Otherworldly Maine Read online

  Otherworldly MAINE

  EDITED BY NOREEN DOYLE

  Copyright © 2008 by Noreen Doyle

  All rights reserved.

  Cover painting: Night into Day (detail), © Greg Mort, watercolor, 2004 Used by permission of the artist.

  ISBN 978-0-89272-746-9

  Printed and bound at Versa Press, East Peoria, Illinois

  5 4 3 2 1

  BOOKS.MAGAZINE.ONLINE

  www.downeast.com

  Distributed to the trade by National Book Network

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:

  Otherworldly Maine / edited by Noreen Doyle.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-89272-746-9 (trade pbk.: alk. paper)

  1. American prose literature--Maine. 2. Science fiction, American. 3. Maine--Social life and customs--Fiction. I. Doyle, Noreen.

  PS548.M2O84 2008

  810.9'9741--dc22

  2008004693

  For my mother, Adrienne Adams Doyle, without whom I would never have passed through that mysterious door into Maine.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  I. “Musings on Maine and the Roots of Modern Science Fiction and Fantasy” by Noreen Doyle

  II. Two Excerpts from “Ktaadn” by Henry David Thoreau

  Longtooth by Edgar Pangborn

  The Hermit Genius of Marshville by Tom Tolnay

  Bass Fishing with the Enemy by Daniel Hatch

  Dreams of Virginia Dare by John P. O’Grady

  Echo by Elizabeth Hand

  Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut by Stephen King

  A Vision of Bangor, in the Twentieth Century by Edward Kent

  By the Lake by Jeff Hecht

  Awskonomuk by Gregory Feeley

  The County by Melanie Tem

  And Dream Such Dreams by Lee Allred

  Flash Point by Gardner Dozois

  The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton by Mark Twain

  Trophy Seekins by Lucy Suitor Holt

  The Autumn of Sorrows by Scott Thomas

  Alternate Anxieties by Karen Jordan Allen

  The Chapter of the Hawk of Gold by Noreen Doyle

  The Bung-Hole Caper by Tom Easton

  Dance Band on the Titanic by Jack L. Chalker

  When the Ice Goes Out by Jessica Reisman

  Creation Story by Steve Rasnic Tem

  About the Contributors

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  I Musings on Maine and the Roots of Modern Science Fiction and Fantasy

  by Noreen Doyle

  “Every boy has his first book; I mean to say, one book among all others which in early youth first fascinates his imagination, and at once excites and satisfies the desires of his mind. To me this first book was the ‘Sketch-Book’ of Washington Irving . . . Whenever I open the pages of the ‘Sketch-Book,’ I open also that mysterious door which leads back into the haunted chambers of youth.”

  —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1859

  Washington Irving was a New York writer, but what Longfellow glimpsed through that mysterious door of Irving’s prose was the haunted chambers of a youth Longfellow had spent in Maine.

  Of course, no Mainer looks only back toward the past. As much as we cherish our heritage and traditions, our state motto is, after all, Dirigo (“I Lead”). Take the case of Frank Andrew Munsey (1854–1925). Born in Mercer, he became a frustrated telegraph office manager in Augusta who wanted “the future . . . and with it the big world.” After considering railroads, steel, and banking, Munsey forged his future in publishing.

  He emigrated from Augusta to New York City in 1882 with his editorial ideas in tow. Persevering through a series of financial crises, Munsey founded a weekly paper that evolved into a monthly called The Argosy. Starting in 1896, he printed it in magazine format on inexpensive wood-pulp paper: through Yankee frugality, Munsey invented the pulp magazine.

  Periodicals had been publishing science fiction, fantasy, and horror since long before Munsey arrived on the scene, but the real flowering of genre short fiction occurred within the pulps of the twentieth century. Although not “science fiction magazines” as such, The Argosy and Munsey’s other periodicals did present readers with all manner of speculative fiction. Perhaps most famously, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan was born in Munsey’s All-Story. Rival publications followed Munsey’s lead into the pulp fiction market. Names of magazines and authors still well-known today debuted in the ensuing decades: Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Astounding, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clark, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, and others. Science fiction’s Golden Age and its giants emerged from the foundation of Munsey’s economizing innovation.

  These authors owed a sort of second-hand debt to yet another Mainer, novelist and critic John Neal (1793–1876). In 1829, Neal praised a book entitled Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems. The young poet called Neal’s review “the very first words of encouragement I ever remember to have heard.” And so it was thanks to the Portland native that Edgar Allan Poe gained footing for his success—and the genre gained one of its most important founding fathers.

  Although Neal himself is largely forgotten, his literary theory laid the groundwork for authors from Longfellow to Mark Twain and countless others besides. Neal’s own novels and short fiction cannot be called fantasy, but they were highly Gothic and he clearly appreciated Poe’s fantastical imagination. Neal advocated the use of American—especially New England—characters and settings to form the basis of a genuinely American literary tradition.

  So Neal might have approved of the twenty-one speculative fiction writers assembled here, each one inspired by Maine and its people. (And Munsey might have published them, too, given the chance.) Both two-time Maine governor Edward Kent and the incomparable Missouri writer Mark Twain give us nineteenth-century views of future Maines, while Elizabeth Hand’s Nebula Award-winning story and Daniel Hatch’s tale afford us post-9/11 glimpses of days to come. Edgar Pangborn, whose first fiction appeared during the Golden Age, leads us deep into the primeval Maine forest. Maine’s towering contribution to modern fiction, Stephen King, drives us down nearly forgotten (but unforgettable) backwoods roads. In Gardner Dozois’s strange Skowhegan, Jack Chalker’s interdimensional maritime ferry crossings, and other writers’ lakes, woods, and towns, the reader will encounter just a few of Maine’s many haunted chambers.

  But first an account—a true account—by Henry David Thoreau will carry us over the threshold of that mysterious door:

  II Two Excerpts from “Ktaadn”

  by Henry David Thoreau

  Ktaadn, whose name is an Indian word signifying highest land, was first ascended by white men in 1804. It was visited by Professor J. W. Bailey of West Point in 1836; by Dr. Charles T. Jackson, the State Geologist, in 1837; and by two young men from Boston in 1845. All these have given accounts of their expeditions. Since I was there, two or three other parties have made the excursion, and told their stories. Besides these, very few, even among backwoodsmen and hunters, have ever climbed it, and it will be a long time before the tide of fashionable travel sets that way. The mountainous region of the State of Maine stretches from near the White Mountains, northeasterly one hundred and sixty miles, to the head of the Aroostook River, and is about sixty miles wide. The wild or unsettled portion is far more extensive. So that some hours only of travel in this direction will carry the curious to the verge of a primitive forest, more interesting, perhaps, on all accounts, than they would reach by going a thousand miles westward.

  Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untameable Nature, or whatever else men call it, while coming down this part of the mountain.
We were passing over “Burnt Lands,” burnt by lightning, perchance, though they showed no recent marks of fire, hardly so much as a charred stump, but looked rather like a natural pasture for the moose and deer, exceedingly wild and desolate, with occasional strips of timber crossing them, and low poplars springing up, and patches of blueberries here and there. I found myself traversing them familiarly, like some pasture run to waste, or partially reclaimed by man; but when I reflected what man, what brother or sister or kinsman of our race made it and claimed it, I expected the proprietor to rise up and dispute my passage. It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and dread and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor wasteland. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made for ever and ever,—to be the dwelling of man, we say,—so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific,—not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in,—no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there,—the home, this, of Necessity and Fate. There was there felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,—to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we.

  We walked over it with a certain awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste. Perchance where our wild pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor, in Concord, there were once reapers, and husbandmen planted grain; but here not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world. What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star’s surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

  LONGTOOTH

  Edgar Pangborn

  My word is good. How can I prove it? Born in Darkfield, wasn’t I? Stayed away thirty more years after college, but when I returned I was still Ben Dane, one of the Darkfield Danes, Judge Marcus Dane’s eldest. And they knew my word was good. My wife died and I sickened of all cities; then my bachelor brother Sam died, too, who’d lived all his life here in Darkfield, running his one-man law office over in Lohman—our nearest metropolis, population 6437. A fast coronary at fifty; I had loved him. Helen gone, then Sam—I wound up my unimportances and came home, inheriting Sam’s housekeeper Adelaide Simmons, her grim stability and celestial cooking. Nostalgia for Maine is a serious matter, late in life: I had to yield. I expected a gradual drift into my childless old age playing correspondence chess, translating a few of the classics. I thought I could take for granted the continued respect of my neighbors. I say my word is good.

  I will remember again the middle of March a few years ago, the snow skimming out of an afternoon sky as dry as the bottom of an old aluminum pot. Harp Ryder’s back road had been plowed since the last snowfall; I supposed Bolt-Bucket could make the mile and a half in to his farm and out again before we got caught. Harp had asked me to get him a book if I was making a trip to Boston, any goddamn book that told about Eskimos, and I had one for him, De Poncins’ Kabloona. I saw the midget devils of white running crazy down a huge slope of wind, and recalled hearing at the Darkfield News Bureau, otherwise Cleve’s General Store, somebody mentioning a forecast of the worst blizzard in forty years. Joe Cleve, who won’t permit a radio in the store because it pesters his ulcers, inquired of his Grand Inquisitor who dwells ten yards behind your right shoulder: “Why’s it always got to be the worst in so-and-so many years, that going to help anybody?” The Bureau was still analyzing this difficult inquiry when I left, with my cigarettes and as much as I could remember of Adelaide’s grocery list after leaving it on the dining table. It wasn’t yet three when I turned in on Harp’s back road, and a gust slammed at Bolt-Bucket like death with a shovel.

  I tried to win momentum for the rise to the high ground, swerved to avoid an idiot rabbit and hit instead a patch of snow-hidden melt-and-freeze, skidding to a full stop from which nothing would extract us but a tow.

  I was fifty-seven that year, my wind bad from too much smoking and my heart (I now know) no stronger than Sam’s. I quit cursing—gradually, to avoid sudden actions—and tucked Kabloona under my parka. I would walk the remaining mile to Ryder’s, stay just long enough to leave the book, say hello, and phone for a tow; then, since Harp never owned a car and never would, I could walk back and meet the truck.

  If Leda Ryder knew how to drive, it didn’t matter much after she married Harp. They farmed it, back in there, in almost the manner of Harp’s ancestors in Jefferson’s time. Harp did keep his two hundred laying hens by methods that were considered modern before the poor wretches got condemned to batteries, but his other enterprises came closer to antiquity. In his big kitchen garden he let one small patch of weeds fool themselves for an inch or two, so he’d have it to work at: they survived nowhere else. A few cows, a team, four acres for market crops, and a small dog, Droopy, whose grandmother had made it somehow with a dachshund. Droopy’s only menace in obese old age was a wheezing bark. The Ryders must have grown nearly all vital necessities except chewing tobacco and once in a while a new dress for Leda. Harp could snub the twentieth century, and I doubt if Leda was consulted about it in spite of his obsessive devotion for her. She was almost thirty years younger and yes, he should not have married her. Other side up just as scratchy: she should not have married him, but she did.

  Harp was a dinosaur perhaps, but I grew up with him, he a year the younger. We swam, fished, helled around together. And when I returned to Darkfield growing old, he was one of the few who acted glad to see me, so far as you can trust what you read in a face like a granite promontory. Maybe twice a week Harp Ryder smiled.

  I pushed on up the ridge, and noticed a going-and-coming set of wide tire tracks already blurred with snow. That would be the egg truck I had passed a quarter-hour since on the main road. Whenever the west wind at my back lulled, I could swing around and enjoy one of my favorite prospects of birch and hemlock lowland. From Ryder’s Ridge there’s no sign of Darkfield two miles southwest except one church spire. On clear days you glimpse Bald Mountain and his two big brothers, more than twenty miles west of us.

  The snow was thickening. It brought relief and pleasure to see the black shingles of Harp’s barn and the roof of his Cape Codder. Foreshortened, so that it looked snug against the barn; actually house and barn were connected by a two-story shed fifteen feet wide and forty feet long—woodshed below, hen loft above. The Ryders’ sunrise-facing bedroom window was set only three feet above the eaves of that shed roof. They truly went to bed with the chickens. I shouted, for Harp was about to close the big shed door. He held it for me. I ran, and the storm ran after me. The west wind was bouncing off the barn; eddies howled at us. The temperature had tumbled ten degrees since I left Darkfield. The thermometer by the shed door read fifteen degrees, and I knew I’d been a damn fool. As I helped Harp fight the shed door closed, I thought I heard Leda, crying.

  A swift confused impression. The wind was exploring new ranges of passion,
the big door squawked, and Harp was asking: “Ca’ break down?” I do still think I heard Leda wail. If so, it ended as we got the door latched and Harp drew a newly fitted two-by-four bar across it. I couldn’t understand that: the old latch was surely proof against any wind short of a hurricane.

  “Bolt-Bucket never breaks down. Ought to get one, Harp—lots of company. All she did was go in the ditch.”

  “You might see her again come spring.” His hens were scratching overhead, not yet scared by the storm. Harp’s eyes were small gray glitters of trouble. “Ben, you figure a man’s getting old at fifty-six?”

  “No.” My bones (getting old) ached for the warmth of his kitchen-dining-living-everything room, not for sad philosophy. “Use your phone, okay?”

  “If the wires ain’t down,” he said, not moving, a man beaten on by other storms. “Them loafers didn’t cut none of the overhand branches all summer. I told ’em of course, I told ’em how it would be. . .I meant, Ben, old enough to get dumb fancies?” My face may have told him I thought he was brooding about himself with a young wife. He frowned, annoyed that I hadn’t taken his meaning. “I meant, seeing things. Things that can’t be so, but—”

  “We can all do some of that at any age, Harp.”

  That remark was a stupid brush-off, a stone for bread, because I was cold, impatient, wanted in. Harp had always a tense one-way sensitivity. His face chilled. “Well, come in, warm up. Leda ain’t feeling too good. Getting a cold or something.”

  When she came downstairs and made me welcome, her eyes were reddened. I don’t think the wind made that noise. Droopy waddled from her basket behind the stove to snuff my feet and give me my usual low passing mark.

  Leda never had it easy there, young and passionate with scant mental resources. She was twenty-eight that year, looking tall because she carried her firm body handsomely. Some of the sullenness in her big mouth and lucid gray eyes was sexual challenge, some pure discontent. I liked Leda; her nature was not one for animosity or meanness. Before her marriage the Darkfield News Bureau used to declare with its customary scrupulous fairness that Leda had been covered by every goddamn thing in pants within thirty miles. For once the Bureau may have spoken a grain of truth in the malice, for Leda did have the smoldering power that draws men without word or gesture. After her abrupt marriage to Harp—Sam told me all this: I wasn’t living in Darkfield then and hadn’t met her—the garbage-gossip went hastily underground: enraging Harp Ryder was never healthy.