“It was three days later,” he told me as I sat on the edge of the nursing room bed, “that the flower died, and Jo put it out with the garbage. But I retrieved it, what was left of it, so that I would always remember that love. What love was. What terror it is.”
The old man began weeping, like a baby.
“It’s all right,” I said, “it’s just a bad dream. Just like a bad dream.”
“But it happened, boy,” he said, and he passed me the flower. “I want you to keep this. I’m going to die someday soon. Maybe within a month, who knows?”
“I couldn’t,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s yours.”
“No,” he said, grinning madly. “It never was mine. Have you ever been with a woman, boy?”
I shook my head.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen. Just last month.”
“Ah, seventeen. A special time. What do you think human love is, boy?”
I shrugged. “Caring. Between people. I guess.”
“Oh, no,” a smile blossomed across his face. “It’s not caring, boy, it’s not caring. It’s opening up your skin to someone else, and opening theirs, too. Everything I told you is true, boy. I want you to take this dried flower—”
I held it in my hand. For a moment I believed his story and I found myself feeling sad, too. I thought of her, of Moira, giving herself up like that. “She loved you.”
“Her? She never loved me,” he said. “Never.”
“How can you say that? You just told me—”
His voice deepened. He sounded as evil as I have ever heard a man sound.
“Jo never loved me.”
“Not Jo,” I said as I looked at the dried flower. “Moira.”
He plucked it from my fingers and held the last of its petals in his open palm.
“You thought that was Moira? Oh, no, boy, I buried her beneath the garden. This is Jo. She eventually left her husband for me. And then, when I had her…O, Lord, when I had her, boy, I tore her apart, I made her bloom, and I left her to dry in sand the way she had dried my heart.” He laughed, clinging more tightly to my arm so that I could not get away. “Her flower was not as pretty as Moira’s. Moira. Lovely Moira.” He sniffed the air, as if he could still smell the fragrance of the opening flower. “I made Jo bloom, boy, and then I stepped on her flower, and I kept it in darkness and dust. Now, boy, that’s what love is.” He laughed even while he crushed the dried blossom with his free hand, turning it to dust.
“O, rare and most exquisite!” He shouted after me as I pulled away from him and backed out of that madman’s room. “O, why,” he laughed, “why hast thou forsaken me?”
The Little Mermaid
The beach house was large, and an entire glass wall looked out upon the flat brown sand below the hill, to the brief line of pavement for the boat landing, down where the pelicans and gulls cracked their clams and oysters and crabs.
Alice didn’t see the birds or the beach much. That first year she kept the curtains drawn shut. Sometimes she opened them, standing at the window, smoking a cigarette. The ocean was a haze most of the winter, but that was fine by her. She wasn’t an ocean person. She could not even swim, and she never waded. She considered herself more of an isolationist, and that is precisely what the beach house offered. She drank a lot of her father’s stored wine (a wood bin had been converted into a wine cellar), and left the house only twice a week to go see a therapist in Nag’s Head.
Molly came down for a visit that lasted approximately six hours before the mother-daughter anger got out of hand; Molly still didn’t understand the divorce, and being a mother now herself, and perhaps (Alice surmised) in a bad marriage, Molly was young enough to still believe in staying together for the sake of family.
Alice read a lot of books, particularly long fat ones that took her mind off life and her miserableness at it. When she thought of it, she practiced her own brand of yoga based on having watched a morning television show once. When the hangovers from the red wine became unbearable, she slacked off drinking and became a coffee addict. This prompted her to frenetic activity in the winter; she began jogging on the beach, finally unable to avoid the outdoors and health (which she kept in check by smoking and drinking coffee sometimes into the wee hours), and thus she met the old man who collected shells.
He was, at first, barely a face to her, for while her jogging was slow enough to distinguish features on the few beachcombers who came down her way, she had stopped looking anyone in the face. She noticed his hands, actually, and the cracked, wormholed shells he held in them. His hands were tanned and rough. Then, another day, she noticed his knees: rather knobby, with fat blue veins down the sides of them. Finally, she met him the day she sprained her ankle at a place where the sand sank. She sat on a large piece of driftwood—moving the red kelp to the side—and rubbed her ankle. He walked right up to her. “You okay?”
She nodded. She still could not bring herself to look at his face. She looked at his feet: he was barefoot, as was she, with a particularly nasty looking ingrown toenail on his big toe.
“If you run, you should wear shoes,” he said. “The sand tugs at your heel. It’s very bad for your arches. It’s made for crabs and seaweed, not people, this beach is.”
“I’ll take that into consideration next time,” she said testily. She rubbed her foot.
“Here,” he said, dropping to his knees. She could no longer avoid his face. He was probably in his late sixties; old enough to be her father by a hair. He had brown eyes and thin lips. He must’ve been handsome, but it had turned to sand, his skin had, and his nose, the shiny red of a lifelong drinker.
He took her foot in his hands and rubbed.
“Please,” she said, pulling her foot back. It hurt when she did it.
“I’m a doctor,” he said. “Retired now, but I know something about feet. We’ll just massage it a little.”
“Well,” she said noncommittally. No one was around to watch, and it did feel good. He pressed his thumbs into the soft flesh at her ankle; the sensation burned at first, but then, as he continued, it felt warm and pleasant. She had had a headache; it melted.
He watched her. “You need to keep off this for a few days. I can wrap it for you, if you like.”
Because she was financially broke from countless therapy sessions and the divorce itself and would not be able to afford any medical expense if her foot’s condition worsened, she agreed to this. She leaned against his shoulder, and he guided her back to her house.
In the master bathroom, he heated torn rags of old towels in the sink with hot water. Then he squeezed them, and tied them around her ankle and foot. “The heat,” he said, “it helps. They say it’s ice that helps, but not for this. It’ll swell up from the heat, but it needs to.”
Alice, who knew nothing of medicine, nodded as if she did.
“Sometimes we need fluids to collect. They carry away the bad stuff.”
She almost laughed. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, “it’s just that it sounded so undoctorly.”
He grinned. He was a warm man, she decided. Not like her ex. This old man, he was a good country doctor who cared. He was a house call kind of doctor. He said, “I try my best. I find that all that medical jargon gets in the way of patient care. Sometimes nature knows best.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
He continued to massage her foot through the warm wet rags.
“You collect shells?” she asked, not wanting him to stop.
“I’m rather aimless these days. Since my wife died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh, we had quite a life together. Life, while it lasts, has its own secrets.”
Alice didn’t quite understand him, but she really didn’t want to get into the dead wife as a topic of conversation any more than she wanted to start prattling on about her husband.
“So I walk the beaches like I’m waiting for a ship to come in or something. Like an old salt. Do you believe in mer
maids?” His eyes glistened a bit, as if he practiced this question and its anticipated response.
“No.”
“I used to, when I was a boy.” He grinned dopily. “Do you know that when a man becomes old, he begins to remember what he believed in as a child and it all comes back to him?”
Something sweet in his voice; that boy that was him thousands of years before, that little boy, was still there in his eyes. She smiled. He rubbed.
“I believed that out in that ocean was a lovely mermaid. She and I knew each other, and when I was four, I would go down to the beach early in the morning, before anyone else was up, and stand on the edge of the land and sing mermaid songs to her. I imagined her fins and her tail, how if she were on land I would carry her to a safe place, and how she would tell me all the secrets of the sea. And I, in turn would tell her how much I loved her, how much I wanted to be with her,” he said.
Alice began weeping upon hearing this. She could not control it, and it was not just about the pathetic little four-year-old who sang to the nonexistent mermaids; it was about everything she’d wished for as a child, all within her grasp, gone now, like sand, like seawater, the way memory always left her bereft and longing for innocence. He slid his hands from her feet and placed them on either side of her face. They were comfortingly cold.
“A beautiful woman should never cry,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t say that either. Your tears are like the mermaids’.”
She opened her eyes to him and felt that lustful heat of first love again, just as if he were not old and she were not middle-aged.
He caressed her, and they fell across the bed, her ankle’s throbbing becoming a distant and occasional pinching. They kissed, weeping, both of them, and then he kissed her every arch and turn and curve.
Afterward, she fell asleep.
When she awoke, the pain was excruciating. The room, shrouded in darkness. The curtains were still drawn shut. She gasped; a light came on.
Her doctor-lover stood over her.
The pain was in her foot. She wasn’t thinking clearly because of the pain.
She reached down to touch her foot, anticipating a throbbing ankle.
But her hand, sliding down her leg, ended at a stump.
She touched the air where her foot should’ve been.
He said, “I had to operate, Alice.” He knew her name now, even though she didn’t know his.
His words seemed meaningless, until on the third try to find her foot where it should’ve been, she suddenly understood.
Her screaming might’ve been heard had the night surf not boomed, had the winter not brought with it a tree-bending wind.
The operation was not completed for six days; it was a blur to Alice, for he kept her drunk and on painkillers.
* * *
When she awoke, clearheaded, she felt nothing but a constant stinging all up and down her spine, as if her skin had been scraped and she’d been rolled in salt.
There was dried blood on the sheets. Several hypodermic needles lay carelessly beside her. Fish scales, too, spread out in a vermillion and blue desert, piled high, as if every fish in the ocean had been skinned and thrown about. The smell was intolerable: oily and fishy. And the flies! Everywhere, the blue and green flies.
She tried to sit up, but her back hurt too much. She fought this, but then parts of her body, including her arms, felt paralyzed. She wondered what drugs he’d been administering to her—strangely, she felt euphoric, and fought this feeling.
She lay back down, closed her eyes, willing this dream to depart.
She awoke again when he came back into the room.
* * *
“One last thing,” he said, holding the serrated knife up to her neck. “One last thing.”
The blade had been warmed with the fire on the gas stove. She felt no pain as he took the knife and scored several slits just below her chin.
Afterward, she could not even speak or scream, but could only open her mouth and emit a bleating noise.
He lifted her up into his arms, kissing her nipples as if they were sacred, and carried her out to the beach. “I will take you out to your city, my love, and set you free,” he said as he laid her down in the bottom of a small boat. She could only stare at him. She felt resigned to death, which would be better than the results of the torture he had put her through.
Out to sea, he rolled her over the edge of the boat.
At first she wanted to drown, but something within her fought against it. She managed to grasp hold of some rocks out beyond the breakwater. She held on to them for over an hour as the freezing salt water smashed against the back of her head.
She grasped at the edge of a rock; it cut at her hands, but she held on.
If I just hang on for another minute, she thought. Just another ten seconds and I’ll be fine. God will rescue me. Or someone will see me. Will see what he’s done to me, this madman. I haven’t lived all my life to come to this. I know something will happen. Something will pull me out of this.
The waves crashed around her, like glass shattering against her face.
Please, God, someone, help me.
All she could taste was the stinging salt. Something animal within her was clinging to all that she knew of life now, not her marriage or her family or her career, but this serrated rock and this icy sea.
From the shore she heard him, even at the distance. His boat already docked. The old man stood there, singing.
Alice held on to the rock for as long as she could.
Then she let go.
* * *
The old man stayed on the shore for hours, his voice faltering only when dark arrived. He had a great and lovely baritone, and he sang of all the secrets of the sea.
A couple, walking along the beach that evening, held each other more tightly. His song sparked within them a memory of love and regret, and such beautiful and heartrending longing.
They watched from a distance as the old man raised his hands up, his songs batting against the wind, against the crash of the surf, against all that life had to offer.
The Rendering Man
1
“We’re gonna die someday,” Thalia said, “all of us. Mama and Daddy, and then you and then me. I wonder if anyone’s gonna care enough to think about Thalia Inez Canty, or if I’ll just be dust under their feet.”
She stood in the doorway, still holding the ladle that dripped with potato chowder.
Her brother was raking dried grass over the manure in the yard. “What the heck kind of thing’s that supposed to mean?”
“Something died last night.” Thalia sniffed the air. “I can smell it. Out in the sty. Smelt it all night long, whatever it is. Always me that’s first to smell the dead. ‘Member the cat, the one by the thresher? I know when things’s dead. I can smell something new that’s dead, just like that. Made me think of how everything ends.”
“We’ll check your stink out later. All you need to think about right now is getting your little bottom back inside that house to stir the soup so’s we’ll have something decent come suppertime.” Her brother returned to his work, and she to hers. She hoped that one day she would have a real job and be able to get away from this corner of low sky and dead land.
The year was 1934, and there weren’t too many jobs in Moncure County, when Thalia Canty was eleven, so her father went off to Dowery, eighty miles to the northeast, to work in an accountant’s office, and her mother kept the books at the Bowend Motel on Fourth Street, night shift. Daddy was home on weekends, and Mama slept through the day, got up at noon, was out the door by four, and back in bed come three a.m. It was up to Thalia’s brother, Lucius, to run the house, and make sure the two of them fed the pigs and chickens, and kept the doors bolted so the winds—they’d come up suddenly in March—didn’t pull them off their hinges. There was school, too, but it seemed a tiny part of the day, at least to Thalia, for the work of the house seemed to slow the hours down
until the gray Oklahoma sky was like an hourglass that never emptied of sand. Lucius was a hard worker, and since he was fifteen, he did most of the heavy moving, but she was always with him, cleaning, tossing feed to the chickens, picking persimmons from the neighbor’s yard (out back by the stable where no one could see) to bake in a pie. And it was on the occasion of going to check on the old sow that Thalia and her brother eventually came face-to-face with the Rendering Man.
The pig was dead, and already drawing flies. Evening was coming on strong and windy, a southern wind which meant the smell of the animal would come right in through the cracks in the walls. Lucius said, “She been dead a good long time. Look at her snout.”
“Toldja I smelled her last night.” Thalia peeked around him, scrunched back, wanting to hide in his lengthening shadow. The snout had been torn at— blood caked around the mouth. “Musta been them yaller dogs,” she said, imitating her father’s strong southern accent, “cain’t even leave her alone when she’s dead.”
The pig was enormous, and although Lucius thrust planks beneath her to try and move her a ways, she wouldn’t budge. “Won’t be taking her to the butcher, I reckon,” he said.
Thalia smirked. “Worthless yaller dogs.”
“Didn’t like bacon, anyways.”
“Me, too. Or ham.”
“Or sausage with biscuits and grease.”
“Chitlins. Hated chitlins. Hated knuckles. Couldn’t chaw a knuckle to save my life.”
“Ribs. Made me sick, thought a ribs all drownin’ in molasses and chili, drippin’ over the barbecue pit,” Lucius said, and then drew his hat down, practically making the sign of the cross on his chest. “Oh, Lord, what I wouldn’t give for some of her.”
Thalia whispered, “Just a piece of skin fried up in the skillet.”
“All hairy and crisp, greasy and smelly.”
“Yes.” Thalia sighed. “Praise the Lord, yes. Like to melt in my mouth right now. I’d even eat her all rotten like that. Maybe not.”
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 37