Friday Fiction: A Friend You Haven't Met (Part One)

 

A FRIEND YOU HAVEN’T MET

 

     It had been years since I’d been to Walnut Springs. The sad fact was that most of the people I knew the last time I was there were probably dead. Sad, but for the best, quite likely. Had somebody recognized me it might have raised some uncomfortable questions, questions it would be awkward for me to answer.

Walnut Springs is one of those places I’ve habitually returned to during my career, though, and that spring found me back again, not unlike the proverbial hog back to its wallow. Washington is another of my places, but it’s not so tolerable if you don’t have any real reason to be there. There didn’t seem to be any reason to be in Walnut Springs either, but its pace was always more comfortable to a man of my advanced age. If you didn’t have to be in any place in particular, I mused, it was at least a place to be.

I’m not a very good driver – never did get easy with it – so I was lumbering along pretty slowly in my old car Bessie through the town center. The courthouse there was one of those bland art deco boxes that had been built in Mr. F. D. Roosevelt’s time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it has many fine points, but I just naturally prefer an older style. Across the street from it was a little park, only about an acre square, and I circled around, trying to find a location that would stay shady for an hour or two. In the early morning hours, the block was deserted, so I had my pick.

I finally chose a spot and lit on it. I got out, grabbed my cane, and closed the car door with a rusty squawk that I felt echoing in my knees. A little hobbling took me to one of the iron benches that faced the water feature in the middle of the square. The angular, geometric fountain was purling away inside a ring of poles sporting all the fabled six flags over Texas, and the city flag, and some damn school flag or other that seemed to devalue the whole effort somewhat. I didn’t really care. I sat down to rest my bones and reflect a bit.

I wondered how long I could stay in Walnut Springs this time, or even whether I should stay at all. In the intervening years the little town had gone from charming to alarming, with the old buildings decaying into patched-up facades of themselves and the new buildings (chain retailers, from what I could see) all brick and glass. It seemed that the major growth industry was tiny thrift stores, the kind that endlessly recycle the unsellable remains of a thousand garage sales, not to be unexpected in what had become a bedroom town in the orbit of the nearest big city. But, like the wares of those desperate shops, Walnut Springs had a sort of fading spirit of old dreams and wistful enthusiasms clinging in the air. And I had memories here.

I looked at the old statue of Colonel Augusto Sanchez on the other side of the park, sword in hand, one foot of his horse raised obediently to show the sculptor’s art. I smiled in recognition. I knew for a fact that it would be more accurate if the sword were skewering a string of sausages, and there would be nothing wrong with that; old Gus was a wonder at supplying the troops, and an army marches on its stomach, as they say. The Texas War of Independence might have been lost without Colonel Sanchez’s skills, but that wasn’t the sort of thing that got mentioned in memorial statuary.

And just across the street at the corner of the courthouse lawn I could see the Nogales Grande, or Big Nut, as the locals call it, a giant concrete model of a kind of walnut, or pecan, as Southerners say. It used to boast about being the biggest walnut in the world, but over time some rival nut-growing towns had fabricated bigger, so the title was in dispute. I shuddered a little to think of what people would say if they knew what was really encased in that cement, and why.

I knew if I walked a couple blocks north, I’d come to the decaying mansion of a dead megalomaniac heretic, and a couple blocks south to a haunted movie house that was the scene of quite a few human sacrifices. Ironically, there was also nearby an old hotel, touted by the Chamber of Commerce as one of the most ghost-ridden in Texas, and that I knew to be completely clean of spooks. How did I know? Well, that’s my business.

I sat and watched the town fountain as it rose and fell. It was early enough in the morning that its colored lights were still on, a feature installed in the Fifties, I think, and which added a tinge of interest to its otherwise bland design. The idea was plain enough; the Four Doors of the Seasons, with every side emblazoned with a single emblem, and water, like time, pouring endlessly in the pool below. I was facing the winter door and a formal snowflake design. I watched the colored lighting cycle from red to yellow to green to blue to purple to red again. I pondered on how, if that was all that there was to things, just how much longer I could take the never-varying cycle before I had to move along.

Then it happened.

I was startled, but only for an instant, when the Winter Door opened. Almost immediately I remembered that these public fountains were hardly ever as solid as they appeared, with panels giving access to the inner workings. So, reflexively, I relaxed again.

What came tumbling out through the door then was what really shocked me.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a trapdoor spider abruptly popping its legs out from the earth and feeling all around its den. Well. Imagine that, except that at the end of each leg there was something like a clawed hand, groping all around the opening and then pulling a squirming, shifting, gaunt body through the doorway. It paused on the lip of the fountain, multiple eyes gleaming, head swaying, clicked enormous jaws, lashed its whipcord tail, spread membranous wings, glided beyond the water of the basin, hit the ground and bounded off into the air, and was out of sight heading west before I had time to get beyond my astonishment.

Notes

I'm sorry to report I haven't been able to buckle down to writing on Thrand again. The circumstances here have not been conducive to new writing; have been, in fact downright deleterious. So instead I offer the first part of A Friend You Haven't Met. 

It's an odd kind of a story, bringing as it does the separate writing 'strands' of The Bureau of Shadows and Tales of the Morgs together in one phantasmagorical crossover extravaganza.  Various other elements enter the stew, of course, as will be seen. This first little part more or less memorializes my own home town and its park here in Texas, somewhat changed in detail. The narrator, as has not been made clear yet, is Bob Bellamy, the hero of A Grave on Deacon's Peak, his life prolonged way beyond normal limits by the fountain in Lovett's Last Task (see elsewhere in this blog).