Adams had changed too. He still was stiff and formal, almost distant, but he was prim no longer. He had not shaved for a day or two and his eyes were haggard and there was a sly nervousness about him that put me on edge.
He did not seem surprised to see me and when I mentioned the storm that had driven me to cover he passed over it with agreement that it was a dirty night. It was as if I lived just across the way and had dropped in for an hour or two.
There was no mention of anything to eat, no indication that he even suspected I hoped to spend the night.
Awkwardly, or at least awkwardly on my part, we talked of inconsequential things. Adams seemed wholly at ease although his face and hands were nervous.
Shortly the talk veered to his studies and I gathered from his words that he had dropped all other phases of his research to concentrate upon the punishments and tortures man had inflicted upon his fellows from the advent of historic time.
Hunched in his chair, staring at the wall, he called up the bloody sadism that had left a trail of blood and pain across the centuries, linking the old Egyptian king whose proudest title had been the Cracker of Foreheads to the man whose smoking revolver piled the dead knee-deep in Russian cellars.
He knew in detail how men had been staked out for the ants, how others had been buried to the neck in desert sands, and he assured me most solemnly that the American Indian had been a past master at the art of burning, that the expert “questioners” of the Inquisition, in this respect at least, had been no more than quasi-efficient bunglers.
He talked of racks and quarterings, of hooks that ripped out a man’s insides—and behind the hard cold words of erudition that he spoke I smelled the smoke and blood and heard the screams and the creaking of the ropes and the clanking of the chains.
But he did not, I am sure, know anything of this.
Then it came, the topic he had been leading up to, the quicksilver problem that slid within his brain, waiting to be grasped and solved—the end product of all the things he knew.
“But they all fall short of perfect,” he said. “There is no such thing as a perfect torture, for always in the end the victim dies or gives in and the torture halts. There is no way of measuring what a man’s resistance is. Sometimes you overdo it and he dies, other times you allow the victim to escape the full rigor of the execution for fear that he has reached the limit of endurance, which he hasn’t.”
“A perfect torture!” I said and I know my words must have been both a question and an exclamation point. For even then I didn’t understand. Even then I couldn’t understand why a man should be interested, even academically, in a perfect torture. Such interest seemed to verge on madness.
It was fantastic—sitting there in that old Wisconsin farmhouse with the first winter’s storm raging against the windows, to hear a man talk calmly and learnedly about the technical problems of efficient torture past and present.
“Perhaps in hell,” said Foster Adams, “but certainly not on earth. For human beings are crude things and the things they do are crude.”
“Hell?” I asked him. “Do you believe in hell? A literal hell?”
He laughed at me and from the laugh I could not tell whether he did or not.
I looked at my watch and it was almost midnight. “I must be going now,” I said. “The storm seems to have slackened a bit.”
But I made no move to rise from my chair, for certainly, I thought, a hint as broad as that would get me an invitation for the night.
Adams said merely, “I’m sorry you must go. I had hoped you could stay another hour.”
I was so angry as I trudged down the hill, back to the car, that I did not hear the feet behind me for some time. They must, I am sure, have followed me from the house but I did not hear them.
The storm had slackened and the wind was dying down and here and there the stars were shining through the scudding clouds.
I was halfway down the hill before I heard the footsteps, although thinking back upon it, I am certain that I had been hearing them for some time before I became aware of them. And hearing them, I knew they were made not by man but by some animal, for I could hear the click of hoofs and the cracking of hocks as they skidded on the ice that lay beneath the snow.
I stopped and swung around but there was nothing on the road behind me, although the footsteps kept coming on. But when they had drawn close they stopped and waited, only to start up again as soon as I went on, following me down the hill, letting me set the pace, keeping just out of sight.
A cow, I thought, although that seemed strange, for I was sure that Adams had no cow and cows as a rule do not wander down a road on a stormy night. And the hoofbeats too were not those of a cow.
I stopped several times and once I shouted at the thing that followed and after the third or fourth time I realized it no longer followed me.
Somehow I got the car turned around. Before I reached the main highway the machine bogged down three times but by dint of good luck and some profanity I got moving again. The highway was easier traveling and I reached home shortly after dawn.
Three days later I had a letter from Adams that was a half apology. He had been overworked, he said, and not quite himself. He hoped that I would overlook any eccentricity. But he did not mention his lack of hospitality. I presume that came under the heading of “eccentricity.”
It was almost a year before I saw him again. By roundabout fashion I learned that his old manservant had died and that now he lived alone. I thought about him often, feeling that he must be lonely, for the servant had been, it seemed, his only human contact. But I was still a little put out by the snowstorm incident and I made no move to visit him again.
Then I got a second letter, really no more than a note. He indicated that he had something of interest to show me and that he would feel obliged if I would stop by the next time I happened to be in his section of the country. There was no word of the manservant’s death, no indication that Adams was lonely for human companionship, nothing to hint that his life was not exactly the same as it had been before. Terse, businesslike, the note made its point and that was all.
I waited a decent interval, for I was determined on two things—that I would demonstrate to my own satisfaction that the man had no hold upon me and that I would not rush off quickly at his summons. I felt the need to demonstrate toward him a certain degree of coolness for his shabby treatment of me that November night.
But finally I went and the house was the same as before except that it looked slightly shabbier and the cellar door had completely rotted and fallen in and another shutter or two had dropped from the windows.
Adams let me in and I was shocked at the change in him. He was unshaven and his beard was turning grey in spots. His hair hung down over his collar and his hands were unwashed with thick lines of black beneath broken fingernails. His collar and cuffs were ragged and his coat was threadbare. Splotches of dried egg had dribbled down his chin and spattered upon his shirt. He wore scuffed carpet slippers which made a swishing scraping noise as he walked along the hall.
He greeted me with the same aloofness as always and led me to the parlor, which seemed darker and mustier than ever before. Although his eyes were bright and his voice as firm as ever there was a fumbling attitude about him, a faint unsureness in his speech and manner.
He complimented me upon my novel and mentioned that he was gratified to see I had made good use of the information he had been able to supply me. But from the way he talked about it I felt sure he had not read the book.
“And now,” he said, “I was wondering if you would mind looking over something I have written.”