by Bob Leman
Thus he had plenty of time for me. He taught me the rudiments of golf that summer (it was now five years since the marriage), and a good deal about guns, and made of me an excellent rider, for my age. He owned three very fine hunters, and one of them, a bay mare grown placid with age, was temporarily mine. We spent a great many afternoons perfecting my seat and practicing low jumps, and at least once a week we would pack a lunch and spend the day on horseback, exploring the dusty back roads of the county. It was during one of these rides that he told me about the feesters.
We were riding that day up a disused road called Dexter Lane, a narrow strip of soft white dust that climbed crookedly through a forest of pin oak and locust to the three abandoned mountain farms it had once served. The day was hot, and we rode at a peaceful walk, to the agreeable sounds of slow hooves in the dust and birdsong from the branches.
My eye was caught by the entrance to a road that seemed even more sunken in desuetude than Dexter Lane. "Hey, Uncle Caleb," I sang out, "where's that road go?"
"That?" he said. "Why, that's the back road down to Howard's Lake."
"A lake? Can we go down there to eat our lunch? Can we, Uncle Caleb?"
He hesitated, and then said, "Why not?" We turned the horses in at the old road and began the descent. The road fell steeply, zigzagging in sharp switchbacks; I do not believe that a car could have negotiated it even in its best days. Years of erosion had cut a complicated system of foot-deep gullies, which sometimes followed the direction of the road and sometimes cut across it, so that we had to watch very carefully where the horses placed their feet. The trees grew more thickly here, their lowest branches spanned the road not far above our heads, so that we traveled in a twisting green tunnel. A silent tunnel, I suddenly realized: the normal small noises of the forest had unaccountably ceased. The only sound was the soft thud of hooves and the creak of our leather.
We emerged from the trees quite suddenly, into bright noon sunlight. We had come into a steep clearing, and from our position on its upper side we were looking over treetops down to the lake below and the house that stood beside it.
They were black. The lake lay like an irregular slab of polished anthracite, utterly black, utterly without motion, utterly lifeless except for the profusion of coarse hairy weeds that blanketed the hundred yards or so between the' edge of the water and the edge of the woods. Across the lake the house rose from the weeds, a building disproportionately narrow and tall, topheavy somehow four stories high and two rooms wide. It was built of black stone, great heavy blocks that would perhaps have suited a manor house of ducal dimensions, but which, in this gaunt structure, conveyed an unpleasant sense of materials ill-used and weight wholly at variance with size. The weeds grew close all around it; there were no outbuildings. It towered in silent paradox there beside the black dead lake, grotesque and menacing.
"Boy," I said. "Boy. That's pretty spooky, Uncle Caleb. Who lived there?" I said "lived." It was clear that the house had been uninhabited for a long time. It was in excellent condition, though. No vandals had sported here.
"Feester," Uncle Caleb said. "Captain Elihu Feester. Shall we have our lunch now?"
We moved back into the shade of the outermost trees and tethered the horses, and then, as we ate our sandwiches and apples, Uncle Caleb told me what he knew or had invented about Elihu Feester and the feesters in the lake.
When Uncle Caleb told me a story, I never asked whether it was true or made up. It never occurred to me to ask how he had come to learn of Captain Elihu's disastrous voyage and all the events preceding his arrival in Sturkeyville, or how he was able to describe in such detail the grisly metamorphoses that were visited upon Feester's family. Fact or embroidery, it was all part of the story, part of the spell Uncle Caleb wove around me that day. Those poor doomed children came alive for me, they and their crazed mother, immured in the gloom of the locked and shuttered house, creeping with sticky sounds through the airless hot darkness of its hallways, struggling against the lure of the black waters of the lake just beyond the door. They were quite innocent, then, and so was their wretched mother, and even Captain Elihu was guilty of nothing more than theft from simple savages, an act not counted a great crime in those times.
That was what Feester had done, Uncle Caleb said. He had stolen treasure of some sort from the inhabitants of that remote South Sea island. And with the treasure he took, all unknowing, something dreadful: a curse, as the superstitious would have it, or, alternately, in the opinion of the more enlightened (among whom Uncle Caleb included himself), a microbe or enzyme or something else that would no doubt in due course be susceptible of scientific explanation.
Whatever it was, it turned human beings into something quite inhuman and thoroughly dangerous, and by the time Feester's travels brought him to Sturkeyville he had experienced things that might well have driven him into lunacy. Perhaps they had, but if so, he concealed it well. He arrived in town with style and elan, riding a spirited horse and bringing with him a heavy wagon driven by a burly man who carried a pistol in his pocket and never strayed more than a few feet from the wagon by day or night. Feester took a room in the hotel and began to explore the countryside, each day taking a different road out of town. Each evening he dined at the hotel and then entered the bar to spend a couple of hours drinking the famous local rye whiskey and conversing with the inquisitive regulars. He was genial enough, but conveyed a minimum of information: his name was Feester; he was retired; he was looking for a quiet place to settle down and enjoy his retirement; yes, he thought it might be here.
He extracted more information than he dispensed, and by the end of a week he had learned a good deal about the people of the town and the geography of the county. He had also, it transpired, selected a location for his house. One morning he turned up at the bank and spent several hours with Ezra Stallworth; before the day was out, he had duly recorded a deed to the old Phillips place, twelve hundred acres of steep forest land surrounding Howard's Lake. The town observed with interest Stallworth's respectful — indeed, almost obsequious — manner toward Feester and drew the obvious conclusion: Feester was very rich. It was said that he had paid spot cash in gold, counting off the coins from a heap dumped out of a heavy leather grip onto Stallworth's table, and that the pile was hardly diminished by removal of the substantial sum paid for the acreage. The rest of the gold, gossip had it, was left with Stallworth on deposit. It seemed likely. Certainly, from that day on, Stallworth became Feester's sponsor in the town, and, in due course, when Feester began to pay court to Agatha, Stallworth extended every possible encouragement. But then Stallworth would have encouraged Agatha to marry a toad, the town said, if the toad had enough money.
Feester continued to live in the hotel while the house was being built. The burly man left town, and the wagon stood empty behind the livery stable, its contents unloaded one night and hidden, presumably somewhere on the Phillips place. The house grew slowly and expensively beside the lake, much visited by Sunday-aftemoon buggy riders who had heard rumors of its surpassing ugliness. It was finished at last, and wagon loads of furniture were moved into it, and on a rainy morning in April Agatha Stallworth, spinster, and Elihu Feester, bachelor, were united in holy matrimony at St. David's Church.
They were not a romantic couple. The bride was pushing thirty and had inherited the craggy Stallworth look, and the groom, two inches shorter and square in build, wore a seafaring beard that seemed to Sturkeyville to be more than a little raffish. But they appeared to be fond enough of each other, and they lost no time in populating the strange house by the lake with children, four little girls born by the time they had been four years married. Feester, in naming them, displayed an unexpected touch of classical learning: he called them Clio, Thalia, Urania, and Polyhymnia, causing a minor scandal by the outlandish names. By the time Polyhymnia was born, Clio had begun to change.
Because it was still there, the old curse or disease. If it was a disease, Feester was only a carrier, not subject to
the symptoms but infecting those around him; and if a curse, then one that doomed him to remain free of the horror but compelled to watch as it destroyed first his crew, and now his family. Little Clio's sturdy legs, just coming fully under her control, and much used for running and jumping, became traitors; they bent at odd angles and would not support her weight. Her bones were softening; not just in her legs, but all the bones of her body, becoming not bone but flexible cartilage or baleen. Her small, even teeth fell out and were swiftly replaced by new ones, twice as many as she had had before, crooked, crowded and pointed, changing the shape of her softened jaw. Her skin turned deadly pale, and then a sick frog-belly white. Her legs began to fuse together, and her arms to fuse to her sides.
That was the beginning. It was to be several years before the change was complete, but it proceeded steadily and inexorably through all those years. Clearly, it moved more slowly in children than in adults; on the ship, as Feester's crew was stricken one by one, it had been only a matter of weeks from the first onset to full, feral metamorphosis, only weeks from the first weakness of the legs to the time when they slipped overboard to assume the life of the sea creatures they had become, or began to try to devour their shipmates and had to be shot.
Each of the children began at an age earlier than her next older sister; the baby Polyhymnia never in all her life had legs that could walk. Perhaps she was never in her life truly human. By the time Clio was six the change was equally advanced in all of them, and almost complete; they continued to grow, but they were now what they would be when they achieved full size. And they were probably already dangerous.
But Agatha never accepted that. Indeed, it remains a question whether she accepted even the fact of the changes that were occurring before her eyes. Her behavior suggests that she had removed herself entirely from reality. She seemed to believe that the pallid cylinders humping wetly across the floors of the dark house (dark because their great lidless eyes could not abide light) were still her four little girls, to be played with and sung to and tucked in at bedtime.
Feester no doubt attempted to reason with her, but there was no possibility that he could say anything capable of penetrating her madness. The more urgent he became, the more she perceived him as a monster, a Saturn bent upon the destruction of his own offspring. But some part of her understood quite well that there was absolutely no way for her to flee with these children, and she never attempted it; instead she created for herself a state of siege, setting up an ingenious system of barricades and locked doors that made a redoubt of the cellar and several ground-floor rooms. Here she lived in the dark in -perpetual terror, lavishing love and tenderness upon the four small horrors that had been her children, crooning children's songs to them in the clammy blackness of a cave-like room in the cellar which had come to be their lair.
One can imagine a desperate Feester prowling at night through his part of the house, scourged by an absolute conviction that the creatures must be destroyed and simultaneously stretched on the rack of an agonized and hopeless grief for his lost children. He wept sometimes, it may be supposed, or raged incontinently and cursed God for allowing his ship to survive the storm. He temporized and procrastinated. And in the end he waited too long, and it was too late.
"It was toooo late," Uncle Caleb said and fell silent. It was a storyteller's trick. He was waiting for me to say, "Why? Why was it too late? What happened?" And of course I said it: "What happened?"
"Well, no one knows, really," he said. "Of course no one ever saw Agatha again. I think we have to conclude that they ate her. And then, it seems, they left the house and went into the lake, down into that black water, down to live in the mud where they were meant to live. And there they live to this very day. "
It was very dramatic, and very well done, and despite any theories about the proper setting for the narration of a spooky story, it seemed to me at that moment that I was in just exactly the right place to enjoy the maximum thrill from this one. Looking down at that blind, black house I found myself elaborating and enlarging upon Uncle Caleb's brisk summation of those last events, wondering whether Agatha, in her last desperate seconds, beset by greedy teeth, might have had a flash of bright, hard sanity and realized, in her moment of lucidity before the final darkness took her, that these were not —were not by any means— her children. And it seemed to me quite easy to visualize the flight after the feast: the silent opening of a ground-floor door and the faint gleam of four pale shapes in the darkness moving soundlessly across the weeds to slide without splashing into the black water. And in the house, silence.
***
We led the horses back up to Dexter Lane and mounted. Uncle Caleb said, "Shall we go on to the end of the road?"
"What's up there?" I asked.
"Three farms. All abandoned for, oh, forty years. Kraft, MacTavish and Love were the farmers. The Krafts and the MacTavishes are farming over in the valley now, but I don't know what became of the Loves. Nobody will farm those places any more. They've got a reputation for being hard-luck farms. Something to do with the feesters in the lake, I imagine."
"Aw, come on, Uncle Caleb. There aren't really any feesters, are there?"
He grinned. "Why, I think you'll have to make up your own mind about that one, Nick. But I'll tell you this: there was indeed a man named Elihu Feester, and he built that house and married Agatha Stallworth and had four daughters. And it's in the archives that Agatha and the four daughter disappeared. Feester reported to the sheriff that Agatha had taken the children and run away. Stallworth backed him up, and the story was accepted, if not necessarily believed in all quarters. As to the curse and monsters in the lake — a good many people in the county believe it."
"But you don't, do you, Uncle Caleb?"
He continued to grin. "I always keep an open mind, Nick. " There are more things... " — you know the quotation. Who can say?"
By unspoken mutual consent we had turned the horses toward home. Being pointed toward the stables aroused thoughts of oats in their heads, and despite the heat they tended to insist on trotting. Even this unaccustomed liveliness in my old Salome did not wholly take my mind off the feesters, however, and after a while I said, "Well, I know stuff like that's just in stories. Or movies. Not in Sturkeyville."
"But you'd like to believe it, is that it?"
"Well, you know. The house and the lake. They're really spooky, boy. You can believe it when you look at them."
Uncle Caleb said, "They belong to your grandfather, you know. The house and the lake. They still call it the Phillips place. For some reason it never did get to be called the Feester place.”
"Grandpa? Grandpa owns it?"
"He does. And one of these days I'll own it."
"Gosh. Gosh. What'll you do with it, Uncle Caleb?"
"Why, nothing. Absolutely nothing at all. Except pay the taxes. That was your great-grandfather's arrangement with Captain Feester."
"Hey," I said. "Wait a minute. You never told me that part."
"So I didn't," he said. "I'll tell you now. A postscript, really." He paused. "Feester went away not too long after that. Went away, and wasn't seen or heard of again. He told your greatgrandfather that he was accursed, that he would have to go where there were no people, and he needed legal advice before he went. The arrangement he wanted to make was this: he asked your great-grandfather to take the proper legal steps to insure that the house and the lake would stay undisturbed for as long as possible — forever, if that could be done. But there was no such thing as the modem trust in those days, and the law forbade entail. So there appeared to be no way to accomplish what he wanted. The upshot finally was that the two men shook hands on a gentlemen's agreement: Feester would deed the land to your great-grandfather in exchange for his word that the property would be kept in the Scoggins family in perpetuity, if possible, and that it would be kept forever undisturbed. The idea was that each Scoggins would deed the property to his eldest son as soon as the son was of responsible age and temperame
nt, and that the sons were to be impressed with the importance of preserving things as they were.
"Some money went with the deal. Quite a lot of money, apparently. The Scoggins money dates from then. It seems that Feesters gold had arrived just in time to save Stallworth's bank from some sort of fatal default that had resulted from old Ezra's loony stubbornness, and Feester had taken a controlling interest in the bank in exchange. Your great-grandfather got Feesters stock in the bank, and Lawyer Scoggins was suddenly in the banking business. He was good at it too, and greedy, and he tended to keep properties he foreclosed. So by the time two or three panics had come and gone he owned a fair percentage of this end of the county. We still have most of it.
"And so in a few years your grandfather will be making a deed to me, and then it'll be my responsibility to see that everything is preserved intact. And to begin to think about what to do about the next generation."
He fell silent. I was riding a little in the lead, and I turned to look at him. On his face was an expression I had never seen him wear before, an expression, I now realized, of an emotion very close to despair. I knew, from overhead parental conversations, something about his loss of Dorothy Hodge, and I was able to make the connection between that and the remark about the next generation. I blurted, "You mean you're never going to get married, Uncle Caleb?”
The bleak look intensified for a moment and then disappeared, and he grinned again. "Oh, I wouldn't say that, Nick. Time will tell. But if it should happen that I don't marry, I expect you've figured out that you're next in line. In twenty or thirty years I may well be deeding the place to you."