He said, “I’m sorry, Doc. I guess this is a big thing for you. But now, at least, you won’t lose out with the news services. You can say you held the story at the request of the police—until, say, mid-afternoon Saturday. Then send it in to them and get credit for it.”
“Cash, you mean. I want the credit of breaking it in the Clarion, damn it.”
“But will you hold it up, Doc? Listen, those boys are killers. You’ll be saving lives if you let us get them. Do you know anything about Gene Kelley?”
I nodded; I’d been reading about him in the magazine Smiley had lent me. He wasn’t a very nice man. Evans was right in saying it would cost human lives to print that story if the story kept Kelley out of the trap he’d otherwise walk into.
I looked up and Pete was standing there listening. I tried to judge from his face what he thought about it, but he was keeping it carefully blank.
I scowled at him and said, “Shut off that God damn Linotype. I can’t hear myself think.”
He went and shut it off.
Evans looked relieved. He said, “Thanks, Doc.” For no reason at all—the evening was moderately cool—he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. “What a break it was that Masters hated the rest of the mob enough to turn them in for us when he figured he was done himself. And that you’re willing to hold the story till we get ’em. Well, you can use it next week.”
There wasn’t any use telling him that I could also print a chapter or two of Caesar’s Gallic Wars next week; it was ancient history too.
So I didn’t say anything and after a few more seconds he got up and left.
It seemed awfully quiet without the Linotype running. Pete came over. He said, “Well, Doc, we still got that nine-inch hole in the front page that you said you’d find some way of filling in the morning. Maybe while we’re here anyway——”
I ran my fingers through what is left of my hair. “Run it as it is, Pete,” I told him, “except with a black border around it.”
“Look, Doc, I can pull forward that story on the Ladies’ Aid election and if I reset it narrow measure to fit a box, it’ll maybe run long enough.”
I couldn’t think of anything better. I said, “Sure, Pete,” but when he started toward the Linotype to turn it back on, I said, “But not tonight, Pete. In the morning. It’s half-past eleven. Get home to the wife and kiddies.”
“But I’d just as soon——”
“Get the hell out of here,” I said, “before I bust out blubbering. I don’t want anybody to see me do it.”
He grinned to show he knew I didn’t really mean it and said, “Sure, Doc. I’ll get down a little early, then. Seven-thirty. You going to stick around a while now?”
“A few minutes,” I said, ‘“Night, Pete. Thanks for coming down, and everything.”
I kept sitting at my desk for a minute after he’d left, and I didn’t blubber, but I wanted to all right. It didn’t seem possible that so much had happened and that I couldn’t get even a stick of type out of any of it. For a few minutes I wished that I was a son-of-a-bitch instead of a sucker so I could go ahead and print it all. Even if it let the Kelley mob get away to do more killing, lost my housekeeper’s husband her job, made a fool out of Carl Trenholm, worried Mrs. Griswald’s daughter and ruined Harvey Andrew’s reputation by telling how he’d been caught robbing his father’s bank while running away from home. And while I was at it, I might as well smear Ralph Bonney by listing the untrue charges brought against him in the divorce case and write a humorous little item about the leader of the local antisaloon faction setting up a round for the boys at Smiley’s. And even run the rummage sale story on the grounds that the cancellation had been too late and let a few dozen citizens make a trip in vain. It would be wonderful to be a son-of-a-bitch instead of a sucker so I could do all that. Sons-of-bitches must have more fun than people. And definitely they get out bigger and better newspapers.
I wandered over and looked at the front page lying there on the stone, and for something to do I dropped the filler items back in page four. The ones we’d taken out to let us move back the present junk from page one to make room for all the big stories we were going to break. I locked up the page again.
It was quiet as hell.
I wondered why I didn’t get out of there and have another drink—or a hell of a lot of drinks—at Smiley’s. I wondered why I didn’t want to get stinking drunk. But I didn’t.
I wandered over to the window and stood staring down at the quiet street. They hadn’t rolled the sidewalks in yet—closing time for taverns is midnight in Carmel City—but nobody was walking on them.
A car went by and I recognized it as Ralph Bonney’s car, heading probably to pick up Miles Harrison and take him over to Neilsville to pick up the night side pay roll for the fireworks plant, including the Roman candle department. To which I had briefly——
I decided I’d smoke one more cigarette and then go home. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the cigarette package and something fluttered to the floor—a card.
I picked it up and stared at it. It read:
Yehudi Smith
Suddenly the dead night was alive again. I’d written off Yehudi Smith when I’d heard that the escaped lunatic had been captured. I’d written him off so completely that I’d forgotten to write him on again when Dr. Buchan had brought in Mrs. Griswald to talk to me.
Yehudi Smith wasn’t the escaped lunatic.
Suddenly I wanted to jump into the air and click my heels together, I wanted to run, I wanted to tell.
Then I remembered how long I’d been gone and I almost ran to the telephone on my desk. I gave my own number and my heart sank as it rang once, twice, thrice—and then after the fourth ring Smith’s voice answered with a sleepy-sounding hello.
I said, “This is Doc Stoeger, Mr. Smith. I’m starting home now. Want to apologize for having kept you waiting so long. Some things happened.”
“Good. I mean, good that you’re coming now. What time is it?”
“About half-past eleven. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. And thanks for waiting.”
I hurried into my coat and grabbed my hat. I almost forgot to turn out the lights and lock the door.
Smiley’s first, but not for a drink; I picked up a bottle to take along. The one at my house had been getting low when I left; only God knew what had happened to it since.
Leaving Smiley’s with the bottle, I swore again at the fact that my car was laid up with those flat tyres. Not that it’s a long walk or that I mind walking in the slightest when I’m not in a hurry, but again I was in a hurry. Last time it had been because I thought Carl Trenholm was dead or seriously injured—and to get away from Yehudi Smith. This time it was to get back to him.
Past the post office, now dark. The bank, this time with the night light on and no evidence of crime in sight. Past the spot where the Buick had pulled up and a voice had asked someone named Buster what town this was. There wasn’t a car in sight now, friend or foe. Past everything that I’d passed so many thousand times, and off the main street into the friendly, pleasant side streets no longer infested with homicidal maniacs or other horrors. I didn’t look behind me once, all the way home.
I felt so good I felt silly. Best of all I was cold-sobered by everything that had been happening, and I was ready and in the mood for a few more drinks and some more screwy conversation.
I still didn’t completely believe he’d be there, but he was.
And he looked so familiar sitting there that I wondered why I’d doubted. I said “Hi”, and shied my hat at the hat-rack and it hit a peg and stayed there. It was the first time that had happened in months so I knew from that I was lucky tonight. As if I needed that to prove it.
I took the seat across from him, just as we’d been sitting before, and I poured us each a drink—still from the first bottle; apparently he hadn’t drunk much while I’d been gone—and started to renew the apologies I’d made over the phone for having been away so
long.
He waved the apologies away with a casual gesture. “It doesn’t matter at all, as long as you got back.” He smiled. “I had a nice nap.”
We touched glasses and drank. He said, “Let’s see; just where were we when you got that phone call—oh, which reminds me; you said it was about an accident to a friend. May I ask——?”
“He’s all right,” I told him. “Nothing serious. It was—well, other things kept coming up that kept me away so long.”
“Good. Then—oh, yes, I remember. When the phone rang we were talking about the Roman candle department. We’d just drunk to it.”
I remembered and nodded. “That’s where I’ve been, ever since I left here.”
“Seriously?”
“Quite,” I said. “They fired me half an hour ago, but it was fun while it lasted. Wait; no, it wasn’t. I won’t lie to you. At the time it was happening, it was pretty horrible.”
His eyebrows went up a little. “Then you’re serious. Something did happen. You know, Doctor——”
“Doc,” I said.
“You know, Doc, you’re different. Changed, somehow.”
I refilled our glasses, still from the first bottle, although that round killed it.
“It’s temporary, I think. Yes, Mr. Smith, I had——”
“Smitty,” he said.
“Yes, Smitty. I had a rather bad experience, while it lasted, and I’m still in reaction from it, but the reaction won’t last. I’m still jittery from it and I may be even more jittery tomorrow when I realize what a narrow squeak I had, but I’m still the same guy; Doc Stoeger, fifty-three, genial failure both as a hero and as an editor.”
Silence for a few seconds and then he said, “Doc, I like you. I think you’re a swell guy. I don’t know what happened, and I don’t suppose you want to tell me, but I’ll bet you one thing.”
“Thanks, Smitty,” I said. “And it’s not that I don’t want to tell you what happened this evening; it’s just that I don’t want to talk about it at all, right now. Some other time I’ll be glad to tell you, but right now I want to stop thinking about it—and start thinking about Lewis Carroll again. What’s the one thing you want to bet me, though?”
“That you’re not a failure as an editor. As a hero, maybe—damned few of us are heroes. But I’ll bet you said you were a failure as an editor because you killed a story—for some good reason. And not a selfish one. Would I win that bet?”
“You would,” I said. I didn’t tell him he’d have won it five times over. “But I’m not proud of myself—the only thing is that I’d have been ashamed of myself otherwise. This way, I’m going to be ashamed of my paper. All newspapermen, Smitty, should be sons-of-bitches.”
“Why?” And before I could answer he tossed off the drink I’d just poured him—tossed it off as before with that fascinating trick of the glass never really nearing his lips—and answered it himself with a more unanswerable question. “So that newspapers will be more entertaining?—at the expense of human lives they might wreck or even destroy?”
The mood was gone, or the mood was wrong. I shook myself a little. I said, “Let’s get back to Jabberwocks. And—My God, every time I get to talking seriously it sobers me up. I had such a nice edge early in the evening. Let’s have another—and to Lewis Carroll again. And then go back to the gobbledegook you were giving me, the stuff that sounded like Einstein on a binge.”
He grinned. “Wonderful word, gobbledegook. Carroll might have originated it, except that there was less of it in his time. All right, Doc, to Carroll.”
And again his glass was empty. It was a trick I’d have to learn, no matter how much time it took or how much whisky it wasted. But, the first time, in private.
I drank mine and it was the third since I’d come home, fifteen minutes ago; I was beginning to feel them. Not that I feel three drinks starting from scratch, but these didn’t start from scratch. I’d had quite a few early in the evening, before the fresh air of my little ride with Bat and George had cleared my head, and several at Smiley’s thereafter.
They were hitting me now. Not hard, but definitely.
There was a mistiness about the room. We were talking about Carroll and mathematics again, or Yehudi Smith was talking, anyway, and I was trying to concentrate on what he was saying. He seemed, for a moment, to blur a little and to advance and recede as I looked at him. And his voice was a blur, too, a blur of sines and cosines. I shook my head to clear it a bit and decided I’d better lay off the bottle for a while.
Then I realized that what he’d just said was a question and I begged his pardon.
“The clock on your mantel,” he repeated, “is it correct?”
I managed to focus my eyes on it. Ten minutes to twelve, I said, “Yes, it’s right. It’s still early. You’re not thinking of going, surely. I’m a little woozy at the moment, but——”
“How long will it take us to get there from here? I have directions how to reach it, of course, but you could probably estimate the time it will take us better than I can.”
For a second I stared at him blankly, wondering what he was talking about.
Then I remembered.
We were going to a haunted house to hunt a Jabberwock—or something.
CHAPTER NINE
“First, the fish must be caught.”
That is easy: a baby, I think, could have caught it.
“Next, the fish must be bought.”
That is easy: a penny, I think would have bought it.
MAYBE you won’t believe that I could have forgotten that, but I had. So much had happened between the time I’d left my house and the time I returned that it’s a wonder, I suppose, that I still remembered my own name, and Yehudi’s.
Ten minutes before twelve and we were due there, he’d said, at one o’clock.
“You have a car?” I asked him.
He nodded. “A few doors down. I got out at the wrong place to look for street numbers, but I was close enough that I didn’t bother moving the car.”
“Then somewhere between twenty and thirty minutes will get us there,” I told him.
“Fine, Doctor. Then we’ve got forty minutes yet if we allow half an hour.”
The woozy spell was passing fast, but I refilled his glass this time without refilling my own. I wanted to sober up a bit—not completely, because if I was sober, I might get sensible and decide not to go, and I didn’t want to decide not to go.
Smith had settled back in his chair, not looking at me, so I looked at him, and wondered what I was doing even to listen to the absurd story he’d told me about Vorpal Blades and the old Wentworth house.
He wasn’t the escaped lunatic, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a screwball, and that I wasn’t a worse one. What the hell were we going to do out there? Try to fish a Bandersnatch out of limbo? Or break through a looking-glass or dive down a rabbit hole to go hunting one in its native element?
Well, as long as I didn’t get sober enough to spoil things, it was wonderful. Crazy or not, I was having a marvellous time. The best time I’d had since the Halloween almost forty years ago when we——But never mind that; it’s a sign of old age to reminisce about the things you did when you were young, and I’m not old yet. Not very, anyway.
Yes, my eyes were focusing all right again now, but the mistiness in the room was still there and I realized that it wasn’t mistiness but smoke. I looked across at the window and wondered if I wanted it open badly enough to get up and open it.
The window. A black square framing the night.
The midnight. Where were you at midnight? With Yehudi. Who’s Yehudi? A little man who wasn’t there. But I have the card. Let’s see it, Doc. Hmmm. What’s your bug number? My bug number?
And the black rook takes the white knight.
The smoke was definitely too thick, and so was I. I walked to the window and threw up the bottom sash. The lights behind me made it a mirror. There was my reflection. An insignificant little man with greying hair, and
glasses, and a necktie badly askew.
He grinned at me and straightened his necktie. I remembered the verse from Carroll that Al Grainger had quoted at me early in the evening:
“You are old, Father William,” the young man said.
“And your hair has become very white.
And yet you incessantly stand on your head.
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”
And that made me think of Al Grainger. I wondered if there was still any chance of his showing up. I’d told him to come around any time up to midnight and it was that now. I wished now that he would come. Not for chess, as we’d planned, but so he could go along on our expedition. Not that I was exactly afraid, but—well, I wished that Al Grainger would show up.
It occurred to me that he might have come or phoned and that Yehudi had failed to mention it. I asked him,
He shook his head. “No, Doc. Nobody came and the only phone call was the one you yourself made just before you came home.”
So that was that, unless Al showed up in the next half hour or unless I phoned him. And I didn’t want to do that. I’d been enough of a coward earlier in the evening.
Just the same I felt a little hollow——
My God, I was hollow. I’d had a sandwich late in the afternoon, but that had been eight hours ago and I hadn’t eaten anything since. No wonder the last couple of drinks had hit me.
I suggested to Yehudi that we raid the icebox and he said it sounded like a wonderful idea to him. And it must have been, for it turned out that he was hungry as I. Between us we killed a pound of boiled ham, most of a loaf of rye and a medium-sized jar of pickles.
It was almost half-past twelve when we finished. There was just time for a stirrup cup, and we had one. With food in my stomach, it tasted much better and went down much more smoothly than the last one had. It tasted so good, in fact, that I decided to take the bottle—we’d started the second one by then—along with us. We might, after all, run into a blizzard.
Night of the Jabberwock Page 10