REGGIE finished his drink and when the bartender set another before him he glanced again toward the end of the bar. The little dark man was still there, regarding him, it seemed, with a steady fixed stare.
Reggie coughed nervously and gulped his drink. There was something in the dark little man’s beady-eyed gaze that disturbed him. He had another quick drink and peeked from the corner of his eye at the little dark man.
There was something sinister about the chap, he felt sure. Reggie was the owner of an extremely lurid imagination and now, warmed by the glow of alcohol, he began to envision all sorts of wild possibilities.
After his fourth drink he was certain that the man was an Axis agent. Just why an Axis agent would be staring at him he had no idea, but he still felt sure the man was a Nazi.
Reggie finished his drink and set the glass on the bar. Then he casually sauntered toward the door. A few paces from the room’s only exit, he paused and under the pretense of inspecting a faded sports print on the wall, sneaked a quick glance at the dark little man.
The dark little man was still staring at him with narrowed, shaded eyes.
Reggie yawned ostentatiously and inched closer to the door. He was going to make a break for it, but it would have to be fast and clever. His heart was pounding with more gusto than usual and there were bright spots of excitement in his pale cheeks. This new role of dodging the Gestapo appealed enormously to his comic strip sense of melodrama.
Headlines popped before his mind’s eye.
REGGIE VAN FIDDLER
MAKES ESCAPE!
From what he was going to escape he wasn’t quite sure, but he felt that the details would be in the body of the news story. Headlines didn’t tell everything, did they?
Within a foot of the door he turned casually and took one last look at the little man who was staring so intently at him. Then, with a sudden slithering motion, he slipped through the door.
He collided heavily with a small figure.
“I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I’m in a bit of a hurry.”
He turned and started away, but he had barely taken three strides when he jerked to a stop. An expression of dazed amazement stole over his face and his sleepy eyes opened wide.
Wheeling suddenly he stared back at the small figure he had collided with. The man was still standing in the corridor that led from the bar, regarding Reggie with a fixed, thoughtful expression.
And he was the same dark little man Reggie had left inside the bar room seconds before!
Reggie gulped audibly. His adam’s apple bobbed in his throat like a mouse in a sock.
How had the dark little man gotten out of the bar ahead of him?
Reggie didn’t know and he had no inclination to wait and ask questions. With one last incredulous look over his shoulder he wheeled and loped across the lobby, down the marble steps, through the club’s revolving doors and into the street.
He walked swiftly, mopping his forehead with his handkerchief.
The experience had been an unnerving one. When he reached the end of the block he hailed a cab and gave the driver the address of another bar.
As the cab rolled across the Loop Reggie settled back and gnawed nervously at his finger nails. Thoughtful meditation and analysis were not his strongest suits; in fact any thinking at all was an annoying chore to him, but he felt now that he had better bend his brain to the problem of the dark little man whom he’d seen at the club.
The chap was obviously interested in him, but why? There was no reasonable answer to that question, and there was no explanation to the way the little fellow had popped up outside the bar, when Reggie had seen him, a split-second before, inside the bar.
REGGIE was still stewing over these matters when the cab came to a stop before a swanky glitter joint which catered to afternoon revellers and jitterbugs of both sexes.
Inside the smoky, dimly lighted den of din and discord Reggie forgot his troubles long enough to order a drink, his fifth of the afternoon. He was conscious of a vague buzzing between his ears and there was a pleasant mellow glow in the region of his solar plexus.
Had it not been for his disturbing experience at the Midland club, he would have been feeling very, very fine.
When his drink arrived he sipped it appreciatively and glanced about the crowded bar, looking for a familiar face. In one corner of the room he saw a tall young man in tweeds lounging against the wall with a drink in his hand. With a glad cry Reggie scrambled from his bar stool and lurched across the crowded floor, weaving his way with drunken dexterity through the jitterbugging maniacs.
“Hi!” he cried, when he reached the tweed-clad young man’s side. “How’ve you been, Ricky? Have a drink?”
“Been fine,” the young man answered. “Got a drink. Name isn’t Ricky.”
“Not Ricky?” Reggie shook his head frowning. “Could’ve sworn you were good old Ricky Davis, chap I knew at school. Well, how’re things?”
“Good,” the young man answered. “Have a drink?”
“Got one,” Reggie said. “Got to go now. It’s been nice seeing you again, Ricky.”
He started to weave his way back to the bar. Suddenly he stopped, his eyes focusing in fascination on the figure of a man at the bar. A man who had appropriated the seat which Reggie had vacated.
The man was small and dark. His eyes were narrow and inscrutable. He was the same person Reggie had seen at the club.
The breath left Reggie’s lungs in a rush.
Obviously the man had followed him here!
As he stood, transfixed, in the middle of the floor, the man turned and looked straight at him, a peculiar thoughtful expression on his dark face. After studying Reggie for a long interval he turned slowly back to the bar.
Reggie swallowed what was left of his drink in one gulp, but the liquor had no effect on him. After the shock he’d received it would take liquid dynamite to bolster him up.
He reeled back to the tall young man who was leaning against the wall.
“Ricky!” he cried hoarsely. “I’m being followed. Axis agents are after me.”
“Name isn’t Ricky,” the tall young man said. “Why?”
“Why what?” Reggie said blankly. He seemed to have fumbled the conversational ball. He wished the young man would speak with more clarity and add a few articles and pronouns to his sentences.
“Why are they following you?” the young man said peevishly. “Nothing better to do?”
“That’s just it,” Reggie said. “I don’t know why I’m being followed. But everywhere I go this little man sticks to me like a postage stamp.”
“Where is he now?”
Reggie pointed dramatically at the dark little man.
“At the bar. He took the stool I left. He’s right between that fat old man and that young girl with the red hair.”
THE tweed-clad young man stared in the direction of Reggie’s pointing finger, then he frowned and glanced down at Reggie.
“Any pink elephants, yet?”
“I’m not drunk,” Reggie said indignantly. “That man has been following me like a conga partner all afternoon.”
The tall young man patted Reggie patiently on the shoulder.
“Sleep and rest will make a new man of you,” he said. “Go home. Go to bed. You’ve got hallucinations.”
“Hallucinations!” Reggie cried over the din of the orchestra. “What do you mean? Don’t you see the man I mean? Right between the fat old man and the girl with the red hair?”
The tweedish young man shook his head.
“The stool between the fat old man and the red-haired girl is completely unoccupied,” he said in the patient voice of a man instructing a very young child.
Reggie shook his head bewilderedly. There was a sudden cold hollow in the pit of his stomach. He opened and closed his mouth several times without producing a sound.
“Are you serious?” he finally managed to gasp.
“Certainly,” the young man answered. “There’
s no one on the bar stool you left. You’re just seeing things. Take my advice and go home. You’ve had too much giggle water.”
Reggie set his drink down hastily. For a long deliberate moment he studied the back of the dark little man at the bar. Then he shook his head dazedly. Maybe this was all some wild product of his imagination. Maybe he was having hallucinations . . .
He shook his head again and then he shook hands with the young man in the tweed suit.
“I’m going home, Ricky,” he said firmly. “Say hello to all the gang for me.”
“Name isn’t Ricky,” the young man said, sipping from his drink, “but I’ll tell the boys you were asking.”
“Good,” Reggie said.
He left the crowded bar by a back entrance. The warm sunshine was pleasant and reassuring. People hurried past him, traffic surged in the streets, and everything was quite normal. He breathed a deep sigh and hailed a cab. He gave the driver the address of his apartment and then settled back against the soft leather cushions.
Sleep was all he needed. That was all.
WHEN he reached his apartment on the near North Side he had succeeded in convincing himself that his peculiar experiences of the afternoon were only products of his fevered imagination.
As he let himself into his apartment he had firmly resolved to strictly ration his reading of comic strips and spy magazines. They were pretty strong meat if they weren’t handled with discretion.
The pleasantly furnished living room of his apartment was shrouded in late-afternoon semi-darkness and, when he closed and locked the door behind him, he switched on the lights.
The first thing he saw when he walked into the room was the little dark man whom he’d seen at the Club and at the bar a few minutes previously.
The dark little man was sitting in a straight chair, his hands resting on his knees. There was a faint smile on his face as he studied Reggie with calm, inscrutable eyes.
Reggie staggered back a few steps, clapping one hand hysterically to his forehead. He couldn’t believe his eyes. He had left this man at a bar in the Loop, but here he was now, sitting calmly and unconcernedly in the living room of his apartment.
“How did you get in here?” he gasped.
The dark little man stood up and smiled.
“Is that important?” he asked softly. “I am here and that is all that matters.”
Reggie swallowed loudly. There was something disturbing about the calm ambiguity of the man’s statement. He rubbed his damp palms together nervously.
“Can I get you a drink?” he blurted.
The dark little man shook his head slowly.
Reggie looked at him uneasily, noticing him in detail for the first time. He was small, hardly more than five feet two and he was slenderly built. His hair was jet black and it combed straight back from a high, delicate forehead. He wore severely tailored black clothes that fitted his small frame without a wrinkle. But his eyes dominated his entire personality, for they were a cold chilling black, lusterless and unwinking, as unrevealing as twin diamonds.
Reggie shivered slightly and looked wistfully toward the door of the apartment. He coughed nervously.
“Sorry to seem rude,” he said, laughing weakly, “but I’ve got to be toddling off now. It’s been nice—er—running into you. There are magazines on the table, liquor in the ice box, so just make yourself at home.”
He backed cautiously toward the door, smiling nervously.
“Don’t wait up for me,” he said. “I’ve—”
“Wait,” the dark little man said quietly, “I must talk with you.”
“Some other time,” Reggie said, feeling behind him for the door knob. “Awfully rushed just now. Sorry but—”
“Wait!” the little man said again, but this time his voice cracked like a whip. “Didn’t you hear me? I must talk with you?”
REGGIE jumped at the cracking tone of the man’s voice. His hand jerked away from the door knob as if it were red hot.
“Oh, you want to talk to me?” he said foolishly. “I didn’t understand you.”
“My name,” the little man said, “is,” he paused and smiled cryptically, “Demise.”
“Glad to know you,” Reggie said. “My name is—”
“I know your name,” Mr. Demise said. “I know everything about you, Reginald Van Fiddler. I know things about you that you don’t know yourself.”
“Do you now?” Reggie said, becoming interested in spite of himself. “For instance?”
“I know that you are about to take a long trip,” Mr. Demise said.
“That’s not news,” Reggie said. “My draft board just classified me 1-A. I’ll be taking a long trip very shortly.”
“That is not the trip I am referring to,” Mr. Demise said. “You are going on a trip with me.”
Reggie blinked. He couldn’t think of anyone with whom he would rather not take a trip than this dark, sinister little man who called himself Mr. Demise. What did Demise mean, anyway?
“It’s nice of you, and all that,” he said, “but I don’t think I’ll be able to make it. My draft board might not like it.”
“They will understand,” Mr. Demise said.
“I don’t know about that,” Reggie said. He was beginning really to worry. There was something damnably inevitable about Mr. Demise’s calm statements. “They’re pretty ticklish about such things. I think we’d just better forget the whole idea.”
“That is impossible,” Mr. Demise said.
Reggie rubbed his moist palms on his trouser legs.
“Who are you?” he asked hesitantly. “Have you been following me around all day just to sell me on the idea of a trip? Are you from Cook’s tours?”
Mr. Demise smiled and shook his head.
“I am not interested in selling you the idea of a trip. I am simply telling you that you are going on a trip. I have already made all the arrangements. There is nothing that can possibly change them.”
“Where am I going?” Reggie asked. His voice was a whisper.
“With me,” Mr. Demise said.
“That’s no answer,” Reggie said, clutching at straws. “Who are you? Where are you going?”
Mr. Demise smiled again, very faintly. He walked slowly to the mantelpiece and plucked a rose from a vase. His hand closed gently over the flower as he turned to face Reggie.
“Perhaps this will answer your questions,” he said softly.
He opened his hand and dropped the flower to the floor at Reggie’s feet. Reggie’s eyes widened in sheer amazement.
Reggie looked at the seared rose, and then he knew . . .!
FOR the soft glowing beauty of the flower was faded forever. It lay on the floor, a blackened, dead reminder of its former glory.
“It’s dead,” he said incredulously. “It withered at the touch of your hand.”
MR. DEMISE nodded slowly and there was a wistful sadness in his face.
“All living things die at my touch,” he said. “For I am Death!”
“Death!” Reggie echoed. For an instant he stared blankly at Mr. Demise. “Death!” he repeated. “Why that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” He actually felt a sensation of relief in the realization that he’d been entertaining some loony instead of an Axis agent as he’d feared. “You’re off your trolley,” he said to Mr. Demise. “You’d better get moving before your keeper finds you. Death! What a gag!”
“I assure you it is not a gag,” Mr. Demise said slowly. “Your time is near at hand and I have been sent to take you to the land of Darkness.”
“Think again, chum,” Reggie said emphatically. “I’m not going to Harlem with you or anyone else and that’s final.”
“It is useless to protest,” Mr. Demise said. “Your destiny is sealed. You must come with me.”
“You are plain balmy,” Reggie said. “I’ve never heard a sillier yarn in my life. So you’re Death, are you?”
Mr. Demise nodded. “I am one of his agents.”
&nbs
p; “Changing your story a little, aren’t you?” Reggie said triumphantly. “Well, since when has Death been announced by personal messengers? A man steps in front of a car. He’s killed. That’s all there is to it. There aren’t little black men standing on the curb pushing him into the street, are there? And they don’t come around a couple of hours in advance tipping him off, do they? No!”
“When a mortal passes over,” Mr. Demise said, “there is always an agent of Death present superintending the details. But he is not always visible to his charge.”
Reggie poured himself a drink and lit a cigarette.
“Well, thanks just the same,” he said, “but I don’t want any special effects when I pass over. If there’s a messenger of Death around I don’t want to see him. Just let him stay invisible. That’s the way I want it.”
Mr. Demise looked slightly pained. There was an embarrassed look on his normally expressionless features.
“Usually the agent of Death is invisible,” he said. “In fact his orders are to remain invisible under all circumstances.”
“Okay then,” Reggie said. “You’re breaking orders. Be a nice obedient chum now and fade away.”
Mr. Demise shrugged and stepped backward—and suddenly he was gone! He had disappeared into thin air, soundlessly, instantaneously.
“Why what?” Reggie said blandly. He started to sip his drink when suddenly the full realization of what had happened burst on him. The drink fell from his nerveless fingers with a crash.
He stared frantically about the room.
Mr. Demise was gone! It was incredible! It was unbelievable! But it was a fact!
He poured himself another drink and drained it in one breathless gulp. He felt his reason tottering as his gaze swung desperately about the room.
“Mr. Demise!” he cried. “Come back! Where are you!”
“I am here before you,” Mr. Demise’s voice sounded in the air. “Are you convinced now?”
Reggie mopped his forehead weakly.
“Yes,” he gasped. “I’m convinced.”
MR. DEMISE reappeared as suddenly as he had vanished. He smiled faintly at Reggie. He was apparently completely unruffled by his transformation.
Collected Fiction (1940-1963) Page 148