Terror in the Modern Vein Read online

  Burns's voice stopped abruptly. Our walk had brought us down to the Campanile, and the library where my companion was due shone just a hundred paces further, its white, glistening granite contrasting gloriously with the clear California blue above, and the delicate green and gorgeous gold of the spring acacia rising along the pathways below.

  Even as we paused Burns thrust out his hand as if in afterthought.

  "See that hand?" he said quietly. "Notice the dried skin on the fingertips, and the shrivelled appearance of the palm. Ridges's hands looked like that, and Gilson's - so with each one of us who touched Jenkins while he was that way. Almost as if they were blistered. But they were not painful, even though that same night when I washed, a good part of the surface cuticle crumbled off. The table top where Jenkins lay was thus curiously rotted to the depth of an eighth-inch or so, too. And even the tapestry upholstery of Jenkins's chair. Not burned exactly, not really rotted, but crisped, dried, discoloured.

  "Hathaway came as near hitting the cause of it as any of us when we discussed the phenomenon afterward. The vibration of Jenkins's body, communicating its almost infinitely rapid trembling to everything his body touched, crystallized skin, wood, cloth. Something like heat, perhaps; or better yet, just as the metal parts of an automobile are crystallized by the vibration of the engine and road. Ridges told us next day, too, what a time he had in getting Jenkins home in even decent condition; for the little man's own clothing crumbled and broke and was shed at every step."

  We were at the library entrance now, and Burns paused once more and stared up at the gracefully stretching eucalyptus across the roadway. Then turned and his gaze covered the splendid granite pile before us. A few words he muttered then; I could make out but one or two.

  "Sierran stone - solid - solid - and like Jenkins -" Came some words I could not get. Then with a curious shrug of his shoulders:

  "Who can tell - who can tell -"

  Abruptly he swung to me again.

  "That," he said, "explains Lemuel Jenkins's eyes - and the almost holy joy in them when he knew that we could see him. He lives in continual fear, you know, that his doubts will run away with him once more, and he -and the same thing happen another time. Has an utter horror of it - but is getting better, thank God, better every day. By the way" - Burns turned with one foot on the step - "Jenkins will remember you. Next time you see him, for the sake of his very soul, go straight up and hold out your hand, and smile your pleasure at seeing him right into his eyes. Don't forget, P.M., don't forget."

  I gripped his hand with sympathy, and nodded. After seeing Jenkins's eyes as had I that morning - how could I forget? How could I?

  THE RAG THING

  by David Grinnell

  The origin of all life we are told is slime-the slime of the molten earth, when dampness and heat and chemical combined to mix a witch's brew. In a few terse words, in a setting as unimaginative as a drab house on a drab street, David Grinnell speaks of the repetition of this phenomenon. Beware, then, of damp, dark, dirty, warm places!

  IT would have been all right if Spring had never come. During the winter nothing had happened and nothing was likely to happen as long as the weather remained cold and Mrs. Larch kept the radiators going. In a way, though, it is quite possible to hold Mrs. Larch to blame for everything that happened. Not that she had what people would call malicious intentions, but just that she was two things practically every boarding-house landlady is - thrifty and not too clean.

  She shouldn't have been in such a hurry to turn the heat off so early in March. March is a tricky month and she should have known that the first warm day is usually an isolated phenomenon. But then you could always claim that she shouldn't have been so sloppy in her cleaning last November. She shouldn't have dropped that rag behind the radiator in the third floor front room.

  As a matter of fact, one could well wonder what she was doing using such a rag anyway. Polishing furniture doesn't require a clean rag to start with, certainly not the rag you stick into the furniture polish, that's going to be greasy anyway - but she didn't have to use that particular rag. The one that had so much dried blood on it from the meat that had been lying on it in the kitchen.

  On top of that, it is probable that she had spit into the filthy thing, too. Mrs. Larch was no prize package. Gross, dull, unkempt, widowed and careless, she fitted into the house - one of innumerable other brownstone fronts in the lower sixties of New York. Houses that in former days, fifty or sixty years ago, were considered the height of fashion and the residences of the well-to-do, now reduced to dingy rooming places for all manner of itinerants, lonely people with no hope in life other than dreary jobs, or an occasional young and confused person from the hinterland seeking fame and fortune in a city which rarely grants it.

  So it was not particularly odd that when she accidentally dropped the filthy old rag behind the radiator in the room on the third floor front late in November, she had simply left it there and forgotten to pick it up.

  It gathered dust all winter, unnoticed. Skelty, who had the room, might have cleaned it out himself save that he was always too tired for that. He worked at some indefinite factory all day and when he came home he was always too tired to do much more than read the sports and comic pages of the newspapers and then maybe stare at the streaky brown walls a bit before dragging himself into bed to sleep the dreamless sleep of the weary.

  The radiator, a steam one oddly enough (for most of these houses used the older hot-air circulation), was in none too good condition. Installed many many years ago by the house's last Victorian owner, it was given to knocks, leaks, and cantankerous action. Along in December it developed a slow drip, and drops of hot water would fall to seep slowly into the floor and leave the rag lying on a moist hot surface. Steam was constantly escaping from a bad valve that Mrs. Larch would have repaired if it had blown off completely but, because the radiator always managed to be hot, never did.

  Because Mrs. Larch feared draughts, the windows were rarely open in the winter and the room would become oppressively hot at times when Skelty was away.

  It is hard to say what is the cause of chemical reactions. Some hold that all things are mechanical in nature, others that life has a psychic side which cannot be duplicated in laboratories. The problem is one for metaphysicians; everyone knows that some chemicals are attracted to heat, others to light, and they may not necessarily be alive at all. Tropisms is the scientific term used, and if you want to believe that living matter is stuff with a great number of tropisms and dead matter is stuff with little or no tropisms, that's one way of looking at it. Heat and moisture and greasy chemical compounds were the sole ingredients of the birth of life in some ancient unremembered swamp.

  Which is why it probably would have been all right if Spring had never come. Because Mrs. Larch turned the radiators off one day early in March. The warm hours were but few. It grew cold with the darkness and by night it was back in the chill of February again. But Mrs. Larch had turned the heat off and, being lazy, decided not to turn it on again till the next morning, provided of course that it stayed cold next day (which it did).

  Anyway Skelty was found dead in bed the next morning. Mrs. Larch knocked on his door when he failed to come down to breakfast and when he hadn't answered, she turned the knob and went in. He was lying in bed, blue and cold, and he had been smothered in his sleep.

  There was quite a to-do about the whole business but nothing came of it. A few stupid detectives blundered around the room, asked silly questions, made a few notes, and then left the matter to the coroner and the morgue. Skelty was a nobody, no one cared whether he lived or died, he had no enemies and no friends, there were no suspicious visitors, and he had probably smothered accidentally in the blankets. Of course the body was unusually cold when Mrs. Larch found it, as if the heat had been sucked out of him, but who notices a thing like that? They also discounted the grease smudge on the top sheet, the grease stains on the floor, and the slime on his face. Probably some grea
se he might have been using for some imagined skin trouble, though Mrs. Larch had not heard of his doing so. In any case, no one really cared.

  Mrs. Larch wore black for a day and then advertised in the papers. She made a perfunctory job of cleaning the room. Skelty's possessions were taken away by a drab sister-in-law from Brooklyn who didn't seem to care much either, and Mrs. Larch was all ready to rent the room to someone else.

  The weather remained cold for the next ten days and the heat was kept up in the pipes.

  The new occupant of the room was a nervous young man from up-state who was trying to get a job in New York. He was a high-strung young man who entertained any number of illusions about life and society. He thought that people did things for the love of it and he wanted to find a job where he could work for that motivation rather than the sort of things he might have done back home. He thought New York was different, which was a mistake.

  He smoked like fury which was something Mrs. Larch did not like because it meant ashes on the floor and burned spots on her furniture (not that there weren't plenty already), but there was nothing Mrs. Larch would do about it because it would have meant exertion.

  After four days in New York, this young man, Gorman by name, was more nervous than ever. He would lie in bed nights smoking cigarette after cigarette, thinking and thinking and getting nowhere. Over and over he was facing the problem of resigning himself to a life of grey drab. It was a thought he had tried not to face and now that it was thrusting itself upon him, it was becoming intolerable.

  The next time a warm day came, Mrs. Larch left the radiators on because she was not going to be fooled twice. As a result, when the weather stayed warm, the rooms became insufferably hot because she was still keeping the windows down. So that when she turned the heat off finally, the afternoon of the second day, it was pretty tropic in the rooms.

  When the March weather turned about suddenly again and became chilly about nine at night, Mrs. Larch was going to bed and figured that no one would complain and that it would be warm again the next day. Which may or may not be true, it does not matter.

  Gorman got home about ten, opened the window, got undressed, moved a pack of cigarettes and ash tray next to his bed on the floor, got into bed, turned out the light and started to smoke.

  He stared at the ceiling, blowing smoke upwards into the darkened room trying to see its outlines in the dim light coming in from the street. When he finished one cigarette, he let his hand dangle out the side of the bed and picked up another cigarette from the pack on the floor, lit it from the butt in his mouth, and dropped the butt into the ash tray on the floor.

  The rag under the radiator was getting cold, the room was getting cold, there was one source of heat radiation in the room. That was the man in the bed. Skelty had proven a source of heat supply once. Heat attraction was chemical force that could not be denied. Strange forces began to accumulate in the long-transformed fibres of the rag.

  Gorman thought he heard something flap in the room but he paid no attention. Things were always creaking in the house. Gorman heard a swishing noise and ascribed it to the mice.

  Gorman reached down for a cigarette, fumbled for it, found the pack, deftly extracted a smoke in the one-handed manner chain smokers become accustomed to, lifted it to his mouth, lit it from the burning butt in his mouth, and reached down with the butt to crush it out against the tray.

  He pressed the butt into something wet like a used handkerchief, there was a sudden hiss, something coiled and whipped about his wrist; Gorman gasped and drew his hand back fast. A flaming horror, twisting and writhing, was curled around it. Before Gorman could shriek, it had whipped itself from his hand and fastened over his face, over the warm, heat-radiating skin and the glowing flame of the cigarette.

  Mrs. Larch was awakened by the clang of fire engines. When the fire was put out, most of the third floor had been gutted. Gorman was an unrecognizable charred mass.

  The fire department put the blaze down to Gorman's habit of smoking in bed. Mrs. Larch collected on the fire insurance and bought a new house, selling the old one to a widow who wanted to start a boarding house.

  The End

  Table of Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  THEY

  FRITZCHEN

  THE GIRL WITH THE HUNGRY EYES

  THE FISHING SEASON

  THE CROWD

  HE

  THE STRANGE CASE OF LEMUEL JENKINS

  THE RAG THING