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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Fantastic Adventures, August 1948, with "Tomorrow I Die"
As his body hurtled through the air it
seemed as if he saw a ghostly figure beckoning.
Sometimes in a man's life there are
instincts that warn
him of danger and death. But few men take the hint.
THE parking lot was alive with activity. A few dozen men, all ages, worked around the cars. Some of them were putting on tow-bars. The tow-bars were long rods, connecting one car with another, so that on the drive-away, one driver could handle two automobiles.
I went over to the tall mechanic with the greasy face and said:
"I'm Joel Hudson. They told me over at the hotel that I could drive for you."
He looked up and grinned. He was a Seattle fellow about five years older than myself. The drive-away boss had brought him to Chicago to take care of the mechanical end of the business. The boss, a guy named Chaney, was at the hotel contacting drivers and settling up last minute business. They were due to pull out of Chicago in a couple of hours.
"Okay," the mechanic said, "Hang around. We got a few hitches to fix."
He pulled a watch out of his pocket.
"Be ready sometime this afternoon."
He went back to work and I wandered around, helping where I could, because I didn't want to leave the lot. I had a month's vacation from Northwestern University and I intended to see the West Coast.
I ran into a short, despondent-looking kid near the gas pumps. I looked him over for a while, then I said:
"You going with us?"
I motioned toward the line-up of cars getting ready to pull out.
He had a sad, twisted face that I figured was a mirror of fear. I didn't know why, but I felt sorry for him. At first, I didn't think he was going to answer me. Then he said:
"I'm going part way—anyhow—if nothing happens."
That's how I met Peter Hawley.
I'm going part way—if nothing happens.
They assigned him to me as an extra driver. The cars were governed so we couldn't drive over thirty-five an hour. They put two men in the lead car, one to drive and the other to keep him awake. You drove for eight hours, and sometimes for ten or twelve. At night you got so tired that you watched the tail-light of the car ahead, and that was all. Your reflexes trained themselves to act by the distance that tail-light was from you. Use the brakes—use the gas—use the brakes. You didn't think of it. You did it automatically.
We were in South Dakota, I think it was. It was ten at night and I was tired out. Pete Hawley was a goofy guy who sat bolt upright all day, every day, his wide eyes on the road. He never spoke. Just sat there and looked scared.
I WAS beginning to see things.
Houses on the road where there weren't any. Headlights rushing down at us, and there weren't any headlights. After a while, I looked out of the corner of my eye.
"For Christ's sake, Hawley, talk, will you? I'm going nuts."
He sighed.
"If I talked, I'd drive you crazy faster," he said softly. "I'm not a very pleasant person to be around."
He said no more.
You could be pleasant, I thought. You're my age, about twenty-nine, good-looking kid, decent.
"What's burning you all the time?" I asked. "You haven't said a dozen words since we left Chi. Are you mad about something?"
"Mad, maybe," he said, "but not the kind of madness you think. I tried to kill myself last night. Did you know it?"
That woke me up all right. My brain started working ninety-miles per. I grabbed the wheel and held on tight. I said, cautiously.
"You what?"
"It was while you were asleep," he said.
We slept two to a bed, in any jerk hotel we could find.
"I took a whole box of sleeping tablets," he went on. "They didn't hurt me. I feel fine."
I just sat there, watching the light on the car ahead, trying to get a hold of myself. I wasn't going to sleep now.
A box of sleeping pills. Enough to kill three people.
"I don't get it," I said. I tried to sound casual.
"That's why I don't talk much," he said. "People don't understand."
"Loosen up if it makes you feel better," I said.
"Do you believe in re-incarnation?" he asked suddenly.
It startled me, because as a matter of fact, I had been doing some exhaustive reading on the subject. Reincarnation, if you'll have it simply, was the idea of living again after death, in another form or the body of another person. Just dying and living again, century after century. I was a little cautious. I said:
"Well, maybe. Maybe not."
He looked at me quickly, as though to find out if I was kidding him. I kept my eyes on the road. It was hot and dusty. I felt like hell.
"Well," he said after a smile, "I'm the re-incarnated soul of Victor Carniff."
"Never heard of him," I said.
"You wouldn't," his voice was eager now. I think he had wanted to talk for a long time. He opened up all the stops and let go. "Victor Carniff was a metal worker in Pittsburgh. He wasn't anyone important. Just a guy."
The way he said just a guy, made me shiver. It was as though he hated the very thought of Carniff and was trying to make him sound unimportant.
"When I was born," he went on, "I knew the first week that I was Victor Carniff. You see, I have an uncanny memory. I could tell you all about Carniff. He died forty years ago."
A shudder swept over his body.
"He drowned in the sea. Took a trip to Boston and fell overboard. I'm going to drown. Did you know that?"
He knew I didn't know it.
"You're nuts," I said. I grinned at him. I wasn't fooling Peter Hawley a bit. I was just trying to be cheerful, and it didn't take.
"Go ahead and laugh if you want to," he said. "But you see, I was born with a memory of Victor Carniff's life. A memory that told me that every person, born with that racial memory, would drown."
It was very still for a while.
"I told you, you wouldn't like to talk with me," he said, and sighed. The wheels sang loud on the hot tar road. After a while he said:
"I even know when I'm going to drown."
I didn't answer. I felt like screaming at him to shut up. Here we were out in the middle of a desert with nothing but sand and cactus for miles, and he was talking about drowning.
"I'm going to drown on my twenty-ninth birthday," he said cautiously, as though he didn't know if he should tell me or not.
I had to ask him when that was.
"Tomorrow," he said.
"IT'S not like I hadn't tried to die before," he said. "You see last night it was the sleeping pills. They didn't even make me sleepy. A year ago I tried to hang myself."
He laughed bitterly. It made the hair stand up on my neck.
"I put a rope over the bathroom door and jumped off a chair. Do you know what happened?"
I said I didn't.
"The rope broke," he said in a low voice. "One inch hemp, and it broke."
He sounded unhappy about that.
We were coming into a town then, and he didn't say anything until we were out of it again, rolling up into the Black Hills.
"You'd be surprised how many times I've tried to kill myself," he said in a quiet voice. "I hate to drown. I've always feared water, ever since I was two days old."
I laughed, but I didn't see anything funny. I was just batting the breeze—trying to jerk him out of that damned, crazy mood he was in.
"You sure can't remember back that far."
"I remember when I was born," he said.
* * *
PETER HAWLEY didn't talk again for perhaps a hundred miles. He just sat there looking out. We were out of the hills and going up a canyon. A canyon where a river flowed past us, sulky, greedy and black. Then he hid his face in his hands and sobbed like a child.
"I can't help it," he said. "Tomorrow is my birthday, and I'm going to drown. I've tried so hard to die. So very damned hard."
I couldn't take that another day. That night I asked Mr. Cheney, the guy who owned the cars, to get Hawley out of my car. I was nuts enough, just driving. There was one driver who wanted to drop out of the line-up in Wyoming. Peter Hawley got his car and I drove alone. It was a lot better.
* * *
THE next night, up in Idaho, it happened. Peter Hawley died, even though there wasn't any water in sight.
It was about eleven at night, and the mechanic, the kid from Seattle, was driving in the rear to pick up any car that might develop engine trouble.
Must have been dark, because he passed right by the piled up mess that Hawley's cars made, at the right side of the road. We went on into town. It was so hot that you couldn't touch the metal outside the door of the car. I closed the windows coming in, because it was cooler that way. I hadn't had a drink all afternoon.
The mechanic came up to me after we checked in at the hotel.
"You see Hawley after we left the Snake River?"
I shook my head.
"He was next in line behind me," I said. "His headlights were on my neck all the time."
He shook his head.
"That's what I thought," he said. "But it must have been me. When we came into town, I was right behind you."
I guess that shook me. Anyhow, I thought grimly, Hawley might have died on his birthday, but not from drowning. Not in this rainless, God-forsaken country of heat and sand.
"Look," the mechanic said, "I gotta go back and try and locate him. Maybe he skipped with the cars. Sometimes they try it and we have to report to the state cops."
"He didn't," I said. "He's dead."
I was a fool to say that.
"Are you nuts?"
I shook my head. I was tired as the devil and I couldn't make up any stories.
"No," I said. "Not crazy. It was Hawley's birthday. He said he was going to die today."
I couldn't say drowned. That sounded too far out of line.
He got a firm grip on my arm.
"Guess you better ride back, with me," he said. "I think I know where he might have dropped out of line. I fell back a little, about fifteen miles out. Maybe he made a run for it before I caught up."
I remembered the place. Hawley's lights hadn't been behind me a while.
YOU could see the wreck easily when we went back. The moon had come up, and the moon in that country is silvery and as bright as a polished steel counter.
Hawley had hit a soft shoulder, I guess. Anyhow, something had thrown the lead car off the road. Hawley had made a mistake. He had jerked at the wheel and tried to get back on the road. When you pull sharp on the wheel, the tow-bar throws the rear car around hard, and it will throw you every time. The cars had smashed together and rolled....
Rolled down a small incline and tipped upside down in the middle of a little lawn where a rancher had built his house near the road.
I felt relieved, somehow, because though Hawley was locked under the car, his face was in the soft grass and he had died quickly.
That's what I thought then.
The doctor told us differently. He came out of town in a Model-T, and he spent some time looking Hawley over. After a while he came up on the road where I was talking with the mechanic and Mr. Cheney.
The Doctor was a little guy with a mustache which he tugged on all the time he told us about Hawley. He wore a ten-gallon hat that almost covered his face.
"He died," the doctor said, and tugged on that damned little mustache, "by drowning."
The mechanic gave me a hard look, and I heard Mr. Cheney gasp in disbelief.
After a while, I managed to say, "I don't get it."
The doctor sighed.
"He might have lived," he said. "He was pinned under the car, but it could have been moved."
He motioned toward a dry ditch that bordered the lawn.
"Every night, up at the head of the valley, they open up the irrigation ditch. Pete Harrison, he's the man who lives here, went down to Cody last week. He left the gate open that floods his lawn. Tonight, like always, the water flooded the ditch, ran out all over the lawn, and when it was about two inches deep, it reached the kid's face. He was trapped under the car and couldn't move."
The doctor sighed.
"Funny," he said, "but who the hell would think of drowning out here on the prairie. Things sure work out to the ways of the Almighty."
They sure do, I thought. Peter Hawley, who had tried to destroy himself a dozen times, died because he couldn't pull his face out of two or three inches of water.
He must have died hard, and suffered a lot as the water came up. He must have been thinking about Victor Carniff, and his memories that had haunted him since birth.
It goes to show, you never can tell about people.
I wonder if I'll ever meet Peter Hawley again. Bitter—frightened Peter Hawley who was destined to drown on his twenty-ninth birthday, and couldn't do anything to prevent it.
Perhaps you'll meet him. His name will be changed and his features will be different. If he starts blabbering like a baby, and tells you the story he told me, for God's sake, and for Peter Hawley's sake, stick by the kid and try to help him out.
I didn't, and I'm not going to be able to sleep again for a long time.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.