Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (70 page)

So I turned and found myself looking into the face of the great-granddaddy of all Southern red-neck sheriffs: face like a bulldog with jowls to match, and sunburnt red, and fat as a pig, and mountain-mean. I said, “Sir?”—every high-school kid could say that in his sleep in those days—and then we turned towards the bay, me saying, “What boat, sir?” and the cop saying just, “What the—”

Because there was nothing there.
My Boat
was gone. There was only a blue shimmering stretch of bay. They weren’t out farther and they weren’t around the other side of the dock—the cop and I both ran around—and by the time I had presence of mind enough to look up at the sky—

Nothing. A seagull. A cloud. A plane out of Idlewild. Besides, hadn’t Cissie said she didn’t yet know how to go straight up into the stars?

No, nobody ever saw
My Boat
again. Or Miss Cecilia Jackson, complete nut and girl genius, either. Her mamma came to school and I was called into the principal’s office. I told them a cooked-up story, the one I’d been going to tell the cop: that they’d said they were just going to row around the dock and come back, and I’d left to see if the car was okay in the parking lot, and when I came back, they were gone. For some crazy reason I
still
thought Cissie’s mamma would look like Aunt Jemima, but she was a thin little woman, very like her daughter, and as nervous and uptight as I ever saw: a tiny lady in a much-pressed, but very clean, gray business suit, like a teacher’s, you know, worn-out shoes, a blouse with a white frill at the neck, a straw hat with a white band, and proper white gloves. I think Cissie knew what I expected her mamma to be and what a damned fool I was, even considering your run-of-the-mill, seventeen-year-old white liberal racist, and that’s why she didn’t take me along.

The cop? He followed me to my car, and by the time I got there—I was sweating and crazy scared—

He was gone, too. Vanished.

I think Cissie created him. Just for a joke.

So Cissie never came back. And I couldn’t convince Mrs. Jackson that Alan Coppolino, boy rapist, hadn’t carried her daughter off to some lonely place and murdered her. I tried and tried, but Mrs. Jackson would never believe me.

It turned out there was no Cousin Gloriette.

Alan? Oh, he came back. But it took him a while. A long, long while. I saw him yesterday, Milt, on the Brooklyn subway. A skinny, short guy with ears that stuck out, still wearing the sport shirt and pants he’d started out in, that Sunday more than twenty years ago, and with the real 1950s haircut nobody would wear today. Quite a few people were staring at him, in fact.

The thing is, Milt,
he was still seventeen
.

No, I know it wasn’t some other kid. Because he was waving at me and smiling fit to beat the band. And when I got out with him at his old stop, he started asking after everybody in Central High just as if it had been a week later, or maybe only a day. Though when I asked him where the hell he’d been for twenty years, he wouldn’t tell me. He only said he’d forgotten something. So we went up five flights to his old apartment, the way we used to after school for a couple of hours before his mom and dad came home from work. He had the old key in his pocket. And it was just the same, Milt: the gas refrigerator, the exposed pipes under the sink, the summer slipcovers nobody uses anymore, the winter drapes put away, the valance over the window muffled in a sheet, the bare parquet floors, and the old linoleum in the kitchen. Every time I’d ask him a question, he’d only smile. He knew me, though, because he called me by name a couple of times. I said, “How’d you recognize me?” and he said, “Recognize? You haven’t changed.” Haven’t changed, my God. Then I said, “Look, Alan, what did you come back for?” and with a grin just like Cissie’s, he said, “The
Necronomicon
by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, what else?” but I saw the book he took with him and it was a different one. He was careful to get just the right one, looked through every shelf in the bookcase in his bedroom. There were still college banners all over the walls of his room. I know the book now, by the way; it was the one you wanted to make into a quick script last year for the guy who does the Poe movies, only I
told
you it was all special effects and animation: exotic islands, strange worlds, and the monsters’ costumes alone—sure, H. P. Lovecraft.
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
. He didn’t say a word after that. Just walked down the five flights with me behind him and then along the old block to the nearest subway station, but of course by the time I reached the bottom of the subway steps, he wasn’t there.

His apartment? You’ll never find it. When I raced back up, even the house was gone. More than that, Milt, the street is gone; the address doesn’t exist anymore; it’s all part of the new expressway now.

Which is why I called you. My God, I had to tell somebody! By now those two psychiatric cases are voyaging around between the stars to Ulthar and Ooth-Nargai and Dylath-Leen—

But they’re not psychiatric cases.
It really happened
.

So if they’re not psychiatric cases, what does that make you and me? Blind men?

I’ll tell you something else, Milt: meeting Al reminded me of what Cissie once said before the whole thing with
My Boat
but after we’d become friends enough for me to ask her what had brought her out of the hospital. I didn’t ask it like that and she didn’t answer it like that, but what it boiled down to was that sooner or later, at every place she visited, she’d meet a bleeding man with wounds in his hands and feet who would tell her, “Cissie, go back, you’re needed; Cissie, go back, you’re needed.” I was fool enough to ask her if he was a white man or a black man. She just glared at me and walked away. Now wounds in the hands and feet, you don’t have to look far to tell what that means to a Christian Bible-raised girl. What I wonder is: will she meet Him again, out there among the stars? If things get bad enough for black power or women’s liberation, or even for people who write crazy books, I don’t know what, will
My Boat
materialize over Times Square or Harlem or East New York with an Ethiopian warrior-queen in it and Sir Francis Drake Coppolino, and God-only-knows-what kind of weapons from the lost science of Atlantis? I tell you, I wouldn’t be surprised. I really wouldn’t. I only hope He—or Cissie’s idea of Him—decides that things are still okay, and they can go on visiting all those places in Al Coppolino’s book. I tell you, I hope that book is a
long
book.

Still, if I could do it again.…

Milt, it is not a story.
It happened
. For instance, tell me one thing, how did she know the name Nofretari? That’s the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, that’s how we all learned it, but how could she know the real name decades, literally decades, before anybody else? And Saba? That’s real, too. And Benin? We didn’t have any courses in African History in Central High, not in 1952! And what about the double-headed ax of the Cretans at Knossos? Sure, we read about Crete in high school, but nothing in our history books ever told us about the matriarchy or the labrys, that’s the name of the ax. Milt, I tell you, there is even a women’s lib bookstore in Manhattan
called
—

Have it your own way.

Oh, sure. She wasn’t black; she was green. It’d make a great TV show. Green, blue, and rainbow-colored. I’m sorry, Milty, I know you’re my agent and you’ve done a lot of work for me and I haven’t sold much lately. I’ve been reading. No, nothing you’d like: existentialism, history, Marxism, some Eastern stuff—

Sorry, Milt, but we writers do read every once in a while. It’s this little vice we have. I’ve been trying to dig deep, like Al Coppolino, though maybe in a different way.

Okay, so you want to have this Martian, who wants to invade Earth,
so he turns himself into a beautiful tanned girl with long, straight blonde hair, right? And becomes a high-school student in a rich school in Westchester. And this beautiful blonde girl Martian has to get into all the local organizations like the women’s consciousness-raising groups and the encounter therapy stuff and the cheerleaders and the kids who push dope, so he—she, rather—can learn about the Earth mentality. Yeah. And of course she has to seduce the principal and the coach and all the big men on campus, so we can make it into a series, even a sitcom maybe; each week this Martian falls in love with an Earthman or she tries to do something to destroy Earth or blow up something, using Central High for a base. Can I use it? Sure I can! It’s beautiful. It’s right in my line. I can work in everything I just told you. Cissie was right not to take me along; I’ve got spaghetti where my backbone should be.

Nothing. I didn’t say anything. Sure. It’s a great idea. Even if we only get a pilot out of it.

No, Milt, honestly, I really think it has this fantastic spark. A real touch of genius. It’ll sell like crazy. Yeah, I can manage an idea sheet by Monday. Sure. “The Beautiful Menace from Mars”? Uh-huh. Absolutely. It’s got sex, it’s got danger, comedy, everything; we could branch out into the lives of the teachers, the principal, the other kids’ parents. Bring in contemporary problems like drug abuse. Sure. Another Peyton Place. I’ll even move to the West Coast again. You are a genius.

Oh, my God.

Nothing. Keep on talking. It’s just—see that little skinny kid in the next booth down? The one with the stuck-out ears and the old-fashioned haircut? You don’t? Well, I think you’re just not looking properly, Milt. Actually I don’t think I was, either; he must be one of the Met extras, you know, they come out sometimes during the intermission: all that Elizabethan stuff, the plum-colored cloak, the calf-high boots, the silver-and-black. As a matter of fact, I just remembered—the Met moved uptown a couple of years ago, so he couldn’t be dressed like that, could he?

You still can’t see him? I’m not surprised. The light’s very bad in here. Listen, he’s an old friend—I mean he’s the son of an old friend—I better go over and say hello, I won’t be a minute.

Milt, this young man is important! I mean he’s connected with somebody very important. Who? One of the biggest and best producers in the world, that’s who! He—uh—they—wanted me to—you might call it do a script for them, yeah. I didn’t want to at the time, but—

No, no, you stay right here. I’ll just sort of lean over and say hello. You keep on talking about the Beautiful Menace from Mars; I can listen from there; I’ll just tell him they can have me if they want me.

Your ten percent? Of course you’ll get your ten percent. You’re my agent, aren’t you? Why, if it wasn’t for you, I just possibly might not have— Sure, you’ll get your ten percent. Spend it on anything you like: ivory, apes, peacocks, spices, and Lebanese cedarwood!

All you have to do is collect it.

But keep on talking, Milty, won’t you? Somehow I want to go over to the next booth with the sound of your voice in my ears. Those beautiful ideas. So original. So creative. So true. Just what the public wants. Of course there’s a difference in the way people perceive things, and you and I, I think we perceive them differently, you know? Which is why you are a respected, successful agent and I—well, let’s skip it. It wouldn’t be complimentary to either of us.

Huh? Oh, nothing. I didn’t say anything. I’m listening. Over my shoulder. Just keep on talking while I say hello and my deepest and most abject apologies, Sir Alan Coppolino. Heard the name before, Milt? No? I’m not surprised.

You just keep on talking.…

T
he lashed-together framework of sticks jutted from a small cairn alongside the stream. Colin Leverett studied it in perplexment—half a dozen odd lengths of branch, wired together at cross angles for no fathomable purpose. It reminded him unpleasantly of some bizarre crucifix, and he wondered what might lie beneath the cairn.

It was the spring of 1942—the kind of day to make the War seem distant and unreal, although the draft notice waited on his desk. In a few days Leverett would lock his rural studio, wonder if he would see it again—be able to use its pens and brushes and carving tools when he did return. It was goodby to the woods and streams of upstate New York, too. No fly rods, no tramps through the countryside in Hitler’s Europe. No point in putting off fishing that trout stream he had driven past once, exploring back roads of the Otselic Valley.