In truth, he was guide; by an invisible hand-mine.
* * *
The day was white with overcast and the promise of snow lurked in its throat. The dunes seemed to foreshadow the winter already, as Gerald crossed them between the slate-roofed house of her dominion and the low stone cottage of his. The sea, sullen and gray, curled on the shingle of beach. Gulls rode the slow swells like buoys.
He Crossed the top of the last dune and knew she it-as there-her cane, with its white bicycle handgrip at the base, stood against the side of the door. Smoke rifted from the toy chimney.
Gerald went up the board steps, kicked sand from his high-topped shoes to make her aware of his presence, and then went in.
"Hi, Mrs. Leighton!"
But the tiny living room and the kitchen both stood empty. The ship's clock on the mantle ticked only for itself and for Gerald. Her gigantic fur coat lay draped over the rocker like Some animal sail. A small fire had been laid in the fireplace, and it glowed and crackled busily. The teapot was on the gas range in the kitchen, and one teacup stood on the counter, still waiting for water. He peered into the narrow hall which led to the bedroom.
"Mrs. Leighton?"
Hall and bedroom both empty.
He was about to turn back to the kitchen when the mammoth chuckles began. They were large, helpless shakings of laughter, the kind that stays hidden for years and ages like wine. (There is also an Edgar A. Poe story about wine.)
The chuckles evolved into large bellows of laughter. They came from behind the door to the right of Gerald's bed, the last door in the cottage. From the tool-shed.
* * *
my balls are crawling like in grammar school the old bitch shes laughing she found it the old fat shebitch goddam her goddam her goddam her you old whore youre doing that cause im out here you old she bitch whore you piece of shit
* * *
He went to the door in one step and pulled it open. She was sitting next to the small space-heater in the sh ed, her dress pulled up over oak-stump knees to allow her to sit cross-legged, and his manuscript was held, dwarfed, in her bloated hands.
Her laughter roared and racketed around him. Gerald Nately saw bursting colors in front of his eyes. She it-as a slug, a maggot, a gigantic crawling thing evolved in the cellar of the shadowy house by the sea. a dark bug that had swaddled itself in grotesque human form.
In the flat light from the one cobwebbed window her face became a hanging graveyard moon, pocked by the Sterile craters of her eyes and the Tagged earthquake rift of her mouth.
"Don't you laugh," Gerald said stiffly.
"Oh Gerald," she said, laughing all the same. "This is such a bad story. I don't blame you for using a penname. it's-" she wiped tears of laughter from her eyes"it's abominable!"
He began to walk toward her stiffly.
"You haven't made me big enough, Gerald. That's the trouble. I'm too big for you. Perhaps Poe, or Dosteyevsky, or Melville. . . but not you, Gerald. Not even under your royal pen-name. Not you. Not you.
She began to laugh again, huge racking explosions of sound.
"Don't you laugh," Gerald said stiffly.
* * *
The tool-shed, after the manner of Zola:
Wooden walls, which showed occasional chinks of light, surrounded rabbit-traps hung and slung in corners; a pair of dusty, unstrung snow-shoes: a rusty spaceheater showing flickers of yellow flame like cat's eyes; Tales; 2 shovel; hedgeclippers; an ancient green hose coiled like a garter-snake; four bald tires stacked like doughnuts; a rust), Winchester rifle with no bolt; a twohanded saw; a dusty work-bench covered with nails, screws, bolts, washers, two hammers, a plane, a broken level, a dismantled carburetor which one sat inside a 1949 Packard convertible; a 4 hp. air-compressor painted electric blue, plugged into an extension cord running back into the house.
* * *
"Don't you laugh," Gerald said again, but she continued to rock back and forth, holding her stomach and flapping the manuscript with her wheezing breath like a white bird.
His hand found the rusty Winchester rifle and he pole-axed her with it.
* * *
Most horror stories are sexual in nature.
I'm sorry to break in with this information, but feel I must in order to make the way clear for the grisly conclusion of this piece, which is (at least psychologically) a clear metaphor for fears of sexual impotence on in), part. Mrs. Leighton's large mouth is symbolic of the vagina; the hose of the compressor is a penis. Her female bu Ik huge and overpowering, is a mythic representation of the sexual fear that lives in every male, to a greater or lesser degree: that the woman, with her opening, is a devouter.
* * *
In the works of Edgar A. Poe, Stephen King, Gerald Nately, and others who practice this particular literary form, we are apt to find locked rooms, dungeons. empty mansions (all symbols of the womb); scenes of living burial (sexual impotence); the dead returned from the grave (necrophilia); grotesque monsters or human be ings (externalized fear of the sexual act itself); torture and/or murder (a viable alternativ e to the sexual act).
These possibilities are not always valid, but the postfreild reader and writer must take them into consideration when attempting the genre.
Abnormal psychology has become a part of the human experience.
* * *
She made thick, unconscious noises in her throat as he whirled around madly, looking for an instrument; her head lolled brokenly on the thick stalk of her neck.
* * *
He seized the hose of the air-compressor.
"All right," he said thickly. "All right, now. All Tight."
* * *
bitch fat old bitch youve had yours not big enough is that right well youll be bigger youll be bigger still
* * *
He ripped her head back by the hair and rammed the hose into her mouth, into her gullet. She screamed around it, a scund like a cat.
* * *
Part of the inspiration for this story came from an old E. C. horror comic boo), which I bought in a Lisbon Falls drugstore. In one particular story, a husband and wife murdered each other simultaneous))- in mutually ironic (and brilliant) fashion. He was very fat; she was very thin. He shoved the hose of an aircompressor down her throat and blew her up to dirigible size. On his way downstairs a booby-trap she had rigged fell on him and squashed him to a shadow.
Any author who tells you he has never plagiarized is 2 liar. A good author begins with bad ideas and improbabilities and fashions them into comments on the human condition.
In a horror story, it is imperative that the grotesque be elevated to the status of the abnormal.
* * *
The compressor turned on with a whoosh and a chug. The hose flew out of Mrs. Leighton's mouth. Giggling and gibbering, Gerald stuffed it back in. Her feet drummed and thumped on the floor. The flesh of her checks and diaphragm began to swell rhythmically. Her eyes bulged, and became glass marbles. Her torso began to expand.
* * *
here it is here it is you lousy louse are you big enough yet are you big enough
* * *
The compressor wheezed and racketed. Mrs. Leighton swelled like a beachball. Her lungs became Straining blowfish.
* * *
Fiends! Devils' Dissemble no morel Here! Here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!
* * *
She seemed to explode all at once.
* * *
Sitting in a boilin hotel room in Bombay, Gerald re-wrote the story he had begun at the cottage on the other side of the world. The original title had been "The Hog." After some deliberation he retitled it "The Blue Air Compressor."
He had resolved it to his own satisfaction. There was a certain lack of motivation concerning the final scene where the fat old woman was murdered, but he did not see that as a fault. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," Edgar A. Poe's finest story, there is no real motivation for the murder of the old man, and that was as it should be. The motive is not the point.
* * *
She got very big just before the end: even her legs swelled up to twice their normal size. At the very end, her tongue popped out of her mouth like a party-favor.