Albert, eyes closed, was shivering. The air was biting cold against his face and hands; yet, all over his body he could feel the sweat running down his flesh in sudden sticky streams. In his mind’s eye he could still see the things which had been illuminated by that brief wan glow, a glow which, now vanished, made the night seem even blacker than before. Above him he imagined the dark shapes still whipping gently to and fro. All around him he felt he could still see the drooping foliage in which his imagination now placed numerous unseen horrors, rustling and creeping, shifting ominously nearer to where he sat, alone, in the darkness at the water’s edge.
Albert trembled and clenched his teeth.
From somewhere came the tiny sound of water dripping, and then it was gone.
Alone. That was the trouble. This night was darker and more frightening than any he had known, and here he was, all alone, with his usually placid imagination working at double-speed. Well, now that he was here he’d have to put up with it. Self-control, that was what was needed. He just had to pull himself together.
He concentrated on the float, the tiny spot of luminescence that floated unmoving before him on the black surface of the water. Why the hell hadn’t he had a bite yet? The float hadn’t moved since he got here. How long ago was that? Three hours? Ten minutes? He couldn’t tell; time seemed to lose its meaning here at night on the lakeside.
He sat on the stool, hands in his lap, and stared at the float. But now the darkness was not quite silent: faintly, just on the edge of his hearing, came little whisperings and rustlings; as of tiny creatures stirring in the grass and the reeds. Or was it something else — something more sinister — coming closer?
The float. Concentrate on the float. Don’t let your imagination play games with you. Albert’s eyes stared into the blackness, yet he could still see the pictures that the brief touch of ghostly moonlight had painted: the flat water, the pointed reeds, the tiny, candle-wax leaves on the softly illuminated branches of the trees. The branches: crooked and long like reaching hands, like clawing fingers, like writhing snakes, like long worms…
Like long worms. Albert thought about the fat worm on the end of his line, squirming with the hook through it, waiting for the black shape of the fish to come looming through the dark water, the fish whose mouth would be open to engulf the worm, to suck at it; to suck out the nourishing innards and leave the skin empty and dead on the barbed hook. To suck…
Albert saw the float-tip suddenly move. Automatically he reached out for the rod, and then he froze. His mouth opened and closed, and his eyes became wide with horror. He could feel it. By God, he could feel it!
It was crawling over his flesh, a cold pulsing stickiness like a wet hand trying to grip him. Needles of pain were suddenly piercing his chest and an oozing dampness was all over him, as if… as if something were trying to suck at him, trying to suck out his insides…
Albert screamed once, briefly, and then be grabbed his rod. He yanked it sideways, and suddenly the feeling was gone. The sucking grip had vanished from his flesh and streams of fire were no longer surging through his chest.
Albert let go of the fishing rod and the float bobbed gently, once more down into the water, His body racked with shudders, Albert Jordan sat down on the stool and closed his eyes tightly against the darkness.
He just couldn’t believe it. For a moment there he had actually thought he was the worm, the hook piercing through him, the line pulling at him as he squirmed desperately this way and that, and the fish sucking at him, trying to draw out his innards.
Albert shook his head. This couldn’t go on; he’d have to pack up his tackle and leave. From now on he’d be strictly a day fisherman.
He reached down for his basket. The sooner he could leave this eerie place the better.
And then he stopped. Suddenly he could sense the mist. It was still completely dark, yet somehow, he knew it was there. The mist rising off the water, through the blackness, sifting through the reeds and creeping along and up the bank and among the trees. Albert could feel it on his hands and on his face, cold and fearful, and completely invisible in the pitch-darkness. Layers of it, rising slowly into him and over him like depths of icy water.
Suddenly the sharp pain returned, lancing through his body like a blade. He tried to reach his rod, but something prevented him from moving. Paralyzed, his eyes staring, he watched the luminous tip of his float disappear as, below the dark surface, a fish took the bait.
Panic churned in Albert’s stomach as he squirmed at the sudden agony in his chest. It churned then rose, tearing up through his body, and then he let out one long, wild, terrified scream.
Once again the oozing stickiness was all over him, sucking, sucking, sucking at his innards. Cold and slimy it was now.
The pain in his chest was the hook on the end of a fishing-line, pushing its barb through him. The damp sliminess was the mouth of a fish closing over him; the rising layers and swirls of invisible mist were the depths of water in which he wriggled and twisted, trying to escape.
He leapt to his feet, but be was bent double with the pain of the hook through his body. The invisible slimy mouth sucked at him and the heaving mist rolled over him in moist, icy waves. He screamed and screamed, squirming and wriggling, the hook burning through him, the huge cold fish-mouth sucking and sucking at his insides.
He half-ran, half-tumbled forward, screaming, falling with a heavy splash into the black waters of the lake…
Albert Jordan’s absence was noticed two days later. The angling equipment found abandoned at a local lakeside was identified as being his and the lake was therefore subsequently drained.
The body of the drowned man found on the bottom was positively identified as Albert Jordan. He was only just recognisable. It seemed as if his flesh was merely a bag containing the loose bones of his skeleton. His innards, strangely, were missing, as though they had been… sucked out.
SUGAR AND SPICE AND ALL THINGS NICE
by David A. Sutton
AT THIS TIME in the morning, the sun showers a blinding swirl of motes through the branches of a nearby tree which, spilling through the window, scatter about the room. It is one of those superb, warm mornings in late spring when not a breath of wind stirs outside and one sits, cosy and contented with the tingle of summer in one’s nostrils. Outside, the occasional car shunts past, disturbing the air, caught hard and bright in the sun’s perpetual gaze. Passersby appear infrequently, devoid of coats and ready for the heat of the afternoon. There is a kind of hazy, half-life to the scene, as though people and their attendant technology had become immured indoors waiting; this early dazzle of summer perhaps merely an hallucination, not to be trusted.
I used to sit by the window sometimes and gaze across the street watching life pass by in its lazy fashion. Watching the still, sombre houses on the opposite side of the road face the challenge of harsh daylight, their red bricks soiled with grime, windows dark, half-lidded with mesh curtains. Doors would be brown or green, gloss paint peeling here and there in an orgy of ultra-violet acceptance; gaining no suntan, but curling under an invisible wave of burning insistence.
My room was on the first floor, a flat, a hideaway, cool. Solid walls of books, a small gas fire, a tropical bamboo screen leading to the bedroom and beyond, the small kitchen. From my window I had a minor vista of the street below, the people, the traffic and the houses. An isolated world where folk would drop in unexpectedly, walk past the view and leave the stage finally past either the left or right hand window frame. Not much amazing happened on that stage, except once, just the daily life of part of a community. This microcosm settled easily upon my mind many a bright morning — I was the watcher, those out there the watched.