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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
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RGL e-Book Cover©
Based on a wallpaper in the public domain
Fantastic Adventures, October 1945, with "Fingerprints of Fear"
Choking vapor clutched at his nostrils and mouth, strangling him.
WHEN I came slowly from under the effects of the ether, I was tied to a bed in a strange room. Warren Serge and Peter Larrs were near me. Before I felt any urge to open my eyes, I heard them speaking to each other in low, excited voices.
"Better get it over with before he comes around."
I recognized Warren Serge's flat voice. "I got the gasoline."
"Good." I knew that Peter Larrs was smiling, because his thin, bloodless lips were, curled perpetually into a sour smile. "Be sure that the blankets and the mattress are well saturated."
I knew with sudden stark horror why they had forced the wet cloth over my face. Why they had filled me with whiskey to make me weak and unsuspecting. I thought I was awake enough now to fight. I opened my eyes and tried to sit up. It was a mistake. I realized that my arms and legs were bound firmly to the bed.
The room was lighted by a single dirty bulb. This was one of the dilapidated apartment buildings that lined High Street. One of those three-story wooden affairs that could become a dry funeral pyre when touched by flame. I had seen them burn before.
"Get him." It was Serge's voice. "He's coming around."
I sank back, my heart pounding. I was weak from the effects of whiskey and whatever they had added to it. Larrs' shadow crossed my face and I twisted around to catch sight of him.
"Pete," I managed to moan weakly. "Pete, for God's sake...!"
"Shut up." He had an empty bottle in his hand. I read hatred and fear on his pimply face. He was afraid that after their plan had gone so far I might cry for help and spoil everything. I tried to dodge as the bottle came down. I could move my head only a few inches. It wasn't enough.
THE blow couldn't have been hard or I would have died then.
Instead, there whirled through my brain the memory of a series of
incidents that had made these men want to murder me.
It's quite simple, I suppose, to murder a man. Simple when the reward is great and the chance of being caught is slim.
It all went back to the conversation at the Owl Club a month before. Pete Larrs and Warren Serge worked for me. We sold insurance, but not to the extent of growing rich on the profits. Then, because we had just finished discussing a case where a widow collected fifty thousand dollars on a husband who died under suspicious circumstances, the conversation drifted around to our own drab lives.
"Take Serge here," Peter Larrs said to me. "Suppose we took out a big policy on him and he died in six months. You and I could retire on the proceeds, Walter."
My name is Walter Peterson.
I grinned sourly. It wasn't my idea of a joke.
"Or you, for that matter," I suggested.
Much to my disgust they both insisted on arguing the idea to a logical conclusion. By the time we were finished, we had figuratively murdered Warren Serge, collected twenty-five thousand apiece and left town. Three insurance agents, schooled in the game we played, letting our minds wander in a manner that might well be dangerous.
I HAD forgotten all about it until tonight. Then, when Serge
faced me across the table in Jimmy Caputo's back room, I knew
what had happened.
"You're getting pretty tight," Serge said. He stared at me without blinking, his hand curved around the top of a Scotch bottle. "Maybe we better take you home."
"Yeah," Peter Larrs said. "Another hour of this and your widow might be collecting that five thousand life insurance."
I remembered how we had talked about insurance, and I stared suspiciously at Serge's dark ugly face and his gleaming teeth.
"That isn't funny," I said. My voice was thick and I had a difficult time with my words.
"Of course it isn't," Larrs agreed. His face was close to mine. "How did that last drink taste, Walt?"
I could see him, but not clearly. His face turned to a white patch of skin, then blurred out until I could only see two blood-shot eyes.
"Not... so..."
I felt myself slipping and grabbed for the Scotch bottle that was standing on the table. I missed it and fell. My head struck the edge of the table.
I heard Peter Larrs chuckle.
I awakened again and by now my head felt as though it had been hammered on the torture rack. I remembered reading that they used to tie a criminal on a rack and break his body, blow after blow, with a heavy sledge. The torturers would hammer on one bone, then the next and listen to the poor devil scream until he was nothing but a mass of mince-meat.
That's how I felt. I didn't open my eyes because I knew that Serge and Larrs were still in the room. I knew that if I showed any sign of life they would hit me again and I couldn't stand that.
The room was quite cool and I wondered why I was sweating so much. Then I realized that it wasn't sweat. It was gasoline. The sharp, pungent odor hit my nostrils.
Gasoline on the bed, poured over my entire body.
"What the hell are you waiting for?"
Serge's voice was jumpy, as though he was frightened to go on and afraid not to go on.
"Take your time," Larrs snarled. "This—this human torch stuff isn't so good for a man with nerves."
"Nerves?"
Serge's laugh wasn't the expression of pleasure I had expected. They were losing their nerve. Or were they? No! I heard footsteps approach the bed. I knew that to cry out again would only result in another blow on the head. I'd burn before I regained consciousness.
Perhaps if I lay very still they would have to rush from the house before the flames touched me. Perhaps I would break the ropes before it was too late.
The room was silent, save for the sudden crackle of flames. I heard the door open, then close. Footsteps pounded down the rickety stairs and I was alone—more alone than I had ever been in my life.
The heat from the very first was insufferable, but I didn't dare think of it because every ounce of strength in me worked for release.
My wrists were bound with heavy rope and the strands went under the bed and were tied there where I couldn't reach the knots.
THE fire started about ten feet from the bed, but it leaped
along the trail where Larrs had poured the gasoline on the floor.
It caught the edge of the mattress, leaped up and bathed me in a
mass of red-yellow hell.
Everything about me, everything I wore was burning with the intense heat that gasoline produces.
Then a strange thing happened. I have pondered over it many times since, and for a long time I could give no explanation.
Have you ever watched a man burn to death? Watched the body as the heat strikes it? The skin shrivels and the body seems to grow smaller, until it is a husk. Then the whole thing caves in upon itself and is gone.
I watched myself burn to death in that room.
Suddenly I was without pain. I seemed, somehow, to hover above the body on the bed. I watched because I had to watch. My eyes never faltered from the blackened sacrificial altar. A sacrifice to man's unholy love of money.
I watched what I have described and turned away only when my eyes could stand no more. I knew that I had seen a man destroyed. I knew that the entire building was afire and that before men could come to put out that fire, the building itself would collapse into the basement.
Two men were at large who would do this again. Do it because it was all quite simple and safe. They had within their grasp the sum of fifty thousand dollars. Money that was theirs to divide because I would never be able to appear again. Never be able to say that they had murdered me.
But I wasn't entirely helpless. What remained of me? I might have called it soul, had I been a religious man. Whatever it was, I was conscious of no feeling, no weight.
There were two men at large who would murder again—if 2 could not stop them.
BEHIND Terry Street, running south, there is an alley. After
midnight the single light at the corner of Terry and Rand
Boulevard sends its dim rays into the entrance of the alley.
Beyond that, you might stumble over crates.
Peter Larrs usually took the short cut through the alley, opened the gate half way down and, by cutting across a neighbor's yard, entered his own home.
The darkness didn't bother Larrs. It didn't bother him even after Walter Peterson died. Peterson wasn't the kind of a guy who promoted fear. Warren Serge walked with Larrs as far as the corner of Terry and Rand. They stopped under the street light and shook hands.
'"Sort of a partnership shake," Serge said. He was wearing a new blue suit, white shirt and a seven buck silk tie. He'd always wanted a seven buck tie.
"And to think old Walt bought it for me," he said, fingering the silk.
Larrs grinned. "Fifty-fifty split on murder," he chuckled. "Remember that gang that called itself Murder, Incorporated? We oughta think up something like that."
They stood there, grinning at each other.
"Poor old Peterson," Larrs said. He turned and started across the street. Serge stood under the light, grinning until Larrs was near the entrance of the alley. Then the grin died.
"Poor old Larrs," he said. "I can work better alone. You've got a month to go, Larrs. Take advantage of it."
He turned with his hands buried deep in his pockets and moved slowly back along Terry Street toward town.
PETER LARRS was half way down the alley when he stopped
whistling abruptly. He felt sick. Sick all the way through. He
looked back at the faint light on the street he had left. An
unreasonable horror crept over him.
He could smell gasoline. The odor stung his nostrils. He imagined he could smell the odor of burning flesh.
It wasn't cold, but he drew up his coat collar and walked faster. The horror followed him. Death smells like that, he thought, and stopped short by the gate that opened on the alley. His hand was on the gate when two steel hands closed about his throat. His mouth opened and he tried to shout. Smoke, choking black smoke shot into his mouth and seared his throat. He struggled, and was lifted from the ground, those hands holding firmly, refusing to give an inch under his clawing, desperate fingers.
His heels beat a tattoo of death on the alley gate, and from the back porch of a nearby house, a voice shouted.
"Hey! What the hell's going on out there?"
Larrs didn't hear the voice. He never knew what was going on.
"I'M damned if I know what happened, Inspector." The cop stood
up slowly, his eyes on the crumpled body. "Someone called the
station and said there was a brawl going on in the alley. The
station sent out an alarm and we came right over."
Inspector Chance Rainey lowered his ponderous body to one knee and turned the body over.
"There's only one clue as far as I can see." He examined the broad black smudges that covered Peter Larrs' skinny neck. "Might have been one of those guys that unload coal. His hands were covered with soot."
The murderer's hands had been covered with soot, yet a check-up revealed that no coal had been delivered that afternoon within a six-block area. The autopsy was equally as puzzling. It revealed that Peter Larrs might have been dead before his body was dumped in the alley. His lungs were badly seared and he had breathed a lot of smoke.
Warren Serge knew that Larrs had died in the alley. He didn't mention his walk home with Larrs. He didn't mention it for several reasons. Larrs was better off out of the way, and Serge didn't want anything to do with it. He was already several thousand dollars richer.
WARREN SERGE was no coward.
Yet, on rainy, cold nights like this one, he kept thinking of Larrs. Thinking of him starting alone down that dark alley. Serge wasn't entirely without imagination. As the weeks went by, his thoughts went back with increasing regularity to Peter Larrs and to Walter Peterson.
He started avoiding dark places. He remembered the smoke they had found in Larrs' lungs and the dirty soot smudges on his throat. After a while, when the novelty of having a lot of money wore off, he wondered how Larrs had died. The police never found a clue that led to the murderer.
The night was rainy, and Serge moved swiftly toward Jimmy Caputo's Saloon. Caputo's joint was built back away from the street, taking up the rear end of several stores. You entered it from the alley, by following a covered board-walk from the street to the door with a small window. The window was a throwback to the old days when Jimmy looked you over carefully before letting you in.
Serge was soaked to the skin. His new overcoat dripped. Rain spotted his polished shoes. Rain swept wildly across the street in front of Jimmy Caputo's place, and Serge ran for the protection of the covered walk.
When Serge saw that the single light near the door was not burning, he had a terrible urge to turn away. However, the rain forced him on to the protection offered.
Half way along the walk, under the black screen of the canvas roof, he stopped. Had you stood beyond the walk, under the dry arc of the door, you might have heard the gurgle of fear that echoed in Serge's throat. That was the only sound, for his threshing about made no noise. Later, his heels kicked a light tattoo on the walk. Then there was no more sound as they kicked their last in mid-air.
Under the canvas that covered the walk the sickening smell of gasoline and burned flesh was still noticeable when the police car drove up. One of Jimmy Caputo's customers had stumbled over the corpse on his way out of the club.
MY name is Walter Peterson.
I said that I did not know what part of my body existed when I hovered in that room and watched my own flesh destroyed. I did not know then, but now it is clear to me.
They say that after death our physical bodies return to basic elements.
Ashes to ashes—dust to dust.
That is true, but there is more to it than that. A part of me hovered in midair.
What happens to a man's soul? I'm not sure, for I haven't travelled that far. I know only what happened to me. My soul, if you must call it that, was contained in the substance that rose above my lifeless body and went to seek revenge.
They can never find the man who murdered Warren Serge and Peter Larrs. They can never find him because he ceased to exist one hot afternoon when a mysterious fire swept the slums.
But Walter Peterson found a way to go on. They found smoke smudges on the throats of the murdered men. They found smoke in their lungs and the smell of gasoline around them.
Dust to dust? Well, in a way you're right. But I am not dust. I am smoke.
I am the smoke from a man who was destroyed by fire. I am done murdering. I hate no one, now that Larrs and Serge are gone. It is still raining fitfully, and beyond the doorway where I hover, I see police officers bending over the still figure of Warren Serge. I can hear them talking and I wish there was some way of telling them what really happened.
My job is done; and the rain, which I have carefully avoided for so long, is the only thing that will beat me down and destroy me.
The officer in the blue overcoat is talking and sniffing the air. He is very close to me. He shivers and pulls up his collar.
"That damned smoke is awful," he says. "Gawd, Inspector, it smells like—like someone is being cremated."
If I could smile, I would. If I float slowly from this dry doorway and drift out into the rain, I will be beaten to the pavement. Then you can use that fancy phrase of yours. What is it? Dust to dust.
Why not? My mission has ended.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.