He'd come around and we'd talk and sit and snort and roll us some of that Prince Albert, which we'd smoke. We had some good laughs, we did, and I miss old Pearly sometimes.
So that night we let the bottle leak out pretty good, and Pearly, he's tellin' me about this time down in Texas in a boxcar with a river trash whore, and he stops in midsentence, right at the good part, and says: "You hear that?"
I said, "I don't hear nothin'. Go on with your story."
He nodded and told the tale, and I laughed, and he laughed. He could laugh better at his own stories and jokes than anyone I'd ever seen.
After a bit Pearly gets up and walks out beyond the firelight to relieve himself, you know. And he comes back right quick, zippin' his fly, and walkin' as fast as them old stiff legs of his will take him.
"There's somethin' out there," he says.
"Sure," I say. "Armadillos, coons, possums, maybe a stray dog."
"No," he says. "Something else."
"Awww."
"I been a lot of places, boy," he says—he always called me boy on account of I was twenty years younger than he was—"and I'm used to hearin' critters walk about. That don't sound like no damn possum or stray dog to me. Somethin' bigger."
I start to tell him that he's full of it, you know—and then I hear it too. And a stench like you wouldn't believe floats into camp here. A stench like a grave opened on a decomposin' body, one full of maggots and the smell of earth and death. It was so strong I got a little sick, what with all the rotgut in me.
Pearly says, "You hear it?"
And I did. It was the sound of somethin' heavy, crunchin' down that garbage out there, movin' closer and closer to the camp, like it was afeared of the fire, you know.
I got the heebie-jeebies, and I went into the but there and got my double-barrel. When I came out Pearly had pulled a little old thirty-two Colt out of his waistband and a brand from the fire, and he was headin' out there in the dark.
"Wait a minute," I called.
"You just stay put, boy. I'll see to this, and I'll see that whatever it is gets a hole in it. Maybe six."
So I waited. The wind picked up and that horrible stench drifted in again, very strong this time. Strong enough so I puked up that hooch I'd drunk. And then suddenly from the dark, while I'm leanin' over throwin' my guts out on the ground, I hear a shot. Another one. Another.
I got up and started callin' for Pearly.
"Stay the hell where you are," he called. "I'm comin' back." Another shot, and then Pearly seemed to fold out of the darkness and come into the light of the fire.
"What is it, Pearly?" I said. "What is it?"
Pearly's face was as white as his teeth. He shook his head. "Ain't never seen nothin' like it . . . Listen, boy, we got to get the hell out of Dodge. That sucker, it's—" He let his voice trail off, and he looked toward the darkness beyond the firelight.
"Come on, Pearly, what is it?"
"I tell you, I don't know. I couldn't see real good with that there firebrand, and it went out before too long. I heard it down there crunchin' around, over there by that big hill of garbage."
I nodded. That was a pile I'd had heaped up with dirt for a long time. I intended to break it open next time I 'dozed, push some new stuff in with it.
"It—it was comin' out of that pile," Pearly said. "It was wrigglin' like a great gray worm, but . . . there were legs all over it. Fuzzy legs.
And the body—it was jellylike. Lumber, fence wire, and all manner of crap was stickin' out of it, stickin' out of it like it belonged there, just as natural as a shell on a turtle's back or the whiskers on a cougar's face. It had a mouth, a big mouth, like a railway tunnel, and what looked like teeth . . . But the brand went out then. I fired some shots. It was still wrigglin' out of that garbage heap. It was too dark to stay there—"
He cut in midsentence. The smell was strong now, solid as a wall of bricks.
"It's movin' into camp," I said.
"Must've come from all that garbage," Pearly said. "Must've been born in all that heat and slime."
"Or come up from the center of the Earth," I said, though I figured Pearly was a mite near closer to right.
Pearly put some fresh loads in his revolver. "This is all I got," he said.
"I want to see it eat buckshot," I said.
Then we heard it. Very loud, crunchin' down those mounds of garbage like they was peanut hulls. And then there was silence.
Pearly, he moved back a few steps from the double-barrel toward the shack. I aimed the double-barrel toward the dark.
Silence went on for a while. Why, you could've heard yourself blink. But I wasn't blinkin'. I was a-watchin' out for that critter.
Then I heard it—but it was behind me! I turned just in time to see a fuzzylike tentacle slither out from behind the shack and grab old Pearly. He screamed, and the gun fell out of his hand. And from the shadows a head showed. A huge, wormlike head with slitted eyes and a mouth large enough to swallow a man. Which is what it did. Pearly didn't make that thing two gulps. Wasn't nothin' left of him but a scrap of flesh hangin' on the thing's teeth.
I emptied a load of buckshot in it, slammed the gun open and loaded her again. By that time it was gone. I could hear it crashin' off in the dark.
I got the keys to the 'dozer and walked around back of the shack on tiptoe. It didn't come out of the dark after me. I cranked the 'dozer, turned on the spotlights, and went out there after it.
It didn't take long to find it. It was movin' across the dump like a snake, slitherin' and a-loopin' as fast as it could go—which wasn't too fast right then. It had a lump in its belly, an undigested lump . . . Poor old Pearly!
I ran it down, pinned it to the chainlink fence on the far side of the dump, and used my 'dozer blade to mash it up against it. I was just fixin' to gun the motor and cut that sucker's head off when I changed my mind.
Its head was stickin' up over the blade, those slitted eyes lookin' at me . . . and there, buried in that wormlike face, was the face of a puppy. You get a lot of them here. Well, it was alive now. Head was still mashed in like it was the first time I saw it, but it was movin'. The head was wrigglin' right there in the center of that worm's head.
I took a chance and backed off from that thing. I dropped to the ground and didn't move. I flashed the lights over it.
Pearly was seepin' out of that thing. I don't know how else to describe it, but he seemed to be driftin' out of that jellylike hide; and when his face and body were halfway out of it, he stopped movin' and just hung there. I realized somethin' then. It was not only created by the garbage and the heat—it lived off of it, and whatever became its food became a part of it. That puppy and old Pearly were now a part of it.
Now don't misunderstand me. Pearly, he didn't know nothin' about it. He was alive, in a fashion, he moved and squirmed, but like that puppy, he no longer thought. He was just a hair on that thing's body. Same as the lumber and wire and such that stuck out of it.
And the beast—well, it wasn't too hard to tame. I named it Otto. It ain't no trouble at all. Gettin' so it don't come when I call, but that's on account of I ain't had nothin' to reward it with, until you showed up. Before that, I had to kind of help it root dead critters out of the heaps . . . Sit down! I've got Pearly's thirty-two here, and if you move I'll plug you.
Oh, here comes Otto now.
Author's Note on Fish Night
"Fish Night" has echoes of Bradbury, but it was the first story I ever wrote that struck me as a complete story in the way I wanted to write a story. It had the obligatory twist ending, as many horror stories had, but it had a thematic depth and point to it that my work before had not possessed. It had more than one layer. It was evenly written. It had some style, if it was slightly borrowed in that department.
I moved on rapidly from that story, began to write a series of stories that had more texture, and eventually my own style jumped out. It really didn't have far to jump. It had been there all the time. I just didn't
know it. I moved out of the California school of horror (Bradbury, Nolan, Matheson, etc.) shortly after this story, and into the Lansdale school of . . . well, of whatever. But this story, at least in my mind, is one of the more pivotal stories in my career.
It is a favorite of many readers. It was filmed once by the university here in Nacogdoches, but never edited to completion. It was optioned for a short film for a while, but nothing came of that either. It still gets reprinted quite a lot. Here, and abroad.
It was inspired by a fish mobile my wife had. I fell asleep on the couch, where I could see it hanging, and when I woke up, I had dreamed this story. I was geared to write a story, and was subconsciously looking for ideas. Bill Pronzini was doing an anthology called Specter! and he wanted something from me. I decided to attack the ghost idea from a different angle.
I hope you like reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. It was written quickly, and came out pretty much as I envisioned. It's nice when that happens.
Fish Night
It was a bleached-bone afternoon with a cloudless sky and a monstrous sun. The air trembled like a mass of gelatinous ectoplasm. No wind blew.
Through the swelter came a worn, black Plymouth, coughing and belching white smoke from beneath its hood. It wheezed twice, backfired loudly, died by the side of the road.
The driver got out and went around to the hood. He was a man in the hard winter years of life, with dead, brown hair and a heavy belly riding his hips. His shirt was open to the navel, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. The hair on his chest and arms was gray.
A younger man climbed out on the passenger side, went around front too. Yellow sweat-explosions stained the pits of his white shirt. An unfastened, striped tie was draped over his neck like a pet snake that had died in its sleep.
"Well?" the younger man asked.
The old man said nothing. He opened the hood. A calliope note of steam blew out from the radiator in a white puff, rose to the sky, turned clear.
"Damn," the old man said, and he kicked the bumper of the Plymouth as if he were kicking a foe in the teeth. He got little satisfaction out of the action, just a nasty scuff on his brown wingtip and a jar to his ankle that hurt like hell.
"Well?" the young man repeated.
"Well what? What do you think? Dead as the can-opener trade this week. Deader. The radiator's chickenpocked with holes."
"Maybe someone will come by and give us a hand."
"Sure."
"A ride anyway."
"Keep thinking that, college boy."
"Someone is bound to come along," the young man said.
"Maybe. Maybe not. Who else takes these cutoffs? The main highway, that's where everyone is. Not this little no-account shortcut." He finished by glaring at the young man.
"I didn't make you take it," the young man snapped. "It was on the map. I told you about it, that's all. You chose it. You're the one that decided to take it. It's not my fault. Besides, who'd have expected the car to die?"
"I did tell you to check the water in the radiator, didn't I? Wasn't that back as far as El Paso?"
"I checked. It had water then. I tell you, it's not my fault. You're the one that's done all the Arizona driving."
"Yeah, yeah," the old man said, as if this were something he didn't want to hear. He turned to look up the highway.
No cars. No trucks. Just heat waves and miles of empty concrete in sight.
They seated themselves on the hot ground with their backs to the car. That way it provided some shade—but not much. They sipped on a jug of lukewarm water from the Plymouth and spoke little until the sun fell down. By then they had both mellowed a bit. The heat had vacated the sands and the desert chill had settled in. Where the warmth had made the pair snappy, the cold drew them together.
The old man buttoned his shirt and rolled down his sleeves while the young man rummaged a sweater out of the back seat. He put the sweater on, sat back down. "I'm sorry about this," he said suddenly.
"Wasn't your fault. Wasn't anyone's fault. I just get to yelling sometime, taking out the can-opener trade on everything but the can openers and myself. The days of the door-to-door salesman are gone, son."
"And I thought I was going to have an easy summer job," the young man said.
The old man laughed. "Bet you did. They talk a good line, don't they?"
"I'll say!"
"Make it sound like found money, but there ain't no found money, boy. Ain't nothing simple in this world. The company is the only one ever makes any money. We just get tireder and older with more holes in our shoes. If I had any sense I'd have quit years ago. All you got to make is this summer—"
"Maybe not that long."
"Well, this is all I know. Just town after town, motel after motel, house after house, looking at people through screen wire while they shake their heads No. Even the cockroaches at the sleazy motels begin to look like little fellows you've seen before, like maybe they're door-to-door peddlers that have to rent rooms too."
The young man chuckled. "You might have something there."
They sat quietly for a moment, welded in silence. Night had full grip on the desert now. A mammoth gold moon and billions of stars cast a whitish glow from eons away.
The wind picked up. The sand shifted, found new places to lie down. The undulations of it, slow and easy, were reminiscent of the midnight sea. The young man, who had crossed the Atlantic by ship once, said as much.
"The sea?" the old man replied. "Yes, yes, exactly like that. I was thinking the same. That's part of the reason it bothers me. Part of why I was stirred up this afternoon. Wasn't just the heat doing it. There are memories of mine out here," he nodded at the desert, "and they're visiting me again."
The young man made a face. "I don't understand."
"You wouldn't. You shouldn't. You'd think I'm crazy."
"I already think you're crazy. So tell me."
The old man smiled. "All right, but don't you laugh."
"I won't."
A moment of silence moved in between them. Finally the old man said, "It's fish night, boy. Tonight's the full moon and this is the right part of the desert if memory serves me, and the feel is right—I mean, doesn't the night feel like it's made up of some soft fabric, that it's different from other nights, that it's like being inside a big, dark bag, the sides sprinkled with glitter, a spotlight at the top, at the open mouth, to serve as a moon?"
"You lost me."
The old man sighed. "But it feels different. Right? You can feel it too, can't you?"
"I suppose. Sort of thought it was just the desert air. I've never camped out in the desert before, and I guess it is different."
"Different, all right. You see, this is the road I got stranded on twenty years back. I didn't know it at first, least not consciously. But down deep in my gut I must have known all along I was taking this road, tempting fate, offering it, as the football people say, an instant replay."
"I still don't understand about fish night. What do you mean, you were here before?"
"Not this exact spot, somewhere along in here. This was even less of a road back then than it is now. The Navajos were about the only ones who traveled it. My car conked out, like this one today, and I started walking instead of waiting. As I walked the fish came out. Swimming along in the starlight pretty as you please. Lots of them. All the colors of the rainbow. Small ones, big ones, thick ones, thin ones. Swam right up to me . . . right through me! Fish just as far as you could see. High up and low down to the ground.
"Hold on, boy. Don't start looking at me like that. Listen: You're a college boy, you know something about these things. I mean, about what was here before we were, before we crawled out of the sea and changed enough to call ourselves men. Weren't we once just slimy things, brothers to the things that swim?"
"I guess, but—"
"Millions and millions of years ago this desert was a sea bottom. Maybe even the birthplace of man. Who knows? I read that in some science books.
And I got to thinking this: If the ghosts of people who have lived can haunt houses, why can't the ghosts of creatures long dead haunt where they once lived, float about in a ghostly sea?"
"Fish with a soul?"
"Don't go small-mind on me, boy. Look here: Some of the Indians I've talked to up north tell me about a thing they call the manitou. That's a spirit. They believe everything has one. Rocks, trees, you name it. Even if the rock wears to dust or the tree gets cut to lumber, the manitou of it is still around."
"Then why can't you see these fish all the time?"
"Why can't we see ghosts all the time? Why do some of us never see them? Time's not right, that's why. It's a precious situation, and I figure it's like some fancy time lock—like the banks use. The lock clicks open at the bank, and there's the money. Here it ticks open and we get the fish of a world long gone."
"Well, it's something to think about," the young man managed.
The old man grinned at him. "I don't blame you for thinking what you're thinking. But this happened to me twenty years ago and I've never forgotten it. I saw those fish for a good hour before they disappeared. A Navajo came along in an old pickup right after and I bummed a ride into town with him. I told him what I'd seen. He just looked at me and grunted. But I could tell he knew what I was talking about. He'd seen it too, and probably not for the first time.
"I've heard that Navajos don't eat fish for some reason or another, and I bet it's the fish in the desert that keep them from it. Maybe they hold them sacred. And why not? It was like being in the presence of the Creator; like crawling back inside your mother and being unborn again, just kicking around in the liquids with no cares in the world."
"I don't know. That sounds sort of . . ."
"Fishy?" The old man laughed. "It does, it does. So this Navajo drove me to town. Next day I got my car fixed and went on. I've never taken that cutoff again—until today, and I think that was more than accident. My subconscious was driving me. That night scared me, boy, and I don't mind admitting it. But it was wonderful too, and I've never been able to get it out of my mind."