The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  That’s the kind of man I was dealing with. Those revenue fellows had been to college, and they were about as stupid as foxes, and they couldn’t do a thing with my uncle. I reckon he really didn’t have the recipe written down on paper.

  But most of the time, I was too busy to sit there and wonder about the home folks. You know, a fellow just gets used to being a magician. And I was learning faster than Uncle Simon suspected. I played dumb, which was easy.

  I naturally couldn’t have picked up so many tricks by just studying. Sekhmet was telling me things.

  She wasn’t speaking in my ear. She was whispering into my mind. I never saw her, never heard her, though once in a while I could almost smell her. That sweet stuff she wore in her hair. It must have been what they called frankincense and such-like in the Sunday school lessons. From Arabia. Like the Queen of Sheba sent King Solomon. I was getting so I knew more than the preacher back home.

  But I had to hurry up. Uncle Simon was fixing to play a dirty trick, making me do all the work, and helping him conjure, and then never dying nor giving his kinfolks any gold bars. He said the stuff isn’t good for people who don’t work for it, unless they’re magicians. I knew I had to move fast.

  This time I climbed out of my window and took the book with me, along with a little-flashlight. I knew now I didn’t have to stand and look at the graven image. Sekhmet would open the road to the Land of Fire no matter where I was, as long as I said the right words. I didn’t even have to holler the words. Just as long as I held my mouth right, they’d be good at a whisper.

  So I went to the far corner of the big yard, where the old stable was. It stood crosswise of the house and close to the back of it.

  I set the flashlight on a sill where it would shine on the book and then I started reading. The reason I needed it at all was because it had directions on what to do when you get ’way into the Land of Fire. In case Sekhmet didn’t show up then and there, I’d have to know what to say to the fire spirits. Magic is just like conjuring away warts, or making a neighbor’s cow go dry, back home, only it’s a lot more serious.

  The difference is, a magician can get himself killed, if he makes a mistake. But he doesn’t have to wait for the dark of the moon, nor sit around in graveyards.

  I began reading. It happened faster this time. First a little spinning spot of light like a whirlpool in a stream. It spread, and changed colors, and all those sounds began shaking me apart. But I had learned that nobody else could hear them. Couldn’t hear anything except what I was speaking, and I kept my voice low.

  Sekhmet came walking down a tunnel of shivering light. It reached so far that the other end of it was small, like the inside of an ice-cream cone. Twisting and spinning. When she saw me, she began to run, with her arms reaching out. Then she got impatient, and she picked up her skirt to her knees so she could stretch her legs.

  Her corkscrew curls were all blue and flaming. I knew now that the sweetness wasn’t perfume. It was the smell of pure fire—the stuff lightning is made of. She was so beautiful I was almost scared. She wouldn’t let me kiss her.

  “We’ve got to hurry.” She was breathing real quick, and she caught my hand. “You shouldn’t have called me tonight.”

  Sekhmet turned around and pulled me after her. I got long legs, but I could hardly keep up. It was like being shot out of a gun. My breath was hammered right back into my teeth, and her curls reached back. “What—what—what’s the matter?” I asked her.

  “You uncle’s been laying for you, and he’s a-chasing you with a book in his hand.”

  I looked back. There was Uncle Simon, laughing to himself. He was scrambling through the clouds of lire that were closing up, ’way behind us. We must have been a million miles away from the barn, and if he’d not gotten there when he did, he’d have been left. But here he was, with those short legs pumping up and down. He was waving one hand, and reading from his book while he ran. It got me worried, seeing anyone his age so spry. He was mad and happy. That’s a funny way for a man to look. I guess he was riled because Sekhmet wouldn’t wait for him, and glad he’d caught us in time.

  Ahead I saw fires that made those in back of us look like a pack of matches. The flames had faces. They had hands. They were leaning like rushes in the wind, closing in to block the path.

  And beyond them everything was dancing. The roaring and crying and twittering sounds began to have color. I could feel the flames reaching into me. I was part of them now, and they wouldn’t kill me. It was like being full of corn whisky and going to a camp meeting and being struck by lightning, all at once.

  But Uncle Simon was right on our heels. Short legs weren’t stopping him. Sekhmet was sinking knee-deep in purple fire. She was choking for breath. And all of a sudden, I sobered up and noticed my feet were getting heavy. I stumbled.

  She wiggled herself clear of the swamp of flame that was clogging our legs. She reached out and tried to pull me up. Uncle Simon was roaring at us.

  “Get your hands off that girl, or you’ll drown in fire! You young squirt, maybe you can open the road, but I followed you and you got not a chance. Not with me inside.”

  Sekhmet looked like she was going to cry. She was panting and pulling, but it didn’t do any good. I was just making her sink deeper. And the fires we’d been running toward were crowding forward something awful, like they were mad at us.

  “Don’t get scared,” she screamed. “I can take care of myself.”

  But I knew she couldn’t. Uncle Simon had a trick that wasn’t in the books. He was so close now that I could see the picture-writing on the paper he had. He was giving me one chance to shut up before he began singing an incantation in Egyptian.

  “He’ll call Osiris and all the other gods!” Sekhmet moaned. “He knows their right names, and they’ll help him against me.”

  Then I lost my head. I pulled my hand away from Sekhmet and began reading. I shouted him down, and anyway, he was too surprised to make a sound. It was like when my dad up and knocked Grandfather down to prove he’d grown up.

  What I did was read my spell backward.

  All the banken-up flames began pouring out like I’d knocked the bottom from a barrel. The whole Land of Fire and everything in it came a-roaring. It tumbled me over and over. For a second I thought I was dead. I couldn’t see and couldn’t hear and couldn’t smell anything.

  The next thing I knew, I was sitting against the high wall, all doubled up and feeling busted to pieces. I didn’t know but what a couple of mules had cut loose and kicked me silly.

  The barn and the house were blazing. You’d have thought someone had doused them with gasoline and touched it off all over at once. I ran around, yelling for my uncle and Sekhmet, but the fire howled and crackled.

  Maybe I did say you couldn’t get over that wall without flying. I didn’t have wings, but I made it. My hands were all torn and my pants ripped, and I fell so hard I couldn’t move for a minute. I had to crawl toward the road. And the smoke reached after me, and so did the blaze.

  That crazy second when I made the fire go backward scared me. When a magician’s scared, he loses his power. I think what really made me that way was knowing that I was finishing Uncle Simon, catching him off guard before he could fight back. It was no longer than a wink, my wanting to kill him for trying to take Sekhmet. But that kind of a thought is wrong, and makes things go wild.

  I don’t know why I wasn’t killed, unless she got me out of it.

  When people and motorcycle officers came a-helling, they allowed it was an explosion. They didn’t ask me much. I looked too dumb, which was lucky.

  I never saw Uncle Simon again. Everything inside the wall burned to ashes. And I couldn’t call Sekhmet. The books and everything were gone, and I was afraid, anyway to try it.

  We didn’t inherit Uncle Simon’s money. The new will was burned, and the old one was still in the bank. So the
y built another college in California, and when I went home, Dad whaled me within an inch of my life for not saving the will when the house burned down.

  STRANGE GATEWAY

  Originally published in Unknown, April 1939.

  It is said that prolonged fasting opens a gateway which is closed to normal senses; that fever or drugs, for instance, can blaze a path across the border of consciousness. I know that fatigue can open that strange gate. There are lessons that can be learned without understanding.

  The setting sun reddened the plateau of Arizona. Sterile crags rose through haze and hell glamour; first they were ruddy buff, then a lurid purple. As the light changed, they became coal-black with threats of fire behind it. All this glare beat through the windshield, making my eyes burn and sting. I had slept only in winks during the past three days, and now this drive, with no stops except for coffee and gasoline.

  I needed money badly, and at once. Jeff Grant had several thousand dollars worth of nuggets in his mountain cabin. He had not answered my letter. Probably it was still at the post office, waiting until he and his wife came to town for supplies. And since I had waited too long for a reply there was nothing to do but head west. Trains were too slow, and planes too expensive.

  Finally coolness drove out the blast-furnace wind that had seared my face all day. For a while that lifted the burden of fatigue. Then the increasing elevation made my head swim. I was dizzy, and the chill of a mile above sea level began to bite home. The worst twelve hours were still ahead, for a life depended on my keeping awake.

  Not that failure would actually cause my kid brother’s death; he’d live, all right. But he’d be a cripple—a helpless twist of scar tissue if he did not get to a specialist, and in a hurry. The furnace explosion that caused the damage was my fault. Just one of those absent-minded moves, followed by a sheet of flame

  Once I had Grant’s hoarded nuggets I could wire the funds back home and quit wondering if the kid might get a genuine break by not living.

  I had calculated on the tortuous road beyond Last Chance. The lights of the mining town were scarcely behind me when the effects of a quart of strong coffee wore off, and the fight began.

  The feeble headlights were none too well focused, which was normal for the antique I drove. Slowly, surely, my eyes were glazing from the monotony of following that snaking white center line.

  My hands automatically manipulated the wheel, and my foot the brake. This was as it should be, until I became somewhat too unconscious of these movements. My ears were filled with the grumble of the engine. The unvarying note became hypnotic.

  Suddenly I found myself halted with the front wheels almost over the edge of a thousand-foot drop. Instinct had failed for a split second, and I had not swung the now heavy wheel in time. My foot had saved me.

  I broke out in a sweat, thinking of the next curve, when foot and hand might fail together. The shock aroused me. I was wide awake. The silence frightened me. It was only after several seconds that I realized I had killed the engine.

  For some miles I drove on, and not uncomfortably. Then the reserves, which fright had lashed to the surface, began to burn out. Once, perhaps twice, a faster-moving car overtook me. One which approached had fairly blinded me, forcing me to the very edge of the precipice.

  I stared into the darkness, looking for some wide spot used by the highway maintenance crews as gravel dumps. But each time, taken by surprise, I overshot my mark. I passed on, and I could not trust myself to back up, nor to risk a U-turn. Fatigue had become an enemy who patiently waited for my first false move. I could feel the menace. Safety lay in straight movement in my own narrow lane.

  I tried to sing, to whistle; anything to keep from sleeping at the wheel. The false recuperation at the last gas stop had kept me from making the rounds of the town to find some caffeine tablets. I was not getting my “second wind.” I had no reserves. They had been exhausted during that nerve-racking day and by the sleepless nights that had preceded it.

  My eyes glazed. They stared sightlessly at the white line and the winding gray of the pavement. I slowed down to a crawl. Fatigue and anxiety had whipped me. But finally, despite my dim headlights, I spied a wide spot where I could park without risk.

  I remember saying “Thank God!”

  Likewise, I cut off the engine. Now that there was no danger from exhaust fumes, I raised the window. Then I slumped across the wheel. Of all this I am certain. But to this day I can only guess what followed.

  I was driving again, and I was not tired. Jeff Grant was talking to me from the back seat—though this did not seem strange at the time.

  “Of course, the money’s there, Bill,” he said, answering my question. “When you grubstaked me, pretending you thought I might do a little prospecting while my lungs improved, I took you at your word. Something told me I’d find a couple of pockets. Enough to pay you back.”

  I don’t know just what I replied. I must have inquired about his wife. Women are funny about some things. She might raise merry hell about him handing me three-four thousand dollars—more than I actually needed—when I had staked him to only a couple hundred.

  Grant was amused at my qualms. “Irene’s not that way! She’s been wonderful, sticking through hell and high water. Way up in that lonely little cabin. She thinks you’re tops, too. I didn’t hide your share to keep it from her. That was just…well, so it’d be safe and ready any time you’d accept it.”

  Months ago I had refused Grant’s offer of a cut. True, I had grubstaked him, and according to old mining tradition, fifty percent of take was mine. But I had never believed he’d have any luck. I’d really staked him to a chance to get well. It didn’t seem right to accept a profit on such an investment. You can’t ever tell when these lungers have a relapse, or need expensive hospitalization.

  “Jeff,” I said, “you’re a godsend, if there ever was one—” Then, abruptly, my voice became unusually loud. I was driving. I was alone, and I had absolutely no recollection of having started up the engine, pulled out of that wide spot.

  I kicked the brakes. The shock of realizing what I had done left me wide awake. I saw a highway marker. A town was only five miles away. The distance, just before I pulled up to rest, had been over thirty miles.

  I had driven that stretch while asleep! That was bad enough, but this was worse: I had retained enough contact with my surroundings to have the illusion of being awake. With this half truth had come an outright hallucination, that of talking with Grant. It seemed now that I had also had a few words with Irene. People, some alive but long forgotten, others long dead, had occasionally made the conversation three-cornered.

  That frightened me. Not the conversation, but the fact that my tormented senses had reached a stage when they could trick me to death.

  I sat there, woodenly wheeling the car down grade. The road was wider. Presently, before the stimulus of the shock wore off, I was rolling into a town whose name I do not any longer recollect.

  There was a restaurant. I went in and called for a bowl of chili and some coffee. The waiter stared at me, particularly when I asked him how far it was to Prescott. Certainly there are many who drive all night. Neither was it my sweat and grease-grimed shirt of dust-caked face; many a truck driver is more disheveled.

  The fellow rang up the money and pushed the change at me without a word. I was still a little dazed, despite eating, walking across the street, and resting my eyes from the stupefying white line. The waiter must have seen something in my face which alarmed him.

  I mean, he knew, as a dog or cat knows things, that he was looking at a man whose senses were still away from his body. Literally, I was not all there. Some of me must still have been beyond that strange gateway. At the time I did not know how far one can go and still return.

  My mind was working and so were my senses, but very slowly. I drove accordingly. I was fairly bloated with strong coffee, and
the strong cigar did its bit. Not the smoke, but the tobacco clamped between my teeth.

  The going was better for a while. Getting to Prescott was no great problem. Neither did I have any difficulty in finding the side road that led to Grant’s mountain retreat. I was not even dismayed at the thought of the last three miles of the one-way trail which I would have to make in low gear once I branched from the secondary highway.

  Perhaps the shock and strain had numbed apprehension. At the time it seemed that I had tapped an ultimate reserve. But this was not so. Quite the contrary, as it later developed.

  It was nearly four o’clock when I reached the foot of the final ascent. A treacherous grayness blurred everything, and wisps of mist banded the road. Perhaps they were dust haze that had freakishly climbed, though that made no difference. They warped the shapes of stunted trees. Once two headlights loomed up, great yellow blobs, bearing straight at me.

  I yelled and pulled over. They swung to meet me. Some fool was not only on the wrong side of the road, but bent on pushing me over the edge. Before I could jump, I realized that a shifting haze band had mirrored my own headlights. Its sudden reaching into a clear space had given me the worst shock of the drive.

  It took a moment or two for me to collect myself. I was still shaking when someone said: “Hi, Bill! I got your letter.”

  Grant’s voice. I croaked something that wasn’t quite articulate and swung toward the door. My sleeve accidentally caught the headlight switch and snapped it off. In the sudden gloom I could just see him—rather, I could distinguish his shape, the blurred pale blotch of his face.

  He said: “When I saw the postmark on your letter, I was sure you’d be here before I could answer. Irene is in Prescott. I had a hunch. I had to come out here to meet you. It seemed crazy, but I didn’t want you to get to the cabin and wonder why we weren’t there.”