Frogmouth

by William Marshall

  ". . . we'll take you three with your wading gear . . . and we . . . to the edge describing a . . . pattern and . . ."

  Hoosier said, ". . . those people with glassine bags . . . from the Quarantine truck . . . larger . . . and I can . . ."

  They faded. The voices were gone. In the forest, he had begun to walk and above the buzzing there was only the sound of his shoes crunching on the packed earth.

  What it had been had been nothing. It had been a shadow.

  It had been a presence.

  He heard the buzzing.

  The voices came back.

  ". . . Mr. Feiffer gone . . . ?"

  Lee called back, ". . . sir . . . and I . . ."

  He felt a coldness. He heard something move. He was not afraid. It was not that. It was something else. In Shanghai, the Chinese had hired coolies to walk their dogs for them. In the West, birds and animals and little creatures were drawn in Technicolor and had human characteristics and the kindergarten voices of blonde-maned Californian actresses. It was something else. What was happening was something else.

  The path turned off to the left on its dogleg down to a dark, overgrown path to the lagoon. On the earth there were no footprints. Whatever had come down here before him, whatever was still there if there was anything still there did not leave signs as it passed.

  All he had seen had been a shadow.

  He reached the end of the path. At the end of the path there was only a broken half-submerged bench in the waters.

  ". . . bring it around and . . ." He heard the commander say in a whisper, "Oh, my God . . ." He heard it clearly. It came not from across the lagoon, but in it. It came from the edge of the forest where, overgrown and in darkness there was something lying on its side in the reeds.

  ". . . bring . . . to . . ."

  The buzzing dropped in intensity. It was a humming. He was standing a little behind the bench with his hand still on the butt of his holstered revolver and there was nothing there at all.

  He had thought he would be able to see the lagoon. There was nothing. It was a backwater, a stagnant pool choked with crushed and fetid reeds. The bench lay partly submerged in it, rotting.

  He could not see anyone in the lagoon and all their voices were gone.

  Touching the back of the bench, he looked along the reeds, following the line of the shore and the bamboo forest's edge. It was all old, disused, let run wild. Where the water met the land there was still a faint gray mist. He heard tapping, the buzzing turning into a soft, insistent humming.

  It stopped.

  There was silence.

  Looking along the fetid weeds into the forest itself, following its twisted and curving line, Feiffer said softly, "Oh, my God!"

  He saw, twenty yards away in the reeds, a second bench.

  He saw, next to it, by it, to one side of it, a grayness.

  The grayness was moving, forming, becoming real.

  Feiffer said softly, "Oh, my God . . ."

  He saw, for the fast time in his life, something he knew did not exist.

  He saw forming, becoming real, creating itself out of the mist and the grayness, a shadow.

  He saw an old man with his hand on the back of the bench looking over, directly at him.

  It rooted him to the spot. It was a shadow. It was forming, wavering, coming and going as if it hung on only tenuously to whatever combination of fog and sound, water and reeds had brought it there. It was by the bench. The bench was real. The bench, in sharp focus, was old and splintered, disused, left there when the lagoon had been remodeled. The shadow beside it was only a shadow.

  It formed. It had shape. It had the line and shape of an arm and then an upper chest and then, wavering, losing touch, it went again and dissolved, then came back. It had a face, eyes. The eyes were blurs. It was something—

  It was a dream, something from—

  Feiffer said in a whisper, "Oh my—" and it firmed, and the face was there and then as a chill ran through him and he thought to look away, it began to go and become only mist.

  It was him. He was doing it himself.

  He tensed, staring at it and the mist became real again and began forming.

  It was him. He was doing it himself.

  He tried to look away, but could not, and the blur began to melt. In the forest he heard the tapping of the bamboo. There was a buzzing. It was getting louder and louder.

  It was an old man. It was not real. It was an invention. It was the tapping and the mist and the water and all the dead things and all the places in his soul he could not explain and all the questions about the birds sailing alone in the sky and he was doing it himself.

  Feiffer said suddenly, "No!"

  It faded. Locked into some awful, minute niche in the world, not part of it—locked into some awful part of Feiffer's mind—it seemed to turn back into mist and had never been.

  It was not real. It had no face. It was across the reeds and the water and however close you came to it you would never come close to it. It was something from a dream, a shadow.

  It was a memory.

  It was, fading and coming, sharpening and then blurring away again, a bent, old man with no face holding a rolled-up umbrella.

  He saw the eyes. They turned on him and he saw them stare at him.

  They were pale. In a dark Asian face, the eyes of something nightmarish. The pupils were pale, blind. They stared. They stared at him.

  The blur was sharpening. It was a memory. It was something drawn back and made real and held there. Whatever it was, it stared.

  It looked. It looked directly at him.

  There was a hissing sound, a whisper, a rasp, a sadness. He had invented it himself. It was not real. It was a lie. It was only the mist and the feeling he had and he had made it up, hallucinated it and it was not real. He had not seen it with the commander, he had sensed it, felt it, brought it up from somewhere inside him that did not exist. It was the soul. It was that part of him that he did not believe in.

  They had been there first, the birds. Then, in that time, in that long dawn, they had—

  The figure was shimmering, turning away, becoming lost.

  "Commander—!" It was Hoosier. There were sounds, commotion. There were sounds of people doing things.

  It was an old, tired man. It was an old, tired man with staring white pupils. It seemed, once, to shake its head, and then—

  "Harry! Harry!" The commander, giving an order, called to someone, "Find Chief Inspector Feiffer! I think he's over there! You and you, get Mr. Feiffer over here now!"

  —and then, suddenly, instantly, as if it had never been, whatever it was, wherever it had come from—whatever it meant—it was gone.

  In the cocoon, without warning, there was a terrible knife of coldness.

  It was an agony, something wrenched free and then, turning the cocoon boiling and alive, coming back again.

  The person inside the cocoon, in the street, audibly, cried out, "No!"

  The person inside the cocoon, in the street, audibly, cried, "Help! Help me!"

  The person inside the cocoon killed things. In that instant, suddenly, the person inside the cocoon, for the first time, was afraid.

  11

  "I can't break through!"

  "Get the screwdriver in between the bricks and twist!"

  From the basement, Lim yelled, "I can't break through the paint!" Obviously the builders must have built the basement and then gone immediately on strike or caught typhoid fever and died. There were no fewer then forty-seven coats of green, puce and a color as yet undiscovered on the spectrum on the basement wall. So far. In the Detectives' Room there had only been thirty. Lim yelled up, "And I've got nothing to hit the screwdriver with!"

  Mr. Wong's book hadn't mentioned paint. O'Yee, squatting down at his wall in a layer of masonry dust, cement rendering and something on the bricks that looked like penicillin culture, yelled down, "Hit it with the butt of Mr. Auden's spare gun!" When you wanted a blunt instrument you
could always be sure of finding something in Auden's bottom desk drawer.

  "It's got ammunition in it!"

  "Then unload it!"

  "It's got some sort of funny ammunition in it! I've opened the cylinder and the base of the cartridges say .357 Magnum and the side of the barrel where it says Ruger Speed 6 says that it's a .357 Magnum, but the cartridges won't come out!"

  "Try the screwdriver with the cartridges still in the gun! They won't go off!"

  "They're dripping something and there's a percussion cap on the tip of each of the bullets! I think they're explosive homemade bullets!"

  No, they weren't. Explosive homemade bullets were illegal. They were Auden's bullets. They were explosive homemade bullets. "Hit it with the butt of your own gun!"

  "My own gun is brand-new!"

  "Well, hit it with something!" O'Yee, setting the chisel against the wall and whacking it with the mallet, yelled, "I've got the book to read! You work it out!"

  . . . cement rendering, followed by a layer of bricks set from the cement footing of the foundation and keyed in on the external wall with two . . . O'Yee turned the page . . . and caps on galvanized iron where the footing and the floor joists intersect and an RSJ . . . He recognized that. An RSJ was the thing builders you asked about the possibility of knocking down a flimsy dividing wall between your dining room and your kitchen said was the only thing stopping you. O'Yee, wiping his hands and sending a shower of masonry dust onto the book, turned to the index under RSJ. There was nothing under RSJ. There was a suspicion, held by all home handymen planning nonprofessional alterations to their homes, that an RSJ was merely a figment of professional builders' imaginations. He was sure the wall didn't have one. The wall only had bricks. He put the chisel in and gave some of them a whack.

  ". . . I can't work it out! The only thing hard enough down here to hit the screwdriver with is—"

  "Use a brick!"

  "I can't get a brick!"

  O'Yee yelled, "What the hell's an RSJ?"

  "What is it in Cantonese?"

  "How the hell do I know what it is in Cantonese if I don't know what it is in English?"

  Lim called up with sudden, brilliant inspiration, "I could shoot the wall with Mr. Auden's bullets!"

  "No." It was some sort of steel girder. He scratched his head and turned his hair white. It was over doorways or lintels—what the hell was a lintel?—or something. Wasn't it? It was. He hit the bricks with the chisel and the bricks shuddered. They were good solid nineteenth-century bricks. In the nineteenth century they had never heard of RSJ and lintels or ant caps or keyed-in joists or —No, in those days they built things to last. O'Yee yelled down, "This is a combined operation! When I break through the wall up here you should have broken through the wall down there and we can see if there's any connection or a secret passage or—" The wall, even to a man who knew nothing about RSJs, was nine inches thick with, according to the book, a four-inch cavity between the inner and outer layers of bricks that made the cavity. If there was a secret passage in there they didn't have a lot to fear from a four-inch-thick man. O'Yee yelled, "Use your initiative! Find something down there! Improvise! Put the blade of the screwdriver in against the wall and, if you have to, use brute force!"

  There was a silence from the basement.

  Lim said, "The screwdriver hasn't got a blade. It's a Phillips head screwdriver. What it's got is a sort of blunt spiral." Lim yelled up, "I've looked at the bullets in the gun and they're hollow points drilled out and filled with something wet like nitroglycerine and then topped off with a pistol-size percussion cap."

  "They're illegal to shoot!"

  "Not at walls!" Lim shouted up, "It's either that or trying to bash my way through the paint with the dead rat!" He added, "Sir." There was a pause. It was a critical pause. Lim, feeling left out, yelled, "I should have had a chisel and a mallet too!" He called up, "It's only eight A.M., maybe your friend Mr. Wong has another set you could borrow!"

  O'Yee hit the wall. Through the last of the paint and the cement rendering, at last, he saw a brick. It was a red brick. Leaning forward, he put his ear to it and listened hard.

  Lim's voice yelled through the pores of the material, "I'll buy a set out of my own money if that's what you want—"

  The brick was cold, a little wet. There was a fungus on it. He wiped the fungus from the brick and his ear and listened hard.

  "—but the shops are closed around here until nine."

  The wall was silent, waiting.

  Lim said, "I'm only an underling—"

  O'Yee tapped the brick with the point of the chisel and it powdered and came loose. O'Yee yelled down, "The bricks are easy."

  "The paint isn't."

  "Once you get to them they're all old and powdery and they haven't got any support—!"

  Lim yelled emotionally, "Neither have I!" Lim, his eyes filling with tears at the humiliation of it all, yelled up, "Mr. O'Yee, I went around to my girlfriend's house last night. She's studying psychology and she says that occult manifestations aren't always caused by sixteen-year-old girls in puberty! Often, they can be caused by the male menopause and waning sexual powers and—"

  "I'm forty-four! I'm not in the male menopause!"

  Lim yelled up, "I'm twenty-three! It isn't me!" Lim, smarting, shouted, "Down here there's just me and the dead rat! I never get any of the glamour jobs! I just get shoved away to the menial tasks because I'm the youngest and everyone thinks they can—"

  He was right. O'Yee said softly, "Shoot the wall."

  "What?"

  He had been a good and true and loyal companion for all his faults. O'Yee, flipping quickly through the book in case there was a drawing of an RSJ tucked away on one of the pages, called down, "You're right!"

  "I always liked you, Mr. O'Yee!"

  "Shoot the wall." The wall, like the sea, at the last trump, was about to give up its secrets. O'Yee, placing his chisel point hard into the powdered brick and readying his mallet for the great blow, yelled down, "Shoot the wall!" He waited for his old friend to mutter in his harumphing, embarrassed way, "Oh, hem, thank you, Holmes, hem . . . ha . . . well, thank you very much . . ."

  He didn't. He yelled, "Haiii-ya!"

  He was happy.

  Down in the basement, with a detonation that shook every atom, not in the wall, but probably in the entire street, Lim, from the hip, with a wild look in his eye, shot the wall.

  He was shooting. Leaning against the garbage skip with his eyes closed Auden, with his head cocked to one side, was quietly shooting his .17 caliber Remingtons and his .577-500s on the rifle range of his mind.

  Only the corner of his mouth moved. The corner of his mouth said softly, "Kra—rack . . ." That was a .17. ". . . Boom . . ." A .577-500 Express. ". . . Click . . ." The reloading.

  The corner of his mouth said, "Hmm . . ." He nodded. It was all to do with trajectories, muzzle velocities, bullet drops at mid range, footpounds of energy, terminal tumble, wound tracks and hydrostatic knockdown. Very technical. All in the book. All there if you knew where to find it. He knew. Eureka: he had found it. Q.E.D. Thus it is proven. Auden, still leaning, making burbling noises, opening his eyes a fraction, said softly, "I'm right. This time I'm right." He looked hard at Spencer standing there with him.

  Spencer wasn't standing there with him. He was gone. It didn't matter.

  Auden, a strange, twisted, determined smile on his face, said, "And Bill, I am prepared to be shot to pieces to prove it."

  8:14 A.M. precisely.

  Auden said as the timelock advanced another click, "Time to go."

  He closed his eyes and went.

  He said softly, "Boom . . . Kra-ack!"

  He put the .17 Remington aside.

  He said softly, precisely, over and over, "Boom . . . bam . . . Boom!"

  It was all quite straightforward: the Tibetan wasn't a Tibetan at all, Ivan, Sergei, Igor, Nicholas and Natasha all looked the same, the air gun shooter shot only at the Tibetan and Auden,
people chased Auden and the Tibetan and scooped up the money when the air gun shooter shot them, they weren't always the same people who scooped up the money—and because there were so many of them what money they got was negligible—and the customers who had their money stolen got their money back from the bank. It would have been easy if the customers who got their money stolen could have claimed they had taken out more money than they actually had, but there was a computer record of what they took because they took it from an autobank.

  It all made sense if you believed that, philosophically, the world was a place of utter chaos and noncausality. Spencer had been to an English public school as a boarder. If the world had really been noncausal and chaotic the food would have been better. Spencer said softly to himself, "No."

  He didn't believe that. Standing in front of the closed autobank he glanced at his watch. His watch, as it always did, went around. It didn't go backward. The numbers on the autobank keyboard read 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0—they didn't read 6,8,2,1,0,9, 3,7, and 7 again. The world was discoverable by logic.

  He looked across the street at Auden by the garbage skip and felt a glow of reassurance. He was a brick. In a world gone mad, he was a rock, a beacon. He saw the corner of Auden's mouth moving. Poor fellow, he probably wanted a cigarette. For PC. Wang he would forgo that pleasure. No, somewhere, somehow, someone was making a profit.

  For Auden, for order, for his own satisfaction, Spencer, scratching his nose and staring down hard at the numbers on the autobank keyboard—the pure, unvarying shining truth of mathematics—concentrated all his powers of logic and deduction in one last, great effort of will to work it out.

  Mr. Nyet. Mr. . . . NYET! Spencer, his mouth suddenly falling open with the pure, simple, wonderful shining logic of it, said, rooted to the spot, "Mr. . . . Nyet!"

  He looked at his watch.

  8:23.

  He looked at the autobank opening time.

  8:24.

  He looked in through the glass doors into the bank. Ivan, Sergei, Igor, Nicholas, Natasha—they had come in through the staff entrance at the back.