“But my boys—”

  “They ain’t yours, are they? They’re his, from before. Nor’s he your rightful helpmate.” Then he laughed, his white teeth gleaming, as if none of it mattered. “I’ve a ship, a crew. We’re invincible, can’t be sunk by God nor nature. I’ll give you the world, a thousand ports of call, if you’ll only cast off this other life and join me.”

  She pressed a hand to her cheek. “How can I do that?” She glanced back through the open door. “My—the children. My husband.”

  His eyes gleamed sharp. “And where’s he now, tonight?” She started to answer but he interrupted. “You stumbled in the telling. I’ll tell you what he’s away on. Riding his tender mistress in a room above a tavern the next town over, where they meet as often as he can steal away, and you pretend not to suspect so as to be able to go on.” He clucked his tongue. “Let’s go back inside. You stand for me in that tin pan, and I’ll wash you clean, and we’ll remark upon the bruises and the marks of his belt.”

  Horrified, she stepped back from him. “You only just arrived, how can you say—how can you know any such a thing?”

  “One hears things in the wind and in the dark. Such as your new name, which I’ll never call you by, nor where you reside.” He opened his arms as if it was obvious. “How do you think I came here so directly?” When she didn’t move, he added, “I saw the stripe on your thigh from his buckle as you got down, is how. Won’t be the only mark. It never is.” He clutched her hair, drew her face close. “You know I won’t leave marks like that on your beautiful flesh.” Her eyes were wet, but it was she who pressed her face, her lips, to his. Her hunger came to the fore now, drew him like an undertow inexorably away, and he let go and drowned with her.

  He wiped a hand on his mouth, half-astonished by the intensity of her feelings. He turned quick, and pointed. “See, out there my waiting ship!”

  It stood, still as something painted upon the night sky, sparkling with inviting lantern lights. They seemed to dot even the masts.

  He licked his lips. Her taste lingered. “Let him have his boys and his belt. I have a whole ship full of boys who’ll admire you—no—worship you. Worship you as I do.” He offered his hand to her. It was flawless and strong. He curled his fingers, relishing the feeling. “Come with me, Maddie Maudlin. I’ve so much to share. Treasures and pleasures. But you must come now. Tonight, before midnight.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Why, the tide of course. We must sail upon the tide before midnight, else find ourselves stranded here when the next storm hits.”

  She looked into his eyes then, and her expression shifted like a sail catching a favorable wind. He watched his promises flow into the curve of her lips. “Swear,” she said, “you’ll take me all the way to Italy, where the white lilies grow.”

  “Of course, of course. Anywhere.”

  She went back inside, lifted a poker and stirred the fire till it jumped up hot and bright again. She climbed the ladder a final time, stood at the top, her back to him. He watched, his will guiding her to sever each adopted tie. The resolve was his, though she would think it her own.

  Down again, she snatched up her shawl and closed the door on the life lived in that house, and all its deceptions.

  “None could ever hold a candle to you, my Tommy.” She ran one slender hand over his taut, cold cheek. His eyes nearly closed at the sensation so long forgotten.

  He took her by the hand and drew her through the curving, sloping streets of the town. He was the current now, pulling her out to sea, and she didn’t resist.

  “It’s late,” he said. “It’s very late. Hurry.”

  Wind already was swirling in from the sea again. The spray stung him.

  At the steps down to the seawall, the “village idiot” reappeared, closer now, running across the uneven dirt to catch up. The moon shone on his balding head. His eyes were like an owl’s, magnified behind the lenses of his eyeglasses. “Thomas,” the man called. “Stop now. Come back, for your soul’s sake. Stay and ride it out with us.”

  “Get away, you.” Tom quickly dragged Maudlin down the stone steps to the seawall.

  “How does he know you?” she asked.

  “He doesn’t,” he replied, and pressed on. “He never did.”

  “Thomas!” ‘Twas as if the wind called from above.

  They hurried along the wall, out the quay. In the distance, the glittering ship rose and fell now, the sea coming to life again as if agitated at his return.

  He set her in the rowboat, clambered down and sat with his back to her as he hauled hard and fast on the oars. Facing the shrinking town, he stared at the man, who just stood there, leaning on the wall in a helpless way.

  The water slapped Tom in the face. It seemed to leap over the gunwale to strike him. The whole sea wanted him back, didn’t it? He craned his neck. Maddie sat with her shawl over her head, her face in its shadow, bowed as though in prayer. The ship rose and fell behind them, closer with each stroke. The gorgon watched their approach.

  He saw his own hands losing their flawless shape. But he’d got her and no mistake. Not the ocean, not her careless husband nor any force of God she prayed to could stop him.

  They glided alongside as he shipped the oars and made a grab for the rope ladder dangling where he’d left it.

  With his head down so that she wouldn’t see the change in him before she was on board, he urged, “Go up, my love, go up.” She climbed ahead of him, barefoot still. The cold of the sea did not chill her. He only looked up when she was halfway and wouldn’t see how his teeth showed through one cheek, and the sockets of his eyes glowed.

  Boys’ faces leered over the chain-wale. Their arms reached out for her.

  Tom climbed along after. With each step he took, the Bedlam transformed around him, planks rotted, snapped, came unpegged. Moss grew up like a beard on either side.

  Above, the sails unfurled without any hand tugging on any halyards. The sheets fluttered, tattered but swollen, pregnant with blue fire. The Bedlam boys’ eyes burned with that same blue, and his own. “Yes,” he mumbled. “Down and down, to hell we go, my Mad Maudlin. I’ll show you where your white lilies grow before our final port of call, yes, I will.” He slid over the side and onto the broken deck. “Oh, I’ve—”

  “Got you now,” she finished for him.

  The naked boys smirked from around her skirts and under them, too. Her eyes gone the yellow of the gorgon’s. Its polished face burnished her features.

  “Mad!” he cried. “I swear! I’ll show you—”

  “No,” she said. “Never can you show me a thing. That power was lost the day you drowned, my darling.” She cocked her head. “Went mad did your Maudlin when you died. Off the sea wall she threw herself. Couldn’t wait for your bones to wash up, so sent hers out to find you instead. An’ here we lie, entangled below.”

  She turned to her crew, her boys. He was just one among them now. They all had ports of call and turns to take.

  “Weigh anchor,” she ordered. The sky cracked with jagged lightning. The wind bulged in the blue burning sails. It carried to his ears one final time that faded voice on the shore, a single shouted “Thomas!”

  Then the sea rose up like a cobra, higher than the yardarm, and as he opened his mouth to scream, it slammed hard upon him, and them. She stood at the wheel, and the ship plunged downward to darkness.

  His ears breached with the wail of a million souls drowned along with him.

  * * *

  Wailing echoed down the corridors. Lightning flashed and the thunder, right atop them, shook the very foundations of the hospital, and behind the terrified shrieks, one woman’s voice screaming, “Tommy!”

  The wild boy with the pail was ready to fling more icy water down on the patient tied to the iron frame below, but the physician raised his hand and called, “Enough!” He lumbered forward, removing his glasses and wiping at the misted lenses, at his own eyes. He leaned over and squinted dolefully at the soggy face.

  Blue eyes stared wide, but somewhere far past and above him, all the way to the stars.

  “Lost,” said the physician. He put his glasses back on. “This time he’s lost.” To the two attendants he said, “Dry him off and take him back to his ward. And get your damned monkey down from that ladder before he strikes one of us with his pail. We won’t have further need of him.” He shook his nearly bald head, and walked over to the table in the corner where his notebook lay. He should have sat down and written up his notes immediately, but he couldn’t face them. It was too great a burden tonight. He’d hoped. . . but he’d failed again. Even “hydro-therapy,” as they were calling it, hadn’t revived Thomas. If anything it had flung him out of this world altogether—not that his journey had been far to begin with.

  The attendants—senior patients themselves—were cautious in wiping down Thomas. They didn’t untie him until they were done. One still wore a bandage from the last time, when he’d been bitten by the savage madman. Rumor was the fiend had stabbed and flayed dozens of children before he’d been caught and locked up here. Another rumor had it that he was the doctor’s only son, and that was why he was given every imaginable treatment from bloodletting to this water-dashing.

  The attendants hauled him upright and dragged him out between them. They didn’t bother to dress him. He wouldn’t notice. Last time it had been a week before he’d come to what passed for his senses, claiming to be the survivor of some shipwreck. It looked this time like he wouldn’t be coming back at all, and you didn’t waste a gown on the mindless ones.

  Lightning flashed again through the barred windows, making them jump as they left the chamber. Yowling filled the air.

  Down the narrow corridor of Bethlem Hospital they staggered, though the patient hardly weighed more than a sack of bones. The near-naked boy who’d flung pails of water capered ahead of them as though leading a parade.

  Wretched creatures ogled from cells on both sides, some grasping after them, but most laughing, howling at the sight of the naked man. Some threw their own stained nightshirts through the bars.

  Across the walls obscene figures had been drawn—not all of them by the incarcerated—including a voluptuous female with fanged teeth and a snake’s body. The word BEDLAM had been gouged out in huge letters beside her with a spoon.

  At the sight of the procession, the woman stopped her cries and then began to sing:

  “Tom o’ Bedlam’s home again

  No escape in the deep.

  Maudlin’s mad with lust and sin,

  All Bedlam boys do weep!”

  The physician, following them, told her, “Hush up, Madeline.”

  She stepped back, curtsied, then raised her gown and pressed her sex against the bars at him. The Bedlam boys across the way yipped and strained to get a look.

  The attendants pushed open the doors at the far end and a chill wind blasted down the corridor, snuffing out wall candles one by one. The hall went dark and the yowling recommenced. Then the doors shut, the bolts snapped, and one by one, they fell silent to listen to her soft chants, flowing like an undercurrent beneath their noise.

  She was whispering singsong; it rose and fell. “I got you now, Tommy, got you, I got you.” The susurrus bore them along, snaking through the cold darkness, drawing them from their cells. It might have been any of them she claimed—at least in their imaginations.

  “Got you forever now, my love,” she sang, “an’ here we’ll lie, together.”

  On…The Demon Lover

  Known as ‘The Demon Lover,‘ ‘The Carpenter’s Wife,‘ or ‘The House Carpenter,‘ Child Ballad 243, also classified as Roud #14, was described by Child as “A Warning For Married Women, being an example of Mrs. Jane Reynolds (a West-country woman), born near Plymouth, who, having plighted her troth to a Seaman, was afterwards married to a Carpenter, and at last carried away by a Spirit, the manner how shall be presently recited. To a West-country tune called ‘The Fair Maid of Bristol,’ ‘Bateman,’ or ‘John True.’” (1)

  According to respected British folk singer and song collector A.L. Lloyd, the ballad was first printed as a broadside in the 17th century and before then was part of oral tradition.(2) There are many versions of this ballad—Child’s description is a good general outline. The details change from version to version: the number of years between learning of her lover, often named Jamie Harris’, death and her marriage, whether the one who comes to her is a spirit or the devil, the number of her children, how she dies and whether her husband simply mourns her or commits suicide.(3)

  Shirley Jackson uses the name Jamie Harris throughout her short story collection THE LOTTERY AND OTHER STORIES. One of the stories, THE DAEMON LOVER, Jackson recorded in 1960 for Folkways Records and is housed by the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.(4)

  The many who have sung the ballad most recently include A.L. Lloyd, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Natalie Merchant, and Pete Seeger.

  1) Child, Francis James. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads Vol. 4. Mineola: Dover, 2003.

  2) Mainly Norfolk: English Folk and Other Good Music. 2013. 9 October, 2013. English Folk Dance and Song Society.

  3) Child, Francis James. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads Vol. 4. Mineola: Dover, 2003.

  4) Smithsonian Folkways. 2013. 10 October, 2013. . Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.

  AWAKE

  By

  Jack Ketchum

  In the dream he was lying on what could only have been a pebbled goat-path high above a whitewater sea pounding the rocks below, lying in the embrace of a beautiful young woman naked as he was, the path so narrow and so dangerous that the slightest move beneath her could send them both tumbling over the edge. He asked her to please let go and she said no, not this time, I don’t think so and they began to fall.

  He startled gasping up off the couch thinking what the hell was that all about? and in the flickering light reached first for the dregs of his scotch and then for a cigarette. On the flat screen in front of him a hard-faced cop stood by while his partner squatted in front of a distraught woman in a chair, her arm on the woman’s shoulder.

  He threw back the scotch and lit the smoke.

  Right away he started coughing.

  The cough took its usual course. Dry at first and insistent and repetitive as a single staccato note played over and over on the piano. Until finally it modulated into a wet cough and the ball of phlegm that released him from its grip.

  Everybody knows they’re going to die, he thought. It’s another thing to have a schedule.

  It was interesting.

  His father had died of emphysema so he knew the drill. The progress of the thing.

  He knew how it ended.

  It was a nasty way to go, struggling for each breath. Until eventually your heart just threw in the towel. He gave himself a few more years. Maybe ten if he was lucky. But a simple head-cold could kill him too.

  When the wet cough stopped happening he was in very deep shit.

  His piss-hard-on was insistent too.

  He took another drag on the Winston and stubbed it out. He shouldn’t be smoking at all. But then there were a lot of things he shouldn’t be doing.

  The woman on the flat screen was quietly sobbing now. He muted her and hauled himself off the couch.

  Maddie had left the light on for him in the hallway. That was good because the scotch was still working its dull magic.

  It wouldn’t be the first time he’d walked into a wall.

  A dozen barefoot steps to the bathroom. A dozen more to their closed bedroom door and his daughter’s open one, opposite. The usual. Lights off in both rooms.

  In the bathroom he could hear himself wheezing.

  The wheeze was roughly B flat. His piss in the bowl a clear A sharp.

  He coughed again and the wheezing stopped.

  He shook himself and zipped his jeans.

  In the living room the cops were roaring silently toward a New York City brownstone. He tried for a moment to place the neighborhood. Couldn’t. They shot the thing here — he’d see the crews on the street every now and then — and sometimes he could make out a landmark, a Grey’s Papaya or a Love Cosmetics or, often, the Chrysler Building. But to him most all brownstones looked the same.

  He lived on the eighteen floor of a decades-old high-rise. You couldn’t miss it. He kept waiting for them to shoot there but it had never happened.

  He reached for the bottle of MacPhail's and poured himself a short one. He’d need a clear head in the morning but he needed sleep too. You weighed one against the other and decided. Tonight it was sleep.

  But an hour and two pours later he found himself grinding yet another Winston into the ashtray while the same cops in another episode grilled a wealthy matron about the supposed suicide of her husband and he was no closer to sleep than he was to Yellowstone National Park.

  The sessions were eating at him. He knew they weren’t right.

  He, Lambert, Georgie and Kovelant were halfway through their fourth CD and the heads were fine, they caught the melodies nice and tight, the segues out of two-four and the ensemble turns were all fine, but his piano breaks just weren’t making it. They were wooden, lacked the mix of fire and subtlety he was known for. They were competent. But they fucking bored him.

  Nobody in the band was saying so but he’d been playing with them long enough to know what they were feeling. What’s wrong with Fahner? And what the hell are we doing playing jazz takes on Appalachian folk ballads in the fucking first place?