A Touch of the Creature

by Charles Beaumont

  It was about three months afterwards, and they wouldn’t still let go of the joke, even though they must have been able to see how sick I was of it. I even remember it was eleven o’clock in the morning. I’d been having just a little bit of bad luck, somehow, as through no fault of my own—since I was always courteous—some pretty big clients had dropped our company. Couldn’t understand this, because I agreed with everything they said and tried to be sympathetic.

  Well, it was eleven o’clock, as I said, when I got up and went into the gentleman’s lounge, which was my custom at this particular time. When I got back, there was this fellow in Mr. Norgesand’s office.

  Now a lot of people came to see Mr. Norgesand in the course of the day, so I don’t know exactly what it was, but I couldn’t seem to be able to take my eyes off of this one. He was around thirty, I’d say, with fat red cheeks and wavy blonde hair, and from his suit handkerchief pocket there were three cigars. Never did care for cigars, but even so this couldn’t have been the reason I started not to like that young fellow.

  Mr. Norgesand, he rose up and stretched across the desk to shake hands, then after a while they came out and over to my own desk.

  “Mac,” Mr. Norgesand said, putting his hand on my back, “I want you to meet George. George, this is Mac, who I was telling you about.”

  I shook his hand.

  “Mac, that is, Mr. Kibber, here, has been our Tracer for quite a while, haven’t you, Mac?”

  I said yes, I had.

  “A good worker, a hard worker, but, well, business is booming, George, as I don’t have to tell a sharp boy like you! Booming, yes sir, and I’m afraid there’s a bit more than old Mac can handle. Mac, George here is going to pitch in and give you a hand. He’s a young man, wants to learn the ropes—and I can’t think of a better way, can you? Later on we may work him into something, eh Mac?”

  I smiled courteously and told Mr. Norgesand that though I didn’t really think there was too much for me, I’d be glad to help teach the young man. He, this fellow, hadn’t said a word yet. Only smiled with his big teeth, which were all white and even.

  When we were alone I had him draw up a chair next to the desk.

  “Well,” I said, trying to be friendly, “so you’re just starting out, are you?”

  “Got it wrong, Pops,” he said, “dead wrong. This is my line, know what I mean, my line, and when something’s your line you’re never just ‘starting out’—know what I mean?”

  I said yes, but I couldn’t make anything out of that, to tell the truth.

  He was awfully large, for being so young. He took out one of his cigars and pointed it at me.

  “Join me in a bomber?”

  He made an ugly round O with his lips and put the cigar inside and lit the cigar with a big silver lighter that must have cost him a lot of money.

  “Okay, Dad, don’t feel you got to sing me any songs—know this stuff like a book. Like a book. So you just work on and we’ll chat like you’re teaching me something, okay? That’ll keep the old man happy. I can see he digs industry.”

  When he started doodling funny pictures on the back of an invoice, as I was explaining a complicated procedure, I said, “See here, now, my boy! I’d appreciate your attention, Mr.—”

  “Call me George, Pops. Real George—get it? The last name is Underhill.”

  Don’t you know that startled me at first, considering that I had made George W. Underhill up out of my head?

  “W.?” I asked.

  “Couldn’t be righter if you strained.”

  I started to tell him what a funny coincidence it was, but frankly I didn’t think he’d understand the joke. And about that time everybody stopped talking about it anyway—for fear of confusion, no doubt—so I buckled down to give him what I had. He drew pictures all the time I spoke, too.

  At first it was awful, because I couldn’t understand what the lad was saying whenever he did say anything. Once he reached over and took off my eye-shade and said: “Crazy hat, man!” Another time he looked at my apron, which is leather and protects my trousers from carbon lint and pencil dust, and just said: “Cool.” There were lots of other peculiar things he came out with, but I can’t remember them.

  Which was bad enough, but since it was my understanding that I was to coach young Mr. Underhill, I became angry when he started taking the calls when I’d go to the water cooler or to the gentleman’s lounge. Finally it got so bad, his taking liberties like that, that I spoke to Mr. Norgesand about it. Do you know what he said?

  “Let the boy alone, Mac. He’s doing fine. Found that Siller Pipe short in two seconds—I watched him.”

  A pure stroke of luck, anyone could see!

  But that was only the beginning. On the fourth day since he came, I punched in twenty minutes early, and there he was proud-as-you-please, with his feet propped up on my desk! He was wearing a double-breasted blue suit with a red-white-and-blue striped silk tie and one of those tabbed-collar things, and there was smoke all over. I could hardly talk.

  “Little bird with yellow bill, perched upon my windowsill, cocked his shiney eye and said, ‘Ain’t you ’shamed, you sleepy head?’ ” was what he told me.

  “What is the meaning of this?” I demanded.

  “Just workin’, Dad, workin’. Got half the morning’s stuff cleared away already. Just a second—” He picked up the telephone and dialed outside. “Mr. Hatterman? Underhill. Yes, you can put the stopper on that worry kick—your cartons will be delivered by two o’clock this afternoon. Yes sir.”

  “Was that Hatterman of Pacific?” I asked.

  “Deedy deed.”

  “But those cartons of his were smashed on the dock yesterday!”

  “Don’t worry about it! Tell him that and he’d blow his stack. He’s happy now and I’ll think of something later on. Take it easy.”

  I didn’t say a word to him all day, except to tell him to take the chair and give me back my desk. “Sure thing, Boss-Man!” he answered.

  That night Mr. Norgesand called me into his office and asked how Mr. Underhill was coming along.

  “Well, sir, he may be a hard worker, but his manner on the phone isn’t what you’d call courteous, really.”

  “Lost any business through him?”

  “No sir, not yet.”

  “Gained any?”

  “Well . . . Merchant Fruit did swing over to us, but I think they would have anyway. I’ve been working on them.”

  Mr. Norgesand looked at me. He said “Yes” and allowed me to go back. Underhill was at my desk again and I had to ask him to give it back to me.

  Once I tried to ask him about his background, but he said, “Crazy background” and I guess I was supposed to know what he meant.

  The folks started to joke around with him after a while, which they never did with me anymore, and it wasn’t long before he was having lunch in the office with them. I myself dined at a little drugstore on the corner.

  He was friendly with them, in that way he had that I didn’t like at all, and I could see they liked Mr. Underhill. Called him George.

  Within three months you’d think he owned the place, he was so familiar in his manner.

  Like that time I came in, early as usual, and saw him and Mr. Norgesand in the front office, laughing. There was an aluminum bottle, or I think they used to call them flasks, on the desk and they had paper cups.

  Naturally, I went over and started to take the night-cover off the billing machine, when I heard Mr. Norgesand’s voice.

  “Hey there, Mac! Can you come in here a minute?”

  I said, “Yes sir.”

  “Mac, how old would you say that biller is, there?” He pointed at the machine.

  “I believe it was manufactured in 1925, sir. We bought it brand new then.”

  “Work all right?”

  “Like the day we got it, sir. It’s been kept up.”

  Underhill laughed. He poured out some liquor into a paper cup and passed it to me. I refused,
of course. He said: “Man, I thought we’d stamped out AA.” and wheezed, all his teeth showing. He had a greenish suit on.

  “Like the day we got it, eh Mac? No better, no worse?”

  Mr. Norgesand was drunk, and in the morning, too. I just nodded.

  “Know what, Mac? They got a new biller on the market. Tell Mac about it, George.”

  “Crazy biller, man. Electrified. All ya do is plug her in and watch her go. Latest kick.”

  “Latest kick, Mac. Turns out twice as much work, twice as little effort. Doesn’t cost very much; pay for itself in a year, two years. Up to date. Now I ask you, what would you do?”

  I was about to answer but they were laughing, so I went back to work.

  Things like that all the time, that I didn’t understand, I mean.

  Then, the way it all looped up to this, all that I’ve mentioned, there was the day I punched in right on time. Not any earlier, as the streetcar ran late. I said “Good morning” to Maggie as per usual but she didn’t say anything back, which was all right. I hung up my umbrella and my hat and my overcoat and took off my galoshes and started down the aisle.

  Underhill was at my desk like he belonged there, but this was all right too. It was getting to be a habit.

  Then I saw it.

  All my personal belongings were missing. My brass cuspidor, the THINK sign I kept under glass, the pictures of my wife who died a long time ago and of the horses (I’ve always loved horses—and never been on top of one, the funny part of it). All gone. Even my special letter-opener that a sailor gave me one night and said he had found it on the corpse of a dead enemy soldier at Okinawa.

  Underhill didn’t notice me at first, although I was standing right next to him. I watched him awhile.

  He was young-looking there in the light, and seemed to be busting with energy like. I wanted to haul off and hit him with something because of the nerve, but I couldn’t help for a second admiring that energy. The papers weren’t all in order and things were helter-skelter all over, and yet somehow he had done the work pretty well. I’ll have to admit that. It was only—he reminded me there of somebody, and I didn’t know who. For no reason at all, I thought of the joke I’d started a while back, and things got dizzy.

  “Mr. Underhill!” I said.

  He didn’t move. Kept right on working.

  “Mr. Underhill, I’m speaking to you. I want you to stop this or I’ll have you fired. What do you mean anyway by taking my personal belongings?”

  Mr. Norgesand came out of his office, looking sad. He didn’t do anything but point at a big black satchel, the one the company had given me some years back and I had always kept in the office. I went and looked inside, by instinct; and there were my things, stacked in neatly.

  Mr. Norgesand said “I’m sorry,” sighed and returned to his office. Nobody else looked up, Sophie or Joe or Maggie or any of them.

  Then I saw the envelope on the corner of my desk, made out to me personally.

  It contained inside one month’s pay in full.

  And nothing else.

  And that’s about the story, I guess.

  I don’t even go by the office any more. I used to, though, toward the first, when it got late at night and I didn’t know what else to do with myself.

  Used to stand there in the shadows thinking all kinds of things, looking up at the window which would be jet-black except for the corner where my desk was.

  There would always be a light there.

  And I’d see Mr. Underhill—working late.

  Resurrection Island

  I was trying to talk the receptionist into a weekend at Palm Springs when the call came. It was from Welch. He almost never called: one of those in-at-ten, out-at-eleven bosses—the successful kind. That’s why I jumped.

  He was drinking milk out of a Martini glass as I walked in. The shades were drawn. Everything was quiet.

  “You wanted me?” I asked.

  He put down the glass and coughed: Welch had ulcers. “Yes. What are you working on?”

  I wasn’t working on anything, but you learn to think fast in Hollywood. “The Sinatra thing.”

  He looked puzzled for a second. Then he said, “Drop it. Turn it over to Mike.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. It was hard to think of this guy as the head of a string of movie fan magazines. He used to be city editor on a New York sheet that folded; then he bought a dying rag somewhere in Oklahoma, and it folded, too; then he borrowed some dough and started Movie Secrets. It didn’t fold. I guess that’s what gave him ulcers. “Artie, I don’t know what’s up. Maybe something big, maybe nothing at all.” He reached across his desk and tossed a tradepaper my way. “I got the rumble from Angelino.”

  Angelino: that’s a four-foot, five-inch newsie on the strip. A little blackmail here, a little informing there. People pity him. They tell him things. He tells us.

  I flipped to the page Welch had marked in grease pencil. It contained an ad; not very big, not much different from the others.

  EXTRAS WANTED!!!

  Ten thousand extras needed urgently by Carl Grushkin. Will guarantee double Guild minimum pay . . . Many speaking parts . . . The chance of a lifetime. Write inquiry, stating qualifications, to Box 304, Los Angeles, Calif.

  “You’ll be goddamned,” Welch said. “Right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I thought that louse was dead.”

  “So did everybody else.” He got up, walked over to the portable bar and returned with a bottle of milk. Half a quart disappeared down his throat. “Well?”

  “A gag,” I said. Not a funny one, either. Most of the extras in town were starving. Not that things were bad—at least a third of the lots were working—but the pictures were Serious-type. No casts of thousands. No Indian uprisings, no Arab wars, no Atmosphere.

  “You think so?”

  “Hell yes.” It was a typical Grushkin prank. In his day he was probably the best known, most successful director in the world. And I suppose a lot of people were for him, because his pictures were Big, and that meant work. David was his first spectacle. You probably remember it: a fantastic, sprawling thing, full of blood and sex and scripture. It cleaned up at the box office. Then came the remake of Griffith’s Intolerance—five-and-a-half hours on Panorama-scope, location shooting in six countries, $15,000,000 budget. A smash. And then The Battle of Dunkirk, which gave a job to every extra in town. Another smash.

  But not everyone loved him: only those who didn’t get close, who could sit back and chuckle over his ‘eccentricities.’ A lot of others hated his guts. I was one of them. Never mind why; let’s just say that as a fan magazine writer I saw a lot. I called Grushkin Janus in my column once and damn near got fired. But it was true. While one of his faces grinned on the multitudes and uttered blessings, the other arranged for executions. And there were plenty of those. Especially among the weak and helpless, the sick, the disturbed . . .

  Anyway, the guy made one more picture: Gettysburg! It outdid all his others, broke the attendance records from New York to Bangkok, and caused one columnist to write: “With this film, Carl Grushkin has carried the so-called spectacle to its final limits. There is nothing else in the way of realism that could possibly be done with a camera.”

  “The Creature,” as he was called, had announced plans for another movie; then, suddenly, he disappeared. Nobody knew where he went—probably to Africa for some big game shooting, or to Tibet, maybe. He wasn’t heard from for over a year.

  Then he returned. Looking pretty much his old self, too: cocky, confident, assured; like a five-year-old with a dirty secret.

  But, unlike the Grushkin of before, he didn’t talk much.

  When he bought that island off the coast of Baja and named it Resurrection, even then he didn’t talk.

  And once that immense stone wall was built around the island (it must have been three years ago) there wasn’t a peep from him . . .

  “Remembering?” Welch asked.<
br />
  I nodded.

  “Still think it’s a gag?”

  “I . . . don’t know. What do you figure?”

  “Another spectacle,” Welch said, hitting the milk. “Closed set. Hush-hush. Big splash later on. Artie—”

  I felt it coming, the way you feel the dentist’s drill a second before it hits your tooth.

  The Fortune Cleaners was a run-down trap on the wrong side of L.A., across from the trucking joints. I stood in front of it, shuffling my feet, trying to get warm. So did thirty other guys. It was six-fifteen in the morning. At six-thirty a bus was supposed to show.

  Getting into the extras’ guild was impossible, on such short notice, so I’d had to turn crafty. I knew a fellow named Sandy McLaughlin. He’d been one of the best-paid character actors in the business; then, in that mysterious way, all of a sudden nobody wanted him any more. He’d sunk to bit parts, finally to extra roles. But he didn’t like it. When I asked for the loan of his card, he said sure, provided I’d give him what he’d have made off Grushkin, double SEG. Of course he’d planned to go. So had every out-of-work extra in town. Why not?

  After the switch, he filled me in. At a certain time I was to appear at a certain address (they’d phone later) where I, as Sandy, would be picked up and taken to San Felipe, a little village in Baja on the edge of the Gulf.

  He also showed me a contract he’d had to sign. The first page read:

  “I, James Andrew McLaughlin, do hereby offer my services as actor to Resurrection Films, Inc.; and in particular, to Carl Grushkin, Producer and Director. I will perform willingly and without coercion of any kind, any and all duties listed on pages four and five of this agreement. Further . . .”

  I asked him what the angle was.

  “Stunt stuff, I guess,” he said. “There was a lot of it in Gettysburg! Some people got hurt, they sued—you know. Protecting himself.”

  “Yeah. By the way, would Grushkin recognize you?” With me, it was a chance.

  “I doubt it,” Sandy said. “Extras don’t have faces, friend. They’re just atmosphere.”