III

White in Blackness

My guide excused himself on the ground of other duties, and I went to my room to unpack. There was a lock on the door of my room, I noticed, but the only keyhole was on the outside. From the inside, one just didn't lock the door.

I stood looking out the window for a moment at a man who, standing in the middle of the driveway, was turning in slow steady circles for no reason that I could discover.

Then I turned back into the room and reached for the handle of my suitcase to move it down to the end of the bed.

The pull nearly jerked my arm out of its socket. It felt as though someone had taken my clothes out of that suitcase and filled it up with paving blocks.

I stared at the suitcase. It was mine, all right.

So I opened it. My clothes were still in it, but packed much more tightly than I'd packed them, to make room for the object that had been added.

It was a tommy gun.

I lifted it out and looked at the drum. It was loaded to capacity, and the bullets were real.

I put it down on the bed alongside the suitcase and stood staring at it unbelievingly.

So Garvey did little errands for patients, huh?

But he had backed off when I'd asked him for a machine-gun.

It just didn't make sense. Granting that he had taken me seriously, granting that he was screwy enough to be willing, where in thunder could he have got a tommy gun?

And why, thinking me crazy, would he have given me one? He was supposed to be sane.

The more I thought about it, the crazier it got.

Finally it occurred to me to look through the rest of my stuff to be sure it was all there.

It all seemed to be. Five shirts, one suit besides the one I was wearing, handkerchiefs, socks. I hadn't counted the smaller items of laundry, but there seemed to be about as many of them as I'd put into the suitcase.

I had just thrown them in, though, and now they were tightly packed to make room for the machine-gun. To give my hands something to do, and my brain a rest, I moved them over to the empty drawers of the bureau. Shirts in the big drawer, handkerchiefs and socks in the upper smaller.

And then I remembered something. None of the rolled-up pairs of socks had been heavier than it should be.

I found the pair of thick, woolen socks into which I had rolled the brass knuckles. I didn't have to unroll it. I could tell merely by feeling. The knucks were gone.

I unrolled the socks to be sure.

And then the humor of the thing hit me square, and I sat down on the edge of the bed and began laughing as though I belonged there, laughing like a blasted loony.

Whoever had given me that loaded tommy gun had gone to the trouble of stealing my set of brass knuckles!

"Lovely," I thought, "perfectly lovely."

Stanley Sanitarium, Paul Verne or no Paul Verne, was going to be an interesting place.

After a while sanity came back to me, and with it the realization that I had to do something about that tommy gun. What?

Take it to Dr. Stanley and tell him the truth about it? If he believed me, okay.

But suppose he didn't--and I wouldn't blame him a bit. Suppose he thought, or even suspected, that I had brought it in myself? Out on my ear I would go, before I got another look at the sanitarium. Or I would have Hobson's choice of paying my fare and signing on as a bona-fide loony and committing myself.

On second thought, I doubted he would give me that alternative. He took "mild psychoses" only. Would he figure a man who pulled a stunt like that with a loaded tommy gun was suffering from a mild psychosis? Hardly. He would turn me over to the police for investigation.

And anyway how could I do an about-face from being a man in need of a job to a man able to pay the plenty high tariff a place like this would charge?

Nope, Dr. Stanley might believe me, or he might not. If I took that chance, I was seriously jeopardizing my "in" here before I even began to accomplish my purpose.

But what then?

Well, there was a tiny penknife on my watch chain. Using it as a screwdriver, I took the breech of the tommy gun apart and took out the firing-pin and the tiny block of metal that held it. I took the bullets out of the drum, too.

Then, leaving the tommy gun, with its teeth pulled, behind me, I went down the corridor a few doors and knocked on a door at random. Number Twelve. As I hoped, there wasn't any answer, and when I tried the door, it opened.

I went back for the tommy gun and put it in a drawer of the bureau in Room Twelve. The room was occupied, because there were shirts in the drawer. I didn't take time to try to find out whose room it was. Undoubtedly the whole place would know, when the occupant of that room found what was in his bureau.

Then I went downstairs, avoiding the recreation room, and went outside. I wandered about the grounds until I found a secluded spot behind a small storage shed, and there I buried the bullets. The firing-pin block I threw over the wall, as far as I could throw it. Somebody might find it some day, but they wouldn't know what it was.

I got back to the building just in time for dinner. A bell was ringing.

Dinner was unexciting, although the food was good. It was served in a dining room with half a dozen tables for four, at which the guests seemed to group themselves at will. I found myself with two table companions. Frank Betterman, the dipsomaniac, sat across from me, and at my left sat a man whose only obvious claim for presence there was that he wore a folded newspaper hat, the kind children make.

Betterman ate without talking or taking his eyes off his plate. The man with the paper hat talked only of the weather at first but with the meat course he warmed up on human destiny and some complex theory of his that seemed similar to astrology except that the affairs of men were run, not by the stars and planets, but by volcanic activity within the seething core of earth.

I followed him, more or less, as far as dessert, and then was hopelessly lost.

On the way out, Betterman came up alongside me.

"Did you bring in any liquor, Anderson?" he said quietly. "I've got to have a drink or . . . Well, I've just got to."

"No," I admitted, "I didn't. Have you tried Garvey?"

"Garvey!" There was the ultimate of scorn in his voice. "That man's on the wrong side of the fence here. He's mad."

"In what way?"

Betterman shrugged. "Cadges you to run errands for you, and then doesn't. Laughs about it behind your back, to the other patients."

"Oh," I said.

Then anyone here might know the joking request for a machine-gun I had made to Garvey. Not that it helped me any to know that.

I played ping-pong in the basement with Betterman for a while, which gave me a chance to study him. Aside from being nervous and jittery, he seemed normal enough.

Lights out at eleven was the rule, but by ten-thirty I was ready to go to my room and sort out my confused impressions. Already all but a few of the patients had disappeared from the recreation room and those few were ones who interested me least.

I walked up the stairs and along the dimly lighted corridor. The door of Room Eleven, just across the hall from the room into which I had put the tommy gun, was open. There was a light on somewhere in the room, out of my range of vision.

I started past the open doorway, glanced in--and stopped abruptly.

On the blank white wall opposite the open door was a shadow, the shadow of a man hanging by his neck from a rope. Obviously dead, for there was not the slightest movement.

I stepped through the doorway and turned to the corner in which the man must be hanging.

"Hullo," said Harvey Toler.

He wasn't hanging by his neck. He was sitting comfortably in a well-padded chair, reading a book.

"Your name's Anderson, isn't it?" he said. "Come in and sit down."

I looked back at the wall, and the shadow of the hanging man was still there. It looked like a real shadow, not painted. I looked back toward the opposite corner and this time I saw the gimmick. Nothing more complicated than a bit of work with a black crayon on the white, translucent shade of the reading lamp. The six-inch figure there cast a six-foot shadow yonder.

"Clever," I said.

Toler smiled and looked pleased.

"Sit down," he repeated. "Care for a drink, perhaps?"

Without waiting for my answer, he put down his book and opened a door in the front of the little stand upon which the lamp stood. He took out two glasses and a quart bottle of whiskey, already opened and with only about a fifth of its contents left.

"You'll find the whiskey Garvey brings in is pretty smooth stuff," he said. "He robs you for it, but it's good."

I took the glass he handed me.

"Here's to crime," I said, and we drank.

It was smooth; didn't bite a bit. The only thing wrong was that it wasn't whiskey at all. It was cold tea.

"Another?" Toler asked.

I declined enthusiastically. For just a moment I felt a deep brotherly sympathy with Frank Betterman. It was part of my job, maybe, to stay and pump Harvey Toler so I could report on him. But after that business with the tea, the devil with it.

Excusing myself on the ground of being sleepy, I went on down the corridor to my own room.

I looked into the drawers and the closet but my stuff still seemed to be as I had left it, and nothing new had been added. I chucked under the bed the several items of silverware which I'd stolen from the dinner table, to carry out my role of kleptomaniac, and then undressed. I was just reaching for my pajamas when the lights went out.

I lay in bed in utter, perfect darkness, trying to think. But the only thought that came was the thought that if I stayed here long enough, I'd go crazy myself.

After a while I could see a thin crescent of moon and there was enough light in my room that I could make out the dark outline of the dresser and the doors.

Why, I wondered, in the name of sanity or insanity, had someone put that loaded tommy gun in my room? No sane person would have put it there. And how would an insane person have got it?

Was Frank Betterman right in thinking the gateman, Garvey, was on the wrong side of the fence in regard to insanity? If so, was Dr. Stanley crazy to hire a crazy attendant? Frank Betterman had seemed sane except for his craving for liquor, and while a dipsomaniac may get DT's, he doesn't usually suffer from fixed delusions.

I wondered what would happen if Toler offered Betterman a drink of that zero-proof whiskey of his. If I knew anything about dipsomania, there would be a bloody murder on the spot.

"Nuts to it," I told myself. "I haven't been here long enough to get any answers. I'd better go to sleep."

I had just shut my eyes when I heard the sound of the door opening.

I didn't move, but my eyes jerked open and strained into the darkness.

Yes, the door was open all right and someone--or something--in white was standing there in the doorway looking at me. I couldn't make out any details, for if there was a light in the hallway, it had been turned off.

Just something white. An attendant's white uniform? Or the white pajamas of a patient?

Still without moving, I braced myself for quick action. As soon as he stepped inside the room, I would jump him. Luckily, my only cover was a thin sheet that wouldn't hamper me much.

Then suddenly the figure wasn't there any more. Blackness instead of gray-white, and the sound of the door closing. The hallway light flashed back on. I could see the crack of it under the edge of the door.

That meant I could see who my visitor had been. Quietly I got out of bed, tiptoed to the door, and turned the knob.

The knob turned silently enough, but the door wouldn't open. It was locked.