“So what’s the point?”
“In my dream I tried to get away from my old man. He chased me all over that basement. Well, it’s the same with the kid—except his dream is a hundred times more vivid, that’s all. He knows he’ll feel that electric chair, feel the jolts frying into him, feel the death boiling up in his throat just as much as if he were honest-to-God sitting there. …”
Kaplan stopped talking. The two men sat quietly watching the clock’s invisible progress. Then Ritchie leaped up and stalked over to the bar again. “Doggone you, Max,” he called. “You’re getting me fidgety now.”
“Don’t kid me,” Kaplan said. “You’ve been fidgety on your own for quite a while. I don’t know how you ever made the grade as a criminal lawyer—you don’t know the first thing about lying.”
Ritchie didn’t answer. He poured the drink slowly.
“Look at you and Ruth, screaming at each other. And then there was the other tip-off. The way you defended the kid—brilliantly, masterfully. You’d never have done that for a common open-and-shut little killer.”
“Max,” Ritchie said, “you’re nuts. Tell you what: at exactly 12:01 I’ll take you out for the biggest, juiciest, rarest steak you ever saw. On me. Then we’ll get loaded and fall all over ourselves laughing—”
Ritchie fought away the sudden picture of steak, rare steak, with the blood sputtering out, sizzling on an electric stove.
The clock began to strike. Henry Ritchie and Max Kaplan stood very still.
He uncoiled. The dry pop of hardened joints jabbed wakefulness into him until finally the twenty-foot long shell lay straight upon the steaming rocks. He opened his eyes, all of them, one by one.
Across the bubbling pools, far away, past the white stone geysers, he could see them coming. Many of them, swiftly, giant slithering things with many arms and many legs.
He tried to move, but rock grew over him and he could not move. By looking around he could see the cliff’s edge, and he remembered the thousand bottomless pits below. Gradually the rest formed, and he remembered all.
He turned to the largest creature. “Did you tell them?” He knew this would be a horrible punishment, worse than the last, the burning, far worse. Fingers began to unhinge the thick shell, peel it from him, leaving the viscous white tenderness bare to the heat and pain. “Tell them, make them understand, this is only a dream I’m having—”
They took the prisoner to the precipice, lingered a moment to give him a view of the dizziness and the sucking things far below. Then nervous hands pressed him forward into space.
He did not wake for a long time.
Colophon
Short Fiction
was published between and by
Charles Beaumont.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Hendrik Kaiber,
and is based on transcriptions from
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Movement,
a painting completed in by
Marsden Hartley.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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The League of Moveable Type.
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