Night Call and Other Stories of Suspense

by Armstrong Charlotte

  Oh, he jumped. But Miggs went at once into an uproar. So Howard, sheltered by the noise, dared to crouch and send the light under the bed and into a face—a face the like of which he had never seen before.

  “Guard. Stay.” he said to Miggs, kindly but firmly, “Good boy. On guard.”

  He went into the hall. Francine, huge in her pale blue robes, had lifted herself on one arm; her other hand was on her bloody forehead. “Lester?” she said, in a childish piping.

  Howard called down the stairs to Stella. “Call the police, hon. That’s quickest.” Then he looked at Francine.

  “My baby? My boy?” said Francine, making everything a question, as if she were sure of nothing. “Never right? Nobody knew? Hungry? Ladder? Hit me?” Her bulk seemed to shake and then flow back down to the floor.

  Stella was already on the phone. At the bottom of the stairs Ralph Sidwell was staring up at his neighbor.

  “We have a problem here,” said Howard quietly. “You’ve had a kind of stowaway, I think.”

  He went back to where Miggs was. The dog backed off, obeying. Slowly Howard persuaded the creature out from under the bed. A boy? Anywhere from fourteen to twenty-four. Who could say? He was deformed and stunted, wire thin, incredibly pale, almost witless. He did not know how to stand up. He clung to the floor like a spider.

  People came . . .

  It was 3:30 in the morning when the Lamboys returned home at last. Stella said it was unthinkable to go to bed without breakfast and set to work creating homely scents of coffee and bacon.

  Howard sat down on the dinette bench and Miggs jumped enthusiastically beside him. This was forbidden, but Howard was in no mood to scold.

  “How did she ever sneak the Thing into the attic?” he said, because he was too filled with horror and pity to mention feelings: the brain was safer. “That’s where the pillow was. She made a mistake about the quilt, eh? What do you know about that candle! Dangerous, whew! That alone!” (Alone, he thought, a living thing, ever alone, alone.) “She’d have to bring its food by night, on Sundays. But last night Ralph wouldn’t go to bed. The ladder hit her.”

  Stella said sternly, “Her shame. So hide it and everything is dandy. And when the money is running out, go after some ordinary lonely man.”

  “What did he want? Home cooking?” said Howard as sternly as she. “How come he didn’t notice this woman was sick and off the beam—’way off, and so desperate. If it wasn’t in his mind to pay any attention to her or to help her—”

  In a moment Stella sat down and said, “If you’re off, so far, and always getting farther, you’d have to have some little tiny pleasure. Something sweet in your mouth, at least?” She held her cheeks. They were feeling hollow.

  Howard was thinking: In how many little boxes are there people, locked up, all alone, and in how many different ways? And how should we know? And what could we do? And why should that be?

  Miggs was licking his master’s left ear. We love. We love? And here we are together. So all is well. All is well?

  Howard put his arm around the meat of Miggs, this warm loving creature who gave his heart in trust, even unto another species. “Miggs,” he said, “what happens to people shouldn’t happen to a dog.” And he snuggled into the live fur.

  What kind of pain comes to someone who knows the past and the future? And what happens when he confides that knowledge to another? In this previously unpublished fireside chat, Armstrong’s protagonist reflects on the courage required to live in a world relentless in its patterns of repetition.

  THE VISE

  There is something paralysing about the idea,” said Harmon. “In spite of its terrific logic, I doubt if any human mind can believe—or at least believe and remain sane.”

  The man in the Morris chair flung a burnt out match into the fire. “I should like to tell you a story,” he said slowly. “I warn you, for purely selfish reasons. If you will consider it a fiction and if you are not afraid to come perhaps too close to this—paralysing idea?”

  Harmon replenished his wine glass. “A ghost story?” he smiled. “Surely, Griffing, if you can support it, I can at least listen.”

  The old lawyer gazed long into the fire.

  “I have been trying for five years to forget it,” he said. “But there are some things—Well, —listen, then.

  “You were not in Brighton five years ago? In twenty-one I turned my practice over to Winslow and set out to see some of the world. I was fifty, then, and I had lived all my life in Brighton, so that anticipation had somehow outrun the realization and the world was less diverse than I had imagined and much less amusing. So after a year of uneventful wandering, I came home.

  “I was glad to get home. Someone—I’ve forgotten who—it doesn’t matter—gave a dancing party at the country club and I attended, grateful for an opportunity to greet all my friends together. It was there that I met Roger Dewey and this thing began.”

  Harmon’s eyes strayed to the bronze clock on the mantel, but he settled back in his chair.

  “I look back upon that evening,” continued Griffing, “as, in a sense, my coming of age. In many ways I was still young, ridiculously content with myself, happy to be at home, and preening my vanity with the thought that I was distinguished by having been a year abroad. You understand? A man of fifty who had never looked beyond his nose. Well—

  “I sat on the veranda—every one was dancing and I was almost alone with the course stretching out before me in the moonlight beyond the pines. I saw a man coming through the trees, a man who came within twenty feet of where I was sitting, and then stood a while in the shadows. I was sitting in a cozy content, in an intimate little world, and before me stood this figure of a man.

  “Under the fantastic weaving of shadow and moon, I saw him—more clearly than I knew. He was alone, lonely, —gaunt, desolate—Can I express to you what I saw? A figure in the shadows who had some affinity for them. If an artist could paint what I saw—All world weariness gathered into one symbol, all sorrow and all despair. I tell you,

  I shivered, even then—as if a cold wind blew from the stars. My cozy content fell away and the peace of the moon was desolation, —the music and the lights were a feeble gesture, impotent and ironic, against a spell of unknown tragedy, tragedy that included us all. He was old,

  I thought, —tired, and the sag of his shoulders mocked my little hopes from the height of some terrible wisdom.”

  His listener made a murmurous sound to indicate that he was following.

  “But the music broke off, then,” said Griffing, “and people came—surrounded me. I shook away the mood and went about my business of being welcomed.

  “You know Martha Cross? She was Martha Kemplar, then, and her hair was as beautiful as it is now, —masses, colored like the heart of a flame. Martha came to speak to me. Warren Fiske with her. And the man under the trees threw away his cigarette and came slowly towards us.

  “His name was Roger Dewey. When he came into the light and was presented to me, I saw how the shadows had tricked me. For there was nothing at all sad about him, nor gaunt, nor weary. He was twenty-four years old, just out of college and still, as Fiske put it, raising hell.

  I must have known him as a little boy. I thought to myself that here was the younger generation. He was a heavy set youngster, nearly plump. Black hair. Brown eyes that roved with a superficial mock in them with which he hid his childishness. You’ve seen it in the eyes of young people—this look. ‘You can’t tell me anything about life! You think you’ve lived! What do you know about my secret delights?’ He had it then. I thought him one of the most insolent and disagreeable young persons I had ever known. He made no pretense of reverence for my fifty years. He seemed to reproach me for them.”

  “I know,” said Harmon. “Even I am old enough—”

  “Yes,” said Griffing, “Fiske mentioned a prize fight. The Leopard—he has gone far, now, but at that time he was unknown—was challenging our local champion, a brute called ‘Ki
d’ Clancy.

  “ ‘I’ve been trying to reach you all day,’ Fiske told me. ‘I want you to see it with me tomorrow night. I’ve an extra ticket.’

  “ ‘Has this black boy, the Leopard, any chance against the Kid?’ I asked.

  “ ‘Not a chance’ burst in Roger, ‘Not-a-chance!’ His tone grated on us all.

  “ ‘I’m not so sure,’ said Fiske, ‘Not so sure.’

  “ ‘Any money with the same opinion?’ said Roger. Fiske frowned, thinking, I knew, that the boy’s father would not approve of his son betting money on the affair. Roger divined his thought. ‘My money is just as old as yours,’ he sneered.

  “But nothing was arranged. Martha broke in to ask if women were ever seen in such places.

  “ ‘What’s the diff?’ said Roger, ‘If you want to go, I’ll take you.’ But Fiske would not hear of that.

  “ ‘No,’ he said, ‘If you really care to see it, Martha, I’d suggest your coming with Griff and me.’ So it was left.”

  Griffing paused and sipped his wine. “So far,” he continued, “nothing but a trick of the shadows to warn me. But we were left alone, Roger and I. When the others had gone, gone in to dance, for a brief moment I caught the impression again—the suggestion of infinite sorrow lurking in those careless young eyes.

  “It began with Martha’s hair—this strangest of conversations.

  “ ‘Beautiful!’ I said of it, for need of something to say.

  “ ‘Yes,’ said Roger. He had a voice like the rest of him, a twanging voice. He was sitting slouched in his chair, brooding over something apart. And as if a voice spoke from the brooding mind of him, a voice—” Griffing shifted his feet and hesitated, “a low voice, that might have come from the shadow under the pines, said, ‘Too bad!’—like that, sadly—‘Too bad!’

  “ ‘What!’ I said sharply, ‘What!’

  “ ‘I am thinking of tomorrow,’ he said, ‘It will be spoiled.’

  “I did not know what he meant, then. How should I have known?

  I heard only a pointless remark, and yet—Perhaps even then the idea

  of insanity occured to me.

  “ ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. But there was an expression growing on his face. I thought at first that it was terror, and then a fearful sort of joy—and then—His eyes widened and the mask fell away. His fingers went to his mouth and trembled over it. I did not know, then. I thought vaguely that some sort of a fit was on him, and still more vaguely that I had touched, unwittingly, a forbidden spring, or as if I stood close to a revelation of something too great. Yes, I must have thought he was insane.”

  The fire hissed in the grate at their feet and Harmon stirred uneasily in his chair.

  “I am telling this slowly,” said Griffing, “as it came to me. I must, to clear it all away. So,” he resumed, “I changed the subject. ‘You are going to the fight, of course,’ I said quickly. ‘Have you seen Clancy in action? I saw him knock out Gleason last summer.’ and I rattled on into a description of the fight. ‘Yes, I think you are right about him,’ I said, ‘This Leopard won’t have a chance.’ Then I paused. The boy’s eyes had a furtive cunning in them.

  “ ‘I am wrong,’ he said, ‘The Leopard will win. He won last time.’

  “ ‘What last time?’ I asked. But he did not heed.

  “ ‘And I’ll lose my money, as I did last time. You’ll bet on the Kid and you’ll lose, too. But I shall lose more than I can afford.’

  “There was utter hopelessness in his face. I told myself definitely that he was mad. I got up and went abruptly away.”

  The speaker dropped his head and sat silently a minute, staring at his hand. Harmon waited quietly.

  “I remember,” said Griffing slowly, “driving home alone when the party was over. I kept a powerful roadster in those days and there’s a spell in speed. It fascinates me into a blankness of mind, a singularly receptive mood, —a mood I dare not risk any more. But have you ever been seized with an idea of orientation? It begins with geography and widens in circles on and out. That night I drove my car swiftly along five miles of white road scratched on the surface of a whirling globe and I heard the spheres rolling in fire, too close. I was fifty and respected of the town. But I was afraid, for I knew myself lost in immensity.”

  Harmon rubbed his fingers over the dog’s head of his arm chair and glanced again, nervously, at the clock.

  “The next morning was sane as any other morning,” Griffing went on, “sane and cheerful. But that night, that next night, I picked up Fiske to take him to the fight. He told me that Martha Kemplar could not go because she was in bed with a violent headache. That she had washed her hair during the day and in drying it, caught it in the whirling spokes of an electric fan. Great hunks had been torn out. What remained had to be cut. Do you see?” Griffing was speaking quickly now. “Roger told me. I refused to think of it, then. I turned my mind resolutely away and I succeeded, somehow.

  “But—Roger had bet two hundred dollars on the Kid, with Fiske.

  I put a tenner on the Kid myself. And the Kid was beaten!

  “What are you to think of a man who prophesies and does not benefit from his prophecy?

  “After the battle I saw Roger making his way to us in the crowd. Fiske was worried about him.

  “ ‘I wish I hadn’t let my temper force me into that bet,’ he said, ‘He made me mad. But the kid shouldn’t be betting any two hundred on anything and I know it. Will you do something?’

  “ ‘What?’ I asked.

  “ ‘Take him home with you, or wherever you go. Keep an eye on him. I’d do it myself, but I have to meet my sister on the eleven-thirty train. Keep an eye on him, or he’ll go somewhere and be a fool and I shall have it on my conscience.’

  “ ‘A fool?’ I asked.

  “ ‘Drinking.’ said Fiske, ‘He’s a prohibition bred souse.’

  “Roger consented to drive away with us and, after Fiske had been dropped, I asked him up to my rooms—these rooms. He said he’d come if I’d give him a drink.”

  Griffing paused and filled his glass. “Would you say that this wine is heavy? I never thought so. My favorite. This happens to be the last bottle but one of a good stock of it.” He smiled. “I used to flatter myself that

  I drank in the continental manner.”

  “It is very good,” murmured Harmon. Griffing nodded over his glass.

  “I opened a bottle of it for Roger Dewey that night,” he said. “He sat where you are sitting. We had nothing to say to each other—and too much. We drank in a silence that wound the situation like a spring, tighter and tighter, until something should break and the fear burst forth. For I was afraid. I was afraid.

  “He sat in your chair and drank greedily and now and then he moistened his lips as if he would speak. It was raining, as it is tonight. There was a fire, too.

  “Well—the spring broke, of course. ‘You heard about Martha?’ he asked me.

  “ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Yes’. ‘See here,’ I cried at last and angrily, ‘If you knew the Leopard was going to win tonight, by whatever devil’s trick you did know it, why didn’t you bet on him? Why did you deliberately lose your money? Why—’

  “But his eyes stopped me. Such sorrow. ‘If I could—’ he whispered, ‘If I only could—’

  “For a moment, then, I was neither angry with him nor afraid. ‘Can’t you tell me?’ I asked. ‘Can I help you?’

  “So—he told me.

  “You spoke a few moments ago about the idea of eternal recurrence, the terrifically logical idea of eternal reshuffling of a finite number of atoms, the relentlessly dreary cycle that Friedrich Nietzsche had the courage to dream. That is what he told me. He told me that it was true. He told me that he had lived before in this world when it was before, and that he remembered! He told me that he was going to get very drunk, this night, going to go home and meet his father, quarrel, strike him, and die before they should become reconciled. That is what he told me, sitting in your
chair.

  “And what he had to plead was this. ‘I shall hurt him terribly,’ he cried, ‘break his heart—all because I am silly and because I am proud. I cannot help being proud. But he will never know, never know what I know—or that I shall love him to the end. If only I didn’t have to die, leaving him, this way. I shouldn’t mind the other agony. Will you try—try to tell him this that I am telling you? You, only, can. Try—tell my father after I am dead. Maybe we can cheat a little, after all. Will you try?’

  “ ‘But must you?’ I said. ‘Need you be so foolish? Stay with me. Don’t give up to a morbid fancy.’ So I argued. ‘You are free to choose.’

  “ ‘Free!’ he cried. ‘But we are made so, and we must do so because of how we are made. Free! God! Oceans of time ago tomorrow,

  I broke my father’s heart. On this tomorrow I must do it again, knowing—knowing my folly—knowing, do you hear—that we will never be reconciled. Knowing I must die. Help me. I cannot help myself.

  I am caught, I tell you, in a vise. So are you. But you are blessed. You cannot see the vise.

  “ ‘Listen’ he said, ‘Have you ever thought that once before the whole world was the same—we lived and did the same things and died? Do you think it could be? It must be, I think, that all the atoms are juggled forever and must fall in the same pattern again.’

  “ ‘That is somebody’s philosophy,’ I told him. ‘Nietzsche?’ Harmon, he hadn’t been reading. He said, ‘Did he think of it?’—quite simply.

  “ ‘I am twenty four years old,’ he told me, ‘When I was about sixteen this thing began, this power of knowing, of seeing ahead—prophecy, if you like. But I can’t remember ever being surprised at anything, even as a child. I always felt vaguely that sometime, somewhere, I had known all about it. But as I grew older the power became more and more definite. Are you imagining that it was pleasant? Oh, horrible—You can’t know! Every time I make a mistake I know it is a mistake. The few minutes of happiness I might have are spoiled, spoiled because I cannot repress this horrible power of looking beyond them. I know everything now that I knew when I died, before. And I can’t tell! I can’t tell!’