Except the memory of the ooze.
A childhood memory, a memory buried with the years, forgotten sometimes but always there, crowded into its own little space in his mind, was ready to confront him and startled him with its vividness.
The ooze was a place beyond the last field, where water always collected in the springtime and after a storm; water running over dirt and clay and rock, merging with the soil until there was nothing underfoot but a black ooze to rise above your boots. He’d followed the stream rushing with storm water, followed it to the place where it cut into the side of the hill.
It was the memory of the tunnel, really, that had brought him back—the dark tunnel leading nowhere, gurgling with rain-fed water, barely large enough for him to fit through. A tunnel floored with unseen ooze, peopled by unknown danger; that was a place for every boy.
Had he only been ten that day? Certainly he’d been no more than eleven, leading the way while his nine-year-old sister followed. “This way. Be careful of the mud.” She’d been afraid of the dark, afraid of what they might find there. But he’d called encouragement to her; after all, what could there be in all this ooze to hurt them?
How many years? Fifty?
“What is it, Buddy?” She’d always called him Buddy. What is it, Buddy? Only darkness, and a place maybe darker than dark, with a half-formed shadow rising from the ooze. He’d brought along his father’s old lantern, and he fumbled to light it.
“Buddy!” she’d screamed—just once—and in the flare of the match he’d seen the thing, great and hairy and covered with ooze; something that lived in the darkness here, something that hated the light. In that terrifying instant it had reached out for his little sister and pulled her into the ooze.
That was the memory, a memory that came to him sometimes only at night. It had pursued him down the years like a fabled hound, coming to him, reminding him, when all was well with the world. It was like a personal demon sent from Hades to torture him. He’d never told anyone about that thing in the ooze, not even his mother. They’d cried and carried on when his sister was found the next day, and they’d said she’d drowned. He was not one to say differently.
And the years had passed. For a time, during his high school days, he read the local papers—searching for some word of the thing, some veiled news that it had come out of that forgotten cavern. But it never did; it liked the dark and damp too much. And, of course, no one else ever ventured into the stream bed. That was a pursuit only for the very young and very foolish.
By the time he was twenty, the memory was fading, merging with other thoughts, other goals, until at times he thought it only a child’s dream. But then at night it would come again in all its vividness, and the thing in the ooze would beckon him.
A long life, long and crowded . . . One night he’d tried to tell his wife about it, but she wouldn’t listen. That was the night he’d realized how little he’d ever loved her. Perhaps he’d only married her because, in a certain light, she reminded him of that sister of his youth. But the love that sometimes comes later came not at all to the two of them. She was gone now, like his youth, like his family and friends. There was only this memory remaining. The memory of a thing in the ooze.
Now the weeds were tall, beating against his legs, stirring nameless insects to flight with every step. He pressed a handkerchief against his brow, sponging the sweat that was forming there. Would the dark place still be there, or had fifty years of rain and dirt sealed it forever?
“Hello there,” a voice called out. It was an old voice, barely carrying with the breeze. He turned and saw someone on the porch of the deserted farmhouse. An old woman, ancient and wrinkled.
“Do I know you?” he asked, moving closer.
“You may,” she answered. “You’re Buddy, aren’t you? My, how old I’ve gotten. I used to live at the next farm, when you were just a boy. I was young then myself. I remember you.”
“Oh! Mrs. . . . ?” The name escaped him, but it wasn’t important.
“Why did you come back, Buddy? Why, after all these years?” He was an old man. Was it necessary to explain his actions to this woman from the past? “I just wanted to see the place,” he answered. “Memories, you know.”
“Bitter memories. Your little sister died here, did she not?” The old woman should have been dead, should have been dead and in her grave long ago.
He paused in the shade of the porch roof. “She died here, yes, but that was fifty years ago.”
“How old we grow, how ancient! Is that why you returned?”
“In a way. I wanted to see the spot.”
“Ah! The little brook back there beyond the last field. Let me walk that way with you. These old legs need exercise.”
“Do you live here?” he asked, wanting to escape her now but knowing not how.
“No, still down the road. All alone now. Are you all alone, too?”
“I suppose so.” The high grass made walking difficult.
“You know what they all said at the time, don’t you? They all said you were fooling around, like you always did, and pushed her into the water.”
There was a pain in his chest from breathing so hard. He was an old man. “Do you believe that?”
“What does it matter?” she answered. “After all these fifty years, what does it matter?”
“Would you believe me,” he began, then hesitated into silence. Of course she wouldn’t believe him, but he had to tell now. “Would you believe me if I told you what happened?”
She was a very old woman and she panted to keep up even his slow pace. She was ancient even to his old eyes, even in his world where now everyone was old. “I would believe you,” she said.
“There was something in the ooze. Call it a monster, a demon, if you want. I saw it in the light of a match, and I can remember it as if it were yesterday. It took her.”
“Perhaps,” she said.
“You don’t believe me.”
“I said I would. This sun is hot today, even at twilight.”
“It will be gone soon. I hate to hurry you, old woman, but I must reach the stream before dark.”
“The last field is in sight.”
Yes, it was in sight. But how would he ever fit through that small opening, how would he face the thing, even if by some miracle it still waited there in the ooze? Fifty years was a long long time.
“Wait here,” he said as they reached the little stream at last. It hadn’t changed much, not really.
“You won’t find it.” He lowered his aged body into the bed of the stream, feeling once again the familiar forgotten ooze closing over his shoes.
“No one has to know,” she called after him. “Even if there was something, that was fifty years ago.”
But he went on, to the place where the water vanished into the rock. He held his breath and groped for the little flashlight in his pocket. Then he ducked his head and followed the water into the black.
It was steamy here, steamy and hot with the sweat of the earth. He flipped on the flashlight with trembling hands and followed its narrow beam with his eyes. The place was almost like a room in the side of the hill, a room perhaps seven feet high, with a floor of mud and ooze that seemed almost to bubble as he watched.
“Come on,” he said softly, almost to himself. “I know you’re there. You’ve got to be there.”
And then he saw it, rising slowly from the ooze. A shapeless thing without a face, a thing that moved so slowly it might have been dead. An old, very old thing. For a long time he watched it, unable to move, unable to cry out. And even as he watched, the thing settled back softly into the ooze, as ifeven this small exertion had tired it.
“Rest,” he said, very quietly. “We are all so old now.”
And then he made his way back out of the cave, along the stream, and finally pulled himself from the clinging ooze. The ancient woman was still waiting on the bank, with fireflies playing about her in the dusk.
“Did you find anything?” she
asked him.
“Nothing,” he answered.
“Fifty years is a long time. You shouldn’t have come back.”
He sighed and fell into step beside her. “It was something I had to do.”
“Come up to my house, if you want. I can make you a bit of tea.”
His breath was coming better now, and the distance back to the farmhouse seemed shorter than he’d remembered. “I think I’d like that,” he said . . .
Lovers and Other Monsters
Ever since Alfred Hitchcock juxtaposed nudity and knifework in Psycho, lesser filmmakers have been showing us countless unclad damsels bloodily murdered, usually just before or after the act of love—as if feminine sexuality were something deserving punishment. Bluestockings make a lot of fuss about the adolescent inoffensiveness of Playboy centerfolds but seem to ignore the true pornography of such repugnant fare as Friday the 13th, Prom Night and the like. Even Steven Spielberg employed this form of sexploitation in the needlessly graphic opening of Jaws.
Yet the wedding, so to speak, of sensuality and horror is a venerable institution in the literature of the occult and gruesome. Demon lovers, sexy vampires, sadistic spouses, incestuous relatives all appear in the following tales, but mostly I have tried to put the emphasis on the psychological terrors accompanying the concept of love and/or sex in its more frightening permutations.
A few of the stories, notably those by Card, Poe, Lee and Matheson, depend for their power on revenge, mostly prompted by loyalty to a mistreated loved one. These are definitely not for the squeamish.
Sample sparingly from this section. Here there be nightmares!
The late JACK SNOW was a native of Piqua, Ohio, where he was born in 1907. A career in radio led him to New York, where he became an NBC executive. Snow wrote the two most Baumlike sequels to The Wizard of Oz, the eerie Magical Mimics in Oz and The Shaggy Man of Oz, the official rollcall of that wonderful land, Who’s Who in Oz, and a fine short story, “Murder in Oz,” which appeared in Oziana, the official publication of the International Wizard of Oz Society. “The Anchor,” an idyllic but ultimately chilling story, comes from Snow’s scarce collection of fantasy tales, Dark Music.
The Anchor
By Jack Snow
How Ailil loved the beauties of the old lake! Like an ancient well into which flowed the potent spells of the deep forest about it, the hollow of silent, black-shaded water lay motionless in the cup of the woods; a cup of loveliness fit for the lips of strange, forgotten Gods to sip from. As this thought occurred to Ailil he nodded with a pleased little smile. There it lay, cool and limpid as a great glistening jewel mounted in the green filigree of drooping willows that wept their trailing branches about the shore. And behind these loomed the deep shadows of the forest pines, vague and shapeless in the faint moonlight.
Tonight Ailil had rowed to the very center of the lake, and was lying in his tiny boat intoxicating himself with the deep, mad beauty about him. A vast distance over his head, there was a slender crescent moon, and stars glimmered faintly through a thin mist that overhung the lake like a veil, protecting it from ancient eyes that might peer down through the limitless heavens. Night birds cried out their weird notes, strange half human wails that issued from bird throats and blended with the eerie monotony of the thrumming bass of the frogs.
Ailil lay for a long time, listening and watching, curiously alert. He was acutely conscious of the ancient charm of the things about him. And, as in all things that are purely of the earth, there was something faintly sinister, something that grimaced and threatened ever so gently and subtly. Here was majestic, elemental beauty armed with its primeval, overpowering appeal . . . often are the Pipes of Pan heard in salute of a new devotee.
Ailil loved the lake. He loved it as a part of his own life. The thought of ever leaving it, or of ever going very far from it, wounded him like a physical pain. Every night, he slipped away and lay on its bosom, as he was doing tonight, calm, peaceful and quietly happy as he floated amid the deep beauty. Lachrymal fronds of willows drooped about the shore, and thin wisps of spiraling mist rose slowly from the lake’s night blue surface, wavering and gliding.
Occasionally a firefly darted over the water, lighting the scene with the green glow of its cold, phosphorescent fire, and like the symphonic composition of an inspired madman, the base of the frogs and the thin wailing of the swamp birds echoed among the trees.
The soft lapping of the water on the sides of the boat recalled Ailil from his dreaming, and he noticed that his little craft had slowly drifted back toward the shore. Arousing himself, he pulled at the oars which slipped noiselessly through the dark waters, and in a few minutes, he was once more in the center of the lake.
Tonight he was free to dream as long as he wished. He would spend the whole night with this beauty, it would be his first night on the lake. Alone through all the deep hours of the night, and the wan moments of the early dawn, when the sun would mingle mists of grey and gold with the blue of the lake, and the somber green of the trees, he would rest alone and content on the bosom of this wild enchantment that he loved.
Once more in the center of the lake, Ailil lifted an ancient, time-rusted anchor and dropped it over the side of the boat. Silently and quickly it plunged through the dark depths of the water. How deep this ancient well must be! Coil after coil of the rope unwound, jerking and sliding over the side of the boat as if it were being sucked into the depths of a fathomless abyss. Finally, with a slight quiver of the rope, the anchor touched bottom, and Ailil made fast the rope, looping it about a hook on the boat’s side.
With a sigh, he leaned back once more in the soft cushions that padded the hard boards of the crude boat. He thought of nothing, he was content merely to lie there with the calm and peace of the beauty about him. How long he remained thus he did not know. It might have been an hour, or merely minutes, for nothing happened to disturb the tranquillity of the scene. There was nothing to claim his attention other than the strange similarity of the lake to a dark mirror, and the curiously twisted shadows of the willows that kneeled about the shore, trailing their branches in the water.
A huge moth, rising seemingly from nowhere, fluttered past his face, its wings brushing his cheek as it passed in silent flight. The great white wings beat the air like frail shadows as the creature fluttered slowly past him in its curious rising and falling flight. These great night moths always impressed Ailil as an ephemeral part of the night; they seemed almost a bit of the night itself, given life for a few brief hours and then sinking into quick dissolution with the rising of the sun. A faint, indescribable odor of mustiness and age-old strangeness was wafted to Ailil as the creature brushed past him, fluttering toward the tiny cabin which sheltered the opposite end of the boat. The door of the cabin was opened, and drawn by the darkness; the moth fluttered through the opening, and as Ailil watched, became a grey ghost, and then was lost in the gloom of the cabin’s recesses.
Ailil smiled. He would have an interesting trophy of his night on the lake. The creature must have tired its fragile wings with the long flight across the water, and sought the boat for rest. Ailil thought it strange that he should not have noticed it as it approached; he reflected that it seemed almost to have risen from the water beside the boat, so suddenly did it flutter past him. And then the moth was forgotten as Ailil once more contemplated the shore and the grotesquely shaped trunks and branches of the willows which his fancy never tired of endowing with gnarled and twisted natures to correspond with their physical shapes of grotesquerie, emphasized in the diffused moonlight that glimmered through the mist of the lake. Again he dreamed, and again he knew not for how long. Time was nothing. For him it had ceased to be, and he existed as might a ripple on the lake’s surface, or as the willows weeping on the shore.
Slowly Ailil felt himself returning. Gradually his attention was being drawn back to the captivation of his mind and body, while unaccountably the projection of his thoughts into the nothingness of this dark abyss of
beauty was being terminated. With something like annoyance, he realized this, and vaguely he wondered why.
Suddenly he knew! He was not alone. His mind was bright, alert and clear, wiped free of the cobwebs of dreams. Quickly he sat up and stared incredibly toward the cabin at the farther end of the boat.
Seated before the entrance of the cabin, was a young girl. She was merely sitting and staring at him with a wan and curious smile on her pale lips. Masses of golden hair floated down her back, and away from her head, mingling and becoming one with the sheen of the moonlight. The faintest of colors tinged the ivory pallor of her cheeks, and about her lips played the wisp of a smile, as tender and appealing as a child’s.
Ailil could only stare, incredibly. He was overwhelmed in an instant with the loveliness of the picture. It possessed him and filled him with a fascination that held something of awe. He could not speak, and for several minutes he simply sat there and stared at this strange beauty that blended so perfectly with the ancient loveliness of the lake. Here, pictured in the exquisite moldings of human flesh, was a mortal representation of the lake’s eternal charm.
And then, a thousand thoughts began whirling in wildest confusion in Ailil’s mind. How did she get here? Who was she? Why was she here? The very commonplaceness of these riddles served to bring him closer to reality, and he realized that the girl must have hidden herself in the cabin of the boat. She could easily have escaped notice, since he never used the cabin except in the daytime, and for storage. Once more, he gazed at her. What a lovely stowaway she was! She had risen from her seat at the end of the boat, and was making her way toward him. The touch of her filmy white dress, brushing him, as she seated herself beside him, was like the trailing garment of a water Goddess, an Amphitrite with all the ancient charms of the seas at her command. Her closeness was overpowering, intoxicating to Ailil’s beauty-drugged senses.
Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural Page 17