Doom Around the Corner

by Wilfred Blanch Talman

All of Mr. Thomas Drumlin’s acquaintances, had he possessed any, would have said that he was in a rut. Drumlin even had some suspicion of it himself, and so, even if the only persons with whom he came in contact refrained from calling it to his attention because they were in a rut themselves, he did not think them remiss for not warning him.

The chief reason for Drumlin being in a rut was his latent curiosity. Perhaps it was because he was lazy, or perchance it was only because he had such a vicarious imagination that his curiosity remained latent until the night that he heard the spirit singing.

In the dusty back room of a factory tucked away in a corner of New York Gty, Drumlin found little to be curious about except the sums of certain columns of figures that confronted him daily as he sat oa a high stool. Any questions that did occur to his mind about how objects changed in appearance, or why it became dark at night, or why it rained on certain days and not on others could be easily solved by Drumlin in his imagination, without recourse to natural science. There was little need, he felt, for sticking one’s nose into a book, or running from one end of the earth to another when the fairies and genii that he had been taught to believe in during a more adventurous childhood could be regarded as the agents of nearly everything that happened.

So that when he climbed down from his stool late every afternoon to follow hundreds of others like himself into a cavern where stuffy trains ran under- ground and under rivers, it is not to be wondered at that Drumlin, not being at all inquisitive about transportation problems or the sources of motive power, thought (if, indeed, he bothered to consider it) that the subway coach in which he clung to a strap was a chariot drawn by some red-eyed underworld dragon.

He always took the same route from the subway to his furnished room—four hundred and twenty steps straight ahead to die grocery store on the corner, and then one hundred and two paces, turning to the right when he had left the store, to the door of the house where he lived. Drumlin had gone home by another route once, but it was twenty-nine steps further, and no grocery store along the way.

There was another corner Just a few paces beyond his door, but Drumlin had never seen around it. To go that far out of his way had never occurred to him, and he must have known that around that corner would be only another street, probably just like the one he lived on, and people walking to and fro in the course of business or pleasure. One corner in a city was to him the same as another.

Touching a match to his diminutive gas stove, Drumlin each night would prepare himself a little supper, wash his dishes, and perhaps straighten up a few things about the room that his landlady had neglected. Then he would sit before his one narrow window, opening to the rear of the house, and gaze out—not because there was much to see outside, or anything he cared to look at, but because looking out of a window seemed to allow greater breadth for meditation.

Then Drumlin’s eyes would grow wide with thought, and he would conjure up, without effort, pictures of elves and witches and strange demons that he believed were part of the very world he lived in. Since he rarely spoke to any one except about matters concerning the business represented by the dusty back room, and took it for granted that every one there believed in elves and demons too, no one had ever argued with Drum- lin that these things were not pan of the everyday world, and so he never considered the fact that perhaps others did not think so. Drumlin thought not only of the good fairies and the helpful little people, but also of ghouls and specters and werewolves, for even he knew that the world was a balance of good and evil principles.

This was another reason why he never had ventured around the comer. For ail he knew, the next street might be peopled with evil spirits. Since he never had seen evidence of any but good genii on his own street, it stood to reason, without the thought ever crossing his mind, that it was better to remain among the good than to venture into something about which he was not in the least curious and which might be harmful. He really cared not in the slightest what might be around the comer until he heard the spirit music, and so never missed the thrill of exploration until the music called it to his attention.

Of course Mr. Thomas Drumlin, knowing all that he did about fairies and ghosts, never bothered to read anything to leam more about them. He practically had ceased reading when he was a youth. He thought he knew what each elf and ghoul looked like — even knew how they talked. That is how he recognized the spirit music when first he heard He had never met or spoken to leprechaun or brownie or pixy because he considered himself only one of the lesser beings that the genii served, and as such not entitled to see or converse with them. The big, successful men of the world, Drumlin considered, must confer with good fairies every day, and the very evil men commune with witches and vampires.

Whether it was winter or summer, Drumlin sat by his window and thought —though exactly what his thoughts were at all times we may never know—until it was the hour for bed. And then in the morning he would rise and make some breakfast, go to sit on his stool in the dusty back room, and the day would start all over again.

As a matter of fact, Drumlin’s subconscious attitude about the evil that might be around the corner was correct, for he lived on the edge of a settlement of swarthy foreigners who were not the most law-abiding of the city’s population, according to the records in a near-by police station. They were continually making merry and becoming drunk and fighting, though Drumlin knew nothing of it except for certain sounds that welled up from between the houses that he could see off beyond his window. When the window was closed he heard no sounds, and when the casement was open it is to be assumed that he was so engrossed with his musings that they were not apparent to him.

On one particular summer evening, however, when the sun had long disappeared and when Drumlin was chin in hand at die window-sill as usual, with his mind wandering in the distances where the stars were beginning to come out, a certain rhythmical cadence intruded into his thoughts. In some way it appeared to parallel the course of his thinking at the time and, almost without realizing, Drumlin found himself listening. The music floated up from one of the dingy brick canyons beyond his window, and consisted of the twanging of a stringed instrument accompanied by several voices not so musical. They were repeating, again and again, a refrain that Drumlin seemed to recognize, and emphasizing the end of the line with vigorous stamping of the feet. Gradually, as his consciousness focussed upon it, Drumlin realized that the singing was in the language of the little people.

Olla huula, buula hei! Olla huula, huula hei!

The refrain continued for some time, the shuffling and stamping leading Drumlin to believe that the persons to whom the voices belonged were dancing clumsily in a circle. Suddenly the singing and twanging stopped and, although Drumlin listened for a long time, it was not resumed. The spot from which it had come was far beneath his sight.

Though the words of the singers could have no translation in worldly language, Drumlin understood them as an invitation to join the singers in rites of some sort. His heart thumped at the thought that at last some of the little people were calling him to speak with them. His curiosity was stirred as to whether these were elves or demons, for Drumlin knew that good and evil spirits speak the same language at times, yet he went to bed and tossed wakefully for a long time without once thinking of venturing around the comer.

The next night, because he had been slow in adding his columns of figures during the day, Mr. Thomas Drumlin arrived home much later than usual, and the stars were already out before he filled his kettle with water for washing the dishes and placed it over die gas flame. Just then there came through die open window the sound of a twanging instrument, voices singing and feet stamping.

Olla huula, huula hei!

Drumlin stood still for many minutes, not daring to move lest he might lose some note of the repeated invitation. Presently he realized that if he was to answer the spirit music that called him, he must do so before the notes died away. And standing there, with his tea-kettle singing on the stove, Mr. Thomas Drumlin at last conceived the idea of going downstairs and around the comer.

Something seemed to restrain him when first he attempted to move, but he wrenched away and, holding his breath so that he might lose none of the refrain that he could barely hear after he had shut the door of his room, Drumlin tiptoed down the stairs. As he stepped out on the street he wondered that his feet were so light and ethereal, but the twanging and singing were louder now, and the little people were stamping harder than ever.

Then, as Mr. Thomas Drumlin turned the comer around which he had never seen before, die shouting and stamping rose into a final crescendo—Olla huula, huula HEI!—and stopped, and there was Drumlin, around the comer, with no voices calling him, and nothing but the same old hum of the city to guide him to the little people.

Just what happened after that concerned Drumlin in a far different way. Part of it is a matter of record which, if people were to take the same attitude that he did, might prove that genii and fairies do cause some of the things that happen.

There is on record, for instance, the fact that Patrolman Moriarty telephoned to his station house to say that he had found a little, middle-aged man wandering near his call-box on a certain comer apparently suffering from loss of memory, and the fact that he called a few minutes later to tell his superior that the man had disappeared. There is also a slip of paper on which the medical examiner wrote, several hours later, of finding one Thomas Drumlin dead on arrival after a tea-kettle had boiled over and extinguished a gas flame.

Nothing was ever committed to writing, however, about Patrolman Moriarty's remark to the medical examiner that Mr. Thomas Drumlin, lying before his stove at the time, was the same individual that he had found groping in the darkness on a near-by corner, or about the medical examiner’s reply to Patrolman Moriarty that the latter must have been mistaken and have an imagination that played tricks with him.

But it somehow occurred to Patrolman Moriarty, with his Celtic background of supernaturalism, that something other than Drumlin’s worldly body was on that comer just after the little bookkeeper had drawn his last breath. Patrolman Moriarty confided this information to Mr. Drumlin’s landlady, whose ancestry was similar to his, and who told of having heard occasionally strange, unearthly sounds of revelry from regions behind the house. Putting two and two together, the pair listened one night and heard a voice that the landlady swears was Mr. Thomas Drumlin’s singing much louder than a number of others, as a group of invisible persons apparently stamped around in a circle to the twanging of instrument strings.