The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  Crane, however, was not listening. He went uncertainly to the door, and down the narrow dingy stairs, without stumbling. He had taken his foul-smelling cigarette, and but for the odor, it was as if he had never been there.

  “Going back to one’s past,” Janos told himself, “is dangerous. But the future—no man can ever be less than he was in his previous life, no matter what that life has been…”

  Janos, the cunning magician, still had his gift, for illusion had sent Crane away, if not happy, at least resigned. For the first time in his life, Janos felt wise instead of clever. Illusion, the magic of mirrors and wires, had served as well as the real thing: better, in fact.

  He went to the window, and leaned over the sill.

  Crane was walking with that peculiar, hitching gait of one whose sense of time is entirely out of gear. Resigned, but without aim.

  Suddenly it seemed to Janos that what he had done for Crane was all too much like the trout sandwich he had conjured: feeding the man’s soul an illusion was no different, after all, than handing a man shadow-food, and Janos was hungry. A rent receipt, after all, is no juicy food…

  So Janos closed his eyes and made a pass, one which he had never made before: yet he knew that it was the proper pass, and that the words he spoke were the proper words: “Crane, it may be sooner than you think.”

  He turned from the sill. He was weary and sagging, but there was no weight on him: for his hoarded gift no longer burdened him. He no longer had any advantage over any other man. He flexed the hands whose thousand tiny “hands” could make bits of paper “walk” over the rippling skin.

  He ignored the crash and squeal and scream of brakes below him. He was thinking of that girl’s hands. It was not until he heard the siren that he looked out again, and saw what happened.

  It was plain in the headlight glare.

  Crane, his sense of time all warped, had forgotten that not the most careful driver could change pace as could the dancing senses of a hasheesh smoker.

  Janos said, “It was sooner than I thought.”

  He looked again at his hands and now he knew what to do with them. He did not know where he got this certainty, but he was sure that it was knowledge, and not illusion.

  He said aloud, to his hands, “You’ll take her job. You can do it better, but it’ll be hard enough to keep you from having time to play tricks. You may even have to learn something new, do you understand?”

  There was no answering ripple of protest. The challenge was worthy of the hands of Janos, and they would obey.

  THE FIRE AND THE FLESH

  Also published as: Land of the Living Flame”

  Originally published in Speed Mystery, March 1943.

  “Damn it, woman!” Harmon thrust his chair back from the breakfast table. “Java and Bali will keep, and so will the Hindu ruins. They’ve been at Borobudur for untold centuries, and they’ll be just as romantic and glamorous next month or next year. Be reasonable—haven’t I got enough on my mind, without sightseeing, here and now?”

  Half-whimsically, half-querulously Lorella Harmon complained, “It’s my fault that blight or smut or whatever it is has struck the crop? Good Lord, Wade! You worked on this dry rice for a couple of years before the war.

  “Won’t it keep till next year? Haven’t you all the time in the world? They haven’t starved in Java or anywhere else so far for lack of this miracle super-rice that’ll grow without irrigation on the rockiest mountainside!”

  The new strain of “dry” rice, which Wade Harmon had developed after long experimentation, was doing worse than fall away from its early promise. And Lorella, just come to Tanah Merah from the States, seemed to feel badly let down—not because the crop had taken a setback but because he refused to leave the plantation and go on the promised sightseeing tour until he learned what had caused the trouble.

  Though slender, Lorella had no need at all for any artifices to round out her pale-blue lounging robe. Her hair had ruddy glints and an almost-nacreous sheen. Her skin was fine and smooth. Good nose and long lovely hands—all in all Lorella Harmon was an uncommonly attractive armful but for the petulance that lurked about her mouth.

  “I might as well have stayed in the States! You’re not a bit glad to see me!”

  But Harmon had beaten her to the punch in quitting the table so Lorella did not leave. Instead she sat there to weep with heroic restraint until the door slammed. Then she bounced to her feet and pressed her face against the panes of the solarium to see how far he would go before coming back to apologize.

  Wade was a wiry, quick-stepping man, perhaps too impatient for the tropics. She tried to make allowances for that and for the lingering effects of war injuries, though there was scarcely a trace of a limp.

  Active as he was in body, his mind left it lagging behind. That expression of farseeingness in the deep-set dark eyes had attracted her from the start—from their very first meeting after the war, while he was still scrambling for funds to return to Tanah Merah to resume his experiments with dry rice.

  And now, she told herself bitterly, he saw so far that his opposite number at breakfast was too near to be in focus!

  Harmon had no intention of coming back to apologize. Once well away from the bungalow, which had for so many weeks awaited Lorella’s arrival, he divided his bitter gaze between the volcano, Merah, and the crop which would surely fail. Sniffing the air he caught a barely perceptible taint of sulfur.

  Harmon began to blame Merah, the Red One, for the unfilled heads of rice, the stunted growths that had sprouted with such promise. Merah had always been an overshadowing beauty—the ever-changing hues as the sun shifted, at times ash-rose, and again a luminous purple during the brief dusk. Merah was red only when the towering cone of lavender-gray pumice was tinged by the slanting rays of early morning and late evening.

  Harmon frowned at the failing crop. His plantation was on the highest of the succession of terraces from which the cone rose. Except for the ground he had cleared the entire shelf was overgrown by jungle, though there had always been a small area cultivated by the natives of the village. These people now worked for Wade Harmon.

  Ahmat, the Javanese labor foreman, appeared at his side. Though his hair had whitened and his eyes were ancient, his delicately modeled face was smooth albeit sharp of line.

  “Tuan, she is angry,” he said. “I have tried to make peace with her but she will not listen to the servant when the master should speak.”

  “She, Ahmat?”

  “You know us of old. I have watched you looking at her long and often.” Ahmat gestured. “The Red Mountain is only the house of One who lives there. She who lives in the house, her one does not see. Do you go and talk to her.”

  “How does a man talk to a mountain? What did you do, Ahmat, when you—talked to her?”

  “I set fruit and flowers on the rim of the crater. As if at a shrine or image. The Presence is everywhere. Go, place your gift and perhaps she will be pleased.”

  “That smell in the air is what’s poisoning the rice.”

  “No, tuan. It comes and it goes, it has always been so. Rice has a soul. It is frightened when Merah is angry. So it dies.”

  Many of the islanders believed that rice had a spirit. They believed that only a certain sort of blade was fit for cutting the stalks, else the spirit of the cereal would be angry.

  “Each living thing,” Ahmat had once explained, “dies in its time to nourish another living thing. That is the Excellent Law. But he who eats without giving thanks for the sacrifice of the eaten, he is cursed for his pride and it is not well with him.”

  This had set Harmon thinking during pre-war years in Tanah Merah when he lived in his bungalow, alone with the problem of crossing one plant strain with another to accentuate desirable traits.

  “But what starts the original mutation?” Harmonad once asked a lecturer at sc
hool. The man had given him a look, half of pity, half of resentment. Later there had been talk of cosmic rays, radioactivity—explanations which explained nothing.

  When Ahmat had seen that under Harmon’s care the dry rice was actually changing as to the size and number of grains in each head, he had offered an explanation no worse than that of the scientists and a good deal more picturesque.

  “It is this way—the plant guardians, the devas who make things grow, they amuse themselves sometimes by making a single grain sprout a stalk that is not like any of the other stalks.”

  “That makes as much sense as what they told me at school.”

  Later, pleased by Harmon’s open-mindedness, Ahmat had added, “The devas make changes when there is a man who sees and understands. There has always been dry rice—but the changes did not start until you came.”

  This queer primitive reasoning had finally warped Harmon into line. But he could not tell Lorella that until the rice devas felt like dispensing with his presence he could not take her to see Bali and Borobudur and the rest of the tourist bait.

  What sustained Ahmat’s contention was that growing things did respond to Harmon’s touch. But Harmon felt foolish about offering gifts to a volcano.

  CHAPTER II

  When Ahmat handed him the small basket Harmon skirted the base of the cone, wanting to be out of sight of the bungalow when he began the ascent. He went cold at the thought of Lorella spotting him; insisting on going along.

  There were lava beds between the plantation’s edge and the foot of the cone. For perhaps a mile, he picked his way among windrows of black fragments, which looked as though a giant had picked up uncounted gondola-loads of coal to dump them in heaps. Between these bunkers was a fairly level floor, seamed and slashed by crevasses.

  Finally he began a slantwise ascent of the cone. At each step he sank ankle deep, and started small slides of cinder. Before long he was exhausted and sat down on the steep slope. A feeling that he had been cut off from humanity, from all animate creatures, became stronger. Then, as his gaze shifted, he saw that Ahmat had well and rightly referred to Merah as she.

  There were cinder dunes which began where the lava flow ended, a succession of mounds, whose curvature the somewhat overrated ladies of Bali might have envied. Each was banded and mottled, white and tawny, coral and buff, scarlet, ocher, and ash-rose. Mottled and banded like the Primordial Serpent in the shadow of whose hooded heads Brahman the Creator sleeps, waiting for the Destroyer to finish his work, resting until the time for new creation.

  Harmon remembered the museum where he had seen the many-breasted statue unearthed at Ephesus. The linkage of association was so strong that he said aloud, “Diana of the Ephesians mated with the Great Serpent—Merah, the great granddaughter of all of the Nagas…”

  And then the scientist in Harmon rebelled. He told himself, “Those color bands are caused by chemical changes in the cinder when anhydride vapors from below encounter atmospheric moisture and become acids.”

  Having built up a good case against intuition he resumed the ascent until at last he could look back and see, far below, the red tiles of the bungalow roof. It was like looking into another world.

  On reaching the crater lip, he looked down into a bowl whose flat floor was broken by crevasses. It supported a confusion of towering lava bulwarks and pinnacles. Wisps of steam curled from several floor and wall crevasses. A light snow-pack clung to the slope.

  He made his way down into the shadow of the turrets and spires. There were passages almost arched over into arcades with only a thin thread of sky showing through. More and more, he got the feeling that all this had been erected by gods or demons—and for no good purpose.

  Then, disconcertingly, mist gathered. It thickened. It plumed and spiraled. Murky twilight became darkness at noon. Sudden panic made him turn and run until he emerged from the passage. There he stopped, for he could neither see the crater wall nor anything that was more than a yard from him.

  Whichever way he went, he should soon reach the side of the bowl and come up into the light again. But to do so he would have to move in a straight line—and this was impossible. Gaping crevasses and towering pillars kept him from holding a straight course. Every few paces demanded a detour.

  He cursed the volcano and his own folly and Ahmat’s as well. Then a detached segment of consciousness warned him and he sat down. He closed his eyes, and drew a deep breath—a second—a third.

  A moment later he perceived that he was not alone. There was a blurred something coming toward him. Though it took shape before tension could again mount he got to his feet, all a-quiver.

  Of a sudden, the form blossomed into color. It was as if a spotlight had been turned on the girl. Her garments were not of the island pattern. If her skirt was actually wound sarong-wise, then she had her own trick of arranging it. Instead of blouse or short jacket, she wore her breasts bound with a scarf, leaving her midriff bare.

  Over this foundation she wore a long garment that put him in mind of the sari of Hindustan, a tunic which after enveloping her body, left a fold sufficient to conceal all but a glimpse of black hair and of ear lobes from which hung ornately worked golden pendants.

  In one hand she carried a tiny basket, much like the one Harmon had abandoned in panic. The other, peeping from the garment, gathered the folds. They were exquisite hands, cream colored, with fingertips henna-dyed. She wore neither bracelets nor anklets. There was no caste mark to brand her smooth forehead—no jeweled stud defaced her nose.

  Her grave loveliness, at first finding expression in eyes which were dark and longish, now spread into life with her smile. Her glance took in the abandoned basket. Understanding at once she said, “You don’t know where to put it? I’ll show you.”

  “Ahmat told me,” Harmon began, gropingly. “He didn’t want to offer these things to—ah—Merah. He thought…”

  “I’m Agni Deva,” she said as though to explain why her features were not Malayan—why, without seeming in any wise foreign, she was in so many small ways unlike other island women. Then, “Don’t worry about the fog. I shall guide you.”

  He followed her into another of the labyrinth’s entrances. Surely some conscious and designing one had modeled the once-plastic lava as a baker might garnish a cake. The shrine at which Agni Deva Stopped was not human handiwork nor could it have been made by nature. He sensed that Agni Deva herself was an ambiguity in flesh and blood.

  After a genuflection she set her basket on the altar and pronounced words he could not understand. Stepping back she said, “I’ll say it for you if you’ve forgotten what Ahmat told you.”

  “Will it be just as good?”

  “Oh, of course!”

  Harmon recited, “I bring the Red One an offering of good will and ask for the sweetness of her breath to be good for my rice. I ask for good will toward the rice I plant in the courtyard of her house.”

  Agni Deva was pleased. “That was just right. But you were angry at her awhile ago, and frightened, and you cursed her in your heart. Sit down while you wait for the fog to lift. Sit here. Throw your thoughts toward the altar.” Her voice dimmed a little as she repeated, “Toward it—toward her—in front of you—always in front. Away from you—out from yourself…”

  When, with a start, he realized that he was alone and that brilliant sunlight reached down just behind him, he knew that for a measurable time his thoughts, and more than any mere thoughts, had been “out in front.”

  Harmon picked his way from the crater rim to go down the slope. He looked back but saw no trace of Agni Deva nor of the way she had left.

  CHAPTER III

  Harmon was not surprised by the quick recovery of the rice from its setback, though all he did was observe and record. He set down the readings of instruments which measured temperature, humidity, air density. He set forth his findings on soil analysis, and on all th
e insect pests and plagues. He entered everything except his visits to the volcano.

  Every so often he met Agni Deva. He did not mention her to Ahmat. Natives would gossip and sooner or later the story would work its way to the bungalow staff. Lorella had her ways of learning things.

  That she quit nagging about the postponed cruise was a relief until her flattering interest in his work became overdone. This hampered Harmon. Getting to the crater was impossible without being observed. He racked his brain for an excuse to get away from Lorella long enough to make the climb—but in vain.

  The rice continued thriving, yet Ahmat looked worried—for there were now earth tremors. Gentle nudges rattled dishes in the china-closet, the glassware on the buffet. Sulfur fumes became strong.

  Lorella became alarmed. “We’ll be burned alive or buried without warning!” she cried, one morning when fumes entirely concealed the black bulwarks of the lava beds. “And that everlasting hissing!”

  “It’s no more dangerous than geysers back home.”

  “Good Lord! Why did you have to pick a volcano!”

  “There isn’t any other sort of mountain in the archipelago.”

  “Well, but most of them are extinct.”

  “Merah is practically so.”

  “Practically so!” Lorella echoed, her voice rising. “If we don’t leave here soon, I’ll get out and you can have your volcano!”

  In fairness, Harmon didn’t blame her.

  He said, “Let’s wait a few more days, darling. These things aren’t touched off with a fuse. They give plenty of warning.”

  He told Ahmat to prepare a basket. That night, when moonlight reached into the bungalow, Harmon tiptoed to the veranda, carrying his boots. The crater would be safe enough. The subterranean forces were finding escape at the base of the cone, in the lava beds, as they had done before.

  He had barely set out when Lorella’s voice checked him. She wore slacks and sneakers. Even by moonlight he read the anger in her face. “Let me go and see how she likes orchids! Oh, don’t give me that I-don’t-know-what-you-mean look. I was awake when Ahmat set the basket on the porch. I’ve noticed how you two always change the subject the minute I come near.”