by Gahan Wilson
And Suzy Brenner's left off dreamily trying to tie her doll's bonnet over her cat's head (much to the cat's relief) and is desperately digging into her plastic, polka-dot purse to see if there's enough change in there to buy her a cup of banana ice cream with chocolate sprinkles. Oh, she can taste the sweetness of it! Oh, her throat can feel its coolness going down!
And you, you've forgotten all about blowing through a leaf to see if you can make it squeak the way you saw Arnold Carter's older brother do it; now you're clawing feverishly with your small hands in both pockets, feeling your way past that sandy shell you found yesterday on the beach, and that little ball chewed bounceless by your dog, and that funny rock you came across in the vacant lot which may, with luck, be full of uranium and highly radioactive, and so far you have come up with two pennies and a quarter and you think you've just touched a nickel.
Meantime Mister Ice Cold's truck is rolling ever closer— clingy di-ding, dingy di-ding—and Martin Walpole, always a show-off, wipes his brow, points, and calls out proudly*. "I see it! There it is!"
And, sure enough, there it is, rolling smoothly around the corner of Main and Lincoln, and you can see the shiny, fat fullness of its white roof gleaming in the bright sun through the thick, juicy-green foliage of the trees which have, in the peak of their summer swelling, achieved a tropical density and richness more appropriate to some Amazonian jungle than to midwestern Lakeside, and you push aside one last, forgotten tangle of knotted string in your pocket and your heart swells for joy because you've come across another quarter and that means you've got enough for an orange icicle on a stick which will freeze your fillings and chill your gut and stain your tongue that gorgeous, glowing copper color which never fails to terrify your sister!
Now Mister Ice Cold's truck has swept into full view and its dingy di-ding sounds out loud and clear and sprightly enough, even in this steaming, muggy air, to startle a sparrow and make it swerve in its flight.
Rusty Taylor's dog barks for a signal and all of you come running quick as you can from every direction, coins clutched in your sweaty fingers and squeezed tightly as possible in your damp, small palms, and every one of you is licking your lips and staring at the bright blue lettering painted in frozen ice cubes and spelling out mister ice cold over the truck's sides and front and back, and Mister Ice Cold himself gives a sweeping wave of his big, pale hand to everyone from behind his wheel and brings his vehicle and all the wonders it contains to a slow, majestic halt with the skill and style of a commodore docking an ocean liner.
"A strawberry rocket!'' cries fat Harold Smith, who has got there way ahead of everyone as usual, and Mister Ice Cold flips open one of the six small doors set into the left side of the truck with a click and plucks out Harold's rocket and gives it to him and takes the money, and before you know it he has smoothly glided to the right top door of the four doors at the truck's back and opened it, click, and Mandy Carter's holding her frozen maple tree and licking it and handing her money over all at the same time, and now Mister Ice Cold is opening one of the six small doors on the right side of the truck, click, and Eddy Morse has bitten the point off the top of his bright red cinnamon crunchy munch and is completely happy.
Then your heart's desire is plucked with a neat click from the top middle drawer on the truck's right side, which has always been its place for as long as you can remember, and you've put your money into Mister Ice Cold's large, pale, always cool palm, and as you step back to lick your orange icicle and to feel its coolness trickle down your throat, once again you find yourself admiring the sheer athletic smoothness of Mister Ice Cold's movements as he glides and dips, spins and turns, bows and rises, going from one small door, click, to another, click, with never a stumble, click, never a pause, click, his huge body leaving a coolness in the wake of his passing, and you wish you moved that smoothly when you ran back over the gravel of the playground with your hands stretched up, hoping for a catch, but you know you don't.
Everything's so familiar and comforting: the slow quieting of the other children getting what they want, your tongue growing ever more chill as you reduce yet another orange icicle, lick by lick, down to its flat stick, and the heavy, hot, summer air pressing down on top of it all.
But this time it's just a little different than it ever was before because, without meaning to, without having the slightest intention of doing it, you've noticed something you never noticed before.
Mister Ice Cold never opens the bottom right door in the back of the truck.
He opens all the rest of them, absolutely every one, and you see him doing it now as new children arrive and call out what they want. Click, click, click, he opens them one after the other, producing frozen banana bars and cherry twirls and all the other special favorites, each one always from its particular, predictable door.
But his big, cool hand always glides past that one door set into the truck's back, the one on the bottom row, the one to the far right. And you realize now, with a funny little thrill, that you have never—not in all the years since your big brother Fred first took you by the hand and gave Mister Ice Cold the money for your orange icicle because you were so small you couldn't even count—you have never ever seen that door open.
And now you've licked the whole orange icicle away, and your tongue's moving over and over the rough wood of the stick without feeling it at all, and you can't stop staring at that door, and you know, deep in the pit of your stomach, that you have to open it.
You watch Mister Ice Cold carefully now, counting out to yourself how long it takes him to move from the doors farthest forward back to the rear of the truck, and because your mind is racing very, very quickly, you soon see that two orders in a row will keep him up front just long enough for you to open the door which is never opened, the door which you are now standing close enough to touch, just enough time to take a quick peek and close it shut before he knows.
Then Betty Deane calls out for a snow maiden right on top of Mike Howard's asking for a pecan pot, and you know those are both far up front on the right-hand side.
Mister Ice Cold glides by you close enough for the cool breeze coming from his passing to raise little goose bumps on your arms. Without pausing, without giving yourself a chance for any more thought, you reach out.
Click!
Your heart freezes hard as anything inside the truck. There, inside the square opening, cold and bleached and glistening, are two tidy stacks of small hands, small as yours, their fingertips reaching out toward you and the sunlight, their thin, dead young arms reaching out behind them, back into the darkness. Poking over the top two hands, growing out of something round and shiny and far back and horribly still, are two stiff golden braids of hair with pretty frozen bows tied onto their ends.
But you have stared too long in horror and the door is closed, click, and almost entirely covered by Mister Ice Cold's hand, which now seems enormous, and he's bent down over you with his huge, smiling face so near to yours you can feel the coolness of it in the summer heat.
"Not that door," he says, very softly, and his small, neat, even teeth shine like chips from an iceberg, and because of his closeness now you know that even his breath is icy cold. "Those in there are not for you. Those in there are for me."
Then he's standing up again and moving smoothly from door to door, click, click, click, and none of the other children saw inside, and none of them will really believe you when you tell them, though their eyes will go wide and they'll love the story, and not a one of them saw the promise for you in Mister Ice Cold's eyes.
But you did, didn't you? And some night, after the end of summer, when it's cool and you don't want it any cooler, you'll be lying in your bed all alone and you'll hear Mister Ice Cold's
pretty little song coming closer and closer through the night, through the dead, withered autumn leaves.
Dingy di-ding, dingy di-ding . . .
Then, later on, you just may hear the first dick.
But you'll never hear the
second click.
None of them ever do.
Traps
Lester adjusted his brand new cap with rose brothers exterminators stitched in bright scarlet on its front and stared gloomily down at the last of the traps and poisons he had set the week before.
"It's just like I told you it would be, Lester Bailey," hissed Miss Dinwittie. "They're too smart for you is what it is!"
Lester winced away from Miss Dinwittie's fierce, wrinkled frown and considered the trap the Rose Brothers Exterminators people had given him to lay on the floor of her basement.
It was a very impressive machine. When you touched the bait it slapped shut sharp serrated jaws, which not only prevented your going elsewhere but insured your bleeding to death as you lingered. If you were a rat, that is. A man would probably only lose a finger.
This time, in spite of the bait being removed, the trap remained unsprung. Impossibly, its shiny teeth continued to
gape wide around the tiny platform which they were supposed to have infallibly guarded. Lester shook his large, rather square head, in mortification.
It was not bad enough that the trap had been gulled. The bait, which had been carefully poisoned, was uneaten. It lay demurely five inches from the trap. Outside of one light tooth-mark, evidence of the gentlest and most tentative of tastes, it was spurned and virginal.
"I ain't never seen nothing like it, Miss Dinwittie,'' admitted Lester with a sign.
"That's quite obvious from the expression on your face," she piped. "All this folderol you've put around hasn't done a thing except stir them up!''
She snorted and kicked at the trap with one high-button shoe. The mechanism described a small parabola, snapped ineffectually at the apogee, and fell with a tinny clatter.
Lester was not surprised by this contemptuous action of Miss Dinwittie. Miss Dinwittie was customarily contemptuous for the simple reason that she felt she had every right to be. Her father had been a remarkably greedy man, and by the time he'd died had managed to pretty well own the small town he'd settled in, and Miss Dinwittie had not let go a foot of it. The children believed she was a witch.
"They get brighter every day,'' she snapped. "And now you've gone and got them really mad!"
She looked around the gloom of the basement, moving her small, gray head in quick, darting movements.
"Listen!"
Lester stood beside her in the musty air and did as he was told. After a time he could make out nasty little noises all around. Shufflings and scratchings and tiny draggings. He peered at the ancient tubes and pipes running along the walls and snaking under the beams and flooring.
"They're just snickering at you, Lester Bailey," said Miss Dinwittie.
She sniffed and marched up the basement steps with Lester dutifully following, looking up at her thin, sexless behind. When they reached the kitchen she made him sit on one of the rickety chairs, which were arranged around the oilcloth-covered table, and poured him some bitter coffee. He drank it without complaint. He had no wish to further offend Miss Dinwittie.
She prowled briefly around the room and then surprised him by suddenly sitting by his side and leaning closely toward him in a conspiratorial manner. She smelled dry and sour.
"They've got together!” she whispered.
She clutched her bony hands on the shiny white oilcloth. Lester could hear the air rustling in the passages of her nose. She frowned and her eyes shone with a dark revelation.
"They've got together," she said again. "It used to be you could pick them off, one by one. It was each rat for himself. But now it's not the same."
She leaned even closer to him. She actually poked a thin finger into his chest.
"Now they've organized!"
Lester studied her carefully. The people at Rose Brothers Exterminators had in no way prepared him for this sort of thing. Miss Dinwittie sat back and crossed her arms in a satisfied way. She smiled grimly and nodded to herself.
"Organized," she said again, quietly.
Lester fumbled uncertainly over the limited information he had at his disposal concerning the handling of the violently insane. There was not much, but he did recall it was very important to humor them. You've got to humor them or they'll go for the ax or the bread knife.
"They're like an army," said Miss Dinwittie, leaning forward again, too self-absorbed to notice Lester's reflex leaning away. "I believe they have officers and everything. I know they've got scouts!"
She looked at him expectantly. Lester's reaction, a blank, wide-eyed look, irritated her.
"Well?" she snapped. "Aren't you going to ask me how I know?"
"About what, Miss Dinwittie?"
"Ask me how I know they've got scouts, you silly boob!"
"How do you come to know that, Miss Dinwittie?"
She stood and, beckoning Lester to follow, crossed the cold linoleum floor. When he reached her side at a particularly dark corner of the kitchen, she pointed to the base of the wall. Lester squinted. He believed he could make out something on the molding. He squatted down to have a better look at it. Scrawled clumsily on the cracked paint with what seemed to be a grease pencil was a tiny arrow and a cross and a squiggle that looked like it came from a miniature alphabet.
"It's some kind of instruction, isn't it?" hissed Miss Dinwittie. "It's put there to guide the other&n
Lester stood, unobtrusively. It had suddenly occurred to him that the old woman could have crowned him easily with a pan as he'd hunkered down at her feet. She glared at the weird little marks and snarled faintly.
"They're all over the house," she said. "In the closets, on the stairs, inside cabinets—everywhere!"
Suddenly her mood changed and, giving a small, vindictive laugh, she once again poked Lester in the chest.
"Gives them clean away, doesn't it?" she asked. "And there's something else! I'll go up and bring it down and you take it over to those silly fools who hired you, so they'll see what they're dealing with and give me some service for my money!"
Putting a thin finger to her lips, she backed out of the room. Smiling, she closed the door.
Lester stared after her and then a sudden hissing behind him made him wheel to see coffee boiling from its pot onto the stove. He turned off the burner, frightened at the way his heart was thumping in his chest. He wished to God he could have a cigarette, but he knew Miss Dinwittie didn't hold with smoking or anything else along those lines.
He could hear the rats. He decided he had never seen such a house for rats in all his life. One of them was making scuttling noises in the wall before him so he thumped the wall, but the rat just scuttled right along, behind the dead flowers printed on the paper, paying him no mind. Lester sighed and sat down in one of the inhospitable chairs.
Another rat started scratching over at the wall where those funny marks were, and then another in some other part, and then a third and then a fourth. Lester began to estimate how many rats there might be in the old house and then decided maybe that wasn't such a good idea, his being alone in this gloomy kitchen and all.
He wiped the back of his hand against his lips and wished again for a cigarette. He stood and went to the hall door and opened it, looking up at the narrow staircase leading to the second floor. The carpeting on the stairs and floor was a smudgy brown.
He went back into the kitchen and took out his cigarettes and lit one. To hell with Miss Dinwittie, anyways. Besides, he’d hear her coming and snuff it out. He bet those steps creaked something awful.
If you could hear them over the sound of the rats, that is. They'd gotten louder, he could swear to it. He let the smoke drift out of his mouth and listened carefully. They said-you could hear better if your mouth was open. He pressed his ear to the ugly floral paper and then drew back in fright when the sound of them instantly spread away from where he'd touched the wall. He ground the cigarette out on the sole of his shoe and dropped it in a box of garbage by the sink. He went to the hall again and called out, "Miss Dinwittie?"
H
e gaped up into the darkness of the second floor. Had something moved up there?
"Miss Dinwittie? You all right?"
He shuffled his feet on the dusty carpet. It looked a little like rat skin itself, come to think of it. Was something rustling up there?
"Miss Dinwittie? I'm coming up!"
That would get a rise out of the old bitch if anything would. She wouldn't tolerate folks like him coming where they hadn't been asked.
But there was no objection of any kind, so he rubbed his nose and began, slowly, to climb the stairs. The bannister was repulsively smooth and slick. Like a rat's tail, he thought.
"Miss Dinwittie?"
It was dark as hell up here. He took the flashlight from his belt and turned it this way and that, continuing to call as he peered through old doorways. When he came to her bedroom he was careful to call her name three times before he went in.
On the dresser, between a silver comb and brush, lying right in the center of a dainty antimacassar doily, was the desiccated body of a rat in the convulsions of a violent rigor mortis. Its dried fingers clawed the air and its withered lips pulled back from dully gleaming teeth. It looked furious.
"Shit!" said Lester.
The top of its head had been flattened, perhaps by the heel of one of Miss Dinwitties shoes. Around its waist was tied a bit of gray string, and fixed to one side of this crude belt, by means of a tiny loop, was a small sliver of glass tapered on one end to a vicious point and wrapped about the other with a fragment of electricians tape so as to form a kind of handle. It was an efficient-looking miniature sword.
Why that goddam old bitch's gone right out of her goddamn head, thought Lester; she's dressed that goddamn dead rat up just like a little girl dresses up a doll!
He heard a faint noise in the hall and turned, sweating in the clammy chill of the room. Was she out there waiting for him with a sword of her own? You read all the time in the papers about the awful things crazy people do!