Dagon

  “You sure now, sweetheart? Used to be, you ‘d hanker after a drink some.”

  He kept mute and still.

  “Well, okay then, whatever you say. Come on in here.”

  He led—half carried-Peter into the dark­ened bedroom, and Peter fell almost gratefully into Mina’s wide bed. Voluntarily he grasped the bars of the bedhead, readying himself for the tattooing session. It was Coke’s turn once more; Mina stood away, slightly behind him, ready to supervise. Bella turned on the naked overhead bulb, and the room went stark and shadowless. Peter gazed down at his long body with clinical interest. He hadn’t imagined that his thin being could grow so much thinner; he was all angles and knobs. His ribs were distress­ingly evident, stiff, stiff as fingers of the dead. When he breathed his skin seemed to move re­luctantly over his ribs, he could almost hear a susurration. Ah, poor body, with its single desti­nation, powerless and expectant. Coke Rymer reached to a cord at Peter’s navel, snapped it loose, began to maneuver the tattered bathing trunks from his waist.

  He squirmed and croaked.

  “Now don’t start that goddam meowling,” Mina said. “You just hush up. Because they ain’t nothing you can do about it anyhow.”

  Only disjointed croaks he could muster from his throat.

  “Hush. They ain’t nothing there that could hardly get hurt, is there? You ain’t got nothing down there to be touchous about. Just you keep quiet.”

  The bare bedroom was filling with men. They jostled together, unreal, tough-looking; they wore sport shirts or white shirts open at the col­lar. He couldn’t count them, the light from the big bulb jabbed his eyes. He thought that he recognized some of them; they were customers, the men the whores brought in. They had red faces, baked, hoodlums from the town of Gor­don, scoured, God knew how, out of the beer joints and hamburger joints, and brought here for the spectacle. They didn’t speak; they were silent except for an occasional single whisper and an accompanying titter.

  Coke Rymer gave a final tug and the swim trunks came off his feet. “There, by God,” the blond boy said. Peter watched him; he was trembling and sweating. He was more fearful than Peter, and somehow it made sense. Coke still had to fear Mina, but Peter didn’t any longer. No matter what happened to him, he was well out of that. It was a strange funny thought, but when he laughed he uttered only a scraping gurgling sound.

  “Hush up,” Mina said. “I ain’t going to tell you no more.”

  He clenched his teeth, he could hear the un­nerving rub of them together; he was going to keep silent, not from fear of Mina but in the hope of frustrating Coke Rymer. He knew that Coke hoped for his pained reactions, that they were a great part of what he had now to subsist upon. He too was losing grip. After she was finished with Peter and with Enid, it would be Coke’s turn. Peter began to wish that he could see it, he would like to know how Coke would bear up under what Mina had planned for him. Whatever it was, it would be different from Peter’s treatment; and he guessed that it would be worse. Abruptly he felt a queer sympathy for the boy, who was pushing forward now through the ring of strangers, bearing the black-handled needle with its black cord dangling; abruptly he was glad that he wouldn’t have to watch the spectacle of Coke Rymer’s going. As the blond boy squatted by the bedhead, grunting, to plug in the electric needle Peter glanced at the top of his sticky hair. He felt that he almost smelled the bad nerves in him. It was a performance for Coke as well as for Peter.

  He held the bars of the bedhead as tightly as he could, as Coke Rymer stood above him, lean­ing forward in a sort of triumphant uncertainty. But those bars seemed to go away from his grip; like the pump handle they had lost substance. In all the world there was nothing in which he could touch, find his maleness; all drifted.

  Mina came closer. She was ready to begin. She put the tip of her index finger on her cold tongue and leaned and touched Peter’s chest just below the right nipple. “There,” she said. “You can start right there.”

  Coke turned about and sat on the edge of the bed, pressing it so that Peter slid slightly against him. “Scoot your ass over,” Coke said. His voice had become the uncertain liquid falsetto once more. Peter shifted. Coke leaned sidewise over him; he was already sweating heavily and the oily drops fell from his forehead onto Peter’s belly, trickled into his navel.

  He held on as tight as he could and kept silent as long as he could. From the circle of the stran­gers came an occasional restless unsurprised mutter.…Perhaps they had expected more from him; he was being too quiet to please them, and he didn’t want to please them. But in a while he was muttering hoarsely; they all peered at him more closely. He couldn’t see very well what Coke was up to with the needle; it hurt his neck to look because of the way he had to crane. There was a murky green-and-purple band filling in from right to left across his chest, joining the place where the tattooing had already lapped over his shoulder. Around the tattooing the bare skin was flushed, heated, swollen; the design, if it could be called a design, appeared on him like a great lurid continent thrusting itself out of the sea. The upper part of his chest was numb, but it afforded him no real relief. He had ceased muttering, though. The only sounds now were the intense breathing of the five or six men gathered about and the warm steady hum of the electric needle, like the flight of a hornet near away in summer air. Not enough was happening; he felt Mina’s boredom, and he wasn’t surprised when she wet her finger and placed it high on his left cheek, not far below his eye.

  “There,” she said. “Start there again.”

  Coke Rymer held the needle above Peter’s neck and turned to look at her. “How come you want me to start up there now?” he said. “Ain’t I done enough work for one day?” His voice, the watery feminine whine.

  “Work; you don’t know what it means, work. You don’t know what the word is. You go ahead now, like I showed you.”

  He turned back to Peter. His hand was shak­ing savagely. For the first time Peter felt that he saw in those wet blue eyes an attitude toward himself that was not indifferent, nor fearful, nor contemptuous, but almost fellowly, almost sym­pathetic. And this discovery was more frighten­ing than any other. If this sort of feeling could be roused in Coke Rymer, it meant that the edge really was close, was nearing steadily.

  “Here we go then, sweetheart,” Coke said. “Hold on to your hat.”

  At the first prick of the needle he jerked his head aside, sputtered with stifling pain. Enid was standing at the foot of the bed, and through his pinched eyes he saw that her mouth was working, rounding and widening on breaths of air, though she made no sound. She had in her eyes a full wasted pity. He thought that she had better keep it for herself, Mina was killing two birds with one stone.

  Coke grasped him harshly with his left hand under his chin; his fingers were tight on the spit glands under his ears. “Goddam your eyes,” he said. “Hold your head still.”

  He acquiesced in his mind; he wanted as little trouble as possible, he wanted it to be over soon.

  But when the needle was at his cheek again, his head recoiled. He couldn’t help it. Now his body was taut with apprehension, and warm liq­uid streamed down his face, across his mouth. Taste of salt. When his head moved, the needle must have ripped his cheek. He looked at Coke in despair. He had made him angry, he hadn’t wanted to. It would be easy for the boy enraged to plunge the vibrant needle into his eye.

  But Coke turned away, turned toward Mina.

  “I ain’t going to do it no more,” he said. “I’m tired of it. You can do it your goddam self.”

  She didn’t smile, but her voice was levelly humorous. “All right. That’s fine. I guess you’ve had a hard day and I feel real sorry for you. You give Bella that needle and then you can go and lie down and take a little rest.” In the blazing room she was the only cool thing. “I’ll be around and tend to you in just a little while.”

  Bella poked her way through the waiting un­real circle of men. “Give me the needle,” she said. “I never have believed that
you had the guts of a weasel.…Isn’t it true that he shamed him in a fight once?” She asked the question of Mina. “Isn’t that true? That Coke was afraid of something like him?” She gestured toward Peter with the needle she had taken from the blond boy. It was still running, humming.

  Coke rose from the bed and pushed his way clumsily through the group. He rubbed his streaming face. Mina took his place on the edge of the bed, a neat aggressive motion.

  “I won’t be able to do it, I can’t hold it still,” Peter said. But the words became mere grating gasps, formed from pain and fear.

  Mina surveyed him from the foot of the bed. There seemed clear in her steady eyes the knowledge of what he was saying. “That’s all right, honey,” she said to Peter. “Don’t you worry about a thing. We’ll take care of you fine.” She touched two of the near men in the circle and they looked at her, waiting, shamefully scared. “Take hold of his feet,” she said. “Hold him down good and tight.”

  They grasped Peter’s ankles, unhesitating; pressed them so hard into the lumpy mattress that he had to let go the bars of the bedhead. His forearms were prickly with exhaustion, his wrists felt all injured tendon, his palms were bruised scarlet.

  “You-all grab his hands too. We got to stop him from jumping all over the place.”

  One of the men, fantastic and red-faced as the others, took Peter’s right hand, bent his elbow hard, bringing his forearm under his neck, and then took both wrists together, one atop the other; held them crossed hard with his knee. His face was unreadable. He steadied his stance by holding to the bedhead.

  Bella took Coke’s place at the bed edge. She took Peter’s chin with thumb and finger and turned the torn cheek toward her. “Look at that,” she said. “Coke’s made a mess of this, it’s just a mess.”

  “You can let that part go then,” Mina said. “You’ll have to start lower down.” She wet her finger, leaned over the foot of the bed, touched him where it would be most sexually excruciat­ing; but there was no longer sexuality in him. She straightened, her eyes still plainly bored; and from the strangers a murmur of…Was it satisfaction? They were expectant.

  He nodded. It was as he had thought; there was no way out of Mina’s thinking. He came at last to anticipate her every maneuver, horrified because she had so usurped his mind. It was his own head that labored so to produce his own humiliation.

  Bella rose and moved lower on the bed.

  The moos were on him, implacable, but now they didn’t care; they let him sound away, ab­sorbed in their work. He kept passing out and rousing again to consciousness. The world was flaring brightly before him; gasping and flicker­ing down again. It was the most fragile tendril that held him tied to it all.

  At last they brought him back again for the final time. Coke Rymer had returned, and he helped one of the strangers hoist Peter to his feet. They almost dropped him; he had no con­trol.

  “That’s all, sweetie,” Coke said. “That’s all there is.”

  Mina came forward and looked him over. They held him pinioned by arms and shoulders. He couldn’t see her well, he didn’t look at her face, but felt the cold wash of her gaze on all his body. “Wouldn’t you like to see how it turned out?” she said. “I believe you’ve improved a whole lot.” She spoke to Coke and the other. “Bring him over here in front of the mirror.”

  They dragged him standing before the ward­robe. He saw the image; nodded wisely. His legs were still naked, untouched by the needle, but they were no longer his, no longer even sup­ported his body. They looked irrelevant and alien, detachable. The remainder of his body was obliterated; it had been absorbed entirely into another manner of existence, a lurid placeless universe where all order was enlarged bit­ter parody. Even his bare skin where the needle had not tracked was a part of it all, and the bloodstain over his face was integral, was as­suredly important. His body now was a river, was flowing away. He nodded again.

  “Well now,” Mina said, “I’m glad to see that you like it. I think it does you a lot of good myself.” She spoke to Coke Rymer and the other man. “Well, take him out there where I told you to.”

  Immediately they began dragging him toward the door. The line of strangers fell away and they went through into the living room, turned, went through the kitchen. It was dark and no cooler. The stars looked close and hot, and in the darkness were clumps of darker shadow. He breathed deep, convulsively; he felt almost as if he had been holding his breath for hours. No, but in the air he had been breathing had been no sustenance for his lungs. The porch floor creaked as they shuffled across it; the board steps cried out. He was not resisting, but he couldn’t aid them, either. There was nothing left in his body. He had no body.

  Shuffling in the thick dust they took him across the barren ground. He gazed upward and the sky looked narrow and vile, hurrying against him. They were taking him, he knew it, to the low weather-stained shed. There the god per­mitted his being at times to obtrude into per­ception. He had feared the obscure shed and the altar with all his deep and fearful hate, but now he was hopeful for it. He wished that he could move toward it under his own volition. Coke Rymer unlatched the shabby raspy door and they flung him in. He fell on his back, and for a few minutes lay still. He knew that they wouldn’t come in to help him sit up; they wouldn’t enter at all. Coke Rymer gazed at him through the door only for a moment; threw him—it was like throwing a foul scrap of meat to a dog—a limp mock salute. “Well, bye-bye sweetheart,” he said. “I guess I won’t be seeing you for a while. Might be a good long time.” He turned and followed the other man, both forms dissol­ving into shadowed night. They left the door open, dark gray rectangle scratched with the wiry lines of blackberry vines. He heard Mina coming; and he pushed himself backward through the dirt floor littered with wads of paper and corncobs.

  She leaned forward in the low door, putting her hands at the top to hold herself. “Well, there you are now,” she said. “You look like you’re comfortable. You look like you’re going to be all right. You’re all right, ain’t you?”

  He couldn’t answer.

  “Well, you look all right to me. I’ll just leave you here and I’ll be back in a little while.”

  All he could make out of her was her luminous gray eyes, spots in the darkness. He nodded, he was sure she could see him.

  “Yeah, I knew you knew I’d be back.” She laughed, a slight dry sound, humorless. She stepped back; shut the door lightly; shot the solid latch forward.

  He waited. He heard her going away, and then he heard nothing for a long while. Then, a faint rustling in a far corner: a rat, perhaps. And then again silence, disturbed by his own un­steady breathing. Inside his chest it was as pain­ful as outside. In here it was inky dark and his eyes did not grow accustomed to it. He could barely make out the shape of the silly altar, loose boards of uneven lengths laid over two rickety sawhorses. Very gradually his breathing grew in volume, stertorous, bladed in the throat. It grew and grew; he could feel the passage of it on his skin. It was not his breathing. He understood. He opened his mouth to breathe. The galaxies poured down his throat, thick tasteless dust he could not spit out, could not vomit. The breathing was icy on his skin; impression of swift wind continually on him, but the dust of the floor not stirring. Slowly he raised his hands to rub his face. It was cold and dry and felt not like flesh, but like wood or leather. It was himself no longer.…Point of vague light somewhere in the air, but then not light: a circle of blackness, a funnel that sucked all the light away, even the light of his body which was glowing with a faint phosphorescent pulse. He looked into his body, looked through it: wide clots of dust, a thin winking membrane where the nebulae were being born.…Something solid out there. An angleless wall without protuberance; no, not solid; a bending wall, breathing upon him.

  Eye.

  Tooth.

  Glimpsed and then erased, wiped coolly from vision.

  The god Dagon assumed the altar.

  Reptilian. Legless. Truncated scaly wings, flightle
ss, useless. The god Dagon was less than three feet long. Fat and rounded, like the belly of a crocodile. He couldn’t see the mouth hidden away under the body, but he knew it: a wirelike grin like a rattlesnake’s; double rows of venomous needles in the maw. On this side a nictitating eye, but he thought that on the other side there would be no eye, but merely a filmy blind spot, an instrument to peer into the mar­row of things. The visible eye gray, almost white. A body grayish-pink like powdery ashes. Chipped and broken scales covered it, tightly overlapped. It breathed and this took a long time. The froglike belly distended, contracted.—The reptilian shape was immobile; there was no way for it to move upon the earth.

  He recognized the god Dagon.

  An idiot. The god was omnipotent but did not possess intelligence. Dagon embodied a naked will uncontrollable. The omnipotent god was merely stupid.

  Peter laughed, his teeth shone in the dark.

  He confronted the god. The presence of Dagon displaced time, as a stone displaces water in a dish. Surely hours elapsed in the stare that was between them.

  Merely a ruptured idiot stubby reptile.

  The god Dagon went away. Suddenly winked out; whisked.

  At last Peter relaxed. He smiled in the dark. He had faced the incomprehensible manifesta­tion and he still maintained himself; he was still Peter Leland. He blinked his eyes gratefully, casually turned his head from the altar. He heard Mina coming and turned to face the door, still smiling in the dark, uncaring and relaxed. She opened the flimsy door and entered without hesitation. In her right hand she bore Coke Rymer’s man-thing, faintly gleaming. She took a handful of his hair in her left hand and Peter knelt forward on his knees and raised his head. Happily he bared his throat for the knife.

  SIX

  Peter Leland died and came through death to a new mode of existence. He did not forget his former life, and now he understood it. The new vantage point of his psyche was an undefined bright space from which he could look back upon this little spot of earth and there see the shape of his life in terms not bitterly limited by misery and fear. At his death he did not relin­quish the triumphant grasp of his identity he had acquired in encountering Dagon face to face. He had come through. In this surrounding brightness there was no time, and he watched his career unfold itself again and again beneath him and he laughed, without rancor and with­out regret. Now his whole personality was a be­nevolent clinical detachment.