Marsha felt the foremost creature pluck at her white t-shirt with its many black limbs, seeking purchase.
She wanted to scream then, cry for help from these many dark staring windows, half-blind with grime, their half-drawn shades like senile drooping eyelids.
The groping creature caught hold of the material. She felt other squirming fingers reaching for her, now.
Her pace was faltering as she forced herself through the lava-like air, her mind a vortex of terror and buzzing. And ahead of her, a familiar landmark at last...
...a barber pole, unturning. Next door, the sea shell shop, its sign ALL WASHED UP smiling at her in welcome. She had come full circle, and there were more and more of the flying animals seizing hold of her clothing...and, for the first time, her skin.
Her steps slowing, crumbling. She had to find shelter. Safety. In her mind, she pictured sharp little bird beaks within those nests of writhing arms.
Just ahead of her, the door to the shop opened, and a pallid figure filled the doorway. It was an elderly woman, large-bodied and wearing a white nightgown, and for an instant Marsha thought it was her mother. Her mother here to protect her. But for all the resemblance, this woman was grinning, and her mother wasn’t one to grin. The woman was beckoning to her, and Marsha went to her...staggering, sobbing, the things snarled in her hair and fixing themselves to the flesh of her back, both through and inside the material of her crisp new t-shirt. She could feel blood running down her ribs, the small of her back...
...but the woman was grinning, and held her fleshy arms out in welcome, and Marsha stumbled into them with a sob of mindless gratitude. Immediately, the creatures fell away. The buzzing stopped.
She heard the door close with a squeal behind her, and she was folded into the woman’s damp and chilly bosom, which smelled of the sea.
The Cellar Gods
I
Ng was beautiful. It was not that I was so lacking in prejudice toward those strange, silent tenants of the brick warehouse, not that I was unafraid of them when the rest of the town let their fear turn to rage. I was too weak to save the others, but it was a weakness that made me save her. It was simply this: that Ng was beautiful.
I still can't say, with any certainty, where she - they – came from. They were oriental, at least in physical resemblance. Even today, over fifty years later, with the world so much smaller, more intimate, with most its mysterious shadowed corners lit by the bland light of cathode rays, I have never learned of her origins. I have watched documentaries, pored over crumbling tomes and glossy National Geographics. A few hints - just broken shards of myth like fragments of ancient pottery, dinosaur bones that cannot be assembled; rumors of a place called Leng, and of a place called the Dreamlands which could be reached by shamans only, through astral projection, the ritual use of drugs, or death. Whether this was truly an actual place, on this plane or another, or merely a state of mind, one might not tell from these obliterated legends. But I think I know the truth.
The most Ng told me herself was that she came from "the cold waste". She was not as stocky and broad-faced as an Eskimo, though I might have believed some of the others to be that. Ng spoke broken English, as some of those mysterious laborers did, so that they might interact with the people of Eastborough to some limited, unavoidable extent. They had purchased a small brick warehouse composed of two stories and a basement, close to the train tracks, where freight was unloaded and carried into the building, or vice versa, though what lay inside those heavy wooden crates and sealed metal drums we never learned; at the time the warehouse was burned, it was found to be largely emptied. At least, that is what was said. If that vengeful little mob did in fact find such freight stored within, and opened it to reveal its secrets, then those contents were either so meaningless – or so horrible - that the information was never revealed.
Later, there was a tannery on that spot. It, too, burned, though the cause of that conflagration was a mystery. There is a retirement complex on the spot now, and the trains no longer use that stretch of track, so that it lies covered in the woods on the outskirts of Eastborough Swamp, into which some people have ventured and never returned, said to be swallowed in quicksand, or abducted by the UFOs teen agers have claimed to see, or done some evil by the ghosts of the thirty oriental laborers murdered on that night in 1944.
The war was not yet over; it was the time of Yellow Peril, not of New World Order. Not to excuse the actions of the clan who descended on that warehouse to murder those who worked and dwelled within. But I will say this: during the war, much was said to portray the Japanese as monsters, fiends, demons straight out of hell. We know now that the Japanese are only as vile as ourselves. But Ng's people - and yes, I still shudder to imagine their fates, and I wonder if Ng was not the only one of them capable of tenderness – well, if fragments and whispers are to be taken as more than just similar propaganda...then the things said about the Japanese might in their case be far more fitting.
I am an old man now, and I will never live in that retirement complex. How much of the delirium of its tenants, thought to be senility, might be caused by ghostly possession, poison vibrations, the stain of sins both brutally human and horribly alien? I, myself, would rather die in an alley.
I was twenty in 1944. My epilepsy, though mild, had kept me out of the war, and I was attending college in nearby Worcester, Massachusetts, pursuing a career in medicine. I felt fortunate then, but in retrospect I think I would have preferred to go to war; to have witnessed merely terrestrial horrors; just blood spilt, just flesh torn. Not dimensions rent, not the black belly of the cosmos incised and peeled back in dissection. But then...but then...I would never have known Ng.
II
I worked weekends in a small grocery, and had as much contact with the mysterious foreigners as anyone in town did. Ng had come in before, and I couldn't help but notice her. Her face was round, the lips of her small mouth full, her teeth - when she would politely, shyly smile – crooked but white and appealing. Her eyes with their oriental fold were neat slits as if cut in the smooth paper mask of her face, slits from out of which those eyes gazed with a dark sheen. Her hair was glossy and straight, usually gathered in a braid in back, but sometimes flowing free about her slight, girlish shoulders. Though my age, she was as small and slim as a child.
One day she entered the tiny market with a companion; briskly they selected the items on their list, then came to the counter. At once I noticed Ng's hand was crudely bandaged in a dirty white rag, this stained deeply with blood. "What happened to you?" I asked with straightforward concern, gesturing at her swaddled limb.
The young woman shrugged and averted her gaze with embarrassment. "Cut hand working."
"Well, you should have it looked after. Here, come around here. Don't be afraid; I'm going to school to become a doctor. Let me have a look at it...dress it properly, at least."
Ng threw a doubtful look at her companion, a stern-faced older woman I had also seen before, and who never smiled. She was all the more unappealing for the deep fissure of a scar which ran down the center of her forehead, even extending down the bridge of her nose, as if she had miraculously survived a catastrophic axe wound to the skull. The woman grunted unpleasantly, but I persisted boldly, taking the younger woman's slim forearm.
"Come around here...please. Don't be afraid..."
And so she did, the older woman reluctantly following, muttering in an alien tongue. In the back room I quickly washed my hands (afraid they would flee if I didn't act fast), then ran to fetch some tape and gauze from one of the narrow aisles. Ng allowed me to unwrap her small hand, and I cleaned it in the sink, lathering it between my own. As the blood both dry and fresh was scrubbed away, I saw that the wounding consisted of four nasty lacerations across the top of her hand, deep but not requiring stitches. I wondered what machinery she had caught her hand in; to me it looked like a panther had raked her with its claws, but I told myself her exotic appearance was making my imagination too fanc
iful.
I bandaged her hand properly, as promised, and told her, "Come back when it needs to be changed again, will you?"
She smiled, nodded...and to my honest surprise, did return, the next day, and alone.
So it began, with my kindness, and our touching, and her blood. I couldn't wait for the weekends; her lovely face was superimposed over the dusty text of my school books. Several weeks passed, and she managed to come in alone every Saturday and Sunday. Finally, one Sunday afternoon, as it was near my time to leave, I asked her if I could walk her home, or maybe to get some coffee. She was visibly hesitant, and I cursed my foolishness, but then she said, "Go your house? People see us coffee. They talk. Your people. My people..."
I wondered what my parents would say if I brought her home; I lived with them in their large old Victorian. But I was too excited to decline. So Ng waited until I closed up, and we stepped outside together into the biting February air, and there floating toward us like some apparition was the stern-faced woman with her cracked doll's head, extending a claw of a hand to Ng. Commanding her, come to fetch her.
Ng spoke defiantly in her native tongue, but the woman seized her roughly by the elbow and began dragging her off. I wanted to speak up, but was too timid, and Ng gave in, casting a sad look at me over her shoulder.
III
The next weekend there came a great snowstorm, a howling wrathful god of a blizzard that dumped thirty inches of heavy wet snow on Eastborough before it was spent. On such a night, one would expect even drunken brutes to remain in their warm homes. Instead, for whatever reasons led to the final decision, that was the night that seven men from the town set out with shotguns and cans of gasoline for the warehouse by the train tracks. Perhaps it was the way the deep snow transformed our familiar town into a savage, isolating, alien world that stirred their fears and restlessness beyond the point they could endure.
The first I learned of the incident was when – it being past midnight, and I the only one awake, pouring over a text book - I heard a faint rapping at my bedroom window. I expected it to be the scraping of a whipped tree branch, but parted the curtains nonetheless and started violently when I saw a dark face peering in at me. I had a flashlight by my bed in case we lost power, pointed it at the glass, and saw Ng's face hovering in the cold black beyond.
I let her in, of course, and took her into the basement so my parents wouldn't hear us converse. She obviously had dressed hurriedly, inadequately, and was next to frozen. I took a blanket from the laundry corner and wrapped it around her shoulders, toweled her hair dry myself. "What are you doing here? How did you find me?" I whispered as I worked. And then I noticed the burnt smell about her. "What happened?"
"Grayeyes– " she said. It was the first time she called me that, and she never called me anything else. Later, she would admit that the color of my eyes – more gray than blue – had fascinated her, as hers had me. "Men come to our place. Shoot boss. Make fire. Only Ng escape. They not see me, but if see me kill me. I must stay here. Please...please, Grayeyes." She touched my face. Ah, seductress! But it wasn't a charade, wasn't insincere. I took her hand from my face...but I continued to hold it in my own.
In the morning, I confessed to my parents that I had taken her in. Naturally, they were alarmed, unhappy, concerned that the band that had gutted the warehouse would seek her out, too. I convinced them that the marauders didn't know she survived, let alone here in our house. I pleaded, and at last they gave in. Ng would remain in the basement, however. There was a corner of the basement, away from the furnace, the water heater, the laundry area, on the other side of the stairs, where we stored boxes of Christmas decorations and the like. I carried what I could up to the attic to clear it out, and into that corner dragged our old sofa, which we kept down in the basement to sit and read on when doing the wash. This became Ng's bed, our cellar her refuge, her sanctuary.
It was difficult returning to school, several days later, leaving this stranger – however meek and seemingly harmless – alone with my parents. Especially as the details of the brutal attack began to circulate...this, despite the fact that no one had been arrested in connection with it, yet. (And no one ever was, though three of the men said to have been responsible died unnatural deaths - two in automobile accidents, and one having been found in his garage as late as 1969, with his throat cut, strung upside-down from the ceiling.)
But the first day I rushed home from school to find all three of them alive and well. My mother had brought food down to Ng, who had only ventured upstairs to use the toilet and bathe. Ng smiled her crooked, sweet smile upon seeing me return, but my father drew me into the living room to whisper to me with a harshness born of nervousness.
"I heard some of what they saw in the warehouse...weird stuff. Animal bones hanging from the ceiling in the cellar, and symbols painted on the walls, and the weirdest thing: out of the cellar floor there was sticking these two big statues, just heads, coming right out of the dirt. Like the warehouse was built around them, but how could that be? They weren't dug up out of the floor by those people, either, and they were too big to have been dragged in there..."
"Statues of what?"
"Just heads, is all. Slanty-eyed heads. Old...real old."
IV
It was again past midnight, the first time we made love; on that narrow musty sofa in the basement, my parents asleep in their comfortable large bed above us.
I still remember the feel, the smell, the taste of her flesh. In the intimate soft glow of her one lamp, it had a warm honey color. She was so tiny, delicate but not weak, her breasts with their brown nipples adolescent, her skin flawless and so smooth, so unlined, barely creased, showing no muscle definition and yet her limbs so slender, that she resembled a child or a doll, not yet fully formed. There was but the barest wisp of coarse hair at the meeting of her legs, her small strong legs that hitched around me, squeezed me, as she squeezed her eyes tightly shut and bared her crooked teeth as if in agony, but moaning so softly in pleasure, her black hair flowing silken over my arms, her arms wrapped desperately around me, as if she would never let me go.
It was the first of many such times, and my parents of course knew what was happening. Soon they never came down cellar without knocking first. The weeks passed. It was now spring. But Ng would not leave the house; she was convinced, and I could not really deny it, that the police knew who the killers were, and would not protect her as they protected them. She feared, as my family did, that our house would be attacked next if her presence came to light. And so, it became summer. We had so much more time together that I almost did not want to return to school that fall. But during the summer I helped my father transform our basement for Ng. We built a wall that divided off her room from the rest of the basement, starting just where the stairs descended, so that the entrance to her tiny apartment (compartment would be fairer) was concealed in the dark beneath the stairs. My father was not cheerful about his labors and the expense, but it didn't show in his work (or was it that his love for me, and pity for Ng, showed in his work?). We installed a toilet and a cramped shower stall in her corner, and I bought her a narrow child's bed. We boarded up the one small window in her room so she wouldn't be as nervous about using her lamp at night. I purchased a second hand bureau, and in Worcester I bought clothing for her; up to now she had been wearing some of my mother's things. (When first she came to my home she had only the clothes on her back, and some few possessions she had gathered into a burlap sack.) After a time we stopped wondering how long we might have to take these precautions; it became our way of life, as it had for the family of Anne Frank, hiding from their persecutors..
And so, years began to pass.
I became a doctor, a general practitioner, and converted rooms in the hulking Victorian to make my office and two examination rooms. My parents, good as always, all but moved to the second floor. After a time I could have bought my own house, and moved Ng into it, but she would not leave her place of asylum. I told her in Worceste
r she would not be so alien in the more heterogeneous throngs of the city, but still she passionately refused. One time when I became especially insistent, and grabbed her arm as if to drag her upstairs, where she hadn't ventured in months, she snatched up a steak knife from the small table I'd given her and pressed its tip under her own jaw. I let her go.
And so I never married, as the years continued by. I declined dates, and once heard it rumored I was disinclined toward my own sex. I felt like the Beast, keeping his Beauty hostage in his castle dungeon, except that she was my willing prisoner. As time turned reality to history, even folklore, some of the rumors about that night of the blizzard also took on a fairy tale quality...
One patient of mine was an elderly man who lived with his son, and who drank too much and constantly injured himself in falls and such. One afternoon, as I was treating him, he began to speak of that night. Naturally, I encouraged him, though I could plainly tell he was already drunk. And this is what he said he saw, peeking out his window into the wild storm.
"I heard a noise, and I looked out the window, and I seen this plow, I thought, moving through Parker's Meadow, where there's houses now. I thought, what the hell's a plow doing in that field? But as I watched it, I saw it wasn't any truck. It was some kind of big animal, I swear to God...big and black, and it started nosing down into the snow, right there in the middle of the meadow, burrowing right down 'til in about fifteen minutes the damn thing was gone. And the snow covered up the spot, of course, and come spring I went out there one day and there was no sign of the spot. But I saw that thing, whatever it was, and it must've come through the woods from Eastborough Swamp."
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