Who Goes There?

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, January 12, 1946.

“This crime wave!” muttered Jimmie Frise, throwing the newspaper aside.

“It isn’t really a crime wave, Jim,” I explained. “It’s actually a part of the war. It’s like, after the storm, the swell still beating on the shore.”

“Do you mean,” demanded Jim, “that soldiers are perpetrating the crimes?”

“I certainly don’t,” I protested. “On the contrary; soldiers are sick and tired of violence. When I say part of the war, I refer to civilians. All the damage of war isn’t done to soldiers. Soldiers lose their legs and arms and lives. But civilians, even away off here in Canada where the war was only a radio program, become casualties, too.”

“How?” asked Jim.

“Morally,” I explained. “We think of criminals as being tough. They’re not. They are cowards. Without exception, they are weaklings. Could a man who wasn’t coward to his very roots go into a store, armed with a gun, and rob a defenceless man?”

“That never occurred to me,” said Jim.

“Is a coward tough?” I pursued. “I mean in the good sense of tough. It’s impossible! A man who will use violence against defenceless people shows right off that he has a yellow streak a yard wide.”

“That’s true,” exclaimed Jimmie.

“He will kick babies,” I said, “he will cheat at cards, he is just a cheap, third-rate lug. Without a hundred per cent. advantage over the man he is about to rob, such as a loaded gun or a black-jack in his hand, he wouldn’t dream of attacking even an old woman.”

“Did you never hear of a criminal who wasn’t a coward?” ruminated Jim.

“Never,” I said. “It takes a kind of perverted or hopped-up courage to commit a crime, I suppose. But always, the criminal makes mighty sure – by the most careful and cautious scouting – that the person he is about to attack is unarmed. And that he is armed.”

“Criminals, in their pictures, look tough,” suggested Jim.

Tough?” I cried. “I guess we don’t mean the same thing when we say tough. Oak is tough. Leather is tough. Good steel is tough. Good soldiers are tough. Criminals are about as tough as boiled spaghetti. Take another look at the next picture you see of a criminal. He has the mark of the coward all over him: the sly, timid eye, the slack mouth, the look of a mongrel that has just been knocked over by a truck. I tell you, the sooner we begin to think of criminal as being synonymous with coward, the sooner a lot of weaklings will realize what their fellow men really think of them.”

“I suppose a lot of criminals,” agreed Jim, “dramatize themselves in their own imaginations as being regular devils.”

“That’s where the war angle comes in,” I pointed out. “A man who imagines himself a regular devil – but who ducked and dodged and avoided going to war – has quite a lot of trouble imagining himself a devil. Conscience stirs, even in plain common crooks. And every time he sticks his chest out and looks at himself in the mirror, to see, if the regular devil is still there, he remembers how he ducked and dodged the war. Now what is the psychological effect of this? Why, he’s got to go out, with a loaded gun, and hold up the old lady who runs the candy store.”

“Aw,” protested Jim.

“During the war,” I explained, “crime subsides because the cowards who are the criminals are too busy ducking and dodging, too anxious to be unnoticed, to be very active. But when the war is over and the troops come home, and these same yellow-bellies have to walk the street amid thousands of he-men, in uniform and fresh out of uniform, they go through tortures. They’ve got to prove to themselves that they are rough, tough, shootin’ guys, too. So they go and shoot an elderly druggist.”

“I’d Blow Him Asunder”

“A lot of the new crop of criminals,” declared Jim, “are just youngsters.”

“The pity of that,” I agreed, “is that many of these kids, if they had been a couple of years older, would have enlisted and gone to war. Their whole being, their mind, heart, imagination, has been steeped in war. They gorged themselves on war literature. They saturated themselves in war movies. They played war games. Suddenly the war ends. They are frustrated. The very things that would have made them splendid soldiers now curdle in them. They have been nurtured for action – by every influence that could be brought to bear on them. Suddenly, all hope of action ends. They have to be good little boys again and fill their imagination with reading, writing and arithmetic, and the thrifty life.”

“And some of them,” surmised Jim, “go sour.”

“They have been nurtured for action,” I repeated, “over six furious years. From the age of 12 to 18. Some of them go looking for action. In crime.”

“But only the yellow ones,” said Jim.

“The ones that aren’t yellow,” I explained, “take hockey or skiing or even rabbit shooting”

“All I can say,” reflected Jim, “is that if a burglar walked in that door right now, I’d tell him to help himself. The situation is too tricky, these days, to monkey with.”

“I,” I stated firmly, “would blow him in two with my shotgun.”

“I’d rather,” countered Jimmie, “collect my burglar insurance than have my widow collect my life insurance.”

“If a few stout citizens,” I submitted, “would just blow a few of these valiant gunmen in half with a double-barrel shotgun loaded with No. 4 shot, there would be a sudden sharp decline in hold-ups.”

“You’re on delicate ground there,” warned Jim. “Even a citizen, in his own home, is not allowed murder even a burglar.”

“An armed burglar!” I protested.

“Suppose,” said Jim, “your house was entered by a thug, armed with a gun, who wakened you and robbed you. Suppose, then, that as the robber fled, you grabbed your shotgun from the closet, ran to the bedroom window and shot the armed burglar as he ran. You’d be arrested.”

“I’d take a chance,” I insisted. “I’d like to give a burglar a load of No. 4 right in the umbilicus.”

“Umbil- what?” protested Jim.

“That’s the technical word for where I’d like to give him the load of No. 4,” I elucidated.

“For one man,” said Jim, “who would use his pistols, guns and rifles to shoot a criminal, there are 20 who leave their weapons loose around the house for criminals to steal – and so arm themselves.”

“If criminals knew,” I countered, “that every home, store and office in the country was armed with a loaded gun, they wouldn’t be so confident walking in.”

“Common sense tells you,” asserted Jimmie, “that guns lying around loose are an advantage to the criminal.”

“Common sense tells me,” I retorted, “that we have just got through a dreadful war in which peaceful nations disarmed, while criminal nations armed. My theory is, teach every honest man to shoot. And let him have a gun in the house. It wouldn’t be long before the criminal population would be satisfactorily reduced.”

“Would you really shoot a burglar?” asked Jimmie earnestly.

“Right in the umbilicus,” I assured him firmly.

“Where is that?” asked Jim.

“It’s the small bull’s-eye on the solar plexus,” I explained, “that we all get when we’re born.”

“Ah,” cried Jim. Then he shuddered.

“What an awful place to shoot a guy!” he pleaded. “Wouldn’t you shoot him in the leg? That would hold him.”

“Probably if I aimed at his umbilicus,” I admitted, “I’d hit him in the leg anyway.”

Jim sat, listening to the silence of my house. My family was all out and Jim and I were sorting over my trout flies. After all, it is only 15 weeks until the opening of the trout season. Fifteen measly weeks! As Jim says; in 10 weeks, it will be only five weeks.

That’s the way to look at it.

Jim sat, listening. He glanced at the front windows. Then at the dining-room windows. While I transferred six Parmacheene belles from one fly box to another, where their color fitted more artistically, Jim got up and wandered over to the windows. I saw him trying the latches.

“What’s the matter?” I inquired. “Nervous ?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jim uneasily. “I sort of feel something in the air. I have the feeling somebody is watching this house.”

“What nonsense!” I laughed. “You’ve got the feeling I get when I read a murder mystery Every time I finish a murder mystery, I have to go all over the house, from cellar to garret, locking windows and double-locking the doors.”

Right on the Button!

“I was thinking more,” said Jim, coming back and sitting down at the trout-fly covered table, “of the sort of crazy guy you are. It would be just like you to grab a shotgun and shoot, somebody.”

“What of it?’ I demanded. “I’m an old soldier. I’ve done some shooting. And they weren’t criminals. You artillery guys do your shooting by remote control. You fire into the air at somebody six miles away. You’re abstract killers. We infantry have lost all our qualms.”

“Would you really, REALLY…?” begged Jim, leaning forward.

“Right,” I declared, “in the umbilicus!”

“Brrrrrr,” shivered Jim.

So we sat, with five fly boxes spread out in front of us, sorting them according to pattern, size and color. Among my flies, we found some with little ends of gut leader still knotted in the eyes. And this we removed with a needle and set those flies aside to be taken out to the kitchen later, to be held in the steam of the kettle. This renews the freshness of the feathers.

As we sat thus in pleasant reverie of fishing days gone and fishing days to come, we heard, with slight starts of nervousness, the frost cracking in the walls of my house. It is amazing how many sounds a house can make, when all else is still. Loud cracks, soft cracks, queer creeping sounds. Weird mutters, which might be the gas meter down cellar, or even the electric wiring taking a stretch, in the changing temperature of a house in winter.

Several times in 10 minutes, Jim and I both were galvanized by these mysterious little murmurs of sound, going on constantly, which I had never noticed before.

After a little while, I got up and looked out through the curtains of the living-room windows. Then I walked into the dining-room and examined the back garden.

“Spooky, isn’t it?” grinned Jim pallidly.

“It’s just what we’ve been talking about,” I said, having to clear my throat slightly before speaking.

We had got from the Montreals to the Grizzly Kings, and from the March Browns to the Invictas, when suddenly, without any warning, no sound of footfall in the side drive, we both heard the side door of my house quietly squeak open.

Without even a whisht, Jim and I looked at each other and froze.

From the hall leading to the side door, not a sound came. The door had opened, quickly, resolutely, Then absolute silence. The intruder was standing, at the open door, listening.

The silence was appalling.

Then, we heard him slowly, cautiously close the door.

Jim and I sat as if turned to ice.

Another long moment of deadly stillness. Not even the walls creaked.

And as clear as if our ears were fitted with amplifiers, we heard the cautious swish, swish of footsteps.

They were descending the cellar stairs!

I moved. Merely to relax.

Jim snatched my wrist.

“No gun!” he warned, soundlessly, forming the words with his mouth. “No gun!”

My heart was thudding right in my ears. I came out in a cold sweat.

“Don’t know where gun is!” I replied by the same system, framing the words right at Jim, but making no sound.

“Good!” signalled Jim in relief, leaning cautiously back so as to avoid squeaks from his chair.

Down cellar, a couple of vagrant knocks rose up through the floor.

“Hunting for the light switch,” I murmured.

“Ssshhhh,” warned Jim ever so softly.

I started slowly to gather my limbs together. They seemed to be scattered.

“What are you doing?” whispered Jim. “Where are you going?”

“Do you think,” I hissed back at him, at the same time doing a little more limb gathering, “I’m going to sit here?”

“He’ll have a gun,” warned Jim.

“I’ll creep upstairs and look for my shotgun,” I replied ever so softly. “Umbilicus. Right in the bull’s-eye.”

“Sit where you are,” gritted Jim fiercely. “He’ll go.”

“He’ll be up here, next,” I returned, “and when he arrives, I’ll be ready for him.”

I thought if I got upstairs, I would recover my muscles a little better. They seemed to have gone all weak; and my hands were tingly, as though asleep.

We listened. Another couple of knocks.

“Whatever he’s doing.” I muttered, “he can’t find it.”

There came a loud thump.

I stood up.

“Hey!” commanded Jim.

“Nobody,” I stated, catwalking towards the door, “is going to thump around like that in my house!”

“Are you crazy?” hissed Jim.

No Gun, No Black-Jack

But that thump had done it. So long as sounds are soft and sinister, you seem to be paralyzed. But a good loud knock brings reality back. A thump is all you need to rouse your ire.

I tiptoed down the hall to the head of the cellar steps. Jim was right behind-me.

We listened. Quite clearly came the sounds of somebody walking with shuffling feet around the concrete cellar floor.

On a nail, hanging in the cellar stairway, was an old battered coat of mine that I used for washing the car and such odd jobs in winter.

In the faint light coming down the hall, I lifted the coat off the nail and holding it in front of me, I started, tiptoe, down the steps. Jim was right behind me.

I could not exactly see the figure. It was too dark. Maybe a faint light came through the cellar windows. But I felt, rather than saw, a sinister shadow standing motionless near the foot of the cellar steps.

I crouched. I sprang.

The shade let out a wild, shrill yell.

But I was on him. My leap bore him down as easily, as lightly, as a clump of autumn weeds. The coat held ahead of me had enveloped him completely and we hit the floor with a terrific squash.

“Got him!” I roared, flattening him and spreading myself all over his prostrate form. “Light! Light, Jim!”

Jim found the switch cord.

From under me and the coat, arms and legs sprawled in complete surrender.

No gun, no black-jack was visible.

“Stand ready, Jim,” I commanded in a ringing voice.

Jim snatched a quart of blueberries off the shelf.

I leaped to my feet and snatched the old coat away.

The figure, face down on the concrete, rolled slowly and painfully over. And sat up.

It was Mr. Moodie! Old Mr. Moodie, who takes out the ashes in winter, and does the odd jobs.

“Mr. Moodie!” I cried in protest.

“Wha… what’s the… what..!” said Mr. Moodie.

“Mr. Moodie,” I accused firmly, “what do you mean, coming so quietly into the house like that. We thought you were a burglar!”

“I’m always quiet,” said Mr. Moodie, weakly.

“You… you crept in…” I complained.

“No,” said Mr. Moodie, still sitting, “I walked in, upright. I couldn’t find the light.”

Jim quietly put the blueberries back.

“But,” I expostulated, “you don’t usually come in the middle of the night…”

“I was feeling poorly,” said Mr. Moodie, “and I thought if I put the ashes out tonight, I could sleep in tomorrow…”

Jim and I assisted him to his feet and we went up to the kitchen and had a generally reviving cup of tea.