William Gresham - Nightmare Alley

The ghostly billiard game went on; then a white ivory ball rolled out from under the curtains and hit the table-leg between him and the medium.

Carlisle stirred uneasily and a voice came from his stiff lips: “ Hari Aum! Greetings, newcomer to the Life of Spiritual Truth. Greetings, our new chela . Believe not blindly. Believe the proof of the mind given you by the senses. They cannot give you the Truth but they point the Path. Trust my disciple, Stanton Carlisle. He is an instrument on which spiritual forces play as a lover plays his sitar beneath the window of his beloved. Greetings, Ezra. A friend has come to you from Spirit Life. Hari Aum! ”

The resonant, accented chanting broke off. Grindle snapped his attention from the lips of the medium to the curtains before the darkened room. The clicks of billiard balls now sounded closer, as if they were rolling and knocking on the floor just beyond the curtains. He stared, his lips drawn back from his dentures, his breath whistling. A white ball rolled slowly from under the curtains and stopped six inches inside the room where they sat. The red cue ball followed it. Click!

While he watched, the hairs on the back of the big man’s neck raised, the skin drew tight over his temples. For in the dim, ruby light a tiny hand felt its way out from under the curtains, groped delicately for the red ball, found it, and rolled it after the white one. Click! And the hand was gone.

With an unconscious shout Grindle leaped up and threw himself after the vanishing hand, only to spin around and claw at the curtains of the doorway to keep himself from falling. For his right wrist was firmly secured by copper wire to the wrist of the medium who was now groaning and gasping, his eyes half open and rolled up, until the whites looked as stark as the eyes of a blind beggar.

Then Grindle felt the room beyond them to be empty and still. He stood, fighting for breath, making no further attempt to enter.

The medium drew a long breath and opened his eyes. “We can remove the wire now. Were there any phenomena of note?”

Grindle nodded, still watching the doorway. “Get me out of this harness, Reverend! I want a look in there.”

Stan helped unwind the wire and said, “One favor, Mr. Grindle -I wonder if you could get me a glass of brandy?”

His host poured him one and knocked off two straight ones himself. “All set?”

He drew the curtains and snapped the wall switch.

A reassuring glow fell from the hanging lamp above the billiard table. Stan’s hand on his arm restrained him from entering.

“Careful, Mr. Grindle. Remember our test precautions.”

The floor had been thickly sprinkled with talcum powder. Now it bore traces, and as Grindle knelt to examine them he saw with a chill that they were the unmistakable bare footprints of a small child.

He rose, wiping his face with a wad of handkerchief. The room had been the scene of grotesque activity. Cues had been taken from their racks and thrust into the open mouths of stuffed sailfish on the wall. The cue chalk had been thrown down and smashed. And everywhere were the tiny footprints.

Carlisle stood in the doorway for a moment, then turned back and sank into his chair and covered his eyes with his hand as if he were very tired.

At last the light in the billiard room snapped off and Grindle stood beside him, pale, breathing heavily. He poured himself another brandy and gave one to the medium.

Ezra Grindle was shaken as no stock-market crash or sudden South American peace treaty could have shaken him. For with a crumb of cue chalk a message had been written on the green felt of the billiard table. It held the answer to a vast, secret, shameful ache inside him-a canker which had festered all these years. Not a soul in the world could know of its existence but himself-a name he had not spoken in thirty-five years. It held the key to an old wrong which he would willingly give a million hard-earned dollars to square with his conscience. A million? Every cent he owned!

The message was in a characterless, copybook hand:

Spunk darling,

We tried to come to you but the force was not strong enough. Maybe next time. I so wanted you to see our boy.

DORRIE

He drew the doors together and locked them. He raised his hand for the bell rope, then dropped it, and poured himself another brandy.

At his side stood the tall, silken figure in black, his face compassionate.

“Let us pray together-not for them, Ezra, but for the living, that the scales may fall from their eyes…”

The train to New York was not due for half an hour and Mrs. Oakes, who had been visiting her daughter-in-law, had read the time table all wrong; now she would have to wait.

On the station platform she walked up and down to relieve her impatience. Then, on a bench, she saw a little figure stretched out, its head pillowed on its arms. Her heart was touched. She shook him gently by the shoulder. “What’s the matter, little man? Are you lost? Were you supposed to meet mamma or papa here at the station?”

The sleeper sat up with a snarl. He was the size of a child; but was dressed in a striped suit and a pink shirt with a miniature necktie. And under his button nose was a mustache!

The mustachioed baby pulled a cigarette from his pocket and raked a kitchen match on the seat of his trousers. He lit the cigarette and was about to snap away the match when he grinned up at her from his evil, old baby face, thrust one hand into his coat and drew out a postcard, holding the match so she could see it.

Mrs. Oakes thought she would have a stroke. She tried to run away, but she couldn’t. Then the train came and the horrible little creature swung aboard, winking at her.

rises from earth to heaven but avenging lightning finds its walls .

BEYOND the garden wall a row of poplars rustled in the night wind. The moon had not risen; in the gentle darkness the voice was a monotonous, musical ripple, as soothing as the splash of a fountain.

“Your mind is quiet… a lamp in a sheltered corner where the flame does not flicker. Your body is relaxed. Your heart is at peace. Your mind is perfectly clear but at ease. Nothing troubles you. Your mind is a still, calm pool without a ripple…”

The big man had a white scarf knotted around his neck and tucked into his tweed jacket. He let his hands lie easily on the arms of the deck chair; his legs in tawny flannel trousers were propped on the footrest.

Beside him the spiritualist in black was all but invisible under the starlight.

“Close your eyes. When you open them again, stare straight at the garden wall and tell me what you see.”

“It’s faint-” Grindle’s voice was flaccid and dreamy. All the bite had gone out of it.

“Yes?”

“It’s growing clearer. It’s a city. A golden city. Towers. Domes. A beautiful city-and now it’s gone.”

The Rev. Carlisle slipped back into his pocket a “Patent Ghost Thrower, complete with batteries and lenses, to hold 16 millimeter film, $7.98” from a spiritualists’ supply house in Chicago.

“You have seen it-the City of Spiritual Light. My control spirit, Ramakrishna, has directed us to build it. It will be patterned after a similar city-which few outsiders have ever seen -in the mountains of Nepal. I myself was permitted to see it under Ramakrishna’s guidance. I was teleported physically to the spot. I was leaving the church one snowy night last winter when I felt Ramakrishna near me.”

The tycoon’s head was nodding belief.