Peculiar Tales

by Ron Miller

  Elm Street was too far to walk and there wasn’t enough money left to take a cab so Carl searched out the nearest subway entrance, which turned out to be a pretty good hike away. It was good to sit down for the fifteen minutes it would take to get to the Elm Street station. He knew that most of the people sharing the crowded car with him were staring, but if he didn’t like that it was his own fault for not bothering to change from his prison denims. But in fact he couldn’t have cared less.

  He got off at the Elm Street Station and walked up the stairs to the sidewalk. A glance at the numbers on the buildings revealed that 118 was only a few doors down from the subway exit. It was a pretty nice neighborhood, he thought, a lot better than where he and Mona’d had to live. That had been no fault of his own, of course, everyone was having a hard time holding a job these days and, besides, bosses always found something to hold against him. Harry had had a steady job, though, but then he was always a lot more willing to kiss ass than Carl was.

  One hundred and eighteen was an old, three-story apartment building. Carl glanced at the mailboxes and was annoyed to see that apartment 5 was on the third floor because like most dumps of this vintage there was no elevator.

  The Polyp apartment was at the end of the corridor. Carl knocked. There was a long moment and then the door opened about an inch. There was a chain and just above the chain a pale blue eye.

  “Yes?”

  Carl didn’t say anything but took the wadded sheet of paper from his shirt pocked and shoved it through the space in the door.

  “What is it, honey?” came a woman’s voice from somewhere further in the apartment.

  “I dunno, baby, just a—”

  Even though the door was still ajar, the owner of the blue eye had stepped out of sight. Carl could hear the paper rustling.

  “‘Greetings...’ Oh Jesus...”

  “What is it, honey?”

  The door closed, there was the sound of the chain rattling, and then the door opened again, this time far enough to let Carl see not only the whole apartment but the two people who occupied it. One was a chubby little gink about fifty years old, Carl figured, with a round red face and a receding hairline. An accountant or shoe salesman, Carl decided. Behind him was a little woman, just as chubby, red-faced and uninteresting-looking as her husband.

  “You may as well come on in,” said Arthur Polyp, for of course this is who it was.

  “Who is this gentleman?” asked his wife.

  “Here, read this. Looks like we won the lottery this week.”

  She didn’t move for a moment, but simply stared uncomprehendingly. Then, as the meaning of his words sank in, she snatched the paper from his fingers and read it through. She hadn’t finished before her hands started to shake.

  “It was the Smiths just last week,” she whined, “right down the block. This same neighborhood. That just doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Well, it’s just the luck of the draw.”

  “‘Luck’! Some luck...”

  “There’s nothing we can do about it, dear. You saw the paper. It’s all legal. We don’t really have any choice.”

  “All right, all right, I know.”

  “You got a nice place here, mister,” offered Carl who thought he ought to say something.

  “Well, we might as well get this over with. I got a Rotary meeting in a hour and I haven’t been late in seventeen years.”

  “Never mind that. The Rotary meets down at the hotel. My bridge club will be here this afternoon and I still have to get the cookies baked.”

  “Sooner the better so far’s I’m concerned,” said Carl.

  “Just stay out of my kitchen, that’s all I say.”

  “Well, we got to do it someplace, dear.”

  “What’s wrong with the bathroom?”

  “Bathroom sound okay to you, Mister, ah, Skittle?”

  “Whatever you say is fine.”

  Carl and Mr. Polyp went into the bathroom. It was all sky blue tile and there was a fake fur cover on the toilet seat. Carl thought it was pretty nice. Mona would’ve liked a bathroom like this.

  “I don’t have a gun or anything,” said Polyp. “Is that the usual thing? This is all pretty new to me. I only know what I’ve seen in the papers.”

  “It don’t make no difference,” said Carl. “I guess it’s up to you.”

  “The Whistles used a gun.”

  “Well, we don’t have one. You know that.”

  “Fred Whistle was prepared. He knew that his turn would come around and he was prepared. Fred Whistle is very organized.”

  “Yes, I know he is, dear. I suppose we could strangle the gentleman?”

  “Phooey. You can’t even wring water out of dish cloth. Hold on a moment.” Mrs. Polyp disappeared for a moment, then reappeared in the doorway. “Here,” she said, handing her husband a large knife, “this ought to do. It’s the old one so make sure you put it in the trash when you’re done. I don’t want it back in the drawer.”

  “Yes, dear,” said Mr. Polyp. Then, turning to Carl, he said, “Maybe you’d better lie down in the tub.

  Carl said sure and climbed in and sat down. He was a pretty tall man and couldn’t stretch out. So he just leaned back as far as he could.

  “This okay?”

  “I guess so. Are you sure you’re comfortable?”

  “I can’t say it really matters too much.”

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right. Can you lean your head back just a little?”

  “This enough?”

  Mr. Polyp placed one hand on Carl’s forehead and with the other drew the knife across his neck. A thin line of blood immediately appeared.

  “That hurt?” he asked.

  “Hell yes, it hurt. What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I told you this was new to me.”

  “Well, put some muscle into it, for God’s sake.”

  Mr. Polyp put some muscle into it this time. He thought it was like cutting a chicken gizzard. All gristle. A gaping hole, like a toothless smile, appeared in the man’s neck and there was a lot of blood and a whistling, gurgling sound and the man’s eyes grew very round and he gritted his teeth so hard that Mr. Polyp could hear the enamel chipping. Polyp really gave it his all the third time, though the old knife was very dull so he had to keep sawing until he finally hit what must have been one of the big arteries that run up the sides of the neck. This time there was an awful lot of blood. He leaped back, but it was too late. The fountain caught him square in the chest, splattering everywhere, bright red on sky blue.

  The man in the bathtub flopped around for a moment, then shuddered, then grew still, sinking into the contours of the tub as though all his bones were dissolving and running down the drain along with the blood.

  “Well, that’s that, I suppose,” said Mr. Polyp.

  “Just look at this mess. You’ll never be able to wear that shirt again and it’s practically new.”

  “I haven’t had much experience at this sort of thing, dear, and, besides, there’s never any warning. I mean, if I’d only had a gun...”

  “If, if, if. Just don’t stand there gawping. Call the authorities and tell them you’ve done your duty. I want them to get this cleaned up before the bridge club arrives. Well,” she added, as her husband went to the phone, “at least I’ll finally have something to talk to them about besides my African violets.”

  THE LAST PAGE

  I know you’re going to ask me the same thing every other doctor has and I also know you’re not really going to believe what I tell you . . . no, I take that back. It’s not that you’re not going to believe me, you're not really going to even listen, are you? I think that's what amuses me most.

  So you want to know why I think I'm in here? No, you don't—that's just part of your script and your mind is already elsewhere. I can see your eyes losing focus, wandering. Thinking about lunch already? I imagine you are, looking at that waistline of yours. Tsk tsk. Not setting a very good example, are you, doctor? Yes,
yes—of course we're here to talk about me, not you. I know that. I'm getting to it, but I really must say that talking about your eating habits has a lot more potential for impacting your life span than talking about my mental condition will impact mine. All right, all right, then...

  I had gone to the Collector with the sole purpose of seeing just one book. I couldn't of course, let him even suspect why I was therethere wouldn't have been a chance in the world he would have let me in the door, let alone get my hands on The Book. Yes, I did pronounce that as if it had capital letters. I hope you will spell it that way in your notes. Where was I? Yes. I daren't even let the Collector suspect that I knew he possessed it—it was something he'd told no one about, and for very good reason. It'd taken me decades to discover that The Book even existed at all and I won't bore you with the efforts it took to locate its owner. I'm not too proud of some of my methods. Besides, it’d only bore you if you were listening, but I can see that you stopped paying any attention to me several minutes ago.

  I had to denigrate some of the rarest, most beautiful books I've ever seen—books that had my hands shaking and my mouth slavering just to see with my own eyes, let alone touch—and pooh pooh the Collector’s efforts as being little better than mere souvenir-collecting. That was what did it: touching the sore nerve of his pride. “Amateur, am I?” he said. “An amateur? Well, then, would you care to see the rarest book in the world?”

  “Certainly,” I replied, trying to add a patronizing, doubtful tone to my voice while at the same time knowing I was on the verge of success. The old man went to a vault in the wall of his study and after twiddling the knob, opened the heavy door and removed a rectangular object wrapped in velvet. He laid this on the table between us and untied the ribbon that bound it. The velvet fell open like the petals of a flower . . . and there it was.

  “And this is—?” I asked, barely able to speak, knowing full well what I was looking at.

  “The Necronomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul al-Hazred,” he replied in much the same tone a magician might have used in producing a rabbit.

  “Oh, come now,” I said, trying to keep my voice from quavering, “that book is a fiction, invented by, oh, some hack pulp writer fifty-sixty years ago.”

  “H.P. Lovecraft is who you mean and he didn’t invent the Necronomicon. He had never seen the book, of course, few have, but in his researches he ran across enough references to it to know what it implied. Most of what he said about it was true enough.”

  “That merely reading it drove men mad?”

  “No, that was where he was wrong . . . it drove men mad all right, but it was not necessary to read it.”

  "May I see it?”

  "Of course.” He pushed the book toward me with one long, skinny finger. It wasn't a very large book—perhaps the size of a tabloid newspaper and about an inch thick. The cover was of a pale leather with a disturbingly familiar texture. “Go ahead and open it.”

  I did. There was nothing on the first page but the title of the book in Arabic, written in a rusty-colored ink.

  “The book,” the Collector explained, “is supposedly written in al-Hazred’s own blood. I haven’t, as you might imagine, ever had it tested. Why take the chance of spoiling a perfectly good legend?”

  I wasn’t really listening to him. I had tried to turn the page and was astonished to discover that it was nearly half an inch thick! At first I assumed that the pages had become stuck together, but that wasn’t the case at all: it was a solid mass. I looked up at the Collector with surprise.

  “I see you’ve discovered what makes the Necronomicon so unusual. Turn the next page and you will see.”

  I did and found that it, too, was unusually thick, but only about half as much as the first page—about a quarter of an inch I guessed. The next page seemed to be only about half as thick as the previous one. What in the world? I thought.

  “You see? Every page is exactly half the thickness of the previous one. The first page is half an inch thick, the second a quarter of an inch, the third an eighth of an inch, and so on . . .”

  I turned a few more pages and found that he was right: each page was indeed half the thickness of the previous one. By the time I’d turned a dozen pages they had become as thin as tissue. I looked at the vellum or parchment, or whatever it was, carefully, feeling it between my fingers. It was strange stuff—thin as it was it was still perfectly opaque and seemed much stronger than it looked. I was sure it would be difficult to tear, though of course I didn’t dare make the experiment. I looked up at the old man questioningly.

  “The book is certainly weird enough,” I said, “but from what I’ve been able to tell of the contents—my Arabic is a little rusty—there's nothing here but banal astrological calculations and cabalistic formulae—hackneyed stuff that’s neither terribly unusual nor terribly frightening. I've seen more disturbing revelations in a newspaper horoscope. Where are the mind-blasting secrets Lovecraft spoke of? There's nothing here that would drive a man mad, other than perhaps the tedium of reading all of it.”

  “I told you it wasn’t the contents but the book itself that contains madness. Don't you see the meaning behind those ever-diminishing pages? Each one half the thickness of its predecessor? I can see you don’t. Well, the answer is simple enough: the book has an infinite number of pages. There is no end to them.”

  “Oh , come now. I can see for myself that the book is only an inch thick. You can’t have an infinite number of pages in a finite space—and certainly not within a space of only one inch!”

  “Certainly you can. The diminishing order of 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 and so on equals 1, but the order itself can be continued indefinitely—there is no ‘last’ fraction since every fraction can be halved into an even smaller one. Look here,” he said, picking up a scrap of paper and a pencil, “I'll draw a line one inch long. I can place a mark here, halfway between the ends. And now one here, half way between the middle and the end, and now another, dividing that space in two. And another and another, each one dividing the line into ever smaller segments. See? I could continue this indefinitely. There are, in fact, an infinite number of segments in this line, yet it remains only an inch in length. Just so: there is no ‘thinnest page’ in the Necronomicon. You can keep turning the pages forever without getting one whit closer to the last page than when you started for the simple reason that there is no last page. That’s the secret of the book and that's the page that contains the madness.”

  Well, I humpfed and scoffed until, in disgust, the Collector wrapped the book up again and replaced it in his safe. My welcome, it was made clear, had seen its end. But it was late and my host took his duties seriously, however much he might have grown to dislike me, and reluctantly but graciously invited me to stay the night, which was exactly what I'd been hoping he’d do.

  I suppose you’ve already anticipated me if you've been listening and if you have you’d have been right. An hour past midnight saw me in my stocking feet stalking across the old man’s study. I'd gotten the safe open—as though the fool thought he’d kept me from seeing the combination!—and The Book on the table and unwrapped. There was no point in flipping through the thing—after all, if the Collector was right—and I knew he was—there wasn’t time enough in the universe for me to get to the final page that way. So I just turned the book over onto its face, opened the back cover and looked directly onto the last page.

  And of course there was no last page. There was Nothing. Absolute Nothing. There was neither shape nor formlessness, neither darkness nor light, neither presence nor void . . .

  A human being can’t look upon such and . . .

  Yes, yes, doctor, I’ve had my medication today, of course. I want to thank you so much for listening, but also have to tell you this: the old man deserved to die the way he did.

 

 

  ks on Archive.