The Compleat Boucher

by Anthony Boucher; Editor: James A. Mann

  I think I said something about the horror. I draw pretty much of a blank between seeing that empty suit and looking up to the far doorway and seeing Inspector Abrahams.

  He was wearing a dressing gown of Stambaugh’s, which was far too short for him. I stared at his grotesque figure and at the android parody which dangled from his hand.

  “Sorry, Lamb,” he grinned. “Couldn’t resist the theatrical effect. Go on. Take a good look at the empty man on the floor.”

  I looked. The clothes were put together with the exactly real, body-fitting, sucked-out effect which we had already decided was impossible.

  “You see,” Abrahams said, “I remembered the vacuum cleaner. And the Downtown Merchants’ parade.”

  I was back at the studio early the next morning. There was nobody from Verner’s Varieties there but Slavko, and it was so relatively quiet that Dr. Verner was just staring at the manuscript of The Anatomy without adding a word.

  “Look,” I said. “In the first place, Stambaugh’s record player isn’t equipped for hill-and-dale records.”

  “They can be played even on an ordinary machine,” Dr. Verner observed tranquilly. “The effect is curious—faint and with an odd echoing overlap, which might even enhance the power of the cantrip.”

  “And I looked in his card catalog,” I went on, “and he didn’t have a recording of the Pergolesi Pater Noster by anybody.”

  Dr. Verner widened his overblue eyes. “But of course the card would vanish with the record,” he protested. “Magic makes allowances for modern developments.”

  “Wait a minute!” I exclaimed suddenly. “Hey, I’m brilliant! This is one Abrahams didn’t think of. It’s me, for once, that solves a case.”

  “Yes, dear boy?” said Dr. Verner gently.

  “Look: You cant play an inside-start record backwards. It wouldn’t work. Visualize the spiraling grooves. If you put the needle in the outside last groove, it’d just stay there ticking—same like it would if you put it in the inside last groove of a normal record. To play it backwards, you’d have to have some kind of gearshift that’d make the turntable spin backwards.”

  “But I have,” said Dr. Verner blandly. “It enables one to make extraordinarily interesting experiments in sound. Doubtless Mr. Stambaugh had too. It would be simple enough to switch over by mistake; he was drinking . . . Tell me, the spinning turntable that you saw . . . was it revolving clockwise or counterclockwise?”

  I thought back, and I was damned if I knew. Clockwise, I took for granted; but if I had to swear . . . Instead I asked, “And I suppose Captain Clutsam and the Bishop of Cloisterham had alternate counterclockwise gearshifts?”

  “Why, of course. Another reason why such a serious collector as Mr. Stam-baugh would. You see, the discs of the Fonogrammia company, a small and obscure firm but one boasting a few superb artists under exclusive contract, were designed to be so played.”

  I stared at those pellucid azure eyes. I had no notion whether counterclockwise Fonogrammia records were the coveted objective of every collector or a legend that had this moment come into being.

  “And besides,” I insisted, “Abrahams has demonstrated how it was really done. The vacuum cleaner tipped him off. Stambaugh had bought a man-sized, man-shaped balloon, a little brother of those monster figures they use in parades. He inflated it and dressed it in his clothes. Then he deflated it, leaving the clothes in perfect arrangement with nothing in them but a shrunken chunk of rubber, which he could withdraw by unbuttoning the shirt. Abrahams found the only firm in San Francisco that manufactures such balloons. A clerk identified Stambaugh as a purchaser. So Abrahams bought a duplicate and pulled the same gag on me.”

  Dr. Verner frowned. “And the vacuum cleaner?”

  “You use a vacuum cleaner in reverse for pumping up large balloons. And you use it normally for deflating them; if you just let the air out whoosh! they’re apt to break.”

  “The clerk” (it came out dark, of course) “identified Stambaugh positively?”

  I shifted under the piercing blueness. “Well, you know identifications from photographs . . .”

  “Indeed I do.” He took a deliberately timed pause. “And the record player? Why was its turntable still revolving?”

  “Accident, I guess. Stambaugh must’ve bumped against the switch.”

  “Which projected from the cabinet so that one might well engage it by accident?”

  I pictured the machine. I visualized the switch and the depth to which one would have to reach in. “Well, no,” I granted. “Not exactly . . .”

  Dr. Verner smiled down at me tolerantly. “And the motive for these elaborate maneuvers by Stambaugh?”

  “Too many threatening male relatives on his tail. He deliberately staged this to look oh-so-mysterious nobody’d spot the simple fact that he was just getting the hell out from under. Abrahams has an all-points alarm out; he’ll be picked up any time within the next few days.”

  Dr. Verner sighed. His hands flickered through the air in gesture of infinitely resigned patience. He moved to his record cabinet, took out a disc, placed it on the turntable, and adjusted certain switches.

  “Come, Slavko!” he announced loudly. “Since Mr. Lamb prefers rubber balloons to truth, we are conferring a signal privilege upon him. We are retiring to the other room, leaving him here alone with the Carina record. His cocksure materialism will surely wish to verify the effect of playing it in reverse.”

  Slavko stopped pounding and said, “Huh?”

  “Come, Slavko. But first say a polite good-by to Mr. Lamb. You may not be seeing him again.” Dr. Verner paused in the doorway and surveyed me with what seemed like genuine concern. “Dear boy,” he murmured, “you won’t forget that point about the reverse phonetics . . . ?”

  He was gone and so (without more polite good-by than a grunt) was Slavko. I was alone with Carina, with the opportunity to disprove Dr. Verner’s fabulous narrative once and for all.

  His story had made no pretense of explaining the presence of the vacuum cleaner.

  And Inspector Abrahams’ theory had not even attempted to account for the still-revolving turntable.

  I switched on the turntable of the Verner machine. Carefully I lowered the tonearm, let the oddly rounded needle settle into the first groove from the outer rim.

  I heard that stunning final note in alt. So flawless was the Carina diction that I could hear, even in that range, the syllable to which it was sung: nem, the beginning of the reverse-Latin Amen.

  Then I heard a distorted groan as the turntable abruptly slowed down from 78 to zero revolutions per minute. I looked at the switch, it was still on. I turned and saw Dr. Verner towering behind me, with a disconnected electric plug dangling from his hand.

  “No,” he said softly—and there was a dignity and power in that softness that I had never heard in his most impressive bellows. “No, Mr. Lamb. You have a wife and two sons. I have no right to trifle with their lives merely to gratify an old man’s resentment of skepticism.”

  Quietly he lifted the tone-arm, removed the record, restored it to its envelope, and refiled it. His deft, un-English hands were not at their steadiest.

  “When Inspector Abrahams succeeds in tracing down Mr. Stambaugh,” he said firmly, “you shall hear this record in reverse. And not before then.”

  And it just so happens they haven’t turned up Stambaugh yet.

  The Ghost of Me

  I gave my reflection hell. I was sleepy, of course. And I still didn’t know what noise had waked me; but I told it what I thought of mysterious figures that lurked across the room from you and eventually turned out to be your own image. I did a good job, too; I touched depths of my vocabulary that even the complications of the Votruba case hadn’t sounded.

  Then I was wide awake and gasping. Throughout all my invective, the reflection had not once moved its lips. I groped behind me for the patient’s chair and sat down fast. The reflection remained standing.

  Now, it was I. There w
as no doubt of that. Every feature was exactly similar, even down to the scar over my right eyebrow from the time a bunch of us painted Baltimore a mite too thoroughly. But this should have tipped me off from the start: the scar was on the right, not on the left where I’ve always seen it in a mirror’s reversal.

  “Who are you?” I asked. It was not precisely a brilliant conversational opening, but it was the one thing I had to know or start baying the moon.

  “Who are. you?” it asked right back.

  Maybe you’ve come across those cockeyed mirrors which, by some trick arrangement of lenses, show you not the reversed mirror image but your actual appearance, as though you were outside and looking at yourself? Well, this was like that—exactly, detailedly me, but facing me rightway round and unreversed. And it stood when I sat down.

  “Look,” I protested. “Isn’t it enough to be a madhouse mirror? Do you have to be an echo too?”

  “Tell me who you are,” it insisted quietly. “I think I must be confused.”

  I hadn’t quite plumbed my vocabulary before; I found a couple of fresh words now. “You think you’re confused? And what in the name of order and reason do you think I am?”

  “That’s what I asked you,” it replied. “What are you? Because there must be a mistake somewhere.”

  “All right,” I agreed. “If you want to play games. I’ll tell you what I am, if you’ll do the same. You chase me and I’ll chase you. I’m John Adams. I’m a doctor. I’ve got a Rockefeller grant to establish a clinic to study occupational disease among Pennsylvania cement workers—”

  “—I’m working on a variation of the Zupperheim theory with excellent results, and I’m a registered Democrat but not quite a New Dealer,” it concluded, with the gloomiest frown I’ve ever noted outside a Russian novel.

  My own forehead was not parchment-smooth. “That’s all true enough. But how do you know it? And now that I’ve told you I’m John Adams, will you kindly kick through with your half of the bargain?”

  “That’s just the trouble,” it murmured reluctantly. “There must be a terrible mistake somewhere. I’ve heard of such things, of course, but I certainly never expected it to happen to me.”

  I don’t have all the patience that a medical man really needs. This time when I said “Who are you?”it was a wild and ringing shout.

  “Well, you see—” it said.

  “I hardly know how to put this—” it began again.

  “To be blunt about it,” it finally blurted out, “I’m the ghost of John Adams.”

  I was glad I was sitting down. And I understood now why old Hasenfuss always recommended arms on the patient’s chair to give him something to grab when you deliver the verdict. I grabbed now, and grabbed plenty hard.

  “You’re the—”

  “I’m the ghost—”

  “—the ghost of—”

  “—of John Adams.”

  “But”—I held onto the chair even tighter—“I am John Adams.”

  “I know,” my ghost said. “That’s what’s so annoying.”

  I said nothing. That was far too impressive an understatement to bear comment. I groped in the pocket of my dressing gown and found cigarettes. “Do you smoke?” I asked.

  “Of course. If John Adams smokes, naturally I do.”

  I extended the pack.

  He shook his head. “I’ll have to dematerialize it. Put one on the table.”

  I obeyed and watched curiously. A hand that was not quite a hand but more a thin pointing shape stretched out and touched the cigarette. It lingered a moment, then came away holding a white cylinder. The cigarette was still on the table.

  I lit it and puffed hard. “Tastes just like any other Camel.”

  “Of course. I took only the nonmaterial part. You wouldn’t miss that any more than you miss . . . well, me.”

  “You mean you’re smoking the ghost of a cigarette?”

  “You can put it that way.”

  For the first five puffs it wasn’t easy to get the cigarette into my mouth. My hand was more apt to steer it at nose or ear. But with the sixth puff I began to feel as normal and self-possessed as any man talking with his own ghost. I even got argumentative.

  “This isn’t possible,” I protested. “You won’t even come into existence until after I’m dead.”

  “Certainly,” my ghost agreed politely. “But you see, you are dead.”

  “Now, look. That’s nonsense. Even supernaturally. Because if I were dead . . . well, if I were dead, I’d be my own ghost. I’d be you. There wouldn’t be two of us.”

  “I am glad that I had a clear and logical mind when I was alive. I didn’t know but that might have come later; it sometimes does. But this way we can understand each other. What I meant is this: Where I come from, of course I am dead; or if you prefer, you are dead. It means the same thing. Also I am alive and also I am not yet born. You see, I come from outside of time. You follow?”

  “I think so. Eternity embraces all time, so when you’ve gone over from time into eternity, all time coexists for you.”

  “Not too precise an expression, but I think you grasp the essentials. Then, perhaps you can see what’s happened. I’ve simply come back into time at the wrong point.”

  “How—”

  “Imagine yourself at large in three dimensions, facing a fence with an infinite series of two-dimensional slots. Think how easy it’d be to pick the wrong slot.”

  I thought a while and nodded. “Could be,” I admitted. “But if it’s that easy, why doesn’t it happen more often?”

  “Oh, but it does. You’ve heard of apparitions of the living? You’ve heard of Doppelgdnger? You’ve even heard of hauntings before the fact? Those are all cases like this—just slipping into the wrong slot. But it’s such a damned stupid thing to do. I’m going to take a terrible ribbing for this.” My ghost looked more downcast and perplexed than ever.

  I started to be consoling. “Look. Don’t take it so— Hey!” The implication suddenly hit me. “You said haunting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?”

  “Well . . . yes.”

  “But you can’t be haunting me?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then whom are you haunting in my room?”

  My ghost played with his ghostly cigarette and looked embarrassed. “It’s not a thing we care to talk about. Haunting, I mean. It’s not much fun, and it’s rather naive. But after all, it’s—well, it’s expected of you when you’ve been murdered.”

  I could hear the right arm of the chair crack under my clutch. “When you’ve been—”

  “Yes. I know it’s ridiculous and childish; but it’s such an old, established custom that I haven’t the courage to oppose it.”

  “Then you’ve been murdered? And that means I’ve been murdered? I mean, that means I’m going to be murdered?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said calmly.

  I rose and opened a drawer of the desk. “This,” I prescribed, “calls for the internal application of alcoholic stimulants. Damn,” I added as the emergency buzzer rang. All I needed was a rush operation now, with my fingers already beginning to jitter.

  I opened the door and looked out into star-bright emptiness. “False alarm.” I was relieved—and then heard the whiz. I ducked it just in time and got the door closed.

  My ghost was curiously contemplating the knife where it stuck quivering in the wall. “Right through me,” he observed cheerfully.

  It was no sinister and exotic stiletto. Just a plain butcher knife, and all the more chillingly convincing through its very ordinariness. “Your prophecies work fast,” I said.

  “This wasn’t it. It missed. Just wait.”

  The knife had stopped its shuddering, but mine went on. “Now I really need that stimulant. You drink rye? But of course. I do.”

  “You don’t happen,” my ghost asked, “to have any tequila?”

  “Tequila? Never tasted it.”

  �
�Oh. Then I must have acquired the taste later, before you were murdered.”

  I was just unscrewing the bottle top, and jumped enough to spill half a jiggerful. “I don’t like that word.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” my ghost assured me. “Don’t bother to pour me one. I’ll just dematerialize the bottle.”

  The rye helped. Chatting with your own ghost about your murder seems more natural after a few ounces of whiskey. My ghost seemed to grow more at ease too, and after the third joint bottle tilting the atmosphere was practically normal.

  “We’ve got to approach this rationally,” I said at last. “Whatever you are, that knife’s real enough. And I’m fond of life. Let’s see what we can do to stave this off.”

  “But you can’t.” My ghost was quietly positive. “Because I—or you—well, let’s say we—already have been murdered.”

  “But not at this time.”

  “Not at this time yet, but certainly in this time. Look, I know the rules of haunting. I know that nothing could have sent me to this room unless we’d been killed here.”

  “But when? How? And above all, by whom? Who should want to toss knives at me:

  “It wasn’t a knife the real time. I mean, it won’t be.”

  “But why—”

  My ghost took another healthy swig of dematerialized rye. “I should prefer tequila,” he sighed.

  “That’s too damned bad,” I snapped. “But tell me about my murder.”

  “Don’t get into such a dither. What difference does it make? Nothing you can do can possibly affect the outcome. You have sense enough to understand that. Foreknowledge can never conceivably avert. That’s the delusion and snare of all prophecy.”

  “Ail right. Grant that. Let’s pretend it’s just my natural curiosity. But tell me about my murder.”

  “Well—” My ghost was hesitant and sheepish again. “The fact is—” He took a long time to swallow his dematerialized rye, and followed the process with a prolonged dematerialized burp. “To tell you the truth—I don’t remember anything about it.