I became aware then of Achmed standing behind me. And at the sight of Seigfried, I saw him start violently and begin to slip away. What possessed me, then, I do not know. But I immediately grabbed him.
“No, you don’t!” I cried drunkenly and triumphantly. I had caught hold of his pudgy hand, and he squirmed and pulled against my grasp.
Meanwhile, Seigfried was dancing before the firepit with great leaps and bounds. Suddenly, he yelled at the top of his voice and pointed in the direction of Suga and myself. The whole crowd turned to look.
“Ahani, beja ylarl” yelled Seigfried, or something sounding like that. —And suddenly, without warning, Suga went to pieces.
I mean that literally. I was drunk, of course. It was undoubtedly a hallucination we all had. But one moment, Achmed seemed to be standing there like any other human being; and the next he began to come apart. His head tumbled off his shoulders and went bouncing along the ground like a great, fat weasel. His body tumbled after, leaping and rolling and bounding away, thinning out as it went until it looked like a running hound—and howled like a hound, too, a hound on the trail of its quarry. His left arm dropped off; and, hissing like a snake, began to glide—but why go on? It was a hallucination. There is no need to go into gruesome details.
Yet I cannot forget the way I imagined these— these things, these parts, to begin their chase of the hapless Seigfried. At his first sight of them he had lost whatever nerve he had originally had. With a terrified shriek he seemed to turn to flee. But the parts of Achmed seemed to be everywhere about the grounds. They hunted him high and low. They hunted him out of arbors, through summer houses. They hunted him from the midst of screaming women where he tried to hide; and finally once more before the fire pit, they closed in upon him as if to blanket his shrinking body with their own shapeless selves.
Together, he and they swayed before the fire in the half-light of the paper lanterns and the low-burning coals. And, at that moment, someone who may have been Cora Lachese—I thought I saw her do it—splashed liquid on the coals. Pit, figures and all went up in one roaring sheet of white flame. And I found myself running from that place.
I ran—I assure you I ran all the way home. At last, in my own home, with the door locked and bolted behind me, I uncorked a bottle of my fine manzanilla sherry and drained it from the bottle like water. It was then I discovered I was carrying something. Something I had been clutching in my hand all the while.
It was Sam.
There is no need to stretch the illusion of that evening out unduly. The next day it was discovered that this youth, Seigfried, had most certainly been unhinged by the long hours of work he had been putting in on his doctorate thesis. Undoubtedly he had been the maniac who had strangled Marilyn Speedo. Almost surely, he had drowned Joan Caswell in her own lily pond. And, while there was some rather firm evidence that he had been teaching a freshman class in anthropology at the time of Maria Selzer’s death, yet there was no doubt he was conversant with judo. The official police verdict was an unofficial tribute to Achmed Suga, who—having the adept’s resistance to hypnosis—had attempted to restrain the madman, after he had first hypnotized everyone else at the party, and then gone berserk.
—A tragedy culminated by Seigfried’s dumping charcoal starter fluid on the live coals of the fire pit and jumping onto them with Achmed clasped to him with maniac strength.
… So, we may say this chapter in the history of Glen Hills is finally, if sadly, concluded. Helen and Cora are jointly engaged in reorganization at the moment—a hint having reached us that Mrs. Laura Bromley of an adjoining community is considering a move into our territory—our turf, as I like to call it to myself.
And I, myself, am now right hand man to both Cora and Helen. They need me at this time of writing, and the fact is recognized by all. I am a happy man with but one fly in my ointment.
It is Sam. Why I keep the creature…
I assure you I have no love for cats.
Nor would I be liable to name one Sam. Salmanazar, now—I find that name coming occasionally, trippingly from my lips, when I see the creature. But where the name came from, I have no idea.
Moreover, how could anyone—let alone myself— have any desire to keep a sort of cat which never meows, never purrs, does nothing a cat should do and refuses its milk in favor of a diet of spiders/, slugs and filth?
It hates me, I am quite convinced. Also it hates Cora and Helen, judging by the way I see it watching them from a window at times when they pass. Sometimes, also, I see it stalking across the carpet at night like some thick, furry hand, and a shudder takes me.
Besides, on that disgusting and most unnatural diet of its own choosing, there is no doubt but what it is growing…
The principle “we are what we eat” ought to impose a certain restraint on consumption.
With Butter And Mustard
“And here we are!” cried peter timfoy, excitedly gazing at the invisible bubble wall that surrounded the Audigel Space Platform. “We made it. Look, Max, look. The ocher sands of Mars. What makes them ocher, Max?” He swallowed and controlled his voice. “Iron rust, I suppose.”
“Red lead,” snapped Max Audigel, his thicket brows and black beard hidden in a pile of cameras and camping equipment. “It’s poisonous. Don’t eat any. Get your fat carcass over here and we’ll load up for the trip.”
“Really?” gulped Peter, coming across the platform. “Red lead? Think of that! I certainly won’t taste a single—aw, Max, you’re kidding me again. I can tell!”
“Take this, and this, and this. And this. Hang this around your neck. Careful, you idiot! Don’t touch the controls in that box at your waist.”
“I wish you wouldn’t keep calling me an idiot,
Max,“ said Peter. ”Maybe it was only a beer joint but I was a bartender. I belonged to the union.“
“Of the jerks, by the jerks and for the jerks,” said Max. “Stand still. And remember what I said about that box—it controls your individual atmospheric bubble. I don’t give a hang about you, but I don’t want that equipment dumped along the way—particularly the cameras.”
“Aw, Max. A couple of scientists shouldn’t ought to talk that way to each other.”
Max stopped. His black beard jutted out like a club. He stood with hands on hips, regarding Peter.
“A couple of what?”
“Aw, Max—”
“How many scientists are there here?”
“Just—just one, Max. You.”
“And who invented the Audigel principle?”
“You, Max.”
“And what did I bring you along for?”
“Because you don’t have any use for other scientists. They’re all nitwits—” Peter’s voice faltered, died. He looked at the floor.
“Well?”
“To—to fetch and carry, you said, Max—but you were just kidding. You told me when you first came into the joint I had as much science and talent as most Ph.D.‘s in the field—”
“No, I was not kidding!” mimicked Max, in a savagely mincing voice. “Now get going, off the edge of the platform, toward that hole in the cliff over there. Go ahead, just step over the edge, idiot. Your personal bubble will merge with the bubble of the platform and let you through. Don’t fall down! Why didn’t I bring a donkey? It’d have more brains and no delusions of building up its own ego by a parasitic attachment to me.”
“I hate you,” muttered Peter under his breath, struggling up from his knees on the sand, and starting out toward the hole in the cliff.
“What?” demanded the harsh voice of Max behind him.
“Nothing, Max.”
“Just keep walking. I’ll tell you what to do.”
They plodded forward across the sand toward the hole in the cliff.
“What’s in the hole, Max?”
“A tunnel.”
“A tunnel!” Peter tried to crane his neck around and look back at his companion. “How do you know?”
“Be
cause I’ve been here before. What’d you think?”
“Been here before!” marveled Peter. “Think of that. And all those other scientists back home haven’t even got out of the atmosphere yet—oh Max, look! Look at that rosebush away up here!”
“Rosebush!” Max jerked his head around to stare about the landscape. “What rosebush?”
“It—it was right there a moment ago…” faltered Peter.
“Rosebush! No, wait—come to think of it, it’s probably one of the projections. Pay no attention to it.”
“Projections?”
“Pictures! Pictures! You can understand that, can’t you? Like on a movie screen—only there’s no screen. Also it didn’t look like a rosebush.”
“It did too, Max. I saw it.”
“Well you were wrong,” snorted Max. “They didn’t know anything about rosebushes. It was just a projection of colored light that reminded you of a rosebush. It wasn’t even actually there. If you’d walked into it, you’d have gone right through it.”
They went along a few more steps in silence.
“Max?”
“What is it now?”
“Who’s they, Max?”
“Martians,” said Max, briefly.
“M-M-Martians?”
“Watch where you put your feet! Of course, Martians—or whatever the people called themselves that lived here. You don’t have to sweat with fright. They’re all gone, now.”
“G-gone where?”
“That,” said Max, grimly, “is what I’m here to find out. That’s why I kept my secret of the Audigel Principle. I’m going to be first, from now on. First on Mars. First on all the planets. First to go out among the stars and unlock the secrets they’ve been hiding. No government interference for me, thanks, so men with half my brains can steal my discoveries, rob me of credit. I’ll show them all—”
“—Max!”
“Imbecile!” screamed Max. “What d’you mean? Yelling at me when I’m talking?”
“I… I’m sorry, Max.”
“Well, what is it?”
“I saw something else, Max. I couldn’t see what it was, it was gone so fast—”
“Projections, I tell you! All right, now.” Max came around from behind Peter and took the lead. Looking at him Peter was rather surprised to see that Max was himself carrying nothing but a small camera clipped to the belt of his jacket. Otherwise, except for ordinary clothing of pants, shirt and shoes, he was unburdened. “Come on. We’ve got to go a good ways yet through this tunnel before we come to the city. Don’t dawdle.”
“I’m not—dawdling—Max,” panted Peter.
“I’m not dawdling, Max!” mimicked Max. “No, no, I’m not dawdling! Sweat off about forty pounds and you might be able to walk at a decent pace.
Come on.“ He turned on a powerful flashlight that searchbeamed down a long, circular walled corridor with walls of highly polished stone, cut straight into the cliffside, and led off.
“Wait for me, Max!”
Peter hurried after him. His insides felt sour and bitter with emotion. He wanted to kick something, but there was nothing around to kick. He fell back on his usual method of consoling himself by thinking what it would be like when he got back from Mars. He would be famous. Audigel and Tomfoy, those two intrepid scientists. He would get rich from television appearances. He would have his own man to do things for him. Come here, you! Bring me my breakfast in bed. Hurry up! I haven’t got all day! And how he’d show everybody back at the joint—
“Keep up! Or I’ll leave you in the dark!”
“Yes, Max…”
Max was so far ahead now, Peter hardly got any help from the flashlight. If the walls weren’t so shiny that they bounced some light backward as well as forward, he wouldn’t be able to see at all. And the tunnel was widening out now, with other tunnels branching off from it. And there were big, perfectly round holes in the floor to go around— and other things standing in the tunnel to go around too. They might be what Max called them, projections, but Peter wasn’t going to walk into them if he could help it. Even if he could walk through them.
“I’m not going to wait for you, so you better make the most of it!”
“I’m coming, Max!” called Peter. “I’m coming just as fast as I can.”
And anyway, that had been a real rosebush that he saw outside on the sand. He guessed he knew a rosebush from the way it looked. There were the roses and the leaves, and even the thorns. It had been a regular rosebush, just like back home outside his rooming house. It had been just about chest high on him, just about chest—
Peter caught himself suddenly, stepping squarely into one of the holes along the tunnel floor. He teetered for a wild, silent moment on the brink— and then fell.
The shock of his landing was nowhere near as bad as he had tensed himself for. He had landed on something firm-textured, yet yielding. Reaching down a cautious hand, he felt it. It was stone-temperature, the same as the tunnel walls, but with somewhat the grain and feel of canvas. He struggled to his feet.
Above him, he could see faintly the dim circle of the hole itself, the lip perhaps four or five feet over his head.
“Help!” he cried. “Help! Max!”
The close walls about him seemed to distort and smother his cries. His voice barely left his lips. It was absorbed by the pit into which he had fallen. Above him, the dim reflected light from the torch up ahead in Max’s hand was growing dimmer. Max had neither heard him, nor looked back to notice he was missing. Peter’s heart leaped into his throat.
“Oh…” he whimpered. Frantically, he groped about him in the dark. There must be someway to get up out of here. Something, some handholds to climb up, a ladder…
He bumped his nose on it.
Jerking his head back, he rubbed the small, button shape of the nose, blinking the tears from his eyes, and moved forward to check again. It was, indeed, a ladder. A short wooden ladder leaning against one side of the pit.
Joyfully, Peter scrambled up it, onto firm flooring again. Up ahead of him, the flashlight had been turned in his direction. Max was yelling.
“Where’d you go? Come on up here. I need some of that stuff you’re carrying.”
Peter broke into a clumsy run. He galumphed forward.
“I fell in a hole,” he called.
He found Max standing before a large, ornate piece of grillwork that blocked the tunnel. It was like a large screen of intricately carved ivory, carelessly thrown down in their way.
“Here,” snapped Max. “This thing’s fallen over on its side since I was here last. I’ll have to break it out of the way. Where’s that hammer?” He stopped and peered at Peter. “What’s that you said? Fell in a hole?”
“Yes, and if I hadn’t found the ladder, I’d never have got out, Max.”
“Ladder? These people didn’t use ladders—or stairs, or anything else.”
“Well, there was a ladder in this hole. A wooden ladder.”
“Oh, shut up!” said Max. “I’ve had enough of your stories. Just because you couldn’t keep up— Give me that hammer.”
He jerked the hammer out of the loop by which it hung from the packsack on Peter’s back. A few swift blows of the metal head and the screen collapsed in shards.
“Now come along,” snapped Max, punching the hammer back into its loop. “We’re almost there.”
“Where?” asked Peter, trotting after him. But Max did not answer. And, after a few seconds, an answer became unnecessary, for they turned a blind corner in the tunnel and emerged suddenly into open air.
They found themselves standing in what appeared to be the heart of a city surrounded by a palisade of small but jagged mountains.
“Look at the screwy buildings,” said Peter, marveling.
All about them, some no higher than a single-story cottage, others towering to a height equivalent to eight or ten stories, were walls of every shade and design. Some richly marbled, some single-toned, dull, brilliant, even a few that
seemed strangely luminescent for anything in bright sunlight. Streets, or what appeared to be streets, wound crookedly between them.
“So you think they’re buildings,” said Max, with some satisfaction apparent in his voice.
“Huh?” said Peter. “They are buildings, Max.”
“Fools, fools—the human race is made up of fools!” But Max did not sound too annoyed. He consented to explain. “These people—Martians if you want to call them that—had no use for buildings. I found out that much when I came here the first time. What they were, I haven’t quite settled that. But they didn’t need buildings. These”—he waved his hand about him—“were objects of art, pieces of virtu.”
“Pieces of what, Max?”
Max laughed.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s see… we go this way…” He led off between two of the walls on one of the twisty little streets.
“I’m right behind you, Max.”
“Well, stay off my heels, blast it!” barked Max. “Now, come on!”
They penetrated into the multicolored maze of the city, as Peter continued to think of it. As they went along, he began to see what Max had meant about these not being buildings. Some of the walls had gaps in them, or perhaps two walls would not quite come together at a corner. When this happened, Peter was able to look inside. And what he saw was that most of the buildings, or whatever they were, did not have roofs. Or, at least, all they had was a little piece of a roof, though there was one that was all roofed over.
Nor was there any furniture, staircases or windows to be seen inside the walls. Instead, there were all sorts of odd colorful shapes, sitting about apparently at random, or stuck to the walls. Some walls enclosed things that looked like mazes, or masses of cubicles. Some were honeycombed in intricate patterns. Some had a light sort of latticework roofing them in, but were otherwise empty. Only a few had any covering that really blocked out the light of the small sun burning high overhead.
“Gosh, Max,” said Peter, “but you know it’s kind of peaceful here? Kind of nice.”
“Shut up!” snapped Max. “I’m trying to remember the way.”
The Last Dream Page 10
