‘Them things happen alla time,’ said Mr Britz, the garage mechanic, chewing. ‘Ever peek inna Missing People Bureau file? It’s that long.’ He illustrated. ‘Can’t tell what happens to most of ’em.’
‘Anyone want more dressing?’ Grandma ladled liberal portions from the chicken’s interior. Douglas watched, thinking about how that chicken had had two kinds of guts—God-made and Man-made.
Well, how about three kinds of guts?
Eh?
Why not?
Conversation continued about the mysterious death of so-and-so, and, oh, yes, remember a week ago, Marion Barsumian died of heart failure, but maybe that didn’t connect up? or did it? you’re crazy! forget it, why talk about it at the dinner table? So.
‘Never can tell,’ said Mr Britz. ‘Maybe we got a vampire in town.’
Mr Koberman stopped eating.
‘In the year 1927?’ said Grandma. ‘A vampire? Oh go on, now.’
‘Sure,’ said Mr Britz. ‘Kill ’em with silver bullets. Anything silver for that matter. Vampires hate silver. I read it in a book somewhere, once. Sure. I did.’
Douglas looked at Mr Koberman who ate with wooden knives and forks and carried only new copper pennies in his pocket.
‘It’s poor judgment,’ said Grandpa, ‘to call anything by a name. We don’t know what a hobgoblin or a vampire or a troll is. Could be lots of things. You can’t heave them into categories with labels and say they’ll act one way or another. That’d be silly. They’re people. People who do things. Yes, that’s the way to put it; people who do things.’
‘Excuse me,’ said Mr Koberman, who got up and went out for his evening walk to work.
The stars, the moon, the wind, the clock ticking, and the chiming of the hours into dawn, the sun rising, and here it was another morning, another day, and Mr Koberman coming along the sidewalk from his night’s work. Douglas stood off like a small mechanism whirring and watching with carefully microscopic eyes.
At noon, Grandma went to the store to buy groceries.
As was his custom every day when Grandma was gone, Douglas yelled outside Mr Koberman’s door for a full three minutes. As usual, there was no response. The silence was horrible.
He ran downstairs, got the pass-key, a silver fork, and the three pieces of colored glass he had saved from the shattered window. He fitted the key to the lock and swung the door slowly open.
The room was in half light, the shades drawn. Mr Koberman lay atop his bedcovers, in slumber clothes, breathing gently, up and down. He didn’t move. His face was motionless.
‘Hello, Mr Koberman!’
The colorless walls echoed the man’s regular breathing.
‘Mr Koberman, hello!’
Bouncing a golf ball, Douglas advanced. He yelled. Still no answer, ‘Mr Koberman!’
Bending over Mr Koberman. Douglas picked the tines of the silver fork in the sleeping man’s face.
Mr Koberman winced. He twisted. He groaned bitterly.
Response. Good. Swell.
Douglas drew a piece of blue glass from his pocket. Looking through the blue glass fragment he found himself in a blue room, in a blue world different from the world he knew. As different as was the red world. Blue furniture, blue bed, blue ceiling and walls, blue wooden eating utensils atop the blue bureau, and the sullen dark blue of Mr Koberman’s face and arms and his blue chest rising, falling. Also…
Mr Koberman’s eyes were wide, staring at him with a hungry darkness.
Douglas fell back, pulled the blue glass from his eyes.
Mr Koberman’s eyes were shut.
Blue glass again—open. Blue glass away—shut. Blue glass again—open. Away—shut. Funny. Douglas experimented, trembling. Through the glass the eyes seemed to peer hungrily, avidly, through Mr Koberman’s closed lids. Without the blue glass they seemed tightly shut.
But it was the rest of Mr Koberman’s body…
Mr Koberman’s bedclothes dissolved off him. The blue glass had something to do with it. Or perhaps it was the clothes themselves, just being on Mr Koberman. Douglas cried out.
He was looking through the wall of Mr Koberman’s stomach, right inside him!
Mr Koberman was solid.
Or, nearly so, anyway.
There were strange shapes and sizes within him.
Douglas must have stood amazed for five minutes, thinking about the blue worlds, the red worlds, the yellow worlds side by side, living together like glass panes around the big white stair window. Side by side, the colored panes, the different worlds; Mr Koberman had said so himself.
So this was why the colored window had been broken.
‘Mr Koberman, wake up!’
No answer.
‘Mr Koberman, where do you work at night? Mr Koberman, where do you work?’
A little breeze stirred the blue window shade.
‘In a red world or a green world or a yellow one, Mr Koberman?’
Over everything was a blue glass silence.
‘Wait there,’ said Douglas.
He walked down to the kitchen, pulled open the great squeaking drawer and picked out the sharpest, biggest knife.
Very calmly he walked into the hall, climbed back up the stairs again, opened the door to Mr Koberman’s room, went in, and closed it, holding the sharp knife in one hand.
Grandma was busy fingering a piecrust into a pan when Douglas entered the kitchen to place something on the table.
‘Grandma, what’s this?’
She glanced up briefly, over her glasses. ‘I don’t know.’
It was square, like a box, and elastic. It was bright orange in color. It had four square tubes, colored blue, attached to it. It smelled funny.
‘Ever see anything like it, Grandma?’
‘No.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
Douglas left it there, went from the kitchen. Five minutes later he returned with something else. ‘How about this?’
He laid down a bright pink linked chain with a purple triangle at one end.
‘Don’t bother me,’ said Grandma. ‘It’s only a chain.’
Next time he returned with two hands full. A ring, a square, a triangle, a pyramid, a rectangle, and—other shapes. All of them were pliable, resilient, and looked as if they were made of gelatin. ‘This isn’t all,’ said Douglas, putting them down. ‘There’s more where this came from.’
Grandma said, ‘Yes, yes,’ in a far-off tone, very busy.
‘You were wrong, Grandma.’
‘About what?’
‘About all people being the same inside.’
‘Stop talking nonsense.’
‘Where’s my piggy-bank?’
‘On the mantel, where you left it.’
‘Thanks.’
He tromped into the parlor, reached up for his piggy-bank.
Grandpa came home from the office at five.
‘Grandpa, come upstairs.’
‘Sure, son. Why?’
‘Something to show you. It’s not nice; but it’s interesting.’
Grandpa chuckled, following his grandson’s feet up to Mr Koberman’s room.
‘Grandma mustn’t know about this: she wouldn’t like it,’ said Douglas. He pushed the door wide open. ‘There.’
Grandfather gasped.
Douglas remembered the next few hours all the rest of his life. Standing over Mr Koberman’s naked body, the coroner and his assistants. Grandma, downstairs, asking somebody. ‘What’s going on up there?’ and Grandpa saying, shakily, ‘I’ll take Douglas away on a long vacation so he can forget this whole ghastly affair. Ghastly, ghastly affair!’
Douglas said. ‘Why should it be bad? I don’t see anything bad. I don’t feel bad.’
The coroner shivered and said, ‘Koberman’s dead, all right.’
His assistant sweated. ‘Did you see those things in the pans of water and in the wrapping paper?’
‘Oh, my God, my God, yes. I saw them.’
‘Christ.’
br />
The coroner bent over Mr Koberman’s body again. ‘This better be kept secret, boys. It wasn’t murder. It was a mercy the boy acted. God knows what might have happened if he hadn’t.’
‘What was Koberman? A vampire? A monster?’
‘Maybe, I don’t know. Something—not human.’ The coroner moved his hands deftly over the suture.
Douglas was proud of his work. He’d gone to much trouble. He had watched Grandmother carefully and remembered. Needle and thread and all. All in all, Mr Koberman was as neat a job as any chicken ever popped into hell by Grandma.
‘I heard the boy say that Koberman lived even after all those things were taken out of him.’ The coroner looked at the triangles and chains and pyramids floating in the pans of water. ‘Kept on living. God.’
‘Did the boy say that?’
‘He did.’
‘Then, what did kill Koberman?’
The coroner drew a few strands of sewing thread from their bedding.
‘This…’ he said.
Sunlight blinked coldly off a half-revealed treasure trove; six dollars and sixty cents’ worth of silver dimes inside Mr Koberman’s chest.
‘I think Douglas made a wise investment,’ said the coroner, sewing the flesh back up over the ‘dressing’ quickly.
Touched with Fire
They stood in the blazing sunlight for a long while, looking at the bright faces of their old-fashioned railroad watches, while the shadows tilted beneath them, swaying, and the perspiration ran out under their porous summer hats. When they uncovered their heads to mop their lined and pinkened brows, their hair was white and soaked through, like something that had been out of the light for years. One of the men commented that his shoes felt like two loaves of baked bread and then, sighing warmly, added:
‘Are you positive this is the right tenement?’
The second old man, Foxe by name, nodded, as if any quick motion might make him catch fire by friction alone. ‘I saw this woman every day for three days. She’ll show up. If she’s still alive, that is. Wait till you see her, Shaw. Lord! what a case.’
‘Such an odd business,’ said Shaw. ‘If people knew they’d think us Peeping Toms, doddering old fools. Lord, I feel self-conscious standing here.’
Foxe leaned on his cane. ‘Let me do all the talking if—hold on! There she is!’ He lowered his voice. ‘Take a slow look as she comes out.’
The tenement front door slammed viciously. A dumpy woman stood at the top of the thirteen porch steps glancing this way and that with angry jerkings of her eyes. Jamming a plump hand in her purse, she seized some crumpled dollar bills, plunged down the steps brutally, and set off down the street in a charge. Behind her, several heads peered from apartment windows above, summoned by her crashing of the door.
‘Come on,’ whispered Foxe. ‘Here we go to the butcher’s.’
The woman flung open a butchershop door, rushed in. The two old men had a glimpse of a mouth sticky with raw lipstick. Her eyebrows were like mustaches over her squinting, always suspicious eyes. Abreast of the butchershop, they heard her voice already screaming inside.
‘I want a good cut of meat. Let’s see what you got hidden to take home for yourself!’
The butcher stood silently in his bloody-fingerprinted frock, his hands empty. The two old men entered behind the woman and pretended to admire a pink loaf of fresh-ground sirloin.
‘Them lambchops look sickly!’ cried the woman. ‘What’s the price on brains?’
The butcher told her in a low dry voice.
‘Well, weigh me a pound of liver!’ said the woman. ‘Keep your thumbs off!’
The butcher weighed it out, slowly.
‘Hurry up!’ snapped the woman.
The butcher now stood with his hands out of sight below the counter.
‘Look,’ whispered Foxe. Shaw leaned back a trifle to peer below the case.
In one of the butcher’s bloody hands, empty before, a silvery meat ax was now clenched tightly, relaxed, clenched tightly, relaxed. The butcher’s eyes were blue and dangerously serene above the white porcelain counter while the woman yelled into those eyes and that pink self-contained face.
‘Now do you believe?’ whispered Foxe. ‘She really needs our help.’
They stared at the raw red cube-steaks for a long time, noticing all the little dents and marks where it had been hit, ten dozen times, by a steel mallet.
The braying continued at the grocer’s and the dime store, with the two old men following at a respectful distance.
‘Mrs Death-Wish,’ said Mr Foxe quietly. ‘It’s like watching a two-yearold run out on a battlefield. Any moment, you say, she’ll hit a mine: bang! Get the temperature just right, too much humidity, everyone itching, sweating, irritable. Along’ll come this fine lady, whining, shrieking. And so good-by. Well. Shaw, do we start business?’
‘You mean just walk up to her?’ Shaw was stunned by his own suggestion. ‘Oh, but we’re not really going to do this, are we? I thought it was sort of a hobby. People, habits, customs, et cetera. It’s been fun. But actually mixing in—? We’ve better things to do.’
‘Have we?’ Foxe nodded down the street to where the woman ran out in front of cars, making them stop with a great squall of brakes, hornblowing, and cursing. ‘Are we Christians? Do we let her feed herself subconsciously to the lions? Or do we convert her?’
‘Convert her?’
‘To love, to serenity, to a longer life. Look at her. Doesn’t want to live any more. Deliberately aggravates people. One day soon, someone’ll favor her, with a hammer, or strychnine. She’s been going down for the third time a long while now. When you’re drowning, you get nasty, grab at people, scream. Let’s have lunch and lend a hand, eh? Otherwise, our victim will run on until she finds her murderer.’
Shaw stood with the sun driving him into the boiling white sidewalk, and it seemed for a moment the street tilted vertically, became a cliff down which the woman fell toward a blazing sky. At last he shook his head.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want her on my conscience.’
The sun burnt the paint from the tenement fronts, bleached the air raw and turned the gutter-waters to vapor by mid-afternoon when the old men, numbed and evaporated, stood in the inner passageway of a house that funneled bakery air from front to back in a searing torrent. When they spoke it was the submerged, muffled talk of men in steam rooms, preposterously tired and remote.
The front door opened. Foxe stopped a boy who carried a well-mangled loaf of bread. ‘Son, we’re looking for the woman who gives the door an awful slam when she goes out.’
‘Oh, her?’ The boy ran upstairs, calling back. ‘Mrs Shrike!’
Foxe grabbed Shaw’s arm. ‘Lord, Lord! It can’t be true!’
‘I want to go home,’ said Shaw.
‘But there it is!’ said Foxe, incredulous, tapping his cane on the roomindex in the lobby. ‘Mr and Mrs Albert Shrike, 331 upstairs! Husband’s a longshoreman, big hulking brute, comes home dirty. Saw them out on Sunday, her jabbering, him never speaking, never looking at her. Oh, come on, Shaw.’
‘It’s no use,’ said Shaw. ‘You can’t help people like her unless they want to be helped. That’s the first law of mental health. You know it. I know it. If you get in her way, she’ll trample you. Don’t be a fool.’
‘But who’s to speak for her—and people like her? Her husband? Her friends? The grocer, the butcher? They’d sing at her wake! Will they tell her she needs a psychiatrist? Does she know it? No. Who knows it? We do. Well, then, you don’t keep vital information like that from the victim, do you?’
Shaw took off his sopping hat and gazed bleakly into it. ‘Once, in biology class, long ago, our teacher asked if we thought we could remove a frog’s nervous system, intact, with a scalpel. Take out the whole delicate antennalike structure, with all its little pink thistles and half-invisible ganglions. Impossible, of course. The nervous system’s so much a part of the frog there’s no wa
y to pull it like a hand from a green glove. You’d destroy the frog, doing it. Well, that’s Mrs Shrike. There’s no way to operate on a souring ganglion. Bile is in the vitreous humor of her mad little elephant eyes. You might as well try to get all the saliva out of her mouth forever. It’s very sad. But I think we’ve gone too far already.’
‘True,’ said Foxe patiently, earnestly, nodding. ‘But all I want to do is post a warning. Drop a little seed in her subconscious. Tell her. “You’re a murderee, a victim looking for a place to happen.” One tiny seed I want to plant in her head and hope it’ll sprout and flower. A very faint, very poor hope that before it’s too late, she’ll gather her courage and go see a psychiatrist!’
‘It’s too hot to talk.’
‘All the more reason to act! More murders are committed at ninetytwo degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature. Over one hundred, it’s too hot to move. Under ninety, cool enough to survive. But right at ninety-two degrees lies the apex of irritability, everything is itches and hair and sweat and cooked pork. The brain becomes a rat rushing around a red-hot maze. The least thing, a word, a look, a sound, the drop of a hair and—irritable murder. Irritable murder, there’s a pretty and terrifying phrase for you. Look at that hall thermometer, eighty-nine degrees. Crawling up toward ninety, itching up toward ninety-one, sweating toward ninety-two an hour, two hours from now. Here’s the first flight of stairs. We can rest on each landing. Up we go!’
The two old men moved in the third-floor darkness.
‘Don’t check the numbers,’ said Foxe. ‘Let’s guess which apartment is hers.’
Behind the last door a radio exploded, the ancient paint shuddered and flaked softly onto the worn carpet at their feet. The men watched the entire door jitter with vibration in its grooves.
They looked at each other and nodded grimly.
Another sound cut like an ax through the paneling; a woman, shrieking to someone across town on a telephone.