Dark Forces

by McCauley, Kirby

  She didn’t look more than eighteen—about a year older than I, who hadn’t ever seen a naked lady except on the backs of well-thumbed and boy-sticky cards that used to get passed around our home room in school.

  Nothing at all.

  There were lights on the river: boys out gigging for frogs or gathering fish in from trotlines. The gleam of the lanterns flashed on the waters and seemed to stream up through the blowing curtains and glimmer darkling on that girl.

  She was so pretty.

  She sensed my stare.

  She turned and—to my mingled ecstasy and terror—came down the threadbare carpet of the companionway toward my door.

  She came in.

  A second later we were into the bunk with her wet-lipped and coughing with passion and me not much better.

  Afterward she kindly sewed the tear in my shirt and the two ripped-off buttons from our getting me undressed.

  Whew!

  All the time we were making love I could hear poor Darly Pogue—somewhere up on Water Street reciting the story of the Flood from Genesis, at the top of his voice.

  And I haint by God no Noah neither! he’d announce every few minutes, like a candidate declining to run for office. So I haint not your wharfmaster as of this by God hereby date!

  Well, I groped and blundered my way into manhood amidst the beautiful limbs of that girl.

  The moon fairly blushed to see the things we did.

  And with her doing all the teaching.

  All through it you could hear the crackle and whisper of static from the old battery Stromberg Carlson—that and the voice of poor Darly Pogue—high atop an old Water Street elm, announcing that the Bible Flood was about to come again.

  Who are you? I asked the woman.

  I am Loll.

  I know that, I said. But I see you in the morning—while you’re fixing me and him breakfast and you’re old—

  I am a prisoner of the moon, she said. My beauty waxes and wanes with her phases.

  I don’t care, I said. I love you. Marry me. I’ll borrow for you. I’ll even steal for you.

  I pondered.

  I won’t kill for you—but I will steal. Will you?

  No.

  Do you love me at all? I asked then in a ten-year-old’s voice.

  I am fond of you, she said, giving me a peck of a kiss: her great fog-grey eyes misty from our loving. You are full of lovely aptitudes and you make love marvelously.

  She pouted a little and shrugged.

  But I do not love you, she said.

  I see.

  I love him, she said. That ridiculous little man who refuses to go with me.

  Go? Go where, Loll? You’re not leaving Glory are you?

  I’m not leaving the river, if that’s what you mean. As for Darly Pogue—I adored him in that Other. Before he went away. And now he won’t go forward with me again.

  Before when, Loll? Forward where?

  I got no answer. Her grey eyes were fixed on a circle of streetlamp that illuminated the verdant foliage of the big river elm—and among it the bare legs of poor Darly Pogue.

  And now, she said. He must be punished, of course. He has gone too far. He has resisted me long enough. This final insult has done it!

  I was getting dressed and in a hurry. I could tell she was talking in other Dimensions about Things and Powers that scared me about as bad as the river did Darly Pogue. Yet I could see what her hold on him was—how she kept him living in that floating casket on top of the moving, living surface of the waters: that great river of pools and shallows, that moving cluster of little lakes, that beloved Ohio. It was her night beauty.

  I eased her out of the stateroom as slick and gentle as I could, for I didn’t want her passing out one of her punishments onto me.

  But I knew I would never be the same.

  In fact, I suddenly knew two new things: that I was going to spend my life on the river, and that I would never marry.

  Because Loll had spoilt me for even the most loving of mortal caresses.

  And, what’s more, she sewed my buttons back on that morning. Though the hands that held my repaired garment out to me—they were gnarled and withered like the great roots of old river trees.

  Well, you remember the flood of thirty-six. It was a bad one all right.

  It was weird—looking down Seventh Street to the streetlight atop the telephone pole by the confectioner’s and seeing that streetlight shimmering and shivering just ten inches from the dark, pulsing stream—that streetlamp like a dandelion atop a tall, shimmering stalk of light.

  Beautiful.

  But kind of deathly, too.

  It was a bad, bad flood in the valleys. Crest of fifty-nine feet. But then Loll had predicted more than one hundred.

  Forecast it and scared poor Darly Pogue—who knew she was never wrong—into running for his life and ending up getting himself the corner room on the fifth floor of the Zadok Cramer Hotel. There was only one higher place in Glory and that was the widow’s walk atop the old courthouse and this was taller even than the mound. But Darly settled for the fifth floor of the Zadok. It seemed somehow to be the place remotest from the subject of his phobia.

  I was living in the hotel by now so I used to take him up his meals—all prepared by the hotel staff: Loll had gone on strike.

  Darly didn’t eat much.

  He just sat on the edge of the painted brass bed toying with the little carved peach pit from Death Row and looking like he was the carver. She wants me back. And by God I haint going back.

  Well, Darly, you could at least go down and see her. I’ll lend you my johnboat.

  And go back on that wharfboat?

  Well, yes, Darly.

  Like hell I will, he snaps, pacing the floor in his Ballyhoo underwear and walking to the window every few minutes to stare out at block after town block merging liquidly into the great polished expanse of river.

  On the wharfboat be damned! he cried. It’s farther than that she wants me.

  I felt a kind of shiver run over me as Darly seemed to shut his mouth against the Unspeakable. I closed my eyes. All I could see in the dark was the tawny sweet space of skin between Loll’s breasts and a tiny mole there, like an island in a golden river.

  But I’m safe from her here! he cried out suddenly, sloshing some J. W. Dant into the tumbler from the small washbowl. He drank the half glass of whiskey without winking. Again I shivered.

  Aint you even gonna chase it, Darly?

  With what?

  Well, hell—with water.

  Aint got any.

  I pointed to the little sink with its twin ornamental brass spigots with the pinheaded cupids for handles.

  That’s for washing—not drinking. It’s—

  He shuddered.

  —it’s river water.

  He looked miserably at the little spigots and the bowl, golden and browned with use, like an old meerschaum.

  I tried to get a room without running water, he said. I do hate this arrangement awfully. Think of it. Those pipes run directly down to…

  Naturally, he could not finish.

  The night of the actual crest of thirty-six I was alone in my own room at the hotel. Since business on the wharfboat had been discontinued during the flood there was no one aboard but Loll. The crest—a mere fifty-nine feet—was registered on the wall of the Purina Feed Warehouse at Seventh and Western. That was the crest of thirty-six. And that was all.

  You would think that Darly would have greeted this news with joy.

  Or at least relief.

  But it sent him into a veritable frenzy against Loll. She had deliberately lied to him. She had frightened him into making himself a laughingstock in Glory. A hundred and fifteen feet, indeed! We shall see about such prevarications!

  In his johnboat he rowed his way drunkenly down the cobbled street to where the water lapped against the eaves of the old Traders Hotel and the wharfboat tied in to its staunchstone chimney top.

  Loudly Darly began
again to read the story of the Flood from Genesis. He got through that and lit into Loll for fair—saying that she had mocked God with predictions of the Flood.

  Loll stayed in her stateroom throughout most of these tirades and when she would stand it no more she came out and stood on the narrow little deck looking at him. She was an old crone, now, her rooty knuckles clutched round the moon-silver head of a stick of English furze. Somehow—even in this moon aspect—I felt desire for her again.

  You lied, Loll! Darly cried. Damn you, you lied. And you mocked the holy Word!

  I did not lie! she cried with a laugh that danced across the renegade water. O, I did not! I did not! I did not!

  You did! screamed Darly and charged down the gangplank from the johnboat and sprang onto the narrow deck. No one was near enough to intervene as he struck the old woman with the flat of his hand and sent her spinning back into the shadows of the companionway.

  The look she cast him in that instant—I saw it.

  I tell you I am glad I was never the recipient of such a look.

  Darly rowed back to his hotel and went in through a third-story window of the ballroom and up to his room on the fifth.

  He was never seen alive on earth again.

  He went into that little room on the top of the Zadok Cramer with a hundred and twenty-six pounds of window glazer’s putty and began slowly, thoroughly sealing up his room against whatever eventuality.

  It was a folly that made the townfolk laugh the harder. Because if the water had risen high as that room—wouldn’t it surely sweep the entire structure away?

  Yet the flood stage continued to go down. It was plainly a hoax on Loll’s part. Yes, the waters kept subsiding. Until by Easter Monday it was down so low that the wharfboat could again tie in onto the big old willow at the foot of Water Street.

  Everything was as usual.

  Or was it?

  There had been a savage electric rainstorm on the last night of the flood of thirty-six. The crest of thirty-six was a grim one and it was near what Loll had warned.

  And there was no way to question her about it.

  Because during the storm—at some point—she disappeared (as Darly was to do) from off our land of earth.

  It all came out the next week.

  Toonerville Boso, the desk clerk, hadn’t seen nor heard of Darly Pogue in three days and nights. An old lady in four-oh-seven reported a slight leak of brown water in the ceiling of her bedroom. Toonerville approached the sealed room on the morning of the Sunday after Easter and he, too, noted a trickle of yellow, muddy water from under the door of Darly’s room. There was also a tiny sunfish flipping helplessly about on the Oriental carpet.

  You remember the rest of it—

  How a wall of green water and spring mud and live catfish came vomiting out of that door, sweeping poor Boso down the hall and down the winding stairs and out the hotel door and into the sidewalk.

  That room had been invaded. Yes, the spigots were wide open.

  Everyone in Glory, every one in the riverlands at least, knows that the ceiling of that hotel room was the real crest of thirty-six. Colonel Bruce he worked with transit and scale and plumb bob for a month afterward—measuring it—the real crest of thirty-six. It was exactly one hundred and thirteen feet.

  I know, I know—there were catfish in the room and sunfish and gars and a couple of huge goldfish and they all too big to have squeezed up through the hotel plumbing, let alone through those little brass spigots.

  But they did. The pressure must have been enormous. And it all must have come rushing out and filling up in the space of a few seconds—before Darly Pogue could know what was happening and could scream.

  The pressure of Love? I don’t know. Some force unknown to us and maybe it’s all explained somewhere in one of those little five-cent blue reincarnation books from out Kansas way—I guess it was one I missed. The pressure to get those fish and a few bottles and a lot of mud and water up the pipes and into that room was, as I say, considerable. But nothing compared to the pressure it must have taken to get Darly back out into the river. Out of that room. Into the green, polished, fathomless mother of waters. Love? Maybe it is the strongest force in nature. At least, the love of someone like her.

  No trace of her was ever found. No trace of Darly, either—except for his rainbow-hued Ballyhoo shorts—they were the one part of him that didn’t go through the spigot and which hung there like a beaten flag against the nozzle.

  Go there now.

  To the river.

  When the spring moon is high.

  When the lights in the skiffs on the black river look like campfires on stilts of light.

  A catfish leaps—porpoising into moonshine and mist and then dip-ping joyously back into the deeps. Another—smaller—appears by its side. They nuzzle their flat homely faces in the starshine. Their great rubbery lips brush in ecstasy.

  And then they are gone in the spring dark—off for a bit of luscious garbage—old lovers at a honeymoon breakfast.

  Lucky Darly Pogue! O, lucky Darly!

  Mark Ingestre:

  The Customer’s Tale

  Robert Aickman

  I met an old man at the Elephant Theatre, and, though it was not in a pub that we met, we soon found ourselves in one, not in the eponymous establishment, but in a nice, quiet little place down a side turn, which he seemed to know well, but of which, naturally, I knew nothing, since I was only in that district on business, and indeed had been in the great metropolis itself only for a matter of weeks. I may perhaps at the end tell you what the business was. It had some slight bearing upon the old man’s tale.

  “The Customer’s Tale” I call it, because the Geoffrey Chaucer implication may not be far from the truth: a total taradiddle of legend and first-hand experience. As we grow older we frequently become even hazier about the exact chronology of history, and about the boundaries of what is deemed to be historical fact: the king genuinely and sincerely believing that he took part in the Battle of Waterloo; Clement Attlee, after he was made an earl, never doubting that he had the wisdom of Walpole. Was Jowett Ramsey’s Lord Chancellor of Clem’s? Which one of us can rightly remember that? Well: the old man was a very old man, very old indeed; odd-looking and hairy; conflating one whole century with another whole century, and then sticking his own person in the center of it all, possibly before he was even born.

  That first evening, there was, in the nature of things, only a short time before the pubs closed. But we met in the same place again by appointment; and again; and possibly a fourth time, too. That is something I myself cannot exactly recollect; but after that last time, I never saw or heard of him again. I wonder whether anyone did.

  I wrote down the old man’s tale in my beautiful new shorthand, lately acquired at the college. He was only equal to short installments, but I noticed that, old though he was, he seemed to have no difficulty in picking up each time more or less where he left off. I wrote it all down almost exactly as he spoke it, though of course when I typed it out, I had to punctuate it myself, and no doubt I tidied it up a trifle. For what anyone cares to make of it, here it is.

  ****

  Fleet Street! If you’ve only seen it as it is now, you’ve no idea of what it used to be. I refer to the time when Temple Bar was still there. Fleet Street was never the same after Temple Bar went. Temple Bar was something they simply couldn’t replace. Men I knew, and knew well, said that taking it away wrecked not only Fleet Street but the whole City. Perhaps it was the end of England itself. God knows what else was.

  It wasn’t just the press in those days. All that Canadian newsprint, and those seedy reporters. I don’t say you’re seedy yet, but you will be. Just give it time. Even a rich journalist has to be seedy. Then there were butchers’ shops, and poultry and game shops, and wine merchants passing from father to son, and little places on corners where you could get your watch mended or your old pens sharpened, and proper bookshops too, with everything from The Complete John Milton
to The Condemned Man’s Last Testimony. Of course the “Newgate Calendar” was still going at that time, though one wasn’t supposed to care for it. There were a dozen or more pawnbrokers, and all the churches had bread-and-blanket charities. Fancy Fleet Street with only one pawnbroker and all the charity money gone God knows where and better not ask! The only thing left is that little girl dressed as a boy out of Byron’s poem. Little Medora. We used to show her to all the new arrivals. People even lived in Fleet Street in those days. Thousands of people. Tens of thousands. Some between soft sheets, some on the hard stones. Fancy that! There was room for all, prince and pauper; and women and to spare for almost the lot of them.

  Normally, I went round the back, but I remember the first time I walked down Fleet Street itself. It was not a thing you would forget, as I am about to tell you. There were great wagons stuck in the mud, at least I take it to have been mud; and lawyers all over the pavement, some clean, some not. Of course, the lawyers stow themselves away more now. Charles Dickens had something to do with that. And then there were the women I’ve spoken of: some of them blowsy and brassy, but some soft and appealing, even when they had nothing to deck themselves with but shawls and rags. I took no stock in women at that time. You know why as well as I do. There are a few things that never change. Never. I prided myself upon living clean. Well, I did until that same day. When that day came, I had no choice.

  How did I get into the barbershop? I wish I could tell you. I’ve wondered every time I’ve thought about the story, and that’s been often enough. All I know is that it wasn’t to get my hair cut, or to be shaved, and not to be bled either, which was still going on in those days, the accepted thing when you thought that something was the matter with you or were told so, though you didn’t set about it in a barbershop if you could afford something better. They took far too much at the barber’s. “Bled white” meant something in places of that kind. You can take my word about that.

  It’s perfectly true that I have always liked my hair cut close, and I was completely clean-shaven as well until I suffered a gash from an assegai when fighting for Queen and Country. You may not believe that, but it’s true. I first let this beard grow only to save her Majesty embarrassment, and it’s been growing and growing ever since.