Black Horse and Other Strange Stories

by Wyckoff, Jason A.

  He surveyed all the lake he could, but saw nothing unusual. He wouldn’t be able to see the porch light from his parents’ house until he pushed away from the island, but he knew it was much too far for his comfort—easily two hundred yards. Nothin’ to it but to do it. Geordie uncoiled the rope from the docking-stump and set the oars. He dipped them in the water and eased away from the island.

  After a few timid strokes, he could see his guiding light. It seemed further than Geordie had ever remembered it being. Geordie became grim, chastising himself for his fear. He turned his back to the light and stabbed the oars into the water, then heaved his chest forward towards his hands. He repeated the determined stroke again—and again—and—

  The oar in his right hand struck something in the water. Geordie whipped his head to the side but saw nothing there. He straightened his back and looked all around the boat. He leaned over the starboard bow to look where the water met the hull.

  Something bumped the other side of the boat. Geordie yelped and grabbed the sides of the boat for balance. He looked to his left and saw something breach the surface. A smooth, dark back arced and disappeared. Geordie’s heart was pounding. He saw the wake pushed out from the thing moving across the water astern. The wake dispersed; Geordie guessed the creature must have dived. Geordie tried to pull the lighter out of his pocket, but his fingers trembled with excitement and he fumbled the lighter over the side of the boat.

  In immediate response, the thing crested and bumped against the hull where the lighter had fallen in the water. Geordie snapped at the oars and began rowing frantically. He smacked the oars flat against the surface, splashing ineffectually. He tried to concentrate and improve his stroke even as his arms wobbled and fought against his will. Finally he began to move in a straight line towards the shore. He looked aft and saw the thing crest again. He still couldn’t identify it. It looked slick and dull-coloured and larger than him. Geordie saw no fins or flippers, but the dark made it difficult for him to distinguish any features finer than the contour of its silhouette. For the duration of several strokes the thing floated placidly. Geordie slowed his pace; he began to believe the assault was ended.

  The thing drifted lazily; its bulk turned in the water like the second-hand of a clock. When its submerged head appeared to point towards Geordie’s boat the water behind the creature exploded in froth and the strange body shot forward.

  Geordie tried to accelerate, but the thing moved with incredible speed. Within seconds it caught up to the boat and dove underneath. There was a terrible pause and then impact as the thing struck the hull. The bow pitched in the air and Geordie lost his handle on the oars. His world spun and turned over. Cold, he thought, even before he felt the wetness of the water. He discharged the air in his lungs involuntarily as the shock of the cold pushed it out from them; bubbles whirled around his head. He reoriented and kicked his legs, gasping as he breached the surface of the lake.

  The creature didn’t matter anymore to Geordie. That threat had been temporarily chased from his mind as he struggled out of his coat and kicked off his shoes underwater. Cold: he was frightened that the thought was repeated so early, before he’d even begun his hundred-yard-plus fight to reach the shore. He left his shirt and pants on and began to move. His limbs felt jerky; he had to fight the instinct to squeeze them close against his body with each stroke and kick. He knew if he stopped he could probably float safely—barring another threat besides the cold—for no more than half an hour, and who would come to save him, anyway? He couldn’t muster the air to force a shout, and all the people around the lake were probably asleep in their houses with their windows shut.

  Cold! Geordie deliberately tried to re-ignite the fear of the creature in his heart; he wanted to be chased, he wanted the propulsion of fright. The fear came: Behind him he heard the low bell of the metal hull struck again, and then the splash after as the boat crashed once more into the water. He still didn’t know what it was, but he felt a primordial loathing of the thing, and grew more and more certain that to see it and apprehend it would damn him and drive him mad.

  Geordie stole a glance over his shoulder and saw that the boat was capsized. He saw no other shapes in the water, nor disembodied wakes. It’s underneath again. The beach was close now, but the cold and his fear had destroyed his coordination. He was moving more slowly the closer he got to the beach, when he most wanted to move more quickly, and the anxiety from his failure stacked tension upon tension. He was crying now, desperate.

  Suddenly he felt the thing underneath him pushing against his midsection and lifting him clear from the water. Geordie’s useless body flew forward and crashed on the small stretch of rocky beach. He couldn’t get his legs beneath him, but he managed to stretch his arms over his head and latched numb claws on the top of the retaining wall. Geordie pulled and somehow launched his body up and over. He lay on his back, wheezing; his head was spinning and his extremities tingled with false, stinging heat.

  Geordie heard it again: On the other side of the wall, down on the short beach, the gurgling, laboured snuffling sound had returned. Geordie tried to sit up but couldn’t. He rolled to his side. He had to see it. He pushed with one hip and one shoulder to get to the edge. But before he could command the strength to rise to one elbow, he heard the thing slide down the beach; there was a burp of water closing over its body, and then the gurgling sound was gone.

  Geordie went limp and his head knocked against the concrete. He wanted to feel relief but found confusion instead. How could he raise an alarm about an unidentified animal? Could he even call it an animal—and who would listen if he called it anything else? He was sure he would have heard if anything like this had ever been seen before at the lake, and compounded with his experience with the strange women of Russom-dumb—that opaque delight—he was beginning to doubt any of it had actually happened the way he thought it had. So what did happen, then? Geordie struggled to imagine what sensible version of events he could relate. The strangeness of his experiences seemed to compel secrecy. What would he tell his father or his sister—

  COLD!

  Geordie shivered violently as the reality of his situation arrested his attention. He struggled to his feet and tore off his soaking shirt. He began to stumble towards the house. The wind blew over his wet skin and he cried out. He stopped and worked fervently with shaking thumbs and forefingers to undo the buttons of his jeans. He tried to take them off and dropped to the ground. His jeans were stuck tight to his legs with lake water. Geordie pushed his shoulders against the ground and arched his back; pushing with desperate effort, he managed to work the jeans down to his knees. He immediately saw his mistake, as the denim was now bunched and unmovable. He struck uselessly at the jeans with his fists. He tried to get to his feet and shuffle towards the house but fell down again with his first step. He reached his hands up over his head and tried to pull himself forward, clawing with unfeeling fingers at the deck. He began to move, inch by inch, torturously slowly, but with an advantageous result: as his remaining clothes dragged across the concrete and brick, they slid free of his body. By the time Geordie reached the first step to the house, he needed only to kick limply to free his ankles from his jeans and underwear.

  Geordie locked both hands onto the door handle and pulled himself up to his knees. He jerked his quaking legs underneath him and straightened. He opened the door and went inside the house.

  He felt the warm air in his lungs first, and on his eyeballs. He couldn’t feel anything anywhere on his skin. He moved across the den, using the back of the couch for support. Neatly folded blankets lay on the seat; as a concession to traditional values, Mike had been expected to sleep there; with the engagement, the conceit had been abandoned.

  Geordie shuffled over to the stairs. He put one hand on the rail and one on the wall so that he wouldn’t have to trust the coordination of his legs to mute his footfalls. He climbed; at the top of the stairs he turned and wobbled back along the length of the balcony to the end. H
is sister’s door was half-open. She lay in bed, asleep, facing towards the door. Mike’s left arm lay across her side. Geordie clamped his jaw shut to keep his teeth from chattering and listened to their restful breathing. His own breathing seemed to him perverse by comparison: a series of spasmodic, wet snorts alternating with quick, whistling exhalations. Geordie rocked sideways and heard the squish of water that had pooled in the carpet beneath him. Denise shifted uneasily in her bed and Mike’s arm fell away. Geordie slid backwards until his shadow passed from his sister’s face. He stood outside the door with his rigid arms crossed in front of his abdomen and waited for the tremors to lessen and for the sensation of warmth to return to his body.

  The Bells, Then the Birds

  In the hills of east Ohio

  There is a town without a name

  Where bells and birds stay silent

  By love’s eternal flame

  Eulalie loved a young man

  A dashing, daring boy

  Who spurned the goodly maiden

  And so her hope destroyed

  One afternoon in August

  She left the town behind

  And went down to the railroad

  With one thought on her mind

  The church bells followed after

  For her they held no sway

  Nor birds in branches singing,

  ‘Eulalie, come away!’

  She waited in the high wheat

  To hear the whistle’s blow

  As the sun ducked down behind her

  To her judgment she did go

  Though some say she still tarries

  By the tracks now overgrown

  Past the town with muted churchbell

  Which no bird will call home

  You young men heed my warning

  Should you stumble ’cross this town

  First the bells ring, then the birds sing

  If you hear that whistle blowing

  Better hurry and get you gone

  Zach Slater first heard the song performed at an Irish Pub in Lowell, Massachusetts. Zach found the Lowell Folk Festival as he expected, neither disappointing nor especially engaging. It was much the same as most modern folk festivals: a loud celebration of multiculturalism. Fortunately, Zach knew that the best festival experiences were to be had late nights after the main stage lights had dimmed, or (as it was in this case) in the days leading up to the festival, as the musicians gathered, reacquainted, and performed for each other. Though Zach could enjoy the disparate styles of music, dance, puppetry, and whatever other attractions found their way on to the modern festival stage, his passion was Americana. Nothing pleased him more than sitting with a small, hushed group listening to the plaintive strains of a travelling troubadour. And nothing excited him as did discovering some new, earnest conservator of traditional songs, or, even more rarely, being exposed to an old song he had not yet heard. On this particular Wednesday night, Zach found both.

  With his collar drawn up and his shoulders hunched ineffectively against a persistent drizzle, Zach happened upon a fellow ethno-musicologist he’d met at a conference several months before. Zach’s colleague was on his way to the pub and invited Zach to join him. Zach gladly acquiesced and the two were soon trading stories between sips until a young woman mounted the stage with her guitar. The performer introduced herself as Lynnie Paige. Her round cheeks pushed her eyes closed when she smiled. She bantered and drank freely between songs, speaking with a smoky drawl punctuated by whooping, alcohol-fuelled bursts of laughter. But when she sang a controlled, soulful contralto filled the room and arrested Zach’s attention. Her interpretations were straight, but the voice and the personality infused the traditionals with new spirit. As the set progressed and Lynnie became more obviously drunk, the quality of her selections diminished. After stumbling through a couple of country honky-tonk numbers better left to their 1970s origins, she tried to depart the stage, but the appreciative crowd wouldn’t let her. Her threat to perform John Mellencamp’s greatest hits was greeted with raucous laughter and dubious encouragement. Finally she relented and sat back down in front of the microphone. Some instinct prompted Zach to engage the digital recorder he kept handy for ‘field’ recording. Lynnie picked through eight opening bars in a minor key before beginning the mournful lyric. The simple melody swelled and drooped, always threatening to soar but never breaking the undulating tension. Lynnie’s voice grew quieter as the song progressed, and a timid silence greeted her final strum before the bar exploded with applause.

  After the set, the press of people around the charismatic singer made it difficult for Zach to ask about her final song. Zach waited until the distraction of the next performer’s set thinned the crowd, allowing him to push through. He introduced himself to Lynnie; she welcomed his company as casually as any other, and they conversed easily.

  ‘Was that last one an original?’

  ‘Naw, naw . . . it’s jus’ something I picked up ’round a campfire at some hippie thing. Bald dude with a beard tryin’ to get in my pants taught it to me. An’, hell, the song was good even if he wasn’t!’ She laughed.

  ‘Did he tell you where he learned it?’

  She laughed again. ‘Probably!’

  Zach realised there was little additional information for him to gather on that front, and switched the topic. They spoke for a little while longer until she excused herself to watch the performance. Zach wasn’t disappointed to have the song’s origins left mysterious; it gave him something to investigate. For Zach, having the seed planted was satisfaction enough for now, and he knew he would revel in the memory of the performance for weeks afterwards.

  Zach was surprised when, just before last call, Lynnie approached him. He hadn’t thought he’d made much of an impression, or that there was any attraction between them. Nevertheless, her intentions were clear, and he soon found himself in her hotel room. They were both drunk and uninhibited, but tired, leading both to fall asleep soon after a brief coupling.

  When Zach awoke, Lynnie was still asleep. As his movements about the room failed to rouse her, he decided to slip away quietly and leave her to her rest.

  Zach didn’t see Lynnie the next day and was unable to find her anywhere during the festival. He thought about going back to her hotel room, but he didn’t want to seem intrusive. He was disappointed. He had neglected to ask her the name of the song.

  Back in Columbus, Zach scoured the Ohio State University Library system, though not having the song’s title made his search somewhat directionless. He tried to consider if other aspects of the song might point to its origins. The asymmetry in the final verse was unusual, though hardly unique—an alteration in the closing stanza was sometimes used to signal the end of a song, though the change was more often manifested in the chord progression or by repetition of a final line than by a structural deviation in the middle.

  Another curiosity was the clash of language in the lyric. ‘Who spurned the goodly maiden’ didn’t mesh easily with ‘Better hurry and get you gone’. The former indicated an artificially lofty origin, possibly from someone of intermediate American education imitating a favourite poet; the latter was plainly influenced by more common parlance. Zach thought this discrepancy to be good news; it likely demonstrated evolution of the lyric from performer to performer, suggesting that the ageing hippie was only one link in a chain. It was possible that the lyric was constructed wholly from the originator’s imagination—as might be suggested by its particularly arch poesy—further complicating Zach’s search. If, however, it was based on actual events, a single point of local lore might have provided the inspiration. The ‘town without a name’ line was terribly unhelpful, but the general region was set. The idea of tracing a song’s origin by investigating the suicides of young women over two centuries and half a state was hardly alluring to Zach, though. The rare and evocative name ‘Eulalie’ might prove a boon, but an internet search provided no information, and sifting through miles of microfiche in search of a single name
would be an onerous pursuit.

  Zach decided instead to see if the story appeared in prose form. Ghost stories, like their subjects, never completely fade away. Moreover, they find themselves frequently and handily collected in volume upon volume, proving an enduringly popular subject matter. Though the amount of material available was daunting, the search was pleasant enough. Zach avoided the popular and elaborate stories; he concentrated on briefer anecdotes. Many of the stories he skimmed through were clearly either constructed or refined to demonstrate moral balance between this life and the next. The more ‘believable’ ones were unadorned of such poetry, however; their poignancy resounded through an injustice left unresolved. The fascination Zach felt for these stories soon faded, though, and he began to despair that this path would also prove fruitless.

  One afternoon, as he sat in an aisle deep in the musty stacks, listening to the quiver of the ventilation and the random tick and pock of the metal shelves, he casually dismissed one book in favour of the next. As he was about to open the book in his hands, the folly of his choice struck him. He had ignored the other book because he was pursuing the story as a literary account, a fiction. The book he had passed over was filed incorrectly: it was not a gathering of folk tales, but a ‘serious’ collection of ‘real’ hauntings which should be found amongst philosophy, psychology and religion texts. Zach immediately altered his course of investigation.