The Long Arm by Franz Habl (i like reading txt) 📖

By FRANZ HABL[1]

[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Weird Tales October 1937. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

[Sidenote: Creeping, writhing, insidiously crawling and groping, the long arm reached out in its ghastly errand of death]

I had been out of Germany for thirty-five years, drawn hither and thither by various glittering of will-of-the-wisps. When I returned to my native country, I was as poor in pocket as when I left, and much poorer in illusions.

The Berlin insurance company which I had represented with such mediocre success in Switzerland, Austria and Belgium agreed to let me sell for them at home, and by a curious coincidence there was an opening in the quaint old Bavarian city in which I had been born and bred.

I will pass over the strangely mingled feelings with which I rode in a Twentieth Century railroad train past the thousand-year-old walls of one of the most curious ancient cities in Europe, a town moreover whose every winding narrow street and sharp-gabled building had been the companion of my infancy and childhood. No one seemed to know me, and I recognized no one. For several days I made no attempt to sell life insurance, but wandered in a dream, the bewildered ghost of my former self, about the spots which I had known in happier days.

One dull rainy afternoon I took refuge from the weather in a dingy little coffee-house in which, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I along with certain boon companions, had learned the gentle art of billiards. It seemed as if every article of furniture was just as I had walked away from them, well toward half a century before. It was raining outside, and I sat alone in the gloomy, smoky old place, pondering the sweet and bitter mysteries of life.

While I sat thus, staring out with unseeing eyes at the rain which was by this time beating down smartly on the pavement, I became conscious that someone in the room was staring at me. I had not noticed that there was anyone else in the dark, low-ceilinged place except the obsequious proprietor who had served me my cigar and coffee. Now I realized that a man who sat in the corner diagonally across from me was studying me curiously from over his newspaper. His face was one that I had seen before. Suddenly, across all the years, I remembered him. And in that same moment he rose and came toward me with his hand held out.

We had been in school together, in the Gymnasium. He had been a strange fellow with few friends, but had enjoyed the reputation of being the best student in his class. But in his last year in the Gymnasium he had, for what reason I never knew, excited the animosity of a cantankerous old professor who had publicly declared that Gustav was not the kind of boy who should have a Gymnasium diploma and that he, the professor, was determined never to give him a passing grade. My father had admired the boy very much, and at one juncture when my marks looked perilously low, he had employed Gustav to tutor me. Gustav had been so successful that Father was delighted and made him a present of a silver cigarette case with Gustav's initials and mine engraved on it. I remembered all this very distinctly as we shook hands, but I was doing fast thinking, because for the life of me I couldn't remember his strange last name. I had a feeling that it was a very foreign name, Polish or Croatian or something of the sort. As he mentioned this and that, I fear I answered him a little absently and incoherently. The name was almost there. The syllables flitted tantalizingly just out of my reach. But I was sure the name began with a B. Wasn't it a Bam- or a Ban-something? Ah! I had it. Banaotovich!

From that moment the conversation went more easily. I was surprized and pleased when Banaotovich drew his silver cigarette-case out of his pocket to prove to me how highly he thought of my poor deceased father. We were soon launched on a cordial exchange of childhood memories. Banaotovich seemed a good-hearted fellow after all, and I wondered why in my childhood I had never been quite comfortable in his company. I remembered that other boys of the group had admitted to me confidentially that they were more than a little afraid of him.

* * * * *

The longer we talked the more intimate, the more in the nature of a mutual confession, our conversation became. I admitted to Banaotovich that the hifalutin fashion in which I had left the town to win fame and fortune years before, had been asinine in the extreme, and that it served me just right to have to sneak back unknown and penniless. Banaotovich rejoined that for all his pride in his school marks he had remained a person of no importance, and that the pot had not the slightest intention of making itself ridiculous by calling the kettle black. He seemed almost painfully inclined to run himself down. I could feel in his manner a sort of pathetic reaching out for sympathy and consideration. And it began to seem as if he were about to tell me something or ask me for something. But whatever he had to tell seemed hard to say, and it was slow in coming over his lips.

Banaotovich ordered two bottles of the heavy native wine. I drank sparingly of it, because it goes to my head. But Banaotovich swallowed two or three glassfuls in hasty succession, and his cheeks grew flushed. There was a pause. Suddenly he leaned across the table toward me and spoke in a hoarse, excited whisper.

"Modersohn," he said anxiously, "I want to make a confession to you--a terrible confession. It may turn you against me completely. Maybe you don't want to hear it. If you don't, say so, and I'll go home. But it seems as if I've got to tell somebody about it. It seems as if I've got to find somebody who understands me and can excuse me, or it will kill me. Shall I tell you? Shall I?"

I was startled. I was reasonably sure that Banaotovich was no criminal, since he had lived half a century in his native city, undisturbed and from all he had told me solvent and respected. I had always known that he was a queer fish, a brooding, solitary sort of person, and I settled myself to listen to some harmless bit of psychopathy which meant nothing except to the unfortunate subject.

"My dear fellow," I said, no doubt a little patronizingly, "I am sure you haven't anything to confess that will make you out an outrageous rascal, but if it will do you any good to tell me your troubles, I am ready to listen to them."

"Thank you," said Banaotovich in a trembling voice. "I've done nothing that they can put me behind the bars for. But I--I----"

He stared at me sternly.

"But I've done worse things," he said solemnly, "than some poor fellows that have been strung up by the neck and choked to death!"

I laughed, a little nervously. "Tell me your story, if you like," I said, "and let me decide just how black you are. But I haven't a great deal of apprehension. We're all of us poor miserable sinners, as far as that's concerned. I could tell you things about myself----"

Banaotovich was not listening to me at all. He had fallen suddenly into a fit of black brooding. After a minute or two, he looked up and asked sharply:

"Do you remember Wolansky?"

Wolansky was the Greek professor who had threatened to vote against Banaotovich when he was finishing his course at the Gymnasium.

"Of course," said I. "And I remember well how he abused you that last year. If there ever was a cantankerous old scoundrel, Wolansky was just that identical individual!"

"Maybe," he said absently; then after another pause:

"Do you remember that Wolansky died suddenly, just a little while before the end of the school year?"

I nodded. "I imagine that was a great piece of good luck for you," I said.

"Yes," said Banaotovich. "If he had lived, I should never have had my diploma. As it was, I finished with honors. If Wolansky hadn't died when he did, I'd have been ruined. Don't forget that--ruined!"

I was puzzled at his insistence. "Yes, you would have been seriously handicapped," I agreed. "Ruined is the word, perhaps."

Banaotovich's face was purple with wine and some strange kind of suffering. "Do you remember another thing?" he said thickly. "Do you remember an old Hindoo who had a dark little hole away back of the shops and the beer depot and the livery stables between the Old Market and the river?"

"The old fellow that had love charms and told fortunes and helped people to health and wealth and happiness?" I said in a tone of slightly forced cheerfulness. It was hard to be cheerful with those somber eyes boring into you. "Yes, I remember him, all right. I wanted to go and see him once, when I was about fifteen or sixteen, but Father told me that meddling with the black art had sent more people to hell than it had helped. And Father was so terribly earnest about it that he frightened me. I never went. As a matter of fact it was only a passing fancy, and I soon forgot all about him."

"That Hindoo," said my old school-fellow thoughtfully, "knew things about the secret forces in the universe that made him almost a god. And he taught me things that the wisest philosopher in the world doesn't suspect. Still, your father may have been right. I think it very likely that what he taught me may send me to hell!"

I shivered. I looked up nervously to make sure that the way was clear to the door. I began to suspect that my friend Banaotovich, though he was certainly not a criminal, might be a dangerous lunatic.

My vis-à-vis rubbed absently at a protuberance on his left side. I had noticed it when he first came across the room to speak to me. A deformity--I was sure it had not been there when he was a boy--or perhaps a tumor or some such thing as that.

"I kept very quiet about what the Hindoo taught me, because I knew most people felt about such things much as you say your father did. And I wanted to get on in the world. But I had an idea the Hindoo could help me get on. Perhaps he has----"

And he stared gloomily at space.

"Perhaps he has. And perhaps he hasn't."

He brooded. Then he took up the thread of his story.

"Wolansky nearly drove me to suicide. I read and studied and crammed, day and night. I tried everything I could think of to overcome the man's antagonism. I crawled in the dust before him like a whipped cur! Nothing did any good. And when I saw he hated me and was determined to smash me, I began to hate him, too. I came to hate him worse than I hated the devils in hell. There was a time when I had to hold myself back with all my strength to keep from sticking a knife into him or braining him with a chair. But the Hindoo and I made some experiments with telepathy, and I discovered that there are other ways of killing a man besides stabbing him or giving him poison.

"I learned how to make a man in front of me on the street turn around and look at me. I learned how to make you dream about me