First he needed a body. A dead one would suffice for awhile. He hadn’t thought much about how he’d get himself a live body when he felt ready for it, but meanwhile that’s where Suddsy came in. Myshkin had hung around the Bellevue morgue, struck up an acquaintance with Suddsy, and they’d got together on the deal.
But nothing happened for weeks and Myshkin stopped coming to the morgue. He couldn’t wait. Moreover, it had occurred to him that he didn’t necessarily need human flesh and blood. He experimented with a variety of small animals and got nowhere. Then he started a little earlier in the genesis of life, working down through fetal specimens until he switched over to oviparous possibilities. That brought him, finally, to chicken eggs.
So there was Myshkin with the eggs again.
By then I wasn’t listening anymore, which wasn’t hard because Myshkin was silent more often than not. That wild fear of his had him by the throat, but he fought it to babble on about the final fantastic success of his experiments with the eggs.
Then everything was swept along, as if in a murmured stream of recollections… of the strange new life he had created… of its developing antagonisms… the revolt… the secret hideouts… the inexplicable manifestations in the machine’s behavior… the current plot against him… the ominous portent of the missing blueprints…
He passed out in the chair.
* * * *
The sound that woke me had stopped before I knew what it was, and the ghastly dream stopped with it. Whatever light there was in the room came slanting in from the hallway bulb, at the head of the stairs, as it had when the door opened in my dream. It was open now.
Myshkin stirred in the deep chair and moaned. When I closed my eyes the room dissolved in a bright sea of gold, but if I opened them to bring back the darkness, the dream came with it. I reached for the bottle and fire blazed in my throat and roared in my ears. I held out the empty bottle at arm’s length and opened my hand. It dropped without a sound. I didn’t know whether it had landed ever so gently on the floor, or whether it stayed in mid-air as I’d thought it would, but I smiled because I liked the silence in my dream, and let it continue. All but that thin, raucous voice.
The little chicken-man said, “Absolutely! He’s guilty!”
“Of those murders, you mean?” I said.
“Exactly. This I find unforgivable. You agree?”
I couldn’t help laughing. It was all I could do to keep from applauding. He was so perfectly a one-foot miniature of Myshkin, that when he spoke in Myshkin’s rather special idiom with Myshkin’s incisive gestures, he became a really wonderful parody, a superb illusion by a gifted, satirical conjurer. His little head was long and cadaverous, his hair an unruly black mop, his nose a distinguished blade, and even his clothes—tiny ragamuffin blue jeans, a gray flannel sweatshirt, and canvas infant’s shoe—were not only much too large for him but managed to duplicate the latter-day-Myshkin’s seedy, disreputable aura.
“Nonsense,” I laughed. “Matter of fact, the opposite is true. Far from murdering them, Myshkin is solely responsible for the creation of your kind.”
“Bah!” cried the chicken-man, instantly ducking under the table as he realized how loud he’d been. Myshkin issued a feeble groan and slumbered on. The chicken-man came out and regarded Myshkin with frank hatred. He wasn’t facing me but I’d already discovered what an amazing radius there was to his vision, so when he turned to look at me I knew it was for my benefit, and that the point was the lavish expression of disgust on his face.
“My friend,” he said, “if we are going to get along, let us dispense with all further propaganda. Don’t misunderstand me. I accept you as an honest man. Probably you are an innocent dupe of the master fiend. Still, all this fantastic talk about Myshkin having created us gets tiresome. On my word.”
He moved a little more into the light and I saw, as I’d thought I’d seen earlier, that his hair seemed feathery, and the suggestion of hair on his face was, literally, down. And there was something odd about his bloodshot eyes, but what?
“But just look at him,” I said.
“Why?”
“Haven’t you ever seen what you look like?”
“Absolutely.”
“Don’t you think there’s, well, a strong resemblance?”
“What?” he cried in quiet horror. He turned slowly to look at Myshkin, and shaking his head, turned back to me. “I assure you I would have done away with myself long ago. No, my friend, if you have arrived at a stage where you can look at that monstrous mask of wickedness and savagery, and tell me that my highly intelligent, sensitive features bear him a resemblance…” He kept shaking his head. “You need expert care nursing. Farewell to you, and I am off to find an ally in the outer, healthy world.”
“Don’t leave,” I said. “I like you.”
“I like you too,” he said. “Strange, isn’t it? I feel drawn to you, somehow—as if I owed you a good deal.”
“I’ll bet there’s a reason for that,” I said.
“Who knows?” he said. “Life is very strange. You know, I am quite young for someone with my gigantic mentality. I am not yet accustomed to the ways of the world. To be truthful, you are really the second human being with whom I have ever conversed. You’re a disappointment in many ways, but I’m glad, all in all, because you’ve taught me that not all of you are such… such…”
“Fiends?” I said.
“Exactly. You seem quite docile, lethargic. Are you always?”
“Not at all,” I said. “I’m drunk.”
“Drunk?”
“Whiskey. Scotch whiskey. I had too much of it.”
“You mean this? What does it do?”
“For one thing,” I said, “it accounts for you.”
“Yes? How so?”
“Well, it tends to produce troubled sleep, nightmares—and sometimes, in chronic cases, very convincing hallucinations.”
“Ah, I see. Then you realize your talk of a resemblance is hallucination? Fine, fine!” He rubbed his hands briskly. “Remarkable insight, nevertheless. I think more of you already. But tell me: how can a man of any intelligence whatsoever accept even for a moment, the absurd notion that Myshkin—who is, after all, to give the devil his due, a human being—how could he possibly create a living, breathing, thinking, being like me?”
“Huh?” I said.
“Jump,” he said. “It aids the digestion and proves that ideas have impact on you. Isn’t it insane? Who is this Myshkin that he should be able to perform such a miracle? Here are no Merlins, or alchemists transmuting base metal to gold, or cabalistic mountain-top rituals, or bottled genii. We are dealing with the one great mystery of the universe, the stupendous secret of life. You mean to tell me that that miserable, wretched, evil-smelling, utterly useless bundle of insignificance named Myshkin found the answer?”
“Huh?” I said.
He glared at me. “Your conversation seems very limited,” he said acidly. “What do you think?”
“Frankly, I never thought of it that way,” I said. “It seemed to make sense when I first saw you. The egg business and so on—you said yourself he destroyed eggs and, well, I thought…”
“You’re just babbling, my friend. Are you aware of it?”
“Well, how do you account for your existence?” I said.
“Hah!” he snorted. “How do you account for yours?”
“But I’m not unusual,” I said. “I was born, that’s all.”
“And I was hatched, that’s all!” he snapped. “Where I come from, it’s considered distinctly unusual to be born. In fact, it’s never done.”
“Where you come from,” I said. “Where is that?”
“Where, he asks me!” He threw his hands up in despair and his haggard features twisted in pain. “If I only knew! What do you think this is all about? Why am I talking to you? Why
do I, obviously your intellectual superior, need your help? Because I don’t know who I am, or where I come from. I don’t even know the name for my kind of being. It must be a wonderful name, but all I know is what that murdering Myshkin calls me…”
“…Chicken-man, you said it was?”
“Chicken-man!” he moaned softly. “Chick-en-man…”
“Please,” I said. “Don’t cry.”
“Forgive me,” he said, wiping his odd little eyes. “I’ve suffered so much these past weeks.”
“I know,” I said. “It leaves its mark on a chicken-man.”
“Absolutely. You know, sometimes you’re almost clairvoyant. Is this common among humans? No? That’s reassuring, anyway. I wouldn’t want Myshkin to catch on to my plan.”
“You have a plan? Not that I’m prying.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I don’t trust you the least bit. I have a plan, yes, and I’ll tell you what its objective is. I want to find out where I come from, and how I can return. I know it must be a long way from here—indeed, from almost anywhere in the world that humans live, or I would not be so unusual a being to you. And so far I haven’t even uncovered a reference to my kind in any one of the books I’ve read.”
“You read?” I said. “Beg pardon, I mean, where do you read?”
“In the library,” he said haughtily. “Where did you think?” He indicated Myshkin with a contemptuous gesture. “You expect a moron like him to own books? He claims he sold them to finance his work on the machine.”
“Ah yes, the machine. Now, Myshkin says—”
“I know what he says,” he said bitterly. “But where did he get it? Or where did he get the plans? Was it from that same unknown land—a far off island, perhaps, a mysterious domain—that he found the eggs that hatch into my kind? And how he manage to pervert its true function—”
“Which is…?” I asked.
“An incubator, naturally,” he said.
“An incubator! That’s just what I said!”
“Did you? That’s very gratifying. I’m really very favorably impressed with you in some ways. Then you know what it’s being used for, don’t you? You’ve seen the powdered ashes of my compatriots in that charnel house downstairs?”
“You mean the yellow dust?”
“Dust!” he sobbed. “Countless innocent embryonic lives blown apart with such demoniacal violence that only dust remains! Why does he hate us so? Why won’t he let us go back? If he wanted fame, wouldn’t his discovery of us be enough? If he wanted wealth, I’d have consented to be exhibited like some freak, or write a newspaper column, or learn to play a harmonica and go on tour.” His little shoulders shook as he wept. “He says he created us, and he destroys us. Why? Tell me why. What have we done?”
“You’ll wake him up,” I said.
“Never mind,” Myshkin croaked. “I’m awake.”
The little chicken-man leaped backward in alarm at the first throaty syllable. Myshkin stirred and his head turned toward the light and I saw his glazed, half-closed eyes.
“Beppo, is that you?” he whispered huskily.
“It’s me,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
Myshkin’s eyelids fluttered and closed. “Oh God,” he moaned faintly. “I dreamed Beppo could talk…”
“Damn it, stop calling me Beppo!” said the chicken-man.
“Hush,” I whispered. “Let’s keep this between us.”
“Hush my foot!” cried the chicken-man. “I’ve had enough of this Beppo business! It’s ridiculous! What the hell am I—a mechanical toy or what? I have a name and I want to be called by it! Is that unreasonable?” He glared at me. “My name,” he said, “is Boris Borisovitch Simeonof-Pishtchik.”
“Quite a name,” I said.
“Thank you. I chose it myself. However, Boris will do. I don’t stand on ceremony.”
Suddenly I realized Myshkin was awake again. He hadn’tb moved at all, but you could see his eyes like live coals staring at us.
“…You’re talking…” he said in a terrible whisper. “…I didn’t dream it… You can really talk…”
The chicken-man smiled derisively. “You object, maybe?”
It was like knowing that I was having a nightmare, and not wanting to do anything about it.
“But you couldn’t,” Myshkin breathed. “Even last week—”
“Ha!” the chicken-man snorted. “Last week I was only four weeks old! I had to learn, didn’t I?”
“…And tonight?” said Myshkin slowly.
“Tonight I didn’t feel talkative!”
For some moments Myshkin was silent. His flickering eyes roamed the dark recesses of the room, his breathing grew calmer.
“…So this is how it was… all the time I was trying to work out those notes on the walls… the symbols the vowel inflections… how amusing it must have been… never once letting on that you could have told me everything all this time while you held me back… all this precious time… gone…”
“So?” the little chicken-man grinned.
“Then you’re going ahead with the plan?”
“Sure. Do me something.”
The next instant Myshkin shot out of his chair and I knew that I’d been awake all night. I recall it as an astonishing but otherwise unemotional sensation. It was like remaining conscious all through a terrible explosion, long after one had disintegrated.
But it couldn’t have lasted very long, because I came out of it in time to stop Myshkin from putting an end to the unquestioned existence of Boris Borisovitch Simeonof-Pishtchik.
* * * *
It was almost eight A.M. before I got to Al Siegman’s private little apartment on East 24th. He had no phone, so I called Eagle to get his address, but Eagle refused to give it to me. Later I found out he was afraid I had returned to the party and found that Gladys had left with Al, and that I’d gotten worked up over it. I must have sounded pretty wild over the phone. Anyway, I finally got the address.
But it was no good with Siegman. He’d had two hours of sleep and was developing a hangover, and what I was talking about didn’t make very good early Sunday morning listening—to me either.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, sitting up and looking me over. “Well, no point being tense with me, is there? Matter of fact, I thought you seemed a little—confused, shall we say?—last night, and after you disappeared, Eagle mentioned what you’d said about Myshkin. Something about a psychopathic ward, wasn’t it?”
“Come off it, will you?” I said.
“Sure, sure. Tell you what: let’s take time out until you feel more relaxed, huh?” He climbed out of bed in his underwear and went to the bathroom. He left the door open and regarded me with a warm smile while he fumbled with a bottle. “By the way, what kind of a discharge did you get from the army?”
“Believe me, I’m not crazy,” I said.
“Did I say you were?” he smiled. He shook a white tablet out of the bottle and swallowed it dry. “Just relax, huh? I’m kind of groggy myself, but this benny ought to—”
“Benzedrine!” I said. “That’s it!”
“Hmmmm? What do you mean by that?”
“Please stop that goddam diagnostic hmmmming and listen! I was confused a minute ago. I admit it. Is that so strange? Listen, Al. I haven’t been home in a long time, and then I walk into this. I had a wild day yesterday and last night I was blind drunk. I haven’t slept and I’m pooped. This whole thing is so completely insane that when I try to think about it, with that bright sunlight outside and you standing here in your underwear, I still can’t be sure it happened. But there’s the Benzedrine. I remember I gave Myshkin some last night, and later he told me the chicken-men—the ones I’ve been talking about, and I don’t care how it sounds—Myshkin told me they’ve been stealing his Benzedrine. He says they’re like chickens in some ways,
and one of them is that they can’t stay awake after sundown. All right? Now, I ask you frankly and freely—would I be capable of inventing details like those if I were nuts?”
Siegman let out a long sigh. “In other words, the crazier the story, the better proof it is of sanity?”
“Just the same, will you listen to me for a few minutes without interrupting?”
“Wouldn’t you rather take a nice nap first?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” I said. “And while I’m talking, you get dressed. Soon’s I’ve finished, and you’re quite convinced I’m crazy, we’ll go to Myshkin’s place.”
I didn’t leave out a thing and I didn’t get emotional. He’d finished dressing before I was through, but he sat and smoked until I said that was it. When we got outside and he asked if I wanted coffee, it was the first time in twenty minutes he’d spoken. We had the coffee in silence, but in the cab going to Myshkin’s place, he brought up the writing on the darkroom walls. Did I know why it had aroused Eagle’s interest?
I repeated Eagle’s analysis. The wall writing was the work of several hands. On the crumpled sheet of stationery he’d found, where a dialogue had apparently been committed, I’d identified the questions as Myshkin’s but the answers—scrawled, hardly legible—had been put down by a hand Eagle had also found among those on the walls. It was that hand that stopped him cold, a strange hand.
“I see,” Siegman nodded. “Does that fit the rest?”
“Everything. Myshkin says the chicken-men trailed him to the darkroom, where he’d gone occasionally to consult his notes. They copied the formulas and carelessly added their own developments, until one day he spotted the new stuff. That was his first inkling that some kind of rebellion was brewing. He confronted them, tried to reason with them, but the revolt broke into the open. They ran away from him and went ahead with their plans. Only one remained friendly—the one I met, who call himself Boris—and Myshkin thought he was a spy for them. Now and then Boris brought him bits of information, and Myshkin already knew enough to understand that something very dangerous was going on. Careful as he was with the machine, they got into his place once or twice and stole tools and machine parts. Last night, when an egg dropped out of the machine, he knew they’d been there again. He ran out and found Boris and brought him here in that box you saw him lugging—”
The Mad Scientist Megapack Page 6
