“Yessir, yessir. I’ll—oh Christ—hurry up Doc…”
He could feel his pajama pants bunched around his knees, under his slacks, as he floored the pedal of the ranch wagon. The midnight roads were jerky in the windshield, and the murk through which he raced was almost too ominous to be a fact of nature.
When he slewed the car into the drive, the gatekeeper threw the iron barrier back almost spastically. The ranch wagon chewed gravel, sending debris back in a wide fan, as Tedrow plunged ahead. When he screeched to a halt in front of the sanitarium, the doors burst open and the Senior Attendant, Wilson, raced down the steps.
“This way, th-this way, Doctor Te—”
“Get out of my way, you idiot, I know which direction!” He shoved Wilson aside, and strode up the steps and into the building.
“It started about an hour ago…we didn’t know what was happ—”
“And you didn’t call me immediately? Ass!”
“We just thought, we just thought it was another one of his stages, you know how he is…”
Tedrow snorted in disgust and threw off his topcoat as he made his way rapidly down the corridor to the section of the sanitarium that housed the restraining rooms.
As they came into the annex, through the heavy glass-portaled door, he heard the scream for the first time.
In that scream, in that tormented, pleading, demanding and hopelessly lost tremor there were all the sounds of fear he had ever heard. In that voice he heard even his own voice, his own soul, crying out for something. For an unnameable something, as the scream came again. “Give me some light!”
Another world, another voice, another life. Some evil and empty beseeching from a corner of a dust-strewn universe. Hanging there timelessly, vibrant in colorless agony. A million tired and blind stolen voices all wrapped into that one howl, all the eternal sadnesses and losses and pains ever known to man. It was all there, as the good in the world was sliced open and left to bleed its golden fluid away in the dirt. It was a lone animal being eaten by a bird of prey. It was a hundred children crushed beneath iron treads. It was one good man with his entrails in his blood-soaked hands. It was the soul and the pain and the very vital fiber of life, draining away, without light, without hope, without succor.
“Give me some light!”
Tedrow flung himself at the door, and threw back the bolt on the observation window. He stared for a long and silent moment as the scream trembled once more on the air, weightlessly, transparently, tingling off into emptiness. He stared, and felt the impact of a massive horror stifle his own cry of disbelief and terror.
Then he spun away from the window and hung there, sweat-drenched back flat to the wall, with the last sight of Richard Becker he would ever hope to see, burned forever behind his eyes.
The sound of his soft sobs in the corridor held the others back. They stared silently, still hearing that never- spoken echo reverberating down and down and down the corridors of their minds:
Give me some light!
Fumbling beside him, Tedrow slammed the observation window shut, and then his arm sank back to his side.
While inside Room 16, lying up against the far wall, his back against the soft passive padding, Richard Becker looked out at the door, at the corridor, at the world, forever.
Looked out as he had come, purely and simply.
Without a face. From his hairline to his chin, a blank, empty, featureless expanse. Empty. Silent. Devoid of sight or smell or sound. Blank and faceless, a creature God had never deigned to bless with a mirror to the world. His Method now was gone.
Richard Becker, actor, had played his last part, and had gone away, taking with him Richard Becker, a man who had known all the sounds, all the sights, all the life of fear.
What can I tell you? When I was a kid in Painseville, Ohio, and involved in the intricacies of Jack Armstrong, the Green Hornet, I Love A Mystery, Hop Harrigan and Dick Tracy, anything was possible. Under the side porch of our house, magic lands of adventure and intrigue made themselves known to me in the pages of comic books that chronicled the adventures of the Sandman, Captain America and Bucky, the Human Torch, the Boy Commandos, Captain Marvel, Starman, Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, the Flash and (my favorite), Hawkman. My Saturday afternoons of quivering joy were secretively spent in a theater whose name I have sadly forgotten that stood next to the Cleveland Trust, where Kresge’s 5 and 10 now looms. (In fact, one personally autographed letter of gratitude is waiting for whatever correspondent with an “A” or an “O,” and truthfully, it’s one of those bits of memory I’d hate to have slip away forever. Duplicate prizes will be awarded in case of a tie.) And in that tiny movie house I saw my first Dick Tracy serial, starring Ralph Byrd. I saw the Shadow with Victor Jory. I shivered at The Clutching Hand and cheered Don Winslow Of The Navy and hissed as The Crimson Skull doomed the hero to a room whose walls came inexorably together. It was a golden time, before TV, in which the imagination and the need to be young were coupled with a world of wonders. In my world, at the corner of Harmon Drive and Mentor Avenue, was a wonderful dark woods, just like the one in
Did you ever feel your nose running and you wanted to wipe it, but you couldn’t? Most people do, sometime or other, but I’m different. I let it run.
They call me square. They say, “Smitty, you are a square. You are so square, you got corners!” This, they mean, indicates I am an oddball and had better shape up or ship out. So all right, so I’m a goof-off as far as they think. Maybe I do get a little sore at things that don’t matter, but if Underfeld hadn’t’a laid into me that day in the gym at school, nothing would have happened. The trouble is, I get aggravated so easy about little things, like not making the track team, that I’m no good at studies. This makes the teachers not care for me even a little. Besides, I won’t take their guff. But that thing with track. It broke me up really good.
There I was standing in the gym, wearing these dirty white gym shorts with a black stripe down the side.
And old Underfeld, that’s the track coach, he comes up and says, “Whaddaya doin’, Smitty?”
Well, anyone with 20-40 eyesight coulda seen what I was doing. I was doing push-ups. “I’m doing push-ups,” I said. “Whaddaya think I’m doing? Raising artichokes?”
That was most certainly not the time to wise off to old Underfeld. I could see the steam pressure rising in the jerk’s manner, and next thing he blows up allover the joint: “Listen, you little punk! Don’t get so mouthy with me. In fact, I’m gonna tell you now, ‘cause I don’t want ya hangin’ around the gym or track no more: You just ain’t good enough. In a short sprint you got maybe a little guts, but when it comes to a long drag, fifty guys in this school give their right arms to be on the team beat you to the tape. I’m sorry. Get out!”
He is sorry. Like hell!
He is no more sorry than I am as I say, “Ta hell with you, you chowderhead, you got no more brains than these ignorant sprinters that will fall dead before they get to the tape.”
Underfeld looks at me like I had stuck him in the seat of his sweat pants with a fistful of pins and kind of gives a gasp. “What did you say?” he inquires, breathless like.
“I don’t mumble, do I?” I snapped.
“Get out of here! Get outta here! Geddouddahere!”
He was making quite a fuss as I kicked out the door to the dressing rooms.
As I got dressed I gave the whole thing a good think. I was pretty sure that a couple of those stinkin’ teachers I had guffed had put wormhead Underfeld up to it. But what can a guy do? I’m just a kid, so says they. They got the cards stacked six ways from Culbertson, and that’s it.
I was pretty damned sore as I kicked out the front door. I decided to head for The Woods and try to get it off my mind. That I was cutting school did not bother me. My mother, maybe. But me? No. It was The Woods for me for the rest of the afternoon.
Those Woods. Something funny about them. D’ja ever notice, sometimes right in the middle of a big populated section they got a little stand of woods, real deep and shadowy, you can’t see too far into them? You try to figure out why someone hasn’t bought up the plot and put a house on it, or why they haven’t made it into a playground? Well, that’s what my Woods were.
They faced back on a street full of those cracker-box houses constructed by the government, the factory workers shouldn’t sleep on the curbs. On the other side, completely boxing them in, was a highway, running straight through to the big town. It isn’t really big, but it makes the small town seem not so small.
I used to cut school and go there to read. In the center is a place where everything has that sort of filtery light that seeps down between the tree branches, where there’s a big old tree that is strictly one all alone.
What I mean is that tree is great. Big thing, stretches and’s lost in the branches of the other trees, it’s so big.
And the roots look like they were forced up out of the ground under pressure, so all’s you can see are these sweeping arcs of thick roots, all shiny and risen right out, forming a little bowl under the tree.
Reason I like it so much there, is that it’s quieter than anything, and you can feel it. The kind of quiet a library would like to have, but doesn’t. To cap all this, the rift in the branches is just big enough so sunlight streams right through and makes a great reading light. And when the sun moves out of that rift, I know it’s time to run for home. I make it in just enough time so that Mom doesn’t know I was cutting, and thinks I was in school all day.
So last week—I’d been going to The Woods off, on for about two years—I tagged over there, after that creep Underfeld told me I was his last possible choice for the track team. I had a copy of something or other, I don’t remember now, I was going to read.
I settled down with my rump stuck into that bowl in the roots, and my feet propped against some smaller rootlings. With that little scrubby plant growth that springs up around the bases of trees, it was pretty comfortable, so I started reading.
Next, you are not going to believe.
I’m sitting there reading, and suddenly I feel this pressure against the seat of my jeans. Next thing I know, I am tumbled over on my head and a trapdoor is opening up out of the ground. Yeah, a trapdoor disguised as solid earth.
Next, you will really not believe.
Up out of this hole comes—may I be struck by green lightning if I’m a liar—a gnome! Or maybe he was a elf or a sprite, or some such thing. All I know is that this gnome character is wearing a pair of pegged charcoal slacks, a spread-collar turquoise shirt, green suede loafers, a pork-pie hat with a circumference of maybe three feet, a long, dinky keychain (what the Hell kinda keys could a gnome have?), repulsive loud tie and sunglasses.