The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  “Don’t, Dave! Please—I’m dreadfully upset—”

  “So am I,” chuckled Loring as the hand that slipped under her left arm found plenty to keep him from being a liar.

  “Oh—you’re terrible!” Another halfhearted attempt to break away ended in her snuggling closer. History was repeating itself, and Loring was going to write a different ending if he had to miss the next dozen lectures at al Azhar! But his riposte en prime—the way the fencing manual describes an attack from the lower left—netted him only a garter clasp, a slap, and some more iron resolution.

  Also, Loring’s heart was hammering like a flivver on an upgrade pull, and by Allah, she couldn’t yell for the steward now!

  “Oh, can’t you stop, just a second! Dave, I’m in terrible trouble. Half the time I’m someone else!”

  The last words fairly cold-cocked Loring. No doubting her agitation. Her eyes were wide with terror.

  “What was that?” he demanded, nailed by her haunted look.

  “Dave—I’m goofy—bughouse—balmy—whatever you want to call it, that’s me!” she sobbed, pillowing a fragrant tangle of exceedingly black hair on his shoulder. “Half the time I’m myself, and the rest of the time I’m the—Queen—of—Sheba!”

  If she hadn’t looked so pitifully desolate and despairing, he’d have reminded her that that set-up would be the most compact form of polygamy he’d ever heard of; but those somber eyes were becoming more devil-haunted every moment. If this was another gag to sidestep a large night in Egypt, it was a convincing number!

  “A strange personality is crowding me out of my body. A dark-haired woman with haughty eyes—long, heavy-lidded eyes. Sometimes when I glance into a mirror I see her in back of me, like a column of mist—waiting to crowd me out of my own body!

  “She did it once, already. But I found my way back from an awful blackness. But I’m losing out. And I can’t leave Egypt. That job at the English school didn’t materialize. The pension management has given me credit, but I’m stranded, and she’ll get me—” She shuddered. So did Loring. It was contagious.

  She had changed! Somehow, her cheek bones were a shade more prominent, and the expression of her eyes had altered. Her mouth, lovely as ever, strangely enough had a more determined, almost haughty set.

  But her warm, sweet presence was like a bucket of shirazi wine with a handful of hasheesh stirred into it. That outrageous line about dual personality was novel, but just too much for one gulp.

  And since Paquita couldn’t be more than fifty per cent queen, Loring grabbed an armful and set out to subdue the democratic sections first.

  A stifled gasp, a flurry of silken legs and cushions and lace, and before Paquita could catch her breath, she was being kissed in that effective way the Cairene story-tellers describe in the bazaars. The kind that’s described just before they stop reciting and start taking up the collection; and the Egyptian audience as one man reaches for a piastre find out what was the next thing that opened to Fatima.

  It was that kind of kiss—hot even to listen to. As for getting it—!

  That simmering simoon of a caress made Paquita think of arbitration. She quit worrying about the lace at the lower edge of her tea-rose combination, and the runs in her hosiery were being dismissed as acts of Allah…

  And then she began whispering things in Loring’s ear that no woman has said for the past twenty-eight centuries.

  It was heart-stirring, but dismayingly like a ghost whispering in the desert.

  Paquita’s murmurings were in the long dead Himyar language which only a few dried-up native professors ever heard of! Loring was fairly knocked dizzy. When he forgot what his right and left caressers were made for, Paquita began offering suggestions that made his hair creep.

  Scholars may have their lighter moments; but listening to something that an olive-skinned woman had whispered to Solomon, twenty-eight dusty centuries ago, was too much.

  Then he regained his breath and decided that Solomon had more to brag about than wisdom—But the breaks were against Loring.

  “D’estour!” bawled a lusty, time-mellowed voice from without; and it was seconded by a vigorous hammering.

  Old Haaji Saoud, Loring’s professor. And the trimming of Paquita’s bias-cut slip was flirting with her girdle—

  The old buzzard, assuming Loring’s studious piety, would be barging in, Koran to the contrary. And to be caught playing with a feringhi girl—

  Loring cursed wrathfully and broke away. Paquita couldn’t understand, and hung on like a first-class queen. And the hinges were creaking.

  He seized an armful and heaved her into the adjoining room. He turned, just as an Arab with a face like a coffin and a beard even longer rumbled a pious greeting.

  A veiled woman was at his heels. It seemed to be one of those evenings when a week’s supply of them arrive at once. But this woman was not like amber and roses and old ivory. Despite her veil, Loring caught luxurious glimpses—and her bare feet were a dead giveaway.

  She was a Habashi, and what she wore revealed that she was a nice specimen. Sleek, gleaming skin of pale walnut color; curly hair, well-oiled and glistening—and though slender, she had curves that would stop a caravan.

  Now what the hell?

  But Loring respectfully said, “Assalaam aleikumu ya shaykh!”

  The luscious effigy in bronze stood by, large eyes smiling over the edge of her veil. Whatever was in the wind, she seemed to be looking forward to lots of it But it was not until old Haaji Saoud seated himself that Loring got the answer.

  “Ya shabb,” the old fellow gravely explained, “Young man, the shaykh of this quarter is displeased at your living as you do. Even though I did assure him that your pious thoughts left no room for anything else, he feels it is a scandal that any Moslem your age should have no harem.”

  That was the Arab view of it. Allah be praised, Paquita couldn’t understand—but since she spoke Himyar, she ought to get this simple chatter!

  “Er…ahh—doubtless the shaykh is right,” Loring conceded. “With electric refrigerators so scarce in Cairo, everyone with four wives is bound to feel suspicious of anyone who hasn’t even one.”

  “Wisdom drips from your beard!” approved the old scholar. “I knew you would agree. So I brought this trifle to…one might say, divert your lighter moments—”

  “Can she cook?” groped Loring. If Paquita hadn’t caught the Arabic, the old man’s gesture and the Hahashi girl’s lowered veil and ivory smile had crabbed the game forevermore!

  “Ay, wallah! And her name is Ayesha.” The old man turned to the door. “The peace upon you, ya shabb!”

  Loring’s teeth gritted. Not a chance of convincing Paquita that Ayesha was a manicurist.

  And then Paquita herself emerged. Loring froze. So did Haaji Saoud. Ayesha, with unfailing feminine intuition, made a power dive for the furthest alcove.

  Paquita hogged the scene. She had peeled down to—right! A bias-cut slip, and it was not shadow proof. Haaji Saoud got a dazzling glimpse of what Mohammed had promised all good Moslems in Paradise. The dinging tea-rose satin advertised every enticing undulation like a neon sign on a dark street. A shoulder strap slipped. Haaji Saoud found time to say, “Mashallah!”

  That’s Arabic to express extreme wonder and admiration, and he couldn’t have picked a better word. But Loring’s Moslem incognito had slipped even further. He wondered if the police would arrive in time, or if the sardar would have to call out the army.

  Paquita wore a Himyar veil, held in place by a pair of great gold headed pins that blazed from above each ear like marigolds. Odds and ends she’d picked up in the back room. And what she told Haaji Saoud was blood-curdling.

  It wasn’t what she said, but her tone and manner.

  “Take that gaping brother of a pig outside, slice him lengthwise and wrap his insides around his collar bone!”r />
  That was the opener, and each stanza became more imperious. And every word in a language dead two dozen centuries!

  Haaji Saoud turned green. He understood it perfectly.

  “Ya Maitda! Ya malikat!” he gasped, staring at the apparition. “Makeda the Queen! There is no might and no majesty save in Allah!”

  When a dead queen comes to life in modern Cairo, it is time to head for the desert. The old scholar plunged toward the door.

  Loring tore after him. The native quarter of Cairo would be no place for Loring once that story got around.

  The Arab had the advantage: having faced an evil spirit gave him speed far in excess of his pursuer, who, while bewildered by the uncanny transfiguration, had at least had fair warning.

  And old Haaji Saoud knew the town. Three blocks down those winding, yard wide alleys and he was out of sight.

  Loring, tripped by a buttress that treacherously reached into the gloom, picked himself from the mud and dashed back to his house. Getting Paquita out of the native quarter before a riot developed was his next problem.

  He burst into the majlis. Not a trace of the self-styled queen. Only silence. He wondered if it really had happened. The sleek, voluptuous body had been Paquita’s, but the more he thought of it, the more certain he was that the face and voice had belonged to someone else. The memory, deeply branded into his mind, was terrifying: it took more than an improvised veil and two antique Himyar hairpins to scare Haaji Saoud out of his wits.

  The expression of that lovely, wrathful face, those dark, smoldering eyes, the haughty carriage of that fine head—they all coincided with the descriptions preserved by nearly thirty centuries of legend.

  Paquita’s incoherent story of a dead queen’s personality that was driving her out of her own body was biting deep.

  He found her in the back room.

  Paquita lay stretched on a divan. Her veil was trailing from one pin. Her alarming pallor distracted him from the white curves displayed by the disarrayed slip; but she no longer wore that imperious expression that had come from some long-forgotten grave to haunt the living.

  He stared for a long moment before he realized that that liberated breast should rise and fall with her breathing.

  She wasn’t breathing! His eyes widened with horror as he noted the slight bruises on her throat—abrasions left by his haste to get her out of sight.

  No pulse. Her hands and feet were cold, and the chill was advancing. The satin softness beyond her hose tops was like a serpent’s skin.

  And when, finally, he held a mirror to her lips and saw not a trace of mist collect, he knew that something had to be done in a hurry. The scandalized old scholar might be too frightened to assemble a riot; but that would be nothing to having to account for a corpse with bruises that became more deadly blue as all color left that once olive-tinted skin.

  Had some malignant spirit actually driven Paquita out of her body, then, unable to defy nature, abandoned its stolen home and left her dead as though slain by a physical weapon?

  Utterly insane! But this was Egypt, where nothing is impossible; Egypt, where mad dervishes chew live coals, drive steel skewers through their flesh, and laugh horribly at the shudders of spectators.

  Anything could happen in that dark, age-old birthplace of magic.

  Anything, that is, except extricate Loring from his perilous predicament. Getting rid of a corpse is not what it used to be. He had to dispose of Paquita. Yet the attempt, almost certain to be detected, would be a final damnation.

  Fire?

  Fuel was scarce, and indoor cremation utterly impossible. The thought of flames lapping up that pallid loveliness sickened Loring. And other solutions were even more terrifying.

  Then the door opened, Loring whirled about. Ayesha was regarding him with wide eyes. He had in the scramble forgotten her; but here she was, a bronzed, high-breasted Nemesis to spread a story worse than any Haaji Saoud could circulate.

  He watched the tightening of her supple nut-colored body. Her eyes were dark riddles. For a moment Loring, maddened to desperation, wondered if his fingers could close about that shapely throat in time to stifle her outcry.

  No use. Having to dispose of two would be worse!

  Then she smiled and said in Arabic, “Sakib, we two could handle this quietly enough.”

  Her voice was a soft slurring of a guttural language. She caught his hand, drew him toward the threshold. He followed her to the alcove.

  “Shaytan the Stoned walks tonight. Wallah, I would be your witness, but who would believe me?”

  “Or me?” echoed Loring.

  “There is a way, sahib,” she whispered. “My uncle can borrow a donkey whose owner sleeps soundly. We will take this devil-haunted feringhi woman out beyond the eastern wall and bury her in some empty tomb.

  “And if Haaji Saoud babbles, let them look for the feringhi girl. Failing to find her here, they will decide he was drunk with hasheesh, and his face will be blackened.”

  Loring relaxed, giddy and trembling. Childishly simple—to anyone but a scholar!

  “Let’s go—”

  “Later,” temporized Ayesha. “Too early for stealth.”

  However, the Habashi girl’s mind was far from being single-tracked. Maybe she could cook, but there were no skillets handy. And before Loring could shake the fuzz from his reeling brain, Ayesha’s tawny fingers were exploring here and there.

  “Lay off!” rasped Loring. He was in a tough spot and in no mood for dallying. A bottle of ’arraki was what he needed to burn out the jitters; but Ayesha wasn’t a bit bothered by a dead queen in the other room.

  She smiled and evaded the repulsing gesture; and Loring for an instant was fairly smothered by a tangle of cushions, a discarded veil, and Ayesha’s arms. She wasn’t heavy; except for luxurious walnut-glistening roundnesses in just the right spots, the Habashi girl was slender and supple, but she was all woman, and a pious professor had told her to take care of the solitary scholar.

  And if Loring chose to be coy about it, that was a delightful novelty.

  “Damn it, forget that foolishness!” he growled, jerking his face dear of plump, firm dunes that for a moment had muffled expression.

  But Ayesha murmured throatily, flung back her well-oiled curls, and slipped possessive arms about him as she snuggled closer.

  It’s almost impossible to be rough with a playful kitten or a whole-hearted creature like Ayesha. He tried to think of something really severe to say, but simmering lips blocked his mouth and those full, firm breasts put permanent dents into his kaftan.

  Before he could fairly break away, he began to like it. When he did get his pinioned arm clear, it slid around her waist instead of thrusting her away. And Paquita had left him in a distressing state of mind…and….

  At all events, it was not until the muezzin intoned the call to midnight prayer that Loring found time to wonder whether Ayesha really could cook.

  He began to think of Paquita’s ghastly, half-dead beauty in the other room. But somehow, the jitters had left him.

  “Now, about that donkey?” he suggested.

  “Wait here, sahib.” Ayesha readjusted her veil. “I’ll get it.”

  Half an hour later she returned. Loring swallowed a shudder, rolled Paquita’s rigid body in a length of khilim he stripped from the divan. Then he carried her to the gloomy courtyard where a shaggy donkey equipped with a pack saddle was waiting.

  He followed Ayesha through the narrow wicket that opened into a side alley. The streets were deserted.

  They passed the Hassanayn Mosque and then out through the Gate of Victory and into the tomb-sprinkled eastern desert. Onion-shaped domes, slender minarets, all white in the dimness of a new moon. The city of the dead: and some of those age old sepulchers were the homes of ghouls and demons…

  God, it was awful, dumping Paquita
’s cold beauty into some crypt with long-picked, yellowing bones…

  “Here’s a good place,” whispered Ayesha.

  “How do you know?” countered Loring. There was something disquieting about her certainty.

  “I’ve often noticed it. When I took Marouf Effendi’s children out for the air,” she answered. Logical enough; Moslems have a flair for promenading in graveyards—by daylight.

  Ayesha prodded the donkey into the dim vault whose crypt housed the bones of some forgotten mameluke. Groping in the diluted moonglow, Loring found its slab, loosened by time and looters.

  He wondered what modern ghouls would strip Paquita of her bracelets…then he turned to lift her from the pack saddle.

  Too late, he sensed that there was more life in that tomb than there should be. A blur of swiftly moving shadow closed in on him as he whirled. A moment of chilling horror, then Loring felt strong hands grip his throat. But they were human. The mameluke’s tomb became a battlefield.

  His fists smashed home, driving an assailant crashing against the masonry, coughing blood and teeth. Loring shook off another clutching hand, only to trip on the coping of the crypt and plunge into its depths. Stifled by tomb dust, he fought his way out, but fists and knees and bare feet ground him into the tiles, crashing out his breath, belaboring and pounding him.

  Loring, still wondering why neither knife nor pistol had come into play, was hurled against the coping. His head exploded in a red blaze; but though paralyzed by pain, he knew that ready hands picked him up.

  He dimly sensed being flung into the back seat of a car; he heard a commanding voice rasping in German, heard answers in Arabic. Then came the muffled drumming of a motor.

  As the car picked up speed, Loring, despite the stifling pressure of his unwashed captors, caught a whiff of a familiar fragrance: Paquita’s lingering perfume.

  He and the lovely dead were in the hands of ghouls. But he was too battered and weak to curse Ayesha’s treachery…