The Best of Robert Bloch

by Robert Bloch

  Harvey's head hurt: the sun was very hot. He wondered if he had heard aright.

  "You can't die?"

  "It is true, baas. Soon, of course, I must decide upon my next move, for this body of mine is no longer suitable. But—"

  Harvey rose, reeling a bit, and backed away.

  "Don't eat me!" he cried.

  The old man crackled again. "Nonsense!" he said. "Sheer, superstitious nonsense. I do not eat children. My brothers feed me." He stretched forth his hand. "Look!"

  And the air was filled with the odor of carrion, as the aasvogels gathered, fluttering frantically up the face of the sheer cliff and clustering about the bony body of the wizened black. In their beaks they carried bits of rancid flesh, dropping their tribute into the Black Skelm's fingers.

  Then Harvey knew that he was very sick indeed; the sun had played tricks. He ran into the cave, and it was dark and musty, and from the twisted caverns beyond welled a terrible odor of decay. The bats hung head downwards, hung in mute millions, and the floor of the cave was not covered with bones, but with whitish droppings. On the walls great eyes winked—eyes that had been painted by hands long dead. The eyes whirled and Harvey felt his kneecaps turn to water. He would have fallen, but the Black Skelm came up behind him and caught him.

  The old man's grip was surprisingly strong.

  "Do not fear," he whispered. "Drink this." And he held out the hollowed skull. The liquid was warm and red.

  "Blood," Harvey quavered.

  "Of cattle. It is pure and fresh."

  "But you are a wizard—"

  "What is a wizard? Merely a seeker, like yourself. A seeker who has perhaps peered further than the land beyond the mountain."

  The Black Skelm led him back to the mouth of the cave, and bade him sit in the shadows there. Harvey was suddenly very tired. He closed his eyes, scarcely listening, as the Black Skelm droned on.

  "All men are seekers, but each chooses a different path in his search for understanding. There is the path of Columbus who sought to encompass the earth and the path of Galileo who sought to search the heavens; the sevenfold path of Buddha which led, he hoped, to Nirvana, and the path of Apollonius which is an inward spiral with oblivion at its core. There is Einstein and—"

  Harvey opened his eyes. He was, he knew, quite delirious. The black man sitting beside him, chanting strange names, eating out of the beaks of vultures, talking of Zulu kraals which had vanished a hundred years ago—this was a fever-dream. He could hear only bits and snatches.

  "You will be a seeker, too, Harvey Wolf. You will go out into the world to look for knowledge. Eventually you will sicken of knowledge and try to find truth. Perhaps we can discover it together—"

  Harvey's head throbbed. The sun was blazing off in the west, sinking benath the purple lower lid of a gigantic cloud. And a voice was echoing along the berg, calling, "Harvey—Harvey, where are you?"

  "Jong Kurt!" Harvey rose.

  The Black Skelm was already on his feet, scuttling into the shadows of the cave.

  "No, wait—come back!" Harvey called, groping after the old man and nearly falling as his fevered body convulsed in a sudden chill.

  But the old man retreated into the cave.

  And then Jong Kurt was looming on the pathway, his face grave and his forehead seamed with apprehension. He caught the reeling boy in his arms.

  Suddenly the blackness blossomed and burst forth from the cave, a blinding billowing of squeaking, stenchful shadows—shadows that flapped and fluttered and stared with millions of little red eyes.

  Jong Kurt fled down the mountain, carrying Harvey Wolf. But the eyes followed, haunting Harvey's delirium in dreams. . . .

  They sent him away, then. Harvey wasn't conscious when the decision was made, though he did see his father once, afterwards, at the dock in Cape Town. His father introduced him to his Uncle Frank, from America, and gave him strict orders about minding his manners and following instructions. There was talk about a New Life and a Good School and the Unhealthy Outlook that comes from being alone.

  Harvey tried to tell his father about the Black Skelm, but his father wouldn't listen; not even Mama or Jong Kurt had listened. They all said Harvey had suffered from sunstroke, and in the end he came to believe it himself. It had all been heat and hallucination and nothing was real now but the great ocean and the great city.

  In New York his Uncle Frank and his Aunt Lorraine were very kind. They took vicarious pleasure in his amazement at the sight of the city, and conducted him to his first motion picture.

  That seemed to be a mistake, and after they dragged the frightened, hysterical child out of the theater he suffered what the doctor called a "relapse." Afterwards, he forgot the whole incident, and it wasn't until years later—

  But meanwhile, Harvey grew up. He went to school and he managed to endure the tight, idiotic abominations called "Health Shoes." Gradually he accumulated the fund of knowledge necessary for a child to flourish in our society—that is to say, he could identify the various makes and models of automobiles in the streets, he learned the names of "baseball stars," and the meanings behind the four-letter words and the slang-phrases of the day.

  Also, he learned to insulate his interior existence from other eyes; he found that seekers are not popular with their fellows, so he concealed his interests from his playmates. His teachers, however, were not unaware of his intelligence; at their advice he went on to private schools and from there to an Ivy League college.

  He was still there when Uncle Frank and Aunt Lorraine went over to Cape Town to bring his father back for a reunion; he was there when the news came to him that the private plane had crashed on the return flight.

  After the funeral he visited the attorneys.

  They told him he had inherited the entire estate. Once liquidated, with all taxes paid, he could count on an accumulation of better than three million dollars. It would be ready for him by the time he reached his twenty-first birthday.

  Right then and there he made a sensible decision; he decided it was time to retire.

  It was not just the caprice of a spoiled brat or a rich man's heir. At twenty-one, Harvey Wolf was a fairly presentable young man—many girls even found him handsome, for three million reasons—and he possessed an alert intellect.

  He turned his back on the world only because he was fed up with hypocrisy and liars.

  Harvey's first move was to leave the college. He said farewell forever to its small Humanities Department and its huge football stadium.

  Next he departed from a church whose spiritual representatives appeared at launching ceremonies to bless aircraft carriers and destroyers.

  At the same time he walked out on most of the phenomena and beliefs held dear by his peers; on chauvinism, on racial prejudice, on the feudal caste-system glorified by the armed forces of our democracy.

  He briefly considered going into business, until he found he couldn't subscribe to the widespread doctrine that there is some mystically ennobling value attached to "competition" and that somehow everybody benefits under a system where one man is dedicated to outsmarting another.

  Harvey turned his back on the life of a wealthy idler because he could not tolerate the common amusements. He did not believe that animal-killers were "sportsmen," whether they dressed in red coats and drank champagne before chasing a fox or wore dirty dungarees and guzzled beer out of the bottle before shooting at an unsuspecting duck. He did not think that baseball players or boxers or even bullfighters were as much heroic as they were overpaid. He squinted but saw nothing in abstract art; he listened, but heard nothing in its credos and critiques.

  Harvey Wolf turned his back on Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, Christmas, and all the other holidays heralded by the joyous tinkle of cash-registers on high. He deplored the phony virility of the men's magazines, the fake coyness of the women's magazines, and the artificial social values which emotionally warped young people into "manliness" or "femininity."

  Taking stoc
k of himself, Harvey found he did not worship sports cars or subscribe to the "theory of obsolescence" dearly beloved by manufacturers and dearly paid for by consumers. He abhorred drum-majorettes, bathing beauty contests, and the publicity given "Miss Canned Goods" or the "Oklahoma Cucumber Queen." He took a dim, pained view of billboards, and disliked the transformation of natural parks and beauty spots into commercialized locales for hot-dog stands and souvenir concessions which sold little wooden outhouses.

  He held opinions which would automatically antagonize all fraternity-members, morticians, professional evangelists, Texans, and the marchers in St. Patrick's Day parades. He did not believe in caveat emptor; card players who slam each trick down on the table and bellow at the top of their lungs; fake "frontier days" held by rough, tough pioneer towns in the wilds of New Jersey; sound engineers who "ride the gain" on TV commercials; professional fund-raisers who take 40% off the top in charity drives, or people who take pride in announcing that they are "quick-tempered," as though this statement entitled them to special privileges.

  Harvey held a bias against practical jokers, and people who obscure driving visibility by decorating their car-windows with dangling dolls, oversize dice, baby shoes, and imitation shrunken heads. He saw no sense to endurance-contests, had no patience with litter-bugs, failed to believe in Beggar's Night or politicians who "compromise" after election at the expense of repudiating their campaign pledges. He had a contempt for Muscle Beach exhibitionists and he objected to the rewriting of history under the guise of "patriotism." He—but the list is endless, and of interest only to psychiatrists; they get $50 an hour for listening.

  Harvey Wolf didn't go to the psychiatrists—not yet, at any rate, including the $50 an hour one.

  He thought he was searching for something to believe in and that perhaps he could find it in good, hard, scientific logic.

  So he sailed for Europe, to study at the source.

  In Edinburgh, Harvey encountered a Brilliant Doctor who prided himself on complete objectivity.

  "Nothing," said the Brilliant Doctor, in one of his famed private seminars, "is ever finally 'proved' and everything remains possible in theory.

  "For example, granted the loose molecular structure of both a human body and a brick wall, it is only logical to concede that, with the exact proper alignment of every single molecule in the given body with every single molecule in the given wall, at a given instant it would be possible for said body to walk through said wall and emerge unscathed on the other side.

  "The chances are almost inconceivably infinitesimal, but the possibility must be granted."

  Harvey Wolf thereupon asked the Brilliant Doctor, in the light of this opinion, what he thought of allied phenomena. What of his late countryman, the Scottish medium, D. D. Home, who practiced levitation? He rose, resting on his back in mid-air, then floated out of one second-story window and back into the room through another, in full view and broad daylight.

  "Nonsense!" said the Brilliant Doctor.

  Harvey Wolf blinked. "But no less an observer than the distinguished scientist Sir William Crookes testified he had witnessed this feat with his own eyes," Harvey replied.

  "Impossible!" said the Brilliant Doctor. . . .

  At Oxford, Harvey Wolf was enthralled by a Learned Scholar who spoke of the biological basis of Life and the almost metaphysical borderland between Being and Nothingness.

  "The electromagnetic principles governing sentience and consciousness are still indefinable," he announced. "No man has yet isolated the Life Force or truly defined death or nonexistence except in terms of its absence."

  Harvey Wolf was interested. What, he asked, did the Learned Scholar think of Pierre and Eve Curie's signed testimony that they had seen genuine evidence of psychic phenomena demonstrated by a medium? What about Thomas Edison's similar convictions, and his final experiments in communication with the spirit world?

  "There is no objective validity offered in evidence here," said the Learned Scholar.

  "But we ignored electricity for thousands of years," Harvey protested. "Its omnipresent existence was unknown to us except in lightning until we found a means of harnessing this force. Surely, if the borderline between existence and nonexistence, consciousness and unconsciousness, cannot be exactly defined, and yet is apparently subject to certain definite principles—"

  "Utter rot!" said the Learned Scholar. . . .

  In Heidelberg, Harvey Wolf studied under a famous Herr Doktor-Professor whose technical mastery of neuropathology was exceeded only by his interest in psychosomatic medicine. The Herr Doktor-Professor was extremely liberal in his outlook, and even admitted prodromosis as a basis for diagnosis.

  "I knew a surgeon who was in charge of an army hospital during the war," Harvey said. "One of his patients was completely paralyzed from the waist down—the spinal cord had been entirely severed and there was no nervous response. He lay in bed, wasting away, and was informed he'd never move his legs again. He refused to accept the verdict. Each day he pulled himself up in bed, lifted his legs over the side, tried to stand. The surgeon gave strict orders to restrain him, but he persisted. After two gruelling months, he stood. A month later he took his first step. All tests showed it was physically impossible for him to exercise any control over his legs, but he walked—"

  "Impossible!" muttered the Herr Doktor-Professor.

  "Yet what about Edgar Cayce and his clinically-verified healings of organic disorders with no possible basis in hysteria? What about—"

  "Dummkopf!" opined the Herr Doktor-Professor. . . .

  In the Sorbonne faculty, Harvey met a Celebrated Savant with unorthodox views; a man who dared to side with Charles Fort in his questioning of organized science. He once stated that if we accepted the theory of evolution from a non-anthropomorphic viewpoint, it was quite possible to believe that man's function on earth was merely to act as host for cancer cells which would eventually learn to survive the death of the human body and emerge as the next, higher life-form. He was even fond of quoting Mark Twain and others to the effect that the stars and planets of our universe might be merely the equivalent of tiny corpuscles moving through the bloodstream of some incalculably huge monster. And that this monster, in turn, might walk the surface of another world in another universe which in turn might be composed of similar corpuscles—ad infinitum to the nth2 power.

  "It is a humbling thought," the Celebrated Savant observed, and Harvey Wolf agreed.

  "A far remove from petty human concepts," Harvey mused. "There is no need to concern oneself with trivia in the face of it now, is there?"

  But the Celebrated Savant wasn't listening; he was reading the newspaper and scowling.

  "Those pigs of Algerians!" he muttered to himself. "Yes, and those lousy colons, bidding for power and setting up education for all. It is a disaster!"

  Harvey shrugged. "The world is only a corpuscle," he said. "Or perhaps it's just a virus-cell in the bloodstream of the Infinite. What does it matter?"

  "Cochon! The purity of the State depends upon marntaining our autonomy. And furthermore, young man—"

  Harvey Wolf found himself walking out once more. But this time he was walking out into Paris.

  Paris, of course, is what you make it. To cutpurse Villon, living from hand to mouth and from the Small to the Grand Testament, it was a city of cold cobblestones were every twisted alley led only to the inevitable gibbet. To Bonaparte it was the site of a triumphal arch through which he marched to celebrate victory—or furtively avoided, in a solitary coach, as he whipped his horses from the field of Moscow or Waterloo. Toulouse-Lautrec clattered across Paris leaning upon two sticks, and his city was a gaslight inferno. There is the Sec and Brut Paris of pout-lipped Chevalier, the cerebral city of Proust and Gide and Sartre, the Paris of the GI on leave for couchez-vous carnival. There is the Paris of the tourist—the Louvre's leg-weary legacy, the giddy gaping from the Eiffel Tower, the hasty concealment of the paperbound Tropic of Cancer at the bottom of the
suitcase. There is a Paris as gay as Colette, as tough as Louis-Ferdinand Céline, as weird as Huysmans. You pay your money and you take your choice.

  And when you have three rnillion dollars—

  Harvey Wolf brooded about it in a Montmartre bistro. A bearded man stared at him with yellow cat-eyes and said, "Welcome, Pontius Pilate."

  "Pilate?" echoed Harvey Wolf.

  "I recognize the mood," said the bearded man. "You are asking yourself Pilate's age-old question—What is Truth?"

  "And the answer?"

  "Truth is sensation," the bearded man told him. "Sensation alone is reality. All else is illusion."

  "Hedonism, eh? I don't know—"

  "You can learn. Experience is the great teacher."

  Harvey was sated with civilization, sick of science. He spent six months with the bearded man and the bearded man's friends. He rented a villa near Antibes, and many guests came.

  There was the dwarf girl and the giantess and the woman with the filed and pointed teeth; the lady who slept only in a coffin and never alone; the girl whose luggage consisted solely of a custom-made traveling case filled entirely with whips. There was a rather unusual troupe of artists whose specialty consisted of a pantomime dramatization of the Kama Sutra.

  Long before the six months were up, Harvey realized that his meeting with the bearded man had not been accidental. Behind the beard was neither Jesus, D. H. Lawrence, or even a genuine Gilles de Rais—merely a weak-chinned, loose-lipped voluptuary adventurer who had visions of sugarplum splendor in the form of a billion-franc blackmail scheme.

  Harvey got rid of him, at last, for considerably less, and he did not begrudge the price he finally paid. For he had learned that the senses are shallow and the orgasmic is not the ultimate peak of perceptivity.