The Avram Davidson Treasury

by Avram Davidson

County First National Bank and Trust Company.

  “Now, Miss Gurnsey, we are really very sorry, but another extension would be out of the—Oh.”

  “Oh.” Ha! Took the wind out of his sails!

  Herman Heinrichs and Sons. Fine Meats. The young heinie, well, one of the young heinies, drew a sour face when he saw her. “No, I don’t have any bones for your dog today,” he said. Beulah Gurnsey didn’t exactly remember the last time she had had a dog. A legal fiction; never mind.

  Ignoring the young one, she turned to the old one, who was there today, for a change; “Heinie,” she said, firmly, “I want six of your best, biggest, nice rib lamb chops, and don’t you trim an ounce off them and don’t you break a single bone: you know how I like them.”

  “Yes, Miss Kurnssey,” he said, obediently. And after, he asked, “Shoult I but dem on your pill, Miss Kurnssey?”

  Oh, how the young one yelped! “Grossdaddy, we don’t carry any more bills,” he cried.

  Beulah paid him no mind. “I. Shall pay. Cash. Thank you, Heinie.”

  Simmons Electrical. It always took Hi Simmons a week to stand up, he was so tall. “Beulah Gurnsey,” said he, now, “that was a good enough and cheap enough used icebox when I sold it to you and I have worked many a miracle with it for you and for the old times in Old Granger Grammar School, but I am not Frankenstein and cannot hang it up in a tower in a lightning storm to revive it again; therefore—” He was all stood up.

  “I want a nice new one.”

  “You can have a nice new one for $300.”

  “I want a nice new one for $500.”

  “You shall have it. Though there’s got to be a catch.”

  “Yes. The catch is that the men who bring the new one take away the old one. You pay the dump fee. Good-bye, Hiram-firam.”

  Back home she simply sat in her chair awhile. A long while. Then she got up and unwrapped the lamb chops and she salted them and peppered them and garlic’d them and onioned them and thymed them and put them in the broiler and turned it on, and then she washed her hands. The fat would bubble and crisp and they would grow nice and brown on the outside and yet be pink and juicy on the inside and she would hold each one by its bone-handle and eat it while she watched television.

  Speaking of which.

  7:30 2 WHERE IT’S AT. Featured: Treasure in Your Attic and Basement.

  8:00 13 MOVIE ★½ Revenge of the Cat-Lady (1953) Percy Wilkins, Velda Snow. An insane spinster terrorizes her neighborhood with the aid of a strange old family amulet. (2 hrs. 5 mins.)

  Good, good. Those looked very good. Beulah Gurnsey sat back in her armchair.

  What was the treasure in her attic and in her basement? Well, she would find out. The television would let her know.

  And tomorrow she must certainly get a cat.

  Cats.

  She leaned forward and turned on the television.

  While You’re Up

  INTRODUCTION BY FORREST J. ACKERMAN

  AVRAM THE MARVA

  I’m an Esperantist and, as a recognizer of the “universalanguage” Esperanto, when I look at author Davidson’s first name it reverses itself and practically suggests “marvelous.” In any language, Avram was marvelous.

  My auctorial specialty is the short-short story. I have had the world’s shortest published, “Cosmic Report Card: Earth.” You may guess the one failing letter of the alphabet that the flying saucer sociologists give Earth.

  I’ve collaborated on short stories with Catherine L. Moore, Robert W. Lowndes, Theodore Sturgeon, and A. E. van Vogt, among others. Why didn’t it occur to me while there was still time to ask Avram if he’d consider collaborating with me on a sequel to “Cosmic Report Card”? After all, I sold it five times for a total of five hundred dollars and it’s been translated into eight languages.

  But enough of my ambling along in this preamble, this is a collection of Davidson stories, not Ackermanuscripts. I’m delighted that the word “friend” was found after my name in Avram’s address book and therefore I was contacted to write an introduction to “While You’re Up.”

  I had only finished the first sentence when I realized something was wrong, inexplicably anachronistic. Undoubtedly you will too when you wonder why anyone would include Maxfield Parrish as a compatriot (dare I, with a bow to Avram, say compaintriot?) of da Vinci and Rembrandt?

  Warm wine?

  Crystal bowls for divining—not balls?

  Aprons outlawed?

  Handkerchiefs archaic?

  What’s going on here?

  And when Sexton—But, no, I’ll leave you to read the shock yourself.

  Avram, you marva rascal, you’ve done it again!

  WHILE YOU’RE UP

  THE SCENE MIGHT HAVE been painted by Maxfield Parrish, perhaps the best of painters during that rich, lost era that also gave the world Leonardo and Rembrandt. While the latter two have their spokesmen, nay, their devotees, even they would have to concede that neither ever painted so blue a sky, and that there are those who deny that such blue skies ever indeed existed is (as Sexton often explained) beside the point. “They ought to have existed,” Tony said now to the few friends, to Mother Ruth—his wife of many years—all sitting in the large front room to which his preeminence and seniority entitled him. “They ought to have existed, for, as we see now, sometimes they almost do—and—look! a cloud!”

  Mother Ruth, who had certainly seen clouds from this room before, merely smiled and murmured something soft and inaudible; the others craned and clearly spoke of their delight and good fortune. All, except of course, for Samjo, who continued sitting with his mouth open. Tony Sexton more than once had said, though—they could all well remember—“Don’t ever underestimate Samjo. He sees more than you think, and he adds things up, too.”

  “The wine should be warm enough to drink in a few minutes,” Sexton said now. “We brought it up from the cellar several hours ago.”

  Barnes, from his chair with the wooden arms, declared, hands sweeping the air, “Good friends, a good view, good thoughts, and—good wine, too.” Overfamiliarity may have perhaps tarnished the quotation, but Barnes’s enthusiasm was always contagious.

  Maria said, “This moment, with the view and the blue and the cloud and, shortly, the wine—will be a moment that I shall always remember.” She peered forward, probably seeking to look into Mother Ruth’s eyes, for such was Maria’s habit; when she said something worthy, she felt, of notice, she sought someone’s eyes and, as it were, sought to bring forth an evident approval: a smile, a nod, an expression of the face, a gesture. But this time it was not forthcoming. Perhaps Maria, for all she knew, was just a bit annoyed.

  Perhaps Tony understood all this, for he smiled his famous Sexton smile, and said, “Mother Ruth often looks into her apron as the ancient sibyls did into their crystal bowls.” For it was true, Mother Ruth dared to wear the antique apron, so long outlawed; and almost it did seem to make her look like something from antique eras.

  Barnes picked up the metaphor and asked—Barnes often asked very odd !questions—“Father, were those crystal bowls empty when the sybils looked into them, or did they contain something, a…a liquid, perhaps?”

  Tony Sexton very slightly pursed his lips. “Wine, I suppose, would have been too precious for such a use; water would always be in short supply. What, then? A thick soup would surely have interfered with the visioning, so—broth perhaps?”

  Barnes in a moment went bright: A new concept! Then the brightness went. “One never knows when you are making a joke,” he muttered.

  “I wanted to have a few friends over,” Sexton said, lightly leaving the subject. “Wine and five glasses waiting, a day with a lot of blue, and, if we were lucky…and I felt we would be lucky…even a cloud. A day to be remembered.”

  Murmurs from all assured him that the day would surely be remembered. With an effect most odd, Sexton’s face turned gray, and his body seemed to fall in upon itself. For a second only, his face—like a dim, thin, crusted
mask—rested on what seemed a pile of ashes; then it, too, dissolved.

  The reaction of the others was varied. Maria started to rise, fell back, composed herself, looked about with a rueful air. Mother Ruth sagged. “Oh, Tony, Tony,” she said, her voice very small. Barnes exclaimed loudly, beat his hands upon the costly arms of his chair. “He didn’t renew!” cried Barnes. “Time and time again, I asked, I begged—much good that will do now,” he said, deeply annoyed. He bent over, removed from the still settling pile the small tag of malleable substance, read aloud, “Your warranty expires on or about the hour of noon on the 23rd of April, 2323.” Several voices declared that Tony Sexton had timed it just about right—leave it to Sexton! they said.

  Maria now rose all the way. “I think,” she said, “that now is just the time to drink that container of wine Sexton was saving; he’d want that, wouldn’t he?”

  “Bound to!” exclaimed Barnes. “Absolutely!”

  Mother Ruth looked up from her lap. “Maria, dear. While you’re up. Would you mind also bringing back with you the dustpan and the broom? Thank you, dear.”

  Samjo had as usual seemed to have been thinking of nothing at all; as often, this semblance was deceptive. He had been wiping, first his eyes, then his nose, with an article of cloth quite as archaic as Mother Ruth’s apron. Then he spoke. “Only four glasses now, Maria,” said he.

  Who could help chuckling?

  The Spook-Box of Theobald Delafont De Brooks

  INTRODUCTION BY ALGIS BUDRYS

  “The Spook-Box of Theobald Delafont De Brooks,” Avram’s last story published before his death, came to me via a literary agent. But when it was published, he wrote to Kandis Elliot, my Production Manager and, in this case, illustrator, to say how much he liked the illustrations, and could he have them? What I don’t think he knew was that Kandis composed them on her computer, so it was no trouble at all to run off a complete set and send them to him. But he was dead by then.

  Avram and I go back a long way. At one point, when we were both selling men’s hairy-chested “true” adventures, we even were collaborators, in the sense that we often talked about it, and fully intended to do it. The problem became that Avram’s stories were true, whereas mine were “true,” and we finally decided against it. But when he published Masters of the Maze, about a hack who wrote “true” adventure stories, he mentioned my invariable working title: “Love-Starved Arabs Raped Me Often.” And when I became editor-in-chief of Regency Books, I published an excellent collection—Crimes and Chaos—of Avram’s true adventure tales.

  We went back further than that. Both of us were living in New York City, and I often wound up in his place on 110th Street. We had something—exactly what is difficult to pin down—that drew us together. It turned out, among other things, that his father had had a chicken farm a few miles up the road from my father’s chicken farm, but that would hardly account for even a part of it, because we never came in contact during that period. But whatever it was, it endured; he and I would trade letters pretty steadily from about 1955 to his death (and he always included my wife in his greetings). I was immensely flattered; here was one of the finest wordsmiths in the English language, with a first-class mind behind all that, and first-class creativity, and he deigned to speak to me as “Uncle Ajay.”

  I wish he still did. I saw him at all the Norwescons I attended, and I did not think he would be gone so soon. I did not realize that Jahweh would dare to take him away from an Earth he made special.

  THE SPOOK-BOX OF THEOBALD DELAFONT DE BROOKS

  IT WAS MORE THAN his theory, it was the very foundation of his belief, that if you were legally entitled to use a name containing the names of two very well-known people, then…sooner or later…it would result in some very good pieces of business getting thrown your way. It hadn’t happened yet…well…not very good pieces of business. He collected rents on a number of properties, collected them for the owners, that is, and he sold the insurance policies to the same properties. He alas did not hold a power of attorney for any of the properties. Not as yet. And he had managed to keep an apartment in one of the properties vacant for so long that old Miss Whittier had forgotten it was even rentable. And then—

  “Eighty-five West Elm really needs a night watchman, Miss Whittier,” he said.

  “It does?” her voice had already begun to flutter.

  “Yes, it does. But it isn’t going to get it. Tell you what I am going to do, Miss Whittier—”

  “Ye-es?”

  “I. Am going to give up the place I now have. And I. Will move in there. Will,” and here he named a sum about the third of his present rent, a rent which he was increasingly finding it inconvenient to pay, “—will that be all right, Miss Whittier?”

  Miss Whittier would have undergone a slow course of the water torture rather than admit she really no longer had a good notion of what would be all right for the place (or any other place). “Oh…why I suppose …” Some last vestige of business sense entered Miss Whittier’s aged mind. “Wasn’t that about what those nice Van Dynes used to pay?” Was it necessary for him to remind her that the Van Dynes (they had been dead for decades) had actually occupied another apartment in another building? Theobald Delafont De Brooks didn’t think it was.

  He squinted a moment, deep in thought, then: “Oh, I have to hand it to you, Miss Whittier. For a minute there I had a hard time remembering just what the Van Dynes used to pay. Little bit less, Miss Whittier. Little bit less, they paid.”

  Another flutter. “Well, then, is that quite fair to you… Mr. De Brooks? To pay more than—”

  But Mr. De Brooks begged her not to think about him. “The main thing, you see, is to have somebody living in that apartment. Apartment stays vacant, no curtains, no screens, no shades in the windows: gives the place a bad name.”

  Miss Whittier was never moved to ask how long the apartment in question had stayed vacant, or anything else pertaining to its possible bad name. “Why…then… I’m sure it will be just fine. Thank you—”

  Very politely he brushed away her thanks. “Anybody wants anything, for example, at night: there I am. Never go out at night anymore. Except,” he did want to be honest with her, his face said, “Thanksgiving. Got to.” He breathed the magic words, Family Dinner.

  Ever squeeze a drop of lemon on a live oyster? Remember what happened? That, more or less, is what happened to Miss Whittier. “Well, of course—why, oh, certainly, Mr. De Brooks! The very idea! that you for one moment or any reason shouldn’t think of going—!”

  “Don’t like to leave the place alone, you see.” Do you see? He hadn’t even moved into the place yet, Thanksgiving was months away, already the owner was begging him not to give it a second thought.

  The prophets, where are they? And your fathers, do they live forever?

  And, bringing it up to date, do your owners live forever, either? It would have been almost as easy as for him to have gotten the apartment rent-free. But a man had to look at the future. Were he to have done so, and the cold eye of an executor or a cost-accountant looked at that No Rent arrangement—and not by any means could De Brooks have pretended he had acted as janitor—superintendent—engineer, so as to have justified the rentlessness: No. Whereas this way, if it were even mentioned, “Well, the late Miss Whittier very much wanted someone whom she knew very well to live in that apartment and, as she put it, ‘Keep an eye on things …’” What could the heir…the banker…the whoever…say? At most, a slight grunt, and at worst, some small amount of time later, a civil letter on crisp paper to the effect that his services were no longer…but that was likely enough in any event. No camp lasts forever.

  So there was one piece of good, if not very, very good, piece of business.

  And although he did not know it, yet he—having a sixth or/and a seventh sense for such things—would have been not at all surprised to learn that a Certain Connection of Miss Whittier had, oh, some several years ago, at her own expense, obtained an independent genealogica
l report; from which we will cite just a bit, as follows:

  The family line or lines of Mr. Theobald Delafont De Brooks himself are certainly traceable to 1820, and probably to 1800. Possibly as far back as 1787. There were quite a number of De Brookses in New York, and only one known progenitor, the Jacobus Aurelius De Broogh who had arrived from Bergen-op-Zoom in the Netherlands in 1643 and on whose great success in the Indian trade the De Brooks family fortunes were founded…so that a distant relationship to both Presidents is certainly probable, though now impossible either to prove or disprove. A further search, though perhaps more productive, would be much more expensive.

  And at the words more expensive, the Certain Connection (certain…and suspicious) drew in her horns, bore the costs in silence, and never, ever said another word. Just as well.

  Visitors and possible clients, gazing at the two large framed photographs, invariably asked on their first visit, “Are you related to both presidents?” and Theobald Delafont De Brooks would say, with a smile, “Shirt-tail cousins, you might say—” Adding, “We were the poor relations.” And…invariably?…well…just in case the visitors and possible clients didn’t ask, TDD would somehow always manage to get in an early reference to Cousin Theo and to Cousin Grosvenor, would laugh and add, “They stopped sending us the Christmas turkey after My Folks supported the other candidates.” Who could fail to enjoy that not-quite-a-story? and who could fail to get the not-quite-point?—High Family Connections … and…Fearlessly Independent People…

  But…really…were they?…weren’t they? Mr. Quincy De Brooks was once semi-publicly asked this outright; rather smoothly said, “If they didn’t have a lot of enemies, then we are probably not related;” rather smoothly passed on before further question time. Still—how could one but wonder? What names to be announced by trumpets! Theobald De Brooks, President of the United States! and Grosvenor Delafont De Brooks, President of the United States! Dead now, long dead, both of them, of course—but what about the descendants?