From the taxi the asylum showed as a series of long, white buildings, a green, tree-filled inclosure, surrounded by a high iron fence. He was led through an endless, quiet corridor; his mind kept straining past the sedate, white-clothed woman ahead of him. Couldn’t she realize this was life and death?
The doctor sat in a little, bright cozy room. He stood up politely as Kent entered, but Kent waited only for the woman to close the door as she went out.
“Sir, you have a woman here named Mrs Carmody.” He paused a fraction of a second to let the name sink in, then rushed on: “Never mind if you can’t remember her name. It’s true.”
The fine, strong face of the white-haired doctor cleared. “I remember the case.”
“Look!” said Kent desperately. “I’ve just found out the truth about that whole affair; and this is what you’ve got to do – at once:
“Take me to the woman, and I’ll assure her, and you assure her, that she has been found innocent, and will be freed. Do you understand?”
“I think,” said the doctor quietly, “that you had better begin at the beginning.”
Kent had a frantic sense of walls rising up between him and his purpose. “For Heaven’s sake, sir, believe me, there’s no time. I don’t know just how it is supposed to happen, but the prediction that she would be hanged can only come true in—”
“Now, Mr Kent, I would appreciate—”
“Don’t you understand?” Kent yelled. “If that prophecy is not to be fulfilled, you must act. I tell you I have information that will release this woman. And, therefore, the next few minutes are the vital ones.”
He stopped because the man was frowning at him. The doctor said: “Really, Mr Kent, you will have to calm down. I am sure everything will be all right.”
The strained wonder came to Kent, if all sane, be-calm people seemed as maddening as this quiet-spoken doctor.
He thought shakily: “He’d better be careful or they’d be keeping him in here with the rest of the lunatics.”
He began to speak, to tell what he’d heard and seen and done. The man kept interrupting him with incisive questions; and, after a while, it came to Kent, that he would actually have to begin at the beginning to fill in the gaps of this fellow’s knowledge.
He stopped, sat shaky for a moment, struggling to clear his brain, and then with a tense quietness, began again.
He found himself, as the minutes dragged, listening to his own voice. Every time his words speeded up, or rose in crescendo, he would deliberately slow down and articulate every syllable. He reached the point where the Dunne books came into the story, and—
His mind paused in a wild dismay: Good heavens, would he have to explain the Dunne theory of time with its emphasis on time as a state of mind. The rest was unimportant, but that part—
He grew aware that the doctor was speaking, saying: “I’ve read several volumes by Mr Dunne. I’m afraid I cannot accept his theory of multi-dimensional time. I—”
“Listen,” said Kent in a tight voice, “picture an old man in his dotage. It’s a queer, incoherent mind-world he lives in; strange, frequently unassociated ideas are the normal condition; memory, particularly memory, is unutterably mixed up. And it is in that confused environment that somehow once a variation of the Dunne phenomena operated.
“An old man whose time sense has been distorted by the ravages of senility, an old man who walks as easily into the future as you and I walk into the next room.”
“What!”
The doctor was on his feet, pacing the rugged floor. He stared at Kent finally.
“Mr Kent, this a most extraordinary idea. But still I fail to see why Mrs Carmody—”
Kent groaned, then with a terrible effort pulled himself together. “Do you remember the murder scene?”
“Vaguely. A domestic tragedy, I believe.”
“Listen. Mrs Carmody woke up the morning after she thought she’d made everything right for herself and her family, and found a note on her dressing table. It had been lying there all night, and it was from her son, Bill.
“In it, he said he couldn’t go through with her plan. Besides, he didn’t like the farm, so he was going immediately to the city – and in fact he walked to Kempster and caught the train while she was in the theater.
“Among other things, he said in his note that a few days before the old man had acted surprised at seeing him, Bill, still around. The old man talked as if he thought Bill had gone to the city—”
That was what kept stabbing into the woman’s mind. The old man, the interfering old man—
He had, in effect, told Bill that he, Bill, had gone to the city, and so in a crisis Bill had gone.
Gone, gone, gone – and all hope with him. Phyllis would marry Charlie Couzens; and what then? What would become of a poor, miserable woman of forty-five?
The old man, she thought, as she went down the stairs from her room, the old man planned it all. Fiendish old man! First, telling Bill about the city, then suggesting who Phyllis was to marry, then trying to scare her with that hanging—
Hanging—
The woman stopped short in the downstairs hallway, her blue eyes stark, a strange, burning sensation in her brain. Why—
If all the rest came true, then—hanging!
Her mind whirled madly. She crouched for a moment like an animal at bay, cunning in her eyes. They couldn’t hang you unless you murdered someone, and—
She’d see that she didn’t pull anything so stupid.
She couldn’t remember eating breakfast. But there was a memory of her voice asking monotonously:
“Where’s Mr Wainwright?”
“He’s gone for a walk, ma. Hey, ma, are you ill?”
Ill! Who asked a silly question like that. It was the old man who’d be ill when she got through with him.
There was a memory, too, of washing the dishes, but after that a strange, dark gap, a living, evil night flooding her mind . . . gone . . . hope . . . Bill . . . damned old man—
She was standing at the screen door for the hundredth time, peering malignantly at the corner of the house where the old man would come into sight – when it happened.
There was the screen door and the deserted veranda. That was one instant. The next, the old man materialized out of the thin air two feet away. He opened the screen door, and then half fell against the door, and slowly crumbled to the ground, writhing, as the woman screamed at him, meaningless words—
“That was her story,” Kent said wearily, “that the old man simply fell dead. But the doctor who came testified that Mr Wainwright died of choking, and besides, in her hysteria, Mrs Carmody told everything about herself, and the various facts taken together combined to discredit her story.”
Kent paused, then finished in a queer voice: “It is medically recognized, I believe, that very old people can choke themselves to death by swallowing saliva the wrong way, or by a paralysis of the throat produced by shock—”
“Shock!” The doctor sank back into his chair from which he had half risen. “Man!” he gasped, “are you trying to tell me that your interference with the old man that day caused his abrupt appearance before Mrs Carmody, and that it was the shock of what he had himself gone through that—”
“I’m trying to tell you,” said Kent, “that we’ve got minutes to prevent this woman from hanging herself. It could only happen if she did do it with her own hands; and it could only happen today, for if we can get there in time to tell her, why, she’ll have no incentive. Will you come . . . for Heaven’s sake, man—”
The doctor said: “But the prophecy. If this old man actually had this incredible power, how can we hope to circumvent the inevitable?”
“Look!” said Kent, “I influenced the past by an act from the future. Surely, I can change the future by – but come along!”
He couldn’t take his eyes off the woman. She sat there in her bright little room, and she was still smiling, as she had been when they first came in, a little more unc
ertainly now, as the doctor talked.
“You mean,” she said finally, “that I am to be freed, that you’re going to write my children, and they’ll come and get me.”
“Absolutely!” Kent spoke heartily, but with just the faintest bit of puzzlement in his voice. “I understand your son, Bill, is working in a machine factory, and that he’s married now, and that your daughter is a stenographer for the same company.”
“Yes, that’s true.” She spoke quietly—
Afterward, while the doctor’s maid was serving Kent a warmed-up lunch, he said frowningly: “I can’t understand it. I ought to feel that everything is cleared up. Her children have small jobs, the girl Phyllis is married to that Couzens chap, and is living in his family home. As for Mrs Carmody – and this is what gets me – I had no impression that she was in danger of hanging herself. She was cheerful; she had her room fixed with dozens of little fancily sewed things, and—”
The doctor said: “The records show that she’s been no trouble while she’s been here. She’s been granted special privileges; she does a lot of sewing – What’s the matter?”
Kent wondered grimly if he looked as wild as the thought that had surged into his mind. “Doctor!” he gasped, “there’s a psychological angle here that I forgot completely.”
He was on his feet. “Doctor, we’ve got to get to that woman again, tell her she can stay here, tell her—”
There was the sound of a door opening violently, then running footsteps. A man in uniform burst in.
“Doctor, there’s a woman just hanged herself, a Mrs Carmody. She cut her dress into strips and using the light fixture—”
They had already cut her down when Kent and the doctor arrived. She lay stiff in death, a dark, heavily built woman. A faint smile was fixed on her rigid lips— Kent was aware of the doctor whispering to him:
“No one’s to blame, of course. How could we sane people remember that the greatest obsession in her life was security, and that here in this asylum was that security she craved.”
Kent scarcely heard. He felt curiously cold; the room seemed remote. In his mind’s eye he could see the Wainwright house, empty, nailed-up; and yet for years an old, old man would come out of it and wander over the land before he, too, sank forever into the death that had long ago struck him down.
The time would come when the – ghost – would walk no more.
The Party
William F. Nolan
Location: Manhattan Apartment, New York.
Time: April, 1967.
Eyewitness Description: “The place was pretty wild: ivory tables with serpent legs; tall, figured screens with chain-mail warriors cavorting across them; lamps with jewel-eyed dragons looped at the base. And, at the far end of the room, an immense bronze gong suspended between a pair of demon-faced swordsmen. A thing to wake the dead . . .”
Author: William Francis Nolan (1928–) is a former racing driver, commercial artist and cartoonist, and now multi-award winning author: having twice won the Edgar Allan Poe Special Award, been voted “Living Legend in Dark Fantasy” by the International Horror Guild and “Author Emeritus” by the SF Writers of America. He became famous with Logan’s Run (1967), about a future world where a youth culture has taken over and orders the death of all those over 21 to avoid overpopulation, which inspired a movie, TV series and two sequels, Logan’s World (1977) and Logan’s Search (1980). Nolan has written a number of contemporary ghost stories, though none have received higher praise than “The Party”, published by Playboy in April 1967. The following year, Newsweek named the story as one of the seven most effective horror tales of the century (“The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs and Saki’s “The Open Window” were two of the others). The story was bought for the American TV series, Darkroom, but the programme was cancelled before it could be filmed. A highly visual tale with mounting tension, this decision is almost as puzzling as the situation in which partygoer David Ashland finds himself.
Ashland frowned, trying to concentrate in the warm emptiness of the thickly carpeted lobby. Obviously, he had pressed the elevator button, because he was alone here and the elevator was blinking its way down to him, summoned from an upper floor. It arrived with an efficient hiss, the bronze doors clicked open, and he stepped in, thinking blackout. I had a mental blackout.
First the double vision. Now this. It was getting worse. Just where the hell was he? Must be a party, he told himself. Sure. Someone he’d met, whose name was missing along with the rest of it, had invited him to a party. He had an apartment number in his head: 9E. That much he retained. A number – nothing else.
On the way up, in the soundless cage of the elevator, David Ashland reviewed the day. The usual morning routine: work, then lunch with his new secretary. A swinger – but she liked her booze; put away three martinis to his two. Back to the office. More work. A drink in the afternoon with a writer. (“Beefeater. No rocks. Very dry.”) Dinner at the new Italian joint on West Forty-Eighth with Linda. Lovely Linda. Expensive girl. Lovely as hell, but expensive. More drinks, then – nothing. Blackout.
The doc had warned him about the hard stuff, but what else can you do in New York? The pressures get to you, so you drink. Everybody drinks. And every night, somewhere in town, there’s a party, with contacts (and girls) to be made . . .
The elevator stopped, opened its doors. Ashland stepped out, uncertainly, into the hall. The softly lit passageway was long, empty, silent. No, not silent. Ashland heard the familiar voice of a party: the shifting hive hum of cocktail conversation, dim, high laughter, the sharp chatter of ice against glass, a background wash of modern jazz . . . All quite familiar. And always the same.
He walked to 9E. Featureless apartment door. White. Brass button housing. Gold numbers. No clues here. Sighing, he thumbed the buzzer and waited nervously.
A smiling fat man with bad teeth opened the door. He was holding a half-filled drink in one hand. Ashland didn’t know him.
“C’mon in fella,” he said. “Join the party.”
Ashland squinted into blue-swirled tobacco smoke, adjusting his eyes to the dim interior. The rising-falling sea tide of voices seemed to envelop him.
“Grab a drink, fella,” said the fat man. “Looks like you need one!”
Ashland aimed for the bar in one corner of the crowded apartment. He did need a drink. Maybe a drink would clear his head, let him get this all straight. Thus far, he had not recognized any of the faces in the smoke-hazed room.
At the self-service bar a thin, turkey-necked woman wearing paste jewelry was intently mixing a black Russian. “Got to be exceedingly careful with these,” she said to Ashland, eyes still on the mixture. “Too much vodka craps them up.”
Ashland nodded. “The host arrived?” I’ll know him, I’m sure.
“Due later – or sooner. Sooner – or later. You know, I once spilled three black Russians on the same man over a thirty-day period. First on the man’s sleeve, then on his back, then on his lap. Each time his suit was a sticky, gummy mess. My psychiatrist told me that I did it unconsciously, because of a neurotic hatred of this particular man. He looked like my father.”
“The psychiatrist?”
“No, the man I spilled the black Russians on.” She held up the tall drink, sipped at it. “Ahhh . . . still too weak.”
Ashland probed the room for a face he knew, but these people were all strangers.
He turned to find the turkey-necked woman staring at him.
“Nice apartment,” he said mechanically.
“Stinks. I detest pseudo-Chinese decor in Manhattan brown-stones.” She moved off, not looking back at Ashland.
He mixed himself a straight Scotch, running his gaze around the apartment. The place was pretty wild: ivory tables with serpent legs; tall, figured screens with chain-mail warriors cavorting across them; heavy brocade drapes in stitched silver; lamps with jewel-eyed dragons looped at the base. And, at the far end of the room, an immense bronze gong suspended between a pair of demo
n-faced swordsmen. Ashland studied the gong. A thing to wake the dead, he thought. Great for hangovers in the morning.
“Just get here?” a girl asked him. She was red-haired, full-breasted, in her late twenties. Attractive. Damned attractive. Ashland smiled warmly at her.
“That’s right,” he said, “I just arrived.” He tasted the Scotch; it was flat, watery. “Whose place is this?”
The girl peered at him above her cocktail glass. “Don’t you know who invited you?”
Ashland was embarrassed. “Frankly, no. That’s why I—”
“My name’s Viv. For Vivian. I drink. What do you do? Besides drink?”
“I produce. I’m in television.”
“Well, I’m in a dancing mood. Shall we?”
“Nobody’s dancing,” protested Ashland. “We’d look – foolish.”
The jazz suddenly seemed louder. Overhead speakers were sending out a thudding drum solo behind muted strings. The girl’s body rippled to the sounds.
“Never be afraid to do anything foolish,” she told him. “That’s the secret of survival.” Her fingers beckoned him. “C’mon . . .”
“No, really – not right now. Maybe later.”
“Then I’ll dance alone.”
She spun into the crowd, her long red dress whirling. The other partygoers ignored her. Ashland emptied the watery Scotch and fixed himself another. He loosened his tie, popping the collar button. Damn!
“I train worms.”
Ashland turned to a florid-faced little man with bulging, feverish eyes. “I heard you say you were in TV,” the little man said. “Ever use any trained worms on your show?”
“No . . . no, I haven’t.”
“I breed ’em, train ’em. I teach a worm to run a maze. Then I grind him up and feed him to a dumb, untrained worm. Know what happens? The dumb worm can run the maze! But only for twenty-four hours. Then he forgets – unless I keep him on a trained-worm diet. I defy you to tell me that isn’t fascinating!”
The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories Page 65