Shadows 7 (4 page)

I knew that it possessed explosive lethal force. I had heard the sounds of destruction coming from below—and I had seen my own door torn away.

All this raced through my mind in seconds.

As the ulcerous, squealing shape lurched toward me, I was finally galvanized into action.

My mind, in its excess of fright, seemed to go blank, but my body, as if automatically repelled by the approaching entity, sprang backward off the bed and literally catapulted itself through the glass panes of the window.

I was aware of stabbing pains in my back, the sensation of falling, sudden immersion into freezing darkness—followed by oblivion.

I awoke in a hospital bed with severe lacerations in my back and shoulders, a broken ankle, and a concussion. A drift of snow beneath my window, built up by the still-falling flakes and heavy winds, had saved me from a fractured spine or shattered skull. Luckily, a homeward-bound night watchman passing the house had spotted me and summoned help.

For a day or two I experienced nearly complete memory loss. And when memory returned, I wondered whether chronic amnesia might be preferable.

The local police, who had been anxiously awaiting the return of my memory, lost no time in questioning me. I learned that Mrs. Clendon had been discovered dead in the shambles of her room, with the door off its hinges and smashed furniture everywhere.

I told my story as well as I could, but the police remained skeptical and uneasy.

A detective lieutenant named Raiders hovered above me impatiently, shaking his head.

"You say you heard those screams from below just before you went out the window?"

I nodded. "Only minutes before."

He frowned. "Then how do you explain the fact that old Mrs. Clendon's body was found in a badly decomposed condition—like she'd been dead a long time? She was"—he groped for the word—"almost
liquescent!"

I couldn't explain it—at least not to him. Privately, I was totally convinced that the thing that smashed down my door had killed Mrs. Clendon just before it came back up the stairs. When the invader caught and enveloped her, she was an immediate vessel for all its disease and putrefaction. As these foci of hoarded infection poured into her, her body underwent the changes which, ordinarily, would affect a corpse only after weeks or months of corruption.

I knew it would be useless to express this opinion to Raiders and his cohorts. Even after I was released from the hospital, they returned to interrogate me. They finally decided that, without question, Mrs. Clendon had been killed weeks before by a maniac prowler who had broken into the house. My version was shrugged away. They concluded I had been undergoing hallucinations or some kind of brain fever.

Later, after I had bid farewell to Mr. Karda and Eats, and my prospects had somewhat improved, I did a little research into the history of the area where Mrs. Clendon's place was located. Again and again, that part of the city had been plagued by waves of deadly diseases—typhoid, diphtheria, yellow fever, smallpox, lethal "Spanish" influenza, and a host of other ailments. The rest of the city had not been immune, but that particular section, whether from sewer stoppages and poor sanitation, or from prevalent malnutrition on the part of its occupants, seemed particularly vulnerable.

The old rooming house which Mrs. Clendon took over must have sheltered literally hundreds of suffering victims over the years. Thrust to the bottom rung of society's ladder, many had undergone agonizing deaths alone in their shabby rooms.

I believe the psychic residues of these poor souls had at last coalesced, as it were, into the deadly thing which prowled the halls as Mrs. Clendon sat chill with terror behind her bolted door.

The revengeful remnants of these hate-filled, disease-racked sufferers apparently remained quiescent during the day. At night, when pain and despair had been most intense during their lives, they combined into the horrifying entity which took on awful life.

For years after my nightmare adventure, the house stood boarded and vacant. When it was finally sold and demolished, the dirt cellar was dug up to put in the foundation of a new building. Beneath the sour, damp soil, workers found the skeletons of six persons—four children and two adults. They were rumored to have been murder victims, but my own belief is that they were the remains of occupants who died of fatal diseases and were interred in the cellar by relatives to avoid the expenses of formal funerals.

The projected new building was never constructed—whether because of the resultant publicity or because of other reasons, I never learned.

When, out of curiosity, I returned to the neighborhood for the last time, I found only a brush-and-weed-covered lot where Mrs. Clendon's place had stood. Some small boys were playing in the adjacent street.

As I stood watching, an elderly codger strolled up and pointed the stem of his pipe at the empty lot.

"They never plays in there," he volunteered. "Says the weeds or somethin' makes 'em feel sick. Kids get a lot of crazy ideas!"

I wonder.

Nostalgia for the "good old days," for times when life was "more simple, less urban" does not always take into account the fact that "simple" doesn't mean "easy," and "good old days" doesn't mean people didn't have their shadows. They just didn't turn on the television to get rid of them.

Michael Cassutt is an executive for CBS-TV, has had numerous science fact and fiction pieces published in magazines and anthologies ranging from
Omni
to
Universe,
and has just sold his first novel,
The Star Country.

They are big families up here on the St. Croix. I myself am the second of eight, and ours was the smallest family of any on Chestnut Street. You might think we were all hard-breeding Papists passing as Lutherans, but I have since learned that it is due to the long winters. For fifty years I have been hearing that Science will take care of winters just like we took care of the river, with our steel high bridge and diesel-powered barges that go the size of a football field. But every damn November the snow falls again and in spring the river swells from bluff to bluff. The loggers can be heard cursing all the way from Superior. I alone know that this is because of what we done to John Jeremy.

I was just a boy then, short of twelve, that would be in 1896, and by mutual agreement of little use to anyone, not my father nor my brothers nor my departed mother. I knew my letters, to be sure, and could be trusted to appear at Church in a clean collar, but my primary achievement at that age was to be known as the best junior logroller in the county, a title I had won the previous Fourth of July, beating boys from as far away as Rice Lake and Taylors Falls. In truth, I tended to lollygag when sent to Kinnick's Store, never failing to take a detour down to the riverfront, where a Mississippi excursion boat like the
Verne Swain
or the
Kalitan,
up from St. Louis or New Orleans, would be pulled in. I had the habit of getting into snowball fights on my way to school, and was notorious for one whole winter as the boy who almost put out Oscar Tolz's eye with a missile into which I had embedded a small pebble. (Oscar Tolz was a God damned Swede and a bully to boot.) Often I would not get to school at all. This did not vex my father to any great degree, as he had only a year of schooling himself. It mightily vexed my elder brother, Dolph. I can still recall him appearing like an avenging angel wherever I went, it seemed, saying, "Peter, what in God's name are you doing there? Get away from there!" Dolph was all of fourteen at the time and ambitious, having been promised a job at the Hersey Bean Lumberyard when the Panic ended. He was also suspicious of my frivolous associates, particularly one named John Jeremy.

I now know that John Jeremy was the sort of man you meet on the river—bearded, unkempt, prone to sudden, mystifying exclamations and gestures. The better folk got no further with him, while curious boys found him somewhat more interesting, perhaps because of his profession. "I'm descended from the line of St. Peter himself," he told me once. "Do you know why?"

I drew the question because my given name is Peter. "Because you are a fisher of men," I told him.

Truth, in the form of hard liquor, was upon John Jeremy that day. He amended my phrase: "A fisher of dead men." John Jeremy fished for corpses.

He had been brought up from Chicago, they said, in 1885 by the Hersey family itself. Whether motivated by a series of personal losses or by some philanthropic spasm I do not know, having been otherwise occupied at the time. I found few who were able or willing to discuss the subject when at last I sprouted interest. I do know that a year did not pass then that the St. Croix did not take at least half a dozen people to its shallow bottom. This in a town of less than six hundred, though that figure was subject to constant change due to riverboats and loggers who, I think, made up a disproportionate amount of the tribute. You can not imagine the distress a drowning caused in those days. Now part of this was normal human grief (most of the victims were children), but much of it, I have come to believe, was a deep revulsion in the knowledge that the source of our drinking water, the heart of our livelihood—the river!—was fouled by the bloating, gassy corpse of someone we all knew. There was nothing rational about it, but the fear was real nonetheless: when the whistle at the courthouse blew, you ran for it, for either the town was on fire, or somebody was breathing river.

Out would go the rowboats, no matter what the weather or time of night, filled with farmers unused to water with their weights, poles, nets, and hopes. It was tedious, sad, and unrewarding work . . . except for a specialist like John Jeremy.

"You stay the hell away from that man," Dolph hissed at me one day. "I've seen you hanging around down there with him. He's the Devil himself."

Normally, a statement like this from Dolph would have served only to encourage further illicit association, but none was actually needed. I had come across John Jeremy for the first time that spring, idly fishing at a spot south of town near the lumberyard. It was not the best fishing hole, if you used worms or other unimaginative bait, for the St. Croix was low that year, as it had been for ten years, and the fish were fat with bugs easily caught in the shallows. I had picked up a marvelous invention known as the casting fly and had applied it that spring with great success. And I was only too happy to share the secret with a thin, pale, scruffy fellow who looked as if he had skipped meals of late. We introduced ourselves and proceeded to take a goodly number of crappies and sunfish during the afternoon. "That's quite a trick you got there," John Jeremy told me. "You make that up all by yourself?"

I confessed that I had read about it in a dime novel, though if Oscar Tolz had asked me, I would have lied. John Jeremy laughed, showing that his teeth were a match for the rest of his ragged appearance.

"Well, it works good enough. Almost makes me wish I'd learned how to read."

By this point, as I remember it, we had hiked up to the Afton Road and were headed back to Stillwater. As we walked, I was struck by John Jeremy's thinness and apparent ill health, and in a fit of Christian charity—I was just twelve—I offered him some of my catch, which was far larger than his.

John Jeremy regarded me for a moment. I think he was amused. "Aren't you a rascal, Peter Gollwitzer. Thank you, but no. In spite of the fact that it's been a long dry spell, I'm still able to feed myself, though it don't show. I'll grant you that. In fact, in exchange for your kindness"—his voice took on a conspiratorial tone—"I shall reward you with this." And into my hand he pressed a five-dollar gold piece. "For the secret of the fly, eh? Now run along home."

My father was unamused by my sudden wealth, especially when he learned the source. "That man is worse than a grave robber. He profits through the misfortune of others." It was then that I learned John Jeremy's true profession, and that he had been known to charge as much as
five hundred dollars
for a single "recovery," as it was called. "One time, I swear by the Lord," my father continued, "he
refused
to turn over a body he had recovered because the payment wasn't immediately forthcoming! A man like that is unfit for human company." I reserved judgment, clutching the eagle in my sweaty palm, happier than I would have been with a chestful of pirate treasure.

June is a month to be remembered for tornados, with the wind screaming and trees falling and the river churning. In this instance there was a riverboat, the
Sidney,
taking a side trip from St. Paul—and regretting it—putting into town just as one of those big blowers hit. One of her deckhands, a Negro, was knocked into the water. Of course, none of those people can swim, and in truth I doubt Jonah himself could have got out of those waters that day. The courthouse whistle blew, though it was hard to hear over the roar of the wind, and Dolph (who had been sent home from the yard) grabbed my arm and tugged me toward the docks.

The crowd there was bigger than you'd expect, given the weather—not only townspeople, but many from the
Sidney,
who were quite vocal in their concern about the unfortunate blackamoor. Into our midst came John Jeremy, black gunny-sack—he referred to it as his "bag of tricks"—over his shoulder. People stepped aside, the way they do for the sheriff, letting him pass. He sought out the
Sidney's
captain. I took it that they were haggling over the price, since the captain's voice presently rose above the storm: "I've never heard such an outrage in my life!" But an agreement was reached and soon, in the middle of the storm, we saw John Jeremy put out in his skiff. It was almost dark by then and the corpse fisher, floating with the wind-whipped water with all the seeming determination of a falling leaf, disappeared from our sight.

The onlookers began to drift home then while the passengers from the
Sidney
headed up the street in search of a warm, dry tavern. Dolph and I and the younger ones—including Oscar Tolz—stayed behind. Because of my familiarity with the corpse fisher I was thought to have intimate and detailed knowledge of his techniques, which, they say, he refused to discuss. "I bet he uses loafs of bread," one boy said. "Like in Mark Twain."