The Cleft, and Other Odd Tales

by Gahan Wilson

  Olson took hold of the top rail of the fence as a man will when he clutches something at the edge of a high precipice to keep from falling.

  "But those godawful stories you write, sir," he said, an audible desperation creeping into his voice, "like that La Traviata where you dreamt up the dead Italian opera star stuffed full of singing worms, or that yarn of yours which still gives me the jimjams every time I think of it, the one where you show that Jack the Ripper was actually Queen Victoria all along, how can anybody who's thought up such stuff as that be put off by a dinky, no-account, bitty old hand?"

  "Since you persist in missing my point, Sheriff Olson," said Bleak exasperatedly, "I suggest we abandon it and move on to a far more important aspect of this situation. It is not only that hand which concerns me. There is more."

  "More?" the Sheriff asked in a dazed tone of voice, clearly floundering. "More?"

  "More," said Bleak. "See where the hand is pointing."

  Sheriff Olson's gape obediently followed the direction indicated by the dead finger as the author had asked him until he saw, lying in the tall grass a little closer to the house, a pale, misshapen lump.

  He climbed over the fence without the least awareness he was doing it and followed Bleak as he walked over to the lump. It was the naked left half of a male corpse, minus its hands and head. Its wrist stump was pointing up the slope toward the house as the hand had done. The Sheriff peered at the thing thoughtfully for a moment and then jumped and wheeled to his rear at the sound of a soft rustle behind him.

  It was Mrs. Bleak, looking pale and distracted. She edged closer to him, wringing her hands almost exactly as Mr. Bleak had done.

  Tm so glad you've come, Sheriff Olson!" she said, speaking with a kind of anxious calm and staring at him with her wide, frightened-looking eyes. "I do so hope you can do something about all these terrible, awful things!"

  Olson opened his mouth to reply but Bleak cut him off.

  "All he has done so far is to advise me not to take them all that seriously," said the author. "Maybe you can convince him we hold a dim view of this sort of thing. He seems altogether very unimpressed with our corpse so far."

  "Then you're just like all the rest of the people here in Commonplace!" she cried, stepping hurriedly back from the Sheriff, a sudden expression of horror on her face.

  "Now, please, Mrs. Bleak, just hear me out—" he began, but Bleak cut him off again.

  "Being an investigator of crime, you might be at least vaguely interested in looking where this part of the body's pointing," he said.

  The Sheriff did and there was yet another pale lump in the grass farther on ahead, and standing by it, hand in hand, were both of the Bleak children, staring at the lawman accusingly.

  "Is he like the others, Mommy?" asked the little girl in a tearful voice which made the Sheriff wince. "Is he going to tease us about killing people? Is he, Mommy?"

  The new lump was the right-hand half of the corpse, and now the Sheriff knew for certain he'd been acquainted with it in life. Like the left half, it had come from a chubby man, probably somewhere in his mid-thirties. Its wrist, too, pointed ahead and this time Olson needed no prompting to look in the direction specified. There, on the top step of the open storm door leading into the basement, pointing downward, was the other hand, and seated next to it, looking at him in an accusatory fashion, just like every other member of the family, was the Bleaks' big, black mastiff.

  "I suppose there's more of it down there," said the Sheriff.

  "There is,'' said Bleak. "One thing more. Shall we go look at it, or do you think it's not all that important and that we should walk off and forget all about it?''

  "Now just hold on,'' said the Sheriff angrily, and then paused to heave a deep sigh, "Let's all just hold on. There's been a misunderstanding here and I admit it's all my fault. I got you folks wrong. It was my business to figure if you would or would not fit in around these parts and I figured wrong. I don't know what I'm going to do about you all, I truly don't, but please understand, no matter what happens, I didn't never mean no harm."

  Bleak stared at him for a long moment, then slowly shook his head.

  "Perhaps, someday, I'll have at least a vague idea what you meant just then, Sheriff,'' he said at last. "But for now, just as a matter of form, let's go look at what's down there in the basement.''

  It was awkward descending the steps in the dark, but the Sheriff had gone down them before, on the last occasion, to supervise the investigation and photography of the place when it had been Wendell's Worper's little embalming room. Here is where the boy had neatly gutted his prey and soaked them in vats of nitron before patting them dry and sewing them up with a stitch he'd learned from studying leather baseball skins. Here is where he dressed them up again in their graveyard clothes, which he'd cleaned and pressed for them, or arrayed them in pretty dresses which he'd bought from department stores in the city for just that purpose.

  The Sheriff paused when he felt the concrete of the basement's floor scuff under his shoes, and at that moment he heard a click behind him as Robert Bleak turned on the lights. There, a yard or two before him, Olson saw a human head sitting on the center of a sterling silver serving platter, resting just where the turkey would ordinarily go. It stared at him open-mouthed and stupidly with its round, blue eyes as it often had in life, but this time it didn't see him, being dead.

  "It's Wilbur," gasped Olson, in astonishment. "It's my deputy, Wilbur! But that can't be because he's the one that called me about this on the damn car radio just a bitty while ago!"

  "That wasn't Wilbur," whispered a voice directly behind him which sounded for all the world like Wilbur himself, only with a bad cold, just like he'd had on the radio. "That was me!"

  The Sheriff turned and his jaw dropped in astonishment both at the sight of the remarkably sinister, bulge-eyed expression playing on Robert Bleak's face and at the enormous chefs knife which he both saw and felt being driven quickly and skillfully through the flesh between his shoulder blades.

  The Sheriff had only fallen halfway to the ground when Mrs. Bleak, wearing an expression as surprisingly diabolic as her husband's, drove a somewhat smaller, but no less effective, knife firmly into the side of his thick neck as she gave a cachinnating laugh.

  The Sheriff had barely thumped onto the concrete when he felt simultaneous sharp pains on either side of his torso as his fading vision dimly made out both the Bleak children eagerly and adroitly inserting even smaller knives between his ribs, and just before sight and all other physical sensations departed him altogether, he became aware that the mastiff had enthusiastically begun to tear at his legs.

  "I was right, goddammit, I was right!" his voice echoed, triumphantly, if only in his skull: "J was right all along about them Bleaks!”

  And the frown line faded completely and entirely and forever from his forehead.

  The Marble Boy

  It was like a huge hole cut into our ordinary world, a great, aching gap sawed right out of the middle of everything that made us and our world seem to make sense, a fatal hollow dug into the very center of the simple, optimistic philosophies our parents were trying to make us live by.

  I did by no means realize at the time that I thought of it in those terms, but I know now that is what all of us, all the children, knew the Lakeside Cemetery to be. It wasn't just a weird place isolated permanently from the day-to-day pretend reality of the grownups; it was an accessible and explorable proof to us, to their young, that even our adults—so huge and powerful, so full of rights and wrongs from the newspapers— were just as fragile and afraid as we were, after all.

  The graveyard spread itself out northward from just this side of the city border for five blocks where it ran into the alley in back of Mulberry Street, and living people in houses, and was temporarily stopped. To the east, it crowded all the way up to the beach drive so that its gray fence and ominous, high gates could remind us of the eventual certainty of our mortality just when we had bob
bed up wet and blinking into the summer air after momentarily convincing ourselves otherwise by holding our breath for a full minute underwater. To the west it was bordered firmly by the train tracks which were the extension of the city's elevated line, now turned suburban and ground bound. If you were up there on the track in order to put pennies on them so that the copper would be squished flat and spread bigger than a half dollar by the wheels of passing trains, you had a fine, panoramic view of the graveyard spread out beneath you like a verdigris carpet splotched with fuzzy brown stains and sprinkled with a multitude of tiny little stones and statues and tombs.

  It was, and is, a fine graveyard, thanks to the prosperity and grief of many Lakesidians from the far and near past, and it boasts as excellent and varied a collection of midwestern funerary art as you could hope to come across. There are any number of elaborate and diverting memorials; rows and rows of mausoleums vie with one another in sustained contests of marble pomposity, and the number of flamboyantly sculptured mourning angels is past counting.

  Of course we, like kids of any generation, were perpetually fascinated with death, and of course we had long since learned that grownups were useless in any consultations on the subject since they seriously disliked talking with their children about even the possibility of dying, and, astonishingly, they never seemed to bring the subject up even among themselves unless one or another of them had recently expired, so we had to satisfy ourselves by quizzing one another on the subject in alleys and other dark places where adults wouldn't hear and disapprove and stop us.

  Why, we earnestly asked one another, do pets expire even when we love them so much? How come the universe permits birds to be flattened into gory, smelly messes by cars, one wing still pointing prettily skyward like a sail? Is it fair that a friend as young as ourselves can sicken and die because he or she caught a bug drinking from a public fountain, or from inhaling the wrong stranger's breath in a movie theater? Does everybody rot the same, or do we all do it differently, and are we in the body when it happens or have we already left it when the eyes melt and fall into the hollow space where the brain was before it shriveled down to the size of a nut? Why does death happen? How can it happen? Mu6t it happen?

  So, if we were in the mood for a particularly adventurous and daring sort of day, a visit to the graveyard was always likely to be suggested, if only to widen everybody's eyes a little, and now and then we actually went ahead and did it.

  Naturally, any expedition to the cemetery was always very heavily draped in secrecy, unannounced and unrecounted to any parent, and we made a great business of carefully avoiding the men who gardened its grounds and dug its graves and patched up its tombs because we had a highly detailed, horrifying body of superstition about what these men would do to us if they caught us, most of it involving, one way or another, fiendish misuse of formaldehyde.

  When we made our plans we never even considered going in either one of the two huge, lacy iron gates because they each had an attached gatehouse with dark little windows for watchmen smelling of embalming fluid to hide behind and peer out of. Our preferred means of entry was a certain part of the graveyard's heavy, chain-link fence which faced the alley to its north and was satisfactorily lined with the backs of grimy garages and intriguingly decorated with tilting garbage cans full of spoiled, smelly things.

  At some time in the ancient past, no one knew when or by what means, this section of the fence had become detached at its base so that it could be lifted up and crawled under and then carefully replaced so that no patrolling gardener or digger or patcher would ever know a child had snuck into their domain and was available for formaldehyde experiments.

  This secret and ancient means of entrance was the one chosen by Andy Hoyle and George Dulane one mild November day when they decided the time had come for another tour of the graveyard with all its tests.

  Andy and George were friends of long standing, and they had visited the graveyard once before that year in a group of five and enjoyed it very much. Today was Andy's twelfth birthday—George had been twelve for three months—and the two of them, after a long and serious discussion, had come to the conclusion that since George had used up sneaking into the school building at night without the superintendent knowing, a graveyard exploration would be a properly scary and solemn way for Andy to mark the occasion.

  They looked carefully up and down the alley and when they were sure that the only living thing in sight was a small dog who was totally preoccupied in trying to tug an interesting bone covered with dried blood out of a box, they pulled firmly at the chain links. Of course the fence held firmly for a moment, as it always held, and Andy and George went through the usual, breath-holding moment before it let go and the two of them knew for certain that the fence's bottom still remained unattached.

  They scuttled under itf pressing their fronts against the cold, leafy ground and, once inside, followed the time-honored tradition of pushing its base back down and burying it under the leaves so that no one would know. Then they scuttled a yard or two into the cemetery and paused by the gnarled, mossy side of a concrete log molded into the corner of a sooty rustic tomb.

  They brushed chilled, damp bits of sod from the knees of their pants, pretended their hearts were not pounding in their chests, and looked at each other and the tall, bare trees and the endless ranks and files of stones and statues and tombs with an almost convincing casualness, and once they'd managed to get their breathing under control they savored the oldness and moldiness in the air and the way the menace of death all around them ran through their veins and arteries.

  Afar off to the east they heard the metal dither of a lawn mower of the old timey, nonpowered variety and began wandering, taking paths which veered from the sound.

  Old friends loomed before them as they walked: the tomb with the stone clock fixed forever at three-thirty over its door, which prompted them once again to speculate whether this signified the exact hour of the occupant's death; the eight-foot-high angel with one missing ear and carved tears running down its pitted, gray cheeks, and, one of their particular favorites, the oddly cheerful skull whose jolly grin still beamed out from under the tilting urn pressed against the back of its cranium.

  The sound of the mower faded and stopped and they angled back to the east, taking the path pointed toward one of the goals especially selected for this day: a particularly sinister-looking mausoleum which you knew contained dead members of a family named Baker, because they had carved that name boldly and deeply across its ornate pediment. The Bakers, or at least the Baker who had commissioned the tomb, had been deeply enamored of rococo ornamentation and the little house of death was so heavily burdened with scrollings and floral fantasies that it looked like the rump of a Spanish galleon turned to stone.

  But it wasn't the gorgeous architectural detail of the Bakers' tomb which drew Andy and George to it; it was the delicious almost-openness of its heavy, rusting, iron door. Thick chains and a huge padlock insured that the door would go no more than ajar, but ajar it was, and you could peer through the opening at the cobwebby dimness beyond and, even better, you could whisper hoarsely into the tomb and hear the sibilant echoes which your voice had raised.

  They glanced at each other and then, because he was the bravest, Andy pressed his body against the door, enjoyed a quick shiver when it gave ever so slightly, and hissed softly into the spooky dark.

  "Hello?" he whispered. "Bakers?"

  George, standing just behind, felt goosebumps popping out all over his arms.

  "Bakers?" Andy persisted relentlessly. "Are there any Bakers lying in there?"

  After a fair pause, Andy turned to George and whispered: "I guess there aren't any Bakers."

  To which George replied on cue: "Or, if there are any Bakers..."

  Then together, in a ghastly wail: ...then they must be dead!"

  And that, as usual, was their signal to turn as one and run off at a full gallop as if pursued by generations of moldering Bakers and not to sto
p running until they were both satisfactorily winded.

  That had been the high point in their last adventure in the graveyard, and in their planning, they had assumed it would be the high point in this one as well, but it turned out not to be so, because thanks to an odd break in the clouds and the sudden appearance of a bold shaft of sunlight, both boys simultaneously spotted a bright glinting among the stones off to their left. Something, they had no idea what, was shining like a huge diamond.

  Without saying a word the two began walking together toward the spot of brilliance. The closer they got to it, the less it became pure radiance and the more it took on solid shape until they saw it was a case of glass mounted on a raised marble casket, and as they came even closer they could make out, through the shining of the glass, a small, standing figure.

  There was a pale marble boy carved full size in the glass case. He had only been eight, you could figure that out by subtracting the dates, and he had been alive a long time ago. His marble clothes were very old-fashioned with many marble buttons on the jacket and knickers, and a fluffy marble bow was tied at his throat.

  The case was sealed with some black substance at the joinings of the glass, but the closure was now far from perfect; the passing of all those years had made the black stuff shrivel, and there were many tiny droplets of water shining on the inside of all its panes.

  The boy's marble hair was curly, and his carved marble eyes stared out with colorless irises and pupils and gave the odd illusion of seeming to be looking directly at the viewer no matter where he stood.

  Andy and George remained silent for a good long while, staring at the marble boy, wondering about him and speculating, each one secretly to himself, about his own mortality.