Authors: Clifford D. Simak
Awkwardly, or at least awkwardly on my part, we talked of inconsequential things. Adams seemed wholly at ease although his face and hands were nervous.
Shortly the talk veered to his studies and I gathered from his words that he had dropped all other phases of his research to concentrate upon the punishments and tortures man had inflicted upon his fellows from the advent of historic time.
Hunched in his chair, staring at the wall, he called up the bloody sadism that had left a trail of blood and pain across the centuries, linking the old Egyptian king whose proudest title had been the Cracker of Foreheads to the man whose smoking revolver piled the dead knee-deep in Russian cellars.
He knew in detail how men had been staked out for the ants, how others had been buried to the neck in desert sands, and he assured me most solemnly that the American Indian had been a past master at the art of burning, that the expert “questioners” of the Inquisition, in this respect at least, had been no more than quasi-efficient bunglers.
He talked of racks and quarterings, of hooks that ripped out a man’s insides—and behind the hard cold words of erudition that he spoke I smelled the smoke and blood and heard the screams and the creaking of the ropes and the clanking of the chains.
But he did not, I am sure, know anything of this.
Then it came, the topic he had been leading up to, the quicksilver problem that slid within his brain, waiting to be grasped and solved—the end product of all the things he knew.
“But they all fall short of perfect,” he said. “There is no such thing as a perfect torture, for always in the end the victim dies or gives in and the torture halts. There is no way of measuring what a man’s resistance is. Sometimes you overdo it and he dies, other times you allow the victim to escape the full rigor of the execution for fear that he has reached the limit of endurance, which he hasn’t.”
“A perfect torture!” I said and I know my words must have been both a question and an exclamation point. For even then I didn’t understand. Even then I couldn’t understand why a man should be interested, even academically, in a perfect torture. Such interest seemed to verge on madness.
It was fantastic—sitting there in that old Wisconsin farmhouse with the first winter’s storm raging against the windows, to hear a man talk calmly and learnedly about the technical problems of efficient torture past and present.
“Perhaps in hell,” said Foster Adams, “but certainly not on earth. For human beings are crude things and the things they do are crude.”
“Hell?” I asked him. “Do you believe in hell? A literal hell?”
He laughed at me and from the laugh I could not tell whether he did or not.
I looked at my watch and it was almost midnight. “I must be going now,” I said. “The storm seems to have slackened a bit.”
But I made no move to rise from my chair, for certainly, I thought, a hint as broad as that would get me an invitation for the night.
Adams said merely, “I’m sorry you must go. I had hoped you could stay another hour.”
I was so angry as I trudged down the hill, back to the car, that I did not hear the feet behind me for some time. They must, I am sure, have followed me from the house but I did not hear them.
The storm had slackened and the wind was dying down and here and there the stars were shining through the scudding clouds.
I was halfway down the hill before I heard the footsteps, although thinking back upon it, I am certain that I had been hearing them for some time before I became aware of them. And hearing them, I knew they were made not by man but by some animal, for I could hear the click of hoofs and the cracking of hocks as they skidded on the ice that lay beneath the snow.
I stopped and swung around but there was nothing on the road behind me, although the footsteps kept coming on. But when they had drawn close they stopped and waited, only to start up again as soon as I went on, following me down the hill, letting me set the pace, keeping just out of sight.
A cow, I thought, although that seemed strange, for I was sure that Adams had no cow and cows as a rule do not wander down a road on a stormy night. And the hoofbeats too were not those of a cow.
I stopped several times and once I shouted at the thing that followed and after the third or fourth time I realized it no longer followed me.
Somehow I got the car turned around. Before I reached the main highway the machine bogged down three times but by dint of good luck and some profanity I got moving again. The highway was easier traveling and I reached home shortly after dawn.
Three days later I had a letter from Adams that was a half apology. He had been overworked, he said, and not quite himself. He hoped that I would overlook any eccentricity. But he did not mention his lack of hospitality. I presume that came under the heading of “eccentricity.”
It was almost a year before I saw him again. By roundabout fashion I learned that his old manservant had died and that now he lived alone. I thought about him often, feeling that he must be lonely, for the servant had been, it seemed, his only human contact. But I was still a little put out by the snowstorm incident and I made no move to visit him again.
Then I got a second letter, really no more than a note. He indicated that he had something of interest to show me and that he would feel obliged if I would stop by the next time I happened to be in his section of the country. There was no word of the manservant’s death, no indication that Adams was lonely for human companionship, nothing to hint that his life was not exactly the same as it had been before. Terse, businesslike, the note made its point and that was all.
I waited a decent interval, for I was determined on two things—that I would demonstrate to my own satisfaction that the man had no hold upon me and that I would not rush off quickly at his summons. I felt the need to demonstrate toward him a certain degree of coolness for his shabby treatment of me that November night.
But finally I went and the house was the same as before except that it looked slightly shabbier and the cellar door had completely rotted and fallen in and another shutter or two had dropped from the windows.
Adams let me in and I was shocked at the change in him. He was unshaven and his beard was turning grey in spots. His hair hung down over his collar and his hands were unwashed with thick lines of black beneath broken fingernails. His collar and cuffs were ragged and his coat was threadbare. Splotches of dried egg had dribbled down his chin and spattered upon his shirt. He wore scuffed carpet slippers which made a swishing scraping noise as he walked along the hall.
He greeted me with the same aloofness as always and led me to the parlor, which seemed darker and mustier than ever before. Although his eyes were bright and his voice as firm as ever there was a fumbling attitude about him, a faint unsureness in his speech and manner.
He complimented me upon my novel and mentioned that he was gratified to see I had made good use of the information he had been able to supply me. But from the way he talked about it I felt sure he had not read the book.
“And now,” he said, “I was wondering if you would mind looking over something
I
have written.”
There was nothing I could do but indicate my willingness.
He shuffled to an old and battered rolltop desk. From it he took a heavy manuscript, tied with cord. “The facts are there,” he said, “but I am poor at the tricks of writing. I wonder if you …”
He waited for me to say it and I did. “I’ll look it over,” I told him. “If I can be of any help I’ll do it gladly.”
I was about to ask him about the subject matter when he asked me if I had heard about his servant. I told him I had heard that the old man had died.
“That’s all?” he asked.
“That’s all,” I said.
Adams sat down heavily in his chair. “He was found dead,” he told me, “and I understood there have been some lurid stories making the rounds of the neighborhood.”
I was about to reply when a sound froze me in the chair. Something was sniffing at the door that opened on the porch.
Adams must not have heard it—either that or he must have heard it so often on previous occasions that he no longer paid attention to it, for he went on talking. “They found him out in the north pasture, at the end of the ridge. He was rather badly mangled.”
“Mangled!” I whispered and I couldn’t have spoken another word nor uttered it aloud had I been paid for it, for the creature was back at the door again, sniffing and snorting. At any moment I expected to hear the sound of nails clawing at the wood.
“Some animal must have got to him before he was found,” said Adams.
I sat there, gooseflesh coming out on me, listening to the thing sniffing up and down the door crack. Once or twice it whined. But Adams still did not hear it or pretended not to hear it, for he went on talking, telling me about the manuscript.
“It’s not completed,” he said. “There is a final chapter, but I’ll have the information soon and then I can finish it. There’s just a little more research, just a little more. I am very, very close.”
Now, for the first time, I saw it although I must have been staring at it ever since I came into the room—the thing upon the wall that was not the way it should be.
Now, for the first time, I saw it plainly and knew it for what it was—a crucifix turned upside down—turned upside down and nailed to the wall.
I stumbled to my feet, clutching the manuscript beneath my arm, muttering that I must go, that I had forgotten something, that I must go at once.
Behind me, as I left the room, I heard the shrill whimpering eagerness of the animal whining at the door, the sound of claws ripping at the wood, trying to get in.
My scalp was crawling and I know I must have run. Even now, thinking back on it, I have no apology to make. For the sounds at the door were sounds of fear deep graven in Man’s soul, reaching back to the dim obscurity of the days when Man crouched in a cave and listened to the padding and snuffling and the whining of the things outside in the dark.
I reached the car and stood there, one hand on the door, ready to get in. Now that I had reached safety I suddenly was brave. I saw that the house was nothing more than an old farmhouse, that there was nothing in the world to be afraid of either in or out of it.
I opened the door, walked over and put one foot on the car’s running-board. As I did I glanced downward and it was then I saw the tracks. Tracks like those a cow would make but smaller, more like the tracks of a goat perhaps. I wondered for a moment if Adams might keep goats and I knew instinctively that he didn’t. Although it was entirely possible that some animals from adjoining farms might have broken through a fence and wandered here.
Now I saw that the barren trampled ground was a solid network of those cloven tracks and I remembered the night of the storm when something that sounded like a creature with hoofs had trailed me down the road.
I got into the car and slammed the door behind me and as if the sound of the slamming door were a signal a dog came around the corner of the house. He was big and black and sleek and as he walked I saw the muscles knotting and flowing beneath his shining hide. There was a sense of strength and speed about him as he slouched along.
He turned his head toward me and I saw his eyes. I shall not forget them—ever. They were filled with a terrible evil, an utter cynicism, and they were not a dog’s eyes.
I stepped on the starter and put the accelerator to the boards. Ten miles later I finally stopped my shaking.
Home at last, I broke out a bottle and sat in the late autumn sunlight on the porch, drinking steadily and by myself, something I had never done before but have done often since that day.
When darkness fell, I went indoors and looked through Adams’ manuscript, and it was the very thing that I had expected. It was a history of torture and of punishment, all the vast historic evidence of man’s inhumanity to man. There were sketches and drawings and minute specifications concerning the construction and operation of every infernal machine the mind of man had been able to invent. The development of torture was traced with studious exactitude and each method was discussed in its many variations, with all the little trivial details of procedure carefully annotated.
And there were tortures listed that are very little known and almost never spoken of and scarcely fit to print.
Skimming through the pages I came to Chapter XLVIII and I saw that the writing ended there, that there was only the beginning of a paragraph upon the page.
It read—
But the ultimate torture, the torture that goes on and on, eternally, always just short of madness and of death, is found only in the depths of Hell and until now no mortal being has ever held the knowledge, prior to death, of the torments of the Pit …
I laid the manuscript on the table and reached for the bottle. But the bottle was empty and I hurled it across the room and it struck the fireplace and was smashed into flying shards that twinkled in the lamplight. I sat hunched in my chair and felt the hairy hands of Hell stretch out for me and not quite reach me and the perspiration ran down my body and my heart was in my throat.
For Adams knew—he either knew or meant to know. He had said that there was just a little research needed for him to complete the book, just a little information he still must get. And I remembered the tracks out in the yard and the dog with eyes that were not a dog’s eyes and the creature, possibly the dog, that had been scratching at the door during my visit.
I sat there for a long time but finally I got out of the chair and went to my desk. From a drawer I took a gun that had been there for a long time and I checked its action and saw that it was loaded. Then I got out the car and drove like a madman down the night road toward a madman’s retreat.
Scudding clouds covered the dying moon that lay above the western ridges when I reached the Smith farmhouse and the house itself reared up like a ghostly creation in the pre-dawn silence that lay across the hills.
Nothing stirred and there were no lighted windows. The wind came fresh and cold across the river valley and there was frost upon the fields. The porch boards creaked as I crossed them and knocked at the door—but there was no answer. I knocked again and yet again and there was still no answer, so I turned the knob and the door came softly open.