Collected Stories and Poems

by Joseph Payne Brennan

  As soon as I awoke, I got up, dressed quickly, and hurried down the hall to the dingy bathroom. I was starting back to my room when a door burst open on the opposite side of the corridor and a glaring, disheveled figure erupted into the hall.

  He stopped abruptly when he saw me. He drew back, his face twitching with agitation.

  Towel-draped and tousled as I was, I halted and stared back at him.

  "You—room here—mister?" he managed finally in a gravelly voice.

  I nodded.

  He shook his head in disbelief. "Don't know how you stand it! This was my first night—and my last! That old crone downstairs has the whole place packed with sick people! Some of 'em dying, I'll bet! Heard 'em moan and holler half the night! Roamin' the halls too, they was. I'm gettin' out!"

  He turned, took a tight grip on the battered suitcase which he carried, and headed for the stairs. Half a minute later I heard the front door slam.

  Thoughtfully, I returned to my room. Recalling the ringing of the doorbell just before I had fallen asleep, I now surmised that it had been the wild-eyed departed character inquiring about a room.

  Well, at least I wasn't merely dreaming or hallucinating, I told myself. Someone else had heard the same sounds, or similar sounds, as I. Perhaps the fleeing one-night roomer was right: Mrs. Clendon was operating some sort of shady nursing home or last refuge for the senile and terminally ill.

  But why were the occupants active and vociferous only at night? Why were the corridors always empty, the rooms always closed and quiet whenever I came or went? I couldn't answer my own questions. They raced around in my head like starving squirrels in a treadwheel cage.

  In spite of the cold morning air and a brisk walk, I had developed a dull, persistent headache by the time I arrived at Eats.

  I had lost my appetite. I nibbled sandwiches, but I got through the day thanks to extra cups of strong black coffee. On several occasions I caught Mr. Karda watching me with disapproving, suspicious eyes, but he made no complaint. I did the work assigned.

  After he had paid me, and as I was about to leave, he approached me, frowning, and spoke. "You got trouble?"

  I hesitated. I was tired and I didn't think he could be of much help in any case.

  I shrugged. "Place where I room gets noisy at night. I don't get half enough sleep."

  "Carousing? Women? Drunks? Stuff like that?"

  "No, not any of those. Seems like a lot of sick people in there. I guess they get worse at night. Groan, yell, prowl around."

  "Where you stayin'?"

  I told him.

  An odd expression crossed his face. I couldn't quite fathom it. He walked back to the counter and wiped it very carefully.

  I had my hand on the doorknob before he looked up. "If I was you," he said, "I'd get a room somewhere else."

  "What do you know about the place?"

  It was his turn to shrug. "Oh, nothin', I guess. Rumors is all. I heard once that old bag takes in anybody for a quick buck. That's an old, old house too. Must be a lot of people died in there."

  For some reason his comments exasperated me. "A lot of people have died in old rooming houses all over the city," I replied irritably. "And everybody's out for a quick buck these days."

  He hung up the counter cloth and grinned. "Sure, sure. That's the truth! Just forget about it and try to get a night's sleep."

  After the sordid ceremony of Mrs. Clendon's sliding bolts and clutching, bony hand, I ascended to my room and sprawled on the bed. As usual, I saw no one in the corridors. The doors of the rooms were all closed. Occasionally, a sporadic wind shook a broken shutter; otherwise the house was gripped in silence.

  "Holding its breath," I told myself—and immediately regretted it. If I was to go on working all day, eating inadequately as I had been, it would be vital for me to get more sleep.

  After minimum ablutions and perfunctory glances at a week-old newspaper which I had picked up, I undressed and got into bed.

  Sleep would not come. Though I ached with fatigue, my brain remained active and alert. In my mind, Mr. Karda repeated his comment endlessly: That's an old, old house. Must be a lot of people died in there.

  I finally got up and dressed. I had had enough, I told myself. I would take the initiative. I was tired of lying in bed, tense with fear, waiting for the sounds to start.

  I stole into the corridor, locked my door, slipped the key into my trousers pocket and moved slowly down the hall. All doors were closed; all rooms quiet. Save for the tapping of the loose shutter, complete silence prevailed.

  I went up and down the long corridor twice. I ascended carpetless stairs to a third floor, holding fast to a flimsy railing in the darkness. Two dim light bulbs created small islands of illumination along the second-floor hall, but the entire third floor lay engulfed in shadow.

  I groped down another musty corridor. Every door stayed shut; every room remained quiet. At the far end faint starlight filtered through a small window nearly opaque with dust. By this meager light I made out a rickety ladder leading to an overhead trapdoor. For a moment I was impelled to climb up and push open the trapdoor, but I decided against it. The ladder rungs were probably brittle with age and perhaps termite damage. If one broke, I might be injured; I might lie for hours, crying out in the darkness. I might lie for days . . .

  Cursing my overactive imagination, I returned along the corridor and carefully crept back down the stairs. I had seen no one, heard nothing.

  I stood scowling, impatient and frustrated. On impulse, I pulled out my room key and tried it on the nearest door. The key turned in the lock. I opened the door, sensing at once that nobody was in the room. By the misty window light I saw the outline of a bed, a chair, and table.

  Shrugging, I closed and locked the door. I stood hesitating, key in hand. Was it possible, I asked myself, that Mrs. Clendon, miser that she obviously was, issued the same key to all the roomers—because the locks were all the same? This would save money if a key were lost or stolen. And it had probably saved money for someone when the locks were first installed. No matter the chaos it must have created for unsuspecting roomers!

  My suspicions were quickly confirmed. My key opened every room along the hall. Not a soul was in any one of them.

  Ordinarily, fury would have excluded every other emotion. But my anger at this disconcerting discovery was now tempered by fear. If there were no other roomers in the house, what was the origin of those ghastly sounds which intruded in my dreams and ruined my sleep?

  Apprehensive and restless, I descended the stairs to the first floor. Pools of darkness. Silence. Bulky furniture, some shrouded by dustcloths. Worn wooden floors and threadbare carpets. Ragged drapes, smelling of undisturbed dust.

  For long minutes I stood outside Mrs. Clendon's barricaded private door, but at length I turned and padded back upstairs. I took off my shoes and lay down, but I made no effort to fall asleep.

  What had I stumbled into? Were nightmares unhinging my brain or was Mrs. Clendon engaged in some weird and secretive operation?

  I clung to the thought of the agitated roomer I had encountered in the corridor as he was hastening from the premises. It was a comforting thought. At least one other person had heard those unexplained night sounds.

  Hours passed before I sank into a fitful sleep. Struggling out of nightmare and only half awake, I heard something slowly sliding down the corridor. As it drew close to my door, a sickening odor seeped into the room. I sat up, heart pounding.

  Something ponderous and clumsy seemed to flop against the door. I could hear the hinges creak. I leaped out of bed, trembling.

  A kind of snuffling sound, interspersed by groans, came from behind the door. Slowly, the sound grew fainter. I realized that whatever had paused outside was now moving off toward the stairwell.

  I dressed and sat on the side of the bed, waiting for the prowler's return. Occasionally, I heard muffled thumps from below, as if an intruder was barging into furniture in the darkness.

>   I would leave the place, I vowed, as soon as I could locate another room in the vicinity—any kind of room.

  As I pondered the matter, I became convinced that Mrs. Clendon was harboring some kind of human monster on the premises, probably a relative born hideously deformed and perhaps an idiot as well. It emerged from a hidden room only at night, to prowl the corridors. After one accidental glimpse of it, roomers fled—and undoubtedly talked. As a result, the house had acquired a sinister reputation. Unless she possessed other sources of income, Mrs. Clendon was probably on the brink of bankruptcy—or even starvation. Under these circumstances, her expression of abiding apprehension, as well as her abrupt manner, were understandable.

  I must have fallen asleep for a few minutes, because I failed to hear the night roamer's return along the corridor.

  Shivering and haggard, I dressed, left the now silent house and hurried down the cold sidewalks toward Mr. Karda and Eats. A light snow was drifting down before I reached my destination.

  Karda took one look at me and shook his head. "You got to get out of that place. You look like death—not even warmed over!" I merely nodded in agreement. I was too tired to attempt talk.

  I performed my duties mechanically, like a sleepwalker. I think Mr. Karda felt sorry for me. Later in the day he said he was giving me a two-dollar-a-day raise, adding that I could have the whole of Sunday off. He even presented me with a pair of sturdy second-hand shoes which he had picked up somewhere. They pinched a little, but the soles were thick and scarcely worn. Considerably cheered, I managed to hold out until quitting time.

  It had snowed heavily all day. I labored back towards Mrs. Clendon's though formidable drifts built up by a driving wind. Under the circumstances, I was doubly grateful for Mr. Karda's gift of the shoes.

  After I had shaken off most of the accumulation which adhered to my clothes and gained the scant shelter of Mrs. Clendon's porch, I went inside and knocked on her locked, near impenetrable private door. The bony hand shot out and drew back so quickly, once the bolts were drawn, I received only a momentary glimpse of my landlady's face. The glimpse shocked me. I saw a countenance distorted with terror.

  It was good to have two dollars still left after the bolts banged shut, but my little advance now brought me small satisfaction. What had brought such an expression of overpowering, abject fear to the woman's face?

  Wearily, I tramped upstairs, removed my tattered coat, shapeless hat, new secondhand shoes, and lay down. Mr. Karda had given me coffee and a couple of leftover salami sandwiches about four o'clock. I was still hungry, but not ravenous. Sleep was the important thing, I told myself.

  Tomorrow, I decided, I would look for another room. I was reasonably sure that Karda would give me an hour or so to look around the neighborhood. Unless the storm turned into a blizzard, I vowed that the next evening would find me under a different roof.

  Exhausted, I dropped off to sleep—and nightmare. I was fighting my way down darkened streets, nearly buried under huge drifts. Somewhere, miles off, a new room awaited me, a clean, quiet room. As I lurched along, groans, emanating apparently, from under the drifts, became audible. Frantically, I began digging into the nearest mound of snow. The faster I dug, the louder grew the groans.

  I sat up in bed suddenly, trembling. The entire house echoed with groans, cries, muffled sobbing—and, at intervals, a high-pitched, half-stifled squeal of agonized rage.

  Briefly, this storm of sound would subside. At these times I was grateful to hear wind rattling the windows. It was a sound I could comprehend, a comforting sound. But, inevitably, the frenzied outbursts began again.

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed and groped for my shoes. As I did so, the wild cacophony seemed to merge into one continuous wailing shriek. I sat petrified as it grew ever louder.

  All at once, this monstrous amalgam of tortured sound swept into the adjacent corridor. I experienced a sudden, terrifying conviction that the fearful concentration of sound had somehow contrived to take on substance and shape.

  Something screaming and unnameable rushed down the hall. My door bent inward as it passed. An indescribable stench, almost like a physical blow, assailed my nostrils.

  Stupefied and sickened, I sat unable to move as the repellent thing continued down the corridor. Whatever it was seemed to pause momentarily at the top of the stairwell. The next instant it apparently plunged down.

  I heard the crash of falling furniture below, followed by the rending of wood and the screech of bolts and hinges as a door was exploded inward.

  The screams which followed were not those which I had been hearing. They were the screams of a mortal human in ultimate throes of agony and terror. They rang through the whole house, on and on, distinct even above the renewed shrieking of the thing which caused them.

  They stopped. I crouched by the bed, chill with fear, listening.

  Silence ensued but lasted only seconds, though they seemed like long minutes. There were more breaking, crashing sounds; the wailing scream of the invader began again.

  I waited, helpless. The volume of sound grew louder, closer. The unnameable was coming back up the stairs.

  Cringing in panic, I considered a wild plunge through the door, down the corridor toward the rear of the house. I had never had occasion to use the back entrance, but I was sure one must exist.

  Yet I hesitated. The rear door might be barred and bolted even as Mrs. Clendon's room. I might be trapped, still struggling to unbar it, even as the thing caught up with me.

  I made some effort to move but my legs seemed paralyzed; by the time I rose to my feet and got them pointed toward the door, it was too late.

  The shrieking grew louder, a burden of unbearable sound beating against my ears. The door bulged inward. A fetor of decay, foul and suffocating, flooded the room.

  As I staggered backward and fell on the bed, the door crashed into the room with such force it ended up flat against the floor.

  A nightmare shape reeled into the room. It was massive, with vaguely human contours, sheened over with the shining of corruption. Saturated rags clung to suppurating skin. Bones pushed outward against a misshapen sheath of discolored flesh and raveled bandages.

  The face was indescribable—sacs of swollen skin cobbled over a mass of open sores, a blood-encrusted hole of a mouth shaped into a scream which never stopped.

  The eyes were the worst. I stared into an inferno of agony, despair, and hate.

  The frightful thing was not static and fixed in appearance. It remained huge in mere bulk but both its contours and its countenance underwent terrifying and incessant alterations. The face flowed in upon itself and switched identities as if a succession of monstrous masks were being swiftly interchanged. One second it was the distorted image of a diseased and dying old man; the next it became the oversized repellent caricature of an infant in the final stage of some fatal malady; then it shifted into the semblance of a haggard younger woman horribly disfigured with suffering, undergoing the last ravages of disease and neglect.

  It was not amorphous; it did not fade or divide. But the swift, bewildering, kaleidoscopic metamorphoses never ceased. Some incarnations—for want of a better word—were repeated. Its appearance as it had first smashed into the room returned again and again.

  And suddenly, even in the depths of my terror, I thought I understood the origin of the grisly thing. It was an amalgam of the forces and emotions of those who had suffered and died in this terrible house. No single one of them haunted the place, but the imprints of their agony, resentment, rage, and fear had remained in the house long after they were gone. Somehow, as these forced strengthened and multiplied over the years, they had merged into the hideous multiple-person entity which hovered before me.

  It was, I felt, essentially mindless—but it was nevertheless motivated. The psychic remnants of pain, hate, and protest, unrelieved and perhaps even unexpressed in life, imbuing the house and steadily gaining power, had eventually grown strong enough to attain fo
rm and purpose.

  But I had scant time for metaphysical speculation. I was convinced that what I saw before me existed, at least periodically, on my own earthly plane—that it was not merely an intermingled projection of thought forms.

  I knew that it possessed explosive lethal force. I had heard the sounds of destruction coming from below—and I had seen my own door torn away.

  All this raced through my mind in seconds.

  As the ulcerous, squealing shape lurched toward me, I was finally galvanized into action.

  My mind, in its excess of fright, seemed to go blank, but my body, as if automatically repelled by the approaching entity, sprang backward off the bed and literally catapulted itself through the glass panes of the window.

  I was aware of stabbing pains in my back, the sensation of falling, sudden immersion into freezing darkness—followed by oblivion.

  I awoke in a hospital bed with severe lacerations in my back and shoulders, a broken ankle, and a concussion. A drift of snow beneath my window, built up by the still-falling flakes and heavy winds, had saved me from a fractured spine or shattered skull. Luckily, a homeward-bound night watchman passing the house had spotted me and summoned help.

  For a day or two I experienced nearly complete memory loss. And when memory returned, I wondered whether chronic amnesia might be preferable.

  The local police, who had been anxiously awaiting the return of my memory, lost no time in questioning me. I learned that Mrs. Clendon had been discovered dead in the shambles of her room, with the door off its hinges and smashed furniture everywhere.

  I told my story as well as I could, but the police remained skeptical and uneasy.

  A detective lieutenant named Raiders hovered above me impatiently, shaking his head.

  "You say you heard those screams from below just before you went out the window?"

  I nodded. "Only minutes before."

  He frowned. "Then how do you explain the fact that old Mrs. Clendon's body was found in a badly decomposed condition—like she'd been dead a long time? She was"—he groped for the word—"almost liquescent!"