Dagon (4 page)

But there was Sheila. She had married him as soon as he was out of seminary, though their contact in those four years had been through letters almost entirely. The courtship and actual wooing had gone on before, when he was at the university where she was a student. She had lasted out the four-year wait easily enough, rather gaily; and he couldn't help wondering if her nature didn't demand his as much as his demanded hers. His faults were the faults of so­lidity, and perhaps the solidity was what she needed to attach to. It might be all too easy for her free humor to fog away into frivolity. A comforting thought, her need for him; made him feel less parasitic.…She was a fine girl, would be a fine mother, but though they had been married four years—he was now thirty-two—there were no children. The childlessness both­ered Peter; he felt it almost as a debt he owed and which he might be called upon to pay at any time, any moment when he would be unpre­pared. Simply one more instance of the way his impending fate would catch him up helpless.

“Why didn't you just read us the whole ency­clopedia?” she asked. She dished out pertly the cool Sunday luncheon salad. “That really would have been entertaining.”

“I'm not so sure you ought to come to church to be entertained,” he said.

“Wow. You can say that again.”

“Maybe you should come with a reasonable hope for edification.”

She peeped at him tartly. “Do you know what hell is? It's edification without entertainment. Big mountains of boredom.”

His anger wouldn't come back, he felt empty. “Oh, come on. It wasn't that bad, was it?”

“I don't know. How bad did you want it to be?”

“I didn't want it to be bad at all. Matter of fact, I thought it was pretty interesting myself. Sort of sexy.”

“That's because it's an idea you found. That's the reason you like it. I doubt if any of it applies much to people now. It all seemed so…histori­cal. So distant.”

“But that's the point. I don't think it is. Didn't you listen to the last part? I was trying to show the pertinence…”

“Yes, yes. I heard. But I don't like it.”

She got up abruptly and left the table. He felt morose and dissatisfied. But she came back in a few minutes and poured the coffee.

“Hurry up and drink that down. I want to find out firsthand all this crazy wild endless Ameri­can sex you keep talking about.”

FOUR

The work wasn't coming along so easily. The idea still held him, it still seemed a valid and terrifying notion, but so far he hadn't un­packed his notes and books and papers. He would sleep late in the mornings, a habit alien to him, would lie tossing in the tall dark bed in the upstairs bedroom they had chosen. Dreams tortured him, jerking him awake sweating and with a dusty acrid taste in his mouth, but he was unable to remember these dreams; he could recall only dark queer impressions, odors. Then when he rose and had eaten—for some reason his appetite had increased; he who had never really cared for food seemed now always hungry—he wandered about the house, not speaking much; and in the after­noons he would take long walks over the farm, usually alone. Now and then, with nothing he could perceive to trigger it, the queer face of Mina would pop into his mind, and always at her image his stomach felt queasy, his skin prickly. He complained a great deal.

“Sure enough,” Sheila said, “I've never seen you so restless.”

“I just can't get started.”

“I wouldn't worry about it so much. I've al­ways heard that people who write things have to go a long time sometimes when they can't write. Professional writers and people, I mean.”

“This isn't like that.” He wished that he didn't sound so abrupt.

She shrugged. “I wouldn't worry about it too much. You deserve a nice vacation, anyway.”

“Not till I've really done something.”

The house managed to occupy much of his attention. It was large enough to explore: six­teen rooms in all, not counting the many closets and areaways and the tall attic. Standing in a room on another floor and at the opposite end of the building he could sense Sheila's move­ments; that was how alive the house was for him. The pleasure he took in poking about was rather a morose pleasure—like so many of his pleas­ures. He opened trunks and drawers and stood contemplating the masses of stiff gauzy dresses and dark woolen shirts and trousers. Uncomfort­able as the clothing looked he had sometimes to suppress the impulse to dress himself in it, to try to find out, like a child, exactly how his grand­parents had felt in it. Now it seemed to him, as he became more closely acquainted with the house, that all his surmises about his grandpar­ents had been only partially correct, that he had missed something central, something essential about them that he could discover in himself if only he looked hard enough. It was not all just soured Puritanism, it was something even darker, if that were possible. One trunk was al­most filled with correspondence and receive Christmas cards and beneath these, lying loose, about three dozen shotgun shells of varying gauges; but there was no gun in the house. In one drawer was a small tin box half filled with dynamite caps. The correspondence was impos­sible. Very few of the letters were signed and the writing was always illegible, always border­ing upon illiteracy. “Our if i ca'nt pay that much Why then i will exspect just what You had oferd the 1st time…my legel rites ech time…the religiun you clame to profess.” There were words so entirely illegible they looked almost like transliterations from some exotic tongue, ancient Pnakotic perhaps: “Nephreu,” “Yogg Sothoth,” “Ka nai Hadoth,” “Cthulhu.” The effort he spent in trying to decipher these letters tired him, and he sometimes got headaches star­ing at the dimmed writing in bad light. He felt that the letters were obscurely responsible for the bad dreams that came on him late in the mornings. The letters coated his hands with a dust that he had almost to scrape off.

Sheila regarded his explorations with her usual amused tolerance, but this attitude of hers which he had always so needed now rankled him. He felt childish enough on his own without her rubbing it in. She found things enough to do. She kept herself busy with the house; keeping clean just the four or five rooms that they used was almost a day-long task. And she was making a dress, using the old foot-treadle sewing machine which sat in a downstairs hall. The awk­ward intermittent clacking of it sang through the house with a sound like a hive of bees. When Peter passed by her as she worked, just wander­ing through, she looked up and grinned at him in what she had to begin to hope was a friendly manner, but he didn't grin back. He laid a tact­less absent-minded hand on her shoulder and wandered away, just passing by.

The attic was the worst. It was narrow but tall, and admitted light through a single small round window, like a porthole, high, just under the arch of the roof. But the light that entered, acrid yellow light, filled the whole space. The light locked with the dust—tons of dust up here—and the atmosphere of the place stuffed his head like a fever. The yellow light was blinding and hot; he breathed slowly and deliberately. It seemed that he perceived this light with every nerve in his body. The attic was mostly empty. On the left side the naked rafters ran down, and here and there nails had been driven into them to hold up a couple of wool coats, which looked almost steamy in the heat, and a couple of long plaited tobacco bed canvases. Piled on the floor were thick sheaves of newspapers, brittle and yellow like the light, and in the light the printed words were withering into unintelligibility. When he nudged a thick folded paper with his toe, it slid forward silently in the thick dust.

In his head the sight of Mina's face bobbed backward and forward like an empty floating bottle.

Against the right wall—which was simply ranked joists and nude lathes through which hardened plaster seemed to be oozing—sat a broken sausage grinder and a small empty keg over the mouth of which generations of spiders had stretched webs. Toward the south, the wall where the light entered, there was a queer ar­rangement of chains. At the angle where the attic floor and two joists met, two thick spikes were driven through two chain links, pinching each chain tightly into the wood. The chains, large chains, ran up each joist to a height of about eight feet, secured at intervals by big hasps, and then from this height they dangled down about a foot. Attached to the ends of the chains were broad iron bands which looked something like colters for plow tongues except that they were hinged on one side so that they could open and shut. Snap. The lock for each chain was some sort of internal affair—the bands were at least a half-inch thick. There was a fairly flexible tongue, notched on one side only, which slipped into the band itself, and on the top of the band was a tiny lever which could be wiggled back and forth. Obviously this lever released the ratchet inside the band so that it could be opened. The chains looked red in the yellow light; he had spent a long time looking at them. He held one of the bands with his index finger and swung it gently. A soft unnerving creak as the chain rubbed against the top hasp. He es­timated that the empty oval the band enclosed was about four inches in diameter the long way. He stroked his finger along the inside of the band and it came away reddish. Rust, he thought; but it didn't flake, it wasn't gritty like rust. He stood on tiptoe and examined the opening where the band was hinged, where it would pinch. Small hairs gleamed yellow on the red iron, hairs like the down on arms, or eyelashes. His eyes were wide. He sucked his lips. He put the band about his wrist and snapped it shut. It fit exactly; he nodded. And if his other wrist was in the other cuff he wouldn't be able to reach the little lever to free himself. Standing flat he had a sensation of lightness, of dizzy buoyancy, his arm dangling upward like that. The iron was at first cool, then warm; his wrist began to sweat a little in it. Immediately he felt thirsty.

I could just eat you all up,
she had said.
I could just throw you down and jerk all your clothes off,
she said.

He swung his arm idly; it wasn't so uncomfort­able after all. Iron rasped on iron. He turned his wrist round in the cuff and, yes, it did pinch and pull at the hinge opening. He thumbed the re­lease lever and it went over quite easily, too easily, and the cuff didn't open. He flipped the lever back and forth and jerked his wrist hard again and again. Then he stood quite still. Plumes of dust rose and settled reluctantly, the yellow motes spiraling down. It was clear that he wasn't going to get himself loose. He tried to remember where in the house he had run across the large old file. Could he signal Sheila? She was on the first floor, busy at something. He shouted twice, and his voice seemed muffled even to himself. The sound locked with the dust and lay silent on the floor. His feet were shuffl­ing, and he sneezed twice, three times. Up here it was simply lifeless; the house which was so alive everywhere else was dead at the top. Or perhaps Sheila was insensitive to the liveliness of the house. He reached to the other cuff and grasped the margin of chain above it and swung the cuff against the joist. He banged it again and again and he could see that the joist was throb­bing quite soundly, he could feel the floor rever­berating beneath his feet, but when he stopped banging he heard no footsteps. She wasn't com­ing; she hadn't heard. And then he did hear footsteps, but they didn't come closer, didn't go anywhere at all. It was just his imagination; no one was walking.

She had no nose, Mina, any more than a fish. She deeped in oceans of semen.

The dust rose to his waist, not so violently yellow now. Time was passing, the light was growing less virulent. He leaned against the wall, trying not to breathe too deeply, but it was no good; he kept sneezing and sneezing, and his eyes filled with water, which made the light go all bright again. How could she not feel the house quiver when he hammered? It shuddered all over, the whole fabric of it was shaken. He banged with the chain for a while and then stopped again. His legs ached, it was unbear­able. The guts had rusted in the cuff lock, he must have known. Not rust but blood his finger had searched out on the iron cuff; it was old caked blood, it didn't flake like rust. It had got later and later. His mind and his eyes had got full of fear and the house was full of sounds, all the wrong kind, scraping and slithering. It was as though iron were freezing on his legs. He was trying to take shallow breaths, for when he breathed deeply he had to choke and sneeze; but thinking about it made it impossible and he would finally have to take a long deep breath, and the coughing would turn into retching.

The thought came to him, as immediate as the binding iron, that this was where his father had died. There wasn't evidence, his mind didn't need evidence, the whole house was full of the fact. His mind was full of the house. The cuff fitted exactly. The image in his head was an event he had already experienced; had stood here with both arms chained, fallen against the hot wall and sweating furiously in the clothes he had fouled all over. He didn't think he could manage to live through it again. But then he realized that the man he knew, both arms locked in the chains, was too short and he car­ried too much flesh.…They had told him his father had died when he was four. He was a shorter man than his son, the chains wouldn't reach down so far for him; his arms he must have wrenched from their sockets almost. And why had they brought him, Peter, up here to see? His father, not mad, but furiously raging in inhuman anger, with the sweat all over him like yellow paint. His shattered eyes. What was it they had wanted him to see?

He could not see. There was only a round whitish glow in the top of the wall, noseless, unreadable as Mina. In the darkness objects, the broken sausage mill, the hanging coats, had seeped over their edges, occupied space where they had no mass. Now it was night; the house multiplied its imagined noises which would ad­vance and advance certainly and never arrive. But under the narrow door a soft thick pane of light appeared, arced and disappeared; ap­peared again.

He heard her. “Peter? Peter? Are you up here?”

“Here,” he said. He didn't say it. His throat was clogged. He croaked, his mouth was thick and helpless.

When she opened the door the draught blew up the dust, invisible now in the darkness. And he coughed and then gagged; wiped his caked mouth on his hanging arm. He imagined how he would look to her, he would frighten her to death; he turned his head to face the light and made his black lips smile. She was holding a kerosene lamp she had found somewhere in the house. He tried to hold his breath again, but drew it in hard and shuddering. It was Mina, it was not Sheila. He was almost weeping and he turned his face away, then turned to look again.…No. It was Sheila, with the darkness gathered on her blond hair, and with the lamp held be­fore her and low like that so that her nose had no outlines, looked gone.

“A fuse must have blown, I think,” she said. “This is all the light I could find. What are you doing up here, anyway?” She held the light close; she could just make him out as yet.

He got the smile back, tried to fix it.

“My God.” She saw him.

He kept hoping she wouldn't drop the lamp. The attic would burn, go up like a box of matches.

“My God, Peter…”

His speech was like bitter black syrup. “There's a big file in the top drawer of the chest in the downstairs hall, if you could…”

She came to him. The warmth of the lamp spread on his face and neck. “What is…”

“If you could get the file. Sheila.” He couldn't be franker in begging.

She stared at his face and then stared away, looking into the glow of the lamp. She had turned the wick too high; sooty threads of smoke rose from the lamp and the bulbous chimney was still blackening. “Yes,” she said. When she turned from him her shadow was huge, fell like thick musty cloth on the whole room, on him. Gathered around the light her shape was bunched and dark and it was licked up softly by the dust and fear of the room. He felt relieved when she went out the door, but then she would have to come back again. He feared for her. It was as bad, the way she found him, as he had imagined. He felt a terrifying pity for her.

His legs felt as if they would topple any mo­ment; trembled, trembled. He heard her going down the stairs, and then after that a complete unexpected silence. There were no noises now to imagine. He hawked up sticky spittle, rolled his tongue in it, licked his lips. They tasted acrid, felt puffy.