BLACK BARGAIN
It was getting late when I switched off the neon and got busy behind the fountain with my silver polish. The fruit syrup came off easily, but the chocolate stuck and the hot fudge was greasy. I wish to God they wouldn’t order hot fudge.
I began to get irritated as I scrubbed away. Five hours on my feet, every night, and what did I have to show for it? Varicose veins. Varicose veins, and the memory of a thousand foolish faces. The veins were easier to bear than the memories. They were so depressing, those customers of mine. I knew them all by heart.
In early evening all I got was “cokes.” I could spot the “cokes” a mile away. Giggling high-school girls, with long shocks of uncombed brown hair, with their shapeless tan fingertip coats and the repulsively thick legs bulging over boots. They were all “cokes.” For forty-five minutes they’d monopolize a booth, messing up the tile table top with cigarette ashes, crushed napkins daubed in lipstick and little puddles of spilled water. Whenever a high-school girl came in, I automatically reached for the cola pump.
A little later in the evening I got the “gimmie two packs” crowd. Sports shirts hanging limply over hairy arms meant the filtertips. Blue work shirts with rolled sleeves disclosing tattooing meant the unfiltered cigarettes.
Once in awhile I got a fat boy. He was always a “cigar.” If he wore glasses he was a two-for-thirty-fiver. If not, I merely had to indicate the box on the counter. Ten cents straight, Mild Havana—all long filler.
Oh, it was monotonous. The “notions” family, who invariably departed with aspirin, Ex-Lax, candy bars, and a pint of ice cream. The “public library” crowd—tall, skinny youths bending the pages of magazines on the rack and never buying. The “soda waters” with their trousers wrinkled by the sofa of a one room apartment, the “curlers,” always looking furtively toward the baby buggy outside. And around ten, the “pineapple sundaes”—fat women Bingo players. Followed by the “chocolate sodas” when the show let out. More booth parties, giggling girls and red-necked young men in sloppy mod outfits.
In and out, all day long. The rushing “telephones,” the doddering old “five-cent stamps,” the bachelor “toothpastes” and “razor blades.”
I could spot them all at a glance. Night after night they dragged up to the counter. I don’t know why they even bothered to tell me what they wanted. One look was all I needed to anticipate their slightest wishes. I could have given them what they needed without their asking.
Or, rather, I suppose I couldn’t. Because what most of them really needed was a good long drink of arsenic as far as I was concerned.
Arsenic! Good Lord, how long had it been since I’d been called upon to fill out a prescription! None of these stupid idiots wanted drugs from a drugstore. Why had I bothered to study pharmacy? All I really needed was a two week course in pouring chocolate syrup over melting ice cream, and a month’s study of how to set up cardboard figures in the window so as to emphasize their enormous busts.
Well—
He came in then. I heard the slow footsteps without bothering to look up. For amusement I tried to guess before I glanced. A “gimme two packs?” A “toothpaste?” Well the hell with him. I was closing up.
The male footsteps had shuffled up to the counter before I raised my head. They halted, timidly. I still refused to give any recognition of his presence. Then came a hesitant cough. That did it.
I found myself staring at a middle-aged, thin little fellow with sandy hair and rimless glasses perched on a snub nose. The crease of his froggish mouth underlined the despair of his face.
He wore a frayed $36.50 suit, a wrinkled white shirt, and a string tie—but humility was his real garment. It covered him completely, that aura of hopeless resignation.
“I beg your pardon, please, but have you any tincture of aconite?”
Well, miracles do happen. I was going to get a chance to sell drugs after all. Or was I? When despair walks in and asks for aconite, it means suicide.
I shrugged. “Aconite?” I echoed. “I don’t know.”
He smiled, a little. Or rather, that crease wrinkled back in a poor imitation of amusement. But on his face a smile had no more mirth in it than the grin you see on a skull.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he mumbled. “But you’re wrong. I’m—I’m a chemist. I’m doing some experiments, and I must have four ounces of aconite at once. And some belladonna. Yes, and—wait a minute.”
Then he dragged the book out of his pocket.
I craned my neck, and it was worth it.
The book had rusty metals covers, and was obviously very old. When the thick yellow pages fluttered open under his trembling thumb I saw flecks of dust rise from the binding. The heavy black-lettered type was German, but I couldn’t read anything at that distance.
“Let me see now,” he murmured. “Aconite—belladonna—yes, and I have this—the cat, of course—nightshade—um hum—oh, yes, I’ll need some phosphorus of course—have you any blue chalk?—Good—and I guess that’s all.”
I was beginning to catch on. But what the devil did it matter to me? A weirdo more or less was nothing new in my life. All I wanted to do was get out of here and soak my feet.
I went back and got the stuff for him, quickly. I peered through the slot above the prescription counter, but he wasn’t doing anything—just paging through that black, iron-bound book and moving his lips.
Wrapping the parcel, I came out. “Anything else, sir?”
“Oh—yes. Could I have about a dozen candles? The large size?”
I opened a drawer and scrabbled for them under the dust.
“I’ll have to melt them down and reblend them with the fat,” he said.
“What?”
“Nothing. I was just figuring.”
Sure. That’s the kind of figuring you do best when you’re counting the pads in your cell. But it wasn’t my business, was it?
So I handed over the package, like a fool.
“Thank you. You’ve been very kind. I must ask you to be kinder—to charge this.”
Oh, great!
“You see, I’m temporarily out of funds. But I can assure you, in a very short time, in fact within three days, I shall pay you in full. Yes.”
A very convincing plea. I wouldn’t give him a cup of coffee on it—and that’s what moochers usually ask for, instead of aconite and candles. But if his words didn’t move me, his eyes did. They were so lonely behind his spectacles, so pitifully alone, those two little puddles of hope in the desert of despair that was his face.
All right. Let him have his dreams. Let him take his old iron-bound dream book home with him and make like crazy. Let him light his tapers and draw his phosphorescent circle and recite his spells or whatever the hell he wanted to do.
No, I wouldn’t give him coffee, but I’d give him a dream.
“That’s okay, buddy,” I said. “We’re all down on our luck some time, I guess.”
That was wrong. I shouldn’t have patronized. He stiffened at once and his mouth curled into a sneer—of superiority, if you please!
“I’m not asking charity,” he said. “You’ll get paid, never fear, my good man. In three days, mark my words. Now good evening. I have work to do.”
Out he marched, leaving “my good man” with his mouth open. Eventually I closed my mouth, but I couldn’t clamp a lid on my curiosity.
That night, walking home, I looked down the dark street with new interest. The black houses bulked like a barrier behind which lurked fantastic mysteries. Row upon row, not houses any more, but dark dungeons of dreams. In what house did my stranger hide? In what room was he intoning to what strange gods?
Once again I sensed the presence of wonder in the world of lurking strangeness behind the scenes of drugstore and high-rise civilization. Black books still were read, and wild-eyed strangers walked and muttered, candles burned into the night, and a missing alley cat might mean a chosen sacrifice.
But my feet hurt, so I went home.
Same old malted milks, cherry cokes, Vaseline, Listerine, hairnets, bathing caps, cigarettes, and what have you?
Me, I had a headache. It was four days later, almost the same time of night, when I found myself scrubbing off the soda-taps again.
Sure enough, he walked in.
I kept telling myself all evening that I didn’t expect him—but I did expect him, really. I had that crawling feeling when the door clicked. I waited for the shuffle of the Tom McCann shoes.
Instead there was a brisk tapping of Oxfords. English Oxfords. The $40 kind.
I looked up in a hurry this time.
It was my stranger.
At least he was there, someplace beneath the flashy blue weave of his suit, the immaculate shirt and foulard tie. He had had a shave, a haircut, a manicure, and evidently a winning ticket in the Irish Sweepstakes.
“Hello there.” Nothing wrong with that voice—I’ve heard it in the big hotel lobbies for years, brimming over with pep and confidence and authority.
“Well, well, well,” was all I could say.
He chuckled. His mouth wasn’t a crease any more. It was a trumpet of command. Out of that mouth could come orders, and directions. This wasn’t a mouth shaped for hesitant excuses any longer. It was a mouth for requesting expensive dinners, choice vintage wines, heavy cigars; a mouth that barked at taxi drivers and doormen.
“Surprised to see me, eh? Well, I told you it would take three days. Want to pay you your money, thank you for your kindness.”
That was nice. Not the thanks, the money. I like money. The thought of getting some I didn’t expect made me genial.
“So your prayers were answered, eh?” I said.
He frowned.
“Prayers—what prayers?”
“Why I thought that—”
“I don’t understand,” he snapped, understanding perfectly well. “Did you perhaps harbor some misapprehension concerning my purchases of the other evening? A few necessary chemicals, that’s all—to complete the experiment I spoke of. And the candles, I must confess were to light my room. They shut off my electricity the day before.”
Well, it could be.
“Might as well tell you the experiment was a howling success. Yes, sir. Went right down to Newsohm with the results and they put me on as assistant research director. Quite a break.”
Newsohm was the biggest chemical supply house in our section of the country. And he went right down in his rags and was “put on” as assistant research director. Well, live and learn.
“So here’s the money. $5.39, wasn’t it? Can you change a fifty?”
I couldn’t.
“That’s all right, keep it.”
I refused, I don’t know why. Made me feel crawling again, somehow.
“Well, then, tell you what let’s do. You are closing up, aren’t you? Why not step down the street to the tavern for a little drink? I’ll get change there. Come on, I feel like celebrating.”
So it was that five minutes later I walked down the street with Mr. Fritz Gulther.
We took a table in the tavern and ordered quietly. Neither he nor I was at ease. Somehow there was an unspoken secret between us. It seemed almost as though I harbored criminal knowledge against him—I, of all men, alone knowing that behind this immaculately clad figure of success, there lurked a shabby spectre just three days in the past. A spectre that owed me $5.39.
We drank quickly, both of us. The spectre got a little fainter. We had another. I insisted on paying for the third round.
“It’s a celebration,” I argued.
He laughed. “Certainly is. And let me tell you, this is only the beginning! From now on I’m going to climb so fast it’ll make your head swim. I’ll be running that place within six months. Going to get a lot of new orders in from the government, and expand.”
“Wait a minute,” I cautioned, reserve gone. “You’re way ahead of yourself. If I were in your shoes I’d still be flipping with what happened to me in the past three days.”
Fritz Gulther smiled. “Oh, that? I expected that. Didn’t I tell you so in the store? I’ve been working for over a year and I knew just what to expect. It was no surprise, I assure you. I had it all planned. I was willing to starve to carry out my necessary studies, and I did starve. Might as well admit it.”
“Sure.” I was on my third drink now, over the barriers. “When you came into the store I said to myself, ‘Here’s a guy who’s been through hell!’”
“Truer words were never spoken,” said Gulther. “I’ve been through hell all right, quite literally. But it’s all over now, and I didn’t get burned.”
“Say, confidentially—what kind of magic did you use?”
“Magic? Magic? I don’t know anything about magic.”
“Oh, yes you do, Gulther,” I said. “What about that little black book with the iron covers you were mumbling around with in the store?”
“German inorganic chemistry text,” he snapped. “Pretty old. Here, drink up and have another.”
I had another. Gulther began to babble, a bit. About his new clothes and his new apartment and the new car he was going to buy next week. About how he was going to have everything he wanted now, by God, he’d show the fools that laughed at him all these years, he’d pay back the nagging landladies and the cursing grocers, and the sneering rats who told him he was soft in the head for studying the way he did.
Then he got into the kindly stage.
“How’d you like a job at Newsohm?” he asked me. “You’re a good pharmacist. You know your chemistry. You’re a nice enough fellow, too—but you’ve got a terrible imagination. How about it? Be my secretary. Sure, that’s it. Be my secretary. I’ll put you on tomorrow.”
“I’ll drink on that,” I declared. The prospect intoxicated me. The thought of escape from the damned store, escape from the “coke”-faces, the “ciggies”-voices, very definitely intoxicated me. So did the next drink.
I began to see something.
We were sitting against the wall and the tavern lights were low. Couples around us were babbling in monotone that was akin to silence. We sat in shadow against the wall. Now I looked at my shadow—an ungainly, flickering caricature of myself, hunched over the table. What a contrast it presented before his suddenly erect bulk!
His shadow, now—
His shadow, now—
I saw it. He was sitting up straight across the table from me. But his shadow on the wall was standing!
“No more Scotch for me,” I said, as the waiter came up.
But I continued to stare at his shadow. He was sitting and the shadow was standing. It was a larger shadow than mine, and a blacker shadow. For fun I moved my hands up and down, making heads and faces in silhouette. He wasn’t watching me, he was gesturing to the waiter.
His shadow didn’t gesture. I just stood there, I watched and stared and tried to look away. His hands moved but the black outline stood poised and silent, hands dangling at the sides. And yet I saw the familiar shape of his head and nose; unmistakably his.
“Say, Gulther,” I said. “Your shadow—there on the wall—”
I slurred my words. My eyes were blurred.
But I felt his attitude pierce my consciousness below the alcohol.
Fritz Gulther rose to his feet and then shoved a dead white face against mine. He didn’t look at his shadow. He looked at me, through me, at some horror behind my face, my thoughts, my brain. He looked at me, and into some private hell of his own.
“Shadow,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with my shadow. You’re mistaken. Remember that, you’re mistaken. And if you ever mention it again, I’ll bash your skull in.”
Then Fritz Gulther got up and walked away. I watched him march across the room, moving swiftly but a little unsteadily. Behind him, moving very slowly and not a bit unsteadily, a tall black shadow followed him from the room.
If you can build a better mousetrap than your neighbor, you’re liable to put your foot in it.
That’s certainly what I had done with Gulther. Here I was ready to accept his offer of a good job as his secretary, and I had to go and pull a drunken boner!
I was still cursing myself for a fool two days later. Shadows that don’t follow body movements, indeed! Who was that shadow I saw you with last night? That was no shadow, that was the Scotch I was drinking. Oh, fine!
So I stood in the drugstore and sprinkled my sundaes with curses as well as chopped nuts.
I nearly knocked the pecans off the counter that second night, when Fritz Gulther walked in again.
He hurried up to the counter and flashed me a tired smile.
“Got a minute to spare?”
“Sure—wait till I serve these people in the booth.”
I dumped the sundaes and raced back. Gulther perched himself on a stool and took off his hat. He was sweating profusely.
“Say—I want to apologize for the way I blew my stack the other night.”
“Why, that’s all right, Mr. Gulther.”
“I got a little too excited, that’s all. Liquor and success went to my head. No hard feelings, I want you to understand that. It’s just that I was nervous. Your ribbing me about my shadow, that stuff sounded too much like the way I was always kidded for sticking to my studies in my room. Landlady used to accuse me of all sorts of things. Claimed I dissected her cat, that I was burning incense, messing the floor up with chalk. Some damn fool college punks downstairs began to yap around that I was some kind of nut dabbling in witchcraft.”
I wasn’t asking for his autobiography, remember. All this sounded a little hysterical. But then, Gulther looked the part. His sweating, the way his mouth wobbled and twitched as he got this out.
“But say, reason I stopped in was to see if you could fix me up a sedative. No, no bromo or aspirin. I’ve been taking plenty of that stuff ever since the other evening. My nerves are all shot. That job of mine down at Newsohm takes it all out of me.”
“Wait a minute, I’ll get something.”
I made for the back room. As I compounded I sneaked a look at Gulther through the slot.
All right, I’ll be honest. It wasn’t Gulther I wanted to look at. It was his shadow.
When a customer sits at the counter stools, the storelights hit him so that his shadow is just a little black pool beneath his feet.
Gulther’s shadow was a complete silhouette of his body, in outline. A black, deep shadow.
I blinked, but that didn’t help.
Stranger still, the shadow seemed to be cast parallel with his body, instead of at an angle from it. It grew out from his chest instead of his legs. I don’t know refraction, the laws of light, all that technical stuff. All I know is that Fritz Gulther had a big black shadow sitting beside him on the floor, and that the sight of it sent cold shivers along my spine.
I wasn’t drunk. Neither was he. Neither was the shadow. All three of us existed.
Now Gulther was putting his hat back on.
But not the shadow. It just sat there. Crouched.
It was all wrong.
The shadow was no denser at one spot than at another. It was evenly dark, and—I noted this particularly—the outlines did not blur or fade. They were solid.
I stared and stared. I saw a lot now I’d never noticed. The shadow wore no clothes. Of course! Why should it put on a hat? It was naked, that shadow. But it belonged to Gulther—it wore spectacles. It was his shadow, all right. Which suited me fine, because I didn’t want it.
Now Gulther was looking down over his shoulder. He was looking at his shadow now. Even from a distance I fancied I saw new beads of sweat string a rosary of fear across his forehead.
He knew, all right!
I came out, finally.
“Here it is,” I said. I kept my eyes from his face.
“Good. Hope it works. Must get some sleep. And say—that job offer still goes. How about coming down tomorrow morning?”
I nodded, forcing a smile.
Gulther paid me, rose.
“See you then.”
“Certainly.” And why not? After all, what if you do work for a boss with an unnatural shadow? Most bosses have other faults, worse ones and more concrete. That shadow—whatever it was and whatever was wrong with it—wouldn’t bite me. Though Gulther acted as though it might bite him.
As he turned away I looked at his departing back, and at the long, swooping black outline which followed it. The shadow rose and stalked after him. Stalked. Yes, it followed quite purposefully. To my now bewildered eyes it seemed larger than it had in the tavern. Larger, and a bolder black.
Then the night swallowed Gulther and his nonexistent companion.
I went back to the rear of the store and swallowed the other half of the sedative I’d made up for that purpose. After seeing that shadow, I needed it as much as he did.
The girl in the ornate outer office smiled prettily. “Go right in,” she warbled. “He’s expecting you.”
So it was true, then. Gulther was assistant research director, and I was to be his secretary.
I floated in. In the morning sunshine I forgot all about shadows.
The inner office was elaborately furnished—a huge place with elegant walnut paneling associated with business authority. There was a kidney desk set before closed venetian blinds, and a variety of comfortable leather armchairs. Fluorescent lighting gleamed pleasantly.
But there was no Gulther. Probably on the other side of the little door at the back, talking to his Chief.
I sat down, with the tight feeling of anticipation hugged somewhere within my stomach. I glanced around, taking in the room again. My gaze swept the glass-topped desk. It was bare. Except in the corner, were a small box of cigars rested.
No, wait a minute. That wasn’t a cigar-box. It was metal. I’d seen it somewhere before.
Of course! It was Gulther’s iron-bound book.
“German inorganic chemistry.” Who was I to doubt his word? So naturally, I just had to sneak a look before he came in.
I opened the yellowed pages.
De Vermis Mysteriis.
“Mysteries of the Worm.”
This was no inorganic chemistry text. It was something entirely different. Something that told you how you could compound aconite and belladonna and draw circles of phosphorescent fire on the floor when the stars were right. Something that spoke of melting tallow candles and blending them with corpse-fat, whispered of the uses to which animal sacrifice might be put.
It spoke of meetings that could be arranged with various parties most people don’t either care to meet or even believe in.
The thick black letters crawled across the pages, and the detestable odor arising from the musty thing formed a background for the nastiness of the text. I won’t say whether or not I believed what I was reading, but I will admit that there was an air, a suggestion about those cold, deliberate directions for traffic with alien evil, which made me shiver with repulsion. Such thoughts have no place in sanity, even as fantasy. And if this is what Gulther had done with the materials he’d bought himself for $5.39 . . .
“Years of study,” eh? “Experiments.” What was Gulther trying to call up, what did he call up, and what bargain did he make?
The man who could answer these questions sidled out from behind the door. Gone was the Fritz Gulther of the come-on-strong personality. It was my original moocher who creased his mouth at me in abject fear. He looked like a man—I had to say it—who was afraid of his own shadow.
The shadow trailed him through the doorway. To my eyes it had grown overnight. Its arms were slightly raised, though Gulther had both hands pressed against his sides. I saw it cross the wall as he walked toward me—and it moved more swiftly than he did.
Make no mistake. I saw the shadow. Since then I’ve talked to wise boys who assure me that under even fluorescence no shadow is cast. They’re wise boys all right, but I saw that shadow.
Gulther saw that book in my hands.
“All right,” he said, simply. “You know. And maybe it’s just as well.”
“Know?”
“Yes. Know that I made a bargain with—someone. I thought I was being smart. He promised me success, and wealth, anything I wanted, on only one condition. Those damned conditions; you always read about them and you always forget, because they sound so foolish! He told me that I’d have only one rival, and that this rival would be a part of myself. It would grow with my success.”
I sat mute. Gulther was wound up for a long time.
“Silly, wasn’t it? Of course I accepted. And then I found out what my rival was—what it would be. This shadow of mine. It’s independent of me, you know that, and it keeps growing! Oh, not in size, but in depth, in intensity. It’s becoming—maybe I am crazy but you see it, too—more solid. Thicker. As though it had palpable substance.”
Crease-mouth wobbled violently, but the words choked on.
“The further I go the more it grows. Last night I took your sedative and it didn’t work. Didn’t work at all. I sat up in the darkness and watched my shadow.”
“In darkness?”
“Yes. It doesn’t need light. It really exists, now. Permanently. In the dark it’s just a blacker blur. But you can see it. It doesn’t sleep, or rest. It just waits.”
“And you’re afraid of it? Why?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t threaten me, or make gestures, or even take any notice of me. Shadows taking notice—sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But you see it as I do. You can see it waiting. And that’s why I’m afraid. What’s it waiting for?”
The shadow crept closer over his shoulder. Eavesdropping.
“I don’t need you for a secretary. I need a nurse.”
“What you need is a good rest.”
“Rest? How can I rest? I just came out of Newsohm’s office. He doesn’t notice anything—yet. Too stupid, I suppose. The girls in the office look at me when I pass, and I wonder if they see something peculiar. But Newsohm doesn’t. He just made me head of research. Completely in charge.”
“In five days? Marvelous!”
“Isn’t it? Except for our bargain—whenever I succeed, my rival gains power with me. That will make the shadow stronger. How, I don’t know. I’m waiting. And I can’t find rest.”
“I’ll find it for you. Just lie down and wait—I’ll be back.”
I left him hastily—left him sitting at his desk, all alone. Not quite alone. The shadow was there, too.
Before I went I had the funniest temptation. I wanted to run my hand along the wall, through that shadow. And yet I didn’t. It was too black, too solid. What if my hand should actually encounter something?
So I just left.
I was back in half an hour. I grabbed Gulther’s arm, bared it, plunged the needle home.
“Morphine,” I whispered. “You’ll sleep now.”
He did, resting on the leather sofa. I sat at his side, watching the shadow that didn’t sleep.
It stood there towering above him unnaturally. I tried to ignore it, but it was a third party in the room. Once, when I turned my back, it moved. I began to pace up and down. I opened my mouth, trying to hold back a scream.
The phone buzzed. I answered mechanically, my eyes never leaving the black outline on the wall that swayed over Gulther’s recumbent form.
“Yes? No—he’s not in right now. This is Mr. Gulther’s secretary speaking. Your message? Yes, I’ll tell him. I certainly will. Thank you.”
It had been a woman’s voice—a deep, rich voice. Her message was to tell Mr. Gulther she’d changed her mind. She’d be happy to meet him that evening at dinner.
Another conquest for Fritz Gulther!
Conquest—two conquests in a row. That meant conquests for the shadow, too. But how?
I turned to the shadow on the wall, and got a shock. It was lighter! Grayer, thinner, wavering a little!
What was wrong?
I glanced down at Gulther’s sleeping face. Then I got another shock. Gulther’s face was dark. Not tanned, but dark. Blackish. Sooty. Shadowy.
Then I did scream, a little.
Gulther awoke.
I just pointed to his face and indicated the wall mirror. He almost fainted. “It’s combining with me,” he whispered.
His skin was slate-colored. I turned my back because I couldn’t look at him.
“We must do something,” he mumbled. “Fast.”
“Perhaps if you were to use—that book again, you could make another bargain.”
It was a fantastic idea, but it popped out. I faced Gulther again and saw him smile.
“That’s it! If you could get the materials now—you know what I need—go to the drugstore—but hurry up because—”
I shook my head. Gulther was nebulous, shimmery. I saw him through a mist.
Then I heard him yell.
“You damned fool! Look at me. That’s my shadow you’re staring at!”
I ran out of the room, and in less than ten minutes I was trying to fill a vial with belladonna with fingers that trembled like lumps of jelly.
I must have looked like a fool, carrying that armful of packages through the outer office. Candles, chalk, phosphorus, aconite, belladonna, and—blame it on my hysteria—the dead body of an alleycat I decoyed behind the store.
Certainly I felt like a fool when Fritz Gulther met me at the door of his sanctum.
“Come on in,” he snapped.
Yes, snapped.
It took only a glance to convince me that Gulther had his cool again. Whatever the black change that frightened us so had been, he’d shook it off while I was gone.
Once again the trumpet voice held authority. Once again the sneering smile replaced the apologetic crease in the mouth.
Gulther’s skin was white, normal. His movements were brisk and no longer frightened. He didn’t need any wild spells—or had he ever, really?
Suddenly I felt as though I’d been a victim of my own imagination. After all, men don’t make bargains with demons, they don’t change places with their shadows.
The moment Gulther closed the door his words corroborated my mood.
“Well, I’ve snapped out of it. Foolish nonsense, wasn’t it?” He smiled easily. “Guess we won’t need that junk after all. Right when you left I began to feel better. Here, sit down and take it easy.”
I sat. Gulther rested on the desk nonchalantly swinging his legs.
“All that nervousness, that strain, has disappeared. But before I forget it, I’d like to apologize for telling you that crazy story about sorcery and my obsession. Matter of fact, I’d feel better about the whole thing in the future if you just forgot all this ever happened.”
I nodded.
Gulther smiled again.
“That’s right. Now we’re ready to get down to business. I tell you, it’s a real relief to realize the progress we’re going to make. I’m head research director already, and if I play my cards right I think I’ll be running this place in another three months. Some of the things Newsohm told me today tipped me off. So just play ball with me and we’ll go a long way. A long way. And I can promise you one thing—I’ll never have any of these crazy spells again.”
There was nothing wrong with what Gulther said here. Nothing wrong with any of it. There was nothing wrong with the way Gulther lolled and smiled at me, either.
Then why did I suddenly get that old crawling sensation along my spine?
For a moment I couldn’t place it—and then I realized.
Fritz Gulther sat on his desk, before the wall, but now he cast no shadow.
Where had it gone?
There was only one place for it to go. And if it had gone there, then—where was Fritz Gulther?
He read it in my eyes.
I read it in his swift gesture.
Gulther’s hand dipped into his pocket and reemerged. As it rose, I rose, and sprang across the room.
I gripped the revolver, pressed it back and away, and stared into his convulsed countenance, into his eyes. Behind the glasses, behind the human pupils, there was only a blackness. The cold, grinning blackness of a shadow.
Then he snarled, arms clawing up as he tried to wrest the weapon free, aim it. His body was cold, curiously weightless, but filled with a slithering strength. I felt myself go limp under those icy, scrabbing talons, but as I gazed into those two dark pools of hate that were his eyes, fear and desperation lent me aid.
A single gesture, and I turned the muzzle in. The gun exploded, and Gulther slumped to the floor.
They crowded in then; they stood and stared down, too. We all stood and stared down at the body lying on the floor.
Body? There was Fritz Gulther’s shoes, his shirt, his tie, his expensive blue suit. The toes of his shoes pointed up, the shirt and tie and suit were creased and filled out to support a body beneath.
But there was no body on the floor. There was only a shadow—a deep, black shadow, encased in Fritz Gulther’s clothes.
Nobody said a word for a long minute. Then one of the girls whispered, “Look—it’s just a shadow.”
I bent down quickly and shook the clothes. As I did so, the shadow seemed to move beneath my fingers, to move and to melt.
In an instant it slithered free from the garments. There was a flash—or a final retinal impression of blackness, and the shadow was gone. The clothing sagged down into an empty huddled heap on the floor.
I rose and faced them. I couldn’t say it loud, but I could say it gratefully, very gratefully.
“No,” I said. “You’re mistaken. There’s no shadow there. There’s nothing at all—absolutely nothing at all.”
AUGUST DERLETH
August William Derleth was born in 1909 in Sauk City, Wisconsin, where he spent most of his life. He sold his first story to Weird Tales at the age of seventeen, in 1926, and contributed prolifically to that pulp magazine for much of its run. Also in 1926, he came into contact with H. P. Lovecraft, whose influence upon his work would be decisive. Corresponding prolifically with Lovecraft, he became acquainted with many of Lovecraft’s colleagues, including Donald Wandrei, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. After Lovecraft’s death in 1937, Derleth and Wandrei established the publishing firm of Arkham House to issue Lovecraft’s tales in hardcover; Arkham House would become the most prestigious small-press publisher of supernatural fiction in the United States.
Derleth established a mainstream reputation with such works as Place of Hawks (1935) and Evening in Spring (1941), which richly evoked the history, topography, and personalities of his native Wisconsin. Sinclair Lewis wrote a laudatory article on him in Esquire in 1945. But Derleth failed to become a mainstream author recognized outside his home state, largely because his prodigious literary work in many different fields tended to dissipate his energies. Aside from his publishing activities, he edited several important anthologies of horror and science fiction, notably The Night Side (1944) and Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre (1947). He wrote many tales of the Cthulhu Mythos under Lovecraft’s inspiration, although he failed to understand the philosophical direction of Lovecraft’s invention and has been much criticized for leading it in a direction Lovecraft would probably not have approved. Derleth died in Sauk City in 1971.
“The Lonesome Place,” first published in Famous Fantastic Mysteries (February 1948) and collected in Lonesome Places (1962), is perhaps Derleth’s finest supernatural tale. Like much of his supernatural work, it relies on relatively conventional supernatural manifestations, but its execution is remarkably skillful.