“Bosworth heap hot,” grunted Whooping Water enigmatically, irritated by the interruption.
Left the mink and beaver playing
Left the tomtoms and—
This time Cosmo broke in.
“Excuse the interruption, chief,” he said apologetically, “it isn’t that we aren’t interested in where you came from, but MacGruder isn’t good for much longer and there’s something we got to find out.”
MacGruder obviously wasn’t good for much longer. He had a faint white froth on his lips and he seemed to be having trouble breathing.
Gutsy leaned over and whispered to Albert.
“Ya don’t bust in, ya never find out nothing. That ‘mink and beaver’ routine of his can keep going all night.”
“What I want to know is just this,” continued Cosmo. “We got a guy from the U that . . .”
“Throw some water on him,” said Cosmo.
Gutsy did and MacGruder came to with a start.
“Did he come through?” he asked groggily.
“He sure did, boy, he sure did. We found this Hoskin character’s heel,” said Cosmo triumphantly. “It’s a tomato named Priscilla Yergut what teaches over at the University. I’m sending Gutsy over to put the snatch on her.”
MacGruder reached out automatically for the bottle that was sitting in front of him and then recoiled as if it had suddenly become red hot.
“Oh, no!” he whispered, his face a mask of horror.
“No what?” asked Gutsy.
“No nothing for two whole weeks!” said MacGruder brokenly. “One of my periodicals just hit me!”
Without a backward glance he pulled himself to his feet and staggered from the room.
III
“Albert!” shrieked Priscilla as Gutsy dragged her into the room, “What have they been doing to you?”
Before Albert could answer, Cosmo cut in. “What’s been done to him, lady, ain’t nothing to what’s going to be done to you unless he starts doing like he’s told.”
Albert blanched, and for the first time that day he felt his resolution slipping. “Don’t you dare touch her!”
“I ain’t,” said Cosmo. “Gutsy here is the boy that’ll handle the job. Take off your shirt, Gutsy, and show the lady what a real man looks like.”
He grinned. “Take it off.”
Bashfully, Gutsy did. He had a torso like a gorilla and just as much hair. Albert took one look and shuddered in revulsion. Priscilla shuddered too, but with something else.
“Make your choice, prof. Either you walk out of here with your lady-friend on your arm or Gutsy gets her.”
Gutsy, rather pleased at the second prospect, threw out his chest, and clenching his fists, held out his arms to exhibit his biceps.
Priscilla gasped again and then she let out a little whinny. She looked at Albert sagging in his chair and then back at Gutsy strutting up and down like a bull ape in mating season.
“Albert,” she said in sudden decision, “I don’t know what they want you to do, but whatever it is, remember that your integrity must come first.”
Cosmo didn’t like the way things were going. “Get her out of here,” he shouted to Gutsy. When she was gone he turned ferociously to Albert. “It ain’t as simple as you think,” he growled. “First he’s going to . . .”
When he had finished with his enumeration, Albert was whitefaced.
“Think it over, punk,” said Cosmo. “I’m giving you exactly half an hour to make up your mind.”
As he headed for the door he gave Albert’s briefcase a kick that sent it sailing into the far corner. As the lock on the door clicked behind him, Albert slumped down and buried his face in his hands. Then he straightened up again. The pressure of his palms on his swollen cheeks hurt too much.
“Got to think,” he muttered to himself. “I’ve got to think fast.”
His thoughts led him in a weird direction. When he finished them he found himself with a small black vellum-bound volume in one hand and his watch in the other. He kept looking back and forth from one to the other.
He didn’t believe in the supernatural. No intelligent young Middle-English teacher did. But after his experience with MacGruder he found himself filled with serious doubts.
Twenty-four minutes left. There wasn’t any use in prolonging Priscilla’s agony. He dragged himself to his feet again and tottered toward the door. But . . . He looked at the book again.
On page 87 he found something he thought might work.
Chalk he had of course. The janitors were supposed to see that each class room had plenty, but they were all secret drinkers and never did. Albert was a man who was tongue-tied without a blackboard to doodle on, and as a result he always kept a private stock in his pockets. He fished out the longest and chalked a pentagram on the floor, feeling rather foolish as he did so.
All that was left after that was the fire and the blasting rod. The fire was easy to provide. Albert didn’t smoke but he always carried matches for the benefit of full professors who did. Taking off his undershirt—which fortunately was rather frayed anyway—he tore it into little strips and crumpled them in an old glass ashtry which he placed in the middle of the floor.
A piece of the tubular brass from which the curtains hung was taken down to serve as a blasting rod and he was finally ready to go. He ran through the incantation he had selected from the little black book until he was satisfied he had it letter perfect, and then touched a match to the scraps of undershirt.
Staring intently into the little pile of smoldering rags that served as his fire, he whispered: “Aglon, Tetragram, vaycheon stimulamaton ezpahers retragrammaton olyaram irion esytion existion eryona onera orasym mozm messias soter Emanuel Sabaoth Adonay, te adoro, et te invoco!”
With that he spit into the fire.
“Venite, Venite, Submiritillor Lucifuge, or eternal torment shall overwhelm thee, by the great power of this blasting rod.”
Grabbing the brass tube firmly in both hands, he waved it over the smoldering rags and waited. He didn’t have to wait long.
There was a sudden popping sound and a small brown figure materialized in the middle of the room. His eyes were closed and he was swaying back and forth as he chanted:
From the land of sky blue waters
Comes the chieftain Whooping Water
Comes across the vasty darkness
Comes to speak to—
“Oh, no!” moaned Albert.
The little Indian slowly opened his eyes. “Great White Father has look on face like brave who dial wrong number on talking machine.”
Albert looked down at the black book and then back at Whooping Water.
The little Indian followed his glance and then snorted. “That thing! That’s a pirated edition. Both the editor and the compositor were illiterate idiots. You would be lucky to raise a ninth order elemental with anything in there. I wouldn’t be here myself if I weren’t bored still with just sitting around the office waiting for a call. The one from MacGruder was the first this week. What’s happened over on this side? The D.A. been closing up all the joints?”
Albert sat silent for a moment, trying to adjust to the new reality.
“Then none of this hocus-pocus really works?” he asked finally.
“Well,” said Whooping Water slowly, “you did open the gate. But that can be done in a dozen different ways.”
“What about this?” said Albert, picking up the blasting rod and jamming it suddenly into the smoldering rags of his little fire.
Whooping Water let out a sudden yell, and leaping to his feet, clapped both hands to his posterior.
Albert jerked the rod out of the fire. “Sorry,” he said. “I was just trying to find out if I had any control over you.”
“Next time you want to find out something, ask!” said the little Indian bitterly. “Now I’m here, what do you want?”
“Out,” said Albert briefly.
“How?” asked the Indian with equal brevity.
&nbs
p; Albert thought for a moment.
“I suppose the easiest way would be for you to transport Priscilla and me to the. nearest police station.”
Whooping Water shook his head. “Wish I could, old man, but I’m just not up to it. The only person I can directly affect is the one who calls me up—and even then my powers are extremely limited.”
Albert took a quick look at his watch. He didn’t have too much time left.
“Then what can you do?”
“I might temporarily superimpose a new character on your old one. Alexander, Napoleon, Julius Caesar—anybody at all.”
“People get shock therapy for that in this world,” said Albert. “What’s the point?”
“A rather obvious one. Suppose you wanted to play the stock market. I could give you the attitudes and responses of an Insull or a Rothschild. By following the imposed set of impulses you’d know just what to do and when.”
“I don’t want to play the market,” said Albert plaintively. “All that I want to do is rescue Priscilla before it’s too late!”
“Then think of somebody who was an expert at the rescuing business.”
“Well . . .” said Albert, and then suddenly smashed his right fist into his left palm in the most virile gesture he’d made in years. “Sir Gawain!”
“Beg pardon?” said Whooping Water with a start.
“Sir Gawain. He was King Arthur’s nephew and one of the greatest knights of the Round Table.”
There was a strange expression on Whooping Water’s face as he shook his head vigorously. “You’d be making a terrible mistake,” he said. “You see, actually the popular image of Gawain doesn’t correspond at all to the real man. In fact—”
“For your information,” interrupted Albert stiffly, “the Gawain myths happen to be my special field of study. In the first place, he had no actual existence. He was a folk hero who embodied all the characteristics of the ideal knight. And in the second—” He stopped suddenly as he realized that he was automatically swinging into the Gawain lecture that he always gave during the first week of his survey course.
“And in the second,” he snapped, “I’m giving orders around here. You will go immediately to my apartment and skim through the manuscript that is sitting on the coffee table. That will give you an excellent picture of Gawain’s character.”
“But . . .”
“Get going!”
Whooping Water got.
Ten seconds later he was back. His face was perfectly blank but there seemed to be a look of secret amusement in his eyes.
“Mission completed,” he said. “All set?”
Albert nodded nervously.
“Go ahead,” he said.
The little Indian held two fingers up to his forehead like horns and pointed them at Albert. They wriggled slightly and then a fat green spark jumped from each of them. Albert winced as a sudden convulsive shock ran through him.
“I hope I made the right choice,” he muttered as he waited for the change.
“You didn’t,” said Whooping Water cheerfully, “so I took the liberty of making another selection.”
Before Albert could answer, the change hit him. He felt himself being swept by surges of strange raw emotion such as he had never felt before. There were gongs beating inside his head and he wanted to smash somebody—hard. The part of him that was still Albert fought desperately for control.
“I’m not turning into Gawain!” he gasped.
Whooping Water grinned. “Heap sorry, boss. But I got reasons. Good reasons.”
The air around the small Indian suddenly turned opaque.
IV
When it cleared Whooping Water was gone and in his place stood a skinny and buck-toothed young man whose first words betrayed his English origin.
“Never did like that get-up,” he said. “But for some reason or other most of the local mediums demand Indians. Anyway, the reason I was so set against your patterning yourself on Sir Gawain was that”—his voice dropped to a confidential whisper—“I am, or at least I was, the one and original Gawain. And frankly, old man, I’m the last person in the world I’d recommend to a man in your predicament as a model.”
“You’re the Sir Gawain?” whispered Albert. “The one who triumphed over the Green Knight.”
“I’m the Sir Gawain all right, but I didn’t do any triumphing. That’s just a bit of propaganda Uncle Arthur put out after I got my head whacked off. What happened was that one night when we were all at dinner a drunk wearing green armor came staggering in looking for a fight.
“He was so old and feeble that the king didn’t feel right about matching him with any of the regulars so he picked on me. I’d had a couple of drinks myself or I’d never have gone through with it.
“As it was, I didn’t go very far. It was the shortest fight in the history of the Round Table. The old boy let fly with his battle axe and I ducked. Wasn’t fast enough. The head that came off was mine. Arthur hushed things up as best he could for the sake of the family name, and then a couple of years later when he got news that the Green Knight had lost the decision in a bout with the D.T.’s, he had one of his bards cook up a story that didn’t make me look so silly.
“Anyway, after taking a quick look at that manuscript I decided you needed somebody else, so I used the guy in the other book.”
“What other book?” demanded Albert, a horrifying suspicion forming inside his head.
“Something called The Big Kill. That Hammer chap was quite a lad. He got himself out of worse spots than this in every other chapter.”
“Turn me back,” gasped Albert. “That character is a moral cesspool.”
“Why not just give him a try?”
Albert felt himself being more and more lost in the new growling stranger who was taking over his body.
“I’ll take care of you later!” he snarled. “Right now I’m going to smoke out some of the vermin that have been lousing up my city!”
Swinging the brass curtain rod like a war club, he stalked purposefully to the door and began to pound on it. A moment later Gutsy’s voice was heard on the other side.
“What’s going on in there?”
“Open up and you’ll find out,” growled Albert.
“Are you ready to talk business?”
“Yeah!”
There was a sound of a key turning and a little popping came from behind Albert as Whooping Water prudently removed himself from sight. Then the door swung open and Gutsy stepped in. There was an expression of deep disappointment on his face. He had been looking forward to his_ intimidation session with Priscilla with a great deal of anticipation.
Albert took one step forward and let loose a sudden swing of the blasting rod that caught Gutsy square on top of the head. Then he stepped back quickly and waited for the giant figure to go crashing to the floor. It didn’t. It just shook its head and said plaintively, “Now what did you want to go and do that for?”
Albert let out a snarl of rage as the gongs in his head suddenly crescendoed and let loose a right hook that smashed Gutsy full in the face. There was a splintering—but not of teeth. Albert howled in pain and began to hop up and down, cupping his broken knuckles in his left hand.
“You keep that up, you’re going to hurt yourself,” said Gutsy.
“Get out of here before I—” The other suddenly stopped as the part of him that was still Albert realized that there wasn’t anything he could do.
“Before you what?” asked Gutsy curiously.
“Oh, nothing,” said Albert. “Just go away. I got some thinking to do.”
“Then you don’t want to talk to Cosmo?”
“No!”
“Okay!” said Gutsy as he lumbered out the door. “But remember that you only got ten minutes before that tomato of yours starts to get it.”
As the lock clicked shut on the door again, Albert turned toward the center of the room and growled.
“All right, punk, turn yourself on again.”
Whooping Water materialized. Only this time he was back in his Indian form again.
Albert picked up his blasting rod and advanced purposefully toward him. “I feel like bashing somebody!” he snarled, “and it might as well be you.”
The little Indian took one good look at the advancing figure of wrath, jerked his hands up to his head, and wriggled them in a reverse direction. Albert stumbled to a stop as the alien character who had been controlling his nerve ends suddenly vanished.
“Easy does it,” said Whooping Water consolingly. “It’s all my fault and I apologize. I forgot that a disposition like Hammer’s needed more beef to back it up than you’ve got. If you were up against a couple of amateurs, they’d run screaming. I’ve got another idea, though. How about this—”
“Shut up!” said Albert in a most unAlbertish voice. “I’ve got some thinking to do.”
The Indian opened his mouth to protest but a threatening twitch of the blasting rod closed it again.
“I’m getting something,” said Albert at last, “but I’m having trouble pinning it down.” He ruminated in silence for a moment and then asked suddenly, “Who was that Bosworth that Gutsy was asking about during the seance?”
“An old pal who got the inside track with a woman Gutsy wanted. He got part of his head taken off with a .45 slug.”
“Got it!” exclaimed Albert.
“Got what?”
Albert explained and the little Indian let out a whistle of admiration.
V
Once Gutsy was safely tucked away in the closet, his hands and feet tied with strips tom from the curtains and a crude but effective gag in his mouth, they were ready for Cosmo. Whooping Water flicked out of sight and then materialized as a large block of dripping and barnacle-encrusted concrete. Albert started toward the door but just as he got to it it swung open and Cosmo came storming in.
“Where in the hell’s Gutsy?” he demanded. “And what’s that?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Albert. “One minute it wasn’t and the next minute it was. It talks.”
“You’re crazy!” snorted Cosmo. “Maybe so, but just go up to it and listen.”
Collected Fiction Page 31