The Future Is Ours

by Hoch Edward D.

  “It’s supposed to be on route 305, north of Winslow.”

  “You got sidetracked,” I explained. “You should have taken the left fork instead of the right.”

  The man, who was driving, leaned over past his wife to say, “That’s what I told her. My name’s Russ Caulkins and this is my wife Freda. It’s mostly the kids want to see Bigfish. I can think of other ways to spend my vacation.” He glanced back at the two boys.

  “You’d better turn around and get back on the paved road,” I suggested. “Then turn right. That should get you there.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  The idea of a giant salmon made Matty chuckle. “Maybe we should get in the car and go see it ourselves,” she said.

  I studied her, trying to determine if she meant it. “OK,” I decided. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “What’s wrong with right now? It might not be there tomorrow.”

  So we got in the car and drove out the way the family of tourists had gone, following our dirt road until it connected with route 305. I made a sharp right turn and we headed south toward Winslow. There was a ferry from nearby Eagle Harbor to Seattle, and a suburban development of commuting businessmen had grown up among the wooded hills and inlets overlooking Puget Sound. Sometimes I worried about these new families getting too close to our little retirement cabin.

  Before long I spotted the large camper pulled off the road with a sign on the side:

  Bigfish! See the world’s largest salmon! Over six feet long! Admission one dollar.

  “There’s that Japanese car,” Matty observed. “I guess the Caulkinses found it all right.”

  “Yes.” I pulled up behind them and we got out. There were no other cars around.

  We were met at the door by a jolly bearded man of indeterminate age.

  “Greetings, folks. I’m Captain Bob Showcroft, but you can just call me Captain Bob. Bigfish is right through here. That’ll be a dollar each, please.”

  Russ and Freda Caulkins and their two boys were already inside, gaping at the huge Chinook salmon that lay stretched out across three card tables. “Hello there,” Freda said, seeing us enter. “Decided to come along for a look at Bigfish?”

  “He certainly is a big fellow,” I agreed.

  Captain Bob followed us in, using a wooden pointer to deliver a short lecture on his prize. “This here’s a Chinook salmon. It’s six feet, one inch long and weighs a hundred and five pounds.”

  “Did you catch it?” the smaller of the two boys asked.

  “Quiet, Tommy!” the woman nudged him. “Let the captain tell his story.”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly catch it myself,” the bearded man answered, patting the small boy on the head, “but I know the fella who did. And this fish gave him quite a tussle.”

  “Where was it caught?” I asked.

  “Kelp Bay, in Alaska. Biggest one they ever took there. Biggest in the world, far as we know.”

  He went on with a lecture about the life cycle of the salmon that seemed to bore even the two boys. After touching Bigfish a bit tenuously, the older one drifted away, followed by little Tommy. Captain Bob wound up his talk and asked perfunctorily, “Any questions?”

  Freda Caulkins noticed the boys had slipped out of the camper and went in search of them. Matty followed, leaving me with Russ Caulkins. “It’s stuffed, isn’t it?” he asked Captain Bob.

  “Oh, sure. You don’t eat a baby like this. You keep it to show off. I been touring the northeast with Bigfish all year. Probably donate it to a museum someday.”

  “Would you consider selling it?” I asked.

  A shrewd look came into his eyes. “Well, sure, if the price was right. You don’t find a fish like this every day, though. Worth a lot of money. You interested in buying?”

  “No,” I said with a laugh. “I just wondered.”

  “Guess I’ll be closing up now,” he decided. “It’s getting dark and I want to make the last ferry over to Seattle.”

  Freda Caulkins came to the door and called to her husband. “Russ, the boys were playing in the woods and now I can’t find Tommy.”

  He sighed and started outside. “All right, I’m sure he’s around somewhere.”

  It had grown dark quickly among the tall trees that lined both sides of the road, and I could see Matty standing over by our car, anxious to get back home. Still, I felt I should remain until the boy was found. Russ went up to the bigger boy and asked, “Bill, where’s your brother? Where’s Tommy?”

  “I don’t know. I think he went back inside. He wanted another look at Bigfish.”

  “We just came out of there,” Russ Caulkins said.

  “There’s a door at the other end,” his wife pointed out. She called to Matty. “Did you see anything of him?”

  “Not a thing. Perhaps he’s still in the woods playing.”

  We all headed for the woods, calling his name, but there was no answer. “He couldn’t just disappear,” Russ said, turning to his other son. “Weren’t you watching him?”

  “Not every second,” Bill answered. “Maybe Bigfoot got him.”

  “Let’s look inside,” I suggested, a growing apprehension building in the pit of my stomach. “Maybe he sneaked in the other door.”

  But the entrance to the camper was locked now, and Captain Bob was up front, in the driver’s seat. “Gotta be going, folks,” he called out.

  “Just a minute!” Freda shouted, running to him. “You have to open up! Our little boy is missing. We think he’s inside!”

  “He’s not in there.”

  “Can’t you open up and look?” her husband asked, his voice sharpening.

  “He’s not in there. What more can I tell you? Hell, you just came out five minutes ago. Nothing in there but Bigfish.”

  “Open it up so we can see.”

  He sighed and climbed out of his seat, going back to unlock the door. We crowded inside, but he’d been telling the truth. There was no sign of the missing boy.

  “Where could he be?” Freda Caulkins asked, close to hysteria.

  “Afraid I can’t help you. How old is he?”

  “Six,” the father answered, “but he’s small for his age. I’d hate to think of him in those woods with night coming on.”

  “He’d never go off by himself,” Freda said. “He must have fallen down, or else someone took him.”

  “Don’t say crazy things,” her husband reproved. “No one’s in the woods, and he was only out of sight a couple of minutes. He’ll turn up.”

  “He’s in here, in this camper!” Freda Caulkins suddenly insisted, her voice wild with panic. She confronted Captain Bob. “What have you done with my child?”

  “Lady, you’re as crazy as they come. I didn’t touch the little brat!”

  Russ Caulkins grabbed the bearded man’s shirt before I could intervene. “If you’ve harmed Tommy—”

  “God, man—look for yourself! Where’s there room to hide him in here?”

  Caulkins and his wife went quickly through the camper, looking in the bunk bed and the toilet. There was no sign of the missing boy, but with each frustration the woman’s hysteria seemed to grow. “You’ve got him here someplace—I know it! He came back to see the fish again.”

  “Lady—”

  Her breath was coming faster. She stared down at the stuffed salmon stretched across its card tables and said very softly, “He’s inside the fish.”

  Her husband got a grip on her shoulders. “Freda, Freda, you can’t—”

  “He’s inside the fish!” It was a scream now, torn from the very heart of her.

  “Help me get her outside,” Caulkins said to me. “We’d better search the woods again and then phone the state police.”

  “Make him open the fish!
Make him open it up before Tommy dies!”

  I tried to grip one arm, but she shook me off. “We’ll find him,” I told her. “We’ll get the police.”

  “The fish! Tommy’s in the fish!”

  We were back outside when I saw a state police car cruising in the distance. He stopped when we flagged him down, and radioed for more assistance. The officer’s name was McBride, and he listened to the hysterical woman with a look of helplessness. “Lady, I’m sure your son just wandered off into the woods. We’ll find him.”

  “The fish. Make him open the fish!”

  Captain Bob’s face was flushed with rage. “I was only in there alone for five minutes! I didn’t touch the kid, and I certainly didn’t put him inside that salmon! Why would I do a crazy thing like that?”

  “Was the boy small enough to have fit inside the fish?” the officer asked Caulkins.

  “Oh, yes. Tommy is only six, and that’s a big fish.”

  Officer McBride went into the camper with the rest of us following. He stared at Bigfish and asked, “What’s inside it?”

  Captain Bob wet his lips nervously. “You understand stuffed fish are usually painted synthetic models, using only the fins and tail from the actual creature. In this case, though, the whole fish was used. The insides were cleaned out and filled with excelsior.”

  “Can we turn it over?”

  “I—I suppose so.”

  Officer McBride glanced up. “The ladies had better wait outside.”

  Caulkins took his wife and Matty outside, while I remained with Captain Bob. We managed to flop the fish over onto its other side, and the bearded man reluctantly cut through the line of stitching. The salmon was filled with excelsior. There was no child inside.

  I went outside and told them. Another police car had arrived on the scene, and already the officers were making plans to search the nearby woods. Freda Caulkins had collapsed, sobbing, against her husband’s shoulder and was being led to the car.

  “It’s time for us to be getting along,” I told Matty.

  I gave Officer McBride our address and told Russ I hoped his son would be found. As we drove away, Captain Bob was rolling up his Bigfish poster.

  It was night by the time we reached our familiar dirt road, and as I turned onto it I summoned up the courage to speak to Matty at my side. “What did you do with the body, dear?” I asked calmly.

  Even in the darkness I knew the wild look would be back in her eyes, that look I’d been dreading, hoping and praying against, for almost a year. “In the trunk,” she answered, nodding toward the rear of the car. “This one was easy, he died so quickly. Not like the others.”

  “Matty—”

  Then there was a tremor in her voice, a sudden note of fear. “Does this mean you won’t take me to visit our grandson again this year?”

  ABOUT “REMEMBER MY NAME”

  For the final story in the horror portion of this book, we turn to a story of beauty and obsession. The narrator, like that in many of Hoch’s stories, is a man in the publishing business. In this case, the narrator is a mystery short story writer. His story is hauntingly beautiful.

  First publication—Eastern Ghosts, ed. Frank D. McSherry, Jr., Charles G. Waugh & Martin H. Greenberg; Rutledge Hill Press, 1990.

  REMEMBER MY NAME

  I don’t get a great deal of fan mail in my business. I understand that some science fiction and horror writers receive letters from readers almost daily, but for most mystery writers—especially short story writers—it’s different. One or two letters a month drift in, often critical of some technical error in your latest work, and that’s about it.

  So I was especially surprised one morning in September when my wife brought in the mail and handed me a small padded mailing bag with the address hand-printed with a thick black pen. It was from someone named Keith Webster, a name that churned up half-forgotten memories. The package was postmarked from a town in Delaware.

  Keith Webster. Someone I’d known a long time ago, in my youth. Why was he sending me this package, which seemed about the size of a paperbound book?

  “You could just open it and see,” my wife suggested.

  “It’s a video tape,” I said, pulling the familiar plastic container from inside the padded bag.

  “Is there a note?”

  “No, just the tape. I suppose we’ll have to play it.”

  Much as I liked receiving mail, I was annoyed that someone was interrupting my work day, especially since I was well into a new story that had a deadline only a week away. I slid the tape into the slot on the VCR, turned on the television and pushed the play button. Almost at once the scene from the afternoon soap opera was replaced by a medium long shot of a stool placed against a blank yellow wall. A middle-aged man with a short, neatly trimmed beard and glasses walked into the scene from the left and sat on the stool, addressing the camera.

  “Hi, Buddy! This is Keith Webster. Remember my name? We were in the army together at Fort Dix, during basic training back in the Korean War. I often wondered what happened to you, and last month I saw your name on the cover of a magazine. I know you wanted to write even then, and I’m glad to see you’ve been successful. I went to the library and found your address in a reference book, and I thought you might be interested in hearing from me after all these years.

  “Did you ever get to Korea? I didn’t, of course. After that trouble I was discharged. Then—”

  “What trouble?” my wife asked. “Fill me in.”

  I stopped the tape for a moment and sat staring at the screen. It was difficult to connect this bearded face I was seeing with the bright, clean-shaven boy I’d known for those few short weeks at Fort Dix. He’d been a non-conformist even then. “He met a girl down in Atlantic City and went AWOL with her. They sort of busted up the town and the army tossed him out.” I turned the tape back on.

  “—I drifted around New York and finally got a job. Cathy had given me the name of someone in the stagehands’ union, and he got me in. I started working Broadway shows and made a career of it. Now I work the big casino shows in Atlantic City. The work is pretty much the same, changing sets and raising curtains. I’m sending you this tape because I’ll probably be retiring in another year or two and I’d love to see you while I’m still here. Do you ever get down to Atlantic City? I live over in Delaware, just outside Wilmington, but this would be the best place to get together. There’s a lot of action here. I work the main showroom at the Ali Baba Hotel.”

  There was a bit more on the tape, talk of the old days and finally phone numbers where he could be reached in Atlantic City and in Delaware. I rewound it and my wife said, “It would give us a good excuse for a couple of days in Atlantic City.”

  “I suppose so.” I’d never been very excited about gambling, though on occasion I’d risked a few dollars at blackjack or in the slot machines. Still, Atlantic City was only a five-hour drive from our home in Albany, New York, and the early September weather was still delightful.

  The next day I phoned Keith Webster at the number he’d given on the tape. The phone rang several times and when he answered I had the impression I might have wakened him. “Hello?”

  “Is this Keith? Keith Webster?”

  “Yes, it is. Buddy! I still recognize your voice after all these years! How the hell are you?”

  “Not bad. How about you? On the video you looked great.”

  “I can’t complain. Life’s been pretty good.”

  “So, you married?”

  “Not now. I was for ten years, but she walked out on me. I guess I wasn’t cut out for marriage. But we can talk about that when I see you. Are you coming down to Atlantic City?”

  “Yeah, this writing for a living has its advantages. I can take a long weekend whenever I want. My wife and I are thinking of driving down next Satu
rday and staying till Monday.”

  “That’s great! The Miss America Pageant is next week.”

  “Is the Ali Baba a good place to stay?”

  “One of the best. Maybe I can even get them to comp you.”

  “There’s no danger of encountering those forty thieves, is there?”

  He chuckled. “The only thieves here are the one-armed bandits, and there’s more like four thousand of them.”

  * * * *

  So the following Saturday my wife and I set out for Atlantic City. She’d always done most of the driving in our household, but at the last minute there’d been a change in plans. Her elderly uncle in Philadelphia was quite ill and not expected to live. Since she was to be so close to the city she felt she should stop there for a day, then go on to Atlantic City by bus to meet me. As I’d arranged to meet Webster for dinner on our first night there, this seemed to be the best plan. If I stopped in Philadelphia with her, it would necessitate changing all our Atlantic City plans.

  I dropped her at a hotel in midtown Philadelphia, then headed over the Ben Franklin Bridge to New Jersey. It was only an hour to Atlantic City, but I felt odd driving the car even that distance. I was glad when the city came into view and I headed directly for the Ali Baba, one of the newer casino hotels at the east end of the Boardwalk.

  The room Keith had reserved for us was certainly impressive, with thick shag carpeting and a pedestal-mounted television that seemed to be growing out of the floor. A fancy bowl of fruit sat on a table near the window, tied with a red ribbon and tagged, Compliments of the Management. I walked to the window and saw that the room overlooked the Boardwalk and the ocean.