The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  “At your birth,” I told him, “the seventh degree of Scorpio was rising.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  I pointed to the wall chart. “Most signs of the zodiac have only one symbol. Yours has four. There is the scorpion, waiting in the dust and ready with his poisonous barb. There is the snake crawling in the grass with his poison. There is the eagle of pride, flying up to stare the sun out of countenance. Finally there is the Phoenix—reborn man, freed of earth, and become god-like. And judging from your stars, your eagle is still in the dust, playing with snakes and scorpions.

  “You are using an invisible weapon, your will power. Like an Australian bushman ‘pointing the bone’ to will someone to death.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “Whether you know it or not, you are practicing black magic. If it weren’t for my bare chance of opening your eyes, I’d wash my hands of the entire business, and good-riddance! Pick up your check—I can’t take any pay.”

  “Why not? This is important to me.”

  “If a man asks a lifeguard to give him swimming lessons on his day off duty, payment is in order. But you rarely hear of a lifeguard offering a drowning man swimming lessons at so much an hour. I’ll see you when I’ve studied your chart and hers and his.”

  Wayland—Benson—Diane—they were Siamese triplets; and Wayland was a blind man with a kit of psychic surgical instruments, trying to cut the invisible bond, so that he and Diane would be free to start a new life together. While the operation might succeed, not one of the three patients could survive.

  All this became so clear and so haunting that I broke away from a dinner party right after the coffee and brandy; and on my way home, I followed an impulse and went directly to Wayland’s place in the foothills behind Atherton.

  The house was on a bald knoll whose base was fringed with oaks. Knowing well the atrocious parking most country places offer, I left my car at the level spot not far from the entrance. The ascent was neither long nor steep, yet the effect was odd. At first I thought that too many cigarettes and too many years sitting at a desk had made me more short-winded than I had realized; but it proved to be another sort of breathlessness, and it was combined with that light-headedness which one experiences after a swift drive from six or seven thousand feet elevation down to sea level.

  It is not so much an actual giddiness as it is a sensing that one’s balance is slightly off; that one’s own voice sounds like someone else’s; probably all this is because the inner ear, which seems to control equilibrium, has not had a chance to readjust itself to the change of pressure.

  Ear…inner ear…sound…sound, not elevation at all!

  Yet there was no more than a suggestion of sound, and that so uncertain as to be no more than premonition that I should presently hear something. Still and all, it played tricks with the equilibrium mechanism, so that I had to exert a conscious effort, however slight, to remain normally balanced.

  Presently the sound became audible, yet hearing it was something like seeing an iceberg—in that what is perceived is less than a tenth of all that is actually there. The unheard part of what came from the house was what had the disturbing force. The murmuring, the rustling, the whispering were only the perceptible indication of something beneath the level of hearing.

  Wayland was beating a drum. Not a snare drum, not a bass drum, not a tympanum, but something far more primitive. Perhaps remember the travelogue and sound track which Harrison Smith recently brought back from Tibet? Hundreds of yellow-robed lamas gathered to chant to the sunrise.

  AUM! Mani padme hum! AUM! Tat Savitur varenyam!

  Wayland’s drumming was like the chanting of those lamas; and I began to understand as from direct experience why the explorer had insisted that the actual chant gave an effect which the sound track did not have; that the intoning of mantrams literally went to one’s head, and seemed to wrench the sutures of the skull, and to hammer the nerve center of the solar plexus.

  Pain and dizziness became more pronounced. I could not feel the porch flooring under my tread. It was as if gravity had ceased to act. I caught at the jamb, and got a glance through the small pane, slantwise through vestibule and archway and into the living room. Wayland sat on the floor. He had a saddle drum whose wooden shell was no larger than a good-sized mixing bowl. With one hand he beat the head.

  Beat is hardly the word. For while he did tap with knuckles and fingertips, and heel of the hand, and slapped with the palm, the strokes were only at times percussive. He varied the impacts by rippling his fingertips as though on the keys of a piano. He made dragging, caressing sweeps. There was only a little sound: a murmuring, a whispering, a muttering, like the persistence of a gong note when the bronze is stilled yet not actually mute.

  He swayed and nodded. It was as though he had become a mechanical toy. Wayland was absent: what I saw was his animated frame. The man himself had stepped into another dimension. His will, carried on drumbeats, reached out. What I felt was only the eddying backwash of the currents which he was directing elsewhere.

  Wayland was making magic. Magic, stripped of ritual, is nothing more than directed and controlled vibration, the carrier wave of concentrated will, of pure power. Thought, in its plane, is molded into shape as are iron or clay on the material plane.

  I groped, fumbled for the pushbutton. Whoever was receiving the directed impulses of Wayland’s drumming was being twisted on a psychic rack. Though I found the button, my fingers acted as though they belonged to someone else. While not ignoring my will, they seemed unable to understand or obey. Rather, my will was groping, hobbled, stumbling.

  That beating, that surging, those flashes and whirlpools of light in my own head were the interference waves of a fourth dimensional heterodyne: the illusion of sound and light, images made stronger by twisted nerves.

  The geometry of the room was warping out of all relation to reality. It was not only as though I now saw Wayland at once full face and in profile; it was as though, without disturbance of the walls, there was an additional dimension down which I could see all the way to infinity. Perspective became wholly false. The woman who came down the hyper-dimensional spiral changed rather in figure and feature and expression than in apparent height as she moved from infinite remoteness to step at last into the room.

  When the face and form solidified, I recognized Diane Benson. The Ascending Sign of her horoscope had correctly described head shape and carriage, the set of the shoulders, the expression of the dark eyes. I had expected unusual brunette beauty, with Saturn in Libra: Diane went far beyond expectation.

  Wayland seemed not to see her, nor she, him. Yet her lips moved, and her eyes, at once haunting and haunted, were fixed as on someone facing her.

  Whatever this was, it would be dangerous to interrupt, even if I could. But the hand which had so long been unable to obey now acted as though of its own will. Space rearranged itself. The bell snarled in the hallway. Wayland continued his drumming; however, the sound was only a normal one, the curiously stirring appeal of drums. The apparition of Diane had vanished.

  I rang again, and gave the knob a twist and a rattle. The door opened without warning. I lurched headlong across the threshold and into the hall. Wayland yelled, jumped up, and checked himself against a chair.

  “Where the devil’d you come, from?”

  “Walked in. I rang, but it seems your drum kept you from hearing. I must have got impatient and jiggled the door and it wasn’t latched. Sorry I startled you.”

  Though Wayland had not yet wholly returned into himself, he made a characteristic grimace, wry and half-humorous. “Drums always have fascinated me. This one’s more relaxing than liquor. You can have your electric organs and the like, I’ll take a drum for self-expression.”

  “This is an odd one,” I said, kneeling to get a close look. “Wouldn’t be out of place in a museum. Is it something liberate
d during the war?”

  He shook his head. “I picked it up when they auctioned the St. Cyr estate. Junk from the trophy room. Persian armor, Zulu assegai, Tibetan statuette—and this.” He reached for the decanter on the tile-topped cocktail table. “Bourbon?”

  “Thanks, no. I just broke away from dinner, and followed the impulse to barge in. I had you three people so strongly in mind I couldn’t stay in step with sociability this evening.”

  “Well, now! What did our horoscopes tell you?”

  “You’re practicing black magic with that drum. If you are not trying to will him to death, you are trying to will her to pack up and run out with you. Pretty mess, you and he, law partners!”

  Wayland’s face tightened. “How would I be able to do anything of the sort, assuming I were trying to?”

  “About one human in every hundred thousand, perhaps one in every million, let’s not quibble about numbers, has will power. The others aren’t able to go beyond mere wishing, hoping. Wish is a firecracker, will is an A-bomb. Wishing is an emotional muddle. Will is pure force. It’s the same as electricity, magnetism, gravity, heat, light. It is energy directed and harmonious. That’s what you’re dabbling with and you’re very likely to destroy everyone concerned—yourself, her, and him!”

  Wayland’s downdroop of the brows, further shading his eyes, told me he had been impressed, so I bored in. “When matter disintegrates it becomes energy. When energy is collected and organized, it becomes matter. The whole material universe is nothing but organized will, and you, you damned fool, are playing with that! With a psychic A-bomb. Quit it!”

  “You said, black magic.”

  “Magic is directed will. It is black when directed for your own wishes, even if they are good, as people ordinarily reckon good.”

  “Aren’t you going a bit too far, just looking at the stars?”

  “No, I’m not. The way her horoscope is related to yours and to her husband’s is such that a danger to one of you is a danger to all three.”

  And then I told him what I had heard and seen before shock made me give the door a wrench.

  Wayland’s eyes, probably for the first time in his life, opened wide. “Is that true? Man to man, is it?”

  “Could I have cooked it up out of my imagination? And if I were trying to fool you, wouldn’t I have picked something more plausible?”

  That seemed to satisfy him, for he asked, “How do you explain it? My being able to—to will this, do this.”

  “If you can accept the idea of reincarnation, at least as something possible—if you can accept the idea of karma, the law of cause and effect, the law that every action and every desire sets in motion a train of events—that, life after life, we come back, bound to those we have either loved or hated in previous lives—if that is not too much for you to swallow, I’d risk answering your question. Not with the idea that you should believe it, but that you would not set yourself against it without taking at least a moment’s thought.”

  He gave me an odd look. “I’ve heard of such things. Hearing a little more won’t hurt. But am I to understand that an astrologer can read a man’s past lives?”

  “To a degree, yes. And the probable trend of his next life. The stars tell all. The only limitation is man’s ability to read them. Anyway, you and Benson are law partners, a quite prosaic and matter of fact profession. But you, in your former lives, learned something of the science of vibration. Now you are using it with the self-centeredness you’ve always had. Though never before have you had the power to go with the selfishness.

  “Here is your test—will you be a scorpion, or a Phoenix?”

  By way of accepting the challenge, he told me about himself and Diane and Benson. There was nothing novel about the situation, not even in the frills and trimming. Benson and Diane had outlived whatever love they might have had—but he wasn’t going to let anyone else have her. It gave him a sense of power to hold out, to command; and Diane would not leave her husband which infuriated Wayland.

  “Chicken-hearted!” he summed up. “Nobody’d be hurt, really!”

  “She is not what you call chicken-hearted,” I told him. “She is simply incapable of changing an innate conviction. That is by no means the same as being stubborn from pride. She was born under fixed signs. In whatsoever pattern such a person is set, she is there to stay. Change is possible, but very slowly, and it has to come from within, never from without. Don’t you understand?”

  “No! That makes no sense whatever!”

  “Probably not. Scorpio, your sign, is also a fixed one.”

  Before that jab had a chance to sink in, a car came up the drive. Wayland exclaimed as though in recognition of its sound. He bounded to the window. After a glance out, he turned on me, exclaiming, “There she is now! Get out, will you? Whatever’s brought her here, I don’t want her embarrassed—get out! No, Lord, no! Not out the front—leave by the back—that way—”

  His gesture had the force to match the ferocity of his voice. Impatience, resentment at my meddling presence; and, triumph also: he conveyed all these with eye and tone.

  I was in the laundry alcove before Wayland opened the front door. I heard her greet him with an inarticulate cry rather than with words. Then a few heel clicks, sharp and jarring, and she was in the living room with Wayland.

  Diane was trying to explain her inexplicable urge, and why she had not phoned. She was violently agitated, and scarcely coherent; this, with the echo of distortion of vestibule and hall kept me from catching more than a few words.

  “…for a minute I was so dizzy I pulled over to the side of the road… I must have blacked out… No, darling, nothing has gone wrong—I simply had to get out, had to and did, and oh, it was the strangest, craziest thing, heading for your place, but I had to!”

  He said something to the effect that a drink would do her good. While he had himself under better control than she had, more had happened than he was able to understand. I twisted the latch knob, and very carefully opened the door. After this unexpected demonstration of his power to command her will, Wayland would certainly not pay heed to anything I might say to him later.

  It seemed, as I skirted the house, that my meddling had done more harm than good, for in telling him what I had seen, I had given him an awareness of a power he had apparently been exercising blindly.

  Once in the parking circle, I saw her coupe. I looked into it. She had brought no luggage. But that did not prove that he and she might not leave within the hour, and not to return. This could well be Wayland’s long-awaited victory, won by magic.

  I was at the foot of the grade, and in the deep shadow of the oaks under which I had parked when a long convertible swung into Wayland’s drive, tires squealing and scattering gravel. With well over four million cars registered in California, the odds were very much against my guessing correctly whose it was that swooped up the grade and around the curves. But since I, a spectator, had been drawn into the outer fringe of the “sending,” it was likely enough that Wayland’s drumming had affected Benson; that Benson had simply trailed his wife.

  By the time I returned to the level of the house, the visitor was indoors. To avoid a betraying latch click, I had not closed the back door after me. In another moment, I was again in the laundry alcove, and tiptoeing for the front.

  “Don’t be piggish, Dick,” a man was saying. “Diane’s life is her own, she’s entitled to it, whatever you two have together is your own business. As long as it’s kept quiet and private. But when she blows her top and bounces out of the house, jet propelled, after getting rid of some guests by telling them she had a headache, it’s going too far!”

  By now I knew that the speaker was Ron Benson. Diane was crying, and insisting that it had not been Wayland’s fault; that she had followed an irresistible impulse. And Wayland, seeing no good in discussing magic, got down to a point of his own:

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p; “We’re serious, Ron. This went way past the flirtation stage a long time ago. She and I did not have an engagement this evening, and if we had had, I’d certainly not expect her to hustle unexpected callers out of your house. And since that’s what she seems to have done, you can put two and two together. You might as well be realistic. The situation is getting under her skin. Break it up, neither is good for the other anymore.”

  As Wayland paused for breath, Benson broke in, “If Diane left me to marry you, you can figure what would happen to our practice. Our clients would lose confidence in us as a team. So quit the sentimental schoolboy stuff and act grown up! She’s getting no divorce—” He chuckled affably. “She can’t. No more than could I. Everything’s too comfortably complicated, you know.”

  And that was when I left. Their fate seemed now to be so much and so immediately in their own hands that details did not matter. It was not until several days later, when Diane Benson called at my studio, that I learned that nothing had been decided, and that Wayland was more than ever at work, forcing a decision.

  She was not as tall as she looked nor was it the high heels; the illusion came from the way she carried herself. Diane was that uttermost rarity, a woman who knew how to walk. Her hair was all alive, and even though its vital quality might have been the result of skillful processing, no beauty parlor could possibly have given her skin that exceedingly fine texture. Most important, however, were the dark eyes. They told that from living and learning, she had reached full human stature; the other two of the Siamese triplet had not, though their chance was just around the corner of Time.

  She summed up what had happened, and except for details, told me nothing I did not already know. She concluded, “Dick finally admitted he had been willing me to leave Ron, commanding me to. Though he certainly hadn’t intended to have me drive about in a trance, and just on the verge of being blacked out. He promised most faithfully he would not try any such tricks again.”