William Gresham - Nightmare Alley

Stan tucked the book under his arm and switched off the light. He felt his way to the door and with caution turned back the bolt. Yellow light from the hall sliced over the patchy wallpaper as he opened the door.

There was a whisper from the bed. “Stan-”

“What is it?”

“Come kiss your old pal good night.”

He stepped over, kissed her cheek and left without another word, closing the door softly behind him.

The lock of his own door sounded like a rifle shot.

He looked each way along the hall but nothing stirred.

Inside, he tore off his clothes, went to the washbowl and washed and then threw himself down on the bed, propping the book on his bare stomach.

The first pages were taken up with figures and notations:

“Evansport. July 20th. Books-$33.00 taken in. Paid-Plants at $2-$6.00. Plants: Mrs. Jerome Hotchkiss. Leonard Keely, Josiah Boos. All okay. Old spook workers. Boos looks like deacon. Can act a little. Worked the found ring in the coat lining…”

“Spook workers” must refer to the local confederates employed by traveling mediums. Swiftly Stan flipped the pages. More expenses: “F. T. rap squared. Chief Pellett. $50.” That would be an arrest on a charge of fortune telling.

Stan felt like Ali Baba in the cavern of riches left by the Forty Thieves.

Impatiently he turned to the back of the book. On the last page was a heading: “Common Questions.” Beneath it was a list, with figures:

“Is my husband true to me? 56, 29, 18, 42.

“Will mother get well? 18, 3, 7, 12.

“Who poisoned our dog? 3, 2, 3, 0, 3.” Beside this was the notation, “Not a big item but a steady. Every audience. Can pull as cold reading during stall part of act.”

The figures, then, were a record of the number of similar questions collected from the same audience. The question “Is my wife faithful?” had only about a third the number of entries as the one about the husband.

“The chumps,” Stan whispered. “Either too bashful to ask or too dumb to suspect.” But they were anxious to find out, all of them. As if jazzing wasn’t what they all want, the goddamned hypocrites. They all want it. Only nobody else must have it. He turned the page.

“There is a recurring pattern followed by the questions asked. For every unusual question there will be fifty that you have had before. Human nature is the same everywhere. All have the same troubles. They are worried. Can control anybody by finding out what he’s afraid of. Works with question-answering act. Think out things most people are afraid of and hit them right where they live. Health, Wealth, Love. And Travel and Success. They’re all afraid of ill health, of poverty, of boredom, of failure. Fear is the key to human nature. They’re afraid…”

Stan looked past the pages to the garish wallpaper and through it into the world. The geek was made by fear. He was afraid of sobering up and getting the horrors. But what made him a drunk? Fear. Find out what they are afraid of and sell it back to them. That’s the key. The key! He had known it when Clem Hoately had told him how geeks are made. But here was Pete saying the same thing:

Health. Wealth. Love. Travel. Success. “A few have to do with domestic troubles, in-laws, kids, pets. And so on. A few wisenheimers but you can ditch them easily enough. Idea: combine question-answering act with code act. Make list of questions, hook up with code numbers. Answer vague at first, working toward definite. If can see face of spectator and tell when hitting.”

On the following pages was a neatly numbered list of questions. There were exactly a hundred. Number One was “Is my husband true to me?” Number Two was “Will I get a job soon?”

Outside the front of Ayres’ Department Store had turned rosy-red with the coming sun. Stan paid it no heed. The sun slid up, the sound of wagon tires on concrete told of the awakening city. At ten o’clock there was a tap on the door. Stan shook himself. “Yes?”

Zeena’s voice. “Wake up, sleepy head. Rise and shine.”

He unlocked the door and let her in.

“What you got the light on for?” She turned it out, then saw the book. “Lord’s sake, kid, ain’t you been to bed at all?”

Stan rubbed his eyes and stood up. “Ask me a number. Any number up to a hundred.”

“Fifty-five.”

“Will my mother-in-law always live with us?”

Zeena sat down beside him and ran her fingers through his hair. “You know what I think, kid? I think you’re a mind reader.”

The carny turned south and the pines began to line sandy roads. Cicadas drummed the late summer air and the crowds of white people were gaunter, their faces filled with desolation, their lips often stained with snuff.

Everywhere the shining, dark faces of the South’s other nation caught the highlights from the sun. They stood in quiet wonder, watching the carny put up in the smoky morning light. In the Ten-in-One they stood always on the fringe of the crowd, an invisible cordon holding them in place. When one of the whites turned away sharply and jostled them the words “Scuse me,” fell from them like pennies balanced on their shoulders.

Stan had never been this far south and something in the air made him uneasy. This was dark and bloody land where hidden war traveled like a million earthworms under the sod.

The speech fascinated him. His ear caught the rhythm of it and he noted their idioms and worked some of them into his patter. He had found the reason behind the peculiar, drawling language of the old carny hands-it was a composite of all the sprawling regions of the country. A language which sounded Southern to Southerners, Western to Westerners. It was the talk of the soil and its drawl covered the agility of the brains that poured it out. It was a soothing, illiterate, earthy language.

The carny changed its tempo. The outside talkers spoke more slowly.

Zeena cut the price of her horoscopes to a dime each but sold “John the Conqueror Root” along with them for fifteen cents. This was a dried mass of twisting roots which was supposed to attract good fortune when carried in a bag around the neck. Zeena got them by the gross from an occult mail-order house in Chicago.

Stan’s pitch of the magic books took a sudden drop and Zeena knew the answer. “These folks down here don’t know nothing about sleight-of-hand, honey. Half of ’em figure you’re doing real magic. Well, you got to have something superstitious to pitch.”

Stan ordered a gross of paper-backed books, “One Thousand and One Dreams Interpreted.” He threw in as a free gift a brass lucky coin stamped with the Seal of Love from the Seventh Book of Moses, said to attract the love of others and lead to the confusion of enemies. His pitch picked up in fine style. He learned to roll three of the lucky coins over his fingers at once. The tumbling, glittering cascade of metal seemed to fascinate the marks, and the dream books went fast.

He had learned the verbal code for questions not a day too soon, for the people couldn’t write or were too shy to try.

“ Will you kindly answer this lady’s question at once? ” Stan had cued the question, “Is my daughter all right?”

Zeena’s voice had taken on a deeper southern twang. “Well, now, I get the impression that the lady is worried about someone near and dear to her, someone she hasn’t heard from in a long time, am I right? Strikes me it’s a young lady- It’s your daughter you’re thinking of, isn’t it? Of course. And you want to know if she’s well and happy and if you’ll see her again soon. Well, I believe you will get some news of her through a third person before the month is out…”

There was one question that came up so often that Stan worked out a silent signal for it. He would simply jerk his head in Zeena’s direction. The first time he used it the question had come to him from a man-massive and loose-jointed with clear eyes smoldering in a handsome ebony face. “Am I ever going to make a trip?”