Microcosmic God (12 page)

I found an old pinchbar in the drive and attacked the ground under the stone. It took quite a while and made my hands bleed, but after a while I pried the stone up and was able to scrabble around under it. Sure enough, there was an oiled silk pouch under there. I caught it up and carefully unwrapped the strings around it. Inside was a key and a letter addressed to a New York bank, designating only “Bearer” and authorizing the use of the key. I laughed aloud. Little old meek and mild John Quigg, I’d bet, had set aside some “mad money.” With a layout like that, a man could take a powder without leaving a single sign. The son-of-a-gun! I would never know just what it was he had up his sleeve, but I’ll bet there was a woman in the case. Even fixed up with his will! Ah, well—I should kick!

It didn’t take me long to get over to the bank. I had a little trouble
getting into the vaults, because it took quite a while to look up the box in the old records. But I finally cleared the red tape, and found myself the proud possessor of just under eight thousand bucks in small bills—and not a yellowback among ’em!

Well, from then on I was pretty well set. What did I do? Well, first I bought clothes, and then, I started out to cut ice for myself. I clubbed around a bit and got to know a lot of people, and the more I knew the more I realized what a lot of superstitious dopes they were. I couldn’t blame anyone for skirting a ladder under which crouched a genuine basilisk, of course, but what the heck—not one in a thousand have beasts under them! Anyway, my question was answered. I dropped two grand on an elegant office with drapes and dim indirect lighting, and I got me a phone installed and a little quiet sign on the door—Psychic Consultant. And, boy, I did all right.

My customers were mostly upper crust, because I came high. It was generally no trouble to get contact with people’s dead relatives, which was usually what they wanted. Most ghosts are crazy to get in contact with this world anyway. That’s one of the reasons that almost anyone can become a medium of sorts if he tries hard enough; Lord knows that it doesn’t take much to contact the average ghost. Some, of course, were not available. If a man leads a pretty square life, and kicks off leaving no loose ends, he gets clear. I never did find out where these clear spirits went to. All I knew was that they weren’t to be contacted. But the vast majority of people have to go back and tie up those loose ends after they die—righting a little wrong here, helping someone they’ve hindered, cleaning up a bit of dirty work. That’s where luck itself comes from, I do believe. You don’t get something for nothing.

If you get a nice break, it’s been arranged that way by someone who did you dirt in the past, or someone who did wrong to your father or your grandfather or your great-uncle Julius. Everything evens up in the long run, and until it does, some poor damned soul is wandering around the earth trying to do something about it. Half of humanity is walking around crabbing about its tough breaks. If you and you and you only knew what dozens of powers were begging for the chance to help you if you’ll let them! And if you let them,
you’ll help clear up the mess they’ve made of their lives here, and free them to go wherever it is they go when they’ve cleaned up. Next time you’re in a jam, go away somewhere by yourself and open your mind to these folks. They’ll cut in and guide you all right, if you can drop your smugness and mistaken confidence in your own judgment.

I had a couple of ghostly stooges to run errands for me. One of them, an ex-murderer by the name of One-Eye Rachuba, was the fastest spook I ever saw, when it came to locating a wanted ancestor; and then there was Professor Grafe, a frog-faced teacher of social science who’d embezzled from a charity fund and fallen into the Hudson trying to make a getaway. He could trace the most devious genealogies in mere seconds, deduce the most likely whereabouts of the ghost of a missing relative. The pair of them were all the office force I could use, and although every time they helped out one of my clients they came closer to freedom themselves, they were both so entangled with their own sloppy lives that I was sure of their services for years.

But do you think I’d be satisfied to stay where I was making money hand over fist without really working for it? Oh, no. Not me. No, I had to big-time. I had to brood over the events of the last few months, and I had to get dramatic about that screwball Audrey, who really wasn’t worth my trouble. It wasn’t enough that I’d proven Audrey wrong when she said I’d never amount to anything. And I wasn’t happy when I thought about the gang. I had to show them up.

I even remembered what the little man in the Shottle Bop had said to me about using my “talent” for bragging or for revenge. I figured I had the edge on everyone, everything. Cocky, I was. Why, I could send one of my ghostly stooges out any time and find out exactly what anyone had been doing three hours ago come Michaelmas. With the shade of the professor at my shoulder, I could backtrack on any far-fetched statement and give immediate and logical reasons for backtracking. No one had anything on me, and I could out-talk, out-maneuver, and out-smart anyone on earth. I was really quite a fellow. I began to think, “What’s the use of my doing as well as this when the gang on the West Side don’t know anything about it?” and “Man, would that half-wit Happy Sam burn up if he saw
me drifting down Broadway in my new six-thousand-dollar roadster!” and “To think I used to waste my time and tears on a dope like Audrey!” In other words, I was tripping up on an inferiority complex. I acted like a veridam fool, which I was. I went over to the West Side.

It was a chilly, late winter night. I’d taken a lot of trouble to dress myself and my car so we’d be bright and shining and would knock some eyes out. Pity I couldn’t brighten my brains up a little.

I drove up in front of Casey’s pool room, being careful to do it too fast, and concentrating on shrieks from tires and a shuddering twenty-four-cylinder roar from the engine before I cut the switch. I didn’t hurry to get out of the car, either. Just leaned back and lit a fifty-cent cigar, and then tipped my hat over one ear and touched the horn button, causing it to play “Tuxedo Junction” for forty-eight seconds. Then I looked over toward the pool hall.

Well, for a minute I thought that I shouldn’t have come, if that was the effect my return to the fold was going to have. And from then on I forgot about everything except how to get out of there.

There were two figures slouched in the glowing doorway of the pool room. It was up a small side street, so short that the city had depended on the place, an old institution, to supply the street lighting. Looking carefully, I made out one of the silhouetted figures as Happy Sam, and the other was Fred Bellew. They just looked out at me; they didn’t move; they didn’t say anything; and when I said, “Hiya, small fry—remember me?” I noticed that along the darkened walls flanking the bright doorway were ranked the whole crowd of them—the whole gang. It was a shock; it was a little too casually perfect. I didn’t like it.

“Hi,” said Fred quietly. I knew he wouldn’t like the big-timing. I didn’t expect any of them to like it, of course, but Fred’s dislike sprang from distaste, and the others from resentment, and for the first time I felt a little cheap. I climbed out over the door of the roadster and let them have a gander at my fine feathers.

Sam snorted and said, “Jelly bean!” very clearly. Someone else giggled, and from the darkness beside the building came a high-pitched “Woo-woo!”

I walked up to Sam and grinned at him. I didn’t feel like grinning. “I ain’t seen you in so long I almost forgot what a heel you were,” I said. “How you making?”

“I’m doing all right,” he said, and added offensively, “I’m still
working
for a living.”

The murmur that ran through the crowd told me that the really smart thing to do was to get back into that shiny new automobile and hoot along out of there. I stayed.

“Wise, huh?” I said weakly.

They’d been drinking, I realized—all of them. I was suddenly in a spot. Sam put his hands in his pockets and looked at me down his nose. He was the only short man that ever could do that to me. After a thick silence he said:

“Better get back to yer crystal balls, phony. We like guys that sweat. We even like guys that have rackets, if they run them because they’re smarter or tougher than the next one. But luck and gab ain’t enough. Scram.”

I looked around helplessly. I was getting what I’d begged for. What had I expected, anyway? Had I thought that these boys would crowd around and shake my hand off for acting this way?

They hardly moved, but they were all around me suddenly. If I couldn’t think of something quickly, I was going to be mobbed. And when those mugs started mobbing a man, they did it up just fine. I drew a deep breath.

“I’m not asking for anything from you, Sam. Nothing; that means advice; see?”

“You’re gettin’ it!” he flared. “You and your seeanses. We heard about you. Hanging up widow-women for fifty bucks a throw to talk to their ‘dear departed’! P-sykik investigator! What a line! Go on; beat it!”

I had a leg to stand on now. “A phony, huh? Why I’ll bet I could put a haunt on you that would make that hair of yours stand up on end, if you have guts enough to go where I tell you to.”

“You’ll bet? That’s a laugh. Listen at that, gang.” He laughed, then turned to me and talked through one side of his mouth. “All right, you wanted it. Come on, rich guy; you’re called. Fred’ll hold
stakes. How about ten of your lousy bucks for every one of mine? Here, Fred—hold this sawbuck.”

“I’ll give you twenty to one,” I said half hysterically. “And I’ll take you to a place where you’ll run up against the homeliest, plumb-meanest old haunt you ever heard of.”

The crowd roared. Sam laughed with them, but didn’t try to back out. With any of that gang, a bet was a bet. He’d taken me up, and he’d set odds, and he was bound. I just nodded and put two century notes into Fred Bellew’s hand. Fred and Sam climbed into the car, and just as we started, Sam leaned out and waved.

“See you in hell, fellas,” he said. “I’m goin’ to raise me a ghost, and one of us is going to scare the other one to death!”

I honked my horn to drown out the whooping and hollering from the sidewalk and got out of there. I turned up the parkway and headed out of town.

“Where to?” Fred asked after a while.

“Stick around,” I said, not knowing.

There must be some place not far from here where I could find an honest-to-God haunt, I thought, one that would make Sam backtrack and set me up with the boys again. I opened the compartment in the dashboard and let Ikey out. Ikey was a little twisted imp who’d got his tail caught in between two sheets of steel when they were assembling the car, and had to stay there until it was junked.

“Hey, Ike,” I whispered. He looked up, the gleam of the compartment light shining redly in his bright little eyes. “Whistle for the professor, will you? I don’t want to yell for him because those mugs in the back seat will hear me. They can’t hear you.”

“O.K., boss,” he said; and putting his fingers to his lips, he gave vent to a blood-curdling, howling scream.

That was the prof’s call-letters, as it were. The old man flew ahead of the car, circled around and slid in beside me through the window, which I’d opened a crack for him.

“My goodness,” he panted, “I wish you wouldn’t summon me to a location which is traveling with this high degree of celerity. It was all I could do to catch up with you.”

“Don’t give me that, professor,” I whispered. “You can catch a
stratoliner if you want to. Say, I have a guy in the back who wants to get a real scare from a ghost. Know of any around here?”

The professor put on his ghostly pince-nez. “Why, yes. Remember my telling you about the Wolfmeyer place?”

“Golly—he’s bad.”

“He’ll serve your purpose admirably. But don’t ask me to go there with you. None of us ever associates with Wolfmeyer. And for Heaven’s sake, be careful.”

“I guess I can handle him. Where is it?”

He gave me explicit directions, bade me good night and left. I was a little surprised; the professor traveled around with me a great deal, and I’d never seen him refuse a chance to see some new scenery. I shrugged it off and went my way. I guess I just didn’t know any better.

I headed out of town and into the country to a certain old farmhouse. Wolfmeyer, a Pennsylvania Dutchman, had hanged himself there. He had been, and was, a bad egg. Instead of being a nice guy about it all, he was the rebel type. He knew perfectly well that unless he did plenty of good to make up for the evil, he’d be stuck where he was for the rest of eternity. That didn’t seem to bother him at all. He got surly and became a really bad spook. Eight people had died in that house since the old man rotted off his own rope. Three of them were tenants who had rented the place, and three were hobos, and two were psychic investigators. They’d all hanged themselves. That’s the way Wolfmeyer worked. I think he really enjoyed haunting. He certainly was thorough about it anyway.

I didn’t want to do any real harm to Happy Sam. I just wanted to teach him a lesson. And look what happened!

We reached the place just before midnight. No one had said much, except that I told Fred and Sam about Wolfmeyer, and pretty well what was to be expected from him. They did a good deal of laughing about it, so I just shut up and drove. The next item of conversation was Fred’s, when he made the terms of the bet. To win, Sam was to stay in the house until dawn. He wasn’t to call for help and he wasn’t to leave. He had to bring in a coil of rope, tie a noose in one end and string the other up on “Wolfmeyer’s Beam”—the great
oaken beam on which the old man had hanged himself, and eight others after him. This was an added temptation to Wolfmeyer to work on Happy Sam, and was my idea. I was to go in with Sam, to watch him in case the thing became too dangerous. Fred was to stay in the car a hundred yards down the road and wait.

I parked the car at the agreed distance and Sam and I got out. Sam had my tow rope over his shoulder, already noosed. Fred had quieted down considerably, and his face was dead serious.