The Dark Side (11 page)

“Found out who he is yet?” asked the postman.

“No.”

Tristram Makepeace turned back along the path towards his house. It was waiting for him. The door into the ever-dusty hallway was open. It was the mouth of the house, and it was open.

The eyes of the house, asymmetrical windows, were blazing, yellow and hungry in the early sun.

He wanted to run after the postman and talk with him; or go up the road to the milkman and ask him about his wife and children, talking and talking to reassert this life and his living of it.

But they would think he was mad; and he was not mad. The cold began to strike through his thin slippers and dressing gown, so he walked slowly back up the gravel pathway into the mouth of the house, and closed the door behind him.

He opened the envelope, took out the blank sheet, tore it through. The equal halves fluttered to the floor. He tried to keep his brain as blank as the sheet of paper. It would be nice, came the sudden thought, if he could take his brain out and wash it blank and white and clean under clear running water.

A dark, itching foulness compounded of a million uninvited pictures was trying to force its way into his mind… strike your god, your father, see him stand surprised with the red marks of your fingers on his cheek… and your lovely virgin mother…

“NO!”

He shouted the negation, forced the pictures back, and stout! trembling with the effort.

Three times three on this wall, three times three on that wall… Keep it down, hard, and if you can’t be blank, think blind… If that barrier goes, I’m done for… I need help.

Mr. Makepeace dressed, and sat down at his old typewriter to compose a sweetly pedantic letter to the Ministry of Pensions, asking for an interview by a psychiatrist.

He wrote, in part: “I cannot doubt the objective reality of these foolish hoax letters, since the postmaster would confirm that I have received them; but I fear that their subsequent apparent disappearance may be the result of short phases of amnesia, attended by false memories, in which I secretly destroy them… Please treat this matter as urgent.”

“ ‘Subsequent apparent disappearance,’ ” murmured a Ministry clerk. “Oh Gawd.” He stamped the letter WRONG DEPARTMENT. PASSED TO MINISTRY OF HEALTH, and placed it in a tray for routine collection by interdepartmental messenger the next day.

On the second day of waiting, Mr. Makepeace’s head was numb with the effort of not thinking.

His letter was routed through the Ministry of Health, marked FOR ATTENTION MEDICAL BOARD, DISTRICT E.

On the fourth day of waiting, as Mr. Makepeace sat head-in-hands at his breakfast table, the morning newspaper, which he had not bothered to pick up from the mat inside the front door, dropped through the ceiling, and spilt a cup of cold tea in front of him. He laughed.

Now he dared not leave his dusty house, for that would be running away. And he might meet a chance acquaintance who would pity him.

He looked over his shoulder and laughed again, a curious little high-pitched giggle. There were tears in his eyes.

The Secretary of the Medical Board, District E, on Form EOH/563, wrote to an Army Medical Board, asking for the case-history papers relating to ex-Captain Tristram Makepeace.

On the fifth day of waiting, thin, proud, foolish Mr. Makepeace, who had no intimate friends, no near relations, no anchor in slipping reality, and no imagination, spent the day walking round inside his house and addressing each face of each inner wall, three times each time, with a new compulsive rune designed to cleanse the inner walls of his brain of an accretion of dust.

On the morning of the seventh day, the woman next door hastily phoned for an ambulance.

Mr. Makepeace, pale eyes quite blank in his gaunt face, was leaning from his bedroom window, and screaming.

She made out a few words: “The barrier’s down… I can’t stand it.”

“He must have been fighting that Oedipus-complex cycle for years,” said the Superintendent thoughtfully. “Then—
phut
—sheer pressure plunges him into psychosis.” He looked again at the encephalograph. “A classical schizophrenic overnight.”

“Be damned,” said his young assistant. “No ordinary schizo—save the mark—ever exhibits such a clear-cut, contrasting duality.”

“Which is he this morning?” asked the Superintendent.

“Grabcheek, writing himself another letter care of Tristram Makepeace. The handwriting is quite distinctive. Incidentally, police checked on those Grabcheek envelopes we found in his pockets. They were definitely typed on his machine.”

“But no actual letters were found—only blank sheets. So what is he writing now?”

The young assistant stared out of the office window. “ ‘Your father sends you his best wishes, and hopes he will meet you soon,’ ” he quoted.

“Poor devil,” said the Superintendent. “At least he can’t post them to himself now.”

The assistant drew a sealed envelope from his pocket. “This was in the mail this morning. We had to pay excess postage because it wasn’t stamped.”

E. Grabcheek, Esq.,
c/o Tristram Makepeace,
Seaton Mental Hospital
Essex.

The Superintendent jerked upright in his chair. “But how in the name of heaven… He’s been isolated here for the past week!”

“A self-haunted man isn’t bound by the three-dimensional limitations of his main personality. Read a few case-histories of poltergeist phenomena and you’ll see what I mean. ‘The poltergeist is not a ghost. It is a bundle of projected repressions.’ That’s a quote from a book you refused to read. Remember?”

“Nonsense,” muttered the Superintendent. “A dissociated personality cannot have a separate objective existence!”

“According to that book it can,” the other persisted. “You might give it a try:
Haunted People
, by Hereward Carrington and Nandor Fodor. Fodor even encountered such dissociations in his psychiatric practice.”

“No…
No!
” the Superintendent said sharply. “Someone smuggled that letter out for him and posted it.”

“Without a stamp?” The assistant grinned. The grin faded.

“It’s a damnable theory,” he admitted. “The other personality is almost invariably evil. In Tibet, adepts deliberately purge their minds of what we would call neurotic symbolism by projecting
thanai
—thoughts which coalesce into evil spirits, which are then dissipated. Or not.”

“And thus,” said the Superintendent, “the Abominable Snowman?” He laughed.

At an empty house in a so-suburban suburb that morning, the postman delivered a final letter. It fluttered to the doormat. It was addressed—without the concession of a c/o now—to:

Ezreel Grabcheek, Esq.,

36, Acacia Avenue.

As the footsteps of the preoccupied, duty-bound postman died away, the letter zig-zagged upwards from the mat, poised in mid-air.

Something laughed.

Here is the first of two stories on the Frankenstein theme; the other will be along a little later and is serious; this one is not.

This story is a marvel of compactness and ease; I do not see how it could be improved by so much as a word.

The gray-faced person came along the street where old Mr. and Mrs. Gumbeiner lived. It was afternoon, it was autumn, the sun was warm and soothing to their ancient bones. Anyone who attended the movies in the twenties or the early thirties has seen that street a thousand times. Past these bungalows with their half-double roofs Edmund Lowe walked arm-in-arm with Leatrice Joy and Harold Lloyd was chased by Chinamen waving hatchets. Under these squamous palm trees Laurel kicked Hardy and Woolsey beat Wheeler upon the head with a codfish. Across these pocket-handkerchief-sized lawns the juveniles of the Our Gang Comedies pursued one another and were pursued by angry fat men in golf knickers. On this same street—or perhaps on some other one of five hundred streets exactly like it.

Mrs. Gumbeiner indicated the gray-faced person to her husband.

“You think maybe he’s got something the matter?” she asked. “He walks kind of funny, to me.”

“Walks like a
golem
,” Mr. Gumbeiner said indifferently.

The old woman was nettled.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “
I
think he walks like your cousin Mendel.”

The old man pursed his mouth angrily and chewed on his pipestem. The gray-faced person turned up the concrete path, walked up the steps to the porch, sat down in a chair. Old Mr. Gumbeiner ignored him. His wife stared at the stranger.

“Man comes in without a hello, goodby, or howareyou, sits himself down and right away he’s at home… The chair is comfortable?” she asked. “Would you like maybe a glass tea?”

She turned to her husband.

“Say something, Gumbeiner!” she demanded. “What are you, made of wood?”

The old man smiled a slow, wicked, triumphant smile.

“Why should
I
say anything?” he asked the air. “Who am I? Nothing, that’s who.”

The stranger spoke. His voice was harsh and monotonous.

“When you learn who—or, rather, what—I am, the flesh will melt from your bones in terror.” He bared porcelain teeth.

“Never mind about my bones!” the old woman cried. “You’ve got a lot of nerve talking about my bones!”

“You will quake with fear,” said the stranger. Old Mrs. Gumbeiner said that she hoped he would live so long. She turned to her husband once again.

“Gumbeiner, when are you going to mow the lawn?”

“All mankind—” the stranger began.

“
Shah!
I’m talking to my husband… He talks
eppis
kind of funny, Gumbeiner, no?”

“Probably a foreigner,” Mr. Gumbeiner said, complacently.

“You think so?” Mrs. Gumbeiner “glanced fleetingly at the stranger. “He’s got a very bad color in his face,
nebbich
, I suppose he came to California for his health.”

“Disease, pain, sorrow, love, grief—all are nought to—”

Mr. Gumbeiner cut in on the stranger’s statement.

“Gall bladder,” the old man said. “Guinzburg down at the
shule
looked exactly the same before his operation. Two professors they had in for him, and a private nurse day and night.”

“I am not a human being!” the stranger said loudly.

“Three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars it cost his son, Guinzburg told me. ‘For you, Poppa, nothing is too expensive—only get well,’ the son told him.”

“
I am not a human being!
”

“Ai, is that a son for you!” the old woman said, rocking her head. “A heart of gold, pure gold.” She looked at the stranger. “All right, all right, I heard you the first time. Gumbeiner! I asked you a question. When are you going to cut the lawn?”

“On Wednesday,
odder
maybe Thursday, comes the Japaneser to the neighborhood. To cut lawns is
his
profession.
My
profession is to be a glazier—retired.”

“Between me and all mankind is an inevitable hatred,” the stranger said. “When I tell you what I am, the flesh will melt—”

“You said, you said already,” Mr. Gumbeiner interrupted.

“In Chicago where the winters were as cold and bitter as the Czar of Russia’s heart,” the old woman intoned, “you had strength to carry the frames with the glass together day in and day out. But in California with the golden sun to mow the lawn when your wife asks, for this you have no strength. Do I call in the Japaneser to cook for you supper?” .

. “Thirty years Professor Allardyce spent perfecting his theories. Electronics, neuronics—”

“Listen, how educated he talks,” Mr. Gumbeiner said, admiringly. “Maybe he goes to the University here?”

“If he goes to the University, maybe he knows Bud?” his wife suggested.

“Probably they’re in the same class and he came to see him about the homework, no?”

“Certainly he must be in the same class;How many classes are there? Five
in ganzen
: Bud showed me on his program card.” She counted off on her fingers. “Television Appreciation and Criticism, Small Boat Building, Social Adjustment, The American Dance… The American Dance—
nu
, Gumbeiner—”

“Contemporary Ceramics,” her husband said, relishing the syllables. “A fine boy, Bud. A pleasure to have him for a boarder.”

“After thirty years spent in these studies,” the “stranger, who had continued to speak unnoticed, went on, “he turned from the theoretical to the pragmatic. In ten years” time he had made the most titanic discovery in history: he made mankind,
all
mankind, superfluous; he made
me
.”

“What did Tillie write in her last letter?” asked the old man.

The old woman shrugged.

“What should she write? The same thing. Sidney was home from the Army, Naomi has a new boy friend—”

“
He made ME!
”

“Listen, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is,” the old woman said, “maybe where you came from is different, but in
this
country you don’t interrupt people the while they’re talking… Hey. Listen—what do you mean, he
made
you? What kind of talk is that?”

The stranger bared all his teeth again, exposing the too-pink gums.

“In his library, to which I had a more complete access after his sudden and as yet undiscovered death from entirely natural causes, I found a complete collection of stories about androids, from Shelley’s
Frankenstein
through Capek’s
R.U.R.
to Asimov’s—”

“Frankenstein?” said the old man, with interest. “There used to be a Frankenstein who had the soda-
wasser
place on Halstead Street—a Litvack,
nebbich
.”

“What are you talking?” Mrs. Gumbeiner demanded. “His name was Franken
thal
, and it wasn’t on Halstead, it was on Roosevelt.”

“—clearly shown that all mankind has an instinctive antipathy towards androids and there will be an inevitable struggle between them—”

“Of course, of course!” Old Mr. Gumbeiner clicked his teeth against his pipe. “I am always wrong, you are always right. How could you stand to be married to such a stupid person all this time?”

“I don’t know,” the old woman said. “Sometimes I wonder, myself. I think it must be his good looks.” She began to laugh. Old Mr. Gumbeiner blinked, then began to smile, then took his wife’s hand.

“Foolish old woman,” the stranger said. “Why do you laugh? Do you not know I have come to destroy you?”

“What?” old Mr. Gumbeiner shouted. “Close your mouth, you!” He darted from his chair and struck the stranger with the flat of his hand. The stranger’s head struck against the porch pillar and bounced back.

“When you talk to my wife, talk respectable, you hear?”

Old Mrs. Gumbeiner, cheeks very pink, pushed her husband back to his chair. Then she leaned forward and examined the stranger’s head. She clicked her tongue as she pulled aside a flap of gray, skinlike material.

“Gumbeiner, look! He’s all springs and wires inside!”

“I
told
you he was a
golem
, but no, you wouldn’t listen,” the old man said.

“You said he
walked
like a
golem
.”

“How could he walk like a
golem
unless he
was
one?”

“All right, all right… You broke him, so now fix him.”

“My grandfather, his light shines from Paradise, told me that when MoHaRal—Moreynu Ha-Rav Löw—his memory for a blessing, made the
golem
in Prague, three hundred? four hundred years ago? he wrote on his forehead the Holy Name.”

Smiling reminiscently, the old woman continued, “And the
golem
cut the rabbi’s wood and brought his water and guarded the ghetto.”

“And one time only he disobeyed the Rabbi Löw, and Rabbi Löw erased the
Shem Ha-Mephorash
from the
golem
’s forehead and the
golem
fell down like a dead one. And they put him up in the attic of the
shule
and he’s still there today if the Communisten haven’t sent him to Moscow… This is not just a story,” he said.

“
Avadda
not!” said the old woman.

“I myself have seen both the
shule
and the rabbi’s grave,” her husband said, conclusively.

“But I think this must be a different kind of
golem
, Gumbeiner. See, on his forehead; nothing written.”

“What’s the matter, there’s a law I can’t write something there? Where is that lump clay Bud brought us from his class?”

The old man washed his hands, adjusted his little black skullcap, and slowly and carefully wrote four Hebrew letters on the gray forehead.

“Ezra the Scribe himself couldn’t do better,” the old woman said, admiringly. “Nothing happens,” she observed, looking at the lifeless figure sprawled in the chair.

“Well, after all, am I Rabbi Löw?” her husband asked, deprecatingly. “No,” he answered. He leaned over and examined the exposed mechanism. “This spring goes here… this wire comes with this one…” The figure moved. “But this one goes where? And this one?”

“Let be,” said his wife. The figure sat up slowly and rolled its eyes loosely.

“Listen, Reb
Golem
,” the old man said, wagging his finger. “Pay attention to what I say—you understand?”

“Understand…”

“If you want to stay here, you got to do like Mr. Gumbeiner says.”

“Do-like-Mr.-Gumbeiner-says…”

“
That’s
the way I like to hear a
golem
talk. Malka, give here the mirror from the pocketbook. Look, you see your face? You see the forehead, what’s written? If you don’t do like Mr. Gumbeiner says, he’ll wipe out what’s written and you’ll be no more alive.”

“No-more-alive…”

“
That’s
right. Now, listen. Under the porch you’ll find a lawnmower. Take it. And cut the lawn. Then come back. Go.”

“Go…” The figure shambled down the stairs. Presently the sound of the lawnmower whirred through the quiet air in the street just like the street where Jackie Cooper shed huge tears on Wallace Beery’s shirt and Chester Conklin rolled his eyes at Marie Dressler.

“So what will you write to Tillie?” old Mr. Gumbeiner asked.

“What should I write?” old Mrs. Gumbeiner shrugged. “I’ll write that the weather is lovely out here and that we are both, Blessed be the Name, in good health.”

The old man nodded his head slowly, and they sat together on the front porch in the warm afternoon sun.