POOR CHARLIE

POOR CHARLIE
by Alex Desiderius

Then she died. She was old. I had to find out how old from mum. “Eighty” she said. That was an impressive number back then. A thousand wouldn’t have been much more impressive.

Even after she was gone, I would still hear her. It would be at nights mostly. “They all die in the end,” I heard her saying “no matter how you love them.” She was imitating the voice of Shoshana, the sea-lady. Shoshana lives in the depths of the depths of the ocean. She has no eyes. Eyes are useless down there. There is no light at all – just the endless hum of underwater currents, soothing and malign.

“Mummy!” My little sister would run away sniveling. “Grandma is telling Shoshana stories again!” They would have proper rows about those stories. Mum didn’t want her scaring us with rubbish.

Only it wasn’t rubbish. Grandma swore it was the truth. She had seen Shoshana. She swore that when she was a girl herself, she’d seen Shoshana with her own two eyes.

I have the picture in my mind. A girl of ten is left alone at home. The father is dead. The mother is away somewhere. There is no money to spend on baby-sitting. It is a pleasant spring evening. The girl is snoozing in an armchair in the living-room. A big tree out in the garden is throwing a branched shadow on the wall above her. The shadow is the form now taken by Shoshana’s voice. That’s what Shoshana is. She is a voice from the depths. As the hand descends upon her, the sleeping beauty suddenly awakes. The hand jumps back up where it started. It now moves like the swaying branches whose shadow it is. It only reflects now. It has no mind of its own, no mind possessed by Shoshana. But the girl has seen.

She closes her eyes once more, and the hand starts sliding down on spider legs. The girl looks again, just in time. Repeat this. Repeat the closing eyes, repeat the sliding shadow, repeat the starting, over and over. She should get up, forget about sleeping, but she feels tired. Her eyelids keep drooping. This shouldn’t be happening. This is no natural sleepiness.

I’d been told the story so many times that I started seeing myself in it. I am the girl now. I manage to rise from the chair finally. “Who’s there?” I ask. I know someone is. “Don’t worry, little girl.” The voice itself is crawly. “Just lay back and relax. I am not going to hurt you. I love you is all.”    

Why Shoshana? Why the name that my sister swears still gives her nightmares now, in her mid-thirties? “That’s only what I call her,” Grandma would say. She doesn’t have a name, no need for one either, any more than for eyes or anything else that’s body. She doesn’t need anything that singles out. “It was the hiss gave me the name,” said Grandma, “that voice like a sibilating snake.” There had to be some recurring, cajoling s’s to describe that hissing lullaby.

A year after Grandma’s death, a local boy called Charlie disappears. He will never be seen again. No body will be found. “Poor Charlie,” everyone will say. Everyone will have the ideal culprit too, Tom. He really is ideal: not too smart, jobless, itinerant – a queer fish if ever there was any.

“Scapegoating” will say the town judge. He is a big, stern man. He will raise his voice against the crowd, hero-like. He is a friend of mum’s too, sitting in our living-room one evening, glass of brandy in one hand, cigar in the other. “Really, my dear,” I hear him saying, “it’s about time the mob let go of that hapless clod.” But I know better.

Down on the ocean floor, down in the most obscenely sunless pits, Shoshana wanders all alone. Her endlessly long hair spasms in the whispers of those secret waters. She is old. She is unloved. Utter darkness calls for love. The two twist around the same effulgent core, like milky waves around a nebula.

That’s the tragedy of one caught in the grip of loving nothingness. Grandma always insisted on that. “She loves too much. It hurts.” Shoshana: moving without moving, living without living, loving without a body or a soul.

When the pain gets too much even for her to stand, she cries. The surf carries her sobs to the shore. Finding its way through cracks invisible to eyes, but open to the air’s slithering fingers, her wail enters the bedrooms of the creepy and the lonely. They sit up in their bed and strain their ears to hear. “Who’s there?”

Then they rise and walk softly in the dark. Every house like that has an altar built from haphazard odds-and-ends, like a bird’s nest. A lonely candle always burns there, day and night, and they will kneel before it, shivering, and pray to the tempest – though without bitterness.

Then, after a day, a week, a month, as they are walking by a sewer, a tiny rivulet, any body of water – flowing or sedate it doesn’t matter – they will hear a name whispered, which they will recognize. It will belong to somebody they know.

These are the lovers of the oblique glance, of the eye that never meets another eye, just stares coolly and methodically out of all reflective surfaces at that remote acquaintance which was thrown of a sudden in such a new and startling light. Who would have thought such beauty could exist in the form of a mere boy, a mere girl, a mere anyone, whose name just may happen, sometimes, to be Charlie?

I knew all this from grandma’s stories, or what I thought I heard behind them. So, one night I followed Tom. From no-good-Tom he’d become Tom-o’-the-cloven-foot almost overnight. Now close to half a year had passed since the disappearance though. The first fury had subsided. Crowd opinion had gotten off his case. There was a general lack of evidence, and there was the judge’s intervention. 

I’d slipped away from home, and as I skulked there, just beyond the edge of town, tall trees all around me, keeping my eyes on the door of Tom’s hovel, I couldn’t help thinking of the judge. I pictured him at his expensive house, a man of sense and of the world lying next to his wife, with his belly full of fine meats and wines, and a clear conscience.

Tom stepped out. He was tearfully scrawny. He had a limp. This didn’t prevent him from making for the woods so fast I could barely keep up. “What’s the hurry, Tom?” I thought.

You’ve never seen a real night unless you’ve seen one in the woods. Tom dragged his bad leg over obstacles barely seen. The lantern he held in his hand shone like a little star on earth. Its pale glow gave me something to follow, though I had a pretty good idea where we were heading.

There is a big swamp in those woods, just outside my hometown, and in it there is an islet locals call “the Noose” – because of its twisted shape, I always thought.

We reached the water after a while, and Tom jumped into a rowboat that lay there waiting, like an obedient dog. For a moment I thought I’d lose him, but then I realized I could follow the boat’s course from ashore, hiding too, behind the ample reeds that lined the banks.

I will never forget the smell. Swamps do generally stink, yes. I looked it up later – there’s scientific reasons and everything. But that, there, was something else. That was like the stench of rotting dreams.

Tom rowed along for a while, slowly now, more relaxed. Then, about halfway to the Noose, he paused. I could see him fumbling for something. He came up with a long stick he dipped into the water. He moved the thing around, prodding, looking. Finally, he let out a contented sigh. He pulled the stick back, threw it in the boat, then stood up.

For a moment I thought he’d go ahead and jump in, but then I saw him reaching for what proved to be a rope with a big hook tied to one end. He let the hook sink in, gradually. After a while, after it’d hit bottom I suppose, he started playing with the rope, twisting it in his hand, feeling around. It took him some time to get purchase. He started pulling, cautiously at first, to make sure he’d gotten a good hold, then swiftly, greedily.

Soon enough, some sort of burlap sack was hanging by the side of the boat. It was big enough to hold – what? I guess the answer would have to be: something like a really big dog, or a person of small stature. He pulled the load inside and started rowing again.          

I’m not sure how my account of what followed will sound to a distant and detached listener. What is one to make of the fact that, as Tom finally reached the shore of the Noose, the moon seemed to be noticeably filling up with every oar-stroke; of the fact that a wind rose in that spot, famous for its stagnant tranquility, and that the air itself was colored by a red glow for no conceivable reason I could then on now discern; of the fact, finally, that as I dipped the end of my boot into the water, in an effort to calculate my chances of wading to the tiny isle I otherwise had no way of accessing, I found it to be bubbling hot?

Meanwhile, even as I was giving up all hope of following him to whatever his destination was, the unexpected gusts brought me echoes of a chant Tom was now wistfully intoning. I could only make out a series of whistling sibilants. He was dragging the bundle behind him, and presently slipped into a thicket of unnaturally tall ferns, which opened like a mouth to receive him and then closed back upon each other in his wake, blocking him entirely from my view.

A long silence ensued, and then I heard him raising his voice. It sounded overjoyed and supplicating at the same time. “Here it is!” I heard him saying “just like you asked, just like I promised. Take it, gran, it’s yours.”

I had no time to wonder at the appellation, for the answer came immediately. It was a deafening moan, liquid, slurred – mixing tenderness and longing with gluttony, rut, and spleen. It lasted for slightly under a minute, maybe, before dying away in a prolonged burst of gurgling, followed by what sounded, for the world, like the smacking of some monstrous set of lips.

The eruption had sent a tremor through the ground in a radius impossible to gauge right then, and as every plant around trembled from the aftershock I took to my heels. I slipped many times in the mud, and was slapped in the face by many a loose hang of bindweed, and it was only after a mile or so that I paused and looked back to make sure I wasn’t being followed. I finally entered the safe perimeter of our blessed little town with a feeling of unspeakable relief.

In the morning, the shake-up was the one topic of discussion. It seems that terrified babies bawled in every house that had them, that cattle lowed, cats hissed, birds screamed, and there were reports of stray dogs attacking random passersby. Some people also heard a kind of voice, apparently.

“A voice?” mum was saying on the telephone, when I got downstairs, “what kind of voice?” I never heard the answer to that question. After she was done talking to her friend, she came into the kitchen, and saw me sitting at the table. She asked me if I’d felt the quake last night. I said no, and looked out of the window, assuming a look of cold indifference to the whole affair.           

Fiction © Copyright Alex Desiderius
Image by B. Hunter