The Compleat Boucher

by Anthony Boucher; Editor: James A. Mann

  My ghost pointed the bottle dramatically at Nick Wojcek and grinned broadly. “Thou art the man!” he thundered cheerily.

  Nick started, whirled, and fired. For an instant he stood rooted and stared first at the me standing by the desk and then at the me slowly sinking to the floor. Then he flung the revolver away and ran terror-stricken from the room.

  I was kneeling at my ghost’s side where he lay groaning on the floor. “But what happened?” I gasped. “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I,” he moaned. “Got a little drunk . . . started haunting too soon—” My ghost’s form was becoming indistinct.

  “But you’re a ghost. That knife went right through you. Nothing can wound you.

  “That’s what I thought. But he did . . . and here I am—” His voice was trailing away too. “Only one thing . . . could have—” Then there was silence, and I was staring at nothing but the empty floor, with a little glistening piece of light metal on it.

  Father Svatomir and Charlie were in the room now, and the silence was rapidly crammed with questions. I scrambled to my feet and tried to show more assurance than I felt. “You were right, Father. It was Nick Wojcek. Went for me with that revolver. Luckily, he missed, got panicky, and ran away.”

  “I shall find him,” said Father Svatomir gravely. “I think that after this fright I may be able to talk some sense into him; then perhaps he can help me convince the others.” He paused and looked down at the gleaming metal. “You see, John? I told you they believed you to be a black magician.”

  “How so?”

  “You notice that? A silver bullet. Ordinary lead cannot harm a magician, but the silver bullet can kill anything. Even a spirit.” And he hastened off after Nick Wojcek.

  Wordlessly, I took the undematerialized tequila bottle from Charlie and paid some serious attention to it. I began to see now. It made sense. My ghost hadn’t averted my death—that had been an absurd hope—but he had caused his own. All the confusion came from his faulty memory. He was haunting not mine, but his own murderer. It was my ghost himself who had been killed in this room.

  That was right. That was fine. I was safe from murder now, and must have been all along. But what I wanted to know, what I still want to know, what I have to find out and what no one can ever tell me, is this:

  What happens after death to a man whose ghost has already been murdered?

  Snulbug

  “That’s a hell of a spell you’re using,” said the demon, “if I’m the best you can call up.”

  He wasn’t much, Bill Hitchens had to admit. He looked lost in the center of that pentacle. His basic design was impressive enough—snakes for hair, curling tusks, a sharp-tipped tail, all the works—but he was something under an inch tall.

  Bill had chanted the words and lit the powder with the highest hopes. Even after the feeble flickering flash and the damp fizzling zzzrwhich had replaced the expected thunder and lightning, he had still had hopes. He had stared up at the space above the pentacle waiting to be awe-struck until he had heard that plaintive little voice from the floor wailing, “Here I am.”

  “Nobody’s wasted time and powder on a misfit like me for years,” the demon went on. “Where’d you get the spell?”

  “Just a little something I whipped up,” said Bill modestly.

  The demon grunted and muttered something about people that thought they were magicians.

  “But I’m not a magician,” Bill explained. “I’m a biochemist.”

  The demon shuddered. “I land the damnedest cases,” he mourned. “Working for that psychiatrist wasn’t bad enough, I should draw a biochemist. Whatever that is.”

  Bill couldn’t check his curiosity. “And what did you do for a psychiatrist?”

  “He showed me to people who were followed by little men and told them I’d chase the little men away.” The demon pantomimed shooing motions.

  “And did they go away?”

  “Sure. Only then the people decided they’d sooner have little men than me. It didn’t work so good. Nothing ever does,” he added woefully. “Yours won’t either.” Bill sat down and filled his pipe. Calling up demons wasn’t so terrifying after all. Something quiet and homey about it. “Oh, yes it will,” he said. “This is foolproof.”

  “That’s what they all think. People—” The demon wistfully eyed the match as Bill lit his pipe. “But we might as well get it over with. What do you want?”

  “I want a laboratory for my embolism experiments. If this method works, it’s going to mean that a doctor can spot an embolus in the blood stream long before it’s dangerous and remove it safely. My ex-boss, that screwball old occultist Reuben Choatsby, said it wasn’t practical—meaning there wasn’t a fortune in it for him— and fired me. Everybody else thinks I’m wacky too, and I can’t get any backing. So I need ten thousand dollars.”

  “There!” the demon sighed with satisfaction. “I told you it wouldn’t work. That’s out for me. They can’t start fetching money on demand till three grades higher than me. I told you.”

  “But you don’t,” Bill insisted, “appreciate all my fiendish subtlety. Look— Say, what is your name?”

  The demon hesitated. “You haven’t got another of those things?”

  “What things?”

  “Matches.”

  “Sure.

  “Light me one, please?”

  Bill tossed the burning match into the center of the pentacle. The demon scrambled eagerly out of the now cold ashes of the powder and dived into the flame, rubbing himself with the brisk vigor of a man under a needle-shower. “There!” he gasped joyously. “That’s more like it.”

  “And now what’s your name?”

  The demon’s face fell again. “My name? You really want to know?”

  “I’ve got to call you something.”

  “Oh, no you don’t. I’m going home. No money games for me.”

  “But I haven’t explained yet what you are to do. What’s your name?”

  “Snulbug.” The demon’s voice dropped almost too low to be heard.

  “Snulbug?” Bill laughed.

  “Uh-huh. I’ve got a cavity in one tusk, my snakes are falling out, I haven’t got enough troubles, I should be named Snulbug.”

  “All right. Now listen, Snulbug, can you travel into the future?”

  “A little. I don’t like it much, though. It makes you itch in the memory.”

  “Look, my fine snake-haired friend. It isn’t a question of what you like. How would you like to be left there in that pentacle with nobody to throw matches at you?” Snulbug shuddered. “I thought so. Now, you can travel into the future?”

  “I said a little.”

  “And,” Bill leaned forward and puffed hard at his corncob as he asked the vital question, “can you bring back material objects?” If the answer was no, all the fine febrile fertility of his spell-making was useless. And if that was useless, heaven alone knew how the Hitchens Embolus Diagnosis would ever succeed in ringing down the halls of history, and incidentally saving a few thousand lives annually.

  Snulbug seemed more interested in the warm clouds of pipe smoke than in the question. “Sure,” he said. “Within reason I can—” He broke off and stared up piteously. “You don’t mean— You can’t be going to pull that old gag again?”

  “Look baby. You do what I tell you and leave the worrying to me. You can bring back material objects?”

  “Sure. But I warn you—”

  Bill cut him off short. “Then as soon as I release you from that pentacle, you’re to bring me tomorrow’s newspaper.”

  Snulbug sat down on the burned match and tapped his forehead sorrowfully with his tail tip. “I knew it,” he wailed. “I knew it. Three times already this happens to me. I’ve got limited powers, I’m a runt, I’ve got a funny name, so I should run foolish errands.”

  “Foolish errands?” Bill rose and began to pace about the bare attic. “Sir, if I may call you that, I resent such an imputation. I’ve spe
nt weeks on this idea. Think of the limitless power in knowing the future. Think of what could be done with it: swaying the course of empire, dominating mankind. All I want is to take this stream of unlimited power, turn it into the simple channel of humanitarian research, and get me $10,000; and you call that a foolish errand!”

  “That Spaniard,” Snulbug moaned. “He was a nice guy, even if his spell was lousy. Had a solid, comfortable brazier where an imp could keep warm. Fine fellow. And he had to ask to see tomorrow’s newspaper. I’m warning you—”

  “I know,” said Bill hastily. “I’ve been over in my mind all the things that can go wrong. And that’s why I’m laying three conditions on you before you get out of that pentacle. I’m not falling for the easy snares.”

  “All right.” Snulbug sounded almost resigned. “Let’s hear ’em. Not that they’ll do any good.”

  “First: This newspaper must not contain a notice of my own death or of any other disaster that would frustrate what I can do with it.”

  “But shucks,” Snulbug protested. “I can’t guarantee that. If you’re slated to die between now and tomorrow, what can I do about it? Not that I guess you’re important enough to crash the paper.”

  “Courtesy, Snulbug. Courtesy to your master. But I tell you what: When you go into the future, you’ll know then if I’m going to die? Right. Well, if I am, come back and tell me and we’ll work out other plans. This errand will be off.”

  “People,” Snulbug observed, “make such an effort to make trouble for themselves. Go on.”

  “Second: The newspaper must be of this city and in English. I can just imagine you and your little friends presenting some dope with the Omsk and Tomsk Daily Vuskutsukt.”

  “We should take so much trouble,” said Snulbug.

  “And third: The newspaper must belong to this space-time continuum, to this spiral of the serial universe, to this Wheel of If. However you want to put it. It must be a newspaper of the tomorrow that I myself shall experience, not of some other, to me hypothetical, tomorrow.”

  “Throw me another match,” said Snulbug.

  “Those three conditions should cover it, I think. There’s not a loophole there, and the Hitchens Laboratory is guaranteed.”

  Snulbug grunted. “You’ll find out.”

  Bill took a sharp blade and duly cut a line of the pentacle with cold steel. But Snulbug simply dived in and out of the flame of his second match, twitching his tail happily, and seemed not to give a rap that the way to freedom was now open. “Come on!” Bill snapped impatiently. “Or I’ll take the match away.”

  Snulbug got as far as the opening and hesitated. “Twenty-four hours is a long way.”

  “You can make it.”

  “I don’t know. Look.” He shook his head, and a microscopic dead snake fell to the floor. “I’m not at my best. I’m shot to pieces lately, I am. Tap my tail.”

  “Do what?”

  “Go on. Tap it with your fingernail right there where it joins on.”

  Bill grinned and obeyed. “Nothing happens.”

  “Sure nothing happens. My reflexes are all haywire. I don’t know as I can make twenty-four hours.” He brooded, and his snakes curled up into a concentrated clump. “Look. All you want is tomorrow’s newspaper, huh? Just tomorrow’s, not the edition that’ll be out exactly twenty-four hours from now?”

  “It’s noon now,” Bill reflected. “Sure, I guess tomorrow morning’s paper’ll do.”

  “OK. What’s the date today?”

  “August 21.”

  “Fine. I’ll bring you a paper for August 22. Only I’m warning you: It won’t do any good. But here goes nothing. Goodbye now. Hello again. Here you are.” There was a string in Snulbug’s horny hand, and on the end of the string was a newspaper.

  “But hey!” Bill protested. “You haven’t been gone.”

  “People,” said Snulbug feelingly, “are dopes. Why should it take any time out of the present to go into the future? I leave this point, I come back to this point. I spent two hours hunting for this damned paper, but that doesn’t mean two hours of your time here. People—” he snorted.

  Bill scratched his head. “I guess it’s all right. Let’s see the paper. And I know: You’re warning me.” He turned quickly to the obituaries to check. No Hitchens. “And I wasn’t dead in the time you were in?”

  “No,” Snulbug admitted. “Not dead,” he added, with the most pessimistic implications possible.

  “What was I, then? Was I—”

  “I had salamander blood,” Snulbug complained. “They thought I was an undine like my mother and they put me in the cold-water incubator when any dope knows salamandry is a dominant. So I’m a runt and good for nothing but to run errands, and now I should make prophecies! You read your paper and see how much good it does you.”

  Bill laid down his pipe and folded the paper back from the obituaries to the front page. He had not expected to find anything useful there—what advantage could he gain from knowing who won the next naval engagement or which cities were bombed?—but he was scientifically methodical. And this time method was rewarded. There it was, streaming across the front page in vast black blocks:

  MAYOR ASSASSINATED

  FIFTH COLUMN KILLS CRUSADER

  Bill snapped his fingers. This was it. This was his chance. He jammed his pipe in his mouth, hastily pulled a coat on his shoulders, crammed the priceless paper into a pocket, and started out of the attic. Then he paused and looked around. He’d forgotten Snulbug. Shouldn’t there be some sort of formal discharge?

  The dismal demon was nowhere in sight. Not in the pentacle or out of it. Not a sign or a trace of him. Bill frowned. This was definitely not methodical. He struck a match and held it over the bowl of his pipe.

  A warm sigh of pleasure came from inside the corncob.

  Bill took the pipe from his mouth and stared at it. “So that’s where you are!” he said musingly.

  “I told you salamandry was a dominant,” said Snulbug, peering out of the bowl. “I want to go along. I want to see just what kind of a fool you make of yourself.” He withdrew his head into the glowing tobacco, muttering about newspapers, spells, and, with a wealth of unhappy scorn, people.

  The crusading mayor of Granton was a national figure of splendid proportions. Without hysteria, red baiting, or strike-breaking, he had launched a quietly purposeful and well-directed program against subversive elements which had rapidly converted Granton into the safest and most American city in the country. He was also a persistent advocate of national, state, and municipal subsidy of the arts and sciences—the ideal man to wangle an endowment for the Hitchens Laboratory, if he were not so surrounded by overly skeptical assistants that Bill had never been able to lay the program before him.

  This would do it. Rescue him from assassination in the very nick of time—in itself an act worth calling up demons to perform—and then when he asks, “And how, Mr. Hitchens, can I possibly repay you?” come forth with the whole great plan of research. It couldn’t miss.

  No sound came from the pipe bowl, but Bill clearly heard the words, “Couldn’t it just?” ringing in his mind.

  He braked his car to a fast stop in the red zone before the city hall, jumped out without even slamming the door, and dashed up the marble steps so rapidly, so purposefully, that pure momentum carried him up three flights and through four suites of offices before anybody had the courage to stop him and say, “What goes?”

  The man with the courage was a huge bull-necked plain-clothes man, whose bulk made Bill feel relatively about the size of Snulbug. “All right, there,” this hulk rumbled. “All right. Where’s the fire?”

  “In an assassin’s gun,” said Bill. “And it had better stay there.”

  Bullneck had not expected a literal answer. He hesitated long enough for Bill to push him to the door marked MAYOR—PRIVATE. But though the husky’s brain might move slowly, his muscles made up for the lag. Just as Bill started to shove the door open, a five-pronged mou
nd of flesh lit on his neck and jerked.

  Bill crawled from under a desk, ducked Bullneck’s left, reached the door, executed a second backward flip, climbed down from the table, ducked a right, reached the door, sailed back in reverse and lowered himself nimbly from the chandelier.

  Bullneck took up a stand in front of the door, spread his legs in ready balance, and drew a service automatic from its holster. “You ain’t going in there,” he said, to make the situation perfectly clear.

  Bill spat out a tooth, wiped the blood from his eyes, picked up the shattered remains of his pipe, and said, “Look. It’s now 12:30. At 12:32 a redheaded hunchback is going to come out on that balcony across the street and aim through the open window into the mayor’s office. At 12:33 His Honor is going to be slumped over his desk, dead. Unless you help me get him out of range.”

  “Yeah?” said Bullneck. “And who says so?”

  “It says so here. Look. In the paper.”

  Bullneck guffawed. “How can a paper say what ain’t even happened yet? You’re nuts, brother, if you ain’t something worse. Now go on. Scram. Go peddle your paper.” Bill’s glance darted out the window. There was the balcony facing the mayor’s office. And there coming out on it—

  “Look!” he cried. “If you won’t believe me, look out the window. See on that balcony? The redheaded hunchback? Just like I told you. Quick!”

  Bullneck stared despite himself. He saw the hunchback peer across into the office. He saw the sudden glint of metal in the hunchback’s hand. “Brother,” he said to Bill, “I’ll tend to you later.”

  The hunchback had his rifle halfway to his shoulder when Bullneck’s automatic spat and Bill braked his car in the red zone, jumped out, and dashed through four suites of offices before anybody had the courage to stop him.

  The man with the courage was a huge bull-necked plain-clothes man, who rumbled, “Where’s the fire?”

  “In an assassin’s gun,” said Bill, and took advantage of Bullneck’s confusion to reach the door marked MAYOR—PRIVATE. But just as he started to push it open, a vast hand lit on his neck and jerked.