Demons

by Gardner Dozois

  "How about pretty girls, John?" she asked me. "You must have had regiments of them."

  "None to mention," I said, for it wouldn't have been proper to mention them. "Miss Annalinda, it's a-getting full dark."

  "And the moon's up."

  "No, ma'am, that's the soap-bubble light from down there in the Bottomless Pool."

  "You make me shiver!" she scolded at me, and drew up her shoulders. "What do you mean with all this talk about soap bubbles?"

  "Only just what I was telling Mr. Howsen. That science man said our whole life, what he called our universe, was swelling and stretching out, so that suns and moons and stars pull farther apart all the time. He said our world and all the other worlds are inside that stretching skin of suds that makes the bubble. We can't study out what's outside the bubble, or either inside, only just what's in the suds part. It sounds crazyish, but when he talked it sounded true."

  "That's not a new idea, John. James Jeans wrote a book about it, The Expanding Universe. But where does the soap bubble come from?"

  "I reckon that Whoever made all things must have blown it, from a bubble pipe too big for us to study out."

  She snickered, so she must have been feeling better. "You believe in a God who blows soap bubbles." Then she didn't snicker. "How long do we have to go on waiting here?"

  "No time at all. We can go whenever you're ready."

  "No," she said, "we have to stay."

  "Then we'll stay till One Other come. He'll come. Mr. Howsen's a despicable man, but he knows about One Other."

  "Oh!" she cried out. "I only wish he'd come and get it over with."

  And her wish came true.

  The firelight had risen high, and as she spoke, something hiked up behind the rocks on the pool's edge. It hiked up like a wet black leech, but much bigger by about a thousand times. It slid and oozed to the top of a rock, and as it waited a second, wet and shiny in the firelight, it looked as if somebody had flung down a wet coat. Then it hunched and swelled, and its edges came apart.

  It was a wet hand, as broad in the back as a shovel, and with fingers as long as the tines of a hayfork.

  "Get up and start down trail," I said to Miss Annalinda, as quiet and calm as I could make out to be. "Don't argue, just start."

  "Why should I?" she snapped out, without moving, and by then she saw, too, and any chance for her to get away was gone.

  The hayfork fingers grabbed hold of the rock, and a head and shoulder heaved up to where we could see them.

  The shoulder was like a cypress root humping out of the water, and the head was like a dark pumpkin, round and smooth and bald, with no face, only two eyes. They were green, but not bright green like cat-eyes or dog-eyes in the night. They were stale rotten green, like something spoiled.

  Miss Annalinda's shriek was like a train blowing for a crossing. She jumped up, but she didn't run. Maybe she couldn't. Then a big black knee lifted into sight, and all of One Other came up out of the Bottomless Pool and rose straight up before us.

  One Other was twice as tall as a tall man, and it was sure enough true that he had just the one arm and the one leg. The arm would be his left arm, and the leg his right leg. Maybe that's why the mountain folks had named him One Other. But his stale green eyes were two, and both of them looked down at us. He made a sure hop on his big single foot, big and flat as the top of a table, and he put out his hand to touch or to grab.

  I dragged Miss Annalinda clear back around the fire. I reckon she'd fainted, or near to. Her feet didn't work under her, she only moaned, and she was double heavy in my arms, the way a limp weight can be. My strength was under tax to pull her toward where I'd flung down my guitar. I wanted to get my hands on the guitar. It might could be a weapon—its music or its silver strings might be a distaste to an unchancy thing like One Other.

  But One Other had circled the fire the other way around, so that we came almost in touch again. He stood on his one big foot, between me and my guitar. It might be ill or well to him, but I couldn't get it and find out.

  Even then, the thought of running across Mr. Howsen's mark and down the mountain in the night never entered my head. I stood still, holding Miss Annalinda on her feet that were gone so limp her shoes were near about to drop off, and looked up twice my height into what wasn't a face save for those two green eyes.

  "What have you got in mind?" I inquired One Other, as if he could understand my talk; and the words, almost in Miss Annalinda's ear, brought back her strength and wits. She stood alone still shoving herself close against me. She looked up at One Other, and she said a couple of holy names.

  One Other bent his big lumpy knee and sank his bladdery dark body down and put out that big splay paw of his. The firelight showed his open palm, slate gray, and things dribbling out from it in a clinking, jangling little strew at our feet. He straightened up again.

  "Oh, John!" And Miss Annalinda dropped down to grab. "Look, he's giving us—"

  Tugging my eyes away from One Other's, I looked at what she held out to me. It shone and lighted up, like a hailstone by lantern light. It was the size of a hen egg, and it had a many little edges and flat faces, all full of fire, pale and blue outside and innerly many-colored like the soap-bubble light in the Bottomless Pool. She shoved it into my hand, and it felt slippery and sticky, like soap. I flung it on the ground again.

  "You fool, that's a diamond!" she squeaked at me. "It's bigger than the Orloff, bigger than the Koh-i-noor!"

  She scrabbled with both hands for more of the shiny things, that lighted up with every color you could call for. "Here's an emerald," she yipped, "and here's a ruby. John he's our friend, he's giving us things worth more money than—"

  Down on her knees before One Other, she clawed up two fistfuls of those things he'd flung for her to get down and gather. But I had my eyes back on him. He was looking at me—not at her, he was sure of her. Well he knew humankind's greed for shiny stones. About me, he wasn't sure yet. He studied me as I've seen folks to study an animal, to see whether to hit it with a stock or slice it with a knife. The shiny stones didn't fetch me. He reckoned to find something that would.

  Oh, I know how like a crazy tale to scare young ones all this sounds. But there and then, One Other was so plain to see and make out, the way you could see him if I was to make a clay image of him and stand it up on one leg in your sight, and it grew till it was twice as tall as you, with stale green eyes and one hayfork paw and one tabletop foot. In a moment there was no sound, he and I looked at one another. Miss Annalinda, down on the ground between us, gopped and goggled at the stones she scooped up in her hands. Then the silence broke. A drop of water fell. Another. Drip, drip, drip, like what Miss Annalinda had dripped into the fire—water from the Bottomless Pool, dripping off at One Other's body and head and his one arm and his one leg.

  Then he turned his eyes and mind back to Miss Annalinda, for long enough to spare me for a big jump past him to where my guitar was.

  He turned quick and swung down at me with his paw, like a man swatting a bug; but I had the guitar and I was running backward out of his reach. I got the guitar across me, my left hand on the frets, and my right hand a-clawing the silver strings. They sang out, and One Other teetered on the broad sole of that foot, cocked his head to hark.

  I started the Last Judgment Song, the one old Uncle T. P. Hinnard had told me long ago was good against evil things:

  "Three holy kings, four holy saints,

  At heaven's high gate that stand,

  Speak out to bid all evil wait

  And stir no foot or hand. . . ."

  But he came at me anyway. The charm wasn't serving against One Other, as I'd been vowed to it would serve against any evil in this world. One Other wasn't of this world, though just now he was in it. He was from the Bottomless Pool, and from whatever was beyond, below, behind where its bottom had ought to be.

  I ran around the fire and around Miss Annalinda, still crouched down among all those jewels. After me he hopped, li
ke the almightiest big one-legged rabbit in song or tale. He had me almost headed off, coming alongside me, and I ran right through the fire that was less fear to me than he was. My shoes kicked its coals as I ran through. On the far side I made myself stop and turn again. Because I had to face him somehow. I couldn't just run off from him and leave Miss Annalinda to pay, all alone, for her foolishness.

  He'd stopped, too, in his one track. The fire, scattered by my feet, blazed up in scattered chunks, and he was sort of pulling himself together and back from it. Drip, drip, the water fell off him. I felt there couldn't be any standing that dripping noise, so I sang out loud with another verse of the Last Judgment Song:

  "The fire from heaven will fall at last

  On wealth and pride and power—

  We will not know the minute, and

  We will not know the hour. . . ."

  One Other hopped a long hop back, away from the fire and away from me and away from the song.

  Something whispered me what I'd needed to know.

  From out the water he'd come. If I didn't want him to get me, to hold me at a price Pd never redeem—the way jewels beyond all reckoning could buy Miss Annalinda—I'd have to fight him like any water thing.

  Fight fire with water, wise folks say. Fire and water are sworn enemies. Fight water with fire . . .

  He circled around again, and that time I didn't flee from before him. I grabbed down toward the scattering of the fire. One Other's big flat hand slapped me spinning away, but my own hand had snatched up a burning chunk. When I staggered back onto my feet, I still held my guitar in one fist, the chunk in the other.

  I whipped that fire in a whirl around my head, and it blazed up like pure lightwood. As One Other came bending down for me again, I rushed to meet him and I shoved the fire at him.

  He couldn't face it. He broke back from it. I jumped sidewise my own self, so that he was between me and the fire, and sashayed that burning stick at him again. He jumped back, and his foot slammed right down among the coals.

  Gentlemen, I hope none of you all ever hear such a sound as he made, with no mouth to make it. Not a yell or a roar or a scream, but the whole top of Hark Mountain hummed and danced to it. He flung himself clear of the fire again, hurting and shaking every ounce of him, and then I stabbed my torch like a spear for where his face ought to be, and made a direct hit.

  I tell you, he couldn't front up to fire, he couldn't stand it. He just spun around and jumped, and then he dived into the water from which he'd come to us, into the Bottomless Pool, and the splash he made was like a wagon falling from a bridge. Running to the rocks, I saw him cleave down below there, into the deep clearness, like a diving one-legged frog—all among the soap-bubble colors, getting small while I watched, so small he looked a hand's size. A finger's size. A bean's size. And then the light gulped him. And he was gone from my sight.

  I stepped back to the scattered fire, and dropped my burning chunk.

  Miss Annalinda still huddled on the ground. I question whether she'd paid aught of mind to what had gone on, that scrambling fight. Her hands were grabbed full of jewels shining green, red, blue, white, all colors.

  I said nothing, but took her by the arm and pulled her to her feet. She looked at me and waved her both full fists in joy.

  "Give them here," I said.

  Her eyes stabbed at me like fish gigs. She couldn't believe I'd spoken such words. I put down my guitar and took her right wrist and pried open her right hand. I tried not to hurt her as I took the jewels. Into the Bottomless Pool I plunged them, one by one. They splashed and sank down like pebbles.

  "Don't, John!" she screamed, but I took her other hand and pried away the rest of them. Plop, I flung one after the first bunch. Plop, I flung another. Plop, plop, plop, more.

  "They're a fortune," she gabbled, dragging at my arm. "The greatest fortune ever dreamed of—"

  "No, ma'am," I said. "A misfortune. The greatest misfortune ever dreamed of."

  "But no!"

  Plop, plop, I flung them in, the last of the jewels. "What were you ready to pay for them?" I inquired her.

  "Anything," she said as if she was tired out. "Anything."

  "You mean everything. If he paid high for us, he meant to have his worth from us. He needs folks of this world to serve him, more folks than just Mr. Howsen." I pointed into the Bottomless Pool, for her to look down there. "I hope and pray he stays now, where things are more comfortable than what taste I gave him."

  She looked, down to where the Bottomless Pool had no bottom.

  "John, you're right," she said, as if she talked out of a dream. "Those colors do look like the tints of a soap bubble—stretched out, with nothing beyond its film of suds that we can imagine. A great big unthinkable soap bubble, like the one you say God blew."

  "Might could be so," I said. "Might could be there's more than the one soap bubble we're in. A right many soap bubbles. Each one a life and a universe strange to this one we're in."

  The pain of that new thought went into her like a knife and made her silent. I talked on:

  "Might could be there's two soap bubbles touching. And the spot where they come together is where something can leave the one and come into the other."

  She sat down. The new thought was weight as well as pain. "Oh," she moaned in herself.

  "Some born venturer dares try to move into the new bubble," I said, "through whatever matches the Bottomless Pool on that far side, in that other life and universe. Maybe, I say. There's God's great plenty of maybes about it."

  "No maybes," she said, all of a sudden. "You saw him, no such creature was ever born into our world. Anything looking like that must be—"

  "You still don't understand," and I shook my head. "I don't truly reckon he'd look like that in his own soap bubble. He makes himself look thataway, to be as possibly much like our kind he meets in our world. We can't guess what he'd naturally look like."

  "I don't want to guess," and she sounded near about to cry.

  "Such a stranger needs friends and helpers in the strange new world. Some things he knows from his own home are like power here, power we think is witch stuff. He'll pay high for helpers like Mr. Howsen. He'd have paid high for us."

  "Will he come back?" she asked.

  "Not right off." I picked up my guitar. "Let's grope down trail in the dark, so if he does come back he won't find us. Somewhere below we'll build a fire and in the morning get all the way down."

  "John," said Miss Annalinda, talking fast, "you were right about me. My spell was to get you up here for spite. But now, if you don't have anywhere to go—"

  "I've got everywhere to go," I said. "Soon as I get you down safe, I'll go everywhere."

  "It's not spite anymore, John, it's love." She said that word as If she'd never said it before. "It's love, I love you, John."

  She maybe didn't know that she was lying and I wanted to stop her.

  "You know," I changed the subject, "there's one more thing about this soap-bubble idea. The bubble we live in keeps on a-stretching and a-swelling. But a soap bubble can't last forever. Some time or other, it stretches and swells so tight, it just bursts."

  That did what I was after, it stopped her flood of words. She stared up and off and all around. I saw the whites of her eyes glitter in the last glow of the fire.

  "Bursts?" she said slowly. "Then what?"

  "Then nothing. When a soap bubble bursts, it's gone."

  And we had silence to start our climb down Hark Mountain.

  An Ornament to His Profession

  by

  Charles L. Harness

  The nineteenth-century French sorcerer Eliphas Levi wrote that "He who affirms the Devil, creates or makes the Devil." And what better way is there to affirm the Devil than to sell him your eternal soul . . . ? We can trace the idea of forming a pact with the powers of darkness back to the Bible (Isaiah 28:5), but the idea of legally binding contract can probably be credited to St. Augustine, who roundly condemned "the pesti
ferous association of men with demons, as if formed by a pact of faithless and dishonorable friendship." But it's the legend of Faust—a supposed sixteenth-century sorcerer who has been credited with being the equal of Virgil, Bacon, the Count de St. Germain, Agrippa, and Crowley—that has set fire to our imaginations for the last four hundred years. Embellished by such literary giants as Marlow, Lessing, and Goethe, the Faust legend has become one of our most compelling and potent archetypes. Faust is the great symbol of civilized man at his most base and his most noble, for it was in return for knowledge that he sold his soul to the Devil. In the preface to the sixteenth-century Fausti Hollenzwang (Faust's Harrowing of Hell), Faust himself is credited with writing: "He who wishes to practice my art, let him love the spirits of hell and those who reign in the air; for these alone are they who can make us happy in this life; and he who would have wisdom must seek it from the devil."

  The elegant and subtle story that follows is in the very best sense a modern Faust, a tale of the commitments and potential betrayals that live in every heart.

  For, after all, aren't we all committed to something . . . or someone?

  Charles L. Harness was born in 1915 in Colorado City, Texas. He received a B.S. in chemistry from George Washington University, and subsequently worked as a patent attorney for a firm in Stamford, Connecticut. An often underrated writer, Harness produced some of the best work being done in science-fiction in the 1950s and early 1960s, specializing in what James Blish has called the "extensively recomplicated plot"—which meant that he threw everything but the kitchen sink into his stories . . . and then for good measure tossed in the sink as well. This baroque and pyrotechnic style produced stories like "The New Reality," which were years ahead of their times, as well as classic novels such as Flight Into Yesterday, and The Rose. After a long absence Harness has been writing again in recent years, and his recent novels have included The Catalyst, Firebird, and The Venetian Count. His most recent book is The Paradox Men, a revised version of Flight Into Yesterday. Upcoming is a new novel, Redworld.