Selected Stories of Alfred Bester

by Alfred Bester

  “How do you mean?”

  “A wife is a wife,” Bacon said. “Three wives are just more of the same But this was going to bed with a tiger.” He smiled sourly. “Only it’s all my imagination, they keep telling me. I never really killed her because she never really lived.”

  “You killed her? Freyda?”

  “It was a war from the start,” he said, “and it ended up with a killing. It wasn’t love with her, it was war.”

  “This is all your imagination?”

  “That’s what the head-shrinkers tell me. I lost a week. Seven days. They tell me I rented an apartment all right, but I didn’t put her in it because there never was any Freyda. We didn’t tear each other apart because there was only me up there all the time. Alone. She wasn’t a crazy, mauling bitch who used to say: ‘Sigma, darling...’”

  “Say what?”

  “You heard me. ‘Sigma, darling.’ That’s how she said goodbye. ‘Sigma, darling.’ That’s what she said on the last day. With a crazy glitter in her virgin eyes. Told me it was no good between us. That she’d phoned Liz and told her all about it and was walking out. ‘Sigma, darling,’ she said and started for the door.”

  “She told Liz? Told your wife?”

  Bacon nodded. “I grabbed her and dragged her away from the door. I locked the door and phoned Liz. That tiger was tearing at me all the time. I got Liz on the horn and it was true. Liz was packing. I hung that phone up on that bitch’s head. I was wild. I tore her clothes off. I dragged her into the bedroom and threw her down and choked her. Christ! How I strangled her...”

  After a pause, I asked: “Liz?”

  “They were pounding on the door outside,” Bacon went on. “I knew she was dead. She had to be dead. I went and opened the door. There were six million cops and six million honest johns still squawking about the screaming. I thought to myself: ‘Why, this is just like the show you do every week. Play it like the script.’ I said to them: ‘Come on in and join the murder — ’” He broke off.

  “Was she dead... Freyda?”

  “There was no murder, ” he said slowly. “There was no Freyda. That apartment was ten floors up in the Kingston Hotel. There wasn't any fire-escape. There was only the front door jammed with cops and squares. And there was no one in the apartment but a crazy guy — naked, sweating and swearing. Me.”

  “She was gone? Where? How? It doesn't make sense.”

  He shook his head and stared at the table in sullen confusion. After a long pause he continued: “There was nothing left from Freyda but a crazy souvenir. It must have busted off in the fight we had — the fight everybody said was imaginary. It was the dial of her watch.”

  “What was crazy about it?”

  “It was numbered from two to twenty-four by twos. Two, four, six, eight, ten... and so on.”

  “Maybe it was a foreign watch. Europeans use the twenty-four hour system. I mean, noon is twelve and one o'clock is thirteen and — ”

  “Don't overwhelm me,” Bacon interrupted wearily. “I was in the army. I know all about that. But I've never seen a clock-face like that used for it. No one has. It was out of this world. I mean that literally.”

  “Yes? How?”

  “I met her again.”

  “Freyda?"

  He nodded. “I met her in Coney Island again, hanging around the roller coaster. I was no fool. I went looking for her and I found her.”

  “Beat up?”

  “Not a mark on her. Fresh and virgin all over again, though it was only a couple of weeks later. There she was, the Black Widow Spider, smelling the flies as they came staggering off the roller coaster. I went up behind her and I grabbed her. I pulled her around into the alley between the freak tents and I said: ‘Let out one peep and you're dead for sure this time.’”

  “Did she fight?”

  “No," he said. "She was loving it. She looked like she just found a million bucks. That glitter in her eyes... ”

  “I don't understand. ”

  “I did when I looked at her. When I looked into that virgin face, happy and smiling because I was screaming at her. I said: ‘The cops swear nobody was in the apartment but me. That put you inside my head and that put me inside the Section Eight ward for a week.' I said: 'But I know how you got out and I know where you went.’” He stopped and looked hard at me. I looked hard at him.

  “How drunk are you?” he asked.

  “Drunk enough to believe anything.”

  “She went out through time,” Bacon said. "Understand? Through time. To another time. To the future. She melted and dissolved right out.”

  “What? Time Travel? I'm not drunk enough to believe that.”

  “Time Travel.” He nodded. “That's why she had that watch — some kind of time machine. That's how she got herself patched up so fast. She could have stayed up there for a year and them come right back to Now or two weeks after Now. And that's why she said 'Sigma, darling.’ It's how they talk up there.”

  “Now wait a minute, Eddie — ”

  “And that's why she wanted to come so close to getting herself killed.”

  “But that doesn't make sense. She wanted you to knock her around?”

  “I told you. She loved it. They all love it. They come back here, the bastards, like we go to Coney Island. They don't come back to explore or study or any of that science-fiction junk. Our time's an amusement park for them, that's all. Like the roller coaster.”

  “What's the roller coaster?”

  “Passion. Emotion. Screams and shrieks. Loving and hating and tearing and killing. That's their roller coaster. That's how they get their kicks. It must be forgotten up there in the future, like we've forgotten how it is to be chased by a dinosaur. So they come back here for it. This is the stone age for them.”

  “But — ”

  “All that stuff about the sudden up-swing in crime and violence and rape. It isn't us. We're no worse than we ever were. It's them. They come back here. They goad us. They macerate us. They stick pins in us until we blow our tops and give them their roller coaster ride.”

  “And Liz?” I asked. “Did she believe this?”

  He shook his head. “She never gave me the chance to tell her.”

  “I hear she kicked up quite a fuss.”

  “Yeah. Six beautiful feet of Irish rage. She took my gun off the study wall — the one I packed when I was with Patton. If it'd been loaded there wouldn't have been any make-believe murder.”

  “So I heard, Eddie. Where's Liz now?”

  “Doing a burn in her old apartment.”

  “Where's that?”

  “Ten-ten Park.”

  “Mrs. Elizabeth Bacon?”

  “Not after Bacon got D.T.s nailed to the name in the papers. She’s using her maiden name.”

  “Oh, yes. Elizabeth Noyes, isn't it?”

  “Noyes? Where the hell did you get that? No. Elizabeth Macy.” He yelled: “Chris! What is this — a desert!”

  I looked at my time-meter. The hand was halfway from twelve to fourteen. That gave me eleven days more before I had to go up. Just enough time to work Liz Macy for some action. The gun was real promising. Freyda was right. It was a good lead. I got up from the table.

  “Have to be going now, Eddie,” I said. “Sigma, pal.”

  * * *

  Hell is Forever

  Round and round the shutter’d Square

  I strolled with the Devil’s arm in mine.

  No sound but the scrape of his hoofs was there

  And the ring of his laughter and mine.

  We had drunk black wine.

  I screamed, ‘‘I will race you, Master!’’

  “What matter,” he shriek’d, “tonight

  Which of us runs the faster?

  There is nothing to fear tonight

  In the foul moon’s light!”

  Then I look’d him in the eyes,

  And I laughed full shrill at the lie he told

  And the gnawing fear he would fain disguise.<
br />
  It was true, what I’d time and again been told

  He was old—old.

  —from “Fungoids,” by Enoch Soames

  There were six of them and they had tried everything.

  They began with drinking and drank until they had exhausted the sense of taste.

  Wines—Amontillado, Beaune, Kirschwasser,Bordeaux , Hock,Burgundy ,Medoc and Chambertin; whiskey, Scotch, Irish, Usquebaugh and Schnapps; brandy, gin and rum. They drank them separately and together; they mixed the tart alcohols and flavors into stupendous punches, into a thousand symphonies of taste; they experimented, created, invented, destroyed—and finally they were bored.

  Drugs followed. The milder first, then the more potent. Crisp brown licorice-like opium, toasted and rolled into pellets for smoking in long ivory pipes; thick green absinthe sipped bitter and strong, without sugar or water; heroin and cocaine in rustling snow crystals; marijuana rolled loosely in brown-paper cigarettes; hashish in milk-white curds to be eaten or tarry plugs of Bhang that were chewed and stained the lips deep tan—and again they were bored.

  Their search for sensation became frantic with so much of their senses already dissipated. They enlarged their parties and turned them into festivals of horror. Exotic dancers and esoteric half-human creatures crowded the broad low room and filled it with their incredible performances. Pain, fear, desire, love and hatred were torn apart and exhibited to the least quivering detail like so many laboratory specimens.

  The cloying odor of perfume mingled with the knife-sharp sweat of excited bodies; the anguished screams of tortured creatures merely interrupted their swift, never-ceasing talk—and so in time this, too, palled. They reduced their parties to the original six and returned each week to sit, bored and still hungry for new sensations. Now, languidly and without enthusiasm, they were toying with the occult; turning the party room into a necromancer’s studio.

  Offhand you would not have thought it was a bomb shelter. The room was large and square, the walls paneled with imitation-grained soundproofing, the ceiling low-beamed. To the right was an inset door, heavy and bolted with an enormous wrought-iron lock. There were no windows, but the air-conditioning inlets were shaped like the arched slits of a Gothic monastery. Lady Sutton had paned them with stained glass and set small electric bulbs behind them. They threw showers of sullen color across the room.

  The flooring was of ancient walnut, high polished and gleaming like metal. Across it were spread a score of lustrous Oriental scatter rugs. One enormous divan, covered with Indian Batik, ran the width of the shelter against a wall. Above, were tiers of book shelves, and before it was a long trestle table piled with banquet remains. The rest of the shelter was furnished with deep, seductive chairs, soft, quilted and inviting.

  Centuries ago this had been the deepest dungeon of Sutton Castle , hundreds of feet beneath the earth.

  Now—drained, warmed, air-conditioned and refurnished, it was the scene of Lady Sutton’s sensation parties. More—it was the official meeting place of the Society of Six. The Six Decadents, they called themselves.

  “We are the last spiritual descendants of Nero—the last of the gloriously evil aristocrats,” Lady Sutton would say. “We were born centuries too late, my friends. In a world that is no longer ours we have nothing to live for but ourselves. We are a race apart—we six.”

  And when unprecedented bombings shook England so catastrophically that the shudders even penetrated to the Sutton shelter, she would glance up and laugh:

  “Let them slaughter each other, those pigs. This is no war of ours. We go our own way, always, eh?

  Think, my friends, what a joy it would be to emerge from our shelter one bright morning and find all London dead—all the world dead—” And then she laughed again with her deep hoarse bellow.

  She was bellowing now, her enormous fat body sprawled half across the divan like a decorated toad, laughing at the program that Digby Finchley had just handed her. It had been etched by Finchley himself—an exquisite design of devils and angels in grotesque amorous combat encircling the cabalistic lettering that read:

  THE SIX PRESENT

  ASTAROTH WAS A LADY

  By Christian Braugh

  Cast:

  (In order of appearance)

  A Necromancer Christian Braugh

  A Black Cat Merlin

  (By courtesy of Lady Sutton)

  Astaroth Theone Dubedat

  Nebiros, an Assistant Demon

  Costumes Digby Finchley

  Special EffectsRobert Peel

  Music Sidra Peel

  Finchley said: “A little comedy is a change, isn’t it?”

  Lady Sutton shuddered with uncontrolled laughter. “Astaroth was a lady! Are you sure you wrote it, Chris?”

  There was no answer from Braugh, only the buzz of preparations from the far end of the room, where a small stage had been erected and curtained off.

  She bellowed in her broken bass: “Hey, Chris! Hey, there—”

  The curtain split and Christian Braugh thrust his albino head through. His face was partially made up with red eyebrows and beard and dark-blue shadows around the eyes. He said: “Beg pardon, Lady Sutton?”

  At the sight of his face she rolled over the divan like a mountain of jelly. Across her helpless body, Finchley smiled to Braugh, his lips unfolding in a cat’s grin. Braugh moved his white head in imperceptible answer.

  “I said, did you really write this, Chris ... or have you hired a ghost again?”

  Braugh looked angry, then suddenly disappeared behind the curtain. “Oh my hat!” gurgled Lady Sutton. “This is better than a gallon of champagne. And, speaking of the same . . . who’s nearest the bubbly? Bob? Pour some more. Bob! Bob Peel!”

  The man slumped in the chair alongside the ice buckets never moved. He was lying on the nape of his neck, feet thrust out in a V before him, his dress shirt buckled under his bearded chin. Finchley went across the room and looked down at him.

  “Passed out,” he said.

  “So early? Well, no matter. Fetch me a glass, Dig, there’s a good lad.” Finchley filled a prismed champagne glass and brought it to Lady Sutton. From a small, cameo-faced vial she added three drops of laudanum, swirled the sparkling mixture once and then sipped while she read the program.

  “A Necromancer . . . that’s you, eh, Dig?”

  He nodded.

  “And what’s a Necromancer?”

  “A kind of magician, Lady Sutton.”

  “Magician? Oh, that’s good . . . that’s very good!” She spilled champagne on her vast, blotchy bosom and dabbed ineffectually with the program.

  Finchley lifted a hand to restrain her and said: “You ought to be careful with that program, Lady Sutton. I made only one print and then destroyed the plate. It’s unique and liable to be valuable.”

  “Collector’s item, eh? Your work, of course, Dig?”

  “Yes.’’

  “Not much of a change from the usual pornography, hey?” She burst into another thunder of laughter that degenerated into a fit of hacking coughs. She dropped the glass altogether. Finchley flushed, then retrieved the glass and returned it to the buffet, stepping carefully over Peel’s legs. “And who’s this Astaroth?” Lady Sutton went on.

  From behind the curtain, Theone Dubedat called: “Me! I! Ich! Moi!” her voice was husky. It had a quality of gray smoke.

  “Darling, I know it’s you, but what are you?”

  “A devil, I think.”

  Finchley said: “Astaroth is some sort of legendary arch-demon—a top-ranking devil, so to speak.”

  “Theone a devil? No doubt of it—” Exhausted with rapture, Lady Sutton lay quiescent and musing on the patterned divan. At last she raised an enormous arm and examined her watch. The flesh hung from her elbows in elephantine creases, and at the gesture it shook and a little shower of torn sequins glittered down from her sleeve.

  “You’d best get on with it, Dig. I’ve got to leave at midnight .”

 
; “Leave?”

  “You heard me.”

  Finchley’s face contorted. He bent over her, tense with suppressed emotions, his bleak eyes examining her. “What’s up? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then—”

  “A few things have changed, that’s all.”

  “What’s changed?”

  Her face turned harsh as she returned his stare. The bulging features seemed to stiffen into obsidian.

  “Too soon to tell you . . . but you’ll find out quick enough. Now I don’t want any more pestering from you, Dig, m’lad!”

  Finchley’s scarecrow features regained some measure of control. He started to speak, but before he could utter a word Sidra Peel suddenly popped her head out of the alcove alongside the stage, where the organ had been placed. She called: “Ro-bert!”

  In a constricted voice Finchley said: “Bob’s passed out again, Sidra.”

  She emerged from the alcove, walked jerkily across the room and stood looking down in her husband’s face. Sidra Peel was short, slender and dark. Her body was like an electric high-tension wire, alive with too much current, yet coruscated, stained and rusted from too much exposure to passion. The deep black sockets of her eyes were frigid coals with gleaming white points. As she gazed at her husband, her long fingers writhed; then, suddenly, her hand lashed out and struck the inert face.

  “Swine!” she hissed.

  Lady Sutton laughed and coughed all at once. Sidra Peel shot her a venomous glance and stepped toward the divan, the sharp crack of her heel on the walnut sounding like a pistol shot. Finchley gestured a quick warning that stopped her. She hesitated, then returned to the alcove, and said: “The music’s ready.”

  “And so am I,” said Lady Sutton. “On with the show and all that, eh?” She spread herself across the divan like a crawling tumor the while Finchley propped scarlet pillows under her head. “It’s really nice of you to play this little comedy for me, Dig. Too bad there’re only six of us here tonight. Ought to have an audience, eh?”