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 u
p 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.
He swayed. He toppled.
No, he cried silently. Free yourself. Look! See!
And at last he turned his head to look up and up at darkness shelved on darkness.
“Thing...?” he whispered. “Are you there?”
The house shifted like an immense scale, under his weight
High in the midnight air a black flag, a dark banner furled, unfurled its funeral skirts, its whispering crepe. Outside, he thought, remember! it is a spring day. Rain tapped the door behind him, quietly.
“Now,” he whispered.
And balanced between the cold, sweating stairwell walls, he began to climb.
“I’m at the fourth step,” he whispered.
“Now I’m at the fifth…”
“Sixth! You hear, up there?”
Silence. Darkness.
Christ! he thought, run, jump, fell out in the rain, the light—!
No!
“Seventh! Eighth.”
The hearts throbbed under his arms, between his legs.
“Tenth—”
His voice trembled. He took a deep breath and—
Laughed! God, yes! Laughed!
It was like smashing glass. His fear shattered, fell away.
“Eleven!” he cried. “Twelve!” he shouted. “Thirteen!!” he hooted. “Damn you! Hell, oh God, hell, yes, hell! And fourteen!”
Why hadn’t he thought of this before, age six? Just leap up, shouting laughs, to kill that Thing forever!?
“Fifteen!” he snorted, and almost brayed with delight.
A final wondrous jump.
“Sixteen!”
He landed. He could not stop laughing.
He thrust his fist straight out in the solid dark cold air. The laughter froze, his shout choked in his throat. He sucked in winter night.
Why? a child’s voice echoed from far off below in another time. Why am I being punished? What have I done?
His heart stopped, then let go. His groin convulsed. A gunshot of scalding water burst forth to stream hot and shocking down his legs.
“No!” he shrieked.
For his fingers had touched something…
It was the Thing at the top of the stairs.
It was wondering where he had been.
It had been waiting all these long years....
For him to come home.
Colonel Stonesteel’s Genuine Home-made Truly Egyptian Mummy
That was the autumn they found the genuine Egyptian mummy out past Loon Lake.
How the mummy got there, and how long it had been there, no one knew. But there it was, all wrapped up in its creosote rags, looking a bit spoiled by time, and just waiting to be found.
The day before, it was just another autumn day with the trees blazing and letting down their burnt-looking leaves and a sharp smell of pepper in the air when Charlie Flagstaff, aged twelve, stepped out and stood in the middle of a pretty empty street, hoping for something big and special and exciting to happen.
“Okay,” said Charlie to the sky, the horizon, the whole world. “I’m waiting. Come on!”
Nothing happened. So Charlie kicked the leaves ahead of him across town until he came to the tallest house on the greatest street, the house where everyone in Green Town came with troubles. Charlie scowled and fidgeted. He had troubles, all right, but just couldn’t lay his hand on their shape or size. So he shut his eyes and just yelled at the big house windows:
“Colonel Stonesteel!”
The front door flashed open, as if the old man had been waiting there, like Charlie, for something incredible to happen.
“Charlie,” called Colonel Stonesteel, “you’re old enough to rap. What is there about boys makes them shout around houses? Try again.”
The door shut.
Charlie sighed, walked up, knocked softly.
“Charlie Flagstaff, is that you?” The door opened again, the colonel squinted out and down. “I thought I told you to yell around the house!”
“Heck,” sighed Charlie, in despair.
“Look at that weather. Hell’s bells!” The colonel strode forth to hone his fine hatchet nose on the cool wind. “Don’t you love autumn, boy? Fine, fine day! Bight?”
He turned to look down into the boy’s pale face.
“Why, son, you look as if your last friend left and your dog died. What’s wrong? School starts next week?”
“Yep.”
“H
alloween not coming fast enough?”
“Still six weeks off. Might as well be a year. You ever notice, colonel....” The boy heaved an even greater sigh, staring out at the autumn town. “Not much ever happens around here?”
“Why, it’s Labor Day tomorrow, big parade, seven cars, the mayor, maybe fireworks—er.” The colonel came to a dead stop, not impressed with his grocery list. “How old are you, Charlie?”
“Thirteen, almost.”
“Things do tend to run down, come thirteen.” The colonel rolled his eyes inward on the rickety data inside his skull. “Come to a dead halt when you’re fourteen. Might as well die, sixteen. End of the world, seventeen. Things only start up again, come twenty or beyond. Meanwhile, Charlie, what do we do to survive until noon this very morn before Labor Day?”
“If anyone knows, it’s you, colonel,” said Charlie.
“Charlie,” said the old man, flinching from the boy’s clear stare, “I can move politicians big as prize hogs, shake the Town Hall skeletons, make locomotives run backward uphill. But small boys on long autumn weekends, glue in their head, and a bad case of Desperate Empties? Well…”
Colonel Stonesteel eyed the clouds, gauged the future.
“Charlie,” he said, at last. “I am moved by your condition, touched by your lying there on the railroad tracks waiting for a train that will never come. How’s this? I’ll bet you six Baby Ruth candy bars against your mowing my lawn, that Green Town, upper Illinois, population five thousand sixty-two people, one thousand dogs, will be changed forever, changed for the best, by God, sometime in the next miraculous twenty-four hours. That sound good? A bet?”
“Gosh!” Charlie, riven, seized the old man’s hand and pumped it. “A bet! Colonel Stonesteel, I knew you could do it!”
“It ain’t done yet, son. But look there. The town’s the Bed Sea. I order it to part. Gangway!”
The colonel marched, Charlie ran, into the house. “Here we are, Charles, the junkyard or the grave yard. Which?” The colonel sniffed at one door leading down to raw basement earth, another leading up to dry timber attic.
“Well—”
The attic ached with a sudden flood of wind, like an old man dying in his sleep. The colonel yanked the door wide on autumn whispers, high storms trapped and shivering in the beams.