THE GREEN THING, by Manly Banister

Originally published in The Nekromantikon, 1950, under the pseudonym “Gregg Powers.”

Jonathan Crane saw out of the corner of his eye the long, skinny green arms snatch at him from the dark cave of a doorway. He leaped aside, just in time, and paused, shaking.

No use looking in the doorway now, he knew. The green thing was gone. It was always gone, whenever he looked.

He cast a wary glance around him. The street was dimly lit and a cold fog wreathed smoke-like tendrils around the streetlamps, making of each a glowing silver cocoon. Ahead, two men slouched along…obviously gunmen, he thought.

He crossed over and continued his way on the other side of the street, circumspectly avoiding pools of shadow. He reached his hotel without further incident although once or twice he had thought he detected a stirring in the shrubbery that lined the way, as if someone—some thing—paced him relentlessly.

Once in his room, he would be safe. His room was the only safety Jonathan Crane knew.

He wondered how civilized men could live in the world that lay beyond the threshold of his room. It was a world of nightmare terrors, of haunting grues, of disembodied nothingnesses that suddenly became something when your back was turned, of lurking gunmen, thieves, footpads, stranglers.

He never went out unless he had to. It had been thoughtless of him to run out of cigarettes, necessitating a trip to the drugstore a block down the street. For anything else, Jonathan would not have stirred from his room. Cigarettes he must have. He smoked four packs a day.

The creaking elevator left him at his floor, and he inserted the key in his lock with shaking fingers. The door opened, and a pair of long, green arms snatched out of the darkness at him.

Jonathan Crane ran screaming.

* * * *

“Kind of a quiet guy, usually,” the room clerk mumbled to the policeman. “Don’t know whether he drinks or hits the hop.” He made circles with his finger against his temple. “Ran down six flights hollering about a skinny green thing in his room.”

The officer pursed his lips and nodded. He glanced at Jonathan huddled in a broken down leather chair. Crane shook spasmodically.

“Sure, ye’ll be wantin’ to go back up to yer room now, mister,” the officer said soothingly. “Everything’s a-goin’ to be okay.”

Jonathan Crane made a strangling sound.

The cop turned to the room clerk.

“I don’t think he’ll give us any more trouble. Take him back up to his room. You might—er—” he winked broadly, “chase out the ‘green thing’ first.”

Crane looked up eagerly.

“Would you? If you only would!”

“Sure,” said the room clerk kindly. “C’mon, Mister Crane. I’ll rout him out and you can go to bed safe and sound. How’s that?”

Crane got up shakily. He thanked the police officer and followed the room clerk into the elevator.

The room blazed with light.

“See?” said the clerk. “The blinkin’ thing’s gone. Nothin’ under the bed. Nothin’ in the closet. Nothin’ in the bath ’cept what belongs there. Okay, Mister Crane?”

Crane pressed a dollar into the expressively outstretched hand.

“Thanks,” he said tiredly. “Thanks…a lot.”

He sat on the edge of the bed after the clerk had gone, scanning the room minutely.

Was the thing really gone? Or was it right here in the room with him, invisible. How had it got into his room in the first place? It had never got into his room before.

He slept poorly the remainder of the night.

* * * *

In the morning, a knock on his door aroused him. The man in the hall was a stranger, spare of build, efficiently professional looking. He tendered a card:

“Dr. Averill Medas, Psychiatrist,” Crane read. “You can’t come in.”

“Of course not,” said Medas pleasantly, “I am a long skinny green thing, waiting to snatch you right out of your overcoat.”

Crane shrank back, then straightened. He looked the man in the eye.

“You are not. Somebody sent you here. You think I’m crazy.”

“Certainly not,” Medas returned. “I am a friend of Officer Flannery. Remember Officer Flannery—the policeman on this beat?”

“He told you I was crazy,” said Jonathan Crane.

Dr. Medas pursed thin lips.

“Let us be frank, Mr. Crane. I am from police headquarters. You have been having trouble. I am here to help you. But I can’t do anything here in the hall. Officer Flannery recommended that I look into your case. When you feel that you need my help, please come in to see me. A professional address is on that card.”

He turned and walked away.

Crane closed the door and remained a long time, leaning against it in thoughtful silence.

He had accepted his construction of the world too long to disbelieve in it. He knew all about the thieves, murderers and footpads that lurked, he knew all about the spirits, demons, and monsters, and the long, skinny green thing that pursued him relentlessly, that waited—just waited—for him to relax his guard.

Medas knew, too. Why had he said, “Snatch you out of your overcoat? Crane knew that once those skinny, horribly knobby green hands closed upon his flesh, he would be snatched right out of his overcoat, out of his suit and shoes and underwear, and the clothes would be left lying there, and he would be…someplace else.

He pondered a good deal that day, and smoked a great many cigarettes. Could he be crazy…too?

* * * *

Jonathan Crane wrote things and sent them away to magazines. Sometimes the magazines bought the things he wrote. More often they did not. The article he had written about the green thing, for instance. It was written in truthful, straightforward style. Not an editor would touch it. Jonathan had come to believe that the editors were in league with the green thing. Naturally they would not want the public to know about it.

He had done scarcely a tap of work all day long. He read through his article on the green thing three times and laid it aside very thoughtfully. The day clerk had been kind enough to get cigarettes for him, and he had called the restaurant downstairs to send up his dinner. It was just after seven.

There came a knock at his door. That must be the boy with his tray, he thought. He opened the door quickly, and a pair of long, skinny green arms snatched at him.

Crane leaped backward, slamming the door. His breath came hard and fast. There was sweat on his forehead.

He snapped the night-latch, groped his way to the telephone and dialed the residence number on the card Dr. Medas had given him. The Doctor’s voice sounded far away, aloof and pleasant.

“Doctor!” gasped Crane. “It—it’s here again…the…the green—”

“What can I do about it?” interposed the psychiatrist coolly.

“Help me, Doctor. Help me!”

“Ah,” there was a tone of pleased satisfaction in Medas’ voice. “Well, there isn’t much I can do over the phone, Crane. I will go down and meet you at my office. We’ll talk this thing over.”

“No,” Crane objected, trembling and sweating. “It—it’s waiting outside my door to snatch me!”

“It is?” asked the Doctor. “Well, don’t worry. Suppose I send Flannery around to pick you up?”

Crane hesitated a moment, then agreed. He hung up.

His tray came up from the restaurant, finally, but he wasn’t hungry. He gave the busboy a tip and told him to take it back down again. He took the opportunity also to look sharply up and down the hall, but the green thing was not in sight.

After a while, Officer Flannery knocked heavily on the door. Crane assured himself of his caller’s identity, then donned hat and overcoat and joined him in the hall.

The policeman was loquaciously pleasant, but Crane squirmed with every step they took along the street. Flannery hailed a cab and held the door while Crane got in. The latter would have refused this cab had he been alone. The driver looked like a gunman. But the policeman’s presence reassured him.

Doctor Medas had already arrived at his office when they got there. He greeted them pleasantly, asked Crane to sit down, then chatted a moment with the officer before letting him out the door, “Now, you just take it easy, Mr. Crane,” Flannery observed pleasantly over his shoulder as he was leaving. “The Doc here is an expert at chasing green things and pink things and any color of things you can mention!”

He winked with well-meaning good humor and went away. Medas came back and sat down, across his desk from Crane.

“Now tell me your trouble,” he said.

Crane told him. He told him of the wretched condition of the world at large, described the lurking monsters and spirits, and with infinite loathing told about the horrid, skinny green thing that lurked and snatched at him.

“And if I thought,” Crane finished, “that I was crazy, too, as well as living in a world as mad as this one, I’d—I’d—”

“Of course you would,” Medas smiled kindly.

He stared thoughtfully at the ceiling.

“Have you ever thought of asking the—green thing—what it wants?”

“I know what it wants,” Crane shuddered.

“I see. Suppose the world is not as mad as you think?”

“I know it is mad.”

“I see. Has it occurred to you that you might be in touch—by virtue of a superior mind—with two worlds, two planes of existence at once?”

Crane looked at him questioningly.

Medas leaned forward. “I mean,” he said seriously, that you—your physical self—occupies our normal, quite sane world, while your mental self, your psyche, occupies both this world and another world that is beyond the perception of ordinary people, like myself for instance.”

“I had not thought of that,” Crane replied.

“Very well. It is a possibility, is it not? Now, these creatures that you perceive you actually perceive on that other plane, yet since your perceptions include both planes simultaneously, they are superimposed upon your perception of this plane. They are not here at all. They just seem to be. Isn’t that logical?”

Crane puzzled over the concept a little.

“Yes,” he admitted hesitantly at last.

“Very well,” smiled Doctor Medas. “By accepting your original perception, that the monsters and the green thing actually occupy this plane, you are inviting them more and more to manifest themselves. That is why they will no longer leave you alone, even in your room.”

“You said you could help me,” Crane said suspiciously. “How is all this going to help me?”

Doctor Medas explained. He explained at length. When he had finished, Crane looked almost cheerful.

“It is a peculiarity of the psyche,” Medas concluded sonorously, “that it exerts an enormous influence upon the physical. You can actually destroy the physical self by means of psyche-created elementalf of imagination that have no existence at all in the plane of your physical being.

“All you need do when your psyche-created ‘green thing’ confronts you is walk right through it, as if it were not there. And it won’t be there!”

He smiled his thin smile and Crane felt vastly reassured.

“I believe you’re right, Doctor,” he admitted.

“That’s it!” beamed the psychiatrist. “Now I want you to walk out that door, hail the first cab you see in the street, and go home. Telephone me when you get there. I’ll wait! I want you to assure me that you met no ‘green things’ on the way.”

Crane stood up with alacrity.

“I’ll do that, Doctor!”

He strode to the door and hesitated moment, adjusting his hat and overcoat. He beamed with gratitude.

“Boy, I feel a million percent better!”

Doctor Medas nodded and smiled.

Jonathan Crane opened the door.

A pair of long, skinny green arms snatched at him from the dark hallway. Crane uttered an incredibly thin, frightened shriek. Then he was snatched right out of his overcoat, out of his jacket and trousers and socks and underwear and shoes; and the whole wardrobe fell shivering down in a lumpy, incongruously empty heap in Doctor Medas’ doorway.