Swamp Tales Page 7

Back around 1850, the man who had managed the iron works for more than 20 years died suddenly in his house, which stood very near to the spot of our campfire.

  His name was John Alderson and he was a very successful businessman, which is to say that he greatly underpaid his workers and skimped on everything in a never ending quest for higher profits.

  Now gentlemen, let the record show that there was nothing extra-ordinary about his death. It was the natural death of a man who had been given the biblical three score and ten years. A person who had chosen to continue working right up to his last breath. In fact, his foreman was working with him when he died.

  They were looking at plans for the construction of a steeple for a new Methodist Church in the town of Plymouth.

  With the victim laid out on his own bed, the Doctor and the foreman were speaking about the funeral arrangements and other details surrounding the death.

  "Well Doctor. We were figuring out what is was going to cost us to fabricate this new Plymouth job, when all of a sudden Mr. Alderson's head just jerked upwards. His eyes bulged and he tried to breathe, but wasn't able too. Then he collapsed. I saddled up a horse and came and got you."

  "You did the right thing Mr. Phipps. It certainly looks like age just caught up with old Alderson. He could have had a bad heart. I wouldn't know because he never came in to the office for medical advice. I don't believe he thought much of medicine. He certainly was slow in paying the bills every time I had to patch up any of your men who got hurt on the job."

  "It was nothing personal Doc. He just hated spending money. The old guy was just plain cheap. He squeezed us on everything. We had to make our tools last twice as long as they should. We had to save every piece of scrap metal from every job and put it in a big 'boneyard' out behind the works. Then, when we'd get a job, Alderson would make me go out and search the scrap to see how much of it would be of use in the new job."

  "Well I guess that makes sense Phipps. Why buy new stock if you have old stock you can use?"

  "It makes sense only on the surface Doc. I would sometimes have to spend a whole day out in the boneyard piecing together junk scraps that we call 'drops', to make a beam! Most of the buildings in the Commonwealth have main beams that were cobbled together with old junk scraps. There's no telling when a serious accident could happen. The State House in Boston could fall down tomorrow because of the shoddy materials we used when we built it."

  "Well it does sound pretty bad when you phrase it that way Phipps. At any rate, I will be back in the morning to take care of the body and finish making my report. By the way, someone has to stay with the body."

  "If you mean me Doc, sitting up with the dead is usually left up to a family member or a loved one."

  "Mr. Phipps you are correct. As far as I know, old Alderson had no family and nobody he loved; and certainly nobody who loved him. But it is tradition. Somebody has to sit up with the dead. You do it tonight and I will have some folks from the Iron Works come in to take over for you early in the morning."

  The doctor prepared to leave. Slowly he took off his rubber gloves. Phipps watched in fascination as he removed the cold and clammy things that felt like the touch of death.

  "Why do my gloves interest you so?"

  "We use gloves in our work too, Doctor. In fact, you treated a man recently who was badly burned because he didn't have any gloves."

  "Yes, young Walter Smith foolishly was working his cutting torch without his gloves. I told him to always put his gloves on before doing any work with heating elements."

  "He didn't have any gloves, Doc. He wore out his pair. When he tried to get new ones from the stockroom, he was told that under Alderson's orders, he could not have a new pair for six more weeks. I told you Alderson shorted us on everything. I can't say that I am sad he's gone. If they give me his job, things will change around here. We might not make as much money, but the men will be safer and happier."

  "I am sorry to hear about this, Phipps. I hope you do get to take over his job. Well, I am off now. Will you be okay until about 8:00 A.M.? I will have people in by then to relieve you."

  "Yes. Sure. I'll sit up with the dead guy and I'll write up a new estimate for this steeple job in Plymouth. I will make sure that at least this job, will be done right."

  The doctor departed and Charles Phipps sat down in one of the two chairs in the small home of the late John Alderson.

  "He wasn't just stingy with us at work, he was even cheap with himself," Phipps said aloud. "Look at this dump. He was the head of a business that has hundreds of workers. The company does work all over the Commonwealth and yet the guy lived in a one room house with just two wooden chairs; a small table; a little bit of a couch, and a tiny twin bed. He had a desk, a dresser and a closet full of identical cheap black suits. That's it. That's all that he had.

  He glanced casually at the formless, sheeted hulk on the bed opposite him, and began to study the steeple plans by the light of the dim lamp which stood on the rough table.

  Still talking aloud, though he was alone in the minuscule dwelling, he said, "Well Alderson, tonight you are in the best mood ever. There's no groaning, no complaining, and you have not once told me that I am wasting the company's money. I have to say that death certainly does become you, you old goat!"

  Outside, a black darkness raced in, obliterating the path, the tree line, and even the sky from Phipps' vantage point at a dirty windowsill. In the dim light of the lamp, he found that it was a strain on his eyes to try to do any more work, so he folded up the plans and set his arms down on the bare table to act as a pillow for his head. Before he closed his weary eyes he looked across the room at Alderson. He had worked with the man for more than 20 years and not once did Alderson have a visitor or a friend. He took no holidays and spent every day, including Sundays, working in his office on the second floor of the main building of the iron works.

  Out of doors, the wind had picked up and was shearing branches from the sheltering pines and tossing them at the little hovel. With a thud, a freshly severed limb struck the door of the house. Charles Phipps jerked his he realized the noise was just a windswept branch.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed something. By the door, on a frail looking three legged table, was the doctor's bag.

  "I wonder if the Doc left any medicine in that case?"

  Phipps rose from his chair, rubbed his eyes, and then was delighted to find a nearly full bottle of brandy among the bandages, scissors, scalpels and such. He drank liberally and straight from the bottle. The Doctor certainly wouldn't mind him having the brandy, he assured himself. He was, after all, doing him a great favor by sitting up with the dead.

  There was a detective magazine in the Doctor's bag, so Charles Phipps turned up the lamp and began reading. After a time, he looked up from the literature and his eyes fell upon the bed with its silent occupant. He was startled, involuntarily; as if he had for a moment, forgotten the presence of the corpse, and was unpleasantly reminded of it.

  Later, he realized that every time he looked up from the magazine, he would peer over at the dead man, and each time, he had a momentary fright; as though he were seeing him 'laid out' for the first time.

  The fright was light and instinctive, but he felt angry at himself.

  The wind died down to a whisper before evaporating into nothing. There were no hooting owls, no croaking frogs, no buzzing crickets. He realized that utter and deadening silence had cloaked both the house and the night.

  Phipps shook himself as if to rid his mind of wild speculations, and went back to his reading. A sudden rogue gust of wind whipped through the window, in which the light in the lamp flickered and went out suddenly. Phipps, cursing softly, groped in the darkness for matches, burning his fingers on the lamp chimney. He struck a match, relit the lamp, and glancing over at the bed, got a horrible shock.

  Alderson's face stared blindly at him, the dead eyes
wide and blank, framed in the gnarled gray features. Even as Phipps instinctively shuddered, his reason explained the apparent phenomenon: the sheet that covered the corpse had been carelessly thrown across the face by the Doctor and the sudden puff of wind had simply tossed it aside.

  Yet there was something grisly about the thing, something fearsomely suggestive; as if, in the masking darkness, a dead hand had cast aside the sheet, just as if the corpse were about to rise....

  Phipps, an imaginative man, shrugged his shoulders at these ghastly thoughts and crossed the room to replace the sheet. The dead eyes seemed to stare malevolently, with an evilness that transcended the dead man in life.

  The workings of a vivid imagination, Phipps knew, and he re-covered the gray face, shrinking as his hand chanced to touch the cold flesh--slick and clammy, the touch of death. He shuddered with the natural revulsion that the living have for the dead, and went back to his chair and magazine.

  "Settle down Charlie," he instructed himself, yawning as the night began to turn towards morning. "I think I'll just lie down on that skimpy little couch over there and get some rest."

  "Now I might fall asleep, but I will leave the light burning. It's not because I'm afraid; it's just that it is the custom to leave the lights burning for the dead," he bravely told himself.

  He did not want to admit, even to himself, that he realized that he had a deep dislike of the thought of lying in the darkness with the corpse of Alderson.

  He dozed, awoke with a start and looked at the sheeted form on the bed. Silence reigned over the house, and outside it was very dark.

  The hour was approaching midnight, the worst time of all for a man with a fragile mind. He stared again at the bed where the body lay and found himself more disturbed than ever by the sight of his sheeted former boss.

  A bizarre idea formed in his mind, and grew, that beneath the sheet, the mere lifeless body had become a strange, monstrous thing, a hideous, conscious being, that watched him with eyes which burned through the fabric of the cloth. This thought of course; he explained to himself by the legends of vampires, undead ghosts and such. The fears; attributes with which the living have cloaked the dead for countless ages, since primitive man first recognized in death something horrid and apart from life. Man feared death, thought Phipps, and some of this fear of death took hold on the dead so that they, too, were feared. And the sight of the dead

  Engendered grisly thoughts, gave rise to dim fears of hereditary memory, lurking back in the dark corners of the brain.

  At any rate, that silent, hidden thing was getting on his nerves. He thought of uncovering the face, on the principle that familiarity breeds contempt. The sight of the features, calm and still in death, would banish, he thought, all such wild conjectures as were haunting him in spite of himself. But the thought of those dead eyes staring in the lamplight was intolerable; so at last he blew out the light and lay down. This fear had been stealing upon him so insidiously and gradually that he had not been aware of its growth.

  With the extinguishing of the light, however, and the blotting out of the sight of the corpse, things assumed their true character and proportions, and he fell asleep almost instantly, on his lips a faint smile for his previous folly.

  He awakened suddenly. How long he had been asleep he did not know. He sat up, his pulse pounding frantically, the cold sweat beading his forehead. He knew instantly where he was, remembered the other occupant of the room. But what had awakened him? A dream - yes, now he remembered - a hideous dream in which the dead man had risen from the bed and stalked stiffly across the room with eyes of fire and a horrid leer frozen on his gray lips. Phipps had seemed to lie motionless, helpless; then as the corpse reached out with a gnarled and horrible hand, he

  had awakened.

  He strained to see something, anything. But the room was all blackness and outside was so dark that no gleam of light came through the window. He reached a shaking hand toward the lamp then recoiled as if from a hidden snake. Sitting here in the dark with a fiendish corpse was bad enough, but he dared not light the lamp, for fear that his reason would be snuffed out like a candle at what he might see.

  Horror, stark and unreasoning, had full possession of his soul; he no longer questioned the instinctive fears that rose in him. All those legends he had heard came back to him and brought a belief in them.

  Death was a hideous thing, a brain-shattering horror, imbuing lifeless men with a horrid malevolence. Alderson in his life had been simply a cheap and selfish man; now, in death, he was a terror, a monster, a fiend lurking in the shadows of fear, ready to leap on mankind with talons dipped deep in violent insanity.

  Phipps sat there, his blood freezing, and fought out his silent battle. Faint glimmerings of reason had begun to touch his fright when a soft, stealthy sound again froze him. He did not recognize it as the whisper of the night wind across the windowsill. His frenzied fancy knew it only as the tread of death and horror. He sprang from the couch then stood undecided. Escape was in his mind but he was too dazed to even try to formulate a plan of escape. Even his sense of direction was gone. Fear had so stifled his brain, that he was not able to think consciously. The blackness spread in long waves about him and its darkness and void entered into his brain. His motions, such as they were, were instinctive. He seemed shackled with mighty chains and his limbs responded sluggishly. He was in a state of pure panic.

  A terrible horror grew up in him and reared its grisly shape, that the dead man was behind him, was sneaking up on him from the rear. He no longer thought of lighting the lamp; he no longer thought of anything. Fear filled his whole being; there was room for nothing else.

  He backed slowly away in the darkness, hands behind him, instinctively feeling the way. With a terrific effort he partly shook the clinging mists of horror from him, and, the cold sweat, clammy upon his body, fought to orient himself. He found the bottle and drained the last of the brandy, then hurled the empty container at the wall. It crashed and broke into many pieces.

  He could see nothing. But the bed was across the room, in front of him. He was backing away from it. That was where the dead man was lying, according to all rules of nature; if the thing were, as he felt, behind him, then the old tales were true: death did implant in lifeless bodies an unearthly animation. Dead men do walk! Dead men do roam the shadows to work their ghastly and evil will upon the living.

  These conclusions he did not reach by any reasoning process; they leaped full-grown into his terror-dazed brain. He worked his way slowly backward, groping, clinging to the thought that the dead man must be in front of him.

  Then his hands, which he had been holding behind him, encountered something--something slick, cold and clammy - like the touch of death. A scream shook the echoes, followed by the crash of a falling body.

  The next morning the doctor and some of the workers came to the house of death. They found two corpses. John Alderson's sheeted body lay motionless upon the bed, and across the room lay the body of Charles Phipps, next to the rickety three legged table where the Doctor had left his bag and his gloves.

  His rubber gloves - slick and clammy to the touch. Like the touch of a hand groping in the dark. A hand of one fleeing from his own fear. Rubber gloves, slick and clammy and cold. Like the touch of death!.

  -0-

  The history teacher, Mr. Markens, stood up as he neared the finish of the story and tried to make it as eerie as possible, but to his chagrin, the boys were not pleased.

  "Look Mr. Markens," Freddy Simpson said, "you are camping out in a swamp where Bigfoot is almost as common as complaints about Cape Cod traffic jams and you give us a lame story like that....."

  "We appreciate that it's probably a good historical story, but it's not paranormal, it's just lame," Bobby Butterfield added. "Don't you know any good stories?"

  "Well guys, like I said, I don't believe in The Bridgewater Triangle. I think that all the stories have explanations. Just like in the story I told y
ou, if you look deep enough you will always find a pair of rubber gloves."

  "You don’t get it Mr. Markens," Bill Ricci commented. "You don't have to believe it, for it to be a good story. Some of the greatest stories ever written are not credible, but they are interesting. I think you have got better stories in you than that Rubber Gloves story."

  "Well Bill," he replied, "Thanks, I guess, for that lukewarm vote of confidence. I do have a really weird paranormal type story. But it didn't happen here. It happened in Cape Cod. Do you guys want to hear it?"

  Nobody answered for a minute. Simpson got himself another cup of coffee. Butterfield fetched a few logs and threw a couple on the fire. Markens looked like a little kid that was trying unsuccessfully to get picked for a sandlot baseball game."

  Bill Ricci took pity on him……"Sure, Mr. Markens. We will listen. But jazz it up. Will yah?"

  "Okay Bill, here goes. Oh Freddy, is there any more coffee? I'm going to need one. You won't need any. This story will keep you guys awake."

  The history teacher, as per his habit, cleared his throat, slid his glasses back into his black hair and finally began. He told the campers of an unfortunate creature named Jimmy Catfish and a Cape Cod lake that none of them had ever heard of, even though their families were frequent Cape Cod visitors.

  To this day, the campers are not sure if the lake actually exists and if the story is true, but Markens said that it does exist and he claimed that the story is true. Here is the tale exactly as it was told to the campfire crew…….

  Eerie Codfresh Lake in Cape Cod – photo by Bill Russo

  Chapter Three: Codfresh Lake and Jimmy Catfish