Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  Miss Green fluted again, urgently. She was trying to tell him something now, and suddenly he thought he understood.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll look at it. That’s what you want me to do, isn’t it?”

  Miss Green flew down to the table again, which indicated agreement. Mel groped himself back into the chair and leaned forward to study the curiously glowing design she had created of sand and pebbles.

  He discovered immediately that any attempt to see it clearly merely strained his vision. Details turned into vaguely distorted, luminous flickerings when he stared at them, and the whole pale, spidery pattern made no more sense than it had with the light on. She must have some purpose in mind with it, but Mel couldn’t imagine what.

  Meanwhile, Miss Green was making minor adjustments in his position which Mel accepted without argument, since she seemed to know what she was doing. Small tugs and pushes told him she wanted his hands placed on the table to either side of the design. Mel put them there. His head was to be tilted forward just so. He obliged her again. Then she was back on the table, and the top two-thirds of the pattern vanished suddenly behind a blur.

  After a moment, he realized she had opened her wings and blotted that part from his sight.

  IN THE darkness, he fastened his puzzled gaze on the remaining section: a quivering, thinly drawn pattern of blue-white light that faded periodically almost to the limits of visibility and slowly grew up again to what was, by comparison, real brilliance. His head was aching slightly. The pattern seemed to tilt sideways and move upward, as if it were creeping in a slow circle about some pivot-point. Presently, it turned down again to complete the circle and start on another round. By that time, the motion seemed normal.

  When a tiny shape of light suddenly ran across the design and vanished again as it reached the other side, Mel was only moderately surprised. The figure had reminded him immediately of Miss Green. After a while, it crossed his field of vision in another direction, and then there were two more . . .

  He seemed to be swimming forward, through the pattern, into an area of similar tiny figures like living silhouettes of light, and of entrancingly delicate architectural designs. It was like a marionette setting of incredible craftsmanship, not quite real in the everyday sense, but as convincing as a motion picture which was spreading out, second by second, and beginning to flow about him—

  “Hey!” Mel sat up with a start. “You’re trying to hypnotize me!”

  Miss Green piped pleadingly. Clearly, she had only been trying to show him something. And wasn’t it beautiful? Didn’t he want to see more?

  Mel hesitated. He was suspicious now, but he was also curious. After all, what could she do to him with her tricks?

  Besides, he admitted to himself, the picture had vanished as soon as he shifted his eyes, and it was beautiful, like moving about through a living illustration of a book of fairy tales.

  He yielded. “All right, I do want to see more.”

  This time, the picture grew up out of the design within seconds. Only it wasn’t the same picture. It was as if he had turned around and was looking in another direction, a darker one.

  There were fewer of the little light-shapes; instead, he discovered in the distance a line of yellow dots that moved jerkily but steadily, like glowing corks bobbing on dark water. He watched them for a moment without recognition; then he realized with a thrill of pleasure that he was getting another view of the luminous globes he had seen before—this time an otherdimensional view, so to speak.

  Suddenly, one of them was right before him! Not a dot or a yellow circle, but a three-foot ball of fire that rushed toward him through the blackness with hissing, sputtering sounds!

  Mel surged up out of the chair with a yelp of fright, and the fireball vanished.

  As he groped about for the light, Miss Green was piping furiously at him from the table.

  Then the light came on.

  SHE was in a rage. Dancing about on the table, beating the air with her wings, she waved her arms over her head and shook her tiny fists at him. Mel backed off warily.

  “Take it easy!” he warned. He could reach the flyswatter in the kitchenette with a jump if she started shooting off miniature electric bolts again.

  She might have had the same idea, because she calmed down suddenly, shook her wings together and closed them with a snap. It was like a cat smoothing down its bristling back fur. There was a whistling query from the princess now, followed by an excited elfin conversation.

  Mel poured himself a drink with a hand that shook slightly, and pretended to ignore the disturbance of his guests, while he tried to figure out what had happened.

  Supposing, he thought a trifle guiltily, settling down on the couch at a safe distance from the table—supposing they simply had to have his help at this point. The manner in which one of the rescue globes suddenly had seemed to shift close to him suggested it. Was he justified in refusing to go on with it? In the directionless dark through which the globes were driving, they might have been reacting to his concentrated awareness of them as if it were a radio signal from the human dimensions. And it would explain Miss Green’s rage at the sudden interruption of the contact.

  But another thought came to him then, and his guilty feelings vanished in a surge of alarmed indignation.

  Well, and just supposing, he thought, that he hadn’t broken the contact. And that a three-foot sputtering fireball materialized right inside his living room!

  He caught sight of Miss Green eying him speculatively and rather slyly from the table. She seemed composed enough now; there was even the faintest of smiles on that tiny face. The smile seemed to confirm his suspicions.

  Mel downed his drink and stood up.

  “Miss Green,” he told her evenly, choosing his words with care, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t intend to be the subject of any more of your experiments. At least not until I’ve had time to think about it.”

  Her head nodded slightly, as if she were acknowledging his decision. But the smile remained; in fact, Miss Green had begun to look rather smug. Mel studied her uneasily. She might be planning to put something else over on him, but he knew how to stop that!

  Before he turned out the light and went to bed, Mel methodically and somewhat grimly swallowed four more shots of brandy. With that much inside him, it wouldn’t matter what Miss Green tried, because he wouldn’t be able to react to her suggestions till he woke up again in the morning.

  ACTUALLY it was noon before he awoke—and he might have gone on sleeping then if somebody hadn’t been banging on his apartment door.

  “Wake up, Mel!” he heard Maria de Guesgne shouting hoarsely. “I can hear you snoring in there!”

  He sat up a little groggily and looked at the clock. His guests weren’t in sight.

  “You awake, Mel?” she demanded.

  “Wait a minute!” he yelled back. “Just woke up and I’m not decent.”

  When he opened the door, she had vanished. He was about to close it quietly and gratefully again, when she called down the stairway. “That you, Mel? Come on up! I want to show you something.”

  He locked the door behind him and went upstairs. Maria received him beamingly in her living room. She was on one of her rare creative painting sprees, and this spree,” to judge by the spattered appearance of the room and the artist, was more riotous than usual. A half dozen fair-sized canvases were propped on newspapers against the wall to dry. They were turned around, to increase the shock effect on Mel when he would get his first look at them.

  “Ever see a salamander?” Maria inquired with anticipation, spreading a few more papers on the table.

  Mel admitted he hadn’t. He wished she’d given him time to have coffee first. His comments at these private showings were usually regarded as inadequate anyway.

  “Well,” Maria invited triumphantly, selecting one of the canvases and setting it abruptly up on the table before him, “take a look at one!”

  Mel gasped
and jerked back. “Holy Judas!” he said in a weak voice.

  “Pretty good, eh?” For once, Maria appeared satisfied with his reaction. She held it away from her and regarded it. “One of my best!” she cried judiciously.

  About three times life-size, it was a quite recognizable portrait of Miss Green.

  IT DIDN’T occur to Maria to offer Mel coffee but he got a cigarette from her. Fortunately, he wasn’t called upon to make any more comments; she chattered away while she showed him the rest of the series. Mel looked and listened, still rather shaken. Presently he began to ask questions.

  A salamander, he learned, was a fire elemental. Maria glanced at her fireplace as she explained this, and Mel noticed she seemed to have had a fire burning there overnight, which wasn’t too unusual for her even in the middle of summer. Listening to the banghaired, bright-eyed oddball rattling off metaphysical details about salamanders, he became aware of a sort of dread growing up in him. For Miss Green was pictured, wings and arms spread, against and within furling veils of yellow-white flame . . .

  “Drawn from life?” he inquired, grinning to make it a joke. He pointed at the picture.

  Without looking directly at her, he saw Maria start at the question. She stared at him intensely for a moment, and after that she became more reticent.

  It didn’t matter because it was all on the canvases. She had seen as much as he had and more, and put it down with shocking realism. Seen through somebody else’s eyes, Miss Green’s world was still beautiful; but now it was also frightening. And there was what Maria had said about salamanders.

  “Maria,” he said, “what actually happened last night?”

  She looked at him sullenly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mel.”

  “I imagine,” he suggested casually, “you were just sitting there in front of the fire. And then—”

  “Gosh, Mel, she was beautiful! It’s all so beautiful, you know . . .” She recovered quickly. “I fell asleep and I had a dream, that’s all. Why? What makes you ask?”

  She was beginning to look rather wild-eyed, but he had to find out. “I was just wondering,” he said, “whether they’d left.”

  “Why should they leave—Look, you oaf! I called you in to give you the privilege of looking at my paintings. Now get out. I’ve got to make a phone call.”

  He stopped at the door, struck by a sudden suspicion. “You’re not going to try to sell them, are you?”

  “Try to sell them!” She laughed hoarsely. “There are circles, Mel Armstrong, in which a de Guesgne original is understood, shall we say? Circles not exactly open to the common herd . . . This series,” she concluded, rather prosaically, “will get me two thousand bucks as soon as I let one or two of the right people have a look at them!”

  BREWING himself a pot of coffee at last, Mel decided that part of it, if true, wasn’t any of his business. He had always assumed Maria was living on a monthly check she got from an unidentified source in Chicago, but her occasional creations might have a well-heeled following, at that. As for the way Miss Green had got in to sit for her portrait—the upstairs screens weren’t in any better shape than the downstairs ones. The fiery background, of course, might have been only in Maria’s mind.

  There was a scratching on top of the cupboard and whispery voices. Mel ignored the slight chill that drifted down his spine. Up to that moment, he’d been hoping secretly that Maria had provided a beacon for the rescue team to home in on while he slept, and that his guests had been picked up and taken home.

  But Miss Green was peering down at him over the edge of the cupboard.

  “Hi, salamander!” he greeted her politely. “Had a busy night? Too bad it didn’t work.”

  Her head withdrew. In the living room Mel stopped to look at the design of sand and pebbles, which was still on the table. Touching one of the threadlike lines, he discovered it was as hard and slick as lacquer. Otherwise the pattern seemed unremarkable in daylight, but Mel dropped a cloth across it to keep it out of sight.

  Miss Green fluttered past him to the sill of the bedroom window. He watched her standing on tiptoe against the screen, apparently peering about at the sky. After a while, it began to seem ridiculous to let himself become obsessed by superstitious fears about this tiny and beautiful, almost jewellike creature.

  Whatever abilities she might have, she and the princess were only trying to get home—and, having seen their home, he couldn’t blame them for that.

  He had a return of the fairy-tale nostalgia his glimpse of those eerily beautiful places had aroused in him the night before, a pleasantly yearning sensation like an awareness of elfin horns blowing far away to send faint, exciting echoes swirling about the commonplace sky of Sweetwater Bay. The feeling might have been resurrected from his childhood, but it was a strong and effective one.

  He recalled how bored he’d been with everything before they appeared . . .

  He walked softly through the bedroom and stopped behind Miss Green. She was making an elaborate pretense of not having noticed his approach, but the pointed ears that could follow the passage of a moth in the dark were tilted stiffly backward. Mel actually was opening his mouth to say, “Miss Green, I’ll help you if I can,” when it struck him sharply, like a brand-new thought, that it was an extremely rash promise to make, considering everything that had happened so far.

  He wondered how the odd impulse ever had come to him.

  In sudden suspicion, he began to trace the last few minutes through again. He had started with a firm decision not to let his guests involve him in their plans any more than was healthy for him, if at all—and the decision had been transformed, step by step, and mental twist by mental twist, into a foolish willingness to have them make use of him exactly as they pleased!

  Miss Green, still maliciously pretending to watch the sky, let him think it all out until it became quite clear what she had done and how she had done it. And then, as Mel spluttered angrily at this latest interference with his freedom of thought and action, she turned around and laughed at him.

  IN A way, it cleared the air.

  The pressure was off. Maria had proved a much more pliable subject than Mel; the rescuers had their bearings and would arrive presently. Meanwhile, everybody could relax.

  Mel couldn’t help feeling relieved as he grew sure of that. At the same time, now that the departure was settled, he became aware of a certain amount of belated regret. Miss Green didn’t seem to know the exact hour; she was simply watching for them well ahead of their arrival.

  Where would they show up? She waved her arms around in an appealingly helpless gesture at the court outside and the sky. Here, there—somewhere in the area.

  It would be a fire globe. At his question, she pointed at the opposite wall of the court where a picture of one formed itself obligingly, slid along the wall a few feet, and vanished. Mel was beginning to enjoy all this easy last-minute communication, when he heard Maria come downstairs and open the door to the other court. There was conversation, and several sets of footsteps went up to her apartment and down again.

  Cautioning Miss Green, he took a look around the shutters of the living room window. A small panel truck stood in the court; Maria was supervising the careful transfer of her paintings into its interior. Apparently she didn’t even intend to let them dry before offering them for sale!

  The truck drove off with Maria inside with her paintings, and Mel discovered Miss Green doing a little spying of her own from the upper edge of the shutters. Good friends now, they smiled at each other and resumed their guard at the bedroom window.

  The princess joined them around five in the afternoon. Whether she had been injured in the accident or weakened by the birth of her babies, Mel couldn’t tell, but Miss Green carried her friend down from the cupboard without visible effort, and then went back for a globular basket of tightly woven tiny twigs, which contained the twins.

  It was a masterfully designed little structure with a single opening about the thick
ness of a pencil, and heavily lined. Mel had a notion to ask for it as a souvenir, but decided against it. He lifted it carefully to his ear, to listen to an almost inaudible squeaking inside, and his expression seemed to cause Miss Green considerable silent amusement.

  All in all, it was much like waiting patiently in pleasant company for the arrival of an overdue train. Then, around seven o’clock, when the room was already dark, the telephone rang abruptly and returned Mel with a start to the world of human beings.

  He lifted the receiver.

  “Hello, oaf!” said Maria de Guesgne in what seemed for the moment to be an enormous, booming voice.

  Mel inquired agreeably whether she’d succeeded in selling her paintings. It was the first thing that occurred to him.

  “Certainly I sold them!” Maria said. He could tell by now that she was thoroughly plastered again. “Got a message to give you,” she added.

  “From whom?”

  “Maybe from me, ha-ha!” said Maria. She paused a moment, seemed to be muttering something to herself, and resumed suddenly, “Oaf, are you listening?”

  Mel said bluntly that he was. If he hung up on her, she would probably ring back.

  “All right,” Maria said clearly. “This is the message: ‘The fiery ones do not tolerate the endangering of their secrets.’ Warning, see? Goobye.”

  She hung up before he could say anything.

  HERS had been a chilling sort of intrusion. Mel stood a while in the darkening room, trying to gather up the mood Maria had shattered, and discovering he couldn’t quite do it. He realized that all along, like a minor theme, there had been a trace of fear underlying everything he did, ever since he had first looked into that bird box and glimpsed something impossible inside it. He had been covering-the fear up; even now he didn’t want to admit it, but it was there.

  He could quite simply, of course, walk out of the room and out of the apartment, and stay away for a week. He didn’t even ever have to come back. And, strictly speaking, this was the sort of thing that should have happened to somebody like Maria de Guesgne, not to him. For him, the sensible move right now would be to go quietly back into the normal world of reality he had stepped out of a few mornings ago. It was a simple physical act. The door was over there . . .