering about Krell, but along with the violence came the sense of a powerful, and powerfully unified, personality. Krell was an unregenerate being with the native appeal of those who are wholly themselves: everybody Graham knew would have thought Bates Krell awful, but the man had accepted his awfulness so thoroughly that he had nearly succeeded in making it a positive quality.
Then Graham understood something else: that this man would have been very attractive to women.
He told as much of the truth as he dared. “No, no, of course not. I’m a writer—I’m just beginning, actually. My name is Graham Williams, Mr. Krell.”
“A book writer?”
“I’m trying to write a book. When I saw you that day I thought, ah, I thought you’d make an interesting character.”
“Was that the first day you saw me, or the second?” Now the eyes were positively sparkling.
“Both.”
Krell took a step backward, still half-smiling; he glanced toward the Fancy, then back at Graham. “A character in a book, eh? That’s something new. A book by Graham Williams. Now I have an idea for you. I’m going out for a couple of hours right now, as soon as I get the last of these new traps on board. Why don’t you come along? You can see if you really want to put a lobsterman in your book, Graham Williams.” He suddenly left Graham and returned to the little heap of traps. He tossed another on the deck while Graham stared at him, and then turned around with an appraising look. He wiped his hand down his handsome beard. “I’ll even give you a glass of wine while you see the work. I understand you writer fellows have nothing against a sip now and then.”
Graham remembered the sparkling wineglass in that dusty cupboard. The memory was darkened with threat: and he said to himself, this man kills people. But if the story he had told Krell were the truth, wouldn’t he accept the invitation? And if Krell were suspicious of his motives, wouldn’t that somehow be more apparent? The man was anything but an actor. If he went out on the boat, Graham thought, and kept his eyes open, he might learn something that would help to convict Krell.
Graham went forward and picked up the last two traps. “Let’s get going,” he said.
Krell lifted his thick eyebrows, nodded; smiled. He waved Graham onto his boat with a mockingly courtly gesture.
A moment later they were chugging up the Nowhatan against the tide. “How do you remember where you put your pots?” Graham asked. He was looking at the spot on the bank where he had been standing the first time he had seen Bates Krell.
“Markers,” the lobsterman said. “You’ll see them when we get out there.”
“The town looks so different from the river,” Graham said. “I’ve never seen it this way before. It looks . . .”
“Wild and woolly,” Krell shouted from the wheelhouse. That was not the term Graham would have chosen, but it fit. From the middle of the Nowhatan, Hampstead looked raw, unfinished; a frontier town. The backs of the buildings seemed to droop toward the river. When they had passed the last of the buildings and the final series of docks had washed behind them, the riverbanks looked as though they led off to an infinity of marshland and tall waving broom grass.
The illusion broke when the Fancy rounded the headland at the mouth of the river and swung out into Long Island Sound. On the bluffs above their private beaches the houses of Mount Avenue, far up the coastline, hung like colored lanterns between their wealth of trees; nearer, the town’s beaches luxuriated against the edge of the water.
“How far out do you go?” Graham called to Krell, who merely waved toward the upper end of the Sound.
A light, bluish haze in the air subtracted Long Island.
The Fancy pushed itself through the water, going always farther from the land—soon the Mount Avenue houses were the size of matchbooks. Dwarf trees curled over them. The Hillhaven beach, just to the right of the tiny houses, hovered above the water like a puff of smoke.
Graham saw a flash of yellow bobbing on the water, then two more a long way ahead, appearing and disappearing with the folding, unfolding of the waves. Krell’s markers. He was about to turn toward the wheelhouse and ask about them; and then decided not to, for the first of them, now identifiable as two painted sticks nailed together to form a cross, was already slipping past the bow. Krell had not cut his engines. Someone else’s markers, then. Graham leaned against the rail.
And then his intuition—or the gift he had momentarily shared with Patsy and Tabby long before either of them was born—saved his life. He suddenly caught the smell of blood, as if an ox had been freshly slaughtered on the deck behind him.
And some animal was behind him—a grotesque thing, a monster. He knew this. It was a thing so terrible that the sight of it would turn his muscles to rubber. Yet it would kill him where he stood if he did not turn around. In his mind was a picture of a spider the size of the wheelhouse, and he turned to face it.
Bates Krell was halfway across the deck toward him. The door to the wheelhouse sagged open. Krell was holding a long wooden rod fitted with a sharp metal point like a bayonet. Coming toward Graham in order to gaff him, the lobsterman smiled. His eyes blazed beneath the thick demarcations of the eyebrows. Krell’s entire face was a mask of joy, power, purpose. . . . I was ascairt of him when he got s’handsome, Graham remembered.
Krell laughed out loud and stepped closer.
5
“So there I was,” Graham said, “without a weapon—and that madman circling in toward me with a gaff. He was going to open me up, I could
see that all right. He was going to slice me from gullet to bellybutton and then feed me to the fish. Bates Krell. He couldn’t have looked happier if someone had given him a steak dinner.” Graham closed his eyes. For a moment, sitting backward on his typing chair, he lowered his head. A few lone white hairs protruded through his scalp. When he raised his head again, his eyes seemed very large. “And it should have ended that way. I could never have defeated Bates Krell in a fight.” He blinked, and—just for a moment—he looked very young to Tabby, as young and as frightened as he had been when he had faced a murderous Bates Krell on the deck of the Fancy. “But I did defeat him. Tabby knows. Tabby saw it happen, the first time we met. But I don’t suppose you understood it, Tabby.”
“I don’t know,” Tabby said, looking up at him. “What did I see? I saw you pick something up—didn’t you do that? Wasn’t there something . . . ?”
“Well, what is it?” Patsy asked. “A club? I have an idea . . . it’s like a club, isn’t it?”
“No, not a club,” Graham said. “But it was the only weapon I could think of then—that eight-inch polished piece of wood that I’d used to open up the hold. I looked sideways, and there it was, still hanging from its thong. I sort of darted to the side, and Krell jabbed at me and missed. He didn’t care. He knew he was going to get me eventually. A little thing like that wooden pin wouldn’t stop him. He jabbed at me again, and I ran for it—I lifted that little wooden pin off the upright and held it in my hand and faced him just like I knew what I was doing. Just like I had a chance.”
Graham looked at them all, having come to the hardest part of his story. “And Krell came in for me, sort of twitching that deadly gaff at my gut. He said, ‘You know nothing, Williams. You know nothing.’ I damn near fell apart—I was panicking. Right then, I thought I heard the buzzing of a million flies—my back was to the wheelhouse, and I remembered what Pitt Burgess had told me and thought they were in there, a million flies blacking out the windows. And then . . .” He scanned their faces, and saw that he had carried them with him so far.
“This is just the hardest thing to say,” he said. “Somehow . . .” The expression on Patsy’s face stopped him.
Patsy was glowing like a candle; she had seen. She was looking straight down into the triumph he had made of that day, and feeling that triumph as if it had been her own—seeing all that in her face, he could have melted with love for her. He reached out and took her willing hand.
“Oh, you had a sword,” she said, her eyes glowing and looking back more than fifty years. “Oh, Graham, you had a sword. You had a sword and you were beautiful.”
She had carried him right through the difficulty; it was she who was beautiful.
“It’s what happened,” he said. “I felt about eight feet tall. I felt as strong as God. And that damned little eight-inch piece of shiny wood in my hand . . . it was a sword, just as Patsy said.” Graham put his free hand over his eyes and was silent for a moment. “A sword.” His voice trembled, and he shook his head. “I’m not going to cry, I’m not. But you know, I’m living through all this again . . .” He shook his head decisively, and took his hand away from his wet eyes. He put that hand too over Patsy’s.
“The whole day changed—I felt a sort of crazy radiance all around me. Krell was screeching at me. His eyes were different. They were big: big as golf balls. And they had no whites and no pupils in them anymore. His eyes were black, jet-black, with a kind of a golden pattern across them—they looked like stones. Precious stones. He rushed at me, screeching like that, and I knew what he was feeling—the same wild triumph that was charging through me. But I knew I was going to win. Everything had turned inside out, and I was going to destroy Bates Krell. I swung that sword through the air, and it bit Krell’s gaff in two. Krell screeched again, and then he threw himself at me.”
Graham straightened up on his chair: he still gripped Patsy’s hand with both of his own. “And I swung that sword again, knowing just what was going to happen. Or it swung itself. Krell’s face was only a foot from mine when the sword went into him, and I thought I saw two faces there—both of them crazy with evil and that wild joy. I felt the sword slide into his middle, and I put my muscles into it. Krell’s face looked like it was magnifying, bloating up like a balloon: and then I felt the sword sever his backbone, and I really hauled at it, and it came out on the other side of him. Blood shot out like out of a hose. The momentum of the sword, and the weight of it, nearly took me overboard. Krell’s face changed again—went blank—and his top half fell over and splashed onto the deck. His legs stayed upright for a moment longer, and then they went down too. I felt like singing—I had a moment of pure elemental fulfillment. The strongest moment in my life. Jesus!
“And then it faded—everything faded. The day went back to being just a day: that gold sparkle went out of the air, the boat was chugging around in circles; and my sword was just a wooden pin again. Blood was still spilling out of Krell’s corpse, and I watched it foaming into the cracks between the deck boards.”
Graham gently released Patsy McCloud’s hand. “Kids, when I got into trouble in the fifties, the power of this memory is what saw me through. I’d fought a devil, I thought, and some power had saved me. Then all my strength flooded out of me, and I almost had to sit down, I was so weak. Already that strange, wonderful moment was getting mythical; vague. Two halves of a man were oozing blood onto the filthy deck in front of me. It almost made me sick, but I had to get rid of them. That was what was uppermost in my mind: I never considered the consequences. It never occurred to me that no one would believe me!
“I closed my eyes tightly and grabbed his trunk by gripping it beneath the arms. I hauled that part of him up and dropped it over the railing. Then I heard it splash into the Sound. Like a good old dog, the Fancy toiled around the place where his head and chest went down; like it was waiting for him to come back. I grabbed one of his ankles with each hand and flipped the rest of him over the side. I leaned over the railing and watched his boots disappear under the water—they sank like stones, they went straight down. Then I turned away. The wooden pin I had been holding was rolling across the deck, and I snatched it up a second before it rolled into all that blood. Then I threw that overboard too.
“I went into the wheelhouse and straightened the boat out—for a second I thought about just sailing straight up the Sound, pushing straight out into the Atlantic and never coming back. But I turned the boat around and went back toward the mouth of the Nowhatan.
“Of course I didn’t have a clue about how to dock a boat like the Fancy. Sailboats were more my league, and luffing in toward a slip was tricky enough for me. Once I spotted the rear windows of the Blue Tern, I turned the wheel in toward the pier and cut off the engines and hoped for the best. Well, the Fancy hit that dock like a truck running downhill out of control, and chewed a big hunk out of civic property. I probably knocked a few glasses off shelves inside the Blue Tern, too; and I put a sizable dent in the side of the boat. I jumped off, tied the lines to the nearest posts, and took off at a dead run for the police station.
“That magical rightness had left me, all right. I sat in Nails Kletzka’s office and told him everything—from my first sight of Krell all the way to bruising the hell out of the dock in back of the Blue Tern. And he just thought he was listening to a boy who’d gone out of his head from reading too many books. Nails Kletzka was a good chief, and he was a tough boyo. He was even good enough at politics to hang on to his job for more than thirty years. But what I was saying was too much for him—and of course I should have known it would be. I should have known enough to soften that story up, to make it more acceptable to a Polish roughneck in his first year as chief. I should have bowed to the realistic tradition. I sat there pouring out my crazy story, and I saw Nails getting at first more and more uncomfortable and then downright fidgety and finally just plain angry. When it came to Krell’s death, I said that I grabbed the gaff away from him and stuck him with it—pushed hard enough
on that gaff to force Krell over the railing. I had that much sense anyhow.
“‘So you decided that this Krell fellow murdered those women. All those women. And that fruitcake boy out on the marshes persuaded you that he’d killed his deckhands, too. Three or four of them.’ Nails looked at me, and I saw that he’d just as soon lock me up for wasting his time with a story like that.
“I told him that was right.
“‘So how many citizens did you decide this Krell did away with altogether? Seven, eight? Ten?’
“‘Something like ten,’ I said.
“‘So where are the bodies?’ Kletzka shouted at me. ‘I mean, where are all these dead boys? Where are their mothers—why hasn’t anybody listed them as missing? And what sort of proof do you have that Krell had anything at all to do with the women who’ve disappeared? Or even the poor women we found dead? Is there any goddamned proof at all?’
“I had to shake my head.
“‘We don’t even know for sure that you killed this man in self-defense and threw his body overboard.’
“‘I did, though,’ I said. ‘You can see the blood on the deck of his boat. That’s some kind of proof.’
“‘Proof of nothing,’ he said.
“I want to tell you that I spent the whole day in that office. Kletzka sent a man down to the docks, and the officer came back with the message that, yes, the Fancy did seem to have been amateurishly berthed, but that no one had seen it come in. No one had seen me leave the dock with Krell. There was some blood on the deck of the Fancy, but that proved nothing. Anyhow, in 1924, we didn’t have the sophisticated blood tests we do now.
“Finally, though Kletzka never said it directly, I began to get an idea—and it helped explain some of his anger. I began to see that some men in town had been complaining about this Bates Krell: they thought he had been bothering some of the local women. Their daughters—or their wives. Somebody had thought they’d seen Krell entertaining a woman on board his boat one night. And I started to see that I had botched up Nails’s investigation, to describe it charitably. He hadn’t been able to begin any real investigation because all they had against Krell was the suspicion of a guy who thought he might be a wronged husband.