The Howling Man

by Beaumont, Charles

  That infernal tap-tap-tapping. It beat a tattoo in Claude's brain. He would get to the bottom of this. And when he did--.

  They passed the bent-backed man who tended the furnaces. His name was lettered on his coveralls: Bram Stoker.

  With torches guttering, they swept by a beautiful scientist and his mad daughter. Some barbarous experiment was in progress.

  They burst through a massive creaking door, older than time, and there it was.

  Seated at a heavy desk enclosed in a scarlet pentagram was a bearded man. He was tap-tap-tapping on a toy typer. The echoes in the cavernous vault magnified the Noise.

  "Kapital!" the bearded man chorted. "Kapital!"

  "Your name?" Claude demanded imperiously.

  "I belong to the family of Marx," the man said with some asperity. "Not one of those pitiful louts whose given names terminate with a vowel, but--"

  "Karl," stated Claude knowingly.

  "The same," Karl Marx admitted proudly. "Whoever you may be, I implore you not to touch that edifice." He gestured toward a precariously tilted structure that was bent over his desk. The thing seemed to be constructed of triangular slices of Italian cuisine. On top of it rested a balding head that fairly reeked of formaldehyde. "If it should collapse and come into contact with the pentagram, there will be Hell to pay."

  "What is it?" Claude asked despite himself.

  "It is the famous Lenin Tower of Pizza," Karl Marx explained. "A monument to my works."

  "Balderdash," Claude commented.

  "The word of an exploiter," Marx snorted. "The propertied classes are smug in their layers of lard. What do the downtrodden peasants know? I am the only one to divine the formula that will save them from their misery. By unleasing the plague of fantasy in the pitiless halls of the money changers, I have driven a wedge--"

  "I did not come here," Claude said shortly, "to savor the rehashed fragments of a dreary lecture."

  It was not simply that sociology bored him. The instant that Marx had opened his beard-stuffed mouth, Claude had realized that this was not the quarry he sought. To reach the true source of trouble, he must dig deeper.

  Much deeper.

  With Claude, to think was to act.

  Grabbing Cleve's shrouded arm, he delivered a stout kick to the Lenin Tower with his right sneaker.

  As the Tower fell, Marx screamed and clutched his toy typer to his bosom. The bowels of the Earth rumbled. Tongues of flame spat up from below. There was a distinct odor of brimstone, not unpleasant . . .

  Holding tightly to Cleve, Claude leaped into the pentagram. While chaos sparked around him, he had a sensation of falling.

  "Down, please," Claude murmured.

  Claude found himself shoving a considerable boulder up an immense hill.

  Momentarily curious, and ignoring the fearful means of Cleve, Claude turned companionably to a fellow worker. "Tedious business," he observed. "How far to the top?"

  The wretch could barely get enough room to speak. It was very crowded on the mountain. The heated rock was slippery with sweat.

  "There is no top," the doomed soul lamented. "There is no bottom."

  Claude was not without pity but he had never admired a quitter. He summoned a fork-tailed fiend. "There has been a slight miscalculation," he informed him.

  "That's what they all say," the fiend said mildly.

  "My companion and I," Claude went on, undaunted, "wish to be taken to Mr. Big."

  The fiend shrugged. "Why not? We have an eternity before us. Go, come, stay. It is all the same to me."

  "Get some starch in your ridgepole," Claude chided him. "It is not, I assure you, all the same to me. If you are a true fiend--a fiend in need, so to speak--you will transport us to Mr. Big."

  "Nobody hurries here, lad," the fiend said. "Time, we have. However, who am Ito add to your torment? In the final analysis, it can be neither better nor worse."

  Sensing a growing impatience on Claude's part, the fiend escorted them to Mr. Big at something a tad faster than a snail's pace. The fiend then withdrew. He could wait. He could wait a long, long time.

  Claude faced Mr. Big at last. Finally, an adversary worthy of his skills! "I am Claude Adams," he announced, "and this is my friend. Not fiend. Friend." The Devil had no horns. He was a short, fashionably-dressed man with thick glasses. He was quite busy. "Call me Tony," he said in a friendly, somewhat husky voice. "Be with you in a moment. Time! There is never enough time, even here."

  Tony was awash in debris. He was surrounded by books, magazines, expense vouchers, comics, manuscripts, and opera records. He was writing a review. Claude peeked at the book's title: The Corpse's Delight, by S. Orbital Ridges. Tony didn't like it. Feeling that he had been too harsh in his criticism, he concluded: "Excellent sidelights on croquet playing in Wales."

  "There," he sighed. "Not always easy to be fair, you know? Taste is such a personal matter. Now, what can I do for you?"

  "We have come to make a deal," Claude stated.

  "Flatly incredible!" Tony groaned. His voice seemed to emerge from the depths of his chest. "I had hoped for something more original. McComas and I--"

  "Who is McComas?" Claude interjected.

  Tony waved his manicured hand. "I always begin sentences that way. Pay it no mind. Your proposition?"

  Claude did not hesitate. He who hesitated, as he had often, observed, was lost. "Do not mistake me for the callow youth I appear to be," he warned. "I am a man of no little experience.

  "McComas and I understand that. Get on with it. I know you of old, Claude Adams."

  Claude felt a pardonable pride. His reputation, then, had preceded him. "The essence of a good bargain," he said, "is that both sides profit from it."

  "I agree with that. It is, indeed a platitude."

  Claude was stung. "I will keep it simple. You are too clever for tricky clauses. I will state my case in plain terms, man to Devil. You will then have no choice."

  "McComas and I," Tony said shiftily, "have many choices."

  Claude seized the horns, as it were. "Try this one on for size. You are overworked and you are overcrowded. The commies are coming. They will try to organize everything, make you write reviews for the State--"

  "McComas won't stand for it!"

  "Perhaps, perhaps. But why face the problem at all? If you permit my companion and Ito leave, I will eliminate the difficulty! I am no slouch at population control, as you know, and I can manipulate culture patterns. It will be like old times. No fuss, no bother, you in your kerchief and me in my cap--"

  Tony's face flushed. "By gad, sir, you interest me! When McComas and I deal, we deal!"

  Claude smiled slyly. "There is--uh--a way out of here?"

  "There is a way," Tony assured him. "A bargain, as you say, is a bargain. But it will not be easy."

  "It never is," Claude observed. He managed to contain his elation. He knew what was coming. "I am, I assure you, all ears."

  "Oh my," said Tony in that distinctive deep voice of his. The Devil told Claude what he had to do. "There is one teensy condition," he concluded.

  "Which is?"

  "You must not look behind you on the journey. Remember that! Do not look back."

  "I will not forget," Claude promised.

  With his robed and hooded companion in tow, Claude took his leave.

  The side-wheeler splashed through the miasmic murk of the River Styx. The river, of course, was full of stones.

  A bewhiskered sailor leaned over the bow-rail, casting a long knotted line. "Ma-a-a-rk Twai-i-i-in!" he bellowed.

  At exactly the proper moment, neither too early nor too late, Claude rolled the dice of destiny.

  He looked back.

  There was a shudder of silence, a skip in the heartbeat of eternity. Then came a blinding flash. Thunder boomed. It was like all the thunder there ever was, or ever could be, all wrapped up in the fireflies of an Illinois summer's twilight.

  It rained strawberries.

  Claude found the
results quite gratifying. He stepped ashore on an Earth of desolation. He was up to his armpits in corpses and rotting strawberries.

  "Unhappy world," he mused. "The paradox of the Solor System. For rebirth, we require abortion. To live in glory, it is necessary to become one with the worm."

  "But what will we do?" quavered Cleve.

  Claude gave no answer. He had been through this before. However, he was forced to concede that he was facing certain difficulties. He fingered his beanie. The Royal Atom-Arranger had done his work well. Lost and by the wind grieved .

  Claude Adams was once more a white-maned old codger. Old, old and suffused with weariness. He noticed that his companion seemed dismayed.

  "We must begin again," he intoned finally. He had never been one to shirk his duty, no matter what the odds.

  His companion brightened. "It may be," the shrouded figure whispered, "that perhaps I can be of some assistance."

  The tasseled robe fell to the shattered Earth. The hood was coyly slipped from golden curls.

  Claude stared at her with surging fatigue. "I should have known," he sighed. "Cleve! You are not Cleve, as advertised, but rather you stand before me as--"

  "Eve," she finished. She quivered expectantly.

  "Not yet, child," Claude temporized. "Mercy, not yet. This had been a trying day, if day it was."

  "When?" Eve pressed.

  Claude squared his worn shoulders. He took refuge in his ancient briar, firing up the shag tobacco with the wooden stick match he always carried. There was great comfort in familiar things.

  "Soon," he puffed. "In all the eons, I have never failed the Earth."

  With infinite tenderness, he took her arm.

  Together, they soared as though on gossamer wings, touching the grandeur of the silvered Moon, while billions and billions of cosmic stars smiled on the miracle of Creation.

  * * *

  APPOINTMENT WITH EDDIE

  * * *

  It was one of those bars that strike you blind when you walk in out of the sunlight, but I didn't need eyes, I could see him, the way deaf people can hear trumpets. It was Shecky, all right. But it also wasn't Shecky.

  He was alone.

  I'd known him for eight years, worked with him, traveled with him, lived with him; I'd put him to bed at night and waked him up in the morning; but never, in all that time, never once had I seen him by himself--not even in a bathtub. He was plural. A multitude of one. And now, the day after his greatest triumph, he was alone, here, in a crummy little bar on Third Avenue.

  There was nothing to say, so I said it. "How are you, Sheck?"

  He looked up and I could tell he was three-quarters gone. That meant he'd put away a dozen Martinis, maybe more. But he wasn't drunk. "Sit down," he said, softly, and that's when I stopped worrying and started getting scared. I'd never heard Shecky talk softly before. He'd always had a voice like the busy signal. Now he was practically whispering.

  "Thanks for coming." Another first: "Thanks" from Shecky King, to me. I tried to swallow but suddenly my throat was dry, so I waved to the waiter and ordered a double scotch. Of course, my first thought was, he's going to dump me. I'd been expecting it for years. Even though I'd done a good job for him, I wasn't the biggest agent in the business, and to Shecky the biggest always meant the best. But this wasn't his style. I'd seen him dump people before and the way he did it, he made it seem like a favor. Always with Shecky the knife was a present, and he never delivered it personally. So I went to the second thought, but that didn't make any better sense. He was never sick a day in his life. He didn't have time. A broad? No good. The trouble didn't exist that his lawyers, or I, couldn't spring him out of in ten minutes.

  I decided to wait. It took most of the drink.

  "George," he said, finally, "I want you to lay some candor on me." You know the way he talked. "I want you to lay it on hard and fast. No thinking. Dig?"

  "Dig," I said, getting dryer in the throat.

  He picked up one of the five full Martini glasses in front of him and finished it in one gulp. "George," he said, "am I a success?"

  The highest-paid, most acclaimed performer in show business, the man who had smashed records at every club he's played for five years, who had sold over two million copies of every album he'd ever cut, who had won three Emmys and at least a hundred other awards, who had, in the opinion of the people and the critics, reached the top in a dozen fields--this man, age thirty-six, was asking me if he was a success.

  "Yes," I said.

  He killed another Martini. "Candorsville?"

  "The place." I thought I was beginning to get it. Some critic somewhere had shot him down. But would he fall in here? No. Not it. Still, it was worth a try.

  "Who says you aren't?"

  "Nobody. Yet."

  "Then what?"

  He was quiet for a full minute, I could hardly recognize him sitting there, an ordinary person, an ordinary scared human being.

  Then he said, "George, I want you to do something for me."

  "Anything," I said. That's what I was being paid for: anything.

  "I want you to make an appointment for me."

  "Where at?"

  "Eddie's."

  "Who's Eddie?"

  He started sweating. "A barber," he said.

  "What's wrong with Mario?"

  "Nothing's wrong with Mario."

  It wasn't any of my business. Mario Cabianca had been Shecky's personal hair stylist for ten years, he was the best in the business, but I supposed he'd nicked The King or forgotten to laugh at a joke. It wasn't important. It certainly couldn't have anything to do with the problem, whatever it was. I relaxed a little.

  "When for?" I asked.

  "Now," he said. "Right away."

  "Well, you could use a shave."

  "Eddie doesn't shave people. He cuts hair. That's all."

  "You don't need a haircut."

  "George," he said, so soft I could barely hear him, "I never needed anything in all my life like I need this haircut."

  "Okay. What's his number?"

  "He hasn't got one. You'll have to go in."

  Now he was beginning to shake. I've seen a lot of people tremble, but this was the first time I'd seen anybody shake.

  "Sheck, are you germed up?"

  "No." The Martini sloshed all over his cashmere coat. By the time it got to his mouth only the olive was left. "I'm fine. Just do this for me, George. Please. Do it now."

  "Okay, take it easy. What's his address?"

  "I can't remember." An ugly sound boiled out of his throat, I guess it was a laugh. "Endsburg! I can't remember. But I can take you there." He started to get up. His belly hit the edge of the table. The ashtrays and glasses tipped over. He looked at the mess, then at his hands, which were still shaking, and he said, "Come on."

  "Sheck." I put a hand on his shoulder, which nobody does. "You want to tell me about it?"

  "You wouldn't understand," he said.

  On the way out, I dropped a twenty in front of the bartender. "Nice to have you, Mr. King," he said, and it was like somebody had turned the volume up on the world. "Me and my old lady, y'know, we wouldn't miss your show for anything." "Yeah," a guy on the last stool said. "God bless ya, buddy!"

  We walked out into the sun. Shecky looked dead. His face was white and glistening with sweat. His eyes were red. And the shaking was getting worse.

  "This way," he said, and we started down Third.

  "You want me to grab a cab?"

  "No. It isn't far."

  We walked past the pawn shops and the laundries and saloons and the gyms and I found myself breathing through my mouth, out of habit. It had taken me a long time to forget these smells. They weren't just poor smells. They were kiss-it-all-goodbye, I never-had-a-chance smells. Failure smells. What the hell was I doing here, anyway? What was Shecky doing here? Shecky, who carried his Hong Kong silk sheets with him wherever he went because that was the only thing he could stand next to his skin, who kep
t a carnation in his lapel, who shook hands with his gloves on? I looked down at his hands. They were bare.

  We walked another block. At the light I heard a sound like roller skates behind me. A bum without legs stopped at the curb. The sign across the street changed to WALK. I nudged Shecky; it was the kind of thing he appreciated. He didn't even notice. The cripple wiggled his board over the curb and, using the two wooden bricks in his hands, rolled past us. I wondered how he was going to make it back up to the sidewalk, but Shecky didn't. He was thinking of other things.

  After two more blocks, deep into the armpit of New York, he slowed down. The shaking was a lot worse. Now his hands were fists.

  "There," he said.

  Up ahead, five or six doors, was a barber shop. It looked like every other barber shop in this section. The pole outside was cardboard, and most of the paint was gone. The window was dirty. The sign--EDDIE THE BARBER--was faded.

  "I'll wait," Shecky said.

  "You want a haircut now, is that right?"

  "That's right," he said.

  "I should give him your name?"

  He nodded.

  "Sheck, we've known each other a long time. Can't you tell me--"

  He almost squeezed a hunk out of my arm. "Go, George," he said. "Go."

  I went. Just before I got to the place, I looked back. Shecky was standing alone in front of a tattoo parlor, more alone than ever, more alone than anyone ever. His eyes were closed. And he was shaking all over. I tried to think of him the way he was ten hours ago, surrounded by people, living it up, celebrating the big award; but I couldn't. This was somebody else.

  I turned around and walked into the barber shop. It was one of those non-union deals, with a big card reading HAIRCUTS--$ 1.00 on the wall, over the cash register. It was small and dirty. The floor was covered with hair. In the back, next to a curtain, there was a cane chair and a table with an old radio on it. The radio was turned to a ball game, but you couldn't hear it because of the static. The far wall was papered with calendars. Most of them had naked broads on them, but a few had hunting and fishing scenes. They were all coated with grease and dirt.

  There wasn't anything else, except one old-fashioned barber chair and, behind it, a sink and a cracked glass cabinet.