Angler In Darkness Read online

  Angler In Darkness

  A Collection of Stories by Edward M. Erdelac

  To my mother, for her constant assurance throughout my life

  Frateretto calls me, and tells me Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness. – King Lear, Act III, Scene 6

  You won’t find a giant fish in this book, so it’s a bit of a (pardon me) bait and switch, I know.

  The title of this collection has its origin in my notion that the stories I tell are not so much outright fabrications as things that have happened somewhere, sometime, which I am only retelling. I believe that a writer’s mind works something like the bait on a fishhook. In my daily experiences, in my studies and reading, I am sinking a line into a deep pool, and certain things at the bottom, attracted to something in me, swim up to greet it. Not every story comes to me. I probably won’t write much hard, existential science fiction in my life. My brain isn’t wired that way, and so those stories swim past like trout with an aversion to whatever metaphorical nightcrawler encompasses my experience. Yet the stories a writer is meant to tell take the bait and breach the surface, attracted I think, to the one person in the all the various universes best suited to relate it.

  The stories in this book are the catches I’ve landed. Sometimes they arrive flopping and ready for the pan. Usually they need to be flayed and cleaned of the detritus they have picked up in the muddy deep mingling with other tales to get at the portion I serve up. I know what I write isn’t for every taste, so I guess you can consider yourself a connoisseur.

  A story collection is a bit like a mix tape I think, and as a kid, I always arranged the tracks according to some predetermined theme. I’ve ordered the stories in this book chronologically not according to publishing date, but to the time period in which they take place, ending with the futuristic stuff. It should be easier for you to flip to the type of story you’re in the mood for that way.

  Where I’ve had some insight to the story’s creation which I feel you might find interesting, I’ve included it as a mini-preface. You should probably read them last though.

  —EME, Valley Village, 11/30/2015

  CONTENTS:

  The Mound of the Night Panther

  Killer of The Dead

  Bigfoot Walsh

  Devil’s Cap Brawl

  Spearfinger

  In Thunder’s Shadow

  The Blood Bay

  The Exclusive

  Tell Tom Tildrum

  Mighty Nanuq

  A Haunt of Jackals

  The Better To See You

  Conviction

  Crocodile

  Philopatry

  Sea of Trees

  Thy Just Punishments

  The Wrath of Benjo

  Cahokia is speculated to be the first metropolis of North America, a hub of Mississippian indigenous mound building culture which mysteriously disappeared or was disbanded sometime prior to European contact, perhaps due to disease.

  I first came across it in the form of a huge diorama at the Field Museum in Chicago, where I was impressed by the size of it and the fact that it was literally only a skip and a jump outside St. Louis. My wife and I visited our son there when he was enrolled at Webster University, and I detoured us to the site on a winter’s day.

  The mounds for the most part, are still there. Monk’s Mound, so called because a group of Trappists lived at its summit at some point, dominates the landscape, and scaling it, you’re rewarded with a commanding view of the entire site, as well as the Arch and the reconstructed woodhenge. The wind howls and whips your clothes at the top, and a ribbon of concrete road which cuts right through the center of Cahokia almost assails the base.

  Walking around, the various artificial hills are marked with informational signs by the park service, including the infamous burial mound which for me, exuded a sensation of dread, knowing its weird contents.

  I found an earthworm wriggling in the snow there, warmed it in my palm, and dug a bit into the ground with my finger before depositing it and covering it over.

  The Mound Of The Night Panther

  Auguste Oudin had come down the Father of All Rivers to Illinois from Quebec three years ago in a forty foot canoe with the Seminarians and Henri DeTonti as a courer des bois, paddling, signing, and trapping for the young priests. He had helped them build the log cabin mission at Des Tamarois in the Wedge, and fought off the Sioux, only to see the black robes arrive and bicker with their predecessors over the right to save the souls of the French and the Indians.

  Being a métis with an Ojibway mother and a French father, that put him smack in the middle. Once enough bug tit priests settled in to argue ceaselessly over the same God, he knew it was time to move on. But he was a man with little prospects, and no contract with any of the big trapping companies.

  So when he traded the Cahokia boy a carving knife for the gold-flecked chunkey stone, he knew he was very near to getting the stake he needed. Perhaps he would retire young, start his own trading post, get a couple of Peoria women to sit and smoke with him, watch the river go by. With what gold sparkled in the smooth stone discoid he could nearly do it already.

  But something the boy told him convinced him there might be more to be had.

  The chunkey stone was round and black as obsidian, speckled with gold like stars in a night sky. It was concave on both sides, with a perfect, small hole drilled through the center. On one side of the stone, etched in clean lines, was a fanciful figure, a genuflecting Indian in a pillbox hat and heart-shaped apron, one fist raised, clutching a bundle of sticks, the other arm in the act of bowling.

  Chunkey was a game Auguste had seen played by different tribes. The Indians went crazy for it, wagering even their women. It seemed a silly sport to him. An old man would cast the chunkey stone along a hard packed, sand-strewn patch of clay. Men would chase after the rolling object, hurling six foot long striped hickory poles at it, betting on who would get theirs closest.

  Making one of the river smooth stones took craftsmanship. Most were heirlooms families weren’t wont to part with, but Auguste had caught the boy sitting alone in front of his mud wigwam rolling it back and forth between his spread knees. Recognizing the flash of precious gold within, he had stopped to barter for it.

  The boy had told him it had come from the place of his ancestors, a group of mounds on a big floodplain nine miles north of the settlement. He said he had camped there with his uncle and just picked it up off the ground. Auguste had seen mounds all over the American Bottom. He had heard of treasures sometimes being dug out of them. After securing the stone and detailed directions in trade, he bought a new knife, a pick, and a shovel and set out the next morning from Cahokia, north through the wilderness of cypress and sucking mudflats, over beaver dams and around stagnant, reeking backwater lakes green with thick tangles of watercress.

  Following a swath of ancient cut stumps, the forest dwindled at last to a grand emerald plain broken not by the few modest humps he had anticipated, but perhaps a hundred or more towering earth mounds, both mesa flat and ridge topped.

  The central heap dominated the others. It was immense, rising a hundred feet above the plain, bisected by a rotting wood staircase that led all the way to the top. This lordly mound was not only two-terraced, but vaguely pyramidal, the sharp angles having softened over time into a great, grass covered, molten monument.

  But a monument to what?

  It must have taken years, or thousands of laborers, or both to create this. He had never seen the like. Surely they were not simply barrows. They would have to contain hundreds of bodies. Most of the woodland tribes in these parts favored scaffolds for their dead. They seemed to be arranged in some predetermined, rigid order. Those stairs, what had they led to? Some sort o
f platform, or perhaps a series of lodges?

  It seemed unfathomable to Auguste that Red Indians were responsible for this construction. He had never known any tribe to dedicate themselves to so permanent a dwelling. Wigwams, maybe. Palisades around their winter camps, but this?

  Yet the boy had said this was the place of his ancestors.

  South of the greatest of the mounds, situated at the center of the complex there lay an expanse of flattened ground, as flat as if it had been tamped down by a great foot.

  Hiking to the center of the area took nearly till sunset. There he found an old stickball pole, such as was planted in clay playing fields all up and down the Mississippi, but capped with tarnished gold. He could barely discern the figure carved on the head. It was a kind of birdman with its wings outspread, similar in the style of the face to the chunkey player on the reverse of his gold flecked stone.

  He laughed at the sight of the thing and spun on the heels of his leggings like a boy, the mounds turning around him. Surely somewhere in these big piles of dirt and clay his fortune lay buried.

  But he stifled his laughter almost as it had rung out across the emptiness. For just an instant, he got the unmistakable, hair-raising impression that the flat field was bare of grass, that it was instead a red earth plaza filled with a multitude of half naked Indian figures. He smelled close sweat and tobacco smoke, and heard hoarse, wild cheers all around. When he ceased his foolish capering, nearly collapsing in surprise, the mirage was gone. There was no one to be seen, nothing to be heard.

  He shivered uncontrollably at the suddenness and clarity of the hallucination. Whatever had happened, all was silent and empty again.

  Yet, was he truly alone?

  It was likely that the mounds had gone undiscovered by Europeans. It was nine miles into the wilderness from the nearest white settlement, far enough away from the river to be hidden from the traffic. But it did seem improbable that such a site could go uninhabited by at least some remnant of the original builders, or a tribe that had come after.

  He took up and primed his flintlock, and left the gold capped stickball pole where it stood. He crept with new respect among the stretching shadows, wary that some savage might come rushing out with a club or a tomahawk, ready to hear the whistle of an arrow flying at him from the bow of some occult archer.

  But nothing happened.

  He decided to make camp, but not in the shadow of the big mound.

  Something about that monolithic edifice unnerved him. It stood so starkly on the plane, so imperiously above its brothers and sisters. It seemed to watch him with silent, grim disapproval. There was something else too. It seemed wrong. His gaze lingered on it, as one might linger on the sight of a familiar room whose furniture has been rearranged. He had never seen this place, but that was the notion he had, that something about the big mound was out of place.

  To the west he found a circle of about thirty upright cedar poles, brittle and weathered by age, some of them leaning or fallen. Perhaps it had been the frame for some circular dwelling, or a kind of henge.

  Whatever its purpose, it afforded him a view of the great mounds, yet lay outside their influence.

  He drew his beaver blanket over his shoulders as the chill of the oncoming night crept up his spine. He lit a bitch lamp to melt some deer fat and fry a few gallettes for supper.

  The sun set, he then lit his cooking fire and poured the melted fat from the cup into his frying pan. From his wooden cassette he took out a sack of flour.

  The galettes were greasy but satisfying. He washed them down with water from his canteen and watched the stars begin to bloom in the dark field overhead, perfectly encircled by the standing poles. He could see Taurus directly above, and what his mother’s people had called The Hand constellation.

  He took out his pipe and some shongsasha, packed the rich smelling red willow tobacco into the bowl, lit it, and heard it sizzle. He lay down on his back and blew a fog across the night sky.

  That was when he heard the approach of the lone, steady footsteps crushing the grass beyond the ring of poles.

  He sat up abruptly and fumbled for his musket, putting it to his cheek.

  At the end of the barrel, between two of the poles, there appeared an old, ratty haired Indian man wearing a long robe of fox tails and sea shells.

  Leave it to an Indian to ignore the smell of dinner but come snuffling like a beggar raccoon at the aroma of tobacco.

  He growled at the man to stand where he was, but the old hermit came on, unheeding of French, English, or Ilinioüek.

  He looked as old as the mounds themselves, his scraggly, web white hair shining with fat, his black eyes deep set in a lined and drooping face. The shells clinked as he came.

  The old man ignored the threat of the musket and stood staring down the barrel at Auguste for a long time. He closed his eyes for a bit. Auguste felt the hairs on the back of his neck stir. He wasn’t sure why.

  “Who are you? What are you doing here?” the old man asked after a bit in raspy, fluent Ilinioüek. He opened his dark eyes.

  “You old rascal!” Auguste cursed, shaking off his trepidation and lowering his rifle. “I nearly blew a hole through you.”

  “Answer me!” the old man demanded. The authority behind his voice was so startling Auguste found himself obeying.

  The old man listened to his French name, but cocked his head and peered at him closely.

  “Your mother’s people,” he ventured. “They’re from here, aren’t they?”

  “What?”

  “They do not come from across the big waters.”

  “No. Ojibway.”

  The old man nodded to himself and sat down slowly on the other side of the cooking fire.

  “What about you?” Auguste asked. “You live here?”

  The old Indian gestured to the tobacco.

  Auguste pursed his lips and passed it over. The old man produced an ancient calumet from beneath his robe. He packed it and said nothing.

  “Any more of you out there?” Auguste repeated.

  The old man lit his pipe.

  Auguste looked out into the darkness. Satisfied that the old man was alone, he laid his musket aside and sat down.

  “What was this place?”

  The old man looked at him again, and blew smoke. He set his pipe down and opened his cape, affording a glimpse of his bare, pale chest, tattooed with strange concentric patterns. There was a lightning whelk shell columnella pendant, a kind of carved white dipper, dangling from around his neck. Auguste saw figures like the birdman and the chunkey player dancing on the bowl.

  “Do you know Asi?” he asked, taking out a cracked leather bottle and popping the stopper.

  He did. The French called it the black drink. Spaniards called it casseena. It was a purgative made from yaupon holly leaves, heavy in caffeine. A lot of tribes used it for purification.

  “Then let us drink, that there be no lies between us.”

  The old man poured a large measure of the syrupy black stuff into the shell and raised it to his lips, then took the dipper from his neck and handed it to Auguste.

  Auguste wrinkled his face. He hated the stuff, but it would be disrespectful to refuse. He drank deep as was required, let the thick, heavy mass seep down into his belly, and passed it back, feeling the rumblings of its return already. It tasted a bit off. Who knew how long ago the old man had brewed it?

  In a few moments both of them turned aside and retched, vomiting the Asi into the grass. It left an awful aftertaste beneath the familiar sweet casseena flavor, like spoiled marrow butter.

  Now it was proper to ask.

  “Old man, what was this place?”

  The old man eased back onto his elbows.

  “This was The City,” he said. “For hundreds of years it stood, the center of the world for all the people, no matter their nation.”

  “Who built it?”

  “Red Horn and his brother Wild Boy built The City and ruled here.”

/>   Auguste had heard stories of Red Horn and Wild Boy. They were twin brothers revered by the Ho-Chunk and under other names by other tribes. They were supposed to have been born to the Earthmaker and had strange powers. Red Horn could move as fast as an arrow, and Wild Boy hunted and ate thunderbirds with his sharp teeth.

  Auguste’s father had told him once about the big city of Rome, Italy, how it had supposedly been built by a pair of twin brothers suckled on a wolf’s tit.

  “You do not believe?” the old man asked sharply.

  Auguste had smiled without realizing it. He had been thinking about that Roman story and about how far it had come.

  “That Indians built this place, or that Red Horn and Wild Boy were real?”

  “Yes,” the old man said.

  Auguste shrugged.

  “It doesn’t matter who built it, I guess. If you say it was Indians, alright. What happened to it?”

  “First tell me how you came here,” said the old man, leaning in.

  Auguste didn’t hesitate. The old man lived around here, so he knew the lay of the land. Maybe he could save him some time. Likely he’d guide him to gold for more tobacco. He reached in his cassette and held up the gold flecked chunkey stone.

  “I came to find more like this.”

  The old man held open his palm. Auguste passed him the stone.

  “A boy told me it came from here.”

  The old Indian rubbed one weathered hand over its surface, turned it over and felt the grooves of the image.

  “Do you know where I can find more like that?” Auguste pressed. “Glittering like that? Yellow, like the cap on the stickball pole out there?”

  He pointed into the dark in the direction of the high black shadows, blacker now than the night sky.

  The old man held the stone up, peering at him through the tiny hole in the center.

  “You know where this came from? The yellow metal inside this? From up there,” he said, pointing to the starry sky. “There, in the Hand. Seven hundred years ago, when a star caught fire. It broke apart like a pumpkin, and rained the yellow metal. And with the metal, the Mishibijiw came too.”