“It is only the young or the adolescent of a species that the ko-el ghosts tear apart, though. If for some reason they catch an adult, they will pull him, whole and hollering, down into the quicksand and drown him in it. But they will not tear him to pieces.
“Sometimes the ko-el ghosts will glow and glitter at night, or even in the morning hours if they have any glitter left over. And sometimes we glow and glitter ourselves. When we do that, then we are ghosts to some of the other creatures who see us. And sometimes we also go down into the quicksand for short periods, for half an hour or half a day. It is restful under the surface of the slough; and it is also informative, because strange and strong thoughts come to us there. It is dangerous, though. If we stay down there too long we die. And yet, below the surface, there isn't much difference between the quick and the dead. The dead, in fact, are sometimes the liveliest of the two.”
“Seriously, Chalky, how long can you live down under the quicksand?” Crescent asked.
“Not very long really. Maybe fifteen minutes. Bog sand-and-water has more air in it than straight water does. But it's mighty abrasive to breathe it.”
“Chalky, Chalky, how about the alligators there?” Susan Wilson asked.
“No. There are no alligators in the Chosky Bottoms,” Chalky said.
“There were alligators the last time you told this rigmarole.”
“Should I tell it the same way every time?”
Chalky was popular with most of his schoolmates. And yet there was dissent.
“Damned ape'” someone was heard to mutter, and the mutter came out of the group of Jonathan Stone and Malcom Schermerhorn and Alex Master.
4
“Sure he's human,” the anthropologist George Whitebluejay said. “Then what race does he belong to?” Principal Franklyn asked.
“Archaic.”
“Is he of the species sometimes called Big-Foot?”
“Oh, I suppose there's twenty popular names for them. They're not just big-foot; they're big-all-over.”
“Have you made a chromosome count on him?”
“Yes, I have. Hey, he's got a lot of them!”
“You don't seem too serious about this, Mr. Whitebluejay.”
“But I am. It's the chromosome counts themselves that show a clownish deportment. It is generally believed, by laymen more than by biologists, that all humans have forty-six chromosomes, and perhaps that is a fair average. But it takes a lot of cheating to come up with the forty-six count every time and with every human. They will vary from as much as three pairs less to three pairs more. This is one of the open secrets: that the thing isn't rigid. Of the ten students whom I put under clinical observation here, one had an even greater chromosome divergence than Chalky had. Such divergence may mean nothing at all. Or it may mean that the subject is on the very edge of species separation, or that he is peculiarly talented; or it may seem that he is criminally insane.
“Chalky has forty-eight chromosomes. Yes, Chalky is human, but he lives in a slightly different world from our own.”
“How do you mean that?”
“Simply that Chalky will see things that we do not see, and fail to see things that we do see.”
“Some of the other students say that Chalky can see ghosts.”
“I suppose so. I can see them pretty well myself, though the talent wasn't natural to me. It represents difficult and professional learning-to-see.”
“Is Chalky's living in a slightly different world a danger to our context here, to the school, to the other students, to the world that we live in?”
“Possibly. He takes things very seriously that we do not take seriously at all. And he does not take at all seriously some of the things that we believe are of the utmost importance. Chalky may not feel that the taking of a life, even a human life, is an ultimate or even a very important matter.”
“That makes it all very tricky, Mr. Whitebluejay. What would you recommend?”
“Oh, when I get back to the university I'll recommend a full scholarship for him, such sports cars and trinkets as are necessary to seduce him completely, and a special scholastic category for him. And I will recommend that he be used as a special roving monsterman on defense, and as a loose halfback alternating with wide end on offense. And I will recommend that he throw a lot of halfback passes. He can throw a football a hundred yards, you know.”
5
Halloween was on Friday that year. It was a combination football rally, homecoming, and regular Halloween Green Country Ball and Masquerade and Bonfire held on the school grounds. Malcom Schermerhorn came to the ball and masquerade as Chalky. He had a full-ape suit that he had bought at a novelty house. It was expensive, with heavy black fur, ape feet, and zippered up the back. He had a Chalky face of rubberoid substance that he had made himself with the aid of an art student named Maudie Stone. It was an amazingly accurate depiction of Chalky, and at the same time it was a rather bruising caricature of him. There was malice and genius mixed in that rubberized face. And Malcom spoke in a very cruel caricature of the Chalky voice.
Chalky came to the ball and masquerade as Malcom Schermerhorn. He had acquired pop clothes of the style that Malcom affected. He had a Malcom face of rubberoid substance that he had made himself with the aid of an art student named — no, it is only a guess who that art student was. But the only one besides Maudie Stone with enough talent to do a thing like that was Crescent Harvestman, and Crescent was supposed to be Malcom's girl.
It wasn't exactly a confrontation. It was funny at first. And, when it split in two, one of the pieces of it was still funny. Chalky's takeoff of Malcom was funny all the way. “A thing about apes, they really can ape,” a doubtful friend of Chalky's said in admiration. But Malcom's takeoff on Chalky was shocking and frightening. It was like meeting a real and rampant monster face to face, like being in the grasp of a nightmare that maintains its reality. But a Halloween Green Country Ball and Masquerade and Bonfire should have both funny and frightening elements.
There were other monsters there. Almost all the boys came as monsters and almost all the girls came as witches. Well, Crescent Harvestman was the most ambiguous witch of all. There was a duplicity about her, a clownishness that went all the way for effect. And that included a real stake through a real heart for comic effect. Crescent was a vampire as well as a witch. But why should Crescent in reality have had any sort of stake through her heart?
Chalky surely had the most fun of anybody there. He was in high spirits and he communicated his spirits to almost everyone.
Well, was “fun” the name of what Malcolm Schermerhorn was having? It was murky and frightful fun, but he drew heavy enjoyment from it. He had always had a secret ape inside him. And now he was inside a public and posturing ape. So what would happen if Malcom and Chalky should indeed change places? Oh, it would be murder, murder!
There was something memorable about that night. The Green Country music was weird and spectral without ceasing to be good. The school grounds were lighted with kerosene torches borrowed from Cottonhead's Turkey Ranch, and there is no light so garish as that from kerosene turkey torches. Something of youth in its intrinsic weirdness was caught in the festivities and bonfires. There was a tension not quite understood by everyone when two young men of traded appearance faced and slid off again and again. And one of them had a chromosome count that was not by consensus human. That might mean nothing at all, or total disaster.
The next afternoon Lost Haven beat Chouteau eighty-seven to nothing for the championship of the Green River Valley Conference.
6
After Christmas and New Year's, at the end of the first semester, Chalky withdrew from the Lost Haven Consolidated High School. He said that he had learned all that the school could teach him, and that he had enjoyed the football, but that the other kids were too little for him and he was always afraid of hurting them. He said that basketball didn't grab him the way football did, that he felt he had an unfair advantage because of his stretchable
height and the fact that there was no way that any Slew-Foot person could miss in throwing at so big a thing as a basketball hoop. He said that he might come out of the Bottoms in a year or so and play football in the National Football League, but now he believed he would spend some time with his family and help them as well as he could. So he went back to the Chosky Bottoms. But he was not to be found anywhere in the Bottoms when friends went down to see if they could visit him there. No houses or shanties of the Quick-Lout or Slew-Foot people had ever been found. It wasn't known where or how they lived. And some of the students came back saying that there wasn't any such people, despite their having known Chalky daily for half a year.
Malcom Schermerhorn felt as if someone had moved out from between him and the sun, and now he took his rightful place in school again. Once more he was the leading boy in school, the president of the senior class, the director of the yearbook publication, the publicity and press man for the school, the star and captain of the basketball and track and baseball teams. He threw himself into feverish activity.
And the parents of Crescent Harvestman had announced her engagement to Malcom Schermerhorn, with marriage to take place in June. This would unite the two richest and finest families in Lost Haven. Malcom, a rather driven and hypertense boy, now seemed mostly content with the world, albeit a somewhat hurried and crowded contentment.
It isn't known whether Chalky threw himself into feverish activity down in the Chosky Bottoms or not. It isn't even known of what feverish activity would consist in the Chosky Bottoms.
A couple of months after that, several of the students were saying that Chalky had gone native, that he had forgotten all his schooling and clothes and shoes and had become the fundamental ape-boy again.
But several of the other students said that nobody at all had seen Chalky after he had returned to the Bottoms, that nobody could say whether he had forgotten his schooling and such, but that he had never been known to forget anything.
7
On the first day of June, the day after high school graduation, Crescent Harvestman broke her engagement to Malcom Schermerhorn. Then she went down to live for a while with her Aunt Ronda Harvestman in that cabin in the Chosky Bottoms. What in the world would she do down there?
Oh, she would work in the garden plot a little. She would fish in both the Green River and the Arkansas River: the Bottoms go on for miles and miles. She would think a lot. She just thought that she might spend the whole summer mostly thinking.
Malcom Schermerhorn became even more tense and disturbed after Crescent had broken her engagement with him. His family was worried about his health.
About a week after Crescent had made her breakaway, there began a series of gruesome events and sightings in and about the Bottoms.
8
A dog was pulled apart down on the edge of the Bottoms. Yes, all four legs were torn off it, and the head was torn off. It was a fair-sized young hound, and it would have taken hundreds of pounds of pull to tear it apart like that. What creature could possibly have done it? The electrifying, yelping scream of the dog had been heard, and then the screams had been cut off suddenly. Men had run to the place at once and had found the dog torn apart and bleeding copiously in still-hot death. The pieces of the dog had been strewn in a circle of about fourteen feet. This was close to midnight on a Monday night in June. A half-dozen men with their dogs had been hunting both possums and coons in a stretch of the Chosky Bottoms. Pictures of the dog were taken within an hour. They were in all the papers. Everybody for half the state knew about it then. What sort of creature could have done it? Could even an African gorilla have done it?
The hunters had been very disturbed on finding the dismembered dog. They howled and bayed like their own hounds. They stomped the ground like bulls. They discussed it in white anger.
“It is that ape-man Chalky who did this,” some of them said. “No one else would have been strong enough. We'll pull him to pieces with tractors when we catch him. We'll kill him as he killed the dog. Jonathan and Malcom, he was your friend, wasn't he? The damned monster!”
Jonathan Stone and Malcom Schermerhorn were among the hunters.
“He was our teammate. He wasn't a friend of ours,” Jonathan said truthfully.
A kid goat was systematically torn apart the next night. This was in a barnyard of a farm on the edge of the Bottoms. The kid goat had not been eaten at all, but the four legs and the head were torn off it. What monstrous creature had the strength to do such a thing? There were clippings and grindings on two of the fenceposts of the barnyard corral. What? Had Chalky, or whoever the monster was, gnawed on the very wooden posts in his smoky rage?
The two animal killings caught the popular fancy and the popular rage. The city papers took it up as “The Monster of the Chosky Bottoms”. They had overly sensational stories about the monster for several days. But who was to say that the stories were overly sensational? They might turn out to be underplayed stories once the whole facts about the monster were known. A monster hunt was on, with armed men ransacking the whole Chosky Bottoms area, and with automatic sensors and infrared cameras set to record the creature.
And a pretty good picture of the Chosky Bottoms Monster was obtained the night after the kid goat was killed. This was taken by an infrared camera focused on what was believed to be a Slew-Foot trail or walkabout, a camera triggered into action by the vibrations of heavy footsteps. They could, a camera expert said, be virtually silent footsteps if they were heavy enough. And what creature do we know that has a very heavy but virtually silent tread?
Oh, it was a Slew-Foot, a Quick-Lout, a Bear-Man, a Hairy Ghost, a Wagoner County Ape, a Green River Monster. And, from the three-quarters view of the face, it was Chalky. Half of the people who had known him said that it was Chalky for certain. The rest said that in all likelihood it was him.
“But we don't know how many of them there are or how much they look alike,” a man said. “Possibly it is an older male run amok.”
“We never knew how old Chalky was,” another man said. “He may be an older male. We never knew how big he was either. He was stretchable. It's bound to be that bestial Chalky.”
“I think it's a fake,” Crescent Harvestman said.
“Three camera experts, one of whom set the camera, swear that it is not a fake,” a third man said.
Three more pictures were obtained the next two nights. In one of them, the Chosky Bottoms Monster had a limb of the dismembered kid goat in its mouth and was gnawing on it. The kid had been left for bait, just as the monster had strewn it.
Teachers and students from the high school set up several loudspeakers in the Bottoms. These were among the genuine friends of Chalky. They set the speakers as loud as they would go and spoke over them:
“Chalky, come and give up, now in the daytime, when everything is open and we are here. Otherwise you'll be killed by men who find you when it is not full light and not before full witnesses. If you are innocent, you will be cleared. If you are sick, you will be treated. We don't want to kill you in the slimy dark here.”
Coach Goodbeaver spoke over the loudspeakers. Crescent Harvestman spoke, and others. But Chalky never hearkened to them, though it was clearly about the only chance he had to come into custody alive, the temper of the countryside being what it was.
And they could not find Chalky in the Bottoms anywhere. They could not find any of the Slew-Foot, Big-Foot, Quick-Lout, Wagoner County Ape people, though there were supposed to be a dozen or so of them in that area. Two escaped convicts were found. A demented man, written off as probably dead several years before, was found alive and unwell. Three wandering horses and half a score of lost cattle were found, but none of the Slew-Foot QuickLout people, and especially no Chalky.
But an illuminated picture of the probably-Chalky was taken. This was on Saturday night. This showed him as the fearful Saturday Night Specter that had terrified people around the Bottoms for a long time. It did look like Chalky, like Chalky turned into a
ghost. It had a garish light on it. It was made entirely of garish light that subsumed all flesh into it and made it a Specter.
This was the ghost that put on and took off its flesh like a garment, and that killed things by tearing them to pieces.
9
Two small white children, a three-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy, a sister and brother from the Cottonhead family, were found dead and dismembered on the edge of the Chosky Bottoms about an hour after sunrise one morning. They had been missing from their house at dawn. Following a lowering premonition and intuition, people had gone to the Bottoms and had found the two small persons in scattered and bloody and bestrewn death.
There was a sound or feel like a countywide intake of breath. This was shock beyond accounting for. It was stunning horror. It was soul-bruising, a new sordidness brought over the world. And would a corporate roar follow on that wide-area intake of breath? At first there was only the susurrus of quiet sobbing. And then more and more people gathered in mute determination to commit Chosky Bottoms justice on the factor of this monstrous crime.
It was still early morning. The shocked members of the Cottonhead family were there at the site on the edge of the Bottoms. Crescent Harvestman was there, and her Aunt Ronda. Their brush-hidden cabin was quite near. Malcom Schermerhorn and several of his cronies arrived with squirrel rifles. Coach Goodbeaver, a friend of Chalky no longer, was there with a heavy shotgun.
Many men were there with shotguns and carbines and heavier rifles. Other men brought two tractors. They swore they'd tear Chalky's body to pieces between those two tractors, as he had torn his victims to pieces. Men were there with tracking dogs. These were given old pads and football shoes of Chalky to snuffle. And the dogs reacted happily. Chalky had been close friends with every dog in that part of the country. He was popular with the dogs. That did not matter. Let the dogs go to Chalky happily or savagely, but let them lead the way to him!
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 267
