Turnabout

by Thorne Smith

  “What a tough joint we picked out,” Mr. Burdock observed to himself. “First they make a guy sleep in a drawer, then they drag him off in a basket. Wonder what they meant by that bit about slugs. Sounded sort of bad to me.” His growing feeling of solitude and uneasiness gave him the temerity to lift the end of the sheet from the figure on the table behind which he had been crouching. He found himself confronting a pair of large, aloof-looking feet.

  “Can’t be Willows’ feet,” he decided, delicately re-covering the feet and moving to another table. “I’ll try this sheet, but maybe they tucked him in a drawer.”

  This effort was rewarded by a glare from two pale, malevolent blue eyes set in a dead white face decorated with a flowing beard. Mr. Burdock, after one look, hastily dropped the sheet. This Turkish bath evidently drew its customers from the very scum of society.

  “I beg your pardon, brother,” he mumbled, “I was looking for my friend.”

  He realized it was rather improper to be going about uncovering naked strangers, and was fully prepared to have this man snap erect and tell him to go to hell with his friend. He was not prepared, however, for the silence that greeted his apology. Perhaps the man had not heard. He’d try him again. Once more he diffidently raised a corner of the sheet and looked down. A person did not usually go to sleep with his eyes wide open, no matter how tired he felt. There was something in the immobility of the figure that arrested Tom Burdock’s attention. Very gently, very reluctantly, he edged in a finger and touched the man’s cold face. Mr. Burdock’s hand flipped back like a frantic fish leaping from a lake. He stood there petrified, frozen to the marrow by the shock of a ghastly realization.

  “Oh, my God,” he breathed at last, “I’m a dead man. We’re all dead men. That bit about the slugs. I see it all now. The ambulance. We died on the way. That stuff in the doctor’s flask did the trick. It killed us.”

  In his morbid mental condition it was not at all difficult for Mr. Burdock to persuade himself that this was the only rational explanation of his predicament.

  “Wonder what poor Willows looks like,” he mused as he moved to the next table.

  Idly he lifted the sheet and glanced down. The grinning face of a Negro seared his eyeballs. The sheet dropped from Mr. Burdock’s nerveless fingers and blotted out the terrible sight.

  “Dear me,” he quavered, in his fright forgetting how to curse. “Oh, dear, dear me. Oh, goodness. I can’t go on with this much longer. How awful everything is.”

  At this inauspicious moment the sheet on the table on the other side of Mr. Burdock was seized with a sudden convulsion. Tom Burdock had often heard of a person’s jaw dropping under the stress of some terrible fright or confrontation. He had never believed it, however. People did not really go about dropping their jaws. In the whole course of his life he had never seen a single jaw drop. But now as he stood looking at that wildly thrashing sheet he had occasion to alter his opinion. His own jaw swung open like a gate that had been roughly kicked. His eyes became two glassy points of fear. What horror was he now about to witness? When Tim Willows’s head finally emerged from the sheet, Tom Burdock drew a quivering breath and snapped his jaw back into place.

  “Where are we?” asked Sally, in a high tremulous voice which even in his dazed condition Mr. Burdock found somewhat incongruous.

  “Take it easy, old man,” he said in a funereal voice. “Pull yourself together. I fear we’re all dead.”

  “Dead?” repeated Sally. “Why, you’re not dead. You don’t even look sick.”

  “I know,” replied Burdock bleakly. “It must be like that. All around us lie the dead. Some of us are in drawers.”

  “You’re not in drawers,” said Sally, not looking at the great man. “Get a sheet and wrap it round you.”

  Absently Mr. Burdock plucked a sheet from a nearby table. In so doing he neatly unveiled the body of an oriental ax victim. Sally took one swift look, then crumpled beneath her sheet.

  “Has it gone?” came her muffled voice. “What a sight!”

  “It will never go,” said Burdock hollowly. “It will be dragged away in a basket.”

  “Oh, dear God,” moaned Sally, hoping to curry favor. “Do they make picnics out of us?”

  “No,” continued Burdock, now thoroughly enjoying his misery. “After that comes the ground—the earth. Parts of us go in bottles, perhaps.”

  “Well, we’ll make a couple of powerful quarts,” Sally could not help observing.

  She ducked out from under the sheet and looked curiously about her.

  “I thought it was a Turkish bath,” intoned Tom Burdock, “but it turned out to be a morgue.”

  “From the frigidity of the temperature,” said Sally, “I should say we’ve missed hell by several degrees.”

  “You shouldn’t talk like that, Willows,” Mr. Burdock mournfully remonstrated. “This may be merely a moment of transition—the pause before the plunge.”

  So far as the plunge was concerned the words of Tom Burdock were singularly prophetic. An aged man came into the room, gave one appalled look at the two strange figures, then hurriedly withdrew.

  “There’re a couple of resurrections in there,” he told the doctor, “and they’re raising hell with our morgue.”

  The doctor received this startling announcement with a smile of malicious glee. A few minutes later four large attendants filed briskly into the morgue and roughly apprehended both Sally and Mr. Burdock. Then came the plunge. They were transported through leagues of space and violently deposited in two tubs of ice-cold water.

  “The final plunge,” gasped Sally as the water closed over her head.

  Mr. Burdock’s amazement and indignation knew no bounds. Sally had reached that stage whereat nothing really surprised her. Dead or alive, she was still sticking to her man.

  The bath over, a couple of strange-looking garments were flung in their faces.

  “My God,” chattered Tom Burdock, distastefully examining the article in his hands. “The things they can’t think of doing to you in a place like this! Now what do you suppose this damn thing is? It looks pretty desperate to me.”

  “Put it on. Put it on,” snapped one of the attendants. “Can’t you see we’re waiting?”

  “How many poor souls have met their God in mine?” demanded Sally, at which Mr. Burdock’s face went white.

  “Plenty,” said the attendant.

  “It’s still quite good,” replied Sally.

  “I can’t do it,” gasped Mr. Burdock. “Have men actually died in these things?”

  “Suffered and died,” said the attendant. “And if you don’t get into yours you’ll find yourself in a strait-jacket.”

  “If it’s a new one,” observed Mr. Burdock, as he struggled into the uncouth sleeping garment, “I think I might prefer even that.”

  “Now, how do we look?” asked Sally after they had slipped into the nightshirts.

  “Take ‘em off,” commanded the attendant disgustedly. “You’ve got ‘em on backwards.”

  “But this way seems more logical,” suggested Mr. Burdock.

  “I’m getting mighty tired of you,” said the attendant. “Are you going to do what I say?”

  “Sure he is,” put in Sally. “Dress pretty for the gentleman, Tom.”

  The attendant gave Sally a suspicious look. She had spoken in her natural voice, which even Mr. Burdock found difficult to tolerate.

  “Don’t talk like that,” he pleaded, “or you’ll be getting us into more trouble.”

  Once more they were seized upon and hurried down the hall. This time they were thrust into a long ward apparently entirely occupied by the maddest sort of madmen. Wild and alarming noises filled this ward. Some men were cursing in their sleep while others preferred to laugh. The laughing was the harder to bear. Several were singing lustily on their cots, while others troubled the air with a cacophony of hard-driven snores. It was bedlam at its weirdest.

  “You don’t expect us to sleep in an animal ho
use like this?” demanded Mr. Burdock in a voice of dignified reproof. “Why, damn it, I’m a gentleman.”

  “We don’t care whether you sleep or not,” replied the communicative attendant. “You can shout and scream like the others if you feel like it. Everybody’s nuts in here.”

  “What!” exclaimed Tom Burdock. “Do you mean to say you’re putting us in with insane people?”

  “Why, didn’t you know?” asked the attendant. “You’re that way yourself. Hope you don’t think we’d put you in with normal patients. You’re under observation.”

  “I can’t stand it,” muttered Mr. Burdock to Sally. “I know I’ll never be able to stand it. I’ll go mad myself. What humiliation! And this damn silly nightgown all split down the back. That in itself is enough to make a person look and act like a madman.”

  Not only were they thrown into bed, but also strapped down until only their heads could move.

  “Well, I never in my life would have thought it possible,” said Mr. Burdock, cocking his massive head at Sally. “To be strapped helplessly in bed with a ward full of raving lunatics. Can you imagine it?”

  “I don’t have to,” replied Sally, popping up her head. “I’m experiencing it to the hilt.”

  “Next time I crawl into an ambulance,” groaned Burdock, “I hope to God they shoot me.”

  “They probably will,” said Sally wearily. “They can do anything they want to you in a place like this, especially if you’re mad. Do you think you are?”

  The great man strained at his bonds.

  “Don’t,” he pleaded. “Don’t even suggest it.”

  “Well, I think I am,” went on Sally. “I believe I’ve lost my reason. First I thought I was dead and now I’m pretty sure I’m not quite all there. I’m glad I’m strapped down or else I might do either you or myself an injury.”

  Tom Burdock gave her a frightened look and shivered. Perhaps that explained the sudden shiftings of his companion’s voice. There was, now that he came to think of it, something rather odd about Tim Willows. No normal man could talk so like a woman.

  “I wish we had Mr. Volstead strapped down between us,” went on Sally. “He’d make a noble experiment.”

  A doctor came quietly up to Mr. Burdock’s cot and stood looking rather sadly down at its occupant. Burdock returned the man’s depressing scrutiny half timidly and half combatively. Suddenly the doctor stooped down and examined the great man’s eyes, roughly snapping back the lids.

  “Don’t do that,” complained Burdock. “Damn it, man, you’re gouging.”

  Slowly the doctor rose and sorrowfully he shook his head.

  “It’s too bad,” was all he said.

  “What’s too bad?” demanded Burdock.

  “Gone, clean gone,” continued the doctor, as if speaking to himself. “The mind… a case for the mad house.”

  “What do you call this?” asked Sally. “They don’t make houses any madder, Doc.”

  Mr. Burdock’s eyes were starting from their sockets. His face was purple from the strain of his efforts to get at the doctor.

  “Do you mean to stand there and tell me to my face I’m gaga?” he fumed.

  The doctor’s face brightened.

  “That’s it,” he replied soothingly. “My good man, you’re gaga. Do you like being gaga?”

  “You’re crazy as a coot,” Mr. Burdock managed to get out. “You should be where I am. You’re criminally insane, yourself.”

  “Another sure indication,” observed the doctor. “The persecution complex. Thinks everyone’s mad but himself. A very sad case.”

  Inarticulate with rage, Tom Burdock began to whine like a dog.

  “Thinks he’s a dog now,” went on the doctor, then, looking down once more at Mr. Burdock: “Playing Bow-wow, old man?” he asked. “What sort of a dog are you?”

  The whining turned to a howl of truly animal ferocity.

  “Why don’t you examine me, too?” Sally inquired of the doctor. “I’m as mad as hell. Much madder than he is. I’m so far gone I think I’m a couple of Bow-wows, not to mention a pack of wolves. If I wasn’t strapped down I’d stalk myself and then turn at bay and snarl in my own face.”

  “You’re not mad,” replied the doctor. “You’re merely peculiar. An all too familiar type.”

  “Now I wonder what he meant by that?” mused Sally as the doctor drifted away. “It had all the earmarks of a nasty crack.”

  “Willows,” said Mr. Burdock weakly, after he had quieted down somewhat, “Julius Cæsar and Napoleon and Alexander the Great and all those famous men would be just as helpless and humiliated as we are if they took away all their clothes and made them wear these silly-looking nightshirts all split down the back, wouldn’t they?”

  “Sure they would,” replied Sally encouragingly. “And that goes for President Roosevelt, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Rudy Vallee. Mahatma Ghandi is the only possible exception. He might look quite snappy for him.”

  “It’s so demeaning,” continued Mr. Burdock. “They don’t give you a ghost of a chance. They strip you of dignity and self-respect and make you look like a fool. They get the moral and physical advantage over you and you can’t do a damn thing. It’s the worst feeling in the world. No man can look competent rigged out the way we are.”

  “I’ve never succeeded in looking like that even in a fur coat,” replied Sally. “But it must be hard lines for you, the head of a great concern.”

  “It is, Willows. It is,” said Burdock mournfully. “I don’t think I’ll ever regain my former self-esteem.”

  “My own inferiority complex,” replied Sally, “has been given a terrific boost. If a worm looked at me severely I’d break down and confess everything.”

  At this juncture an interne presented himself and gave them what proved to be a sleeping potion, for presently their eyes closed and they fell into an uneasy doze.

  Several hours later Mr. Burdock awoke and immediately wished he hadn’t. What he saw caused him to shrink within his bonds. He hoped he was still dreaming. He even hoped that the doctor had been right and that he had gone mad. He hoped for any other explanation except the true one. An incredibly aged creature or thing, a face remotely suggestive of a woman, an evil face framed in an unholy nimbus of straggling, grey hair, was peering down into his, peering with the glazed, fixed stare of the demented. In the hand of this apparition was a long kitchen knife. Just above Mr. Burdock’s throat the blade was suggestively poised.

  “Get up, Jim,” croaked the face in a hoarse voice. “Get up at once. It’s time ye were rising, man.”

  Mr. Burdock licked his dry lips and endeavored to speak. No sound came.

  “Get up,” continued the terrible voice. “Get up, Jim, you hulk of a man.”

  “My good woman,” Tom Burdock gasped. “Nothing would please me more. I long to get up. I’d give ten years of my life to get up, but unfortunately I can’t get up.”

  “I’ll make you get up,” grated the old woman, tentatively pricking her victim with the point of the knife.

  “But, madam, I’m not Jim,” Mr. Burdock protested. “You’ve made some mistake. I think that man over there calls himself Jim.”

  “Oh, what a lie!” exclaimed Sally, who had been awakened by the sound of voices. “Don’t you believe him, lady. Jim went out to get a drink.”

  “I’d like a drink,” observed the old woman.

  “Why don’t you go and get one?” suggested Mr. Burdock. “We all want a drink.”

  “No,” said the old woman, once more prodding Burdock with the knife. “You go get the drink.”

  “Listen, lady,” he said very earnestly. “If I could go get a drink you don’t think I’d be lying here, do you? I couldn’t go get a drink if they were being given away in buckets. I can’t even budge.”

  “I’ll make you budge,” proclaimed the old lady, growing excited. “Are you going to get that drink before I slit your throat?”

  As she prodded the knife into Mr. Burdock her face wa
s working horribly. Unable to stand the situation any longer, he lifted up his voice in one anguished cry for help.

  “Pipe down in there,” called a gruff voice. “Want another cold bath?”

  “Yes,” shouted Burdock. “That’s it. I want another cold bath. Quick, for God’s sake.”

  “If you don’t hurry he’ll be bathed in blood,” Sally sang out. “We’ve got a wild woman in here. And she’s got the cutest knife—about twelve inches long.”

  “Come out of there, Maggie,” came a bored voice. “Neither one of those guys is your husband. They’re just plain bums. Come on and give us that knife and I’ll slip you a little drink.”

  “That’s a good girl, Maggie,” said Mr. Burdock. “Did you hear what he said? He promised you a little drink. Think of that!”

  Evidently Maggie was thinking of that. She seemed undecided. From the knife she looked to Mr. Burdock’s unprotected throat. Maybe she could cut it and get the drink, too. A greedy look sprang up in her eyes.

  “No, no,” said Sally, who had been watching the old woman closely. “No cheating, Maggie. I’ll tell.”

  Mumbling furiously to herself, Maggie turned and hobbled from the alcove.

  “Who in God’s name can that be?” asked Tom Burdock, the sweat standing out on his face.

  “She seems to be the mascot of the troop,” observed Sally.

  “Well, she certainly gave me the worst fifteen minutes of my life,” said Mr. Burdock. “This has been a most unpleasant night. Wish I could go home.”

  “Do you mean that?” cried Sally.

  “If I ever get out of this place alive,” replied Burdock with deadly conviction, “that’s just where I’m going—home.”

  “Is that a promise?” asked Sally. “It’s more than a promise,” said Burdock. “It’s a grim determination.”

  Sally sighed deeply and let her head sink back to rest.

  An orderly appeared and stood at the foot of Mr. Burdock’s bed. He was grinning rather apologetically.

  “Maggie wasn’t premeditated,” he said. “We didn’t plan Maggie. It was all her own idea.”

  “She’s got some mean ideas, that girl,” commented Sally. “Why don’t you keep her locked up?”