One final note. Katie Arlen and I dated for four months, Novem-42
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ber 1994 through February of 1995. We broke it off by mutual consent, due to sexual incompatibility.
I was impotent unless she was wearing rubber gloves.
At some point I think every writer of scary stories has to tackle the subject of premature burial, if only because it seems to be such a pervasive fear. When I was a kid of seven or so, the scariest TV
program going was Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and the scariest AHP —my friends and I were in total agreement on this—
was the one starring Joseph Cotten as a man who has been injured in a car accident. Injured so badly, in fact, that the doctors think he’s dead. They can’t even find a heartbeat. They are on the verge of doing a postmortem on him—cutting him up while he’s still alive and screaming inside, in other words—when he produces one single tear to let them know he’s still alive. That was touching, but touching isn’t in my usual repertoire. When my own thoughts turned to this subject, a more—shall we say modern? —method of communicating liveliness occurred to me, and this story was the result. One final note, regarding the snake: I doubt like hell if there’s any such reptile as a Peruvian boomslang, but in one of her Miss Marple capers, Dame Agatha Christie does mention an African boomslang. I just liked the word so much ( boomslang, not African ) I had to put it in this story.
43
The Man in the Black Suit
I am now a very old man and this is something which happened to me when I was very young—only nine years old. It was 1914, the summer after my brother Dan died in the west field and three years before America got into World War I. I’ve never told anyone about what happened at the fork in the stream that day, and I never will . . . at least not with my mouth. I’ve decided to write it down, though, in this book which I will leave on the table beside my bed. I can’t write long, because my hands shake so these days and I have next to no strength, but I don’t think it will take long.
Later, someone may find what I have written. That seems likely to me, as it is pretty much human nature to look in a book marked DIARY
after its owner has passed along. So yes—my words will probably be read. A better question is whether or not anyone will believe them.
Almost certainly not, but that doesn’t matter. It’s not belief I’m interested in but freedom. Writing can give that, I’ve found. For twenty years I wrote a column called “Long Ago and Far Away” for the Castle Rock Call, and I know that sometimes it works that way—what you write down sometimes leaves you forever, like old photographs left in the bright sun, fading to nothing but white.
I pray for that sort of release.
A man in his nineties should be well past the terrors of childhood, but as my infirmities slowly creep up on me, like waves licking closer and closer to some indifferently built castle of sand, that terrible face grows clearer and clearer in my mind’s eye. It glows like a dark star in the constellations of my childhood. What I might have done yesterday, who I might have seen here in my room at the nurs-45
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ing home, what I might have said to them or they to me . . . those things are gone, but the face of the man in the black suit grows ever clearer, ever closer, and I remember every word he said. I don’t want to think of him but I can’t help it, and sometimes at night my old heart beats so hard and so fast I think it will tear itself right clear of my chest. So I uncap my fountain pen and force my trembling old hand to write this pointless anecdote in the diary one of my great-grandchildren—I can’t remember her name for sure, at least not right now, but I know it starts with an S—gave to me last Christmas, and which I have never written in until now. Now I will write in it. I will write the story of how I met the man in the black suit on the bank of Castle Stream one afternoon in the summer of 1914.
The town of Motton was a different world in those days—more different than I could ever tell you. That was a world without airplanes droning overhead, a world almost without cars and trucks, a world where the skies were not cut into lanes and slices by overhead power lines.
There was not a single paved road in the whole town, and the business district consisted of nothing but Corson’s General Store, Thut’s Livery & Hardware, the Methodist Church at Christ’s Corner, the school, the town hall, and Harry’s Restaurant half a mile down from there, which my mother called, with unfailing disdain, “the liquor house.”
Mostly, though, the difference was in how people lived—how apart they were. I’m not sure people born after the middle of the twentieth century could quite credit that, although they might say they could, to be polite to old folks like me. There were no phones in western Maine back then, for one thing. The first one wouldn’t be installed for another five years, and by the time there was one in our house, I was nineteen and going to college at the University of Maine in Orono.
But that is only the roof of the thing. There was no doctor closer than Casco, and no more than a dozen houses in what you would call town. There were no neighborhoods (I’m not even sure we knew the 46
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word, although we had a verb— neighboring—that described church functions and barn dances), and open fields were the exception rather than the rule. Out of town the houses were farms that stood far apart from each other, and from December until middle March we mostly hunkered down in the little pockets of stovewarmth we called families. We hunkered and listened to the wind in the chimney and hoped no one would get sick or break a leg or get a headful of bad ideas, like the farmer over in Castle Rock who had chopped up his wife and kids three winters before and then said in court that the ghosts made him do it. In those days before the Great War, most of Motton was woods and bog, dark long places full of moose and mosquitoes, snakes and secrets. In those days there were ghosts everywhere.
This thing I’m telling about happened on a Saturday. My father gave me a whole list of chores to do, including some that would have been Dan’s, if he’d still been alive. He was my only brother, and he’d died of being stung by a bee. A year had gone by, and still my mother wouldn’t hear that. She said it was something else, had to have been, that no one ever died of being stung by a bee. When Mama Sweet, the oldest lady in the Methodist Ladies’ Aid, tried to tell her—
at the church supper the previous winter, this was—that the same thing had happened to her favorite uncle back in ’73, my mother clapped her hands over her ears, got up, and walked out of the church basement. She’d never been back since, either, and nothing my father could say to her would change her mind. She claimed she was done with church, and that if she ever had to see Helen Robichaud again (that was Mama Sweet’s real name), she would slap her eyes out.
She wouldn’t be able to help herself, she said.
That day, Dad wanted me to lug wood for the cookstove, weed the beans and the cukes, pitch hay out of the loft, get two jugs of water to put in the cold pantry, and scrape as much old paint off the cellar bulkhead as I could. Then, he said, I could go fishing, if I didn’t mind going by myself—he had to go over and see Bill Eversham about some cows. I said I sure didn’t mind going by myself, and my Dad smiled like that didn’t surprise him so very much. He’d given me a 47
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bamboo pole the week before—not because it was my birthday or anything, but just because he liked to give me things, sometimes—
and I was wild to try it in Castle Stream, which was by far the troutiest brook I’d ever fished.
“But don’t you go too far in the woods,” he told me. “Not beyond where it splits.”
“No, sir.”
“Promise me.”
“Yessir, I promise.”
“Now promise your mother.”