The Best of Robert Bloch

  The ancient wood groaned, then splintered around the rotten doorframe. With a rasp of hinges, the door tottered and fell inward.

  A cloud of dust billowed out, filling Morgan's lungs, blinding him. He coughed, he choked, but he groped forward and stepped into the room.

  The twenty chandeliers were gone, and the twenty carpets and the twenty vanities and the twenty beds. That's because the mirrors hung cracked and broken in their frames. Now there was only one of everything—one cobwebbed chandelier, one ragged and mouldering patch of carpet, one vanity whose littered top gave off a scent of dead perfume and musty decay, and one canopy bed with its yellowed hangings mildewed and shredded.

  And the bed had only one occupant. She was sleeping, just as the old man whined now while he peered over Morgan's shoulder. Always sleeping, and maybe he'd have to fix her again like he did once years ago. Morgan saw that she was still wearing the red garters, but aside from that he wouldn't have recognized her. One skeleton looks just like another.

  "What the hell kind of joke is this?" Belden wanted to know.

  The old man couldn't tell him, because he was alternately whining and complaining, and then he was weeping in a high, shrill voice—something about the Red Queen and the old days and how he hadn't meant to do it, and he only could awaken her on the nights when Company came calling.

  Morgan couldn't tell him, either. He couldn't tell him about the land of dreams, or the land of nightmares either.

  All he could do was walk over to the bed, lift the rotting skull from the rotting pillow, reach his hand underneath and pull out his brand-new, shiny leather wallet.

  Word of Honor

  AT 2:27 ON THE afternoon of September 19 Dr. Samuel Laverty rose from his chair and opened a window. This he managed to do without disturbing the flow of free association from his analysand, who was stretched out upon the couch.

  For approximately one minute Dr. Laverty stood before the window, inhaling deeply, while the analysand—a Mrs. Amelia Stoughton, aged fifty-three—continued her monologue.

  "It's all his fault," she was saying. "He doesn't even try to understand me. And the children don't have any consideration. The trouble with them is that they're just plain selfish, they don't appreciate me—"

  Dr. Laverty turned and faced his patient. He blinked rapidly, then scowled and shook his head.

  "The trouble with you," he said loudly, "is that you're a self-centered old horror. You don't need analysis. What you need is a good swift kick in the rump. Now get out of here before I'm tempted to administer that therapy myself."

  Mrs. Stoughton rose from the couch, bristling and open-mouthed.

  Suddenly she inhaled deeply and her face reddened. "You know something, Doctor?" She sighed. "I guess maybe you're right."

  At 2:28, in an air-conditioned studio, a television announcer lifted a box of nationally advertised detergent and wreathed his features into a sickly smile.

  "Ladies," he said, "I'm here to tell you about the most important household discovery in years—new, miracle Wonder Flakes, the amazing new cleanser that leaves your finest fabrics cleaner than clean."

  He faltered, the smile fading from his face as he set the box down. "Now just what does that mean?" he asked. "Cleaner than clean? I'm damned if I know, and I'll bet the copywriter doesn't know either." He scratched his head. "And who do they think they're kidding with that jazz about miracles? Soap flakes are soap flakes, and since when is it a miracle if they take the dirt out of clothes? Nothing amazing about that, if you ask me. And nothing new either. Wonder Flakes has been handing out that same line of tired adjectives for years. I'm getting good and sick of belting out their stale boasts as if I was announcing the Second Coming."

  The red light flickered and died above the studio door. The announcer started, then glanced up at the control booth sheepishly. But the engineers were grinning down at him and the director nodded and raised his thumb and forefinger in the closed-circle gesture which indicated approval of a job well done. . . .

  Promptly at 2:29 Homer Gans entered the office of his employer, the president of the First National Bank. The little cashier seemed to be his usual unobtrusive self, and his voice was as hushed and respectful as always.

  "I've got something to tell you," Homer Gans murmured. "It's about the reserve fund. I'm into it for forty thousand dollars."

  "You're what?" the president barked.

  "I embezzled from the reserve fund," Homer said. "Been doing it for years now. Nobody ever caught on. Some of the money went to play the races, and a lot of it has been paying somebody's room rent. You wouldn't think to look at me that I'm the kind who'd be keeping a blonde on the side. But then you don't know how it is at home."

  The president frowned. "Oh yes, I do," he answered, taking a deep breath. "As a matter of fact, I happen to be keeping a blonde myself. Though to tell the truth, she isn't a natural blonde."

  Homer hesitated, then sighed. "To tell the truth," he said, "neither is mine."

  Between 2:30 and 2:45 quite a number of things happened. A model nephew told his rich and elderly uncle to go to hell and quit trying to run his life. A saintly and patient mother of six advised her husband, an unemployed poultry stuffer, to get off his fat butt and find a job. A star shoe salesman rose from his knees before a customer and suggested she either try a size suitable for her big feet or quit wasting his time. And up at the embassy's garden party a visiting diplomat paused in the middle of a flattering toast and abruptly dashed the contents of his champagne glass into the face of the American ambassador.

  And—

  "Holy Toledo!" howled Wally Tibbets, managing editor of the Daily Express. "Has everybody gone nuts?"

  Reporter Joe Satterlee shrugged.

  "In nine years on this rag I've never once yelled 'Stop the presses!' But we're standing by for a replate right now—and we're going to stand by until we find out what's going on. Got enough lead copy for a dozen front pages right now, only none of it makes sense."

  "Such as?" Joe Satterlee gazed calmly at his boss.

  "Take your pick. Our senior senator just issued a statement of resignation. Not one of those owing-to-ill health things either. Just says he's unfit for office. Marty Flanagan did him one better than that—he shot himself in the lobby of his new union headquarters. We've got an open wire going between here and the police station. Can't keep up with the guys who are coming in and confessing everything from murder to mopery. And if you think that's bad, you ought to hear what's going on down in the advertising department. Clients are canceling space like mad. Three of the biggest used-car dealers in town just yanked their ads."

  Joe Satterlee yawned. "What goes on here?"

  "That's just what I want you to find out. And fast." His employer stood up. "Go see somebody and get a statement. Try the university. Tackle the science department."

  Satterlee nodded and went downstairs to his car.

  The university was only a half mile from the Express offices, but it wasn't an easy drive. Traffic seemed to be disrupted all over the city. And something had happened to the pedestrians. Their normal gait had altered. Half of them seemed to be running, and the other half moved along in a daze or merely stood silently in the center of the sidewalk. Peoples' faces—drivers and pedestrians alike—had lost the usual mask of immobility. Some were laughing; some were weeping. Over in the grass of the campus a number of couples lay locked in close embrace, oblivious of still other couples who seemed to be fighting furiously. Joe Satterlee blinked at what he saw and drove on.

  At 3:08 he found a parking space directly in front of the administration building. He climbed out, went around to the curb, and almost collided with a burly man who came flying down the steps.

  "Pardon me," Satterlee said. "Is Dean Hanson's office in this building?"

  "If it isn't, I've been using the wrong quarters for the past twenty years."

  "You're Hanson? My name's Satterlee. I'm with the Daily Express—"

  "Good Lord, do
they know already?"

  "Know what?"

  "Never mind." The burly man attempted to brush past. "I can't talk to you now. Got to find a cab."

  "Leaving town?"

  "I must get to the airport immediately. Sorry, no time to make a statement."

  "Then you are leaving town."

  "No. I'm going to the airport." Dean Hanson peered into the street. "What's happened to all the taxis? I suppose they got a whiff of it too. Just wait till I get my hands on that Doctor Lowenquist—" The burly man began to do a little dance of impatience there on the curb. "Taxi!" he shouted. "Hey, taxi!"

  Joe Satterlee grasped his arm. "Come on," he said. "I'll drive you to the airport. We can talk on the way."

  A sudden flurry of wind sent papers swirling along the walk. Dust rose as they seated themselves in the car, and the sun disappeared abruptly behind a cloud rising out of the western sky.

  "Storm coming up," Dean Hanson muttered. "That damned fool better have sense enough to make a landing before it hits."

  "Lowenquist," Satterlee said. "Isn't he head of the School of Dentistry?"

  "That's right. And he ought to be looking down somebody's mouth right now instead of being up in a private plane. All this nonsense about mad scientists is bad enough, but a mad dentist—"

  "What did he do?"

  "He chartered a plane this afternoon, all by himself, and took it up over the city. He's been spraying the town with that gas of his."

  "What gas?"

  "Look." Hanson sighed. "I don't know anything about science. I'm just a poor university dean, and my job is to get money out of rich alumni. I don't even keep track of what the faculty is up to. The way I hear it, Lowenquist was monkeying around with chemical anesthetics. He mixed up some new combination—some derivative like thiopental sodium, sodium amytal, sodium pentothal—only a lot stronger and more concentrated."

  "Aren't those used in psychotherapy, for narcohypnosis?" Satterlee asked. "What they call truth serums?"

  "This isn't a serum. It's a gas."

  "You can say that again," Satterlee replied. "So he waited for a clear, windless day and went up in a plane to dust the city with a concentrated truth gas. Is that a fact?"

  "Of course it is," Dean Hanson murmured. "You know I can't lie to you."

  "Nobody can lie anymore."

  "I'm afraid so. The stuff is so powerful, apparently, that one sniff does the trick. I was asking Snodgrass over in the Psychiatry Department about it. He gave me a lot of flap about inhibitory release and bypassing the superego and if a man answers, hang up. But what it all boils down to, apparently, is that the gas works. Everybody who was outside, everybody getting a breath of fresh air through a window or an air-conditioning unit, was affected. And that means almost the entire city."

  "Nobody can lie anymore."

  "The way I understand it, nobody wants to lie."

  "But that's wonderful!"

  "Is it?" Dean Hanson squinted at the gathering storm clouds. "I'm not so sure. It would be better off for me if I hadn't told you all this. What's going to happen when the story hits the paper tonight? Give the whole school a bad name. I may even lose my job. Funny, I realize this, but I can't seem to do anything about it. I just feel the need to be frank about everything. That's what I was telling my secretary, before she slapped my face—" He broke off abruptly. "Are we almost there? It's going to start raining any minute now."

  "Just down this road," Satterlee told him. "Did you notify the airport that you're coming?"

  "Of course. They've been trying to get Lowenquist down for the past half hour. He has no radio, and he won't head in . . . keeps buzzing over town, spraying and spraying. Crazy fool! I wonder where he ever got the idea of trying a stunt like this?"

  "I don't know," Satterlee mused. "Maybe he just thought it was time people became honest for a change. Maybe he was getting fed up with the way our lies and pretenses make a mess of everything."

  "Say, what's the matter with you?" Dean Hanson glanced at him apprehensively. "You sound as if you approved of this business."

  "Why not? I'm a reporter. My job is to deal with facts. I'm sick of listening to lies, sick of seeing the stories I write changed and distorted before they appear in print. The world could use some truth. As for myself, I've always tried to stick to honesty in my dealings with others—"

  "You aren't married, eh?"

  "How did you know?"

  "Never mind," said Hanson wryly. Suddenly he craned his neck out of the window. "Look!" he shouted. "Up there—that must be Lowenquist's plane!"

  Satterlee gaped. There was a small plane flying over the field, its outline almost obscured by the clouds. A blast of wind roared overhead, and thunder rumbled as the rain began to fall in a driving torrent.

  "He's trying to come in for a landing," Hanson shouted. "But the wind's too strong—"

  A sudden lance of lightning pierced the sky. Thunder crashed, and then Hanson was yelling again. "That lightning—it must have struck the plane—he's going to crash—"

  "Come on!" Satterlee muttered, gunning the motor and turning off into the field. In the distance a siren wailed, and through the rain he could see the white bulk of an oncoming ambulance. And the plane spiraled down in a crazy spin. . . .

  Wally Tibbets leaned back and pushed his chair away from the desk.

  "So that's how it happened, eh?" he said.

  Satterlee nodded soberly.

  "That's how it happened. The poor guy was dead before they pulled him out of the wreckage. But they found the tanks and everything. And he had the papers on him—the whole story, plus copies of the formula he'd discovered. I persuaded Dean Hanson to turn the stuff over to me. He was in such a daze I guess he didn't think about objecting. So now we can back up everything we say with actual proof. I suppose we'll be feeding the wire services too."

  Tibbets shook his head. "Nope," he said. "I'm going to answer all inquiries with a flat denial."

  "But I have the facts right here in my pocket—"

  "Keep 'em there. On second thought, burn 'em."

  "The story—"

  "There isn't going to be any story. It's all over now anyway. Didn't you notice a change in people after that storm came up? Wind must have blown the gas away, dissipated it or something. Anyway, everybody's back to normal. And most of them have already convinced themselves that nothing ever happened."

  "But we know it did! What about all those story leads that came in this afternoon? You said they were burning up the wires."

  "For one hour, yes. And ever since then they've been calling back with denials and retractions. Turns out the senator isn't resigning after all. The labor boy shot himself by accident. The police can't get anyone to sign their confessions. The advertisers are placing new copy again. Mark my words, by tomorrow morning the whole town will have forgotten what went on. They'll will themselves to forget, in order to protect their own sanity. Nobody can face the truth and live."

  "That's a terrible way to think," Satterlee said. "Doctor Lowenquist was a great man. He knew that what he'd stumbled on accidentally could revolutionize everything. This flight over the city was just a trial run—he tells about it in his papers here. He had plans for doing it again on a larger scale. He wanted to take a plane up over Washington, fly over Moscow, all the capitals of the world. Because this truth serum could change the world. Don't you see that?"

  "Of course I see it. But the world shouldn't be changed."

  "Why not?" Satterlee squared his shoulders. "Look here, I've been thinking. Lowenquist is dead. But I have his formula. There's no reason why I couldn't carry on his work where he left off."

  "You mean you'd make some more of that stuff, spray it around?"

  Satterlee nodded. "There's nothing to stop me. I've saved my money these past years. I could hire planes and pilots. Don't you think they need a dose of truth throughout the world today?"

  Wally Tibbets stood up. "You're forgetting one thing," he said. "Truth is a weapon.
And weapons are dangerous."

  "But it isn't as if I was dropping hydrogen bombs."

  "No." Tibbets shook his head slowly. "This would be worse. Far worse. You saw what happened on a small scale, just here in town, today."

  "Of course I saw. Criminals confessed. Crooks reformed or blew their brains out. People suddenly stopped lying to one another. Is that so bad?"

  "About the criminals, no. But that's not all that happened. As you say, people stopped lying to one another. Ordinary people. And that could be a terrible thing."

  "I don't see—"

  "That's right. You don't see. You don't see what happens when the doctor tells his patient that he's dying of cancer, when the wife tells her husband he's not actually the father of their son. Everybody has secrets, or almost everybody. Sometimes it's better not to know the whole truth—about others or about yourself."

  "But look at what goes on in the world today."

  "I am looking. That's my job—to sit at this desk and watch the world go round. Sometimes it's a dizzy spin, but at least it keeps going. Because people keep going. And they need the lies to help them. If you get right down to it, maybe most of the things we live by are lies. The notion of abstract justice. The ideal of romantic love everlasting. The belief that right will triumph. Even our concept of democracy may be a lie.

  "But we believe in them, most of us. And because we believe in these things we do our best to live by them. And little by little our belief helps to make these things come true. It's a slow process, and sometimes it looks pretty hopeless, but over the period of recorded history it works. Animals don't lie, you know. Only human beings know how to pretend, to make believe, to deceive themselves and others. But that's why they're human beings."

  "Maybe so," Satterlee said. "Yet think of the opportunity I have. I could even stop the possibility of war."

  "Perhaps. Once the military and political and economic leaders faced up to the truth about their ideas and policies, they might change temporarily."