by Robert Bloch
Then one day Ed Pierce at the hardware store started to chuckle and told the sheriff about the time Mr. Bleak had been in to buy a shotgun because he and Mrs. Bleak were terribly concerned about “all the people” they’d heard lately sneaking about on the grounds outside the house in the dark of night, and how once they thought they’d caught a glimpse of someone dragging someone else wrapped in what looked to be a bloody sheet. Ed said when he tried to calm him down by telling him you “just naturally got to expect folks to take advantage of these nice summer nights.” Bleak went still and then, after staring at him very intently and quietly for a moment or two, told him to add on five more boxes of ammo to his order. Sheriff Olson looked in the mirror while he was shaving the very next morning after he heard that and for the first time noticed a tiny frown line had blossomed on his forehead.
But though he didn’t like the sound of what he’d heard, the sheriff assumed it was all only a case of city people being understandably jumpy because they were new to the country life-style, to all that quiet at night, to the way the local inhabitants tended to keep their private business private. He would listen to the stories, and then he would smile and scratch his big jaw and try to paper it over by telling anybody who had brought him another depressing story to be patient, that it wouldn’t be any time at all before the Bleaks got used to things, that soon you wouldn’t hear of any more complaining. He would assure them all the Bleaks would fit in fine.
But the stories kept coming in and they kept adding up. Ben Frazier at the butcher shop said he saw Mrs. Bleak studying the specialty meats in the separate case at the back with extreme care one day when she was waiting for the rain to ease off, when suddenly she gave a little cry and began to peer harder and harder until she started to actually tremble. When Ben walked over to her she pointed at an arm and asked him “What’s that?” in a kind of a hiss, and there was something in her tone of voice that made him decide not to tell her just then what it was, so he said it was a leg of veal though he knew she didn’t believe him.
After she left he looked at the meat carefully and was more than a little irritated to realize that the tourist lady’s watch had left an easily recognizable indentation on her wrist.
And Doc Huggins at the pharmacy said he cut Mr. Bleak short with a friendly smile once when he’d started going on and on about how he was killing some rats in order to explain why he needed a tin of cyanide he’d come to buy. Doc did his best to assure him that no excuses at all were needed when it came to buying poison in Commonplace; he told him that as a matter of fact the store took special pride in the quality and wide variety of the poisons which they stocked. He was in the process of proving the point by bending down and fishing around in a lower drawer in order to get a jar of the new nerve gas the Ryan boy had brought in on his last leave from the Marines, but when he straightened up with the jar in his hand he realized Mr. Bleak had left and that he’d scuttled right out of the establishment in such a rush that he’d left his package of cyanide behind all wrapped up neatly and tidily as you please on the counter.
There was all of that and a lot more and it just would not stop and the frown line got so deep and long that the sheriff’s wife had taken to fretting over it audibly, but somehow he’d managed to fend all these tales away, to keep pushing them off, to make excuses.
Then, just before he’d left the café and gotten that call from Wilbur which had proven to be the final straw, Mae had to go and tell him her funny little story.
It would never have seemed anywhere near so ominous by itself since it wasn’t more than a tiny thing, but landing as it did atop of all those other accumulated accounts which had been steadily heaping up through the days and weeks and months, it somehow managed to strike Sheriff Olson as being particularly discouraging.
He remembered he’d paused after turning off the engine when he’d parked in Mae’s lot to stand and listen to the early morning birds chirping in the soft, fresh air, and it had put him into such a pleasant, peaceful mood that he’d walked into the café whistling, something he’d never done before, but he stopped that on a dime when he saw Mae studying him sidewise and slyly with her tiny, cold little eyes and noticed she was wearing that twisty, snaky smile she only let show when she knew she’d snagged onto something that would really hurt.
She didn’t say anything much in particular while he worked his way through his chili burger, she just hovered over her grill, picking at little raised bits of carbon with the sharp tip of a long, red fingernail. He ate as quietly as he could, then snuck his money under the side of his plate, and was nearly beginning to believe he’d managed to sneak out of there without her noticing when she was on him with the suddenness of a shark, full of simpers and coy cooings and giving his cup an extra, unwanted pour of coffee.
“You hear about what little Harold Perkins told his maw and paw about the Bleak kids, Sheriff, honey?” she asked in an almost motherly manner.
“Can’t say as I have, Mae,” he murmured.
“Well, it’s quite a shock and that’s the truth,” she said, shaking her head in a slow, sad, righteous manner. “Particularly seeing as how it all come up in a schoolyard where you wouldn’t expect anything of that nature to take place.”
“In a schoolyard,” he repeated.
“All the poor, dear children was trying to do was teach them Bleak kids an innocent playground game when the girl begun to cry and holler something awful and her brother got so darn-fool mad things almost ended in a fistfight!”
“What game was that, Mae?” Sheriff Olson asked, standing and carefully adjusting his belt so that his belly would pop over it comfortably.
“Why good old Rob the Coffin,” said Mae, her eyes widening with astonishment. “The same game as you and I and every boy and girl that’s grown up around hereabouts has played since Lord knows when. The sweet little dears explained them all the rules, such as how each member of the one team plays a body part—choosing the head or the heart or the bowels and such—whilst the other team plays the ghouls. That cute little Finley girl was showing them how you draw the blood pump in the funeral parlor diagram with a stick on the playground dirt, and Harold Perkins was explaining how if you shout ‘I’m embalmed!’ three times before the ghouls grab you they can’t eat you, when out of the blue and all of a sudden the Bleak girl began screaming and carrying on fit to beat the band and her brother got all mad and uppity and like to pop poor Harold Perkins right on the nose and maybe broke it if the teacher hadn’t heard all the caterwauling and come rushing out to calm things down.”
Mae paused in order to give the counter a little swipe with a paper towel before she twisted her knife.
“I hate to mention it because I know you vouched for them Bleaks, Sheriff, honey, and are more responsible than anybody else for them presently living in our little community,” she purred. “But I feel it’s my civic duty, painful though it may be, and besides, we’re all sure you’ll put things right again once you’ve gone and realized your mistake.”
When Sheriff Olson saw the shiny new stainless steel mailbox with BLEAK glued on it in bright red, reflective letters he extinguished his car’s flashing lights and siren, slowed to a civilian speed, and turned off Route 46 onto a dirt road winding up a craggy hill. He cringed a little when, in the process of doing all this, he caught a peek at his reflection in the rearview mirror and hoped he hadn’t looked that dismally gloomy when he’d been leaving Mae’s Café as it would have pleased her far too much. The frown line, which was now the most noticeable feature of his face, presently traversed the entire length of his forehead and he feared if it cut any deeper it might expose his very skull.
He chewed a corner of his moustache as he bumped up the road, watching the grey spot on the mountain’s top grow into a big, old, drearily menacing house with tall, thin, secretive windows peering over and under a quantity of crouching roofs, and he didn’t even try to fight off wishing little Wendell Worper still lived there. Peaceful Wendell, with never a com
plaint from him or about him, content to play shyly and quietly with his mother and all the rest of those stuffed dead women, always careful never to bother a soul, save for his victims.
But that brief, nostalgic reverie was exploded by the sight of Robert Bleak leaning his scrawny frame over the fence and flapping his long arms at him like an agitated blue jay. Olson sighed, smoothed the frown line from his forehead with a great effort, and arranged his face into what he hoped would seem a relaxed, convincingly official smile as he pulled to the side of the road.
“Well, now, Mr. Bleak,” he said, easing his big body out of the car. “What seems to be the trouble?”
“That,” said Bleak, waving frantically at the ground, and the sheriff saw a pale object jammed onto the end of a short board stuck into the ground. It was a hand with its index finger pointed in Bleak’s general direction and its other fingers and thumb tightly clenched. It was a macabre object, without doubt, but it undeniably had a peculiar kind of charm. It looked very much like an antique direction indicator in some old-fashioned place of business except, perhaps, for its gory stump.
Sheriff Olson studied it for a moment with his eyes narrowed slightly and his head tilted to one side. There seemed to be something oddly familiar about that hand; those chubby, spatulate fingers definitely rang a muffled bell.
“Well, now,” said Olson after a pause, “so this here is why you called me? This is what the fuss is all about?”
“All the fuss?” gritted Bleak, leaning even further over his fence and firmly fixing his visitor with an incredulous glare. “All the fuss? I should think the discovery of an item as horrible and gruesome as this would be a perfectly appropriate occasion for a fuss! I should indeed!”
“Well, now,” Olson said again, visibly disconcerted at the sight of Bleak actually wringing his hands. “I want you please to understand I meant no offense when I said that, Mr. Bleak, sir, none at all. The truth be told, I’d really hoped you’d take it as a kind of compliment!”
Bleak blinked, obviously puzzled. His jaw moved slightly as if he were chewing over what he’d just heard.
“Compliment?” he said at length. “I’m afraid I don’t follow you at all on that, Sheriff Olson.”
Extending both his palms before him in a double-barreled gesture of peace, Olson made his way to the fence, speaking as he went.
“What I was trying to say, sir, is that I wouldn’t think a person such as yourself would bother to call the police about some little bitty thing like this,” he said, indicating the severed hand with an almost dismissive wave. “I’d expect a lot of folks might be spooked by it, sure, but not you, sir, not you!”
Now the sheriff was directly across the fence from Bleak. He was trying to keep his easy, friendly, sheriff’s smile in place but it persisted in slipping away whereas his frown line kept treacherously popping into view in spite of all his efforts. The author studied him warily as the sheriff continued speaking more and more in a rush.
“Heck, sir, if anything, I’d have thought you’d be able to manage something like this little old hand, here, a whole lot better than me. Oh, sure, I’ve seen a bunch of bodies and stuff like that what with one thing and another, but, hell, I’m just a country cop, Mr. Bleak, I’m just a hayseed, and you’re worldwide known as a master of the macabre, dammit, sir, just like it says on the covers of your books, and I know you really are, sir, because I’ve read those books and what it says is the plain truth, so I just can’t see how come a bitty piece of corpse meat has got you so riled up!”
Bleak stared at him with bug-eyed incredulity for a moment, and then pointed back at the pointing hand.
“That thing stuck on that little post in the ground between your feet and mine is real, Sheriff Olson,” he said, speaking slowly and grimly. “It is part of a genuine dead body. In my stories amputated hands are only made-up things which I create both because I enjoy doing it and because it makes me a reasonable living. They are works of fiction and therefore they won’t slowly turn into green slime or mummify into cracklings or attract worms or do any of the other things a real dead hand such as that one there can do. My dead hands are just pretend dead hands.”
Olson took hold of the top rail of the fence as a man will when he clutches something at the edge of a high precipice to keep from falling.
“But those godawful stories you write, sir,” he said, an audible desperation creeping into his voice. “Like that La Traviata where you dreamt up the dead Italian opera star stuffed full of singing worms, or that yarn of yours which still gives me the jimjams every time I think of it, the one where you show that Jack the Ripper was actually Queen Victoria all along, how can anybody who’s thought up such stuff as that be put off by a dinky, no-account, bitty old hand?”
“Since you persist in missing my point, Sheriff Olson,” said Bleak, exasperated, “I suggest we abandon it and move on to a far more important aspect of this situation. It is not only that hand which concerns me. There is more.”
“More?” the sheriff asked in a dazed tone of voice, clearly floundering. “More?”
“More,” said Bleak. “See where the hand is pointing.”
Sheriff Olson’s gape obediently followed the direction indicated by the dead finger as the author had asked him until he saw, lying in the tall grass a little closer to the house, a pale, misshapen lump.
He climbed over the fence without the least awareness he was doing it and followed Bleak as he walked over to the lump. It was the naked left half of a male corpse, minus its hands and head. Its wrist stump was pointing up the slope toward the house as the hand had done. The sheriff peered at the thing thoughtfully for a moment and then jumped and wheeled to his rear at the sound of a soft rustle behind him.
It was Mrs. Bleak, looking pale and distracted. She edged closer to him, wringing her hands almost exactly as Mr. Bleak had done.
“I’m so glad you’ve come, Sheriff Olson!” she said, speaking with a kind of anxious calm and staring at him with her wide, frightened-looking eyes. “I do so hope you can do something about all these terrible, awful things!”
Olson opened his mouth to reply but Bleak cut him off.
“All he has done so far is to advise me not to take them all that seriously,” said the author. “Maybe you can convince him we hold a dim view of this sort of thing. He seems altogether very unimpressed with our corpse so far.”
“Then you’re just like all the rest of the people here in Commonplace!” she cried, stepping hurriedly back from the sheriff, a sudden expression of horror on her face.
“Now, please, Mrs. Bleak, just hear me out—” he began, but Bleak cut him off again.
“Being an investigator of crime, you might be at least vaguely interested in looking where this part of the body’s pointing,” he said.
The sheriff did and there was yet another pale lump in the grass further on ahead, and standing by it, hand in hand, were both of the Bleak children, staring at the lawman accusingly.
“Is he like the others, mommy?” asked the little girl in a tearful voice which made the sheriff wince. “Is he going to tease us about killing people? Is he, mommy?”
The new lump was the right-hand half of the corpse, and now the sheriff knew for certain he’d been acquainted with it in life. Like the left half, it had come from a chubby man, probably somewhere in his mid-thirties. Its wrist, too, pointed ahead and this time Olson needed no prompting to look in the direction specified. There, on the top step of the open storm door leading into the basement, pointing downward, was the other hand, and seated next to it, looking at him in an accusatory fashion, just like every other member of the family, was the Bleaks’ big black mastiff.
“I suppose there’s more of it down there,” said the sheriff.
“There is,” said Bleak. “One thing more. Shall we go look at it, or do you think it’s not all that important and that we should walk off and forget all about it?”
“Now just hold on,” said the sheriff angrily, and then
paused to heave a deep sigh. “Let’s all just hold on. There’s been a misunderstanding here and I admit it’s all my fault. I got you folks wrong; it was my business to figure if you would or would not fit in around these parts and I figured wrong. I don’t know what I’m going to do about you all, I truly don’t, but please understand, no matter what happens, I didn’t never mean no harm.”
Bleak stared at him for a long moment, then slowly shook his head.
“Perhaps, someday, I’ll have at least a vague idea what you meant just then, Sheriff,” he said at last. “But for now, just as a matter of form, let’s go look at what’s down there in the basement.”
It was awkward descending the steps in the dark, but the sheriff had gone down them before, on the last occasion to supervise the investigation and photography of the place when it had been Wendell Worper’s little embalming room. Here is where the boy had nearly gutted his prey and soaked them in vats of nitron before patting them dry and sewing them up with a stitch he’d learned from studying leather baseball skins. Here is where he dressed them up again in their graveyard clothes which he’d cleaned and pressed for them, or arrayed them in pretty dresses which he’d bought from department stores in the city for just that purpose.
