Fifty Contemporary Writers

by Bradford Morrow

  Then there was the matter of Liam. Tim Rutter had always despised the boy even more than he despised his employer, Mr. Murgen. But after the business with Oona LeMur his malice intensified—despite (or even because of) the fact that the old man, who was absentminded and didn’t care for gossip, knew nothing of his assistant’s connection to the girl’s aborted pregnancy. Not only that, but Rutter’s hatred became even more maniacally focused on the person of the little boy. Perhaps Rutter had a notion that the boy had seen something, or knew something that most others did not.

  —I dislike that crazy little blind boy, said Tim Rutter to Bobby LeMur, Oona’s older brother, whom, oddly, Tim still counted among his reliable acquaintances.

  —What’s wrong with the boy? asked Bobby.

  —He pees his trousers, said Rutter. He’s ugly. I heard he has got water on the brain. Murgen is a fool for keeping him.

  Rutter said that he couldn’t even be sure Liam was a true boy and not a strange sexless large-headed imp of some kind. Rutter also knew about the special jar that was kept on a high shelf in the back of the shop. He knew of it and despised what was inside it.

  —I can hear him creeping back up in there, said Rutter. Saying baby talk to it. He is a spoiled child. I don’t think he is blind at all. I think he fakes it for attention.

  Liam knew that Tim Rutter knew about the jar. The boy couldn’t see the strange smile on Rutter’s face as the older boy watched him through the wooden grille, but he sensed the expression plainly enough.

  Liam asked Murgen if they could hide the jar someplace else.

  —But why? laughed the old man. Who is going to mess with it?

  The boy suggested, without naming him, that Murgen’s assistant might mess with the jar.

  Murgen laughed again.

  —Timothy? What would he want with a thing like that?

  But the boy wasn’t convinced. He carefully removed the label from a bottle of quinine and reglued it on the creature’s jar, hoping it might serve as a disguise. The boy asked the creature if it minded the label and the creature said it did not.

  The very next morning, an unidentifiable boat was spotted in profile on the horizon. By noon an observer from shore would have noticed the boat had doubled in size and rotated slightly toward land. In the afternoon a fierce little squall passed over Gumbo Limbo, obscuring the boat from view. Purple clouds heaped up over the village, rain spat and lashed, wind drove sea nuts and the grit of oyster shell against the windowpanes. The listless surf beat itself into an angry froth and threw all manner of slimed and twisted wrack upon the sand.

  When the squall had passed the strange boat was gone. But in Gumbo Limbo there was a weird hollow noise, a kind of dysphoric reverberation that seemed to come from everywhere at once and no place in particular. It made people feel like their heads had been filled with rubber. A man returning from the cinema house said he’d been issued a black ticket, and so had refused the admission. He said he had gone to the cinema every week for the past eleven years. He believed the perverse ticket meant that he’d been sold a viewing of a nightmare not his own. When released from his hand the ticket blew away down Mutus Street in a vortex of queerly charged wind.

  The windless rains followed. It rained three days and didn’t stop. Gumbo Limbo receded behind a curtain of rain. The line between sea and sky dissolved, the line between sky and land. Nothing was dry. The lanes were canals of mud. Brine shrimp proliferated in the puddles. Instances of the sea louse and sea weevil were noted. A week went by, ten days. The rain was quiet, vertical, whispering, incessant.

  Mushrooms with unusual ocher labia sprouted in the cellars; rare black molds got a death grip in the walls. Mucus ran freely. Slimy heaps of refuse rotted in the breezeways. Some folks went a little deaf. The giant seedpods of some strange profligate plant crunched softly underfoot; the agglutinate seed husks clotted the mechanisms of local vehiculation. Two weeks into the slow deluge a kind of dentriform barnacle, lilac in color, had attached itself by way of a gummy tendon to every latch, newel, baluster, and gutter pipe; by the seventeenth day the peak of each chitinous bud had split and extruded a tiny fiddlehead nub that within hours had unfurled, with obscene grace, into a false wind foot or storm tentacle. Citizens who sought the apothek were obliged to ford a canal of mustard-colored slurry. They complained of head noise, skin blight, and geographical tongue, dysbasia, night terror, and partial paralysis of the eye. Murgen shook his head and prepared tonics and poultices. Three whole weeks. The rain went on. Instances of the marsh weevil were noted. In the unremitting gloom moods festered. Voices grew hoarse and decayed into angry whispers. Cases were mentioned of instantaneous death caused by lagoon-borne spores lodging in the lungs. It seemed that in some people the excess moisture had caused a perilous loosening in the delicate structures of the mind. Citizens complained of cryptopodia, cephalopathy, late rickets, anoesia. Snails and slugs reared their soft blind antennae from bed knobs and cupboard handles. In the cupboards themselves the water beetle clicked through the long minutes of the night.

  The rumors Tim Rutter had begun to sow germinated in the fertile rot of Gumbo Limbo. Slouched on the porch railing of Mrs. Torpin’s home, he muttered to his companions—boys of brighter countenance than he—about a special jar on a high shelf in the back room of the apothek. A jar in which old Murgen kept a thing that, while in the technical sense unspeakable, it would not be past his powers of description to describe, should he decide to do so. As Tim Rutter spoke, hard little pockets of muscle stood forth on his jaw; the thin lips from which his news issued were crooked to the side, yet the listening boys felt that Tim’s account, while definitely odd, conformed with what they felt they might already in some sense have known.

  For indeed the attentive customer could have attained a partial glimpse, through the wooden grille, of a museum of the sort many apothecaries keep: specimens of local natural history as well as rare examples of corporeal perversion (e.g., omphalopagus, crinoia, cutaneum cornu), preserved in transparent mineral spirits for the edification of specialists. But to those laypeople inclined to be offended or appalled by jars of such prodigious content, their mode of display (obscured but not concealed by the wooden grille) might seem to reflect a subtle audacity on the part of the custodian—an implicit peepshow, an inadvertent medical pornography. The pickled specimens could, in this way, be viewed as artifacts of life partially developed and misformed, stuck in time, suspended in globes of fluid, marinating in their own juices, unable to properly decay, disappear, pass on to the next, the other world. Or else such examples of death enjarred might appear to conflict or, worse, conflate with the palliative, life-preserving purpose of the vessels of medicine alongside which they were shelved, making of the whole enterprise a relativistic and charlatanous fraud. The keeping of this sort of private museum might be one reason there has always been something suspicious about apothecaries, even kind and old ones like Murgen.

  Whether or not the youths arrayed on the Torpin porch believed the insinuations of Rutter is neither here nor there. They listened and would later repeat what they had heard.

  Tim Rutter spat over the railing; the ejected matter plopped like a livid frog in a seething brownish pond. He asked:

  —What kind of abortions he got in those jars, anyway?

  The question scarified the fellows; and they went home pruriating a little.

  Liam climbed the foot ladder, full of misgiving. He’d had a bad dream and no breakfast yet to dispel the gray net the dream had cast over his mind. He’d dreamt his friend the creature had rebuked him—had called him a name like “goony” or “fat ass” or leveled some cutting accusation, such as the boy had failed to protect or take proper care of it—then left the jar and gone back into the sea to become an argonaut, a night voyager that lives in a spiral shell, a narrow twisting house of diminishing chambers.

  In his dream Liam heard a muffled scream and ran down to the beach. He saw a gray-bearded old man hauling in his net—he dragged his
catch through the surf and dumped it out on the sand. A little girl came running up to look at the fisherman’s find. She jumped back and shrieked with terror or delight, while the old man, expressionless, worked at untangling his nets … .

  When he woke, the boy tried to feel better about knowing it was only a dream, but the hurt feeling lingered until, having mounted the foot ladder, he found his friend laughing quietly in the jar.

  —Do you want to know a funny song? it said.

  —Sure.

  —It’s called “Turkey Foot,” said the creature, who taught the boy the song. It was a very comical song and tears filled the boy’s large eyes and rolled down his face because his friend’s joke had caused him to laugh so hard.

  Oona LeMur dreamt the moon released her baby back into the sea. Its sea mother called the child back to herself.

  A livid morello bobbed in the brine.

  It was going to be named “Nelly” or perhaps “Merceau.”

  It had happened like this: the bone-globe moon tugged and tugged until the bulb broke; it slithered out, oyster and seed pearl, over the cup’s lip, down the whelk’s tube, the finite whorl, the spiral steps, nautilus the night voyager, hidden eye and sealed chamber, round and round to the vanishing point, till moonlight on cuttle-white bone lit tiny stapes, no more than a whisper, sea-polished glinting and gone.

  —I named it Merceau, she said when she woke. It is out there in the wide world now. It has gone to an olden home.

  —Old Murgen, he made a sin, said a man called Crippen who was known to be congenitally morose.

  —A bad sin, he said. I believe it cannot be put right.

  The talk that led the man to his conclusion had come from many quarters. But the first and most influential testimony had come from Mrs. Torpin herself. Torpin was a woman who even before the long rain had suffered greatly in her nerves, and whom Murgen had treated, at her own insistence, with salves of black mercurial lard, green belladonna, and even a pale silken hood thought to restore sense to the lunatic mind. Mrs. Torpin maintained that Murgen had captured a she-beast with no hind limbs and malformed breasts and hands that were flippers or flattened lobes.

  —Like a mermaid, she said. Or some type of female siren.

  The apothecary, she said, was keeping the mermaid hostage in a bottle. The rain would not stop on account of her fury. The unwholesome liquid had pickled and shrunk her. Yet even as she physically weakened (her skin or scales had yellowed and begun to slough off), her mental powers only intensified. Mute, she convulsed in her jar.

  —Truly the rain will not stop, declared the elderly woman, until the mermaid is freed back into the sea where he got her.

  It is always a difficult matter when someone else’s nightmare gets caught in the tangled net of your dreams. A man named Onder said the creature had the head of a horse and the tail of a fish, but no one believed him. A man named Frye held that the creature was a tardigrade, otherwise known as the water bear, but no one believed him either. Nonetheless, everybody soon knew there was a mermaid ashore—or something close enough to a mermaid—and that Gumbo Limbo would drown like Atlantis, under an unbroken waste of waters a mile deep, unless the apothecary could be made to release her.

  —If she is taken wrongfully from the sea, said Mrs. Torpin, truly the sea will come to her. Wherever she is taken, there too will the sea follow.

  The man who said he’d been sold the black ticket began to advertise a ten-cent fee for people to come inside his home and view something he called a “sea movie,” a hastily crafted zoetrope or flip book that might or might not have been purported to show a picture of the mermaid.

  It is a difficult thing when not only two but many people feel they have shared the same dream. When they feel they’re still in it together. When suddenly everybody is.

  —Murgen made a sin, declared Crippen. A strange and awful sin.

  Murgen himself, catching wind of the notion that a mermaid had been seen in the village, formed a hypothesis that a case of the sironomelia or “mermaid syndrome” had at last befallen some unfortunate family. He said to the boy Liam that never in his long experience had he seen such a case, though he’d read of it once in a medical book and the description of that particular birth deformity was so terrible it made him weep.

  Mrs. Torpin’s porch roof sagged under the weeks of water, seemed ready to break off like a slab of soft clay. Tim Rutter’s urine arced in a long jet over the rotten railing into the soup of the submerged garden. He said:

  —I saw Murgen’s little retarded boy teasing the cripple fish-lady in that bottle.

  Then he fell silent. Bobby LeMur watched Tim Rutter, who was dribbling pee onto his own foot. He stood there holding his cock and gazing into some unfathomable distance; the queer glazed contented expression had stolen over his face.

  Bobby LeMur frowned. He had never cared much for this Rutter fellow.

  Murgen didn’t sleep, didn’t dream; he lay on his cot and listened. A murmured demand rose in Gumbo Limbo. There was a freshly rotten stench, of something damp and spoiled, and many people gathered by the water. The sanitary wagon with its pale canvas hood drew up.

  Mrs. Torpin, standing atop an upturned shrimp bucket, flapped her short, fat arms like a penguin and effected subtle evolutions of her theory.

  —She is alive! cried the aunt, alluding to the mermaid. It’s her baby—her baby has been abandoned in the sea. The mermaid must be freed unto the sea so she can nurse her child there.

  Torpin painted for the crowd a picture of a baby floating in a cold limbo under the dark swells, a hungry baby crying out for its mama in the darkness far below the rain-pocked ceiling of the sea.

  This news of a baby fanned the outrage of the pervasive stench: a chlorotic woman named Lucy Graves, who’d never been known for a morbid sensibility, suggested the mermaid’s baby was dead. But such a thing was too awful to contemplate, for by that logic the rain might never stop, even should the furious and damaged mermaid be released.

  From his window Murgen listened to the silence that followed the pronouncement of Lucy Graves; he listened while the wind drew vast curtains of rain across the dark plain of the sea and he listened while, on the forty-seventh day of rain in Gumbo Limbo, the citizens coagulated in groups that, by the time they’d begun to clog the narrow lane before the apothek, had formed into a veritable mob.

  At the head of the mob were Tim Rutter and Bobby LeMur. The perversity of their alliance was not lost on LeMur, but at the moment he had no other idea of where to be or what to do.

  Rutter’s face was red and strained and his sweaty arms gestured wild and inarticulate. An exhilaration swept through him like he’d never known except when he was fornicating with Oona LeMur. He shouted at the crowd, rehearsing and reifying and embellishing the dicta of his aunt: that Murgen the apothecary had a mermaid or other variety of fabled she-beast held hostage in the shop; that the mermaid was shrunken and deformed in Murgen’s bottle; that she raged impotently in a slightly viscous lime green solution; that, in addition, old Murgen had unnatural designs on the female creature; that for all anyone knew he may have already begun to pursue those designs; that the rain was a curse cast by the mermaid to punish Gumbo Limbo for the apothecary’s secret crimes against her; that truly the rain would never end until somebody set her free.

  As the words escaped his mouth Rutter felt that he believed them; as he convinced himself, so he hardened the resolve of the mob. They scooped up clots of mud and oyster shell and flung them at the shop. Two men climbed a drainpipe on the side of the building to try and get a look through the transoms at the famous hostage.

  Murgen knew of the secret monstrosities wrought by nature in the bodies of God’s creatures. And he knew it was their fear that made them truly monstrous. He suspected their rage had something to do with the boy’s special jar but he wasn’t sure what. He looked for Liam in his room above the shop but the boy was not there. A clamshell thick and heavy as a horseshoe hit the window and cracked it. R
ain blew in. The old man went to the window; he held his hands before his face and wept and begged the people to stop. He raised his voice to ask why they were angry with him, with the apothek, but the sound was swallowed in the din of the crowd. Blinking into the wind, he tried to survey the crush of faces in the lane. He saw his assistant was among them.

  —Is that you, Timothy? called the old man, hoping for acknowledgment and help.

  But the dead-eyed youth was buffeted and sustained in the surging press of people; his mouth hung open in a loose smile of childish incomprehension.

  Again and again the mob surged against the apothek. They had nearly smashed out every last shard of the display windows and were beginning to climb inside when a man appeared in their midst, a medical physician named Grover Stiles. Stiles was a large man and he pushed to the front and told everybody there to shut up and listen. He said Gumbo Limbo was sick—sick with rain. He told the people they had water on the brain and implored them to be still and regain possession of their persons. He told them they saw mermaids everywhere they looked. He said that he was going to walk into the apothek and have a communication with the apothecary Mr. Murgen.

  —I intend to enter that store, he said, through the doorway, not the window, and take an accounting of what all is in there and what is not.

  So in the few moments of chastened bafflement the physician had purchased with his speech, he entered and went upstairs to where Murgen sat on the glass-strewn floor with his back to the open window, weeping.

  —I gave Leroy a syrup, he muttered, a syrup for the cancer. But the cancer come back.

  Stiles nodded. The apothecary’s reason was impaired.

  —It is not about a cancer or a syrup, he explained to the elderly man. It is about this rain. And something those people think you got hidden down there in a bottle.

  —That is all made-up lies, said Murgen.

  —It may be, said Grover Stiles.