The only lesson we learn from history is that we never learn from history. Primitive weakness destroys just as surely in the age of Rock and Roll as it did in the days of the harp or the spinet. Man has nothing to fear so much as human frailty. Material progress alone means nothing. Whether you kill your enemy with a club, a musket or an atomic bomb...he is equally dead! Civilisation will be mo better a thousand years from now unless man changes his nature. An ape in a space ship is just as much a jungle beast as an ape in a tree.
Fear is the fetter that holds the cave man, the twentieth century man and the space man of tomorrow. Doubt is his chain.
Release date:
August 28, 2014
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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It was late when Slasher Banks left the friendly light, warmth and alcoholic comfort of the “Green Elephant’s” four ale bar.
As he pushed open the swing doors and stepped out into the darkness of the wintry north London night it took him several seconds to become accustomed to the absence of light. After the glare of the bar, the narrow road, which had been destined for slum clearance for the last two years, seemed more like the bottom of a great rubble canyon than anything else. Banks was moderately drunk, but he was one of those men who soused himself so often that he had developed a series of subconscious behaviour patterns, which enabled him to simulate sobriety with a reasonable amount of success. In Slasher Banks’ business it didn’t pay to get so hopelessly drunk that a man was not in a position to defend himself efficiently. The exact nature of Slasher’s business did not stand close scrutiny. He ran with a mob who dabbled in most things short of murder. They had been known to go in for a little white slaving, they operated most of the vice dens in their area, they eked out their living with an occasional pay roll snatch, or a lightning fast smash and grab, and one of their most regular sources of income was the protection racket. By and large, Banks and his boys didn’t do at all badly, but he was by no means top of his profession and there were bigger and tougher men than Slasher Banks in the area. Usually that strange unwritten underworld code kept them apart, unless somebody thought that somebody else had muscled in on his territory. Then there was trouble—trouble with a capital ‘T’. Big trouble! Razor trouble. Slasher Banks was a razor man. Had been for years. It had earned him his rather unenviable nickname.
The glow from the “Green Elephant”s’ windows died out as he rounded a corner. He was completely alone now in the absolute darkness of the crumbling slum area, sordid, broken houses peered from behind grimy curtained windows as though aware of the evil that had been done in them and around them, as though aware of the squalor of which they were an integral part, as though they were aware and bitterly ashamed. It was as though the bricks and mortar themselves were possessed of some kind of corporate conscience that made them somehow desire to crumble into merited decay …. Slasher Banks paused at the next corner. “Footsteps”, he mumbled, his hand edged to the pocket where his big cut-throat razor lived and moved and had its being. Drunk or sober he could whip out that razor faster than the old-time Western hero could draw a .45.
He stood stock still in the darkness listening …. and listening …. and listening yet again. The footsteps were unmistakeable now—not by any means clear—but they were coming his way …. Slasher backed into a derelict doorway. The footsteps came closer and closer still. They drew level with the doorway. Banks was just beginning to accustom his eyes to the darkness of the streets. He saw a heavy, grotesque-looking shape ambling past, the air seemed to have gone strangely cold; but there was no wind, no sound except those padding footsteps …. Banks held his breath. The air seemed definitely colder now, as though a mountain of ice had gone wallowing past him, as though a glacier had speeded up its movement to perceptibility and slid past in the night. It was as though an iceberg had swept a passage down that decaying slum road.
“Come out of that doorway, my friend,” said a voice that was quiet yet full of command, and it sounded strangely mechanical, inhuman; it had a weird metallic ring about it, like listening to someone calling out loudly through an old-fashion speaking trumpet.
“Don’t be afraid,” went on the voice, “I want to do a deal with you, Banks.”
Slowly and uncertainly Slasher edged out of the doorway towards the dark, shambling figure in the centre of the path. He was forcing his eyes to their widest extent, staring desperately, fixedly through the darkness, trying to make out some detail, but other than the size of the figure, and what looked like arms and legs at the four corners of the gigantic torso, it was practically impossible to make any detail at all; the back appeared to be crippled and twisted, the figure resembled a huge, black-overcoated Quasimodo. A wide-brimmed black felt hat was pulled low down over the face, the collar of the huge black coat turned up until it met the hat. He couldn’t even see the eyes that he knew must be peering at him out of the darkness. It didn’t look as though there were any! But that, he told himself, was impossible! There must be something between the brim of the hat and the collar of the coat. He could see nothing except a patch of darker shadow.
“Who are you? demanded Slasher suspiciously.
“That is something you do not need to know!”
“I can’t do business with a voice in the dark,” protested Slasher.
“You have no choice!” said the lumbering thing, in that strange metallic voice.
“What do you mean, ‘I have no choice!’ I’ll carve you up!” threatened Slasher, “Get out o’ my way! I wanna get ’ome!”
“We have business,” persisted the voice.
“There are plenty of other blokes, why can’t you do business with them?” demanded Banks, truculently.
“Because I have chosen you! And I do not take ‘no’ for an answer.” There was something deadly and sinister about the metallic ring of that voice. Something terrifying, something horrific, something absolutely out of this world. It sent icy thrills of fear down his back.
“Well—what do you want.”
“That is better,” came the voice from the black mass,
“That is much better.”
For the first time in his life, Banks was afraid, afraid as he had never been afraid of the law, afraid as he had never been of a rival gangster. It was as though he had met the personification of fear itself, wearing a black slouch hat and a thick overcoat over a humped back. It was as though he had met Terror in human form, as though Hell had made itself a body, as though Satan had suddenly stepped from the nethermost pit into that crumbling North London slum.
“I understand that you are able to obtain certain merchandise?”
“What do you mean?” asked Banks.
“Human merchandise—”
“White slaving?” Banks came out with the words rather reluctantly, “I might and I might not. I might know somebody who’s in it.”
“I know all about you. I know more about your record that Scotland Yard does,” returned the deadly, hunched figure, “and unless you choose to be co-operative I shall personally deliver you to Scotland Yard with sufficient evidence to put you away for twenty years!”
“You’d have a job,” retorted Banks, “I’m faster than you, and I’ve got a razor!”
He didn’t see what moved, like dark lightning in the shadows, but suddenly something like a great hand, or a coil of rope, or an elephant’s trunk— he had no means of knowing what—descended on the wrist that held the weapon. Paralysing cold shot up and down his arm, he gave a muffled moan and then the hand or trunk, or whatever it was, was withdrawn. Gradually the circulation came back into the frozen limb.
“I assure you that you are quite powerless against me,” said the black figure. “Quite powerless! Your razor would no more damage me than it would damage that wall, be sensible!”
“All right,” Banks had backed away into the doorway and was whimpering, like a terrified toddler, “For God’s sake— who are you? what are you?”
“Just call me the black Voice,” returned the figure, “that is enough for you. Stretch out your hand!”
“You’re not going to ’urt me again?”
“I shall not hurt you if you obey!”
Trembling like a leaf the gangster extended his hand in the darkness, Something war placed into it, something extremely cold, but which warmed as he touched it.
“What is it?” he asked suspiciously.
“What does it feel like?”
“It feels like a lump o’ metal,” returned the gangster, “biggish, heavy too.. . .
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