Tales From Gavagan's Bar (33 page)

             
He stood up. The two cops patted me all over to see if I had any weapons, then hustled me pretty roughly down some stairs into a basement and threw me into a cell, where they locked me in. One of them called out: "Sweet dreams, species of a camel. I'll tell your sweetheart to meet you at the Luxembourg in the morning."

             
I groped around in the dark until I found a cot, and sat down on it to figure things out. I was fairly sober by this time, and I had the king of all hangovers, the kind you get from sobering up without having had a chance to sleep it off. I decided that if I was not dreaming, Hamid's amulet had been trying to do me a favor by introducing me to Antoinette Violanta, which was a very fine idea; but it had missed fire somehow, and landed me in the pokey as a by-product of the operation. With an espionage rap to beat, too. I know too much about the way the French handle that sort of thing to want to take a chance on getting clear, even though when I did, I could find the beautiful Antoinette. And I remembered Hamid had said the amulet would open all locked places. Well, I was behind a lock right then. So I took the amulet and applied it to the lock on the cell-door. It opened as though it had never been locked, and I stepped through into the hall in front of my own apartment. It was nearly dawn, and all I had to show for my trip was a burn on my hand and some thoroughly wet and pretty much torn clothes.

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Allen finished his Rob Roy and tapped his glass to show that he wanted another.

             
"Very interesting," said Willison. "Ver—y interesting. And did you try it again? Or try to check up?"

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As a matter of fact [said Allen] I did try writing to Pa
ris, but you know how French officials are. They just didn't answer when I asked about somebody named Antoinette Violanta, and I haven't had the chance to go over and check in person. It wouldn't be much use now; she'd be something over fifty. And I haven't tried the amulet again because of something else that happened.

             
I was at the house of a girl I know, waiting for her to finish dressing before going out on a date with me one night, when I picked up a silver cigarette box to have a smoke. The lid stuck. I was looking at a magazine at the time, and without watching what I was doing, I got out my bunch of keys and stuck the thin edge of the amulet into the crack where the lid met the box, and twisted.

             
The box came open all right, but when I reached in still with my eyes on the magazine, I got a burn instead of a cigarette. I said, "Ow!" and looked then. And I saw Hell.

             
["Hell?" chorused two or three of the listeners. "What did it look like?" asked Witherwax.]

             
It looked the way you'd expect Hell to look if you were a Fundamentalist. It was only a peep-hole view, but the place was full of real, red angry flames, with little figures moving somewhere far down. Only I didn't get a chance to see any details, because I was so startled I dropped the box. It landed on the lid and closed again, and when I picked it up and opened it, it was full of cigarettes, like always.

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"So you don't dare try the amulet any more?" said Willison.

             
Allen finished his drink. "No, it's not that. It's just that I'd rather like to get some inkling of what to expect. For example, I don't want to equip myself with an elephant gun and turn
up at the court of Napoleon or the North Pole. Look." He slid off the bar stool, walked across to the broom closet at the back of the room, and, producing something from his pocket, dabbed at the lock. The door swung open, and the others standing at the bar had an impression of something bright inside.

             
"Well, I'll be damned!" said Allen's voice. He disappeared
into the broom closet as though he had been jerked from inside, and the door banged to behind him.

             
"Hey!" said Mr. Cohan. He strode across to the closet and flung it open.

             
From the little
12
-by
-12
window at the back, a gust of cool air swirled through Gavagan's Bar, but the closet was empty.

-

             
The young man in the expensive suit put his hat on the stool beside him and said: "Scotch!"

             
Doc Brenner paused with his Manhattan halfway to his mouth and said: "In my experience, anyone who asks for Scotch in that tone of voice is either a non-drinker taking a big plunge, or a heavy drinker who can't be bothered with mixtures." He stopped and turned his head from left to right and back, sniffing.

             
"I smell it too," said Witherwax. "Oh, Mr. Cohan!" The bartender had given the young man his Scotch and came in answer to the appeal. "What's that smell all of a sudden? It's like a whale died in here, a long time ago."

             
The young man in the expensive suit put down his Scotch and shuddered violently, demonstrating the accuracy of Doc Brenner's observation.

             
"By God, I wish I knew," said Mr. Cohan. "It wasn't here a minute ago, and it seems to come from around him," he indicated the young man, "but that wouldn't be right now. That's Mr. Fries, and he's got more dollars than you have dimes and can afford soap if he wants to buy it."

             
"You ought to have Gavagan look after the plumbing," began Brenner, but was interrupted by the entry of an individual with a mop of unruly iron-grey hair and a pince-nez, who immediately took his place beside Mr. Fries. Like the others he sniffed, then laughed, revealing a set of teeth that would have done
credit to a crocodile.

             
"Phil, you stink!" said he. "Mr. Cohan, give me a Stinger. It will help kill the odor emanating from my unfortunate friend here. Didn't it work?"

             
"Are you kidding?" said Fries. "Another Scotch, Mr. Cohan. This is the latest counter-attack. The whole house is full of it, and I can't even bear to smell myself, even if I do work in a laboratory."

             
"I wonder what went wrong," said the man with the crocodile smile.

             
"I don't know, but something better go right pretty quick. Mrs. Harrison is going to leave if I don't get rid of it, and Alice is supposed to come down for the weekend, and I don't even dare go up there and see her instead. George, if it doesn't stop I'll go nuts!" His voice rose in intensity and the knuckles of the hand that clutched the bar were white.

             
Witherwax said: "Pardon me, but you seem to be in a good deal of trouble. Is there any way we could help?"

             
"Yes," Brenner said. "Why not put your difficulties up to Mr. Cohan here? With all his experience behind the bar at Gavagan's, there aren't many things he doesn't have some answer for."

             
Fries made a push-away gesture and drank from his glass, but George flashed his row of teeth and said: "He's got a ghost, and it likes him."

             
"The ghost seems to have a rather queer way of displaying affection—" began Brenner, but Fries made another motion with his hand and said: "All right, all right, I'll tell about it. I think people you meet in Gavagan's can be trusted to keep a secret, and this is one. And maybe you can spot wh
at's wrong, Mr. Cohan. George can't, and he's supposed to be an expert. That's why I went to him in the first place. He's studied all that sort of thing for years and even has a collection of medieval manuscripts. And it just gets worse. A week ago—"

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Look here, I better start at the beginning. I own that big brown house on Baltimore Street, the one with the shutters. I don't know exactly how old it is; a couple of hundred years,
I guess. It's always been in our family; was built by an ancestor of mine, about seven greats back, who was a good deal of an old rip and was supposed to be in league with the Devil. They believed in that sort of thing those days. Maybe he's the ghost himself; but he hasn't communicated, and I don't know that it matters. The main thing is that the ghost has been in the building for a long time, one of those ghosts that throws things around. ["Poltergeist," said George.]

             
I know [Fries went on] but I wanted to explain. In spite of the odd happenings the ghost caused, it never made trouble for any member of the family—at least not in recent generations, though back in Victorian times when it was really fashionable to be frightened of ghosts, it may have been different. The fact is that our poltergeist established itself quite early in the game as taking a kind of benevolent interest in us.

             
I can remember when I was a kid, we'd always have a Hallowe'en party at home, and Donald—we called him Donald for no good reason except that it was the name of the ancestor who built the house—would put on a special show for the occasion. If we were telling stories in front of the fire, there'd be a sound of footsteps from upstairs where there wasn't anybody, or else a can that someone had been going to take down cellar would tip over and go rolling down, bump, bump, bump, or a candle would go out in perfectly still air. It was very thrilling and satisfactory, and unlike most families, we grew up regarding ghosts as quite amiable and friendly creatures.

             
Donald paid for his keep by more than merely being amusing, too. There was an aunt of my mother's who came for a visit, bringing a perfect horror of a Chinese vase that didn't match anything in the decoration. I don't know what my mother intended to do with the thing, but as it turned out she didn't have to do anything. When the family came down for breakfast, Donald had taken care of it and the vase was on the floor, broken in about a thousand pieces. And there's a family story that when some burglars broke into the
place a few years back, he raised such a terrible racket that everyone woke up and the burglars had to leave in a hurry. Give me another drink; I'm feeling better.

             
After my parents died and my sister got married and moved away, I had the house to myself except for Mrs. Harrison, the housekeeper. You might ask why I don't sell the old place, and I'll answer by saying that nobody wants to pay anything like what it's worth for a twenty-room house, even one with a poltergeist in it, and the girl I'm going to marry—that is, if I am—[Fries looked gloomily into his glass] wants to live in it. Anyway, with me alone there, Donald apparently got to feeling lonely. When I'd get home late from the laboratory, there would be a few companionable hangings around the place, and in the morning I'd find a book he had pulled out of the bookcase and thrown on the floor—just some friendly little action to let me know he was there taking care of me and appreciated having me there, too.

             
You have to understand that I met Alice at a college reunion up at Williamsburg. That's where she lives with her mother, and even if it isn't the nicest thing to say about one's future mother-in-law, that mother is a horrible old harridan. She can talk the paint off a wall and is always having everyone in for a tea fight or a seance. Did I say she was a Spiritualist? Well, she is; one of the kind that's always writing letters to newspapers and making a big fuss over the business. I don't know how Alice has stood her this long. But Alice and I hit it off right from the start, and it wasn't long before we decided it would be a good idea to get married.

             
Her mother raised a terrible row about it, not that she had anything definite against me, but just because she can't bear to see Alice getting away from her. Of course, Alice is old enough to write her own ticket, but after all, Mrs. Hilton— that's her name now, she's been married and divorced about six times—Mrs. Hilton is her mother, and she didn't want to hurt her. So we finally agreed that after we were married, she'd come and live with us in the big house.

             
I figured that in a twenty-room place there'd be space enough to keep out of her way, and Alice felt the same. Just
to give the thing a dry run, I asked them both down for New Year's weekend at the place. That's where the trouble started; that's why I smell like essence of decayed cabbage tonight.