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It looked like Lucinda wasn’t going to have anything to scold him about tonight, that much was for certain.

But as he headed back home, his fishing pole draped over one shoulder and his guitar slung over the other, Hop couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched—and by something besides the catfish hanging from his belt.

That night as he was lying in bed, Lucinda snoring beside him, Hop got to thinking.

Maybe what Sammy Herkimer said about catfish gals wasn’t all hogwash after all. He remembered reading in one of them yellow-backed magazines down at the barbershop about some kind of fish everyone thought was extinct being found in some foreign country a few years back. Besides, who was he to decide there weren’t no such things as catfish gals, when he didn’t know a soul who’d been to the bottom of the Mississippi and lived to tell the tale?

The very next day Hop went fishing without Lucinda telling him to.

He decided to try his luck again at Steamboat Bend. When he arrived at the dock, he was relieved to find he was alone. Hop set himself up on the dock just as he had the day before, but after a half hour of sitting and waiting for something to happen, he put down the fishing rod and picked up his guitar to pass the time.

Halfway into “Moanin’ at Midnight,” Hop heard what sounded like a fish slap the water near the pier. When he glanced up to see what had caused the noise, what he saw caused him to nearly drop his ax into the water below.

There was a human head bobbing in the water a hundred feet away from the dock. At the sound of his astonished gasp, the head ducked back down beneath the muddy surface without leaving so much as a ripple to mark its passing. Just as suddenly, there was a strike on Hop’s line so powerful it nearly yanked his fishing pole into the river.

*  *  *

Although Lucinda was extremely pleased with the fifteen-pound catfish he brought home that evening, Hop didn’t say anything about what he’d seen on the river. Something told him that whatever it was that was out at Steamboat Bend was best kept to himself.

The next day Hop didn’t even bother casting his line into the river. He knew what was drawing the thing in the river to the dock, and it sure as hell wasn’t the shiners he was using for bait.

He made his way to the very end of the landing, careful to avoid the loose and missing planks, and sat so his legs dangled over the edge. After a moment of deliberation, he decided “They Call Me Muddy Waters” would be an appropriate choice.

Just like before, the thing surfaced halfway through the song. Hop’s heart was racing so fast it was hard to breathe, but he forced himself to keep playing. He didn’t want to scare it off, so he kept playing, switching to “Pony Blues” once he’d finished with his first song.

While he played, Hop kept his head down, ignoring his audience as best he could. As he launched into “Circle Round the Moon” he risked glancing in the thing’s direction, only to discover it was almost directly underneath his dangling feet, staring at him with big, dark eyes that seemed to be all pupil.

Hop was surprised at how human the catfish gal looked. From what Sammy had said, he’d pictured a fish in a fright wig, but that wasn’t the case. Hell, he’d seen worse-looking women in church.

Her upper lip was extremely wide, with the familiar whiskers growing out of them, and she had slits instead of a nose, but outside of that she wasn’t
too
ugly. Her hair was a real mess, though, with everything from twigs to what looked like live minnows caught in the tangled locks. He couldn’t see much of what she looked like below the waterline, although he did glimpse vertical slits opening and closing down the sides of her neck.

Hop couldn’t help but smile to himself when he saw how the catfish gal looked at him. Half fish or not, he knew what that look meant on a woman’s face. He had her hooked but good and now was as good a time as any to reel her in.

Hop looked the catfish gal right in the eye and smiled. “Hello, lit’l fishie. You come to hear me play?”

The catfish gal’s dreamy look was replaced by one of surprise. She glanced around, as if confused by her surroundings, then shot backwards like a dolphin walking on its tail.

“Please! Don’t go!” he shouted, stretching out one hand to stay her retreat.

To his surprise, the catfish gal came to a sudden halt, regarding him curiously, bobbing up and down in the Mississippi as easily as a young girl treading water in a swimming pool.

“You ain’t got nothin’ to be scared of, lit’l fishie,” Hop said, smiling reassuringly. “I ain’t gonna hurt you none. Do you want me to play some more for you?” he asked, holding up his guitar.

The catfish gal nodded and lifted a dripping arm and pointed at the guitar with a webbed forefinger. Hop smiled and obliged her by picking up where he had left off on “Goin’ Down Slow.”

By the time the sun was starting to go down, Hop’s hands were cramping and his fingertips bloody. He’d played a little bit of almost everything—blues, bluegrass, honky-tonk, camp songs, even a couple of nursery songs—trying to figure out what the catfish gal liked and didn’t like: turned out she was partial to the blues—which made sense, seeing how the blues was born on the banks of the Mississippi.

When he finally put aside his guitar, the catfish gal disappeared beneath the river’s muddy surface. A few seconds later a large catfish came flying out of the water as if shot from a sling and landed on the dock beside him. Hop picked up the floundering fish and shook his head.

“I appreciate the thought,” he said loudly. “But this ain’t what I’m lookin’ for.” After he tossed the fish back into the water, Hop reached into his pocket and pulled out a silver dollar, which he held up between his thumb and forefinger, so that it caught the sun’s fading rays. “If you want me to keep playing, you got to feed th’ kitty. And this here is what the kitty eats.”

The catfish gal popped back to the surface, stared at the gleaming coin for a long second, then submerged again. Hop shifted about uneasily as first one minute, then another, elapsed without any sign of the catfish gal. Maybe he pushed his luck a little too far too early. …

Something heavy and wet struck his chest, then dropped to the deck with a metallic sound. Hop picked up the flat, circular piece of slime-encrusted metal at his feet with trembling fingers. He scraped the surface with his thumbnail and was rewarded not by the gleam of silver—but the mellow shine of gold.

He gave out a whoop, then looked around to see if anyone might have witnessed his good fortune, but he was alone on the landing, at least as far as human company was concerned. Talk about falling in a honey pot!

And all for the price of a song.

As summer wore on, Hop Armstrong became a regular visitor to Steamboat Bend, showing up early and staying till late, and always leaving with heavy, if somewhat damp, pockets. On those occasions Sammy Herkimer was fishing off the dock, Hop was forced to wait the old angler out, but for the most part he didn’t have to worry about being found out.

At first Lucinda had been suspicious of his newfound interest in fishing, but since he never came back smelling of perfume or wearing another woman’s shade of lipstick on his collar, she eventually accepted his pastime as genuine. Of course, Lucinda had no way of knowing about the Folgers can full of old gold and silver coins he had stashed out in the garage, or about the bag of gold doorknobs hidden in the woodpile behind the house. Hop didn’t see any need to tell her about his newfound wealth because that would lead to her asking him where he got it from, and where would he be then?

If he told Lucinda about the catfish gal, every man, woman and child in Flyjar would be lined up on the dock playing everything from a banjo to a Jew’s harp trying to muscle in on his gig. The way Hop saw it, there was no call for him to ruin a good thing before he had to.

Once there weren’t any more goodies coming his way from Lit’l Fishie, as he called her, he planned to take his Folgers can full of antique coins and gunnysack of doorknobs and head off to the big city—say, Jackson or Greenville. Hell, he might even go as far as New Orleans—maybe even Biloxi! He didn’t really care where he ended up, just as long as it was someplace where the women were prettier and younger than those in Flyjar and you could buy beer on Sundays. Judging from how Lit’l Fishie was behaving during his more recent serenades, something told him it wouldn’t be long before things dried up on her end, so to speak.

She kept swinging back and forth between acting skittish—disappearing every time a bullfrog croaked—and making kiss-kiss noises with that saddlebag mouth of hers. Hop might not know much, but he sure as hell knew women, and Lit’l Fishie was showing all the signs of a sugar mama running short on cash.

As he set out for Steamboat Bend that day, Hop decided it was going to be his last serenade for the catfish gal—and his final day as a citizen of Flyjar. Now that he’d found his fortune, it was time for him to strike out into the world and collect his fame.

Hop scanned the sky, frowning at the approaching clouds. It had rained off and on since sunrise, and there were puddles all along the rutted cow path that was the only road that led to the derelict landing at Steamboat Bend. As much as he disliked tramping through the mud, going out on foul-weather days meant he didn’t have to worry about anyone snooping around.

Tightening his grip on his guitar strap, Hop hurried down the levee embankment and onto the deserted dock’s wooden surface. He sat down on the end of the pier, as he always did, dangling his legs over the open water, and began to play “See My Grave Is Kept Clean.”

Normally Lit’l Fishie broke surface about fifty yards away the moment he started to play, then moved in until she was staring up at him like a snake-tranced bird. Hop knew that look all too well. He saw it all the time in the eyes of the women whenever he played at the juke joints. He knew that if he said the word, Lit’l Fishie would roll in cornmeal and gladly throw herself in a red-hot frying pan.

He finished with the Blind Lemon and started into Leadbelly, but the catfish gal had yet to put in an appearance. Hop frowned. Maybe she couldn’t hear him. He didn’t really know where she lived, exactly, but he was under the impression she didn’t stray that far from the Bend. He changed from Leadbelly to Son House, on the offhand chance that she didn’t care for “Cotton Fields.” When Lit’l Fishie still didn’t show herself, Hop’s frown deepened even further. It was time to pull out the stops. He began to play one of her favorites: “Up Jumped the Devil.”

There was a bubbling sound directly below where he was sitting. Hop smiled knowingly at the shape lurking just below the murky water lapping against the pylon. Robert Johnson worked like a charm on women—whether they were two-legged or had gills.

“Why you so shy all of a sudden, darlin’?” he called out. “Why don’t you show me that sweet face of yours?”

The bubbles at the end of the pier grew more intense, as if the water was boiling. Hop scowled and leaned forward, staring down between his dangling feet at the muddy water below.

“Lit’l Fishie—is that you?”

There was less than a heartbeat between the moment the thing with bumpy skin and gaping mouth filled with jagged teeth leapt from the water and when its powerful jaws snapped closed on Hop’s legs. He was only able to scream just the once—a high, almost womanly shriek—before he was yanked, guitar and all, into the river.

The last thing Hop saw, before the silty waters of the Mississippi closed over him, was the catfish gal watching him drown, a sorrowful expression in her bruised eyes.

When Hop Armstrong went out fishing and never came back, most folks in Flyjar were of the opinion he’d found himself a new girlfriend and left Lucinda for greener pastures. A smaller group thought the handsome ne’er-do-well had gotten drunk and fallen through the dilapidated dock into the river below. In any case, no one really gave a good god damn, and after a couple of weeks there were other things to talk about down at the barbershop.

About three months after Hop disappeared, Sammy Herkimer snagged his line on something underneath the pier at Steamboat Bend. At first he thought he was just caught on some waterlogged reeds. But when he reeled his line back in, he found Hop’s git-box hanging off the other end.

The guitar that had charmed so many ladies out of their drawers and their life’s savings was now dripping slime, its neck splintered and body badly chewed up. Sammy shook his head as he freed the mangled instrument. He really wasn’t surprised by what he’d found. In a way, he blamed himself for what happened to poor Hop. After all, when he’d told him about the catfish gals, he’d forgot to mention they weren’t the
only
critters that made Steamboat Bend their home.

One thing about them gator boys: they sure are jealous.

Ramsey Campbell

THE ENTERTAINMENT

Ramsey Campbell has done it all in the horror field—and he’s refused to leave it. There from the beginning of the boom in the late 1970s, where brilliant stories like “Mcintosh Willie” very quickly established him as a distinctive voice, he has continued to publish brilliantly in the genre to this day. His best tales are identifiable almost immediately as Campbellian; though his style owes something to Robert Aikman with its dreamlike, vaguely roiling quality, Campbell’s images are unlike any others in imaginative fiction
.

Campbell won the Stoker Award in 1994 for his collection
Alone with the Horrors,
and his latest work can he found in a nonsupernatural novel (something of a departure)
, The Last Voice They Hear,
as well as in the following typically creepy tale, written just for you and me
.

B
y the time Shone found himself back in Westingsea he was able to distinguish only snatches of the road as the wipers strove to fend off the downpour. The promenade where he’d seen pensioners wheeled out for an early dose of sunshine, and backpackers piling into coaches that would take them inland to the Lakes, was waving isolated trees that looked too young to be out by themselves at a gray sea baring hundreds of edges of foam. Through a mixture of static and the hiss on the windscreen a local radio station advised drivers to stay off the roads, and he felt he was being offered a chance. Once he had a room he could phone Ruth. At the end of the promenade he swung the Cavalier around an old stone soldier drenched almost black and coasted alongside the seafront hotels.

There wasn’t a welcome in sight. A sign in front of the largest and whitest hotel said
NO
, apparently having lost the patience to light up its second word. He turned along the first of the narrow streets of boardinghouses, in an unidentifiable one of which he’d stayed with his parents most of fifty years ago, but the placards in the windows were just as uninviting. Some of the streets he remembered having been composed of small hotels had fewer buildings now, all of them care homes for the elderly. He had to lower his window to read the signs across the roads, and before he’d finished his right side was soaked. He needed a room for the night—he hadn’t the energy to drive back to London. Half an hour would take him to the motorway, near which he was bound to find a hotel. But he had only reached the edge of town, and was braking at a junction, when he saw hands adjusting a notice in the window of a broad three-story house.

He squinted in the mirror to confirm he wasn’t in anyone’s way, then inched his window down. The notice had either fallen or been removed, but the parking area at the end of the short drive was unoccupied, and above the high thick streaming wall a signboard that frantic bushes were doing their best to obscure appeared to say most of
HOTEL
. He veered between the gateposts and came close to touching the right breast of the house.

He couldn’t distinguish much through the bay window. At least one layer of net curtains was keeping the room to itself. Beyond heavy purple curtains trapping moisture against the glass, a light was suddenly extinguished. He grabbed his overnight bag from the rear seat and dashed for the open porch.

The rain kept him company as he poked the round brass bellpush next to the tall front door. There was no longer a button, only a socket harboring a large bedraggled spider that recoiled almost as violently as his finger did. He hadn’t laid hold of the rusty knocker above the neutral grimace of the letter-slot when a woman called a warning or a salutation as she hauled the door open. “Here’s someone now.”

She was in her seventies but wore a dress that failed to cover her mottled toadstools of knees. She stooped as though the weight of her loose throat was bringing her face, which was almost as white as her hair, to meet his. “Are you the entertainment?” she said.

Behind her a hall more than twice his height and darkly papered with a pattern of embossed vines not unlike arteries led to a central staircase that vanished under the next floor up. Beside her a long-legged table was strewn with crumbled brochures for local attractions; above it a pay telephone with no number in the middle of its dial clung to the wall. Shone was trying to decide if this was indeed a hotel when the question caught up with him. “Am I …”

“Don’t worry, there’s a room waiting.” She scowled past him and shook her head like a wet dog. “And there’d be dinner and a breakfast for anyone who settles them down.”

He assumed this referred to the argument that had started or recommenced in the room where the light he’d seen switched off had been relit. Having lost count of the number of arguments he’d dealt with in the Hackney kindergarten where he worked, he didn’t see why this should be any different. “I’ll have a stab,” he said, and marched into the room.

Despite its size, it was full of just two women—of the breaths of one at least as wide as her bright pink dress, who was struggling to lever herself up from an armchair with a knuckly stick and collapsing red-faced, and of the antics of her companion, a lanky woman in the flapping jacket of a dark blue suit and the skirt of a grayer outfit, who’d bustled away from the light switch to flutter the pages of a television listings magazine before scurrying fast as the cartoon squirrel on the television to twitch the cord of the velvet curtains, an activity Shone took to have dislodged whatever notice had been in the window. Both women were at least as old as the person who’d admitted him, but he didn’t let that daunt him. “What seems to be the problem?” he said, and immediately had to say “I can’t hear you if you both talk at once.”

“The light’s in my eyes,” the woman in the chair complained, though of the six bulbs in the chandelier one was dead, another missing. “Unity keeps putting it on when she knows I’m watching.”

“Amelia’s had her cartoons on all afternoon,” Unity said, darting at the television, then drumming her knuckles on top of an armchair instead. “I want to see what’s happening in the world.”

“Shall we let Unity watch the news now, Amelia? If it isn’t something you like watching you won’t mind if the light’s on.”

Amelia glowered before delving into her cleavage for an object that she flung at him. Just in time to field it he identified it as the remote control. Unity ran to snatch it from him, and as a newsreader appeared with a war behind him Shone withdrew. He was lingering over closing the door while he attempted to judge whether the mountainous landscapes on the walls were vague with mist or dust when a man at his back murmured, “Come out, quick, and shut it.”

He was a little too thin for his suit that was gray as his sparse hair. Though his pinkish eyes looked harassed, and he kept shrugging his shoulders as though to displace a shiver, he succeeded in producing enough of a grateful smile to part his teeth. “By gum, Daph said you’d sort them out, and you have. You can stay,” he said.

Among the questions Shone was trying to resolve was why the man seemed familiar, but a gust of rain so fierce it strayed under the front door made the offer irresistible. “Overnight, you mean.” He thought it best to check.

“That’s the least,” the manager presumably only began, and twisted round to find the stooped woman. “Daph will show you up, Mr. …”

“Shone.”

“Who is he?” Daph said as if preparing to announce him.

“Tom Shone,” Shone told her.

“Mr. Thomson?”

“Tom Shone. First name Tom.”

“Mr. Tom Thomson.”

He might have suspected a joke if it hadn’t been for her earnestness, and so he appealed to the manager. “Do you need my signature?”

“Later, don’t you fret,” the manager assured him, receding along the hall.

“And as for payment …”

“Just room and board. That’s always the arrangement.”

“You mean you want me to …”

“Enjoy yourself,” the manager called, and disappeared beyond the stairs into somewhere that smelled of an imminent dinner.

Shone felt his overnight bag leave his shoulder. Daph had relieved him of the burden and was striding upstairs, turning in a crouch to see that he followed. “He’s forever off somewhere, Mr. Snell,” she said, and repeated, “Mr. Snell.”

Shone wondered if he was being invited to reply with a joke until she added, “Don’t worry, we know what it’s like to forget your name.”

She was saying he, not she, had been confused about it. If she hadn’t cantered out of sight his response would have been as sharp as the rebukes he gave his pupils when they were too childish. Above the middle floor the staircase bent towards the front of the house, and he saw how unexpectedly far the place went back. Perhaps nobody was staying in that section, since the corridor was dark and smelled old. He grabbed the banister to speed himself up, only to discover it wasn’t much less sticky than a sucked lollipop. By the time he arrived at the top of the house he was furious to find himself panting.

Daph had halted at the far end of a passage lit, if that was the word, by infrequent bulbs in glass flowers sprouting from the walls. Around them shadows fattened the veins of the paper. “This’ll be you,” Daph said, and pushed open a door.

Beside a small window under a yellowing lightbulb the ceiling angled almost to the carpet, brown as mud. A narrow bed stood in the angle, opposite a wardrobe and dressing table and a sink beneath a dingy mirror. At least there was a phone on a shelf by the sink. Daph passed him his bag as he ventured into the room. “You’ll be fetched when it’s time,” she told him.

“Time? Time …”

“For dinner and all the fun, silly,” she said with a laugh so shrill his ears wanted to flinch.

She was halfway to the stairs when he thought to call after her. “Aren’t I supposed to have a key?”

“Mr. Snell will have it. Mr. Snell,” she reminded him, and was gone.

He had to phone Ruth as soon as he was dry and changed. There must be a bathroom somewhere near. He hooked his bag over his shoulder with a finger and stepped into the twilight of the corridor. He’d advanced only a few paces when Daph’s head poked over the edge of the floor. “You’re never leaving us.”

He felt absurdly guilty. “Just after the bathroom.”

“It’s where you’re going,” she said, firmly enough to be commanding rather than advising him, and vanished down the hole that was the stairs.

She couldn’t have meant the room next to his. When he succeeded in coaxing the sticky plastic knob to turn, using the tips of a finger and thumb, he found a room much like his, except that the window was in the angled roof. Seated on the bed in the dimness on its way to dark was a figure in a toddler’s blue overall—a teddy bear with large black ragged eyes or perhaps none. The bed in the adjacent room was strewn with photographs so blurred that he could distinguish only the grin every one of them bore. Someone had been knitting in the next room, but had apparently lost concentration, since one arm of the mauve sweater was at least twice the size of the other. A knitting needle pinned each arm to the bed. Now Shone was at the stairs, beyond which the rear of the house was as dark as that section of the floor below. Surely Daph would have told him if he was on the wrong side of the corridor, and the area past the stairs wasn’t as abandoned as it looked: he could hear a high-pitched muttering from the dark, a voice gabbling a plea almost too fast for words, praying with such urgency the speaker seemed to have no time to pause for breath. Shone hurried past the banisters that enclosed three sides of the top of the stairs and pushed open the door immediately beyond them. There was the bath, and inside the plastic curtains that someone had left closed would be a shower. He elbowed the door wide, and the shower curtains shifted to acknowledge him.

Not only they had. As he tugged the frayed cord to kindle the bare bulb, he heard a muffled giggle from the region of the bath. He threw his bag onto the hook on the door and yanked the shower curtains apart. A naked woman so scrawny he could see not just her ribs but the shape of bones inside her buttocks was crouching on all fours in the bath. She peered wide-eyed over one splayed knobbly hand at him, then dropped the hand to reveal a nose half the width of her face and a gleeful mouth devoid of teeth as she sprang past him. She was out of the room before he could avoid seeing her shrunken disused breasts and pendulous gray-bearded stomach. He heard her run into a room at the dark end of the corridor, calling out “For it now” or perhaps “You’re it now.” He didn’t know if the words were intended for him. He was too busy noticing that the door was boltless.