The Toynbee Convector (26 page)

Her husband looked at the place she occupied in the dark, and couldn’t think of anything good enough to say, so he just swore, groaned, and sank down into sleeping.

Not half an hour later, she grabbed his elbow and turned him so she could whisper swiftly, fearfully, into one of his ears, like a person calling into a cave: “Walter!” she cried. “Wake up, wake up!” She intended doing this all night, if need be, to spoil his superior kind of slumber.

He struggled with her. “What’s wrong?”

“Mr. White!l Mr. White! He’s starting to haunt us!”

“Oh, go to sleep!”

“I’m not fibbing! Listen to him!”

The Oklahoma man listened. From under the linoleum, sounding about six feet or so down, muffled, came a man’s sorrowful talking. Not a word came through clearly, just a sort of sad mourning.

The Oklahoma man sat up in bed. Feeling his movement, Leota hissed, “You heard, you heard?” excitedly. The Oklahoma man put his feet on the cold linoleum. The voice below changed into a falsetto. Leota began to sob. “Shut up, so I can hear,” demanded her husband, angrily. Then, in the heart-beating quiet, he bent his ear to the floor and Leota cried, “Don’t tip over the flowers!” and he cried, “Shut up!” and again listened, tensed. Then he spat out an oath and rolled back under the covers. “It’s only the man downstairs,” he muttered.

“That’s what I mean. Mr. White!”

“No, not Mr. White. We’re on the second floor of an apartment house, and we got neighbors down under. Listen.” The falsetto downstairs talked. “That’s the man’s wife. She’s probably telling him not to look at another man’s wife! Both of them probably drunk.”

“You’re lying!” insisted Leota. “Acting brave when you’re really trembling fit to shake the bed down. It’s a haunt, I tell you, and he’s talking in voices, like Gran’ma Hanlon used to do, rising up in her church pew and making queer tongues all mixed, like a black man, an Irishman, two women, and tree frogs, caught in her crawl That dead man, Mr. White, hates us for moving in with him tonight, I tell you! Listen!”

As tf to back her up, the voices downstairs talked louder. The Oklahoma man lay on his elbows, shaking his head hopelessly, wanting to laugh, but too tired.

Something crashed.

“He’s stirring in his coffin!” shrieked Leota. “He’s mad! We got to move outa here, Walter, or well be found dead tomorrow!”

More crashes, more bangs, more voices. Then, silence. Followed by a movement of feet in the air over their heads.

Leota whimpered. “He’s free of his tomb! Forced his way out and he’s tramping the air over our heads!”

By this time, the Oklahoma man had his clothing on. Beside the bed, he put on his boots. “This building’s three floors high,” he said, tucking in his shirt “We got neighbors overhead who just come home.” To Leota’s weeping he had this to say, “Come on. I’m taking you upstairs to meet them people. That’ll prove who they are. Then we’ll walk downstairs to the first floor and talk to that drunkard and his wife. Get up, Leota.”

Someone knocked on the door.

Leota squealed and rolled over and over, making a quilted mummy of herself. “He’s in his tomb again, rapping to get out!”

The Oklahoma man switched on the lights and unlocked the door. A very jubilant little man in a dark suit, with wild blue eyes, wrinkles, gray hair, and thick glasses danced in.

“Sorry, sorry,” declared the little man. “I’m Mr. Whetmore. I went away. Now I’m back. I’ve had the most astonishing stroke of luck. Yes, I have. Is my tombstone still here?” He looked at the stone a moment before he saw it “Ah, yes, yes, it is! Oh, hello.” He saw Leota peering from many layers of blanket. “I’ve some men with a roller-truck, and, if you don’t mind, well move the tombstone out of here, this very moment. It’ll only take a minute.”

The husband laughed with gratitude. “Glad to get rid of the damned thing. Wheel her out!”

Mr. Whetmore directed two brawny workmen into the room. He was almost breathless with anticipation. “The most amazing thing. This morning I was lost, beaten, dejected—but a miracle happened.” The tombstone was loaded onto a small coaster truck. “Just an hour ago, I heard, by chance, of a Mr. White who had just died of pneumonia. A Mr. White, mind you, who spells his name with an I instead of a Y. I have just contacted his wife, and she is delighted that the stone is all prepared. And Mr. White not cold more than sixty minutes, and spelling his name with an I, just think of it. Oh, I’m so happy!”

The tombstone, on its truck, rolled from the room, while Mr. Whetmore and the Oklahoma man laughed, shook hands, and Leota watched with suspicion as the commotion came to an end. “Well, that’s now all over,” grinned her husband as he closed the door on Mr. Whetmore, and began throwing the canned flowers into the sink and dropping the tin cans into a waste-basket. In the dark, he climbed into bed again, oblivious to her deep and solemn silence. She said not a word for a long while, but just lay there, alone-feeling. She felt him adjust the blankets with a sigh. “Now we can sleep. The damn old thing’s took away. It’s only ten thirty. Plenty of time for sleep.” How he enjoyed spoiling her fun.

Leota was about to speak when a rapping came from down below again. “There! There!” she Cried, triumphantly, holding her husband. “There it is again, the noises, like I said. Hear them!”

Her husband knotted his fists and clenched his teeth. “How many times must I explain. Do I have to kick you in the head to make you understand, woman! Let me alone. There’s nothing—”’

“Listen, listen, oh, listen,” she begged in a whisper.

They listened in the square darkness.

A rapping on a door came from downstairs.

A door opened. Muffled and distant and faint, a woman’s voice said, sadly, “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Whetmore.”

And deep down in the darkness underneath the suddenly shivering bed of Leota and her Oklahoma husband, Mr. Whetmore’s voice replied: “Good evening again, Mrs. White. Here. I brought the stone.”

The Thing at the Top of the Stairs

He was between trains.

He had got off in Chicago only to find that there was a four-hour waitover.

He thought about heading for the museum; the Renoirs and Monets had always held his eyes and touched his mind. But he was restless. The taxicab line outside the station made him blink.

Why not? he thought, grab a cab and taxi thirty miles north, spend an hour in his old hometown, then bid it farewell for the second time in his life, and ease back south to train out for New York, happier and perhaps wiser?

Much money for a few hours’ whim, but what the hell. He opened a cab door, slung his suitcase in, and said:

“Green Town and return!”

The driver broke into a splendid smile and flipped the meter-flag, even as Emil Cramer leaped into the back seat and slammed the door.

Green Town, he thought, and—

What?

My God, he thought, what made me remember that on a fine spring afternoon?

And they drove north, with clouds that followed, to stop on Green Town’s Main Street at three o’clock. He got out, gave the taxi driver fifty dollars as security, told him to wait, and looked up.

The marquee on the old Genesee Theater in blood red letters, said:
TWO CHILLERS. MANIAC HOUSE, DOCTORDEATH. COME IN. BUT DON’T TRY TO LEAVE.

No, no, thought Cramer. The Phantom was better. When I was six, all he had to do was stiffen, whirl, gape, and point down into the camera with his ghastly face. That
was
terror!

I wonder, he thought, was it the Phantom then, plus the Hunchback, plus the Bat that made all of my childhood nights miserable?

And, walking through the town, he gave a quiet laugh of remembrance…

How his mother would give him a look over the morning cornflakes: What
happened
during the night? Did you see it? Was it
there
, up in the
dark
? How tall, what color? How did you manage not to scream this time, to wake your father: what,
what
?

While his father, from around the cliff of his newspaper, eyed them both, and glanced at the leather strop hung near the kitchen washstand, itching to be used.

And he, Emil Cramer, six years old, would sit there, remembering the stabbing pain in his small crayfish loins if he did not make it upstairs in time, past the Monster Beast lurking in the attic midnight of the house, shrieking at the last instant to fall back down like a panicked dog or scorched cat, to lie crushed and blind at the bottom of the stairs, wailing:

Why? Why is it there? Why am I being punished? What have I done?

And crawling, creeping away in the dark hall to fumble back to bed and lie in agonies of bursting fluid, praying for dawn, when the Thing might stop waiting for him and sift into the stained wallpaper or suck into the cracks under the attic door.

Once he had tried to hide a chamberpot under the bed. Discovered, it was thrown and shattered. Once, he had run water in the kitchen sink, and tried to use it, but his father’s radio ears, tuned, heard, and he rose in a shouting fury.

Yes, yes, he said, and he walked through the town on a day becoming storm colored. He reached the street on which he had once lived. The sun turned off. The sky was all winter dusk. He gasped.

For a single drop of cold rain struck his nose.

“Lord!” he laughed. “There it is. My house!”

And it was empty and a for sale sign stood out by the sidewalk.

There was the white clapboard front, with a large porch to one side and a smaller one out front. There was the front door and, beyond, the parlor where he had lain on the foldout bed with his brother, sweating the night hours, as everyone else slept and dreamed. And to the right, the dining room and the door that led to the hall and the stairs that moved up into eternal night.

He moved up the walk toward the side porch door.

The Thing, now, what shape had it been, and color and size? Did it have a smoking face, and grotto teeth and hellfire-burning Baskerville eyes? Did it ever whisper or murmur or moan—?

He shook his head.

After all, the Thing had never really existed, had it?

Which was exactly why his father’s teeth had splintered every time he stared at his gutless wonder of a son! Couldn’t the child see that the hall was empty,
empty
!? Didn’t the damned boy know that it was his own night mare movie machine, locked in his head, that flashed those snowfalls of dread up through the night to melt on the terrible air?

Thump-
whack
! His father’s knuckles cracked his brow to exorcise the ghost. Whack-
thump
!

Emil Cramer snapped his eyes wide, surprised to find he had shut them. He stepped up on the small porch.

He touched the doorknob.

My God! he thought

For the door, unlocked, was drifting quietly open.

The house and the dark hall lay empty and waiting.

He pushed. The door drifted further in, with the merest sigh of its hinges.

The same night that had hung there like funeral-parlor curtains, still filled the coffin-narrow hall. It smelled with rains from other years, and was filled with twilights that had come to visit and never gone away....

He stepped in.

Instantly, outside, rain fell. The downpour shut off the world. The downpour drenched the porch floorboards and drowned his breathing.

He took another step into complete night.

No light burned at the far end of the hall, three steps up—

Yes
! That had been the problem!

To save money, the damned bulb was
never
left burning!

In order to scare the Thing off, you had to run, leap up, grab the chain and yank the light on!

So, blind and battering walls, you jumped. But could
never find the chain
!

Don’t look up! you thought. If you see
It
, and it sees You! No. No!

But then your head jerked. You looked. You screamed!

For the dark Thing was lurching out on the air to slam flat down like a tomb lid on your scream!

“Anyone
home
...?” he called, softly.

A damp wind blew from above. A smell of cellar earths and attic dusts touched his cheeks.

“Ready or not,” he whispered. “Here I come.”

Behind him, slowly, softly, the front door drifted, hushed, and slid itself
shut
.

He froze. Then he forced himself to take another step and another.

And, Christ! it seemed he felt himself... shrinking. Melting an inch at a time, sinking into smallness, even as the flesh on his face diminished, and his suit and shoes became too large

What am I
doing
here? he thought. What do I
need
?

Answers. Yes. That was it.
Answers
.

His right shoe touched....

The bottom of the stairs.

He gasped. His foot jerked back. Then, slowly, he forced it to touch the step again.

Easy. Just don’t look up, he thought.

Fool! he thought, that’s why you’re here. The stairs. And the top of the stairs. That’s
it
!

Now...

Very quietly, he lifted his head. To stare at the dark light bulb sunk in its dead white socket, six feet above his head.

It was as far off as the moon.

His fingers twitched.

Somewhere in the walls of the house, his mother turned in her sleep, his brother lay strewn in pale winding sheets, his father stopped up his snores to—
listen
.

Quick! Before he
wakes
. Jump!

With a terrible grunt he flung himself up. His foot struck the third step. His hand seized out to yank the light-chain
there
.
Yank
! And there
again
.

Dead! Oh, Christ. No light. Dead! Like all the lost years.

The chain snaked from his fingers. His hand fell.

Night. Dark.

Outside, cold rain fell behind a shut mine-door.

He blinked his eyes open, shut, open, shut, as if the blink might yank the chain, pull the light
on
! His heart banged not only in his chest, but hammered under his arms and in his aching groin.