Death Has Five Guesses

 

Robert Bloch wrote a lot of psycho-killer stories, often with an overt or implied supernatural element. He dealt with Jack the Ripper in at least two stories--"Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" (1943) and "A Toy for Juliette" (1967)--and also had Jack show up on the starship Enterprise in the Star Trek episode "Wolf in the Fold" (1967). On other occassions, such as the novel Psycho (1959), mad killers other than Jack get the spotlight. 

I'm not normally a fan of psycho-killer stories, which can often degenerate into slasher-film territory to tell a story without style or intelligence. But Bloch had both style and intelligence. His tales were legitimately creepy and enthralling.

Heck, when he was a mere lad of 22, he sold the story "Death Has Five Guesses" to Strange Stories. It was published in the April 1939 issue of that magazine. This story is generates just the right amount of tension and creepiness to make it work.

Harry Clinton is an average college student who volunteers for an ESP experiment. It's the same sort of experiment we see Bill Murray using to hit on a pretty girl at the beginning of Ghostbusters. The professor uses a set of cards, each of which has one of five symbols on it: a cross, a circle, a square, a star and a pair of wavy lines. The subject of the experiment is supposed to guess what symbol is on specific cards without looking.

Harry does extraordinarily well--he gets 23 out of 25 correct. So the professor asks him to continue with the experiment. Harry continues to do well, but finds himself often getting headaches and then getting hit by bouts of short-term amnesia, losing track of a half-day at a time. 

Then comes a three-day bout of amnesia, in which he murders a cross-wearing priest with a weapon that represents a cross. Then he kills a movie star with a star-themed weapon.

By the time Harry actually remembers what he's done, he's already added a wavy-line themed murder to his accomplishments. 

Is he somehow cursed or possessed by an alien intelligence? Or is he simply nuts? Harry doesn't know and, though there is nothing overt in the story that points to a supernatural explanations, Bloch creates an atmosphere in which we don't know either.

Two more murders to commit and it's pretty darn hard to avoid squares and circles. For Harry, there's no way this story is going to end well. But Bloch will give those of us reading the tale an appropriately tragic but still satisfying conclusion.

The story can be found online HERE.