beside him while he listened to Hunton tell Mrs Gillian’s story.
When Hunton had finished, Jackson said, ‘I asked you once if you thought the mangler might be
haunted. I was only half joking. I’ll ask you again now.’
‘No,’ Hunton said uneasily. ‘Don’t be stupid.’
Jackson watched the turning clothes reflectively. ‘Haunted is a bad word. Let’s say possessed. There are almost as many spells for casting demons in as there are for casting them out. Frazier’s Golden Bough
is replete with them. Druidic and Aztec lore contain others. Even older ones, back to Egypt. Almost all
of them can be reduced to startlingly common denominators. The most common, of course, is the blood
of a virgin.’ He looked at Hunton, ‘Mrs Gillian said the trouble started after this Sherry Ouelette
accidentally cut herself.’
‘Oh, come on,’ Hunton said.
‘You have to admit she sounds just the type,’ Jackson said.
‘I’ll run right over to her house,’ Hunton said with a small smile. ‘I can see it. “Miss Ouelette, I’m Officer John Hunton. I’m investigating an ironer with a bad case of demon possession and would like to
know if you’re a virgin.” Do you think I’d get a chance to say goodbye to Sandra and the kids before
they carted me off to the booby hatch?’
‘I’d be willing to bet you’ll end up saying something just like that,’ Jackson said without smiling. ‘I’m
serious, Johnny. That machine scares the hell out of me and I’ve never seen it.,
‘For the sake of conversation,’ Hunton said, ‘what are some of the other so-called common
denominators?’
Jackson shrugged. ‘Hard to say without study. Most Anglo-Saxon hex formulas specify graveyard dirt
or the eye of a toad. European spells often mention the hand of glory, which can be interpreted as the
actual hand of a dead man or one of the hallucinogenics used in connection with the Witches’ Sabbath –
usually belladonna or a psilocybin derivative. There could be others.’
‘And you think all those things got into the Blue Ribbon ironer? Christ, Mark, I’ll bet there isn’t any
belladonna within a five-hundred-mile radius. Or do you think someone whacked off their Uncle Fred’s
hand and dropped it in the folder?’
‘If seven hundred monkeys typed for seven hundred years -‘One of them would turn out the works of
Shakespeare,’
Hunton finished sourly. ‘Go to hell. Your turn to go across to the drugstore and get some dimes for the
dryers.’
It was very funny how George Stanner lost his arm in the mangler.
Seven o’clock Monday morning the laundry was deserted except for Stanner and Herb Diment, the
maintenance man. They were performing the twice-yearly function of greasing the mangler’s bearings
before the laundry’s regular day began at seven-thirty. Diment was at the far end, greasing the four
secondaries and thinking of how unpleasant this machine made him feel lately, when the mangler
suddenly roared into life.
He had been holding up four of the canvas exit belts to get at the motor beneath and suddenly the belts
were running in his hands, ripping the flesh off his palms, dragging him along.
He pulled free with a convulsive jerk seconds before the belts would have carried his hands into the
folder.
‘What the Christ, George!’ he yelled. ‘Shut the frigging thing off,
George Stanner began to scream.
It was a high, wailing, blood-maddened sound that filled the laundry, echoing off the steel faces of the
washers, the grinning mouths of the steam presses, the vacant eyes of the industrial dryers. Stanner
drew in a great, whooping gasp of air and screamed again: ‘Oh God of Christ I’m caught I’M CAUGHT
-,
The rollers began to produce rising steam. The folder gnashed and thumped. Bearings and motors
seemed to cry out with a hidden life of their own.
Diment raced to the other end of the machine.
The first roller was already going a sinister red. Diment made a moaning, gobbling noise in his throat.
The mangler howled and thumped and hissed.
A deaf observer might have thought at first that Stanner was merely bent over the machine at an odd
angle. Then even a deaf man would have seen the pallid, eye-bulging rictus of his face, mouth twisted