The short story is included in the anthology, Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature. Highly recommended.

The episode is also one of the most intense and exquisitely written passages in the book. The liquid cool sado-masochist Dominique gets a brief glimpse of hell, and looking up at her is an unyielding man like none she has ever met:

Because the sun was too hot, that morning, and she knew it would be hotter at the granite quarry, because she wanted to see no one and knew she would face a gang of workers, Dominique walked to the quarry. The thought of seeing it on that blazing day was revolting; she enjoyed the prospect.

 

When she came out of the woods to the edge of the great stone bowl, she felt as if she were thrust into an execution chamber filled with scalding steam. The heat did not come. from the sun, but from that broken cut in the earth, from the reflectors of flat ridges. Her shoulders, her head, her back, exposed to the sky, seemed cool while she felt the hot breath of the stone rising up her legs to her chin, to her nostrils. The air shimmered below, sparks of fire shot through the granite; she thought the stone was stirring, melting, running in white trickles of lava. Drills and hammers cracked the still weight of the air. It was obscene to see men on the shelves of the furnace. They did not look like workers, they looked like a chain gang serving an unspeakable sentence for some unspeakable crime. She could not turn away.

 

She stood, as an insult to the place below. Her dress—the color of water, a pale green-blue, too simple and expensive., its pleats exact like edges of glass—her thin heels planted wide apart on the boulders, the smooth helmet of her hair, the exaggerated fragility of her body against the sky—flaunted the fastidious coolness of the gardens and drawing rooms from which she came.

 

She looked down. Her eyes stopped on the orange hair of man who raised his head and looked at her.

 

She stood very still, because her first perception was not of sight, but of touch: the consciousness, not of a visual presence, but of a slap in the face. She held one hand awkwardly away from her body, the fingers spread wide in the air, as against a wall. She knew that she could not move until he permitted her to.

 

She saw his mouth and the silent contempt in the shape of his mouth; the planes of his gaunt hollow cheeks; the cold, pure brilliance of the eyes that had no trace of pity. She knew it was the most beautiful face she would ever see, because it was the abstraction of strength made visible. She felt a convulsion of an­ger, of protest, of resistance—and of pleasure. He stood looking up at her; it was not a glance, but an act of ownership. She thought she must let her face give him the answer he deserved. But she was looking instead, at the stone dust on his burned arms, the wet shirt clinging to his ribs, the lines of his long legs. She was thinking of those statues of men she had always sought; she was wondering what he would look like naked. She saw him looking at her as if he knew that. She thought she had found an aim in life—a sudden, sweeping hatred for that man.

 

So if we ever find ourselves in consultation with a cosmetic surgeon and they ask what kind of face we want, we’ll ask for that “abstraction of strength made visible” one. Yah. 

We’ll just note also that the previous post about Domesday Book was the 100th for the InfinityBound site. We have around 14 posts in draft status so we will make a resolution to clear some out. Real soon now.

This Money Quote was going to be part of the next post you’ll see, but that one became a little longer than anticipated and differently themed. You’ll see why if you read it. Anyway, since I had reason to pull a famous quote….

Here’s the dripping-with-irony funeral speech from Act 3, Scene II of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

ANTONY
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

As with nearly all westerns, sort through the horses and the shoot-outs and the unavoidable genre cheesiness you’ll find some tense drama and some fine writing. This one was somewhat ahead of its time in 1959, with a racial edge. Marshall Morgan’s Indian wife is raped and killed by two men on a lonely road. Their son witnesses and rides home on one of the horses, which has a distinctive saddle. Morgan knows who the saddle belongs to, his old friend Belden, who he hasn’t seen in years. He goes to Gun Hill and finds out one of the killers is Belden’s son. He’s wants to bring him in but the father will not allow it. Morgan manages to subdue Rick, the son, and is “holed up” with him handcuffed to a bed in the local hotel, which is surrounded by the elder Belden’s hired men. The younger Belden sneers at Morgan, tells him he’ll never get out alive and then claims he had no way to know it was his wife he’d killed, that she was just a “damn squaw.” An enraged Morgan chokes him near to death, then stops himself.

Belden mocks him again: “Don’t take no guts to kill a man when he’s cuffed.”

And Morgan replies:

“Takes guts not to. Be too easy on ya. You die too quick. I know an old man who’d like to kill you, Belden. The Indian way. Slow. That’s how I’m going to do it. Slow. The white man’s way. First you stand trial. That takes a fair amount of time and you’ll do a lot of sweatin’. Then they’ll sentence ya. I never seen a man who didn’t get sick to his stomach when he heard the kind of sentence you’ll draw. After that you’ll sit in a cell and wait. Maybe for months, thinking how that rope’ll feel around your neck. Then they’ll come around some cold morning, just before sun-up. They’ll tie your arms behind you. You’ll start blubbering, kicking, yelling for help. Won’t do you any good. And then drag y’out in the yard, heave y’up on that platform, fix that rope around your neck and leave y’out there all alone with a big black hood over your eyes. You know the last sound you hear? Kind of a thump when they kick the trapdoor catch and down you go. You’ll hit the end of that rope like a sack o’ potatoes, all dead weight. It’ll be white hot around your neck and your Adam’s Apple will turn to mush. You’ll fight for your breath, but you haven’t got any breath. Your brain will begin to boil. You’ll scream and holler. But nobody’ll hear you. You’ll hear it. But nobody else. Finally you’re just swingin there’. All alone and dead.”

Margaret: In any State that was half good. you would be raised up high, not here [in the dungeon,] for what you’ve done already. It’s not your fault the State’s three-quarters bad. Then if you elect to suffer for it, you elect yourself a hero.

More: That’s very neat. But look now…If we lived in a state where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we’d live like animals in the happy land that needs no heroes. But in fact we see the avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility , chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all…why then perhaps we must stand fast a little — even at the risk of being heroes.