Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural

by Marvin Kaye (ed. )

  Willy—the moon’s in a cloud—Goodnight. I am going. He calls.

  STANLEY ELLIN is the distinguished author of critically acclaimed suspense novels and stories and is a past president of the Mystery Writers of America. His captivating thriller, House of Cards, was made into a tolerably effective film, but he is better known for the quietly cannibalistic “Specialty of the House,” dramatized on television. Many of his stories have won awards, but “The Question” is a winner even by Ellin’s own standards. It is one ofthe author’s favorite stories, and no wonder—in its implications, it is among the most unsettling indictments of the contemporary human spirit ever penned.

  The Question

  By Stanley Ellin

  I am an electrocutioner . . . I prefer this word to executioner; I think words make a difference. When I was a boy, people who buried the dead were undertakers, and then somewhere along the way they became morticians and are better off for it.

  Take the one who used to be the undertaker in my town. He was a decent, respectable man, very friendly if you’d let him be, but hardly anybody would let him be. Today, his son—who now runs the business—is not an undertaker but a mortician, and is welcome everywhere. As a matter of fact, he’s an officer in my Lodge and is one of the most popular members we have. And all it took to do that was changing one word to another. The job’s the same but the word is different, and people somehow will always go by words rather than meanings.

  So, as I said, I am an electrocutioner—which is the proper professional word for it in my state where the electric chair is the means of execution.

  Not that this is my profession. Actually, it’s a sideline, as it is for most of us who perform executions. My real business is running an electrical supply and repair shop just as my father did before me. When he died I inherited not only the business from him, but also the position of state’s electrocutioner.

  We established a tradition, my father and I. He was running the shop profitably even before the turn of the century when electricity was a comparatively new thing, and he was the first man to perform a successful electrocution for the state. It was not the state’s first electrocution, however. That one was an experiment and was badly bungled by the engineer who installed the chair in the state prison. My father, who had helped install the chair, was the assistant at the electrocution, and he told me that everything that could go wrong that day did go wrong. The current was eccentric, his boss froze on the switch, and the man in the chair was alive and kicking at the same time he was being burned to a crisp. The next time, my father offered to do the job himself, rewired the chair, and handled the switch so well that he was offered the job of official electrocutioner.

  I followed in his footsteps, which is how a tradition is made, but I am afraid this one ends with me. I have a son, and what I said to him and what he said to me is the crux of the matter. He asked me a question—well, in my opinion, it was the kind of question that’s at the bottom of most of the world’s troubles today. There are some sleeping dogs that should be left to lie; there are some questions that should not be asked.

  To understand all this, I think you have to understand me, and nothing could be easier. I’m sixty, just beginning to look my age, a little overweight, suffer sometimes from arthritis when the weather is damp. I’m a good citizen, complain about my taxes but pay them on schedule, vote for the right party, and run my business well enough to make a comfortable living from it.

  I’ve been married thirty-five years and never looked at another woman in all that time. Well, looked maybe, but no. more than that. I have a married daughter and a granddaughter almost a year old, and the prettiest, smilingest baby in town. I spoil her and don’t apologize for it, because in my opinion that is what grandfathers were made for—to spoil their grandchildren. Let mama and papa attend to the business; grandpa is there for the fun.

  And beyond all that I have a son who asks questions. The kind that shouldn’t be asked.

  Put the picture together, and what you get is someone like yourself. I might be your next-door neighbor, I might be your old friend, I might be the uncle you meet whenever the family gets together at a wedding or a funeral. I’m like you.

  Naturally, we all look different on the outside but we can still recognize each other on sight as the same kind of people. Deep down inside where it matters we have the same feelings, and we know that without any questions being asked about them.

  “But,” you might say, “there is a difference between us. You’re the one who performs the executions, and I’m the one who reads about them in the papers, and that’s a big difference, no matter how you look at it.”

  Is it? Well, look at it without prejudice, look at it with absolute honesty, and you’ll have to admit that you’re being unfair.

  Let’s face the facts, we’re all in this together. If an old friend of yours happens to serve on a jury that finds a murderer guilty, you don’t lock the door against him, do you? More than that: ifyou could get an introduction to the judge who sentences that murderer to the electric chair, you’d be proud of it, wouldn’t you? You’d be honored to have him sit at your table, and you’d be quick enough to let the world know about it.

  And since you’re so willing to be friendly with the jury that convicts and the judge that sentences, what about the man who has to pull the switch? He’s finished the job you wanted done, he’s made the world a better place for it. Why must he go hide away in a dark comer until the next time he’s needed?

  There’s no use denying that nearly everybody feels he should, and there’s less use denying that it’s a cruel thing for anyone in my position to face. If you don’t mind some strong language, it’s a damned outrage to hire a man for an unpleasant job, and then despise him for it. Sometimes it’s hard to abide such righteousness.

  How do I get along in the face of it? The only way possible—by keeping my secret locked up tight and never being tempted to give it away. I don’t like it that way, but I’m no fool about it.

  The trouble is that I’m naturally easygoing and friendly. I’m the sociable kind. I like people, and I want them to like me. At Lodge meetings or in the clubhouse down at the golf course I’m always the center of the crowd. And I know what would happen if at any such time I ever opened my mouth and let that secret out. A five minute sensation, and after that the slow chill setting in. It would mean the end of my whole life then and there, the kind of life I want to live, and no man in his right mind throws away sixty years of his life for a five minute sensation.

  You can see I’ve given the matter a lot of thought. More than that, it hasn’t been idle thought. I don’t pretend to be an educated man, but I’m willing to read books on any subject that interests me, and execution has been one of my main interests ever since I got into the line. I have the books sent to the shop, where nobody takes notice of another piece of mail, and I keep them locked in a bin in my office so that I can read them in private.

  There’s a nasty smell about having to do it this way—at my age you hate to feel like a kid hiding himself away to read a dirty magazine—but I have no choice. There isn’t a soul on earth outside of the warden at state’s prison and a couple of picked guards there who know I’m the one pulling the switch at an execution, and I intend it to remain that way.

  Oh, yes, my son knows now. Well, he’s difficult in some ways, but he’s no fool. If I wasn’t sure he would keep his mouth shut about what I told him, I wouldn’t have told it to him in the first place.

  Have I learned anything from those books? At least enough to take a pride in what I’m doing for the state and the way I do it. As far back in history as you want to go there have always been executioners. The day that men first made laws to help keep peace among themselves was the day the first executioner was born. There have always been lawbreakers; there must always be a way of punishing them. It’s as simple as that.

  The trouble is that nowadays there are too many people who don’t want it to be as simple as that. I�
��m no hypocrite, I’m not one of those narrowminded fools who thinks that every time a man comes up with a generous impulse he’s some kind of crackpot. But he can be mistaken. I’d put most of the people who are against capital punishment in that class. They are fine, high-minded citizens who’ve never in their lives been close enough to a murderer or rapist to smell the evil in him. In fact, they’re so fine and high-minded that they can’t imagine anyone in the world not being like themselves. In that case, they say anybody who commits murder or rape is just a plain, ordinary human being who’s had a bad spell. He’s no criminal, they say, he’s just sick. He doesn’t need the electric chair; all he needs is a kindly old doctor to examine his head and straighten out the kinks in his brain.

  In fact, they say there is no such thing as a criminal at all. There are only well people and sick people, and the ones who deserve all your worry and consideration are the sick ones. If they happen to murder or rape a few of the well ones now and then, why, just run for the doctor.

  This is the argument from beginning to end, and I’d be the last one to deny that it’s built on honest charity and good intentions. But it’s a mistaken argument. It omits the one fact that matters. When anyone commits murder or rape he is no longer in the human race. A man has a human brain and a God-given soul to control his animal nature. When the animal in him takes control he’s not a human being any more. Then he has to be exterminated the way any animal must be if it goes wild in the middle of helpless people. And my duty is to be the exterminator.

  It could be that people just don’t understand the meaning of the word duty any more. I don’t want to sound old-fashioned, God forbid, but when I was a boy things were more straight-forward and clear-cut. You learned to tell right from wrong, you learned to do what had to be done, and you didn’t ask questions every step of the way. Or if you had to ask any questions, the ones that mattered were how and when.

  Then along came psychology, along came the professors, and the main question was always why. Ask yourself why, why, why about everything you do, and you’ll end up doing nothing. Let a couple of generations go along that way. and you’ll finally have a breed of people who sit around in trees like monkeys, scratching their heads.

  Does this sound far-fetched? Well, it isn’t. Life is a complicated thing to live. All his life a man finds himself facing one situation after another, and the way to handle them is to live by the rules. Ask yourself why once too often, and you can find yourself so tangled up that you go under. The show must go on. Why? Women and children first. Why? My country, right or wrong. Why? Never mind your duty. Just keep asking why until it’s too late to do anything about it.

  Around the time I first started going to school my father gave me a dog, a collie pup named Rex. A few years later Rex suddenly became unfriendly, the way a dog will sometimes, and then vicious, and then one day he bit my mother when she reached down to pat him.

  The day after that I saw my father leaving the house with his hunting rifle under his arm and with Rex on a leash. It wasn’t the hunting season, so I knew what was going to happen to Rex and I knew why. But it’s forgivable in a boy to ask things that a man should be smart enough not to ask.

  “Where are you taking Rex?” I asked my father. “What are you going to do with him?” “I’m taking him out back of town,” my father said. “I’m going to shoot him.”

  “But why?” I said, and that was when my fatht:r let me see that there is only one answer to such a question.

  “Because it has to be done,” he said.

  I never forgot that lesson. It came hard; for a while I hated my father for it, but as I grew up I came to see how right he was. We both knew why the dog had to be killed. Beyond that, all questions would lead nowhere. Why the dog had become vicious, why God had put a dog on earth to be killed this way—these are the questions that you can talk out to the end of time, and while you’re talking about them you still have a vicious dog on your hands.

  It is strange to look back and realize now that when the business of the dog happened, and long before it and long after it, my father was an electrocutioner, and I never knew it. Nobody knew it, not even my mother.

  A few times a year my father would pack his bag and a few tools and go away for a couple of days, but that was all any of us knew. If you asked him where he was going he would simply say he had a job to do out of town. He was not a man you’d ever suspect of philandering or going off on a solitary drunk, so nobody gave it a second thought.

  It worked the same way in my case. I found out how well it worked when I finally told my son what I had been doing on those jobs out of town, and that I had gotten the warden’s permission to take him on as an assistant and train him to handle the chair himself when I retired. I could tell from the way he took it that he was as thunderstruck at this as I had been thirty years before when my father had taken me into his confidence.

  “Electrocutioner?” said my son. “An electrocutioner?”

  “Well, there’s no disgrace to it,” I said. “And since it’s got to be done, and somebody has to do it, why not keep it in the family? If you knew anything about it, you’d know it’s a profession that’s often passed down in a family from generation to generation. What’s wrong with a good, sound tradition? If more people believed in tradition you wouldn’t have so many troubles in the world today.”

  It was the kind of argument that would have been more than enough to convince me when I was his age. What I hadn’t taken into account was that my son wasn’t like me, much as I wanted him to be. He was a grown man in his own right, but a grown man who had never settled down to his responsibilities. I had always kept closing my eyes to that, I had always seen him the way I wanted to and not the way he was.

  When he left college after a year, I said, all right, there are some people who aren’t made for college, I never went there, so what difference does it make. When he went out with one girl after another and could never make up his mind to marrying any of them, I said, well, he’s young, he’s sowing his wild oats, the time will come soon enough when he’s ready to take care of a home and family. When he sat daydreaming in the shop instead of tending to business I never made a fuss about it. I knew when he put his mind to it he was as good an electrician as you could ask for, and in these soft times people are allowed to do a lot more dreaming and a lot less working than they used to.

  The truth was that the only thing that mattered to me was being his friend. For all his faults he was a fine-looking boy with a good mind. He wasn’t much for mixing with people, but if he wanted to he could win anyone over. And in the back of my mind all the while he was growing up was the thought that he was the only one who would learn my secret some day, and would share it with me, and make it easier to bear. I’m not secretive by nature. A man like me needs a thought like that to sustain him.

  So when the time came to tell him he shook his head and said no. I felt that my legs had been kicked out from under me. I argued with him and he still said no, and I lost my temper.

  “Are you against capital punishment?” I asked him. “You don’t have to apologize if you are. I’d think all the more of you, if that’s your only reason.”

  “I don’t know ifit is,” he said.

  “Well, you ought to make up your mind one way or the other,” I told him. “I’d hate to think you were like every other hypocrite around who says it’s all right to condemn a man to the electric chair and all wrong to pull the switch.”

  “Do I have to be the one to pull it?” he said. “Do you?”

  “Somebody has to do it. Somebody always has to do the dirty work for the rest of us. It’s not like the Old Testament days when everybody did it for himself. Do you know how they executed a man in those days? They laid him on the ground tied hand and foot, and everybody around had to heave rocks on him until he was crushed to death. They didn’t invite anybody to stand around and watch. You wouldn’t have had much choice then, would you?”

  “I don’t know,” he s
aid. And then because he was as smart as they come and knew how to turn your words against you, he said, “After all, I’m not without sin.”

  “Don’t talk like a child,” I said. “You’re without the sin of murder on you or any kind of sin that calls for execution. And if you’re so sure the Bible has all the answers, you might remember that you’re supposed to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”

  “Well,” he said, “in this case I’ll let you do the rendering.”

  I knew then and there from the way he said it and the way he looked at me that it was no use trying to argue with him. The worst of it was knowing that we had somehow moved far apart from each other and would never really be close again. I should have had sense enough to let it go at that. I should have just told him to forget the whole thing and keep his mouth shut about it.

  Maybe if I had ever considered the possibility of his saying no, I wouldn’t have done it. But because I hadn’t considered any such possibility I was caught off balance, I was too much upset to think straight. I will admit it now. It was my own fault that I made an issue of things and led him to ask the one question he should never have asked.

  “I see,” I told him. “It’s the same old story, isn’t it? Let somebody else do it. But if they pull your number out of a hat and you have to serve on a jury and send a man to the chair, that’s all right with you. At least, it’s all right as long as there’s somebody else to do the job that you and the judge, and every decent citizen wants done. Let’s face the facts, boy, you don’t have the guts. I’d hate to think of you even walking by the death house. The shop is where you belong. You can be nice and cozy there, wiring up fixtures and ringing the cash register. I can handle my duties without your help.”

  It hurt me to say it. I had never talked like that to him before, and it hurt. The strange thing was that he didn’t seem angry about it; he only looked at me, puzzled.