five-fifteen they slipped on their grotesque false faces, snapped out
all the lights and got their little candles ready. Ten minutes later
they drew the shades, lit their candles and waited breathlessly like
mischievous children.
The minutes dragged, but presently they heard the click of the
self-service elevator down the hall. And then Mr. Apondee's light but
steady tread.
He was, as a matter of fact, slightly late. Work had piled up at the
office and he was more tired than usual.
Opening the door into the tiny vestibule of his apartment, he sighed
with contentment and relief. After hanging up his hat and coat, he
strolled into the living room.
In that impossibly black place eleven luminous, nightmare masks floated
suddenly out at him. They gleamed and flickered with an unearthly light
all their own. The masks were different, but they were all hideous, all
malevolent. Some had huge drooping noses; some, great white rubbery
lips, grinning with insane merriment; some had tiny glittering eyes and
fearful pink mouths.
For one terrible moment Mr. Apondee stood frozen and speechless. Then
he began to scream. He screamed and kept on screaming and shouts of
"Surprise!" died in eleven throats which were in turn suddenly stricken
silent.
Candles were dropped, and some of the masks, but too late. Mr. Apondee
plunged like a maddened thing through the darkened room. He headed for
the only glimmer of natural light which was visible--a window.
He hurled himself through it, shade and all, and he was still screaming
when he struck the cement walk, seven stories below.
THE VISITOR IN THE VAULT
Newling hated the vault. Hated its shadows, its silence, its cold stale
air.
But this morning there could be no escape. Preston Haver's books had
been sorted and classified, and Mr. Twais, the head librarian, had
given instructions that some of the most valuable of the lot were to be
stored in the locked basement vault.
Running his hand through his thinning hair, Newling pushed the book
truck into the staff elevator. Mrs. Joy, the desk attendant, watched
him with an abstracted expression. There was no one else in sight. Mr.
Twais was in his private office, reading the morning mail.
The elevator glided to a smooth stop and Newling rolled out the truck.
Fretting with irritation, he started down the long, dimly-lighted
corridor which led to the locked vault.
Preston Haver always had been a nuisance. Always poking and prying
around the library, looking for some outlandish book which no one
had ever heard of. He had given Newling many a start as he shuffled
suddenly into sight around a book shelf, grinning and nodding like an
overgrown gnome.
Some weeks before he had donated and shipped his entire private book
collection to the library. Mr. Twais had been ecstatic, but Newling
considered the whole business a bother.
Reaching the far end of the corridor, he stopped before the massive
locked door of the vault, twirled the shiny dials until he heard the
familiar faint click, and then pushed ajar the heavy metal door.
Frowning, he rolled the truck inside. The atmosphere of the vault this
morning seemed even more oppressive than usual. It seemed far colder
than it ordinarily was. Newling shivered as he brought the truck to a
stop and scanned the shelves for a suitable spot for the books.
Most of them were vellum-bound incunabula, written in Latin and
embellished with archaic designs. Remembering Preston Haver's
yellow-toothed smile and bony hands, Newling lifted the books with
distaste.
He began placing them on shelves as rapidly as he could, occasionally
glancing behind him into the deeper shadows of the vault. The lighting
was far from adequate, and although Mr. Twais had promised that
something would be done, somehow nothing ever was.
Newling filled one shelf and started another. He was cold in spite of
his hurried movements. He glanced toward the vault door, to make sure
that it was still open. More than once he had had nightmares about
being shut up in the vault.
The book truck was nearly empty, and he was beginning to feel somewhat
relieved, when he suddenly froze with his arm half outstretched toward
a shelf.
He had heard nothing and seen nothing, but he knew, even before he
turned, that he was no longer alone in the vault.
His heart was hammering and he could feel the cold sweat break out on
his forehead. Mustering his last shred of will power, he forced himself
to turn around.
Weakly, he leaned back against the book shelves. Preston Haver stood
inside the vault door, half in shadow. He looked yellower and bonier
than ever and his gaunt mirthless grin seemed more grotesque.
Nodding and still grinning, he shuffled forward. "I see you're shelving
my books!" His voice was cracked and thin. It sounded to Newling as if
it came from the far end of the corridor.
Newling stammered. "You, you have a fine collection, Mr. Haver. We're
putting the--the best ones--here in the vault."
Preston Haver's ghastly grin widened. His long yellow eye-teeth looked
like fangs, Newling thought.
He peered at the librarian with his reddish eyes. "There's just
one"--his eyes roved the shelves--"one that I sent by mistake. I want
it back."
Newling nodded. "Of course. Could you--ah--describe it, sir?"
The visitor stared at him, with a kind of enigmatic smirk. "A small
book, with a soft cover. I'm sure you'd have it here. It's rare--oh,
very rare!"
He threw back his head and laughed, while Newling listened in horrified
fascination. He had never heard Preston Haver laugh before. He hoped he
never did again.
Regaining some measure of composure, Newling turned to the shelves
and began a systematic scrutiny. He felt thoroughly chilled, chilled
to the very marrow. Of course it was imagination, but Preston Haver's
presence seemed to have immeasurably intensified the oppressive clammy
atmosphere of the vault.
Newling sighed with relief when he spotted the book.
His unwelcome visitor literally snatched it out of his hand, a quick
gleam of triumph in his glowing eyes. He chuckled with glee. Newling
recoiled from his evil grin.
Preston Haver peered up at him with an air of confidence which he found
utterly repellent.
"This cover," he said, stroking it fondly with his bony hand. "Human
skin!"
Newling stared at it, horrified. It was a pale, grey-yellow, mottled
looking.
"Human skin!" his visitor hissed again.
Newling wiped the perspiration from his face. He felt weak and he
suddenly realized that he was actually trembling.
"I'm sure it's--quite a treasure," he managed.
Preston Haver nodded. "Quite a treasure! You see," he went on, again
with that odd air of confidence which Newling found revolting, "I'm
starting on a trip--a long trip--and I couldn't leave without this
book!"
Newling's voice was scarcely a whisper. "I'm glad you, we, found it."
His visitor moved toward the vault door. Just before reaching it, he
turned, and his red eyes sought out the librarian's. His face contorted
into one last, lingering malignant grin and then he was gone.
Newling leaned against the shelves for a full five minutes before he
summoned up enough strength to finish emptying the book truck.
Still shaking, he rolled it out of the vault, slammed the great door,
automatically twirled the dials and started back down the corridor.
He was cold and weak. He had scarcely strength enough to slide open the
elevator doors.
He stepped out of the elevator into the large open-shelf room of the
library with a feeling of indescribable relief. He felt as if he had
ascended from a tomb.
Mr. Twais, the head librarian, was coming down the aisle. He stopped
when he came abreast of Newling. He was about to say something, but at
the sight of Newling's face, his mouth fell open.
"What is it, man?" he exclaimed. "You look positively shaken!"
"Oh--nothing," Newling whispered. "I'll be all right. Just--the air--in
the vault. I guess I felt a trifle faint."
Mr. Twais seemed satisfied. He nodded. "You'd better go in the lounge
and rest for a few minutes. Oh, by the way, have you heard the news?"
Newling shook his head.
Mr. Twais' expression became properly sober. "Preston Haver, our
generous benefactor, died during the night."
IN THE VERY STONES
"It is inconceivable to me," wrote my psychic-investigator friend,
Lucius Leffing, "that any person of reasonable perception and
sensitivity could pass a long period of his life in a specific
habitation without leaving something of himself, impregnated as it
were, in the very stones, wood and mortar of the place."
How vividly I recalled this statement later on! But let me start at the
beginning.
I had been away from New Haven for many years and I returned in a
rather weary mood of reminiscence and regret. My health was not good.
The rheumatic fever of my childhood had finally damaged my heart. In
addition, I was having eye trouble. The optic nerves were unaccountably
inflamed; strong light was painful to me. In dim or subdued light,
however, I could see remarkably well, so well in fact that I began to
feel that my vision was becoming abnormal.
After engaging a room in one of the few remaining residential areas
of the city which had not been engulfed in the spreading contagion of
human and social degeneration, I began to take long, rambling walks
about the town. I usually waited for a day when the sun was hidden;
when the sky was overcast and the light was grey rather than gold, my
eyes stopped throbbing and I could stroll in relative peace.
The city had changed remarkably. At times I scarcely knew where I was.
Acres of familiar buildings had been swept away. Remembered streets had
vanished. Great new structures, efficient but ugly, rose on every side.
New highways looped and slashed in every direction. In bewilderment I
frequently retreated to the still unseized central Common, or Green as
it is called. (I understood, however, that even this last leafy refuge
was under siege; various interests were agitating to cover the grass
with cement in order to create a gigantic pay-toll parking lot.)
One afternoon in late October when a threat of rain hung in the air, I
started out on a walk. The lack of sun rested my eyes; the chill air
somehow soothed me. For an hour or so I strolled aimlessly. On a sudden
whim I decided to visit a city area which I had so far neglected. I
had lived in this section as a very young child--over forty years
ago. Although I was scarcely more than three when the family moved, I
retained vivid memories of the neighborhood and of the specific house
itself.
The house was a two-story, red-brick structure, solidly built, located
at 1248 State Street. When I lived there, a big elm tree stood in
front of the house. In the rear, a large empty lot which stretched
to the adjacent street, Cedar Hill Avenue, made an ideal playground.
Subsequently the elm tree was cut down, the lot was nearly filled by a
cheap tenement-type building and the entire neighborhood declined.
As I approached the old area, I was appalled at the appearance of
things. Some houses had been torn down; others stood vacant, displaying
smashed windows, broken doors and collapsed verandas. On one block
every house was empty and partially wrecked. I was amazed and
disconcerted. I had not seen such desolation since war days.
Under those grey October skies, with a thin mist already starting to
fall, it was the bleakest scene imaginable. I experienced an intense
oppression of spirits, and as I continued to walk along those strangely
deserted streets, my mood of dejection only deepened.
I finally met a pedestrian, muffled already in a winter overcoat. He
squinted at me suspiciously when I asked him why so many of the houses
stood smashed and empty. "Route 91," he muttered, hurrying away.
Although I had learned there was indeed a rational explanation for the
devastation, I felt no better. I was firmly convinced that a slight
alteration on the highway blueprints could have carried the new road
across empty marsh flats, only a few miles away. The cost of fill
would have been a fraction of that expended on extensive condemnation
proceedings.
I fully expected that the brick house of my early childhood lay already
in ruins. I felt a thin exultation at finding it still standing. I say
"thin" because of course I knew it was doomed. Already its windows were
broken, its door sagged in and part of its front hedge had been ground
away by truck or bulldozer.
As I stood regarding it, remembering clearly episodes of over forty
years past, I reflected on the rootlessness which marks the average
city denizen. By choice, or more likely necessity, he moves from one
house to another. He has no anchor, nothing of continuity. When he
visits his old neighborhood, he may find that his former house has
vanished. The site of it may be occupied by a city-supported "project"
for permanent welfare cases, or by a cinder-block garage, or by a
barren parking lot. The house, the trees, the back yard, the very
curbstones and sidewalks may be gone.
The returner will experience a haunting sense of loss, a sense of
bewilderment, of chaos. He may finally begin to feel that he is even
losing his own identity, that, in fact, he has no identity. He will
feel lost in time, without either a future or a past. There will be
nothing he can go back to and nothing of permanence that he can foresee
in an uncertain future.
Isolated, fugacious, essentially a drifter, he will experience a
loneliness of spirit which nothing can assuage. Thousands of his kind
inhabit the modern city, gnawed by a sense of their own rootlessness,
hungering in vain for a home, a habitation which partakes of the flavor
of time, a continuing and cherished spot of earth which links their own
past with some kind of hopeful future.
With these depressing thoughts in mind, I stood before the lost red
brick house of my childhood. I had an impulse to enter, but I supposed
it was unsafe and very probably forbidden.
Dusk fell; the mist grew heavier; and still I lingered in that area.
Moving away from the doomed house I had known, I wandered along those
desolate streets, peering through cracked windows, through sagging
doors which never again would open to a friendly hand.
In some windows, frayed, blackened curtains, left hanging in the
confusion of forced removal, fluttered in the cold October wind. Odd
bits of broken furniture, dishes and ornaments lay scattered about.
Entire lifetimes had been passed in some of these houses; now they
stood as empty shells, awaiting absolute and final destruction.
The entire area seemed deserted, silent, drained of all life. Even the
usual city noises were strangely muffled and distant.
I roamed restlessly, numbed by the desolation which surrounded me, yet
perversely unwilling to leave. The mist thickened and full darkness
fell and I remained.
In spite of the darkness I could see remarkably well. I linked this
abnormal ability with my eyes' unusual sensitivity to strong light; I
felt that both conditions stemmed from the inflamed state of the optic
nerves, an affliction I have already mentioned.
I passed an alley, glittering strangely with bits of scattered window
glass, and stood surveying an adjacent house which leaned crazily with
a collapsed roof. It was a small white frame house, inexpensively
built, and yet I saw that someone had once tended it carefully. The
paint was bright; the little mailbox looked as if it had been scrubbed;
and the trampled remains of a once-neat garden surrounded the place.
As, musing, I stared at this wrecked house through the growing mist,
I saw a face at one of the two front ground-floor windows. It was
the face of an old man, white, mournful, filled with an ineffable
desolation.
I gazed at it in astonishment. My first thought was that an elderly
vagrant had crept into the wreckage of the white house in order to pass
the night. The dampness, probably, made his old bones ache.
The face continued to look out at me; I walked away with some
uneasiness. I shivered, blaming it on the cold mist.
I had gone less than a half block when I saw the woman. Enormously fat,
she sat in a wicker chair on the half-demolished veranda of a two-story
house. She wore very thick-lensed glasses which seemed to reflect light
from some hidden source. There was no moon, certainly, and I saw no
artificial lights nearby.
I was startled, but I supposed that a few people must still be clinging
illegally to old homes in the area, pending final arrangements for the
occupancy of a new residence.
Some impulse urged me to hurry past, to move straight ahead without
looking aside. Stubbornly, however, and against my own best judgement,
I refused.
Instead, I paused, cleared my throat and spoke. "Good evening," I said.
The fat woman did not reply; she did not seem to have heard me.
Possibly, I reasoned, in addition to having weak eyes, she was also
hard of hearing.
I moved a few steps up the front walk and nodded. "Good evening," I
repeated, loudly.
Then I blinked in astonishment. The wicker chair was empty! I stopped
dead and stared at it. Momentarily I had glanced down at the walk to
make sure that I would not stumble over debris; in those scant seconds
the fat woman must have vacated her chair and slipped inside.
I marveled. For one of her bulk, she moved with amazing agility.
Turning, I went back to the sidewalk and started on. I supposed
that the woman was self-conscious about her continued occupancy in
the condemned house and had gone inside to avoid any necessity of
discussing it with a stranger.
As I walked away, I glanced back. Once again I saw light glitter on
those thick-lensed glasses; the fat woman was back in her wicker chair.
Something more than the swirling mist made me shudder. Frowning, I
hurried on. It was late, I told myself, and I had better leave these
ruined, mist-shrouded streets and go home to a good cup of hot tea.
I walked rapidly, but I could not resist looking at the vacant houses I
passed.
Suddenly I stopped. My heart began pounding. An icy gush of fear made
my scalp tingle. Wide-eyed, mouth agape, I gazed through that tenuous
wall of mist and felt that reason and sanity were leaving me.
Nearly half of those smashed and deserted houses all at once were
occupied. I saw pale sad faces peering from a dozen different windows.
Dim, mist-circled figures sat on some of the porches. An old man,
twisted with some arthritic malady, worked feebly in a tiny front
garden. A middle-aged woman, white as death, but with a kind of
hopeless fury stamped on her face, stood glaring near a broken gate.
Worse than these were other sights. I saw a rocker moving to-and-fro
on a porch, although there was no one in it. I saw a claw-like hand,
tapering to a vague sleeve which in turn raveled away to nothingness,
clutching the brick side of a building. In the rear garden of a
half-destroyed house I glimpsed what appeared to be the disembodied
head of a woman in a big straw hat drifting slowly above the matted
tangle of a neglected flower plot.
I felt the clutch of near madness. I no longer had any faint desire
to linger and look. Flight, immediate and imperative, became my only
object.
I rushed wildly through those forsaken, yet-not-forsaken streets
with fear like a hound at my heels. I ran till my heart thumped and
dizziness overcame me. At last, away from that accursed area of peering
white faces, of clinging mist and strange pregnant silence, I collapsed
in a doorway.
Hours afterward I reached home and fell into bed. For days I was ill.
My heart had been strained anew and in addition I manifested pleuritic
symptoms. As I lay in bed, I brooded over my weird experience on that
street of silent houses. I told myself that my eyes, inflamed and
super-sensitive, had played tricks on me, that the drifting fog plus my
own imagination had been at fault.
But weeks later when I related my adventure to my psychic-investigator
friend, Lucius Leffing, he shook his head at my explanations.
"I am firmly convinced," he told me, "that neither your inflamed eyes
nor your imagination conjured up the phantoms which you describe.
"As I wrote you recently, it is inconceivable to me that any person of
reasonable perception and sensitivity could pass a long period of his
life in a specific habitation without leaving something of himself,
impregnated as it were, in the very stones, wood and mortar of the
place.
"What you saw were the psychic residues of the poor vanished souls
who, in the aggregate, had spent hundreds of years in those condemned
houses. Their psychic remnants were still clinging to the only earthly
anchors that remained, and already, as you relate, some of them had
dwindled and faded to mere detached fragments."
He shook his head. "Poor souls!"