“This is also a cautionary tale, intended to say ‘You are not alone.’ We all carry the past with us like the chambered nautilus; and we all must find ways to exorcise it at peril of our destiny.”
The King grew vain;
Fought all his battles o’er again;
And thrice he routed all his foes,
And thrice he slew the slain.
—JOHN DRYDEN, ALEXANDER’S FEAST (1697)
IN THE FOURTH year of the war with the despicable personage that had come to live in my brain, the utterly vile tenant who called himself Jerry Olander, I was ordered to kill for the first time.
It came as no surprise. It had taken Jerry Olander four years, plus or minus a couple of months, to get sufficient control over my motor responses. He had been working toward just such a program of monstrous actions, and though I never knew till the moment he ordered the hit that the form of his evil was to be murder, that was one of the few possibilities. Even though I wasn’t surprised, I was sickened, and refused. It didn’t do me any good, of course. Jerry was strong enough after four years of constant warfare within my brain; I was just weak enough, weary enough, just enough filled with battle fatigue, to put up a losing argument.
The target was to be my mother’s older brother, my Uncle Carl. Had Jerry Olander suggested the Pope, or the President of the United States, or some notorious public figure, I might have grasped a thin edge of rationality in the order. But Uncle Carl? A man in his late sixties, a retired jeweler whose wife had died of cancer fifteen years earlier, who lived quietly and inoffensively in a suburb of Chicago. Carl? Why should the unwanted roommate of my brain want to see old Uncle Carl dead?
“Don’t you want to see him dead?” Jerry replied, when I put the question to him.
“Who, Carl?” I didn’t mean to sound stupid; but I was nonplussed; and sounded stupid.
Jerry laughed. I had come to know that miserable sound. In the dead of night, when I was hovering on the lip between wakefulness and whatever was strobing across the face of my bedside television set, and the abyss of thankful sleep, he would begin laughing. It was the sound I’m certain was made when the broken-handled claw hammer wrenched out the rusty spikes from Jesus’s crucified wrists.
He laughed that rusty laugh and mimicked me. “Who, Carl? Yes, Carl. Old Uncle Carl, who killed your father’s dreams. Don’t begin to tell me, don’t even begin to tell me that you’ve forgotten all that, chum.”
“Don’t call me chum.”
“Well, then, using the short form: yes, Uncle Carl.”
“You’re crazy. I can’t do it … won’t do it!”
“Oh, you’ll do it, all right. We have no problem on that score. As for my being crazy, I won’t argue the point. One would have to be a bit crazy to share a mind with you.”
“Carl never did anything to my father,” I said.
“Think about it,” Jerry said. I hated his smugness.
But I thought about it. And from the quicklime pit of forgotten memories something dead but still moving rose from corruption and dragged itself into my consciousness. A zombie recollection, a foulness from childhood, half-understood, miserable, something that intellectually I knew was a lie, yet a thing I believed true with that trapped child’s refusal to abandon the terrors of the past.
Jerry laughed. “Yeah, that’s it, chum. Remember now?”
“That isn’t true. I know it isn’t. I only thought that was the way it was … because I was a kid. I didn’t know any better.”
“Nobody’s evil, right? No black and white. Just a shitload world of grays. Right? Then how come you still believe it?” He was really gnawing at me now. I tried to send that shambling awfulness back to its quicklime grave, but it stalked through my mind, led forward by Jerry’s voice. “Look at it, chum. Consider Uncle Carl and what he did to your old man.”
The memory grew larger in my mind. I found myself unable to turn away from its rotted flesh and stinking breath, the dead eyes covered with a gray film. I found myself remembering my father …
He had managed Carl’s jewelry store during the war, when Carl had gone off to the navy. My father had been too old, had had a heart condition; so he had worked in the store instead of serving. Carl had pulled strings and wound up on the West Coast, at one of the supply terminals. And my father had worked twelve, fifteen, eighteen hours a day building up the clientele. He had always wanted his own store, to be in business for himself, to go to Tucson or San Francisco, a warm and wonderful place away from the snow and the biting Lake Michigan winds. But my mother had insisted that family was more important than self-realization. “Stay with family,” she had said. “Carl told you he’d make you a partner. The family always keeps its promises.”
So my father had let his dreams fade, and had stayed on with the store.
When the war was over, and Carl came home, and my father finally summoned up the courage to call in the promise, Carl had thrown him out of the store.
I never knew why, really. I was a child. Children are never told the whys of family disasters. They just happen. You wouldn’t understand, children are told; and then, in the next breath, they are told, You mustn’t hate your Uncle Carl for this, he has his reasons.
But my father had to start all over again. At the age of fifty. He rented a small apartment on the second floor in a business district close to the Loop, and he opened a jewelry shop. It was two long flights up, one steep set of stairs, a landing, and a switchback flight half as long but just as steep. And the drive from Evanston, back and forth, each day. Working far into the evening to catch the late foot traffic; on the phone with customers, trying to hustle an extra sale, even at night when he was home and should have been relaxing. A grinding, terrible schedule without break or release, to keep my mother and myself fed and clothed, not to lose the house.
One year. He lasted one year, almost to the week of opening the new store. And on a Sunday morning, sitting in his big chair by the old Philco radio, he had a sudden smash of a coronary thrombosis and he died. In a moment, as I watched, he went pale and his eyes popped open so I could see how blue they were, and his mouth drooped at one side, and he died. He had no last words.
The zombie memory would not free me. I saw things I never could have imagined as a child. My father’s blue eyes, with the realization in them that all the dreams had been stolen from him, that he had lived his life and it had come to nothing, that he was dead and had never made his mark, had been here and was gone, and no one would remember or care. I saw, I remembered, I cared.
My child’s memories were of hatred, and revenge. Carl.
“My father did it to himself,” I said, walking upstairs. “He allowed his dreams to die. If he’d really had the courage to break loose and go to the Coast he would have done it,” I said, entering my bedroom and going to the closet. “Carl had nothing to do with it. If it hadn’t been Carl, it would have been someone else in whom my father placed his trust. I can’t hate a man for not keeping a promise twenty-five years ago,” I said, pulling down my overnight case. “This is crazy. You can’t get me to do this.” I began packing for the flight to Chicago. I heard the sound of spikes being twisted out of wormwood.
It took Carl a long time to answer the door. He had a serious arthritic condition, and it was late. Highland Park was silent and sleeping. I stood under the porch light and saw Carl’s pale, tired eyes peering at me through the open-weave curtain behind the door’s glass panes. He blinked many times, and finally seemed to recognize me. He opened the door.
“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” he said. I put my hand against the half-opened door and pushed it slowly inward. Carl moved back and I walked in. My overnight case was still lying on the back seat of the rental compact at the curb. “Why didn’t you call me and tell me you were coming? How’s your mother?”
“Mom died three years ago.”
He blinked again. His liver-spotted forehead drew down and he thought about it. “Yes. I’d forgotten. Why didn’
t you call me up on the phone and tell me you were coming?”
He closed and locked the door behind me. I walked into the darkened living room, only faintly outlined by the hall light. He followed me. He was wearing something I had seen only in period movies, a long night-gown that reached to his thin calves, white with blue veins prominent. The fabric was rough cotton, and like his calves was veined with blue pinstriping. I turned around to look at him. In my head I said, “This is crazy. Look at him. He’s an old man. He won’t even remember. What’s the point of this?”
And Jerry Olander said, “It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t remember. You remember. But if it makes you feel any better, tell him why you’ve come to kill him.”
“What are you doing here in the dead of night, I wish you’d called me up on the phone and told me,” Carl said.
I couldn’t see his face. He was standing with the hall light behind him. It was a black circle without feature. I said to him, “Do you remember a night a long time ago, in the red brick house you had on Maple Street, when Lillian was alive?”
“I remember the house. It was a small house. We had much bigger houses. Maybe you called and I was asleep.”
I moved toward him till he could see my face, lit along the sharp planes of cheeks and nose by the light over his shoulder. “I see it all now the way a little boy would see it, Uncle Carl. I’m looking out from under a dining room table, through the legs and cross-braces of chairs, watching you and my father on the screened back porch. You’re arguing. It was the first time I ever heard my father swear or raise his voice. I remember it very clearly, even if it isn’t true, because he was such a quiet person. You know that. He never raised his voice or got angry. He should have. He might not have died when he did, or died so miserably, if he’d raised his voice a few times.”
“What are you talking about?” Carl said. He was beginning to realize he wanted to be annoyed at his nephew barging in on him at three o’clock in the morning while he was still half-asleep. “Do you want something to eat? What are you doing here in Chicago? Don’t you live out there in California now?”
He hadn’t seen me in years. We had no contact. And here I stood before him, dragging him back through the dead years to a night he didn’t even remember. “Then you stood up and yelled at him, and he pushed back his chair till it fell over, and he yelled at you, and then you swung at him, and he hit you with a cushion off one of the chairs. And the next day he didn’t go down at seven-thirty to open the store while you stayed in and slept late and had a nice breakfast with Lillian. Do you remember all that, Uncle Carl?”
“Lillian is dead. She’s been gone a long time.”
I walked to the sofa and looked down. Then I walked back to him and took him by the arm. He resisted for a moment, but he was very old, and I wasn’t, and he came with me to the sofa, and I forced him to sit down. Then I took the pillow with the fringe, and I held it in one hand as I shoved him down, and held it over his face while he thrust himself up against it, until he stopped. It was over much more quickly than I’d thought. I’d always thought people struggle much harder to cling to life. But he was old, and his memories were gone.
And all the while I was begging Jerry Olander to stop. But he had spent four full years of wresting control from me, and in those four years of the war I had come to know he would win a battle or two. This was the first battle. And he had won. “Very efficient,” Jerry Olander said.
In the fourth year of the war with the homicidal maniac that had come to nest in my brain, a second hit was ordered. A woman I wasn’t even certain was still alive. She had had my dog gassed, put to sleep as they tell it to children, one summer when I was away at camp. Her name was Mrs. Corley, and she had lived down at the end of our street in Evanston.
I argued with Jerry Olander. “Why did you pick me to live in?” I had asked that question surely more than a hundred and fifty thousand times in four years.
“No particular reason. You haven’t got a wife, or many friends. You work at home most of the time—though I still can’t see how you make any kind of a living with that mail order catalog—and nobody’s going to put you away too quickly because you talk to yourself.”
“Who are you?” I screamed, because I couldn’t get him out of me. He was like the eardrums refusing to pop when a plane lands. I couldn’t break his hold on me, no matter how hard I swallowed or held my nose and blew.
“The name is Jerry Olander,” he said, lightly, adding in an uncannily accurate imitation of Bogart, “and somebody’s always gotta take the fall, shweetheart.”
Then he made me go to the main branch of the public library, to look at all the telephone books. He didn’t have control of my vocal cords, couldn’t make my brain call the 312-555-1212 information operator in Chicago, to establish if Mrs. Corley still lived in Evanston. But he could make my legs carry me to my car, make my hands place themselves at 11:50 and 12:05 on the steering wheel, make my eyes run down the columns of names and phone numbers in the Evanston telephone directory in the library’s stacks.
She lived in the same house, at the same address, in the same world I had shared with her as a child.
Jerry Olander made my body drive to the savings and loan where I had my small account, made my right hand ink in the withdrawal slip, made my mouth smile as the teller handed me my last five hundred dollars.
And Jerry Olander made me tape the basement window of Mrs. Corley’s house before I broke it with a rock. Fighting him every step of the way, I was nonetheless made to walk silently through the basement to the steps, was made to climb them to the kitchen where I found old Mrs. Corley fixing herself a vegetarian dinner, and was made to tie and gag her.
But when I refused to go farther, Jerry Olander’s voice played Pied Piper to the living dead in the quicklime pit of memory, and another shambling, rotted thing dragged itself up onto the landscape of my mind, and I saw myself as a child, coming home from a ghastly month at some nameless summer camp. And, of course, the name was right there, unremembered for thirty years, just as fresh as if I had come home yesterday. Camp Bellefaire. On Lake Belle. I had hated it, had pleaded with my mother and father every Sunday when they had come to visit me—like seeing a Death Row resident during visitation hours—“Please take me home, Momma, Poppa, please, I don’t like it here!” But they had never understood that there are some children for whom organized activities in which they can never distinguish themselves is a special sort of debasement.
And I had come home gladly, to see Charlie, my dog; to move around freely in my room with the Erector set and the comic books and my very own radio; to build Stukas and Lightnings and Grumman seaplanes, and smell TesTor’s cement once again.
And Charlie was dead. “Do you remember that summer, Mrs. Corley?” I heard myself saying, and Jerry Olander wasn’t making me say it. “Do you remember how you told the man at the pound that the dog was running loose for a week? Do you remember how you found Charlie’s tags caught on your bush in the backyard, and didn’t turn them in? I remember, Mrs. Corley, because you told Mrs. Abrams next door, and she told my Momma, and I overheard my Momma telling my Poppa. You knew who Charlie belonged to, Mrs. Corley; he’d lived here for ten years, so you had to know.”
And then I pushed Mrs. Corley to her knees, and turned on all four jets of the gas range, and opened the oven and put her head inside while she struggled, and hit her once sharply behind the left ear, and laid her head down on the open door of the oven, left her kneeling there in prayer, final prayer, ultimate prayer … and went away.
“I liked the part about the dog tags best,” Jerry Olander said, on the plane back to California.
In the fourth year of the war with that evil intelligence in my brain, I was ordered to kill, and did kill, seven people, including my Uncle Carl and old Mrs. Corley. And each one made me sick to think about it. I had no idea if Jerry Olander was merely the product of my own mind, a sick and twisted, deranged and malevolent phantom of a personality that had finall
y split, or if he was a disembodied spirit, an astral projection, a dybbuk or poltergeist or alien from the center of the Earth that had come to wreak murder on the race of humans, using me as his unwitting tool. I have seen enough motion pictures, read enough mystery stories, seen enough television programs in which a man’s evil nature takes him over, to know that is the most rational answer.
There is no reason to believe me, but I swear, Jerry Olander never came from within me. He was from outside, a rejected thing. And he inhabited me without my consent. It had been war, and he had won battle after battle, and I knew if those killings were ever traced to me I would spend the rest of my life in a home for the criminally insane … but further than saying, as quietly and as miserably as I can … I was not Jerry Olander … what can I say to convince …
And finally, it came the time I had known would arrive, from the moment he ordered the death of my Uncle Carl.
Jerry Olander said to me, as the fourth year of the war drew to an end, “Now it’s time to kill Nancy.”
“No!” I screamed. “No. I won’t do it. I’ll kill myself first. You can’t make me, there’s no way you can make me, I’ll fight you, you’re not going to make me do that!”
Nancy was my ex-wife. She had left me, but there wasn’t the faintest vestige of bad feeling in me about it. She had made her reasons for wanting a divorce plain to me, and they were good and sound reasons. We had been married when we were too young to know better, and through the years we had loved each other. But Nancy had learned she was more than a wife, that she had never been provided the opportunity to know herself, to expand herself, to fulfil the dreams she had had. And we had parted with love.
Now she lived in Pasadena, working with an orthopedic shoe company that had designed a special footgear for those who suffered with Hansen’s disease. Her life was full, she was responsible and settled, mature and wonderful. We talked from time to time, occasionally had dinner together.
The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories Page 25
