by Bob Leman
"I want you to do the right thing, Uncle Caleb," I said. "You know what it is. I've brought the pistol."
I heard a strange little sound that could have been either a whimper or a giggle. "Now why should I do a thing like that?" he said.
"You know why. You knew I'd be here. You were expecting me, weren't you?" He made no answer. I said, "We had an understanding. I believed you, God help me. And now there's another corpse up in town. Or part of a corpse. But it's the last one, Uncle Caleb. You can be very sure that it's the last one."
Silence again, and then the eerie voice out of the shadows: "That's got nothing to do with me. It's the feesters, Nick. The feesters."
"Yes, of course," I said. "But tell me, Uncle Caleb: does it seem to you that you know how it happened? Do you have a picture in your mind — something that seems almost like a memory — of what happened in the parking lot? As though maybe you know what the feesters are doing, are thinking?"
I was being the amateur psychiatrist, but I was at least partly right. He said, "Yes. Yes. Of course. I knew they were going to do it as soon as they started to think about it. I wished they'd stop thinking about it, but they wouldn't. And finally they did it. And it was awful. Nick, it was awful."
"Yes," I said. "You know you're going to have to do it, don’t you, Uncle Caleb? You know it's the only thing that will make the feesters stop, don't you?"
There was only silence. I said, "Come out into the light, now, Uncle Caleb. It's time. You know it's time."
I heard it again, then, the noise I had heard in the hall, but still I saw only shadows. And then I looked down.
He was on the floor, wriggling out of the shadows into the small pool of light at my feet, naked, dead-white, moving like a worm on his belly. His arms were held tight against his sides, his legs were squeezed tightly together. He twisted his head to look up at me from the floor, and the wild growth of hair on his head and face, still the same straw color it had always been, looked very dark against his extraordinary pallor. The great round eyes glowed in the faint lamplight like a nocturnal animal's. Within the tangle of facial hair his teeth gleamed in what could have been either a smile or a snarl.
It was as horrifying a sight as I ever expect to see, both frightening and pitiful; but it was also more than a little ludicrous, and it was that fact that enabled me to hold fast to my resolution and do what had to be done. I said, "Oh, Uncle Caleb." And then: "Here’s the gun, Uncle Caleb."
The teeth flashed yellow in the lamplight. "You know I can't use a gun, Nick. I haven't got any hands. Or arms."
"Or legs, I suppose," I said.
"That's right. No arms or legs. But I can get around all right."
"Yes," I said. "I know. You can indeed." I thought about it for a moment. I said, "Do you suppose you could pretend or imagine — just for a minute or so — that you have an arm and a hand? If I left the gun on the floor?"
This time when he spoke the voice had changed; under the toneless quack was a faint ghost of the voice of my own Uncle Caleb, and I swallowed. He said, "No. No. I can't take the gun. But you're right. I've thought about it. The feesters have to be stopped. You'll want to be here won't you. To be sure that I do it. I'll do it now. But another way. Open the door for me, Nick. I can’t, you know."
I might have asked him how he had opened it to let me in, but scoring debater points was not what I had come for, and in any case I suppose he would have found the question meaningless. I took the lamp and went to the front
door and opened it.
There was a moon at the gibbous stage; it threw a pale oblong of light into the hallway. I extinguished the lamp and went down the steps and a little way out into the weeds. I stood there in the warm night watching the door.
In a little while he came out, a whiteness that bulged suddenly across the threshold and then moved in a silent squirm down the steps and away from the house. And then he was gone, a gleam of white humping with quite astonishing speed in the dim light toward the blackness of the lake. As he reached the edge, I called out, "Goodbye, Uncle Caleb."
There was no reply, only a small splash as the white shape disappeared into the water. And then silence. I walked back to the car and drove into town. On the way I stopped and parked at the side of the road for perhaps half an hour while I gave way to an unseemly emotional fit, howling and weeping and pounding on the steering wheel. When it was over I went to the sheriff's office and reported that I had been to the house, where I had discovered the door standing open and Uncle Caleb nowhere to be found. The sheriff said that he was not surprised and that he would investigate.
He was not surprised, and not much interested, either; and in Sturkeyville the name of Scoggins ended that night as an item of routine police business, a dingy and discreditable end for a proud name. The investigation
was hasty and perfunctory: an inadequate search of the woods, and an attempt to drag the lake, which proved to be impossible because it was found to be very much deeper than anyone had suspected. A missing-person bulletin was circulated. A watch was kept on the lake for a while, to see if a body would surface, but it never did.
In due course there was a memorial service at St. David's. I sat sedately through it, remembering strange things. Afterward elderly people came to me and talked about the old days, when they and Uncle Caleb were young and the world was bright. Their conventional nostalgia evoked my own memories of enchanted summers on horseback in the hills above Sturkeyville before the shadows closed in upon Uncle Caleb, and an access of regret and grief and guilt seized and shook me. I might reason that what had occurred was no more than the timely suicide of a homicidal maniac, but what I felt was a terrible sense of loss.
I still feel that loss. It is more than a decade, now, since Uncle Caleb died, and I am a man closer to old age than middle, and Sturkeyville itself has changed almost beyond recognition, but I have noticed of late that my reveries increasingly tend to dwell upon those boyhood summers with Uncle Caleb. There is, of course, a proximate cause: it has now become imperative that I decide what I am going to do about the Phillips place and the lake.
It will be my decision, and mine alone; I did, in the end, record Uncle Caleb's deed, and the property is mine in fee simple, the land and the lake. But not the house; I had it pulled down after Uncle Caleb's death, and its stones hauled away. The weeds grow uninterrupted now around the silent lake.
I have already consulted the Corps of Engineers and a contractor; the lake can be drained. It can be drained and the mud on its bottom exposed to the sun to dry and bake and crack. And anything buried there in the mud will dry and bake as well, and die, if it is alive.
That is the direction in which my mind has been running, the kind of plans I have been making. Sometimes it seems totally irrational, and indeed almost insane; but then I look at what has begun to happen again in Sturkeyville, and I am persuaded that these things must be done.
There have been more of the murders. They are the same in every respect as those of the past, monstrously savage and gruesome, ghastly rendings and mutilations under midnight rainstorms. The theory is that some unbalanced person was pushed over the edge by reading in a true-crime magazine one of the periodic rehashings of the Sturkeyville Butcher murders. It may be true, I hope so. Another maniac seems more acceptable, somehow, than what I have almost begun to believe.
And so I think I will drain the lake.
If nothing else, it will free me of the obsessive imaginings that have plagued me since I first heard of the new murders. I am persistently visited by a terrifying picture, a picture of the lake. I see it from the hillside above, as I first saw it with Uncle Caleb. It is night in this picture, a night of violent summer rain, utterly black except for sudden lightning that sporadically freezes the scene in a momentary white glare. The surface of the lake is churned by rain.
In a flash of lightning I discern four white shapes in the water, making for shore. Moments later, in another flash, I see them squirming and humping through
the weeds away from the lake, the foremost almost at the tree line. I can give them names: Clio, Thalia, Urania, Polyhymnia.
Their name is Feester. Their name is Death.
And the next flash shows the lake as before, black, rain-lashed, lifeless, waiting. They will come back after they have done what they are setting out to do, wriggling back into the black water, sinking into the depths, burrowing into the mud, deep into the cold mud.
That is the vision that obsesses me. It is obviously egregious nonsense, the sort of thing that could be accepted only by the most credulous and superstitious, and I devoutly wish I could exorcise it. But it will not go away.
It will not go away, and indeed it becomes more elaborate. My imagination, fed no doubt by discreditable suppressed guilts and fears, has given the screw at last an unbearable turn, and now, as I lie tensely in bed or sit in my chair gnawing my knuckles, I have begun to imagine that there are not four shapes exposed by the lightning's glare, but five.
And I will not tolerate that. Uncle Caleb, whatever became of his mind, deserves better of me than that. I will drain the lake. I will drain it down to its bottommost mud. And in that mud we will find Uncle Caleb's bones.
I hope very much we will find Uncle Caleb's bones.
Skirmish On Bastable Street
(The Magazine of Fantasy & S.F., June 1981)
Quite recently, in a disreputable bar on Bastable Street in this city, a wino and an elderly couple fought a brisk little skirmish with a supernatural adversary and had the good fortune to prevail. None of the three ever grasped the magnitude of their accomplishment, and indeed they soon forgot what had actually happened, but they had in truth won a laudable small victory in an ancient war, and the facts of the affair deserve to be recorded.
These facts are not verifiable, for reasons that will be obvious, and it must be admitted that many of them have something of the flavor of the bedtime stories of our youth. You are therefore quite at liberty, if you are of a skeptical or cynical turn of mind, to view the following matter as nothing more than a fairy tale. Its beginning is, after all, one of the fairy tale cliches: Once a poor woodcutter named Garft rescued a demon from the deep hole in which it had been confined by an enchantment, and the demon had no choice but to grant him three wishes as a reward. Garft wished first for a long and happy life, and second for a painless end when at last his time came round. Then he was stumped, and he thought about it for so long that the demon became impatient and displayed its true nature by threatening to eat him there and then.
"I'll tell you what," Garft said. "I'll give the other wish to my son, Garft. How would that be?"
"Done!" said the demon, and disappeared.
Garft's calling was chopping trees, not thinking, and so it was not until much later that he realized that the demon had left no instructions about how young Garft Was to avail himself of his wish. No amount of shouting succeeded in causing the demon to reappear, and Garft finally concluded that the problem would have to be turned over to a wiser head. Unfortunately, there was no one in the village whom Garft conceded to be wiser than himself, and he very much doubted that any neighboring village had anyone better to offer.
He mulled over the matter for a considerable time, and the seasons came and went, and then the years. He felt no urgency. Indeed, nothing affected his tranquillity and contentment. The demon had granted his wish for a happy life by the elegant expedient of making him somewhat simple-minded. No matter what misfortune befell him, he remained happy.
Because of this, his son Garft had to assume heavy responsibilities at a very early age. When he was seventeen, there was a winter of famine, and he killed one of the Earl's deer to feed his little brothers and sisters. The deer's hide was found by the Earl's men, and young Garft had to flee, an outlaw.
He fled south and west, living on what small game he could snare, until, in late summer, he found himself in a fat and prosperous countryside where the horses were enormous and the people small and dark. It was there that a petty lord elected, on a whim, to impress young Garft into his service instead of hanging him for a poacher, and a guardsman in the lord's service he remained for the rest of his life. He took a wife and had sons, and in the fullness of time he died, without ever having the wish that was his by birthright.
Now it is a fact that commerce between mortal men and supernatural creatures is regulated by a complex and immutable body of law, and that, once a bargain is struck, irresistible forces see to it that the letter of the law is fulfilled. The law holds, stare decisis, that the words of a contract mean what the mortal party to the contract understood them to mean. In Garft's language the word for "son" meant not only "son," but any male descendant, however remote. The third wish was there for the taking by any descendant of the woodcutter who bore the name Garft.
But young Garft's sons were named Guillaume and Rene, and their sons were Olivier and Robert and Jean. Jean's distant descendant Jean went to England with the Conqueror, and fathered a child upon a Saxon girl. She named the boy John, after Jean, his father. There followed many generations of villeins named John, and then one of the Johns rose in the world and acquired a little silver, and his grandson acquired a little land. In due course the Johnsons became a prosperous yeoman family in Devon.
Late in the seventeenth century a blacksheep son of the family ran off to the American colonies and settled in Boston, Massachusetts. His great-grandson Keble Johnson prospered in the rum trade and helped finance the War for Independence. In the nineteenth century another Keble Johnson lost most of the family fortune playing the railroad game with Jay Gould and J.P. Morgan. Just enough money remained to keep up appearances in a somewhat threadbare way and to send the eldest son to Harvard.
The money ran out in 1904, and the sixth Keble Johnson left Harvard at the end of his sophomore year, with no degree, no money, and no prospects, and no family: his father's liver had given out at about the same time as the money, and his mother died shortly thereafter. His two years of college secured him a job on the Boston Transcript, which he was unable to hold. He became an itinerant newspaperman, drifting westward. He ended his travels in Fowler, Illinois, where he edited The Bedford County Chronicle, married a local girl, and produced a son. This son grew up to manage the local creamery and cultivate a vegetable garden; he left absolutely nothing to show for his sixty years of life except his son George.
George was drafted into the army in 1940, and at the end of the war he brought back to Fowler a bride, a native of the distant northern kingdom where the woodcutter had labored centuries before. When their son was born, she selected for the child a name out of her own racial heritage; she named him Garft. And somewhere, on the boy's Christening day, an ancient record amended itself to show that there was now once more a mortal eligible to claim the outstanding wish.
George Johnson had not amounted to much before he went into the army, and after his return he was, if anything, even less useful. He worked intermittently as an auto mechanic, but most of his time was spent drinking beer at the Moose Club. When Garft was ten, his mother, having had as much as she could take of life in Fowler with George, disappeared. From that time on, Garft was largely on his own.
In high school he excelled in basketball, and upon graduation he was offered room, board, and pocket money to play for a small college in Missouri. After a semester and a half he was fired from the freshman squad, to widespread approbation. He had consistently broken training rules, had missed as many practice sessions as he had attended, and was loathed by every jock in the college. There was no possibility of his staying on as a student, as he had no more bothered to attend classes than basketball practice. He had, however, developed a circle of acquaintance among a set of hairy undergraduates with progressive political ideas and a fondness for rock music, and after his dismissal from the college he remained in the town, pretending to be a student and sponging. He felt that he was gaining an excellent education in rap sessions and was able to hold his own in conversations about Carl
os Castenada and Kurt Vonnegut. He actually read most of one of the Vonnegut novels.
He liked to think that he was part of what the press called The Ferment On Campus, and he marched and demonstrated in the spirit of the times. The community was too small for the creation of really satisfactory disorder, however, and he moved on to a larger campus in a large city, living in a confused world he saw through a haze of pills and alcohol. As the sixties wore on to their end, he drifted away from the campus skid row and into the real thing; geographically the distance was not great.
And so here we have Garft Johnson at the age of thirty-five: a full-fledged bum, a dirty and emaciated scarecrow with bad teeth and shifty eyes, who sleeps on a pile of rags in an abandoned filling station and panhandles for enough wine to keep the shakes at bay. He is wholly untrustworthy and is capable of any nastiness he can find the courage to undertake. He deserves the contempt and scorn of every right-thinking citizen. He is the contingent recipient of absolutely anything at all that he may see fit to wish for.
But contingent recipient only; obviously he cannot be granted a wish until he has made a wish, and the wish cannot be made unless the demon is present. Since calling up a demon requires the performance of a complex ritual, involving a number of intricate and disgusting procedures, the likelihood of his ever realizing his good fortune would appear to be extremely remote. Certain events, however, have been evolving in such a way that they are militating in his behalf.
The realm of the supernatural lies outside of time and separate from space, and nothing about it is in any way comprehensible to the human understanding. It is thus necessary to use analogy in talking about it, rendering discourse among its beings as if it were human speech, and referring to their milieu in mundane terms. Using this method, we will transcribe a colloquy between two such beings. One of them might be called an efficiency expert or an expeditor, and the other could be labeled a middle executive. Call their topic the Obligations Backlog. Their conversation (we will call it a conversation) is taking place in the offices of the Fulfillment Section of the Contracts Division of the Mortal Relations Department of the Temporal Affairs Branch. Smith and Jones will do for their names.