I’d heard it all before. I yawned, looked crosseyed at the ice in my glass, drained the last of the Scotch and glanced up at the opposite wall.
This time it was pure hallucination. Instead of the Rousseau it was another kind of picture on the wall and it moved as though I were looking at a pull-down movie screen, stereoscopic, teehnicolored.
There it all was, clear and perfect. No imagination about it this time. Malesco—exactly as Uncle Jim had told me. A black line that looked like an iron bar ran across one corner of the picture. Beyond it, small and far away, was the city lit with sunset.
Domes, soaring columns, a shining globe that moved like water in one enormous sphere, surrounded by curved arches that seemed to support it though they too had a flowing upward motion, And all the intricate pattern of arches and bubbles was on fire with reflected light.
A rose-red city, half as old as time.
“Eddie, look at me!”
I didn’t stir. This was like hypnosis. I couldn’t turn my eyes away from that incredible hallucination. I knew Lorna hadn’t seen it, for the pitch of her voice didn’t change.
Maybe she couldn’t see it. Maybe I was crazy. Or maybe she just hadn’t glanced that way.
She was babbling something about taking her shoes off so she could show me the dance and I realized vaguely that she was thumping heavily about the floor, making like Pearl Primus maybe. I knew I ought to rub my eyes and try to make that vision go away.
“Eddie, look at me!” she insisted.
“All right, all right,” I said, not looking. “It’s fine.”
I rubbed my eyes.
Then Lorna screamed.
MY head jerked up. I remember the coldness of ice spilling across my hand. I stared at the spot where she should have been and all I could see across the room was that picture, the sunset city with its globe of burning water and the black bar across the foreground. The whole city quivered.
I heard her scream fade. It diminished and grew thin and ceased so gradually it still seemed to ring in my ears long after I thought it had stopped.
Then the air’s flickering steadied. The rose-red city blurred again and in the next moment the lion crouched above the sleeping gypsy and the Rousseau painting was unchanged there on the solid wall.
“Lorna,” I said. No answer. I stood up, dropping the glass. I took a step forward and stumbled over her shoes. I ran across to the door and jerked it open. The corridor was empty outside. No footsteps sounded.
I came back and tried the kitchen, the bedroom.
No Lorna.
An hour later I was down at police headquarters, trying to tell the cops I hadn’t murdered her.
An hour after that I was in jail.
CHAPTER II
Balcony Scene
I’D RATHER deal with a crook than a fanatic any day. The Assistant D.A. was a fanatic about his own theories and I found myself in a difficult spot in less than no time. This isn’t the story of how circumstantial evidence can make mistakes and I won’t go into detail. It was just that Lorna had left a friend waiting in the lobby, the neighbors heard her call and heard me let her in—and where was she?
I didn’t try to tell the truth. I said she’d gone out. I was too rattled to remember the shoes and that was a strong point against me. The Assistant D.A. was bucking for his boss’s job and he got himself so thoroughly convinced of my guilt that toward the end I think he’d have been willing to stretch a point or two, legally speaking, if he could bring a murderer to justice—me.
Maybe you remember the newspaper stories about it. I lost my part in the hit play. I got a lawyer who didn’t believe me because I couldn’t tell him the truth. Time went by and all that saved me was the fact that Lorna’s body never did show up. Eventually they let me go.
What would you have done in my spot? In the movies I’d instantly have gone to see Einstein and he’d have figured it all out and whipped up a supermachine that would bring Lorna back or send me into a world like King Kong’s.
Or in another kind of movie there’d have been gangsters hammering at the door while I climbed down the fire-escape, looking like Dick Powell. Or there’d have been sliding panels or something to explain things at the end of the movie. But Lorna had vanished into a picture on the wall and I was beginning to worry about my own sanity.
The only hope was that the shimmer in the air might come again and I could somehow lean through and haul Lorna back. I’d come to accept it that definitely by the time a few months had gone by and I’d thought it all over and been to an optometrist and a psychiatrist and found out all the things it couldn’t have been. Not hallucination. Not visual disturbance. Not madness.
No, it had simply been—Malesco.
I went through Uncle Jim’s books and papers after that. I found a lot of notes in a shorthand I never was able to read, then or later. I found quite a lot of stuff on alchemy, of all odd things. And I found the old Malescan primer and vocabulary, which was the one thing I really got some good out of. But not then.
Not until much later when everything broke at once. It was night again. I was sitting at home drinking Scotch again. And again a bell rang but this time the phone. It was my attorney. He talked fast and carefully.
“Listen, Burton,” he said. “A body’s been picked up in the Sound. A floater. Your friend Thompson’s got the lab working on it. He thinks it’s the Maxwell woman.”
“Lorna’s not dead,” I said stupidly. “At least not—”
“All right. Take it easy. It’s just that I’m a little worried. This is what Thompson’s been waiting for, you know.”
“They can’t possibly identify—”
“After this long it’s mostly guesswork anyhow. But Thompson’s got the experts working for him, and juries have a way of believing experts. They might—just might—make it stick, Burton.”
SO THAT was that—crisis. And what could I do? If I ran they’d pick me up. If I stayed, they’d probably convict me. I hung up the phone and went back to my chair, pausing on the way to tap with insane hopefulness at the Rousseau. If I tore my way through that wall would I come out on the other side into Malesco? Would Lorna be there or was she that floater after all?
“Lorna?” I said inquiringly into the empty air. “Lorna?”
I waited. No answer. And yet there was something more than silence. My voice had a curious echoing quality as if I’d-spoken in a tunnel. Malesco, of course, didn’t exist. It was a fairy-tale land like Oz and Wonderland out of a childhood story. But I had a sudden, compelling certainty that my voice echoed when I called to Lorna and echoed in Malesco.
“Lorna!” I said it louder. “Lorna!” This time it was a shout. But a hollow and ghostly shout, echoing and reechoing down a long invisible tunnel, dying away at the far end—in Malesco. “Lorna!”
The shrill hum of the doorbell cut through the echoing of my voice. The police? I spun around—but as I moved the walls tilted sickeningly. Either I couldn’t stop turning or the room was falling sidewise—no, collapsing in a direction I didn’t understand.
The doorbell sang its thin, shrill summons, over and over, farther and farther away. For I was falling.
I saw a. man’s face whirl by in darkness. He wore a queer headdress and his mouth was wide open with a look of surprise and terror. He was pointing a weapon at me.
He slid sidewise and vanished. I slipped down a wire of singing sound, clinging to it as to a lifeline, pausing, falling, sliding into an abyss. Then the ringing wire of sound grew thinner. It began to fade. It no longer supported me.
I was falling.
A black horizontal line whipped up, vertical bars appeared and I saw suddenly that my hands were gripping them, sliding down slowly. Instinct had sent its red warning flashing through my body—“Grab! Hang on! Hang on!”
This was real. There was no singing void around me any more. But there was a very real void under me and a terribly real pavement a million feet straight down. I was clutching the outside of a balco
ny rail with both hands and dangling over a drop I couldn’t let myself think about.
Was this, I wondered frantically, the usual method of entering Malesco? If it was the way Lorna came then I was wasting my time. Lorna would be a long time dead by now, down there on that horribly distant, horribly hard-looking pavement, in the pink sunset light.
I couldn’t see anything except the bars I clung to, the wall in front of me and a sickening angle of vertical building ending in pavement far down. I didn’t see the city. The only important things were very near ones—real, vital, beautiful things like a ledge in the wall or a cornice I could brace my foot against.
If I’d been sent back to New York right then I’d have had exactly this to say about Malesco—one, railings are made of some hard slick metal too thin and slippery to hold on long. Two, building walls are stone or plastic or metal or something, maybe pre-fab, and there aren’t any joints or cracks and it’s a, very poor way to build a wall.
I simply didn’t have the strength to get over that balcony rail. But I got over it. My simian progenitors sent me a cable along the instinct channel, my feet became prehensile in spite of my shoes and the ancient basic terror of the long drop spurred me on. I don’t like to think about it even now. I don’t know how I did it.
But eventually I levered myself over and felt the balcony floor under my feet. The simian strength went back where it came from, millions of years in my biological past. My remote ancestor, Bandar-Log Burton, returned to hunting his antediluvian fleas and a still older ancestor, a mere blob of protoplasm, became dominant.
I felt like jelly. My protoplasm carried me with reeling rapidity across the balcony and through an open window. I found myself in a medium-sized room with the guy who had tried to shoot me.
CHAPTER III
I Knew Malesco
THE room was empty except for my new acquaintance. I mean empty. There wasn’t a thing in it except that in the four upper corners were good-sized cups of corroded steel or iron. The walls were blue-green and the floor was darker green and gave slightly underfoot. The pink light of sunset cast my shadow ahead of me across the walls.
There were two doors. At one of them was my friend with the odd headdress, which was perched at a drunken angle so that one flap hung over his eye and the other at the back of his head. He had his ear against the door panel, listening, paying no attention to me.
I got an impression of a thin middle-aged face alert with apprehension, a shirt with what looked like a coffee-stain on it and long red-flannel drawers. I had just time to realize that it was the sunset light which made them look so crimson. Then the man heard my footstep, twisted around, saw me and fell into a fit of violent indecision.
He tried to do several things at once. He seemed to want to open the door and run. He wanted to yell for help. He wanted to pull out his equivalent of a police positive and kill me.
What he did was run at me, grip me around the waist and shove me back on the balcony. Before I knew what was happening, the guy had stuffed me halfway over the rail again. Don’t think I wasn’t resisting. I was. But what can an amoeba do?
A couple of times he could simply have let go and I’d have fallen. But he didn’t let go. To him, it seemed, I was a square peg and he was frantically trying to find a square hole in space to fit me. He was trying to hit the lucky number on a punchboard and using me to do it.
All the while he was looking around in a worried fashion, glancing down, trying to prevent my falling, looking over his shoulder, up at the sky and shaking at the flap of his headdress, which had twisted around even farther so that he could scarcely see at all.
As for me, I was in a nightmare. There was a ridiculous temptation to stay passive and wait till I’d been stuffed into that square hole in space. Maybe he could find it, I thought. I never had exactly in thirty-odd years. All I’d found were round holes.
On that philosophical point I got a grip on myself, grabbed my friend around the neck and hauled myself back to safety. Neither of us was in a state suitable for a ten-round scrap. I hit him somewhere, he snatched at his belt and brought up a weapon like a little dumbbell and I hit him again.
He gripped the ends of the dumbbell in each hand and pulled it apart. A silent flash of blue light streamed between his clenched fists. He looked at me. I could see only half his face because of that striped flap but in his one visible eye there was desperation. Then it looked past me. A shadow fell on us. The man hesitated.
I knocked the weapon out of his hand. As the two globes fell they snapped together and the blue light was gone. My opponent must have gone crazy, because he stooped to pick up his gadget and I gave him a fast rabbit punch. I had just enough strength left me to make it effective. He kept on stooping until he lay flat on his face, motionless.
I looked around and saw some kind of aircraft moving between me and what was left of the sun. It was a good distance away and for an instant it reminded me of a galleon. It had a cobwebby filigree appearance as it slid across the red bisected sphere.
Beneath it lay the city with its domes and swooping roads and spires. And there was the fiery ball of moving light or water, supported by its shifting arches. So this was Malesco.
I KNEW Malesco. Uncle Jim had told me about it too often for me not to know the place when I saw it.
I was just glancing shudderingly down at a formal garden below, in a sort of clear, shadowy well of air lit by sunset, when a deep sigh from my fallen enemy made me turn abruptly.
He hadn’t moved. But I went rapidly back into the room and stood listening. Once I thought I heard footsteps outside but they ceased and there was only silence except for a muffled distant murmur of voices now and then. I opened the door, the one my murderous friend had been listening at, and peered out through a narrow crack. I saw a hall well lighted.
I closed that door and tried the other one across the room. Beyond was another chamber of the same size with the same rusty cups in the upper. corners. The wall opposite the door was a machine. At any rate it was solid with dials and panels and levers and things. It had a round flat face about as tall as I was. I looked at it. It looked at me. Nothing happened.
For the rest of the room, there was a curtain across one corner that screened a sort of clothes closet. In the middle of the floor was a small table. On the table was the remnant of a meal. There was a crust of bread, the green dregs of liquid in a cup and a fruit or vegetable the size of a radish with a worm-hole in its pink skin.
On the floor by the table, lying as if someone had dropped it, was a crumpled black robe. Beside the bread-crust lay a tablet with circles drawn on it, most of them connected by straight lines, and the whole thing irritably crossed out with a few heavy strokes. I don’t know why I thought of tic-tac-toe.
I walked back and forth, studying the machine hopefully from several angles. It made not the slightest sense to me. However, it would have made just as much sense if it had been a Ford motor or a vacuum cleaner, so I let it go and went back to see if my victim had wakened.
He hadn’t. I rolled him over and investigated. He wore a light tunic, heavy brown sandals, tight ankle-length trousers, pure white except for the dirt, and the striped headdress.
Oh, yes—he wore a bracelet and a ring on his left wrist and middle finger, and they were connected by a flexible band of the same metal—bluish-green. There was a pouch in his belt and, as I touched it—just before I touched it—the thing made a noise at me, like a rattlesnake giving warning.
Then it said something: in a language I automatically translated and understood before I realized what that language was.
“Temple Headquarters,” it remarked. “From the Priest of the Night, Falvi!”.
Two thoughts collided inside my head. One of them brought my gaze down to my victim’s striped headdress and the other made my lips move silently as I repeated the words I had just heard spoken. One and one are two. One and one are—Malesco.
All of a sudden, I was remembering Uncle Jim’s bedt
ime stories and how striped headdresses had occasionally figured in those tales. Those who wore them bore the rank of—what had it been? Priest. And that meant—
My mind clamped down and rejected such an impossibility. I stood up, took a deep breath and wished I hadn’t.
FOR THIS was the moment I’d been avoiding—the moment when I couldn’t keep moving and would have to start thinking and realizing. I was in another world. (What world? Oh, no! I wasn’t quite ready to believe that yet.)
The only other explanation was that I’d gone crazy and was really in a bed in Bellevue with doctors looking at me thoughtfully and remarking, “Obviously a hopeless case. Shall we try shock treatment, or should we experiment with that new method, the one that killed all the Rhesus monkeys?”
Meanwhile, at my feet was an unconscious. priest and beyond the railing lay the city, no longer rose-red, but darkening into evening. The sun had gone. Night came quickly here. I looked out over the eerily familiar view I’d dreamed of so often as a child.
The sense of wonder hadn’t hit me yet. I wasn’t even incredulous—yet. Anybody pitched headforemost into Oz or Graustark or any other familiar unreal world and finding it a real place after all would expect to be half-stunned by disbelief. I wasn’t. There was no use disbelieving in Malesco—here it was. After a while, I told myself, I’ll start being surprised. Then, there wasn’t time.
The thing that I wanted to think about most when I got a moment was Uncle Jim. It had been no series of bedtime tales he’d told me then. He knew Malesco. All right—had he been here in person?
Had he just found some way to open the door between the worlds and look through, maybe listen, since he’d learned the language? I wanted time to think about it but I hadn’t any to spare right now. Too much was going on.
One thing was certain—the Malesco Uncle Jim described to me had been the description of an eyewitness. There was the-great flowing dome with its spires of bright water. He hadn’t mentioned the patterns of lights visible all over the city after dark, though. Some of them were colored, some of them formed words. I could read Malescan. I knew advertising when I saw it.
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