Free Short Stories 2013

by Baen Books

  The stories in Night & Demons were mostly written during the '70s and '80s when I was becoming an increasingly close friend of Manly and Frances. I therefore decided to write a ghostbreaker story of the type Manly had written for Weird Tales.

  It might seem to some readers that the character and attitudes of Professor Field aren't a million miles away from those of Manly Wade Wellman. I like to think that also.

  THE VIRGIN OF HERTOGENBOSCH

  Field squinted through the goggles. His eyes weren't what they'd been fifty years back. Ordinary glasses would probably have been sufficient protection and would have given him a clearer view of the 1962 dime he held in the Bunsen burner, but he didn't cut corners in matters like this.

  Not that his present task had anything directly to do with magic.

  Field set the glowing silver on the anvil and banged it three times with the rounded end of his ball-peen hammer. The hot metal spread enough for him to take a last stroke with the flat face and not hit the jaws of the pliers. That flattened the edges which had risen during the previous blows.

  He thought of reversing the half-formed coin and striking what had been the back side, but the fingers of his left hand were starting to cramp. He opened the pliers--ordinary blacksmith's tongs were too clumsy to work on the small coin--and set them on the workbench, then raised the goggles to his forehead.

  The calendar above the workbench still showed July. If Field remembered it when he was done working, he'd tear the sheets back to September, though it didn't matter very much.

  The Buick dealer had sent a calendar each of the past two years. The color picture at the top showed Field and Louise in front of the dealership with their brand-new 1968 Wildcat. The car still sat in the drive, backed nearly to the street because Field liked room in front of the former garage when he was working in it, but Louise had died of a heart attack the night they brought the car home.

  The silver dime was cooling on the anvil. In a moment Field would reheat it and flatten the portion which he'd been holding with the pliers the first time. After he'd tempered it again in the flame--hammering made silver hard--he could cut two crude bullet jackets from the former coin to be swaged onto lead cores.

  A car with a thumping exhaust pulled up on the street, raced for a moment, and shut down. Field looked out the open door of the shop. A black Ford station wagon had parked in front of the house. There weren't proper shoulders in this subdivision, so the parked vehicle narrowed the pavement so that two cars couldn't pass in opposite directions. There wasn't much traffic out here, though.

  Field wasn't doing much beyond looking these days, but the girl who got out the passenger side--and stumbled; the car's right wheels were in the grassy ditch--was well worth looking at. She wore a paisley halter-top with a button-front denim skirt and sandals.

  Her long black hair swung gracefully when she moved. For a moment she looked so much like a girl named Slowly that Field's breath caught.

  But that had been a long time ago, back when Field, GT, had been a reserve center on a football scholarship. A very long time ago.

  The boy who'd been driving came around the front of the car, holding a paperback book in his right hand and in his left a package--it was of a size to be another book--wrapped in red cloth. He wore jeans with a pale yellow shirt, and over the shirt a brown leather vest. His chin was clean shaven and his moustache was as neat as Field's own, but his brown hair was shoulder length.

  Field kept his lips from curling. Long hair was the fashion for men now; but it wasn't a fashion he was ever going to warm to.

  Field removed the goggles and turned off the Bunsen burner, then stepped out the door of the shop. "Can I help you?" he called, working the gauntlet off his left hand. The pliers were too short to use without protection from the heat.

  "I'm looking for Professor G T Field," said the boy. "They gave me this address at the School of Journalism."

  "You've found me," Field said, "though I'm retired now. And yourselves?"

  The couple walked down the drive, skirting the Buick. The fellow was in his mid-twenties, a young man, but the girl was at least six or seven years younger. She's certainly well-growed, though, Field thought; and smiled.

  "I'm Aubrey Huber," the boy said, offering the book in his right hand to Field. "I'm a writer."

  The book's title was Where Toad-Men Croak. Against an orange background a Negro spearman wearing a loincloth and a Greek helmet guarded stylized city gates. The publisher wasn't one Field had ever heard of.

  "And this is Becca Walsh," Huber added as Field squinted at the cover.

  Up close the girl was even prettier than Field had thought at first. Around her neck was a pendant with Celtic symbols on a braided thong. A separate ball-chain--Field thought of it as a dog-tag chain--disappeared into her halter.

  Becca reached down into her halter top and came up with dog-tags and a silver St Christopher medal on the same chain. She held them out.

  "We're married even though I don't wear a ring!" she said brightly. "These are Donald's dog-tags. Aubrey gave them to me when we found them in the safe-deposit in Memphis. This really makes me a Huber!"

  She'd sound perky if she were announcing the end of the world, Field thought wonderingly. Of course, he wasn't sure that Becca would know what "the end of the world" meant, but she might be smarter than she seemed on this first meeting. And she certainly was pretty.

  Aubrey glanced at the girl. He was trying to keep his expression blank, but Field didn't think he was best pleased with Becca's blurting.

  Aloud the boy said, "My Dad was a paratrooper in World War Two. We found the dog-tags in the lock-box along with this thing I brought to show you."

  He hefted the object in his left hand. The red cloth around it was a towel.

  "Then let's go inside the house and you'll show me," Field said without noticeable hesitation. He didn't see as many people as he used to before he retired, especially not since Louise had died. A visit from personable strangers was a pleasure, if he looked at it the right way.

  Field closed the shed and hung the hasp of the padlock through the staple to keep the wind from blowing open the double doors, but he didn't bother to lock it. There was nothing inside to draw a thief, and little enough that would be costly to replace. The anvil had been his father's, and the block it was set in was a section of tropical hardwood left over from a tree bole which Campa natives had hollowed out to make a canoe... but it wasn't of any monetary value.

  Field walked toward the house with his visitors on either side. Unexpectedly Becca said, "Were you wounded in the war, Professor? Your arm?"

  Field raised his left hand and clenched it to show he understood what she meant. He didn't think about his withered arm, any more than he thought about the fact his hair was thinning or that he needed glasses to read unless the light was very good.

  "I was not," he said. "This happened when I was six. My father ran a clinic for the Presbyterian Church in Brazil, and one day a coral snake bit me."

  He opened the kitchen door and gestured his guests through, glad that he'd made an effort to keep the house cleaned up. It wasn't as neat as it had been when Louise was alive, of course. Sometimes Field thought he could hear her chiding him for leaving things in the sink for a few days. When that happened, he got up and washed dishes.

  "Like the coral snakes in Florida?" Aubrey said, pausing inside the simple kitchen. "Their bite is neurotoxin like a cobra's. A six-year-old would be lucky to survive if he got a full dose."

  Becca was looking at the electric range. Two of the burners had stopped working, but Field hadn't bothered to replace them. There hadn't seemed to be any reason to. As he got older, there seemed less and less reason to do anything, but he tried to keep himself from feeling that way.

  Field set Where Toad-Men Croak on the kitchen table. He liked the title, though he wondered if it was a deliberate play on words. The book seemed to be Robert E Howard stuff. In the course of that sort of story, the mighty-thew
ed hero was likely to croak any number of monsters, possibly including Toad-Men.

  "Would you like beers?" he said, opening the refrigerator. "I'm going to have one myself."

  "I'll have one, thank you," said Aubrey.

  "I never turn down a beer!" Becca said. Giggling, she added, "Or much of anything else if you ask the right way."

  Field took three Schlitz from the tray in the refrigerator door and set them on the linoleum countertop. They had twist-off caps, but it was easier for him to use the bottle opener waiting there.

  "Here you go," he said, handing a bottle to each of them. He hoped that Becca was eighteen, drinking age for beer in North Carolina, but it wasn't enough of a concern for him to ask. "There's glasses in that cabinet--" he nodded "--if you need them."

  Aubrey shrugged and drank from his bottle; Becca was already two deep drafts into hers. That was much as Field had expected; but he knew Louise would have insisted that he ask, so he had.

  "Come into the living room," he said, leading the way. "And since we're on social terms, you'd best call me Gee. I always figured that Gee fitted me better than 'Professor' did, so it's what I had my students call me."

  Aubrey and Becca followed. The boy turned to look at the egg-crate shelving to the right of the door.

  Most of the items wouldn't mean much to a stranger. For example, the intricately carved billet of wood had been a guard's lignum vitae club around the turn of the century until it was scrimshawed into a work of art in a Kansas prison-mine. The man who gave it to Field on his deathbed had also described the 1908 riot. It had ended in a bloody massacre when a carload of guards, each carrying two revolvers, had emptied their weapons into gathered prisoners who were expecting negotiators.

  You couldn't put memories on a knickknack shelf. When Field died, the memories would die also unless he had passed them on.

  Becca was looking at the portrait of a seated man which hung between the front windows. She pointed and said, "He's a mean bastard. Look at that mouth, I mean."

  "Louise would have agreed with you," Field said, smiling faintly. He settled into his easy chair in the corner, with bookshelves behind him and the side table and gooseneck lamp to his right. "Louise was my wife, my late wife. The painting is a self-portrait by my father. The two of them didn't get along."

  "Where did these knives come from, Gee?" Aubrey said. He turned, holding a hilt of polished hardwood into which was set a mere sliver of steel--probably a horseshoe nail which had been hammered flat.

  The boy was changing the subject, though Becca's comment hadn't bothered Field. His father had been a brilliant and many-talented man, but Becca hadn't been the first--or the hundred and first--to call him a bastard.

  "From the interior of Brazil," Field said. "As I did--I was born at the medical station, and it wasn't till the snake bit me that I came to the United States. It wasn't coming back for me."

  He let his mind drift into the past, as it did often these days. But he had guests, he mustn't be discourteous. Aloud he said, "You said I was lucky to have survived a coral snake's bite. You're right, and the luckiest part of it is that it happened while my father was on a turtle hunt, so the boys with me--Campa natives--took me to their own healer. I spent the night in his hut while he prayed and burned herbs."

  The scene was as clear in Field's mind as it ever had been; though in truth, it hadn't been clear when it was happening. He didn't know how much he really remembered and how much his mind had created over sixty-odd years as he tried to make sense of what had happened.

  "I saw warriors battling demons all through the night," he said. "And at dawn the demons fled. I woke up then, and I was alive."

  Field shook his head with the memories, if that was what they were. "My father had arrived by midnight," he said, "but he didn't interfere. There was nothing he could have done, and for all his flaws--"

  He smiled at Becca.

  "--he never insisted on taking over from somebody who knew more than he did."

  Aubrey had set his beer and the package on the built-in cabinet under the shelves when he picked up the knife. Now he put the knife back in place and brought the package over to where Field sat.

  "It's about dreams that I want to talk to you," the boy said. "You've got a reputation for knowing about things that they don't believe in medical school. I think you can help me with this."

  Field put on his reading glasses and turned on the lamp. "I've seen things that they don't believe in most places," he said. "But I believe what I` see. Most times, at least."

  Aubrey offered him the package. Field held it in his right hand and peeled back the layers of folded towel. He could already tell it wasn't a book after all. It felt more like a short length of board....

  Field opened the last fold, and his breath caught. It was a length of board, in a manner of speaking: a hardwood panel, about four inches by five or maybe a little larger. On it was painted the Virgin Mary in a dark blue robe, wearing a crown rather than a halo. She held a spindly Jesus on her lap, more an emaciated midget than a child.

  It was very old. The painter had signed his name around the edge of the yellow circle that framed the Virgin. Though the Gothic letters were too small for Field to read without the handglass he kept in the drawer of this table, he already knew what the words would be.

  "Dad said it was painted by Hieronymus Bosch," Aubrey said, saving Field the trouble of taking out the glass. "He brought it back from Europe with him."

  Field kept his eyes on the painting. It was as serene as you could ask, not at all the sort of subject that you thought of when you read Hieronymus Bosch pinxit; but there was something unpleasant about it nonetheless.

  I don't want to turn my back on it, he realized.

  Aloud Field said, "Where is it that your father found this painting?"

  "Well, it wasn't Dad who found it," said Aubrey, leaning over Field's shoulder to look at the painting also. "He traded a Luger to a British sergeant for it. The sergeant said it was valuable but he didn't want to keep it because it gave him bad dreams. Dad said he wasn't worried about worse dreams than he had from the Ardennes already, but after he had it a while he knew what the fellow meant and he didn't want the painting around either."

  Aubrey laced his fingers together and stretched them backward. Field glanced up at the boy but said nothing.

  "Dad talked about the painting," Aubrey said, "but we never saw it. I thought he must've sold it or traded it away. But there it was with his dog-tags when we opened the lock box after he died. And the St. Christopher's medal was on the chain too, wrapped around the painting. He said the medal had saved him at Cheneux when everybody else in his platoon was killed or badly wounded."

  "Umm," Field said, a place-holder while he thought. In sudden decision he laid a fold of the red terrycloth over the painting again and switched off his reading light. He held the painting out for Aubrey to take.

  "I'm not the person to come to for authenticating pictures," he said, "For what my opinion's worth, I think it's real. But I think your father was right in not wanting it around."

  "I don't like it either," Becca said. "It's creepy."

  Switching to a wheedling tone, she went on, "Aubrey? You know what we ought to do? We ought to sell it. Then we'd have the money to go to Las Vegas like we been talking!"

  "Becca, just shut up till you've got something useful to say!" Aubrey snapped. The anger surprised Field, though the whine that underlay Becca's voice no matter what she was saying had gotten on his nerves already.

  "Look, Gee," Aubrey said, turning from the girl again. "I don't care who painted this picture or how much it's worth. I'm not going to sell it. I want to use it."

  "Use it how?" Field said. He took a sip of his beer. His mouth felt dry, but the beer didn't taste right either. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

  "Look, I'm just breaking in to writing," Aubrey said. "The fantasy writers who really made it big were able to unlock their subconsciouses. Lovecraft wrote
the things he dreamed about. Robert E. Howard said when he wrote the Conan stories, it was like an old frontiersman was sitting at his elbow and dictating--it wasn't Howard himself writing it."

  Field tried the beer again. It was all right this time.

  "I know that's what they said," he said, looking up at Aubrey. The boy seemed tense, desperate even. "I've known enough writers over the years to doubt anything they say about writing, though. And it seems to me that you're writing already--"

  Field gestured toward the door. He wished he'd brought the book with him instead of leaving it in the kitchen.

  "--so you don't need dreams."

  "Toad-Men isn't real publishing!" Aubrey said. "Powell offered me five hundred bucks and they still owe me a hundred of that. If I'm going to really make it as a writer, I need to access my dreams. I thought this would be the way--"

  He hefted the covered painting.

  "--but I slept with it and I didn't feel anything like what Dad talked about."

  "I think you should thank your lucky--" Field began, but he broke off when his eye fell on Becca. She was sitting on the couch under Dr. Field's picture. She had stopped pouting and taken rolling papers and a glassine bag of marijuana out of her purse.

  "Miss Walsh!" Field said. "I'll thank you not to smoke a reefer in my house."

  Becca flushed. Her hands covered the marijuana reflexively, but she said in an angry voice, "Why not? A joint never hurt anybody! You ought to try it yourself some time!"

  "Becca, we're guests," Aubrey said. His voice had none of the anger he had shown moments before when the girl suggested that he sell the painting. To Field he said, "I'm sorry, sir, it's your house as you say. Drugs aren't nearly as dangerous as the government wants you to think, though. Even cocaine has no long term effect unless you overdose. It's not addictive."

  "That's not my experience," Field snapped, angry but keeping hold of his temper. He generally did unless he'd had a few drinks, but that didn't mean that it didn't get his dander up when somebody talked twaddle to him like a preacher in church.