Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  There was a long leash attached to the hawk’s leg and Commager noticed that, far down below, a number of people were holding the leash and watching the battle. “That explained why there wasn’t anyone else around, you see. When anyone tried it, they simply sent a hawk up after him.”

  “Hm!” said Julius. “Recognize the people?”

  “No—” Commager checked himself and laughed. “Of course, it just struck me! Hawkes was the name of one of the people I met last night! That explains the dream!”

  Julius nodded doubtfully. “Possibly. How did it continue?”

  AS COMMAGER recalled it, there hadn’t been much more to it. He couldn’t damage the hawk and the hawk couldn’t bring him down; finally it disappeared. Then he’d been up there alone . . . and then he’d been wakened by the telephone.

  Julius tapped the desk with the eraser end of a pencil, looking thoughtful. “Well—” he sighed. He turned to the recorder. “Let’s try another part of this now, Alan. The central part. Incidentally, we didn’t get into what you were actually doing last night. These are your subjective impressions and they aren’t necessarily an immediately recognizable reflection of real events, past or present. You understand that?”

  Commager said he did. But he felt a stab of sharp apprehension. He was reasonably certain that whatever Julius heard or guessed in his office remained a private matter. But his own line of action had been based on the solid personal conviction that, whatever had happened last night, it hadn’t been he who had killed Ruth MacDonald.

  In view of the hypnotist’s careful and almost formal phrasing, Commager was, for a few moments at least, not quite so sure about that.

  They were a bad few moments . . .

  Then the recorder was turning again.

  “WHAT DO you make of it?” Julius asked. “It will help me formulate my own opinion.”

  Commager shrugged. He still felt shaken, after the intermittent waves of grief, rage and remorse that had pounded through him while a section of the tape rewound itself again—with a vividness and immediacy that dazed him, but still seemed rather unaccountable. After all, that had been over and done with almost four years ago!

  “It’s fairly obvious to me,” he said reluctantly. At least his voice sounded steady enough. “A few months before my wife died, I’d begun to get interested in the ESP experiments she was playing around with. You remember Lona was almost as bad that way as Ira Bohart.”

  He managed a brief, careful grin. “It annoyed me at first, but, of course, I didn’t let her know. I thought she’d drop it soon enough. When she didn’t, I decided I’d experiment on the quiet by myself. Actually, I was after information I could use to convince Lona she was wasting her time with that sort of thing—and then she’d have more time to spare for the kind of fun and games I was interested in.” Julius smiled faintly and nodded.

  “I STARTED making lists of coincidences,” Commager explained. “Occasions when I’d tell myself Lona would be home at six, say, and she’d actually show up about that time. Or I’d decide what dress she’d select to wear next morning—”

  “Predictions, generally?” Julius drew a precise little circle on the desk blotter with his pencil and studied it critically.

  “Yes. Or I’d put the idea into her head that she wanted to talk about some particular thing with me—and sometimes she would!” Commager smiled. “I was also, you see, keeping a list of the times these little experiments didn’t work out, and they often didn’t, at first. So that, when I told Lona about it finally, it would be obvious that the coincidences had been just that.”

  He hesitated. “I still think they were just that. But one day, it struck me I’d accumulated too many coincidences lately. It shook me.”

  “Did it stop your experimentation?” Julius remained intent on his art work.

  “A few days later, it did,” Commager said. He discovered suddenly that he was sweating. “Lona phoned me that afternoon that she was driving down to the beach to pick me up. After she hung up, I had a sudden positive feeling that if she drove her car that afternoon, she’d get killed! I almost called her back. But I decided I wasn’t going to turn into another Ira Bohart. As of then, I was quitting all this ESP business and so was Lona! When she got there, I’d tell her—

  The sweat was running down his face now. “Well, you know that part of it. Lona had a heart attack while driving, the doctors thought, and crashed and got killed.” He paused again, because his voice had begun to shake. “I don’t know why that got on there—” he nodded at the recorder—“except that last night was the first time since that I felt, even tor a minute, that something might be going on that couldn’t be explained in a perfectly normal way!”

  “THAT,” inquired Julius, “was while you were going through that peculiar set of exercises you were describing, wasn’t it? Alan, how long ago has it been, exactly, since your wife died?”

  “Not quite four years.” Commager drove back a surge of impatience. “I suppose I’ve felt guilty enough about it ever since! But right now, Julius, I’m interested in finding out why I lost a few hours of memory last night and how to restore them. Are we getting any closer to that?”

  “I think we are. Can you be at this office at 10 A.M. two days from tomorrow? That’s Thursday morning—”

  “Why should I come here then?”

  Julius shrugged. “Because that’s the earliest appointment I could make for you with Dr. Ciardi. I phoned him just before you woke up. He’s a friend of mine and an excellent psychiatrist, Alan. We do a lot of work together.”

  Commager said in angry amazement, “Damn you, Julius!

  I told you I didn’t want anyone else to know about this!”

  “I know,” Julius admitted unhappily. “We’ve been fairly good friends for about eight years now, haven’t we? We’ve been in and out of each other’s homes and met each other’s acquaintances, right?”

  Commager’s fingertips drummed on his right knee. He was still furious. “So what?”

  “So hell, Alan! What you were telling me just now never happened! Your wife wasn’t killed in an auto-accident four years ago because, four years ago, you didn’t have a wife! To the best of my knowledge, you’ve never been married!”

  V

  COMMAGER had a rather early dinner at Tilford’s. A mirror lined the entire wall on the opposite side of the room; now and then, he glanced at himself. For a sort of lunatic, he thought, the big, sun-tanned man sitting there looked remarkably calm and healthy.

  He was still amazed, above all, at the apparent instantaneousness with which he had realized that what Julius had blurted out was true! He could picture Lona in a hundred different ways, very vividly, but he couldn’t actually recall having ever mentioned her to anybody else! And he couldn’t now remember a single time when he and she and any other person had been together.

  It was almost as if the entire episode of Lona had been a story somebody had told him, illustrated out of his own imaginings. And now, in a few hours, the story was beginning to fade out. Specific scenes had dropped almost beyond the reach of memory. The image of Lona herself started to blur.

  HIS immediate reaction had been an odd mixture of shocked self-disgust and profound relief, threaded with the feeling that actually he’d always known, without being consciously aware of it, that there wasn’t any real Lona.

  Even the emptions he’d felt while listening to the tape recorder were a part of the fabrication; almost at the instant of realization, they began to break away from him. Like the sudden shattering of a hard shell of alien matter, Commager thought, which he’d been dragging around, rather like a hermit-crab, under the pretense that it was a natural part of himself. The self-disgust became even more pronounced at that comparison.

  But whatever his original motives had been for imposing that monstrous construction upon his mind, Commager couldn’t see any further connection between it and the events of the past night.

  Apparently he had thrust himself into a peri
od of amnesia to avoid the full impact of an artificial set of emotions. In that period, there had been a very real and very unpleasant occurrence—a murder.

  His main reason now for remaining convinced that he hadn’t been the murderer was that the evening papers carried no indication that the body of Ruth MacDonald had been found.

  Which certainly indicated guilt on the part of those who must have found her.

  He could afford to wait until Thursday, Commager decided, to go digging after the causes of his delusion under Dr. Ciardi’s guidance. But he probably couldn’t afford to wait at all to find out what the Guides—he still had to assume it was the Guides—were preparing for him next.

  And perhaps the best way to find out would be, quite simply, to ask.

  HE FINISHED his dinner, walked up the street to a telephone booth and dialed the number of Herbert Hawkes’s home. A man’s voice informed him presently that it was the Hawkes residence, Lex Barthold speaking.

  That, Commager recalled, was the name of the blond young man who had been an untalkative member of the party last night. He gave his own name and said he was trying to contact Miss Paylar—a piece of information which produced a silence of several seconds at the other end. But when Barthold spoke again, he sounded unshaken.

  “Paylar isn’t in at the moment. Shall I take your message, Mr. Commager?”

  Commager said no, he’d try again, and hung up. Now that, he reflected, walking back to his car, seemed to be an interesting sort of household!

  For the first time since leaving Julius’s office, he wasn’t too displeased with himself. If he saw Paylar alone, he might, as far as appearances went, be taking an interest in the well-being of Ira Bohart or, reasonably enough, in Paylar herself.

  And things could start developing from that point.

  Of course, she might avoid letting him see her alone. In any case, his call would give them something new to consider.

  He drove to the beach and turned south toward San Diego. A half hour later, he parked before the cabin where, among bulkier items of fishing gear, he kept a 45-caliber revolver. He put that in the glove compartment of the car and started back to town.

  THE TELEPHONE rang a few minutes after he reached his apartment.

  “I’ve called you twice in the last hour,” Paylar said. “I understand you want to speak to me.”

  “I do,” said Commager. “Do you happen to have the evening free?”

  She laughed. “I’ve arranged to have it free. You can meet me at your aquarium store, Mr. Commager.”

  “Eh?” he said stupidly.

  “At your store.” Her voice still sounded amused. “You see, I may have a business proposition for you.”

  Then the line went dead. Commager swore and hung up. When he turned into Wilshire Boulevard not very many minutes later, he saw a long gray car, vague under the street lights, move away from the curb a hundred feet or so beyond his store and drive off. There was no sign of Paylar.

  He parked and followed the car thoughtfully with his eyes. Then he got out. The store was locked, the interior dark. But in back of the office, behind the partition, was a shimmering of light.

  He thought of the gun in his car. There had been one murder.

  It seemed a little early for another one.

  He unlocked the door and locked it again behind him. This time, there were no bodies lying around the aisles. But at the back of the store, standing before a lighted fish tank and looking into it, Paylar was waiting for him.

  HE DIDN’T ask her how she got in. It seemed a theatrical gesture, a boasting indication that his affairs could be easily invaded from without. Aside from that, the darkened store undoubtedly was a nice place for an ambush. Commager wondered briefly why he didn’t feel more concerned about that and realized then that he was enormously angry. An ambush might have been a relief.

  “Did you find out much about us today?” Paylar asked.

  “Not enough,” he admitted. “Perhaps you can tell me more.”

  “That’s why I’m here.” Commager looked at her skeptically. She was wearing a black sweater and slacks that appeared wine-colored in the inadequate light from the big tank. A small, finely shaped body and a small, vivid face. The mouth smiled soberly; black eyes gleamed like an animal’s as she turned her head toward him.

  “We’re an organization,” she said, “that operates against the development of parapsychological abilities in human beings . . .” Oddly enough, it made sense and he found himself believing her. Then he laughed. “Do you object to my winning a crap game?”

  Paylar said seriously, “We don’t object to that. But you’re not stopping there, Mr. Commager.”

  Again there was an instant of inner agreement; an elation and anxiety. Commager hesitated, startled by his reaction. He said, “I’m not aware of any ambition along that line.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think you’re being quite truthful. But it doesn’t really matter how aware you are of it just now. The last twenty-four hours have indicated clearly that you can’t be checked by any ordinary methods.” She frowned. “The possibility had been foreseen—and so we hit you with everything that was immediately available, Mr. Commager. I was sure it was enough.”

  Commager felt a little bewildered. “Enough for what?”

  “Why, almost anybody else would have done something sensible—and then refused to ever budge out of the everyday world again, even in his thoughts. Instead, you turned around and started to smoke us out—which, incidentally, saved you for the moment from an even more unnerving experience!”

  COMMAGER stared at her, appalled. That final comment had no present meaning for him, but she obviously was speaking about a murder of which she, at the very least, had known at the time. She considered it mildly amusing that it had back-fired on them!

  He said harshly, “I’d enjoy breaking your neck. But I suspect that you’re a little crazy.”

  She shrugged, smiling. “The trouble is that you’re not going to go on thinking that, Mr. Commager. If you did, we could safely disregard you.”

  He looked down at his hands. “So what are you going to do?”

  “There are others who say you can be stopped. It’s certain you won’t like their methods, though I’m not entirely sure they will be effective. I came here tonight to offer you an alternative.”

  “Go ahead and offer it.”

  “You can join us,” she said. Commager gave a short laugh of sheer astonishment. “Now why should I want to do that?”

  “In the end,” Paylar said soberly? “you may have very little choice! But there’s another reason. You’ve been trying, all your life, to bring your abilities into your consciousness and under your control.”

  He shook his head. “If you mean wild talents, I haven’t done anything of the sort.”

  “Unfortunately,” she said, “you won’t remain unaware of that trend in yourself very much longer. And, if you cooperate with us, we can and will help you to do just that. But we can’t let you continue by yourself, without safeguards. You’re too likely to be successful, you see. Those wild talents can become extremely wild!”

  “You know,” he said, almost good-humoredly, “I think you really believe what you say. But as far as I’m concerned, you’re a group of criminal lunatics without any more secret ability than I have myself—”

  “That,” Paylar replied undisturbed, “is precisely what we’re afraid of. For the time being, though, we can use our abilities in ways that you cannot. What happened while you were doing those exercises last night, Mr. Commager?”

  He looked at her and then away. “I got rather bored.”

  PAYLAR laughed. “You’re lying! Exercises of that kind provide very convincing illusions, and very little else, for people who are hungry for illusion. But since you have an ability, it took no more than a word to bring it into action! That was when we knew you had to be stopped. However, I’m afraid you’re still turning down my offer.”

  “You read my min
d that time, lady! I’d turn you over to the police, too, if I thought it would do any good.”

  “It wouldn’t,” she assured him. Her head tilted a moment, with soft grace, into an attitude of listening. “I think my car is coming back for me. I’ll leave that offer open, Mr. Commager—in case you survive long enough now to except it!”

  He grinned. “You shouldn’t frighten me like that.”

  “I’ve frightened you a little, but not nearly enough. But there is more than one way to shake a man to his senses—or out of them—so perhaps we can still change your mind. Would you let me out the front door now?”

  Lights slid over the ceiling above her as she spoke, and the long gray car, its engine throbbing, stood at the curb when they came out. Paylar turned at the car door.

  “You know where I’m staying,” she said, looking up at him, “if you want to find me.”

  Commager nodded.

  She smiled and then the door opened for her and light briefly filled the interior of the car.

  Seconds later, he stood staring after it as it fled down the street. She’d been right about there being more than one way of shaking a man out of his senses.

  The driver of the car—the very much alive driver—had been Ruth MacDonald!

  UNDER WHAT wasn’t quite a full Moon tonight, the Bay would have looked artificial if it hadn’t been so huge. A savage, wild place, incongruous in this area with the slow thump and swirl and thunder of the tide.

  A mile to the south was a cluster of cottages down near the water’s edge. Commager’s cabin was as close as anything could have been built to the flank of the big northern drop-off. He could look down at the sharp turn of the highway below him or out at the Bay. Nobody yet had tried to build on the rocky rises of ground behind him.

  Without ordinary distractions, it was a good place for a few hours of painstaking reorientation. He wasn’t exactly frightened, Commager told himself. But when he had recognized Ruth MacDonald, a wave of unreason inside him had seemed to rise to meet and merge with the greater wave of unreason rolling in from a shadow-world without. For that moment, the rules of reality had flickered out of existence.