Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions (29 page)

I next turned my attention to the matter of Slade's marriage. From his girl friends I selected one who was rather idealistic, timid, and sympathetic, though by no means lacking in narrow-mindedness. I went straight to her and said, "Slade needs you. Potentially he's a man of creative genius but he's like a child. Will you devote your life to cherishing his dreams, soothing his hurts, shielding him so far as you are able from the harsher aspects of reality?"

The moment sticks in my mind. It was winter and the girl was alone with me. (Slade's best friend, up to a best friend's usual tricks). We were sitting in front of a log fire. Its flames struck mysterious gleams from her dark eyes and lent a false flush to her cheeks as she answered in a whisper, almost reverently, "Yes."

Once outside, I grinned with satisfaction. This was the final triumph. I had procured for Slade a lifelong companion who would reflect all his moods, bringing them to an almost unendurable focus. Little remained for me to do except await the inevitable developments.

The worst frustrations are yet to come. I, who have laid and lit the fuses, know.

At present Slade is working in an insurance office. Outwardly he hasn't done too badly for the past ten years, but two drawers of his desk and a large cardboard box are filled with his hated word-doodlings. He keeps the stuff at his office ever since his wife found out about his accumulated automatic writing, worshipfully decided there might be creative material – "even stories, Dick!" – buried in it, and insisted on reading it.

Slade is very confused. His futile idealisms ache like hard sores, and his wife cherishes him very, very much. I am toying with the idea of infatuating him with the pleasures of the senses. Slade with a mistress – it would be a wonderful comedy. And I may sting him – via the mistress? – into a desperate attempt to make big money. He couldn't succeed in that either, but he could spend several very painful years trying. Oh, the possibilities are endless.

Some day those possibilities, fruitful as they seem now, may be exhausted. In that case I shall kill Slade. But probably that will not be for years. My capacity for devising new and ever more grotesque torments for Slade seems infinite.

I wonder why that is. Why of all the people in the world, I should hate and abominate Richard Slade.

Did Slade originally harm me in some secret, despicable way my memory cannot retain? Or am I simply suffering from a monomania? Is the world my hell and Slade my punishment?

Or ... yes, that might be it ... I may have missed it all these years because of its very obviousness – Perhaps I hate Slade simply because he hates me, because he has sought to trick and persecute me for as long as I can remember, because he has done his best to wreck my life ... and because he placed a dead branch so it would trip me in the dark and make me break my telescope.

For of course I am also Richard Slade slayed made laid grayed grave slave but I'm brave like a slave in the grave and I write in the night without light without sight and I write write right wrong ...

 

Although Miss Barnes made a careful search, no other connected narratives whatever were discovered in the two boxes, nor any light thrown on their origin. They have since become the property of the Krothering-Kingsley Art Conference.

 

 

 

THE WINTER FLIES

 

AFTER THE supper dishes were done there was a general movement from the Adler kitchen to the Adler living room.

It was led by Gottfried Helmuth Adler, commonly known as Gott. He was thinking how they should be coming from a dining room, yes, with coloured maids, not from a kitchen. In a large brandy snifter he was carrying what had been left in the shaker from the martinis, a colourless elixir weakened by melted ice yet somewhat stronger than his wife was supposed to know. This monster drink was a regular part of Gott's carefully-thought-out programmer for getting safely through the end of the day.

"After the seventeenth hour of creation God got sneaky," Gott once put it to himself.

He sat down in his leather-upholstered easy chair, flipped open Plutarch's
Lives
left-handed, glanced down through the lower halves of his executive bifocals at the paragraph in the biography of Caesar he'd been reading before dinner, then without moving his head looked through the upper halves back toward the kitchen.

After Gott came Jane Adler, his wife. She sat down at her drawing table, where pad, pencils, knife, art gum, distemper paints, water, brushes, and rags were laid out neatly.

Then came little Heinie Adler, wearing a spaceman's transparent helmet with a large hole in the top for ventilation. He went and stood beside this arrangement of objects: first a long wooden box about knee-length with a smaller box on top and propped against the latter a toy control panel of blue and silver plastic, on which only one lever moved at all; next, facing the panel, a child's wooden chair; then back of the chair another long wooden box lined up with the first.

"Good-bye Mama, good-bye Papa," Heinie called. "I'm going to take a trip in my spaceship."

"Be back in time for bed," his mother said.

"Hot jets!" murmured his father.

Heinie got in, touched the control panel twice, and then sat motionless in the little wooden chair, looking straight ahead.

A fourth person came into the living-room from the kitchen – the Man in the Black Flannel Suit. He moved with the sick jerkiness and he had the slack putty-grey features of a figure of the imagination that hasn't been fully developed. (There was a fifth person in the house, but even Gott didn't know about him yet.)

The Man in the Black Flannel Suit made a stiff gesture at Gott and gaped his mouth to talk to him, but the latter silently writhed his lips in a 'Not yet, you fool!' and nodded curtly towards the sofa opposite his easy chair.

"Gott," Jane said, hovering a pencil over the pad, "you've lately taken to acting as if you were talking to someone who isn't there."

"I have, my dear?" her husband replied with a smile as he turned a page, but not lifting his face from his book. "Well, talking to oneself is the sovereign guard against madness."

"I thought it worked the other way," Jane said.

"No," Gott informed her.

Jane wondered what she should draw and saw she had very faintly sketched on a small scale the outlines of a child, done in sticks-and-blobs like Paul Klee or kindergarten art. She could do another 'Children's Clubhouse,' she supposed, but where should she put it this time?

The old electric clock with brass fittings that stood on the mantel began to wheeze shrilly. 'Mystery, mystery, mystery, mystery.' It struck Jane as a good omen for her picture. She smiled.

Gott took a slow pull from his goblet and felt the scentless vodka bite just enough and his skin shiver and the room waver pleasantly for a moment with shadows chasing across it. Then he swung the pupils of his eyes upward and looked across at the Man in the Black Flannel Suit, noting with approval that he was sitting rigidly on the sofa. Gott conducted his side of the following conversation without making a sound or parting his lips more than a quarter of an inch, just flaring his nostrils from time to time.

BLACK FLANNEL: Now if I may have your attention for a space, Mr. Adler –

GOTT: Speak when you're spoken to! Remember, I created you.

BLACK FLANNEL: I respect your belief. Have you been getting any messages?

GOTT: The number 6669 turned up three times today in orders and estimates. I received an airmail advertisement beginning 'Are you ready for big success?' though the rest of the ad didn't signify. As I opened the envelope the minute hand of my desk clock was pointing at the faceless statue of Mercury on the Commerce Building. When I was leaving the office my secretary droned at me, 'A representative of the Inner Circle will call on you tonight,' though when I questioned her she claimed that she'd said, 'Was the letter to Innes-Burkle and Company all right?' Because she is aware of my deafness I could hardly challenge her. In any case she sounded sincere. If those were messages from the Inner Circle, I received them. But seriously I doubt the existence of that clandestine organization. Other explanations seem to me more likely – for instance, that I am developing a psychosis. I do not believe in the Inner Circle.

BLACK FLANNEL (
smiling shrewdly
–
his features have grown tightly handsome though his complexion is still putty grey
): Psychosis is for weak minds. Look, Mr. Adler, you believe in the Mafia, the FBI, and the Communist Underground. You believe in upper-echelon control groups in unions and business and fraternal organizations. You know the workings of big companies. You are familiar with industrial and political espionage. You are not wholly unacquainted with the secret fellowships of munitions manufacturers, financiers, dope addicts and procurers and pornography connoisseurs and the brotherhoods and sisterhoods of sexual deviates and enthusiasts. Why do you boggle at the Inner Circle?

GOTT (
cooly
): I do not wholly believe in all of those other organizations. And the Inner Circle still seems to me more of a wish-dream than the rest. Besides, you may want me to believe in the Inner Circle in order at a later date to convict me of insanity.

BLACK FLANNEL (
drawing a black brief-case from behind his legs and unzipping it on his knees
): Then you do not wish to hear about the Inner Circle?

GOTT (
inscrutably
): I will listen for the present. Hush!

Heinie was calling out excitedly, "I'm in the stars, Papa! They're so close they burn!" He said nothing more and continued to stare straight ahead, his eyes diamond bright.

"Don't touch them," Jane warned without looking around. Her pencil made a few faint five-pointed stars. The Children's Clubhouse would be on a boundary of space, she decided – put it in a tree on the edge of the Old Ravine. She said, "Gott, what do you suppose Heinie sees out there besides stars?"

"Bug-eyed angels, probably," her husband answered, smiling again but still not taking his head out of his book.

BLACK FLANNEL (
consulting a sheet of crackling black paper he has slipped from his brief-case, though as far as Gott can see there is no printing, typing, writing, or symbols of any sort in any colour ink on the black bond
): The Inner Circle is the world's secret élite, operating behind and above all figureheads, workhorses, wealthy dolts, and those talented exhibitionists we name genius. The Inner Circle has existed
sub rosa niger
for thousands of years. It controls human life. It is the repository of all great abilities and the key to all ultimate delights.

GOTT (
tolerantly
): You make it sound plausible enough. Everyone half believes in such a cryptic power gang, going back to Sumeria.

BLACK FLANNEL: The membership is small and very select. As you are aware, I am a kind of talent scout for the group. Qualifications for admission (
he slips a second sheet of black bond from his briefcase
) include a proven great skill in achieving and wielding power over men and women, and amoral zest for all of life, a seasoned blend of ruthlessness and reliability, plus wide knowledge and lightning wit.

GOTT (
contemptuously
): Is that all?

BLACK FLANNEL (
flatly
): Yes. Initiation is binding for life – and for the afterlife: one of our mottoes is Ferdinand's dying cry in
The Duchess of Malfi
. 'I will vault credit and affect high pleasures after death.' The penalty for revealing organizational secrets is not death alone but extinction – all memory of the person is erased from public and private history; his name is removed from records; all knowledge of and feeling for him is deleted from the minds of his wives, mistresses, and children; it is as if he had never existed. That, by the by, is a good example of the powers of the Inner Circle. It may interest you to know, Mr. Adler, that as a result of the retaliatory activities of the Inner Circle, the names of three British kings have been expunged from history. Those who have suffered a like fate include two popes, seven movie stars, a brilliant Flemish artist superior to Rembrandt ... (
As he spins out an apparently interminable listing, the Fifth Person creeps in on hands and knees from the kitchen. Gott cannot see him at first, as the sofa is between Gott's chair and the kitchen door. The Fifth Person is the Black Jester, who looks rather like a caricature of Gott but has the same putty complexion as the Man in the Black Flannel Suit. The Black Jester wears skin-tight clothing of that colour, silver-embroidered boots and gloves, and a black hood edged with silver bells that do not tinkle. He carries a scepter topped with a small death's-head that wears a black hood like his own edged with tinier silver bells, soundless as the larger ones
.)

THE BLACK JESTER (
suddenly rearing up like a cobra from behind the sofa and speaking to the Man in the Black Flannel Suit over the latter's shoulder
): Ho! So you're still teasing his rickety hopes with that shit about the Inner Circle? Good sport, brother! – you play your fish skillfully.

GOTT (
immensely startled, but controlling himself with some courage
): Who are you? How dare you bring your babble into my court?

THE BLACK JESTER: Listen to the old cock crow innocent! As if he didn't know he'd himself created both of us, time and again, to stave off boredom, madness, or suicide.

GOTT (
firmly
): I never created
you
.

THE BLACK JESTER: Oh, yes you did, old cock. Truly your mind has never birthed anything but twins – for every good a bad, for every breath a fart, and for every white, a black.

GOTT (
flares his nostrils and glares a death-spell which hums toward the newcomer like a lazy invisible bee
).

THE BLACK JESTER (
pales and staggers backward as the death-spell strikes, but shakes it off with an effort and glares back murderously at Gott
): Old cock-father, I'm beginning to hate you at last.

Just then the refrigerator motor went on in the kitchen and its loud rapid rocking sound seemed to Jane to be a voice saying, "Watch your children, they're in danger. Watch your children, they're in danger."