by Gahan Wilson
The ball, on the other hand, made an almost fiendishly penetrating kind of clatter which brought to mind the rappings of bony knuckles and the chatterings of fever victims' teeth, and I confess that throughout my gaming I always found myself holding my breath like one afraid of being overheard in some dark place during the whole time it danced and bounced from one number to the next.
At first I gambled in a somewhat dilettantish sort of way, not following any particular pattern and frankly more interested in my fellow gamblers than the results of my betting, but then I felt the Baroness' gaze upon me and turned to her and saw her studying me with some amusement.
"Have you decided to wager for money or for more important things?" she asked me, and I am afraid I looked at her a trifle blankly.
"Surely you have understood by now," she continued, with just a trace of impatience. "That ancient fellow expiring of old age as they dragged him away? The child turning into a baby before your eyes?"
She bent a little closer to me.
"Take a quiet look at the General beside you," she whispered softly. "Obviously he is winning. Wouldn't you say he is now at least a decade younger?"
I turned my head surreptitiously to steal a glance at General Vasillos Konstantinides and I am afraid my eyes must have literally bulged as I observed that the Baroness was quite right and that the old gentleman appeared to have dropped at least a good tenth of a century. He turned to me and grinned hugely with a whole new brightness in his eyes.
"It is an extraordinary place, is it not?" he asked me, and with a hearty puff at his cigar he enthusiastically resumed his gambling.
I turned back to the Baroness and stared with astonishment down at her upturned face as she regarded me with an ironic smile.
" Now you finally appear to have got it," she said dryly, after a little pause. "The penny seems to have finally dropped."
"But how is it done?" I asked in a cracked whisper.
"Exactly as I told you, dear boy," she said. "You make up your mind what you want and then you gamble for it. You don't have to tell anyone, you just go ahead and do it. It's as simple as that."
Then she paused and leaned forward and I saw the jewels on her fingers sparkle under the chandelier as she took hold of my arm and held it in a tightening grip.
"But you absolutely must remember what I told you back in the car," she said, with extreme solemnity. "That if you lose, you lose in those same terms you've set."
Her grip continued to tighten until it became positively painful. I could feel her nails digging into the fabric of my sleeve and one or two of them actually penetrating my flesh.
"That woman you saw this morning," she said, "that poor, bent, moaning creature they were carrying down the staircase in a chair, was Mademoiselle Chandron. She was born horribly deformed, you see. She had been betting against it all this week and she'd been winning. Those were her terms. Last night she lost. Rather horribly, I'm afraid."
The Baroness studied me carefully for a long moment, then she nodded, apparently satisfied at her instructions, gave me a final, almost motherly, smile of encouragement, let go of my arm, and went back to her game.
I looked up at the croupier to find he was regarding me with the same sort of intensity as a poised and swaying cobra regards a fakir from its basket and somehow I summoned the courage to stare back at him.
Apparently, at a previous point all unknown to my conscious mind, I must have carefully formed the whole structure of my special wager for I found I had it ready for him then and there. He read it somehow, gave me a small, cool, barely noticeable nod, and then once more spun his wheel.
As this totally different game advanced I began to empathize increasingly with the profound seriousness of my fellow wagerers. There were tuggings in my gut now which I had never felt before, there was a bottomless depth of awful apprehension in my belly deeper than any I had previously known.
More and more my mind, my whole being, focused in on the spinnings and respinnings and spinnings again of that pretty wheel with its flashing gold bandings and its constantly changing tones, and the cracking and chittering of that smartly tossed ivory ball made me jump and wince like a child frightened by a boogie man under the bed.
But I was winning more and more, steadily and regularly, and I could feel the shape of what I was after growing realer and solider each time the croupier pushed more chips toward me with his little golden rake. Soon, very soon, if my luck held, if I could only maintain this constant improvement, it would all come true with a kind of click whose first echoings I could almost hear. It would suddenly tumble into place and be there, done and completed and solid. It would be a holdable fact and I would have it truly. It would be mine.
Then I heard a horrible hollow gasp and turned to see the Baroness folding in on herself beside me like a collapsing spring.
"Take hold of her, sir," whispered the General urgently into my ear.
I turned to him and was astonished to see he was now nearly as young as myself.
"Help her at once, man," he said, "or she'll fall from her chair!"
I grabbed her near arm with both my hands and was appalled to feel the change in it. I had held that arm before, helping her rise in the salon, escorting her along with Denise into the dining room of the Hotel Splendide, and it had been firm and full with smooth, resilient skin.
Now that skin was limp and porous and hung loosely as an oversized sleeve from an arm which had shriveled to something little more than bone and stringy muscle. I gaped at her and saw that in the last half hour or so her whole body had undergone the sort of ghastly shrinking which was ordinarily produced only by long months of some monstrous wasting disease.
"She has lost badly," said the General. "We must make a sizable wager from her funds at once. She hasn't the time to drag it out.”
He reached across me to her pile of counters and hastily shoved forward something more than half of them just in time to catch the new spinning of the wheel.
"Rien ne va plus, ” said the croupier, and we both watched the hopping of the bone-pale ball with a terrible intentness and we both cursed when it landed wrong.
I was now holding the Baroness with both arms, cradling her against me, and I could actually feel her body shrinking as the wheel slowed to a stop.
"There's not much left of her," I said.
"Cancer/’ said the General. "I thought she’d beaten it. I thought she was betting on something else altogether. I suppose she was trying to make sure she’d cleaned it out of her body.
He reached across me again and pushed what was left of her counters onto the board. She lost again.
"Oh, damn/’ said the General, very softly. "Oh damn, damn, damn.’’
It only took one of those purple-clad attendants to lift her, chair and all. I reached up and touched the General, who had stood in order to follow after her. .
"I’ve got to finish,’’ I said.
He glanced down at me and nodded.
"Of course you do, old fellow,’’ he said, scooping up his counters. "We’ll both be waiting in the Bentley.”
He glanced down at his chips.
"I’d give you these to play with,’’ he said. "But we can't transfer them from one of us to another. It's one of their damned rules, you see."
I nodded and he pushed them all through the little slot cut into the table in front of the croupier to receive his tips.
"Pour votre servicethe General said to him and the croupier mechanically gave him one of his little bows.
"Merci beauccup, ” he said.
It was no time at all, I think only three more bets, before I felt something go absolutely right inside me and knew for certain that I had won. I pushed a generous tip into the slot, but did not follow the General's example and leave all my remaining chips as I did not care overmuch for the croupier.
"Merci beauccup, ” he said, giving me the same exact bow he had bestowed on the General.
We took what was left of the Baroness t
o the hospital. After some hours I yielded to the General's kindly insistence I be driven back to the hotel and left him with her, sitting next to her bed in the dimly lit room. I hope to see them both again sometime, but one never knows. There is so much luck involved in that sort of thing.
The next morning, after a very nice breakfast, I passed through the tall front doors of the Hotel Splendide for perhaps the very last time and made my way leisurely down its steps to the Rolls Silver Ghost patiently waiting for me with my family crest, the crest of that legendarily distinguished and wealthy family I had claimed to belong to and now actually did belong to, painted very discreetly on both its rear doors.
The chauffeur greeted me with considerable deference as I had been wise enough to improve my situation with that family in the terms of my bet from being an obscure member of the clan to being its oldest son and, therefore, the major inheritor of its practically uncountable holdings. I would be, upon the death of my elderly mother, one of the richest men in the world. I was presently something like the tenth richest man in the world.
With a deep bow, a much better bow I may say than anything the croupier of the Casino Mirago had to offer, my chauffeur opened the door of my Rolls and I prepared to enter it in order to sit next to my wife, the former Denise Chandron, and give her the kiss I had been aching to bestow upon her for what now seemed a very long time as I loved her very deeply because—among the many other marvelous and wonderful things about her—I knew she would be exactly as beautiful as she wanted to be. The terms of the bet I had made at the Casino Mirago had left all that entirely up to her.
The Frog Prince
Ah, so, again the same dream," sighed Doctor Neiman, without any trace of accusation, making a note among many other notes in his notebook. "Always the same dream."
Frog rolled the tiniest bit to the right on the couch, selecting another part of the ceiling to look at, the part with the crack which ran out of the edging of plaster flowers like a questing tendril, perhaps his favorite part.
He was aware that the continuing emanation of sweat from his armpits was once again soaking itself into the twin bunching of his shirt underneath the tweed jacket, making the material into two hard, swelling, highly uncomfortable lumps.
There was so much moisture in him! Saliva, as always, had nearly filled his mouth and he would soon have to swallow, silently, as silently as possible, since Doctor Neiman often incorporated Frog's frequent gulpings into his little analytical summations near the ends of their sessions. Frog always felt particularly vulnerable when it came to gulpings. With reason, of course, with reason.
And then there was the constant wetness in his eyes which would increase and brim and finally spill over the edges of his heavy, puffy lids and roll down his round, pale cheeks each and every time he spoke or thought of sad or moving things, which was often. Not to mention the constant moisture on his palms which turned them into little, pale suction cups and made them cling alarmingly to the soft leather of the couch, or the ever renewing dampness of his socks so that the unending process of evaporation taking place continued to bring uncomfortable and unnerving coolness to the wide bottoms of his feet.
Sometimes, lying there, he wondered if he was making visible rivulets and pools underneath himself on the surface of the couch. Sometimes he wondered if it had got so bad it was running off the couch's sides and darkening the thick oriental carpet, and that only Doctor Neiman's professional politeness was preventing him from making some totally understandable comment about the potential damage this flood of sweat and tears and drool—yes, even drool!—represented to his property.
Again and again he would turn on the couch—always just the tiniest little bit—and think these thoughts, and each time he moved he would anticipate and listen, with repressed winces, for the squishings and squelchings which he never heard, thank God!
But when he finally rose to leave at the end of his session and was not able to resist the impulse to look back down at the couch and see if the damage done by the flood of moisture from his round body was anywhere near as bad as his imagination conjured, he would observe, with perhaps the smallest wisp of disappointment, that the couch had not been reduced to a sodden, dripping mass, that it seemed startlingly dry, and that the only visible trace of all that steady gushing seemed to be a faint dampness on the disposable paper cover on the pillow—a dim round spot representing his head with a short, wide, vertical tail underneath it representing his neck, the whole thing vaguely suggesting the sun reflected in water more or less as it would be done if painted by Edvard Munch.
"The king in your dream," Doctor Neiman said, frowning and making another note, perhaps underlining it. "You say you feel he is your father?"
His father, yes! his father. Holding him high in his heavy, hard metal gauntlets, holding him over the battlements of the topmost tower so that they could look down upon their kingdom together and see the glinting of gold, the long banners flapping, the dust rising from the wide earth road and settling on the gaudy wrappings of the horses; holding him high so that he could clearly hear the trumpets, the loving cheers from the crowd, the drumbeats! The king had been, indeed, his father.
But then had come the spell, and the separation, and the desperate, unsuccessful hunting which had once come so close, so terribly close that he had felt the water shaking, the whole pool trembling, as the hoofs pounded the soft earth of its round shore, could even see the ripples caused by nearness of the trumpets' high, brassy notes.
Worst of all had been the horribly brief glimpse of a rider larger than all the others, bound in golden armor, wearing a long, billowing, red cape, and calling out his name over and over in a cracked, frantic lion's roar.
Not that he hadn't loved the pool, loved the modulations of its greenness as he swam this way and that underwater; loved digging into the cool, soft, receiving blackness of its bottom mud; loved to squat waiting on the smooth warmth of its lily pads, letting the hunger lazily grow and watching the buzzing bugs circle overhead, their wings sparkling in the sunlight, until they came too close.
It was a warm July day and he had fed particularly well and was swimming just below the surface with wide, easy strokes when he saw a great, bright pinkness shimmering ahead of him through the water, a blur of color so-dazzling that his limbs stopped moving where they were and only his momentum pushed him through the water, closer to that vast glowing, in a dreamy, hypnotized, forward drifting.
The wide, round, golden bulging of his eyes with their long black slits strained past aching to absorb the sight of this gorgeousness as it came nearer and nearer, and he sank into a trance far, far deeper than his tiny pond.
Then the pinkness moved, faceted by the water into a enormous, glittering wall of multitudinous shades of rose and pale reds, and he realized how huge, how tremendous the thing that made it must be, and backed away speedily, sculling to the security of the far end of the pond and a cluster of willow roots where he cowered behind the slimy stems a moment, gathering himself and letting his heart slow so that its pounding didn't frighten him quite so much.
But the pinkness continued to fascinate him absolutely, and he found himself slowly and carefully raising his head, keeping his eyes the highest part of him until they gently and very quietly broke the surface of the water and he found himself staring directly at a beautiful woman kneeling by the side of the pond and smiling intently into its mysteries.
The pinkness had been her face and neck and shoulders and arms leaning over the surface of his pond. The rest of her was clad in a long green dress flecked with gold, and had blended with the water. Her hair was a piled mass of gold and Frog knew that was what he had taken for the sun.
He realized, then and there, that he would love her always and forever, hopelessly and beyond redemption. Clinging to the smooth curving of a willow root with his tiny, emerald feet, he stared at her with a helpless wonder for long, uncounted minutes, and his ordinarily unnoticed blood stirred strangely within him and seemed to wa
rm him and he almost half believed that he could sense it taking on a redness in his veins.
It began to dawn on him, watching her make one precious, unforgettable, irreplaceable move of her body after another, that he had been alone in his quiet little pond for a long, long while. He observed her slim, pale, perfect fingers trail along the surface of the water and was astonished to realize how far ago that day of hoof poundings and harsh trumpet blasts and hoarse shoutings of his name must have been. He watched her darling arm straighten as she stretched forward to gently nudge a floating leaf and was amazed to see how faint and dim and blurred with time the recollections of his castle and his father's face had grown in his mind.
With an incredible effort, he tore his eyes from his beloved and let himself slide noiselessly down the willow root to the soft, yielding mud at the bottom of the pond, and then he walked on the tips of his toes over the vagueness of the mud's dim, uncertain surface until he came to a little heap of algae-covered rocks. He moved the rocks gently to one side and then carefully dug into the bit of mud which they had marked. At first his gropings only found deeper mud and a terrible anxiety swept through him, but then he clawed just a little farther and felt a flood of enormous relief when the pale little pads on the ends of his front feet made contact with a smooth, hard, curving surface.
He reached down, and when all his green fingers were curled around the object hidden underneath the mud, he pulled mightily with every bit of strength in his stout little body and at last, with a wet sucking and a dark, swirling cloud of mud, he pulled out his treasure.
It was a lovely, large ruby carved beautifully into the shape of a heart, and as he gently stroked the mud from its surface, it glowed brightly, even here, in the deepest, darkest corner of the pond. It had stayed with him, he had no idea why or how, through his losses and transformations, and through all the endless eons which had passed over him since.
He had always suspected there was something wonderful and magical about it; it had always been a great source of hope, and now, holding it with a clear plan forming easily and effortlessly in his mind, he was sure of it. He knew, in the deepest part of his speckled green body, that he and it had been waiting together in this lonely pool all along, through all these stretching years, for just this moment.