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

by Edited by Alfred Bester

  Slyker looked at me with a little smile. “I never say ‘Quiet’ twice, Carr. The foam plastic of that gag is another of Henri Artois’ inventions. It consists of millions of tiny valves. As long as you breathe softly—very, very softly, Carr—they permit ample air to pass, but if you gasp or try to shout through it, they’ll close up tight. A wonderfully soothing device. Compose yourself, Carr; your life depends on it.”

  I have never experienced such utter helplessnesss. I found that the slightest muscular tension, even crooking a finger, made my breathing irregular enough so that the valves started to close and I was in the fringes of suffocation. I could see and hear what was going on, but I dared not react, I hardly dared think. I had to pretend that most of my body wasn’t there (the chameleon plastic helped!), only a pair of lungs working constantly but with infinite caution.

  Slyker had just set the Cordew folder back in its drawer, without closing it, and started to gather up the other scattered folders, when he touched the desk again and the lights went out. I have mentioned that the place was completely sealed against light. The darkness was complete.

  “Don’t be alarmed, Carr,” Slyker’s voice came chuckling through it. “In fact, as I am sure you realize, you had better not be. I can tidy up just as handily—working by touch is one of my major skills, my sight and hearing being rather worse than appears—and even your eyes must be fully accommodated if you’re to see anything at all. I repeat, don’t be alarmed, Carr, least of all by ghosts.”

  I would never have expected it, but in spite of the spot I was in (which actually did seem to have its soothing effects), I still got a little kick—a very little one—out of thinking I was going to see some sort of secret vision of Evelyn Cordew, real in some sense or faked by a master faker. Yet at the same time, and I think beyond all my fear for myself, I felt a dispassionate disgust at the way Slyker reduced all human drives and desires to a lust for power, of which the chair imprisoning me, the “Siegfried Line” door, and the files of ghosts, real or imagined, were perfect symbols.

  Among immediate worries, although I did a pretty good job of suppressing all of them, the one that nagged at me the most was that Slyker had admitted to me the inadequacy of his two major senses. I didn’t think he would make that admission to someone who was going to live very long.

  The black minutes dragged on. I heard from time to time the rustle of folders, but only one soft thud of a file drawer closing, so I knew he wasn’t finished yet with the putting-away and locking-up job.

  I concentrated the free corner of my mind—the tiny part I dared spare from breathing—on trying to hear something else, but I couldn’t even catch the background noise of the city. I decided the office must be soundproofed as well as light-sealed. Not that it mattered, since I couldn’t get a signal out anyway.

  Then a noise did come—a solid snap that I’d heard just once before, but knew instantly. It was the sound of the bolts in the office door retracting. There was something funny about it that took me a moment to figure out: there had been no preliminary grating of the key.

  For a moment too I thought Slyker had crept noiselessly to the door, but then I realized that the rustling of folders at the desk had kept up all the time.

  And the rustling of folders continued. I guessed Slyker had not noticed the door. He hadn’t been exaggerating about his bad hearing.

  There was the faint creaking of the hinges, once, twice— as if the door were being opened and closed—then again the solid snap of the bolts. That puzzled me, for there should have been a big flash of light from the corridor— unless the lights were all out.

  I couldn’t hear any sound after that, except the continued rustling of the file folders, though I listened as hard as the job of breathing let me—and in a crazy kind of way the job of cautious breathing helped my hearing, because it made me hold absolutely still yet without daring to tense up. I knew that someone was in the office with us and that Slyker didn’t know it. The black moments seemed to stretch out forever, as if an edge of eternity had got hooked into our time-stream.

  All of a sudden there was a swish, like that of a sheet being whipped through the air very fast, and a grunt of surprise from Slyker that started toward a screech and then was cut off as sharp as if he’d been gagged nose-and-mouth like me. Then there came the scuff of feet and the squeal of the casters of a chair, the sound of a struggle, not of two people struggling, but of a man struggling against restraints of some sort, a frantic confined heaving and panting. I wondered if Slyker’s little lump of chair had sprouted restraints like mine, but that hardly made sense.

  Then abruptly there was the whistle of breath, as if his nostrils had been uncovered, but not his mouth. He was panting through his nose. I got a mental picture of Slyker tied to his chair some way and eying the darkness just as I was doing.

  Finally out of the darkness came a voice I knew very well because I’d heard it often enough in movie houses and from Jeff Crain’s tape-recorder. It had the old familiar caress mixed with the old familiar giggle, the naïveté and the knowingness, the warm sympathy and cool-headedness, the high-school charmer and the sybil. It was Evelyn Cordew’s voice, all right.

  “Oh for goodness sake stop threshing around, Emmy. It won’t help you shake off that sheet and it makes you look so funny. Yes, I said ‘look’, Emmy—you’d be surprised at how losing five ghosts improves your eyesight, like having veils taken away from in front of them; you get more sensitive all over.

  “And don’t try to appeal to me by pretending to suffocate. I tucked the sheet under your nose even if I did keep your mouth covered. Couldn’t bear you talking now. The sheet’s called wraparound plastic—I’ve got my chemical friend too, though he’s not Parisian. It’ll be next year’s number-one packaging material, he tells me. Filmy, harder to see than cellophane, but very tough. An electronic plastic, no less, positive one side, negative the other. Just touch it to something and it wraps around, touches itself, and clings like anything. Like I just had to touch it to you. To make it unwrap fast you can just shoot some electrons into it from a handy static battery—my friend’s advertising copy, Emmy— and it flattens out whang. Give it enough electrons and it’s stronger than steel.

  “We used another bit of it that last way, Emmy, to get through your door. Fitted it outside, so it’d wrap itself against the bolts when your door opened. Then just now, after blacking out the corridor, we pumped electrons into it and it flattened out, pushing back all the bolts. Excuse me, dear, but you know how you love to lecture about your valved plastics and all your other little restraints, so you mustn’t mind me giving a little talk about mine. And boasting about my friends too. I’ve got some you don’t know about, Emmy. Ever heard the name Smyslov, or the Arain? Some of them cut ghosts themselves and weren’t pleased to hear about you, especially the past-future angle.”

  There was a protesting little squeal of casters, as if Slyker were trying to move his chair.

  “Don’t go away, Emmy. I’m sure you know why I’m here. Yes, dear, I’m taking them all back as of now. All five. And I don’t care how much death-wish they got, because I’ve got some ideas for that. So now ‘scuse me, Emmy, while I get ready to slip into my ghosts.”

  There wasn’t any noise then except Emil Slyker’s wheezy breathing and the occasional rustle of silk and the whir of a zipper, followed by soft feathery falls.

  “There we are, Emmy, all clear. Next step, my five lost sisters. Why, your little old secret drawer is open—you didn’t think I knew about that, Emmy, did you? Let’s see now, I don’t think we’ll need music for this—they know my touch; it should make them stand up and shine.”

  She stopped talking. After a-bit I got the barest hint of light over by the desk, very uncertain at first, like a star at the limit of vision, where it keeps winking back and forth from utter absence to the barest dim existence, or like a lonely lake lit only by starlight and glimpsed through a thick forest, or as if those dancing points of light that persist even
in absolute darkness and indicate only a restless retina and optic nerve had fooled me for a moment into thinking they represented something real.

  But then the hint of light took definite form, though staying at the dim limit of vision and crawling back and forth as I focused on it because my eyes had no other point of reference to steady it by.

  It was a dim angular band making up three edges of a rectangle, the top edge longer than the two vertical edges, while the bottom edge wasn’t there. As I watched it and it became a little clearer, I saw that the bands of light were brightest toward the inside—that is, toward the rectangle they partly enclosed, where they were bordered by stark blackness—while toward the outside they faded gradually away. Then as I continued to watch I saw that the two corners were rounded while up from the top edge there projected a narrow, lesser rectangle—a small tab.

  The tab made me realize that I was looking at a file folder silhouetted by something dimly glowing inside it.

  Then the top band darkened toward the Center, as would happen if a hand were dipping into the folder, and then lightened again as if the hand were being withdrawn. Then up out of the folder, as if the invisible hand were guiding or coaxing it, swam something no brighter than the bands of light.

  It was the shape of a woman, but distorted and constantly flowing, the head and arms and upper torso maintaining more of an approximation to human proportions than the lower torso and legs, which were like churning, trailing draperies or a long gauzy skirt. It was extremely dim, so I had to keep blinking my eyes, and it didn’t get brighter.

  It was like the figure of a woman phosphorescently painted on a long-skirted slip of the filmiest silk that had silk-stockinglike sheaths for arms and head attached—yes, and topped by some illusion of dim silver hair. And yet it was more than that. Although it looped-up gracefully through the air as such a slip might when shaken out by a woman preparing to put it on, it also had a writhing life of its own.

  But in spite of all the distortions, as it flowed in an arc toward the ceiling and dove downward, it was seductively beautiful and the face was recognizably that of Evvie Cordew.

  It checked its dive and reversed the direction of its flow, so that for a moment it floated upright high in the air, like a filmy nightgown a woman swishes above her head before she slips into it.

  Then it began to settle toward the floor and I saw that there really was a woman standing under it and pulling it down over her head, though I could see her body only very dimly by the reflected glow of the ghost she was drawing down around her.

  The woman on the floor shot up her hands close to her body and gave a quick wriggle and twist and ducked her head and then threw it back, as a woman does when she’s getting into a tight dress, and the flowing glowing thing lost its distortions as it fitted itself around her.

  Then for a moment the glow brightened a trifle as the woman and her ghost merged and I saw Evvie Cordew with her flesh gleaming by its own light—the long slim ankles, the vase-curve of hips and waist, the impudent breasts almost as you’d guess them from the Bikini shots, but with larger aureoles—saw it for an instant before the ghost-light winked out like white sparks dying, and there was utter darkness again.

  Utter darkness and a voice that crooned, “Oh that was like silk, Emmy, pure silk stocking all over. Do you remember when you cut it, Emmy? I’d just got my first screen credit and I’d signed the seven-year contract and I knew I was going to have the world by the tail and I felt wonderful and I suddenly got terribly dizzy for no reason and I came to you. And you straightened me out for then by coaxing out and cutting away my happiness. You told me it would be a little like giving blood, and it was. That was my first ghost, Emmy, but only the first.”

  My eyes, recovering swiftly from the brighter glow of the ghost returning to its sources, again made out the three glowing sides of the file folder. And again there swam up out of it a crazily churning phosphorescent woman trailing gauzy streamers. The face was recognizably Evvie’s, but constantly distorting, now one eye big as an orange, then small as a pea, the lips twisting in impossible smiles and grimaces, the brow shrinking to that of a pinhead or swelling to that of a mongolian idiot, like a face reflected from a plate-glass window running with water. As it came down over the real Evelyn’s face there was a moment when the two were together but didn’t merge, like the faces of twins in such a flooded window. Then, as if a squee-gee had been wiped down it, the single face came bright and clear, and just as the darkness returned she caressed her lips with her tongue.

  And I heard her say, “That one was like hot velvet, Emmy, smooth but with a burn in it. You took it two days after the sneak preview of Hydrogen Blonde, when we had the little party to celebrate after the big party, and the current Miss America was there and I showed her what a really valuable body looked like. That was when I realized that I’d hit the top and it hadn’t changed me into a goddess or anything. I still had the same ignorances as before and the same awkwardnesses for the cameramen and cutters to hide—only they were worse because I was in the center of the show window—and I was going to have to fight for the rest of my life to keep my body like it was and then I was going to start to die, wrinkle by wrinkle, lose my juice cell by cell, like anybody else.”

  The third ghost arched toward the ceiling and down, waves of phosphorescence flickering it all the time. The slender arms undulated like pale serpents and the hands, the finger- and thumb-tips gently pressed together, were like the inquisitive heads of serpents—until the fingers spread so the hands resembled five-tongued creeping puddles of phosphorescent ink. Then into them as if into shoulder-length ivory silk gloves came the solid fingers and arms. For a bit the hands, first part to be merged, were brightest of the whole figure and I watched them help fit each other on and then sweep symmetrically down brow and cheeks and chin, fitting the face, with a little sidewise dip of the ring fingers as they smoothed in the eyes. Then they swept up and back and raked through both heads of hair, mixing them. This ghost’s hair was very dark and, mingling, it toned down Evelyn’s blonde a little.

  “That one felt slimy, Emmy, like the top crawled off of a swamp. Remember, I’d just teased the boys into fighting over me at the Troc. Jeff hurt Lester worse than they let out and even old Sammy got a black eye. I’d just discovered that when you get to the top you have all the ordinary pleasures the boobs yearn for all their lives, and they don’t mean anything, and you have to work and scheme every minute to get the pleasures beyond pleasure that you’ve got to have to keep your life from going dry.”

  The fourth ghost rose toward the ceiling like a diver paddling up from the depths. Then, as if the whole room were filled with its kind of water, it seemed to surface at the ceiling and jackknife there and plunge down again with a little swoop and then reverse direction again and hover for a moment over the real Evelyn’s head and then sink slowly down around her like a diver drowning. This time I watched the bright hands cupping the ghost’s breasts around her own as if she were putting on a luminescent net brassiere. Then the ghost’s filminess shrank suddenly to tighten over her torso like a cheap cotton dress in a cloudburst.

  As the glow died to darkness a fourth time, Evelyn said softly, “Ah but that was cool, Emmy. I’m shivering. I’d just come, back from my first location work in Europe and was sick to get at Broadway, and before you cut it you made me relive the yacht party where I overheard Ricco and the author laughing at how I’d messed up my first legitimate play reading, and we swam in the moonlight and Monica almost drowned. That was when I realized that nobody, even the bottom boobs in the audience, really respected you because you were their sex queen. They respected the little female boob in the seat beside them more than they did you. Because you were just something on the screen that they could handle as they pleased inside their minds. With the top folk, the Big Timers, it wasn’t any better. To them you were just a challenge, a prize, something to show off to other men to drive them nuts, but never something to love. Well, that’s four,
Emmy, and four and one makes all.”

  The last ghost rose whirling and billowing like a silk robe in the wind, like a crazy photomontage, like a surrealist painting done in a barely visible wash of pale flesh tones on a black canvas, or rather like an endless series of such surrealist paintings, each distortion melting into the next-trailing behind it a gauzy wake of draperies which I realized was the way ghosts were always pictured and described. I watched the draperies bunch as Evelyn pulled them down around her, and then they suddenly whipped tight against her thighs, like a skirt in a strong wind or like nylon clinging in the cold. The final glow was a little stronger, as if there were more life in the shining woman than there had been at first.

  “Ah that was like the brush of wings, Emmy, like feathers in the wind. You cut it after the party in Sammy’s plane to celebrate me being the top money star in the industry. I bothered the pilot because I wanted him to smash us in a dive. That was when I realized I was just property-something for men to make money out of (and me to make money, too, out of me), from the star who married me to prop his box-office rating to the sticks theater owner who hoped I’d sell a few extra tickets. I found that my deepest love—it was once for you, Emmy—was just something for a man to capitalize on. That any man, no matter how sweet or strong, could in the end never be anything but a pimp. Like you, Emmy.”