August 17, 2017 - About eleven-thirty Willie Glover came lumbering into the parlor to stand over our domino table watching us, his big, pink face alight with some bit of new and choice information that he was itching to tell us.
“Thuh cellar,” said Willie. “Somethin’ in thuh…thuh….”, and his slow, foolish drawl drifted off into an indecisive mumbling. Willie wasn’t very bright. His grass-hopper mind was ever jumping from one thing to another, incapable of holding one particular thought for more than a second at a time. Amused, we looked up at the big fellow, waiting for him to continue, but Willie’s quick little eyes had fallen upon something more interesting to him – a beetle crawling along the floor beside the fire place. Whatever it was that Willie had wanted to tell us was forgotten. Insects had a particular fascination for Willie. He got down on his knees to look at this one, his eyes wide, his thick lips agape and drooling; and for a time no one paid him any heed.
The domino game was in the sweating stage. Old Jeff Glover and I were playing partners against Big Jim Moss, and Barney Slater, and there was a stack of greenbacks on the table to make things more interesting.
The four of us sat around the pine-topped table, faces harsh and sweat shining under the swinging oil lamp. The table was placed as near the front door as possible in order to catch whatever breeze there might be, for it was a hot and sultry late August night. Outside in the cypress-break swamp, the crickets and bull frogs were in an uproar, and big, squashy candle bugs kept banging themselves against the window screens, trying to get closer to the yellow lamp light.
There were a lot of fives and sixes showing on the table, and at the moment I was taking my time trying to figure out some way of making a good count. Big Jim moss puffed on a dead cigar, his pale, little eyes almost hidden in rolls of florid fat, as he watched me with impatience. Across from Big Jim, Barney Slater sat with a whole handful of dominoes. Barney was sweating profusely, and his chalky T.B. complexion was, if possible, paler than usual; he had just put his last five-spot on the table. Barney waited, watching me foxily, and wiped his streaming brow with a shirt-sleeve.
But, I am not a man to be rushed, especially when I’m playing dominoes. I took my own good time, studying the board, figuring, and clicking my last two dominoes together speculatively.
Big Jim drummed his fat fingers on the table top. “Well, are you goin’ to play, Sid, or ain’t you?”
I grinned at Big Jim and clamped down a blank five that netted us fifteen points. Old Jeff Glover guffawed, marking the count down in the “US” column. Barney Slater coughed and then passed, and Old Jeff played a double-blank that made us fifteen more points.
“Well, damnitall!”, big Jim cursed and passed. I was about to play my last rock and domino when there, suddenly hovering over us once more, his close-set little eyes shining white in the shadows, was Willie.
“It’s big, big, big…..” Willie had something in his freckled fist – probably the beetle – and every now and then he would open his puffy fingers a fraction and peep inside.
“It’s big and big and big”, sang Willie. He had a way of talking to crickets and lizards and things as if they were human. Irritated, Old Jeff shoved Willie away from the table. “Get that consarned insect away from here, Sonny Boy”, he commanded sternly. Pouting, Willie gawked backward into the kitchen.
“Willie is bothersome”, Jeff apologized, “but he don’t mean to be. While Sadie was alive she kept him out of devilment. Real strict with the boy, she was. Sadie was a good and righteous woman – a little radical, but good.” Old Jeff threw a guilty glance around the room at the number of religious placards hanging from the walls.
For the first time I noticed that the large picture of Christ that had for so long decorated the space just above the mantelpiece had been taken down. From the ornate frame of their wedding picture above the piano, a veiled woman stared threateningly at us four men.
I played my last domino and caught four rocks from Slater, and two from Big Jim, and that amounted to enough count to put us out. There were twenty dollars in the pot, and Old Jeff and I wanted to quit while we were ahead, but Big Jim insisted on another game.
“Ah, come on, gents. Let’s make it four out of five.” He wiped his fat neck with a soiled bandana. “Four out of five, and double the pot.” As he staked Barney Slater with a ten-spot, Old Jeff shuffled the dominoes.
“Boy, it’s surely a good thing she’s not around here now!” Old Jeff giggled, catching, out of the corner of his eye, the omnipotent glower of the woman in the wedding picture. “A devout woman, Sadie; a real hard-shelled Baptist. If there was anything she couldn’t condone it was gambling.”
“A good thing is right!”, Barney agreed. “Bet she’s turning over in her grave right now.”
“God rest her stern and righteous soul”, Old Jeff added with veneration, while vigorously rustling the dominoes on the boards.
It was about three hands later that I first noticed it. To begin with, there was only that strange feeling – that vague sensation of something amiss. It took several minutes for me to figure it out. Then as it dawned on me, my lower jaw drooped lower and lower. Abruptly, I thumped the table for silence. “Listen!”
Old Jeff had been pondering a play and now he stopped, his gnarled hands poised just above the table.
“What in the Sam-hill bit you?”, Big Jim grumbled.
But I was looking past him at the black doorway, lost in thought. In the yard outside, everything was still and silent – so silent you could have heard the movement of your own shadow.
“That’s it!!”, I said. “It’s too quiet. Seems to me as just a few minutes ago the frogs and crickets were raising Old Billy out there. Now it’s as still as a graveyard outside. I don’t get it.”
We all sat there listening for a long time. But the frogs and crickets continued their eerie silence. Presently Barney’s thick lips drew back from his protruding teeth in a smile of amused comprehension.
“You’re a good one, Sid”, he grinned knowingly. “I read your scheme all right. Trying to make me overlook this good play, you was, with all that talk of crickets and bull frogs. Well, neighbor, Barney Slater’s not to be side-tracked so easy.” With a flourish he plunked down his double-five and grinned at Old Jeff. “Mark us fifteen, neighbor.”
Once again the dominoes raked and rattled on the table top. But from that point on my game wasn’t up to par. A curious sort of uneasiness, a premonition, you might call it, got hold of me, and I couldn’t keep my mind on the white spots. Instead, I kept listening for more candle-bugs to thump against the screen door. I kept straining my ears for the familiar night sounds, hoping vaguely that they would start up again in the swamp. Maybe that was a trivial thing to give a man the creeps, but I surely enough had them.
Outside everything was very hot and still. After awhile, I shifted my chair away from the table and stood up, sweating. “Jeff”, I said, “Jeff, do you reckon she would mind too awful much if I went into the kitchen and poured myself a great big jigger of whiskey? I’m not feeling up to snuff.”
Old Jeff looked at me and winked. “Reckon she’d mind a lot, Sid, if she was here. Sadie was a war-horse when it came to liquor, same as she was about gambling – wouldn’t allow a drop of the stuff in the house. But right now Sadie is up on Cemetery Hill under six feet of sod, and I reckon you can go right in there and pour us all a glass of whatever it is you got there in your hip pocket.”
He winked again at Big Jim, who sat back in his chair and roared with laughter. “You tell him, neighbor.” Big Jim slapped the older man on the back. “That woman never did know who was boss.”
Glover looked down at his hands abashed. “Sadie was a good woman”, he argued. “Kind of over-bearing sometimes, but good.” With that, I headed for the kitchen.
The smell met me as I opened the kitchen door. Don’t ask me to describe it. I remember only that it was sickening; I remember that it hit me full in the face in a thick, hot cloud so that for a moment I reeled there on the threshold, affected by an almost over-powering sense of physical nausea.
Over in one corner beside the big iron cook stove was Willie. The cellar door was open and the big fellow was sitting on the edge of the square black hole, sitting there with his legs hanging over into space and his great bulk bent forward, fascinated by something in the pitch blackness below. He didn’t seem to mind the stench at all. His thick lips were open in a pink weal and every once in a while he would let out a slobbery whimper.
I walked over to him, feeling sick to my stomach as the odor grew stronger. I shook Willie’s flabby shoulder. “What in blazes is down there in that blasted cellar? Smells as if a whole herd of cows fell in there and died.”
Willie looked around at me with pained, red-rimmed eyes, his face wrinkled up like a little boy’s who was about to cry.
“Scoldin’”, he blubbered. “I got a – a scoldin’.” He repeated it over and over in his whining, parrotfish voice. It required a lot of coaxing to get Willie away from that cellar, but I finally managed it. Then, holding my nose, I slammed the trap door shut, and went around opening all the windows. Willie followed close behind me, picking at my shirt and mumbling incoherently.
When I had finished airing the room the stench was a great deal more bearable. I got two glasses from the cupboard and poured a couple of stiff drinks from my pocket flask. Willie took his drink in a hairy paw, smelled it, wrinkled his pink face in approval, and drained the class in a single gulp.
“Now listen, Will”, I told him kindly. “There’s a dead dog or cat or something in that cellar. It smells bad…bad. I’ll tell your paw and tomorrow he’ll go down there and bury it. But in the meantime don’t you open that trap door again. Don’t open…bad, bad.” I lowered my eyebrows in an expression of severity, pointed to the cellar door, and shook a prohibitive finger.
“Bad, bad”, Willie echoed, and giggled.
When I returned from the kitchen, the domino players had quit the room and were out on the front porch watching the night sky. Over the swamp toward the south, lightning flashed intermittently, and far-away thunder disturbed the pall-like silence.
The four of us sat on the door stoop and passed around the bottle. All about us the swamp lay still and waiting. That peculiar sense of foreboding grew on me. The liquor did not help it; for some reason I kept remembering Willie the way I had found him, hovering there as though hypnotized over the black maw of the cellar. I kept recalling that awful smell of death, and it seemed to me that a trace of the noisome scent lingered still in my nostrils.
Slowly the storm drew closer. We watched the lightning play around the white tombstones up on Cemetery Hill, and the black storm clouds billowing toward us out of the hot atmosphere; a sudden formless suspicion was born in me. It hit me with such a sudden and benumbing impact that the half-empty whiskey bottle slipped from my fingers and shattered on the bottom porch step. In the darkness I heard Big Jim’s dismayed curse.
“Where’s Willie?” I whispered. The three of them looked at me, faces slack, not understanding.
“Say”, the old man looked at me squint-eyed, “what in Hades is eating you tonight, Sid? I never saw you so jumpity.”
“A feeling”, I said. “Just a feeling I’ve got that something’s wrong. We Thompsons have always had a kind of gift. My aunt Maudie had forewarnings – visions. And you know how Grandma Thompson used to tell the future. Well, I just had a premonition about Willie. You’d better go find him, Jeff.”
The lightning showed a mixture of amusement and incredulity on Old Jeff’s wrinkled face. Somewhere in the darkness Big Jim laughed derisively.
“Sid, you get the spooks”, he remarked. “That bottle has give you a case of the jumpin’ Jimminies.”
The thunder rumbled closer. On the step beside me I sensed Barney Slater shifting uneasily; and now and then Old Jeff would glance at the yellow doorway, cock his head to one side, and listen. I had planted a seed that grew and grew….
And then the boiling storm clouds were hovering directly above, the crackling bolts of lightning prodded the tops of the big cypress trees in the front yard. The four of us sat on the porch steps, glued there, afraid to move…waiting, listening. You know the jumpy kind of a way a person waits for an expected pistol shot, all nervous and knotted up inside? Well, I began to feel like that. I began to have that same sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and the flesh on the back of my neck began to crawl.
But when finally it happened, this unknown thing that we had been awaiting, it did not burst upon us in some sort of explosion. It came, on the contrary, with insidious casualness. There was no scream, no warning of any kind; just that big, disheveled shadow suddenly blotting out most of the yellow rectangle of the open door.
We whirled – and there was Willie – and yet not Willie either, but rather the pulpy and mangled mound of flesh that had once been Willie. And there was also that sickening, clammy smell – the smell from the cellar.
At my elbow, Old Jeff gave a choked gasp. Barney Slater let out a shrill, womanish bleat of terror.
For a long time there was a paralyzed silence as the thing that had once been Willie Glover sagged at the threshold, white eyes glaring at us out of a strange, misshapen countenance; then the torn lips opened and a voice incongruously amused, repeated parrot-like:
“And the zeal for my house…the zeal for my house shall eat me up.”
After that Willie Glover sagged to the floor, his words growing blubbery and indistinct like words spoken under water. Presently the crushed mound of flesh trembled and then was still.
Walking in slow motion Old Jeff approached the inert mass on the threshold, bent down and removed something gingerly from the bloody left hand. A flash of lightning showed the old man gaping chalk-faced at a particle of cloth in his hand.
“Blue calico!” he whispered. “SHE was buried in blue calico. She… She..”
There was a burst of close-by thunder. I saw the bit of cloth flutter from the old man’s grasp. Old Jeff was listening again, his head cocked to one side in that peculiar way of his. His face was slack and quivering. Like men in a nightmare, the four of us waited as the footsteps, the quick and inexorable, determined footsteps reverberated from the kitchen…
