Collector of Souvenirs ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp
Winter was going to hit hard. The woman had been preparing for weeks. The root cellar and larder were full to overflowing with everything she would need until spring. Firewood was stacked to the ceiling. She wouldn’t have to set foot outside the house unless of her own choosing.
She didn’t mind being alone, even if her solitude lasted for months, and she would have plenty to do to pass the time. She had her books, her sewing and her music. She was mastering some difficult pieces for piano that she had never had the concentration for before. She planned on making some dresses and fancy goods that she would sell in her cousin’s shop in the village in the spring to earn some money. When she grew tired of these pursuits, she would nap and look out at the winter landscape, or else daydream and jot down notes for a book she had been planning to write since she was twelve years old.
On Thursday, the first day of December, the snow began to fall. At first it fell lightly but after a while it was like a curtain of gauze. It accumulated very fast, rendering the scene out the window all but unrecognizable. There was not a sound to be heard except the wind blowing the snow around the little house and rattling the bare branches on the trees. Far off in the valley the houses looked like playthings on a blanket of cotton with the thin streams of smoke coming from their chimneys. It reminded her of a beautiful scene she had once seen in a store window at Christmastime of a miniature village with a tiny electric train going in and out of tunnels in the mountain.
In late afternoon on the second day of snowfall, she had just taken some bread out of the oven when she heard a scraping sound at the back door. She thought it was her cat wanting to be let in, but he was asleep in his box in the corner. When she went to the door and opened it a little to see who or what was there, she saw a man standing there, bent over from the waist as if to catch his breath.
“Are you lost?” she asked, not thinking for a moment to be alarmed. She would allow him to come in and sit at the table and warm himself and she would help to set him on the right course.
When the man looked at her in the half-dark, she almost, but not quite, recognized him. It couldn’t be who she thought it was. That person was dead and deserved to be so.
“They’re after me,” he said.
“Who is?” she asked, but instead of answering he burst through the door, pushing her back against the wall.
“Just a minute,” she said. “You’ve got the wrong house!”
“Don’t you recognize me?” he asked, taking off his hat and letting her see his face in the light.
“It’s not…”
“Yes, it is I,” he said. “It’s Michael.”
“No,” she said.
“Give me something to eat. I’m starving.”
She moved around to the other side of the table away from him. She saw her cat scuttle off into the next room, afraid of a stranger being admitted to the house.
“All right,” she said, trying to think. “I’ll feed you but then you’ll have to leave.”
He laughed and pulled out a chair from the table and sat down and began to take off his boots. “You’re not going to get rid of me that easily, my pet.”
“You can’t stay here.”
“Why not? We’re man and wife.”
“They told me you were dead.”
“A man thought to be dead can get away with so much more than a man known to be alive.”
“You can’t stay here. I have someone coming.”
“Who?”
“My aunt and uncle are coming. And my cousin. My aunt and my cousin are coming tomorrow to spend a few days with me.”
“In this weather? I don’t believe you. Nobody is coming here and you know it.” He took hold of her arm by the wrist and twisted it a little. “After I’ve eaten we’ll have a good long lie-in.”
“You can stay the night. I’ll make a pallet for you on the floor near the fire, but in the morning you have to leave.”
“You don’t seem to be hearing me,” he said, grinning up at her. “I’m going to hide out here for a while. What wife wouldn’t offer refuge to her husband?”
“We’re no longer man and wife. The marriage is invalid.”
“Not according to my book of rules, it’s not.”
She set the steaming plate of food in front of him. “I have a little money in the house. You can have it as long as you promise me I won’t ever see you again.”
He laughed as he began eating. “I don’t think your pin money would do me a lot of good right now.”
“Why do you want to torment me?”
“I’m your husband. Isn’t that what husbands do?”
“I despise you. I was happy when your father came and told me you were dead. It meant I was free of you.”
“You always knew how to be cruel, didn’t you?”
“If you don’t leave, I’m going to put on my boots and walk down the mountain to the village. I know people there. I’ll be back in no time at all with three or four men carrying shotguns.”
“You’d never make it. The snow is too deep but even if it wasn’t you wouldn’t be able to see two feet in front of you. You’d freeze to death and they wouldn’t find your body until spring.”
She sat down at the table across from him. “All right,” she said. “Suppose you stay here for a few days. A week or two. What then?”
“After the snow settles, I’m going to send word to some friends to join me here.”
“What friends?”
“You don’t know them.”
“After that, what then?”
“Well, we wait here—all winter if need be—until the little spot of trouble we’re in dies down.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Now, that’s not a fair question without knowing the circumstances. All will be revealed in time.”
“What if I said I don’t want any part of this? What if I said this is my house and you and your friends are not welcome here?”
“Then, I’m afraid your husband would be bound to overrule you.” He took a small gun out of his pocket and set it on the table in front of him. “I’m sure you’ll come around to my way of thinking after you’ve had time to get over the shock of seeing me again.”
She stood up and walked around the table to stand behind him, putting her hand on his shoulder. He slumped in the chair as if melting under her touch.
“I never stopped thinking of you,” he said. “There were so many times I wanted to let you know I was alive and would be coming back to you.”
“What would you have done if I had married again?”
“I guess I would have had to kill him,” he said with a small laugh.
“You’re tired, now, dear,” she said. “You just need to rest.”
“Yes, we’ll talk more in the morning.”
“No one knows you’re here?” she asked. “No one at all?”
“Not a living soul on God’s green earth,” he said. “We’re safe and it’s so good to be home.”
She picked up a small, razor-sharp knife that she kept handy to cut up poultry and game and plunged it into his neck a couple of inches below his ear. Blood gushed like a fountain from the severed artery in his neck. He fell off the chair onto the floor, writhing in pain and rage. He tried to speak but only made gurgling sounds. She stood back several feet and watched him as he reached feebly for the table as if to try to pull himself up. After a couple of minutes he bled to death.
She fed his body into the fire. How he sputtered and crackled as the fire consumed him! How quickly and easily he burned! She had to smile to herself as she imagined the particles of him going out the chimney in smoke, spreading out into the frigid winter night.
When the fire cooled and she saw there were fragments of bone among the ashes, she ground them into a fine dust with a mortar and pestle that had belonged to her father. She poured the dust into a glass jar with a lid and placed the jar on a shelf, alongside her glass pig from a county fair she had attended when she was fifteen years old and other souvenirs that she kept from significant events in her life.
My wife, Pseudophia, had become increasingly unable to function. She stayed in her darkened room all the time, lying in bed and staring at the wall screen. If I ever shut it off, she became horribly agitated. At times she projected herself into what was happening in the pictures and if it was turned off she believed she was dead. The only two things in her life that had any meaning for her anymore were the drugs she was addicted to for her illness and the wall screen.
I needed help with taking care of Pseudophia and managing the cooking and household chores, so I took a two-year option on a female domestic robot. When the two years are up, I will either own the robot outright or I can send her back to where she came from. I considered getting a combination domestic model and pleasure model, but I settled for the domestic model only.
After the robot had been with us for about two weeks, I went into the kitchen one evening when she was washing the dinner dishes.
“That was a wonderful dinner, Sunny,” I said, coming up behind her and taking her by surprise.
She turned and smiled at me. “So glad you liked it, sir.”
“How do you like being with us?” I asked.
“I like it fine, sir,” she said. “This is my first assignment.”
I couldn’t help noticing, as she reached above her head to put the plates away, that she looked the same as she had looked in the morning; her blue-and-white check dress appeared freshly laundered and she hadn’t a hair out of place.
“You look so real,” I said. “I can hardly believe you’re a robot.”
“We prefer the term ‘human simulant’,” she said.
“Of course. When I was growing up, I was afraid of the domestic robots. I thought they were monsters. They didn’t look human then. We had one that seemed to be about eight feet tall. Any time it came near me, I ran and hid.”
“Robot technology has come a long way since then, sir,” she said.
“Do you mind if I touch your cheek?”
“If you wish, sir.”
She held still as I ran the tips of my fingers along her cheek, down to her chin.
“You feel warm,” I said. “Human.”
“My body temperature is ninety-eight point six degrees, sir.”
“Just like a living person.”
“Just as you say, sir.”
“Would you like to go for a little walk around the lake with me after you’re finished with the dishes?” I asked. “There’s a full moon tonight.”
“Now, you know I can’t do that, sir.” she said. “If I don’t get my full eight hours recharging my energy supply, I won’t be able to perform effectively tomorrow.”
“Of course,” I said. I turned away and began rearranging the fruit in the bowl on the table.
“I sense that you’re lonely, sir,” she said.
“No, it’s not that. I just wanted to talk to you about my wife.”
“What about your wife, sir?”
“What do you think about her condition? Do you think the situation is hopeless?”
I forgot for the moment that robots don’t think but only reflect the thoughts of the humans they live among.
“It’s not for me to say, sir,” she said. “Surely you’ve consulted with doctors. What do they say?”
“They say she has a rare degenerative disease that will become progressively worse until she dies.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that, sir. She’s so young and I can tell by looking at her that she was very beautiful before she became ill.”
“She used to be an excellent knife-thrower and she could walk up and down stairs on her hands. She had musical ability, too; she played show tunes on the musical saw.”
“You’re fortunate to have those memories of her, sir.”
I picked up an apple from the bowl and took a bite of it because I was feeling uncomfortable talking about Pseudophia the way she used to be and I didn’t know what else to do.
“Why don’t you go sit in your comfortable recline chair and I’ll bring you a drink that will relax you and help you to sleep?” Sunny said with a sympathetic smile.
I went into the other room and made myself comfortable, and in a few minutes she brought me a little glass of green liquid.
“What is it?” I asked as I took the glass from her.
“Just something I learned to make in school,” she said. “I don’t think you would have ever heard of it.”
I took a tiny taste of the green liquid and I immediately felt a warming sensation throughout my entire body.
“It tastes good,” I said.
“I was sure you would like it, sir,” she said.
She turned on some soothing music and straightened some objects on the desk and turned off all the lights in the room except for one and turned and faced me with her hands clasped in front of her.
“If there’s nothing else you require, sir, I believe I’ll retire for the evening,” she said.
“Of course,” I said. “Good night, Sunny.”
“Good night, sir.”
I drank all the liquid in the glass and dozed for a while, listening to the music that was, I believe, a string quartet by Schubert. After a few minutes I stood up and, instead of going up the stairs to my own bedroom as I had planned to do, I went into Pseudophia’s room and closed the door quietly.
Black-and-white images flickered on the wall screen, affording just enough light in the room for me to see Pseudophia sprawled on her back on the bed. She was a terrible sight with her mouth open and her hair in wild disarray. Her eyes were wild and staring but unfocused, so I knew she didn’t see me and she knew nothing. It was becoming almost impossible for me to remember the person she had been.
I picked a pillow up from the bed and, without thinking about what I was about to do, put it over her face and leaned on it with both hands. She offered very little resistance—only a slight reflexive movement of the arms and legs—and soon I knew she was dead. When I pulled the pillow away from her face, she looked no different—the only difference was that she wasn’t breathing.
I awoke at about nine o’clock the next morning to the smell of food cooking. Feeling a stab of hunger, I got out of bed and put on my bathrobe and went downstairs.
Sunny was pouring a cup of tea for me when I went into the kitchen and sat down at the table and picked up the morning paper.
“Breakfast is nearly ready,” she said as she placed the cup of tea at my elbow with a smile.
I unfolded the paper, took a drink of the scalding tea and watched Sunny as she walked across the room. She looked radiant in a yellow pinafore with a white blouse and a yellow ribbon in her white-blonde hair. I couldn’t help noticing that her lips were very red and her cheeks looked flushed.
“You look like a ray of sunshine this morning,” I said as she set a plate of food before me.
“You’re too kind,” she said with a becoming blush.
“Did you have a good rest?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Most restful. I was up early this morning, though. The undertaker’s assistants came and took away poor Pseudophia’s body before daylight.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” I said.
“I didn’t want to wake you. I took care of everything. They wanted your signature on a release form, but I signed your name for you. The man said he thought that would be all right. I hope I did the right thing.”
“Of course,” I said.
“If you have everything you need for the moment, sir, I’ll just go upstairs and tidy up.”
“There’s just one thing,” I said.
“What is it?” she asked.
“What was in that drink you gave me last night?”
“Nothing special, sir. Just a drink.”
“That will be all for now,” I said with a grateful nod of my head.
“And if I may say so, sir?” she said as she turned to go out of the room.
“Yes?”
“I think your life is going to be very happy and very bright from now on.”
I heard her footsteps on the stairs as I picked up the fork and began eating my breakfast.
Carla picked up one of her lesser teddy bears and examined it carefully, front and back. It was pink with little red overalls and white snout, ears and feet. Its eyes were open wide in delighted greeting and its mouth formed a little cupid’s bow, as if delivering a kiss to the world. She shook it vigorously for dust and put it in a pillow case and left for school.
All morning long, everywhere she went, in class after class, people were talking about one thing above all others: Marlene Bowen, just turned sixteen, was dropping out of school because she was going to have a baby. Most of the speculation centered on who the father was, which had not yet been revealed. Carla pretended she wasn’t interested and contributed nothing to the discourse, but she was as titillated by the subject as anybody else.
At lunch she was sitting at a table by herself, wishing it was time to go home, when Jeddah Godric sat down across from her. She had known Jeddah since first grade and had never liked her very much. She had an annoying manner and a funny smell like a closed-up basement.
“Have you seen her today?” Jeddah asked, eyes glinting with excitement.
“Seen who?” Carla asked.
“Marlene Bowen.”
“No, why should I?”
“Today is her last day in school. She won’t ever be back.”
“How do you know she won’t be back? She can come back after she has the baby.”
“I heard she won’t be back because she’s getting married.”
“Who is she going to marry?”
“The father of the baby, silly. It could be the janitor or the football coach. Maybe even the algebra teacher. There’s reason to suspect.”
“It isn’t any of them,” Carla said.
“Do you know something I don’t know?” Jeddah asked, specks of food spraying out her mouth.
Carla shrugged as if she might know something but wasn’t telling.
She was about to leave and go to her fifth period science class to go over some notes before a test, when there was a stir at the entrance to the lunch room. People stepped out the way to let somebody through and a hush came over those already seated.
“Oh, my god!” Jeddah said, turning all the way around to gawk. “It’s her!”
Marlene Bowen had just come into the lunch room alone. Everybody was looking at her but she didn’t look back. She picked up a tray and started moving down the line, not taking her eyes off the food behind the glass. She had a little smile on her lips that seemed frozen on, as though part of a pose.
“How can she be so brazen?” Jeddah said. “How can she hold up her head?”
When Marlene sat down at a table, a couple of boys at the other end got up and left quickly, as though they might be contaminated by being near her. Marlene leaned forward over her tray and began stuffing food into her mouth. She was hungry, eating for two as she was.
The afternoon dragged on exactly like all the afternoons that had come before it. Finally the bell rang to go home. Carla put her books away in her locker and took the teddy bear in the pillow case and went down to the first floor and waited near the door. In a little while she saw Marlene Bowen coming toward her.
“Hi, Marlene,” she said cheerily, as if they were old friends.
Marlene stopped and raised her eyes and looked at Carla. “Oh, hello,” she said.
“Where are you going?” Carla asked.
“I’m going home. Where do you think?”
“I have something I want to give you.”
“What is it? Do I know you?”
“We’ve never met but I feel like I already know you.”
“Oh.”
Marlene started to brush past Carla, as if to bring the conversation to an end, but Carla stood between her and the door.
“I just wanted to give you this,” Carla said. She took the teddy bear out of the pillow case and held it out.
Marlene eyed the bear and huffed with impatience. “Is this some kind of a joke?”
“No, it’s just something I wanted to give you. A little present because today is your last day in school.”
“Why would I want that stupid thing?” Marlene said. She grabbed the bear out of Carla’s hand and threw it in the direction of the trash can and went out the door.
The bear hit the wall and missed going into the can. Carla picked it up and ran out the door after Marlene.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” she called to Marlene. “I just wanted you to have it for your baby.”
Marlene turned around and faced Carla. “Today has been the worst day of my life,” she said. “Everybody is laughing at me. I thought I could keep it a secret but when I said I had to quit school, I had to give a reason. When one person found out, then everybody knew. The people in this school are cruel and hateful and I hope they all rot in hell!”
“Do you want a boy or a girl?” Carla asked. “What are you going to name it?”
“You’re the only person who has been nice to me all day,” Marlene said, crying. “I’m sorry I was so rude.” She grabbed the bear from Carla and, holding it to her breast, ran off very fast. Carla watched her down the street until she was out of sight.
When she started to walk away, she saw a shiny object on the sidewalk where Marlene had been standing. She bent over and picked it up, seeing it was a little locket worn around the neck, the kind of locket to keep a person’s picture in. She opened the locket with her thumbnail and saw the face of someone she recognized, a person that anybody in the school would know. It was the face of the new, bowtie-wearing English teacher, Mr. Truex, just out of college. That must mean that Mr. Truex was the father of Marlene’s baby. What else could it mean? He would probably lose his job over impregnating Marlene and might even go to jail since she was legally a minor. It had the potential of the being the scandal of the year.
That evening at the dinner table, Carla said to her mother, “I know a girl at school who’s going to have a baby. They say she doesn’t know who the father is, but I think she does know.”
“How awful!” Carla’s mother said. “What is this world coming to?”
“I gave her a teddy bear.”
“Why in the world would you do that?”
“Today was her last day. I wanted to do something for her.”
“I don’t want you to be seen talking to a girl like that. Do you understand me? You’re not to have anything to do with her.”
“Why do you say a ‘girl like that’? You don’t know anything about her.”
The phone rang and Carla’s mother got up to answer it, ending the conversation. Carla looked at her father but he stood up and went out the back door, suddenly remembering something that required his attention in the garage.
Left alone at the table, Carla took the locket out of her pocket and ran her fingers over it. She opened it and looked at the picture inside, as she had done a dozen times since finding it. Mr. Truex was so handsome and it was so romantic that he and Marlene Bowen were having a child together.
She would wait a few days before she let Marlene know she knew her secret. It must be worth something. Maybe it would open the door to friendship. She could see herself standing by Marlene during the difficult days ahead when everybody else, even her family, abandoned her. For the first time in her life she knew the power of a secret knowledge. She planned on finding a way to use it to her advantage.
August put the strap of his duffle bag over his shoulder and looked around the room as if seeing it for the last time. His eyes lingered fondly over the books, the closet that held his clothes, the door to the bathroom, the writing desk, the bed that (he realized now) was the best and most comfortable bed in the world. He wouldn’t be back for two weeks and two weeks is a long time when you’re going someplace you don’t want to go. He was already homesick and he hadn’t even left yet.
He had been going to take the bus but his father agreed as a kind of concession to drive him the hundred miles to camp. He was silent the entire way, staring grimly out the window. When he saw a sign that said they had only ten miles to go, his mouth went dry and he felt a sick feeling in his stomach.
“You’re going to have such a good time,” his father said, as if reading his mind.
“I don’t want to do this,” August said. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“You’re not going to be sick,” his father said. “ You’re going to be fine. Look, we all have to do things we don’t want to do. That’s the way life is. Sometimes those things we don’t want to do can turn out to be very good for us.”
“Mother wouldn’t have made me go.”
“Your doctor had to pull some strings to get you accepted. Not everybody can get into this camp.”
“I wish I had been one of the ones that couldn’t get in.”
“He believes it’s the best thing for you at this point in your development.”
“He’s an idiot. I’d like to see him spend two weeks away from home in a strange place with a bunch of strangers he doesn’t care to know.”
“Give it a chance, August. Please, for my sake.”
“How do you know I won’t run away when nobody’s looking. Hitchhike back home?”
“Is that what you’re planning on doing?”
“No, I’m just saying ‘what if’.”
“I don’t want you hitchhiking. You’re only thirteen years old. You don’t know what the world is like yet.”
“I have a pretty good idea.”
“I don’t want to find you in a ditch with your throat cut and God only knows what else.”
“It might turn out to be a good thing.”
When they came to the camp, his father pulled off the highway and went up an enormous hill where the trees were so thick they kept out the sunlight. He turned in at a gate marked “welcome” at the top of the hill and drove around a winding drive to a low, rustic building where new arrivals were supposed to check in. He parked the car and turned off the engine.
“That’s all right,” August said. “You don’t have to wait. You can just drop me off.”
“No,” his father said. “This is your first time away from home. I want to see where you’ll be staying. I want to talk to the person in charge.”
They went inside. His father waited patiently while August stood in line to sign in. When he had his room assignment, his father insisted on going to the room with him and seeing it. He wanted to have a picture in his head to take back home, he said, of the place where August would be staying.
Each cabin had four rooms with four boys to a room. August was in room two of cabin eight. The three other boys who would be staying in the room with him had already arrived, so August had to take the bed that was left over. He didn’t mind because it was the bed that was the farthest from the others. He threw his bag down and turned to his father.
“You can go now,” he said.
“You’ll be all right?” his father asked. “You like the room?”
“Does it matter?”
“Aren’t you going to say good-bye to me before I go?”
“Good-bye.”
“Won’t you miss me?”
“Probably not as much as you think I should.”
His father put his hands on his shoulders, patted him twice, and then left him alone in the room. Out the window August saw him talking to one of the counselors, a thin young man dressed all in white. His father had his back to the window but August could see the face of the counselor as it went from jolly to seriously attentive. He knew his father was telling him August’s history of emotional problems and how they had all been trying to get August to open up to others and emerge from his self-imposed isolation before it was too late.
After his father drove away, August lay down on the bed, not knowing exactly what he was supposed to do. In a little while his three roommates came in and August stood up. They introduced themselves and shook hands like little men. Two of them, Ricky and Eddie, were younger than August and had a callow, frightened look. The third was half-a-head taller and a year or two older. His name was Randall. He had a self-confident swagger that August found intimidating. If August had trouble with any of them, it would be with Randall.
“There’s something I think I should tell you about myself,” August said, when the others had stopped talking and he had a chance to speak.
“What’s that?” Randall asked.
“I don’t want to be here and I want to be left alone. If you don’t mess with me, we’ll be fine, but if you’re thinking about playing any little tricks on me like putting a snake in my bed or dipping my toothbrush in the toilet, I have to tell you I’m not right in the head and I can snap. I have a big knife and I don’t mind using it.”
Ricky and Eddie sat side by side on the bed looking at him, trying to figure out what he was saying. Ricky smiled but Eddie looked scared.
“I don’t believe you have a knife,” Randall said with a sneer. “Let me see it.”
“Oh, you don’t want to see it,” August said.
“You’re not supposed to have weapons here.”
“Well, nobody needs to know about it. Just knowing it exists ought to be enough.”
“Maybe Captain Jack should know about it too,” Randall said.
“Who’s Captain Jack?”
“He’s the head counselor,” Eddie said.
“He doesn’t need to know about it,” August said. “It’s just for the four of us to know.”
Ricky and Eddie nodded their heads and smiled as if a mystery had been cleared up.
“Big man,” Randall said. “Big, crazy man.”
At dinner in the cafeteria, he imagined that people were looking at him oddly, whispering about him and avoiding being near him, so he figured that Randall must have told people what he said about having a knife. After dinner he went back to the room and lay on his back on the bed with his hands across his chest. Eddie and Ricky came in and asked him if he wanted to go for a walk to see the lake, but he said he was sick from the terrible food and he couldn’t get up off the bed.
That night he couldn’t sleep because the bed was hard and narrow, he was hot, and the chirring of the insects kept him awake. He was still awake around two in the morning when a thunderstorm moved through and nearly tore the roof off the cabin, which the others didn’t seem to notice.
Breakfast was at seven-thirty. After breakfast everybody was required to attend an orientation meeting in the assembly hall, at which the rules of the camp were explained. At the end of the meeting, each camper was given a schedule of events and activities. Failure to follow the schedule resulted in demerits. A certain number of demerits resulted in expulsion from the camp. August glanced briefly at his schedule and crumpled it up. Just like school, he thought, only worse. At school he at least got to go home at the end of the day.
His first scheduled activity was a demonstration of wood carving. He was trying to figure out where he was supposed to go when the young counselor he had seen talking to his father approached him.
“Are you August Gilpin?” the counselor asked, not unlike a police officer serving a summons.
“Who wants to know?”
“Don’t get cute with me. I know who you are.”
“If you know, then why are you asking?”
“Captain Jack wants to see you in his office right away in the administration building.”
“What for?”
“We don’t tolerate any shit here from you city kids, even the crazy ones. You’re about to find that out.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” August said. “I haven’t done anything.”
“They’re waiting for you, little man.”
“Let them wait. I don’t care. They can go to hell.”
He looked over his shoulder to see if anybody was watching him and then he left camp. He didn’t go out the front gate and down the road but instead went around by the lake and into the woods. He found a path through the thick trees and heavy foliage on the other side of the lake but he didn’t know where it led. It led away from camp and that was the important thing.
He followed the path for a long way and then he came to a converging path going in another direction. He was tired of going the same way so he took the new path. It seemed to hold promise in a vague way that he didn’t understand. Maybe the path would lead him to what he was looking for, but he didn’t know yet what that was.
After a while the path ended, or turned back on itself, but he didn’t mind. He kept going because the pathless foliage was not as thick as it had been or the trees as forbidding. It was easy walking for as far as he could see.
Coming to a high hill with some large rocks, he sat down to rest. From that vantage point he could see a long way, perhaps miles. He saw some houses and a road, so he knew he wasn’t hopelessly lost in the woods. On the road he saw a few cars and large trucks on their way to the city. He would hitch a ride with one of the truck drivers. He would tell him he was hiking in the woods with friends and got separated from them, became lost on his own, and wanted only to get back home and let everybody know he was all right.
The road was farther away than it appeared. He was sweating when he reached it, out of breath and thirsty. He began walking in the direction he believed was home. Cars whizzed past him going very fast. He didn’t know how he was ever going to get anybody to stop.
He had walked maybe a quarter-mile or so with his back to oncoming traffic, when a big car, an old white Cadillac, slowed, passed him and pulled off onto the shoulder ahead of him. He didn’t understand at first if somebody was offering him a ride or if it was something else.
The driver rolled down the window and motioned for August to come to him. August saw it was an older man, much older than his father.
“Where you headed?” the man asked him.
“I’m not really sure,” August said.
“You look like you’re pretty well done in. Get in and we’ll give you a ride.”
He reached behind him and pulled the latch on the back door, opening it partway. August grabbed onto the door and got in. He saw right away that there was a woman in the car with the man.
“This is my wife, Nellie Fritchie,” the man said.
“How do you do?” the woman said. She turned around and faced August but he knew she couldn’t see him because she was blind. Her eyes rolled around in her head like loose marbles and her eyelids fluttered. Her face was very wrinkled and she wore a blond wig that seemed too young for her and lots of lipstick.
“And my name is Johnny Fritchie,” the man said.
“Hello,” August said.
“And what might your name be?”
“Carl Heinrich,” he said. It was the first name that came to him, the name of an older boy he knew from school.
“And how old are you, Carl?”
“Thirteen.”
“That’s pretty young to be walking along the highway in this part of the United States alone, Carl. Are you sure you’re not in some kind of trouble?”
“No, I’m not.”
“I’m not even going to ask you where you live, Carl, because I don’t think you’d tell me the truth. Would you like to know where we live?”
“Where?”
“We live hundreds and hundreds of miles from here in the state of Maine. Have you ever been to Maine, Carl?”
“No.”
“Would you like to see Maine?”
“I guess so.”
“We have a big house on the coast of Maine with more room than the two of us need. Would you like to come and be our guest for a while, Carl? For as long as you want, really. You don’t have to answer me right this minute, Carl. Just sit there and think about it. I admire a man who takes his time to make decisions.”
August lay down on the broad seat and put his legs up. He turned over on his side with his face toward the seat back. The leather smelled good and felt cool against his face. He felt perfectly relaxed and at ease for the first time in a long time. As he drifted off to sleep, he felt the tires underneath him turning, turning, putting miles between himself and everything he wanted to leave behind.
See a Show, Smoke a Lucky ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp
MissBobbie Bouchard lived in an air-conditioned apartment on the fifteenth floor in an apartment building in the city. When her mother went into the hospital for an extended stay during the summer, she sent Bobbie to stay with her aunt and uncle on their farm a hundred miles from the city. Bobbie rode all that way on the bus by herself, feeling very grown-up and wishing she had bought along a pack of cigarettes to smoke on the way. When the bus stopped midway through the trip for a rest stop at a little café, she went inside and sat at a booth by herself and ordered a tuna salad sandwich and a Coke just like a seasoned traveler.
Uncle Floyd and Aunt Bernice had two children of their own, cousins of Bobbie Bouchard. Bobbie liked them well enough, even though they were younger than she was and they seemed awfully naïve. There was a girl named Freda, who was fourteen, and a twelve-year-old boy named Floyd Junior, who was just called Junior. Neither of them had ever gone to a show, smoked a cigarette or kept a secret from their mother. The only family secret was that Junior occasionally wet the bed, still, at his age. The doctor said it was an adolescent phase and that Junior would eventually stop doing it. In the meantime he advised Aunt Bernice to buy a rubber sheet.
Bobbie was just as naïve about the farm as Freda and Junior were about the way things were done in the city. She thought chickens were strange, exotic creatures and a pig was a kind of dog that might bite her if she got too close. She could hardly believe that you could go all day on the farm and not see any people or cars and hear nothing except the wind in the trees and the sounds the farm animals made. At night the crickets kept her awake, but after three or four nights she didn’t notice them as much.
When Bobbie saw in the newspaper that there was a show in the town of Delford, about ten miles from the farm, and that they had a two o’clock matinee on Saturday, she asked Aunt Bernice if she and Freda and Junior might go. Wanting Bobbie to have as much fun as possible during her stay on the farm, Aunt Bernice agreed.
Saturday was the day that Aunt Bernice had to see her doctor in the city for her female trouble; Uncle Floyd would be driving her in his pickup truck. They left at nine o’clock in the morning and wouldn’t be back until evening. Before she left, Aunt Bernice gave Bobbie a wad of bills from her egg money and put her in charge of the trip to Delford to see the show, since she was the oldest. She was to watch out for Freda and Junior and make sure they were careful and that nothing bad happened to them.
After breakfast and after Uncle Floyd and Aunt Bernice had left, Bobbie and Freda were still sitting at the kitchen table. Bobbie was telling Freda a funny story about a family of midgets that lived in her apartment building in the city. There was a write-up about them in the newspaper. They had tiny furniture made especially for them, a tiny bed, table, sofa and chairs just a little bit larger than doll furniture. They had a special-made door on their apartment, with the knob and the lock about knee-high to a normal-sized person.
Bobbie stopped mid-sentence and looked appraisingly at Freda. “You have hardly any eyebrows at all,” she said.
“What?” Freda asked. She had difficulty making the transition from midgets to eyebrows that fast.
“Hold on a minute!” Bobbie said.
She ran into the bedroom she shared with Freda and when she came back she was carrying a makeup kit. She unzipped it and took out an eyebrow pencil and gently penciled in where Freda’s eyebrows would be if she had any.
“You look just like Joan Crawford!” she said when she was finished, handing Freda a mirror.
“Like who?” Freda asked.
When Bobbie saw the effect of a little eyebrow pencil, she wasn’t going to stop there. She endowed on Freda’s face a full complement of makeup, including rouge, lipstick, mascara and eye shadow. Not too much but just the right amount; if she had learned anything at all in the city, it was how to apply makeup. Freda had never worn makeup before and was amazed at the way it made her look. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw a much older, more sophisticated girl looking back at her.
“Mother would die if she saw me like this,” she said.
She seemed to have a solution for everything. She just happened to have a curly blond wig in her suitcase. She went to the bedroom and brought it back to the kitchen and put it on Freda’s head, covering up her own lank, colorless hair with it, tugging it until it was in place and pushing the stray strands underneath.
“There!” she said, handing Freda the mirror. “Now you look like somebody.”
“That’s not me,” Freda said.
Junior came into the kitchen with his hair slicked back, wearing his favorite blue plaid shirt. When he saw Freda, he said, “Who are you supposed to be?”
“Doesn’t she look glamorous?” Bobbie said.
“Daddy is going to kill her!”
“He’ll never know about it,” Bobbie said.
“And you’d better not tell him!” Freda said. “If you do, I’ll tell him and mama about how you skipped Sunday school.”
“I didn’t skip Sunday school,” he said. “I just didn’t go.”
“I hope I don’t see anybody at the show who knows me,” Freda said. “They’re bound to tell on me.”
“You look so different nobody would ever know who you are,” Bobbie said with a laugh.
They walked half-a-mile up the highway to the crossroads to catch the bus to Delford. Bobbie carried a big patent leather handbag that contained the money to ride on the bus and see the show, along with a headscarf, cough drops, lipstick and some other things she might need. She still had not been able to come by any cigarettes since she had been on the farm, though. Freda felt funny at first in the wig and makeup, but after a while when she realized people weren’t staring at her she felt more comfortable.
The bus ride to Delford, at about fifteen minutes, was all too short for Bobbie Bouchard. After being on the farm for several days, she was happy to be moving again and to see people. There were hardly any people on the bus and they were very quiet, absorbed in their own thoughts. Nobody paid any attention to Bobbie, Freda and Junior. Junior sat in a seat by himself and looked out the window at the passing scenery as if he had never seen it before. Bobbie talked the whole time about motion pictures she had seen and about her favorite motion picture actors and actresses. She found it very nearly incredible that Freda and Junior had gone their entire lives and hadn’t seen a motion picture. She felt sorry for them and didn’t know how they could have stood such a life.
The bus let them out at a little gas station on the edge of the Delford downtown business district. It was an easy walk to get to the show and the stores that lined the two streets, Main Street and First Street. Bobbie told Freda and Junior to wait for her for a minute while she went into the gas station. They thought she needed to use the restroom, but when she came out they saw that she had bought a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, with a complementary book of matches, which she ostentatiously placed inside the patent leather handbag.
Bobbie was a little disappointed that the movie that was playing was a western—she much preferred musicals or love stories—but she was willing to see the western for Freda and Junior’s sake and not complain about it. If she had been in the city, she would have had four or five movies to choose from. In a little town like Delford, though, when a western was playing, a western is what you saw.
There was lots of action in the movie, lots of riding and shooting. When the characters in the movie, mostly men, weren’t sitting around in the saloon talking and drinking beer while they played poker around a big table, they were riding horses through the desert or getting into fights or shooting at each other from behind big rocks. The sheriff of the town had a red-haired girlfriend with big breasts who was always crying and begging him to take her away and marry her. She had a brother with a big scar on the side of his face that gave him a lopsided grin. He was a cattle rustler and a murderer and the mortal enemy of the sheriff. The red-haired, big-breasted woman was torn between her love for the two men, one her brother and the other her sweetheart. In the end there was the inevitable showdown between them, the struggle between good and bad.
When the show was over, they still had plenty of time before their bus back to the farm, so they went to the Idle Hour Café across from the courthouse. They sat at a booth next to a window. After an elderly waitress in a black-and-white uniform came and took their order, Bobbie opened her purse and took out her cigarettes and lit one as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Did you like the show?” she asked Junior.
“I liked it fine,” he said. He never seemed to have too much to say about anything. “Can we go again sometime?”
“I don’t think your mother would like it if she knew you were smoking,” Freda said, looking over her shoulder to make sure nobody was looking.
“She’s not here, though, is she?” Bobbie said. “Would you like to try one?”
“No.”
“I’d like to try one,” Junior said.
“You’re twelve years old,” Freda said.
“Go ahead and take a puff,” Bobbie said. “Nobody’s looking.”
“Only if Freda does it first,” he said. “Then she can’t tell on me if I do it.”
“I’m not going to do it,” Freda said.
“Then I won’t either,” Junior said.
Bobbie placed the cigarette on the ash tray and slid it across the table to Freda. “Nobody’s looking,” she said.
“Go ahead,” Junior said.
Freda picked up the cigarette and took a small puff and blew the smoke out as quickly as she took it in.
“It doesn’t count if you don’t inhale,” Bobbie said.
Bobbie took the cigarette back from Freda and showed how to take the smoke into the mouth and draw it down into the lungs before letting it out. Freda tried doing what Bobbie had done but started coughing.
“It tastes terrible,” she said, “and it burns my throat.”
“You get used to it after a while,” Bobbie said.
“Now let me try,” Junior said.
He took a couple of preliminary puffs before making a show of trying to inhale.
“I don’t think you did it right,” Freda said.
“Close enough for twelve,” Bobbie said.
“Can they put you in jail for smoking?” Junior asked.
“Smoking is silly,” Freda said. “I don’t know why anybody wants to do it.”
“It’s very sophisticated,” Bobbie said. “All the best people do it.”
While they were eating, an older gentleman with a big belly and a toupee stepped up to the table and snapped Freda’s picture with a camera he had hanging around his neck. “Pardon me,” he said. “I wonder if I might have a word with you.”
Freda looked at him, bewildered. She thought it had something to do with the cigarette. “Yes?” she said. She put down her hamburger and wiped her fingers. She half-expected to be handcuffed and led away.
“I couldn’t help noticing you sitting there in front of that window. Your face stands out above all the others.”
“What?” she asked. “I was just sitting here.”
“The way the light shines through the window behind your head, I think you would photograph very well.”
“I, uh—“
“What are you talking about, mister?” Bobbie asked. “You’re scaring the poor girl.” She had learned how to deal with his type in the city.
“May I?” the man asked, stepping closer to Freda. He put his finger under her chin and lifted her face. “You have a very interesting physiognomy,” he said.
In the excitement of riding on the bus, seeing the show and eating in a restaurant, Freda had forgotten she looked like somebody completely different from who she was. “I, uh, this is not me,” she said.
“I’m a casting director for a motion picture production company,” he said, handing her his card. “We’re shooting a picture locally and want to hire some non-professional actors for some of the smaller speaking parts. I think you might be right for one of the parts.”
“A part in a movie?” Bobbie asked.
“Well, perhaps,” he said. “That is, if she’s available and interested.”
“I, uh, I don’t know,” Freda said.
“Are you a minor?”
“What?”
“He’s asking you your age, dumbbell,” Bobbie said.
“I’m fourteen,” Freda said.
The man took a step back. “You look older than that,” he said. “You look about sixteen or seventeen.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling her,” Bobbie said.
“No matter,” he said. “Since you are a minor, have your parent or guardian call us at the number on that card and we’ll arrange a time for you to come in and talk to us.”
“Imagine that,” Bobbie said. “A part in a movie!” She didn’t know whether to be jealous or terribly happy for Freda, so she was both.
Freda laughed. “They wouldn’t want me if they knew what I really look like underneath.”
“Don’t be silly,” Bobbie said. “They don’t care about underneath. They care about what they can see.”
“It’s just about the silliest thing that’s ever happened to me,” Freda said, flushing with embarrassment.
“I told you you looked great and you didn’t believe me.”
“Are they going to make you a movie star?” Junior asked.
“It’s too ridiculous,” Freda said.
“You’ll call, won’t you?” Bobbie asked. “Just as soon as you get home?”
“No,” Freda said. “I can’t call. It’s not me they want. It’s somebody who doesn’t even exist.”
“Have Aunt Bernice call.”
“I can’t have her know about this. She’d just about die.”
“So does that mean you’re not going to call?”
Bobbie considered calling herself and saying she was the girl the man saw in the restaurant, but she didn’t know if she would be able to pull it off. He would know as soon as he saw her that she was somebody else, the “other girl” who didn’t even rate a second look.
When they left the Idle Hour Café, they still had more than an hour before their bus, so they walked around, looking in store windows. Bobbie smoked on the street and tried to get Freda and Junior to light up, but they refused. They had smoked once already and that was enough. All the fun had gone out of it.
Bobbie tried repeatedly to talk Freda into calling the number on the card, but Freda wanted no part of it and she refused to let Bobbie call on her behalf and pretend to be Aunt Bernice. She wanted to forget all about it, she said, but, above all, she wanted to keep Uncle Floyd and Aunt Bernice from ever knowing about it. She made Junior promise not to ever mention it. If he should forget and let it slip, she would tell them he had smoked. Never mind that she had smoked, too.
Bobbie believed that Freda was passing up the chance to be a big star, maybe even bigger than Linda Darnell, Rita Hayworth, or Susan Hayward. She believed a chance like that only comes along once in a lifetime. A part of her, deep down, though, was glad. She wouldn’t have to go through life seeing Freda a movie star while she herself was something less. She believed that things always work out for the best.
A few days later, Bobbie received a call from her mother. She was going home from the hospital and she wanted Bobbie to come home and help take care of her while she recuperated from an operation. Bobbie hated the thought of being cooped up at home taking care of her mother, but she promised to come back to the farm as soon as she could. For the next trip, she would think of all kinds of fun things for the three of them to do. She had some secret pictures she would bring along next time to show them.
Mrs. Shockley had been a widow for many years. Just when she was thought to be past such things, she began “keeping company” with an old man named Wallace Timpkins, who worked as a janitor at the grade school. Nobody was more chagrined at Mrs. Shockley’s recent flowering than her forty-year-old unmarried daughter, Edith. She watched in disbelief as her mother and Wallace sat on the couch on the evenings when he came for dinner, whispering and grappling together like a couple of adolescents. Edith was embarrassed for her mother. She knew that she, of all people, had to rescue her from the spell that Wallace seemed to have cast over her.
When Wallace Timpkins proposed marriage to Mrs. Shockley and she told him she needed a few days to think about it, Edith knew the situation was spiraling out of her control. Having dinner together and sitting on the couch afterwards was one thing, but talk of marriage seemed to be taking it a step too far. She had hoped her mother would come to her senses about Wallace but, if she married him, it would be too late; she would be stuck with him for as long as she lived and where would that leave Edith? She had no intention of being put out of her home.
One rainy Saturday morning when Edith had washed Mrs. Shockley’s hair at the kitchen sink and was putting it up in rollers at the table, she broached the rather sensitive topic of a union with Wallace.
“You wouldn’t really marry him, would you?” she asked.
“I don’t know why not,” Mrs. Shockley said. “He’s free and I’m free. We’re both of age.”
“Yes, but why would you even want to marry him?”
“Why does anybody get married?”
“I know why he wants to marry you.”
“Why?”
“He needs a cook, laundress and housekeeper and he can’t afford to hire one.”
“What a terrible thing to say!”
“How do you know he isn’t already married?”
“His wife died. He told me all about it.”
“How did she die?”
“She was hit by a train.”
“How do you know he didn’t push her?”
Mrs. Shockley sputtered with laughter and turned around so she could see Edith’s face. “Why would he do that?”
“So he would be free to marry you.”
“Oh! This conversation is getting out of hand!”
“You know nothing about him.”
“I know enough.”
“How long as he worked at the school?”
“Six years.”
“Where was he before that? Has he ever been in prison?”
“Why don’t you ask him yourself? He’s coming over tonight for dinner.”
With that revelation, Edith went upstairs to her room and locked herself in, refusing to finish rolling up her mother’s hair. Let her do it herself for once and see how she likes it, she thought.
For the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon, Edith remained in her room. She didn’t come down for lunch but instead sampled generously from a box of chocolate candy she kept in her dresser drawer. After that she took a long nap, waking up to a pounding headache and the smell of cooking food. She went downstairs silently and set the dining room table for three.
Wallace arrived just as dinner was ready. He seemed, Edith thought, to have a sixth sense where food was concerned. As she brought the chicken in from the kitchen and set it in the middle of the table and Wallace pulled out her chair for her to sit down, she thought: the dinner is already ruined for me. Mrs. Shockley was giggling like a schoolgirl and Wallace had only been there for five minutes.
Edith sat and nibbled at her food (what appetite she had was gone), looking coldly at her mother and Wallace. Mrs. Shockley spread some butter on a roll and held it up to Wallace; when he took a bite of it, the butter rolled down his chin. He began laughing to himself and when Mrs. Shockley asked what was so funny, he leaned over and whispered something in her ear, which caused her to erupt into a fit of laughter. When Wallace’s left hand wasn’t engaged in stuffing food into his maw, it was usually someplace or other on Mrs. Shockley’s body. Edith thought she was going to be sick. She needed to say something to remind them that she was also in the room.
“Being a janitor at a school must be terribly exciting,” she said, with an archness that Wallace and her mother both missed.
“What was that?” he asked, taking his eyes off Mrs. Shockley to look directly at Edith.
“I said it must be so exciting to be a janitor.”
“No, it’s not exciting,” he said. “It’s a living, that’s about all I can say. There are the good days and the bad days.”
“How long do you intend to be a janitor?” Edith asked.
“Until I retire, I guess.”
“And when might that be?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Why all the questions?” Mrs. Shockley asked.
“I don’t know,” Edith said. “I guess I’m just trying to get better acquainted.”
“Yes, that’s a good idea,” Wallace said, “since we’re all going to be living in the same house together.”
“Why do you say that?” Edith asked.
“I haven’t told her yet, dear,” Mrs. Shockley said.
“Told me what?” Edith asked.
“I’ve accepted Wallace’s proposal of marriage. We’re going to be married in about six weeks, when school is out.”
Edith wasn’t even mildly surprised. She had been expecting the news. “This is rather sudden, isn’t it?” she asked.
“We decided the time is right,” Wallace said. “We neither one of us are getting any younger.”
“Do you think it’s wise for two people of your age to get married?” Edith asked.
“You’re beginning to sound rude,” Mrs. Shockley said, reaching over and taking Wallace’s hand in hers. “I was hoping you would be happy for us.”
“I am happy for you,” Edith said. “I just think there are some practical considerations that must be taken into account.”
“Like what?” Mrs. Shockley asked.
“Where are you going to live?”
“Wallace is going to move in with us, dear,” Mrs. Shockley said. “He lives in a rented place. We own our home.”
“I see,” Edith said. “And where does that leave me?”
“Why, what do you mean?”
“Where am I supposed to live?”
“You’ll live here with us, of course.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“This has always been your home. I never thought of having it any other way.”
“I see,” Edith said, tears forming in her eyes. “While the two of you are mooning around, giggling and pawing at each other in a nauseating fashion, I’ll be doing all the housework, all the cooking, cleaning, washing and sewing. I’m to be relegated to the role of unpaid servant, is that right?”
“Well, of course not!” Mrs. Shockley said. “What a ridiculous notion!”
“I think she just needs some time to get used to the idea,” Wallace said. “It’s a bit of a shock for her.”
“I just might be getting married myself,” Edith said defiantly.
“Who would marry you?” Mrs. Shockley said with a laugh.
“Do you realize how insulting that is?” Edith asked. “As if nobody in the world would ever want to marry me!”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Mrs. Shockley said. “It’s just that we’ve already gotten so used to the idea that you will never marry. It seems your time has come and gone.”
“Oh!” Edith said. “So that’s what you think of me, is it?”
“I think we just need to calm down and take a deep breath and watch what we say,” Wallace said.
“You don’t need to be giving me orders in my own house!” Edith said.
“There’s no need to be so touchy about everything!” Mrs. Shockley said.
“Let’s talk about something more pleasant,” Wallace said, “and talk about the marriage stuff later. There’s no hurry.”
“My mother and I own this house,” Edith said. “If she dies, the house belongs to me. If she marries you, does that mean you own the house?”
“We haven’t thought about anything like that,” Mrs. Shockley said.
“We can work out those details later,” Wallace said. “Let’s not spoil this lovely dinner.”
They sat in silence for a few moments, with Edith snuffling back tears. When it was time to serve the dessert, Mrs. Shockley started to get up to go into the kitchen.
“You just stay put,” Edith said, “and keep Mr. Timpkins company. I’ll get the dessert and make the coffee.”
“All right, dear,” Mrs. Shockley said.
Edith went into the kitchen and squeezed the tears out of her eyes. She took the banana cream pie out of the ice box where it was chilling and sliced three big pieces. While she was waiting for the coffee to brew, she took the flashlight out of the drawer and went quietly down the basement steps.
She went to the far corner of the basement—shining the light in the murk—behind the furnace and past the hot water heater, to the little shelf where her father used to keep paint cans. Now the shelf was empty except for a box of rat pellets that her mother had bought when she mistakenly believed she saw a rat under the basement steps. She shook two of the pellets into her hand and went back upstairs.
The pellets were hard like stale cookies. She crumbled them up with a butter knife and, after she had poured three cups of coffee, dissolved the rat pellets into one of the cups. She put the three slices of pie and three cups of coffee on a tray—the cup with the rat pellets in it separated from the other two—and took them into the dining room.
Her mother was talking about a murder case she had been reading about in the paper and Wallace was, as usual, hanging on her every word. After Edith set the coffee and pie in front of Wallace, she resumed her seat and watched him closely after he began taking small bites of the pie and sipping the coffee. She didn’t know how many pellets it would take to kill him but, if he was going to die, she hoped he would not die until later, until after he had gone home. Maybe the small amount she had used would only make him sick. Maybe it would have no effect at all.
When they were finished eating, Mrs. Shockley began clearing the table, but Edith told her to take Wallace into the living room and have a nice “visit” with him while she washed all the dishes herself and put everything away. Mrs. Shockley readily complied, believing that Edith was over the “unpleasantness” that had occurred earlier.
While Edith was in the kitchen, she could hear her mother and Wallace talking and laughing in the front room. He played the piano while she sang in her quivery soprano. After a while she heard nothing, so she was sure they were locked in an intimate embrace on the couch. In that way did all their evenings conclude.
She went upstairs to her room and read for a while and then readied herself for bed. She was aware when Wallace Timpkins left to go home about eleven-thirty. She heard her mother come upstairs a short time after that and go into her bedroom and shut the door.
She slept well and soundly and was awakened at dawn by the ringing of a bell. It took her a few seconds to realize the ringing was the phone in the hallway, halfway between her room and her mother’s room.
After several rings, her mother opened her door and come out into the hallway to answer the phone. Edith listened carefully to the voice of her mother as it went from a barely audible murmur to a gasp and a cry of distress. She turned over on her side and covered up her head. When her mother came into her room to tell her the news, she would pretend to be asleep and would not be smiling.
The Lumber Room ~ A Classic English Short Story by Saki (H. H. Munro)
The children were to be driven, as a special treat, to the sands at Jagborough. Nicholas was not to be of the party; he was in disgrace. Only that morning he had refused to eat his wholesome bread-and-milk on the seemingly frivolous ground that there was a frog in it. Older and wiser and better people had told him that there could not possibly be a frog in his bread-and-milk and that he was not to talk nonsense; he continued, nevertheless, to talk what seemed the veriest nonsense, and described with much detail the coloration and markings of the alleged frog. The dramatic part of the incident was that there really was a frog in Nicholas’s basin of bread-and-milk; he had put it there himself, so he felt entitled to know something about it. The sin of taking a frog from the garden and putting it into a bowl of wholesome bread-and-milk was enlarged on at great length, but the fact that stood out clearest in the whole affair, as it presented itself to the mind of Nicholas, was that the older, wiser, and better people had been proved to be profoundly in error in matters about which they had expressed the utmost assurance.
“You said there couldn’t possibly be a frog in my bread-and-milk; there was a frog in my bread-and-milk,” he repeated, with the insistence of a skilled tactician who does not intend to shift from favourable ground.
So his boy-cousin and girl-cousin and his quite uninteresting younger brother were to be taken to Jagborough sands that afternoon and he was to stay at home. His cousins’ aunt, who insisted, by an unwarranted stretch of imagination, in styling herself his aunt also, had hastily invented the Jagborough expedition in order to impress on Nicholas the delights that he had justly forfeited by his disgraceful conduct at the breakfast-table. It was her habit, whenever one of the children fell from grace, to improvise something of a festival nature from which the offender would be rigorously debarred; if all the children sinned collectively they were suddenly informed of a circus in a neighbouring town, a circus of unrivalled merit and uncounted elephants, to which, but for their depravity, ther would have been taken that very day.
A few decent tears were looked for on the part of Nicholas when the moment for the departure of the expedition arrived. As a matter of fact, however, all the crying was done by his girl-cousin, who scraped her knee rather painfully against the step of the carriage as she was scrambling in. “How she did howl,” said Nicholas cheerfully, as the party drove off without any of the elation of high spirits that should have characterized it.
“She’ll soon get over that,” said the soi-disant aunt; “it will be a glorious afternoon for racing about over those beautiful sands. How they will enjoy themselves!”
“Bobby won’t enjoy himself much, and he won’t race much either,” said Nicholas with a grim chuckle; “his boots are hurting him. They’re too tight.”
“Why didn’t he tell me they were hurting?” asked the aunt with some asperity.
“He told you twice, but you weren’t listening. You often don’t listen when we tell you important things.”
“You are not to go into the gooseberry garden,” said the aunt, changing the subject.
“Why not?” demanded Nicholas.
“Because you are in disgrace,” said the aunt loftily.
Nicholas did not admit the flawlessness of the reasoning; he felt perfectly capable of being in disgrace and in a gooseberry garden at the same moment. His face took on an expression of considerable obstinacy. It was clear to his aunt that he was determined to get into the gooseberry garden, “only,” as she remarked to herself, “because I have told him he is not to.”
Now the gooseberry garden had two doors by which it might be entered, and once a small person like Nicholas could slip in there he could effectually disappear from view amid the masking growth of artichokes, raspberry canes, and fruit bushes. The aunt had many other things to do that aftemoon, but she spent an hour or two in trivial gardening operations among flower beds and shrubberies, whence she could watch the two doors that led to the forbidden paradise. She was a woman of few ideas, with immense powers of concentration.
Nicholas made one or two sorties into the front garden, wriggling his way with obvious stealth of purpose towards one or other of the doors, but never able for a moment to evade the aunt’s watchful eye. As a matter of fact, he had no intention of trying to get into the gooseberry garden, but it was extremely convenient for him that his aunt should believe that he had; it was a belief that would keep her on selfimposed sentry-duty for the greater part of the aftemoon. Having thoroughly confirmed and fortified her suspicions, Nicholas slipped back into the house and rapidly put into execution a plan of action that had long germinated in his brain. By standing on a chair in the library one could reach a shelf on which reposed a fat, important-looking key. The key was as important as it looked; it was the instrument which kept the mysteries of the lumber-room secure from unauthorized intrusion, which opened a way only for aunts and such-like privileged persons. Nicholas had not had much experience of the art of fitting keys into keyholes and turning locks, but for some days past he had practised with the key of the schoolroom door; he did not believe in trusting too much to luck and accident. The key turned stiffly in the lock, but it turned. The door opened, and Nicholas was in an unknown land, compared with which the gooseberry garden was a stale delight, a mere material pleasure.
Often and often Nicholas had pictured to himself what the lumber-room might be like, that region that was so carefully sealed from youthful eyes and concerning which no questions were ever answered. It came up to his expectations. In the first place it was large and dimly lit, one high window opening onto the forbidden garden being its only source of illumination. In the second place it was a storehouse of unimagined treasures. Tne aunt-by-assertion was one of those people who think that things spoil by use and consign them to dust and damp by way of preserving them. Such parts of the house as Nicholas knew best were rather bare and cheerless, but here there were wonderful things for the eye to feast on. First and foremost there was a piece of framed tapestry that was evidently meant to be a fire-screen. To Nicholas it was a living, breathing story; he sat down on a roll of Indian hangings, glowing in wonderful colours beneath a layer of dust, and took in all the details of the tapestry picture. A man, dressed in the hunting costume of some remote period, had just transfixed a stag with an arrow; it could not have been a difficult shot because the stag was only one or two paces away from him; in the thickly growing vegetation that the picture suggested it would not have been difficult to creep up to a feeding stag, and the two spotted dogs that were springing forward to join in the chase had evidently been trained to keep to heel till the arrow was discharged. That part of the picture was simple, if interesting, but did the huntsman see, what Nicholas saw, that four galloping wolves were coming in his direction through the wood? There might be more than four of them hidden behind the trees, and in any case would the man and his dogs be able to cope with the four wolves if they made an attack? The man had only two arrows left in his quiver, and he might miss with one or both of them; all one knew about his skill in shooting was that he could hit a large stag at a ridiculously short range. Nicholas sat for many golden minutes revolving the possibilities of the scene; he was inclined to think that there were more than four wolves and that the man and his dogs were in a tight corner.
But there were other objects of delight and interest claiming his instant attention; there were quaint twisted candlesticks in the shape of snakes, and a teapot fashioned like a china duck, out of whose open beak the tea was supposed to come. How dull and shapeless the nursery teapot seemed in comparison! And there was a carved sandalwood box packed tight with aromatic cotton-wool, and between the layers of cotton-wool were little brass figures, hump-necked bulls, and peacocks and goblins, delightful to see and to handle. Less promising in appearance was a large square book with plain black covers; Nicholas peeped into it, and, behold, it was full of coloured pictures of birds. And such birds! In the garden, and in the lanes when he went for a walk, Nicholas came accross a few birds, of which the largest were an occasional magpie or wood-pigeons here were herons and bustards, kites, toucans, tiger-bitterns, brush turkeys, ibises, golden pheasants, a whole portrait gallery of undreamed-of creatures. And as he was admiring the colouring of the mandarin duck and assigning a life-history to it, the voice of his aunt in shrill vociferation of his name came from the gooseberry garden without. She had grown suspicious at his long disappearance, and had leapt to the conclusion that he had climbed over the wall behind the sheltering screen of the lilac bushes: she was now engaged in energetic and rather hopeless search for him among the artichokes and raspberry canes.
“Nicholas, Nicholas!” she screamed, “you are to come out of this at once. It’s no use trying to hide there; I can see you all the time.”
It was probably the first time for twenty years that any one had smiled in that lumber-room.
Presently the angry repetitions of Nicholas’s name gave way to a shriek, and a cry for somebody to come quickly. Nicholas shut the book, restored it carefully to its place in a corner, and shook some dust from a neighbouring pile of newspapers over it. Then he crept from the room, locked the door, and replaced the key exactly where he had found it. His aunt was still calling his name when he sauntered into the front garden.
“Me,” came the answer from the other side of the wall; “didn’t you hear me? I’ve been looking for you in the gooseberry garden, and I’ve slipped into the rain-water tank. Luckily there’s no water in it, but the sides are slippery and I can’t get out. Fetch the little ladder from under the cherry tree–”
“I was told I wasn’t to go into the gooseberry garden,” said Nicholas promptly.
“I told you not to, and now I tell you that you may,” came the voice from the rain-water tank, rather impatiently.
“Your voice doesn’t sound like aunt’s,” objected Nicholas; “you may be the Evil One tempting me to be disobedient. Aunt often tells me that the Evil One tempts me and that I always yield This time I’m not going to yield.”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” said the prisoner in the tank; “go and fetch the ladder.”
“Will there be strawberry jam for tea?” asked Nicholas innocently.
“Certainly there will be,” said the aunt, privately resolving that Nicholas should have none of it.
“Now I know that you are the Evil One and not aunt,” shouted Nicholas gleefully; “when we asked aunt for strawberry jam yesterday she said there wasn’t any. I know there are four jars of it in the store cupboard, because I looked, and of course you know it’s there, but she doesn’t, because she said there wasn’t any. Oh, Devil, you have sold yourself!”
There was an unusual sense of luxury in being able to talk to an aunt as though one was talking to the Evil One, but Nicholas knew, with childish discernment that such luxuries were not to be over-indulged in. He walked noisily away, and it was a kitchenmaid, in search of parsley, who eventually rescued the aunt from the rain-water tank. Tea that evening was partaken of in a fearsome silence. Tne tide had been at its highest when the children had arrived at Jagborough Cove, so there had been no sands to play on–a circumstance that the aunt had overlooked in the haste of organising her punative expedition. The tightness of Bobby’s boots had had a disasterous effect on his temper the whole of the afternoon, and altogether the children could not have been said to have enjoyed themselves. The aunt maintained the frozen muteness of one who has suffered undignified and unmerited detention in a rain-water tank for thirty-five minutes. As for Nicholas, he, too, was silent, in the absorption of one who has much to think about; it was just possible, he considered, that the huntsman would escape with his hounds while the wolves feasted on the stricken stag.
The Midnight Hideaway ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp
The phone rang several rings before Tully was awake. He had been dreaming about when he was seven years old and saw a fat woman in a blue flowered dress having an epileptic seizure on the street; she lay on her back and twitched and moaned like a ghost but the thing that scared him the most was the foaming at the mouth. He was still having nightmares.
He picked up the receiver without turning on the light and almost dropped it. He could still see the woman’s face, the twitching. “Hello,” he said. “Tully here.”
“Tully, is that you?” a man’s voice said.
“I just said it was,” he said. He managed to look at the clock and see that it was nearly two in the morning.
“Got a job for you.”
“Who is this?”
“Wellington.”
“Couldn’t it have waited until morning?”
“Manners says it’s urgent. You know how he is.”
“Don’t you ever sleep like a normal person?”
“Yeah, I sleep sometimes.”
“Well, what is it then? I want to go back to sleep and see how my nightmare turns out.“
“You’re not going to like this job, I’m afraid. It’s the sort of thing you hate.”
“Just tell me what it is without the editorial comment.”
“They want you to kill a guy.”
He felt a contraction in his chest. “I’m listening,” he said.
“His name is Sidney Keen. He’s twenty-three years old. I’m going to send you over a couple of pictures.”
“Anything else I need to know?”
“He works at the Paradise movie theatre downtown and gets off work around midnight. He sometimes goes to a bar on his way home and stays there a couple of hours. Should be easy for you to pick off.”
“Who wants him dead and why?”
“You know we’re not supposed to ask.”
“When am I supposed to do this dirty deed?”
“Tomorrow night. You know the drill.”
“Okay.”
“Call me when it’s finished. And no slip-ups this time!”
Tully was still awake a couple of hours later when the runner slipped the envelope under his door. He got out of bed, turned on the light, opened the envelope and studied the pictures of the person he was supposed to kill. The first was of a young man in a tuxedo with a blonde in a black dress on his arm, all smiles, off to the country club dance. The other picture was of the same young man dressed in a baseball uniform with a big smile, standing at home plate swinging a bat; obviously just a pose because the uniform was too clean to be real and the young man’s hair too perfectly combed. He was a kid like a million others, not ugly and not pretty. No distinguishing characteristics but a good face with a strong chin and a straight nose.
Tully had killed anonymously before, but not often, and he hated doing it. Each time he had to tell himself there was nothing personal in it; he hoped somehow to convey that sentiment in the last few seconds, without words, to the person he was killing.
He stayed at home all day the next day; went out about seven o’clock in the evening and bought a newspaper. After checking the time of the last show at the Paradise theatre, he had a steak at his favorite restaurant and after that still had plenty of time to go to a hotel bar not far from the theatre and have a couple drinks to give him courage.
Ten minutes before the last show started, he walked to the Paradise and stood in line and bought a ticket. As soon as he entered the theatre lobby, he saw Sidney Keen, smiling at people as he took their tickets. There could be no mistake it was him: the same face as the one in the pictures, the same lock of dark hair falling forward on the forehead.
“Good evening, sir,” Sidney said to Tully as he tore his ticket in half.
“Show any good tonight?” Tully asked just to have something to say.
“Everybody’s crazy about it,” Sidney said. “I’ve seen it three times myself.”
“Must be good, then,” Tully said as he moved on.
About half the seats were filled; a fairly large crowd for the late show. Tully took a seat on the aisle in the shadows close to the back and took off his hat and rested it on his knee.
The picture was about a group of misfits pulling off a jewelry heist. They were naïve enough, or dumb enough, to believe they were going to succeed. The main character, who was the head of the gang, was going to go straight after he made the one final haul that would allow him to get away from all the things in the world he hated, such as women who wear too much lipstick and people who mistreat animals.
When the picture was over, Tully stood up, put on his hat and filed out with the others. He stood out in front of the theatre and smoked a cigarette and waited. In a few minutes the marquee went dark and the ushers and other people who worked in the theatre came out and, saying their good nights, went their separate ways.
Sidney separated himself from the others, took a few steps and stopped to light a cigarette. Then he walked briskly off into the night, trailing a stream of smoke. Tully waited until Sidney was about fifty yards away and then began following him.
The street after midnight was deserted, so Tully could have popped Sidney in the back right then and there without being seen, gone home and gone to bed and reported the next morning that all went well. It was too easy, though—he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. Killing an unarmed, unsuspecting man that way just seemed too dishonorable. There had to be a better way, one that would let him sleep nights and live the rest of his days in relative peace.
Sidney came to a small bar about three blocks from the theatre called The Midnight Hideaway and went inside. Tully waited about five minutes and then went in himself.
The place was smoky and dark, lit by blue lights that barely allowed people to see where they were going. There were a few drunks sitting at the bar, some couples sitting at tables. Canned jazz music played softly in the background, punctuated by low conversation and drunken female laughter.
Sidney had taken a seat at the bar. Tully sat in the seat two over from Sidney and lit a cigarette. When the bartender asked him what he wanted, he ordered a scotch and soda.
“You were following me from the theatre, weren’t you?” Sidney said, turning to his left to face Tully.
“What’s that?” Tully said. Playing innocent was easy.
“I said you were following me from the theatre.”
“No, not at all.” He downed his drink and the bartender served him again.
“Then why are you here?”
“Everybody’s got to be someplace.”
“How did you like the picture?”
“I was a little disappointed in the ending. I’m always hoping the crooks get away with it and live happily ever after.”
“They can’t do that. Have stories turn out that way, I mean. It’s against the code of morals and ethics. People who commit crimes have to be punished.”
“You seem to know a lot about it.”
“I’ve been in the motion picture business now for two years, first behind the candy counter and then as an usher.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a real career going for you.”
“No, I’m going to quit soon. I don’t have to work if I don’t want to. I’ve only been doing it this long to have someplace to go in the evenings to get out of the house.”
“Independently wealthy?”
“My father is in the final stages of heart disease. I’m the principal beneficiary of his will.”
“Why are you telling all this to a complete stranger?”
“I’m not sure. I think I felt some kind of connection with you the minute I first saw you in the lobby of the theatre. You were looking at me in a way I’ve never been looked at before.”
“Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not that sort.”
“What sort is that?”
“If you don’t know, I’m not going to explain it to you.”
“No, it’s nothing like that. It’s on a higher plane than that.”
“I don’t know anything about planes. But I do you know you should be careful who you spill your guts to. The enemy is everywhere.”
“That’s an odd thing to say.”
“I’m an odd sort of a fellow, I guess.”
“I have this stepmother, though. She’d like to see me dead.”
“Why do you say that?”
“My father’s will stipulates that I get the bulk of his estate. I think it has something to do with guilt over the way he treated my mother. There’s this other woman, though, that he’s has been married to for about five years, my darling stepmother. While she’s mentioned in his will, she’s not sitting as pretty as I am. The only way she can get the whole caboodle is if I die.”
“If something happened to you, wouldn’t the stepmother be the first to be suspected?”
“Well, yes, but she’d make sure there was never a shred of evidence connecting her to my death. People could suspect all they wanted to, but it would never go any farther than that. If she could arrange it, she’d make it appear that I was killed randomly by a crazed escapee from an insane asylum or in an accident. A runaway bus that just happened to run up onto the sidewalk where I was walking and flattened me would be the answer to her prayers.”
“Maybe she’s not as bad as you think.”
“She’s ten times worse. She’s Satan’s doxy. She’d sell her own young to the highest bidder.”
“Why did your father marry her?”
“He was afraid of being alone. She was available.”
A drunk fell noisily to the floor, pulling a chair over with him. Everybody turned to see what the disturbance was. Sidney took advantage of the lull in conversation to stand up in preparation for leaving.
“It was a pleasure talking to you,” he said. “I hope I didn’t bore you too much with my problems.”
“No, it’s all right,” Tully said. “I wasn’t bored.”
“Could I give you a lift somewhere? I have my car.”
“No, thanks. I’ll get a cab.”
“You won’t be able to find a cab this late, I’m afraid.”
“All right. You can drop me off downtown.”
When they left the bar, Sidney told Tully to wait for him on the street corner while he went to get the car. Tully waited so long he believed Sidney wasn’t coming back, but finally he pulled up at the curb and stopped for Tully to get in.
Tully, sitting on the seat two feet away from Sidney, fingered the gun in his pocket. He thought about how easy it would be to shoot Sidney in the head and be done with it. He thought about the freshly laundered sheets on his bed and how good it would feel to get between them and shut out the world, to have his work behind him and have nothing to think about.
“Now, maybe you can tell me who you really are and why you were following me,” Sidney said.
“I already said I wasn’t following you.”
“What’s your racket?”
“I don’t have a racket.”
“Did she send you to kill me?”
“Of course not.”
“I knew you weren’t there to see the show. All we get for the late show are smooching couples and giggling adolescents. People like you have better things to do than come to a third-rate theatre late at night to see a second-rate feature. What’s your story?”
“I don’t have one.”
Sidney surprised him by pulling a gun out of his clothing and pointing it at him.
“Put the gun away,” Tully said with a little laugh. “You don’t need it.”
“I started carrying a gun when I realized my life was in danger.”
“Why don’t you go someplace far away where nobody knows you? Change your name if you have to. Then when your daddy dies you can collect your inheritance and give the evil stepmother the boot.”
“It’s not that easy. I need to stay around and keep an eye on things.”
“Why don’t you go to the police and tell them your stepmother is trying to have you killed?”
“I don’t have any proof. They would just say I’m imagining things.”
“Look, just drop me downtown and I’ll forget you threatened to shoot me.”
“You still haven’t told me who you are.”
“I’m nobody.”
“What brings a nobody like you to this part of the city this late at night?”
“I have trouble sleeping. I’m a roamer. I like to roam around and go places I’ve never been before. I stop at a bar I’ve never been to before and have a couple of drinks and then I go back home and go to sleep.”
“I don’t believe you. Why were you at the theatre tonight?”
“People usually go to a theatre to see a show.”
“That’s not why you were there. I could see it on your face. When you saw me, you recognized me. Have we met someplace before?”
“No.”
“Are you a friend of my stepmother’s?”
“Of course not.”
“If you don’t tell me, I’m going to shoot you in the leg.”
“Why don’t you just stop the car right here? I’ll get out and we’ll forget we ever had this conversation.”
“And then you’ll come back tomorrow night and finish the job?”
“You’ve been seeing too many movies, sonny.”
To Tully’s surprise, Sidney shot him in the thigh. Tully pulled his gun out from where he had it hidden against his chest and pointed it at Sidney.
“You little bastard!” he said. “I’m going to blow your head off!”
“I’m driving fifty miles an hour. If you shoot me, and, if you survive the crash, don’t you think you’d have some explaining to do?”
“Just pull over and I’ll kill you properly, the way I should have done when I had the chance.”
“Now we’re getting down to cases. You are a hired killer, aren’t you?”
“I’m an operative. I do what I’m told.”
“And that involves killing people you don’t know?”
“It beats working in a factory. I’m going to bleed to death if you don’t stop the car and let me out so I can see a doctor.”
“It’s a flesh wound. I could have shot you in the knee and you would have walked with a limp for the rest of your life.”
“What makes you so tough?”
“It’s a rotten, stinking world. You’re either tough or you’re dead.”
“You’re just a kid. That’s why I didn’t kill you as soon as you left the theatre. I felt bad about killing somebody who looks so young.”
“How much did my stepmother pay you to kill me?”
“I don’t know anything about that, or even if it was your stepmother. It could have been somebody else, maybe your boss at the theatre or a girl friend you’ve wronged. The higher-ups make the arrangements and then give the assignments to the operatives to carry out.”
“If you don’t kill me, they’ll send somebody else?”
“There’s always somebody else.”
“Just go ahead and kill me, then, but not in the car or on the street. I’ll get a room in a cheap hotel and lie down on the bed and you can plug me in the head and leave quietly afterwards. Just make it quick.”
Tully put his gun away. “Drop me off at the hospital. My leg hurts like hell and I’m bleeding all over your upholstery.”
“And you’ll come back tomorrow night and kill me?”
“I won’t but somebody will. If you want to go on living, you’ll take my advice. Don’t go back to the theatre or the bar. Go into hiding for the time being. Hire a couple of body guards. Somebody paid ten thousand dollars to have you killed. That’s all I can tell you. When that much money is involved, there’s determination to get the job done.”
“And what about you?”
“I’ll be fine after I get the bleeding stopped.”
After Tully had his leg wound treated, it was seven o’clock. He stopped by a diner and had breakfast and then went home. He hadn’t been home more than a few minutes when the expected call came.
“Everything go all right?” Wellington asked.
“Couldn’t have been easier,” Tully said.
“The subject was dispatched as we discussed?”
“You have nothing to worry about.”
“I’ll let Manners know.”
He figured he had at least a day or two before they discovered the truth. When they came looking for him, he would be so far away it would be as if he never existed.
Wet Saturday ~ A Classic British Short Story by John Collier
It was July. In the sprawling house they were imprisoned by the swish and the gurgle and all the hundred sounds of rain. They were in the drawing room, behind four tall and weeping windows, in a lake of damp and faded chintz.
This house, ill-kept and unprepossessing, was necessary to Mr. Princey, who detested his wife, his daughter, and his hulking son. His life was to walk through the village, touching his hat, not smiling. His cold pleasure was to recapture snapshot memories of the infinitely remote summers of this childhood — coming into the orangery and finding his lost wooden horse, the tunnel in the box hedge and the square light at the end of it. But now all this was threatened — his pride of position in the village, his passionate attachment to the house — and all because Millicent, his cloddish daughter Millicent, had done this shocking and incredibly stupid thing. Mr. Princey turned from her in revulsion and spoke to his wife.
“They’d send her to the lunatic asylum,” he said. “A criminal-lunatic asylum. We should have to move. It would be impossible.”
His daughter began to shake again. “I’ll kill myself,” she said.
“Be quiet,” said Mr. Princey. “We have very little time. No time for nonsense. I intend to deal with this.” He called to his son, who stood looking out the window. “George, come here. Listen, how far did you get with your medicine before they threw you out as hopeless?”
“You know as well as I do,” said George.
“Do you know enough — did they drive enough into your head for you to be able to guess what a competent doctor could tell about such a wound?”
“Well, it’s a — it’s a knock or blow.”
“If a tile fell from the roof? Or a piece of the coping?”
“Well, guv’nor, you see, it’s like this –“
“Is it possible?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, because she hit him several times.”
“I can’t stand it,” said Mrs. Princey.
“You have got to stand it, my dear,” said her husband. “And keep that hysterical note out of your voice. It might be overheard. We are talking about the weather. If he fell down the well, George, striking his head several times?”
“I really don’t know, guv’nor.”
“He’d have to had to hit the sides several times in thirty or forty feet, and at the correct angles. No. I’m afraid not. We must go over it all again. Millicent.”
“No! No!”
“Millicent, we must go over it all again. Perhaps you have forgotten something. One tiny irrelevant detail may save or ruin us. Particularly you, Millicent. You don’t want to be put in an asylum, do you? Or be hanged? They might hang you, Millicent. You must stop that shaking. You must keep your voice quiet. We are talking of the weather. Now.”
“I can’t. I… I…”
“Be quiet, child. Be quiet.” He put his long, cold face very near to his daughter’s. He found himself horribly revolted by her. Her features were thick, her jaw heavy, her whole figure repellently powerful. “Answer me,” he said. “You were in the stable?”
“Yes.”
“One moment, though. Who knew you were in love with this wretched curate?”
“No one. I’ve never said a–“
“Don’t worry,” said George. “The whole god-damned village knows. They’ve been sniggering about it in the Plough for three years past.”
“Likely enough,” said Mr. Princey. “Likely enough. What filth! He made as if to wipe something off the backs of his hands. “Well, now, we continue. You were in the stable?”
“Yes.”
“You were putting the croquet set into its box?”
“Yes.”
“You hear someone crossing the yard?”
“Yes.”
“It was Withers?”
“Yes.”
“So you called him?”
“Yes.”
“Loudly? Did you call him loudly? Could anyone have heard?”
“No, Father. I’m sure not. I didn’t call him. He saw me as I went to the door. He just waved his hand and came over.”
“How can I find out from you whether there was anyone about? Whether he could have been seen?”
“I’m sure not, Father. I’m quite sure.”
“So you both went into the stable?”
“Yes. It was raining quite hard.”
“What did he say?”
“He said ‘Hullo, Milly.’ And to excuse him coming in the back way, but he’d set out to walk over to Lyston.”
“Yes.”
“And he said, passing the park, he’d seen the house and suddenly thought of me, and he thought he’d just look in for a minute, just to tell me something. He said he was so happy, he wanted me to share it. He’d heard from the Bishop he was to have the vicarage. And it wasn’t only that. It meant he could marry. And he began to stutter. And I thought me meant me.”
“Don’t tell me what you thought. Exactly what he said. Nothing else.”
“Well … Oh dear!”
“Don’t cry. It is a luxury you cannot afford. Tell me.”
“He said no. He said it wasn’t me. It’s Ella Brangwyn-Davies. And he was sorry. And all that. Then he went to go.”
“And then?”
“I went mad. He turned his back. I had the winning post of the croquet set in my hand –“
“Did you shout or scream? I mean, as you hit him?”
“No. I’m sure I didn’t.”
“Did he? Come on. Tell me.”
“No, Father.”
“And then?”
“I threw it down. I came straight into the house. That’s all. I wish I were dead.”
“And you met none of the servants. No one will go into the stable. You see, George, he probably told people he was going to Lyston. Certainly no one knows he came here. He might have been attacked in the woods. We must consider every detail . . . A curate, with his head battered in –“
“Don’t, Father!” cried Millicent.
“Do you want to be hanged? A curate, with his head battered in, found in the woods. Who’d want to kill Withers?”
There was a tap on the door, which opened immediately. It was little Captain Smollett, who never stood on ceremony. “Who’d kill Withers?” said he. “I would, with pleasure. How d’you do, Mrs. Princey. I walked right in.”
“He heard you, Father,” moaned Millicent.
“My dear, we can have our little joke,” said her father. “Don’t pretend to be shocked. A little theoretical curate-killing, Smollett. In these days we talk nothing but thrillers.”
“Parsonicide,” said Captain Smollett. “Justifiable parsonicide. Have you heard about Ella Brangwyn-Davies? I shall be laughed at.”
“Why?” said Mr. Princey. “Why should you be laughed at?”
“Had a shot in that direction myself,” said Smollett, with careful sang-froid. “She’d have said yes, too. Hadn’t you heard? She told most people. Now it’ll look as if I got turned down for a white rat in a dog collar.”
“Too bad!” said Mr. Princey.
“Fortune of war,” said the little Captain.
“Sit down,” said Mr. Princey. “Mother, Millicent, console Captain Smollett with your best light conversation. George and I have something to look to. We shall be back in a minute or two, Smollett. Come, George.”
It was actually five minutes before Mr. Princey and his son returned.
“Smollett,” said Mr. Princey, “will you come round to the stable for a moment? There’s something I want to show you.”
They went into the stable yard. The buildings were now unused except as odd sheds. No one ever went there. Captain Smollett entered, George followed him, Mr. Princey came last. As he closed the door he took up a gun which stood behind it. “Smollett,” said he, “we have come out to shoot a rat which George heard squeaking under that tub. Now, you must listen to me very carefully or you will be show by accident. I mean that.”
Smollett looked at him. “Very well,” said he. “Go on.”
“A very tragic happening has taken place this afternoon,” said Mr. Princey. “It will be even more tragic unless it is smoothed over.”
“Oh?” said Smollett.
“You head me ask,” said Mr. Princey, “who would kill Withers. You heard Millicent make a comment, an unguarded comment.”
“Well?” said Smollett. “What of it?”
“Very little,” said Mr. Princey. “Unless you heard that Withers had met a violent end this very afternoon. And that, my dear Smollett, is what you are going to hear.”
“Have you killed hiim?” cried Smollett.
“Millicent has,” said Mr. Princey.
“Hell!” said Smollett.
“It is hell,” said Mr. Princey. “You would have remembered–and guessed.”
“Maybe,” said Smollett. “Yes. I suppose I should.”
“Therefore,” said Mr. Princey, “you constitute a problem.”
“Why did she kill him?” said Smollett.
“It is one of these disgusting things,” said Mr. Princey. “Pitiable, too. She deluded herself that he was in love with her.”
“Oh, of course,” said Smollett.
“And he told her about the Brangwyn-Davies girl.”
“I see,” said Smollett.
“I have no wish,” said Mr. Princey, “that she should be proved either a lunatic or a murderess. I could hardly live here after that.”
“I suppose not,” said Smollett.
“On the other hand,” said Mr. Princey,” you know about it.”
“Yes,” said Smollett. “I am wondering if I could keep my mouth shut. If I promised you–“
“I am wondering if I could believe you,” said Mr. Princey.
“If I promised,” said Smollett.
“If things went smoothly,” said Mr. Princey. “But not if there was any sort of suspicion, any questioning. You would be afraid of being an accessory.”
“I don’t know,” said Smollett.
“I do,” said Mr. Princey. “What are we going to do?”
“I can’t see anything else,” said Smollett. “You’d never be fool enough to do me in. You can’t get rid of two corpses.”
“I regard it,” said Mr. Princey, “as a better risk than the other. It could be an accident. Or you and Withers could both disappear. There are possibilities in that.”
“Listen,” said Smollett, “You can’t–“
“Listen,” said Mr. Princey. “There may be a way out. There is a way out, Smollett. You gave me the idea yourself.”
“Did I?” said Smollett. “What?”
“You said you would kill Withers,” said Mr. Princey. “You have a motive.”
“I was joking,” said Smollett.
“You are always joking,” said Mr. Princey. “People think there must be something behind it. Listen, Smollett, I can’t trust you, you must trust me. Or I will kill you now, in the next minute. I mean that. You can choose between dying and living.”
“Go on,” said Smollett.
“There is a sewer here,” said Mr. Princey, speaking fast and forcefully. “That is where I am going to put Withers. No outsider knows he has come up here this afternoon. No one will ever look there for him unless you tell them. You must give me evidence that you have murdered Withers.”
“Why?” said Smollett.
“So that I shall be dead sure that you will never open your lips on the matter,” said Mr. Princey.
“What evidence?” said Smollett.
“George,” said Mr. Princey, “hit him in the face, hard.”
“Good God!” said Smollett.
“Again,” said Mr. Princey. “Don’t bruise your knuckles.”
“Oh!” said Smollett.
“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Princey. “There must be traces of a struggle between you and Withers. Then it will not be altogether safe for you to go to the police.”
“Why won’t you take my word?” said Smollett.
“I will when we’ve finished,” said Mr. Princey. “George, get that croquet post. Take your handkerchief to it. As I told you. Smollett, you’ll just grasp the end of this croquet post. I shall shoot you if you don’t.”
“Oh, hell,” said Smollett. “All right.”
“Pull two hairs out of his head, George,” said Mr. Princey, “and remember what I told you to do with them. Now, Smollett, you take that bar and raise the big flagstone with the ring in it. Withers is in the next stall. You’ve got to drag him through and dump him in.”
“I won’t touch him,” said Smollett.
“Stand back, George,” said Mr. Princey, raising the gun.
“Wait a minute,” cried Smollett. “Wait a minute.” He did as he was told.
Mr. Princey wiped his brow. “Look here,” said he. “Everything is perfectly safe. Remember, no one knows that Withers came here. Everyone thinks he walked over to Lyston. That’s five miles of country to search. They’ll never look in our sewer. Do you see how safe it is?”
“I suppose it is,” said Smollett.
“Now come into the house,” said Mr. Princey. “We shall never get that rat.”
They went into the house. The maid was bringing tea into the drawing room. “See, my dear,” said Mr. Princey to his wife, “we went to the stable to shoot a rat and we found Captain Smollett. Don’t be offended, my dear fellow.”
“You must have walked up the back drive,” said Mrs. Princey.
“Yes. Yes. That was it,” said Smollett in some confusion.
“You’ve cut your lip,” said George, handing him a cup of tea.
“I … I just knocked it.”
“Shall I tell Bridget to bring some iodine?” said Mrs. Princey. The maid looked up, waiting.
“Don’t trouble, please,” said Smollett. “It’s nothing.”
“Very well, Bridget,” said Mrs. Princey. “That’s all.”
“Smollett is very kind,” said Mr. Princey. “He knows all our trouble. We can rely on him. We have his word.”
“Oh, have we, Captain Smollett?” cried Mrs. Princey. “You are good.”
“Don’t worry, old fellow,” Mr. Princey said. “They’ll never find anything.”
Pretty soon Smollett took his leave. Mrs. Princey pressed his hand very hard. Tears came into her eyes. All three of them watched him go down the drive. Then Mr. Princey spoke very earnestly to his wife for a few minutes and the two of them went upstairs and spoke still more earnestly to Millicent. Soon after, the rain having ceased, Mr. Princey took a stroll round the stable yard.
He came back and went to the telephone. “Put me through to Lyston police station,” said he. “Quickly … Hullo, is that the police station? This is Mr. Princey, of Abbott’s Laxton. I’m afraid something rather terrible has happened up here. Can you send someone at once?”
When we started for our drive the sun was shining brightly on Munich, and the air was full of the joyousness of early summer. Just as we were about to depart, Herr Delbruck (the maitre d’hotel of the Quatre Saisons, where I was staying) came down bareheaded to the carriage and, after wishing me a pleasant drive, said to the coachman, still holding his hand on the handle of the carriage door, “Remember you are back by nightfall. The sky looks bright but there is a shiver in the north wind that says there may be a sudden storm. But I am sure you will not be late.” Here he smiled and added, “for you know what night it is.”
Johann answered with an emphatic, “Ja, mein Herr,” and, touching his hat, drove off quickly. When we had cleared the town, I said, after signalling to him to stop:
“Tell me, Johann, what is tonight?”
He crossed himself, as he answered laconically: “Walpurgis nacht.” Then he took out his watch, a great, old-fashioned German silver thing as big as a turnip and looked at it, with his eyebrows gathered together and a little impatient shrug of his shoulders. I realized that this was his way of respectfully protesting against the unnecessary delay and sank back in the carriage, merely motioning him to proceed. He started off rapidly, as if to make up for lost time. Every now and then the horses seemed to throw up their heads and sniff the air suspiciously. On such occasions I often looked round in alarm. The road was pretty bleak, for we were traversing a sort of high windswept plateau. As we drove, I saw a road that looked but little used and which seemed to dip through a little winding valley. It looked so inviting that, even at the risk of offending him, I called Johann to stop—and when he had pulled up, I told him I would like to drive down that road. He made all sorts of excuses and frequently crossed himself as he spoke. This somewhat piqued my curiosity, so I asked him various questions. He answered fencingly and repeatedly looked at his watch in protest.
Finally I said, “Well, Johann, I want to go down this road. I shall not ask you to come unless you like; but tell me why you do not like to go, that is all I ask.” For answer he seemed to throw himself off the box, so quickly did he reach the ground. Then he stretched out his hands appealingly to me and implored me not to go. There was just enough of English mixed with the German for me to understand the drift of his talk. He seemed always just about to tell me something – the very idea of which evidently frightened him; but each time he pulled himself up saying, “Walpurgis nacht!”
I tried to argue with him, but it was difficult to argue with a man when I did not know his language. The advantage certainly rested with him, for although he began to speak in English, of a very crude and broken kind, he always got excited and broke into his native tongue – and every time he did so, he looked at his watch. Then the horses became restless and sniffed the air. At this he grew very pale, and, looking around in a frightened way, he suddenly jumped forward, took them by the bridles, and led them on some twenty feet. I followed and asked why he had done this. For an answer he crossed himself, pointed to the spot we had left, and drew his carriage in the direction of the other road, indicating a cross, and said, first in German, then in English, “Buried him – him what killed themselves.”
I remembered the old custom of burying suicides at cross roads: “Ah! I see, a suicide. How interesting!” But for the life of me I could not make out why the horses were frightened.
Whilst we were talking, we heard a sort of sound between a yelp and a bark. It was far away; but the horses got very restless, and it took Johann all his time to quiet them. He was pale and said, “It sounds like a wolf—but yet there are no wolves here now.”
“No?” I said, questioning him. “Isn’t it long since the wolves were so near the city?”
“Long, long,” he answered, “in the spring and summer; but with the snow the wolves have been here not so long.”
Whilst he was petting the horses and trying to quiet them, dark clouds drifted rapidly across the sky. The sunshine passed away, and a breath of cold wind seemed to drift over us. It was only a breath, however, and more of a warning than a fact, for the sun came out brightly again.
Johann looked under his lifted hand at the horizon and said, “The storm of snow, he comes before long time.” Then he looked at his watch again, and, straightway holding his reins firmly—for the horses were still pawing the ground restlessly and shaking their heads—he climbed to his box as though the time had come for proceeding on our journey.
I felt a little obstinate and did not at once get into the carriage. “Tell me,” I said, “about this place where the road leads,” and I pointed down.
Again he crossed himself and mumbled a prayer before he answered, “It is unholy.”
“What is unholy?” I enquired.
“The village.”
“Then there is a village?”
“No, no. No one lives there hundreds of years.”
My curiosity was piqued, “But you said there was a village.”
“There was.”
“Where is it now?”
Whereupon he burst out into a long story in German and English, so mixed up that I could not quite understand exactly what he said. Roughly I gathered that long ago, hundreds of years, men had died there and been buried in their graves; but sounds were heard under the clay, and when the graves were opened, men and women were found rosy with life and their mouths red with blood. And so, in haste to save their lives (aye, and their souls!—and here he crossed himself) those who were left fled away to other places, where the living lived and the dead were dead and not—not something. He was evidently afraid to speak the last words. As he proceeded with his narration, he grew more and more excited. It seemed as if his imagination had got hold of him, and he ended in a perfect paroxysm of fear – white-faced, perspiring, trembling, and looking round him as if expecting that some dreadful presence would manifest itself there in the bright sunshine on the open plain.
Finally, in an agony of desperation, he cried, “Walpurgis nacht!” and pointed to the carriage for me to get in.
All my English blood rose at this, and standing back I said, “You are afraid, Johann—you are afraid. Go home, I shall return alone, the walk will do me good.” The carriage door was open. I took from the seat my oak walking stick—which I always carry on my holiday excursions—and closed the door, pointing back to Munich, and said, “Go home, Johann—Walpurgis nacht doesn’t concern Englishmen.”
The horses were now more restive than ever, and Johann was trying to hold them in, while excitedly imploring me not to do anything so foolish. I pitied the poor fellow, he was so deeply in earnest; but all the same I could not help laughing. His English was quite gone now. In his anxiety he had forgot ten that his only means of making me understand was to talk my language, so he jabbered away in his native German. It began to be a little tedious. After giving the direction, “Home!” I turned to go down the cross road into the valley.
With a despairing gesture, Johann turned his horses towards Munich. I leaned on my stick and looked after him. He went slowly along the road for a while, then there came over the crest of the hill a man tall and thin. I could see so much in the distance. When he drew near the horses, they began to jump and kick about, then to scream with terror. Johann could not hold them in; they bolted down the road, running away madly. I watched them out of sight, then looked for the stranger; but I found that he, too, was gone.
With a light heart I turned down the side road through the deepening valley to which Johann had objected. There was not the slightest reason, that I could see, for his objection; and I daresay I tramped for a couple of hours without thinking of time or distance and certainly without seeing a person or a house. So far as the place was concerned, it was desolation itself. But I did not notice this particularly till, on turning a bend in the road, I came upon a scattered fringe of wood; then I recognized that I had been impressed unconsciously by the desolation of the region through which I had passed.
I sat down to rest myself and began to look around. It struck me that it was considerably colder than it had been at the commencement of my walk—a sort of sighing sound seemed to be around me with, now and then, high overhead, a sort of muffled roar. Looking upwards I noticed that great thick clouds were drafting rapidly across the sky from north to south at a great height. There were signs of a coming storm in some lofty stratum of the air. I was a little chilly, and, thinking that it was the sitting still after the exercise of walking, I resumed my journey.
The ground I passed over was now much more picturesque. There were no striking objects that the eye might single out, but in all there was a charm of beauty. I took little heed of time, and it was only when the deepening twilight forced it self upon me that I began to think of how I should find my way home. The air was cold, and the drifting of clouds high overhead was more marked. They were accompanied by a sort of far away rushing sound, through which seemed to come at intervals that mysterious cry which the driver had said came from a wolf. For a while I hesitated. I had said I would see the deserted village, so on I went and presently came on a wide stretch of open country, shut in by hills all around. Their sides were covered with trees which spread down to the plain, dotting in clumps the gentler slopes and hollows which showed here and there. I followed with my eye the winding of the road and saw that it curved close to one of the densest of these clumps and was lost behind it.
As I looked there came a cold shiver in the air, and the snow began to fall. I thought of the miles and miles of bleak country I had passed, and then hurried on to seek shelter of the wood in front. Darker and darker grew the sky, and faster and heavier fell the snow, till the earth before and around me was a glistening white carpet the further edge of which was lost in misty vagueness. The road was here but crude, and when on the level its boundaries were not so marked as when it passed through the cuttings; and in a little while I found that I must have strayed from it, for I missed underfoot the hard surface, and my feet sank deeper in the grass and moss. Then the wind grew stronger and blew with ever increasing force, till I was fain to run before it. The air became icy- cold, and in spite of my exercise I began to suffer. The snow was now falling so thickly and whirling around me in such rapid eddies that I could hardly keep my eyes open. Every now and then the heavens were torn asunder by vivid lightning, and in the flashes I could see ahead of me a great mass of trees, chiefly yew and cypress all heavily coated with snow.
I was soon amongst the shelter of the trees, and there in comparative silence I could hear the rush of the wind high overhead. Presently the blackness of the storm had become merged in the darkness of the night. By-and-by the storm seemed to be passing away, it now only came in fierce puffs or blasts. At such moments the weird sound of the wolf appeared to be echoed by many similar sounds around me.
Now and again, through the black mass of drifting cloud, came a straggling ray of moonlight which lit up the expanse and showed me that I was at the edge of a dense mass of cypress and yew trees. As the snow had ceased to fall, I walked out from the shelter and began to investigate more closely. It appeared to me that, amongst so many old foundations as I had passed, there might be still standing a house in which, though in ruins, I could find some sort of shelter for a while. As I skirted the edge of the copse, I found that a low wall encircled it, and following this I presently found an opening. Here the cypresses formed an alley leading up to a square mass of some kind of building. Just as I caught sight of this, however, the drifting clouds obscured the moon, and I passed up the path in darkness. The wind must have grown colder, for I felt myself shiver as I walked; but there was hope of shelter, and I groped my way blindly on.
I stopped, for there was a sudden stillness. The storm had passed; and, perhaps in sympathy with nature’s silence, my heart seemed to cease to beat. But this was only momentarily; for suddenly the moonlight broke through the clouds showing me that I was in a graveyard and that the square object before me was a great massive tomb of marble, as white as the snow that lay on and all around it. With the moonlight there came a fierce sigh of the storm which appeared to resume its course with a long, low howl, as of many dogs or wolves. I was awed and shocked, and I felt the cold perceptibly grow upon me till it seemed to grip me by the heart. Then while the flood of moonlight still fell on the marble tomb, the storm gave further evidence of renewing, as though it were returning on its track. Impelled by some sort of fascination, I approached the sepulchre to see what it was and why such a thing stood alone in such a place. I walked around it and read, over the Doric door, in German –
COUNTESS DOLINGEN OF GRATZ
IN STYRIA
SOUGHT AND FOUND DEATH
1801
On the top of the tomb, seemingly driven through the solid marble–for the structure was composed of a few vast blocks of stone–was a great iron spike or stake. On going to the back I saw, graven in great Russian letters:
“The dead travel fast.”
There was something so weird and uncanny about the whole thing that it gave me a turn and made me feel quite faint. I began to wish, for the first time, that I had taken Johann’s advice. Here a thought struck me, which came under almost mysterious circumstances and with a terrible shock. This was Walpurgis Night!
Walpurgis Night was when, according to the belief of mill ions of people, the devil was abroad – when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel. This very place the driver had specially shunned. This was the depopulated village of centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay; and this was the place where I was alone–unmanned, shivering with cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again up on me! It took all my philosophy, all the religion I had been taught, all my courage, not to collapse in a paroxysm of fright.
And now a perfect tornado burst upon me. The ground shook as though thousands of horses thundered across it; and this time the storm bore on its icy wings, not snow, but great hailstones which drove with such violence that they might have come from the thongs of Balearic slingers – hailstones that beat down leaf and branch and made the shelter of the cypresses of no more avail than though their stems were standing corn. At the first I had rushed to the nearest tree; but I was soon fain to leave it and seek the only spot that seemed to afford refuge, the deep Doric doorway of the marble tomb. There, crouching against the massive bronze door, I gained a certain amount of protection from the beating of the hail stones, for now they only drove against me as they ricocheted from the ground and the side of the marble.
As I leaned against the door, it moved slightly and opened inwards. The shelter of even a tomb was welcome in that pitiless tempest and I was about to enter it when there came a flash of forked lightning that lit up the whole expanse of the heavens. In the instant, as I am a living man, I saw, as my eyes turned into the darkness of the tomb, a beautiful woman with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on a bier. As the thunder broke overhead, I was grasped as by the hand of a giant and hurled out into the storm. The whole thing was so sudden that, before I could realize the shock, moral as well as physical, I found the hailstones beating me down. At the same time I had a strange, dominating feeling that I was not alone. I looked towards the tomb. Just then there came another blinding flash which seemed to strike the iron stake that surmounted the tomb and to pour through to the earth, blasting and crumbling the marble, as in a burst of flame. The dead woman rose for a moment of agony while she was lapped in the flame, and her bitter scream of pain was drowned in the thundercrash. The last thing I heard was this mingling of dreadful sound, as again I was seized in the giant grasp and dragged away, while the hailstones beat on me and the air around seemed reverberant with the howling of wolves. The last sight that I remembered was a vague, white, moving mass, as if all the graves around me had sent out the phantoms of their sheeted dead, and that they were closing in on me through the white cloudiness of the driving hail.
Gradually there came a sort of vague beginning of consciousness, then a sense of weariness that was dreadful. For a time I remembered nothing, but slowly my senses returned. My feet seemed positively racked with pain, yet I could not move them. They seemed to be numbed. There was an icy feeling at the back of my neck and all down my spine, and my ears, like my feet, were dead yet in torment; but there was in my breast a sense of warmth which was by comparison delicious. It was as a nightmare—a physical nightmare, if one may use such an expression; for some heavy weight on my chest made it difficult for me to breathe.
This period of semi-lethargy seemed to remain a long time, and as it faded away I must have slept or swooned. Then came a sort of loathing, like the first stage of seasickness, and a wild desire to be free of something—I knew not what. A vast stillness enveloped me, as though all the world were asleep or dead—only broken by the low panting as of some animal close to me. I felt a warm rasping at my throat, then came a consciousness of the awful truth which chilled me to the heart and sent the blood surging up through my brain. Some great animal was lying on me and now licking my throat. I feared to stir, for some instinct of prudence bade me lie still; but the brute seemed to realize that there was now some change in me, for it raised its head. Through my eyelashes I saw above me the two great flaming eyes of a gigantic wolf. Its sharp white teeth gleamed in the gaping red mouth, and I could feel its hot breath fierce and acrid upon me.
For another spell of time I remembered no more. Then I be came conscious of a low growl, followed by a yelp, renewed again and again. Then seemingly very far away, I heard a “Holloa! holloa!” as of many voices calling in unison. Cautiously I raised my head and looked in the direction whence the sound came, but the cemetery blocked my view. The wolf still continued to yelp in a strange way, and a red glare began to move round the grove of cypresses, as though following the sound. As the voices drew closer, the wolf yelped faster and louder. I feared to make either sound or motion. Nearer came the red glow over the white pall which stretched into the darkness a round me. Then all at once from beyond the trees there came at a trot a troop of horsemen bearing torches. The wolf rose from my breast and made for the cemetery. I saw one of the horsemen (soldiers by their caps and their long military cloaks) raise his carbine and take aim. A companion knocked up his arm, and I heard the ball whiz over my head. He had evidently taken my body for that of the wolf. Another sighted the animal as it slunk away, and a shot followed. Then, at a gallop, the troop rode forward—some towards me, others following the wolf as it disappeared amongst the snow-clad cypresses.
As they drew nearer I tried to move but was powerless, although I could see and hear all that went on around me. Two or three of the soldiers jumped from their horses and knelt beside me. One of them raised my head and placed his hand over my heart.
“Good news, comrades!” he cried. “His heart still beats!”
Then some brandy was poured down my throat; it put vigor into me, and I was able to open my eyes fully and look around. Lights and shadows were moving among the trees, and I heard men call to one another. They drew together, uttering frightened exclamations; and the lights flashed as the others came pouring out of the cemetery pell-mell, like men possessed. When the further ones came close to us, those who were around me asked them eagerly, “Well, have you found him?”
The reply rang out hurriedly, “No! no! Come away quick—quick! This is no place to stay, and on this of all nights!”
“What was it?” was the question, asked in all manner of keys. The answer came variously and all indefinitely as though the men were moved by some common impulse to speak yet were restrained by some common fear from giving their thoughts.
“It – it – indeed!” gibbered one, whose wits had plainly given out for the moment.
“A wolf—and yet not a wolf!” another put in shudderingly.
“No use trying for him without the sacred bullet,” a third remarked in a more ordinary manner.
“Serve us right for coming out on this night! Truly we have earned our thousand marks!” were the ejaculations of a fourth.
“There was blood on the broken marble,” another said after a pause, “the lightning never brought that there. And for him—is he safe? Look at his throat! See comrades, the wolf has been lying on him and keeping his blood warm.”
The officer looked at my throat and replied, “He is all right, the skin is not pierced. What does it all mean? We should never have found him but for the yelping of the wolf.”
“What became of it?” asked the man who was holding up my head and who seemed the least panic-stricken of the party, for his hands were steady and without tremor. On his sleeve was the chevron of a petty officer.
“It went home,” answered the man, whose long face was pallid and who actually shook with terror as he glanced around him fearfully. “There are graves enough there in which it may lie. Come, comrades—come quickly! Let us leave this cursed spot.”
The officer raised me to a sitting posture, as he uttered a word of command; then several men placed me upon a horse. He sprang to the saddle behind me, took me in his arms, gave the word to advance; and, turning our faces away from the cypresses, we rode away in swift military order.
As yet my tongue refused its office, and I was perforce silent. I must have fallen asleep; for the next thing I remembered was finding myself standing up, supported by a soldier on each side of me. It was almost broad daylight, and to the north a red streak of sunlight was reflected like a path of blood over the waste of snow. The officer was telling the men to say nothing of what they had seen, except that they found an English stranger, guarded by a large dog.
“Dog! that was no dog,” cut in the man who had exhibited such fear. “I think I know a wolf when I see one.”
The young officer answered calmly, “I said a dog.”
“Dog!” reiterated the other ironically. It was evident that his courage was rising with the sun; and, pointing to me, he said, “Look at his throat. Is that the work of a dog, master?”
Instinctively I raised my hand to my throat, and as I touched it I cried out in pain. The men crowded round to look, some stooping down from their saddles; and again there came the calm voice of the young officer, “A dog, as I said. If aught else were said we should only be laughed at.”
I was then mounted behind a trooper, and we rode on into the suburbs of Munich. Here we came across a stray carriage into which I was lifted, and it was driven off to the Quatre Saisons—the young officer accompanying me, whilst a trooper followed with his horse, and the others rode off to their barracks.
When we arrived, Herr Delbruck rushed so quickly down the steps to meet me, that it was apparent he had been watching within. Taking me by both hands he solicitously led me in. The officer saluted me and was turning to withdraw, when I recognized his purpose and insisted that he should come to my rooms. Over a glass of wine I warmly thanked him and his brave comrades for saving me. He replied simply that he was more than glad, and that Herr Delbruck had at the first taken steps to make all the searching party pleased; at which ambiguous utterance the maitre d’hotel smiled, while the officer plead duty and withdrew.
“But Herr Delbruck,” I enquired, “how and why was it that the soldiers searched for me?”
He shrugged his shoulders, as if in depreciation of his own deed, as he replied, “I was so fortunate as to obtain leave from the commander of the regiment in which I serve, to ask for volunteers.”
“But how did you know I was lost?” I asked.
“The driver came hither with the remains of his carriage, which had been upset when the horses ran away.”
“But surely you would not send a search party of soldiers merely on this account?”
“Oh, no!” he answered, “but even before the coachman arrived, I had this telegram from the Boyar whose guest you are,” and he took from his pocket a telegram which he handed to me, and I read:
Be careful of my guest – his safety is most precious to me. Should aught happen to him, or if he be missed, spare nothing to find him and ensure his safety. He is English and therefore adventurous. There are often dangers from snow and wolves and night. Lose not a moment if you suspect harm to him. I answer your zeal with my fortune.
– Dracula.
As I held the telegram in my hand, the room seemed to whirl around me, and if the attentive maitre d’hotel had not caught me, I think I should have fallen. There was something so strange in all this, something so weird and impossible to imagine, that there grew on me a sense of my being in some way the sport of opposite forces—the mere vague idea of which seemed in a way to paralyze me. I was certainly under some form of mysterious protection. From a distant country had come, in the very nick of time, a message that took me out of the danger of the snow sleep and the jaws of the wolf.
Literary Fictions 