Career in C Major by James M. Cain

Author:James M. Cain [Cain, James M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-3643-5
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2013-07-15T23:03:00+00:00

The Visitor

LOOKING BACK AT IT, sorting his recollections into something resembling order, Greg Hayes is sure now that the first warning he had, of a presence there in the room, was a smell—a pungent, exotic reek that was strange, yet oddly familiar. He remembers knowing, though not yet fully awake, that this could not be a dream, as some article had once informed him that “While visual images are constantly reproduced in sleep, olfactory sensations never are, unless caused by external stimulus.” At this point, wondering about the stimulus, he thinks he opened his eyes. But then came a blank in consciousness, followed by an interval of staring at two beautiful, lambent orbs; and he suspects that this was produced by hypnotic narcosis, during which sight functioned, but thought was wholly suspended. Then music sounded, some distance off, in the night, unlocking his mind, somehow, so he regained control of his will. With an effort, he shifted his gaze from these twin luminescences, with their lovely, shifting colors, so suggestive of northern lights, to probe the half-dark of the room. So doing, he became aware of a face, an expression of deep perplexity, and an unmistakable pattern of stripes, which zigged and zagged and tapered to fine points. Only then, at last, did he realize that facing him was a tiger.

Even then, he has no memory of panic, or even of undue alarm. He knew, of course, how the tiger got in: it was through the open window, where he hadn’t put in the screen. He had taken the storm windows off after Easter, as always, but when it came to the screens, he had clownishly said he was “bushed”—“Yah, yah, yah, they can wait till tomorrow, can’t they? Flies don’t come out in the spring.” But when tomorrow came, so also did a prospect, to whom he showed a house, for Bridleway Downs, Inc., of which he was general manager. Other tomorrows brought still other prospects, and he kept postponing the screens. And he knew where the tiger came from: the Biedermann-Rossi Circus, whose band even now was playing the music he’d heard, The Skaters’ Waltz, actually, which was the cue for the flying trapeze act that wound up the main performance, proving the night was wearing on. He himself was responsible for the show’s being there, as for $1,000 he had rented them their lot, earning his directors’ thanks, but the neighbors’ deep resentment. They regarded the invasion as vulgar, an infringement on “exclusiveness.” Rita, his wife, went quite a lot further, denouncing it as a “damned nuisance.” Having slept not at all the preceding night on account of the bellowing, neighing, squealing, roaring, and trumpeting that had gone on until dawn, she had moved, “for the duration,” into the children’s room, which was in the same wing, but in the front part of the house—which explained why he was here alone. Thus, all antecedents of the case, its causative factors, so to speak, wore the color of chickens, his own ugly brood, coming home to roost.

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