Yes, it was all very wonderful for that glorious year, then mother had to go and entice Graham Gunterstone from the lounge bar of a Chelsea pub and all our plans and hopes and dreams from that fateful moment were doomed to be as useless as an overcoat for a Teddy bear.
Graham Gunterstone was young and handsome with blond, wavy hair, blue-blue eyes, a tiny nose, even teeth, an Oxford accent and manners so perfect they made me heave. From the moment he swaggered into our cosy little house, I was itching to lay about me with the meat cleaver . . . to part that pansy hair with a neat, bloody channel across the scalp . . . to slice off that teeny nose, to hack out those sparkling blue eyes, to chop off the tongue and silence forever his irritating whine.
But dear mother had other plans for Graham and in a most devious way, she dissuaded me from slicing him up immediately, saying he needed fattening up. I fell for her lies, as well. Well, if a chap can’t trust his mother, who can he trust? I mean, I didn’t credit for a moment that she would retract her promise to me.
I didn’t know that she would be spending her evenings cuddling and kissing Graham Gunterstone: fondling his ears and stroking his face and telling him how much she loved him. I didn’t know . . . oh, and it makes me sick just thinking of it . . . my beautiful mother! I didn’t know she’d actually go to bed with Graham. But I caught them at it. Up in the back bedroom what she used to share with Mr. Hollins . . . this sacred room which I had never been allowed to enter. It was disgusting.
Here was me worrying me eyeballs out in the front room, running short of catsmeat while my trusted mother is upstairs back, gasping and puffing, giggling and kissing, playing the most unhealthy games with our immediate meat supply.
Well, I got the bang needle, I can tell you. I crept downstairs, picked up the cleaver and tiptoed again to the bedroom door. I could hear dear mother, talking and giggling and that pansy-boy Graham, tittering and breathing heavy and from the general gist of the overheard chatter, I realized that dear mother didn’t love me at all and had broken her faithful promise to me by kissing and cuddling with every bloke she’d enticed since we took over from Mister Hollins. Unable to contain myself longer, I burst into that darkened, filthy room and yelling blue murder I let the pair of ’em have it, fast as I could.
There was a lot of sensation when I gave myself up. You know what papers are. Things like: “Cannibals in S.W.6.” and “Frenzied Ghoul Axes Mother and Lover!” and “The Inglorious Rise of the Catsmeat Man!” But, as you will appreciate, that was all paper claptrap. Facts are, mother and me were in business and would have stayed in business if she had kept her word. I was faithful. She wasn’t. Simple as that.
Anyway, I wound up in Broadmoor where I’ve now resided for thirty-four years. There is some talk of letting me out on a short parole . . . sort of to prepare me for my eventual release. Trouble is, as I explained to Sir Georgie Ringle, our chief head-shrinker . . . where would I get employment?
There’s not much call for catsmeat men nowadays.
Is there?
THE PAWNSHOP
by Charles E. Fritch
Charles E. Fritch was the editor of Gamma, a short-lived but fine science fiction magazine of the early 1960s. His fiction appeared frequently in the science fiction journals of the 1950–56 era, but after that his primary output was aimed toward crime and adventure writing. He, though, did find time to break that habit long enough to write a biography of Kim Novak. William Nolan was kind enough to put me in touch with Charles, and I am pleased to present you with one of his all-too-infrequent stories. It is a deal-with-the-devil tale wherein that fine gentleman gives our hero a fighting chance, or does he? . . .
“It’s not that I have anything against you personally, Davis,” the old man said. “But I simply must kill you.”
“But why, Mr. Carver?” the young man wanted to know. He’d stopped straining at his bonds, realizing at last the futility of that. “I’ve been your faithful employee for the past two years. If I’m going to die, at least tell me why.”
“Because I’m old,” Jonathan Carver said wearily, “and ready to die myself, and my soul is in hock.”
“I don’t understand,” James Davis said.
Carver grunted. “Of course you don’t. You’re young, happily married, with children. You have your whole life ahead of you. Or you would have,” he amended, matter-of-factly, “if I weren’t going to kill you.”
The old man glanced around the soundproof basement. The two of them were alone, of course. The door was locked and bolted from the inside. Davis’s young body was securely manacled to the wall, and there was no danger of his escaping.
“I suppose I do owe you an explanation,” he admitted.
I was a very young man (Jonathan Carver said) and I needed a thousand dollars. I had this idea for a new kind of radio component that would replace vacuum tubes. With a little money I could set myself up in business. But as I say, I was very young, very inexperienced. I was afraid someone would steal my ideas. I was also desperate.
I had this ring my mother had given me—a diamond, not very large, probably not worth very much, I thought, but I had to raise money somehow, so on impulse one day I stopped in a pawnshop to see what I could get for it. It was a dark, dusty old shop cluttered with the usual junk one finds in such a place. The proprietor was a middle-aged man of medium height and average appearance who didn’t even look at the ring I thrust under his nose.
“I’ll give you a thousand dollars cash for something else,” the man said; “something you don’t even know you have.”
A thousand dollars! Exactly the amount I needed. “Yes,” I agreed quickly. “Anything. I’d give my soul for a thousand dollars.”
The man smiled, and with good reason, for that’s precisely what he had in mind.
You laugh at that. Well, I don’t blame you. I laughed too, because of course I thought he was jesting; or else he was a madman. But then he went to his cashbox and brought out a thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills and placed them on the counter. Madman or not, his money was sane enough for my purpose.
I reached for the money, but he stopped me. “First,” he said, placing a small card on the counter before me, “you must put your thumbprint in the blank space. That makes it legal.”
I believed it to be nonsense, but for a thousand dollars I desperately needed, I’d be willing to humor the devil himself. I placed my finger in the blank space on the card and was surprised to find it was very warm. When I took my thumb away, the imprint was imbedded in the formerly blank area.
He didn’t stop me as I gathered up the ten one-hundred-dollar bills. I said, “I suppose you’ll want this back with interest?”
He said, “Of course not. Read the fine print on back of the card. You don’t repay us with money, but with bad deeds.”
He turned away and disappeared amid the clutter in the back of the store. I was going to call to him for an explanation, but I decided not to. After all, I had my money, and what good would it do me to argue ridiculous points with someone so obviously addled? I glanced at the card again. It held my thumbprint, as big as life, my name, and the amount borrowed: $1,000.00. The reverse side of the card held a library of small print, which I’d read later, if I had the time.