Shadows 4

by Charles L. Grant (Ed. )

  "I don't know about the others, but I felt a distinct sense of relief that had little to do with the large sum of money I had put into the pot. The game had been becoming cutthroat, and while Baker and I could afford to lose, if it came to that, Jase Davidson could not. He was currently at loose ends, living on a trust fund—not a large one—left him by his aunt. And Brower—how well could he stand the loss? Remember, gentlemen, that by this time there was better than a thousand dollars on the table."

  Tremain paused here. His pipe had gone out.

  "Well, what happened?" Varney leaned forward. "Don't tease us, Clint. You've got us all on the edge of our chairs. Push us off or settle us back in."

  "Be patient," Tremain said, unperturbed. He produced another match, scratched it on the sole of his shoe, and puffed at his pipe. We waited intently, without speaking. Outside, the wind screeched and hooted around the eaves.

  When the pipe was aglow and things seemed set to rights, Tremain continued:

  "As you know, the rules of poker state that the man who has been called should show first. But Baker was too anxious to end the tension; he pulled out one of his three down cards and turned it over to show four kings.

  " 'That does me,' I said. 'A flush.'

  " 'I have you,' Davidson said to Baker, and showed two of his down cards. Two aces, to make four. 'Damn well played.' And he began to pull in the huge pot.

  " 'Wait!' Brower said. He did not reach out and touch Davidson's hand, as most would have done, but his voice was enough. Davidson paused to look, and his mouth fell—actually fell open as if all the muscles there had turned to water. Brower had turned over all three of his down cards, to reveal a straight flush, from the eight to the queen. 'I believe this beats your aces?' Brower said politely.

  "Davidson went red, then white. 'Yes,' he said slowly, as if discovering the fact for the first time. 'Yes, it does.'

  "I would give a great deal to know Davidson's motivation for what came next. He knew of Brower's extreme aversion to being touched; the man had showed it in a hundred different ways that night. It may be that Davidson simply forgot it in his desire to show Brower (and all of us) that he could cut his losses and take even such a grave reversal in a sportsmanlike way. I've told you that he was something of a puppy, and such a gesture would probably be in his character. But puppies can also nip, when they are provoked. They aren't killers—a puppy won't go for the throat; but many a man has had his fingers stitched to pay for teasing a little dog too long with a slipper or a rubber bone. That would also be a part of Davidson's character, as I remember him.

  "I would, as I say, give a great deal to know . . . but the results are all that matter, I suppose.

  "When Davidson took his hands away from the pot, Brower reached over to rake it in. At that instant, Davidson's face lit up with a kind of ruddy good fellowship, and he plucked Brower's hand from the table and wrung it firmly. 'Brilliant playing, Henry, simply brilliant. I don't believe I've ever—'

  "Brower cut him off with a high, womanish scream that was frightful in the deserted silence of the game room, and jerked away. Chips and currency cascaded every which way as the table tottered and nearly fell over.

  "We were all immobilized with the sudden turn of events, and quite unable to move. Brower staggered away from the table, holding his hand out in front of him like a masculine Lady Macbeth. He was as white as a corpse, and the stark terror on his face is beyond my powers of description. I felt a bolt of horror go through me such as I had never experienced before or since, not even when they brought me the telegram with the news of Rosalie's death.

  "Then he began to moan. It was a hollow, awful sound, cryptlike. I remember thinking, Why, the man's quite insane; and then he said the queerest thing: 'The switch . . . I've left the switch on in the motorcar . . . O God, I'm sorry!' And he fled up the stairs toward the main lobby.

  "I was the first to come out of it. I lurched out of my chair and chased after him, leaving Baker and Willden and Davidson sitting around the huge pot of money Brower had won like graven Inca statues guarding a tribal treasure.

  "The front door was still swinging to and fro, and when I dashed out into the street I saw Brower at once, standing on the edge of the sidewalk and looking vainly for a taxi. When he saw me he cringed so miserably that I could not help feeling pity intermixed with wonder.

  " 'Here,' I said, 'wait! I'm sorry for what Davidson did and I'm sure he didn't mean it; and if you must go, you must. But you've left a great deal of money behind and it belongs to you and you shall have it.'

  " 'I should never have come,' he groaned. 'But I was so desperate for any kind of human fellowship that I . . . I . . .' Without thinking, I reached out to touch him—the most elemental gesture of one human being to another when he is grief-stricken, but Brower shrank away from me and cried, 'Don't touch me! Isn't one enough? O God, why don't I just die?'

  "His eye suddenly lit feverishly on a stray dog with slat-thin sides and mangy, chewed fur that was making its way up the other side of the deserted, early morning street. The cur's tongue hung out and it walked with a wary, three-legged limp. It was looking, I suppose, for garbage cans to tip over and forage in.

  " 'That could be me over there,' he said reflectively, as if to himself. 'Shunned by everyone, forced to walk alone and venture out only after every other living thing is safe behind locked doors. Pariah dog!'

  " 'Come now,' I said, a little sternly, for such talk smacked more than a little of the melodramatic. 'You've had some kind of nasty shock and obviously something has happened to put your nerves in an awful state, but nothing is quite as bad as that. Now if you will only come back inside and—'

  " 'You don't believe me?' he cried, and his eyes were wild enough to make me acutely uneasy. There was no light of sanity left in them, and he reminded me of nothing so much as the battle-fatigued psychotics I had seen carried away in carts from the front lines: husks of men with awful, blank eyes like portholes to hell, mumbling and gibbering. 'Would you care to see how one outcast responds to another?' he asked me with a strange, twitching smile. 'Watch, then, and see what I've learned in strange ports of call!'

  "And he suddenly raised his voice and said imperiously, 'Dog!'

  "The dog raised its head, looked at him with wary, rolling eyes (one glittered with rabid wildness; the other was filmed by a cataract), and suddenly changed direction and came limpingly, reluctantly, across the street to where Brower stood.

  "It did not want to come; that much was obvious. It whined and growled and tucked its mangy rope of a tail between its legs; but it came—a dog that surely would have shied from any living thing upon two legs and most upon four. It came right up to Brower's feet and then lay upon its belly, whining and crouching and shuddering. Its emaciated sides went in and out like bellows, and its good eye rolled horribly in its socket.

  "Brower uttered a hideous, despairing laugh that I still hear in my dreams, and squatted by it. 'There,' he said. 'You see? It knows me as one of its kind . . . and knows what I bring it!' He reached for the dog's paw and the cur uttered a snarling, lugubrious howl and bared its teeth.

  " 'Don't!' I cried sharply. 'He'll bite!'

  "Brower took no notice. In the glow of the streetlight his face was livid, hideous, the eyes black holes burnt in parchment. 'Nonsense,' he crooned. 'Nonsense. I only want to shake hands with him . . . as your friend shook with me!' And suddenly he seized the dog's paw and shook it. The dog made a horrible howling noise, but made no move to bite him.

  "Suddenly Brower stood up. His eyes seemed to have cleared somewhat, and except for his excessive pallor, he might have again been the man who had offered courteously to pick up a hand with us earlier the night before.

  " 'I'm leaving now,' he said quietly. 'Please apologize to your friends and tell them I'm sorry to have acted the fool. Perhaps I'll have a chance to . . . redeem myself another time.'

  " 'It's we who owe you the apology,' I said. 'And have you forgotten the money? It's bet
ter than a thousand dollars.'

  " 'O yes! The money!' And his mouth curved in one of the bitterest smiles I have ever seen.

  " 'If you will promise to wait right here, I'll bring it,' I said. 'Will you do that?'

  " 'Yes,' he said. 'If you wish, I'll do that.' And he looked reflectively down at the dog whining at his feet. 'Perhaps he would like to come to my lodgings with me and have a square meal for once in his miserable life.' And the bitter smile reappeared.

  "I left him then, before he could reconsider, and went downstairs. Someone—probably Jack Willden; he always had an orderly mind—had changed all the markers for greenbacks and had stacked the money neatly in the center of the green felt. None of them spoke to me as I gathered it up. Baker and Jack Willden were smoking wordlessly; Jason Davidson was hanging his head and looking at his feet. His face was a picture of misery and shame. I touched him on the shoulder as I went back to the stairs and he looked at me gratefully.

  "And when I reached the street again, it was utterly deserted. Brower had gone. I stood there with a handful of greenbacks in each hand, looking vainly either way, but nothing moved. I called once, tentatively, in case he should be standing in the shadows someplace near, but there was no response. Then I happened to look down. The stray dog was still there, and he would never tip over another trash can. He was quite dead. The fleas and ticks were leaving his body in marching columns across the cement. I stepped back, revolted and yet also filled with an odd, dreamy terror. I had a premonition that I was not yet through with Henry Brower, and so I wasn't; but I never saw him again."

  The fire in the grate had died to guttering flames and cold had begun to creep out of the shadows, but no one moved or spoke while Tremain lit his pipe again. He sighed and recrossed his legs, making the old joints crackle, and resumed.

  "Needless to say, the others who had taken part in the game were unanimous in opinion: we must find Brower and give him his money. I suppose some would think we were insane to feel so, but that was a more honorable age. Davidson was in an awful funk when he left; I tried to draw him aside and offer him a good word or two, but he only shook his head and shuffled out. I let him go. Things would look different to him after a night's sleep, and we could go looking for Brower together, I thought. Willden was going out of town, and Baker had "social rounds" to make. It would be a good way for him to gain back a little self-respect, I thought.

  "But when I went round to his apartment the next morning, I found him not yet up. I might have wakened him, but he was a young fellow and I decided to let him sleep the morning away while I spaded up a few elementary facts.

  "I called here first, and talked to Kelley Earnshaw, who was on the door in those days. He said that Raymond Greer, a fellow I knew slightly, had spoken for Brower. Greer was with the city trade commission, and I immediately went to his office in the Trade Center Building that used to stand over on Market Street. I found him in, and he spoke to me immediately.

  "When I told him what had happened the night before, his face became filled with a confusion of pity, gloom, and fear.

  " 'Poor old Henry!' he exclaimed. 'I knew it was coming to this, but I never suspected it would arrive so quickly.'

  " 'What?' I asked.

  " 'His breakdown,' Greer said. 'It stems from his year in Bombay, and I suppose no one but Henry will ever know the whole story. But I'll tell you what I can.'

  "The story that Greer unfolded to me in his office that day increased both my sympathy and understanding. Henry Brower, it appeared, had been unluckily involved in an authentic rarity of our times: a real tragedy. And, like all tragedy, it had stemmed from a fatal flaw—in Brower's case, forgetfulness.

  "As a member of the trade commission group in Bombay, he had enjoyed the use of a motorcar, a relative rarity there. Greer said that Brower took an almost childish pleasure in driving it through the narrow streets and byways of the city, scaring up chickens in great, gabbling flocks and making the women and men fall on their knees to their heathen gods. He drove it everywhere, attracting great attention and huge followings of ragged children that followed him about but always hung back when he offered them a ride in the marvelous device, which he constantly did. The auto was a Model-A Ford with a truck body, and one of the earliest cars able to start not only by crank but by the touch of a button. I ask you to remember that.

  "One day Brower took the auto far across the city to visit one of the high poobahs of that place concerning possible consignments of jute rope. He attracted his usual notice as the Ford machine growled and backfired through the streets, sounding like an artillery barrage in progress—and, of course, the children followed.

  "Brower was to take dinner with the jute manufacturer, an affair of great ceremony and formality, and they were only halfway through the second course, seated on an open-air terrace above the teeming street below, when the familiar racketing, coughing roar of the car began below them, accompanied by screams and shrieks.

  "One of the more adventurous boys—and the son of an obscure holy man—had crept into the cab of the auto, convinced that whatever dragon there was under the iron hood could not be roused without the white man behind the wheel. And Brower had left the switch on and the spark retarded.

  "One can imagine the boy growing more daring before the eyes of his peers as he touched the mirror, waggled the wheel, and made mock tooting noises. Each time he thumbed his nose at the dragon under the hood, the awe in the faces of the others must have grown.

  "His foot must have been pressed down on the clutch, perhaps for support, when he pushed the starter button. The engine was hot; it caught fire immediately. The boy, in his extreme terror, would have reacted by removing his foot from the clutch immediately, preparatory to jumping out. Had the car been older or in poorer condition, it would have stalled. But Brower cared for it scrupulously, and it leaped forward in a series of bucking, roaring jerks. Brower was just in time to see this as he rushed from the jute manufacturer's house.

  "The boy's fatal mistake must have been little more than an accident. Perhaps, in his flailings to get out, an elbow accidentally struck the throttle. Perhaps he pulled it with the panicky hope that this was how the white man choked the dragon. But it was his last mistake. The auto gained suicidal speed and charged down the crowded, roiling street, bumping over bundles and bales, crushing the wicker cages of the animal vendors, smashing a flower cart to splinters. It roared straight downhill toward the street's turning, leaped over the stone gutter of the house at the bottom, crashed into a stone wall and exploded in a ball of flame."

  Tremain switched his briar from one side of his mouth to the other.

  "This was all Greer could tell me, because it was all Brower had told him that made any sense. The rest was a kind of deranged harangue on the folly of two such disparate cultures ever mixing. The dead boy's father evidently confronted Brower before he was recalled and flung a slaughtered chicken at him. There was a curse. At this point, Greer gave me a smile which said that we were both men of the world, lit a cigarette, and remarked, 'There's always a curse when a thing of this sort happens. The miserable heathens must keep up appearances at all costs. It's their bread and butter.'

  " 'What was the curse?' I wondered.

  " 'I should have thought you would have guessed,' said Greer. 'The wallah told him that his black magic would answer Brower's, or some such drivel. Told him that a man who would practice sorcery on a small child should become a pariah, an outcast. Then he told Brower that any living thing he touched with his hands would die.'

  " 'Brower believed it?'

  "Greer sighed. 'Apparently he did. You must remember that the man had suffered a dreadful shock. And now, from what you tell me, his obsession is worsening rather than curing itself.'

  " 'Can you tell me his address?'

  "Greer hunted through his files, and finally came up with a listing. 'I don't guarantee that you'll find him there,' he said. 'People have been naturally reluctant to hire him, and I understand he h
asn't a great deal of money.'

  "I felt a pang of guilt at this, but said nothing. Greer struck me as a little too pompous, a little too smug, to deserve what little information I had on the miserable Henry Brower. But as I rose, something prompted me to say, 'I saw Brower shake hands with a mangy street cur last night. Fifteen minutes later the dog was dead.'

  " 'Really? How interesting.' He raised his eyebrows as if the remark had no bearing on anything we had been discussing.

  "I rose to take my leave and was about to shake Greer's hand when the secretary opened his office door. 'Pardon me, but are you Mr. Tremain?'

  "I told her I was.

  " 'A man named Baker has just called. He's asked you to come to four seventeen Westfall Street immediately.'

  "It gave me quite a nasty start, because that was Jason Davidson's address. When I left Greer's office, he was just settling back with his pipe and The Wall Street Journal. I never saw him again either, and don't count it any great loss. I was filled with a very specific dread—the kind that will not quite crystallize into an actual fear with a fixed object, because it is too awful, too unbelievable to actually be considered."

  Here Havelock interrupted Tremain's narrative: "Good God, Clint! You're not going to tell us he was dead?"

  "Quite dead," Tremain said. "I arrived almost simultaneously with the coroner. His death was listed as a coronary thrombosis. He was short of his twenty-third birthday by sixteen days.

  "In the days that followed, I tried to tell myself that it was all a nasty coincidence, best forgotten. I did not sleep well, even with the help of my good friend Mr. Cutty Sark. I told myself over and over that the thing to do was divide that night's last pot between the three of us and forget that Henry Brower had ever stepped into our lives. But I could not. I drew a cashier's check for the sum instead, and went to the address that Greer had given me, which was in the Seventies—a fashionable district in those days.

  "He was not there, quite as Greer had prophesied. His forwarding address was in the Sixties, a slightly less well-off neighborhood of respectable brownstones. He had left those lodgings a full month before the poker game, and the new address was on Dock Street, an area of ramshackle tenements.