The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  When the car halted, and his captors, throttling hands at his throat, dragged him forth, Loring saw that they had parked in a walled estate which must be in new Cairo, probably in the Qasr en Nil quarter, judging from the impressive masonry and well-kept grounds.

  Some Egyptian dignitary had a reason for wanting the corpse of a lovely white woman…Loring shuddered…remembering that, centuries ago, the bodies of beautiful women were not delivered to the hands of the embalmers until several days after death…

  This time the shudder was quite personal: there might be horrors ahead that would make a knife thrust in a tomb a pleasant way out.

  Then one of the robed figures rumbled a command in German, and a pair of negroes hustled Loring to a vault in the basement. He caught a final glimpse of two others who carried upstairs a muffled burden from which hung a bare, white arm…

  By the dim light that filtered in between iron bars near the ceiling of the vault, Loring finally saw that he was imprisoned in a wine cellar. The door was a massive iron-bound hardwood, and the tumblers of the lock were far too heavy to pick, even if he had been able to use the bits of wire he found lying about.

  His captors bad made one error: in mistaking him for an Arab, they had counted on the loss of a few bottles of wine as the limit of fatalistic resignation. Loring, however, was not resigned.

  He ignored the vintage champagnes in their honeycomb bins; but a case of Demerara rum brought a vengeful gleam to his eyes.

  He knocked off a bottle neck and took a deep swig. The blistering stuff was about one hundred and twenty proof. With some wires he fastened a handful of excelsior waste to the lock, and saturated it with rum. No one had thought to search him for matches: and thus in a moment he had touched off the head-splitting beverage.

  The blue flame fiercely and silently ate into the heavy door. Another quart. And as it bit in, Loring chipped the char away with the metal lug of a wine case.

  Slow work; but at last he backed off, muffled his shoulder with his kaftan, and charged. The weakened wood yielded.

  “Not bad rum,” he muttered, opening the last bottle. Just a refreshing jolt; and then he gathered up a basket of Veuve Cliquot. After ten minutes of prowling, Loring located his captors in a richly furnished European-style drawing room in the left wing.

  Four burly negroes squatted cross-legged in a corner. Stretched out on a table, splendid in her unconcealed beauty, lay Paquita. Standing on its far side were two men: a black-mustached, hook-nosed Egyptian in evening dress, and a beefy, square-jawed German in tweeds. Too many to take empty-handed. He watched from the door jamb.

  “Let us complete the change now, Assad Basha,” demanded the German. “She’s been a problem, and she’s getting worse.”

  “No, von Blauvelt. Wait till hostilities actually start in Ethiopia. To produce the resurrected Queen of Sheba now would start a premature wave of enthusiasm. It would be wasted. But time it right, and the fanatic Arabs from al Yemen would cross over into Ethiopia just when the final push is needed to sweep the accursed Italians back into the sea.”

  “Hmmm…” rumbled von Blauvelt. “Maybe it would be better to take her to al Yemen the way she is. But we cannot afford to wait till the last minute to see if that crazy dervish can make a synthetic queen.

  “Me, I am a psychiatrist, not a magician. True, I hypnotized her while she was under the influence of datura; but to create a brand new personality, ach, that dervish may be a fraud!”

  Assad Basha nodded.

  “You are right, von Blauvelt. And it is lucky you got wind of her going to that scholar’s house tonight. Clever, putting her into a cataleptic trance so he’d scramble to get rid of the supposed corpse! That saved us the embarrassment of breaking into his house.”

  Loring’s heart skipped half a dozen beats.

  “By God, she isn’t dead!”

  But knowing that he could not fight his way through a free-for-all with an unconscious woman in his arms, he had to wait. “Where’s the dervish?” demanded the German.

  Assad Basha clapped his hands. From behind a curtained alcove came a short, gnarled man the color of an old saddle. He wore only a loin cloth, but his long, straggling beard half clothed him. His wildly streaming hair trailed to his shoulders. Grimy, verminous, wild-eyed: a madman and mystic from the hinterland of al Yemen, where Makeda had been queen, centuries ago.

  In his hand he had a tiny drum. Squatting on the floor, he began tapping it with his finger tips and knuckles and the heel of his hand, evoking a spine-tingling, barbarous rhythm that droned like a wizard’s curse. And as he drummed, he began chanting.

  Words, here and there, were vaguely familiar to Loring: they made him shudder, and he was glad that he could understand so little.

  Then he saw von Blauvelt start, step forward as if to intervene; heard him mutter, “Ach, wait I should wake her, first—”

  “Silence, fool!” hissed Assad Basha, catching his arm. “The dervish needs none of your occidental science! The more nearly dead she is, the better!”

  Terror gripped Loring as he saw the German’s ruddy face become sallow. This was no mummery!

  That old madman’s voice was rumbling now like the thunder of a distant surf. First coaxing, it was now commanding; and Loring began to understand.

  “Makeda, Queen of the Morning, come back from dust of time to greet the sunrise again! Come back from the dusty centuries and take this new body which is lovelier than the one Suleiman loved!”

  Great God—she was breathing now! Loring could no longer mistake the rise and fall of her breast. That dervish was conquering the German psychiatrist’s hypnotic spell that had mimicked death.

  Paquita slowly sat up. At first with the uncertain motion of something just learning to move, then more surely. And what Loring had previously seen—the effect of von Blauvelt’s hypnotism—was but a dim shadow of the change that now took place.

  Her eyes were as haughty as her imperious mouth and the tilt of her chin. Neither flesh nor bone could alter their structure, but the incantation of that necromancer from al Yemen had called from the grave some long dead personality whose invading presence was reflected in every curve and line of that sweet loveliness. No hypnotist’s trick, but desert magic.

  She slid from the table. Her attitude was that of a queen condescendingly regarding fawning dignitaries. She gestured, and seemed displeased that they did not grovel face down on the floor.

  But they could not grovel. Assad Basha and von Blauvelt were frozen by the fraud that had become genuine.

  And that touched off Loring’s wire-edged nerves. She was moving. It was time to open the show.

  He bounded from cover. The German yelled. Assad Basha cursed and drew a pistol; but Loring’s quart of Veuve Cliquot was faster.

  Sock! The bottle sizzled home for a bulls-eye! And then the four negroes joined the melee. The dervish, kicking aside his drum and drawing a curved jambiah, crowded into the tangle. Loring hurled another bottle. It exploded against the mantelpiece, spraying shards of glass and wine. A club smashed down across his shoulder. A knife raked his ribs; but he clung to his remaining bottle, and as he kicked an African in the stomach, he cracked down on the dervish who was lunging upward for a ripping cut.

  Flesh and bone became pulp beneath that deadly bludgeon of glass. But though the magician flattened, Loring was submerged by a wave of black giants. And Assad Basha, recovering his wits, took command.

  Pay day in Cairo—

  And then a woman screamed: Ayesha! Gruff voices echoed, and hard shoes pounded down the hallway.

  Loring, still flailing the champagne bottle, struggled to his knees in time to see a file of Egyptian policemen clubbing Assad Basha into shape, and booting the negroes into submission.

  Ayesha, babbling and chattering, was clutching at the arm of an Egyptian official who wore so many medals he rattled like a junk wa
gon as he advanced to survey the riot. From the sidelines came another official, clutching a handful of papers.

  Von Blauvelt looked sick as he heard the bemedaled official explain to Loring: “A plot which your cook, Ayesha, very fortunately exposed. When you were kidnapped in the cemetery, she clung to the tire rack, then came to my palace with the news.

  “Had this gone any further, Egyptian neutrality might have been seriously compromised.

  “In the name of His Majesty, King Fuad, I offer you one thousand pounds Egyptian—”

  “Give it to my cook, your Excellency,” countered Loring, “so she can open a restaurant.”

  Paquita, imperious but smiling, twined an arm about Loring and whispered Sabean endearments in his ear.

  Von Blauvelt saw his chance to get off the spot.

  “The dervish did it, your Excellency,” he protested. “And he is dead. But modern psychiatry can restore this poor girl’s personality, and she will no longer think she is a queen.”

  That set Loring thinking. Paquita had been distressingly distant, but the invading personality was quite the contrary.

  “Nuts!” snapped Loring. “I like her better this way.”

  His Arab incognito had been fairly cracked by the language he had used during the melee, but as long as he stayed out of the native quarter, that made no great difference.

  “Darling,” murmured the resurrected queen, remembering that Haaji Saoud’s visit to Loring’s house had interrupted something important, “I did want you to crucify that white-bearded old goat—”

  “Listen, Makeda,” consoled Loring as he tipped a salute to the bemedaled and slightly bewildered official, “he’s not a bad old guy, teaching me dead languages.

  “Now let’s go home and I’ll tell you about electric refrigerators and other odds and ends Solomon didn’t have.”

  SANCTUARY

  Also published as “Peach Blossom Paradise”

  Cooper looked back, once, at the comrades he was deserting. There were Captain Breen, a handful of American soldiers, some Philippine Army men, and a dozen shock-headed Ifugao mountaineers who had turned guerilla because they liked to use home-made axes on Japanese necks.

  “To hell with it,” said Cooper, “I’m no magician! They’re nuts.” Then, steadily as a half-starved and fever-shaken man could, he went downgrade toward the broad Cagayan Valley.

  He kept talking to himself as he went. Though his words did not make a marching cadence, they kept the voices out of his ears. After all, he didn’t need any rhythm, for Cooper was no soldier. Also, he was walking on air, which is sometimes very solid, but sometimes full of small whirlpools, so that no one could have kept step.

  The voices were becoming louder now as he left the shade of gigantic lauans and ferns a dozen feet high, and came into the full blaze of the sun. The deserted guerrillas were chanting a sing song which maddened him: “No good son of a bitch! No good son of a bitch! He goes away to see the Japs, the no good son of a bitch!”

  No one had tried to talk him out of surrendering. Captain Breen, a living mummy, had merely said, “Well, sunshiner, maybe they will give you chow and quinine. We all could use some.”

  What did they expect of a sunshiner, a bum who had missed too many boats and quit trying?

  But they had no business mocking him, after his months of campaigning, bushwhacking Jap outposts, then racing for cover. Instead of his pre-war routine, guzzling a “pickaninny” of gin a day, he’d been drunk only once or twice. Too shaky to use firearms, he’d done some nice work with a bolo.

  “Quit hollering at me!” he croaked. “You’re dying on your feet and don’t know it! I’m going to eat.”

  He stumbled on, peering back once in a while to make sure there were no mountaineers lurking to spear him and then hurry to some high cave to smoke his head over a smoldering fire. But no one was following him. While they despised him for a quitter, the knotty-legged Ifugaos would not take an American head when there were so many Japs to supply trophies of valor.

  According to Captain Breen, “Igorrotes are all right if you leave their women alone.”

  Cooper began to laugh, a croaking, cackling laugh. When you’re half starved, drenched with mountain mist twenty-four hours a day, burned by fever and then shaken by chills, you don’t bother anyone’s women. Funny—why hadn’t someone told the Skibbies to let the girls alone?

  He wondered where Catalina was. Slender, lovely Catalina, with great dark eyes, and sampaguita blossoms in her blue-black hair. Catalina with the neat little bamboo shack, and the flock of chickens, and the garden of mais and camotes; and the hand loom, weaving enough pina cloth to keep them both in rice and supply him with gin.

  She hadn’t reproached him when the soldiers arrived to take over. One sun-shiner, owl-eyed-groggy, couldn’t have gotten anywhere with three armed Japs. Even so, while he hoped she was alive and well, he did not want her ever to see him again.

  It all came back as he stumbled down the lower slopes of the Sierra Central: he remembered why he had joined the guerrillas. After failing Catalina, though through no fault of his own, bushwhacking a few Japs had been the only answer.

  Cooper sat down and readjusted the length of native cloth wrapped turban-wise about his head. He wondered why the leeches bothered with his legs. What blood he did have was rotting with malaria. The Japs had all the quinine. His duck pants ended at the knee. Julat-anay thorns had attended to that. Tattered rawhide sandals took the place of shoes. Aside from the lack of two silver bars, he was dressed much like Captain Breen, who did not have enough sense to quit.

  Cooper dug out of his pocket one of the handbills dropped from the planes which soared over the mountains. Failing to machine-gun or bomb the guerrillas out of action, the Japs were trying persuasion:

  Misguided Comrades & Self-Called Patriots: Resist is futile. Grieving Elder Brother craves reconcilement with Erring Younger Brother. Honoring gallant resistance in error, we offer pardon, nice welcome, medicine treatings when needed, and amiable lesson in Right Thinking about New Prosperity. Chicken in every pot, Enlightened Radio Message, everyone restored to Bosom of Family. N.B.—Identical kindness for all American soldier or civilian presenting this safe-conduct paper to Colonel Joro Yoshiwara, Commandant.

  He gained strength from the handbill, for villagers had from time to time reported that guerrillas who surrendered were actually treated well. He would have rested, but the voices mocked him:

  “The son of a bitch, he loves the Japs, hup! Hup!”

  It was worse than the time he had the DT’s. Captain Breen, Sergeant Piamonte, the long-legged galoot from Arkansas, and the Igorrotes were all chiming in. Then the maddening beat subsided and Captain Breen’s bitter voice came in, cold and clear, “If you change your mind, sunshiner, see Hong Li and get some chow and come back.”

  Hong Li was a Chinese shopkeeper who, apparently too old and harmless to be molested, had more than once helped the guerrillas by giving them supplies and information. And that was why Captain Breen’s voice, reaching fantastically from the hills, sounded so much like an accusation of treachery. For a guerrilla to stumble into the Chino tienda could well put the old man on the spot.

  Hong Li was either very daring or very cunning - perhaps both, for he was said to have a daughter, an exquisite girl, who had eluded the Japs. The old man must be a magician, Cooper told himself.

  “Need more magicians,” he mumbled through cracked lips. “You damn fools back there, you can’t do it. You think you can, but can’t!”

  It was dark, but he stumbled along, muttering, singing, giggling, cursing. Sometimes he hated the comrades who reviled him, but again he pitied them and resolved that he’d find a magician to save them, since nothing else could. Hong Li was one. He knew lots of Chinese tricks…

  The odd thing of it was that when he became aware of brightness, instead of the mosquito-infeste
d gloom through which he had been plunging for so many years, a Chinese face was looking down at him.

  The face was Hong Li’s. Sunken cheeks, a funny little sparse beard, a million wrinkles carved deeply into weathered skin. Twinkling eyes, their pupils somewhat contracted from the opium whose fumes still lingered in the sunlit room.

  In his skinny hand, Hong Li had a bowl of steaming soup and a porcelain spoon figured in green, blue and yellow glaze.

  “Eat more, eat every damn all. Plenty good.”

  Cooper sat up. He felt better though bad enough. Then he remembered the voices and his shouted arguments. “Did I talk loud?”

  “Way out where I find you, plenty, then no talk at all. Damn fool, come to town alone.”

  Cooper, sensing that the old man had not guessed the purpose of the trip, did not explain.

  The room itself suggested to him that telling Hong Li the truth might be bad stuff. There were two coffins sitting on trestles near the lacquered screen. They were elaborate, massive, trimmed in red and gold. They were air-tight, so that the deceased could be kept for days, even weeks, without offense, while awaiting the lucky day for burial, which was decided upon by consulting the feng shui men, who talked it over with demons and spirits. Chinese magic.

  Hong Li risked his neck for the guerrillas. He was a practical person, and he might have private thoughts about the proper treatment for a deserter. And that large, air-tight coffin would very easily fit Cooper.

  His fever-dried skin began to gleam with sweat. He stuttered, “Uh—those coffins—”

  Hong smiled blandly. “Oh, American too scare of dead, not scare of alive.” He raised the lid of the nearest coffin. “No got dead one. This for me. You savee?”

  Cooper felt better. A Chinaman buys his coffin in advance and keeps it prominently displayed for his friends to envy. No use asking about the second one. Maybe it was a present for some relative. Nicest thing you can give a kinsman is a first-chop coffin with lots of red and gold and carving. Time to change the subject…