Абрахам Меррит - Creep, Shadow!

The City News man said that if he could get the Riff women to teach him that trick, he could lift all the mirror-makers in America out of the depression and get rich doing it. The other two morosely agreed that they knew some editors whose reflections they'd like to catch. I laughed and said it would be easier to bring over a good old-fashioned Bulgarian mason or two. Then all they need do was to get the mason a job, decoy the editor to the place and have the mason measure his shadow with a string. After that, the mason would put the string in a box and build the box in the wall. In forty days the editor would be dead and his soul be sitting in the box beside the string.

One of the afternoon men glumly said that forty days would be too long to wait for the ones he had in mind. But the other asked, with disarming naivetй, whether I believed such a thing possible. I answered that if a man were strongly enough convinced he would die on a certain day, he would die on that day. Not because his shadow had been measured and the string buried, but because he believed that this was going to kill him. It was purely a matter of suggestion – of auto-hypnosis. Like the praying to death practiced by the kahunas, the warlocks of the South Seas, of the results of which there was no doubt whatever. Always providing, of course, that the victim knew the kahuna was praying his death – and the exact time his death was to occur.

I ought to have known better. The morning papers carried only a few lines to the effect that I had talked to the police and had been unable to throw any light on the Ralston suicide. But the early editions of the naive reporter's paper featured a special article.

WANT TO GET RID OF YOUR ENEMIES? GET A RIFF GAL'S MAGIC MIRROR – OR BRING IN A BULGARIAN MASON.

Dr. Alan Caranac, noted explorer, tells how to separate yourself safely from those you don't want around, but the catch is that first you have to make 'em believe you can do it.

It was a good story, even if it did make me swear in spots. I read it over again and laughed. After all, I'd brought it on myself. The 'phone rang, and Bill was on the line. He asked abruptly:

"What put it in your head to talk to that reporter about shadows?"

He sounded jumpy. I said, surprised:

"Nothing. Why shouldn't I have talked to him about shadows?"

He didn't answer for a moment. Then he asked:

"Nothing happened to direct your mind to that subject? Nobody suggested it?"

"You're getting curiouser and curiouser, as Alice puts it. But no, Bill, I brought the matter up all by myself. And no shadow fell upon me whispering in my ear – "

He interrupted, harshly: "Don't talk like that!"

And now I was truly surprised, for there was panic in Bill's voice, and that wasn't like him at all.

"There really wasn't any reason. It just happened," I repeated. "What's it all about, Bill?"

"Never mind now." I wondered even more at the relief in his voice. He swiftly changed the subject: "Dick's funeral is tomorrow. I'll see you there."

Now the one thing I won't be coerced or persuaded into doing is to go to the funeral of a friend. Unless there are interesting and unfamiliar rites connected with it, it's senseless. There lies a piece of cold meat for the worms, grotesquely embellished by the undertaker's cosmetic arts. Sunken eyes that never more will dwell upon the beauty of the clouds, the sea, the forest. Ears shut forever, and all the memories of life rotting away within the decaying brain. Painted and powdered symbol of life's futility. I want to remember friends as they were alive, alert, capable, eager. The coffin picture superimposes itself, and I lose my friends. The animals order things much better, to my way of thinking. They hide themselves and die. Bill knew how I felt, so I said:

"You'll not see me there." To shut off any discussion, I asked:

"Had any nibble at your witch bait?"

"Yes and no. Not the real strike I'm hoping for, but attention from unexpected quarters. Dick's lawyers called me up after I'd left you and asked what he had told me about those cash withdrawals. They said they'd been trying to find out what he had done with the money, but couldn't. They wouldn't believe me, of course, when I said I knew absolutely nothing; that I had only vague suspicions and had tried a shot in the dark. I don't blame them. Stanton's executor called me up this morning to ask the same thing. Said Stanton had drawn substantial amounts of cash just before he died, and they hadn't been able to trace it."

I whistled:

"That's queer. How about Calhoun and Marston? If they did the same, it'll begin to smell damned fishy."

"I'm trying to find out," he said. "Good-by – "

"Wait a minute, Bill," I said. "I'm a good waiter, and all of that. But I'm getting mighty curious. When do I see you, and what do you want me to do in the meantime?"

When he answered his voice was as grave as I'd ever heard it.

"Alan, sit tight until I can lay the cards before you. I don't want to say more now, but trust me, there's a good reason. I'll tell you one thing, though. That interview of yours is another hook – and I'm not sure it isn't baited even better than mine."

That was on Tuesday. Obviously, I was puzzled and curious to a degree. So much so that if it had been anybody but Bill who had sat me down in my little corner chair and told me to be quiet, I would have been exceedingly angry. But Bill knew what he was about – I was sure of that. So I stayed put.

On Wednesday, Dick was buried. I went over my notes and started the first chapter of my book on Moroccan sorceries. Thursday night, Bill called up.

"There's a small dinner party at Dr. Lowell's tomorrow night," he said. "A Dr. de Keradel and his daughter. I want you to come. I'll promise you'll be interested."

De Keradel? The name had a familiar sound. "Who is he?" I asked.

"Rene de Keradel, the French psychiatrist. You must have read some of his – "

"Yes, of course," I interrupted. "He took up some of Charcot's hypnotic experiments at the Sвlpetriиre, didn't he? Carried them on from the point where Charcot had stopped. Left the Sвlpetriиre under a cloud some years ago. Subjects died, or he was too unorthodox in his conclusions, or something?"

"That's the chap."

I said: "I'll be there. I'd like to meet him."

"Good," said Bill. "Dinner's at 7:30. Wear your dinner jacket. And come an hour ahead of time. There's a girl who wants to talk to you before the company comes, as we used to say."

"A girl?" I asked, astonished.

"Helen," said Bill with a chuckle. "And don't you disappoint her. You're her hero." He hung up.

Helen was Bill's sister. About ten years younger than I. I hadn't seen her for fifteen years. An impish sort of kid, I recalled. Eyes sort of slanting and yellow brown. Hair a red torch. Gawky when I saw her last and inclined to be fat. Used to follow me around when I was visiting Bill during college vacations, and sit and stare at me without speaking until it made me so nervous I stuttered. Never could tell whether it was silent adoration or sheer deviltry. That was when she was about twelve. Nor could I forget how she had led me, apparently innocently, to sit on a subterranean nest of hornets; nor the time when, going to bed, I had found it shared by a family of garter snakes. The first might have been an accident, although I had my doubts, but the second wasn't. I had dumped the snakes out the window and never by word, look, or gesture referred to it, having my reward in the child's bafflement at my reticence and her avid but necessarily mute curiosity. I knew she had gone through Smith and had been studying art in Florence. I wondered what she had grown to be.

I read over some of de Keradel's papers at the Academy of Medicine Library next day. He was a queer bird without doubt, with some extraordinarily arresting theories. I didn't wonder that the Sвlpetriиre had eased him out. Stripped of their scientific verbiage, the framework of his main idea was startlingly like that expounded to me by the Many-Times-Born Abbot of the Lamasery at Gyang-tse, in Tibet. A holy man and an accomplished wonder-worker, a seeker of knowledge along strange paths, what would be loosely called by the superstitious – a sorcerer. Also by a Greek priest near Delphi whose Christian cloak covered a pure case of pagan atavism. He offered to demonstrate his hypothesis, and did. He nearly convinced me. Indeed, visualizing again what he had made me see, I was not sure that he hadn't convinced me.