Блейк Крауч - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, No. 5. Whole No. 813, May 2009

I awoke in my bed, dehydrated and nauseous. I tried to get up but the pain in my head forced me back down. I reached across for Stella but the sheet was cold.

Some time later I woke again. The thirst was unbearable. I felt like death. It took me some time to realise that the intrusive hammering was not only in my head but also outside. Someone was banging on the door. I forced myself to sit up.

I was naked. Where were my pyjamas? More to the point, where were my clothes? I managed to stand and grabbed my dressing gown. “I’m coming,” I muttered angrily as I made my way downstairs.

I opened the door to find Jacques, his employer Monsieur Chicot, and a younger man whom I didn’t recognise standing on the step. They were bareheaded and solemn. It was Jacques who spoke.

It is difficult to be alert or coherent when in the throes of a severe hangover, even more so when one must converse in a foreign tongue. I couldn’t at first grasp what he was saying, and wished only that he would go away so that I could get a drink of water and some aspirin and return to my bed. I was aware of how I must look, unshaven and haggard, and of the coldness of the tiles beneath my bare feet. I gathered he was speaking of my wife and eventually I caught the word etang.

“Again,” I told him. “Slowly.”

I must go with them, he said. To the etang . There had been an accident.

My stomach filled with ice. “Stella?” I asked.

He hung his head.

It was the third man who had found her, the one they called Alain. He was a hunter and had gone into the woods to shoot. Normally, he said, he avoided the etang , but for some reason that morning he had been drawn. He had found her facedown in the water, frozen into the ice, and had run to Jacques, who in turn had called Chicot. The three of them had returned and dragged her out. Then they had come for me.

Somehow I managed to dress — I still couldn’t find my clothes — and followed them to the pond. They had left her lying on the bank, face upwards in the frosted leaves, as though staring at the cold circle of sky above the clearing. Her lashes were thick with ice. The grey woollen frock, saturated and (since they had come to fetch me) frozen over, clung to her body like a diseased second skin, coarse and putrescent. I turned away and vomited.

A moment later I heard shouting. The police had arrived. There was much arguing and gesticulating — mainly, I gathered, because the body had been moved. For the first time I looked at the dark gash in the ice. Already it was filming over.

Gabrielle appeared and, despite my wild protests and demands to stay with my wife, she, Jacques, and a policeman led me back to the house. They took me to the kitchen and stared aghast at the mess. The dining room was in even greater chaos — spilled wine, kicked-over chairs, sprawling empty bottles. Had we really behaved so disgustingly?

“Party,” I mumbled as Gabrielle made a space for me to sit down and began to clear the debris.

The following days were a nightmare. I kept expecting Stella to appear — there were so many things I wanted to tell her — but then I would remember and my stomach would churn. I howled with loneliness. The police interviewed me many times, but there was little I could tell them, other than that we had all drunk far too much and I had eventually passed out in a stupor. I cringed with shame. Neil and Penny confirmed my story but, like me, could offer no logical reason why Stella should have gone to the etang . Penny’s suggestion that she had been drawn by whatever evil presence lurked in the house was dismissed, quite rightly, as nonsense. Although I have since learned that Helene Bazire was not the first woman to die there, I still cannot accept supernatural intervention. For pity’s sake, we are no longer peasants.

The press, it goes without saying, were obnoxious. The incident had all the ingredients of a sensational story — mysterious death, well-known protagonists, hints of the paranormal. Even implications of foul play which I did my best to ignore. They couldn’t substantiate, of course — any evidence had been destroyed when Jacques and his companions removed her body and by our footprints walking to and fro — but it added to the speculation. Which did not displease my agent. Sales of my books soared. Penny too, I’m told, was paid handsomely for her chilling descriptions of “The Ghost of Le Coisel,” although I suspect the “woman pleading for mercy at the top of the stairs” was the product of a business mind rather than psychic disturbance, and I doubt if we’ll ever know what, if anything, she truly saw that night. I eschew the use of cliches but at times it is hard not to think of the proverbial ill wind.

Later that day I found my clothes. Gabrielle was pulling them from the washing machine when I stumbled into the kitchen. They were wet and clean, the cycle completed, so I said nothing and allowed her to continue. There seemed little point in drawing attention to what had otherwise passed unremarked.

The verdict of the inquest was predictable — death by drowning whilst under the influence of alcohol — and I pray there isn’t an afterlife or Stella will have died a second time through shame. I returned to Le Coisel, determined to sell, determined to have the etang filled in. In the event, I have done neither.

To be frank, there seems little point. I never go near the Devil’s Pond now, and nor, I feel sure, do the locals. This latest incident will have done nothing to diminish its evil reputation. And as for selling...

I thought at first I would move south, but I find I am strangely content here. Yellow flags again line the riverbank and damsel flies dart jewel-like amongst the leaves. It is a haven of peace and tranquillity. I sit daily beside the water and have come to rely on its gentle murmur for solace, even, I suspect, for inspiration. I have begun writing again and my first novel for many years is under way. I see little reason to move.

Perhaps content is too strong a word... The night of the tragedy is never far from my mind and at times I am deeply troubled. But there are some fears one cannot fully express even to oneself. That way lies madness.

I am a gentle soul, I tell myself, when I lie awake in the early hours, heart pounding and bathed in sweat. I am kind and compassionate, incapable of inflicting even the mildest hurt. But then the other voice begins to speak, soft and insidious, reminding me that we are all capable of good and evil, and that I, as a writer, should know that better than most. Whereupon I begin to sweat again and strain to hear the former voice for reassurance. How well, I wonder, do any of us truly know ourselves?

©2009 by Caroline Benton

Christopher Bundy’s fiction and essays have appeared in Atlanta Magazine, Glimmer Train Stories, The Rambler, and many other publications. He is a teacher and a founding editor of the journal New South in Atlanta, Georgia. He joins us for the first time with a story that explores the mystique and magnetism of The Beatles. A small kernel of fact helped to inspire this story: there were actual accounts of barbers going out of business in the 1960s because of the popularity of the popularity of the Beatle cut.

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When Dobson Johns found Donny Palmer by the railroad tracks, Lake Claire, Georgia, embarked upon a change, just like the world beyond that had begun to surface in the newspapers and on TV. The citizens of Lake Claire thought the con-fusing headlines from Atlanta, Washington, and abroad, however forbidding, wouldn’t make it to their town; and for the most part the town stood still. But then, among the odd rhythms of the summer of 1966, even blue sky was fleeting, buckets of rain submerging pastures and overflowing streams and rivers. Not a patch of solid ground to be found. Lake Claire, which never had a lake, only a few places where water seemed to collect more than others, went swampy. As soon as you rested on firm earth it gave way beneath. Inside the houses of the small south-Georgia town the sheets were damp and towels never dried. Clothes clung to warm backs and it was best to sit still and let the sound of rain quiet your heart. And for the first time it seemed even the television went muddy, revealing, nightly, a window onto a more and more inconceivable and unpredictable decade.