People say the floods are a dream or
hallucination of mine. Yet the swollen
lands darkly whisper, allowing me no peace while Im locked away.
Tonight I'm out and back on the river road. I
see the gate ahead
its fog pillars swamped in visions of lake-bottom
corpses.
I shouldn't have told the doctor about the body
parts floating in the ink blots. If I had kept quiet he wouldn't have turned
dead-fish pale. Staying out of town would've been smart. Then I might've
been okay. Guess I got disturbed then, really chilled out
and not by the
floods, but by someone I buried in them.
I remember a scarlet membrane over the moon. A
morbid eye in a sky of shimmering twilight
and I should've recognized
destiny.
It was my usual stroll down the river trail;
insects and melancholy in the air
the springtime river gushing over the
rapids, licking up off stones in monstrous tongues of glistening spray
swollen and sliding on the break-walls like the gleaming scales of a sea
monster. Its roar that of some hungry thing about to break loose on the
town.
I wandered around the bend and the water rose
higher there. The river seemed untamed, like it could snatch me quick like
the head of a giant cobra. But it didn't frighten me. I knew the river
relied on me for many of its meals. In a sense I was its priest and keeper.
Then I saw the gate illumined in ghostly white
like the moon had beamed it into existence. Drawn closer I saw beyond to
shining pools of water and endless islands of stones and packed mud. Gnarled
trees clutched the slime and reached into the trails of fog blowing in the
sky. Wisps spread like extended strands to encircle the moon in a
strangler's grip. I found it a chilly place and ancient, like glacial melt
had released the remains of a few centuries of doom.
Jerry appeared, though I couldn't quite believe
it. He staggered near a withered oak tree, holding a bottle of cheap sherry.
Features decayed, his face puffed like a toadstool
the top of his head
split, with brains, maggots and algae sponging out.
Since Jerry drowned years back he looked better
than I expected. Anything more than bones would have amazed me
and he was
animated
letting loose with howls of laughter like he was crazy and not
drunk or dead.
He wagged a finger on his fat ulcerated hand,
gesturing for me to follow. Moonlight fell on his face like a pale
spotlight, making him over as a being of supernatural ugliness. He stumbled
on a winding course through the mud and water. Like a flag his ragged
clothes streamed back in my memory. I saw myself on the day he died. I stood
there smiling as I bet Jerry that he couldn't swim out to the buoy and back.
Laying fifty on his ten, I watched as he stripped and dove in. He didn't
flounder long before he choked and went under. For once he got enough to
drink.
I got caught in some bushes and was pulling out
thorns when Jerry crested the rise we were on. He crashed into the brush on
the far side and I hurried to the top figuring he'd fooled me and led me
into the floods to die lost. At the top I found myself looking down at a
canal; its waters blacker than the bottom end of the sky. The reflection of
the moon floated like a body in darkness by a break wall
and Jerry leaned
into it, pulling a pearly jug out of the water. He took a slug of that
moonshine and another corpse appeared. This one dressed in black.
I knew it had to be Steve. Some guys wear black
leather jackets until they're pretty beat up, but Steve's had gathered a
patina of slimy fish scales. Steve's muffled voice touched me with unwanted
reflections. I remembered his last day and telling him he had to stand up
and fight. But he didn't win. He got beat up by Al, knocked cold by the
water
and there I was holding Steve's wrist and lying. "There's no pulse.
You killed him, Al! We better dump him in the river and never say another
word about this!"
Steve took a long guzzle of moonshine and
shrugged his muddy shoulders. I heard him speak my name and a number of grim
words. Then Jerry laughed and they were off along the break wall like two
old pals on a Friday night.
I followed them back to the river through
surroundings that grew spookier by the step; bushes and trees were flattened
like dinosaurs had stamped through them. There were treacherous areas of
quicksand, shifting fog and hideous things scuttling in rancid mud. The
night had dimmed and the river roared deafeningly beneath the long smear of
pus mist had made of the moon. We were nearing a burst dam, the torrent
climbing the jagged remains like a huge froth-edged wheel. Jerry and Steve
strolled up so close I thought they'd get washed away, but they sipped
moonshine, and like magic there were three of them.
Jim's tangled black hair shone green and he wore
gray rags coated with tiny pebbles. His exposed flesh had a dark and scarred
appearance like he'd been chewed by pike. The three of them followed a
gravel path that led away from the river, and as I admired the misty black
blood haloing Jims exhalations I recalled his fate. We were up on the dam
that sunny day, looking down from a pier at the racing water. "You can do
it," I was saying. "It's an easy dive then ride the current at an angle to
the shore. And Jim dived, his body bouncing off rocks as it washed away in
frothing rapids. I had made that dive myself, only I had gone farther out to
the third pier where the water was deeper than the two feet Jim had splashed
into. Guess I should've told him about that.
The night wore on and time passed in splashing
flood waters. Faces and memories, all of them attached to bloated corpses,
swirled up from sediments in my mind. Jerry marshaled a gruesome parade of
victims and my guilt began to morph to terror. There were tourists, ice
fishermen, boaters, skidooers, lock keepers, game wardens and more that had
found the bottom with help from me. The river reared and spit forth the dead
with wretched efficiency and the moon became the eye of my conscience,
revealing me as a hideous servant of the abominable. Grotesque faces swam
like fish in cloudy waters. I covered my eyes and shivered as I contemplated
the extent of my arrogance. Then I wasn't sure what was happening any more.
We were walking up a hillside and never seemed to reach the top. I wanted to
scream but all I could manage was a croak. I knew I had forgotten something
something too horrible to remember.
An old house stood on the hilltop. Charred by a
fire it leaned on its foundation. Years of the floods had turned it to rot,
mold and living decay. A crumbled tomb, it was a marker on some unspeakable
evil. Chilled to the bone I turned to the river, seeing a vast sheet of
rippled glass.
Wind gathered, pushing Jerry and his gang of the
drowned up the hill. They stopped and waited in the sodden front garden as
Jerry walked up the steps and took the knocker. Thunder rolled. A sound of
ships breaking on rocks, and high on the charred walls an eerie light glowed
in a salt-crystal window.
The house awoke and beams fanned the sky from
gaping holes in the roof. It towered like a nightmare and I stumbled back
fearing it would collapse and bury me in rot. My back brushed a tree and I
sank to my knees, staring at the house like it was the face of a demon. I
sensed that doom would arrive if the front door opened, and I tried to will
it permanently shut. But it defied me and creaked slowly on its hinges.
Jerry bowed and took something from an emerging
starfish hand. I saw it and gasped. They all turned and stared down the
hillside at me. But that battered crowd of monsters didn't frighten me like
the thing in Jerry's hands did. He held a little girl's doll and in my soul
it was a voodoo doll.
Stuttering a frightened sentence, I rose and
stumbled toward the river. Tripping I bashed my knee on the slippery stones.
Thick mud clung to me, stinging my eyes and nostrils. Spitting out some foul
ooze I struggled with my heart and lungs.
The riverbank trees touched the sky with a thorny
net and reached over me like crooked claws. A scummy patch in the main
current belched up gas, breaking the water into mirrored fragments. Blood
red stains spread quickly on the surface. I tried to catch my breath. My
lungs were on fire; waves leapt up and pounded the rocks on the shore. I
leaned against an oak tree, trying to believe my eyes; it was a gushing
river of blood.
Fear came at my back like a hurricane and I saw a
moldering rope flying from a tree limb. My thoughts took refuge in the past
a summer day with breeze-touched emerald grass. The river drifted with a
soft current of opaque blue jade; its banks moist and black. The girl kicked
out over the water on the rope and landed back on the bank like a little
white dove. I hadn't planned evil for her. I wanted her to be my friend, but
she pinched her face, got nasty and called me an ugly, creepy man. Then she
screamed, telling me not to touch her.
I waited for her to leave then seized her
said
I wanted to talk, but she struggled and bit me so I gouged her eyes out and
hung her up in the tree with the rope. Her body swung over the bank for a
while, the tree limb creaking
then I took my hatchet and slit her like a
fish, taking her heart before I chopped her up and threw the pieces in the
river.
Of course I got lucky as always. The police
charged old Johnson with the murder and I sort of blotted the whole thing
out of my mind.
Now she was coming down the hill. Night rose like
a cloak of grief. The wind still blew and the river remained wild. I felt
exposed, the victim of some eternal nightmare, and I wanted to leap into the
river and find the mercy of the rocks. I couldn't bear the thought of her
touching me.
She moved through Medusa tentacles of fog and I
saw her clearly. She carried her doll and a bloodstained hatchet. Her
yellowed dress was in tatters and there were lines of fish scales where her
body parts had grown together. Starfish formed her hands, thick water snakes
made up her arms. Bluish green tinged her hair and as the wind lifted it
from her face I saw leeches in her eyes. Her heart had not been replaced,
only a pulsing hole remained and it needed to be filled.
The chill wind tore chunks of rotten wood and
shingles from the house and showered them down. The air stank of stagnant
water and gas. Near the bottom of the hill she began to lurch this way and
that, blindly slicing the air with her hatchet. Her black lips were moving
and I knew she was calling for me, for my heart.
My legs were frozen. I cringed and wept
wept
because I couldn't move to throw myself into a river of blood. She went from
tree to tree in search of my flesh. Tears streamed down my cheeks until I
became sure the floods were fed by tears. Icy shivers and her cold blade
touched me, and then I felt a noose tighten on my neck. I choked up blood
and felt my flesh splitting, the warmth of my heart slipping from my breast.
After that the river bank sucked me down and washed me out with the floods.
They found me in town, weeping and raving, cut up
really bad. Rope burns scarred my neck, a deep gouge bled on my chest. They
said my brain had surrendered to madness, that I was a danger to myself.
But I know better; evil and insanity are alike both are corruption and
waters of the same flood.
I hear the waters whispering
blood and tides
rolling in. It is destiny that I can't escape. I belong to the dead of the
river and I am food for the river. Here I see Jerry waiting, and I must go.
Tonight she'll have me, they'll all have me
but I'll return with the
floods. And it won't be some madness in my head, because I'll likely only
have half a head, and less than half a heart.
…the end…
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . .
