The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich

by Fritz Leiber

  Ferguson ran his finger around inside his collar and smiled in an unconvincing fashion.

  “Surely not,” he answered, “even though we are near the hotbed of cults and ignorant faddish religions—I mean Hollywood. No, it must be, as you say, a mass delusion, though I am hard put to admit it, for that means I am one of those suffering… er… from the… mental epidemic.”

  I looked at him, puzzled.

  “You told me as much in the police station,” I said. “But do you really mean that you actually think that the woman whose funeral service you preached was buried alive? Don’t you mean that you sympathize with the delusion in others and that you’ve been imagining what it would be like if you had it yourself?”

  “Hardly, hardly, though it’s difficult for me to admit it. It’s this way: for the past two or three days I’ve found my mind full of disturbing pictures—Mrs. Ellis lying in the coffin with color in her cheeks under the undertaker’s rouge and with her lips moving a little, feebly. Things like that. But so strong that they almost completely drown out my memories of what actually happened. Can it be that everyone in this town is suffering from a silly, morbid obsession? Why, it is as if some demon of the upper air had opened our brains and scattered in seeds of unrest. For let me tell you that the thing grows, just as plants sprout from seeds. I’ll wager that at this very moment many people of Smithville are sitting at home, shivering, wondering if they’re going mad. It’s only because I can see things like that and talk over the matter with you that even I am beginning to get a grip on myself. You’re outside all this; you can’t know how terrible it is to have one’s very memory tampered with.”

  I shook my head hopelessly.

  “You mentioned hypnotism, pastor, didn’t you?” I ventured at random. “But… O, I admit there was something very reminiscent of the hypnotized in the people I saw this afternoon. But that can’t mean anything very obvious, can it, like a mastermind working on this whole town? That would be silly. How could he operate? What could his methods be?” Just then there came a subdued rapping at the door opening on the side of the house where the church stood. Ferguson opened it and I heard a man say something about, “wanting him, please, to come and read the litany.”

  Ferguson made me excuses as he fumbled in the closet for his cassock; he murmured something about “having to give consolation at all times and for all causes.”

  For a moment my heart stood still, my mind held by a vision of a pale-faced man in black holding the minds of his congregation by the monotony of ritual, by the hypnotic quality of his voice…

  Ferguson stood before me, thin and stiff in his black cassock. With a quick laugh I got up.

  As I passed the open doors of the church a little later, after taking leave of the warm study, I heard the voices of the congregation, hoarse, heartfelt, and a trifle wild:

  “God have mercy upon us.”

  “Christ have mercy upon us.”

  CHAPTER 8 - INMATES OF AN EMPTY HOUSE

  As usual the streets were dark and empty but only a few of the houses were lighted up, and these brilliantly, which was unusual. People had chosen this night to go visiting, to band together; probably the franker ones admitted that the force was fear. Passing Elstrom’s place I noticed him standing on the porch with three men, one of whom seemed to be trying to persuade him to go in and to bed.

  “No!” I caught from Elstrom, as his voice rose vindictively. “I won’t stay out of this. He’s scared… trying to save his own neck… I know it… used a different poison… my own dear little girl, God rest her… possibility of an autopsy… where’s he gone?… have any idea…”

  His voice sank and I heard no more. The other men seemed now to be listening to him intently. I moved on. The town was in a distraught and menacing mood. Thus, I thought, must Paris have seemed before the revolution and Jerusalem the night before the resurrection, Jerusalem… it reminded me of the ministry and of Ferguson, the one man in a position to—I laughed shortly—at myself. What rot?

  Was it rot?

  My thought roamed aimlessly around the problem of Smithville. With almost a start I realized that I hadn’t told Ferguson of my experience with the appearing pebbles. I laughed again, shortly. Who was I to criticize people for their mass obsessions? When all the time I myself was hiding my own hallucinations for fear, unconscious or otherwise, of ridicule—or worse. Or worse. With a start I realized, realized fully for the first time, how easily an active imagination could connect me, George Kramer, with the suggestive things that had been happening. I had been the first one to reach the exploded house. I had been the one to call attention to Mary Ellis’s grave. I was known to be a friend of Ellis and Kesserich. All this was innocent but to an irrational crowd, looking for a scapegoat…? To my jangled nerves it seemed that Smithville, in a gesture of menace, drew back from me, crouching in the darkness.

  John Ellis’s house loomed up on my right, angular, black, and mysterious. Several times before, my walks had carried me past it and its double garage, but this time I was in a mood to test all eventualities, however improbable. I walked up quickly to the door and impulsively rapped out our old college signal: four, two.

  Almost before I was finished and to my great surprise the door shot open; there was a muffled exclamation and the door began to slam to, was stopped.

  “Kesser—, Kramer, aren’t you?” in nervous tones I recognized as those of John Ellis!

  I nodded and he motioned me in, immediately locking the door. I hardly knew what to think, tensed myself for surprises.

  “Thought you were Kesserich,” he muttered, then changed his tone. “I didn’t know you were out here; never expected to see you.”

  We stood in darkness. He made no move to turn on lights.

  “Of course, there was your letter,” I murmured tentatively.

  “Ah, yes.” And then abruptly, almost ferociously, “You’ve been out here several days? You’ve seen things? The cemetery this afternoon and all that?”

  I intimated that I had. I didn’t say much. I was realizing very rapidly that I was suspicious and even afraid of my old friend. However, I did ask him how he had learned all about the happenings of the afternoon.

  “Simple,” he replied shortly. “Country telephones. You can listen in on everything.”

  Suddenly he stood very still, listening.

  “Sit down, won’t you?” he resumed after a moment.

  I complied. He paced up and down; I caught him damning Kesserich in undertones. Then he broke off and raced up the stair. A few moments later he came down, slowly.

  My own thoughts at the time? Squirming things that touched the possibilities of insanity, murder, affection wrought to the pitch of ghoulery… they were interrupted and at the same time reintensified by my first real glimpse of Ellis’s face, momentarily spotted by a beam of night light from a window. It was very haggard but there burned in it instead of grief an excitement and a joy that I definitely did not like. I continued to sit tight, leashing my questions.

  “Kramer,” he said deliberately, breaking off his pacing close to my chair and looking down at me, “I’ve thought of you as the one person in the world besides Kesserich to whom I could narrate and justify this business, and Kesserich is gone God knows where. And now that you, Kramer, are here I realize how utterly ridiculous it would be even to make the attempt.”

  His voice was heavy with world-irony.

  Silently invoking friendship and besting fear I risked an encouragement. I told him of my experience with the appearing pebbles. There was a moment’s pause, magnified by the darkness, and then from Ellis a little amused snort that made my hair rise.

  “The luck of it,” he muttered, “the uncanny, sumptuous luck of it, that such a thing should happen to you of all people. You deserve the story. Here it is.”

  The next chapter is a faithful attempt to reproduce what he told me, up to the point at which he was strangely interrupted.

  CHAPTER 9 - SPECULATIONS OF KESSERICH />
  (THE STATEMENT OF DR. JOHN ELLIS)

  Any way you look at it, the story has to begin with Kesserich. You remember the discussions we used to have at college, the ones about space and time—and other things? But of course you would. Come to think of it, I believe you were more truly interested in them than I was. Perhaps that was the subtle reason for Kesserich’s coming out here to live. He knew he’d always have me to talk to and he also knew that I wouldn’t, well, bother him with too many comments, and suggestions, and criticisms. He’s a queer chap, that way. He doesn’t like friends to get too close to his inner thoughts. You’ve seen that in him too, I’m sure. Strange, he could have gotten for himself the most brilliant of intellectual associates, and yet he preferred a couple of people—you and me— who I guess I can safely say aren’t any more than average, at least in his line. Who knows but that even then he faintly saw what was coming, felt somehow compelled to keep aloof from men… it’s hard to say.

  But he couldn’t have seen all that was coming… you won’t believe…

  Well, anyway I was always willing to listen to him; I liked the man tremendously and his imagination fascinated me— those being my callow days, when I fancied myself as being something of a psychologist. Every week I would manage to find a few hours that weren’t taken up with my practice or with Mary and I’d go over and listen to Kesserich’s latest plan for overcoming the limitations of the human mind. He’d never come to visit me; I think he felt that Mary had taken a dislike to him for some reason. Perhaps she had; it was difficult not to misunderstand him.

  Well, one evening that I drove out to his little cottage he seemed especially keyed up. This was as much as five years ago. He talked for a long time on his favorite subject, the past. Said that the past was just as real as the present, that the future was just as real as the present, and that the only thing that kept us from seeing this was the fact that our minds were tied down to the present and could only see a tiny distance forward or backward.

  “I can take a trip to New York, or Berlin, or Tokyo,” he said (or something like that), “so why can’t I go back to New York as it was ten years ago, or to ancient Babylon, or to pay my unexpected respects to Aaron Burr or Julius Caesar? You say they’re dead and gone? Gone where? Into the past? Well, then, if one had the method, why couldn’t one go back into the past and find them? Find one’s very self, for that matter, when one was younger. You ask me what the method is? That I don’t know, but I insist in the possibility!”

  I made some commonplace objections and he took a new tack. Picked up a book, tossed it into the air, and caught it.

  “Did you watch that, Ellis?” he asked. “Did you notice that when the book was moving fast you only got a blur? That, in other words, you were seeing it in more places than one and therefore more times than one? Do you realize what that means? You saw a little of the past of that book as it went through the air and a little of its future? Only a little? But that’s enough.”

  Don’t get impatient, Kramer, while I ramble through these seemingly impertinent matters. They have an important, but indirect bearing on the things that have been happening lately; though what kind of a bearing you’d never suspect.

  Anyway, I think I agreed there was something to what he said about the book. It was late—I should have been gone long before—but he proposed a cup of coffee. There was an amused glint in his eyes as we sipped it. I remember thinking that probably my very normal and sane reactions to his unbounded speculations were a source of relief and relaxation to him.

  It was about five minutes later that I began to notice there was something wrong with my eyesight. It frightened me at first. Things in motion began to blur. The cat walked into the room and out again. I rubbed my eyes but after it was gone I could still see it walking through the room, a great black trail of cat. Only slowly did it vanish. You know, how after you’ve looked at a bright light you can still see it after you shut your eyes? Afterimage—it was something like that. But, more than that. After I’d rubbed my eyes, I put my hands down—to find that, in spite of that, my hands were still in front of my eyes. It was some time before I could see clearly again.

  Kesserich must have noticed my look of abject fear for he said to me, “Don’t be alarmed, Ellis; it’s just a harmless, little experiment.”

  I started to say, “You fool, what have you done,” but before I’d got the sentence out of my mouth I realized I was still hearing what Kesserich had said a moment before and the realization struck me dumb. Kesserich, himself, was a blur. As he got up I could still see him sitting in the chair. He took up the book and threw it into the air again. I could see the path of the thing as plain as I see you.

  “This time you saw a little more of the book’s future and a little more of the book’s past,” he said with a smile, a smile that lingered on his face like the grin of a Cheshire cat.

  However, by now the effect of what I realized he must have given me in the coffee was beginning to wear off. In a remarkably short time my sight and hearing were normal once again. I proceeded to become very indignant. I remembered that hashish and loco weed were supposed to have very much the same effect as I’d just experienced and I told him I strongly objected to being drugged without my knowledge and consent.

  He tried to placate me.

  “I’d tried to stuff on myself several times before, so I knew it was safe. I wanted to prove to you there was something in my argument and I know you think my ideas a bit too crazy for you ever to take any drug I’d brewed.”

  While he was still explaining how his preparation, called x-hashish, differed from what is commonly called hashish, I stormed out of the house.

  After that—it was about five years ago, as I said—I began to see less and less of Kesserich. From an idler who spun romantic imaginings he was metamorphosing into an investigator with a purpose that he unswervingly pursued. He made occasional trips to libraries and universities—though I’ll wager no one but myself got as much as a whisper of what he was doing. He worked for long hours each day. Every once in a while he’d bring in a new piece of apparatus. And he performed experiment after experiment, must have…

  Quite a bit of electrical stuff, too, was delivered at his place, transformers, specially designed coils, coil forms, a tremendous quantity of wire. A heavy power line was run out to his place; there was some unusual contract that puzzled the local utility people.

  A good deal of this I learned from the townspeople whom I was visiting in my professional capacity.

  Kesserich became for them first an engaging mystery and then a tradition. When the electric lights would dim momentarily at night they would turn to one another and say, “Mister Kesserich’s usin’ the power now.”

  So much for old times; I jump ahead to within two months of the present. Something happened to Kesserich, the importance of which I did not, could not at the time conceive. In fact, all that came through to me were some strange stories, trivial but disturbing. For example, Kesserich had walked through town, looking at no one and singing some outlandish gibberish at the top of his voice; or, he had frightened some wandering children with a wild story and there was talk of prosecution; or, he was sitting in the graveyard laughing unrestrainedly and knelt at the tombstones—that particular incident gave Eldredge a great fright and people began to mention insanity and nod gravely. Things like that; nothing more. 0 yes, once I met Kesserich, but he only talked enthusiastically about college days, answered my anxious questions with laughs, and suddenly walked off like a king, reciting poetry to himself. I was worried. He didn’t seem exactly insane but I sensed a deep terror and a burden, things that he seemed to be fighting with his forced, hysterical exuberance. The crisis, thought I then, that comes to certain people when they realize the inescapability of their introversion.

  All it came to outwardly was a heightening of the fear and the suspicion in the townspeople’s’ attitude toward Kesserich.

  Soon the whole episode was swept out of my mind by my life’s
catastrophe, my wife’s death. The passing of a week found my mind still completely obsessed with thoughts of it. I could not sleep. One night, in bed and to the accompaniment of the howling of a rising wind, I set out once again on the vicious circle of fruitless speculation. If only she hadn’t chosen that particular fruit… and so on; I think my letter must have shown you just how I was feeling.

  Kramer, have you even in day-dreaming wished that your life could be shoved back a year or two so that you would be able to avoid mistakes, take advantage of vanished opportunities? That was the hopeless wish that kept circling through my mind, still hopeless, but a thousand times stronger than you’ve probably ever felt it. For I didn’t want a past opportunity; I wanted my wife. If only I could have known, if only I could have stopped her, if only I could have been at hand, if only… my helplessness almost made me burst out in an hysterical laugh.