Nightmare Alley

by William Lindsay Gresham

  Addie thought back. It was amazing what she could remember when Mr. Carlisle was there; it was like being nearer to Caroline just to talk with him. And now she remembered. “Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings!” She turned and played it, gently at first and then more strongly until it filled the room and a metal dish vibrated in sympathy. She played it over and over, hearing Caroline’s thin but true-pitched young voice through the blast of the organ. Her legs ached with pumping before she stopped.

  Mr. Carlisle had already extinguished all the lights and drawn the curtain before the cabinet. She took her place in the straight-backed chair beside him and he turned out the last light and let the dark flow around them.

  Addie started when she heard the trumpet clink as it was levitated. Then from a great distance came a shrill, sweet piping—like a shepherd playing on reeds. “… And Phoebus ’gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs …”

  A cool breeze fanned her face and then a touch of something material stroked her hair. From the dark, where she knew the cabinet to be, came a speck of greenish light. It trembled and leaped like a ball on a fountain, growing in size until it stopped and unfolded like an opening flower. Then it grew larger and took shape, seeming to draw a veil from before its face. It was Caroline, standing in the air a few inches above the floor.

  The green light that was her face grew brighter until Addie could see her eyebrows, her mouth and her eyelids. The eyes opened, their dark, cavernous blankness wrenched her heart.

  “Caroline—baby, speak to me. Are you happy? Are you all right, baby?”

  The lips parted. “Mother … I … must confess something.”

  “Darling, there isn’t anything to confess. Sometimes I did scold you, but I didn’t—Please forgive me.”

  “No … I must confess. I am not … not altogether liberated. I had selfish thoughts. I had mean thoughts. About you. About other people. They keep me on a low plane … where the lower influences can reach me and make trouble for me. Mother … help me.”

  Addie had risen from her chair. She stumbled toward the materialized form but the hand of the Rev. Carlisle caught her wrist quickly. She hardly noticed. “Caroline, baby! Anything— tell me what to do!”

  “This house … evil things have entered it. They have taken it away from us. Take me away.”

  “Darling—but how?”

  “Go far away. Go where it is warm. To California.”

  “Yes. Yes, darling. Tell Mother.”

  “This house … ask Mr. Carlisle to take it for his church. Let us never live here any more. Take me to California. For if you go I will go with you. I will come to you there. And we will be happy. Only when this house is a church can I be happy. Please, Mother.”

  “Oh, baby, of course. Anything. Why didn’t you ask me before?”

  The form was growing dim. It sank, wavering, and the light went out.

  The pair in the cab was the usual stuff: gab, gab, gab. Jesus, what a laugh!—“they lived happy ever afterwards.” The hackie slid between a bus and a sedan, grazing the car and making the driver mutter in alarm.

  “G’wan, ya dumb son-of-a-bitch,” he yelled back.

  The couple were at it again and he listened in, for laughs.

  “I tell you, we’ve got our foot in the door. Don’t you see, baby, this is where it starts? With this house, I can gimmick it up from cellar to attic. I can give ’em the second coming of Christ if I want to. And you were swell, baby, just swell.”

  “Stan, take your hands off me.”

  “What’s eating you? Get hold of yourself, kid. How about a drink before you hit the hay?”

  “I said take your hands off me! I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it! Let me out of this cab! I’ll walk. Do you hear? Let me out!”

  “Baby, you better calm down.”

  “I won’t. I won’t go up there with you. Don’t touch me.”

  “Hey, driver, let us out. Right here at the corner. Anywhere.”

  The cabbie took a quick look in his rear vision mirror. Before he got control of the wheel he had nearly piled the boat up against a light pole. Holy gees, the dame’s face was glowing bright green right inside his own cab!

  From Ed Wolfehope’s column, “The Hardened Artery”:

  “… She is a widow who owned a fine old mansion in the Seventies near the Drive. Her only child died years ago and she lived on in the house because of memories. Recently a pair of spook workers ‘materialized’ the daughter and she told her mother to give them the house and move to the West Coast. No one knows how much they took the widow for in cash first. But she left on her journey beaming and rosy—kissed both crooks at the train gate. And they put guys in jail for welching on alimony! …”

  From “The Trumpet Voice”:

  “To the Editor:

  “A friend of mine recently sent me a piece from a Broadway columnist, which is one lie from beginning to end about me and the Reverend Stanton Carlisle. I want to say it could not have been a practical joker with an air pistol who made the raps on my window. I kept my eyes open the whole time. And anybody who knows anything about Psychic Phenomena knows all about poltergeist fires.

  “Miss Cahill and the Reverend Carlisle are two of the dearest people I have ever been privileged to meet and I can testify that all the séances they conducted were under the strictest test conditions and no decent person could even have dreamed of fraud. At the very first séance I recognized my dear daughter Caroline who ‘died’ when she was sixteen, just a few days before her high school commencement. She came back again and again in the other sittings and I could almost have touched her dear golden hair, worn in the very style she wore it when she passed over. I have a photograph of her taken for her high school yearbook which shows her hair worn this way and it was something no one but I could have possibly known of.

  “The Reverend Carlisle never said one word asking for my house. It was Caroline who told me to give it to him and in fact I had a hard time to persuade him to take it and Caroline had to come back and beg him before he would give in. And I am happy to say that here in California, under the guidance of the Rev. Hallie Gwynne, Caroline is with me almost daily. She is not as young as she was in New York and I know that means she is reflecting my own spiritual growth….”

  Sun beat on the striped awnings while six floors below them Manhattan’s streets wriggled in the rising heat from the pavement. Molly came out of the kitchenette with three fresh cans of cold beer and Joe Plasky, sitting on the overstuffed sofa with his legs tied in a knot before him, reached up his calloused hand for the beer and smiled. “Sure seems funny—us loafing in mid-season. But that’s Hobart for you—too many mitts in the till. Show gets attached right in the middle of the season.”

  Zeena filled an armchair beside the window, fanning herself gently with a copy of Variety. She had slipped off her girdle and was wearing an old kimono of Molly’s, which hardly met in the middle. “Whew! Ain’t it a scorcher? You know, this is the first summer I’ve ever been in New York. I don’t envy you all here. It ain’t quite this bad in Indiana. Say, Molly”—she finished the last swallow of beer and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand—“if they ever get this mess straightened out, why don’t you come out with us and finish the season? You say Stan is working this new act of his solo.”

  Molly sat down next to Joe and stretched out her long legs; then she curled them under her and lit a cigarette, the match shaking just a little. She was wearing an old pair of rehearsal rompers; she still looked like a kid in them, Zeena noticed a little sadly.

  Molly said, “Stan’s awfully busy at the church. The folks are crazy about him. He gives reading services every night. I used to help him with those but he says a straight one-ahead routine is good enough. Then he has development classes every afternoon. I—I just take it easy.”

  Zeena set down the empty can on the floor and took the full one which Molly had put on the window sill. “Lambie-pie, you need a good time. Why don’t you get y
ourself slicked up and come out with us? We’ll get you a date. Say, I know a swell boy with Hobart Shows this season—an inside talker. Let’s hire a car and get him and have dinner up the line somewheres. He’s a swell dancer and Joe don’t mind sitting out a couple, do you, snooks?”

  Joe Plasky’s smile, turned on Zeena, deepened; his eyes grew softer. “Swell idea. I’ll call him now.”

  Molly said quickly, “No, please don’t bother. I’m really fine. I don’t feel like going anywhere in this heat. Really, I’m okay.” She looked at the little leather traveling clock on the mantel, which Addie Peabody had given her. Then she switched on the radío. As the tubes warmed, the voice came through clearer. It was a familiar voice but richer and deeper than Zeena had ever heard it before.

  “… therefore, my beloved friends, you can see that our claims for evidence of survival are attested to and are based on proof. Men of the caliber of Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Camille Flammarion, and Sir William Crookes did not give their lives to a dream, to a chimera, to a delusion. No, my unseen friends of the radio audience, the glorious proofs of survival lie about us on every hand.

  “We at the Church of the Heavenly Message rest content and secure in our faith. And it is with the deepest gratitude that I thank them, the splendid men and women of our congregation, for their generosity, which has enabled me to bring you this Sunday afternoon message for so many weeks.

  “Some persons think of the ‘new religion of Spiritualism’ as a closed sect. They ask me, ‘Can I believe in the power of our dear ones to return and still not be untrue to the faith of my fathers?’ My dearly beloved, the doors of Spiritual Truth are open to all—it is something to cherish close to your heart within the church, of your own faith. Whatever your creed it will serve simply to strengthen it, whether you are accustomed to worship God in meeting house, cathedral, or synagogue. Or whether you are one of the many who say ‘I do not know’ and then proceed to worship unconsciously under the leafy arches of the Creator’s great Church of the Out of Doors, with, for your choir, only the clear, sweet notes of the song sparrow, the whirr of the locust among the boughs.

  “No, my dear friends, the truth of survival is open to all. It is cool, pure water which will gush from the forbidding rock of reality at the touch of a staff—your own willingness to believe the evidence of your own eyes, of your own God-given senses. It is we, of the faith of survival, who can say with joy and certainty in our heart of hearts, ‘O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”’

  Joe Plasky’s smile was now a faint, muscular imprint on his face; nothing more. He leaned across Molly and gently switched off the radio. “Got a deck of cards, kid?” he asked her, his face lighting up again. “I mean a deck of your own cards—the kind your dad would have played with. The kind that read from only one side.”

  CARD X

  The Moon

  Beneath her cold light howl the dog and the wolf. And creeping things crawl out of slime.

  IN THE black alley with a light at the end, the footsteps followed, drawing closer; they followed, and then the heart-stopping panic as something gripped his shoulder.

  “… in about another fifteen minutes. You asked me to wake you, sir.” It was the porter shaking him.

  Stan sat up as though a rope had jerked him, his pulse still hammering. In the early light he sat watching the fields whip by, trying to catch his breath, to shake off the nightmare.

  The town looked smaller, the streets narrower and cheaper, the buildings dingier. There were new electric signs, dark now in the growing dawn, but the horse chestnuts in the square looked just the same. The earth doesn’t age as fast as the things man makes. The courthouse cupola was greener with time and the walls were darker gray.

  Stanton Carlisle walked slowly across the square and into the Mansion House, where Old Man Woods was asleep on the leather couch behind the key rack. Knocking on the counter brought him out, blinking. He didn’t recognize the man with the arrogant shoulders, the cold blue eyes; as the Rev. Carlisle signed the register he wondered if anyone at all would recognize him. It was nearly seventeen years.

  From the best room, looking out on Courthouse Square, Stan watched the town wake up. He had the bellboy bring up a tray of bacon and eggs, and he ate slowly, looking out on the square.

  Marston’s Drug Store was open; a boy came out and emptied a pail of gray water into the gutter. Stan wondered if it was the same pail after all these years—his first job, during high school vacation. This kid hadn’t been born then.

  He had come back, after all. He could spend the day loafing around town, looking at the old places, and catch the night train out and never go near the old man at all.

  Pouring himself a second cup of coffee, the Rev. Carlisle looked at his face in the polished surface of the silver pot. Hair thinner at the temples, giving him a “widow’s peak” that everyone said made him look distinguished. Face fuller around the jaw. Broader shoulders, with imported tweed to cover them. Pink shirt, with cuff links made from old opal earrings. Black knitted tie. All they could remember would be a kid in khaki pants and leather jacket who had waited behind the water tank for an open freight-car door.

  Seventeen years. Stan had come a long way without looking back.

  What difference did it make to him whether the old man lived or died, married or suffered or burst a blood vessel? Why was he here at all?

  “I’ll give it the once over and then highball out of here tonight,” he said, drawing on his topcoat. Picking up his hat and gloves he took the stairs, ancient black woodwork with hollows worn in the marble steps. On the porch of the Mansion House he paused to take a cigarette from his case, cupping the flame of his lighter against the October wind.

  Horse-chestnut leaves were a golden rain in the early sun, falling on the turf of the park where the fountain had been turned off for the winter. In its center a stained bronze boy smiled up under his bronze umbrella at the shower which wasn’t falling.

  Stan followed the south side of the park and turned up Main Street. Myers’ Toy and Novelty Mart had taken in the shop next to it and expanded. In the window were construction kits for airplanes with rubber-band motors. Mechanical tractors. A playsuit of what looked like long red underwear, with a toy rocket-pistol. A new generation of toys.

  Leffert’s Kandy Kitchen was closed but the taffy still lay golden in metal trays in the window with almonds pressed in it to form flower-petal designs. Christmas was the time for Leffert’s taffy, not autumn. Except the autumn when they had beaten Childers Prep; he had taken a bag of it to the game.

  The wind whirled down the street, making store signs creak above him. The autumns were colder than they used to be, but the snow of winter wasn’t as deep.

  On the edge of town Stan looked out across rolling country. A farmhouse had stood on the ridge once. Must have burned down or been pulled down. Dark against the sky Mills’ Woods lay over the rise, too far to walk; and what was the use of going through all that again. She was probably dead by now. It didn’t matter. And the old man was dying.

  Stan wondered if he could get a bus out of town before the night train left. Or he might load up with magazines and go to the hotel and read. It was well past noon but there was a lot of the day left.

  Then a side street led him down familiar ways; here and there a lot stood empty, with a gaping cellar where a house had been.

  He didn’t realize he had walked so far when the sight of the school brought him up short. In a country of square, brick boxes some long-dead genius on a school board had made them build this high school differently: gray stone with casement windows, like a prep school or an English college. The lawn was still green, the ivy over the archway scarlet with the old year.

  It was a cool June evening and Stan wore a blue coat with white pants; a white carnation in his lapel. Sitting on the platform he watched the audience while the speaker droned on. His father was out there, about ten rows back. And alone. Couples everywhere e
lse, only his father, it seemed, was alone.

  “… and to Stanton Carlisle, the Edwin Booth Memorial medal for excellence in dramatic reading.”

  He was before them now but applause didn’t register; he couldn’t hear it. The excitement under his ribs was pleasant. The power of the eyes upon him lifted him out of the black emptiness in which he had been sunk all evening. Then, as he turned, he suddenly heard the applause and saw his father, beaming, smashing his palms together, shooting quick looks left and right, enjoying the applause of the others.

  “Taxi!” Stan saw the old limousine lumbering toward him and flagged it. The driver was Abe Younghusband, who didn’t recognize him until he gave the address.

  “Oh, say, you must be Charlie Carlisle’s boy, ain’t you? Ain’t seen you around for some time.”

  “Sixteen—nearly seventeen years.”

  “That a fact? Well, guess there’s lots of improvements since you left. Say, I heard you’re a preacher now. That ain’t true, is it?”

  “Sort of half and half. More of a lecturer.”

  They turned off the car tracks, down the familiar street with the maples scarlet in the rays of the afternoon sun.

  “I always figured you’d go on the stage. I still remember that show you put on at the Odd Fellows’ Hall, time you borrowed Chief Donegan’s watch and made believe you was smashing the hell out of it. His face was sure something to see. But I guess you got kind of tired of that stuff after a while. My boy’s a great one on tricks. Always sending away for stuff. Well, here we are. I hear Charlie’s pretty shaky these days. I hear he’s turned worse during the last week.”

  The house looked tiny and run to seed. A wooden staircase had been built up one side of it, and a door cut into the attic floor. The yard was scuffed, with bare patches; the maples that used to shelter the house had been cut down. Where Gyp’s kennel had stood there was still a rectangle in the ground. The earth forgets slowly.