Uncollected Stories 2003 (7 page)

T
he house was tall, with an incredible slope of shingled roof. As he
walked up toward it from the shore road, Gerald Nately thought it was
almost a country in itself, geography in microcosm. The roof dipped and
rose at varying angles above the main building and two strangely-angled
wings; a widow's walk skirted a mushroom-shaped cupola which looked
toward the sea; the porch, facing the dunes and lusterless September
scrubgrass, was longer than a Pullman car and screened in. The high
slope of roof made the house seem to beetle its brows and loom above
him. A Baptist grandfather of a house.

He went to the porch and after a moment of hesitation, through the
screen door to the fanlighted one beyond. There was only a wicker
chair, a rusty porch swing, and an old discarded knitting basket to watch
him go. Spiders had spun silk in the shadowy upper corners. He
knocked.

There was silence, inhabited silence. He was about to knock again
when a chair someplace inside wheezed deeply in its throat. It was a
tired sound. Silence. Then the slow, dreadfully patient sound of old,
overburdened feet finding their way up the hall. Counterpoint of cane:
Whock...whock...whock...
The floorboards creaked and whined. A
shadow, huge and unformed in the pearled glass, bloomed on the
fanlight. Endless sound of fingers laboriously solving the riddle of
chain, bolt, and hasp lock. The door opened. "Hello," the nasal voice
said flatly. "You're Mr. Nately. You've rented the cottage. My husband's
cottage."

"Yes," Gerald said, his tongue swelling in his throat. "That's right.

And you're – "
"Mrs. Leighton," the nasal voice said, pleased with either her
quickness or her name, though neither was remarkable. "I'm Mrs.
Leighton."

this woman is so goddam fucking big and old she looks like oh jesus
christ print dress she must be six-six and fat my god shes fat as a hog
can't smell her white hair long white hair her legs those redwood trees
she could be a tank she could kill me her voice is out of any context like
a kazoo jesus if i laugh i can't laugh can she be seventy god how does
she walk and the cane her hands are bigger than my feet like a goddam
tank she could go through oak oak for christs sake.

"You write." She hadn't offered him in.

"That's about the size of it," he said, and laughed to cover his own
sudden shrinking from that metaphor.
"Will you show me some after you get settled?" she asked. Her eyes
seemed perpetually luminous and wistful. They were not touched by the
age that had run riot in the rest of her

wait get that written down

image:
"age had run riot in her with luxuriant fleshiness: she was like a
wild sow let loose in a great and dignified house to shit on the carpet,
gore at the Welsh dresser and send the crystal goblets and wine-glasses
all crash-atumble, to trample the wine colored divans to lunatic puffs of
springs and stuffing, to spike the mirrorbright finish of the great hall
floor with barbarian hoofprints and flying puddles of urine"
okay shes there its a story i feel her

body, making it sag and billow.
"If you like," he said. "I didn't even see the cottage from the Shore
Road, Mrs. Leighton. Could you tell me where – "
"Did you drive in?"
"Yes. I left my car over there.'' He pointed beyond the dunes, toward
the road.
A smile, oddly one-dimensional, touched her lips. "That's why. You
can only see a blink from the road: unless you're walking, you miss it."
She pointed west at a slight angle away from the dunes and the house.
"There. Right over that little hill."
"All right," he said, then stood there smiling. He really had no idea
how to terminate the interview.
"Would you like to come in for some coffee? Or a Coca-Cola?"
"Yes," he said instantly.
She seemed a little taken back by his instant agreement. He had, after
all, been her husband's friend, not her own. The face loomed above
Gerald, moonlike, disconnected, undecided. Then she led him into the
elderly, waiting house.
She had tea. He had Coke, Millions of eyes seemed to watch them. He
felt like a burglar, stealing around the hidden fiction he could make of
her, carrying only his own youthful winsomeness and a psychic
flashlight.
* * *

My own name, of course, is Steve King, and you'll pardon my
intrusion on your mind – or I hope you will. I could argue that the
drawing-aside of the curtain of presumption between reader and author
is permissible because I am the writer; i.e., since it's my story I'll do any
goddam thing I please with it – but since that leaves the reader out of it
completely, that is not valid. Rule One for all writers is that the teller is
not worth a tin tinker's fart when compared to the listener. Let us drop
the matter, if we may. I am intruding for the same reason that the Pope
defecates: we both have to.

You should know that Gerald Nately was never brought to the dock;
his crime was not discovered. He paid all the same. After writing four
twisted, monumental, misunderstood novels, he cut his own head off
with an ivory-figured guillotine purchased in Kowloon. I invented him
first during a moment of eight o'clock boredom in a class taught by
Carroll F. Terrell of the University of Maine English faculty. Dr. Terrell
was speaking of Edgar A. Poe, and I thought

ivory guillotine Kowloon
twisted woman of shadows, like a pig
some big house
The blue air compressor did not come until later. It is desperately

important that the reader be made cognizant of these facts.

He did show her some of his writing. Not the important part, the story
he was writing about her, but fragments of poetry, the spine of a novel
that had ached in his mind for a year like embedded shrapnel, four
essays. She was a perceptive critic, and addicted to marginal notations
with her black felt-tip pen. Because she sometimes dropped in when he
was gone to the village, he kept the story hidden in the back shed.

September melted into cool October, and the story was completed,
mailed to a friend, returned with suggestions (bad ones), rewritten. He
felt it was good, but not quite right. Something indefinable was missing.
The focus was a shade fuzzy. He began to toy with the idea of giving it
to her for criticism, rejected it, toyed with it again. After all, the story
was her; he never doubted she could supply the final vector.His attitude
concerning her became increasingly unhealthy; he was fascinated by her
huge, animalistic bulk, by the slow, tortoise-like way she trekked across
the space between the house and the cottage

* * *
image:
"mammoth shadow of decay swaying across the shadowless
sand, cane held in one twisted hand, feet clad in huge canvas shoes
which pump and push at the coarse grains, face like a serving platter,
puffy dough arms, breasts like drumlins, a geography in herself, a
country of tissue"

by her reedy, vapid voice; but at the same time he loathed her, could not
stand her touch. He began to feel like the young man in "The Tell-Tale
Heart, " by Edgar A. Poe. He felt he could stand at her bedroom door for
endless midnights, shining one ray of light on her sleeping eye, ready to
pounce and rip the instant it flashed open.

The urge to show her the story itched at him maddeningly. He had
decided, by the first day of December, that he would do it. The
decisionmaking did not relieve him, as it is supposed to do in the
novels, but it did leave him with a feeling of antiseptic pleasure. It
was right that it should be so – an omega that quite dovetailed with
the alpha. And it was omega; he was vacating the cottage on the fifth
of December. On this day he had just returned from the Stowe Travel
Agency in Portland, where he had booked passage for the Far East. He
had done this almost on the spur of the moment: the decision to go and
the decision to show his manuscript to Mrs. Leighton had come together,
almost as if he had been guided by an invisible hand.

In truth, he was guided by an invisible hand-mine.

The day was white with overcast and the promise of snow lurked in its
throat. The dunes seemed to foreshadow the winter already, as Gerald
crossed them between the slate-roofed house of her dominion and the
low stone cottage of his. The sea, sullen and gray, curled on the shingle
of beach. Gulls rode the slow swells like buoys.

He crossed the top of the last dune and knew she was there – her cane,
with its white bicycle handgrip at the base, stood against the side of the
door. Smoke drifted from the toy chimney. Gerald went up the board
steps, kicked sand from his high-topped shoes to make her aware of his
presence, and then went in.

"Hi, Mrs. Leighton!"

But the tiny living room and the kitchen both stood empty. The ship's
clock on the mantle ticked only for itself and for Gerald. Her gigantic
fur coat lay draped over the rocker like some animal sail. A small fire
had been laid in the fireplace, and it glowed and crackled busily. The
teapot was on the gas range in the kitchen, and one teacup stood on the
counter, still waiting for water. He peered into the narrow hall which led
to the bedroom.
"Mrs. Leighton?"
Hall and bedroom both empty.
He was about to turn back to the kitchen when the mammoth chuckles

began. They were large, helpless shakings of laughter, the kind that
stays hidden for years and ages like wine (There is also an Edgar A. Poe
story about wine). The chuckles evolved into large bellows of laughter.
They came from behind the door to the right of Gerald's bed, the last
door in the cottage. From the tool-shed.

my balls are crawling like in grammar school the old bitch shes
laughing she found it the old fat she bitch goddam her goddam her
goddam her you old whore youre doing that cause im out here you old
she bitch whore you piece of shit

He went to the door in one step and pulled it open. She was sitting next
to the small space-heater in the shed, her dress pulled up over oak-stump
knees to allow her to sit cross-legged, and his manuscript was held,
dwarfed, in her bloated hands.

Her laughter roared and racketed around him. Gerald Nately saw
bursting colors
in front of his eyes. She was a slug, a maggot, a gigantic crawling thing
evolved in the cellar of the shadowy house by the sea. A dark bug that
had swaddled itself in grotesque human form.

In the flat light from the one cobwebbed window her face became a
hanging graveyard moon, pocked by the sterile craters of her eyes and
the ragged earthquake rift of her mouth.

"Don't you laugh," Gerald said stiffly.
"Oh Gerald," she said, laughing all the same. "This is such a bad story.
I don't blame you for using a penname. It's – " she wiped tears of
laughter from her eyes, "it's abominable!"
He began to walk toward her stiffly.
"You haven't made me big enough, Gerald. That's the trouble. I'm too
big for you. Perhaps Poe, or Dosteyevsky, or Melville…but not you,
Gerald. Not even under your royal pen-name. Not you. Not you.”
She began to laugh again, huge racking explosions of sound.
"Don't you laugh," Gerald said stiffly.

The tool-shed, after the manner of Zola:
Wooden walls, which showed occasional chinks of light, surrounding
rabbit-traps hung and slung in corners; a pair of dusty, unstrung
snowshoes: a rusty spaceheater showing flickers of yellow flame like
cat's eyes; a shovel; hedge clippers; an ancient green hose coiled like
a garter-snake; four bald tires stacked like doughnuts; a rusty
Winchester rifle with no bolt; a two handed saw; a dusty work-bench
covered with nails, screws, bolts, washers, two hammers, a plane, a
broken level, a dismantled carburetor which once sat inside a 1949
Packard convertible; a 4 hp. air-compressor painted electric blue,
plugged into an extension cord running back into the house.

"Don't you laugh," Gerald said again, but she continued to rock back
and forth, holding her stomach and flapping the manuscript with her
wheezing breath like a white bird.

His hand found the rusty Winchester rifle and he pole-axed her with it.

 

Most horror stories are sexual in nature.

I'm sorry to break in with this information, but feel I must in order to
make the way clear for the grisly conclusion of this piece, which is (at
least psychologically) a clear metaphor for fears of sexual impotence on
his part. Mrs. Leighton's large mouth is symbolic of the vagina; the
hose of the compressor is a penis. Her female bulk, huge and
overpowering, is a mythic representation of the sexual fear that lives in
every male, to a greater or lesser degree: that the woman, with her
opening, is a devourer.

In the works of Edgar A. Poe, Stephen King, Gerald Nately, and others
who practice this particular literary form, we are apt to find locked
rooms, dungeons, empty mansions (all symbols of the womb); scenes of
living burial (sexual impotence); the dead returned from the grave
(necrophilia); grotesque monsters or human beings (externalized fear of
the sexual act itself); torture and/or murder (a viable alternative to the
sexual act).

These possibilities are not always valid, but the post-Freud reader and
writer must take them into consideration when attempting the genre.
Abnormal psychology has become a part of the human experience.

She made thick, unconscious noises in her throat as he whirled around
madly, looking for an instrument; her head lolled brokenly on the thick
stalk of her neck.

He seized the hose of the air-compressor.

 

"All right," he said thickly. "All right, now. All Tight."

 

bitch fat old bitch youve had yours not big enough is that right well
youll be bigger youll be bigger still

* * *
He ripped her head back by the hair and rammed the hose into her
mouth, into her gullet. She screamed around it, a sound like a cat.

Part of the inspiration for this story came from an old E. C. horror comic
book, which I bought in a Lisbon Falls drugstore. In one particular
story, a husband and wife murdered each other simultaneously in
mutually ironic (and brilliant) fashion. He was very fat; she was very
thin. He shoved the hose of an air compressor down her throat and blew
her up to dirigible size. On his way downstairs a booby-trap she had
rigged fell on him and squashed him to a shadow.