A Puzzle for fools (3 page)

There were only two things for me to think. Either I was catching old Laribee's bug, or else there was something in that room ticking, something quite separate from the sinister sounds in Laribee's broken brain.

Tick, tack — tick, tack!

NEXT MORNING I felt pretty fair considering my hectic night. Jo Fogarty, one-time champion wrestler and now the night nurse's problematic husband, woke me at the usual, ungodly hour of seven-thirty.

As I stumbled out of bed into my slippers, I noticed that the ones lent me by Miss Brush had vanished. The day nurse, too, it seemed, was an early riser.

We all had our daily treatments and mine consisted largely of a thorough pepping up. Dr. Stevens, whose job it was to look after the patients' physical condition as opposed to their mental frailties, had prescribed an extensive course of physio-therapy and massage. He was a pleasant fellow and I didn't hold it against him, but I always felt injured at being dragged to the slaughter before breakfast. That morning I sulked as Fogarty took me down to the physio-therapy room and made me atone, once again, for my years of soaking, with the pin shower, the electrical camel and other outlandish exercises.

Fogarty was one of those half-ugly brutes just past their prime with a sense of humor and a Tarzan attractiveness for the women who like that sort of thing. And quite a lot of them did, judging from the tales he told me. I couldn't help wondering sometimes whether he was equally frank with his grim-faced wife.

For some reason he was crazy to get into show business; stunts and strong-man acts, or something of the sort. I think that was why he liked me, or, at least, played up to me. Anyhow, we had become quite friendly and he told me sanitarium gossip out of school.

While I lay naked on the slab, waving my legs, he started to kid me about the night before.

"Gettin' into Miss Brush's bedroom!" he said. "You’ll have old man Laribee after you if you don't watch out"

"Laribee?"

"Sure, he's nuts about her, asks her to marry him twenty times a day. I figured everyone knew that."

I thought he was being funny, but he convinced me that he was serious. And after all, there was nothing particularly fantastic about it. Usually Laribee was perfectly normal. Last night was the only time I had seen him acting up. He was a widower with a couple of million and a good chance of getting well again. And even if he was hovering around the crazy sixties, he was still young and sane enough to know an attractive girl when he saw one. I was interested to hear Miss Brush's reactions to these proposals, but Fogarty had gone off on another tangent.

"So my sissy brother-in-law threw a headlock on you," he was saying as he kneaded my muscles. "He reckons he's got the leverage even if he don't have the weight. Had the nerve to challenge me for a tumble the other night—me, an ex-champ! But I say, what's the use of chewing up a little guy like that anyway?"

I had a look at his muscles and felt he could chew up anyone, even the steel-cabled Warren. I knew that no love was lost between the two of them and I imagined that, if it came to blows, he could beat up his brother-in-law with one hand tied behind his back. I told him so and he seemed pleased.

"It's kind of nice to have a drunk to look after once in a while; someone who isn't out-and-out cuckoo," he said. "They're more human, if you see what I mean." He gave me a final slap and asked, "How's 'at?"

I said it was fine, and that for the first time since I had been in the place I felt like eating something for breakfast.

And I did. Despite a slight return of jitteriness, I managed to get some cereal down without kidding myself that the milk was rye. Miss Brush, who presided in the dining room as a kind of hygienic hostess, noticed immediately and showed her approval.

"Night life seems to agree with your appetite, Mr. Duluth."

"Yeah," I said. "And I never thanked you for the blanket and the bedroom slippers."

She smiled disarmingly and moved away.

Since my talk with Lenz, I found myself feeling an almost convalescent interest in the people around me. Before, patients and staff alike had just been sombre caricatures on a monotone backcloth. I had been too wrapped up in myself to pay any attention to them. But now I began to figure out the relationships between them and do a bit of wondering. After all, from my own experience I knew that Lenz' "subversive influence" lurked somewhere in the building. Maybe it was tangible. Maybe it was right here in the room. Drunk, sober or convalescent, the detective instinct is as fundamental as birth or sex.

We had small individual tables in the dining room, just two or four at a table to kid us into believing we were on a boat or something and not in the hatch. I ate alone with Martin Geddes, a nice, quiet Englishman who superficially had nothing worse wrong with him than a tendency to talk too much about the Empire, and India, where he had been born.

He was in for a disease which seemed like sleeping sickness, but which his chart called narcolepsy, complicated with cataplexy. He was liable to fall off into a rigid, profound sleep at any moment.

That morning he did not appear for breakfast and, consequently, I had more time and opportunity to observe the others.

From a casual glance it would have been difficult to tell that there was anything wrong with any of us. Laribee was over the way from me. Apart from a slight twitch around his heavy mouth, he might have been any successful Wall Street financier taking breakfast anywhere. But I noticed he was up to his old tricks of pushing away the food and whispering:

"It's no use. I can't afford it. With Steel down below 30, I’ve got to economize—economize."

Miss Brush was watching him with an angelic brightness which almost hid the worried cloud in her deep blue eyes, I remembered what Fogarty had told me and wondered just how much of the day nurse's worry was professional.

Laribee sat at a table with a very beautiful, lustrous young man with perfect tailoring and the mouth of a saint. His name was David Fenwick, and, although usually he was no more peculiar than the average young aesthete, he occasionally heard spirit voices. You could see him suddenly break off in the middle of a sentence to listen to phantom messages which were, to him, far more important than the conversation of his fellow inmates. Spiritualism had gotten him as successfully as spirits had gotten me.

There were about six others, but I only knew a couple of them. Franz Stroubel sat by himself, a fragile, paper-thin little man with a shock of white hair and the eyes of a fawn. He had been in Doctor Lenz’ sanitarium ever since that night six months before when, instead of conducting the Eastern Symphony Orchestra, he had begun to conduct the audience, and later had stood bare-headed in Times Square trying to conduct the traffic. The rhythm of life had become confused in his mind.

As I watched him at the breakfast table, his beautiful hands never stopped moving. There was no other means of telling that he had suffered a setback.

The most popular inmate was Billy Trent, a swell kid who had been hit on the head playing football. It was only a superficial brain lesion. He thought he was serving in a drug store, and he would come up all smiles and eagerness to ask your order. You couldn't resist him. You had to take a chocolate milk shake and a liverwurst on rye. Miss Brush had told me the lesion would heal soon and he would be well again. It made me glad.

After breakfast I began to wonder about the nonappearance of Geddes. I knew that he, like myself, had a bad time nights. I couldn't help thinking that, perhaps, something had happened to him, too.

I asked Miss Brush about it when she conducted us to the smoking room, where we were supposed to digest our breakfasts over the high-brow magazines. She didn't reply. She never did when you asked anything about the other patients. She just struck a match for my cigarette and told me there was a good article on theatrical producing in
Harper's
. To please her, I picked up the magazine and started to read.

Geddes looked pretty shaken when he appeared. He strolled over to me and sat down on the couch. He was one of those thirtyish men who look like Ronald Colman; handsome, groomed, and with a mustache which you felt must be a whole-time job. He had been in America several years but like Rupert Brooke's grave, he was forever England, or, rather, Anglo-India.

I noticed that his hand trembled as he lifted his cigarette for Miss Brush to light. I asked him quite bluntly if he had had a good night. He seemed surprised that I had started the amenities, because I was usually pretty glum.

"A good night?" he echoed in that type of English voice which, in the Lonsdale era, used to set Broadway by the ears. "As a matter of fact, I had a rotten night."

"I had a pretty bad time, too," I said encouragingly. "Maybe I disturbed you."

"There was a bit of a row, but I didn't pay much attention." I felt that he was edging around to say something.

"I guess it's fairly grim for you here," I tried. "After all, you're not a mental salad like the rest of us. Your trouble's more or less physical."

"I suppose it is." He spoke quietly but with a strange faltering in his voice. "You're better off than I am, though. They'll cure you, but none of these doctors seem to know the first thing about narcolepsy. I've read a few medical books and I know as much about it as any of 'em. They say you've got a screw loose in the central nervous system. They know something snaps and you go to sleep fifteen times a day and that if you've got cataplexy, too, you're liable to turn as rigid as a five-bar gate. But they can't do anything about making you well."

He looked at his hands as though he hated them for shaking. "I came here because I heard Stevens and Moreno were having real results with some new drug. For a while I had hopes, but it doesn't seem to do me any good."

"It must be tough," I murmured.

Geddes bit the lip under his mustache and said surprisingly: "Moreno's one of those supercilious blighters. Jolly difficult to tell him anything, if you get me."

I said I got him and showed what I hoped was the correct amount of impersonal interest.

"Listen, Duluth," he said suddenly, "something happened last night and I’ve got to tell someone about it or I'll go off my bean. Of course, you'll say it was one of those damnable nightmares of mine. But it wasn't. I swear I was awake."

I nodded.

"I got off to sleep quite early, and then I woke up. I don't know how late it was, but things were pretty quiet. I was in one of those half dozes when I heard it."

"Heard what?" I asked quietly.

He passed a hand across his forehead with that curious English languidness which is cultivated to conceal any emotion.

"I think I may be going mad," he said in a very slow and deliberate tone. "You see, I heard my own voice speaking quite plainly."

"Good God!" I broke in, suddenly alert.

"Yes, my own voice. And I was saying: 'You've got to get out of here, Martin Geddes. You've got to get out now. There will be murder.'"

He had clenched his fists in his lap and now he turned toward me with a look of sudden terror. His mouth was half open, as though he were about to say something more. But he did not speak. As I watched, I saw the muscles of his face freeze. The mouth locked half open.

The eyes stared. There was a sort of wooden hardness about his cheeks. I had seen him fall asleep several times before, but I had never seen one of these cataplectic trances. It wasn't pretty.

I touched him and his arm was stiff and unhuman, like a sack of cement. I felt suddenly helpless. My fingers started to shake, and went on shaking. It made me realize what a wreck I still was.

Somehow, Miss Brush got onto the situation. She nodded to Fogarty, who was constantly on guard. The attendant hurried forward and picked Geddes up.

Not a muscle of the Englishman's body moved. It was amazing to see a man like that, still in a sitting position when he was being carried across the room. With his dark complexion and wide-open eyes he looked like a solemn Indian fakir giving a demonstration in levitation.

I had returned to the magazine to steady my nerves when the ethereal David Fenwick came up. I saw at once that he had that far-away, ghost look in his huge, deer-like eyes.

"Mr. Duluth," he said, almost in a whisper, "I'm worried. The astral plane is not propitious." He glanced over his shoulder as though eager to make certain there were no phantom eavesdroppers. 'The spirits were about last night. They almost got through to me to warn me. I couldn't see them. But I could hear their voices faintly. Soon I shall be able to take their message."

Before I had time to ask more, he had floated away, gazing in front of him with that dazed, other-world stare.

So Laribee, Geddes, and I were not the only ones who had been disturbed last night. In a sense, it was comforting to have this further proof that my imagination hadn't been playing tricks on me. But even so, I didn't like it. Imaginary voices do not prophesy murder for nothing, not even in a mental hospital.

I picked up
Harper's
again, trying to revive the old theatrical enthusiasm which used to effervesce in my blood, but which now had gone as flat as yesterday's champagne.

The article told me the stage was this and the stage was that. It even threw a bouquet at a play I had done a few years before. Well, what of it? It was a relief to see Billy Trent coming over to me, his young face smiling.

"Hello, Pete," he said, standing in front of me as though there were a soda fountain between us. "What's it to be today?"

I grinned at him. Crazy as he was at the moment, there was something intensely healthy about young Trent with his clear blue eyes and athletic build. You knew it was all the fault of a crack-up on the football field, and you could take it in the spirit of good clean fun.

"What's it to be, Pete?"

"Oh, I don't know, Billy. Give me a couple of nut sundaes. And for the love of God, get yourself a hard-liquor license. The stuff you serve is ruining my stomach."

THE USUAL ROUTINE of the day went on. Discipline at Dr. Lenz' sanitarium was strict, but never obvious. However planned one's schedule might be, it was allowed to progress with a seeming spontaneity. It was faintly reminiscent of the organized fun to which cruise passengers are subjected on board ship.