A Touch of the Creature

by Charles Beaumont

  “Ronald Mansfield, if you don’t stop I’ll scream. I’ll call the police and have you arrested if you don’t get out of here!”

  “You’re beautiful, Mary. More beautiful than any other living creature in this ugly world. I love you as much as I’m capable of loving anyone. Have you any idea of how beautiful you are right now, sitting there with your hair in curlers and all the make-up off your face? Every night I’ve dreamed of seeing you like this.”

  Mansfield drew from his coat pocket a small knife. As he pressed a button with his thumb, the blade sprang out.

  “This is sharp, Mary. I could kill you with it. I don’t want to do that, but I think you know by now that I’m not incapable of such a thing. You mustn’t underestimate me. You must fulfill my dreams, or I shan’t be able to go on. Is it so great a thing to ask, Mary? But I warn you, if you try to scream or make any noise whatever I’ll put this shiny blade in your throat.”

  He sat on the bed next to Mary and began to unbutton the top to her pajamas. Tears were running from her eyes and she was too frightened to move. He pulled her hands away roughly, holding the knife to her neck, and undid the cord around her waist. Mary began to sob aloud as her naked body was pushed over the bed, and then she screamed at the top of her voice.

  At breakfast the next morning Ronald Mansfield kissed his mother and chided that the coffee was not quite up to her standard. He ate heartily, made a final adjustment on his bow tie, collected his books and arrived at the university three minutes early. Later, as the professor lectured on inductive logic, no one noticed that Mary Ellen Ross was absent from her seat. It was certainly not the first time. The professor droned on for two hours. After that followed a general examination in British Empiricism, in another part of the building. Then came a course in Kant and time for dismissal. The final class dispersed and each student left the university, each thinking his own private thoughts.

  Later that evening Mr. Gerald Mansfield received a call from the police. Was his son Ronald at home? Would they both please come down immediately to the precinct station? A terrible thing had happened. A young girl, known to have been a friend of Ronald Mansfield’s, had been found a few hours ago raped and murdered. Mr. Mansfield said that he would be right over with his boy, he was very shocked to hear such a thing. He went into his son’s room.

  “Ronald, the police have just called up. It’s a terrible thing, but you know that young girl you took out a few times last month? Well, son, she’s been found in her home, murdered.”

  Ronald Mansfield looked up from the book he was reading.

  “Mary Ellen? Of course, she was in my class! Good God, Dad, what a thing to happen! Why, I saw her only last Friday.”

  “They want us to come down to the station. I guess because you knew her. Lord, I pity her poor parents. Well, get on your coat, and I’ll get the car.”

  It was raining slightly and the streets glistened. As they got into the car Mr. Mansfield put an arm around his son’s shoulder. “Buck up, my boy,” he said for some reason. Then, in a strange tone:

  “You were seeing a lot of this girl, for a time, weren’t you, son?”

  “Yes, Dad, I was. But we found we had no real interests in common, and, well, you know how that goes.”

  They drove off without saying anything further.

  In the station there were assembled all the fairly close friends of Mary’s that her parents knew about. There was Amy Lindstrom, Kathleen Farrell’s roommate. She and Kathleen and Mary used to see a lot of one another. Kathleen was out of town. There was Pat Davidson, a girl friend, and Marcy Stevens. Marcy and Mary had been old friends. In the corner stood the very pale figure of Leonard Kline. Everyone knew he and Mary had been sweethearts. And sitting down, with his head in his hands, was Tony Sudor, a new student at the University and a new member of the community. He had taken Mary to a dance the week before.

  Ronald Mansfield walked over to Mrs. Ross, who was sobbing violently, and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “You don’t know me, Mrs. Ross, but I was a friend of Mary’s. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about this. I was just told, myself, and I know what a shock it must be to you.”

  * * * *

  The only one in the group who spoke was Professor Corneille. He cleared his throat nervously, and said in a voice rather too blasé, “Good Lord, James, you can’t stop there. Now that you’ve started this . . . singularly lurid tale, you’ve got to finish it.”

  James Morley put out his cigarette and slowly sipped his scotch and soda. Those at the cocktail party, which had begun so gregariously, were listening in rapt silence to the story being told to them. No one thought it possible that the distinguished author and philosophy professor, James Morley, could be capable of such a yarn. And somehow, disturbingly, certain parts of it sounded vaguely familiar to a few of the seated listeners.

  “See here, old man, you’ve admittedly been rattling on like a narrative from some detective magazine, but hang it! what did happen? It was easy enough, I suppose, for the police to apprehend this Mansfield fellow.”

  “No, Professor, the story takes a rather ironic turn at this point. Perhaps its ending will justify the somewhat melodramatic fashion in which I’ve chosen to tell it so far.”

  Morley gulped down his drink and poured another. Not a person moved.

  “You see, for some unaccountable reason the police suspected young Tony Sudor, who had been in town only a couple of months. It was found that he had once been in a reformatory, on a morals charge. It was discovered that he collected knives as a hobby. And most important, Sudor could not remember where he had been on the night of the crime. Out walking, he thought, he wasn’t sure. Astonishingly enough, a witness testified that she’d seen him in the Rosses’ neighborhood shortly after midnight. He had no alibi at all, and when they got hold of his diary they found plenty of motive. Well, his lawyer thought a confession would make it easier on him. But by this time the case had heated the public’s blood; someone had to die for that crime and poor Sudor was found guilty of first degree murder. Within a year he was executed and no more was said of the affair.

  “Ronald Mansfield, you may be interested to learn, moved shortly there­after to another state. He got his degree and in a while he published his first novel. He has been writing books and teaching philosophy ever since.”

  Several members of the party shifted uneasily in their chairs.

  “Well, James, a very moral little tale. Pure balderdash, of course. My boy, I’m afraid you’ve been reading too many murder mysteries. Still, I seem to recall—you see, you’ll have me reading them now as a result of your fairy tale!” There was a nervous quality to Professor Corneille’s voice.

  James Morley smiled at the silent gathering, threw down his drink and ran a pale hand through his hair. Within fifteen minutes the party broke up. Not a person could explain his sudden uneasiness.

  But no one was very much surprised to hear the next morning that Professor James Morley had hanged himself, in the loneliness of his room.

  The Blind Lady

  “It is a great mystery to me,” the old man said, “why you policemen always get so upset when justice is done.” He creaked forward in his chair and grinned and patted Pearson’s hand.

  Pearson jerked the hand away. He tried to think of something really appropriate to say.

  “Look at you now,” the old man went on. “Dour, reproach­ful, scarcely touching your brandy—and excellent brandy it is, too, unless my memory is failing.” He coughed. “Can’t touch it, myself, you know. Which presents another problem: why is it, John, that when one grows old one is systematically denied all the necessities of life and granted all the luxuries?”

  The big man with the flushed face brought his cigar back to life. “No one enjoys being shown up as a fool,” he said.

  “My dear friend, it is not necessary to be a fool to make a mistake!” Amos Carter chuckled and rubbed his cucumbery nose vigorously. “The difference between us, John,”
he said, “is that you must judge by externals, whereas I am not so obliged. That’s all. But let’s get on to other things; the merits of a system which every day sends men to prison on the weight of externals seems hardly worth an argument. There are pros and cons.” He laughed. ”I’ve made a joke. Pros and cons! Well, never mind. You are here for chess, not jokes or legal semantics.”

  Lieutenant John Pearson looked at the shriveled, spindly, fuzz-topped old man in the wheelchair and mused that such a bag of bones could be capable of stirring up so much trouble. Confined to the chair, half-paralyzed, Amos Carter hadn’t set foot out of his crumbling brownstone for fifteen years; yet, because of him, because of this sneering, brilliant grand­father of grandfathers, the judicial system in America was becoming a laughing stock. And also because of Carter almost fifty convicted men and women—tried, convicted, sentenced to life imprisonment or, in some cases, the death house—were walking about the streets, restored citizens, free.

  “Would you mind setting up the board?” The old man’s eyes twinkled, danced; they said; Lieutenant Pearson, you are discomfited this evening. Is there a slight chance that this mood is in any way connected with the fact that your prize catch has been judged innocent of the crime for which you fought to have him executed? Could this be so?

  They played quietly, evidently an even match for one another. Pearson finished his drink and accepted another and finished that one in less time than the first. His face began to glisten with perspiration.

  “Do you really think the man is innocent?” he said, suddenly, in a loud voice.

  Carter looked up and studied Pearson. “Passarelli?” he said, at last. “Of course he is innocent. Didn’t I prove that beyond reasonable doubt?”

  Pearson grunted. He thought of the wild-eyed guilty little man, and he remembered how the bodies had looked sprawled in the charred debris.

  “You forget that one of the basic tenets of your club provides: Guilty until proven innocent; and that my approach is precisely the reverse. It has always been. That is why I formed my Court of Last Chance.”

  “How do you explain the fire, then?”

  “I don’t have to explain it. It isn’t my concern. My concern was simply to prove that Santi Passarelli, appear­ances notwithstanding, in spite of all the evidence, did not start it.” Carter smiled. “Your move, I believe.”

  “The fire was no accident.”

  “Then,” Carter said unhesitatingly, “we are faced with the grim knowledge that the actual culprit is still at large. A matter which lies in your territory, not mine.”

  Lieutenant Pearson watched the old man carefully. Seated close to the hearth, swathed in layers of wool, Amos Carter did not manage to look the role of the Good Samaritan he played so noisily. Pearson wondered about the real motive; he’d long ago stopped believing it was an honest desire to see justice done. No; it seemed more an insane urge to get everybody out of jail, regardless, an urge sufficient to itself. Or perhaps it was a secret game the man played, a game whose reward was evenings like this, when he could gloat and mock and bask in his superior sun.

  “You hate Passarelli, don’t you?” the old man said, pleasantly.

  Pearson gave the syllable organ depth and body: “Yes.”

  “Well, this will astound you, I suppose—but you know, I don’t care for him, either. Disgusting little monkey; exactly the type who would set fire to a sanatorium. But . . . it, remains that he is innocent of the crime. A pity, perhaps. You see, my particular kind of justice, like your own, is not always a matter for cheers—except in principle. Our Lady with the Scale is the same; mine peeks over her blind­fold occasionally, that is all. It is still your move.”

  The snap of a burning log spat noise and specks of fire. Pearson loosened his collar. Strange thoughts began to occur to him. as brandy followed brandy.

  What were the facts?

  Santi Passarelli had been convicted on the testimony of witnesses who had seen him loitering about Hogarth Sanitarium. They had seen him wait until the fire was raging, then dash away. There was the fellow’s record: a confirmed pyromaniac. Convicted and sent to prison in ’37 for firing a candy factory in Chicago. Again in ’43, an apartment unit. He had been in the neighborhood when the Golden Clover club burned down to the ground, killing over twenty people. There was the match test, the other tests. And finally there was his own confession—which, of course, he later denied. Judgment: not insane. A cold­-blooded killer, ruthless, conscienceless, and now breathing free air that he had once polluted with the stink of burning flesh . . .

  “You see, lieutenant, you are handicapped,” Carter said. “You go by appearances—which are seldom accurate. Take a golf ball. Show it to a Zulu native and the man would die and rot away before he’d ever guess the ball’s insides to consist of a fibrous pulp. You read in the evening paper of a young scion who has kicked his mother to death and then berated her broken corpse with pointedly unfilial remarks. Immediately you hate the boy; your jaws clamp, your fingers tighten. If he were to walk into the same room, you would doubtless attack him. You do not realise that the mother, bless her, had poisoned the boy’s wife out of jealousy, taken over the baby and then engineered to cheat her son out of the inheritance left by his late father. The papers do not tell you that, for the boy has decided not to tell the papers: his fit of anger over, he retains a respect for his mother which she had never shown him.” Carter rubbed at his nose gleefully. “Or, to take a more simple example,” he continued: “Dog Kills Tot. A big dog has chewed out the throat of its three-year-old mistress. The public is shocked! The dog is put to death. Other dogs are shut out of their homes. Of course, no one bothers to look at the numerous scars and burnt spots on the first dog, the hurtful sores that bear rather eloquent testimony to the sadistic temperament of the young mistress. No one bothers to inquire why the dog should have committed such an atrocity in the first place.” The old man gazed at a knight thoughtfully. “Appearances,” he said.

  Pearson pretended to be thinking about his move. Instead, he thought about Santi Passarelli. How had Carter manipulated his release? One by one, the witnesses had come forward and admitted that yes, they might have been mistaken. Yet, they’d been so certain before! So positive! Olson, the star, con­fessed—and had the papers to prove it—that he’d had a double abscess on his eye and was therefore obliged to wear dark glasses, so he could have been wrong. It might not have been Passarelli he’d seen . . .

  And another strange thing: there was the surprise alibi, the clincher, the mysterious figure who came out of hiding to swear that Passarelli had been with him across the city on the night of the fire. Come to think about it, in most instances—in the ones where the freed parties were obviously, to Pearson, guilty—there was this Mysterious Witness . . .

  Pearson remembered Carter’s bank account now. The old man was swinishly rich, had been for years. He thought about the strange transformation that takes place in other­wise upright citizens at the sight of negotiable currency.

  “By the way, John,” Carter adjusted a muffler with his one good hand, “I should have warned you—Mr. Passarelli telephoned me last night. He’s coming over later on this evening—to thank me, I expect. I tried to prevent it, needless to say, but he was—”

  Pearson got to his feet quickly, the brandy racing through him. His movement upset the chess table and this caused the delicately carved pieces to scatter off to the floor. Automatically, Carter propelled his chair backwards. The part of his face that was not paralyzed twitched.

  “Am I to understand you’re conceding the game, Lieutenant?” he said coldly.

  Pearson’s upper lip curled over his teeth. “Carter,” he said, making an effort to control his voice, “listen to me. You know goddamn well that filthy little pig started the fire. You know it as well as I do. You know Buchanan was guilty, too, You know Shriker killed that kid. Don’t you?” The big man stumbled only slightly as he advanced toward the wheelchair.

  Amos Carter smiled with half
his face. His eyes seemed set on pinwheels. “John Pearson, I do believe my brandy has gone to your head. You’re surely not suggesting that I’ve used my influence to assist those I do not genuinely—”

  “When you started this Court of Last Chance I was with you—remember that. Right down the line. Then your brain started to get soft. You started springing losers. Losers like Schuh, like Phil Janeway, the biggest narco pusher in this county. But even then, Carter, even when I knew you were wrong, I was on your side because I believed in what you were doing, I thought you did, too. But you don’t. You don’t believe it at all.” Pearson was leaning his hands on the arms of the wheelchair, his face inches away from the old man’s. “I don’t know why you’re doing it now. I’m a cop, not a psychoanalyst. Maybe you have to be both; maybe that’s why I didn’t peg you for a phony right off the bat. But I’ll tell you one thing now, and you’d better listen pretty damn carefully. If that skunk Passarelli shows his miserable face in here tonight I’ll tear him into little pieces.”

  “That,” Carter said, “would be one of your more serious mistakes.”

  Pearson pulled himself erect and looked down at the grinning old man. “When’s he due?”

  “He should have arrived twenty minutes ago.”

  Pearson looked at his watch. The numbers floated in his sight. He picked up the brandy bottle and then set it down again.

  Amos Carter sighed. “I’m afraid, dear friend,” he said, “that this marks a hiatus in a relationship which has been—or so I thought—of great mutual comfort. I judged incor­rectly, I see; but that is merely another argument for my thesis on appearances. One would swear you were intelligent. You dress decently: no ventilated shoes, no trenchcoat; you play a fair game of chess . . . well, vogue la galère! Pity it should happen now at this time, though. I was hoping to surprise you.”