“What’s it about?”
“One thing at a time. It’s pretty obvious from the recording that all Cliff could manage to mumble was a word of one syllable. But he knew me well, and my name’s easy to say. So why didn’t he simply say ‘Strang’?”
“Look, the doc had given him some kind of drug or something.”
“Yes, he was certainly in a dazed condition. But he was a historian, remember that. And he had been researching a paper on shipping off the Atlantic and Gulf coasts in the early seventeen hundreds until a few minutes before the car struck him. Add that to his staring at the skull and crossbones on the poster. Don’t all those things suggest something to you?”
“Let me see. Poison, maybe, like on the can the plumber had.” Fosse scratched his head, still puzzled. “Or—” His eyes widened. “Pirates?”
“Go to the head, of the class, Mr. Fosse. Pirates. The time about which Cliff planned to write was the era of some of the famous buccaneers who plied the southern coastal waters.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Strang, but — well, so what?”
“Now think of Cliff lying there outside the library. The driver of the car that struck him gets out. And Cliff sees a man bending over him — a man he’d never seen before that evening and whose name he didn’t know. Our Mr. Wilson, who’d just moved to Aldershot the day before.
“In the hospital Cliff could have used an identifying word like ‘beard’ but that might have implicated innocent people. Remember, Mr. Kitrich has a small beard, and even young Quinn was in need of a shave.”
The teacher opened the book in front of him to a marked page. “Cliff wanted to describe a particular man,” he went on. “A man who, in the words of an Eighteenth Century writer, had a ‘large Quantity of Hair which, like a frightful Meteor, covered his whole Face.’ Wouldn’t you say that was a fairly accurate description of Mr. Wilson?”
Fosse regarded the librarian’s bushy black beard and nodded. “But who was that guy writing about?”
“A man who was undoubtedly a central figure in Cliff’s article.” The little teacher took a breath and lifted a pointing finger high above his head triumphantly.
“Blackbeard the Pirate!”
“Hold it a minute,” said Fosse, shaking his head impatiently. “Berlinger never said anything about Blackbeard.”
Without a word Mr. Strang passed the book to Fosse, indicating a passage with a slender finger.
“ ‘Blackbeard the Pirate’,” Fosse read slowly, “ ‘the name given to Edward Teach, born in Bristol, England; died Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, in 1718’.”
“Once I’d connected Cliff’s word ‘Teach’ with Blackbeard, the rest was easy,” said Mr. Strang. “Since there was no damage to the car you saw, there had to be another car. It was a fairly safe bet the other car belonged to Wilson’s sister, and he was keeping it out of sight until the case calmed down. It was sure to be at the sister’s house — Wilson wouldn’t take the risk of hiding it anywhere else.”
As he said these words the telephone on the wall behind them rang. Roberts picked it up. After a short conversation he hung up and turned toward Wilson.
“Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum,” he said. “C’mon, Blackbeard. Fosse and I are going to book you into a nice jail cell.”
“But—”
“That was the lab. The two pieces of glass by Berlinger’s body fit the cracked lens of the headlight Fosse found in your sister’s rubbish can.”
The Man Who Could Only Write Things
by Robert Twohy[6]
Robert Twohy was one of the earliest of EQMM contributors — perhaps the earliest — to write mystery stories of the Absurd. His first was “Routine Investigation” (as ironic a title as can be imagined), published in these pages nearly ten years ago (issue of April 1964). Here is another of Mr. Twohy’s oddball stories — far out and offbeat. But we think you’ll enjoy it...
Burt Dee came upstairs from his workroom in the cellar whose floor was half cemented, half earth. He had a zapped look on his face.
His wife, sagging on the couch in their worn-out living room and reading a magazine, turned her head as she heard the clink of bottle against glass, and watched Burt pour a stiff one.
“Are you planning to get drunk again?” she asked.
He had got drunk last night, when the TV script he had been working on fell apart like old cheesecloth.
He stared at her over the drink, with weird eyes. “Listen, you won’t believe this — but I just wrote a horse.”
“Wrote a story about a horse, you mean.”
“No. What I mean is, I wrote a horse.”
“You’ve been at that liquor already this morning.”
“Couple or three shots before I started to work. Then I wrote a horse.”
She got up from the couch, a tall, still good-looking but somewhat slack-faced and faded-eyed blonde, and walked over to him, saying coldly, “We’re both in our forties. That’s too old for nonsense.”
“Listen.”
“To what?”
“The horse.”
She stared at him, tight-lipped. From below came muffled clops and whinnies.
He said, “It’s a horse, I tell you. A small gray honest-to-God not quite full-sized horse.”
Rage suddenly seized her. They were behind in the mortgage payments, all she had to wear were souvenirs of yesteryear, they hadn’t been out in months, the only invitations they got were invitations to pay overdue bills or various horrible consequences would ensue, and instead of grinding out a saleable TV script, he had cooked up some monstrous prank, so he could yuk about it in a barroom. Probably a barfly friend of his had lent him a horse.
She grabbed him by the front of the sweatshirt that covered his fat little torso, and said, in shaking tones, “Why-have-you-put-a-HORSE-in-the-cellar?”
“I haven’t. Leggo. Listen. I was typing and suddenly it was all in high gear, like I was out of myself, typing like mad, knowing something was coming... and there was this horse.”
She stared at him, and knew that if he wasn’t telling the truth, he believed it was the truth.
He put his glass down and said, “I’ll show you.”
They went down the stairs to the cluttered cellar, cement-floored at this end, raw earth at the other. Standing near Burt’s desk and rolling whited eyes at them was a smallish gray horse.
She whispered, “Is it real?”
“Real as any horse in the world.”
She stared at the horse, then at him.
“How did you write it?”
“Like I said. I was writing a love scene and it was limping along, and then suddenly I was aware that I wasn’t writing a love scene any more.”
“Was it a horse scene?”
“No. I just became aware that what I was writing was turning into something. I didn’t know what it was but I kept on writing and then I looked up and saw it. Then I knew I had written a horse.”
They had moved toward the horse, which tossed its head nervously. Back in the dear dead days Lila Dee had lived on an uncle’s farm and had developed a fondness for horses, and the memory of this came back to her as she touched the horse’s neck — and she smiled.
Burt said, “You smiled.”
“Did I?”
“First time in months.”
“There hasn’t been much to smile about.” She gazed at the page in Burt’s machine. There were a few lines of inane dialogue, then rows and rows of letters, all run together, meaningless.
“This is what you wrote?”