Collected Stories (4.0)

by James Wade

  Collected Stories

  James Wade

  (version 4.0)

  ***

  CONTENTS

  The Pursuer (1951)

  The Deep Ones (1969)

  A Darker Shadow Over Innsmouth (1969)

  Those Who Wait (1971?)

  Planetfall on Yuggoth (1972)

  The Nightingale Floors (1975)

  The Silence of Erika Zann (1976)

  James Wade (1930-1983)

  James Wade was born in 1930 in Illinois, after army service he settled in Korea and he wrote widely on music for a variety of periodicals. His symphonic and chamber music has been performed in many countries, and he completed an opera based on Richard E. Kim's best-selling novel of the Korean War, "The Martyred". James Wade's work includes Cthulhu Mythos, "The Deep Ones" and "A Darker Shadow Over Innsmouth" and others such as "Temple of the Fox", which only ever saw print in Korea. His work has been anthologised by such noted editors as August Derleth, Ramsey Campbell and Herbert Val Thal.

  The Pursuer

  (1951)

  He has been following me for longer than I dare to remember. And it scares me to think how long he may have been following me before I noticed him.

  He follows me when I go to work in the morning, and when I come home at night. He follows me when I am alone, and when I date a girl or go out with friends - although I’ve almost stopped doing those things because it’s no fun to be with people while he’s around.

  I can’t say to my friends, or to the police or anyone, ‘That man there - he’s following me! He’s been following me for months!’ They’d think I was crazy. And if I tried to point him out to them another time, somewhere else far away from the first place, to prove it, why - he just wouldn’t be there. I’m sure of that.

  I think I know now what he wants.

  ***

  I remember when I first noticed him - noticed that he was following me, that is. I was down in the Loop on a Saturday night, just messing around, planning to take in a few of the cheaper bars and lounges. Saturday night is a pretty big night in Chicago.

  I was getting some cigarettes in a drug store, and when I turned around he was there standing right next to me: small and seedy-looking, in a long brown overcoat and a brown hat pulled low. His face was long and leathery, with a thin nose and wide, wet lips. He didn’t seem to be looking at me or at anything in particular.

  I recognized him as the little guy I’d seen around my neighbourhood a lot, in stores and on the street. I didn’t know who he was, and I’d never talked to him, but I started to open my mouth and say something in a conversational way about running into him down here. Then I looked closer at his face and for some reason I didn’t say anything. I just edged past him and left the store. He followed.

  Every bar. Every lounge. Every joint.

  As I fled from him, one spot to another, I kept remembering other unlikely times and places I’d seen him in the last few days, and longer ago than that, it seemed to me. Maybe I imagined a few of them, but there were plenty I could be pretty sure about.

  And I began to get scared. I didn’t know what he wanted; I thought he might be planning to rob me or kill me (why, I didn’t know; I had little enough). I couldn’t face him, I couldn’t look at him.

  He would come into a place like he always does, just a little after me - very quiet, very unnoticeable - and stay just a medium distance away from me. Nothing suspicious. And he wouldn’t leave just when I did, he was too clever for that; but soon after I left a spot, I’d know that he was coming on behind me.

  I have never heard him speak.

  ***

  The last place I went to that night, I must have been pretty shook up. I couldn’t take my eyes away from the door, but I couldn’t stand to keep looking at it, either. The barkeep, a big bald-headed guy, leaned forward and squinted at me through the foggy neon light.

  ‘ ’S matter, buddy, you expecting somebody?’

  I got up and went out.

  It took a lot of courage to go through that door; I was deadly afraid of meeting him coming in.

  I didn’t, and I didn’t see him on the street, either, but right away I knew he was behind me.

  I was pretty drunk by that time, with all the doubles I had knocked back in the bars I’d visited, and it was like some crazy nightmare, staggering along Randolph Street under all the glaring neon signs, with the loudspeakers blaring music from inside the lounges, and the crowds pushing in every direction. I felt sick, and scared enough almost to cry. People looked at me, but I guess they thought I was just drunk. Naturally, no one ever noticed him.

  After a while I threw up in an alley, and then I felt a little calmer and headed for home. I knew he was on the street car with me, and I knew he got off at my stop. I went down the street as fast as I could, hardly able to tell my rooming house from all the others just like it.

  At last I found it and staggered upstairs, groped open my door, and threw the bolt behind me. I went to the window and looked down, peering intently through the darkness towards the splashes of light from the street lamps, but I didn’t see him below on the street; it was dark and quiet and empty. (I never do see him down there, in fact; but somehow he’s always after me as soon as I come out.)

  I went over to the mirror and stood there, as if for company. If only I’d had some family, or anyone that cared enough to believe such a crazy story! But there was no one.

  I was very scared; at that time I believed he wanted to hurt me. I know better now.

  I went over and lay down on the bed, trembling. After a while I fell asleep, and slept all the next day.

  When I went out that evening, he was standing on the corner.

  ***

  That’s how it’s been ever since: day or night, anywhere, everywhere, I can always spot him if I dare look. I’ve tried every way to dodge or elude him, even made a sort of grim game out of it, but nothing is any good.

  All this time I couldn’t think of anything to do about him.

  I knew that I couldn’t prove a thing, that there was no way to get any witnesses without making people think I was crazy. I knew that even if I took a train or plane and went a thousand miles, he’d be there, if he wanted to be, as soon as I was there or sooner, and it would start all over.

  After a while I began almost to get used to it. I became convinced he wouldn’t try to hurt me; he’d had too many chances to do that already. The only thing I could think of to do was to keep working, to act as if nothing was the matter, and to ignore him. Maybe some day he wouldn’t be there.

  I started staying in, not seeing anyone, pretending to be sick if friends called. Gradually they stopped calling. I tried to read magazines all the time I was off work.

  ***

  Lately I find that I can’t stand that any more. I can’t sit in my room and do nothing, and not know where he is. As bad as it is, it’s better to know that he’s walking behind me, or standing at the end of the bar, or waiting on the corner outside - better than imagining all sorts of things.

  So I walk.

  I walk in all kinds of weather, in all kinds of places. I walk at any time of the day or night. I walk for hours and if I get tired I get on a street car or a bus, and when I get off I walk some more.

  I walk along shabby streets of lined-up flats and brownstones, where the prostitutes stand under the street lights after dark and writhe their bodies when you pass by. I walk in the park during afternoon rains, when no one is there but us and the thunder. I walk on the lake-front breakwater at midnight, while the cold wind sends waves slithering inland to shatter into nets of spray.

  I walk in suburban neighbourhoods; the sun bakes the brick and concrete, cars are parked in neat rows under shade trees. I wal
k in the snow and slush along Skid Row, where legless beggars and awful cripples and drunks and degenerates sprawl on the sidewalks. I walk through market day on Maxwell Street, with all the million-and-one things in stalls and booths, with the spicy food smells and the crazy sales spiels and the jabbering crowds of every kind of people on earth.

  I walk by the university campuses, and the churches, and the blocks and blocks of stores and bars, stores and bars. And I know that whenever I look behind, I’ll be able to see his small shuffling form, that brown hat and overcoat, that long expressionless face - never looking at me, but knowing I’m there.

  And I know what he wants.

  He wants me, some night on a dark street (or in the neon glow outside a tavern, or in a park at noon, or by a church while they’re holding services inside and you can hear the hymn singing) - he wants me to turn around and wait for him. No - he wants me to walk back and come up to him.

  He wants more than that. He doesn’t expect me to ask what he’s doing, why he’s following me. The time is long past for that. He wants me - he is inviting me to come up to him in blind rage and attack him; to try to kill him in any way I’m able.

  And that I must not do. I don’t know why, but the thought of doing that - as satisfying as it should be after all I’ve been through - makes me run cold with a sweat of horror beyond any revulsion I felt for him up to now.

  I must not, I dare not approach him. Above all, I must not touch him, or try to injure him in any way. I can’t imagine what would happen if I did, but it would be very awful.

  I must continue not to pay him any heed at all.

  And yet I know, if he keeps on following me, some time, somewhere, I’ll not be able to help myself; I will turn back on him with insane fury and try to kill him. And then...

  The Deep Ones

  (1969)

  “Diviner than the dolphin is nothing yet created; for indeed they were aforetime men, and lived in cities along with mortals.”

  —Oppian, Halientica (A.D. 200)

  I

  I had never met Dr. Frederick Wilhelm before I went to work at his Institute for Zoological Studies, located in a remote cove on the California coast some miles north of San Simeon and Piedras Blancas, not far from the Big Sur area; but of course I had heard of his studies. The Sunday supplements picked Wilhelm up years ago, which was only natural: What more potentially sensational subject could a journalist hope for than the idea that man shared the Earth with another, older, and perhaps more intelligent species; a species overlooked or ignored by modern science, but with which communication might someday be established?

  It wasn’t a worn-out gambit like flying saucer people, or spiritualism, or trolls hidden under the hills, of course. Wilhelm’s subject was the dolphin, that ocean mammal glimpsed centuries ago by superstitious sailors and transmogrified into myths of mermaids, sirens of the fabulous sea- dwelling secret races of legend. Now it appeared the superstitions might not be far wrong.

  Preliminary tests had showed long ago that our ocean-going distant cousins harbored a high degree of pure intelligence and potential for communication, unsuspected because of their watery habitat and their lack of hands or any other prehensile apparatus for producing artifacts. Wilhelm’s researches had not been the first, but his speculations were certainly the most daring, and he had parlayed his preoccupation into a career, attracting both government and private foundation funds to set up the institute toward which I found myself jogging in a rented jeep over rutted, sandy roads beside the sinuous green Pacific one starkly sunlit afternoon in April a year ago.

  Although I knew of Frederick Wilhelm and his institute, I wasn’t sure just how or what he knew of me. In a sense, I could easily see how my field, extrasensory perception and telepathy, might tie in with his work; but his initial letters and wires to me had never spelled out in any detail what he expected of our collaboration. His messages, indeed, had seemed at once euphoric and evasive, confining themselves mostly to grandiloquent descriptions of his basic purposes and facilities, plus details on the financial aspects of our association.

  I will admit that the amount of money Dr. Wilhelm offered was a strong factor in my accepting a job the exact nature of which remained unclear. As research coordinator of a small Eastern foundation devoted to parapsychological studies overlooked by the Rhine group at Duke, I had had my fill of skimped budgets and starvation wages. Wilhelm’s offer had come as an opportunity golden in more ways than one, so I had lost little time in packing my bags for the trip to sunny California.

  Actually, the location of Wilhelm’s experiments gave me more pause than any of the other doubtful aspects of his offer. I confess that I have always had an antipathy to California, despite the little time I recall having spent there. Perhaps I had read too much in the works of mordant satirists like Waugh and Nathaniel West, but to me there had always seemed something decadent and even sinister about this self-eulogizing Pacific paradise.

  The impression had not been allayed by my arrival via plane in gritty, galvanic Los Angeles, or by a stroll through that tiny downtown park where predatory homosexuals, drug derelicts, and demented fanatics of all kinds congregate under the bloated, twisted palms, like so many patients in the garden of Dr. Caligari’s madhouse. To some, Gothic battlements of New England backwaters represent the apex of spiritual horror and decay; for me, the neon-lit, screaming depravity of Los Angeles filled the bill. As the comedian Fred Allen once remarked, California is a great place if you’re an orange.

  These thoughts and others tangled in my mind as I guided my jeep over the rough beachside path which, I had been assured by the jovial car rental agent in San Simeon, would take me unfailingly to the Institute for Zoological Studies. (“Ain’t no place else the road goes, after you turn off left at the first orange juice stand—you know, the kind where the stand is built to look just like a great big orange. Jest keep on goin’, and don’t stop for hippies or high water till the road ends!”)

  As I glanced rather nervously around, I could see on my left a sort of encampment of bleached white tents and dark, darting figures down by the wavering lace of surf at water’s edge. Were these the hippies my guide had referred to, those sardonic jesters on the periphery of our society, razzing and reviling all the standards and values of three thousand civilized years? Or had he been spoofing me—were these only a gaggle of middle-class youngsters out for an afternoon of beachside sun, sand, and sex as a respite from the abrasive grind of our precariously affluent society?

  Even as these trite and puerile thoughts chased through my head, suddenly the vestigial road took a sharp turn over a rise and I found myself startlingly close up (a zoom lens effect) to what could only be the famous Institute for Zoological Studies.

  II

  “What, actually, do you know about dolphins—or porpoises, as they are sometimes called?” queried Dr. Frederick Wilhelm, his eyes invisible behind thick lenses that caught the light from filtered globes under gold-tinted shades in his plush office. We had just settled down over a late afternoon cocktail, expertly crafted by Wilhelm himself, after my first rapid tout of the Institute, conducted by its director immediately after meeting my arriving jeep.

  Wilhelm had been cordial and almost courtly, though it seemed a bit odd for him to start me off on a junket around his establishment before I had had a chance even to drop my luggage at my quarters and freshen up a bit after the long drive. I put it down to the vanity of a self-made scientific pioneer jockeying a cherished hobby horse down the home stretch in the big race.

  The impression I’d received on the whirlwind tour was superficial and a bit bewildering: The long, low, white-plastered cement buildings straggling along the shoreline seemed crammed with more sound, lighting, recording, photographic, and less identifiable computerized equipment than would be needed to study the entire passenger list of Noah’s ark, let alone one minor subspecies of marine mammal.

  About Wilhelm himself there was nothing odd, though: A big, rumpled, gray
ing penguin of a man, he moved and spoke with the disarming enthusiasm of a schoolboy just discovering that there is such a thing as science. As he hurried me from lab to lab at a breathless pace, he explained, “We’ll see the dolphin pools tomorrow morning. Josephine—my research assistant, Josephine, is working there now; she’ll join us later for drinks and dinner.” As I had learned from correspondence with Dr. Wilhelm, his senior staff (now totaling three, himself included, with my arrival) had quarters at the Institute, while the dozen or so technicians and laboratory assistants employed here made the trip to and from San Simeon billets in a Volkswagen microbus each day.

  Now as I sat with Wilhelm in the dim, richly decorated office over an acridly enticing martini, I heard the bus pull away, and realized that I was alone in the sprawling complex of buildings with its director and the unsurmised Josephine.

  “What do you actually know about dolphins?” Wilhelm was saying.

  “About what any layman knows,” I found myself replying frankly. “I know that research started back in the 1950’s, and indicated that dolphin brain size and specialized adaptations made probable a high degree of intelligence, along with sensory equipment suggesting a possibility of communication with man. So far as I recall, up to date nothing conclusive has come of it all, despite a lot of effort. I bought Dr. Lilly’s books on his research in the Virgin Islands, but all this has happened so fast I haven’t gone very far into them, though I still have them with me, in my suitcase.”

  “Don’t bother with Lilly,” Dr. Wilhelm broke in, refilling my glass from a crystal shaker with the etched classical design of a boy riding a dolphin. “I can show you things here that Lilly never even dreamed of.”

  “But the big mystery to me,” I had the temerity to mention, “is what I’m here for. Do you want me to try and hypnotize your dolphins, or read their minds?”

  “Not exactly,” Wilhelm answered. “At least, not at the present stage. The way I actually plan for you to begin is to hypnotize a human subject, to see whether such a person may become more sensitive to the thought patterns of the animal.