In a sense, the thing never happened. Actually, it would not have happened had not a thundershower been at its height when the four of them came out of the movie.
It had been a horror picture. A really horrible one—not trapdoor claptrap, but a subtle, insidious thing that made the rain-laden night air seem clean and sweet and welcome. To three of them. The fourth—
They stood under the marquee, and Mae said, “Gee, gang, what do we do now, swim or take taxis?” Mae was a cute little blonde with a turned-up nose, the better for smelling the perfumes she sold across a department-store counter.
Elsie turned to the two boys and said, “Let’s all go up to my studio for a while. It’s early yet.” The faint emphasis on the word “studio” was the snapper. Elsie had had the studio for only a week, and the novelty of living in a studio instead of a furnished room made her feel proud and Bohemian and a little wicked. She wouldn’t, of course, have invited Walter up alone, but as long as there were two couples of them, it would be all right.
Bob said, “Swell. Listen. Wally, you hold this cab. I’ll run down and get some wine. You girls like port?”
Walter and the girls took the cab while Bob talked the bartender, whom he knew slightly, into selling a fifth of wine after legal hours. He came running back with it and they were off to Elsie’s.
Mae, in the cab, got to thinking about the horror picture again; she’d almost made them walk out on it. She shivered, and Bob put his arm around her protectively. “Forget it, Mae.” he said. “Just a picture. Nothing like that ever happens, really.”
“If it did—” Walter began, and then stopped abruptly.
Bob looked at him and said, “If it did, what?”
Walter’s voice was a bit apologetic. “Forget now what I was going to say.” He smiled, a little strangely, as though the picture had affected him a bit differently than it had affected the others. Quite a bit.
“How’s school coming, Walter?” Elsie asked.
Walter was taking a premed course at night school; this was his one night off for the week. Days he worked in a bookstore on Chestnut Street. He nodded and said, “Pretty good.”
Elsie was comparing him, mentally, with Mae’s boy friend, Bob. Walter wasn’t quite as tall as Bob, but he wasn’t bad-looking in spite of his glasses. And he was sure a lot smarter than Bob was and would get further some day. Bob was learning printing and was halfway through his apprenticeship now. He’d quit high school in his third year.
When they got to Elsie’s studio, she found four glasses in the cupboard, even if they were all different sizes and shapes, and then she rummaged around for crackers and peanut butter while Bob opened the wine and filled the glasses.
It was Elsie’s first party in the studio, and it turned out not to be a very wicked one. They talked about the horror picture mostly, and Bob refilled their glasses a couple of times, but none of them felt it much.
Then the conversation ran down a bit and it was still early. Elsie said, “Bob, you used to do some good card tricks. I got a deck in the drawer there. Show us.”
That’s how it started, as simply as that. Bob took the deck and had Mae draw a card. Then he cut the deck and had Mae put it back in at the cut, and let her cut them a few times, and then he went through the deck, face up, and showed her the card, the nine of spades.
Walter watched without particular interest. He probably wouldn’t have said anything if Elsie hadn’t piped up, “Bob, that’s wonderful. I don’t see how you do it.” So Walter told her, “It’s easy; he looked at the bottom card before he started, and when he cut her card into the deck, that card would be on top of it, so he just picked out the card that was next to it.”
Elsie saw the look Bob was giving Walter and she tried to cover up by saying how clever it was even when you knew how it worked, but Bob said, “Wally, maybe you can show us something good. Maybe you’re Houdini’s pet nephew or something.”
Walter grinned at him. He said, “If I had a hat, I might show you one.” It was safe; neither of the boys had worn hats. Mae pointed to the tricky little thing she’d taken off her head and put on Elsie’s dresser. Walter scowled at it. “Call that a hat? Listen, Bob, I’m sorry I gave your trick away. Skip it; I’m no good at them.”
Bob had been riffling the cards back and forth from one hand to the other, and he might have skipped it had not the deck slipped and scattered on the floor. He picked them up and his face was red, not entirely from bending over. He held out the deck to Walter. “You must be good on cards, too,” he said. “If you could give my trick away, you must know some. G’wan, do one.”
Walter took the deck a little reluctantly, and thought a minute. Then, with Elsie watching him eagerly, he picked out three cards, holding them so no one else could see them, and put the deck back down. Then he held up the three cards, in a V shape, and said, “I’ll put one of these on top, one on bottom, and one in the middle of the deck and bring them together with a cut. Look, it’s the two of diamonds, the ace of diamonds, and the three of diamonds.”
He turned them around again so the backs of the cards were towards his audience and began to place them one on top the deck, one in the middle, and—
“Aw, I get that one,” Bob said. “That wasn’t the ace of diamonds. It was the ace of hearts and you held it between the other two so just the point of the heart showed. You got that ace of diamonds already planted on top the deck.” He grinned triumphantly.
Mae said, “Bob, that was mean. Wally anyway let you finish your stunt before he said anything.”
Elsie frowned at Bob, too. Then her face suddenly lit up and she went across to the closet and opened the door and took a cardboard box off the top shelf. “Just remembered this,” she said. “It’s from a year ago when I had a part in a ballet at the social centre. A top hat.”
She opened the box and took it out. It was dented and, despite the box, a bit dusty, but it was indubitably a top hat. She put it, on its crown, on the table near Walter. “You said you could do a good one with a hat, Walter,” she said. “Show him.”
Everybody was looking at Walter and he shifted uncomfortably. “I—I was just kidding him, Elsie. I don’t—I mean it’s been so long since I tried that kind of stuff when I was a kid, and everything. I don’t remember it.”
Bob grinned happily and stood up. His glass and Walter’s were empty and he filled them, and he put a little more into the girls’ glasses, although they weren’t empty yet. Then he picked up a yardstick that was in the corner and flourished it like a circus barker’s cane. He said, “Step this way, ladies and gentleman, to see the one and only Walter Beekman do the famous non-existent trick with the black top hat. And in the next cage we have—”
“Bob, shut up,” said Mae.
There was a faint glitter in Walter’s eyes. He said, “For two cents, I’d—”
Bob reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of change. He took two pennies out and reached across and dropped them into the inverted top hat. He said, “There you are,” and waved the yardstick-cane again. “Price only two cents, the one-fiftieth part of a dollah! Step right up and see the greatest prestidigitatah on earth—”
Walter drank his wine and then his face kept getting redder while Bob went on spieling. Then he stood up. He said quietly, “What’d you like to see for your two cents, Bob?”
Elsie looked at him open-eyed, “You mean, Wally, you’re offering to take anything out of—”
“Maybe.”
Bob exploded into raucous laughter. He said, “Rats,” and reached for the wine bottle.
Walter said, “You asked for it.”
He left the top hat right on the table, but he reached out a hand toward it, uncertainly at first. There was a squealing sound from inside the hat, and Walter plunged his hand down in quickly and brought it up holding something by the scruff of the neck.
Mae screamed and then put the back of her hand over her mouth and her eyes were like white saucers. Elsie keeled over quietly on the studio couch in a dead faint; and Bob stood there with his cane-yardstick in midair and his face frozen.
The thing squealed again as Walter lifted it a little higher out of the hat. It looked like a monstrous, hideous black rat. But it was bigger than a rat should be, too big even to have come out of the hat. Its eyes glowed like red light bulbs and it was champing horribly its long scimitar-shaped white teeth, clicking them together with its mouth going several inches open each time and closing like a trap. It wriggled to get the scruff of its neck free of Walter’s trembling hand; its clawed forefeet flailed the air. It looked vicious beyond belief.
It squealed incessantly, frightfully, and it smelled with a rank fetid odor as though it had lived in graves and eaten of their contents.
Then, as suddenly as he had pulled his hand out of the hat, Walter pushed it down in again, and the thing down with it. The squealing stopped and Walter took his hand out of the hat. He stood there, shaking, his face pale. He got a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped sweat off his forehead. His voice sounded strange: “I should never have done it.” He ran for the door, opened it, and they heard him stumbling down the stairs.
Mae’s hand came away from her mouth slowly and she said, “T—take me home, Bob.”
Bob passed a hand across his eyes and said, “Gosh, what—” and went across and looked into the hat. His two pennies were in there, but he didn’t reach in to take them out.
He said, his voice cracking once, “What about Elsie? Should we—” Mae got up slowly and said, “Let her sleep it off.” They didn’t talk much on the way home.
* * *
It was two days later that Bob met Elsie on the street. He said, “Hi, Elsie.”
And she said, “Hi, there.” He said, “Gosh, that was some party we had at your studio the other night. We—we drank too much, I guess.”
Something seemed to pass across Elsie’s face for a moment, and then she smiled and said, “Well, I sure did; I passed out like a light.”
Bob grinned back, and said, “I was a little high myself, I guess. Next time I’ll have better manners.”
Mae had her next date with Bob the following Monday. It wasn’t a double date this time.
After the show, Bob said, “Shall we drop in somewhere for a drink?”
For some reason Mae shivered slightly. “Well, all right, but not wine. I’m off of wine. Say, have you seen Wally since last week?”
Bob shook his head. “Guess you’re right about wine. Wally can’t take it, either. Made him sick or something and he ran out quick, didn’t he? Hope he made the street in time.”
Mae dimpled at him. “You weren’t so sober yourself, Mr. Evans. Didn’t you try to pick a fight with him over some silly card tricks or something? Gee, that picture we saw was awful; I had a nightmare that night.”
He smiled. “What about?”
“About a—Gee, I don’t remember. Funny how real a dream can be, and still you can’t remember just what it was.”
Bob didn’t see Walter Beekman until one day, three weeks after the party, he dropped into the bookstore. It was a dull hour and Walter, alone in the store, was writing at a desk in the rear. “Hi, Wally. What you doing?”
Walter got up and then nodded toward the papers he’d been working on. “Thesis. This is my last year premed, and I’m majoring in psychology.”
Bob leaned negligently against the desk. “Psychology, huh?” he asked tolerantly. “What you writing about?”
Walter looked at him a while before he answered. “Interesting theme. I’m trying to prove that the human mind is incapable of assimilating the utterly incredible. That, in other words, if you saw something you simply couldn’t possibly believe, you’d talk yourself out of believing you saw it. You’d rationalize it, somehow.”
“You mean if I saw a pink elephant I wouldn’t believe it?”
Walter said, “Yes, that or a—Skip it.” He went up front to wait on another customer.
When Walter came back, Bob said, “Got a good mystery in the rentals? I got the week-end off; maybe I’ll read one.”
Walter ran his eye along the rental shelves and then flipped the cover of a book with his forefinger. “Here’s a dilly of a weird,” he said. “About beings from another world, living here in disguise, pretending they’re people.”
“What for?”
Walter grinned at him. “Read it and find out. It might surprise you.”
Bob moved restlessly and turned to look at the rental books himself. He said, “Aw, I’d rather have a plain mystery story. All that kind of stuff is too much hooey for me.” For some reason he didn’t quite understand, he looked up at Walter and said, “Isn’t it?”
Walter nodded and said, “Yeah, I guess it is.”