Night of the Jabberwock Read online

  I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,

  And each damp thing that creeps and crawls

  Went wobble-wobble on the walls.

  “Of course he should have stopped there instead of adding fifteen or twenty bad triads. But ‘Went wobble-wobble on the walls’ is marvellous.”

  He nodded. “Let’s drink to it.”

  We drank to it.

  He said, “Go on.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m just realizing that I could easily go on for hours. I can quote every line of verse in the Alice books and most of The Hunting of the Snark. But, I both hope and presume, you didn’t come here to listen to me lecture on Lewis Carroll. My information about him is fairly thorough, but quite orthodox. I judge that yours isn’t, and I want to hear it.”

  I refilled our glasses.

  He nodded slowly. “Quite right, Doctor. My—I should say our—information is extremely unorthodox. I think you have the background and the type of mind to understand it, and to believe it when you have seen proof. To a more ordinary mind, it would seem sheer fantasy.”

  It was getting better by the minute. I said, “Don’t stop now.”

  “Very well. But before I go any further, I must warn you of something, Doctor. It is also very dangerous information to have. I do not speak lightly or metaphorically. I mean that there is serious danger, deadly danger.”

  “That,” I said, “is wonderful.”

  He sat there and toyed with his glass—still with the third drink in it—and didn’t look at me. I studied his face. It was an interesting face. That long, thin, pointed nose, so incongruous to his build that it might have been false—a veritable Cyrano de Bergerac of a nose. And now that he was in the light, I could see that there were deep laughter-lines around his generous mouth. At first I would have guessed at his age at thirty instead of the forty he claimed to be; now, studying his face closely, I could see that he had not exaggerated his age. One would have to laugh a long time to etch lines like those.

  But he wasn’t laughing now. He looked deadly serious, and he didn’t look crazy. But he said something that sounded crazy.

  He said, “Doctor, has it ever occurred to you that—that the fantasies of Lewis Carroll are not fantasies at all?”

  “Do you mean,” I asked, “in the sense that fantasy is often nearer to fundamental truth than is would-be realistic fiction?”

  “No. I mean that they are literally, actually true. That they are not fiction at all, that they are reporting.”

  I stared at him. “If you think that, then who—or what—do you think Lewis Carroll was?”

  He smiled faintly, but it wasn’t a smile of amusement.

  He said, “If you really want to know, and aren’t afraid, you can find out tonight. There is a meeting, near here. Will you come?”

  “May I be frank?”

  “Certainly.”

  I said, “I think it’s crazy, but try to keep me away.”

  “In spite of the fact that there is danger?”

  Sure, I was going, danger or no. But maybe I could use his insistence on warning me to pry something out of him. So I said, “May I ask what kind of danger?”

  He seemed to hesitate a moment and then he took out his wallet and from an inner compartment took a newspaper clipping, a short one of about three paragraphs. He handed it to me.

  I read it, and I recognized the type and the setup; it was a clipping from the Bridgeport Argus. And I remembered how having read it, a couple of weeks ago, I’d considered clipping it as an exchange item, and then had decided not to, despite the fact that the heading had caught my interest. It read:

  MAN SLAIN BY UNKNOWN BEAST

  The facts were few and simple. A man named Colin Hawks, living outside Bridgeport, a recluse, had been found dead along a path through the woods. The man’s throat had been torn, and police opinion was that a large and vicious dog had attacked him. But the reporter who wrote the article suggested the possibility that a wolf—or even a panther or a leopard—escaped from a circus or zoo might have caused the wounds.

  I folded the clipping again and handed it back to Smith. It didn’t mean anything, of course. It’s easy to find stories like that if one looks for them. A man named Charles Fort found thousands of them and put them into four books he had written, books that were on my shelves.

  This particular one was less mysterious than most. In fact, there wasn’t any real mystery at all; undoubtedly some vicious dog had done the killing.

  Just the same something prickled at the back of my neck.

  It was the headline, really, not the article. It’s funny what the word “unknown” and the thought back of it can do to you. If that story had been headed “Man Killed by Vicious Dog”—or by a lion or a crocodile or any other specified creature, however fierce and dangerous, there’d have been nothing frightening about it.

  But an “unknown beast”—well if you’ve got the same kind of imagination I have, you see what I mean. And if you haven’t, I can’t explain.

  I looked at Yehudi Smith just in time to see him toss down his whisky—again like a conjuring trick. I handed him back the clipping and then refilled our glasses.

  I said, “Interesting story. But where’s the connection?”

  “Our last meeting was in Bridgeport. That’s all I can tell you. About that, I mean. You asked the nature of the danger; that’s why I showed you that. And it’s not too late for you to say no. It won’t be, for that matter, until we get there.”

  “Get where?”

  “Only a few miles from here. I have directions to guide me to a house on a road called the Dartown Pike. I have a car.”

  I said, irrelevantly, “So have I, but the tyres are flat. Two of them.”

  I thought about the Dartown Pike. I said. “You wouldn’t, by any chance, be heading for the house known as the Wentworth place?”

  “That’s the name, yes. You know of it?”

  Right then and there, if I’d been completely sober, I’d have seen that the whole thing was too good to be true. I’d have smelled a fish. Or blood.

  I said, “We’ll have to take candles or flashlights. That house has been empty since I was a kid. We used to call it a haunted house. Would that be why you chose it?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And your group is meeting there tonight?”

  He nodded. “At one o’clock in the morning, to be exact. You’re sure you’re not afraid?”

  God, yes, I was afraid. Who wouldn’t be, after the build-up he’d just handed me?

  So I grinned at him and said, “Sure, I’m afraid. But just try to keep me away.”

  Then I had an idea. If I was going to a haunted house at one o’clock in the morning to hunt jabberwocks or try to invoke the ghost of Lewis Carroll or some equally sensible thing, it wouldn’t hurt to have someone along whom I already knew. And if Al Grainger dropped in—I tried to figure out whether or not Al would be interested. He was a Carroll fan, all right, but—for the rest of it, I didn’t know.

  I said, “One question, Mr. Smith. A young friend of mine might drop in soon for a game of chess. How exclusive is this deal? I mean, would it be all right if he came along, if he wants to?”

  “Do you think he’s qualified?”

  “Depends on what the qualifications are,” I said. “Offhand, I’d say you have to be a Lewis Carroll fan and a little crazy. Or, come to think of it, are those one and the same qualification?”

  He laughed. “They’re not too far apart. But tell me something about your friend. You said young friend; how young?”

  “About twenty-three. Not long out of college. Good literary taste and background, which means he knows and likes Carroll. He can quote almost as much of it as I can. Plays chess, if that’s a qualification—and I’d guess it is. Dodgson not only played chess but based Through the Looking-Glass on a chess game. His name, if that matters, is Al Grainger.”

  “Would he want to come?”

  “Frankly,” I admitted, �
��I haven’t an idea on that angle.”

  Smith said, “I hope he comes; if he’s a Carroll enthusiast, I’d like to meet him. But, if he comes, will you do me a favour of saying nothing about—what I’ve told you, at least until I’ve had a chance to judge him a bit? Frankly, it would be almost unprecedented if I took the liberty of inviting someone to an important meeting like tonight’s on my own. You’re being invited because we know quite a bit about you. You were voted on—and I might say that the vote to invite you was unanimous.”

  I remembered his familiarity with the two obscure things about Lewis Carroll that I’d written, and I didn’t doubt that he—or they, if he really represented a group—did know something about me.

  He said, “But—well, if I get a chance to meet him and think he’d really fit in, I might take a chance and ask him. Can you tell me anything more about him? What does he do—for a living I mean?”

  That was harder to answer. I said, “Well, he’s writing plays. But I don’t think he makes a living at it; in fact, I don’t know that he’s ever sold any. He’s a bit of a mystery to Carmel City. He’s lived here all his life—except while he was away at college—and nobody knows where his money comes from. Has a swanky car and a place of his own—he lived there with his mother until she died a few years ago—and seems to have plenty of spending money, but nobody knows where it comes from.” I grinned. “And it annoys the hell out of Carmel City not to know. You know how small towns are.”

  He nodded. “Wouldn’t it be a logical assumption that he inherited the money?”

  “From one point of view, yes. But it doesn’t seem too likely. His mother worked all her life as a milliner, and without owning her own shop. The town, I remember, used to wonder how she managed to own her own house and send her son to college on what she earned. But she couldn’t possibly have earned enough to have done both of those things and still have left him enough money to have supported him in idleness—Well, maybe writing plays isn’t idleness, but it isn’t remunerative unless you sell them—for several years.”

  I shrugged. “But there’s probably no mystery to it. She must have had an income from investments her husband had made, and Al either inherited the income or got the capital from which it came. He probably doesn’t talk about his business because he enjoys being mysterious.”

  “Was his father wealthy?”

  “His father died before he was born, and before Mrs. Grainger moved to Carmel City. So nobody here knew his father. And I guess that’s all I can tell you about Al, except that he can beat me at chess most of the time, and that I hope you’ll have a chance to meet him.”

  Smith nodded. “If he comes, we’ll see.”

  He glanced at his empty glass and I took the hint and filled it and my own. Again I watched the incredible manner of his drinking it, fascinated. I’d swear that, this time, the glass came no closer than six inches from his lips. Definitely it was a trick I’d have to learn myself. If for no other reason than that I don’t really like the taste of whisky, much as I enjoy the effects of it. With his way of drinking, it didn’t seem that he had the slightest chance of tasting the stuff. It was there, in the glass, and then it was gone. His Adam’s apple didn’t seem to work and if he was talking at the time he drank there was scarcely an interruption in what he was saying.

  The phone rang. I excused myself and answered it.

  “Doc,” said Clyde Andrews’ voice, “this is Clyde Andrews.”

  “Fine,” I said, “I suppose you realize that you sabotaged this week’s issue by cancelling a story on my front page. What’s called off this time?”

  “I’m sorry about that, Doc, if it really inconvenienced you, but with the sale called off, I thought you wouldn’t want to run the story and have people coming around to——”

  “Of course,” I interrupted him. I was impatient to get back to my conversation with Yehudi Smith. “That’s all right, Clyde. But what do you want now?”

  “I want to know if you’ve decided whether or not you want to sell the Clarion.”

  For a second I was unreasonably angry. I said, “God damn it, Clyde, you interrupt the only real conversation I’ve had in years to ask me that, when we’ve been talking about it for months, off and on? I don’t know. I do and I don’t want to sell it.”

  “Sorry for heckling you, Doc, but I just got a special delivery letter from my brother in Ohio. He’s got an offer out West. Says he’d rather come to Carmel City on the proposition I’d made to him—contingent on your deciding to sell me the Clarion, of course. But he’s got to accept the other offer right away—within a day or so, that is—if he’s going to accept it at all.

  “So you see that makes it different, Doc. I’ve got to know right away. Not tonight, necessarily; it isn’t in that much of a rush. But I’ve got to know by tomorrow sometime, so I thought I’d call you right away so you could start coming to a decision.”

  I nodded and then realized that he couldn’t see me nod so I said, “Sure, Clyde, I get it. I’m sorry for popping off. All right, I’ll make up my mind by tomorrow morning. I’ll let you know one way or the other by then. Okay?”

  “Fine,” he said. “That’ll be plenty of time. Oh, by the way, there’s an item of news for you if it’s not too late to put it in. Or have you already got it?”

  “Got what?”

  “About the escaped maniac. I don’t know the details, but a friend of mine just drove over from Neilsville and he says they’re stopping cars and watching the roads both sides of the country asylum. Guess you can get the details if you call the asylum.”

  “Thanks, Clyde,” I said.

  I put the phone back down in its cradle and looked at Yehudi Smith. I wondered why, with all the fantastic things he’d said, I hadn’t already guessed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “But wait a bit,” the Oyster cried,

  “Before we have our chat;

  For some of us are out of breath,

  And all of us are fat!”

  I FELT a hell of a letdown. Oh, not that I’d really quite believed in the Vorpal Blades or that we were going to a haunted house to conjure up a Jabberwock or whatever we’d have done there.

  But it had been exciting even to think about it, just as one can get excited over a chess game even though he knows that the kings and queens on the board aren’t real entities and that when a bishop slays a knight no real blood is shed. I guess it had been that kind of excitement, the vicarious kind, that I’d felt about the things Yehudi Smith had promised. Or maybe a better comparison would be that it had been like reading an exciting fiction story that one knows isn’t true but which one can believe in for as long as the story lasts.

  Now there wasn’t even that. Across from me, I realized with keen disappointment, was only a man who’d escaped from an insane asylum. Yehudi, the little man who wasn’t there—mentally.

  The funny part of it was that I still liked him. He was a nice little guy and he’d given me a fascinating half hour, up to now. I hated the fact that I’d have to turn him over to the asylum guards and have him put back where he came from.

  Well, I thought, at least it would give me a news story to fill that nine-inch hole in the front page of the Clarion.

  He said, “I hope the call wasn’t anything that will spoil our plans, Doctor.”

  It had spoiled more than that, but of course I couldn’t tell him so, any more than I could have told Clyde Andrews over the phone, in Smith’s presence to call the asylum and tell them to drop around to my house if they wanted to collect their bolted nut.

  So I shook my head while I figured out an angle to get out of the house and to put in the phone call from next door.

  I stood up. Perhaps I was a bit more drunk than I’d thought, for I had to catch my balance. I remember how crystal clear my mind seemed to be—but of course nothing seems more crystal clear than a prism that makes you see around corners.

  I said, “No, the call won’t interrupt our plans except for a few minutes. I�
�ve got to give a message to the man next door. Excuse me—and help yourself to the whisky.”

  I went through the kitchen and outside into the black night. There were lights in the houses on either side of me, and I wondered which of my neighbours to bother. And then I wondered why I was in such a hurry to bother either of them.

  Surely, I thought, the man who called himself Yehudi Smith wasn’t dangerous. And, crazy or not, he was the most interesting man I’d met in years. He did seem to know something about Lewis Carroll. And I remembered again that he’d known about my obscure brochure and equally obscure magazine article. How?

  So, come to think of it, why shouldn’t I stall making that phone call for another hour or so, and relax and enjoy myself? Now that I was over the first disappointment of learning that he was insane, why wouldn’t I find talk about the delusion of his almost as interesting as though it was factual?

  Interesting in a different way, of course. Often I had thought I’d like the chance to talk to a paranoiac about his delusions—neither arguing with him nor agreeing with him, just trying to find out what made him tick.

  And the evening was still a pup; it couldn’t be later than about half past eight so my neighbours would be up at least another hour or two.

  So why was I in a hurry to make that call? I wasn’t.

  Of course I had to kill enough time outside to make it reasonable to believe that I’d actually gone next door and delivered a message, so I stood there at the bottom of my back steps, looking up at the black velvet sky, star-studded but moonless, and wondering what was behind it and why madmen were mad. And how strange it would be if one of them was right and all the rest of us were crazy instead.

  Then I went back inside and I was cowardly enough to do a ridiculous thing. From the kitchen I went into my bedroom and to my closet. In a shoebox on the top shelf was a short-barrelled thirty-eight calibre revolver, one of the compact, lightweight models they call a Banker’s Special. I’d never shot at anything with it and hoped that I never would—and I wasn’t sure I could hit anything smaller than an elephant or farther away than a couple of yards. I don’t even like guns. I hadn’t bought this one; an acquaintance had once borrowed twenty bucks from me and had insisted on my taking the pistol for security. And later he’d wanted another five and said if I gave it to him I could keep the gun. I hadn’t wanted it, but he’d needed the five pretty badly and I’d given it to him.