Nightmare Alley

by William Lindsay Gresham

  Stan felt the prickle crawl up over his scalp again. The old house was waiting for him and the fat ones with pince-nez and false teeth; this woman doc probably was one of them, for all the music of voice and cool, slow speech. What could she do for him? What could anybody do for him? For anybody? They were all trapped, all running down the alley toward the light.

  The nameplate said, “Dr. Lilith Ritter, Consulting Psychologist. Walk In.”

  The waiting room was small, decorated in pale gray and rose. Beyond the casement window snow was falling softly in huge flakes. On the window sill was a cactus in a rose-colored dish, a cactus with long white hair like an old man. The sight of it ran along Stan’s nerves like a thousand ants. He put down his coat and hat and then quickly looked behind a picture of sea shells drawn in pastel. No dictaphone. What was he afraid of? But that would have been a beautiful place to plant a bug if you wanted to work the waiting room gab angle when the doc’s secretary came in.

  Did she have a secretary? If he could make the dame he might get a line on this woman doc or whatever she was, find out how much overboard she was on occult stuff. He might swap developmental lessons for whatever she gave her patients—some kind of advice. Or did she interpret dreams or something? He lit a cigarette and it burned his finger as he knocked the ashes off. In reaching down to pick it up he knocked down an ashtray. He got on his hands and knees to pick up the butts and that was where he was when the cool voice said, “Come in.”

  Stan looked up. This dame wasn’t fat, she wasn’t tall, she wasn’t old. Her pale hair was straight and she wore it drawn into a smooth roll on the nape of her neck. It glinted like green gold. A slight woman, no age except young, with enormous gray eyes that slanted a little.

  Stan picked up the ashtray and put it on the edge of a table. It fell off again but he didn’t notice. He was staring at the woman who stood holding the door open into another room. He weaved to his feet, lurching as he came near her. Then he caught a whiff of perfume. The gray eyes seemed as big as saucers, like the eyes of a kitten when you hold its nose touching yours. He looked at the small mouth, the full lower lip, carefully tinted but not painted. She said nothing. As he started to push past her he seemed to fall; he found his arm around her and held on knowing that he was a fool, knowing something terrible would strike him dead, knowing he wanted to cry, to empty his bladder, to scream, to go to sleep, wondering as he tightened his arms around her….

  Stan lay sprawling on the floor. She had twisted his shoulders, turning him until his back was toward her, and then planted one neat foot at the back of his knee. Now she knelt beside him on the carpet, gripping his right hand in both of hers, forcing it in toward the wrist and keeping him flat by the threatened pain of the taut tendons. Her expression had not changed.

  She said, “The Rev. Stanton Carlisle, I believe. Pastor of the Church of the Heavenly Message, lecturer on Tarot symbolism and yogic breathing, a producer of ghosts with cheesecloth—or maybe you use a little magic lantern. Now if I let you up will you promise to be co-operative?”

  Stan had thrown one arm over his eyes and he felt the tears slipping down his face into his ears. He managed to say, “Promise.”

  The deft hands released his and he sat up, hiding his face with his palms, thinking of a pillow that had been slept on and perfumed, with shame washing back and forth over him, the light too strong for his eyes, and the tears that wouldn’t stop running. Something in his throat seemed to be strangling him from inside.

  “Here—drink this.”

  “What—what is it?”

  “Just a little brandy.”

  “Never drink it.”

  “I’m telling you to drink it. Quickly.”

  He felt blindly for the glass, held his breath and drank, coughing as it burned his throat.

  “Now get up and sit over here in this chair. Open your eyes and look at me.”

  Dr. Lilith Ritter was regarding him from across a wide mahogany desk. She went on, “I thought I’d be hearing from you, Carlisle. You were never cut out to run a spook racket solo.”

  CARD XII

  The Star

  shines down upon a naked girl who, between land and sea, pours mysterious waters from her urns.

  “LIE BACK on the couch.”

  “I don’t know what to talk about.”

  “You say that every time. What are you thinking about?”

  “You.”

  “What about me?”

  “Wishing you sat where I could see you. I want to look at you.”

  “When you lie down on the couch, just before you lean back, you run your hands over your hair. Why do you do that?”

  “That’s my get-set.”

  “Explain.”

  “Every vaudeville actor has some business: something he does in the wings just before he goes on.”

  “Why do you do that?”

  “I’ve always done it. I used to have a cowlick when I was a kid and my mother would always be telling me to slick it down.”

  “Is that the only reason?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Think about it. Did you ever know anybody who did that—anybody else in vaudeville?”

  “No. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “What are you thinking about now?”

  “Pianos.”

  “Go on.”

  “Pianos. People playing pianos. For other people to sing. My mother singing. When she sang my old man would go in the dining room and whisper all the time to one of his pals. The rest would be in the living room listening to my mother.”

  “She played the piano herself?”

  “No. Mark played. Mark Humphries. He’d sit down and look up at her as if he was seeing right through her clothes. He’d run his hands once over his hair—”

  “Yes?”

  “But it’s crazy! Why would I want to swipe a piece of business from that guy? After she’d run off with him I used to lie awake nights thinking up ways to kill him.”

  “I think you admired him.”

  “It was the dames that admired him. He was a great big guy with a rumbling voice. The dames were crazy over him.”

  “Did this Humphries drink?”

  “Sure. Now and then.”

  “Did your father drink?”

  “Hell, no. He was White Ribbon.”

  “The first day you were here I offered you a glass of brandy to help you get hold of yourself. You said you never drank it.”

  “God damn it, don’t twist everything around to making it look as if I wanted to be like my old man. Or Humphries either. I hated them—both of ’em.”

  “But you wouldn’t take a drink.”

  “That was something else.”

  “What?”

  “None of your—I—it’s something I can’t tell you.”

  “I’m being paid to listen. Take your time. You’ll tell me.”

  “The stuff smelled like wood alcohol to me. Not any more but the first time.”

  “Did you ever drink wood alcohol?”

  “Christ, no, it was Pete.”

  “Pete who?”

  “I never knew his last name. It was in Burleigh, Mississippi. We had a guy in the carny named Pete. A lush. One night he tanked up on wood alky and kicked off.”

  “Did he have a deep voice?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “Never mind. What was he to you?”

  “Nothing. That is—”

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Damn it, quit deviling me.”

  “Take your time.”

  “He—he was married to Zeena, who ran the horoscope pitch. I was—I was—I was screwing her on the side I wanted to find out how she and Pete had done their vaude mental act and I wanted a woman and I made up to her and Pete was always hanging around I gave him the alky to pass him out I didn’t know it was wood or I’d forgotten it he died I was afraid they’d pin it on me but it blew over. That’s all. Are you sat
isfied?”

  “Go on.”

  “That’s all. I was scared of that murder rap for a long time but then it blew over. Zeena never suspected anything. And then Molly and I teamed up and quit the carny and it all seemed like a bad dream. Only I never forgot it.”

  “But you felt so guilty that you would never drink.”

  “For God’s sake—you can’t do mentalism and drink! You’ve got to be on your toes every minute.”

  “Let’s get back to Humphries. Before he ran away with your mother you preferred him to your father?”

  “Do we have to go over that again? Sure. Who wouldn’t? But not after—”

  “Go on.”

  “I caught him—”

  “You caught him making love to your mother? Is that it?”

  “In the Glade. We’d found it, together. Then I went there. And I saw it. I tell you, I saw it. All of it. Everything they did. I wanted to kill my old man. He drove her to Humphries, I thought. I wanted—I wanted—”

  “Yes.”

  “I wanted them to take me with them! But she didn’t, God damn her, she left me with the old son-of-a-bitch to rot in his goddamned hick town. I wanted to go away with her and see something and maybe get into show business. Humphries had been in show business. But I was left there to rot with that Bible-spouting old bastard.”

  “So you became a Spiritualist minister.”

  “I’m a hustler, God damn it. Do you understand that, you frozen-faced bitch? I’m on the make. Nothing matters in this goddamned lunatic asylum of a world but dough. When you get that you’re the boss. If you don’t have it you’re the end man on the daisy chain. I’m going to get it if I have to bust every bone in my head doing it. I’m going to milk it out of those chumps and take them for the gold in their teeth before I’m through. You don’t dare yell copper on me because if you spilled anything about me all your other Johns would get the wind up their necks and you wouldn’t have any more at twenty-five bucks a crack. You’ve got enough stuff in that bastard tin file cabinet to blow ’em all up. I know what you’ve got in there—society dames with the clap, bankers that take it up the ass, actresses that live on hop, people with idiot kids. You’ve got it all down. If I had that stuff I’d give ’em cold readings that would have ’em crawling on their knees to me. And you sit there out of this world with that dead-pan face and listen to the chumps puking their guts out day after day for peanuts. If I knew that much I’d stop when I’d made a million bucks and not a minute sooner. You’re a chump too, blondie. They’re all Johns. They’re asking for it. Well, I’m here to give it out. And if anybody was to get the big mouth and sing to the cops about me I’d tell a couple of guys I know. They wouldn’t fall for your jujit stuff.”

  “I’ve been shouted at before, Mr. Carlisle. But you don’t really know any gangsters. You’d be afraid of them. Just as you’re afraid of me. You’re full of rage, aren’t you? You feel you hate me, don’t you? You’d like to come off that couch and strike me, wouldn’t you?—but you can’t. You’re quite helpless with me. I’m one person you can’t outguess. You can’t fool me with cheesecloth ghosts; you can’t impress me with fake yoga. You’re just as helpless with me as you felt seeing your mother run away with another man when you wanted to go with her. I think you went with her. You ran away, didn’t you? You went into show business, didn’t you? And when you start your act you run your hands over your hair, just like Humphries. He was a big, strong, attractive man, Humphries. I think you have become Humphries —in your mind.”

  “But he—he—”

  “Just so. I think you wanted your mother in the same way.”

  “God damn your soul, that’s—”

  “Lie back on the couch.”

  “I could kill you—”

  “Lie back on the couch.”

  “I could—Mother. Mother. Mother.”

  He was on his knees, one hand beating at his eyes. He crawled to her and threw his head in her lap, burrowing in. Dr. Lilith Ritter, gazing down at the disheveled corn-colored hair, smiled slightly. She let one hand rest on his head, running her fingers gently over his hair, patting his head reassuringly as he sobbed and gasped, rooting in her lap with his lips. Then, with her other hand, she reached for the pad on the desk and wrote in shorthand: “Burleigh, Mississippi.”

  In the spring darkness the obelisk stood black against the sky. There were no clouds and only a single star. No, a planet; Venus, winking as if signaling Earth in a cosmic code that the worlds used among themselves. He moved his head a fraction, until the cold, brilliant planet seemed to rest on the bronze tip of the stone shaft. The lights of a car, winding through the park, sprayed for a moment across the stone and the hieroglyphics leaped out in shadow. Car??touches with their names, the boasts of the dead, invocations to dead gods, prayers to the shining, fateful river which rose in mystery and found the sea through many mouths, flowing north through the ancient land. Was it mysterious when it still lived? he wondered. Before the Arabs took it over and the chumps started measuring the tunnel of the Great Pyramid in inches to see what would happen in the world.

  The spring wind stirred her hair and trailed a loose wisp of it across his face. He pressed her cheek against his and with his other hand pointed to the planet, flashing at the stone needle’s point. She nodded, keeping silence; and he felt the helpless wonder sweep over him again, the impotence at touching her, the supplication. Twice she had given it to him. She had given it as she might give him a glass of brandy, watching his reactions. Beyond that elfin face, the steady eyes, there was something breathing, something that was fed blood from a tiny heart beating under pointed breasts. But it was cobweb under the fingers. Cobweb in the woods that touches the face and disappears under the fingers.

  The hot taste of need rose in his mouth and turned sour with inner turmoil and the jar of forbidding recollection. Then he drew away from her and turned to look at her face. As the wind quickened he saw her perfectly molded nostrils quiver, scenting spring as an animal tastes the wind. Was she an animal? Was all the mystery nothing more than that? Was she merely a sleek, golden kitten that unsheathed its claws when it had played enough and wanted solitude? But the brain that was always at work, always clicking away behind the eyes—no animal had such an organ; or was it the mark of a superanimal, a new species, something to be seen on earth in a few more centuries? Had nature sent out a feeling tentacle from the past, groping blindly into the present with a single specimen of what mankind was to be a thousand years hence?

  The brain held him; it dosed him with grains of wild joy, measured out in milligrams of words, the turn of her mouth corner, one single, lustful flash from the gray eyes before the scales of secrecy came over them again. The brain seemed always present, always hooked to his own by an invisible gold wire, thinner than spider’s silk. It sent its charges into his mind and punished him with a chilling wave of cold reproof. It would let him writhe in helpless misery and then, just before the breaking point, would send the warm current through to jerk him back to life and drag him, tumbling over and over through space, to the height of a snow mountain where he could see all the plains of the earth spread out before him, and all the power of the cities and the ways of men. All were his, could be his, would be his, unless the golden thread broke and sent him roaring into the dark chasm of fear again.

  The wind had grown colder; they stood up. He lit cigarettes and gave her one and they passed on, circling the obelisk, walking slowly past the blank, unfinished wall of the Museum’s back, along the edge of the park where the busses trailed their lonely lights away uptown.

  He took her hand in his and slid it into the pocket of his topcoat, and for a moment, as they walked, it was warm and a little moist, almost yielding, almost, to the mind’s tongue, sweet-salty, yielding, musky; then in an instant it changed, it chilled, it became the hand of a dead woman in his pocket, as cold as the hand he once molded of rubber and stretched on the end of his reaching rod, icy from a rubber sack of cracked ice in h
is pocket, straight into the face of a believer’s skeptical husband.

  Now the loneliness grew inside him, like a cancer, like a worm of a thousand branches, running down his nerves, creeping under his scalp, tying two arms together and squeezing his brain in a noose, pushing into his loins and twisting them until they ached with need and not-having, with wanting and not-daring, with thrust into air, with hand-gripping futility—orgasm and swift-flooding shame, hostile in its own right, ashamed of shame.

  They stopped walking and he moved toward a backless bench under the trees which were putting out the first shoots of green in the street lamp’s glow, delicate, heartbreakingly new, the old spring which would bring the green softly, gently, like a young girl, into the earth’s air long after they and the fatal, coursing city, were gone. They would be gone forever, he thought, looking down into her face which was now as empty as a ball of crystal reflecting only the window light.

  The rush, the rocketing plunge of the years to death, seized hold of him and he gripped her, pressing her to him in a fierce clutch after life. She let him hold her and he heard himself moaning a little under his breath as he rubbed his cheek against the smooth hair. Then she broke away, reached up and brushed his lips with hers and began to walk again. He fell in behind her for a few steps, then came abreast of her and took her hand once more. This time it was firm, muscular, determined. It closed on his own fingers for a single reassuring instant, then broke away and she thrust her hands into the pockets of her coat and strode on, the smoke of her cigarette whirling back over her shoulder like a sweet-smelling scarf in the wind.

  When she walked she placed her feet parallel, as if she were walking a crack in the sidewalk. In spite of high heels the ankles above them never wavered. She wore gunmetal stockings, and her shoes had buckles of cut steel.

  Two ragged little boys, gleeful at being out after midnight, came bounding toward them, chasing each other back and forth across the walk by the wall where the trees leaned over. One of them pushed the other, screaming dirty words, and the one pushed caromed toward Lilith. Turning like a cat released in mid-air, she spun out of his path and the boy sprawled to the cinders, his hands slipping along, grinding cinders into the palms. He sat up and as Stan turned to watch, he suddenly sprang at his companion with his fists. Kids always play alike. Rough-house around until one gets hurt and then the fight starts. A couple of socks and they quit and the next minute are friends again. Oh, Christ, why do you have to grow up into a life like this one? Why do you ever have to want women, want power, make money, make love, keep up a front, sell the act, suck around some booking agent, get gypped on the check—?