I grinned, and when I told him why I wanted ‘em, he looked at me sideways. “Well, I guess it oughtta work,” he said finally. “If that’s really whatcha got.”
“If it is, I’ll buy you a couple of replacements,” I told him. “Thanks.”
I took the chance of riding into Ma’s garage after I picked up the two brass extinguishers, figuring everyone ought to be in bed and asleep now that they figured the excitement was over. I didn’t see the Chevy roadster in the driveway, so Patricia and Mrs. Davis had gone on home, too. I was glad about that, especially if my suspicions were right about my room. No sense in putting anyone else in danger.
Lugging the two metal bottles up the stairs, trying not to clink them together and make noise, I got ready for war. First, I crept down to Dave’s room. He’d been on the midnight shift up at the depot for a couple of weeks, so I knew his room was unoccupied. It wasn’t locked, either, and I went in and borrowed a straight-backed chair, bringing it back down to my own door. Then I pulled my sheath knife out of my boot and its leather case, using it to dig the pencil lead out of the lock. I kept it handy.
Now came the tricky part. I didn’t want to wake anybody up, but I needed to make a little noise. So I took a chance and stamped my foot several times hard on the floor just outside the door, shaking the knob at the same time.
I exhaled, steeling myself. This was it.
I turned the key in the lock and cracked open the door, knife in hand. Nothing.
Another inch, and the coast was still clear. I opened it wide. No sign of anything. A little wind came up and lifted the window screen for a moment. That was all. Climbing up on the chair, I opened the transom all the way. Then I climbed down, set the knife on the chair’s seat, and backed up, gently pushing the door until it was open just enough for me to stick the nozzle of the fire extinguisher through.
I opened her up, shooting a pencil-thick stream of carbon tet under my bed. It fizzed like it was going to explode and maybe it did because all of a sudden a huge rattlesnake blew out like a rocket from beneath the bed – not slithering but airborne and headed right for me! I slammed the door shut, heard the body wham against the wood.
Jumping up on the chair, I stuck the nozzle through the open transom and sprayed that baby but good, emptying one extinguisher and replacing it with the fresh one. I knew by this time the noise was probably waking up everyone in the house but I couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop now. Carbon tet is heavier than air, so I knew it was displacing the oxygen on the floor and forcing that damn thing to breathe in those vapors. I peered through the transom then, and saw four feet of reptile rolling around under that steady stream of carbon tet, thrashing and lifting its hideous head, stretching its jaws open so the twin fangs showed white and glistening. I sprayed until the stream from the second extinguisher died. By that time, the snake wasn’t moving much. I pulled aside the chair, grabbed up my knife, jerked the door open, and hacked that son-of-a-bitch into about fifty bloody pieces. I know it was fury at being scared so, but there was also a kind of triumph in it. I knew I had a snake in my room. My seventh sense told me. That’s why I’d stamped my foot and rattled the doorknob. You and I both know that snakes hear through vibrations, so by warning it I was coming I gave it a chance either to come out after me in full view or hide and wait – and since the only place something as big as that can hide in that room is under my bed, it gave me time to set my plan into action.
After I’d chopped that snake into hamburger, I opened up the window and turned the fan on high, searching every inch of my room in case there were any other surprises. Carbon tet has a strong smell and I got a little light headed, so I shut the door and went out into the hall, sitting down on Dave’s straight-backed chair.
I heard footsteps and muttered voices. Once again, Robert had shaken up the household.
Ma was the first to reach me, an old robe thrown around her, her salt-and-pepper hair tangled atop her head. Mac was right with her, scrambling to stay up.
“Land sakes, Mr. Robert Brown,” she said. “What is it this time?”
I nodded toward my opened door. She peered in.
“Sweet baby Jesus in Heaven,” she said quietly. Mac stood at the door sill, peering in. He wasn’t all puffed up again, but he didn’t show any inclination to enter the room, either. He kept looking into it, and then back to me.
Somewhere around that time, tall Paul in pajamas and stocky Mr. Clark in undershirt, shorts, and a ratty bathrobe, looking like Mutt and Jeff, appeared and stood at the doorway to my room with Ma, gazing in at the carnage and talking in low tones. I just sat there, used up, the smell of carbon tet still hot in my nostrils, thinking about how it had been one hell of a day.
Your pal and faithful correspondent,
Robert
June 21, 1939
Wednesday night
Dear John,
Man, you didn’t let any grass grow under your feet! You must’ve driven up to my folks’ house, picked up the books I asked for, and sent ‘em out all the same day you got my letter. You didn’t say so, but I imagine you mailed them from the Hallock p.o. before driving back, which probably got them to me 24 hours quicker. I hope you didn’t have to take off work to do all that, but I’ll bet you did.
Anyway, they arrived Monday – via Air Mail! I figured you’d be able to promote a couple of lunches and a beer or two at the Press Club with the change from that five-spot I sent you.
Instead, you used most of it to get the books here quicker. A true pal. Thanks.
I’m glad that story I sent you about the snake/person in the hen house gave you the shivers. Maybe a couple of months ago I would’ve just seen it as a tall hill-billy tale myself. Now, though, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it really happened.
To tell you the truth, I’m not sure what could surprise me now. I’ve been wondering how I’ve started accepting as fact things that rightfully belong in Weird Tales. Fiction. Except it’s not.
Accepting the idea that those cats were staring at me from the bone yard the night I rode into Mackaville was the way it began. Then, as the other stuff I’ve been telling you about started happening, and things began getting stranger and stranger, it got easier for me to buy into the whole scene, to believe that some of the cats I’d seen and people I’d met had some sort of eldritch bond. Then came the snakes, which make the cats seem as benign as my old Aunt Nellie.
After only six weeks in this crazy little burg, I feel like I’m living my days in a different reality, separated from my old life not only by miles but by the whole idea of what “normal” is. Some of the stories I’ve gotten, like the two I’ve sent you, just reinforce that feeling.
I think maybe my whole life I’ve been preparing for this. It’s not just having the seventh sense since I was a kid, although that’s a big part of it. It also has to do with how I’ve always skirted the edges of messing with black magic – lots of times with you. Remember how we planned to filch a couple of stethoscopes from Dr. Jennings’ office and go out to the grave yard at night to see if we could hear dead people breathing? We planned a lot of that sort of stuff, even though I was too chicken to go through with most of it. You didn’t know that. I always let you back out first, then ridiculed you. Or maybe you did know it and didn’t say anything.
Anyway, not to be melodramatic, I’m thinking what’s happening here is something I was destined for. I know, like the sheriff said, I won’t be here forever and it might be best just to keep my nose clean and not turn over any more rocks. But it could be too late to turn away now. It’s obvious that people are trying to kill me. But I’m pretty sure they constitute a very small part of this town’s population. It may just be three people, in fact: Old Man Black and his twin idiot offspring.
After the books came yesterday, I took several hours when I should’ve been transcribing interviews and studied up on a few things. Going on that, my sense about what’s happening, and some of the things people I trust like Ma and Pete and Mrs. Davis have told me, I’ve co
me up with the idea that a lot of the folks around here, especially the old-timers, have a spiritual or magical or whatever you want to call it “link” to certain animals. One of the books you sent me suggests that people like this can become those animals, but I don’t think this is the case here – even though I still have my questions about Mrs. Davis and the cat in my room. If this were true, one of the Blacks would be dead by now, his snake-ass body hacked to pieces in my room. Since that night, I’ve seen two of ‘em myself, and since the pieces of the rattler I chunked in the gunny sack didn’t turn into a human carcass, like the one in Mr. Gunnison’s story, I feel pretty confident that the other half-wit son is still roaming around the hills somewhere.
I’m sure that the Blacks are linked to rattlesnakes, though, just like Mrs. Davis and the cats. I’ve got the incident at Jolley’s Mercantile to go on, along with the rattler Pete and I saw on the road a few minutes before the Blacks tried to ambush us, and then the snake in my room at the end of that crazy Sunday. Ma said as much that night, after the two boarders had made it back to bed. I was afraid again that she was going to tell me to blow – hell, just in the past couple of weeks I’d shot up her place and filled it full of carbon tet, not to mention scared the stuffing out of everyone by impersonating a bloody corpse in the communal bathtub. No judge in the country would convict her if she wanted to give me the bum’s rush.
So, around midnight, as I was stabbing pieces of snake with the end of my sheath knife and sacking them up while she swept and mopped up, I was half waiting for the axe to fall. She hadn’t said much, but all of a sudden she shook her head and said, “That old man is pure-dee evil.”
“Pardon me?” I said, looking up at her.
“Black. Pure evil. Nothin’ but trash.” She mopped vigorously at a bloody spot on the wood floor, a lock of hair coming undone and dangling in front of her forehead. “Always has been, always will be.”
“You think it was Old Man Black who did this?”
She stopped mopping, fixing me with a stare. “What do you think, Robert?”
“I think it was him, Ma. Although I don’t know how he managed to get up on the roof and let that snake in my room.”
“Maybe not him. Maybe one of them kids done it. Don’t matter. Dollars to doughnuts he was behind it. I guess you made him mad back there at the train station, th’ night you come in.” She fell silent for a short time, as we worked along, and then she added, “You be careful, Robert. He’s gonna try again.”
I nodded, skewering another piece of snake. “I will,” I said. “I might even be able to give him a reason to leave me alone.”
The opportunity to do that fell in my lap yesterday. I don’t much believe in divine intervention, but you be the judge. It sure as hell seems like more than mere coincidence.
I was scheduled to go by Dr. Chavez’s downtown office to get my stitches pulled out, so that morning I guided the big Indian into a parking space beside an old pick-up that looked familiar. Just as I got to the door of Doc’s storefront, it opened and this big blond hulk lumbered out. He had no shirt on, his shoulder was bandaged, and right behind him was Old Man Black, a cigarette dangling from his lips.
Neither one recognized me at first. They were both a couple of steps past when Black turned and stared at me, jaw dropping, cigarette falling to the sidewalk.
His nitwit kid stopped too, eyes going over me like an animal’s. His mouth twisted into an enraged scowl.
“You gawd damned–” He started to go for me then, but the old man put out a scrawny arm.
“I’m still alive,” I told them, my screwed-up sense of the dramatic kicking in. I got to admit I postured a little, struck a pose. “Maybe you already knew that. I’m not even hurt much. But I am getting mad, and somebody’s going to be sorry.”
I stood in the doorway for effect just a moment, and then shut it behind me before they could rush me. I didn’t figure they’d start anything in the Doc’s office, and I was right. Cracking the door after a few moments, I watched the two of them, jawing at one another, get in the ancient truck and drive away. When they were gone, I went back out and picked up Old Man Black’s cigarette butt, twisting out the glowing end. Then, holding it by the ash end between thumb and forefinger, I walked back in.
I held it that way until the nurse came out for me. When she asked if I needed an ash tray, I told her no, and looking as though she thought I was a little nuts she led me into a well- organized room that seemed almost a carbon copy of the one in Doc Chavez’s house. He was waiting for me.
“What you got there?” he asked, nodding at the cigarette butt I held.
“Something I’d like to put in a test tube. Can I get one from you?”
He looked at me for a long moment and then, as if he’d just gotten my idea, suddenly grinned.
“You can go now, Ida.” He nodded and the nurse slipped out the door. Then he turned back to me.
“Fresh?” he asked.
“You bet.”
“Know what you’re doing?”
“I think I do.”
“All right then.” He went to a cabinet and pulled out a test tube. There was a stopper in the top that he uncorked, holding the tube out to me. I dropped the butt in and he replaced the stopper.
“Here you go.”
“Thanks, doc,” I said, sticking the tube in the front pocket of my CCC shirt.
“Sit down over here and let me see if I can get those stitches out.” Peeling off the bandage, he poked around a little. “Looks good. Looks good. Now this is going to hurt a little.”
It did, but my mind wasn’t on the pain. It was on what he said as he worked away.
“We know what you’re doing, Mr. Brown, although we can’t quite figure out how you know what you’re doing – hold still, now. There.” A snap, and I knew he’d popped one of the stitches. “Just don’t get in too deep.” Snap. “There’s only so much help we can give you. We’ve existed like this for a lot of years, and too much boat-rocking doesn’t help anybody. Still, I admire you. And I’m not the only one.” Again, there was a little snapping sound, and before I knew it he was cleaning up the traces of the wound and putting on another, smaller bandage.
“That ought to do it,” he said. “Give my receptionist two bucks on your way out and we’ll call it square. Keep the dressing on for a couple more days and you’ll be fine. It hardly left a scar.”
I nodded. “Thanks for taking care of me, Dr. Chavez. I appreciate it.” Then, “I suppose you’ve told me all you can tell me.”
“I have,” he returned. “And maybe a little more.”
With those parting words, I nodded another thanks at him and left, remembering the test tube in my front pocket, knowing exactly what potentially boat-rocking thing I was going to do with its contents.
Your pal and faithful correspondent,
Robert
June 24. 1939
Saturday morning
Dear John,
I have really been ginning the folklore interviews out – fifteen in the last week alone.
Concentrating on them helps me forget all this stuff about the Blacks and the snakes and the cats for a while. When I’m typing up one of the reports, I can lose myself in it, just like you do in a good book or pulp.
The upshot is that I’m so ahead of schedule that I may actually get finished before the end of October. I think I wrote you that this WPA job is officially over on October 1 and my clerk’s job in the Department of War begins very soon after that. Man, things are really speeding along. When I get settled in Washington, D.C., I want you to come stay with me a day or ten. Elaine could spare you for that long, and so could the paper, I bet. Maybe we’ll take all this stuff I’ve been writing you about and make it into a book.
First of all, though, I’ve got to get through the rest of my time here with my carcass intact.
Things have been quiet since the confrontation between me and two-thirds of the Black clan at Doc Chavez’s office Tuesday, when I had the pre
sence of mind to go out and pick up the old man’s cigarette butt. I’ve half expected something else to happen by now, although I haven’t had any discernible seventh sense about it, which says something. And sure enough, it’s been quiet. In a way, it’s like they say in the western movies – too quiet. But in another way, it’s been good. I’ve felt a sense of peace, although there’s a little guilt mixed up in in, too, because of what I did with Old Man Black’s cigarette butt. I don’t want to tell you too much about that yet – not until I’m sure it’s working.
I’ve had a lot of time to think about things while I’ve been out riding from place to place in the mountains, gathering up my interviews. There’s no doubt that the “good” people in town – Ma, Mrs. Davis, the doc, even Pete – are trying to tell me what they can about the evil in Mackaville, which seems to center squarely around Old Man Black. And somehow, I know that the good people are in some way connected up with the cats that have bedeviled me since I pulled into this burg.
Yeah, the cats. Cuckoo as it sounds, I know the cats have something to tell me, too. Sometimes I think about you sitting there in your bungalow, or maybe in the Dispatch newsroom, reading one of my wilder letters and shaking your head. Maybe you laugh. I really do hope you think I’m not non compos mentis, or that I’m going to end up like Old Lady Crawford back in Hallock. Remember how we used to sneak up at night and throw rocks at the porch of her creepy old house, just so we could watch those dozens of cats shoot out from under it?
You know, I couldn’t stop you from showing these letters to other people, but I hope you’re not and I don’t think you are. You are the one person I’d trust with my life, so I’m trusting you with all of this, too, and I’m trusting you to keep it to yourself for now. Just know it is happening exactly as I’m putting it down. I’ve been looking over your letters again and I can’t see any sign that you think I’ve gone around the bend. I thank you for that.
Besides the people I mentioned, I think some other citizens of Mackaville and its mountainous environs are trying to tell me things in their own way. Did you notice that the snake-man in that story Mr. Gunnison told me was named “Black?” Sure, it’s a common name, but rattlers and Blacks are so mixed up in this town that I think the old guy had a reason for using that name.
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