Mysteries of the Worm

  Once again I sensed the presence of wonder in the world, of lurking strangeness behind the scenes of drugstore and apartment house civilization. Black books still were read, and wild-eyed strangers walked and muttered, candles burned into the night, and a missing alley cat might mean a chosen sacrifice.

  But my feet hurt, so I went home.

  — 2 —

  Same old malted milks, cherry cokes, Vaseline, Listerine, hairnets, bathing caps, cigarettes, and what have you?

  Me, I had a headache. It was four days later, almost the same time of night, when I found myself scrubbing off the soda-taps again.

  Sure enough, he walked in.

  I kept telling myself all evening that I didn’t expect him—but I did expect him, really. I had that crawling feeling when the door clicked. I waited for the shuffle of the Tom McCann shoes.

  Instead there was a brisk tapping of Oxfords. English Oxfords. The $18.50 kind.

  I looked up in a hurry this time.

  It was my stranger.

  At least he was there, someplace beneath the flashy blue pin-strip of his suit, the immaculate shirt and foulard tie. He’d had a shave, a haircut, a manicure, and evidently a winning ticket in the Irish Sweepstakes.

  “Hello, there.” Nothing wrong with that voice—I’ve heard it in the ritzy hotel lobbies for years, brimming over with pep and confidence and authority.

  “Well, well, well,” was all I could say.

  He chuckled. His mouth wasn’t a crease any more. It was a trumpet of command. Out of that mouth could come orders, and directions. This wasn’t a mouth shaped for hesitant excuses any longer. It was a mouth for requesting expensive dinners, choice vintage wines, heavy cigars; a mouth that barked at taxi-drivers and doormen.

  “Surprised to see me, eh? Well, I told you it would take three days. Want to pay you your money, thank for your kindness.”

  That was nice. Not the thanks, the money. I like money. The thought of getting some I didn’t expect made me genial.

  “So your prayers were answered, eh?” I said.

  He frowned.

  “Prayers—what prayers?”

  “Why I thought that—” I’d pulled a boner, and no mistake.

  “I don’t understand,” he snapped, understanding perfectly well. “Did you perhaps harbor some misapprehension concerning my purchases of the other evening? A few necessary chemicals, that’s all—to complete the experiment I spoke of. And the candles, I must confess, were to light my room. They shut my electricity off the day before.”

  Well, it could be.

  “Might as well tell you the experiment was a howling success. Yes, sir. Went right down to Newsohm with the results and they put me on as assistant research director. Quite a break.”

  Newsohm was the biggest chemical supply house in our section of the country. And he went right down in his rags and was “put on’ as assistant research director! Well, live and learn.

  “So here’s the money. $2.39, wasn’t it? Can you change a twenty?”

  I couldn’t.

  “That’s all right, keep it.”

  I refused, I don’t know why. Made me feel crawling again, somehow.

  “Well then, tell you what let’s do. You are closing up, aren’t you? Why not step down the street to the tavern for a little drink? I’ll get change there. Come on, I feel like celebrating.”

  So it was that five minutes later I walked down the street with Mr. Fritz Gulther.

  We took a table in the tavern and ordered quickly. Neither he nor I was at ease. Somehow there was an unspoken secret between us. It seemed almost as though I harbored criminal knowledge against him—I, of all men, alone knowing that behind this immaculately-clad figure of success, there lurked a shabby specter just three days in the past. A specter that owed me $2.39.

  We drank quickly, both of us. The specter got a little fainter. We had another. I insisted on paying for the third round.

  “It’s a celebration,” I argued.

  He laughed. “Certainly is. And let me tell you, this is only the beginning. Only the beginning! From now on I’m going to climb so fast it’ll make your head swim. I’ll be running that place within six months. Going to get a lot of new defense orders in from the government, and expand.”

  “Wait a minute,” I cautioned, reserve gone. “You’re way ahead of yourself. If I were in your shoes I’d still be dazed with what happened to me in the past three days.”

  Fritz Gulther smiled. “Oh, that? I expected that. Didn’t I tell you so in the store? I’ve been working for over a year and I knew just what to expect. It was no surprise, I assure you. I had it all planned. I was willing to starve to carry out my necessary studies, and I did starve. Might as well admit it.”

  “Sure.” I was on my fourth drink now, over the barriers. “When you came into the story I said to myself, ‘Here’s a guy who’s been through hell’!”

  “Truer words were never spoken,” said Gulther. “I’ve been through hell all right, quite literally. But it’s all over now, and I didn’t get burned.”

  “Say, confidentially—what kind of magic did you use?”

  “Magic? Magic? I don’t know anything about magic.”

  “Oh, yes you do, Gulther,” I said. “What about that little black book with the iron covers you were mumbling around with in the store?”

  “German inorganic chemistry text,” he snapped. “Pretty old. Here, drink up and have another.”

  I had another. Gulther began to babble, a bit. About his new clothes and his new apartment and the new car he was going to buy next week. About how he was going to have everything he wanted now, by God, he’d show the fools that laughed at him all these years, he’d pay back the nagging landladies and the cursing grocers, and the sneering rats he told him he was soft in the head for studying the way he did.

  Then he got into the kindly stage.

  “How’d you like a job at Newsohm?” he asked me. “You’re a good pharmacist. You know your chemistry. You’re a nice enough fellow, too—but you’ve got a terrible imagination. How about it? Be my secretary. Sure, that’s it. Be my secretary. I’ll put you on tomorrow.”

  “I’ll drink on that,” I declared. The prospect intoxicated me. The thought of escape from the damned store, escape from the “coke”-faces, the “ciggies”-voices, very definitely intoxicated me. So did the next drink.

  I began to see something.

  We were sitting against the wall and the tavern lights were low. Couples around us were babbling in monotone that was akin to silence. We sat in shadow against the wall. Now I looked at my shadow—an ungainly, flickering caricature of myself, hunched over the table. What a contrast it presented before his suddenly erect bulk!

  His shadow, now—

  His shadow, now—

  I saw it. He was sitting up straight across the table from me. But his shadow on the wall was standing!

  “No more Scotch for me,” I said as the waiter came up.

  But I continued to stare at his shadow. He was sitting and the shadow was standing. It was a larger shadow than mine, and a blacker shadow. For fun I moved my hands up and down, making heads and faces in silhouette. He wasn’t watching me, he was gesturing to the waiter.

  His shadow didn’t gesture. It just stood there. I watched and stared and tried to look away. His hands moved but the black outline stood poised and silent, hands dangling at the sides. And yet I saw the familiar shape of his head and nose; unmistakably his.

  “Say, Gulther,” I said. “Your shadow—there on the wall—”

  I slurred my words. My eyes were blurred.

  But I felt his attitude pierce my consciousness below the alcohol.

  Fritz Gulther rose to his feet and then shoved a dead-white face against mine. He didn’t look at his shadow. He looked at me, through me, at some horror behind my face, my thoughts, my brain. He looked at me, and into some private hell of his own.

  “Shadow,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with my shadow. Yo
u’re mistaken. Remember that, you’re mistaken. And if you ever mention it again, I’ll bash your skull in.”

  Then Fritz Gulther got up and walked away. I watched him march across the room, moving swiftly but a little unsteadily. Behind him, moving very slowly and not a bit unsteadily, a tall black shadow followed him from the room.

  — 3 —

  If you can build a better mousetrap than your neighbor, you’re liable to put your foot in it.

  That’s certainly what I had done with Gulther. Here I was, ready to accept his offer of a good job as his secretary, and I had to go and pull a drunken boner!

  I was still cursing myself for a fool two days later. Shadows that don’t follow body-movements, indeed! Who was that shadow I saw you with last night? That was no shadow, that was the Scotch I was drinking. Oh, fine!

  So I stood in the drug store and sprinkled my sundaes with curses as well as chopped nuts.

  I nearly knocked the pecans off the counter that second night, when Fritz Gulther walked in again.

  He hurried up to the counter and flashed me a tired smile.

  “Got a minute to spare?”

  “Sure—wait till I serve these people in the booth.”

  I dumped the sundaes and raced back. Gulther perched himself on a stool and took off his hat. He was sweating profusely.

  “Say—I want to apologize for the way I blew up the other night.”

  “Why, that’s all right, Mr. Gulther.”

  “I got a little too excited, that’s all. Liquor and success went to my head. No hard feelings, I want you to understand that. It’s just that I was nervous. Your ribbing me about my shadow, that stuff sounded too much like the way I was always kidded for sticking to my studies in my room. Landlady used to accuse me of all sorts of things. Claimed I dissected her cat, that I was burning incense, messing the floor up with chalk. Some damn fool college punks downstairs began to yap around that I was some kind of nut dabbling in witchcraft.”

  I wasn’t asking for his autobiography, remember. All this sounded a little hysterical. But then, Gulther looked the part; his sweating, the way his mouth wobbled and twitched as he got this out.

  “But say, reason I stopped in was to see if you could fix me up a sedative. No, no bromo or aspirin. I’ve been taking plenty of that stuff ever since the other evening. My nerves are all shot. That job of mine down at Newsohm takes it all out of me.”

  “Wait a minute, I’ll get something.”

  I made for the back room. As I compounded I sneaked a look at Gulther through the slot.

  All right, I’ll be honest. It wasn’t Gulther I wanted to look at. It was his shadow.

  When a customer sits at the counter stools, the store lights hit him so that his shadow is just a little black pool beneath his feet.

  Gulther’s shadow was a complete silhouette of his body, in outline. A black, deep shadow.

  Stranger still, the shadow seemed to be cast parallel with his body, instead of at an angle from it. It grew out from his chest instead of his legs. I don’t know refraction, the laws of light, all that technical stuff. All I know is that Fritz Gulther had a big black shadow sitting beside him on the floor, and that the sight of it sent cold shivers along my spine.

  I wasn’t drunk. Neither was he. Neither was the shadow. All three of us existed.

  Now Gulther was putting his hat back on.

  But not the shadow. It just sat there. Crouched.

  It was all wrong.

  The shadow was no denser at one spot than at another. It was evenly dark, and—I noted this particularly—the outlines did not blur or fade. They did not blur or fade. They were solid.

  I stared and stared. I saw a lot now I’d never noticed. The shadow wore no clothes. It was naked, that shadow. But it belonged to Gulther—it wore spectacles. It was his shadow, all right. Which suited me fine, because I didn’t want it.

  Fiddling around compounding that sedative, I got in several more peeks.

  Now Gulther was looking down over his shoulder. He was looking at his shadow, now. Even from a distance I fancied I saw new beads of sweat string a rosary of fear across his forehead.

  He knew, all right!

  I came out, finally.

  “Here it is,” I said. I kept my eyes from his face.

  “Good. Hope it works. Must get some sleep. And say—that job offer still goes. How about coming down tomorrow morning?”

  I nodded, forcing a smile.

  Gulther paid me, rose.

  “See you then.”

  “Certainly.” And why not? After all, what if you do work for a boss with an unnatural shadow? Most bosses have other faults, worse ones and more concrete. That shadow—whatever it was and whatever was wrong with it—wouldn’t bite me. Though Gulther acted as though it might bit him.

  As he turned away I looked at his departing back, and at the long, swooping black outline which followed it. The shadow rose and stalked after him. Stalked. Yes, it followed quite purposefully. To my now bewildered eyes it seemed larger than it had in the tavern. Larger, and a bolder black.

  Then the night swallowed Gulther and his non-existent companion.

  I went back to the rear of the store and swallowed the other half of the sedative I’d made up for that purpose. After seeing that shadow, I needed it as much as he did.

  — 4 —

  The girl in the ornate outer office smiled prettily. “Go right in,” she warbled. “He’s expecting you.”

  So it was true, then. Gulther was assistant research director, and I was to be his secretary.

  I floated in. In the morning sunshine I forgot all about shadows.

  The inner office was elaborately furnished—a hug place, with the elegant walnut panelling associated with business authority. There was a kidney-desk set before closed Venetian blinds, and a variety of comfortable leather armchairs. Fluorescent lighting gleamed pleasantly.

  But there was no Gulther. Probably on the other side of the little door at the back, talking to his chief.

  I sat down, with the tight feeling of anticipation hugged somewhere within my stomach. I glanced around, taking in the room again. My gaze swept the glass-topped desk. It was bare. Except in the corner, where a small box of cigars rested.

  No, wait a minute. That wasn’t a cigar box. It was metal. I’d seen it somewhere before.

  Of course! It was Gulther’s iron-bound book.

  “German inorganic chemistry.” Who was I to doubt his word? So naturally, I just had to sneak a look before he came in.

  I opened the yellowed pages.

  De Vermis Mysteriis.

  “Mysteries of the Worm.”

  This was no inorganic chemistry text. It was something entirely different. Something that told you how you could compound aconite and belladonna and draw circles of phosphorescent fire on the floor when the stars were right. Something that spoke of melting tallow candles and blending them with corpse-fat, whispered of the uses to which animal sacrifice might be put.

  It spoke of meetings that could be arranged with various parties most people don’t either care to meet or even believe in.

  The thick black letters crawled across the pages, and the detestable odor arising from the musty thing formed a background for the nastiness of the text. I won’t say whether or not I believed what I was reading, but I will admit that there was an air, a suggestion about those cold, deliberate directions for traffic with alien evil, which made me shiver with repulsion. Such thoughts have no place in sanity, even as fantasy. And if this is what Gulther had done with the materials, he’d bought himself for $2.39.

  “Years of study,” eh? “Experiments.” What was Gulther trying to call up, what did he call up, and what bargain did he make?

  The man who could answer these questions sidled out from behind the door. Gone was the Fritz Gulther of the pinstripe suit personality. It was my original Caspar Milquetoast who creased his mouth at me in abject fear. He looked like a man—I had to say it—who was afraid of his ow
n shadow.

  The shadow trailed him through the doorway. To my eyes it had grown overnight. Its arms were slightly raised, though Gulther had both hands pressed against his sides. I saw it cross the wall as he walked toward me—and it moved more swiftly than he did.

  Make no mistake. I saw the shadow. Since then I’ve talked to wise boys who assure me that under even fluorescence no shadow is cast. They’re wise boys all right, but I saw that shadow.

  Gulther saw that book in my hands.

  “All right,” he said, simply. “You know. And maybe it’s just as well.”

  “Know?”

  “Yes. Know that I made a bargain with—someone. I thought I was being smart. He promised me success, and wealth, anything I wanted, on only one condition. Those damned conditions; you always read about them and you always forget, because they sound so foolish! Oh, not in size, but in depth, in intensity. It’s becoming—maybe I am crazy but you see it too—more solid. Thicker. As though it had palpable substance.”

  Crease-mouth wobbled violently, but the words choked on.

  “The further I go the more it grows. Last night I took your sedative and it didn’t work. Didn’t work at all. I sat up in the darkness and watched my shadow.”

  “In darkness?”

  “Yes. It doesn’t need light. It really exists, now. Permanently. In the dark it’s just a blacker blur. But you can see it. It doesn’t sleep, or rest. It just waits.”

  “And you’re afraid of it? Why?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t threaten me, or make gestures, or even take any notice of me. Shadows taking notice—sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But you see it as I do. You can see it waiting. And that’s why I’m afraid. What’s it waiting for?”

  The shadow crept closer over his shoulder. Eavesdropping.

  “I don’t need you for a secretary. I need a nurse.”

  “What you need is a good rest.”

  “Rest? How can I rest? I just came out of Newsohm’s office. He doesn’t notice anything—yet. Too stupid, I suppose. The girls in the office look at me when I pass, and I wonder if they see something peculiar. But Newsohm doesn’t. He just made me head of research. Completely in charge.”