Nightmares & Geezenstacks (3 page)

He awoke without mowing what had awakened him until a second temblor, only a minute after the first, shook the bed slightly and rattled small objects on the dresser. He lay waiting for a third shock but none came, not then.

He realized, though, that he was wide awake now and probably would not be able to go back to sleep. He looked at the luminous dial of his wrist watch and saw that it was only three o’clock, the middle of the night. He got out of bed and walked, in his pajamas, to the window. It was open and a cool breeze came through it, and he, could see the twinkling, flickering lights in the black sky and could hear the sounds of-night, Somewhere, bells. But why bells at this hour? Ringing for disaster? Had the mild temblors here been damaging quakes elsewhere, nearby? Or was a real quake coming and the bells a warning, a warning to people to leave their houses and get out into the open for survival?

Suddenly, although not from fear but from a strange compulsion he had no wish to analyze, he wanted to be out there and not here. He had to run, he had to.

And he was running, down the hallway and out the front door, running silently in bare feet down the long straight walk that led to the gate. And through the gate that swung shut behind him and into the field…
Field?
Should there be a field here, right outside his gate? Especially a field dotted with posts, thick ones like truncated telephone poles his own height? But before he could organize his thinking, try to start from scratch and remember where here was and who he was and what he was doing here at all, there was another temblor. More violent this time; it made him stagger in his running and run into one of the mysterious posts, a glancing blow that hurt his shoulder and deflected his running course, almost making him lose his footing. What was this weird compulsion that kept him going toward—what?

And then the real earthquake hit, the ground seemed to rise up under him and shake itself and when it ended he was lying on his back staring up at the monstrous sky in which now suddenly appeared, in miles-high glowing red letters a
word
. The word was
TILT
and as he stared at it all the other flashing lights went off and the bells quit ringing and it was the end of everything.

Ralph NC-5 sighed with relief as he caught sight of Planet Four of Arcturus in the spotter scope, just where his computer had told him it would be. Arcturus IV was the only inhabited or inhabitable planet of its primary and it was quite a few light-years to the next star system.

He needed food—his fuel and water supplies were okay but the commissary department on Pluto had made a mistake in stocking his scouter—and, according to the space manual, the natives were friendly. They’d give him anything he asked for.

The manual was very specific on that point; he reread the brief section on the Arcturians as soon as he had set the controls for automatic landing.

“
The Arcturians
,” he read, “
are inhuman, but very friendly. A pilot landing here need only ask for what he wants, and it is given to him freely, readily, and without argument
.

“
Communication with them, however, must be by paper and pencil as they have no vocal organs and no organs of hearing. However, they read and write English with considerable fluency.
”

Ralph NC-5’s mouth watered as he tried to decide what he wanted to eat first, after two days of complete abstinence from food, preceded by five days of short rations; a week ago he had discovered the commissary department’s mistake in stocking his lockers.

Foods, wonderful foods, chased one another through his mind.

He landed. The Arcturians, a dozen of them and they were indeed inhuman—twelve feet tall, six-armed, bright magenta—approached him and their leader bowed and handed him paper and pencil.

Suddenly he knew exactly what he wanted; he wrote rapidly and handed back the pad. It passed from hand to hand among them.

Then abruptly he found himself grabbed, his arms pinioned. And then tied to a stake around which they were piling brushwood and sticks. One of them lighted it.

He screamed protests but they fell, not on deaf ears but on no ears at all. He screamed in pain, and then stopped screaming.

The space manual had been quite correct in saying that the Arcturians read and write English with considerable fluency. But it had omitted to add that they were very poor at spelling; else the last thing Ralph NC-5 would have requested would have been a sizzling steak.

The Halperins were a very close-knit family. Wade Smith, one of the only two non-Halperins present, envied them that, since he had no family himself—but the envy was tempered into a mellow glow by the glass in his hand.

It was Granny Halperin’s birthday party, her eightieth birthday; everyone present except Smith and one other man was a Halperin, and was named Halperin. Granny had three sons and a daughter; all were present and the three sons were married and had their wives with them. That made eight Halperins, counting Granny. And there were four members of the second generation, grandchildren, one with his wife, and that made thirteen Halperins. Thirteen Halperins, Smith counted; with himself and the other non-Halperin, a man named Cross, that made fifteen adults. And there had been, earlier, three more Halperins, great-grandchildren, but they had been put to bed earlier in the evening, at various hours according to their respective ages.

And he liked them all, Smith thought mellowly, although now that the children had been abed a while, liquor was flowing freely and the party was getting a bit loud and boisterous for his taste. Everyone was drinking; even Granny, seated on a chair not unlike a throne, had a glass of sherry in her hand, her third for the evening.

She was a wonderfully sweet and vivacious little old lady, Smith thought. Definitely, though, a matriarch; sweet as she was, Smith was thinking; she ruled her family with a rod of iron in a velvet glove; he was just inebriated enough to get his metaphors mixed.

He, Smith, was here because he’d been invited by Bill Halperin, who was one of Granny’s sons; he was Bill’s attorney and also his friend. The other outsider, a Gene or Jean Cross, seemed to be a friend of several of the grandson-generation Halperins.

Across the room he saw that Cross was talking to Hank Halperin and noticed that whatever they were saying had suddenly led to raised and angry voices. Smith hoped there wouldn’t be trouble; the party was much too pleasant to be broken up now by a fight or even an argument. But suddenly Hank Halperin’s fist lashed out and caught Cross’s jaw and Cross went backward and fell. His head hit on the stone edge of the fireplace with a loud
thunk
and he lay still. Hank quickly ran and knelt beside Cross and touched him, and then Hank was pale as he looked up and then stood up. “Dead,” he said thickly. “God, I didn’t mean to—But he said—”

Granny wasn’t smiling now. Her voice rose sharp and querulously. “He tried to hit you first, Henry. I saw it. We all saw it, didn’t we?”

She had turned, with the last sentence, to frown at Wade Smith, the surviving outsider.

Smith moved uncomfortably. “I—I didn’t see the start of it, Mrs. Halperin.”

“You did,” she snapped. “You were looking right at them, Mr. Smith.”

Before Wade Smith could answer, Hank Halperin was saying, “Lord, Granny, I’m sorry—but even that’s no answer. This is
real
trouble. Remember I fought seven years in the ring as a pro. And the fists of a boxer or an ex-boxer are legally considered lethal weapons. That makes it second-degree murder even if he did hit. first. You know that, Mr. Smith; you’re a lawyer. And with the other trouble I’ve been in, the cops will throw the book at me.”

“I—I’m afraid you’re probably right,” Smith said uneasily. “But hadn’t somebody better phone a doctor or the police, or both?”

“In a minute, Smith,” Bill Halperin, Smith’s friend, said. “We got to get this straightened out among ourselves first. It
was
self-defense, wasn’t it?”

“I—I guess. I don’t—”

“Wait, everybody,” Granny’s sharp voice cut in. “Even if it was self-defense, Henry’s in trouble. And do you think we can
trust
this man Smith once he’s out of here and in court?”

Bill Halperin said, “But, Granny, we’ll have to—”

“Nonsense, William. 1 saw what happened. We all did. They got in a fight, Cross and Smith, and killed each other. Cross killed Smith and then, dizzy from the blows he’d taken himself, fell and hit his head. We’re not going to let Henry go to jail, are we, children? Not a Halperin, not one of us. Henry, muss that body up a little, so it’ll look like he was in a fight, not just a one-punch business. And the rest of you—”

The male Halperins, except Henry, were in a circle around Smith now; the women, except Granny, were right behind them—and the circle closed in.

The last thing Smith saw clearly was Granny in her throne-like chair, her eyes beady with excitement and determination. And the last thing Smith heard in the sudden silence which he could no longer make his voice penetrate was the soft sound of Granny Halperin’s chuckling. Then the first blow rocked him.

The Chief of Police of Midland City owned two dachshunds, one of which was named Little Note and the other Long Remember. But this fact has nothing at all to do with cats or cat burglars, and this story concerns the concern of the said Chief of Police over a seemingly inexplicable series of burglaries—a one-man crime wave.

The burglar had broken and entered nineteen houses or apartments within a period of a few weeks. Apparently he cased his jobs carefully, since it could not have been coincidence that in each and every house he burglarized there was a cat.

He stole only the cat.

Sometimes there had been money lying loose in sight, sometimes jewelry; he ignored them. Returning householders would find a window or door forced, and their cat missing, nothing else Was ever stolen or disturbed.

It was for this reason that—if we wish to belabor the obvious, and we do so wish—the newspapers and the public came to call him the Cat Burglar.

Not until his twentieth—and first unsuccessful—burglary attempt was he caught. With the help of the newspapers, the police had set a trap by publicizing the fact that the owners of a prize-winning Siamese cat had just returned with it from a cat show in a nearby city, where it won not only the best-of-breed prize, but the much more prized prize for the best of show.

Once this story, accompanied by a beautiful picture of the animal, had appeared in the newspapers, the police staked out the house and had the owners of it leave, and in an obvious manner.

Only two hours later the burglar appeared, broke into the house and entered it. They caught him cold on his way out, with the champion Siamese under his arm.

Downtown at the police station, they questioned him. The Chief of Police was curious, and so were the listening reporters.

To their surprise, the burglar was able to give a perfectly logical and understandable explanation of the unusual and specialized nature of his thefts. They didn’t release him, of course, and eventually he was tried, but he received an exceedingly light sentence since even the judge agreed that, although his method of acquiring cats had been illegal, his purpose in acquiring them had been laudable.

He was an amateur scientist. For research in his field, he needed cats. The stolen cats he had taken home and put mercifully into eternal rest. Then he had cremated the cats in a small crematory which he had built for the purpose.

He had put their ashes in jars and was experimenting with them, pulverizing them to various degrees of fineness, treating different batches in different ways, and then pouring hot water over them. He had been trying to discover the formula for instant pussy.

He hesitated upon the porch and looked a last long look upon the road behind him and the green trees that grew beside it and the yellow fields and the distant hill and the bright sunlight. Then he opened the door and entered and the door swung shut behind him.

He turned as it clicked and saw only blank wall. There was no knob and no keyhole, and the edges of the door, if there were edges, were so cunningly fitted into the carven paneling that he could not discern its outline.

Before him lay the cobwebbed hallway. The floor was thick with dust and through the dust wound two so slender curving trails as might have been made by two very small snakes or two very large caterpillars. They were very faint trails and he did not notice them until he was opposite the first doorway to the right, upon which was the inscription
Semper Fidelis
in old English lettering.

Beyond this door he found himself in a small red room, no larger than a large closet. A single chair in this room lay on its side, one leg broken and dangling by a thin splinter. On the nearest wall the only picture was a framed portrait of Benjamin Franklin. It hung askew and the glass covering it was cracked. There was no dust upon the floor and the room appeared to have been recently cleaned. In the center of the floor lay a bright curved scimitar. There were red stains upon its hilt, and upon the edge of the blade was a thick coating of green ooze. Aside from these things the room was empty.

After he had stood in this room for a long time, he crossed the hallway and entered the room opposite. It was large, the size of a small auditorium, but the bare black walls made it seem smaller at a first glance. There was row upon row of purple-plush theater seats, but there was no stage or platform and the rows of seats started only a few inches from the blank wall they faced. There was nothing. else in the room, but upon the nearest seat lay a neat pile of programs. One of these he took and found it blank save for two advertisements on the back cover, one for Prophylactic toothbrushes and the other for choice building lots in the Sub Rosa Subdivision. Upon a page near the front of the program he saw that someone had written with a lead pencil the word or name
Garfinkle
.

He thrust the program into his pocket and returned to the hallway, along which he walked in search of the stairs.

Behind one closed door which he passed he heard someone, obviously an amateur, picking out tunes on what sounded like a Hawaiian guitar. He knocked upon this door but a scurrying of footsteps and silence was the only answer. When he opened the door and peered within he saw only a decaying corpse hanging from the chandelier, and an odor hurled itself upon him, so nauseating that he closed the door hastily, and walked on to the stairway.

The stairway was narrow and winding. There was no banister, and he clung close to the wall as he ascended. He saw that the first seven steps from the bottom had been scrubbed clean but in the dust above the seventh step he saw again the two winding trails. Upon the third step from the top they converged, and vanished.

He entered the first door to his right and found himself in a spacious bedroom, lavishly furnished. He crossed immediately to the carven poster bed and pulled aside the curtains. The bed was neatly made, and he saw a slip of paper pinned to the smoothed pillow. Upon it was written hastily in a woman’s handwriting,
Denver, 1909
. Upon the reverse side, neatly written in ink in another handwriting, was an algebraic equation.

He left this room quietly and stopped short just outside the door to listen to a sound that came from behind a black doorway across the hall.

It was the deep voice of a man chanting in a strange and unfamiliar tongue. It rose and fell in a monotonous cadence like a Buddhist hymn, yet over and over recurred the word
Ragnarok
. The word seemed vaguely familiar, and the voice sounded like his own voice, but muffled by many things.

With bowed head he stood until the voice died away into a blue trembling silence and twilight crept into the hallway with the stealth of a practiced thief.

Then as though awakening, he walked along the now-silent hallway until he came to the third and last door and he saw that they had printed his name upon the upper panel in tiny letters of gold. Perhaps radium had been mixed with the gold for the letters glowed in the hallway’s dimness.

He stood for a long moment with his hand upon the knob, and then at last he entered and closed the door behind him. He heard the click of the latch and knew that it would never open again, yet he felt no fear.

The darkness was a black tangible thing that sprang back from him when he struck a match. He saw then that the room was a counterpart of the east bedroom of his father’s house near Wilmington, the room in which he had been born. He knew, now, just where to look for candles. There were two in the drawer, and the stump of a third, and he knew that, burned one at a time, they would last for almost ten hours. He lighted the first and stood it in the brass bracket on the wall, from whence it cast dancing shadows from each chair, from the bed, and from the small waiting cradle that stood beside the bed.

Upon the table beside his mother’s sewing basket lay the March 1887 issue of
Harper’s
, and he took up the magazine and glanced idly through its pages.

At length he dropped it to the floor and thought tenderly of his wife who had died many years ago, and a faint smile trembled upon his lips as he remembered a dozen little incidents of the years of days and nights they had spent together. He thought, too, of many other things.

It was not until the ninth hour when but half an inch of candle remained and darkness began to gather in the farther corners of the room and to creep closer, that he screamed, and beat and clawed at the door until his hands were a raw and bloody pulp.