The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  “Phil! Phil-l-l!”

  Her voice was weak. The winds were too strong. Hot sands blew against her cheeks. Her feet seemed weighted. She must not get too far from the plane.

  “Phil-l-l-l! It’s Verena. Are you there?”

  No use to shout. No use to cry, either. It was strange to recall story books, here in this faraway planet. The fairies. They always rewarded little girls who didn’t cry.

  “A reward,” thought Verena. “Phil—his admiration—his gratitude—that would be all the reward any girl could want. Phil’s strength. His laughter.”

  Laughter. She stopped, chilled, remembering. At the camp one man had laughed. Like a demon. And then died. From heat, or maybe desolation. An expedition to such a planet was punishment. The party had bogged down. They wanted to go home. They had seen enough. They had fulfilled their mission. They didn’t want to do more. Only Phil, with his burning curiosity, dared to seek the answers to certain mysteries. Like ghost-like balls of fire that floated along the ground at night—what were they?

  It was like Phil to strike out on an impulse—to leap into a plane to follow one of those roving fireballs. An illusion, the others called it. That was because they were afraid. Smith, the red-faced cook, had been terrified. And he was the one who had voted against Verena’s coming along—because she was a woman!

  Smith had seen Phil fly off in the night, in pursuit of that fiery ghost. “Let him go! He’s mad with the heat,” Smith had said. “On half a tank of gas he’ll lose himself in that awful desert.”

  But Verena had scorned such cowardice. She had waited for her chance and taken “the other plane.

  “Phil-l-l!”

  Her cry disturbed the vultures overhead. They were ugly hungry birds with immense sixteen-foot wings. Bright green wings with strength to combat the heavy gravity. It took muscles to fly. It took muscles to walk. Verena fell.

  She laughed at herself. Falling like a child in deep snow. So comfortable to rest for a moment.

  Someone was coming. Not Phil.

  She leaped to her feet. She ran. It was like slow motion against the gravity. She tried to hide. There was a patch of scrubby trees. Hardly as large as the green-winged vultures perched on them.

  Her pursuer was less than a hundred yards away, and gaining. She would be overtaken. She stopped, then, turned and came toward him, slowly.

  He was dark and grizzled and larger than Phil, with heavy muscles adapted to the gravity. He had the coarse features of the natives she had seen earlier on this expedition on another side of this planet. Natives who had prided themselves in elaborate adornments and costumes. This man was half naked, leathery brown, a creature of the wilderness. Deep dark eyes under fierce eyebrows. Scraggy hair like shreds of rusty iron.

  He came cautiously, now. He touched the handle of the short knife at his side. His fingers were large and clumsy.

  She knew the languages of certain regions of this planet. Her skill in languages had won her a place with the expedition. As the leathery brown man spoke, she understood “You are a woman.” He sounded like an animal snarling. “You are my captive. You understand?”

  “I understand.” Her hands dropped to her sides. The little pistol weighed warm within the pocket of her green gabardine trousers.

  “You come with me,” he said. “Where?”

  “To my family.”

  “Why?”

  “They want a woman.”

  He slipped the loop of a four-foot grass rope over her wrist to lead her away. She was not afraid. He was a stupid creature. He probably knew nothing of firearms.

  “This way.” He hardly looked at her.

  “Where do I find a city?”

  “No cities in all the land.”

  “Isn’t there a camp or an interplanetary expedition somewhere?”

  This was over his head. He grunted and trudged on. She tried again. “Where are other people?”

  “No others but my family. I take you to them. Come on.”

  He gave a sharp jerk on the rope, and they moved along, kicking up the brown dust, he with his bare, scarred feet, she with her dirt-caked boots. She quickened her pace, to walk beside him, to study his face as she questioned him.

  She decided it was a cowardly face. Full of nervous twitches. His eyes were away from her, toward the ledges beyond the flat stretch of sand. He turned and felt the pressure of her eyes. He gave a grotesque laugh. Jangled nerves, she thought.

  “What is your name?”

  “Muddi.”

  “You must have neighbors. Where are they? Where did you get your language?”

  “Everything I have I get from my family.”

  “Isn’t there a trading post or a government agency? Aren’t there any visitors?”

  “Any visitors come, we make them part of the family. You be part of the family too.”

  She considered, slowing her pace. “Do you ever find tracks of men who have lost their way in this wilderness?”

  “All tracks lead to my home. Only my mother no longer makes tracks. She moves through the air. She is not often seen.”

  The land was not quite devoid of life. Besides the vultures there were small brown rodents. Bulky little creatures. The heavier gravity of this planet accounted for their stoutness, Verena thought.

  The air was dim with dust. To the south the fantastic towers of stone rose higher with each step of their progress. Verena’s swollen lips were gratified, at last, by the moisture of a tub-sized pool of muddy water sheltered among the rocks.

  The desert man mumbled uneasily as she drank her fill. He was looking away. She caught her reflection—her thick yellow hair heavy with dust, her long eyelashes darkened, her smooth throat above the open collar of her flyer’s jacket powdered with dust against windburn.

  Among the men of her own faraway world Verena was celebrated for her beauty. But to this creature she was simply “a woman.”

  It was obvious that any woman would do.

  “There was once a hungry lion,” she spoke to herself, recalling an old fable, “who was so intent upon his search for a dried carcass that when, by some fortune, he came upon the choicest viands of a king’s feast, he behaved as if his find were a dried carcass.”

  “What are you saying?” Muddi asked.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” said Verena. “What is this steep path?” They were about to descend a dark deep diff. The jagged walls led down into an oblivion of grey dust-mist.

  “You will not fall,” he said. “I have a magic charm.”

  He took a small bright object from his pocket—a con. Verena recognized it. It might have been her own. Or Phil’s!

  “Where did you get that?”

  “It is new,” said Muddi. “But it will work.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “My brother took it away from—” He stopped short suddenly self-conscious. Evidently he had been instructed that certain things must be kept secret. He added; “My brother had it. He said it was a good charm. You will not fall.”

  CHAPTER II

  It was a vertical chasm. Four massive shoulders of iron-colored rock had pulled apart in some past geological upheaval. This gaping pit had formed, large enough that a sizable house could have been dropped in. Verena could not tell how deep it went.

  “We live down there,” he said. “All of us.”

  “Is there food down there?” she asked.

  He was tying a stout rope around her waist. “My brothers and their wives are there. They have food some day. Some days we only fight.”

  He let the rope down over the cliff, his massive muscles working with animal-like cunning. She descended slowly, steadily, until her feet found the shelf on the rock below.

  Then she could see the next shelf, thirty or forty feet down. He descended, grimy with sweat.

  By the time they reached the fifth shelf below the surface it was much darker, and all the sky space above the surface was a gray haze. She could barely see the soft silhouettes of the
vultures that flew the jagged walls.

  Now, looking down into a heavy darkness, she saw the black earthern floor where a feeble fire burned. The thin smoke odors rose through the dust.

  “There we live,” he said. “They are waiting for you.”

  “They couldn’t have known I was coming,” she said.

  “They sent me forth to find a woman,” he repeated, giving a low cackle of triumph. “I found you.”

  It was a tantalizing thought. She asked, “Where would you have gone if I hadn’t come along?”

  “It must be that my mother went out and got you and put you in my path.”

  “I didn’t see your mother, I’m sure,” said Verena. What strange ideas possessed this dull-witted man?

  “My mother lives in the flames,” he said. “She goes anywhere in the flames. She brings back what we need.”

  “She lives in the flames? In actual fire?” Verena repeated the words carefully to make sure.

  The dolt nodded. “In flames.”

  “I didn’t see any fires,” she said. “I just came down from the skies—in a plane. Or don’t you understand? I am a stranger. I don’t know anything about this wild land. I don’t belong here. I was just flying over. You must have the wrong person.”

  “They said to bring a woman,” he repeated stubbornly. “They said I must have a wife.”

  He frowned at the rope, the last dangling cord in the series, a trifle disturbed because it had begun to rub thin at the point where it hung over the rock. He worked silently to change the ends of the rope. Verena listened. Now, from below, the sounds of raspy breathing welled up to her, like the sifting of sand over stones.

  Then from two hundred feet overhead came a series of thumping noises. She looked up through the dusty gloom. A stick of wood was falling down along the jagged wall—a bit of dry branch that a careless vulture had kicked off the edge of its nest. The echoes grew with the fall, and the descent of the breaking chunks rose to a crescendo.

  The falling wood missed her by inches and crashed to the floor of stone and earth about twenty-five feet below.

  At once she saw the dark figure of a slovenly woman scurrying through the shadows down there. She was partly naked, her hair was matted over the sides of her face. She bent down hastily, seized the fallen chunks of wood, and ran back.

  Immediately another woman, larger and quite as naked, lumbered into sight from another corner. She rubbed her eyes sleepily and looked for any chips that might be left. A heavy male voice roared at her. “Did you get any? . . . So she beat you again! Well, I’ll beat you, too!”

  The woman went back into her shadowy recess.

  “Those are my brothers’ wives,” Muddi said. “That’s the way they are.” Verena shuddered to hear the quarreling and fighting that followed. Could the fallen chunks of wood be so precious that they must be fought over?

  The quarrel promptly subsided in favor of a continuation of a lazy afternoon of sleeping. Muddi helped Verena down the last of the descent. She now stood on the solid stone floor of the pit, with vertical walls rising over two hundred feet around her. The tiny patch of graying sky seemed very remote indeed. As if she were at the bottom of the deepest well in the world.

  So this was the home of Muddi’s family! Imagine living in so weird a place!

  On looking around at the base of these walls, Verena saw that this stone floor, which had been visible from above, was a natural court, opening into irregular caverns that provided shelter. There were four of these, each cluttered with the sort of properties that might belong to primitive householding. Four separate rock-walled apartments, after a fashion, thought Verena.

  Highly oppressive, to say the least. Her longing for food was the only magnet that held her. And yet, that coin!

  She backed away from the small fire. Her hand jerked involuntarily at the touch of warm metal at her side. She observed, then, the huge black iron kettle.

  An unpleasant odor surrounded the place, and she suspected the kettle was the source. She peeked in to see seven or eight bones, completely bare and white, lying in the remains of the soup.

  The wives of Muddi’s brothers came out of their corners to look at her. Their evil eyes narrowed in jealousy. They were whiskery old women, and the fuzz did not end with their cheeks but curved into their lips.

  “They live there, and there,” said Muddi, pointing to the two corners of the pit. Then nodding to a third corner, “You and I will live there.”

  Verena sought the support of the stone wall. High walls were all around her, and though they stood solid, she felt as if they were closing in.

  “Father lives there.” This was the fourth of the four recesses. In the deep gloom she discerned the outline of a large basket.

  “Tell her where your mother lives,” one of the wretched women muttered. The other gave a brittle laugh, like dry twigs breaking.

  “Mother lives in here.” He pointed to the kettle. “You don’t see her except when there’s a fire. She’s away most of the time.”

  Verenas’ wide eyes became fastened upon the white bones in the remains of the soup.

  “That’s animal meat she brings us,” said Muddi. “Father never wants her to come.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she accuses father of murdering her.”

  Verena frowned. “That’s absurd.”

  “But someone did murder her.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Verena. “If someone murdered her she’d be dead.”

  “She is dead,” said Muddi, “so she is fire.”

  “Where did you come from?” one of the women said.

  “I came from where Muddi’s good luck charm came from.”

  This caused a stir of whispers among the two wives and one of the brothers, and they were staring at her very suspiciously. As if her wits were dangerous weapons. As if she had flung a challenge in their teeth. The husky brother rubbed the three ugly knife scars on the side of his neck. He growled, “How did you get here?”

  “I was flying over. I came from thousands of miles away.”

  “Flying over, like a vulture?”

  “Much higher than a vulture. There are ways, where I came from.”

  The brother with the scars exchanged a knowing glance with the oldest brother, who now emerged, like a big sleepy animal, from his cave.

  There was a fight among the three brothers that evening. Muddi, Verena soon realized, was used to being bullied by the other two. They were larger than he, and fiercer. They would slap at Muddi, and he, used to such treatment, would retreat to a corner and sulk. It was plain that he knew, from past experience, the futility of fighting back.

  Tonight they taunted him for his cowardice. As if to show off before her. They took his knife away from him and threw it up on a rock shelf overhead. At last Muddi struck back at the oldest one, and suddenly the bare fists were popping in a three-way battle. Verena crouched in a corner and tried to pay no attention. She had no sympathy for any of them. When they saw that their show had ceased to interest her, they stopped of their own accord. Muddi, badly beaten, was left whimpering.

  The two older brothers were called into their separate caves by their scolding wives. Muddi stalked off to his lair without so much as looking at Verena, if indeed he could have seen her out of his swollen eyes.

  And so, as night’s darkness came on, she was left alone in the open court at the bottom of the deep pit, sitting in a corner with a warm stone at her back, and a few red coals of a dying fire to keep her company.

  CHAPTER III

  As soon as she thought everyone was asleep, she started around the cavern entrances whispering, “Phil—Phil-l-l!”

  Once she imagined she heard a low whispering answer.

  “Verena!”

  She listened. She tried again, going from one cave to another. No, there was no answer. Imagination? She wondered.

  The sounds were few and mysterious. Sometimes she heard the low groan or heavy breathing of one of the
brothers. Occasionally a bit of wood would fall through the darkness, closer and louder, until the final crash. Echoes would drift up through the pit. There were long minutes of empty silence. A particularly loud crash of wood awakened both of the wives. After they had scrambled for the precious stuff, they stopped to stir the fire. The two of them stared at her, then, with a single thought. She tried to pretend she was asleep. But she heard them whispering. They were jealous of her. They came toward her. She suddenly realized that they might be planning to kill her.

  “Where are you?” One of the brothers shouted.

  One of the women slipped back toward her cave, but her irate husband met her at the entrance, and he was in a bad mood.

  “I was getting wood,” the woman said.

  “I saw you,” he said sarcastically. “Is she asleep?”

  “How do I know?”

  “So you were going to beat her. It’s a wonder my mother doesn’t burn you to a cinder.”

  There it was again, thought Verena. That same allusion to the Mother’s power—a mother who was somehow associated with fire.

  The other brother came out, and the two couples began to quarrel and wrangle. Why, they demanded, had the wedding been postponed? Why not arouse Muddi and get it over with? The sniveling coward! Their argument was brutal and profane. Now Verena knew, instinctively, that the women hoped to get rid of her because of their husbands. The husbands, on the other hand, wanted her to be married to Muddi. Then she could stay. And her life would be in less danger in this whirlpool of conflict.

  “Wake him up. Get it over with.”

  “Throw some wood on.”

  “Wake your father,” the larger woman said. “He can wake up long enough to say the marriage words. He’s the only one that knows them.”

  The father, according to their belief, hadn’t been awake for days. But Verena saw at once that the brothers and their wives were mistaken in this conjecture. At this moment the father appeared.