Reincarnations

THE HAUNTED BICUSPID

This one first appeared in The Enchanter Completed, the tribute anthology to L. Sprague de Camp that I had the privilege of editing. Being a tavern tale, it's a sort of hommage to de Camp and Pratt's classic Tales from Gavagan's Bar. That's why the bartender here is called "George M." You're supposed to think "Cohan," the name of de Camp and Pratt's barkeep. As for the rest, well, I had the chance to be a Poe-t, and I took it.

Here’s two dollars and fifty cents-in gold, by God, George M. A quarter eagle’s plenty to buy drinks for everybody in the place. Tell me when you need more. I’ll do it again.

What’s that you say, my friend? You see more gold now than you did just a few years ago? Well, I should hope you do, by thunder. It’s all coming from California, way out West. I don’t suppose any one would have thought the world held so much gold until they stumbled across it on that Sutter fellow’s land.

But I don’t feel like talking about gold right this here minute-except that that’s my gold on the bar. If I’m buying, part of what I’m buying is the chance to talk about any blamed thing I please. Anybody feel like quarreling about that?

No? Good.

All right, then. Here goes. Friends, my name is William Legrand. Most of you know me, and most of you call me Bill. I’m a plainspoken man, I am. Nothing fancy about me. Yes, I’m partial to canvasback duck and soft-shell crabs when I can get ‘em, but what Baltimorean isn’t? That’s not fancy-they’re right good eating, and who’ll tell me they aren’t?

I was born in the year of our Lord 1800. Last year of the eighteenth century, that was, and don’t you believe any silly fool who tries to tell you it was the first year of the nineteenth. As of the twenty-seventh ultimo, that makes me a right round fifty-one years of age. I am not ashamed to say I have done pretty well for myself in that half century and a little bit. If there’s a single soul who sells more furniture or finer furniture in Baltimore, I’d like to know who he is. Helen and I have been married for twenty-eight years now, and we still get on better than tolerably well. I have three sons and a daughter, and Helen was lucky enough never to lose a baby, for which I thank God. One of my sons went to Harvard, another to Yale. I wasn’t able to do that kind of thing myself, but a man’s children should have more chances than he did. That’s the American way, don’t you think? And I have two little granddaughters now, and I wouldn’t trade ‘em for anything. Not for the moon, do you hear me?

If it weren’t for my teeth, everything would be perfect.

I see some of you wince. I see some of you flinch. I see I am not the only man in this splendid establishment to find himself a martyr to the toothache. I am not surprised to make that discovery. People laugh about the toothache-people who haven’t got it laugh at it, I should say. And Old Scratch is welcome to every single one of those laughing hyenas.

I was still a young man the first time I faced the gum lancet, the punch, the pincers, the lever, and the pelican. They sound like tools for an old-time torturer, don’t they? By God, gentlemen, they are tools for an old-time torturer. Any of you who ever had dealings with a dentist more than a few years ago will know what I am talking about. Oh, yes, I see some heads going up and down. I knew I would.

Here’s another quarter eagle, George M. You keep that river flowing for these gentlemen, if you would be so kind.

People would say, You try this, Bill, or, You do that, Bill, and it will not hurt so bad. I would drink myself blind before I went to have a tooth yanked. Or I would take so much opium, I could not even recollect my own name. Or I would do both those things at once, so that my friends would have to steer me to the latest butcher because I could not navigate on my own.

And when the damned quack got to work, whoever he was that time, it would hurt worse than anything you can think of. If he grabs a tooth with the pincers, and instead of pulling it he breaks it, and he has to jerk out all the fragments one at a time, what else is it going to do? I ask you, my friends, what else can it possibly do?

I tell you frankly, I was more relieved than sorry when I lost the last tooth down below-ten years ago it was now. My bottom false teeth fit tolerably well, and I don’t mind ‘em a bit. But I wanted to hang on to the ones I have up top. I still do want that, as a matter of fact. If you have a full plate up there, they hold in your uppers with springs, and that is another infernal invention. There are plenty of ways I would like to be like George Washington, but that is not one of them.

But God does what He wants, not what you want. Not what I want, either. About six months ago, it was, when one of my top left bicuspids went off like it had a fire lit inside it.

What’s a bicuspid? On each side, top and bottom, you have got two teeth betwixt your eyeteeth and your grinders. Ask a dentist, and he will tell you they’re bicuspids. I have done a powerful lot of palavering with dentists over the years. I know how they talk. I am a man who likes to learn things. I want to find out just precisely what they are going to inflict on me before they go and inflict it.

And a whole fat lot of good that has done me, too.

I kept hoping the toothache would go away. Might as well hope the bill collector or your mother-in-law will go away. You stand a better chance. Before long, I knew it was time to get me to a dentist-that or go plumb out of my mind, one. I had not had to lose a chopper for five or six years before that. The last quack I had gone to was out of business. Maybe the folks he tormented strung him up. I can hope so, anyhow.

So I found me another fellow, a Dutchman named Vankirk. He grinned when he saw my poor sorry mouth. His teeth, damn him, were as white as if he soaked ‘em in cat piss every night. For all I know, maybe he did.

He poked at my poor sorry chopper with one of those iron hooks his miserable tribe uses. You know the type I mean-like out of the Spanish Inquisition, only smaller. He had to pry me off the ceiling afterwards, too. You bet he did. Then he gave me another shiny smile. "Oh, yes, Mr. Legrand," he says, "I can have that out in jig time, and a replacement in the socket, and you will not feel a thing."

I laughed in his face. "Go peddle your papers," I says. "I am not a blushing bride at this business. I have been with your kind of man before. I have heard promises like that before. I have stupefied myself with every remedy known to nature. And it has hurt like blazes every single time."

"Every remedy known to nature, perhaps," says Vankirk. "But what about remedies known to man? Have you ever visited a dentist who uses chloroform?"

Now, I had heard of his stuff. It was written up in the Baltimore Sun not so long before. But, "Just another humbug," says I.

Vankirk shook his head. "Mr. Legrand, chloroform is no humbug," he says, solemn as a preacher at a millionaire’s funeral. "They can take off a man’s leg with it-never mind his tooth, his leg-and he will not feel a thing until he wakes up. I have been using it for six months, and it is a sockdolager."

In my day, I have been lied to by a good many dentists. I am familiar with the breed. If this Vankirk was lying, he was better at it than any other tooth-drawer I have had the displeasure to know. I felt something I had not felt since my very first acquaintance with the pincers. Friends, I felt hope.

"You can pop a replacement tooth in when you yank mine, you say?" I ask him. "I have had that done before, more than once, and never known it to hold above a year."

"Plainly, you have been visiting men who do not know their business," says Vankirk. "From examining your mouth, I believe I have the very tooth that will make a perfect fit in your jaw."

He opened a drawer and rummaged in a box of teeth and finally found the one he wanted. It looked like a tooth to me. That is all I can tell you. It did not have blood and pus all over it, I will say that, the way mine do when one butcher or another hauls them out of my jaw. I ask him, "Where did it come from?"

"Out of the mouth of a brave young soldier killed at the battle of Buena Vista," Vankirk says. "This tooth, Mr. Legrand, is good for twenty or thirty more years than you are. You may count on that."

I never count on anything a dentist tells me. I say, "In my day, I have had teeth put in my head from men slain in the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War, and the war the Texans fought against Mexico before the US of A decided to teach Santa Anna a lesson. Not a one of them lasted. Why should I think this here one will be any different?"

"It is not the tooth alone, Mr. Legrand. It is the man who puts it in," he says, and strikes a pose.

He did not lack for confidence, Vankirk. And the one I had in there had to come out. I knew that. I would not have been there if I didn’t. But, says I, "Tell me one thing-is this here tooth an American’s or a Mexican’s?"

"An American’s," he answers right away. He was all set to get shirty about it, too. "Do you think I would stick a damned greaser’s tooth in your jaw? No, sir."

"That was what I wanted to know," I say, and I sat down in his chair. "Go ahead, then. Let us get it over with."

George M., I see there are folks with empty glasses. Why don’t you keep them filled? We can settle the score when I am done. You know me. I am good for it. If I am not, no man in Baltimore is. Thank you kindly, sir. You are a gentleman, as I have cause to know.

Where was I? Oh, yes-in that blamed dentist’s chair. Says I, "Won’t you strap down my arms so I can’t punch you while you are pulling?"

"No need. I was not lying when I said it would not hurt," Vankirk says. He opened that drawer again, the one the tooth came out of. This time, he had hold of a bottle and a rag. He soaked the rag in the stuff in the bottle-it looked like water, but it wasn’t-and then he hauled off and stuck that wet rag over my nose and mouth.

The chloroform-that was what it had to be, chloroform-smelled sweet and nasty at the same time. It did not smell like anything I had ever known before. When I opened my mouth to yell, it tasted sweet, too. It tasted unnaturally sweet, to tell you the truth. It tasted so sweet, it burned.

What I meant for that yell came out like a gurgle. It was like all of a sudden I was drunker than I had ever been before. Well, no. It was not just like that, you understand. But it was closer to that than to anything else you will know if you have not been under chloroform yourself. And then I was not drunk any more. I was gone.

When I woke up, at first I did not realize I was waking up. I did not know I had been asleep, you see. My senses were still reeling. I started to ask Vankirk when he was going to start. That was when I realized my mouth tasted all bloody.

I also realized I could not talk, not for hell. I wondered if the chloroform had scrambled my brains for fair. But it was not the chloroform. Vankirk had stuffed a wad of cloth in there to soak up some of the blood. I spat it out, and did not land it on my breeches, for which I was grateful.

Says I, "This is no humbug. It did not hurt."

"No, sir," Vankirk says. He held up his pincers. In it, he still had the black ruin that was my tooth. Its bottom end was all smeared with blood, like I knew it would be. He took it out of the pincers and flung it in the rubbish. "No use putting this old wreck in another man’s head."

"I reckon not," says I.

"The one I put there in its place fit as though it was made there," Vankirk says. "I have been doing this for a while now, Mr. Legrand, and I have never had a transplanted tooth go in so well."

"Good," says I. I felt around with my tongue. Sure enough, the new tooth was in there. It was fixed to the one in back of it by fine wire. Not to the one in front. That there one is long gone.

Vankirk says, "You will feel some pain now, as the chloroform wears off. You see, I do not lie to you. Have you got some laudanum with you?"

"That I do," I says, and I took a few drops. I know about the pain after a tooth comes out. I ought to. It is not so bad. Laudanum- -which is opium in brandy, for anyone who does not know-laudanum, I say, can shift that pain all right.

"As your jaw heals, that tooth will become a part of you," Vankirk says. "Because it fit in there so exceedingly well, I think it will last a long time."

Like I said, friends, I have had teeth transplanted before. Not a one of them stayed in place long. I had said as much to the tooth-drawer. I started to say so again. But then I shut my mouth, and not on account of I was still bleeding some. He knew what he was talking about with the chloroform. Maybe he knew what he was talking about here, too.

"Can you walk?" he asks me. "Are you all right to go?"

I got to my feet. The room swayed some, but it was not too bad. I have felt drunker than I did just then. "I am fine, thank you," says I. "And I do thank you-believe me, I do." I think this was the first time I ever thanked a tooth-drawer after escaping his clutches. I confess, though, I may be mistaken. Now and then, I have been suffering sufficient so as to thank one of those brigands no matter what he did to me.

"Walk around my room here a bit. I want to make certain you are steady on your pins," Vankirk says. So I did that. It was not too bad. On my third or fourth circuit, I caught the dentist’s eye. He nodded, for I had satisfied him. Says he, "Come back in a fortnight. I will take the wire off that new tooth I put in there. It should do fine on its own. With any luck at all, it will last you the rest of your life."

"I will do just as you say. Let us make the appointment now," I answer him. So we did. He wrote it in a book he had, and he wrote it for me on a scrap of paper. I put that in my waistcoat pocket. "And after that," says I, and I planted my beaver hat on my head, "you will see me nevermore."

Looking back, I do believe that to be the very commencement of my troubles, the beginning of a descent into the maelstrцm from which I was fortunate in the extreme to escape unscathed, or nearly so. But at this time I knew nothing of what lay ahead, nothing of the ordeal to which I was to be subjected.

My head still whirled a bit from the chloroform and from the laudanum. I could walk, however, and knew where I was going. And I was leaving the dentist’s, and it did not hurt. It did not hurt. Since the Passion and Resurrection of our Lord, I do not think God has wrought a greater miracle.

When I returned to my house, Helen flew into my arms. "Oh, Bill! Poor Bill!" she cried. "How are you, you sorry, abused creature?"

"I am-well enough," I answered, and regaled her with the tale of my experience. As she hearkened to the story, her eyes, the outward expression of her soul, grew ever wider in astonishment. Kissing her tenderly yet carefully, I continued, "And so you see, my dear, I am in a state to be envied rather than pitied."

"No one who loses a tooth is to be envied," she said, which is true enough, "but I am gladder than I can express that it was not the torment you have known too many times."

"So am I, by all that is holy," I replied. "He told me the chloroform was no humbug, and he told me the truth. Who would have expected such a thing from a dentist?"

My three sons, my daughter, and her husband, knowing I was to be subjected to this latest bout of toothly torment, came to call upon me in turn to learn how I was, and were pleasantly amazed to discover me so well. I am, as I have previously observed, fortunate in my family.

They all exclaimed to no small degree on observing me to be free of the agonies I had hitherto endured during and subsequent to the forced removal of that which Nature purposed to endure forever. And Benjamin, my eldest, on learning in full what had transpired, said, "So you have another man’s tooth in your jaw in place of your own?"

"I do indeed," I replied.

"And from what unlucky soul came the mortal fragment?" he inquired.

"Why, from a fallen hero of the late war against Mexico," I informed him. "So, at any rate, said Mr. Vankirk. He seeming otherwise veracious, I have no cause to doubt his word- But why do you laugh? What have I said or done to inspire such mirth?"

"You will know, dear and loving Father," said Benjamin, "that my particular friend is Dr. Ernest Valdemar, with whom I studied at Harvard College. Owing to your dental miseries, we have found occasions too numerous to mention on which to discuss such matters. He has, generally speaking, a low opinion of transplanted teeth."

"As has Mr. Vankirk, generally speaking," I replied. "Exceptio probat regulam, however, and he believed I would do well with this new tooth inserted into my jaw. Since he spoke the truth-indeed, if anything, less than the truth-regarding the analgesic and anaesthetic properties of chloroform, I see no reason not to hope, at least, he likewise had cause to be sanguine about my long-continuing use of a tooth now valueless to the soldier who once bore it."

He held up a hand to forestall my further speech, and then declared, "Dr. Valdemar has also a low opinion of those who gather these bits of ivory for the tooth-drawers’ trade-harvesters, he styles them. He says, and he should be in a position to know, that the bulk of the teeth employed in dentures and in transplantation come not from battlefields but from graveyards and even from the potter’s field, stolen at night in the dark of the moon by those whose deeds must not see the light of day. Whose tooth, then, Father, dwells now in that socket once your own?"

I will not-I cannot-deny the frisson of horror and dread shooting through me at this question. If the donor of the dental appendage was not the stalwart soldier to whom Vankirk had animadverted, who was he? Who, indeed? Some fiend in human shape? Some nameless, useless, worthless scribbler, his brief, strutting time on earth all squandered, his soul gone to fearful judgement, and his fleshly envelope flung now into a pauper’s grave?

My laugh holding more heartiness than I truly felt, I essayed to make light of my beloved Benjamin’s apprehensions. "In a fortnight’s time, I shall see Vankirk again; it is then he will remove the wire affixing the new tooth to its neighbor, that neighbor being one of the handful of sound instruments of mastication remaining in my upper mandible," I said. "That will be time enough to discuss the matter with him, and, I pledge to you, I shall not omit doing so."

Setting a kindly hand upon my shoulder, my eldest said, "Let it be as you wish, then, Father. My concern is only for you; I would not have you-contaminated by some unclean bit of matter rightfully residing on the far side of the tomb."

My own chief concern after receipt of the new tooth was not contamination but suppuration, the almost inevitable bout of pus and fever attendant upon such rude intrusions upon the oral cavity as the tooth-drawer is compelled to make. Having suffered several such bouts-having, indeed, lost a cousin at an untimely age as a result of one-I knew the signs, and awaited them with the apprehension to be expected from a man of such knowledge. Yet all remained well, and, in fact, I healed with a rapidity hardly less astonishing to me than the anodyne of chloroform itself. By the third day after the extraction, I was up and about and very largely my usual self once more.

Fourteen days having passed, I repaired to the illustrious Vankirk’s so that he might examine the results of his ministrations upon me. "Good morning, Mr. Legrand," he said. "How fare you today?"

"Exceeding well; monstrous well, you might even say," I replied. "Undo your wire, sir, and I shall be on my way."

"If the socket be healed sufficiently, I shall do just as you say. In the meantime"-here gesturing towards the chair whence I had been fortunate enough to make my escape half a month before-"take a seat, if you would be so kind."

"I am entirely at your service," I said, reflecting as I sat upon how great a prodigy it was that one such as I, with my fear both morbid and well-earned of those practicing the dentist’s art, should allow such a pronouncement to pass his lips as anything save the most macabre jest.

A tiny, sharp-nosed pliers of shiny iron in his hand, Vankirk bent towards me-and I, I willingly opened my mouth. "Well, well," quoth he, commencing his work, "here is a thing most extraordinary."

"What is it?" I enquired-indistinctly, I fear me, on account of the interference with my ejaculation arising from his hand and instrument.

First removing the wire, as he had told me he would, he answered, "Why, how very well you have recovered from your ordeal, Mr. Legrand, and how perfectly the tooth I have transplanted into your jawbone has taken hold there. If I-if any man-could do such work with every patient, I would serve kings, and live as kings do; for kings are no less immune to the toothache than any other mortals."

"You did better with me than I had dreamt possible, Mr. Vankirk, and should I again stand in need of the services of a tooth-drawer-which, given the way of all flesh, and of my sorry flesh in especial, strikes me as being altogether too probable-you may rest assured I shall hasten hither to your establishment as quickly as ever I may; for, rendered insensible by the miracle of chloroform, I shall at last be able-or rather, happily unable-to cry out, imitating the famous and goodly Paul long ago in his first letter to the Corinthians, ‘O pincers, where is thy sting? O torment, where is thy victory?’ and knowing myself to have triumphed over the agonies that have tortured mankind forever and ever."

Still holding the pliers, Vankirk cocked his head to one side, examining me with a keenness most disconcerting. After a moment, he shook his head, a quizzical expression playing across his countenance. "Extraordinary indeed," he murmured.

"Why say you that, sir, when I-?"

I had scarcely begun the question ere the tooth-drawer raised a hand, quelling my utterance before it could be well born. "Extraordinary in that you are, to all appearances, a changed man," he said.

"Why, so I am-I am a man free from pain, for which I shall remain ever in your debt, figuratively if not financially," I said.

"Our financial arrangements are satisfactory in the highest degree," Vankirk said. "By every account reaching my ear, you are and have always been a man of the nicest scrupulosity in respect to money, and in this you seem to have altered not by the smallest jot or tittle; not even by the proverbial iota, smaller than either. But your present style-how shall I say it?-differs somewhat from that which I observed in you a fortnight previously. And, as the illustrious Buffon (not to be confused with any of our present illustrious buffoons) so justly remarked, ‘Le style c’est l’homme mкme.’ I trust you would agree?"

"How could any man disagree with such a sage observation?" I returned. "As an apologia, however, I must remind you that my faculties at the time of our last encounter were more than a little deranged by the pain of which you so skillfully relieved me."

"It could be," he replied, studying me with even greater keenness than before. "Yes, it could be. Yet the transformation seems too striking for that to be the sole fount wherefrom it arises."

"I know none other, unless"-and I laughed; yes, laughed! fool that I was-"you would include in your calculations the tooth of which you made me a gift in exchange for my own dear, departed bicuspid. Tell me, if you would-what is the tooth’s true origin? Some source closer than a sanguinary field from the late war with Mexico? Am I correct in guessing you obtained it from some local-harvester, I believe the term is?"

"Well-since from some source or another-"

"My eldest son, whose particular friend is a doctor."

"I see. Since you have learned the term from your son, then, I shall not deny the brute fact of the matter. Yes, you have a Baltimore tooth, not one from the Mexican War. But I insist, Mr. Legrand, that it is a tooth as sound as I declared it to be when first I showed it to you, the truth of which is demonstrated by the rapidity and thoroughness with which it has incorporated itself into the matrix of your dentition. That last you cannot possibly deny."

"Nor would I attempt to do so," I replied, rising from the chair in which I had, on this occasion, neither suffered the tortures inflicted upon those condemned to the nether regions by the just judgement of the Almighty nor experienced the miracle of complete insensibility granted through the agency of the dentist’s chloroform, but merely undergone some tiny and transitory discomfort whilst Vankirk removed the wire tethering the transplanted tooth to its natural neighbor. "Truly, I have a better opinion of you after your frank and manly admission of the facts of the matter than I would have had as the result of some vain and pompous effort at dissembling."

Vankirk scraped a match against the sole of his shoe to light a cigarillo; the sulfurous stink springing from the combustion of the match head warred briefly with the tobacco’s sweeter smoke before failing, just as the Opponent of all that is good, he who dwells in brimstone, shall surely fail at the end of days. Pausing after his first inhalation, he said, "Your style has indeed undergone an alteration; and what this portends, and whether it be for good or ill, I know not-and, I believe, only the sequential unfolding of the leaves of the Book of Time shall hold the answer."

"I am but a man; a featherless biped, as the divine Plato put it; though not, I should hope, Voltaire the cynic’s plucked chicken; and, as a man, I can only agree that the future is unknowable until it shall have become first present and then past; while, as a man named William Legrand- -commonly called Bill-I can only assert that no change perceptible to me other than the relief of my distress through your art has eventuated in the time that is now the recent past, this time being as impalpable as the future but, unlike it, perceptible through memory, whatever sort of spiritual or physical phenomenon memory may one day prove to be."

"God bless my soul," the tooth-drawer declared, and then, upon due reflection, "yes, and yours as well."

"Yes," I said, "and mine as well."

On leaving his place of business, I truly believed all would be well, or as well as it might be for one with my notorious dental difficulties. The only cloud appearing upon the horizon of my imagination was the fear-no, not really the fear; say rather, the concern-that the tooth transplanted to my maxilla, whencever it first came, would weaken and abandon its adopted home. This showed no sign of eventuating. Indeed, as day followed day that tooth became attached ever more firmly to my jaw. Would that my own had been so tenacious of adhesion to the jawbone from which they sprang.

For some considerable while, then, all seemed well. No-again I misstate the plain truth, which is that for some considerable while all was well. Not everything was perfect; we speak of a man’s life, after all, not an angel’s. But all went as I would have hoped, or near enough. The most that occurred of an unusual-certainly not uncanny, not yet- -nature was that one or two or perhaps even several individuals imitated Vankirk the tooth-drawer in remarking upon what they perceived as an alteration to my accustomed forms of speech.

"Whatever can you mean?" I enquired of one of these, a newspaper man by the name of Thomas Bob. "I note no variation from my utterances of days gone by."

"Whether it be perceptible to yourself or not, your prolixity, I must tell you, has increased to a remarkable degree," Thomas Bob replied. "Were that not so, would I remark upon it?" He laughed immoderately; such were the jests of which he was enamored.

"My prolixity, say you? Why, am I not the same simple, straightforward fellow I always was, a man to call a spade a spade, and not, with Tacitus, an implement for digging trenches-you will, I pray, forgive my failing to append the original Latin, which unfortunately I cannot at the moment-"

"Enough!" He committed the sin of interruption, sometimes merely a peccadillo of the most venial sort, but at others approaching the mortal. So I felt it to be now. This notwithstanding, my acquaintance continued, "Do you not see, Legrand, how for you have gone down the road towards proving my assertion?"

"No," I said-only this and nothing more.

Again, Thomas Bob gave forth with the heartiest expression of his mirth, which increased my liking for him, for a man who will laugh when the joke is on himself is more highly to be esteemed than one who either cannot imagine the possibility of such a thing or who at once is inspired to hatred on becoming the butt of another’s wit. We parted on the friendliest terms. I asked him to convey my regards to his son, who has lately attained to prominence as an editor of magazines.

Several days after my meeting with this distinguished gentleman, I had a dream of such extraordinary clarity-indeed, of such verisimilitude-as to surpass any I had ever known before. Some of these, whether they spring from the lying gate of ivory or the true gate of horn to which Homer animadverts, are fonts of delight. Not so the one darkening my slumbers on the night I now describe.

I was black, to begin with. Now, I will not speak to the issue of whether the negro should by rights be slave or free; that is a discussion for another time and another place, and one that, the Compromise of 1850 notwithstanding, seems to be as likely to be decided by shot and shell as by the quills and quillets of fussy barristers. Suffice to say, the Legrands have not, nor have we ever had, the faintest tincture of colored blood flowing in our veins.

Yet I was black, black as soot, black as coal, black as ebony, black as India ink, black as midnight in a sky without stars or moon, black as Satan’s soul. And, when I first came to myself in this dream, I found I was high amongst the branches of a great tulip tree. Glancing down for even the briefest instant engendered terror which nearly sufficed to loose my grip upon the trunk and send me hurtling to my doom, as Lucifer hurtled from the heavens long, long ago.

Quickly gathering myself, I managed to hang on, and to climb. The branch upon which I was at length compelled to crawl shuddered under my weight, not least on account of its rotten state. Whoever would send any man, even a worthless negro, on such a mission deserves, in my view, nothing less than horsewhipping. Yet I had no choice; I must go forward, or face a fate even worse than the likelihood of plunging, screaming death.

Crawling on, I came upon a human skull spiked to the said branch (a skull with, as I noted enviously, teeth of an extraordinary whiteness and soundness; whatever had pained this mortal morsel, the dreaded toothache had kept apart from his door). I dropped through one of the skull’s gaping eye sockets a scarabaeus beetle of remarkable heft; it glinted of gold as it fell.

And then, as is the way of dreams, I found myself on the ground once more, digging at a spot chosen by extending a line from the center of the trunk through the spot where the beetle fell. Imagine my delight upon discovering a wooden chest banded with iron, of the sort in which pirates were wont to bury treasure. Imagine my despair upon discovering it to be full of-teeth.

Yes, teeth. Never had I seen such a marvelous profusion of dentality all gathered together at one and the same place. Incisors, eyeteeth, bicuspids, molars; so many, they might have been a flock of passenger pigeons turned to rooted enamel. Under the bright sun of my imagined sky, they shone almost as if they were the gold and jewels for which I had surely hoped.

I reached down and ran my hand through them. The not unpleasing music they made striking one against another suggested something to me, something not merely musical but reminding me of- Of what I never learned, for I awoke then, and the answer, if answer there was, vanished and was lost forever, as is the way of dreams. Yet the dream itself remained perfect in my memory, suffering none of the usual distortion and diminution attendant upon these nocturnal visions in the clear light of morning.

A few nights later, I dreamt once more; once more I found myself in a world seeming perfectly real, yet assuredly the product of a dreadful and disordered imagination. My enemies-vile ecclesiastics of some inquisitorial sect better left unnamed-had captured me and condemned me to a death of cruelty unparalleled, a death wherein the horror of anticipation only added to the innate terror of extinction lodged in the breast of brute beast and man alike.

I lay on my back, strapped to a low wooden platform by the securest of leather lashings, at the bottom of a deep and but dimly lighted chamber. And above me-as yet some distance above me, but slowly and inexorably lowering towards my helpless and recumbent frame-swung an immense pendulum, hissing through the air at its every passage. The heavy metal ball weighting it would have sufficed-would far more than have sufficed-to crush the life from me when its arc should at last have met my yielding flesh, but that, apparently, was not the doom ordained for me.

For, you see, affixed to the bottom of the weighty ball was an enormous tooth, sharpened by patient and cunning art until its cutting edge glittered with a keenness to which the patient swordsmiths who shaped blades from finest Damascus steel might only have aspired. And when that tooth-I do not say fang, for it came from no lion or serpent or grotesque antediluvian beast, but was in form a man’s tooth, somehow monstrously magnified-began to bite into me, I should without fail have been sliced thinner than a sausage at a lunch counter.

Closer and closer, over what seemed hours, descended the pendulum and that supernally terrifying instrument of destruction at which I could but gaze in dread, almost mesmerized fascination. Already I could feel the sinister wind of its passage with each swing. Soon, soon- Soon, how much more I would feel!

From far above, a soft but clear voice called, "Will you not return that which you have stolen?"

"Stolen?" I said, and my own voice held a new terror, for I pride myself, and with justice, on being an honest man. "I have stolen nothing-nothing, do you hear me?"

"I hear lies; naught save lies." The inquisitor, I thought, spoke more in sorrow than in anger. "Even now, that which you purloined remains with you to embellish your person and salve your vanity."

"Lies! You are the one who lies!" I cried, my desperation rising as the pendulum, the terrible pendulum, perceptibly descended.

"Having granted you the opportunity to repent of your crimes, I now give you the punishment you have earned both for your sin and for your failure of repentance," the inquisitor declared. "I wash my hands of you, Legrand, and may God have mercy upon your immortal soul."

Again the pendulum lowered, and lowered, and, Lord help me, lowered once more. Its next stroke sliced through some of the lashings binding me to that sacrificial platform. The one following that would surely slice through me. My eyes arced with the inexorable motion of the ball and its appended cutting tooth. I watched it reach the high point of its trajectory, and then, moaning with fear at what was to come, I watched it commence its surely fatal descent. I screamed-

And I awoke with Helen beside me, warm in my own bed and altogether unbisected.

After these two most vivid dreams, I trust you will understand why from that time forward I feared and shunned slumber no less than a hydrophobic hound fights shy of water. The hound in due course expires of his distemper. Not being diseased in any normal sense, I did not perish, and the natural weakness of my mortal flesh did cause me occasionally to yield to the allurements of Morpheus despite my fear of what might come to pass if I did.

One night, asleep despite all wishes and efforts to remain awake, I fancied myself-indeed, in my mind, I was-guilty of some heinous crime. I had done it, and I had concealed it, concealed it so perfectly no human agency could have hoped to discover my guilt. Yes, officers of the police had come, but purely pro forma. That the crime had been committed at all was even, in their minds, a question; that I was in any way connected to it had never once occurred to them.

We sat down to confer together in the very chamber where the nefarious deed was done. I was, at first, charming and witty. But something then began to vex me, something at first so slight as to be all but imperceptible-certainly so to the minions of the law with whom I was engaged. And yet it grew and grew and grew within the confines of my mind to proportions Brobdingnagian. It was a low, dull pain-much such a pain as a tooth makes when commencing to ache. I gasped for breath-and yet the officers, lucky souls, felt it not.

I grew nervous, agitated, distrait, for the pounding in my mouth grew worse and worse. Soon I felt I must cry out or perish. It hurt more and more and more!-and at last, unable to suffer such anguish for another instant, I cried, "I admit the deed! Tear out the tooth!"- -and I pointed to the one in question. "Here, here!-it is the paroxysm of this hideous bicuspid!"

Then, as before, I awoke in a house all quiet and serene; all quiet and serene but for me, I should say, for I lay with my heart audibly thudding as if in rhythm to the tintinnabulation of a great iron bell, my nightclothes drenched with the fetid perspiration brought on by terror. I slept no more until dawn, and not a wink for two days afterwards, either.

I had begun to steel myself towards a course of action I should have called mad in any other, yet one seemingly needful in my particular circumstance. Yet still I hesitated, for divers reasons that appeared to me good, beginning with my unwillingness to undergo yet more pain and suffering and ending with my disinclination to credit the conclusion towards which these nocturnal phantasms were driving me-or, it could be, I should say, beginning with the latter and ending with the former. So many dreams pass through the mendacious gate of ivory, it is easiest to believe they all do.

Whilst equivocating-indeed, tergiversating, for I knew in my heart of hearts the right course, yet found not the courage to pursue it-I again found I could no longer hold eyelid apart from eyelid despite the heroic use of every stimulant known to man. I yawned; I tottered; I fell into bed, more in hope than in expectation of true rest; I slept.

And, once more, I dreamt. I had thought my previous nightmare the worst that could ever befall any poor mortal, of no matter how sinful a character. This proves only the limits of my previous power of imagination, not of the horror to which I might subject myself in slumber-or rather, as I had begun to suspect, the horror to which some increasingly unwelcome interloper and cuckoo’s egg might subject me.

I seemed to awake, not from sleep, but from some illness so grave and severe, so nearly fatal, as to have all but suspended permanently my every vital faculty. And, upon awakening, I found myself not in the bed in which I had surely had consciousness slip away from me, but lying on rude, hard planks in darkness absolute.

It was not night. Oh, it may have been night, but it was not night that made the darkness. This I discovered on extending my hands upwards and encountering, less than a foot above my face, more boards, these as rude and hard as the others. Reaching out to either side, I found, God help me, more still. I had been laid in the tomb alive!

But one question beat upon my mind as I beat uselessly, futilely, upon the inner confines of the coffin housing what soon would become in truth my mortal remains unless I found some means of egress- -would I go utterly mad ere perishing of asphyxiation, or would I take my last stifling breath still in full possession of the faculty of reason and aware to the end of my imminent extinction? The devil and the deep sea are as nothing beside it.

My screams rang deafeningly loud in the wooden enclosure so altogether likely to enclose me forever. Perhaps God was kind, and I did not have earth surrounding me on all sides, six feet above and how many thousands of miles below? Perhaps some merciful soul, hearing the cries of one in his last extremity, would hurry to his rescue as the Good Samaritan did in our Lord’s parable so long ago. I did not believe it, but what had I to lose?

Only after some little time had elapsed did I note what I was screaming, and in so doing startled myself even in the midst of the unsurpassable horror of interment untimely. No such commonplace expostulation as Help me! or In God’s name, let me out! passed my lips. No; what I shouted in that moment of terror inexpressible was, "I will give it back! So help me, I will give it back!"

A monstrous shaking commenced, as from the earthquake that ravaged New Madrid in the days of my green youth. Was I saved? Had I lain in the mortuary after all, and was some kindly soul tipping over the casket to facilitate my liberation? Was that light-sweet, blissful light-beating on my eyelids, or was it no more than madness commencing to derange my sense?

With a supreme effort of will, I opened my eyes. There above me, more sublimely beautiful than any angel’s, appeared my sweet Helen’s face, illumined by a candle bright and lovelier, altogether more welcoming, than the sun. "Are you well, Bill?" she inquired anxiously. "You gave some great, convulsive thrashes in your sleep."

"I will give it back!" I said, as I had when I lay entombed, even if only within the bounds of my own mind. Helen laughed, reckoning me-as any reasonable person might-still half swaddled in my slumbers. Yet never in all my days was I more sincere, more intent, more determined.

As soon as I thought there was any probability, no matter how remote, of bearding the illustrious Vankirk in his den, I hurried thither as fast as shank’s mare would carry me. Finding him there-a commendation to his diligence, a trait of character frequently allied to skill- -I was so rude as to seize him by the lapels, at the same time crying, "Take it out! Take from my jaw this ghastly, ghostly fragment, untimely ripped from the maxilla of a man who, even from beyond the grave, has made it all too plain he desires-no, requires-a reunion of his disiuncta membra."

"My dear Legrand!" quoth Vankirk. "You desire me to remove the bicuspid I successfully-indeed, all but miraculously- -transplanted to your jaw? What madness do you speak, sir?"

"If miracle this be, never let me see another," I replied. "A miracle is said to be a happening for the good, but no good has come to me of this. On the contrary; never have I known such nightmares, which word you may construe either metaphorically or literally, as best suits you." I spent the next little while explaining all that had eventuated since that tooth’s taking residence in my head, and finished, "This being so, I implore you to get it hence; get it hence forthwith. I have returned to you because of your knowledge of chloroform and skill with the anaesthetic drug, yet were you to tell me you needs must extract this accursed bicuspid with no such alleviating anodyne, I should not hesitate in begging you to proceed."

"You are in earnest," Vankirk observed, and my answering nod, I dare say, closely approximated to that of a madman in its vehemence. He was for some time silent, examining me closely. "To eschew the use of chloroform in an extraction would show a beastly and barbarous cruelty to which no man aspiring to the merciful calling of dentistry should sink," he declared. "Come; seat yourself in my chair. I shall do as you wish, and charge not a penny for it; never let it be said I leave those seeking my services unsatisfied in any way."

I seized his hand. "God bless you," I said fervently, and of my own free will placed myself in the seat in whose counterparts I had undergone so many exquisite excruciations. As he took the bottle of liquid Lethe from its repository, I held up one finger. "A moment, if you please."

"Yes? What do you require now?"

"Have you any notion, any true notion, of the provenance of this tooth? The more precisely you can return it, once drawn, to its former and even now rightful owner, the better, I think, for everyone."

"I know from whom I bought it," Vankirk answered, "and have a good notion of the haunts she frequents. I can, I believe, make nearly certain to deliver it to the proper cemetery-or, I should say, paupers’ graveyard. Will that suffice you?"

Although staggered at the notion that the person who took the tooth which had so tormented me from the reeking jaw of some dull-eyed, swollen corpse could possibly belong to the fair sex, I nodded once more. "You must do that very thing," I said. "You must swear by whatever you hold most dear and holy that you will do it; else I cannot answer for the consequences, either to you or to myself."

"By my mother’s grave, Mr. Legrand-a fitting oath here, in my opinion-I shall do what you require of me," Vankirk said. The solemnity with which he spoke not failing to impress me, I lowered my head in agreement, as Jove is said to have done in days of yore. He commenced to removed the stopper from the jar of chloroform, but then, arresting the motion, sent my way a glance instinct with curiosity. "I trust I do infer correctly that you would have me extract the offending bicuspid-the suppositiously offending bicuspid-without attempting to implant in your maxilla another intended to replace it?"

"Not for all the gold in California, not for all the cotton in Alabama, not for all the swindlers in New York City would I ever again have some other man’s dental apparatus rooted in my own jaw. This being so, yes, sir, your inference is accurate."

"Very well. You must be aware, your bite will suffer."

"Worse things than my bite will suffer should you disregard my wishes here. Go on, man; go on."

Bowing courteously, he said, "I obey," and did at last expose to the open air the contents of that small yet potent bottle. Once more he steeped a scrap of cloth in the oily liquid contained therein; to my nostrils came the heavy, sweetish odor of this incomparable product of human sagacity and ingenuity, this even before he pressed the cloth to my face and brought with it-oblivion.

When I woke up, my mouth was full of blood. Vankirk held up a basin for me to spit in. I did. Soon as I could talk straight, I asks him, "Is the blamed thing out of there?"

"It sure is," Vankirk says. He held up his pelican to prove it. I couldn’t swear that was the same tooth. But it was all over blood and there was a hole in my mouth in the right place, so I expect it was. He goes on, "I will tell you something downright peculiar, Mr. Legrand. Is your head clear enough to follow me?"

"I will follow you wherever you may go," says I. "You may count on it. Tell me this downright peculiar thing."

"I have had to take out a good many transplanted teeth," Vankirk says. "They most often fail. You know this yourself." I nodded, on account of I know it much too well. He goes on, "They are not in the habit of taking root. By the nature of things, they cannot be. They are dead. That means they come out easy as you please. But not this one here."

"Is that a fact? Somehow, Mr. Vankirk, I am not much surprised."

"By what you have told me, I can see how you would not be. This tooth here hung on with both hands and both feet, you might say. It made itself a part of you, and did not want to leave. I have never seen that before in a transplanted tooth. I never expect to see it again. I feared I would harm your jawbone getting it out. It was clinging that tight-it truly was. But it is gone now," he says.

"A good thing, too," says I. "I will not miss it a bit, and you can bet on that. Now-are you sure you got it all?"

He held up the pelican again. There was the tooth. It looked pretty much like a whole tooth, I will tell you that. Vankirk, now, he took another look at it. He frowned a little. Says he, "I suppose it is just barely possible some tiny little piece of root may have got left behind. I do not think so, but it is just barely possible. If it troubles you after this wound heals up, you come back, and I will go in there after it."

"I will do that very thing. You may rely on it," says I.

But that was a while ago now, and my teeth have not given me any trouble since. Well, that is not true. I have had some of the usual sort. I have the measure of that, though. With this new chloroform, I hardly even fear going to the tooth-drawer. I have not had any trouble of the other kind. I have not had any dreams of the sort I had with that tooth in my head. Those dreams would stagger an opium eater, and that is nothing but the truth.

They are gone now. Thank heavens for that. Vankirk is a smart fellow, but this time he outsmarted himself. He did yank every bit of that miserable tooth, and he fooled himself when he thought he might not have. I am glad he fooled himself, too, which is one more thing you may take to the bank.

In fact, George M., I am so glad that dreadful tooth is truly gone and will trouble me no more, I am going to ask you to set things up again for everybody, so my friends here can help me celebrate.

Amontillado, all around!