Daring in its day (but, to Annabelle’s credit and to everyone
else’s relief, not quite a Scandal), left her shoulders bare, but
Annabelle did not seem to feel the cold. Her hair, a soft,
dark auburn, blew long in the wind. “ Only a little Anther.”
She took Stella’s other arm and they moved forward again.
Other figures came out of the snowy night (for it was night
now). Stella recognized many of them, but not all. Tommy
Frane had joined Annabelle; Big George Havelock, who had
died a dog’s death in the woods, walked behind Bill; there
was the fellow who had kept the lighthouse on the Head for
most of twenty years and who used to come over to the island
during the cribbage tournament Freddy Dinsmore held every
February—Stella could almost but not quite remember his
name. And there was Freddy himself! Walking off to one side
of Freddy, by himself and looking bewildered, was Russell
Bowie.
“ Look, Stella,” Bill said, and she saw black rising out of
the gloom like the splintered prows of many ships. It was not
ships, it was split and fissured rock. They had reached the
Head. They had crossed the Reach.
She heard voices, but was not sure they actually spoke:
Take my hand, Stella—
(do you)
Take my hand, Bill—
(oh do you do you)
Annabelle . . . Freddy . . . R u sse ll. . . John . . . Ettie
. . . Frank . . . take my hand, take my hand . . . my
hand . . .
(do you love)
“ Will you take my hand, Stella?” a new voice asked.
She looked around and there was Bull Symes. He was
The Reach
41
smiling kindly at her and yet she felt a kind of terror in her
at what was in his eyes and for a moment she drew away,
clutching Bill’s hand on her other side the tighter.
“ Is it—”
“ Time?” Bull asked. “ Oh, ayuh, Stella, I guess so. But
it don’t hurt. At least, I never heard so. All that’s before.”
She burst into tears suddenly—all the tears she had never
wept—and put her hand in Bull’s hand. “ Yes,” she said,
“ yes I will, yes I did, yes I do.”
They stood in a circle in the storm, the dead of Goat Island, and the wind screamed around them, driving its packet of snow, and some kind of song burst from her. It went up
into the wind and the wind carried it away. They all sang
then, as children will sing in their high, sweet voices as a
summer evening draws down to summer night. They sang,
and Stella felt herself going to them and with them, finally
across the Reach. There was a bit of pain, but not much;
losing her maidenhead had been worse. They stood in a circle
in the night. The snow blew around them and they sang. They
sang, and—
—and Alden could not tell David and Lois, but in the summer after Stella died, when the children came out fo r their annual two weeks, he told Lona and Hal. He told them that
during the great storms o f winter the wind seems to sing with
almost human voices, and that sometimes it seemed to him
he could almost make out th words: “Praise God from whom
all blessings flow/Braise Him, ye creatures here below . . . ”
But he did not tell them (imagine slow, unimaginative A lden Flanders saying such things aloud, even to the children!) that sometimes he would hear that sound and feel cold even
by the stove; that he would put his whittling aside, or the trap
he had meant to mend, thinking that the wind sang in all the
voices o f those who were dead and gone . . . that they stood
somewhere out on the Reach and sang as children do. He
seemed to hear their voices and on these nights he sometimes
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Stephen King
slept and dreamed that he was singing the doxology, unseen
and unheard, at his own funeral.
There are things that can never be told, and there are
things, not exactly secret, that are not discussed. They had
found Stella frozen to death on the mainland a day after the
storm had blown itself out. She was sitting on a natural chair
o f rock about one hundred yards south o f the Raccoon Head
town limits, frozen ju st as neat as you please. The doctor
who owned the Corvette said that he was frankly amazed. It
would have been a walk o f over fo u r miles, and the autopsy
required by law in the case o f an unattended, unusual death
had shown an advanced cancerous condition—in truth, the
old woman had been riddled with it. Was Alden to tell David
and Lois that the cap on her head had not been his? Larry
McKeen had recognized that cap. So had John Bensohn. He
had seen it in their eyes, and he supposed they had seen it
in his. He had not lived long enough to forget his dead fa ther’s cap, the look o f its bill or the places where the visor had been broken.
‘‘These are things made fo r thinking on slowly, ” he would
have told the children i f he had known how. ‘ ‘Things to be
thought on at length, while the hands do their work and the
coffee sits in a solid china mug nearby. They are questions
o f Reach, maybe: do the dead sing? And do they love the
living?
On the nights after Lona and Hal had gone back with their
parents to the mainland in A l Curry’s boat, the children
standing astern and waving good-bye, Alden considered that
question, and others, and the m atter o f his fa th e r’s cap.
Do the dead sing? Do they love?
On those long nights alone, with his mother Stella Flanders
at long last in her grave, it often seemed to Alden that they
did both.
John Collier
E v e n i n g P r i m r o s e
John Collier's characteristic stories of satirical horror (a
small but distinguished tradition including certain works
of Saki and Avram Davidson) have fallen out of print in
recent years. “ Evening Primrose” is a particularly vivid
example of the subversive little moral tale, so psychologically acute that it leaves us more than a bit uncomfortable about what goes on at night in the most ordinary and seductive of middle-class environments: the department store, the abode of grotesques, human and otherwise.
In a pad o f Highlife Bond, bought by
Miss Sadie Brodribb at Bracey's fo r 25C
MARCH 21
Today I made my decision. I would turn my back for good
and all upon the bourgeois world that hates a poet. I
would leave, get out, break away—
And I have done it. I am free! Free as the mote that dances
in the sunbeam! Free as a house-fly crossing first-class in the
largest of luxury liners! Free as my verse! Free as the food I
shall eat, the paper I write upon, the lamb’s-wool-lined softly
slithering slippers I shall wear.
This morning I had not so much as a car-fare. Now I am
43
44
John Collier
here, on velvet. You are itching to leam of this haven; you
would like to organize trips here, spoil it, send your relations-
in-law, perhaps even come yourself. After all, this journal
will hardly fall into your hands till I am
dead. I ’ll tell you.
I am at Bracey’s Giant Emporium, as happy as a mouse in
the middle of an immense cheese, and the world shall know
me no more.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now, secure behind a towering
pile of carpets, in a comer-nook which I propose to line with
eiderdowns, angora vestments, and the Cleopatrean tops in
pillows. I shall be cosy.
I nipped into this sanctuary late this afternoon, and soon
heard the dying footfalls of closing time. From now on, my
only effort will be to dodge the night-watchman. Poets can
dodge.
I have already made my first mouse-like exploration. I tiptoed as far as die stationery department, and, timid, darted back with only these writing materials, the poet’s first need.
Now I shall lay them aside, and seek other necessities: food,
wine, the soft furniture of my couch, and a natty smoking-
jacket. This place stimulates me. I shall write here.
DAWN, NEXT DAY
I suppose no one in the world was ever more astonished
and overwhelmed than I have been tonight. It is unbelievable.
Yet I believe it. How interesting life is when things get like
that!
I crept out, as I said I would, and found the great shop in
mingled light and gloom. The Central well was half illuminated; the circling galleries towered in a pansy Piranesi of toppling light and shade. The spidery stairways and flying
bridges had passed from purpose into fantasy. Silks and velvets glimmered like ghosts, a hundred pantie-clad models offered simpers and embraces to the desert air. Rings, clips,
and bracelets glittered frostily in a desolate absence of Honey
and Daddy.
Evening Primrose
45
Creeping along the transverse aisles, which were in deeper
darkness, I felt like a wandering thought in the dreaming
brain of a chorus girl down on her luck. Only, of course,
their brains are not as big as Bracey’s Giant Emporium. And
there was no man there.
None, that is, except the night-watchman. I had forgotten
him. As I crossed an open space on the mezzanine floor,
hugging the lee of a display of sultry shawls, I became aware
of a regular thudding, which might almost have been that of
my own heart. Suddenly it burst upon me that it came from
outside. It was footsteps, and they were only a few paces
away. Quick as a flash I seized a flamboyant mantilla, whirled
it about me and stood with one arm outflung, like a Carmen
petrified in a gesture of disdain.
I was successful. He passed me, jingling his little machine
on its chain, humming his little tune, his eyes scaled with
refractions of the blaring day. “ Go, worldling!’’ I whispered,
and permitted myself a soundless laugh.
It froze on my lips. My heart faltered. A new fear seized
me.
I was afraid to move. I was afraid to look around. I felt I
was being watched by something that could see right through
me. This was a very different feeling from the ordinary emergency caused by the very ordinary night-watchman. My conscious impulse was the obvious one: to glance behind me.
But my eyes knew better. I remained absolutely petrified,
staring straight ahead.
My eyes were trying to tell me something that my brain
refused to believe. They made their point. I was looking
straight into another pair of eyes, human eyes, but large, flat,
luminous. I have seen such eyes among die nocturnal creatures, which creep out under the artificial blue moonlight in the zoo.
The owner was only a dozen feet away from me. The
watchman had passed between us, nearer him than me. Yet
he had not seen him. I must have been looking straight at
46
John Collier
him for several minutes at a stretch. I had not seen him either.
He was half reclining against a low dais where, on a floor
of russet leaves, and flanked by billows of glowing home-
spun, the fresh-faced waxen girls modeled spectator sports
suits in herringbones, checks, and plaids. He leaned against
the skirt of one of these Dianas; its folds concealed perhaps
his ear, his shoulder, and a little of his right side. He, himself, was clad in dim but large patterned Shetland tweeds of the latest cut, suede shoes, a shirt of a rather broad m otif in
olive, pink, and grey. He was as pale as a creature found
under a stone. His long thin arms ended in hands that hung
floatingly, more like trailing, transparent fins, or wisps of
chiffon, than ordinary hands.
He spoke. His voice was not a voice; it was a mere whistling under the tongue. “ Not bad, for a beginner!”
I grasped that he was complimenting me, rather satirically,
on my own, more amateurish, feat of camouflage. I stuttered.
I said, “ I ’m sorry. I didn’t know anyone else lived here.” I
noticed, even as I spoke, that I was imitating his own whistling sibilant utterance.
“ Oh, yes,” he said. “ We live here. It’s delightful.”
“ We?”
“ Yes, all of us. Look!”
We were near the edge of the first gallery. He swept his
long hand round, indicating the whole well of the shop. I
looked. I saw nothing. I could hear nothing, except the
watchman’s thudding step receding infinitely far along some
basement aisle.
“ Don’t you see?”
You know the sensation one has, peering into the half-light
of a vivarium? One sees bark, pebbles, a few leaves, nothing
more. And then, suddenly, a stone breathes—it is a toad; there
is a chameleon, another, a coiled adder, a mantis among the
leaves. The whole case seems crepitant with life. Perhaps the
whole world is. One glances at one’s sleeve, one’s feet.
So it was with the shop. I looked, and it was empty. I
Evening Primrose
47
looked, and there was an old lady, clambering out from behind the monstrous clock. There were three girls, elderly ingenues, incredibly emaciated, simpering at the entrance of
the perfumery. Their hair was a fine floss, pale as gossamer.
Equally brittle and colourless was a man with the appearance
of a colonel of southern extraction, who stood regarding me
while he caressed mustachios that would have done credit to
a crystal shrimp. A chintzy woman, possibly of literary tastes,
swam forward from the curtains and drapes.
They came thick about me, fluttering, whistling, like a
waving of gauze in the wind. Their eyes were wide and flatly
bright. I saw there was no colour to the iris.
“ How raw he looks!”
“ A detective! Send for the Dark Men!”
“ I ’m not a detective. I am a poet. I have renounced the
world.”
“ He is a poet. He has come over to us. Mr. Roscoe found
him.”
“ He admires us.”
“ He must meet Mrs. Vanderpant.”
I was taken to meet Mrs. Vanderpant. She proved to be
the Grand Old Lady of the store, almost entirely transparent.
“ So you are a poet, Mr. Snell? You will find inspiration
here. I am quite the oldest inhabitant. Three mergers and a
complete rebuilding, but they didn’t get rid of me!”
>
“ Tell how you went out by daylight, dear Mrs. Vanderpant, and nearly got bought for Whistler’s M other.”
“ That was in pre-war days. I was more robust then. But
at the cash desk they suddenly remembered there was no
frame. And when they came back to look at me—”
“ —She was gone.”
Their laughter was like the stridulation of the ghosts of
grasshoppers.
“ Where is Ella? Where is my broth?”
“ She is bringing it, Mrs. Vanderpant. It will come.”
“ Tiresome little creature! She is our foundling, Mr. Snell.
She is not quite our sort.”
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John Collier
“ Is that so, Mrs. Vanderpant? Dear, dear!”
“ I lived alone here, Mr. Snell, for many years. I took
refuge here in the terrible tunes in the eighties. I was a young
girl then, a beauty, people were kind enough to say, but poor
Papa lost his money. Bracey’s meant a lot to a young girl, in
the New York of those days, Mr. Snell. It seemed to me
terrible that I should not be able to come here in the ordinary
way. So I came here for good. I was quite alarmed when
others began to come in, after the crash of 1907. But it was
the dear Judge, the Colonel, Mrs. Bilbee—”
I bowed. I was being introduced.
“ Mrs. Bilbee writes plays. A nd of a very old Philadelphia
family. You will find us quite nice here, Mr. Snell.’’
“ I feel it a great privilege, Mrs. Vanderpant.’’
“ And of course, all our dear young people came in ’29.
Their poor papas jumped from skyscrapers.”
I did a great deal of bowing and whistling. The introductions took a long time. Who would have thought so many people lived in Bracey’s?
“ And here at last is Ella with my broth.”
It was then I noticed that the young people were not so
young after all, in spite of their smiles, their little ways, their
inginue dress. Ella was in her teens. Clad only in something
from the shop-soiled counter, she nevertheless had the appearance of a living flower in a French cemetery, or a mermaid among polyps.
“ Come, you stupid thing!”
“ Mrs. Vanderpant is waiting.”
Her pallor was not like theirs; not like the pallor of something that glistens or scuttles when you turn over a stone.
Hers was that of a pearl.
Ella! Pearl of this remotest, most fantastic cave! Little
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 6
