White Legs

by Mark Dane

[Pseudonym of Michael Avallone]

Days when there was nothing but time, he would sit and watch the legs going by. The trousered and slacked ones, the concealed limbs, held no interest for him. You couldn’t tell personality with cloth over it, corduroy, or wool. Silk was fine, though. Invisible, gossamer silk that windowed the soft, creamy magnificence of Nature.

He had to see the flesh, the pale-white fullness, the white leanness, the wan stick-legs or the tanned beef of calves. The female leg, that portion which tapered down from the concealing skirt and dress, disappearing into the shoe, sandal and slipper, gripped him, held him with a passion that knew no limit. Legs to him were like some all-powerful amulet of strange power.

He had come to know that women had all kinds of legs, all varieties, and in each fresh aspect, each new, startling dissimilitude of calf, knee and ankle lay the all-consuming interest.

He had never thought himself strange because of his peculiar abnormality of eye and mind. He likened his fervor to some secret, personal hobby from which great stores of pleasure could be drawn. If other people didn’t know about, didn’t sense the very game beneath their feet, then it was his own esoteric, monumental gain. For game, it was.

Legs alone had fascination for him. The face, the upper structure that they upheld, was lost to him. He saw nothing but the flick of calf muscle, the rock of heel activated by a flexible knee. Beyond that—was nothing.

If his interest had been healthy, he might have been a shoe designer, or an artist, or a creator of women’s hosiery.

As it was, he was only a maniac. An ingrown, unhealthy, deadly maniac.

“This dream of yours,” the Doctor said. “Tell me about it. You see, Carter, I can’t be of much help to you if you hide things from me. It’s extremely important that a case history omits nothing. In that way, we have all the facts and can arrange them accordingly.”

Carter’s weak face, with its lacklustre eyes, lifted into a ludicrous mask of injury.

“Ah—now, Doc! Don’t be that way.” He spread his large, strong-boned fingers. “I’m here on my own hook, right? Why should I hold anything back?”

The Doctor laughed professionally, indicating past familiarity with an approach such as Carter’s. He straightened in his leather-backed chair and splayed a neat thumb and forefinger along the slender shaft of a red mechanical pencil.

“Carter, let’s put our cards on the table. You are here because your ‘nightmare’ is causing your wife to lose a good deal of sleep. Oh, it’s bothering you too. I can see that. But I can also see that you are the type of man who’d rather eat worms than walk into a psychiatrist’s office and ask to have his dream analyzed for him.”

Carter’s drab eyes showed admiration.

“Now that’s a fact. I’m too damn busy in the office to waste—ah, spend my time at this sort of thing. But like you say, I’ve been driving Molly nuts with talking in my sleep and she made me come. Boy! The things that have popped out of me the last three weeks.”

He tried to make it sound jocular but the Doctor wasn’t tone deaf to the ragged worry in his voice.

With no show of haste, he moved from behind his broad, flat desk and went over to the window. The afternoon sunlight faded away with each lowering slat of venetian blind.

Carter stirred uneasily in the half-gloom of the private chamber. His restlessness increased as his eyes followed the physician’s long, trim figure.

The man seemed to be making a tour of the room, pressing this button, turning that handle, and soon a switch clicked and a dazzling orifice of light trained itself on a large, leather couch over by the wall. Illumination came from the core of a hooded lamp that poised from an adjacent stand like some deadlier species of serpent.

Carter coughed. “I’ve already had my tonsils out, Doc.”

The Doctor’s laugh was brief and easy, to show that the joke was appreciated, that he was a regular fellow and a patient need not be afraid to tell him anything.

“Will you lie down on the couch, please? The light won’t bother you.”

His newest patient suddenly bridled. “Hell, you’re not going to hold my hand, are you? I thought you wanted to ask me about my dream.”

“I do, Carter. Believe me, this is the best way.” He had seated himself in an easy chair next to the couch and motioned Carter to take his place. “We have found that people express themselves more freely, without restriction of any sort, such as they might feel when sitting up. You’d be amazed at your reaction.”

With a grunt of distrust, Carter settled back on the lounge. It was soft.

“You may loosen your tie if you like. Or anything that feels tight on you—as if it were holding you back.”

He did as he was told and very shortly was startled to sense the change in himself. It was gradual and subtle but soon he felt relaxed, the blood evenly distributed in his medium-sized frame and a general surge of contentment and comfort spread through his limbs.

The Doctor’s pomaded head bobbed above a black, leatherette notebook balanced on one crossed knee. His eyes burned down at the prone Carter.

“Begin at any point you like. I’ll merely take notes from time to time. Perhaps, ask a question. But don’t regard them as interruptions. Just follow your train of thought. Is that clear to you?”

Carter nodded. The couch idea was beginning to appeal to him. Hell, this was giving him some of the rest he had been missing with that crazy nightmare—

“Fine. Now, describe this dream to me as if you were talking to me about a movie you’ve seen and want to tell me about.” The Doctor paused.

“Close your eyes, Carter. You’ll find it helps you to think—”

He did as he was told. The Doctor’s smooth voice drifted off and his chest filled with air. There was darkness, pitch, inky blackness. But there was comfort, too. Rich, wonderful comfort. He sighed and his mind seemed to detach itself from his earth-bound body and soon he was standing away from the lounge. His brain felt clear, free of any problem. Save that of his dream. His nightmare. Yet, he wanted to recall it somehow. He had to. Someone was asking him about it.

A gentle, easy voice, directly above him. Near. Each syllable dropping like a small pebble into still, deep water. Spirals billowed out silently from the center of the splash and the waves of darkness wavered and spread like diabolical curtains that would never change color.

The pebbles prodded him. No, of course not. The voice did. The voice that had given him the mental picture of pebbles.

“What do you dream?” the voice asked.

“A dream. Funniest kind of dream. It scares me and yet it doesn’t. Know what I mean? When I wake up, I can hardly remember it but my underclothes are all wet and I’m soaking with perspiration. But when I’m dreaming it, I’m scared. Like a kid, I’m scared. As if the world was full of monsters and ghouls and all things like that. Sound crazy to you?”

The cool voice disagreed without force or loudness.

“No, it doesn’t sound crazy. It sounds very interesting. Tell me about it.” Everything in this dark world was still—when your eyes were closed. Carter heard his heart ticking like a clock wadded in cotton, way off in the distance.

“Well—it’s like I’m walking, see? No particular place. Just walking. But it’s no ordinary stroll. It seems as if—sure, I’m following somebody and they keep on moving away from me. Like I was on one of those treadmills at Coney Island and I can never quite catch up to whoever I’m following. But—wait, that’s not right either. Don’t see anyone! Unless—”

The voice probed. “—see anyone. Unless?”

“—unless it’s—well, this is screwy!” There was jagged disbelief in Carter’s tone. “It’s not people I’m trying to reach. It’s trees! Can you beat that? It’s trees!”

“Trees?” Another gentle pebble stirring the pool of his thoughts. Only this time, he could hear a whisper of sound, a sibilant scratch. He grinned in the darkness. He remembered now. Red mechanical pencil. Black leatherette pad. The Doctor must be taking notes.

“Yeah, that’s right. Trees. I can see a whole forest full of them. Like the outer edges of a park. I’m trying to get to them but they keep moving away from me. They seem to be moving or—walking, each separate and split up from the next one but all going the same way like a squad of soldiers.” There was a brief, awful stillness. “DAMN—”

The Doctor’s voice drew nearer. “What else do you see?”

“The trees aren’t trees anymore!” Carter was almost breathless now. He moved restlessly on the couch, comfort and relaxation fast ebbing from him. A firm yet gentle hand pressed his shoulder and he subsided.

“The trees aren’t trees? What are they now, if they aren’t trees?”

A sigh parted Carter’s lips noisily.

“They’re legs! Damn it, legs! Legs as big as trees, ten times bigger than me! I can’t see where they lead to. I can’t look up that far. But, they’re legs all right. White legs, long and beautiful and shiny. Like they were—that’s it! They’re all in silk stockings and they’re moving away, fast, moving faster away from me. I’m running now but I can’t seem to reach them at all. They’re always just ahead of me, moving away—”

“Legs as big as trees.” Pebbles falling in silent waters. “White legs that once were trees. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

Carter moaned and tried to open his eyes but the self-imposed concentration of closing them seemed to keep him from doing so. He moaned again.

“—how do I know? They were trees, I tell you and they ran away from me and changed. Changed into legs. Ohhhhh—”

A groan escaped the uncomfortable man on the couch in the dark office.

The voice leaned closer.

“What do you see now?”

“They’ve stopped walking! They’ve stopped—and I’ve—reached them.”

Fear was speaking now; the oldest fear in the world, the darkest. The threat of the unknown. Carter’s voice rose on a note of hysterical fright in the sound-proofed chamber.

“They’re milling all around me. Closing me in! I’m trying to get away but I—I can’t! I can touch them. I do. They’re cold and stiff like old, wrinkled trees a thousand years old! Oh, God, they’re changing! I want to get away but I can’t—they’re all around me now, surrounding me like bars, like—God! They’re trees again. Big, thick trees with no leaves or branches, all crooked and gnarled—STOP THEM! STOP THEM! They’re leaning over—they’re falling—God, stop them before they crush me to pieces—!!”

Bright light flashed down, splattering the darkness into a million far-flung atoms and Carter sprang erect with a muffled shout. His eyes rocketed around the room so that he blinked uncontrollably.

He stared down at his rumpled suit, seeing its disorder, feeling its sickening sweaty cling to his body.

Numbed, he sagged against the wall and pressed his senseless fingers to his eyes. His heart was tom-tomming furiously and his ears throbbed with a roaring cataract of noise that gradually receded with a fading sound like some loud locomotive rushing past a whistle stop until it disappeared around the bend of a mountain miles away.

A strong, brown hand holding a glass filled with some soupy-looking liquid came into his range of vision and he remembered where he was. He reached for it feverishly and downed it swiftly, not conscious of its taste or its leaden weight in his throat.

The Doctor was seated at the broad desk, regarding him evenly out of keen, wide-spaced eyes.

Carter struggled to his feet and heard his shoes hit the polished floor like dead weights.

“Boy! No wonder Molly thought I should see a doctor. The things she must have heard me say.”

He fumbled with his tie and sat down in the chair across from the psychiatrist. Passing a nervous hand through his disheveled hair, he looked at the Doctor sheepishly.

“Give it to me straight, Doc. What do you think?”

The Doctor made a pyramid of his hands. When he spoke, his words were no longer like pebbles. More like separate, well-oiled tools that he had used many times with great success.

“Well, Carter, I’ll say this. That was one of the most interesting nightmares I have ever encountered. Tell me frankly. You remember everything you have just imagined?”

Carter nodded resolutely. “I do and I wish I didn’t.”

The Doctor shook his head gently. “Be grateful. Not sorry. Since you have brought this dream on consciously this time, you may never have it again. Also, I have analyzed it rather fully for you, I think.” He smiled. “The combination of the two will remove the disturbance, that is to say, the source of your dream.”

“I certainly hope so, Doc,” rumbled Carter. “I don’t want to go through that mill again. I don’t think I could take it.”

Carter’s haggard face, still damp from his private hell, showed renewed interest and hope. Somehow, he felt better for his experience. His head was clear and the only thing that was bothering him now was his rapidly mounting curiosity.

“I’ll begin as far back as your history warrants. Thanks to your wife, I am well informed on your case already. Carter, you are a very successful man. You own and control one of the largest trucking concerns here in New York. You’re rather rich, in good health and blessed with three fine children from the report. In truth, you really shouldn’t have anything on your mind. Yet, you have.

“A recurrent dream in which you chase trees that run from you, which later transform into gigantic legs that stop running from you. They surround you, re-assume their tree structure and topple down on you from a great height. Is that correct?”

Carter could only wag his head dumbly.

“Well, then,” the Doctor continued, with bell-clear emphasis, “that takes us to your past when you weren’t so rich, when you weren’t married and there wasn’t any Julie, Teddy or Michael.”

The Doctor paused thoughtfully to toy with some papers on his desk.

“You had a truck of your own fifteen years ago. You were uneducated but a real plodder. Day after day found you hauling produce from one city to the other. No long run or gruelling time schedule was too much for you in those days. You built up quite a reputation for yourself that eventually let you in on the ground floor of the business you now own.”

“That’s right.” Carter’s chest puffed a bit. “I had it in those days. Now, I don’t know. Get tired awfully easy. But what’s it got to do with this crackpot dream of mine?”

“I’m coming to that. Actually, you are going to supply that solution yourself.”

The Doctor smiled at the open confusion in Carter’s face but he continued with an easy shifting of verbal gears.

“Your case history of those years shows nothing unusual happening to you. An accident but nothing of a serious nature.” He paused again, pencil poised like a pointer.

“Carter, how did you feel on those lonely road trips of yours? More specifically, how did you keep alert as the same endless scenery went by your window?”

Carter snorted in obvious disappointment. The Doctor’s magic act had turned out to be a very small rabbit indeed.

“That’s a funny question, Doc. What could I do but keep my mind on the road, watch the signs and billboards, maybe pick up a hitch-hiker here and there for company? ’Course I’d drive through lots of small towns and count the legs of pretty girls going by—”

He halted of his own volition and whistled. He had said it. Bang! Just like that.

The Doctor leaned forward, across the desk, his lean, planed face intense, waiting.

“Say,” Carter slapped his thigh. “Wait a minute! I see what you’re getting at. Why, hell, that’s right. I remember now. Sure. I used to count the legs I’d see. You know, like sheep at night. That way I kept my mind occupied. It was a game at first but—”

“—after that you began to look forward to it, depended on seeing females’ legs to keep your run from being dull.”

“Now, wait a minute, Doc,” Carter blurted angrily. “I’m no sex maniac. I just like to look at a girl’s leg. What man doesn’t?”

“Certainly. We all do. That’s not what I mean. Actually, in your years as a trucker, your greatest fear was falling asleep at the wheel. Natural enough considering the demands of your profession. Can’t you see your counting on seeing girls’ legs was a safety device your mind used against that danger?”

Carter’s eyes, his drab, lacklustre eyes, mirrored an expression not usual for them.

“Okay, okay. That part of it I get. I’m no dummy. But why are they trees in the dream? Why do they run away from me? Why do they change to trees again and fall on top of me?”

The Doctor rose slowly. The sound of street traffic came into the office as he raised the blinds and opened the window a few inches. The office was below street level and the rising and falling feet of passing people were now visible. Carter stared at them blankly, then nervously lit a cigarette.

“Carter, the mind is a curious thing. In protecting us by keeping our fears hidden, the subconscious creates symbols for objects or things that our waking minds do not want to recognize. Do you follow me? It is true that trees do resemble legs but your real search for women’s legs in the dream is camouflaged by their taking the identity of trees.

“The rest seems easy and logical enough. You no longer drive a truck because you are wealthy, successful. A self-made man. With other men to drive your trucks for you now. But you haven’t shaken your old urges off. The fixation is still with you. A form of residue from your old fear. Taking away the need for something doesn’t always take away the vicarious thrill of that need. Unfortunately, danger can be like a drug.”

The Doctor smiled suddenly with the questionable warmth of a cold sun.

“Let me put it in a better way. Don’t you find yourself still inordinately interested in women’s legs?”

He did not need Carter’s answer for in the man’s eyes was bright agreement. The Doctor coughed.

“Well, we’ve covered symbols and your quest for more thrills. But the trees falling on you—I’m afraid that is something entirely different.”

“You mean—”

“I mean that it is a conclusion, a result, a finale. I can give you no logical explanation for the climax of the dream. Since there is nothing in your history that corresponds to such an accident. Do you fear being crushed by things or imagine that something is always just about to fall on you?”

“No, no. Of course not. I’m no whachacallit. Except for this dream, I’m okay.” Carter was strangely adamant on the point and the Doctor’s keen mind didn’t miss the inference.

“Well, Carter, I can only say this. What I’ve told you are my conclusions. The rest is entirely up to you and your inner man. I’m no tea-leaf reader or palmist. I suggest you may have seen too many movies lately or possibly you’re not allowing yourself new interests.”

As Carter’s chin sagged, he laughed cordially and came around the big desk to clap him heartily on the back.

“Cheer up, old man. Go on home and forget the whole thing. Only do call on me the same time next Friday. We’ll see then if I have done you any good.”

The ordinary face before him brightened visibly and Carter lurched to his feet eagerly if a trifle unsteadily.

“That suits me, Doc. I am anxious to see if I ever get that whopper again.”

“I don’t think you will.” The Doctor said it so firmly that Carter no longer doubted it. Cheerfully, he put on his overcoat and shook hands with the tall professional man.

“I’m glad I came now. Molly was so sure you could help me and you did. The last part of that dream always did throw me but like you said—” He shrugged broadly and without further word marched out of the office.

The Doctor went over to the lounge after he had gone and lay down with a profound sigh. Dream analysis, while absorbing, was a tiring thing. It demanded much study of the facts and a good deal of mental gymnastics. The things people had to tell you about their narrow little lives. Stupid, ugly confusion. Maladjustments of the highest order.

This fellow Carter, for instance. Oh, his dream was real enough to him but the fool’s real trouble was probably that he no longer made love to his wife. Just hungered after the slick, young, tailored creatures that scented up his office.

The Doctor shrugged reflectively. More often than not, this was the prime core of most mental disorders. Sex.

Sighing, he got up again, crossed over to the telephone. Magically, it rang into life as his hand cradled the shiny black receiver. He grinned at the masterpiece of timing as he hugged the transmitter to his chin.

“Yes? Dr. Harcourt speaking—”

“Dr. Harcourt, this is Molly Carter. You remember. Has my husband been in to see you?”

“Oh, Mrs. Carter. Yes, he has. But he’s gone now. Just left this minute. Was there something you wanted to tell him?”

“Oh, no.” The voice cracked over the wire nervously. “It’s just that I wasn’t sure he would go through with it. You know how men are.”

“Your husband will be alright, Mrs. Carter. Just nerves, that’s all. See that he gets some rest from now on.”

“Thank you, Doctor. I will. I’m certainly glad you could help him.”

“That’s all right.”

“Well, goodbye, Doctor. He’ll be getting home soon so I better get his dinner prepared. Goodbye and thanks again.”

“Goodbye, Mrs. Carter.”

He replaced the receiver and went back to the leather couch beneath the window; he had already forgotten his own call.

Sighing, he opened his collar and studied the ceiling. His head ached with the dull record of Carter’s voice. Curious dream the fellow had had, at that. Not that he couldn’t understand it. The subject held fascination for him, too.

Propping himself on one elbow, he peered through the lower, open part of the window that led out to the street level.

He watched the legs going by, seeing only as far as the knee since the upper frame of the sash cut the rest of the body from view.

The trousered and slacked ones held no interest for him. You couldn’t tell personality with cloth over it—

Three blocks from the Doctor’s office, Carter drew abreast of a crew of laborers in the midst of pulling down one of those old, wooden telephone poles that seem to still be standing. A terrible snapping of cable, a warning cry ... but too late. Carter looked up quickly but he was only in time to see the cumbersome, tree-like pole descend on him.

Not to get out of its way.

THE END