High Cotton: Selected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “Was the magician you worked for good?”

  “Damn good, m’boy. But his wife was better.”

  “His wife?”

  “Marilyn was her name. A beautiful woman.” He winked at me. “Claimed to be a witch.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “I do, I do. Said her father was a witch and she learned it and inherited it from him.”

  “Her father?”

  “That’s right. Not just women can be witches. Men too.”

  We poured ourselves another and exchanged sloppy grins, hooked elbows, and tossed it down.

  “And another to meet the first,” the old man said and poured. Then: “Here’s to company.” We tossed it off.

  “She taught me the ventriloquism, you know,” the old man said, relighting his pipe.

  “Marilyn?”

  “Right, Marilyn.”

  “She seems to have been a rather all-around lady.”

  “She was at that. And pretty as an Irish morning.”

  “I thought witches were all old crones, or young crones. Hook noses, warts…”

  “Not Marilyn. She was a fine-looking woman. Fine bones, agate eyes that clouded in mystery, and hair the color of a fresh-robbed hive.”

  “Odd she didn’t do the magic herself. I mean, if she was the better magician, why was her husband the star attraction?”

  “Oh, but she did do magic. Or rather she helped McDonald to look better than he was, and he was some good. But Marilyn was better.

  “Those days were different, m’boy. Women weren’t the ones to take the initiative, least not openly. Kept to themselves. Was a sad thing. Back then it wasn’t thought fittin’ for a woman to be about such business. Wasn’t ladylike. Oh, she could get sawed in half, or disappear in a wooden crate, priss and look pretty, but take the lead? Not on your life!”

  I fumbled myself another brandy. “A pretty witch, huh?”

  “Ummmm.”

  “Had the old pointed hat and broom passed down, so to speak?” My voice was becoming slightly slurred.

  “It’s not a laughin’ matter, m’boy.” Machen clenched the pipe in his teeth.

  “I’ve touched a nerve, have I not? I apologize. Too much sauce.”

  Machen smiled. “Not at all. It’s a silly thing, you’re right. To hell with it.”

  “No, no. I’m the one who spoiled the fun. You were telling me she claimed to be the descendant of a long line of witches.”

  Machen smiled. It did not remind me of other smiles he had worn. This one seemed to come from a borrowed collection.

  “Just some silly tattle is all. Don’t really know much about it, just worked for her, m’boy.” That was the end of that. Standing, he knocked out his pipe on the concrete floor and went to his cot.

  For a moment I sat there, the last breath of Machen’s pipe still in the air, the brandy still warm in my throat and stomach. I looked at the windows that surrounded the lighthouse, and everywhere I looked was my own ghostly reflection. It was like looking out through the compound eyes of an insect, seeing a multiple image.

  I turned out the lights, pulled the curtains and drew the partition between our beds, wrapped myself in my blanket, and soon washed up on the distant shore of a recurring dream. A dream not quite in grasp, but heard like the far, fuzzy cry of a gull out from land.

  It had been with me almost since moving into the tower. Sounds, voices…

  A clunking noise like peg legs on stone…

  …a voice, fading in, fading out…Machen’s voice, the words not quite clear, but soft and coaxing…then solid and firm: “Then be a beast. Have your own way. Look away from me with your mother’s eyes.”

  “…your fault,” came a child’s voice, followed by other words that were chopped out by the howl of the sea wind, the roar of the waves.

  “…getting too loud. He’ll hear…” came Machen’s voice.

  “Don’t care…I…” lost voices now.

  I tried to stir, but then the tube of sleep, nourished by the brandy, came unclogged, and I descended down into richer blackness.

  · · ·

  Was a bright morning full of sun, and no fog for a change. Cool clear out there on the landing, and the sea even seemed to roll in soft and bounce against the rocks and lighthouse like puffy cotton balls blown on the wind.

  I was out there with my morning coffee, holding the cup in one hand and grasping the railing with the other. It was a narrow area but safe enough, provided you didn’t lean too far out or run along the walk when it was slick with rain. Machen told me of a man who had done just that and found himself plummeting over to be shattered like a dropped melon on the rocks below.

  Machen came out with a cup of coffee in one hand, his unlit pipe in the other. He looked haggard this morning, as if a bit of old age had crept upon him in the night, fastened a straw to his face, and sucked out part of his substance.

  “Morning,” I said.

  “Morning.” He emptied his cup in one long draft. He balanced the cup on the metal railing and began to pack his pipe.

  “Sleep bad?” I asked.

  He looked at me, then at his pipe, finished his packing, and put the pouch away in his coat pocket. He took a long match from the same pocket, gave it fire with his thumbnail, lit the pipe. He puffed quite a while before he answered me. “Not too well. Not too well.”

  “We drank too much.”

  “We did at that.”

  I sipped my coffee and looked at the sky, watched a snowy gull dive down and peck at the foam, rise up with a wriggling fish in its beak. It climbed high in the sky, became a speck of froth on the crystal blue.

  “I had funny dreams,” I said. “I think I’ve had them all along, since I came here. But last night they were stronger than ever.”

  “Oh?”

  “Thought I heard your voice speaking to someone. Thought I heard steps on the stairs, or more like the plunking of peg legs, like those old sea captains have.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “And another voice, a child’s.”

  “That right? Well…maybe you did hear me speakin’. I wasn’t entirely straight with you last night. I do have quite an interest in the voice throwing, and I practice it from time to time on my dummy. Last night must have been louder than usual, being drunk and all.”

  “Dummy?”

  “My old dummy from the act. Keep it in the room below.”

  “Could I see it?”

  He grimaced. “Maybe another time. It’s kind of a private thing with me. Only bring her out when we’re alone.”

  “Her?”

  “Right. Name’s Caroline, a right smart-looking girl dummy, rosy-cheeked with blonde pigtails.”

  “Well, maybe someday I can look at her.”

  “Maybe someday.” He stood up, popped the contents of the pipe out over the railing, and started inside. Then he turned: “I talk too much. Pay no mind to an old, crazy man.”

  Then he was gone, and I was there with a hot cup of coffee, a bright, warm day, and an odd, unexplained chill at the base of my bones.

  · · ·

  Two days later we got on witches again, and I guess it was my fault. We hit the brandy hard that night. I had sold a short story for a goodly sum—my largest check to date—and we were celebrating and talking and saying how my fame would be as high as the stars. We got pretty sicky there, and to hear Machen tell it, and to hear me agree—no matter he hadn’t read the story—I was another Hemingway, Wolfe, and Fitzgerald all balled into one.

  “If Marilyn were here,” I said thoughtlessly, drunk, “why we could get her to consult her crystal and tell us my literary future.”

  “Why that’s nonsense, she used no crystal.”

  “No crystal, broom, or pointed hat? No eerie evil deeds for her? A white magician no doubt?”

  “Magic is magic, m’boy. And even good intentions can backfire.”

  “Whatever happened to her, Marilyn I mean?”

  “Dead.”
/>   “Old age?”

  “Died young and beautiful, m’boy. Grief killed her.”

  “I see,” I said, as you’ll do to show attentiveness.

  Suddenly, it was if the memories were a balloon overloaded with air, about to burst if pressure was not taken off. So, he let loose the pressure and began to talk.

  “She took her a lover, Marilyn did. Taught him many a thing, about love, magic, what have you. Lost her husband on account of it, the magician, I mean. Lost respect for herself in time. “You see, there was this little girl she had, by her lover. A fine-looking sprite, lived until she was three. Had no proper father. He had taken to the sea and had never much entertained the idea of marryin’ Marilyn. Keep them stringing was his motto then, damn his eyes. So he left them to fend for themselves.”

  “What happened to the child?”

  “She died. Some childhood disease.”

  “That’s sad,” I said, “a little girl gone and having only sipped at life.”

  “Gone? Oh, no. There’s the soul, you know.”

  I wasn’t much of a believer in the soul and I said so.

  “Oh, but there is a soul. The body perishes but the soul lives on.”

  “I’ve seen no evidence of it.”

  “But I have,” Machen said solemnly. “Marilyn was determined that the girl would live on, if not in her own form, then in another.”

  “Hogwash!”

  Machen looked at me sternly. “Maybe. You see, there is a part of witchcraft that deals with the soul, a part that believes the soul can be trapped and held, kept from escaping this earth and into the beyond. That’s why a lot of natives are superstitious about having their picture taken. They believe once their image is captured, through magic their soul can be contained.

  “Voodoo works much the same. It’s nothing but another form of witchcraft. Practitioners of that art believe their souls can be held to this earth by means of someone collecting nail parins or hair from them while they’re still alive.

  “That’s what Marilyn had in mind. When she saw the girl was fadin’, she snipped one of the girl’s long pigtails and kept it to herself. Cast spells on it while the child lay dyin’, and again after life had left the child.”

  “The soul was supposed to be contained within the hair?”

  “That’s right. It can be restored, in a sense, to some other object through the hair. It’s like those voodoo dolls. A bit of hair or nail parin’ is collected from the person you want to control, or if not control, maintain the presence of their soul, and it’s sewn into those dolls. That way, when the pins are stuck into the doll, the living suffer, and when they die their soul is trapped in the doll for all eternity, or rather as long as the doll with its hair or nail parin’s exists.”

  “So she preserved the hair so she could make a doll and have the little girl live on, in a sense?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Sounds crazy.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And what of the little girl’s father?”

  “Ah, that sonofabitch! He came home to find the little girl dead and buried and the mother mad. But there was that little gold lock of hair, and knowing Marilyn, he figured her intentions.”

  “Machen,” I said slowly. “It was you, was it not? You were the father?”

  “I was.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. We were both foolish. I was the more foolish. She left her husband for me and I cast her aside. Ignored my own child. I was the fool, a great fool.”

  “Do you really believe in that stuff about the soul? About the hair and what Marilyn was doing?”

  “Better I didn’t. A soul once lost from the body would best prefer to be departed I think…but love is some times a brutal thing.”

  We just sat there after that. We drank more. Machen smoked his pipe, and about an hour later we went to bed.

  · · ·

  There were sounds again, gnawing at the edge of my sleep. The sounds that had always been there, but now, since we had talked of Marilyn, I was less able to drift off into blissful slumber. I kept thinking of those crazy things Machen had said. I remembered, too, those voices I had heard, and the fact that Machen was a ventriloquist, and perhaps, not altogether stable.

  But those sounds.

  I sat up and opened my eyes. They were coming from below. Voices. Machen’s first. “…not be the death of you, girl, not at all…my only reminder of Marilyn…”

  And then to my horror. “Let me be, Papa. Let it end.” The last had been a little girl’s voice, but the words had been bitter and wise beyond the youngness of the tone.

  I stepped out of bed and into my trousers, crept to the curtain, and looked on Machen’s side.

  Nothing, just a lonely cot. I wasn’t dreaming. I had heard him all right, and the other voice…it had to be that Machen, grieved over what he had done in the past, over Marilyn’s death, had taken to speaking to himself in the little girl’s voice. All that stuff Marilyn had told him about the soul, it had gotten to him, cracked his stability.

  I climbed down the cold metal stairs, listening. Below I heard the old, weathered door that led outside slam. Heard the thud of boots going down the outside steps.

  I went back up, went to the windows, and pulling back the curtains section by section, finally saw the old man. He was carrying something wrapped in a black cloth and he had a shovel in his hand. I watched as, out there by the shore, he dug a shallow grave and placed the cloth-wrapped object within, placed a rock over it, and left it to the night and the incoming tide.

  I pretended to be asleep when he returned, and later, when I felt certain he was well visited by Morpheus, I went downstairs and retrieved the shovel from the tool room. I went out to where I had seen him dig and went to work, first turning over the large stone and shoveling down into the pebbly dirt. Due to the freshness of the hole, it was easy digging.

  I found the cloth and what was inside. It made me flinch at first, it looked so real. I thought it was a little rosy-cheeked girl buried alive, for it looked alive…but it was a dummy. A ventriloquist’s dummy. It had aged badly, as if water had gotten to it. In some ways it looked as if it were rotting from the inside out. My finger went easily and deeply into the wood of one of the legs.

  Out of some odd curiosity, I reached up and pushed back the wooden eyelids. There were no wooden painted eyes, just darkness, empty sockets that uncomfortably reminded me of looking down into the black hollows of a human skull. And the hair. On one side of the head was a yellow pigtail, but where the other should have been was a bare spot, as if the hair had been ripped away from the wooden skull.

  With a trembling hand I closed the lids down over those empty eyes, put the dirt back in place, the rock, and returned to bed. But I did not sleep well. I dreamed of a grown man talking to a wooden doll and using another voice to answer back, pretending that the doll lived and loved him too.

  But the water had gotten to it, and the sight of those rotting legs had snapped him back to reality, dashed his insane hopes of containing a soul by magic, shocked him brutally from foolish dreams. Dead is dead.

  · · ·

  The next day, Machen was silent and had little to say. I suspected the events of last night weighed on his mind. Our conversation must have returned to him this morning in sober memory, and he, somewhat embarrassed, was reluctant to recall it. He kept to himself down below in the locked room, and I busied myself with my work.

  It was night when he came up, and there was a smug look about him, as if he had accomplished some great deed. We spoke a bit, but not of witches, of past times and the sea. Then he pulled back the curtains and looked at the moon rise above the water like a cold fish eye.

  “Machen,” I said, “maybe I shouldn’t say anything, but if you should ever have something bothering you, if you should ever want to talk about it…well, feel free to come to me.”

  We said little more and soon went to bed.

  I slept sound
er that night, but again I was rousted from my dreams by voices. Machen’s voice again, and the poor man speaking in that little child’s voice.

  “It’s a fine home for you,” Machen said in his own voice.

  “I want no home,” came the little girl’s voice. “I want to be free.”

  “You want to stay with me, with the living. You’re just not thinking. There’s only darkness beyond the veil.”

  The voices were very clear and loud. I sat up in bed and strained my ears.

  “It’s where I belong,” the little girl’s voice again, but it spoke not in a little girl manner. There was only the tone.

  “Things have been bad lately,” Machen said. “And you’re not yourself.”

  Laughter, horrible little girl laughter. “I haven’t been myself for years.”

  “Now, Caroline…play your piano. You used to play it so well. Why, you haven’t touched it in years.”

  “Play. Play. With these!”

  “You’re too loud.”

  “I don’t care. Let him hear, let him…”

  A door closed sharply and the sound died off to a mumble; a word caught here and there was scattered and confused by the throb of the sea.

  · · ·

  Next morning Machen had nothing for me, not even a smile from his borrowed collection. Nothing but coldness, his back, and a frown.

  I saw little of him after coffee, and once, from below—for he stayed down there the whole day through—I thought I heard him cry in a loud voice. “Have it your way, then,” and then there was the sound of a slamming door and some other sort of commotion below.

  After a while I looked out at the land and the sea, and down there, striding back and forth, hands behind his back, went Machen, like some great confused penguin contemplating the far shore.

  I like to think there was something more than curiosity in what I did next. Like to think I was looking for the source of my friend’s agony; looking for some way to help him find peace.

  I went downstairs and pulled at the door he kept locked, hoping that, in his anguish, he had forgotten to lock it back. He had not forgotten.

  I pressed my ear against the door and listened. Was that crying I heard?

  No. I was being susceptible, caught up in Machen’s fantasy. It was merely the wind whipping about the tower.