William Gresham - Nightmare Alley

What a relief it was when she heard the doorbell ring and knew it was Mr. Carlisle and Miss Cahill. The Simmonses were not coming tonight, and with a little guilty pang Addie thought of it with elation-she would have Mr. Carlisle all to herself. That always seemed to get the best results. It was hard to get good results with so many different sets of vibrations even though the Simmonses were just as dear and devoted as any spiritualists she had ever known.

Miss Cahill seemed even more tired and run-down-looking than ever and Addie insisted on giving her a hot Ovaltine before the séance but it didn’t seem to strengthen her any. The lines about her mouth grew deeper if anything.

After she had played “On the Other Side of Jordan” Mr. Carlisle asked her if Caroline had a favorite hymn. She had to answer truthfully that Caroline was not a religious child. She sang hymns in Sunday school, of course, but she never sang any around the house.

“Mrs. Peabody, what did she sing about the house? That is, what songs of a serious nature? An old love song perhaps?”

Addie thought back. It was amazing what she could remember when Mr. Carlisle was there; it was like being nearer to Caroline just to talk with him. And now she remembered. “Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings!” She turned and played it, gently at first and then more strongly until it filled the room and a metal dish vibrated in sympathy. She played it over and over, hearing Caroline’s thin but true-pitched young voice through the blast of the organ. Her legs ached with pumping before she stopped.

Mr. Carlisle had already extinguished all the lights and drawn the curtain before the cabinet. She took her place in the straight-backed chair beside him and he turned out the last light and let the dark flow around them.

Addie started when she heard the trumpet clink as it was levitated. Then from a great distance came a shrill, sweet piping-like a shepherd playing on reeds. “… And Phoebus ’gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs…”

A cool breeze fanned her face and then a touch of something material stroked her hair. From the dark, where she knew the cabinet to be, came a speck of greenish light. It trembled and leaped like a ball on a fountain, growing in size until it stopped and unfolded like an opening flower. Then it grew larger and took shape, seeming to draw a veil from before its face. It was Caroline, standing in the air a few inches above the floor.

The green light that was her face grew brighter until Addie could see her eyebrows, her mouth and her eyelids. The eyes opened, their dark, cavernous blankness wrenched her heart.

“Caroline-baby, speak to me. Are you happy? Are you all right, baby?”

The lips parted. “Mother… I… must confess something.”

“Darling, there isn’t anything to confess. Sometimes I did scold you, but I didn’t-Please forgive me.”

“No… I must confess. I am not… not altogether liberated. I had selfish thoughts. I had mean thoughts. About you. About other people. They keep me on a low plane… where the lower influences can reach me and make trouble for me. Mother… help me.”

Addie had risen from her chair. She stumbled toward the materialized form but the hand of the Rev. Carlisle caught her wrist quickly. She hardly noticed. “Caroline, baby! Anything- tell me what to do!”

“This house… evil things have entered it. They have taken it away from us. Take me away.”

“Darling-but how?”

“Go far away. Go where it is warm. To California.”

“Yes. Yes, darling. Tell Mother.”

“This house… ask Mr. Carlisle to take it for his church. Let us never live here any more. Take me to California. For if you go I will go with you. I will come to you there. And we will be happy. Only when this house is a church can I be happy. Please, Mother.”

“Oh, baby, of course. Anything. Why didn’t you ask me before?”

The form was growing dim. It sank, wavering, and the light went out.

The pair in the cab was the usual stuff: gab, gab, gab. Jesus, what a laugh!-“they lived happy ever afterwards.” The hackie slid between a bus and a sedan, grazing the car and making the driver mutter in alarm.

“G’wan, ya dumb son-of-a-bitch,” he yelled back.

The couple were at it again and he listened in, for laughs.

“I tell you, we’ve got our foot in the door. Don’t you see, baby, this is where it starts? With this house, I can gimmick it up from cellar to attic. I can give ’em the second coming of Christ if I want to. And you were swell, baby, just swell.”

“Stan, take your hands off me.”

“What’s eating you? Get hold of yourself, kid. How about a drink before you hit the hay?”

“I said take your hands off me! I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it! Let me out of this cab! I’ll walk. Do you hear? Let me out!”

“Baby, you better calm down.”

“I won’t. I won’t go up there with you. Don’t touch me.”

“Hey, driver, let us out. Right here at the corner. Anywhere.”

The cabbie took a quick look in his rear vision mirror. Before he got control of the wheel he had nearly piled the boat up against a light pole. Holy gees, the dame’s face was glowing bright green right inside his own cab!

From Ed Wolfehope’s column, “The Hardened Artery”:

“… She is a widow who owned a fine old mansion in the Seventies near the Drive. Her only child died years ago and she lived on in the house because of memories. Recently a pair of spook workers ‘materialized’ the daughter and she told her mother to give them the house and move to the West Coast. No one knows how much they took the widow for in cash first. But she left on her journey beaming and rosy-kissed both crooks at the train gate. And they put guys in jail for welching on alimony!…”

From “The Trumpet Voice”:

“To the Editor:

“A friend of mine recently sent me a piece from a Broadway columnist, which is one lie from beginning to end about me and the Reverend Stanton Carlisle. I want to say it could not have been a practical joker with an air pistol who made the raps on my window. I kept my eyes open the whole time. And anybody who knows anything about Psychic Phenomena knows all about poltergeist fires.

“Miss Cahill and the Reverend Carlisle are two of the dearest people I have ever been privileged to meet and I can testify that all the séances they conducted were under the strictest test conditions and no decent person could even have dreamed of fraud. At the very first séance I recognized my dear daughter Caroline who ‘died’ when she was sixteen, just a few days before her high school commencement. She came back again and again in the other sittings and I could almost have touched her dear golden hair, worn in the very style she wore it when she passed over. I have a photograph of her taken for her high school yearbook which shows her hair worn this way and it was something no one but I could have possibly known of.

“The Reverend Carlisle never said one word asking for my house. It was Caroline who told me to give it to him and in fact I had a hard time to persuade him to take it and Caroline had to come back and beg him before he would give in. And I am happy to say that here in California, under the guidance of the Rev. Hallie Gwynne, Caroline is with me almost daily. She is not as young as she was in New York and I know that means she is reflecting my own spiritual growth…”

Sun beat on the striped awnings while six floors below them Manhattan’s streets wriggled in the rising heat from the pavement. Molly came out of the kitchenette with three fresh cans of cold beer and Joe Plasky, sitting on the overstuffed sofa with his legs tied in a knot before him, reached up his calloused hand for the beer and smiled. “Sure seems funny-us loafing in mid-season. But that’s Hobart for you-too many mitts in the till. Show gets attached right in the middle of the season.”