by Gahan Wilson
"Don't tell me where it's got to, now, Faulks," he said, "I don't want to know; I don't want to hear about it."
Faulks said nothing, only touched a trembling hand on Sir Harry's shoulder and pointed to the ceiling. There, almost directly in its center, was:
Sir Harry leaned his head close to Faulks' ear and whispered: "Keep looking at it for as long as you can, old man. Try not to let it get away." Then in his normal, conversational tone, which was a kind of cheerful roar, he spoke to Archer: "Seems you have a bit of a sticky problem here, what?"
Archer looked up grimly from between his fingers. Then, carefully, he lowered his arms and stood. He brushed himself off, made a few adjustments of his coat and tie, and spoke:
"I'm sorry, Sir Harry. I'm afraid I rather let it get the better of me."
"No such thing!" boomed Sir Harry Mandifer, clapping Archer on the back. "Besides, it's enough to rattle anyone. Gave me quite a turn, myself, and I'm used to this sort of nonsense!"
Sir Harry had developed his sturdy technique of encouragement during many a campaign in haunted house and ghost-ridden moor, and it did not fail him now. Archer's return to self-possession was almost immediate. Satisfied at the restoration, Sir Harry looked up at the ceiling.
"You say it started as a kind of spot?" he asked, peering at the dark thing which spread above them.
"About as big as a penny," answered Archer.
"What have the stages been like, between then and now?"
"Little bits come out of it. They get bigger, and, at the same time, other little bits come popping out, and, as if that weren't enough, the whole ghastly thing keeps dwelling, like some damned balloon."
"Nasty," said Sir Harry.
"I'd say it's gotten to be a yard across," said Archer.
"At least."
"What do you make of it, Sir Harry?"
"It looks to me like a sort of plant."
Both the butler and Archer gaped at him. The
instantly disappeared.
"I'm sorry, sir," said the butler, stricken.
"What do you mean, plant?" asked Archer. "It can't be a plant, Harry. It's perfectly flat, for one thing."
"Have you touched it?"
Archer sniffed.
"Not very likely," he said.
Discreetly, the butler cleared his throat.
"It's on the floor, gentlemen," he said.
The three looked down at the thing with reflectful expressions. Its longest reach was now a little over four feet.
"You'll notice," said Sir Harry, "that the texture of the carpet does not show through the blackness, therefore it's not like ink, or some other stain. It has an independent surface."
He stooped down, surprisingly graceful for a man of his size, and, pulling a pencil from his pocket, poked at the thing. The pencil went into the darkness for about a quarter of an inch, and then stopped. He jabbed at another point, this time penetrating a good full inch.
"You see," said Sir Harry, standing. "It does have a complex kind of shape. Our eyes can perceive it only in a two dimensional way, but the sense of touch moves it along to the third. The obvious implication of all this length, width, and breadth business is that your plant's drifted in from some other dimensional set, do you see? I should imagine the original spot was its seed. Am I making myself clear on all this? Do you understand?"
Archer did not, quite, but he gave a reasonably good imitation of a man who had.
"But why did the accursed thing show up here?" he asked.
Sir Harry seemed to have the answer for that one, too, but Faulks interrupted it, whatever it may have been, and we shall never know it.
"Oh, sir," he cried. "It's gone, again!"
It was, indeed. The carpet stretched unblemished under the three men's feet. They looked about the room, somewhat anxiously now, but could find no trace of the invader.
"Perhaps it's gone back into the dining room," said Sir Harry, but a search revealed that it had not.
"There is no reason to assume it must confine itself to the two rooms," said Sir Harry, thoughtfully chewing his lip. "Nor even to the house, itself."
Faulks, standing closer to the hallway door than the others, tottered slightly, and emitted a strangled sound. The others turned and looked where the old man pointed. There, stretching across the striped paper of the hall across from the door was:
"This is," Archer said, in a choked voice, "really a bit too much, Sir Harry. Something simply must be done or the damned thing will take over the whole bloody house!"
"Keep your eyes fixed on it, Faulks," said Sir Harry, "at all costs." He turned to Archer. "It has substance, I have proven that. It can be attacked. Have you some large cutting instrument about the place? A machete? Something like that?"
Archer pondered, then brightened, in a grim sort of way.
"I have a kris," he said.
"Get it," said Sir Harry.
Archer strode from the room, clenching and unclenching his hands. There was a longish pause, and then his voice called from another room:
"I can't get the blasted thing off its mounting!"
Til come and help," Sir Harry answered. He turned to Faulks, who was pointing at the thing on the wall like some loyal bird dog. "Never falter, old man," he said. "Keep your gaze rock steady!"
The kris, an old war souvenir brought to the house by Archer's grandfather, was fixed to its display panel by a complicatedly woven arrangement of wires, and it took Sir Harry and Archer a good two minutes to get it free. They hurried back to the hall and there jarred to a halt, absolutely thunderstruck. The
was nowhere to be seen, but that was not the worst— the butler, Faulks, was gone! Archer and Sir Harry exchanged startled glances and then called the servant's name, again and again, with no effect whatever.
"What can it be, Sir Harry?" asked Archer. "What, in God's name, has happened?"
Sir Harry Mandifer did not reply. He grasped the kris before him, his eyes darting this way and that, and Archer, to his horror, saw that the man was trembling where he stood. Then, with a visible effort of will, Sir Harry pulled himself together and assumed, once more, his usual staunch air.
"We must find it, Archer," he said, his chin thrust out. "We must find it and we must kill it. We may not have another chance if it gets away, again!"
Sir Harry leading the way, the two men covered the ground floor, going from room to room, but found nothing. A search of the second also proved futile.
"Pray God," said Sir Harry, mounting to the floor above, "the creature has not quit the house."
Archer, now short of breath from simple fear, climbed unsteadily after.
"Perhaps it's gone back where it came from, Sir Harry," he said.
"Not now," the other answered grimly. "Not after Faulks. I think it's found it likes our little world."
"But what id it?" asked Archer.
"It's what I said it was—a plant," replied the large man, opening a door and peering into the room revealed. "A special kind of plant. We have them here, in our dimension."
At this point, Archer understood. Sir Harry opened another door, and then another, with no success. There was the attic left. They went up the narrow steps, Sir Harry in the lead, his kris held high before him. Archer, by now, was barely able to drag himself along by the bannister. His breath came in tiny whimpers.
"A meat-eater, isn't it?" he whispered. "Isn't it, Sir Harry?" Sir Harry Mandifer took his hand from the knob of the small door and turned to look down at his companion.
"That's right, Archer," he said, the door swinging open, all unnoticed behind his back. The thing's a carnivore.
Sea Gulls
I have been sitting here, throughout this entire morning, watching the gulls watching me. They come, a small group at a time, carefully unnoticeable, and squat on various branches of a large tree opposite the hotel veranda. When each shift of them have gaped their fill of me, they fly away and their places are taken at once by others of their disgusting species.
Outside of their orderly coming and going, the deportment of these feathered spectators of my discomfort has been calculatedly devoid of anything which might excite the attention of anyone lacking my particular and special knowledge of their loathsome kind. Their demeanor has been more than ordinarily ordinary. They are on their best behavior, now that they have sealed my doom.
I stumbled on their true nature, and I curse the day I did, by a complete fluke. It was, ironically, Geraldine herself who called my attention to that little army of them on the beach.
We had been sitting side by side on a large, sun-warmed rock, I in a precise but somewhat Redonesque pose, Geraldine in her usual, space-occupying, sprawl. I was deep in a poetic revery, reflecting on the almost alchemical transition of sand to water to sky while Geraldine, my wife, was absorbed in completely finishing off the sumptuous but rather overlarge picnic the hotel staff had prepared for our outing, when she abruptly straightened, a half-consumed jar of pate clutched forgotten in her greasy fingers, and, suddenly emitted that barking coo of hers which never has never failed to simultaneously startle and annoy me throughout all the years of our marriage.
"Hughie, look!" she cried. "The gulls are marching!"
"What do you mean, 'marching?" I asked, doing what I could to conceal my annoyance.
"I mean they're marching, Hughie," she said. "I mean they are marching!"
I looked where she pointed, the pate jar still in her hand, and a vague complaint died unspoken on my lips as I observed that Geraldine had been scrupulously correct in her announcement. The gulls were, indeed, marching.
Their formation was about ten files wide and some forty ranks deep, and it was well held, with no raggedness about the edges. A line of five or so officer gulls marched at the army's head, and one solitary gull, I assumed their general, marched ahead of them.
The gull general was considerably larger than the other birds, and he had an imposing, eaglelike bearing to him. His army was obviously well drilled, for all the gulls marched in
perfect step on their orange claws, and seemed capable of neatly executing endless elaborate maneuvers.
Geraldine and I watched, fascinated, for as long as ten minutes, observing the creatures wheeling about, splitting and rejoining, and carrying out whole routines of complicated, weaving patterns. The display was so astoundingly absorbing that it took me quite some time to realize the fantastic impropriety of the whole proceeding, but at last it dawned on me.
"This will never do," I observed in a firm, quiet tone, and carefully placing my cigar on the edge of the rock, I selected a large, smooth stone and hefted it in my hand.
"Hughie!" Geraldine cried, observing the rock and the look of grim determination on my face. "What are you planning to do?"
"We must discourage this sort of thing the instant we see it," I said. "We must nip it in the bud."
I shot the stone into their midst and they scattered, squawking in a highly satisfactory fashion. I threw another stone, this one rather pointy, and had the pleasure of striking the general smartly on his rear. I turned to Geraldine, expecting words of praise, but of course I should have known better.
"You should not hurt dumb animals," she said, regarding me gently but mournfully as a mother might regard a backward child. "Look, you have made that big one limp!"
"Gulls are birds, not animals," I pointed out. "And their behavior was far from dumb. It was, if you ask me, altogether too smart."
My cigar had gone out so I lit another one, using the gold lighter she had given me a day or so before, and I was so piqued at her that I was tempted to ostentatiously throw it away as casually as I would a match, but she would only have forgiven me with a little sigh and bought me another. I would only be like an infant knocking objects off the tray of his high chairf its bowls and cups replaced with loving care. I had learned, through the years, that there really was no way to get one's rage through to Geraldine.
That night, as we were having dinner on the terrace of the hotel, Geraldine stared out into the darkness and once again drew my attention to an odd action on the part of the gulls. This time her tiny little bark caught me with a spoonful of consomme halfway to my lips, and when I started at the sudden sound, a shimmering blob of the stuff, tumbled back into the bowl with a tiny plop.
"The gulls, Hughie," she said, in a loud, dramatic whisper as she reached out and tightly clutched my arm. "See how they are staring at you!
I frowned at her.
"Gulls?" I said. "It's night, my dear. One doesn't see gulls at night. They go somewhere."
But then I peered where she had pointed, and I saw that once again she was right. There, in the branches of the tree which I have mentioned before, were in view perhaps as many as thirty gulls staring at us, or more precisely at me, with their cold, beady little eyes.
"There must be hundreds of them!" she whispered. "They're everywhere!"
Again she was quite correct. The creatures were not only in the tree, they were perched on railings, stone vases, the heads of statues, and all the various other accoutrements with which a first-class, traditional French seaboard hotel is wont to litter its premises. They were all, to the last gull among them, staring steadily and unblinkingly at me.
"Do you think," I whispered very quietly to Geraldine, "that anyone else has noticed?"
"I don't believe so," she said, and turned to openly study the people sitting at neighboring tables. "Should we ask them if they have?"
"For God's sake, no!" I said, in a harsh whisper. "What do you think it looks like—being singled out by crowds of gulls to be stared at? How do you think it makes me feel?"
"Of course, Hughie," she said, loosing her hold on my arm and patting my hand. "Don't you worry, dearest. We shall just pretend it isn't happening."
Halfway through the wretched dinner the gulls flew off for mysterious reasons of their own, and when it was through I made my excuses and left my wife to attend to herself while I took a thoughtful little stroll.
I had some time ago sketched out the broad design of what I intended to do during our visit to this hotel, had, indeed, begun to plan it the very day Geraldine suggested we come here to celebrate our wedding anniversary, because it had dawned on me fatally and completely and quite irreversibly, even as she spoke, that we had already celebrated far too many anniversaries and that this one should definitely be our last.
But now it was time to put in the fine details, the small, delicate strokes which would spell the difference between disaster and success. Eliminating Geraldine would serve very little purpose if I did not survive the act to enjoy her money afterward.
I wandered down to the canopied pier where I knew the hotel moored several brightly painted little rowboats, and even a couple of dwarfish sailboats, for the use of their guests. I knew full well that the sailboats would strike Geraldine as being far too adventurous, so I concentrated on examining the rowboats.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they were even more unseaworthy than I'd dared to hope. I quietly tested them, one after the other, and found that the boat at the end of the pier, a jaunty little thing with a puce hull and a bright gold stripe running around its sides, was especially dangerous. I felt absolutely confident the police would have no trouble at all in convincing themselves that any drowning fatality associated with this highly tippy boat had been the result of a tragic accident.
Just to make sure—I have been accused of being something of a perfectionist—I climbed into the tiny craft, pretended I was rowing, and then suddenly made a move to one side. The boat came so close to capsizing that I had considerable difficulty avoiding unexpectedly tumbling out of it then and there! I exited the craft carefully, with even more respect for its deadliness, and started walking up the path leading back to the hotel, whistling a little snatch of a Chopin mazurka softly to myself as I went.
The path took a turn by a kind of miniature cliff, which concealed it from almost all points of view, and when I reached this point
the mazurka died on my lips as I saw that the ground before me was lumpy and grayish in the moonlight as though it was infested with some sort of disgusting mold, but then I peered closer and saw that the place was horribly carpeted with the softly stirring bodies of countless sea gulls.
They were crowded together, so tightly packed that there was absolutely no space between them, and every one of them was glaring up at me. The menace emanating from their hundreds of tiny eyes was, at the same time, both ridiculous and totally terrifying. It was also positively sickening, and for a brief, absolutely ghastly moment I was afraid that I would faint and fall and be suffocated in the soft, feathery sea of them.
However, I took several very deep breaths and managed to still the pounding in my ears and to steady myself. With great casualness, very slowly and deliberately, I reached into my breast pocket and withdrew a cigar. I lit the cigar and blew a contemptuous puff of smoke at the enormous crowd of gulls at my feet.
"You have exceeded your position in life," I told them, speaking softly and calmly. "You have overstepped your natural authority. But I am on to you."
I drew on the cigar carefully, increasing its ash, and when I'd produced a good half inch, I tapped the cigar so that the ash fell directly and humiliatingly on the top of the head of the remarkably large gull standing directly in front of me. Of course I had recognized him as the general. He did not stir or blink; nor did any of the others. They continued to glare up at me.
"Whereas you are merely birds," I continued, "and scavenger birds at that, I am a human being. I am not only smarter than you are, I am stronger. If you attack me, I will simply shield my eyes with my arm and walk away, and soon other humans will see me and come to my aid."
I took another long pull at my cigar and looked away from them, as if bored.
"I guarantee you," I went on, "that I will not panic. I will survive, merely scratched, to see that you, and a great number of your kin, pay dearly for attacking your betters. Pay painfully. Pay with your lives."