The Second Haunts & Horrors MEGAPACK®: 20 Tales by Modern and Classic Authors

by Fritz Leiber

  These feats accomplished, I managed to get up the stairs and into my own room, where I locked the door and dropped, face downward, across the bed. Though the evening was cool, my whole body was drenched in sweat and my brain reeled sickeningly.

  One may get help from queer sources. Van, in our gay junior year—his last at college—had initiated me into a device for keeping steady when the last drink has been one too many. You mentally recite a poem or speech or the multiplication table—any old thing will do. Fixing the mind in that way seems to soothe the gyrating interior and enables a fellow at least to fall asleep like a gentleman.

  In my present distress that came back to me. Still fighting off the unknown with one-half of my mind, I scrabbled around in the other half for some definite memorization to take hold of.

  There was none. The very multiplication table swam a jumble of numbers. Then I caught a rhyme beginning in the back of my head, and fixed my attention on it feverishly. Over and over the words said themselves, first haltingly, then with increasing certainty. It was a simple, jingling little prayer that every child in the English-speaking world, I suppose, has learned past forgetfulness.

  Now I lay me down to sleep—

  Again—again—by the tenth repetition of “I pray the Lord my soul to take,” I had wrenched my mind away from—that other—and had its whole attention on the rhyme. At last, following a paroxysm of trembling, I knew myself the victor. Once more the Fifth Presence had released me.

  Panting and weak from reaction, I sat up. What ailed me? How, in reason and common sense, could the sound of any man’s name have this effect on me?

  Hypnotism? Nearly two months had elapsed since my first trouble of this kind, and without recurrence in the interim. No, and come to think of it, I couldn’t recall having heard the name spoken in that while, either. Serapion! It was only when uttered aloud that the word had power over me. I could think of it without any evil effect. And that name on Alicia’s lips had been my last vivid impression before I lost self-consciousness and walked out of Moore’s house, an intelligent automaton for sixty minutes after.

  Scraps of psychology came back to me. Hypnotism—hypnotic suggestion. Could a man be shocked into hypnotic sleep, awaken, and weeks later be swayed by a sound that had accompanied the first lapse?

  One way, I set myself very firmly. In cool judgment I was no believer in ghosts. Whatever the explanation, it had nothing to do with my uncle in propria persona. The very thought brought a smile to my lips. He had died before I was born; but, though dad had for some reason disliked him, by all accounts my namesake had been a genial, easy-going, agreeable gentleman, rather characterless, perhaps, and inclined to let the other fellow work, but not a man whose spirit could be imagined as a half-way efficient “haunt.”

  Serapion! No, and neither would he probably have flung away his own and his family’s comfort for a point of fine-drawn honor. Was dad in the right? I had tried to reserve criticism there, and in action I had certainly backed him to the limit. Inevitably, though from yet far-off, I could see the loss of Roberta grinding down upon me. She couldn’t wait my convenience forever, you know. Some other fellow—some free, unburdened chap—

  I buried my head in my hands.

  Then I dropped them and sprang erect, every nerve alert.

  I had closed my eyes, and in that instant a face had leaped into being behind their shut lids.

  The face was not Roberta’s, though I had been thinking of her. Moreover, it had lacked any dreamlike quality. It had come real—real as if the man had entered my bedroom and thrust his face close to mine.

  As my eyes flicked open, it had vanished, leaving me quivering with a strange resentment—an anger, as if some intimate privacy had been invaded. I stood with clenched fists, more angry than amazed at first, but not daring to shut my eyes lest it return. What had there been about the queer vision that was so loathsome?

  The face of a man around forty years it had seemed, smooth-shaven, boyish in a manner, with a little inward twist at the mouth corners, an amused slyness to the dear, light-blue eyes. The face of an easy-going, take-life’s-jokes-as-they-come sort of fellow, amiable, pleasant, and, in some indefinite fashion—horrible.

  I was sure I had never seen the man in real life, though there had been a vague familiarity about him, too.

  About him! A dream—a vision.

  “Clayton Barbour,” I muttered through shut teeth, “if it has reached the point where a word throws you into spasms and you are afraid to close your eyes, you’d better consult a doctor; and that is exactly what I shall do!”

  CHAPTER VIII.

  FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS.

  Nils Berquist had his own ways, and whether or not they were practical or customary to mankind at large influenced him in no degree. He called himself a socialist, but in pure fact he was one of those persons who require a cause to fight for and argue about, as a Hedonist craves his pleasures, or the average man an income.

  Real socialism, with the communal interests it implies, was foreign to Berquist’s very nature. He could get along, in a withdrawn kind of way, with almost anyone. He would share what small possessions he had with literally anyone. But his interest went to such abstractions of thought as were talked and written by men of his own kind, while himself—his mind—he kept for the very few. These are the qualities of an aristocrat, not a socialist.

  One result of his paradoxical attitude showed in the fact that when it came to current news, Nils was as ignorant a man as you could meet in a day’s walk. My various troubles and activities had kept me from thinking of him, but when I again happened on Nils in town one evening it hurt my feelings to discover that the spectacular downfall of Barbour & Hutchinson might have occurred on another planet, so far as he was concerned.

  News that had been blazoned in every paper was news to him all this time afterward. Even learning it from me in person, he said little, though this silence might have been caused by embarrassment. Roberta was with me, and to tie Nils’s tongue you had only to lead him into the presence of femininity in the person of a young, pretty girl.

  I at last recalled the fact, and because for a certain reason I wished a chance to talk with him where he would talk, I asked if he couldn’t run out some night and have dinner with us. Cathy’s cooking was nothing wonderful, but I knew Nils wouldn’t mind that, nor the cramped quarters we had to live in. I reckoned on taking him up to my own room later for a private confab.

  After a short hesitation he accepted.

  “You take care of yourself, Clay,” he added. “You’re looking pale—run down. Don’t tell me you’ve been laid up sick along with all this other trouble?”

  “No, indeed, old man. Working rather harder than I used to and—lately I haven’t slept very well. Bad dreams. But aside from that, nothing serious.”

  After a few more words, we parted, he striding off on his lonely way to some bourn unknown; Roberta and I proceeding toward the motion-picture theater that we tried to enjoy like a real playhouse. As if misery had altered the Charlestonian viewpoint, Mrs. Whitingfield had relaxed her chaperonage, and let us go alone almost wherever we liked—or where my diminished pocket-fund afforded to take us.

  A fortnight had passed since the strange face had made its first appearance. If Nils thought I looked pale, there was reason for it. “Bad dreams,” I had told him, but bad dreams were less than all.

  My resolve to visit a doctor had come to nothing. I had called, indeed, upon our family physician, as I had meant. The moment I entered his presence, however, that instinct for concealment which had prevented me from confiding in Roberta or my family rose up full strength. The symptoms I actually laid before Dr. Lloyd produced a smile and a prescription that might as well have been the traditional bread pills—I didn’t bother to have it filled. I went out as alone with my secret as when I entered.

/>   A face—boyish in manner, pleasant, half-smiling usually; with an amused slyness to the clear, light-blue eyes; an agreeable inward quirk at the corners of the finely cut lips. I had come to know every lineament intimately well.

  It had not returned again until some time after the first appearance. Then—at the bank, the afternoon following my futile conference with Dr. Lloyd—I happened to close my eyes, and it was there, behind the lids.

  There was a table in Mr. Terne’s office, over which he used to spread out his correspondence and papers. I was seated at one side of the table and he on the other, and I started so violently that he dropped his pen and made a straggling ink-feather across the schedule of securities he was verifying.

  He patiently blotted it, and I made such a fuss over getting out the ink-eradicator and restoring the sheet of minutely figured ledger-paper to neatness, that he forgot to ask what had made me jump in the first place.

  After that the face was with me so often that if I shut my eyes and saw nothing, its absence bothered me. I would feel then that the face had got behind me, perhaps, and acquired the bad habit of casting furtive glances over my shoulder.

  You may think that if one must be burdened with a companion invisible to the world, such a good-humored countenance as I have described would be the least disagreeable. But that was not so.

  There was to me a subtle hatefulness about it—like a thing beautiful and at the same time vile, which one hates in fear of coming to love it.

  I never called the face “him,” never thought of it as a man, nor gave it a man’s name. I was afraid to! As if recognition would lend the vision power. I called it the Fifth Presence, and hated it.

  As days of this passed, there came a time when the face began trying to talk to me. There, at least, I had the advantage. Though I could see the lips move, forming words, by merely opening my eyes I was able to banish it, and so avoid learning what it wished to say.

  In bed, I used to lie with my eyes wide open sometimes for hours, waiting for sleep to come suddenly. When that happened I was safe, for though my dreams were often bad, the face never invaded them.

  I discovered, too, that the name Serapion had in a measure lost power to throw me off balance, since the face had come. My mother continued to harp on the superiority of my dead uncle’s character, and how he would have shielded us from the evils that had befallen, until dad acquiesced in sheer self-protection. But though I didn’t like to hear her talk of him, and though the sound of the name invariably quickened my heart-beat, hearing neither increased nor diminished the vision’s vividness.

  It was with me, however, through most of my waking hours—waiting behind my lids—and if I looked pale, as Nils said, the wonder is that I was able to appear at all as usual. So I wished to talk with Nils, hoping that to the man who had warned me against the Moores I could force myself to confide the distressing aftermath of my visit at the “dead-alive house.”

  He had promised to come out the next night but one, which was Wednesday. Unfortunately, however, I missed seeing him then, after all, and because of an incident whose climax was to give the Fifth Presence a new and unexpected significance.

  About two thirty Wednesday afternoon I ran up the steps of the Colossus Trust, and at the top collided squarely with Van, Jr. By the slight reel with which he staggered against a pillar and caught hold of it, I knew that Van had been hitting the high spots again and hoped he had not been interviewing his father in that condition. On recovering his balance, Van, stood up steady enough.

  “Old scout Clay! Say, you look like a pale, pallid, piffling fresh-water clam, you do. ’Pon my word, I’m ashamed of the old Colossus. The old brass idol has sucked all the blood out of you. My fault, servin’ up the best friend I ever had as a—a helpless sacrifice to the governor’s old brass Colossus. Come on with me—you been good too long!”

  He playfully pretended to tear off the brass-lettered name of the trust company, which adorned the wall beside him, cast it down and trample on it. When I tried to pass he caught my arm. “Come on!”

  “Can’t,” I explained quietly. “Mr. Terne was the best man at a wedding today, but he left me a stack of work.”

  Van sniffed. “Huh! I know that wedding. I was invited to that wedding, but I wouldn’t go. Measly old prohibition wedding! Just suits Fatty Terne. When you get married, Clay, I’ll send along about eleven magnums for a wedding present, and then I’ll come to your wedding!”

  “You may—when it happens.” Again I tried to pass him.

  “Wait a minute. You poor, pallid work-slave—you know what I’m going to do for you?”

  “Get me fired, by present prospects. I must—”

  “You must not. Just listen. You know Barney Finn?”

  “Not personally. Let me go now, Van, and I’ll see you later.”

  “Barney Finn,” he persisted doggedly, “has got just the biggest lil’ engine that ever slid round a track. Now you wait a minute. Barney’s another friend of mine. Told me all about it. Showed it to me. Showed me how it’s going to make every other wagon at Fairview tomorrow look like a hand-pushed per-perambulator!”

  “All right. Come around after the race and tell me how Finn made out. Please—”

  “Wait. You’re my friend, Clay, and I like you. You put a thousand bones on Finney’s car, and say goodbye to old Colossus. Start a bank of your own. How’s that, huh?”

  I laughed. “Bet on it yourself, Van, and let me alone. I’ve forgotten what a thousand dollars looks like.”

  “No place for you roun’ old Colossus, then. Say, boy, if you think me too squiffy to wist whereof I speak, you misjudge me sadly—yes, indeed! Didn’t I wrest one pitiful century from Colossus five minutes ago, and isn’t that the last that stood between me an’ starvation, and ain’t I going right out an’ plaster that century on Finn’s car? Would I im-impoverish the Colossus and me, puttin’ that last century on anything but a sure win? Come across, boy!”

  Now, one might think that Van’s invitation lacked attractiveness to a sober man. I happened to know, however, that drunk or sober, his judgment was good on one subject, the same being motor-cars. Barney Finn, moreover, was a speed-track veteran with a mighty reputation at his back. He had, in the previous year, met several defeats, due to bad luck, in my opinion, but they had brought up the odds. If he had something particularly good and new in his car for tomorrow’s race at Fairview, there was a chance for somebody to make a killing, as Van said.

  “What odds?” I queried.

  “For each lil’ bone you plant, twelve lil’ bones will blossom. Good enough? I could get better, but this will be off Jackie Rosenblatt, an’ you know that lil Jew’s a reglar old Colossus his own self. Solid an’ square. Hock his old high silk hat before he’d welch.”

  “Yes, Rosie’s square.” I did some quick mental figuring, and then pulled a thin sheaf of bills from an inner coat-pocket. Instantly, Van had snatched them out of my hand.

  “Not all!” I exclaimed sharply. “Take fifty, but I brought that in to deposit—”

  “Deposit it with Jackie! Why, you old miser with your bank account! Four entire centuries, and you weepin’ over poverty! Say, Clay, how much is twelve times four?”

  “Forty-eight, but—”

  “Lightnin’ calculator!” he admired. “Say, doesn’t forty-eight hundred make a bigger noise in your delicate ear than four measly centuries? Come across!”

  I don’t think I nodded. I am almost sure that I had begun reaching my hand to take all, or most of those bills back. But Van thought otherwise.

  “Right, boy!”

  With plunging abruptness he was off down the steps. I hesitated. Forty-four hundred. Then I caught myself and was after him, but too late. His speedy gray roadster was already nosing recklessly into the traffic. Before I reached the bottom step it had shot ar
ound the corner and was gone.

  CHAPTER IX.

  THE FACE SPEAKS.

  Off Mr. Terne’s spacious office there was a little glass-enclosed, six-by-eight cubby-hole, which I called my own.

  Ten o’clock Thursday morning found me seated in the one chair, staring at a pile of canceled notes on the desk before me. I had started to check them half an hour ago, but so far just one check-mark showed on the list beside them. I had something worse to think of than canceled notes.

  As I sat, I could hear Mr. Terne fussing about the outer office. Then I heard him go out. About two minutes afterward the door banged open so forcibly that I half started up, conscience clamoring.

  But it wasn’t the second voice returning in a rage. It was Van. He fairly bolted into my cubby-hole, closed the door, pitched his hat in a corner, and swung himself to a seat on my desk-edge, scattering canceled notes right and left. There he sat, hands clasped, staring at me in a perfect stillness which contrasted dramatically with his violent entry. His eyes looked dark and sunken in a strained, white face. My nerves were inappreciative of drama.

  “Where were you last night?” I demanded irritably. “I hunted for you around town till nearly midnight.”

  “What? Oh, I was way out in—I don’t know exactly. Some dinky road-house. I pretty nearly missed the race and—and I wish to God I had, Clay!” He passed a shaking hand across his eyes.

  “Did Finn lose?” I snapped. “But—why, the race can hardly be more than started yet!”

  “Finn started!” he gulped.

  “Ditched?” I gasped, a flash of inspiration warning me of what was coming.

  He nodded. “Turned turtle on the second lap and—say, boy—I helped dig him out and carry him off—you know, I liked Barney. It was—bad. The mechanism broke his back clean—flung against a post—but Barney—say, what was left of him kind of—kind of came apart—when we—” He stopped short, gulped again, and: