THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror

by Thomas M. Disch

  “I’ve been under a strain,” he insisted. “And this is some kind of hallucination. Isn’t it?”

  She smiled and, though she knew it to be a lie, nodded yes. She could feel his fear, like a string between her fingers waiting to be plucked. She did not wish to see what that fear, released, would make him do.

  She wished herself away.

  Swift as the wish she vanished into the turbid darkness of his corpus callosum. Then, with a thought, emerged in the bedroom.

  The room seemed full of smoke. It billowed up under her footsteps like the ooze stirred from the bed of a stagnant pond. The mirror above the dresser had darkened almost to opacity and gave back no image of herself. She knew at once that these dark vapors were a residue of his presence, as was the smell that emanated from the trellised roses of the wallpaper—a blast of corruption like the stench that explodes from an icebox of rotted groceries.

  She began then to feel panic, for there seemed to be no way to escape his pervading presence. She wished herself outside the house, but nothing happened, unless the glimmering of red within the coiling darkness of the mirror might be an echo of that wish. She went to the bedroom door and tried to turn the knob, but the physical world would not yield to her ghostly touch. She felt it, cool and smooth and curved, but could not make it move. It was as though all the world were carved from one monumental block of marble.

  She heard him approaching the bedroom. Not heard, but registered the intenser pressure of his presence. Then he stood within the doorway, glaring, baleful—and she could not resist the impulse to make him feel some part of the horror he inspired. She took the taut wire of his fear between her fingers and plucked it, once. At once his face convulsed, eyes starting, mouth agape, the tongue distended, and a scream tore from his throat. He fell to his knees and then, hamstrings spasming, to his side. She looked on for a while with curiosity, then, overcome with disgust, walked around him and out of the bedroom through the door he’d left open.

  The front and back doors were both closed. There were two windows open, but they were screened. She was trapped inside the house. She would have to resign herself to that fact. With a sigh she sat down on the edge of the recliner and watched the first few minutes of the ten o’clock news. Reagan had been elected president and already, it seemed, someone had tried to shoot him. Otherwise nothing had changed. Various countries were in turmoil. The black smoke that had filled Glandier’s bedroom swirled about the news studio and blanketed the streets of faraway cities like an immovable layer of smog. It was all too depressing. She found a corner of the living room from which the screen of the TV was not visible. I’ll try and sleep, she thought, and at once she was asleep.

  At the same moment, in the bedroom, Glandier’s convulsions ceased and he sank into a dreamless oblivion.

  CHAPTER 24

  Joy-Ann was watching another replay of her wedding day in April of 1949, when the nurse (whose name was Adah Menken and who had been, she claimed, a world-famous actress and poet back at the time of the Civil War) came in with a tray of carrot sticks and sour cream dip and a bottle of real French champagne.

  “Goodness!” said Joy-Ann. “What’s the occasion?”

  Adah Menken laughed, popped the cork, and poured the champagne into two glasses. “The occasion is that you’re moving up to the next level of blessedness.” She handed Joy-Ann a brimming glass and lifted her own in homage. “Congratulations!”

  After the clinking of the glasses, Joy-Ann sipped and nibbled and went on watching, out of the corner of her eye, dear old Dewey, with his hair parted low to disguise his bald spot, and herself beside him in a white veil, only seventeen years old. Life was so amazing, and now it was all over, and that was even more amazing.

  But it wasn’t very polite to go on viewing Home Box Office when it was clear that Adah wanted to have a serious discussion, and in any case Joy-Ann had watched her wedding a dozen times already, so she aimed the remote control at the TV screen and blipped it off.

  “Shouldn’t I change?” Joy-Ann asked, remembering wistfully the gown of golden feathers she’d found the first time she looked inside the closet.

  “What a good idea,” Adah agreed. “We’ll both change. I hate dressing like a nurse, if truth be told.” She placed her emptied glass on the Zenith and went into the closet, reemerging a moment later in an immense dress of burgundy velvet with panels of pink satin, the kind of dress that only exists in old movies. “Like it?” Adah fluffed out the thick folds of the skirt with catlike complacence.

  “Oh, it’s lovely.”

  And the dress with the golden feathers was, if anything, even lovelier. Joy-Ann could have spent the rest of the day luxuriating in its extravagance, and possibly she did. Time was entirely subjective here in the afterlife, and minutes could stretch out into hours or melt away to nothing.

  When she returned to Adah, the hospital room had disappeared. They were standing now in what looked like the lobby of a downtown theater outside the ladies’ lounge. Far across the marble floor was an escalator with silver steps and a handrail of gleaming gold.

  “There it is,” Adah proclaimed in the tone of a hometown booster, “the stairway to Paradise!”

  The steps mounted up and up until they vanished in the haze. You couldn’t see Paradise itself, but you could hear, far, far away, a trembling of music.

  “Will Dewey be waiting at the top?” Joy-Ann asked in a whisper.

  “Well, no, not exactly. Dewey’s in heaven, of course, but he’s advanced to a level where neither of us would be able to recognize him as… Dewey. You see, after a certain stage of transcendental growth, a person isn’t exactly a person any longer. You’re more like a vast—” Adah opened up her arms in a universe-encompassing gesture. “—ball of gas.”

  “Inflammable gas, I’ll bet,” said Joy-Ann, bursting into laughter at the idea of Dewey turning into a hot air balloon. He always had let off the most atrocious farts.

  “In a sense, yes,” said Adah seriously. “In the sense that combustion is a natural metaphor for love.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Joy-Ann in a stricken tone.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m not sure I’m ready for this. I mean, I’m probably not worthy. I remember the day Bing came home from school, just after Dewey had passed on, and explained that all anyone ever did in heaven was look at God’s face. Which struck me, at the time, as kind of a dull thing to do, especially for all eternity. I know it’s probably wonderful once you start to do it, but… oh, I don’t know: my idea of a good time has always been to go dancing.”

  “There’s plenty of dancing in heaven. Just take the escalator to the mezzanine and you can dance to the Day of Judgment. In fact, if you like, I can go that far with you.”

  “Would you like to?”

  “Oh, I never refuse a chance to enjoy some higher bliss. And time stops completely at the mezzanine, so I wouldn’t be in any sense shirking my duties down here. All work and no play, as they say.” She held out her hand to Joy-Ann. “Shall we dance (oom-pah-pah)?”

  Arm in arm and hip to hip they whirled toward the foot of the escalator. Anywhere else Joy-Ann would have felt funny waltzing with another woman, but here in heaven with her own personal spirit-guide leading—and with such verve!—what could be the harm? Adah hummed Richard Rodgers’s unforgettable tune, and their bodies swooped and tilted and dipped and spun around, and even as they danced Joy-Ann became thoughtful and asked, “Why do you stay at this level, if what you said yesterday is so: that every soul is always free to move on to the next level up?”

  “It’s my earthy nature, I suppose, or as the French might say, nostalgia de la boue.”

  “Oh well, if you’re going to speak French!”

  “But you see, Joy-Ann, it was there I learned to love the material world for itself. Not, you may be sure, in Cincinnati! Oh my dear, you can’t imagine the Paris of those years. The houses, the furniture, the clothes, and there was I in the midst of it all, the leading s
candal of my day. I was photographed with Dumas—in his shirt sleeves! George Sand was my son’s godmother! And when I appeared, virtually naked, in Les Pirates at the Gaîté, nothing can express the splash I made. Perhaps if I’d lived long enough I might have grown disillusioned, but God was kind to me, as He was to you, and I died in 1868 at the height of my fame. If it hadn’t been for the war and the terrible things that happened during the Commune, I doubt I’d ever have stopped haunting Paris. But there were all these poor souls wandering about in total confusion, and since I wasn’t quite so lost as they were, I felt I had to help out. If someone asks you directions on the street, you can’t just tell them to bugger off. I can’t, anyhow.”

  “And now you’re in charge of all this!” marveled Joy-Ann, their waltz having come to an end by the foot of the escalator.

  “In charge? Scarcely that. Let’s say that I try to be useful to souls who are having difficulties making the transition. There aren’t that many of us who are willing to linger, as it were, on the threshold. Most souls are too eager, once they reach their staircase, to ascend directly to a higher existence. It’s natural, I suppose.”

  “I suppose,” Joy-Ann agreed without conviction.

  Adah stood upon the gleaming silver plate at the base of the moving escalator and held out her hand invitingly. Joy-Ann hesitated, then took the hand she’d been offered and stepped onto the escalator.

  “I’ve got this funny feeling,” she said, “that there’s something I haven’t done.”

  “Oh?” said Adah in a tone of neutral inquiry.

  “What a slow escalator,” Joy-Ann observed. “It seemed to go much faster when we were just looking at it.”

  “It moves as fast as the soul wants it to. Perhaps something, or someone, is holding you back. That can happen.”

  “Who?” Joy-Ann insisted.

  Adah looked over the side of the escalator to the floor of the lobby forty feet below. “I’m not permitted to tell you her name…” She put only the lightest emphasis on the telltale possessive pronoun.

  “Is it—?” Joy-Ann shook her head. “But that’s impossible. It couldn’t be Giselle. Surely by now Giselle is up there, with Dewey. Isn’t she?”

  Adah wouldn’t look Joy-Ann in the eye, and suddenly she knew it was Giselle who was holding her back, calling to her. Giselle was still on the material plane, trapped there in some way, and she needed her mother’s help!

  “Is there a down escalator?” Joy-Ann asked. “I’ll have to return. Giselle needs me. I can feel it.”

  “I’m afraid,” said Adah, “we’ll have to run.” She lifted her velvet skirts and began to clamber down the upward-moving steps. Joy-Ann ran after her, not without a sense that she was much too old for such games. Only children who’ve escaped from their parents in department stores get into such mischief as this. The faster they ran, the faster the escalator seemed to rise, and soon Joy-Ann’s legs were trembly from the exertion. She had to remind herself that in reality she didn’t have legs, that everything she was going through existed entirely in her imagination—the theater lobby, the escalator, the golden feathers of her dress, the wind that ruffled them. All that pertained to the senses (as Adah had explained) was a kind of mirage that the soul had to put up with until it got used to an entirely spiritual existence. But meanwhile this was a very potent illusion, and Joy-Ann began to think it might be pleasanter just to give in to the escalator and let it take her to the ballroom on the mezzanine. Already she could hear the million-string orchestra playing “Begin the Beguine.”

  Joy-Ann ignored the lure of the music and paid no heed to the pain in her legs and kept running down against the current of the steps. She was nearer now, and Adah caught hold of her hand and squeezed it for encouragement, and she knew then she’d reach the lobby, and when she did, an instant later, she let herself collapse into a feathery heap on the marble floor and just lie there gasping for breath and wishing she’d worn a dress that wasn’t quite so tight about the midriff. Then she started to laugh, and Adah laughed along with her, and for the longest time that’s all they did—just lay there on the floor in their evening dresses laughing like a couple of lunatics. Joy-Ann hadn’t had so much fun in ages.

  CHAPTER 25

  Something was definitely going wrong inside his head—something beyond the nonsense he’d been imagining, something physical. It felt like a shred of pork that had got embedded between two molars at the back of his mouth. He had this maddening urge to pry it out, though there was no way to get at it. Could it be cancer? he wondered. Never in all the time old Joy-Ann had been shriveling away with her cancer and her chemotherapy had he been disturbed by the idea that that sort of thing could happen to him. Fear had kept at a reasonable distance, like an animal that never ventures within the city limits. Now the animal was snuffling around the garbage can, dropping its spoor on his lawn, and all because he could feel an itch, a gnawing, an ache dead center in the middle of his brain.

  I’ve got to go to a dentist, he thought. Not a rational thought at all, and then just as his car was pulling into the parking lot beside the dentist’s office, he woke to a clearer degree of consciousness and realized that the aching wasn’t only in his head, that his whole body ached from sleeping on the floor. He pushed himself up to his knees, then used the yielding edge of the mattress to lever himself to his feet.

  Before he could take in just what it was, he knew there was something wrong outside his head, something beyond the jumble of dreaming, something physical. Then he saw it, scrawled on the wallpaper in crude, thick lines, a drawing of Giselle, her eyes staring, her tongue distended, his fingers gripping her throat. He didn’t ask himself how he knew those few jagged lines were meant to be fingers, his fingers: he just knew. He knew, as well, that he had made this drawing himself, though he had no memory of doing so. Whenever he doodled this was the way he drew. The way, rather, he refused to draw, since to have evidenced any skill at drawing would have been a concession to the idea of art.

  He rubbed at one of the eyes staring out of the wallpaper. The circle of crumbly, pale-blue chalk blurred, but not out of recognition. The drawing was no hallucination, and he had drawn it. No one else could have; no one else knew.

  Unless (he thought) someone were to get in the house and see this. Then, sure as hell, they would know! The thing was worse than a signed confession. There was something in its very craziness that made it believable.

  He had to erase it. Immediately. But how? The wallpaper was ruined. He’d have to strip off the paper or paint over it. Though possibly plain soap and water would serve for the time being. He reached into his back pocket for his handkerchief, intending to test his theory with a gob of spit. A piece of blue chalk fell from the folds of the cloth onto the carpet. It was the carpenter’s chalk from the tool kit he kept in the bathroom closet. He stooped, with a small gasp, to pick up the chalk, thinking he might blot out the graffito by scribbling over it.

  But when he stood before the drawing with the chalk poised, it was as though another hand had closed over his own, and instead of effacing the drawing, he wrote, beside it, in letters six inches high:

  YOU ARE A MURDERER

  Not (he thought) I AM but YOU ARE.

  His fingers dropped the chalk. His foot lifted and ground it into the carpet. And then he heard her, laughing, and turned toward the mirror and saw her framed in it, taunting and tempting him with her nakedness.

  He acted without thought, but it was his own act, no puppet-string compulsion. He grabbed the heavy green-glass ashtray from the bedside table and hurled it, discuslike, into the mirror.

  The mirror shattered.

  She was gone. But not (somehow he knew this) destroyed. She had retreated into some darkness where he could not follow.

  The strangest thing in all this strangeness was that he suddenly felt much better. Was it simply knowing he was not insane? Knowing that he was being haunted, literally haunted, by the ghost of his murdered wife? No, it went beyond that. It was hi
s feeling, his hunch, that he still stood a chance against her. Even though she was a ghost, she could be destroyed. How it could be done he didn’t know, but he’d find out, and he’d do it, and it would give him unimaginable pleasure.

  CHAPTER 26

  As a seventh-grader Giselle had filled four pages of a narrow-ruled spiral notebook with a single endlessly repeated sentence: I wish I were dead. I wish I were dead. I wish I were dead… She had had no particular reason to wish herself dead, just a conviction that life ought to offer something more than the tedium of sitting in a classroom listening to the semi-senile Sister Terence explain about adverbs. Some weeks after Giselle had scribbled that testimony to her boredom, Sister Terence had discovered the notebook and made Giselle, as a penance, fill as many pages with its opposite: I’m glad I’m alive, I’m glad I’m alive. I’m glad I’m alive…

  Sister Terence’s lesson now seemed more pertinent than ever, for time and again Giselle found herself wishing that old, foolish wish—wishing, that is, for oblivion, since what could be accomplished, now, by wishing to be dead? She was dead, and death had proved to be no improvement on Sister Terence’s classroom or on the years of marital monotony. She would rather have been back inside the grave than here in the rambler on Willowville Drive, where at any moment she could be summoned to Bob’s side by some quirk of his psyche. She hated the sight of his gross, disproportioned body, of his dull, demented eyes, of the round lips that seemed to be nothing but the exposed portion of the digestive tract that governed his existence. Even more, she hated being made to hate.

  She had not meant to laugh at him. She had not consciously prompted him to scrawl his confession on the wallpaper. He seemed in some way she could not understand to be able to read her mind. Or it was as though their minds had been joined in an unwilling marriage, each at the mercy of the other, subject to the other’s caprice.