Its teeth ringed a blood-colored maw which looked full of strange guts and tumors. It seemed to be laughing at him.
[“Who are you? Are you the Crimson King?”
[That’s Ed’s name for me-we ought to have our own, don’t you think? Lets see. If you don’t want me to be Mom Roberts, why not call me the Kingfish? You remember the Kingfish from the radio, don’t you?] Yes, of course he did… but the real Kingfish had never been on Amos in’ Andy, and it hadn’t really been a kingfish at all. The real Kingfish had been a queenfish, and it had lived in the Barrens.
On a summer’s day during the year when Ralph Roberts was seven, He had hooked an enormous catfish out of the Kenduskeag while fishing with his brother, John-this had been when it was still possible to eat what you caught down in the Barrens. Ralph had asked his older brother to take the convulsively flopping thing off his hook for him and put it in the bucket of fresh water they kept on the bank beside them. Johnny had refused, loftily citing what he called the Fisherman’s Creed: good fishermen tie their own flies, dig thef’r own worms, and unhook their own catches. It was only later that Ralph realized Johnny might have been trying to hide his own fear of the huge and somehow alien creature his kid brother had reeled out of the Kenduskeag’s muddy, piss-warm water that day.
Ralph had at last brought himself to grasp the catfish’s pulsing body, which was at the same time slick, scaly, and prickly. As he did, Johnny had added to his terror by telling him, in a low and ominous voice, to look out for the whiskers. They’re poison, Bobb,lo Therriault told me if one of em sticks ya, you could get paralyse in Spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair. So be careful, Ralphie.
Ralph had twisted the creature this way and that, trying to free the hook from its dark, wet innards without getting his hand too near its whiskers (not believing Johnny about the poison and at the same time believing him completely), exquisitely aware of the gills, the eyes, the fishy smell that seemed to shimmer its way more deeply into his lungs each time he inhaled.
At last he’d heard a gristly ripping from deep within the catfish and felt the hook start to slide free. Fresh streamlets of blood trickled from the corners of its flexing, dying mouth. Ralph gave a little sigh of relief-prematurely, as it turned out. The catfish gave a tremendous flap of its tail as the hook came out. The hand Ralph had been using to free it slipped, and all at once the catfish’s bleeding mouth clamped shut on his first two fingers. How much pain had there been? A lot? Some? Maybe none at all? Ralph couldn’t remember.
What he did remember was Johnny’s completely unfeigned shriek of horror and his own surety that the catfish was going to make him pay for taking its life by eating two fingers off his right hand.
He remembered screaming himself, and shaking his hand, and begging Johnny to help him, but Johnny had been backing away, his face pale, his mouth a knotted line of revulsion. Ralph shook his hand in big, swooping arcs, but the cat hung on like death, whiskers (Poison whiskers put me in a wheelchair for the rest of my life) snapping and flapping against Ralph’s wrist, black eyes staring.
At last he’d struck it against a nearby tree, breaking its back.
It had dropped to the grass, still flopping, and Ralph had stamped on it with one foot, provoking the final horror. A spew of guts vomited from its mouth, and from the place where Ralph’s heel had smashed it open had come a gluey torrent of bloody eggs. That was when he had realized that the Kingfish had really been the Queenfish, and only a day or two from roeing.
Ralph had stared from this freakish mess to his own bloody, scaleencrusted hand, and then howled like a banshee. When Johnny touched his arm in an effort to calm him, Ralph had bolted. He hadn’t stopped running until he got home, and he’d refused to come out of his room for the rest of the day. It had been almost a year before he’d eaten another piece of fish, and he’d never had anything to do with catfish again.
Until now, that was.
[“Ralph!”] That was Lois’s voice… but distant! So distant!
[“You have to do something right away! Don’t let it stop you."’] Ralph now realized that what he’d taken for an afghan in his mother’s lap was actually a mat of bloody eggs in the lap of the Crimson King.
It was leaning toward him over this throbbing blanket, its thick lips quivering in a parody of concern.
[Something wrong, Ralphzie? Where does it hurt? Tell Mother.] [“You’re not my mother.”] [No-I be the Queenfish! I be loud and I be proud! I got the walk and I got the talk.” Actually, I can be whatever I want. You may not know it, but shape-changing is a time-honored custom in Derry.] [“Do you know the green man Lois saw?”] [Of course!
I know all the neighborhoodfolks!] But Ralph sensed momentary puzzlement on that scaly face.
The heat along his forearm cranked up another notch, and Ralph had a sudden realization: if Lois were here now, she would hardly be able to see him. The Queenfish was putting out a pulsing, everbrightening glow, and it was gradually surrounding film, The glow was red instead of black, but it was still a deathbag, and now he knew what it was like to be on the inside, caught in a web woven from your sickest fears and most traumatic experiences. There was no way to retreat from it, and no way to cut through it, as he had cut through the deathbag which had surrounded Ed’s wedding ring.
If I’m going to escape, Ralph thought, I’m going to have to do it by running forward so hard and fast I rip right out the other side.
The earring was still in his hand. Now he shifted it so that the naked prong at the back was sticking out between the two fingers a catfish had tried to swallow sixty-three years ago. Then he said a brief prayer, not to God but to Lois’s green man.
The catfish leaned farther forward, a cartoon leer spreading across its noseless face. The teeth inside that flabby grin looked longer and sharper now. Ralph saw drops of colorless fluid heading the ends of the whiskers and thought, Poison. Spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair. Man, I’m so scared. Scared to fucking death.
Lois, screaming far away: [“Hurry, Ralph! You HAVE To HURRY!”] A little boy was screaming from somewhere a lot closer; screaming and waving his right hand, waving the fish clinging to the fingers buried inside the gullet of a pregnant monster that would not let go.
The catfish leaned closer yet. The dress it wore rustled. Ralph could smell his mother’s perfume, Saint Elena, mixing obscenely with the fishy, garbagey aroma of bottom-feeder.
[I intend Ed Deepneau’s errand to end in success, Ralph; I intend that the boy your friends told you about should die in his mother’s arms, and I want to see it happen. I’ve worked very hard here in Derry, and I don’t feel that’s too much to ask, but it means I have to finish with you right now.]-Ralph took a step deeper into the thing’s garbagey stink. And now he began to see a shape behind the shape of Mother, behind the shape of the Queenfish. He began to see a bright man, a red man with cold eyes and a merciless mouth. This man resembled the Christ he had seen only moments ago… but not the one which had re"Illy hung in his mother’s kitchen corner.
An expression of surprise came into the lidless black eyes of the Queenfish… and into the cold eyes of the red man beneath.
[What do you think you’re doing? Get away from me! Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair?] [“I can think of worse things, pal-my days of playing first base are pretty definitely over.”] The voice rose, becoming the voice of his mother when she was angry.
[Pay attention to me, boy! Pay attention and mind me!] For a moment the old commands, given in a voice so eerily like his mother’s, made him hesitate. Then he came on again. The Queenfish shrank back in the rocker, its tail flipping up and down below the hem of the old housedress.