Mrs. Rahlo's Closet and Other Mad Tales Page 3

  I made a quick turn—and tripped again. I lay on the ground and saw I’d fallen over a half-buried chunk of masonry. I’d hurt myself. My hand was bleeding. I still clutched whatever it was that had cut my hand. I felt a small sharp stone. I opened my palm and held the stone in the moonlight. It was a tiny stone cross, intact save for a jagged edge where it had broken off from something.

  Still on my knees, I cleared the weeds from the half-buried stone that caused my fall. It had words carved upon it. It was a tombstone. I thought of those other white slabs of shattered stone that lay around me. And I knew I was in a graveyard. The whole field was once a graveyard—ancient, desiccated, demented. A dead graveyard. A graveyard’s ghost.

  All was wrong; I mustn’t climb the wall; I wouldn’t. I stood up and began to make my way back to the house. Mrs. Rahlo screamed.

  “Climb the wall. He is waiting for you.”

  The wall. Of course, I had to climb the wall. The wall was only a few feet away. It would take but a moment to climb over. I reached up with my wounded hand. Pain coursed through my arm. In the moonlight I saw I had left a small bloodstain on the wall’s surface.

  “Climb the wall!” shrieked the piercing voice. But my hand hurt too much. I started back to the house.

  “I am coming to make you climb the wall.”

  Suddenly I had a vision of Mrs. Rahlo pursuing me with outstretched arms, hands curled to claws, and I realized she was not human.

  Avoiding the tinseled path, I crashed through the wall of white weeds, running, tripping, stumbling in my haste. I lost all sense of direction, but still I ran. As often as I fell, I picked myself up and ran on.

  I paused momentarily on a slight ridge to gather breath and look around me. The weeds waved like an ocean. Far beyond lay the dark shadow of the house. Then I saw something moving at a tremendous rate, some low crawling thing parting the weeds as it swept on. I knew it was Mrs. Rahlo looking for me.

  I was exposed to sight. I leaped off the ridge and plowed through the weeds. Sweat-blind, I raced and swam and crashed—and suddenly left the weeds.

  And found the fountain. Tall and white it stood, but not empty, no. It was full of blood. Gushing blood, pumping blood, spewing blood out of the cracked cherub’s leering mouth. Blood filled the wineglass I had left on the rim. Blood poured from the wide, split basin, dyeing the ground crimson.

  My one chance was to make my way to the front of the house and escape through the crazy, winding streets. Gradually, I stole through the weeds, burrowing through the thicket, inching my way, sometimes crawling, till at last I crouched hidden beneath the house’s massive shadow, then I crept stealthily along the side of the house till I was clear.

  The street lay only a few paces ahead. I paused to gather breath, then sprang onto the sidewalk. And stopped. Black, misshapen figures shambled from the ancient houses, pouring into the streets as if in some weird procession. One slouched toward me.

  I bolted back the way I’d come and again entered the weeds. The night was nearly spent. I had a notion that if I held on till daylight, they would all be powerless to hurt me. I buried myself beneath a mass of weeds, insulated from the feverish light of the sinking moon.

  I knew then the probable fate of the former tenant, Mr. Wycliff. She had fed him to the horror from beyond the stars. Did it see him as it saw me—through the “television” in the parlor? Had it found him, too, an acceptable offer? Did he climb the wall? For generations now, Mrs. Rahlo, charged with satanic lightning—like a stored battery—had lain mindlessly in her death sleep—periodically roused to life by callers at her door. I awoke her, just as Wycliff had a few years earlier. What would have happened had I not hurt my hand? What was behind that wall?

  Something tickled the side of my face. Casually I turned to brush aside a wisp of weed—and peered into red-jeweled eyestalks. The crab squatted two feet from my face. Its antenna had touched me.

  It lunged suddenly. I kicked out. It was thrown back. I leaped to my feet and raced through those hideous dead fields, the monster just behind. It moved with incredible speed, like a bloodhound. I hurled myself through the white walls of weed, not daring to draw breath. I came to the fountain of blood. I had to know. The crab. Where was the crab? I glanced back.

  Something leaped upon me.

  “I have got you,” Mrs. Rahlo shrieked, and bore me to the ground. Above me the fountain gushed.

  Blackness. Dank, damp-house smell. A crawling sensation all over my skin. I was standing. I put out my arms. A narrow space, rough, splintered wood on either side.

  “I’m in the closet,” I said. “I’m in the locked closet of my room.”

  “You’re in a coffin!” said a voice behind me. “And I am with you, my dear.”

  “No,” I shouted. “I’m in the closet. I can get out.”

  “Yes, go back and climb the wall. Someone’s waiting for you.”

  It was hard to breathe. The overpowering smell of decay. That narrow closet. And the bulging-eyed horror was in there with me.

  “You really must see him, my dear; he is tall and black and full of power.”

  “No.”

  “He will give you secrets and wine.”

  “No.”

  “You have drunk of his wine, eaten his flesh; now you must yield him your pledge.”

  “His flesh? I’ve eaten his flesh?”

  “Our vegetables, my dear; they are part of him.”

  “I can get out of this closet,” I screamed. “I must find the door.” Here I feverishly clawed at the boards around me.

  “It isn’t a closet, dear; it only looks like one.”

  “There must be a door—”

  Then my hand, already wounded, must have struck a splinter, for my head grew bright with pain. And in the brightness directly ahead, I saw the outline of a door.

  “The handle should be about here,” I said. “I must make a handle.”

  “No,” said the voice. “You must go the other way and see him.”

  I felt the handle in my aching hand; I twisted the handle and pushed the door out from me.

  And I came into the room. Early-morning sunlight flooded it. The room shook to an agonized shriek of despair, a wailing ululation that died abruptly.

  I turned toward the closet. Only there was no closet. I saw only a coffin, upright against the wall. The sun’s full rays impaled the tattered thing that squirmed inside: a goggle-eyed heap of shriveled skin, its appalling head framed in a profusion of wiry hair, its howling mouth gaping in a silent scream. Electric sparks crawled over the body.

  Then the coffin shrank back to a closet, then became a coffin again, crackling with sparks as the mummy writhed. The coffin brightened to a blinding brilliance and went out. Only the locked closet remained.

  I left that house then, slowly, quietly. In the morning sunlight I left Grantham Path, too, with its silent tottering houses. How many other Mrs. Rahlos, I wondered, infested those rotting piles? I walked, the morning sun on my face, through those sinuous streets drowned in vegetation, past those leering houses with ROOM FOR RENT signs in upper windows. I walked west, away from the heart of Old Town, until I found people and noise. It was only after I found a seat aboard the streetcar bound for the college that I fainted.

  I am well now. I am living on campus and pursuing my studies. Sometimes I think of Mrs. Rahlo in her closet, waiting for other callers, and I am troubled. I think she knows where I am. I wonder how far she can roam from her house.

  Sometimes I think I’ll return to that mansion on Grantham Path and wrench open the door of that locked closet. I’m sure I’ll find her remains; if I burn them, I’ll probably make an end of her. That was our mistake. In Europe they burned them; in this country the creatures were pressed to death or hanged.

  Scourge of Fire

  I n the words of those interviewed, everything seemed to “go wrong” about eleven o’clock. The early-summer heat shimmering off the baked pavement on that brilliant, dusty June morning suddenly
vanished; the sunlight dimmed, the air grew opaque. There were strange sounds and stranger odors. One woman, washing her clothes, witnessed the soap bubbles crash to the floor and shatter. Two men, smoking their pipes while discussing the affairs of the day, found their rising smoke to be solid like a screen. Another man put his arm through the wall of his house. A young girl, listening to her radio, related how the music changed into a “funny smell.” Some workmen tearing up the street had the opportunity to survey the scene around them. The buildings, they said, behaved like collapsing shadows. One old gentleman was observed to run through an alley, his shadow audibly flapping behind him like an old coat. Another man, dashing into the living room to join his family, suddenly disappeared. For the next few hours they heard his voice moaning from somewhere in the room. But perhaps the strangest occurrence was that cited by a motorist who covered his eyes as he braked to avoid collision with a giant lizard rising from the unbroken asphalt of the highway.

  • • •

  “Queer things,” the doctor was saying, “are the life’s blood of sanity. Tales of strange disappearances, of monsters rising from the sea, of men transformed into wolves keep the mind from stagnating in its own complacency. They force us to accept the world as a perpetual enactment of mystery and wonder. They remind us that beneath the paved highways lies dark, cold earth.”

  “Yes,” agreed his friend. The two corpulent, middle-aged men sat in Dr. Rosen’s study, a book-lined, comfortable room downstairs in a mellow old house in the city. “It is life’s strangeness that makes life worth living. It is the butter of our daily bread.”

  “Our daily drudge,” said the doctor, absently tugging an immense black beard. “Take you, for example, a marketing executive. You rise each day at six, breakfast at six-thirty, arrive at your office at eight. Then you’re busy for the day—no, don’t say it; I know you enjoy your work. You’re home at four-thirty, you relax, you listen to a bit of music, eat a good dinner, read a good book, and so to bed. Life blankets you cozily with sameness. But is this the path for which we are intended? I have the impression that most of the world lives life as though it were something to be ‘got through’ as painlessly as possible.”

  “Yet one must work.”

  “Of course, unless one is endowed with independent means.” Here the doctor coughed modestly. “A person must go through the motions of life—paying taxes, for example—but not lose sight that these motions are not life itself. Life is something deeper.”

  The late afternoon had darkened with the declining sun, and twilight entered the room. Dr. Rosen adjusted his gold spectacles, stood up, pulled the drapes closed, and turned on the light. Returning to his seat, he filled and lit his briar pipe.

  “I’ll give you an example,” he continued, puffing. “You, William, are on your way to work. It is late spring. The morning is especially bright. Seized by a whim, you decide to walk. Every object you pass seems fresh, as though viewed for the first time. Without your being aware of it, a great sense of well-being has stolen over you. On your way you pass a garden with a few rosebushes. Impulsively, you stoop to smell a rose. The fragrance remains with you. As you step through the office door, you greet your secretary with a smile born of the rose fragrance. Thus you transmit your rapture to her, and she too becomes radiant. Now perhaps she regrets being too hard on a certain young man who tried to impress her. All this because of a rose, a walk, the season—and each of those things derives from causes still more remote, mysterious. Consequences, you see, cause and effect. Causes result from mystery; effects scatter to infinity.”

  “Well,” said William Shanks, rubbing his bald head, “this is all very fine. But I don’t see the connection between werewolves and finding a husband for my secretary.”

  The doctor smiled.

  • • •

  About the time this conversation took place, a truck rumbled along a dark and particularly desolate stretch of road. The driver stretched and yawned. On either side of the highway great tracts of wasteland reached as far as the eye could see. Suddenly the headlights picked out a figure in the road. It was a woman dressed in white and waving her arms wildly. She was burning. Even as he braked, he saw her plunge into the field. By the time he reached her, she was only ashes.

  This was the first of the fires.

  Many fires followed. So many that the city began to suffer an “epidemic of fire,” as one newspaper put it.

  It was the hottest summer in years; and, of course, there was a drought. People were careless; too many air conditioners overloaded circuits. Too many hot plates were put too near inflammable curtains. Perhaps too many children played with too many matches.

  It was a summer of cremation.

  An elderly woman—nearly three hundred pounds of wrinkled fat—presumably fell asleep on a sofa by a cold, empty fireplace. A heap of greasy ashes and an unburned arm remained. Most of the sofa was intact. The coroner ruled death by misadventure.

  A wife returned from the grocery to find her husband seated in a chair, unaware that he was burning. He was consumed in seconds.

  Because of his hectic schedule, Shanks had not seen Rosen in some weeks. Now, as the fury of July rose to the furnace of August, the marketing executive ascended the worn steps leading to the doctor’s study.

  “Ah,” said Rosen, “how good of you to come. Sit down, and I’ll find you something cool to drink.” The visitor sat close to the air conditioner and luxuriated in the wet, refrigerated breeze. Through the windows he could see the heat shadows reflecting off the pavement.

  The two men refreshed themselves with lemonade and sank back into overstuffed armchairs. Rosen was the first to break the silence.

  “There are fires,” he said.

  “Yes,” his friend agreed. “It has certainly been a summer of fires.”

  “Do you recall the conversation we had the last time you were here?”

  “Something about my secretary’s happiness depending on my smelling a rose.”

  “Causes and effects, yes. Your secretary’s nuptials the effect—at least one effect—of your smelling the rose. And the rose was, of course, the effect of very different causes. The union of your secretary with her young man must surely produce still other effects.”

  “Children, probably.” His friend laughed.

  “Now there are fires,” Rosen said seriously.

  “It’s been a brutal summer.”

  “I wonder.” Rosen leaned forward. “If the fires are our effect, what do you suppose is the cause?”

  “Why, different things, just what one reads in the newspapers—smoking in bed, overloaded circuits, the drought. Why, the very lawn has become kindling.”

  “But cannot you see, William, that these fires are different? They are cases, pure and simple, of spontaneous combustion. A woman lying on her sofa is burned to ashes. Nothing else is destroyed, except that the sofa is a little scorched.”

  “Well, yes, that is queer. But spontaneous combustion—Dickens wrote of that in Bleak House and Charles Brockden Brown in Wieland. It has something to do with electricity in the air, doesn’t it?”

  “Something in the air. Yes, perhaps.” The doctor removed his gold spectacles, wiped them with his handkerchief, and replaced them carefully on the bridge of his nose. “William,” he said slowly, “I’ve a big favor to ask. Might I get one of your bright research assistants to find some information on his computer?”

  “What do you need?”

  “I would like a geographical chart plotting all the known locations of our mysterious fires. Also, a list of the victims, showing the common elements among them.”

  Shanks grinned. “You’ll have your data by tomorrow night.”

  • • •

  The night was uncomfortably warm when the two friends met in Rosen’s study. The doctor poured out two glasses of chilled wine.

  “Tell me what you have learned,” he said.

  “The combustions are restricted to certain areas of the city, the heaviest conce
ntrations being here, here, and here.” Shanks pointed to portions of an elaborately annotated city map.

  “Ah,” said Rosen. “Yes, I see. Around the stockyards, the dump, and—here, what is over here?”

  “Why, the paper mill—also the tool and die works, and the foundry.”

  “Now the victims.”

  Shanks handed over a folded printout. “Here is a breakdown into age, sex, physical condition, occupation, and everything else we could think of.”

  “Excellent.” Rosen ran his eyes over the papers. “Ha! Age and weight . . . age and weight. Well, well, well . . .”

  “Well?”

  “Most of the victims are old and fat. William, that would describe us.”

  He spent some time poring over the document, tugging now and then at his great black beard or pausing to polish his spectacles.

  “This is not random,” he said at last. “If we set aside the accidental fires that occur in all seasons, these fires, our fires, are deliberate.”

  Shanks was on his feet. “Deliberate? Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Someone is burning people to death.” Rosen folded his hands over his belly. “Perhaps not an agency that exists in the natural order of things.”

  “Are you suggesting the supernatural? My dear Emile!”

  Rosen looked grave. “Once there were sirens,” he said. “Desirable and deadly, they sang men to death—remember your Homer. Medieval France witnessed a plague of lycanthropy; people attacked and devoured one another. Or take all those queer pestilences that seem to have arisen from nowhere, scorched civilization, and quietly sunk out of sight.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t see your point.”

  “My point is this. As old mysteries die out, cannot new ones be born?”

  “For some agency, some incendiary force, to come suddenly from nowhere to destroy human life—why, our world would be a horror!”

  “What is as horrible as a shark?” Rosen asked.