“You haven’t any fever, and there’s no sign of d.t.,” he reassured finally. “Your nerves seem to be sound though jumpy. I don’t think you’re likely to go insane—at least not for some time. Probably it’s your eyes. You’d better see a good oculist tomorrow. In the meanwhile I’ll prescribe a sedative for your nervousness. Of course you ought to ease up on liquor—maybe the alcohol is affecting your eyesight.”
Jones hardly heard the doctor’s advice. He had been studying the doctor’s shadow, flung across an expensive rug by a tall and powerful floor-lamp. It was the least human and most unpleasant of all the shadows he had yet seen. It had the contours and the posture of a ghoul stooping over a ripe carrion.
After leaving the doctor’s office, Jones remembered that he had a fiancée. He had not seen her for a week. She did not approve of Martinis—at least not in such quantities as Jones had been collecting nightly for the past month. Luckily—unless he collected them in her company—she was unable to tell whether he had had two drinks or a dozen. He was very fond of Marcia. Her quaint ideas about temperance weren’t too much of a drawback. And anyway he was going to be temperate himself till he got rid of the shadows. It would be something to tell Marcia.
On second thought he decided to leave out the shadow part. She would think he had the heeby-jeebies.
Marcia Dorer was a tall blonde, slender almost to thinness. She gave Jones a brief kiss. Sometimes her kisses made him feel slightly refrigerated. This was one of the times.
“Well, where have you been keeping yourself?” she asked. There was a sub-acid undertone in her soprano. “In front of all the bars in town, I suppose?”
“Not today,” said Jones gravely. “I haven’t had a drink since last night. In fact, I have decided to quit drinking.”
“Oh, I’m glad,” she cooed, “if you really mean it. I know liquor can’t be good for you—at least, not so much of it. They say it does things to your insides.”
She pecked him again, lightly, between cheek and lips. Just at that moment Jones thought to look at their shadows on the parlor wall. What would Marcia’s shadow be like?
In spite of the queer phenomena he had already seen, Jones was unpleasantly surprised, even shocked. He hardly knew what he had expected, but certainly it wasn’t anything like this.
To begin with, there were three shadows on the wall. One was Jones’, porcine, satyr-like as usual. In spite of his physical proximity to Marcia, it stood far apart from hers.
Marcia’s shadow he could not clearly distinguish from the third one, since, with its back turned to Jones’, it was united with the other in a close embrace. It resembled Marcia only in being a shadow of a female. The other shadow was plainly male. It lifted a grossly swollen, bearded profile above the head of its companion. It was not a refined-looking shadow. Neither was Marcia’s.
Marcia had never embraced him like that, thought Jones. He felt disgusted; but after all, he couldn’t be jealous of an unidentified shadow.
Somehow, it was not a very successful evening. Jones turned his eyes away from the wall and refrained from looking at it again. But he could not forget the shadows. Marcia chattered without seeming to notice his preoccupation; but there was something perfunctory in her chatter, as if she too were preoccupied.
“I guess you’d better go, darling,” she said at last. “Do you mind? I didn’t sleep well, and I’m tired tonight.”
Jones looked at his wrist-watch. It was only twenty minutes past nine.
“Oh, all right,” he assented, feeling a vague relief. He kissed her and went out, seeing with the tail of his eye that the third shadow was still in the room. It was still on the parlor wall, with Marcia’s shadow in its arms.
Halfway down the block, beside a lamp-post, Jones passed Bertie Filmore. The two nodded. They knew and liked each other very slightly. Jones peered down at Filmore’s shadow on the sidewalk as he went by. Filmore was a floorwalker in a department store—a slim, sleek youth who neither drank, smoked nor indulged in any known vice. He attended the Methodist church every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening. Jones felt a profane and cynical curiosity as to what his shadow would look like.
The adumbration that he saw was shortened by the nearby lamp. But its profile was unmistakably the gross, bearded profile of the third shadow on Marcia’s wall! It bore no resemblance to Filmore.
“What the hell!” thought Jones, very disagreeably startled. “Is there something in this?”
He slackened his pace and glanced back at Filmore’s receding figure. Filmore sauntered on as if out for an airing, without special objective, and did not turn to look back at Jones. He went in at the entrance of Marcia’s home.
“So that’s why she wanted me to leave early,” Jones mused. It was all plain to him now… plain as the clinching shadows. Marcia had expected Filmore. The shadows weren’t all katzen-jammer, not by a jugful.
His pride was hurt. He had known that Marcia was acquainted with the fellow. But it was a shock to think that Filmore had displaced him in her affections. In Jones’ estimation, the fellow was a cross between a Sunday school teacher and a tailor’s dummy. No color or character to him.
Chewing the cud of his bitterness, Jones hesitated at several barroom doors. Perhaps he would see worse shadows if he killed another row of Martinis. Or… maybe he wouldn’t. What the hell….
He went into the next bar without hesitating.
The morning brought him a headache worthy of the bender to which twenty—or was it twenty-one—more or less expert mixologists had contributed.
He reached his office an hour behind time. Surprisingly, Miss Owens, who had always been punctual, was not in evidence. Less surprisingly, Johnson was not there either. He often came late.
Jones was in no mood for work. He felt as if all the town clocks were striking twelve in his head. Moreover, he had a heart which, if not broken, was deeply cracked. And there was still the nerve-wracking problem of those strangely distorted and often misplaced shadows.
He kept seeing in his mind the shadows on Marcia’s wall. They nauseated him… or perhaps his stomach was slightly upset from more than the due quota of Martinis. Then, as many minutes went by and neither Miss Owens nor Johnson appeared, he recalled the queer shadow-play in his office of the previous afternoon. Why in hell hadn’t he thought of that before? Perhaps—
His unsteady fingers spun the combination of the safe, drew back the door. Cash, negotiable bonds, a few checks that had come in too late for banking—all were gone. Johnson must have returned to the office that night. Or perhaps he had cleared out the safe before leaving in the late afternoon. Both he and Miss Owens had stayed after Jones’ departure. They often did that, and Jones hadn’t thought much about it since both were busy with unfinished work.
Jones felt paralyzed. One thing was clear, however: Johnson’s shadow had forewarned him with its pantomime of opening the safe, removing and counting money. It had betrayed its owner’s intention beforehand. If he had watched and waited, Jones could no doubt have caught his partner in the act. But he had felt so doubtful about the meaning of the shadows, and his main thought when he left the office had been to see a doctor. Later, the discovery of Marcia’s deceit had upset him, made him forget all else.
The telephone broke into his reflections with its jangling. A shrill female voice questioned him hysterically. It was Mrs. Johnson. “Is Caleb there? Have you seen Caleb?”
“No. I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”
“Oh, I’m so worried, Mr. Jones. Caleb didn’t come home last night but phoned that he was working very late at the office. Said he might not get in till after midnight. He hadn’t come in when I fell asleep; and he wasn’t here this morning. I’ve been trying to get the office for the past hour.”