elimae

Nine More Grim Tales
Norman Lock

The steamer appeared in the harbor at dusk, black smoke from its stacks losing itself in the coming darkness. As the boat drew closer to the wharf, men leaning against the bollards to smoke heard band music on the water: "The Mountains of the Moon," a tune none had heard until then, which seemed to dissolve in the suddenly chill air. Night fell; the ship's lights trembled against the black river. Here and there, passengers could be seen standing in the light that splashed down onto the decks. The men on the pier had never seen such a ship. It came to rest, gangplanks were let down, and now the passengers began their slow disembarkation. They wore clothes the men thought peculiar -- clothes that had been fashionable in 1912 when the Titanic is believed to have gone down. But the name of this ship was H.M.S. Titanic; and later, when the passengers were questioned, they laughed at the idea their ship had sunk! Didn't we know it is "unsinkable"? There had been ice in the sea lanes and thick fog -- they remembered the fog; but they had slept soundly that night and long -- dreaming, in first class or steerage, of ballrooms or barrooms, polo or bocce. The best sleep of our lives! they said while they waited with letters in their hands for those who had promised to meet them.

Forbidden to look at the sun, he did and ever after saw unimaginable sights.

The children stopped their play and looked at the ground from which -- they said -- a music was coming like "ants singing." But the mothers and fathers who had gone outside to see why the children had grown so silent heard nothing, though they strained to hear and went so far, some of them, as to kneel and put their ears to the ground. They could hear nothing like a music anywhere underneath the grass -- all except the simple-minded one who mowed lawns in summer. He said shyly, "Like ants singing a nasty song that makes me want to run and hide." And that evening as the sun fell swiftly behind the hill, the children hid themselves down the wells, in storm drains, culverts, and other places inside the earth and were never seen again, although afterwards the simple-minded man said he heard them, from time to time -- heard them sing a terrible song.

The first thing the angel did when he came to earth was, with the help of a locksmith, to take off his wings. The second thing was to go up in an airplane. The third was to marry a woman, whom he called "angel," although she was ordinary. When she died, he took his wings out of storage, had them cleaned and oiled and the rubies in their intricate works replaced by a watch-maker. And then he returned to the place from which he had come -- satisfied that he had lived the life of a man.

In another version of the story, the angel, having grown tired of life on earth, killed his wife and took her home in order to "give his beloved a head start on eternity."

In a third version, the wife murdered the angel, sold his wings for a fortune, and lived happily ever after with her lover, who was reasonably imperfect, had a wicked sense of humor, believed entirely in the here-and-now and not at all in the hereafter.

During the night, lightning opened an ancient oak's trunk below the first fork. In the morning, a hand was found revealed in the splintered wood -- a hand fresh as if recently alive, although the ring on its finger was of a kind worn in England and in the English colonies in the 17th century. This, the university archaeologists were able to ascertain with certainty. How the hand had been caused to be locked in the wood and how it had been preserved there were never adequately explained. Some of a fantastic disposition believed it had belonged to a malefactor, a thief perhaps, who had forfeited his hand in punishment and that it had been brought to the tree by a carrion-bird to nourish its young. But why it should have remained intact they could not say. One other explanation was put forward: that the hand had been at the throat of a woman -- a wife, surely -- when it had been severed "by a miracle," then buried in the tree. But the proponent of this theory was ridiculed. She was of unstable mind, after all; and hadn't her husband lost his hand in an accident?

From the fissure that had opened during the night "like a piece of black lightning," issued a seemingly endless column of giant ants of a kind not previously identified but now believed to have come from the depths of the interior. In a short while -- shorter than anyone had thought possible -- the ants carried off the houses with their contents down to the last bed, broom, and cup until nothing remained of them, and the ground where they had stood was beaten flat. Why this neighborhood had been singled out is unknown, as is the fate of those who had lately dwelled there. Some think that the former inhabitants are now living in a reconstruction of their original houses deep below ground under an artificial sun. Whether they were brought there to rescue or to punish is hotly debated.

The pit is full, he said. Wiping blood from his hands, the other man answered: Dig another one.