The Seventh Pan Book of Horror Stories Part 6

'He was the only one left to us/ he said, turning gently to the visitor. 'It is hard.'

The other coughed, and rising, walked slowly to the window. 'The firm wished me to convey their sincere sympathy with you in your great loss,' he said, without looking round. 'I beg that you will understand that I am only their servant and merely obeying orders.'

There was no reply; the old woman's face was white, her eyes staring, and her breath inaudible; on the husband's face was a look such as his friend the sergeant might have carried into his first action.

'I was to say that Maw and Meggins disclaim all responsibility,' continued the other. 'They admit no liability at all, but in consideration of your son's services, they wish to present you with a certain sum as compensation.'

Mr White dropped his wife's hand, and rising to his feet, gazed with a look of horror at his visitor. His dry lips shaped the words, 'How much?'

'Two hundred pounds,' was the answer.

Unconscious of his wife's shriek, the old man smiled faintly, put out his hands like a sightless man, and dropped, a senseless heap, to the floor.

In the huge new cemetery, some two miles distant, the old people buried their dead, and came back to a house steeped in shadow and silence. It was all over so quickly that at first they could hardly realise it, and remained in a state of expectation as though of something else to happen - something else which was to lighten this load, too heavy for old hearts to bear.

But the days pa.s.sed, and expectation gave place to resignation - the hopeless resignation of the old, sometimes miscalled apathy. Sometimes they hardly exchanged a word, for now they had nothing to talk about, and their days were long to weariness.

It was about a week after that the bid man, waking suddenly in the night, stretched out his hand and found himself alone. The room was in darkness, and the sound of subdued weeping came from the window. He raised himself in bed and listened.

'Come back,' he said tenderly. 'You will be cold.'

'It is colder for my son,' said the old woman, and wept afresh.

The sounds of her sobs died away on his ears. The bed was warm, and his eyes heavy with sleep. He dozed fitfully, and then slept until a sudden wild cry from his wife awoke him with a start.

'The paw!' she cried wildly. 'The monkey's paw!'

He started up in alarm. 'Where? Where is it? What's the matter?'

She came stumbling across the room toward him. 'I want it,' she said quietly. 'You've not destroyed it?'

'It's in the parlour, on the bracket,' he replied, marvelling. 'Why?'

She cried and laughed together, and bending over, kissed his cheek.

'I only just thought of it,' she said hysterically. 'Why didn't I think of it before? Why didn't you think of it?'

'Think of what?' he questioned.

'The other two wishes,' she replied rapidly. 'We've only had one.'

'Was not that enough?' he demanded fiercely.

'No,' she cried triumphantly; 'we'll have one more. Go down and get it quickly, and wish our boy alive again.'

The man sat up in bed and flung the bedclothes from his quaking limbs. 'Good G.o.d, you are mad!' he cried, aghast.

'Get it/ she panted; 'get it quickly, and wish- Oh, my boy, my boy!'

Her husband struck a match and lit the candle. 'Get back to bed,' he said unsteadily. 'You don't know what you are saying.'

'We had the first wish granted,' said the old woman feverishly; 'why not the second?'

'A coincidence,' stammered the old man.

'Go and get it and wish,' cried his wife, quivering with excitement.

The old man turned and regarded her, and his voice shook. 'He has been dead ten days, and besides he - I would not tell you else, but - I could only recognise him by his clothing. If he was too terrible for you to see then, how now?'

'Bring him back,' cried the old woman, and dragged him toward the door. 'Do you think I fear the child I have nursed?'

He went down in the darkness, and felt his way to the parlour, and then to the mantelpiece. The talisman was in its place, and a horrible fear that the unspoken wish might bring this mutilated son before him ere he could escape from the room seized upon him, and he caught his breath as he found that he had lost the direction of the door. His brow cold with sweat, he felt his way round the table, and groped along the wall until he found himself in the small pa.s.sage with the unwholesome thing in his hand.

Even his wife's face seemed changed as he entered the room. It was white and expectant, and to his fears seemed to have an unnatural look on it. He was afraid of her.

'Wish!' she cried in a strong voice.

'It is foolish and wicked,' he faltered.

'Wish!' repeated his wife.

He raised his hand. 'I wish my son alive again.'

The talisman fell to the floor, and he regarded it fearfully. Then he sank trembling into a chair as the old woman, with burning eyes, walked to the window and raised the blind.

He sat until he was chilled with the cold, glancing occasionally at the figure of the old woman peering through the window. The candle-end, which had burned low below the rim of the china candle-stick, was throwing pulsating shadows on the ceiling and walls, until, with a flicker larger than the rest, it expired. The old man, with an unspeakable sense of relief at the failure of the talisman, crept back to his bed and a minute or two afterward the old woman came silently and apathetically beside him.

Neither spoke, but lay silently listening to the ticking of the clock. A stair creaked, and a squeaky mouse scurried noisily through the wall. The darkness was oppressive, and after lying for some time s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up his courage, he took the box of matches, and striking one, went downstairs for a candle.

At the foot of the stairs the match went out, and he paused to strike another; and at the same time a knock, so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door.

The matches fell from his hand and spilled in the pa.s.sage. He stood motionless, his breath suspended until the knock was repeated. Then he turned and fled swiftly back to his room, and closed the door behind him. A third knock sounded through the house.

'What's that?' cried the old woman, starting up.

'A rat,' said the old man in shaking tones - a rat. It pa.s.sed me on the stairs.'

His wife sat up in bed listening. A loud knock resounded through the house.

It's Herbert!' she screamed. It's Herbert!'

She ran to the door, but her husband was before her, and catching her by the arm, held her tightly.

'What are you going to do?' he whispered hoa.r.s.ely.

It's my boy; it's Herbert!' she cried, struggling mechanically. I forgot it was two miles away. What are you holding me for? Let go. I must open the door.'

Tor G.o.d's sake don't let it in,' cried the old man, trembling.

'You're afraid of your own son,' she cried, struggling. 'Let me go. I'm coming Herbert, I'm coming.'

There was another knock, and another. The old woman with a sudden wrench broke free and ran from the room. Her husband followed to the landing, and called after her appealingly as she hurried downstairs. He heard the chain rattle back and the bottom bolt drawn slowly and stiffly from the socket. Then the old woman's voice, strained and panting.

The bolt,' she cried loudly. 'Come down. I can't reach it.'

But her husband was on his hands and knees groping wildly on the floor in search of the paw. If he could only find it before the thing outside got in. A perfect fusillade of knocks reverberated through the house, and he heard the Sc.r.a.ping of a chair as his wife put it down in the pa.s.sage against the door. He heard the creaking of the bolt as it came slowly back, and at the same moment he found the monkey's paw, and frantically breathed his third and last wish.

The knocking ceased suddenly, although the echoes of it were still in the house. He heard the chair drawn back, and the door opened. A cold wind rushed up the staircase, and a long loud wail of disappointment and misery from his wife gave him courage to run down to her side, and then to the gate beyond. The street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road.

THE LAST EXPERIMENT.

By John D. Keefauver.

It was the absence of noise that bothered him. From the very beginning of his stay inside the soundproof and lightless cubicle, a crushing, total silence had forced him - within the first hour - to make his own sounds.

He did not mind the dark; in a sense, he enjoyed it. For years he had closed his eyes and daydreamed in a private dark.

He had been in the room now for days, it seemed, with only a bed, some cans of food and jars of water and a toilet in the nine-by-seven-by-seven-foot cubicle.

A psychologist had led him inside, smiled, shaken his hand and then left him alone, shutting him into the dark silence, into the waiting. And into his thoughts.

At first he had gone over the incidents of the last few days and weeks that had led to his being in this room. As usual, his thoughts were pegged to sounds - the sound of the voice calling him to the company orderly room a few weeks ago, the sound of the sergeant's words as he was told to pack his gear. 'You'll be told what it's all about, Nelson, when you get over there,' he had said.

Neff Nelson, una.s.signed Army private just out of basic training, hadn't waited long. Within a few days he and 24 other young men had been taken by truck to a far corner of the post. There, housed in barracks, they'd been interviewed by two psychologists.

Nelson remembered in particular the voice of one, a soft monotone, almost a purr, that was calm and rea.s.suring. The psychologists had said that because Nelson and the other young men were all healthy and of above average intelligence, they were being offered a role in an important experiment in human research.

The project was to discover the effects of solitude and monotony on human efficiency. What happens to a man when he is completely shut off from society for a number of hours or days; when he has absolutely nothing to do? 'What happens when you eliminate all stimulating sights and sounds?' the soft-voiced psychologist had asked. 'That's what we're trying to find out; how well a man can perform various skills in such a situation.'

The Army wanted to develop tests that would indicate the type of person best suited to man a remote radar, missile or weather station, or any other job - perhaps in outer s.p.a.ce - where a man might be alone and doing a monotonous job.

The psychologists had also explained what the volunteers would be getting into. Research a.s.sistants in a control room would record all sounds from the cubicles and 'they may ask questions of you subjects' through a microphone. The 'may' had been emphasized, Nelson remembered. The questions would test the volunteers' ability to think, to solve problems, to retain independent judgment. The answers and reactions of each volunteer would be compared with those he gave before entering the cubicle. He would also be given another test after completing his stay in the room.

'From this comparison,' the soft-voiced psychologist had said, 'any differences caused by the experiment in the cubicle may be isolated.' His voice purred on, explaining that the door of the cubicle would not be locked; that a volunteer could walk out at any time he wanted to, although if he did he would be disqualified. Both psychologists declined to say how long the volunteers would stay in the soundproof, lightless rooms. They explained that if they disclosed the time they would invalidate the test because the men would antic.i.p.ate the time when they would get out of the cubicle.

'Would you like to be a part of the project?' each man was asked.

Private Neff Nelson remembered the exact tone of his own voice as it had said emphatically, 'Yes.' He remembered it clearly because the matter of going into a soundless cubicle was a decision he would never forget. He knew he was volunteering for something that might very well drive him insane, and he was afraid.

Not literally all the way off the deep end, he told himself; not to a point where he would go blubbering off to the psycho ward. But all his life he had lived not with but on sound. The absence of it, if only partial and for a short time, drove him to seek and find a sound, a noise, be it ever so slight. The breathing of another person would be enough, even the sound of a dog walking on a carpet. He had consulted specialists since he was a child but they had never been able to help him. During his waking hours he simply had to be constantly aware of sound.

He had been trying to break himself of the need for years. And when this chance to go into a soundless world was offered, he had jumped at it. Here was an opportunity that would force him to go without - like a dope addict in confinement. If he could survive, his habit would be broken.

Yet when he was actually on the way to his cubicle, his mind had uncontrollably strained to hear, record and store up everything audible in those last moments.

Now he remembered the footsteps of those who went first up the steps of the building that housed the cubicles. He remembered the scurrying sounds of caged rats - also being experimented upon - which they had pa.s.sed just inside the corridor along which the cells were situated. There were eight cells. Each man received a handshake and last instructions from one of the psychologists as he entered his room. Nelson's cubicle was the last one at the end of the hall. He went in, followed by the psychologist with the purring voice.

The small room, well ventilated and kept at a constant temperature of 72 degrees, was entirely white, corklined and as spotlessly clean as a hospital. A toilet sat in one corner, a food-and-water-stocked refrigerator in another. There was a bed with a pillow and a blanket. That was all.

The psychologist was a tall, stoop-shouldered man, with unblinking owl eyes. He shook Nelson's hand and wished him luck. 'Remember, the door is not locked,' he said. 'You can leave whenever you want, but if you do you're automatically disqualified.' He left with the words: The light will go out in a few minutes and the one in the corridor, too.'

Five-feet-ten-inch Neff Nelson was left alone in a nine-by-seven-by-seven-foot cubicle with water and canned food - each can a balanced meal - to keep his 174 pounds nourished. Suddenly aware of his loneliness, he listened intently for the sound of the psychologist's footsteps in the corridor. But he heard nothing; the room was soundproof.

For the first few minutes he had listened to the hum of the refrigerator, until it had stopped when the light was turned off. The hum would const.i.tute an audial cue,' the psychologist had said. You would not be completely cut off from society if it were on.'

So he had begun a life of fumbling in the dark for food and water, washing with chemically treated wash cloths, and lying on the bed. There was nothing else to do. He had no schedule, no wrist.w.a.tch. Dressed in pyjamalike clothes, he could sleep whenever he wanted to - in a quiet that noise could not penetrate, in a darkness that completely blanketed him.

And he could wait. He ate, slept, washed; ate, slept, washed. And waited.

And he thought. In a soundless world his thoughts swirled around sounds. His life had always been one of noises; now there were none.

Once, twice, three times he stuck his head under his pillow and pressed it to his ears in hope that when he released it there would be some contrast, some sound - even if ever so slight. But when his ears came away from the pillow there was no difference. The only thing he could hear was his heart. It pumped on and on, like the pound of a sledge. But this was noise of his own making, an inside sound, like the one he made by tapping his fingers on the wall or the floor. What he needed was a sound from outside, something, anything, to tell him an outside world existed.

And though the darkness itself did not bother him, it intensified his isolation from the outside world and made the lack of sound worse. In addition to hearing nothing, he saw nothing. He could not see the wall or refrigerator when they were inches from his nose. The only way he knew anything existed was to touch it.

Once, after only a few hours in the room, he went to the door and quietly opened it, then shut it, opened and shut it, over and over, listening greedily to the slight noise it made. But, again, it was a sound of his own making and he needed an outside sound. And the corridor was as dark as his room.

At first he had gone over the sounds accompanying the incidents that had brought him into his soundless world. But he had soon used them up. Then he started back over his life, a man on a desperate hunt, searching for sounds he had heard, recalling and listening to them, sucking all noise from them greedily, almost frantically, as his cubicle-stay extended from hours to a day, to days. He clawed into his experiences, going back, back, looking, listening.

He went through the roar of the airplane engines he'd heard on his way to camp, the thump of his foot on a football in high school, the ringing cheer of spectators, the loud ticking of his first wrist.w.a.tch (a sound that others barely could hear), the squeal of his first car's tyres, the scream of his voice when he fell from a tree, the br-r-r-r the cutting tool made in the cast on the leg he'd broken, the screech of chalk on a blackboard (a sound that had almost driven him out of school), his sister breathing on the other side of a bedroom wall...

Yet now his mind kept grabbing onto and holding a sound that had first frightened him - the faint scurrying and nibbling of rats.

The sound had originated on a 30-minute radio show he'd heard when he was a child, a harrowing story of starving rats chewing their way closer and closer to a terrified man.

The man was a lighthouse keeper, and more than a hundred starving rats had drifted to his island in an abandoned row-boat. The keeper had seen them pour off the boat as it touched land, had seen them swarm toward him in the lighthouse. He had slammed and locked the ground floor door but in their frenzy they quickly ate through the wood.

Nelson vividly recalled the panting of the rats and the frightened monologue of the man as the starvation-crazed rodents slowly, relentlessly, chewed their way up to the top of the lighthouse.

Higher and higher, the man had climbed, slamming a trap door shut behind him at each floor. But the rats, their feet scurrying, their teeth grinding, maintained a constant background to the man's terrified words. He'd waited at each door until he saw the wood begin to splinter, then with a choking cry of terror he'd sprinted up to the next floor and slammed shut the door.

The rats kept coming, their efforts growing more frenzied at each level, as if they could almost taste the meal so near them. A chewing wave, they washed through every floor until they reached the top, the gla.s.s-enclosed room from which the keeper had first seen the rodents. The floor of that room had been made of metal, Nelson remembered; it had stopped the rats - for a while.

Then had come a terrible silence; for the first time since the rats had hit the first door there was no sound of them. The keeper had thought the metal floor had stopped them, that he was saved, and Nelson remembered the strong disappointment he had felt then - and was feeling now - not because he wanted the black rodents to tear the man apart, but because he was left with no sound after having had it with him in long, rich moments of mounting tension.

Then Nelson heard again the keeper's gasp and the sc.r.a.ping of rat feet on the gla.s.s enclosing the light room. They had scurried to the ground and then climbed the outside of the building, and two had got into the top room before the keeper could slam the window shut. Nelson remembered the man's scream as the rats sprang at him, teeth bared. But he had desperately kicked and struck at them until lie killed them. Then Nelson heard only the sound of claws on gla.s.s.

The rats finally left. For some reason they went back to the boat, perhaps because they saw it was moving. Then the shifting tide caught it and carried it away. Nelson could not remember the exact reason for their leaving the gla.s.s top. It really didn't matter. What did matter was his reliving, rehearing the programme's sounds; when the sounds went, so did his memory of the programme.

He had brought it back many times in his life, times when there weren't enough outside sounds, even though the memory sent shivers over him like rat feet. And here, in the lost silence of the cubicle, the radio story was more real to him than it ever had been. Over and over the programme repeated itself in his mind. It came back even when*he realised he had heard it enough - too much - repeating, repeating, until he couldn't stop the sounds of rats gnawing and scrambling on the lighthouse.