The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original)

by Unknown

  “He’ll put up a fight, I tell you.”

  Wood’s voice shaded off into a near-whimper.

  “Take no chances with him,” directed Courtnay. “If he doesn’t give up at once, well—” He finished with a gesture of his tan hand.

  They understood; into the darkness moved the men; their tread was determined.

  III

  When they had gone, Cater Courtnay poured himself a leisurely drink from the carafe on the venerable sideboard. There was no hurry; his house was not far from the cross-roads where they were to meet. He sat down in an easy chair and examined his pistol minutely; it was loaded, oiled, ready. Idly his glance roved along the row of paintings on the walls, men in uniform, mostly, with the lean, serious faces of the Courtnay breed. A thought struck him. He rang a bell, and presently an ancient negress, her eyebrows like tufts of cotton, her manner the respectfully familiar manner of the old and trusted retainer, came into the room.

  “Mammy Stella?”

  “Yes, Mr. Cater—”

  “Isn’t there up in the attic somewhere an old trunk that belonged to my grandfather, Colonel Courtnay?”

  He did not notice that her hands took a sudden grip on the edges of her apron.

  “I disremember,” she said.

  “Oh, come now, Mammy Stella. You were up there only the other day. Wasn’t there an old trunk of my grandfather’s?”

  “Mebbe so.”

  “You packed it, didn’t you?”

  “I reckon so.”

  “Do you remember what you put in it?”

  “Not ’zactly. It was more than forty years ago.”

  “Well, what did you put in it?”

  “Nothing but a lot of old clothes, Mr. Cater.”

  “Ah, that’s what I’m after. Do you remember putting in a sort of white garment, like a big night-shirt, with a hood on it?”

  He saw from her eyes and the look that came to her face that she remembered.

  “Will you get it for me, Mammy Stella?”

  The old woman had begun to tremble.

  “Mr. Cater,” she said, “ask me to do anything, but don’t ask me to do that—I’m scared—it’s up there in the dark.”

  “Scared? Nonsense.”

  “Before the Lord, I am, Mr. Cater. I know that robe, Mr. Cater. It’s the old Klan robe. I—I’m scared of it.”

  “Just an old piece of cloth! Nonsense, Mammy Stella. Why should it scare you?”

  “They come one night—to our cabin—I was a little girl then—and they took my brother—I’ll never forget—”

  “Oh, well, I suppose I can get it myself.”

  He rose.

  “Mr. Cater—”

  “What?”

  “You ain’t plannin’—to use it?”

  “Never mind what I’m planning, Mammy Stella. Run along now.”

  “For God’s sake, Mr. Cater, don’t—don’t—”

  “Don’t what?”

  He regarded the old woman tolerantly; she had been his nurse.

  “Don’t be cruel—because he’s a black man.”

  “I’ve no intention of being cruel,” he said stiffly.

  “But—” she ventured. “Greel—he’s a good man—”

  “He’s poisoning the niggers’ minds; we can’t permit that.”

  Courtnay spoke partly to her, but mostly to himself.

  “But must you go, Mr. Cater? Can’t you leave it to the others—”

  His voice was not unkind as he said:

  “Mammy Stella, you know better than that, after sixty-five years in the Courtnay family. You know when Courtnays have a duty to perform they don’t leave it to other folks. Now run along to bed. I’m going up in the attic.”

  He stepped toward the door, but the old woman held him back, her wrinkled hands on his arm.

  “Don’t go, Mr. Cater,” she begged. “It’s haunted—up there—I tell you—”

  “Haunted? The old trunk?”

  “It’s locked,” she cried. “You can’t open it.”

  “I’ll break it open.”

  “You mustn’t—oh, Mr. Cater, you mustn’t.”

  “I mustn’t? Why not?”

  “It’s haunted, I tell you.” She was clinging to his arm.

  He tried, quite gently, to free himself.

  “White folks don’t believe in haunts, Mammy Stella,” he said, with a short laugh. “Let go my arm; let go, do you hear?”

  “Oh, don’t go up there—your father never let you—” Her voice was desperate.

  “I’m a man now,” he said, smilingly. “I’m not afraid of the dark—”

  “He’ll get you, if you go up. He’ll get you if you go up.”

  “Who’ll get me?”

  “The devil in the trunk,” she cried.

  “I eat devils,” laughed Courtnay.

  He took her by the wrists and made her loosen her grip. Then he bounded up the stairs, still laughing.

  It was dark in the beamed, stoop-shouldered attic, and in the corners under the eaves was the dust of years. With lighted candle, Cater Courtnay peered about. He had not been up there since he was a boy; then he had gone up once, and had been strictly forbidden by his father to go again.

  In the circle of light he saw piles of old trunks and boxes, discarded pieces of furniture, garments, wrapped in muslin, hanging from hooks like so many dead murderers, the odds and ends of a hundred years. Impatiently he pushed the boxes right and left, his eyes searching. He bent over a leathern chest—no, that was not the one. A sound made him start; it was only the creaking of a blind.

  “Nerves a bit jumpy,” he muttered. “The old fool and her talk of haunts! Funny it should affect me.”

  He started again, at another sound, but checked himself, with an oath; it was the sputtering of his candle. He continued a brisk search. Then, as he bent to examine a corner, he wheeled about, his hand plucking at his hip-pocket—he had sensed something moving in the attic. He laughed aloud. It was his own shadow, grotesque, misshapen in the candle’s wavering flame. His laugh echoed; to his own ears it sounded unreal, smothered.

  “A ghost’s laugh,” he said to himself, and he didn’t like the way his voice cracked.

  He pushed aside a pile of boxes; then he found what he was seeking—a very old, flat, brass-bound chest, marred by time, its lock rusty, and his grandfather’s initials on it, in faded paint.

  He could not understand why his heart was beating with fast, irregular beats; why his brow felt damp; why the words of a superstitious old black woman should just then be dancing in his brain. He bent over the chest with a determined frown, and with a snatched-up poker pried at the rusty lock. A violent twist, and the lock shot open like a hound showing its fangs. He jumped back from it, cursed his nerves, bent over the chest again.

  In the old chest there was nothing to alarm him; there was nothing in it but a pile of old clothes, the folded grey uniform of a colonel, the crushed wide felt hat, the black boots. He took them out, one by one, with careful pride. Then came his grandfather’s frock coat with silk facings, his grey pantaloons with straps under the insteps, his white, frilled shirts.

  At last, at the very bottom, Courtnay found it—a robe of some coarse cotton stuff, white once, but yellowed by time; to it was attached a hood, with eye holes, and on the breast was a cross, rusty red, like an old bloodstain.

  His fingers, unbidden, recoiled from it. He forced them to pick it up, and his hands, usually so steady, were trembling, and he shuddered as he laid it aside.

  Courtnay glanced into the chest to see if he had entirely emptied it. The candle, as if to aid him, sent up a spurt of flame, strange flame that seemed greenish in the silent gloom of the room, and Courtnay saw that in the bottom of the chest was a raised place, a swollen place, like the lump after a blow.

  He examined it. He saw that the leather lining had been slit, and something flat thrust under it, and the lining stitched together again. His finger-nails tore at the stitching; he was breathing throu
gh his mouth, jerkily; he fumbled for the poker, grasped it.

  The stout seams resisted at first, then gave up and the slit gaped open like a fresh wound. He pulled out what had been hidden there. It was an envelope, worn and smelling of the must of years. He ripped it open and, by the candle’s light, read the long communication in the handwriting of his grandfather.

  Then he screamed, the cut-short scream of a man stabbed through the lungs. He staggered. The candle was overturned and utter blackness filled the attic.

  “Lord God, have pity on me! Oh, Lord, oh, Lord—”

  He was sobbing, moaning in a delirium of fear.

  “Lord, have pity. Lord, have pity. Lord, have pity.”

  He was on his knees and the words came from him in the terror-spurred, yet rhythmic, chant of the revival meeting. He struggled to his feet, wildly, as a fallen horse does, and plunged through the darkness for the door; his head struck a beam and the shock steadied him for an instant. He made the door and half leaped, half fell down the stairs.

  Mammy Stella was still in the library when Cater Courtnay stumbled in, the paper from the envelope still grasped in his hand. She was kneeling there, praying aloud as she swayed her body back and forth—

  “Don’t let him find the devil! Don’t let him find the devil!”

  He heard. He shook her, his fingers digging into her shoulders.

  “It isn’t true,” he cried. “Tell me it isn’t true.”

  The old woman moaned. A hot, blind wave of fury swept over him.

  “You knew all the time. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She raised her eyes to his; she faltered at first; then she spoke clearly:

  “Because, Mr. Cater, I know what it is to be a nigger,” she said.

  A spasm of pain twisted his face at the word. He sank into a chair; he sat staring dully at the paper in his hand, still held in a grip like the rigid grip of a corpse. He knew now why he had felt that nameless fear in the attic.

  He did not see the old woman as, with a cat-like movement, she stole to his side; before he could stop her she had snatched the papers from his hand, and had cast them into the fire that blazed in the fireplace. He leaped up, bewildered. She thrust her body between him and the blazing papers.

  “Now,” she said, and her lips parted in a toothless smile, “no one need ever know.”

  He stared at her as if he did not understand. Then, thickly, he said:

  “No—one?”

  “No one but me—and you.”

  He leaned against the library table; he shook his head, then half muttered:

  “But I know. But I know.”

  The old negress was about to speak, but he stopped her.

  “Please go, Mammy Stella. I want to be left—alone.”

  She left him standing there, and he might have been dead so motionless was his body, so fixed his black eyes.

  How long he stood there, his stunned brain trying to take hold of what had happened to him, Courtnay did not know. The knell-like stroke of a clock on the mantel broke in upon him, and galvanized him into action, at first dulled and aimless, then, as he got a better grip on himself, into action more coherently directed. For the stroke of the clock pricked him into the consciousness that it was ten-thirty—and at eleven he had a duty to perform. He was due at the cross-roads; if he did not arrive they would start without him; later they would say he had weakened, had shirked. Time pressed.

  Mechanically his hand felt at his hip-pocket to reassure him that his pistol was there; the hand that touched the cold metal leaped back as if it were glowing hot. The pistol was there, and ready. Ready? For what? To shoot a nigger. He drove his teeth into his lips.

  The ticking of the clock seemed inordinately loud and insistent. Twenty-five minutes to eleven. They would be beginning to gather under the live oak at the cross-roads, relentless men, silent in their white hoods.

  Even as they gathered, half a mile from the place of their assembling, Greel would be asleep in the little shack where he tried to teach the alphabet to men of his own color. He would be tired after his day’s work, reflected Courtnay, worn out in mind and body, for it must be a heart-breaking job. The hooded men would steal upon the cabin, surround it, order him to come out, and then …

  Courtnay remembered Greel and the interview they had had. There was a deep gentleness and patience about the schoolmaster, but when Courtnay had ordered him, peremptorily, to close the school and go, there had been a light in Greel’s eye and he had held his head high as he had refused. Greel would fight.…

  Courtnay wished the clock would not tick so loudly. Twenty minutes to eleven. He had barely time to reach the cross-roads. But he did not start; he stood there in the library and his eyes were fastened on the paintings that hung there … his father, his great-uncle Carroll, his grandfather … honorable men.…

  Tick, tick, tick. They would be starting on their grim errand soon. They looked to him—to a Courtnay—to lead them. And still he stood staring into the eyes of his great-uncle Carroll who had died at Shiloh. Tick, tick, tick. Cater Courtnay straightened; in the hearth’s dying light he seemed very tall and erect. Then, all action now, he went from the library and the house, and with long, swift strides hurried through the heavy blackness of the night.

  IV

  It was just eleven. In the village the drowsy church clock announced the hour. Breathless, Cater Courtnay darted up to the door of Greel’s cabin. There was no light; he rapped with tense fists.

  “Who’s there?”

  The voice of the colored schoolmaster was firm, alert.

  “I—Cater Courtnay—a friend—”

  The door opened an inch.

  “What do you want?”

  “Quick!” Courtnay whispered. “Let me in. They’re coming to get you.”

  The door opened wide enough to admit a man. By the embers on the hearth Courtnay saw that Greel was fully dressed, and that he held a pistol in his hand.

  “You knew they were coming then?”

  “Every night,” said Greel, “I wait like this.”

  Courtnay’s words were swift, incisive.

  “We must act quickly. They’ll be here in five minutes. They’ll murder you like a dog.”

  “I’ll fight—”

  “No use. They’re nine to one.”

  Greel shrugged his shoulders; he kept his pistol leveled at Courtnay’s heart.

  “You can’t talk me into giving up, Mr. Courtnay,” he said. “Go back and tell them they’ll never take me alive.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Greel. You’d be no good dead. You’ve work to do—I didn’t come to betray you—I came to help you escape—”

  “Too late,” said Greel.

  “No. You’ve got a chance. Go now. Run down the path by Claymore creek; cross the footbridge; you can catch the midnight train as it goes through Bayardville—”

  “No use; I’m too tired to run fast; they’d find the cabin empty; they’d follow and catch me; I’ll stay.”

  “They won’t follow you—”

  “Why?”

  “Because they won’t find the cabin empty.”

  Greel looked at Courtnay sharply.

  “You mean—”

  “Yes.”

  “But why?”

  Courtnay drew himself up.

  “My grandfather—damn him—had a mulatto slave—damn him—damn him to Hell—my father had her blood in him—we’re black—damn him to Hell. But you’ve got to hurry.”

  Greel looked out of the cabin door; a faint moon, just come out, showed far down the ribbon of road something white moving toward them.

  “Go, Greel,” Courtnay whispered fiercely.

  “But why should you do this?”

  “Because I choose to. Now run.”

  Greel moved toward the door.

  “I don’t understand—” he said. “But I’m going to go. But before I go, there’s one thing I want to do—”

  “Quick. What?”

>   “Shake hands with you.”

  In the almost dark room the hand of Cater Courtnay and the negro schoolmaster met for an instant; then Greel slipped out into the night and disappeared in the tangle of weeds and underbrush through which the creek path ran.

  Greel was across the footbridge when he heard through the night’s silence a hard, high voice call out:

  “Greel! Greel!”

  Then he heard another voice, but not his own, call back:

  “Yes? What do you want?”

  The hard, high voice answered:

  “We want you. Come out, Greel.”

  No reply. Greel sped on through the night.

  “Come out, Greel, do you hear?”

  No reply. Other voices took up the cry.

  “Come out, Greel. Come out, you black skunk. Come out, or we’ll come and get you out.”

  Then as he ran, Greel heard a terrible voice that seemed to fill the whole night, cry:

  “Come get me, if you can, you white devils. I’ll show you how a nigger can die!”

  He heard the staccato bark of shots.

  Greel had come to a bend in the path; he was panting, but he felt he was safe now; he could see the lights of Bayardville not far off; he stopped to catch his breath. He looked back toward where he had come from. Against the brooding sky he saw the bloody orange-red of flames.

  Middleman for Murder

  Bruno Fischer

  BRUNO FISCHER (1908–1992) was born in Berlin, Germany, and emigrated to the United States at the age of five, his family settling in New York City. He was educated at the Rand School of Social Sciences, which had been established by the Socialist Party in 1906 and closed in 1956 during Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist reign. Fischer became a sportswriter for the Long Island Daily Press (1929), then worked for the Socialist newsletter Labor Voice (1931–1932) before becoming the editor of the Socialist Call (1934–1936), the official weekly magazine of the Socialist Party. He went on to run for the New York State Senate on the Socialist Party ticket and retained his dedication to Jewish causes and socialism until the end of his life, spending his final summers at a socialist cooperative in Putnam County, New York.

  As was true of most of the pulp writers whose names remain even slightly familiar more than a half century after the last pulp died, Fischer was a prodigiously prolific writer for numerous pulps, though many of them were not the first tier, with only a few sales to Black Mask and The Shadow, but numerous stories sold to Dime Mystery, 10-Story Detective, and Strange Detective Mysteries. In addition to his hundreds of stories, both under his own name and as Russell Gray, he wrote more than two dozen novels, several of which featured his brainy detective Ben Helm, said to have been modeled after Norman Thomas, the three-time Socialist presidential candidate.