Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“G’night, boss,” says Lee. “Anytime you need any other little thing—”

“No,” says Eddie. “I’m getting out of New Orleans.” His hand is like ice when they shake.

He does. He hands Graham back his contract, and a split week later he’s playing New York’s newest, in the frantic Fifties. With a white valet. The Chant, of course, is still featured. He has to; it’s his chief asset, his biggest draw. It introduces him and signs him off, and in between, Judy always dances it for a high-spot. But he can’t get rid of that backache that started the night he first played it. First he goes and tries having his back baked for a couple of hours a day under a violet-ray. No improvement.

Then he has himself examined by the biggest specialist in New York. “Nothing there,” says the big shot. “Absolutely nothing the matter with you: liver, kidneys, blood — everything perfect. It must be all in your own mind.”

“You’re losing weight, Eddie,” Judy says, “you look bad, darling.” His bathroom scales tell him the same thing. Down five pounds a week, sometimes seven, never up an ounce. More experts. X-rays this time, blood analysis, gland treatments, everything from soup to nuts.

Nothing doing. And the dull ache, the lassitude, spreads slowly, first to one arm, then to the other.

He takes specimens of everything he eats, not just one day, but every day for weeks, and has them chemically analyzed. Nothing. And he doesn’t have to be told that anyway. He knows that even in New Orleans, way back in the beginning, nothing was ever put into his food. Judy ate from the same tray, drank from the same coffee-pot he did. Nightly she dances herself into a lather, and yet she’s the picture of health.

So that leaves nothing but his mind, just as they all say. “But I don’t believe it!” he tells himself. “I don’t believe that just sticking pins into a wax doll can hurt me — me or anyone!”

So it isn’t his mind at all, but some other mind back there in New Orleans, some other mind thinking, wishing, ordering him dead, night and day.

“But it can’t be done!” says Eddie. “There’s no such thing!”

And yet it’s being done; it’s happening right under his own eyes. Which leaves only one answer. If going three thousand miles away on dry land didn’t help, then going three thousand miles away across the ocean will do the trick. So London next, and the Kit-Kat Club. Down, down, down go the bathroom scales, a little bit each week. The pains spread downward into his thighs. His ribs start showing up here and there. He’s dying on his feet. He finds it more comfortable now to walk with a stick — not to be swanky, not to be English — to rest on as he goes along. His shoulders ache each night just from waving that lightweight baton at his crew. He has a music-stand built for himself to lean on, keeps it in front of him, body out of sight of the audience while he’s conducting, and droops over it. Sometimes he finishes up a number with his head lower than his shoulders, as though he had a rubber spine.

Finally he goes to Reynolds, famous the world over, the biggest alienist in England. “I want to know whether I’m sane or insane.” He’s under observation for weeks, months; they put him through every known test, and plenty of unknown ones, mental, physical, metabolic. They flash lights in front of his face and watch the pupils of his eyes; they contract to pinheads. They touch the back of his throat with sandpaper; he nearly chokes.

They strap him to a chair that goes around and around and does somersaults at so many revolutions per minute, then ask him to walk across the room; he staggers. Reynolds takes plenty of pounds, hands him a report thick as a telephone book, sums it up for him. “You are as normal, Mr. Bloch, as anyone I have ever handled. You’re so well-balanced you haven’t even got the extra little touch of imagination most actors and musicians have.” So it’s not his own mind, it’s coming from the outside, is it?

The whole thing from beginning to end has taken eighteen months. Trying to outdistance death, with death gaining on him slowly, but surely, all the time. He’s emaciated. There’s only one thing left to do now, while he’s still able to crawl aboard a ship — that’s to get back to where the whole thing started. New York, London, Paris haven’t been able to save him. His only salvation, now, lies in the hands of a decrepit colored man skulking in the Vieux Carre of New Orleans.

He drags himself there, to that same half-ruined house, without a bodyguard, not caring now whether they kill him or not, almost wishing they would and get it over with. But that would be too easy an out, it seems. The gorilla that Lee crippled that night shuffles out to him between two sticks, recognizes him, breathes undying hate into his face, but doesn’t lift a finger to harm him. The spirits are doing that job better than he could ever hope to. Their mark is on this man, woe betide anyone who comes between them and their hellish satisfaction. Eddie Bloch totters up the stairs unopposed, his back as safe from a knife as if he wore steel armor. Behind him the negro sprawls upon the stairs to lubricate his long-awaited hour of satisfaction with rum — and oblivion.

He finds the old man alone there in the room. The Stone Age and the 20th Century face each other, and the Stone Age has won out. “Take it off me,” says Eddie brokenly. “Give me my life back — I’ll do anything, anything you say!”

“What has been done cannot be undone. Do you think the spirits of the earth and of the air, of fire and water, know the meaning of forgiveness?”

“Intercede for me then. You brought it about. Here’s money, I’ll give you twice as much, all I earn, all I ever hope to earn—”

“You have desecrated the obiah. Death has been on you from that night. All over the world and in the air above the earth you have mocked the spirits with the chant that summons them. Nightly your wife dances it. The only reason she has not shared your doom is because she does not know the meaning of what she does. You do. You were here among us.”

Eddie goes down on his knees, scrapes along the floor after the old man, tries to tug at the garments he wears. “Kill me right now, then, and be done with it. I can’t stand any more—” He bought the gun only that day, was going to do it himself at first, but found he couldn’t. A minute ago he pleaded for his life, now he’s pleading for death. “It’s loaded, all you have to do is shoot. Look! I’ll close my eyes — I’ll write a note and sign it, that I did it myself—”

He tries to thrust it into the witch-doctor’s hand, tries to close the bony, shriveled fingers around it, tries to point it at himself. The old man throws it down, away from him. Cackles gleefully, “Death will come, but differently — slowly, oh, so slowly!” Eddie just lies there flat on his face, sobbing dryly. The old man spits, kicks at him weakly. He pulls himself up somehow, stumbles toward the door. He isn’t even strong enough to get it open at the first try. It’s that little thing that brings it on. Something touches his foot, he looks, stoops for the gun, turns. Thought is quick but the old man’s mind is even quicker. Almost before the thought is there, the old man knows what’s coming. In a flash, scuttling like a crab, he has shifted around to the other side of the bed, to put something between them. Instantly the situation’s reversed, the fear has left Eddie and is on the old man now. He’s lost the aggressive. For a minute only, but that minute is all Eddie needs. His mind beams out like a diamond, like a lighthouse through a fog. The gun roars, jolting his weakened body down to his shoes. The old man falls flat across the bed, his head too far over, dangling down over the side of it like an overripe pear. The bed-frame sways gently with his weight for a minute, and then it’s over...