Then she stopped and gaped when she saw Leo Whittaker's car parked out of sight behind the house. She hurried on, letting the heavy can bounce against the ground with every other step. She opened the kitchen door and shrieked.
Mrs. Gilbreath stood in the doorway, smiling pleasantly at her, and holding a butcher knife. Without reasoning, without even thinking, Miss Mahan took the handle of the heavy gasoline can in both hands and swung it as hard as she could.
The sharp rim around the bottom caught Mrs. Gilbreath across the face, destroying one eye, shearing away her nose, and opening one cheek. Her expression didn't change. Blood flowed over her pleasant smile as she staggered drunkenly backward.
Miss Mahan lost her balance completely. The momentum of the gasoline can swung her around and she sat in the snow, flat on her skinny bottom. The can slipped from her fingers and bounced across the ground with a descending scale of clangs. She lurched to her feet and looked in the kitchen door. Mrs. Gilbreath had slammed against the wall and was sitting on the floor, still smiling her gory smile, her right arm twitching like a metronome.
Miss Mahan scrambled after the gasoline can and hid it in the pantry. She ducked up the kitchen stairs when she heard footsteps.
Mr. Gilbreath walked through the kitchen, ignoring Mrs. Gilbreath, and went out the back door. Miss Mahan hurried up the stairs. Oh Lord, she thought, I'll be so sore I can't move for a week.
She entered the upstairs hall from the opposite end. She stepped carefully over the debris from the wall shattered by the djinn. She looked in the bedrooms on the other side. The first one was empty with a layer of dust, but the second . . . She stared. It looked like a set from a Maria Montez movie. A fire burned in the fireplace and Leo Whittaker lay stark naked on the fur-covered bed.
"Leo Whittaker!" she bellowed. "Get up from there and put your clothes on this instant!" But he didn't move. He was alive; his chest moved gently as he breathed. She went to him, trying to keep from looking at his nakedness. Then she thought, what the dickens? There's no point in being a prude at this stage. Her eyes widened in admiration. Then she ceded him a few additional points for being able to satisfy Twilla. Why couldn't she have found a beautiful man like that when she was twenty-three? she wondered. She sighed. It wouldn't have made any difference, she guessed. It would have all turned out the same.
She put her hand on his shoulder and shook him. He moaned softly and shifted on the bed. "Leo! Wake up! What's the matter with you?" She shook him again. He acted drugged or something. She saw a long golden hair on his stomach and plucked it off, throwing it on the floor. She took a deep breath and slapped him in the face. He grunted. His head lifted slightly and then fell hack. "Leo!" she shouted, and slapped him again. His body jerked and his eyes clicked open but didn't focus.
"Leo!" Slap!
"Owww," he said and looked at her. "Miss Mahan?"
"Leo, are you awake?"
"Miss Mahan? What are you doing here? Is Lana all right?" He sat up in the bed and saw the room. He grunted in bewilderment.
"Leo. Get up and get dressed. Hurry!" she commanded. She heard the starter of a car grinding. Leo looked at himself, turned red, and tried to move in every direction at once. Miss Mahan grinned and went to the window. She could hear Leo thumping and bumping as he tried to put his clothes on. The car motor caught and steam billowed from the carriage house. "Hurry, Leo!" The black Chrysler began slowly backing out, Mr. Gilbreath at the wheel. Then the motor stalled and died.
He's trying to get away, she thought. No, he's only a puppet. He's planning to take Twilla away! She turned back to Leo. He was dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed putting on his shoes. He looked at her shame-faced, like a little boy.
"Leo," she said in her sternest, most no-nonsense, unruly child voice. The car motor started again. "Don't ask any questions. Go down the kitchen stairs, and to your car. Hurry as fast as you can. Don't let Mr. Gilbreath see you. Bring your car around to the front and to the end of the lane. Block the lane so Mr. Gilbreath can't get out. Keep yourself locked in your car because he's dangerous. Do you understand?"
"No," he said, shaking his head.
"Never mind. Will you do what I said?"
He nodded.
"All right, then. Hurry!" They left the bedroom. Leo gave it one last bewildered glance. They ran down the kitchen stairs as fast as they could, Leo keeping her steady. She propelled him out the back door before he could see Mrs. Gilbreath still smiling and twitching. The black Chrysler was just pulling around to the from of the house.
She ran to the pantry, retrieved the gasoline can, and staggered into the entry hall. She could see Mr. Gilbreath getting out of the car. She locked the door and hobbled into the parlor. Twilla had been moved to the divan and covered with a quilt. He shouldn't have moved her, Miss Mahan thought, with an injury like that it could have killed her.
Twilla saw her enter and began screeching curses at her. Miss Mahan shook her head. She put the gasoline can down by the divan and tried to unscrew the cap on the spout. It wouldn't budge. It was rusted solid. Miss Mahan growled in frustration. The front door began to rattle and clatter.
Twilla's curses stopped suddenly, and Miss Mahan looked at her. Twilla was staring at her in round-eyed horror. Miss Mahan went to the fireplace and got the poker. Twilla's eyes followed her. She drew the poker back and,swung it as hard as she could at the gasoline can. It made a very satisfactory hole. She swung the poker several more times and tossed it away. She picked up the can as Twilla began to scream and plead. She rested it on the back of the divan and stripped away the blanket. She tipped it over and pale pink streams of gasoline fell on Twilla.
Glass shattered in the front door. Miss Mahan left the can resting on the back of the divan, still gurgling out its contents, and went to the fireplace again. She picked up the box of matches as Mr. Gilbreath walked in. His expression didn't change as he hurried toward her. She took a handful of wooden matches. She struck them all on the side of the box and tossed them on Twilla.
Twilla's screams and the flames ballooned upward together. Mr. Gilbreath shifted directions and waded into the flames, reaching for Twilla. Miss Mahan ran out of the house as fast as she could.
She was past the black Chrysler, its motor still running, when the gasoline can exploded. Leo had parked his car where she told him. Now he jumped out and ran to her. They looked at the old Peacock house.
It was old and dry as dust. The flames engulfed it completely. The snow was melting in a widening circle around it. They had to back all the way to Leo's car because of the heat.
They heard a siren and turned to see Sheriff Walker's car hurrying down the lane, followed by some of the funeral procession on its way back to Hawley. The ones who hadn't turned down the road were stopped on the highway, looking.
"Leo, dear," she said. "Do you know what you're doing here?"
He rubbed his hand across his face, his eyes still a little bleary. "Yes, I think so. It all seems like a dream. Twilla . . . Miss Mahan," he said in pain. "I don't know why I did it."
"I do," she said soothingly, and put her arm around him. "And it wasn't your fault. You have to believe that. Don't tell Lana or anyone. Forget it ever happened. Do you understand?"
He nodded as Robin Walker got out of his car and ran toward them. He looks very handsome in his uniform, she thought. My, my, I've suddenly become very conscious of good-looking men. Too bad it's thirty years too late.
"Miss Mahan? Leo? What's going on here?" Robin asked in bewilderment. "Is anyone still in there?" He looked at her feet. "Miss Mahan, why are you running around in the snow with only one shoe on?"
She followed his gaze. "I'll declare," she said in astonishment. "I didn't know I'd lost it. Leo, Robin, let's get in your car. I have a lot to tell you both."
Miss Mahan sat before the fireplace in her comfortable old house, tearing the pages from her Twilla journal and feeding them one at a time to the fire. Paul Sullivan had doctored her cuts and bruises and she felt w
onderful—stiff and sore, to be sure—but wonderful. Tomorrow the news would be all over town that, with brilliant detective work, Robin Walker, aided by Leo Whittaker, had discovered that Twilla Gilbreath's father was Yvonne's killer. In an attempt to arrest him, the house had burned and all three had perished.
She had told Robin and Leo everything that happened—well, almost everything. She had left out her own near encounter with Dazreel and a few other related items. She had also given the impression—sort of—that the house had burned by accident. Poor, sweet Robin hadn't believed a word of it. But after hearing Leo's account, taking a look at her demolished car, and seeing the footprints in the snow, he finally, grudgingly, agreed to go along with it. And it did explain all the mysteries of Yvonne's death.
She knew the public story was full of holes and loose ends, but she also knew the people in Hawley. They wanted to hear that an outsider had done it, and they wanted to hear that he had been discovered. Their own imaginations would fill in the gaps.
Lana Whittaker didn't really believe that Leo was working with Robin all those nights he was away, but they loved each other enough. They'd be all right.
She fed the last pages to the fire and looked around her parlor. She decided to put up a tree this year. She hadn't bothered with one in years. And a party. She'd have a party. There hadn't been more than three people in the house at one time in ages.
She hobbled creakily up the stairs, humming. "Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly," considerably off key, heading for the attic to search for the box of Christmas tree ornaments.
The Purple Pterodactyls
by
L. Sprague de Camp
Although we are most familiar with them in the somewhat watered-down later-day role of genie-in-the-bottle (or lamp), jinn are really potent and fearsome supernatural creatures, the Moslem equivalent of demons. In the words of Jorge Luis Borges, "According to moslem tradition, Allah created three different species of intelligent beings: Angels, who are made of light; Jinn ('Jinnee' or 'Genie' in the singular), who are made of fire; and men, who are made of earth. The Jinn were created of a black, smokeless fire some thousands of years before Adam, and consist of five orders. Among those orders we find good Jinn and evil, male Jinn and female."
Like demons, jinn can be bound to servitude, and magically summoned to perform various tasks. Borges tells us that "certain scholars attribute to them the building of the pyramids or, under the orders of Solomon, the Great Temple of Jerusalem." Solomon, in fact, is said to have magically bound thousands of the jinn—which is how many of them ended up stuck in all those bottles and lamps beloved of cartoonists and moviemakers.
Jinn can be dangerous servants, though, and are likely to have their own ideas about how to handle even the simplist of tasks as the wry story that follows amply demonstrates.
L. Sprague de Camp is a seminal figure, one whose career spans almost the entire development of modern fantasy and SF. For the fantasy magazine Unknown in the late 1930s, he helped create a whole new modern style of fantasy writing—funny, whimsical, and irreverent—of which he is still the most prominent practitioner. His most famous books include Lest Darkness Fall, The Incomplete Enchanter (with Fletcher Pratt), and Rogue Queen. His most recent book is The Bones of Zora, a novel written in collaboration with wife Catherine Crook de Camp.
I am as ordinary, commonplace a guy as you can find: middle-sized, middle-class, middle-aged; engineer by training, banker by circumstance; with a nice wife, nice kids, nice house, and nice car. But the damndest things happen to me.
When the children were grown enough so that they could take care of themselves in summer, Denise and I spent a vacation by ourselves at the shore. My cousin Linda, who has a house there, had been raving about Ocean Bay. So we rented an apartment in a rambly wooden-frame building, a block from the beach. This was before the waterfront sprouted a host of huge condominiums, like a plague of concrete mushrooms. You could walk on the sand without stepping on somebody or getting hit in the eye with a Frisbee.
We swam, we sunned, and we walked the boardwalk. The second afternoon, Denise said: "Willy, my old, why do we walk not down to the park of amusement?"
She said it in French, since we speak it a lot en famille. It is her native tongue, and I try to keep mine up by practice. We tried to bring the children up bilingually, but it took with only one of them.
We walked a mile to the piers and concessions. There were the usual fun house, roller coaster, and shooting gallery. There was a fortuneteller who called himself Swami Krishna. There were concessions where you threw darts at rubber balloons, or threw baseballs at plywood cats, or tossed baseballs into baskets. These baskets were so set that, when you did get your ball in, it bounced right out again and did not count. If you succeeded in such endeavors, you won teddy bears, rubber pythons, and similar junk.
I am normally immune to the lure of such games. One, however, showed more originality.
You bought three rubber rings, four or five inches in diameter, for half a dollar. You tossed these rings over three little posts, a couple of feet high and a mere yard from the thrower. There were three sets of these posts, forming three sides of a square.
The upper part of each post was conical, and it was no trick to get the ring over the point of the cone. To win, however, the ring had to fall down the rest of the post, which was square in cross section and barely small enough for the ring to go over it. Nearly always, the ring hung up on the corners at the top of the square lection. You had to ring all three posts at once to win a prize.
The prizes were even more original: a flock of plush-and-wire pterodactyls. They came in several models and sizes, some with long tails and some with short, some with teeth and some with long, toothless beaks. The biggest were over a yard across the wings. They were made so that you could hang one from your ceiling as a mobile. If the wind was strong, you could lock the wings in place and fly the thing as a kite. They were all dyed in shades of purple.
"Purple pterodactyls!" I said. "Darling, I've got to have one of those."
"Oh, mon Dieu!" said Denise. "What on earth would you do with it?"
"Hang it in my study, I suppose."
"You had better not hang it where the people can see it. What do you like about these monsters?"
"I suppose it's the alliteration of the name. Only it's not a real alliteration, since you don't pronounce the p in 'pterodactyl.' That makes it just an eye-rhyme—I mean an eye-alliteration."
"In English, maybe. But in French we do pronounce the p: p'tero-dac-TEEL. That is what is wrong with the English; you never know when some letter at the beginning of a word is silent."
"Like 'knife,' you mean? Well, in French you never know when a letter at the end of a word is silent. Let me have a try at this."
The concessionaire was a short, tubby, bald man of about my age, with a big black mustache. The ends of the mustache were waxed and curled up, something like the Schnurrbart once worn by Kaiser Wilhelm II.
The man sold me a set of rings, and I threw . . . . Ten dollars and sixty rings later, I was no nearer to getting my purple pterodactyl.
"Will you sell me one of those?" I asked the proprietor. "How much?"
The man ducked a little bow. "I am so sorry, sir," he said with a slight accent, "but they are not for sale. Either you win them with the rings, or you do not get any."
A look from Denise told me I had better not throw any more of the Newbury fortune, such as it was, after Mesozoic reptiles just then. As we walked off, I growled something like: "I'll get one of those things if it's my last . . ."
"You say we can't afford a Mercedes," she said, "but you throw away money on those hideous . . ."
"Well, anyway," said I to change the subject, "if we go right back to the house, we can get another swim before dinner."
"Willy!" she said. "You have had one swim today. The waves are big, and you will get the sunburn. Do not kill yourself, trying to prove your manhood! You forget we are middle-aged."<
br />
"I may be middle-aged," said I with a leer, "but I can still do some of the things young men do."
"Yes, I know. You did it just this morning. Some day you will I try to prove your manhood once too often, and you will have the stroke in the middle of it."
"I can't think of a better way to go."
"But think of your poor wife! Aside from the fact that I don't want to be a widow, consider how embarrassing it would be to explain to the policemen!"
Next morning, we went out for our sun-and-swim. There on the beach was our friend of the purple pterodactyls, also soaking up ultra-violet. In bathing trunks, with his pod and his jungle of graying chest hair, he was a walking argument against nudism. He had been swimming, for the water had dissolved the pomade out of his mustache, so the ends hung down in Fu-Manchurian style. He was spooning sand upon himself with a child's toy shovel.
"Hello," I said, since you never know when the unlikeliest people might want to do business with your bank. "How's the pterodactyl business?"
"Business is good," he said. "Three of my pterosaurs were won yesterday, so you see people do win sometimes. I regret that you did not. You must try again."
"I'll be back," I said. "Do you come out here every day before opening?"
"Yes. It is the only time I have, since I must be on duty from noon to midnight. It is not an easy business."
In answer to my questions, he told me something of the economics of boardwalk concessions. "Excuse me please," he said. "Permit me to introduce myself. I am Ion Maniu, at your service. I regret that I cannot give you my card."
"I'm Wilson Newbury," I said.
He repeated the name slowly, as if it really meant something to him. "Is there an initial?"
"Woodrow Wilson Newbury, if you want the whole thing," I told him, "but I haven't used the 'Woodrow' in years. When I see you this afternoon, we can exchange cards." I thought Mr. Maniu's formality a little quaint but did not mean to let him outdo me.
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