demonstrate my supernormal sensory powers to the university psychology faculty. For the first time I began to worry about whether I’d come through. Perhaps they kept me going at too hard a pace, I don’t know. At any rate, when the test came, I couldn’t do a thing. Everything became opaque. I got desperate and made things up out of my imagination. I lied. In the end I failed utterly, and I believe the two young psychologists got into a lot of hot water as a result.”
He could hear the brusque, bearded man saying, “You’ve been taken in by a child, Flaxman, a mere child. I’m greatly disturbed. You’ve put yourself on the same plane as common charlatans. Gentlemen, I ask you to banish from your minds this whole sorry episode. It must never be referred to.” He winced at the recollection of his feeling of guilt. But at the same time he was beginning to feel exhilarated and almost light-hearted. Unburdening his long- re-spressed memories had altered his whole viewpoint. The episodes on the elevated began to take on what seemed their proper proportions as merely the bizarre workings of overwrought nerves and an overly suggestible mind. The doctor, he anticipated confidently, would disentangle the obscure subconscious causes, whatever they might be. And the whole business would be finished off quickly, just as his childhood experience – which was beginning to seem a little ridiculous now – had been finished off.
“From that day on,” he continued, “I never exhibited a trace of my supposed powers. My mother was frantic and tried to sue the university. I had something like a nervous breakdown. Then the divorce was granted, and my father got custody of me. He did his best to make me forget it. We went on long outdoor vacations and did a lot of athletics, associated with normal matter-of-fact people. I went to business college eventually. I’m in advertising now. But,” Catesby paused, “now that I’m having nervous symptoms, I’ve wondered if there mightn’t be a connection. It’s not a question of whether I was really clairvoyant or not. Very likely my mother taught me a lot of unconscious deceptions, good enough to fool even young psychology instructors. But don’t you think it may have some important bearing on my present condition?”
For several moments the doctor regarded him with a professional frown. Then he said quietly, “And is there some . . . er . . . more specific connection between your experiences then and now? Do you by any chance find that you are once again beginning to . . . er . . . see things?”
Catesby swallowed. He had felt an increasing eagerness to unburden himself of his fears, but it was not easy to make a beginning, and the doctor’s shrewd question rattled him. He forced himself to concentrate. The thing he thought he had seen on the roof loomed up before his inner eye with unexpected vividness. Yet it did not frighten him. He groped for words.
Then he saw that the doctor was not looking at him but over his shoulder. Color was draining out of the doctor’s face and his eyes did not seem so small. Then the doctor sprang to his feet, walked past Catesby, threw up the window and peered into the darkness.
As Catesby rose, the doctor slammed down the window and said in a voice whose smoothness was marred by a slight, persistent gasping, “I hope I haven’t alarmed you. I saw the face of . . . er . . . a Negro prowler on the fire escape. I must have frightened him, for he seems to have gotten out of sight in a hurry. Don’t give it another thought. Doctors are frequently bothered by
“A Negro?” asked Catesby, moistening his lips.
The doctor laughed nervously. “I imagine so, though my first odd impression was that it was a white man in blackface. You see, the color didn’t seem to have any brown in it. It was dead-black.”
Catesby moved toward the window. There were smudges on the glass. “It’s quite all right, Mr Wran.” The doctor’s voice had acquired a sharp note of impatience, as if he were trying hard to reassume his professional authority. “Let’s continue our conversation. I was asking you if you were” – he made a face – “seeing things.”
Catesby’s whirling thoughts slowed down and locked into place. “No, I’m not seeing anything that other people don’t see, too. And I think I’d better go now. I’ve been keeping you too long.” He disregarded the doctor’s half-hearted gesture of denial. “I’ll phone you about the physical examination. In a way you’ve already taken a big load off my mind.” He smiled woodenly. “Goodnight, Dr Trevethick.”
Catesby Wran’s mental state was a peculiar one. His eyes searched every angular shadow, he glanced sideways down each chasm-like alley and barren basement passage-way, and kept stealing looks at the irregular line of the roofs, yet he was hardly conscious of where he was going. He pushed away the thoughts that came into his mind, and kept moving. He became aware of a slight sense of security as he turned into a lighted street where there were people and high buildings and blinking signs. After a while he found himself in the dim lobby of the structure that housed his office. Then he realized why he couldn’t go home, why he daren’t go home – after what had happened at the office of Dr Trevethick.
“Hello, Mr Wran,” said the night elevator man, a burly figure in overalls, sliding open the grille-work door to the old-fashioned cage. “I didn’t know you were working nights now, too.”
Catesby stepped in automatically. “Sudden rush of orders,” he murmured inanely. “Some stuff that has to be gotten out.”
The cage creaked to a stop at the top floor. “Be working very late, Mr Wran?”
He nodded vaguely, watched the car slide out of sight, found his keys, swiftly crossed the outer office, and entered his own. His hand went out to the light switch, but then the thought occurred to him that the two lighted windows, standing out against the dark bulk of the building, would indicate his whereabouts and serve as a goal toward which something could crawl and climb. He moved his chair so that the back was against the wall and sat down in the semidarkness. He did not remove his overcoat.
For a long time he sat there motionless, listening to his own breathing and the faraway sounds from the streets below: the thin metallic surge of the crosstown streetcar, the farther one of the elevated, faint lonely cries and honkings, indistinct rumblings. Words he had spoken to Miss Millick in nervous jest came back to him with the bitter taste of truth. He found himself unable to reason critically or connectedly, but by their own volition thoughts rose up into his mind and gyrated slowly and rearranged themselves with the inevitable movement of planets.
Gradually his mental picture of the world was transformed. No longer a world of material atoms and empty space, but a world in which the bodiless existed and moved according to its own obscure laws or unpredictable impulses. The new picture illuminated with dreadful clarity certain general facts which had always bewildered and troubled him and from which he had tried to hide: the inevitability of hate and war, the diabolically timed mischances which wreck the best of human intentions, the walls of willful misunderstanding that divide one man from another, the eternal vitality of cruelty and ignorance and greed. They seemed appropriate now, necessary parts of the picture. And superstition only a kind of wisdom.
Then his thoughts returned to himself and the question he had asked Miss Millick, “What would such a thing want from a person? Sacrifices? Worship? Or just fear? What could you do to stop it from troubling you?” It had become a practical question.
With an explosive jangle, the phone began to ring. “Cate, I’ve been trying everywhere to get you,” said his wife. “I never thought you’d be at the office. What are you doing? I’ve been worried.”
He said something about work.
“You’ll be home right away?” came the faint anxious question. “I’m a little frightened. Ronny just had a scare. It woke him up. He kept pointing to the window saying, ‘Black man, black man.’ Of course it’s something he dreamed. But I’m frightened. You will be home? What’s that, dear? Can’t you hear me?”
“I will. Right away,” he said. Then he was out of the office, buzzing the night bell and peering down the shaft.
He saw it peering up the shaft at him from the deep shadows three floors below, the sacking face pressed against the iron grille-work. It started up the stair at a shockingly swift, shambling gait, vanishing temporarily from sight as it swung into the second corridor below.
Catesby clawed at the door to the office, realized he had not locked it, pushed it in, slammed and locked it behind him, retreated to the other side of the room, cowered between the filing cases and the wall. His teeth were clicking. He heard the groan of the rising cage. A silhouette darkened the frosted glass of the door, blotting out part of the grotesque reverse of the company name. After a little the door opened.
The big-globed overhead light flared on and, standing inside the door, her hand on the switch, was Miss Millick.
“Why, Mr Wran,” she stammered vacuously, “I didn’t know you were here. I’d just come in to do some extra typing after the movie. I didn’t . . . but the lights weren’t on. What were you—”
He stared at her. He wanted to shout in relief, grab hold of her, talk rapidly. He realized he was grinning hysterically.
