The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  “Nice vase there, too.”

  “Look-ee at. Like walk in garden.”

  And so it was. Fully two yards high, and curved on lines as lovely as a perfect woman’s body, its glaze was something like peach blossoms, with transparent clouding of deeper and warmer persimmon red. But this pure beauty of color was only a background for the garden which frame lines separated from the red ground.

  “Uh-huh, like a garden,” Cooper agreed, and would have seated himself had not his weary glance caught something which shocked him.

  Despite the crazy Chinese perspective of the bridge and the stream and the kiosks and pagodas of the formal landscape, there was depth. He was looking into a vista. It was as though the overlay of glaze and the curvature of the vase itself combined to give the three-dimensional effect of a stereoscope.

  In the garden was a tiny figure in peacock-blue tunic and black silk trousers. A girl, for though the face was turned away and the garments ambiguously straight-lined, there was no mistaking the ornate headdress of kingfisher plumes and satin and gold embroidery. And she was moving toward the nearest kiosk!

  A bamboo cluster masked her before she reached her destination. But Cooper had seen enough to be frightened. When a man hears voices, it is bad; when he sees things, it is worse.

  He pointed at the vase, and demanded, “What’d you put in my soup?”

  “Men believe what they read, believe not what they see. Why?”

  That touched off the panic. Cooper clapped his hand to his remaining pocket. Though the wadded handbill was still there, he was convinced now that the old man had read it.

  He yelled, bounded for the door, raced through the shop, and into the sunrise glare of the village street. He stumbled over a pig and sprawled full length in the mud. But he scrambled to his feet, and ran faster than ever.

  Pedestrians scattered. When a man runs amuck, there is no time for questions.

  A Jap soldier, walking his beat, halted, leveled his rifle and challenged. Cooper raised his hands.

  Some minutes later, with a bayonet behind him, he was marching out of the barrio and into the business part of town, where there were tobacco warehouses and brokers’ offices, a school and a cathedral.

  Presently he was in front of Colonel Joro Yoshiwara, a smooth-faced little man who said in English, “So you listen to reason?” He picked up the handbill which a noncom had taken from Cooper. “How many other cultured refugees have read invitation to fraternity and right thinking?”

  “I’ve been sick. In a barrio. I found that paper in the street.”

  Yoshiwara cut loose some jangling Jap talk. Then, when a soldier saluted and went to obey, he said in English, “Now eat, rest, go to dispensary for medicine treatings under amiable auspices of Elder Brothers.”

  * * * *

  There was no third degree, no guard house or stockade. Instead, it turned out exactly as the colonel promised. The only hardship was that, once Cooper had stuffed himself with food and quinine, he had to listen to lectures on Right Thought, and then, dressed in clean whites, parade about town with one Lieutenant Hakamoto—as propaganda on the hoof, he realized, intended to show rebellious natives that they were making a mistake.

  As he regained his strength, he was assigned to checking the literary colonel’s bigger and more persuasive handbills. He broadcast over a local short wave, saying truthfully that he was being well treated, allowed to walk at will, without restraint except that of obeying the curfew.

  After a week or so of luxuriating in food and rest and mosquito nettings and quinine, and even getting moderately jingled on some warm sake from the colonel’s stock, Cooper’s memory of the madness and the illusions and the mocking voices and the magic of Hong Li’s vase ceased worrying him. And so his own comfort was no longer the marvel it had been.

  The first shock came when, walking alone, natives halted and bowed to him, as to a Jap soldier. It did not help, either, when he saw a Spanish priest being marched to the guard house for being non-cooperative.

  Worse yet were the blank Chinese faces and the little black eyes which speared him. He was just as glad that he did not meet Hong Li.

  Then Colonel Yoshiwara said, “Mr. Cooper, we have proved good will. You must repay by pledge of allegiance.”

  “Become a Japanese citizen?”

  “Oh, no. Cannot ever do that. Not allowed, excuse please. Even nice white man not worthy. But citizen of Free Philippines, yes.”

  “Suppose I don’t want to?”

  “Not compelling. Take time, think.”

  He did think, and his answer was simple: String them along, talk is cheap. The Japs were silly people. There was even a Thought Policeman who halted passersby and demanded, “What are you thinking?” You handed him any kind of malarkey, he wrote it down in his book, thanked you, and went on. Meanwhile, you ate and the mosquitoes didn’t. That was all right: and the reason for his growing unease became clear to him.

  He was chiseling on Captain Breen and his guerrillas. They were skeptical, from those early months of terror. The thing to do was convince them. Why be chumps? Wait for the big day when the Army and Navy came to settle the Japs, and then show your hand! So Cooper went for a walk one evening, to go back to camp. He dodged three sentries, but the Thought Police nailed him. “Please come to headquarters and state reaction to New Order.”

  The next time, they wanted his thoughts on guerrillas. It seemed impossible for him to get through the cordon of Thought Police and guards.

  He tried again. And now, Hong Li blocked him.

  “This way! I fix.”

  He followed the old man. Though uneasy, he wanted to tell someone, anyone who would listen, that he meant well, that his actions had been intended for the best.

  He was not surprised when, stepping from a narrow alley to a doorway, he saw the room of the coffins and the vase.

  “Look here,” he blurted out, “I didn’t mean—I couldn’t help—”

  Hong Li smiled, bobbed a bow. “They look-ee now, for you. All place. But not catch.”

  A door-to-door search had in fact started. Jap voices and the barking of dogs became louder. Perhaps someone had suspected him of being a guerrilla spy.

  He glanced about wildly. Searching parties were approaching from two directions.

  “That coffin—”

  “No. That vase,” Hong Li corrected.

  “God, I can’t wedge down into it!”

  “Look into garden. So—”

  Hong Li touched his elbow, nudged him gently. Cooper again looked into the uncanny depths. The girl now emerged from behind a hedge of quince trees and approached the bridge. The perspective changed, maddeningly. As long as he kept his vision fixed, Cooper had the ever growing conviction that instead of illusion, he gazed into actuality whose expanse was far greater than the dimension of the vase or of the room which contained it.

  “Walk when looks real,” Hong whispered, and nudged him.

  Cooper swayed dizzily and, despite his fear of tipping the vase, he could not draw back. His palms had the momentary sensation of chilly glaze and a smooth, lovely curve. The coldness in his hands trickled up his arms. Ice ran through his veins and gripped his heart. Terror choked him.

  He yelled hoarsely, “I couldn’t help—I didn’t mean—”

  “Cross bridge,” Hong Li commanded, as though from an enormous distance.

  The bridge of life and death… Diabolical Chinese trick… He’d wanted magicians, and now he’d met one…thrusting him into the chill of annihilation, tricking him with an illusion.

  Then the choking and the freezing ceased. He knew he was not dead. Also, though no explanation was possible, he was in the glaze of the vase, or beyond it. He had stepped into something which for lack of better expression he called a fourth dimension. The farther limits of the garden were hazy, and too distant for him to d
iscern. A pheasant, tail a flame of red and gold, whirred between him and the girl in shimmering silk. Her skin was cream-colored. He had never seen the like of her loveliness.

  After all that had happened, he could not be amazed when she called him by name and welcomed him to what she said was the Peach Blossom Paradise. Her English was smooth and without accent.

  “I’m Tien Yuk,” she said. “It means Heavenly Jewel. Those old-fashioned names are awfully silly. You can call me something that makes sense in English.”

  “Tien Yuk makes sense in any language.” He glanced about.

  She read his thought. “Oh, I’m entirely alone here. Maybe that’s why I’m so glad to see you. Lovely, though, isn’t it? Much nicer than—well, than outside.”

  “You used to be outside? How long—”

  She caught his hand impulsively, in the playful way a kitten might have patted him. “Don’t be idiotic. Time is just something to fool people. Everybody has either too much of it or not enough. This is a place where it doesn’t exist.”

  Between fever and fatigue and wounds, he had had so many dreams and nightmares and hallucinations that he was practiced in distinguishing between reality and illusion. This was real, he was certain. The girl, the rippling stream, the gardens, and the food.

  “Not much to eat,” she said later, as she brought out soy-bean curds and millet cakes and bamboo shoots. “I simply haven’t the heart to snare pheasants, and I’m too clumsy to fish, and carp are awfully bony anyway.”

  There seemed never to be any sharp division between day and night in that world of peach-blossom haze. It soon became clear why Tien Yuk called time an illusion. They said that time was one of the dimensions of space. So the curious business of a thin, curved layer of glaze having infinite depth might merely be an utter absence of time.

  Past and present and future became scrambled, finally. Though Captain Breen and his men had receded into non-existence for a while, they eventually became so real that Cooper told Tien Yuk all about them. It was not until he had finished his story that he realized his mistake.

  She still sat beside him, knee to knee, smooth and silken and lovely; but a great distance now separated them. “You must go back. You have a debt to pay. I’ll miss you terribly. Still I don’t want to see you until you have paid.”

  “But what’s it to you?” he demanded. “You’re out of all that.”

  Her eyes became a riddle, and he knew that she would not answer, though he also sensed that she could.

  The thought of going back to the horror he had left must have shown clearly on his face, for she smiled a little and said, “For all you know, this world hangs from the one you left, and whatever happens to it will happen to this. I don’t want to be alone, but you must pay your debt.”

  When he saw that no logic could shake her, when he saw that however long he stayed in the Peach Blossom Paradise, he would be as alone as he had been on his march from the mountains, he got up and went toward the bridge. Tien Yuk had showed him the landmarks, and he walked.

  And after a moment of freezing misery and the obliteration of all his senses, he was standing near a single red lacquered coffin, and near an enormous ruddy vase. Looking back, he could see the garden, but not Tien Yuk. The air was thick with peculiar Chinese scents, and the only light was that of a wavering taper.

  Then Hong Li came from behind the lacquered screen. The old man clasped his own two hands and bowed. “They stop look for you. Now you can go out.” He lifted the coffin lid, and took out three bandoliers of cartridges, half a dozen hand grenades, some bandages. These he put into a canvas bag. “You take. Good-bye.”

  * * * *

  When Cooper reached the guerrilla hideout, he saw that Captain Breen and the others had recuperated. Though they were still gaunt and ragged, there was fire in them again. Somewhere they had found cartridges and grenades. Cooper, to assure himself a welcome, came into camp with all his bandoliers in plain sight.

  All but Captain Breen ignored him.

  “I don’t think we want you here,” Breen said.

  Since there was no accusation, Cooper could hardly defend himself. He hoped the cartridges would speak for him.

  After a dragging pause, Breen explained, “You’ve eaten too much Jap grub. And you sank Hong Li proper.”

  “But he gave me these!” Cooper dropped the bandoliers. “He hid me when the Skibbies looked for me, the time I tried to come back. He was okay when I left.”

  “How many Chinese funerals did they have while you were in Santo Tomas?”

  He answered, “Uh—none at all.”

  “You wouldn’t hear the firecrackers and gongs; you slept too sound.”

  This was bad. There was no chance of convincing Breen that a man living in a paradise of peach-blossom glaze could not hear a Chinese funeral in the outer world. He repeated, “Captain, I saw Hong Li. He gave me those cartridges.”

  “Hum. Same batch. Same as he sent us, couple weeks ago. Other half was snatched by the Skibbies. Their Thought Police became suspicious of Chinese funerals; too many of them.”

  Terrifying conviction seized Cooper. If a living man can walk in and out of a thin glaze, why couldn’t a vengeful dead man hand him bandoliers to damn him when he reached his one-time comrades?

  The men were silent. They obviously suspected Cooper had returned as a spy. Suspected, probably, that he had led the Japs to those coffins in Hong Li’s room—those smuggling devices which, overworked in fake funerals, had finally-brought the old man to his death.

  “But he was alive, he was alive,” Cooper repeated desperately.

  “Villagers,” Breen stated, “tell us he disappeared. After a coffin was broken open and found full of ammunition instead of a corpse. The natives do keep in touch with me. How long did it take you to get here?”

  Cooper told him.

  Breen started at the answer. “He gave you this stuff three and a half days ago?”

  “Yes, sir. Before God, he did.”

  “In his house?”

  “Yes.”

  A long silence. Then: “Probably you believe what you’re saying. But when a man disappears after a jam like Hong Li’s, he doesn’t hang around his own house, just assuming he could possibly be alive, which by the Lord, he could not!”

  The guerrillas were on their feet, seasoned slayers ready to strike. Only respect for the toughest one of them all, Captain Breen, kept them back. He said, “We heard about the nice reception you got. Foxy, not telling the colonel you were one of us. I don’t really believe you’ve come back to spy on us. I didn’t blame you for leaving. But I don’t want you around.”

  “You—you think I’m—crazy?”

  “Not taking any chances. Double-time, before someone gets excited. Goodbye.”

  Cooper obeyed. These men were hair-triggered killers. Their lives depended on taking no chances. He was lucky to be alive.

  But the fear which went with him took the savor from his luck. First, voices. Then, the Peach Blossom Paradise. Then a dead Chinaman gives him a damning cargo. Cooper was haunted by the certainty that Hong Li had planned a vengeance which had almost succeeded.

  He was going back with the grenades he had not taken out of his haversack. If the Japs caught him slipping into Santo Tomas, he’d blast them apart, then run and hide until he had a chance to explain himself to the dead Chinaman.

  And he had to convince Tien Yuk that he had done his best. If no one else believed, she would. It was, finally, her belief which counted. He’d been worthless, a drunkard, before the war, but his love for Tien Yuk had changed him. He’d helped her work in the garden, he’d caught carp from the pool. That unmeasured time in another dimension was the only time in which he had ever amounted to anything, and he was going back.

  He was not surprised when, sneaking into the native quarter, he found Hong Li’s house an empty wr
eck. There had been some slip in Captain Breen’s information; Hong Li had not been tripped up until after he’d given Cooper the munitions.

  He crouched in the ruins. He was worn out, hungry, and ready to drop. At last he risked crawling to the back of the adjoining house. He scratched on the matting wall. A native whispered, “Que pasa?”

  “A donde esta Hong Li?” Cooper countered in Spanish. “What happened to his store, his goods, everything?”

  “No one knows where Hong Li is,” the native whispered. “As for the goods, who but Colonel Yoshiwara would have them?”

  So the Jap had the Peach Blossom Paradise and everything else!

  Light-headed from fatigue, Cooper shaped a plan which seemed entirely practical: He would sneak into the colonel’s quarters, and then into the vase. He’d get into Paradise right under the Jap’s nose!

  From down the street came the sound of the patrol that enforced the curfew. Cooper picked up a hatchet from the ruins. He followed the patrol, darting from shadow to shadow.

  The colonel had quartered himself in what had been a tobacco planter’s combination of town house and business headquarters. It was a convenient blend of residence and office, with accommodations ample for one commandant, yet not large enough for a number of junior officers.

  A sentry walked post in front. The patrol saluted the colonel’s house. The orderly returned the salute in behalf of the commandant. Then Cooper smacked down with his hatchet, and walked in.

  Once more, he trod on air. He had paid his debt. In the eyes of a Chinese lady, he would now be a gentleman. He would be worthy of her respect.

  He walked right in. He felt as though he’d drunk a case of San Miguel gin. The stairs to Colonel Yoshiwara’s quarters were paved with purple clouds.

  Cooper knew the way. He’d spent hours there, checking the English handbills. It was easy finding the switch.

  The big vase was there. Cooper, too exhilarated to think of caution, turned on lights. He needed light, because you had to get just the right angle to march into the Peach Blossom Paradise.

  He didn’t see Tien Yuk. Maybe she was asleep in the little kiosk. But there was a man, a man with a straggling little graying beard, and he was fishing for carp. Cooper began to chuckle. Talk about fooling the Skibbies! Hong Li had walked right into the glaze, and nuts to the buck-toothed monkeys!