Strange Ports of Call

by August Derleth (ed)

  Not the fur of anything Jane had ever imagined before.

  He remembered a great court paved with shining things, and something in bright chains in the center, and rings of watching eyes as he entered and neared the sacrifice.

  As he tore his due from its smooth sides, the cruel chains clanked around him as he fed . . .

  Jane tried to close her eyes and not watch. But it was not with eyes that she watched. And she was ashamed and a little sickened because she was sharing in that feast, tasting the warm red sweetness with Ruggedo in memory, feeling the spin of ecstasy through her head as it spun through his.

  “Ah—the kids are coming now,” Aunt Gertrude was saying from a long way off.

  Jane heard her dimly, and then more clearly, and then suddenly Grandmother Keaton’s lap was soft beneath her again, and she was back in the familiar room. “A herd of elephants on the stairs, eh?” Aunt Gertrude said.

  They were returning. Jane could hear them too now. Really, they were making much less noise than usual. They were subdued until about halfway down the stairs, and then there was a sudden outburst of clattering and chatter that rang false to Jane’s ears.

  The children came in, Beatrice a little white, Emily pink and puffy around the eyes. Charles was bubbling over with repressed excitement, but Bobby, the smallest, was glum and bored. At sight of Aunt Gertrude, the uproar redoubled, though Beatrice exchanged a quick, significant glance with Jane.

  Then presents and noise, and the uncles coming back in; excited discussion of the trip to Santa Barbara—a strained cheeriness that, somehow, kept dying down into heavy silence.

  None of the adults ever really looked over their shoulders, but—the feeling was of bad things to come.

  Only the children—not even Aunt Gertrude—were aware of the complete emptiness of the Wrong Uncle. The projection of a lazy, torpid, semi-mindless entity. Superficially he was as convincingly human as if he had never focused his hunger here under this roof, never let his thoughts whirl through the minds of the children, never remembered his red, dripping feasts of other times and places.

  He was very sated now. They could feel the torpor pulsing out in slow, drowsy waves so that all the grown-ups were yawning and wondering why. But even now he was empty. Not real. The “nobody-there” feeling was as acute as ever to all the small, keen, perceptive minds that saw him as he was.

  Later, at bedtime, only Charles wanted to talk about the matter. It seemed to Jane that Beatrice had grown up a little since the early afternoon. Bobby was reading The Jungle Book, or pretending to, with much pleased admiration of the pictures showing Shere Khan, the tiger. Emily had turned her face to the wall and was pretending to be asleep.

  “Aunt Bessie called me,” Jane told her, sensing a faint reproach. “I tried as soon as I could get away from her. She wanted to try that collar thing on me.”

  “Oh.” The apology was accepted. But Beatrice still refused to talk. Jane went over to Emily’s bed and put her arm around the little girl.

  “Mad at me, Emily?”

  “No.”

  “You are, though. I couldn’t help it, honey.”

  “It was all right,” Emily said. “I didn’t care.”

  “All bright and shiny,” Charles said sleepily. “Like a Christmas tree.”

  Beatrice whirled on him. “Shut up!” she cried. “Shut up, Charles! Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

  Aunt Bessie put her head into the room.

  “What’s the matter, children?” she asked.

  “Nothing, Auntie,” Beatrice said. “We were just playing.”

  Fed, temporarily satiated, it lay torpid in its curious nest. The house was silent, the occupants asleep. Even the Wrong Uncle slept, for Ruggedo was a good mimic.

  The Wrong Uncle was not a phantasm, not a mere projection of Ruggedo. As an amoeba extends a pseudopod toward food, so Ruggedo had extended and created the Wrong Uncle. But there the parallel stopped. For the Wrong Uncle was not an elastic extension that could be withdrawn at will. Rather, he—it—was a permanent limb, as a man’s arm is. From the brain through the neural system the message goes, and the arm stretches out, the fingers constrict—and there is food in the hand’s grip.

  But Ruggedo’s extension was less limited. It was not permanently bound by rigid natural laws of matter. An arm may be painted black. And the Wrong Uncle looked and acted human, except to clear immature eyes.

  There were rules to be followed, even by Ruggedo. The natural laws of a world could bind it, to a certain extent. There were cycles. The life-span of a moth-caterpillar is run by cycles, and before it can spin its cocoon and metamorphize, it must eat—eat—eat. Not until the time of change has come can it evade its current incarnation. Nor could Ruggedo change, now, until the end of its cycle had come. Then there would be another metamorphosis, as there had already, in the unthinkable eternity of its past, been a million curious mutations.

  But, at present, it was bound by the rules of its current cycle. The extension could not be withdrawn. And the Wrong Uncle was a part of it, and it was a part of the Wrong Uncle.

  The Scoodler’s body and the Scoodler’s head.

  Through the dark house beat the unceasing, drowsy waves of satiety—slowly, imperceptibly quickening toward that nervous pulse of avidity that always came after the processes of ingestion and digestion had been completed.

  Aunt Bessie rolled over and began to snore. In another room, the Wrong Uncle, without waking, turned on his back and also snored.

  The talent of protective mimicry was well developed . . .

  It was afternoon again, though by only half an hour, and the pulse in the house had changed subtly in tempo and mood.

  “If we’re going up to Santa Barbara,” Grandmother Keaton had said, “I’m going to take the children down to the dentist today. Their teeth want cleaning, and it’s hard enough to get an appointment with Dr. Hover for one youngster, not to mention four. Jane, your mother wrote me you’d been to the dentist a month ago, so you needn’t go.”

  After that the trouble hung unspoken over the children. But no one mentioned it. Only, as Grandmother Keaton herded the kids out on the porch, Beatrice waited till last. Jane was in the doorway, watching. Beatrice reached behind her without looking, fumbled, found Jane’s hand, and squeezed it hard. That was all.

  But the responsibility had been passed on. No words had been needed. Beatrice had said plainly that it was Jane’s job now. It was her responsibility.

  She dared not delay too long. She was too vividly aware of the rising tide of depression affecting the adults. Ruggedo was getting hungry again.

  She watched her cousins till they vanished beneath the pepper trees, and the distant rumble of the trolley put a period to any hope of their return. After that, Jane walked to the butcher shop and bought two pounds of meat. She drank a soda. Then she came back to the house.

  She felt the pulse beating out faster.

  She got a tin pan from the kitchen and put the meat on it, and slipped up to the bathroom. It was hard to reach the attic with her burden and without help, but she did it. In the warm stillness beneath the roof she stood waiting, half-hoping to hear Aunt Bessie call again and relieve her of this duty. But no voice came.

  The simple mechanics of what she had to do were sufficiently prosaic to keep fear at a litde distance. Besides, she was scarcely nine. And it was not dark in the attic.

  She walked along the rafter, balancing, till she came to the plank bridge. She felt its resilient vibration underfoot.

  “One, two, buckle my shoe,

  Three, four, knock at the door,

  Five, six, pick up sticks,

  Seven, eight—”

  She missed the way twice. The third time she succeeded. The mind had to be at just the right pitch of abstraction. She t crossed the bridge, and turned, and—

  It was dim, almost dark, in this place. It smelled cold and hollow, of the underground. Without surprise she knew she was deep down, perhaps beneath the house,
perhaps very far away from it. That was as acceptable to her as the rest of the strangeness. She felt no surprise.

  Curiously, she seemed to know the way. She was going into a tiny enclosure, and yet at the same time she wandered for a while through low-roofed, hollow spaces, endless, very dim, smelling of cold and moisture. An unpleasant place to the mind, and a dangerous place as well to wander through with one’s little pan of meat.

  It found the meat acceptable.

  Looking back later, Jane had no recollection whatever of U. She did not know how she had proffered the food, or how it had been received, or where in that place of paradoxical space and smallness it lay dreaming of other worlds and eras.

  She only knew that the darkness spun around her again, winking with little lights, as it devoured its food. Memories swirled from its mind to hers as if the two minds were of one fabric. She saw more clearly this time. She saw a great winged thing caged in a glittering pen, and she remembered as Ruggedo remembered, and leaped with Ruggedo’s leap, feeling the wings buffet about her and feeling her rending hunger rip into the body, and tasting avidly the hot, sweet, salty fluid bubbling out.

  It was a mixed memory. Blending with it, other victims shifted beneath Ruggedo’s grip, the feathery pinions becoming the beat of great clawed arms and the writhe of reptilian litheness. All his victims became one in memory as he ate.

  One flash of another memory opened briefly toward the last. Jane was aware of a great swaying garden of flowers larger than herself, and of cowled figures moving silently among them, and of a victim with showering pale hair lying helpless upon the lip of one gigantic flower, held down with chains like shining blossoms. And it seemed to Jane that she herself went cowled among those silent figures, and that he—it—Ruggedo—in another guise walked beside her toward the sacrifice.

  It was the first human sacrifice he had recalled. Jane would have liked to know more about that. She had no moral scruples, of course. Food was food. But the memory flickered smoothly into another picture and she never saw the end. She did not really need to see it. There was only one end to all these memories. Perhaps it was as well for her that Ruggedo did not dwell overlong on that particular moment of all his bloody meals.

  “Seventeen, eighteen,

  Maids in waiting,

  Nineteen, twenty—”

  She tilted precariously back across the rafters, holding her empty pan. The attic smelled dusty. It helped to take away the reek of remembered crimson from her mind.

  When the children came back, Beatrice said simply, “Did you?” and Jane nodded. The taboo still held. They would not discuss the matter more fully except in case of real need. And the drowsy, torpid beat in the house, the psychic emptiness of the Wrong Uncle, showed plainly that the danger had been averted again—for a time . . .

  “Read me about Mowgli, Granny,” Bobby said. Grandmother Keaton settled down, wiped and adjusted her spectacles, and took up Kipling. Presently the other children were drawn into the charmed circle. Grandmother spoke of Shere Khan’s downfall—of the cattle driven into the deep gulch to draw the tiger—and of the earth-shaking stampede that smashed the killer into bloody pulp.

  “Well,” Grandmother Keaton said, closing the book, “that’s the end of Shere Khan. He’s dead now.”

  “No he isn’t,” Bobby roused and said sleepily.

  “Of course he is. Good and dead. The cattle killed him.”

  “Only at the end, Granny. If you start reading at the beginning again, Shere Khan’s right there.”

  Bobby, of course, was too young to have any conception of death. You were killed sometimes in games of cowboys-and-Indians, an ending neither regrettable nor fatal. Death is an absolute term that needs personal experience to be made understandable.

  Uncle Lew smoked his pipe and wrinkled the brown skin around his eyes at Uncle Bert, who bit his lips and hesitated a long time between moves. But Uncle Lew won the chess game anyway. Uncle James winked at Aunt Gertrude and said he thought he’d take a walk, would she like to come along? She would.

  After their departure, Aunt Bessie looked up, sniffed.

  “You just take a whiff of their breaths when they come back, Ma,” she said. “Why do you stand for it?”

  But Grandmother Keaton chuckled and stroked Bobby’s hair. He had fallen asleep on her lap, his hands curled into small fists, his cheeks faintly flushed.

  Uncle Simon’s gaunt figure stood by the window.

  He watched through the curtains, and said nothing at all. “Early to bed,” Aunt Bessie said. “If we’re going to Santa Barbara in the morning. Children!”

  And that was that.

  By morning Bobby was running a temperature, and Grandmother Keaton refused to risk his life in Santa Barbara. This made Bobby very sullen, but solved the problem the children had been wondering about for many hours. Also, a telephone call from Jane’s father said that he was arriving that day to pick up his daughter, and she had a little brother now. Jane, who had no illusions about the stork, was relieved, and hoped her mother wouldn’t be sick any more now.

  A conclave was held in Bobby’s bedroom before breakfast. “You know what to do, Bobby,” Beatrice said. “Promise you’ll do it?”

  “Promise. Uh-huh.”

  “You can do it today, Janie, before your father comes. And you’d better get a lot of meat and leave it for Bobby.”

  “I can’t buy any meat without money,” Bobby said. Somewhat reluctantly Beatrice counted out what was left of Jane’s small hoard, and handed it over. Bobby stuffed the change under his pillow and pulled at the red flannel wound around his neck.

  “It scratches,” he said. “I’m not sick, anyway.”

  “It was those green pears you ate yesterday,” Emily said very meanly. “You thought nobody saw you, didn’t you?”

  Charles came in; he had been downstairs. He was breathless. “Hey, know what happened?” he said. “He hurt his foot. Now he can’t go to Santa Barbara. I bet he did it on purpose.”

  “Gosh,” Jane said. “How?”

  “He said he twisted it on the stairs. But I bet it’s a lie. He just doesn’t want to go.”

  “Maybe he can’t go—that far,” Beatrice said, with a sudden flash of intuition, and they spoke no more of the subject. But Beatrice, Emily and Charles were all relieved that the Wrong Uncle was not to go to Santa Barbara with them, after all.

  It took two taxis to carry the travelers and their luggage. Grandmother Keaton, the Wrong Uncle, and Jane stood on the front porch and waved. The automobiles clattered off, and Jane promptly got some money from Bobby and went to the butcher store, returning heavy-laden.

  The Wrong Uncle, leaning on a cane, hobbled into the sun-parlor and lay down. Grandmother Keaton made a repulsive but healthful drink for Bobby, and Jane decided not to do what she had to do until afternoon. Bobby read The Jungle Book, stumbling over the hard words, and, for the while, the truce held.

  Jane w as not to forget that day quickly. The smells were sharply distinct; the odor of baking bread from the kitchen, the sticky-sweet flower scents from outside, the slightly dusty, rich-brown aroma exhaled by the sun-warmed rugs and furniture. Grandmother Keaton went up to her bedroom to cold-cream her hands and face, and Jane lounged on the threshold, watching.

  It was a charming room, in its comfortable, unimaginative way. The curtains were so stiffly starched that they billowed out in crisp whiteness, and the bureau was cluttered with fascinating objects—a pincushion shaped like a doll, a tiny red china shoe, with tinier gray china mice on it, a cameo brooch bearing a portrait of Grandmother Keaton as a girl.

  And slowly, insistently, the pulse increased, felt even here, in this bedroom, where Jane felt it was a rather impossible intrusion.

  Directly after lunch the bell rang, and it was Jane’s father, come to take her back to San Francisco. He was in a hurry to catch the train, and there was time only for a hurried conversation before the two were whisked off in the waiting taxi. But Jane had found time to run
upstairs and say goodbye to Bobby—and tell him where the meat was hidden.

  “All right, Janie,” Bobby said. “Goodbye.”

  She knew she should not have left the job to Bobby. A nagging sense of responsibility haunted her all the way to the railroad station. She was only vaguely aware of adult voices saying the train would be very late, and of her father suggesting that the circus was in town.

  It was a good circus. She almost forgot Bobby and the crisis that would be mounting so dangerously unless he met it as he had promised. Early evening was blue as they moved with the crowd out of the tent. And then through a rift Jane saw a small, familiar figure, and the bottom dropped out of her stomach. She knew.

  Mr. Larkin saw Bobby in almost the same instant. He called sharply, and a moment later the two children were looking at one another, Bobby’s plump face sullen.

  “Does your grandmother know you’re here, Bobby?” Mr. Larkin said.

  “Well, I guess not,” Bobby said.

  “You ought to be paddled, young man. Come along, both of you. I’ll have to phone her right away. She’ll be worried to death.”

  In the drugstore, while he telephoned, Jane looked at her cousin. She was suffering the first pangs of maturity’s burden, the knowledge of responsibility misused.

  “Bobby,” she said. “Did you?”

  “You leave me alone,” Bobby said with a scowl. There was silence.

  Mr. Larkin came back. “Nobody answered. I’ve called a taxi. There’ll be just time to get Bobby back before our train leaves.”

  In the taxi also there was mostly silence. As for what might be happening at the house, Jane did not think of that at all. The mind has its own automatic protections. And in any case, it was too late now.

  When the taxi drew up the house was blazing with orange squares of windows in the dusk. There were men on the porch, and light glinted on a police officer’s shield.

  “You kids wait here,” Mr. Larkin said uneasily. “Don’t get out of the car.”

  The taxi driver shrugged and pulled out a folded newspaper as Mr. Larkin hurried toward the porch. In the back seat Jane spoke to Bobby, her voice very soft.