“The neighbors ever—Skip it; here we are.”
The sedan was turning into a driveway, and it came to a stop before a big iron gate in a high brick wall. A watchman looked out through the gate, but didn’t open it until Garland got out of the car and showed him a paper.
Then, while Garland got back into the car, the watchman went back into a sentry booth beside the gate and stayed inside for a minute or two. Then he came out and swung open the gate.
As we drove through, I asked Garland why the man had gone back in the booth before letting us in.
“He phoned the building and had them throw the switch to open the gate.”
“Why don’t they just give him a key?” I wanted to know.
Garland shrugged. “Playing safe, that’s all. If somebody wanted to escape, they might overcome him and take away the key. It’d be tougher, wouldn’t it, if they had to phone the main building and give a password?”
I whistled softly. “You mean they have dangerous…er…patients here? I thought Major Lorne told me—”
But the car was stopping now in front of a brightly lighted doorway. Garland got out hastily, as though trying to avoid my question. He said, “Come on.”
I hesitated, on the verge of protesting and saying that I’d changed my mind about agreeing to Lorne’s suggestion for a place to rest up. But—Oh, hell, I might as well go through with it now. If Dr. Wheeler was half the psychiatrist Major Lorne said he was, it wouldn’t take him long to decide I was perfectly sane.
Besides, I was coming here voluntarily. I wasn’t being committed.
Or was I? What was that paper Garland had shown the guard at the gate?
But I was outside the car now, and almost to the door. Garland was on one side of me and the intern on the other, the policeman who’d driven the car bringing up the rear. Resistance, either physical or verbal, would prejudice my case. I had an uneasy hunch I’d be taken in there just the same, and with a black mark on my dossier that might take longer than two weeks to eradicate. Considerably longer.
I went in.
An attendant in a white uniform led us to an office. The policeman and the intern waited in the hallway, and Garland took me in to meet Dr. Wheeler.
Wheeler stood up behind his desk as we went in. He was a small man, bald as an egg, and he wore thick-lensed pince-nez glasses on a wide black ribbon. The lenses made his eyes look enormous.
They turned on me, and studied me, and I felt transparent.
“Mr. Henry Remmers, doctor,” Garland said. “The man Major Lorne talked to you about. Here are the papers—the reports from St. Vincent’s and so on.” He tossed an envelope down on the desk.
I cleared my throat. It seemed suddenly important that I make my voice sound natural and say the natural thing. The words came out all right, but it sounded to me as though somebody else were talking.
I said, “Good evening, doctor. Major Lorne suggested this as the ideal place for a rest cure for a week or two. I’m coming here voluntarily, of course. I mean that I’m not…er—” I bogged down, realizing that it would have been better if I’d said nothing at all.
“Of course, of course,” Dr. Wheeler smiled and nodded. “We want you to feel that you are a guest here, Mr. Remmers. You’re tired, of course, after your trip?”
“Not particularly. I—”
“But rest will be the best thing for you, right now. It will be much better if I…ah…talk with you in the morning, will it not? I’ll have you shown to your room.”
He pressed a button on his desk.
I realized the futility of protest, and I was a bit tired, after all. A good night’s sleep, and everything might look different in the sunlight of tomorrow.
Maybe it was all to the good that, feeling as I did right now, I didn’t have to undergo a lengthy examination and more cross-questioning.
I nodded, and said, “I guess you’re right, doctor. Er…goodbye, Mr.—”
I turned, but Garland wasn’t there. I hadn’t heard him leave the office, but he was gone.
The door opened, and an attendant came in. Not the one who’d shown us to the office, but another—a husky man with a nose twisted a little to one side. He looked like a fugitive from the fight rings.
“This is Mr. Remmers, Wilbur,” Dr. Wheeler said. “You will take him to Room 212. It’s been prepared for him.”
He turned back to me. “Tomorrow, Mr. Remmers, we’ll show you around the place. The grounds here are beautiful at this time of year. But tonight, sleep well.”
Again his eyes seemed to look right through me. Possibly it was the effect of the thick lenses, or it may have been a trick of focusing. I wondered if Dr. Wheeler used mesmerism on his patients. With eyes like his, very little verbal suggestion would be needed.
Then he sat down abruptly and turned to papers on his desk, and I followed Wilbur out of the office.
I followed him up a flight of stairs and along a corridor. He opened the third door from the end, reached inside and flicked a light switch.
He said, “There’s a button in the door frame here. Push it if you need anything.”
I said, “Thanks,” and stepped inside, and the door closed behind me.
It was a small, but comfortable room. There was a window, open a few inches at the top, and I was glad to see that there were no bars across it. There was a desk and a chair, and a shelf with a few books on it.
There was a single bed with a pair of pajamas lying across it. The pajamas looked familiar. I picked them up to make sure, and they were mine all right.
Then I saw that my black Gladstone bag had been pushed back under the bed, and I remembered that these pajamas had been the ones I kept in the bag. Probably Major Lorne had brought the bag out during the afternoon when he’d talked to Wheeler about me. I was certain that it hadn’t been in the car in which I’d been brought here.
I pulled it out and opened it, to refresh my memory on what its contents had been. There were shirts, socks and underwear enough to last me for several days. And there was a toothbrush and comb. But my razor was gone.
Someone in a nearby room started singing in a high, cracked voice. No tune, just a continuous high monotone. I couldn’t make out the words.
Well, I thought to myself, you’re here to relax. Damn it, relax.
I bent over to scan the titles of the books on the shelf. There were half a dozen of them. I read the titles: “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “Ivanhoe,” “Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come,” “Heidi,” and “Ben Hur.”
All the latest best sellers! Leisurely literature for lulling lunatics. Well, there’d be an evening paper somewhere around the joint. I’d stick my head out into the hall and ask the attendant on duty to bring me one.
I turned and reached for the door-knob.
There wasn’t any. The door didn’t open, from my side.
I stood for quite a while looking at that door, and especially at the place where the knob should have been and wasn’t.
I got myself calmed down before I pressed the button for the attendant. No use raising hell with him. I’d have to put up with being locked in until I had a chance to talk to Dr. Wheeler.
On principle, I didn’t like it. But it wouldn’t hurt me, for one night.
The door opened, and it was Wilbur. He said, “Yeah?”
“Is there a copy of the evening paper around?” I asked him. “Any evening paper.”
“Sorry, mister. Against the rules.”
“Huh? Why?”
He shrugged. “Patients aren’t supposed to worry about what goes on outside.”
“But, look,” I said, “I’m not—Oh, skip it.”
He closed the door.
I sat down on the bed and glowered at nothing in particular. Darn Major Lorne for getting me into a place like this. N
ext time I saw him, I’d tell him he was badly mistaken about the character of Dr. Wheeler’s private little rest haven.
No newspapers! In times like these, the surest way to work up a good worry is not to know what’s going on. What’s happening tonight in Tunisia? If I knew, I could forget it.
After a while, I got up and went to the window. It was so dark out that I couldn’t see anything in the glass but my own reflection. I tried to raise the sash and it wouldn’t lift. The top part went down six inches and that was all. No more.
No, there weren’t any bars, but the panes were set in metal frames and I had a pretty good idea that the glass was bulletproof, once I got the significance of the frames and the fact that the window wouldn’t open wide enough for anyone to escape.
Well, there wasn’t anything I could do about it tonight.
I took another look at that shelf of books, and picked out “Ivanhoe.” It wasn’t bad, after the first couple of chapters. By the time events got to Sherwood, I was deeply interested.
Then, suddenly, and without warning, the lights went out.
I put the book down in annoyance and groped for the doorway. By the time I got there, I could see well enough to find the button and push it. There was, once my eyes were used to the comparative darkness, a faint blue illumination in the room.
It came from a dim bulb set in the ceiling, behind blue glass.
Wilbur opened the door and said, “Yeah?”
“The light went off,” I said. “Was it an accident or—”
“All room lights go off at ten sharp.” He slammed the door, and since there was nothing else to do, I undressed and went to bed.
* * *
—
I couldn’t sleep. And I didn’t want to think, but there was nothing I could do about it. I didn’t want to think until things had simmered down, and I’d had my talk with Dr. Wheeler and—
Then I began to hear the voice. It was a strangely hoarse, whispering voice, and it didn’t come from any ascertainable direction. It filled the room, as the blue radiance filled it, dimly.
“You’re new here?” it demanded. “You’re new here? You’re new here?”
I sat up in bed and looked around. Was I really going crazy?
“The register,” said the voice. “I’m talking from the next room.”
I looked around until I spotted it. A small metal grille in the wall near the desk. I went over to it and bent down. “Yes. I’m new—”
“Sh-sh, just whisper. I can hear you, if you whisper.” His own voice was lower now. “If they hear, they’ll shut off the registers. They murdered the man in that room before you, like they’ll murder you.”
He was crazy, of course. I said, “Thanks; I’ll watch out. My name’s Remmers. What’s yours?”
“George Zehnder. They’ll kill me, too. I was in censorship; and I found out too much. Look, when did you see a paper last?”
“This morning,” I told him. “We’re doing well in the Solomons and the Russians are pushing the Nazis back steadily. Things are deadlocked in Tunisia. The Germans have lost—”
“You believe all that?”
“Believe it? Why, sure. Even the Axis radio—”
“There isn’t any Axis radio. There isn’t any Axis: Those stations are our own. The Russians control Europe. That’s what I found out. That’s why I’m here. You got to tell people, if you can escape. And I know how you can. I can’t.”
It sounds funny, here and now, but it wasn’t, then. Not in that luminous-blue room, locked in, with my wardens apparently thinking I was as crazy as the man I was listening to. It put shivers down my spine and for reasons I couldn’t explain.
Maybe because it settled once and for all the character of the place I was in and the fact that I was in a jam. That was a logical reason for those shivers.
There was a lesser one, and I didn’t like to think about it. People today had been listening to my story with just about the same feeling with which I’d been listening to that of George Zehnder in the next room—the next cell.
“It’s a plot, Remmers,” the voice whispered. “The whole administration, Washington, and the Russians. They control Europe. There isn’t any war, but they’re sending all the men out of this country and landing them on islands out of the way, so they can take over and make this part of the Comintern. That’s why you’re here, too. You found out something. What was it?”
I couldn’t very well refuse to tell him why I was here; I put it into as few words as I could.
“See?” he whispered. “Things like that are going on all over. Train wrecks that they keep secret. Factories blown up. Everybody else on that train was killed, but you survived, and they had to tell you there wasn’t any wreck and put you here. Now they’ll kill you, so you can’t tell.”
I said, “That’s—Maybe you’re right. But I’d better get some sleep, so I can be on my guard tomorrow.”
“Good,” came the whisper through the register. “You’ve got to be on your guard tomorrow all right. Sleep.”
I went back to the bed, a little shakily. Someone across the corridor started laughing hysterically and couldn’t stop, until a door opened and closed. Then silence. Finally, I slept.
Then I was dreaming, for things were confused and unreal, in the manner of dreams. A train conductor was telling me that Dr. Wheeler had told him that the war was all a plot, and shouldn’t I ask Major Lorne about it before I went on working with explosives, and I laughed out loud and told him that Wheeler was a paranoiac because his eyes were as big as grapefruit. And then things went swish and I was in the laboratory.
Good old Peter Carr was stuffing reports into my briefcase and saying, “These are all you need, Hank. In case you get cold, I mean, up in Iceland. You can start a fire with them, and they won’t explode because the stability factor of paper is ninety-nine and a half.”
I grabbed the briefcase and then Armin Andrews was there asking me for an interview about my trip to Iceland and I took him back to the testing rack and said, “See, it doesn’t make any more noise than a rifle shot. You can stand right there behind the shield and I’ll go throw the switch from over there and it goes bang.”
And it went bang, and I joined him again and moved the shield and said, “Stable, see? But no power. Now take the hexanitrodiphenylamine—” And he said, “Not me, I’ll take vanilla.” And then I took him back to the office and I sat down, only I was sitting on a train again, and my attorney, John Weatherby, was with me instead of Armin.
Then there was a rap on the window of the train, and I opened it and a stranger stuck his head in the window and said, “Here it comes!”
He disappeared, and there it was again! Sudden darkness. The long, drawn-out sound of ripping steel and wood, shrieks and screams of terror from all about me. And the seat going up and over into darkness. And then nausea and pain. Shrieks and screams and tearing steel in darkness.
Then a locomotive headlight—
Somebody was shaking me, and the light wasn’t a locomotive. It was a flashlight playing in my face, blinding me, and I was back in bed at the sanitarium. Wilbur, the attendant, was shaking me.
“Wake up, cut it out,” his voice growled.
The wreck terror was still with me, and my forehead was clammy.
Wilbur said, “Lay off the screaming. We won’t let it get you.”
“I’m all right,” I said. “I…I just had a nightmare.”
He grunted and went out. But I knew one thing now. That wreck really had happened. It hadn’t been a dream, the first time. Last night—
The voice from the register whispered, “Remmers, are you all right? Did they kill you?”
I didn’t dare answer, because if I listened to that mug, pretty soon I’d be believing him. I’d be crazy, too. Or was I already?
I faked a snore, to avoid answering Z
ehnder. And then I must have slept again. For I woke up to the sound of my own screams.
There were two of them this time, Wilbur and another. Wilbur was slapping my face. “Wake up, buddy, cut it out. Come on; what you need is a nice long soak in hot water.”
And then the two of them were leading, half carrying me out of the blue room into the yellow-lighted hallway. They handled me firmly, but not roughly.
The other attendant was as big as Wilbur, but dumber-looking. He had a swarthy, brutal face and a curiously gentle voice.
He asked; not of me, “Hadn’t we better call the boss?”
“Naw,” said Wilbur. “Not unless he has another, anyway. If he does, we’ll put him in a special.”
Then the white tile room, and they stripped my pajamas off me and the warm water in the sunken tub felt good. It was hot at first to my cold-sweated skin. Then pleasantly, languorously warm, and I relaxed. I didn’t think. I was past thinking, just then.
The rest of the night was quieter, though I didn’t sleep again. I felt, somehow, that I’d never again trust myself to sleep.
After they took me back to my room, I watched dawn come up. Watched it out of the bulletproof-glass window that wouldn’t open wide enough for a man to squeeze through.
It was a beautiful fried-egg sunrise along the tops of the trees beyond the distant high wall. A riot of red and yellow above the green.
Breakfast was brought to me and I ate, a little.
Then I watched the sun climb higher, and thought of it shining into the windows of my home out in Glen Olden. I wondered if I’d ever live there again.
The sun was almost overhead when they took me downstairs to Dr. Wheeler’s office. The day attendant who took me there remained in the office, standing with his back against the door.
Dr. Wheeler motioned me to a seat facing him. He studied a file of papers for a while, looking up at me occasionally as he read.
I sat quietly, waiting.
He cleared his throat, finally. “I understand you had an…ah…unquiet night last night, Mr. Remmers.”
I nodded. “Nightmares. Or rather, the same one twice.”
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 114
