THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror

by Thomas M. Disch

  “Right,” said Glandier. He began to arrange the cards in his hand.

  “Didn’t you hear my question?”

  “Oh, yes, sorry. Mind’s wandering. She called her mother collect once from Las Vegas. When her mother went into the hospital I took care of her bills for her. The Las Vegas number was on the phone bill. I knew she didn’t have anything to do with her son, so who else was it likely to be? I called the number. It was a motel.” He looked at the cards in his hand. They made no sense. “I don’t think I can play cribbage any more. My mind is… I mean, I need sleep.”

  “So sleep,” said Jack.

  “It’s almost day. Your parents will be getting up soon. You’ll have to go home. They’ll become alarmed if you’re not there.”

  “Right,” said Jack, without stirring.

  “What are you?” Glandier asked, surprising himself as much as the boy, whose gaze lifted up from the cards in his hand like a cobra rising from a basket.

  “Don’t you mean who are you? People are usually whos, not whats.”

  “But you’re not a person. What else is there? Devils? Are you a devil?”

  “Do you believe in devils?” the boy countered with a sneer.

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  “And you’re not answering mine. But no, I wouldn’t say I’m a devil. Unless you want to say that tumors are devils, or bombs, or gamma rays, or tornadoes. The idea seems to be, if it hurts, call it a devil. But I haven’t hurt you. Have I? Have I?”

  Glandier ignored the question. “When I dream…” He didn’t know how to continue.

  The boy nodded, smiling encouragement, like a teacher drawing out a slow student. “That’s warmer, yes. I’m there then, in a way. I’d even say that’s when we’re closest. Closer than this, certainly. When was the last time you saw yourself in a mirror?”

  “I suppose the last time I went into the bathroom.”

  “No, I mean really saw yourself, saw behind your eyes and inside your head. Because in a way that’s me. A reflection, but free from the mirror, so I don’t have to behave like your fucking monkey.”

  “If I…” But no, he wouldn’t ask that question.

  “If you were to die? I suppose I’d just gradually fade away, like the smoke in those ads for air purifiers. But that’s only my guess. I’m no fortune-teller.” He grinned with new ferocity. “Hey, is that what you’d like? Me to read your fortune? Why not.” He picked up the deck of undealt cards from the table and fanned it out clumsily. Cards dropped to the tabletop: the six of hearts, the jack of clubs, the queen of spades. “Pick a card, any card.”

  “No.” Retreating into the living room. “Honestly. I’ve got to get some sleep now. I’m falling to pieces.”

  The boy laughed, “So good night. Unless you want me to come and tuck you in?”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” Glandier groaned.

  “To you? What have you got to do with it one way or the other? Do you think the reflection in the mirror cares about what it’s reflecting? It just wants to get loose, that’s all. Go to sleep.”

  Then there was an interval Glandier could not account for. He was in the bedroom with no memory of having left Jack Sheehy alone in the kitchen. He was lying in bed, still dressed, except for his shoes. He was dreaming, and yet he was not properly asleep. There were dots of phosphorescent color flickering on the blank screen of the ceiling. The colors coalesced into a long rectangle of lawn, just as though a strip of sod had been unrolled across the ceiling. Dew flashed on the blades of grass as the first rays of daylight raked the ground. Jack’s sneakers darkened with dampness as he advanced across the lawn toward the bleating of a solitary frog. He swung a long-handled ax in his right hand, scything the dew with each broad sweep of the blade. The ax had come from Glandier’s cellar, one of the relics of his youth that he’d kept back from the sale of his parents’ effects after his father’s death. Once, at the age of eight, Glandier had spent an entire frantic afternoon hacking away at a half-rotten apple tree with that same ax. Jack ought not to have taken the ax from the cellar, but Glandier was helpless to prevent him. He could not call out Stop! or whisper Please. The dream went on, indifferent as a TV program to what he might hope or dread. The blade of the ax paused, assessingly, by the bark of a large-boled, low-forking willow, then drew back and reared up and swung down and struck the tree trunk, leaving a long incision in the bark. Again the blade bit into the tree, this time at a slightly sharper angle, so that a small almond-shaped wound of whiteness was formed by the two strokes. The blade was lifted a third time, but now a voice called out Woodman, spare that tree! and Jack Sheehy turned around, ax handle balanced on his shoulder, to scan the grass for the source of this sudden prohibition. There he stood, at the edge of the artificial pond, a green frog with one good eye and one eye-socket empty and bleeding. The frog, when Jack had seen him, swelled his cheeks, as if in scorn, and croaked another line of the old poem: Touch not a single bough! To which the boy replied, The fucking hell I won’t! and swung the ax at the frog. The frog jumped away, and the ax hit the concrete with a loud, edge-dulling crack. Then the frog leaped across the lawn with Jack in pursuit. The frog would croak derisively, and Jack would swing the ax into the still dewy lawn, gouging dark holes where bugs and angleworms squirmed with dimly apprehended fear to find themselves exposed to the sun’s withering heat and the eyes of predators. The frog leaped through a bed of tulips Mrs. Kendall had forced to early bloom. Jack pursued him, oblivious of the flowers. The frog zigzagged about the Mertons’ lilac bush, and Jack pursued. He hid in the shadow of a lawn chair, but Jack spied him there, and the ax came swinging down, missing the frog by less than an inch. The frog fled down the narrow corridor between the Mertons’ and the Gallaghers’ garages, veered to the left around the black-faced jockey holding up a lantern at the foot of the Mertons’ asphalt drive, and took refuge beneath the thick prickly branches of the ornamental junipers that graced the fieldstone-trimmed facade of the Gallaghers’ house. As it happened, Mrs. Gallagher, an early riser, was standing by the picture window at the moment that Jack Sheehy pursued the frog into her junipers. Glandier could see her, through the window, dialing and then speaking into a phone, all the while Jack continued, in an ecstasy of rage, to attack the shrubberies, screaming Little fucker, I’ll get you yet! Glandier wanted to warn him, to tell him he must stop, but in the trance of his dream, speech and motion were denied him. He could only lie there, sweating, and watch as Jack’s father stalked from the Sheehy house and across his lawn and the Gallaghers’ driveway, to stand behind his son, who still raged on, laying waste the junipers. What in the name of God do you think you’re doing? Mr. Sheehy roared. The boy stopped at last, looked up at his father, seemed to take a firmer grip on the handle of the ax, as though he meant to… But no, he lowered it, and said, mildly enough, but not at all apologetically, I’m trying to kill a frog.

  Glandier woke then, buttered in his own sweat. I’ve had a dream, he told himself; that’s all it was, a dream. But his heart was thudding in his chest as fast as if he’d just got through an especially strenuous fuck, and he refused to get up and go to the front door and look out to see whether indeed it had been only a dream.

  He was not, in any case, to be spared the knowledge. The doorbell rang. He got up from the bed, groaning, and looked at himself in the mirror. His pants were rumpled, his shirt soaked with sweat, and his sparse hair was pasted to his forehead higgledly-piggledy, like fracture lines in a broken windshield. The doorbell rang again. He toweled his face with a terrycloth bathrobe, then slipped the bathrobe over his clothes and went to answer the door. It was Jack’s father. He was carrying the ax. His face had gone beet-red with anger.

  “What is it?” Glandier asked.

  Michael Sheehy held up the ax. “Is this yours?”

  “It could be, I suppose. But mine should be in my basement. Why?”

  “Then this is yours. Would you take it please.”

  Glandier opene
d the screen door separating him from Michael Sheehy and gingerly accepted the ax. “I still don’t understand,” he said, when the door was closed.

  “I can’t say that I do either. My son told me he stole this ax from your basement. Would you know anything about that?”

  Glandier made his face into a mask of puzzlement—brow furrowed, lips pursed—and shook his head. It was soothing to be able to lie. Glandier took an almost professional pride in his ability to deceive other people.

  “Don’t you keep your doors locked?” Sheehy asked, looking for a way to put Glandier in the wrong.

  “Of course not. Do you? I never supposed it was that kind of neighborhood.”

  Sheehy bit his lip. “Well, maybe it would be better if you did. I’m sorry about this.”

  Glandier couldn’t resist giving the thumbscrew another little twist. “But what was your boy doing with the ax? It looks as though—” He held the blade up and saw a long liquid streak across the gray steel. “—as though he tried to dig up the sidewalk with it.”

  “He killed a frog,” said Sheehy.

  “A frog?” Glandier repeated.

  “There’s really nothing more I can tell you.” Sheehy turned away.

  Glandier was almost overpowered by a feeling of wild hilarity. He wanted to call out after Sheehy, to jeer at him, to take a Polaroid picture of the man’s face stained with shame.

  He looked at the blade of the ax. Was that really blood on it? Why had that boy (who was not, of course, a “boy”) been so determined to kill a frog (which was not, in all likelihood, a “frog”)?

  As though the answer might be coded to its taste, he lifted the ax blade to his mouth and touched the tip of his tongue to the smear of blood. It was salty and… something else. He licked up the whole smear with the full stretch of his tongue as if it were a drip running down the side of an ice-cream cone. The strange taste awakened familiar pangs of hunger. Breakfast beckoned from the kitchen, sacramental with its promise of an ordinary life. He propped the ax against the doorjamb and stumbled toward the kitchen. He would make bacon and eggs, coffee and buttered toast. Juice too, if there was a can left in the freezer compartment.

  But when he went into the kitchen there was the table covered with cards. With a single unconsidered sweep of his hand he swept them off the table. Damn, he thought the moment after he’d done it, for now he would have to pick them all up.

  The doorbell rang.

  Fear froze Glandier to the spot. The early sunlight spilled across the kitchen floor, exposing the months of unmopped stains, the helter-skelter cards, almost all of them face up, spelling out a fortune he could not read. The clock face, a white disc in a walnut skillet, gave the time to be 6:03.

  He heard the front door open—and close.

  “Anyone home?” asked a voice. A voice that was not, to Glandier’s immense relief, that of Jack Sheehy.

  Then, that doubt allayed, he was able to feel the luxury of indignation: for who the fuck could walk in the front door with no more than “Anybody home?” Glandier strode out of the kitchen ready to berate the unknown intruder—but there was no one there. He was certain he’d heard someone come in. Could whoever it was have already gone down the hall to the bedroom?

  There was a burst of light from the shadowed hallway, like the last flare from a bulb as it burns out. But when Glandier looked down the hallway, again there was no one there.

  Then, just behind him, in the living room, that same voice called his name: “Bob?”

  He turned around and saw, with a horror tempered by sheer disbelief, the statue of the nigger jockey that belonged at the foot of the Mertons’ driveway. It held aloft its iron lantern so that the light from it was at a level with Glandier’s eyes: a brilliant light, so intense that looking at the statue’s features was like driving straight into the sun. But he could see that its wide crimson lips moved when it repeated his name, and from this he reasoned that he must be hallucinating. Yet he stood there immobilized, unable to act on this awareness as reason further demanded, to return to the kitchen and begin making breakfast, ignoring the presence of this apparition until it faded in the light of day.

  Instead, he asked, “Who are you?” and the statue, as though this question were the permission it had been awaiting, lowered its lantern and lifted the visor of its purple cap to stare at him with its one good eye. From the other eye socket, blood flowed down the statue’s black face, crimson as its painted lips.

  “Berryman’s the name,” said the statue, grinning, “and poetry’s the game. And you must be Bob Glandier, right?”

  Glandier said nothing.

  “Of course that’s who you are. I wouldn’t be visible to anyone else. Ghosts only appear to people wired to receive them. It’s like cable TV. And that’s what I am, sure enough, a ghost who’s come to haunt you, round the clock, twenty-four hours a day. Properly speaking, Bob (do you mind if I call you Bob?), this is a job that your wife should handle, but because of your offspring’s nasty little trick with that ax (to mention only one of his nasty tricks), Giselle is stuck inside that tree until the wound in the bark heals. Like a genie in a bottle with a stuck cork. Who would have thought the afterlife had so many rules, eh? Or, for that matter, who would have thought there was an afterlife?”

  If (Glandier reasoned) it were a hallucination, its only reality would be mental, not physical. So that if he stepped forward and put his hand out where the statue seemed to be, then his hand would pass right through it. Wouldn’t it?

  “I doubt,” said the statue, “that you’ve ever read Thomas Lovell Beddoes, a wonderful and much undervalued poet of the early nineteenth century. There’s a scene in Death’s Jest Book, his immensely long, often silly, but more often sublime closet drama, that is very apropos to our situation. The Duke, who has murdered Wolfram, sees his ghost and starts to rant:

  “ ‘Lie of my eyes, begone! Art thou not dead?

  Are not the worms, that ate thy marrow, dead?

  What dost thou here, thou wretched goblin fool?

  Think’st thou, I fear thee? Thou man-mocking air,

  Thou art not truer than a mirror’s image,

  Nor half so lasting. Back again to coffin,

  Thou baffled idiot spectre, or haunt cradles:

  Or stay, and I’ll laugh at thee.’

  “It’s wonderful fustian, and you must forgive me for taking what ought by right to be your lines. In the fullness of time, perhaps, we’ll be able to do the scene together. For, like Wolfram in the play, I don’t mean to go away.”

  “You’re not real,” Glandier insisted. “None of this is real.”

  “To which objection,” said the statue, “the ghostly Wolfram replied: ‘Is this thin air, that thrusts thy sword away?’ That’s to say: Touch me if you don’t believe I’m real. Take the Doubting Thomas finger test.” To illustrate, the statue stuck its forefinger into its bleeding eye socket and drew it out, dripping. “This, for instance, is the highest quality Velva-Chrome Chinese Red Enamel.” The statue offered its finger for Glandier’s closer inspection. When he backed away, the statue went to the recliner, on which Glandier had draped the rumpled jacket of his gray pinstripe suit. It scrawled a large M on the back of the jacket. “There,” it said with satisfaction, wiping its finger on its yellow riding breeches. “Just like the movie.”

  “Get out of here,” Glandier said, without notable conviction.

  The statue grinned at him; then, fluttering three fingers over its lower lip, made a burbling sound.

  Glandier closed his eyes.

  The statue said, “Gibber, gibber? No? Still no response? Then how about some poltergeistry?”

  Glandier opened his eyes in time to see the statue toss toward him a bulb it had unscrewed from the lowest of the lamps on the lamp pole. “Catch!” it shouted, as Glandier lurched for it. He was too slow, and the bulb shattered at his feet.

  “That is just a sample of what it’s going to be like to be haunted, just a sliver of the whole big chee
se. Some of the effects, admittedly, are only stage magic. Like this.” The statue adjusted a knob on the base of the lantern, and the light within flared to an eye-searing, furnacelike brightness. “But, as witness that former light bulb, some of my tricks pass well beyond the subjective. One idea I want to try out right away is to see what I can do with the plumbing. I was never much of a handyman along those lines in my own lifetime, but sabotage is always easier than fixing. Of Sleep’s two gates you may be sure that you shall pass through neither.”

  Keeping his eyes warily on the statue and his back to the wall, Glandier began to edge around the room.

  “But there is one way you can persuade me to leave off. Two ways, in fact. Do you want to know how?”

  “How?” said Glandier, trying not to look at the ax where it leaned against the doorjamb, trying not to think of it for fear his thoughts could be read.

  “The first way, and the one I recommend, is to follow my own example of some years past: kill yourself. I jumped off the bridge by the U, but there’s no need to exert yourself to that degree. Just roll down the garage door, start the motor, and breathe deeply. Or if that seems not quite manly, try the Hemingway technique, a shotgun blast into the soft palate. Guaranteed to be effective. However, you may share Hamlet’s scruples about the afterlife and not want to head off for undiscovered countries—in which case I can also be persuaded to leave by the simple expedient of confession. There’s the phone. Just dial nine-one-one, ask for the police, and ease your soul. Those are your alternatives. Now what do you say?”

  “What I say,” said Glandier, bending sideways to grasp the handle of the ax, “is you can go to hell!”

  As Glandier advanced across the living room, the statue held up its lantern as though to fend him off. Squinting against the lantern’s glare, Glandier swung the ax with all the strength in his back and shoulders. There was a satisfying whack of connection. The lantern fell to the carpet. Crimson gouts spurted from the stump of the statue’s arm.