by Gahan Wilson
‘We can avoid that easily and simply by merely stepping together, gentlemen,’ the tall man said. ‘I propose we do just that. I propose we march!’
There was a thoughtful silence.
‘We three,’ said the man in black, ‘would make quite an army.’
‘Separately, we have achieved much,’ murmured the old man at the rack, ruminatively running a knobby finger along the twisted lips of the dummy. ‘There is no imaginable limitation to what we could accomplish together!’
‘The glorious slaughters,’ rumbled the man in the mask. ‘The refinements and extensions of torture. Mon Dieu, the screams!’
‘The treasures we might garner in,’ the old man said looking up, a new light in his rheumy eyes, ‘all that lovely money to count and stack!’
The tall man smiled down at them with his green cat’s-eyes.
‘And the power, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘The ability to crush!’
There was a longer, even more thoughtful silence, and then the man in black extended a large, gloved hand.
‘The possibilities are altogether too delightful to resist,’ he said, simply.
‘I should never forgive myself for not undertaking the experiment,’ said the old man, raising a pallid claw.
‘We are joined, then,’ concluded the tall man triumphantly and clutched the others’ hands with a strong, spidery grip over the figure on the rack.
Did it stir when those three made contact? Of course not, since it was, after all, only a sooty, rather pathetic little statue. For all its writhing and grimacing it could not possibly move of itself no matter what awful things took place around it. For the same reason it also had to be an illusion that there was the faintest sound of a dusty rustling in the surrounding gloom, as if a shudder had run through the assembled wax murderers when those hand touched and those evil fingers webbed together. Crippen did not cringe and clutch his little bottle of poison tighter, for instance, and Jack the Ripper did not totter and cling to his whore of the moment for support, and Haigh, the acid-bath murderer, certainly did not blanch.
Nevertheless, the very next day, just a little before teatime, a child dragged to Madame Grimmaud’s Dungeon of Horror by his nanny—a child who should of course never have been taken to such a dreadful place except that his guardian could not defer a moment longer seeing the brand-new effigy, just put on display, that of little Henry Briggs, who had, after years of ignored complaints, finally killed his wife and made her into meat pies which he had put in the freezer and later eaten, one by one—that child (who, to tell the truth, was thoroughly enjoying his visit) reached out a tiny hand to pluck at his nanny’s dress, and with the other, he pointed to a dummy representing the fiendish strangler Christie and asked her: ‘Why is that man so frightened, Miss Tootle?’
Miss Tootle gave a small, dry sniff, smiled coldly, and said: ‘Frightened? That lot? Not likely, dear.’
But then she leaned a little closer and noticed the bulge of Christie’s eyes.
‘Well,’ she said, uncertainly, for once, ‘perhaps . . .’ and then her voice drifted off in a manner which was highly satisfactory to the little boy as it began to dawn on her that there did seem to be something new and strange about the old familiar figure, after all.
‘Why is he afraid, then, Miss Tootle?’ the little boy asked again, but of course she did not answer directly, it was not her way; she only bustled herself and her charge up the sinister steps and out of the establishment with a speed unusual for one who ordinarily moved only with a stately tread, and that’s how the little boy came to believe Christie really did look frightened, and so did the dark hangman by the stairs, and so did the head of Louis the Fourteenth sitting on a bloody stump in its niche in the wall. They were, he was sure of it now, every one of them afraid.
And the best part was that Miss Tootle was so rattled by it all that she let him bully her into an extra ice cream before she managed to pull herself together.
— I —
IT WAS EARLY on a hot summer Tuesday morning, six thirty-three if you want to get picky, when I saw a black stretch limo moving like an ocean liner along Maple Street in Elmsville, and I just barely managed not to stop my gaze from rising smoothly above the sparkly water pouring out of the tap, and gliding by a robin singing out on the lawn, and coming to a graceful rest on a can of coffee sitting on a shelf just to the right of the window.
The driver was pretty good but not quite good enough because I caught him slowing down right in front of the house, right where you had a square-on view of it and of me standing by the kitchen sink.
Maybe he had an excuse, maybe someone had tapped him unexpectedly on the shoulder behind those smoky, one-way windows, perhaps because that someone was having trouble getting a lens focused, but I caught the driver slowing down, and that way I knew to keep my gaze moving right along to the can of coffee with my hand following after, and I knew I’d done it well enough so that nobody in that limo had seen me see them, or managed to get anything on tape to show somebody else I’d seen them, no matter how close up they’d zoomed in on me or how many frames they had to play with, because I’m good, because I’m a lot better than that driver.
Nevertheless, I have to confess I was pretty mad because this meant somebody had figured out that Mr Bowen of 257 Maple Street wasn’t just this old guy up the block, they’d figured out he was me, and one way or another that had to put a big hitch in my retirement and I resented it because it’s not easy to retire in my line of work, it’s plenty hard to get old enough to do it, and I’d gone to a lot of trouble and I thought I’d pulled it off, but now it looked like I hadn’t, after all.
The best thing I liked about retirement, and I realize I’m talking about it in the past tense these days, was that nobody wanted to kill me. For most of my life people had wanted to kill me, and some of them had made some pretty good tries at it, but here in Elmsville it was unlikely the idea had ever crossed any of my neighbors’ minds since I was just Mr Bowen, and nobody wanted to kill Mr Bowen or even took him particularly seriously.
I’d worked hard at that and done my usual good job, and my guess is that if you’d asked any of those neighbors how long I’d been living here among them the bulk of them might overestimate by as much as five years, maybe longer. I was a fixture: Little kids around here had me as one of their first memories, old ladies expected me to help them with their shopping bags when they got tired or confused, and girl scouts knew I’d buy their cookies.
Anyhow, that was all over now, probably, so I began to make plans and little preparations for the coming day. I got a couple of holsters and guns out of their hiding place under the little trapdoor I’d put in by the bed where they’d been for a long, long time, and strapped them on in sneaky places and put a larger, deadlier weapon under some rags in a bucket alongside of a clipper and a hand rake and a trowel, and then I slipped on the scruffy old outfit I liked to wear doing messier chores because my plan was to trim the bushes and weed the lawn and otherwise keep moving around outside the house.
It turned out to be a pretty good plan because it put me just around the corner of the front porch next to a little pile of crabgrass when the neat man with the briefcase showed up, and that gave me the chance to lean into view from nowhere and nail him where he stood with a neighborly smile halfway between the sidewalk and the front steps.
He smiled back, of course, I’d have been pretty insulted if they’d sent along somebody who wasn’t good enough to smile back, and asked me my retirement name.
‘Mr Bowen?’
I stood up slow and easy and friendly enough, and gave him an amiable Mr Bowen nod as I put my right hand under the rags in the bucket I was holding in my left hand so it could get a good, firm grip on what I’d hidden there.
The man was a shade over thirty, probably got his sport jacket at a place that sells them for a little less than regular stores, had neat, close-cropped hair and a face like a young, sincere bulldog, and looked as if he could move pretty quick
ly and efficiently if it was called for. He really didn’t like seeing my hand stay in that bucket, but since he was completely exposed on a tidy walkway in the middle of a sunny, well-mowed Elmsville lawn, there wasn’t too much he could do about it.
‘I’m Fred Perkins,’ he said, lifting his chin a little. ‘From the Beautiful Home Shop in the mall?’
He raised his briefcase, slowly, and opened it, slowly, keeping his bright little brown eyes on my big, bright blue ones, except for quick, guarded flickers at that bucket, and I was interested in him, too, and neither of our smiles faltered for a minute.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Mr Perkins. Sure enough.’
‘I think I’ve got something that might interest you, sir,’ he said, and carefully lifted out a swatch of carpet and held it up so that anybody passing by or looking out of a neighboring window could see the roses on it clearly.
‘Looks just like what I’ve been trying to find,’ I said, speaking in a friendly tone of voice just a trifle louder than I ordinarily would, and then I went on, still friendly, but a lot quieter. ‘You’re holding that thing up like a flag. Let’s go inside and see how it looks in a darkened hallway. You first. The door’s unlocked because we don’t lock doors much here in Elmsville because we don’t get many visitors like you. And you’re right, I do have something nasty in this bucket.’
I watched him, not all that enthusiastically, as he went up the steps just ahead of me. Someone in his past had done too good a job of teaching him to walk like a soldier, for example, and the after-shave he used was sold with particularly dumb ads on tv.
I arranged to be right behind him through the door and I closed it with my foot and let the bucket drop the moment we got through so he could have a clear view of what I was pointing at the base of his throat, just above his collar. I always like to aim at visible flesh since you never know what kind of a trick outfit might be covering the rest of the person.
‘I know this could be described as excessive firepower,’ I said, ‘almost in bad taste, but I always say you can’t play it too safe with someone trying to sell you a carpet.’
Going over him carefully with my other hand I found the police special I’d more or less expected, a nasty little Italian pistol which came as something of a surprise, and some ID—which he obviously hated to see me paw over—indicating he was a member in good standing of a government investigative agency I’d variously worked with and against through the years.
‘I hope you realize you probably wouldn’t have been able to get your hands on those so easily if my instructions weren’t to let you see them in the first place,’ he said.
I gave him an ambiguous smile and a little push in order to move him along into the kitchen.
‘Let’s assume for the moment you’re one of the good guys,’ I said. ‘I sincerely hope you are and that these cards of yours aren’t lying, since, so long as I’ve been tracked down, that would be better than a number of other alternatives that could cross my mind. I assume you want me to call you George Ashman, like it says? How did you find me? Sit over there, keeping your hands on the table, and I’ll pour us some coffee.’
‘I’ll have mine light with no sugar,’ he said. ‘George Ashman is my name, and I am with the agency. I have other papers, other proofs, in my briefcase, along with a number of things we’d like you to see. I wouldn’t want you to think it wasn’t tough locating you. For a long time we couldn’t get past Egypt, and we almost gave up on you in Paris.’
‘You weren’t supposed to get past Egypt,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d died pretty well in Egypt.’
‘You did,’ he said. ‘You did the whole thing well and ordinarily we’d never have managed to find you, but finding you was given top priority, from the House. Not just to our outfit, but to every group we’ve got. The entire government of the United States of America was after you, sir.’
I sat across from him after putting the coffee on the table, one cup at a time. I never let my weapon leave my hand, nor did I let it point anywhere but at his head. Taking things out item by item, according to my instructions, Ashman gave me a stack of very snappy documentation as to his being who and what he said he was, and then handed me a number of convincing-looking letters from important people I’d worked with before.
‘Seems all these folks want me to hear you out, George,’ I said. ‘So let’s spend a quarter hour at it and see what happens.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Can I call you by your right name? Can I call you John Weston?’
‘I sort of hoped I’d never hear that name again, but so long as you’re at it let’s say you make it John, same as I’ve made it George, and then we can play at being friends and see if it takes.’
He reached into his briefcase again, continuing to move slowly because I was still holding on to my weapon is spite of us being friends, took out a photograph, and pushed it across the table so it would come to me right-side up.
It wasn’t a pretty photograph at all since it showed a lot of dead bodies and spatters of blood and things like that. The camera was looking into a room, a handsome room, oddly familiar; looking from the height of a tall man’s face down at the floor where the bodies were, or most of them. There was one lying across a big desk by the windows and another draped over the arms of a large chair in back of the desk. Counting those two bodies and those on the floor you came out to nine.
The shooting must have interrupted a fairly formal occasion since all the dead people were decked out in neat, dark suits, and a number of them, especially the little cluster around the desk, looked to be pretty expensively tailored; there’s no tougher test for a good suit than to have somebody shoot it full of holes and then have somebody else soak it with their blood and still have it drape nicely even if the person wearing it is sprawled in a crazy attitude on top of a fan of documents spread over a carpet and giving you a wide, meaningless grin with one eye staring at you and the other one shut.
After I’d taken the first photograph in, Ashman pushed another across the table at me and then some others and pretty soon I had quite a collection of them, each one considerately taken from a slightly different angle of the room so I wouldn’t miss a thing, and all the time the room was growing more and more familiar. I knew for sure now I’d seen it a number of times, or other pictures of it, and I knew they weren’t bloody ones like these.
Other items seemed familiar, too. There was one man, for instance, a plump fellow, with a distinct shape to his head, which was bald except for a neat strip of gray hair running from ear to ear, who I almost kept recognizing except for his face having been blown away. Again, like the room, I may never have actually seen him in person, but I knew that particular bald dome because he was somebody famous, somebody really famous.
It was another man, though, that really bothered me. He was bunched up against the side of the desk—something about his posture put me in mind of a kid hiding—and I knew him, I knew him personally. Something about his hands and shoulders made me sure of it. I knew his thick, strong fingers, but the camera was always shooting him so that he was looking the other way, sometimes only just, but always the other way.
‘It’s quite a slaughter,’ I said. ‘And they used some really serious weapons. Look at the wall here; I assume it was fancy plasterwork like the rest, but it’s pulverized, it’s rubble. And the whole corner of the desk looks like it’s been bashed off by a passing truck. I take it you want my expert opinion on all of this.’
Then he handed me another photograph, and in this one the man bunched up by the desk, the one I knew I knew, was looking straight at the lens, straight at me. He looked pissed off, I supposed he’d look pissed off forever unless a mortician did something about it, and he had a gun halfway out of his shoulder holster.
‘Oh, brother,’ I said. ‘God damn it. It’s Harry Fellows. God damn it to hell. I thought he’d be safe there in Treasury.’
Of course, with that to go on, my mind started putting things together.
‘The
bald guy’s Senator Barker,’ I said and looked across the table at Ashman. ‘I had trouble making him because I had a mental block because an anchorman on tv told me last week he was in a hospital with a surprise cancer they’d come across in a routine operation.’
Ashman nodded.
‘He’s going to die next week, after complications,’ he said. ‘They’ll bury him in Arlington because he was a marine before he got into politics. That last part is true.’
‘And now I know the room,’ I said. ‘It’s just where you’d expect a senator and a Treasury agent to be. It’s the Oval Office. And that desk, the one I said got hit by a truck, that’s the desk of the president of the United States.’
I rechecked the photos quickly because there’d been a tall guy in a pinstriped suit with his face down, but the hair was wrong and he was too thin.
‘No, that’s not him,’ said Ashman. ‘That’s not the president. But it might have been, it damn near was. They didn’t get him only because his wife threw a fit about something a decorator did wrong with the Lincoln Room and screwed up the schedule. We’re covering for it now with a story about a minor fire, because those people got away. They’re still out there, and they’re too damned dangerous. We need your help, John. We need it bad.’
I leaned back and noticed I’d left my weapon lying on the table, so I guessed I was going to come along.
‘You mean well, and it’s very flattering,’ I said, ‘but you don’t really need just my help, do you? You need our help, mine and a certain other person’s help, don’t you, George? And this other person isn’t getting off his rump and it’s driving you nuts to watch him sit and pout and not do it. Am I right?’