The Collection

by Fredric Brown

  We shook hands and he sat down again at his desk while I went to the door and opened it. I took one step to go into the outer hallway, and then I stopped short as though I'd run into a brick wall.

  I stood staring, and then I wrenched my eyes away and looked back at my employer.

  I had to clear my throat before I could say:

  "Dr. Stanley?"

  "Yes, Anderson."

  "You have any homicidal patients here?"

  "Homicidal? Of course not. That is. . . . Of course not."

  "There is a corpse in the middle of the hallway, with the hilt of a dagger sticking out of his chest," I said. "Right over the heart."

  "Eh? Oh, I should have warned you. That would be Harvey Toler."

  It didn't faze him in the least. He didn't even get up from his desk or reach for the telephone. Was he crazy, or I?

  "I don't care if it's J. Edgar Hoover," I said. "The fact remains that there's a knife in his chest."

  I heard a sound in the hall and looked through the door. The corpse had got up and was walking away. He was a slender, dark young man with thick shell-rimmed glasses. He put something in his pocket that looked like the hilt of a dagger without any blade.

  I looked back at Dr. Stanley.

  "Harvey Toler," he repeated. "Uncontrollable exhibitionism. He must have heard I had a caller in my office. A strange case--arrested development in one respect only. A brilliant mind, but he cannot control impulses to shock people. I want particularly careful reports on his conduct among the other patients. I think you'll like him when you get to know him."

  "I'm sure I will," I said. "Is that a favorite stunt of his, with the dagger?"

  "He's used it before, but he seldom repeats himself. He may . . . Well, I'd rather not tell you too much about him. I'd rather have your impressions without prejudice."

  Without prejudice, my grandmother, I thought as I walked to the bus line. If Harvey Toler pulled another one like that one, I'd take advantage of being a fellow-patient to pop him on the nose, exhibitionism or not. And maybe that would be the best cure, at that.

  I went to my rooming house, told my landlady I'd landed a job and she could keep the rest of the week's rent I'd paid her.

  Then I went to the hotel and woke up Kit. She'd had early breakfast with me and then gone back to sleep.

  "Got the job," I told her. "And I'll have to live there. Hope it won't take me more than a few days to decide one way or the other about whether I'm on the right track or not."

  "What is the job, Eddie?"

  "I'm in charge of the hypochondriac ward, honey. It's confidential. I'd better not tell you about my duties."

  "Eddie! Be serious. What is the job?"

  I told her and she wouldn't believe me. But by dint of repeating it four or five times, I finally convinced her.

  I packed a few things in a suitcase, rather regretfully leaving my automatic out of it. Hardly the sort of thing I'd be carrying, if I was what I pretended to be. But if I really found Paul Verne, it might not be any picnic to handle him. I took a chance on including brass knuckles, rolling them up carefully inside a pair of thick woolen socks.

  Kit and I had lunch and then she walked with me to the bus. I told her I might or might not be able to phone her. I couldn't be sure till I knew the set-up at the sanitarium. And not to worry if she didn't hear from me for a week.

  "Eddie, why didn't you tell me the truth?" she said.

  "Huh? What didn't I tell you?"

  "That Paul Verne is a homicidal maniac. That what you're going to do is dangerous, really dangerous. After breakfast this morning, I went to a newspaper office and I read their file of clippings on him. I wouldn't have tried to stop you, Eddie. But--but I want you to be honest with me."

  From her face, I could tell she was being brave.

  "Okay, honey," I said. "I just didn't want you to worry."

  The bus pulled up.

  "I won't, Eddie," she said.

  I kissed her good-by and got on. She turned away, crying quietly, and I felt like a heel.

  I was still feeling punk when I rang the bell that brought Garvey to the gate.

  "You again?" he said, and opened it.

  I grinned at him. "Well, I found it out," I said.

  "Found what out?"

  "I'm crazy."

  "Huh?"

  "That's it. I told you this morning that if I was, I hadn't found it out yet. I found it out."

  He digested that as we went up the walk.

  "Oh, well, what I told you goes, then," he finally said. "If you want anything just let me know."

  We had reached the door, and he turned to leave.

  I said, "Sssst," and when he turned back, I leaned over and whispered:

  "Can you get me a machine-gun?"

  He backed off.

  Dr. Stanley turned me over to an attendant who took me to Room Twenty and told me it was to be mine. The attendant said if I wanted he would show me around the place, so I left my suitcase on the bed and went with him.

  My room was at the end of the corridor and was the highest number on the second floor. My guide--fortunately he was over six feet tall, so I didn't have to study him as a possible suspect--told me that these twenty rooms, with five others on the first floor, were all the rooms assigned to patients, and that attendants and other employees had quarters on the third floor. He said that, counting me, there were now twelve male patients and seven female. The remaining rooms were empty.

  He took me first to the main recreation room on the first floor. There was a bridge game going on in one corner. My friend Harvey Toler was one of the players. The others were a nondescript little woman with gray hair and mousy eyes, a gaunt, dissipated-looking man of about forty, and an anemic youth. They were introduced to me as Miss Zaner, Frank Betterman and Billy Kendall.

  Betterman and Kendall went down on my list as possibles. As we walked on, I elicited from my guide the fact that Betterman was an alcoholic--a dipsomaniac--and Kendall the anemic, was suffering from recurrent amnesia. Periodically, he would forget who he was and where he was and what he was doing there.

  We saw another recreation room in the basement, with ping-pong tables and a shuffleboard set-up as well as one billiard table with warped cues and a few rips in the cloth. We encountered several other patients in our walk around the outside grounds, and I was introduced to each.

  Five men, out of eight I met, could have been Paul Verne.

  III

  White in Blackness

  My guide excused himself on the ground of other duties, and I went to my room to unpack. There was a lock on the door of my room, I noticed, but the only keyhole was on the outside. From the inside, one just didn't lock the door.

  I stood looking out the window for a moment at a man who, standing in the middle of the driveway, was turning in slow steady circles for no reason that I could discover.

  Then I turned back into the room and reached for the handle of my suitcase to move it down to the end of the bed.

  The pull nearly jerked my arm out of its socket. It felt as though someone had taken my clothes out of that suitcase and filled it up with paving blocks.

  I stared at the suitcase. It was mine, all right.

  So I opened it. My clothes were still in it, but packed much more tightly than I'd packed them, to make room for the object that had been added.

  It was a tommy gun.

  I lifted it out and looked at the drum. It was loaded to capacity, and the bullets were real.

  I put it down on the bed alongside the suitcase and stood staring at it unbelievingly.

  So Garvey did little errands for patients, huh?

  But he had backed off when I'd asked him for a machine-gun.

  It just didn't make sense. Granting that he had taken me seriously, granting that he was screwy enough to be willing, where in thunder could he have got a tommy gun?

  And why, thinking me crazy, would he have given me one? He was supposed to be sane.

&nb
sp; The more I thought about it, the crazier it got.

  Finally it occurred to me to look through the rest of my stuff to be sure it was all there.

  It all seemed to be. Five shirts, one suit besides the one I was wearing, handkerchiefs, socks. I hadn't counted the smaller items of laundry, but there seemed to be about as many of them as I'd put into the suitcase.

  I had just thrown them in, though, and now they were tightly packed to make room for the machine-gun. To give my hands something to do, and my brain a rest, I moved them over to the empty drawers of the bureau. Shirts in the big drawer, handkerchiefs and socks in the upper smaller.

  And then I remembered something. None of the rolled-up pairs of socks had been heavier than it should be.

  I found the pair of thick, woolen socks into which I had rolled the brass knuckles. I didn't have to unroll it. I could tell merely by feeling. The knucks were gone.

  I unrolled the socks to be sure.

  And then the humor of the thing hit me square, and I sat down on the edge of the bed and began laughing as though I belonged there, laughing like a blasted loony.

  Whoever had given me that loaded tommy gun had gone to the trouble of stealing my set of brass knuckles!

  "Lovely," I thought, "perfectly lovely."

  Stanley Sanitarium, Paul Verne or no Paul Verne, was going to be an interesting place.

  After a while sanity came back to me, and with it the realization that I had to do something about that tommy gun. What?

  Take it to Dr. Stanley and tell him the truth about it? If he believed me, okay.

  But suppose he didn't--and I wouldn't blame him a bit. Suppose he thought, or even suspected, that I had brought it in myself? Out on my ear I would go, before I got another look at the sanitarium. Or I would have Hobson's choice of paying my fare and signing on as a bona-fide loony and committing myself.

  On second thought, I doubted he would give me that alternative. He took "mild psychoses" only. Would he figure a man who pulled a stunt like that with a loaded tommy gun was suffering from a mild psychosis? Hardly. He would turn me over to the police for investigation.

  And anyway how could I do an about-face from being a man in need of a job to a man able to pay the plenty high tariff a place like this would charge?

  Nope, Dr. Stanley might believe me, or he might not. If I took that chance, I was seriously jeopardizing my "in" here before I even began to accomplish my purpose.

  But what then?

  Well, there was a tiny penknife on my watch chain. Using it as a screwdriver, I took the breech of the tommy gun apart and took out the firing-pin and the tiny block of metal that held it. I took the bullets out of the drum, too.

  Then, leaving the tommy gun, with its teeth pulled, behind me, I went down the corridor a few doors and knocked on a door at random. Number Twelve. As I hoped, there wasn't any answer, and when I tried the door, it opened.

  I went back for the tommy gun and put it in a drawer of the bureau in Room Twelve. The room was occupied, because there were shirts in the drawer. I didn't take time to try to find out whose room it was. Undoubtedly the whole place would know, when the occupant of that room found what was in his bureau.

  Then I went downstairs, avoiding the recreation room, and went outside. I wandered about the grounds until I found a secluded spot behind a small storage shed, and there I buried the bullets. The firing-pin block I threw over the wall, as far as I could throw it. Somebody might find it some day, but they wouldn't know what it was.

  I got back to the building just in time for dinner. A bell was ringing.

  Dinner was unexciting, although the food was good. It was served in a dining room with half a dozen tables for four, at which the guests seemed to group themselves at will. I found myself with two table companions. Frank Betterman, the dipsomaniac, sat across from me, and at my left sat a man whose only obvious claim for presence there was that he wore a folded newspaper hat, the kind children make.

  Betterman ate without talking or taking his eyes off his plate. The man with the paper hat talked only of the weather at first but with the meat course he warmed up on human destiny and some complex theory of his that seemed similar to astrology except that the affairs of men were run, not by the stars and planets, but by volcanic activity within the seething core of earth.

  I followed him, more or less, as far as dessert, and then was hopelessly lost.

  On the way out, Betterman came up alongside me.

  "Did you bring in any liquor, Anderson?" he said quietly. "I've got to have a drink or . . . Well, I've just got to."

  "No," I admitted, "I didn't. Have you tried Garvey?"

  "Garvey!" There was the ultimate of scorn in his voice. "That man's on the wrong side of the fence here. He's mad."

  "In what way?"

  Betterman shrugged. "Cadges you to run errands for you, and then doesn't. Laughs about it behind your back, to the other patients."

  "Oh," I said.

  Then anyone here might know the joking request for a machine-gun I had made to Garvey. Not that it helped me any to know that.

  I played ping-pong in the basement with Betterman for a while, which gave me a chance to study him. Aside from being nervous and jittery, he seemed normal enough.

  Lights out at eleven was the rule, but by ten-thirty I was ready to go to my room and sort out my confused impressions. Already all but a few of the patients had disappeared from the recreation room and those few were ones who interested me least.

  I walked up the stairs and along the dimly lighted corridor. The door of Room Eleven, just across the hall from the room into which I had put the tommy gun, was open. There was a light on somewhere in the room, out of my range of vision.

  I started past the open doorway, glanced in--and stopped abruptly.

  On the blank white wall opposite the open door was a shadow, the shadow of a man hanging by his neck from a rope. Obviously dead, for there was not the slightest movement.

  I stepped through the doorway and turned to the corner in which the man must be hanging.

  "Hullo," said Harvey Toler.

  He wasn't hanging by his neck. He was sitting comfortably in a well-padded chair, reading a book.

  "Your name's Anderson, isn't it?" he said. "Come in and sit down."

  I looked back at the wall, and the shadow of the hanging man was still there. It looked like a real shadow, not painted. I looked back toward the opposite corner and this time I saw the gimmick. Nothing more complicated than a bit of work with a black crayon on the white, translucent shade of the reading lamp. The six-inch figure there cast a six-foot shadow yonder.

  "Clever," I said.

  Toler smiled and looked pleased.

  "Sit down," he repeated. "Care for a drink, perhaps?"

  Without waiting for my answer, he put down his book and opened a door in the front of the little stand upon which the lamp stood. He took out two glasses and a quart bottle of whiskey, already opened and with only about a fifth of its contents left.

  "You'll find the whiskey Garvey brings in is pretty smooth stuff," he said. "He robs you for it, but it's good."

  I took the glass he handed me.

  "Here's to crime," I said, and we drank.

  It was smooth; didn't bite a bit. The only thing wrong was that it wasn't whiskey at all. It was cold tea.

  "Another?" Toler asked.

  I declined enthusiastically. For just a moment I felt a deep brotherly sympathy with Frank Betterman. It was part of my job, maybe, to stay and pump Harvey Toler so I could report on him. But after that business with the tea, the devil with it.

  Excusing myself on the ground of being sleepy, I went on down the corridor to my own room.

  I looked into the drawers and the closet but my stuff still seemed to be as I had left it, and nothing new had been added. I chucked under the bed the several items of silverware which I'd stolen from the dinner table, to carry out my role of kleptomaniac, and then undressed. I was just reaching for my pajam
as when the lights went out.

  I lay in bed in utter, perfect darkness, trying to think. But the only thought that came was the thought that if I stayed here long enough, I'd go crazy myself.

  After a while I could see a thin crescent of moon and there was enough light in my room that I could make out the dark outline of the dresser and the doors.

  Why, I wondered, in the name of sanity or insanity, had someone put that loaded tommy gun in my room? No sane person would have put it there. And how would an insane person have got it?

  Was Frank Betterman right in thinking the gateman, Garvey, was on the wrong side of the fence in regard to insanity? If so, was Dr. Stanley crazy to hire a crazy attendant? Frank Betterman had seemed sane except for his craving for liquor, and while a dipsomaniac may get DT's, he doesn't usually suffer from fixed delusions.

  I wondered what would happen if Toler offered Betterman a drink of that zero-proof whiskey of his. If I knew anything about dipsomania, there would be a bloody murder on the spot.

  "Nuts to it," I told myself. "I haven't been here long enough to get any answers. I'd better go to sleep."

  I had just shut my eyes when I heard the sound of the door opening.

  I didn't move, but my eyes jerked open and strained into the darkness.

  Yes, the door was open all right and someone--or something--in white was standing there in the doorway looking at me. I couldn't make out any details, for if there was a light in the hallway, it had been turned off.

  Just something white. An attendant's white uniform? Or the white pajamas of a patient?

  Still without moving, I braced myself for quick action. As soon as he stepped inside the room, I would jump him. Luckily, my only cover was a thin sheet that wouldn't hamper me much.

  Then suddenly the figure wasn't there any more. Blackness instead of gray-white, and the sound of the door closing. The hallway light flashed back on. I could see the crack of it under the edge of the door.