Dark Forces: The 25th Anniversary Edition

by Kirby McCauley

  I felt something twist within me like a fist made of broken glass.

  “I conjure you, Noble One! Come before me at once and perform my bidding without complaint as is the wont of the office you occupy!”

  Pain ripped through my abdomen. I wanted to lie down and hug myself with my knees drawn up to my chin.

  “I conjure you. Suffer no injury to me, or know the wrath of the Grand Master.” The conjuration continued. I thought I saw the doll’s tiny limbs writhe.

  “Extersi adsit siti vas seu copula pamini consecrando!”

  I spoke the words of discharge over and over until the passage was complete. Fatigue rushed over me like the surf. I lay on the hardwood floor and wanted to sleep forever. I did sleep, but before I went to my bed, I looked to see if there were blood to clean. I had thought there would be blood.

  ****

  Weeks passed. The sleek shape of the doll slowly began to distort. So did my dreams. I knew I was having nightmares, but could never remember the precise details in the morning. What I knew full well—and it surprised me—was that I was having doubts. Finally being skeptical of my own feelings and actions.

  What was the true cost of retaliation?

  Was it worth it?

  My friends noticed my disturbance. So did my clients. I hated second-guessing myself. Finally I felt I had no choice. “…leeway for a mistake,” Jerry had said. People do change over two decades, for better or worse. Perhaps Jerry for the better. Maybe I had made a mistake. I needed to find out.

  Playing detective was the easiest part. First I went to the Denver Public Library and looked in the Las Vegas white pages. There was a listing for Jerry Hanford on East Kalahari Court. I called my travel agent and she got me a coach reservation on the next Western flight to Las Vegas. I packed in the next hour, watered the plants, and drove to the airport. In another two hours I was carrying my overnight bag through the terminal at McCarran International Airport. It was noon. I hired a cab to take me to East Kalahari Court. The address turned out to be a sprawling apartment complex on a dusty street running east of the glittering Strip. I got the Hanfords’ apartment number from the mailbox rows beside the management building and made my way through a maze of sandy rock gardens and concrete walks.

  I found the right number and knocked on the plank door of the pseudo-Spanish villa. Nobody answered. I knocked periodically for five minutes. Finally an elderly woman poked her head out of the door of the adjacent apartment and said, “He ain’t here.”

  “I need to speak with Mr. Hanford,” I said. “I have a check to hand-deliver from his insurance company.”

  “I don’t know when he’ll be back,” she said. “Sometimes he’s gone for weeks. Believe this time he’s at some convention in Phoenix. Saw him just yesterday.”

  I don’t think she believed my story about the insurance company. I picked up my overnight bag from the sidewalk. “What about Linda—Mrs. Hanford? Is she home?”

  “Not hardly,” said the woman. “She’s dead.” My surprise must have been evident. “Didn’t know? Yeah, she died quite a ways back. Killed herself with Jerry’s pistol. I heard the shot,” said the old woman, warming to the subject. “Called the cops.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said, hesitating.

  “You ain’t from no insurance company,” said the woman.

  I shook my head.

  “You got to be one of them women Jerry picks up and drops after a little sweet-talk.”

  I nodded encouragingly.

  “I don’t know how that prick does it,” said the woman.

  I said, “Why did Linda Hanford do it?”

  ‘Well,” said the woman, “I don’t want to be talking out of school, but—” She didn’t hesitate very long. “Jerry treated her like shit, he did. I mean, really bad. Hit her. Hurt her. I could hear it all.” She gestured around the apartment mall. “Construction’s nothing but crap. Anyhow, Jerry beat her up real bad one night because the doctor said she couldn’t have his kid. Next day he was in Oklahoma City sellin’ hardware and she blew her brains out. Like I say, he’s a prick, and excuse my French.”

  “What’s your name?” I said.

  “Finch,” she said. “Mrs. Mona T. Finch. Mr. Finch bought a farm in Korea.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Finch,” I said. “Thanks for talking with me. I’ve got to go now. I’ve got a flight to Phoenix to catch.”

  “Good luck,” she said. “You want to use my phone to call a taxi?”

  I could get a three-thirty flight for Phoenix. Before I boarded, I called the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce and found out that a major medical-sales-personnel convention was booked into the Hyatt Regency Hotel. I didn’t talk to my seatmate on the plane, didn’t read the airline magazine, turned down drinks, and rejected the meal. I lay back in my window seat and made my mind as blank a slate as I could. I watched the desert below us.

  In Phoenix I took a taxi downtown to the Hyatt Regency, a blocky sand-colored low-rise structure. At the front desk I identified myself as Linda Hanford and asked for my husband, Jerry.

  “Uh, right,” said the clerk, checking the registration spinner. “Hanford, Jerry. Room 721. You want me to ring him?”

  “I want it to be a surprise,” I said.

  Jerry looked stunned when he answered my knock.

  “Have you got a friend in there?”

  “I’m alone,” he said, and stood back from the door. I walked past him. The room didn’t look much different from the room in Colorado Springs.

  “Excuse me,” said Jerry. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He went into the bathroom and closed the door; I heard him vomit. I listened to the rasp of brush against teeth and water running in the sink.

  When Jerry returned, I said, “You’re looking a little peaked.”

  “I feel terrible,” he said. “Been feeling lousy for a while. Goddamned doctors can’t tell me why. Absolutely nothing wrong, they say.”

  A condition of the spell, I thought. No one else can see; nobody else can know. When the time comes, he will be alone… No person can tell him why.

  “I can,” I said. He looked at me sharply. “And I will. I’ve already been in Las Vegas today. I heard about Linda.”

  “Probably had a nice talk with Mona Finch, the big-mouthed bitch. Linda wasn’t my fault.”

  “I wonder,” I said. “Let me tell you a few things.” I made him sit down, then sat opposite at the writing desk. I started telling him those things.

  “You’re a what?” he said.

  “I think ‘witch’ is an accurate job title.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I’m deadly serious. Now let me tell you more.”

  He touched his abdomen gingerly and settled back in his chair.

  “Why don’t you lie on the bed? I think you’ll be more comfortable.”

  He did.

  I told him about the doll.

  The silence seemed to lengthen beyond endurance for him. “But that’s—” He almost choked on the word. “That’s voodoo.”

  “Something like that.”

  “It’s magic. Magic doesn’t work unless you believe in it.”

  “I do.”

  “I don’t,” he said.

  “The sickness?” I said. “The nausea? The cramps? You didn’t know about the doll, remember?”

  “Coincidence.”

  “Today I’m telling you only truths. Later on you’ll be more credulous. You’ll touch your belly and feel him kick.”

  Jerry said, “This is sick.”

  “Kind for kind.”

  “I think you’d better leave.”

  “I will,” I said. “When I’m sick, I know I’d rather be alone.”

  “Bitch,” he said.

  “Yes.” I turned back toward him at the door. “One thing I didn’t tell you yet.”

  He stared at me stonily from the bed. “Tell me, Angie, and get out.”

  “The doll, remember? I modified it radically, but only so far.”
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  “So?”

  “I know how proud you are of your penis. I left that. I didn’t switch it for a vagina.”

  He looked at me uncomprehendingly.

  “The doll has no birth canal,” I said.

  Jerry still didn’t know what I was saying. He would. I blew him a sad kiss and exited.

  In the elevator my legs shook and for a while I had to wedge myself in a corner. Everybody can have one mistake, I told myself. One only. I suddenly wanted to leave the elevator, the hotel, Phoenix. I didn’t want to go back to Denver. I wanted to go anywhere else.

  I reached the street and wanted to run. The sunset spread clouds the color of blood across the west. I heard screams behind me from the hotel. It was still early in his term. I knew the screams must be echoing only in my head.

  The Crest Of Thirty-Six

  Davis Grubb

  I don’t know if she was black or white. Maybe some of both. Or maybe Indian—there was some around Glory, West Virginia, who said she was full Cherokee and descended from the wife of a chief who had broken loose from the March of Tears in the 1840s. Some said not descended at all—that she was that very original woman grown incredibly old. Colonel Bruce theorized that she was the last of the Adena—that vanished civilization who built our great mound here in Glory back a thousand years before Jesus.

  What matter whom she was or from whence? Does a seventeen-year-old boy question the race or origin or age of his first true love?

  You might well ask, in the first place, what ever possessed the Glory Town Council to hire on Darly Pogue as wharfmaster? A man whose constant, nagging, gnawing fear—a phobia they call it in the books—whose stuff of nightmare and the theme of at least two attacks of the heebie-jeebies or Whiskey Horrors was the great Ohio River.

  Darly feared that great stream like a wild animal fears the forest fire.

  There were reasons for that fear. It is said that, as an infant, he had floated adrift in an old cherry-wood pie-safe for six days and six nights of thundering, lightning river storms during the awful flood of 1900.

  I read up a lot on reincarnation in those little five-cent Haldemann Julius Blue Books from out Kansas way.

  There was one of the little books that says man doesn’t reincarnate from his body to another body to another human and so on. It held that our existence as spiritual creatures is divided by God between air and water and land. And we take turns as fish or birds or animals. Or man. A lifetime as a dolphin might be reincarnated as a tiercel to ply the fathomed heavens in splendour and, upon death, to become again a man. Well, somehow, some way, something whispery inside Darly Pogue told him that the good Lord now planned that Darly’s next incarnation would, quite specifically, be as an Ohio River catfish.

  You can imagine what that did to Darly, what with his phobia of that river.

  And where could such mischievous information have originated? Maybe some gypsy fortune-teller—they were always singing and clamoring down the river road in the springtime in their sequined head scarves and candy-colored wagons—maybe one of them told Darly that. In my opinion it was Loll who told him herself: she could be that mean.

  And it was, of course, a prediction to rattle a man up pretty sore. I mean, did you ever look eyeball to eyeball with an old flat-headed, rubber-lipped, garbage-eating, mud-covered catfish?

  I didn’t say eat one—God knows that nothing out of God’s waters is any tastier rolled in cornmeal and buttermilk batter and fried in country butter.

  I said did you ever look a catfish square in the whiskers? Try it next time. It’ll shake hell out of you. There’s a big, sappy, two-hundred-million-year-old grin on that slippery skewered mug that seems to ask: Homo sapiens, how long you been around? The critter almost winks as much as to remind you that you came from waters as ancient as his—and that you’ll probably be going back some day. But, pray the Lord! you’ll exclaim, not as one of your ugly horned tribe!

  What sense does it make to hire on as wharfmaster a man who fears the very river?

  To position such a man twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week in a kind of floating coffin tied with a length of breakable, cuttable rope to the shore?

  But, what if that man has ready and unique access to the smallest and greatest of the great river’s secrets. Suppose he can locate with unerring accuracy the body of a drowned person. Suppose he can predict with scary certainty the place where a snag is hiding in the channel or the place where a new sandbar is going to form. Suppose he can prognosticate the arrival of steamboats—hours before their putting in. What if he can board one of those boats and at one sweeping glance tell to the ounce—troy or avoirdupois—the weight of its entire cargo?

  There wasn’t a secret of that old Ohio—that dark, mysterious Belle Rivière—not one that Darly Pogue didn’t have instant access to: except one. That One, of course, was the Secret he was married to: Loll, river witch, goddess, woman, whatever—she was the one secret of the great flowing Mistress which Darly did not understand.

  But she was, as well, the source of all the rest of the great river’s secrets.

  Loll.

  Dark, strange Loll.

  What could possess a man to live with such a woman and on the very breast of that river he feared like a very demon?

  The business all began the morning the water first showed sign of rising in the spring of thirty-six. Everybody around Glory came down to the wharfboat full of questions for Darly Pogue and asking him either to confirm or contradict the predictions now crackling in the radio speakers. Wheeling’s WWVA.

  You see, I have not told you the half of Loll—what kind of creature she really was.

  Look at Loll for yourself.

  Pretend that it is about ten o’clock in the morning. Wisps of fog still hover like memories above the polished, slow, dark water out in the government channel. Loll creeps mumbling about the little pantry fixing breakfast for me and Darly—cornbread and ramps with home fries and catfish. Mmmmmmm, good. But look at Loll. Her face is like an old dried apple. A little laurel-root pipe is stuck in her withered, toothless gums. Her eyes wind out of deep, leathery wrinkles like mice in an old shoe bag. Look at the hump on her back and her clawlike hands and the long shapeless dotted Swiss of her only dress. This is her—this is Darly Pogue’s wife Loll.

  So what keeps him with her?

  Why does he stay with this old harridan on the river he so disdains? You are on board the wharfboat, in the pantry, looking at this ancient creature. Glance there on the table at the Ingersoll dollar watch with the braided rawhide cord and the watchfob whittled out of a peach pit by a man on Death Row up in Glory prison.

  I said about ten o’clock.

  Actually, it’s five after.

  In the morning.

  Now turn that nickel-plated watch’s hands around to twelve twice—to midnight, that is. Instantly the scene changes, alters magically. The moon appears, imprisoned in the fringes of the violet willow tree up above the brick landing. The stars fox-trot and dip in the glittering river. A sweet, faint wind stirs from the sparkling stream. Breathe in now.

  What is that lovely odor?

  Laburnum maybe.

  Lilac mixed with spicebush and azalea.

  With a pinch of cinnamon and musk.

  Who is that who stands behind the bedroom door in the small, narrow companionway?

  She moves out now into the light—silvered by ardent, panting moonshine—seeming almost like an origin of light rather than someone lit by it. You know you are looking at the same human being you saw at ten—and you know it cannot be but that it is: that, with the coming of nightfall, this is become the most beautiful woman you have ever seen or shall ever look upon again.

  Ever.

  In your lifetime.

  She is naked, save for a little, shimmery see-through skirt and sandals and no brassiere, no chemise, no teddy, nor anything else.

  And she comes slipping, a little flamewoman, down the companionway, seeming to catch and drag all
the moonlight and shadows along with her, and knocks shyly, lovingly, on the stateroom door of Darly Pogue.

  Darly has been drinking.

  At the first rumor of a flood he panicked.

  Loll knocks again.

  Y-yes?

  It’s me, lovey. I have what you’ve been waiting for. Open up.

  Can’t you tell me through the door?

  But, lovey! I want your arms around me! cried Loll, the starlight seeming to catch and glitter in the lightly tinseled aureole of her nipples. I want to make love! I want to make whoopee!

  You know I caint get it up whilst I’m skeert bad, sweetie!

  Oh, do let me in!

  Aw, shucks, I got a headache, see?

  All right, pouted the beautiful girl.

  Well? squeaked poor Darly in a teethchattering voice.

  Well, what, lovey?

  The crest! The crest of thirty-six! cried Darly. What’s it going to be? Not as bad as twenty-eight or nineteen and thirteen surely or back in awful eighteen and eighty-four. Is it? O, don’t spare me. I can take it. Tell me it haint going to rise that high!

  What was the crest of 1913? asked Loll, her pretty face furrowed as she thumbed through her memory. Yes, the crest of 1913 at Glory was sixty-two feet measured on the wall of the Mercantile Bank.

  I think so, grunted poor Darly. Yes. That’s right.

  And the crest of thirty-six—it can’t be any higher than that.

  The crest of thirty-six, Loll said quietly, lighting a reefer. Will be exactly one hundred and fifteen feet.

  Darly was quiet except for an asthmatic squeak.

  What? I’m losing my hearing. It sounded exactly like you said, one hundred and fifteen feet!

  I did, said Loll, blowing fragrant smoke out of her slender, sensitive nostrils.

  Whoooeee! screamed poor Darly, flailing out now through the open stateroom door and galloping toward the gangplank. He was wearing a gaudy pair of underwear which he had sent away for to Ballyhoo magazine. He disappeared somewhere under the elms up on Water Street.

  That left me alone with her on the wharfboat, peering out through a crack in my own stateroom door at this vision of beauty and light and sweet-smelling womanhood. By damn, it was like standing downwind from an orchard!