Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (17 page)

Yet—that agonizing
yet
—Isabel had discovered that of course after so many centuries the frog and human were too closely melded to ever separate completely. The man had been inside the frog, yet the frog would always be part of the man. It came out at the oddest times.
Impossible to protect against.
Perhaps a shock—a near traffic miss crossing the street, stepping on a garden rake—might have the reverse effect, with the man changing back into the frog?

Isabel shuddered. ‘I must warn my John about what might happen to him,’ she told herself, closing the book of fairy tales. ‘I must tell him what he is, where he came from, and caution him against any possible scare.’

That evening, in the privacy of their bedroom, while the children were asleep, she told him the dreadful news.

‘But I will keep you safe, my darling,’ she said to him. ‘You have really nothing to fear.’

He lay there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, and just before she fell asleep she heard him murmur, ‘
So
that’s why I like water so much...’

The following morning, a bright spring day, she awoke to find the bed empty beside her. Fearing the worst she put on her silk dressing gown and combed the house for her husband John. Not finding him there she went out into the garage to see if he was sitting in the car. He was not. Finally, with a sinking heart, she ran down to the pond.

There he was, her dear heart, floating face down in the water, the
pond weed
caressing his naked body, stroking it lovingly as if welcoming home a lost son. When she turned him over, on his face was a look of serenity, as if he had found the way to Marvell’s green shaded place where he could think cool green thoughts
for ever
.

The funeral was simple. She had him buried in the garden, by the pond. Special-Friend Frank came down to see her through her time of sorrow, but she didn’t need him. She had her children, who were beginning to blossom in splendid ways. They still loved going out in the car and she was pleased to drive them.

It was while she was thus engaged that she realised why
her husband had been fascinated by the car, felt comfortable inside it
. Being in the car, looking through the glass at grass and overhead
trees,
was like being under a pond looking out through the watery surface at the green world beyond.

And two of her children are now famous.

You must remember Yvonne Fairfax, the Olympic long jumper, whose extraordinary standing-jump style won her the hearts and minds of the people of Munich?
And Arthur Fairfax, who swam his way to a gold in the Games at Montreal?
Two brilliant sporting children, who had inherited intrinsic skills passed on to them by their deceased
father.

And the third child?

Why he has a love of poetry that excels even that of his mother, whose traits he bears with vocal pride.

As a child I was always fascinated by the fact that many American towns were named after European ones.
The Paris of France and Texas.
The Boston of Lincolnshire and Massachusetts.
The Sierra Nevada
mountains
of Spain and the U.S.A. It is natural for me to think they may be linked I spirit as well as in name.

M
idnight in the small town of Hamelin, Nebraska.

Hamelin was one of those
places which
seemed uniquely American. Just another sleepy hollow where people minded their own business but knew everyone else’s just the same. It boasted a doctor, and a lawyer, a
school teacher
, and a mayor. It also had a nasty stain on its history, like most small towns anywhere, but this had nothing to do with bigotry or hatred of strangers. No innocent Japanese immigrants had been shot to death after the attack on Pearl Harbour. No black citizens had been lynched in the heat of the night. Hamelin’s blemish occurred through positive negligence, a turning of the back against responsibility, a washing of the hands.

Hamelin’s shame, like most shame, had been born out of fear.

Sheriff Phil Watkins had sent his Deputy home and was preparing to lock up his office and make tracks for his own bed, where his wife Matty was lying awake, expectantly. Saturday night was their night of the week, since Sunday was a lazy day when neither of them had to rise early. They would have a couple of drinks in bed, watch some television on the portable set propped up by their feet, then they would turn to each other and enjoy safe middle-aged sex.

Hat in hand, Phil Watkins turned off the light, went through the open doorway into the warm night, then locked up, rattling the door to make sure it was secure. He had just removed the key, when something struck him on the head, behind the left ear, causing him to reel backwards in intense pain. He blinked rapidly, reaching up to feel a warm sticky wetness in his salt-white hair.

‘Hey.
. . !’ he cried, then looked down where the object had bounced on the porch boards, saw a heavy rock. It was smeared with his own blood. ‘What the hell?’ He turned, dizzily, just as another rock struck him in the chest, immediately above the heart.

‘Jesus!’ he wheezed. Then angrily, ‘
Who
’s out there, goddamit? If that’s you Eb Shaffer, I’m...’

He got no further because a third hunk of stone hit him in the mouth, knocking out three teeth. Phil Watkins staggered backwards, drawing his gun, but it was only halfway out of its holster when the rocks began to come at him in numbers, catapulting out of the darkness with considerable force behind them.

Within a few minutes he had been stoned to death.

Three people died that Saturday night. One of them was the mayor and the town’s banker, Stan Fredericks, who was first silenced with a piece of fruit.

Stan lived alone and like most fat men, slept with his mouth wide open, to draw in enough oxygen to feed his massive bulk. Someone had plugged that airhole with a large apple. Thus muzzled he was then dragged bodily from his bed and drowned in his own swimming pool. Whoever had killed him left red marks around his neck where presumably they had held his head under water. His body was still on the edge of the pool, belly-up, while his head lolled back in the water.

Some of the poorer folk from the edge of town, who had at various times been threatened with foreclosure of the mortgages Stan Fredericks held on their homes and smallholdings, could not help but feel that perhaps there was some kind of divine punishment involved.

Furthermore, Mayor Fredericks had given the seal of approval to several buildings erected out of public funds, like the new town library, while Banker Fredericks provided loans to the construction companies that were awarded the contracts. The bank’s interest rates were surprisingly high, though Stan Fredericks maintained this was necessary to protect his clients. When the town saw him lying next to his pool barbecue, looking like a bloated suckling pig, the apple still jammed between his jaws, many of them nodded sagely.

The third death, by suffocation, had been administered to Wincy Jacobs, the lady who delivered the mail. She had been smothered by her own rose-scented pillow, the slip and cover of which she tore through with her teeth in her death throes, as she tried to gnaw her way to fresh air. There were down feathers caught in her throat, trapped in her nostrils. Her nails had splinters under them, where she had clawed at the bedhead, presumably blindly trying to find the eyes of her attackers.

‘What we have here,’ said Deputy Dan Starkly, in his ponderous fashion to a gathering of the town’s most influential citizens, ‘is a multie murderer. Hamelin (he pronounced it ‘Hammerlen’) has a killer who just likes to kill...’

David Werner, the town’s young lawyer, interrupted.

‘We don’t know that. We don’t know anything at this time. All we know is we’ve got three dead bodies.’

‘We know they was killed,’ snapped someone from behind him. ‘They didn’t just roll over and die.’

David turned in his chair and addressed the person directly.

‘Yes, we know that much, but no more. Dan talked about
a
multiple murderer. How do we know it was just one person? It could have been a dozen. Maybe some
sort of gang passed through here in the night and are
halfway across South Dakota by now? Let’s not make emphatic statements, Dan. Let’s look at what we’ve got and then make some
assumptions
.’

‘OK, OK,’ muttered Dan, ‘let’s look at them
assumptions
. Three violent killings, no weapons involved, less you count rocks, apples and pillys as weapons. I don’t. A gun’s a weapon. A knife’s a weapon. They don’t just come to hand. The instruments used here, was just things that came to hand, on the spur of the moment so to speak. Am I right Dave?’ He looked to the lawyer for approval.

‘These were opportunist tools, as you say Dan.’

‘Fair ‘nough.
So I
assume
that what we got here is a person, or
persons
unknown, goin’ out not looking to murder, but taking it as it comes. Nothin’ was stole. There don’t seem to be
no
motive at all. Less someone had a special grudge against these three folk, which I personally can’t see any connection, we got to worry about the rest of us. When you get down to it, you got to figure Dave’s right, that there’s more’n one. Have to be a pretty strong man to drag the mayor from his bed, him weighing what he did.’

The meeting broke up shortly after that little speech, with Dan warning the townspeople that perhaps the killers would not stop at an odd number, but go on to round it up, maybe into double figures. David Werner was convinced they were looking for a Manson type gang. The state police had been alerted of course, but until the town elected a new mayor and sheriff, they had only Dan to look after them. Dan Starkly was a good solid youth who could hit things he aimed at with his thirty-eight, but as an investigative detective he would make a good short order cook.

Some people, naturally scared, were asking if the FBI could be brought in, but there was an incident in the town’s past, an
ugly
moment in its near history, of which others were ashamed and had no wish to reveal to outsiders. The FBI
were
good at uncovering such skeletons, so it was better to keep out the feds until someone absolutely insisted they be involved.

Dan Starkly and David Werner went through the clues together, retraced possible movements of the victims, tried to come up with some conclusions, but by the end of that day were no nearer to any answers. The two men had a beer together,
then
went home to lock their doors and windows, securely, for the first time in many years.

The next morning they found Eb Shaffer, the town troublemaker, decorated with pointed sticks. He was lying in the middle of the bridge, over the ravine at the back of town, looking like a porcupine. The bridge was one of those preserved timber affairs, with strengthened supports to take the weight of modern vehicles, of which small towns like Hamelin were proud. It gave them a sense of history.

The sticks bristling from the anatomy of Eb Shaffer weren’t much more than twigs, maybe nine inches long at the most. They had been
sharpened,
it seemed, on sandstone rock. Just like the twigs Eagle Scouts fashioned to spear their sausages before cooking them over a campfire. About sixty of these barbecue skewers protruded from the soft parts of Eb’s body: his throat, stomach, eyes, and his groin. Dan said the sight made him sick to his stomach, and kept subconsciously touching himself between the legs. Doc Skimmer remarked that Eb Shaffer must have been attacked somewhere out in the hills, and had staggered, blinded by two of the sharp sticks, to the bridge to die.

‘You can see the marks in the dust,’ he said, pointing with his pipe stem at the weaving tracks. ‘Poor bastard must’ve been in terrible pain. My guess is he was wanting the ravine, to kill himself quick, but God bein’ a contrary old goat, guided his feet to the bridge.’