John and Moira knew all about the rope and the letter. Over and over she had told them that one day she must again do what she felt was necessary. Yet they were so reluctant to let her go. She could feel their reluctance now. Selfish. Even in death, they cared only for themselves.
“John,” she said, “this is the proper day. Can’t you understand how I feel?”
The wind mourned outside.
“Moira? We’ve hurt each other enough. Isn’t it time we were together again?”
The last of the flowers suddenly trembled and broke apart. The earth seemed to tremble, too, as if there were stirrings within. It was only a draft caused by the wind, she knew it could be nothing else, yet it was as if they had caused it. As if they were beseeching and mocking her, saying quite clearly: “You can’t leave us, Miranda. Who will tend to us once you’re gone? Who will bring flowers and keep the weeds from growing up around us?
“We need you, Miranda. You know that, don’t you?”
She did not argue; it never did any good to argue. She sighed and got slowly to her feet. “After all,” she said, “I think I will not hang myself today.”
She lowered the hinged section, thinking that she must buy fresh flowers to replace the withered ones because it was autumn and there were none left in the garden. But before she called the florist, she would ring up Mrs. Boyer and tell her she would be able to babysit tonight after all.
The Man Who Collected “The Shadow”
Mr. Theodore Conway was a nostalgist, a collector of memorabilia, a dweller in the uncomplicated days of his adolescence when radio, movie serials, and pulp magazines were the ruling forms of entertainment and super-heroes were the idols of American youth.
At forty-three, he resided alone in a modest apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where he commuted daily by subway to his position of file clerk in the archives of Baylor, Baylor, Leeds and Wadsworth, a respected probate law firm. He was short and balding and very plump and very nondescript; he did not indulge in any of the vices, major or minor; he had no friends to speak of, and neither a wife nor, euphemistically or otherwise, a girlfriend. (In point of fact, Mr. Conway was that rarest of individuals, an adult male virgin.) He did not own a television set, did not attend the theater or movies. His one and only hobby, his single source of pleasure, his sole purpose in life, was the accumulation of nostalgia in general — and nostalgia pertaining to that most inimitable of all super-heroes, The Shadow, in particular.
Ah! The Shadow! Mr. Conway idolized Lamont Cranston, loved Margo Lane as he could never love any living woman. Nothing set his blood to racing quite so quickly as The Shadow on the scent of an evildoer, utilizing the Power that, as Cranston, he had learned in the Orient — the Power to cloud men’s minds so that they could not see him. Nothing gave Mr. Conway more pleasure than listening to the haunting voice of Orson Welles, capturing The Shadow as no other had over the air; or reading Maxwell Grant’s daring accounts in The Shadow Magazine; or paging through one of the starkly drawn Shadow comic books. Nothing filled him with as much delicious anticipation as the words spoken by his hero at the beginning of each radio adventure: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows... and the eerie, bloodcurdling laugh that followed it. Nothing filled him with as much security as, when each case was closed, this ace among aces saying words of warning to criminals everywhere: The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay. The Shadow knows!
Mr. Conway had begun collecting nostalgia in 1946, starting with a wide range of pulp magazines. (He now had well over ten thousand issues of Wu Fang, G-8 and his Battle Aces, Black Mask, Weird Tales, Doe Savage, and two hundred others.) Then he had gone on to comic books and comic strips, to premiums of every kind and description — decoders and secret compartment belts and message flashlights and spy rings and secret pens that wrote in invisible ink. In the 1970s he had begun to accumulate tapes of such radio shows as Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. But while he amassed all of these eagerly, he pursued the mystique of The Shadow with a fervor that bordered on the fanatical.
He haunted secondhand bookshops and junk shops, pored over advertisements in newspapers and magazines and collectors’ sheets, wrote letters, made telephone calls, spent every penny of his salary that did not go for bare essentials. And at long last he succeeded where no other nostalgist had even come close to succeeding. He accomplished a remarkable, an almost superhuman feat.
He collected the complete Shadow.
There was absolutely nothing produced about his hero — not a written word, not a spoken sentence, not a drawing or gadget — that Mr. Conway did not own.
The final item, the one that had eluded him for so many years, came into his possession on a Saturday evening in late June. He had gone into a tenement area of Manhattan, near the East River, to purchase from a private individual a rare cartoon strip of Terry and the Pirates. With the strip carefully tucked into his coat pocket, he was on his way back to the subway when he chanced upon a small neighborhood bookshop in the basement of a crumbling brownstone. It was still open, and unfamiliar to him, and so he entered and began to browse. And on one of the cluttered tables at the rear — there it was.
The October 1931 issue of The Shadow Magazine.
Mr. Conway emitted a small, ecstatic cry. Caught up the magazine in trembling hands, stared at it with disbelieving eyes, opened it tenderly, read the contents page and the date, ran sweat-slick fingers over the rough, grainy pulp paper. Near-mint condition. Spine undamaged. Colors unfaded. And the price—
Fifty cents.
Fifty cents!
Tears of joy rolled unabashedly down Mr. Conway’s cheeks as he carried this treasure to the elderly proprietor. The bookseller gave him a strange look, shrugged, and accepted two quarters from Mr. Conway without a word. Two quarters, fifty cents. And Mr. Conway had been prepared to pay hundreds...
As he went out into the gathering darkness — it was almost nine by this time — he could scarcely believe that he had finally done it, that he now possessed the total word, picture, and voice exploits of the most awesome master crime fighter of them all. His brain reeled. The Shadow was his now; Lamont Cranston and Margo Lane (beautiful Margo!) — his, all his, his alone.
Instead of proceeding to the subway, Mr. Conway impulsively entered a small diner not far from the bookshop and ordered a cup of coffee. Then, once again, he opened the magazine. He had previously read a reprint of the novel by Maxwell Grant — The Shadow Laughs! — but that was not the same as reading the original, no indeed. He plunged into the story again, savoring each line, each page, the mounting suspense, the seemingly inescapable traps laid to eliminate The Shadow by archvillains Isaac Coffran and Birdie Crull, the smashing of their insidious counterfeiting plot: justice triumphant. The weed of crime bears bitter fruit, crime does not pay...
So engrossed was Mr. Conway that he lost all track of time. When at last he closed the magazine he was startled to note that except for the counterman, the diner was deserted. It had been nearly full when he entered. He looked at his wristwatch, and his mouth dropped open in amazement. Good heavens! It was past midnight!
Mr. Conway scrambled out of the booth and hurriedly left the diner. Outside, apprehension seized him. The streets were dark and deserted — ominous, forbidding.