“Death Has Five Guesses” (Strange Stories, April 1939)

Bloch, Robert. “Death Has Five Guesses.” Strange Stories, April 1939, pp. 15-24.
https://archive.org/details/Strange_Stories_v01n02_1939-04/page/n91/mode/2up

Harry Clinton is a nondescript college student until he takes a course taught by Dr.  Baim, an investigator into extrasensory perception. Baim recruits students for his experiments, He has a deck of cards, five cards each of circles, squares, crosses, stars, and wavy lines. Without looking at the card, a student must guess which card is being held up. Guessing randomly, students average five correct guesses out of twenty-five cards. Clinton scores twenty-four correct. Baim adopts him as his favorite subject and pushes him to test all the time, hoping to write a publishable paper on ESP. Clinton begins to see the images in his mind as Baim holds up each card. He begins to see the images even without Baim being present. He begins to have memory and attention problems. He feels as if something is taking control of him. He spends a day wandering, the image of a cross seared into his mind. He finds two sticks that call to mind a cross and then sees a priest wearing a cross on a chain.  In a daze, Clinton murders him and immediately the image of the cross vanishes form his mind. Then the other shapes, one by one, take hold of him and do not let go. The image of a star, the wavy lines, and the square: these painful obsessions all result in murder that he immediately forgets. The final shape—the circle—haunts him. He has a gun now, and stares into the round barrel. He catches a glimpse of his round head in the round mirror in his apartment. There is one final murder and the story ends.

I really should have included this in my Psycho precursors chapter of my book. Harry Clinton comes right out and says this: “Was he actually guilty of such crimes? Or was he a dual personality? Some subconscious murdering impulse had guided him very cunningly in the execution of his killings. Was he insane?” (22). The idea that Dr. Baim, in his relatively innocuous study of ESP, has somehow opened a doorway for unknown and fatal forces to enter into the mind of Harry Clinton is an idea familiar to Lovecraft readers. One similarity between Norman Bates and Harry Clinton is the awareness they have about the terrible things they do. Clinton says this about Dr. Baim after he kills him: “Poor old Baim; had he actually realized the full extent of the forces he had tampered with? There was certainly a lot to it he hadn’t suspected. Must have had his suspicions though, when he went out the window. Perhaps he knew now. This stuff was all from across the Border. Clinton didn’t know and couldn’t control it. Funny idea. Suppose this was really some ‘extrasensory perception’ of his, this guessing faculty he’d developed. Suppose it were, and that it was not meant for men. Something or someone might guard it. Or perhaps this faculty merely opened up a new part of the mind in such a way that the old mind was unable to govern or control the actions of its augmented self?” (23). The idea that the brain was complex and largely unknown is an important insight that Bloch comes back to again and again in his work. If this story is read not as Lovecraftian but as one about mental illness, then it is possibly more important in Bloch’s development than its obscurity might indicate. It did appear in Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies, the 1998 collection from Arkham House, but that was posthumously published, and so the story’s placement among a bunch of supernatural horror and fantasy might be unnecessarily limiting. A really fun story!