Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  The man’s dark face—that among many things floated before him more often than before. It was not the face itself that mattered, he began to realize. The face was more a key to some secret than anything of intrinsic value. And it was not even a living face, but a pictured one . . .

  One day he saw that face in reality. He followed the man at a distance, through streets that grew familiar . . . At last he was left standing in front of an ancient, narrow brownstone house by the East River—indeed, its rear windows must have looked on the river. As he watched the man unlock the door and enter the house, he knew, without knowing why, that this was the place which had been drawing him for so long.

  The muscles on his jaw tightened under the stubble of his beard. He crossed the street, mounted the low flight of steps, and stood waiting, not quite daring to ring the bell. Then, scowling, he thrust his finger forward.

  AFTER a moment the door opened.

  Blind wings of panic beat in Boyce’s chest. He thrust forward, and the man facing him gave ground, his face darkening with suspicion.

  Boyce’s gaze went beyond him. He knew this dark long hall somehow, as he knew the stairway that went up into gloom, and the other one that led down.

  “What do you want?” the man said sharply. “Who’re you looking for?”

  Boyce stared at that strangely familiar face. “I—my name’s Boyce,” he said, hesitating. “You don’t . . . remember me?”

  “Boyce?” Sharp eyes searched his. Again the quick suspicion flared. “Heck, no! Listen, mister—just what do you want? I don’t know you.”

  Boyce felt his throat dry.

  “Two years ago—I’ve changed a lot, probably, but not so much that you can’t remember me.”

  “I never saw you before in my life.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “Ten years,” the man said. “Except—”

  “I know this house!” Boyce said desperately. “Over there’s the living-room, with the fireplace.” He moved so quickly that the other was left behind. In a second Boyce was through a curtained archway and staring around a cluttered, gloomy room—a room he knew!

  His eyes went to the fireplace and over it. There hung a framed tinted photograph, nearly life-size, of the dark man.

  It was the photograph he remembered—not the man! He whirled.

  “I tell you, I know this house! I’m certain of it!” Again the inexplicable urgency tugged at him, drawing him . . . where?

  The dark man said, “Look—I said I lived here for ten years, except when I leased the place once. But I leased it to somebody named Holcomb, not Boyce.”

  “Holcomb? Who was he?”

  “I never saw the guy. My lawyer handled the whole deal. I moved out and a year later I moved back in. Never saw Holcomb. But that was the name.”

  Boyce stared, trying to find some light in this deeper mystery. Abruptly he headed for the door and out into the hall. Behind him the dark man said, “Hey,” but Boyce didn’t stop. He knew where he was going.

  As he went down the stairs his unwilling host called after him.

  “There’s nothing down there! It’s all empty, in the basement rooms. Mister, I’m gonna call the—”

  But Boyce was gone. Heightened expectancy made his breath come faster. What he would find here he did not know, but he felt that he was on the right track at last. That inexplicable call was thrilling in his blood, urging him, commanding him to do something he should have done long ago.

  He went through a door and the room beyond was small and dusty. The splintering board walls had no windows and the only light filtered dimly past Boyce as he stood staring. It was like any other square empty room—and yet somehow Boyce sighed, a deep sigh of curious satisfaction.

  This was it. This was the room. It was here that . . . what?

  He stepped out on the dust of the floor. It was so empty a room that the one thing in it struck his gaze forcibly once he was inside. On a shelf on the wall a cheap glass candlestick stood and in it a guttered candle. Only the wax of the candle looked a little strange. It was almost clear wax, a delicate blue-green like the sky at evening, so nearly transparent that you could see the shadow of the wick through its half-melted floor.

  Footsteps sounded overhead. Boyce went over to the candle and touched it with a hesitant forefinger.

  “I remember this,” he whispered. “I’ve seen this before. But the room . . . It is and it isn’t. It never was empty this way, and dirty. Somehow I don’t think it was. But it looks . . . right, even now.”

  It was too gloomy to make out details. He snapped a match into flame and then lit the candle.

  The room—it should have been a little different. Richness. Tapestries. Jewels. Silk stuff. But it should have looked exactly like this, too. How—

  The wick kindled and bloomed up in a slow golden oval.

  Boyce drew his breath in a long gasp.

  “Something’s missing,” he said softly. “This!”

  The crystal he had carried for two years was cold in his fingers as he lifted it in a gesture that was virtually a conditioned reflex. He held it before the candle and the flame struck sparks from the facets of the stone. The room for an instant was full of shooting fireflies as the lights danced wildly on floor and walls and ceiling. Boyce’s hand shook.

  He remembered, now, out of that lost year, how he had held up this crystal before, while she—she . . .

  THERE were suddenly shadows upon the walls. Shadows that moved and grew stronger as Boyd gazed. A strange, dim richness was gathering and growing all around him, a dance of shadow-tapestries blowing like ghosts in a ghostly wind whose draft he could not feel. Dim jewels flashed from the unreal folds.

  The bare boards still rose around him, gray and splintered and dusty, but a clothing of tapestried hangings was taking shadow-form upon the walls, silently rustling in that silent, unreal breeze. Thicker and thicker the shadows grew. Now the boards were half-hidden behind their ghostly richness, like the bare bones of a skeleton that gathered ephemeral flesh about it out of a phantom-world.

  With every flicker of the candle-flame the tapestries grew richer and more real. The jewels caught the light more clearly. There was a rug like thick, soft dust underfoot, opulently patterned. Overhead the ceiling billowed with dim silks like the webs of fabulous spiders, woven into flowery garlands. And yet behind all the richness he could still see the naked ribs of the room, grey boards, dust, desolation.

  Boyce held the crystal to the light, his hand now steady. And the candle flame, falling through it in broken refractions, cast a web of light upon the one surface of the wail that was not shadow-hung. But no longer did the bare boards show there. Where the light fell a crystalline pattern formed upon the wall, intricately woven in designs as delicate and clear as the pattern of a snowflake.

  It seemed to brighten as he watched. The ghostly tapestries blew about them, the silken garlands overhead billowed, but the pattern on the wall held steady and grew deeper and more brilliant, deeper and deeper. Light poured powerfully from the flame through the crystal, was strengthened as through a lens and sank like some tangible substance into the wall beyond. It permeated the wall, dissolved it, etched the pattern of the crystal as if with some strange, bright acid that set its mark forever upon the surface where the light-pattern lay.

  The wind blew through the pattern . . . Boyce was aware of it dimly. The tapestries blew both ways from that delicately etched design upon the wall, as if the light had dissolved an opening into the outer air and a breeze from another world blew through it.

  It must be a breeze from another world, for he could not feel its breath.

  Suddenly his hand began to shake. This was impossible. This could not be happening. It was hallucination, alcohol-born, and he would waken in a moment in some dingy booth in a bar with the noise of tin-pan music in his ears and crowds moving about him—not with these silent tapestries that looked so frighteningly familiar upon the walls.

  His
hand shook—yes. But the light upon the wall did not shake. Unbelievingly, he lowered the crystal slowly. The light held steady. He closed his fingers about the crystal—it was colder than ever now, with a chill that sank into his hand—and dropped the smooth, shining thing back into his pocket, his eyes still unwaveringly fixed upon the wall.

  The beautiful, shining pattern was a refraction no longer. It was real. It was a great glittering design of crystal, cold and perfect as a snowflake, and as fragile. He knew it was fragile. How he knew it he was not sure.

  But it was the only real thing in the room. The bare bones of the walls, the dust and the splintered boards were not there at all. The tapestries were more real than he, blowing. In a scented breeze from the crystalline wall. But neither tapestries nor the unfelt breeze had the compelling reality of the pattern.

  There was something—he fought to grasp it.

  She had gone before him. That was it! That was what had haunted him for so long, driving him along devious paths to this moment and this sorcerous room.

  He could see her as she had stood here months ago—a moment ago—time lost all meaning as he remembered. But he could not see her face. She had stood with her back to him in this rich, gleaming room, a silhouette against the great shining pattern on the wall. A tall silhouette, lovely, dangerous . . .

  Light flashed in his mind. He saw as if a shutter had snapped open the way she turned for one brief instant and glanced across her shoulder into his eyes.

  She had smiled. He saw the red lips curve, and the white flash of her teeth and the brilliance of her eyes, violet fire in the richly-tinted face. Danger was in her smile, and bright, blinding color. An invitation and a threat. And then she had stepped forward and—and . . .

  Yes, it had been invitation. It might have happened a year ago—it might have happened only the moment before this. Time meant nothing to her. She meant terror and something worse than terror. She meant the thing his mind had gone blank to shut away forever. But where she went, he must follow.

  He had completely forgotten everything but that.

  Blindly he stepped forward. The pattern upon the wall loomed above him, exquisitely etched in infinities of tiny crystalline panes. Beyond it he could see dim things moving. He did not care. He thought they meant danger, but he did not care. The bright, laughing, terrible face was in his eyes like a flash of light that blotted out all other vision. He saw nothing now, but her.

  By instinct he put up both arms to protect his face—and plunged blindly through the glass.

  He heard it splinter around him with a sound like thousands of tiny musical bells tinkling. He felt their sharp edges cutting through his sleeves. He felt a gust of keen, cold air, and then the world failed beneath his feet and he was falling.

  After that he remembered nothing at all.

  CHAPTER II

  The Huntsman

  SOMEONE was laughing. It sounded far away. Boyce opened his eyes and looked up dazedly at a drift of blue-grey mist floating before his face. Beyond and above it he could see more mist, layer upon layer hanging in the dim cool air, and above them—mountains?—great walls of rock that vanished into the fog.

  The laughter came again. It was not far away—it was close by, and there was a snarl in it. He sat up stiffly, wondering where he was.

  There was clear glass, broken into glittering fragments, lying all around him. Boyce remembered.

  But now he lay upon a shelf of stone, cold and a little damp, and behind him when he twisted to look was a grey rocky wall rising sheer into clouds. Window? There was none. Yet he must have emerged here, upon this ledge, for here lay the splintered glass of his passage through the pattern. Whatever door he had come through was closed behind him now.

  The ledge was narrow. To right and left it led downward over a trail along the face of the cliff. Mist floated to hide what lay below. But before him, far away over the drifting mist, a great walled city lifted its towers. And it was a curiously shaped city. He blinked through the dim air that lay between.

  Clouds formed and tore apart and reformed over the whole valley floor, but the city’s roofs rose too high to be hidden. He could see that some of them were made of jagged rock, and some of clear glass. Many were of bright stuff like the roofs of tents, striped and patterned or of clear, glowing colors that billowed a little in the wind.

  It was dim in the valley, and he could see lights burning among the roofs. Some of them came brilliantly through the crystal; some glowed like lanterns through the colored stuff of the tented towers. The city looked like a carnival alight with festive lamps. But there was something about it that he did not like. Was it memory, he wondered, or something more deeply rooted than memory—instinct itself warning him of what lay within those high walls?

  Beyond them the mists rolled again over the far reaches of the valley, and beyond the mists were more mountains. They swept up and up, peak upon jagged peak, range upon rising range, until the low clouds hid them.

  But upon one of the foremost peaks a gigantic castle lay. Boyce narrowed his eyes against the haze and the distance, and tried in vain to make out the shape of the building. The mists between thinned for a moment, like the curtains of a stage drawing back.

  He saw the great crenelated towers, with a scarlet banner like a tongue of flame blowing tremendously from the topmost height of the great donjon-keep. It was a castle such as he had seen often enough in old pictures, a mighty fortified heap of walls and towers, strangely familiar in this—this dream, this incredible land of mist and mountains.

  Then the clouds rolled in again and the castle with its banner like a flame was blotted out as if memory itself had revealed it for a moment and then forgotten again, or as if the mists of the past had swallowed forever those anachronistic towers.

  Boyce got slowly to his feet.

  Not until then did the laughter come again, deep now, with amusement and a snarl that underlay the amusement.

  Boyce turned. The sound seemed to come from above, and after a moment the mists drew back and he saw the one who laughed. Standing on a ledge a little way up the face of the rock, with mist swirling around him, a tall man watched him. Boyce stared incredulously.

  At first glance he could not be sure the man was not actually furred like a tiger, for his long, muscular limbs and lithe body were tawny and striped with a fur of velvety sheen. But the man’s grinning face was pale, and his black hair under the tiger-skin hood lay smooth.

  He was leaning back against a leather strap he held with both hands, and Boyce could see dimly the surge of sleek bodies around his knees. The strap was a leash, but the creatures he held upon it were invisible in the fog.

  The tiger-striped man’s lip lifted in a smile like a snarl, and he took one hand from the leash to make a signal to Boyce—intricate, swift motions of the fingers that were blurred to the sight. About his knees the leashed animals surged instantly into activity, and the man laughed fiercely and seized the strap again, wrestling with his pack. But his eyes were questioning upon Boyce.

  He waited, struggling with his beasts. The smile faded. He made the quick, cabalistic gesture again, again fought with his pack to quiet it as he waited. This time he scowled, and the scowl was scarcely fiercer than the smile had been.

  Boyce lifted both hands, palm out, in the universal gesture of peace. It was all he could do. He had no answer for the mysterious sign, though dimly he felt he should know what the answer was.

  LAUGHTER leaped into the other man’s face, instant murderous delight, as if this failure was what he had longed for. Boyce thought for the fraction of a second that he saw recognition in the pale, dangerous countenance above him. He thought the man knew him, had hoped for the chance at enmity and laughed now in terrible delight because the chance had come.

  The laughter swelled to a roar, triumphant, with a tiger snarl in the sound, and the man shouted out a deep halloo like a huntsman calling to his pack. One striped, tawny arm flung out in a gesture of warning. He was motion
ing Boyce to run. He was pointing down the narrow trail toward the valley, and the unseen beasts leaped about his knees, almost free of the loosened leash.

  Boyce turned uncertainly, bewilderment fogging his mind. Everything had happened too suddenly, and he was not yet sure at all that he was not asleep and in a dream where a tiger-striped nightmare warned him to flee from snarling nightmares tugging at their leash. He did not like the thought of running. He did not—

  With one last halloo the Huntsman slipped the strap. Over the lip of rock Boyce saw smooth bodies pouring down at him, five, six, seven sleekly furred beasts as large as mastiffs and as lithe as serpents. One lifted an almost human face to snarl at him.

  It was a beautiful, demented face, halftiger, half-cat—the strange semi-human countenance of animal faces in medieval tapestries. But the beast was neither cat nor dog. It was something he had never seen before. Circe’s beasts might have had such faces.

  He turned and ran.

  The trail was steep. Mist blew around him as he plunged downward, never sure that the next step might not carry him over some unseen abyss. Behind him the Huntsman’s laughter rang wildly through the fog, the cliffs echoing it back until the whole valley seemed to laugh with him. From the beasts came a low, deep snarling, but no other sound. They might be far behind, they might be already at his heels. Boyce did not dare turn to look.

  The steep trail curved around the face of the rock and leveled slowly toward the valley floor. Stumbling, panting, dizzy with incredulity, Boyce ran on.

  When the ground was level underfoot and the drifting mist revealed to him that he had come at last to the base of the cliffs, he paused for a moment to get his bearings. There was silence behind him. Even the Huntsman’s laughter was quiet now and no snarling rolled through the fog.