Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 20, No. 1, January 1975

Enter the Stranger by Donald Olson

There are times, when one escapes into fantasy, that a misty mirage seems to portend a strange destiny.

When the young man with the dream-scarred eyes finally found his way to Windfall, De Vore Goring’s secluded estate, he stood trembling in the rain under the lighted windows, and not even the thunder rumbling over the wooded foothills behind him sounded louder in his ears than the frantic drumming of his own heart, a disturbance caused less by awe than by joyful anticipation, and when he passed through the gate and sounded the bell he did so without a tremor of shyness.

The aged housekeeper looked at him the way most people looked at him, with that eye-squint of uncertainty he’d learned to counteract, as he did now, with a disarmingly boyish smile. He asked for Goring and when the housekeeper wanted to know his name he said merely that he was a friend of Penelope’s.

The woman looked at him oddly for a moment but then responded with a comprehending chirp of approval. “Friend of Penelope’s, are you? Oh, ha-ha, yes, I see. Well, come in, then, come in. I’ll see if he’s still up.”

He glanced behind him before following her inside and in a flash of silvery lightning noticed once more how totally isolated the house was.

She returned in a few moments and conducted him to a room at the head of the stairs, leaving him outside the open door.

With the greedy eyes of a traveler overjoyed to be home again, he tried to take in everything at once: the shelves of books, the huge mahogany desk, the marble fireplace, the picture of the young girl over the mantel, so that it was all a shimmery blur made worse by the tears filming his eyes, those dreamy slate-colored eyes that betrayed the presence of some wound or flaw or sorrow lurking just below the surface of his personality.

There was Goring himself, dear old Uncle Dev, with the familiar white hair and moustache, bushy brows and tame-lion eyes.

Goring waited for his tongue-tied caller to speak. When he did not, he lifted a frail hand from his blanketed lap and beckoned the young man closer.

“I’m Goring. Mr...?”

The visitor stepped eagerly forward to clasp the outstretched hand, somewhat startling Goring, making him feel uncomfortably like St. Peter in the Vatican, fearing for a moment that the fellow might be going to kneel and kiss his toe.

Instead, he moved back as if to give the older man a better look at him and said, with his too-generous smile: “Don’t you recognize me?”

Goring stared, murmured an apology.

“I’m Jack!”

“Jack? Hmm... I’m still afraid...”

“Jack. You know — the Mysterious Stranger!”

Goring’s hand rose to his eyes. “I’m afraid you still have me at a disadvantage, young fellow. An old man’s memory...”

The caller looked more impatient than annoyed. “Gee, I recognized you right away. You’re just like I knew Uncle Dev would be.”

Goring became alert now in a more than socially attentive way. “Wait a minute. You don’t mean you’re — not our Jack.”

As he said this he waved toward a certain shelf of books directly behind the desk. The visitor pounced on them, ran trembling fingers across their brightly jacketed spines.

“Yes! Jack, the Mysterious Stranger. I’m him!”

“Are you indeed? Well, fancy that.” Although truly flabbergasted, a well-trained imagination helped Goring maintain his aplomb.

A blunt-tipped finger plucked one of the volumes from the shelf. “Penelope and the Coral Reef. Wow! That was super. But I don’t see how Penelope could have thought I was one of the had fishermen. I kept trying to warn her about Chang. But she kept running away.”

He raced on in this vein, darting from one book to another, from Penelope and the Deadly Amulet to Penelope and the Enchanted Valley, from Penelope and the Tavisham Ghost to Penelope and the Smugglers’ Revenge, recalling delightedly how in each adventure he had come to Penelope’s rescue.

Goring listened to all this with an emotion so singular he could not have defined it; it was as if one of his characters had magically come to life and burst through the study door to confront him at the very spot where Goring had created him. The emotion was certainly disturbing but not ungratifying. Recognition he’d had, to a degree, but this was in its way the supreme compliment.

The Penelope books, some two dozen of which had been published over the past couple of decades, had grown out of a simple story he’d written to amuse his young niece, based on one of his archaeological expeditions. He would never have tampered with the stories’ formula — his teen-age readers would not have tolerated it — and in each book Penelope would accompany Uncle Dev to some distant spot and be plunged into an exotic, danger-filled adventure. A conventional figure in each of the plots was a shadowy young man named Jack, a Mysterious Stranger who invariably popped up when Penelope was about to be fatally bitten by a cobra, suffocated in a mine cave-in, drowned in a scuttled yacht, or shot in a bandit’s hideout. Any young reader of average intelligence could have told Penelope — Goring had scores of letters to prove it — that ever since The Opal Talisman adventure Jack had been wildly in love with her, yet she remained, book after book, annoyingly oblivious to his affection.

Only now did the visitor become aware that Goring was in a wheelchair.

“Did that bullet wound in The Mandarin’s Hatchet really injure you, sir?”

Goring sighed and was on the point of explaining that nothing more dramatic than degenerative arthritis accounted for his condition when the caprice seized him to humor the lad’s delusion.

Or was the impulse quite that innocent?

It was second nature to Goring to invent fictional plots and already certain elements of a curious scenario may have been shaping themselves in his mind, a mind grown bitter with jealousy and illness.

So he said, “Not really, no. It was that fall in The Temple of the Sun Dragon, remember? When I fell down the thousand and one steps?”

The man who thought he was “Jack” looked sympathetic to the point of tears. Feeling guilty, Goring insisted his visitor tell him more about himself. “I could offer you some refreshments, but I told Mrs. Harkins she could go to bed. And I’m quite helpless, as you see.”

The visitor’s face grew surprisingly hostile. “Is that why Penelope’s going to marry Howard Rashbrooke?”

Goring’s mind, until now only toying with that dangerous scenario, not really believing he could connect those various elements, seized upon the young man’s hostility with furtive delight, as if the key to that shadowy plot had suddenly dropped into his hand.

“Er... no. No, of course not.”

“Because she mustn’t, you know. Rashbrooke’s nothing but a fortune hunter. Can’t you see that?”

The sorrows which had been Goring’s only company ever since Sheila had begun the affair with Harry Lawton, the affair she thought Goring knew nothing about, were momentarily forgotten, the pain no pills could conquer half-forgotten.

“Rashbrooke claims to be in love with Penelope,” he said slyly.

“Penelope can’t love him. She loves me. She always has, ever since I kissed her in The Opal Talisman. She slapped my face, sure. Any decent girl would have done the same thing if a mysterious stranger kissed her. But she never forgot that kiss. No! She can’t marry Rashbrooke. She can’t!”

The young man had jumped to his feet and assumed a pose, legs apart, fists jammed against hips, which Goring recognized as characteristic of Jack. For a moment he felt a bit like Frankenstein and, like Frankenstein, he had passed beyond the point where he might still have abandoned his perilous experiment. It was as if fate had sent him this instrument, this human tool.

Goring implored the visitor to sit down. “You were going to tell me about yourself. How did it begin? I mean, when did you first know?”

“That I was Jack? Gosh, ages ago. When I was still in the orphanage. The other kids, they liked Tom Swift and Nancy Drew, but the minute I read Penelope and the Jade Tiger... well, Jack was me. He looked like me and he was an orphan and he never belonged anywhere. I must have read that book twenty times. And the others... all the others.”

Goring was silent, watching the emotions glide swiftly over his visitor’s young-old face, while outside the window the artillery rumble of thunder drew closer, and rain, like cold-fingered refugees fleeing before the guns, tapped urgently upon the pane. In spite of what he knew he was going to do, Goring was still deeply touched by the young man’s tale, never dreaming that his unambitious labors could have wrought so lastingly vivid an effect upon a childish mind. How dismaying to realize that he had provided another human being with so total an escape into fantasy.

The caller’s voice droned on. “...and when I read The Missing Cipher last month and Penelope actually got engaged to Howard Rashbrooke I knew I had to do something. I couldn’t let it happen. I knew I had to come here and find her and tell her I love her... Where is she, Uncle Dev? Where’s Penelope?”

Goring’s mind was busy with the various aspects of his scenario that must be made coherent and viable.

“Tell me, Uncle Dev. Where is she?”

Where indeed? No motion has she now, no force, she neither hears nor sees... Only her name in real life was Polly, that adored little niece who had died in Goring’s arms, and with her had died the only thing in the world he’d ever truly loved. He had been unable to keep Polly alive, but he could be sure that Penelope, the shadow child of his imagination whose adventures had so enthralled his little niece, would never die.

This reminded him of Sheila and a wave of hatred darkened his face.

“Uncle Dev? Where is Penelope?”

Goring knew it was his last chance to tell the truth, his last chance to scrap the grisly scenario in his mind. And what if he did? What if he were to tell “Jack” that all this time he had been idolizing a dead girl? What effect might such a revelation have on his already clouded mind?

The thunder, closer now, as if the furious armies in the sky were battling above the very roof, seemed to echo the words: “Where is she, Uncle Dev?”

“She’s not home this evening, Jack. She had to go out.”

“With him?”

“No. Not with him. She went to visit a sick friend.”

Sheila, damn her, had insulted his intelligence with the same brazen excuse. A sick friend! Did she think he was senile, that he would swallow as phony an excuse as that? But then, it gave her pleasure to insult his intelligence just as it gave her pleasure to see him sitting in that wheelchair, helpless and vulnerable and so totally at her mercy.

“That’s just like Penelope,” the young man murmured. “Where is she, Uncle Dev? Tell me how to get there.”

“If you found her, what would you do?”

“Why, tell her, of course.”

“That you love her?”

“Yes.”

“And want to marry her?”

“Yes!”

“What if she refused?”

“She wouldn’t. She loves me.”

“But what if she did?”

“I’d kill myself!” All his utterances were as melodramatic as a child’s, and as artlessly sincere.

“Ah, my boy, it’s no good. She has to marry Rashbrooke whether she wants to or not.”

The young man was actually trembling with excitement. “You’re wrong, Uncle Dev! I’ll help her escape. Like I always do.”

“You don’t understand, lad. You don’t know what Rashbrooke is.”

In Goring’s mind the scenario assumed its final shape.

“He’s nothing but a lousy fortune hunter, Uncle Dev.”

“He’s more than that. Much more.” Goring pointed to the manuscript on the desk. “It’s not finished. But read the title.”

A sudden shattering clap of thunder seemed to make the house tremble on its foundation as the young man picked up the manuscript and looked at it, his lips shaping and reshaping the words before speaking them aloud. “Penelope and the Final Escape... I don’t get it, Uncle Dev. Final escape? That doesn’t mean—”

“Marriage will bring Penelope’s adventures to a logical conclusion.”

Not his idea, never his idea; if he’d had anything to say about it Penelope’s adventures would never end, not so long as he had breath in his body. Only he didn’t have anything to say about it; he was powerless to cope with Sheila, the woman who had entered his house for the first time as a hired secretary when arthritis had afflicted him shortly after the fourth Penelope book and who, as his wife two years later, was writing the books herself. No one knew, of course, not even his publisher; she had become an expert at aping Goring’s style. As the royalties had rolled in greater and greater abundance she had grown indifferent to Goring and his suffering and had begun the affair with Lawton almost under his nose, until finally a day had come when she declared that she was sick of Penelope and she had embarked upon The Final Escape, intending to bring the series to a close.

Now Goring wheeled himself to the young man’s side and calmly took the manuscript from his hand. “You remember Anaxos in The Greek Uprising?”

“Sure. He was one of Chang’s men.”

“Well, so is Rashbrooke.”

The effect of this upon his visitor was enough to make Goring lower his eyes in shame even while his heart pounded with excitement.

“But, Uncle Dev, you can’t let her do it!”

Goring spread his hands. “I’m helpless, as you can see. There’s nothing I can do.”

Gradually a sly, deliberate smile swept the anxiety from the young man’s face. “I’m not helpless, Uncle Dev. I can help her get away from Rashbrooke just like I helped her escape from Anaxos.”

Now that he could no longer dismiss it, Goring tried to tell himself that the idea for this monstrous scenario wasn’t really his at all, but something evil and hideous spawned by the Devil of Pain that had made its home in his crippled body.

“You’d be risking your life, Jack. If you were caught they’d never believe you. You know what they’d say, don’t you? That Penelope and Rashbrooke are only figments of the imagination, characters in a book.”

The caller’s smile grew noticeably slier. “That’s what Mrs. Brooks said when I went back to visit her once at the orphanage and told her all about my adventures. She said I was all mixed up. She said they were only characters in a book. And you know what I said, Uncle Dev? I said, if they’re not real, then I’m not real either. She couldn’t argue with that. That stumped her, let me tell you. Because I was right there talking to her and she couldn’t say I wasn’t real.”

The hideousness of what he was doing brought a cold sweat to Goring’s hands. “Go away, boy. While there’s still time. Forget about Penelope.”

“Where is he, Uncle Dev? Tell me where to find Rashbrooke. I’ll take care of him just like I took care of Anaxos.”

Once more his hand darted toward the desk, this time grabbing up a silver letter knife. “I don’t have that Persian dagger I used on Anaxos, but this will do just fine.” He smiled at Goring. “How do I find him, Uncle Dev?”

Goring looked very old and very tired. “You’d never find him. Not unless I called him and told him to come here.”

Tiny flames burned behind the dream-scarred eyes. “Then call him, Uncle Dev. Right now.”

With a curious, passive sense of having delivered himself into the power of an emotion he could neither understand nor resist, Goring picked up the telephone, then paused. “Listen, Jack, while I’m calling him you go downstairs and unlock the front door. Don’t make any noise. We don’t want to wake Mrs. Harkins.”

As soon as the young man was out of the room Goring dialed the number with an aching, stiff-jointed finger. They would be together, of course, Sheila and Lawton. Suppose Sheila were to answer. But of course she didn’t.

“Lawton? It’s me, Goring. I’ve got to see you... Yes, yes, I know what time it is, but it’s important... There’s something I’ve got to tell you. About Sheila. Something she mustn’t know. You’ve got to come right now. Sheila’s visiting a friend and I’ve got to see you before she gets home... Yes... The door will be unlocked. Come straight up to my study.”

He hung up and pressed his fingers to his eyes. That would give the precious pair something to think about, and he’d come. He’d come running to find out what it was all about. Sheila would make sure of that.

When the young man returned his face was deeply flushed and the paper knife still gleamed in his clenched fist. “Did you reach him, Uncle Dev?”

“Yes. He’s on his way.” Goring wheeled himself to the door. “Switch off that light, Jack. Just leave the desk lamp burning.”

In its greenish glow Goring’s face looked as dead-white as a cadaver’s. “I’ll wait in the next room. Be quick about it, and be silent.”

The young man nodded, then spoke just as Goring opened the door. “Uncle Dev?”

Goring looked back at him.

“I just want you to know something. Whatever happens to me, this has been the happiest day in my life.”

Goring quickly withdrew. In his darkened bedroom he opened a drawer in the bedside stand, removed the revolver which he kept there and slid it under the blanket on his lap.

He waited. The sound of thunder was now no more than a distant cannonade.

He didn’t hear the car when it drove up and the first sound that reached his ear was a soft but impatient tap on the study door.

For perhaps a second or two he remained immobile, unbreathing, but the wild impulse of remorse which sent him hurtling toward the door came an instant too late. The man he had said was “Rashbrooke” gave a muffled cry as the paper knife drove fiercely into his heart.

Goring froze, then reacted with the calm, fatalistic precision of a sleepwalker, gently pushing the door open wider, raising the gun and firing.

He was almost sure that the young man who thought he was “Jack” never knew what happened, never knew that it was Uncle Dev who killed him.

The sensation it caused was, of course, considerable, but not so great as it would have been had Goring permitted reporters to step foot upon the grounds. His story was simple. A young man had come to the house, Mrs. Harkins confirmed that she had let him in (“he had real funny-looking eyes”) and taken him upstairs to Goring’s study. Goring stated that the caller had babbled incoherently, seemed to have confused some of the Penelope stories with real life, and when Harry Lawton had arrived unexpectedly the young man had gone berserk, seized up a paper knife from the desk and stabbed Lawton in the heart. Before he could turn on Goring the older man had been able to reach his revolver and shoot the intruder.

Goring would remember with utmost satisfaction the look on his wife’s face when she arrived home just as they were removing her lover’s body from the study. He wondered, with no particular alarm, if she would tell the police that Lawton had received a call from Goring. If she did Goring was prepared to deny it, but he didn’t really expect her to, since it would mean confessing that she had been with Lawton.

He was right. She said nothing about that call, not to the police and not to him.

Instead of aggravating his condition as it might have been expected to do, the events of that night had quite a different effect upon Goring, for days afterward his aches and pains seeming to enter upon a period of remission, raising his spirits to the point where he actually expressed a desire to return to work.

His wife stared at him in amazement. “Work? You?”

“Why not?”

“You haven’t worked in years.”

“Well, now I feel like working. I’ve got two or three ideas churning around up here,” and he gaily tapped his forehead.

“You’re out of your mind,” she said coldly. “Doctor Simpson would never approve. And you’d never stand the discomfort. That’s why you hired me in the first place, don’t forget. Every time you struck a typewriter key you winced with pain, and you know you were never any good at dictating your novels.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t have the right kind of secretary.”

He wheeled himself to the desk, picked up the unfinished manuscript of The Final Escape and with a look of infinite satisfaction calmly forced his crippled fingers to rip it into shreds.

“I’ve got a much better idea. How’s this for a title? Penelope and the Evil Bridegroom. We’ll take the little darling right up to the altar with that scoundrel and then, when things look absolutely hopeless, when there seems to be no conceivable way out of the situation — enter the stranger!”