In Soulsville the busted microphones resounded with the oratory of live ghosts protesting the mystery of the missing children.
Finally, midway through our journey the public-address system announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, the infamous Black Bay.” Huge yellow lights from the battleship aimed their beams on the nefarious waters. As far as the eye could see, long serpentine tentacles oscillated in the bay and what appeared to be white arms reached from beneath its surface. The silhouettes of peculiar-shaped animals leaped into the air-sometimes many feet high. It was a staggering sight.
People poured from the stateroom, eager to get a better view. Two well-tailored men stood next to me. The men removed field glasses from cases and looked in fascination upon the waters-writhing with odd life. They spoke. “I’ve always had a strange attraction to it, Waldo,” the first man said. “It’s been the subject of a ten-thousand-page report by the International Geophysical Expedition and the Royal Academy of Sciences. Fleets of oceanographers, a special group called the Black Bay Authorities, have examined it.”
“How did it get thataway, Matthew?” responded the other man. (Both of whom looked like the grim sabled brothers on the famous cough-drop box.)
“It’s become a veritable Madagascar of the sea, yielding animals not to be found anywhere else in the world. It seems that in the bad old days the sea was saturated with chemicals coming from the rows of cereal factories that lined the banks. There was no cause for alarm until one day a man was peacefully fishing when a bird rose from the waters and carried away his head in its beak. When the British Museum caught the bird-burning its wings with napalm from a supersonic jet-they dissected it and found it to be full of old Manhattan telephone numbers and skulls. An investigation was immediately launched by Congress. You remember the celebrated bird hearings of the fifties. It was decided that it was merely a crowd delusion. The chairman-a dwarf named Eberett Whimplewopper-did such a fine job that he gained a judgeship in HARRY SAM.
“Science had the last say, however. Science took samples from the bay and put them under microscopes. We had decided that crowd delusions were for the more backward unsophisticated part of the world and that we as hardheaded empiricists could never indulge anything that was not amenable to sensory investigation. Since SAM went up there about thirty years ago and took up residence in the er … er … er … way station, the material that flushes into the bay from those huge lips has stirred even stranger forms of life. That sickness he has must be HORRIBLE. Now it’s only safe to cross the thing in a battleship.”
No sooner had he said that when a giant tentacle attacked the ship, tilting it to an angle. An ever-ready gun, one of four massive ones on the ship, swung into action and blasted the tentacle to bits. Chunks of quivering blob rained down on some of the passengers. The two men plucked some of the trembling membrane-like substance from their clothes where it had fastened itself, and calmly walked back into the stateroom.
Heavy kats, I thought. The battleship docked at a wharf that stood at the bottom of the great stone wall which surrounded the entire island. The bottom of the wall seemed to disappear into the very depths of the insidious Black Bay. Holding a flashlight, the two men, Waldo and Matthew, led the guests down the ramp.
Suddenly Matthew trained his light on a tentacle lying across the wharf like a lazy boa constrictor with suction holes for scales. Matthew removed a bottle from his pocket and poured its contents on the tentacle. A great groan was heard from the bottom and the passengers held each other to avoid falling from the rocking wharf. The tentacle slunk back into the dreadful waters.
Some steps led from the wharf to the top of the wall where a path began and wound to the summit of the mountain where the motel stood. At the top of the steps a woman waited. She seemed to be dressed in the traditional habit of a nun. I was the last passenger to walk down the ramp and onto the wharf. To the right of me the pounding and crashing of the ugly effervescence of a sickly yellow color could be heard pouring into the bay from the stony mouth of the nineteenth President of the United States.
At the top of the steps the woman greeted us, that is, greeted all of us save Waldo and Matthew, who strode past her with their noses upturned.
“Glad to make your acquaintanceship, I’m sure,” she said to the rest of us in authentic Flatbush. “My name is Lenore and I’m the official hostess and cook up here at SAM’s. If you’ll just walk up this path …,” she said, pointing to a cobblestoned path that disappeared around the bend where a gnarled tree stood, its limbs lit up with yellow eyes.
She stood to the side as the guests filed past her on the path. I was the last to walk by the place where she stood. “Did you say your name was Lenore?” I asked.
“That’s right,” she said. “The same.”
“Do you know an old man named Alfred who spends his time at the Seventeen Nation Disarmament Conference Bar cutting out articles from the old Harper’s Brothers Weekly?”
“Yes, Alfred is my ex-old man,” she said. “You see those creeps walking ahead of everybody else, looking so proper and all? They ruined it.”
“Ruined what?” I asked.
“They ruined my romance with Alfred. Prying and sticking their noses into our business. They were all on the rowing team together, Harvard, eighty-nine, and used to carouse about ‘wenching,’ as they called it, in some of the bars in the dilapidated section of BAWSTON.
“You should have seen Alfred with his features of classical cut, his brow so trim-and his mouth so precise. See I was working behind the BAWR and he’d flirt with me; calling me stuff like the second Helen of Troy and names of dames that guys use to fight those dragons over. Well, Matthew and Waldo, those unalterable bores, had to put their two cents in. Those flat moralistic cough drops. They didn’t approve of me and they kicked him off the rowing team and stopped inviting him to the cockfights. When we got hitched the Anglican Church refused to perform the wedding. It was very lonely playing whist every night and when he bumped into his friends on the street — those that would talk to him — spoke in French. Well, Alfred and I became bored with each other after a while but I didn’t want to leave him because he was so helpless. Sometimes he would go out into the streets with nothing but a boiled vest and tall hat and carrying a pocket watch that stopped on August 6, 1945. I didn’t mind the perms he used to read me but I was young and wanted to do a little boo-ga-loo so I asked him to buy me some harpsichord lessons. On the pretense of taking the harpsichord lessons, I went down into the Village and met the black man named Jr. Bug and we did the boo-ga-loo for days. Finally Waldo and Matthew who were in a café on Greenwich Avenue doing strange recipes spotted me even though I was wearing shades.
“They told Alfred and he took me to court. We appeared before Judge Whimplewopper, a little fellow so high who combs his hair in public with a two-foot-long comb.”
“Yes, I’ve had dealings with him,” I said, interrupting her.
“Well, anyway, the Civil Liberties Committee warned him that the decision would make American justice a laughingstock around the world but he went ahead and did it.”
“Did what?” I asked impatiently.
“He admitted all the precedents from the Salem witch trials where these teeny boppers were burned at the stake for going out into the woods to meet black men. I was due to be burned at the stake too.
“The villagers were led by J. Lapp Swine, jazz critic from the Deformed Demokrat, who romped about rousing the mob with a small torchlight between his toes. Being a double-jointed freak, he was capable of all kinds of odd contortions.