In answer came a scratching at the base of the inn beneath his window as though something sought to surmount the decaying barrier.
More shapes were gathering on the street, slithering towards the inn and scratching at it. Trembling fiercely he realised why the villagers took such precautions as they did, and why none spoke or left their houses at night, leaving the village as though deserted. But the facade had been broken. They knew he was here, they had heard him!
Picking up a heavy fore-edged book he hurled it down at the creatures below. As it struck them there was the sound as of a large stone falling into mud, and then a series of cracks like breaking bones, thin, brittle ones shattered by the copper-bound book. At this the horrid sounds increased into a crescendo of fiendish glee. A shriek as inhuman as the others, yet still possessing the wretched qualities of agony and terror, echoed down the street. But loud and terrible though this was no one in any of the neighbouring houses appeared to see what was happening. All shutters and doors remained closed.
As a sudden breeze that died almost as soon as it came sent the fog floundering from the street in scattering wisps Wilderman saw the shapes more clearly though blurred even now by the gloom. For a time he had thought them to be animals, hybrids of some sort, but what he now saw was neither wholly bestial nor human, but possessed, or seemed to be possesed, in the shadow world they inhabited, of the worst features of each. Hunched, with massive backs above stunted heads that hung low upon their chests, they dragged themselves along with skeletal arms which, when outstretched above their shoulders into the diffused light from his room, proved white and leprous, crumbling as though riddled with decay. Tapering to gangrenous stumps their fingers opened slowly, painfully, and closed again before the mist returned and resealed them in a spectral haze.
When once more half hidden in the fog Wilderman saw that the shadows were converging upon one spot which then became progressively clearer, more distinct. And suddenly with the self-consuming quick-lime of fear he realised why; slowly, inevitably they were climbing upon each to form a hillock, a living hillock to his window.
Again he threw a book at them, and then another and another, each one more savagely than the last, but though they seemed to crash into and through the skulking bodies, the mound still continued to grow. And from the nethermost extremes of the mist-filled street he could make out others slithering and shuffling towards the inn.
In alarm Wilderman threw himself back from the window, slamming and fastening its shutters as he did so. Then in a fit of nausea he staggered to a basin on his dresser and was violently sick. Outside the tittering was continuing to grow louder, nearer. Awful in its surfeit of abhorrence it filled Wilderman with increasingly more dread at every passing instant. With movements strained from forcing himself to resist the panic he felt growing in him, he crept behind the writing desk in the centre of the room until, with his hand clenched tightly on it, he faced the shuttered window, his face shivering uncontrollably as his eyes stared harder and harder at the window . . . waiting, dreading the end of his wait, fearing the expected arrival.
And still from outside, the gibbering, the hellish inhuman giggling increased in volume until suddenly it ended and a scratching of claws on wood took its place. The shutters shook and rattled on their creaking hinges so violently that they threatened to give way at any moment. And then they did.
A myriad shrieks of fiendish glee flooded Wilderman's room, shrieks that mingled with and then utterly overpowered and drowned the tortured screams of anguish, terror and then agony that were human, and which ended as the slobbering tearing sounds of eating took their place.
2
The next day as a reluctant sun reared itself in a blood-red crescent above the pale pine forests to the east the locked door to Wilderman's room was forced open by two of Mrs. Jowitt's permanent guests after her unsuccessful attempt to rouse him earlier. As the men pushed and beat at the old oak panels she waited behind them, shivering as she remembered the cries of the night when she lay locked in her room down the passageway, wide eyed in fear and dread. So had, as she could tell by their red-rimmed eyes and fearful expressions, the two men.
With a mournful rending of wood the door fell inwards. As the men were contorted with disgust and nausea she looked into the room, and screamed. Inside, the room was cluttered with shattered and overturned furniture, scratched till the wood was bare, sheets torn into shreds, and a skeletal thing that lay amidst a bloody upheaval of tattered books, manuscripts, pens and cloth, bones scattered to every corner of the room.
3
Though the circumstances surrounding Wilderman's death did not show even the vaguest trace of suicide this was the verdict solemnly reached by the coroner, a native of Heron, four days later in the poorly lit village hall.
All through the hastily completed inquest Wilderman's various relatives from Pire were refused permission to view his remains before they were interred in the cemetery on the outskirts of the village, the coroner saying that his mode of self destruction—drowning himself in a nearby river—and the fact that it had taken nearly a week to find him, had left him in a state that was most definitely not wise to be seen.
"It would be better to remember him as he was," said the wrinkled old man, nervously cleaning his wire-framed bifocals, "than like he is now."
While outside, unnoticed by the visitors, the church warden completed his daily task of beating down the disrupted earth on the graves in the wild and tawny burial ground, whispering a useless prayer to himself before returning to his home for supper.
DEATH'S DOOR by Robert McNear
I read from the oil-company travel guide: "Blackrock is the northernmost community on the peninsula. Here you get the feeling of a true fishing center among the anchored fishing boats and nets reeled out to dry. Off Blackrock lies the Porte des Morts, a strait six miles wide separating mainland Wisconsin and Nicolet Island. In 1679, about 300 Potawatomi Indians drowned in a sudden storm while crossing the water to engage the Winnebago. The tragedy was witnessed by explorers La Salle and De Tonti, who named the strait Porte des Morts, or Death's Door. Today it is said the strait contains more shipwrecks per square mile than any other area in the Great Lakes."
I folded the travel guide and put it in the glove compartment. Sitting there in my car, on the last leg of my journey, my immediate impression was that the waters were a lure for the local chamber of commerce to attract visitors, a thrill for these station-wagon travelers at seeing so sinister a place, a pool for skin divers in which to explore old wrecks. Porte des Morts: Death's Door. It seemed very commonplace this late afternoon: a desolate little landing deep in the snow, a weather-beaten smokehouse whose door moved open and shut with the wind, a timber dock where a veteran ferryboat—the R. L. Ostenson, Nicolet Island, Wisconsin—creaked patiently on its hawsers. Beyond that was the bleak strait—sky the color of worn steel and bay the same, hinged by the horizon line and identical except for the dark channel of water out through the ice. I like forgotten, half-populated places, almost-deserted cubbyholes of the world. I suppose that's one of the reasons I stay on as a reporter for a small-town newspaper instead of going to Chicago and becoming a well-known journalist.
I'd been waiting in the car for about five minutes when the hunchback deck hand turned up. He came half skipping from the dock, thumb up, to motion me out of the car. I got out in the ankle-deep snow, saying, unnecessarily, "You'll take her on?" He swung into the driver's seat and slammed the door for an answer.
Great! I liked every bit of it. Only in some out-of-the-way place like this would you find a hunchback deck hand who—I had got a good look at him—had fine golden hair and an almost perfect Botticelli face. He took the car carefully across the planking and onto the deck while I, bothered by the usual curiosity, had to walk across the road to the smokehouse and look inside. No fire had burned there for months, but the ghost of smoke and fish possessed the place completely. It was so dark that I could see little except the small drift o
f snow that had come in through the door. Now, one of my itches is about doors—I can't stand to see them open when they should be shut, or idly swinging, like this one; so I closed it tight, for this winter, at least.
Then I took myself aboard the ferryboat, climbed the stairs and came to the door of the passenger saloon. I'd felt almost alone until now, but there were about ten people sitting around in the cabin, smoking, drinking coffee, waiting. It looked like a roadside diner, with plywood booths along the walls and a couple of scarred tables in the center. It looked stifling in there, so I turned away from the door and made my way along the railing to the pilothouse door.
Inside the pilothouse, leaning on the wheel and smoking a cigarette as he gazed at the car deck below, was a youngish, long-jawed man with pepper-and-salt hair, who, in spite of the ordinary windbreaker and dungarees he wore, was obviously the captain. On his head he had an old-fashioned officer's cap with a brass plate above the bill. It read: CAPTAIN. I watched him douse the cigarette, straighten up and signal down to the hunchback on the deck. A floodlight went on down there. The hunchback and a teen-age boy moved around quickly to cast off. The captain tugged twice at a cord on the compressed-air horn, bouncing two blasts off the snow-shrouded face of Blackrock. Then he pulled the engine telegraph to reverse and I could feel the deck plates vibrate as the ferry backed away from the wharf. The skin of ice crushed under the black-steel hull as we moved out to swing around slowly into the channel. Bon voyage, R. L. Ostenson.
In those few minutes, the pale daylight had gone completely; and now, looking out across the strait, I saw an early moon laying a yellow path almost directly alongside the channel through the ice of the Porte des Morts. At the end of the double line, I could see the low fishback of Nicolet Island. "Strange place, the island," Ed Kinney had said back in Green Bay. "Isolated, ingrown, maybe two hundred people, fifty families. Swedes, Icelanders, Germans. They don't warm much to strangers. Lots of superstition." Kinney has been a feature editor for a long time and he can't help talking like that. Still, he used to summer on the island and I didn't doubt the truth of what he said. "Trouble is," he'd added, "there's nothing to be superstitious about. In winter, the island's about as exciting as the lobby of the Northland Hotel at two o'clock of a Sunday morning. You'll see 'em all come out of hibernation for that basketball game. Then they go back into it for the rest of the winter."
Blackrock had slowly receded into the distance and the last lonely peninsula pine had faded astern. I realized that the sharp wind had got through my overcoat and that I was beginning to shiver. Just then, the wheelhouse door opened and the nasal voice of the captain said, "So softhearted I can't stand to see even a damn fool freeze to death. C'mon in, friend."
I stepped inside. "Thanks, Captain. It was like the fresh and gentle breeze of May. You are speaking to a man who has covered the Packers Sunday in and Sunday out for four winters."
"Hey, a reporter!" he said, smiling. We shook hands. "I'm Axel Ostenson."
"Now, why d'you figure Vince had to go and retire?" he asked. "Those boys ain't been the same since."
"Even the iron men wear out in time," I said. At this point, the radio squawked and he went over to say something into a microphone about position and time of arrival. I looked around.
All was neat and newly painted—up front near the window, the wheel and the engine telegraph, the captain's high stool. A padded bench ran the length of the pilothouse. Framed on the walls were some Great Lakes shipping charts, a safety-inspection certificate and a plaque informing me that the Sturgeon Bay Shipbuilding Company had created this noble vessel. Ostenson finished with the radio.
"You remember Ed Kinney?" I asked. "He's my editor in the News down in Green Bay."
"Sure do. Used to have a summer place on the island. I taught his boy Gene how to sail."
"Ed thought I ought to cover the Door County championship game this year. First one on Nicolet Island since 1947. Ed thought there might be a good feature story in it, along with the play-by-play. I thought maybe you could help me, and so I thought I'd ask you a few questions—"
"Nuremberg, Germany," he said.
"What's that?"
"Missed it. I was in Nuremberg, Germany, with the Tenth Division in 1947."
"But you must have heard a lot of talk Since about—"
"I'm sorry, mister, but you know the Great Lakes maritime regulations say that I'm not supposed to have anybody who don't belong in the pilothouse. I'm gonna have to ask you to go along to the saloon. You get yourself a Coke or a cuppa coffee." He didn't look at me, but kept staring straight ahead as I went out.
Queer how suddenly the Great Lakes maritime regulations got enforced.
I moved along the rail to about midship. The wind was like a cold blade on my face, but I wanted to give myself just a few more minutes before I had to go into the stuffy, smoke-filled cabin, where I knew that, in spite of myself, I'd drink at least three or four cups of bad coffee to pass the time. So I'd cut the taste of that with something better. I groped in the inside pocket of my overcoat and found the oblong shape of my flask. The bourbon built a comfortable small fire in my throat and my innards.
I stared down at the black edge of water alongside the hull and the thick shelf of ice. In the moonlight, the strait was one vast skating rink. Every now and then, a chunky little berg came scraping along the hull as we passed. I wondered what might happen if the R. L. Ostenson didn't go back and forth from Blackrock to the island twice a day. How long would it take before the channel froze over solid? But, I supposed, even at that, the island could hardly be cut off. With this kind of freeze, the iceboats—those craft with runners and sails or a motor—could make it back and forth without the slightest trouble.
Speak of the Devil, I thought. It was just about then that I heard the motor. I took another sip and peered ahead into the dark. Funny that somebody would be running one of those things this time of evening. There was more spray now than there had been and it stung my forehead and fogged my glasses. There seemed to be an area of low-lying mist on the ice ahead. I took the glasses off and gave them a good wipe with my handkerchief. The motor noise got no louder; it was still a low chugga-chugga-chugga, like something I remember out of my boyhood. I leaned over the rail and strained my eyes toward the sound and I saw one red eye in the gray cotton fog.
Then, gradually, as we overtook it, the thing took shape just at the far reach of glimmer from our deck lights. No iceboat, by God, but a black, sign-bedecked Model-A Ford, bumping along at maybe ten or fifteen miles an hour. Running boards, spare tire on the rear, dim yellow headlights on the ice. It looked just like the one my dad used to own back when. Only Dad would never have let anybody violate the glassy black finish with signs like, HOLD ME TIGHT, BABY and THERE AIN'T NO FLIES ON THE N.I.S. Bent backward in the wind was a radio aerial from which flew a green pennant that read in block letters, NICOLET ISLAND.
I leaned as far over the rail as I could and, as the old car came abreast of me then gradually began to drop astern, I tried to make out the faces of the kids inside. It was too dark for much more than silhouettes. However, I did raise my arm and wave to them. And I swear that I saw somebody waving back from the rear seat. Then the yellow headlight beams grew dimmer, the chugga-chugga dropped back out of earshot and we'd lost them.
Funny, I thought. I'd hate to have any kids of mine out on the ice on a freezing night like this one. But I supposed that people up here had different ideas. They probably drove over to Blackrock—when the ice was thick enough—as casually as we'd go down to the drugstore in Green Bay.
Anyway, it was an interesting little incident, probably not the usual thing to the average Wisconsin newspaper reader. I thought I'd pin it down a little more and use it some place in the feature. "Up around Nicolet Island, some strange things are taken as a matter of course," my lead might go. "As I was crossing over on the ferryboat last night, I saw . . ." I made my way along the railing until I'd come back to the pilothouse door. Ostenson
was still at the wheel, as if he hadn't moved since I'd left. I went on in. He glanced at me.
"Captain, I guess you saw those kids out on the ice in the old car back there just a bit. Heading over to the island. Is that a fairly common thing up here? Couldn't the kids get into trouble?"
He didn't reply. He swung his whole head around toward me, his face perfectly immobile and his gray fish-scale eyes staring. Then he looked back at his course and was silent for nearly a minute.
At last he said quietly, "It happens." Then, in a louder voice, he commanded, "Come here!" I walked over. "Open your mouth and breathe out," he said. He waited a moment. Then he said, "Liquor drinking on this ship is against the law. I could file a complaint against you and get you fined. You hear that?"
"Come off it, Cap," I said. "It's just a drop to keep the old blood flowing."
"Maybe," he said in a cold voice. "But I could testify that you barged into my pilothouse once and I had to order you out. Then you spent some time drinking liquor somewhere. Then you came back into the pilothouse against my orders. Mister, this may be just a dinky little Great Lakes ferryboat, but the captain is still the law on it. Now, you go back and sit down in the passenger cabin and shut up."
I made my disconsolate way back to the cabin. What in the world had gone wrong with that moron in the pilothouse? He'd seemed perfectly friendly until . . . I couldn't figure out what came after the "until." I sat down at one of the tables in the middle of the cabin. A burly man with a blond mustache and wearing a thick mackinaw looked up from across the table. He pointed at a half-full bottle of Seagram's and a paper cup. "Drink?" he asked.
The Year's Best Horror Stories 1 Page 17