by Fritz Leiber
And then… then I suddenly lay very still, rigid. In the mind of one in an ecstasy of joy or grief, meaningless incidents will flare up with a deep significance. It was that way with me. I thought of Kesserich sitting in a graveyard, laughing at the tombstones. That action of his seemed to sum up for me the whole of reality and—this is the strangest thing of all—filled me with an irrational hope. Perhaps I thought that Kesserich could teach me how to conquer my racking grief. We’re egotists mostly, Kramer; it’s our suffering that matters to us and not the thing we’re suffering for. A near sleepless week had made dust of my nerve juice. God knows just why I went to Kesserich. Perhaps only to be near someone. Anyhow, I went.
I threw on my clothes, stumbled down the darkened stair, and dashed out of the house, as hurriedly as a machine gone mad. The storm had broken; great sheets of rain were driven by the high wind. I got my roadster out of the garage and rocketed through the town, out into the desert, out into chaos, out to Kesserich.
My wild knocking brought him to the door. I saw his haggard face in a lightning flash, saw its every drawn line graven momentarily and immobile as though on the statue of martyr.
“Kesserich,” I said, the intensity of my feeling preventing any preliminary statement, “I’ve come to…” and I paused, speechless at my unreason.
“I think I know why,” he said slowly and with a terrible irony, freezing me, the world, and himself; “Yes, yes, it had to be just this… just this…”
CHAPTER 10 - THE FINAL OUTBURST
Suddenly Ellis broke off his story; with a start I became aware of small, threatening noises that my rapt attention had hitherto excluded. Noises from the outside. Then I noticed that Ellis was peering furtively at one of the windows. There was the sound of many swift footsteps, a thunderous knocking at the door. Ellis started away, reached the feet of the stairs, and paused—in doubt, it seemed from the tenor of his muttered ejaculation. I recognized the voices of the chief of police and of Elstrom in hurried conference outside the door. Then the incisive sound of an ax; the first blow shattered a panel. Quickly, I placed myself in a little alcove at one side of the door. The events of the day made me fear anything; I was not going to be found “on the spot.”
As the remnants of the door were finally swung in, Ellis switched on the light. Several men, bewildered by this, checked their rush inward and stood, blinking and panting. Elstrom, who was clutching a terrified boy by the shoulder, was the first to speak.
“See, see,” he screamed, the laryngitic squeak now constituting almost his entire voice, “it’s just as I told you. He’s here hiding, wondering what to do with his wife’s body. Rather incompetent, isn’t it? A good doctor ought to have no difficulty in disposing of a corpse.”
Ellis’s face was white but he held on to his composure.
“1 hardly understand the meaning of this illegal intrusion,” he said, ignoring Elstrom and addressing himself to the others. “I have just now returned home and cannot imagine any justification for this wild and rowdyish action. What have you to say for yourselves? You don’t seem to know what you’re doing.”
What he said was true. It was exactly as it had been at the police station: a crowd dashing about, plunging into courses of action seemingly without any adequate motivation. But before they were forced into admitting their bewilderment, Elstrom answered for them.
“We know you poisoned your wife and were afraid that an autopsy would prove that the stuff in her stomach wouldn’t tally with the stuff on my trees. You wanted people to blame me but even with that you couldn’t rest easy. You were scared for your miserable life. So you stole her body. And you were aided by another miserable degenerate, your dear Mister Kesserich. I can prove it all. Robert Graves, tell what you know!”
He twisted the boy by the shoulder and held him out like an exhibit. I started to interfere, but thought better of it, deciding to hold my hand. At the same moment I saw the Reverend Ferguson appear at the door. He, too, hesitated; however, he looked both less bewildered and more worried than the other men.
The boy’s sobs were choked off by his terror and he began to speak—mechanically, as though he’d done it several times before.
“I went out in the graveyard some nights ago on a dare and I sees a light close and gets awful scared—a dim light, like goes with ghosts. Then I sees Mister Ellis here diggin’ at a grave, the one you showed me. And with him was Mister Kesserich, only he…” here his voice broke, “looked like a ghost. All blurred-like, where his skin showed. It scared me something terrible. I run.”
Because I was concealed, my senses were likely more acute and free than the others’. I heard something that I doubt disturbed any of the others’ consciousnesses, even Ellis’s. I heard the creak of footsteps on the floor above.
“So you sees now,” came in triumphant squeak from Elstrom. “You sees now, Doctor Ellis. You broke my heart, stealing my little girl that I’d been as kind to as twenty husbands and then murdering her in cold blood. Got insurance on her too, didn’t you? Butcher! Butcher! Have you begun to mutilate her?”
Ellis started to reply, then suddenly turned and raced up the stairs, out of sight. Elstrom followed him, puffing and screaming. The others started forward, then paused doubtfully—even the chief of police. They still moved as men in a dream, with staring eyes and gaping faces.
Elstrom reached the top, started to follow on, and then went as frozenly rigid as if he’d been plunged into liquid helium. His eyes were fixed on something, or somebody, we could not see from below. His voice rose into a terrible falsetto:
“Don’t do it! Don’t come! I did it for love! Don’t!”
The squeak became a rattle. Then he went over backwards, to roll down the stairs, slowly, a fat sack, indented by whatever it hit. I doubt whether anyone could have thought he was still alive.
Those of the crowd that had gotten into the room stood still for full ten seconds—longer even than I had expected of their fear. The minister raised his head, looking about with strange speculativeness. I poised myself for action.
There were small, confused sounds from the floor above, then rapid footsteps on a stair; there must have been a second flight at the back of the house. The chief of police dashed toward the hall leading rearward, only to find a medium-heavy door locked. Others followed, to bring the ax into play; suddenly the leaders changed their minds and turned, evidently to rush through the front door and around to the back. At the last surge forward I had moved out to stand beside the spell-bound stragglers crowding the entrance. And now I instinctively turned all my efforts to further the confusion at the door and so delay the leaders. I suppose I was partly moved by a romantic perversity in my nature that makes me always favor an outnumbered minority.
However, it was only after a few moments of pushing and panting that the leaders stumbled and plunged raggedly around the side of the house and up the drive leading to the built-in garage. Just then the flimsy doors were bumped open and a touring car shot out in screaming, roaring first. The mob scattered in time, some of them throwing themselves to the lawns on either side of the drive and landing sprawling. The gears bit into second as the machine swerved half across a lawn and onto the street. The late-comers were jumping out of the way; no one was hurt. I recognized John Ellis at the wheel. The chief of police fired a belated couple of shots but they apparently went wide.
I got away as quickly as I could. I was done up.
The next day I left Smithville; it is not my intention to return. Early in the morning I learned that Ellis’s car had been pursued but with no success; he had been given too great a start by the bewildered chief of police. The house was searched that night but nothing of any suspicious character whatever was found; I imagine that it will stand empty for a few years and then be sold for taxes, unless some distant relative of Ellis’s turns up or unless Ellis returns and is able to clear himself.
It turned out that we were right in thinking Elstrom dead. Two doctors would call it nothing but heart failure precipita
ted by unaccustomed exertion and extreme excitement; at all events and to my knowledge, no further attempts were made to apprehend Ellis in any connection. My own idea is that the town was scared back into normalcy by a fear for its own collective sanity. They wanted in the worst way to forget him. Ferguson has since substantiated this in two, long, intelligent, but comparatively noninformative letters. As far as he can learn, Smithville has ceased to be a center magnetic to the preternatural. Nevertheless, I have no desire to revisit it.
I have heard from Ellis, or at least I think I have—a scrawl from San Francisco apprising me of his safety and of a desire to let all explanations drop, especially since he claimed to be entering a new life. Something about the look of the envelope makes me think it was delayed for some time by a remailing agency. He seems to have determined on secrecy.
My memory of his college desire to become a missionary doctor makes me think he may have gone to some part of the orient. Half the time I wished he had written more and the other half I am glad that the whole Smithville problem has never been reopened.
A little of the spare money that my modest success as an author has provided me with I have used in employing a news bureau to glance through papers coming from China for news of a Dr. John Ellis. Thus far I have received only one clipping that interests me (the few others all concerned an aged British military surgeon in Shanghai). The odd one mentions a Dr. Ellis taking over a dangerous voluntary post in a plague-ridden inland province. The first name is not given and I am further inclined to doubt its being my friend because it mentions him as expecting to be joined by his wife. Doubt? God, I am not so sure…
For I cannot forget that as his touring-car plunged through the mob and away I saw someone crouched in the seat beside him, motionless—whether dead or alive I could not guess—but, and I am not sure of any definite reason for this opinion, seemingly a woman.
CHAPTER 11 - THE BLACK CAT
Frankly, when I penned those last lines, I thought they would never be augmented, I only wanted a clear account of the single bizarre interval in my otherwise commonplace life. Then, whenever I wanted to mull the thing over, my imagination wouldn’t have so great a chance of leading my memory astray. Matters, large or small, that one can’t reconcile to what is reasonable, have a way of being forgotten; one begins to doubt their entire fabric. That very thing happened to me in spite of my manuscript.
The fact that John Ellis had admitted being dosed at one time (or more than once) with a mixture called x-hashish came to seem more and more important to me. That, and the nervous, feverish state he claimed to be in after his wife’s death. Events prevented me from hearing all of his story but what I did hear of it did indeed have the quality of an opium dream; again and again I remembered that what I had read in the fragment of Kesserich’s notebook made me suspect him of being a drug addict.
Worse, though, the disappearance of Mary’s body and the sudden flight of Ellis from the mob could not but give rise to suspicions it is better not to entertain of a person who has been one’s friend and may still be. Today every educated person can hardly help but know of those pitiable creatures whose warped desires drive them to robbing graves. It might even be possible that Ellis killed his wife in order that—but there is no need of expanding this topic, save to note that it fits in nicely with the drug addict theory. Though I must mention that I was even inclined to give the blowing up of Kesserich’s laboratory a dark interpretation. No remains identifiable as human had been found; still the explosion had been a violent one; it might have covered up traces, traces of a Kesserich who knew too much.
But how explain all the facts? The strange behavior of Elstrom and his death, which was, I feel, caused by fright; I’d swear to that impression in any court.
Then, too, what became of Ellis’s other car; he had a roadster besides the touring-car in which he made his escape. This is a small point, but it has bothered me.
And why, if Ellis had murdered Kesserich, did he mistake me for him when I knocked at the door? And what was behind the boy’s strange description of Kesserich as he appeared in the graveyard? And why… but there are no end to my “whys?” and “whats?”
As for the strange behavior of the population of Smithville.
I have since read a number of books dealing with mob psychology and the genesis of rumor. In them I have been confronted by incidents quite as bewildering to the untutored. However, even if I do accept the text-book explanation, important questions are still left unanswered. If Smithville was a case of “mob psychology,” then what was the cause? What was the background? I saw people act in a completely unreasonable way; I saw a ridiculous rumor (that Mary Ellis was buried alive) spread through scores in the course of minutes; and then, from all I’ve heard, the unrest ended just as quickly as it began.
Now, that sort of thing doesn’t “just happen.” Mob psychology doesn’t “just happen.” There must have been something to make those people, average people, susceptible. But what could that something have been? A secret cult? But I saw no evidence of one and it’s a silly, sensational idea, anyway. A master hypnotist? But that’s impossible, for how could he work? And yet…
O, I think I’d give the thing up as a case of “mass-stupidity” if it weren’t for Ferguson. He was so reasonable, so convinced and convincing…
Forget it.
And the trail of pebbles. Symptomatic, isn’t it, that I keep overlooking that important experience? Well, when I wasn’t overlooking it, I was beginning to think it some fantastic sort of optical illusion. Yes, I was willing to distrust my own senses to the point of inventing myself with a kind of minor, sporadic insanity, rather than admit a preternatural agency. That’s clear isn’t it?
I write this much to warn my readers against the insidious mental forces that work unceasingly to shield consciousness from a knowledge of those wild powers that walk the world unrecognized and denied by science. What I have written no longer represents my own point of view.
Yet can I be sure? Although what happened at The Black Cat seemed to be a hideously complete substantiation of my wildest hypotheses, I find myself longing to doubt its reality as much as I doubt the reality of some of the things that happened at Smithville. There is no denying the fact that I was a little drunk at the time. It is barely possible that certain repressed theories festered in my mind to such an extent that when they did appear they cloaked themselves in the form of actual event.
However, I shall write everything down just as I seem to remember it, for whenever I rise sufficiently above the petty fears and cheaply logical explanations characteristic of everyday human reasoning, I must admit that I am unable honestly to dispose of everything on the well-worn grounds of illusion and coincidence.
First, let me explain about The Black Cat. It is a quiet little drinking establishment located near the great New York university that Ellis, Kesserich, and I attended. The place has persisted into the era of repeal along with and perhaps because of its large tin mugs and generous portions. The proprietor, an aging Hungarian, is satisfied with reasonable but regular profits. He is a man of no little cultivation and like many Europeans, is an enthusiastic admirer of the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, after whose famous story he has named his establishment.
As I remember, Kesserich discovered the place and became rather acquainted with the proprietor. You see, the name Kesserich is Hungarian and even, if one goes far enough back, old Hun.
Lately, I had revisited The Black Cat quite often; not because I am a heavy drinker looking for cheap prices—an assumption that would make even my closest friends laugh— but because I find that old haunts have a way of stimulating the imagination. An author needs to keep in contact with his own past or some of his best ideas will be lost.
This winter night whose events I am going to relate found New York in the grip of an incisive cold snap. A slight snow falling, the air still, sounds clarified but reduced in number, automobiles creeping and occasionally skidding with dreamlike irrevocabi
lity on the ice-film. Partly due to the fact that the university was not in session, The Black Cat was deserted. This made me both lonely and pleased. The proprietor proposed hot rum punches. I acquiesced and he promised to brew them with meticulous care. For a while we conversed together. I realized that once again his profound understanding of the art of drinking had enabled him to find the precise liquid answer to my mood and, in my enthusiasm and gratitude, I consumed a few more glasses than were indicated as necessary, finally retiring to a secluded booth to dream. The drinking was by no means a great excess. Of that I am positive. At no time were my powers of judgment and reason seriously interfered with. However, I was sufficiently affected not to be able, for a few seconds, to determine why the face, shadowed as it was by a hat, of the man who sat down to join me uninvited, seemed vague, featureless, blurred.
Then I realized that it was covered in bandages. Completely covered from collar to hat brim. A pair of seemingly thick glasses took up the eye holes.
My surprise was not as great as may be thought. One comes in contact with so many people in New York that their variety becomes a commonplace. Besides, the appalling number of automobile accidents makes plaster casts and bandages no great novelty. “I am confronted,” I reasoned logically, “either by a nut, or by some friend who seeks to surprise me or else thinks I have already heard of his misfortune.”
Taking the latter hypothesis for granted I attempted to deduce the identity of the still silent stranger from traits other than facial. This proved difficult; his hands were covered with gloves, his eyes with thick, distorting glasses.
Then I heard what he was idly rapping out on the table with his knuckles. Four raps, then two…
The man was too tall for John Ellis. His shoulders were narrower… yet there was only one other who knew that signal…