“Hear that?”
McIntyre sat up in bed. The moonlight outlined Sean standing in front of the window. The house was quiet. The woods were quiet. All McIntyre heard were the waves lapping against the shore. “No.”
“There’s something downstairs.”
“It’s probably a raccoon.”
“Yeah, probably.”
McIntyre lay back down, wishing Sean would leave so that he could investigate. Below them, a chair scraped across the linoleum. “Whatever it is,” Sean whispered. “It sure wants to get caught.” McIntyre frowned and rolled out of bed. He padded barefoot across the hall and grabbed the hunting rifle. The gun wasn’t loaded, but no one had to know that. It was big enough to scare a person, and his presence was enough to frighten a raccoon. He didn’t want to think about the possibility of the noise being anything else.
He started down the spiral staircase. Sean was right behind him. “No,” McIntyre whispered. “I’m going alone.”
“No, you’re not,” Sean said. He followed his father down the iron stairs and into the kitchen. Nothing moved in the darkness. McIntyre flicked on the light.
The screen door stood open and the garbage pail had been tipped over. Garbage covered the floor. McIntyre relaxed. “We’ve got to find a better way to store that shit.”
He turned toward Sean. His son was staring at the refrigerator. There was a tiny, bloody handprint on the freezer door.
Elmira, Wisconsin
October 20, 1976
“I wonder which one of us it’s come for,” McIntyre’s grandfather said. He stuck a finger in the footprint. “Blood’s still wet.” McIntyre started up the porch steps. Grandfather grabbed his arm. “Don’t tell me you haven’t seen ’em, Davie. They come after a McIntyre has his first woman and they stay with him until he dies.”
McIntyre wrenched his arm free. The children he had seen over the years—and killed—had been nightmares. Figures of his imagination taking form in the daylight.
“Running from me won’t help either of us, Davie. They may kill our lovers, but it’s the McIntyres they want.”
McIntyre turned. His grandfather stood beside the bloody footprint. The old man’s eyes still twinkled with intelligence.
“What do they want us for?” McIntyre whispered.
“I never took the time to ask one of them.” The old man pulled himself up the porch steps. “But they’ve been there ever since I slept with Tina Wood sixty years ago. And I know your daddy started seeing ’em after he started seeing your ma. And I don’t know about you. You kept it real quiet and if you hadn’ta run right now, I would have guessed you hadn’ta seen ’em at all.”
“What are they?”
His grandfather shrugged. “Children. I think they’re just children.”
“It makes no sense.”
“Maybe not. But they follow rules, Davie. They hunt alone. If you kill one of theirs, they kill one of yours. If you don’t kill them, they kill you. Either way, you don’t win.”
McIntyre frowned. “You ever tried letting them be?”
“No.” The old man took a deep breath. “But I think your daddy did.”
The thought made McIntyre ache. He opened the door and let himself inside. His grandfather’s house smelled like leather and old books.
“Davie,” his grandfather said. “We got a better chance together than we do by ourselves.”
“I’ll be right back,” McIntyre said. He ran toward his grandfather’s bedroom, opened the closet and pulled out the old deer rifle. He had to dig for the bullets. He loaded the gun and then ran back for the porch. When he reached the dining room, he heard a scream and a thud. Gingerly he opened the door. His grandfather’s heels rested on the top step. His grandfather’s head lay in a pool of blood on the concrete sidewalk.
Bear Trap Lake
June 17, 1987
“You know what these things are, don’t you, Dad?”
McIntyre didn’t answer. He grabbed Sean’s elbow to keep them together. “We’re going to go back upstairs and get the bullets,” McIntyre said. “This time we’re going to do it right.”
“Dad?”
Metal clanged in the utility room. Suddenly McIntyre knew where the creature was. Sean yanked his arm free and ran in the direction of the noise. Then the lights went out.
“Sean?” McIntyre’s voice sounded hollow in the quiet room. He heard a rustle off to his left.
“It’s okay, Dad. I’m coming back toward you. Just stay still, okay?”
“All right, Sean.”
McIntyre was holding his breath. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see Sean make his way across the kitchen floor. Behind the boy, a shadow moved. McIntyre opened his mouth to shout a warning, but Sean screamed first. McIntyre started toward his son, thinking that they couldn’t kill Seanie. It wasn’t fair that they killed Seanie. McIntyre couldn’t have protected himself from them this long only to have them kill his son.
Something leaped onto McIntyre’s back. Sharp claws digging into his sunburn made him cry out. He whirled, trying to shake the thing off of him, catching its slightly musty odor every time he moved. He slammed into the counter and the creature let go. McIntyre turned and the creature reached for his face, its claws narrowly missing his eyes. McIntyre grabbed the creature’s arms, squeezing them until he felt bones snap. The creature screamed, and McIntyre dropped it. It landed heavily on the floor and then ran out into the darkness.
“Sean?” McIntyre called.
He saw his son in the moonlight, lying in the same position they had found his mother in.
“Seanie?”
McIntyre knelt beside Sean and touched his face. McIntyre’s fingers came away sticky with blood. Goddammit, he thought. He had let that one go free, and Seanie was still dead.
Fond du Lac, Wisconsin
February 26, 1966
McIntyre’s father knelt beside the crumpled body. McIntyre stood beside him.
“I can only tell you this once, Davie,” his father said. “You see one of these, you leave it alone. You don’t touch it. After tonight, the score will be even. And if one comes after you, you let it. You may not save yourself, but you’ll save a lot of others. You understand me, David?” McIntyre looked at his father’s face. The older man was serious. “Yeah, Dad,” McIntyre said. “I understand.”
His dad went to the shed to get a shovel so that they could dispose of the creature. McIntyre knelt beside the tiny body and noted how the skin along the back of its head flapped open, how the bones splintered and mixed with its grey brain tissue, how its blood melted the snow. He memorized the details because he knew he would never see anything like it again.
Sea Gulls
Gahan Wilson
When I last saw Gahan Wilson, the great cartoonist was displaying a sign with my name and I was holding one bearing his, for the photographer. We were in Columbus, Ohio, where a poster (“Mindkind”) for which Wilson had provided the illustration and I the text was being offered. Of course, his reasons for being there included the chance he had to return to Thurber House. Fast growing Columbus was home to the nonpareil writer and cartoonist James Thurber, an idol of Gahan’s and, I might add, mine. (It was Jim who reminded us all, “You can’t very well be the king of the beasts if there aren’t any.”)
While in Columbus, the Jim Kisners and Williamsons introduced the creator of Twilight Zone’s film column to a chocolatey concoction called a “Frostee.” Gahan liked it, thereby making it unlikely that he’s exactly what old Jim called a “smugbottle”: a man who boasts of his knowledge of wines (also Thurberized as a “fuss-grape”), this story notwithstanding.
A real delight of the first Masques was “The Substitute” and here, in his return to this series, is another new Gahan Wilson treat that goes down as easily as if it were made of the smoothest custard. It’s so cunningly illustrative one’s imagination easily visualizes the artist’s own drawings—in particular near the end of “Sea Gulls” when I imagined I wa
s looking at a perfect panel of Gahan’s.
You may wish to keep in mind another Thurber quotation when you’ve devoured this deft delectation: “Never be mean to a tiger’s wife, especially if you’re the tiger.”
I have been sitting here, throughout this entire morning, watching the gulls watching me. They come, a small group at a time, carefully unnoticeable, and squat on various branches of a large tree opposite the hotel veranda. When each shift of them have gaped their fill of me, they fly away and their places are taken at once by others of their disgusting species.
Outside of their orderly coming and going, the deportment of these feathered spectators of my discomfort has been calculatedly devoid of anything which might excite the attention of anyone lacking my particular and special knowledge of their loathsome kind. Their demeanor has been more than ordinarily ordinary. They are on their best behavior, now they have sealed my doom.
I stumbled on their true nature, and I curse the day I did, by a complete fluke. It was, ironically, Geraldine herself who called my attention to that little army of them on the beach.
We had been sitting side by side on a large, sun-warmed rock, I in a precise but somewhat Redonesque pose, Geraldine in her usual, space-occupying, sprawl. I was deep in a poetic revery, reflecting on the almost alchemical transition of sand to water to sky while Geraldine, my wife, was absorbed in completely finishing off the sumptuous but rather over-large picnic the hotel staff had prepared for our outing, when she abruptly straightened, a half consumed jar of pate clutched forgotten in her greasy fingers, and suddenly emitted that barking coo of hers which has never failed to simultaneously startle and annoy me throughout all the years of our marriage.
“Hughie, look!” she cried. “The gulls are marching!”
“What do you mean, ‘marching’?” I asked, doing what I could to conceal my annoyance.
“I mean they’re marching, Hughie,” she said. “I mean they are marching!”
I looked where she pointed, the pate jar still in her hand, and a vague complaint died unspoken on my lips as I observed that Geraldine had been scrupulously correct in her announcement. The gulls were, indeed, marching.
Their formation was about ten files wide and some forty ranks deep, and it was well held, with no raggedness about the edges. A line of five or so officer gulls marched at the army’s head, and one solitary gull, I assumed their general, marched ahead of them.
The gull general was considerably larger than the other birds, and he had an imposing, eagle-like bearing to him. His army was obviously well drilled, for all the gulls marched in perfect step on their orange claws, and seemed capable of neatly executing endless elaborate maneuvers.
Geraldine and I watched, fascinated, for as long as ten minutes, observing the creatures wheeling about, splitting and rejoining, and carrying out whole routines of complicated, weaving patterns. The display was so astoundingly absorbing that it took me quite some time to realize the fantastic impropriety of the whole proceeding, but at last it dawned on me.
“This will never do,” I observed in a firm, quiet tone, and carefully placing my cigar on the edge of the rock, I selected a large, smooth stone and hefted it in my hand.
“Hughie!” Geraldine cried, observing the rock and the look of grim determination on my face. “What are you planning to do?”
“We must discourage this sort of thing the instant we see it,” I said. “We must nip it in the bud.”
I shot the stone into their midst and they scattered, squawking in a highly satisfactory fashion. I threw another stone, this one rather pointy, and had the pleasure of striking the general smartly on his rear. I turned to Geraldine, expecting words of praise, but of course I should have known better.
“You should not hurt dumb animals,” she said, regarding me gently but mournfully as a mother might regard a backward child. “Look, you have made that big one limp!”
“Gulls are birds, not animals,” I pointed out. “And their behavior was far from dumb. It was, if you ask me, altogether too smart.” My cigar had gone out so I lit another one, using the gold lighter she had given me a day or so before, and I was so piqued at her that I was tempted to ostentatiously throw it away as casually as I would a match, but she would only have forgiven me with a little sigh and bought me another. I would only be like an infant knocking objects off the tray of his high chair, its bowls and cups replaced with loving care. I had learned, through the years, that there really was no way to get one’s rage through to Geraldine.
That night, as we were having dinner on the terrace of the hotel, Geraldine stared out into the darkness and once again drew my attention to an odd action on the part of the gulls. This time her tiny little bark caught me with a spoonful of consommé halfway to my lips, and when I started at the sudden sound, a shimmering blob of the stuff tumbled back into the bowl with a tiny plop.
“The gulls, Hughie,” she said, in a loud, dramatic whisper as she reached out and tightly clutched my arm. “See how they are staring at you!”
I frowned at her.
“Gulls?” I said. “It’s night, my dear. One doesn’t see gulls at night. They go somewhere.”
But then I peered where she had pointed, and I saw that once again she was right. There, in the branches of the tree which I have mentioned before, were in view perhaps as many as thirty gulls staring at us, or more precisely at me, with their cold, beady little eyes.
“There must be hundreds of them!” she whispered. “They’re everywhere!”
Again she was quite correct. The creatures were not only in the tree, they were perched on railings, stone vases, the heads of statues, and all the various other accoutrements with which a first-class, traditional French seaboard hotel is wont to litter its premises. They were all, to the last gull among them, staring steadily and unblinkingly at me.
“Do you think,” I whispered very quietly to Geraldine, “that anyone else has noticed?”
“I don’t believe so,” she said, and turned to openly study the people sitting at neighboring tables. “Should we ask them if they have?”
“For God’s sake, no!” I said, in a harsh whisper. “What do you think it looks like—being singled out by crowds of gulls to be stared at? How do you think it makes me feel?”
“Of course, Hughie,” she said, loosing her hold on my arm and patting my hand. “Don’t you worry, dearest. We shall just pretend it isn’t happening.”
Halfway through the wretched dinner the gulls flew off for mysterious reasons of their own, and when it was through I made my excuses and left my wife to attend to herself while I took a thoughtful little stroll.
I had some time ago sketched out the broad design of what I intended to do during our visit to this hotel; had, indeed, begun to plan it the very day Geraldine suggested we come here to celebrate our wedding anniversary, because it had dawned on me even as she spoke, fatally and completely and quite irreversibly, that we had already celebrated far too many anniversaries and that this one should definitely be our last.
But now it was time to put in the fine details, the small, delicate strokes which would spell the difference between disaster and success. Eliminating Geraldine would serve very little purpose if I did not survive the act to enjoy her money afterwards.
I wandered down to the canopied pier where I knew the hotel moored several, brightly-painted little rowboats, and even a couple of dwarfish sailboats, for the use of their guests. I knew full well that the sailboats would strike Geraldine as being far too adventurous, so I concentrated on examining the rowboats.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they were even more unseaworthy than I’d dared to hope. I quietly tested them, one after the other, and found that the boat at the end of the pier, a jaunty little thing with a puce hull and a bright gold stripe running around its sides, was especially dangerous. I felt absolutely confident the police would have no trouble at all in convincing themselves that any drowning fatality associated with this highly tippy boat had be
en the result of a tragic accident.
Just to make sure—I have been accused of being something of a perfectionist—I climbed into the tiny craft, pretended I was rowing, and then suddenly made a move to one side. The boat came so close to capsizing that I had considerable difficulty avoiding unexpectedly tumbling out of it then and there! I exited the craft carefully, with even more respect for its deadliness, and started walking up the path leading back to the hotel, whistling a little snatch of a Chopin mazurka softly to myself as I went.
The path took a turn by a kind of miniature cliff which concealed it from almost all points of view and when I reached this point the mazurka died on my lips as I saw that the ground before me was lumpy and grayish in the moonlight as though it was infested with some sort of disgusting mold, but then I peered closer and saw that the place was horribly carpeted with the softly stirring bodies of countless sea gulls.
They were crowded together, so tightly packed that there was absolutely no space between them, and every one of them was glaring up at me. The menace emanating from their hundreds of tiny eyes was, at the same time, both ridiculous and totally terrifying. It was also positively sickening, and for a brief, absolutely ghastly moment I was afraid that I would faint and fall and be suffocated in the soft, feathery sea of them.
However, I took several very deep breaths and managed to still the pounding in my ears and to steady myself. With great casualness, very slowly and deliberately, I reached into my breast pocket and withdrew a cigar. I lit the cigar and blew a contemptuous puff of smoke at the enormous crowd of gulls at my feet.
“You have exceeded your position in life,” I told them, speaking softly and calmly. “You have overstepped your natural authority. But I am on to you.”
I drew on the cigar carefully, increasing its ash, and when I’d produced a good half inch, I tapped the cigar so that the ash fell directly and humiliatingly on the top of the head of the remarkably large gull standing directly in front of me. Of course I had recognized him as the general. He did not stir nor blink, nor did any of the others. They continued to glare up at me.
Masques IV Page 5