by Whit Burnett
other two packages were a small box of absorbent cotton and
a bottle of wood alcohol.
That night Artur lighted no fire in the hearth. Instead, he
placed the wire trap on the floor in the center of the room, in
the pitch-black darkness, baited with a tightly wadded ball of
absorbent cotton soaked in alcohol, which he carefully lighted.
After watching the bluish flame for a moment, he tiptoed into
his alcove bedroom and with the curtains drawn lay down to
wait. All day long he had been moving in a dazed fever of suppressed excitement, and it had not occurred to him to take any food. He was surprised now tl}at he felt so lightheaded and
weary. As he lay on his bed his body seemed to be floating motionless in space, without energy or movement. Now his mind was floating too . . . calm . . . light as a feather . . . floating
. . . in space and silence. . . •
He was aroused by a sharp sound . . . a scream. From the
other room, through the hangings, came a faint ruddy glow. He
rose, trembling, and parted the curtains. In the center of the
floor, with the glow radiating from it, was the wire trap. But it
was strangely larger than he remembered it . . . it was as large
as a bushel basket. And crouching, imprisoned in the trap, with
the wire bars pressing tightly against her flesh, was a beautiful
woman. Her body was rosy, luminous. The wires encircled her
so cruelly that she could scarcely move. She was moaning piteously and begging in a voice of agonized sweetness to be released. Artur moved toward her-but stopped in terror, for he saw that her breasts were pressed against the pointed barbs,
and that from the wounds, instead of blood, were trickling
little streams of fire! She was not a mortal woman, but a demon.
He knew that if he freed her he would be consumed to ashes in
her fiery embrace. He knew that he must kill her, if he could,
while she was still captive in the cage. She was struggling now,
straining with all the force of her cramped body against the
taut wires. He would have to be quick! He remembered that
there was a long curved paper knife on his writing table. He
moved toward it. But it was too late. The wires of the cage
were turning red! They were bending . . . breaking . . . she was
free!
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Nineteen Tales ol Terror
•
Rising to her full height, terrible, naked, beautiful, with
the little streams of fire still trickling from her breasts, she came
with outstretched arms toward him. He could feel her breath
. . . her arms reaching to encircle him . • . already his own body
was on fire . . . her burning lips . . . .
Artur escaped from this fiery, erotic vision trembling and
covered with perspiration. He was in a high fever. And the
room was cold. Everything was in black darkness. From beyond the curtains, not a flicker of light. He groped his way blindly into the other room, found matches and a candle. The
little wire tray lay empty in the center of the floor. The ball of
cotton was burned to a charred crisp. The acanthus leaves in
the cornice were cold, white, motionless.
The next morning he was still feverish and a little delirious.
Yet it seemed to him that his mind was singularly clear. He
realized now as he lay in bed, thinking, that he might be mistaken about the salamander. Perhaps there was no salamander in the cornice; no demon woman either. Perhaps it bad all
been an illusion of his distorted mind. Perhaps there were no
such things as a salamander, no such thing as a divine spark.
Somewhere in the back of his brain an absurd sentence
began to form itself, a sentence which he had long ago heard, or
read, while seated (it seemed to him) with a Capuchin monk in
the kitchen of a queen. "My son, I am fifty years of age; I am
a bachelor of arts and a doctor of theology; I have read all the
Greek and Latin authors who have survived the injury done by
time and the evil done by men, and I have never seen a salamander, whence I reasonably conclude that no such thing exists."
As he lay and slowly repeated the forgotten sentence, he was
seized by a spasm of rage. "God damn all bachelors of arts and
doctors of theology!" he screamed aloud. "If salamanders no
longer exist, it is because these men have murdered them !"
After this outburst he lay quiet for a while, pondering. If the
bachelors of arts and doctors of theology were right-if they
were right about anything-dearly it was useless to go on living. It required no genius to see that, quite independently of the question of salamanders. But was there or was there not a
salamander in the cornice? It was absolutely necessary to know.
But how? He was thinking quite sanely now, he believed, and
presently he began to formulate a plan-a plan that was simple
and could not fail.
That afternoon he went out again, and when be returned he
carried two heavy cans of kerosene. He chose an hour when
he knew the janitor would be in the basement. No one saw him
leave or enter the bouse. He remembered that kindling and
firewood were stored in the basement. It would be well to
Tile Salalllander • 1&3
bring up a few armfuls later, in case his furniture was not
sufficient. Meanwhile he would lie down and rest. He was quite
tired and ill.
A little after dark he arose, lighted the gas, and began to
work. But it was nearly midnight before his preparations were
completed. The fire mounted quicker and more fiercely than
he had anticipated. The brightness and roaring frightened him
a little, but he stood with his arms shielding the lower part of
his face, steadfastly watching the acanthus leaves. The flames
were licking the wall, running along the cornice, spreading
over the ceiling. Now the acanthus leaves began to writhe and
glow. His eyes were smarting painfully and the smoke was beginning to hurt his lungs. He was growing dizzy. He felt that in a moment he would fall. But there, out of the glowing foliage, out of the heart of the flames, the salamander was coming, coming to him at last. And with transfigured face, with outstretched arms, he went to the fulfillment of his dreams.
DOROTHY CANFI ELD FISHER
THE M U R DER O N J EFFERSON STREET
WITH its low, bungalow-style, stucco cottages,
and its few high old-fashioned clapboarded houses, Jefferson
Street looked like any side street in the less expensive part of
any American large-town, small-city. And it was like any one
of them. Like all collections of human habitations, everywhere,
its roofs sheltered complex and unstable beings, perilously feeling their way, step by step, along the knife-edge narrow path of equilibrium that winds across the morasses and clings to the
precipitous cliffs of life.
Mrs. Benson, the slender, middle-aged, well-bred widow who
had moved to Jefferson Street because it was cheap, was the
only one of them-as yet-whose foot had slipped too far from
the path for recovery. With her every breath since her husband's death, she had slid down towards that gray limbo of indifference in which all things look alike. She was lost and she knew it; but as she fell, she grasped at anything that could hold
her for a little longer; till her daughter grew up. At fourteen
,
Helen, plain, virtuous, intelligent, charmless, needed all the
help she could get, if she were to have even a small share of
the world's satisfaction.
Although Mrs. Benson went through the normal manoeuvres
of life, speaking, smiling, asking and answering questions, her
secret aloofness from what other people prized was, of course,
obscurely felt by the people around her. It was both felt and
feared by the Warders, who were her next-door neighbors. It
was one of the many things that made them feef insecure in
Jefferson Street life. They felt everything, feared everything,
started back at the snapping of a twig, all. their senses strained
like those of nervous explorers cautiously advancing, hand on
cocked trigger, into an unknown jungle. For they were undertaking a hazardous feat compared to which hunting big game
&54
The Murder on Jefferson Street • 155
or living among hostile savages is sport for children. They were
moving from one social class to the one above it.
Their family (as far as Jefferson Street knew it) was made up
of Bert Warder, his wife, their daughter Imogene and a brother
Don, employed in a bank in Huntsville. But this presentable
floe, visible above the white-collar surface was the smallest part
of the tribe. Below it was a great substructure, sunk deep in the
ocean of manual work--()veralled uncles who were factoryhands, drab, stringy-necked aunts who "worked out," brothers who were garage mechanics, sisters who sold over the counters
of ten-cent stores. Only Bert and his bank-clerk brother Don
sat at desks with pens in their hands. Bert like most of the men
who lived on Jefferson Street, was an employee of the great
Stott McDevitt Electric Company. His desk there felt to him
like a pedestal. His bungalow-home was another. To the occasional Packard car which, trying to locate a dressmaker or a trained nurse, sometimes purred into it and rolled noiselessly
out, Jefferson Street looked plebian and small-employee-ish
enough. For Bert Warder and his wife, brought up in tenement
houses in a black brutally industrial city, Jefferson Street was
patrician with its small lawns, its shade trees, its occasional
.flowerbeds, above all, its leisure-class tennis courts on the two
vacant lots at the end. They could hardly believe that Bert's
night-school-educated brains had lifted them to such a height.
The watchful tips of their antennae soon told them that in the
class into which they were transferring themselves it was considered no notable feat to live in a home with a yard, so they took care to speak of the street as other people did, with
amused condescension for its hwribleness; but in reality they
all three worshipped it, admired, feared and tried to imitate its
inhabitants, lived in dread that something from their past
might cast them out from it, and did what we all do, passionately
collected their neighbors' weak points as potential ammunition
with which to resist attacks on their own. They would have
fought to the death against a threat to their social standing on
the street-as indeed they did, quite literally, when they felt
themselves so threatened.
Tautly on the look-out as they were, they naturally felt that
Mrs. Benson's pre-occupied good manners might be intended
as a reflection on their own, and suspected that the Tuttles
(neighbors on the other side) looked down on them and on
Jefferson Street. There was nothing definite in Francis and
Mary Tuttle around which this suspicion could crystallize. It
was everything. In their every contact with the Tuttles, the
Warders uneasily felt the need to make an effort towards more
ease, pleasantness, reticence and quietness than was natural to
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•
them. It was fatiguing. And they were never sure they had
quite caught the new tune.
Yet, as a matter of fact, the Tuttles did not look down on
Jefferson Street but were as glad to live there as the Warders.
And, exactly like the Warders, had escaped to it from a life they
shuddered to look back on. It was true, as Bert Warder's quiveringly suspicious nose for class differences told him, that both Francis and Mary his wife had been brought up in a house
grander than any Bert had ever set foot in, and that Francis'
youth (which he mentioned as little as Bert mentioned his) had
been spent not with hired girls and factory hands but with
Senators and Bank Presidents. But his past had something else
in it-mi�ery and failure, and a period of total black eclipse
such as the vigorous Bert had never dreamed of. Francis
thought of his past as seldom as possible. Till Mary had dragged
him up out of the morass of self-contempt in which he lay, already half drowned, and set his feet beside hers on the knifeedge narrow path of equilibrium, he had taken for granted that his failure in life was inevitable, was because he was an allaround misfit. Living with her he had · begun to hope that perhaps it was only his family he did not fit. He said-he thought
-"family." What he meant was "brother." Away from Roger
there might be a place for him in the world, after all, he began ·
to hope.
When Mary thought of that past, as wretched for her as for
Francis, it was to Francis' mother not his brothers, she cried,
"Shame on you! Shame !" His mother had long been dead but
_
no tombstone could hide her from Mary's wrath. In the old bad
days when both sons were little boys, and the mother's favoritism was at its maddest worst, people used to say, if they noticed Francis at all, "It's hard on an ordinary boy, and rather a weakling at that, to have such a successful older brother.
Doesn't give him a chance, really." But Mary knew that Roger
was not the one to blame for the tragedy of their relation. She
had thought him stub-fingered and tiresome, the sort of successful person who bores sensitive and intelligent ones; but living as she did-mouselike invisible poor relative-close to both of
them, she had always known that Roger felt wistful and clumsy
beside Francis' accurate rightness of taste, and that he had
even a dim divination of Francis' exquisite undeveloped gift.
No, part of Roger's exasperating rightness was that he had
never accepted his mother's over-valuation. The older brother
had steadily tried to be friendly; but Francis' mother had early
conditioned the younger to see in any friendliness from anyone
only a contemptuous pity for his own ineptitude. "You, you!"
cried Mary ragingly to the wqman in her grave. "Before your
little poet-son could walk alone, you had shut him into the
Tile Murder on JeHerson Street • 151
black vault with your stupid admiration of Roger's commonplace successses, your stupid notion that Francis' fineness was weakness. And every year you added another padlock to the
door. What strange hateful mania possessed you, you wicked
woman with your mean perverted bullying . • . " Whenever
another bitter adjective came into her mind she said all this and
more to Francis' dead mother, ending triumphantly, "But I
know what he is and I've always known-a poet, a spirit so
fine and true that j
ust to breathe the air with him lifts an ordinary human being to nobility ! I, the little poor young cousindrudge you never noticed, I married a broken man, and he's a whole man now--or will be soon. I've given him children who
adore him, who depend on him! And I depend on him. He earns
their living and mine. He's escaped from the role of defeated
weakling you bullied him into. He creates happiness and knows
it! He's coming to life. And every day I bury you � little deeper,
thank God!"
Never a word of this did she say to Francis. He did not recognize personal resentment as one of the permissible elements in life. Not in his life. It belonged in a lower, meaner world
than his. Mary had climbed through the keyhole of his vault,
had triumphantly thrown open the door and led him out to
happiness, without letting him hear a single reproach to his
mother or brother at which his magnanimity could take fright.
She knew magnanimity to be the air he must breathe or die.
It was part of what she adored in him, part of what she loved
in the world he shared with her. But she did not practise it in
her own thoughts. Francis, she knew, would have cut his hand
off before he would have admitted even to himself that the
smallest part of his passionate delight in the twins came from
the knowledge that Roger's brilliant marriage was childless,
and that he had-at last-something that Roger envied. She
felt no such scruples. Hugging her babies to her, she often
revelled, unabashed, in happy savagery, "You dumb conspicuous go-getter, you haven't anything like this in your expensive empty house!" Sometimes in reaction from the loftiness of
Francis' ideals she thought, "Why can't he be unfair like anybody, and hate Roger, even if Roger's not to blame? It's nature. Who but Francis could feel guilty-not over being unfair, but over the mere temptation to be not angelically just. It'd do
him good to let himself go."
But she did not believe this. "He couldn't let himself go into
unfairness like just anybody," she thought, "for he's not just
anybody. He's a poet with a poet's fineness of fibre. And about
the only civilized being on the globe."
So there was Jefferson Street; its low bungalows, its awk-
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Nineteen Tales ol Terror