The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror

THE BUSINESS ABOUT FRED by Joseph Payne Brennan

AT THE TIME I was a cub reporter on the local Star Daily, a morning paper. Unless something "big" was still breaking, I’d usually leave the editorial rooms shortly before midnight. I drifted into a regular routine; six nights out of seven I’d stop in at Casserman’s Cafe and drink beer until the place closed at one. A few other newspapermen would stop in; we’d talk and unbend for an hour before going home to bed.

Casserman’s was a quiet place. I suppose it was like a thousand other bars. I can’t remember a single outstanding or remarkable thing about it unless it might be the autographed, framed photograph of Jack Dempsey prominently displayed over the cash register. But on second thought I guess at least several hundred other bars had framed autographed photographs of Jack Dempsey.

Casserman was friendly but not ebullient. If you felt like talking, he’d lend a listening ear. If you didn’t want to talk, he’d respect your silence. He kept the place reasonably clean and he wouldn’t tolerate real rowdiness. It was just a pleasantly drab little refuge to relax in about midnight.

Around this time of night, one of the fixtures of the place was a runty-looking guy whom Casserman addressed as Fred. He resembled a disbarred jockey or a down-at-heels tout, pale-faced, shifty-eyed and always taciturn. He’d just sit hunched up over a beer and never say a word, but his eyes couldn’t stay put.

After awhile we paid no more attention to him than we did to the photograph of Jack Dempsey. His eyes would flick around the place and sometimes sort of accidentally meet your own, but there was never any challenge in them. They seemed vacant, incurious, oddly cold, and they slid away without revealing anything. The pale, wedge-shaped face never showed any expression.

Casserman told us once that he thought his silent customer had something to do with horse racing and "different sports events", but be was vague about it and none of us were interested enough to make any further inquiries.

The months and finally several years passed. I got a city-room promotion and a raise in pay. Several of my reporter friends left and several others took their places. And almost every night, about twelve, I went to Casserman’s and drank beer. And every night when I went there, Fred, the runty little guy with the pale wedge of a face, sat at the end of the bar and silently sipped his beer. His eyes roved around as always, restless but empty looking. Sometimes I’d give him a short nod when I first went in but I never could figure out whether or not he gave a half nod in reply. If he did, it was scarcely perceptible. I never saw him talking to anyone except Casserman and even then only a few perfunctory words were exchanged.

As time went on, the funny little runt seemed to get whiter and smaller and more silent — if that was possible. He seemed to be shrinking. I’d never paid any attention to his clothes, but I finally noticed one evening how really seedy they had become. All this registered in a sort of subconscious way. I had no real interest in the character. Several times during the evening you’d catch his eyes sliding away, but they affected me no more than the blinking neon sign across the street.

More time passed. Six months. Eight months. I can’t remember precisely. I went to Casserman’s as usual and drank beer and as always the runt sat at the far end of the bar, pale and still and shrunken-looking. He just seemed to be fading away.

One evening, toward the end, I caught his eyes sliding away and, just momentarily, something about his expression held my attention. Had I read a kind of fleeting but desperate appeal in those shifty eyes, or had I only imagined it? I was troubled, briefly, and then one of my cronies came in and we started to talk and I forgot all about the runt.

From here on, it’s tough. The time sequence and the exact sequence of minor events.

One evening, I remember, Casserman leaned across the bar and shook his head. ‘Fred’s lookin’ bad. Real bad. And not touchin’ his beer.’

I glanced toward the end of the bar. Fred sat there as usual and, to be truthful, he looked about the same to me. No worse than usual, that is. What I do remember is that the light at the far end of the bar appeared to be a bit dimmer than it ordinarily was. I couldn’t seem to get a sharp clear image of Fred. But the room was pretty smoky at the time and I thought nothing of it. I made some reply to Casserman, glanced up to see if a bulb had burned out — apparently none had — and then turned toward the door as my friend, Henry Kalk, the rewrite man, came in.

Two or three nights later Casserman leaned over and shook his head again. ‘I guess Fred’s gettin’ worse.’

I looked toward the end of the bar. Fred was no longer there. I was startled; the little runt almost never left till closing time.

‘I didn’t see him leave,’ I said rather pointlessly.

Casserman’s big shoulders bunched. ‘Left without touchin’ his beer.’ A wry grin turned the corners of his mouth. ‘And didn’t leave any dime either!’

For a few minutes, before the rest of the gang came in, I thought about Fred. He was obviously sick and something should be done. I resolved to ask about him somewhere. Then the city room slaves burst in and I’m afraid I forgot all about it as usual.

But the next night, when I returned to my midnight refuge, I did recall Casserman’s comment. I looked toward the end of the bar and there sat Fred as usual, still and white. He glanced up and then quickly looked away and I was rather shocked at his appearance. His face seemed terribly drawn and sunken; he appeared years older than he had a few weeks before. I got the impression that he was seriously ill and just going ahead on will power alone.

I caught Casserman’s attention later. ‘He ought to be in the hospital,’ I said.

Casserman nodded uneasily. ‘Yeah. But what can you do? The guy just sits there and won’t talk. Just sits and don’t even drink his beer anymore.’ He shrugged with an uncomfortable air. ‘It gives me the jitters.’

I don’t know what prompted me to ask the question, but I did. Lowering my voice, I leaned across the bar. ‘Is he leaving his dime?’

Casserman shook his head. ‘Just forgets, I guess. Hell, I don’t care much about that. He’s been comin’ here for years. It’s only that he’s beginning to get on me nerves a bit.’

Again, the exact sequence of time and events eludes me. But I have the impression that the next evening Fred sat at the far end of the bar as usual. The place was extra busy and I didn’t get to talk to Casserman.

I had a late, rush assignment the following night and didn’t make it to Casserman’s. But the subsequent night I strolled in at the regular time and there sat the runt, pale, silent and really sick looking. His eyes met mine and I nodded. This time, surprisingly, his return nod was actually perceptible. His eyes even held for a few moments and, again, I fancied that I read a mute but desperate and mounting appeal in them.

I was almost impelled to walk to the end of the bar and speak to him, but I didn’t. He looked away at the last moment, I hesitated, and the impulse passed. I sat down at my usual place.

A few minutes later, when the tavern had begun to fill up, Casserman leaned across the bar. ‘Still not touched his beer. Holy Jesus! He looks like a walkin’ corpse!’

‘We ought to do something,’ I said.

Casserman shrugged unhappily. ‘He don’t talk anymore, don’t say a word. Maybe before closin’ time, you could try to get somethin’ out of him?’

I hesitated. ‘Yeah. I’ll see.’

Although I had been impelled to speak to the runt only a few minutes previously, I now found that my desire to do so had ebbed away. I’m not sure why. Pure selfishness maybe. I suppose I just didn’t want to disturb the pleasant aura of late evening which alcohol, companions and a familiar refuge combined to create. Beyond that, I think I felt convinced that the little runt would probably repel my attempts at solicitude with a wall of silence and the whole episode would turn out to be both awkward and embarrassing. In any event, I did nothing.

I suppose my decision to do nothing was the climax. In a sense the business about Fred ended right there, that same evening, no more than a half hour later. I’ll try to describe it as I recall it and you can accept or reject it as you see fit.

I can’t remember the exact time, right to the minute, but it must have been approximately quarter to one, I recollect, clearly, that for some reason I glanced up, toward the end of the bar. Fred was looking at me. His eyes lingered and once more I read a curious, despairing appeal in them. It was so intense and so apparent that it fixed my attention.

I was looking back, still undecided what I should do, when the little runt finally dropped his eyes. A moment later he got up and moved into the men’s room, at the rear of the building.

I hesitated for a minute and then acted on impulse. Perhaps, I must have reasoned, if I could speak to the poor little guy in private, he might be willing to talk. Maybe Casserman and I could help him somehow. Get him into a hospital or at least to a doctor.

I got up and walked into the men’s room. It was empty.

Let me emphasise two things. First, that I followed the runt into the men’s room no more than two minutes after he entered it — actually, I think it was just over a minute. If, in that brief time, he had emerged from the room, lie would have had to open the door, cross my field of vision — I sat staring at the door — and walk the entire length of the bar before leaving by the street entrance. Second, there was absolutely no way out of the men’s room except by the single door. There was a small window set in the rear wall, but some years previously someone had smashed through that window and rifled the cash register. Shortly after, Casserman had heavy steel bars set into the window frame. In addition, a thick wire-mesh screen had been placed over the entire window, bars and all, from the outside. Only an insect or a mouse could have gotten through that window without tearing off the wire screen and cutting through at least two or three of the steel bars.

There was a rear door, but it was in the opposite corner of the building, behind the bar. It was bolted and locked and Casserman carried the key. I don’t quite know how Casserman passed the fire marshal’s annual inspection, but the fact remains it would have been impossible for the runt to leave by that exit unless he went behind the bar and got the key from Casserman — which he did not do.

I stood in that dingy men’s room and looked around. The stall doors were attached by springs and they were all wide open. To keep them closed they had to be locked. From the inside. There was no place else in that room where anyone could stand, sit or crouch without being seen.

I walked to the barred window at the rear of the room and gazed out. The bars were in place, the wire screen intact, the window closed and locked.

Only a few yards behind Casserman’s place, a series of railroad tracks came together and ran off toward a sprawl of waterfront salt flats. As I stood at the window, frowning in bewilderment, I looked down those empty tracks and for a fleeting second I thought that I saw someone walking along them. I had the odd impression that although this figure was walking slowly, it was, paradoxically, receding rapidly into the distance. Then I decided that my eyes were deceiving me, that a blur of shadows in the moonlight was all that I had actually seen.

As I lingered at the window, looking down that shiny, dwindling road of steel track and wooden ties, a sense of the most indescribable desolation overcame me. I don’t possess the words to convey it. A sudden feeling of heart-stopping, overwhelming loneliness washed through me. It was not a mere physical sense of loneliness; it was a loneliness of the psyche, of the spirit, an abrupt and unaccountable conviction that I was alone and isolated from all humanity, that I was sinking, soul-hungry and desperate, into an awful, inconceivable gulf of immense outer darkness, a universe of unutterable cold, unrelieved and never-ending.

I shuddered and turned away from the window. A minute later I was back at the bar and Casserman came over.

‘You see him?’ he asked.

I took a long drink and grinned at him rather foolishly. I suppose it was some kind of reaction from the experience I’d just had. ‘How could I see him?’ I replied. ‘He went into the men’s room and disappeared!’

Casserman scowled at me. ‘I was up near the front; I didn’t see him go out.’

I drained my glass and shoved it across the bar. ‘Hell, one of us needs glasses then!’

I left late, a bit the worse for wear and went home. I didn’t sleep well.

The next night when I stopped in at Casserman’s, Fred wasn’t there. His place at the end of the bar was empty.

When he got a free minute, Casserman came over. ‘I’m worried about that little runt. Probably lyin’ sick in some flea-bag flophouse.’

I sipped my beer. ‘Can you get his address?’

Casserman scratched his head. ‘Maybe. Rick Platz used to know all that race-track bunch. Maybe I’ll call him tomorrow. No use tonight.’

‘By the way,’ I said, ‘do you know the runt’s name — I mean, besides ‘Fred?’

Casserman shook his head. ‘Cripes. I don’t. He just never told me. But Rick probably knows.’

A late assignment kept me from Casserman’s the next night. The following evening I stopped in as usual.

Casserman sliced the foam off a beer and set it before me. ‘I got the runt’s address,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Rick didn’t know at first but he found out and called me back. Just as I figured, it’s a kind of flophouse. Eleven Buren Street, around the corner from Water Street. The runt has a room there. His last name, Rick says, is Amodius.’

‘I’ll look him up tomorrow,’ I promised.

Since I didn’t have to report to the city room until four in the afternoon, I had plenty of time the next day. I drove down Water Street, turned at Buren and parked just around the corner in front of a four-storey brick tenement-type building. It was the kind of place which had seen better days fifty years ago. The bricks were black with soot and grime, the window panes cracked and pasted together with tape, the front sidewalk a litter of blown papers and broken bottles.

It was situated in a seedy, waterfront neighborhood and I didn’t like leaving my car, but I had little choice.

The doorbell obviously didn’t work so I just clumped down a dimly lighted entrance hall until I ran into someone — a wild-looking teenager carrying two gallon jugs.

He shrugged impatiently when I asked for Fred Amodius. ‘I dunno no names here. See Mr. Catallo.’ He nodded toward a nearby door. I knocked on it.

There was a stir inside and an enormous fat man wearing a satiny pink bathrobe opened the door. He took a swipe at his scattered hair and scowled… ‘Yeah?’

When I mentioned Fred Amodius, I saw the blood rising up through his bristly jowls. ‘That lousy punk! You’re too late, mister! They dragged him out of here yesterday. The lousy punk!’

‘He was sick?’ I asked.

He grinned evilly. ‘Yeah, he was sick all right! So sick he stunk up the place! He musta croaked up there in that closet a coupla weeks ago. The lousy punk! I let him have the place for nothing — over a year now. Said he’d take out the garbage and stuff. Clean up a little. The lousy punk! A month now and he ain’t done nothing! Good riddance!’

‘Can I see his room?’ I asked.

His scowl deepened and he hesitated. Finally he shrugged. ‘Sure, if you can stand the stink. Top floor, last room at the back, left. Leave the window open.’ He peered at me with suspicion, ‘Whatta you lookin’ for? You a relative? There’s nothin’ in the room. That dope didn’t leave a dime.’

I told him a distant relative of Amodius had sent me to check the room. He didn’t believe me but he let me go up anyway.

I was starting up the stairs when he called out, ‘Lousy punk!’ I had the feeling, this time, that he meant me instead of Amodius, but I didn’t make an issue of it. I supposed he was miffed because I hadn’t slipped him a bill.

At the end of the fourth-floor hallway, I saw a tiny door on the left and swung it open. Catallo was right; it was a closet. An undersize cot, a kitchen chair and a wooden box comprised the furniture. The cot was covered with a stained mattress, which looked as if the rats had stampeded in it. The only other things in the room were some newspapers and magazines strewn on the floor and one pair of torn socks tossed in a corner.

The room gave off a sickly-sweetish odour, but it wasn’t as bad as I feared. The single window was wide open.

I glanced into the wooden box. It was empty. I closed the door and got out of there.

I reported to Casserman that night. He shook his head, ‘I feel bad about it. We waited too long. Maybe we could have done something. But that slob is all wet. The runt wasn’t lyin’ dead in that room for any two weeks. We saw him here just a few nights ago.’

I sipped my beer thoughtfully. ‘Well, Catallo lost track of time, that’s all.’

Casserman gave me an enigmatic troubled look and then moved down the bar to wait on a new customer.

I should have dismissed the business from my mind right then and there — I had plenty of other problems to worry about — but I kept fretting about it.

After all, I had detected an odour in the room.

I didn’t sleep well that night. The next day I went to see the autopsy surgeon. Not the coroner, but the doctor who had actually performed the autopsy. For the average citizen this might have proved sticky, but a newspaperman does have certain advantages.

I met him in a little anteroom near the morgue, a Doctor Seilman. He was still wearing his white hospital coat but he had taken off his mask and gloves. He nodded.

He remembered the cadaver of the runt, Fred Amodius, very well.

‘One of the worst cases of malnourishment I’ve seen,’ he told me. ‘He was a walking skeleton.’

‘What was the cause of death?’ I asked him.

‘We put down pneumonia as the immediate cause. But he also had a massive viral infection not necessarily related to the lung condition. Beyond that, he had bleeding ulcers, cirrhosis of the liver and probably a weak heart. Besides the malnutrition.’

‘How long had he been dead — before he was found I mean.’

Seilman didn’t hesitate. ‘Three weeks.’

I stared at him. ‘I don’t think that’s possible.’

He shrugged. ‘Well, we don’t pretend to pin it right to the day. Three weeks, twenty days, eighteen days, something like that.’

I felt perspiration rolling down my face. ‘What, Dr. Seilman, would you say was the absolute minimum?’

He looked at me curiously and thought a minute. ‘I’d say the absolute minimum would be sixteen days. There was no evidence of foul play.’

I thanked him and left.

I can’t even remember what went on in the city room that night. All I could think about was Catallo’s phrase, "croaked up there in that closet a coupla weeks ago". And then Dr. Seilman’s "I’d say the absolute minimum would be sixteen days".

It didn’t add up. Nothing added up. Because both Casserman and I had seen the runt that last night — and that was only three days before they carried him out of Catallo’s closet, less than three full days actually.

I told Casserman that night. He swore. ‘Cripes! Somebody’s loco! We saw him sittin’ there. The both of us can’t be crazy!’

‘It looks like somebody is,’ I said.

He leaned across the bar later in the evening. ‘Don’t laugh now,’ he said frowning, ‘but I’ve been thinkin’. I mean the way the runt didn’t drink his beer and stopped leavin’ a dime. Could both of us been seein’ a ghost?’

I glanced toward the end of the bar. ‘Well — could be. But I believe he just kept going longer than they figured anybody could with his ailments. Will power, you know.’

Casserman nodded. ‘Yeah, maybe.’ He wasn’t convinced and neither was I. I kept remembering that sickish-sweet odour up in the closet room.

Even then, I didn’t drop the business. I tried to find out all I could about Fred Amodius. There were pitifully few facts available.

Over a period of several weeks I picked up scattered bits of information. Amodius had been an orphan, kicked around from one foster home to another. Sometime in his early teens he had wound up in the street. His formal schooling must have been minimal.

He had wanted to be a jockey but he had never made it — never even came close to it. One rainy day I stood at the big local race track talking to a stable "boy" (he was about sixty).

He picked up a currycomb and shrugged. ‘Yeah, I remember the guy, a faded, funny-lookin’ little character. Wanted to ride. Everybody just laughed at him. He didn’t have nothin’.’

He shook his head. ‘He gave up, I guess. Finally tried a stable job, but they kicked him out after a couple days.’ He looked up at me. ‘You know what, mister?’

‘No, what?’

‘He frightened the horses! The boss told him "Get lost!" The jerk!’

That’s about all I could find out. I suppose there wasn’t much more to find out. Amodius drifted around the track, panhandled and once in a while picked up some kind of odd job. How he lived as long as he did is a mystery. They put his age down at thirty-four and although there was some uncertainty about it, that must have been fairly close.

He lived in flophouses and cheap hotels, sometimes slept in doorways and wound up in Catallo’s miserable little closet room.

So far as I could discover, he had no friends. Women must have been rare, or perhaps non-existent, in his life. One informant told me: ‘I never saw that little creep with a dame.’ He may have spent some time with a few of the lower-rung prostitutes. There’s no way of telling. God knows he didn’t have much to offer a woman.

As the stark, pitifully dreary outline of his existence began to take form, I saw why that pale, shadowy, pathetic figure had clung so long to his usual place at the end of Casserman’s bar.

He had been an individual with virtually no emotional life. All his years he had known a shabby, bleak and isolated existence. He must have hungered for life, without ever finding it. Hunger, that was the keynote. Hunger, remorseless and unremitting. Hunger for love, for affection, for recognition, for acceptance, for status — for anything.

Having no inner emotional life at all, the thought of being hurled into the detached world of the mind, of spirit, must have been, to him, the ultimate horror. How could he survive in the world not of flesh, he must have subconsciously asked himself, when he had nothing of the spirit to remember?

He must have looked on death, not as release, but as a last unending loneliness. With his inward emptiness, his non-life as it were, his terrible emotional deprivation, he must have neared death with a sense of fearful desperation.

Death loomed before him as an indescribable abyss of enduring darkness, of ultimate isolation.

If we survive death, we survive, probably, on our memories, on our emotional experiences and recollections, on the relationships which enriched our lives.

Amodius had none, or almost none. The outer darkness must have filled him with inconceivable terror.

And that, I think, is why he lingered at Casserman’s bar. That is why we saw him there nearly two and a half weeks after he was supposed to be dead. That is why we saw him there, or thought we saw him there, when his cadaver was lying in Catallo’s closet.

Casserman’s bar was probably the nearest thing to "home" which he had known in many years. If he was not exactly cherished in the establishment, he was certainly not challenged. He was never badgered, nor annoyed, nor made conspicuous. At the worst he was ignored. Casserman himself always treated him courteously; some of the rest of us nodded to him.

I am convinced that some element of him, some residue as it were, anchored itself desperately to Casserman’s even after the formal death of the flesh. It clung with inconceivable loneliness and longing to the one spot where it had known a degree of warmth, of toleration, of familiarity and friendliness.

It left with enormous reluctance. It was torn away, I suppose, as the tenuous threads which held it temporarily at last yielded to the irresistible tug of the terrible outer gulfs.

Possibly its terror generated a kind of energy which permitted it to move about in a body which no longer supported life as we normally know it.

But as I recall the shadowy something which I glimpsed receding down the railroad tracks that last night, as I remember the sense of insupportable desolation which swept over me, I think not. I believe the thing which Casserman and I saw on those final nights was sheer spectre.

At least, I am convinced, it was not of this earth.