Black Gondolier and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

great desert conventions; beautiful Gloria Lee listening raptly to her man on Jupiter—there is no end to them.
    So when Daloway began to rehearse to me his fearful suspicions, or beliefs rather, about oil’s black ghosts—or acolytes, or agents, or budded-off black ameboid humanoid creatures, or whatever they exactly might be—I was uneasily sympathetic to the idea if not consciously credulous. Good Lord, if there could be such things as ghosts, it would be easy to imagine them in Venice—ghosts of the Channel Indians and those whom the Indians called “the Ancient Ones,” ghosts of Cabrillo’s men when he discovered this coast in 1592 before he died on windswept forbidden San Miguel, westernmost of the Santa Barbara Islands; ghosts from the harsh theocratic Mission days and the lawless Mexican years that followed, ghosts of the Spanish and Yankee Dons, ghosts of gold-seekers and vigilantes, anarchists and strike-breakers, and ghosts of the gamblers and gondoliers and the other folk from the illusion-packed years. Especially now that the illusions are edging back again: in the swampy south end of Venice they’ve just built a great marina or small-boat harbor, with fingers of sea interlocking fingers of low-lying land and with all sorts of facilities for luxurious dockside apartments and homes—if the buyers materialize and if they fully subdue the strange tidal waves which first troubled the marina. There is even talk of linking the marina to the old canal system and cleaning that up and filling it all year round and perhaps bringing back the gondolas. Though at the same time, by a cackling irony, a battle goes on in the courts as to whether or not industry may be licensed to drill for offshore oil, setting up its derricks in the shallows off the Pacific, just beyond the breakers that beat against the beaches of Venice—Wells’ Martians submerged to their chests in waves. In our modern world, illusion and greed generally walk hand in hand.
    So it was by no means with complete skepticism about his wild theory of black buried oil and its creatures that I listened to Daloway’s accounts of his dreams of the Black Gondola, or rather his dream, since it was always basically the same, with minor variations. I will tell it one time in his words, as he most fully told it, remembering too how I heard it—in his cramped trailer, late at night, perhaps just after the passing of the wailing drunken guitarist, no other sound but the faint distant rattle of the breaking waves and the slow throb of the oil pump a few yards beyond the thin metal wall with the small half-curtained window in it, the edges of my mind crawling with thoughts of the black preternatural creatures that might be on watch outside that same wall and pressing even closer.
    â€œI’m always sitting in the Black Gondola when the dream begins,” Daloway said. “I’m facing the prow and my hands grip the gunwales to either side. Apparently I’ve just left the trailer and got aboard her, though I never remember that part, for we’re in the canal outside, which is full to the top of its banks, and we’re headed down the middle of it toward the Grand Canyon. There’s oil on my clothes, I can feel it, but I don’t know how it got there.
    â€œIt’s night, of course, dark night. The street lights are all out. There’s just enough glow in the sky to silhouette the houses. No light shows in any of their windows, only the glimmer coming between them—a glimmer no brighter than the phosphorescence that paints the breakers some summer nights when the sewage breeds too big an algae crop and there’s a fish-kill. Yet the glimmer and glow are enough to show the tiny ripples angling out from the gondola’s prow as we move along.
    â€œIt’s a conventional gondola, narrow and with a high prow, but it’s black—sooty black—no highlights reflect from it. You