by Don Wilcox
“You’re talking big, Hammond!” said the figure that emerged from Number Five. It was neither a butler nor a one-armed Arab; or rather, it was something of both, a balance of extremes achieved in the transition stage. “Don’t forget you’re pretty well trapped down here a hundred and fifty feet below the ground.”
“Don’t make me laugh,” I snorted. “Your canvas walls that rolled past your stationary elevators weren’t quite as realistic as your contortions . . . Tell that girl to stop screaming!”
I jerked out of my rubber arms, swung through the door of Number Six, and flashed my gun at the disappearing figure of Lamar. He slid through the trapdoor in the floor of Number Five.
In that split second I let him get away. The girl, crawling out from under the table, saw me turn my gun aside.
“Oh, thanks,” she moaned, clutching at my knees helplessly. “Thanks for letting him live!”
“I hadn’t any other intention,” I muttered. “If his mental telepathy had been any good, he’d have known that . . . Say, you’re Miss Winthrop, aren’t you! I’ve been having some strong premonitions that you were mixed up in this.” In fact, I had known, by telepathy, that she was eavesdropping, driven to it by her fears.
I helped her to her feet. She was as frightened as any child you ever saw, pleading for the life of the man who was her uncle. He was all she had to depend upon, she cried, and if all the crimes he’d got away with came down on his head it would kill him—and her too. She just couldn’t bear to live if she lost him.
The way she was carrying on, darned if I didn’t think she was putting on an act—but at once my mental telepathy told me otherwise. And it also told me that her Uncle Lamar wasn’t going to pop out of a trapdoor in the floor to make trouble with firearms. He had his own plan . . .
I made the rounds of the cylinders and saw the trapdoor in the floor of each, and saw how easy it had been for Lamar to make one entrance after another in the guise of different persons, slipping out each time by under-floor passages. I examined the equipment in Number Five, where Lamar had stationed himself, after all his entrances to shift his voice back and forth and carry on conversations with himself from four different points. I saw the mechanical devices by which he operated the rubber arms of One, Two, Three and Four. All in all, it was the neatest mechanical set-up for conducting a one-man secret society you ever saw.
Frank Hammond glanced out the train car window at the passing telegraph poles and chuckled softly to himself. “Yes,” he said, “the changeable old cuss had gotten by with a lot of hoaxes, all kinds of them, by a clever use of his high-pressure equipment. But this mental telepathy business was his Waterloo. He didn’t have it, and it took him for a ride.”
“What happened to him?” I asked. “You mentioned a plan.”
“Yes—a quick suicide. It was hard to explain to the authorities, but I gave them my telepathic insight. The fellow just couldn’t face defeat. He saw all his glittering hoax was punctured—the biggest hope of his life, to get next to that colossal treasure, was blasted right out of his hands. He couldn’t take it. Miss Winthrop and I heard the gunfire from the passageway under the floor, and when we reached him he was dead . . . There was one bit of comfort for her. In dying, he had reverted to the form of one of the butlers. It was in that guise that she had loved him most.”
Frank Hammond rose from his seat. He looked down at me and seemed to read the countless questions that welled up in my mind.
“Think it over, my friend,” he said. “And don’t forget what I said about the new insights that telepathy is bound to bring us. So far as I know, there’s no other way that this diabolical art of Lamar’s would ever have been apprehended—though I’ll admit he was in a tight spot in the tiffin room that time I waited for him as a butler, and he shifted into the one-armed Arab to elude me—in spite of his clothes.”
“I can’t understand why such a girl as this Miss Winthrop should have strung along with him,” I said.
“Poor kid,” said Hammond. “She was a victim of circumstances. She had grown up under his domination. It seems to have become a part of her make-up. It may take years for her to outgrow the effects of his bullying.”
“She probably never will,” I commented.
“On the contrary,” said Hammond. “She shows progress every day. By the way, she’s back in the next car wondering what’s become of me. Would you like to go back and meet her?”
QUEEN OF THE LIVING PUPPETS
First published in Fantastic Adventures, October 1941
Janetto had a strange power; he could see the future. But Venzita, his girl musician really held the strings to his human puppets.
CHAPTER I
Enough was enough! The hooting and yelling had worn Dr. Janetto’s sensitive nerves to snapping threads. And now, on the tenth night of the carnival’s stay at this ancient metropolis, the riff-raff had begun throwing rocks.
“Get the manager!” Janetto shouted through the rear window of his house-trailer. “Tell him I’m through!”
“This ain’t nothing!” the passing carnival hand retorted, moping off. “Tell him I want my money. I’m through feeding pearls to swine!”
With that, Dr. Albert Janetto whirled about in his wheel-chair to the curtained entrance in the house-trailer’s sidewalls. He hadn’t had a customer all evening. The masses of beggars and scalawags who couldn’t afford the price of a sideshow took their fun out in mocking hoots and laughter. A sorry state for the high arts of mysticism to fall into.
But such was the New Dark Ages! No appreciation of the finer things of life. Those crowds of beggars fairly gloated in their poverty and ignorance!
Janetto reached out through the open door, defying taunts and flying clods, and jerked in the battered tin sign, “PALACE OF VISIONS.” He flung aside the curtains and slammed the house-trailer door closed with a jolt that knocked several boxes of incense off their shelves. He dragged out his suitcases and began packing. . .
At midnight he found a cheap hotel on the edge of the central business district. While he waited for the night clerk to make up the room, he wheeled along the lobby walls.
His thick eyelids fell to a thoughtful halfmast. He scarcely noticed the series of wall maps tracing the changes in the national boundaries brought about by World War II and the twenty years that followed. He was unconscious of the falling of chips of dirty mortar from the drafty patchwork of masonry in one corner of the room. Each time a heavy truck went by, the building shuddered, echoing the war days when shells had crashed through those walls.
Physically and mentally, Dr. Albert Janetto had been shattered no less than a war-torn building. For twenty years he had drifted about in this squeaky wheel-chair, groping vainly for snatches of pre-war security. In those days his mystic arts had promised a lucrative career. But now . . .
He reread the pencil-scrawled note the carnival manager had sent him with his check: “Here’s your pay, Doc. You were a good sideshow while you lasted, but you haven’t got enough carnival in your blood. You’ll never get anywhere blowing up at a crowd. You’ve got to master them. That was never truer than now. These New Dark Ages are hardboiled, and the riff-raff piles up thicker on us at every new town. Good luck, Doc, and take my advice and climb down off your high-horse.”
Below the manager’s signature he had added a P.S. This was what Janetto reread several times.
“P.S. By the way, Doc, I never did know whether your racket was on the level. Some of your customers claimed it was. If so, why the hell don’t you whip up a vision or two for yourself and see where you’re going?”
The night clerk wheeled Janetto onto the elevator. A moment later he was alone in his room.
He propelled himself across to the window, rose up on his crutches and locked it, then drew the shade to shut out most of the flickering night lights. Where the shade was torn he pinned a newspaper over it.
The big mirror leaning above the old-fashioned dresser distracted him, sending back the hard g
litter of his coal-black eyes, the determined twist of his mouth, the sallow green of his close-shaved sensitive chin. He turned to one of the suitcases on the bed, opened it, drew out a wide purple velvet scarf. This he threw over the top of the mirror, allowing its glossy folds to droop down over the edges of the dresser.
From another case he took an assortment of short candles and some boxes of incense powders. He arranged the candles on a long aluminum tray, which he placed on the velvet-covered dresser, and lighted them.
Over the eleven sturdy blazes he fixed eleven dainty cup-like cylinders, and in each of these he poured a liberal sprinkling of powders. He snapped off the electric light to test the results. The eleven yellow blazes could no longer be seen. Instead, eleven small columns of red smoke rose, illuminated before the background of purple velvet. The room was all blackness except for those eleven slow-moving shafts of red smoke.
Janetto drew a deep breath. The incense was strong in the air.
The twisting coils of smoke, so familiar to him from his years of mystic practice, engaged his eyes with some of the long lost freshness that had accompanied his earliest experiments. The charm was still there.
Without turning his head, he reached in the suitcase, passed his hand along the row of bottles, chose the one that contained the strongest elixir of visions. He uncorked it, drank deeply, tossed the empty bottle aside.
He took another long breath of the perfumed air, settled more comfortably in his wheel-chair, let his thick eyelids droop into dreamy relaxation. He waited.
Ten minutes passed. The elixir began to work. He felt the sluggish torpor engulf his sensitive nerves, felt the imagery of his relaxed eyes suddenly grow sharper. The weaving threads of smoke glowed out of the darkness in fuller contours. The fantastic shapes became a parade of figures, a passing show that formed and melted before his imaginative eyes.
He mumbled to himself. “Racket . . . on the level! Little did that manager realize! . . . Hell, the world’s masters of science could come to me for clearer insights . . . if they weren’t so damned conceited . . . My arts could open paths for magistrates and kings and presidents . . . For anyone that gets blinded by chaos . . . Even myself . . .”
His voice lowered to a whisper.
“What is my answer? . . . How can I sell my visions to the world? . . . How can I turn this knowledge into wealth and power? . . . How? . . . How? . . .”
Minutes passed. Janetto’s concentration grew more intense.
Suddenly the answer began to form. The red smoke thickened into meaningful shapes. A momentary pause in the swirl shot its suggestion home. The picture hung like a tableau somewhere between the background of purple velvet and dimmer eye of Janetto’s brain. He drew in a sharp breath, closed his drooping eyelids, fixed the image in his mind.
He looked again. It was still there, not motionless but changing. Minor figures were coming and going past the granite pedestal on which the central figure stood.
The central figure was a beautiful young girl, dressed in a flowing purple gown. She was smiling, and there was the slightest touch of disdain in the curve of her lips and the arch of her eyebrows as she looked down on the passing figures.
In her hands she held an ancient Grecian lyre, which she stroked carelessly with her long slim fingers—and now Janetto imagined he could hear the faint tinkle of those weird strings.
At first the girl’s beauty so fascinated him that he did not see what the minor figures had to do with the picture. But at once he was startled to notice his own hand—it had to be his own, for it wore the same topaz ring, bore the same vein markings; the hand passed across the side of the pedestal to gather up the bags of money that the passing figures placed there at the feet of the girl.
Then, as the vision began to fade, Janetto caught the last detail. The procession of persons, mostly men who were so magnetized by the girl’s beauty that they laid offerings of gold at her feet, passed on through an entrance over which hung an old battered tin sign hung with diamond-studded nails . . .
For a time the vision screen was almost black. Janetto began to whisper to himself, “Where do I find her? . . .
Where do I find her? . . . She is undoubtedly the most beautiful girl in the land. . . But where? . . .
The red strands of smoke began to weave a landscape of rolling hills, distant mountains . . .
CHAPTER II
A Reunion
It was a sunny morning in the narrow mountain-flanked grasslands known as the Blue Valley. It was a morning for making hay, and Rustan’s strong young arms wielded the pitchfork with practiced skill. The horses kept the old hay wagon lumbering along just fast enough for Rustan to keep up a sweat.
He finished a windrow, was about to start on the next one, when he looked across the fence to see a hiker coming along the highway.
Rustan turned the horses to rest facing the breeze. He ambled over to the fence, stripped off a sliver of wood to chew on while he waited for the figure to approach. Rustan never missed a chance to talk with a drifter. He was, in fact, a drifter himself by birth, though the charm of Blue Valley had rooted him down for the time being.
“It’s a girl!” he said to himself. Then as she came closer, he called, “Hi, there! where’s your limousine?”
“Left it back in the ditch,” said the girl.
“Chauffeur?”
“Same ditch,” the girl retorted without smiling. “Where can I get water?” She looked warm in her knitted green jersey and faded moleskin trousers rolled up at the ankles. Her fluffy red hair was damp at the edges of her forehead. Her lips were slightly swollen.
“Right this way, madam,” said Rustan, “I’ve got a jug in the wagon. Say . . .”
He looked sharply at her clear dark eyes, the dainty curves of her face. There was something damned familiar—
She crossed the barbed-wire fence with a rugged grace that proved she was a veteran drifter. She caught up the burlap-covered water jug with a hooked finger and rested its weight on her folded arm as she drank.
Her face suddenly drew back from the lips of the jug. “I know you!” she cried. “You’re Rustan!”
His eyes brightened. “Are you— Mary? The kid I used to play with down in the west-side jungles? I’ll be damned!”
He gave a yell of delight, tossed the water jug to the wagon, grabbed her and kissed her. She laughed and tousled his hair and beat him on the shoulders with her fists the way she had used to do when they were kids. Then she drew back with mock dignity.
“Here, here! You’re taking advantage, kissing a girl before she has time to get her guard up. I ought to punch you.”
“Hell, I was so glad to see you!” Rustan paused, looking at her intently. How she had changed in five years! She must be all of sixteen! Rustan twinkled. “If I’d really meant it for a serious kiss, I’d have kissed you this way—”
She pushed him away with a toss of her arm and laughed, “No you don’t. I’m a lady now, even if I don’t dress like it. I’m entitled to men’s respect, and believe me, laddie, I’m getting it.”
“In the drifters’ jungles?”
“Your darn right.” Mary looked at him steadily. “You know how it is. There’s plenty of us been uprooted in the last few years, and set a-drifting with no homes or families; but some of the oneriest beggars in the jungles still have enough decency to put up a scrap when a girl needs a friend.”
“Hmm. What made you leave the jungles?”
The girl arched an eyebrow. “Too much scrapping.” She took another drink of water. “Beside, you know what I’ve always said. When I grew up I’d get a job . . . I hear that times are getting better in some of the cities the other side of the mountains.”
“You won’t like a job.”
“I might.”
“Stay here and take a job on this hay wagon,” Rustan suggested.
“Give me a pitchfork.”
She took the extra fork and went to work. They finished loading the hay wagon, sat in the shade
of it and ate lunch, and talked over the world’s problems.
A third voice interrupted their discussion—the growl of the sour-faced old hired man.
“What’s she doing here?”
“Working here,” Rustan grinned. “She’s a friend of mine.”
“You and your friends are getting too thick around here.” Sour-face lighted a pipe and sat down beside them. He scowled at the girl. “The government’ll have to do something about all these drifters.”
“The government better do something about the government,” Rustan retorted. “What is the government anyhow? A bunch of police in each city, run by a bunch of magistrates, to keep a bunch of barons in the dough. The big governments have gone out like soap bubbles.”
“Maybe so,” said Sour-face. “But up here in Blue Valley we don’t care how many governments go out or come in, so long as they don’t pan their troubles off on us.”
Rustan was satisfied to let this point stand. Nowhere in all his hitchhiking travels had he found a more serene or self-sufficient place than this bit of valley. He liked it here.
Sour-face rose. “You’d better send that girl away before the boss and his wife get back this afternoon.”
“I’m going to make them give her a job,” said Rustan. “They’ll do it, too.”
“I’m warning you!”
“Go plow your potatoes before I jab you with a pitchfork!” Rustan emphasized his words by reaching for a fork, and old Sour-face hobbled away.
Rustan turned to Mary. “I’m in dead earnest about that job. The boss and his wife’ll fall for you. You’d like it here—I hope.”
The girl’s eyes snapped at him like firecrackers. “So you’ve settled down! I’m surprised, after the way you used to talk. You had so much drifter in your blood you were getting out and set the world on fire.”
Rustan plowed an uneasy hand through his shaggy brown hair. “We had a lot of big ideas, didn’t we? But it looks like the New Dark Ages have got a choke-hold on us. We won’t live to see the century that the world shakes out of it. So here I am making hay in Blue Valley. How about staying with me, kid?”
