Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions (28 page)

"How do you mean?" Driscoll asked, frowning. Then his brow cleared and he nodded. "I get you."

At that moment Otto came in from the back wearing his own coat and they all fell silent. The off-duty janitor was staggering a little, but as he surveyed them a momentary flicker of distrust crossed his eyes.

"Say, fellows, what were you all talking about?" he asked.

Cappy answered for them.

"Why, Otto," he said innocently, "we were just all wondering who would ever take the place of poor old Wilmer."

 

 

 

MS. FOUND IN A MAELSTROM

 

ON JUNE 4, two large boxes without return addresses were delivered at the Manhattan offices of the American Psychological Congress. On examination, they were found to be filled with sheets and scraps of paper tied in packets and covered with a roughly-estimated automatic writing, a veritable maelstrom of verbiage sometimes rhyming and occasionally forming phrases but otherwise incoherent, as far as a sampling showed.

The boxes were turned over to the Creighton Wagram Study of the Psychopathology of Creativity, where their contents were eventually used by Helen Crumly Barnes, graduate student, as raw material for a statistical investigation of rhythm and patterns of word-choice in schizophrenic thought. During the third week of her tabulations Miss Barnes discovered the following narrative in the welter of words. It appeared abruptly, like a deadly rock in a dubious sea. At the time Miss Barnes was being recompensed at the rate of ninety-three cents an hour from a grant made by the General Motors Foundation.

 

...WRONG WRONG
right right
write write write without sight without light in the night it'll bite and I write in the grave like a slave but I'm brave as a knave from the grave I arose and I pose without clothes but with prose just suppose suppose suppose Suppose someone very close to you whom you had every reason to trust and even love -wife, husband, mother, brother, childhood chum – really hated you insanely and always had hated you far too keenly to grant you the kindness of a quick death.

Suppose this person – apparently normal, having no obvious motive for wishing you ill, at least as clever as yourself, and infinitely more patient and with a medieval taste for long-drawn revenges and a matchless talent for creating alibis and diverting suspicion – suppose this person were plotting spider-like every free instant of his or her life to achieve your ultimate destruction after exquisite torture.

A nightmarish fancy? I agree.

But do not be sure there is not such a person for you. I am such a person for Richard Slade.

I am certain that the seeds of my hatred for Slade were sowed before the beginning of conscious memory. I sometimes think I simply was born hating the type. However, the first incident that comes to my mind when I recall my lifelong persecution of Richard Slade happened in middle boyhood. We were aimlessly loitering through a small town's summer dusk, sucking in the lovely odors of rotted leaves and damp wood.

That morning Dickie Slade had received from a mail-order house a small telescope for which he had saved allowance and errand money for months. He had been showing it off to me all day, dragging it out of his pocket and its case at every opportunity and brandishing it like a royal scepter.

I pretended to admire it, but actually I loathed Dickie's infatuation with the cheap thing and his intention to use it equally for observing the stars, the squirrels in the trees, and the bedroom window of young Mrs. Cloudsley across the street – just as I generally loathed his cowardice, his stupidity, his sneakiness, his gullibility, the intolerable dullness of his spirit.

But my time would come. In fact, it had. We had just reached a weed-walled path – now, in the evening, a dark trench – treading to Dickie's house across an empty lot and past a big hunk of concrete and a dead dwarfed tree that took on eerie shapes when the light failed.

Without warning I said in an anxious voice, "Better hurry, Dickie. You'll be late for supper."

This simple remark, as I had known it would, instantly switched Dickie's mood from dreamy ecstasy to formless dread. He took off down the path like a scared rabbit. At exactly the point where I'd known it would happen, he caught sight of the crouching evil tree. It lent wings to his feet and blinkers to his eyes, though considering the darkness of the path the blinkers were merely one of my artistic touches.

Hardly a second later he tripped over the dead branch I had that morning kicked casually but with infinite precision across the path, so that it was lying just two yards this side of the block of concrete.

The wind was knocked out of him. Far more important, the concrete smashed the object lens of the telescope and drove the other end against his cheek just beside his eye. He would soon have a fine shiner. Of course I would have liked to see him lose the eye eye eye aye aye ai ai ai I I I die and I sigh and I cry by and by but don't lie never lie yet I lie in the rye and my eye sees an eye in the sky why why why in the sky there's an eye there's an eye eye eye but I and the eye could wait. There'd always be another chance at the eye.

As I listened to his retching gasps turn to sobs, as I enjoyed his anguish over the damage to the telescope – his dawning realization that the stars would remain unmagnified and Mrs. Cloudsley cloaked with distance even when she forgot the bedroom shade – I realized for the first time with absolute certainty that this was what I wanted to do all my life. I had found my vocation.

I also knew I had been far too clever for Dickie ever to realize I had engineered the whole thing. He would always think it had been an accident.

However, even then I didn't make the mistake of underestimating my enemy. As Dickie finally got his wind back and limped home, I remember deciding that in the future I would avoid such direct attacks. A wonderful idea came to me. Karswell.

He was a venomous old teacher who was outrageously unfair to us boys. After a particularly nasty session, I egged on Dick to persuade the other boys to neglect their homework for the following day and refuse to recite when called on. I knew Dick had already completed the next assignment.

So the act of revolt was agreed upon, in the far corner of the cindered schoolyard, with all the tribal solemnity of boyhood. The group broke up and Dick and I started home. The walk led us past the police station and the yellow brick courthouse. Casually, as if it meant nothing to my young life, I reminded Dick that what we were going to do was a serious thing. After all, behind the teacher stood the principal, and behind the principal the policeman. Dick tucked his head when genial Officer Mason said hello to him. By the time we got to his house he was very unhappy.

I prudently waited while he went in to his mother – she never did like my looks and I detested her. She had a bad headache and was lying in the darkened parlor. She said something like, "...and always be a good boy." When he tiptoed out I said to him, as if impulsively, "Gee, Dick, I didn't know your mother was as sick as that. I bet if you got in any trouble she'd be awful worried and maybe something would happen to her."

In the dark hallway he twisted as if he had a stomachache.

Next morning Karswell called on Dick as soon as class started. Perhaps he smelled rebellion and was smart enough to attack at the weakest point, Dick, his seat to the rear and well-shielded by the fat boy in front of him, was doodling abstractedly and very rapidly – a habit of his. I saw that this time it was words, not pictures, that his pencil was spawning, with apparent aimlessness, and I noted with approval "police," "jail," and "mother."

Karswell creased his pulpy face and roughened his voice. Dick's pencil fluttered and stopped and like someone talking in his sleep he gave the correct answer.

The revolt fizzled out. None of the other boys had nerve enough to stand up to Karswell alone, though they had been only too glad of an excuse to skip their homework. Naturally they called Dick a double-crosser and a couple of them picked fights with him which he lost because he knew he was in the wrong. He never did live the blow to his pride down.

By the time we went to college I had my methods for tormenting Slade in smooth working order. I went first to his instructors. To each I said in effect, "Richard Slade is intensely interested in your subject. He will probably make it his life work. He is a very promising student, worthy of special attention."

Naturally they were flattered and modified their behavior toward Slade accordingly. A few months later I paid each of them a second visit. I said, "I can see now that I was mistaken. Richard Slade is not really interested in your subject. He has confused transient mental excitement with enduring intellectual dedication. Just where his actual interests lie it's difficult to say. Perhaps he is incapable of any." Dick, poor fool, could not understand the reason for their sudden cooling, though to my delight he was considerably hurt by it.

With an irony very amusing to me, he ended up by majoring in psychology, which netted him no real knowledge except such oddments of information as "automatic writing is on some respects the equivalent of word-doodling."

His habit of doodling had grown with the years. His compulsion aroused brief interest in a class in experimental psychology and was superficially investigated. He learned nothing about it, but he acquired the practice of storing away all the automatic writing he did – generally without looking at it, for in later years he came to hate his "wild talent," which sometimes operated even when he was asleep.

I wasn't being too rough on Slade at the time. It was a definite part of my plan to cushion him during those early years. Premature jolts must be avoided, I kept telling myself. He must be given the illusion of floating in a dreamy, easy current until I had my fish securely hooked crooked booked rooked cooked what a dish that poor fish ragged lipped belly ripped wet with blood and with mud in the boat and I gloat and I hate and I wait for my fate for it's late and I hate and I love hand in glove yes I love to make love and make hate with the girls with the girls with the girls With the girls.

I pursued the policy that had succeeded so well with the instructors, playing "Slade loves you" against "Slade does not really love you, perhaps he is incapable of love" until I worked some of them into pitiably neurotic states where they were as ready to wound themselves as to wound Slade. That pleased me, since I knew he would suffer in either case – more in the first.

During his last year at college Slade was deeply attracted to a girl somewhat more sophisticated than himself. She liked him and for a time I let matters develop unhindered.

Then I went to a brilliant young instructor who was quite friendly with Slade because of kindred intellectual interests and who had a secret reputation for amusing himself with such girls as were adult enough to be safe.

"Look, Satterlee," I said in effect, "why don't you sometimes go out with Slade and Beatrice? They both like you. They're your kind and I'm sure you would have some good times together. Besides, there's a special reason. Slade's often afraid he's boring Beatrice. A witty companion would take care of the dull moments and Slade would be flattered to have Beatrice know that you are his friend."

Satterlee balked at this somewhat unrealistic suggestion. So, very guardedly, I introduced an argument that I knew would eventually get him; namely, that Beatrice was not much in love with Slade and that Slade, appearances to the contrary, was even less in love with her and might be glad of an opportunity to shake loose. Needless to say, the latter suggestion was a flat lie.

After a few days, the three of them began to be seen together. There were wondering comments, also sardonic ones, quite baseless at the time. It was an interesting triangle. Beatrice was flattered, but a little uneasy. Satterlee, finding the situation somewhat different from the false one I had described to him, held his hand but did not withdraw. Slade kept me awake every night yapping about how happy he was.

Then in the late afternoon of a Saturday when the three of them had a date for dinner and a concert, I lured Slade into a game of chess with an opponent of just the right caliber to test his powers fully. I had selected him for precisely that reason.

It was an intensely exciting struggle, but prolonged. The dusty windows of the café annex grew dark. Lights were turned on. The small hand of the ugly wall-clock began its upward climb. Slade, I noted with approval, was nervously doodling in a notebook where he had started to keep the score of the game, filling page after page with words his eyes would never see.

He was tempted to break off the game by offering a draw, although he was in a winning position. But I pointed out he could forego the dinner and still be in time for the concert. (He held the three tickets.) Twice he tried to call Beatrice or Satterlee, but the lines were busy and he had to hurry back to the board.

Finally he rushed off with barely time to make the concert, having lost the game by an oversight. He was very nervous now and stood on the front platform of the rocking street car, although there were plenty of seats inside. Making good connections, he arrived at the auditorium with ten minutes to spare. But no Beatrice, and no Satterlee.

He paced the lobby until the concert had begun, then risked a dash to the restaurant on the off-chance that they might have waited for him there. Of course they hadn't. He hurried back. Still no Beatrice and Satterlee, although the man in the box office thought a couple answering to Slade's description of them had looked around the lobby and walked out.

Slade tried again to call them. The girl who answered the dormitory phone told him Beatrice had gone out before supper, while the phone in Satterlee's apartment rang unanswered. Eventually he went into the auditorium, leaving the other two tickets at the box office. He spent most of the evening darting back and forth between the lobby and the three empty seats.

Next day Beatrice and Satterlee had their excuses. Indeed at first Slade thought of himself as the guilty party. But I saw to it that he was informed that Beatrice had been seen leaving Satterlee's apartment early Sunday morning lorning warning horning suborning adorning scorning warning stop look listen listen look stop stop stop red red bed bed bred wed dead slain pain pain pain pain pain The pain this discovery caused Slade provided me with rare pleasure for the whole two months before his graduation.