In the following two years . . .
Greenface
“What I don’t like,” the fat sport—his name was Freddie Something—said firmly, “is snakes! That was a whopping mean-looking snake that went across the path there, and I ain’t going another step nearer the icehouse!”
Hogan Masters, boss and owner of Masters Fishing Camp on Thursday Lake, made no effort to conceal his indignation.
“What you don’t like,” he said, his voice a trifle thick, “is work! That little garter snake wasn’t more than six inches long. What you want is for me to carry all the fish up there alone, while you go off to the cabin and take it easy—”
Freddie already was on his way to the cabin. “I’m on vacation!” he bellowed back happily. “Gotta save my strength! Gotta ‘cuperate!”
Hogan glared after him, opened his mouth and shut it again. Then he picked up the day’s catch of bass and walleyes and swayed on toward the icehouse. Usually a sober young man, he’d been guiding a party of fishermen from one of his light-housekeeping cabins over the lake’s trolling grounds since early morning. It was hot work in June weather and now, at three in the afternoon, Hogan was tanked to the gills with iced beer.
He dropped the fish between chunks of ice under the sawdust, covered them up and started back to what he called the lodge—an old two-story log structure reserved for himself and a few campers too lazy even to do their own cooking.
When he came to the spot where the garter snake had given Freddie his excuse to quit, he saw it wriggling about spasmodically at the edge of a clump of weeds, as if something hidden in there had caught hold of it.
Hogan watched the tiny reptile’s struggles for a moment, then squatted down carefully and spread the weeds apart. There was a sharp buzzing like the ghost of a rattler’s challenge, and something slapped moistly across the back of his hand, leaving a stinging sensation as if he had reached into a cluster of nettles. At the same moment, the snake disappeared with a jerk under the plants.
The buzzing continued. It was hardly a real sound at all—more like a thin, quivering vibration inside his head, and decidedly unpleasant. Hogan shut his eyes tight and shook his head to drive it away. He opened his eyes again, and found himself looking at Greenface.
Nothing even faintly resembling Greenface had ever appeared before in any of Hogan’s weed patches, but at the moment he wasn’t greatly surprised. It hadn’t, he decided at once, any real face. It was a shiny, dark-green lump, the size and shape of a goose egg standing on end among the weeds; it was pulsing regularly like a human heart; and across it ran a network of thin, dark lines that seemed to form two tightly shut eyes and a closed, faintly smiling mouth.
Like a fat little smiling idol in green jade—Greenface it became for Hogan then and there. . . . With alcoholic detachment, he made a mental note of the cluster of fuzzy strands like hair roots about and below the thing. Then—somewhere underneath and blurred as though seen through milky glass—he discovered the snake, coiled up in a spiral and still turning with labored writhing motions as if trying to swim in a mass of gelatin.
Hogan put out his hand to investigate this phenomenon, and one of the rootlets lifted as if to ward off his touch. He hesitated, and it flicked down, withdrawing immediately and leaving another red line of nettle-burn across the back of his hand.
In a moment, Hogan was on his feet, several yards away. A belated sense of horrified outrage overcame him—he scooped up a handful of stones and hurled them wildly at the impossible little monstrosity. One thumped down near it; and with that, the buzzing sensation in his brain stopped.
Greenface began to slide slowly away through the weeds, all its rootlets wriggling about it, with an air of moving sideways and watching Hogan over a nonexistent shoulder. He found a chunk of wood in his hand and leaped in pursuit—and it promptly vanished.
He spent another minute or two poking around in the vegetation with his club raised, ready to finish it off wherever he found it lurking. Instead, he discovered the snake among the weeds and picked it up.
It was still moving, though quite dead, the scales peeling away from the wrinkled flabby body. Hogan stared at it, wondering. He held it by the head; and at the pressure of his finger and thumb, the skull within gave softly, like leather. It became suddenly horrible to feel and then the complete inexplicability of the grotesque affair broke in on him.
He flung the dead snake away with a wide sweep of his arm, went back of the icehouse and was briefly but thoroughly sick.
Julia Allison was leaning on her elbows over the kitchen table studying a mail-order catalogue when Hogan walked unsteadily into the lodge. Julia had dark-brown hair, calm gray eyes, and a wicked figure. She and Hogan had been engaged for half a year. Hogan didn’t want to get married until he was sure he could make a success of Masters Fishing Camp, which was still in its first season.
Julia glanced up smiling. The smile became a stare. She closed the catalogue.
“Hogan,” she stated, in the exact tone of her pa, Whitey Allison, refusing a last one to a customer in Whitey’s bar and liquor store in town, “you’re plain drunk! Don’t shake your head—it’ll slop out your ears.”
“Julia—” Hogan began excitedly.
She stepped up to him and sniffed, wrinkling her nose. “Pfaah! Beer! Yes, darling?”
“Julia, I just saw something—a sort of crazy little green spook—”
Julia blinked twice.
“Look, infant,” she said soothingly, “that’s how people get talked about! Sit down and relax while I make up coffee, black. There’s a couple came in this morning, and I put them in the end cabin. They want the stove tanked with kerosene, ice in the icebox, and coal for a barbecue—I fixed them up with linen.”
“Julia,” Hogan inquired hoarsely, “are you going to listen to me or not?”
Her smile vanished. “Now you’re yelling!”
“I’m not yelling. And I don’t need coffee. I’m trying to tell you—”
“Then do it without shouting!” Julia replaced the coffee can with a whack that showed her true state of mind, and gave Hogan an abused look which left him speechless.
“If you want to stand there and sulk,” she continued immediately, “I might as well run along—I got to help Pa in the store tonight.” That meant he wasn’t to call her up.
She was gone before Hogan, struggling with a sudden desire to shake his Julia up and down like a cocktail for some time, could come to a decision. So he went instead to see to the couple in the end cabin. Afterwards he lay down bitterly and slept it off.
When he woke up, Greenface seemed no more than a vague and very uncertain memory, an unaccountable scrap of afternoon nightmare. Due to the heat, no doubt. Not to the beer—on that point Hogan and Julia remained in disagreement, however completely they became reconciled otherwise. Since neither wanted to bring the subject up again, it didn’t really matter.
The next time Greenface was seen, it wasn’t Hogan who saw it.
* * *
In mid-season, on the twenty-fifth of June, the success of Masters Fishing Camp looked pretty well assured. Whitey Allison was hinting he’d be willing to advance money to have the old lodge rebuilt, as a wedding present. When Hogan came into camp for lunch, everything seemed peaceful and quiet; but before he got to the lodge steps, a series of piercing feminine shrieks from the direction of the north end cabin swung him around, running.
Charging up to the cabin with a number of startled camp guests strung out behind him, Hogan heard a babble of excited talk shushed suddenly and emphatically within. The man who was vacationing there with his wife appeared at the door.
“Old lady thinks she’s seen a ghost, or something!” he apologized with an embarrassed laugh. “Nothing you can do. I . . . I’ll quiet her down, I guess. . . .”
Hogan waved the others back, then ducked around behind the cabin, and listened shamelessly. Suddenly the babbling began again. He could hear every word.
“I did so see it! It was sort of blue and green and wet—and it had a green face, and it s-s-smiled at me! It f-floated up a tree and disappeared! Oh-G-G-Georgie!”
Georgie continued to make soothing sounds. But before nightfall, he came into the lodge to pay his bill.
“Sorry, old man,” he said. He still seemed more embarrassed than upset. “I can’t imagine what the little woman saw, but she’s got her mind made up, and we gotta go home. You know how it is. I sure hate to leave, myself!”