“I’m afraid not, Joey. I’m sorry.”
She was gone before he could respond, slipped away into the darkness.
All week, he thought of her, his moods alternating between anger and concern. Sunday and Monday, he scanned the newspaper carefully, looking for anything about a 17-year-old girl who’d been hit by a car, or was missing, or . . . he couldn’t bring himself to think of the other possibilities. But there was nothing. Not a word. So she must have made it home all right. Walked all the way to Providence at 3 in the morning. She was weird, no question.
And she was beautiful.
And Joe Ricci had fallen. Fallen hard.
As Tuesday became Wednesday, and Wednesday Thursday, and the weekend was rolling around once again, Joe missed Debbie as he’d never missed anyone in his life. So what if she was playing hard to get? Lots of girls do that. That’s how they operate, toying with guys, playing little head games until you don’t know which way is up. When you’re hopelessly in love, what does it matter?
By Saturday, thinking about her was too much. During the game - they walloped La Salle, 28 to 6 - Joe kept scanning the stands, praying that she was there, watching, waiting, just as she had been at the dance. But she was not there. She did not show up during the game, or after it, when the team went to Billy Williams’s to party.
“Still hung up on that chick?” Jo-Jo asked.
“Told you she wouldn’t give you the time of day,” Robert quipped.
“Heard she was quite the looker,” said Teddy, who hadn’t been at the dance.
“She was,” Robert said. “Took one look at the big guy and blew town.”
Joe didn’t care what they said. He had to call.
He left the party and drove home. He told himself he was going to tell her off - no babe treated Joe Ricci like dirt. But in truth, he was hoping against hope that Debbie would agree to see him.
Her last name, she’d told him during that long, crazy ride, was Glidden. Her father was dead, she’d said - “since passed on,” was how she’d phrased it - but her mother’s name was Alice and she lived on the East Side of the capitol city, he believed she’d said.
Maybe that’s what it was, he thought suddenly. Money. Class. Maybe the son of an electrician isn’t good enough for her.
It was after supper when he finally dialed directory assistance and gave the name. There was a pause and then the computer voice told him the number was unlisted, at the customer’s request. That might have discouraged a lesser person, but not Joe Ricci. If anything, it infuriated him. Well, he knew a thing or two about the world. He knew about street directories.
An hour later, standing at the reference desk of the library, he had the address. He drove there immediately. The house was just as he’d imagined: red-brick, three stories, almost hidden behind thick hedges. There was money here, all right. You could almost smell it in the air.
Joe swallowed hard and went through the gate. He rang the buzzer. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, after all. Night had settled in, and the house looked too dark, too huge, way too unfriendly, like there were guard dogs and Pinkertons just waiting to attack.
He was about to leave when the door opened a crack and a woman peeked out.
“Yes?” she said, sounding tired and old. Joe couldn’t see her full face, but he caught a glimpse of hair. It was completely white.
“Is . . . is, ah, Debbie here?” he squeaked. His courage was evaporating mighty fast.
She looked at him, and although he could see only a sliver of her face, it was enough to show long, deep suffering.
“I believe you have the wrong address,” she said.
“But isn’t this the Glidden residence?”
She hesitated before saying, “Yes.”
“Debbie . . . I . . . ah . . . she has my jacket,” he finally blurted out.
“I’m afraid you must be mistaken,” the woman said, her voice shaking.
“No, I’m not. We . . . we met last Saturday and . . . she was cold . . . I loaned it to her.”
“No.”
“We . . . kissed.”
“This is so cruel,” the woman said, and now her voice was breaking, the tears close by. “Coming here like this. Tormenting me with this terrible joke, this . . . this Halloween prank. So cruel . . .”
It was definitely Weirdsville now.
“I d-d-don’t get it,” Joe blathered.
“Debbie died last year,” the woman said.
“Her car went off Route 95 . . . after the Halloween dance . . . hit an abutment . . . in Warwick . . . killed instantly . . . my only baby . . . a whole year . . . Swan Point, there in the ground on Elm . . . some things you never get over . . .”
The tears were choking her now.
“Please, whoever you are . . . whatever you want . . . please leave me alone . . . please . . .”
And with that, she quietly closed the door.
There wasn’t any rational reason why Joe went to Swan Point Cemetery that night, the cemetery where H.P. Lovecraft is buried - unless it was to prove to himself that this woman was crazy.
All a bad joke, he tried to reassure himself. Lots of kooks in the world.
He found the Glidden Family plot on his second drive down Elm Avenue in the cemetery. It was the kind of plot really rich people have: a giant obelisk in the middle, with smaller stones encircling it, like those weird rocks on Easter Island.
Joe parked and killed the ignition. It was a cold night, colder than last week, when he’d met her, but just as clear. The moon, smaller now, gave plenty of light. The wind was steady, but not strong.
He walked into the Glidden plot and proceeded slowly past the stones, squinting to read the inscriptions. Thomas Glidden, apparently the patriarch, who’d died in 1848. His three sons, Henry, Ezekial and Joshua. Their wives. Their children. Their grandchildren. On and on, deeper and deeper into the plot, deeper and deeper into the shadows, down through the generations.
Suddenly, he saw it: her tombstone.
“Deborah Glidden,” it read. “1969-1986. May the Angels Welcome You, Debbie, and Keep You by Their Side. Mom.”
The shivers ran up his spine in waves.
It can’t be.
But he knew with terrifying conviction that it was: that the woman who’d answered the door had been telling the truth.
He ran.
The paralysis in his legs gone, he ran - madly, blindly, through the stones, past the obelisk, across the cold ground and to his car.
There on the front seat was his jacket.
A voice that could have been nothing but the wind whispered: “I hope you understand.”
Chiganook
“There’s something down there!”
Toby’s cry fractured the stillness, carrying all the way to inside, where his mother was enjoying her morning coffee. Heart pounding, Sheila came running - across the terrace, through the pines, over the lawn, and onto the weather-beaten dock that protruded into Lake George, like a misshapen finger. Her son was 25 or 30 feet out, paddling his inner tube for shore as if his life depended on it.
“What? What is it?”
“There’s . . . something . . . down there]” There was terror in her son’s voice. Pure panic.
“Toby, what’s wrong? What is it?”
But he could not answer this time, not intelligibly. He was too panicked. Struggling too hard to get to safety. Screaming and gasping for air.
Now everyone was on the dock. Mrs. Rockwell, the well-to-do elderly woman who owned Haven Island and its only house, an enormous place that must have had 10 bedrooms. Her daughter-in-law, Anne Richards, Sheila’s ‘60s college roommate. Anne’s son, Jack, who was turning 12 in just two days. All of them were on the dock, blinking the August sun away and wondering what on earth could be making Toby ruin such a perfect summer morning.
“Is his tube leaking?”
“Maybe there’s a big fish.”
“Or a turtle.”
“Can he see without his glas
ses?”
“I’m going in!” Jack declared.
With a flawless running start, he dove off the end of the dock, disappearing into the lake with barely a ripple. He resurfaced alongside Toby, got an arm lock around his inner tube, shouted for the younger boy to hold on, and started swimming for the dock. In less than a minute, he had him in.
Toby pulled himself out of the water, looked once behind him - as if he thinks something’s following him, his mother thought - and dashed inside without saying a word.
“Sorry,” Sheila said, excusing herself.
She found Toby in his room. He was on his bed, struggling to hold back the tears.
“What was it?” his mother demanded. “Tell me, Toby.”
Now that her son was safe, her concern was shading to anger. How lucky they were that Anne had invited them to stay on Haven, she’d been reminding him all week. How well behaved he must be, she’d repeated the whole long drive from Providence. Now this. This embarrassing little scene, played out in full view of their hosts, who obviously didn’t know what to make of it.
“What was it?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
But he did know.
Even with his near-sightedness - bad enough to have kept him out of Little League before he got these glasses he so hated - it was clear what Toby had seen.
He’d seen the creature Mahican Indians called Chiganook.
An underwater creature, with bloated green body, scales, bear paws, and the pointed black head of a water snake. A head with a tongue big enough to wrap around a person several times, according to the library book about monsters Toby had read before leaving for Lake George. Twice the size of a grown man. Doomed to an eternity underwater, prowling the depths of the lake and waiting . . . waiting . . .
“Mom,” Toby said later, after lunch, when everyone else had taken the boat to the mainland to shop. “We should call the police.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“We’ve gotta get out of here.”
“It was just your imagination,” Sheila said.
“But I saw it.”
“You didn’t see anything,” Sheila said firmly. “And that’s the last I want to hear about it. Got it? The end.”
As of that morning, Toby refused to go back into the water. No amount of coaxing could convince him. He spent the afternoon on the terrace, reading a Hardy Boys book. After supper, he excused himself from the table and went to his room, leaving his mother to apologize to their hosts for his odd behavior (“He just doesn’t seem himself,” she said. “I bet it’s a touch of the flu”).
For three days, they’d been guests on Haven Island. Three days of swimming and fishing from the dock and barbecues and nighttime Parcheesi. Three days of fun - except for this morning, and Jack.
Jack, who, like everyone else, didn’t believe for a second there was anything down there.
Jack, who could now boast that he’d saved Toby’s life.
Jack, almost three years older than him.
Jack, always trying to be cool.
I hate him, Toby thought. Know-it-all.
The truth was, Jack was cool. He was bigger than Toby, stronger, and he didn’t wear glasses. He was the starting pitcher for his Little League team. He could swim in water over his head - without a tube or the stupid life preserver Toby’s mother always insisted on. Back home, Jack had a girlfriend - who was going to be a freshman in high school. He could smoke a cigarette, inhaling it without coughing. And he boasted of being able to drink two whole beers without getting drunk.
“Chicken,” Jack had whispered at one point.
“Hardy Boys, huh?” he said another time. “Drag. Mega-drag.”
“Four-eyes,” he taunted on his way in for his customary evening swim.
I hate him, Toby thought. I wish he was dead.
Late that night, alone in his bed, his finger at the ready on the flashlight he’d lifted from the cupboard, Toby heard it.
Chiganook.
Coming out of the lake, the way Mahicans believed it did once every year.
Stalking its next victim. Choosing the one it wants most.
At first, Toby tried not to believe. Those sounds that seemed so loud - heck, they could be waves lapping the shore. A midnight motorboat somewhere in the distance. Or the wind. But the wind doesn’t make a splashing sound. Waves don’t come ashore, don’t slosh across the terrace, don’t stop at the front door, trying to figure out how to open it.
Why didn’t they lock it? Toby thought, terrified.
There was silence, broken only by snoring from the other bedrooms.
The door creaked.
Not me, Toby pleaded. Please - not me. Take someone else. Take . . . him.
And then there were footsteps. Coming up, stair by stair by stair. Reaching the top. A passing smell like dead fish. Down the corridor that led to Jack’s room. Silence while it - whatever it was - sized him up. Then the footsteps again, retreating. Back down the stairs. Across the terrace. Splashing as it re-entered the water, its home.
The next morning, there they were: faint but unmistakable footprints.
“See?” he said to his mother before breakfast.
“What?”
“Those footprints.”
“So?”
“Chiganook.” He whispered the word, as if saying it too loudly would have terrible consequences.
“Toby, you’ve got to stop this creature business,” Sheila said sternly. “You’ve got to stop this game.”
“It’s not a game.” He pointed at the stairs. “See? That’s where it was.”
“Those are human feet,” Sheila said, not admitting to him that she could not, in fact, imagine which particular human’s - that they were much bigger than any foot she’d ever seen. And much rounder.
“Everyone’s in danger!” Toby shouted.
“The legend says that once a year it has to eat a person - I think it wants Jack]” As much as Toby hated him, he didn’t think Jack deserved to be eaten.
“Toby,” Sheila barked, “I want this to stop] And I want it to stop now] One more word and we’re going home. Got it?”
He nodded.
“Good. Now get your trunks. You’re going swimming.”
Reluctantly, Toby obliged.
He took his time putting on his trunks; then, when he could stall no more, he walked to the end of the dock, where his mother was slathering Coppertone over her body (damn if she was going to return to Providence without a tan). Toby sat, careful not to get a splinter from the old dock. He dipped one foot in the water and then pronounced, as calmly as he could: “It’s too cold.”
“Too cold?” his mother said. “It’s 78 degrees. There’s the thermometer, tied around that post. See for yourself. Seventy-eight degrees. That’s bath water, for heaven’s sake.”
“Well . . . I just don’t feel like it.”
“Come on, Toby. You’re going in. We’re going to end this . . . creature thing once and for all. Now put your life jacket on.”
“That’s not fair! Jack doesn’t have to wear one!”
“Okay,” she conceded. “I’m going to be right here, watching. You don’t need the preserver - this one time. But you have to use the tube. Now go.”
Toby could see that she meant business. Moving glacially, he took off his glasses and tucked them inside one of his sneakers. Once again, the world was a semi-blur. He climbed down the ladder until the water was knee-level.
“All the way, Toby.” It’s like falling off a horse, Sheila rationalized. You get right back up, or risk never getting up again at all.
“Do I have to?” he pleaded.
“Yes.”
Toby eased himself down another step, and another, until his foot contacted muck. He recoiled - the muck felt the way he imagined the creature’s belly would. But Mom was watching. Mom wasn’t going to back down on this one. He wrapped his arms around the inner tube and paddled away from the dock, not daring to look down.
&nbs
p; And, in spite of himself, was almost enjoying the water again.
“See?” Sheila said triumphantly. “Nothing to it at all.”
Nothing at all, indeed. Toby still couldn’t bring himself to look down, into the weeds - its weeds, its home - but the water was warm, and the sun was out, and it was summer vacation, and for the morning, at least, Jack was away, shopping with his mother.
It grabbed his ankle.
Coiled its tongue around his leg and started dragging him down.
Toby screamed. He could feel the slimy roughness of its scales. He could see its snake face, its giant snake eyes, looking at him, laughing at him, preparing to have him. His other ankle was ensnared. Down. Down, beneath the surface, toward the weeds, the water in his mouth, in his eyes, only a matter of time before it entered his lungs -
And then it let him go.
Just like that. He bobbed back up. His mother was in the water, swimming for him. She hadn’t seen anything except her son in distress.
And when she finally had him out of the water, and his crying had finally subsided, she vowed: Never again without a life jacket. Never.
This time, she punished Toby for talking about the creature (“Chin-whatever-it’s-called”). Lectured him about honesty, about little boys who cry wolf, and sent him to his room.
It was not a sentence that displeased him.
During the day, his room was safe.
From Chiganook, that is.
But not from Jack, who when he returned from shopping poked his head in and said: “Monster get you again? Chick-en!”
Toby said nothing.
Jack went on, squawking like a chicken.
Toby felt tears coming.
“Mega-chicken!”
Toby couldn’t help it. He cried.
It was a family tradition, Mrs. Rockwell reminded everyone after supper. On their 12th birthday, Rockwells since before the turn of the century had made their momentous first solo swim to Partridge Isle, a quarter-mile away.
Jack had already been making the swim regularly since three summers before - when he was Toby’s age, he pointed out - but tradition was tradition, his grandmother said, and that was that. He would swim. Since thunder squalls were forecast for tomorrow, the big day, Mrs. Rockwell saw no good reason why the landmark couldn’t be passed tonight.
Vapors: The Essential G. Wayne Miller Fiction Vol. 2 Page 11