Distinctly she had seen the young woman smoking in her room, the previous evening, as she happened to be driving by. A woman who should be an example to the children she taught.
Mrs. Norton sailed along, indignation high in her. She had called first at Minerva Benson’s home. Minerva was a member of the school board. But Minerva had said she was sick, and refused to see her.
Then she had tried Jacob Earl, the second member of the board. And he had been ill too.
It was odd.
Now she was going directly to the office of Dr. Norcross. He was head of the school board. Not the kind of man she approved of for the position, of course—
Mrs. Norton paused. For the past few moments she had been experiencing a strange sensation of puffiness, of lightness. Was she ill too? Could she be feeling light-headed or dizzy?
But no, she was perfectly normal. Just a moment’s upset perhaps, from walking too fast.
She continued onward. What had she been thinking? Oh, yes, Dr. Norcross. An able physician, perhaps, but his wife was really quite—well, dowdy. . . .
Mrs. Norton paused again. A gentle breeze was blowing down the street and she—she was being swayed from side to side by it. Actually, it was almost pushing her off balance!
She took hold of a convenient lamppost. That stopped her from swaying. But—
She stared transfixed at her fingers. They were swollen and puffy.
Her rings were cutting into them painfully. Could she have some awful—
Then she became aware of a strained, uncomfortable feeling all over her person. A feeling of being confined, intolerably pent-up in her clothing.
With her free hand she began to pat herself, at first with puzzlement, then with terror. Her clothing was as tight on her as the skin of a sausage. It had shrunk! It was cutting off her circulation!
No, it hadn’t. That wasn’t true. She was growing! Puffing up! Filling out her clothes like a slowly expanding balloon.
Her corset was confining her diaphragm, making it impossible to breathe. She couldn’t get air into her lungs.
She had some awful disease. That was what came of living in a dreadful, dirty place like Locustville, among backward, ignorant people who carried germs and—
At that instant the laces of Mrs. Norton’s corsets gave way. She could actually feel herself swell, bloat, puff out. Her arms were queer and hard to handle. The seams of her dress were giving way.
The playful breeze pushed her, and she swayed back and forth like a midnight drunk staggering homeward.
Her fingers slipped from the lamppost.
And she began to rise slowly, ponderously into the air, like a runaway balloon.
Mrs. Edward Norton screamed. Piercingly. But her voice seemed lost, a thin wail that carried hardly twenty yards. This was unthinkable. This was impossible!
But it was happening.
Now she was a dozen feet above the sidewalk. Now twenty. And at that level she paused, spinning slowly around and around, her arms flopping like a frightened chicken’s wings, her mouth opening and closing like a feeding goldfish’s, but no sounds coming forth.
If anyone should see her now! Oh, if anyone should see her!
But no one did. The street was quite deserted. The houses were few, and set well back from the street. And the excitement downtown, the herd of strange ponies that all day had been kicking up their heels as they dodged in and out of alleys, whinnying and squealing as Henry Jones and his volunteer assistants tried to pen them up, had drawn every unoccupied soul in Locustville.
Mrs. Norton, pushed along by the gentle breeze, began to drift slowly northward toward the town limits.
Tree branches scraped her and ripped her stockings as she clutched unavailingly at them. A crow, attracted by the strange spectacle, circled around her several times, emitted a raucous squawk that might have been amusement, and flew off.
A stray dog, scratching fleas in the sunshine, saw her pass overhead and followed along underneath for a moment, barking furiously.
Mrs. Norton crimsoned with shame and mortification. Oh, if anyone saw her!
But if no one saw her, no one could help her. She did not know whether to pray for someone to come along or not. She was unhurt. Perhaps nothing worse was going to happen.
But to be sailing placidly through the air, twenty feet above the street, puffed up like a balloon!
The breeze had brought her out to a district marked for subdivision, but still vacant. Fruit trees grew upon the land. The playful wind, shifting its quarter, altered her course. In a moment she was drifting past the upper branches of gnarled old apple trees, quite hidden from the street.
Her clothes were torn, her legs and arms scratched, her hair straggling down her back. And her indignation and fear of being seen began to give way to a sensation of awful helplessness. She, the most important woman in Locustville, to be blowing around among a lot of old fruit trees for crows to caw at and dogs to bark at and—
Mrs. Norton gasped. She had just risen another three feet.
With that she began to weep.
The tears streamed down her face. All at once she felt humble and helpless and without a thought for her dignity or her position. She just wanted to get down.
She just wanted to go home and have Edward pat her shoulder and say, “There, there,” as he used to—a long time ago—while she had a good cry on his shoulder.
She was a bad woman, and being punished for it. She had been puffed up with pride, and this was what came of it. In the future, if ever she got down safely, she’d know better.
As if influenced by the remorseful thoughts, she began to descend slowly. Before she was aware of it, she had settled into the upper branches of a cherry tree, scaring away a flock of indignant robins.
And there she caught.
She had quite a lot of time in which to reflect before she saw Janice Avery swinging past along a shortcut from the school to her home, and called to her. . . .
Janice Avery got her down, with the aid of Bill Morrow, who was the first person she could find when she ran back to the school to get aid.
Bill was just getting into his car to drive out to the football field, where he was putting the school team through spring practice, when she ran up; and at first he did not seem to understand what she was saying.
As a matter of fact, he didn’t. He was just hearing her voice—a voice that was cool and sweet and lovely, like music against a background of distant silver bells.
Then, when he got it, he sprang into action.
“Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “Mrs. Norton stuck up a tree picking cherries? I can’t believe it.”
But he got a ladder from the school and brought it, gulping at the sight of the stout, tearful woman caught in the crotch of the cherry tree.
A few moments later they had her down. Mrs. Norton made no effort to explain beyond the simple statement she had first made to Janice.
“I was picking cherries and I just got stuck.”
Wild as it was, it was better than the truth.
Bill Morrow brought his car as close as he could and Janice hurried her out to it, torn, scratched, bedraggled, red-eyed. They got her in without anyone seeing and drove her home.
Mrs. Norton sobbed out a choked thanks and fled into the house, to weep on the shoulders of her surprised husband.
Bill Morrow mopped his forehead and looked at Janice Avery. She wasn’t pretty, but—Well, there was something in her face. Something swell. And her voice. A man could hear a voice like that all his life and not grow tired of it.
“Lord!” he exclaimed, as he slid behind the wheel of his car. “And Betty Norton is going to look just like that someday. Whew! Do you know, I’m a fool. I actually once thought of—But never mind. Where can I take you?”
He grinned at her, and Janice Avery smiled back, little happy lines springing into life around the corners of her lips.
“Well,” she began, as the wide-shouldered young man kicked the motor into life
, “you have to get to practice—”
“Practice is out!” Bill Morrow told her with great firmness, and let in the clutch. “We’re going some place and talk!”
She sat back, content.
VI
The sun was setting redly as Dr. Norcross closed his office and swung off homeward with a lithe step.
It had been a strange day. Darned strange. Wild ponies had been running through the town since morning, madly chased by the usually somnolent Henry Jones. From his window he had seen into the bookstore across the street and distinctly perceived John Wiggins and Alice Wilson embracing.
Then there had been that abortive phone call from an obviously agitated Jacob Earl. And he had positively seen Mrs. Luke Hawks going past in a brand-new car, with a young man at the wheel who seemed to be teaching her to drive. Whew!
There would be a lot to tell his wife tonight.
His reflections were cut short as he strode past Henry Jones’s backyard, which lay on his homeward short-cut route.
A crowd of townsfolk were gathered about the door in the fence around the yard, and Dr. Norcross could observe others in the house, peering out the windows.
Henry and Jake Harrison, mopping their faces with fatigue, stood outside peering into the yard through the cautiously opened doorway. And over the fence itself, he was able to see the tossing heads of many ponies, while their squeals cut the evening air.
“Well, Henry”—that was Martha, who came around the corner of the house and pushed through the crowd about her husband—“you’ve rounded up all the horses all right. But how’re you going to pay for the damage they did today? Now you’ll have to go to work, in spite of yourself. Even if they aren’t good for anything else they’ve accomplished that!”
There was an excitement on Henry’s face Dr. Norcross bad never seen there before.
“Sure, Martha, sure,” he agreed. “I know I’ll have to pay off the damage. But Jake and me, we’ve got plans for these hooved jackrabbits. Know what we’re going to do?”
He turned, so all of the gathered crowd could hear his announcement.
“Jake and me, we’re going to use that land of Jake’s south of town to breed polo ponies!” he declared. “Yes, sir, we’re going to cross these streaks of lightning with real polo ponies. We’re gonna get a new breed with the speed of a whippet, the endurance of a mule, and the intelligence of a human. Anybody who seen these creatures skedaddle around town today knows that when we get a pony with their blood in it developed, it’ll be something! Yes, sir, something! I wish—No I don’t! I don’t wish anything! Not a single, solitary thing! I’m not gonna wish for anything ever again, either!”
Norcross grinned. Maybe Henry had something there. Then, noting that the sun had just vanished, he was home.
VII
Up in his room, Danny Norcross woke groggily from a slumber that had been full of dreams. Half asleep still, he groped for and found the little piece of ivory he had kept beside him ever since he had fallen asleep the night before. His brow wrinkled. He had been on the stair, listening to the grown-ups talk. They had said a lot of queer things. About horses, and money, and pictures. Then he had gotten back in bed. And played with his bit of ivory for a while.
Then he had had a funny thought, and sort of a wish—
The wish that had passed through his mind, as he had been falling asleep, had been that all the things Dad and Mom and the others had said would come true, because it would be so funny if they did.
So he had wished that just for one day, maybe, all Henry Jones’s wishes would be horses, and money would stick to Luke Hawks’s fingers, and Jacob Earl would touch something that would coin money for somebody else for a change.
And, too, that Netty Peters’s tongue really would be hinged in the middle and wag at both ends, and Mrs. Benson have two faces, and Mrs. Norton swell up and blow around like a balloon.
And that Miss Wilson would really be as pretty as a picture, and you could truly hear silver bells when Miss Avery talked.
That had been his wish. But now, wide awake and staring out the window at a sky all red because the sun had set, he couldn’t quite remember it, try as he would. . . .
Crouched in her darkened room, Minerva Benson felt the back of her head for the hundredth time. First with shuddering horror, then with hope, then with incredulous relief. The dreadful face on the back of her head was gone now.
But she would remember it, and be haunted by it forever in her dreams.
Netty Peters stared at herself in her mirror, her eyes wide and frightened. Slowly she took her hands from her throat. The queer fluttering was gone. She could talk again without that terrible voice interrupting.
But always after, when she began to speak, she would stop abruptly for fear it might sound again, in the middle of a sentence.
“I’ve decided, Luke,” Mrs. Luke Hawks said with decision, “that we’ll have the house painted and put in a new furnace. Then I’m going to take the children off on a little vacation.
“No, don’t say anything! Remember, the money is in my name now, and I can spend it all, if I’ve a mind to. I can take it and go away to California, or any place. And no matter what you say or do, I’m not going to give it back!”
Jacob Earl uttered a groan. The last gold ingot had just vanished from the floor of his library.
John Wiggins turned. The tiny chink-chink that had sounded all afternoon had ceased. The little god still grinned, but the coins were no longer coming from his mouth.
“He’s quit,” the little man announced to the flushed and radiant Alice Wilson. “But we don’t care. Look how much money came out of him. Why there must be fifteen thousand dollars there!
“Alice, we’ll take a trip around the world. And we’ll take him back to China, where he came from. He deserves a reward.”
With the red afterglow tinting the little lake beside which he had parked the car, Bill Morrow turned. His arm was already about Janice Avery’s shoulders.
So it really wasn’t any effort for him to draw her closer and kiss her, firmly, masterfully.
The door to Danny’s room opened. He heard Dad and Mom come in, and pretended for a minute that he was asleep.
“He’s been napping all day,” Mom was saying. “He hardly woke up enough to eat breakfast. I guess he must have lain awake late last night. But his fever was down, and he didn’t seem restless, so I didn’t call you.”
“We’ll see how he is now,” Dad’s voice answered; and Danny, who had closed his eyes to try to remember better, opened them again.
Dad was bending over his bed.
“How do you feel, son?” he asked.
“I feel swell,” Danny told him, and struggled to a sitting position. “Look what I found yesterday in my box. What is it, Dad?”
Dr. Norcross took the piece of ivory Danny held out, and looked at it.
“I’ll be darned!” he exclaimed to his wife. “Danny’s found the old Chinese talisman Grandfather Jonas brought back on the last voyage of the Yankee Star. He gave it to me thirty years ago. Told me it had belonged to a Chinese magician.
“Its peculiar power, he said, was that if you held it tight, you could have one wish come true, providing—as the Chinese inscription on the bottom says—your mind was pure, your spirit innocent, and your motive unselfish. I wished on it dozens of times, but nothing ever happened. Guess it was because I was too materialistic and wished for bicycles and things. Here, Danny, you can keep it. But take good care of it. It’s very old; even the man who gave it to Grandfather Jonas didn’t know how old it was.”
Danny took back the talisman.
“I made a wish, Dad,” he confessed.
“So?” Dad grinned. “Did it come true?”
“I don’t know,” Danny admitted. “I can’t remember what it was.”
Dad chuckled.
“Then I guess it didn’t come true,” he remarked. “Never mind; you can make another. And if that one doesn’t happen either, don’t fre
t. You can keep the talisman and tell people the story. It’s a good story, even if it isn’t so.”
Probably it wasn’t so. It was certain that the next time Danny wished, nothing happened. Nor any of the times after that. So that by and by he gave up trying.
He was always a little sorry, though, that he never could remember that first wish, made when he was almost asleep. But he never could. Not even later, when he heard people remarking how much marriage had improved Alice Wilson’s appearance and how silvery Mrs. Bob Morrow’s voice was.
F&SF BK UNICORNS VOL 2.indb Page 13
