Mrs. Rahlo's Closet and Other Mad Tales Read online

“I nearly forgot,” she said. “A man came here every day while you were on vacation. Some sort of foreigner. I kept telling him you were away. But he didn’t seem to understand. He just stood there, whispering your name—till I had to ask him to leave. Every day. I think he was an albino. I suppose he’ll be back. What should I do about him, sir?”

  Shanks told her to use her own discretion and began to assemble the threads of business. By the time he finished, it was evening, and the office was empty. A glance at the clock told him he was nearly late for an appointment. To save time, he left the building by the rear exit instead of his usual way through the front, since his car was parked on a side street. He started the engine and turned the corner, past his office entrance. It was only when he was some blocks away that he realized he had seen a figure standing in the shadows by the office door.

  For some reason he could not sleep that night. He tried reading, then counting backward, and finally formed wordless pictures. Still he could not sleep. What was bothering him? Was he hungry?

  Shanks pulled the bedcovers away, got into his slippers, and made his way to the kitchen. When he opened the refrigerator, he decided he wasn’t hungry after all and settled for a glass of milk.

  He carried the glass into the dark living room and sat on the sofa. When he finished his milk, he remembered reading somewhere that people often suffered insomnia during a full moon. Was it full tonight? He went to the window and parted the curtains.

  Someone was standing in front of his house.

  Half-hidden by the big cotoneaster arch that fronted the sidewalk, a figure stood facing him, stood with its arms at its sides, stood and did not move. Just then a passing automobile lit the front yard for an instant. Shanks gave a start: the figure seemed to be wearing a white mask.

  What was it his secretary had told him? Something about an albino. His impulse was to call the police to report a prowler. But, even as he watched, the figure moved away and disappeared down the street.

  • • •

  The first thing he did on arising the next morning was peer out the window. In the street he saw only neighbors. He had slept late. When he called to inform Rosen of what had happened in the night, there was no answer. The doctor had probably gone to the library.

  Business was heavy that day. It was nearly closing time when Shanks remembered he had meant to call Rosen. He reached for the phone.

  This time the doctor was home. Briefly Shanks told him what had occurred.

  “It is probably nothing, Emile, but my secretary told me that a similar character has been calling at my office.”

  “I have a suspicion,” Rosen said in a strange voice. “William, you may be in terrible danger.”

  “What?”

  “I thought it instinctive, like a shark. I was wrong. It is acutely intelligent. Listen, my friend. The man with the white face. It is our creature. It has found a body. And it is coming after you.”

  The intercom buzzed.

  “Sir,” came the secretary’s voice, “that man is here again, the foreign gentleman I told you about. Shall I send him in?”

  “Not just yet,” said Shanks. “Emile? He’s here. He’s here, now, in the outer office.”

  “William, get out. Go! Run!”

  “You don’t think—?”

  “The wasting sickness we hear so much of—it is that creature keeping itself alive. It has become a vampire. Leave immediately. Use the back door. Drive home. I’ll meet you. Hurry!”

  As Shanks stepped through the private exit and into the alley, he heard the inner door opening. Then he was off, sprinting like a boy.

  • • •

  The evening came moonless and cold, with a slight wind spilling through the streets, rustling the shrubbery that grew alongside the house. Rosen had arrived a few minutes after Shanks. Together they hefted a heavy stone tablet from the trunk of Rosen’s car onto the front porch.

  They sat in the unlit living room, peering from the window. The wind increased. Shanks’s gaze kept returning to the swaying branches of the cotoneaster arch. By now they shook so fiercely, he expected to see a white face each time they clashed. Rosen put a hand on his friend’s arm. “What is the time?”

  “Ten to twelve,” came the whispered reply. “Listen—”

  A pause. “It is only the sylphs working their wind,” Rosen said softly.

  Outside, something metallic scraped discordantly every time a tide of wind flooded the passageway between Shanks’s house and the house next door. The tossing shrubbery sounded like the sea, the grinding metal like the hoot of a foghorn heard in delirium. The wind sang louder.

  “On such a night, the salamander is doubly strong,” whispered Rosen. “The sylph goads it into a fury of combustion.”

  “Why does it want me, Emile? It saw us both—why me?”

  Rosen shrugged. “Maybe you were easier to find. Maybe it can concentrate on only one at a time. Who knows? Perhaps it is drawn to you.”

  “Why do you think it will come here—tonight?”

  “I suspect it comes here every night, just as it haunts your office by day. I think it will continue to do this until it finds you.”

  “Do you really believe the tombstone will work? That that thing will take the time to read all that foreign writing?”

  “It is Chaldean,” the doctor said. “And our creature doesn’t have to read anything. The writing is a spell to attract it to the stone, which, by the way, is chalcedony. Buried inside are seven semiprecious amulets. According to my old Babylonian author, if the creature but touches the stone, the lapidary charms inside will catapault it back to where it belongs.”

  Rosen’s hand gripped Shanks’s shoulder. There, by the shrubbery—a flash of white.

  A figure stepped out of the shadow.

  “It’s coming for the tablet,” Shanks whispered. “It’s making for the porch.”

  Something split the air with a cacophonous crack.

  “It worked!” cried Shanks. “He’s gone.”

  “Wait!” His friend restrained him from tearing open the door.

  “Wait? Why?”

  The doorbell rang.

  “The tablet?” Shanks whispered. Rosen shook his head.

  All was quiet except for the wind.

  Then, from beyond the door, a hollow voice uttered a monosyllable.

  “Shanks,” it repeated, over and over. “Shanks.”

  The knob of the locked door rattled. The wind was howling now, the scraping metal shrieking.

  But then the rattling ceased. The wind stopped. The house lay calm.

  “The window,” Rosen whispered.

  They looked out in time to see a figure retreating down the street.

  Rosen opened the door. Fragments of the tablet littered the walkway. Rosen stooped to retrieve the amulets and some of the fragments, then closed the door and turned on all the lights.

  “What stopped it from breaking in?” asked Shanks.

  Rosen tugged at his beard. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it was the amulets.” He held them tightly in his fist. “I need more time to study.” The wind started up again.

  “I own a pistol,” Shanks said. “We can always shoot it, you know.”

  “What use would that be? To have the creature once more indulge itself in an orgy of burnings until it finds another body? I begin to despair.”

  “Despair?” Shanks said angrily. “I despair that there are such things as elementals. I despair that my well-ordered universe has been kicked upside down. I despair that every elemental that ever existed was not stood up before a celestial firing squad and blasted into hell!”

  Rosen’s eyebrows lifted. “No elementals? Why, then, no life! Without the salamander, no fire,—no sun, no warmth. Our planet a mere spongy rag dripping with cold, wet earth. Without the undine, no water—the world a shriveled, bone-hard ball. Would you banish the gnome? No solid substance—no earth at all—a whirling mass of gas, fire, and water. And the sylph—do you not like to brea
the? No, my friend, elementals in their proper spheres spell life and substance. It is only when such a spirit falls out of its sphere that there is death and chaos. We must restore it!”

  “How?”

  “Produce an undine. Fire and water are inimical; water must prevail. Do you know where we can find an undine?”

  “No.”

  “Nor do I. Yet there is a way. There must be!” he shouted. Excitement lit his face. “Where does the creature go, William, when it is not attacking others or spying on you? It has a body, and a body requires rest. Where does it go to rest? It must have a lair. We have to find that lair, surprise the creature while it is resting, and capture it. Then we must immerse it in a large body of water. That will send it back to where it came from. The amulets are our key.”

  “Brave words,” said Shanks.

  Rosen produced a handful of fragments from the shattered tablet. “Brave words are not enough,” he remarked dryly.

  • • •

  Daylight found Shanks at Rosen’s house, groggy and dispirited from lack of sleep. He looked about him irritably as he sipped his coffee.

  His secretary had orders to phone him as soon as she completed her project—also orders not to admit the foreign man for any reason. He yawned again. Rosen had gone to the library. Shanks lit his pipe. It tasted ashy.

  Without enthusiasm he took up their old memorandum of fire data and with a compass began drawing circles on a city map. According to Rosen, somewhere within one of those circles was the creature’s lair. A half hour passed.

  The phone rang. It was the secretary. No, the foreign man had not come by, but the figures were ready.

  Shanks scrambled to copy the information. He hung up. Now he had another sheet to work from, a list correlating the outbreaks of the wasting sickness. Excitement rose in him as he added circle after circle to the city map. When the last circle was drawn, he hurriedly phoned Rosen at the library.

  • • •

  The next few days were busy ones. Rare gems had to be bought and carved to specification. An important meeting had to be arranged for two in the morning. Then, too, there was the matter of the large asbestos box.

  It is not uncommon for the head of a marketing research firm to superintend the testing of a new product. A certain amount of secrecy is also expected, to protect a manufacturer against his competitors. A 2 A.M. appointment, then, did not seem suspicious. After all, tremendous profits might be made from a totally heat-resistant container.

  A strip of moon glowed dimly behind the clouds as Shanks and Rosen once more passed through the industrial district. As always, it was Shanks who drove. But this time he drove a rented van that carried an asbestos box.

  As the van navigated the narrow back streets, Shanks thought of the eerie cremation of the Spanish medium. What would this night bring? The sight of the foundry cut short his dark thoughts. He pulled the van up before a sprawling colossus of winking fires blazing in the night. Shanks parked at the receiving dock in the rear, ascended the loading platform, and pushed an electric bell. Almost immediately a foreman came out, accompanied by two workers, who lifted the asbestos crate onto a metal dolly and wheeled it inside.

  “You gentlemen won’t need your coats,” the foreman said. “It’s always summer here.”

  The inside proved cyclopean. Enormous blast furnaces lined the walls, their iron doors constantly opening or shutting with loud clangs, throwing a lurid red light on the sweating workmen.

  “Welcome to the caverns of hell,” the foreman said with a grin. “This heat”—he stretched out his arms—“you never get used to it. And you’re always cold when you’re someplace else.” The two workmen donned protective masks. The foreman handed similar ones to Rosen and Shanks.

  “This place never stops,” he said. “The fires never go out. If anything goes wrong, the mechanics come and fix it. Here’s the one you insisted on, Dr. Rosen, the one that burns hotter than the others.”

  The workmen lifted the crate off the dolly and onto a roller slide. The foreman pushed a button to open the furnace door. Though the oven was only in the pilot position, a terrific blast of heat hit them, and an appalling glare.

  “Say the word,” said the foreman, “and I’ll take this gaff and slide your box right in. You can see everything through the glass panel in the door. Say, why is the top still up? And what you got in there? They look like jewels.”

  “To test the heat,” Rosen said darkly. “When I am satisfied with the experiment, I’ll operate the mechanical rod to give the lid a nudge. A spring trap will lock the case.”

  At Rosen’s signal the box went into the furnace. The fires were turned up. Shanks stared into the white heat. Despite his protective mask his eyes could peer only for a few seconds at a time. The heat was unspeakable.

  The workmen left for another project, but the foreman lingered by the furnace. Rosen had told Shanks to divert any onlookers. The foreman was easily diverted.

  “Do I like working here?” he asked in response to Shanks’s question. “Look around you. Do you know what this place is, Mr. Shanks? This is Gehenna. Have you heard of Gehenna? It’s in the Bible, sir, the place where they made sacrifice to Moloch. He was a devil, you know, and we’ve got devils—lately. We’ve got that wasting sickness bad here. It’s all that heat and light—they never hurt anybody much before. They shrivel a man now. They start by affecting the eyes.” He lowered his voice yet still had to shout to make himself heard above the din of the foundry. “Last week I thought I saw a lizard in this furnace.” He pointed. “A little lizard, climbing over white-hot steel!” He laughed, and Shanks laughed with him.

  Rosen did not laugh. For he, too, saw shapes in the fire. It was not a lizard he saw, but a full-sized human body squirming from the back of the furnace. In the fierce white light he watched its mottled face and dead eyes, dormant but moving instinctively, the tongue darting in and out of its mouth to lick the flames. The body made a half turn and shrank to a tiny salamander with jeweled eyes. Lured by the amulets, it crawled dreamily up the side of the case and dropped through the opening. Rosen worked a lever; an iron rod came down and closed the lid.

  “Enough!” he cried to the foreman. “Remove the case, please.”

  The workmen returned to gaff the box back up the metal rollers. Despite the intense heat, Rosen had the case immediately loaded on an iron gurney and wheeled to the van.

  “Help me attach these metal bands,” he cried, when the workers had left. “It may wake any second.” They labored feverishly until they had the case banded in four places with strips of metal.

  “Now—to the reservoir. Drive! Go!”

  The reservoir was all the way across town. Out of the factory district onto the highway, they sped past closed buildings and empty lots. A whirl of city blocks shot by. The highway opened up to broad fields.

  The air inside the van grew uncomfortably warm.

  “It is awake,” said Rosen, “and exerting tremendous pressure. Please drive faster.”

  “Can it break out?” called Shanks, increasing the speed so that the van shook as it roared along the highway.

  “It doesn’t matter. If the lid cracks open just a hair—Never mind. Drive faster.”

  Shanks leaned forward, his head nearly touching the windshield, his hands shaking on the wheel, his eyes fixed hypnotically on the unstable highway. The speedometer registered its full 120 mph. The van rattled dangerously.

  “There!” cried Rosen. “Up that steep hill—it is the reservoir!”

  The air stifled, smothered, singed the eyes, cracked the skin.

  “Slow down. Don’t miss the turnoff. There, just ahead.”

  Overlooking the city, the reservoir was accessible only by a steep and winding road. Shanks hit the brake; the van nearly capsized as they veered into the narrow curve. Now the van did not shake; it crawled up and around each painful turn. The air was scarcely breathable.

  Rosen leaned over to glance at the dashboard. “We’re overheatin
g,” he said. “The temperature gauge is all the way to the red. The reservoir cannot be much farther.”

  But it was. The road went up and up—till suddenly they reached the top. Sparkling in the faint starlight a large body of water gently rippled a hundred yards below. A three-foot wall of concrete blocks separated the water from the embankment.

  The van stopped.

  “The engine has quit,” Rosen whispered. The intense heat made it difficult to speak. “Get out. We’ll let the van coast down to the water.” Rosen heaved his bulk out of the passenger side. But Shanks remained.

  “William, release the brake and get out!”

  As though awakening from a daze, Shanks stepped out of the van as it began to roll down the inclined road. Gradually it picked up speed, hurling itself faster and faster at the wall. It hit the concrete with a resounding thud, taking pieces with it as it partially burst through and came to rest with its front wheels overhanging the water by a few feet.

  “Down!” roared Rosen. “We must push it all the way into the water!” They raced to the van.

  “Push,” Rosen panted. Their feet braced, their backs straining, they strove with every sinew to dislodge the van. It was wedged fast.

  “Inside,” Rosen gasped as he fought for breath. “Grappling hooks. Attach them to the metal bands. We’ll heave the case into the water.”

  The impact of the crash had sprung the rear doors. The box was in full view, surrounded by an almost palpable wall of heat. Nearby a pile of blankets was beginning to smolder.

  “Gloves,” Rosen whispered. “And wet the blankets.”

  They drew on heavy gloves and immersed the blankets in the reservoir. Shielding themselves with the dripping blankets, they attached short grappling hooks to the blistering metal bands.

  “Hoist!” Rosen yelled through the fiery heat. “Hoist, hoist—there! Now into the water. What is wrong? Why don’t you help?”

  Shanks’s gaze was not on the case but up into the sky, where a giant glowing salamander was forming above them, its claws twitching, ready to pounce, its razor teeth grinning down.

  “It is an image,” shouted Rosen. “It’s only an image. Help me with the case!”