American Supernatural Tales (Penguin Horror)

by S T Joshi

  Miss Keene looked bleakly at her nurse. Then, after a moment, she nodded once. Grudgingly.

  * * *

  She lay in the dark bedroom, the sound of the dial tone humming in her ear; keeping her awake. Or am I just telling myself that? she thought. Is it really keeping me awake? Didn’t I sleep that first night with the receiver off the hook? No, it wasn’t the sound, it was something else.

  She closed her eyes obdurately. I won’t listen, she told herself, I just won’t listen to it. She drew in trembling breaths of the night. But the darkness would not fill her brain and blot away the sound.

  Miss Keene felt around the bed until she found her jacket. She draped it over the receiver, swathing its black smoothness in woolly turns. Then she sank back again, stern breathed and taut. I will sleep, she demanded, I will sleep.

  She heard it still.

  Her body grew rigid and, abruptly, she unfolded the receiver from its thick wrappings and slammed it down angrily on the cradle. Silence filled the room with a delicious peace. Miss Keene fell back on the pillow with a feeble groan. Now to sleep, she thought.

  The telephone rang.

  Her breath snuffed off. The ringing seemed to permeate the darkness, surrounding her in a cloud of ear-lancing vibration. She reached out to put the receiver on the table again, then jerked her hand back with a gasp, realizing she would hear the man’s voice again.

  Her throat pulsed nervously. What I’ll do, she planned, what I’ll do is take off the receiver very quickly—very quickly—and put it down, then push down on the arm and cut off the line. Yes, that’s what I’ll do!

  She tensed herself and spread her hand out cautiously until the ringing phone was under it. Then, breath held, she followed her plan, slashed off the ring, reached quickly for the cradle arm . . .

  And stopped, frozen, as the man’s voice reached out through darkness to her ears. “Where are you?” he asked. “I want to talk to you.”

  Claws of ice clamped down on Miss Keene’s shuddering chest. She lay petrified, unable to cut off the sound of the man’s dull, expressionless voice, asking, “Where are you? I want to talk to you.”

  A sound from Miss Keene’s throat, thin and fluttering.

  And the man said, “Where are you? I want to talk to you.”

  “No, no,” sobbed Miss Keene.

  “Where are you? I want . . .”

  She pressed the cradle arm with taut white fingers. She held it down for five minutes before letting it go.

  * * *

  “I tell you I won’t have it!”

  Miss Keene’s voice was a frayed ribbon of sound. She sat inflexibly on the bed, straining her frightened anger through the mouthpiece vents.

  “You say you hang up on this man and he still calls?” Miss Finch inquired.

  “I’ve explained all that!” Elva Keene burst out. “I had to leave the receiver off the phone all night so he wouldn’t call. And the buzzing kept me awake. I didn’t get a wink of sleep! Now, I want this line checked, do you hear me? I want you to stop this terrible thing!”

  Her eyes were like hard, dark beads. The phone almost slipped from her palsied fingers.

  “All right, Miss Elva,” said the operator. “I’ll send a man out today.”

  “Thank you, dear, thank you,” Miss Keene said. “Will you call me when . . .”

  Her voice stopped abruptly as a clicking sound started on the telephone.

  “The line is busy,” she announced.

  The clicking stopped and she went on. “To repeat, will you let me know when you find out who this terrible person is?”

  “Surely, Miss Elva, surely. And I’ll have a man check your telephone this afternoon. You’re at 127 Mill Lane, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right, dear. You will see to it, won’t you?”

  “I promise faithfully, Miss Elva. First thing today.”

  “Thank you, dear,” Miss Keene said, drawing in relieved breath.

  There were no calls from the man all that morning, none that afternoon. Her tightness slowly began to loosen. She played a game of cribbage with Nurse Phillips and even managed a little laughter. It was comforting to know that the telephone company was working on it now. They’d soon catch that awful man and bring back her peace of mind.

  But when two o’clock came, then three o’clock—and still no repairman at her house—Miss Keene began worrying again.

  “What’s the matter with that girl?” she said pettishly. “She promised me faithfully that a man would come this afternoon.”

  “He’ll be here,” Nurse Phillips said. “Be patient.”

  * * *

  Four o’clock arrived and no man. Miss Keene would not play cribbage, read her book or listen to her radio. What had begun to loosen was tightening again, increasing minute by minute until five o’clock, when the telephone rang, her hand spurted out rigidly from the flaring sleeve of her bed jacket and clamped down like a claw on the receiver. If the man speaks, raced her mind, if he speaks I’ll scream until my heart stops.

  She pulled the receiver to her ear. “Hello?”

  “Miss Elva, this is Miss Finch.”

  Her eyes closed and breath fluttered through her lips. “Yes?” she said.

  “About those calls you say you’ve been receiving.”

  “Yes?” In her mind, Miss Finch’s words cutting—“those calls you say you’ve been receiving.”

  “We sent a man out to trace them,” continued Miss Finch. “I have his report here.”

  Miss Keene caught her breath. “Yes?”

  “He couldn’t find anything.”

  Elva Keene didn’t speak. Her gray head lay motionless on the pillow, the receiver pressed to her ear.

  “He says he traced the—the difficulty to a fallen wire on the edge of town.”

  “Fallen—wire?”

  “Yes, Miss Elva.” Miss Finch did not sound happy.

  “You’re telling me I didn’t hear anything?”

  Miss Finch’s voice was firm. “There’s no way anyone could have phoned you from that location,” she said.

  “I tell you a man called me!”

  Miss Finch was silent and Miss Keene’s fingers tightened convulsively on the receiver.

  “There must be a phone there,” she insisted. “There must be some way that man was able to call me!”

  “Miss Elva, there’s no one out there.”

  “Out where, where?”

  The operator said, “Miss Elva, it’s the cemetery.”

  * * *

  In the black silence of her bedroom, a crippled maiden lady lay waiting. Her nurse would not remain for the night; her nurse had patted her and scolded her and ignored her.

  She was waiting for a telephone call.

  She could have disconnected the phone, but she had not the will. She lay there waiting, waiting, thinking.

  Of the silence—of ears that had not heard, seeking to hear again. Of sounds bubbling and muttering—the first stumbling attempts at speech by one who had not spoken—how long? Of—hello? hello?—first greeting by one long silent. Of—where are you? Of (that which made her lie so rigidly) the clicking and the operator speaking her address. Of—

  The telephone ringing.

  A pause. Ringing. The rustle of a nightgown in the dark.

  The ringing stopped.

  Listening.

  And the telephone slipping from white fingers, the eyes staring, the thin heartbeats slowly pulsing.

  Outside, the cricket-rattling night.

  Inside, the words still sounding in her brain—giving terrible meaning to the heavy, choking silence.

  “Hello, Miss Elva. I’ll be right over.”

  CHARLES BEAUMONT

  Charles Beaumont—the pseudonym, and later the legally adopted name, of Charles Leroy Nutt—was born in Chicago in 1929. A high-school dropout, he served briefly in the U.S. Army before taking up a career in writing in the early 1950s. It was just at this time that the pulp magazines were dying out, and supe
rnatural fiction—often disguised as mystery or suspense fiction—had to appear in the science fiction digest magazines or in mainstream magazines. Beaumont published widely in such digests as Infinity Science Fiction and such men’s magazines as Playboy and Rogue. His first story collection, The Hunger and Other Stories, appeared in 1957, and several others—Yonder: Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1958), Night Ride and Other Journeys (1960), The Magic Man (1965), and The Edge (1966)—appeared in rapid succession. Many of Beaumont’s stories present a fusion of science fiction, fantasy, mystery, suspense, and the supernatural, so that genre classification of his work becomes difficult. Of his two novels, Run from the Hunter (1957; with John E. Tomerlin) is a crime thriller, and The Intruder (1959) is a mainstream novel of race relations in the South. Some of his best-known horror tales are “The Howling Man,” a brilliant tale of the Devil, and “Black Country,” which ingeniously fuses the supernatural with blues music.

  Beaumont did much work in film and television, writing the screenplay (with Ben Hecht) to the film Queen of Outer Space and writing many scripts for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. These have now been collected in The Twilight Zone Scripts of Charles Beaumont, Volume I (2004), with more volumes to follow. Beaumont, afflicted with an extremely advanced case of Alzheimer’s disease, died in 1967. His Selected Stories appeared in 1988.

  “The Vanishing American” (first published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1955, and collected in The Hunger and Other Stories) exhibits Beaumont’s use of the supernatural as a metaphor for social and psychological trauma in the literal vanishment of a dispirited office worker.

  THE VANISHING AMERICAN

  e got the notion shortly after five o’clock; at least, a part of him did, a small part hidden down beneath all the conscious cells—he didn’t get the notion until some time later. At exactly five p.m., the bell rang. At two minutes after, the chairs began to empty. There was the vast slamming of drawers, the straightening of rulers, the sound of bones snapping and mouths yawning and feet shuffling tiredly.

  Mr. Minchell relaxed. He rubbed his hands together and relaxed and thought how nice it would be to get up and go home, like the others. But of course there was the tape, only three-quarters finished. He would have to stay.

  He stretched and said good night to the people who filed past him. As usual, no one answered. When they had gone, he set his fingers pecking again over the keyboard. The click-clicking grew loud in the suddenly still office, but Mr. Minchell did not notice. He was lost in the work. Soon, he knew, it would be time for the totaling, and his pulse quickened at the thought of this.

  He lit a cigarette. Heart tapping, he drew in smoke and released it.

  He extended his right hand and rested his index and middle fingers on the metal bar marked TOTAL. A mile-long ribbon of paper lay gathered on the desk, strangely festive. He glanced at it, then at the manifest sheet. The figure 18037448 was circled in red. He pulled breath into his lungs, locked it there; then he closed his eyes and pressed the TOTAL bar.

  There was a smooth low metallic grinding, followed by absolute silence.

  Mr. Minchell opened one eye, dragged it from the ceiling on down to the adding machine.

  He groaned, slightly.

  The total read: 18037447.

  “God.” He stared at the figure and thought of the fifty-three pages of manifest, the three thousand separate rows of figures that would have to be checked again. “God.”

  The day was lost, now. Irretrievably. It was too late to do anything. Madge would have supper waiting, and F. J. didn’t approve of overtime; also . . .

  He looked at the total again. At the last two digits.

  He sighed. Forty-seven. And thought, startled: Today, for the Lord’s sake, is my birthday! Today I am forty—what?—forty-seven. And that explains the mistake, I suppose. Subconscious kind of thing . . .

  Slowly he got up and looked around the deserted office.

  Then he went to the dressing room and got his hat and his coat and put them on, carefully.

  “Pushing fifty now . . .”

  The outside hall was dark. Mr. Minchell walked softly to the elevator and punched the Down button. “Forty-seven,” he said, aloud; then, almost immediately, the light turned red and the thick door slid back noisily. The elevator operator, a bird-thin, tan-fleshed girl, swiveled her head, looking up and down the hall. “Going down,” she said.

  “Yes,” Mr. Minchell said, stepping forward.

  “Going down.” The girl clicked her tongue and muttered, “Damn kids.” She gave the lattice gate a tired push and moved the smooth wooden-handled lever in its slot.

  Odd, Mr. Minchell decided, was the word for this particular girl. He wished now that he had taken the stairs. Being alone with only one other person in an elevator had always made him nervous: now it made him very nervous. He felt the tension growing. When it became unbearable, he cleared his throat and said, “Long day.”

  The girl said nothing. She had a surly look, and she seemed to be humming something deep in her throat.

  Mr. Minchell closed his eyes. In less than a minute—during which time he dreamed of the cables snarling, of the car being caught between floors, of himself trying to make small talk with the odd girl for six straight hours—he opened his eyes again and walked into the lobby, briskly.

  The gate slammed.

  He turned and started for the doorway. Then he paused, feeling a sharp increase in his heartbeat. A large, red-faced, magnificently groomed man of middle years stood directly beyond the glass, talking with another man.

  Mr. Minchell pushed through the door, with effort. He’s seen me now, he thought. If he asks any questions, though, or anything, I’ll just say I didn’t put it on the time card; that ought to make it all right . . .

  He nodded and smiled at the large man. “Good night, Mr. Diemel.”

  The man looked up briefly, blinked, and returned to his conversation.

  Mr. Minchell felt a burning come into his face. He hurried on down the street. Now the notion—though it was not even that yet, strictly: it was more a vague feeling—swam up from the bottom of his brain. He remembered that he had not spoken directly to F. J. Diemel for over ten years, beyond a “Good morning” . . .

  Ice-cold shadows fell off the tall buildings, staining the streets, now. Crowds of shoppers moved along the pavement like juggernauts, exhaustedly, but with great determination. Mr. Minchell looked at them. They all had furtive appearances, it seemed to him suddenly, even the children, as if each was fleeing from some hideous crime. They hurried along, staring.

  But not, Mr. Minchell noticed, at him. Through him, yes. Past him. As the elevator operator had done, and now F. J. And had anyone said good night?

  He pulled up his coat collar and walked toward the drugstore, thinking. He was forty-seven years old. At the current life-expectancy rate, he might have another seventeen or eighteen years left. And then death.

  If you’re not dead already.

  He paused and for some reason remembered a story he’d once read in a magazine. Something about a man who dies and whose ghost takes up his duties, or something; anyway, the man didn’t know he was dead—that was it. And at the end of the story, he runs into his own corpse.

  Which is pretty absurd: he glanced down at his body. Ghosts don’t wear $36 suits, nor do they have trouble pushing doors open, nor do their corns ache like blazes, and what the devil is wrong with me today?

  He shook his head.

  It was the tape, of course, and the fact that it was his birthday. That was why his mind was behaving so foolishly.

  He went into the drugstore. It was an immense place, packed with people. He walked to the cigar counter, trying not to feel intimidated, and reached into his pocket. A small man elbowed in front of him and called loudly: “Gimme coupla nickels, will you, Jack?” The clerk scowled and scooped the change out of his cash register. The small man scurried off. Others took his place. Mr. Minchell thrust his a
rm forward. “A pack of Luckies, please,” he said. The clerk whipped his fingers around a pile of cellophaned packages and, looking elsewhere, droned: “Twenty-six.” Mr. Minchell put his twenty-six-cents-exactly on the glass shelf. The clerk shoved the cigarettes toward the edge and picked up the money, deftly. Not once did he lift his eyes.

  Mr. Minchell pocketed the Luckies and went back out of the store. He was perspiring now, slightly, despite the chill wind. The word “ridiculous” lodged in his mind and stayed there. Ridiculous, yes, for heaven’s sake. Still, he thought—now just answer the question—isn’t it true? Can you honestly say that that clerk saw you?

  Or that anybody saw you today?

  Swallowing dryly, he walked another two blocks, always in the direction of the subway, and went into a bar called the Chez When. One drink would not hurt, one small, stiff, steadying shot.

  The bar was a gloomy place, and not very warm, but there was a good crowd. Mr. Minchell sat down on a stool and folded his hands. The bartender was talking animatedly with an old woman, laughing with boisterous good humor from time to time. Mr. Minchell waited. Minutes passed. The bartender looked up several times, but never made a move to indicate that he had seen a customer.

  Mr. Minchell looked at his old gray overcoat, the humbly floraled tie, the cheap sharkskin suit-cloth, and became aware of the extent to which he detested this ensemble. He sat there and detested his clothes for a long time. Then he glanced around. The bartender was wiping a glass, slowly.

  All right, the hell with you. I’ll go somewhere else.

  He slid off the stool. Just as he was about to turn he saw the mirrored wall, pink-tinted and curved. He stopped, peering. Then he almost ran out of the bar.

  Cold wind went into his head.

  Ridiculous. The mirror was curved, you jackass. How do you expect to see yourself in curved mirrors?

  He walked past high buildings, and now past the library and stone lion he had once, long ago, named King Richard; and he did not look at the lion, because he’d always wanted to ride the lion, ever since he was a child, and he’d promised himself he would do that, but he never did.