Fear and Trembling

by Robert Bloch

But at night, she had company. They never came before supper, but along about eight o’clock, when it got dark, they started drifting in. Sometimes there were only one or two, sometimes a whole bunch. Most always, Mr. Willis was there, and Mrs. Cassidy, and Sam Gates. There were others, too, but Ed remembered these three the best.

  Mr. Willis was a funny man. He was always grumbling and complaining about the cold, and quarreling with Grandma about what he called “my property.”

  “You have no idea how cold it gets,” he used to say, sitting over in the corner next to the fireplace and rubbing his hands. “Day after day it seems to get colder and colder. Not that I’m complaining too much, mind you. It’s nothing as bad as the rheumatism I used to have. But you’d think that they’d at least have given me a decent lining. After all the money I left them, to pick out a cheap pine job like that, with some kind of shiny cotton stuff that didn’t even last through the first winter—”

  Oh, he was a grumbler, that Mr. Willis. He had a long, pale old man’s face that seemed to be all wrinkles and scowl. Ed never really got a good look at him, because right after supper when they went into the parlor, Grandma would turn out all the lights and just keep the fire going in the fireplace. “We got to cut down on bills,” she used to tell Ed. “This little widow’s mite of mine is hardly enough to keep body and soul together for one, let alone an orphan, too.”

  Ed was an orphan; he knew that, but it never bothered him. Nothing seemed to bother him, the way things bothered people like old Mr. Willis.

  “To think I’d come to this in the end,” Mr. Willis would sigh. “Why, my family owned this place. Fifty years ago it was just a pasture—nothing but meadowland. You know that, Hannah.”

  Hannah was Grandma’s name; Hannah Morse. And Grandpa’s name had been Robert Morse. Grandpa had died a long time ago in a war and Grandma never even knew where he was buried. But first he had built this house for Grandma. That’s what made Mr. Willis so mad, Ed guessed.

  “When Robert built this house, I gave him the land,” Mr. Willis complained. “That was fair and square. But when the city came in and took over—made me take a price for the whole shooting-match—there was nothing fair and square about that. Bunch of crooked lawyers, cheating a man out of his rightful property, with all their gib-gab about forced sales and condemning. Way I see it, I still got a moral right. A moral right. Not just to that itty-bitty little plot where they planted me, but to the whole shebang.”

  “What do you plan to do,” Mrs. Cassidy would say, “Evict us?”

  Then she would laugh, real soft, because all of Grandma’s friends sounded soft no matter how happy or mad they got. Ed liked to watch Mrs. Cassidy laugh, because she was a big woman and she laughed all over.

  Mrs. Cassidy wore a lovely black dress, always the same one, and she was all powdered and rouged and painted up. She talked to Grandma a lot about something called “perpetual care.”

  “I’ll always be grateful for one thing,” Ed remembered her saying. “And that’s my perpetual care. The flowers are so pretty—I picked out the design for the blanket myself. And they keep the trim so nice, even in winter. I wish you could see the scrollwork on the box, too; all that hand-carving in mahogany. They certainly spared no expense, let me tell you, and I’m mighty grateful. Mighty grateful. Why, if I hadn’t forbid it in the will, I’ll bet they’d have put up a monument. As it is, I think the plain Vermont granite has a little more restraint—you know, dignity.”

  Ed didn’t understand Mrs. Cassidy very well, and besides, it was more interesting to listen to Sam Gates. Sam was the only one who paid much attention to Ed.

  “Hi, sonny,” he would say. “Come over and sit by me. Want to hear about the battles, sonny?”

  Sam Gates was a young-looking man, always smiling. He’d sit there in front of the fire, with Ed sprawled out at his feet, and then there would be wonderful stories to hear. Like the time Sam Gates met Abe Lincoln—not President Lincoln, but just plain Abe, the lawyer from down in Springfield-Illinois. Then there was the story about General Grant and the story about something called the Bloody Corner, where the boys in blue really gave ’em the cold steel.

  “Wisht I could have lasted out to see the finish,” Sam Gates would sigh. “Course, by ’64 wasn’t one of us on either side didn’t know how it would end. After Gettysburg we had ’em on the run. And maybe it’s just as well I didn’t have to go through all that messing around with Reconstruction, or whatever they called it. Nosiree, sonny, I guess I was lucky in a way at that. Leastways, I never had to grow old, like Willis here. Never had to marry and settle down and raise a family and end up mumbling in the corner, trying to gum my porkchops. I’d have come to the same thing at the last, anyhow—isn’t that so, friends?”

  And Sam Gates would look around the room and wink. Sometimes Grandma got mad at him.

  “Wish you wouldn’t carry on that way,” she said. “Watch your language, please. Little pitchers have big ears. Just because you’re all sociable and come around on account of this house being more or less a part of the property—so to speak—that’s no reason you got to go putting ideas in the head of a six-year-old. It ain’t decent.”

  That was a sure sign Grandma was mad; when she said “ain’t.” And at such times Ed usually got up and went out to play with Susie and Joe.

  Thinking back, years later, Ed couldn’t remember the first time he played with Susie and Joe. The moments they spent together were quite fresh in his memory, but other details escaped him; where they lived, who their parents were, why they only came around at night, calling under the kitchen window.

  “Oh, Ed-deeee! C’mon out and play!”

  Joe was a black-haired, quiet kid of about nine. Susie was Ed’s age or even a little younger; she had curly, taffy-colored hair and always wore a ruffled dress which she was careful not to stain or dirty, no matter what games they played.

  Ed had a crush on her.

  They played hide-and-seek all over the cool, dark graveyard, night after night; calling faintly and giggling quietly at one another. Even now, Ed recalled how quiet the children were. He tried vainly to remember other games they played, like tag, where they’d touch each other. He was sure, somehow, that he had touched them, but no single instance came in recollection. Mainly he remembered Susie’s face, her smile, and the way she called in her little-girl voice.

  “Oh, Ed-deeee!”

  Ed never told anyone what he remembered, afterwards. Because afterwards was when the trouble started. It began when the people from the school came and asked Grandma why he wasn’t attending first grade.

  They got to talking with her, and then they talked to Ed. There was a lot of confusion—he remembered Grandma crying, and a big man with a blue suit on came in and showed her a lot of papers.

  Ed didn’t like to think about these things, because they marked the end of everything. After the man came there were no more evenings around the fireplace, no more games in the cemetery, no more glimpses of Joe or Susie.

  The man made Grandma cry, and talked about incompetence and neglect, and something called a sanity hearing, just because Ed had been dumb enough to tell him about playing in the graveyard, and about Grandma’s friends.

  “You mean to tell me you got this poor kid so mixed up that he thinks he sees them too?” the man had asked Grandma. “That can’t go on, Mrs. Morse; filling a child’s head with morbid nonsense about the dead.”

  “They ain’t dead!” snapped Grandma, and Ed had never seen her quite so mad, even though she’d been crying. “Not to me they ain’t, and not to him, nor anyone who’s friendly. I’ve lived in this house nigh all my life; ever since Robert was taken from me in that foreign war in the Philippines, and this is about the first time a stranger ever marched into it. What you and your kind would call a living stranger, that is. But the others—they come around regular. Seeing as how we share the same property, so to speak. They ain’t dead, Mister; they’re just neighborly, is all. And to Ed and me they’re a d
arn sight more real than your kind ever was!”

  But the man didn’t listen to Grandma, even though he stopped asking questions and began treating her nice and polite. Everybody was nice and polite from then on; the other men that came, and the lady who took Ed away on the train to the orphanage in the city.

  That was the end. There were no fresh flowers every day at the orphanage, and while Ed met plenty of kids, he never saw anyone like Joe or Susie.

  Not that everyone, kids and grownups alike, weren’t nice to him. They treated him just so, and Mrs. Ward, the Matron, told him that she wanted Ed to think of her as his own mother—that being the least she could do, after his harrowing experience.

  Ed didn’t know what she meant by harrowing experience and she wouldn’t explain. She wouldn’t tell him what had happened to Grandma, either, or why she never came to visit him. In fact, any time he asked any questions about the past she had nothing to say except that it was best to try and forget all that had happened before he came to the orphanage.

  Gradually, Ed forgot. In the score of years that followed, he forgot almost completely—that was why it was so hard to remember, now. And Ed wanted to remember, very badly.

  During the two years in the hospital at Honolulu, Ed spent most of his time trying to remember. There was nothing else for him to do, lying flat on his back that way, and besides, he knew that if he ever got out of there he’d want to go back.

  Just before he went into the Service, after getting out of the orphanage, he’d received a letter from Grandma. It was one of the few letters Ed ever received in his lonely lifetime and at first the return address on the envelope and the name, “Mrs. Hannah Morse,” had meant nothing to him.

  But the letter itself—just a few scrawled and spidery lines written on ruled notebook paper—brought a rush of confused memories.

  Grandma had been away, in a “sanotarium,” as she put it, but she was back home, now, and had found out all about the “put-up job they worked to get you into their clutches.” And if Ed would like to come back home—

  Ed wanted very desperately to come back home. But he was already in uniform and waiting orders when the letter came. He wrote, of course. He wrote all the while he was overseas, and sent her an allotment, besides.

  Sometimes Grandma’s answers reached him. She was waiting for his leave to come. She was reading the papers. Sam Gates said it was a horrible thing, this war.

  Sam Gates—

  Ed told himself that he was a grown man now. Sam Gates was a figment of the imagination. But Grandma kept writing about her figments; about Mr. Willis and Mrs. Cassidy, and even some “new friends” who came to the house.

  “Lots of fresh flowers these days, Ed boy,” Grandma wrote. “Scarcely a day goes by without them blowing taps over yonder. Of course a body isn’t so spry any more—I’m pushing seventy-seven, you know, but I still get over for flowers same as always.”

  The letters stopped coming when Ed got hit. For a long while, everything stopped, for Ed. There was only the bed and the doctors and the nurses and the hypo every three hours and the pain. That was Ed’s life—that, and trying to remember.

  Once Ed nearly told a skull doctor about the whole deal, but he caught himself in time. It was nothing you could talk about and hope to be understood, and Ed had enough trouble without bucking for a Section Eight.

  When he was able to, he wrote again. Nearly two years had passed and the war was long since over. So many things had happened that Ed didn’t even dare to hope very much. For Hannah Morse would be “pushing eighty” by now, if—

  He got an answer to his letter a few days before his medical discharge came through.

  “Dear Ed.” The same spidery scrawl, probably a sheet from the same ruled notebook. Nothing had changed. Grandma was still waiting and she’d just known that he hadn’t given up. But there was a funny thing she wanted him to know about. Did he remember Old Sourpuss, the caretaker? Well, Old Sourpuss was hit by a truck last winter, and ever since then he’d taken to dropping in with the rest of them evenings, and now he was friendly as could be, nice as pie. They’d have so much to talk about when Ed came back—

  So Ed came back.

  After twenty years, after a new lifetime, Ed came back. There was a long month in Honolulu, waiting for sailing—a month filled with unreal people and events. There were nights in a barroom, there was a girl named Peggy and a nurse named Linda, and there was a hospital buddy of Ed’s who talked about going into business with the dough they’d saved up.

  But the barroom was never as real as the parlor back in Grandma’s house, and Peggy and Linda weren’t in the least like Susie, and Ed knew he would never go into business.

  On the boat, everybody seemed to be talking about Russia and inflation and housing. Ed listened and nodded and tried to remember some of the phrases Sam Gates used to use when he told about Old Abe down in Springfield-Illinois.

  Ed took a plane from Frisco, wiring ahead to Mrs. Hannah Morse. He got in at the airport in mid-afternoon, but he couldn’t catch a bus for the last forty-mile ride until just before supper. He grabbed a bite to eat at the station and then jolted into town along about twilight.

  A cab took him over to Grandma’s.

  Ed was trembling when he got out in front of the house on the edge of the cemetery. He handed the driver a five and told him to keep the change. Then he stood there until the cab drove away, before he got up enough nerve to knock on the door.

  He took a long, deep breath. Then the door opened and he was home. He knew he was home because nothing had changed. Nothing at all.

  Grandma was still Grandma. She stood there in the doorway and she was little and wrinkled and beautiful. An old, old woman, peering up at him in the dimness of the firelight, and saying, “Ed, boy—I declare! It is you, isn’t it? Land, what tricks a body’s mind can play. I thought I’d still be seeing a little shaver. But come in, boy, come in. Wipe your feet first.”

  Ed wiped his feet on the mat, same as always, and walked into the parlor. The fire was going in the fireplace and Ed put on another log before he sat down.

  “Hard to keep it up, boy,” Grandma said. “Woman gets to be my age.” She sat down opposite him and smiled.

  “You shouldn’t be alone like this,” Ed told her.

  “Alone? But I’m not alone! Don’t you remember Mr. Willis and all the others? They sure enough haven’t forgotten you, I can tell you that. Hardly talk about another thing except when you were coming back. They’ll be over, later.”

  “Will they?” Ed said, softly, staring into the fire.

  “Of course they will. You know that, Ed.”

  “Sure. Only I thought—”

  Grandma smiled. “I understand, all right. You’ve been letting the other folks fool you; the ones who don’t know. I met a lot of them up to the sanotarium; they kept me there for nigh ten years before I caught on to how to handle them. Talking about ghosts and spirits and deelusions. Finally I just gave up and allowed they were right and in a little while they let me come home. Guess you went through the same thing, more or less, only right now you don’t know what to believe.”

  “That’s right, Grandma,” Ed said. “I don’t.”

  “Well, boy, you needn’t worry about it. Or about your chest, either.”

  “My chest? How did you—”

  “They sent a letter,” Grandma answered. “Maybe it’s right, what they said, and maybe it’s wrong. But it doesn’t matter, either way. I know you aren’t afraid. You wouldn’t have come back if you were afraid, would you, Ed?”

  “That’s right, Grandma. I figured that even if time was short, I belonged here. Besides, I wanted to know, once and for all, if—”

  He was silent, waiting for her to speak. But she merely nodded, face bowed and dim in the shadows. At last she replied.

  “You’ll find out, soon enough.” Her smile flashed up at him, and Ed caught himself remembering a dozen familiar gestures, mannerisms, intonations. Come what may, that
was something nobody could take away from him—he was home.

  “Land, I wonder what’s keeping them?” Grandma said, rising abruptly and crossing over to the side window. “Seems to me they’re pretty late.”

  “Are you sure they’re coming?” Ed could have bitten his tongue off a moment after he uttered the question, but it was too late then.

  Grandma turned stiffly. “I’m sure,” she said. “But maybe I was wrong about you. Maybe you ain’t sure.”

  “Don’t be mad, Grandma—”

  “I ain’t mad! Oh, Ed, have they really fooled you after all? Did you go so far away that you can’t even remember?”

  “Of course I remember. I remember everything; even about Susie and Joe and the fresh flowers every day, but—”

  “The flowers.” Grandma looked at him. “Yes, you do remember, and I’m glad. You used to get fresh flowers for me every day, didn’t you?”

  She glanced at the table. An empty bowl rested on the center.

  “Maybe that will help,” she said. “If you’d go get some flowers. Now. Before they come.”

  “Now?”

  “Please, Ed.”

  Without a word, he walked out into the kitchen and opened the back door. The moon was up, and there was enough light to guide him along the path to the fence. Beyond, the cemetery lay in silver splendor.

  Ed didn’t feel afraid, he didn’t feel strange, he felt nothing at all. He boosted himself over the fence, ignoring the sharp, sudden pain below his ribs. He set his feet upon the gravel path between the headstones and he walked a little ways, letting memory guide him.

  Flowers. Fresh flowers. Fresh flowers from fresh graves. It was all wrong, it was Section Eight for sure, but at the same time it was all right. It had to be.

  He saw the mound over at the side of the hill, near the end of the fence. Potter’s field, but there were flowers on one grave; the single bouquet rested against a wooden marker.

  Ed stooped down, scenting the freshness, feeling the damp firmness of the cut stems as he lifted the cluster from the marker. The moon was bright.