Dagon (7 page)

“You better come here and set down,” she said. “You've got a bad case of something, I guess. You sure do look like a mess.”

He sat across from her in a creaky little chair, the cane bottom drooping. He slid his hands aimlessly about on the oilcloth.

“You just set there and I'll get you some coffee. It looks to me like you sure could use it. I don't reckon I ever seen anybody in worse shape.”

Involuntarily he cowered away. He was sit­ting by the range. She would have to cross by him to get the coffee. He didn't want her to come near him.

She rose and started toward the stove, but stopped. A slow smile seeped into her inexpres­sive face. “But it looks like to me you could use something that'd do you more good than coffee. They's a jug back here I'll get. That's what'd do you more good, I bet anything.” She turned and went through the door behind her. He heard her displacing a box, rummaging among things which must have been cloth. She returned, holding a gallon jug by its stubby neck, swinging it easily by her side, brushing the black cotton skirt. Her calves were full and muscular, olive-colored. She set the jug on the table, not letting it thump, and went by him to the stove. He twisted away from her, his buttocks clenched tight in the sagging chair. She brought a thick chipped coffee mug back to the table and poured it about half full from the jug. She laughed humorlessly. “I don't reckon a Leland would want to be drinking out of a jug,” she said. She put the cup gently before him and turned the handle round toward him. “There you go.”

It smelled and tasted oily, of rotting corn. He swallowed it eagerly; and immediately droplets of sweat were on his forehead. He knew abso­lutely that he was going to be ill, sick to death. He drank again. He had never been more grate­ful for something to drink.

It was going to be a hot day. Now it was full dawn, and the kitchen was filled with the warm dank religious light, yellow. She stood across the room by the open bedroom door. He felt he saw her with fine clarity, totally, every inch. He wiped his forehead with his blood-smeared wrist. He felt sticky.

II

ONE

The little house, so humid and rickety—every­where you stepped the floor gave a little and creaked—was always full of movement. The old man came and went incessantly, God only knew what his errands were. The mother was almost motionless, she moved her great bulk but sel­dom, and even standing still she occupied much space; sometimes it seemed to Peter that the air of the house and the movements of body and mind of all the others were loaded by her pres­ence, that somehow she affected even his blood. Mina was always coming and going too, she came to Peter and went away. “I got to look after you,” she said. “Somebody's got to take care of you.”

He lay in the shabby shaggy bed in the little room that seemed mostly a storeroom. Or he would wander from room to room, keeping away from the windows and open doors; and then he would return to Mina's bed and sit straight, holding his knees with his hands, watching with fixed gaze the unchanging splotched opposite wall. He kept drinking; he had not halted in the three weeks—was it three weeks now?—he had been here. Mina kept bringing moonshine to him, wearing on her face an impassive but still wearily sardonic expres­sion. He loathed the oily raw taste of the stuff; he gulped it quickly and breathed with his mouth open. At night she bore him down in the torn greasy quilts and made love: silent as stand­ing water. It was he who might cry out, her fingernails in him and her cold teeth on his shoulder and neck and face. He struggled des­perately not to make a sound; when he did groan, his throat hoarse and tight, he was able later to persuade himself that he had made no sound. Mina was relentless as cold wind, she had no feelings, no passion; she seemed to perform with a detached curiosity.

He was continually in a clear acid delirium. Things leaped forward and would get brighter, so clearly he saw them. The unsteady table, the chipped dull blue porcelain coffee pot, the barred iron bedhead, all had outlines strong and burning. Now he lay in the wadded quilts and thought of her father, his face round and red. If you suddenly jabbed him with a pin behind his ear, wouldn't his face pop and go to shreds like a balloon? He drank, and speculated that if you grasped a man's mouth by its corner, you could rip away his meaningless little grin and expose to daylight the real expression on his face. And what would it be? Disgust? A terrible pitiless joy? Anything at all? But it couldn't be done, the grin was too greasy to get a grip on. He drank quickly and regretfully. Or at times he would suddenly find himself on his knees, holding the bars of the bed's footboard as tightly as he could. “Our Father who art,” he would say. “Our Fa­ther, Our Father, Our Father, Our Father.” He could get no further. He would bang his head against the bars until broad red welts appeared on his forehead. And then he would sweat and roll like a pig on the floor. Now tenderly he felt his cheeks; his face must be all ravaged with his own beatings and with Mina's cold teeth. He didn't need a shave. He couldn't remember shaving. Had Mina shaved him? Nausea rose in him to think of her standing with a razor at his face.

Or he would talk, feverishly but clearly; he would actually hold forth with true brilliance, he thought. He spoke about the tragic inevitable division between the cultural aims of a civiliza­tion, any society whatever, and the aims of the religion which that culture included. He told how he had at last come to recognize the neces­sity for a diseased temperament in the under­standing of any religious code. He slapped the table softly with open palm. “It's only through suffering that one comes to realize this,” he said. “Only through the purest, most intense sort of suffering.” He wagged his head gravely. “That's how I have come to know the things I know.” At these times he felt he was sixty-five or seventy years old, and a benevolent paternal feeling washed through him; he felt oddly protective of people. They would watch him with slow eyes and stolid expressions. He would expound elabo­rate theological justifications for suicide, for ex­treme poverty, for every emotional and physical excess. Sometimes he merely sat in the broken stained stuffed chair in the living room and stared into the tiny fireplace, where lay yet the powdery ashes of the last fire of the winter. He would mutter continuously to himself then, but he wasn't certain what he was saying. It seemed to be a long disquisition on the nature of fault, whether it was ever entirely personal. But he would suddenly break off and shout for help, for it seemed to him that he had become very small and that he lay smothering in the pinkish-gray ash. Mina would come in and press his shoulders into the chair with her cold dark hands. “Hold on there,” she said. “You're all right. You just hold on there.” She kept her face steady above his so long that he couldn't avoid looking up into it. And then he couldn't look away, and he was awed into silence. Into this unending mono­logue would creep nonsensical words, words he did not know, an unknown language of despair. “Yogg Sothoth…Cthulhu…Nephreu…” Then his mouth tasted bad, and he would drink again.

It was early July; it was scorching. In the fields the weeds—there didn't seem to be any crops growing—drooped lank and fat in the sun, and there was the continual sawing of insects. Sun­light was hot and heavy in the air, and the tin roof banged like firecrackers sometimes, ex­panding in the heat. For a while there was no rain and the road was muffled with pinkish-yel­low dust, which would rise in long tall plumes as cars passed and then settle, coating the leaves of the weeds and bushes. At night it was cooler and quieter; the crickets sang, but the darkness made the sound seem distant. Then he heard the stream running below and the infrequent splash of something small and dark entering the stream. He hoped it was one of Morgan's musk­rats.

Visitors were incessant, and Peter kept out of their sight as much as possible, where he could collect himself. They were mostly farmers, large taciturn men with large weathered rancid faces. He was startled to think how long it had taken him to realize how Morgan made his real living: he was a bootlegger. Somewhere on the farm his still was smoking away, digesting and distilling corn. He was even rather amused to think that Morgan must have to buy the grain from some of his customers; he certainly didn't grow the stuff himself. Was it a profitable business, was Morgan—for all his outward poverty—actually a wealthy man? This thought too was amusing. And now he could account for the endless supply of the alcohol that Mina was fetching him.

But he didn't like it when on some evenings there would be six or seven of Morgan's custom­ers gathered in the hot kitchen. Then he didn't move, but lay stockstill in the raddled quilts, frozen like an animal trying to camouflage itself. He had to guess the number of them from the guttural muttering he heard and the occasional solemn clomp of a heavy shoe. Often enough there were furtive wheezy giggles uttered, and sometimes, there was a single voice shouting, not words, but merely a sound of…of…of fearful surprise, of quick pain, of pained delight. None of these kinds of sounds, and maybe all of them together. What? He struggled to imagine what Mina was doing in there among them. It would be Morgan's idea, that Mina would encourage the men to drink. But he would not find out, he would not move to look. She would come in now and then to check on him, to bring him liquor if he needed it. She would toss a quilt over him and tuck it tightly and contemptuously under his chin. Her blouse would be unbuttoned at the top and when she bent over the bed he observed her small thick inexpressive breasts. Her skin would be warmer than usual from the heat of the kitchen, but it was still cool.

The next day there was a long massive July storm. It was the first time the light hadn't seemed unbearable to him and he had gone out onto the narrow back porch which ran the length of the house. A cool wind, and the yearn­ing stirring of the wild cherry tree below the house, the limbs asway; flies swarmed out of the wide air and gathered on his face and arms, and he didn't brush them away. He sat in a slouched slat-bottomed rocking chair and moved nothing but the forefinger of his right hand, with which he tapped his knee slowly and steadily, in time to a rhythm by which he felt the storm was gathering. Very gradually he accelerated his tapping. Dark gray on gray: the sky was bunch­ing its muscle; it was slow and broad as dream­less sleep. There seemed miles of air between the big first drops of rain. Then it was all loosened at once, noisily drenching the tin roof. The first stroke of lightning was blinding; it seemed that the nearest western hill cleft open, the lightning ascended the skies like something scurrying up a crooked ladder. There was no warning rumble, the thunder issued immedi­ately all in a bang. He dropped to the worn boards of the porch on his hands and knees, heaving and shuddering like a shot dog. Mo­mentarily he imagined the air full of electric particles; if he breathed, his lungs would be elec­trocuted. Then he was up and ran stumbling into the darkened living room and stood by the fireplace, clutching the daubed stream rock with both hands. He turned round and round. Then he put his hands in his pockets and walked quite casually to the corner of the room and pressed his shoulders against the walls, pressed his face hard into the corner. He kept quivering, but he felt that now it was all right to breathe. When Mina passed her damp fingers along the back of his neck he didn't move at first, but then turned around suddenly, his eyes unseeing and his face blanched. She grasped his shoulders and steered him into the stuffed chair before the fireplace, and he sat there watching it, turned away from the murderous storm. An inky ooze spread on the walls of the fireplace, the rain running down the chimney sides, and an occa­sional drop fell straight down the chimney, fell into the powdery ashes with a sound like some­one letting out his breath suddenly. He gave no sign that he observed anything.

Later he had calmed a great deal, but was very voluble and seemed joyfully excited. The storm had gone away, but trees and the roof were letting down the final drops. The land­scape burned with the reflected sunlight. “Look,” he said, “look, it's true what they said, that God does speak to you out of the storm cloud. I was sitting there, and my ears had never been more closed. It came to me when I was sitting there that I was dead, as dead as anyone buried in the ground. It seemed to me that I would like to struggle to come alive again, to make myself alive somehow, but I didn't know how. Even if I knew how I wouldn't have dared, I didn't have courage, I didn't have the strength to find courage. God spoke through the sky to me, and then I was dead, but I came back to life. I had to be killed first, you see, truly killed. The trouble was, you know, not that I didn't have courage to come to life, but that I didn't have courage to be truly dead. I had to accept that I was dead before anything good could happen like that for me. And then when it thundered I knew I
was
dead, and I remained dead for a long time. Whole ages passed while I was dead—I just vaguely knew they were passing. I was in a void, you know, I was where it was all dark­ness and empty space. Then at last I felt the breath of God, I actually felt it.” He ran his fingertips gently, reverently, across the back of his neck. “Here, right here. I literally felt the breath of God pass over my neck.”

Mina held him folded in her slow gaze. “That was just me,” she said. “I was just trying to get you to pay some mind.”

He appeared not to have heard her. He smiled in painful bewilderment. “But I can't re­member the words,” he said. “Not exactly, any­way. Not the exact words.…Isn't it strange that I should forget the words? I can remember all sorts of other things, and none of that is impor­tant now. It's very strange, don't you think?”

“Anyhow, you're okay now,” she said. “I guess I better get you something to drink.”

He shook his head, absently impatient. “I want to think,” he said. He felt he was on the verge of remembering, if not the words he so badly needed, then something equally impor­tant, a revelation.

Mina went off; she smiled carelessly. He sat where he was and slowly, helplessly, watched the bright event flicker in his mind and go out. For a panic moment he couldn't remember even the flavor of what had happened to him; but something at least seemed to come back, and he felt happy again. Now he was sure that an important event had occurred, something happy and eminent. That was enough. You had to be happy with what you got, he thought. No use expecting too much, it wouldn't be handed to you on a platter.

He rose and went to find Mina in the kitchen. “I think that was a good idea you had about having a drink.”

She stood with her legs apart, her hands on her hips. “You reckon?”

“Yes.” He chewed his upper lip.

“I don't know about that,” she said. “I don't see why I always got to be hauling liquor to you, just whenever you want. I don't hardly see no good I get out of it.”

He looked at her uncertainly. “Well…”

“If I was to expect you to look after me hand and foot, you wouldn't be doing it, I don't reckon. I don't see the good I get out of it at all.” She gazed steadily on his face.

“Well…” A slight perspiration came on his forehead.

She put her fingertips against his chest and shoved him backward lightly. “You better go and sit down,” she said. “I'll bring it to you, I guess, when I get a chance.”

He went back and sat waiting, sadly puzzled. What made her act like that, anyway? What had he done? He rubbed his left side slowly and thoughtfully with a vague circular movement. Lately he had a recurrent pain, sharp at times but mostly a blunt heavy ache, and now it seemed to have settled there. The room was much too bright; there was too much light outside, as there always is after a storm has cleared.

In a while she came, bearing a quart Mason jar of the slightly yellow alcohol. No glass or cup this time, he would have to drink it from the jar. “There you are then,” she said. “Is there any­thing else I got to do to keep you satisfied?” When he looked up at her his face was unknow­ingly appealing. But she had no mercy.