by S T Joshi
He hurried on to the subway, took the stairs by twos, and clattered across the platform in time to board the express.
It roared and thundered. Mr. Minchell held onto the strap and kept himself from staring. No one watched him. No one even glanced at him when he pushed his way to the door and went out onto the empty platform.
He waited. Then the train was gone, and he was alone.
He walked up the stairs. It was fully night now, a soft, unshadowed darkness. He thought about the day and the strange things that were gouging into his mind and thought about all this as he turned down a familiar street which led to his familiar apartment.
The door opened.
His wife was in the kitchen, he could see. Her apron flashed across the arch, and back, and across. He called: “Madge, I’m home.”
Madge did not answer. Her movements were regular. Jimmy was sitting at the table, drooling over a glass of pop, whispering to himself.
“I said—” Mr. Minchell began.
“Jimmy, get up and go to the bathroom, you hear? I’ve got your water drawn.”
Jimmy promptly broke into tears. He jumped off the chair and ran past Mr. Minchell into the bedroom. The door slammed viciously.
“Madge.”
Madge Minchell came into the room, tired and lined and heavy. Her eyes did not waver. She went into the bedroom, and there was a silence; then a sharp slapping noise, and a yelling.
Mr. Minchell walked to the bathroom, fighting down the small terror. He closed the door and locked it and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. Ridiculous, he thought, and ridiculous and ridiculous. I am making something utterly foolish out of nothing. All I have to do is look in the mirror, and—
He held the handkerchief to his lips. It was difficult to breathe.
Then he knew that he was afraid, more so than ever before in a lifetime of being afraid.
Look at it this way, Minchell: why shouldn’t you vanish?
“Young man, just you wait until your father gets here!”
He pushed the handkerchief against his mouth and leaned on the door and gasped.
“What do you mean, vanish?”
Go on, take a look. You’ll see what I mean.
He tried to swallow, couldn’t. Tried to wet his lips, found that they stayed dry.
“Lord—”
He slitted his eyes and walked to the shaving mirror and looked in.
His mouth fell open.
The mirror reflected nothing. It held nothing. It was dull and gray and empty.
Mr. Minchell stared at the glass, put out his hand, drew it back hastily.
He squinted. Inches away. There was a form now: vague, indistinct, featureless: but a form.
“Lord,” he said. He understood why the elevator girl hadn’t seen him, and why F. J. hadn’t answered him, and why the clerk at the drugstore and the bartender and Madge . . .
“I’m not dead.”
Of course you’re not dead—not that way.
“—tan your hide, Jimmy Minchell, when he gets home.”
Mr. Minchell suddenly wheeled and clicked the lock. He rushed out of the steam-filled bathroom, across the room, down the stairs, into the street, into the cool night.
A block from home he slowed to a walk.
Invisible! He said the word over and over, in a half-voice. He said it and tried to control the panic that pulled at his legs, and at his brain, and filled him.
Why?
A fat woman and a little girl passed by. Neither of them looked up. He started to call out and checked himself. No. That wouldn’t do any good. There was no question about it now. He was invisible.
He walked on. As he did, forgotten things returned; they came and they left, too fast. He couldn’t hold onto them. He could only watch, and remember. Himself as a youngster, reading: the Oz books, Tarzan, and Mr. Wells. Himself going to the University, wanting to teach, and meeting Madge; then not planning any more, and Madge changing, and all the dreams put away. For later. For the right time. And then Jimmy—little strange Jimmy, who ate filth and picked his nose and watched television, who never read books, never; Jimmy, his son, whom he would never understand . . .
He walked by the edge of the park now. Then on past the park, through a maze of familiar and unfamiliar neighborhoods. Walking, remembering, looking at the people and feeling pain because he knew that they could not see him, not now or ever again, because he had vanished. He walked and remembered and felt pain.
All the stagnant dreams came back. Fully. The trip to Italy he’d planned. The open sports car, bad weather be damned. The firsthand knowledge that would tell him whether he did or did not approve of bullfighting. The book . . .
Then something occurred to him. It occurred to Mr. Minchell that he had not just suddenly vanished, like that, after all. No; he had been vanishing gradually for a long while. Every time he said good morning to that bastard Diemel he got a little harder to see. Every time he put on this horrible suit he faded. The process of disappearing was set into action every time he brought his pay check home and turned it over to Madge, every time he kissed her, or listened to her vicious unending complaints, or decided against buying that novel, or punched the adding machine he hated so, or . . .
Certainly.
He had vanished for Diemel and the others in the office years ago. And for strangers right afterwards. Now even Madge and Jimmy couldn’t see him. And he could barely see himself, even in a mirror.
It made terrible sense to him. Why shouldn’t you disappear? Well, why, indeed? There wasn’t any very good reason, actually. None. And this, in a nightmarish sort of a way, made it as brutally logical as a perfect tape.
Then he thought about going back to work tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. He’d have to, of course. He couldn’t let Madge and Jimmy starve; and, besides, what else would he do? It wasn’t as if anything important had changed. He’d go on punching the clock and saying good morning to people who didn’t see him, and he’d run the tapes and come home beat, nothing altered, and some day he’d die and that would be that.
All at once he felt tired.
He sat down on a cement step and sighed. Distantly he realized that he had come to the library. He sat there, watching the people, feeling the tiredness seep through him, thickly.
Then he looked up.
Above him, black and regal against the sky, stood the huge stone lion. Its mouth was open, and the great head was raised proudly.
Mr. Minchell smiled. King Richard. Memories scattered in his mind: old King Richard, well, my God, here we are.
He got to his feet. Fifty thousand times, at least, he had passed this spot, and every time he had experienced that instant of wild craving. Less so of late, but still, had it ever completely gone? He was amazed to find that now the childish desire was welling up again, stronger than ever before. Urgently.
He rubbed his cheek and stood there for several minutes. It’s the most ridiculous thing in the world, he thought, and I must be going out of my mind, and that must explain everything. But, he inquired of himself, even so, why not?
After all, I’m invisible. No one can see me. Of course, it didn’t have to be this way, not really. I don’t know, he went on, I mean, I believed that I was doing the right thing. Would it have been right to go back to the University and the hell with Madge? I couldn’t change that, could I? Could I have done anything about that, even if I’d known?
He nodded sadly.
All right, but don’t make it any worse. Don’t for God’s sake dwell on it!
To his surprise, Mr. Minchell found that he was climbing up the concrete base of the statue. It ripped the breath from his lungs—and he saw that he could much more easily have gone up a few extra steps and simply stepped on—but there didn’t seem anything else to do but just this, what he was doing. Once upright, he passed his hand over the statue’s flank. The surface was incredibly sleek and cold, hard as a lion’s muscles ought to be, and tawny.
H
e took a step backwards. Lord! Had there ever been such power? Such marvelous downright power and—majesty, as was here? From stone—no, indeed. It fooled a good many people, but it did not fool Mr. Minchell. He knew. This lion was no mere library decoration. It was an animal, of deadly cunning and fantastic strength and unbelievable ferocity. And it didn’t move for the simple reason that it did not care to move. It was waiting. Some day it would see what it was waiting for, its enemy, coming down the street. Then look out, people!
He remembered the whole yarn now. Of everyone on Earth, only he, Henry Minchell knew the secret of the lion. And only he was allowed to sit astride this mighty back.
He stepped onto the tail, experimentally. He hesitated, gulped, and swung forward, swiftly, on up to the curved rump.
Trembling, he slid forward, until finally he was over the shoulders of the lion, just behind the raised head.
His breath came very fast.
He closed his eyes.
It was not long before he was breathing regularly again. Only now it was the hot, fetid air of the jungle that went into his nostrils. He felt the great muscles ripple beneath him and he listened to the fast crackle of crushed foliage, and he whispered:
“Easy, fellow.”
The flying spears did not frighten him; he sat straight, smiling, with his fingers buried in the rich tawny mane of King Richard, while the wind tore at his hair . . .
Then, abruptly, he opened his eyes.
The city stretched before him, and the people, and the lights. He tried quite hard not to cry, because he knew that forty-seven-year-old men never cried, not even when they had vanished, but he couldn’t help it. So he sat on the stone lion and lowered his head and cried.
He didn’t hear the laughter at first.
When he did hear it, he thought that he was dreaming. But it was true: somebody was laughing.
He grasped one of the statue’s ears for balance and leaned forward. He blinked. Below, some fifteen feet, there were people. Young people. Some of them with books. They were looking up and smiling and laughing.
Mr. Minchell wiped his eyes.
A slight horror came over him, and fell away. He leaned farther out.
One of the boys waved and shouted: “Ride him, Pop!”
Mr. Minchell almost toppled. Then, without understanding, without even trying to understand—merely knowing—he grinned widely, showing his teeth, which were his own and very white.
“You—see me?” he called.
The young people roared.
“You do!” Mr. Minchell’s face seemed to melt upwards. He let out a yell and gave King Richard’s shaggy stone mane an enormous hug.
Below, other people stopped in their walking and a small crowd began to form. Dozens of eyes peered sharply, quizzically.
A woman in gray furs giggled.
A thin man in a blue suit grunted something about these damned exhibitionists.
“You pipe down,” another man said. “Guy wants to ride the goddamn lion it’s his own business.”
There were murmurings. The man who had said pipe down was small and he wore black-rimmed glasses. “I used to do it all the time.” He turned to Mr. Minchell and cried: “How is it?”
Mr. Minchell grinned. Somehow, he realized, in some mysterious way, he had been given a second chance. And this time he knew what he would do with it. “Fine!” he shouted, and stood upon King Richard’s back and sent his derby spinning out over the heads of the people. “Come on up!”
“Can’t do it,” the man said. “Got a date.” There was a look of profound admiration in his eyes as he strode off. Away from the crowd he stopped and cupped his hands and cried: “I’ll be seeing you!”
“That’s right,” Mr. Minchell said, feeling the cold new wind on his face. “You’ll be seeing me.”
Later, when he was good and ready, he got down off the lion.
T. E. D. KLEIN
Theodore Donald Klein (the E. in his name does not stand for anything) was born in 1947. Exhibiting an early interest in supernatural fiction, he attended Brown University and wrote an honors thesis (1969) on the influence of the Irish writer Lord Dunsany on H. P. Lovecraft. In the 1970s he produced several notable tales of supernatural horror, some published in small-press magazines and others appearing in anthologies; among them were “Petey” (1979), a story of monstrous horror in rural Connecticut; “Children of the Kingdom” (1980), a chilling tale of terrors on the underside of New York City; “Black Man with a Horn” (1980), a tale utilizing Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos; and “Nadelman’s God” (1985), a tale fusing cosmicism and psychological horror. These four tales were gathered in a landmark volume, Dark Gods (1985). A year previously, Klein published The Ceremonies, an immense expansion of what remains his best-known tale, “The Events at Poroth Farm,” and drawing upon Klein’s sensitive reading of Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and other supernatural writers.
Klein edited Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine from its inception in 1981 until 1986, making it the flagship publication in its field. He has since written relatively little: a second novel has been in gestation for two decades, while only a few short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies. Some of his later works include “Ladder” (1990), another tale of cosmic horror, and several supernatural stories for younger readers. Klein has also written engagingly about horror fiction in such works as Raising Goosebumps for Fun and Profit (1988). In spite of his small output, Klein remains a leading figure in the field and one of the masters of the modern horror tale.
“The Events at Poroth Farm” (From Beyond the Dark Gateway, December 1972) is a dense, complex work of horror in rural New Jersey and well utilizes Klein’s exhaustive reading of previous horror literature. Klein has revised the tale on several occasions; the text used here derives from his latest revision, in a volume of his uncollected tales, Reassuring Tales (2007).
THE EVENTS AT POROTH FARM
s soon as the phone stops ringing, I’ll begin this affidavit. Lord, it’s hot in here. Perhaps I should open a window. . . .
Thirteen rings. It has a sense of humor.
I suppose that ought to be comforting.
Somehow I’m not comforted. If it feels free to indulge in these teasing, tormenting little games, so much the worse for me.
The summer is over now, but this room is like an oven. My shirt is already drenched, and this pen feels slippery in my hand. In a moment or two the little drop of sweat that’s collecting above my eyebrow is going to splash onto this page.
Just the same, I’ll keep that window closed. Outside, through the dusty panes of glass, I can see a boy in red spectacles sauntering toward the courthouse steps. Perhaps there’s a telephone booth in back. . . .
A sense of humor—that’s one quality I never noticed in it. I saw only a deadly seriousness and, of course, an intelligence that grew at terrifying speed, malevolent and inhuman. If it now feels itself safe enough to toy with me before doing whatever it intends to do, so much the worse for me. So much the worse, perhaps, for us all.
I hope I’m wrong. Though my name is Jeremy, derived from Jeremiah, I’d hate to be a prophet in the wilderness. I’d much rather be a harmless crank.
But I believe we’re in for trouble.
I’m a long way from the wilderness now, of course. Though perhaps not far enough to save me. . . . I’m writing this affidavit in room 2-K of the Union Hotel, overlooking Main Street in Flemington, New Jersey, twenty miles south of Gilead. Directly across the street, hippies lounging on its steps, stands the county courthouse where Bruno Hauptmann was tried back in 1935. (Did they ever find the body of that child?) Hauptmann undoubtedly walked down those very steps, now lined with teenagers savoring their last week of summer vacation. Where that boy in the red spectacles sits sucking on his cigarette—did the killer once halt there, police and reporters around him, and contemplate his imminent execution?
For several days now I have been afraid to leave this room.
I have perhaps been staring too often at that ordinary-looking boy on the steps. He sits there every day. The red spectacles conceal his eyes; it’s impossible to tell where he’s looking.
I know he’s looking at me.
But it would be foolish of me to waste time worrying about executions when I have these notes to transcribe. It won’t take long, and then, perhaps, I’ll sneak outside to mail them—and leave New Jersey forever. I remain, despite all that’s happened, an optimist. What was it my namesake said? “Thou art my hope in the day of evil.”
There is, surprisingly, some real wilderness left in New Jersey, assuming one wants to be a prophet. The hills to the west, spreading from the southern swamplands to the Delaware and beyond to Pennsylvania, provide shelter for deer, pheasant, even an occasional bear—and hide hamlets never visited by outsiders: pockets of ignorance, some of them, citadels of ancient superstition utterly cut off from news of New York and the rest of the state, religious communities where customs haven’t changed appreciably since the days of their settlement a century or more ago.
It seems incredible that villages so isolated can exist today on the very doorstep of the world’s largest metropolis—villages with nothing to offer the outsider, and hence never visited, except by the occasional hunter who stumbles on them unwittingly. Yet as you speed down one of the state highways, consider how few of the cars slow down for the local roads. It is easy to pass the little towns without even a glance at the signs; and if there are no signs . . . ? And consider, too, how seldom the local traffic turns off onto the narrow roads that emerge without warning from the woods. And when those untraveled side roads lead into others still deeper in wilderness; and when those in turn give way to dirt roads, deserted for weeks on end. . . . It is not hard to see how tiny rural communities can exist less than an hour from major cities, virtually unaware of one another’s existence.
Television, of course, will link the two—unless, as is often the case, the elders of the community choose to see this distraction as the Devil’s tool and proscribe it. Telephones put these outcast settlements in touch with their neighbors—unless they choose to ignore their neighbors. And so in the course of years they are . . . forgotten.