by Roger Elwood
I shuddered. “That was bad … evil. What about this ‘good and evil’ theory of Ponder’s, incidentally? How could he have worked evil on you with a spell from the Bible?”
There was a trace of irritation in his voice. “You’ll have to get rid of this ‘black and white magic’ misconception,” he said. “Is a force like electricity ‘white’ or ‘black’? You use it for the iron lung. You use it also for the electric chair. You can’t define magic by its methods and its materials, but only in terms of its purpose. Regard it, not as ‘black’ and ‘white’ but as High and Low magic. As to the Testament, why, that ritual is older than the Bible or it couldn’t have been recorded there. Believe me, Ponder was using it well out of its context. Ah well, it’s all over with now. You two are blessed—do you realize that? You both will keep your special immunity, and Claire shall have what she most wants, besides.”
“What about you?”
“I must go. I have work to do. The world was not ordained to be without me.
“For there is reason in the world, and all the world is free to use it. But there has been no will to use it. There’s wilfulness aplenty, in individuals and in groups, but no great encompassing will to work with reason. Almost no one reads a Communist newspaper but Communists, and only prohibitionists attend a dry convention. Humanity is split up into tiny groups, each clinging to some single segment of Truth, and earnestly keeping itself unaware of the other Truths that make up the great mosaic. And even when humans are aware of the fact that others share the same truth, they allow themselves to be kept apart from each other. The farmer here knows that the farmer there does not want to fight a war against him, yet they fight. I am that Will. I am the brother of Reason, who came here with me. My brother has done well, but he needs me and you have set me free.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“The earliest men called me Kamäel.”
“The Camel … in every language,” murmured Claire. Suddenly her eyes widened. “You are—an … an archangel, Kamäel! I’ve read… .”
He smiled, and we looked down, blinded.
“Tiltol!”
The tiny familiar twitched and was suddenly balancing on its two legs. It moved abruptly, impossibly fast, zoomed up to Kamäel, where it nestled in the crook of his arm. And suddenly it began to grow and change. Great golden feathers sprouted from its naked hide, and a noble crest. It spread wide wings. Its plumage was an incredible purple under its golden crest and gold-tipped wings. We stared, filling our minds with a sight no human being alive had seen—of all birds, the noblest.
“Goodbye,” said Kamäel. “Perhaps one day you will know the size of the thing you have done. The One who imprisoned me will come back, one day, and we will be ready for him.”
“Satan?”
“Some call him that.”
“Did he leave earth?”
“Bless you, yes! Mankind has had no devil but himself these last twenty thousand years! But we’ll be ready for the Old One, now.”
There was more sun, there were more colors in the world as we walked back to town.
“It was the Phoenix!” breathed Claire for the twentieth time. “What a thing to tell our children.”
“Whose children?”
“Ours.”
“Now look,” I said, but she interrupted me. “Didn’t he say I was to have what I wanted most?”
I looked down at her, trying hard not to smile. “Oh, all right,” I said.
I Kiss Your Shadow —
Robert Bloch
Joe Elliot sat down in my favorite chair, helped himself to a drink of my best whiskey, and lighted one of my special cigarettes. I didn’t object.
But when he said, “I saw your sister last night,” I was ready to protest. After all, a man can only take so much.
So I opened my mouth and then realized there was nothing to say. What could I say to a statement like that? I’d heard it from his lips a hundred times before, during their engagement, and it sounded perfectly natural then.
It would sound perfectly natural now, except for one thing—my sister had been dead for three weeks.
Joe Elliot smiled not too successfully. “I suppose it sounds crazy,” he said. “But it’s the truth. I saw Donna last night. Or, at least, her shadow.”
He still wasn’t giving me the opportunity for a sensible answer; the only sensible thing I could do was remain silent and listen.
“She came into the bedroom and leaned over me. I’ve had trouble getting to sleep nights, ever since the accident, but I guess you know that. Anyway, I was lying there looking up at the ceiling and trying to decide if I should get up and pull down the shade, because the moonlight was so bright. Then I turned on my side and got ready to swing my legs out of bed, and there she was. Just standing there, bending over me and holding her arms out.”
Elliot leaned forward. “Sure, I know what you’re thinking. The moonlight was deflected by something in the room and made a shadow, and I made the rest of it myself. Or 1 really was asleep and didn’t know it. But I know what I saw. It was Donna, all right—I’d recognize her anywhere, just from the silhouette.”
I found my voice, or a reasonable facsimile. “What did she do?” I asked.
“Do? She didn’t do anything. Just stood there, holding her arms out as if she were waiting for something.”
“What was she waiting for?”
Elliot stared at the floor. “This is really the hard part,” he murmured. “It sounds so—well, the hell with how it sounds. When Doona and I were engaged, she had this trick of hers. We’d be talking, or perhaps getting ready to do the dishes when I ate over at her place, some ordinary thing like that. And then, all at once she’d hold out her arms. I got so I recognized the gesture. It meant she wanted to be kissed. So I’d kiss her. And—go ahead, laugh!—that’s what I did last night. I got up out of bed and kissed her shadow.”
I didn’t laugh. I didn’t do anything. I just sat there and waited for him to continue. When he showed no signs of saying anything further, I had to fill the gap. “You kissed her. And then what happened?”
“Why, nothing. She just went away.”
“Disappeared?”
“No. She went away. The shadow released me and then turned around and walked through the door.”
“The shadow released you,” I said. “Does this mean you—?”
He nodded. I’m not a nod-interpreter, but it was obvious that there was no defiance in his movement; only a sort of resignation. “That’s right. When I kissed her she put her arms around me. I—I saw it. And I felt it. I felt her kiss, too. Funny sensation, kissing a shadow. Real, and yet not all there.” He glanced down at the glass in his hand. “Like a watered drink.” .
There was something wrong with his comparison, but then there was something wrong with the whole story. I suppose the main trouble lay in mere chronology—he’d come to me with it just about fifty years too late.
Fifty years ago, it might not have sounded quite so odd. Not in the days when people still believed in ghosts, by and large; the days when even so eminent and hardheaded a psychologist as William James was active in the Society for Psychical Research. There was a certain receptivity then to the sentimental approach—undying love, capable of reaching beyond the grave, and all that sort of thing. But to hear it now was wrong.
The only thing that kept me from coming right out and saying so was the realization that there was another aspect to the business even wronger than the rest. Joe Elliot himself. He was the professional skeptic, the confirmed scoffer.
Of course, maybe the shock of Donna’s death—
“Don’t say it,” he sighed. “I know how cockeyed and corny it all sounds, and I know what you’re thinking. I won’t argue with you. The accident did hit me pretty hard, you understand that. And I admit I was in some kind of shock-state when they pulled me out of the car down there in the ravine. But I snapped out of it before the funeral. You know that, too. And if you don’t believe it, just c
heck with Doc Foster.”
My turn to nod.
“I was all right at the funeral and after,” he continued. “You’ve seen me almost every day since then. Have you noticed anything—offbeat?”
“No.”
“So it wasn’t just imagination. It couldn’t be.”
“Then what’s your answer?”
He stood up. “I have no answer. I just wanted to tell you what happened. Because it’s one of those things where you must tell someone, and you’re the logical person. I can trust you not to go around repeating it. Besides, you’re her brother, and there’s a chance that she might—come to you.”
Joe Elliot moved to the door.
“Leaving so soon?” I asked.
“Tired,” he said. “I didn’t sleep very much last night, afterwards.”
“Look,” I said. “How about a sedative? I’ve got 6ome stuff here that—”
“Thanks, but I’d rather not.” He opened the door. “I’ll call you in a day or so. We can have lunch together.” “You’re sure you’re—”
“Yes, I’m all right.” He smiled and went out I frowned and stayed in. I was still frowning as I got ready for bed. Something was definitely wrong with Elliot’s story and that meant something was definitely wrong with Elliot. I wished I knew the answer.
“There’s a chance that she might—come to you I crawled between the sheets and noted that the moonlight was bright on my ceiling tonight, too. But I didn’t look at the moonlight very long. I closed my eyes and contemplated the chance. It seemed to be a very slim one, as chances go.
My sister Donna was dead and in her grave. I hadn’t seen her die, but I was the first one summoned right after the accident, as soon as the police arrived on the scene. I saw them lift her out of the crumpled car, and she was dead, no doubt about it. I didn’t like to think about seeing her. I didn’t like to think about seeing Joe Elliot, either, shaking in shock; unconscious of my presence, unconscious of the gash in his forehead, unconscious even of the fact that Donna was dead. He’d kept talking to her while they carried her to the ambulance, trying to make her understand that it was an accident, there was oil-slick on the road, the car had skidded. But Donna never heard him because she was already dead. She had died when her head went through the windshield.
That’s what they thought at the inquest, too. Verdict of accidental death. And surely the morticians who embalmed her had no doubts, nor did the minister who preached the sermon over her casket, the workmen who lowered hex body into the grave out there at Forest Hills. Donna was dead.
And now, three weeks later, Joe Elliot came to me and said, “I saw your sister. Or at least, her shadow.” Hardheaded Joe, a rewrite man on the desk and cynical as they come, kissing a shadow. He had said she stood there with her arms extended and he recognized her.
Well, I hadn’t seen fit to mention it, but I recognized that particular gesture from his description. Because it so happens I’d seen it myself, long before Joe Elliot came into the picture. Way back when Donna was engaged to Frankie Hankins, she used to pull the same trick with him. I wondered if Frankie had heard the news yet, over there in Japan. He’d enlisted and that broke the affair up.
Come to remember, there was another time Donna used the open-arms technique. With Gil Turner. Of course, that hadn’t lasted, it was obvious from the-start: Turner was just a namby-pamby. Surprised everybody to see a wishy-washy character like him pull up stakes and leave town in such a hurry.
It must have surprised Donna, too, but not for long. Because just about that time I introduced her to Joe Elliot and the heat was on.
There was no question about this being the big thing for both of them. They were engaged inside of a month, and planning to be married before the summer was out. Donna just took over, lock, stock and barrel.
Of course I’d always known my sister was a determined woman Get’s face it, she made a habit of getting her Own way, and she was a hellcat if you crossed her) but it was interesting to watch how she worked on Joe Elliot. Talk about Pygmalion—here was one case where Galatea reversed the play. Before anyone knew it, Joe Elliot was out of his sloppy sports-jacket and into gray tweeds, out of smelly cigars and into briar pipes, out of cuppa-cawfee-’n-a-hamburger and into Donna’s comfortable little apartment for regular evening meals.
Oh, she made a lot of changes in that boy! Got so that he was shaving twice a day, and he trotted around the comer to the bank with his paycheck instead of over to Smitty’s Tap.
I had to give Donna credit. She knew what she wanted, and she knew just how to get it Maybe she was ruthless, but she was feminine-ruthless. She remade Joe Elliot, but she also made him like it. He certainly didn’t seem to object. I got so used to the new Elliot that I virtually forgot about the old one—the old one who used to sit in Smitty’s and swear a mighty oath that the girl didn’t breathe who could ensnare him into unholy dreadlock.
By the time the wedding drew near, Donna was already openly talking about their plans for buying a house—“You can’t raise a family in an apartment”—and Elliot would listen and actually grin.
“And another thing,” he used to say, shaking his finger at Smitty in solemn warning, “I may be a poor downtrodden wage-slave, but you’ll never catch me being a house-slave. Or turning into that typical figure of fun—the American Father. Dear Old Dad, the butt of every family radio and TV show in the country! Not for me. I believe in the old saying: children should be seen and not had.”
But this was before Donna. Before, I suppose, he found out how nice it is to have a woman around who lights your pipe, and straightens your tie, and fixes the fried potatoes at just the right time so they won’t get soggy when the steak is served. Before he found out what it is to have somebody who holds out her arms and doesn’t say anything, except with her eyes.
This much I was sure of: Donna wasn’t playing any trick. She loved the guy. She died loving him, the night they were driving back from my party. That part was real.
Everything was real, up to now. Now, and Joe Elliot’s story of the shadow.
I looked up at the shimmering ceiling. Somehow, here in the dark, with its mingling of moonlight, I could almost begin to believe.
Maybe we’re not quite as sophisticated as we like to think we are; ghosts happen to be unfashionable, and the concept of love conquering the grave went out with Outward Bound. But set a sophisticate down in the pitch-black bowels of a haunted house, bar the exit, and leave him there for the night Maybe his hair won’t turn white by morning; still, there’ll be some reaction. Intellectually, we reject. Emotionally, we’re not so sure. Not when the chips are down and the lights are low.
Well, the lights were low and I kept waiting for Donna to come. I waited and waited, and finally I guess I just fell asleep.
I told Joe Elliot about it at lunch two days later. “She never showed,” I said.
He cocked his head at me. “Of course not,” he answered. “She couldn’t. She was at my place.”
I finally managed to speak. “Again?”
“Two nights ago, and last night.”
“Same thing?”
“Same thing.” He hesitated. “Only—she stayed longer.”
“How much longer?”
More than hesitation now; a lasting silence. Until he brushed his napkin from his lap, stooped down to pick it up, and barely whispered, “All night”
I didn’t ask the next question. I didn’t have to. One look at his face was enough.
“She’s real,” Elliot said. “Donna. The shadow. You remember what I said the first time? About the watered whiskey?” He leaned forward. “It’s not like that now. Maybe they get stronger once they break through. Do you think that’s it? They learn the way, and then they get stronger.”
He was close enough so that I could smell his breath, and he hadn’t been drinking—any more than he’d been drinking the night of the accident. I’d testified to that, and it helped seal the verdict.
No, Elliot wasn’t
drunk. I wished to heaven he was, so I wouldn’t have to say what I was going to say. But I had to.
“Why don’t you take a rum up to see Doc Foster?” I asked him.
Joe Elliot spread his palms on the table. “I knew you’d say that,” he grinned. “So I already called him this morning, for an appointment.”
I managed to withhold the sigh of relief, but it was there, and I could feel it. For a minute I’d been afraid of an argument—not because I dreaded arguments, but because of what it would imply about Elliot, I was glad to see he hadn’t gone completely overboard.
“You needn’t worry,” he assured me. “I know what Doc will tell me. Sedatives, relaxation, and if that doesn’t work, see a head-shrinker. And if he does, I’ll follow orders.”
“Promise?”
“Sure.” He gave me the grin again, but this time it was a little twisted. “Want to know something funny? I’m beginning to be a bit scared of that sister of yours—even if she is only a shadow.”
I put a large No Comment sign on my face and we went out together in silence. We separated in the street—I went back to the office and Elliot went over to Doc Foster’s.
I didn’t learn about his visit for several days. Because when I got back to the office they had a surprise for me.
The same newspaper employing Joe Elliot on the rewrite desk sees fit to retain me in the capacity of roving correspondent. And the M.E. was waiting for me with a suggestion that I rove in the direction of Indo-China. As of two days from now, with all watches synchronized.
I got busy. So busy that I never managed to call Joe Elliot. So busy that if he called me, I wasn’t around to get the message.
He finally caught me at the airport, actually, just before I took off for the west coast and die first leg of the flight.
“Sorry I couldn’t be on hand,” he said. “Bon voyage and all that.”
“You sound pretty happy.”
“Why not?”
“Doc’s sedatives do the trick?”
He chuckled. “Not exactly. When I told him, he didn’t even bother with the first part of the routine. Sent me packing right away to the you-know-who. Name of Partridge. Heard of him?”
