Horror Hunters

by Roger Elwood

  Zebub disappeared as the last words of Formula 73 were uttered.

  So did Mr. Ames.

  In the X-Ray

  Fritz Leiber, Jr.

  “Do the dead come back?” Dr. Ballard repeated the question puzzledly. “What’s that got to do with your ankle?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Nancy Sawyer answered sharply. “I said, ‘I tried an ice pack.’ You must have misheard me.” “But …” Dr. Ballard began. Then, “Of course I must have,” he said quickly. “Go on, Miss Sawyer.”

  The girl hesitated. Her glance strayed to the large, gleaming window and the graying sky beyond. She was a young woman with prominent eyes, a narrow chin, strong white teeth, reddish hair, and a beautiful, doe-like figure which included legs long and slim—except for the ankle of the one outstretched stockingless on the chair before her. That was encircled by a hard, white, somewhat irregular swelling.

  Dr. Ballard was a man of middle age and size, with strong, soft-skinned hands. He looked intelligent and as successful as his sleekly furnished office.

  “Well, there isn’t much more to it,” the girl said finally. “I tried the ice pack but the swelling wouldn’t go down. So Marge made me call you.”

  “I see. Tell me, Miss Sawyer, hadn’t your ankle bothered you before last night?”

  “No. I just woke up from a nightmare frightened because something had grabbed my foot, and I reached down and touched my ankle—and there it was.”

  “Your ankle didn’t feel or look any different the day before?”

  “No.”

  “Yet when you woke up the swelling was there?”

  “Just as it is now.”

  “Do you think you might have twisted your foot while you were asleep?”

  “No.”

  “And you don’t feel any pain in it now?”

  “No, except a feeling of something hard clasped snugly around it and every once in a while squeezing a bit tighter.”

  “Ever do any sleepwalking?”

  “No.”

  “Any allergies?”

  “No.”

  “Can you think of anything else—anything at all—that might have a bearing on this trouble?”

  Again Nancy looked out the window. “I have a twin sister,” she said after a moment, in a different voice. “Or rather, I had. She died more than a year ago.” She looked back quickly at Dr. Ballard. “But I don’t know why I should mention that,” she said hurriedly. “It couldn’t possibly have any bearing of this. She died of apoplexy.” There was a pause.

  “I suppose the X-ray will show what’s the matter?” she continued.

  The doctor nodded. “Well have it soon. Miss Snyder’s getting it now.”

  Nancy started to get up, asked, “Is it all right for me to move around?” Dr. Ballard nodded. She went over to the window, limping just a little, and looked down.

  “You have a nice view, you can see half the city,” she said. “We have the river at our apartment. I think we’re higher, though.”

  “This is the twentieth floor,” Dr. Ballard said.

  “We’re twenty-three,” she told him. “I like high buildings. It’s a little like being in an airplane. With the river right under our windows I can imagine I’m flying over water.”

  There was a soft knock at the door. Nancy looked around inquiringly. “The X-ray?” He shook his head. He went to the door and opened it.

  “It’s your friend, Miss Hudson.”

  “Hi, Marge,” Nancy called. “Come on in.”

  The stocky, sandy-haired girl hung in the doorway. “I’ll stay out here,” she said. “I thought we could go home together though.”

  “Darling, how nice of you. But I’ll be a bit longer, Tm afraid.”

  “That’s all right. How are you feeling, Nancy?”

  “Wonderful, dear. Especially now that your doctor has taken a picture that’ll show him what’s inside this bump of mine.”

  “Well, I’ll be out here,” the other girl said and turned back into the waiting room. She passed a woman in white who came in, shut the door, and handed the doctor a large, brown envelope.

  He turned to Nancy. “I’ll look at this and be back right away.”

  “Dr. Myers is on the phone,” the nurse told him as they started out. “Wants to know about tonight. Can he come here and drive over with you?”

  “How soon can he get here?”

  “About half an hour, he says.”

  “Tell him that will be fine, Miss Snyder.”

  The door closed behind them. Nancy sat still for perhaps two minutes. Then she jerked, as if at a twinge of pain. She looked at her ankle. Bending over, she clasped her hand around her good ankle and squeezed experimentally. She shuddered.

  The door banged open. Dr. Ballard hurried in and immediately began to re-examine the swelling, swiftly exploring each detail of its outlines with gentle fingers, at the same time firing questions.

  “Are you absolutely sure, Miss Sawyer, that you hadn’t noticed anything of this swelling before last night? Perhaps just some slight change in shape or feeling, or a tendency to favor that ankle, or just a disinclination to look at it? Cast your mind back.”

  Nancy hesitated uneasily, but when she spoke it was with certainty. “No, I’m absolutely sure.”

  He shook his head. “Very well. And now, Miss Sawyer, that twin of yours. Was she identical?”

  Nancy looked at him. “Why are you interested in that? Doctor, what does the X-ray show?”

  “I have a very good reason, which I’ll explain to you later. I’ll go into details about the X-ray then, too. You can set your mind at rest on one point, though, if it’s been worrying you. This swelling is in no sense malignant.” “Thank goodness, Doctor.”

  “But now about the twin.”

  “You really want to know?”

  “I do.”

  Nancy’s manner and voice showed some signs of agitation. “Why, yes,” she said, “we were identical. People were always mistaking us for each other. We looked exactly alike, but underneath …” Her voice trailed off. There was a change in the atmosphere of the office, a change hard to define. Abruptly she continued, “Dr. Ballard, I’d like to tell you about her, tell you things I’ve hardly told anyone else. You know, it was she I was dreaming about last night. In fact, I thought it was she who had grabbed me in my nightmare. What’s the matter, Dr. Ballard?”

  It did seem that Dr. Ballard had changed color, though it was hard to tell in the failing light. What he said, a little jerkily, was, “Nothing, Miss Sawyer. Please go ahead.” He leaned forward a little, resting his elbows on the desk, and watched her.

  “You know, Dr. Ballard,” she began slowly, “most people think that twins are very affectionate. They think stories of twins hating each other are invented by writers looking for morbid plots.

  “But in my case the morbid plot happened to be the simple truth. Beth tyrannized over me, hated me, and … wasn’t above expressing her hate in a physical way.” She took a deep breath.

  “It started when we were little girls. As far back as I can remember, I was always the slave and she was the mistress. And if I didn’t carry out her orders faithfully, and sometimes if I did, there was always a slap or a pinch. Not a little-girl pinch. Beth had peculiarly strong fingers. I was very afraid of them.

  “There’s something terrible, Dr. Ballard, about the way one human being can intimidate another, crush their will power, reduce to mush their ability to fight back. You’d think the victim could escape so easily—look, there are people all around, teachers and friends to confide in, your father and mother—but it’s as if you were bound by invisible chains, your mouth shut by an invisible gag. And it grows and grows, like the horrors of a concentration camp. A whole inner world of pain and fright. And yet on the surface—why, there seems to be nothing at all.

  “For of course no one else had the faintest idea of what was going on between us. Everyone thought we loved each other very much. Beth especially was always b
eing praised for ‘sunny gayety.’ I was supposed to be a little ‘subdued.’ Oh, how she used to fuss and coo over me when there were people around. Though even then there would be pinches on the sly—hard ones I never winced at. And more than that, for… .”

  Nancy broke off. “But I really don’t think I should be wasting your time with all these childhood gripes, Dr. Ballard. Especially since I know you have an engagement for this evening.”

  “That’s just an informal dinner with a few old cronies. I have lots of time. Go right ahead. I’m interested.”

  Nancy paused, frowning a little. “The funny thing is,” she continued, “I never understood why Beth hated me. It was as if she were intensely jealous. Yet there was no reason for that. She was the successful one, the one who won the prizes and played the leads in the school shows and got the nicest presents and all the boys. But somehow each success made her worse. I’ve sometimes thought, Dr. Ballard, that only cruel people can be successful, that success is really a reward for cruelty … to someone.”

  Dr. Ballard knit his brows, might have nodded.

  “The only thing I ever read that helped explain it to me,” she went on, “was something in psychoanalysis. The idea that each of us has an equal dose of love and hate, and that it’s our business to balance them off, to act in such a way, that both have expression and yet so that the hate is always under the control of the love.

  “But perhaps when the two people are very close together, as it is with twins, the balancing works out differently. Perhaps all the softness and love begins to gather in the one person and all the hardness and hate in the other. And then the hate takes the lead, because it’s an emotion of violence and power and action—a concentrated emotion, not misty like love. And it keeps on and on, getting worse all the time, until it’s so strong you feel it will never stop, not even with death.

  “For it did keep on, Dr. Ballard, and it did get worse,” Nancy looked at him closely. “Oh, I know that what I’ve been telling you isn’t supposed to be so unusual among children. ‘Little barbarians,’ people say, quite confident that they’ll outgrow it. Quite convinced that wrist-twisting and pinching are things that will automatically stop when children begin to grow up.”

  Nancy smiled thinly at him. “Well, they don’t stop, Dr. Ballard. You know, it’s very hard for most people to associate actual cruelty with an adolescent girl, maybe because of the way girls have been glorified in advertising. Yet I could write you a pretty chapter on just that topic. Of course a lot of it that happened in my case was what you’d call mental cruelty. I was shy and Beth had a hundred ways of embarrassing me. And if a boy became interested in me, she’d always take him way.”

  “I’d hardly have thought she’d have been able to,” remarked Dr. Ballard.

  “You think I’m good-looking? But I’m only good-looking in an odd way, and in any case it never seemed to count then. It’s true, though, that twice there were boys who wouldn’t respond to her invitations. Then both times she played a trick that only she could, because we were identical twins. She would pretend to be me—she could always imitate my maimer and voice, even my reactions, precisely, though I couldn’t possibly have imitated her—and then she would … do something that would make the boy drop me cold.”

  “Do something?”

  Nancy looked down. “Oh, insult the boy cruelly, pretending to be me. Or else make some foul, boastful confession, pretending it was mine. If you knew how those boys loathed me afterwards… .

  “But as I said, it wasn’t only mental cruelty or indecent tricks. I remember nights when I’d done something to displease her and I’d gone to bed before her and she’d come in and I’d pretend to be asleep and after a while she’d say—oh, I know, Dr. Ballard, it sounds like something a silly little girl would say, but it didn’t sound like that then, with my head under the sheet, pressed into the pillow, and her footsteps moving slowly around the bed—she’d say, ‘I’m thinking of how to punish you.’ And then there’d be a long wait, while I still pretended to be asleep, and then the touch … oh, Dr. Ballard, her hands! I was so afraid of her hands! But … what is it, Dr. Ballard?”

  “Nothing. Go on.”

  “There’s nothing much more to say. Except that Beth’s cruelty and my fear went on until a year ago, when she died suddenly—I suppose you’d say tragically—of a blood clot on the brain. I’ve often wondered since then whether her hatred of me, so long and so cleverly concealed, mightn’t have had something to do with it. Apoplexy’s what haters die of, isn’t it, doctor?

  “I remember leaning over her bed the day she died, lying there paralyzed, with her beautiful face white and stiff as a fish’s, one eye bigger than the other. I felt pity for her (You realize, doctor, don’t you, that I always loved her?) but just then her hand flopped a little way across the blanket and touched mine, although they said she was completely paralyzed, and her big eye twitched around a little until it was looking almost at me and her lips moved and I thought I heard her say, ‘I’ll come back and punish you for this,’ and then I felt her fingers moving, just a little, on my skin, as if they were trying to close on my wrist, and I jerked back with a cry.

  “Mother was very angry with me for that. She thought I was just a selfish, thoughtless girl, afraid of death and unable to repress my fear even for my dying sister’s sake. Of course I could never tell her the real reason. I’ve never really told that to anyone, except you. And now that I’ve told you I hardly know why I’ve done it.”

  She smiled nervously, quite unhumorously.

  “Wasn’t there something about a dream you had last night?” Dr. Ballard asked softly.

  “Oh yes!” The listlessness snapped out of her. “I dreamed I was walking in an old graveyard with gnarly gray trees, and overhead the sky was gray and low and threatening, and everything was weird and dreadful. But somehow I was very happy. But then I felt a faint movement under my feet and I looked down at the grave I was passing and I saw the earth falling away into it. Just a little cone-shaped pit at first, with the dark sandy earth sliding down its sides, and a small black hole at the bottom. I knew I must run away quickly, but I couldn’t move an inch. Then the pit grew larger and the earth tumbled down its sides in chunks and the black hole grew. And still I was rooted there. I looked at the gravestone beyond and it said ‘Elizabeth Sawyer, 1926-48.’ Then out of the hole came a hand and arm, only there were just shreds of dark flesh clinging to the bone, and it began to feel around with an awful, snatching swiftness. Then suddenly the earth heaved and opened, and a figure came swiftly hitching itself up out of the hole. And although the flesh was green and shrunken and eaten and the eyes just holes, I recognized Beth—there was still the beautiful reddish hair. And then the ragged hand touched my ankle and instantly closed on it and the other hand came groping upward, higher, higher, and I screamed … and then I woke up.”

  Nancy was leaning forward, her eyes fixed on the doctor. Suddenly her hair seemed to bush out, just a trifle. Perhaps it had “stood on end.” At any rate, she said, “Dr. Ballard, I’m frightened.”

  “I’m sorry if I’ve made you distress yourself,” he said. The words were more reassuring than the tone of voice. He suddenly took her hand in his and for a few moments they sat there silently. Then she smiled and moved a little and said, “It’s gone now. I’ve been very silly. I don’t know why I told you all I did about Beth. It couldn’t help you with my ankle.”

  “No, of course not,” he said after a moment;

  “Why did you ask if she was-identical?”

  He leaned back. His voice became brisker again. “I’ll tell you about that right now—-and about what the X-ray shows. I think there’s a connection. As you probably know, Miss Sawyer, identical twins look so nearly alike because they come from the same germ cell. Before it starts to develop, it splits in two. Instead of one individual, two develop. That was what happened in the case of you and your sister.” He paused. “But,” he continued, “sometimes, especially if there’s a
strong tendency to twin births in the family, the splitting doesn’t stop there. One of the two cells splits again. The result—triplets. I believe that also happened in your case.”

  Nancy looked at him puzzledly. “But then what happened to the third child?”

  “The third sister,” he amplified. “There can’t be identical boy-and-girl twins or triplets, you know, since sex .is determined in the original germ cell. There, Miss Sawyer, we come to my second point. Not all twins develop and are actually born. Some start to develop and then stop.”

  “What happens to them?”

  “Sometimes what there is of them is engulfed in the child that does develop completely—little fragments of a body, bits of this and that, all buried in the flesh of the child that is actually bom. I think that happened in your case.”

  Nancy looked at him oddly. “You mean I have in me bits of another twin sister, a triplet sister, who didn’t develop?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And that all this is connected with my ankle?”

  “Yes.”

  “But then how—?”

  “Sometimes nothing happens to the engulfed fragments. But sometimes, perhaps many years later, they begin to grow—in a natural way rather than malignantly. There are well-authenticated cases of this happening—as recently as 1890 a Mexican boy in this way ‘gave birth’ to his own twin brother, completely developed though of course dead. There’s nothing nearly as extensive as that in your case, but I’m sure there is a pocket of engulfed materials around your ankle and that it recently started to grow, so gradually that you didn’t notice it until the growth became so extensive as to be irritating.”

  Nancy eyed him closely. “What sort of materials? I mean the engulfed fragments.”