The Macabre Short Story Collection (11-stories)


Synergy Group Recommended Reading (April 2010) pertaining to topics on Behavioral and
Emotional Health, the book: The Path to Sobriety…” by Dr. Dennis L. Siluk

Midnight Waters


The Macabre Short Story Collection
Volume IV
Dennis L. Siluk, Ed.D.
Andean Scholar and Three-Time Poet Laureate

Parts in English, Spanish, Illustrated

Midnight Waters ((The Macabre, Short Story Collection) (Volume IV))
Copyright by© Dennis L. Siluk, Ed.D.


Cover by Clark A. Smith (original picture owned by Dlsiluk)
All other pictures within this book by done by the Author



















Index

1

The Westerly Winds off Cape Horn
((Or, “The Man with the Black Raincoat”) (1896)) Part one of two
…and
Dying: off Cape Horn
(A moment of still lethargy…) Part two of two

2

Old Solomon’s Fish
(A short story of Macabre Suspense)

3

Passage to Elephant Island
Hell-of-an-Island

4

Big Blow, off Maui
(12/2001)

5

Winter in the Wind’s Mouth
(The Inside Passage; Alaska)

6

The Wallace Plantation
(a six part short story)

7

Otis (in three parts)
Otis
Galloping Horses
“Amnon, Amnon!”

8

The Ebon Room

9

The Tiamat and the Demonic Stampede
((6820 BC) (part one of three))

10

Midnight Waters
(A night for Hell’s Gatekeeper)

11

Clotted by a Python
(Based on actual Events)



From the novelette: “Father Josephus”

The Westerly Winds
Off Cape Horn

((Or, “The Man with the Black Raincoat”) (1896))

Part one of two












The Forsaken Island
(Cape Horn)

One of the Great Places of the Earth, of myth and forsaken—is Cape Horn: as your ship plunges into the mountainous seas (tidal current waves moving from the Pacific to the Atlantic), one on each side, as the ramming and mighty westerly winds cross the Drake Passage, and crosses the face of the island landmass of Cape Horn (over its granite volcanic rock and peat moss), it lifts up its crashing waters from stern to bow—across the islands tender tundra, then lets it fall: nerve-racking, but fulfilling and unequalled. (No: 2780/8-22-2010)

The Captain of the forty-food sailing yacht—a right snappy vessel, with a good size cabin, gaff rigged—was in one of those ongoing, non-stopping, monologues which men can carry on and on when they realize someone is listening, and they know more than that someone about something, of the center of the stage: suddenly, within the Drake Passage, going east bound at 56 south latitude, the vessel absorbing the funneling effect of the Andes, going through one of the most hazardous ship routes in the world, a major challenge to anyone in any kind of ship—with its strong westerly winds off the Southern Hemisphere, making the waters off Cape Horne most dangerous—large waves the size of buildings—the wind giving rise to the strong waves—strong currents and icebergs, all lay in front of Captain Minor, and his wife Anna Mae Minor, of Columbus, Georgia, a yachtsman of the first kind, whose grandfather even once tried for—was involved with, back in the 1850s—with trying to win some Yachts Club Cup—was recounting the experience with actual pride, a sort of adolescent and remote vanity (his mind was not on what it should have been), it even sounded a bit like he was making half it up, thought Josephus Hightower I (on what one might call a vacation, with a business colleague), holding on the steel railing of the craft, looking at the small Island known as Cape Horn. The Captain took a quick darting to the sails, glancing at the large waves pushing the boat to and fro like a kite in the wind.
“I don’t see how anyone ever sleeps on such vessels,” said Josephus.
“No one ever gets used to it, that’s for sure…” said Anna Mae. She like Josephus, were breathing down, getting drunk on the shifting of the boat. And Josephus got to thinking, could he sink? That’s when the mountains of Cape Horn became larger and more visible, right to his side.
“What do you do, Anna Mae when you’re scared on such trips?” asked Josephus.
“I try to daydream, back when I was a young girl, and I was drowning and Herb (her husband), jumped in and saved me.” She exclaimed.
And it seemed like Josephus was thinking right hard on what she said, but he hadn’t been this scared before. And then he held his eyes tight and shut, the largest wave he had ever seen was coming, and he thought how much he had done for his son, Josephus II, and his daughter Ruth, and how would they ever do without him. And a voice in the back of his head said something as he was getting ready to look, and he counted inside his head: 1, 2, 3, 4—1, 2, 3, 4, over and over, and he opened his eyes and the biggest wave he had ever seen was upon him, and that voice had said, ‘They’ll be fine, they always are…” and there towards the stern (rear part) of the boat was a man with a black raincoat onboard the ship (Josephus also notice the helm was wild, no one steering the boat, and the jack fell into the water, and the masts feel into the water, and the poop broke open), and his name was: Nick, or Death—and he wore an iron belt, and he had chains on the belt perhaps for his captives to be, as if it kept him steady on the vessel too, and Anna Mae saw him also, the only one that didn’t see him was Herb, the captain who was holding onto something at the bow (front) of the ship, perhaps the anchor. And the wave hit the ship, and the ship toss liked to and fro a broken legged seagull, and then upside down, and then onto its side, and there were icebergs that hit the ship (or the ship hit the iceberg) like sharp spikes and no one would know it until later and it jabbed into the ship—broke its spine, like a shark into a human body. And the guts of the vessel fell open and emptied out.
“Oh, yes,” said Josephus as he sunk to the bottom of the passage, “this is something else I didn’t plan on.” And Anna Mae, looked at him, as she sunk alongside him, and Josephus was thinking— ‘Will Herb save her this time?” And it all became dark; he could almost hear the darkness full of movement, feeling, approaching, and the blood in his veins freezing like a statue in a museum. And that was all that was left of him, forever and ever on plant earth.



Dying: off Cape Horn
(A moment of still lethargy…)

Part two of two


So I thought I was dead—there was this moment of still lethargy—really dead, and Anna Mae, she was staring at me a few feet away, I’m not sure how many fathoms we sunk, but it was an awful lot, then I did an odd thing, I closed my eyes, and all I could see was myself in a coffin. I looked handsome though—you know, all dressed in white. And I was crying because I was dead, and unable to help my two grown children. “No,” the man with the black raincoat said, “there will be no coffin for you, or the lady, not where you are dead.” And all this time I could feel my nose and cheeks and toes and fingers going cold, and yet there was warmness still in my blood. And I looked at Anna Mae, and I said, ‘Don’t she look sweet,’ but I lied, she looked numb and waxy and cold and white. I think her lips said, “Touch me!” But I was a coward. And there we were, just waiting—I think for the man with the black raincoat. And we remained in place there, in the water, somehow balanced, not even jerking away from one another. And now when I looked at Anna Mae, it looked like she had iron gray hair, and she opened her eyes, looked around to see where Herb was, but he never came. Then I said to her—mentally—“He won’t!” Then I thought about being a human man again. And my ears or something made a kind of popping sound, like someone was blowing into a little rubber tube inside my ears, and head, it felt cold. And I told myself, I just want to go to sleep. And there was no longer any pain. And I read her, Anna Mae’s mind again, it said, “I wish Herb would get here, down here and not let me drown.” And I thought: if she’s not dead, she’ll be dead soon, and if she’s saved, she’ll be in an asylum for brain damage, and perhaps better off dead. I don’t think she was born for this kind of life; she simply had to put up with it because she loved a man who loved the sea. Better for her she were dead now, than endure a hundred more storms and then die alone, at least she has me, company. I think she was swearing now, unprintable words, surely not to be inscribed onto her gravestone. Perhaps this is the instant we come to realize, admit, that there is a logical pattern to everything, where we throw pretense to the side, she has seen in my eyes what perhaps I saw in hers, the eyes of the dead tell stories to the dead (for at this time the shocked despair was fading):
I was drowning or had drowned, suffocated—I had been taking in water not oxygen, as I should have been. I must have been unconscious for awhile. I figured, Anna Mae, must have figured, she was a high candidate for such a death, for me, it never occurred I’d die this way. I kind of wished at this point I had been born a whale or seal.
I found some light; I wondered who turned it on. Anna Mae was now off in the distance, by the man in black, the man with the black raincoat, almost palpable enough to be seen. And she had a small face that appeared to collapse in the sight of the demonic creature with the blurring still chains in his hands, more than an invitation to the secret Dark Promised Land—which was my conclusion; he horridly grabbed her by the hair and dragged her off. And I was left there to wait. Then someone opened a door, fumbled in the darkness beyond the light, said, as he plunged forward, his head lifted slightly, “You know about the crucifix, do you not?”
“Oh yes, yes, of course I do…” I said, and beyond the door there was a terrific uproar, and then faces—many I had known who had died in the past.


Note Written 1-13-2010/No: 568) Dlsiluk © 2010







Old Solomon’s Fish
(A short story of Macabre Suspense)






Within the Caribbean waters outside of Havana, in a depth of perhaps eighty fathoms, Solomon Parra Tapia was fishing off his new 1987, small twenty-five foot yacht, with his wife, Rosalina Nayelis, he was on deck near the bow (front), she was below towards the stern (back), he did a literary version of the event in Hemingway’s book: “The Old Man and the Sea,” meaning, he was in his sixties, she in her fifties, and he was well off as a restaurant owner (although the opposite of Hemingway’s Santiago), on the Caribbean island, Cuba, and having all the necessary fishing gear—such as hooks and rod and reel, deep dropping tackle for the most part, and there he was with a big fish on his line—likened to Santiago, which wasn’t all that dramatic for the moment, but it did matter; although he was not a great fisherman—again, perhaps more clumsy than most, and not as chancy as most, and quickly taken back if any great challenges appeared. Nor did he wish to be considered a great seaman, of the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico, or the Mediterranean. But he liked fishing and boating, and drinking, and so forth.
There was no magic in the moment (not Yet anyway)—the boat was drifting with the current in the bluish-green waters, its two-hundred horsepower Mercury engine, was shut down—and the sunburst over the old man’s rusty balled looking head: just a big tug on the fishing line, and the fish fathoms below, zoomed down to the bottom of the sea with a plunge, and then he knew it was a predatorily, it had to be, the pull the wildness, and to reach the bottom as fast as it did he assumed it was a swordfish—perhaps near size of the yacht, he knew they went up to sixty-miles per hour, fifteen feet in length. And when it hit the bottom, it was like a ripple effect all the way up the line to his hands, to the other end of his fishing rod—a quivering ripple. And did it matter now, gosh yes, now nothing mattered, but the fish, forgetting his wife was down below in the cabin, he took in several breaths like a race horse, at the end of the race, and this was just his beginning; whatever it was it was big and strong and fast. ‘Maybe it’s a shark,” he concluded, ‘no,’ he went on to say, ‘must be a Marlin, like in Hemingway’s book?’ of course he was guessing. Old Solomon might have drunk a beer too many this day, as he had been doing all morning into the afternoon, but he dare not reach over to get another out of the cooler, or even call his wife, he had several already—near intoxication, but not quite, not quite drunk, no, not yet—although he was sweating like a boxer in the tenth round race horse.
This was his fundamental problem—he was a coward, luckily, the fish stopped to ponder a moment; this allowed Old Solomon, to catch his breath—he was near hyperventilating—his line stiff as a board. Meanwhile, he thought: what kind of fish is this, I’ll make him into a trophy, certainly, this was God sent, and the old sixty-two year old man was now daydreaming. I mean, this had not been his idea to catch such a big fish; it had been his brother Harry Tapia, who had pointed out this spot, said there were some big swordfish out this way, and he liked the meat of the swordfish, it was tender, he had caught a few before, ones with sixteen inch swords on their nose, and perhaps several feet long, and four or five hundred pounds, but surely this one was bigger, if indeed it was a swordfish, and if it was bigger, well, if indeed it was, could he handle it? I mean, the two he had caught before, Harry was with him, helped him, clubbed the fish, held tight the rod and reel for him. This one had pulled him closer to the bow, forward a few feet. He looked to the port side of the boat, then to the starboard side, and the fish hadn’t gone either way, there was an awful lot of line loose, he could have.
“I’m going to go to sleep,” yelled his wife Rosalina, she had the lower berth, and lower of the bunk bed.
“Ye s, ye s, go oo to sl eep, I’ve g ot a big-g on e!” said Solomon, too erratic to respond any other way. She only heard “…go to sleep… (his voice was trembling, and low it was)” most of his message was gobbledygook, and what she could make out, suggested to her it was of no consequence, and consequently, she fell to sleep instantly. She was a heavy woman and the mattress sank near the floor, and she also had had several beers and so she slept soundly.
Above, the summer heat was getting to the old man, and he and the fish hadn’t progressed one iota in twenty-minutes, it was as if the fish had got his sword stuck in the sand below him, because if it was a swordfish, if in reality it really was one, he would have been irritated with him to no avail, and most likely had a vehement disposition towards him now, in its frustration and ill-temper the fish skyrocketed—at that very instant—out of the water, jumping several feet into the air, no, several yards into the air, with its long flat bill and rounded body. And it would have seen him even from a distance clearly, it had those select heated eyes and brain, that only a few species in the sea had, origins by the eyes thus allowing it edge on its pry—and when it hit the water its tail slapping and banging and body clubbing against the boat.
Ahead of him was another yacht, in the distance, reflecting from its mirrors, and it was to a high-intensity for the old man, the sun illuminating so brightly that he let go of his rod and reel slightly, just a moment, and it slipped halfway out of his grips, as the fish jumped out of the water even higher, split the water at fifty-miles per hour, zooming as high as a lower building, it was a dreary mental moment for him, whishing Harry was there, listening to the afternoon wind rustle by his ears, and his palms sweaty, and he exclaimed “Yes, oh yes, it’s a swordfish!” But it was humungous; perhaps sixteen-feet long, perchance, 1500-pounds of pure fish, with a forty-in plus, sword on the end of its nose—a huge cold blooded predator.
“You weren’t supposed to be so cleaver,” murmured old Solomon, out loud trying to grab his fishing rod, that is, clutch onto the part that had slipped down from his hands, “Don’t” he said to the fish “get away, let me have you! Don’t jump no more, I can’t handle you…!” But that was followed by another thump and jump, almost dragging the old man over the edge of the bow (a bow that was spoon like), bouncing him like a toy ball. The creature’s anger was like something combustible, the old man found it utterly terrifying—the creature had a lack of emotion for a kill, or perhaps too much for revenge—so it would seem, those warm eyes and brain, made him one-hundred and twenty percent faster than without it, he was apologizing to his second-self for letting go the grip he had once had on the fishing rod, that helped him win the first round with the fish, but now hanging over the bow, loosely on the fishing rod’s end, leisurely the fish came closer to the boat to get a better look at the old man, the old man’s heart rapidly beating, he wasn’t surprised to see the fish sizing him up, only that suspense that the fish all of a sudden sensed something beyond him and then quickly snapped the water with a solid blow moving slowly over to the port side of the boat, and to the old man’s dismay, he dropped the rod out of fright, into the water, surprisingly, actually almost delicate—and deliberately, as if he wanted to get rid of the pain and fear and the puffing of his heart the fish had created within him: ‘Where is Harry…? He murmured, as if he didn’t know.
He heard the swordfish shifting its sleek body under the boat, I think he’s going to defuse his rage; the old man conjured in his mind, and he sense the fish was closing in. Then there was the sound of a blow against the bottom of the boat, the fish was hitting it with its tail to see how strong it was—testing. There the old man stood, nearly in a daze, frighten of the fish, did he dare go down and wake his wife up? If he didn’t was it possible the fish could do harm to the belly of the boat? Was she in any danger? If he didn’t, Rosalina might wake up and panic and the fish hear her—and then what He asked himself. Perchance, he was trying to avoid, no interfere—
But if not…?
And he cried into the palms of his hands “Please don’t hurt my wife!” He clenched his fists and thought: wake up and run Rosalina, run, run… he was frozen with fear—he said what said but he said it in a whisper as if the fish might hear, and he couldn’t move, and now the fish was hitting the bottom of the boat harder and harder—his heart sank, and the boat rolled, rocked and rolled, sideways, and the door to the cabin locked, the latch outside of the door locked and Rosalina woke up, “Solomon!” she cried “what is going on?” And before he could answer her, he actually turned away, plugged his ears, before an idea could occur to him to go around the boot to the stern, and down into the cabin area and unlock the door, in fear the fish would get him.
It is not to say, these thoughts had any coherent or direct passage way to his brain—they just got there zigzagging: some people freeze, while others can face such dilemmas: some people cannot hold spiders or snakes, or look down fifty-story buildings, the mind closes, and the hands perspire, and fear grips them like nothing else, this was the case, this was it in a nutshell. He took three steps to the front, and stooped down low his head near touching his knees, and hid from the sounds of his wife, then the swordfish hit the boat—plunged into the boat with all its force, after it had submerged, 250-feet, driving its sword into the boat’s fiberglass body, all its forty-plus inches of hard bone extended out like a sword from its face, through the back spine of Rosalina, as she arched her back, her spine split in two, the fish unable to dislodge itself, and she screamed bloody murder.

No: 669 (8-24-2010)sk


































Passage to
Elephant Island

Hell-of-an-Island


By morning Ernest Montgomery from Dothan, Alabama had decided to lay off the sightseeing onboard the cruise ship, last he remembered the ship was somewhere between the Falkland Islands, and the South Shetland Islands, to be exact, he’d soon find out, they were docked momentarily off the north shores of Elephant Island. Ernest had been getting tired of the trip, if not bored, from: Buenos Aires, Port Stanley, around Cape Horn, Chile, docking at Ushuaia, Argentina for eight hours, the principle reason for taking the cruise was to make his life more exciting, and he wanted to be around young women, he was forty-five years old, freshly divorced, and he was discovering, the longer the trip, the older the clientele—it was a fifteen-day trip, and there was only a few stray women, and they were bitchy and older than him by twenty-years plus.
With nothing to do but complain, Ernest decided to get as drunk as scotch whiskey would make him. He found a nice corner in the bar and by mid-morning two pints had been consumed. The remainder of the morning he spent on deck looking at an odd island, everyone called “Elephant,” and some called “Hell-of-an-Island.”
He went back into the bar bought another pint of scotch whiskey. And he went back out to the deck; the wind was white and raw. Then he heard a voice over the ship’s microphone system, it was the Captain, “Elephant Island,” said the Captain, “is 779-miles West-southwest of South Georgia, and 581-miles from the south of the Falkland Islands, and 550-miles southeast of Cape Horn, and we are now three miles in front of it.” Then he heard him say, “Excursions, those who want to go to the Island meet at…” and then he stopped hearing, and saw a blond, pathetically he followed her to where folks were signing up to take the excursion, he had missed her among the 1950-passengers, perhaps near thirtieth (he simply put an X for his name on the document—a manifest, for those intending to go to the island, he was too drunk to do otherwise). He wiped his hands over his face as if to wake himself up, “What’s the matter?” said the young woman, the very one he was attempting to pursue, his face wet and appearing as if he had been crying, but of course he hadn’t been; and now the ship was even closer to the Antarctic island.
She pulled the scarf out of the way from her face, standing in line waiting to board the small craft and getting her lifejacket, putting it on, and clamping the two clamps together, readying to go to the island, Ernest really not too aware of anything, just in heat over this young damsel, did likewise—a monkey see monkey do, kind of thing.
“Nothing’s wrong kid,” he said sharply, “why did something go wrong?” he questioned.
The girl turned her back, she was hurt, and seemingly one could hear a few sniffles, as if they were sighs.
“Say what’s the matter with you anyway?” he asked the girl, “you nuts or something? Let’s get out of here and go to my room instead of this stupid island! Say!” but she never turned around again, and so Ernest simply put on his lifejacket, as did the fifteen other people getting into the small zodiac-boat—although he hesitated, thinking, perhaps thinking why waste my time on this stuck-up chick and this stupid excursion, but before he could deliberate it any further—or completely, they were on their way to the area where Ernest Shackleton had made his campsite, in 1916, along with twenty-two of his companions—to Point Wild.
The closer the inflated zodiac vessel got to the island, the more inhospitable it looked to Earnest, “Say,” said the young lady, the very one Earnest had tried to pick up, “are you soused?”
“No, I’m as sober as a dead rat, what’s it to you lady?” said Earnest. It was as if she was trying to rekindle the candle—figuratively speaking, the one he had lit, and rudely blew out.
“That’s right,” he said, “hell, I’m sober enough to swim to the island,” and she laughed, and for once, Ernest took that serious look off his face and laughed with her. But the fact was, and the fact remained, he was nearly soused, and saw only blurs of her, and blurs of the island, but he hid most of those drunken mannerisms somehow.

(On the Antarctic Island called Elephant—at Point Wild, a plateau area residing next to a mountain on the northern coast) “Well,” said Earnest, he pulled out a cigarette, sucking deeply on it, walking a distance away from the group, to pull out his pint and have a drink—and he’d end up drinking the whole pint behind those dark wet granite walls; the young woman by the name of Pilar, took no notice in where he went, and the rest of the group, didn’t even know he existed—and on the official paper—the document or manifesto (program, indicating who was there, and who was who), the one he was supposed to sign getting into the vessel for the excursion, the very one he had simply placed a smeared X on, one that looked more like a mistake than a name, and there he sat on what might have been a hidden corner where Shackleton himself sat, smoking and drinking, and then he passed out.

“Well, I—say, folks let’s board the zodiac-craft and head on back to the ship,” said the young navigator, in charge of the excursion. As they neared the ship, Pilar began to look about for Ernest, said to the man sitting next to her, “Say, where’s that man that I was talking to before, do you know who I mean?” Not knowing his name. And the man pointed to someone at the other end of the vessel, who was seasick, and had his head in his palms and his elbows on his knees—who could have been anybody, and the young woman thinking he was still drunk, simply said “Oh, the stinking drunk. I started to take a liking for him.” And left well enough alone, thinking no more of it.

The ship now was at sea, heading for Paradise Bay, Earnest Montgomery, on the island, alone, just waking up. It was pretty cold, and he was having a hell of a time trying to focus his eyes, he dashed out from behind the rocks—unaware of how long he had been sleeping but knowing he had been, and hoping it wasn’t all that long, and noticed the ship was gone.
“How in hell can I get…!” he said. And there he stood thinking out loud, “She was so crazy about getting my attention, she’ll tell the captain and they’ll come back.” Then after a long while still standing waiting to see the ship return, he mumbled, “I reckon that cutie likes me, why didn’t she come across quicker, she perhaps…how in the hell can I get out of here!” (It really wasn’t a question, but a disparaging statement.)
He looked about—up and down the ice-covered mountainous island (its tallest peak, nearly three-thousand feet), elephant seals were observing him from afar; other than that, there was no significant flora or native fauna, just a few penguins and seals found moseying about Point Wild and its coast, and a fog and snow was coming in… he knew he didn’t have a high cold threshold nor an extreme weather tolerance, and there was no ship in sight, and his pint of whiskey was empty, and he lit his last cigarette staring out into the sea, waiting, just waiting, continuously waiting, bored to death, and nearly frozen to death—not believing he was marooned on an island no more than ten by two kilometers east to west in the Antarctic waters—waiting, just waiting for the ship to return—continuously waiting, and bored to death…

No: 609/3-28-201/EC






Big Blow, off Maui
(12/2001)





Rosa


It was dark and there was water in the streets and no lights on alongside of the road, and the trees were blown down everywhere. I had heard once we got off the plane at the Maui airport, heard tell, a storm was coming, it evidently had come—although not completely stretched out nor in its full bud. So I grabbed my wife’s hand and got into the escorted tourist van. And we were headed for our hotel within minutes; it was off the Western Harbor. The streets and everything was full of water, gutters filled to the rim, and cars splashing water as they drove by us— tossing water everywhichway, and just everywhere was water and the wind was picking up gradually—more and more, to who knows when it would reach its zenith. A moon was scarcely seen overhead with dark faded clouds around it, some through it, and plenty of rough weather seemed to be brewing all around us.
When we got to the hotel all the lights were out, no street lights no any kind of lights but car headlights and very few of them, and the wind was still picking up, “Man,” I said to Rosa, “this is some storm fermenting.” Like a hurricane in the makings.
It was just as dark as an empty barrel with a lid on top of it—; anyhow we couldn’t even recognize our hotel when we came ahead of it, the driver had to shine his headlights on the sign out near the street on the green area, and point to it, and when we got out, he was gone like a flying fish.
As we walked to the back of the hotel, where there was kind of a plaza area with a pool in the middle of it, trees and all types of greenery were blowing in the wind, along with water from the sea and branches from the nearby hotels. And a few trees, bulky tall trees, by the pool were ripped out of the ground, roots and all; some birds lay dead here and there in the grass, a few pelicans, all kinds of birds evidently were trying to escape the torrent winds and surge of flying water, some I saw being blown from out of the sky, back and forth to kingdomcome, a shrill and eerie night indeed. You had to look everywhichway, lest you get slapped with something, someplace on your body, and the vibrating thunder run through your body like ramparts being rapidly opened and closed, I could feel this heavy impulse from my heart to my throat.
Apparently, most everyone had gone inside one or the other parts of the doubled sectioned hotel we were at, the lower bottom floor of the first section was the one serving hot meals in a cafeteria style restaurant, Rosa and I were hungry, very hungry. The other part that was opened was next to the restaurant, where the hotel desk was, where a clerk remained on duty—by candle light.
We talked to the hotel clerk, got our keys to our rooms, and we went and put our luggage in it, but there were no lights. And it now was raining hard—there was a grim unrelenting blackness starting to seep into the sky covering earth like a cloak, a sinister and ominous darkness seeping out from the sea; we then walked back out into the plaza area, I started to look out towards the sea, and to where they were serving the hot food, on the other side of the pool, glancing back and forth, one side to the other: sea to café, the sea and then the cafe, thinking: should we go eat or run back to our rooms, eat or run back to our rooms.
“Let’s see what they got left to eat,” I told Rosa “we ought to eat something before morning,” we had flown directly from Minnesota, to San Francisco, and then onward to Maui, with very little to eat, my hunger was overtaking my mind, perhaps even to the point of overlooking safety measures.
We were quite a ways on the other side, across from the plaza, to where the café was, and we ran, getting slapped with the wet and sometimes thick watery air, heavy blows of water from the sea being carried by the winds striking us all over our soaked bodies, as if being bombarded with shapeless ghouls (the hotel having been only a hundred yards from the beach).
When we got to the café, the floor was under an inch of water, somehow they produced some artificial lighting from overhanging gas lanterns. “We haven’t had a storm like this in a decade,” said some voice serving food behind a long row of tables, to a guest in front of me. The food looked like it was mostly picked over—under incandescent light, perhaps electrified by some generator. And the sign read “$25.00!” And under the sign was a note that read “No exceptions,” meaning I would guess: Take it or Leave it! Meaning, it would cost you $25.00-dollars apiece, skimpy as it was; and where the nearest café was other than this one—only God knew, so we took it. It was a rip-off, but we had no choice, starve or pull out fifty big ones.
There we were standing up with our trays and dishes of food, bits and pieces of leftovers—so it appeared to me, looking out a glass window at the tall trees swaying, to and fro, looking as if they were going to be ripped out of the ground any minute, and a few smaller ones were already ripped up and out from its roots, laying here and there, around the pool. We looked about, there was no place to sit down, and so we continued to eat standing up. Another peeve I couldn’t do much about.
“If this storm would just take a break until we get settled in,” I commented to Rosa. She remained silent, there was really no response needed it was more a statement than a question.
As we finished our food and walked outside, I could see the tops of the trees rocking as if they were floating ships out at sea. And you could hear the hard twisting winds; whistling and clashing like titans at war—it was all deafening to your ears, branches breaking. I hung onto Rosa as if onto a little dinghy—took a couple of deep breaths then we ran like cabooses attached to a train, across the plaza to our hotel, and once through the doorway, to our room.
I could see Rosa’s hair was tied down somehow—towards the back of her head, close to her head and I had to carry my hat in hand. She was right up close to me when we ran into our apartment building; the hallway was dark, drenched. We went up one flight of stairs, and once in our apartment, I had to let go of Rosa, and I heard a great thump, looked out the window, thought a wall from a building had cracked or crashed, or something had gotten wrecked, but it was a large, very large towering tree that had been ripped in two, struck by lightening I guess, and had fallen by the pool, and then I noticed lighting and thunder and there was no longer a moon to be seen—and now an eldritch dark mist had filled all the light spaces the hotel had once emanated.
My head felt tired, my neck stiff and then I rested on the bed, fully clothed, in case I had to get up quick, for whatever reason, but I fell to sleep quicker than a rabbit can jump, after a short tossing and turning and thinking. It wasn’t any good staying up anyhow and just worrying about something you can do nothing about (the hotel staff was not going to vacate the hotel, and told us to simply lock ourselves in our rooms and outwait the storm).
As I initially laid there, I started drifting off into some dream sleep, as the wind was hammering against the window, I had shut the curtains in case the glass broke: the rains lashed out like whips, clear and sharp against the windows, and sand was being tossed about, I could hear the stones inside the sand hitting the building we were in.
This evening had been like witnessing a storm blowing right out of hell; Maui per se, had lost control, and the storm took charge. You couldn’t get out of the hotel—had you wanted to, until morning anyhow, and where would you go anyway. But it came out all right, in the morning, Maui was as if it had a nightmare, and had taken a sedative, and I woke up to sunshine.

No: 419/ 6-22-2009 (reedited, 8-22-2009)
Dedicated to my sidekick, Rosa
















Winter in the Wind’s Mouth Flash Fiction
(The Inside Passage; Alaska)





Chapter One


He camped out along the Inside Passage (or, Inland Passage), somewhere between Juneau, Alaska and Petersburg, watching the bears climbing up and down the sandstone cliffs, his partner was crushed by a fallen tree a week ago or so, the water was cold—they had travelled up and through steeply, several hills and own through deed powdery snow to his ravine—and his wife stood by the dogs, then as he tested the water—taking off his short snow-shoes—testing it to see what he’d have to endure crossing the inlet—it was cold, near as cold an ice cube get without totally freezing solid that is and he knew putting back on his shoe, he’d have to fling himself into the water with all his might and haul himself brutally to the other side without thinking, looking back, with total focus on the other side lest he lose his pole and rope and strength, it required strong lungs and muscle, he jumped into the deep creek as he had just mentally versioned, he knew he’d die of exposure, or using up all his energy, and heat in his body most likely others had—if not doing it with a hissing push: but he felt he had no choice.
This was forsaken territory in 1910, and he was on a treasure hunt planning to find gold, or pan it or dig it—he was tempted to search for the Servia, which sank in 1905 near Kodiak—$35,000-dollars worth of gold was on that ship; then Ken Morgan changed his mind for the Aleutian, loaded with gold from the mines of Nome and Fairbanks which went down in a storm, between one and three million in gold; then it was Petersburg he was heading for—he had come up from Seattle to Juneau and was hoping to make it to Petersburg—a dropping off point for gold rush seekers, and find a claim, here or there or on the way—he had god fever; but in the process of looking for a new claim, he and his partner and wife had found pert near $10,000-dollars in gold nuggets, and dust, taken off it off of two dead bodies, who had evidently been toting those pouches to Petersburg or perhaps they were on their way to Sitka, or Skagway, who’s to say? In any case, they took the gold off of those two dead and frozen bodies—no, I mean, taken the gold from the saddlebags those heavy rounded pouches in those two saddle bags, there, which laid—nearly exposed, by the two dead and frozen bodies, other than that, an empty campsite.
They had to cross the creek now, and Ken Morgan, needed to tie a rope around the tree once he got across the creek—and they, Ken Morgan and his wife and the dogs were hungry—dogs standing in a stone like trance, Ken undoing the sled, the dogs with ice-rimmed muzzles: he knew they had stayed too long looking for the treasure of where those two men may have been mining, now on the other side of the creek his wife and several dogs could follow him, and thus, hoping once, once they all got across they all could make a new campsite quick, before one or the other caught their death, and find the food they had hidden, buried for just this occasion of returning back to Juneau should they wish to, and Juneau was closer than Petersburg—and the gold was heavy.
“Just tie the coffee-pot and cooking –pail onto the dogs, and the tent, we’ll never get the sled across,” he exclaimed. Then he took an axe and chopped off chucks of wood from the sled, and tied them around some of the dogs, solidly: the jaws of the dogs not seemingly working, half frozen, all gazing at one another, at Ken, yearning for food, Northland dogs, one half dog and grey wolf, the leader of the group.
And so he stretched out into the icy waters, up to his shoulders, he had fallen into a water pocket, then once out of that, and once in the middle, and then stepping forward he was on a upward slant and out of the icy waters within minutes ripping off his cloths, and making a fire quicker than a bird could have seize upon the next branch of a tree, underneath him. Then his wife followed suite, along with the dogs: the grey wolf had carried one dry piece of wood, covered with a cloth.
“I wish you’d not consider what you are considering,” said his wife, Samantha, as he starred into the creek once more—across the creek where they had been for two months, as if he was leaving his whole life behind him, leaving his treasure for someone else to take—a gold mine, they were out of food, used it up looking for that gold, staying two weeks too long, or longer than they had planned and hence, had eaten up the last of the food, extra food they had two days earlier—and the dogs were hungry.
“I’ll get the food, feed the dogs,” sand Ken, knowing that his going back to look for the gold mine was just a passing whim, it was not possible, unless he killed the dogs, ate them, and that was a hunch, she didn’t figure on, but the grey wolf did. The lead dog he bought in Juneau, he guessed it, and he was not mollified with the look on his master’s face.
“It’s okay,” answered Ken Morgan, “we’ll come back for the treasure, or at least try to find it in the summer,” contemplating that hunch. His eyes moved in a crawl like manner, as if they held a secret in life, and the grey wolf sensed it.

They had buried the two bodies and took the gold. He also had a map he had taken off one of the bodies, it showed a far-off location, and a cove: with a turtle sign that pointed to the words “Cold Treasure (leaving out the word Gold, and Ken assuming the sign of the turtle was perhaps carved into something, a tree or rock, something leading to the cave or gold mine)!”
Now they had searched high and low for their food, the hole they had placed three rocks above to point the spot where the food was hidden. And what they found was a torn out empty hole, as if a bear had dug it up.

The camp fire was flickering like leaping stars, as the sky was filling the night with a flaming aurora. His bed was that of a number of furs, mostly taken from the gold miners who had done some trapping, who evidently fallen upon the gold mine, and regretfully had gotten mauled by some bears during their sleep—Ken assumed they were bears, he was no expert in such matters, what else could it have been? He had questioned himself, saying nothing to his wife, and made a tent with the canvas they had brought along and had left hidden near that there campsite they had comeback to, where the food was missing, and Ken being too tired to find any food, or even kill a dog to eat, or find some food to feed the dogs, who had not eaten for a number of days, and his energy was down, weak as a snake chewed up by a mongoose. The creek was in front of them, the woods in back of them.


Chapter Two


“The dogs are hungry,” said Samantha, inside the tent, warm and cosy, and her husband lying to her side, “they’re pacing, I see them pacing all looking at the leading dog, and the leading dog is staring into the canvas here, I can’t see his eyes, but I feel them, I mean sense them, I see his shape out side.” Ken half asleep, “Where is it now?” he asked.
“Oh, he walked away.”
“He’s tied up to the tree, like the others, they’ll be fine until morning.”
“You’re not afraid, Ken—I’m afraid. Go talk to them like you do, the walk will do you good—the fresh air, this smoke isn’t leaving the tent so quick, even with the opening in the back and above us!” But Ken was sleeping now; he didn’t hear a word, deeply in an earnest sleep.
The dog, called Alamo, paced, passed alongside the tent, but couldn’t go but three feet to its entrance without being choked by the rope around its neck, not a tight rope.
“I tell you Ken, the dog has ideas, wake up!” said Samantha, a premonition, that the dog was contemplating something awful.
“Something’s going to happen before long,” she said in a louder voice and pulled on his arm.
She was no longer sceptically thinking, she knew danger was bearing down on her and Ken.
The brightness of the moon and the cloudless sky overhead, gave more light to the tent, and Alamo was half wolf, and Ken had skinned his knees and forearm while crossing the stream, and falling to his knees, blood could be smelled, and there was a mysterious cry, and as the fire inside the tent went out and it got darker and darker, and a cloud was covering the moon, Samantha’s mind went into a misty vagueness, and she stood up, and the wind grew stronger, blew out the rest of the fire, and the air became icy-cold as Alamo broke the rope around his neck, his eyes opened up wide—untellable eyes, hungry eyes, eyes that spilling over with sap boiled down into hunger and she shook her head knowing it was the moment; now looking an inch away from the tent as if into the tent, his nose nearly touching the tent sniffing, heavily coated with snow, smelling the scent of blood—as if it was opiate—Samantha staggered backwards towards the opening of the tent where the smoke was being funnelled out from, she ripped it open wider lifting herself slightly upward, to make her escape—then there was a sudden stillness, a storm was about to befall the tent, and those in it—it was only momentarily, for suddenly the wolf-dog broke completely through the tent, he was the fierce sign of the storm—Ken was woozy, intolerable woozy and starvation was on the face of Alamo—and then it occurred to Samantha, the dogs may have eaten the two miners—Samantha in near shock, impelled by some sort of fascination though, she did not make her escape, but instead, on her feet, she bent over, with bending knees, with the back of the tent opened for her escape, she didn’t move, she simply talked to the dog—the moment grotesque, horrible, famine unmistakable famine stricken, both of them, days without food, no, nearly a week, that’s right, they ate snow, and bark and snails, she forgot all that, “I understand,” she said to Alamo, “we’re all hungry, and someone has to die, and you’ve now made that decision for us,” now hemmed in by not moving, weird and uncanny the dog seemed to understand. And then there was moaning and wailing, cuts and slashes and blows and kicks, but regardless, the dog dragged it pry out of the tent, bodily and flung it back to his comrades.
In the morning, ken’s corpse was fleshless, and she buried her husband, and Samantha and the dogs were on their way back to Juneau, with the ten-thousand in gold, and that was a huge some in 1910 (equal to perhaps: $350,000-dollars in 2010).


Note: This story, chapter one of two, was written in March of 2004 (“Eaten by your own Dogs”) and never finished. Found tucked away, in August of 20110, at which time, Chapter two was written, to complete the story; realizing the name had to follow what wasn’t written yet, in Chapter two call: “Winter in the Wind’s Mouth” (No: 672) Dlsiluk (PS: My trip to Juneau, Alaska, and down the Inside Passage was in 2002.) Perhaps the reason I did not finish the story and put it aside was because my mother had passed away in July of 2003, and I grieved hard for the first eighteen months, of which perhaps I started many things and never finished them, and many I misplaced during those trying days.



The Wallace Plantation





The Deal
Abby Wallace



Abby Wallace would take two days to make the trip from Ozark, Alabama, to drive down to New Orleans, and onto Fayetteville, to see her brother’s grave. She slept the night in New Orleans, at Betty Hightower’s home, a friend, and Thursday morning headed onto the plantation house, the Wallace Plantation.
There was only a hundred-acres left of the land out of over four-hundred they originally had, the over four-hundred that Old Man Wallace had purchased way back in 1780, or thereabouts, they had sold—the two brothers had sold most of it, Wally and Frank that is, sold over three-hundred acres, giving her ten-percent, keeping the rest of the money for themselves, as they always did, she was never quite equal with them, but it was better to take ten-percent of something, than no percent of nothing because knowing them, they’d had sign her name one way or the other anyhow, and a war would have started, and by the time the fighting would have stopped, her ten-percent of something would have been long gone, spent on whatever.
This journey was really more for seeing Burgundy, than anything else, to see where everything stood between her and Burgundy, she told folks back in Ozark, it was to see her brother’s graves, and in passing mentioned Burgundy and the plantation, but said no more about it, save, she had to tell them something, and she didn’t want to look as a ogre towards the dead brothers, the ones who cared less about her, and more about that damn 1950-Chevy they constantly worked on just to work on and have something to do, so they could talk eye to eye, shoulder to shoulder.

When Burgundy and Abby met, neither one turning and walking away, both dissolving the other for a moment, as if in a spell, as if each had to find a common moment to exhale and find the right face to put on, thus, standing in a little square spot, each in a their own little cube as if it was marked, three feet from one another, both finding their comfort zone with each other, they looked into each other’s eyes, like a fox to a hound.
“Come in,” said Burgundy, Abby at the door, she was but half dressed, as if she was in the finishing process of dressing, and they somehow both ended up cross-legged sitting down on the sofa chairs in the living room.
“I was just in the middle of doing some of my voodoo dancing,” she told Abby with a smile; Abby in return, giving a flat “Oh,” to the statement. She had noticed, Abby had noticed, Burgundy had a lower body frame that gave an impression of being short, a long torso, and pale thin arms, like a snake, an odd kind of body she deliberated. Then her eyes and neck seemed to bob about the house, just a minute or so her eyes took a tour, around the house, finding wooden masks, voodoo masks, and disarray, a messy house to say the least.
“I cleaned your room for you, since this will be our home, unless we can come up with a pack or deal, and I’d like to talk to you about that shortly,” remarked Burgundy, going on, “after Wally died, Frank took it pretty hard, It was physically and mentally costly for him, his heart, his whole being collapsed I do believe, and remained for a long time in a convalescent state. Minnie Mae and I have been keeping the plantation afloat, well, Minnie Mae, more than I, I suppose. But now you are here and we can all work together.” (This was really not what Burgundy wanted to do or say, but it was what she had to say, and wait to see what response would come from Abby.)
“To be quite frank,” said Abby, “I am more interested in selling the place, than living in it, or listening to your proposition, that is why I came.”
“Yes,” remarked Burgundy, “I fully understand that, and I knew from the very moment I laid eyes on you, from the very beginning you and I’d git along well, I jes’ knew that, and look, here we are now seeing eye to eye, don’t that beat all.”
Amos came in, “Should I feed the hogs miss Burgundy?” he asked, and she nodded her head yes.
“Frank has some prize, country fair type hogs out yonder, as big as horses, one over 900-pounds, that one, the big one got a prize for eating more food in a meal, faster in one meal that is, than any other hog at the fair, and got a ribbon, blue ribbon for it, with its name on it, “Big Hog Wally,” Frank named it that, kids were riding her, so youall got to be careful, when she gets hungry back there in the pigpen, she can eat a whole lamb in a matter of minutes, and who knows what else.”
“Thanks for the warning, when I go by there I’ll keep my distance, or make sure they’re feed, especially Big Hog Wally!” They both laughed.
“Okay, Miss Abby Wallace, here is the deal (she pulls out a check from her purse, for the sum of $500,000-dollars written to Abby Wallace, hands it over to Abby) take this check, cash it, I sold all but four acres of the one-hundred acres left to Mr. Ritt, the Ritt Fayetteville Bank, once you cash it, the deal is sealed, and the plantation house is mine, and everything on this four-acres will belong to me, and the money to you, it is more fair than your brothers would have been to you.”
It was a fair deal, and she was right, her brothers would not have given her much if even ten-percent on the last one hundred acres left, although the land was sold a little under its value, and should they have waited to sell, it would have increased in value, an investment that appeared not to please either party, Abby or Burgundy, for neither were of the plantation breed, neither one wanted to grow corn or cotton, and Abby knew this, plus, she had never had such a sum before, and this kind of a deal was more than she had expected from this cleaver fox, and therefore accepted the check with a big smile, saying, “Yes, perhaps we see eye to eye, my brothers and I never did.”
It was but a few days later when Abby left to go back to Ozark, Alabama, she was happy as a stuffed hog, and Burgundy was happy, as the saying goes: there were two winners.



The Sacrifice
The Child, Otis Pity Wallace





It has been said, and there is much truth to it I believe, what Christ has done on earth, Satan has tried to duplicated. Burgundy was around her plantation house doing her voodoo stuff with more of a dedication than she ever had, she put more vitality into it, perhaps because who could interfere now. The Child Otis Pity Wallace Washington was about eighteen-months old now.
The house was quiet, not many visitors came about anymore, since Frank and Wally had passed on now, dead and buried and quickly forgotten, and Abby in Ozark, Alabama, Old Josh, and Amos came around now and then, but besides them, not many other folks. Minnie Mae was still working on the farm, and Burgundy had money in the bank, around $40,000-dollars, Frank and Wally leaving each half of that sum to her personally, in their personal accounts at the Ritt Bank.
She worshipped, chanted, danced and prayed to Satan, and was said to do likewise to his demonic following, this was not new, it just become more noticeable, and actually a little old, it was on Halloween she got what she called a vision, an awakening, a messenger came to her in her bedroom, sat on her bed, told her the following (which she would repeat in court in times yet to come), “The Ten-Winged Master, wants you to make a sacrifice to him, your child, like Abram, so long ago did for God, this will prove your loyalty, and there will be a resurrection, if you follow this example.” The messenger was a henchman from hell, so she claimed.
About this time, the Abernathy family, and the Stanley family, the two families who owned the other two plantations, along the same side of the road the Wallace Plantation was on, now Burgundy’s plantation, was ostracized from their gatherings, the weekend get-togethers, where they’d play checkers or cards or chess with Wally and Frank, and even the Stanley’s came over. They could hear the yelping and screaming and voodoo drums at all hours of the night now. It was becoming vexing.
This sacrifice was all planned for October 31, 1962, midnight, she put the child on the living room table, Minnie Mae was in the kitchen, closed her eyes, wanted to stop her but there was no way, she was scared, and so she ran out of the house—perhaps thinking: out of sight, out of mind, cried, slipped, hit her head on a rock, fell to sleep, more like knocked herself out. And so the sacrifice proceeded as scheduled, nobody noticed. No kids came for candy, none were allowed to go near the plantation lest they get disciplined by their parents, and rightly so, and there really were no kids about in the countryside there anyhow. With no haggling, she lifted up a heavy double edged axe, and when she lowered it, the child was split into two pieces, and she danced, and danced, and tore her cloths to shreds—as if waiting for the resurrection. And of course there was no resurrection, what she had to learn the hard way, and she never did learn it, Satan is a liar, as well as a deceiver—that is what she learned. But if she got anything out of this, it was his blessings.



The Trial
Of Burgundy Washington
(1962-63)




There was a boiling trial, and we all thought, all us from the vicinity and countryside where the Wallace’s had lived, we thought she, Burgundy Washington was either insane or possessed, and therefore sent to River Mount Hospital, in Prescott, Wisconsin, under the care of Dr. Whitman. Her lawyer was none other than the famous Henry Thompson, who did murder trials, he himself once was up for murder, but it was dismissed for the lack of information, he acted as his own lawyer in his own case, they had said he killed his wife and dropped her off in a junkyard, in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Minnie Mae had left the Wallace Plantation, we all knew she would, it was just too, way too much for her to endure that night, it still haunts her folks say; when she awoke from her fall, the night Burgundy killed her son, she ran to the Stanley plantation, that was how the police was notified, and in the morning found the dead child, and her passed out on the floor, and she testified that she saw, what she saw, which was up to the prior moment of the slaying of the child—but did not see that actual happening, the murder itself, she had run out of the house. But Burgundy was not denying the killing anyhow, so she was guilty by her own mouth.
Us folks at the trial, none of us ever had to consider such a mishap, I mean, she was guilty, but there was insanity involved. We kind of thought, any kind of murder would be a form of insanity, but I guess not. So there were technicalities involved.

The Hospital was quite expensive, and Thompson suggested she stay there, and in three to four years, she’d be out, actually after her money run out, she’d be out, but she needed to sell the plantation to pay the hospital bills, and lawyer bills, the hospital was costly, and Abby was there each day of the trial, and made a deal with the lawyer, to have Burgundy sign the deed of the plantation over to her for $150,000-dollars, and thus, she’d have $190,000 with the money in the bank, enough for at least two to three years expenses, hopefully for the hospital bills and lawyer bills. Hoping it was not much more. A private hospital, and not a burden on the state, and in time, folks might forget her, and so, it was the way Thompson wanted her to go and she did just that.
Burgundy signed it without a peep, and grabbed the Bible, and did as Thompson told her, started reading it from page one to the end of the last page of the whole New and Old Testaments, and would go to church on Sundays, to become un-possessed, and if she couldn’t, at least pretend to be.

It was now 1963. Abby did leave $2000 dollars in her account personal account, to buy things she might need in the hospital, and signed the other money over to the lawyer to pay her bills.
And now the plantation returned back to its old and rightful owners, and Whisky Charlie moved in, moved out of Ozark, Alabama, and moved in with his family member, his cousin Abby, first cousin, once and for all.



The Phantoms
Of the Wallace Plantation (Whiskey Charlie)
(1964)


Whiskey Charlie had went to the Wallace Plantation to be with and live with Abby Wallace for the summers, or at least that was the original plan, although I think deep down inside their minds, both Abby’s mind and Charlie’s, they had no intentions to limit it to summers, it was perhaps a smoke screen for the neighbors, and relatives in Ozark, Alabama were Charlie lived ((Whisky Charlie Codden) (a distinct cousin born 1935, relative to Frank, Wally, and Abby Wallace, of Ozark, Alabama; Charlie’s sister being sister Cindy Codden, born 1932; their mother was the sister to Gertrude Wallace.))

They now had only four acres of land, with a plantation house on that remaining four acres, only a patch compared to what they once had, and had sold the rest, which was 396- acres some time back, meaning her brothers, Frank and Wally, and thereafter, Burgundy, who owned the land for a short period, now in a mental facility, a hospital for the mentally deranged, in Prescott Wisconsin.
It is fair to say, Abby does not miss her two brothers who are now deceased, she hardly seen them when she was alive, and therefore the grieving process was next to nil. To be honest, I think the only one that grieved over Frank Wallace was Minnie Mae Walsh, the cook, now working for the Stanley’s, and as far as Wally goes, there is no human being left to grieve him, so they—the two brothers—parted this earth, with perhaps what they came with, nothing, although Wally got his brother’s Frank’s grieving, he had died a little before Frank.
Abby, on the other hand, not wanting to live alone, preferring company to no company —Whiskey Charlie Codden, is good enough she tells herself (Langdon Abernathy is now thirteen-years old, growing like a weed, works for Abby, and he also is good company now and then, along with Amos, who now and then comes around, more than, than now, since working for the Stanley’s; but still helps Abby, reluctantly).

A sudden phenomena looks as if to be entering Abby’s life though, disrupting it, engaging her mind, taxing her sleep, paranoia coupled with anxiety, not sure if I’d call it a disorder, perhaps there is some logic to this, some realism also, for she is seeing ghosts, pure and simple, ghosts, she says to Charlie (and babbles on, and on with it to Amos) she sees Frank and Wally talking by that old 1950-Chevy, every morning, just talking, that is all they do, and she is wondering what they got to talk about. She really doesn’t even want to get out of bed until the afternoon. If she looks out the window, down onto the car, down onto that old green Chevy they simply look up at her, pay her little to no attention, and then they go about their business as usual, as normal, as they always had, and talking about whatever they were originally talking about. Not much difference from when they were alive, but it frightens her, scares her some. She doesn’t know if there is any substance to this or not—she just knows it is.
In addition to these visual scenes into the invisible world, that Charlie Codden cannot see nor Amos, Abby is hearing voices, those of Wally and Frank, sitting by the hearth and they just talk and talk and talk the night away. It is becoming all too much for her to endure. She, Abby, is not a mentally strong woman, not in particular, no—never has been, and so this state of paranormal psychological occurrences, is becoming, or is beginning to become, beginning to takeover more of her life, consuming her you might say, taking up more hours everyday, in the day, likened to a bad habit, an alcoholic, or drug habit, one that slowly possesses you and then it grips you by the gut, and you got to see, listen, and you get more and more involved, then it controls you, your life, your very existence—a damn fixation develops, and this is what is happening to Abby.
Her family, and she knows her family tree pretty well, goes back to the tenth century, back into Scotland for the most part, where they were called, “Those Walsh Folk,” meaning those who migrated from Wales, to Scotland, and through time and events, the name was combed out to Wallace. And if you went back to several more generations, to her Great Grandmothers, one married a Judith, and she was a woman who not only had second insight, but a light blend of Haitian blood, who folks said she saw things, things not of this physical world, and those same folks debated over if she had a gift from God, or perhaps it was from the devil, or was it simply a form of insanity—who’s to say, those days are long gone now.
Be that as it may, Langdon Abernathy was working for Abby Wallace at the time which is only a hop-skip and a jump, from his family’s plantation (twenty-one miles outside of Fayetteville, North Carolina) and he would say when questioned, she and Charlie got along well, as well as any two folks could, and perhaps better, they respected one another, if not even a little more.
Well, here is what took place: the Ritt family (who owned the bank in Ozark, Alabama) had bought most of the plantation land up, and around the Wallace’s, and now had corn and cotton growing on it, it was the month of July, Amos and Langdon had quite working for the day on the Wallace Plantation, fed the hogs, and mended some fences, among other chores, and Langdon went home, and Amos went back to his regular employer the Stanley family. Now Charlie and Abby are alone. It was during this time, Abby overheard Frank and Wally talking, the ghosts during one of those long evenings I was talking about, when they’d sit by the fireplace, as they often did when they were alive, and what she remembers the most was that Frank, the meaner one of the brothers, was angry at her for accepting the $500,000-dollars for the plantation, the land Burgundy sold, then turned about and repurchased the plantation home back, with out even enough land to spit across. He was madder than a mass of hornets, and swore to get even. That was it, that was all she overheard, that was the top of the iceberg, I say top because what was underneath, only Frank and Wally knew, and Abby would never fully be allowed to know, be familiar with, for sure, but would blame them for, yet she’d not say it out loud, lest she be taken to the same place Burgundy was, the mental hospital; then they vanished, as usual, in this case the voices simply faded out.

In the morning, Langdon came over to see what work Miss Abby wanted him to do—had for him, he knew she would not come down those stairs until noon, she never did, but left a note on the dinning room table, under the chandelier, and when he came into see the note, to read it, he was shocked almost into a vomiting state. There was Charlie, Charlie Codden from Ozark, Alabama, hanging from the chandelier, old Charlie’s hands tied behind his back, hanging like a limp fish, tongue out like a dead bulls. He woke Abby up, and she fainted once she got a glimpse of Charlie, scant was the glimpse, but more than enough.
No one expected Abby to have been able to have done such a job as lifting a man in midair that weighed somewhere around one-hundred and eighty pounds, and besides, tied his hands behind him, and a rope around his neck, that was absurd. And Abby would never admit to ghosts, although Langdon knew the story behind her visions and voices, and mentioned them to the Chief of Police, it came to a point of leaving it as a mystery, there was even a suggestion that two bums came from the train nearby, that normally slows down as it nears the city and jumped off that evening, and they might have done the dirty deed, but that was manufactured by the police department, there really was no train, nor bums, but they now had suspects, which eliminated the ghost theory, although nothing was taken in the house, and in place of that, they said the bums were simply hungry, wanted to drink and got too drunk to rob the place, and so they hung Charlie as a stupid trick, and then the file was put into what they called “file thirteen,’ the dead file area, and left to grow mold.

Langdon of course was told never to go back to that haunted house by his parents, where one thing lead into another, and after the other, there was always another, and it just simply looked too much of a troubled spot. And for the most part, he came to be fine with that, he was in those early days, talking much about going into the Army, the Vietnam War I guess had started, and that really is what he was waiting for, a new war to start so he could join and be like his grandfather, and Amos.




The Monster Hog
((…of the Wallace Plantation) (August, 1964/and conclusion))



It was a bad summer, 1964, bad because the Wallace Plantation had buried, Charlie Codden, a relative of Abby Wallace, bad because she did not have the help she needed to take care of the place, Langdon Abernathy was told not to return to work for them anymore, it was all too much: first Burgundy, and the slaying of her child, and then the mysterious hanging of Old Whisky Charlie, and before that the deaths of Frank and Wally, although that was now a little over three years in the past since Wally had died. Even old Amos avoided the plantation as if it was plagued by God and Satan or both; Burgundy was still in the hospital in the Midwest, close to two years now. So, what next could happen, or go wrong, no one knew, and no one wanted to be acquainted with it, whatever it was going to be—meaning that plantation. The Ritt family, was making money off the land they bought, and although that did not worry Abby for the most part, she heard the ghosts—as she referred to them—talking at night how they hated Abby for selling the land to the Ritt Bank. Evidently, Wally and Frank hadn’t gotten over it yet, hadn’t gotten enough revenge, because he fought over who got to tie the hands of Whisky Charlie, and who got to swing the chandelier with Charlie hanging from it, that is what Abby told Amos anyhow, also mentioning in passing: “I don’t think the boys know they’ve died!”
But what was really on her mind, Abby’s mind, now was to sell the plantation, and so she had put it in the paper up for sale, and Frank, the mean one, the suggestive one, angry and more hateful than a horde of rattle snakes and more stubborn than a herd of mules, the more aggressive one of the two brothers, read the three line ad in the paper: “Lovely four acre plantation (or, hobby farm, because that was all that was left of it) outside of Fayetteville, for sale, any reasonable price.”
Frank and Wally knew there was no other plantations for sale, this was it, Abby was selling their souls now, so the brothers grimly said.

It was a warm August evening, in the year 1964, the end of August, Abby heard the hogs squealing, fighting with one another, biting at their tails, at their feet, the big one, the one they called “Big Wally the Hog,” the nine-hundred pound hog, the one that won a Blue Ribbon at the County Fair, was becoming nasty to one of the smaller hogs, the very small one, the smallest of the lot in the enclosure—or pigpen—and took a nibble out of its leg, it was a week since Amos had came around to feed the hogs, and she was always scared to get too close to the hog pen herself, although it was fenced in, with four by four poles, and two by four cross beams, to make a sturdy fence. Actually there were several hogs in the pigpen, nearly all over 400-pounds except a few smaller ones, and that one little one that got a bite taken out of its leg that had been yelping to get fed, and instead became in part, part of the Blue Ribbon hog’s meal. Abby at this point was quite frustrated, hearing those hogs yelping like wild dogs night and day, endlessly yelping, and so she called up the Stanley House for Amos to come on over and feed them—nearly begging him this time, but Amos refused to work for her, his mind unchanged, it was out of sympathy he had came the few times he did after her brothers had died, because of her constant mumbling about her seeing and hearing the brothers walking about the house and yard—especially by that old car of theirs that they worked on for ten-years straight, it was all too creepy for him, all too much, way too much for Amos to take, so he refused to come for the last time—with a straight emphatic and final: “NO!”

Mr. Ritt, the owner of the bank who purchased the land from Abby, through Burgundy, and in earlier times bought land from Frank and Wally Wallace, stopped by to see Abby, he did now and then, a kind gesture if anything, he knew she liked company; he figured he’d say hello, and she’d offer him coffee as usual and he’d have a little break, and be on his way. But she didn’t answer the door when he came, and the hogs were going wild in the back area, where the pig enclosure was. And he went back to see what was going on.
The evening by itself was most pleasant with its starry sky and gibbous moon, overlooking the Wallace Plantation, had not the hogs been yelping, moreover giving it an uneasy kind of eerie touch within its atmosphere it would have been a perfect end to a long day.
As he, Mr. Ritt walked slowly back to the pigpen, it seemed as if everything was unattended, he even got a cramp in his stomach, a nervous cramp, as if something strange had taken place, or was taking place, you get such feelings when something is wrong, deadly wrong—death reeks, and your body does something like a turnabout, a knotting up of muscles to protect you, to guard you from heart attacks and strokes and all those impending doom related occurrences that take a person by surprise, it signals the brain, beware…! And it was doing just that.
The hogs were fighting mad, squealing mad, jerking this and that way everywhichway, bumping everything, pulling with their teeth, bits and pieces of the wooden fence, gnawing on the thinner parts of the fence like rats, to free themselves: he got closer, they were limbs he was seeing, limbs his eyes scanned, indeed he confirmed they were limbs, red like roots hanging out of the limbs, muscles tissue, read knotted fleshly muscles hanging out like threads from a limp limb; hair hanging out of the pigs mouth—Big Wally’s mouth, and his associates, they were chewing Abby Wallace up, like pulp, as if she was in a wheat grinder, a saw mill, she evidently was trying to feed the hogs, fell in, or got pushed in, through the fence (because it would have been pretty hard to fall through those two-foot openings between the two wooden flat pieces of timber, one above the other, crossovers, and foolish to have gone to the top of the fence of the pen it would not have been necessary) and before she could get up, she was pined down by the monster hog—all nine-hundred pounds of pork. Her head was balled, they had ripped the hair out from its roots, and her torso was the main thing now the hogs were fighting over….
Her shawl lay over one of the fence two-by-fours wooden cross beams, and many of her bones—splintered—laid about, and the hogs licking the marrow out of them; everything was being caked with mud, as it surfaced here and there, as the livestock moved about, then sunk into the mud again, as if the hogs themselves were trying to hide the flesh from the other predators; Mr. Ritt had to turn about, look deep into the sky, hold his stomach, catch his breath and grab his heart, as it started to leap.


The Plantation
Conclusion


The plantation was up for sale thereafter, and the money was to be given to the boy’s farm, but in September of 1965, a little over a year later, it burnt down, another mystery, perhaps those two bums the police talked about who they said hung old Whisky Charlie came back; for the most part, it remains a mystery to this day (although it was known in the dark queues of Ozark, it was the town city folk). The Ritt Bank bought up the remaining four acres of land, and the money, before it could be sent to the boy’s farm, $25,000-dollars, a woman showed up by the name of Cindy Codden, from Ozark, Alabama, the sister to Charlie Codden, or old Whisky Charlie and claimed it, the Codden’s were relatives, the only ones known, of the Wallace’s.


Note: Chapters 10 thru 15, deleting chapter 13; written 6-2008; reedited, 10.-2009, and reedited 5-2010. From the unpublished work “The Last Plantation” (includes the chapters: the Deal, the Sacrifice, the Trial, the Phantoms, the Monster Hog, and the Plantation.




























Two stories taken from the novel:

Tick on aClock
An Episodic Novel, taken from the Shannon O’Day, Independent Sketches


Otis (1977)


Otis Wilder Mather stood still within the deep cornfields on which one time he and Shannon O’Day drank. Flanked by the tall stocks of corn, as if walled in—the early morning sunlight fell lightly in faded thin like flashes, seeping through the gaps of the cornfield onto his exposed flesh, and upon the bamboo walking stick in his hand, and across the aging shape of his black face who paced to and fro, looking down— as if swimming in some unfathomable emotions, brooding and drooping eyes, childless, never married, Cantina’s new born child in Mabel’s house, Shannon’s brother Gus’ house, both long dead. Out of a window, of the neighbor’s house, peered old lady Stanley, Mrs. Alice Stanley (her husband now dead, died back around 1960, she now was in her mid 80s,her daughter Nadine now was near forty, Nadine’s daughter, pert near twenty-five), smothered with curiosity—she hadn’t seen Otis in nearly a year.
“Well, Cantina,” said Otis “too bad the baby isn’t white, you and the boy will be treated as if you belong in the stockyards.” And he chuckled.
She didn’t move any, just remained on the sofa with the newborn. Looking up at Otis, with a flat expression, with a youthful, no expression, a face gloomy, and sphinx-like, still worn, and tired looking, pale from giving birth but a few hours earlier.
Shannon was nearly a god to Otis, it now had been ten-years, ten long enduring years since his death in 1967, he was now himself, getting old, sixty-seven years old, he had been ten-years Shannon’s junior. He said loudly to Mabel, now owning several fish stores, between Minnesota and Alabama, “Sorry it wasn’t you.” He had always liked Mabel, although Gus never liked him.
“What kind of car is that?” asked Cantina.
“A car, just a car. A damned good car…why?” he remarked back to her, in a soft delicate way, his hand still holding the bamboo walking stick. “The car’s a Cadillac I guess,” he mentioned as if not wanting to mention it, or pretending he didn’t want to mention it.
“Oh,” said Cantina in a near un-hearable shallow whisper. “Yes, it looks like a brand-new car, a 1977 I bet?”
“Yes, that’s what it is.”
“Oh.” She said, as she glanced back out the window. No one could have guessed what she was thinking, but she watched him and watched him as he looked at the child, paced with his staff looked out the window into the cornfields—as if longing for those extended lost days, never to be rekindled.
“Here take this check, its $5000-dollars, do whatever you need to do to make your life better and your child’s, whatever his name is,” he said to Cantina, passing the check over to her in a frizzy like way, and walking out the doorway, as if in a trance, stepping down the few wooden steps onto the ground (leaning on his walking stick with more of his weight than he had before) with a crazy like look on his face, moving a lever in the bamboo upper part of the stick, which made a four inch blade extend outward from a hole in the end of the stick—a weapon as sharp as a razor, and took a bottle of whiskey out of the trunk of his car, and stood there holding the stick in one had and the bottle in the other, drinking and pushing the blade back into its little hidden compartment, its nest by way of the ground, looking into the cornfields: just waiting there, as the neighbor concluded it was who she thought it was, Otis Wilder Mather. The rich black man from Ozark, Alabama, that once was the bosom-buddy of Shannon O’Day, they were like white on rice, or one black pea and one white pea mixed together in a pod: and many a nights had they spent in the cornfields half cocked, and unable to walk. Otis remembered what Shannon had told him once, that life was no more than “A Tick on a clock,” that “to do what you’re going to do, or don’t do it at all, because waiting—if prepared is simply not worth the waste of the time thinking about it…” and then he added “and then life as we know it, is over” and so it was appearing to so, for him.

When Corporal Shannon O’Day was shipped over to France to fight the Germans, in those trenches, Otis then was only ten years old. Then when WWII, came along he didn’t go to that war either, he had something they called flat feet “I’m taking care of my family in Ozark looking after the things,” he’d tell folks who asked, and those who didn’t ask, but wanted to ask, and stared at Otis as if they were about to ask, Shannon O’Day would tell all of those “It aint none of your business why Otis is up here drinking with me in my brother’s cornfields and not in that stupid war those Europeans started over across the Atlantic again.” It’s how it was with Shannon O’Day, a thin, pale-ridden Irishman, with quizzical eyes, who looked about fifty when he was thirty, though it was known that he had married by the time he died a number of times, and only one daughter Catharine, born in 1947, two years after that war had ended and was never a grandfather as well, she was twenty-years old the time Shannon died, not thirty. Mrs. O’Day or Gus’ wife always knew better to stay out of Shannon’s drinking business, and he was just too lazy and idle, although Gus would try to help him out now and then, help him also with his drinking—a hopeless task at best, they said, everyone said knowing that his sole connection with life after the first war: that he didn’t give a hoot for much after that, but Gus’ farm that is where Shannon and Otis lay in the cornfields summer after summer, the first summer Otis was in St. Paul, he worked at the Hill Top Stables, and around 1945, Shannon borrowed him five-hundred dollars and Otis bought his first fish store down in Ozark, Alabama, that started him off, he never forgot it, fact that for years now Gus had allowed him to drink like crazy in the cornfields was due to Shannon getting mad if he’d not allow it, which Gus had purchased when Shannon was just ten years old, and raised him from then on, until the war that is. For a while in other years, Otis even lived with Shannon down in his apartment, the one he kept on Wabasha Street, away from Gertrude his wife at the time, who lived on Amenable Street, he had been living folks said—hearsay, in some caves, outer section of the sewer system, over by Rondo Street (a part, section made during the Civil War days, held up by old rotting timbers, wooden beams, some replaced with large stones and cement blocks, it kept him dry from the rainy days, and he could make a fire with no worrying about city code violations, or being spotted as a vagrant and put in jail, or being asphyxiate with smoke)—Rondo, being a street and district in St. Paul, know for the blacks; Otis, a bachelor in his decrepitude surroundings, no more than a open hole, less than a barn. So now it looked like he was doing fine in the financial area, aged somewhat, and seemingly a little sick, too much reminiscing, too many hardships to look back on, and that terrific ability to drink in the act of near dying.
Even the Stanley’s knew by observation, or heard by hearsay, much of what took place in those far-off days. That Gus and his kind, his crowd laughed at Shannon for taking Otis in as if he was a sparrow with a broken wing—and a nigger lover on top of it. And Otis knew it was not the first time they had laughed at him, calling Shannon: nigger lover, even Gus said that, I mean, he wasn’t called white trash, which would have been truer than nigger lover, I mean he just took a liking for Otis, and he did work: Shannon did work, once at a foundry and a few other places, just not steadily. They began to tell Shannon themselves down at the local downtown Conley Island Bar, the so called Group Gus hung out with, the likes Judge Finley,
“Tell that nigger friend of yours to stay down in Alabama where he belongs; you know which one, that war dodger!”
The drunker Shannon would get, the more redder his face got, the more angry he got, he then would look about the bar of white faces and bloodshot eyes and stained yellow teeth from smoking cigar after cigar, or cigarette after cigarette, behind the smoke, you could see where scorn prowled, and it was there from his extending square jaw bones to inside its marrow, and Gus knew Shannon’s blood was red hot, like a flaming sword ready to strike “I got to go on home now fellows, because I got a wife that wakes me up early to tend to those cornfields, I got to mosey on home now see you all later…” he’d say, and bring Shannon with him before he tore up the bar, bring him to his house on Albemarle Street if he could walk, or if not, to his apartment around the corner. Shannon usually got half cocked, but not all that drunk he was a professional drinker, I mean he could drink—seldom got sick like those armature drinkers—so he’d say, boast, pretending he was drunker, walking out of the bars, and if Judge Finley was there, he’d say to the old judge “Git out of my way fag, I like niggers better!” And Gus and the old Judge would just brush it off as if he was out of his mind.
“Niggers?” the judge would repeat; “You got a nigger lover for a brother Gus!” laughing now.
“Yes,” Gus would say. “I know, he looks after a big black one, but aint nothing I can do about it, he’s my brother.”
“Send them all back to the South, or to Africa!” the old judge always could be quoted as saying, as if it was his one and only phrase for the black race.
This was all true what Judge Finley said about Shannon O’Day, he did take care, watch over Otis like an older brother would, even when Gus tried to put him in jail for burning his fields, which he never burnt, and Shannon couldn’t say way, because had he told the truth, he would have exposed his brother’s wife to infidelity. So not knowing—even at the cost of belittlement, was better than telling him the truth, it was a matter of sorting out priorities, who got hurt the worse, or the levels of hurt, or where was the point of most damage.
But with Otis, there was this kind of devotion, not pride for prides sake, but devotion, for devotions sake, for Otis’ sake, it lifted him up from a depressing world that Shannon took his side—no matter what the cost was to him, he became much more than he ever expected to become because of Shannon’s outlook on him, not his own outlook—he couldn’t beat the white man to death physically, so he beat him to death with success. No one up in the Midwest in those early days would except him, permit him unabated to advance, it was an attitude among the whites: I aint going to give to no nigger—especially coming from down south, who avoided a war, the chance to settle down here among us good white folks, to seed money home to feed those little niggers back in Ozark, that was the way of thinking. “Aint no chance in hell, we’re going to do that,” old Judge Finley would confirm while half drunk in the bars, say it to himself or anyone listening, willing to listen—sober enough to decipher. Judge Finley had told Otis, a few decades back, nearly cussed him out in the courtroom, to head on out of town, and spend more time where he came from, than were he came to, meaning, Alabama and not Minnesota. Perhaps Finley’s mind—being a friend of Gus—knew nothing else would scare Otis away, yet the fact remained, Otis came back after years, and rekindled the friendship he once had with Shannon, oh, it wasn’t exactly as it was before, but between business and business he spent a whole lot of afternoons with Shannon drinking—of course no longer able to take drink after drink like he used to, and at this time he formed even a bond with Cantina, Shannon’s only daughter, otherwise known as Catherine. He watched her grow up, you could say. Even thought of himself as her uncle, for the time being, until she showed development, and after Shannon died, his heart would be quiet and proud he took such an interest in her, although after Mabel’s husband died, remembering her fling with him, he had never forgot it actually—he had a half lit flame for her, and she had a full lit flame for him. The only problem was, or so it seemed, was that humanity had created a curse for him, a black skinned curse, although times were changing, they were changing slowly in Minnesota.
“Your father was a fine proud man, a war hero,” he told Catherine, as if he was near god himself. And had he aimed to look like anyone white, it would have been Shannon O’Day.


“I know what they all say to one another,” he had told Cantina, a year later, after the child had been born. “I can just visualize it, live it all over for the boy: but I can fix it, not with money but I can fix it. Just like your father fixed things up for me. It has taken me thirty-five years, but I done it at last, I’m richer than a dog with a barn full of bones. Now that I think of it, I never did ask you, what did you named the boy?”
It had been a year since she had seen Otis, it was pert near the same month and day he had left, and now returned, but a year apart, the boy was walking, black as the ace of spades, and Cantina was as white as the empty space around the ace of spades.
While thinking, pacing between the kitchen and the living room, Mabel busy doing the dishes, and Cantina fumbling on the couch involved somehow with putting a new shirt on the boy, said “Otis Jr., his name is Otis Wilde O’Day Mather Jr.” In his head, in Otis’ head came a sound of screeching tires, until there was a sudden stop, “What?” he said.
He broke suddenly free, to think free. Thinking “How on God’s earth can this little boy grow up here, with a white woman, and how can Shannon O’Day’s daughter live with this scorn, a life time of scorn wherever they walk, this just wasn’t good enough for Shannon O’Day, not at all…” thoughts were galloping to and fro in his mind; and then Cantina look his way fumbled with the boy’s shirt, broke free of her attention span that she had on the boy: to ask, quite clearly ask, looking at Otis, lonely and droopy-eyed —ask explicable, beyond—and seemingly into his mind’s eye, “Just what is on your mind Otis?”
Suddenly she could see he was contemplating something, and the child knew something, he was looking at him with foresight, as if he realized that his father’s voice had entered a tomb.
“What’s the matter Otis,” she repeated; “The boy” he said, in a depressed, drunken astonishment, as if he had just figured it out. He seemed to watch an imaginary happening taking place—eyes towards the heavens, one he was going to duplicate.

Now it was getting toward twilight. His composure had completely changed, the boy was crying, and his mother was trying to breastfeed the boy, but he kept on crying no matter what. As it is often said, a child knows at six months old, knows his parent’s character to the point of controlling his parents, perhaps it is truer than fiction, but could it be controlled this evening was the unspoken question? Cantina’s face still puzzled on Otis’ previous behavior, and lack of candor: especially, his brooding, his sphinx-like face, now it was calm and collected “Do you want something to eat?” asked Mabel.
“I don’t want anything,” he remarked stern and straight, looking at the child, smiling at Catherine—but the child had some kind of foresight, intuition, something instinctive, as if its whole body knew what his brain couldn’t completely put together—a siren went off in his eyes—and it cried and cried, and moved and wanted to get away as if it was a little bird caught in the grips of a closing hand, closing fist.
“You should eat something,” she exclaimed.
This time he did not answer at all, staring down at the child—his walking stick in his hand, He turned the lever on the upper part of the bamboo, and the sun had completely been devoured by night now. “It wouldn’t be much longer, the child will be sleeping,” said Cantina, thinking the crying was driving Otis crazy. He couldn’t hear her, or the child’s cries, he couldn’t hear anything, or feel anything, no longer curious of what people might think now or then, but knowing how vengeful they could be in the future for his child. He could even hear what they were saying about him and his child and Shannon O’Day, his bosom-buddy, years in advance, the suggestion of believing afar into the fury man’s heart, their intent: Old Otis Wilde Mather with his hand tumbling at last he come to the conclusion, his child would not pay the same price for life he had paid: he screamed aloud like a madman, glancing at Cantina watching the child
“What are you thinking, going to do…!” she said.
“Nothing much! Nothing Much!” that’s what he screamed, as the four inch blade shot out of the end of his walking stick that no one seen—that he only felt it movement forward, thrust, its click into a solid and firm hold, and only he knew, could feel the extending weight at the end of his stick. His eyes were becoming indistinctly blurred, in the new born twilight. “Don’t worry any,” he said calmly, smoothly as everything became still, as if before a storm. He heard the galloping in his head again—“…horses: those damn horses again…” he complained, in a whisper, but he remained still. His hand firmly on the top of his walking stick, he stood up, faced the girl and child “Otis,” she said, as if thinking he was leaving.
“I’m here, I’m right here, don’t fret…” Otis said with a smile, a storm had started outside, and the lights went off. His left hand touched the child’s throat, “What are you doing?” asked Cantina in the dark.
Now he moved his right had swiftly with the end of the bamboo. He knew exactly in the dark where the child was, every inch of him, just as he knew every turn, every event in his life, every moment he and Shannon O’Day spent together. The room exploded with terror—but to Otis the horses in his head had now stopped galloping, and consequently, there was a wild relief.
“Otis!” the mother shouted; “Stop! Stop! Otis! Otis!”
But the tall thin, fuming figures crippled around the baboon couldn’t stop, against the frown and roar in the room, and the abrupt storm out side and Mabel frozen stiff in the archway of the kitchen. With the blade lifted, it opened up a wound around the neck of a glaring child’s eyes, without any cry, any sound, the mother passed out.

No: 660 (8-4-2010) Written: as a pre-story to “The Black Sedan”
Leading up to Otis demise••



Galloping Horses
(Part Two, to “Otis”)




To Otis, the shouts and screams were the loudest thing he had ever heard in his life, and they were now echoing in his head, and there were galloping horses in his head—again. The horses were pounding, and of course could not be heard outside of Otis’ head, and it continued to build, as he stood by his car, making not a sound. It was outrageous, unbelievable what he had just done. But it was too late to undo, to re-cross that bridge, to even re-build that bridge, the child, the infant was dead. He wanted to run. He figured he might. He had talked himself into doing so the night before. Thus, he expected to, and he expected everything to go as planned, and it did, except for the galloping horses inside his head. “Right after you do what you got to do to the infant, if it is born today, or tomorrow, you can run and escape back to Alabama,” he had told himself. “But you can’t run until you finish the plan.” He did that; he did all he had planned but run. His eyes were closed now, he was shaking, and he opened his trunk for a bottle of whiskey. He bent over to the outside foist, turned it on and washed his hands, and washed his hands, washed them for two hours straight. These were his vain attempts to calm down, clean that dirty sin. He knew the decaying corpse was still on the couch, he saw Mabel standing still in the kitchen doorway, her hands over her face, where Cantina was he didn’t know, he had been out by the car for a long time now, washing his hands for a long time, fell on the ground woke up (having had slept for four hours). He had prepared himself for the killing, and he knew he’d never forget this day, forget about what he did so if he was to be hung by the neck to die, so be it. His body and mind was empty, he was or had been waiting, thinking listening for the police, but they didn’t come. It was all too grotesque, nightmarish, and he wasn’t going to run.


The sound of the horse’s hoofs came steadily. He followed the sound as if it was in the air, and he was sweating. Then the galloping ceased. He stepped forward, his teeth grinding one on top of the other, nearly all of them. His lips dry, his hands sweaty half blind, a faint phosphorescent glare into the eyes of heaven—it was a dark heaven, it was 2:00 a.m., in the morning, he looked at the shape of the corn stalks—shadowy shapes like creatures of the night, perhaps it was just a possum, because there was an infant like cry, and he knew it couldn’t be the infant; after a time, he started slashing at his fingers, fingers to fingers, he found some silence. He walked backwards to the field. He was a large man, bumping everything on his way to the cornfield, drinking the bottle of whiskey gulp after gulf. At last he threw his bamboo walking stick over by a hollow stump, and fell suddenly beneath the corn stalks, crawling on his knuckles, faint in his head, the ground was damp; he snuffed at the dirt with his nostrils. Now he lay back glaring at the sky. He had never been so tired, so spent, so dark inside, he hooted like an owl, and passed out (Mabel, ended up looking for Otis—thinking, everything had gotten out of hand).
You can mark it, he never run.
“You can never tell what a man will do when in a pinch,” said Mabel, “what would Shannon do?” She sat on the top of her step that evening, in old trousers, and a collarless white blouse, smoking a cigarette. “He had no reason to run off,” she commented, “to run into those cornfields as if it was his sanctuary, as it was for Shannon.”
Cantina, her face lowered, beaten and worn, stained, shabby hair, “I got to say something,” she said, “but I just don’t know what!” And she wished she had not even spoken that.
“You’re better off without the child,” said Mabel, as if trying to protect Otis, “drinking makes you do strange things,” she added.


No: 661 (8-5-2010)




“Amnon, Amnon!”
((A Shannon O’Day Story) (Late 1984 to1988))





Chapter One
(Homecoming)


It was the morning after Amnon had returned home from college; he had spent six-years away at Harvard gotten his law degree (now twenty-four years old, handsome, tall, dark eyes and square jaw, and broad shoulders, five foot eleven), and was hoping to get an early judge’s seat in Ramsey County, likened to his father—now deceased, Judge Albert Finley, the elder, and he was out on the town with his younger sister Tamar—who had just turned eighteen (prom queen from Washington High School, a beauty and well developed since last he saw her), and was preparing for school, and Mrs. Finley, their mother—Eleanor Finley (madden name Hill, from a well to do family, from Summit Hill in St. Paul, nearby where she once lived in a large mansion—nearly connecting to her parents’ house, now a museum) all three had gone out celebrating his Law Degree, to the Blue Horse Restaurant and Bar, out on University Avenue. In a way, this was for Eleanor, a climacteric year, one son returns and one child leaves, but Tamar would not be far away, she’d be living on campus, at the University of Minnesota, but a few miles away, studying Psychology. The elder boy, G.N. Finley, or often just called Nathan for his middle name—leaving the George out because it was too close to George Washington’s name, he was already a judge in Minnesota, twenty-eight years old, who had gotten into some trouble a few years back, called “The Black Sedan Case” in Minnesota, dealing with the death of Otis Wilde Mather, a rich negro from Ozark, Alabama, a friend to the O’Day family, in particular to a deceased man once known in the city as Shannon O’Day, a war hero of the Great War, so legend says. The case was on hold between Joe Quinn and Sheriff Donavan’s statement, and Truman Quinn, had said it was a false statement, his son was tricked into saying what he said. But Banister Samuel Jackson Mather, Otis’ brother was pushing the government to act on this case—to reopen it, because it was closed so quickly and oddly, and then the sheriff had a turn of heart and stated Joe said he killed Otis, and now his father said, “My sons a little daffy as you all know, and he can be tricked easily, as the Sheriff had done.”
Anyhow, during the whole evening, Tamar had hardly looked at her brother, had said only a few words to him, especially when he had demanded they dance together and him crushing his body against hers, like slamming a door into her face, and trying to persuade her to go out and have a night-cap after they took their mother home. He had smelled the heavy perfume she used, he liked it, but she remained quiet, pert near still, and she walked off the dance floor, not waiting for his approval. Amnon made no reply, and slacken his pace as she increased hers.
When they had gotten home, he kept her up for three hours talking of his affairs at Harvard, drinking glass after glass of wine, red dry wine, and how she had blossomed into a beauty, as they walked on through the mansion in the darkness, down the corridor to their bedrooms—he kept close to her like a puppy to its mother.
“Oh Amnon, Amnon stop!” she said, “stop thinking I’m one of your girlfriends at school, I’m your sister, everybody seems to know that but you.” He slid his arm around her neck, sliding it on and over her shoulder, pinned her against the wall, the light was dim above them, “It’s true,” he said to her, “I’m your brother,” and her quick reply was, “You’re dirty! Step back!”

It was now well into early hours of the morning, and the scent of her was still on him, transplanted into his pores, drifted steadily into his bedroom from hers, as if it was waves of flowers following him; he had rapped her, kind of rapped her, without much resistance beyond the shady side of “Amnon, Amnon, stop, please don’t”; whereupon, after it was over he retreated himself to tiptoe back to his bedroom, not necessary back, since he had not been there that evening—yet, but down to his room, around the corridor. From his bedroom window, he could see her bedroom—and there he stared for a moment looking at her laying there naked, as he had pulled her covers off of her for that very reason, in her bed still sleeping.
Tamer, messed about the kitchen nervously in the morning with her mother, as the servant waxed the living room table and chairs, dusting this and that, and the cook was making breakfast for Tamer and Eleanor, Amnon was still sleeping, it was 9:00 a.m., Saturday, they had slept in some.



Chapter Two
(The Deal)



In the meantime, Amnon, dashed about the city, talking to his father’s old friends, making connections, harassed the younger lawyers at the courthouse, in his old cold arrogant Finley fashion, and took a liking for Catherine O’Day, now thirty-seven years old, she owned Gus O’Day’s old Farm—farmhouse and cornfield and all, had also inherited $10,000-dollars from her father’s will, and Otis Wilde Mather left her a fish store down on Wabasha Street in the city, now dead, all those from the last generation now were dead, all those I’ve just mentioned, I just mentioned were dead to include Mabel, she had quite a sum after adding it all up. And Catherine had known of Amnon from the parties Gus had in what she’d now call the old days, and when he had invited Old Judge Finley over, and his sons and wife for dinner. Shannon was seldom about. So it was an updated reunion for them both.
Tamer had went off to the University, but had made a deal with Amnon, that he should ask mother for a $5,000-dollars advance, of his inherence, lest she tell her what he had done, raped her, kind of rapped her, but she’d make it sound more like ‘Raped’ not the second one. She gave him until the end of the semester, three months—this of course would ruin his career, and as cold as he was, so was she—it was a Finley to Finley genetic thing, I think. And Amnon had known the bad reputation his bother had gotten from the “Black Sedan Incident,” he nearly lost his judgeship: where the brute of a boxer had killed Otis—when in essence he was just supposed to have scare him, which the case was still fermenting between the Courthouse and the Police Station, looking to get a second and more clearer statement from the accused, now out on bail on $10,000-dollars. And should the Finley’s name come up again, come out in anymore derogatory cases, it would for sure, stop his being appointed to any critical position, and do his brother harm—not to mention his family name. But he dare not go to his mother, lest he wanted to be taken completely out of the will—she was not of course an original Finley, rather a Hill, but being married to one for over fifty-years made her cold as ice or could be, and as for his brother, if he knew, he’d surely not assist him in a judgeship or job or anything, wanting to keep his distance.


He spent a lot of time with Catherine O’Day now, and at the Courthouse as an assistant for his bother, checking out cases, occasionally now and then going out with the guys for a drink—not his usual self, and spending more time courting Catherine, over ten years his senior. Actually, his mother was growing a little concerned, un-preventative in the sense of she was used to being, just the opposite—over protective.
“Mark my words mother, I have my reasons, I need to make my mark while I can, I’m nearly twenty-five,” as if he would store up the devilment in the mean time, only to display it sometime afterwards, whereupon once he got what he wanted, and got to where he wanted to go, he’d hold loose of it, and let his inners burst wherever it may. And then, anyone in the way would have hell to pay.
“Why, what is it that is driving you,” she asked him, knowing the first few days back he was so carefree, but that gay kind of look was gone, that happy go lucky look had disappeared for a serious one. And then worse turned to worse, Tamer was pregnant, and she wanted $10,000 to shut up.
“Well,” said Amnon in agreement “If you want it, it will take longer,” and he got a reprieve out of that; meaning, five-thousand as agreed on before, which was in a week, and the other five in three more months, thereafter. Amnon leaned over the sofa at their mansion, and touched her arm “All this for one night’s pleasure?” he remarked.
“I don’t see why you are so upset over it, it’s your child. I mean, it really is.”
“Oh,” he said “then I’ll just wait to see the birth certificate, before I give you the second $5000-dollars and if my name is on it, I won’t pay.”
She sat there rigidly, “You’ll pay until that child is eighteen years old, or until I get married.” She said indomitable.
“Is that so,” Amnon said, walking over to the piano, sitting down on the stool and starting to play, ‘Old Man River,’ then commented, “Those psychology courses are really doing you justice!”



Chapter Three
(The Doormat)



The Child was born out of wedlock, and named Erskine Finley, in lack of knowing the father’s name, she told her mother she had gotten drunk and got Pregnant from some stranger at a college party. She ended up enjoying the grandchild nonetheless—that is to say, without knowing the name of the father, for the following two years, during those days Amnon filled his destiny, and became a judge, and discovered pride once more, but not to any wild extent. And he made his payments as she had demanded $5000 every three months. Between his salary and playing the horses, living at home, it had worked out. Those days he drove a lesser valued car also, as he drove into town, and had less expensive habits, and gave up courting Miss O’Day, whom he was only courting anyhow for an escape route should he need one.
Mrs. Finley, her growing belief, what at last her youngest son had settled down, but something told her, it wouldn’t last. That he’d outwear this time and that old violent temper of his would flare up. Mrs. Finley having a true lack of optimistic outlook for young Amnon: Who even was quite fond of Erskine? She seemingly disillusioned herself by assisting him in every way she could to get him the best position at the courthouse, and in line for a future state legislative position. Yet in all, Amnon himself improved in his own ways, without perhaps even knowing, or wanting to, but through the snare he had created with Tamer, He had been so cleverly tricked, so he felt—now into this clandestine fatherhood dilemma. Tamer, herself was wondering how long before he’d grow out of wanting success at the price he was paying for it—monitory, and position. Mother Finley felt he needed a wife, but Tamer felt different, there went her support: perhaps Eleanor forgot: they both bled the same blood.

Then sowing-time over the following year—1988, Ronald Reagan was still president, Tamer had raised her support payments to $7000-per month. And she found herself with nothing to do, she had one year of college left, a free summer, and she was bored, and Amnon was taking interest in Miss O’Day again, and that bothered her. The summer was warm and hot, and she had gone into some kind of savage gloom over being a single mother. It was that summer, Mrs. Eleanor Finley pass on, had a heart attack. The family split up the $600,000-dollars equally, and only the mansion was left, and that had a 1.6 million dollar price tag on it. And Amnon was now engaged to Cantina O’Day. It was a sweet and sour summer for Tamer.


Chapter Four
(Impact)



Samuel Ingway a young lad of twelve years old, son to a foreman who works at a foundry on the East Side of town called Malibu Iron, had been down by the Mississippi River playing, somewhat playing, more at waking up tramps and hobos sleeping inside of the cave within the cliffs, right above the Robert Street Bridge, that crossed the River from St. Paul—he’d run up to as they were still sleeping, kick them here or there and run like hell; a car had been driven onto the first part of the bridge, going southwest, towards West St. Paul that is, and the car went out of control and had skidded and jumped over the side railing, and crashed, rolled and crashed, halfway into the Mississippi River, and the man in the car was groaning, he was still alive—but painful groaning, and he lay with his head on Samuel’s knees cussing, struggling to move his body, but he was pinned, and the boy just let him do as he wished, with half opened eyes; the boy waiting for someone, anyone to appear to help him. The man looked up to the boy “Something busted in the brake line,” he mumbled—still half in a daze, “I’m not drunk or anything, I think it was… (and he went silent, as if he had a hunch….)” The boy held his knee up higher so his head would not drop back into the shallow water; he was liable to drawn otherwise.
“I hear the ambulance coming sir,” the boy said.
“You, who are you?” asked Amnon.
“Samuel, Samuel Ingway, I was just checking out the caves down here and I heard a crash and here I am. I can’t pull you out, you’re too heavy, I already tired,” said the boy, “but I’ll stay with you,” he said with a calm face, looking at the wet face from what had been in the water prior to his arrival.

“We better get him out of here,” said the first arriving police officer to the boy.
“Aint nobody else coming?” asked the boy.
“He you’re pa?” asked the police officer, as they both struggled to pull Amnon out and would have but couldn’t slide him completely out, his feet were crushed under a tone of iron and steel. So they both stopped, having him half way out: as both man and boy caught their breaths.
“No,” said the boy, “He’s not my pa; he looks like a dead man to me though,” added the boy.
“He sure does act like one,” said the police officer; and then he was.


Outline: 8-16-2010/No: 668







The Ebon Room


Judson Macomb

“Long and dark eldritch evenings, I lived and listened and slept, in this wind howling deep lustrous black room of gloom—no electric bulbs embedded in the ceiling, flattened by boredom, covered by a load of stone, no birthdays, choked with idleness, as a urine pungent smell drifted throughout my cell daily, as if it was stuck in limbo like me. No stray birds, a few stray mice, while in a deep, frenzied fantasy. And never once did I blaspheme God, nor seek his invisible shield. And in the process became an absurdist, and believed that it all was meaningless, irrational but consequently, we must go on with our existence, this strained conceit in us demands we do so, thinking that we are more than what we are, or hoping we are— And waited, and I waited for shapes in the shadows to form, and sensed things of darkness near me, and after awhile, saw shrill looking cadaverous faces lingering and lurking in the air, and smelt putrid odors as it lingered likewise in invisible clouds overhead—beings, dragging their flimsy corpse like bodies to and fro, malodorously from corner to corner.
“I was young back then, filled with irony and the wonder of life. Dark rooms are not silent, doctor. All those days I watched and listened and I knew they were there. The creatures were like ebon manna falling from the sky while living those four-years in a silent panic. And with their yellow eyes I could see them clearer; they grew friendlier as time passed— in the amber twilights of my cell, created by some kind of sorcery, I do suppose, in this titan built prison, with no horizons, only a bleak and eldritch twilight, with anon wings to the eerie darkness it so dearly loved, and they even spoke to me—as they separated from one point in the room to another in their ongoing ashy like transfigurations, all these dark things: shadows, and shapes and strange things out of other worlds, out of space and time, out of a vapor like haze.
“I only got glimpses of them of course—when they talked and howled, lurked, moved about stealthily until they simply disappeared—this awful lone, that always was so still in my room, was a blessing when they came to visit me, even if they were who they were—whoever they were, as I stood the first few times—weirdly stood in a hysterical posture, and frantic—stood in an upright, pure vertical position until I got to know them better, and became at ease—became familiar with seeing them, they sounded like rushing water, far-off at sea when they spoke, as if halfway in our world, and halfway in theirs—they were, by and large, ebony shadows, with cadaverous glimpses: beings more ancient than the mountains, more diabolic than the creatures of the deep, and some were reptilian. ‘Huh!’ I said to myself, ‘it is better to mingle with the dead or half dead, since I am not allowed to mingle with the living.’ ”
I tried often to sit up erect; it was most a most difficult task at times, after an extraordinary effort, I managed to do so, I did realize at that time I was very weak, my thoughts were confused, but my curiosity wasn’t, although I found it most difficult to orient myself in any manner, being light-headed, living in an enfeeble state of existence—dazed. But these abruptions—of what you call, unreality, allowed me to live on. You see doctor, it really wasn’t starvation that was going to kill me—I knew that from day one, but rather an extreme thirst for other life, contact; boredom you know, kills all living things faster than any disease. Thus, the roar of life is like protein to the flesh, not the complete peril of silence that would be a bitter death. You might say, during my captivity, I was in uncharted space, within the darkest reefs. Many of times I felt I died, and was revived by one or more of these creatures.
Only having a Shawl…
“One night—in the corner of my room, this yellow-eyed thing, reptilian thing, creature, with watermelon seeds for eyes, with a long purple shawl, or cape, something on that order—very long, you know the one, I saw him many times after this night, this first visit, he appeared to be beckoning me to come to him, in his little corner of the room, originally my room my corner, not always did I see him but on many occasions thereafter he shared my room with me without knocking. He filled the room many a night with his chanting; it soothed me. Matter-of-fact, many of times I felt I had died, and was revived by one or more of these creatures.”

“How was your room?” questioned the doctor.
“It was long and narrow, with a tall ceiling, it was a trifle taller than I. and I’m pert near six-foot tall. This much I distinctly recall, but for the most part—for the life of me, it seems unreal and remote, and somehow belongs to another person other than me. In those days, now seemingly eerie and far off days, I often felt very dreamy and detached from everything and in particular, everybody. I found bugs very edible, after a while and I even pretended they were fruit. I can’t identify the bugs, but its portion was mouth-watering after a while—their residue adding to the putrid odor.”
“You have given me a heap of weird impressions,” said the doctor, “some of which could not exist in our everyday reality. I do hope you see this more clearly now that you are out of your old environment, rest and proper nutrition intake is of course required before your abnormal reality completely disappears, and the oddity of it all. They differ from anything reasonable, through worlds unknown to us, who live in a world of matter-of-factness, or at least from anything I’ve ever encountered. I don’t want to send you to an asylum, you’ve been through enough, but you must acknowledge, that your long stay in that room contributed to these bizarre impressions.”
Consequently, in an effort to surmount his agitation, Judson Macomb started pacing the floor with vehement briskness from wall to wall in the doctor’s office.
“We are not in Germany anymore,” remarked the doctor, to his client, “you can let me know who gave you the cape now, or is it a robe or was it a shawl? no one will tell the SS where you got it? And what wing were you on?” Then Doctor R. J. Sharp saw Judson Macomb, his patient, start to tremble, he wouldn’t stop. Then Judson rolled around on his back right there in the middle of his office floor—as if in some cyclopean cave, stretching out flat, his arms entangled—a groaning from a shrill voice with some dysphonic noises came out of his mouth—indiscernible words, his eyes became a malignant red, as he tried to suppress the unpleasant moment, but he couldn’t. A sinister, ominous aching in his head prevailed; the inmost fibers of his body illumed to a purple and yellow heat, creating a near unearthly form to him, as his body vibrated like a thunder storm right then and there on the woodened varnished floor. He held onto his head, he held onto it as if it might fall off his neck, and closed his eyes. “The room was like an alpine cliff sometimes,” he murmured, “if it wasn’t for those trans-dimensional pilgrims, I’d not be here today doctor,” he exclaimed, looking up at him. “Yes, they invaded my room, had overtaken my room but, but there I lived in a stupor, without a friend, what did the SS expect. In that room the granite walls were often being pinched immeasurably nearer to me, as if to squeeze the life out of me like a python. I couldn’t stop them.” Then he cried out in silence with his convex and reddened eyes and looked towards the ceiling as if it was some great somber sky.

To try to break the moment, the doctor asked his patient a frivolous question, “You were known as number 545, is this correct?”
Judson breathed with difficulty. He glanced at the doctor—as he sat up, no longer a cosmic menace— soothe and exalt: “I never really liked falling to sleep back then, nor do I nowadays, because I often thought I’d never wake up.”
“They were SS men, right?” asked the doctor.
Judson was now sitting upright, and in a chair, he let his head droop, it seemed heavy for him, the muscles in his neck were disturbing to look at by the doctor, trusting out from the surrounding surface on a semi rounded mass of flesh. He turned to look out the window, there was a mild sun.
“They, the creatures and I had an obscure kind of telepathy between us, I felt assured they knew what I was thinking, what I was saying when I wasn’t saying anything out loud, and I knew what they were thinking, but not saying, out loud. We both had ramparts to each others brains.”
“Did you ever go over to help in the crematorium?” asked the doctor.
His client didn’t answer, but the doctor knew he most likely didn’t, or couldn’t, he was eighty-pounds when he was found in his room, and was near six foot tall.
“The creatures were dancing, dragging the dead like a heap of cobwebs, to and fro throughout the room, peering at me oddly, and after a few years, I got redeeming glimpses of a clear blue sky, they allowed me to see.”
“You do realize you were having hallucinations in that room, Mr. Macomb, don’t you?” remarked the doctor, knowing there were no windows in the room. And Judson closed his eyes again, remembering the stench, it was of a latrine, it floated in the air, everywhere.
“I just know this world was not my own,” replied Judson.
“Perhaps these hallucinations, and this strange-dimensional world, or worlds, with nameless beings, simple grew stranger from day to day, was created by your mind, a mad and long flash of fears, running through your mind so as to survive” said the doctor.
“Why do you say that?” asked Judson.
“Describe your guard that paced the hallway,” asked the doctor.
“I seldom seen him, but the few times I did, he had voracious eyes and a jaw long-drawn-out, and wide. And he mumbled and fumbled all the time, I heard him do so.”
“Well, first of all, you had that long cape or was it a robe wrapped around you, I mean that was the only thing you had on, when they found you, and you never saw a guard, but the first day, and that was four years before your release, and you never saw the sky, because they never took you out of the one room, and you say…” then the doctor hesitated to finish his sentence.
“The cape my friend gave it to me, is that what you wanted to say?” asked Judson, “that my friend with the yellow irises, and black pupils the size of watermelon seeds was not really in my room, that I got it from a guard or someone else? But you said I never seen the guard?”
“Well,” said the doctor, “isn’t that more believable than that reptilian creature in your room?” Although that was problematic also, usually political prisoners or criminals never got such things, matter of fact the only one that could have given him the long purple type robe, was the Commandant, and he never had one, so that was most unlikely, and out of the question. But the good doctor wanted Judson to face reality, not make up stories to his fancy. On the other hand, he had been too weak to work and was seldom brought out for exercising from his one man cell. He was actually dying. Had they had a gas chamber, he might have had a quicker death than being starved to death slowly.
“Why,” asked Judson Macomb, “why do you insist by implying it was not my friend in the room?” Then he got up, quite like, he had closed his eyes again, and was hardly breathing, scratching himself here and there, his eyes then opened, but now vacant, then turned towards the doctor, looking at his egg-shaped head, “Why?” he asked a second time.
“Because it’s not possible,” said the doctor, “you see, when they found you, you were in a cell as big as a stone coffin, in which one could neither stand nor lie—”

Written: 6-14 & 15-2010; No: 623







The Tiamat,
And the Demonic Stampede

((6820 BC) (part one of three))


The Tiamat of the Underworld


Tiamat's Equatorial Stars

Beneath the equatorial starsWhere once, warriorsTurned their eyes, to the deep, deepInto the deep green sea:
Lays a hovering legend—calledThe Tiamat, wicked and terrifying.
Waiting—frightfully waitingAre these ancient eyesFor the gigantic bulk—Of a demigod, to reappear.


Prelude

The author has written three books and several tales on the adventures of the Tiamat, and Sinned. Published in 2002, this being the first published story since. The story here takes place around 6,820 BC (the Chakolithic Period—10,000 to 4300 BC), with her antagonist being Sinned, a man close to the One God. The Tiamat’s cohort, being the demigods of Yort, and her sons: Untameable, the First Born, and her rivals Marduk, Seth, the Tiger Woman, the Ram demigod, and the White Brute Gorillas; Lucifer who had his dealings with both the Tiamat and Marduk, was at this time, at his forest temple, outside the city, thus, not involved with this happening, but he was well known throughout the city and had his own temple in Yort, a city fortress. It was the ‘The Age of Pride’ where men and demigods lived in the visible world next to each other.



The Story




Yort, harbour


Her hands were very quietly nervous. Sinned, understood why she didn’t care to talk about it, but she wanted to talk, had to talk about it. But she had come from the Great City fortress, Yort, to see him in Pergamum, to report what took place, was still taking place, at the harbour, in the city, near the woods, she came hoping he could be of assistance. She was here to report what took place by the demigods in particular, the Tiamat and her two sons: Untameable, and the First Born, and her cohort, Marduk, Seth, the Ram, tiger Woman, the White Brute Gorillas. King Thesas III, ruler of Yort was in a deep underground vault within the city, hidden away from the demonic battle and stampede.





Princess Fatemeh




Princess Fatemeh, the daughter of King Thesas III, and her mother, the Queen, Ellen sat by her side as they told Sinned the story you are about to hear:

“The boat was already to sail,” said the daughter, “had we not been down at the dock, I doubt we would have escaped; or had been able to get ready to escape.”
“Yes,” said the mother, “the queen’s boats always sail at forenoon on Friday.”
“Just prior to this time was a great upheaval that took place, a great rumbling sound, and then everything started to rock to and fro, even the dock rolled and started to buckle. My mother and I were on board the boat, leaning on the rail. It had lasted about a minute,” said the daughter.
“We both fell flat onto and into the water and had to swim to the dock,” said the mother (exasperated.)
“It is, as you know Sinned, a big wooden dock, but it nonetheless rolled back and forth, what was left of it. My daughter and I hung onto each other for dear life. I remember seeing several of our navy men clambering back up out of the water. We remained for the moment right alongside of the statue of King Thesas the I (near the harbour), the first Thesas of Yort, the one your father fought with so many years ago and captured the Great Macedonian Stone, that had the rules and the name of the One True God, on it, taking it from the Tiamat, and bringing it to Yort, and of course giving up his life for it. How proud we were of him.”
“What did you do when the shock was over?” asked Sinned.
“We were now ashore. We had to climb the hill to Yort, no one to carry us up, no horses or wheeled means of transport to take us. The dock was crumbled in places and great portions of the wood were afloat in the harbour. We wanted to have our King saved from this horrid disaster, only to find out he was hidden in the underground vault.
“As I was about to say, we got as far as the One God Temple, and it was caved-in.


The City and the
Stampede


“All the walls in the city had fallen down, in on themselves like a crushed and open dam…just demolished, crumbled, everything crumbled to the ground. The demigods were fighting one another, the Tiamat with Marduk, Seth with the Tiger Woman, Untameable with the Ram demigod, the First Born with some angelic force called Hawk (eye of the sun, a leader from the dark angels of the person house for angels, someplace hidden in the cosmos). The White Gorillas, among themselves,” said the princess.
Said the mother, a little airless, “There was nothing we could do, there was a big cloud of dust all over everything from the buildings that had caved in. Much of the city could hardly been seen, nothing clear, visible, and fires were breaking out everywhere, all over.”
“What were the people doing, how were they reacting? Did they pray to the One God? Run into any of the temples?” asked Sinned.
“There didn’t’ seem to be any panic. That was the strange thing. I didn’t see anyone hysterical at all. There was a family, by the Tiamat’s temple and it caved in all around them, and they were badly shaken, and the little girl came out crying, and there were a horde of others, actually drinking wine standing and watching from the great walls of Yort, but they just stood there, they didn’t move much. They looked as if they couldn’t move, as if they were in a semi state of shock, and of course nobody helped anybody, everyone looking out for themselves,” remarked the Queen.


The Escape


“How did you get back to the boat?” asked Sinned.

“There was a horse, military horse tied to a post nearby us, and finally the commander of the military took notice of who we were, said he knew you since he was a boy, gave us his horse, so we could get to the dock area and come and see you. We got to the dock finally, found some of our dedicated sailors and we come here. The fire from the city was going so badly, then the wind came off shore towards us, and we sailed away, an awful wind, hot wind for a while. We got to the dock here, and of course they couldn’t get a gangplank out, so we had to swim again to the shore,” said the daughter.
“We had to leave many of our servants in the palace as it was burning, alive with the fire coming on!” said the Queen Mother, with tears now coming from her eyes, “and of course all our treasures.”
“Yes,” said the daughter, “we had to leave the cooks, and housemaids, and just everything.”
“There was a woman on the dock area looking for her husband, had lost him. I didn’t recognize her; she said he was an officer in the Army. There was a young couple also, that lost a child, they had just gotten married, I briefly talked to them, to comfort them,” said the mother. When we got on the boat, we could no longer even see the shore for the reason that of the smoke. The captain had three boats launched on the far side of us, from the smoke and fires. It blocked some of the heat. It kept coming on though;” said the Queen, “we slept in the open air; it was all like a volcanic eruption.”
“Did the demigods cause a tidal wave?” asked Sinned.
“No.” said the princess, “there wasn’t any at all.”



Reverberations



(The Queen Mother, she was thinking about the Captain of the navy, and the four boats that had made it to safety with her, and her husband that was in hidden in the palace underground vault, her mind went back and forth to them, as she sat there explaining it all to the old Soldier of Yort, Sinned.)



“Some of our sailors had stayed up all night and day, fighting the Sea to get here, they are very tired,” the Queen Mother offered.
“Yes,” said Sinned, “to save their Queen and Princess, but I see nobody else, not one old woman, or child, there were lots of people in the dock area, in the crumbling city, by its inland waterways, too, Yort, has a big population.”
“We were all confused in the demonic stampede,” said the Queen, “you have a voice with the One God, He listens to you, speak to Him on our behalf to stop these demonic beasts, please; lest there be nothing of our city to return to.”
“What did you think when it all started?” Asked Sinned (inquisitively).
“Oh,” said the princess “we knew it was the demigods, but it was just that nobody knew it was going to be so bad. There have been lots of fights among them in the city, over who would be ahead of all the temples in the city, who would have the number one temple, since you left, or was ostracized by them, and of course the King could do nothing about it, for you had not obeyed them. His hands were tied.”
“It would seem that you and the King have a lot of work to do now, reorganizing,” remarked Sinned.

Just then a disciple of Sinned came out from a cavern, asked, “When will you be finished here, we’re retranslating a few of the complex words on the Mesopotamian Stone, your friends are waiting?”
The Queen and Princess listened, their ears odd for a moment. The Queen was very tired. Sinned got up, the daughter got up.
“You understand,” said Sinned (now a very old man).”
The disciple had started to walk back to the entrance of the cave; they had been sitting outside by the old ruins, where once the She-Ocean, one of Satan’s lovers and mates, had held up, where she tried to seduce him. And in time they actually became friends.
Sinned took a long look at the jewels and fancy dress the Queen had on, although drenched from her swim, and the many rings the Princess had on her fingers, several, then started to meet his disciple who was waiting by the entrance for him…

“Well,” said the Queen, “what can we do?” (Near desperation.)
“You just don’t get it, you and the king and the people of Yort, have rebelled against the One God, now he is trying to get your attention and I guess he still didn’t get it…maybe you need more pain, before He straightens things out for you…some people need to get hit between the eyes to get their attention. You come to me, yet do evil against the name of the One God.”

Then the disciple and Sinned started to walk into the cave, said the disciple, “Who’s going to write this story, you or me?”
“I don’t know,” said Sinned.


Short Story: No: 422 (6-24-2009).



The Tiamat, in:
King Thesas’ Weakness
((Part two of Three, to ‘The Tiamat, and the Demonic Stampede’) (6820 BC))



Oblivion - and the Tiamat

[Sonnet of the Tiamat]
Her mouth sunken with undying black blood The same, King Belphegor in Hell sips. Silently at night about the halls of Scheol Unnoticed, she walks dribbling the cursed blood; The Tiamat has found her pacing-place, divine Where she sneers in jest, at Belphegor’s whims. O Hades and your relentless cryptic sides! The fallen demigod has mockery eyes! Ah! I hear her echoes from walls of stone From pre-history and to dawn’s eternal. She bellows as from Arch kingdoms, far below, As I stand here in wonderment and stare A sad gaze, who feels his soul eternal I hear her blind echoes, echoes, echoes! #512 [3/1/05]





King Thesas I, was a soldier, warrior, and ruler, as was his son, King Thesas II, both now dead, both worthy of their thrones. Why was King Thesas the III, not like his grandfather, or father? Thus, a weakness to the great city of Yort, which he allowed demonic temples to be built, in fear of his life, not raising a finger when confronted by the demonic forces of the Tiamat, and her sons, Untamable and the First Born, Lucifer, the Ram,
and even Marduk.

The Queen of Yort had now left Pergamum where the Queen and Princes had asked Sinned for intervention, to stomp the onslaught of the demonic stampede, killing and wreckage, they were doing in the city of Yort, that was taking place, for demonic domination of the city, its people, and temples…

Nimrod, Sinned’s scribe, has just asked this question of Sinned, hoping he could explain it…



“King Thesas the III, comes from a noble family, as you know Nimrod; he has a reddish and dark brown beard, a low forehead, and walks with a slump like an older man, like a near dead man you might say, and he mumbles more than talks, with the accent of a hissing snake, an annoying whisper. He has thin, cold hands; perhaps his veins are too thin for him, although he can talk several languages.
“His grandfather was an old tyrant, but a good diplomat, and when the demonic underworld tried to make a dictatorship out of Yort, a revolution started throughout the land, and his cries were heard in the great heaves by the One God. The Tiamat was refused refuge by both, the underworld, and Yort, she and his sons were in exile, in the great woods beyond the gates of Yort, Ura’el the angelic being sent to tie the Tiamat and those with her, escaped.
“King Thesas the II said to me one afternoon, back when I was a soldier, ‘The straits, both the Dardanelles and Bosporus, must remain open to our ships.’
“He spoke with the belief and hardness of a warrior king, fifty, if not a hundred times on this, to the point of becoming wearied from not being understood. You see it had to do with trade, the livelihood of Yort, ‘and once the straits are closed to our ships,’ he went on ‘Yort is at the mercy of any and all the demonic beasts or demigods in the land, in particular in the Black Sea, were the Tiamat lives. We therefore, can have no safety, no freedom to develop, no security from her and her kind from invasion as long as our ships and dreadnoughts cannot enter the black sea, there is only one thing for Yort to do, not allow the demonic beasts to blockade it, and therefore to arm. She must build a fleet and carry the Great Mesopotamian Stone, with its sacred writings on it in the lead ship, the sacred words of the One God. Other than that, it means crippling of our productive power, by diverting it to build a navy, and we simply must do it.’
“So you see, Nimrod, the second Thesas, was as his father, a man of faith, military cleverness, and a leader. When he died, Thesas the III, was not invited to the demonic conference, outside of Yort, the Tiamat shrugged her shoulders.”
“And what came of that conference?” asked Nimrod.
“We are dealing with facts, with conditions that existed then, and because of them, now. Thesas the III was no diplomat did not have any national aims for Yort. He sees the problems, as they were under his grandfather and father’s realms, but did not produce a revolution to come off against the demigods; he knew the rivalry between his predecessors, and he tried to gain by treaties some advantages and securities, that later would have to be gained or lost by wars. But no wars ever developed, and the sacred stone was given to the Tiamat to keep, until I retrieved it, he never used its power, or prayed to the One God. During this time, the demigods invaded parts of Italy, and Greece, and India, and other empires around the Black Sea, but they wanted Yort, and they took it like cutting up whole salami, piece by piece, until they had the whole thing.”
“Yes,” said Nimrod, “the Tiamat and its horde were awful; I couldn’t believe the stampede they produced in Yort, when I heard it.”
“Isn’t it horrible?” Sinned said his chin in his palm, his elbow on his knew.
“But what produced such a coward?” asked Nimrod.
“Whose to say,” said Sinned, “but a fair guess might be, he was not from the same blood stock of his forefathers, and when he was a boy he was kept in dresses until he was thirteen years old, his father being in battle after battle, seldom at Yort to insure he’d be a great soldier some day, because his father always wanted him to be a great soldier. And soldiers make kings and kings make peace and wars.”
“So, whose fault is it?” asked Nimrod.
“It is not always the fault of the ax, but of the tree as well.”


No: 423/ 6-27-2009





Midnight Waters
(A night for Hell’s Gatekeeper)




The fog has shifted, risen from Hades’ Sea, and the once dark mist has become unthreaded along the pier; the Gatekeeper’s voice now roams the Midnight Waters, amongst the ripples, and echoes in the charcoal air, along the midnight sea—; vibrations in the earth’s crust, shifts the rowboats, to and fro, up and down Hades Coast, out into, and through the deep, to let the oarsman’s know, the gate’s of Hell are closed, but will be opened once they reappear, over the midnight waters.
The Gatekeeper chants from the heavy-iron-lidded gates, mouth opened, tongue hanging out like a thirsty bull, in the shape of a snake, loyal to the archangel of ten-wings, who calls to the darkness and the midnight light, to bring in the incarnate ghouls to be—amongst the midnight waters, for eternity, for time has been incalculable for him, and the ghouls have been waiting, waiting, holding their breaths, for this momentous moment, when they (phantoms of the earth) will be sanctified into Hell’s gray-dark mirage, thus, given their third birth.
Henceforward, on they go, as the Gatekeeper waits for this earth-shattering once flash, now of a ghostly mass, to appear in the Midnight Waters.
“Nay!” he cries, “nay…a few more moments…” he exclaims to himself, he does not know hours or days, for time is scattered among ashes of long past infamous names. Now he hears the roaring of Hades Sea, the whirling dusts of Hell, and much too much grinding of teeth, yelping, and tears: the ghouls have appeared.
#2169 1-21-2008 (here is Part one of two Parts)





Clotted by a Python
(Based on actual Events)



(Intro :) His body was swollen, a bulk of lumped flesh, inflamed looking, bruised, and his last feelings were that he was deserted, clotted by a python, and this was going to be how he died, what people would read in the morning paper the following day.


He was the only worker present at this bazaar happening, moving among the doubtless reality that lingered ahead—with what he would have to face, a violent involvement, indefinite, the unimaginative, the python rubbing off a layer of skin on the abrasive cell floor where it was kept in the Zoo area, it was restless, and the lack of restrictions made it more restless day after day after day, strong and healthy it was, youthful, placed in a cubical with bars, and supported by the public for entertainment—just out of the wild, from South America.
Henceforward, it is fair to say, no one knows what the python was thinking, perhaps don’t care, but I feel the python needs its say-so because it was cleaver enough in what it did, and evidently, it took some thinking, and since it cannot communicate as man would like it to and ask for understand, I shall play the devils advocate in this story, that has more truth then fiction to it.

Maybe he was thinking, ‘…these feeders, onlookers, they are really just bits and pieces of matter chucked together to form a cleaver species—’ being seen constantly, day after day, night after night (in addition, perhaps they seen man simply as an enemy, slayer, to be slayer). Depending on who had the upper hand and having the upper hand is everything—even in man’s world with man.

‘I am behind this enclosure (bars),’ thinks the python, ‘somehow I got here. They articulate funny, I can’t understand why I’m here in the first place when I was some other place not long ago, some of their gestures I’m learning, but that is expected. Where’s their weakness that is the real way out of this dilemma (the question?)’
Everyone looks for the weakness. ‘They get tired just like me, they look more like tall weeds that fling in the wind when they walk on those tree stumps, more like branches, surely I can break one in two, if only I had the chance. They like passiveness maybe that is there weak spot!’

They don’t know the Devil, but the Devil knows them, and he knows man, he knows their weaknesses, vanity, pride, power, control for man, and the python, perhaps has a shared portion of this unwavering behavior, with better instincts, and soullessness.

Life is boring for the python, this indigenous slave; beyond the bars the python stares day after day, after day. Looking at forms walking by, human forms, who is the more inextricable form? It would seem ‘I’ the python guesses. It waits and waits, as the day and night zoo workers clean his cage and feed him, never quite getting the chance to wrap himself around anyone, and he is learning, to play possum—dead, ‘…they like that better…’ the creature has contemplates. Everybody: beast, creature, bird, man, fish, we all learn after a while, trial and error, what doesn’t work, and we invent, learn to read masters of the world, and in time, slowly, one becomes—if given the time—the master, or learns where the best hiding places are.
And now we shall kind of stagger away from the thinking of the python, get away from him, he is a trouble maker—as all pythons are to mankind who want to enslave them, as any wild creature would be, or person whose desire is not to be enslaved, would be.


The young man was only twenty-three-years old, working at the Como Park Zoo (in the summer of 1957), he had let an eleven-foot python out of its glass and steel bar cage, in the little stone zoo building, built sometime in the 1930s. He was an intern from Chicago, living in St. Paul, Minnesota, a Zoologist. He worked the night shift, cleaned the cages, fed the animals, and insured all was well within that designated area—working on his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. There was a security guard also who walked the grounds, in particular, over in the Midway area where they had all the rides for the kids, perhaps a hundred yards away. It was now 2:00 a.m. All was well and quiet.
The Intern, took the eleven-foot python from its habitat, and carried him out into the zoo atrium area, where in the morning visitors would come through to see the twelve cages, that held lions, and tigers, and large snakes, and monkeys, and two wolves.
He, the Intern, was playing with the snake, put him around his shoulders, held him by the back of the head, but came the moment the python got irritated, had rolled upward a tinge, from his shoulders to his neck, it was no longer playing possum, or passive. The Intern drew in his breath, tried to, it was difficult, as the monstrous brute of a snake had already crept downward towards his left wrist, and sunk its teeth into it, holding on with a solid grip. The python had already lowered its body which had previously risen from underneath his light coat, it had already circled upward and doubled around his neck, forming a lump, a knot like loop around his collar (and neckline), he tried to draw in his breath again, and found out it was next to gone, and he went to shout for help—the security guard had already circled the Midway area—and was on his way to check the zoo area, where he was, but all you could hear was a whimpering sound, by the intern.
With his powerful arms and shoulders, the young intern couldn’t pull the bend of the python loose. He heard the whistle of the Security Guard, which indicated all was well outside of the Zoo area, and the intern knew he was close by; so close, yet it might just had been a thousand-miles away, the python had the Zoologist helpless like his pry in the jungle. With urgent eyes moving, he was now looking for help, understanding there was no way out; battered overalls, in a world now that was deaf and dumb—the snake mute, to his whimpering petition.
The viper, now head to head, stared at his victim—his once: feeder, janitor, his master, prison guard, the once obedient creature was nearly back home, doing what was natural, ‘…if only he could find where they took him from…’ pondered the python.

The Python wasn’t a murderer, nor in need of a psychologist, or even seeking revenge, nor even a lawyer, he lived to kill to survive, he had never gotten food free before, thus, it was odd to be fed, perhaps even humiliating, he wasn’t doing what he was born to do—he knew that, then he’d die—he knew that also, and be replaced, but he had no idea the human lost the most precious thing anyone could have—life, he just wanted to do what he was meant to do, but he learned, from the human, like the human, he got his entertainment.

Now it was rapid whimpering, then the intern fell purposely to the floor, there the scuffle continued, to no avail.
In the morning, the janitor found the snake outside of the building, the intern on the floor, inside. His overalls half torn off, as if the snake and intern had a great battle—and the intern lost.

Written 8-26-2008 (Reedited, 10-6-2008 and again in 8-2010)