GUYANESE HORROR FICTION…LEAD ME TO WATERS DARK

Aug 12, 2019 News

---

 

By Michael Jordan

My dear daughter,
Do you remember the story I used to tell you, about two boys who did a terrible, thoughtless thing a long time ago? Remember how you would smile whenever I said that parts of it were true? I guess you were thinking: ‘Here goes daddy again with one of his far-fetched stories.’ And I would smile in return as if to say,’ yes, it’s just one of my stories.’ Smiling, even when I felt like screaming.
You’re much older now, and you’re attracted to waterways like I was, and that scares me, and so I’m telling you this:
All of it is true.
Every single line.
I know, because I was one of those boys…
Your Dad

PART ONE
Last night I woke to find a woman in my room. She wasn’t the same girl that I had brought to the hotel. I had seen her once before, when I was twelve years old. She had tried to kill me back then.
I like to sometimes fool myself that things wouldn’t have turned out the way they did if I hadn’t followed Maxie that August.
We were fishing near Old Skeets’ bridge, the August sun stinging our backs and the fish refusing to bite. Finally, Max sucked his teeth and said: “Leh we go by the Blacka.”
I hesitated. For me, that long stretch of the Lamaha Conservancy that we called the Blacka was strictly out of bounds. It was where naked Rastafarians smoked and swam. It was where little Orin Smith had drowned himself just a month ago, after his father had beaten him badly again with an electric cord. The Blacka was where a man named Michael De Noon had strangled his baby daughter as a sacrifice to water spirits. Some woman had told him he would get a visa to America if he did this. He died of TB in Camp Street Prison instead.
I was about to make up some lame excuse when Maxie said: “I know a spot where Ralphie pull up a yarrow long like he arm.” He showed me his own thin, sinewy arm for emphasis.
Ralphie was Max’s big brother and the thought of catching a yarrow the length of his arm made me forget about any punishment I would get; like the licks I got when Max and me swam across the caiman pond in the Botanic Gardens to fish on a spot we called Bird Island.
Old Skeets was in his yard, his back to us as he sat on a low stool, patiently weeding between some okra beds. He didn’t see when we slipped away down the Tucville back street and into Festival City, then to the back of North Ruimveldt, until eventually, we were on a dam, with the black and silent Lamaha Conservancy—the Blacka—ahead of us.
Maxie, my neighbour and good friend—twelve years old like myself — led the way south down the dam. Fish splashed occasionally in the black water, and I felt the familiar stirring of excitement as we headed further south; the thought of catching a giant yarrow keeping me going, even though, behind the trees, the sun was going down.
We stopped at a turn on the dam, where the trees were thickest. Max pointed to a spot near a log that had fallen in the water and whispered, “Is right there Ralphie pull up the yarrow.”
We baited our hooks, then shifted apart to cast our lines. Max had chosen the spot by the log. I found a spot where the branches of a tree leaned close to the water. I always tried to imagine a spot that I thought the fishes would like. I bobbed my line a few times, then sat back and waited. My cork began to dip frantically and then began to sink. When it was almost out of sight, I pulled on my bamboo rod. There was a splashing and a pink-and white sunfish came into view. Max came over to watch as I unhooked the sunfish and put it on a string. I baited my hook again, set it at the same spot, and waited. Not a minute had passed before I was pulling up another sunfish, then a nice-sized yarrow. Soon after, I added four tilapias to my string.
And now I was having that weird sensation I had sometimes: a feeling of having some sort of connection to the fish; a feeling that I could fish out the entire Blacka if I wanted.
Maxie had taught me to fish a year ago, but I was the one who always came home with the longest string of catch. Old Skeets said that it was because I was Cancer-born, which he explained meant I was ‘water sign’. He would sometimes sit on his front step, watching us Tucville boys fish and chuckling knowingly at my strange good fortune.
“That is a lucky, lucky boy,” he would tell my mother sometimes.
“I wish he had the same luck with his homework,” she would say.
Max was still trying his luck at the same spot where Ralphie had caught the giant fish. Every now and then he would pull frantically on his rod and suck his teeth as his hook came up empty. I could sense his impatience.
After I had pulled up yet another sunfish he muttered: “Ah going to another spot”. With that, he walked past me and headed further up the dam, and disappearing from view.
I was baiting my hook about ten minutes later when I heard Max yell my name.
“What?” I yelled back.
“Ah got a big one!”
I wrapped up my line and hurried in the direction that Maxie had gone. Eventually, I spotted him. He was hauling on a cast-net (I would later learn that he had found it tucked behind a tree). His sinewy biceps were bunched as he struggled with something large that was trapped inside.
I helped him to haul the net onto the muddy shore.
What was inside the net scared me—I guess Maxie was too. It was about four feet long, it had a pink-and-white colour, and it was like no other fish we had ever seen. It appeared to have no scales; its teeth were tiny and harmless. But, to me, the strangest thing was its eyes. They hadn’t that usual fish-eyed blankness. Those eyes appeared to be fear-filled and pleading.
We stared back in silence at this strange, beautiful thing, then Max, still panting a little, said triumphantly: “This gun make Ralphie yarrow look like stupidness.”
I nodded. I didn’t bother to tell him that he had used a net, and that we had always considered that as cheating.
“You will have to help me carry it,” he said. This thing weigh ’bout forty pounds.”
I stared at the fish, lying silently in the net and staring at us, and the words tumbled out without me thinking.
“We have to throw it back.”
“What?”
“Maxie, we have throw it back. Something funny about this fish…I don’t even think it good to eat.”
But it was more than that. I was having that weird feeling, that connection.
Max was glaring at me resentfully, but I sensed that he was feeling some of my unease.
Now he turned again to the fish. He rubbed his hand along its side, then pulled it back.
“It feels so…so smooth,” he said, almost to himself.
“Leh we put it back,” I said again. “We gun share what I catch.’
He glared at me again, but then he bent to the fish and we began to untangle it from the net, while it lay silently, watching us.
I really can’t account for what happened next. Maybe Maxie was thinking of how we would be passing Old Skeets’ home, and how Old Skeets would laugh when he saw my string of fish, and Maxie with his fishing rod alone. Maybe he was thinking of how he had failed to bring home a fish bigger than Ralphie’s, but just before we tossed it back, Max whipped out his sharp pocket knife, and slashed the fish just below the gill.
I gave a shout of surprise. At the same time, I thought I heard that fish emit a human-like-sighing sound, and then Maxie had pushed it back into the Blacka.
There was a splash, and the fish sank from sight, and all that was left was a thin streak of blood on the black water, and that sigh ringing in my ears… When we returned from the Blacka, keeping the fish I’d caught was the last thing on my mind. Max didn’t want them either, so we gave them to Old Skeets, who was watering his plants when we passed his home.
Old Skeets grinned and said: “These gun eat good with bread when the Mistress fry dem dry.”
I washed off with soap and Dettol at the pipe in Max’s yard before going home.
Mommy was listening to the radio. Dad was out. I didn’t feel very hungry, so I went to bed early.
I lay there, tossing in bed, unable to sleep; and then it grew dark, a full moon was out—and I was at the Blacka, at the spot where Maxie and I had stared into the eyes of the huge fish. I was terrified, because I sensed that something was about to happen.
I became aware of an overpowering, fishy rank that was yet somehow pleasant. But I was not alone. A naked girl with waist-long, water-drenched black hair sat on a tree that had fallen into the water. She was weeping.
A man sat next to her stroking her hair; comforting her in a strange language that I somehow understood. He was shirtless and wiry, with long greying hair tied in a knot at the back. On his wrists were two silver bracelets that were shaped into snakes.
And then I saw something else that raised the hairs on my arms and neck: Below their waists, where their legs should have been, were fish tails. Hers was pink and white; his was black as a tilapia’s.
I was still gaping when she saw me. She looked at me through her tangled hair. I thought she was the prettiest girl I had ever seen. I was lost looking into the fish-girl’s strange, greenish eyes, before I realized that the man was looking at me, too.
Unlike the girl’s, his eyes were a muddy yellow and they glinted. He then gently shifted the hair away from the girl’s face, and I no longer thought her pretty. A long, deep, ugly, ragged cut ran from her left ear to the bottom of her chin. It was beginning to heal, but the tightening skin had pulled the left side of her mouth upwards into a demented grin that reminded me of ‘The Joker’ in the Batman comic books. She probably saw my revulsion, because her green eyes narrowed and her hands went up to hide the scar.
She snarled something at the man. I recoiled as they suddenly plunged off the fallen tree and began to slither like eels up the side of the dam towards me. I stood there, unable to run, unable to scream…
I awoke trembling, and kept the light on for the rest of the night; but when morning came, the dream was still on my mind.
After I got up, I started on some of my chores. I was sweeping the front yard when Max came over. At first I thought that maybe he wanted us to go fishing again, but the moment I looked at him I knew that something was wrong. Tears streamed down his face. I immediately thought of his mother, who I knew was ill.
“What happen, Maxie?”
He wiped at the tears then said. “Come and see what somebody do to my chickens.”
The first thing that I noticed when we got to Maxie’s home was that Lassie, the old dog with a bit of German Shepherd blood; that dog that always growled at me, was cowering in a corner.
Maxie, still sobbing, pointed to the pen, in which he was rearing about twenty chicks.
“You see what they do?”
I saw.
Something or someone had entered the yard last night—walked past big, bad-tempered Lassie—and wrenched off the door of the chicken pen.
Maxie’s tiny yellow chickens lay scattered on the ground.
Someone had wrung their heads off.
A chill ran through me. “Who do this, Max?”
“I doan know…”
I helped Max get rid of the dead chicks. He had stopped crying, but he wasn’t speaking much. I asked him again who he thought had killed the chicks. A look of fear flashed across his face. But he said nothing.
That was the day Maxie began to change.
We had tons of plans for the holidays—we’d fish, play road cricket against the guys from Festival City, and let Ralphie sneak us into the cinema to see a Bruce Lee double, when he came back from training at Tacama. But it seemed that Max’s heart wasn’t in any of those things. I knew that he was troubled about something.
Things weren’t too bright with me, either. I had dreamed a few more times about the fish-girl and the man; and in those dreams it was always moonlight and they were chasing me down the dam by the Blacka.
About a week after Max’s chickens had died, he came by my house calling for me. He had always been skinny, but it seemed to me that he had gotten even thinner. I saw something else. He looked terrified. “You could come by me now?”
We went back to his house and sat silently on his front steps for a few minutes. I could hear his mother coughing inside.
“You remember that fish that I ketch?” he blurted out.
I felt goose-bumps break out on my arms. I nodded, dreading what was coming next.
He sighed. “I think I going crazy.”
“What you mean, Max?”
He sighed again: “Since that day at the Blacka…I dreaming about a fish-girl with a cut on her face. And—and a man with yellow eyes…”
I took a deep breath then said: “Max … you ain’t crazy. … I getting the same dream.”
He stared at me. “At the Blacka?—by where we catch the fish?”
“Yes. I does dream that they chasing me.”
Me too,” he said. “But my dreams is real.”
Without waiting for me to answer, Maxie stripped off his jersey. I stared at the fresh scratches on his back and arms.
“I don’t have anybody to tell this to,” he said. “Daddy out of town, Ralphie still at Tacama…mommy sick—” he brushed at a tear then muttered: “This happen last night.”
“How?” I found myself blurting out, though part of me really didn’t want to know. .
“I dream I was walking to the Blacka. I didn’t want to go, but like something was pulling me. …The two of them was in the water. They was telling me to come in, but I know that if I went near them they would kill me. … While I standing on the dam, they start to come out of the water—but just before they reach me, I wake up…” He looked at me with terrified eyes. “I wake up near the Blacka.”
“What?”
He nodded. “The place was dark, but I know I was standing at the same spot where we catch that fish—that thing. I was barefoot and in my shorts alone…I could hear something splashing around in the water, but I couldn’t see anything. … But I was sure I hear somebody laughing…”
Maxie’s voice was trembling now: “I run, boy. I run all the way home. I was so frighten that I run in the wrong direction. Fall down twice. Scratch up my skin.” He was crying.
I stared at his scratched-up chest. “Who you think these people is, Max?”
He stared at me with reddened eyes. “You mean you don’t know?—I caught a fairmaid, and now she want to kill us!”
(To be continued)
(Michael Jordan is the author of the supernatural novel KAMARANG, which is on sale at Austin’s Book Store and also on AMAZON (Kindle version)

---

---