Out of My Mind Read online

  “I ought to make you eat those words,” I said. “Write ’em out and make you eat ’em, one by one. But I’d like to think you’re grieving for Rock as badly as I did.”

  “You’re smooth, Mr. Wise,” he said. He wasn’t quite so sure of himself now. “But you didn’t care for Jack. He wasn’t anything to you.”

  “Nothing to me? Laurie, you watch what you’re saying or I’ll come after you, gun or no gun, and beat the truth into your backside. You know I got closer to Rock than—”

  “His name wasn’t Rock. I’m not talking about anyone called Rock. You made up Rock Careless and hung the name on a guy who came handy. A guy called Jack Suggs, who was my brother. I didn’t say that Rock wasn’t anything to you. Rock was just about everything, I guess. Meal ticket, rent, carfare—a walking bank, especially when he was out of the way and the story of his death boosted those record sales. And not just cash, you …” He had to swallow. “I looked around the apartment when I came in. I saw that room in back.”

  “It was his.”

  “You mean he was yours.” He spat accurately into the middle of a handwoven Turkey rug beside his chair. “I ought to shoot you just for that, making my brother into a—hell, I never learned what word was bad enough to fit.”

  He looked sick. I felt a stir of hope. Provided that silly emotional reaction didn’t drive him to some deed of symbolic desperation, it too was working on my side.

  I said, “Go ahead, then.”

  He blinked at me, suddenly uncertain.

  “Go ahead!” I repeated. “Want to shoot your brother too? This brother you’re so crazy about you’re all set to avenge him nobly, thinking this’ll set you up alongside him in the eyes of the world? Nuts.”

  “What do you mean?” His eyes were narrow with alarm.

  That’s it! That’s the weak spot!

  “Isn’t this what you’re after, Laurie? You want to kill the brother who made his way in the world—the brother who liked you and the rest of his family so much he wouldn’t admit to having any kin—the brother who didn’t see why the hell he should give any of what he’d earned for himself to people who’d never given him anything, even though they were his relatives. But you can’t kill him. He’s dead. He’s immortal! So you decided you’d kill his best friend instead.”

  His mouth was working. I leaned forward on my chair and flung the last words at him like knives. “Jack Suggs didn’t die by being mobbed and broken in a crowd of fans. Jack Suggs killed himself because he hated being Jack Suggs. He wanted to be Rock Careless—he liked being Rock Careless—and I was all the family Rock Careless ever had.”

  Swaying, he closed his eyes. Then, remembering he had to watch me and keep the gun leveled, he snapped them open again. He said, “Shit. I went over this place before you got back. You didn’t care about Rock, either, ’cept for what you had out of him. You talk slick, but it doesn’t hang together.”

  He laughed. It was an unpleasant noise, fit to set the teeth on edge.

  “He wasn’t any part of your world, Mr. Wise. This—” He waved his left hand around the apartment. “This doesn’t belong with Jack, or with Rock Careless either. You’re a rich egghead who didn’t give a cuss about your human play-pretty. He sang good, played guitar good—same as hundreds of others. You figured you could live off his back. And you did. And when you’d made plenty you saw how you could make some more and be rid of Jack as well. You pulled him to pieces. Did he scream? They said in the paper you couldn’t hear for the crowd of fans.”

  “Jack Suggs left home the earliest moment he could,” I said. I was having difficulty keeping the scorn in my voice. “He didn’t have a cent, but he wanted the hell out and nothing else mattered. He and I stayed together for going on three years. By then he had a quarter-million in the bank in his own name. You know that—since he didn’t make a will, it was carved up among his kinfolk, and I guess there’s a piece of it coming to you if you don’t get yourself to the electric chair through playing with guns once too often. Rock Careless had a quarter of a million; he could have walked out any day. He stuck with me. You figure it. I say I was his best friend, and he’d have said the same.”

  “Mister,” the boy said, his voice beginning to give at the edges like mine, “I don’t agree. You’re a smooth liar, but I went over this place like I told you. I don’t find anything to say he was a friend of yours. I don’t find his picture any place. I don’t find his disks in your rack along with the longhair music. I say you didn’t give a damn for him and you killed him because you—”

  “Jesus!” I said. “Listen, kid. They sent me back from the hospital after I got through mending the two ribs the crowd broke, and I went over this place and I took down the pictures and I smashed the disks because I didn’t want to be reminded every time I turned around that he was dead.”

  This one worked.

  The waxy face melted. The mask distorted. The dangerous young man with a gun seemed to fade from the room, leaving only a puzzled, trembling boy with a gun. I was in command.

  “You didn’t get all broken up over being reminded when I made you look at those pictures,” he said after a pause.

  “No,” I admitted. “No, I’m finished with getting upset about it, and I’ll tell you why.” I reached to my pocket, and the gun jerked.

  “I’m not trying to pull anything!” I said sharply. “I was going to offer you a cigarette, OK?”

  I took out the pack and half rose from the chair, as naturally as I could, to reach it to him. He hesitated, then took the cigarette. I gave him a light with a table lighter patterned after the sort of lamp Aladdin is generally shown using.

  He let out the first of the smoke, closing his eyes. He said, “Damn you, Mr. Wise…! I know what you say about Jack hating his family is so, and I guess it did start before you ever met him, but—Christ, do I have to like you when I know what you did to him?”

  “You’re still saying I tore him to bits?” I suggested, and tensed for the answer.

  After a moment he gave a negative sort of shrug, and I was so relieved I nearly showed it. Fortunately, even if I had done so it wouldn’t have mattered; his eyes had strayed to one of the fine pieces of ancient votive ware displayed on tables against the wall—a statue of Dionysus-Bacchus portrayed in one of his most characteristic postures, seated on a pillarlike base of unmistakable symbolism.

  One of these days, I thought, someone was going to sit in this apartment and look at my Bacchus and talk about the death of Rock Careless, and that someone would be well enough educated to put two and two together. Not Laurie Suggs, though. Not an ignorant country-born youth.

  He said eventually, “That thing makes me want to puke.”

  “Rock used to find it amusing,” I said. “I was going to tell you why I got over mourning after Rock. I’d like you to hear my reasons—I think afterwards you might feel a bit more kindly disposed towards me.”

  He curled his lip and went on staring at the statuette.

  “You know,” I said reflectively, “what happened to Rock wasn’t just what the papers said—a singer mobbed by his fans, accidentally injured in the crush. It was more than that. It was his apotheosis, in the literal sense.”

  The burning eyes turned to me again. He said, “Stuff your three-dollar words.”

  “Apotheosis means making into a god. I said you weren’t able to kill Rock now, because he’s immortal. I mean that literally, and this is something which hasn’t happened for thousands of years, so far as I know. It’s the most tremendous thing that could have happened to him.”

  “You go on like this,” the boy said, “and I’ll start thinking you helped tear him to bits all over again.”

  “Think about what I’m saying instead.”

  A frown furrowed the forehead to which a little color was returning now. “You mean—his being killed was sort of a bigger thing than if he’d gone on living? Like Jimmy Dean? Like Buddy Holly?”

  This Laurie Suggs was a very perceptive youth, I
realized. I was profoundly glad he was also ignorant. I said, “Not exactly, though I admit it was those two who first put me on to this idea. No, the person I had in mind was someone you probably haven’t heard of: Orpheus.”

  “Who was he?”

  “He was a singer and musician who was said to be so—so great that he could charm animals, trees, even mountains with his music. This is probably exaggerated, because he lived at least three thousand years ago, if he actually did live. Myself, I believe he was a real person. And the same thing happened to him that happened to Rock. He played to some women called Bacchantes, worshipers of the god Bacchus, and they were so wild about him they tore him to pieces. And because of this he became a god, too; they founded a religion in his honor called the Orphic Mysteries—a sort of church. I guess you aren’t quite following me.”

  He shook his head, his mouth a little open. He had relaxed enough to rest his heavy gun on his knee. I started to get to my feet. I knew him now, not intimately, but well enough.

  “Move slow!” he rapped, tensing. “What are you going to do? I don’t like this crazy talk about Jack turning into a god!”

  “Oh, it’s the truth,” I said, and chuckled inwardly. “Want me to prove it to you? I’d have thought you’d want to know what a terrific thing it really was when your brother died.”

  I gestured at the door he hadn’t been able to open when he toured the apartment. “Let me get the strong room open, and I’ll prove it to you. You ought to feel proud of your brother.”

  As casually as I could I walked to the armored door and put my fingers on the combination lock. The sound of irregular breathing and the click of tumblers were all that could be heard in the room for long moments. Then I swung the door back and stood aside.

  He didn’t even have time to scream. He loosed one shot, which went wild, and then the panthers had borne him backward to the floor and were taking their sacrifice. While they were at it, I meditated on the curious relationship between the Bacchus cult, that of Orpheus, and these graceful beasts.

  The boy was scrawny, of course, and was not enough to satisfy the panthers; when they had done with him, they would have rent me also, but by the power of the god I subdued them and returned them to their captivity. Then I picked up the smoldering cigarette which had fallen in the middle of the Turkish rug, but not before it had burned a hole.

  I noticed that by chance—or perhaps not by chance—the spurt from the boy’s jugular, released by a slash of panther claws, had drenched my Bacchus and made it run redder than wine. I cleared up all the other traces, but the blood on the statuette, I felt, was better left to dry where it was.

  PREROGATIVE

  A man who said he was God; a man who someone else said was a god; and this one is about a man who other people were quite sure was not God.

  We say, “I’m on the side of the angels!” And treat it as self-flattery, forgetting that when Disraeli coined the phrase he was making a 101 per cent stupid remark. (He was taking the losing side in the debate about evolution.)

  Even now the first tentative applications of Darwin’s century-old theory are being made in the study of mind—the first, as though it’s taken a hundred years to bring people around to the idea that our consciousness may have been acquired by slow degrees, as the skills of our bodies are agreed to have been. Quite respectable philosopher-scientists still storm into print with references to “life force,” with which doubtless “man is not meant to meddle.”

  Meantime, in various laboratories, useful work gets done.

  Amazing.

  * * *

  It was a small and rather sleepy town, called Ditchmarket. Eight hundred years ago it had been rather important; later, there had been a minor clash between Roundheads and Royalists on what was now a school playing field. After that, it was as though Ditchmarket had decided that its destiny was fulfilled and had been content to go to seed while other towns grew to be cities.

  Something of the essence of Ditchmarket was distilled into the oak-paneled, inadequately windowed rooms of the town hall. There was a smell of dust. Doors creaked, objecting to anyone who opened them. The loudest noise that had intruded here for a long, long time was the clashing of the full peal of bells from the tower of St. Swynfrith’s church on the other side of the market square.

  And therefore the tense excitement of today was grating on the nerves of Ditchmarket’s coroner.

  He was a scrawny man of sixty, a doctor, with thin grey hair and wire-rimmed glasses, and he was in a complaining mood. In this town people died natural deaths, so that usually there was no need for an inquest; the last such had been after a fatal road accident, and it had been perfectly simple. But this!

  He rapped with his gavel and looked over his glasses at the audience in the public seats. There were a lot of them. There were persons present he had never expected to see in this depressing room, with its dark woodwork fading to black, its once-cream walls and ceiling turned to sour yellow. There were old women he knew by sight, because once a day they would hobble out of their narrow front doors to call on a neighbour, and once a week they would struggle across the market square to Sunday service at St. Swynfrith’s. Some day, he would know them better. He would be called in to help them die.

  There were men he knew, too: solid farmers dressed in their best but seeming not to have scraped off the clinging traces of the rich black local soil; shopkeepers who ought to have been behind their counters on a weekday; retired people who normally were content to stay the right side of their garden gates. …

  And to these people who were Ditchmarket embodied, he spoke severely, conscious that his voice was too reedy to be authoritative.

  “Silence!” he ordered. “I must make it clear at once that I will not tolerate interruptions of any kind during this inquest. I am not concerned with anything but the evidence of the witnesses. Save your personal opinions for private conversation, but keep them to yourselves in here.”

  The audience sighed. Women exchanged knowing looks and firmed their lips together. Men shrugged and leaned back, crossing their arms and jutting their chins. The coroner rustled through the papers before him.

  “The first witness is Sergeant Hankinson,” he said. “Take the stand, please, sergeant.”

  Burly, peasant-faced, rubicund, the sergeant—sweating in his tight dark uniform—recited the oath in a rapid uncaring manner and followed it in the same breath with his particulars. Then he pulled his notebook from his breast pocket, opened it to the correct page, and took a deep breath.

  “At 4:10 p.m. on Friday last the thirteenth of May—”

  There was a sound from the public seats, between a sigh and a chuckle. The coroner held up his hand to interrupt the witness, and cast a warning glare at the audience. The sound stopped.

  “Proceed, sergeant,” he said. But the sergeant had been put off by the interruption. He had to take another breath and begin afresh.

  “At 4:10 p.m. on Friday last the thirteenth of May I received a telephone call from Dr. Blankenberg at this ’ere research station on the Fogwell Road.” He paused as though gathering strength for the articulation of unfamiliar words. “The Biological—Synthesis—Establishment, that is.” And mopped his face, looking pleased with himself.

  “What did Dr. Blankenberg say?” the coroner prompted.

  “That one of the scientists up there ’ad been found dead in ’is room.”

  “What did you do as a result of this call?”

  “I noted the details down. Leaving the station in charge of young Jones—Constable Jones, I should say—I proceeded on my bicycle to the research station.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “Well, there was this Dr. Welby lying on the floor of ’is bedroom, all scorched and burned.”

  A simultaneous sharp intake of breath from the public seats, which stilled of itself before the coroner could comment on it.

  “Was anyone else there when you arrived?”

  “About seven or eight
people, sir, including Dr. Gordon ’oo’d found Dr. Welby and tried giving artificial respiration.”

  “Was Dr. Blankenberg there?”

  “Yes. ’E said ’e’d come along after sending for me.”

  “And—?”

  “After ascertaining whether anything at the scene of the—uh—the mishap ’ad been tampered with, I asked for an ambulance to take the body to the cottage ’ospital. I took measurements before the ambulance came. Also I took statements from those present, including Dr. Gordon, ’oo said—”

  “Thank you, sergeant, but I think we shall let Dr. Gordon speak for himself,” said the coroner testily. Was that enough from this horrible man? He almost permitted himself to think it was; then he recalled one pertinent question he had to get on the record.

  “What was the weather like that afternoon?”

  “Sunny,” said the sergeant promptly. “A bit windy like, but not a cloud to be seen.”

  “Thank you,” said the coroner. “You may stand down—I’ll recall you later if necessary.” He looked down at his papers to avoid the sergeant’s gaze, hurt and reproachful that his period in the limelight had been curtailed, and said, “Dr. Gordon to the stand, please.”

  The audience rustled and stirred as they turned to look at this new witness. He was a fresh-faced young man, under thirty; he wore a college blazer and flannels, and looked as though what he regretted most about being at Ditchmarket was missing his Saturday game of rugger or cricket.

  “You are Dr. David Gordon, of the Biological Synthesis Establishment on the Fogwell Road?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What is your post there?”

  “I’m a biophysicist. I’m doing research into the physical and chemical structure of microorganisms.”

  “Were you well acquainted with the late Dr. Welby?”

  Gordon made a seesawing movement with his hand. “Not very. I only came here six months ago, and my work didn’t bring me into contact with him much. But we got on all right.”