Page 61 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

TILL HUMAN VOICES WAKE US, AND WE DROWN

Poppy Z. Brite

The first time Seth saw him, the old man was sitting on Menemsha Beach playing with a disgusting thing.

He was spare and angular, this old man, and looked as if he might have spent his whole life on this brief stretch of up-island shoreline; sand clung to him in a faint glittering aura and salt lined the many creases of his face.

The disgusting thing he held was perhaps eight inches long, brown and sere.

It had a rudimentary, wicked-looking little face, a long spiny tail, and what appeared to be a pair of wings.

It looked as if it had been alive at some point, but was now very, very dead.

“Jenny Haniver,” the old man said when he saw Seth looking, and made the thing nod.

“Uh… Seth Harris,” Seth said, thinking the man was introducing himself.

The old man’s face wrinkled in contempt. “Not me . This creature here is called a Jenny Haniver. People used to think they was dried mermaids.” His tone became singsong. “Mermaid, mermaid, down by the docks, I see her titties, but where’s her box?”

It was rare these days to run across a talking person on Martha’s Vineyard.

Most of the summer people had left when the flu started ramping up, though a few had hunkered down in their luxurious homes and died.

Almost all the remaining people were locals, and they tended to keep to themselves.

Seth knew some of them and checked on them from time to time.

Most of them were crazy. This old man sounded crazy, but possibly interesting.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Stingray. You catch the little ones and cut em up so it looks like a body. Nostrils are the eyes, mouth is the mouth. Hang ’em up to dry a while, then varnish ’em and sell ’em to the tourists.

My father used to have a good little sideline in Jenny Hanivers.

” The old man cackled. “Take home a dried mermaid, boy, you really had a souvenir. Kid like you wouldn’t remember that. ”

“No, I don’t,” Seth admitted. “My parents never had much luck selling anything to the tourists. They tried to start a sushi restaurant, but people come here to eat lobster and clams, not raw fish.”

The old man looked searchingly at Seth. His eyes were an undimmed brilliant blue in his seamed brown face. “You Japanese?”

“No. My mom was half-Japanese. My dad was Black. I’m just an islander.”

“Had a buddy whose ship was sunk by a Jap torpedo in the Big One.”

“I’m nineteen and I’ve never even been to Japan, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, keep your hair on, I got no problem with you… Sean?”

“Seth. I’m Seth. What’s your name?”

“You don’t need to know my real name. Some folks used to call me Mole, ’cause I got a lot of ’em.

” The old man set the Jenny Haniver carefully on the sand and pulled up the sleeve of his jacket, revealing a constellation of brown spots on his forearm.

“Got ’em on my legs, too. Hell, got ’em on my ass , for that matter.

” He cackled again. “Or so the ladies always told me. Can’t see my own ass, y’know. ”

They stared out at the slaty waters of Menemsha Bight. The late summer sun was westering, beginning to bleed into the sea. After a few minutes, Mole said, “Now Jenny, there, people used to say she could protect you from getting sick. She couldn’t do it, of course, but a real mermaid could.”

“A real mermaid,” Seth said.

Mole nodded.

“There’s no such thing.”

“Wasn’t any such thing as the superflu, either, till there was.

Government making a plague that killed everybody in the world?

Who’d have believed it? Government made this AIDS thing, you know.

Wanted to wipe out the homosexuals. And what for?

Were they bothering anybody? No, but the government always wants a scapegoat.

Democrat, Republican, what have you, they all want to blame someone else for the messes they make.

Nobody left to take the blame now, though.

Nobody much left to do the blaming, for that matter. ”

“There are still people on the mainland.”

“Yeah, and most of ’em are headed west, to one place or another. I got no use for either of their places. I’m staying right here.”

“Were you a fisherman, before?”

Everyone understood before . The single word was enough to denote all the pain it carried: before you watched your family choke on snot and die, before you had to break into the stores for food, before the world ended.

“Nah.” Mole smiled ruefully. “My father was, but I get seasick. Never could find my legs and quit pukin’. I’m a carpenter. Built us a shack right here while he went out on the water, and we lived in it until he died. Not from the flu, thank God. Long before these devilish times. Heart attack.”

Seth wished he could say the same. Both of his parents had been active and healthy until they caught the flu.

His father had gone first, one of the early wave of Vineyard deaths that had prompted calls to suspend ferry service and close off the island.

His mother had survived a couple of weeks longer, but then she got sick, too.

She had clawed at her swollen throat until Seth caught her hands and pulled them away; then they trembled like frightened birds in his grasp and she was gone.

“I worked at Bunch of Grapes, the bookstore in Vineyard Haven,” Seth said, though the old man hadn’t asked.

“It was a great job, but it didn’t really, you know, prepare me for the end of the world.

When people started heading to the mainland, I figured I had everything I needed here, and I just decided to stay. ”

Everything I needed wasn’t strictly true, since the hospital had shut down, but Seth had a good supply of his antiretroviral medication.

That was, if he decided to start taking it again.

He’d tested positive for HIV during a routine blood draw in the spring, but felt fine until he started on the AZT, which sometimes made him violently ill and always left him low-grade nauseated.

His doctor had stressed the need to keep taking it as a preventative, but the doctor was dead now and here was Seth on the beach, feeling fine even though he hadn’t taken AZT in a month.

He had come to believe he wasn’t going to catch the flu, had even wondered whether HIV conferred some kind of immunity.

Mole picked up the Jenny Haniver and shook a skirl of sand off it. The thing’s desiccated skin had the look of a rawhide toy, and Seth felt an unexpected pang. The dogs were all dead, too, including Lucy Vincent, the collie his family had had since he was nine.

“They make these things in Japan as well,” Mole said.

“Your mum might have known about them, but probably not. Most people don’t.

My father took a particular interest in mermaids.

He said the Japanese ones were more like Feejee mermaids, you know, those things they used to cobble together out of a dead monkey’s top and a dried fish’s tail? ”

Seth shook his head, mystified.

“Well, it don’t matter. Point is, they were supposed to predict epidemics, and they were supposed to protect people from epidemics.

The Japanese kept them in temples and prayed to them.

Some of the stories even said eating one was supposed to make a person immortal.

Now, if you could go out there”—Mole nodded at the sound—“and catch a mermaid dinner that would make you live forever, would you do it?”

“I don’t know. Wouldn’t that be murder?”

“Guess it depends on which end you hooked,” Mole said, and cackled at his own joke.

Seth laughed a little, too. The old guy was a weirdo, but his irascible good humor was catching. Soon all but the last bloody sliver of sun had sunk below the horizon. Nothing in Seth’s years had prepared him for the darkness of an island without electricity, and he wanted to get home.

“Well,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

“Likely so. Stay well.”

As Seth headed back toward his car, he heard Mole crooning a song whose words he couldn’t make out, but whose tune had a dirgelike flavor. He imagined that the old man was singing to the dried thing he held in his hands, and a shudder ran up his spine like the first touch of September frost.

The moon was rising by the time Mole walked back up the beach.

It cast its stark illumination over the little fishing town and across the waters of Menemsha Bight, making him think of the coming winter.

The season would be no worse than usual for him, as he had plenty of fuel and canned food, but he suspected it might send some of the Vineyard’s remaining residents packing for the mainland.

Playing pioneer was easy enough in the blessed summer weather.

An island winter might chap their asses.

He’d been a boy in 1934, the year seawater froze all around the island.

His father and a couple of other men had walked from Edgartown Harbor to Cape Pogue Pond and back, just for the novelty of it, no doubt passing a flask and laughing the whole way.

He’d wanted to go with them, but his mother put paid to that.

Mole climbed the stairs of the raised shack, which he still thought of as his father’s place, although the old cob had been gone forty years.

He trod the risers easily enough in the dark, and why not?

He had built them himself. The wood had silvered in the salt air, but the place was still strong.

He let himself in and lit an oil lamp. The big aquarium against the far wall bubbled softly.

He had it running on a small generator, but didn’t use the power to light the shack’s one big room; he didn’t like the idea of being a bright beacon visible to any who might come.