BANTAM BOOKS 990
Printing History:
Dutton Edition Published December, 1950
1st Printing October, 1950
Unicorn Mystery Book Club Edition Published February, 1951
Bantam Edition Published April, 1952
1st Printing March, 1952
Copyright, 1950, by Fredric Brown
ALL VERSES INTRODUCING
CHAPTERS ARE FROM THE WORKS
OF CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON,
KNOWN IN WONDERLAND AS LEWIS
CARROLL.
CHAPTER ONE
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
In my dream I was standing in the middle of Oak Street and it was dark
night. The street lights were off; only pale moonlight glinted on the huge
sword that I swung in circles about my head as the Jabberwock crept closer.
It bellied along the pavement, flexing its wings and tensing its muscles for
the final rush; its claws clicked against the stones like the clicking of
mats down the channels of a Linotype. Then, astonishingly, it spoke.
"Doc," it said. "Wake up, Doc."
A hand ´ not the hand of a Jabberwock ´ was shaking my shoulder.
And it was early dusk instead of black night and I was sitting in the
swivel chair at my battered desk, looking over my shoulder at Pete. Pete was
grinning at me.
"We're in, Doc," he said. "You'll have to cut two lines on this last
take and we're in. Early, for once."
He put a galley proof down in front of me, only one stick of type long.
I picked up a blue pencil and knocked off two lines and they happened to be
an even sentence, so Pete wouldn't have to reset anything.
He went over to the Linotype and shut it off and it was suddenly very
quiet in the place, so quiet that I could hear the drip of the faucet way in
the far corner.
I stood up and stretched, feeling good, although a little groggy from
having dozed off while Pete was setting that final take. For once, for one
Thursday, the Carmel City Clarion was ready for the press early. Of course,
there wasn't any real news in it, but then there never was.
And only half-past six and not yet dark outside. We were through hours
earlier than usual. I decided that that called for a drink, here and now.
The bottle in my desk turned out to have enough whisky in it for one
healthy drink or two short ones. I asked Pete if he wanted a snort and he
said no, not yet, he'd wait till he got over to Smiley's, so I treated
myself to a healthy drink, as I'd hoped to be able to do. And it had been
fairly safe to ask Pete; he seldom took one before he was through for the
day, and although my part of the job was done Pete still had almost an
hour's work ahead of him on the mechanical end.
The drink made a warm spot under my belt as I walked over to the window
by the Linotype and stood staring out into the quiet dusk. The lights of Oak
Street flashed on while I stood there. I'd been dreaming ´ what had I been
dreaming?
On the sidewalk across the street Miles Harrison hesitated in front of
Smiley's Tavern as though the thought of a cool glass of beer tempted him. I
could almost feel his mind working: "No, I'm a deputy sheriff of Carmel
County and I have a job to do yet tonight and I don't drink while I'm on
duty. The beer can wait."
Yes, his conscience must have won, because he walked on.
I wonder now ´ although of course I didn't wonder then ´ whether, if he
had known that he would be dead before midnight, he wouldn't have stopped
for that beer. I think he would have. I know I would have, but that doesn't
prove anything because I'd have done it anyway; I've never had a conscience
like Miles Harrison's.
Behind me, at the stone, Pete was putting the final stick of type into
the chase of the front page. He said, "Okay, Doc, she fits. We're in."
"Let the presses roll," I told him.
Just a manner of speaking, of course. There was only one press and it
didn't roll, because it was a Miehle vertical that shuttled up and down. And
it wouldn't even do that until morning. The Clarion is a weekly paper that
comes out on Friday; we put it to bed on Thursday evening and Pete runs it
off the press Friday morning. And it's not much of a run.
Pete asked, "You going over to Smiley's?"
That was a silly question; I always go over to Smiley's on a Thursday
evening and usually, when he's finished locking up the forms, Pete joins me,
at least for a while. "Sure," I told him.
"I'll bring you a stone proof, then," Pete said.
Pete always does that, although I seldom do more than glance at it.
Pete's too good a printer for me ever to catch any important errors on him
and as for minor typographicals, Carmel City doesn't mind them.
I was free and Smiley's was waiting, but for some reason I wasn't in
any hurry to leave. It was pleasant, after the hard work of a Thursday ´ and
don't let that short nap fool you; I had been working ´ to stand there and
watch the quiet street in the quiet twilight, and to contemplate an
intensive campaign of doing nothing for the rest of the evening, with a few
drinks to help me do it.
Miles Harrison, a dozen paces past Smiley's, stopped, turned, and
headed back. Good, I thought, I'll have someone to drink with. I turned away
from the window and put on my suit coat and hat.
I said, "Be seeing you, Pete," and I went down the stairs and out into
the warm summer evening.
I'd misjudged Miles Harrison; he was coming out of Smiley's already,
too soon even to have had a quick one, and he was opening a pack of
cigarettes. He saw me and waved, waiting in front of Smiley's door to light
a cigarette while I crossed the street.
"Have a drink with me, Miles," I suggested.
He shook his head regretfully. "Wish I could, Doc. But I got a job to
do later. You know, go with Ralph Bonney over to Neilsville to get his pay
roll."
Sure, I knew. In a small town everybody knows everything.
Ralph Bonney owned the Bonney Fireworks Company, just outside of Carmel
City. They made fireworks, mostly big pieces for fairs and municipal
displays, that were sold all over the country. And during the few months of
each year up to about the first of July they worked a day and a night shift
to meet the Fourth of July demand.
And Ralph Bonney had something against Clyde Andrews, president of the
Carmel City Bank, and did his banking in Neilsville. He drove over to
Neilsville late every Thursday night and they opened the bank there to give
him the cash for his night shift pay roll. Miles Harrison, as deputy
sheriff, always went along as guard.
Always seemed like a silly procedure to me, as the night side pay roll
didn't amount to more than a few thousand dollars and Bonney could have got
it along with the cash for his day side pay roll and held it at the office,
but that was his way of doing things.
I said, "Sure, Miles, but that's not for hours yet. And one drink isn't
going to hurt you."
He grinned. "I know it wouldn't, but I'd probably take another just
because the first one didn't hurt me. So I stick to the rule that I don't
have even one drink till I'm off duty for the day, and if I don't stick to
it I'm sunk. But thanks just the same, Doc. I'll take a rain check."
He had a point, but I wish he hadn't made it. I wish he'd let me buy
him that drink, or several of them, because that rain check wasn't worth the
imaginary paper it was printed on to a man who was going to be murdered
before midnight.
But I didn't know that, and I didn't insist. I said, "Sure, Miles," and
asked him about his kids.
"Fine, both of 'em. Drop out and see us sometime."
"Sure," I said, and I went into Smiley's.
Big, bald Smiley Wheeler was alone. He smiled as I came in and said,
"Hi, Doc. How's the editing business?" And then he laughed as though he'd
said something excruciatingly funny. Smiley hasn't the ghost of a sense of
humor and he has the mistaken idea that he disguises that fact by laughing
at almost everything he says or hears said.
"Smiley, you give me a pain," I told him. It's always safe to tell
Smiley a truth like that; no matter how seriously you say and mean it; he
thinks you're joking. If he'd laughed I'd have told him where he gave me a
pain, but for once he didn't laugh.
He said, "Glad you got here early, Doc. It's damn dull this evening."
"It's dull every evening in Carmel City," I told him. "And most of the
time I like it. But Lord, if only something would happen just once on a
Thursday evening, I'd love it. Just once in my long career, I'd like to have
one hot story to break to a panting public."
"Hell, Doc, nobody looks for hot news in a country weekly."
"I know," I said. "That's why I'd like to fool them just once. I've
been running the Clarion twenty-three years. One hot story. Is that much to
ask?"
Smiley frowned. "There've been a couple of burglaries. And one murder,
a few years ago."
"Sure," I said, "and so what? One of the factory hands out at Bonney's
got in a drunken argument with another and hit him too hard in the fight
they got into. That's not murder; that's manslaughter, and anyway it
happened on a Saturday and it was old stuff ´ everybody in town knew about
it ´ by the next Friday when the Clarion came out."
"They buy your paper anyway, Doc. They look for their names for having
attended church socials and who's got a used washing machine for sale and ´
want a drink?"
"It's about time one of us thought of that," I said.
He poured a shot for me and, so I wouldn't have to drink alone, a short
one for himself. We drank them and I asked him, "Think Carl will be in
tonight?"
I meant Carl Trenholm, the lawyer, who's about my closest friend in
Carmel City, and one of the three or four in town who play chess and can be
drawn into an intelligent discussions of something besides crops and
politics. Carl often dropped in Smiley's on Thursday evenings, knowing that
I always came in for at least a few drinks after putting the paper to bed.
"Don't think so," Smiley said. "Carl was in most of the afternoon and
got himself kind of a snootful, to celebrate. He got through in court early
and he won his case. Guess he went home to sleep it off."
I said, "Damn. Why couldn't he have waited till this evening? I'd have
helped him ´ Say, Smiley, did you say Carl was celebrating because he won
that case? Unless we're talking about two different things, he lost it. You
mean the Bonney divorce?"
"Yeah."
"Then Carl was representing Ralph Bonney, and Bonney's wife won the
divorce."
"You got it that way in the paper, Doc?"
"Sure," I said. "It's the nearest thing I've got to a good story this
week."
Smiley shook his head. "Carl was saying to me he hoped you wouldn't put
it in, or anyway that you'd hold it down to a short squib, just the fact
that she got the divorce."
I said, "I don't get it, Smiley. Why? And didn't Carl lose the case?"
Smiley leaned forward confidentially across the bar, although he and I
were the only ones in his place. He said, "It's like this, Doc. Bonney
wanted the divorce. That wife of his was a bitch, see? Only he didn't have
any grounds to sue on, himself ´ not any that he'd have been willing to
bring up in court, anyway, see? So he ´ well, kind of bought his freedom.
Gave her a settlement if she'd do the suing, and he admitted to the grounds
she gave against him. Where'd you get your version of the story?"
"From the judge," I said.
"Well, he just saw the outside of it. Carl says Bonney's a good joe and
those cruelty charges were a bunch of hokum. He never laid a hand on her.
But the woman was such hell on wheels that Bonney'd have admitted to
anything to get free of her. And give her a settlement of a hundred grand on
top of it. Carl was worried about the case because the cruelty charges were
so damn silly on the face of them."
"Hell," I said, "that's not the way it's going to sound in the
Clarion."
"Carl was saying he knew you couldn't tell the truth about the story,
but he hoped you'd play it down. Just saying Mrs. B. had been granted a
divorce and that a settlement had been made, and not putting in anything
about the charges."
I thought of my one real story of the week, and how carefully I'd
enumerated all those charges Bonney's wife bad made against him, and I
groaned at the thought of having to rewrite or cut the story. And cut it I'd
have to, now that I knew the facts.
I said, "Damn Carl, why didn't he come and tell me about it before I
wrote the story and put the paper to bed?"
"He thought about doing that, Doc. And then he decided he didn't want
to use his friendship with you to influence the way you reported news."
"The damn fool," I said. "And all he had to do was walk across the
street."
"But Carl did say that Bonney's a swell guy and it would be a bad break
for him if you listed those charges because none of them were really true
and´"
"Don't rub it in," I interrupted him. "I'll change the story. If Carl
says it's that way, I'll believe him. I can't say that the charges weren't
true, but at least I can leave them out."
"That'd be swell of you, Doc."
"Sure it would. All right, give me one more drink, Smiley, and I'll go
over and catch it before Pete leaves."
I had the one more drink, cussing myself for being sap enough to spoil
the only mentionable story I had, but knowing I had to do it. I didn't know
Bonney personally, except just to say hello to on the street, but I did know
Carl Trenholm well enough to be damn sure that if he said Bonney was in the
right, the story wasn't fair the way I'd written it. And I knew Smiley well
enough to be sure he hadn't given me a bum steer on what Carl had really
said.
So I grumbled my way back across the street and upstairs to the Clarion
office. Pete was just tightening the chase around the front page.
He loosened the quoins when I told him what we had to do, and I walked
around the stone so I could read the story again, upside down, of course, as
type is always read.
The first paragraph could stand as written and could constitute the
entire story. I told Pete to put the rest of the type in the hell-box and I
went over to the case and set a short head in tenpoint, "Bonney Divorce
Granted," to replace the twenty-four point head that had been on the longer
story. I handed Pete the stick and watched while he switched heads.
"Leaves about a nine-inch hole in the page," he said. "What'll we stick
in it?"
I sighed. "Have to use filler," I told him. "Not on the front page, but
we'll have to find something on page four we can move front and then stick
in nine inches of filler where it came from."
I wandered down the stone to page four and picked up a pica stick to
measure things. Pete went over to the rack and got a galley of filler. About
the only thing that was anywhere near the right size was the story that
Clyde Andrews, Carmel City's banker and leading light of the local Baptist
Church, had given me about the rummage sale the church had planned for next
Tuesday evening.
It wasn't exactly a story of earth-shaking importance, but it would be
about the right length if we reset it indented to go in a box. And it had a
lot of names in it, and that meant it would please a lot of people, and
particularly Clyde Andrews, if I moved it up to the front page.
So we moved it. Rather, Pete reset it for a front page box item while I
plugged the gap in page four with filler items and locked up the page again.
Pete had the rummage sale item reset by the time I'd finished with page
four, and this time I waited for him to finish up page one, so we could go
to Smiley's together.
I thought about .that front page while I washed my hands. The Front
Page. Shades of Hecht and MacArthur. Poor revolving Horace Greeley.
Now I really wanted a drink.
Pete was starting to pound out a stone proof and I told him not to
bother. Maybe the customers would read page one, but I wasn't going to. And
if there was an upside-down headline or a pied paragraph, it would probably
be an improvement.
Pete washed up and we locked the door. It was still early for a
Thursday evening, not much after seven. I should have been happy about that,
and I probably would have been if we'd had a good paper. As for the one we'd
just put to bed, I wondered if it would live until morning.
Smiley had a couple of other customers and was waiting on them, and I
wasn't in any mood to wait for Smiley so I went around behind the bar and
got the Old Henderson bottle and two glasses and took them to a table for
Pete and myself. Smiley and I know one another well enough so it's always
all right for me to help myself, any time it's convenient and settle with
him afterward.
I poured drinks for Pete and me. We drank and Pete said, "Well, that's
that for another week, Doc."
I wondered how many times he'd said that in the ten years he'd worked
for me, and then I got to wondering how many times I'd thought it, which
would be´
"How much is fifty-two times twenty-three, Pete?" I asked him.
"Huh? A hell of a lot. Why?"
I figured it myself. "Fifty times twenty-three is ´ one thousand one
hundred and fifty; twice twenty-three more makes eleven ninety-six. Pete,
eleven hundred and ninety six times have I put that paper to bed on a
Thursday night and never once was there a really big hot news story in it."
"This isn't Chicago, Doe. What do you expect, a murder?"
"I'd love a murder," I told him.
It would have been funny if Pete had said, "Doc, how'd you like three
in one night?"
But he didn't, of course. In a way, though, he said something that was
even funnier. He said, "But suppose it was a friend of yours? Your best
friend, say. Carl Trenholm. Would you want him killed just to give the
Clarion a story?"
"Of course not," I said. "Preferably somebody I don't know at all ´ if
there is anybody in Carmel City I don't know at all. Let's make it Yehudi."
"Who's Yehudi?" Pete asked.
I looked at Pete to see if he was kidding me, and apparently he wasn't,
so I explained: "The little man who wasn't there. Don't you remember the
rhyme?
I saw a man upon the stair,
A little man who was not there.
He was not there again today;
Gee, I wish he'd go away."
Pete laughed. "Doc, you get crazier every day. Is that Alice in
Wonderland, too, like all the other stuff you quote when you get drinking?"
"This time, no. But who says I quote Lewis Carroll only when I'm
drinking? I can quote him now, and I've hardly started drinking for tonight
´ why, as the Red Queen said to Alice, `One has to do this much drinking to
stay in the same place.' But listen and I'll quote you something that's
really something:
`Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe´"
Pete stood up. "Jabberwocky, from Alice Through the Looking-Glass," he
said. "If you've recited that to me once, Doc, it's been a hundred times. I
damn near know it myself. But I got to go, Doc. Thanks for the drink."
"Okay, Pete, but don't forget one thing."
"What's that?"
I said:
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird and shun
The frumious´"
Smiley was calling to me, "Hey, Doc!" from over beside
the telephone and I remembered now that I'd heard it ring half a minute
before. Smiley yelled, "Telephone for you, Doc," and laughed as though that
was the funniest thing that had happened in a long time.
I stood up and started for the phone, telling Pete good night en route.
I picked up the phone and said "Hello" to it and it said "Hello" back
at me. Then it said, "Doc?" and I said, "Yes."
Then it said, "Clyde Andrews speaking, Doc." His voice sounded quite
calm. "This is murder."
Pete must be almost to the door by now; that was my first thought. I
said, "Just a second, Clyde," and then jammed my hand over the mouthpiece
while I yelled, "Hey, Pete!"
He was at the door; but he turned.
"Don't go," I yelled at him, the length of the bar. "There's a murder
story breaking. We got to remake!"
I could feel the sudden silence in Smiley's Bar. The conversation
between the two other customers stopped in the middle of a word and they
turned to look at me. Pete, from the door, looked at me. Smiley, a bottle in
his hand, turned to look at me ´ and he didn't even smile. In fact, just as
I turned back to the phone, the bottle dropped out of his hand and hit the
floor with a noise that made me jump and close my mouth quickly to keep my
heart from jumping from it. That bottle crashing on the floor had sounded ´
for a second ´ just like a revolver shot.
I waited until I felt that I could talk again without stammering and
then I took my hand off the mouthpiece of the phone and said calmly, or
almost calmly, "Okay, Clyde, go ahead."
CHAPTER TWO
"Who are you, aged man?" I said.
"And how is it you live?"
His answer trickled through my head,
Like water through a sieve.
"You've gone to press, haven't you, Doc?" Clyde's voice said. "You must
have because I tried phoning you at the office first and then somebody told
me if you weren't there, you'd be at Smiley's, but that'd mean you were
through for the´"
"That's all right," I said. "Get on with it."
"I know it's murder, Doc, to ask you to change a story when you've
already got the paper ready to run and have left the office, but ´ well,
that rummage sale we were going to have Tuesday; it's been called off. Can
you still kill the article? Otherwise a lot of people will read about it and
come around to the church Tuesday night and be disappointed."
"Sure, Clyde," I said. "I'll take care of it."
I hung up. I went over to the table and sat down. I poured myself a
drink of whisky and when Pete came over I poured him one.
He asked me what the call had been and I told him.
Smiley and his two other customers were still staring at me, but I
didn't say anything until Smiley called out, "What happened, Doc? Didn't you
say something about a murder?"
I said, "I was just kidding, Smiley." He laughed.
I drank my drink and Pete drank his: He said, "I knew there was a catch
about getting through early tonight. Now we got a nine-inch hole in the
front page all over again. What are we going to put in it?"
"Damned if I know," I told him. "But the hell with it for tonight. I'll
get down when you do in the morning and figure something out then."
Pete said, "That's what you say now, Doc. But if you don't get down at
eight o'clock, what'll I do with that hole in the page?"
"Your lack of faith horrifies me, Pete. If I say I'll be down in the
morning, I will be. Probably."
"But if you're not?"
I sighed. "Do anything you want." I knew Pete would fix it up somehow
if I didn't get down. He'd drag something from a back page and plug the back
page with filler items or a subscription ad. It was going to be lousy
because we had one sub ad in already and too damn much filler; you know,
those little items that tell you the number of board feet in a sequoia and
the current rate of mullet manufacture in the Euphrates valley. All right in
small doses, but when you run the stuff by the column´
Pete said he'd better go, and this time he did. I watched him go,
envying him a little. Pete Corey is a good printer and I pay him just about
what I make myself. We put in about the same number of hours, but I'm the
one who has to worry whenever there's any worrying to be done, which is most
of the time.
Smiley's other customers left, just after Pete, and I didn't want to
sit alone at the table, so I took my bottle over to the bar.
"Smiley," I said, "do you want to buy a paper?"
"Huh?" Then he laughed. "You're kidding me, Doc. It isn't off the press
till tomorrow noon, is it?"
"It isn't," I told him. "But it'll be well worth waiting for this week.
Watch for it, Smiley. But that isn't what I meant."
"Huh? Oh, you mean do I want to buy the paper. I don't think so, Doc. I
don't think I'd be very good at running a paper. I can't spell very good,
for one thing. But look, you were telling me the other night Clyde Andrews
wanted to buy it from you. Whyn't you sell it to him, if you want to sell
it?"
"Who the devil said I wanted to sell it?" I asked him. "I just asked if
you wanted to buy it."
Smiley looked baffled.
"Doc," he said, "I never know whether you're serious or not. Seriously,
do you really want to sell out?"
I'd been wondering that. I said slowly, "I don't know, Smiley. Right
now, I'd be damn tempted. I think I hate to quit mostly because before I do
I'd like to get out one good issue. Just one good issue out of twenty-three
years."
"If you sold it, what'd you do?"
"I guess, Smiley, I'd spend the rest of my life not editing a
newspaper."
Smiley decided I was being funny again, and laughed.
The door opened and Al Grainger came in. I waved the bottle at him and
he came down the bar to where I was standing, and Smiley got another glass
and a chaser of water; Al always needs a chaser.
Al Grainger is just a young squirt ´ twenty-two or -three ´ but he's
one of the few chess players in town and one of the even fewer people who
understand my enthusiasm for Lewis Carroll. Besides that, he's by way of
being a Mystery Man in Carmel City. Not that you have to be very mysterious
to achieve that distinction.
He said, "Hi, Doc. When are we going to have another game of chess?"
"No time like the present, Al. Here and now?"
Smiley kept chessmen on hand for screwy customers like Al Grainger and
Carl Trenholm and myself. He'd bring them out, always handling them as
though he expected them to explode in his hands, whenever we asked for them.
Al shook his head. "Wish I had time. Got to go home and do some work."
I poured whisky in his glass and spilled a little trying to fill it to
the brim. He shook his head slowly. "The White Knight is sliding down the
poker," he said. "He balances very badly."
"I'm only in the second square," I told him. "But the next move will be
a good one. I go to the fourth by train, remember."
"Don't keep it waiting, Doc. The smoke alone is worth a thousand pounds
a puff."
Smiley was looking from me of us to the other. "What the hell are you
guys talking about?" he wanted to know.
There wasn't any use trying to explain. I leveled my finger at him. I
said, "Crawling at your feet you may observe a bread-and-butter fly. Its
wings are thin slices of bread-and-butter, its body a crust and its head is
a lump of sugar. And it lives on weak tea with cream in it."
Al said, "Smiley, you're supposed to ask him what happens if it can't
find any."
I said, "Then I say it would die of course and you say that must happen
very often and I say it always happens."
Smiley looked at us again and shook his head slowly. He said, "You guys
are really nuts." He walked down the bar to wash and wipe some glasses.
Al Grainger grinned at me. "What are your plans for tonight, Doc?" he
asked. "I just might possibly be able to sneak in a game or two of chess
later. You going to be home, and up?"
I nodded. "I was just working myself up to the idea of walking home,
and when I get there I'm going to read. And have another drink or two. If
you get there before midnight I'll still be sober enough to play. Sober
enough to beat a young punk like you, anyway."
It was all right to say that last part because it was so obviously
untrue. Al had been beating me two games out of three for the last year or
so.
He chuckled, and quoted at me:
" `You are old, Father William,' the young man said,
`And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head´
Do you think, at your age, it is right?' "
Well, since Carroll had the answer to that, so did I:
" `In my youth,' Father William replied to his son,
`I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.' "
Al said, "Maybe you got something there, Doc. But let's quit
alternating verses on that before you get to `Be off, or ´ I'll kick you
down-stairs!' Because I got to be off anyway."
"One more drink?"
"I ´ think not, not till I'm through working. You can drink and think
too. Hope I can do the same thing when I'm your age. I'll try my best to get
to your place for some chess, but don't look for me unless I'm there by ten
o'clock ´ half past at the latest. And thanks for the drink."
He went out and, through Smiley's window, I could see him getting into
his shiny convertible. He blew the Klaxon and waved back at me as he pulled
out from the curb.
I looked at myself in the mirror back of Smiley's bar and wondered how
old Al Grainger thought I was. "Hope I can do the same thing when I'm your
age," indeed. Sounded as though he thought I was eighty, at least. I'll be
fifty-three my next birthday.
But I had to admit that I looked that old, and that my hair was turning
white. I watched myself in the mirror and that whiteness scared me just a
little. No, I wasn't old yet, but I was getting that way. And, much as I
crab about it, I like living. I don't want to get old and I don't want to
die. Especially as I can't look forward, as a good many of my fellow
townsmen do, to an eternity of harp playing and picking bird-lice out of my
wings. Nor, for that matter, an eternity of shoveling coal, although that
would probably be the more likely of the two in my case.
Smiley came back. He jerked his finger at the door. "I don't like that
guy, Doc," he said.
"Al? He's all right. A little wet behind the ears, maybe. You're just
prejudiced because you don't know where his money comes from. Maybe he's got
a printing press and makes it himself. Come to think of it, I've got a
printing press. Maybe I should try that myself."
"Hell, it ain't that, Doc. It's not my business how a guy earns his
money ´ or where he gets it if he don't earn it. It's the way he talks. You
talk crazy, too, but ´ well, you do it in a nice way. When he says something
to me I don't understand he says it in a way that makes me feel like a
stupid bastard. Maybe I am one, but´"
I felt suddenly ashamed of all the things I'd ever said to Smiley that
I knew he wouldn't understand.
I said, "It's not a matter of intelligence, Smiley. It's merely a
matter of literary background. Have one drink with me, and then I'd better
go."
I poured him a drink and ´ this time ´ a small one for myself. I was
beginning to feel the effects, and I didn't want to get too drunk to give Al
Grainger a good game of chess if he dropped in.
I said, for no reason at all, "You're a good guy, Smiley," and he
laughed and said, "So are you, Doc. Literary background or not, you're a
little crazy, but you're a good guy."
And then, because we were both embarrassed at having caught ourselves
saying things like that, I found myself staring past Smiley at the calendar
over the bar. It had the usual kind of picture one sees on barroom calendars
´ an almost too voluptuous naked woman ´ and it was imprinted by Beal
Brothers Store.
It was just a bit of bother to keep my eyes focused on it, I noticed,
although I hadn't had enough to drink to affect my mind at all. Right then,
for instance, I was thinking of two things at one and the same time. Part of
my brain, to my disgust, persisted in wondering if I could get Beal Brothers
to start running a quarter page ad instead of an eighth page; I tried to
squelch the thought by telling myself that I didn't care, tonight, whether
anybody advertised in the Clarion at all, and that part of my brain went on
to ask me why, damn it, if I felt that way about it, I didn't get out from
under while I had the chance by selling the Clarion to Clyde Andrews. But
the other part of my mind kept getting more and more annoyed by the picture
on the calendar, and I said, "Smiley, you ought to take down that calendar.
It's a lie. There aren't any women like that."
He turned around and looked at it. "Guess you're right, Doc; there
aren't any women like that. But a guy can dream, can't he?"
"Smiley," I said, "if that's not the first profound thing you've said,
it's the most profound. You are right, moreover. You have my full permission
to leave the calendar up."
He laughed and moved along the bar to finish wiping glasses, and I
stood there and wondered why I didn't go on home. It was still early, a few
minutes before eight o'clock. I didn't want another drink, yet. But by the
time I got home, I would want one.
So I got out my wallet and called Smiley back. We estimated how many
drinks I'd poured out of the bottle and I settled for them, and then I
bought another bottle, a full quart, and he wrapped it for me.
I went out with it under my arm and said "So long, Smiley," and he said
"So long, Doc," just as casually as though, before the gibbering night that
hadn't started yet was over, he and I would not ´ but let's take things as
they happened.
The walk home.
I had to go past the post office anyway, so I stopped in. The mail
windows were closed, of course, but the outer lobby is always left open
evenings so those who have post office boxes can get mail out of them.
I got my mail ´ there wasn't anything important in it ´ and then
stopped, as I usually do, by the bulletin board to look over the notices and
the wanted circulars that were posted there.
There were a couple of new ones and I read them and studied the
pictures. I've got a good memory for faces, even ones I've just seen
pictures of, and I'd always hoped that some day I'd spot a wanted criminal
in Carmel City and get a story out of it, if not a reward.
A few doors farther on I passed the bank and that reminded me about its
president, Clyde Andrews, and his wanting to buy the paper from me. He
didn't want to run it himself, of course; he had a brother somewhere in Ohio
who'd had newspaper experience and who would run the paper for Andrews if I
sold it to him.
The thing I liked least about the idea, I decided, was that Andrews was
in politics and, if he controlled the Clarion, the Clarion would back his
party. The way I ran it, it threw mud at both factions when they deserved
it, which was often, and handed either one an occasional bouquet when
deserved, which was seldom. Maybe I'm crazy ´ other people than Smiley and
Al have said so ´ but that's the way I think a newspaper should be run, and
especially when it's the only paper in a town.
It's not, I might mention, the best way to make money. It had made me
plenty of friends and subscribers, but a newspaper doesn't make money from
its subscribers. It makes money from advertisers and most of the men in town
big enough to be advertisers had fingers in politics and no matter which
party I slammed I was likely to lose another advertising account.
I'm afraid that policy didn't help my news coverage, either. The best
source of news is the sheriff's department ´ and, at the moment, Sheriff
Rance Kates was just about my worst enemy. Kates is honest, but he is also
stupid, rude and full of race prejudice; and race prejudice, although it's
not a burning issue in Carmel City, is one of my pet peeves. I hadn't pulled
any punches in my editorials about Kates, either before or after his
election. He got into office only because his opponent ´ who wasn't any
intellectual heavyweight either ´ had got into a tavern brawl in Neilsville
a week before election and was arrested there and charged with assault and
battery. The Clarion had reported that, too, so the Clarion was probably
responsible for Rance Kates' being elected sheriff. But Rance remembered
only the things I'd said about him, and barely spoke to me on the street.
Which, I might add, didn't concern me the slightest bit personally, but it
forced me to get all of my police news, such as it is, the hard way.
Past the supermarket and Beal Brothers and past Deak's Music Store ´
where I'd once bought a violin but had forgotten to get a set of
instructions with it ´ and the corner and across the street.
The walk home.
Maybe I weaved just a little, for at just that stage I'm never quite as
sober as I am later on. But my mind ´ ah, it was in that delightful state of
being crystal clear in the center and fuzzy around the edges, the state that
every moderate drinker knows but can't explain or define, the state that
makes even a Carmel City seem delightful and such things as its squalid
politics amusing.
Past the comer drugstore ´ Pop Hinkle's place ´ where I used to drink
sodas when I was a kid, before I went away to college and made the big
mistake of studying journalism. Past Gorham's Feed Store, where I'd worked
vacations while I was in high school. Past the Bijou Theater. Past Hank
Greeber's Undertaking Parlors, through which both of my parents had passed,
fifteen and twenty years ago.
Around the corner at the courthouse, where a light was still on in
Sheriff Kates' office ´ and I felt so cheerful that, for a thousand dollars
or so, I'd have stopped in to talk to him. But no one was around to offer me
a thousand dollars.
Out of the store district now, past the house in which Elsie Minton had
lived ´ and in which she had died while we were engaged, twenty-five years
ago.
Past the house Elmer Conklin had lived in when I'd bought the Clarion
from him. Past the church where I'd been sent to Sunday School when I was a
kid, and where I'd once won a prize for memorizing verses of the Bible.
Past my past, and walking, slightly weaving, toward the house in which
I'd been conceived and born.
No, I hadn't lived there fifty-three years. My parents had sold it and
had moved to a bigger house when I was nine and when my sister ´ now married
and living in Florida ´ had been born. I'd bought it back twelve years ago
when it happened to be vacant and on the market at a good price. It's only a
three-room cottage, not too big for a man to live in alone, if he likes to
live alone, and I do.
Oh, I like people, too. I like someone to drop in for conversation or
chess or a drink or all three. I like to spend an hour or two in Smiley's,
or any other tavern, a few times a week. I like an occasional poker game.
But I'll settle, on any given evening, for my books. Two walls of my
living room are lined with them and they overflow into bookcases in my
bedroom and I even have a shelf of them in the bathroom. What do I mean,
even? I think a bathroom without a bookshelf is as incomplete as would be
one without a toilet.
And they're good books, too. No, I wouldn't be lonely tonight, even if
Al Grainger didn't come around for that game of chess. How could I be
lonesome with a bottle in my pocket and good company waiting for me? Why,
reading a book is almost as good as listening to the man who wrote it
talking to you. Better, in one way, because you don't have to be polite to
him. You can shut him up any moment you feel so inclined and pick someone
else instead. And you can take off your shoes and put your feet on the
table. You can drink and read until you forget everything but what you're
reading; you can forget who you are and the fact that there's a newspaper
that hangs around your neck like a millstone, all day and every day, until
you get home to sanctuary and forgetfulness.
The walk home.
And so to the corner of Campbell Street and my turning.
A June evening, but cool, and the night air had almost completely
sobered me in the nine blocks I'd walked from Smiley's.
My turning, and I saw that the light was on in the front room of my
house. I started walking a little faster, mildly puzzled. I knew I hadn't
left it on when I'd left for the office that morning. And if I had left it
on, Mrs. Carr, the cleaning woman who comes in for about two hours every
afternoon to keep my place in order, would have turned it off.
Maybe, I thought, Al Grainger had finished whatever he was doing and
had come early and had ´ but no, Al wouldn't have come without his car and
there wasn't any car parked in front.
It might have been a mystery, but it wasn't.
Mrs. Carr was there, putting on her hat in front of the panel mirror in
the closet door as I went in.
She said, "I'm just leaving, Mr. Stoeger. I wasn't able to get here
this afternoon, so I came to clean up this evening instead; I just
finished."
"Fine," I said. "By the way, there's a blizzard out."
"A ´ what?"
"Blizzard. Snowstorm." I held up the wrapped bottle. "So maybe you'd
better have a little nip with me before you start home, don't you think?"
She laughed. "Thanks, Mr. Stoeger. I will. I've had a pretty rough day,
and it sounds like a good idea. I'll get glasses for us."
I put my hat in the closet and followed her out into the kitchen.
"A rough day?" I asked her. "I hope nothing went wrong."
"Well ´ nothing too serious. My husband ´ he works, you know, out at
Bonney's fireworks factory ´ got burned in a little accident they had out
there this afternoon, and they brought him home. It's nothing serious, a
second degree burn the doctor said, but it was pretty painful and I thought
I'd better stay with him until after supper, and then he finally got to
sleep so I ran over here and I'm afraid I straightened up your place pretty
fast and didn't do a very good job."
"Looks spotless to me," I said. I'd been opening the bottle while she'd
been getting glasses for us. "I hope he'll be all right, Mrs. Carr. But if
you want to skip coming here for a while´"
"Oh, no, I can still come. He'll be home only a few days, and it was
just that today they brought him home at two o'clock, just when I was
getting ready to come here and ´ That's plenty, thanks."
We touched glasses and I downed mine while she drank about half of
hers. She said, "Oh, there was a phone call for you, about an hour ago. A
little while after I got here."
"Find out who it was?"
"He wouldn't tell me, just said it wasn't important."
I shook my head sadly. "That, Mrs. Carr, is one of the major fallacies
of the human mind. The idea, I mean, that things can be arbitrarily divided
into the important and the unimportant. How can anyone decide whether a
given fact is important or not unless one knows everything about it; and no
one knows everything about anything."
She smiled, but a bit vaguely, and I decided to bring it down to earth.
I said, "What would you say is important, Mrs. Carr?"
She put her head on one side and considered it seriously. "Well, work
is important, isn't it?"
"It is not," I told her. "I'm afraid you score zero. Work is only a
means to an end. We work in order to enable ourselves to do the important
things, which are the things we want to do. Doing what we want to do ´
that's what's important, if anything is."
"That sounds like a funny way of putting it, but maybe you're right.
Well, anyway, this man who called said he'd either call again or come
around. I told him you probably wouldn't be home until eight or nine
o'clock."
She finished her drink and declined an encore. I walked to the front
door with her, saying that I'd have been glad to drive her home but that my
car had two flat tires. I'd discovered them that morning when I'd started to
drive to work. One I might have stopped to fix, but two discouraged me; I
decided to leave the car in the garage until Saturday afternoon, when I'd
have lots of time. And then, too, I know that I should get the exercise of
walking to and from work every day, but as long as my car is in running
condition, I don't. For Mrs. Carr's sake, though, I wished now that I'd
fixed the tires.
She said, "It's only a few blocks, Mr. Stoeger. I wouldn't think of
letting you, even if your car was working. Good night."
"Oh, just a minute, Mrs. Carr. What department at Bonney's does your
husband work in?"
"The Roman candle department."
It made me forget, for the moment, what I'd been leading up to. I said,
"The Roman candle department! That's a wonderful phrase; I love it. If I
sell the paper, darned if I don't look up Bonney the very next day. I'd love
to work in the Roman candle department. Your husband is a lucky man."
"You're joking, Mr. Stoeger. But are you really thinking of selling the
paper?"
"Well ´ thinking of it." And that reminded me. "I didn't get any story
on the accident at Bonney's, didn't even hear about it. And I'm badly in
need of a story for the front page. Do you know the details of what
happened? Anyone else hurt?"
She'd been part way across the front porch, but she turned and came
back nearer the door. She said, "Oh, please don't put it in the paper. It
wasn't anything important; my husband was the only one hurt and it was his
own fault, he says. And Mr. Bonney wouldn't like it being in the paper; he
has enough trouble now getting as many people as he needs for the rush
season before the Fourth, and so many people are afraid to work around
powder and explosives anyway. George will probably be fired if it gets
written up in the paper and he needs the work."
I sighed; it had been an idea while it lasted. I assured her that I
wouldn't print anything about it. And if George Carr had been the only one
hurt and I didn't have any details, it wouldn't have made over a one-inch
item anyway.
I would have loved, though, to get that beautiful phrase, "the Roman
candle department," into print.
I went back inside and closed the door. I made myself comfortable by
taking off my suit coat and loosening my tie, and then I got the whisky
bottle and my glass and put them on the coffee table in front of the sofa.
I didn't take the tie off yet, nor my shoes; it's nicer to do those
things one at a time as you gradually get more and more comfortable.
I picked out a few books and put them within easy reach,. poured myself
a drink, sat down, and opened one of the books.
The doorbell rang.
Al Grainger had come early, I thought. I went to the door and opened
it. There was a man standing there, just lifting his hand to ring again. But
it wasn't Al; it was a man I'd never seen before.
CHAPTER THREE
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!
He was short, about my own height, perhaps, but seeming even shorter
because of his greater girth. The first thing you noticed about his face was
his nose; it was long, thin, pointed, grotesquely at variance with his pudgy
body. The light coming past me through the doorway reflected glowing points
in his eyes, giving them a catlike gleam. Yet there was nothing sinister
about him. A short pudgy man can never manage to seem sinister, no matter
how the light strikes his eyes.
"You are Doctor Stoeger?" he asked.
"Doc Stoeger," I corrected him. "But not a doctor of medicine. If
you're looking for a medical doctor, one lives four doors west of here."
He smiled, a nice smile. "I am aware that you are not a medico, Doctor.
Ph. D., Burgoyne College ´ nineteen twenty-two, I believe. Author of Lewis
Carroll Through the Looking-Glass and Red Queen and White Queen."
It startled me. Not so much that he knew my college and the year of my
magna cum laude, but the rest of it was amazing. Lewis Carroll Through the
Looking-Glass was a monograph of a dozen. pages; it had been printed
eighteen years ago and only a hundred copies had been run off. If one still
existed anywhere outside of my own library, I was greatly surprised. And Red
Queen and White Queen was a magazine article that had appeared at least
twelve years ago in a magazine that had been obscure then and had long since
been discontinued and forgotten.
"Yes," I said. "But how you know of them, I can't imagine, Mr.´"
"Smith," he said gravely. Then he chuckled. "And the first name is
Yehudi."
"No!" I said.
"Yes. You see, Doctor Stoeger, I was named forty years ago, when the
name Yehudi, although uncommon, had not yet acquired the comic connotation
which it has today. My parents did not guess that the name would become a
joke ´ and that it would be particularly ridiculous when combined with
Smith. Had they guessed the difficulty I now have in convincing people that
I'm not kidding them when I tell them my name´" He laughed ruefully. "I
always carry cards."
He handed me one. It read:
Yehudi Smith
There was no address, no other information. Just the same, I wanted to
keep that card, so I stuck it in my pocket instead of handing it back.
He said, "People are named Yehudi, you know. There's Yehudi Menuhin,
the violinist. And there's´"
"Stop, please," I interrupted. "You're making it plausible. I liked it
better the other way."
He smiled. "Then I haven't misjudged you, Doctor. Have you ever heard
of the Vorpal Blades?"
"Plural? No. Of course, in Jabberwocky:
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack.
But ´ Good God! Why are we talking about vorpal blades through a
doorway? Come on in. I've got a bottle, and I hope and presume that it would
be ridiculous to ask a man who talks about vorpal blades whether or not he
drinks."
I stepped back and he came in. "Sit anywhere," I told him. "I'll get
another glass. Want either a mix or a chaser?"
He shook his head, and I went out into the kitchen and got another
glass. I came in, filled it and handed it to him. He'd already made himself
comfortable in the overstuffed chair.
I sat back down on the sofa and lifted my glass toward him. I said, "No
doubt about a toast for this one. To Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, known, when
in Wonderland, as Lewis Carroll."
He said, quietly, "Are you sure, Doctor?"
"Sure of what?"
"Of your phraseology in that toast. I'd word it: To Lewis Carroll, who
masqueraded under the alleged identity of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the
gentle don of Oxford."
I felt vaguely disappointed. Was this going to be another, and even
more ridiculous, Bacon-was-Shakespeare deal? Historically, there couldn't be
any possible doubt that the Reverend Dodgson, writing under the name Lewis
Carroll, had created Alice in Wonderland and its sequel.
But the main point, for the moment, was, to get the drink drunk. So I
said solemnly, "To avoid all difficulties, factual or semantic, Mr. Smith,
let's drink to the author of the Alice books."
He inclined his head with solemnity equal to my own, then tilted it
back and downed his drink. I was a little late in downing mine because of my
surprise at, and admiration for, his manner of drinking. I'd never seen
anything quite like it. The glass had stopped, quite suddenly, a good three
inches from his mouth. And the whisky had kept on going and not a drop of it
had been lost. I've seen people toss down a shot before, but never with such
casual precision and from so great a distance.
I drank my own in a more prosaic manner, but I resolved. to try his
system sometime ´ in private and with a towel or handkerchief ready at hand.
I refilled our glasses and then said, "And now what? Do we argue the
identity of Lewis Carroll?"
"Let's start back of that," he said. "In fact, let's put it aside until
I can offer you definite proof of what we believe ´ rather, of what we are
certain."
"We?"
"The Vorpal Blades. An organization. A very small organization, I
should add."
"Of admirers of Lewis Carroll?"
He leaned forward. "Yes, of course. Any man who is both literate and
imaginative is an admirer of Lewis Carroll. But ´ much more than that. We
have a secret. A quite esoteric one."
"Concerning the identity of Lewis Carroll? You mean that you believe ´
the way some people believe, or used to believe, that the plays of
Shakespeare were written by Francis Bacon ´ that someone other than Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson wrote the Alice books?"
I hoped he'd say no.
He said, "No. We believe that Dodgson himself ´ How much do you know of
him, Doctor?"
"He was born in eighteen thirty-two," I said, "and died just before the
turn of the century ´ in either ninety-eight or nine. He was an Oxford don,
a mathematician. He wrote several treatises on mathematics. He liked ´ and
created ´ acrostics and other puzzles and problems. He never married but he
was very fond of children, and his best writing was done for them. At least
he thought he was writing only for children; actually, Alice in Wonderland
and Alice Through the Looking-Glass, while having plenty of appeal for
children, are adult literature, and great literature. Shall I go on?"
"By all means."
"He was also capable of ´ and perpetrated ´ some almost incredibly bad
writing. There ought to be a law against the printing of volumes of The
Complete Works of Lewis Carroll. He should be remembered for the great
things he wrote, and the bad ones interred with his bones. Although I'll
admit that even the bad things have occasional touches of brilliance. There
are moments in Sylvie and Bruno that are almost worth reading through the
thousands of dull words to reach. And there are occasional good lines or
stanzas in even the worst poems. Take the first three lines of The Palace of
Humbug:
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And each damp thing that creeps and crawls
Went wobble-wobble on the walls.
"Of course he should have stopped there instead of adding fifteen or
twenty bad triads. But `Went wobble-wobble on the walls' is marvelous."
He nodded. "Let's drink to it."
We drank to it.
He said, "Go on."
"No," I said. "I'm just realizing that I could easily go on for hours.
I can quote every line of verse in the Alice books and most of The Hunting
of the Snark. But, I both hope and presume, you didn't come here to listen
to me lecture on Lewis Carroll. My information about him is fairly thorough,
but quite orthodox. I judge that yours isn't, and I want to hear it."
I refilled our glasses.
He nodded slowly: "Quite right, Doctor. My ´ I should say our ´
information is extremely unorthodox. I think you have the background and the
type of mind to understand it, and to believe it when you have seen proof.
To a more ordinary mind, it would seem sheer fantasy."
It was getting better by the minute. I said, "Don't stop now."
"Very well. But before I go any farther, I must warn you, of something,
Doctor. It is also very dangerous information to have. I do not speak
lightly or metaphorically. I mean that there is serious danger, deadly
danger."
"That," I said, "is wonderful."
He sat there and toyed with his glass ´ still with the third drink in
it ´ and didn't look at me. I studied his face. It was an interesting face.
That long, thin, pointed nose, so incongruous to his build that it might
have been false ´ a veritable Cyrano de Bergerac of a nose. And now that he
was in the light, I could see that there were deep laughter-lines around his
generous mouth. At first I would have guessed his age at thirty instead of
the forty he claimed to be; now, studying his face closely, I could see that
he had not exaggerated his age. One would have to laugh a long time to etch
lines like those.
But he wasn't laughing now. He looked deadly serious, and he didn't
look crazy. But he said something that sounded crazy.
He said, "Doctor, has it ever occurred to you that ´ that the fantasies
of Lewis Carroll are not fantasies at all?"
"Do you mean," I asked, "in the sense that fantasy is often nearer to
fundamental truth than is would-be realistic fiction?"
"No. I mean that they are literally, actually true. That they are not
fiction at all, that they are reporting."
I stared at him. "If you think that, then who ´ or what ´ do you think
Lewis Carroll was?"
He smiled faintly, but it wasn't a smile of amusement.
He said, "If you really want to know, and aren't afraid, you can find
out tonight. There is a meeting, near here. Will you come?"
"May I be frank?"
"Certainly."
I said, "I think it's crazy, but try to keep me away."
"In spite of the fact that there is danger?"
Sure, I was going, danger or no. But maybe I could use his insistence
on warning me to pry something more out of him. So I said, "May I ask what
kind of danger?"
He seemed to hesitate a moment and then he took out his wallet and from
an inner compartment took a newspaper clipping, a short one of about three
paragraphs. He handed it to me.
I read it, and I recognized the type and the setup; it was a clipping
from the Bridgeport Argus. And I remembered now having read it, a couple of
weeks ago. I'd considered clipping it as an exchange item, and then had
decided not to, despite the fact that the heading had caught my interest. It
read:
MAN SLAIN BY UNKNOWN BEAST
The facts were few and simple. A man named Colin Hawks, living outside
Bridgeport, a recluse, had been found dead along a path through the woods.
The man's throat had been torn, and police opinion was that a large and
vicious dog had attacked him. But the reporter who wrote the article
suggested the possibility that a wolf ´ or even a panther or a leopard ´
escaped from a circus or zoo might have caused the wounds.
I folded the clipping again and handed it back to Smith. It didn't mean
anything, of course. It's easy to find stories like that if one looks for
them. A man named Charles Fort found thousands of them and put them into
four books he had written, books which were on my shelves.
This particular one was less mysterious than most. In fact, there
wasn't any real mystery at all; undoubtedly some vicious dog had done the
killing.
Just the same something prickled at the back of my neck.
It was the headline, really, not the article. It's funny what the word
"unknown" and the thought back of it can do to you. If that story had been
headed "Man Killed by Vicious Dog" ´ or by a lion or a crocodile or any
other specified creature, however fierce and dangerous, there'd have been
nothing frightening about it.
But an "unknown beast" ´ well, if you've got the same kind of
imagination I have, you see what I mean. And if you haven't, I can't
explain.
I looked at Yehudi Smith, just in time to see him toss down his whisky
´ again like a conjuring trick. I handed him back the clipping and then
refilled our glasses.
I said, "Interesting story. But where's the connection?"
"Our last meeting was in Bridgeport. That's all I can tell you. About
that, I mean. You asked the nature of the danger; that's why I showed you
that. And it's not too late for you to say no. It won't be, for that matter,
until we get there."
"Get where?"
"Only a few miles from here. I have directions to guide me to a house
on a road called the Dartown Pike. I have a car."
I said, irrelevantly, "So have I, but the tires are flat. Two of them."
I thought about the Dartown Pike. I said, "You wouldn't, by any chance,
be heading for the house known as the Wentworth place?"
"That's the name, yes. You know of it?"
Right then and there, if I'd been completely sober, I'd have seen that
the whole thing was too good to be true. I'd have smelled fish. Or blood.
I said, "We'll have to take candles or flashlights. That house has been
empty since I was a kid. We used to call it a haunted house. Would that be
why you chose it?"
"Yes, of course."
"And your group is meeting there tonight?"
He nodded. "At one o-clock in the morning, to be exact. You're sure
you're not afraid?"
God, yes, I was afraid. Who wouldn't be, after the build-up he'd just
handed me?
So I grinned at him and said, "Sure, I'm afraid. But just try to keep
me away."
Then I had an idea. If I was going to a haunted house at one o'clock in
the morning to hunt Jabberwocks or try to invoke the ghost of Lewis Carroll
or some equally sensible thing, it wouldn't hurt to have someone along whom
I already knew. And if Al Grainger dropped in ´ I tried to figure out
whether or not Al would be interested. He was a Carroll fan, all right, but
´ for the rest of it, I didn't know.
I said, "One question, Mr. Smith. A young friend of mine might drop in
soon for a game of chess. How exclusive is this deal? I mean, would it be
all right if he came along, if he wants to?"
"Do you think he's qualified?"
"Depends on what the qualifications are," I said, "Offhand, I'd say you
have to be a Lewis Carroll fan and a little crazy. Or, come to think of it,
are those one and the same qualification?"
He laughed. "They're not too far apart. But tell me something about
your friend. You said young friend; how young?"
"About twenty-three. Not long out of college. Good literary taste and
background, which means he knows and likes Carroll. He can quote almost as
much of it as I can. Plays chess, if that's a qualification ´ and I'd guess
it is. Dodgson not only played chess but based Through the Looking-Glass on
a chess game. His name, if that matters, is Al Grainger."
"Would he want to come?"
"Frankly," I admitted, "I haven't an idea on that angle."
Smith said, "I hope he comes; if he's a Carroll enthusiast, I'd like to
meet him. But, if he comes, will you do me the favor of saying nothing about
´ what I've told you, at least until I've had a chance to judge him a bit?
Frankly, it would be almost unprecedented if I took the liberty of inviting
someone to an important meeting like tonight's on my own. You're being
invited because we know quite a bit about you. You were voted on ´ and I
might say that the vote to invite you was unanimous."
I remembered his familiarity with the two obscure things about Lewis
Carroll that I'd written, and I didn't doubt that he ´ or they, if he really
represented a group ´ did know something about me.
He said, "But ´ well, if I get a chance to meet him and think he'd
really fit in, I might take a chance and ask him. Can you tell me anything
more about him? What does he do ´ for a living, I mean?"
That was harder to answer. I said, "Well, he's writing plays. But I
don't think he makes a living at it; in fact, I don't know that he's ever
sold any. He's a bit of a mystery to Carmel City. He's lived here all his
life ´ except while he was away at college ´ and nobody knows where his
money comes from. Has a swanky car and a place of his own ´ he lived there
with his mother until she died a few years ago ´ and seems to have plenty of
spending money, but nobody knows where it comes from." I grinned. "And it
annoys the hell out of Carmel City not to know. You know how small towns
are."
He nodded. "Wouldn't it be a logical assumption that he inherited the
money?"
"From one point of view, yes. But it doesn't seem too likely. His
mother worked all her life as a milliner, and without owning her own shop.
The town, I remember, used to wonder how she managed to own her own house
and send her son to college on what she earned. But she couldn't possibly
have earned enough to have done both of those things and still have left him
enough money to have supported him in idleness ´ Well, maybe, writing plays
isn't idleness, but it isn't remunerative unless you sell them ´ for several
years."
I shrugged. "But there's probably no mystery to it. She must have had
an income from investments her husband had made, and Al either inherited the
income or got the capital from which it came. He probably doesn't talk about
his business because he enjoys being mysterious."
"Was his father wealthy?"
"His father died before he was born, and before Mrs. Grainger moved to
Carmel City. So nobody here knew his father. And I guess that's all I can
tell you about Al, except that he can beat me at chess most of the time, and
that I hope you'll have a chance to meet him."
Smith nodded. "If he comes, we'll see."
He glanced at his empty glass and I took the hint and filled it and my
own. Again I watched the incredible manner of his drinking it, fascinated.
I'd swear that, this time the glass came no closer than six inches from his
lips. Definitely it was a trick I'd have to learn myself. If for no other
reason than that I don't really like the taste of whisky, much as I enjoy
the effects of it. With his way of drinking, it didn't seem that he had the
slightest chance of tasting the stuff. It was there, in the glass, and then
it was gone. His Adam's apple didn't seem to work and if he was talking at
the time he drank there was scarcely an interruption in what he was saying.
The phone rang. I excused myself and answered it.
"Doc," said Clyde Andrews' voice, "this is Clyde Andrews."
"Fine," I said, "I suppose you realize that you sabotaged my this
week's issue by canceling a story on my front page. What's called off this
time?"
"I'm sorry about that, Doc, if it really inconvenienced you, but with
the sale called off, I thought you wouldn't want to run the story and have
people coming around to´"
"Of course," I interrupted him. I was impatient to get back to my
conversation with Yehudi Smith. "That's all right, Clyde. But what do you
want now?"
"I want to know if you've decided whether or not you want to sell the
Clarion."
For a second I was unreasonably angry. I said, "God damn it, Clyde, you
interrupt the only really interesting conversation I've had in years to ask
me that, when we've been talking about it for months, off and on? I don't
know. I do and I don't want to sell it."
"Sorry for heckling you, Doc, but I just got a special delivery letter
from my brother in Ohio. He's got an offer out West. Says he'd rather come
to Carmel City on the proposition I'd made him ´ contingent on your deciding
to sell me the Clarion, of course. But he's got to accept the other offer
right away ´ within a day or so, that is ´ if he's going to accept it at
all.
"So, you see that makes it different, Doc. I've got to know right away.
Not tonight, necessarily; it isn't in that much of a rush. But I've got to
know by tomorrow sometime, so I thought I'd call you right away so you could
start coming to a decision."
I nodded and then realized that he couldn't see me nod so I said,
"Sure, Clyde, I get it. I'm sorry for popping off. All right, I'll make up
my mind by tomorrow morning. I'll let you know one way or the other by then.
Okay?"
"Fine," he said. "That'll be plenty of time. Oh, by the way, there's an
item of news for you if it's not too late to put it in. Or have you already
got it?"
"Got what?"
"About the escaped maniac. I don't know the details, but a friend of
mine just drove over from Neilsville and he says they're stopping cars and
watching the roads both sides of the county asylum. Guess you can get the
details if you call the asylum."
"Thanks, Clyde," I said.
I put the phone back down in its cradle and looked at Yehudi Smith. I
wondered why, with all the fantastic things he'd said, I hadn't already
guessed.
CHAPTER FOUR
"But wait a bit," the Oyster cried,
"Before we have our chat;
For some of us are out of breath,
And all of us are fat!"
I felt a hell of a letdown. Oh, not that I'd really quite believed in
the Vorpal Blades or that we were going to a haunted house to conjure up a
Jabberwock or whatever we'd have done there.
But it had been exciting even to think about it, just as one can get
excited over a chess game even though he knows that the kings and queens on
the board aren't real entities and that when a bishop slays a knight no real
blood is shed. I guess it had been that kind of excitement, the vicarious
kind, that I'd felt about the things Yehudi Smith had promised. Or maybe a
better comparison would be that it had been like reading an exciting fiction
story that one knows isn't true but which one can believe in for as long as
the story lasts.
Now there wasn't even that. Across from me, I realized with keen
disappointment, was only a man who'd escaped from an insane asylum. Yehudi,
the little man who wasn't there ´ mentally.
The funny part of it was that I still liked him. He was a nice little
guy and he'd given me a fascinating half hour, up to now. I hated the fact
that I'd have to turn him over to the asylum guards and have him put back
where he came from.
Well, I thought, at least it would give me a news story to fill that
nine inch hole in the front page of the Clarion. He said, "I hope the call
wasn't anything that will spoil our plans, Doctor."
It had spoiled more than that, but of course I couldn't tell him so,
any more than I could have told Clyde Andrews over the phone, in Smith's
presence, to call the asylum and tell them to drop around to my house if
they wanted to collect their bolted nut.
So I shook my head while I figured out an angle to get out of the house
and to put in the phone call from next door.
I stood up. Perhaps I was a bit more drunk than I'd thought, for I had
to catch my balance. I remember how crystal clear my mind seemed to be ´ but
of course nothing seems more crystal clear than a prism that makes you see
around corners.
I said, "No, the call won't interrupt our plans except for a few
minutes. I've got to give a message to the man next door. Excuse me ´ and
help yourself to the whisky."
I went through the kitchen and outside into the black night. There were
lights in the houses on either side of me, and I wondered which of my
neighbors to bother. And then I wondered why I was in such a hurry to bother
either of them.
Surely, I thought, the man who called himself Yehudi Smith wasn't
dangerous. And, crazy or not, he was the most interesting man I'd met in
years. He did seem to know something about Lewis Carroll. And I remembered
again that he'd known about my obscure brochure and equally obscure magazine
article. How?
So, come to think of it, why shouldn't I stall making that phone call
for another hour or so, and relax and enjoy myself? Now that I was over the
first disappointment of learning that he was insane, why wouldn't I find
talk about that delusion of his almost as interesting as though it was
factual.
Interesting in a different way, of course. Often I had thought I'd like
the chance to talk to a paranoiac about his delusions ´ neither arguing with
him nor agreeing with him, just trying to find out what made him tick.
And the evening was still a pup; it couldn't be later than about half
past eight so my neighbors would be up at least another hour or two.
So why was I in a hurry to make that call? I wasn't.
Of course I had to kill enough time outside to make it reasonable to
believe that I'd actually gone next door and delivered a message, so I stood
there at the bottom of my back steps, looking up at the black velvet sky,
star-studded but moonless, and wondering what was behind it and why madmen
were mad. And how strange it would be if one of them was right and all the
rest of us were crazy instead.
Then I went back inside and I was cowardly enough to do a ridiculous
thing. From the kitchen I went into my bedroom and to my closet. In a
shoebox on the top shelf was a short-barreled thirty-eight caliber revolver,
one of the compact, lightweight models they call a Banker's Special. I'd
never shot at anything with it and hoped that I never would ´ and I wasn't
sure I could hit anything smaller than an elephant or farther away than a
couple of yards. I don't even like guns. I hadn't bought this one; an
acquaintance had once borrowed twenty bucks from me and had insisted on my
taking the pistol for security. And later he'd wanted another five and said
if I gave it to him I could keep the gun. I hadn't wanted it, but he'd
needed the five pretty badly and I'd given it to him.
It was still loaded with bullets that were in it when we'd made the
deal four or five years ago, and I didn't know whether they'd still shoot or
not, but I put it in my trouser pocket. I wouldn't use it, of course, except
in dire extremity ´ and I'd miss anything I shot at even then, but I thought
that just carrying the gun would make my coming conversation seem dangerous
and exciting, more than it would be otherwise.
I went into the living room and he was still there. He hadn't poured
himself a drink, so I poured one for each of us and then sat down on the
sofa again.
I lifted my drink and over the rim of it watched him do that marvelous
trick again ´ just a toss of the glass toward his lips. I drank my own less
spectacularly and said, "I wish I had a movie camera. I'd like to film the
way you do that and then study it in slow motion."
He laughed. "Afraid it's my one way of showing off. I used to be a
juggler once."
"And now? If you don't mind asking."
"A student," he said. "A student of Lewis Carroll ´ and mathematics."
"Is there a living in it?" I asked him.
He hesitated just a second. "Do you mind if I defer answering that
until you've learned ´ what you'll learn at tonight's meeting?"
Of course there wasn't going to be any meeting tonight; I knew that
now. But I said, "Not at all. But I hope you don't mean that we can't talk
about Carroll, in general, until after the meting."
I hoped he'd give the right answer to that; it would mean that I could
get him going on the subject of his mania.
He said, "Of course not. In fact, I want to talk about him. There are
facts I want to give you that will enable you to understand things better.
Some of the facts yon already know, but I'll refresh you on them anyway. For
instance, dates. You had his birth and death dates correct, or nearly enough
so. But do you know the dates of the Alice books or any other of his works?
The sequence is important."
"Not exactly," I told him. "I think that he wrote the first Alice book
when he was comparatively young, about thirty."
"Close. He was thirty-two. Alice in Wonderland was published in
eighteen sixty-three, but even before then he was on the trail of something.
Do you know what he had published before that?"
I shook my head.
"Two books. He wrote and published A Syllabus of Plane Geometry in
eighteen sixty and in the year after that his Formulae of Plane
Trigonometry. Have you read either of them?"
I had to shake my head again. I said, "Mathematics isn't my forte. I've
read only his non-technical books."
He smiled. "There aren't any. You simply failed to recognize the
mathematics embodied in the Alice books and in his poetry. You do know, I'm
sure, that many of his poems are acrostics."
"Of course."
"All of them are acrostics, but in a much more subtle manner. However,
I can see why you failed to find the clues if you haven't read his treatises
on mathematics. You wouldn't have read his Elementary Treatise on
Determinants, I suppose. But how about his Curiosa Mathematica?"
I hated to disappoint him again, but I had to.
He frowned at me. "That at least you should have read. It's not
technical at all, and most of the clues to the fantasies are contained in
it. There are further ´ and final ´ references to them in his Symbolic
Logic, published in eighteen ninety-six, just two years before his death,
but they are less direct."
I said, "Now, wait a minute. If I understand you correctly your thesis
is that Lewis Carroll ´ leaving aside any question of who or what he really
was ´ worked out through mathematics and expressed in fantasy the fact that
´ what?"
"That there is another plane of existence besides the one we are now
living in. That we can have ´ and do sometimes have ´ access to it."
"But what kind of a plane? A through-the-looking-glass plane of
fantasy, a dream plane?"
"Exactly, Doctor. A dream plane. That isn't strictly accurate, but it's
about as nearly as I can explain it to you just yet." He leaned forward.
"Consider dreams. Aren't they the almost perfect parallel of the Alice
adventures? The wool-and-water sequence, for instance, where everything
Alice looks at changes into something else. Remember in the shop, with the
old sheep knitting, how Alice looked hard to see what was on the shelves,
but the shelf she looked at was always empty although the others about it
were always full ´ of something, and she never found out what?"
I nodded slowly. I said, "Her comment was, `Things flow about so here.'
And then the sheep asked if Alice could row and handed her a pair of
knitting needles and the needles turned into oars in her hands and she was
in a boat, with the sheep still knitting."
"Exactly, Doctor. A perfect dream sequence. And consider that
Jabberwocky ´ which is probably the best thing in the second Alice book ´ is
in the very language of dreams. It's full of words like trumious, manxome,
tulgey, words that give you a perfect picture in context ´ but you can't put
your finger on what the context is. In a dream you fully understand such
meanings, but you forget them when you awaken."
Between "manxome" and "tulgey" he'd downed his latest drink. I didn't
pour another this time; I was beginning to wonder how long the bottle ´ or
we ´ would last. But he showed no effect whatsoever from the drinks he'd
been downing. I can't quite say the same for myself. I knew my voice was
getting a bit thick.
I said, "But why postulate the reality of such a world? I can see your
point otherwise. The Jabberwock itself is the epitome of nightmare creatures
´ with eyes of flame and jaws that bite and claws that catch, and it
whiffles and burbles ´ why, Freud and James Joyce in tandem couldn't have
done any better. But why not take it that Lewis Carroll was trying, and
damned successfully, to write as in a dream? Why make the assumption that
that world is real? Why talk of getting through to it ´ except, of course,
in the sense that we invade it nightly in our dreams?"
He smiled. "Because that world is real, Doctor. You'll hear evidence of
that tonight, mathematical evidence. And, I hope, actual proof. I've had
such proof myself, and I hope you'll have. But you'll see the calculations,
at least, and it will be explained to you how they were derived from Curiosa
Mathematica, and then corroborated by evidence found in the other books.
"Carroll was more than a century ahead of his time, Doctor. Have you
read the recent experiments with the subconscious made by Liebnitz and
Winton ´ the feelers they're putting forth in the right direction, which is
the mathematical approach?"
I admitted I hadn't heard of Liebnitz or Winton.
"They aren't well known," he conceded. "You see, only recently, except
for Carroll, has anyone even considered the possibility of our reaching ´
let's call it the dream plane until I've shown you what it really is ´
physically as well as mentally."
"As Lewis Carroll reached it?"
"As he must have, to have known the things he knew. Things so
revolutionary and dangerous that he did not dare reveal them openly."
For a fleeting moment it sounded so reasonable that I wondered if it
could be true. Why not? Why couldn't there be other dimensions besides our
own? Why couldn't a brilliant mathematician with a fantastic mind have found
a way through to one of them?
In my mind, I cussed our Clyde Andrews for having told me about the
asylum break. If only I hadn't learned about that, what a wonderful evening
this one would be. Even knowing Smith was insane, I found myself ´ possibly
with the whisky's help ´ wondering if he could be right. How marvelous it
would have been without the knowledge of his insanity to temper the wonder
and the wondering. It would have been an evening in Wonderland.
And, sane or crazy, I liked him. Sane or crazy, he belonged
figuratively in the department in which Mrs. Carr's husband worked
literally. I laughed and then, of course, I had to explain what I'd been
laughing about.
His eyes lighted. "The Roman candle department. That's marvelous. The
Roman candle department."
You see what I mean.
We had a drink to the Roman candle department, and then it happened
that neither of us said anything right away and it was so quiet that I
jumped when the phone rang.
I picked it up and said into it, "This is the Roman candle department."
"Doc?" It was the voice of Pete Corey, my printer. It sounded tense.
"I've got bad news."
Pete doesn't get excited easily. I sobered up a little and asked,
"What, Pete?"
"Listen, Doc. Remember just a couple of hours ago you were saying you
wished a murder or something would happen so you'd have a story for the
paper ´ and remember how I asked you if you'd like one even if it happened
to a friend of yours?"
Of course I remembered; he'd mentioned my best friend, Carl Trenholm. I
took a tighter grip on the phone. I said, "Cut out breaking it gently, Pete.
Has something happened to Carl?"
"Yes, Doc."
"For God's sake, what? Cut the build-up. Is he dead?"
"That's what I heard. He was found out on the pike; I don't know if he
was hit by a car or what."
"Where is he now?"
"Being brought in. I guess. All I know is that Hank called me´" Hank is
Pete's brother-in-law and a deputy sheriff. "´ and said they got a call from
someone who found him alongside the road out there. Even Hank had it
third-hand ´ Rance Kates phoned him and said to come down and take care of
the office while he went out there. And Hank knows Kates doesn't like you
and wouldn't give you the tip, so Hank called me. But don't get Hank in
trouble with his boss by telling anybody where the tip came from."
"Did you call the hospital?" I asked. "If Carl's just hurt´"
"Wouldn't be time for them to get him there yet ´ or to wherever they
do take him. Hank just phoned me from his own place before he started for
the sheriff's office, and Kates had just called him from the office and was
just leaving there."
"Okay, Pete," I said. "Thanks. I'm going back downtown; I'll call the
hospital from the Clarion office. You call me there if you hear anything
more."
"Hell, Doc, I'm coming down too."
I told him he didn't have to, but he said the hell with having to; he
wanted to. I didn't argue with him.
I cradled the phone and found that I was already standing up. I said,
"Sorry, but something important's come up ´ an accident to a friend of
mine." I headed for the closet to get my coat. "Do you want to wait here,
or´"
"If you don't mind," he said. "That is, if you think you won't be gone
very long."
"I don't know that, but I'll phone here and let you know as soon as I
can. If the phone rings answer it; it'll be me. And help yourself to whisky
and books."
He nodded. "I'll get along fine. Hope your friend isn't seriously
hurt."
That was all I was worrying about myself. I put on my hat and hurried
out, again, and this time seriously, cussing those two flat tires on my car
and the fact that I hadn't taken time to fix them that morning. Nine blocks
isn't far to walk when you're not in any hurry, but it's a hell of a
distance when you're anxious to get there quickly.
I walked fast, so fast, in fact, that I winded myself in the first two
blocks and had to slow down.
I kept thinking the same thing Pete had obviously thought ´ what a hell
of a coincidence it was that we'd mentioned the possibility of Carl's being´
But we'd been talking about murder. Had Carl been murdered? Of course
not; things like that didn't happen in Carmel City. It must have been an
accident, a hit-run driver. No one would have the slightest reason for
killing, of all people, Carl Trenholm. No one but a´
Finishing that thought made me stop walking suddenly. No one but a
maniac would have the slightest reason for killing Carl Trenholm. But there
was an escaped maniac at large tonight and ´ unless he'd left instead of
waiting for me ´ he was sitting right in my living room. I'd thought he was
harmless ´ even though I'd taken the precaution of putting that gun in my
pocket ´ but how could I be sure? I'm no psychiatrist; where did I get the
bright idea that I could tell the difference between a harmless nut and a
homicidal maniac?
I started to turn back and then realized that going back was useless
and foolish. He would either have left as soon as I was out of sight around
the corner, or he hadn't guessed that I suspected him and would wait as I'd
told him to, until he heard from me. So all I had to do was to phone the
asylum as soon as I could and they'd send guards to close in on my house and
take him if he was still there.
I started walking again. Yes, it would be ridiculous for me to go back
alone, even though I still had that gun in my pocket. He might resist, and I
wouldn't want to have to use the gun, especially as I hadn't any real reason
to believe he'd killed Carl. It could have been an auto accident just as
easily; I couldn't even form an intelligent opinion on that until I learned
what Carl's injuries were. I kept walking, as fast as I could without
winding myself again.
Suddenly I thought of that newspaper clipping ´ "MAN SLAIN BY UNKNOWN
BEAST." A prickle went down my spine ´ what if Carl's body showed´
And then the horrible thought pyramided. What if the unknown beast who
had killed the man near Bridgeport and the escaped maniac were one and the
same. What if he had escaped before at the time of the killing at Bridgeport
´ or, for that matter, hadn't been committed to the asylum until after that
killing, whether or not he was suspected of it.
I thought of lycanthropy, and shivered. What might I have been talking
about Jabberwocks and unknown beasts with?
Suddenly the gun I'd put in my pocket felt comforting there. I looked
around over my shoulder to be sure that nothing was coming after me. The
street behind was empty, but I started walking a little faster just the
same.
Suddenly the street lights weren't bright enough and the night, which
had been a pleasant June evening, was a frightful, menacing thing. I was
really scared. Maybe it's as well that I didn't guess that things hadn't
even started to happen.
I felt glad that I was passing the courthouse ´ with a light on in the
window of the sheriff's office. I even considered going in. Probably Hank
would be there by now and Rance Kates would still be gone. But no, I was
this far now and I'd carry on to the Clarion office and start my phoning
from there. Besides, if Kates found out I'd been in his office talking to
Hank, Hank would be in trouble.
So I kept on going. The corner of Oak Street, and I turned, now only a
block and a half from the Clarion. But it was going to take me quite a while
to make that block and a half.
A big, dark blue Buick sedan suddenly pulled near the curb and slowed
down alongside me. There were two men in the front seat and the one who was
driving stuck his head out of the window and said, "Hey, Buster, what town
is this?"
CHAPTER FIVE
When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark,
And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark:
But, when the tide rises and sharks are around,
His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.
It had been a long time since anyone had called me "Buster," and I
didn't particularly like it. I didn't like the looks of the men, either, or
the tone of voice the question had been asked in. A minute ago, I'd thought
I'd be glad of any company short of that of the escaped maniac; now I
decided differently.
I'm not often rude, but I can be when someone else starts it. I said,
"Sorry, pal, I'm a stranger here myself." And I kept on walking.
I heard the man behind the wheel of the Buick say something to the
other, and then they passed me and swung in to the curb just ahead. The
driver got out and walked toward me.
I stopped short and tried not to do a double-take when I recognized
him. My attention to the wanted circulars on the post office bulletin board
was about to pay off ´ although from the expression on his face, the payoff
wasn't going to be the kind I'd want.
The man coming toward me and only two steps away when I stopped was Bat
Masters, whose picture had been posted only last week and was still there on
the board. I couldn't be wrong about his face, and I remembered the name
clearly because of its similarity to the name of Bat Masterson, the famous
gunman of the old West. I'd thought of it as a coincidence at first and then
I realized that the similarity of Masters to Masterson had made the nickname
"Bat" a natural.
He was a big man with a long, horselike face, eyes wide apart and a
mouth that was a narrow straight line separating a lantern jaw from a wide
upper lip; on the latter there was a two-day stubble of hair that indicated
he was starting a mustache. But it would have taken plastic surgery and a
full beard to disguise that face from anyone who had recently, however
casually, studied a picture of it. Bat Masters, bank robber and killer.
I had a gun in my pocket, but I didn't remember it at the time. It's
probably just as well; if I'd remembered, I might have been frightened into
reaching for it. And that probably would not have been a healthful thing to
do. He was coming at me with his fists balled but no gun in either of them.
He didn't intend to kill me ´ although one of those fists might do it quite
easily and unintentionally. I weigh a hundred and forty wringing wet, and he
weighed almost twice that and had shoulders that bulged out his suit coat.
There wasn't even time to turn and run. His left hand came out and
caught the front of my coat and pulled me toward him, almost lifting me off
the sidewalk.
He said, "Listen, Pop, I don't want any lip. I asked you a question."
"Carmel City," I said. "Carmel City, Illinois."
The voice of the other man, still in the car, came back to us. "Hey,
Bill, don't hurt the guy. We don't want to´" He didn't finish the sentence,
of course; to say you don't want to attract attention is the best way of
drawing it.
Masters looked past me right over my head ´ to see if anybody or
anything was coming that way and then, still keeping his grip on the front
of my coat, turned and looked the other way. He wasn't afraid of my swinging
at him enough to bother keeping his eyes on me, and I didn't blame him for
feeling that way about it.
A car was coming now, about a block away. And two men came out of the
drugstore on the opposite side of the street, only a few buildings down.
Then behind me I could hear the sound of another car turning into Oak
Street.
Masters turned back to me and let go, so we were just two men standing
there face to face if anyone noticed us. He said, "Okay, Pop. Next time
somebody asks you a question, don't be so God damn fresh."
He still glared at me as though he hadn't yet completely given up the
idea of giving me something to remember him by ´ maybe just a light
open-handed slap that wouldn't do anything worse than crack my jawbone and
drive my dentures down my throat.
I said, "Sure, sorry," and let my voice sound afraid, but tried not to
sound quite as afraid as I really was ´ because if he even remotely
suspected that I might have recognized him, I wasn't going to get out of it
at all.
He swung around and walked back to the ear, got in and drove off. I
suppose I should have got the license number, but it would have been a
stolen car anyway ´ and besides I didn't think of it. I didn't even watch
the car as it drove away; if either of them looked back I didn't want them
to think I was giving them what criminals call the big-eye. I didn't want to
give them any possible reason to change their minds about going on.
I started walking again, keeping to the middle of the sidewalk and
trying to look like a man minding his own business. Also trying to keep my
knees from shaking so hard that I couldn't walk at all. It had been a narrow
squeak all right. If the street had been completely empty´
I could have notified the sheriff's office about a minute quicker by
turning around and going back that way, but I didn't take a chance. If
someone was watching me out of the back window of the car, a change in
direction wouldn't be a good idea. There was a difference of only a block
anyway; I was half a block past the courthouse and a block and a half from
Smiley's and the Clarion office across the street from it. >From either one
I could phone in the big news that Bat Masters and a companion had just
driven through Carmel City heading north, probably toward Chicago. And Hank
Ganzer, in the sheriff's office, would relay the story to the state police
and there was probably better than an even chance that they'd be caught
within an hour or two.
And if they were, I might even get a slice of the reward for giving the
tip ´ but I didn't care as much about that as about the story I was going to
have. Why, it was a story, even if they weren't caught, and if they were, it
would be a really big one. And a local story ´ if the tip came from Carmel
City ´ even if they were actually caught several counties north. Maybe
there'd even be a gun battle ´ from my all too close look at Masters I had a
hunch that there would be.
Perfect timing, too, I thought. For once something was happening on a
Thursday night. For once I'd beat the Chicago papers. They'd have the story,
too, of course, and a lot of Carmel City people take Chicago dailies, but
they don't come in until the late afternoon train and the Clarion would be
out hours before that.
Yes, for once I was going to have a newspaper with news in it. Even if
Masters and his pal weren't caught, the fact that they'd passed through town
made a story. And besides that, there was the escaped maniac, and Carl
Trenholm´
Thinking about Carl again made me walk faster. It was safe by now; I'd
gone a quarter of a block since the Buick had driven off. It wasn't anywhere
in sight and again the street was quiet; thank God it hadn't been this quiet
while Masters had been making up his mind whether or not to slug me.
I was past Deak's Music Store, dark. Past the supermarket, ditto. The
bank´
I had passed the bank, too, when I stopped as suddenly as though I'd
run into a wall. The bank had been dark too. And it shouldn't have been;
there's a small night light that always burns over the safe. I'd passed the
bank thousands of times after dark and never before had that light been off.
For a moment the wild thought went through my head that Bat and his
companion must have just burglarized the bank ´ although robbery, not
burglary, was Masters' trade ´ and then I saw how ridiculous that thought
had been. They'd been driving toward the bank and a quarter of a block away
from it when they'd stopped to ask me what town they were in. True, they
could have burglarized the bank and then circled the block in their car, but
if they had they'd have been intent on their getaway. Criminals do pretty
silly things sometimes but not quite so silly as to stop a getaway car
within spitting distance of the scene of the crime to ask what town they're
in, and then to top it by getting out of the car to slug a random pedestrian
because they don't like his answer to their question.
No, Masters and company couldn't have robbed the bank. And they
couldn't be burglarizing it now, either. Their car had gone on past; I
hadn't watched it, but my ears had told me that it had kept on going. And
even if it hadn't, I had. My encounter with them had been only seconds ago;
there wasn't possibly time for them to have broken in there, even if they'd
stopped.
I went back a few steps and looked into the window of the bank.
At first I saw nothing except the vague silhouette of a window at the
back ´ the top half of the window, that is, which was visible above the
counter. Then the silhouette became less vague and I could see that the
window had been opened; the top bar of the lower sash showed clearly, only a
few inches from the top of the frame.
That was the means of entry all right ´ but was the burglar still in
there, or had he left, and left the window open behind him?
I strained my eyes against the blackness to the left of the window,
where the safe was. And suddenly a dim light flickered briefly, as though a
match had been struck but had gone out before the phosphorus had ignited the
wood. I could see only the brief light of it, as it was below the level of
the counter; I couldn't see whoever had lighted it.
The burglar was still there.
And suddenly I was running on tiptoe back through the areaway between
the bank and the post office.
Good God, don't ask me why. Sure, I had money in the bank, but the bank
had insurance against burglary and it wasn't any skin off my backside if the
bank was robbed. I wasn't even thinking that it would be a better story for
the Clarion if I got the burglar ´ or if he got me. I just wasn't thinking
at all. I was running back alongside the bank toward that window that he'd
left open for his getaway.
I think it must have been reaction from the cowardice I'd shown and
felt only a minute before. I must have been a bit punch drunk from
Jabberwocks and Vorpal Blades and homicidal maniacs with lycanthropy and
bank bandits and a bank burglar ´ or maybe I thought I'd suddenly been
promoted to the Roman candle department.
Maybe I was drunk, maybe I was a little mentally unbalanced ´ use any
maybe you want, but there I was running tiptoe through the areaway. Running,
that is, as far as the light from the street would let me; then I groped
along the side of the building until I came to the alley. There was dim
light there, enough for me to be able to see the window.
It was still open.
I stood there looking at it and vaguely beginning to realize how crazy
I'd been. Why hadn't I run to the sheriff's office for Hank? The burglar ´
or, for all I knew, burglars ´ might be just starting his work on the safe
in there. He might be in a long time, long enough for Hank to get here and
collar him. If he came out now, what was I going to do about it? Shoot him?
That was ridiculous; I'd rather let him get away with robbing the bank than
do that.
And then it was too late because suddenly there was a soft shuffling
sound from the window and a hand appeared on the sill. He was coming out,
and there wasn't a chance that I could get away without his hearing me. What
would happen then, I didn't know. I would just as soon not find out.
A moment before, just as I'd reached the place beside the window where
I now stood, I'd stepped on a piece of wood, a one-by-two stick of it about
a foot long. That was a weapon I could understand. I reached down and
grabbed it and swung, just in time, as a head came through the window.
Thank God I didn't swing too hard. At the last second, even in that
faint light, I'd thought´
The head and the hand weren't in the window any more and there was the
soft thud of a body falling inside. There wasn't any sound or movement for
seconds. Long seconds, and then there was the sound of my stick of wood
hitting the dirt of the alley and I knew I'd dropped it.
If it hadn't been for what I'd thought I'd seen in that last fraction
of a second before it was too late to stop the blow, I could have run now
for the sheriff's office. But´
Maybe here went my head, but I had to chance it. The sill of the window
wasn't much over waist high. I leaned across it and struck a match, and I'd
been right.
I climbed in the window and felt for his heart and it was beating all
right. He seemed to be breathing normally. I ran my hands very gently over
his head and then held them in the open window to look at them; there wasn't
any blood. There could be, then, nothing worse than a concussion.
I lowered the window so nobody would notice that it was open and then I
felt my way carefully toward the nearest desk ´ I'd been in the bank
thousands of times; I knew its layout ´ and groped for a telephone until I
found one. The operator's voice said, "Number, please?" and I started to
give it and then remembered; she'd know where the call came from and that
the bank was closed. Naturally, she'd listen in. Maybe she'd even call the
sheriff's office to tell them someone was using the telephone in the bank.
Had I recognized her voice? I'd thought I had. I said, "Is this Milly?"
"Yes. Is this ´ Mr. Stoeger?"
"Right," I said. I was glad she'd known my voice. "Listen, Milly, I'm
calling from the bank, but it's all right. You don't need to worry about it.
And ´ do me a favor, will you? Please don't listen in."
"All right, Mr. Stoeger. Sure. What number do you want?"
I gave it; the number of Clyde Andrews, president of the bank. As I
heard the ringing of the phone at the other end, I thought how lucky it was
that I'd known Milly all her life and that we liked one another. I knew that
she'd be burning with curiosity but that she wouldn't listen in.
Clyde Andrews' voice answered. I was still careful about what I said
because I didn't know offhand whether he was on a party line.
I said, "This is Doc Stoeger, Clyde. I'm down at the bank. Get down
here right away. Hurry."
"Huh? Doc, are you drunk or something? What would you be doing at the
bank. It's closed."
I said, "Somebody was inside here. I hit him over the head with a piece
of wood when he started back out of the window, and he's unconscious but not
hurt bad. But just to be sure, pick up Doc Minton on your way here. And
hurry."
"Sure," he said. "Are you phoning the sheriff or shall I?"
"Neither of us. Don't phone anybody. Just get Minton and get here
quick."
"But ´ I don't get it. Why not phone the sheriff? Is this a gag?"
I said, "No, Clyde. Listen ´ you'll want to see the burglar first. He
isn't badly hurt, but for God's sake quit arguing and get down here with Dr.
Minton. Do you understand?"
His tone of voice was different when he said, "I'll be there. Five
minutes."
I put the receiver back on the phone and then lifted it again. The
"Number, please" was Milly's voice again and I asked her if she knew
anything about Carl Trenholm.
She didn't; she hadn't known anything had happened at all. When I told
her what little I knew she said yes, that she'd routed a call from a
farmhouse out on the pike to the sheriff's office about half an hour before,
but she'd had several other calls around the same time and hadn't listened
in on it.
I decided that I'd better wait until I was somewhere else, before I
called to report either Bat Masters' passing through or about the escaped
maniac at my own house. It wouldn't be safe to risk making the call from
here, and a few more minutes wouldn't matter a lot.
I went back, groping my way through the dark toward the dim square of
the window, and bent down again by the boy, Clyde Andrews' son. His
breathing and his heart were still okay and he moved a little and muttered
something as though he was coming out of it. I don't know anything about
concussion, but I thought that was a good sign and felt better. It would
have been terrible if I'd swung a little harder and had killed him or
injured him seriously.
I sat down on the floor so my head would be out of the line of sight if
anyone looked in the front window, as I had a few minutes before, and
waited.
So much had been happening that I felt a little numb. There was so much
to think about that I guess I didn't think about any of it. I just sat there
in the dark.
When the phone rang I jumped about two feet.
I groped to it and answered it. Milly's voice said, "Mr. Stoeger, I
thought I'd better tell you if you're still there. Somebody from the
drugstore across the street just phoned the sheriff's office and said the
night light in the bank is out, and whoever answered at the sheriff's office
´ it sounded like one of the deputies, not Mr. Kates ´ said they'd come
right around."
I said, "Thanks, Milly. Thanks a lot."
A car was pulling up at the curb outside; I could see it through the
window. I breathed a sigh of relief when I recognized the men getting out of
it as Clyde Andrews and the doctor.
I switched on the lights inside while Clyde was unlocking the front
door. I told him quickly about the call that had been made to the sheriff's
office while I was leading them back to where Harvey Andrews was lying. We
moved him slightly to a point where neither he nor Dr. Minton, bending over
him, could be seen from the front of the bank, and we did it just in time.
Hank was rapping on the door.
I stayed out of sight, too, to avoid having to explain what I was doing
there. I heard Clyde Andrews open the door for Hank and explain that
everything was all right, that someone had phoned him, too, that the night
light was out and that he'd just got here to check up and that the bulb had
merely burned out.
When Hank left, Clyde came back, his face, a bit white. Dr. Minton
said, "He's going to be all right, Clyde. Starting to come out of it. Soon
as he can walk between us, we'll get him to the hospital for a checkup and
be sure."
I said, "Clyde, I've got to run. There's a lot popping tonight. But as
soon as you're sure the boy's all right will you let me know? I'll probably
be at the Clarion, but I might be at Smiley's ´ or if it's a long time from
now, I might be home."
"Sure, Doc." He put his hand on my shoulder. "And thanks a lot for ´
calling me instead of the sheriff's office."
"That's all right," I told him. "And, Clyde, I didn't know who it was
before I hit. He was coming out of the back window and I thought´"
Clyde said, "I looked in his room after you phoned. He'd packed. I ´ I
can't understand it, Doc. He's only fifteen. Why he'd do a thing like´" He
shook his head. "He's always been headstrong and he's got into little
troubles a few times, but ´ I don't understand this." He looked at me very
earnestly. "Do you?"
I thought maybe I did understand a little of it, but I was remembering
about Bat Masters and the fact that he was getting farther away every minute
and that I'd better get the state police notified pretty quickly.
So I said, "Can I talk to you about it tomorrow, Clyde? Get the boy's
side of it when he can talk ´ and just try to keep your mind open until
then. I think ´ it may not be as bad as you think right now."
I left him still looking like a man who's just taken an almost mortal
blow, and went out.
I headed down the street thinking what a damn fool I'd been to do what
I'd done. But then, where had I missed a chance to do something wrong
anywhere down the line tonight? And then, on second thought, this one thing
might not have been wrong. If I'd called Hank, the boy just might have been
shot instead of knocked out. And in any case he'd have been arrested.
That would have been bad. This way, there was a chance he could be
straightened out before it was too late. Maybe a psychiatrist could help
him. The only thing was, Clyde Andrews would have to realize that he, too,
would have to take advice from the psychiatrist. He was a good man, but a
hard father. You can't expect the things of a fifteen year-old boy that
Clyde expected of Harvey, and not have something go wrong somewhere down the
line. But burglarizing a bank, even his own father's bank ´ I couldn't make
up my mind whether that made it better or worse was certainly something I
hadn't looked for. It appalled me, a bit. Harvey's running away from home
wouldn't have surprised me at all; I don't know that I'd even have blamed
him.
A man can be too good a man and too conscientious and strict a father
for his son ever to be able to love him. If Clyde Andrews would only get
drunk ´ good and stinking drunk ´ just once in his life, he might get an
entirely different perspective on things, even if he never again took
another drink. But he'd never taken a drink yet, nor one in his whole life.
I don't think he'd ever smoked a cigarette or said a naughty word.
I liked him anyway; I'm pretty tolerant, I guess. But I'm glad I hadn't
had a father like him. In my books, the man in town who was the best father
was Carl Trenholm. Trenholm ´ and I hadn't found out yet whether he was dead
or only injured!
I was only half a block, now, from Smiley's and the Clarion. I broke
into a trot. Even at my age, it wouldn't wind me to trot that far. It had
probably been less than half an hour since I'd left home, but with the
things that had happened en route, it seemed like days. Well, anyway,
nothing could happen to me between here and Smiley's. And nothing did.
I could see through the glass that there weren't any customers at the
bar and that Smiley was alone behind it. Polishing glasses, as always; I
think he must polish the same glasses a dozen times over when there's
nothing else for him to do.
I burst in and headed for the telephone. I said, "Smiley, hell's
popping tonight. There's an escaped lunatic, and something's happened to
Carl Trenholm, and a couple of wanted bank robbers drove through here
fifteen or twenty minutes ago and I got to´"
I was back by the telephone by the time I'd said all that and I was
reaching up for the receiver. But I never quite touched it.
A voice behind me said, "Take it easy, Buster."
CHAPTER SIX
"What matters it how far we go?" his scaly friend replied.
"The further off from England the nearer is to France.
There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.
Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance."
I turned around slowly. They'd been sitting at the table around the el
of the tavern, the one table that can't be seen through the glass of the
door or the windows. They'd probably picked it for that reason. The beer
glasses in front of them were empty. But I didn't think the guns in their
hands would be.
One of the guns ´ the one in the hand of Bat Masters' companion ´ was
aimed at Smiley. And Smiley, not smiling, was keeping his hands very still,
not moving a muscle.
The gun in Masters' hand was aimed at me.
He said, "So you knew us, huh, Buster?"
There wasn't any use denying it; I'd said too much already. I said,
"You're Bat Masters." I looked at the other man, whom I hadn't seen clearly
before, when he'd been in the car. He was squat and stocky, with a bullet
head and little pig eyes. He looked like a caricature of a German army
officer. I said, "I'm sorry; I don't know your friend."
Masters laughed. He said, "See, George, I'm famous and you're not.
How'd you like that?"
George kept his eyes on Smiley. He said, "I think you better come
around this side of the bar. You just might have a gun back there and take a
notion to dive for it."
"Come on over and sit with us," Masters said. "Both of you. Let's make
it a party, huh, George?"
George said, "Shut up," which changed my opinion of George quite a bit.
I personally wouldn't have cared to tell Bat Masters to shut up, and in that
tone of voice. True, I had been fresh with him about twenty minutes before,
but I hadn't known who he was. I hadn't even seen how big he was.
Smiley was coming around the end of the bar. I caught his eye, and gave
him what was probably a pretty sickly grin. I said, "I'm sorry, Smiley.
Looks like I put our foot in it this time."
His face was completely impassive. He said, "Not your fault, Doc."
I wasn't too sure of that myself. I was just remembering that I'd
vaguely noticed a car parked in front of Smiley's place. If my brains had
been in the proper end of my anatomy I'd have had the sense to take at least
a quick look at that car. And if I'd had that much sense, I'd have had the
further sense to go across to the Clarion office instead of barging
nitwittedly into Smiley's and into the arms of Bat Masters and George.
And if the state police had come before they'd left Smiley's, the
Clarion would have had a really good story. This way, it might be a good
story too, but who would write it?
Smiley and I were standing close together now, and Masters must have
figured that one gun was enough for both of us. He stuck his into a shoulder
holster and looked at George. "Well?" he said.
That proved again that George was the boss, or at least was on equal
status with Masters. And as I studied George's face, I could see why.
Masters was big and probably had plenty of brass and courage, but George was
the one of the two who had the more brains.
George said, "Guess we'll have to take 'em along, Bat."
I knew what that meant. I said, "Listen, there's a back room. Can't you
just tie us up? If we're found a few hours from now, what does it matter?
You'll be clear."
"And you might be found in a few minutes. And you probably noticed what
kind of a car we got, and you know which way we're heading." He shook his
head, and it was definite.
He said, "We're not sticking around, either, till somebody comes in.
Bat, go look outside."
Masters got up and started toward the front; then he hesitated and went
back of the bar instead. He took two pint bottles of whisky and put one in
either coat pocket. And he punched "No Sale" on the register and took out
the bills; he didn't bother with the change. He folded the bills and stuck
them in his trouser pocket. Then he came back around the bar and started for
the door.
Sometimes I think people are crazy. Smiley stuck out his hand. He said,
"Five bucks. Two-fifty apiece for those pints."
He could have got shot for it, then and there, but for some reason
Masters liked it. He grinned and took the wadded paper money out of his
pocket, peeled a five loose and put it in Smiley's hand.
George said, "Bat, cut the horseplay. Look outside." I noticed that he
watched very carefully and kept the gun trained smack in the middle of
Smiley's chest while Smiley stuck the five dollar bill into his pocket.
Masters opened the door and stepped outside, looked around casually and
beckoned to us. Meanwhile George had stood up and walked around behind us,
sliding his gun into a coat pocket out of sight but keeping his hand on it.
He said, "All right, boys, get going."
It was all very friendly. In a way.
We went out the door into the cool pleasant evening that wasn't going
to last much longer, the way things looked now. Yes, the Buick was parked
right in front of Smiley's. If I'd only glanced at it before I went in, the
whole mess wouldn't have happened.
The Buick was a four-door sedan. George said, "Get in back," and we got
in back. George got in front but sat sidewise, turned around facing us over
the seat.
Masters got in behind the wheel and started the engine.
He said over his shoulder, "Well, Buster, where to?"
I said, "About five miles out there are woods. If you take us back in
them and tie us up, there isn't a chance on earth we'd be found before
tomorrow."
I didn't want to die, and I didn't want Smiley to die, and that idea
was such a good one that for a moment I hoped. Then Masters said, "What town
is this, Buster?" and I knew there wasn't any chance. Just because I'd given
him a fresh answer to a fresh question half an hour ago, there wasn't any
chance.
The car pulled out from the curb and headed north.
I was scared, and sober. There didn't seem to be any reason why I had
to be both. I said, "How about a drink?"
George reached into Masters' coat pocket and handed one of the pint
bottles over the back of the seat. My hands shook a little while I got the
cellophane off with my thumbnail and unscrewed the cap. I handed it to
Smiley first and he took a short drink and passed it back. I took a long one
and it put a warm spot where a very cold one had been. I don't mean to say
it made me happy, but I felt a little better. I wondered what Smiley was
thinking about and I remembered that he had a wife and three kids and I
wished I hadn't remembered that.
I handed him back the bottle and he took another quick nip. I said,
"I'm sorry, Smiley," and he said, "That's all right, Doc." And he laughed.
"One bad thing, Doc. There'll be a swell story for your Clarion, but can
Pete write it?"
I found myself wondering that, quite seriously. Pete's one of the best
all-around printers in Illinois, but what kind of a job would he make of
things tonight and tomorrow morning? He'd get the paper out all right, but
he'd never done any news writing ´ at least as long as he'd worked for me ´
and handling all the news he was going to have tomorrow would be plenty
tough. An escaped maniac, whatever had happened to Carl, and whatever ´ as
if I really wondered ´ was going to happen to Smiley and me. I wondered if
our bodies would be found in time to make the paper, or if it would be
merely a double disappearance. We'd both be missed fairly soon. Smiley
because his tavern was still open but no one behind the bar. I because I was
due to meet Pete at the Clarion and about an hour from now, when I hadn't
shown up yet, he'd start checking.
We were just leaving town by then, and I noticed that we'd got off the
main street which was part of the main highway. Burgoyne Street, which we
were on, was turning into a road.
Masters stopped the car as we came to a fork and turned around. "Where
do these roads go?" he asked.
"They both go to Watertown," I told him. "The one to the left goes
along the river and the other one cuts through the hills; it's shorter, but
it's trickier driving."
Apparently Masters didn't mind tricky driving. He swung right and we
started up into the hills. I wouldn't have done it myself, if I'd been
driving. The hills are pretty hilly and the road through them is narrow and
does plenty of winding, with a drop-off on one side or the other most of the
time. Not the long precipitous drop-off you find on real mountain roads, but
enough to wreck a car that goes over the edge, and enough to bother my touch
of acrophobia.
Phobias are ridiculous things, past reasoning. I felt mine coming back
the moment there was that slight drop-off at the side of the road as we
started up the first hill. Actually, I was for the moment more afraid of
that than of George's gun. Yes, phobias are funny things. Mine, fear of
heights, is one of the commonest. Carl is afraid of cats. Al Grainger is a
pyrophobiac, morbidly afraid of fire.
Smiley said, "You know. Doc?"
"What?" I asked him.
"I was thinking of Pete having to write that newspaper. Whyn't you come
back and help him. Ain't there such things as ghost writers?"
I groaned. After all these years, Smiley had picked a time like this to
come up with the only funny thing I'd ever heard him say.
We were up high now, about as high as the road went; ahead was a
hairpin turn as it started downhill again. Masters stopped the car. "Okay,
you mugs," he said. "Get out and start walking back."
Start, he'd said; he hadn't made any mention of finishing. The tail
lights of the car would give them enough illumination to shoot us down by.
And he'd probably picked this spot because it would be easy to roll our
bodies off the edge of the road, down the slope, so they wouldn't be found
right away. Both of them were already getting out of the car.
Smiley's big hand gave my arm a quick squeeze; I didn't know whether it
was a farewell gesture or a signal. He said, "Go ahead, Doc," as calmly as
though he was collecting for drinks back of his bar.
I opened the door on my side, but I was afraid to step out. Not because
I knew I was going to be shot ´ that would happen anyway, even if I didn't
get out. They'd either drag me out or else shoot me where I sat and bloody
up the back seat of their car. No, I was afraid to get out because the car
was on the outside edge of the road and the slope started only a yard from
the open door of the car. My damned acrophobia. It was dark out there and I
could see the edge of the road and no farther and I pictured a precipice
beyond. I hesitated, half in the door and half out of it.
Smiley said again, "Go ahead, Doc," and I heard him moving behind me.
Then suddenly there was a click ´ and complete and utter darkness.
Smiley had reached a long arm across the back of the seat to the dashboard
and had turned the light switch off. All the car lights went out.
There was a shove in the middle of my back that sent me out of that car
door like a cork popping out of a champagne bottle; I don't think my feet
touched that yard-wide strip of road at all. As I went over the edge into
darkness and the unknown I heard swearing and a shot behind me. I was so
scared of falling that I'd gladly have been back up on the road trying to
outrun a bullet back toward town. At least I'd have been dead before they
rolled me over the edge.
I hit and fell and rolled. It wasn't really steep, after all; it was
about a forty-five degree slope, and it was grassy. I flattened a couple of
bushes before one stopped me. I could hear Smiley coming after me, sliding,
and I scrambled on as fast as I could. All of my arms and legs seemed to be
working, so I couldn't be seriously hurt.
And I could see a little now that my eyes were getting used to the
darkness. I could see trees ahead, and I scrambled toward them down the
slope, sometimes running, sometimes sliding and sometimes simply falling,
which is the simplest if not the most comfortable way to go down a hill.
I made the trees, and heard Smiley make them, just as the lights of the
car flashed on, on the road above us. Some shots snapped our way and then I
heard George say, "Don't waste it. Let's get going," and Bat's, "You mean
we're gonna´"
George growled, "Hell, yes. That's woods down there. We could waste an
hour playing hide and seek. Let's get going."
They were the sweetest words I'd heard in a long time.
I heard car doors slam, and the car started.
Smiley's voice, about two yards to my left, said, "Doc? You okay?"
"I think so," I said. "Smart work, Smiley. Thanks."
He came around a tree toward me and I could see him now. He said, "Save
it, Doc. Come on, quick. We got a chance ´ a little chance, anyway ´ of
stopping them."
"Stopping them?" I said. My voice went shrill and sounded strange to
me. I wondered if Smiley had gone crazy. I couldn't think of anything in the
whole wide world that I wanted to do less than stop Bat Masters and George.
But he had hold of my arm and was starting down-hill, through the dimly
seen trees and away from the road, taking me with him.
He said, "Listen, Doc, I know this country like the palm of my foot.
I've hunted here, often."
"For bank robbers?" I asked him.
"Listen, that road makes a hairpin and goes by right below us, not
forty yards from here. If we can get just above the road before they get
there and if I can find a big boulder to roll down as the car goes by´"
I wasn't crazy about it, but he was pulling me along and we were
through the trees already. My eyes were used to the darkness by now and I
could see the road dimly, a dozen yards ahead and a dozen yards below. In
the distance, around a curve, I could hear the sound of the car; I couldn't
see it yet. It was a long way off, but coming fast.
Smiley said, "Look for a boulder, Doc. If you can't find one big enough
to roll, then something we can throw. If we can hit their windshield or
something´"
He was bending over, groping around. I did the same; but the bank was
smooth and grassy. If there were stones, I couldn't find any.
Apparently Smiley wasn't having any luck either. He swore. He said, "If
I only had a gun´"
I remembered something. "I've got one," I said.
He straightened up and looked at me ´ and I'm glad it was dark enough
that he couldn't see my face and that I couldn't see his.
I handed him the gun. The headlights of the car were coming in sight
now around the curve. Smiley pushed me back into the trees and stood behind
one himself, leaning out to expose only his head and his gun hand.
The car came like a bat out of hell, but Smiley took aim calmly. He
fired his first shot when the car was about forty yards away, the second
when it was only twenty. The first shot went into the radiator ´ I don't
mean we could tell that then, but that's where it was found afterwards. The
second went through the windshield, almost dead
