That, Annixter thought, would be a laugh! That would be irony—
He took another drink. It was his fifteenth since the little man with the hexagonal glasses had given him the slip, and Annixter was beginning to reach the stage where he lost count of how many places he had had drinks in tonight. It was also the stage, though, where he was beginning to feel better, where his mind was beginning to work.
He could imagine just how the little man must have felt as the quality of the play he was being told, with hiccups, gradually had dawned upon him.
‘This is mine!’ the little man would have thought. ‘I’ve got to have this. He’s drunk, he’s soused, he’s bottled—he’ll have forgotten every word of it by the morning! Go on! Go on, mister! Keep talking!’
That was a laugh, too—the idea that Annixter would have forgotten his play by the morning. Other things Annixter forgot, unimportant things; but never in his life had he forgotten the minutest detail that was to his purpose as a playwright. Never!
Except once, because a taxi had knocked him down.
Annixter took another drink. He needed it. He was on his own now. There wasn’t any little man with hexagonal glasses to fill in that blind spot for him. The little man was gone. He was gone as though he’d never been. To hell with him! Annixter had to fill in that blind spot himself. He had to do it—somehow!
He had another drink. He had quite a lot more drinks. The bar was crowded and noisy, but he didn’t notice the noise—till someone came up and slapped him on the shoulder. It was Ransome.
Annixter stood up, leaning with his knuckles on the table.
‘Look, Bill,’ Annixter said, ‘how about this? Man forgets an idea, see? He wants to get it back—gotta get it back! Idea comes from inside, works outwards—right? So he starts on the outside, works back inward. How’s that?’
He swayed, peering at Ransome.
‘Better have a little drink,’ said Ransome. ‘I’d need to think that out.’
‘I,’ said Annixter, ‘have thought it out!’ He crammed his hat shapelessly on to his head. ‘Be seeing you, Bill. I got work to do!’
He started, on a slightly tacking course, for the door—and his apartment.
It was Joseph, his ‘man,’ who opened the door of his apartment to him, some twenty minutes later. Joseph opened the door while Annixter’s latchkey was still describing vexed circles around the lock.
‘Good evening, sir,’ said Joseph.
Annixter stared at him. ‘I didn’t tell you to stay in tonight.’
‘I hadn’t any real reason for going out, sir,’ Joseph explained. He helped Annixter off with his coat. ‘I rather enjoy a quiet evening in, once in a while.’
‘You got to get out of here,’ said Annixter.
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Joseph. ‘I’ll go and throw a few things into a bag.’
Annixter went into his big living-room-study, poured himself a drink.
The manuscript of his play lay on the desk. Annixter, swaying a little, glass in hand, stood frowning down at the untidy stack of yellow paper, but he didn’t begin to read. He waited until he heard the outer door click shut behind Joseph, then he gathered up his manuscript, the decanter and a glass, and the cigarette box. Thus laden, he went into the hall, walked across it to the door of Joseph’s room.
There was a bolt on the inside of this door, and the room was the only one in the apartment which had no window—both facts which made the room the only one suitable to Annixter’s purpose.
With his free hand, he switched on the light.
It was a plain little room, but Annixter noticed, with a faint grin, that the bedspread and the cushion in the worn basket chair were both blue. Appropriate, he thought—a good omen. Room Blue by James Annixter—
Joseph had evidently been lying on the bed, reading the evening paper; the paper lay on the rumpled quilt, and the pillow was dented. Beside the head of the bed, opposite the door, was a small table littered with shoebrushes and dusters.
Annixter swept this paraphernalia onto the floor. He put his stack of manuscript, the decanter and glass and cigarette box on the table, and went across and bolted the door. He pulled the basket chair up to the table, sat down, lighted a cigarette.
He leaned back in the chair, smoking, letting his mind ease into the atmosphere he wanted—the mental atmosphere of Cynthia, the woman in his play, the woman who was afraid, so afraid that she had locked and bolted herself into a windowless room, a sealed room.
‘This is how she sat,’ Annixter told himself, ‘just as I’m sitting now: in a room with no windows, the door locked and bolted. Yet he got at her. He got at her with a knife—in a room with no windows, the door remaining locked and bolted on the inside. How was it done?’
There was a way in which it could be done. He, Annixter, had thought of that way; he had conceived it, invented it—and forgotten it. His idea had produced the circumstances. Now, deliberately, he had reproduced the circumstances, that he might think back to the idea. He had put his person in the position of the victim, that his mind might grapple with the problem of the murderer.
It was very quiet: not a sound in the room, the whole apartment. For a long time, Annixter sat unmoving. He sat unmoving until the intensity of his concentration began to waver. Then he relaxed. He pressed the palms of his hands to his forehead for a moment, then reached for the decanter. He splashed himself a strong drink. He had almost recovered what he sought; he had felt it close, had been on the very verge of it.
‘Easy,’ he warned himself, ‘take it easy. Rest. Relax. Try again in a minute.’ He looked around for something to divert his mind, picked up the paper from Joseph’s bed.
At the first words that caught his eye, his heart stopped.
The woman, in whose body were found three knife wounds, any of which might have been fatal, was in a windowless room the only door to which was locked and bolted on the inside. These elaborate precautions appear to have been habitual with her, and no doubt she went in continual fear of her life, as the police know her to have been a persistent and pitiless blackmailer.
Apart from the unique problem set by the circumstance of the sealed room is the problem of how the crime could have gone undiscovered for so long a period, the doctor’s estimate from the condition of the body as some twelve to fourteen days.
Twelve to fourteen days—
Annixter read back over the remainder of the story; then let the paper fall to the floor. The pulse was heavy in his head. His face was grey. Twelve to fourteen days? He could put it closer than that. It was exactly thirteen nights ago that he had sat in the Casa Havana and told a little man with hexagonal glasses how to kill a woman in a sealed room!
Annixter sat very still for a minute. Then he poured himself a drink. It was a big one, and he needed it. He felt a strange sense of wonder, of awe.
They had been in the same boat, he and the little man—thirteen nights ago. They had both been kicked in the face by a woman. One, as a result, had conceived a murder play. The other had made the play reality!
‘And I actually, tonight, offered him a share!’ Annixter thought. ‘I talked about “real” money!’
That was a laugh. All the money in the universe wouldn’t have made that little man admit that he had seen Annixter before—that Annixter had told him the plot of a play about how to kill a woman in a sealed room! Why, he, Annixter, was the one person in the world who could denounce that little man! Even if he couldn’t tell them, because he had forgotten, just how he had told the little man the murder was to be committed, he could still put the police on the little man’s track. He could describe him, so that they could trace him. And once on his track, the police would ferret out links, almost inevitably, with the dead woman.
A queer thought—that he, Annixter, was probably the only menace, the only danger, to the little prim, pale man with the hexagonal spectacles. The only menace—as, of course, the little man must know very well.
He must have been very fright
ened when he had read that the playwright who had been knocked down outside the Casa Havana had only received ‘superficial injuries.’ He must have been still more frightened when Annixter’s advertisements had begun to appear. What must he have felt tonight, when Annixter’s hand had fallen on his shoulder?
A curious idea occurred, now, to Annixter. It was from tonight, precisely from tonight, that he was a danger to that little man. He was, because of the inferences the little man must infallibly draw, a deadly danger as from the moment the discovery of the murder in the sealed room was published. That discovery had been published tonight and the little man had had a paper under his arm—
Annixter’s was a lively and resourceful imagination.
It was, of course, just in the cards that, when he’d lost the little man’s trail at the subway station, the little man might have turned back, picked up his, Annixter’s trail.
And Annixter had sent Joseph out. He was, it dawned slowly upon Annixter, alone in the apartment—alone in a windowless room, with the door locked and bolted on the inside, at his back.
Annixter felt a sudden, icy and wild panic.
He half rose, but it was too late.
It was too late, because at that moment the knife slid, thin and keen and delicate, into his back, fatally, between the ribs.
Annixter’s head bowed slowly forward until his cheek rested on the manuscript of his play. He made only one sound—a queer sound, indistinct, yet identifiable as a kind of laughter.
The fact was, Annixter had just remembered.
The Wolf
Caius Petronius Arbitrus, probable author of The Satyricon, who lived and died in the Roman Empire in the first century. The only information about this author has come down via the writings of Tacitus (Annals, Book XVI, chapters XVII, XVIII, X IX). He is the putative author of a major work of fiction, The Satyricon, of which only a few prose and verse fragments have survived.
‘When I was still in service, we were living down a narrow street—Gavilla owns the house now—and there as heaven would have it, I fell in love with the wife of Terentius the innkeeper.
‘You all used to know Melissa from Tarentium, an absolute peach to look at. Honest to god, it wasn’t her figure or just sex that made me care for her, it was more because she had such a nice nature. If I asked her for anything, it was never refused. She made a penny, I got half of it. I gave her what I had to look after and she never let me down.
‘One day her husband died out on the estate. So I did my best to get her by hook or by crook. After all, you know, a friend in need is a friend indeed.
‘Luckily the master had gone off to Capua to fix up some odds and ends. I seized my chance and I talked a guest of ours into walking with me as far as the fifth milestone. He was a soldier as it happened, and as brave as hell. About cock-crow we shag off, and the moon was shining like one o’clock. We get to where the tombs are and my chap starts making for the grave-stones, while I, singing away, sits down and starts counting them. Then just as I looked in my mate’s direction, he stripped off and laid all his clothes by the side of the road. My heart was in my mouth, I stood there like a corpse. Anyway, he pissed a ring round his clothes and suddenly turned into a wolf. Don’t think I’m joking, I wouldn’t tell a lie about this for a fortune. However, as I began to say, after he turned into a wolf, he started howling and rushed off into the woods.
‘At first I didn’t know where I was, then I went up to collect his clothes—but they’d turned to stone. If ever a man was dead with fright, it was me. But I pulled out my sword, and I fairly slaughtered the early morning shadows till I arrived at my girl’s house.
‘I was just like a ghost when I got in, I practically gasped my last, the sweat was pouring down my crotch, my eyes were blank and staring—I could hardly get over it. It came as a surprise to my poor Melissa to find I’d walked over so late.
‘ “If you’d come a bit earlier,” she said, “at least you could’ve helped us. A wolf got into the grounds and went for all the livestock—it was a shambles. But he didn’t have the last laugh, even though he got away. One of the slaves put a spear right through his neck.”
‘I couldn’t close my eyes again after I heard this. But when it was broad daylight I rushed off home like the innkeeper after the robbery. And when I came to the spot where his clothes had turned to stone, I found nothing but bloodstains. However, when I got home, my soldier friend was lying in bed like a great ox with the doctor seeing to his neck. I realized he was a werewolf and afterwards I couldn’t have taken a bite of bread in his company, not if you killed me for it. If other people think differently about this, that’s up to them. But me—if I’m telling a lie may all your guardian spirits strike me down!’
The Bust
Manuel Peyrou, Argentine writer born in San Nicolas de los Arroyos (province of Buenos Aires). Author of La espada dormida (1944); El estruendo de las rosas (1948); La noche repetida (1953); Las leyes del juego (1959); El árbol de Judas (1961); Acto y Ceniza (1963).
He tied the knot in his tie and, as he tugged downwards to tighten it, pressed the material with his fingers, so that there was a fold from the knot, a pleat in the middle, avoiding any small creases. He put on his blue coat and checked the overall effect. For him, being impeccable was a form of comfort. Satisfied—well satisfied—he left, carefully closing the front door behind him. He had been unable to be at the church, but hoped to arrive at his sister’s house before ten. It was the wedding day of his eldest nephew, who, more than a relative, was his friend. He went past the concierges of the neighbouring houses and casually wished them good night. His was an elegant silhouette, despite his age: tall, dark, his hair lightly streaked with silver.
The display cabinets in the room with the gifts exhibited expensive jewellery. A necklace of various different gemstones diffused a tiny rainbow on its red case in the background; a topaz ring, a pair of bright earrings and a few other artificial miniature meteors glittered under the lights. He checked whether the brooch he had chosen for his brand-new niece and the diamond cufflinks for the groom had pride of place. Satisfied, he went forth in search of the new couple.
‘Don’t tell me it isn’t odd!’ his nephew suddenly said, taking him by surprise. He had been in the same room and not noticed his presence.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about . . .’ he replied, stopping in his tracks.
‘The bust . . . or whatever it is . . .’
He followed the youth’s gaze and then approached, frowning. His instinct had taught him to disdain the habit displayed by those who live in the capital of laughing at what they don’t understand.
‘Yes . . . it’s peculiar . . . but it’s not bad. It’s got something of Blumpel about it . . .’
His nephew didn’t answer. He took a few steps towards it, walked around the pedestal which supported the bust and said, ‘I think it looks worst seen from the front.’
‘From the front? Which is the front?’ He stopped and frowned. ‘I don’t think it has a front. In any case, I don’t think it’s right that you should attribute to the author an intention he was probably far from having.’
‘I don’t know, Uncle; but I think it’s an intrusion, a dark presence in a place which is full of light things . . .’
‘Fantasies, son, fantasies. You’ve always been very imaginative. And you always forget the most important thing. For instance, who gave it to you?’
‘Here’s the card. I’ve not heard the name before.’
His uncle took the card and studied it carefully; he turned it over and then looked at the front again, with his usual frown, as though he could make out fingerprints or any other trace simply by looking at it.
‘Perhaps it’s an old classmate you’ve forgotten about?’ he suggested, handing back the tiny rectangular card.
‘No. I’ve checked the list I made before sending the invitations. The name isn’t on it.’
His uncle went up to the bust and looked at it close to. ‘Have
n’t you seen this little bronze plaque?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps you didn’t see it because it was covered in dust. Look, it says: “The man of this century”.’
‘So it does,’ the young man replied. ‘I hadn’t noticed it. But which century does it refer to? And whichever it is, I don’t like it. I can’t explain, but I don’t like it. I’d like to chuck it out.’
Eduardo Adhemar looked at him calmly. He felt his abundant, unvarying tenderness rising; he had always liked to be the arbiter of his relatives’ decisions. ‘I don’t think you should do that,’ he said. ‘In any case,’ he added, suddenly inspired, ‘you could take advantage of the opportunity to do something original. And while you’re at it, take advantage of the gift too . . .’
His excitement encouraged his nephew. ‘Yes, but I don’t know how . . . It’s a perfectly useless article . . .’
‘That’s just it,’ replied Eduardo Adhemar. ‘Because it’s useless, it’s good for a present.’
His nephew was shocked by the bust. He didn’t think it would go down very well if he gave it to anybody. ‘It’s a form of provocation,’ he said. ‘And people have already seen it here . . .’
Adhemar was a pleasant and educated dilettante; he would discourse superficially on anything and took pleasure in it. He looked at his nephew with an ironic frown. ‘Why do you insist on seeing this bust from an aesthetic point of view?’ he asked. ‘I suggest you view it as something peculiar, mysterious.’ His nephew blinked at him. ‘For example, imagine a being who lacked the possibility of becoming real. Nature, say, had five projects for the horse and chose the one we know. The other four have remained a mystery, but they do not lack interest for that reason. Perhaps there was one with extremely long legs, like stilts, and another with long hair, like a sheep, and another with a prehensile tail—most useful in the forest. Perhaps this is the man which might have been. Not that I see it like that. I only like it as a theory. I prefer to imagine it in a dark street, emerging from a carriage entrance; a shapeless being to our present concept, with two pairs of arms and the nose to one side, talking in barks and saying; “Excuse me, I’m the rejected project for Man”.’
The Book of Fantasy Page 34