by Steve Vernon
Maybe it was the man seed that brought her back. Maybe she’d scented it, like a hound scenting a bear. Or maybe it was just time and she rose up.
Bass and Willie heard Lem’s screams, three floors up. Long and sharp, like hardened spikes and then a wet sound like she’d dragged him down into the concrete.
Willie ran down like he was trying to save someone. Him self, most likely, but Bass had ran up.
Why?
He didn’t know. He just knew that it was something he didn’t want to see, close to the ground. He knew it was her, even then.
She caught Willie at the doorway. Bass saw it down through the open framework. He saw Willie, torn and hanging. Bass had kept on running, trying not to look back. He’d run as high as he could go. She couldn’t catch him up here. Her ghost was rooted in the cellar, under a couple of yards of concrete and gravel. He was safe up here. All she could do was whisper from down below.
He could hang on. The day crew would be here in a couple of more hours. He’d be safe then. He could hang on that long. If only she’d stop whispering.
It was his fault for hitting her like he’d done with that hammer. For hitting her in the mouth. The pieces of her teeth falling like a roof tack rain. She probably couldn’t make more of a sound than that low wet gravel gargling whisper she kept making.
“It wasn’t my fault,” He yelled down. “It was their idea.”
This was true. It was Willie who ran and got her. Lem who held her down. Bass had just stood and watched until they told him to join him.
He heard her whispering. He felt it in the broken shards of teeth he still carried in his overall pockets. He felt the running up his arms to his fingernails, nesting there bone against nail, tearing at his finger bones. Like chicken, fried chicken, chewing, gnawing, ripping, all of the notes running together.
He caught his hammer, high in that high tight arc of steel, swinging upwards against his hand, clipping and slamming each nail/tooth/shriek, pounding them soft until he softly bled free.
And then he fell.
He fell a long way, down, his fingers still holding on up there forever, seven lucky high floors up. Pounded fingerprint deep into the twisting hot beam of redemption. He felt them, hanging on and screaming, all the way down.
The nail guns fired at god and the moon and the star-pierced sky and him on the way down, a cannonade, symphony, an endless running note - chuff/chuff/chuff/chuff…
She took him down into the concrete where the four of them would scream forever.
Harry’s Mermaid
It happened in early September, the time of year when the city does its damndest to remember what heat was like just one more time before winter rocked on in and socked the hell out of every one left standing.
Most days you could find Harry Moore hanging down by the Hudson. He liked it down here. He liked to listen to the wind and the water. He claimed it was washing away his sins, bit by bit in a gentle sort of soul erosion.
Harry and I were sitting and watching old Cooter Hawlett trying to catch a fish. Old Cooter hailed from Alabama. He’d wormed his way up to the Big Rotten Apple as a teenager hoping to make some sort of fortune. He hit the skids by the time he was twenty and hadn’t looked back since.
“There’s no fish in that there river,” Harry said to Cooter.
“Nothing that I’d eat, anyway,” I added.
Who am I? My name, when I give it, is Easter Noon. My momma named me Easter because I was born on Christmas morning. Momma just loved to cut to the chase.
I’m down here by the Hudson because it’s as good a place as any. You can feel the ocean air wafting up from the bay up through the stink of sewage and river bottom; a blast of amnesia cheaper than any poured grape I know of.
Cooter grinned and recast his line. He fished like that all day and sometimes all night. We never saw him catch anything, except that damned Arabian bottle he’d reeled in once. We had the devil of a time corking that back up.
Other than that, nothing, but Cooter didn’t care. No sir, with Cooter, fishing didn’t have anything to do with catching. It was just Cooter’s way of passing through life as gently as possible.
“There’s things out there yet,” Cooter said. “I’ve just got to get out a little deeper is all.”
“You ought to get a boat,” Harry suggested.
“Just might do that,” Cooter answered. “One of these days I just might.”
Then he reeled in his line and cast again. Harry and I grinned. We both were certain old Cooter would be sitting here fishing until several strokes past the last booming stroke of doomsday.
We really shouldn’t have grinned that hard. Odds were we’d be sitting there with him, come the time the Lord rang his supper bell. Things have a way of settling to the bottom if you don’t keep stirring and I haven’t been stirred in a good long time.
“I hear you grinning back there,” Cooter called over his shoulder. “But I tell you there’s something out there. I’ve just got to cast a little farther. Get the line in around mid-channel, out to where the river runs deepest. I’ll drag in something for sure.”
I chuckled to myself. The Hudson was over a mile across from where we sat. The only way old Cooter would get a line out to mid-channel was if he borrowed a rocket launcher from the United States Navy.
“You going to catch something big, like the Loch Ness Monster?” Harry asked.
“Nessie? Hell, she’s just a baby. I dragged her in last week and threw her back. How’d you like a bite of them apples, hey? Thirty eight cubic tons of plesiosaurus and I threw her back. No regrets.”
“No regrets?” I said, with a quick grin. “That could have fed us for a month.”
“Have you ever tasted deep fried plesiosaurus?” Cooter asked.
I shook my head.
“Believe me,” He said knowingly. “There’s no regrets.”
Harry looked thoughtful at that like he was listening right here but thinking in some other dimension.
“No regrets,” He said in a voice soaked full of them. “No goddamn regrets.”
He looked over to me. “You ever regret anything, Easter?”
He caught me off guard, so I lied.
“Hell no,” I said. “What the hell would I regret any way? Maybe a bottle or two emptied too fast. That’s all a man ever really regrets. Life. Women. Money. It all just empties way too fast.”
Harry grinned only it was a hollow grin. One of those grins salesmen give you when they think you’re getting ready to buy something. Being the fine financial success story I am I don’t get that grin very often so I noticed it right off.
Then Harry stood up. “Give me that rod. Let me show you how to cast deep.”
Cooter reluctantly handed over the fishing rod with the reluctance of a fellow handing over his wife to the football team. “Just one time, mind you. Just one time and then you got to give it back.”
“One time’s all I need. Just sit back and watch.”
Harry tilted the rod way back. He paused for just a moment, like he was gathering his strength. There was a strange kind of fire burning in the back of his eyes like he’d waited all his life for just this cast.
“Remember this,” Harry said, right before casting, only the way he spoke it was more like he meant - remember me.
He gave a heave and the line snaked over the Hudson, arcing out like the world’s thinnest rainbow sailing past the seagulls, the tugboats and the fishing trawlers. Sailing out past all reason, like old Harry was trying to hook down the sun. And then it landed, splash, mid-channel, nearly a half mile out.
And then something took hold of the hook.
* * *
Harry was a hard man to forget. He was a big man, built like a wall that walked on legs. Even his face was big like a block of dusty concrete. He stayed big right up to the very end. Most fellows hooked by the bottle, they lean down and wire out real fast with too many liquid calories. Not Harry. Harry was a regular Rock of Gibraltar.
> He’d been a brick layer, same as his daddy and his granddaddy before that. It was funny how family ties can work. No matter how far Harry walked, he stood in his daddy’s shadow, twice shadowed by his granddads before.
I wondered how many shadows a man could stand in?
Things were happy once for Harry. He had a home and a wife and three kids - a boy and two girls. He had it all until the day he was laying brick on a school house wall, and this layer bricks kicked over and come down on the head of the apprentice he was working with. It would have been okay if it hadn’t been such a hot day the apprentice took his hard hat off to mop the sweat. It would have been okay if the apprentice hadn’t happened to be Harry’s only son. All of that brick coming down, it squashed the boy’s skull like one of those jellyfish you stomp on the beach.
The papers called it an accident but Harry never did figure out how he’d ever forgive himself. Some cuts slice way too deep for forgiving. He climbed into the bottle like a wish spinning down a bottomless well. He lost his job, his house, his wife and his kids. The order of loss depended on how drunk Harry was when he retold the story.
Cheap dry white wine - that was Harry’s poison. I figure he didn’t much care for the color red any more. There was too much blood in it, too much brick.
* * *
I saw it out there in the water only I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure if Harry had hooked something or if it was the other way around.
Cooter saw it next and jumped up like a jack in the box on speed.
“You got something. You got something for sure.”
“I see her,” Harry said, grinning the kind of grin you’d expect to see in a falling airplane.
Then I saw what he’d caught. He’d caught a beautiful woman with hair like a rake of seaweed spinning out behind her and the tail of a dolphin bobbing up where her ass ought to be. A mermaid. Old Harry had gone and caught himself an honest to Odysseus mermaid. Only there was something about that mermaid I didn’t much care for. Some thing that ran my blood colder than a deep frozen refrigerator.
“Let it go,” I quietly said, only I couldn’t make myself heard over Cooter’s yelling.
“A mermaid! A bejesus, bikinied mermaid,” Cooter yelled. “Drag her in Harry, drag her on in.”
“I’m dragging it, Cooter. I’m dragging it hard.”
She moved in closer.
Harry was reeling fast as he could pump his wrist but not fast enough to make her move as fast as she was going.
“She wants us Harry,” Cooter yelled. “She by-the-jesus wants us.”
“Let her go, Harry,” I said.
He couldn’t hear me or he didn’t want to. He kept reeling like his life depended on it. Then I heard the singing, soft and low and faraway. Like the sound you hear tuned between two radio stations. You can almost make out the words of one song only there’s another being played on top of it, another message coming in beneath the first.
As far as I could see her mouth wasn’t moving at all. I wondered what part of her was doing the singing.
“Let it go,” I said.
Harry didn’t listen. I grabbed the rod from his hands. Harry tried to grab it back but I moved quicker. I tossed the fishing rod out into the river and hoped the mermaid would swim away.
Cooter yelled in dismay; partly over his lost fishing rod and partly over the lost mermaid.
Harry hauled back a sledge sized fist ready to clout me a fist full of there-you-go.
I knew Harry hit hard and I was regretting my actions already. I said a prayer to what ever god was listening for something soft to land on.
Cooter kept yelling. Yelling and pointing.
Harry stopped thinking about hitting me just long enough to take at look at what Cooter was pointing at. We saw it coming up out of the water. At first it looked like a big old fishing net. A big old net all long and broad and flattened out, like some kind of giant manta. It was coming in for a landing, full speed ahead. It looked like the world’s broadest and flattest torpedo aimed itself straight at us. The mermaid or whatever the hell she was sat smack dab in the middle of all this. She looked like a woman perched in the middle of the largest bridal gown ever sewn.
And then her face began to change. Moving, slow like mud, turning itself into the face of a very young man.
The face of Harry Moore’s only son.
“Tommy!” Harry yelled, jumping into the water.
Harry wore army boots. They must have been heavy. He sank into the mud of the river bottom like a man sinking into quicksand. The mermaid manta moved around and over Harry, swallowing him whole.
Cooter ran the other way in a burst of blind panic. I think he was headed for Alabama or at least somewhere where rivers refused to run. I couldn’t run. Not seeing Harry like all trapped inside that mermaid manta. I thought about fly paper, pitcher plants, worms on hooks and sirens singing out to lonely sailors.
Then I jumped in after Harry.
The thing wasn’t fussy. It grabbed me fast.
“Harry!” I shouted, only my mouth was full of something that felt a little like warm putty and tasted a lot like dead man’s piss.
I saw Harry, ahead of me and inside the thing and next thing I knew I was inside with him. I yanked my old clasp knife out of my coat pocket and tried to cut my way free. It was like trying to cut wet fish glue. I pushed in deeper, kicking and biting and hollering as best I could, hoping to give the thing a case of terminal indigestion.
Harry wasn’t kicking. He just let himself drag in towards the center of the mermaid manta that looked so much like his dead son. Harry’s face was the color of blood stained brick. In between my kicking and Harry’s drifting, we arrived in the middle almost simultaneously.
The mermaid smiled at Harry and then in a voice that sounded like the Titanic colliding with a half dozen corrugated tin ice bergs it said “I forgive you father.”
And then she began to eat him.
I saw Harry peeling away from himself like an onion being unwound, layer after stinking tear soaked layer. It must have hurt because he finally started to struggle.
“I love you father,” The mermaid sang and Harry stopped struggling.
I had to do something for myself and for Harry. I pushed closer, pushing my hand up around my neck, grabbing for what hung there. My mother’s crucifix.
I hit the mermaid with my fist. I held my clasp knife blade out with the crucifix wound around my knuckles. I tried to remember a prayer while I was at it. I must have remembered the words right. The mermaid’s head popped open like a chunk of rotten fruit. The head screeled in agony like a cassette tape being run too fast.
I grabbed Harry and kicked for shore. While I was trying to do that the thing’s face reformed. It became the face of someone I used to know, a half of a hell and a heartbeat ago. And she spoke to me, god damn her long dead soul, from out of the mermaid’s manta mouth, she spoke to me.
“Stay with me Easter,” She said.
Regrets. There’s not a man alive doesn’t have one.
“Stay,” She repeated.
Do you know I almost stayed there? Knowing all I did, I almost stayed.
But I couldn’t stay then and I wouldn’t stay now.
I turned and kicked for shore.
Yet holding on to Harry was harder than hanging on to a handful of greased eels. He pulled away and dove back towards the mermaid like a mother diving into a fire to save a burning child.
I thought of desperation. I thought of destiny. And then I let him go. He was smiling when he went under, smiling like he’d found something that he’d lost a long time ago. He didn’t regret his decision one single bit.
I crawled back onto the shore. I sat there, partly because I was out of breath. Partly because something inside me just had to see what a man looked like after you peeled him down to the bone, right down to his last screaming regret.
I looked away at the end but only because it was over.
When I looked back the mermaid
was gone.
All that remained was Cooter’s old spinning rod, washed to the shore. A long length of broken fish line tailing out like a kite string to nowhere.
I walked away but some nights when the wind harps long and low over the Hudson I come back to remember and watch.
But I never stay.
End of the Road
I’ve spent a lot of time and thought putting this collection together. It’s always a little nerve wracking trying to decide what stories fit together and which should be left out. I’d like to thank all of you folks who’ve thought enough of me to buy yourselves a copy or have coveted the really cool cover enough to shoplift. Just so long as you read it and remember some of the stories then I’ll be happy to spin a few more yarns.
This is where they all came from, more or less
Hyperactive Cleaning Power: This story has never appeared anywhere else until now. I was in a Bradbury/Bukowski mood when I wrote it.
A Fine Sacrifice: This story originally appeared as a chapbook - the winning story of Ottawa publisher's Bad Moon Books 1999 Blood & Guts Horror Story Contest. This publisher is no longer around but I’m still selling my stories to Bad Moon Books. My novella Plague Monkey Spam will be appearing from California’s Bad Moon Books.
I Know Why the Waters of the Sea Taste of Salt: This story was originally written to be a part of an anthology of daikaju – giant monsters. However, I decided to take a chance on selling it to a brand new magazine that never made it into print. So here it is in its entirety, never seen anywhere else until now.
The Takashi Miike Seal of Approval: This story grew up into a novella entitled “Leftovers” that was published in 2008. The story itself hasn’t appeared anywhere but in this collection.
Rolling Stock: This story first appeared in the small press magazine, Not One of Us #24, back in the year 2000. It marks Easter Noon’s first appearance in a genre-based story.
Last Stand of the Great Texas Packrat: This story was first published in chapbook format by White Noise Press, with some gorgeous art by Keith Minnion back in February 2007.
