The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction 8 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Alfred Bester

  He had two file drawers open now, and I could just make out the word burnt into their fronts. The word certainly looked like present, and there were two of the closed file drawers labeled what looked like past and future. I didn’t know what sort of hocus-pocus was supposed to be furthered by those words, but along with Slyker’s darting, lingering monologue they did give me the feeling that I was afloat in a river of girls from all times and places, and the illusion that there somehow was a girl in each folder became so strong that I almost wanted to say, “Come on, Emil, trot ‘em out, let me look at ‘em.”

  He must have known exactly what feelings he was building up in me, for now he stopped in the middle of a saga of a starlet married to a Negro baseball player and looked at me with his eyes open a bit too wide and said, “All right, Carr, let’s quit fooling around. Down at the Countersign I told you I had a deskful of girls and I wasn’t kidding—although the truth behind that assertion would get me certified by all the little head-shrinkers and Viennese windbags except it would scare the pants off them first. I mentioned ectoplasm earlier, and the proof of its reality. It’s exuded by most properly stimulated women in deep trance, but it’s not just some dimly fluorescent froth swirling around in a dark stance chamber; It takes the form of an envelope or limp balloon, closed toward the top but open toward the bottom, weighing less than a silk stocking but duplicating the person exactly down to features and hair, following the master-plan of the body’s surface buried in the genetic material of the cells. It is a real shed skin but also dimly alive, a gossamer mannequin. A breath can crumple it, a breeze can whisk it away, but under some circumstances it becomes startlingly stable and resilient, a real apparition. It’s invisible and almost impalpable by day, but by night, when your eyes are properly accommodated, you can just manage to see it. Despite its fragility it’s almost indestructible, except by fire, and potentially immortal. Whether generated in sleep or under hypnosis, in spontaneous or induced trance, it remains connected to the source by a thin strand I call the ‘umbilicus’ and it returns to the source and is absorbed back into the individual again as the trance fades. But sometimes it becomes detached and then it lingers around as a shell, still dimly alive and occasionally glimpsed, forming the very real basis for the stories of hauntings we have from all centuries and cultures—in fact, I call such shells ‘ghosts.’ A strong emotional shock generally accounts for a ghost becoming detached from its owner, but it can also be detached artificially. Such a ghost is remarkably docile to one who understands how to handle and cherish it—for instance, it can be folded into an incredibly small compass and tucked away in an envelope, though by daylight you wouldn’t notice anything in such an envelope if you looked inside. ‘Detached artificially’ I said, and that’s what I do here in this office, and you know what I use to do it with, Carr?” He snatched up something long and daggerlike and gleaming and held it tight in his plump hand so that it pointed at the ceiling. “Silver shears, Carr, silver for the same reason you use a silver bullet to kill a werewolf, though those words would set the little head-shrinkers howling. But would they be howling from outraged scientific attitude, Carr, or from professional jealousy or simply from fear? Just the same as it’s unclear why they’d be howling, only certain they would be howling, if I told them that in every fourth or fifth folder in these files I have one or more ghostgirls.”

  He didn’t need to mention fear—I was scared enough myself now, what with him spouting this ghost-guff, this spiritualism blather put far more precisely than any spiritualist would dare, this ‘ obviously firmly held and elaborately rationalized delusion, this perfect symbolization of a truly insane desire for power over women—filing them away in envelopes!—and then when he got bug-eyed and brandished those foot-long stiletto-shears . . . Jeff Crain had warned me Slyker was “nuts—brilliant, but completely nuts and definitely dangerous,” and I hadn’t believed it, hadn’t really visualized myself frozen on the medium’s throne, locked in (“no one without explosives”) with the madman himself. It cost me a lot of effort to keep on the acolyte’s mask and simper adoringly at the Master.

  My attitude still seemed to be fooling him, though he was studying me in a funny way, for he went on, “All right, Carr, I’ll show you the girls, or at least one, though we’ll have to put out all the lights after a bit—that’s why I keep the window shuttered so tightly—and wait for our eyes to accommodate. But which one should it be?—we have a large field of choice. I think since it’s your first and probably your last, it should be someone out of the ordinary, don’t you think, someone who’s just a little bit special? Wait a second— I know.” And his hand shot under the desk where it must have touched a hidden button, for a shallow drawer shot out from a place where there didn’t seem to be room for one. He took from it a single fat file folder that had been stored flat and laid it on his knees.

  Then he began to talk again in his reminiscing voice and damn if it wasn’t so cool and knowing that it started to pull me back toward the river of girls and set me thinking that this man wasn’t really crazy, only extremely eccentric, maybe the eccentricity of genius, maybe he actually had hit on a hitherto unknown phenomenon depending on the more obscure properties of mind and matter, describing it to me in whimsically florid jargon, maybe he really had discovered something in one of the blind spots of modern science-and-psychology’s picture of the universe.

  “Stars, Carr. Female stars. Movie queens. Royal princesses of the gray world, the ghostly chiaroscuro. Shadow empresses. They’re realer than people, Carr, realer than the great actresses or casting-couch champions they start as, for they’re symbols, Carr, symbols of our deepest longings and—yes-most hidden fears and secretest dreams. Each decade has several who achieve this more-than-life and less-than-life existence, but there’s generally one who’s the chief symbol, the top ghost, the dream who lures men along toward fulfillment and destruction. In the Twenties it was Garbo, Garbo the Free Soul—that’s my name for the symbol she became; her romantic mask heralded the Great Depression. In the late Thirties and early Forties it was Bergman the Brave Liberal; her dewiness and Swedish-Modern smile helped us accept World War Two. And now it’s”—he touched the bulky folder on his knees—”now it’s Evelyn Cordew the Good-Hearted Bait, the gal who accepts her troublesome sexiness with a resigned shrug and a foolish little laugh, and what general catastrophe she foreshadows we don’t know yet. But here she is, and in five ghost versions. Pleased, Carr?”

  I was so completely taken by surprise that I couldn’t say anything for a moment. Either Slyker had guessed my real purpose in contacting him, or I was faced with a sizable coincidence. I wet my lips and then just nodded.

  Slyker studied me and finally grinned. “Ah,” he said, “takes you aback a bit, doesn’t it? I perceive that in spite of your moderate sophistication you are one of the millions of males who have wistfully contemplated desert-islanding with Delectable Evvie. A complex cultural phenomenon, Eva-Lynn Korduplewski. The child of a coal miner, educated solely in back-street movie houses—shaped by dreams, you see, into a master dream, an empress dream-figure. A hysteric, Carr, in fact the most classic example I have ever encountered, with unequaled mediumistic capacities and also with a hypertrophied and utterly ruthless ambition. Riddled by hypochondrias, but with more real drive than a million other avid schoolgirls tangled and trapped in the labyrinth of film ambitions. Dumb as they come, no rational mind at all, but with ten times Einstein’s intuition—intuition enough, at least, to realize that the symbol our sex-exploiting culture craved was a girl who accepted like a happy martyr the incandescent sexuality men and Nature forced on her—and with the patience and malleability to let the feathersoft beating of the black-and-white light in a cheap cinema shape her into that symbol. I sometimes think of her as a girl in a cheap dress standing on the shoulder of a big throughway, her eyes almost blinded by the lights of an approaching bus. The bus stops and she climbs on, dragging a pet goat and breathlessly giggling explanations at the driver.
The bus is Civilization.

  “Everybody knows her life story, which has been put out in a surprisingly accurate form up to a point: her burlesque-line days, the embarrassingly faithful cartoon-series Girl in a Fix for which she posed, her bit parts, the amazingly timed success of the movies Hydrogen Blonde and The Jean Harlow Saga, her broken marriage to Jeff Crain—What was that, Carr? Oh, I thought you’d started to say something— and her hunger for the real stage and intellectual distinction and power. You can’t imagine how hungry for brains and power that girl became after she hit the top.

  “I’ve been part of the story of that hunger, Carr, and I pride myself that I’ve done more to satisfy it than all the culture-johnnies she’s had on her payroll. Evelyn Cordew has learned a lot about herself right where you’re sitting, and also threaded her way past two psychotic crack-ups. The trouble is that when her third loomed up she didn’t come to me, she decided to put her trust in wheat germ and yogurt instead, so now she hates my guts—and perhaps her own, on that diet. She’s made two attempts on my life, Carr, and had me trailed by gangsters . . . and by other individuals. She’s talked about me to Jeff Crain, whom she still sees from time to time, and Jerry Smyslov and Nick De Grazia, telling them I’ve got a file of information on her burlesque days and a few of her later escapades, including some interesting photostats and the real dope on her income and her tax returns, and that I’m using it to blackmail her white. What she actually wants is her five ghosts back, and I can’t give them to her because they might kill her. Yes, kill her, Carr.” He flourished the shears for emphasis. “She claims that the ghosts I’ve taken from her have made her lose weight permanently—’look like a skeleton’ are her words— and given her fits of mental blackout, a sort of psychic fading—whereas actually the ghosts have bled off from her a lot of malignant thoughts and destructive emotions, which could literally kill her (or someone!) if reabsorbed—they’re drenched with death-wish. Still, I hear she actually does look a little haggard, a trifle faded, in her last film, in spite of all Hollywood’s medico-cosmetic lore, so maybe she has a sort of case against me. I haven’t seen the film, I suppose you have. What do you think, Carr?”

  I knew I’d been overworking the hesitation and the silent flattery, so I whipped out quickly, “I’d say it was due to her anemia. It seems to me that the anemia is quite enough to account for her loss of weight and her tired look.”

  “Ah! You’ve slipped, Carr,” he lashed back, pointing at me triumphantly, except that instead of the outstretched finger there were those ridiculous, horrible shears. “Her anemia is one of the things that’s been kept to-secret, known only to a very few of her intimates. Even in all the half-humorous releases about her hypochondrias that’s one disease that has never been mentioned. I suspected you were from her when I got your note at the Countersign Club—the handwriting squirmed with tension and secrecy—but the Justine amused me—that was a fairly smart dodge—and your sorcerer’s apprentice act amused me too, and I happened to feel like talking. But I’ve been studying you all along, especially your reactions to certain test-remarks I dropped in from time to time, and now you’ve really slipped.” His voice was loud and clear, but he was shaking and giggling at the same time and his eyes showed white all the way around the irises. He drew back the shears a little, but clenched his fingers more tightly around them in a dagger grip, as he said with a chuckle, “Our dear little Evvie has sent all types up against me, to bargain for her ghosts or try to scare or assassinate me, but this is the first time she’s sent an idealistic fool. Carr, why didn’t you have the sense not to meddle?”

  “Look here, Dr. Slyker,” I countered before he started answering for me, “it’s true I have a special purpose in contacting you. I never denied it. But I don’t know anything about ghosts or gangsters. I’m here on a simple, businesslike assignment from the same guy who lent me the Justine and who has no purpose whatever beyond protecting Evelyn Cordew. I’m representing Jeff Crain.”

  That was supposed to calm him. Well, he did stop shaking and his eyes stopped wandering, but only because they were going over me like twin searchlights, and the giggle went out of his voice.

  “Jeff Crain! Evvie just wants to murder me, but that cinematic Hemingway, that hulking guardian of hers, that human Saint Bernard tonguing the dry crumbs of their marriage—he wants to set the T-men on me, and the boys in blue and the boys in white too. Evvie’s agents I mostly kid along, even the gangsters, but for Jeff’s agents I have only one answer.”

  The silver shears pointed straight at my chest and I could see his muscles tighten like a fat tiger’s. I got ready for a spring of my own at the first movement this madman made toward me.

  But the move he made was back across the desk with his free hand. I decided it was a good time to be on my feet in any case, but just as I sent my own muscles their orders I was hugged around the waist and ankles. By something soft but firm.

  I looked down. Padded, broad, crescent-shaped clamps had sprung out of hidden traps in my chair and now held me as comfortably but firmly as a gang of competent orderlies. Even my hands were held by wide, velvet-soft cuffs that had snapped out of the bulbous arms. They were all a nondescript gray but even as I looked they began to change color to match my suit or skin, whichever they happened to border.

  I wasn’t scared. I was merely frightened half to death.

  “Surprised, Carr? You shouldn’t be.” Slyker was sitting back like an amiable schoolteacher and gently wagging the shears as if they were a ruler. “Streamlined unobtrusiveness and remote control are the essence of our times, especially in medical furniture. The buttons on my desk can do more than that. Hypos might slip out—hardly hygienic, but then germs are overrated. Or electrodes for shock. You see, restraints are necessary in my business. Deep mediumistic trance can occasionally produce convulsions as violent as those of electroshock, especially when a ghost is cut. And I sometimes administer electroshock too, like any garden-variety head-shrinker. Also, to be suddenly and firmly grabbed is a profound stimulus to the unconscious and often elicits closely-guarded facts from difficult patients. So a means of making my patients hold still is absolutely necessary—something swift, sure, tasteful, and preferably without warning. You’d be surprised, Carr, at the situations in which I’ve been forced to activate those restraints. This time I prodded you to see just how dangerous you were. Rather to my surprise you showed yourself ready to take physical action against me. So I pushed the button. Now we’ll be able to deal comfortably with Jeff Crain’s problem . . . and yours. But first I’ve a promise to keep to you. I said I would show you one of Evelyn Cordew’s ghosts. It will take a little time and after a bit it will be necessary to turn out the lights.”

  “Dr. Slyker,” I said as evenly as I could, “I—”

  “Quiet! Activating a ghost for viewing involves certain risks. Silence is essential, though it will be necessary to use—very briefly—the suppressed Chaikovsky music which I turned off so quickly earlier this evening.” He busied himself with the hi fi for a few moments. “But partly because of that it will be necessary to put away all the other folders and the four ghosts of Evvie we aren’t using, and lock the file drawers. Otherwise there might be complications.”

  I decided to try once more. “Before you go any further, Dr. Slyker,” I began, “I would really like to explain—”

  He didn’t say another word, merely reached back across the desk again. My eyes caught something coming over my shoulder fast and the next instant it clapped down over my mouth and nose, not quite covering my eyes, but lapping up to them—something soft and dry and clinging and faintly crinkled-feeling. I gasped and I could feel the gag sucking in, but not a bit of air came through it. That scared me seven-eighths of the rest of the way to oblivion, of course, and I froze. Then I tried a very cautious inhalation and a little air did seep through. It was wonderfully cool coming into the furnace of my lungs, that little suck of air—I felt I hadn’t breathed for a week.