“Yes,” he said “I can see you haven’t been lounging about on beaches, soaking up the sun and ogling maidens in bikinis. Are you sure you’re not taking all this classical archaeology a bit too seriously? No, really. There’s hardly any colour in your cheeks. You look like death warmed up. Come with me. A few glasses of FIX should fix it. They shall be to you as the waters of Lethe were to the departed spirits in the Underworld.”
STEVE DUFFY
* * *
The Oram County Whoosit
STEVE DUFFY LIVES in North Wales. His short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in Europe and North America. His forthcoming collection, The Moment of Panic, will be his third, and includes the International Horror Guild Award-winning tale, “The Rag-and-Bone Men”.
Of “The Oram County Whoosit”, Duffy says: “The story comes from my long-standing appreciation of the works of two true American one-offs: Charles Hoy Fort and Howard Phillips Love-craft.
“Running their idiosyncratic world-views together in a two-fisted tale of the Yukon seemed like a fun thing to try, and I can honestly say it never once felt like hard work.”
MAYBE FOR THE REST of the welcoming committee it was the proudest afternoon of their lives; I remember it mostly as one of the wettest of mine. We were standing on a platform in Oram, West Virginia, waiting for a train to pull in, and it hadn’t stopped raining all day. It wasn’t really a problem for anybody else at the station: the mayor had a big umbrella, and his cronies had the shelter of the awning, over by the ticket office.
I had my damn hat, was all. They belonged to the town, you see, and I didn’t. I’d been sent down from Washington the day before, like the guest of honour on whom we were all waiting. Our newspaper had sprung for him to travel first-class, having sent me up ahead in a rattling old caboose – to pave the way for his greatness, I guess. Because he was some kind of a great man even then, in newspaper circles at least. Nowadays, you’ll find his stories in all the best anthologies, but back then the majority of folks knew Horton Keith mostly from the stuff they read over the breakfast table; which was pretty damn good, don’t get me wrong. But then so were my photographs, or so I thought, so why was I the one left outside in the cold and wet like a red-headed stepchild? It’s a hell of a life, and no mistake; that’s what I was thinking. I was younger then, in case you hadn’t guessed: twenty-four, as old as the century. That didn’t feel so old then – but it does now, here on the wrong side of 1980. Then again, the century hasn’t weathered too well either, has it?
Away down the track a whistle blew, and the welcoming committee spat out their tobacco and gussied themselves up for business. Through the sheets of rain you could barely see the hills above the rooftops, but you felt them pressing in on you: that you did. Row upon row of them, their sides sheer and thickly forested, the tops lost in the dense grey clouds that had lain on the summits ever since I arrived. By now, I was starting to wonder whether there was any sort of blue sky up there, or whether mist and rain were the invariable order of the day. Since then I’ve looked into it scientifically, and what happens is this: the weather fronts blow in off the Atlantic coast, and they scoot across Virginia like a skating rink till they hit the Alleghenies. Then, those fronts get forced up over the mountains by the prevailing winds, and by the time they’re coming down the other side, boy, they’re dropping like a shot goose. And then, the whole bunch of soggy-bottom clouds falls splat on to Oram County, and it rains every goddamn day of the year. Scientifically speaking.
A puff of smoke from round the track, and then the train came into view. The welcoming committee shuffled themselves according to rank and feet above sea-level; one of them dodged off round the side of the station, and hang me for a liar if he didn’t come back with a marching band, or the makings of one at least – a tuba, trombones, a half-a-dozen trumpets and a big bass drum. The musicians had been waiting someplace under shelter, or so I hoped: if not, then I wasn’t going to be standing too close to that tuba when it blew. It might give me a musical shower-bath on top of my regular soaking.
The first man off the train when it pulled in was a Pullman conductor, an imperturbable Negro who looked as if he’d seen this kind of deal at every half-assed station down the line. Next was a nondescript fat man packed tight into a thin man’s suit, weighed down by a large cardboard valise. If he looked uncomfortable before, you can bet he looked twice as squirrelly when the band struck up a limping rendition of “Shenandoah” and the mayor bore down on him like a long-lost brother. One look at that, and the poor guy jumped so high I practically lost him in the cloud – his upper slopes, at least. In many ways he was wasted on the travelling-salesman game; he ought to have been trying out for the Olympics over in Paris, France. Instead, he was stuck selling dungarees to miners. Like I said before, it’s a hell of a life.
While that little misunderstanding was being cleared up, a few carriages down my man was disembarking, quietly and without any fuss. You may have seen photographs of Horton Keith – you may even have seen my photograph of him, which just happens to be the one on the facing-title page of his Collected Short Stories – but it seems to me he always looked more like his caricature. Not a bad-looking man: hell no! That sweep of white hair and the jet-black cookie-duster underneath meant he’d always get recognized, by everyone but the good folk of Oram, West Virginia at any rate. And there was nothing wrong with his features, if you liked ’em lean and hungry-looking. But the hunger was the key, and it came out in the drawings more vividly than in any photo I ever took of him. I never saw a keener man, nor one more likely to stick at it till the job got done. As a hunting acquaintance of mine once put it: “He’s a pretty good writer, but he’d have made one hell of a bird-dog.”
“Sir?” I presented myself as he stepped down from the train. He looked me up and down and said, “Mister Fenwick?” Subterranean rumble of a voice. I nodded, and tipped the sopping straw brim of my hat. “Good to meet you, sir.”
“Nice hat,” he said, still taking my measure as he shook my outstretched hand. “Snappy.” No hint of a joke in those flinty eyes. It was 1924, for God’s sake. Everyone wore a straw hat back then.
“I guess it’s had most of the snap soaked out of it by now,” I said, taking it off and examining it. “We could dry it out, maybe, or else there’s a horse back there on the hitching rail without a tooth in his head. He could probably use it for his supper, poor bastard.”
Keith smiled at that. Didn’t go overboard or anything; but I think I passed the test. Then, the welcoming committee were upon us.
The guest of honour was polite and everything; that is to say, he wasn’t outright rude, not to their faces. He shook all their hands, and listened to a few bars more of “Shenandoah” from underneath the mayor’s big umbrella. I was fine, I had my snappy straw hat, which had more or less disintegrated by now. But then the mayor, a big moose called Kronke, wanted to cart him off in the civic automobile for some sort of a formal reception with drinks, and Keith drew the line at that.
“Gentlemen, it’s been a long day, and I need to consult with my colleague here. We’ll meet up first thing in the morning, if it’s all the same to you.” My colleague. That was about the nicest thing I’d heard since I’d arrived in Oram County. It did my self-esteem a power of good; better than that, it got me a lift in the mayoral flivver as far as the McEndoe Hotel, which was where Keith and I had rooms.
The McEndoe was a rambling old clapboard palace, one of the few buildings in town that went much above two storeys. It had a view over downtown Oram that mostly comprised wet roofs and running gutters, and inevitably you found your eyes were drawn to the wooded hills beyond, brooding and enigmatic beneath their caps of cloud. Here and there you saw scars running down the hillside, old landslides and abandoned workings. Oram was a mining town, and you weren’t likely to forget it; at six in the evening the big siren blew, and soon after a stream of men came trudging down main street on their way home from the pits. Watching them
from the smoking lounge window as I sipped bootleg brandy from my hip flask – their pinched sooty faces, the absolute deadbeat exhaustion in their tread – I told myself there were worse things in life than getting my hat a little wet. I might have to work for a living, like these poor lugs.
“It’s funny,” Keith said, close up behind me. I hadn’t heard him come in.
“Sorry?” I guessed he meant peculiar; God knows there was little enough that was comical about the view.
He was staring at the miners as they shuffled along in their filthy denim overalls. “I was up in the Klondike round the time of the gold rush, back in ’98,” he said. “Dug up about enough gold to fill my own teeth, was all. It was like that with most of the men: I never knew but half-a-dozen fellows who ever struck it rich; I mean really rich. But my God, we were keen sons-o-bitches! We’d jump out of our bunks in the morning and run over to those workings, go at it like crazy men all the length of a Yukon summer’s day till it got dark, and like as not we’d be singing a song all the way home. And were we singing because we were rich? Had we raised so much as a single grain of gold? No, sir. Probably not.” He took a panatella from his pocket and examined it critically. I waited for him to carry on his story, if that’s what it was.
“Now these fellers,” he said, indicating with his cigar: “each and every one of them will have pulled maybe a dozen tons of coal out of that hill today. No question. They found what they were looking for, all right. Found a damn sight more of it than we ever did. But you don’t see them singing any songs, do you?” He looked at me, and I realized it wasn’t a rhetorical question: he was waiting for an answer. I was sipping my drink at the time, and had to clear my throat more quickly that I’d have liked.
“They’re working for the company,” I said, as soon as I could manage it through my coughing. “You fellers were working for yourselves. Man doesn’t sing songs when he knows someone else is getting eighty, ninety cents out of every dollar he earns.”
“No,” agreed Keith. “No, he doesn’t. But that’s just economics, after all. You know what the main difference is?” I had a pretty good idea, but shrugged, so that he’d go on. “We were digging for gold,” he said simply, “and these poor bastards ain’t. Call a man an adventurer, send him to the top of the world so he’s half-dead from the frostbite and the typhus and the avalanches, and he’s happy, ’cause he knows he might – just might! – strike it rich. Set him to dig coal back home day in, day out for a wage, and he’s nothing but a slave. It’s the difference between what you dream about, and what you wake up to.”
It sounds commonplace when I write it down. That’s because you don’t hear the way his voice sounded, nor see the animation in his face. I don’t know if I can put that into words. It wasn’t avaricious, not in the slightest. I never met a man less driven by meanness or greed. It was more as if that gold up in the Klondike represented all the magic and excitement he’d ever found in the world; as if the idea had caught hold of him when he was young and come to stand for everything that was fine and desirable, yet would always remain slightly out of reach, the highest, sweetest apple on the tree. That he kept reaching was what I most admired about him, in the end: that he knew he wasn’t ever going to win the prize, and yet still reckoned it was worth fighting for. The Lord loves a trier, they say, but sometimes I think he’s got a soft spot for the dreamer, too.
“Well, these fellows here might have been digging for coal,” I said, offering him a light, “but seems as if a couple of ’em may have lit on something else, doesn’t it?”
“Indeed,” said Keith, glancing at me from beneath those jet-black bushy eyebrows before bending to the flame of the match. “Now you mention it, I guess it is kind of time we talked about things.” He fished out another stogie and offered it to me.
I sat up straight and gave it my best stab at looking keen and judicious. Keith probably thought I’d gotten smoke in my eyes.
“What do you think we actually have here, Fenwick?” He honestly sounded as if he wanted to know what I thought. Back in my twenties, that was still pretty much of a novelty.
“Toad in a hole,” I said promptly. “There’s a hundred of ’em in the newspaper morgue – seems like they pop up every summer, around the time the real news dries up.”
“Toad in a hole,” said Keith thoughtfully. He gestured with his cigar for me to continue. Emboldened, I did so.
“The same story used to run every year in the papers out West,” I said, to show I’d done my homework and wasn’t just any old newspaper shutterbug. “Goes like this: some feller brings in a lump of rock split in half, it’s got a tiny little hole in the middle. See there, he says? That’s where the frog was. Jumped clean out when I split the rock in two, he did. Here he is, look – and he lays down some sorry-looking sun-baked pollywog on the desk. Swears with his hand on his heart: ‘it happened just the way I’m telling you, sir, so help me God’. And the editor’s so desperate, he usually runs with it.” I spread my hands. “That’s about the way I see it, Mr Keith.”
Keith nodded. “So you don’t believe such a thing could happen?”
“Huh-uh.” With all the certainty of twenty-four summers. “Toads just can’t live inside rocks. Nothing could. No air. No sustenance.” Speaking of sustenance, I offered him a pull on my hip flask. Keith accepted, then said:
“But these miners here – they don’t claim to have found a toad exactly, now, do they?” He was watching my face narrowly all the while through a pall of cigar smoke, gauging my reactions.
“No sir. They say they’ve found a whoosit.”
“A whoosit.”
“Exactly that. A whoosit, just like P. T. Barnum shows on Broadway. A jackalope. A did-you-ever. An allamagoosalum.”
“Jersey devil,” said Keith, entering into the spirit of the thing.
“Feegee mermaid,” I amplified. “Sewn-up mess of spare parts from the taxidermy shop. Catfish with a monkey’s head. That’s the ticket.” I felt pleased we’d nailed the whole business on the head. Maybe we could be back in Washington by this time tomorrow evening.
Keith was nodding still. He showed every sign of agreeing with me, right up until he said – musing aloud it seemed – “So, how does a thing like that get inside a slab of coal, do you suppose, Mr Fenwick?”
“Well, that’s just it. It doesn’t, sir.” Had I not made myself clear?
“But this one did.” His deep-set eyes bored into me, but I held my ground.
“So they say. I guess we’ll see for ourselves in the morning, sir.”
Unexpectedly, Keith dropped me a wink. “The hell with that. I was thinking we might take a stroll down to the courthouse after dinner and save ourselves a night of playing guessing games. Skip all the foofaraw the mayor’s got planned. That is, unless you have plans for the rest of the evening?” A wave of his cigar over sleepy downtown Oram.
I spread my hands, palms up. “What do you know? Clara Bow just phoned to say she couldn’t make it.”
And so, in the absence of Miss Bow’s company, I found myself walking out down the main street of Oram with Horton Keith, headed for the courthouse. We’d passed it in the mayor’s car earlier that afternoon; Kronke had told us that was where the whoosit was being kept, under lock and key and guarded by his best men. If the man who was on duty out front when we arrived was one of Kronke’s best, then I’d have loved to have seen the ones he was keeping in reserve. He was a dried-up, knock-kneed old codger with hardly a tooth left in his head, and when Keith told him we were the men from Washington come to see the whoosit, he waved us right through. “In there,” he said, without bothering to get up off his rocking chair. “What there is of it, anyways.”
“What there is of it?” Keith’s heavy brows came down.
“Feller who found it, Lamar Tibbs? Had him a dispute with the mine bosses when he brung it up last week. They said, any coal comes out of this shaft belongs to the company, and that’s that. So Lamar, he says well, thisyer freak of nature ai
n’t made of coal though, is it? Blind man can see that. And they say, naw, it ain’t. And Lamar, he says, it’s more in the nature of an animal, ain’t it? And they say, reckon so. And Lamar says, well, I take about a thousand cooties home out of this damn pit of yours ever’ day, so I reckon this big cootie here can come along for the ride as well. And he up an took it home with ’im.” The caretaker cackled with senile glee at Lamar’s inexorable logic. I guess it was a rare thing for anybody to get the better of the company, let alone some poor working stiff. But more to the point:
“You’re saying the whoosit isn’t actually in there?”
“No sir. It’s over to Peck’s Ridge, up at the Tibbs place. Mayor’s plannin’ to take you there in the automobile tomorrow, I believe – first thing after the grand civic breakfast.”
This was starting to look like a snipe hunt we’d been sent on. Keith jabbed his cigar butt at the courthouse. “So what have you got in here?”
“Lump o’ coal it came out of,” said the caretaker proudly. “Got an exact imprint of the whoosit in it, see? Turn it to the light, you can see everything. Large as life, twice as ugly.”
“Is that right?” Keith said. “Company hung on to the lump of coal, I guess?”
“That they did,” agreed the last surviving veteran of the Confederate army. “All the coal comes out of that mine’s company coal – them’s the rules. Mayor’s just holdin’ it for safekeeping, is all.”
“Exactly so,” said Keith. “Well, thank you, sir.” He slipped a dollar into the caretaker’s eager hand – assuming it was eagerness that made it tremble so. “Now if you could see your way to showing us where they’re keeping it, we’ll quit bothering you.”
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