Charles Beaumont: Selected Stories (9 page)

Introduction to

THE HOWLING MAN
by Harlan Ellison

No one-not critics or savants of semiotics or even readers of the most sensitive sort-can know how good Chuck Beaumont was at putting words on paper. Only other writers can feel the impulse that beats in his work as strongly as it beats in themselves. Good writers love him and what he did; mediocre writers envy and marvel and even hate him a little because he heard the music denied them; bad writers are simply overwhelmed and are left desolate at the realization that, like Salieri, they can never be Mozart. Charles Beaumont was truly one in a million. A million men and women fighting that battle waged every time they sit down to work, on a battlefield 8 1/2 x 11, in conflict not only with themselves and the best they've ever done personally, but with all the best who went before.
We try to avoid such statements, because they reek of the worst pronouncements of Hemingway getting into the ring with Chekhov (that snappy little counterpuncher). But any writer worth the name, unless he or she is totally daft, knows that it's true: comparisons will eventually be made, and one has to go up against the highest standards of literature if one hopes to be read fifteen minutes after final blackout. Even John Simon knows it: ". . . there is no point in saying less than your predecessors have said."
So we pick our icons. And we pick them carefully, in hopes that we haven't been spotted so many balls that beating the competition is a hollow victory. Mine have been Kafka and Poe and Borges… and Beaumont. (Arrogance had long been my prime character flaw.) Thus far I don't think their shades need worry.
And though I know the former three only through their work, Chuck Beaumont was my friend for about nine years, and I had the honor of buying and publishing quite a bit of his stuff.
From April Fool's Day 1959, my separation date from the U.S. Army, till August of 1960, yoked with the excellent novelist Frank M. Robinson, I was editor of Rogue, a slick men's magazine published out of Evanston, Illinois-only a few miles and even fewer dissimilarities from Playboy's offices on Ohio Street in Chicago's Loop. The magazine was published by one of the industry's great characters, William L. Ham ling.
Now, Mr. Ham ling, early in his publishing career, circa 1950, had worked in Skokie, Illinois for a man named George von Rosen, publisher of (among other titles, such as Art Photography, which Bill worked on) Modern Man, arguably the first true men's magazine.
(Let me backtrack for a moment. I hadn't really intended to get into this much ancient history, simply to make a point about origins, but it occurs to me that this is the kind of publishing history minutiae that gets lost forever unless someone accidentally manages to commit it to paper before the memories blur. Some archivist may one day need this series of linkages, which are kinda sorta fascinating in/of themselves, so excuse the digression.
(Hamling had worked under editor Raymond A. Palmer at Ziff-Davis Publishing in Chicago during the '40's, winding up as managing editor of the pulp science fiction magazines Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures in 1948. When Z-D decided to move the operation to New York in 1950, both Palmer and Ham ling chose to stay in Evanston. Palmer started Other Worlds and Imagination, digest-sized genre magazines, and Ham ling got a job with von Rosen.
(In 1951, Ray Palmer fronted Hamling financially and Bill bought Imagination, later adding Imaginative Tales and, in 1955, branching out of the sf digest idiom to start a semi-slick men's magazine, Rogue. Which circles us back out of the digression to the element of Hamling's stint at von Rosen's magazine factory that resulted in Beaumont working for us at Rogue.)
In the accounting department at von Rosen's happy little nudery, was a guy who had been fired from Esquire (which also, at that time, had its office in Chicago.) His name was Hugh Hefner, and his aspirations were only slightly higher than those of his coworker, William L. Ham ling… though his taste and inventiveness were infinitely greater. Hamling and Hefner were friendly acquaintances. Not buddies, but chummy enough that when Ham ling saw Hefner start Playboy on his kitchen table (with a capital investment of $600 of his own money and loans from friends that brought the seed total to between $7000-$8000) and quickly achieve high-profile success, his own sense of home-grown American venality was piqued.
By 1953, when Hefner started Playboy and began gathering around him the core talents who would form the basis of the magazine's non-public popularity-Beaumont, Matheson, Herbert Gold, Ken Purdy, and others-Ham ling had become financially solvent with the sf magazines, and he burned with envy at the way in which that no-name guy from von Rosen's accounting department had passed him at a dead run. Playing his acquaintance with Hefner to get basic start-up information, Hamling began Rogue, ripping off as many aspects of the original as he could on a lower budget. The paper wasn't slick, the photos weren't in color, the nudes weren't as stunning, but it was the second men's magazine (excluding Modern Man, which was mostly nudes, with prose that might have included some fiction and contemporary articles, but if it did, I can't remember any.) And in 1955 when Rogue debuted, the market was so new that there was plenty of room for a Playboy competitor, despite its ragtag look.
But Ham ling had a plethora of blind spots. The most interesting, of concern to us here, was that though he envied Hefner to a degree that consumed him, he also admired him and sought to emulate Hefner's every move. By 1959, when Hamling hired me straight out of my honorable discharge to edit Rogue, he had decided to go whole hog and turn Rogue into a full slick magazine. So he needed professional talent-both as editorial staff and as contributors-to supplement his own iron will at the conceptual stages. After Frank Robinson and I came on board, Ham ling set about (from the vantage point behind that blind spot) co-opting everyone of talent who worked for Hefner, on the theory that they must be the best - . . after all, wasn't Hefner publishing them? Don't ask.
The problem for Bill was that most of those people were under exclusive contract to Hefner, with restrictions against their publishing anywhere else in competing markets that were Draconian. (Once, a model who had appeared in Playboy had the bad fortune to allow a photo set of leftovers appear in Rogue. The woman's personal services contract with HMH was voided and she lost thousands of dollars' worth of personal appearance gigs, not to mention the succoring warmth of the Playboy Mansion.)
But Bill was determined. The two most prominent contributors to Playboy whose acquisition obsessed Ham ling, were artist Ron Bradford and writer Charles Beaumont. So Bill made the acquaintance of Chuck, and made him money offers Chuck couldn't refuse, and before I arrived at Rogue Chuck was already doing profiles of show biz personalities and sports car pieces under the house pseudonyms "Michael Phillips" and "Robert Courtney." (These names were used by others, as well. My own "The Case for Our College Bohemians"-about which the less said, the better-was published in the August 1 959 Rogue bylined "Robert Courtney.")
But on the day that Chuck delivered into my hands the manuscript of "The Howling Man," which Hefner had rejected for heaven-only-knows-what-reason, I realized instantly that we had been proffered a small literary miracle, and that a house pseudonym would not suffice. Another "Courtney" or "Phillips" piece meant nothing. But if we could create a separate nom-de-plume persona for Beaumont's fiction, we might be able to raise out of the mire of non-entities a penname creation that might have as much serious literary coin as Beaumont himself
The Evan Hunter/Ed McBain Theory.
Bill Hamling, of course, thought "The Howling Man" was much too dangerous a Piece for us to publish. Frank Robinson and I beat him mercilessly, day after day, until he finally capitulated; and I set about preparing a showcase for the work that would set it off for special attention.
First, I achieved one of Bill's dreams by getting to artist Ron Bradford, who had been doing the most memorable feature art for Hefner. Through the then-art director, Richard A. Thompson, who knew Bradford in the Chicago art community, I met and cajoled Ron by using the one tool I knew was perfect: I let him read "The Howling Man."
Bradford was as knocked out by the story as Frank and I had been, and he agreed to do the art. I invented the name "Corey Summerwell" for Bradford and he created a style of collage entirely different from what he was doing for Playboy so Hefner would not be able to make the connection. Ironically, a second piece of Bradford art, for a story titled "Manny" by Raymond Passacantando, got into print a month before the Summerwell painting for 'The Howling Man" in the November 1959 Rogue.
All that remained was to invent a pseudonym for Beaumont. We wanted it to be a subterfuge, but we also wanted those who were on to such things to know who was behind the pen-name. I invented C.B. Lovehill. The C and the B are obvious; beau I twisted out the French to get love, though idiomatically it was a stretch; and mont became hill. On the meet the authors page that issue (called "Rogue Notes'), my attempts to keep Beaumont out of trouble with Hefner by making no allusions to the pseudonym, were defeated by Hamling who, with typical disregard for anyone else's personal danger, rewrote my copy and damned surely indicated Lovehill was Beaumont to all but the dopiest reader. I was furious with Hamling, as was Beaumont, but life with Hamling in it was like having a nagging summer flu that simply will not go away; and finally, we just had to accept it.
The story was published, it drew huge amounts of laudatory mail, and Chuck went on to do (if memory serves) another half dozen stories for me, stories like "Dead, You Know" and "Genevieve, My Genevieve."
Funnily, in the same "Rogue Notes" where Chuck was betrayed, we ran a photo of "Lovehill." It is a snapshot of Frank Robinson in his summer straw hat, talking on the phone with his back to the camera. (In another issue, "Courtney" is seen in photo closeup. He looks a lot like Ellison.)
The story that lies at the heart of all this history has gone on to be recognized as a modern fantasy classic. Chuck scripted it for the original Twilight Zone and its television incarnation plays and replays endlessly in syndication; and each time it airs we realize anew how deft, how sinister, how universal in its message it is.
But beyond the simple plot structure and horrendous implications of characterization, "The Howling Man" recommends itself, and the wonders of Beaumont's muse, because it is the rare fiction that we cannot forget. It touches places in the soul that resonate purely, almost thirty years after it first appeared, as strongly as in 1959. It is, for me, not merely a point of pride to be able to say that I was privileged to publish the work of one of the best writers this country ever produced, but it is a way of saying thank you to a man who was my friend and who influenced not only my own writing but my life in ways he would recognize were he still with us.
Yet on this 20th anniversary of Chuck's passing (as I write this introduction to what I think is his finest short story), it takes on considerable import for anyone who looks toward the icons for the tap roots of contemporary American fiction.
Charles Beaumont was one in a million, and perhaps rereading "The Howling Man" will remind the other 999,999 that what they do, when they do it with honor and high craft, has been profoundly influenced by what Chuck taught us in the pages of magazines now three decades gone.

THE HOWLING MAN

by Charles Beaumont

The Germany of that time was a land of valleys and mountains and swift dark rivers, a green and fertile land where everything grew tall and straight out of the earth. There was no other country like it. Stepping across the border from Belgium, where the rain-caped, mustached guards saluted, grinning, like operetta soldiers, you entered a different world entirely. Here the grass became as rich and smooth as velvet; deep, thick woods appeared; the air itself, which had been heavy with the French perfume of wines and sauces, changed: the clean, fresh smell of lakes and pines and boulders came into your lungs. You stood a moment, then, at the border, watching the circling hawks above and wondering, a little fearfully, how such a thing could happen. In less than a minute you had passed from a musty, ancient room, through an invisible door, into a kingdom of winds and light. Unbelievable! But there, at your heels, clearly in view, is Belgium, like all the rest of Europe, a faded tapestry from some forgotten mansion.
In that time, before I had heard of St. Wulfran's, of the wretch who clawed the stones of a locked cell, wailing in the midnight hours, or of the daft Brothers and their mad Abbot, I had strong legs and a mind on its last search, and I preferred to be alone. A while and I'll come back to this spot. We will ride and feel the sickness, fall, and hover on the edge of death, together. But I am not a writer, only one who loves wild, unhousebroken words; I must have a real beginning.
Paris beckoned in my youth. I heeded, for the reason most young men just out of college heed, although they would never admit it: to lie with mysterious beautiful women. A solid, traditional upbringing among the corseted ruins of Boston had succeeded, as such upbringings generally do, in honing the urge to a keen edge. My nightly dreams of beaded bagnios and dusky writhing houris, skilled beyond imagining, reached, finally, the unbearable stage beyond which lies either madness or respectibility. Fancying neither, I managed to convince my parents that a year abroad would add exactly the right amount of seasoning to my maturity, like a dash of curry in an otherwise bland, if not altogether tasteless, chowder. I'm afraid that Father caught the hot glint in my eye, but he was kind. Describing, in detail, and with immense effect, the hideous consequences of profligacy, telling of men he knew who'd gone to Europe, innocently, and fallen into dissolutions so profound they'd not been heard of since, he begged me at all times to remember that I was an Ellington and turned roe loose. Paris, of course, was enchanting and terrifying, as a jungle must be to a zoo-born monkey. Out of respect to the honored dead, and Dad, I did a quick trot through the Tuileries, the Louvre, and down the Champs Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe; then, with the fall of night, I cannoned off to Montmartre and the Rue Pigalle, embarking on the Grand Adventure. Synoptically, it did not prove to be so grand as I'd imagined; nor was it, after the fourth week, so terribly adventurous. Still: important to what followed, for what followed doubtless wouldn't have but for the sweet complaisant girls.
Boston's Straights and Narrows don't, I fear, prepare one-except psychologically-for the Wild Life. My health broke in due course and, as my thirst had been well and truly slaked, I was not awfully discontent to sink back into the contemplative cocoon to which I was, apparently, more suited. Abed for a month I lay, in celibate silence and almost total inactivity. Then, no doubt as a final gesture of rebellion, I got my idea-got? or had my concentrated sins received it, like a signal from a failing tower?-and I made my strange, un-Ellingtonian decision. I would explore Europe. But not as tourist, safe and fat in his fat, safe bus, insulated against the beauty and the ugliness of changing cultures by a pane of glass and a room at the Englishspeaking hotel. No. I would go like an unprotected wind, a seven-league-booted leaf, a nestless bird, and I would see this dark strange land with the vision of a boy on the last legs of his dreams. I would go by bicycle, poor and lonely and questing-as poor and lonely and questing, anyway, as one can be with a hundred thousand in the bank and a partnership in Ellington, Carruthers & Blake waiting.
So it was. New England blood and muscles wilted on that first day's pumping, but New England spirit toughened as the miles dropped back. Like an ant crawling over a once lovely, now decayed and somewhat seedy Duchess, I rode over the body of Europe. I dined at restaurants where boar's heads hung, all vicious-tusked and blind; I slept at country inns and breathed the musty age, and sometimes girls came to the door and knocked and asked if I had everything I needed ("Well…") and they were better than the girls in Paris, though I can't imagine why. No matter. Out of France I pedaled, into Belgium, out, and to the place of cows and forest, mountains, brooks and laughing people: Germany. (I've rhapsodized on purpose for I feel it's quite important to remember how completely Paradisical the land was then, at that time.)
I looked odd, standing there. The border guard asked what was loose with me, I answered Nothing-grateful for the German, and the French, Miss Finch had drummed into me-and set off along the smallest, darkest path. I serpentined through forests, cities, towns, villages, and always I followed its least likely appendages. Unreasonably, I pedaled as if toward a destination: into the Moselle Valley country, up into the desolate hills of emerald.
By a ferry, fallen to desuetude, the reptile drew me through a bosky wood. The trees closed in at once. I drank the fragrant air and pumped and kept on pumping, but a heat began to grow inside my body. My head began to ache. I felt weak. Two more miles and I was obliged to stop, for perspiration filmed my skin. You know the signs of pneumonia: a sapping of the strength, a trembling, flashes of heat and of cold; visions. I lay in the bed of damp leaves for a time. At last a village came to view. A thirteenth-century village, gray and narrow-streeted, cobbled to the hidden store fronts. A number of old people in peasant costumes looked up as I bumped along and I recall one ancient tallow-colored fellow-nothing more. Only the weakness, like acid, burning off my nerves and muscles. And an intervening blackness to pillow my fall.
I awoke to the smells of urine and hay. The fever had passed, but my arms and legs lay heavy as logs, my head throbbed horribly, and there was an empty shoveledout hole inside my stomach somewhere. For a while I did not move or open my eyes. Breathing was a major effort. But consciousness came, eventually.
I was in a tiny room. The walls and ceiling were of rough gray stone, the single glassless window was arch-shaped, the floor was uncombed dirt. My bed was not a bed at all but a blanket thrown across a disorderly pile of crinkly straw. Beside me, a crude table; upon it, a pitcher; beneath it, a bucket. Next to the table, a stool. And seated there, asleep, his tonsured head adangle from an Everest of robe, a monk.
I must have groaned, for the shorn pate bobbed up precipitately. Two silver trails gleamed down the corners of the suddenly exposed mouth, which drooped into a frown. The slumbrous eyes blinked.
"It is God's infinite mercy," sighed the gnomelike little man. "You have recovered."
"Not as yet," I told him. Unsuccessfully, I tried to remember what had happened; then I asked questions.
"I am Brother Christophorus. This is the Abbey of St. Wulfran's. The Burgemeister of Schwartzhof, Herr Barth, brought you to us nine days ago. Father Jerome said that you would die and he sent me to watch, for I have never seen a man die, and Father Jerome holds that it is beneficial for a Brother to have seen a man die. But now I suppose that you will not die." He shook his head ruefully.
"Your disappointment," I said, "cuts me to the quick. However, don't abandon hope. The way I feel now, it's touch and go."
"No," said Brother Christophorus sadly. "You will get well. It will take time. But you will get well."
"Such ingratitude, and after all you've done. How can I express my apologies?"
He blinked again. With the innocence of a child, he said, "I beg your pardon?"
"Nothing." I grumbled about blankets, a fire, some food to eat, and then slipped back into the well of sleep. A fever dream of forests full of giant two-headed beasts came, then the sound of screaming.
I awoke. The scream shrilled on-Klaxon-loud, high, cutting, like a cry for help.
"What is that sound?" I asked.
The monk smiled. "Sound? I hear no sound," he said.
It stopped. I nodded. "Dreaming. Probably I'll hear a good deal more before I'm through. I shouldn't have left Paris in such poor condition."
"No," he said. "You shouldn't have left Paris."
Kindly now, resigned to my recovery, Brother Christophorus became attentive to a fault. Nurselike, he spooned thick soups into me, applied compresses, chanted soothing prayers, and emptied the bucket out the window. Time passed slowly. As I fought the sickness, the dreams grew less vivid-but the nightly cries did not diminish. They were as full of terror and loneliness as before, strong, real in my ears. I tried to shut them out, but they would not be shut out. Still, how could they be strong and real except in my vanishing delirium? Brother Christophorus did not hear them. I watched him closely when the sunlight faded to the gray of dusk and the screams began, but he was deaf to them-if they existed. If they existed!
"Be still, my son. It is the fever that makes you hear these noises. That is quite natural. Is that not quite natural? Sleep."
"But the fever is gone! I'm sitting up now. Listen! Do you mean to tell me you don't hear that?"
"I hear only you, my son."
The screams, that fourteenth night, continued until dawn. They were totally unlike any sounds in my experience. Impossible to believe they could be uttered and sustained by a human, yet they did not seem to be animal. I listened, there in the gloom, my hands balled into fists, and knew, suddenly, that one of two things must be true. Either someone or something was making these ghastly sounds, and Brother Christophorus was lying, or-I was going mad. Hearing-voices mad, climbing-walls and frothing mad. I'd have to find the answer: that I knew. And by myself.
I listened with a new ear to the howls. Razoring under the door, they rose to operatic pitch, subsided, resumed, like the cries of a surly, hysterical child. To test their reality, I hummed beneath my breath, I covered my head with a blanketing, scratched at the straw, coughed. No difference. The quality of substance, of existence, was there. I tried, then, to localize the screams; and, on the fifteenth night, felt sure that they were coming from a spot not far along the hall.
"The sounds that maniacs hear seem quite real to them."
I know. I know!
The monk was by my side, he had not left it from the start, keeping steady vigil even through Matins. He joined his tremulous soprano to the distant chants, and prayed excessively. But nothing could tempt him away. The food we ate was brought to us, as were all other needs. I'd see the Abbot, Father Jerome, once I was recovered. Meanwhile.
"I'm feeling better, Brother. Perhaps you'd care to show me the grounds. I've seen nothing of St. Wulfran's except this little room."
"There is only this little room multiplied. Ours is a rigorous order. The Franciscans, now, they permit themselves esthetic pleasure; we do not. It is, for us, a luxury. We have a single, most unusual job. There is nothing to see."
"But surely the Abbey is very old."
"Yes, that is true."
"As an antiquarian-"
"Mr. Ellington-"
"What is it you don't want me to see? What are you afraid of, Brother?"
"Mr. Ellington? I do not have the authority to grant your request. When you are well enough to leave, Father Jerome will no doubt be happy to accommodate you."
"Will he also be happy to explain the screams I've heard each night since I've been here?"
"Rest, my son. Rest."
The unholy, hackle-raising shriek burst loose and bounded off the hard stone walls. Brother Christophorus crossed himself, apropos of nothing, and sat like an ancient Indian on the weary stool. I knew he liked me. Especially, perhaps. We'd got along quite well in all our talks, but this-verboten.
I closed my eyes. I counted to three hundred. I opened my eyes.
The good monk was asleep. I blasphemed, softly, but he did not stir, so I swung my legs over the side of the straw bed and made my way across the dirt floor to the heavy door. I rested there a time, in the candleless dark, listening to the howls; then, with Bostonian discretion, raised the bolt. The rusted hinges creaked, but Brother Christophorus was deep in celestial marble: his head drooped low upon his chest.
Panting, weak as a landlocked fish, I stumbled out into the corridor. The screams became impossibly loud. I put my hands to my ears, instinctively, and wondered how anyone could sleep with such a furor going on. It was a furor. In my mind? No. Real. The monastery shook with these shrill cries. You could feel their realness with your teeth.
I passed a Brother's cell and listened, then another; then I paused. A thick door, made of oak or pine, was locked before me. Behind it were the screams.
A chill went through me on the edge of those unutterable shrieks of hopeless, helpless anguish, and for a moment I considered turning back-not to my room, not to my bed of straw, but back into the open world. But duty held me. I took a breath and walked up to the narrow bar-crossed window and looked in.

A man was in the cell. On all fours, circling like a beast, his head thrown back, a man. The moonlight showed his face. It cannot be described-not, at least, by me. A man past death might look like this, a victim of the Inquisition rack, the stake, the pincers: not a human in the third decade of the twentieth century, surely. I had never seen such suffering within two eyes, such lost, mad suffering. Naked, he crawled about the dirt, cried, leaped up to his feet and clawed the hard stone walls in fury.
Then he saw me.
The screaming ceased. He huddled, blinking, in the corner of his cell. And then, as though unsure of what he saw, he walked right to the door.
In German, hissing: "Who are you?"
"David Ellington," I said. "Are you locked in? Why have they locked you in?"
He shook his head.
"Be still, be still. You are not German?"
"No."
I told him how I came to be at St. Wulfran's.
"Ah!" Trembling, his horny fingers closing on the bars, the naked man said: "Listen to me, we have only moments. They are mad. You hear? All mad. I was in the village, lying with my woman, when their crazy Abbot burst into the house and hit me with his heavy cross. I woke up here. They flogged me. I asked for food, they would not give it to me. They took my clothes. They threw me in this filthy room. They locked the door."
"Why?"
"Why?" He moaned. "I wish I knew. That's been the worst of it. Five years imprisoned, beaten, tortured, starved, and not a reason given, not a word to guess from-Mr. Ellington! I have sinned, but who has not? With my woman, quietly, alone with my woman, my love. And this God-drunk lunatic, Jerome, cannot stand it. Help me!"
His breath splashed on my face. I took a backward step and tried to think. I couldn't quite believe that in this century a thing so frightening could happen. Yet, the Abbey was secluded, above the world, timeless. What could not transpire here, secretly?
"I'll speak to the Abbot."
"No! I tell you, he's the maddest of them all. Say nothing to him."
"Then how can I help you?"
He pressed his mouth against the bars. "In one way only. Around Jerome's neck, there is a key. It fits this lock. If-"
"Mr. Ellington!"
I turned and faced a fierce El Greco painting of a man. White-bearded, prow-nosed, regal as an Emperor beneath the gray peaked robe, he came out of the darkness. "Mr. Ellington, I did not know that you were well enough to walk. Come with me, please."
The naked man began to weep hysterically. I felt a grip of steel about my arm. Through corridors, past snore-filled cells, the echoes of the weeping dying, we continued to a room.
"I must ask you to leave St. Wulfran's," the Abbot said. "We lack the proper facilities for care of the ill. Arrangements will be made in Schwartzhof-"
"One moment," I said. "While it's probably true that Brother Christophorus's ministrations saved my life-and certainly true that I owe you all a debt of gratitude-I've got to ask for an explanation of that man in the cell."
"What man?" the Abbot said softly.
"The one we just left, the one who's screamed all night long every night."
"No man has been screaming, Mr. Ellington."
Feeling suddenly very weak, I sat down and rested a few breaths' worth. Then I said, "Father Jerome-you are he? I am not necessarily an irreligious person, but neither could I be considered particularly religious. I know nothing of monasteries, what is permitted, what isn't. But I seriously doubt you have the authority to imprison a man against his will."
"This is quite true. We have no such authority."
"Then why have you done so?"
The Abbot looked at me steadily. In a firm, inflexible voice, he said: "No man has been imprisoned at St. Wulfran's."
"He claims otherwise."
"Who claims otherwise?"
"The man in the cell at the end of the corridor."
"There is no man in the cell at the end of the corridor."
"I was talking with him!"
"You were talking with no man."
The conviction in his voice shocked me into momentary silence. I gripped the arms of the chair.
"You are ill, Mr. Ellington," the bearded holy man said. "You have suffered from delirium. You have heard and seen things which do not exist."
"That's true," I said. "But the man in the cell-whose voice I can hear now!-is not one of those things."
The Abbot shrugged. "Dreams can seem very real, my son."
I glanced at the leather thong about his turkey-gobbler neck, all but hidden beneath the beard. "Honest men make unconvincing liars," I lied convincingly. "Brother Christophorus has a way of looking at the floor whenever he denies the cries in the night. You look at me, but your voice loses its command. I can't imagine why, but you are both very intent upon keeping me away from the truth. Which is not only poor Christianity, but also poor psychology. For now I am quite curious indeed. You might as well tell me, Father; I'll find out eventually."
"What do you mean?"
"Only that. I'm sure the police will be interested to hear of a man imprisoned at the Abbey."
"I tell you, there is no man!"
"Very well. Let's forget the matter."
"Mr. Ellington-" The Abbot put his hands behind him. "The person in the cell is, ah, one of the Brothers. Yes. He is subject to… seizures, fits. You know fits? At these times, he becomes intractable. Violent. Dangerous! We're obliged to lock him in his cell, which you can surely understand."
"I understand," I said, "that you're still lying to me. If the answer were as simple as that, you'd not have gone through the elaborate business of pretending I was delirious. There'd have been no need. There's something more to it, but I can wait. Shall we go on to Schwartzof?"
Father Jerome tugged at his beard viciously, as if it were some feathered demon come to taunt him. "Would you truly go to the police?" he asked.
"Would you?" I said. "In my position?"
He considered that for a long time, tugging the beard, nodding the prowed head; and the screams went on, so distant, so real. I thought of the naked man clawing in his filth.
"Well, Father?"
"Mr. Ellington, I see that I shall have to be honest with you-which is a great pity," he said. "Had I followed my original instinct and refused to allow you in the Abbey to begin with… but, I had no choice. You were near death. No physician was available. You would have perished. Still, perhaps that would have been better."
"My recovery seems to have disappointed a lot of people," I commented. "I assure you it was inadvertent."
The old man took no notice of this remark. Stuffing his mandarin hands into the sleeves of his robe, he spoke with great deliberation. "When I said that there was no man in the cell at the end of the corridor, I was telling the truth. Sit down, sir! Please! Now." He closed his eyes. "There is much to the story, much that you will not understand or believe. You are sophisticated, or feel that you are. You regard our life here, no doubt, as primitive-"
"In fact, I-"
"In fact, you do. I know the current theories. Monks are misfits, neurotics, sexual frustrates, and aberrants. They retreat from the world because they cannot cope with the world. Et cetera. You are surprised I know these things? My son, I was told by the one who began the theories!" He raised his head upward, revealing more of the leather thong. "Five years ago, Mr. Ellington, there were no screams at St. Wulfran's. This was an undistinguished little Abbey in the wild Black Mountain region, and its inmates' job was quite simply to serve God, to save what souls they could by constant prayer. At that time, not very long after the great war, the world was in chaos. Schwartzhof was not the happy village you see now. It was, my son, a resort for the sinful, a hive of vice and corruption, a pit for the unwary-and the wary also, if they had not strength. A Godless place! Forsaken, fornicators paraded the streets. Gambling was done. Robbery and murder, drunkenness, and evils so profound I cannot put them into words. In all the universe you could not have found a fouler pesthole, Mr. Ellington! The Abbots and the Brothers at St. Wulfran's succumbed for years to Schwartzhof, I regret to say. Good men, lovers of God, chaste good men came here and fought but could not win against the black temptations. Finally it was decided that the Abbey should be closed. I heard of this and argued. 'Is that not surrender?' I said. 'Are we to bow before the strength of evil? Let me try, I beg you. Let me try to amplify the word of God that all in Schwartzhof shall hear and see their dark transgressions and repent!'"
The old man stood at the window, a trembling shade. His hands were now clutched together in a fervency of remembrance. "They asked," he said, "if I considered myself more virtuous than my predecessors that I should hope for success where they had failed. I answered that I did not, but that I had an advantage. I was a convert. Earlier I had walked with evil, and knew its face. My wish was granted. For a year. One year only. Rejoicing, Mr. Ellington, I came here; and one night, incognito, walked the streets of the village. The smell of evil was strong. Too strong, I thought-and I had reveled in the alleys of Morocco, I had seen the dens of Hong Kong, Paris, Spain. The orgies were too wild, the drunkards much too drunk, the profanities a great deal too profane. It was as if the evil of the world had been distilled and centered here, as if a pagan tribal chief, in hiding, had assembled all his rituals about him…" The Abbot nodded his head. "I thought of Rome, in her last days; of Byzantium; of-Eden. That was the first of many hints to come. No matter what they were. I returned to the Abbey and donned my holy robes and went back into Schwartzhof. I made myself conspicuous. Some jeered, some shrank away, a voice cried 'Damn your foolish God!' And then a hand thrust out from darkness, touched my shoulder, and I heard: 'Now, Father, are you lost?"
The Abbot brought his tightly clenched hands to his forehead and tapped his forehead.
"Mr. Ellington, I have some poor wine here. Please have some."
I drank, gratefully. Then the priest continued.
"I faced a man of average appearance. So average, indeed, that I felt I knew, then. 'No,' I told him, 'but you are lost!' He laughed a foul laugh. 'Are we not all, Father?' Then he said a most peculiar thing. He said his wife was dying and begged me to give her Extreme Unction. 'Please,' he said, 'in God's sweet name!' I was confused. We hurried to his house. A woman lay upon a bed, her body nude. 'It is a different Extreme Unction that I have in mind,' he whispered, laughing. 'It's the only kind, dear Father, that she understands. No other will have her! Pity! Pity on the poor soul lying there in all her suffering. Give her your Sceptre!' And the woman's arms came snaking, supplicating toward me, round and sensuous and hot…"
Father Jerome shuddered and paused. The shrieks, I thought, were growing louder from the hall. "Enough of that," he said. "I was quite sure then. I raised my cross and told the words I'd learned, and it was over. He screamed-as he's doing now-and fell upon his knees. He had not expected to be recognized, nor should he have been normally. But in my life, I'd seen him many times, in many guises. I brought him to the Abbey. I locked him in the cell. We chant his chains each day. And so, my son, you see why you must not speak of the things you've seen and heard?"
I shook my head, as if afraid the dream would end, as if reality would suddenly explode upon me. "Father Jerome," I said, "I haven't the vaguest idea of what you're talking about. Who is the man?"
"Are you such a fool, Mr. Ellington? That you must be told?"
"Yes!"
"Very well," said the Abbot. "He is Satan. Otherwise known as the Dark Angel, Asmodeus, Belial, Ahriman, Diabolus-the Devil."
I opened my mouth.
"I see you doubt me. That is bad. Think, Mr. Ellington, of the peace of the world in these five years. Of the prosperity, of the happiness. Think of this country, Germany, now. Is there another country like it? Since we caught the Devil and locked him up here, there have been no great wars, no overwhelming pestilences: only the sufferings man was meant to endure. Believe what I say, my son; I beg you. Try very hard to believe that the creature you spoke with is Satan himself. Fight your cynicism, for it is born of him; he is the father of cynicism, Mr. Ellington! His plan was to defeat God by implanting doubt in the minds of Heaven's subjects!" The Abbot cleared his throat. "Of course," he said, "we could never release anyone from St. Wulfran's who had any part of the Devil in him."
I stared at the old fanatic and thought of him prowling the streets, looking for sin; saw him standing outraged at the bold fornicator's bed, wheedling him into an invitation to the Abbey, closing that heavy door and locking it, and, because of the world's temporary postwar peace, clinging to his fantasy. What greater dream for a holy man than actually capturing the Devil!
"I believe you," I said.
"Truly?"
"Yes. I hesitated only because it seemed a trifle odd that Satan should have picked a little German village for his home."
"He moves around," the Abbot said. "Schwartzhof attached him as lovely virgins attract perverts."
"I see."
"Do you? My son, do you?"
"Yes. I swear it. As a matter of fact, I thought he looked familiar, but I simply couldn't place him."
"Are you lying?"
"Father, I am a Bostonian."
"And you promise not to mention this to anyone?"
"I promise."
"Very well." The old man sighed. "I suppose," he said, "that you would not consider joining us as a Brother at the Abbey?"
"Believe me, Father, no one could admire the vocation more than I. But I am not worthy. No; it's quite out of the question. However, you have my word that your secret is safe with me."