Evan Hunter - A Horse’s Head

This drunk was a lousy one because it was taking place in the presence of McReady, a joyless staggering dumb intoxication. Its only saving grace was that in talking to the hopeless drunk who was Mullaney, the pipe-smoking McReady had inadvertently revealed the fact that the jacket was important, the jacket , though Mullaney could not for the life of him see how.

“I need air!” he shouted, suddenly desiring to be sober, and staggered across the room to the window and threw it open. A gust of cemetery wind rushed into the room, a blast of chilling tombtop air that smelled of rot and decomposition. Behind him, the front door of the cottage was suddenly blown open by the gust of air that rushed through the window, though it seemed to Mullaney that such a gust would have blown the door closed rather than open. Drunkenly, he turned to see how such a remarkable tiling could have occurred contrary to all the laws of physics, and realized at once that the door had been thrown not blown open and realized in the next drunken shuddering horrible moment it had been thrown open by a ghost.

K was pale and covered with dust, K was wrapped in tattered, tom and trailing rags, K wore upon his face a haggard look of weariness, evidence of a journey from some distant purgatory, K was a spectral image standing just inside the cottage door, a terrifying poltergeist that raised its arm and pointed a long bony blue finger at Mullaney in mute accusation. Beyond the open window, Mullaney could hear the fearsome wailing of a thousand other ghosts, the clatter of bones, the clanking of chains, all the promised horrors his grandmother had conjured for him when he was but a wee turnip sitting on her knee. The stench of them rushed through that open window, stale and fetid from the grave, while standing just inside the door was another of their gruesome lot, closer, more frightening, pale and ragged and dead, oh my good sweet Jesus save me, killed in a terrible highway accident, dead, and closing the door gently now, the door squeaking on its hinges, closing the door and taking a step into the room, and raising its arm once again, the blue bony finger extended, and pointing directly at Mullaney who swayed in drunken terror near the open window where, beyond, the thousand other keening members of the union shrieked their dirges to the night.

He jumped through the open window head first, arms extended, hands together, fingers touching, as though he were going off the high board at Wilson’s Woods swimming pool, where he and Irene used to swim a lot before they were married. He hit the gravel outside hands first, absorbing the shock with his arms, rolling over into an immediate somersault, and then coming up onto his feet and breaking into a run the moment he was erect. He intended to run toward the sidewalk, out of this grisly place, away from the shrieking, melancholy voices in the cemetery, but his drunken state had been intensified by the plunge through the open window and the head-over-heels somersault he had performed with considerable style and grace, and he detected with horror that he was running not for the open gate of McReady’s Monument Works but instead for the open gate of the cemetery. He stopped himself with effort, and was turning in the opposite direction when the door of the cottage opened, and K stepped into the light with his dusty rags trailing, leaping off the doorstep and bounding across the yard toward Mullaney.

There is nothing to be afraid of, Mullaney said to himself, knowing he was lying, and turned toward the open cemetery gate again, reasoning it might be safer to face a thousand caterwauling but possibly benign specters rather than one obviously enraged and accusing demon, which K most certainly was. As he ran into the cemetery, he began to regret his decision. He tried to tell himself that his grandmother’s tales had only been fictions calculated to delight a young and excitable wee turnip like himself (“You’re a wee cowardly turnip,” she would laugh and say, after he had almost wet his pants in her lap), but whereas he was willing to exonerate old Grandma of any malicious intent, he was now beginning to think her stories had contained the unmistakable ring of truth. Yawning pits opened before his feet, gravestones moved into his path, trees extended clutching branches and roots, faces materialized on the air, laughter sounded in his ears and faded, screams permeated the night, dogs howled and bats hovered, skeletons danced and specters drifted on the wind, oh my God, he was scared out of his wits.

This is not what I bargained for when I said I’d take the gamble, he thought, beginning to sober up and becoming more and more frightened the more sober he got. I did not bargain for the mummy’s curse or the witch’s tale or the monkey’s paw. All I bargained for was a life of romantic adventure, and not K loping along behind me there wrapped in ceremonial funeral rags and shouting whatever the hell it is he’s shouting. I did not bargain for things that go bump in the night, or in the daytime either, I did not bargain for terror, I do not want terror in my life, I want peace and happiness and calm, I want it to be dawn, I want all these crawling things to go back into their holes, I want the sun to shine, “or I’ll shoot!”

He caught the words carried on the wind, words shouted in K’s unmistakable voice, and then heard the full sentence shouted again, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” and wondered why a ghost would have to shoot, and simultaneously became cold sober, and simultaneously realized that K, whatever else he was, was definitely not a ghost. He realized, too, that if anybody shot him, K or Kruger or anybody else, then nobody would ever learn where he had left the jacket, which was undoubtedly very important to all concerned, though he still couldn’t understand why, especially in its tom and tattered shape. The jacket, of course, was back in the stacks of the New York Public Library, resting on the dusty floor where he and Merilee had made love only a short time ago, and that’s where it would stay until tomorrow morning when the library opened. The trick then, he thought, as K shouted again behind him, was not to avoid getting killed by these people because he was certain they weren’t going to kill the only person who knew where the jacket...

Merilee, he thought.

Merilee also knows where the jacket is.

Well, he thought, that’s okay because Kruger only knew the money was supposed to be in the coffin, but not in the jacket. So chances are six to five he doesn’t know what else is important about the jacket, as neither do I. Besides, why shouldn’t he imagine the jacket is still on my back, which is where he saw it last, unless Merilee decides to tell him about our brief, ecstatic (for me, anyway) episode on the library floor? Well, hither thither willy nilly, let’s say he does ask her why the back of her velvet dress is covered with dust, and let’s say she does tell him what happened, which is doubtful, why should she mention the jacket at all, except to say that I had slit it open and found only cut-up newspapers in the lining? Why would she possibly mention I had left it on the floor back there, when she — no more than Kruger — has any knowledge of its importance?

Things were getting terribly complicated, and besides K was once again shouting “Stop or I’ll shoot!” which Mullaney knew very well he would not do.

A shot rang out.

The shot, carried on the wind, broke into a hundred echoing fragments of sound, put to rout the screaming banshees of the night, rushed away on the crest of its own cordite stench, and left behind it a stillness more appropriate to cemetery surroundings. Mullaney knew the shot had been intended only to frighten, but he was now impervious to fear because of his knowledge of the jacket’s whereabouts. Besides, he was beginning to realize something he had suspected all along, that his grandmother was simply full of shit, there were no ghosts, in or out of cemeteries. And since there were no ghosts to worry about, and since K could not harm him without eliminating the sole source of information about the jacket, he decided to play the same trick he had used to such marvelous advantage on Forty-second Street. He decided to reverse his field and charge K, knock him head over teacups and then run out of the cemetery and vanish until tomorrow morning. The wind was blowing fiercely as he turned, billowing into his jasmine shirt, causing the fabric to balloon out from his body. K stopped some twenty feet away from him and extended his arm again, the blued revolver in his hand pointing like an accusing finger. You can’t scare me, pal, Mullaney thought, and permitted himself a grin as he rushed toward K. An orange spark flared in the night, there was the sound of the gun going off and then nothing, and then a whistling tearing rush of air, and Mullaney was surprised to see a neat little bullet hole appear in his jasmine shirt where it ballooned out not three inches from his heart. He was surprised to see the bullet hole because if K was trying to frighten him, he was carrying things just a trifle too far. Didn’t K realize Mullaney was the source? Didn’t K realize Mullaney knew where the jacket was?