The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  I told him. “But you’d have to have Jud or one of the boys from Newhale Appliance look at it, to say what it was.”

  “It smells,” said Doc. “It stinks, right out loud.”

  The bolt of lightning came so quickly and hit so close that I wasn’t conscious of anything but a great flare of livid green. Doc yelled. The station wagon slewed on the road that now had a thin film of mud over it, and I saw trees rushing at us, their tops bent by a sudden wind so that they seemed to be literally leaping forward. There was no thunder. I remembered that, I don’t know why. The station wagon tipped over and hit the trees. There was a crash. The door flew open and I fell out through a wet whipping tangle of branches and on down to the steep-tilted ground below. I kept on falling, right down the slope, until a gully pocket caught and held me. I lay there dazed, staring up at the station wagon that now hung over my head. I saw Doc’s legs come out of it, out the open door. He was all right. He was letting himself down to the ground. And then the lightning came again.

  It swallowed the station wagon and the trees and Doc in a ball of green fire, and when it went away the trees were scorched and the paint was blistered on the wrecked car, and Doc was rolling over and over down the slope, very slowly, as if he was tired and did not want to hurry. He came to rest not three feet away from me. His hair and his clothes were smoldering, but he wasn’t worrying about it. He wasn’t worrying about anything, any more. And for the second time there had not been any thunder, close at hand where the lightning was.

  The rain came down on Doc in heavy sheets, and put the smoldering fire out.

  Jim Bossert had just come from posting Doc Callendar’s body. For the first time I found myself almost liking him, he looked so sick and beat-out. I pushed the bottle toward him, and he drank out of it and then lighted a cigarette and just sat there shaking.

  “It was lightning,” he said. “No doubt at all.”

  Ed Betts, the sheriff, said, “Hank still insists there was something screwy about it.”

  Bossert shook his head at me. “Lightning.”

  “Or a heavy electric charge,” I said. “That comes to the same thing, doesn’t it?”

  “But you saw it hit, Hank.”

  “Twice,” I said. “Twice.”

  We were in Bossert’s office at the hospital. It was late in the afternoon, getting on for supper time. I reached for the bottle again, and Ed said quietly, “Lightning does do that, you know. In spite of the old saying.”

  “The first time, it missed,” I said. “Just. Second time it didn’t. If I hadn’t been thrown clear I’d be dead too. And there wasn’t any thunder.”

  “You were dazed,” Bossert said. “The first shock stunned you.”

  “It was green,” I said.

  “Fireballs often are.”

  “But not lightning.”

  “Atmospheric freak.” Ed turned to Jim Bossert. “Give him something and send him home.”

  Bossert nodded and got up, but I said, “No. I’ve got to write up a piece on Doc for tomorrow’s paper. See you.”

  I didn’t want to talk any more. I went out and got my car and drove back to town. I felt funny. Hollow, cold, with a veil over my brain so I couldn’t see anything clearly or think about anything clearly. I stopped at the store and bought another bottle to see me through the night, and a feeling of cold evil was in me, and I thought of green, silent lightning, and little gimcracks that didn’t belong in a television set, and the grave wise face of a child who was not quite human. The face wavered and became the face of a man. A man from Hrylliannu.

  I drove home, to the old house where nobody lives now but me. I wrote my story about Doc, and when I was through it was dark and the bottle was nearly empty. I went to bed.

  I dreamed Doc Callendar called me on the phone and said, “I’ve found him but you’ll have to hurry.” And I said, “But you’re dead. Don’t call me, Doc, please don’t.” But the phone kept ringing and ringing, and after a while I woke part way up and it really was ringing. It was two-forty-nine a.m.

  It was Ed Betts. “Fire up at the hospital, Hank. I thought you’d want to know. The south wing. Gotta go now.”

  He hung up and I began to put clothes on the leaden dummy that was me. The south wing, I thought, and sirens went whooping up Goat Hill. The south wing. That’s where X-ray is. That’s where the pictures of the boy’s insides are on file.

  What a curious coincidence, I thought.

  I drove after the sirens up Goat Hill, through the clear cool night with half a moon shining silver on the ridges, and Buckhorn standing calm and serene against the stars, thinking the lofty thoughts that seem to be reserved for mountains.

  The south wing of the hospital burned brightly, a very pretty orange color against the night.

  I pulled off the road and parked well below the center of activity and started to walk the rest of the way. Patients were being evacuated from the main building. People ran with things in their hands. Firemen yelled and wrestled with hoses and streams of water arced over the flames. I didn’t think they were going to save the south wing. I thought they would be doing well to save the hospital.

  Another unit of the fire department came hooting and clanging up the road behind me. I stepped off the shoulder and as I did so I looked down to be sure of my footing. A flicker of movement on the slope about ten feet below caught my eye. Dimly, in the reflected glow of the fire, I saw the girl.

  She was slim and light as a gazelle, treading her furtive way among the trees. Her hair was short and curled close to her head. In that light it was merely dark, but I knew it would be red in the sunshine, with glints of silver in it. She saw me or heard me, and she stopped for a second or two, startled, looking up. Her eyes shone like two coppery sparks, as the eyes of an animal shine, weird in the pale oval of her face. Then she turned and ran.

  I went after her. She ran fast, and I was in lousy shape. But I was thinking about Doc.

  I caught her.

  It was dark all around us under the trees, but the firelight and the moonlight shone together into the clearing where we were. She didn’t struggle or fight me. She turned around kind of light and stiff to face me, holding herself away from me as much as she could with my hands gripping her arms.

  “What do you want with me?” she said, in a breathless little voice. It was accented, and sweet as a bird’s. “Let me go.”

  I said, “What relation are you to the boy?”

  That startled her. I saw her eyes widen, and then she turned her head and looked toward the darkness under the trees. “Please let me go,” she said, and I thought that some new fear had come to her.

  I shook her, feeling her small arms under my hands, wanting to break them, wanting to torture her because of Doc. “How was Doc killed?” I asked her. “Tell me. Who did it, and how?”

  She stared at me. “Doc?” she repeated. “I do not understand.” Now she began to struggle. “Let me go! You hurt me.”

  “The green lightning,” I said. “A man was killed by it this morning. My friend. I want to know about it.”

  “Killed?” she whispered. “Oh, no. No one has been killed.”

  “And you set that fire in the hospital, didn’t you? Why? Why were those films such a threat to you? Who are you? Where—”

  “Hush,” she said. “Listen.”

  I listened. There were sounds, soft and stealthy, moving up the slope toward us.

  “They’re looking for me,” she whispered. “Please let me go. I don’t know about your friend, and the fire was—necessary. I don’t want anyone hurt, and if they find you like this—”

  I dragged her back into the shadows underneath the trees. There was a huge old maple there with a gnarly trunk. We stood behind it, and now I had my arm around her waist and her head pressed back against my shoulder, and my right hand over her mouth.

  “Where do you come from?” I asked her, with my mouth close to her ear. “Where is Hrylliannu?”

  Her body stiffened. It was
a nice body, very much like the boy’s in some ways, delicately made but strong, and with superb coordination. In other ways it was not like the boy’s at all. I was thinking of her as an enemy, but it was impossible not to think of her as a woman, too.

  She said, her voice muffled under my hand, “Where did you hear that name?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Just answer me.”

  She wouldn’t.

  “Where do you live now? Somewhere near here?”

  She only strained to get away.

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll go now. Back up to the hospital. The sheriff wants to see you.”

  I started to drag her away up the hill, and then two men came into the light of the clearing.

  One was slender and curly-headed in that particular way I was beginning to know. He looked pleasantly excited, pleasantly stimulated, as though by a game in which he found enjoyment. His eyes picked up the fitful glow of the fire and shone eerily, as the girl’s had.

  The other man was a perfectly ordinary type. He was dark and heavy-set and tall, and his khaki pants sagged under his belly. His face was neither excited nor pleasant. It was obvious that to him this was no game. He carried a heavy automatic, and I thought he was perfectly prepared to use it.

  I was afraid of him.

  “…to send a dame, anyway,” he was saying.

  “That’s your prejudice speaking,” said the curly-haired man. “She was the only one to send.” He gestured toward the flames. “How can you doubt it?”

  “She’s been caught.”

  “Not Vadi.” He began to call softly. “Vadi? Vadi!”

  The girl’s lips moved under my hand. I bent to hear, and she said in the faint ghost of a whisper:

  “If you want to live, let me go to them.”

  The big dark man said grimly, “She’s been caught. We’d better do something about it, and do it quick.”

  He started across the clearing.

  The girl’s lips shaped one word. “Please!”

  The dark man came with his big gun, and the curly-headed one came a little behind him, walking as a stalking cat walks, soft and springy on its toes. If I dragged the girl away they would hear me. If I stayed where I was, they would walk right onto me. Either way, I thought, I would pretty surely go to join Doc on the cold marble.

  I let the girl go.

  She ran out toward them. I stood stark and frozen behind the maple tree, waiting for her to turn and say the word that would betray me.

  She didn’t turn, and she didn’t say the word. The curly-headed man put his arms around her and they talked rapidly for perhaps half a minute, and I heard her tell the dark man that she had only waited to be sure they would not be able to put the fire out too soon. Then all three turned and went quickly away among the dark trees.

  I stayed where I was for a minute, breathing hard, trying to think. Then I went hunting for the sheriff.

  By the time I found Ed Betts, of course, it was already too late. But he sent a car out anyway. They didn’t find a trace of anyone on the road who answered the descriptions I gave.

  Ed looked at me closely in the light of the dying fire, which they had finally succeeded in bringing under control. “Don’t get sore at me now, Hank,” he said. “But are you real sure you saw these people?”

  “I’m sure,” I said. I could still, if I shut my eyes and thought about it, feel the girl’s body in my arms. “Her name was Vadi. Now I want to talk to Croft.”

  Croft was the Fire Marshal. I watched the boys pouring water on what was left of the south wing, which was nothing more than a pile of hot embers with some pieces of wall standing near it. Jim Bossert joined us, looking exhausted and grimy. He was too tired even to curse. He just wailed a little about the loss of all his fine X-ray equipment, and all his records.

  “I met the girl who did it,” I said. “Ed doesn’t believe me.”

  “Girl?” said Bossert, staring.

  “Girl. Apparently an expert at this sort of thing.” I wondered what the curly-haired man was to her. “Was anybody hurt?”

  “By the grace of God,” said Bossert, “no.”

  “How did it start?”

  “I don’t know. All of a sudden I woke up and every window in the south wing was spouting flame like a volcano.”

  I glanced at Ed, who shrugged. “Could have been a short in that high-voltage equipment.”

  Bossert said, “What land of a girl? A lunatic?”

  “Another one like the boy. There was a man with her, maybe the boy’s father, I don’t know. The third one was just a man. Mean looking bastard with a gun. She said the fire was necessary.”

  “All this, just to get rid of some films?”

  “It must be important to them,” I said. “They already killed Doc. They tried to kill me. What’s a fire?”

  Ed Betts swore, his face twisted between unbelief and worry. Then Croft came up. Ed asked him, “What started the fire?”

  Croft shook his head. “Too early to tell yet. Have to wait till things cool down. But I’ll lay you any odds you like it was started by chemicals.”

  “Deliberately?”

  “Could be,” said Croft, and went away again.

  I looked at the sky. It was almost dawn, that beautiful bleak time when the sky is neither dark nor light and the mountains are cut from black cardboard, without perspective. I said, “I’m going up to the Tates’. I’m worried about the boy.”

  “All right,” said Ed quickly, “I’ll go with you. In my car. We’ll stop in town and pick up Jud. I want him to see that teevee.”

  “The hell with Jud,” I said. “I’m in a hurry.” And suddenly I was. Suddenly I was terribly afraid for that grave-faced child who was obviously the unwitting key to some secret that was important enough to justify arson and murder to those who wanted to keep it.

  Ed hung right behind me. He practically shoved me into his car. It had county sheriff painted on its door, and I thought of Doc’s station wagon with its county health service, and it seemed like a poor omen but there was nothing I could do about it.

  There was nothing I could do about stopping for Jud Spofford, either. Ed went in and routed him out of bed, taking the car keys with him. I sat smoking and looking up at Tunkhannock Ridge, watching it brighten to gold at the crest as the sun came up. Finally Jud came out grumbling and climbed in the back seat, a tall lanky young fellow in a blue coverall with Newhale Electric Appliance Co. embroidered in red on the pocket. His little wife watched from the doorway, holding her pink wrapper together.

  We went away up Tunkhannock Ridge. There was still a black smudge of smoke above the hospital on Goat Hill. The sky over Buckhorn Mountain was clear and bright.

  Sally Tate and her boy were already gone.

  Mrs. Tate told us about it, while we sat on the lumpy sofa in the living room and the fat old dog watched us through the screen door, growling. Sally’s sisters, or some of them at least, were in the kitchen listening.

  “Never was so surprised at anything in my life,” said Mrs. Tate. “Pa had just gone out to the barn with Harry and J. P.—them’s the two oldest girls’ husbands, you know. I and the girls was washing up after breakfast, and I heard this car drive in. Sure enough it was him. I went out on the stoop—”

  “What kind of a car?” asked Ed.

  “Same panel truck he was driving before, only the name was painted out. Kind of a dirty blue all over. “Well,’ I says, ‘I never expected to see your face around here again!’, I says, and he says—”

  Boiled down to reasonable length, the man had said that he had always intended to come back for Sally, and that if he had known about the boy he would have come much sooner. He had been away, he said, on business, and had only just got back and heard about Sally bringing the child in to the hospital, and knew that it must be his. He had gone up to the house, and Sally had come running out into his arms, her face all shining. Then they went in together to see the boy, and Bill Jones had fondled him and called him
Son, and the boy had watched him sleepily and without affection.

  “They talked together for a while, private,” said Mrs. Tate, “and then Sally come and said he was going to take her away and marry her and make the boy legal, and would I help her pack. And I did, and they went away together, the three of ‘em. Sally didn’t know when she’d be back.”

  She shook her head, smoothing her hair with knotted fingers. “I just don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.”

  “What?” I asked her. “Was there something wrong?” I knew there was, but I wanted to hear what she had to say.

  “Nothing you could lay your hand to,” she said. “And Sally was so happy. She was just fit to burst. And he was real pleasant, real polite to me and Pa. We asked him about all them lies he told, and he said they wasn’t lies at all. He said the man he was working for did plan to open a store in Newhale, but then he got sick and the plan fell through. He said his name was Bill Jones, and showed us some cards and things to prove it. And he said Sally just misunderstood the name of the place he come from because he give it the old Spanish pronunciation.”

  “What did he say it was really?” Ed asked, and she looked surprised.

  “Now I think of it, I guess he didn’t say.”

  “Well, where’s he going to live, with Sally?”

  “He isn’t settled yet. He’s got two or three prospects, different places. She was so happy,” said Mrs. Tate, “and I ought to be too, ‘cause Lord knows I’ve wished often enough he would come back and get that peaky brat of his, and Sally too if she was minded. But I ain’t. I ain’t happy at all, and I don’t know why.”

  “Natural reaction,” said Ed Betts heartily. “You miss your daughter, and probably the boy too, more than you know.”

  “I’ve had daughters married before. It was something about this man. Something—” Mrs. Tate hesitated a long time, searching for a word. “Queer,” she said at last. “Wrong. I couldn’t tell you what. Like the boy, only more so. The boy has Sally in him. This one—” She made a gesture with her hands. “Oh, well, I expect I’m just looking for trouble.”

  “I expect so, Mrs. Tate,” said Ed, “but you be sure and get in touch with me if you don’t hear from Sally in a reasonable time. And now I’d like this young man to look at your teevee.”