Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 6, June, 1994
- Автор: Bashover Albert, Crawford Dan
- Год: 1994
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: ISSN: 0002-5224
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 6, June, 1994». Краткое содержание книги:
The dead man looked up at us, and I realized I could almost see through him, as if he were made of milky beach glass. His eyes looked like blind cat’s-eye marbles. He wore clothes after all — overalls and a work shirt — but they were as pale and translucent as the rest of him. His hollowed face was wreathed in a tattered beard, and his nose was flat and misshapen. I thought immediately of the campfire stories of the hillfolk who perished as the floodwaters roared through the long-drowned valley. One of the creature’s hands released Bobby Lee’s line and grasped the gunwale.
At the same moment the lake around us began to glow, as if a huge underwater bonfire had been lit on the lake bottom. And I saw more of them rising toward us like tailless mermaids; men, women, and children, their expressions a mixture of delight and desperation.
Bobby Lee must have spotted them, too, because he gave his line a mighty yank, pulling the lure free from the man’s wet grasp. It whistled up into the air and landed on the transom with a faint clank.
Suddenly the boat rocked and pitched. Several pairs of watery hands gripped the sides as the lake people — for what else could you call them — began struggling to climb aboard. The boat canted again, and I nearly lost my balance; the air filled with a strong damp odor of decay, far worse than the lake’s usual fishy smell.
“The lure!” I shouted to Bobby Lee. “Cast it out fast!”
Bobby Lee came to the same conclusion. The Indian lure had called them up, and they wanted it. He lifted his rod and cast the lure overhand as hard as he could, far out into the night.
Immediately the hands released the boat and disappeared below the surface. The bearded man, who had grabbed Bobby Lee’s right leg below the knee, let go and sank soundlessly into the lake like a film of splashing water run backwards. I caught a glimpse of him hurrying after the others like a man-shaped torpedo.
“Cold,” Bobby Lee moaned, clutching his soaked denim-clad leg. “That thing was freezing, Kenny.”
“Hurry and cut your line,” I panted. “Then start that damned engine.” My brain was having trouble sorting out what I’d just witnessed, but my blood sang with adrenaline.
Bobby Lee stared across the water to where his line disappeared, hyperventilating. His eyes looked jumpy and his hands trembled.
“Bobby Lee!”
I started back to the transom, stepping over tackle and the cooler, and then the line in Bobby Lee’s hand came alive again. He pulled back by reflex and started reeling.
“Cut the line!” I hollered.
“That damn thing’s dangerous,” he said grimly. “We can’t leave it here.”
I couldn’t believe what I’d heard, but I recognized that stubborn tone in Bobby Lee’s voice. Did he mean to sell the lure to someone else? Someone like the National Enquirer or one of those UFO TV specials? Or was he really afraid to let it sink into the lake?
Bobby Lee cranked furiously, his expensive reel spooling line in fast.
I reached down and fumbled open my tackle box. A fillet knife, slender blade almost gone from sharpening, lay in the bottom compartment in a plastic sheath. I pulled it out.
Bobby Lee didn’t even try to stop me. He’d probably never seen me move so fast. I grabbed the line just past his rod tip and cut it, but not before I felt a wild thrumming — and something that sounded like a chorus of garbled voices — telegraphed from the other end. It felt like they all had grabbed hold of that cursed lure.
Bobby Lee plopped back into his plastic swivel chair with a grunt. I sank into my chair and dropped the knife, shivering. We both saw his fishing line being drawn below the surface like a kid sucking down a long string of spaghetti. It disappeared quick.
“Sorry about that, Bobby Lee,” I said. “You can buy another from that Indian peddler, I guess.”
I didn’t mention that he’d be fishing it alone. I planned to start the outboard when I had my breath back, motor to shore, and never venture onto the lake again.
The boat lurched, and for a wild second I thought Bobby Lee had lost his senses and jumped in after that damned lure. Then I looked up and saw Karla, his hellcat of a wife, rearing up not a foot behind him.
She stood perched on the transom like a liquid emerald statue, smiling and swinging the lure like a hypnotist’s medallion. She looked not a day older than she had the week she disappeared, except there was a long dent in her skull above her left eye. Circling her wrists and long translucent legs were black tarnished bracelets of heavy logging chain.
Bobby Lee saw the expression on my face and slowly turned. His scream probably gave the loons nightmares for a year. It was still rolling across the water when the lake spirit that had once been Karla stepped down into the boat.
Bobby Lee leaped up like he’d touched a live power line. Moaning, he grabbed the wooden oar from the boat floor and swung at his dead wife’s liquid form. The paddle sank into her neck at the shoulder — and came to a syrupy stop.
The Karla-thing grinned her most ferocious grin and suddenly lost all human form, twisting up the oar handle and Bobby Lee’s arm. She flowed over him like some gelatinous monster from a drive-in flick, cutting off his final scream.
I turned to escape, to run across the water like one of those South American basilisks, and I stumbled on the tackle box. I saw stars and the pale, pocked belly of the Strawberry Moon, and then nothing at all.
So I swam to shore, clawed my way through the thick brush and cattails along the bank until I came to the launch ramp and my pickup, then barreled into town on the county road that runs alongside the south end of the lake.
At the police station I shivered and gulped hot coffee and told them what had happened to Bobby Lee and, sadly, where they’d find the remains of his missing wife — or at least a version they would believe. Drunk and guilt-ridden, I said, my friend had confessed and jumped overboard before I could stop him.
Oh hell, I wish I could tell you that’s what happened.
No storyteller likes to serve up an odd or unsatisfying ending, and fishermen are no different. But none of that Nancy Drew stuff happened. And it’s not so bad here beneath the lake’s green, concave sky.
You didn’t guess that I never made it back to dry land? Karla took Bobby Lee with her — oh yes, she’ll be giving him an earful from now until eternity — but I drowned, plain and simple. Must have hit my head on the side of the boat when I tumbled overboard. No life vest on, like they warn you about in all the safety advertisements. Glub-glub.
It’s at night that loneliness calls me from the cold depths, makes a small part of me yearn to rejoin those who still kick, paddle, and motor above the lake’s vast surface. Every so often a boat drifts silently by overhead like a slender dark cloud, and a flash of silver catches my eye as some midnight angler’s nickel-plated lure pulsates through the depths. A permanent resident of that drowned (but hardly deserted) village beneath the lake, I finally understand the ageless attraction that draws the deepwater fish closer to the surface. The glimmer of reflected moonlight; the muffled thrumming of hammered metal.
When the Strawberry Moon comes again, I’m going to grab myself one and give some old boy a good story to tell his fishin’ buddies.
The Mists of the Southern Seas
by Martin Limón
The Great King Sejong Daewang held up the chart and pointed to the clustered islands along the southern coast of Cholla Province.