The Compleat Boucher

by Anthony Boucher; Editor: James A. Mann

  It began—at least according to one means of reckoning a time sequence—on the morning after Fergus had trapped the murderer in the Dubrovsky case—a relatively simple affair involving only such prosaic matters as an unbreakable alibi and a hermetically sealed room.

  Nonetheless it was a triumph that deserved, and received, wholehearted celebration, and it was three o’clock before Fergus wound up in bed. It was eight when he unwound upon hearing a thud in the corner of the room. He sat up and stared into the gloom and saw a tall thin figure rising from the floor. The figure moved over to his typewriter and switched on the light. He saw a man of about sixty, clean-shaven, but with long, untrimmed gray hair. An odd face—not unkindly, but slightly inhuman, as though he had gone through some experience so unspeakable as to set him a little apart from the rest of his race.

  Fergus watched curiously as the old man took an envelope out of a drawer in the desk, opened it, unfolded the papers it contained, set them in a pile beside the typewriter, took the topmost sheet, inserted it in the machine, and began typing furiously.

  It seemed a curious procedure, but Fergus’ mind was none too clear and the outlines of the room and of the typist still tended to waver. Oh well, Fergus thought, long-haired old men at typewriters is pretty mild in view of those boilermakers. And he rolled over and back to sleep.

  It was about an hour later that he opened his eyes again, much surprised to find Curly Locks still there. He was typing with his right hand, while his left rested on a pile of paper beside him. As Fergus watched, the old man pulled a sheet from the typewriter and added it to the pile at his left. Then he put the pile in the side section of the desk which housed unused paper, rose from the machine, switched off the light, and walked out the door with a curious awkward walk, as though he had been paralyzed for years and had had to learn the technique all over again.

  The dominant O’Breen trait, the one that has solved more cases than any amount of ingenuity and persistence, is curiosity. A phantasm that stays right there while you sleep is worth investigating. So Fergus was instantly out of bed, without even bothering to pull on a robe, and examining the unused paper compartment.

  He sighed with disgust. All the sheets were virginally white. It must have been a delusion after all, though of a singular sort. He turned back to bed. But as he did so, his eye glanced at the corner where he had heard that first thud. He executed a fabulous double take and looked again. There was no doubt about it.

  In that corner lay the body of a tall thin man of about sixty, clean-shaven, but with long untrimmed gray hair.

  The average man might find some difficulty in explaining to the police how an unidentified corpse happened to turn up in his bedroom. But Detective Lieutenant A. Jackson had reached the point where he was surprised at nothing that involved O’Breen.

  He heard the story through and then said judiciously, “I think we’ll leave your typewriter out of the report, Fergus. If your Irish blood wants to go fey on you, it’s O.K. with me; but I think the Psychical Research Society would be more interested in a report on it than the L.A. Police Department. He died when you heard that thud, so his actions thereafter are pretty irrelevant.”

  “Cyanide?” Fergus asked.

  “Smell it from here, can’t you? And the vial still clenched in his hand, so there’s no doubt of a verdict of suicide. To try a little reconstruction: Say he came to see you professionally about whatever was preying on him. Found you asleep and decided to wait, but finally got restless and finished the job without seeing you.”

  “I guess so,” said Fergus, taking another gulp of tomato juice. “This and the coffee make the typewriter episode seem pretty unlikely. But no O’Breen’s gone in for second sight since great-great-grandfather Seamus. I’ll expect the family leprechaun next.”

  “Tell him these shoes need resoling,” said Lieutenant Jackson.

  For twenty-four hours the affair rested at that. Suicide of Unknown. Nothing to identify him, not even laundry marks. Checkup on fingerprints fruitless. One odd thing that bothered Jackson a little: the man’s trousers had no cuffs.

  Sergeant Marcus, whose uncle was in cloaks and suits, had an idea on that. “If we get into this war and run into a shortage of material, we’ll all be wearing ’em like that. Maybe he’s setting next year’s styles.”

  When Fergus heard this, he laughed. And then he stopped laughing and sat down and began thinking. He thought through half a pack of Camels in a chain before he gave up. There was a hint there. Something that was teasing him. Something that reminded him of the Partridge case and yet not quite.

  The notion was still nibbling at the back of his mind when Jackson called him the next day. “Something might interest you, Fergus. Either a pretty farfetched coincidence or part of a pattern.”

  “My pattern?”

  “Your pattern maybe. Another old man with long hair and no identification. Found in a rooming house out on Adams in a room that was supposed to be vacant. But this one was shot.”

  Fergus frowned. “Could be. But is long hair enough to make it a coincidence?”

  “Not by itself. But he hasn’t any cuffs on his pants either.”

  Fergus lost no time in getting to the West Adams address. Onetime mansion fallen on evil days, reduced to transient cubicles. The landlady was still incoherently horrified.

  “I went into the room to fix it up like I always do between tenants and there on the bed—”

  Jackson shooed her out. The photographing and fingerprinting squads had come and gone, but the basket hadn’t arrived yet. He and Fergus stood alone and looked at the man. He was even older than the other—somewhere in his late seventies, at a guess. A hard, cruel face, with a dark hole centered in its forehead.

  “Shot at close range,” Jackson was commenting. “Powder burns. Gun left here— clear prints on it.” There was a knock on the door. “That’ll be the basket.”

  Fergus looked at the trousers. The cuffs hadn’t been taken off. They were clearly tailored without cuffs. Two old men with cuffless trousers—

  Jackson had gone to open the door. Now he started back with a gasp. Fergus turned. Gasps aren’t easily extorted from a police lieutenant, but this one was justified. Coming in the door was the exact twin of Fergus’ typing corpse, and walking with that same carefully learned awkwardness.

  He seemed not to notice the corpse on the bed, but he turned to Jackson when the officer demanded, “And who are you?” To be exact, he seemed to turn a moment before Jackson spoke.

  He said something. Or at least he made vocal noises. It was a gibberish not remotely approximating any language that either detective had ever heard. And there followed a minute of complete cross-purposes, a cross-examination in which neither party understood a syllable of the other’s speech.

  Then Fergus had an idea. He took out his notebook and pencil and handed them over. The old man wrote rapidly and most peculiarly. He began in the lower right hand corner of the page and wrote straight on to the upper left. But the message, when he handed it back, was in normal order.

  Fergus whistled. “With that act on a blackboard, you could pack ’em in.” Then he read the message:

  I see that I will have succeeded, and because of the idea that has just come to my mind I imagine that you already understand this hell as much as it is possible for one to understand who has not gone through it and know that it is impossible to arrest me. But if it will simplify your files, you may consider this a confession.

  Jonathan Hull

  Jackson drew his automatic and moved toward the door. Fergus took out one of his cards with business and home address and penciled on it:

  Look me up if you need help straightening this out.

  An idea seemed to strike the man as he accepted the card. Then his features widened in a sort of astonished gratification and he looked at the bed. Then with that same rapid awkwardness he was walking out of the room.

  Detective Lieutenant Jackson called a warning to him. He tried to grab
him. But the man went right on past him. It isn’t easy to fire a close-range bullet into a gray-haired old man. He was out of the room and on the stairs before Jackson’s finger could move, and then the bullet went wild.

  Jackson was starting out of the room when he felt Fergus’ restraining hand on his arm. He tried to shake it off, but it was firm. “You’ll never catch him, Andy,” said Fergus gently. “Never in God’s green eternity. Because you see you can’t have caught him or he couldn’t have typed—’’

  Jackson exploded. “Fergus! You don’t think this trick-writing expert is another wraith for your second sight, do you? I saw him, too. He’s real. And he must be your corpse’s twin. If we find him, we can have the answer to both deaths. We can—”

  “Telephone for you, Lieutenant,” the landlady called.

  When Jackson returned, his chagrin over Jonathan Hull’s escape was forgotten. “All right,” he said wearily. “Have it your way, Fergus. Ghosts we have yet. Do I care?”

  “What happened?”

  “Anything can happen. Everything probably will. There’s no more sense and order in the world. Nothing a man can trust.”

  “But what is it?”

  “Fingerprints. They don’t mean a thing any more.”

  “The prints on the gun?” Fergus said eagerly. “They belong to my corpse?”

  Jackson nodded shamefacedly. “So a cuffless ghost came back and— But it’s worse than that. Much worse. This stiff’s prints—they belong to a seventeen-yearold kid working out at Lockheed.” With these words the lanky lieutenant seemed to reach the depth of despair.

  But they brought new hope to Fergus’ face and a triumphant glint to his green eyes. “Perfect, Andy! I couldn’t have asked for better. That rounds it off.”

  Jackson looked up wide-eyed. “You mean it makes sense? O.K., maestro; what’s the answer?”

  “I don’t know,” said Fergus coolly. “But I know where the answer is: in the drawer of my desk.”

  He stubbornly refused to say a word until they were in his room. Then he said, “Look at all the little things we saw: How Hull turned to you just before you spoke to him; how he registered amazement, and then looked at the corpse; above all, how he wrote that note. And the wording of the note too: ‘I will have succeeded,’ and how we must already understand because of something he just thought of. There’s only one answer to it all:

  “Jonathan Hull is living backwards. ”

  Jackson burst out with a loud “Nonsense!”

  “It even explains the absence of the cuffs. They’re trousers from next year, when we’ll be in the war and Sergeant Marcus’ prophecy will come true.”

  “Then you mean that the other stiff too—?”

  “Both of’em.”

  “O.K. Grant you that much, and I suppose in some cockeyed way it explains the prints of a corpse on a murder weapon. But that kid out at Lockheed—”

  “—is your second stiff. But don’t trust me: Let’s see what Hull himself has to say.” Fergus reached for the drawer.

  “Hull left a message before he bumped himself off?”

  “Don’t you see? If he’s living backwards, he came into my room, sat at the typewriter, wrote a message, and then killed himself. I just saw it being reeled off hindsideto. So when I ‘saw’ him taking an envelope out of this drawer, he was actually, in his own time-sequence, putting it in.”

  “I’ll believe you,” said Jackson, “when I see—”

  Fergus had pulled the drawer open. There lay a fat envelope, inscribed:

  FOR FERGUS O’BREEN

  FROM JONATHAN HULL.

  “All right,” said the lieutenant, “so your conclusion is correct. That still doesn’t mean your reasoning is. How can a man live backwards? You might as well ask the universe to run in reverse entropy.”

  “Maybe it does,” said Fergus. “Maybe Hull just found out how to go forwards.”

  Jackson snorted. “Well, let’s see what he says.”

  Fergus read: “ ‘The first indication of my strange destiny was that I could see ghosts, or so I then interpreted the phenomena.’ ”

  Jackson groaned. “Ghosts we have again! Fergus, I will not have the supernatural. The parascientific is bad enough, but the supernatural—no!”

  “Is there necessarily any difference?” Fergus asked. “What we haven’t found the answer to, we call supernatural. Maybe Jonathan Hull found an answer or two. Subside, Andy, and let’s settle down to this.”

  They settled.

  THE NARRATIVE OF JONATHAN HULL

  The first indication of my strange destiny was that I could see ghosts, or so I then interpreted the phenomena. The first such episode occurred when I was five years old and came in from the yard to tell the family that I had been playing with Gramps. Since my grandfather had died the previous year in that mysterious post-war epidemic, the family was not a little concerned as to my veracity; but no amount of spanking shook me from my conviction.

  Again in my twentieth year, I was visited in my lodgings near the Institute by my father, who had died when I was fifteen. The two visitations were curiously similar. Both apparitions spoke unintelligible gibberish and walked with awkwardly careful movements.

  If not already, you will soon recognize these two traits, Mr. O’Breen. When I add that the Hulls are noted for the marked physical resemblance between generations, you will readily understand the nature of these apparent ghosts.

  On neither of these occasions did I feel any of the conventional terror of revenants. In the first case, because I was too young to realize the implications of the visit; in the second, because I had by my twentieth year already reached the conclusion that my chief interest in life lay in the fringes of normal existence.

  Too much of scientific work, by the time I reached the Institute, was being devoted to further minute exploration of the already known, and too little to any serious consideration to the unknown or half-known, the shadowy blurs on the edges of our field of vision. To pursue the work as mathematical physicist for which I was training myself meant, I feared, a blind alley of infinite refinement and elaboration.

  To be sure, there was the sudden blossoming of atomic power which had begun after the war, when peacetime allowed the scientists of the world to pool their recent discoveries with no fear lest they be revealing a possible secret weapon. But the work that needed doing now in that field was that of the mechanic, the technician. Theory was becoming fixed and settled, and it was upon my skill in theoretical matters that I prided myself.

  Yes, I was the bright young lad then. There were no limits to my aspirations. The world should glow with the name of Hull. And behold me now: a ghost even to myself, a murderer, and soon a suicide. Already, if my understanding of the reversal is correct, my body lies in that corner; but I cannot turn my eyes to it to verify my assumption. And I was always more satisfied with the theory than with the fact.

  I was the prodigy of the Institute. I was the shining star. And Lucifer was a shining star, too.

  When the United Nations established the World Institute for Paranormal Research at Basle, I recognized my niche. My record at the local institute and my phenomenal score in the aptitude test made my admission a matter of course. And once surrounded by the magnificent facilities of the WIPR, I began to bestow upon the name of Hull certain small immortalities.

  Yes, there is that consolation. The name of Hull will never quite die while extrasensory perception is still measured in terms of the H.Q., the Hull quotient, or while Hull’s “Co-ordinating Concordance to the Data of Charles Fort” still serves as a standard reference work. Nor, I suppose, while mystery-mongers probe the disappearance of Jonathan Hull and couple his name with those of Sir Benjamin Bathurst and the captain of the Mary Celeste— a fate that shall be averted, Mr. O’Breen, if you follow carefully the instructions which I shall give you later.

  But more and more one aspect of the paranormal began to absorb me. I concentrated on it, devouring everything I could obtain in fact o
r fiction, until I was recognized as the WIPR’s outstanding authority upon the possibilities of chronokinesis, or time travel.

  It was a happy day when I hit upon that word chronokinesis. Its learned sound seemed to remove the concept from the vulgar realm of the time machines cheapened by fiction fantasists. But even with this semantic advantage, I still had many prejudices to battle, both among the populace and among my own colleagues. For even the very men who had established extra-sensory perception upon a scientific basis could still sneer at time travel.

  I knew, of course, of earlier attempts. And now, I realize, Mr. O’Breen, why I was inclined to trust you the moment I saw your card. It was through a fortunately preserved letter of your sister’s, which found its way into our archives, that we knew of the early fiasco of Harrison Partridge and your part therein. We knew, too, of the researches of Dr. Derringer, and how he gave up in despair after his time traveler failed to return, having encountered who knows what unimaginable future barrier.

  We learned of no totally successful chronokinetic experiment. But from what we did know of the failures, I was able to piece together a little of what I felt must be the truth. Surely the method must involve the rotation of a ternporomagnetic field against the “natural” time stream, and Hackendorf’s current researches would make the establishment of such a field a simple matter.

  It was then that I hit upon my concept of reversed individual entropy—setting, so to speak, the machinery of the individual running in an order opposite to the normal, so that movement along the “contrary” direction of the time stream would be for him natural and feasible.