by S. T. Joshi
They pointed straight up. Into the sky.
They swung wildly toward the fence. Illuminated all the leaves straining straight up.
They winked out.
I snapped on the porch light, wondered why the hell I hadn’t done that already.
Taylor—the Caddy—both were gone.
I looked at the cell, the connection broken. I noticed the jeweled plane of the driveway’s surface, rippling.
It didn’t add up—mind must be shorting—I knew the car was too damn big to be anywhere but right out that window, shining or no shining.
Safe in the Caddy, I calculated. She didn’t back out, no time, she didn’t drive over barrels, I could see . . .
Next to “Elder God,” a little green strobe on the two-way radio flashed. I tried to comprehend. Eternity passed. Then I remembered; I selected the zone and flipped through the channels, and through static heard Taylor scream.
“Help me! Alex, Help me! I’m sinking! It’s taking me!”
She was sobbing then. It was the first time I ever heard Taylor sobbing.
There was one channel on the radio, used to receive or to transmit, not both. I pushed the button and cut her off.
“Sinking?” I repeated foolishly, rooted to the floor, logic failing me.
Sinking made no sense, the river a mile away and Taylor just here. I choked, couldn’t find my voice, had nothing to ask, nothing to say.
“Stay inside!” I decided finally, then hit the button again, hoping for another green light . . .
“I . . . out . . . your house,” Taylor croaked from wherever she was. This house? I ran window to window again, radio in hand.
“Below . . . it’s the bottom I see,” she yelled. “I’m looking up at it!”
I cut her off.
“What do you mean?” I yelled in return, viciously. She was nowhere near the house.
Green light!
Taylor’s voice, then dreamy and awestruck . . . pretty soon she would begin wordless screaming.
Looking up, she said, at the foundation, she thought; I realized she was seeing the foundation slipping by.
Only she couldn’t be underground is what I thought, because I didn’t see a sinkhole, and then because of what she said was behind it all, superimposed . . .
Stars glimmering. Suns and planets.
I swung the back door open again, but didn’t look down; instead I looked up, studied the sky over Sac Prairie: It was starless, empty, dirty grey—there was rain pattering down . . .
Taylor choked out more words.
“Between stars, moving . . . gigantic . . . shapes,” she managed.
A pause, then—
“The Great Old Ones are close. Do you hear?”
I did hear, over the static, through the two-way, and in my bones; it was barely audible noise in the room, but in my head it became wave after wave of enigmatical sense-impacts, indescribable, uninscribable; and only one word of it did I recognize— the word most frequently repeated—”Tsathoggua.”
“Oh, please, please!” Taylor shouted out. “Iä!—the sunken red world—Iä!”
Forcing myself, I tried moving again. To do what, I didn’t know. I swung open the front door and stared long and hard in every direction, flashed lights for anybody to see, hoped for lights I would see. I saw nothing up or down the street. I hurried again from window to window. I saw nothing but the bright stones. Was I the one who was mad?
“Down,” Taylor stated, resolute, overcome. “Oh . . . black nest, the basalt nest is open—no more time, timeless— Tsathoggua rises.”
I tried looking where the car had been, where the dog had run, at a driveway almost normal now, at a gate almost closed.
I was helpless to do anything. The assault in my head continued. Taylor’s frightened rant continued, but with fewer words.
“Here . . . now, here now—can’t be—huge, huge . . . huge!”
Then came her last rational utterance. She began, “We’re so small compared to it . . .”
In fact, it was her voice that seemed very small and it sounded very far away.
“Small as a seed compared to the pumpkin,” my dear Taylor whimpered, “Seed . . . pumpkin,” she repeated.
Then she screamed and she screamed and she screamed.
A terrible din came next—loud enough finally to wake the town and bring the police—clamor proclaiming somewhere the twisting, screaming, and collapsing of metal. It ended just as abruptly with one final report, one to set all the dogs in Sac Prairie barking; I thought the mythic iron gate of a Titan had slammed shut. The sense-impressions stopped that instant. The radio was silent.
I dove out the front door onto the lawn. Hedges were hissing in the wind. But everything else lay undisturbed; the black drive seemed completely normal then, half-hidden in darkness. High above deceiving lilacs and lilies, dark stars were also still hidden, though the rain had stopped. Nothing at all suggested Taylor had ever been.
With two-way in hand, its range good for ten miles at least, I spent the rest of that night circling Sac Prairie before going home. Back here in Boston I reported Taylor missing, saying only that she had promised to meet me, but never did. And here, thinking I must be guilty of something that will someday be discovered, old Henry refuses to speak to me about the girl we both love.
Eventually they found the wallet, the phone, and a set of Ed’s clothes (but not him) next to the stoop, about eight feet down, with miscellany that included animal collars, an amulet, and five coded soapstones. But there was no reason that made sense for the village to dig up the adjacent gravel drive, so they didn’t.
Only the disturbing lack of any explanation to fit the facts for a while was sufficient to resurrect in the news the famous Pinckney name and lineage, probably for the very last time. Even rounding me up was without reason. The only fact I know is how pure physics rules out everything that happened there.
I suspect that behind everything lay those idols Wecter unearthed for his collection, and those creatures Smith unwittingly sculpted. Primitive religions, black magic, what have you, I know now how real it is, just as I know that Tsathoggua exists inside of the earth; and so I “listen” and now ask you, how many disappearances might that fact explain?
God knows how intuitions happen, those vague notions that come out of nowhere to stretch the mind. They came when I tore open the packaging that night to yank out a set of fresh batteries. It came first when I let the debris fall to the floor. Suddenly I was fearing for what had been similarly discarded somewhere below that house. And seeing again the old Caddy’s crest was the bellwether, I think.
But mainly it was intuition that imparted the importance of the batteries themselves. My apartment (which I only leave these days to buy supplies) is littered not only with packaging and receipts, but with batteries. Not everything plugs in, you know, and electric power is known to fail. Lining the room, decorating the shelves and tables, you’ll find all kinds and brands of battery-operated two-way radios, though none of them do what I want, none except the one with the green-lit display. I’ve kept it going for a full year now, but never so loud that it disturbs anyone, hoping one day to discover any clue as I listen tearless to Taylor’s never-ending screaming, pleading, and nonsense, wherever she is.
Ice Fishing
Donald Tyson
The big red ball of the sun spread itself across the western ridge, its light spilling between the leafless maple trees and around the brooding dark spruce to lie over the ice on the lake like a pink carpet. There was no trace of wind, but the air was cold enough that every noise had a ring to it, like struck brass about to break. The doors of the old Ford pickup creaked and clunked, brittle enough to drop off their hinges.
Two men waddled their way from the still-steaming truck down the snow-covered slope to the ice, a big red-and-white plastic cooler hung between them on their mitten-covered hands. One w
as fat and the other thin, but they were both about the same height. Each carried a bulging plastic grocery bag in his free mitt. Puffs of effort hung white around their heads, which were covered in knitted wool caps with ear flaps and wrapped in wool scarves to the eyeballs.
They did the Canadian duck walk across the lake. Every Canadian learns it about the time they learn to walk. You keep your ass clenched and the muscles down the insides of your thighs tight to prevent your feet slipping out sideways, and you shuffle along with your shoulders hunched so that if you slip and go bass ackwards on the ice, you hit with your back and don’t bang your brains out.
Their destination was a little wooden structure that was nothing more than four plywood walls and a sloping sheet of plywood for a roof. It was unpainted. It had a door but no window. More than anything else, it resembled an old-fashioned outhouse.
“I don’t know why you had to put the shack so far out,” the thin one grumbled.
His corner of the cooler brushed the ice at each short step.
“Gotta put her where the fish are, Mickey D.,” the fat man said between puffs. “Lift her up, will ya?”
The shack was about a hundred yards from the shore. Halfway there they set down the cooler and straightened their backs with grateful little groans.
“Did you hear about Billy Bignose?” Mickey D. Mackintosh said as he squinted into what remained of the sun.
“Never heard nothing. What happened to him?”
“I’m telling ya, Gump, so let me tell ya.”
Gump Cameron unwound the scarf from his face, revealing a bristling grey moustache and cherry-red cheeks. He turned his head, snorted snot from the back of his nose into his mouth, and spat it across the ice. It was a good one—ten feet or better.
“So tell me.”
“Way I heard,” Mickey D. continued, “he went to his shack one night and never come home.”
Gump Cameron squinted through hairy iron-grey eyebrows at the last redness of the sun as it winked out, leaving the breathless world in twilight.
“Where’d he have his shack?”
Mickey D. pointed east across the ice.
“Down by the narrows with them others.”
Gump turned and peered into the distance. Where Crooked Cove narrowed he saw three other fishing shacks on the ice. Smoke spiralled from the stovepipe chimney of one of them.
“When was this again?”
“Two weeks, there abouts. Just went to his shack, and never come home. Now what do you think of that?”
Gump shrugged and wrapped his face in his scarf, then bent to pick up the cooler. He waited with his back bent until Mickey D. got his end, and the two men completed their waddle to the shack.
The old shed door they’d salvaged was frozen shut. Gump kicked its boards to break the ice around its edge and pulled it open. An odor of stale grease and fish came out. Neither man showed signs of minding it. They lugged the cooler and their plastic bags into the darkness. The bags were so cold they rustled like dry paper.
“Get the lantern,” Gump said as he tugged the cooler into the corner.
When the glow from the Coleman kerosene lantern lit the shed, the fat man pulled the door shut.
“Colder than a witch’s tit out there,” he said.
“Good thing there’s no wind,” Mickey D. agreed, surveying the contents of the shack with satisfaction as he hung the lantern on its wall hook.
Nothing was missing. The shack was never locked, but it was an unwritten rule on Cape Breton Island that you didn’t steal from a fishing shack. There were a couple of folding chairs, an old wooden card table, a bench that supported a little green Coleman stove that ran on white gas. In the corner stood a long metal screw with a wide T handle. The shack had no floor, but straw was scattered over the ice to keep it from melting and becoming slippery from the heat of the stove.
Gump opened the lid of the cooler. Four six-packs of Keith’s India Pale Ale lined the bottom. On top of them rested a one-pound package of Maple Leaf smoked bacon and a loaf of Ben’s sandwich bread. He took out two of the brown bottles and set them on the table.
Mickey D. unwound his scarf and pulled off his mittens with his teeth, then lifted his grocery bag to the card table and carefully removed a flat of eggs and a foil-covered brick of butter. They had been transported in the cab of the truck and were not frozen, although the trip between the truck and the shack had chilled them down.
“I hope we brought enough food this time.”
He went over to the Coleman stove and took the iron skillet from its top. He tilted it to look into it with a doubtful expression on his lined and freckle-covered face. Both men were fifty-seven, but the lines in his cheeks and his snow-white hair made Mickey D. look ten years older. Anyone looking at them would never guess they had gone to the same elementary school in New Waterford, half a century ago.
“One of these days we should clean out this fry pan.”
Gump shook his head. “That would ruin it. Light the stove, will you?”
After a while, with the lantern and the stove burning, it was warm enough to take off their wool caps. Their breath no longer formed puffs of cotton in front of their faces.
Mickey D. peered down into the fishing hole in the center of the floor.
“She froze up much?” Gump asked.
“In this cold? What do you think?”
Grunting, Gump got the auger and fitted it into the hole, and they began to turn it. After a while it broke through the ice to the water beneath. They pulled it out with care to avoid splashing water all over their floor. Mickey D. found a little dipper with a long handle and ladled out the slush into a bucket. When it was full, he opened the door of the shack and threw its contents across the ice. Already it was dark, but the quarter moon that rode high among the stars cast down a little silver.
They opened their beers and settled in to the serious task of fishing. Not many words were exchanged. They had been friends since early childhood and each had stood at the other’s wedding. They had ice-fished the brackish water of the Bras D’Or Lake every winter for three decades. There was one difference, however. This was the first year they had set their shack on Crooked Cove. The old cove closer to Sydney had got too crowded. There were so many shacks it was like a little town. Both men liked the quiet, so by common consent they moved the shack here.
“Funny there aren’t more Mi’kmaq fishing this ice,” Mickey D. said around the stem of his pipe. He had given up smoking cigarettes but still used the pipe in the shack.
“Why is it funny?” Gump asked as he fiddled with the lines that dangled into the hole.
“Just seems funny, with the reservation so close, and the fishing so good. Not like the Indians to pass up good fishing.”
“You want more people out here?”
“I didn’t say that, Gump,” the freckled man protested. “Don’t go putting words into my mouth.”
The empties began to multiply on the card table. They pulled up three good fryers, and then there was a lull as the fish seemed to lose interest in the bait. Gump cleaned the fish outside on the bare ice with his folding knife and left the heads, tails, and guts for the ravens to find in the morning. He brought the fillets back in and threw them into the already heated iron pan. They sizzled when they hit. He used his bloodstained knife to cut off a corner from the block of butter and dropped it into the pan with the fillets. The rich smell of frying fish filled the shack. The smoke rose up and hung in the air over their heads, but there was enough of a vent in the high edge of the roof to let it out before it became too much of a nuisance.
“Now that I think on it, this cove’s never been very popular,” Gump said in a meditative tone. “Billy Bignose used to brag about her, but he was about the only one.”
“The Mi’kmaq got some legend about this cove,” Mickey D. murmured. His tongue was fuzzy with beer.
“What legend?�
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“I never heard it. I just heard a couple of them talking about it once at a gas station. Forgot all about it until just now.”
“What’s the legend about?” Gump asked with deliberate emphasis.
Mickey D. tilted his head back and looked up at the smoke gathered near the roof of the shed.
“Something about fishers of the cove . . . or maybe it was fishers on the cove.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“They fish at night,” Mickey D. went on. “They fish through the ice.”
“Those Indians must have been talking about ice fishing,” Gump said.
“Maybe so,” Mickey D. agreed, taking a pull on his current bottle of beer. “Only thing is about that . . .” He stopped talking. After a while he realized that Gump had stopped fiddling with the fish and was staring at him, waiting.
“They looked scared, that’s all,” he said with a shrug.
A loud crack made them both jump. They stared at each other.
“Ice must be moving,” Gump said.
“Shouldn’t be moving tonight,” Mickey D. said. “There’s no wind.”
“That’s true enough.”
They stood listening for half a minute before they relaxed.
“Fish is done,” Gump said.
“I’ll get the hooks up so we can eat.”
Mickey D. bent over the hole in the ice and carefully began to draw up their fishing lines. He cursed.
“Did you see that?” he said.
“See what? I’ve got fish in my hands.”
His friend’s silence made him turn and look. Mickey D. was on his knees, staring down into the hole.
“Something flashed down there. She looked like metal.”
“What do you mean?”
“Something flashed in the lamplight.”
Gump deposited the fish fillets onto two mismatched plates and added the fried eggs and bacon beside them.
“Maybe it was a piece of cigarette paper caught in the current. Or maybe a fish.”