Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 43, No. 4. Whole No. 245, April 1964

Steps... Coming Near by William Irish

A memorable little chiller that may go on and on in your head like a broken record...

Ceil had brought her latest love home with her. Ceil is my daughter. She is always bringing her latest love home with her. At least once a week, sometimes twice in the same week, she brings a new and different latest love home with her, and the one before is neglected, forgotten, discarded. Fickle? Well, aren’t they all at her age? But while the newest latest love holds sway over her, she gives herself to it heart and soul. There is no holding back. There are posturings, and the rapturous clasping-together of the hands alongside her own cheek; there is a light in her eyes of starry radiance, there are sighs of unutterable bliss. I have even seen her kneel in adoration in the center of the room hugging her arms about herself. I have even heard her squeal in unconfined delight.

These loves of hers are not boys or young men, you understand. Ceil is not old enough yet for a serious love affair. She dances with boys, she goes out with groups of boys and girls to the beach, or for a car ride, but these boys are still no more than companions, friends, nothing else.

No, the loves I speak of are flat and round, about the diameter of a dinner plate, and black, and polished as jet. She comes home with them tucked under her arm, and fits them over the turntable of the high fidelity machine, and flicks a little switch. And then the love affair begins, there in our presence, right in the center of the family living-room.

I saw her slip a new record out of its paper jacket, and I knew we were in for it once again.

“What, another one?” I said, putting on an air of long-suffering patience that was only partly pretended.

“Oh, but this is dreamy. This is the end.”

When she says it is the end, she does not mean there will be no more. I learned that to my vast disappointment long ago. The first time I heard it my hopes rose high, only to be dashed down to earth again. She had only meant it was better than the one before. Seven short days later there was another one, still better than the one better than the one before.

“The Prince,” she whispered. “The Prince.” This is an aristocracy that the Almanach de Gotha never knew. The aristocracy of jazz. There was a King — Mr. Nat Cole. There was a Duke — Mr. Ellington. There was a Count — Mr. Basie. But that was long ago — almost a whole year perhaps, or was it a year and a half? Now it was the Prince — Mr. Matt Molloy.

The sounds began.

“He’s so cool,” she said, drawing up her knees under her chin and wrapping her arms about them.

This, I had learned by now, did not refer to the performer’s bodily temperature.

“He’s out of this world,” she said.

For my part, I could only wish he was.

“I get his message,” she said.

Her mother looked up, meaning only to assume a fond maternal interest in her almost-grown daughter’s affairs. “Oh,” she said benevolently, “I didn’t know you had corresponded with him. What was in the message? What did it say?”

“Oh, Mama,” protested Ceil with a reproachful expression.

She turned to me complainingly. “Papa, please tell Mama to stop making fun of me.”

Her innocent mother shrugged bewilderedly. “In my day a message meant a note or a letter or a telegram.”

“It doesn’t now,” I informed her drily.

The commotion — excuse me, the song interpretation — was growing louder.

“That reminds me,” my wife said, rising. “I must go upstairs and sort the laundry.”

“Coward,” I whispered to her out of the side of my mouth.

She gave me a knowing look that said plainly, You are the coward, not me. You are aching to get out of here with me, but you haven’t got the courage to leave.

So Ceil and I and the Prince were left alone.

I think I heard him through seven times that first evening. To have kept actual count would be, it seems to me, an act of disloyalty on the part of a doting father toward his young daughter. So I content myself by saying I heard him far too many times. Six and one half times too many, or even six and three-quarters. But one should be willing to suffer for the sake of one’s dear ones. I am, and I did.

However, a law of diminishing returns invariably sets in during the course of these love affairs of Ceil’s. I knew this by experience. If, for example, one listens to her current rage seven times on the first occasion, it is a safe bet that three or four evenings later he will be heard not more than twice. And perhaps a week later, not at all. Of course, by that time one is due for a new one, so I am not sure there is too much advantage in it.

About a week after she first brought Mr. Molloy home with her, she came into the room, kissed me (I had only just arrived home myself), and then as soon as our brief but affectionate exchanges of the day were over, she proceeded to put him back on the turntable and finger the switch. At that moment, before it could be drowned out by the imminent clamor, the telephone rang. Her mother was in the kitchen supervising the evening meal, so Ceil called out to her, “Never mind, Mama, I’ll get it for you,” and ran out of the room.

Now, my mind is a curious one. If it is subjected to a certain pattern or sequence long enough, it memorizes it — even if the pattern is completely on the margin of its attention, outside its main interests at the time. It is a sort of automatic process. I think many other people’s minds work that way too.

I remember glancing up at one point from the office reports I was going over, with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction about some minor detail that was just beyond my awareness, but I couldn’t quite recognize what it was, or had been. So I went back to the reports again.

By the time Ceil returned, the record had already come to a stop. She made no move to start it again; Mr. Malloy was already at a very low ebb in her affections.

I looked up, and for a moment I couldn’t recall what it was that had disturbed me the first time. Then it suddenly came to me and I turned to her. “Ceil,” I said, “how should the bridge of that piece go?”

This is an expression I had learned from Ceil herself. The middle part of a song is called the bridge. Ceil did not know why; therefore I still do not know why either. I suppose because it links the first part to the last part, bridges them over.

She attempted at first to reproduce the succession of tonal sounds — an impossibility except for a slowly strangling gorilla.

“No,” I said. “I mean the words, not the notes.”

She began to tell the words off on the tips of her fingers, turning her eyes upward as an aid to memory. For when love wanes, all the little remembered things about it are apt to fade with it.

“You see?” I exclaimed, sitting up more alertly. “That is exactly what I told myself they should be. But they aren’t that way on the record. That’s what caught my ear.”

“Oh, Papa,” she said patronizingly, “you probably weren’t paying close attention. You have all those office reports there, and—”

“I beg your pardon,” I said a little stiffly. “My mind is trained to be precise. My whole occupation depends on hairline precision. Well, listen for yourself then.”

We played it over, bending forward attentively.

When the bridge came, Prince Molloy sang the first three lines just as Ceil had recited them to me. “Waiting for you in the moonlight, My heart beats with a lover’s delight. Are these your steps I hear...” Then he groaned — well, his entire singing style was one prolonged groan anyway, so I should say he groaned more deeply, more realistically than usual, and this came out:

“Oh-h-h, I’m sick, oh-h-h, I’m dying...”

She was a little surprised, but not too concerned. “Well,” she said, “it only proves how mistaken you can be even after you hear a thing over and—”

“No, you miss the point,” I insisted. “If I had said it was one variation, and you another, very well then. But we both hit on exactly the same new fourth line. Identical, word for word. How do you explain that?”

She put a bent knuckle to her mouth and nibbled on it thoughtfully. “I don’t know, Papa. It is strange, isn’t it?”

“I must get to the bottom of this,” I said determinedly, putting aside my office reports. “It will keep bothering me until I do. Logic demands a logical explanation.”

“Suppose I call up one of the girls I know and ask her,” Ceil suggested. “Most of them have this same record in their houses.” And without waiting for me to agree, she ran outside to the telephone.

When she returned, she reported, “Virginia said exactly same thing we both did at first — the four lines just as we first thought they were. She even played her record to make sure, while I waited, and then she came back and said it was the original way — the fourth line going Steps so dear, coming near... Not sick... dying.”

“Then there must be two different records, don’t you think? Maybe ours is a faulty one and it slipped into circulation by mistake.”

She has great lore in these branches of culture, greater than I have. “It couldn’t be, Papa, just couldn’t. They’re all made from a master record. They’re all stamped from that master, whether ten are sold or ten thousand or a million. Two different things can’t be on there. It’s got to be one or the other.”

“Wait,” I said firmly, digging into my pocket and giving her some money. “There is only one way to settle it, once and for all. Go back to the music store where you bought it, and buy another, a duplicate.”

“But how will that prove—?” she started to object. Then she did as I told her.

“And when you pass the newsstand, see if the evening paper is out, like a good girl,” I called after her. “It hadn’t arrived yet when I went by.”

She took excessively long, I thought, for such a simple errand, and when she returned at last, the white and somewhat dazed look on her face brought me to my feet in alarm. “What happened? Were you hit by a car or something?”

“No... no... nothing like that,” she said dully, as though her thoughts were far off. “I played it in the store first, before I bought it, and listened closely,” she went on in a languid voice. “It was the way we thought ours was in the beginning. The same.”

“Well, where is it, then?”

“I dropped it in the street, Papa,” she answered.

“But I thought nowadays they made them of some unbreakable material, so that—”

“I didn’t want to bring it home with me,” was all she said, falteringly. Then she added, “Here’s your paper, Papa.”

I took it and glanced only carelessly at it for an instant. Then I quickly looked back again, more closely this time.

In one of the upper corners of the front page was a last-minute bulletin that read: “It has just been announced that Matt ‘Prince’ Molloy, known to millions of people all over the world, has died suddenly at Calvary Hospital within the last hour. No further details are available at the moment—”

I saw Ceil seek a chair and drop into it, the way even the young do when they feel unable to support themselves standing any longer. “We both heard it,” she said softly, as if to herself. “But no one will ever believe us.”

Then she looked at me. And she said again and again, “But we both heard it, we both heard it...”