“The supernatural beings of a modern city?” Tom answered, seeming to find nothing out of the way in the question. “Sure, they’d be different from the ghosts of yesterday. Each culture creates its own ghosts. Look, the Middle Ages built cathedrals, and pretty soon there were little gray shapes gliding around at night to talk with the gargoyles. Same thing ought to happen to us, with our skyscrapers and factories.” He spoke eagerly, with all his old poetic flare, as if he’d just been meaning to discuss this very matter. He would talk about anything tonight. “I’ll tell you how it works, Dave. We begin by denying all the old haunts and superstitions. Why shouldn’t we? They belong to the era of cottage and castle. They can’t take root in the new environment. Science goes materialistic, proving that there isn’t anything in the universe except tiny bundles of energy. As if, for that matter, a tiny bundle of energy mightn’t mean anything.
“But wait, that’s just the beginning. We go on inventing and discovering and organizing. We cover the earth with huge structures. We pile them together in great heaps that make old Rome and Alexandria and Babylon seem almost toy-towns by comparison. The new environment, you see, is forming.”
David stared at him with incredulous fascination, profoundly disturbed. This was not at all what he had expected or hoped for—this almost telepathic prying into his most hidden fears. He had wanted to talk about these things—yes—but in a skeptical reassuring way. Instead, Tom sounded almost serious. David started to speak, but Tom held up his finger for silence, aping the gesture of a schoolteacher.
“Meanwhile, what’s happening inside each one of us? I’ll tell you. All sorts of inhibited emotions are accumulating. Fear is accumulating. Horror is accumulating. A new kind of awe of the mysteries of the universe is accumulating. A psychological environment is forming, along with the physical one. Wait, let me finish. Our culture becomes ripe for infection. From somewhere. It’s just like a bacteriologist’s culture—I didn’t intend the pun—when it gets to the right temperature and consistency for supporting a colony of germs. Similarly, our culture suddenly spawns a horde of demons. And, like germs, they have a peculiar affinity for our culture. They’re unique. They fit in. You wouldn’t find the same kind any other time or place.
“How would you know when the infection had taken place? Say, you’re taking this pretty seriously, aren’t you? Well, so am I, maybe. Why, they’d haunt us, terrorize us, try to rule us. Our fears would be their fodder. A parasite-host relationship. Supernatural symbiosis. Some of us—the sensitive ones—would notice them sooner than others. Some of us might see them without knowing what they were. Others might know about them without seeing them. Like me, eh?
“What was that? I didn’t catch your remark. Oh, about werewolves. Well, that’s a pretty special question, but tonight I’d take a crack at anything. Yes, I think there’d be werewolves among our demons, but they wouldn’t be much like the old ones. No nice clean fur, white teeth and shining eyes. Oh, no. Instead you’d get some nasty hound that wouldn’t surprise you if you saw it nosing at a garbage pail or crawling out from under a truck. Frighten and terrorize you, yes. But surprise, no. It would fit into the environment. Look as if it belonged in a city and smell the same. Because of the twisted emotions that would be its food, your emotions and mine. A matter of diet.”
Tom Goodsell chuckled loudly and lit another cigarette. But David only stared at the scarred counter. He realized he couldn’t tell Tom what had happened this morning—or this noon. Of course, Tom would immediately scoff and be skeptical. But that wouldn’t get around the fact that Tom had already agreed—agreed in partial jest perhaps, but still agreed. And Tom himself confirmed this, when, in a more serious, friendlier voice, he said:
“Oh, I know I’ve talked a lot of rot tonight, but still, you know, the way things are, there’s something to it. At least, I can’t express my feelings any other way.”
They shook hands at the corner, and David rode the surging street car home through a city whose every bolt and stone seemed subtly infected, whose every noise carried shuddering overtones. His mother was waiting up for him, and after he had wearily argued with her about getting more rest and seen her off to bed, he lay sleepless himself, all through the night, like a child in a strange house, listening to each tiny noise and watching intently each changing shape taken by the shadows.
That night nothing shouldered through the door or pressed its muzzle against the window pane.
Yet he found that it cost him an effort to go down to the department store next morning, so conscious was he of the thing’s presence in the faces and forms, the structures and machines around him. It was as if he were forcing himself into the heart of a monster. Detestation of the city grew within him. As yesterday, the crowded aisles seemed only hiding places, and he avoided the locker room. Gertrude Rees remarked sympathetically on his fatigued look, and he took the opportunity to invite her out that evening. Of course, he told himself while they sat watching the movie, she wasn’t very close to him. None of the girls had been close to him—a not-very-competent young man tied down to the task of supporting parents whose little reserve of money had long ago dribbled away. He had dated them for a while, talked to them, told them his beliefs and ambitions, and then one by one they had drifted off to marry other men. But that did not change the fact that he needed the wholesomeness Gertrude could give him.
And as they walked home through the chilly night, he found himself talking inconsequentially and laughing at his own jokes. Then, as they turned to one another in the shadowy vestibule and she lifted her lips, he sensed her features altering queerly, lengthening. “A funny sort of light here,” he thought as he took her in his arms. But the thin strip of fur on her collar grew matted and oily under his touch, her fingers grew hard and sharp against his back, he felt her teeth pushing out against her lips, and then a sharp, prickling sensation as of icy needles.
Blindly he pushed away from her, then saw—and the sight stopped him dead—that she had not changed at all or that whatever change had been was now gone.
“What’s the matter, dear?” he heard her ask startledly. “What’s happened? What’s that you’re mumbling? Changed, you say? What’s changed? Infected with it? What do you mean? For heaven’s sake, don’t talk that way. You’ve done it to me, you say? Done what?” He felt her hand on his arm, a soft hand now. “No, you’re not crazy. Don’t think of such things. But you’re neurotic and maybe a little batty. For heaven’s sake, pull yourself together.”
“I don’t know what happened to me,” he managed to say, in his right voice again. Then, because he had to say something more: “My nerves all jumped, like someone had snapped them.”
He expected her to be angry, but she seemed only puzzledly sympathetic, as if she liked him but had become afraid of him, as if she sensed something wrong in him beyond her powers of understanding or repair.
“Do take care of yourself,” she said doubtfully. “We’re all a little crazy now and then, I guess. My nerves get like wires too. Goodnight.”
He watched her disappear up the stair. Then he turned and ran.
At home his mother was waiting up again, close to the hall radiator to catch its dying warmth, the inevitable shapeless bathrobe wrapped about her. Because of a new thought that had come to the forefront of his brain, he avoided her embrace and, after a few brief words, hurried off toward his room. But she followed him down the hall.