“I’m sorry,” said Morningside. He turned her out of his shop and closed the door. The nerve of that babe! Coming right into his shop in the middle of a high-class Optimus neighborhood! Ruin his trade, he thought darkly. He could sue.
“Books!” yelled a hoarse voice at his delivery entrance. “Optimus Press delivery!”
“Thanks,” he said, taking the crate. He broke off the plastic top and stared in amazement. “Two gross,” he whispered. “And who the hell wants to buy the Odes of Anacreon?” He opened a copy and squinted at the weird words on the pages.
“How now!” said Morningside. He started at the strange words, and suddenly their meaning became plain as day.
“YOU WILL BE LOYAL TO THE LOWERS,” it said. He smacked a fist on his plump knee. “So I shall!” he snapped.
“YOU WILL TURN THE FUSION 1ST PAWNS OUT OF OFFICE.” Bravo!
“YOU WILL SAFEGUARD YOUR LIBERTIES AGAINST THE CONSPIRACIES OF THE OPTIMUS PARTY AND THEIR TOOLS.” About time somebody spoke out like this!
“YOU WILL SHOW THE ODES TO EVERYBODY YOU SEE.” No time like the present, he decided. Passing his shopwindow was a stately, plump dowager, aglitter with diamonds.
“Hey, babe!” he yelled.
She turned aghast as he came through the door. “Got something to show you,” he explained, taking her by the arm.
“Unhand me!” she shrilled. “You scum! You vermin!”
“Don’t get tough, lady,” he pleaded. Finally he had to carry her over his shoulder into the shop and shove the book under her nose. She read and looked again.
“Great stuff,” she said. “What everybody ought to know. It’s about time those bloodsuckers got fired. Come on!” She took up an armful of the Odes.
“Come on!” she called to Mr. Morningside as she was piling a score of the Odes up to his shoulders. “We’ll tell the world!”
They went together rollicking down the street, stopping passersby, handing out copies of the Odes.
They were telling the world, and the world was listening.
Mr. Packer Goes to Hell
Almarish Packer found himself in a peck of trouble when he lost his kingdom. A dizzier sequel to the dizzy yarn of “Thirteen O’Clock.” A sequel the readers demanded.
CHAPTER I
“DRAT IT!” cursed Almarish, enchanter supreme and master of all Ellil. “Drat the sizzling dingus!” Lifting his stiffly embroidered robes of imperial purple, he was dashing to right and left about his bedroom, stooping low, snatching with his jewelled hands at an elusive something that skidded about the floor with little, chuckling snickers.
Outside, beyond the oaken door, there was a sinister thud of footsteps, alternately firm and normal slaps of bare sole against pavement with sinister tappings of bone. “Slap-click. Slap-click. Slap-click,” was the beat. Almarish shot a glance over his shoulder at the door, his bearded face pale with strain.
“Young ’un,” he snapped to an empty room, “this ain’t the silly season. Come out or when I find you I’ll jest take your pointed ears and twist them till they come off in my hands.”
Again there was the chuckling snicker, this time from under the bed. Almarish, his beard streaming, dove headlong, his hands snapping shut. The snicker turned into a pathetic wail.
“Leggo!” shrilled a small voice. “You’re crushing me, you ox!”
Outside the alternating footsteps had stopped before his door. A horny hand pounded on the solid oak.
“Be with ye in a minute.” called the bearded enchanter. Sweat had broken out on his brow. He drew out his clenched fists from under the bed.
“Now, young lady!” he said grimly, addressing his prize.
The remarkable creature in his hands appeared to be young; at least she was not senile. But if ever a creature looked less like a lady it was she. From tiny feet, shod in rhinestone, high-heeled pumps to softly-waved chestnut hair at her very crown, she was an efficient engine of seduction and disaster. And to omit what came between were a sin: her voluptuous nine inches were cased in a layne that glittered with the fire of burnished silver, cut and fitted in the guise of an evening gown. Pouting and sullen as she was in Almarish’s grasp, she hadn’t noticed that the hem was scarcely below her ankles, as was intended by the unknown couturier who had spared no pains on her. That hem, or the maladjustment of it, revealed, in fact, that she had a pretty, though miniature, taste in silks and lacework.
“Ox!” she stormed at the bearded sorcerer. “Beastly oaf—you’ll squeeze me out of shape with your great, clumsy hands!”
“That would be a pity,” said Almarish. “It’s quite a shape, as you seem to know.”
The pounding on the door redoubled. “Lord Almarish!” shouted a voice, clumsily feigning anxiety. “Are you all right?”
“Sure, Pike,” called the sorcerer. “Don’t bother me now. I have a lady with me. We’re looking at my potted plants.”
“Oh,” said the voice of Pike. “All right—my business can wait.”
“That stalled him,” grunted Almarish. “But not for long. You, what’s your name?”
She stuck a tiny tongue out at him. “Look here,” said Almarish gently. He contracted his fist a little and the creature let out an agonized squawk on a small scale. “What’s your name?” he repeated.
“Moira,” she snapped tartly. “And if your throat weren’t behind all that hay I’d cut it.”
“FORGET THAT, Kid,” he said.
“Let me give you a brief resume of pertinent facts:
“My name is Packer and I’m from Braintree, Mass., which you never heard of. I came to Ellil by means of a clock with thirteen hours. Unusual, eh? Once here I sized things up and began to organize on a business basis with the assistance of a gang of half-breed demons. I had three wishes, but they’re all used up now. I had to send back to Braintree my grandson Peter, who got here the same way I did, and with him a sweet young witch he picked up.
“Before leaving he read me a little lecture on business reform and the New Deal. What I thought was commercial commonsense—little things like bribes, subornation of perjury, arson, assassination and the like—he claimed was criminal. So I, like a conscientious Packer, began to set things right. This my gang didn’t like. The best testimony of that fact is that the gentleman outside my door is Balthazar Pike, my trusted lieutenant, who has determined to take over.
“I learned that from Count Hacza, the Vampire, when he called yesterday, and he said that I was to be wiped out today. He wrung my hand with real tears in his eyes—an affectionate chap—as he said good-bye.”
“And,” snarled the creature, “ain’t that too damn’ bad?”
“No,” said Almarish mildly. “No, because you’re going to get me out of this. I knew you were good luck the moment you poked your nose through the wall and began to snicker.” Moira eyed him keenly. “What’s in it for me?” she finally demanded.
There was again the pounding on the door. “Lord Almarish,” yelled Balthazar Pike, “aren’t you through with those potted plants yet?”
“No,” called the sorcerer. “We’ve just barely got to the gladioli.”
“Pretty slow working,” grumbled the trusted lieutenant. “Get some snap into it.”
“Sure, Pike. Sure. Only a few minutes more.” He turned on the little creature. “What do you want?” he asked.
There was a curious catch in her voice as she answered-: “A vial of tears from le Bete Joyeux.”
“Cut out the bunk,” snapped Almarish impatiently. “Gold, jewels—anything at all. Name it.”
“Look, whiskers,” snarled the little creature. “I told you my price and I’ll stick to it. What’s more I’ll take you to the right place.”
“And on the strength of that,” grinned the sorcerer, “Pm supposed to let you out of my hands?”
“That’s the idea,” snapped Moira. “You have to trust somebody in this lousy world—why not me? After all, mister, Pm taking your word—if you’ll give it.”
&nb
sp; “Done,” said Almarish with great decision. “I hereby pledge myself to do everything I can to get you that whatever-it-was’s tears, up to and including risk and loss of life.”
“Okay, whiskers,” she said. “Put me down.” He obliged, and saw her begin to pace out pentacles and figures on the mosaic floor. As she began muttering to herself with great concentration he leaned his head against the door. There were agitated murmurs without.
“Don’t be silly,” Pike was saying. “He told me with his own mouth he had a woman—”
“Look, Bally,” said another voice, one that Almarish recognized as that of a gatekeeper, “I ain’t sayin’ you’re wacked up, but they ain’t even no mice in his room. I ain’t let no one in and the ectoplasmeter don’t show nothin’ on the grounds of the castle.”
“Then,” said Pike, “he must be stalling. Rourke, you get the rest of the breeds and we’ll break down the door and settle Lord Almarish’s hash for good. The lousy weakling!”
Lord Almarish began to sweat afresh and cast a glance at Moira, who was standing stock-still to one side of the mosaic design in the floor. He noted abruptly a series of black tiles in the center that he had never seen before. Then others surrounding them turned black and he saw that they were not coloring but ceasing to exist.
Apparently something of a bottomless pit was opening up beneath his palace.
OUTSIDE the padding and clicking of feet sounded. “Okay, boys,” yelled Pike. “Get in line!” They would be swinging up a battering-ram, Almarish surmised. The shivering crash of the first blow against the oaken door made his ears ring. Futilely he braced his own brawny body against the planking and felt the next two blows run through his bones.
“One more!” yelled his trusted lieutenant. And with that one more the door would give way, he knew, and what they would do to him would be no picnic. He had schooled them well, though crudely, in the techniques of strikebreaking affected by employers of the 1880’s.
“Hurry it up!” he snapped at Moira. She didn’t answer, being wholly intent, it seemed, on the enlargement of the pit which was growing in the floor. It would now admit the passage of a slimmer man than the sorcerer, but his own big bones would never make it.
With agonizing slowness the pit grew, tile by tile, as the tiny creature frowned into it till her face was white and bloodless. Almarish fancied he could hear through the door the labored breathing of the half-breed demons as they made ready to swing again.
Crash! It came again, and only his own body kept the door from falling in fragments.
“Right—dive!” shrilled the little voice of Moira as the battering-ram poked through into the room. He caught her up in one hand and squeezed through into the blackness of the pit. He looked up and could gee a circle of faces snarling with rage as he slid down a kind of infinitely smooth inclined tunnel. Abruptly the patch of light above him was blotted out and there was absolutely nothing to be seen.
All Almarish knew was that he was gliding in utter blackness at some terrifying speed in excess of anything sane down to a place he knew nothing of in the company of a vicious little creature whose sole desire seemed to be to cut his throat and drink his blood with glee.
CHAPTER II
“WHERE,” asked Almarish, “does this end?”
“You’ll find out,” snarled the little creature. “Maybe you’re yellow already?”
“Don’t say that,” he warned. “Not unless you want to get playfully pinched—in half.”
“Cold-blooded,” she marvelled. “Like a snake or lizard. Heart’s probably three-ventricled, too.”
“Our verbal contract,” said the sorcerer, delicately emphasizing verbal, “didn’t include an exchange of insults.”
“Yeah,” she said abstractedly. And though they were in the dark he could sense that she was worried. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“What’s the matter?” he demanded.
“It’s your fault,” she shrilled. “It’s your own damned fault hurrying me up so I did this!” The man knew that she was near distraction with alarm. And he could feel the reason why. They were slowing down, and this deceleration, presumably, was not on Moira’s schedule.
“We on the wrong line?” he asked coolly.
“Yes. That’s about it. And don’t ask me what happens now, because I don’t know, you stupid cow!” Then she was sniffling quietly in his hand and the sorcerer was wondering how he could comfort her without breaking her in two.
“There now,” he soothed tentatively, stroking her hair carefully with the tip of a finger. “There, now, don’t get all upset—”
It occurred to him to worry on his own account. They had slowed to a mere snail’s pace, and at the dramatically, psychologically correct moment a light appeared ahead. A dull chanting resounded through the tube:
“Slimy flesh,
Clotted blood,
Fat, white worms,
These are food.”
From Moira there was a little, strangled wail. “Ghouls!”
“Grave-robbers?” asked the sorcerer. “I can take care of them—knock a few heads together.”
“No,” she said in thin, hopeless tones. “You don’t understand. These are the real thing. You’ll see.”
As they slid from the tube onto a sort of receiving table Almarish hastily pocketed the little creature. Then, staring about him in bewilderment, he dropped his jaw and let it hang.
The amiable dietary ditty was being ground out by a phonograph tending which there was a heavyeyed person dressed all in grey. He seemed shapeless, lumpy, like a half-burned tallow candle on whose sides the drops of wax have congealed in half-teardrops and cancerous clusters. He had four limbs and, on the upper two, hands of a sort and wore what could be roughly described as a face.
“You,” said Almarish. “What’s—where—?” He broke off in confusion as a lacklustre eye turned on him.
From a stack beside him the creature handed him a pamphlet. The sorcerer studied the title: “Workers! Fight to preserve and extend the glorious revolution which has befallen you!”
He read further: “There are those among you who still can remember the haphazard days of individual enterprise and communal wealth. Those days were bad; many starved for lack of nutritious corpses. And yet people died Above; why this poverty in the midst of plenty?
“There were Above as usual your scouts who cast about for likely members of your elite circle, those who wished to live forever on the traditional banquets of the Immortal Eaters. Fortunate indeed was the scout who enrolled Ingvar Hemming. For it was he who, descending to the Halls of the Eaters, saw the pitiful confusion which existed.
“Even as he had brought order into the vast holdings which had been his when Above he brought order to the Halls. A ratio was established between production and consumption and civilized habits of life-in-death were publicized. Nowadays no Immortal Eater would be seen barbarously clawing the flesh from a corpse as in the bad old days; in these times your Safety-Tasty cans are the warrant of cleanliness and flavor.”
Bug-eyed, Almarish turned to the back of the booklet and scanned advertisements:
For Those Guests Tonight!
Why Not
A Bottle of SAFETY-TASTY
EYES
10 per bottle—Hemming-Pakt
“5 blue, 5 brown—remember?”
There’s STRENGTH
s-p-e-e-d
grace
In A HEMMING HEARSE
“To serve we strive
The dead-alive.”
He tore his eyes from the repulsive pages. “Chum,” he demanded hoarsely of the phonograph attendant, “what the hell goes on here?”
“Hell?” asked the ghoul in a creaky, slushy voice. “You’re way off. You’ll never get there now. I buzzed the receiving desk—they’ll come soon.”
“I mean this thing—” gingerly he held it up between thumb and forefinger.
“Oh—that. I’m supposed to give it to each new arrival. It’s full of bunk. If
you could possibly get out of here, you’d do it. This ain’t no paradise, not by a long shot.”
“I thought,” said Almarish, “that you all had enough to eat now. And if you can afford hearses you must be well off.”
“YOU THINK SO?” asked the attendant. “I can remember back when things was different. We ate plain and liked it. And then this Hemming man—he comes down from Above, corners the supply, hires men to can it and don’t pay them enough to buy it in cans. I don’t understand it, but I know it ain’t right.”
“But who buys the—the eyes and hearses?”
“Foremen an’ ex-ex-ekky-tives. And whut they are I don’t know. It jest ain’t jolly down here no more.”
“Where you from?” asked Almarish.
“Kentucky. Met a scout. 1794. Liked it and been here ever since. You change—cain’t git back. It’s a sad thing naow.” He dummied up abruptly as a squad of ghouls approached. They were much less far gone—“changed”—than the attendant. One snapped out a notebook.
“Name?” he demanded.
“Packer, Almarish—what you will,” he said, fingering an invincible dagger in his sleeve.
“Almarish—the Almarish?”
“Overlord of Ellil,” he modestly confessed, assuming, and rightly, that the news of his recent deposition had not yet reached the Halls of the Eternal Eaters. “Come on a tour of inspection. I was wondering if I ought to take over this glorified cafeteria.”
“I assume,” said one of the reception committee—for into such it had hastily resolved itself—“you’ll want to see our Vice President in charge of Inspection and Regulation?”
“You assume wrongly,” said the sorcerer coldly. “I want to see the president.”
“Mr. Hemming?” demanded the spokesman. All heads save that of Almarish bowed solemnly. “You—you haven’t an appointment, you know.”
“Lead on,” ordered the sorcerer grimly. “To Mr. Hemming.” Again the heads bowed.
Collected Short Fiction Page 48
