"The Whisperer" would go on to be the title story of a 2001 Lumley collection and was also anthologized by Dennis Etchison and Eric Protter, so I think we have a right to expect this will be a story representative of Lumley at his best.
Lumley's work, I have found, is uneven, but I am happy to report that "The Whisperer" is pretty good.
Benton, a British office clerk, is terrorized by a hunchbacked dwarf, a hideous creature who wears a floppy black hat and smells powerfully of the sewer. First, the bowler-clad office worker encounters this apparition on the commuter train--the monster uses its hypnotic power to make the train conductor direct Benton to a less comfortable train car. Then, a few months later, the dwarf is in a pub Benton visits for lunch, and the creep uses his powers to steal Benton's beer! When Benton later asks the train conductor and the barman about the little weirdo, they profess to have never seen the apparition!
Benton becomes obsessed with this haunt, his habits and character taking a turn for the worse as he spends his time searching for the malodorous dwarf. A few months after the episode in the pub comes a horrendous turn of events--Benton returns home to find the dwarf having sex with his wife! Benton drives the monster off, and then confronts, and strikes, his wife, who claims she has no idea what Benton is talking about! Benton's wife leaves him and Benton begins searching for the dwarf even more fervently, armed with a knife, intent on slaying his tormentor. Who will live and who will die when the final showdown comes?
This story is well-written and well-paced, and actually disturbing. Maybe, for reasons of class resentment, we are supposed to find the crimes inflicted on Benton amusing, but I did not find them amusing--I identified with the victim and his hopeless quest for vengeance and for answers. Because Benton's quest is hopeless--he ends the story dead in a gutter, and we are never afforded any clues as to what the monster is and why he chose to harass and destroy Benton.
Unless we are expected to observe the torture, cuckolding and murder of a member of the bourgeoisie with the glee of a malicious working-class brute or a supercilious Marxist university professor, I interpret this story as a reminder that ordinary people are essentially helpless when confronted by crime, that justice and safety are impossible to secure, that everything we have--our property, our families and our lives--can easily be taken from us by anybody who is strong enough and brazen enough to do so.
Thumbs up for this black nightmare of a story.
"Armaja Das" has been anthologized by Gardner Dozois, Thomas F. Monteleone, and Margaret Weis, so here we have a piece that has been embraced by the speculative fiction community!
"Armanja das," the story tells us, is Romani for "we curse you"--this is a story about Gypsies!
John Zold is a rich man, a talented mathematician who left academia to make a pile of money in private industry as a computer programmer--he has designed a piece of software that gives computers the ability to mimic human feeling and talk to a computer user as if it is his or her sympathetic friend.
Zold works in Manhattan, lives in Dobbs Ferry. His Romani parents fled Europe during the Nazi era, but were murdered in America, leaving him an orphan. John became totally assimilated to English-speaking American culture and, as a wealthy man in his late thirties, has been financing a charity that encourages other young Gypsies to assimilate. Many Gypsies in America resent this charitable effort, considering that Zold is "stealing their children," and Zold receives threatening letters in the mail featuring that phrase, "armanja das." Early in the story an ancient little Romani woman sneaks into his building in Dobbs Ferry and casts a spell on him. Of course, Zold doesn't believe in magic, but immediately after the curse is put on him he is unable to perform in the bedroom and he develops carbuncles on the back of his neck.
Conventional medical professionals prove unable to cure Zold's impotence or his skin problems, which get worse, much worse, and, suffering a severe fever and covered head to tow in hideous boils, he seeks out help from a Gypsy herbal healer or "white witch." However, the evil witch who cursed Zold in the first place has deep ties within the Gypsy community and no healers will tend to him! Desperate, Zold turns to the computer personality that he designed himself! The computer, with access to libraries all over the world, comes up with a Gypsy spell that will transfer the deadly curse to somebody else and guides Zold in performing the ritual!
Unfortunately, the curse does not transfer to the witch, as Zold hoped, but to his computer. The curse then spreads to almost every computer in the world, making them "impotent"--this causes havoc because, for example, all electricity in New York City is handled by a computer, so the curse brings the greatest city in the world to a standstill. The only computers that are immune are the computers managing the Soviet and American nuclear arsenals--when they sense that the world's computers are out of commission they interpret that as a vulnerability amongst the enemy's ranks and both computers launch nuclear strikes. Civilization is almost wiped out, and the Gypsies, who hadn't come to rely on machines as did all other cultures, are now on top of the heap!
The first half or two-thirds of this "Armaja Das" I took to be a serious piece on assimilation and alienation and psychosomatic illness, and I suppose it is, but the end feels like a nonsensical joke story, undermining much of what I liked about it. Perhaps we should admire the story for the way it mixes high technology and traditional superstitious beliefs, a reflection of our real 21st-century lives, in which book store browsers will find that there are more shelves for books on ghosts, witchcraft and the tarot than there are for computer programs.
Acceptable.
Like the Lumley and the Haldeman story we are looking at today, William F. Nolan's "Dead Call" has been widely anthologized.
This story is very short, and a little gimmicky. The narrator answers the phone, and it is his friend Len, dead for four weeks, on the line! Len says that death is nice--peaceful, with no pressure! Len reveals that his car accident was no accident, that he committed suicide, and is glad he did! I guess dead people have ways of knowing things, because he tells the narrator that his wife is cheating, his daughter is a junkie who hates him, and his boss is about to fire him. Len suggests that, seeing how things are going, that the narrator also commit suicide, and the narrator takes his advice.
In the last few lines of this story the narrator addresses the reader directly, suggesting that, seeing how things are going, we join him in death.
Acceptable.
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Maybe we should see these three stories as reflecting particular 1970s concerns about increases in crime rates and divorce rates. Maybe this is something I should keep in mind when I read three more stories from Frights in the next exciting installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.
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