American supernatural tales

by S. T. Joshi

  Passed Sarr out in the field—he yelled to watch out for the copperhead, which put a pall on my enthusiasm for exploration. . . . But as it happened I never ran into any snakes, and have a fair idea I’d survive even if bitten. Walked around half a mile into the woods, branches snapping in my face. Made an effort to avoid walking into the little yellow caterpillars that hang from every tree. At one point I had to get my feet wet, because the trail that runs alongside the brook disappeared and the undergrowth was thick. Ducked under a low arch made by decaying branches and vines, my sneakers sloshing in the water. Found that as the brook runs west it forms a small circular pool with banks of wet sand, surrounded by tall oaks, their roots thrust into the water. Lots of animal tracks in the sand—deer, I believe, and what may be a fox or perhaps some farmer’s dog. Obviously a watering place. Waded into the center of the pool—it only came up a little past my ankles—but didn’t stand there long because it started looking like rain.

  The weather remained nasty all day, but no rain has come yet. Cloudy now, though; can’t see any stars.

  Finished Otranto, began The Monk. So far so good—rather dirty, really. Not for today, of course, but I can imagine the sensation it must have caused back at the end of the eighteenth century.

  Had a good time at dinner tonight, since Sarr had walked into town and brought back some wine. (Medical note: I seem to be less allergic to cats when mildly intoxicated.) We sat around the kitchen afterward playing poker for matchsticks—very sinful indulgence, I understand; Sarr and Deborah told me, quite seriously, that they’d have to say some extra prayers tonight by way of apology to the Lord.

  Theological considerations aside, though, we all had a good time and Deborah managed to clean us both out. Women’s intuition, she says. I’m sure she must have it—she’s the type. Enjoy being around her, and not always so happy to trek back outside, through the high grass, the night dew, the things in the soil. . . . I’ve got to remember, though, that they’re a couple, I’m the single one, and I mustn’t intrude too long. So left them tonight at eleven—or actually a little after that, since their clock is slightly out of kilter. They have this huge grandfather-type clock, a wedding present from Sarr’s parents, that has supposedly been keeping perfect time for a century or more. You can hear its ticking all over the house when everything else is still. Deborah said that last night, just as they were going to bed, the clock seemed to slow down a little, then gave a couple of faster beats and started in as before. Sarr, who’s pretty good with mechanical things, examined it, but said he saw nothing wrong. Well, I guess everything’s got to wear out a bit, after years and years.

  Back to The Monk. May Brother Ambrosio bring me pleasant dreams.

  JUNE 13

  Read a little in the morning, loafed during the afternoon. At 4:30 watched The Thief of Baghdad—ruined on TV and portions omitted, but still a great film. Deborah puttered around the kitchen, and Sarr spent most of the day outside. Before dinner I went out back with a scissors and cut away a lot of ivy that has tried to grow through the windows of my building. The little shoots fasten onto the screens and really cling.

  Beef with rice tonight, and apple pie for dessert. Great. I stayed inside the house after dinner to watch the late news with the Poroths. The announcer mentioned that today was Friday the thirteenth, and I nearly gasped. I’d known, on some dim automatic level, that it was the thirteenth, if only from keeping this journal; but I hadn’t had the faintest idea it was Friday. That’s how much I’ve lost track of time out here; day drifts into day, and every one but Sunday seems completely interchangeable. Not a bad feeling, really, though at certain moments this isolation makes me feel somewhat adrift. I’d been so used to living by the clock and the calendar. . . .

  We tried to figure out if anything unlucky happened to any of us today. About the only incident we could come up with was Sarr’s getting bitten by some animal a cat had left on the porch. The cats had been sitting by the front door waiting to be let in for their dinner, and when Sarr came in from the field he was greeted with the usual assortment of dead mice and moles. As he always did, he began gingerly picking the bodies up by the tails and tossing them into the garbage can, meanwhile scolding the cats for being such natural-born killers. There was one body, he told us, that looked different from the others he’d seen: rather like a large shrew, only the mouth was somehow askew, almost as if it were vertical instead of horizontal, with a row of little yellow teeth exposed. He figured that, whatever it was, the cats had pretty well mauled it, which probably accounted for its unusual appearance; it was quite tattered and bloody by this time.

  In any case, he’d bent down to pick it up, and the thing had bitten him on the thumb. Apparently it had just been feigning death, like an opossum, because as soon as he yelled and dropped it the thing sped off into the grass, with Bwada and the rest in hot pursuit. Deborah had been afraid of rabies—always a real danger around here, rare though it is—but apparently the bite hadn’t even pierced the skin. Just a nip, really. Hardly a Friday-the-thirteenth tragedy.

  Lying in bed now, listening to sounds in the woods. The trees come really close to my windows on one side, and there’s always some kind of sound coming from the underbrush in addition to the tapping at the screens. A million creatures out there, after all—most of them insects and spiders, a colony of frogs in the swampy part of the woods, and perhaps even skunks and raccoons. Depending on your mood, you can either ignore the sounds and just go to sleep or—as I’m doing now—remain awake listening to them. When I lie here thinking about what’s out there, I feel more protected with the light off. So I guess I’ll put away this writing. . . .

  JUNE 15

  Something really weird happened today. I still keep trying to figure it out.

  Sarr and Deborah were gone almost all day; Sunday worship is, I guess, the center of their religious activity. They walked into Gilead early in the morning and didn’t return until after four. They’d left, in fact, before I woke up. Last night they’d asked me if I’d like to come along, but I got the impression they’d invited me mainly to be polite, so I declined. I wouldn’t want to make them uncomfortable during services, but perhaps someday I’ll accompany them anyway, since I’m curious to see a fundamentalist church in action.

  In any case, I was left to share the farm with the Poroths’ seven cats and the four hens they’d bought last week. From my window I could see Bwada and Phaedra chasing after something near the barn; lately they’d taken to stalking grasshoppers. As I do every morning, I went into the farmhouse kitchen and made myself some breakfast, leafing through one of the Poroths’ religious magazines, and then returned to my rooms out back for some serious reading. I picked up Dracula again, which I’d started yesterday, but the soppy Victorian sentimentality began to annoy me; the book had begun so well, on such a frightening note—Jonathan Harker trapped in that Carpathian castle, inevitably the prey of its terrible owner— that when Stoker switched the locale to England and his main characters to women, he simply couldn’t sustain that initial tension.

  With the Poroths gone I felt a little lonely and bored, something I hadn’t felt out here yet. Though I’d brought shelves of books to entertain me, I felt restless and wished I owned a car; I’d have gone for a drive, perhaps visited friends at Princeton. As things stood, though, I had nothing to do except watch television or take a walk.

  I followed the stream again into the woods and eventually came to the circular pool. There were some new animal tracks in the wet sand, and, ringed by oaks, the place was very beautiful, but still I felt bored. Again I waded into the center of the water and looked up at the sky through the trees. Feeling myself alone, I began to make some of the odd signs with face and hands that I had that evening in the tree—but I felt that these movements had been unaccountably robbed of their power. Standing there up to my ankles in water, I felt foolish.

  Worse than that, upon leaving it I found a red-brown leech clinging to my right ankle. It wasn’t large and
I was able to scrape it off with a stone, but it left me with a little round bite that oozed blood, and a feeling of—how shall I put it?—physical helplessness. I felt that the woods had somehow become hostile to me and, more important, would forever remain hostile. Something had passed.

  I followed the stream back to the farm, and there I found Bwada, lying on her side near some rocks along its bank. Her legs were stretched out as if she were running, and her eyes were wide and astonished-looking. Flies were crawling over them.

  She couldn’t have been dead for long, since I’d see her only a few hours before, but she was already stiff. There was foam around her jaws. I couldn’t tell what had happened to her until I turned her over with a stick and saw, on the side that had lain against the ground, a gaping red hole that opened like some new orifice. The skin around it was folded back in little triangular flaps, exposing the pink flesh beneath. I backed off in disgust, but I could see even from several feet away that the hole had been made from the inside.

  I can’t say that I was very upset at Bwada’s death, because I’d always hated her. What did upset me, though, was the manner of it—I can’t figure out what could have done that to her. I vaguely remember reading about a kind of slug that, when eaten by a bird, will bore its way out through the bird’s stomach. . . . But I’d never heard of something like this happening with a cat. And far stranger than that, how could—

  Well, anyway, I saw the body and thought, Good riddance. But I didn’t know what to do with it. Looking back, of course, I wish I’d buried it right there. . . . But I didn’t want to go near it again. I considered walking into town and trying to find the Poroths, because I knew their cats were like children to them, even Bwada, and that they’d want to know right away. But I really didn’t feel like running around Gilead asking strange people where the Poroths were—or, worse yet, stumbling into their forbidding-looking church in the middle of a ceremony.

  Finally I made up my mind to simply leave the body there and pretend I’d never seen it. Let Sarr discover it himself. I didn’t want to have to tell him when he got home that his pet had been killed; I prefer to avoid unpleasantness. Besides, I felt strangely guilty, the way one often does after someone else’s misfortune.

  So I spent the rest of the afternoon reading in my room, slogging through the Stoker. I wasn’t in the best mood to concentrate. Sarr and Deborah got back after four—they shouted hello and went into the house. When Deborah called me for dinner, they still hadn’t come outside.

  All the cats except Bwada were inside having their evening meal when I entered the kitchen, and Sarr asked me if I’d seen her during the day. I lied and said I hadn’t. Deborah suggested that occasionally Bwada ignored the supper call because, unlike the other cats, she sometimes ate what she killed and might simply be full. That rattled me a bit, but I had to stick to my lie.

  Sarr seemed more concerned than Deborah, and when he told her he intended to search for the cat after dinner (it would still be light), I readily offered my help. I figured I could lead him to the spot where the body lay. . . .

  And then, in the middle of our dinner, came that scratching at the door. Sarr got up and opened it. Bwada walked in.

  Now I knew she was dead. She was stiff dead. That wound in her side had been huge, and now it was only . . . a reddish swelling. Hairless. Luckily the Poroths didn’t notice my shock; they were busy fussing over her, seeing what was wrong. “Look, she’s hurt herself,” said Deborah. “She’s bumped into something.” The animal didn’t walk well, and there was a clumsiness in the way she held herself. When Sarr put her down after examining the swelling, she slipped when she tried to walk away.

  The Poroths concluded that she had run into a rock or some other object and had badly bruised herself; they believe her lack of coordination is due to the shock, or perhaps to a pinching of the nerves. That sounds logical enough. Sarr told me before I came out here for the night that if she’s worse tomorrow, he’ll take her to the local vet, even though he’ll have trouble paying for treatment. I immediately offered to lend him money, or even pay for the visit myself, because I desperately wanted to hear a doctor’s opinion.

  My own conclusion is really not that different from Sarr’s. I tend to think now that maybe, just maybe, I was wrong in thinking the cat dead. Maybe what I mistook for rigor mortis was some kind of fit—after all, I know almost nothing about medicine. Maybe she really did run into something sharp, and then went into some kind of shock . . . whose effect hasn’t yet worn off. Is this possible?

  But I could swear that hole came from inside her.

  I couldn’t continue dinner and told the Poroths my stomach hurt, which was partly true. We all watched Bwada stumble around the kitchen floor, ignoring the food Deborah put before her as if it weren’t there. Her movements were stiff, tentative, like a newborn animal still unsure how to move its muscles. I guess that’s the result of her fit.

  When I left the house tonight, a little while ago, she was huddled in the corner staring at me. Deborah was crooning over her, but the cat was staring at me.

  Killed a monster of a spider behind my suitcase tonight. That Ortho spray really does a job. When Sarr was in here a few days ago he said the room smelled of spray, but I guess my allergy’s too bad for me to smell it.

  I enjoy watching the zoo outside my screens. Put my face close and stare the bugs eye to eye. Zap the ones whose faces I don’t like with my spray can.

  Tried to read more of the Stoker—but one thing keeps bothering me. The way that cat stared at me. Deborah was brushing its back, Sarr fiddling with his pipe, and that cat just stared at me and never blinked. I stared back, said, “Hey, Sarr? Look at Bwada. That damned cat’s not blinking.” And just as he looked up, it blinked. Heavily.

  Hope we can go to the vet tomorrow, because I want to ask him whether cats can impale themselves on a rock or a stick, and if such an accident might cause a fit of some kind that would make them rigid.

  Cold night. Sheets are damp and the blanket itches. Wind from the woods—ought to feel good in the summer, but it doesn’t feel like summer. That damned cat didn’t blink till I mentioned it. Almost as if it understood me.

  JUNE 17

  . . . Swelling on her side’s all healed now. Hair growing back over it. She walks fine, has a great appetite, shows affection to the Poroths. Sarr says her recovery demonstrates how the Lord watches over animals—affirms his faith. Says if he’d taken her to a vet he’d just have been throwing away money.

  Read some LeFanu. “Green Tea,” about the phantom monkey with eyes that glow, and “The Familiar,” about the little staring man who drives the hero mad. Not the smartest choices right now, the way I feel, because for all the time that fat gray cat purrs over the Poroths, it just stares at me. And snarls. I suppose the accident may have addled its brain a bit. I mean, if spaying can change a cat’s personality, certainly a goring on a rock might.

  Spent a lot of time in the sun today. The flies made it pretty hard to concentrate on the stories, but figured I’d get a suntan. I probably have a good tan now (hard to tell, because the mirror in here is small and the light dim), but suddenly it occurs to me that I’m not going to be seeing anyone for a long time anyway, except the Poroths, so what the hell do I care how I look?

  Can hear them singing their nightly prayers now. A rather comforting sound, I must admit, even if I can’t share the sentiments.

  Petting Felix today—my favorite of the cats, real charm—came away with a tick on my arm which I didn’t discover till taking a shower before dinner. As a result, I can still feel imaginary ticks crawling up and down my back. Damned cat.

  JUNE 21

  . . . Coming along well with the Victorian stuff. Zipped through “The Uninhabited House” and “Monsieur Maurice,” both very literate, sophisticated. Deep into the terrible suffering of “The Amber Witch,” poor priest and daughter near starvation, when Deborah called me in for dinner. Roast beef, with salad made from garden lettuce. Quite good. And
Deborah was wearing one of the few sleeveless dresses I’ve seen on her. So she has a body after all. . . .

  A rainy night. Hung around the house for a while reading in their living room while Sarr whittled and Deborah crocheted. Rain sounded better from in there than it does out here where it’s not so cozy.

  At eleven we turned on the news, cats purring around us, Sarr with Zoë on his lap, Deborah petting Phaedra, me sniffling. . . . Halfway through the wrap-up I pointed to Bwada, curled up at my feet, and said, “Look at her. You’d think she was watching the news with us.” Deborah laughed and leaned over to scratch Bwada behind the ears. As she did so, Bwada turned to look at me.

  The rain is letting up slightly. I can still hear the dripping from the trees, leaf to leaf to the dead leaves lining the forest floor; it will probably continue on and off all night. Occasionally I think I hear thrashings in one of the oaks near the barn, but then the sound turns into the falling of the rain.

  Mildew higher on the walls of this place. Glad my books are on shelves off the ground. So damp in here my envelopes are ruined—glue moistened, sealing them all shut. Stamps that had been in my wallet are stuck to the dollar bills. At night my sheets are clammy and cold, but each morning I wake up sweating.

  Finished “The Amber Witch,” really fine. Would that all lives had such happy endings.

  JUNE 22

  When Poroths returned from church, helped them prepare strips of molding for the upstairs study. Worked out in the tool shed, one of the old wooden outbuildings. I measured, Sarr sawed, Deborah sanded. All in all, hardly felt useful, but what the hell?

  While they were busy, I sat staring out the window. There’s a narrow cement walk running from the shed to the main house, and, as was their habit, Minnie and Felix, two of the kittens, were crouched in the middle of it taking in the late afternoon sun. Suddenly Bwada appeared on the house’s front porch and began slinking along the cement path in our direction, tail swishing from side to side. When she neared the kittens she gave a snarl—I could see her mouth working—and they leaped to their feet, bristling, and ran off into the grass.