Dare We Share Some Spooky Stories?

[Spookie Monster]

Welcome to the festivities, Blanc de Neige, and many thanks to you all for bringing the heebie-jeebies!

In my first post in this season's round of storytelling I quoted Percy Bysshe Shelley's famous poem "Ozymandias," which concerns the transience of worldly accomplishments and the emptiness of vanity.  I presume that most of you are familiar with it; I featured it in our 2015 round, in fact.  Did you know, though, that Shelley actually wrote the poem as a response to a mutual writer's challenge?  And, further, that his competitor, so to speak -- poet Horace Smith -- penned a poem with an identical theme?  For inspiration the two men selected a line from Bibliotheca historica, by Greek historian Diodorus Siculus:

King of Kings Ozymandias am I.  If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work.

and while Shelley proceeded to write "Ozymandias," Smith proceeded to write... well, "Ozymandias."


Ozymandias

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows: --
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
The wonders of my hand." -- The City's gone, --
Naught but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder, -- and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.


How many now remember Smith's fine, ominous poem, do you think?

Spel

[Spookie Monster]

And in my second post in this season's round of storytelling I mentioned radio pioneer Frank Edwards.  Now, as you may have noticed, I'm trying like the dickens to make it a tradition to include an old radio show in each round.  You can listen to the Quiet Please episode "The Thing on the Fourble Board" here, for example, and you can listen to the Suspense episode "Ghost Hunt" here.  This time I want to bring you the weird, unsettling Suspense episode "The House in Cypress Canyon."  Pour yourself a glass of Roma wine* and avoid closets for the next half-hour...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_sVt-HX2vw


Our Witches' Sabbath, pregnant with moon, draws nigh.  Do you have a spooky story to share?

Spel


* Unless, of course, you never drink... wine.  (Yes, yes, I made that joke when I introduced "Ghost Hunt," too, but here I'm talking specifically about Roma wine -- that's ahr-oh-em-ey -- Roma wine...)

[Lilias]

Nightcrawlers
by Robert McCammon

“Hard rain coming down,” Cheryl said, and I nodded in agreement.

Through the diner’s plate-glass windows, a dense curtain of rain flapped across the Gulf gas pumps and continued across the parking lot. It hit Big Bob’s with a force that made the glass rattle like uneasy bones. The red neon sign that said BIG BOB’S! DIESEL FUEL! EATS! sat on top of a high steel pole above the diner so the truckers on the interstate could see it. Out in the night, the red-tinted rain thrashed in torrents across my old pickup truck and Cheryl’s baby-blue Volkswagen.

“Well,” I said, “I suppose that storm’ll either wash some folks in off the interstate or we can just about hang it up.” The curtain of rain parted for an instant, and I could see the treetops whipping back and forth in the woods on the other side of Highway 47. Wind whined around the front door like an animal trying to claw its way in. I glanced at the electric clock on the wall behind the counter. Twenty minutes before nine. We usually closed up at ten, but tonight—with tornado warnings in the weather forecast—I was tempted to turn the lock a little early. “Tell you what,” I said. “If we’re empty at nine, we skedaddle. ’Kay?”

“No argument here,” she said. She watched the storm for a moment longer, then continued putting newly washed coffee cups, saucers, and plates away on the stainless-steel shelves.

Lightning flared from west to east like the strike of a burning bullwhip. The diner’s lights flickered, then came back to normal. A shudder of thunder seemed to come right up through my shoes. Late March is the beginning of tornado season in south Alabama, and we’ve had some whoppers spin past here in the last few years. I knew that Alma was at home, and she understood to get into the root cellar right quick if she spotted a twister, like that one we saw in ’82 dancing through the woods about two miles from our farm.

“You got any love-ins planned this weekend, hippie?” I asked Cheryl, mostly to get my mind off the storm and to rib her too.

She was in her late thirties, but I swear that when she grinned she could’ve passed for a kid. “Wouldn’t you like to know, redneck?” she answered; she replied the same way to all my digs at her. Cheryl Lovesong—and I know that couldn’t have been her real name—was a mighty able waitress, and she had hands that were no strangers to hard work. But I didn’t care that she wore her long silvery-blond hair in Indian braids with hippie headbands, or came to work in tie-dyed overalls. She was the best waitress who’d ever worked for me, and she got along with everybody just fine—even us rednecks. That’s what I am, and proud of it: I drink Rebel Yell whiskey straight, and my favorite songs are about good women gone bad and trains on the long track to nowhere. I keep my wife happy. I’ve raised my two boys to pray to God and to salute the flag, and if anybody don’t like it he can go a few rounds with Big Bob Clayton.

Cheryl would come right out and tell you she used to live in San Francisco in the late sixties, and that she went to love-ins and peace marches and all that stuff. When I reminded her it was 1984 and Ronnie Reagan was president, she’d look at me like I was walking cow-flop. I always figured she’d start thinking straight when all that hippie-dust blew out of her head.

Alma said my tail was going to get burnt if I ever took a shine to Cheryl, but I’m a fifty-five-year-old redneck who stopped sowing his wild seed when he met the woman he married, more than thirty years ago.

Lightning crisscrossed the turbulent sky, followed by a boom of thunder. Cheryl said, “Wow! Look at that light show!”

“Light show, my ass,” I muttered. The diner was as solid as the Good Book, so I wasn’t too worried about the storm. But on a wild night like this, stuck out in the countryside like Big Bob’s was, you had a feeling of being a long way off from civilization—though Mobile was only twenty-seven miles south. On a wild night like this, you had a feeling that anything could happen, as quick as a streak of lightning out of the darkness. I picked up a copy of the Mobile Press-Register that the last customer—a trucker on his way to Texas—had left on the counter a half-hour before, and I started plowing through the news, most of it bad: those A-rab countries were still squabbling like Hatfields and McCoys in white robes; two men had robbed a Qwik-Mart in Mobile and been killed by the police in a shoot-out; cops were investigating a massacre at a motel near Daytona Beach; an infant had been stolen from a maternity ward in Birmingham. The only good things on the front page were stories that said the economy was up and that Reagan swore we’d show the Commies who was boss in El Salvador and Lebanon.

The diner shook under a blast of thunder, and I looked up from the paper as a pair of headlights emerged from the rain into my parking lot.

Keep reading...

[Valerian]

An unsettling tale from Long Island of the ghost of an Algonquin maiden:

Lake Ronkonkoma is Long Island’s largest freshwater lake and was for many years a popular summer destination. According to legend, it is also cursed. This body of water is said to be the home of a vengeful spirit that claims one man's life per year.

Supposedly, Ronkonkoma was the name of a Native American princess who fell in love with a white settler who lived near the lake.  Upon their meeting, the princess and the settler immediately fell in love, but their union was forbidden by her father. Every night, they would sneak out to send messages of love to one another. Ronkonkoma would paddle her canoe out to the middle of the lake, where she would then float a message the rest of the way to her lover waiting on the opposite shore. This continued for years, until one day the princess was unable to deal with this arrangement. She sent a final farewell note to her lover. He received it on the shore and minutes later, the canoe washed up in front of him as well. Inside it was the princess’s body — she had died by suicide in the middle of the lake.

Since that day Ronkonkoma has haunted the lake, becoming known to many as the Lady of the Lake. Angered because she wasn’t allowed to love in life, she now drags one man into the lake each year. People say that at least one person has drowned each year in Lake Ronkonkoma for the past 200 years, the large majority of them male. Many others have reported being drawn by some unseen force out to the center of the lake, as if something was trying to drag them in. These souls have been able to resist the pull of the Lady of the Lake, and have been lucky enough to live to report the existence of this strange phenomenon.

[Lilias]

Sunbleached
by Nathan Ballingrud

“We’re God’s beautiful creatures,” the vampire said, something like joy leaking into its voice for the first time since it had crawled under this house four days ago. “We’re the pinnacle of his art. If you believe in that kind of thing, anyway. That’s why the night is our time. He hangs jewels in the sky for us. People, they think we’re at some kinda disadvantage because we can’t go out in the sunlight. But who needs it. The day is small and cramped. You got your one lousy star.”

“You believe in God?” Joshua asked. The crawlspace beneath his house was close and hot; his body was coated in a dense sheen of sweat. A cockroach crawled over his fingers and he jerked his hand away. Late summer pressed onto this small Mississippi coastal town like the heel of a boot. The heat was an act of violence.

“I was raised Baptist. My thoughts on the matter are complicated.”

The crawlspace was contained partially by sheets of aluminum siding and partially by decaying wooden latticework. It was by this latter that Joshua crouched, hiding in the hot spears of sunlight which intruded into the shadows and made a protective cage around him.

“That’s why it’s so easy for us to seduce. God loves us, so the world does too. Seduction is your weapon, kid. You’re what—fifteen? You think seduction is pumping like a jackrabbit in your momma’s car. You don’t know anything. But you will soon enough.”

The vampire moved in the shadows, and abruptly the stink of burnt flesh and spoiled meat greased the air. It had opened a wound in itself, moving. Joshua knew that it tried to stay still as much as it could, to facilitate the healing, but the slowly shifting angles of the sunbeams made that impossible. He squinted his eyes, trying to make out a shape, but it was useless. He could sense it back there, though—a dark, fluttering presence. Something made of wings.

“Invite me in,” it said.

“Later,” Joshua said. “Not yet. After you finish changing me.”

The vampire coughed; it sounded like a snapping bone. Something wet hit the ground. “Well come here then, boy.” It moved again, this time closer to the amber light. Its face emerged from the shadows like something rising from deep water. It hunched on its hands and knees, swinging its head like a dog trying to catch a scent. Its face had been burnt off. Thin, parchment-strips of skin hung from blackened sinew and muscle. Its eyes were dark, hollow caves. Even in this wretched state, though, it seemed weirdly graceful. A dancer pretending to be a spider.

For the second time, Joshua laid himself on the soft earth, a-crawl with ants and cockroaches, centipedes and earthworms, positioning his upper body beyond the reach of the streaming sunlight. The light’s color was deepening, its angles rising until they were almost parallel to the ground. Evening was settling over the earth.

The vampire pressed the long fingers of one charred hand onto his chest, as delicately as a lover. Heat flushed Joshua’s body. Every nerve ending was a trembling candle flame. The vampire touched its lips to his throat; its tongue sought the jugular, the heavy river inside. It slid its teeth into his skin.

A sharp, lovely pain.

Joshua stared at the underside of his home: the rusted pipes, the duct tape, the yellow sheets of insulation. It looked so different from beneath. So ugly. He heard footsteps overhead as somebody he loved moved around inside it, attending to mysterious offices.

Keep reading...

[Spookie Monster]

Thank you very much indeed, Lilias and Valerian!

We started our round of storytelling this season with "Missed trains."  Goodness knows that I've missed a few in my time.  There are some trains that cannot be missed, however, and we here have to catch one of those now.  Maybe there was more to be said; maybe there was more to be done; maybe there were is to dot and ts to cross and loose ends to tie up.  None of that matters anymore, though: The season is bidding us farewell.

Let us begin our end with a haunted caboose.  No, no! -- not that kind of caboose! -- the kind at the end of a train.  Let us begin our end with the end of a train.  I'm taking the following from an article in the ol'-timey Spiritualist journal The Two Worlds -- "Price One Penny."  (You can find a scan of the issue that said article appears in here -- but please be aware that it is a PDF file.)


Apparition of a Brakeman

The account of a Mexican ghost is told by H. Gilmore, assistant manager of the American Jewellery Association, who was formerly conductor of the train which received the visits of the dead brakeman.  It is as follows:

I was conductor of work-train No. 2 on the Sonora rail-road, in Mexico, in 1888.  My train crew consisted of Engineer John Ebertz, Fireman Joe Magill, Head-brakeman Frank Urquidez, Hind-brakeman James Gibbons, and Bill Laguna, foreman of the work-train.  On August 12 I received orders to run to Magdalena and bring up fifteen empty flat-cars.  I left Casita station at 6-30 a.m. and stopped midway between Casita and Imuris station to leave the foreman and his gang, who had to clean the weeds off the track between these two stations, and then continued on to Magdalena.  I left Magdalena about 8 p.m. on the return trip, and when nearing bridge 522, near Imuris, a sudden jolt of the cars threw head-brakeman Frank Urquidez between the cars and he was instantly killed.  We gathered up all that was left of him and continued on our journey.  After due investigation by the Mexican authorities, we were exonerated from all blame.  His remains were buried in Magdalena next day.

Three days afterwards, while we were tied up at Santa Anna station and all hands were asleep, Engineer Ebertz, who had been sleeping on the water-car, suddenly aroused us by coming tearing into the caboose, with a look of terror on his face, and informed us that he had seen the dead brakeman standing over him.  We all laughed at him, and attributed his fright to excessive nervousness and imagination, on account of brooding over the dreadful tragedy.  But the following night, while we were laying over at Casita station, all hands who were in the caboose found it impossible to sleep on account of the strange and dismal sounds and knocking which resounded through the car, coming from different portions of the caboose at odd times.  The following parties were in the caboose at the time: Engineer Ebertz, Fireman Magill, Brakemen Gibbons and Burns (who had taken the dead man's place), Line Repairer Sam Bonsell, and myself.

We were all keeping still as death, when suddenly the engineer exclaimed in a hoarse whisper: "Look!  look!  there he comes!" and sure enough upon casting our eyes in the direction indicated, we beheld the form of the dead brakeman slowly and with measured tread approaching the caboose over the top of the train.  We were horrified, but could not move, so overcome were we with awe or fright -- I cannot describe which.  The ghost approached nearer and nearer until it came within ten feet of us, and took a look at us; then it turned and retraced its steps and disappeared at the end of the last car.

From this time on for about ten days, the form of the dead brakeman could plainly be seen passing over the train from end to end every night, always disappearing at the caboose, and the weird sounds and knockings continued to annoy us, so that the fireman and the wiper of the engine refused to any longer sleep in the caboose.  I therefore determined to change it and substitute another, which I did, and from that time on we received no more visits from the ghost of our dead brakeman.  The caboose now stands condemned in the Guaymas yard, and nobody wants it.

The subject was brought to the attention of the railroad officials, and being authenticated by so many witnesses, they held an investigation at the time, but came to no definite conclusion in regard to it, so they let the matter drop.


Our station appears...

Spel

[Spookie Monster]

We cannot miss our train; neither can we miss our stop.  I urge you now to open your eyes wide and listen to writer Stanley Ellin's world go round in his "Unreasonable Doubt."


Unreasonable Doubt

Mr. Willoughby found a seat in the club car and gingerly settled into it.  So far, he reflected with overwhelming gratitude, the vacation was a complete success.  Not a hint of the headaches he had lived with the past year.  Not a suggestion of the iron band drawing tight around the skull, the gimlet boring into it, the hammers tapping away at it.

"Tension," the doctor had said.  "Physically you're sound as a nut, but you sit over your desk all day worrying over one problem after another until your mind is as tight as a mainspring.  Then you take the problems home and worry them to death there.  Don't get much sleep, do you?"

Mr. Willoughby admitted that he did not.

"I thought so," said the doctor.  "Well, there's only one answer.  A vacation.  And I do mean a real vacation where you get away from it all.  Seal your mind up.  Don't let anything get into it but idle talk.  Don't think about any problems at all.  Don't even try a crossword puzzle.  Just close your eyes and listen to the world go round.  That'll do it," he assured him.

And it had done it, as Mr. Willoughby realized even after only one day of the treatment.  And there were weeks of blissful relaxation ahead.  Of course, it wasn't always easy to push aside every problem that came to mind.  For example, there was a newspaper on the smoking table next to his chair right now, its headline partly revealing the words NEW CRISIS IN -- Mr. Willoughby hastily averted his head and thrust the paper into the rack beneath the table.  A small triumph, but a pleasant one.

He was watching the rise and fall of the landscape outside the window, dreamily counting mileposts as they flashed by, when he first became aware of the voice at his elbow.  The corner of his chair was backed up near that of his neighbor, a stout, white-haired man who was deep in talk with a companion.  The stout man's voice was not loud, but it was penetrating.  The voice, one might say, of a trained actor whose every whisper can be distinctly heard by the gallery.  Even if one did not choose to be an eavesdropper it was impossible not to follow every word spoken.  Mr. Willoughby, however, deliberately chose to eavesdrop.  The talk was largely an erudite discourse on legal matters; the stout man was apparently a lawyer of vast experience and uncanny recollective powers; and, all in all, the combination had the effect on Mr. Willoughby of chamber music being played softly by skilled hands.

Then suddenly his ears pricked like a terrier's.  "The most interesting case I ever worked on?" the stout man was saying in answer to his companion's query.  "Well, sir, there's one I regard not only as the most interesting I ever handled, but which would have staggered any lawyer in history, right up to Solomon himself.  It was the strangest, most fantastic, damnedest thing that ever came my way.  And the way it wound up -- the real surprise after it was supposedly over and done with -- is enough to knock a man out of his chair when he thinks of it.  But let me tell it to you just as it took place."

Mr. Willoughby slid down in his chair, pressed his heels into the floor, and surreptitiously closed the gap between his chair and his neighbor's.  With his legs extended, his eyes closed, and his arms folded peaceably on his chest he was a fair representation of a man sound asleep.  Actually, he had never been more wide awake in his life.

Naturally [the stout man said], I won't use the right names of any of these people, even though all this took place a long time ago.  That's understandable when you realize it involves a murder for profit, beautifully planned, flawlessly executed, and aimed at making a travesty of everything written in the law books.

The victim -- let's call him Hosea Snow -- was the richest man in our town.  An old-fashioned sort of man -- I remember him wearing a black derby and a stiff collar on the hottest days in summer -- he owned the bank, the mill, and a couple of other local interests.  There wasn't any secret among folks as to how much he was worth.  On the day of his death it came to about two million dollars.  Considering how low taxes were in those days, and how much a dollar could buy, you can see why he was held in such high esteem.

His only family consisted of two nephews, his brother's sons, Ben and Orville.  They represented the poor side of the family, you might say.  When their father and mother died all that was left to them was a rundown old house which they lived in together.

Ben and Orville were nice-looking boys in their middle twenties about that time.  Smooth-faced, regular features, much of a size and shape, they could have been a lot more popular than they were, but they deliberately kept apart from people.  It wasn't that they were unfriendly -- any time they passed you on the street they'd smile and give you the time of day -- but they were sufficient unto themselves.  Nowadays you hear a lot of talk about sibling rivalry and fraternal complexes, but it would never fit those two boys.

They worked in their uncle's bank, but their hearts were never in it.  Even though they knew that when Hosea died his money would be divided between them it didn't seem to cheer the boys any.  Fact is, Hosea was one of those dried-out, leathery specimens who are likely to go on forever.  Looking forward to an inheritance from somebody like that can be a trying experience, and there's no question that the boys had been looking forward to that inheritance from the time they first knew what a dollar was worth.

But what they seemed to be concerned with, meanwhile, was something altogether different from banking and money -- something Hosea himself could never understand or sympathize with, as he told me on more than one occasion.  They wanted to be songwriters, and, for all I know, they had some talent for it.  Whenever there was any affair in town that called for entertainment, Ben and Orville would show up with some songs they had written all by themselves.  Nobody ever knew which of them did the words and which the music, and that in itself was one of the small mysteries about them that used to amuse the town.  You can pretty well judge the size and disposition of the place if something like that was a conversation piece.

But the situation was all shaken up the day Hosea Snow was found dead in his big house, a bullet hole right square in the middle of his forehead.  The first I heard of it was when a phone call got me out of bed early in the morning.  It was the County Prosecutor telling me that Ben Snow had murdered his uncle during the night, had just been arrested, and was asking me to come to the jail right quick.

I ran over to the jail half dressed, and was pulled up short by the sight of Ben locked in a cell, reading a newspaper, and seemingly indifferent to the fact that he was on his way to a trapdoor with a rope around his neck.

"Ben," I said, "you didn't do it, did you?"

"They tell me I did," he said in a matter-of-fact voice.

I don't know which bewildered me more -- what he said or the unconcerned way he said it.

"What do you mean?" I asked him.  "And you'd better have a good story to tell me, boy, because you're in serious trouble."

"Well," he said, "in the middle of the night the police and the Country Prosecutor walked in on Orville and me, because Uncle Hosea was killed, and after some talking they said I did it.  When I got tired of them nagging me about it I said, all right, I did do it."

"You mean," I said, "they've got evidence against you?"

He smiled.  "That'll come out in court," he said.  "All you've got to do is call Orville as my witness at the trial, and you won't have any trouble.  I'm not going to testify for myself, so they can't cross-examine me.  But don't you worry any.  Orville'll take care of everything."

I felt a terrible suspicion creeping into my mind, but I didn't let myself consider it.  "Ben," I said, "have you and Orville been reading law books?"

"We've been looking into them," he admitted.  "They're mighty interesting" -- and that was all I could get out of him.  I got even less from Orville when I went over to the bank and tried to talk to him about his testimony.

Considering that, you can imagine my state of mind when we finally came to trial.  The case was the biggest sensation the town had ever known, the courthouse was packed, and here I was in the middle of things with no idea of what I could do for Ben, and Ben himself totally indifferent.  I felt sick every time I got a look at the prosecutor's smug and smiling face.  Not that I could blame him for looking like the cat that ate the canary.  The crime was a brutal one, he and the police had solved it in jig time, and here he was with an airtight case.

In his opening address to the jury he threw the works at them.  The motive was obvious: Ben Snow stood to inherit a million dollars from his uncle's death.  The method was right there on the clerk's desk where everyone could see it: an old pistol that Ben Snow's father had left among his effects years before, and which was found -- one bullet freshly discharged from it -- right in the kitchen where Ben and Orville were drinking coffee when the police broke in on them.  And the confession signed by Ben before witnesses settled things beyond the shadow of a doubt.

The only thing I could do in the face of this was put blind faith in Ben and do what he wanted me to.  I had Orville Snow called as my first witness -- and my only witness, too, as far as I could see -- and then, without any idea of what he was going to say, I put him on the stand.  He took the oath, sat down, straightened the crease in his trousers, and looked at me with the calm unconcern his brother had shown throughout the whole terrible business.

You see, I knew so little about the affair that it was hard to think of even a good opening question for him.  Finally, I took the bull by the horns and said, "Would you please tell the jury where you were on the night of the crime?"

"Glad to," said Orville.  "I was in Uncle Hosea's house with a gun in my hand.  If the police had only gotten to me before they started pestering Ben about this, I could have told them so right off.  Fact is, I was the one who killed uncle."

Talk about sensations in court!  And in the middle of the uproar I saw Ben eagerly signaling me over to him.  "Now, whatever you do," he whispered to me, "don't you ask this trial be stopped.  It's got to go to the jury, do you understand?"

I understood, all right.  I had had my suspicions all along, but for the sake of my own conscience I just didn't want to heed them.  Now I knew for sure, and for all I hated Ben and Orville right then, I had to admire them just a little bit.  And it was that little bit of admiration which led me to play it Ben's way.  With the prosecutor waiting hang-dog for me to ask that the trial be stopped I went back to Orville on the witness stand and had him go ahead with his story as if nothing spectacular had happened.

He told it like a master.  He started 'way back when the desire for his uncle's money had seeped into his veins like a drug, and went along in detail right up to the killing itself.  He had the jury hypnotized, and just to make sure the job was complete I wound up my closing speech by reminding them that all they needed in finding a man innocent was a reasonable doubt of his guilt.

"That is the law of this state," I told them.  "Reasonable doubt.  It is exactly what you are feeling now in the light of Orville Snow's confession that he alone committed the crime his brother was charged with!"

The police grabbed Orville right after the verdict of "Not Guilty" was brought in.  I saw him that evening in the small cell Ben had been kept in, and I already knew what he was going to tell me.

"Ben's my witness," he said.  "Just keep me off the witness stand and let him do the talking."

I said to him, "One of you two killed your uncle, Orville.  Don't you think that as your lawyer I ought to know which of you it was?"

"No, I don't," said Orville, pleasantly enough.

"You're putting a lot of faith in your brother," I told him.  "Ben's free and clear now.  If he doesn't want to testify for you the way you did for him, he gets two million dollars and you get the gallows.  Doesn't that worry you any?"

"No," said Orville.  "If it worried us any we wouldn't have done it in the first place."

"All right," I said,  "if that's the way you want it.  But tell me one thing, Orville, just for curiosity's sake.  How did you decide which one of you should kill Hosea?"

"We cut cards," said Orville, and that was the end of it, as far as I was concerned.

If Ben's trial had stirred up the town, Orville's had people coming in from all over the county.  It was the prosecutor's turn to look sick now when he faced that crowd.  He knew in his bones what was coming, and he couldn't do a blessed thing about it.  More than that, he was honestly outraged at what looked to be an obscene mockery of the law.  Ben and Orville Snow had found a loophole in justice, so to speak, and were on their way to sneaking through it.  A jury couldn't convict a man if it had a reasonable doubt of his guilt; a man couldn't be retried for a crime when a jury has acquitted him of it; it wasn't even possible to indict the two boys together for conspiracy to commit murder, because that was a lesser charge in the murder indictment and covered by it.  It was enough to make any prosecutor wild with frustration.

But this one held himself in check until Ben had finished telling his story to the jury.  Ben told that story every bit as well as Orville had told his at the previous trial.  He made it so graphic you could almost see him there in the room with his uncle, the gun flashing out death, the old man crumpling to the floor.  The jurymen sat there spellbound, and the prosecutor chewed his nails to the quick while he watched them.  Then when he faced Ben he really cut loose.

"Isn't this all a monstrous lie?" he shouted.  "How can you be innocent of this crime one day, and guilty of it the next?"

Ben raised his eyebrows.  "I never told anybody I was innocent," he said indignantly.  "I've been saying right along I was guilty."

There was no denying that.  There was nothing in the record to dispute it.  And I never felt so sure of myself, and so unhappy, as when I summed up the case for the jury.  It took me just one minute, the quickest summing-up in my record.

'If I were sitting among you good people in that jury box,' I said, 'I know just what I'd be thinking.  A heinous crime has been committed, and one of two men in this very courtroom has committed it.  But I can take my oath that I don't know which of them it was, any more than you do, and like it or not I'd know I had to bring in a verdict of "Not Guilty."'

That was all they needed, too.  They brought in their verdict even quicker than the jury had in Ben's case.  And I had the dubious pleasure of seeing two young men, one of them guilty of murder, smilingly walk out of that room.  As I said, I hated them, but I felt a sort of infuriated admiration for them too.  They had gambled everything on their loyalty to each other, and the loyalty had stood the test of fire...

The stout man was silent.  From his direction came the sound of a match striking, and then an eddy of expensive cigar smoke drifted under Mr. Willoughby's nostrils.  It was the pungent scent of the present dissolving the fascinating web of the past.

"Yes, sir," the stout man said, and there was a depth of nostalgia in his voice, "you'd have to go a long way to find a case to match that."

"You mean," said his companion, "that they actually got away with it?  That they found a way of committing the perfect murder?"

The stout man snorted.  "Perfect murder, bosh!  That's where the final, fantastic surprise comes in.  They didn't get away with it!"

"They didn't?"

"Of course not.  You see, when they -- good heavens, isn't this our station?" the stout man suddenly cried, and the next instant he went flying past Mr. Willoughby's outstretched feet, briefcase in hand, overcoat flapping over his arm, companion in tow.

Mr. Willoughby sat there dazed for a moment, his eyes wide open, his mouth dry, his heart hammering.  Then he leaped to his feet -- but it was too late: the men had disappeared from the car.  He took a few frantic steps in the direction they had gone, realized it was pointless, then ran to a window of the car overlooking the station.

The stout man stood on the platform almost below him, buttoning his coat, and saying something to his companion.  Mr. Willoughby made a mighty effort to raise the window, but failed to budge it.  Then he rapped on the pane with his knuckles, and the stout man looked up at him.

"H-o-w?" Mr. Willoughby mouthed through the closed window, and saw with horror that the stout man did not understand him at all.  Inspiration seized him.  He made a pistol of his hand, aimed the extended forefinger at the stout man, and let his thumb fall like a hammer on a cartridge.  "Bang!" he yelled, "Bang, bang!  H-o-w?"

The stout man looked at him in astonishment, glanced at his companion, and then putting his own forefinger to his temple, made a slow circling motion.  That was how Mr. Willoughby last saw him as the train slowly, and then with increasing speed, pulled away.

It was when he moved away from the window that Mr. Willoughby became aware of two things.  One was that every face in the car was turned toward him with rapt interest.  The other was that an iron band was drawing tight around his skull, a gimlet was boring in, tiny hammers were tapping at it.

It was, he knew with utter despair, going to be a perfectly terrible vacation.


And with that we've reached the end of the line.  Thank you again, Lilias, Valerian, and Blanc de Neige; thank you, too, all of you listeners.  I hope that 2020's journey through the Season of the Witch proved, let us say, "bewitching."  Perhaps a year from now we'll once more hear that familiar whistle and find ourselves traveling together through places gusty, chill, damp, and gloomy...

Spel

"Willoughby...  This stop is Willoughby..."