Essex.
The Superintendent jerked upright in his chair. “But how in the name of heaven… He’s been isolated here for the past week!”
“A self-haunted man isn’t bound by the three-dimensional limitations of his main personality. Read a few case-histories of poltergeist phenomena and you’ll see what I mean. ‘The poltergeist is not a ghost. It is a bundle of projected repressions.’ That’s a quote from a book you refused to read. Remember?”
“Nonsense,” muttered the Superintendent. “A dissociated personality cannot have a separate objective existence!”
“According to that book it can,” the other persisted. “You might give it a try: Haunted People, by Hereward Carrington and Nandor Fodor. Fodor even encountered such dissociations in his psychiatric practice.”
“No… No!” the Superintendent said sharply. “Someone smuggled that letter out for him and posted it.”
“Without a stamp?” The assistant grinned. The grin faded.
“It’s a damnable theory,” he admitted. “The other personality is almost invariably evil. In Tibet, adepts deliberately purge their minds of what we would call neurotic symbolism by projecting thanai—thoughts which coalesce into evil spirits, which are then dissipated. Or not.”
“And thus,” said the Superintendent, “the Abominable Snowman?” He laughed.
At an empty house in a so-suburban suburb that morning, the postman delivered a final letter. It fluttered to the doormat. It was addressed—without the concession of a c/o now—to:
Ezreel Grabcheek, Esq.,
36, Acacia Avenue.
As the footsteps of the preoccupied, duty-bound postman died away, the letter zig-zagged upwards from the mat, poised in mid-air.
Something laughed.
Here is the first of two stories on the Frankenstein theme; the other will be along a little later and is serious; this one is not.
This story is a marvel of compactness and ease; I do not see how it could be improved by so much as a word.
Avram Davidson
THE GOLEM
The gray-faced person came along the street where old Mr. and Mrs. Gumbeiner lived. It was afternoon, it was autumn, the sun was warm and soothing to their ancient bones. Anyone who attended the movies in the twenties or the early thirties has seen that street a thousand times. Past these bungalows with their half-double roofs Edmund Lowe walked arm-in-arm with Leatrice Joy and Harold Lloyd was chased by Chinamen waving hatchets. Under these squamous palm trees Laurel kicked Hardy and Woolsey beat Wheeler upon the head with a codfish. Across these pocket-handkerchief-sized lawns the juveniles of the Our Gang Comedies pursued one another and were pursued by angry fat men in golf knickers. On this same street—or perhaps on some other one of five hundred streets exactly like it.
Mrs. Gumbeiner indicated the gray-faced person to her husband.
“You think maybe he’s got something the matter?” she asked. “He walks kind of funny, to me.”
“Walks like a golem,” Mr. Gumbeiner said indifferently.
The old woman was nettled.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I think he walks like your cousin Mendel.”
The old man pursed his mouth angrily and chewed on his pipestem. The gray-faced person turned up the concrete path, walked up the steps to the porch, sat down in a chair. Old Mr. Gumbeiner ignored him. His wife stared at the stranger.
“Man comes in without a hello, goodby, or howareyou, sits himself down and right away he’s at home… The chair is comfortable?” she asked. “Would you like maybe a glass tea?”
She turned to her husband.
“Say something, Gumbeiner!” she demanded. “What are you, made of wood?”
The old man smiled a slow, wicked, triumphant smile.
“Why should I say anything?” he asked the air. “Who am I? Nothing, that’s who.”
The stranger spoke. His voice was harsh and monotonous.
“When you learn who—or, rather, what—I am, the flesh will melt from your bones in terror.” He bared porcelain teeth.
“Never mind about my bones!” the old woman cried. “You’ve got a lot of nerve talking about my bones!”
“You will quake with fear,” said the stranger. Old Mrs. Gumbeiner said that she hoped he would live so long. She turned to her husband once again.
“Gumbeiner, when are you going to mow the lawn?”
“All mankind—” the stranger began.
“Shah! I’m talking to my husband… He talks eppis kind of funny, Gumbeiner, no?”
“Probably a foreigner,” Mr. Gumbeiner said, complacently.
“You think so?” Mrs. Gumbeiner “glanced fleetingly at the stranger. “He’s got a very bad color in his face, nebbich, I suppose he came to California for his health.”
“Disease, pain, sorrow, love, grief—all are nought to—”
Mr. Gumbeiner cut in on the stranger’s statement.
“Gall bladder,” the old man said. “Guinzburg down at the shule looked exactly the same before his operation. Two professors they had in for him, and a private nurse day and night.”
“I am not a human being!” the stranger said loudly.
“Three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars it cost his son, Guinzburg told me. ‘For you, Poppa, nothing is too expensive—only get well,’ the son told him.”
“I am not a human being!”
“Ai, is that a son for you!” the old woman said, rocking her head. “A heart of gold, pure gold.” She looked at the stranger. “All right, all right, I heard you the first time. Gumbeiner! I asked you a question. When are you going to cut the lawn?”
“On Wednesday, odder maybe Thursday, comes the Japaneser to the neighborhood. To cut lawns is his profession. My profession is to be a glazier—retired.”
“Between me and all mankind is an inevitable hatred,” the stranger said. “When I tell you what I am, the flesh will melt—”
“You said, you said already,” Mr. Gumbeiner interrupted.
“In Chicago where the winters were as cold and bitter as the Czar of Russia’s heart,” the old woman intoned, “you had strength to carry the frames with the glass together day in and day out. But in California with the golden sun to mow the lawn when your wife asks, for this you have no strength. Do I call in the Japaneser to cook for you supper?” .
. “Thirty years Professor Allardyce spent perfecting his theories. Electronics, neuronics—”
“Listen, how educated he talks,” Mr. Gumbeiner said, admiringly. “Maybe he goes to the University here?”
“If he goes to the University, maybe he knows Bud?” his wife suggested.
“Probably they’re in the same class and he came to see him about the homework, no?”
“Certainly he must be in the same class;How many classes are there? Five in ganzen: Bud showed me on his program card.” She counted off on her fingers. “Television Appreciation and Criticism, Small Boat Building, Social Adjustment, The American Dance… The American Dance—nu, Gumbeiner—”
“Contemporary Ceramics,” her husband said, relishing the syllables. “A fine boy, Bud. A pleasure to have him for a boarder.”
“After thirty years spent in these studies,” the “stranger, who had continued to speak unnoticed, went on, “he turned from the theoretical to the pragmatic. In ten years” time he had made the most titanic discovery in history: he made mankind, all mankind, superfluous; he made me.”
“What did Tillie write in her last letter?” asked the old man.
The old woman shrugged.
“What should she write? The same thing. Sidney was home from the Army, Naomi has a new boy friend—”
“He made ME!”
“Listen, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is,” the old woman said, “maybe where you came from is different, but in this country you don’t interrupt people the while they’re talking… Hey. Listen—what do you mean, he made you? What kind of talk is that?”
The stranger bared all his teeth again, exposing the too-pink
gums.
“In his library, to which I had a more complete access after his sudden and as yet undiscovered death from entirely natural causes, I found a complete collection of stories about androids, from Shelley’s Frankenstein through Capek’s R.U.R. to Asimov’s—”
“Frankenstein?” said the old man, with interest. “There used to be a Frankenstein who had the soda-wasser place on Halstead Street—a Litvack, nebbich.”
“What are you talking?” Mrs. Gumbeiner demanded. “His name was Frankenthal, and it wasn’t on Halstead, it was on Roosevelt.”
“—clearly shown that all mankind has an instinctive antipathy towards androids and there will be an inevitable struggle between them—”
“Of course, of course!” Old Mr. Gumbeiner clicked his teeth against his pipe. “I am always wrong, you are always right. How could you stand to be married to such a stupid person all this time?”
“I don’t know,” the old woman said. “Sometimes I wonder, myself. I think it must be his good looks.” She began to laugh. Old Mr. Gumbeiner blinked, then began to smile, then took his wife’s hand.
“Foolish old woman,” the stranger said. “Why do you laugh? Do you not know I have come to destroy you?”
“What?” old Mr. Gumbeiner shouted. “Close your mouth, you!” He darted from his chair and struck the stranger with the flat of his hand. The stranger’s head struck against the porch pillar and bounced back.
“When you talk to my wife, talk respectable, you hear?”
Old Mrs. Gumbeiner, cheeks very pink, pushed her husband back to his chair. Then she leaned forward and examined the stranger’s head. She clicked her tongue as she pulled aside a flap of gray, skinlike material.
“Gumbeiner, look! He’s all springs and wires inside!”
“I told you he was a golem, but no, you wouldn’t listen,” the old man said.
“You said he walked like a golem.”
“How could he walk like a golem unless he was one?”
“All right, all right… You broke him, so now fix him.”
“My grandfather, his light shines from Paradise, told me that when MoHaRal—Moreynu Ha-Rav Löw—his memory for a blessing, made the golem in Prague, three hundred? four hundred years ago? he wrote on his forehead the Holy Name.”
Smiling reminiscently, the old woman continued, “And the golem cut the rabbi’s wood and brought his water and guarded the ghetto.”
“And one time only he disobeyed the Rabbi Löw, and Rabbi Löw erased the Shem Ha-Mephorash from the golem’s forehead and the golem fell down like a dead one. And they put him up in the attic of the shule and he’s still there today if the Communisten haven’t sent him to Moscow… This is not just a story,” he said.
“Avadda not!” said the old woman.
“I myself have seen both the shule and the rabbi’s grave,” her husband said, conclusively.
“But I think this must be a different kind of golem, Gumbeiner. See, on his forehead; nothing written.”
“What’s the matter, there’s a law I can’t write something there? Where is that lump clay Bud brought us from his class?”
The old man washed his hands, adjusted his little black skullcap, and slowly and carefully wrote four Hebrew letters on the gray forehead.
“Ezra the Scribe himself couldn’t do better,” the old woman said, admiringly. “Nothing happens,” she observed, looking at the lifeless figure sprawled in the chair.
“Well, after all, am I Rabbi Löw?” her husband asked, deprecatingly. “No,” he answered. He leaned over and examined the exposed mechanism. “This spring goes here… this wire comes with this one…” The figure moved. “But this one goes where? And this one?”
“Let be,” said his wife. The figure sat up slowly and rolled its eyes loosely.
“Listen, Reb Golem,” the old man said, wagging his finger. “Pay attention to what I say—you understand?”
“Understand…”
“If you want to stay here, you got to do like Mr. Gumbeiner says.”
“Do-like-Mr.-Gumbeiner-says…”
“That’s the way I like to hear a golem talk. Malka, give here the mirror from the pocketbook. Look, you see your face? You see the forehead, what’s written? If you don’t do like Mr. Gumbeiner says, he’ll wipe out what’s written and you’ll be no more alive.”
“No-more-alive…”
“That’s right. Now, listen. Under the porch you’ll find a lawnmower. Take it. And cut the lawn. Then come back. Go.”
“Go…” The figure shambled down the stairs. Presently the sound of the lawnmower whirred through the quiet air in the street just like the street where Jackie Cooper shed huge tears on Wallace Beery’s shirt and Chester Conklin rolled his eyes at Marie Dressler.
“So what will you write to Tillie?” old Mr. Gumbeiner asked.
“What should I write?” old Mrs. Gumbeiner shrugged. “I’ll write that the weather is lovely out here and that we are both, Blessed be the Name, in good health.”
The old man nodded his head slowly, and they sat together on the front porch in the warm afternoon sun.
Now we return to the question of identity, which appears so often that I suspect it is one of the ground notes of imaginative fiction. Most of the stories in this book, in fact, are about the nature of reality in one aspect or another. In “They,” in “C/o Mr. Makepeace,” and in this story, it takes the most agonising form of all. “I think, therefore I exist”: but who am I? On the bright side, in the hemisphere of daylight, clarity, and good common sense, it is tacitly agreed that this question shall not be asked. But in dreams, in drunkenness, in moments of shock and strong emotion, each of us, at some time in his life, must come face to face with it.
H. G. Wells
THE STORY OF THE LATE MR. ELVESHAM
I set this story down, not expecting it will be believed, but, if possible, to prepare a way of escape for the next victim. He perhaps may profit by my misfortune. My own case, I know, is hopeless, and I am now in some measure prepared to meet my fate.
My name is Edward George Eden. I was born at Trentham, in Staffordshire, my father being employed in the gardens there. I lost my mother when I was three years old and my father when I was five, my uncle, George Eden, then adopting me as his own son. He was a single man, self-educated, and well-known in Birmingham as an enterprising journalist; he educated me generously, fired my ambition to succeed in the world, and at his death, which happened four years ago, left me his entire fortune, a matter of about five hundred pounds after all outgoing charges were paid. I was then eighteen. He advised me in his will to expend the money in completing my education. I had already chosen the profession of medicine, and through his posthumous generosity, and my good fortune in a scholarship competition, I became a medical student at University College, London. At the time of the beginning of my story I lodged at 11A University Street, in a little upper room, very shabbily furnished, and draughty, overlooking the back of Shoolbred’s premises. I used this little room both to live in and sleep in, because I was anxious to eke out my means to the very last shilling’s-worth.
I was taking a pair of shoes to be mended at a shop in the Tottenham Court Road when I first encountered the little old man with the yellow face, with whom my life has now become so inextricably entangled. He was standing on the kerb, and staring at the number on the door in a doubtful way, as I opened it. His eyes—they were dull grey eyes, and reddish under the rims—fell to my face, and his countenance immediately assumed an expression of corrugated amiability.
“You come,” he said, “apt to the moment. I had forgotten the number of your house. How do you do, Mr. Eden?”
I was a little astonished at his familiar address, for I had never set eyes on the man before. I was annoyed, too, at his catching me with my boots under my arm. He noticed my lack of cordiality.
“Wonder who the deuce I am, eh? A friend, let me assure you. I have seen you before, though you haven’t seen me. II there anywhere where I can tal
k to you?”
I hesitated. The shabbiness of my room upstairs was not a matter for every stranger. “Perhaps,” said I, “we might walk down the street. I’m unfortunately prevented—” My gesture explained the sentence before I had spoken it.
“The very thing,” he said, and faced this way and then that. “The street? Which way shall we go?” I slipped my boots down in the passage. “Look here!” he said abruptly, “this business of mine is a rigmarole. Come and lunch with me, Mr. Eden. I’m an old man, a very old man, and not good at explanations, and what with my piping voice and the clatter of the traffic—”
He laid a persuasive skinny hand that trembled a little upon my arm.
I was not so old that an old man might not treat me to a lunch. Yet at the same time I was not altogether pleased by this abrupt invitation. “I had rather—” I began. “But I had rather,” he said, catching me up, “and a certain civility is surely due to my grey hairs,” and so I consented, and went away with him.
He took me to Blavitski’s; I had to walk slowly to accommodate myself to his pace; and over such a lunch as I had never tasted before, he fended off my leading questions, and I took a better note of his appearance. His clean-shaven face was lean and wrinkled, his shrivelled lips fell over a set of false teeth, and his white hair was thin and rather long; he seemed small to me—though, indeed, most people seemed small to me—and his shoulders were rounded and bent. And, watching him, I could not help but observe that he, too, was taking note of me, running his eyes, with a curious touch of greed in them, over me from my broad shoulders to my suntanned hands and up to my freckled face again. “And now,” said he, as we lit our cigarettes, “I must tell you of the business in hand.
“I must tell you, then, that I am an old man, a very old man.” He paused momentarily. “And it happens that I have money that I must presently be leaving, and never a child have I to leave it to.” I thought of the confidence trick, and resolved I would be on the alert for the vestiges of my five hundred pounds. He proceeded to enlarge on his loneliness, and the trouble he had to find a proper disposition of his money. “I have weighed this plan and that plan, charities, institutions, and scholarships, and libraries, and I have come to this conclusion at last”—he fixed his eyes on my face—“that I will find some young fellow, ambitious, pure-minded, and poor, healthy in body and healthy in mind, and, in short, make him my heir, give him all that I have.” He repeated, “Give him all that I have, So that he will suddenly be lifted out of all the trouble and struggle in which his sympathies have been educated, to freedom and influence.”
The Dark Side Page 10