More Good Old Stuff

I Accuse Myself (“The Scarred Hand,” Doc Savage, November 1946)

It was a siren buried under the flesh. Not the up-and-down roller-coaster kind of siren, but the constant wail — the steady shattering scream.

In one part of his mind he heard the ward noises, heard the clink of a spoon in a glass and the snap as sheets were drawn drum tight. But they wouldn’t become familiar noises. Always he turned mentally away just as he was about to listen carefully and remember where he was. There was also the prick of a needle, but it was dull beside the grind of the siren. He would fade away and the siren would become a screaming woman, or a hot white light — bringing him back to the restless muttering.

On some days he could see the pain. That was when the siren was not so loud. The pain looked like the edge of a razor held close to the eye. It stretched off for miles toward a Dali horizon, each bitter blur on its edge grating like teeth on crushed glass.

Then there was a heavy bearded face close to his own. He saw it vaguely and then it was gone. He was handled, moved. He felt a sense of movement and it looked as though a long wall was slowly passing his bed. Then sharp lights and suffocation...

On one hot summer between grade school and high school he had gone with Tom and Rod out to Corey’s Creek, to the black pool. They had often dived from a high limb down into the center of the blackness. But they had never touched bottom. On this day Rod had started to ride him about his diving. And finally he had gone out onto the limb, exhaled most of the air in his lungs and dropped straight and clean into the black depths. He had gone down until his ears had throbbed, but his outstretched hands touched nothing. Then, in the deep blackness, sudden fear had sent him struggling up toward the surface. The little air in his lungs contributed no buoyancy. He had fought his way upward, seeing above him the dim light of the sunny afternoon. He had seemed to rise so slowly, fighting the involuntary sucking of his lungs by keeping his throat tightly shut. And when he thought he could fight no more, he had burst through into the bright light, his chest aching, his throat making a rasping sound as he sucked in the sweet air. The sun had felt warm on his face...

But this time when he broke through it was all different. Rod and Tom swirled back into the far past, remote and sweet. And he was on crisp sheets in a hard bed in a large white room. It seemed suddenly silent — and he realized that the siren was gone. The sharp pain had left him and it was as though the turning world had stopped on its axis. With a long spent sigh he shut his eyes and drifted off into a velvet sleep.

It was daylight again. Somehow he knew it was a new day. He turned his head weakly, feeling the pull of adhesive on the skin of his forehead. There were two other beds in the room, but they were empty. The window showed him a square of gray sky and the green tops of trees. There was no clue. He wondered, but was content to rest.

It must have been a half hour later when a nurse brought the woman in. The woman was tall, with pale hair and colorless eyes. Her face was wide and white. She chewed at her underlip as she tiptoed across the room and sank gently into a chair by the bed. He stared at her, knowing that he had looked at her ten thousand times. Her face was familiar and unfamiliar. It frightened him to look at her and feel the pull of long association combined with strangeness. He looked into her pale eyes, wondering who she was, and saw the quick tears brim up. She crouched with her forehead on the edge of his bed and he felt her soundless sobbing shake him in dull rhythm. Her hair was parted and with the clarity of weakness he could see tiny flecks of scurf along the gleaming whiteness of her skull. He remained motionless, dreading the moment when she would lift her head and he would have to find out who she was, what their relationship had been. He felt too exhausted to puzzle over it. He wanted to hold back his questions until he had rested again. Until he was so strong that the answers he might get would not bring back the siren shriek.

The man in white walked in, the nurse following respectfully a few steps behind. He ignored the woman, stopping a few feet behind her and looking down at the face on the pillow. There was an intent expression on his long heavy face, a look of curiosity in his eyes.

“How do you feel now?” he asked. It wasn’t a question of compassion. His high sharp voice was medical curiosity — like a question written in a case history.

His lips felt dry and his voice sounded rusty in his own ears as he answered, “Better.” He had tried to speak loudly, but the tone sounded as though he were speaking through a mass of cotton. He wanted to tell them all to go away — tell them to leave until he could find the strength to wonder, to question. But he couldn’t find the words.

“You will feel strange for a time. Maybe a year. Maybe two. The technical name for what was done to you is a frontal lobotomy. Used on manic-depressives in extreme cases. First time it was ever done on a sane man to relieve the internal pressure of a complex skull fracture. It will play tricks with your memory and might even effect minor changes in your personality. But don’t be frightened. It was a long chance, and we saved you. You will recover rapidly, Mr. Warlow.” The tall man leaned forward and touched the still-crouching woman on the shoulder. She looked up at him through a shine of tears. He made a small motion toward the door and she stood up obediently. They both smiled at him before they walked quietly out. His was a smile of professional pride. Hers was a smile of bravery and uncertainty. In a few moments he felt sleep drifting across him. All of the other words had faded, except his name. Warlow. He would cling to that. Yes, he would remember that. It was a stone on which to anchor the odd, shifting memories. He slept.

On the third day the little man came. He sighed wearily as he sat on the bedside chair, and brushed with a fat white hand at the gray ash on his dark blue lapels. His nose was long and fat, with the tip covered with little wandering red veins like a miniature road map. He squinted little blue eyes and looked down his nose at Warlow, like a man aiming some strange weapon. He sighed again.

“Now, Pete,” he rumbled, “it’s time we got some of the answers. Jackson says your memory is going to be mixed up, so I got to help you. My name’s Kroschik. I’m a cop. Do you remember anything about what happened in the office?”

“Office?” Peter Warlow felt the strangeness of it. Of course, there must have been an office. He must have worked in an office. And then he saw it. Saw the rows of desks, heard the clatter of the typewriters and the ringing of many phones. His desk was on the end, near the windows. He could even see the small black sign with his name — Peter J. Warlow — printed in discreet gold.

“Yeah. Benson and Coward, where you worked.”

“I remember, but I don’t know what happened. Was I hurt?”

“All we know is that four of you were working late on a Friday night about a month ago. Three guys and a girl. She was a little blondie named Clarissa Paine, but everybody called her Sandy. I’d say she was a cute little piece. The other two guys were J. Howard Jones, a fat guy who is your boss, and Trent Welch, a red-headed college kid who does part-time stuff for Jones.

“Jones says he heard a big argument going on out in the big room. He stepped out of his office and you and this Sandy were yelling at each other. He heard her screaming something about telling everybody. Then he says you pulled a gun out of your desk drawer and shot her in the head. He grabbed one of those heavy gadgets that hold Scotch tape and flung it at you. It caught you smack in the forehead and he called up and reported both of you as dead. But you’ve been lucky. They fixed your bashed-in head and stirred up the front half of your brain with some kind of a stick or knife or something. This Welch came back from the men’s room just as Jones was calling us. Now, do you remember shooting the little lady?”

Peter could hear his heart thudding. The horrible words seemed to belong to some other situations, to other people. It didn’t fit his slowly returning concept of himself. It was like a puzzle that he had read in a magazine, or the first half of a TV play. He couldn’t feel that he had done such a thing. He could remember the faces of the others, but they seemed far away and unreal. He couldn’t remember working late. He couldn’t even remember the sound of Sandy’s voice. He rolled his head from side to side on the pillow and stared at the veins on Kroschik’s nose.

“Can’t remember a thing, hey?”

“But, if... if I... why do you ask...?”

“You mean if we got you hooked why do I ask you questions? The reason is that we like to know reasons and background. We can’t figure why you should knock her off. Your books are all in shape. You got money in the bank. But you could have been in love with her and she wouldn’t play. You’re our killer, but we need some more blanks filled in. Like where you got the toy gun. We can’t trace the twenty-two target job you used, and the surface of it is too corrugated to leave any prints. I don’t like to bother a guy who is just getting well, but this thing has been dragging on for a month now, and I want to get it off the books. You understand?”

The mists in his mind wouldn’t clear. He tried to force his mind back to the office, tried to imagine the sound of a shot in the office. But no stimulus of the imagination would give him any clue to what had happened. At last Kroschik left, with the promise to return on the next day. Peter lay motionless in the bed, forming countless pictures in his mind — trying to fit the shifting impressions into a coherent self-history. But all he could get was a series of quick snatches of past events. In no one of the scenes was there a shot fired. He couldn’t imagine himself shooting anyone. And yet, what if in his previous mental life he had been the type of person who could take a life? What if he had deliberately...?

He awakened with a jump. It was a different awakening than he had experienced before — the slow drifting up out of black curtains of sleep. He tried to move and then remembered, slowly at first, and then with a rush that brought back everything — the white-faced blond woman — it was Jane, his wife. The late work on Friday. The mass of correspondence that had to be gone through, with countless dictations into the office tape equipment. Then he saw it. He shut his eyes and he could see the brown weight turning over slowly in the air as it hurtled toward his eyes. He could even see the glint of light on the shining roll of tape. Yes, it had spun slowly toward him and then a great blackness — a sense of spinning away into a black depth. But what had happened before that? His own hand around a slim, long-barreled gun — he could see his own index finger clenched around the trigger. Could even see the deep semicircular scar across the back of his finger as it tightened on the trigger. There was the crack of a shot and Sandy sliding down behind the desk, her eyes narrowed, quick blood matting her hair. Yes, he had done it. It was too clear — too vivid. It could have been no one else.

He felt helpless as he lay on the bed in the dark room. He couldn’t move. He heard the hum of traffic in a far street, and the click of heels in the corridor outside his room. Above all, he heard his own breath, shallow and quick. He smelled his own acid perspiration brought on by fear. He had nearly died. The great pain had been defeated and now he must get well only to give his life to the state. But why should they kill a man who had changed — a man who flinched at the thought of firing a shot at a human being? The small night light threw motionless shadows against the wall. One of them was the shadow of a chair. A freak effect of the lighting made it look as though there were straps on the arms of the chair. He knew that if he were standing he would feel faint. Nausea made the room spin slowly around him. Yes, his finger had pulled the trigger. The lead had smashed into the brain of the girl Sandy. He began to call, a feeble monotonous sound, more like a groan than a signal. It was many long minutes before he heard steps coming toward his room. A vague form walked in.

“Get the police! Get Kroschik! Tell him I can remember.” The figure left and he tasted blood, realized he had sunk his teeth into his underlip. It was an endless period of waiting. The temptation to tell Kroschik that he had seen Jones shoot the girl was impelling. Then there would be a chance. But if he won, then Jones would pay. And he knew that he had killed the girl. Maybe it would be better to say that he could never remember. But he had already sent for Kroschik to tell what had happened. He felt trapped by his own haste and weakness. He tried to move, to get out of the bed, but found that he couldn’t even lift his arms. The struggle made him sweat more profusely.

The lights clicked on with a blinding flash that sent sharp pains deep into his eyes. He squinted and saw Kroschik standing by the bed, a cigar stub in the corner of his wide flat mouth, his shirt open at the neck.

“Okay, Pete. Give it to me.”

Peter Warlow started slowly, his speech hesitant and fumbling. “I remember that somehow... when the thing hit me, I could see it coming through the air. Before that — before I was hit, there was a vision of Sandy sliding down out of sight behind the desk. But... the worst... I could see my own hand... a long gun, sort of thin, with my finger on the trigger. I could see the scar on the back of my finger, a scar like a new moon... I saw it squeeze the trigger. I must have done it. I don’t see how I could have, but I must have. And I’ll have to take whatever I’ve got coming to me.”

There was silence in the room. Peter couldn’t meet Kroschik’s gaze. Then the little man said, “So you saw your hand on the gun, with the scar on your finger? Saw that finger pull a trigger?”

“Yes. I remember it.”

Again the silence. He looked up and saw the small blue eyes narrowed. Saw the expression of satisfaction. “Okay, Pete. That cooks it. You’ll testify formally, won’t you?”

“Anything you want. All I want to do now is sleep and see if I can forget. I want to forget the look on her face...”

After Kroschik had left, Peter Warlow lived in a strange world of tangled dreams. A world where a girl named Sandy had two slim guns fastened to her wrists instead of hands; where he stood behind a chair with straps on the arms and tried to duck as dozens of brown tape holders came turning slowly through the air; where a spreading red stain matted blond hair and a trickle ran down a white part like muddy water down a clean gutter.

The pale morning sun was slanting into his room when he awakened. He felt the bed shake and saw the same blond head in the same position on the edge of his bed. Once again he felt the tremor of the quiet sobs and realized that it was Jane, his wife, and he knew that she was mourning the wreckage of her life and the ruin of her husband. He tried to think of something that he could say which would convince her of his love and his own sorrow.

But the only words that would come were a halting “I’m sorry, darling.”

She lifted her head and in her eyes there was a strange light of joy and triumph. It startled him. She should be mourning him! Wasn’t he as good as dead?

Then with the words dancing over each other she said, “Oh, Peter. Mr. Kroschik told me. Now the case is over.”

“It’s over, certainly. I’ve confessed.”

“But, darling, your confession proved it wasn’t you. The scar on your finger.” He tried to lift his right hand and couldn’t. She sensed what he was trying to do and lifted it for him. The fingers were like a fragile bundle of gray twigs. There was no scar. His world reeled around him.

“You see, Peter,” she continued, “you are still mixed up. Your memory will play tricks for a long time. But you’re still the same sweet guy. You saw Jones’s finger on the trigger and some part of your poor mind made it seem to you that you had seen your own hand. Then he tried to kill you and blame the girl’s death on you. But when you spoke of the scar, Kroschik remembered seeing it on Jones’s finger. He understood. With that clue, he broke Jones down after he left you last night. Now they won’t want you — but I do. I want you to be well again.”

After his wife left, Peter lay for a long time in delicious relaxation. All the pieces were beginning to drop into place. He felt bemused at the memory of the alarm he had felt during the night.

Memory was still fragmented. It was like riding a bus through the night, looking out rainy windows at fleeting glimpses of unknown towns. Bits of memory had no relation to time. He could not tell if a vivid scene had happened ten years ago or ten months.

Suddenly he was in a motel room, propped up in bed, lights from the parking area shining in, lighting the room. Sandy stood naked at the window, looking out, hair tousled. There was an old black-and-white movie on television, the sound off. Cowboys rode down a long slope, firing silent guns at invisible foes.

Sandy said, her voice listless, “Fat Jones told me if I don’t go back to him, he’ll fire you.”

The scene faded away, dwindling to a bright white dot.

So that’s the kind of man I am, he thought. Or was. And Sandy hadn’t gone back to him. Did Jane know about him and Sandy? Was that the reason for some of the triumph in her eyes, knowing the girl was dead?

When he was on the edge of sleep, another scene flashed bright in the back of his mind. He was in a pine woods on a cool day, walking silently, carefully on the soft carpet of brown needles. Ahead, through the trees, appearing and reappearing, he saw a woman in a red-and-black-plaid wool jacket, strolling slowly. He leaned his left shoulder against a pine trunk and raised the rifle and looked through the scope at Jane, his wife. She would reappear in a few seconds on the other side of a deadfall. He aimed the cross hairs at that height where her pale head would reappear.

He was wide awake. The scene faded. The sense of delicious relaxation was totally gone.

What had happened? Had it been some sort of game?

The neurological surgeons had scrambled his brains. Was this the sort of man he had been? Was this the sort of man he was now?

Or was it a glimpse forward into time, of the sort of man he would become?