A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

I look at the wall-clock and it’s five to eleven, late for the mountains, so I give Vin the eye to clear, to give the newlyweds a break alone together by the fire. Meanwhile a big orange moon has come up late and everything is as still as death for miles around, not even a mountain owl’s hoot, as if the whole set-up was just waiting for something to happen.

The kid and I get up and say good-night, and, fire or no fire, her hand isn’t any warmer than before, so I let go of it in a hurry. Vin goes right up but I take a minute off to lock up the windows and the door. Then, as I’m climbing, I glance around at them. They’ve moved closer together and the dying fire throws their shadows on the wall behind them. The old man’s head looks just like what it should, but hers is flat, spade-shaped, you almost expect to see a forked tongue come darting in and out. She’s moving a little and I see what she’s doing, she’s rouging her lips. I give a deep sigh of relief and it takes such a load off my mind to find out she’s just a regular woman after all, that I stop there for a minute and forget to go on.

Then she takes something out of the little bag she has with her and offers it to him. It’s one of those long reefers she seems partial to. She also takes one herself. “Cigarette,” she murmurs silkily, “before we go up?” She says it in such a soft voice it almost sounds like a hiss.

I know I have no business watching, so I soft-shoe it the rest of the way up and go about my business. Only five minutes go by, less than that even, and I hear a rustling and a swishing in the upstairs hall and that’s her going to her room — by herself. You don’t hear any footsteps when she walks, just a soft sound that scaly dress of hers makes when it drags along the floor.

Her door closes and goodnight to her, I say to myself; and I think I wouldn’t want to be in Mary’s father’s shoes for all the rice in China. Then, as I come out of the bathroom with my toothbrush in my hand, I hear the old man’s step starting up the stairs from the floor below and I wait there out in the hall to have a last word with him.

He comes up slow, he’s breathing kind of hard, sounds like sandpaper rubbing on concrete, and then when he gets halfway to where the landing is, he hesitates. Then he comes on a step or two more, stops again, and then there’s a soft plop like something heavy falling. Right after that the woodwork starts to creak and snap a lot, as if somebody was wrestling on it. I don’t wait to listen to any more, I throw my toothbrush away and I chase to the end of the hall. When I look down, I gasp in surprise.

He’s lying flat on his back on the staircase landing between the two floors, and he’s threshing about and squirming horribly, as if he’s in convulsions. The agonized movement of his body is what’s making the woodwork creak like that. Something seems to be jerking him all over, his arms and legs will stiffen to their full length and then contract again like corkscrews. His tongue’s sticking all the way out of his mouth, and saliva or foam or something is bubbling around it. His eyes are glazed over.

One jump brings me down to where he is, and I lift his head and get it off the floor. As I do so, his whole face begins to blacken in my hands. There is one last hideous upheaval, as if I was trying to hold down a wild animal, and then everything stops. There’s not a twitch left in his whole body after that.

Vin’s heard the racket and he comes tearing out of his room.

“Whiskey,” I pant. “Don’t know what it is, gotta bring him to!” But there isn’t any bringing to. Before the kid can sprint down past me and then up again with it, he’s stiff as a board in my arms. I’m holding a lead weight, with a color that matches.

The blackness has spread all over his body like lightning and shows up in the veins in his throat and on his wrists, as if ink had been poured into his arteries. Nothing to be done, he isn’t breathing. We pour the whiskey into his open mouth, but when we tilt his head to make it go down it comes right back again.

I pass him to Vin and get out from under and go down and take a miniature Keeley cure right then and there. It isn’t because he’s Mary’s old man or because it happened right in my arms, it’s those terrific spasms and that blackness that have gotten me. I get over it in a minute and we bring him down off the landing between us and lay him out. Then I let the kid have a double bracer and the hell with his extra growth.

We look at him lying there on the divan, stiff as a ramrod, and I try to flex his arms and legs. A peculiar muscular rigidity has already set in all over, even in those few minutes. I’m no medical student but I know it can’t be rigor mortis that soon. This is the United States, but this was an unrecognizable death, a sudden, thrashing, black, tropical death — here in the States.