"No scientist on this earth ever had a chance like that before, and I was making the best of it.
I found out all there was to be found before I collapsed over my laboratory table and had to be taken to the hospital.
"Of course long before that I had told them the thing wasn"t an ape. There was vaguely anthropoid structure, all right; and the blood corpuscles were almost human quite shockingly so. But the head and the spade-like appendages and the muscular development were quite unlike any beast or man on this earth. Indeed, the thing had never been on this earth! There was no doubt of that! It would have died above ground in half a minute, just like an angleworm in the sun.
"And I"m afraid my report to the authorities didn"t help them much. After all, even a fellow scientist would have found it a bit difficult to reconcile my cla.s.sification of "some sort of giant, carrion-feeding, subterranean mole" with my ravings about "canine and simian developments of members" and my absurd insistence on "startlingly humanoid cranial development, and brain convolutions indicating a degree of intelligence that"
"Well, there"s no use going into all that now! I firmly expected them to order me up before a Sanity Commission when I reported my findings. Instead, they offered me a position as head of the "Special Subway Detail," at a salary that was, to say the least, fantastic. It was more a month than I"d been getting a year from the museum.
"Because, you see, they"d deduced much of the stuff for themselves without needing me to tell them! They had facts they"d deliberately withheld from me, not wanting to influence my report. They knew that that train had been deliberately derailed the mutilated track proved that beyond all doubt. No less than three ties had been taken up and laid some distance away down the tunnel. And the condition of the earth about the wrecked cars showed conclusively that extensive mining and sapping had taken place there it was like a gigantic mole-hill, only worse. And while I"d been a.n.a.lyzing stomach fluids and body tissue to try to find out what my subject fed upon, they"d been burying, secretly and with most elaborate precautions, the half-dessicated corpses of half a dozen men and women and children who well, they hadn"t died in the wreck, old boy! They hadn"t died in the wreck, any more than had that screaming thing that hid its eyes from the lights when they found it pinned in the wreckage where it had been caught while trying to drag a dead victim out G.o.d! What a hideous shambles that place must have been before the wrecking-crews got there.
"Mercifully, of course, there was total darkness. The poor devils who were merely injured never knew what charnel horrors were going on in the Stygian depths about them nor cared, no doubt, in their agony! A few of them gibbered afterward about green eyes, and claws that raked their faces but of course all that was set down to delirium! Even one man who had his arm chewed half off never knew surgeons amputated the rest immediately and told him when he regained consciousness that he"d lost it in the wreck. He"s still walking the streets today, blissfully ignorant of what almost happened to him that night.
"Oh, you"d be surprised, old boy, how you can hush a thing up if you"ve got a whole city administration behind you! And believe me, we did hush matters up. No newspaper reporter was ever allowed to see the wreck freedom of the press or no freedom of the press! The Government wanted to appoint a commission to investigate we squelched it! And by the time the crews had cleaned out the smashed train and removed the last victim, the Special Subway Detail had gone into action. And it"s been on steady duty ever since for the last twenty-odd years!
"We had a terrible time at first, of course. All these modern improvements weren"t available then. All we had were lanterns and guns and hand-cars with which to patrol nearly five miles of tunnel. It was Mrs. Partington sweeping back the sea all over again only worse. A handful of puny mortals against h.e.l.l itself, in the eternal darkness of these long gloomy tunnels far below the city.
"There were no more wrecks after we took over, though; I"ll say that much. Oh, an accident or two. How could we prevent them? We did everything we could think of! How we worked in those early years! Once we sank a shaft fifty feet deep in the earth, where we"d seen queer disturbances beside the train-tracks and heard queerer sounds. And once we blocked up both ends of the tunnel for a mile stretch and filled it with poison gas. And once we dynamited but why go on? It was all useless, utterly useless. We just couldn"t get to grips with anything tangible. Oh, we"d hear sounds sometimes on our long dismal patrols in the darkness; our little lanterns mere pin-p.r.i.c.ks of light in these vast old concrete vaults. We"d catch glimpses of glinting eyes far off, find fresh earth piled up where only a moment before there"d been hard-packed cinders and gravel. Once in a while we"d fire our guns at something whitish and half seen, but there"d be only a t.i.ttering laugh in answer a laugh as mirthless and savage as that of a hyena, dying away in the earth...
"A thousand times I was tempted to chuck the whole thing, to get back above ground to sunshine and sanity and forget the charnel horrors of this mad Nyarlathotep-world far underneath. And then I"d get to thinking of all those helpless men and women and children riding the trains unsuspecting through the haunted dark, with Evil out of the primeval dawn burrowing beneath them for their destruction, and well, I just couldn"t go, that"s all. I stayed and did my duty, as the rest did, year after year. It"s been a strange career for a man of science, and certainly one I never dreamed I"d be following during all the years I prepared myself for museum work. And yet I flatter myself that it"s been rather a socially useful career at that; perhaps more so than stuffing animals for dusty museum cases, or writing monstrous textbooks that no one ever bothers to read. For I"ve a science of my own down here, you know: the science of keeping millions of dollars worth of subway tunnels swept clean of horror, and of safeguarding the lives of half the population of the world"s largest city.
"And then, too, I"ve opportunities for research here which most of my colleagues above ground would give their right arms for, the opportunity to study an absolutely unknown form of life; a grotesquerie so monstrous that even after all these years of contact with it I sometimes doubt my own senses even now, although the horror is authentic enough, if you come right down to it. It"s been attested in every country in the world, and by every people. Why, even the Bible has references to the "ghouls that burrow in the earth", and even today in modern Persia they hunt down with dogs and guns, like beasts, strange tomb-dwelling creatures neither quite human nor quite beast; and in Syria and Palestine and parts of Russia...
"But as for this particular place well, you"d be surprised how many records we"ve found, how many actual evidences of the Things we"ve uncovered from Manhattan Island"s earliest history, even before the white men settled here. Ask the curator of the Aborigines Museum out on Riverside Drive about the burial customs of Island Indians a thousand years ago customs perfectly inexplicable unless you take into consideration what they were guarding against. And ask him to show you that skull, half human and half canine, that came out of an Indian mound as far away as Albany, and those ceremonial robes of aboriginal shamans plainly traced with drawings of whitish spidery Things burrowing through conventionalized tunnels; and doing other things, too, that show the Indian artists must have known Them and Their habits. Oh yes, it"s all down there in black and white, once we had the sense to read it!
"And even after white men came what about the early writings of the old Dutch settlers, what about Jan Van der Rhees and Woulter Van Twiller? Even some of Washington Irving"s writings have a nasty twist to them, if you once realize it! And there are some mighty queer pa.s.sages in "The History of the City of New York" mention of guard patrols kept for no rational purpose in early streets at night, particularly in the region of cemeteries; of forays and excursions in the lightless dark, and flintlocks popping, and graves hastily dug and filled in before dawn woke the city to life...
"And then the modern writers Lord! There"s a whole library of them on the subject. One of them, a great student of the subject, had almost as much data on Them from his reading as I"d gleaned from my years of study down here. Oh, yes; I learned a lot from Lovecraft and he got a lot from me, too! That"s where the well, what you might call the authenticity came from in some of his yarns that attracted the most attention! Oh, of course he had to soft-pedal the strongest parts of it just as you"re going to have to do if you ever mention this in your own writings! But even with the worst played down, there"s still enough horror and nightmare in it to blast a man"s soul, if he lets himself think on what goes on down there, below the blessed sanity of the earth"s mercifully concealing crust. Far below...
"We"ve figured out we who"ve been studying Them all this time, that They must have been pretty numerous once. No wonder the Indians sold this place so cheaply! You"d sell your home cheaply, too, if it were fairly overrun with monstrous noxious vermin that but with civilization"s coming they were decimated, killed off, pogromed against, blasted with fire and steel by men whose utter ruthlessness sprang from soul-shuddering detestation, who slew and kept silent about their slaying, lest their fellowmen think them mad until finally the blasted remnant of the Things went far underground, burrowed down like worms to charnel depths that well, we daren"t conjecture just where, but we think that there"s some fault in the basic bedrock of the Island, some monstrous cavern whose edge this lowest of all the subway tunnels taps, and which lets them through somehow into the tubes...
"Oh, it took us a long time to find all that out. At first we thought we had to patrol the whole subway system of the city! We had guards even out under the river, and over in Brooklyn and Queens. We were even afraid they"d get into upper levels of the tunnels, perhaps into the very deserted streets of Manhattan during the pre-dawn hours. We had half the police department down here in those days, even the mounted force. Yes, indeed; though G.o.d knows what even a trained police horse would do if it ever came face to face with one of those things! But horses were faster than the hand-cars we used then, and could cover more territory.
"But as time went on we got things pretty well localized. It"s only in this one stretch of tunnel that the danger is, and only here in certain hours of the night. Don"t ask me why they never come up in daylight; for it"s always night down here, you know, hundreds of feet below the surface. Maybe it"s the constant pa.s.sage of the trains they shuttle by at two-minute intervals all day long, you know, and until the Broadway theatres close at night. Only for about four hours of the night is there a lull when long miles of tunnel are lifeless and deserted and silent, when anything could come and go at will in them and not be seen.
"And so it"s only during these hours that we really worry, you see. It"s only now that we"re vigilant and ready. Although of course it"s no longer warfare, you understand. We hunt them now, they don"t hunt us any more! We run them down howling with terror, kill them or capture them as we will oh yes, I said capture! A half-dozen times we"ve had a sort of mad "Bronx Zoo" of our own down here or perhaps it would be more accurate to say a living "Madame Tussaud"s Chamber of Horrors." I have cages in my laboratory, and there have been times when it seemed judicious for influential people above ground to well, to realize just how important is the work we"re doing down here! So when we have a really stubborn skeptic to our program we"d take him in there, hand him a flashlight and let him train it himself on what was prisoned there in total darkness and then we"d stand by to catch him as he fainted! Oh, a lot of city officials and politicians have been down here. Why not? They couldn"t possibly speak of the experience afterward they"d just be locked up as lunatics if they did! And it made them much more liberal about funds. Our menagerie was a great success, only we just couldn"t keep it going for very long at a time! We"d get so soul-sick at the very proximity of the creatures that we"d have to kill them finally. There was just no putting up with them for any length of time!
"Oh, it"s not so much the appearance of the Things, or even what they eat we got an unlimited supply of that from the city morgue; and to anyone who"s spent half his life in dissecting-rooms, as I have, it might be a lot worse. But there"s a sort of cosmic horror the Things exude that well, it"s quite beyond description. You just can"t breathe the same air with them, live together in the same sane world! And in the end we"d have to gun them and throw them back underground to their friends and neighbors who were waiting for them, apparently. At least we"ve opened the shallow graves a few days later and there"d be only a gnawed bone or two there....
"And then, of course, we kept them alive in order to study their habits. I"ve filled two volumes with notes for my successors who"ll carry on the fight when I"m gone oh, yes, old boy! It"ll always have to be carried on, I fear! There"s no possibility of ever really wiping them out, you know. All we can do is hold our own. The fight will go on so long as this particular tunnel is occupied. And can"t you just see the City Fathers consenting to abandon twenty million dollars" worth of subway tunnels for nothing? "I"m sorry, gentlemen; but, you see, the place is infested with" G.o.d! What a laughing stock anyone would be who even suggested that above ground! Why, even on our own furloughs, when we walk sunlit streets among our fellow men, with G.o.d"s own blue sky above and G.o.d"s own clean air about us even we wonder whether all this foulness isn"t just a bad dream! It"s hard, up there, to realize what can go on down in the crepuscular earth, the mad gnawing eternal darkness far below h.e.l.lo!"
The telephone was ringing.
Somehow I didn"t listen as he spoke briefly into it, perhaps because I was listening to something else to a faint crackling from that great blackboard on the wall, where one little light (no glowing worm this time, but only one minute spark) kept flicking oddly on and off and on again. "79th Street" it marked, over and over. "79th Street 79th"
My friend hung up the phone at length, and stood up. "Queer," he said softly. "Very queer indeed! The first in months; and tonight, now, while we were talking. It makes one wonder, you know about those supernatural telepathic powers that they"re said to have..."
Something went past in the tunnel outside, something that moved so fast that I could scarcely make it out; just a little low platform on four wheels, with no visible engine to propel it. Yet it scudded along with the speed of a racing car. Uniformed men rode the bucking thing, crouching with glinting objects in their hands.
"Riot Car Number 1!" my friend said, grimly. "Our own version of the "squad automobiles" above ground. Just one of the little electric hand-cars used in subway construction but "souped up" by our engineers until it"ll do nearly eighty miles an hour. It could traverse the entire sector in less than five minutes, if it had to. But it doesn"t, of course. Another one, also with machine-gunners aboard, left 105th Street at the same time. They"ll meet somewhere along the tunnel"s length with the er, disturbance in between. Let"s listen to them!"
He crossed the room to the strange apparatus, threw switches and adjusted dials. There was a burring and crackling from what looked like an old-fashioned radio amplifier that stood on one of the cabinets.
"Microphones every hundred feet along the tunnel!" said my friend. "Another small fortune to install, of course; but another great step forward in our efficiency. A man listens all night long at a switchboard and you"d be surprised to know what he hears sometimes! We have to change operators pretty often. Ah! there we are. Microphone Number 290 approximately a thousand feet below one of the busiest corners, even at this hour of the night, in all a great metropolis. And listen! Hear that?"
"That" was a sound that brought me out of my chair, a strange high t.i.ttering, blasphemously off key, that merged into a growl and a moan...
"There we are!" my friend grated. "One of them, certainly perhaps more than one. Hear that scratching, and the rustle of the gravel? All unsuspecting, of course, that they"re broadcasting their presence; unaware that we modern human beings have got ourselves a few "supernatural" powers of our own, nowadays; and unaware that, from both directions, death is sweeping down upon them on truckling wheels. But a little moment more and ah! hear that shriek? That howling? That means they"ve sighted one of the cars! They"re fleeing madly along the tunnel now the voices get fainter. And now yes! Now they double back. The other car! They"re trapped, caught between them. No time to dig, to burrow down into their saving Mother Earth like the vermin they are. No, no, you devils! We"ve got you! Got you! Hear "em yell, hear "em shriek in agony! That"s the lights, you know. Blazing searchlights trained on dark-accustomed bodies; burning, searing, withering them like actual blazing heat! And now "Brrr-rat-tat-tat!" That"s our machine-guns going into action silenced guns, with Maxims on them so that the echoes won"t carry to upper levels and make men ask questions but throwing slugs of lead, for all that, into cringing white bodies and flattened white skulls...Shriek! Shriek, you beasts from h.e.l.l! Shriek, you monsters from the charnel depths! Shriek on, and see what good it does you. You"re dead! Dead! DEAD Well, you blasted fool, what are you staring at?"
To save my life I couldn"t have answered him. I couldn"t look away from his blazing eyes, from his body crouched as if he would spring at me across the room, from his teeth bared in a b.e.s.t.i.a.l snarl...
For a long moment that tableau held. Then suddenly he dropped into a chair, flung his hands up over his face. I stood regarding him, my mind sickly ticking off details. G.o.d! Why had I not seen them before. That lengthening of jaw, that flattening of forehead and cranium no human head could be shaped like that!
At last he spoke, not looking up. "I know!" he said softly. "I"ve felt the change coming on me for a long time now. It"s coming over all of us, bit by bit, but on me the worst, for I"ve been here the longest. That"s why I almost never go above ground any more, even on leave. The lights are dim down here. But I wouldn"t dare let even you see my face in sunlight!
"Twenty-five years, you see twenty-five long dragging years down here in h.e.l.l itself. It was bound to leave a mark, of course. I was prepared for that. But, oh, Great Powers above! If I"d for one instant dreamed what it was to be! Worse, oh, how much worse than any mark of the beast!...
"And it"s spiritual, you know, as well as physical. I get...cravings, sometimes, down here in the night"s loneliness; thought and charnel desires that would blast your very soul if I were to whisper them to you. And they"ll get worse, I know, and worse until at last I run mad in the tunnel like that poor devil I told you about and my men shoot me down like a dog as they already have orders to do if "And yet the thing interests me, I"ll admit; it interests me scientifically, even though it horrifies my very soul, even though it d.a.m.ns me for ever. For it shows how They may have come about must have come about, in fact, in the world"s dim dawn; perhaps never quite human, of course, perhaps never Neanderthal or even Piltdown; something even lower, closer linked to the primeval beast, but that when driven underground, into caves and then beneath them by Man"s coming, retrograded century by uncounted century down to the worm-haunted darkness just as we poor devils are retrograding down here from very contact with them until at last none of us will ever be able again to walk above in the blessed sunlit air among our fellow men"
With a roar and a howl the thing was upon us, out of total darkness. Instinctively I drew back as its headlights pa.s.sed; every object in the little room rattled from the reverberation. Then the power-car was by, and there was only the "klackety-klack, klackety-klack" of wheels and lighted windows flicking by like bits of film on a badly connected projection machine.
"The Four-Fifteen Express," he said heavily, "from the Bronx. Safe and sound, you"ll notice, its occupants all unsuspecting of how they were safeguarded; of how they"ll always be safeguarded...but at what a cost! At what an awful cost!
"The Four-Fifteen Express. That means it"s dawn, you know, in the city overhead. Rays of the rising sun are gilding the white skysc.r.a.pers of Manhattan; a whole great city begins to wake to morning life.
"But there"s no dawn for us down here, of course. There"ll never be a dawn for poor lost souls down here in the eternal dark, far, far below..."
Smoke Ghost.
Fritz Leiber.
Fritz Leiber (19101992) was an influential, award-winning American writer of fantasy, horror and science fiction. H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Graves, and Carl Jung all helped inspire his fiction. Although perhaps best-known for the swords-and-sorcery Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, Leiber also wrote several sui generis macabre novels and stories. Our Lady of Darkness (1977) is among the best-known of his horror novels and, like much of his later fiction, includes autobiography by way of his real-life struggles with depression and alcoholism. Along with such novels, stories like "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" (1949) and the cla.s.sic reprinted here, "Smoke Ghost" (1941), made Leiber a key forerunner of the urban weird of writers like Ramsey Campbell.
Miss Millick wondered just what had happened to Mr. Wran. He kept making the strangest remarks when she took dictation. Just this morning he had quickly turned around and asked, "Have you ever seen a ghost, Miss Millick?" And she had t.i.ttered nervously and replied, "When I was a girl there was a thing in white that used to come out of the closet in the attic bedroom when I slept there, and moan. Of course it was just my imagination. I was frightened of lots of things." And he had said, "I don"t mean that kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories on its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost. Not something out of books." And she hadn"t known what to say.
He"d never been like this before. Of course he might be joking, but it didn"t sound that way. Vaguely Miss Millick wondered whether he mightn"t be seeking some sort of sympathy from her. Of course, Mr. Wran was married and had a little child, but that didn"t prevent her from having daydreams. The daydreams were not very exciting, still they helped fill up her mind. But now he was asking her another of those unprecedented questions.
"Have you ever thought what a ghost of our times would look like, Miss Millick? Just picture it. A smoky composite face with the hungry anxiety of the unemployed, the neurotic restlessness of the person without purpose, the jerky tension of the high-pressure metropolitan worker, the uneasy resentment of the striker, the callous opportunism of the scab, the aggressive whine of the panhandler, the inhibited terror of the bombed civilian, and a thousand other twisted emotional patterns. Each one overlying and yet blending with the other, like a pile of semi-transparent masks?"
Miss Millick gave a little self-conscious shiver and said, "That would be terrible. What an awful thing to think of."
She peered furtively across the desk. Was he going crazy? She remembered having heard that there had been something impressively abnormal about Mr. Wran"s childhood, but she couldn"t recall what it was. If only she could do something laugh at his mood or ask him what was really wrong. She shifted the extra pencils in her left hand and mechanically traced over some of the shorthand curlicues in her notebook.
"Yet, that"s just what such a ghost or vitalized projection would look like, Miss Millick," he continued, smiling in a tight way. "It would grow out of the real world. It would reflect all the tangled, sordid, vicious, things. All the loose ends. And it would be very grimy. I don"t think it would seem white or wispy or favour graveyards. It wouldn"t moan. But it would mutter unintelligibly, and twitch at your sleeve. Like a sick, surly ape. What would such a thing want from a person, Miss Millick? Sacrifice? Worship? Or just fear? What could you do to stop it from troubling you?"
Miss Millick giggled nervously. There was an expression beyond her powers of definition in Mr. Wran"s ordinary, flat-cheeked, thirtyish face, silhouetted against the dusty window. He turned away and stared out into the grey downtown atmosphere that rolled in from the railroad yards and the mills. When he spoke again his voice sounded far away.
"Of course, being immaterial, it couldn"t hurt you physically at first. You"d have to be peculiarly sensitive even to see it, or be aware of it at all. But it would begin to influence your actions. Make you do this. Stop you from doing that. Although only a projection, it would gradually get its hooks into the world of things as they are. Might even get control of suitably vacuous minds. Then it could hurt whomever it wanted."
Miss Millick squirmed and read back her shorthand, like the books said you should do when there was a pause. She became aware of the failing light and wished Mr. Wran would ask her to turn on the overhead. She felt scratchy, as if soot were sifting down on to her skin.
"It"s a rotten world, Miss Millick," said Mr. Wran, talking at the window. "Fit for another morbid growth of superst.i.tion. It"s time the ghosts, or whatever you call them, took over and began a rule of fear. They"d be no worse than men."
"But" Miss Millick"s diaphragm jerked, making her t.i.tter inanely "of course there aren"t any such things as ghosts."
Mr. Wran turned around.
"Of course there aren"t, Miss Millick," he said in a loud, patronizing voice, as if she had been doing the talking rather than he. "Science and common sense and psychiatry all go to prove it."
She hung her head and might even have blushed if she hadn"t felt so all at sea. Her leg muscles twitched, making her stand up, although she hadn"t intended to. She aimlessly rubbed her hand back and forth along the edge of the desk.
"Why, Mr. Wran, look what I got off your desk," she said, showing him a heavy smudge. There was a note of clumsily playful reproof in her voice. "No wonder the copy I bring you always gets so black. Somebody ought to talk to those scrubwomen. They"re skimping on your room."
She wished he would make some normal joking reply. But instead he drew back and his face hardened.
"Well, to get back to that business of the second cla.s.s mailing privileges," he rapped out harshly, and began to dictate.
When she was gone he jumped up, dabbed his finger experimentally at the smudged part of the desk, frowned worriedly at the almost inky smears. He jerked open a drawer, s.n.a.t.c.hed out a rag, hastily swabbed off the desk, crumpled the rag into a ball and tossed it back. There were three or four other rags in the drawer, each impregnated with soot.
Then he strode over to the window and peered out anxiously through the gathering dusk, his eyes searching the panorama of roofs, fixing on each chimney and water tank.
"It"s a neurosis. Must be compulsions. Hallucinations," he muttered to himself in a tired, distraught voice that would have made Miss Millick gasp. "It"s that d.a.m.ned mental abnormality cropping up in a new form. Can"t be any other explanation. But it"s so d.a.m.ned real. Even the soot. Good thing I"m seeing the psychiatrist. I don"t think I could force myself to get on the elevated tonight" His voice trailed off, he rubbed his eyes, and his memory automatically started to grind.
It had all begun on the elevated. There was a particular little sea of roofs he had grown into the habit of glancing at just as the packed car carrying him homeward lurched around a turn. A dingy, melancholy little world of tar-paper, tarred gravel, and smoky brick. Rusty tin chimneys with odd conical hats suggested abandoned listening posts. There was a washed-out advertis.e.m.e.nt of some ancient patent medicine on the nearest wall. Superficially it was like ten thousand other drab city roofs. But he always saw it around dusk, either in the smoky half-light, or tinged with red by the flat rays of a dirty sunset, or covered by ghostly wind-blown white sheets of rain-splash, or patched with blackish snow; and it seemed unusually bleak and suggestive, almost beautifully ugly, though in no sense picturesque; dreary, but meaningful. Unconsciously it came to symbolize for Catesby Wran certain disagreeable aspects of the frustrated, frightened century in which he lived, the jangled century of hate and heavy industry and total wars. The quick, daily glance into the half darkness became an integral part of his life. Oddly, he never saw it in the morning, for it was then his habit to sit on the other side of the car, his head buried in the paper.
One evening toward winter he noticed what seemed to be a shapeless black sack lying on the third roof from the tracks. He did not think about it. It merely registered as an addition to the well-known scene and his memory stored away the impression for further reference. Next evening, however, he decided he had been mistaken in one detail. The object was a roof nearer than he had thought. Its colour and texture, and the grimy stains around it, suggested that it was filled with coal dust, which was hardly reasonable. Then, too, the following evening it seemed to have been blown against a rusty ventilator by the wind which could hardly have happened if it were at all heavy. Perhaps it was filled with leaves. Catesby was surprised to find himself antic.i.p.ating his next daily glance with a minor note of apprehension. There was something unwholesome in the posture of the thing that stuck in his mind a bulge in the sacking that suggested a misshapen head peering around the ventilator. And his apprehension was justified, for that evening the thing was on the nearest roof, though on the farther side, looking as if it had just flopped down over the low brick parapet.
Next evening the sack was gone. Catesby was annoyed at the momentary feeling of relief that went through him, because the whole matter seemed too unimportant to warrant feelings of any sort. What difference did it make if his imagination had played tricks on him, and he"d fancied that the object was crawling and hitching itself slowly closer across the roofs? That was the way any normal imagination worked. He deliberately chose to disregard the fact that there were reasons for thinking his imagination was by no means a normal one. As he walked home from the elevated, however, he found himself wondering whether the sack was really gone. He seemed to recall a vague, smudgy trail leading across the gravel to the nearer side of the roof, which was marked by a parapet. For an instant an unpleasant picture formed in his mind that of an inky humped creature crouched behind the parapet, waiting. Then he dismissed the whole subject.
The next time he felt the familiar grating lurch of the car, he caught himself trying not to look out. That angered him. He turned his head quickly. When he turned it back his compact face was definitely pale. There had only been time for a fleeting rearward glance at the escaping roof. Had he actually seen in silhouette the upper part of a head of some sort peering over the parapet? Nonsense, he told himself. And even if he had seen something, there were a thousand explanations which did not involve the supernatural or even true hallucination. Tomorrow he would take a good look and clear up the whole matter. If necessary, he would visit the roof personally, though he hardly knew where to find it and disliked in any case the idea of pampering a silly fear.
He did not relish the walk home from the elevated that evening, and visions of the thing disturbed his dreams and were in and out of his mind all next day at the office. It was then that he first began to relieve his nerves by making jokingly serious remarks about the supernatural to Miss Millick, who seemed properly mystified. It was on the same day, too, that he became aware of a growing antipathy to grime and soot. Everything he touched seemed gritty, and he found himself mopping and wiping at his desk like an old lady with a morbid fear of germs. He reasoned that there was no real change in his office, and that he"d just now become sensitive to the dirt that had always been there, but there was no denying an increasing nervousness. Long before the car reached the curve, he was straining his eyes through the murky twilight, determined to take in every detail.
Afterward he realized that he must have given a m.u.f.fled cry of some sort, for the man beside him looked at him curiously, and the woman ahead gave him an unfavorable stare. Conscious of his own pallor and uncontrollable trembling, he stared back at them hungrily, trying to regain the feeling of security he had completely lost. They were the usual rea.s.suringly wooden-faced people everyone rides home with on the elevated. But suppose he had pointed out to one of them what he had seen that sodden, distorted face of sacking and coal dust, that boneless paw which waved back and forth, unmistakably in his direction, as if reminding him of a future appointment he involuntarily shut his eyes tight. His thoughts were racing ahead to tomorrow evening. He pictured this same windowed oblong of light and packed humanity surging around the curve then an opaque monstrous form leaping out from the roof in a parabolic swoop an unmentionable face pressed close against the window, smearing it with wet coal dust huge paws fumbling sloppily at the gla.s.s.
Somehow he managed to turn off his wife"s anxious inquiries. Next morning he reached a decision and made an appointment for that evening with a psychiatrist a friend had told him about. It cost him a considerable effort, for Catesby had a well-grounded distaste for anything dealing with psychological abnormality. Visiting a psychiatrist meant raking up an episode in his past which he had never fully described even to his wife. Once he had made the decision, however, he felt considerably relieved. The psychiatrist, he told himself, would clear everything up. He could almost fancy him saying, "Merely a bad case of nerves. However, you must consult the occulist whose name I"m writing down for you, and you must take two of these pills in water every four hours," and so on. It was almost comforting, and made the coming revelation he would have to make seem less painful.
But as the smoky dust rolled in, his nervousness returned and he let his joking mystification of Miss Millick run away with him until he realized that he wasn"t frightening anyone but himself.
He would have to keep his imagination under better control, he told himself, as he continued to peer out restlessly at the ma.s.sive, murky shapes of the downtown office buildings. Why, he had spent the whole afternoon building up a kind of neo-medieval cosmology of superst.i.tion. It wouldn"t do. He realized then that he had been standing at the window much longer than he"d thought, for the gla.s.s panel in the door was dark and there was no noise coming from the outer office. Miss Millick and the rest must have gone home.
It was then he made the discovery that there would have been no special reason for dreading the swing around the curve that night. It was, as it happened, a horrible discovery. For, on the shadowed roof across the street and four stories below, he saw the thing huddle and roll across the gravel and, after one upward look of recognition, merge into the blackness beneath the water tank.
As he hurriedly collected his things and made for the elevator, fighting the panicky impulse to run, he began to think of hallucination and mild psychosis as very desirable conditions. For better or for worse, he pinned all his hopes on the psychiatrist.
"So you find yourself growing nervous and...er...jumpy, as you put it," said Dr. Trevethick, smiling with dignified geniality. "Do you notice any more definite physical symptoms? Pain? Headache? Indigestion?"
Catesby shook his head and wet his lips. "I"m especially nervous while riding in the elevated," he murmured swiftly.
"I see. We"ll discuss that more fully. But I"d like you first to tell me something you mentioned earlier. You said there was something about your childhood that might predispose you to nervous ailments. As you know, the early years are critical ones in the development of an individual"s behaviour pattern."
Catesby studied the yellow reflections of frosted globes in the dark surface of the desk. The palm of his left hand aimlessly rubbed the thick nap of the armchair. After a while he raised his head and looked straight into the doctor"s small brown eyes.
"From perhaps my third to my ninth year," he began choosing the words with care, "I was what you might call a sensory prodigy."
The doctor"s expression did not change. "Yes?" he inquired politely.
"What I mean is that I was supposed to be able to see through walls, read letters through envelopes and books through their covers, fence and play ping-pong blindfolded, find things that were buried, read thoughts." The words tumbled out.
"And could you?" The doctor"s expression was toneless.
"I don"t know. I don"t suppose so," answered Catesby, long-lost emotions flooding back into his voice. "It"s all confused now. I thought I could, but then they were always encouraging me. My mother...was...well...interested in psychic phenomena. I was...exhibited. I seem to remember seeing things other people couldn"t. As if most opaque objects were transparent. But I was very young. I didn"t have any scientific criteria for judgment."
He was reliving it now. The darkened rooms. The earnest a.s.semblages of gawking, prying adults. Himself sitting alone on a little platform, lost in a straight-backed wooden chair. The black silk handkerchief over his eyes. His mother"s coaxing, insistent questions. The whispers. The gasps. His own hate of the whole business, mixed with hunger for the adulation of adults. Then the scientists from the university, the experiments, the big test. The reality of those memories engulfed him and momentarily made him forget the reason why he was disclosing them to a stranger.
"Do I understand that your mother tried to make use of you as a medium for communicating with the...er...other world?"
Catesby nodded eagerly.
"She tried to, but she couldn"t. When it came to getting in touch with the dead, I was a complete failure. All I could do or thought I could do was see real, existing, three-dimensional objects beyond the vision of normal people. Objects anyone could have seen except for distance, obstruction, or darkness. It was always a disappointment to mother."
He could hear her sweetish patient voice saying, "Try again, dear, just this once. Katie was your aunt. She loved you. Try to hear what she"s saying." And he had answered, "I can see a woman in a blue dress standing on the other side of d.i.c.k"s house." And she replied, "Yes, I know, dear. But that"s not Katie. Katie"s a spirit. Try again. Just this once, dear." The doctor"s voice gently jarred him back into the softly gleaming office.
"You mentioned scientific criteria for judgment, Mr. Wran. As far as you know, did anyone ever try to apply them to you?"
Catesby"s nod was emphatic.
"They did. When I was eight, two young psychologists from the university got interested in me. I guess they did it for a joke at first, and I remember being very determined to show them I amounted to something. Even now I seem to recall how the note of polite superiority and amused sarcasm drained out of their voices. I suppose they decided at first that it was very clever trickery, but somehow they persuaded mother to let them try me out under controlled conditions. There were lots of tests that seemed very businesslike after mother"s slipshod little exhibitions. They found I was clairvoyant or so they thought. I got worked up and on edge. They were going to demonstrate my super-normal sensory powers to the university psychology faculty. For the first time I began to worry about whether I"d come through. Perhaps they kept me going at too hard a pace, I don"t know. At any rate, when the test came, I couldn"t do a thing. Everything became opaque. I got desperate and made things up out of my imagination. I lied. In the end I failed utterly, and I believe the two young psychologists got into a lot of hot water as a result."
He could hear the brusque, bearded man saying, "You"ve been taken in by a child, Flaxman, a mere child. I"m greatly disturbed. You"ve put yourself on the same plane as common charlatans. Gentlemen, I ask you to banish from your minds this whole sorry episode. It must never be referred to." He winced at the recollection of his feeling of guilt. But at the same time he was beginning to feel exhilarated and almost light-hearted. Unburdening his long-repressed memories had altered his whole viewpoint. The episodes on the elevated began to take on what seemed their proper proportions as merely the bizarre workings of overwrought nerves and an overly suggestible mind. The doctor, he antic.i.p.ated confidently, would disentangle the obscure subconscious causes, whatever they might be. And the whole business would be finished off quickly, just as his childhood experience which was beginning to seem a little ridiculous now had been finished off.
"From that day on," he continued, "I never exhibited a trace of my supposed powers. My mother was frantic and tried to sue the university. I had something like a nervous breakdown. Then the divorce was granted, and my father got custody of me. He did his best to make me forget it. We went on long outdoor vacations and did a lot of athletics, a.s.sociated with normal, matter-of-fact people. I went to business college eventually. I"m in advertising now. But," Catesby paused, "now that I"m having nervous symptoms, I"ve wondered if there mightn"t be a connection. It"s not a question of whether I really was clairvoyant or not. Very likely my mother taught me a lot of unconscious deceptions, good enough to fool even young psychology instructors. But don"t you think it may have some important bearing on my present condition?"
For several moments the doctor regarded him with a slightly embarra.s.sing professional frown. Then he said quietly, "And is there some...er...more specific connection between your experiences then and now? Do you by any chance find that you are once again beginning to...er...see things?"
Catesby swallowed. He had felt an increasing eagerness to unburden himself of his fears, but it was not easy to make a beginning, and the doctor"s shrewd question rattled him. He forced himself to concentrate. The thing he thought he had seen on the roof loomed up before his inner eye with unexpected vividness. Yet it did not frighten him.
He groped for words.
Then he saw that the doctor was not looking at him but over his shoulder. Color was draining out of the doctor"s face and his eyes did not seem so small. Then the doctor sprang to his feet, walked past Catesby, threw open the window and peered into the darkness.
As Catesby rose, the doctor slammed down the window and said in a voice whose smoothness was marred by a slight, persistent gasping, "I hope I haven"t alarmed you. I must have frightened him, for he seems to have gotten out of sight in a hurry. Don"t give it another thought. Doctors are frequently bothered by voyeurs...er...Peeping Toms."