【英文短篇小说】The Man in the Black Suit（2）

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My bladder let go, and the scuffed¹ brown the dead bee was lying on went a darker brown. I was hardly aware of what had happened, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the man standing² on top of the bank and looking down at me, the man who had walked out of thirty miles of trackless western Maine woods in a fine black suit and narrow shoes of gleaming leather. I could see the watch-chain looped across his vest glittering in the summer sunshine. There was not so much as a single pine-needle on him. And he was smiling at me.

“Why, it’s a fisherboy!” he cried in a mellow³, pleasing voice. “Imagine that! Are we well-met, fisherboy?”

“Hello, sir,” I said. The voice that came out of me did not tremble, but it didn’t sound like my voice, either. It sounded older. Like Dan’s voice, maybe. Or my father’s, even. And all I could think was that maybe he would let me go if I pretended not to see what he was. If I pretended I didn’t see there were flames glowing and dancing where his eyes should have been.

“I’ve saved you a nasty sting, perhaps,” he said, and then, to my horror, he came down the bank to where I sat with a dead bee in my wet lap and a bamboo fishing pole in my nerveless hands. His slicksoled city shoes should have slipped on the low, grassy⁴ weeds which dressed the steep bank, but they didn’t; nor did they leave tracks behind, I saw. Where his feet had touched—or seemed to touch— there was not a single broken twig⁵, crushed leaf, or trampled⁶ shoeshape.

Even before he reached me, I recognized the aroma⁷ baking up from the skin under the suit—the smell of burned matches. The smell of sulfur⁸. The man in the black suit was the Devil. He had walked out of the deep woods between Motton and Kashwakamak, and now he was standing here beside me. From the corner of one eye I could see a hand as pale as the hand of a store window dummy⁹. The fingers were hideously¹⁰ long.

He hunkered beside me on his hams, his knees popping just as the knees of any normal man might, but when he moved his hands so they dangled¹¹ between his knees, I saw that each of those long fingers ended in what was not a fingernail but a long yellow claw.

“You didn’t answer my question, fisherboy,” he said in his mellow voice. It was, now that I think of it, like the voice of one of those radio announcers on the big-band shows years later, the ones that would sell Geritol and Serutan and Ovaltine and Dr. Grabow pipes. “Are we well-met?”

“Please don’t hurt me,” I whispered, in a voice so low I could barely hear it. I was more afraid than I could ever write down, more afraid than I want to remember … but I do. I do. It never even crossed my mind to hope I was having a dream, although I might have, I suppose, if I had been older. But I wasn’t older; I was nine, and I knew the truth when it squatted¹² down on its hunkers beside me. I knew a hawk¹³ from a handsaw, as my father would have said. The man who had come out of the woods on that Saturday afternoon in midsummer was the Devil, and inside the empty holes of his eyes, his brains were burning.

“Oh, do I smell something?” he asked, as if he hadn’t heard me … although I knew he had. “Do I smell something … wet?”

He leaned forward toward me with his nose stuck out, like some one who means to smell a flower. And I noticed an awful thing; as the shadow of his head travelled over the bank, the grass beneath it turned yellow and died. He lowered his head toward my pants and sniffed¹⁴. His glaring eyes half-closed, as if he had inhaled¹⁵ some sublime¹⁶ aroma and wanted to concentrate on nothing but that.

“Oh, bad!” he cried. “Lovely-bad!” And then he chanted: “Opal! Diamond! Sapphire¹⁷! Jade¹⁸! I smell Gary’s lemonade!” Then he threw himself on his back in the little flat place and laughed wildly. It was the sound of a lunatic.

I thought about running, but my legs seemed two counties away from my brain. I wasn’t crying, though; I had wet my pants like a baby, but I wasn’t crying. I was too scared to cry. I suddenly knew that I was going to die, and probably painfully, but the worst of it was that that might not be the worst of it.

The worst of it might come later. After I was dead.

He sat up suddenly, the smell of burnt matches fluffing out from his suit and making me feel all gaggy in my throat. He looked at me solemnly from his narrow white face and burning eyes, but there was a sense of laughter about him, too. There was always that sense of laughter about him.

“Sad news, fisherboy,” he said. “I’ve come with sad news.”

I could only look at him—the black suit, the fine black shoes, the long white fingers that ended not in nails but in talons¹⁹.

“Your mother is dead.”

“No!” I cried. I thought of her making bread, of the curl lying across her forehead and just touching²⁰ her eyebrow²¹, standing there in the strong morning sunlight, and the terror swept over me again … but not for myself this time. Then I thought of how she’d looked when I set off with my fishing pole, standing in the kitchen doorway²² with her hand shading her eyes, and how she had looked to me in that moment like a photograph of someone you expected to see again but never did. “No, you lie!” I screamed.

He smiled—the sadly patient smile of a man who has often been accused falsely. “I’m afraid not,” he said. “It was the same thing that happened to your brother, Gary. It was a bee.”

“No, that’s not true,” I said, and now I did begin to cry. “She’s old, she’s thirty-five, if a bee-sting could kill her the way it did Danny she would have died a long time ago and you’re a lying bastard²³!”

I had called the Devil a lying bastard. On some level I was aware of this, but the entire front of my mind was taken up by the enormity of what he’d said. My mother dead? He might as well have told me that there was a new ocean where the Rockies had been. But I believed him. On some level I believed him completely, as we always believe, on some level, the worst thing our hearts can imagine.

“I understand your grief, little fisherboy, but that particular argument just doesn’t hold water, I’m afraid.” He spoke²⁴ in a tone of bogus comfort that was horrible, maddening, without remorse²⁵ or pity. “A man can go his whole life without seeing a mockingbird, you know, but does that mean mockingbirds don’t exist? Your mother—”

A fish jumped below us. The man in the black suit frowned, then pointed²⁶ a finger at it. The trout²⁷ convulsed in the air, its body bending so strenuously²⁸ that for a split-second it appeared to be snapping at its own tail, and when it fell back into Castle Stream it was floating lifelessly, dead. It struck the big gray rock where the waters divided, spun²⁹ around twice in the whirlpool eddy³⁰ that formed there, and then floated off in the direction of Castle Rock. Meanwhile, the terrible stranger turned his burning eyes on me again, his thin lips pulled back from tiny rows of sharp teeth in a cannibal smile.

“Your mother simply went through her entire life without being stung by a bee,” he said. “But then—less than an hour ago, actually— one flew in through the kitchen window while she was taking the bread out of the oven and putting it on the counter to cool.”

“No, I won’t hear this, I won’t hear this, I won’t!”

I raised my hands and clapped them over my ears. He pursed his lips as if to whistle and blew at me gently. It was only a little breath, but the stench was foul³¹ beyond belief—clogged sewers³², outhouses that have never known a single sprinkle of lime, dead chickens after a flood.

My hands fell away from the sides of my face.

“Good,” he said. “You need to hear this, Gary; you need to hear this, my little fisherboy. It was your mother who passed that fatal weakness on to your brother Dan; you got some of it, but you also got a protection from your father that poor Dan somehow missed.” He pursed his lips again, only this time, he made a cruelly comic little tsk-tsk sound instead of blowing his nasty breath at me. “So, although I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, it’s almost a case of poetic³³ justice, isn’t it? After all, she killed your brother Dan as surely as if she had put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.”

“No,” I whispered. “No, it isn’t true.”

“I assure you it is,” he said. “The bee flew in the window and lit on her neck. She slapped at it before she even knew what she was doing—you were wiser than that, weren’t you, Gary?—and the bee stung her. She felt her throat start to close up at once. That’s what happens, you know, to people who are allergic³⁴ to bee-venom. Their throats close and they drown in the open air. That’s why Dan’s face was so swollen³⁵ and purple. That’s why your father covered it with his shirt.”

I stared at him, now incapable³⁶ of speech. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I didn’t want to believe him, and knew from my church schooling³⁷ that the devil is the father of lies, but I did believe him, just the same. I believed he had been standing there in our dooryard, looking in the kitchen window, as my mother fell to her knees, clutching at her swollen throat while Candy Bill danced around her, barking shrilly³⁸.

“She made the most wonderfully awful noises,” the man in the black suit said reflectively, “and she scratched her face quite badly, I’m afraid. Her eyes bulged³⁹ out like a frog’s eyes. She wept.” He paused, then added: “She wept as she died, isn’t that sweet? And here’s the most beautiful thing of all. After she was dead … after she had been lying on the floor for fifteen minutes or so with no sound but the stove ticking and with that little stick of a bee-stinger still poking⁴⁰ out of the side of her neck—so small, so small—do you know what Candy Bill did? That little rascal⁴¹ licked away her tears. First on one side … and then on the other.”

He looked out at the stream for a moment, his face sad and thoughtful. Then he turned back to me and his expression of bereavement⁴² disappeared like a dream. His face was as slack and avid⁴³ as the face of a corpse⁴⁴ that has died hungry. His eyes blazed. I could see his sharp little teeth between his pale lips.

“I’m starving,” he said abruptly⁴⁵. “I’m going to kill you and tear you open and eat your guts⁴⁶, little fisherboy. What do you think about that?”

No, I tried to say, please, no, but no sound came out. He meant to do it, I saw. He really meant to do it.

“I’m just so hungry,” he said, both petulant⁴⁷ and teasing. “And you won’t want to live without your precious mommy, anyhow, take my word for it. Because your father’s the sort of man who’ll have to have some warm hole to stick it in, believe me, and if you’re the only one available, you’re the one who’ll have to serve. I’ll save you all that discomfort⁴⁸ and unpleasantness. Also, you’ll go to Heaven, think of that. Murdered souls always go to Heaven. So we’ll both be serving God this afternoon, Gary. Isn’t that nice?”

He reached for me again with his long, pale hands, and without thinking what I was doing, I flipped⁴⁹ open the top of my creel, pawed all the way down to the bottom, and brought out the monster brookie I’d caught earlier—the one I should have been satisfied with. I held it out to him blindly, my fingers in the red slit⁵¹ of its belly⁵² from which I had removed its insides as the man in the black suit had threatened to remove mine. The fish’s glazed⁵³ eye stared dreamily at me, the gold ring around the black center reminding me of my mother’s wedding ring. And in that moment I saw her lying in her coffin⁵⁴ with the sun shining off the wedding band and knew it was true—she had been stung by a bee, she had drowned in the warm, bread-smelling kitchen air, and Candy Bill had licked her dying tears from her swollen cheeks.

“Big fish!” the man in the black suit cried in a guttural, greedy voice. “Oh, biiig fiiish!”

He snatched it away from me and crammed⁵⁵ it into a mouth that opened wider than any human mouth ever could. Many years later, when I was sixty-five (I know it was sixty-five because that was the summer I retired⁵⁶ from teaching), I went to the New England Aquarium⁵⁷ and finally saw a shark. The mouth of the man in the black suit was like that shark’s mouth when it opened, only his gullet was blazing red, the same color as his awful eyes, and I felt heat bake out of it and into my face, the way you feel a sudden wave of heat come pushing out of a fireplace when a dry piece of wood catches alight. And I didn’t imagine that heat, either, I know I didn’t, because just before he slid the head of my nineteen-inch brook⁵⁰ trout between his gaping⁵⁸ jaws⁵⁹, I saw the scales along the sides of the fish rise up and begin to curl like bits of paper floating over an open incinerator.

He slid the fish in like a man in a travelling show swallowing a sword. He didn’t chew, and his blazing eyes bulged out, as if in effort. The fish went in and went in, his throat bulged as it slid down his gullet, and now he began to cry tears of his own … except his tears were blood, scarlet⁶⁰ and thick.

I think it was the sight of those bloody⁶¹ tears that gave me my body back. I don’t know why that should have been, but I think it was. I bolted to my feet like a jack⁶² released from its box, turned with my bamboo pole still in one hand, and fled up the bank, bending over and tearing tough bunches of weeds out with my free hand in an effort to get up the slope more quickly.

He made a strangled, furious noise—the sound of any man with his mouth too full—and I looked back just as I got to the top. He was coming after me, the back of his suit-coat flapping and his thin gold watch-chain flashing and winking⁶³ in the sun. The tail of the fish was still protruding⁶⁴ from his mouth and I could smell the rest of it, roasting in the oven of his throat.

He reached for me, groping with his talons, and I fled along the top of the bank. After a hundred yards or so I found my voice and went to screaming—screaming in fear, of course, but also screaming in grief for my beautiful dead mother.

He was coming along after me. I could hear snapping branches and whipping bushes, but I didn’t look back again. I lowered my head, slitted my eyes against the bushes and low-hanging branches along the stream’s bank, and ran as fast as I could. And at every step I expected to feel his hands descending⁶⁵ on my shoulders pulling me back into a final hot hug.

That didn’t happen. Some unknown length of time later—it couldn’t have been longer than five or ten minutes, I suppose, but it seemed like forever—I saw the bridge through layerings of leaves and firs. Still screaming, but breathlessly now, sounding like a teakettle which has almost boiled dry, I reached this second, steeper bank and charged up to it.

Halfway⁶⁶ to the top I slipped to my knees, looked over my shoulder, and saw the man in the black suit almost at my heels, his white face pulled into a convulsion of fury and greed. His cheeks were splattered with his bloody tears and his shark’s mouth hung open like a hinge.

“Fisherboy!” he snarled⁶⁷, and started up the bank after me, grasping at my foot with one long hand. I tore free, turned, and threw my fishing pole at him. He batted it down easily, but it tangled⁶⁸ his feet up somehow and he went to his knees. I didn’t wait to see anymore; I turned and bolted to the top of the slope. I almost slipped at the very top, but managed to grab one of the support struts⁶⁹ running beneath the bridge and save myself.

“You can’t get away, fisherboy!” he cried from behind me. He sounded furious, but he also sounded as if he were laughing. “It takes more than a mouthful of trout to fill me up!”

“Leave me alone!” I screamed back at him. I grabbed the bridge’s railing and threw myself over it in a clumsy somersault, filling my hands with splinters and bumping my head so hard on the boards when I came down that I saw stars. I rolled over onto my belly and began crawling. I lurched to my feet just before I got to the end of the bridge, stumbled once, found my rhythm, and then began to run. I ran as only nine-year-old boys can run, which is like the wind. It felt as if my feet only touched the ground with every third or fourth stride, and for all I know, that may be true. I ran straight up the righthand wheelrut in the road, ran until my temples pounded and my eyes pulsed in their sockets⁷⁰, ran until I had a hot stitch in my left side from the bottom of my ribs⁷¹ to my armpit, ran until I could taste blood and something like metal-shavings in the back of my throat. When I couldn’t run anymore I stumbled to a stop and looked back over my shoulder, puffing⁷² and blowing like a windbroke horse. I was convinced I would see him standing right there behind me in his natty⁷³ black suit, the watch-chain a glittering loop across his vest and not a hair out of place.

But he was gone. The road stretching back toward Castle Stream between the darkly massed pines and spruces was empty. And yet I sensed him somewhere near in those woods, watching me with his grassfire eyes, smelling of burnt matches and roasted fish.

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