Read Mr. Vertigo for Free Online Page A

myself and had just walked through the pearly gates.
    “Look at you,” the woman said. “You poor boy. Just look at you.”
    “Forgive the intrusion, ma’am,” I said. “My name is WalterRawley, and I’m nine years old. I know this might sound strange, but I’d appreciate it if you told me where I am. I have a feeling this is heaven, and that don’t seem right to me. After all the rotten things I done, I always figured I’d wind up in hell.”
    “Oh dear,” the woman said. “Just look at you. You’re half frozen to death. Come into the parlor and warm yourself by the fire.”
    Before I could repeat my question, she took me by the hand and led me around the staircase to the front room. Just as she opened the door, I heard her say, “Darling, get this boy’s clothes off him and sit him by the fire. I’m going upstairs to fetch some blankets.”
    So I crossed the threshold by myself, stepping into the warmth of the parlor as clumps of snow dropped off me and started melting at my feet. A man was sitting at a small table in the corner, drinking coffee from a delicate china cup. He was nattily dressed in a pearl-gray suit, and his hair was slicked back with no part, glistening with brilliantine in the yellow lamplight. I was about to say something to him when he looked up and smiled, and right then and there I knew that I was dead and had gone straight to hell. Of all the shocks I’ve suffered in my long career, none was greater than the electrocution I received that night.
    “Now you know,” the master said. “Wherever you turn, that’s where I’m going to be. However far you run, I’ll always be waiting for you at the other end. Master Yehudi is everywhere, Walt, and it isn’t possible to escape him.”
    “You goddamn son-of-a-bitch,” I said. “You double-crossing skunk. You shit-faced bag of garbage.”
    “Watch your tongue, boy. This is Mrs. Witherspoon’s house, and she won’t countenance any swearing here. If you don’t want to get turned out into that storm, you’ll strip off those clothes and behave yourself.”
    “Make me, you big Jew turd,” I spat back at him. “Just try and make me.”
    But the master didn’t have to do anything. A second after I gave him that answer, I felt a flood of hot, salty tears gush down my cheeks. I took a deep breath, gathering as much air into my lungs as I could, and then I let loose with a howl, a scream of pure, unbridled wretchedness. By the time it was halfway out of me, my throat felt all hoarse and choked up, and my head began to spin. I stopped to take another breath, and then, before I knew what was happening, I blacked out and fell to the floor.

I was sick for a long time after that. My body had caught fire, and as the fever burned within me, it looked more and more as though my next mailing address was going to be a wooden box. I spent the first days in Mrs. Witherspoon’s house, languishing in the upstairs guest room, but I remember none of that. Nor do I remember being taken back home, nor anything else for that matter until several weeks had passed. According to what they told me, I would have been a goner if not for Mother Sue—or Mother Sioux, as I eventually came to think of her. She sat by my bed around the clock, changing compresses and pouring spoonfuls of liquid down my throat, and three times a day she would get up from her chair and do a dance around my bed, beating out a special rhythm on her Oglala drum as she chanted prayers to the Great Spirit, imploring him to look down on me with sympathy and make me well again. I don’t suppose it could have hurt the cause, for no professional doctor was ever called in to examine me, and considering that I did come round and make a full recovery, it’s possible that her magic was what did the trick.
    No one ever gave a medical name to my illness. My own thought was that it had been brought on by the hours I’d spent in the storm, but the master dismissed that explanation as of no