Finally he tried flying, leaping into the air. Though he drifted for yards at a tune, slowly and easily, he could not land where he wanted to. From the air the vortices looked like petals of a flower, and when he came drifting down to the desert he would land hi the very center of the strange blossom.
Again he ran, the circle of foggy ccnes following still, the tower still before him. He felt with his bare feet something tinglingly clammy. The circle had contracted to the point of coalescence, had gripped his two feet like a trap.
He shot into the air and headed straight for the tower. The creaking, napping noise of the bat-winged skulls was very much louder now. He cast his eyes to the side and was just able to see the tips of his own black, flapping membranes. As though regular nightmares—always the same, yet increasingly repulsive to the detective—were not- enough woe for one man to bear, he was troubled with a sudden, appalling sharpness of hearing. This was strange, for Fitzgerald had always been a little deaf in one ear.
The noises he heard were distressing things, things like the ticking of a wristwatch two floors beneath his flat, the gurgle of water in sewers as he walked tile streets, humming of underground telephone wires. Headquarters was a bedlam with its stentorian breathing, the machine-gun fire of a telephone being dialed, the howitzer crash of a cigarette case snapping shut.
He had his bedroom soundproofed and tried to bear it The inches of fibreboard helped a little; he found that he could focus his attention on a book and practically exclude from his mind the regular swish of air in his bronchial tubes,
the thudding at his wrists and temples, the slushing noise of food passing through his transverse colon.
Fitzgerald did not go mad for he was a man with ideals. He believed in clean government and total extirpation of what he fondly believed was a criminal class which could be detected by the ear lobes and other distinguishing physical characteristics.
He did not go to a doctor because he knew that the word would get back to headquarters that Fitzgerald heard things and would probably begin to see things pretty soon and that it wasn’t good policy to have a man like mat on the force.
The detective read up on the later Freudians, trying to interpret the recurrent dream. The book said that it meant he had been secretly in love with a third cousin on his mother’s side and that he was ashamed of it now and wanted to die, but that he was afraid of heavenly judgment. He knew that wasn’t so; his mother had had no relations and detective Fitzgerald wasn’t afraid of anything under the sun.
After two weeks of increasing horror he was walking around like a corpse, moving by instinct and wearily doing his best to dodge the accidents that seemed to trail him. It was then that he was assigned to check on the Cult of Hagar. The records showed that they had registered at City Hall, but records don’t show everything.
He walked in on the cult during a service and dully noted that its members were more prosperous in appearance than they had been, and that there were more women present Joseph Kazam was going through precisely the same ritual that, the detective had last seen.
When the last bill had fallen into the pot covered with gilded wood and the last dowager had left Kazam emerged and greeted the detective.
“Fitzgerald,” he said, “you damned fool, why didn’t you come to me in the first place?”
“For what?” asked the detective, loosening the waxed cotton plugs in his ears.
The stringy, brown man chuckled. “Your friend Rooney’s been at work on you. You hear things. You can’t sleep and when you do—”
“That’s plenty,” interjected Fitzgerald. “Can you help me out of this mess I’m in?”
“Nothing to it Nothing at all. Come into the office.”
Dully the detective followed, wondering if the cot had been removed.
The ritual that Kazam performed was simple in the extreme, but a little revolting. The mucky aspects of it Fitzgerald completely excused when he suddenly realized that he no longer heard his own blood pumping through his veins, and that the asthmatic wheeze of the janitor in the basement was now private to the ‘janitor again. “How does it feel?” asked Kazam concernedly. “Magnificent,” breathed the detective, throwing away his cotton plugs. “Too wonderful for words.”