The TC grinned. The captain knew his men pretty well. "Naw, too big. I did think one of them skulls would make kind of a nice souvenir if they don't check my hold baggage too close, though."
Fuller swore and laughed. "OK," he said, squatting down preparatory to jumping in himself, "go ahead, you found the place. But I want the rest of you guys back on your tracks. We're going to be leaving here in five, as soon as I get a look around myself."
"Hey, Red, throw me something," one of the bystanders begged Casely, but the captain waved him away peremptorily."Go on, god damnit, I don't want all of you hanging around here in case the dinks are out there." He hopped down into the cavity, joining Casely and the driver whose mask hung from his hand again. The air was thick but had lost the earlier noisomeness.
Casely picked up the skull he wanted for a trophy with a finger through each of the eye-sockets. When he had lifted it waist high, the bone crumbled to powder. What was left of the skull shattered unrecognizably when it hit the floor. "Goddamn," the TC swore, kicking angrily at the heap of dust, "why didn't it do that when the frag went off if it had to do it at all? Now I got my hopes up and look what happens!"
Peacock, squatting like a black Buddha on the rim of the crypt, chuckled deep in his chest."Why, the next dink we get, you just cut his head off and dry it out. How that be, Red? Get you a nice fresh head to take back to your wife."
Casely swore again. The captain was handling another of the bones. This one was a femur, sheared off some inches short of the knee joint. If the frag hadn't done it, the damage dated from the unguessable past. The bone was almost as dry and fragile as the skull that had powdered in Casely's hands. He tossed it up to the field first, shaking his head in puzzlement. "How old do you guess that is, Sarge?" he asked. "I don't think I ever saw anything that used up before."
"This old guy is still in fine shape," Jody put in, rapping the brutal idol on the nose with his gas mask. "Frag didn't hurt him hardly at all, did it?" He kicked at the broken limb lying near the statue. The others, more or less consciously, had been avoiding the idol with their eyes. If you looked too closely, the crude swirls on the thing that were supposed to represent hair seemed to move by themselves. Probably the grain of the stone.
"Goddamn," Fuller said. It was not entirely blasphemous the way he said it. "Will you look at that."
The driver's foot had shaken the broken arm, paw, whatever, out of the pile of rubble in which it lay. Previously unseen was the figure of the man-it was clearly a man-held in the monster's clawed grip. The man had been sculpted only a fraction of the size of the thing holding him, some thirty inches or so from foot to where the head would have been if it hadn't been broken off by the blast. Fuller looked more closely. No, the figure had been carved that way originally, limp and headless in the idol's claws. The beast-god's leering mouth seemed to take a further, even more unpleasant dimension. Fuller stretched his arm up to Sergeant Peacock. "Sarge, give me a hand. Come on, you two, we're getting out of here."
"Think the gooks been using this as a hospital?" Jody asked, scrambling up to the surface with a boost from Casely. Jody always missed the last word and didn't have quite the intelligence to supply it himself.
"I don't know what they're doing," Fuller grunted. "If there's one bunker around here, there could be a hundred though, and I'm not sitting around to find out. I think I'll ask for a B-52 strike here. God knows, they're flattening enough empty jungle they ought to be willing to hit a spot like this."
Casely picked up a bit of the crypt's roof and tossed it in his hand."Hey," he said, "maybe some of those locals speak English. I'd like to know what these squiggles are saying."
"You're going to have to find them to ask," Peacock said with a shrug. "They must'a took off when the bunker buster went off."
"Umm," the redhead grunted. "Well, it makes a souvenir anyway." Around the circle of vehicles engines were starting up. One of the gunners signaled Casely with the radio helmet in his hand. "Come on, Red," he shouted, "we're moving out." Casely nodded and began jogging toward the track. He wasn't sorry to be leaving this place either. Not sorry at all.
Three-six had a full crew of four men, and so they split the guard into two-hour shifts from 2200 to 0600. The new location was a dead ringer for the one they'd just left, low jungle approaching the graveled length of Highway 13, but at least there didn't seem to be any bunkers. Or idols. Casely had last guard, a concession to his rank that meant he could get six hours sleep uninterrupted, but he couldn't seem to drop off soundly. The air was cool and misty, cloaking the tracks so closely that the Sheridan to the left in the laager was almost invisible. A good night for sappers. Casely could almost feel them creeping closer.
He glanced at his watch. Three o'clock, Jody's shift. The TC was stretched out on the closed cargo hatch of the ACAV while the two gunners slept inside on mattresses laid over the ranked ammo boxes. He should have been able to see Jody sitting in the cupola, staring out into the jungle. At first glance the driver wasn't there, and Casely sat up to make sure the little guy hadn't gone and done something unusually stupid. At the first sound of movement from behind him Jody gasped and straightened up from where he was hunched over the cupola's fifty caliber machine gun. "Jeez, Red, it's you. Jeez, you gave me a shock there!" he whispered nervously.
Casely swung himself around to lean his left side on the sloping steel of the cupola and peer out in to the night."Couldn't sleep," he muttered. The rustle of static escaping from the driver's radio helmet was comforting, mechanical.
"I think there's somebody out there," Jody blurted suddenly, waving his arm toward the mist. "I keep hearing something moving, kind of."
Something like thunder began in the far distance. It didn't seem loud until you tried to whisper over it. Unlike thunder, it didn't stop. The rustling, rumbling sound went on and on, and to the west the sky brightened intermittently with white flashes.
Jody tensed. "What the hell's that?" he stammered, his right hand already snaking for the cal fifty's charging handle. His TC chuckled and stopped him. "Christ, you are new," Casely said without malice. "This the first time you heard an Arclight?"
Jody's blank expression was evident even in the gloom."Arclight," the TC repeated. "You know, a B-52 strike. Hell, that must be ten klicks away at least."
"Ten kilometers?" the driver said in surprise. "It scared me there for a minute."
"If there's any dinks under it, it'll scare them worse," Casely stated positively.
"Wait till we go through one of the bombed areas, and you'll see. They just flatten whole swaths of the jungle, a quarter mile wide and as long as there's planes in the strike. Don't leave a thing higher than the grass, either."
He glanced at his watch again and swore."Look, I got to get some sleep. Wake me up in half an hour, huh?"
"You don't think there's something out there, Red?"
"Hell, I don't know," the TC grunted. "Keep your eyes open and wake me up in half an hour."
There was something pressing down on them from the dark, but it might have been the mist alone. Casely drew his poncho liner closer about him and fell back into a fitful sleep. He dreamed, aimlessly at first but then of the writing-covered crypt he had stood in that afternoon. He was there again, but the roof had been replaced and the walls were miles high. The idol was waiting for him. Its soapstone jaws grinned, and its remaining arm began to reach out. The stench rolled almost tangibly from its maw.
"Jesus God!" the TC blurted. His head rang with the blow he had given it, lurching uncontrollably against the cupola to get away from his dream. Even awake, the charnel fetor lay heavily in his nostrils. "Jesus," he repeated more softly. If he'd known the sort of nightmare he was due for, he'd have spelled Jody right then at 3:15 and let the driver dream it for him.
It was still pitch-dark; dawn and sunset are sudden things in the tropics. The illuminated hands of his big wristwatch were clear at five after four, though, twenty minutes after Jody should have waked him up. "Hey, turtle," he whispered, "I told you to get me up at a quarter of. You like guard so much you want to pull my shift too?"
No answer. Alarmed, Casely peered into the cupola. The light fabric of the driver's shirt showed faintly where his torso covered the receiver of the cal fifty. Despite all his talk about hearing something in the jungle, Jody had fallen asleep.
In the guts of the ACAV, the radio hissed softly. "Come on, Jody," Casely prodded. He put his hand on the driver's shoulder. Jody's body slipped fluidly off the seat, falling through the cupola into the vehicle's interior. One of the gunners snapped awake with a startled curse and turned on his flashlight.
On the back deck of the ACAV, Casely stared at the dark wetness on his hand. For a moment he was too transfixed even to look down into the track, to look down at Jody's torso sprawling in headless obscenity.
Captain Fuller yawned, then shook his head to clear it. "Sure hope we don't have another sapper tonight," he muttered. "Christ, I'm tired."
Sergeant Peacock methodically checked the tent flap, making sure it was sealed and not leaking light from the small yellow bulbs inside. The command track's engine was on, rumbling to power the lights and the two radio sets in the track itself behind the tent. It was midnight and voices crackled as the radio operator called the roll of the vehicles around the NDP.
"Tell the truth," Fuller went on with a grin of furtive embarrassment, "I wasn't sleeping too well last night even before Casely started shouting. Had one hell of a nightmare. Christ, what a thing that was."
"I knew the gooks to do it in Korea," Peacock said, his great brown eyes guarded. "Cut a fella's head off and leave his buddy sleeping right beside him. I guess they figured the story that got around did more good than if they just killed both of 'em."
The officer shrugged impatiently, lost in his own thoughts. "The dream, I meant. You don't expect your own dreams to go back on you over here. Christ, it's not as though we don't have enough trouble with the dinks."
"We moved ten klicks today," the black said mildly, shifting his bulk on his cot. "You were probably right, figuring there was a bunker system off in the jungle where we laagered last night. They'll just be glad we moved outa their hair; they won't chase us."
Captain Fuller wasn't listening. His face was peculiarly tense, and he seemed to be straining to catch a sound from outside the tent."Who's moving around out there, Peacock?" he said at last.
The field first blinked. "Sir?" he said. The big man stood up, thrust his head through the tent flap, holding the edges of the material close to his neck to block off the light inside. There was nothing, nothing but an evil reek that seemed to permeate the whole area. He pulled back into the tent. "Everything seems all right, sir; they got a radio going in one of the tracks, maybe that's what you heard."
"No, no," the officer denied peevishly, "it was somebody moving around. I suppose it was just somebody taking a piss. Christ, I'm too jumpy to sleep and too tired to think straight when I stay awake. God damn it, I wish July was here so I could take my R amp;R and forget this damn place."
"Don't let dreams bother you," Sergeant Peacock counseled quietly."I know about dreams; I had bad dreams when I was a baby, but my momma would wake me up and tell me it was all right, that it didn't mean anything. And that's so, once you wake up. Even that one last night-"
"Look, Peacock," the captain snarled, "what I don't need is a lecture from you on how childish I'm being. Besides, what do you know what I was dreaming last night?"
"Sorry, sir," the sergeant said with impassive dignity, "I'm sure I don't know what you were dreaming about. I meant my own dream about the idol-you know, the one back at yesterday's first NDP. It was pretty bad, the thing reaching out for me and all, but I knew it was just-"
The captain was staring at him in terror, all the ruddiness seeping yellowly out of his face."My God," Fuller whispered."Dear God, you mean you dreamed that too?" He stood up. The cot creaked behind him and his dog tags clinked together on his bare chest. To his ears, at least, there seemed to be another sound; one from outside.
"Goddamn it!" Fuller shouted. His M16 lay under his cot, across the double V of the head and center legs. He snatched it out and snapped back the operating rod. The bolt clacked home, chambering a round. With the rifle in his hands and not another word for the sergeant, the captain stepped through the tent flaps. The radio operator glanced through the back of the tent to see what the commotion was about. Sergeant Peacock shrugged and shook his head. Outside the tent they could hear the CO's voice shouting angrily, "All right, who the hell is-"
The voice fluted horribly into a scream, high-pitched and terrified."My God!" the radioman blurted and jumped back to his seat in front of the equipment. Sergeant Peacock scooped up his holstered pistol and the machete beside it, his right hand brushing the light switch and plunging the tent into darkness. In the track behind him the radios winked evilly as the big noncom dived out into the night.
There was nothing to be seen. The scream had cut off as quickly as it had begun. There was an angry hiss from one of the encircling tracks as somebody sent up a parachute flare. Its chill glare showed nothing more than the black overcast had as it drifted down smokily, moving southward on the sluggish wind. There was a clatter of equipment all around the circle now, men nervously activating weapons and kicking diesels into life. "There!" somebody shouted from the southern curve of the laager. The flare, yellow now, had in its dying moments caught something lying at the edge of the jungle.
"Cover me," Peacock shouted. Pistol in hand, he ran toward the afterimage of the object. Something hard skittered underfoot, not enough to throw him. It was an M16. He did not pause to pick it up. He pounded heavily between two tracks, out into the narrow strip between laager and jungle torn by the vehicles maneuvering there earlier in the day. He was very close to what the flare had illuminated. "Gimme some light!" the sergeant roared, heedless of the fact that it would show him up to any lurking sniper.
A five-cell flashlight beamed instantly from the nearest track. The light wobbled, then steadied when it found its target. The flat beam lay in a long oval across the thing glimpsed in the flare.
"Sarge, is that the captain?" someone shouted from the track. The radio operator must have told them who had screamed.
"No, not quite," the field first replied in a strange voice. He was looking farther out into the jungle, at the shadows leaping behind the light. "It's only his leg. No, I'm wrong-I think the rest of him's here after all. Jesus, I do hope his family knows an undertaker who likes jigsaw puzzles."
Lieutenant Worthington turned back to an angry soldier, scratching the brown hair that lay close to his scalp. On the card table in front of him were laid three sections of relief map, joined and covered by a layer of clear acetate.
"Look, Casely," the officer said with ebbing patience," I know you're shook; we're all shook. And on top of that, I've got to keep this troop running until they get a replacement for Fuller out here. But I'm not going to send the troop back south to blow up a goddamn idol just because you have bad dreams about it. Besides, look here-"he thrust the map toward the TC, stubby finger pointing a long rectangle shaded in red crayon on it-"the location is off limits since six this morning until Sunday midnight. Somebody else is operating in there, I guess, and they don't want us shooting at each other."
The redhead's hands clenched. "I'm telling you," he grated, his voice tight, "it's coming for us. First Jody, then the captain-hell, what makes you think it's going to quit when it gets Peacock and me? All of you were there."
"Captain Fuller was eaten by a tiger," the lieutenant snapped."Now why don't you cut the crap and get back to your track?"
"Goddamn funny tiger that doesn't leave footprints-"
"So it jumped! Are you going to get out of here, or are you going back to Quan Loi under guard?" Worthington started to rise out of his lawn chair to lend his words emphasis.
For an instant it seemed the enlisted man would hit him; then Casely turned and stalked off without saluting. Well, salutes weren't common in the field anyway, the lieutenant told himself as he went back to his job of sorting out the mess the captain had left for him.
Under the tarp by the supply track, Sergeant Peacock sat at another card table sipping juice from the five-gallon container there. He looked up as Casely approached. First platoon had gotten back late from a convoy run, and a few of the men were still eating their supper nearby.
"Can't you do something about him, Sarge?" the TC begged. His body, under its tan, had an unhealthy hue that the field first noted without comment. The younger man was about to crack.
"Well, I guess he's right," the Negro said without emphasis. "I know what you're thinking, it was a bad dream-"
"The same dream twice in a row!" Casely broke in, "and you had it too." He drew a cup of juice from the container, and the action seemed to steady him. "Jesus Christ, you can't tell me that's just a coincidence, not with the things that happened right when we were dreaming!"
The big noncom shrugged. "So maybe we smelled something," he agreed, "and it made us think about that stinkhole we opened up the other day. It could do that, you know. Maybe some tiger was using the place for a cave and caught the smell from it. The dream don't mean anything, that's all I'm saying. If there's a tiger roaming around, we'll shoot it the next time."
The redhead took a sip of his juice and sloshed it around in his mouth. He grinned wryly. "Sarge," he said, "I almost think you believe that. Even though you know damn well that the only chance for you and me and maybe the rest of the outfit is to blow up that idol before it gets us too. Stands to reason that if we see it dreaming with only one arm and if we blow the rest of it to smithereens, it won't be able to come for us at all."
The sergeant chuckled."Well, you better hope you're wrong, son, 'cause they aren't going to let us go back and blow that thing up. Be a fine thing if the arvins ambushed us or we ran into a sheaf of our own one-five-fives, wouldn't it?"
"God damn it, how do you stay so calm?"the younger man exploded. Sergeant Peacock looked him up and down before answering, "Well, I tell you, son, when I was about your age in Korea, my platoon was holding a ridge that the gooks wanted real bad. They came at us with bayonets; you know those old Russian ones, seventeen inches in the blade? There was one coming right for me and I swear he was the biggest gook I ever saw, bigger than me even. I had a carbine with a thirty-round box, and I shot that son of a bitch right through the chest. I mean I shot him thirty goddamn times. And he kept coming.
"I couldn't believe it. There was blood all over the front of his uniform, and he just kept coming. I put the last shot into him from closer than I am to you, and then he stuck his goddamn bayonet all the way through my guts before he died. I said to myself, Mrs. Peacock, your favorite son isn't coming back 'cause the gooks got zombies fighting for them. But I was wrong both times. They fixed me up in Japan and had me back with the rest of the unit before the ceasefire. And that gook wasn't magic either; he was just tougher than anybody else in the world. Since then I just haven't let anything scare me-especially not magic, even when I could see it. That all went out of me when the bayonet slipped in."
Casely shook his head in resignation."I hope to God you can say that tomorrow morning," he muttered. "And I hope to God that I'm around to hear you." He walked off in the direction of his track.
Bailey and Jones sat in front of the cupola, playing cribbage and keeping a desultory watch on the surrounding jungle. Bailey was driving now that Jody was gone; that meant that only one of the machine guns in back would be manned in a firefight. Christ, why should he worry about that? Casely asked himself savagely. "Hey, snake," the others greeted him. The TC nodded. He climbed into the cupola and sighted along the barrel of the cal fifty. It didn't give him the comfortable feeling it sometimes did.
"Say, Red," Jones said, keeping his eyes on his cards, "you been looking kinda rocky. Just for tonight, Pete and I thought we'd cover for you and let you get some sleep."
"No, thanks a lot, man, but no."
"Aw, come on, Red," Bailey put in. "You're so beat you're gonna fall right off the track if you don't get some sleep. Hell, we can't have that happening to a short-timer with only twenty-seven days left, can we?"
"Twenty-eight," Casely corrected automatically. God, that close to going home and this had to happen! It would have been bad enough to get zapped by the dinks now, but, hell, you figure on that…
"What do you say, man?" Bailey prompted.
"Sorry, I really do appreciate it. But I'm not going to sleep tonight. I know what you're thinking, but I'm right. If it gets me, it's going to get me awake. That's how it is."
Below the TC's line of sight, Jones caught Bailey's eyes. The driver frowned and gave a shrug. "Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and a pair for six," he counted morosely.
The sky was beautiful. Cloud streaks in the west broke the brilliant sunset into three orange blades stabbing across the heavens to bleed on a wrack of cumuli. The reflecting wedges, miles high, stood like three keystones of an arch, more stunning than any sunrise could have been. Swiftly they shrunk upward, deepened, disappeared. The same clouds that had made the display possible blocked off the moon and stars utterly. It was going to be another pitch-black night.
Jones stepped around to the cargo hatch and pulled three beers out of the cooler. He handed them up to the TC to open with the church key hanging from the side of the cupola. No pop-tops in Nam. Christ, little enough ice, Casely thought as he sipped his warm Pabst. What a hell of a place to die in!
Footsteps crunched on the gravelly soil. Casely's heart jumped as he turned around to find the source of the sounds. Tiger, monster, whatever, the thing could be on you before you saw it in this darkness."How's it going?"Sergeant Peacock's familiar voice asked.
The TC relaxed, almost able to laugh at his fright. "Not bad till you scared the crap out of me just now."
"You keep cool," the sergeant admonished. He didn't attempt to climb onto the back deck; instead, he stood beside the ACAV, his head a little below the level of its sides. Casely climbed out of the cupola and squatted down beside it to see the big Negro better.
"You could have gone back on the supply bird tonight," Peacock said, his voice low but audible to Jones and Bailey inside the track now as well as to the TC.
Casely didn't care. He could live anything down, if he had more than a night or two to live. In normal tones he replied, "Didn't figure that was going to do much good, Sarge. We're at least ten klicks away from where we found that thing, right?" The field first nodded.
"Well, stands to reason that if it can follow us anyways at all, it could just as easy follow me back to Quan Loi. At least here I got a chance." His left hand reached out and patted the heavy barrel of the cal fifty, sticking more than three feet out from the cupola gunshield. "Oh, I know," the redhead went on, "the captain had a gun, and Jody was right here when it got him-but Christ, back at Quan Loi or Di An there wouldn't be a goddamn thing between me and it."
The sergeant chuckled without much humor. Casely thought he could see the outline of a machete, buckled onto the pistol belt under the massive bulge of the black's stomach. The only other time the TC could remember Peacock actually wearing the big knife was the evening they got word that the firebase was being hit by everything from one-oh-sevens on down and that the NDPs could expect their share any moment. "Hey, you want a beer?" he questioned. "It's warm, but-ohChrist!"
The younger man leaped back into his cupola. "What's the matter?" the sergeant demanded. Then his nostrils wrinkled.
"Flares!" the noncom shouted at the top of his lungs. "Everybody shoot up flares!"
"What the hell?"Jones blurted in confusion as he and Bailey stuck their heads up out of the cargo hatch. The bolt of the cal fifty in the cupola clanged loudly as Casely snatched back the charging handle. Across the laager somebody had heard the sergeant's bellow and obeyed enthusiastically with a pair of white star clusters. They shot up like Roman candles, drawing weird shadows with their short multiple glare and silhouetting Sergeant Peacock himself as he pounded across the dirt toward the command track. A horrible stench lay over everything.
The flares burned out. The sergeant disappeared, black into the deeper blackness. Lt. Worthington lurched into sight at the flap of the command tent, his rifle in his hand. Then the sergeant bellowed, a terrible mixture of hatred and surprise that almost drowned out the hiss of another flare going up. In the cupola of three-six, Casely cursed with effort as he swung the squealing armor around and pointed the big machine gun in across the NDP.
"Red, what in God's name are you doing?" Jones shrieked. The flare popped and began floating down on its parachute. Sergeant Peacock was between three-six and the command track. His bloated shadow writhed across the soil; neither of his feet were touching the ground. Casely pressed down the butterfly trigger with both thumbs. The shattering muzzle blast pocked the sides of the command tent as the red tracers snicked out past it. The stream of fire was whipping almost straight across the laager, a long raking burst endangering everybody in the troop as it lashed the air just over Sergeant Peacock's head. The field first was struggling titanically with nothing at all; his right hand slashed the glinting machete blade again and again across the air in front of him while his left seemed clamped on the invisible something that held and supported him.
The southern sky brightened, flickered. Not another flare, Jones realized, not thunder either as the sound shuddered toward him. Arclight, a strike on the area they had started to laager in two nights back.
All around the NDP, men were shouting in confusion. The lieutenant had started running toward the field first, then collapsed gagging as he took a deep breath. Diesels rumbled, but no one else had started shooting. The barrel of Casely's machine gun was cherry red. You could watch tracers start to tumble in screaming arcs as soon as they left the burnt-out barrel, but the TC continued hosing the air. Sergeant Peacock gave a choked cry; his machete snapped, then dropped from his hand. At the same instant, the cal fifty came to the end of its belt of ammunition and stuttered into silence. The TC's despairing curses were barely audible over the rising thunder of bomb blasts raking the jungle south of them.
There was an incongruous pop from the air beside Sergeant Peacock. The field first dropped to the ground, unconscious but alive. With a smile of incredulous hope etched on his face by the last glow of the flare, Casely staggered out of his cupola. His eyes were fixed on the rippling glare in the south, and he didn't seem to notice when Jones plucked his sleeve.
"God bless the Air Force," the TC was whispering. "God bless the Air Force."
Something Had to Be Done
There's a mistake in this story which a fan who'd been a unit clerk called to my attention. I haven't corrected it for this appearance, but I want to point it out.
A character is described as wearing "a Silver Star (medal) with V for Valor." The clerk explained that the Silver Star was by definition an award for valor; there was no additional V endorsement as there might be with the (lower-status) Bronze Star or Army Commendation Medal.
I made the mistake because I based the description on a real soldier whom I knew with 2nd Squadron and whom I'd been told had been awarded a Silver Star with V for his courage at Fort Defiance. Obviously I was told wrong. My bet now is that the guy got a Bronze Star with V because he was a Spec 4 and, quite frankly, medals were more a matter of rank than of merit in Viet Nam. (I know of a lieutenant colonel who got a Silver Star for being so detested by his men that they shot down his helicopter when he flew over them on a road march. The loss was attributed to enemy action, of course.)
But that brings up the question of truth, which is one I wrestle with a lot. I wrote these stories very close to the period of their setting, and they're as true as I could make them-but what the people on the ground "knew" isn't necessarily the truth.
For example, there was a widely hated form of 90-mm ammunition, a shrapnel round called Green Ball (from the nose color) or Dial-A-Dink (from the fact that you rotated the fuse to detonate the round at a chosen distance from the gun; ideally just short of the dink, the Vietnamese, you were trying to kill). It was a complex and not particularly reliable round. We got a lot of it, and it was always the first thing tank commanders burned up during Mad Minutes when they were firing as many rounds as possible into the darkness for sixty seconds.
The 90-mm gun of our M48 tanks had a T-shaped muzzle brake. I was told that Green Ball had a tendency to blow off the front half of the brake, and it was certainly true that many of the tanks had damaged muzzle brakes.
Actually, the damage (I now know) had nothing to do with the type of ammunition. It was simply a result of guns firing thousands of rounds in jungle anti-guerrilla operations, when they'd been designed to fire hundreds of rounds (at most) during armored battles in Europe. Because we disliked Green Ball, we blamed the failures on the ammunition.
So you can't depend on my fiction to tell you the truth… but as for how it felt and what we thought, that's real and I stand by it today. Writing short stories and writing novels are two different things-as different as writing prose fiction and scripting for television. There are people who do both superbly well (Arthur C. Clarke above all), but the ability to do one doesn't say much about the likelihood that the same person will be able to do the other. The marketplace today is geared to novels. That's fine, and it's by writing novels that I earn my living.
But I came up through short stories, which necessitated me developing skill in writing tight prose. "Something Had to Be Done" is the best I've ever done at packing a story effectively in a brief compass. I'm very proud of it.
"He was out in the hall just a minute ago, sir," the pinched-faced WAC said, looking up from her typewriter in irritation. "You can't mistake his face."
Capt. Richmond shrugged and walked out of the busy office. Blinking in the dim marble were a dozen confused civilians, bussed in for their pre-induction physicals. No one else was in the hallway. The thick-waisted officer frowned, then thought to open the door of the men's room. "Sergeant Morzek?" he called.
Glass clinked within one of the closed stalls and a deep voice with a catch in it grumbled, "Yeah, be right with you." Richmond thought he smelled gin.
"You the other ghoul?"the voice questioned as the stall swung open. Any retort Richmond might have made withered when his eyes took in the cadaverous figure in ill-tailored greens. Platoon sergeant's chevrons on the sleeves, and below them a longer row of service stripes than the captain remembered having seen before. God, this walking corpse might have served in World War II! Most of the ribbons ranked above the sergeant's breast pockets were unfamiliar, but Richmond caught the little V for valor winking in the center of a silver star. Even in these medal-happy days in Southeast Asia they didn't toss many of those around.
The sergeant's cheeks were hollow, his fingers grotesquely thin where they rested on top of the door or clutched the handles of his zippered AWOL bag. Where no moles squatted, his skin was as white as a convict's; but the moles were almost everywhere, hands and face, dozens and scores of them, crowding together in welted obscenity.
The sergeant laughed starkly. "Pretty, aren't I? The docs tell me I got too much sun over there and it gave me runaway warts. Hell, four years is enough time for it to."
"Umm," Richmond grunted in embarrassment, edging back into the hall to have something to do. "Well, the car's in back… if you're ready, we can see the Lunkowskis."
"Yeah, Christ," the sergeant said, "that's what I came for, to see the Lunkowskis." He shifted his bag as he followed the captain and it clinked again. Always before, the other man on the notification team had been a stateside officer like Richmond himself. He had heard that a few low-casualty outfits made a habit of letting whoever knew the dead man best accompany the body home, but this was his first actual experience with the practice. He hoped it would be his last.
Threading the green Ford through the heavy traffic of the city center, Richmond said, "I take it Pfc Lunkowski was one of your men?"
"Yeah, Stevie-boy was in my platoon for about three weeks," Morzek agreed with a chuckle."Lost six men in that time and he was the last. Six out of twenty-nine, not very damn good, was it?"
"You were under heavy attack?"
"Hell, no, mostly the dinks were letting us alone for a change. We were out in the middle of War Zone C, you know, most Christ-bitten stretch of country you ever saw. No dinks, no trees-they'd all been defoliated. Not a damn thing but dust and each other's company."
"Well, what did happen?"Richmond prompted impatiently. Traffic had thinned somewhat among the blocks of old buildings and he began to look for house numbers.
"Oh, mostly they just died," Morzek said. He yawned alcoholically. "Stevie, now, he got blown to hell by a grenade."
Richmond had learned when he was first assigned to notification duty not to dwell on the ways his… missions had died. The possibilities varied from unpleasant to ghastly. He studiously avoided saying anything more to the sergeant beside him until he found the number he wanted. "One-sixteen. This must be the Lunkowskis'."
Morzek got out on the curb side, looking more skeletal than before in the dappled sunlight. He still held his AWOL bag.
"You can leave that in the car," Richmond suggested. "I'll lock up."
"Naw, I'll take it in," the sergeant said as he waited for Richmond to walk around the car."You know, this is every damn thing I brought from Nam? They didn't bother to open it at Travis, just asked me what I had in it. 'A quart of gin,' I told 'em, 'but I won't have it long,' and they waved me through to make my connections. One advantage to this kind of trip."
A bell chimed far within the house when Richmond pressed the button. It was cooler than he had expected on the pine-shaded porch. Miserable as these high, dark old houses were to heat, the design made a world of sense in the summer.
A light came on inside. The stained-glass window left of the door darkened and a latch snicked open."Please to come in," invited a soft-voiced figure hidden by the dark oak panel. Morzek grinned inappropriately and led the way into the hall, brightly lighted by an electric chandelier.
"Mr. Lunkowski?"Richmond began to the wispy-little man who had admitted them. "We are-"
"But yes, you are here to tell us when Stefan shall come back, are you not?" Lunkowski broke in."Come into the sitting room, please, Anna and my daughter Rose are there."
"Ah, Mr. Lunkowski," Richmond tried to explain as he followed, all too conscious of the sardonic grin on Morzek's face, "you have been informed by telegram that Pfc. Lunkowski was-"
"Was killed, yes," said the younger of the two red-haired women as she got up from the sofa. "But his body will come back to us soon, will he not? The man on the telephone said…?"
She was gorgeous, Richmond thought, cool and assured, half-smiling as her hair cascaded over her left shoulder like a thick copper conduit. Disconcerted as he was by the whole situation, it was a moment before he realized that Sgt. Morzek was saying, "Oh, the coffin's probably at the airport now, but there's nothing in it but a hundred and fifty pounds of gravel. Did the telegram tell you what happened to Stevie?"
"Sergeant!" Richmond shouted. "You drunken-"
"Oh, calm down, Captain," Morzek interrupted bleakly."The Lunkowskis, they understand. They want to hear the whole story, don't they?"
"Yes."There was a touch too much sibilance in the word as it crawled from the older woman, Stefan Lunkowski's mother. Her hair was too grizzled now to have more than a touch of red in it, enough to rust the tight ringlets clinging to her skull like a helmet of mail. Without quite appreciating its importance, Richmond noticed that Mr. Lunkowski was standing in front of the room's only door.
With perfect nonchalance, Sgt. Morzek sat down on an overstuffed chair, laying his bag across his knees.
"Well," he said, "there was quite a report on that one. We told them how Stevie was trying to booby-trap a white phosphorous grenade-fix it to go off as soon as some dink pulled the pin instead of four seconds later. And he goofed."
Mrs. Lunkowski's breath whistled out very softly. She said nothing. Morzek waited for further reaction before he smiled horribly and added, "He burned. A couple pounds of Willie Pete going blooie, well… it keeps burning all the way through you. Like I said, the coffin's full of gravel."
"My god, Morzek," the captain whispered. It was not the sergeant's savage grin that froze him but the icy-eyed silence of the three Lunkowskis.
"The grenade, that was real," Morzek concluded. "The rest of the report was a lie."
Rose Lunkowski reseated herself gracefully on a chair in front of the heavily draped windows."Why don't you start at the beginning, Sergeant?"she said with a thin smile that did not show her teeth. "There is much we would like to know before you are gone."
"Sure," Morzek agreed, tracing a mottled forefinger across the pigmented callosities on his face. "Not much to tell. The night after Stevie got assigned to my platoon, the dinks hit us. No big thing. Had one fellow dusted off with brass in his ankle from his machine gun blowing up, that was all. But a burst of AK fire knocked Stevie off his tank right at the start."
"What's all this about?" Richmond complained. "If he was killed by rifle fire, why say a grenade-"
"Silence!" The command crackled like heel plates on concrete.
Sgt. Morzek nodded. "Why, thank you, Mr. Lunkowski. You see, the captain there doesn't know the bullets didn't hurt Stevie. He told us his flak jacket had stopped them. It couldn't have and it didn't. I saw it that night, before he burned it-five holes to stick your fingers through, right over the breast pocket. But Stevie was fine, not a mark on him. Well, Christ, maybe he'd had a bandolier of ammo under the jacket. I had other things to think about."
Morzek paused to glance around his audience. "All this talk, I could sure use a drink. I killed my bottle back at the Federal Building."
"You won't be long," the girl hissed in reply.
Morzek grinned."They broke up the squadron, then," he rasped on, "gave each platoon a sector of War Zone C to cover to stir up the dinks. There's more life on the moon than there was on the stretch we patrolled. Third night out, one of the gunners died. They flew him back to Saigon for an autopsy but damned if I know what they found. Galloping malaria, we figured.
"Three nights later another guy died. Dawson on three-six… Christ, the names don't matter. Some time after midnight his track commander woke up, heard him moaning. We got him back to Quan Loi to a hospital, but he never came out of it. The lieutenant thought he got wasp stung on the neck-here, you know?" Morzek touched two fingers to his jugular. "Like he was allergic. Well, it happens."
"But what about Stefan?" Mrs. Lunkowski asked. "The others do not matter."
"Yes, finish it quickly, Sergeant," the younger woman said, and this time Richmond did catch the flash of her teeth.
"We had a third death," Morzek said agreeably, stroking the zipper of his AWOL bag back and forth. "We were all jumpy by then. I doubled the guard, two men awake on every track. Three nights later, and nobody in the platoon remembered anything from twenty-four hundred hours till Riggs' partner blinked at ten of one and found him dead.
"In the morning, one of the boys came to me. He'd seen Stevie slip over to Riggs, he said; but he was zonked out on grass and didn't think it really had happened until he woke up in the morning and saw Riggs under a poncho. By then, he was scared enough to tell the whole story. Well, we were all jumpy."
"You killed Stefan." It was not a question but a flat statement.
"Oh, hell, Lunkowski," Morzek said absently, "what does it matter who rolled the grenade into his bunk? The story got around and… something had to be done."
"Knowing what you know, you came here?" Mrs. Lunkowski murmured liquidly. "You must be mad."
"Naw, I'm not crazy, I'm just sick." The sergeant brushed his left hand over his forehead. "Malignant melanoma, the docs told me. Twenty-six years in the goddam army and in another week or two I'd bewarted to death.
"Captain," he added, turning his cancerous face toward Richmond, "you better leave through the window."
"Neither of you will leave!" snarled Rose Lunkowski as she stepped toward the men.
Morzek lifted a fat gray cylinder from his bag."Know what this is, honey?"he asked conversationally.
Richmond screamed and leaped for the window. Rose ignored him, slashing her hand out for the phosphorous grenade. Drapery wrapping the captain's body shielded him from glass and splintered window frame as he pitched out into the yard.
He was still screaming there when the blast of white fire bulged the walls of the house.
The Elf House
Bill Fawcett, a friend and a book packager, put together for Baen Books what was supposed to be an original anthology of novellas by Dave Weber, Eric Flint, and me. (It was a little more complex than that to begin with, and a lot more complex before the book eventually came out.) For that volume I wrote a Hammer novella which became part of an episodic Hammer novel.
Bill then sold a fantasy equivalent and asked me to write a short story in the Isles universe. Each volume of my Isles fantasy series has four individual viewpoint strands which combine for the climax. If Bill had been able to use a novella, I might've written a sequence which I'd spread out over five or six chapters when it appeared in the next Isles novel. A short story didn't fit that novel format, so I simply wrote "The Elf House" from scratch with no expectation-then or now-of ever reusing it as part of an Isles novel.
I wrote the story to be self-standing. If it had any value at all beyond doing a favor to a friend, it needed to be accessible to readers who had no previous familiarity with the Isles series. That meant limiting it to a single character.
I picked Cashel because he's friendly, cheerful, and very direct. Basically, I like him. (I identify with Cashel's sister Ilna, who's angry, harsh, and generally depressed, but that's another matter entirely.)
I knew the concept of the "The Elf House" wasn't original to me, but until I'd finished the rough draft I couldn't have told you from whom I'd stolen it. In reading it through for the first time, the source was obvious: "Kazam Collects," an early work by Cyril Kornbluth.
If I needed proof of how much better a writer I could be than I am, all I'd have to do is reread any of a dozen or more pieces which Kornbluth dashed off before he was twenty. Because I don't need that proof, I reread Kornbluth simply for the pleasure of discovering new flashes of brilliance with each reading. I suggest that all of you read him also.
Cashel didn't need to carry his quarterstaff in the corridors of the Vicar's palace-what'd been the Count of Haft's place till Prince Garric arrived the week before-but he was more comfortable holding the smooth, familiar hickory than he'd be otherwise. He didn't dislike big buildings, but he disliked being in them; and this palace had a nasty feel all its own.
Besides, the staff had been a friend in places where Cashel had no other friends. He wouldn't feel right about leaving it alone in the huge suite assigned to him while he went off to dinner with Garric in the roof garden. If the servants, officials, and the amazing number of other people crowding the palace stared at him, well, a man as big as Cashel or-Kenset was used to being stared at whether he carried a quarterstaff or not.
For a wonder there wasn't anybody around at the moment. Cashel sauntered down the hall looking at the cherub mural painted just above shoulder level. In the dim light through the transoms of the rooms to either side, there was something new to catch every time he passed.
Cashel started to grin at the little fellow with his wings spread as he struggled to lead a goat who didn't want to go. The sound of a girl crying jerked his head around.
He'd been holding the quarterstaff straight up and down in one hand. Now, without him thinking about it his left hand slipped into position a span below the right and he slanted the staff before him. "Ma'am?" he said, ready to deal with whatever was making a woman cry.
The girl wore servant's clothing, a cap and a simple gray tunic set off by a sash of bleached wool. She knelt a little way down a corridor which joined the main one from the right. Cashel didn't remember there being anything but a blank wall there, but he guessed he'd always missed it because he'd been intent on the mural opposite.
She gave another vain push at the inward-opening door in front of her, then looked up at Cashel with eyes glittering with tears."Oh, sir!"she said."I dropped the key and it slipped under the door. The steward will beat me if I don't get it back!"
"I don't guess he will," Cashel said. The notion that somebody'd beat a little slip of a girl surprised him into speaking in a growl. He didn't know her, but he didn't think men ought to hit any girls. He was real sure no man was going to try that twice in front of Cashel or-Kenset.
He cleared his throat and went on in a normal voice, "But anyhow, let's see if I can't get your key."
The door stood a finger's breadth ajar. Cashel pressed with the fingertips of his right hand without budging it further. It was stuck, that was all; rusty hinges, he figured, since the panel didn't bind to the lintel or transom. Through the crack at the edge he could see a glint of gold in what was otherwise darkness; the key was there, all right. It must've bounced wrong off the stone floor.
Cashel leaned his quarterstaff against the wall beside him and placed his hands one above the other on the latch side of the panel. The girl looked up at him intently. She seemed older, all of a sudden, and there was no sign of her frightened despair of a moment ago. He made sure his feet were set, then put his weight against the wood.
More people lived in the palace than did in all Barca's Hamlet where Cashel'd grown up. Even though there wasn't any traffic in the main corridor, sounds constantly echoed through the hallways and made the floor quiver. All that stopped; Cashel pressed against the panel in dead silence. Maybe it was the effort, because the door still didn't want to give And then it did, though with creaking unwillingness. It opened another finger's breadth, twice that…
The girl stuck her arm in, calling something that Cashel could barely hear through the roar of blood in his ears."I can't quite…" she said, so he kept pushing and the door gave some more, enough that she squeezed her torso into the room beyond.
Cashel shoved harder yet. He could feel the wood fighting him like the staff of a bent bow, ready to snap back if he let up the pressure. "I've got it!" the girl said, only her legs from the knees down out in the hallway where Cashel could see them. "I've-"
And then she shrieked, "Milord, I'm falling!"shrilly. Her legs slid out of sight, following the rest of her. She was wearing sandals with straps of green-dyed cut-work.
Cashel didn't understand what was happening, but as the girl slipped inward he slammed his shoulder hard against the panel instead of just shoving with his hands. He hadn't done that before because he didn't want to smash the door, but now he didn't care.
The door didn't break, neither the thick fir panel nor the squealing hinges that fought him all the way, and he swung it open at right angles. The room within was small and dingy. There was no furniture, and part of the rotten wainscoting had fallen onto the floor.
The girl had the key in one hand and reached toward Cashel with the other. She looked like she was sliding backwards, but she was already farther away than the far wall of the room.
Cashel grabbed the staff with his left hand and stretched it out to the girl. She couldn't reach it and screamed again. Her voice was growing fainter; he could see her body shrink as the distance increased.
"Duzi!"Cashel bellowed. He strode into the room, holding the quarterstaff out in both hands. The girl grabbed it, but Cashel's feet slipped like he was standing on an icy hillside.
The door slammed behind him. The only light was a dim, yellow-brown glow that silhouetted the girl's body and he and she plunged down an unseen slope.
Cashel felt himself spinning as he dropped, but his body wasn't touching anything. The girl held the other end of his staff; he couldn't see her expression, but she didn't bawl in fear or make any sound at all that he noticed.
They skidded onto a gritty hillside and stopped. Cashel looked over his shoulder. All he saw was gray sky and a rising slope. There wasn't any sign of the room where they'd come from. He looked all around and didn't see anything he liked better.
The bare hills ranged in color from yellow-white to the red of rusty iron. For the most part the rock had weathered into gravel, but there were outcrops where the stone must've been harder. The general landscape wasn't pretty, but the outcrops were worse. Whenever Cashel looked hard at one, he started to see a large, angry face.
He got up, brushing crumbled rock from the back of his tunic. He hadn't come down hard, for all that they'd seemed to be rushing headlong through emptiness. He glanced at the girl, already on her feet. She smiled and said, "My name is Mona, Lord Cashel. Do you know where we are?" "Just Cashel, please, mistress," he said with a grimace. "I'm not lord anything."
He cleared his throat, looking around again. The landscape wasn't any more appealing on a careful survey than it'd been when he first landed in it. "And I don't know anything about this place, except I wish we were someplace else."
"It's where the house elf lives," Mona said. She was looking at the landscape also, turning her head slowly."Used to live, I mean. There can't be anything alive here except the dwelling itself."
She held her arms across her bosom; her expression was coldly disapproving. From Mona's features she was younger than Cashel's nineteen years, but her eyes were a lot older than that.
Cashel followed the line of her gaze up a series of streaked, ragged slopes. On top of a butte was what at first he'd taken for white stone weathered into a spire. When he squinted and let it sink in angle by angle, he realized he was seeing a man-made tower with battlements on top. A slant of windows curved around the shaft the way they'd do to light a circular staircase.
"You mean that castle?" Cashel said, nodding toward the structure instead of pointing. "That there's people living there?"
"There's no people here and no elves either," the girl said as she stared toward the tower. "Only us. And I don't mean the building, Cashel. This whole world was the dwelling for the house elf."
Cashel cleared his throat. He took out the pad of raw wool he carried in his belt wallet and wiped the smooth hickory surface of his quarterstaff as he thought.
"Mona," he said while keeping his eyes fixed on his task. "The only house elves I've heard of are the little fellows who live under the hearth and, well, make things go right. The Luck of the House, some people call them."
He cleared his throat again. "Not that I've ever seen one. Or known anybody who did."
"How could anybody live under a hearth?" Mona asked, with a pretty smile that took the sting out of words that could've been pretty cutting if said the wrong way. "But they could live between the cracks of the real world, in a place that grew for them. A place like this was."
She looked around, no longer smiling."When the elf died," she said, "the dwelling should've fallen apart like a web when the spider dies. This dwelling took a life of its own instead. A sort of life."
The sky was getting darker. It was solidly overcast, as heavy and oppressive as a block of gray stone. Cashel could feel a storm in the air. Duzi, the little god of shepherds, knew how many times he'd been caught by the weather while he was minding sheep; but he didn't have sheep to worry about this time, so he could go somewhere else.
"Ah, Mona?" he said. "I think we'd best get under cover while we can. Unless you've got a better idea, let's head for the castle up there."
"Yes," she said. "We'll do that. Though the storm will catch us anyway."
They had about a half-mile to go. The route was uphill on average, but Cashel could see there were several ridges and gullies between them and the castle. Experience had taught him that the terrain was always worse than it seemed at a distance, but he didn't foresee anything they couldn't cross even if he had to carry the girl part of the way.
He looked at Mona again. She wasn't the frail little girl that she'd seemed when he first saw her in the palace corridor. She stepped with determination across the rough terrain, avoiding head-sized chunks of rock but seemingly unperturbed by the coarse gravel. Maybe the soles of her sandals were sturdier than they seemed. Cashel himself was wearing thick boots. He didn't like the feel of footgear, especially in warm weather, but the stone floors of the palace and cobblestone streets of the city beyond were too much for the calluses he'd developed going barefoot on the mud and meadows where he grew up.
Lightning flashed somewhere above the clouds, giving them texture if not shape for an instant. Cashel held his staff crosswise, ready to brace himself with an iron butt-cap if the gravel slid or a rock turned under his foot. You couldn't trust your footing here…
"I'm surprised there's nothing growing here," Cashel said. The girl was a couple steps in front of him, choosing each step and keeping in perfect balance. "This isn't good soil-" his boot toe gouged into the slope "-but with rain, there ought to be something."
"Nothing can live here," Mona said bitterly. She reached down and brushed at the loose grit. "Look."
The underlying rock was mostly dark brown and cream, with streaks of maroon and other colors. Cashel frowned as he let his eyes grapple with the pattern.
"It's a tree trunk," he said at last. "It's a stone statue of a tree trunk."
"It was a tree trunk," the girl said."The house has turned it to stone to reabsorb it. Lesser vegetation is-"
She swept her left hand in a short arc, palm down.
"-already gone. Stone and dust. The house has only a half-life; it hates the real thing."
She smiled wryly at Cashel."Forgive me if I get carried away," she said. "There's nothing evil about what's happening here, any more than there is with cancer or a wolf tree. But it's a perversion and can't be allowed."
Cashel nodded. "We'd best be getting on," he said, nodding toward the tower ahead of them. The hill was particularly steep right here; he could only see the crowning battlements from where he stood. "Though you were right about us not beating the storm."
They resumed, climbing steeply now. The girl dabbed a hand down frequently while Cashel used the butt of his staff to steady him where he didn't trust the grip of his feet.
He knew what a wolf tree was. If a forest grew wild, there'd always be a few trees, oaks more often than not, that through a combination of luck in soil and the weather spread over ground that could've supported a dozen ordinary trees. Their limbs shaded out lesser growth, and their trunks grew gnarled and rotted at the heart, useless for anything but firewood.
Forests didn't grow wild, of course: wood was too valuable a resource for that. If a tree started taking more than its share, the woodlot's owner hired a husky young man like Cashel to cut it down.
A steep-sided gully barred their way, not broad but deeper than twice Cashel's height. He figured he could get over it, but the girl'd have to climb down and then Mona jumped over the gully from a standing start, looking like nothing so much as a squirrel hopping the gap between trees. She glanced over her shoulder. "I'll wait for you here, Master Cashel," she said with a trace of laughter in her tone.
Cashel grunted. He checked the ground, then backed two steps and came on again in a rush. He butted his quarterstaff firmly at the edge of the gully and used the great strength of his shoulders to loft him over. He landed beside her, flexing his knees to take his weight.
"You're graceful despite your size," the girl said as she resumed her way toward the tower.
"Who are you, Mistress Mona?" Cashel asked. "What are you?"
"I'm a servant," she said. "We're all servants of one kind or another, aren't we? You used to serve sheep, for example."
"I didn't serve sheep," Cashel said, shocked at the thought. "I-"
He broke off. A shepherd did a lot of things, but when you boiled them all down they amounted to making sure his sheep were safe and comfortable. Put like that it sure enough sounded like being a servant.
"Well, maybe that's so," he admitted, saying the words instead of just holding his tongue and pretending he hadn't been wrong to begin with. The rain hit, violent slashes from straight ahead. Each gust drove at Cashel's face like he was standing in the sluice of the mill back home in Barca's Hamlet. He didn't see how Mona could stand against it but she did, lowering her head and striding on.
The lightning was nearly constant, dancing in the clouds as the air shuddered with thunder. Runoff gouged fresh rivulets which gushed down the slopes as streams of thin mud.
The gully they'd crossed must be a raging freshet now. It'd be a bad time to lose your footing and slide into a torrent.
The storm stopped as abruptly as it'd begun. It paused, at any rate; the rain no longer fell, but the sky stayed the same dark mat. Mona had a little peaked cap as part of her livery. It'd blown away, and her simple tunic stuck to her torso, sopping wet and three shades darker than its original light gray. Cashel figured he looked like a drowned rat himself.
He grinned and slicked the water off his staff between his thumbs and forefingers, sliding first his right hand to the ferrule and then cleaning the other half with his left. A drowned ox, maybe. On his worst day, nobody was going to confuse Cashel or-Kenset with a rat.
They'd reached the base of the great outcrop on which the tower stood. The cliff was pretty steep, but there was a path slanting up to the left. It looked badly worn… well, no. It looked more like the rock had been melted somehow. Anyway, they'd be able to get up it even if the rain started again.
"Wait!" the girl said, staring intently at the cliff to the side of the pathway. Her index finger traced a bump in the rock. It was about the size of a ripe cantaloupe and had a pearly luster instead of the dull, chalky surface holding it.
Now that Mona'd pointed out the first one, Cashel saw that there were more balls, as many as he could count on the fingers of one hand, in the rock beside it. They looked as much like frog's eggs as anything Cashel could think of; though much bigger, of course.
"The seeds of new dwellings," the girl said softly. She took her hand away from the stone. "Each seed should grow into a home for a young elf who'd make the people of a house in the waking world a little happier. This place is absorbing them too."
She turned her head toward Cashel."I was wrong, I think," she said. Her voice didn't sound angry, but it rang as hard as a sword edge. "What's happening here is evil."
"Let's go on," said Cashel, but Mona had started up the path before he got the words out.
The wind rose again before they'd climbed halfway. It whirled around the outcrop, buffeting Cashel head-on no matter which direction he was facing as he walked along the curving path. Rain began to fall, a few drops at a time but big ones that stung like hard-thrown pebbles.
Mona's tunic was sleeveless and only knee-length. Even so Cashel was afraid that it'd give the storm's violence enough purchase to snatch her from the path and throw her onto the broken landscape below. Her balance remained perfect and her steps stayed steady despite the gusts.
The top of the outcrop was as flat as a table. The tower stood in the center with no more margin than Cashel could span by stretching his arms out to either side. He wondered if the spire itself was artificial, a pedestal built at the same time the tower was; though if what Mona said was true, this whole world had been made-or grown, which he supposed was the same thing.
The entrance was partway around the tower from where the path reached the top. Mona started for it with Cashel right behind. Now that they were close, Cashel saw that the windows in the tower were blocked up-filled with stone rather than just shuttered. What he'd seen were the outlines where the sashes used to be.
The rain resumed in torrents, now mixed with hail the size of quails' eggs. Cashel threw his left arm up to shield his eyes. He'd have bruises when this was over, that was for sure. Balls of ice shattered against the stone, cracking like a fire of pine boughs. Sharp bits bounced from the ground, pricking Cashel's ankles and lower legs.
The tower's doorway was recessed. Mona bent toward it, doing something with the panel. Cashel hunched behind her, trying to shelter her from the hailstones that slipped past the overhang.
The rattling hail drowned the thunder, but its deeper notes still vibrated through Cashel's boots. Lightning was a constant rippling presence overhead. The tower's walls were alabaster; Cashel ran his fingertips over them, trying to find joints between the courses. If there were any, they were too fine for his touch or eyesight, either one, to identify them.
"Mona, maybe I can break it down," Cashel said, speaking louder with each word of the short sentence. The hail made more noise than he appreciated until he tried to talk over it.
A crust flaked off the wall when Cashel rubbed it. Though the tower stood in open air, the stone was rotting like a statue buried in the acid soil of a forest.
"I've got it!" said the girl, and as she spoke the tower opened; she stepped inside.
Cashel was close on her heels, bumping the door as he entered. It was made of the same white stone as the rest of the building, pivoting on pins carved from one block with the panel. As soon as Cashel was past, it banged shut with a ringing sound more like a xylophone than that of stone on stone.
The storm's noise ended abruptly when the door closed. They were in an anteroom.
"There's light!" Cashel said in surprise, and there was: a soft, shadowless glow from the stone itself. The room was unfurnished, but on the walls were carved patterns as rich and fanciful as the engravings on a nobleman's gold dinner service.
Only a few patches remained to show what the original decoration had looked like, though. The scaly rot disfiguring the tower's exterior had claimed most of the inner surfaces too.
Mona stepped through the inner doorway. Cashel followed, keeping his elbows close to his sides. The passage was so narrow that if he'd tried to swagger through arms-akimbo, he'd have bumped the jambs.
A slender woman stood in the center of the hall, her right hand out in greeting. "Oh!" Cashel said, straightening in surprise. The tower was so silent that he'd convinced himself it was empty
"Her name was Giglia," Mona said, walking toward the other woman. "She was the luck of the palace ever since the Count of Haft built it. There was never a house elf who could match what Giglia did with glass. She made the palace windows gleam like a thousand rainbows every sunrise."
Cashel touched his tongue to his lower lip. His staff was slantways before him, not so much a threat as a barrier between him and the silent Giglia."Why doesn't she move?" he asked.
"Because she's dead, Cashel," Mona said. "She grew old and died; as things should do. Without death there can be no renewal."
She reached toward the dead woman; their faces were as like as those of twins. When her fingers touched the other's cheek, Giglia disintegrated into dust motes. Her right arm fell to the floor intact, then erupted as a geyser of fine dust swirling in the air.
There was a dry, sweetish smell. Cashel threw his arm over his nose to breathe through the waterlogged sleeve of his tunic, though he didn't suppose it mattered."Mona?" he said."How can we get out of here? Back to the palace, I mean? Or somewhere!"
Instead of answering, the girl walked toward the door on the other side of the central room. Her feet stirred Giglia's remains into umber whorls. Grimacing, Cashel followed.
The room beyond was darker than the others. Against the far wall was a throne inexpertly hacked out of stone; on it sat a statue as brutal and primitive as the throne itself. It was male, but it had tusks and a crude ape's face. In its right hand was a stone club the length of Cashel's arm.
"Is this a chapel?" Cashel said. "Is that the god they worship here?"
The tower shuddered. Cashel heard the sharpcrack/crack/crack of stone breaking. The statue trembled side to side on its throne.
Cashel turned; the outer door had slammed behind them, but maybe he could smash it open again. "Earthquake!" he cried. "We've got to get out!"
"It's not an earthquake," Mona said impassively; she didn't move. "And we can't get out while this remains. The dwelling must have a master to exist, so it's created a master in its own image."
The statue stood up. It looked even bigger standing than it'd seemed while seated; Cashel didn't think he could reach to the top of its head flat-footed. Not that he was likely to need to do that.
It started forward, raising its club. "Mona, get out of the way!" Cashel said in a growl.
He lifted the quarterstaff before him and began backing toward the door to the central room. The light was better there, and there was more space besides. He and his staff covered a lot of territory when the fight started.
Rock groaned against itself. The statue's face shifted as its mouth moved."I will destroy you…" the stone said in a rumble almost too low for human ears.
Cashel knew where the doorway was behind him. He feinted at the statue's head, then stepped back quickly and surely. He kept his staff vertical to clear the narrow opening. Mona was somewhere nearby, a presence without form because all Cashel's attention was on the statue. He hoped the girl'd stay clear, but he couldn't worry about that right now.
The statue clumped through the doorway after him, barely clearing the jambs. It looked even uglier than it had in the relative shadow of the further room."You cannot escape me…" it grated in a voice of emotionless menace.
Cashel spun his staff in a short sun-wise arc, crashing his left ferrule into the lumpish fist which gripped the stone club. There was a crack and flash of blue wizardlight; the creature growled like an approaching avalanche.
Cashel wasn't looking for escape. He'd come to fight.
The statue rushed him, swinging the stone club in an overhead blow. Cashel rammed his staff forward like a spear. The blunt butt-cap slammed into the thing's throat with another blue flash.
The creature's head jerked back. The mighty arc of its club touched nothing but air till it smashed itself on the floor, cratering the alabaster. The grip flew out of the stone hand.
Cashel backed, gasping in deep breaths. He'd struck swiftly and as hard as he could, and the quivers of wizardlight meant he was using more than the strength of his great muscles. He was uncomfortable about that other business-he was a shepherd, not a wizard-but when he was facing a creature like this he was glad of any help he could get.
The thing held its hands up in front of its face. Its fingers were thin scorings in stone mitts; only the thumbs were separate. Its blunt features were those of a bestial doll a child had molded from clay.
The creature's mouth opened. It screamed like millstones rubbing.
"Watch-" Mona cried, but Cashel didn't need to be told what to do in a fight. The creature leaped toward him like a missile from a huge catapult. Cashel stepped back and sideways, thrusting his quarterstaff low. He slipped the thick hickory pole between the stone ankles; it flexed but held. The creature plunged head-first into the wall with a crash that rocked the tower.
The alabaster fractured in scalloped flakes, leaving a crater at the point of impact. The creature dropped flat on the floor. It braced its stone arms beneath it, starting to rise.
Cashel, holding the staff like a battering ram, struck the back of its head, bouncing it into the wall again. Light as blue as the heart of a sapphire flared at the doublecrack! of iron on stone and stone on stone.
Cashel stepped back, bending slightly and sucking air through his open mouth. The creature's arms moved feebly, like an infant trying to swim. The ferrule Cashel had just struck with glowed orange, cooling to dull red. He switched ends, then brought the staff back with both arms.
The creature got its hands under it and lifted its head slightly. Cashel lunged forward, driving the staff down with the whole weight of his body. The butt hammered the creature at the same point as before. The statue's head exploded in a flash and thunderclap. The massive body began to crumble the way a sand castle dissolves in the surf.
Cashel felt himself wavering. He planted the quarterstaff against the floor and used it to brace him as he let himself kneel. His breath was a rasping thunder, and his blood hammered in his ears.
The only part of the creature still remaining was the outstretched right arm. When it suddenly collapsed to a spill of sand, Cashel caught a brief reminder of the dry, sweet odor in which Giglia had vanished. Then nothing remained but air harsh with the faint brimstone reek of nearby lightning.
Cashel stayed like that for-well, for a time. He figured he could move if he had to, but since he didn't he was just going to rest till he felt like doing something else.
Though he'd kept his eyes open, he didn't have much awareness of his surroundings. There wasn't a lot to see, after all; just the trail of coarse grit that'd been a statue there on the floor in front of him. It looked like what he'd seen on the hills he'd climbed to reach the tower…
"Are you ready to go home, Cashel?" Mona said.
Cashel's world clicked back into hard focus again. He turned his head and smiled at the girl, feeling a little embarrassed. How long had she been standing there, waiting for him to come to himself?
"I'm all right," he said, wondering how true that was. He stood, lifting himself partly by the strength of his arms on the quarterstaff. He swayed a little, but no worse than you always did when you'd been bent over and got up suddenly.
He grinned wider and said, "I'm fine," meaning it this time. "But how do we get back home, Mona?"
As Cashel spoke, he took a closer look at the walls. His eyes narrowed."Mona?" he said. "Things don't look right. The stone looks thin. It wasn't like that before."
"This world is decaying," the girl said, "and not before time. We have to get you out of here, though. Come."
She stepped through the doorway to the room where the statue had waited; the gold key was out in her hand again. Cashel followed, as he'd been doing ever since he met the girl-except when there was the fighting.
He grinned again. That was all right. Mona was better at leading than Cashel ever wanted to be, and she'd kept out of the way when he went to work.
Mona looked back at him. "I'm sorry I had to trick you," she said. "Your help was very important."
Cashel shrugged. "You didn't have to trick me, Mona," he said. "You could just have asked. But that's all right."
The throne had fallen into a pile of sand and pebbles like the thing that'd sat on it. On the wall behind was another door. Mona stuck the key into the door-there hadn't been a keyhole that Cashel could see, but he was sure about what she'd just done-and pulled the panel open.
"Go on through, Cashel," she said, smiling like the sun rising. "Thank you. We all thank you."
Cashel hesitated. "You're coming too, aren't you, Mona?" he said. Light and color without shape swirled in the door opening.
Her smile became pensive. She raised the key in the hand that didn't hold the door open. "I have to free the seeds we found," she said. "Otherwise they'll rot instead of growing as they should."
"But what happens to you?" Cashel said.
"Go on back to your own world, Cashel," Mona said, her voice hard without harshness. "There must be renewal."
Cashel cleared his throat. He didn't have anything to say, though, so he nodded and walked toward the opening. As his leading foot entered the blur of color, Mona said, "Your house will always be a happy one, dear friend."
For a moment Cashel stepped through nothingness so silent that he heard his heart beating; then his boot heel clacked on stone. He was standing in the familiar hallway down which he'd been going to dinner.
"Oh!" cried a servant, dropping the pair of silver ewers he'd been carrying to refill from the well in the courtyard at the end of the passage. They rang on the floor, sounding sweet or hollow by turns as they rolled.
Cashel squatted, holding his staff upright in one hand as he caught the nearer pitcher. It might have a few new dings in it, but he didn't guess the servant would get in real trouble.
"Oh, your lordship, I'm so sorry!" the fellow babbled. He took the ewer from Cashel's hand but he was trembling so bad he looked like he might drop it again. "I didn't see you!"
Cashel glanced at the door he'd come out of… and found there wasn't one, just a blank wall between the entrances to a pair of large suites. He stood up. "Sorry," he said apologetically. "I didn't mean to startle you."
Cashel headed on in the direction he'd been going when he'd first heard the girl-well, first heard Mona-crying. He'd never really liked this palace. It was a dingy place, badly run-down before Garric arrived and replaced the Count of Haft with a vicar.
Nothing Cashel could see was different about it now, but the corridor seemed a little cheerier than it used to be. He smiled. He'd have started whistling if he could carry a tune.
The Hunting Ground
I read (and always have read) both science fiction and fantasy. Mr. Derleth insisted that SF was merely a subset of fantasy, but even if that's true (and I'm not sure it is) the statement doesn't accurately describe most people's perceptions. Still, because I move between fantasy and SF as a reader, it's been easy for me to write both.
Nor do I see any reason that a horror story can't be SF. Many years ago Ramsey Campbell asked me for my choice of the ten top horror stories. One of those I picked instantly was "The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin, a pure SF story which I find horrifying in ways that one more nut with a meat cleaver can never be.
"The Cold Equations" proves my point in another fashion also. It's well known that John Campbell published the story in Astounding, the quintessentially hard-SF magazine. It's less well known that Godwin borrowed the plot from an EC horror comic. The boundaries between horror and SF are easily permeable.
Ramsey Campbell asked me for a story for Superhorror, an original horror anthology he was putting together. The only criterion was that the story be a good one. (One of the best in the collection was "The Viaduct" by Brian Lumley, a slice of autobiography with no fantasy element whatever.)
I chose to write a story that was SF in form, although it could have been done just as easily as a fantasy. Payment was to be 2 cents/word, but instead I traded the piece for the pencil rough draft of the novel Ramsey had just finished: his first, The Doll Who Ate His Mother.
It's neither the science nor the could-be fantasy that makes "The Hunting Ground" a horror story; it's the character's situation. There's less fiction in that than I might wish.
I came back from Nam with no physical damage and an absolute refusal to admit that there might be other problems. We-my wife and I-rented rooms in an old house that had been split into three apartments for students and other people without a lot of money.
One of the nicest aspects of the house was the attached vacant lot. A large tree had been cut down a year or two past; the stump remained beside the driveway. I sat cross-legged on that stump, reading or writing, any time it wasn't raining. For whatever reason, it was what my soul needed.
You'll find that stump in "The Hunting Ground." You'll also find an accurate description of a neighborhood of Durham, NC, just north of Duke's East Campus. And you'll find a part of me; but I emphasize, only a small part.
The patrol car's tires hissed on the warm asphalt as it pulled to the curb beside Lorne. "What you up to, snake?" asked the square-bodied policeman. The car's rumbling idle and the whirr of its air conditioner through the open window filled the evening. Lorne smiled and nodded the lighted tip of his cigarette. "Sitting on a stump in my yard, watching cops park on the wrong side of the street. What're you up to, Ben?" Instead of answering, the policeman looked hard at his friend. They were both in their late twenties; the man in the car stocky and dark with a close-cropped mustache; Lorne slender, his hair sand-colored and falling across his neck brace. "Hurting, snake?" Ben asked softly.
"Shit, four years is enough to get used to anything," the thinner man said. Though Lorne's eyes were on the chime tower of the abandoned Baptist church a block down Rankin Street, his mind was lost in the far past. "You know, some nights I sit out here for a while instead of going to bed."
Three cars in quick succession threw waves of light and sound against the rows of aging houses. One blinked its high beams at the patrol car briefly, blindingly. "Bastard," Ben grumbled without real anger. "Well, back to the war against crime." His smile quirked. "Better than the last war they had us fighting, hey?"
Lorne finished his cigarette with a long drag. "Hell, I don't know, sarge. How many jobs give you a full pension after two years?"
"See you, snake."
"See you, sarge."
The big cruiser snarled as Ben pulled back into the traffic lane and turned at the first corner. The city was on a system of neighborhood police patrols, an attempt to avoid the anonymous patrolling that turned each car into a miniature search and destroy mission. The first night he sat on the stump beside his apartment, Lorne had sworn in surprise to see that the face peering from the curious patrol car was that of Ben Gresham, his squad leader during the ten months and nineteen days he had carried an M60 in War Zone C.
And that was the only past remaining to Lorne.
The back door of Jenkins' house banged shut on its spring. A few moments later heavy boots began scratching up the gravel of the common drive. Lorne's seat was an oak stump, three feet in diameter. Instead of trying to turn his head, he shifted his whole body around on the wood. Jenkins, a plumpish, half-bald man in his late sixties, lifted a pair of canned Budweisers. "Must get thirsty out here, warm as it is."
"It's always thirsty enough to drink good beer," Lorne smiled. "I'll share my stump with you."They sipped for a time without speaking. Mrs. Purefoy, Jenkins' widowed sister and a matronly Baptist, kept house for him. Lorne gathered that while she did not forbid her brother to drink an occasional beer, neither did she provide an encouragingly social atmosphere.
"I've seen you out here at 3 a.m.," the older man said. "What'll you do when the weather turns cold?"
"Freeze my butt for a while," Lorne answered. He gestured his beer toward his dark apartment on the second floor of a house much like Jenkins'."Sit up there with the light on. Hell, there's lots of VA hospitals, I'vebeen in lots of them. If North Carolina isn't warm enough, maybe they'd find me one in Florida." He took another swallow and said, "I just sleep better in the daytime, is all. Too many ghosts around at night."
Jenkins turned quickly to make sure of the smile on the younger man's face. It flashed at his motion."Not quite that sort of ghost," Lorne explained. "The ones I bring with me…"And he kept his smile despite the sizzle of faces in the white fire sudden in his mind. The noise of popping, boiling flesh faded and he went on, "There was something weird going on last night, though-" he glanced at his big Japanese wristwatch-"well, damn early this morning."
"A Halloween ghost with a white sheet?" Jenkins suggested.
"Umm, no, down at the church," said Lorne, fumbling his cigarettes out. Jenkins shrugged refusal and the dart of butane flame ignited only one."The tower there was-I don't know, I looked at it and it seemed to be vibrating. No sound, though, and then a big red flash without any sound either. I thought sure it'd caught fire, but it was just a flash and everything was back to normal. Funny. You know how you hold your fingers over a flashlight and it comes through, kind of? Well, the flash was like that, only through a stone wall."
"I never saw anything like that," Jenkins agreed. "Old church doesn't seem the worse for it, though. It'll be ready to fall down itself before the courts get all settled about who owns it, you know."
"Umm?"
"Fellowship Baptist built a new church half a mile north of here, more parking, and anyhow, it was going to cost more to repair that old firetrap than it would to build a new one." Jenkins grinned. "Mable hasn't missed a Sunday in forty years, so I heard all about it.
The city bought the old lot for a boys' club or some such fool thing-I want to spit every time I think of my property taxes, I do-but it turns out the Rankins, that's who the street's named after too, they'd given the land way back before the Kaiser's War. Damn if some of them weren't still around to sue to get the lot back if it wasn't going to be a church anymore. So that was last year, and it's like to be a few more before anybody puts money into tearing the old place down."
"From the way it's boarded up and padlocked, I figured it must have been a reflection I saw," Lorne admitted. "But it looked funny enough," he added sheepishly, "that I took a walk down there last night."
Jenkins shrugged and stood up. He had the fisherman's trick of dropping the pull tab into his beer before drinking any. Now it rattled in the bottom. "Well," he said, picking up Lorne's can as well, "it's bed time for me, I suppose. You better get yourself off soon or the bugs'll carry you away."
"Thanks for the beer and the company," Lorne said. "One of these nights I'll bring down an ice chest and we'll really tie one on."
Lorne's ears followed the old man back, his boots a friendly, even sound in the warm April darkness. A touch of breeze caught the wisteria hedge across the street and spread its sweetness, diluted, over Lorne. He ground out his cigarette and sat quietly, letting the vines breathe on him. Jenkins' garbage can scrunched open and one of the empties echoed into it. The other did not fall. "What the hell?" Lorne wondered aloud. But there was something about the night, despite its urban innocence, that brought up memories from past years more strongly than ever before. In a little while Lorne began walking. He was still walking when dawn washed the fiery pictures from his mind and he returned to his apartment to find three police cars parked in the street.
The two other tenants stored their cars in the side yard of the apartment house. Lorne had stepped between them when he heard adwoman scream, "That's him! Don't let him get away!"
Lorne turned. White-haired Mrs. Purefoy and a pair of uniformed policemen faced him from the porch of Jenkins' house. The younger man had his revolver half-drawn. A third uniformed man, Ben, stepped quickly around from the back of the house. "I'm not going anywhere but to bed," Lorne said, spreading his empty hands. He began walking toward the others. "Look, what's the matter?"
The oldest, heaviest of the policemen took the porch steps in a leap and approached Lorne at a barely restrained trot. He had major's pips on his shoulder straps. "Where have you been, snake?" Ben asked, but the major was between them instantly, growling, "I'll handle this, Gresham. Mr. Charles Lorne?"
"Yes," Lorne whispered. His body flashed hot, as though the fat policeman were a fire, a towering sheet of orange rippling with the speckles of tracers cooking off…
"… and at any time during the questioning you may withdraw your consent and thereafter remain silent. Do you understand, Mr. Lorne?"
"Yes."
"Did you see Mr. Jenkins tonight?"
"Uh-huh. He came out-when did you leave me, Ben? 10:30?" Lorne paused to light another cigarette. His flame wavered like the blade of a kris. "We each drank a beer, shot the bull. That's all. What happened?"
"Where did you last see Mr. Jenkins?"
Lorne gestured. "I was on the stump. He walked around the back of the house-his house. I guess I could see him. Anyway, I heard him throw the cans in the trash and… that's all."
"Both cans?" Ben broke in despite his commander's scowl.
"No, you're right-just one. And I didn't hear the door close. It's got a spring that slams it like a one-oh-five going off, usually. Look, what happened?"
There was a pause. Ben tugged at a corner of his mustache. Low sunlight sprayed Lorne through the trees. Standing, he looked taller than his six feet, a knobbly staff of a man in wheat jeans and a green-dyed T-shirt. The shirt had begun to disintegrate in the years since it was issued to him on the way to the war zone. The brace was baby-flesh pink. It made him look incongruously bullnecked, alien.
"He could have changed clothes," suggested the young patrolman. He had holstered his weapon but continued to toy with the butt.
"He didn't," Ben snapped, the signs of his temper obvious to Lorne if not to the other policemen. "He's wearing now what he had on when I left him."
"We'll take him around back," the major suddenly decided. In convoy, Ben and the other, nervous, patrolman to either side of Lorne, and the major bringing up the rear, they crossed into Jenkins' yard following the steep downslope. Mrs. Purefoy stared from the porch. Beneath her a hydrangea bush graded its blooms red on the left, blue on the right, with the carefully tended acidity of the soil. It was a mirror for her face, ruddy toward the sun and gray with fear in shadow.
"What's the problem?" Lorne wondered aloud as he viewed the back of the house. The trash can was open but upright, its lid lying on the smooth lawn beside it. Nearby was one of the Budweiser empties. The other lay alone on the bottom of the trash can. There was no sign of Jenkins himself.
Ben's square hand indicated an arc of spatters six to eight feet high, black against the white siding. "They promised us a lab team but hell, it's blood, snake. You and me've seen enough to recognize it. Mrs. Purefoy got up at four, didn't find her brother. I saw this when I checked and…" He let his voice trail off.
"No body?" Lorne asked. He had lighted a fresh cigarette. The gushing flames surrounded him.
"No."
"And Jenkins weighs what? 220?" He laughed, a sound as thin as his wrists. "You'd play hell proving a man with a broken neck ran off with him, wouldn't you?"
"Broke? Sure, we'll believe that!" gibed the nervous patrolman.
"You'll believeme, meatball!" Ben snarled."He broke it and he carried me out of a fucking burning shithook while our ammo cooked off. And by God-"
"Easy, sarge," Lorne said quietly. "If anybody needs shooting, I'll borrow a gun and do it myself."
The major flashed his scowl from one man to the other. His sudden uncertainty was as obvious as the flag pin in his lapel: Lorne was now a veteran, not an aging hippy.
"I'm an outpatient at the VA hospital," Lorne said, seeing his chance to damp the fire."Something's fucking up some nerves and they're trying to do something about it there. Wish to hell they'd do it soon."
"Gresham," the major said, motioning Ben aside for a low-voiced exchange. The third policeman had gone red when Ben snapped at him. Now he was white, realizing his mortality for the first time in his twenty-two years.
Lorne grinned at him."Hang loose, turtle. Neither Ben or me ever killed anybody who didn't need it worse than you do."
The boy began to tremble.
"Mr. Lorne," the major said, his tone judicious but not hostile, "we'll be getting in touch with you later. And if you recall anything, anything at all that may have bearing on Mr. Jenkins' disappearance, call us at once."
Lorne's hands nodded agreement. Ben winked as the lab van arrived, then turned away with the others.
Lorne's pain was less than usual, but his dreams awakened him in a sweat each time he dropped off to sleep. When at last he switched on the radio, the headline news was that three people besides Jenkins had disappeared during the night, all of them within five blocks of Lorne's apartment.
The air was very close, muffling the brilliance of the stars. It was Friday night and the roar of southbound traffic sounded from Donovan Avenue a block to the east. The three northbound lanes of Jones Street, the next one west of Rankin, were not yet as clotted with cars as they would be later at night, but headlights there were a nervous darting through the houses and trees whenever Lorne turned on his stump to look. Rankin Street lay quietly between, lighted at alternate blocks by blue globes of mercury vapor. It was narrow, so that cars could not pass those parked along the curb without slowing, easing; a placid island surrounded by modern pressures.
But no one had disappeared to the east of Donovan or the west of Jones.
Lorne stubbed out his cigarette in the punky wood of the stump. It was riddled with termites and sometimes he pictured them, scrabbling through the darkness. He hated insects, hated especially the grubs and hidden things, the corpse-white termites… but he sat on the stump above them. A perversely objective part of Lorne's mind knew that if he could have sat in the heart of a furnace like the companions of Daniel, he would have done so.
From the blocky shade of the porch next door came the creak of springs: Mrs. Purefoy, shifting her weight on the cushions of the old wing-back chair. In the early evening Lorne had caught her face staring at a parlor window, her muscles flat as wax. As the deeper darkness blurred and pooled, she had slipped out into its cover. Lorne felt her burning eyes, knowing that she would never forgive him for her brother's disappearance, not if it were proven that Jenkins had left by his own decision. Lorne had always been a sinner to her; innocence would not change that.
Another cigarette. Someone else was watching. A passing car threw Lorne's angled shadow forward and across Jenkins' house. Lorne's guts clenched and his fingers crushed the unlit cigarette. Light. Twelve men in a rice paddy when the captured flare bursts above them. The pop-pop-pop of a gun far off, and the splashes columning around Lt. Burnes "Christ!"Lorne shouted, standing with an immediacy that laced pain through his body. Something was terribly wrong in the night. The lights brought back memories, but they quenched the real threat that hid in the darkness. Lorne knew what he was feeling, knew that any instant a brown face would peer out of a spider hole behind an AK-47 or a mine would rip steel pellets down the trail…
He stopped, forcing himself to sit down again. If it was his time, there was nothing he could do for it. A fresh cigarette fitted between his lips automatically and the needle-bright lighter focused his eyes.
And the watcher was gone.
Something had poised to kill Lorne, and had then passed on without striking. It was as unnatural as if a wall collapsing on him had separated in midair to leave him unharmed. Lorne's arms were trembling, his cigarette tip an orange blur. When Ben's cruiser pulled in beside him, Lorne was at first unable to answer the other man's, "Hey, snake."
"Jesus, sarge," Lorne whispered, smoke spurting from his mouth and nostrils. "There's somebody out here and he's abad fucker."
Carrier noise blatted before the car radio rapped a series of numbers and street names. Ben knuckled his mustache until he was sure his own cruiser was not mentioned. "Yeah, he's a bad one. Another one gone tonight, a little girl from three blocks down. Went to the store to trade six empties and a dime on a coke. Christ, I saw her two hours ago, snake. The bottles we found, the kid we didn't… Seen any little girls?"
There was an upright shadow in front of Ben's radio: a riot gun, clipped to the dashboard. "Haven't seen anything but cars, sarge. Lots of police cars."
"They've got an extra ten men on," Ben agreed with a nod."We went over the old Baptist church a few minutes ago. Great TAC Squad work. Nothing. Damn locks were rusted shut."
"Think the Baptists've taken up with baby sacrifice?" Lorne chuckled.
"Shit, there's five bodies somewhere. If the bastard's loading them in the back of a truck, you'd think he'd spread his pickups over a bit more of an area, wouldn't you?"
"Look, baby, anybody who packed Jenkins around on his back-I sure don't want to meet him."
"Don't guess Jenkins did either," Ben grunted. "Or the others."
"PD to D-5," the radio interrupted.
Ben keyed his microphone. "Go ahead."
"10-25 Lt. Cooper at Rankin and Duke."
"10-4, 10-76," Ben replied, starting to return the mike to its holder.
"D-5, acknowledge," the receiver ordered testily.
"Goddamn fucker!" Ben snarled, banging the instrument down. "Sends just about half the fucking time!"
"Keep a low profile, sarge," Lorne murmured, but even had he screamed, his words would have been lost in the boom of exhaust as Ben cramped the car around in the street, the left wheels bumping over the far curb. Then the accelerator flattened and the big car shot toward the rendezvous.
In Viet Nam, Lorne had kept his death wish under control during shelling by digging in and keeping his head down. Now he stood and went inside to his room. After a time, he slept. If his dreams were bright and tortured, then they always were…
"Sure, you knew Jackson," Ben explained, the poom-poom-poom of his engine a live thing in the night."He's the blond shit who… didn't believe you'd broken your neck. Yesterday morning."
"Small loss, then," Lorne grinned. "But you watch your own ass, hear? If there's nobody out but cops, there's going to be more cops than just Jackson disappearing."
"Cops and damned fools," Ben grumbled."When I didn't see you out here on my first pass, I thought maybe you'd gotten sense enough to stay inside."
"I was going to. Decided… oh, hell. What's the box score now?"
"Seven gone. Seven for sure," the patrolman corrected himself. "One got grabbed in the time he took to walk from his girl's front porch back to his car. That bastard's lucky, but he's crazy as hell if he thinks he'll stay that lucky."
"He's crazy as hell," Lorne agreed. A spring whispered from Jenkins' porch and Lorne bobbed the tip of his cigarette at the noise."She's not doing so good either. All last night she was staring at me, and now she's at it again."
"Christ," Ben muttered. "Yeah, Major Hooseman talked to her this morning. You're about the baddest man ever, leading po' George into smoking and drinking and late hours before you killed him."
"Never did get him to smoke," Lorne said, lighting Ben's cigarette and another for himself. "Say, did Jackson smoke?"
"Huh? No." Ben frowned, staring at the closed passenger-side windows and their reflections of his instruments. "Yeah, come to think, he did. But never in uniform, he had some sort of thing about that."
"He sheered off last night when I lit a cigarette," Lorne said. "No, not Jackson-the other one. I just wondered…"
"You saw him?" Ben's voice was suddenly sharp, the hunter scenting prey.
Lorne shook his head. "I just felt him. But he was there, baby."
"Just like before they shot us down," the policeman said quietly. "You squeezing my arm and shouting over the damn engines 'They're waiting for us, they're waiting for us!' And not a fucking thing I could do-I didn't order the assault and the captain sure wasn't going to call it off because my machine gunner said to. But you were right, snake."
"The flames…" Lorne whispered, his eyes unfocused.
"And you're a dumb bastard to have done it, but you carried me out of them. It never helped us a bit that you knew when the shit was about to hit the fan. But you're a damn good man to have along when it does."
Lorne's muscles trembled with memory. Then he stood and laughed into the night. "You know, sarge, in twenty-seven years I've only found one job I was any good at. I didn't much like that one, and anyhow-the world doesn't seem to need killers."
"They'll always need us, snake," Ben said quietly. "Some times they won't admit it." Then, "Well, I think I'll waste some more gas."
"Sarge-" The word hung in the empty darkness. There was engine noise and the tires hissing in the near distance and-nothing else."Sarge, Mrs. Purefoy was on her porch a minute ago and she didn't go inside. But she's not there now."
Ben's five-cell flashlight slid its narrow beam across the porch: the glider, the wing-back chair. On the far railing, a row of potted violets with a gap for the one now spilled on the boards as if by someone vaulting the rail but dragging one heel…
"Didn't hear it fall," the policeman muttered, clacking open the car door. The dome light spilled a startling yellow pool across the two men. As it did so, white motion trembled half a block down Rankin Street.
"Fucker!" Ben said. "He couldn't jump across the street, he threw something so it flashed." Ben was back in the car.
Lorne squinted, furious at being blinded at the critical instant."Sarge, I'll swear to God he headed for the church." Lorne strode stiffly around the front of the vehicle and got in on the passenger side.
"Mother-fuck!"the stocky policeman snarled, dropping the microphone that had three times failed to get him a response. He reached for the shift lever, looked suddenly at Lorne as the slender man unclipped the shotgun. "Where d'ye thinkyou're going?"
"With you."
Ben slipped the transmission into Drive and hung a shrieking U-turn in the empty street. "The first one's birdshot, the next four are double-ought buck," he said flatly.
Lorne jacked the slide twice, chambering the first round and then shucking it out the ejector. It gleamed palely in the instrument light. "Don't think we're going after birds," he explained.
Ben twisted across the street and bounced over the driveway cut. The car slammed to a halt in the small lot behind and shielded by the bulk of the old church. It was a high, narrow building with two levels of boarded windows the length of the east and west sides; the square tower stood at the south end. At some time after its construction, the church had been faced with artificial stone. It was dingy, a gray mass in the night with a darkness about it that the night alone did not explain.
Ben slid out of the car. His flash touched the small door to the right of the tower. "Nothing wrong with the padlock," Lorne said. It was a formidable one, set in a patinaed hasp to close the church against vandals and derelicts.
"They were all locked tight yesterday, too," the patrolman said. "He could still be getting in one of those windows. We'll see." He turned to the trunk of the car and opened it, holding his flashlight in the crook of his arm so his right hand could be free for his drawn revolver.
Lorne's quick eyes scanned the wall above them. He bent back at the waist instead of tilting his head alone. "Got the key?" he asked.
The stocky man chuckled, raising a pair of folding shovels, army surplus entrenching tools. "Keep that corn-sheller ready," he directed, holstering his own weapon. He locked the blade of one shovel at 90° to the shaft and set it on top of the padlock. The other, still folded, cracked loudly against the head of the first and popped the lock open neatly. "Field expedients, snake," Ben laughed. "If we don't find anything, we can just shut the place up again and nobody'll know the difference."
He tossed the shovels aside and swung open the door. The air that puffed out had the expected mustiness of a long-closed structure with a sweetish overtone that neither man could have identified. Lorne glanced around the outside once more, then followed the patrolman within. The flames in his mind were very close.
"Looks about like it did last night," Ben said.
"And last year, I'd guess." The wavering oval of the flashlight picked over the floor. The hardwood was warping, pocked at frequent intervals by holes.
"They unbolted the old pews when they moved," Ben explained. "Took the stained glass too, since the place was going to be torn down."
The nave was a single narrow room running from the chancel in the north to the tower which had held the organ pipes and, above, the chimes. The main entrance was by a side aisle, through double doors in the middle of the west wall. The interior looked a gutted ruin.
"You checked the whole building?" Lorne asked. The pulpit had been ripped away. The chancel rail remained though half-splintered, apparently to pass the organ and altar. Fragments of wood, crumpled boxes, and glass littered the big room.
"The main part. We didn't have the key to the tower and the major didn't want to bust in." Ben took another step into the nave and kicked at a stack of old bulletins.
White heat, white fire-"Ben, did you check the ceiling when you were here last night?"
"Huh?" The narrow Gothic vault was blackness forty feet above the ground. Ben's flashlight knifed upward across painted plaster to the ribbed and paneled ceiling that sloped to the main beam. And-"Jesus!"
A large cocoon was tight against the roof peak. It shimmered palely azure, but the powerful light thrust through to the human outline within. Long shadows quivered on the wood, magnifying the trembling of the policeman's wrist as the beam moved from the cocoon to another beside it, to the third "Seven of the fuckers!" Ben cried, taking another step and slashing the light to the near end of the room where the south wall closed the inverted V of the ceiling. Above the door to the tower was the baize screen of the pipe loft. The cloth fluttered behind Mrs. Purefoy, who stood stiffly upright twenty feet in the air. Her face was locked in horror, framed by her tousled white hair. Both arms were slightly extended but were stone-rigid within the lace-fringed sleeves of her dress.
"She-" Lorne began, but as he spoke and Ben's hand fell to the butt of his revolver, Mrs. Purefoy began to fall, tilting a little in a rustle of skirts. Beneath the crumpled edge of the baize curtain, spiked on the beam of Ben's flashlight, gleamed the head and foreclaws of what had been clutching the woman.
The eyes glared like six-inch opals, fierce and hot in a dead-white exoskeleton.
The foreclaws clicked sideways. As though they had cocked a spring, the whole flat torso shot down at Ben.
An inch long and scuttling under a rock, it might have passed for a scorpion, but this lunging monster was six feet long without counting the length of the tail arced back across its body. Flashing legs, flashing body armor, and the fluid-jeweled sting that winked as Lorne's finger twitched in its killer's reflex Lorne's body screamed at the recoil of the heavy charge. The creature spun as if kicked in midair, smashing into the floor a yard from Ben instead of on top of the policeman. The revolver blasted, a huge yellow bottle-shape flaring from the muzzle. The bullet ripped away a window shutter because a six-inch pincer had locked Ben's wrist. The creature reared onto the back two pairs of its eight jointed legs. Lorne stepped sideways for a clear shot, the slide of his weapon slick-snacking another round into the chamber. On the creature's white belly was a smeared asterisk-the load of buckshot had ricocheted off, leaving a trail like wax on glass.
Ben clubbed his flashlight. It cracked harmlessly between the glowing eyes and sprang from his hand. The other claw flashed to Ben's face and trapped it, not crushingly but hard enough to immobilize and start blood-trails down both cheeks. The blades of the pincer ran from nose to hairline on each side.
Lorne thrust his shotgun over Ben's right shoulder and fired point-blank. The creature rocked back, jerking a scream from the policeman as the claws tightened. The lead struck the huge left eye and splashed away, dulling the opal shine. The flashlight still glaring from the floor behind the creature silhouetted its sectioned tail as it arched above the policeman's head. The armed tip plunged into the base of his neck. Ben stiffened.
Lorne shouted and emptied his shotgun. The second dense red bloom caught like a strobe light the dotted line of blood droplets joining Ben's neck to the withdrawn injector. A claw seized Lorne's waist in the rolling echo of the shotgun blasts. His gunbutt cracked on the creature's armor, steel sparking as it slid off. The extending pincer brushed the shotgun aside and clamped over Lorne's face, half-shielding from him the sight of the rising sting.
Then it smashed on Lorne's neck brace, and darkness exploded over him in a flare of coruscant pain.
The oozing ruin of Mrs. Purefoy's face stared at Lorne through its remaining eye when he awoke. Everything swam in blue darkness except for one bright blur. He blinked and the blur suddenly resolved into a streetlight glaring up through a shattered board. Lorne's lungs burned and his stiffness seemed more than even unconsciousness and the pain skidding through his nerve paths could explain. He moved his arm and something clung to its surface; the world quivered.
Lorne was hanging from the roof of the church in a thin, transparent sheath. Mrs. Purefoy was a yard away, multiple wrappings shrouding her corpse more completely. With a strength not far from panic, Lorne forced his right fist into the bubble around him. The material, extruded in broad swathes by the creature rather than as a loom of threads, sagged but did not tear. The clear azure turned milky under stress and sucked in around Lorne's wrist.
He withdrew his hand. The membrane passed some oxygen but not enough for an active man. Lorne's hands patted the outside of his pockets finding, as he had expected, nothing with a sharp edge. He had not recently bitten off his thumbnails. Thrusting against the fire in his chest, he brought his left hand in front of his body. With a fold of the cocoon between each thumb and index finger, he thrust his hands apart. A rip started in the white opacity beneath his right thumb. Air, clean and cool, jetted in.
"Oh, Jesus," Lorne muttered, even the pain in his body forgotten as he widened the tear upwards to his face. The cocoon was bobbing on a short lead, rotating as the rip changed its balance. Lorne could see that he had become ninth in the line of hanging bodies, saved from their paralysis by the chance of his neck brace. Ben, his face blurred by the membrane holding him next to Lorne, had been less fortunate.
Ten yards from where Lorne hung and twenty feet below the roof beam, the baize curtain of the pipe loft twitched. Lorne froze in fearful immobility.
The creature had been able to leap the width of a street carrying the weight of an adult; its strength must be as awesome as was the rigidity of its armor. Whether or not it could drive its sting through Lorne's brace, it could assuredly rip him to collops if it realized he was awake.
The curtain moved again, the narrow ivory tip of a pincer lifting it slightly. The creature was watching Lorne.
Ben carried three armor-piercing rounds in his. 357 Magnum for punching through car doors. Lorne tried to remember whether the revolver had remained in Ben's hand as he fell. There was no image of that in Lorne's mind, only the torchlike muzzle blasts of his own shotgun. Slim as it was, his only hope was that the jacketed bullets would penetrate the creature's exoskeleton though the soft buckshot had not.
Lorne twisted his upper torso out of the hole for a closer look at Ben, making his own cocoon rock angrily. The baize lifted further. The streetlight lay across it in a pale band. Why didn't the creature scuttle out to finish the business?
Brief motion waked a flash of scintillant color from the pipe loft. The curtain flapped closed as if a volley of shots had ripped through it. Lorne recognized the reflex: the panic of a spider when a stick thrusts through its web. Not an object, though; the light itself, weak as it was, had slapped the creature back.
Ben's bright flashlight had not stopped it when necessity drove, but the monster must have felt pain at human levels of illumination. Its eyes were adapted to starlight or the glow of a sun immeasurably fainter than that of Earth. "Where did you come from, you bastard?" Lorne whispered.
Light. It gave him an idea and he fumbled out his butane lighter, adjusting it to a maximum flame. The sheathes were relatively thin over the victims' faces to aid transpiration. At the waist, though, where a bulge showed Ben's arm locked to his torso, the membrane was thick enough to be opaque in the dim light. Lorne bent dangerously over, cursing the stiffness of his neck brace. Holding the inch-high jet close, he tried to peer through Ben's cocoon. Unexpectedly the fabric gave a little and Lorne bobbed forward, bringing the flame in contact with the material sheathing Ben.
The membrane sputtered, kissing Lorne's hand painfully. He jerked back and the lighter flicked away. It dropped, cold and silent until it cracked on the floor forty feet below. Despite the pattern of light over it, the curtain to the loft was shifting again. Lorne cursed in terror.
A line of green fire sizzled up the side of Ben's cocoon from the point at which the flame had touched it. The material across his face flared. The policeman gave no sign of feeling his skin curl away. The revolver in his hand winked green.
Lorne screamed. His own flexible prison lurched and sagged like heated polyethylene. Ben was wrapped in a cancerous hell that roared and heaved against the roofbeams as a live thing. Green tongues licked yellow-orange flames from the dry wood as well. Lorne's cocoon and that to the other side of Ben were deforming in the furnace heat. Another lurch and Lorne had slipped twenty feet, still gripped around the waist in a sack of blue membrane. He was gyrating like a top.
The loft curtain had twitched higher each time it spun past his vision.
The bottom of Ben's cocoon burned away and he plunged past Lorne, face upward and still afire. Bone crunched as he hit. The body rebounded a few inches to fall again on its face. The roar of the flames muffled Lorne's wail of rage. His own elongated capsule began to flow. Flames grasped at Lorne's support. Before they could touch the sheathing, the membrane pulled a last few inches and snapped like an overstretched rubber band. The impact of the floor smashed Lorne's jaw against his neck brace, grinding each tortured vertebra against the next. He did not lose consciousness, but the shock paralyzed him momentarily as thoroughly as the creature's sting could have done.
Bathed in green light and the orange of the blazing roof panels, the scorpion-thing thrust its thorax into the nave. It walking legs gripped the flat surface, dimpling the plaster. The creature turned upward toward the fire, three more cocoons alight and their hungry flames lapping across the beams. Then, parti-colored by the illumination, its legs shifted and the opal eyes trained on Lorne. The light must be torture to it, muffling in indecision its responses, but it was about to act.
A small form wrapped in a flaming shroud dropped to thump the floor beside Lorne. His arms would move again. He used them to strip the remaining sheathing from his legs. It clung as the heat of the burning corpse began to melt the material. Something writhed from a crackling tumor on the child's neck. The thing was finger-long and seemed to paw the air with a score of tiny legs; its opalescent eyes proved its parentage. The creature brought more than paralysis to its victims: it was a gravid female.
Green flame touched the larva. It burst in a pustulant smear.
The adult went mad. Its legs shot it almost the length of the nave to rebound from a sidewall in a cloud of plaster. The creature's horizontally flattened tail ruddered it instinctively short of the fire as it leapt upward to the roof peak. It clung there in pale horror against the wood, eyes on the advancing flames. Three more bodies fell, splashing like ginkgo fruits.
Lorne staggered upright. The fire hammered down at him without bringing pain. His body had no feeling whatever. Ben's hair had burned. His neck and scalp were black where skin remained, red where it had cracked open to the muscle beneath. The marbled background showed clearly the tiny, pallid hatchling trying to twist across it.
Lorne's toe brushed the larva onto the floor. His boot heel struck it, struck again and twisted. Purulent ichor spurted between the leather and the boards. Lorne knelt. In one motion he swung Ben across his shoulders and stood, just as he had after their helicopter had nosed into the trees and exploded. Logic had been burned out of Lorne's mind, leaving only a memory of friendship. He did not look up. As his mechanical steps took him and his burden through the door they had entered, a shadow wavered across them. The creature had sprung back into the loft.
Lorne stumbled to his knees in the parking lot. The church had been rotten and dry. Orange flames fluffed through the roof in several places, thrusting corkscrews of sparks into the night sky. Twelve feet of roof slates thundered into the nave. Flame spewed up like a secondary explosion. There were sirens in the night.
Without warning, the east facade of the tower collapsed into the parking lot. Head-sized chunks of Tennessee-stone smashed at the patrol car, one of them missing Lorne by inches. He looked up, blank-eyed, his hands lightly touching the corpse of his friend. Of its own volition, the right hand traced down Ben's shoulder to the raw flesh of his elbow. The tower stairs spiraled out of the dust and rubble, laid bare to the steel framework when the wall fell. On the sagging floor of the pipe loft rested a machine like no other thing on Earth, and the creature was inside it. Tubes of silvery metal rose cradle-form from a base of similar metal. The interstices were not filled with anything material, but the atmosphere seemed to shiver, blurring the creature's outline.
And Lorne's hand was unwrapping Ben's stiff fingers from the grips of his revolver.
Lorne stood again, his left hand locking his right on the butt of the big magnum. He was familiar with the weapon: it was the one Ben had carried in Nam, the same tool he had used for five of his thirteen kills. It would kill again tonight.
Even in the soaring holocaust the sharp crack of Lorne's shot was audible. Lorne's forearms rocked up as a unit with the recoiling handgun. The creature lurched sideways to touch the shimmering construct around it. A red surface discharge rippled across the exoskeleton from the point of contact. Lorne fired again. He could see the armor dull at his point of aim in the center of the thorax.
Again the creature jumped. Neither bullet had penetrated, but the splashing lead of the second cut an upright from the machine. The creature spun, extending previously unglimpsed tendrils from the region of its mouth parts. They flickered over a control plate in the base. Machinery chimed in response.
The shivering quickened. The machine itself and the thing it enclosed seemed to fade. Lorne thumb-cocked the magnum, lowered the red vertical of the front sight until it was even with the rear notch; the creature was a white blur beyond them. The gun bucked back hard when he squeezed; the muzzle blast was sharper, flatter, than before. The first of the armor-piercing bullets hit the creature between the paired tendrils. The exoskeleton surrounding them shattered like safety glass struck by a brick.
The creature straightened in silent agony, rising onto its hind legs with its tail lying rigidly against its back. Its ovipositor was fully extended, thumb-thick and six inches long.
"Was it fun to kill them, bug?" Lorne screamed. "Was it as much fun as this is?" His fourth shot slammed, dimpling a belly plate which then burst outward in an ugly gush of fluids. The creature's members clamped tightly about its spasming thorax. The tail lashed the uprights in red spurts. The machine was fading and the torn paneling of the loft was beginning to show through the dying creature's body.
There was one shot left in the cylinder and Lorne steadied his sights on the control plate. He had already begun taking up the last pressure when he stopped and lowered the muzzle. No, let it go home, whatever place or time that might be. Let its fellows see that Earth was not their hunting ground alone. And if they came back anyway-if they only would!
There was a flash as penetrating as the first microsecond of a nuclear blast. The implosion dragged Lorne off his feet and sucked in the flames so suddenly that all sound seemed frozen. Then both sidewalls collapsed into the nave and the ruins of the tower twisted down on top of them. In the last instant, the pipe loft was empty of all but memory.
A fire truck picked its way through the rubble in the parking lot. Its headlights flooded across the figure of a sandy-haired man wearing scorched clothing and a neck brace. He was kneeling beside a body, and the tears were bright on his face.
The Automatic Rifleman
Fritz Leiber is credited with developing the horror story with an urban setting. His Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series is more a parallel development to Robert E. Howard's work than it's a copy (compare Le Fanu's Carmilla with Stoker's Dracula for another case of "similar" not meaning "the same"). And for horror in an SF milieu, it'd be hard to better, say, "A Bad Day for Sales" or "A Pail of Air."
I stole this idea from Leiber's urban fantasy "The Automatic Pistol."
Well, it's not quite that simple. Vergil was regularly accused of stealing from Homer, to which he would reply, "Why don't you try it yourself? If you did, you'd understand that it's easier to filch Hercules' club than it is to steal a verse from Homer." But "The Automatic Rifleman" wouldn't exist in the form it does were it not for Leiber's literally seminal story.
If you like my work, go out and read everything Fritz Leiber wrote before, say, 1960. I don't know of a writer with a more varied and brilliant take on every subject he touched.
The story itself is a wish-fulfillment fantasy like a great deal of other horror fiction, some of it very good. The story posits the notion that things are in their present state because some external force is working to make them bad; in other words, the world's problems are not the result of mankind's own actions.
I wish I could really believe that was true.
Coster was waiting for them in the darkened room, hidden by the greater shadow of the couch. His face was as lean and hard-edged as the automatic rifle he held pointed at the door. "Where's the goddam light?" Penske muttered. He found the switch, threw it, and froze with his hand halfway down to the knife in his boot.
Davidson bumped into Penske from behind and cursed, her lips twisting into the sneer she kept ready when she was around the short man. "Move your-" she began before she saw why Penske had stopped. Then, without hesitation, she cried, "George, look out!"
"Too late," said Coster with a bailiff's smirk and the least motion of the rifle muzzle to bring it to the attention of George Kerr. The black man in suit and tie loomed behind his two companions. His eyes were open and apparently guileless, shuttering a mind that had already realized that the flimsy apartment walls would be no obstacle to rifle bullets. "But we're all friends here," Coster went on, his grin broadening.
"Then I suggest we all come in and discuss matters," said Kerr in a cultured voice, showing his bad front tooth as he spoke. His fingers touched Davidson's right elbow and halted the stealthy motion of her hand toward her open purse.
"Sure," said Coster, nodding, "but stay bunched in that corner, if you will." His head and not the rifle twitched a direction. "Until you're convinced of my good intentions, you'll be tempted to-put yourselves in danger. We don't want that."
"Who the hell are you?" Penske demanded, shuffling sideways as directed. An angry flush turned his face almost as dark as that of Kerr beside him.
"My name's Coster," the rifleman said. "Agfield told me where I'd find you."
Davidson whirled angrily toward Kerr. "I told you not to trust that bastard!" she said. "Somebody ought to take one of his basketballs and stuff it-"
"Dee, that's enough," the big man said, his eyes still on the rifleman. He had closed the hall door softly behind him. Nothing in his manner called attention to the pistol holstered in the small of his back.
"He said you could use a rifleman for what you had in mind," Coster amplified. "We're what you need."
"We?"asked Penske tautly. The muscles beneath his leather jacket were as rigid as the bones to which they were anchored, for he recognized even better than the others the menace of the weapon which covered them.
"Me," said Coster, "and him." His left forefinger tapped the gunbarrel where it projected from its wooden shroud. His right hand stayed firm on the rifle's angled handgrip, finger ready on the trigger.
Calmly, Kerr said, "Agfield doesn't know what we have in mind."His right hand was now loose at his side, no longer restraining Davidson.
"Sure he does," said the rifleman, flashing his tight-lipped grin again. "Kawanishi, the Japanese Prime Minister. And I'm here to make sure you get him."
For a moment, no one even breathed. Coster leaned forward, his right elbow still gripping the gunstock to his ribs. He said earnestly, "Look, if I were the police, would I be talking to you? The whole World Proletarian Caucus is right here, right in front of… us. And if it was trials, convictions, they were after-the evidence ison you, or at least outside in your car. You blew away a teller in La Prensa, and you've still got the gun, don't you? And the one that killed that little girl in Mason City?"
Davidson mumbled a curse and looked hot-eyed at Penske.
"But we're friends," Coster repeated. Very deliberately, he rotated the automatic rifle so that its muzzle brake pointed at the ceiling. The rubber butt rested on his thigh.
"Friends," said Kerr. "Then we should get comfortable." He took off his suit coat and turned, as deliberate as Coster, to drape it over the back of a chair. The grip of the big Colt was a square black silhouette against his light shirt.
Everyone eased a little. Coster laid the rifle across his knees, one hand still caressing the receiver of the weapon. Davidson and Penske both lit cigarettes, the latter by flicking the head of a kitchen match with his thumbnail. He tossed the wooden sliver toward a wastebasket. It missed, but he ignored it as it continued to smoulder on the cheap carpet.
Kerr took one of the straight chairs from the kitchen-dinette and sat backwards on it, facing in toward the living room and Coster. The pistol did not gouge at him that way. "Penske, why don't you bring things in from the van," he said.
The short man glowered, but his expression suddenly cleared and he walked to the door. "I'll knock when I want you to open," he said as he left the room.
Davidson moved over beside Kerr, her fingertips brushing the point of his shoulder."You sound very confident about your ability to use that gun," the big man said with a gesture toward the oddly shaped rifle. "But I don't know that I'd care to make plans based on something… suppositious."
Coster's tongue clicked in amusement. "Do you want references? Somebody who saw us put away Kennedy? Or King?"
Davidson snorted a puff of smoke. "You don't look like a fool," Kerr said.
"I'm not-not any longer," the rifleman replied. He shook his head as if to clear something from his hair. He went on, "What we've done doesn't matter. You won't believe me, and it doesn't matter. But if you have some place for a demonstration, we'll-demonstrate."
Kerr nodded. "That would be best," he said neutrally.
Coster suddenly turned and lowered the rifle again toward the door."Speaking of fools," he said, "your Mr. Penske-"
There was no knock. The door slammed back."All right you-"Penske shouted before he realized that the fat muzzle of the automatic rifle was centered on his breastbone. The swarthy man held a carbine waist high, his left hand locked on the curving 30-round magazine.
Obviously furious but with no more sound than his chair made clattering on the floor, Kerr strode toward the disconcerted Penske. With his left hand the black gripped the carbine and tugged the smaller man back within the room. Then his right hand slapped Penske's head against the wall. He stepped away, holding the carbine muzzle-down."And if you'd used it, you damned fool?"the big man demanded."If you'd brought the police down on us here, what chance would our plans have had then? What chance?"
"You didn't have to hit me," Penske said, not quite meeting Kerr's eyes.
Contemptuously, the black unloaded the carbine, tossing the magazine onto a stuffed chair and ejecting the round in the chamber. It winked against the carpet. "Get the things out of the van," he said.
Kerr had rented the furnished apartment a month before, but that was as far as preparations had gone. The can-opener beside the sink was broken and Penske, grumbling, had to hack their dinners open with his heavy-bladed dagger.
"If you were a real Green Beret, you could bite the lids off," Davidson gibed. "Shut the hell up!" the short man snarled. He caught Coster eying him as the rifleman spread baked beans one-handed on a slice of bread. "I'da'made it, no goddam doubt," Penske said defensively. "Only they had us doing sprints up and down the company street with sand in our packs. Some wise-ass clerk thinks it's funny to laugh at me. I knocked his teeth out, and the bastard's goddam lucky they hadn't issued us ammo. But the goddam government don't want anybody that'll really fight, so they busted me out."
"Makes a good story," Davidson said. "I think they caught him with his-"
"Dee!" Kerr said.
Penske's eyes unglazed and he slowly lowered his knife back onto the can of spaghetti. He hammered the hilt down with his palm, splashing the red sauce onto the table.
Despite their hostility, Davidson and Penske settled down to a desultory game of cribbage after dinner.
Kerr sat in the living room across from the rifleman. "I don't play games that you have to score," the big black said. "When I win, the whole world will know it. When I win, there won't be any polite Orientals pumping mercury into the sea because poisoning children is cheaper than not. There won't be any blue-shirted gestapo beating in their brothers' heads because the bankers say to. There won't be any more nuclear powerplants pouring out their deadliniess for a quarter-million years."
The rifleman smiled. He held a jelly glass he had filled with whiskey and had not diluted."There won't be any three-year-olds orphaned in La Prensa because their daddy was too slow emptying his money drawer."
"What are you here for?" Kerr demanded.
Coster's free hand played with his rifle. "Now? To kill a Japanese politician in America discussing import quotas." He swigged his drink.
Kerr leaned forward. "To show the rich that there is justice for the people?" he pressed.
"Human society's a funny thing," said the rifleman, staring at the reflection of the overhead light in his whiskey. "Very complex. But if it gets enough little thrusts, all in the same direction… lots of people hate lots of other people anyway. Someday enough people are going to hate enough other people that one of them is going to push the button. Then it all stops."
Kerr's lips tightened. "Bad as things are, I don't believe they've come to that pass yet. Nobody would gain by that."
"Right. Nobody would gain."
Penske and Davidson were arguing about the count. The dinette was blurry with cigarette smoke. Kerr stared for a moment at the ex-soldier, then said to Coster, "There'll be bodyguards, you know. Secret Service men."
"Bodyguards," Coster snorted. "Like Huey Long had? It was one of his guards who killed him, you know, a bullet ricocheting in the marble hallway. And when King Alexander was killed in Marseilles, the gunman ran right through a line of mounted gendarmes."
"I suppose you shot him, too?" Kerr said acidly. "Like Kennedy?"
Coster looked at the heavier man with an odd expression. "I wasn't there," he said. "That was in 1934. The man who did it used a pistol, yes, but there was an automatic rifle backing him up. If it had been needed." He finished his drink with a long swallow and said, "A push here, a push there…"
Kerr stood abruptly."It's been a long day for us," he said."Now that I've stopped seeing pavement, I'll go to bed. You can carry your things into the smaller bedroom, Coster. Penske fits the couch better, I think."
Coster nodded. "I don't have much," he said, toeing a canvas AWOL bag.
In the dinette, Davidson threw in her hand without a word. She followed Kerr into the larger bedroom, slamming the door behind them.
The rifleman walked over to the table, his weapon muzzle-down in his left hand. He poured a drink and raised it in an ironic salute."Cheers," he said to the brooding Penske. He drank and walked into the remaining bedroom without bothering to take his bag.
Penske drove with Davidson on the front seat beside him. Her short hair was dark except at the roots where it was growing in blond. Kerr and Coster looked at each other from side benches in the windowless back of the van.
Over his shoulder Penske said, "Ah, George… the guy who owns the farm, Jesse, I met him when I was at Bragg, see? Could be he won't be around and he's not gonna care what we're shooting, choppers, grenades, whatever. Only maybe you better stay in the back, you know? It'd be better if Jesse didn't, you know…"
"Jesse doesn't like his black brothers, is that it?" Kerr said easily. His face worked and he added, "Don't have much use fer a nigger 'cept to kick his black butt, that is."
"Well, George…" the short man mumbled. "We just needed a place to range in the guns…"
"That's all right, it's no fault of yours," Kerr said. "Or your friend's."He looked over at the rifleman."You see what they do, splitting natural allies so that they'd rather tear each other's throats out than both tear at their oppressors. Turning humans into beasts."
"Humans are beasts, of course," Coster said without emphasis. "Whether or not Darwin was right, he was convincing on that score. I think that's why the concept of werebeasts is so much less terrifying today than it was in the fifteenth century. We're all basically convinced that man-beasts are normal reality. Hieronymus Bosch and his constructs of part flesh, part metal… that I don't think we've outgrown. Yet."
"Is that all injustice means to you?" Davidson asked sharply. "That we're all beasts, so what? Did you just get out of your flying saucer or something?"
Coster looked at her, his fingers toying with the selector switch below his rifle's gunsight."Viewpoint, I suppose," he said. "But no, I'm human. Funny, I used to wonder what aliens… creatures from space, that is… would look like. I thought they might look just like you and me." He began to laugh brittlely.
No one in the van spoke again during the remainder of the drive.
After nearly an hour on the road, Penske pulled off on a farm track. A gate stopped the van immediately. The swarthy man jumped down, unhooked the chain, and tugged the sagging frame out of the way. As he got back in and slipped the van into gear, he explained, "Jesse said he'd loop it for me, not run it through the bars."
Penske pulled up just beyond the arc of the gate. He said to Davidson, "Go hook it shut. We don't want any a' the cows to get loose."
Davidson's eyes narrowed. "You opened it, you can shut it. Who the hell-"
"Look, bitch!" Penske said, his right hand curled by reflex into a fist, "You'll shake a leg or you'll-"
"Penske!"Kerr shouted, thrusting his torso over the seat and forcing the driver back without contact."What do you think we are, exploiters ourselves who treat women like furniture? Want to try that with me too, is that what you think?"
"George, I…" Penske began. He shook his head fiercely to hide the tears of frustration. Then he unlatched the door, almost falling out backwards in the process. He closed the gate. It was almost a minute before the short man got back into the van and drove on. There were three more gates in the long track between the highway and the pasture swale in which they finally halted. Penske opened and closed each gate himself without saying anything more.
In wet weather the swale drained into a creek more than three hundred yards from the van. The bank beyond the watercourse was steep but generally grassy. There was a bare patch in line with the axis of the swale. Bits of cardboard and metal there brightened the bullet-gouged bank. Other target material lay in riddled clumps at various distances along the way. There was some scattered cartridge brass, mostly. 22 caliber-centerfire empties had been picked up for reloading.
"The boys around here use it a lot," Penske said in satisfaction as he took cases out of the back of the van.
"The boys," Davidson snorted. "The Klan's more like it."
Penske looked at her without speaking or moving. He had just begun to load a magazine into a carbine. He looked back downrange after a moment.
Davidson swallowed, then bit at a knuckle. "I'll set some targets up," she said.
"That'll take rigging," Penske said without turning around. "You get the rest a' the guns loaded. Coster'n me'll rig the targets."
"Sure," she said, and she slid a box of miscellaneous empty containers over to the automatic rifleman.
Coster gripped the box with his left hand and his jutting hip bone. His other hand held the rifle at its balance. "All right," he said, "where do you want them?"
"I doubt you'll have to fight off the field mice," Kerr observed from the van. "You can leave the gun here and save the trouble of carrying it."
"No trouble," Coster said. He began walking down the swale.
Penske, carrying an armload of clothesline and plastic milk jugs, trotted along beside the rifleman. "You put a few a' those at one hundred and two hundred," he said. "Save a lot for the bank across the creek, though, 'cause that's where it's really gonna be at. We'll see if you can handle that thing'r not."
The smaller man stopped some fifty yards from the van. He dropped his load and pointed. A fence post and a metal engineer stake stood on opposite rims of the swale. "I'm gonna rig a moving target," he said. "You set up the bottles."
Both men worked quickly. By the time Coster had returned to the line of the posts, the shorter man joined him, unreeling clothesline behind him."Aw right," Penske said, wringing his hands with enthusiasm as they strode back to the firing line. "Aw right, now we just see how goddam good you are."
Coster said nothing.
On a blanket beside the van, Davidson had laid out half a dozen varied long arms. Kerr was still in the vehicle, either in deference to Penske's request or from a disinclination to be anywhere else. Penske had forgotten his shirt downrange. Sweat streaks trembled along valleys separating ridges of chest muscle. He picked up what looked like an ordinary autoloading rifle and checked its magazine before cradling the weapon in his left arm.
"We let the lady shoot, hey?" Penske said to Coster with a high-lipped grin. "Then you'n me try it."
The automatic rifleman shrugged.
Davidson passed Penske's reference with only a scowl. She picked up an M1 carbine and pointed it in the general direction of the nearest bottles. Her grip on the trim little weapon was fierce enough to whiten the skin across the tendons of her hands. She held the gunstock a good quarter-inch from her shoulder. The first shot was loud and metallic, startling even to those who were prepared for it.
"You don't wanna let it scare you," Penske said, reaching for the carbine.
"Go shove your head up your ass!" Davidson flared, snatching the weapon away with a clear willingness to empty it into the swarthy man. She whirled back to the targets and fired a long, savage volley as fast as she could jerk her trigger finger. When she paused, the muzzle had recoiled up to a 30° angle. None of the men spoke when she glared around fiercely. Squinting along the barrel, Davidson resumed fire more deliberately until the banana magazine was empty. Her brass spun off in flat arcs to the right. Once a puff of dirt halfway to the targets marked a shot. Davidson flung the carbine back onto the blanket and stalked into the van.
Penske started to say something but thought better of it. He grinned at Coster and raised his own rifle. Instead of a shot, there was a ripping five-round burst, the rifle emptying its own magazine as Penske held the trigger back. Dirt spouted around the bottles, though the last three shots had been slung skyward by the recoiling muzzle.
"Thought you had the only automatic rifle here, huh?" the short man crowed. "Converted this myself, same as one a' the M1s and the. 22 there. Not so special now, are you?"
"You only hit one bottle," Coster said. His left hand curled around the grip on the rifle's forearm.
"Only one?" Penske cried in a fury. "A man's a lot bigger target'n a goddam bottle!"
Metal clicked as Coster's forefinger slid forward the safety catch in his rifle's trigger guard. Speech crumbled into the shattering muzzle blasts of the automatic rifle.
Coster ignored the nearest targets. The bottles at 200, then 300, yards disintegrated in pluming earth. The weapon fired in short bursts of two and three rounds, the muzzle recovering momentarily between blasts to snuffle another target. When the bolt locked back on an empty magazine, there was nothing but dust and glass shards at either aiming point.
Coster's fingers relaxed on the handgrips. He extracted the magazine and began thumbing cartridges into it from a box on the ground. He looked sidelong at Penske.
"We'll try the moving one, wise guy," the shorter man said.
Behind them, Kerr had gotten out of the van. "What kind of gun is that?" he asked.
"M14E2,"Penske replied."The squad automatic version of the standard M14. Has pistolgrips and a straight-line stock. Made goddam few of 'em, too, before they switched from the fourteen to the sixteen."He looked at Coster."Hey, ain't that so?"
Coster shrugged and locked home his magazine. Heat waves danced from the tip of the barrel where metal was exposed to the air.
"Well, don't you even goddam know?" Penske demanded. "How'd you get that rifle, anyway?"
The rifleman looked at him."You'd better hope you never learn," he said. "Now, are we going to shoot guns or talk about them?"
"We'll shoot," the smaller man said fiercely. "We'll goddam shoot."He pointed to the gallon milk jug suspended beside the engineer stake. "One line's through the handle, the other's tied to it," he said. "When I pull this one-" he gestured with the loop of wire-core clothes line in his left-hand-" the jug runs to the other post. Don't sweat, I poured it full a' dirt so it'll show if you hit it. If you hit it."
"Then pull," Coster said, and braced himself. His knuckles were as white as Davidson's had been. His head, hunched low, looked more like that of a man trying to hide than one aiming.
Penske chuckled. "Won't hit nothing but air if you're that scared a' your weapon," he said. He tugged two-handed at the line bent around the fencepost. The jug spurted sideways and the first three bullets ripped it. Sandy loam sprayed from the torn plastic in all directions. The impacts spun the jug around its support line and the second burst caught it at the tip of its arc. Dirt flew again and both lines parted. The gun muzzle tracked the flying container, spiked it in the air, and then followed it down the swale, the bullets themselves kicking their target into a semblance of life.
Flying brass had driven Kerr back from where he stood to Coster's right. Now he massaged his left fist with his right palm, watching the rifleman reload methodically.
"That enough?" Coster asked. Kerr nodded.
Penske had silently begun to gather up the paraphernalia they had brought. Suddenly he stopped, staring at the empty cartridge box he held in his hand."You reloaded from this," he said, waving the box in Coster's face. "Last time."
"So?" said the rifleman. "You want me to pay you for them?"
"You stupid bastard!"the shorter man blazed. "This was. 30-'06 for my Remington there. It won'tfit a goddam M14. You need. 308!"
"Then I didn't use your ammunition after all," Coster said, backing a step. "I brought my own in my kit, you know." His foot tapped the AWOL bag gently.
"Let's see that goddam rifle," said Penske, lunging forward, and the safety clicked off with the muzzle only six inches from the bridge of his nose.
"Don't," said Coster very quietly.
Sullenly, the ex-soldier backed away."Somebody gimme a hand with this crap," he said, thrusting weapons back into their cases.
"We aren't rivals, you know," Coster said without lowering the M14. "I wasn't Oswald's rival either. If you want a man dead and he dies, what else matters?"
"Just shut the hell up, will you?" Davidson burst out unexpectedly.
The three men looked around in surprise. Davidson's fists were clenched at waist-height, her elbows splayed. After a moment Coster said, "All right." He dropped the muzzle of his rifle and began handing guns back into the van.
A mercury-vapor streetlight threw a line of saw teeth through the Venetian blinds to the wall above the couch. Penske lay there, fully clothed, watching the whorls which his cigarette smoke etched across the pattern. The apartment was still.
Penske took a last drag on his cigarette. Its yellow-orange glow was momentarily brighter than the blue of the streetlight. He ground the butt out in the dish with the others and the crumpled pack from which they had come. Then Penske swung his feet over the side of the couch and stood, his right hand silently drawing his knife from its sheath in the same motion. He glided across the worn carpet to the door of Coster's room.
For a moment the swarthy man waited with his ear pressed against the panel. There was no sound within. The door did not have a working latch; its hinges were nearly silent. Penske pulled the door open just enough to slip through into the pitch-dark bedroom. His whole body followed the knife as if he were a serpent and the blade was his questing tongue.
There was a metallic click from the bed, tiny and lethal as a cobra.
"The light switch is on the right," Coster said quietly. "Better flip it on. Carefully."
Penske's hand found the switch. The room was narrow. The bed lay along its axis, the foot of it pointing to the door. The M14 pointed down that same axis. Coster's index finger was within the trigger guard. The safety catch had clicked as it slid forward. The shorter man stared at the muzzle brake of the automatic rifle. He remembered the way bullets had shredded the earth-filled jug that morning. Now his blood and tissue and splinters of his bones would spray the inside of the door panel.
"Put your knife away," Coster said.
The shorter man only blinked.
"We're not here to kill you, Penske," said the automatic rifleman. His voice was calm, almost wheedling. "Put your knife away and close my door behind you. It'll all look different tomorrow. Kawanishi will be dead, and you'll have as much of the credit for it as you want."
Penske swallowed and began to back through the doorway. The gun muzzle waggled disapproval. "First the knife," Coster said.
The shorter man hunched over, his eyes on the rifle except for quick dips down to the strait boot sheath. He jabbed the point into the flesh above his ankle the first time he tried. At last he succeeded.
"Fine," said the rifleman. "You can go now."
Penske's face contorted with rage. "You bastard, you gotta sleep sometime!" he said.
Coster smiled like a skull. "Do we?"
The swarthy man slammed the door, turned, and jumped back before he realized that the figure hulking on the arm of the couch was Kerr. "What're you doing up?" Penske demanded in a husky whisper.
Kerr shrugged."Let's go out on the landing," he said."Dee's asleep. "But it was toward the rectangle of light around Coster's door that he nodded.
The second-floor apartment was served by an outside staircase. Its landing formed a small railed balcony, open to crisp air and the stars of early morning. Kerr waved Penske outside, then followed and swung the door closed behind them. The big man was barefoot, but he wore slacks and a shirt. The latter was unbloused to conceal his pistol.
Penske clenched his joined hands. "He can't shoot," he said in a low voice. "Not worth a damn."
"You could have fooled me, then," said Kerr. "What I saw this morning was pretty convincing."
"I tell you he's afraid of it!" Penske burst out. "The recoil, the noise even-he flinched every time Dee shot, and when he was shooting himself-I swear togod he kept his eyes shut!"
Kerr's fingers played at flaking paint from the bars of the railing. His complexion was richened to a true black in the wash of the streetlight. "It looked like that to me, too," he admitted, "but he hit everything he shot at. He couldn't have done that if-if you were right."
"Unless that goddam rifle was alive," said Penske under his breath. He gripped the railing with both hands. His eyes were focused on the cars parked in the lot beneath them.
"Don't be a fool," Kerr snapped.
"George, I'veseen people who can shoot," Penske said urgently."That bastard's not one of 'em. Besides, nobody's that goddam good to shoot like he did offhand. Nobody human. He got it somewhere, and he trained it up to look like an M14 and shoot for him. Christ, he don't even know the difference from one kinda ammo and another. But it don't matter 'cause he's trained this-thing-and it's just like a guard dog." The little man paused, breathing deeply. "Or a witch cat," he added.
Kerr's index finger began to massage the gum above his bad tooth. "That's nonsense," he muttered around his hand. He did not look at Penske.
The smaller man touched Kerr's wrist. "Itfits, George," he said. "It's the only goddam thing that does. The whole truth an' nothing but."
Kerr pursed his lips and said, "If we suppose that… what you say… could be true, does that change anything?"
"It changes-"Penske blurted, but he stopped when Kerr raised his hand. The question had been rhetorical.
"We accepted him as a man with a sophisticated weapon," the big man continued as if he had not been interrupted. "That's no less true now than it was. And our need for his weapon is no less real."
Penske blinked. "Maybe you know what you're doing. But I don't like it."
Kerr patted him on the shoulder. "After tomorrow it won't matter," he said. "After this morning, that is. Let's both get some sleep."
Coster's door was dark when the two men re-entered the silent apartment. Everything was peaceful. Penske wondered briefly at what would have happened if instead they had returned determined to kill the automatic rifleman. He took his mind off that thought as he would have taken his hand off a scorpion.
The three men in the back of the van were each expressionless in a different way. Davidson swung to the curb in front of the office building. The street was marked "No Parking" but there was little traffic this early on a Saturday morning. Kerr nodded minusculy. Penske, carrying a Dewar's carton, scrambled out the back door. Coster followed with a long, flat box stenciled "Ajax Shelving-Light-Adjustable-Efficient." His right hand reached through a hole in the side of the box, but a casual onlooker would not have noticed that.
The entranceway door was locked. After a moment's fumbling with the key Kerr had procured, Penske pulled it open. Behind them, the assassins heard the van pull away. It would wait in the lot of a nearby office building until time to pick them up.
The hallways were empty and bright under their banks of fluorescents. Coster stepped toward the elevators but Penske motioned him aside. "We take the fire stairs," he said. "Get in a elevator'n you got no control. We can't afford that."
The stairs were narrow and sterile, gray concrete steps in a dingy yellow well.
Penske slipped once as he took two hurrying steps at a time, barking his shins and falling with a clatter on the box he carried. He got up cursing and continued to leap steps, but now he held the liquor carton in his right hand and gripped the square iron rail with his left. At the third floor landing, the little man pulled open the door and peered suspiciously down the hall.
"Clear," he said, stepping through. He let the door swing closed as Coster grabbed for it. Penske was opening an office with another key when the rifleman joined him. Then they were inside, the hall door closed and the fluorescents in the ceiling flickering into life.
Coster threw down the shelving box and caressed the M14 with both hands. Penske squatted on the carpet as he reassembled the stock and action of his carbine. He sneered, "You shoulda took that down 'steada hauling a goddam box that size around. Or don't you know how?"
"I don't take him down," said Coster. "You handle your end, I'll handle mine."
Penske strutted into the inner office. From the letterheads on the desks, the suite was connected in some fashion or other to the university. The swarthy man pushed a swivel chair aside and raised the Venetian blinds."There," he said, waving. "There's where the bastards'll be."
Coster's slight smile did not change as he ducked a little to follow Penske's gesture. The rifleman had not visited the ambush site before. The window looked out on a parking lot, almost empty now, and the back street which formed a one-way pair with the street in front of the building. Beyond the lot and the street was a chainlink fence surrounding the building that sprawled across the whole block. The gates were open, but there was a guardhouse with a sign which read "Carr Industries-Knitwear Division."
The name had amused Kerr.
In the paved yard between the gates and the two-story mill were already gathered a score of newsmen and perhaps an equal number of plain-clothes security personnel. Many of the latter carried attache cases and binoculars. They looked bored and uncomfortably warm in their suits.
The phone beside Penske rang. He jumped, waggling his carbine. Coster grinned and lifted the instrument out of its cradle. He offered it to the shorter man. Penske glowered. "Yeah, everything's goddam fine," he said. "Just don't screw up yourself." He laid the receiver down on the desk instead of hanging up. At the other end of the open line was Kerr in a sidewalk phone booth. The sound of the shots through the telephone was the signal to start the van toward the pickup point.
Coster swung open the lowest window into the room. He pushed the desk further aside and knelt with the rifle muzzle a yard back from the frame. The relative gloom of the office shielded them from the security men who were dutifully sweeping windows and rooftops with their binoculars. Coster grinned in satisfaction. He lowered the automatic rifle and began scanning the crowd left-handed through the glasses Penske had brought.
"Gonna spray the whole load a'the bastards?"Penske asked. "Supposed to be some big mother from the State Department, too."
"Nobody dies but Kawanishi," said Coster. He did not take his eyes from the binoculars. "We'd lose the effect, otherwise."
Penske grunted. Coster grimaced at him and explained, "If Martin Luther King had been gunned down with thirty whites, there would have been doubt as to just… what we had in mind. It would have been an accident, not an attack-and maybe no cities had burned. American officials can die at, say, a Memorial Day parade. Here, only the Japanese. Only a slant-eyed Nip." He turned back to the crowd.
The swarthy man stared at the side of Coster's head. His right hand began a stealthy, not wholly conscious, movement to his boot. As his fingers touched the knife, there was a sharp snap. Penske jumped as he had when the phone rang. The rifle lay across Coster's lap, its muzzle pointing at Penske. The safety had just clicked off.
The rifleman set the binoculars down between them. "Don't even think of that," he said.
Penske's lips were dry, but he nodded.
There was a bustle around the mill entrance. Uniformed officers had joined the plain-clothes team and were forming a double cordon against the gathering sightseers. Down the cordon and in through the gate drove a city police car with its bar lights flashing, followed by a trio of limousines. The first of the black cars disgorged its load of civilians, both Westerners and Japanese. "Small fry," mumbled Coster beneath the binoculars.
A security man from the third, open-topped, limousine ran to the rear door of the second big car and opened it. A tall, gray-haired man in a dark suit got out. He nodded and reached a hand back to help his companion.
"Yes…" Coster breathed. He dropped the glasses and fitted his left hand to the forward grip of the automatic rifle. A stocky man, shorter than the first, straightened and waved to the cameras. Then he hurtled forward, face-first onto a patch of concrete already darkened by the spray of his blood.
The BAM BAM of the two-round burst struck the office like hammer blows. A Daumier print on the wall jarred loose and fell. Coster scrambled back to the outer office. Penske waited a moment, his eardrums still jagged from the punishing muzzle blasts. Three security men were thrusting the Undersecretary of State back into the armored limousine like a sacked quarterback. Cut-down Uzis had come out of the attache cases, but they were useless without targets. A cluster of security men was shouting into walkie-talkies while trying to shield Kawanishi's body. They were useless too. Kawanishi was beyond human help, his spine shattered by two bullets.
Penske broke for the door, leaving his carbine and the binoculars where they lay. He could replace them in the van. They were too dangerous to be seen carrying now. The stairwell door was still bouncing when the shorter man reached it. Coster was taking the steps two and three at a time, his right hand hugging the rifle to him through the hole in the carton. Penske, unburdened, was only a step behind when the rifleman turned at the second-floor landing, lost his footing on the painted concrete, and slid headlong down the next flight of steps. The crack of his right knee on the first step was louder than contact alone could explain.
Penske paused, staring down at the rifleman. Coster's face was a sallow green. "Give me a hand," he wheezed, trying unsuccessfully to rise.
"You'll never make it with a broken kneecap," the swarthy man said, more to himself than to the fallen man.
"God damn you!"Coster shouted. He had flung the shielding carton away from the automatic rifle. He aimed the weapon at Penske's midriff. "Help me!"
The safety clicked on. Both men heard the sound. Coster went a shade still paler and tried to force the slotted bar forward with his index finger. It would not move.
"Sure, I'll help you," Penske said softly. He slipped his dagger from its sheath and stepped forward.
The van was waiting at the curb with its rear door ajar. Penske leaped in, thrusting the carton before him. He shouted, "Drive!"
"Wait!" Kerr snapped to Davidson. "Where's Coster?"
Penske had the automatic rifle out on his lap now. He was feeling a little dizzy. "He fell and I had to leave him," he said. "Don't worry-he won't talk."
Without further orders, Davidson swung the van out into traffic. Occasional pedestrians were looking around for the source of the sirens they heard, but no one gave the escape vehicle a second glance.
Kerr's eyes narrowed as he watched the smaller man's fingers play with the action of the automatic rifle. After a moment he said, "Well, maybe it's for the best."
Penske did not reply. His mind was filling with images of men staggering and falling, each scene a separate shard differing in costume and background. Together the images turned smoothly like gear teeth engaging, each a part of a construct as yet incomplete.
"You know, I don't think I ever got a chance to look at that," Kerr remarked conversationally. He reached out to take the weapon.
"No!" said Penske, and the automatic rifle swung to cover the black's chest.
For an instant Kerr thought of drawing his pistol, but the thought passed and the pressure on the trigger of the automatic rifle passed also. "Okay," the big man said, "so long as you shoot what you're told to shoot with it."
Penske was no longer listening. The pattern was now complete. It stretched from a cold world whose remaining energies were all harnessed in a great design, to an Earth without native life forms. Winds whipped sand and nerve gas around badlands carven in past millennia, and the poisoned seas surged against blue-glowing shorelines. But over those landscapes coursed metal creatures who glittered and shifted their forms and raised triumphant cities to the skies.
And in Penske's mind something clicked. A voice said in no human language, "Yes, this replacement will be quite satisfactory…"
Blood Debt
I got interested in witchcraft when I was in high school (or maybe even earlier), as an outgrowth of my interest in traditional fantasy. When I became an undergraduate at Iowa the university library gave me more to read on the subject, but the real outpouring of material came in the later '60s when "The Occult" became hugely popular. There's a lot of crossover between the Occult and the more recent New Age, but the earlier version seems to me to have had more sharp edges.
I focused on scholarly sources like Margaret Alice Murray and Montague Summers, writers who purported to collect original documents and theorize from them. I say "purported" because I now know that both authorities were phony.
Murray was a real scholar, but she falsified her cites to show that medieval witchcraft had an organized structure which the facts do not support. Summers was far, far worse. His erudition was as false as his claim of a religious vocation, and his retailing of the worst medieval bits of misogyny (for example, the absurd derivation of femina, female, from femina, "lesser in faith") wears quickly even on me (who can't claim to be a feminist).
I never believed in the effectiveness of witchcraft. If my reading misled me, it was by causing me to accept that numbers of ordinary people in the Middle Ages practiced witchcraft in an organized fashion. That was no more harmful to a fiction writer (which is what I was trying to be) than believing in a reality behind the Airship Flap of 1897, now known to be a hoax, hurt "Travelers," one of my best novellas.
The thing is, though I don't believe in witchcraft at a gut level, I'm intellectually convinced that there's something real out there. Occasionally I ran into a writer-Elliott O'Donnell in his fiction (rather than his non-fiction) was a prime example-whom I thought and think really understood things that I'd prefer not to know about.
The fact that gangsters in Sierra Leone believed that bullets would bounce off their magically armored bodies didn't prevent the SAS from stacking up corpses like cordwood when they went in to rescue British hostages. Likewise, my personal disbelief in witchcraft won't help me if I'm attacked by someone who can manipulate occult powers. The effectiveness of the weapon doesn't depend on the belief system of the target. That's the background from which I wrote "Blood Debt." On rereading it, I'd say that the story accurately reflects my combination of scholarship and skepticism, leavened by the tiniest measure of fear.
The shadow of the house next door razored down Rigsbee's in the winter dawn. First the red light tinged the wrought-iron rail of the widow's walk. Spidery star-shapes writhed in the glow, the uprights molded as blunt arrowheads and the slanted pairs of limbs linked with fanciful hands. Below, the dark green shingles of the mansard roof sharpened but did not brighten when the light touched them. Only the small-paned French window winked back at the sun.
The left half was off the catch and swung as the air stirred around it. The dawn paled as it glided more swiftly down the white sidewalls of the second story, walking the crazy angles of the trellis and the ancient ivy clambering up into the gutters. There were already lights on in the kitchen on the ground floor. The tall, blonde woman put a last plate on the breakfast tray, then pushed the stairwell door open with her heel. She moved with precision, as she had for forty years. Life, ignoring her hopes and trampling her certainties, had been unable to change that; but crow's feet now softened the hard lines of her face.
Her shoes rapped steadily up the back stairs, pausing at the triangular landing where her dress flashed through the slit window before swinging up the flight. The old house had high-ceilinged rooms and she liked the feel of them, though of course heating was a great expense to Mr. Judson. She made out the checks herself, who should know better.
A bolt snicked back and the door to the second floor opened before she had to knock. Judson Rigsbee was wrapped in a velvet robe-the green one, this morning-and smiling at her."Good morning, Mrs. Trader; I hope you slept well."He did not smile often, and even with her it was a slightly uncomfortable expression, that of a stranger who is afraid to embarrass by seeming over-warm.
Mrs. Trader set the breakfast things neatly on the table inside the door-toast, poached eggs, coffee; the big glass of orange juice. Mr. Judson didn't care for orange juice but she insisted, it was good for him. The man would waste away to nothing if she didn't bully him-no chance Anita would stir a finger for her uncle.
"Thank you, I did indeed," the tall woman said aloud. "Now that Harvey and Stella are back together, I haven't been having those headaches at all, Mr. Judson."
"Well, I'm certainly glad," he said diffidently. He edged back slightly from the housekeeper's determined confidences, a pudgy-seeming man of fifty with no hardness showing except in his eyes.
"I'm certain I don't understand men," Mrs. Trader plowed on as she poured the coffee, "not even my own boy. They were as sweet a couple as you could find, he and Stella. For five years, and I'll say it even though I didn't want the marriage myself, they were too young. And then with the little one due any day, there Harvey goes off with never a word to Stella or even to me. But he was there in the waiting room when Kimberly was born, and Stella took him back though I wouldn't have blamed her if she hadn't… But itwas a weight off my mind."
"Thank you, Mrs. Trader."
"Thank you, sir." She gathered up the part-loaded tray and stepped crisply up the remaining double flight of polished hardwood. Mr. Judson was looking peaked and she did wish he would eat bacon in the morning, but on that score he was more determined than she."Orange juice or bacon, Mrs. Trader, but not both. Male, both of them, and together they would overbalance me hopelessly." Terrible things, queasy stomachs, and the green robe did nothing for his complexion. A pretty thing it was by itself with all the astrology symbols in silver on the hem, but not proper dress for a sickly man in the morning.
She rapped smartly on the door to the third story, squarely in the middle of the great red-lacquer eye Anita had painted there."If Uncle Jud won't let me bolt my door, I at least have to know who's coming, don't I?" the girl had sneered. Mr. Judson never talked very much about his sister, but Mrs. Trader could guess that she had been the wild one of the family. Who could be surprised that the daughter took after the mother when the poor child had not so much as a father's name to bear?
A second knock brought no response. The baleful eye waited, unblinking. Well, this was the first time it had happened, but Mrs. Trader was not slow to act. Mr. Judson insisted the house be run to a schedule so as not to disturb his work. Anita should have learned that in the months she had stayed here. If she hadn't, well… Mrs. Trader swung open the door.
The room within, its walls skewed a little to the shape of the roof, was far different from Rigsbee's own austere sitting room below. The dormers were blacked out by locked shutters; a volcano lamp lighted the rug and brocade chairs, but it had overheated during the night. Its paraffin and oil were in ugly stasis within the red glass base. Mrs. Trader switched it off as she strode past into the middle room.
A pentagram had been freshly chalked on the floor; the candles at its points still stood at half their original lengths, snuffed before they burned out, and the air was heavy with incense. "Anita, it's eight-thirty," Mrs. Trader called. Aping her uncle, she thought as she glanced around the room distastefully. Though in fairness to the girl, that couldn't be true. Mrs. Trader had seen the paraphernalia arrive with the rest of Anita's baggage. Runs in the family, then.
The girl failed to come to the bedroom door either. Mrs. Trader sniffed and unlatched it herself without knocking again.
The window slammed shut in the sudden air current. It left a damp chill in the room. The walls were a brilliant, metallic yellow that matched the spread, now rumpled at the foot of Anita's bed. Anita, too, was rumpled. The coils of hair that lay silken over the sheets beneath her were no blacker than her protruding tongue. The breakfast tray slipped, smearing the golden carpet with strawberry preserve and coffee.
Mrs. Trader turned stiffly and walked toward the stairs. A candle holder smashed unnoticed beneath her foot as she strode through the middle room. "Mis-" she started, but her voice cracked and she had to lick her lips before trying again. "Mr. Judson!"
Rigsbee opened the door just in time to catch the rigid woman as she stumbled on the last step and fell toward him. The unexpected impact drove them back into his sitting room. For once, Mrs. Trader would not meet her employer's eyes as she blurted, "Dead, Mr. Judson, she's dead and murdered. Oh dear God! In her own bed!"
Rigsbee rotated the blonde woman's weight into the room, then disengaged her arms to dart up the stairs. She wept in one of the straight-backed chairs until he returned; and her tears were real, but they were shed for the thing and not the girl herself.
Rigsbee was very quiet when he came back a few minutes later. His slippers rasped a little on the steps, that was all. The skin of his face was almost the color of his neutrally short gray hair. "Look at me, Elinor," he said softly. His fingers, gentle but inexorable, guided her jaw around when she was slow to obey. He was a little man in a comic robe, but his eyes were molten zinc. "You will go home now and forget all that you saw upstairs. When you return tomorrow, you will never have known Anita, there will never have been anyone living on the third floor. Do you understand?"
"Yes." The voice from Mrs. Trader's lips was not her own, but it ruled her.
Alone in the center of his three rooms, Rigsbee changed into white. The symbols worked into the robe's borders were of thread the same shade, differing only in texture from the base cloth.
"Well?" a voice inquired from a corner.
Rigsbee shrugged. His bald spot was more apparent whenever he was depressed. "She was my niece. She was the last of my blood."
"You know what she was," the voice rasped. "She was a slut, a whore-"
"Some things are necessary… "
"Not to her. She was never that deep in-"
"She was my blood!"Rigsbee's voice racketed through the dim room and shook it to silence. He turned toward the outer wall, clasping his hands to keep them from trembling. The windows on that side were blocked by the bookshelves running the length of the long wall. Spines of blue, green, and dull red library tape marched across the polished walnut with no markings beyond a few digits in white ink. He touched one of them.
Each thin volume was a typescript of Rigsbee's own production, bound by him between sheets of gray card. No one had helped during the typing or compilation. Partly Rigsbee's purpose had been to give the volumes the slight added virtue resulting from that close contact with him. More important, however, was another consideration: each typescript was treble-columned with groups of letters and numbers in no order that would have made sense to one not adept. Rigsbee had not intentionally encoded the results of his years of searching, but the form of notation he had come to use was far more specialized than Latin and Arabic symbols could accommodate in their normal values. One trivial error of pagination, one transposition among millions of letters, unnoticed and unnoticeable, would mean instant disaster in the dark moment when the data were used again.
A very few of the cased books were not of Rigsbee's own composition. His hand moved to one of them: squat, age-blackened; its pigskin binding cracking away from the cords. He knew by heart every word of the cryptic Latin text, but he had never before seriously contemplated using it. The pages opened stiffly, parting with difficulty under his fingertips.
"You would go that far?" the voice behind him asked mournfully.
Rigsbee closed the book before answering, "Punishment that stopped with the body would not-would not for me-be enough. The finality of that act, whoever did it, can't be answered by a gas chamber or a motor accident. I'm sorry, Vera; but I have no choice."
And, "No," he said sharply, wheeling with a strand of diamond in his voice before his listener could reply, "don't tell me that I'll have to give up all this, this… " Rigsbee's voice broke but his hand slashed an arc across the room. The books, the retorts joined by crystalline worms of tubing; the charts rolled in one corner beneath the ancient astrolabe."That's already gone, it's dead. If I ignored what has happened… Vera, I wouldn't be the same man, the man who… did the things I have done."
His face was carved from gray steel. If he felt any hesitation, none of it trembled in his throat when he said, "You'll help me, Vera."
"So close," the voice whispered. "In this short time-and you will understand how short it was, some day before you are as old as I-you came closer to unity than I have done in all these ages. And now, nothing."
"Vera. You'll help me?"
"Even to make the responses to you would bring me closer to the Blackness than a thousand cycles of the Fire would erase. Dos Lintros tried to walk that line after he wrote the book you hold. Where is he now, since they came for him?"
"I know," Rigsbee admitted softly.
"You know? You think you know!" the voice shrieked. "But you will know, Judson, for eternity you will know if you…
"But it's no good to tell you that, is it?" the voice went on. "You will do this thing, I see. And you are wiser than I can ever hope to be; but because of what I am, Iknow things that you only accept. Not even you, Judson, can imagine what you are about to do to yourself. To your soul."
Rigsbee shrugged, ran a hand through his thinning hair while his eyes stared unseeing at the numbered spines of his volumes. "I'm sorry, Vera-"
"Goodbye." Her word was as soft and as dull as the first handful of dirt on a coffin. Rigsbee shuffled to the corner, let his hand brush down the wire cage. The albino starling within croaked, darted its head forward to spike the ball of his thumb.
"Goodbye, Vera," Rigsbee muttered, and he turned away again.
The back door groaned. The lock had worked smoothly, but the hinges were frozen with the grit of long disuse. The girl glanced up the outer wall before entering. It was too dark to tell the ivy from the trellis it climbed.
"Nice place," she said as she followed Rigsbee up the stairs. Her knee-length coat was of a plastic imitation cowhide, now torn at two of the seams. The belt was missing and she held the front closed with one thin, white hand."You been here long?"
"Most of my life," Rigsbee said as he unlocked the door to the second story. Despite the dimness of the stairwell, he inserted his key without fumbling.
Again the girl hung back, hipshot, in the doorway. She was a dark brunette; long snarls of hair bobbled against her coat as she suddenly giggled. "Aren't the neighbors gonna wonder if they saw me come in?" She laughed again, stepping over the threshold with an exaggerated stateliness. Shrugging away the coat, she tossed it onto one of the straight chairs and stood in tank top and jeans. Most of the bright embroidery had worn away. Her bare toes, poking through handmade sandals, were an unhealthy blue beneath their coating of grime.
"This way," Rigsbee directed briefly, swinging the stair door shut and motioning the girl inward toward his study.
" 'Cause if you don't care," she went on, speaking over her shoulder as she slowly obeyed Rigsbee, "this doesn't have to be a one night stand, you know."
Rigsbee's glance took in her too-thin face, her too-white skin. "That won't be necessary," he said flatly. "It's in the next room."
"It wouldn't be so much," the girl said with unshakable coquetry. "I mean, not another of these-very often." Both hands lifted the thin top up over the waistband of the jeans. A hundred dollar bill, folded vertically into eighths, was poked into the jeans on her midline. "I couldn't put it in the top," she said with another giggle. Raising the thin cloth higher, the girl pirouetted back toward Rigsbee. The motion flung out her breasts, bare beneath the hiked blouse. They were not large but seemed surprisingly full for a body so thin; the areoles were almost black against the dingy pallor of her flesh.
Rigsbee stepped past her, his neutral expression unchanged. He swung the room's other door soundlessly toward him. White light flooded out."Go in," he ordered, holding the portal open. Its inner face was covered with a thin, hard fabric that seemed less reflectant than self-luminous. Despite the strangeness of it, the girl obeyed this time without hesitation. Her motion slowed; then, three steps inside the final room, she stopped completely.
The whole chamber and its only furnishing, a circular couch, were covered in the slick fabric. The high ceilings of the old house had allowed Rigsbee to dome the material smoothly in the center of the room without making the edges uncomfortably low. The light was not harsh but was shadowless and omnipresent, the interior of a cold, white star. Rigsbee entered behind the girl, closing the door on the last rectangle of reality left to the room. In his right hand swung the bird cage from his study. The starling hopped uneasily on its perch.
The girl let her blouse fall; her head rotated, taking in featurelessness."Hey, this is unreal," she whispered. A hesitant step brought her to the couch. It was firm to the touch, warmer than blood."You really go all out, don't you?" she said. For the first time, there was a trace of something genuine in her voice.
Rigsbee slid off his shoes and stepped onto the couch. The cage hung from the center of the dome on a hook that had been invisible until then. "It's time now.
You can take your clothes off," he said. He loosed the gold-shot sash he wore over his street clothes as a belt.
The girl pulled the top over her head, freeing it with a sharp tug when it caught in a loop of hair. With the same motion, she flipped the garment carelessly toward the wall. Seating herself on the edge of the couch, she hooked one long, slim-jointed toe over the backstrap of the other sandal, then paused. The surgical coldness of the light bit at her. "I-" she began. She hugged her breasts close without sexual intent. "Look," she said, "you want me to take a shower? I mean, they shut the water off… "
"I hired you as you are," Rigsbee answered bleakly. "Afterwards you may bathe or not, as you please. Get off the rest of your clothes."
The girl obeyed without enthusiasm. Both sandals struck the wall. They should have clattered but did not. She thrust the folded bill into a side pocket before sliding the ragged jeans down her thighs. "Look," she repeated, her eyes on Rigsbee's short, soft body so as not to have to see her own so clearly, "have we got to have the lights so bright?"
For the first time that night, Rigsbee smiled. "Yes," he said, the tight rictus of irony still on his face as he reached for the girl, "but they'll dim later."
As she began the ancient mechanisms of her trade, the girl wondered again how a room with no visible light source could be so brilliant. Then, without paling, the lucence began to slip from white to violet in waves as mindless as the sea's.
The room was yellow-green, a throbbing chartreuse that washed the fine gray hairs of Rigsbee's chest into a new-sewn field. "Again," he said quietly.
"Again, honey?" The girl ran her calloused palm over his belly with something like affection as she snuggled closer. "Say, you're not bad. But this time-" She repositioned herself with a silken movement on the glowing couch.
"Yes," Rigsbee muttered in a gelatinous voice as he bent. The girl's high-thrusting legs flickered shadows across her prominent rib-cage. And the light in the room glissaded to orange.
Garnet light the color of congealing blood oozed across them. Rigsbee rose to his feet awkwardly. The girl squirmed on the couch, stretched. "Now what, honey?"
"Nothing." Rigsbee's eyes were focused beyond the throbbing walls of the room. "Now you can leave."
Plucked eyebrows arched in surprise. "What's the matter? Wasn't I good?"
His tone itself a manner of ignoring the girl, Rigsbee went on, "The thing I had to do required that I be… sexless, that will suffice, to contact those who can aid me. With a female associate with whom I could have merged my spirit, I could have become a neuter entity. That was…"
He looked at the starling. It felt the impact of his eyes, the thin ruby whites around pupils which were still metal gray. The bird squawked, hopped to the far end of its perch.
"… impossible under the circumstances," Rigsbee continued. "Where the body goes, the spirit must follow, then. It became necessary that I drain a part of my nature, the masculine portion. For that, I needed you. Nothing more."
"My God," the girl said, rising from her back to her elbows. "You mean you didn't even want to fuck?"
"You?" Rigsbee asked wearily.
"God, that's dirty!"the girl hissed. Grimy hands levered her shanks back across the couch to the edge.
Rigsbee laughed, a humorless cackle of sound that echoed in the room. "Yes. It is," he agreed, the skin stretched bone-tight across his face. "Far fouler than you can dream. I made the contact that I… desired."
He lifted down the bird cage."Shall we see what they say?"The starling chopped at Rigsbee's hand as he slipped it through the cage door. His pudgy fingers were swifter than the bird; thumb and forefinger closed about its neck and hooked it from the cage.
"What-"the girl blurted. Her muscles tensed as she tried to remember which swatch of burning fabric hid the exit.
Rigsbee was not speaking aloud, but the agonized tremors creeping across his flesh showed his concentration. The bird seemed forgotten, clasped in both his hands. The fingers on its throat kept the starling from crying, but it had enough freedom to snap its pinions. The feathers clattered together like boards slapping.
Rigsbee shifted his grip, then wrenched his fists in opposite directions. The girl's scream covered the faint pop as the starling's neck parted. The bird's tiny heart thumped out two powerful jets, the last choking off as the veins feeding it emptied.
The adept's eyes stared at the floor. Half-unwillingly, the girl leaned over to see what was there. Instead of lying in a ragged pool with satellite splotches, the blood was crawling of its own volition into connected words. The letters were spidery but perfect, and they stood out ironically black against the sanguine background: