serving platter, puffy dough arms, breasts like drumlins, a
geography in herself, a country of tissue"
* * *
by her reedy, vapid voice; but at the same time he loathed her,
could not stand her touch. lie began to feel like the young man in
"The Tell-Tale Heart, " by Edgar A. Poe. He felt lie could stand at
her bedroom door for endless midnights, shining one Tay of light
on her sleeping eye, ready to pounce and rip the instant it flashed
open.
The urge to show her the story itched at him maddeningly. He had
decided, by the first day of December, that he would do it. The
decision-making did not relieve him, as it is supposed to do in the
novels, but it did leave him with a feeling of antiseptic pleasure. It
was right that it should be so-an omega that quite dovetailed with
he alpha. And it was omega; he was vacating the cottage on he
fifth of December. On this day he had just returned from the Stowe
Travel Agency in Portland, where he had booked passage for the
Far East. He had done this almost on the spur of the moment: the
decision to go and the decision to show his manuscript to Mrs.
Leighton had come together, almost as if he had been guided by an
invoisible hand.
* * *
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