The Cleft, and Other Odd Tales

by Gahan Wilson

  "Check," said Balden. With some force.

  "Nor did any of our other efforts meet with the slightest success. We tracked down every rumor and followed up each clue, but all to no avail."

  Abstaining from giving it so much as a glance, I moved my king one square to the right.

  "After two full years of fruitless search, the police of a dozen nations were ready to admit defeat. The small army of private investigators which we had hired fared no better. The corpse of Arthur Mannering was conceded lost."

  "Check," said Balden, again.

  "It was at this gloomy moment that I received a midnight telephone call from Mannering's nephew, Charles Addison Vaughn." I blocked Balden's attack with a move of my bishop. "He had a remarkable tale to tell. It seemed that he had wandered into a Forty-second Street sideshow emporium, drawn by a poster advertising an attraction billed as Oscar, the Romanian Robot. Oscar, so the poster claimed, could do lightning calculations, play chess and checkers, recite poetry, and execute pastel portraits of surpassing charm."

  "Check," said Balden, yet again.

  "Imagine Vaughn's astonishment when the curtains of Oscar the Romanian Robot's booth parted to reveal nothing less than the corpse of his uncle, clothed in mandarin attire, seated on a large wooden throne, a chessboard before it and a blackboard at its side. While Vaughn gazed on, appalled, the corpse did indeed do lightning calculations, play chess and checkers, recite several atrocious poems, and essay a number of rather muddy drawings. The jerky movements of the jaw, arms, and torso which accompanied all this were accomplished by means of an intricate system of wires and pulleys connected to an involved, cog-wheeled machine built into the body of the throne.''

  My next move, which I made with my eyes fixed on Balden's, simultaneously captured his attacking piece and placed his king in jeopardy.

  "Check. I joined Vaughn and we both went at once to the Forty-second Street place of entertainment, but we arrived too late. Oscar, the Romanian Robot, had severed his connections with that establishment. The boards of his accustomed booth were bare.''

  For the first time, Balden seemed undecided as to his next move. His hand went here and there over the board, then retreated to scratch nervously at his thick beard.

  "We traced the history of Oscar and found the trail led straight back to Hong Kong. His first appearance had been in an alley theater, an unsavory den presided over by an Arabian midget, Salaman Ruknuddin."

  Balden pushed a piece several squares to the right, then attempted to take the play back. I forestalled him with an upraised palm.

  "No fair changing the move after you let go."

  I captured the piece, smiling thinly.

  "Ruknuddin closed his theater shortly thereafter, and he and Oscar began a meteoric rise in show business. First in the Far East, then in Australia, on to England and Europe, and finally to America. Everywhere they went the audiences flocked to see Oscar's marvelous performance. Then the fatal flaw in the robot was uncovered, and overnight, Oscar turned from a wonder into a laughingstock." .

  "Check," said Balden, a little shakily.

  "Stonewosk, the Polish master, discovered that Oscar was a patsy for the Ethiopian end game." I took Balden's piece. "An absolute sucker for it. No matter how many times you pulled it on him, he'd tumble right into the trap. Shaken badly, his confidence gone, Oscar's other talents coarsened or disintegrated altogether."

  Balden's next move was done with a spastic gesture which very nearly knocked several men from the board.

  "Check," he said, in a voice so faint as to be hardly audible.

  "Oscar's career, and Ruknuddin's, went into a speedy decline and then into total eclipse. The last that was heard of them was their pathetic final stand at the Forty-second Street dive. The Ethiopian end game had pursued them to the end."

  My voice rose.

  "It pursues them even now, Balden," I said, moving my king. "Checkmate!"

  Suddenly the figure sitting opposite me began to twitch and shudder in a remarkable fashion. I stood, reached over the board, and plucked off the false beard worn by my opponent to reveal the face of a tired-looking, certainly dead Arthur Mannering.

  "The game is up, Ruknuddin!" I cried.

  Abruptly the figure stopped its struggling, and as if to compensate, the chair on which it sat began a series of violent movements. After a moment or so a cog-bedecked panel in its side flew open and a tiny figure dashed out, spun, and streaked for the door. The curtains behind me were pulled apart and a group of anxious men rushed into the room.

  "We must stop him!" shouted Charles Vaughn, and he was seconded by the others, but I held them back with a gesture.

  "Let him go," I said, watching the desperate fugitive scuttle out of the apartment. "He is finished. He can do no more harm."

  I saw that the mortician had already begun to restore Mannering to his former seemliness. I was glad to observe that there was no serious damage. The travel agent was also present and he stepped forward, a quantity of folders and timetables in his hand, to look at me expectantly. Mannering's journeyings were, of course, to continue. I suggested a quiet sea voyage for a restful start.

  A Gift of the Gods

  Spring always snuck up on the children in Lakeside. The winters were so convincing and so durable that we eventually forgot about other possibilities, about a chance of change.

  Then, always without warning, there were tender new leaves on the bushes surrounding the apartment buildings; a fresh, clayey smell of earth everywhere; birds picking up broom and mop fragments for making nests; summer vacation becoming an actual possibility; the bravest new flies crawling out from their hiding places along the edges of windows and wandering on the sunny panes—and the children began taking ruminative walks, going places they wouldn't ordinarily go and observing things they would ordinarily ignore.

  It was the time of exploration come again, and the taste and feel of new adventure were everywhere, infusing the world, and none of the implications of any of it was lost on Henry Laird.

  He had been walking, for no conscious reason, along the broad quietness of Harmon Avenue, gazing at the fine old trees and the low hills of the lawns and the looming bulks of the old mansions that lined its sides, when he found he had come to the little park that sat at the end of Main Street and faced the great spread of the lake.

  The park was a small jewel of design, with its gardens gracious even now, before their real blooming; and its budding trees, waiting for their new leaves, stood composed in smooth, stylish curves and dumpings.

  In the center of the park, or, rather, just enough off its center to make its location more interesting, was a small Grecian temple of the open, pillared style. Henry climbed the western steps and stood on the porch like a lost prince come at last to his kingdom.

  The air from the lake wafted as gently over his face as a deliberately loving stroke, so he pulled his wool cap from his head in order to let the breeze caress more of him. He closed his eyes for a long moment and after some time, let them flutter open. At first, he looked about dazedly, enjoying the faint, odd, golden gleam that everything about him had taken on; but then he began to observe his surroundings in some detail, looking around in the manner of one who has returned home after a long and hazardous voyage.

  It was then, for the first time, that he saw the greasy paper sack.

  A thing as ugly as that had no business being in such surroundings. It belonged in a dingy alley next to garbage cans. It was not proper that such an object be in such a place as this.

  Henry advanced to the brown sack and, after a moment's hesitation over its really spectacular filthiness, bent down and picked the thing up with both his hands.

  It was nowhere near as heavy as its bulk seemed to indicate. Although it was jammed full, almost to bursting, it could not weigh a full three pounds. A rich animal reek exuded from the sack, and Henry peeked down into its gaping mouth and saw that it seemed to be stuffed full of grayish-black hair. He would remove the di
sreputable, odious thing.

  But just before he left the park—just before he stepped from its grass to the sidewalk that would lead him back into the twentieth-century maze of concrete and asphalt that made up the basic webbing of this modern world—he became aware of being observed.

  Something, he knew it, something with shiny, dark eyes was watching him, was carefully taking his measure as a hunter does of a rabbit or a lion of a zebra colt; and it was thinking, he could feel it in his own mouth, how Henry Laird would taste if you sunk your teeth into his shoulder until the skin split and the muscles tore and the blood spurted into your maw. And it was enjoying the taste, enjoying it very much.

  So Henry quit the little park with more speed than he ordinarily might have used, and he was very glad when he reached his apartment building with his shoulder still unsplit and whole, and he was even gladder when he had gained the safety of his bedroom, having gotten past his mother, who, thank God, was busy making Jell-0 with fruit in it and so hadn't caught as much as a glimpse of him or what he bore.

  In his room, on his desk, the sack looked even worse than it had before. Its splotchings were more numerous and varied now, it seemed, and the disreputable, furtive look of it, its sullen poverty, made it stand out starkly against its present comfortable surroundings.

  Henry took hold of the long, dark hair that poked from the sack's mouth, and when he tugged, it slithered forth and cascaded smoothly to the floor almost like liquid, like thick blood or oil. Henry tossed the sack aside and went to his knees, smoothing the fur with his hands, spreading it out; and then, with a silent gasp and a widening of his eyes, he saw what he had got.

  From its head (for it certainly had a head) to the sharp, curving claws of its hind feet (for it had them, too), it was a kind of nightmare costume made of, as far as Henry could see, one single pelt for all its six-foot length and the wide stretch of its arms or upper legs.

  It was animalskin, no doubt of it, bestial for certain, and yet there was an extremely disquieting suggestion of the human about it, too. It seemed to have been scalped from something between species, something caught in the middle of an evolutionary leap or fall.

  The ears were animal in shape, pointed and high-peaked, with the wide cupping given to wild things that they might better hear their prey or would-be killer padding in the dark, and yet the placement of them, their relation to the forehead, was entirely human. And was that a nose or a snout?

  It was hard to say, too, whether the appendages at the ends of its arms or forelegs were claws or hands, since they had something of the qualities of both. The cruelty in their design strongly suggested an anatomy too brutal to be human, yet the thumbs and the forefingers were clearly opposable, and there was something about the formation of the palms that denied their being exclusively animal.

  Of course, in their present condition, these last were neither hands nor claws; they were gloves. Large gloves—far too large for the hands of Henry Laird, for instance—but gloves all the same.

  Henry held his left hand over the left glove of the costume. Yes, it was far, far too small to fill that hairy, clawed container. The fingers of them were inches too long. If he slipped his fingers into them—it was a strangely disquieting thought that made all of his own skin tingle and crawl—the gloves would dangle limply hollow from the first knuckle.

  Still, Henry would try; and he moved his hand down in a kind of slow swoop to where the skin gaped in a slit just under the costume's palm and slid his hand in, noting how smoothly and effortlessly it seemed to glide; and when it was in, entirely in, the glove, with an odd noise something like a cat's hiss, shrank in against the fingers and back and palm of Henry's hand until it fit him like a second skin.

  Henry gave a kind of muffled shriek, stifling it with his unclad hand, and then pulled frantically at the glove. He expected a horrible resistance, but no such thing; it slid off most cooperatively—shot off, really, since he had pulled it so hard— and when Henry saw that his hand seemed none the worse for having worn it, he slipped the glove on and off again a few more experimental times.

  Now it seemed that Henry's wearing of the glove had permanently affected it, for it remained his exact size, whether he had it on or not, which meant it was now ludicrously small for its opposite partner; so Henry, after giving the matter a little thought, slipped his other hand into the other glove with identical effect and the end result that the two were now precisely the same size—which is to say Henry's size.

  The implications of this singular phenomenon gave Henry a clear challenge that very few boys his age could have resisted, and certainly Henry did not; and so, after going very quietly to the door and peeking out of it and listening carefully to make sure that his mother was still immersed in making fruit Jell-0, Henry picked up the costume and, with just a slight grating of his teeth and squinching up of his face, slipped it on.

  He started with the legs, slipping into them as he would into pants, and gasped slightly as they shrank instantly to accommodate his size, again with that catlike hissing sound; and then he hunched into the arms, and they, hissing, fitted to him; and then there was a very alarming moment when the torso of the costume curled round his own and shrank to coat him smoothly; this with the loudest hissing of all; and then, by far the worst, the whole thing sealed up, the openings withering down to slits and the slits healing to unbroken skin, until his whole body was covered and wrapped with the dark-gray pelt.

  Except for his head, that is. Henry had left the head for the last, just as he would have done with a Halloween costume.

  He walked over to the mirror set into the door and gazed at himself in wonder, his pink face staring above the dark, hairy body, a mad scientist's transplant He moved his arms and legs, experimentally at first, and watched their reflections make little, cautious movements. He reached out with one hand to touch the mirror and thrilled when he realized that he was actually feeling the glass not through the skin, as one does when wearing a glove, but with the skin!

  After a time of touching and moving and carefully watching, Henry reached up behind him, groping for the mask, which was dangling down his back like a hood, and took hold of it and, very slowly and cautiously, watching anxiously all the time, slipped it over the top of his head and then his forehead; and then, closing his eyes—somehow, he did not want them to be open when they would be blind and covered—he pulled the mask completely down until the fur of its neck met the fur of the costume's chest, and he shuddered violently when he felt, with his lids still firmly closed, the whole business squeeze gently in, molding itself to the flesh of his face; and only when the catlike hissing had faded away entirely did he dare open his eyes.

  There, facing him from the mirror of his own bedroom, with his desk covered with homework and a hanging model airplane for its background, was a monster—a small monster, true, but no less frightening for that.

  Henry crouched a little as he studied his reflection. It seemed more comfortable that way. He moved his face closer to the glass. The nostrils worked as he breathed.

  He lifted his head slightly and inhaled deeply and found he could smell the Jell-0 his mother was making way off in the kitchen more clearly than he would ordinarily be able to do if he put his nose close enough to the pot to feel the heat.

  He looked back at his reflection and studied his eyes intently. They were his eyes, no doubt of that, though the blueness of them was strange in their present setting. Then he opened his mouth and nearly fainted.

  It was in no way the mouth of Henry Laird. It had fangs, for one thing, for the most obvious thing, but the differences did not stop there. All its teeth were as sharp as needles, every single tooth; and moving in and around them and lapping over them, constantly on the move, was a long, lean, curling tongue. Not Henry Laird's tongue. Not even a human tongue.

  Without giving any thought to it, Henry pulled the skin costume from his head, his arms, his whole body, and threw it to the floor.

  Again he studied himself
in the mirror, touching his forehead, feeling his arms, wiggling his fingers; and then, only after all those preliminary tests, he opened his mouth and nearly cried aloud in his relief in seeing nothing more formidable in it than the ordinary incisors .and molars with the occasional filling put here and there by Dr. Mineke, the family dentist, because of Mounds bars and licorice.

  The skin was returned to its filthy paper sack, the sack was stuffed into the rear of the bottom drawer of his bureau and Henry took the most meticulous shower of his life and scrubbed his mouth three times in a row with Stripe toothpaste.

  About ten that night, when Henry was just about to go to bed and had almost convinced himself that there was nothing waiting in his room, the doorbell rang and his father got out of his easy chair with a grunt and pushed the button by the doorbell so that he could talk with whoever it was downstairs and said, "Yes? Yes? Who's there?"

  At first, there was nothing but breathing from downstairs; then they all heard a voice, Henry and his father and his mother—a deep, growly sort of voice.

  "I want it back," the voice said, muffled and distorted.

  "What?" asked Henry's father. "What did you say?"

  "You give it back," the voice said louder; and this time you could hear the saliva in it, the drool. "It's mine, you! They gave it to me, see?"

  "Look here," said Henry's father, "I don't know who you are or what you're trying to say."

  "Who is that, dear?" asked Henry's mother. "What does he want?''

  Now there was only breathing, heavier than before and with the hiss of spittle.

  "You're going to have to speak up," said Henry's father. ”1 can't make out a word you're saying."

  But now the breathing was gone and there was only the sound of rain, near and insistent, as it battered and spattered against the windows of the apartment. Henry quietly gathered up his books from the table where he had been doing his homework.

  "Hello? Hello?'' said Henry's father, pressing impatiently on the LISTEN button. "I think he's some drunk."