by T E. D Klein
I kept my light on until I was ready to fall asleep, listening to the wind rattle the palm leaves and whine up and down the row of terraces. As I switched off the light I half expected to see a shadowy shape at the window, but I saw, as the poet says, nothing but the night.
The next morning I packed my bag and left, aware that my stay in the hotel had proved fruitless. I returned to my sister’s house to find her in agitated conversation with the druggist from upstairs; she was in a terrible state and said she’d been trying to reach me all morning. She had awakened to find the flower box by her bedroom window overturned and the shrubbery beneath it trampled. Down the side of the house ran two immense slash marks several yards apart, starting at the roof and continuing straight to the ground.
***
My gawd, how the years fly. Stolidly middle-aged—when only yesterday I was young and eager and awed by the mystery of an unfolding world.
—Lovecraft, 8/20/1926
There is little more to report. Here the tale degenerates into an unsifted collection of items which may or may not be related: pieces of a puzzle for those who fancy themselves puzzle fans, a random swarm of dots, and in the center, a wide unwinking eye.
Of course, my sister left the house on Indian Creek that very day and took rooms for herself in a downtown Miami hotel. Subsequently she moved inland to live with a friend in a green stucco bungalow several miles from the Everglades, third in a row of nine just off the main highway. I am seated in its den as I write this. After the friend died my sister lived on here alone, making the forty-mile bus trip to Miami only on special occasions: theater with a group of friends, one or two shopping trips a year. She had everything else she needed right here in town.
I returned to New York, caught a chill, and finished out the winter in a hospital bed, visited rather less often than I might have wished by my niece and her boy. Of course, the drive in from Brooklyn is nothing to scoff at.
One recovers far more slowly when one has reached my age; it’s a painful truth we all learn if we live long enough. Howard’s life was short, but in the end I think he understood. At thirty-five he could deride as madness a friend’s “hankering after youth,” yet ten years later he’d learned to mourn the loss of his own. “The years tell on one!” he’d written. “You young fellows don’t know how lucky you are!”
Age is indeed the great mystery. How else could Terry have emblazoned his grandmother’s sundial with that saccharine nonsense?
Grow old along with me;
The best is yet to be.
True, the motto is traditional to sundials—but that young fool hadn’t even kept to the rhyme. With diabolical imprecision he had written, “The best is yet to come”—a line to make me gnash my teeth, if I had any left to gnash.
I spent most of the spring indoors, cooking myself wretched little meals and working ineffectually on a literary project that had occupied my thoughts. It was discouraging to find that I wrote so slowly now, and changed so much. My sister only reinforced the mood when, sending me a rather salacious story she’d found in the Enquirer—about the “thing like a vacuum cleaner” that snaked through a Swedish sailor’s porthole and “made his face all purple”—she wrote at the top, “See? Right out of Lovecraft. ”
It was not long after this that I received, to my surprise, a letter from Mrs. Zimmerman, bearing profuse apologies for having misplaced my inquiry until it turned up again during “spring cleaning.” (It is hard to imagine any sort of cleaning at the Barkleigh Hotella, spring or otherwise, but even this late reply was welcome.) “I am sorry that the minister who disappeared was a friend of yours,” she wrote. “I’m sure he must have been a fine gentleman.
“You asked me for ‘the particulars,’ but from your note you seem to know the whole story. There is really nothing I can tell you that I did not tell the police, though I do not think they ever released all of it to the papers. Our records show that our guest Mr. Djaktu arrived here nearly a year ago, at the end of June, and left the last week of August owing me a week’s rent plus various damages which I no longer have much hope of recovering, though I have written the Malaysian Embassy about it.
“In other respects he was a proper boarder, paid regularly, and in fact hardly ever left his room except to walk in the back yard from time to time, or stop at the grocer’s. (We have found it impossible to discourage eating in rooms.) My only complaint is that in the middle of the summer he may have had a small colored child living with him without our knowledge, until one of the maids heard him singing to it as she passed his room. She did not recognize the language, but said she thought it might be Hebrew. (The poor woman, now sadly taken from us, was barely able to read.) When she next made up the room, she told me that Mr. Djaktu claimed the child was ‘his,’ and that she left because she caught a glimpse of it watching her from the bathroom. She said it was naked. I did not speak of this at the time, as I do not feel it is my place to pass judgment on the morals of my guests. Anyway, we never saw the child again, and we made sure the room was completely sanitary for our next guests. Believe me, we have received nothing but good comments on our facilities. We think they are excellent and hope you agree, and I also hope you will be our guest again the next time you come to Florida.”
Unfortunately, the next time I came to Florida was for my sister’s funeral late that winter. I know now, as I did not know then, that she had been in ill health for most of the previous year, but I cannot help thinking that the so-called “incidents”—the senseless acts of vandalism directed against lone women in the South Florida area, culminating in several reported attacks by an unidentified prowler—may have hastened her death.
When I arrived here with Ellen to take care of my sister’s affairs and arrange for the funeral, I intended to remain a week or two at most, seeing to the transfer of the property. Yet somehow I lingered, long after Ellen had gone. Perhaps it was the thought of that New York winter, grown harsher with each passing year; I just couldn’t find the strength to go back. Nor, in the end, could I bring myself to sell this house; if I am trapped here, it’s a trap I’m resigned to. Besides, moving has never much agreed with me; when I grow tired of this little room—and I do—I can think of nowhere else to go. I’ve seen all the world I want to see. This simple place is now my home—and I feel certain it will be my last. The calendar on the wall tells me it’s been almost three months since I moved in. I know that somewhere in its remaining pages you will find the date of my death.
The past week has seen a new outbreak of the “incidents.” Last night’s was the most dramatic by far. I can recite it almost word for word from the morning news. Shortly before midnight Mrs. Florence Cavanaugh, a housewife living at 24 Alyssum Terrace, South Princeton, was about to close the curtains in her front room when she saw, peering through the window at her, what she described as “a large Negro man wearing a gas mask or scuba outfit.” Mrs. Cavanaugh, who was dressed only in her nightgown, fell back from the window and screamed for her husband, asleep in the next room, but by the time he arrived the Negro had made good his escape.
Local police favor the “scuba” theory, since near the window they’ve discovered footprints that may have been made by a heavy man in swim fins. But they haven’t been able to explain why anyone would wear underwater gear so many miles from water.
The report usually concludes with the news that “Mr. and Mrs. Cavanaugh could not be reached for comment.”
The reason I have taken such an interest in the case—sufficient, anyway, to memorize the above details—is that I know the Cavanaughs rather well. They are my next-door neighbors.
Call it an aging writer’s ego, if you like, but somehow I can’t help thinking that last evening’s visit was meant for me. These little green bungalows all look alike in the dark.
Well, there’s still a little night left outside—time enough to rectify the error. I’m not going anywhere.
I think, in fact, it will be a rather appropriate end for a man of my pursuits—
to be absorbed into the denouement of another man’s tale.
Grow old along with me;
The best is yet to come.
Tell me, Howard: how long before it’s my turn to see the black face pressed to my window?
Nadelman's God
Nadelman would never forget the first witch he'd ever met.
It had been on a drizzly Thursday evening in November in the early 1970s, in an S & M club called the Chateau 21. The club was in the basement of a brownstone on West Twenty-first Street, just below one of the Chelsea area's oldest occult book-shops. Upstairs you could buy paperbacks by people with names like Ashtoreth Grove and Dr. Hermes Fortune, along with crystal-ball keychains, Tarot decks, knives with hairy goat's-foot handles, and little wax figurines in the shape of satyrs. Downstairs had been turned into a barroom, complete with black velvet drapes, wrought-iron candle sconces, and a wall mural depicting a lushly bosomed blonde stretched over an altar. On weekends the place doubled as a classroom for self-hypnosis seminars and aura readings, and on Mondays a group from New Jersey held seances there.
Nadelman and the woman who would later become his wife had taken the subway in from Brooklyn that night in a spirit of adven-ture, Nadelman dressed in a leather bomber jacket he hadn't worn since college, Rhoda wearing the uncomfortable-looking black leather pants that had caught his eye the day she'd first shown up in them at the ad agency. Normally the Chateau was closed to nonmembers, but Thursday night, they'd read in the Voice, was open house, when outsiders were welcome to check out the goings-on. Admission was twelve dollars for men, free for women.
Even at that disparate rate, nearly all the customers were men. Most of them appeared to be lonely out-of-town businessmen in search of pickups or simply someone to talk to, perhaps just a good story to bring back to St. Paul. In the dim light they looked lost and faintly embarrassed. There were only half a dozen women in the room, including a homely girl with a flat, pock-marked face who strolled among the drinkers in nothing but black panties, a somewhat dazed smile, and a pair of heavy chains fastened in an X across her sad, sagging little breasts. Imprinted on her left cheek was an upside-down five-pointed star, dark as if freshly branded, though Nadelman was sure it was just Magic Marker.
The room itself reminded him of someone's furnished basement. There was nothing to eat but pretzel nuggets in little tin bowls on the bar, and nothing to drink but cans of beer which the bartender fished from a grey plastic garbage can full of ice chunks swimming in dirty water. Several feet away a plump middle-aged man draped himself clumsily over a bar stool, dropped his pants, and was spa nked by a negress as large as a linebacker. The businessmen averted their eyes and looked preoccupied, but the sound of the slaps remained audible throughout the room, even above the heavy-metal music that blared from a speaker in the corner.
The witch was standing by the opposite wall, Budweiser in hand, beside a pile of crumpled empties on the floor. With a beer belly bulg-ing over faded jeans, a T-shirt with the picture of a leering skull beneath the words
KILL 'EM ALL - LET GOD SORT 'EM OUT!
and a day's growth of beard darkening into a hairy chest, he didn't look at all like a witch. In fact, he looked more like a Hell's Angel. He was talking to a small, stocky red-haired woman, jerking his head up and down to emphasize a point, and even from across the room Nadelman could see something glinting in the lobe of his left ear. The seventies were still young and Nadelman not widely traveled; this was the first man he'd ever seen wearing an earring, outside of a pirate movie.
As Nadelman watched, the man downed the last of his beer, crushed the can with a casual squeeze of his hand, and dropped it into the pile at his feet with the absent-minded propriety of a diner tossing down a crumpled napkin. Encircling the redhead's waist, he began walking with her toward the bar, pushing one of the businessmen out of the way with a hard shove of his shoulder. Moments later Nadelman saw them pause and greet the girl with the chains across her chest. She nodded to them familiarly, breasts thrust out for their inspection, a celebrity acknowledging her peers. As she strutted off, the man turned to his woman and shouted something in her ear. Both grinned, the woman with evident distaste, and then they were lost amid the crowd of drinkers.
Nadelman leaned his body against the beer-stained wood of the bar and wondered if it was time to leave. Though he was pleased with himself for having actually ventured into an honest-to-god S & M club, the place saddened and depressed him. Rhoda, seated beside him-as the best-looking woman there she had managed to secure one of the few bar stools-looked up from her drink. "Do you think it gets any livelier than this?"
"Yeah, at the end of the evening they squirt seltzer at us."
"I wouldn't mind if they did. These pants are hot."
"Hiya, hotpants'" said a boozy voice. Nadelman felt himself jostled from behind and turned to see the slob in the T-shirt grinning at Rhoda, his arm still wrapped around the redhead's waist.
Nadelman leaned toward him, feeling his own quota of beers pum-ping fizzily through his head. "I'm afraid I didn't catch your name."
The other stuck out a hand, which Nadelman reached for until he saw that it was still clutching a Bud. "Lenny," the man said. "I was just admiring your lady's outfit there." He gestured with the beer toward Rhoda's legs.
Nadelman forced a smile. "And I was just admiring your earri/ig." he said, nodding toward the bit of silver that gleamed in the c>fher's left ear. It was a tiny version of the shape he'd seen earlier, L five-pointed star turned upside-down. The redhead, he saw now, w
"It fuckin' well oughta be," Lenny said, with grumpy pride. "There's only nine like it in the entire world. Me and Tina here know the artist who made 'em." He reached up and touched the earring in a curiously girlish gesture. Nadelman noticed that the back ot his hand bore a tattoo of a similar design.
"Does that star have some special significance?"
The man's brows lowered menacingly. "Some special what?"
"I mean, is it some kind of symbol?"
Tina gave her companion a questioning glance, while he in turn eyed Nadelman and his girlfriend up and down, as if deciding whether they could be trusted. "Yeah," he said at last, "it's a symbol all right-the symbol of our coven. You know what a coven is, pal?"
"Sure," said Nadelman, on firm ground. Years before, in his sophomore year at college, he had gone on an occult kick, reading everything from John Dee to von Daniken. "It's like a congregation of witches."
"Not bad," said Lenny. Tina nodded approvingly.
"And that's what me and Lenny are," she said.
"You're witches?" Nadelman tried to keep a straight face. Beside him he heard Rhoda giggle.
"You got it, pal," said Lenny. He scratched his belly as Tina draped an arm around his thick shoulders. "It ain't like you're probably think-ing though. I mean, we've not into sacrificing babies and shit like that."
Tina chuckled. "We just do our thing, you know? Live and let live, that's our motto."
"Oh, of course." Nadelman nodded strenuously, the way he always did when he was around crazy, possibly dangerous people bigger than himself. Lenny looked well-muscled, the kind of guy who lifted weights in his basement or hefted a lot of tire irons as he worked on his car; or maybe he was just the sort of lower-class type who seems born with muscular, hairy arms, the way smart people are born with bad eyesight.
Rhoda spoke up, a little more emphatically than usual thanks to the drinks in her. "She's the witch, right?" She nodded at Tina. "But you yourself would be-what? A warlock? A wizard?"
Lenny shook his head. "Uh-uh," he said, "that's just a lot of bullshit people believe. A witch can be a man or a woman. Warlocks-" He made a face. "That's a whole' nother bag. Those dudes are into black magic. We're into Wicca, the white stuff. . . unless somebody gets us really, really pissed off!" He laughed, blowing gusts of beer breath into Nadelman's face. "Then boy oh boy, they better watch out!"
&
nbsp; "And does it actually work?" said Rhoda.
"Fuckin' A!"
They waited for him to elaborate, but Lenny was gazing around the bar, as if looking for friends. Finally Nadelman said, "What's magic done for you two?"
Tina giggled and nudged Lenny with her hip. "Helped our sex life, hasn't it?"
He grinned. "Lemme tell you," he said, little eyes darting back and forth between his two listeners, "our sex life don't need no help. My old lady here's a fuckin' sex machine!"
Nadelman stole a glance at Tina, who was smiling as if she agreed. He found himself envisioning steamy occult-type sex with her; there was something arousing about the way the guy could brag about their sex life right in front of her like that. Tina had a solid little figure and looked up for anything, the kind who wouldn't say no to an orgy with a bunch of witches or bikers or whatever. Though the notion of all those hairy limbs, beer bellies, and tattoos was something of a turn-off.
"It's hard to put your finger on exactly," Lenny was saying, eyes still on Rhoda's pants. "Like, one guy in our coven went out and got himself a better job, just like that. And another couple was look-ing all over for an apartment, and like out of the blue they found one."
"With just an incredible rent, too," said Tina.
Nadelman nodded, disappointed. "That's something, all right."
"But it's more than that," said Lenny. "It's also a religion, you know?, like any other religion. We have our worship, our ceremonies, our beliefs . . . ." He shrugged; he might just as easily have been talk-ing about his bowling league. "Only we try to get back to the source, you dig? The life-force. Before the Church and all that other shit came along."
"I understand," said Nadelman. "A kind of pre-Christian religion, right? Like paganism?"
"Hey, you seem to know a bit," said Lenny, eyeing Nadelman guardedly. "You wouldn't happen to be an initiate yourself, by any chance?"
Nadelman was flattered. "Well, I've done a bit of reading in my time." He searched his memory for names. "Like Aleister Crowley, for instance."