Finden was still sipping his first cup when Jes sidled in and took his place.
The boy chuckled. "Old Nell almos' drunk the trough dry!"
Harley nodded. "Hope this heat spell breaks. Six year ago that trough went dry. Lugged well water."
Mrs. Orcutt brushed aside a straggling lock of grey-streaked black hair. "More tea, Mr. Finden?"
Finden accepted another cup. He felt curiously uninclined to converse but made some effort at small talk. The Orcutts appeared at ease, apparently recognizing the fact that he was hot, tired and, probably, somewhat confused.
He retreated to the kitchen with Harley and Jes while Mrs. Orcutt cleared up.
After a decent interval, Finden said that he had better be going. He felt refreshed after the tea, but when he stood up, a wave of dizziness flowed over him. He sat down.
Harley Orcutt regarded him with concern. "You jest set there, Mr. Finden. I'll be right back."
He returned bearing a small flask and a water glass and poured out a potion.
"Sip it slow, Mr. Finden. Throws off that shaky feelin'."
Finden sampled the clear yellowish liquid. A warm inner glow, born not of the brassy skies, soon suffused him. He felt more relaxed and loquacious.
He was chatting away with Harley Orcutt about heat, crops and wells running dry when Mrs. Orcutt came in from the dining room and silently beckoned to her husband.
Excusing himself, Harley left the room. He returned shortly and resumed his seat.
"Ma says why don't you stay for supper. It's no cooler and you ain't feelin' well."
Finden looked up, surprised. "I thank you, but actually I feel fine now!"
Orcutt grinned, glancing at Finden's empty glass.
"That applejack's the best medicine I know. But all the same, you need some vittles. Worst mistake folks make is not eatin' in the heat."
Finden hesitated and Orcutt poured some more applejack.
Supper, served in the dining room, consisted of boiled potatoes, fried steak, whole boiled carrots, bread and tea and apple pie.
Finden was surprised to find that in spite of the heat he was famished.
The Orcutts applied themselves to the meal with diligence. The intake of food was obviously one of their major concerns. Conversation was desultory.
Finden was not sorry. He felt sleepy, listless and dull-witted. As he glanced around the room, he became convinced that his eyes were not focusing properly. For instance, the calendar on the wall opposite him read August 8, 1877. He knew perfectly well, of course, that it was August 8, 1977.
He remained in his chair, exchanging occasional remarks with Harley Orcutt, while Mrs. Orcutt took away the dishes, aided by a reluctant Jes.
Orcutt cleared his throat portentously. "Keeps right hot out there, Mr. Finden. Likely you'd be better off stayin' the night. Sort of a couch in the parlor here. A cool room, too."
Finden protested feebly, but the appeal of a couch in a cool parlor was too great to resist. He literally ached to lie down and fall asleep.
After complimenting Mrs. Orcutt on the meal, he sat chatting with Harley for a few minutes. At length, finding himself unable to keep his eyes open, he followed his host down a short hallway into the adjacent parlor.
The room was small, musty, dim in the gathering twilight. Two overstuffed armchairs, covered with cracked green Turkish leather, squatted in corners. A couch of the same style lay alongside one wall. A round walnut table bearing a kerosene lamp with a rose-colored chimney stood in the center of the room. Several family portraits, too big for the small room, hung on the walls. Heavy-featured farmers, grim and uncomfortable-looking in their store clothes, stared solemnly into the growing gloom.
Mrs. Orcutt hurried in with sheets, a pillow and a light blanket, bid him good night and bustled out.
Harley Orcutt hovered about. "If there's anythin' else ..."
Finden shook his head. "No, no, I'm fine. Just fine. Nothing at all. And I am grateful!"
Orcutt nodded and went out, closing the door.
Finden draped his clothes on an armchair and crawled between the sheets in his underwear. In spite of the outside heat, the room was relatively cool. He pulled up the blanket.
He had a vague feeling that something was wrong, that something was strangely out of place, but he could not decide what it was.
He was still trying to decide when oblivion overcame him.
***
His eyes refused to open. They appeared to be fastened shut, stitched together. Light grew; the room was no longer cool. Heat seemed to be covering him, invisible layers of it, blanket after burning blanket.
He stirred, feeling peculiarly disembodied, and managed to sit up. At length his crusted, heavy-lidded eyes opened a slit.
His heart thudded heavily in his chest and he closed his eyes quickly. He must be having nightmares, he thought. He was not yet awake.
He waited a full minute and then very slowly, very carefully, opened his eyes again.
He was lying amid debris on the dirt floor of an open cellar hole. A hot sun, already far up in a brassy-looking sky, beat down on him.
He tried to think, fighting off the panic which threatened to overwhelm him ... the farmhouse, the Orcutts, the applejack, the meal, his own sleepiness and apathy.
He saw it all suddenly, with a mixture of fury and relief. The drinks had been drugged, of course. They had stolen all his possessions and then dumped him into this abandoned cellar hole, left him for dead.
Well, he wasn't dead, and once he got out of here, he'd teach those murderous hayseeds a lesson.
He started to get up, fell back with a gasp as darkness spun about him. Terribly weak. He'd have to... he crouched motionless for a time until the whirling darkness cleared.
He must try to think coherently, he told himself. Probably they had knocked him out with a blow to the head. That would explain his weakness and vertigo.
He lifted his arm and gingerly felt his head. His; exploring hand did not encounter any contusions, but he pulled it away quickly with a twinge of terror. He tried again, with the same result.
There could be no doubt of it—he had lost all his hair.
Panic crowding him again, he finally managed to sit up. Glancing down, he saw that his clothes were in tatters. They were nothing more than rotted, mouldy rags clinging together.
Somehow he struggled to his feet and leaned against the wall of the cellar hole. One minute the glare of the sun was in his eyes; the next, darkness spun about him again.
After a long interval, the darkness cleared and the sun stayed steady. He stared around the cellar hole.
The floor of the cellar lay deep in mounds of autumn leaves, tangles of burdock, thistle and fireweed. A few scattered sticks of furniture were strewn about. He noticed part of a chair arm covered with a kind of green scurf which once might have been leather. A broken picture frame, half-buried in a drift of leaves, leaned against the opposite wall.
As the sun rose, the place became an inferno. He began scrabbling frantically at the nearest wall in an effort to climb out. The loose stones of the foundation teetered and shook under his thrusting fingers. His feet, after gaining a precarious hold, would slip and lose it.
Looking down, he saw that his shoes were mere crusts of lumpy leather hanging loosely on his feet. He shook them off.
With clawing fingers and bare, questing toes he finally managed to reach the top. He collapsed in the weeds and lay motionless. His heart pounded, shaking his whole body.
Very slowly, he stood up. The dim trace of a road, or path, lay before him and he started along grass-grown tracks. Halfway down, he stopped. The fallen, decayed trunk of a huge buttonwood tree lay across the path.
He stared at it and something stirred in his memory, but renewed panic stirred with it. He refused to think. He could not afford to think too much, he told himself. He was Henry Finden. His car was waiting out on the blacktop road. It was terribly hot. It was August. He had been drugged, robbed
and dumped in an old cellar hole by the Orcutts. He was going to get in his car and go for the police.
His ordeal had left him confused, that was all. The shock of it all had caused his hair to fall out. They had stripped off his clothes and dressed him in rags. He was weak, yes, very weak. After all, who wouldn't be weak after what... what he had been through...
Circling the fallen tree, he reached the end of the overgrown drive and entered another abandoned road which the woods were swiftly reclaiming. It was cooler here and he stopped to rest, grateful for the canopy of shade.
He had walked some distance when he saw the faded wooden sign nailed to a blackjack oak: "Granville." Yes, of course. He was on the right road, then. All he had to do was keep walking along this shady road until he reached the blacktop. His car would be waiting. He was Henry Finden. It was August. It was hot...
Almost before he realized it, his bare feet had left the cool dirt and grass and were burning on the blacktop. The sun struck him like a sudden heavy hammer. He swayed dizzily and passed a hand over his eyes. His head cleared and he looked down the road.
There was his car, just as he had left it! He hurried along the blacktop on scorching feet until he reached the car.
Panic crowded him once again. His clothes... gone... stolen... rotted away... pockets... keys... car keys.
He fingered the filthy tatters which hung about him, but any vestiges of pockets had long since vanished.
He was still standing there, fumbling aimlessly, when a car approached.
His heart leaped, leaped literally. Here was help! He extended his thumb, grinned apologetically.
The car slowed down, almost stopped. The driver leaned out and looked at him.
The driver's red, sweaty face turned putty-pale. His mouth dropped open. His head pulled back like a turtle's returning to its shell. The car roared off up the road.
Henry Finden watched until it was out of sight. As he stood regarding the empty road, he became conscious again of his burning feet. And not only his feet. His throat was burning. The top of his head was burning. His entire body seemed to be burning.
Turning, he shuffled off the blacktop back onto the overgrown dirt road.
Possibly, he told himself, the car keys—by some miracle—might be lying in the cellar hole. And then another thought struck him. Perhaps, as he had bent to drink at that roadside pool, the keys had slipped from his pocket.
The pool glimmered in his memory as if it were the final goal of all his life's strivings. El Dorado. The Holy Grail.
Surely, the pool would save him. He would plunge his head into it and drink water as cold as ice. Drink and drink until he could hold no more. He would slip his burning feet into the pool, immerse his whole feverish body in the sweet water...
He started along the road. Someone had held hot irons on his feet, poured burning cinders down his throat, buried him in the sun in a cellar hole... but the pool would save him.
Before he reached it, he grew so weak that he had to crawl. As he hitched along the grassy trace, he resembled some kind of giant land crab tortuously finding its way back toward the sea.
Now and then he stood up, afraid that he might pass the pool without seeing it. He knew that it lay a little beyond the sign reading "Granville" and he watched carefully for the dim wooden board.
He saw it at last and crawled along more slowly. From time to time he raised his head and listened. And finally he heard it: the chuckling whisper of water over stone.
He found the place easily enough because the creek, working under the old road, had caused it to sink.
Turning off, he crawled through a cluster of cattails.
He squirmed frantically toward the pool as if it might recede before he reached it. On the edge, he stopped and looked down into the clear depths.
A demon thing, a death's head, hidden in the deep recesses of the pool, stared up at him. Its filmy eyes bulged and it opened its sunken mouth in mock horror, mimicking him. The yellowish, tightly stretched skin of its hideous face was beginning to flake off. It was hairless. It resembled nothing so much as a disinterred mummy.
Finden screamed, and the thing screamed soundlessly back at him.
The brassy sky pressed down intolerably. A searing wave of fire seemed to flash through every fiber of his body.
He toppled into the pool and sank out of sight.
Jendick’s Swamp
(1987)
At the time, Chris Kellington was only a constable in Greystone Bay; he didn’t have much to do. Occasionally he was called out by a farmer whose fences had been damaged by a neighbor’s cows. Now and then there were minor thefts—pumpkins lifted from somebody’s back lot, a few tools taken from the town truck.
Sometimes he stopped at my place for a chat. If I was hunched at my typewriter, hammering away, he’d merely remark on the weather and stroll off. If I was puttering around, he’d stay and talk.
One afternoon, after I’d finished my writing chores, he came in and sat down. No matter what the weather was, he’d head for a worn and somewhat rickety kitchen chair near my old wood-burning stove. He’d prop his feet on the edge of the wood-box and lean back.
It was late August, warm and sultry. I broke out some chilled apple cider. Chris sipped appreciatively. “Best cider I’ve had all summer!" After some routine remarks, he looked up with a quizzical expression. “Kirk, any chance you remember the Jendicks?”
I had to ponder a minute. “I remember some rumors. A sort of inbred, run-down family. Squatters, kind of. Built a big house on a knoll in the middle of a quicksand bog. Lived by hunting mostly. A wild bunch best avoided. Died out many years ago.”
Kellington nodded. “You’ve summed it up fairly well. Wasn’t a bog, though; it was the marshes on the other side of North Hill. A treacherous enough place, no matter what you call it. I was in there only once and I was glad when I’d sloshed my way out. I didn’t sink in any quicksand but probably I was close to it. It’s pretty certain that a number of hunters went in there and never returned.”
“What brought the Jendicks and their quicksand swamp to mind?” I asked.
He set down his cider glass. “Funny thing. About a week ago some New York character named Lawton was visiting the Clarksons in the Bay—cousins, I think. He considered himself a hunter. Brought along a brand-new sporting rifle. Well, he wandered around the back end of North Hill without any luck and was about to give up when he spotted a deer. Spooked it but caught sight again and kept following. Tracked it into the marshes. The deer got clean away; before long Lawton was lost. Trudged around for hours getting soaked up to his belt line and finally glimpsed a house standing on a knoll—he called it a hill. Said the house was a wreck, rotted and moldy-looking, and he naturally assumed it was uninhabited. Well, he climbed up the knoll to rest and dry off a bit, if that was possible. While he was sitting there, he had a strange feeling that he was being watched. The Clarksons quoted him as saying: ‘I had the worst sense of impending danger I’ve ever experienced.’ Stood up and turned around and there were two eyes glaring at him from one of the dark window apertures. Eyes like those of a wild animal. But he swears he saw the shadowy form of a man.”
Kellington shrugged. “That’s about it. He rushed away, back into the swamp, and never turned around. Found his way out by sheer luck. Doesn’t know whether he was followed or not. By the time I got the story secondhand from the Clarksons, Lawton had left for New York.”
I refilled the cider glasses. “Makes a spooky little anecdote. I imagine a tramp had settled down in the old Jendick house and didn’t welcome visitors.”
Chris frowned. “Well—maybe. But I’ve got a nagging urge to check it out.”
“What’s to check, Chris? A squatter in an abandoned house surrounded by a swamp where scarcely anybody ventures? Sure, you can get yourself half-drowned going in there but what’s accomplished? You evict some halfwitted derelict and like as not he takes up quarters in somebody’s barn and causes real trouble."
<
br /> “I’d make sure he cleared right out of town. Aside from that, I guess maybe I have a hankering to get a look at that old Jendick house—or what’s left of it.”
He rearranged his feet on the wood-box and leaned back. “They were a weird bunch, Kirk. You’ve heard some rumors, but maybe not all. Seems old Jendick was part Indian—Pequot, I guess, though I’m not sure. Anyway, there’s a legend that some of the early tribes worshiped a so-called Spirit of the Swamp. I think he—it—was named Iththaqua. In exchange for sacrifices, Iththaqua was supposed to guide his worshipers safely through the labyrinths of the swamp and eventually grant them other favors as well. I’ve heard it said that during a hunt in the swamp, the Jendicks always tried to catch one creature alive—even though wounded—in order to sacrifice it to Iththaqua.”
“And in exchange, Iththaqua kept them from getting lost or drowned?” I interposed.
“Something like that. Anyway, there might be some clue left in the house.”
I shook my head. "The Jendicks don’t sound like the kind who kept written records. And even if they did, any journal would be long gone by now—weather, rats, roaches.”
“You’re probably right," he agreed. “But I'd still like a look in the house before it rots away completely.”
I grinned at him. “You always were a stubborn cuss! Well, let me know when you plan to drown yourself and I’ll tag along. My current yarn’s hit a dry plateau and I need to get away from it for a day or two.”
“How about tomorrow, then? Midmorning. Say, ten. I’ll bring a Thermos and sandwiches.”
“Fine. I’ll be ready.”
He turned at the door. “Better wear hip boots!”
The next day was overcast and humid. The hip boots were hot and highly uncomfortable, but once we started into the swamp, I was grateful for Chris’ suggestion that I wear them.
The swamp was a world to itself. On the north end of the marshland, it was shadowy, nearly silent, filled with the smell of still water and dissolving vegetation. Dense stands of hemlock, spruce, and black ash crowded along narrow aisles slippery with sphagnum moss. Tall cinnamon ferns and tangled patches of nettles clustered around the trunks. In some places the remains of fallen and decaying trees had created little hummocks which rose above the level of the surrounding pools. I recognized a few bird sounds but the only bird I glimpsed was a small green heron which glided away over the glistening water.
Collected Stories and Poems Page 16
