by Otto Penzler
“No.” Tony shook his head impatiently. His mind was full of the horror he had seen working back there in the field. A gun! What did he want with a gun? Did old Robert Perry think he would be dangerous—the story-book rejected-lover type, perhaps? Nonsense. Urgent, staccato words tumbled from his lips as he ignored the question.
“Mr. Perry—there’s a man back there with the whole top of his head split open. He’s stark mad; he wouldn’t speak to me or come with me. But—he’ll die if he’s left where he is! It’s a wonder he isn’t dead already.”
There was a long silence before the old man answered. “Where did you see this man?”
“Back there—back in the cotton.”
Old Robert Perry shook his head, spoke in a muttered whisper, as if to himself, “Die? He can’t—die!”
Abruptly he paused. The screen door leading into the house had opened. Two Negroes and a white man had come out on the porch.
The two Negroes were nondescript enough—mere plantation blacks. But the white man!
He was tall and wide as a door. He was so huge that any person attempting to guess his weight would have considered himself lucky if he got the figure within a score of pounds of the truth; he was bigger than any man Tony had ever seen outside a sideshow. And he was not a glandular freak; he was muscled like a jungle beast; his whole posture, his whole carriage silently shrieked super-human vitality. His gargantuan face, beneath the broad-brimmed, rusty black hat he wore, was pale as the belly of a dead fish, pale with the pallor of one who shuns the sunlight. His eyes were wide-set, coal-black, and staring; Tony had glimpsed that same intensity of gaze before in the eyes of religious and sociological fanatics. His nose was fleshy and well-muscled at the tip; his lips were thin and straight and tightly compressed. Garbed as he was in a knee-length, clerical coat of greenish, faded black, still wearing a frayed, filthy-white episcopal collar, he looked what he must have been, a pastor without honour, a renegade man of God.
He stood silently there on the porch and looked disapprovingly at Tony. His thin, weak, reformer’s lips beneath that powerful, sensual nose tightened. Then, quietly, he spoke, not to Tony but to the paralytic old man:
“Who is this—person, Mr. Perry?”
Tony’s fists clenched at the man’s insolence. His anger turned to astonishment as he heard the old man answer almost cringingly: “This is Anthony Kent, Reverend Barnes—Anthony Kent, from New York City. Anthony—the Reverend Warren Barnes, who is stopping with us for a while. He has been very kind to us during my—illness.”
Tony nodded coldly. The funereal-clad colossus stared for a long moment at this unexpected guest, and Tony could feel the menace smouldering in him like banked fires. But when he spoke for the second time his words were innocuous enough.
“I’m temporarily in charge here.” His voice was vibrant as a great hollow drum. “Mr. Perry’s mind, since he suffered his most unfortunate stroke, has not always been entirely clear, and Miss Eileen too. I am temporarily without a pastorate, and I am glad to help in any way that I can. You understand, I’m sure?” He smiled, the sickeningly pious smile of the chronic hypocrite, and ostentatiously clasped his hands.
Again Tony nodded. “Yes, I understand, Reverend,” he said quickly, although some obscure sixth sense had already warned him that this man was as slimy and dangerous as a water-moccasin—and as treacherous. But—that man in the field, working in the cotton with the brain-stuff hanging down behind his ear! Hurriedly, Tony went on, “I spoke to Mr. Perry when I came up the steps—something must be done at once—there’s a man working out there in the field beside the road with something seriously wrong with his head. My God, I looked at him, and it looked to me as though his skull was fractured!”
With surprising swiftness the colossus turned upon Tony. “What’s that you say? It looked as though what?”
Tony rasped, “A man working in the field with a fractured skull, Reverend! His head looks staved in—bashed open—God knows how he can still work. He’s got to be brought to the house.”
The giant’s too brilliant, too intense black eyes were suddenly crafty. He laughed, patronisingly, as though humouring a child or a drunkard. “Oh, come, come, Mr. Kent; such things are impossible, you know. A trick of the light, or perhaps your weariness; you’ve driven a long distance, haven’t you? One’s eyes play strange tricks upon one.”
He peered at Tony, and suddenly the expression on his face changed. “But if you’re worried, we’ll convince you, put your mind at ease. You go and get Cullen, Mose and Job. Jump smart, niggers!” He pointed up the road. “Jump smart; bring Cullen back here; Mr. Kent’s got to be shown.” His thin lips curled scornfully.
The two Negroes “jumped smart.” The Reverend Warren Barnes calmly seated himself in one of the wicker chairs near paralytic old Robert Perry and waved carelessly toward a vacant chair. Tony sat down—glanced inquiringly at Eileen’s uncle. But the aged man remained silent, apathetic, indifferent. Obviously, Tony thought, his mind was enfeebled; in that, at least, the Reverend Barnes had been truthful.
Almost diffidently, Tony addressed the white-haired old paralytic.
“I’ve come here to speak with Eileen, Mr. Perry. I can’t believe that she meant—what she wrote in her last letter. Regardless of whether or not her feelings toward me have changed, I must speak to her. Where is she?”
When the old man spoke his voice was flat and hard. “Eileen has written to tell you that she wished to terminate whatever had been between you. Perhaps she has decided that she would prefer not to become too deeply involved with a Northerner. Perhaps she has other reasons. But in any case, Mr. Kent, you are not acting the gentleman in coming here and attempting to renew an acquaintanceship that has been quite definitely broken off.”
The words were brutal, and not at all the sort of speech Tony would have expected, a moment ago, from a man whose mind had dimmed through age and shock. A sharp, involuntary retort surged to Tony’s lips. Suddenly, then, the Reverend Barnes guffawed loudly.
“There, Mr. Kent!” he chuckled. It was a sound utterly unministerial, utterly coarse, sardonic and evil. “There—coming down the road. Is that the man you saw working in the cotton—with the fractured skull?”
Walking into the yard between the two Negroes was the white man Tony had encountered earlier. He was plodding along steadily, almost rapidly, with no assistance from his coloured companions. The straw hat was set tightly down upon his head, shading his face and covering his temples. There was no bit of greyish stuff hanging down beside his left ear.
The three men halted before the porch. The Reverend Barnes, grinning broadly, showing great, yellowed, decaying teeth, stood up and put his hands on the porch rail. Abruptly he spoke to Tony.
“Is this the man, Mr. Kent?”
Tony, his mind numb with amazement, answered, “It’s the man, all right.”
The Reverend Barnes’s grin deepened. “Are you all right, Cullen? Do you feel quite able to work? Not ill, or anything?”
There was a long, long pause before the man answered. And when at last he spoke, his voice was curiously cadenceless, as though speech were an art he seldom practised. But there was no doubt about what he said.
“Ahm all right, Reverend Barnes. Ah feels good.”
The big man chuckled, as though in appreciation of some ghastly joke.
“You haven’t any headache?” he persisted. “No dizziness from the sun, perhaps? You don’t want to knock off for the rest of the day?”
After a moment the reply came.
“Ah ain’ got no haidache. Ah kin work.”
The Reverend Barnes smiled pontifically. “Very well, then, Cullen. You may go back to work.”
“Wait!” Tony exclaimed. “Tell him to take off his hat.”
The big man wheeled slowly; slowly his right hand lifted, like that of some mighty patriarch about to pronounce a benediction—or a damning curse. For an instant Tony glimpsed murder in his eyes. Then his hand fell, and he spoke s
moothly, quietly, to Cullen.
“Take off your hat, Cullen.”
With maddening, mechanical slowness the man lifted his hat, and Tony saw a mat of irongrey hair, caked with dirt.
“Put your hat back on, Cullen. You may go back to work.”
The man turned, was plodding slowly from the yard. And in that instant, striking vaguely against his dazed consciousness, the realisation came to Tony that only the hair on the left side of the man’s skull was matted with ground-in dust—the hair above his right ear was relatively clean! He opened his lips to speak. But the Reverend Barnes, as if anticipating him, was saying with amused, contemptuous finality:
“He’s gone back to work. Dirty fellows, aren’t they—these poor white trash?”
And Tony, wondering if his own reason were tottering, let the man go. . . .
The big man settled comfortably back in his chair.
“You thought you saw something you didn’t,” he said. His voice was soft now, soft and tolerant as silk. “Eye-strain, nervousness that’s very close to hysteria. You must look after yourself.”
For an instant Tony cradled his face in his hands. Yes, he must get hold of himself; his mind was overwrought. He raised his head and looked at the old man. “Eileen,” he said doggedly. “I must see her.”
Old Robert Perry opened his lips to speak. And suddenly the big man turned in his chair to stare deeply into the aged paralytic’s eyes.
“You would like to see Miss Eileen?” he asked Tony, then, with grave courtesy, “But certainly, Mr. Perry. He’s come such a distance; it would be a pity—”
“Whatever you say.”
The Reverend Barnes rose from his chair, smiled sorrowfully and pityingly toward Tony.
“Job, Mose,” he said to the two Negroes, “stay here on the porch, in case Mr. Perry has one of his spells.” He nodded significantly to Tony. “I’ll call Miss Eileen. Such a lovely, sweet girl!”
Leisurely, moving on the balls of his feet like some magnificent jungle beast, he rose and stalked across the porch, opened the rusty screen door and disappeared within the house.
Mr. Perry did not speak; neither did Tony. There was something in the air that eluded him, Tony knew—some mystery that even Mr. Perry himself concealed, some mystery that seemed as elusive as the breeze stirring the magnolias.
FOOTSTEPS WITHIN THE house, and Eileen Perry, small, slender, with the wistful beauty of a spring flower, came onto the porch. Behind her, as if carelessly, his face overspread with a pious smirk, lounged Reverend Barnes.
Tony started up eagerly.
“Eileen!”
For a moment she did not speak. Only her splendid eyes looked at him hungrily, with illconcealed terror rising in their depths.
“You shouldn’t have come, Tony,” she said then, simply.
The words were a rebuff. Yet Tony fancied that he had seen her hands lift toward him. He took a single step forward. But, as if to elude him, she stepped swiftly to the rail, stood with her back toward him.
“I had to come, Eileen,” Tony said. His voice sounded oddly choked. “I love you. I had to know if you meant—those words you wrote, or if it was some strange madness—”
“Madness?” She laughed, and there was sudden hysteria in her low contralto voice. “Madness? No. I’ve changed, Tony. You may think what you please about me; you may think that I’m fickle, or that I’m insane—whatever you will. But—above everything else in the world I did not want you to come here. Is that plain enough for you? I thought I tried to tell you that in my letter. And now—I wish that you would go.”
As a man who dreams a nightmare, Tony heard his own voice, muttering, “But don’t you love me, Eileen?”
For a moment he believed that she would speak, but she did not. She turned, and, without a backward look, walked into the house.
The giant, Reverend Barnes, was rubbing his hands together—an incongruous, absurd gesture in a man of his physique. And then, after a moment, he laughed, a hoarse, obscene guffaw. But Tony, heartbroken, heard the insulting sound as no more than a disquieting rumble that had no meaning. His lips quivering, his eyes misty with the sudden tears he could not restrain, he walked slowly across the porch.
Then, as though the longing in them could bring her back to him, his tear-dimmed eyes gazed into the emptiness where Eileen had stood, looked unseeingly across the flowering mimosa, stared downward for a second at the porch rail.
A single word had been written on that rail, written in dust with a fingertip. Tony’s mind did not register the significance of that word; it was transmitted only to his subconscious. But, as if mechanically, his lax lips moved.
The sombrely clad giant suddenly tensed, took a step forward.
“What was that you said, Mr. Kent?”
Mechanically Tony repeated the word.
The big man’s eyes swept the rail. The grin had abruptly gone from his face; his muscles knotted beneath his rusty black coat.
And then he leaped. And simultaneously leaped the two Negroes who had lingered, diffidently, down the porch. Monstrous, spatulate, pasty-white hands clenched into Tony’s throat. Abruptly fighting, not with his numbed brain, but with a primitive, involuntary instinct of the flesh for self-preservation, Tony sent his fists lashing into the pair of black faces before him. But the giant renegade minister was on his shoulders like an albino shrouded leopard; the Negroes were tearing at his arms. His knees were buckling.
Like a slender tree stricken by the woodsman’s axe, he wavered and plunged headlong. There was a cascade of darting light as his head crashed against the dusty pine boards. Then came oblivion.
ANTHONY KENT AWOKE to swirling, throbbing pain. His skull beat and hammered; the dim walls of a small room, barren save for the straw-mattressed cot on which he lay, swooped and gyrated before his eyes.
Slowly he recalled what had occurred. The Reverend Barnes, that magnificent jackal, had struck him down as he stood on the porch. He was in some long-disused room, presumably a servant’s bedchamber, within the old Perry house.
A word was struggling upward from deep within his brain. What was that word? Almost he remembered it. It was the word Eileen had written in dust on the porch rail, a word repulsive and hideous.
Eileen had been trying to tell him something, trying to convey some message to him. Eileen, then, loved him!
What was the word?
There was a small, square window in the room, through which a feeble, yellowish light struck high up on the opposite wall. The sun was setting, then; he had been unconscious for hours. But it was not at the window that Tony glanced despairingly. It was at the two-by-six pine beams nailed closely together across that small square space!
Tony stumbled to his feet, reeled to the window and shook those wooden bars with all his strength. But they were solid white pine, and they had been spiked to the house with twenty-penny nails.
Through the narrow apertures between the beams Tony could see the broad, level fields, and the road, sloping gently upward to disappear within the encircling forest.
People were coming down that road now, grey, dusty people who plodded toward the house. They appeared almost doll-like, for the room in which Tony was imprisoned was on the side of the house, and long before the road swung in toward the yard they passed beyond his vision. But as Tony watched them his nerves crawled.
They walked so slowly, so listlessly, with dragging footsteps! And they stumbled frequently against one another, and against the stones in the road, as though they were almost blind. Almost they walked like soldiers suffering from shell-shock, but recently discharged from some hospital in hell.
For many were maimed. One walked with a deep, broken stoop, as though his chest had been crushed against his backbone. Another’s leg was off below the knee, and in place of an artificial limb he wore a stick tied against the leg with rope, a stick that reached from twelve inches beyond the stump to the hip. A third had only one arm; a fourth was skeleton-thin.
In the
Name of God whence had these maimed toilers come?
And then a soundless scream rattled in Tony’s throat; for, coming down the road alone, walking with the same dragging lifelessness as did the others, was another of the grey toilers. And, as the man turned the wide sweep in the road that would lead him to the house and beyond Tony’s vision, Tony glimpsed, in the last yellow rays of the setting sun, the horror that had once been his face!
Had once been his face! For, from beneath the ridge of his nose downward, the man had no face! The vertebrate whiteness of his spine, naked save for ragged strings of dessicated flesh, extended with horrid starkness from the throat of his shirt to merge with the shattered base of a bony skull!
HIDEOUS MINUTES PASSED, minutes through which Tony fought to retain some semblance of sanity. At last he staggered weakly to the door, only one thought in his mind—to escape that mad place and take Eileen with him.
But the door, like the bars across the window, was made of heavy pine. From its resistance to his assault Tony knew that it was secured by bars slotted through iron sockets. It was impregnable.
Darkness was within that room now. Night had come quickly with the setting of the sun, velvety, semi-tropical night. The window was a purplish square through which a star gleamed brilliantly; the pine bars were invisible in the gloom. Tony was engulfed in blackness.
Yet, in a corner near the floor, there was a lessening of the darkness. Tony, crouching there, saw that the light came through a quarter-inch crack between the planks. Throwing himself down, he glued his eyes to that crack.
He could see only a small portion of the room beneath him, a rectangle roughly three feet by twelve, yet that was enough to tell him that the room was the dining-room of the old house. The middle of an oaken table, littered with dishes and scraps of food, bisected his field of vision.
At that table, his back toward Tony, sat the apostate Reverend Barnes. A little way down the table a black hand and arm appeared and disappeared with irregular frequency. The rumble of voices floated upward through the narrow slit.
“God!” Tony thought. “If only I had a gun!”
