The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  “I’ll show you.” Bayne’s thought closely paralleled Terry’s; it would be hell if this leaked out. He had to make good. “Come here. Both of you. Take off your shoes, or you can’t make it. That’s important.” Elise licked her taut lips. She did not like this. But she stepped forward. She would not admit, nor would Terry, that they did not want to have Bayne behind them, even for an instant. Pride won. So they risked it, and he told them. “It is simple—we’ll all go—”

  They did that. And for moments, there in the everlasting sunglow of Khosru’s springtime, Elise stood marveling. Terry’s face twitched, and he muttered, “It’s the damndest thing I ever heard of.”

  Elise caught his hand; the squeeze was a farewell, he knew. He sensed that she was thinking, “A fellow that can do this can read our minds—see us wherever we go—we’re through, through for keeps…”

  Then Bayne said, amicably, for the garden had soothed his wrath, “Now let’s go out again. Lovely, isn’t it?” He guided them, Elise leading, between the palmettos he knew so well. He watched them when they pierced the veil, and stood there seeing each other and the room with wide eyes.

  “Let’s all go out to dinner,” Elise said. She laughed shakily. “Elmer darling, you are clever!”

  Elmer Bayne shrugged. “A fellow just learns odd things. The mystic orient, I guess.” They entirely missed his irony.

  The Imperial Amontillado was sixty years old and at just the right temperature. The green turtle soup was perfect. The planked steak was contributed by a steer whose horoscope had indicated a high destiny. The omelette soufflé would have made Jules Alciatore envious, though a tactless chef did shape a pair of turtle doves to crown the delicately browned fluff. But dinner was an ordeal. This matter of being civilized had its limits.

  On the way home, Terry chewed a Garcia Vega to dripping shreds, and the only poised person was Elise. “Let’s sit in the patio,” Bayne said, stepping to the door that opened into a broad expanse of diamond-shaped red tiles. A fountain played mistily in the center. It was all so charming that not even the chrome and green leather lounging-chairs jarred with their modernistic touch.

  “Now that you know I wasn’t snooping,” Bayne hitched his chair about to face the two in the canopied hammock, “let’s be mutually tolerant and civilized. I suppose you want to marry Terry, as soon as things can be arranged.”

  Elise’s brows became Gothic arches, and she tried not to laugh. She took a deep breath, slowly exhaled. Terry was jealous as a cat. The very traits that made him charming made him unstable. In no time, they’d hate each other bitterly, or bore each other silly; it wouldn’t be a game, there would be no zest and tang and sparkle. Imagine champagne and caviar three times a day. Or a whole meal of omelette soufflés. Or Imperial Amontillado served in beer mugs. She could not imagine anyone stupid enough to have Bayne’s thought, much less speak it.

  She was fond of Bayne, in her way. Just a little browbeating, just a little pretense of jealous cross-examining; just enough extravagance to make him frown at times, when he noticed the bills. A nice life with Bayne, an amiable serenity that made excitement a glamorous contrast, gave it a tang. He could not understand that, so she shouldn’t tell him. And for Terry’s sake, she could not be frank, though she had the courage to, and the will.

  So Elise said, finally, at the end of a silence that had made Terry lean forward, face tense: “We’ve been…I hate to call it silly…but it’s not necessary, Elmer. You’ve been so decent about that giddy moment of ours—”

  It sounded so honest and from the heart that Hillman Terry slowly rose. “I guess we can’t do a thing but meet you halfway, Bayne.”

  Basically, he wasn’t a bad fellow. He felt rather rotten about it all. He’d been determined to see it through, to the limit; he could take care of Elise almost as well as Bayne. Certainly he was no fortune-hunter. He really cared a great deal, but he could not make a liar of her by holding out for Bayne’s offer.

  “Someday, I hope we’ll see each other,” he said.

  “You’ll be very welcome,” Bayne answered.

  He wondered if they suspected how much he knew; knew with every sense except the five that limit rational people. But he had been civilized about it; tolerant enough to wipe the slate clean, and without even giving her reason to think he had consciously done so. Khosru’s garden, he thought, had given him the poise needed to make him superior to trying circumstances. The Sultan of the Black Isles had drawn a sword.

  Maybe he had taken Elise too much for granted. Life was an exciting adventure to her, not an old wine to be sipped slowly and savored. Reasonably, she liked to be regarded as an adventure. An immature viewpoint, but tolerance demanded his acceptance of it.

  A single damning little thought edged into this smoothing over, as the days passed. That uncanny “trick” with the garden carpet might have frightened the lovers into what they had offered as renunciation…

  But Elise and Terry apparently were sticking to the bargain. They were no longer seen together at cocktail lounges, nor in his phaeton, at golf or polo matches. Terry was doing his skeet-shooting to a strictly masculine audience. He always drew a gallery. This all finally came to Bayne’s ears; this lack of gossip.

  Someone, assuming that he had never suspected, took that one drink too many and said with a carefully arranged wink to assure Bayne beyond any doubt that it was a jest, “Hillman Terry had a lot of your friends worried, Elmer, old boy. But you know how to keep ’em at home!”

  Bayne smiled, shrugged. Later there were labored explanations to the effect that the first statement had been just an ill-timed jibe. Bayne’s easy poise smoothed it over, and his level head became further famed. They did not know how that carelessly added, “you keep ’em at home,” had reassured Bayne. He was trying heroically to be gay and sparkling and apparently his efforts were not wasted.

  Bayne still found time for Khosru’s garden, though not as often as before. He went out for sports, and did well enough with the string of polo ponies Terry helped him select. This charmed Elise. Bayne was finally amounting to something. The way he carried his cocktails, however large the overload, filled her with pride of possession.

  * * * *

  One day, a horse fell. The shaking-up was not serious, but it took Bayne out of the game. His head ached as well as his muscles. Business, dancing, sports, they had made him dizzy; an instant of bad judgment, and he’d booted his mount into a clash that had to end in a spill. “I’m tired as hell,” he said to a groom. “Drive me home in your car; you can get back in time.”

  Bayne, among other things, was homesick for Khosru’s garden. Holy ground, he called it, more so than ever: the quiet retreat where he had won the final measure of tolerant understanding. Elise was meeting him more than halfway. How much better that he had been modern!

  The gardener, puttering around in the farther corner of the grounds, did not hear Bayne enter. He was stone-deaf and decidedly near-sighted. A Great Dane scented the master and came galloping out; he forgot his dignity, leaped up, pawed Bayne, slobbered joyously over him, licked his face. A puppy’s heart in a body the size of a Shetland pony’s! Later, he would become grave and stately.

  Elise must be out, or in her soundproofed suite in the left wing. He had changed at the clubhouse. He’d just as soon not see Elise. A nerve-twisting day, then a great game ruined by a spill. Since that evening when he had rushed out of Khosru’s garden, they had never mentioned the rug. He had often caught side glimpses of Elise’s frown, and he told himself, “She still thinks it was a trick…thinks she couldn’t ever have been in Khosru’s garden…and she’d rather not bring up any reminders of that evening.”

  Either guess was good enough. Neither Elise nor Terry could possibly have believed that they had walked into a rug. It was too easy to blame it on illusion—a crazy hallucination conjured up by the shock and embarrassment of his uncanny appearance, in dim li
ght.

  Then he glanced at the time and remembered an engagement. He sighed, cast a regretful look at Khosru’s garden. The trees did not stir in any breeze, the water did not ripple; the peacocks were motionless, and none of the ducks were swimming. All the life was beyond the veil, and so was all the serenity and quiet. There would be cocktails somewhere, and dinner, and a crowd. So he went to find Elise.

  She was not in, but her car was. He sat down to wait. Presently, someone would be driving her home. It was now well past the time he would normally have returned from the clubhouse. The cook, with no dinner to serve, had left.

  Elise did not arrive. Bayne poured some sherry. Had he expected this delay, he could have strolled through Khosru’s garden, and been refreshed. He switched on the lights, and watched them bring out the hidden glow of that ancient carpet.

  The shattering of glass aroused him. He had dozed, and finally knocked his sherry to the floor. The bouquet billowed upward. Like Khosru’s garden, it imprisoned sunlight and warmth. He looked at his watch. Wherever Elise was, two engagements were already beyond redemption. Coffee must now be steaming in just two fewer cups than some hostess had anticipated. Bayne was not sorry. It had been quiet, here in this room with the beamed ceiling and the far-off, monstrous fireplace.

  He might have phoned, here and there, to try to get in touch with Elise, but that would have irritated her. It would have savored of checking up.

  He began to admit that he was worried, that perhaps he had gone too far in his finesse. Above all things, she was punctual, to within at least the half-hour. Damn that Bayshore Highway, and the countless fools racing along it! But if she’d been injured, he’d have been notified by now.

  Finally he unlaced his shoes. No one ever worried in Khosru’s garden. The automatic stoker in the basement kept the temperature even, but in the garden, concentrated sunlight did that. He stepped toward the web of sorcery. It blurred momentarily before his eyes. There was the same short, shuddering chill as he hovered in an undefined shift of dimensions.

  But this time, he stayed, poised. He was not quite in the room, nor yet in the garden. The view ahead was all too clear, and so were the voices. Elise and Terry huddled far in the dimness where the palmettos blended with that strange curvature of space. She was hysterical and he was grim. Whether they could have seen Bayne was an open question; the fact was that they had not. They were too intent on leaving the only rendezvous they could find after that agreement in the courtyard, weeks ago.

  “I know these are the trees,” she cried.

  “Hell, we’ve tried them all!” He shook her shoulder. “Pull yourself together. Suppose he is waiting outside? Suppose he turned in an all-car alarm? Suppose we will have to cook up a yarn no one with sense enough to pour sand out of a boot will believe? It’s lousy, but we can’t dodge it. Anyway, he’ll come in here, finally, and let us out.”

  Elise was bedraggled. She had slipped into at least one canal, in her frantic search for the exit, and her negligee clung close. Terry’s encouragement had an undertone that told how quickly he would crack.

  Bayne stepped back, and then he saw nothing but the formal patterns designed by a Persian weaver whose ally had been a wizard. If he had gone forward, Bayne might once more have found tolerance, but now the garnet glow of the Boukhara carpet under his feet matched his mood.

  “They couldn’t even spare me that,” he said to the silence. “Tolerance, hell!…” His voice was even and cool, which made it infinitely bitter. “Civilized!”

  He was thinking now of red grass, and the Sultan of the Black Isles; of the sultana who had scourged him, and of a broken enchantment that had released him, and of a scimitar that had been drawn.

  Bayne methodically searched until he found Terry’s shoes. It would not do to leave them around. When they missed Terry, no telling what would happen. Bayne did not want to reveal the secret of Khosru’s garden a second time. Not to the police, not to the papers, not to his friends. Something cracked as he hurried to the furnace room and flung the shoes into the glowing coals.

  Then he remembered that Terry and Elise might find their way back. And with his civilization quite vanished, Bayne did not know what he might do, when he met them. Bayne wondered, as he pulled the garden carpet from the wall, just what would happen next. Since a man cannot live in two worlds, he had best arrange to live in the one into which he had been born.

  The carpet was not heavy. Bayne closed his eyes and thrust it into the firebox. The fumes did not smell of burning wool. They were deadly sweet, pungent, and a many-colored mist filtered past the furnace door, for moments blotting the single ceiling bulb.

  When he opened the door, there was only a crumbling ash. It would be hard now to pick the two palmettos between which one had to pass to leave Khosru’s garden…

  SHADOW CAPTAIN

  Originally published in Speed Mystery, July 1943.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Khamsin

  They say in the desert that if the khamsin blows three days without interruption, a man can justly kill his best friend; if five days, his wife; if seven days, himself. And Captain Tod Rowan had for ten days faced the furnace blast which swept the Libyan Desert.

  He could not tell when day ceased and night began. The sun was scarcely visible. It was not plain whether the desert was underfoot or overhead; the sand was all in motion, a satanic conspiracy against every living thing which invaded the land of the dead.

  This was the western land, where Egypt for centuries had buried her uncounted generations. And now Rowan was no longer certain what lived and what did not. He crouched there, squinting through reddened eyes; his blackened lips moved, and he muttered, “This blasted khamsin, why can’t it stop and give Rommel a chance…”

  Rowan watched the marching drifts, watched them form as the khamsin stripped the sand away, uncovering rocky ridges and burying others. His company was entrenched among tombs which no archeologist’s spade had ever found. Here, miles west of the charted cities of the dead, the khamsin exposed Egypt’s most ancient necropolis.

  He held a scorching hot canteen to his baked lips, and muttered, “Necropolitan Police Force directing traffic, clubbing the mummies into line. Move on, you!”

  The fancy was growing into a fact. But thus far, Rowan had not asked Higgins, his orderly, whether people actually were coming out of the city of the dead. Better wait till one of the men reported the procession.

  As the murky daylight dwindled, the figures became clearer: men in robes, wearing tall miters. And there were women; shapely creatures, their hair tightly twisted into compact curls.

  They were dressed like tomb paintings he had seen in a museum during that last leave in Cairo.

  The bewildered dead milled about. Their tombs, exposed by the khamsin, had been plastered by artillery and by dive bombers during lulls in the murderous wind. Sculptured and painted fragments littered the ground about Rowan’s shelter. There were flakes of mummy cloth, there were bones to which dark long dried bits of flesh still clung despite the force of the blasts. He was thinking, “They’ll be in a hell of a fix, they were embalmed and wrapped, and put to bed in deluxe underground hotels so they’d be safe until resurrection.”

  A girl was coming toward the trench nearest Rowan’s command post. She was speaking; that much was plain from her gestures, and it was clear that none of the half-blinded men saw her. Then she rounded the end of the unstable slit in the desert, and approached Rowan. Her supple figure was white, almost luminous in that fast failing light.

  She spoke to him, and he looked up, licked dust from his lips, and tried to answer, though he could not understand a word she said. With a gesture, he invited her to come down out of the wind which whipped biting sand against her.

  Her gratitude was beautiful to see. A smile lighted her face, and made a splendor of her almond-shaped eyes; they were very dark, and the lashes were so lon
g and thick that they made as it were a smudge along the edge of the lids.

  “Your eyes aren’t red.”

  She shrugged, shook her head, so that the tightly twisted curls which cascaded to her shoulders rippled a little; even in the stench of battle, he caught the heavy sweetness which her hair and garments exhaled as she came closer.

  Since she moved, she wasn’t dead; his logic made him feel better. He asked in halting Arabic, “’Ism-ak?”

  Apparently she did not know the language, but when he pointed and repeated the query, she answered, “Maatkara.” And then he guessed that Maatkara wanted to know his name, so he told her.

  More than that, she wanted him to go with her. The touch of her hand on his arm, the gentle but insistent tug at his sleeve gave him a strange thrill; but when she pointed, and he saw the tomb shapes which were receding in the distance, a wavering file scarcely visible in the failing light, Rowan was frightened, and he shook his head.

  But Maatkara pressed closer, and he could not repel her; instead, he caught her with both arms. He knew that the act was a fatal error, yet there was no resisting the urge. She was more than a woman in his arms; Maatkara had all the fascination of old Egypt on her lips, and all its lure in her eyes.

  He forgot the khamsin, his thirst, and even his horror of combat duty. In all this hell of sand and death, there was nothing but himself, and Maatkara, and the loveliness of her upturned face.

  Maatkara’s features were finely modeled, with cheekbones just prominent enough to be piquant; and her nose had a hint of the aquiline: high bred, and proud, and now abandoning her pride. Since he would not go willingly, she would persuade.

  “I can’t leave,” he protested, when he contrived to break free. “I’m on duty—” He made a gesture. “All along here.”

  Pebbles slid into the shelter; a man came stumbling in, and Rowan leaped to his feet. His orderly, having entered without knocking, drew back, made a fumbling salute, and stuttered, “I didn’t know, sir—”