by Otto Penzler
“All right,” Lestrade said gruffly. “Just be quick. I want to get out of this damned room.”
Instead of answering, I bent down, picked up the felt shadows, rolled them into a ball, and put them in my coat pocket. I felt quite odd doing it: much as I had felt when in the grip of the fever which almost took my life in India.
“Capital fellow, Watson!” Holmes said. “You’ve solved your first case and became an accessory to murder all in the same day, and before tea-time! And here’s a souvenir for myself—an original Jory Hull. I doubt it’s signed, but one must be grateful for whatever the gods send us on rainy days.” He used his pen-knife to loosen the glue holding the canvas to the legs of the coffee-table. He made quick work of it; less than a minute later he was slipping a narrow canvas tube into the inner pocket of his voluminous greatcoat.
“This is a dirty piece of work,” Lestrade said, but he crossed to one of the windows and, after a moment’s hesitation, released the locks which held it and raised it half an inch or so.
“Some is dirtier done than undone,” Holmes observed. “Shall we?”
We crossed to the door. Lestrade opened it. One of the constables asked Lestrade if there was any progress.
On another occasion Lestrade might show the man the rough side of his tongue. This time he said shortly, “Looks like attempted robbery gone to something worse. I saw it at once, of course; Holmes a moment later.”
“Too bad!” the other constable ventured.
“Yes, too bad,” Lestrade said. “But the old man’s scream sent the thief packing before he could steal anything. Carry on.”
We left. The parlour door was open, but I kept my head as we passed it. Holmes looked, of course; there was no way he could not have done. It was just the way he was made. As for me, I never saw any of the family. I never wanted to.
Holmes was sneezing again. His friend was twining around his legs and miaowing blissfully. “Let me out of here,” he said, and bolted.
—
An hour later we were back at 221B Baker Street, in much the same positions we occupied when Lestrade came driving up: Holmes in the window-seat, myself on the sofa.
“Well, Watson,” Holmes said presently, “how do you think you’ll sleep tonight?”
“Like a top,” I said. “And you?”
“Likewise,” he said. “I’m glad to be away from those damned cats, I can tell you that.”
“How will Lestrade sleep, d’you think?”
Holmes looked at me and smiled. “Poorly tonight. Poorly for a week, perhaps. But then he’ll be all right. Among his other talents, Lestrade has a great one for creative forgetting.”
That made me laugh, and laugh hard.
“Look, Watson!” Holmes said. “Here’s a sight!” I got up and went to the window, sure I would see Lestrade riding up in the waggon once more. Instead I saw the sun breaking through the clouds, bathing London in a glorious late afternoon light.
“It came out after all,” Holmes said. “Top-hole!” He picked up his violin and began to play, the sun strong on his face. I looked at his barometer and saw it was falling. That made me laugh so hard I had to sit down. When Holmes looked at me and asked what it was, I could only shake my head. Strange man, Holmes: I doubt if he would have understood, anyway.
The Brown Recluse
DAVIS GRUBB
THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1953), the remarkable first novel by Davis Grubb (1919–1980), served as the basis for one of the great noir suspense films of all time. Invited to write the screenplay, Grubb instead wrote in-depth character sketches of the principal roles, allowing interpretation by the director, Charles Laughton, and the starring actor, Robert Mitchum. James Agee is listed as the writer of the screenplay but it was Laughton, with Grubb’s profiles in hand, who deserves credit.
The novel, about a thief who finds widows in “lonely hearts” ads in newspapers, seduces them, and murders them and their children, was based on a true-life serial killer in Grubb’s hometown of Moundsville, West Virginia, where the murderer was a member of one of the town’s most prominent families. The Night of the Hunter was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Prior to the publication of his first novel, Grubb had been a painter but, afflicted with color blindness, he turned to writing for radio while producing numerous short stories for major magazines. Many of these stories later were adapted for television by Alfred Hitchcock for Alfred Hitchcock Hour and by Rod Sterling for Night Gallery.
Grubb wrote nine additional novels, none of which approached the success of The Night of the Hunter, but his crime drama, Fools’ Parade (1969), was also filmed, starring James Stewart, George Kennedy, Kurt Russell, and Strother Martin.
“The Brown Recluse” was originally published in Shadows 3, edited by Charles L. Grant (New York, Doubleday, 1980).
THE BROWN RECLUSE
Davis Grubb
I POSSESS, AS you can see, the narrowest, smallest, most beautiful foot in the whole town of Glory.
I wear a size five and a half quadruple A, and since no Glory shoe store—and few anywhere in West Virginia, for that matter—carries my size, I have my shoes—my shoe, that is—especially crafted for me in Waltham, Massachusetts.
You see, my left leg below the knee is missing and has been from birth. And now that I have that blunt and admittedly unpleasant detail out in the open I feel well enough to continue my tale of Justice, of fog—and of murder.
Naturally, I adore this perfect right extremity of mine. And yet, having to make my way about on that one foot, with the aid of a particularly heavy orthopedic crutch made necessary by a slight curvature of the spine, this—one would suppose—might tend to make my foot heavy and calloused and broad. O, no, my dear, far from it! My five narrow little toes wink up at me every night as I draw from them my expensive French silk stocking. At night I soak my foot for hours in warm olive oil. I massage the soles and arch and ankle with Lanolin and vitamin E cream then. The result is a foot of perfection—one without callus or blemish. Each tiny nail has been lacquered with a special shade of polish blended for me exclusively by a Pittsburgh cosmetologist—the subtle flaming hue of the nasturtiums that grow in my small, old-fashioned garden. Is the association too farfetched?—the identification of myself with a flower? Yet what is a flower but beauty standing on its one leg and being swayed and bent by the chance wind of Destiny? Should I be compared perhaps to a stork? No; with my beautiful foot, I think of myself as a blossom.
But men are cruel.
Everyone does not see me in this light.
Towns like Glory are cruel.
And so I live alone in this perfectly charming old frame house on Water Street—amid a yard overgrown with weeds and wildflowers; with tan bark walks and a spice bush and azalea and crab apple trees for jelly and Impatiens growing all around the crumbling, rococo porches.
My father willed me the property. I was an only child. My mother, Ellen, for whom I am named, died at my birth, which was difficult and which, obviously, injured me as well as her. My father was inconsolable after her death and within a year had resigned his job as Professor of Logic and Oriental Philosophy at the local Glory college.
He lived until I was nine.
I did not grieve for him, or my mother particularly, as I grew up under the austere stewardship of my father’s two gaunt sisters who came to the big waterfront house to take over my care and rearing. They did little to help me through a particularly distressing adolescence; and then one of the sisters, the younger, ran away with a carnival medicine man from Chillicothe, Ohio, and the other, within a year, fell asleep after two pints of elderberry wine and drowned in my father’s great Grecian bathtub.
I was nineteen, alone, and really quite well off, thanks to several oil wells which suddenly resumed production on land my father had owned downriver in Pleasant County.
And that was thirty years ago.
Forgive me while I shed my shoe. It is a hot August midday and such humidity—added to the
strain of getting about—causes my foot to perspire. I must let nothing strain that exquisite member.
Look at me closely now, if you please, and tell me what you find. A rather pretty spinster nearing fifty, with striking titian hair, slender (if slightly bowed) figure, with one leg missing and at the end of the other, a foot without peer in all of Glory—perhaps in all of West Virginia.
Is that all you see?
Of course it is, since how—unless you were a mystic—could you see behind my large and rather wistful eyes a mind of absolute clarity and of extraordinary powers of ratiocination. Everyone says I inherited such brilliant powers of deduction from my father. I should somehow prefer to think they came from my mother’s side of the family, though, I must confess, it is from my father that I derive my intense fascination for mystery stories in general, and for the tales of Sherlock Holmes in particular.
I seldom read mysteries anymore, even though the local Glory library has a quite good and up-to-date selection. They are so predictable. If the author plays fair and gives me the clues as he should, I can generally spot the killer by the end of page one hundred. And I sigh and go back to my father’s deep, cool library bookshelves and pull down the bound Strand instalments of the Master’s exploits. I know these tales by heart, of course, and yet I find more real mystery and suspense in them than in any of these jejune, modern exercises in deduction.
Somehow, I believe the fogs we have here in Glory, especially down here on Water Street, account for my fascination with this segment of nineteenth-century London tradition.
Slowly the river fogs creep in from our great Ohio River. The crickets and frogs down in the rushes and cattails persist for a while, after the world has grown pale and flocculent and peculiarly hushed. But after a time, Mystery wins, and even they grow still.
They seem waiting, listening, watching.
For what?
One stares out the deep parlor windows and the pale lemon-damask curtains hanging there seem part of the piled mists beyond the wrinkled window panes.
Mystery is afoot.
And what is the world out there?
Is it truly the majestic Ohio out yonder—running deep and silent over its submerged secrets in the cunning and clandestine night? Or is it not, magically, incontrovertibly, suddenly the ancient Thames? And has not our Water Street and the end of Twelfth Street and the bricked, deserted wharf not suddenly become a fragment of London, east of Mansion House, beyond Limehouse and sinister, sleeping Soho—and those bricks gleaming with mists like black blood out there at the place where the wharf descends to the lapping shore—is not this perhaps actually a piece of London’s waterfront with some satanic malevolence implicit within every shifting shadow and mist-drenched bough and glistening cobbled gutter?
Sometimes I stand in those mists, father’s old blue-and-green Alpaca shawl hugged round my shoulders, and stare down the curling white phantoms in the moonlit street toward the looming black-brick dwelling, ugly beyond description, which stands at the end of Water Street at the place where the land, defoliated by the foul-breathing zinc smelter, provides its endless treasure of arrowheads and other Meso-American artifacts for summertime boys. This ugly edifice is the home of Charlie Gribble, the town banker, pillar of the community, bachelor, eccentric, sixtyish, irascible, unbending, with no single warm human virtue.
I call him the Brown Recluse. Naturally.
As you doubtless know, the Brown Recluse shares the distinction of being—along with the Black Widow—the most venomous spider in our land. It is sneaking and furtive and bites unexpectedly and is extremely lethal.
My appropriation of the name of this loathsome creature and giving it to Charlie Gribble is, as you shall see, quite natural.
Look at him pass along the misted, glistening, brick sidewalk beyond my honeysuckle and red raspberry bushes, homeward bound, his goldheaded walking stick ferrule ringing resoundingly on the stones as he hunches past in some still hour of the night after long hours at his cluttered, roll-top desk in the frosted-glass office at the bank, hours of piece-mealing painfully through reams of bank loans, mortgages, proposed foreclosures, imminent bankruptcies, corporation claims to mineral rights—the process of squeezing every last penny out of paper until the paper moans in pain.
Just see him hunker past through the mists which seem, like white spectral fingers, to clasp, cling, and then tear free of the shape of him—a veritable mortal incarnation of the Brown Recluse Spider in that particularly hideous and indescribably ugly brown Manx tweed cape he wears in every kind of weather. See how he seems to scuttle on eight legs rather than stride, like a man, on two. See how the furry, brown, venomous hulk of his shoulders in their repulsive vestiture resembles the shape of the insidious and lethal namesake. A moment later and he has scuttled off under the fog, like a Thing hiding under a stone. O, how one longs to overturn that sandstone shelter and drive the creature out into the open, into the light, where it can be seen. And crushed.
Next to money—and I am not even sure of this—the creature I have named the Brown Recluse has one obsession. And I am not sure whether or not I should not put this passion of his first. I mean, of course, his obsession with Sherlock Holmes.
I know it is difficult to imagine this miser, this money-grubber of unmitigated meanness, as the fanatic fan of the most romantic figure in perhaps all of English fiction. I used to ponder it over my solitary suppers in the pantry, when the lovely light of sundown came in golden lacy lights through the leaves beyond the kitchen window onto my mother’s white linen tablecloth. Why, naturally, the Brown Recluse worshipped Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes, wiser even than Inspector Lestrade, was the absolute paradigm of proper law and order. And banking would rot without law and order. Moreover, there was in the Master’s patient unraveling of the tangled skeins of proof and guilt, something close to Gribble’s own patient, nitpicking perusal of a mortgage, a deed, a contract for coal or oil rights. O, how well I have named him the Brown Recluse. How patiently he would sit in the center of his mercantile web, throwing out sticky, fresh strands when necessary to entrap some poor man and then pounce, kill and suck out the last drops of some pitiful little legacy or the picayune and pathetic residue of some insurance check after hospital and funeral deductions were made. O, like Sherlock he was a patient, painstaking—and logical—man.
He was also my first and only lover.
I shan’t distress you with the details of that short liaison—I don’t like to dwell on it. Suffice it to say that it happened over a period of three months in the summer and early autumn of my twenty-ninth year and by Christmas—perhaps the saddest since my childhood—I had miscarried a child and almost hemorrhaged to death in the Glendale Hospital.
O, my diabolical, furry, brown darling—how well I have named you!
And you will think me perhaps strange when I tell you that the loss of my good name in Glory, the loss of my maidenhead, even the loss of my baby—these were not the facts that pinched most painfully in the end. What hurt me—what really maddened me—was the knowledge that the Brown Recluse’s passion for Sherlock, the Master, had begun in this very room—over there, in the cool, dark shelves where my father’s morocco-bound volumes of the Strand glow dully in the amber light of sundown from the stirring curtains above my ferns.
I must confess that in the last few weeks of our little interlude the Brown Recluse spent less time in my bedroom and more in that secluded, shrinelike corner of my father’s library. It seemed to me at the time disquieting. I mean, I really do think of Father’s books as a kind of chapel, a sort of dedicated retreat which somehow seemed more inviolable than my own body. He had no right to be down there! It seemed more of a rape than his taking of myself.
The night we parted he swinishly called me a cripple and when he left, by the side porch, scuttling off into the fog, he stole from my father’s desk a silver-framed inscribed sepia photo portrait of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself.
In the eyes of the law it would have s
eemed a small thing, if even provable, and besides I was too sick that autumn to fight.
I wonder if I ever would have summoned gumption enough to fight—ever—if the Brown Recluse had not then done what he did.
The following April he—and six other Glory professional men—formed the first West Virginia chapter of the Baker Street Irregulars. Almost overnight he—this Brown Recluse—had become the county’s expert, proprietor, and final arbiter of a subject so very dear to my heart—Sherlock Holmes, dear Dr. John Watson, Mrs. Hudson, Moriarity, Mycroft, and all that enchanted world of vanished, foggy, London nights. How dare he! If it hadn’t been for his knowing me—if it had not been for that world I foolishly shared with him in that cool, sacred retreat of my father’s bookshelves—he would not—. But wait! I have not told you the most outrageous part of all. This obscene person—this Brown Recluse—had formed a social club of other addicts to Holmesiana—and he had persuaded them not to admit me as a member!
How’s that for cheek? Can you blame me for what followed?
Yet I won that round with the Brown Recluse, at least. Little, five-foot Harry Hornbrook and Ory Gallagher, Glory real estate partners along with Gene Voitle, the county sheriff—they had all three been students of my father at the Glory college. They had loved him. They had respected him. It was in those sunny campus autumns that Father had initiated them to the inner sanctum of the neat little flat at 221B Baker Street. They had not forgotten.
And so they haggled, bullied, and cajoled the Brown Recluse until he had agreed to my membership.
Ory called me that night and told me the news. I was invited to the spring meeting. I was to be accepted into the organization with full rights and membership.
And pleased and victorious as I felt—how could I know that my troubles had only begun?
The fourth member of the Irregulars was Jake Bardall, who made his living as a carpenter and—in the winters—teaching manual training at Glory High School. The Irregulars had secured rooms on the third floor of the Snyder Hotel, and Jake promptly proposed that, with him and his sons doing all the work, they transform the quarters, and in particular the large front room, into an exact historical replica of the digs at 221B. It took Jake and the boys all that summer. The result was surprisingly good. Wives and sisters provided Victorian oil lamps and curtains and overstuffed turn-of-the-century chairs and a davenport from dusty attics. Abner Snyder, the hotel proprietor, raised some fuss over the bullet-hole pattern of the patriotic VR over the fireplace, but in the end, myth was master, and Ory, with an old banker’s special .32, fired the initials into the golden oak mantelpiece. Gribble and the others went to work on the fine details—the hypodermic syringe and the coal scuttle and the files of cases.
