Black Wings Of Cthulhu: Volume Two Part 5

I stand on a beach.

I sit on a sidewalk, eleven years old, and a woman named Maddy pa.s.ses me the Wheel of Fortune between the bars of an iron gate.

MEMORY FAILS, AND MY THOUGHTS BECOME AN apparently disordered torrent. I'm a dead woman recalling the events of a life I have relinquished, a life I have repudiated. I sit in this chair at this desk and hold this pen in my hand because Isobel has asked it of me, not because I have any motivation of my own to speak of all the moments that have led me here. I'm helpless to deny her, so I didn't bother asking why she would have me write this. I did very nearly ask why she didn't request it before, when I was living and still bound by the beeline perception of time that marshals human recollection into more conventional recitals. But then an epiphany, or something like an epiphany, and I understood, without having asked. No linear account would ever satisfy the congregation of the Church of Starry Wisdom, for they seek more occult patterns, less intuitive paths, some alternate perception of the relationships between past and present, between one moment and the next (or, for that matter, one moment and the last). Cause and effect have not exactly been rejected, but have been found severely wanting.

"That is you," says Madeleine, pa.s.sing me the Tarot card. "You are the Wheel of Fortune, an avatar of Tyche, the G.o.ddess of fate."

"I don't understand," I tell her, reluctantly accepting the card, taking it from her because I enjoy her company and don't wish to be rude.

"In time," she says, "it may make sense," then gathers her deck and hurries back inside that dilapidated house on East Hall Street, kept safe from the world behind its moldering yellow brick walls.

Burning, I lie down upon the cold granite altar. Soon, my lover, the Empress, climbs on top of me-straddling my hips-while the ragged High Priestess snarls her incantations, while the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana and all the members of the Four Suits (Pentacles, Cups, Swords, and Staves) chant mantras borrowed from the Al Azif.

The Acela Express rattles and sways and dips as it hurries me through Connecticut, and then Rhode Island, on my way to South Station. Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me... The woman sitting next to me is reading a book by an author I've never heard of, and the man across the aisle is busy with his laptop.

I come awake to the dank embrace of the clayey soil that fills in my grave. It presses down on me, that astounding, unexpected weight, wishing to pin me forever to this spot. I am, after all, an abomination and an outlaw in the eyes of biology. I've cheated. The ferryman waits for a pa.s.senger who will never cross his river, or whose crossing has been delayed indefinitely. I lie here, not yet moving, marveling at every discomfort and at my collapsed lungs and the dirt filling my mouth and throat. I was not even permitted the luxury of a coffin.

"Caskets offend the Mother and the Father," said the High Priestess. "What use have they of an offering they cannot touch?"

I drift in a fog of pain and impenetrable night. I cannot open my sunken eyes. And even now, through this agony and confusion, I'm aware of the jade pendant's presence, icy against the tattoo on my chest.

I awaken in my bed, in my mother's house, a few nights after her funeral. I lie still, listening to my heartbeat and the settling noises that old houses make when they think no one will hear. I lie there, listening for the sound that reached into my dream of a Dutch churchyard and dragged me back to consciousness-the mournful baying of a monstrous hound.

On the altar, beneath those smoking braziers, the Empress has begun to clean the mud and filth and maggots from my body. The Priestess mutters caustic sorceries, invoking those nameless G.o.ds burdened with innumerable names. The congregation chants. I am delirious, lost in some fever that afflicts the risen, and I wonder if Lazarus knew it, or Osiris, or if it is suffered by Persephone every spring? I'm not certain if this is the night of my rebirth or the night of my death. Possibly, they are not even two distinct events, but only a single one, a serpent looping forever back upon itself, tail clasped tightly between venomous jaws. I struggle to speak, but my vocal cords haven't healed enough to permit more than the most incoherent, guttural croaking.

...I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all...

"Hush, hush," says the Empress, wiping earth and hungry larvae from my face. "The words will come, my darling. Be patient, and the words will come back to you. You didn't crawl into h.e.l.l and all the way up again to be struck mute. Hush." I know that Isobel Endecott is trying to console me, but I can also hear the fear and doubt and misgiving in her voice.

"Hush," she says.

All around me, on the sand, are dead fish and crabs and the carca.s.ses of gulls and pelicans.

It's summer in Savannah, and from the wide verandah of the house on East Hall Street, an older woman calls to Maddy, ordering her back inside. She leaves me holding that single card, my card, and I sit there on the sidewalk for another half hour, staring at it intently, trying to make sense of the card and what Maddy has told me. A blue sphinx squats atop the Wheel of Fortune, and below it there is the nude figure of a man with red skin and the head of a dog.

"You are taking too long," snaps the High Priestess, and Isobel answers her in an angry burst of French. I cannot speak French, but I'm not so ignorant that I don't know it when I hear it spoken. I wonder dimly what Isobel has said, and I adore her for the outburst, for her brashness, for talking back. I begin to suspect something has gone wrong with the ritual, but the thought doesn't frighten me. Though I'm still more than half blind, my eyes still raw and rheumy, I strain desperately for a better view of Isobel. In all the wide world, at this instant, there is nothing I want but her and nothing else I can imagine needing.

This is a Sat.u.r.day morning, and I'm a few weeks from my tenth birthday. I'm sitting in the swing on the back porch. My mother is just inside the screen door, in the kitchen, talking to someone on the telephone. I can hear her voice quite plainly. It's a warm day late in February, and the sky above our house is an immaculate and seemingly inviolable shade of blue. I've been daydreaming, woolgathering, staring up at that sky, past the sagging eaves of the porch, when I hear something and notice that there's a very large black dog only a few yards away from me. It's standing in the gravel alleyway that separates our tiny backyard from that of the next house over. I have no way of knowing how long the dog has been standing there. I watch it, and it watches me. The dog has bright amber eyes, and isn't wearing a collar or tags. I've never before seen a dog smile, but this dog is smiling. After five minutes or so, it growls softly, then turns and trots away down the alley. I decide not to tell my mother about the smiling dog. She probably wouldn't believe me anyway.

"What was that you said to her?" I ask Isobel, several nights after my resurrection. We're sitting together on the floor of her loft on Atlantic, and there's a Beatles alb.u.m playing on the turntable.

"What did I say to who?" she wants to know.

"The High Priestess. You said something to her in French, while I was still on the altar. I'd forgotten about it until this morning. You sounded angry. I don't understand French, so I don't know what you said."

"It doesn't really matter what I said," she replies, glancing over the liner notes for Hey Jude. "It only matters that I said it. The old woman is a coward..."

Somewhere in North Carolina, the rhythm of the train's wheels against the rails lulls me to sleep. I dream of a neglected Dutch graveyard and the amulet, of hurricanes and smiling black dogs. Maddy is also in my dreams, reading fortunes at a carnival. I can smell sawdust and cotton candy, horses.h.i.t and sweating bodies. Maddy sits on a milking stool inside a tent beneath a canvas banner emblazoned with the words Lo! Behold! The Strikefire & Z. B. Harbinger Wonder Show! in bold crimson letters fully five feet high.

She turns another card, the Wheel of Fortune.

I lie in my grave, fully cognizant but immobile, unable to summon the will or the physical strength to begin worming my way towards the surface, six feet overhead. I lie there, thinking of Maddy and the jade pendant. I lie there considering, in the mocking solitude of my burial place, what it does and does not mean that I've returned with absolutely no conscious knowledge of anything I may have experienced in death. Whatever secrets the Starry Wisdom sent me off to discover remain secrets. After all that has been risked and forfeited, I have no revelations to offer my fellow seekers. They'll ask their questions, and I'll have no answers. This should upset me, but it doesn't.

Now I can hear footsteps on the roof of my narrow house. Something is pacing heavily, back and forth, snuffling at the recently disturbed earth where I've been planted like a tulip bulb, like an acorn, like a seed that will unfold, but surely never sprout.

It goes about on four feet, I think, not two.

The hound bays.

I wonder, will it kindly dig me up, this restless visitor? And I wonder, too, about the rumors of the others who've worn the jade pendant before me, and the stories of their fates. Those two ghoulish Englishmen in 1922, for instance; they cross my reanimated mind. As does a pa.s.sage from Francois-Honore Balfour's notorious grimoire, Cultes des Goules, and a few stray lines from the Al Azif. My b.e.s.t.i.a.l caller suddenly stops pacing and begins scratching at the soft dirt, urging me to move.

In the temple, as my lover takes my hand and I'm led towards the altar stone, through the fire devouring me from the inside out, the High Priestess of the Starry Wisdom reminds us all that only once in every thousand years does the hound choose a wife. Only once each millennium is any living woman accorded that privilege.

My train pulls into a depot somewhere in southern Rhode Island, grumbling to a slow stop, and my dreams are interrupted by other pa.s.sengers bustling about around me, retrieving their bags and briefcases, talking too loudly. Or I'm jarred awake by the simple fact that the train is no longer moving.

After s.e.x, I lie in bed with Isobel, and the only light comes from the television set mounted on the wall across the room. The sound is turned down, so the black-and-white world trapped inside that box exists in perfect grainy silence. I'm trying to tell her about the pacing thing from the night I awoke. I'm trying to describe the snuffling noises and the way it worried at the ground with its sharp claws. But she only scowls and shakes her head dismissively.

"No," she insists. "The hound is nothing but a metaphor. We weren't meant to take it literally. Whatever you heard that night, you imagined it, that's all. You heard what some part of you expected, and maybe even needed, to hear. But the hound, it's a superst.i.tion, and we're not superst.i.tious people."

"Isobel, I f.u.c.king died," I say, trying not to laugh, gazing across her belly towards the television. "And I came back from the dead. I tunneled out of my grave with my bare hands and then, blind, found my way to the temple alone. My flesh was already rotting, and now it's good as new. Those things actually happened, to me, and you don't doubt that they happened. You practice necromancy, but you want me to think I'm being superst.i.tious if I believe that the hound is real?"

She's quiet for a long moment. Finally, she says, "I worry about you, that's all. You're so very precious to me, to all of us, and you've been through so much already." And she closes her hand tightly around the amulet still draped about my neck.

On a sweltering August day in Savannah, a fastidious man who sells antique jewelry and Chinese porcelain makes no attempt whatsoever to hide his relief when I tell him I've decided to buy the jade pendant. As he rings up the sale, he asks me if I'm a good Christian girl. He talks about the Pentecost, then admits he'll be glad to have the pendant out of his shop.

I stand on a beach.

I board a train.

Maddy turns another card.

And on the altar of the Church of Starry Wisdom, I draw a deep, hitching breath. I smell incense burning and hear the lilting voices of all those a.s.sembled for my homecoming. My heart is a sledgehammer battering at my chest, and I would scream, but I can't even speak. Isobel Endecott is straddling me, and her right hand goes to my v.a.g.i.n.a. With her fingers, she scoops out the slimy plug of soil and minute branches of fungal hyphae that has filled my s.e.x during the week and a half I've spent below. When the pad of her thumb brushes my c.l.i.t, every shadow and shape half-glimpsed by my wounded eyes seems to glow, as if my l.u.s.t is contagious, as though light and darkness have become sympathetic. I lunge for her, my jaws snapping like the jaws of any starving creature; there are tears in her eyes as I'm restrained by the Sun and the Moon. The Hanged Man places a leather strap between my teeth.

Madness rides on the star-wind...

"Hush," Isobel whispers. "Hush, hush," whispers the Empress. "It'll pa.s.s."

It's the day I leave Savannah for the last time. In the bedroom of the house where I grew up, I pack the few things that still hold meaning for me. These include a photo alb.u.m, and tucked inside the alb.u.m is the Tarot card that the woman named Madeleine gave me.

ISOBEL IS WATCHING ME FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE dining room. She's been watching, while I write, for the better part of an hour. She asks, "How does it end? Do you even know?"

"Maybe it doesn't end," I reply. "I half think it's hardly even started."

"Then how will you know when to stop?" she asks. There's dread wedged in between every word she speaks, between every syllable.

"I don't think I will," I say, this thought occurring to me for the first time. She nods, then stands and leaves the room, and when she's gone, I'm glad. I can't deny that there is a certain solace in her absence. I've been trying not to look too closely at Isobel's eyes. I don't like what I see there anymore...

King of Cat Swamp JONATHAN THOMAS.

Jonathan Thomas's collections of weird fiction include Stories from the Big Black House (Radio Void Press, 1992), Midnight Call and Other Stories (Hippocampus Press, 2008), and Tempting Providence and Other Stories (Hippocampus Press, 2010). Arcane Wisdom has published his Lovecraftian novel The Color Over Occam, and his short stories have appeared most recently in Postscripts 22/23 and the first Black Wings of Cthulhu (both from PS Publishing). Thomas is a native of Providence, Rhode Island.

DWIGHT PEEKED PAST DRAWN SHADE IN THE LIVING room to make sure the yard crew had decamped before he switched on the underground sprinkler system. Yes, they were gone, but how long had that frail old guy been pacing back and forth out front, in this July scorcher? Like a stray dog with a fix on some tantalizing scent? And why did he keep casting coppery bright eyes toward the house, and were those eyes probing, or beseeching, or resentful? If he was casing the place-not that he looked physically capable of burglary-he scored no points for stealth. In fact, Dwight was a little surprised none of the neighbors had called the cops on this blatantly "suspicious character."

Edith reached from behind his shoulder and parted the shade another inch to let her see what was so absorbing. Made him jump. "Maybe he needs to use a bathroom," she speculated. "Maybe he needs to borrow a phone. Maybe he's thirsty."

"But why does he have to be thirsty here?" Dwight didn't consider himself the least mean-spirited. Or elitist. It just seemed a fair question.

"Well, we can't stand by and let him limp around till he gets sunstroke." Edith had an extraordinary gift for telling Dwight what to do short of coming right out with it. All right, so she was only hastening the decision he'd have made on his own, eventually. That didn't help him feel any less like a hapless pinball as he chucked a pair of gold cufflinks into a sideboard drawer to be on the safe side, b.u.mped into the row of suitcases ready in front hall for dawn taxi to the airport, and opened the door onto triple-digit heat index. A world of stunning difference from the central air inside. Dwight needed a few seconds to regroup before calling out, "Can I help you?"

But by then, ancient geezer had shuffled halfway up the grey slate walk. His burnished eyes never blinked as they narrowed upon Dwight, and he licked cracked lips, priming them to speak. In his expression resided a strength of will completely at odds with his general infirmity. Osteoporosis had crumpled him so severely that the average catalpa pod looked more substantial. His dark but bloodless complexion reminded Dwight of walnut meat, with comparably deep wrinkles and hairlessness to match.

Dwight was a washout when it came to pegging ethnicities, and even at the edge of point-blank range couldn't tell if angular features were Hispanic or Italian or Syrian. "Mediterranean" struck him as a rational compromise. And the outfit was emphatically generic. White b.u.t.ton-down shirt with long sleeves, loose khaki trousers, sandals. If anything, too much coverage for this hothouse climate. Maybe he suffered from poor circulation. "Please, I come back after long, long time away," he wheezed. "I do not want to steal." The rutted face peered up at Dwight's as if in supplication, but also as if Dwight owed him something, an insinuation with which he was less than comfortable. What's more, the accent contributed nothing toward defining the stranger's pedigree. Cajun? Portuguese? Mexican? Dwight was starting to feel rudderless. Say something! "Did you work for the people who used to live here?"

"This place was mine! Something of mine is still here!" Oh, s.h.i.t. Dwight had wounded the catalpa pod's dignity. He'd also been blindsided by that claim to former ownership, and who was he to brand anyone a liar out of hand? Still, he couldn't see it, not in this upper-crust Colonial Revival enclave, in what had always been, well, an unapologetically white bastion on the East Side of Providence. Like water into cracked cement, the geezer took advantage of Dwight's nonplussed state to slip past him and into the house. This turn of events had scarcely registered when Edith's startled yelp pulled Dwight inside on the double.

How had those decrepit legs carried the unwanted guest to the living room already? Dwight heard him mewl, "Please, I am only Castro. I have come back here for something that is mine." Edith was still at the window, and this so-called "Castro," with hands upraised in a medieval-looking gesture of appeas.e.m.e.nt, had violated her personal s.p.a.ce, to judge by her red cheeks and arched eyebrows and incisors biting into lower lip. She was wedged in among the beige velvet drapes, and had backed well beyond arm's length from the doddering intruder. Dwight could understand why she was aghast, even if it seemed an overreaction. She treated Dwight to a glance that fairly bristled, I meant for you to find out what he wanted, not ask him in! Oh, boy. No smoothing this over till she decided in due course to cool off.

Instead, Dwight aimed for a conciliatory tone toward Castro, who was, after all, merely a feeble and confused, if not senile, old specimen. As if anything of his were really on the premises! "Mr. Castro, why don't you have a seat? I'm sure we can get this sorted out in a minute." Castro eyed him as if wary of forked tongues, waddled backward and away from Edith, sized up the furnishings, and planted himself in the leather Deco club chair, their most valuable piece, facing the plasma TV. Dwight perched at one end of the puffy canvas sofa, across the room from the rear picture window, setting his guest in three-quarters profile. Castro swiveled on the squeaky upholstery to confront him head-on, putting Dwight unjustly on the defensive.

Edith, with a valiant post-traumatic smile, was rebounding from the drapes, rising to the occasion, doing her part to defuse the awkwardness. "Can I get you something to drink? It's so humid out there, isn't it?" Barely making eye contact, let alone giving Castro a chance to answer, she was off to the kitchen, with that sway in her hips, more p.r.o.nounced when she was in a hurry, that Dwight had found so provocative in premarital days, before realizing she couldn't help it, that it wasn't meant to turn him on. Maybe she was less interested in relieving Castro's thirst than in jumping at any excuse to absent herself a while.

Castro did watch her departure with what Dwight preferred to regard as appreciation. Yes, the man must have been parched, though no more perspiration shone on his furrowed skin than on petrified wood, as if his sweat glands had worn out over decades. Nor did he proffer her thanks or other nicety, but to Dwight he confided, "She is pretty, your wife."

Dwight for the life of him couldn't think up an answer to that. Castro didn't visibly care, content with an armchair inspection of the room, from j.a.panese woodblock prints on the wall to Erte bust on Corinthian pedestal to bronze figurines from Benin on the mantel. Casing the place despite protests to the contrary? Dwight wished in vain for something to say, if only to curtail the mental checklist. Jeez, had the sneaky codger noticed the luggage on his way in? Good luck enjoying Costa Rica for two carefree weeks now. And where the h.e.l.l was Edith with that gla.s.s of whatever?

"Here we are!" she lilted, bustling in with a blue plastic tumbler of cola. In her own good time, as usual. Handed it to Castro, who sniffed it with pursed, questioning lips as the fizz subsided. He tasted it and his features crinkled disdainfully.

"Please, can you put nice rum in this?" he demanded. "Nice Cuban rum."

Dwight and Edith exchanged helpless frowns, far from thrilled at prospects of a drunk, out-of-control foreigner in their den. More disturbing, it was as if Castro knew about that liter of Edmundo Dantes, a gift from Dwight's boss, who'd smuggled it in through Canada. It was locked in the bottom drawer of Second Empire china cabinet in the dining room. On reserve for special occasions. Was Castro psychic? Or a practical joker in the employ of Dwight's boss? In either case, refusing him would likely result in an ugly scene sooner rather than later. This Castro, as two minutes with him had demonstrated, was nothing if not irascible.

Another excuse for Edith to duck out, anyway, and she seized upon it without comment. Dwight heard her clattering in the McCoy bowl full of Lindt chocolates where they hid the key to the cabinet, and then the key rattling in the lock. Castro was also listening, head c.o.c.ked quizzically to one side. More clinking and sc.r.a.ping of gla.s.s against gla.s.s, across wood. Followed by the squeal and pop of a cork stopper.

Edith tripped back in, with a cheerful demeanor that may have been less transparently phony to Castro than to Dwight. Castro had to hold out his cup to meet Edith's outstretched arm with the open bottle. Quite admirable, her skill at hovering no closer than absolutely necessary to get the job done. "Say when!" Her smile did become brittle as the level of liquid rose significantly in the cup before Castro gave an understated nod of approval. He sampled the expensive concoction and smacked his arid lips with gusto. n.o.body's fault if it sounded more to Dwight like the click of mandibles.

Dammit, with all that fussing over the drink, Dwight had almost forgotten Castro's purported reason for worming his way in, and beaming Castro was relaxing and enjoying his rum and c.o.ke way too much. Dwight leaned forward from the edge of the sofa and aspired to a stern, authoritative timbre. "Mr. Castro, when we bought this house, the attic was completely empty, the bas.e.m.e.nt was completely empty, and every cupboard and closet was completely empty. Unless we've missed a secret crawls.p.a.ce or trapdoor, anything you mislaid was gone when we moved in."

"Mislaid?" huffed Castro scornfully. Then he nestled deeper in the maroon leather, sipped his drink, and adopted a more serene air. "Please, Mrs. Nickerson, you sit down too." Castro extended his free arm toward the sofa and drew circles in the air with his index finger. Edith sighed and played along. Keeping a lid on her impatience, but no longer smiling. Dwight wondered whether guest or hostess would blow up first. Edith had an extensive record of speaking her mind on short notice.

Wait a minute, how had Castro known their last name? Dwight had to rein in his alarm. Let the old guy spook you, and you pa.s.s the ball to his court. "Nickerson" was on the mailbox, for G.o.d's sake. Or, a.s.suming Castro's claim about lost property was sincere, he could have learned by any number of aboveboard means who occupied his former address.

"The houses around us, the streets and the sidewalks, the ground under our feet, they all feel so solid, like they always will be here, like they always have been," Castro expounded. "But it was not so long ago, things were different, were they not?"

"I don't see how this enters into your business here." When had Dwight asked for an oration? Had he already allowed Castro an inch and ceded a mile?

As if affirming that worst fear, Castro took a slow, exasperating slurp from his tumbler. "This ground we walk on, for example, with the big houses and the neat yards on top of it. Underneath, for thousands of years, was a swamp here that festered and bred sicknesses and vermin. Even less than a hundred years ago, some swamp was around us. The English who first came, they named it Cat Swamp, and the street you call Olney now, it went to the swamp, and they called it Cat Swamp Trail. That swamp is all buried, but who can say it is gone forever?"

"Whether it is or it isn't, every word of this is news to me," Dwight retorted, loath to admit Castro had hit a nerve by reducing his exclusive neighborhood to malarial wetland. "Why should we trust this information?"

Castro shrugged impa.s.sively. "No one can be sure of how much history there is, even in one's own backyard."

"Well, maybe I see what you mean," Edith ventured. "I heard there used to be a ravine where Elton Street is. But what does any of this have to do with whatever it is that belongs to you?"

"The ravine? Nothing to do with it, nothing." Sly Castro winked. Yes, of course he was acting purposely obtuse. Not out to fool anybody. Just his little jest, okay?

"Okay, but why in the world," asked Dwight despite wishing he could stop himself, despite misgivings that he was somehow chomping on bait, "was it called Cat Swamp?"

Castro raised his index finger and wagged it back and forth, as if to say, All in good time, my child. "It took a little while in front of your house to be sure you still had my thing of value. It will take a little while to relate how that thing of value came to be here."

Oh G.o.d, please, just get on with it, Dwight inwardly fumed, regretting he'd ever peeked out the front window. A like sentiment was all too readable in Edith's body language.

"In the beginning was a religious persecution, very long ago, but it is the first cause of my being here." Castro indulged a generous swallow from his tumbler. "In Andalusia, the people had leave to worship as they pleased. But after the Moors were expelled, it became bad, too hard to stay, for those who did not profess the orthodox creed."

Oh no, Dwight silently quailed, he's not really dragging us all the way back to 1492, is he? But yes, he plainly was, and Dwight would have been fidgeting with irritation had he not been s.p.a.cing out amidst Castro's nonstop babble.

"The Inquisition and the wars about faith were to spread all over Europe. To be safe for the longest time, it was needful to join with the Portuguese, who were sailing to lands with no Christians, with no jealous G.o.ds. And what is now New England would be safest, even though the Portuguese had put up a church and a fort where your Newport is today, and sought to convert the Niantic people. But in a few years the soldiers and the priests went away, as anyone could have foretold they would, because the gold and the silver and the trade were elsewhere, and those pa.s.sengers were soon forgotten who chose to stay and watch hurricanes and lightning hammer away at the fort. Nothing remains from those Portuguese builders except some of the church, visible at sea, and used by mapmakers as a landmark for generations before the Protestant colonies."

Inexplicably to Dwight, the more Castro drank, the more polished his diction, the more educated and articulate his delivery, above and beyond simply warming to his topic.

"And so where the doctrine of the Catholics did not take root, another did, with precious decades to flourish unmolested, and to attract members from among the native men, and to receive those disciples from the Old World with the cunning to seek and find American refuge. For the sake of avoiding friction with the sachems and the shamans of that region, the newcomers retired to territory shunned as worthless and unlucky, a swamp in fact, north of the bay. There they could practice their rituals and libations in privacy, to curry the favor of divine powers sovereign over earth and sea and stars. Native leadership for the most part left these swamp dwellers in peace, unwilling to risk the displeasure of strange G.o.ds."

Castro emptied the tumbler and set it gently on the parquet beside his chair. He had crossed the line between doddering and delusional, in Dwight's confident opinion, and where would he go from there? Slipping out of earshot and phoning the police to remove this potential menace might have been the best plan, but then the babble resumed, and Dwight didn't want to exit in the middle of a monologue and maybe set off their touchy powder keg. Wait till the next pause.

"Throughout this era, the only English to come ash.o.r.e were fishermen who stayed in summer stations, and who had nothing for recreation but to drink and to seduce the native women. These seasonal visitors, and not the next century's settlers, gave Cat Swamp its name, which was later thought to be from an abundance of cattails, or because bobcats prowled there, but no, it was because of the fishermen's own cats that ran off and hid in the swamp, hunting mice and beetles." Castro silently clapped his palms together, with fingertips leveled at Dwight. "And that is the answer I owed you, Mr. Nickerson, is it not?"

The best Dwight could do was nod helplessly, as if he had to keep his head above treacherous current, to the exclusion of almost everything else. A current of verbiage? Is that all it was? Edith was similarly gla.s.sy-eyed.

"The people of the swamp were happy to let the cats breed as they would, for they made acceptable offerings to those exalted, almighty powers, greedy for adoration. Much more pleasing to those powers was the blood of living men, which the fishermen also supplied when drunkenness made them easy marks, or when the furious kinfolk of a ravished native woman delivered them bound and naked. If entire boatloads of fishermen were to disappear, for the most part no one would miss them, and if someone did, where would blame ordinarily fall except upon the Atlantic?"

This crazy old coot, this demented story, it must be a hoax, Dwight reverted to telling himself. Staged by his boss, a send-up in lieu of a send-off, before tomorrow's flight. Yeah, that'd be just like him. Any minute now, someone somehow, Castro, boss, or third party, would tip his hand.

"Mrs. Nickerson, you look especially upset about these past happenings. Would it help for me to a.s.sure you that fishermen and rapists and slavers were often the same people?"

Castro droned on without waiting for Edith's yes or no. "Those first English colonists came here to escape persecution, even as we did, and those who built the first homes around the bay, and who were sometimes in earshot of our feline sacrifices, pretended deafness to them, in those days when the reputation of the cat was doubtful at best. Again you are upset, Mrs. Nickerson, but you must accept, your ancestors did not care what happened to cats."

Castro's hands were still clasping together and seemed to operate with a fidgety, independent volition of their own. They jerked a couple of inches back, forth, up, down at irregular intervals, as if obeying the skittish pull of the four compa.s.s points. Ever more annoying. If only Dwight could find the words to make him stop. At least Edith, bless her, had mustered the wherewithal to scoff, "Mr. Castro, do you really expect us to believe that Providence was founded by a coven of witches?"