in a very steady voice: 'It isn't the dreams that get you; it's when you know you're awake and they keep on coming.'
'Yes?' I asked, leaning back. I thought he was delirious.
'Shut up. I'm telling you everything—don't you see? It's your fault anyway—waking me up when I was dreaming James Branch Cabe11—
showing me the way things happen.'
'Go on,' I said after a long pause. He didn't seem to hear me, for it was an equally long time before he made a curious choking sound and said:
'I think I have been in Hell for the past few years, old ink-blotter. But I recall a very special chapter of the book. Allow me to describe it. There is, first of all, a large, rocky cavern.' He paused again and leaned back, speaking in a very faint, rasping voice, as though he could not bear the sounds of the words he was saying.
'And there is very foolish talk going on. There are people in the cavern who think they are Satanists, or something like it. They have prepared fantastic things—a long table, various dyes and pigments. Very foolish.
They are well-dressed people; it is true, as a rule, that the poor are on the side of God.
'One of the foolish, wealthy people is a woman. She finds it necessary to undress and begin to dance as the others clap their hands. Did I mention that there were fires lighting this cavern? She spins close by the fires, one by one, and makes it a point to burn herself badly in various places. Then, as she falls to the floor, another, a man, has reasons for doing, essentially, what she has done. But the man wears a chain around his neck which he does not remove, and from this chain hangs a small medallion. When the man is very badly burned, another woman makes a fool of herself in the same manner, and after her a man.
'Would you believe it if I told you that in all twenty-four people willingly subjected themselves to widespread first-degree burns? After hours of this folly they sat in a circle, still without their clothes, and mumbled gibberish for twenty minutes or more.
'At that point they had conjured up Satan, theoretically. My guess is that they did nothing of the sort. The incarnation of Evil? No! He would not have let them live or praise him. Something they did conjure up.
What it was I do not know, but this is what happened.
'There was, first of all, a noticeable diminution of the firelight. Then appeared a definite blue glow at what would be the apex of the cone about whose basal circumference they were sitting. As that glow grew, the fires went out. There was definitely a Presence there …
'I don't know what to call it. It was not Satan. There probably is no Satan. But there was a Presence, and it had horns and a tail and great, shining teeth and lustful, shining eyes.'
I stood up from my chair. 'That's enough!' I yelled at him.
He looked at me and then, shockingly, suddenly, gave a low chuckle.
'Quaint tale, isn't it? What's the matter?'
'You tell me!' I snapped. 'What's on your mind?'
'Allow me to get on with the story. I'm afraid I was becoming hypnotized by my own rhetoric. And interrupt if you feel too weak to stand it.' I flushed suddenly as I felt his eyes on my twisted foot. Where did the damned slander start that cripples are loose in the head?
'Go on,' I growled.
'To be brief, direct and—crude—the women then proceed to caress this creature. And then—!
'There appears a man in that cavern who does not wear a pendant from his neck. He is no demonologist. He is, God knows, not wealthy. He is but a simple mathematician who made the horrid mistake of attempting to tie in his mathematics with occult philosophy.'
Another very long pause. 'Go on,' I said.
'Don't get me wrong,' said Mac. 'Don't do that. I didn't know what I was doing. If I'd known I would have cut off my hand before I wrote the supersonic equations. But it's so simple. All you need is a scale of tuning forks—then you modify them the right way and you find yourself in the nearest occult vortex. It's so simple! The clue is in several of Madame Blavatsky's Meditations. That old hag didn't know what she was writing, I suppose. You need money, millions, to get into the circle.
I was an outsider.
'The Presence vanished, and I was cursed by those people—cursed while I was waking, sleeping, talking, walking, dancing, writing and reading. Then they opened a door and threw me out.'
'A door?' I asked. 'In a cavern?'
He laughed like the closing of a lock. 'The rocks,' he said, 'were papier mache. The cavern was the third-floor ballroom of a hotel on 32nd Street.'
'And so?' I asked.
'I wired back to Council Bluffs for bus fare. I was back there in two days with a tale of urgent business in New York.'
'That's plenty, Leonard. Now you can get the hell out of my house. Yes, even before you build up to the touch for the rare herbs that'll take the curse off you.'
'Sorry,' he said, rising. 'I tried to let you know. It wasn't a touch. I remembered that you have a cousin, or had, the one you wrote that Bronx monograph on—'
'He's up the river. Dewey got him, with the rest of Murder Incorporated. Did you want a bodyguard against the demons? Or do you want to become a policy banker?'
He had his hat on. From the door he said: 'I wanted to have a murder done for me. But now I suppose I'll have to do it myself …'
I locked the door and went to bed, fuming like a tea-kettle. I'm from a short-lived clan; we break down early and live in the fear of death. That night I found myself with a hacking cough, which didn't add to my sense of well- being, for my father and sister had died of throat infections. You could accurately say that between Mac's turning out to be a chiseling phony and my fears that in a week I'd be a dead man, I bordered on distraction. There was a heightening of the sensory powers all the sensory powers. The darkest room was not dark enough for me, and the traffic below jerked me up in bed repressing shrieks of pain. It was as though I had been flayed alive, for the silk bedsheets I use for that very reason were like sacking-cloth—or sandpaper.
How I managed to fall asleep I didn't know. Certainly the quality of my dreams was horrid enough to wake me up screaming.
I got disconnected scraps and images from Leonard's story of that night. I saw over again, in the most damnably vivid colors, the lie he had told of the ceremonial in the hotel. Details he had omitted were plentifully supplied by my subconscious—revolting details. Cripples, I am told, are generally stews of repression and fear.
Quite the most awful part was the Presence turning to me and stating, in a language of snarls and drooling grunts, the following message:
'A curse is no mouthing of words. That worries at a man but does not kill. A curse is no juggling of hands. That worries at a man, but does not maim. A curse is no thinking of evil. That worries at a man, but does not blind, tear, crush, char and slash. A curse is something you can see, hear, feel, hate and love.'
That was not the end of the dream, but it was near. After I—
subconsciously doubling for Mac—had been thrown out of that ballroom, it ended and I awoke. My throat irritation was gone, which was good. That night I did not sleep any more, but read and re-read the clippings Mac had sent me. I wanted to look at his letters, but they were in no kind of order.
I saw the sun rise and made myself a breakfast of bacon and eggs. It was interrupted by a telegram slipped under my door. The yellow slip read: 'Please phone me. Not a touch. Mac Leonard.' The telegram was because I have no phone; if you want to hear my dulcet voice, you have to coerce me into going down to the corner drug store to call you up.
Frankly, I didn't know what to do. I was still mad, half because of his ridiculous story, half because of his continuous rude staring at my right foot. I long ago passed the point where I allowed people to indulge their curiosity at the cost of much personal anguish to me. I decided that I might as well.
I threw some clothes on and went down to the corner where a tubercular young clerk was dispensing a few early-morning Cokes. 'Hi,'
he said. 'Nice day.' Avoiding his conversational spray I got change and slid into the booth.
A woman's voice answered the phone in their room at a nearby hotel.
