Black House

"Gorg means death," she says, and licks her dry upper lip without realizing it. Her tongue comes out even farther, and on the return swipe the tip licks across her nostrils, warm and wet and somehow comforting. "Over there, gorg means death. Over there in the — "

Faraway is the word she doesn’t say. Before she can, she sees something on the kitchen table that wasn’t there before. It’s a wicker box. A sound is coming from it, some low sleepy sound.

Distress worms into her lower belly, making her bowels feel loose and watery. She knows what a box like that is called: a creel. It’s a fisherman’s creel.

There is a fisherman in French Landing these days. A bad fisherman.

"Ty?" she calls, but of course there is no answer. The house is empty except for her. Dale is at work, and Ty will be out playing — you bet. It’s half-past July, the heart of summer vacation, and Ty will be rolling around the town, doing all the Ray Bradbury–August Derleth things boys do when they’ve got the whole endless summer day to do them in. But he won’t be alone; Dale has talked with him about buddying up until the Fisherman is caught, at least until then, and so has she. Judy has no great liking for the Wexler kid (the Metzger or Renniker kids, either), but there’s safety in numbers. Ty probably isn’t having any great cultural awakenings this summer, but at least —

"At least he’s safe," she says in her croaky Crow Gorg voice. Yet the box that has appeared on the kitchen table during her nap seems to deny that, to negate the whole concept of safety. Where did it come from? And what is the white thing on top of it?

"A note," she says, and gets up. She crosses the short length of floor between the rocker and the table like someone still in a dream. The note is a piece of paper, folded over. Written across the half she can see is Sweet Judy Blue Eyes. In college, just before meeting Dale, she had a boyfriend who used to call her that. She asked him to stop — it was annoying, sappy — and when he kept forgetting (on purpose, she suspected), she dropped him like a rock. Now here it is again, that stupid nickname, mocking her.

Judy turns on the sink tap without taking her eyes from the note, fills her cupped hand with cold water, and drinks. A few drops fall on Sweet Judy Blue Eyes and the name smears at once. Written in fountain-pen ink? How antique! Who writes with a fountain pen these days?

She reaches for the note, then draws back. The sound from inside the box is louder now. It’s a humming sound. It —

"It’s flies," she says. Her throat has been refreshed by the water and her voice isn’t so croaky, but to herself, Judy still sounds like the Crow Gorg. "You know the sound of flies."

Get the note.

Don’t want to.

Yes, but you NEED to! Now get it! What happened to your GUTS, you little chickenshit?

Good question. Fucking good question. Judy’s tongue comes out, slathers her upper lip and philtrum. Then she takes the note and unfolds it.

Sorry there is only one "kiddie-knee" (kindney). The other I fryed and ate. It was very good!

The Fisherman

The nerves in Judy Marshall’s fingers, palms, wrists, and forearms suddenly shut down. The color drops so completely from her face that the blue veins in her cheeks become visible. It’s surely a miracle that she doesn’t pass out. The note drops from her fingers and goes seesawing to the floor. Shrieking her son’s name over and over again, she throws back the lid of the fisherman’s creel.

Inside are shiny red coils of intestine, crawling with flies. There are the wrinkled sacs of lungs and the fist-sized pump that was a child’s heart. There is the thick purple pad of a liver . . . and one kidney. This mess of guts is crawling with flies and all the world is gorg, is gorg, is gorg.

In the sunny stillness of her kitchen Judy Marshall now begins to howl, and it is the sound of madness finally broken free of its flimsy cage, madness unbound.

Butch Yerxa intended to go in after a single smoke — there’s always a lot to do on Strawberry Fest! days (although kindhearted Butch doesn’t hate the little artificial holiday the way Pete Wexler does). Then Petra English, an orderly from Asphodel, wandered over and they started talking motorcycles, and before you know it twenty minutes have passed.

He tells Petra he has to go, she tells him to keep the shiny side up and the rubber side down, and Butch slips back in through the door to an unpleasant surprise. There is Charles Burnside, starkers, standing beside the desk with his hand on the rock Butch uses as a paperweight. (His son made it in camp last year — painted the words on it, anyway — and Butch thinks it’s cute as hell.) Butch has nothing against the residents — certainly he would give Pete Wexler a pasting if he knew about the thing with the cigarettes, never mind just reporting him — but he doesn’t like them touching his things. Especially this guy, who is fairly nasty when he has his few wits about him. Which he does now. Butch can see it in his eyes. The real Charles Burnside has come up for air, perhaps in honor of Strawberry Fest!

And speaking of strawberries, Burny has apparently been into them already. There are traces of red on his lips and tucked into the deep folds at the corners of his mouth.

Butch barely looks at this, though. There are other stains on Burny. Brown ones.

"Want to take your hand off that, Charles?" he asks.

"Off what?" Burny asks, then adds: "Asswipe."

Butch doesn’t want to say Off my pet rock, that sounds stupid. "Off my paperweight."

Burny looks down at the rock, which he has just replaced (there was a little blood and hair on it when he emerged from the toilet stall, but cleanup is what bathroom sinks are for). He drops his hand from it and just stands there. "Clean me up, bozo. I shit myself."