The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  While Dujardin struggled to evade the charge that he must have known was coming, I managed to crawl out of the net and slip down over the rear end of the drawer, dropping softly to the floor.

  I picked my path carefully, crept to a hiding place within a foot of a doorsill. The door fit badly, and I had an even chance of squeezing through.

  By this time the governor was confronting Dujardin with the same jarring newspaper story that Gaston had found.

  “It says Raymond Quinton is in a hospital,” the governor spat. “Quinton was the last man on my list. Several days ago we sent him into the Test of Dust—and you, my fine-feathered friend, checked him off. What kind of liar does this make you?”

  I couldn’t have chosen a moment of colder silence for my climb through the door. But I wouldn’t be seen, for I knew that the two men were glaring at each other.

  By springing my wings ever so slightly I made it. I was out—free—

  But a huge rough hand clapped down over me—I had forgotten to beware of eavesdroppers! Within the fingers of W. Heffle I was again a prisoner.

  W. Heffle blinked at me approximately twenty times. Then he kicked on the door and grunted, “Let me in. I got something to show you.”

  The scientist may or may not have welcomed this intrusion. With or without me, he was in a spot.

  One Heffle called another until the four of them crowded into the room, joining the governor and Dujardin in gazing at me. Dujardin placed me in an empty fishbowl and laid a piece of thick plate glass over the top, leaving a crack for air.

  I was pained to have them glaring at me, making a side-show out of me. But in spite of my humiliation I realized by this time that my feelings were of secondary importance. Monsieur Dujardin was in a hot spot. I no longer misjudged him. He had been fighting a set of ruthless criminals all these years. Yes, and single-handed. But they were closing in on him with a vengeance at last.

  What Dujardin had done to me, and to nine other men that the governor had tricked into coming under Madeline’s spell, was crime enough to leave an unforgivable blot on science. No one could deny that. But the fact remained that Dujardin had not murdered us.

  His ingenuity had contrived to keep us alive, at least.

  Yes, at the risk of his own life, under the very eyes of those four stiff owleyed thugs, he had dared to defy orders, and had gotten away with it.

  Moreover, he’d been clever enough to hide the whole game from his daughter, had kept her in a realm of beauty and idealism, away from the sordid. No wonder her innocence was such that even butterflies could instinctively feel her warmth and friendship.

  But what would happen to her when the scientist’s game exploded? I dreaded to think how horrified she would be. She must be warned, before this ugly business broke in her face.

  These thoughts flooded through my tiny brain as I waited amid the stifling air of the fish bowl.

  The sight of me had uncorked perturbed speculations in the mind of Governor Revel. He paced the floor, snapping his fingers, champing his wide jaws. Everytime around he stopped for another look at me.

  “So that’s what comes of your science,” he growled. “Along with all your baloney-stuffed lectures you can really turn out something. Um-m-m . . . I think you’re pulling a fast one, Dujardin.”

  The Heffles grunted their agreement.

  The scientist thumbed through some notes absently. Even when they prodded him with sharp questions he made a fair show of ignoring them.

  I knew well enough that Dujardin was confused. After that news account of Raymond Quinton, he couldn’t be sure about me.

  But he kept his mouth shut. He was wise enough to know that the governor was confused too.

  “Have you Heffles seen any other specimens like that?” Governor Revel asked.

  The Heffles hadn’t. No synthetic butterfly had ever been developed along these lines before. They were sure of that.

  “Do you Heffles know how he goes about it to develop one of the damned things?”

  The four butlers had to admit they didn’t. The scientific processes were too complicated. They could never be sure what the scientist was working on from one time to the next.

  “A fine quartet you are,” the governor snorted, “letting this happen right under your eyes. You’d better take care that he doesn’t mix a couple of you fellows into butterfly batter—ugh!”

  The governor’s words broke off with a husky grunt, as if someone had slugged him in the chest. “Wait a minute, boys, maybe I have an idea there. Tell me, how often have these synthetic butterflies appeared?”

  Dujardin, of course, refused to answer. But the four Heffles began to pool their observations on the matter. They quickly stumbled onto a formula.

  There had been nine butterflies in all, they agreed—ten, counting me—and when one of them had been killed during Maurice De Brosse’s duel, they remembered, both the scientist and the girl had been terribly upset.

  “The point is,” said Y. Heffle, getting hot on the trail that the governor was after, “the girl has got a new butterfly for every boy friend that got cancelled.”

  “Now we’re getting places, aren’t we, Dujardin?” The governor smiled evilly at the scientist. “Maybe some of your lectures about organisms that revert and then redevelop didn’t go over my head after all.”

  “Purely hypothesis,” said the scientist dryly, pretending to miss the other’s implication, devoting all his attention, apparently, to the marking of chemical formulas on a scratch pad.

  “How soon after the disappearance of each of my special friends,” the governor drew out the words with luxurious sarcasm, “did these synthetic butterflies come on the scene?”

  Again the Heffles lacked exact information. Several days, they were sure, in each instance.

  “Then this damned little varmint,” the governor said savagely “is in all probabilities a certain nephew of a certain cursed aristocrat who once threw mud in my face. The tenth number on my revenge list. This is Raymond Quinton the actor”

  Dujardin looked up and laughed in a mocking tone. He was playing his invisible cards as boldly as he dared.

  “You’re going to terrific lengths,” Dujardin said, appearing greatly amused, “to make trouble for yourself out of nothing. Now that I’ve dispatched your ten men—”

  “Or have you?”

  “Now that I’ve dispatched them for you, virtually at the point of a gun, your moth-eaten conscience begins to hatch illusions. You’re getting bats. You think your dead men will come to life. First you see them in news stories. Next you see them in butterflies. Next they’ll be jumping at you right out of your soup—”

  “Very funny, Dujardin,” the governor snapped. “But I’m on the inside track, now. Whichever way the wind blows, you’ll get your reward for your obedient and noble services.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “When I find the first trace that any of those ten men are living, you’re through. I’ll give you the honor of being number eleven on my list. And you’re daughter—well, I’ve got some ideas about her too.”

  In spite of the alert Heffles, the scientist straightened to his feet, clenched his fists, and shot a hard challenging eye at the governor.

  “A fine business! Conjuring up false guilt for innocent people,” Dujardin said, and his whitened lips measured every word. “If I were the blackest criminal in the world, that wouldn’t make Madeline guilty—”

  “I’m far ahead of you, Dujardin,” said the governor suavely. “Don’t I know that if you’ve pulled some strange butterfly miracle over my ten men, you did it for a purpose? . . . You did it thinking there’d be a chance to bring them back . . . Back to men! And you’d try it, too. The minute you thought you were through with me. Wouldn’t you? . . . You or your daughter. Don’t answer, you sphinx. But I’m not so dumb.”

  The words were nerve-shattering, and their volume reechoed terrifyingly in my fish bowl.

  “In a few days,” said the governor, “Gast
on, the comedian, will come back from a visit he’s making to a hospital on the continent. He’s gone to check up on what I think must be a false news story. He’s promised to stop on the way back and let me know whether Raymond Quinton is alive. No, he doesn’t know my purpose. He thinks I’m Quinton’s friend. But when I get that report, I’ll know what’s what.” He paused, and all four Heffles as well as the scientist watched him thumb through the calendar.

  “He’ll soon be back,” the governor went on. “Meanwhile I’ll take a new interest in those other synthetic butterflies. Where are they?”

  “Flying around wherever they please,” said the scientist evasively.

  “They huddle together out in the flower-garden at night,” said X. Heffle, turning to the window. “We could gather them up for you. Right out there—”

  He opened the window and pointed.

  Governor Revel nodded, observing that a once-over might be in order right away. “And this little mannish-looking freak with the red wings we’ll keep—”

  The scientist, backing out of the governor’s way, struck the lid of my bowl with his elbow. The glass clattered over the edge of the table and crashed to the floor. I flew out the window.

  And I hadn’t needed any butterfly instincts to tell me it was time to fly. I knew, as well as I knew my name was Louis Ribot, that Dujardin had knocked that glass lid off on purpose.

  War had been pounding across France in unprecedented blitzkriegs, during recent days, and its hatreds, fears, and tragedies had not failed to shake the island of Fraise.

  But that the treacherous governor of this French island should dream of selling out to the enemy somehow had not occurred to me. And yet, for one of his rashness and lack of principle, it was what I should have expected.

  What I heard, during the remainder of the show-down conversation between him and his scientist-stooge, convinced me that this was one of his alternative plans: to invite Nazi bombers to come over and clean up the mess he had started.

  For at heart Governor Revel was scared white. The magic of science had him quivering in his boots. After seeing me, he knew that anything might happen. One or all of his ten victims might materialize before him—they might sprout from bulbs or hatch from eggs or jump out of water spouts—unless he crushed out this whole realm of experimentation.

  He told Dujardin bluntly that a word to the German military staff would be the surest way to make a clean sweep of every damned haunt, butterfly, chrysalis, or test tube.

  “I’ll give you one week to come out with the whole truth—or else.” With that threat he departed, leaving the four Heffles alert at their posts.

  The days moved slowly.

  I kept out of sight to be sure the Heffles wouldn’t recapture me.

  I often visited Madeline’s sunny south room, where the new French windows admitted lights of many hues. The other butterflies would be there, playing over the girl’s lovely hair, chasing boldly down her arms, taking off from her fingertips. She called them each by name, but only one of them did I know—the blue and silver one named Maurice.

  Maurice knew me, too, I assumed, for Madeline had begun to call me Raymond. But all of Maurice’s pugnacious tendencies seemed to be glossed over with butterfly instincts. Like the others he was bright, cheery, playful—not malicious in the slightest. I couldn’t help wondering whether he would have been the same if he had been as well developed as I, or whether he would have liked to finish our unfinished duel.

  Then I observed something startling. Gradually he was changing—yes, and so were the others. Especially those who basked in the light of a certain amber-colored window. Though the changes were slight they were unmistakable. In the course of a week one butterfly that spent hours in the amber light acquired a heavier body, a rounder head, and the beginnings of tiny arms and legs—not the legs of the lepidoptera, but human arms and legs.

  Then I knew what the scientist had meant, instructing the architect to make mosaics of some specially prepared glass to be useful in laboratory experiments. Tadpoles and other forms of animal life which the scientist sometimes exposed to this amber window light developed with magical speed. It had the same effect as the amber lantern had had on me.

  However, when Dujardin found any of us butterflies basking in the amber, he would call to Madeline to take us away. And so the changes in our butterfly bodies were suspended, and remained too slight for Madeline ever to notice.

  I felt terrible, and if I hadn’t been sturdy I would have had a nervous breakdown. For I knew what no one else except Dujardin knew—that we were figuratively living on dynamite with the fuse already lighted beneath us.

  As I already stated, I was determined to put Mademoiselle Butterfly wise to the dangers. How? I didn’t know. My butterfly talents were too ineffectual to make any impression. All my human knowledge was no good unless I could find some way to communicate it.

  No little pet dog could have trailed any more persistently after its master than I trailed after her. I continually fluttered at her ears, crying at the top of my piping voice.

  “It’s me, Madeline. Can’t you hear me? I’ve got something terribly important to tell you. Listen to me.”

  She would smile at me, and pet me, and call me a rogue for tickling her ears. But she couldn’t seem to hear my voice.

  “Madeline, you’ve got to know that I’m not what you think I am. I didn’t come from a butterfly chrysalis. I’m a man—the actor you loved. Your father changed me. That green fluid—the pressures inside that false tunnel—”

  I tried to spell words out, waving my hands. I tried to make use of the dot and dash code, sometimes with my arms, sometimes my wings. Occasionally I succeeded in making her intensely curious. Then other butterflies would swerve around her diverting her attention. Sometimes when she would be reading a book I would alight on the edge and start pointing to letters.

  But she would brush me away, telling me I was full of funny tricks. To her there was no more purpose in my actions than in the endless random fluttering of the others.

  And yet she must have sensed that there was a difference. Once while she was standing by the large window, radiating her friendliness and beauty to all of us, she turned to gaze at me.

  I happened to be perched on the carved pedestal at the moment, as if I were on a stage. Perhaps it was her beauty, the loveliness of her honey-colored hair, the sunlight glinting from the myriad strings of beads at her throat, the costume effect of her yellow silk sleeves and full-skirted brown dress. There was all the glamor of footlights and music about her.

  I began to act.

  Unheard though my voice was, I went straight through a climax from a Moliere play, with the grandest gestures ever.

  “Why, Raymond Quinton,” she said, and there was a startled, haunted note in her voice, “you’re a regular actor—just like your name’s sake.”

  That was as near as I came to it—until I stumbled upon my bazaar method of writing.

  Mademoiselle Butterfly was writing a letter that night. It was a love letter meant for me. I watched over her shoulder, and from time to time she spoke to me. But she did not know. I was only a cunning little pet, affording a little solace. She crumpled the letter, half-finished, and started another. But she went to sleep over her desk.

  The ink bottle was open. I tried to dip the pen, but it was too heavy and awkward for me to handle. Then came the remarkable discovery. My little six-inch butterfly tongue coiled up under my nose could suck nectar. Why couldn’t it suck ink? It could deposit pollen. Why couldn’t it deposit ink?

  Within a few minutes I had succeeded writing my first words with swift, delicate strokes. That was the beginning of this journal, written between the printed lines of this book.

  “The invisible trap was closing in on me,” I began, “on the night I finished my sell-out week at the Fraise Theater.”

  The more I wrote, the easier the tongue worked. The ink fairly flew, that night; for once I had begun my story, I wanted to complete i
t before showing it to Madeline.

  There were two other evenings that Madeline fell asleep over letters, and each morning following she was mystified over the way the ink was disappearing, jokingly accusing me of drinking it.

  Meanwhile, every hour brought Governor Revel’s deadline closer.

  The end came swiftly.

  For three of my fellow butterflies it was a violent end with no warning whatsoever. Evidently the governor had instructed the Heffles to kill all of us at once. They killed the first three they could get their hands on. By that time I was crying warnings to the others.

  My butterfly habits might have been enough to convey a sense of danger to the others, but by this time I had made the remarkable discovery that my voice, unheard by persons, carried perfectly to my winged fellows. We became an army of six to fight our own battles. I had learned something about ink that would apply equally well to poison.

  We hid out until dusk, then raided the laboratory shelves. The strength of my arms was barely sufficient. I uncorked the bottle, each of us filled our little tubular tongues with poison. We slipped into the bedchambers of the Heffles and waited, biding our time until the snoring began.

  Three snores were silenced that night.

  Early the next morning W. Heffle, who had paced the grounds all night keeping vigil, beat his fists against a bedchamber window trying to rouse his brothers. We swooped down on him, a deadly little army of five butterflies. Five, not six, for one unfortunate member had succumbed to the poison.

  I’ll never forget the heroic attack that Maurice De Brosse made in his last fight. His flashy blue and silver wings caught the early morning light, made the butler start. Maurice cut in with all the daring of a champion swordsman. Twice Heffle’s swinging palm grazed his wings. The third stroke landed squarely. Maurice fell to the sidewalk and W. Heffle stamped on him, cursing.

  But the rest of us took our advantage when W. Heffle opened his mouth to curse. We flew at his face, sprayed poison on his tongue. Heffle, swinging at us, gulped and gagged—then sank into a heap . . .