Fear Read online

The class shuffled and moved seats and greeted one another the width and length of the room. A girl had a new dress and was being casual. A boy had a new sweetheart and was trying to act very manly in her sight and very careless before his own friends. The rattling and talking and scraping gradually died down. A bell rang. Lowry began his lecture.

  Only long habit and much reading from the book carried him through. Now and then, during the hour, his own words came into his consciousness for a moment and he seemed to be talking rationally enough. The students were making notes and dozing and whispering and chewing gum—it was a normal enough class, and obviously they saw nothing wrong.

  “This fallacious belief and the natural reluctance of the human being to enter in upon and explore anything so intimately connected with the gods as sickness served as an effective barrier for centuries to any ingress into the realm of medical science. In China—”

  Waiting in his office? What could be waiting? And what did it mean, Entity?

  “—even when medicinal means were discovered by which fever could be induced or pain lessened, the common people ascribed the fact to the dislike of the demon of illness for that particular herb or the magic qualities of the ritual. Even the doctors themselves long continued certain ritualistic practices, first because they themselves were not sure and because the state of mind of the patient, being a large factor in his possible cure, could be bettered by the apparent flattery of the patient’s own beliefs.”

  It was a relief to be able to stand here and talk to them as though nothing were wrong. And it was a normal class, for they kept gazing through the windows and out of doors, where the sun was bright and friendly and the grass cool and soft.

  “In any culture, medical cure begins its history with the thunder of a witch doctor’s drums, by which the witch doctor attempts to exorcise his patient.” Here he always essayed a small joke about a patient letting himself be cured in a wild effort to save his own eardrums, but just now he could not utter it. Why?he asked himself.

  “Man’s predisposition to illness at first acted as a confirmation of spirits and demons, for there was no visible difference, in many cases, between a well patient and a sick one, and what man has not been able to see, he attributes to dev—” He gripped the edge of his lecture desk. “He attributes to devils and demons.”

  Strange, wasn’t it, that medicine drums did cure people? Strange that incantations and health amulets had been man’s sole protection from bacteria for generations without count? Strange that medicine itself still retained a multitude of forms which were directly traceable to demons and devils? And that the pile of crutches in that Mexican church indicated the efficacy of faith in even “hopeless” cases. The church! And now that people had turned from the church to a wholly materialistic culture, was it not odd that worldly affairs were so bloody and grim? Demons of hate and devils of destruction, whose lot was to jeer at man and increase his misfortunes! Spirits of the land and water and air, abandoned in belief and left, unhampered, to work their evil upon a world—

  He stopped. The class was no longer whispering and chewing gum and staring out the window or dozing. Wide young eyes were fixed upon him in fascination.

  He realized that he had spoken his last thoughts aloud. For a moment no longer than an expressive pause would be, he studied his class. Young minds, ready and waiting to be fed anything that any man of repute might wish to feed them, sponges for the half-truths and outright lies and propaganda called education, material to be molded into any shape that their superiors might select. How did he know if he had ever taught truth? He did not even know if the dissemination of democracy itself was error or right. These were the children of the next generation, on the sill of marriage and the legal war of business. Could he, with his background, ever tell them anything which might help them? He, who had been so sure for so many years that all was explainable via material science, he who now had wandered far and had seen things and talked to beings he had for years decried!—could he say now what he had said so often before?

  “—and because of that very belief, so deeply rooted in our ancestors, none of us today is sure but what there was some truth in those ancient thoughts. Or perhaps—” Why should he back off now? These were his for the molding. Why should he stand here and lie when not twelve hours ago he had walked with phantoms, had been guided by a priest three hundred and more years dead, had been whipped on by things he had not seen, who even now could catch a glimpse of a black object which threw a shadow where there was no sun? These were his for the molding. Why should he be afraid of them?

  “Men of science,” he began again in a quiet voice, “have sought to clear fear from the minds of men by telling men that there is nothing of which he must be afraid just because he cannot see the actual cause. Men today have spread the feeling that all things are explained, and that even God himself has had his face gazed upon through the medium of an electric arc. But now, standing here, I am not sure of anything. I have dipped back to find that countless billions of people, all those who lived prior to the last century, regulated their lives with due respect to a supernatural world. Man has always known that his lot upon this earth is misery, and he has, until a split second ago in geological time, understood that there must be beings beyond his ken who take peculiar delight in torturing him.

  “In this class at this very moment there are at least half a dozen amulets in which the owner places considerable faith. You call them luck charms and you received them from one beloved or found them through an incident beyond your power of comprehension. You have a semibelief, then, in a goddess of luck. You have a semibelief in a god of disaster. You have all noticed from time to time that at that moment when you felt the most certain of your own invulnerability, that that moment was the beginning of your own downfall. To say aloud that you are never ill seems to invite illness. How many lads have you known who have bragged to you that they have never had accidents, only later to visit them after an accident? And if you did not save some belief in this, then you would not nervously look for wood each time you make a brag about your own fortune.

  “This is a modern world, full of material ‘explanations,’ and yet there is no machine which will guarantee luck; there is no clear statement of any law which serves to regulate man’s fate. We know that we face a certain amount of light and, disclaiming any credence in the supernatural or in any existing set of malicious gods, we still understand and clearly that our backs are against the darkness and the void, and that we have a very slight understanding of the amount of misery we are made to experience. We talk about ‘breaks,’ and we carry luck charms and we knock on wood. We put crosses on top of our churches and arches in our belfries. When one accident has happened, we wait for the other two and only feel at ease when the other two have happened. We place our faiths in a god of good and by that faith carry through, or we go without help through the dim burrows of life, watchful for a demoniac agent of destruction which may rob us of our happiness, or we arrogantly place all faith in ourselves and dare the Fates to do their worst. We shiver in the dark. We shudder in the presence of the dead. We look, some of us, to mystic sciences like astrology or numerology to reassure us that our way is clear. And no person in this room, if placed at midnight in a ‘haunted’ house, would assert there the nonexistence of ghosts. We are intelligent beings, giving our lips to disbelief, but rolling our eyes behind us to search out any danger which might swoop down from that black void.

  “Why? Is it true, then, that there exist about us demons and devils and spirits whose jealousy of man leads on to the manufacture of willful harm? Or, despite the evidence of the science of probabilities against the explanation of coincidence, are we to state that mankind brings its misery upon itself? Are there agencies which we generally lack power to perceive?

  “As a question only, let me ask, might it not be possible that all of us possess a latent sense which, in our modern scurry, has lapsed in its development? Might not our own ancestors, acute to the primit
ive dangers, exposed to the wind and the dark, have given attention to the individual development of that sense? And because we have neglected to individually heighten our own perceptions, are we now ‘blind’ to extramaterial agencies? And might we not, at any moment, experience a sudden rebirth of that sense and, as vividly as in a lightning flash, see those things which jealously menace our existences? If we could but see, for ever so brief a period, the supernatural, we would then begin to understand the complexities which beset man. But if we experienced that rebirth and then told of what we saw, might we not be dubbed ‘mad’? What of the visions of the saints?

  “As children, all of us felt the phantoms of the dark. Might not that sense be less latent in a child whose mind is not yet dulled by the excess burden of facts and facts and more facts? Are there not men in this world today who have converse with the supernatural, but who cannot demonstrate or explain and be believed because of the lack in others of that peculiar sense?

  “I am giving you something on which to ponder. You have listened patiently to me for long weeks and you have filled notebooks with scraps of ethnology. I have not once, in all that time until now, caused you to think one thought or ponder one question. There is the bell. Think over what I have said.”

  Half of them, as they wandered out, seemed to think it was one of Professor Lowry’s well-known jokes. The other half, of more acute perception, seemed to wonder if Professor Lowry was ill.

  Somehow it made no difference to Lowry what they wondered. He had seated himself in his chair and was avoiding all looks by sorting out notes.

  “You are the Entity. Wait for us in your office.”

  Chapter Seven

  For some time Lowry sat in his office, staring at the disarranged stacks of papers which cluttered his desk, wondering at the way he had finished his lecture. It seemed to him, as he thought about it, that man’s lot seems to be a recanting of statement and prejudice: those things which he most wildly vows he will not do are those things which, eventually, he must do; those beliefs which are the most foreign to his nature are eventually thrust down his throat by a malignant fate. To think that he, James Lowry, ethnologist, would ever come near a recognition of extrasensory forces— Well, here he was, waiting. Waiting for what?

  Those four hours?

  The thought made him rise and pace around the room with the hunched manner of a jungle brute surrounded by bars. He caught himself at it and forced calmness by stirring various bundles with his foot and looking at the address labels of the things which had been shipped up from Yucatàn. There was a year’s work at this classification, and even he did not know what he had here. Bits of stone, pieces of rubble, plaster casts of prints, hasty miniatures of idols, a scroll in a metal container—

  To fill his waiting he unwrapped the first box at hand and set it on his desk. He lifted the cover from it. It was just a fossilized skull found beside a sacrificial block, the last relic of some poor devil who had had his heart torn, living, from his body to satisfy the priest-imagined craving of some brutal deity whose life was thought to need renewal. Just a brown, sightless skull— He had dug this out quite cold-bloodedly, so used he had become to his job. Why did it make him shudder so now?

  His name—that was it. That must be it! His name engraved upon that headstone.

  JAMES LOWRY

  Born 1901

  Died 1940

  Rest In Peace

  Odd that he should somehow fall upon the grassy mound of his own grave; odder still that it would be the one place he had found rest that night. And the date? 1940?

  He swallowed a dry lump which threatened to cut off his breathing. This year? Tomorrow, next week, next month?

  Died 1940

  And he had found rest from his torment.

  The door opened and Tommy came in. Lowry knew who it was, but he could not quite bring himself to look at Tommy’s face. And when he did, as his eyes swept up he saw the malevolent smile and those yellow fangs. But when he looked straight at Tommy it was the same Tommy he had always known.

  “So life is too dull for you,” said Tommy with a smile. “You wouldn’t want to send up to Chemistry for some nitroglycerin, would you? Or do you need it?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing wrong, except that one of your students nearly collapsed from hysteria. And the rest of them—or some of them, at least—are walking around muttering to themselves about demons and devils. Don’t tell me you are seeing things my way now.”

  “Not your way,” said Lowry. “What a man sees he is forced to believe.”

  “Well, well, well, old Witch Doctor Lowry himself! Do you actually think those things they say you said?”

  “What else can I think? For forty-eight hours I have walked and talked, pursued and been pursued by phantoms.”

  “You seem quite calm about it.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be calm?”

  “Oh, no reason. You seem much less agitated than you have been the past few days, or Saturday and Sunday, to be exact. Is . . . well, do you still see—”

  “It’s there,” said Lowry. “A man can get used to anything.”

  The door opened a second time and they turned to see Mary. She was oblivious of any stir Lowry might have made in class, and had no anxiety to question him, evidently feeling that she might possibly be the cause of some of his strange actions. She looked half frightened now for all that she was smiling, and then, seeing Lowry smile at her, she brightened.

  “Hello, Jim. Hello, Tommy. I just breezed by for a very wifely reason, Jim. The exchequer, much as I hate to mention it, is at a very low ebb, and spring and an empty larder demand some clothes and some groceries.”

  Jim pulled out his checkbook.

  “That,” said Tommy, “is the reason I’ll never marry.”

  “It’s a pleasure,” said Lowry, writing out the check.

  “It’s two hours to my next class,” said Tommy. “May I be burdened with your bundles?”

  “Such a delightful beast of burden is quite acceptable,” said Mary with a curtsy.

  Lowry gave her the check and she kissed him lightly. Tommy took her arm and they left the office.

  Was it some sort of sensory illusion that caused Lowry to momentarily feel fangs in her mouth? Was it some way the light fell upon her face that made him see those fangs? Was it a natural jealousy which made him believe she looked lovingly at Tommy as they went out of the door?

  He shook his head violently in an effort to clear away such horrible thoughts, and turned to his desk to find himself face to face with the skull. Angrily, he put the top upon the box and cast it away from him; but the top did not stay on, nor did the box remain atop the pile of packages; the skull rolled with a hollow sound and finally stood on its nose hole against his foot. He kicked it and it thumped slowly into the corner where its sightless sockets regarded him in mild reproach; one of its teeth had fallen out and made a brown dot on the carpet.

  JAMES LOWRY

  Born 1901

  Died 1940

  Rest In Peace

  His thoughts had gotten all tangled until he could not remember if this was Sebastian’s skull or not, or even if Sebastian’s grave had yielded anything but dust and a golden belt. Aimlessly, from the depths of his high-school cramming, came the words “To be or not to be, that is the question.” He said them over several times before he recognized them at all. He essayed, then, a sort of grim joke, muttering, “Alas, poor Lowry. I knew him, Horatio—”

  He tried to laugh at himself and failed. He could feel his nerves tautening again; he could hear the echoes of the old mother’s remarks. Cats, hats, rats— Cats, hats, rats. Hats, bats, cats, rats. Hats lead to bats, lead to cats, lead to rats. Rats are hungry, James Lowry. Rats will eat you, James Lowry. Hats, you came here to bats, you go on to cats, you get eaten by rats. Do you still want to find your hat? Hats, bats, cats, rats. Rats are hungry, James Lowry. Rats will eat you, James Lowry.

  Rats will eat you, James Lowry.


  Rats will eat you, James Lowry.

  Rats will eat you, James Lowry.

  Rats will eat you, James Lowry.

  Rats will eat you, James Lowry.

  Rats will eat you, James Lowry.

  Rats will eat you, James Lowry.

  Do you still want to find your hat?

  Do you still want to find your hat?

  DO YOU STILL WANT TO FIND YOUR HAT?

  He threw himself away from the desk and crashed his chair to the floor. The sound of violence gave him some relief, but the second he picked it up—

  Hats, bats, rats, cats. Hats, bats, cats, rats. Hats, hats, hats. Bats, bats, bats, bats. Rats, rats, rats, rats, rats. Hats, bats, cats, hats, rats, hats, bats, rats, cats, hats, rats, bats, cats—

  Do you still want to find your hat, James Lowry?

  “No!”

  “Then,” said a childish treble, “you are the Entity.”

  He glared around his office in search of the owner of the voice. But the office was empty.

  And then Lowry saw a certain movement on the wall before his desk where a bookcase had been taken away, leaving a meaningless pattern of scars upon the plaster. He stared at the place intently and found that it was taking definite shape. First the vague outline of a face, and then, little by little, an extension which began to form as a body. Hair came into being upon the head, and the eyes moved slightly and a hand emerged from the wall to be followed by the rest.

  “I would dislike frightening you,” said the high, musical voice.

  The thing looked like a child not more than four years old, a little girl with long blond curls and shapely, dimpled limbs. She was dressed in a frilled frock, all clean and white, and a white bow was slightly to one side of her head. Her face was round and beautiful, but it was a strange kind of beauty, not altogether childish; the eyes were such a dark blue they were almost black, and deep in them was an expression which was not an innocent child’s, but more a lascivious wanton’s; the lips were full and rich and slightly parted, as though to bestow a greedy lover’s kiss. And like an aura a black shadow stood in globular shape about her. But at a casual, swift glance, it was a little child, no more than four, naïve and full of laughter. The lewd eyes lingered caressingly upon Lowry’s face as she perched herself upon the top of his desk.