Dead Bait 2

by Steve Alten

  But what was out there wasn’t done yet.

  There was a scratching sound like fingernails being dragged over the walls and that godawful, hideous voice calling out for Bones. It was like the whining, mewling voice of a cat in the dead of night sounding almost human but not quite.

  By that point, my mind was like a churning pulp of terror. The pains in my stomach came in waves, aches threading through my limbs. I fell onto one of the benches, gasping, shivering, but knowing I had to keep it together because Modek looked like he was in shock. He was just kneeling on the ice, rocking back and forth, mumbling incoherently under his breath. He had the glassy, bovine eyes of a stunned cow.

  I fed a few logs into the woodstove to get some warmth into us and that’s when what was out there began clawing at the door with a manic, wild sort of frenzy. Soon, the entire shack was shaking. The lanterns overhead were swinging back and forth and I clearly smelled the hot stink of Modek’s shit as he fouled himself.

  And that voice… constant, perpetual, agonized and evil but with a bone-deep despair feeding through it: “Bones… Bones… let me in… please let me in… Boooonnnes… Booooonnnnnes… let me in…” It was the high and keening voice of a hag scraping on a dry wind.

  “GO AWAY, GINA!” I shouted. “DEAR GOD, GO AWAY!”

  And somehow, someway, that seemed to work. The shack stopped trembling. The voice was gone. There was nothing out there but the whistle of the wind, snow brushing against the walls. The perpetual creaking and cracking of the ice you hear on cold, cold nights.

  I found Dutch’s medicinal bottle and pulled hard off it. I got a cigarette into my mouth with both hands and drew deep, wondering what in God’s name I was going to do. Modek was dead silent, that shiny and shell-shocked look in his eyes. If we struck out on foot and he cracked up and ran off, there was no way at my age I would be able to stop him. Dutch’s pickup was out there, but I had a nasty feeling that Gina had seen to that, too. Whatever she had been as a girl, she was no longer. This thing was just a revenant, a shadow, a malefic memory. I knew Gina. She was spiteful and you didn’t want to piss her off, but down deep she was good and she was kind. That’s who she had been.

  But what about at the point of death?

  What was she then?

  What would any of us be as we were trapped in a sinking truck, locked in an iron coffin? Angry? Terrified? Hateful, even? Certainly. Maybe that’s what ghosts are—the earthbound instincts and animal drives, the need to survive coupled with all the awful, squirming things of the human condition: hunger, hate, violence, greed, madness. No mercy or charity or love. Those things pass on with the soul, what’s left behind is the psychic energy of those last moments, eternal and undying, energized into a wraith or a shade, a hungering, hating force of vengeance. They say energy can’t be destroyed it can only change shape—and maybe that’s exactly what it does.

  I sat there, ruminating for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, trying not to listen to Modek’s whining little boy voice, and then something began to happen. The ice began to creak and shift beneath us and something like a hot steam came from the holes at our feet. The water and slush bubbled in them. I saw a face looking up at me from the one nearest my boot. It was distorted like running tallow cooling on a skull. I saw wormholed eyes staring up at me and then… she rose.

  I can’t properly explain how she came up through that hole, but she did, something elastic and rubbery, moist and ectoplasmic, fluid and oozing… she rose up, white and puckered, slicked with mud from the bottom and strung with rotting lake weed like garland. The stink she brought with her was sickening. It was up my nose. It made my eyes water. It filled my mouth with a taste of putrescence like biting into a rotten apple, filled with wormy mush and crawling flies.

  She had been down there a long, long time.

  Now she came up in a hissing helix of ice-fog—hair like twisted black roots growing from white bone, face nothing but crawling moon-white pulp shot through with tiny holes from the things that had been burrowing into her. There was a crooked, wicked grin on that face like the cut of a scythe and depthless slate-black eyes like windows looking down into the blackest charnel hell I could imagine. Anything remotely human or good had been milked from her.

  She was living, festering, animate hunger.

  She opened her mouth, pitted lips pulling away from tar-black gums and a scream came spraying out of her like vomit and it must have been the very scream Gina Shiner had let loose right before the black waters entombed her in Bones’ pickup truck on the bottom.

  She began to shudder and shake, moving with frantic, stiff whiplike motions of her limbs, her head snapping back and forth on her neck. Moving faster and faster like some gyrating dancer in a strobe light, an obscene puppet with jerking strings.

  I heard Modek scream like he was being flayed as she took hold of him, shrieking the name of her lover in his face.

  The lanterns overhead both went out.

  By then I had thrown myself out the door and scrambled away across the snow, madly climbing hills of shattered ice that rose from the pack like the broken prows of ghost ships. That’s when I turned back, just as the blizzard played out some and a thin, sickly moonlight spilled over the ice. Somehow, Modek had gotten away. He was moving through the drifts with the scuttling motion of a beach crab. He saw Dutch’s pickup truck. He threw himself at it, yanked the door open, and climbed inside. The keys were in it and he got it going. The headlights came on.

  But he was not alone.

  The ghost was suckered to the windshield like some human fly, a writhing, flapping thing that seemed to be fragmenting and breaking apart in the wind.

  I saw the truck vibrating. I heard ice cracking and the gushing, roar of water as it rushed up from below and the pickup slid back off a sheet of pack into the fuming lake. The front end bobbed for a moment or two like the bow of a ship, then down it went with a gurgling sound. Beneath the dark waters, the headlights gradually faded away, finally winking out like eyes closing. Then the ice slid back in place, crashing and booming, and all was quiet.

  My memory gets a bit vague at that point. All I can say for sure is I started walking towards the shore and whether that took two hours or six I cannot say. Sometimes it comes back to me in my dreams… the screech of the wind, the blowing snow, the shadows jumping across the ice, and the voices of the dead calling to me out of the night and the storm and some shattered gray corridor of hell caught in-between.

  I think Gina followed me.

  I have certain delirious, deranged memories of hearing her calling out for Bones and the sound of it still rings in my ears as if she were right next to me when she cried his name. I can only be sure that two or three times I heard the sound of feet following me and saw eyes yellow as autumn moons peering out at me through the snowstorm.

  Maybe I imagined it. I don’t know.

  But the closer I did get to shore—and I could feel the reach of it extending a hand to me—the farther away was the voice of the thing that had been Gina Shiner: some dim and phobic memory, an unholy will to survive. A ghost haunting the bones of its former existence, reliving those last tormented moments again and again. As that voice faded into the storm and I was distanced from it, I could finally hear the absolute despair and loneliness of it, the melancholy, pitiful cry of something lost in a black dimension of horror, forever trying to find its way out of the darkness and into the light, reaching out for the hand of Bones Pilon which it would never, ever find.

  They found me on the county trunk road towards morning. I spent a month in the hospital for exposure, exhaustion, and frostbite. I lost two toes and the pinkie on my left hand. While I was there, they discovered several tumors in my gut which came as no surprise to me. I evaded death that night only to find it still had a solid grip on me. They operated, of course, but it only spread and they gave me two months at the outside.

  I survived an encounter with that thing on the ice. I lost my best friend in the world and buried a good
part of my soul out there.

  Now, as I lay in my hospital bed, the ticking of the deathwatch beetle getting louder in my ears and my time growing short, I worry on things. I worry on things undone and unsaid, crushed hopes and wasted dreams, desires unfulfilled and longings unsatisfied. The shadows and impulses that might live after us, forever lonesome, forever hungering. I think about the good things we take with us and the starving evil we leave behind and what form it might take. And if some of that might still be out on the Spider, waiting for dark to come.

  Ferry-moans

  J.M. Harris

  It has always been my private conviction that any man who pits his intelligence against a fish and loses has it coming. ~ John Steinbeck

  Ryan first saw the girl crouching in the reeds. Beside him, the Amazon snaked its way deeper into the forest, its hollows filling and then emptying in lapping gulps. His surroundings had been muted by the whispered lullaby of the water, but the girl awakened a primal instinct, and his senses tuned in, the pulse of insect chatter loud, the warble of exotic bird song chaotic. The girl appeared feral, her movements visceral and quick. As she rose up, a memory hit him in a series of snapshots, and a blazing summer three decades previous came back as clear and vibrant as the sky above him.

  ***

  Ryan sat beside his ten-speed, a stalking rod resting across his knees. Having experimented with several lures with no luck, he secured a Silver Wriggler to the end of his line; he hoped it would tempt a brown trout from the shadow-dappled margins on the far bank.

  It was hot, so hot his twelve year old skin had never tanned to the point of golden before. He’d never burned either, and picked at a dry piece of skin on his nose, leaving a pink tender patch underneath—he didn’t know it, but these mundane details would come back with the same startling clarity as the girl who approached him through the veil of hay dust and pollen that day.

  She was older (the bumps under the T shirt she’d knotted up above her pale midriff told him that much), and her hair flowed long, thick and red. Freckles dusted a scarlet ribbon of skin banding her cheeks and nose. Her teeth were large and square. She wasn’t particularly pretty, but her smile and confident approach stole the breath from his lungs, scared him the way only pre-pubescent boys could be frightened at the prospect of talking to an older girl.

  “Caught much?” she said, beaming, hand on hip.

  He shook his head, and to his dismay, she laughed and stepped closer. “Well, I know the secret to catching big fish.”

  Ryan wanted to scowl and tell her to get lost, only managing to raise his eyebrows.

  “Don’t talk much, do you?”

  He shrugged, “What’s this secret, then?”

  “Did you know the record Salmon caught in the UK was landed by a lady in Scotland?”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  The girl stepped closer still, and he detected the combination of soap, shampoo and sweat. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant smell, but he singled out the pungent scent from the manufactured aromas, teased it through his nostrils. Using the full motion of her lips, she carefully pronounced, “Ferry-moans.”

  Ryan frowned. “I’ve never heard of her,” he said.

  The girl threw her head back. “Silly,” she laughed. “Ferry-moans aren’t a person.”

  He blushed, looked out across the river.

  “Ferry-moans come from a person.”

  “Oh.”

  “Want me to show you?”

  “Well... yeah, I guess so.”

  “Give me your hand.”

  He reluctantly placed his lure onto the grass.

  “Okay,” she said, “these are ferry-moans.”

  What happened next was like a slap, his senses triggered into overload. She guided his hand down the front of her shorts, rubbed it over the place he’d only seen in friends’ magazines. He wanted to pull free, but the movement happened so quickly, so unexpectedly, he stood dumbfounded until she let him go. “Ferry-moans,” she said.

  He felt sick but excited, embarrassed yet exhilarated, his world tilting as though he’d stepped off the bank and onto a fishing punt. He felt himself go hard and hunched to disguise just exactly how excited he really was.

  The girl beamed. “Rub your fingers over your bait. It’s why women catch bigger fish. They can sense our ferry-moans.”

  And just as majestically as she’d appeared, she turned and skipped away, laughing, her hair billowing behind her until the afternoon haze vanished her into thin air.

  Ryan never forgot that moment, nor did he see the girl again. He did, however, think about her every night for years, until he’d finally managed to get serious with girls.

  He didn’t know if it was the Silver Wriggler or these so called ‘ferry-moans’, but he took two brown trout home for his mother that evening.

  ***

  Ryan placed his rod to one side, never taking his eyes off the girl. His heart thumped beneath his open, sweat-soaked shirt. He guessed he’d stalked around two miles from camp, reassuring the forest guides he wouldn’t wander far—it was easy to get carried away, though, especially if you’d spent three miserable days without so much as a nibble, and he wasn’t leaving this godforsaken place without something he could mount in a glass case. He’d fished the Earth’s seven seas, for Heaven’s sake, stalked its big rivers, and all relinquished a specimen for his collection. He’d battled with sharks and barracudas, wrestled with conga eels, giant carp, river perch and pike, and he’d be damned if he wasn’t yanking something from the Amazon. A Piranha would be ideal, even a tiddler—it wasn’t the first time he’d pictured the crimson-faced predator mounted on his study wall, its dagger teeth impressively exposed.

  The girl would see to it. All he needed were ‘ferry-moans’ and he inched his way closer, expecting the girl to spook and sniff the air like a hare detecting a fox.

  The girl was close. He wondered why he was stalking her like the elusive fish in the river. She was a human being, after all, although primitive; her hair was crudely cut—styled, he thought, like one of The Three Stooges. She could’ve been anywhere between twenty and forty, he really couldn’t tell because of her emaciated limbs, distended belly and sagging breasts. The red shorts hanging from her hips—obviously a charity token from civilization—in no way tamed her wild disposition. Why not make himself known, then? Talk to her calmly, hold his hands up in submission.

  He raised himself, cringing as his knees popped. Making out he hadn’t seen her, he looked upstream, inhaling deeply before turning. Their eyes met, the minds behind them worlds apart, but human recognition apparent nonetheless. She looked frightened, ready to bolt. He feigned surprise and bared his palms, offering the universal greeting of a broad smile. Her expression remained one of caution and suspicion, but he was relieved to see her shoulders relax. With his smile firmly in place, he said, “Hello.” He jabbed at his chest, announced, “My name is Ryan.” This enabled a steady advance and with his hands held out, an idea struck him. He removed his gold divers’ watch, making it sparkle prettily in the sun—a Gold Wriggler, he thought, unaware he was panting.

  Her expression transformed into something like curiosity, and he was now close enough to make out the rows of pockmarks scarring her cheeks. A red stripe ran under her dark eyes and over the bridge of her pudgy nose. Although he thought this indigenous creature made the red-headed girl look like a lingerie model, and this was by no means a sexual advance, was he really going hard inside his khaki pants? It was the hunt, he mused, the thrill of the hunt.

  “Yours,” he said, “all yours.” Maybe this could be done amicably, he thought. Perhaps he could just hunker down next to her, offer his watch over and...

  A shadow crossed her face, and he froze. “Yours,” he repeated, trying to disguise the tremor creeping into his voice.

  He lifted his smile, unaware he was grinning. That wild instinct was back, he noticed, her irises dancing, the thin muscles in her thighs twitching.

  Scared of sp
ooking the girl further, he pulled his hands to his chest and passing a hand over the fingers pinching the watch’s strap, masked it and let it fall into his breast pocket. He splayed his fingers as if to say, Taddahhh!

  Her head cocked and the moment her eyes left his, he lunged, snagging her wrist.

  She exploded, bucking and kicking like a snared gazelle. Emitting grunts and pig-like squeals, her struggle abated, long enough for her to turn and strike out, lips peeled back over blackened gums.

  Repulsed (he’d never admit to it, but he was also terrified), he swung a panicked haymaker, forcing him into a comedy pirouette. Arms wind-milling, he stumbled back, tottered at the river’s edge, and slid down the bank. His boots and clawing fingers stopped him inches from the mud. He didn’t see if he’d made contact with the girl, but the fire in his knuckles confirmed a KO blow. He grabbed at the grass, whHHhhhhhjkincing at the needle-jab pain, his ascent clumsy and slow.

  Finally, he stood, breathing hard. The girl, as far as he could tell, had fled. “Damn it,” he hissed. He ran his fingers through his hair—enough was enough; he’d head back to camp.

  And there she was. “Oh no,” he panted, “Oh Christ, no.”

  Partially obscured by an outcrop of reeds, she lay face down in a shallow. The pale balls of her feet bobbed in the lazy currents. Her shorts had slipped, revealing taut buttocks. And her hair, once looking so ridiculous, swayed dreamily in the lapping waves.