Гарднер Дозуа - Mermaids!

Expertly, then, she pulled out the plugs of twisted palm fronds which allowed the carbon dioxide to escape during fermentation, but prevented sand from sifting in. "Nah, then! 'Ave a go!"

Wilson took the cocoanut, sniffed, and tasted. That part of his mind which had not been dulled by shock had to admit that the stuff wasn't bad. He took a long swig; it went down smooth and warm.

"Ahhh!" said Mavis, licking her bristly upper lip; "that's wot myde the deacon dance!"

Jack said nothing. There was a whole night to get through, and then the rest of his life after that, and he might as well start the ordeal as drunk as possible. He took another swig of the jungle juice. Mavis moved off, then she moved back.

"Got no bib," she said gayly, "but 'ere's your tucker, Cocky."

Wilson looked down at the palm frond she had spread on the sand in front of him. He didn't move; he merely stared at the whole baked fish resting there. Then the soft sea breeze wafted a delicate scent to his educated nostrils, bringing a flow of saliva from beneath his tongue.

Almost as if it had volition of its own, his hand reached out and broke off a bit of the crisp skin and flaky flesh and popped it into his mouth....

The J & M Seafood Grotto was opened to a select clientele only a few months later. Jack Wilson, the junior partner, still makes excursions in the Lorelei to procure both rare and staple oceanic delicacies for the house's table, but he rarely stays away long.

The few people who have seen his wife, the senior partner, say that she isn't much to look at, and is confined to a wheelchair, her lower extremities covered, which is probably why she stays hidden in the kitchen most of the time. There are rumors that she and Jack often go for midnight swims in the nearby surf; and there are other rumors of various sorts, not confirmed.

What needs no confirmation is the fact that Jack seems very fond of his wife, indeed—and that her seafood simply is out of this world.

The late Davis Grubb was a West Virginia author who set much of his fiction in the Ohio River valley country of West Virginia, where his family had lived for more than two hundred years. Grubb's most famous novel was probably The Night of the Hunter, a scary and suspenseful book that was later made into a successful film starring Robert Mitchum. Grubb was also well known for his short work, which appeared mostly in horror markets such as Shadows and Dark Forces. His other novels include The Watchman, Fool's Parade, and The Voices of Glory. His last novel was the enormous and controversial Ancient Lights, published in 1982.

Here Grubb takes us to his fictional town of Glory, West Virginia—in which several of his stories are set—and beguiles us with the earthy and poetic tale of Darly Pogue, a man who has reluctant knowledge of the mighty Ohio River's greatest secret, a man doomed to spend his life on the river even though he is terrified of water... with good reason.

I DON'T KNOW IF SHE WAS BLACK OR WHITE. MAYBE SOME OF both. Or maybe Indian—there was some around Glory, West Virginia, who said she was full Cherokee and descended from the wife of a chief who had broken loose from the March of Tears in the 1840's. Some said not descended at all—that she was that very original woman grown incredibly old. Colonel Bruce theorized that she was the last of the Adena—that vanished civilization who built our great mound here in Glory back a thousand years before Jesus.

What matter whom she was or from whence? Does a seventeen-year-old boy question the race or origin or age of his first true love?

You might well ask, in the first place, what ever possessed the Glory Town Council to hire on Darly Pogue as wharfmaster? A man whose constant, nagging, gnawing fear—a phobia they call it in the books—whose stuff of nightmare and the theme of at least two attacks of the heebie-jeebies or Whiskey Horrors was the great Ohio River.

Darly feared that great stream like a wild animal fears the forest fire.

There were reasons for that fear. It is said that, as an infant, he had floated adrift in an old cherry-wood pie-safe for six days and six nights of thundering, lightning river storms during the awful flood of 1900.

I read up a lot on reincarnation in those little five-cent Haldemann Julius Blue Books from out Kansas way.

There was one of the little books that says man doesn't reincarnate from his body to another body to another human and so on. It held that our existence as spiritual creatures is divided by God between air and water and land. And we take turns as fish or birds or animals. Or man. A lifetime as a dolphin might be reincarnated as a tiercel to ply the fathomed heavens in splendor and, upon death, to become again a man. Well, somehow, some way, something whispery inside Darly Pogue told him that the good Lord now planned that Darly's next incarnation would, quite specifically, be as an Ohio River cat-fish.

You can imagine what that did to Darly, what with his phobia of that river.

And where could such mischievous information have originated? Maybe some gypsy fortune-teller—they were always singing and clamoring down the river road in the springtime in their sequined head scarves and candy-colored wagons—maybe one of them told Darly that. In my opinion it was Loll who told him herself: she could be that mean.

And it was, of course, a prediction to rattle a man up pretty sore. I mean, did you ever look eyeball to eyeball with an old flat-headed, rubber-lipped, garbage-eating, mud-covered cat-fish?

I didn't say eat one—God knows that nothing out of God's waters is any tastier rolled in cornmeal and buttermilk batter and fried in country butter.

I said did you ever look a catfish square in the whiskers? Try it next time. It'll shake hell out of you. There's a big, sappy, two-hundred-million-year-old grin on that slippery skewered mug that seems to ask: Homo sapiens, how long you been around? The critter almost winks as much as to remind you that you came from waters as ancient as his—and that you'll probably be going back some day. But, pray the Lord! you'll exclaim, not as one of your ugly horned tribe!

What sense does it make to hire on as wharfmaster a man who fears the very river?

To position such a man twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week in a kind of floating coffin tied with a length of breakable, cuttable rope to the shore?

But, what if that man has ready and unique access to the smallest and greatest of the great river's secrets. Suppose he can locate with unerring accuracy the body of a drowned person. Suppose he can predict with scary certainty the place where a snag is hiding in the channel or the place where a new sandbar is going to form. Suppose he can prognosticate the arrival of steamboats—hours before their putting in. What if he can board one of those boats and at one sweeping glance tell to the ounce—troy or avoirdupois—the weight of its entire cargo?

There wasnt a secret of that old Ohio—that dark, mysterious Belle Rivière—not one that Darly Pogue didnt have instant access to: except one. That One, of course, was the Secret he was married to: Loll, river witch, goddess, woman, whatever—she was the one secret of the great flowing Mistress which Darly did not understand.

But she was, as well, the source of all the rest of the great river's secrets.

Loll.

Dark, strange Loll.

What could possess a man to live with such a woman and on the very breast of that river he feared like a very demon?

The business all began the morning the water first showed sign of rising in the spring of thirty-six. Everybody around Glory came down to the wharfboat full of questions for Darly Pogue and asking him either to confirm or contradict the predictions now crackling in the radio speakers. Wheeling's WWVA.