Nightmare Alley

by William Lindsay Gresham

  The woman who answered the door was white-haired and stout, the lines about her mouth petulant. It was Clara Carpenter; but what a tub she had turned into!

  “How do you do. Mrs. Carpenter?”

  “Mrs. Carlisle. Oh.” Her face lost some of its caution. “You must be Stan Carlisle. Come right in. Your dad’s been asking me a dozen times an hour when you were coming.” She lowered her voice. “He’s not a bit well, and I can’t make him stay in bed. Maybe you can persuade him to take it easy, a little. It’s his heart, you know.” She called upstairs, “Charlie, somebody to see you.” To Stan she said, “I guess you know your way upstairs. The big bedroom. I’ll be up directly.”

  The stairs, the newel post, the two ridiculous spouted urns on the mantelpiece, seen through the double doors. The metal fireplace covering. The wallpaper was different, and the upper hall looked different some way, but he didn’t stop to find out why.

  The old man was seated in a chair by the window, with a knitted afghan over his knees; seamed face, scrawny neck. His eyes looked frightened and sullen.

  “Stanton?” Charlie Carlisle moved with difficulty, hands gripping the chair arms. “Stanton, come over here and let me take a good look. Gosh, you—you don’t look so very different, son. Only you’ve filled out a lot. You’re—you’re looking all right, son.”

  Stan tried to throw his shoulders back. But a weight was pressing them, a deadly weight that made his knees tremble. The life seemed to be leaking out of him, flowing into the carpet under his feet. He took a chair on the other side of the window and leaned back in it, drawing his breath, trying to fight off the crushing weariness.

  “I didn’t know you’d married Clara,” Stan said at last, getting a cigarette out and lighting it. He offered one to his father, who shook his head.

  “Doctor’s got me cut down to one cigar a day. Yes, I kept bachelor’s hall for quite a spell after you left. I—I always figured I’d hear from you, boy, and then I’d tell you. Clara’s a fine girl. Ever hear from your mother?”

  The words had a hard time coming out, his lips were so tired. “No. Never did.”

  “I’m not surprised. Guess she didn’t find us exciting enough. What do they call it now—glamour? That’s what Cynthia wanted. Glamour. Well, if she found it I don’t reckon she’s got much of it now.” The mouth came down in creases of bitterness. “But tell me what you been doing, Stan. I said to Clara, sure he’ll come. I said, we had our differences, and I guess he’s been busy, making his own way. I said, I know he’ll come if I tell him I’m in bad shape. Feel a lot better today, though. I told the doctor I’d be back at the office in a month. Feel a lot better. What’s this I hear you’re a minister of the gospel, Stan? Clara heard you on the radio one day, she said. That’s how we knew where to send that telegram.”

  The Rev. Carlisle uncrossed his legs and knocked the ashes from his cigarette into a jardiniere holding a fern. “I’m more of a lecturer. But I do have a Minister’s certificate.”

  The elder Carlisle’s face brightened. “Son, I’m gladder to hear that from you, and believe it, than any other news I’ve heard in a month of Sundays. You work your way through seminary? Why, son, I wanted you to go. I was willing to lay out cold cash to pay your way. You know that. Only you couldn’t see it at the time. Always fooling with that magic nonsense. I’m glad you finally got that out of your system. It was your mother put those ideas in your head, Stan, buying you that box of tricks. I haven’t forgotten it. But I don’t even know your denomination.”

  The Rev. Carlisle closed his eyes. His voice sounded flat and toneless in his own ears. “It’s not a big or a rich church, Dad. The United Spiritual League. It’s devoted to preaching the gospel that the soul survives earthly death, and that those of us who still are earth-bound can receive intelligence—from those who have passed over to the higher spheres.”

  “You mean you’re a spiritualist? You believe the dead come back?”

  Stan forced a smile, his eyes wandering up to the ceiling where cracks made the outline of an old man’s face. The sun was slanting through the window now and night was coming but not fast enough. He came back with a start.

  “I’m not going to try converting you, Dad. I am secure in my faith. Many others share my views, but I am no proselytizer.”

  His father was silent for a time, swallowing uneasily. His head seemed to nod back and forth a fraction of an inch as he sat, a quick, rhythmic, involuntary nod of weakness. “Well, everybody to his own faith. I don’t hold with spiritualism much. But if you’re convinced, that’s all that matters. Real estate is all shot, here in this town, son. If I was younger I’d pull out. Town’s dying. I been trying to get the Civic Betterment Committee to put on a little campaign—make it a good, open-shop town and no nonsense. Attract industry. But they don’t listen. Property values way down—Oh, here’s Clara. Reckon it’s most suppertime. We been talking so much.”

  “I’ll wash up and be right down,” Stan said. The load of weariness— There was a place where he might leave it, where it might slip from him like a weight cut from his neck.

  In the hall he turned left and his hand was reaching for the knob when, with a cold flash, he realized that he was facing a smooth, papered wall. The attic door was not there! Looking down, he saw a single step at the bottom of the wall. So that was it—the stairs outside. It was an apartment now, cut off from the rest of the house. Strangers living in it, under the slope of the roof, around the brick chimney. The iron bed, the silk patchwork, smell of camphor and silk and lumber and the tight mesh of maple leaves below, seen through the narrow windows where you could make out the signboard on the lawn of the church. The house was dying, too.

  Stan closed the bathroom door and locked it. The same taps on the washbowl anyhow, even though the walls were painted a different color. And the odd mix-up of tiles in the floor, where he used to find half-tiles and try to count them. The old-fashioned tub on its high legs; marble-topped commode with its old-fashioned mahogany drawers; shaving stand with its circular cabinet and a mirror on a swivel, where Dad kept his shaving brush, his mug and his soap, his hones.

  Stan wondered if the water still made the sharp sucking gurgle in the tub when the stopper was pulled out—as it did when his mother had finished splashing and singing to herself. He recalled the day when he had fallen out of the tree, and Mother had picked him up in her arms and carried him upstairs, bleeding all down the front of her dress. She hadn’t minded the dress getting messed up. He had made leggings of corrugated cardboard, like explorers wear in the jungle. One of them had been bloody; after the doctor had sewed up the cut in his forehead Mother undressed him, taking the cardboard leggings off carefully. She had put them on the marble top of the commode. They stayed there for a long time, until the blood stains became black. Jennie finally threw them out—said they gave her the jimjams.

  If only they could all have stayed together a few more years. If Mother had not minded the town. If Dad had always been as weak and as friendly as he was now that he was dying. If only he could have been dying for twenty years, Stan might have loved him. Now there was nothing but the old things, and they were going past him and would soon be gone.

  He drew his breath and tried again to strain his shoulders back. I mustn’t forget to ask the old man about the church and how to go about selling it when it’s time to pull out. But the Church of the Heavenly Message seemed too far away to matter, now. The old man was slipping into that dark hole where you fall and fall forever because there’s no bottom to it. We are all creeping to its edge, some slowly, some, like the old man, balanced on the brink. And then what? Like the rush of wind past a bullet, probably, forever and ever. Gyp was dead all these years. Even the memories of him were dead and forgotten except in one mind. And when that was gone Gyp would be forgotten entirely. When the old man was dead and under ground Stan could forgive it.

  Gyp never knew what hit him. They said the vet just put chloroform on a rag and dropped it in the box. />
  But that end of rope, tied to the leg of the workbench in the garage—it had been cut when Stan came home from school. Why did they tie Gyp up in there if they wanted to get rid of him? There was no they. Only he. Gyp had a chain on his kennel. Why the rope?

  Oh, Christ, let me get to hell out of here. But the voice that had said “son” held him. The house was swallowing him. And they had sealed up the attic door; there was no way. All the years had dropped off, tearing with them his poise, so carefully built up tone by tone. They had taken his cleverness, his smile, his hypnotic glance, leaving him powerless and trapped inside the walls of old familiarity.

  He had come back because Dad was dying and Mother was gone and the maples were cut down, the square still visible where Gyp’s kennel had stood, and the shaving stand on its smooth pillar of wood, still in the same place and still smooth under his hand, smelling sweetly of shaving soap.

  The strop.

  It hung from the brass hook where it had always hung. It was smooth, black with handling and with oil, shining.

  The garage at night with the moonlight making bars of silver across the floor, silvering the workbench, sparkling on the bar of the vise and on the lidless coffee cans of nails and bolts. Shining blue and cold on the concrete floor. And the shadows hiding dread and shame.

  “Take down your pants.”

  That was to add to the shame: nakedness.

  Stan fumbled with the belt of his knickers, stalling for split seconds.

  “Hurry up. I said drop ’em.”

  His knickers bound his feet about the ankles. He couldn’t run. He had to take it. “Now bend over.” A hand on his shoulder pushed him into the patch of moonlight, where his nakedness could show. Stan saw the shadow of the strop rise and braced himself. The pain split its way up to his brain in waves and he bit his lip, his breath catching at the bottom of his lungs. He pushed his knuckles in his mouth so they wouldn’t hear him next door. The moonlight was a fuzzy blur of tears; and the strop, when it struck the roundness of his bare flesh, made a sound that got to his brain before the stab of pain—and the rope’s end, tied to the leg of the workbench there in the smell of oil and gasoline on the day when the sun went out.

  Downstairs Charlie Carlisle fidgeted with his napkin, pushing himself back in the chair by bracing his hands against its polished arms. “Confound it, Clara, what d’you s’pose the boy’s doing up there? Oh, there you are, son. Sit right down.”

  When Charlie raised his glance to the man who entered the dining room he caught his old, quick breath at something he saw. It was Stan, much as he had appeared a few minutes before. Maybe with his face fresh-washed and his hair damped down a little. But in the set of the shoulders was something strange. And when old Charlie met his son’s eyes they were a sharper blue than any he had ever seen before; as hard as a frozen pond.

  The Great Stanton pulled back a chair and sat down swiftly and gracefully, opening his napkin with a single snap. Mrs. Carlisle brought in a platter of chicken. When rice and gravy arrived Charlie said, “Sit down, Clara. Quit running in and out. Stan’ll pronounce the blessing.”

  The Rev. Carlisle ran his hands once over his hair and took a deep breath. His voice came resonantly:

  “Almighty God, our heavenly father, we thank Thee from the bottom of our hearts for what we are about to receive. We come to Thee steeped in sin and corruption, our hearts black with guilt, knowing that in the river of Thy forgiveness they will be washed as white as snow.”

  His father had slid one heavily veined hand over his eyes.

  “He who watches the sparrow’s fall will hold us in the hollow of his hand to the end of our days, on earth and beyond.”

  Clara was frowning in bewilderment or worrying about the chicken getting cold.

  “… in the name of thy son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, we ask it. Amen.”

  The old man said “Amen” and then grinned weakly at his wife. “No matter what denomination, Clara, it’s a proud day when we can have a son saying grace and him a preacher. Pass Stan the rice.”

  Clara was not one to eat in silence. She began a brief history of the community during the past sixteen years, full of hot summers, hard winters, deaths, births, weddings, and disasters.

  Stan ate quickly and took a second helping of everything. At last he slid his plate away from him and lit a cigarette. He looked at Clara Carpenter Carlisle for a long minute; the penetrating blue glance made her conscious of the old apron over her good dress.

  “My dear friend, have you ever thought that these persons whom you have mourned as dead will never die?”

  Under that brilliant stare she began to simper and found it difficult to control her hands. “Why, Stan, I—I’ve always believed. But I think it’s one of those things you just have to feel. I never paid much attention. I took it for granted, about heaven.”

  The Rev. Carlisle wiped his lips with his napkin and took a swallow of water. “I have seen magnificent proofs that the spirit does not lie fallow until the Day of Judgment. The spirits of the liberated are around us every moment. How often have we said, in anguish, ‘If only I could speak to him again. And feel the touch of his hand.’ ”

  Both the older Carlisles looked embarrassed, eyed one another and then each took a sip of coffee.

  Stan’s mellow voice rolled on. “Yes. And the glorious truth is that it can be done. The spirits of the liberated are around us even now, as we speak.” His eyes were still on Clara; he dropped his voice. “I feel one presence beside me now, distinctly. Insistently. Trying to get through.”

  On his father’s face was the suggestion of a sly grin.

  “It is one who loved me in its earth existence. But it is not human.”

  They stared at him.

  “A small spirit, a humble presence. But brimming with devotion and loyalty. I believe it is the spirit of my old dog, Gyp.” Charles Carlisle had slumped forward, his arms before him on the tablecloth, but now he sat up straighter, the bitter lines around his mouth deeper and more biting.

  “Son, you don’t believe that! That’s blasphemous! You can’t mean it—about a dog having a soul same as a man.”

  Stan smiled. “As I said before, I shall not try to convert you, Dad. Only the ones who have passed over into spirit life can do that. But I have communicated with Gyp—not in words, naturally, since Gyp did not speak in words. Yet this house is full of his presence. He has spoken to me, trying to tell me something.” Watching his father keenly, Stan noticed a little flash of alarm on the wrecked face. He covered his eyes with his hand, watching his father’s hands on the cloth before him, and bore in:

  “Something about his last day on earth. I remember you told me, when I came home from school, that you had had a veterinary chloroform Gyp. But there’s some contradiction, here. I get another impression …”

  A pulse was beginning to pound in the shrunken wrist.

  “Gyp has been trying to tell me something … wait a minute … the garage!”

  His father’s hands clenched into fists and then released the tablecloth, which they had seized.

  “That’s it … I see it clearly before me. Gyp is tied to the leg of the workbench in the garage. I see something rising and falling … in anger … faster and faster.”

  The clatter of a fork on the floor made Stan look up. The old man’s face was ashy; he kept shaking his head, trying to speak. “No. No, son. Don’t.”

  “That was the day—the day Mother left. With Mark Humphries. You came home and found her note. Gyp got in your way—you had to vent your temper on something. If I’d been home you’d have licked me. But Gyp got it. He died.”

  Old Carlisle had heaved to his feet, one hand clawing at his shirt collar. Stan turned, swaying a little, and walked stiffly through the doors into the living room, across it to the hall. When he took down his hat and coat his arms felt numb and heavy. One last glimpse of Clara shaking capsules from a bottle and holding a glass of water; the old man swallowing painfully.
/>
  The moon brightened concrete steps leading down the terrace where the grass was ragged. Stan’s legs felt stiff as he descended to the street where the arching maples closed over him, moonlight showering through their leaves now black with night. A sound came from the house he had left, an old man weakly crying.

  In a patch of silver the Rev. Carlisle stopped and raised his face to the full moon, where it hung desolately, agonizingly bright—a dead thing, watching the dying earth.

  CARD XI

  The Lovers

  They stand between the Eden trees; winged Love hovers overhead while Knowledge lies in serpent coils upon the ground.

  WHEN Molly woke up the third time, Stan was dressing. She looked at the clock: four-thirty. “Where you going?”

  “Out.”

  She didn’t question him, but lay awake watching. His movements were so jumpy lately you didn’t dare speak to him for fear he would bite your head off. Lately he had been sleeping worse and worse, and Molly worried about him taking so many sleeping pills all the time. They didn’t have any more effect on him, it seemed, and his temper got worse and he looked like hell. She began to cry softly and Stan stopped in the middle of buttoning his shirt and came over.

  “Now what?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. I’m all right.”

  “What’s eating you, kid?”

  “Stan—” Molly sat up, holding the covers in front of her for warmth. “Stan, let’s quit and go back to the old act.”

  He went on buttoning. “Where we going to book it? On street corners? Vaudeville’s a dead pigeon. I know what I’m doing. One live John and we’re set.”

  She drew the covers up tighter. “Honey, you look like hell. Why don’t you go see a doctor? I—I mean give you something for your nerves or something. Honest, I’m worried sick you’re going to have a nervous breakdown or something.”