The Toynbee Convector

Much money for a few hours’ whim, but what the hell. He opened a cab door, slung his suitcase in, and said:

“Green Town and return!”

The driver broke into a splendid smile and flipped the meter-flag, even as Emil Cramer leaped into the back seat and slammed the door.

Green Town, he thought, and—

What?

My God, he thought, what made me remember that on a fine spring afternoon?

And they drove north, with clouds that followed, to stop on Green Town’s Main Street at three o’clock. He got out, gave the taxi driver fifty dollars as security, told him to wait, and looked up.

The marquee on the old Genesee Theater in blood red letters, said: TWO CHILLERS. MANIAC HOUSE, DOCTORDEATH. COME IN. BUT DON’T TRY TO LEAVE.

No, no, thought Cramer. The Phantom was better. When I was six, all he had to do was stiffen, whirl, gape, and point down into the camera with his ghastly face. That was terror!

I wonder, he thought, was it the Phantom then, plus the Hunchback, plus the Bat that made all of my childhood nights miserable?

And, walking through the town, he gave a quiet laugh of remembrance…

How his mother would give him a look over the morning cornflakes: What happened during the night? Did you see it? Was it there, up in the dark? How tall, what color? How did you manage not to scream this time, to wake your father: what, what?

While his father, from around the cliff of his newspaper, eyed them both, and glanced at the leather strop hung near the kitchen washstand, itching to be used.

And he, Emil Cramer, six years old, would sit there, remembering the stabbing pain in his small crayfish loins if he did not make it upstairs in time, past the Monster Beast lurking in the attic midnight of the house, shrieking at the last instant to fall back down like a panicked dog or scorched cat, to lie crushed and blind at the bottom of the stairs, wailing:

Why? Why is it there? Why am I being punished? What have I done?

And crawling, creeping away in the dark hall to fumble back to bed and lie in agonies of bursting fluid, praying for dawn, when the Thing might stop waiting for him and sift into the stained wallpaper or suck into the cracks under the attic door.

Once he had tried to hide a chamberpot under the bed. Discovered, it was thrown and shattered. Once, he had run water in the kitchen sink, and tried to use it, but his father’s radio ears, tuned, heard, and he rose in a shouting fury.

Yes, yes, he said, and he walked through the town on a day becoming storm colored. He reached the street on which he had once lived. The sun turned off. The sky was all winter dusk. He gasped.

For a single drop of cold rain struck his nose.

“Lord!” he laughed. “There it is. My house!”

And it was empty and a for sale sign stood out by the sidewalk.

There was the white clapboard front, with a large porch to one side and a smaller one out front. There was the front door and, beyond, the parlor where he had lain on the foldout bed with his brother, sweating the night hours, as everyone else slept and dreamed. And to the right, the dining room and the door that led to the hall and the stairs that moved up into eternal night.

He moved up the walk toward the side porch door.

The Thing, now, what shape had it been, and color and size? Did it have a smoking face, and grotto teeth and hellfire-burning Baskerville eyes? Did it ever whisper or murmur or moan—?

He shook his head.

After all, the Thing had never really existed, had it?

Which was exactly why his father’s teeth had splintered every time he stared at his gutless wonder of a son! Couldn’t the child see that the hall was empty, empty!? Didn’t the damned boy know that it was his own night mare movie machine, locked in his head, that flashed those snowfalls of dread u

p through the night to melt on the terrible air?

Thump-whack! His father’s knuckles cracked his brow to exorcise the ghost. Whack-thump!

Emil Cramer snapped his eyes wide, surprised to find he had shut them. He stepped up on the small porch.