The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  Her features were perfectly under control, with an almost Asiatic serenity, except for the twitch of her eyelids.

  “Well?”

  “Now he’s concentrating on Ron.”

  “You mean that your husband has begun to take drives like the one that gave you such a shock? Neat way of making you a widow?”

  “Oh, Lord, no! Nothing like that. Dick has simply been willing Ron to release me.”

  “And you’re not cooperating a bit, when you could make yourself so thoroughly obnoxious in a million dainty feminine ways that your husband would in no time at all be glad to give you to the Indians. Easiest thing on earth, only you’ve not done it. Why not?”

  “Call it a matter of obligation. No one and nothing compelled me to marry Ron. I knew I was wrong at the time, but I went ahead anyway. Because he was good to me, and because I was all in a whirl, looking for escape, and nowhere to go. I didn’t love him, but I liked him. He was solid, he had his feet on the ground. Oh, you wouldn’t understand what I mean by escape!”

  “Wouldn’t I? Escape seems to be humanity’s career, and first urge.”

  “I think this must have been escape from myself,” she went on. “Or from the giddy crowd I was part of. Nothing seemed especially important, and nothing was. Except getting away.”

  I pointed to the column of solar arcs on the margin of her chart. “Sun square Venus and Neptune. Saturn crossed mid-heaven. Say, 1945, in the autumn?” At her nod, I continued, “Escape or rather the attempt to didn’t work out at all, and so?”

  “Somehow or other, I realized that one can’t ever escape from oneself and from what one has made. One has to stick and see it through. If I forced the issue and walked out on Ron, all I’d do would bring Dick grief in one way or another, and we’d probably end by being each other’s stumbling blocks, resenting and accusing each other. I’d rather stay and pay my bill, my debt to fate. I have to pay it before I can ever have someone I really love. Idiotic sounding, isn’t it? But that’s how I feel.”

  “Did someone tell you what you’ve just told me, or did you read it, or—?”

  “It simply came to me. That you can’t run away from what you’ve made for yourself. It follows you wherever you go. Does that make sense?”

  “That,” I told her, “is the beginning and the end and the entire substance of Wisdom. You’ve stated the Law of Karma. You set forces in motion, and now you’re at the receiving end until the forces have expended themselves. And what worries you right now is that Dick Wayland is setting fresh forces in motion.”

  She nodded. “Will you please tell Dick that whatever he’s doing, holding a thought or whatever he wishes to call it, it is not working out the way he wants it to. Ron is becoming morbid, shaky, and stubborn.”

  “Why not tell him yourself?”

  “He’d only laugh and say I’m chicken-hearted. He insists that he and I belong to each other. That Ron encouraged the flirtation, largely for his own convenience, and now it’s up to him to like what he promoted.”

  “Promoted? So you’d look the other way while he had some other woman on the brain?” I glanced at the chart. “The spring of 1948?”

  “That’s right. And I was very happy about it all. Taking the easy view of things again! When I could have made a break and been free—ever hear of anything so utterly crazy.”

  “Pardon my yawn,” I said, and gestured toward the filing cabinet. “I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve charted that story. There’s not even a bit of novelty about the three of you being so civilized about it all. There is only one thing unusual about you three, and maybe I can convince Dick Wayland.”

  “What is it?” she asked eagerly.

  “It’s not necessary to tell you, so I won’t. Words may very often set forces in motion, too, you know. The same as acts or desires.”

  “Suppose Ron went to the mountains for a couple of weeks. That’d break the close association—they’ve both been working day and night on a case that’s wound up now, and a change of pace wouldn’t hurt a bit. That’s the oddest thing about it all—the way they work together, and really like each other—there isn’t any jealousy or animosity, or can you believe that?”

  “Just because it’s never allowed to happen in fiction, on the ground that it’s quite impossible, and that they simply ought to hate each other, doesn’t keep it from happening in actual life.”

  “So you see where that puts me! They’re close as brothers.”

  “Much closer,” I told her. “You three. That’s what’s dangerous. There’s nothing I could tell your husband—he’s a down-to-earth thinker—but I’ll talk to Wayland. He can understand, if he wants to.”

  “But can’t you tell me now what to do, what not to do, how it’s going to turn out?”

  “No.”

  “That makes you a queer sort of astrologer!” She spoke without petulance; she was merely puzzled. “After all, that’s your business, predicting and foreseeing?”

  “You’re confusing astrology with fortune telling. There is one element which never shows in my horoscope.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Will and choice. The stars shape your personality and the pattern of your moods, your peaks of vitality and your depths of depression. But whether your mood will rule you, or you rule it is a matter of choice. There’s neither pure predestination nor purely free will—there is rather a blend. You can’t escape from the circle of your fate, but within the circle, you have a million choices. Whatever I said to you now would influence you, and since there is no real need of my saying anything, I am not saying it.”

  “I think I understand,” she said, and when Diane left, it seemed that she had actually understood; and the eyelids had quit twitching from tension; Whether or not Benson’s leaving town for awhile would get him beyond the range of Wayland’s magic was an open question. He might go into the mountains to set to work with his drum. I began to consider the merits of breaking into his house and burning that diabolical instrument, but ending by discarding the thought. Destroying the drum would not decontaminate Wayland’s will, without which no amount of thumping would have any force at all.

  When I phoned the office and learned that Benson would be away for a week, I went to see Wayland; and, as before, without first calling him.

  He was at it when I arrived. There was that same inaudible undertone of vibration, the same queer and distressing effect, but apparently he had not yet got his will in tune with the rhythm. While the archway opening into the living room had begun to warp, and the walls were approaching a shimmering translucence, there was not yet any opening into higher dimensions.

  I rang, and called his name. No answer. Another jangle, another shout. Concentration broken, Wayland came pouncing for the door. I endured his eyes, and said, “You wanted to know how long Benson had to live, and I wouldn’t answer. I may not tell you now, but you have forced me pretty close to telling.”

  “Come in.”

  “Get in touch with Mrs. Benson. Let me talk to the two of you at the same time.”

  “She went with him as far as Modesto—she’ll be visiting relatives there while he and two friends from around there are up at the lodge, fishing. If you have a good argument, you don’t need her here to team up with you.”

  I spread the three horoscopes on the cocktail table. “In each chart, the malefic planets are so placed, were so placed at the birth of each of you, that when the daily motion of the planets—the transits, that is—puts one of you under a disastrous influence, the other two are likewise under it.”

  “It looks as clear to me as the fine print in an insurance policy is to anyone but an insurance broker!”

  “All right, take my word for it, then. You three are linked more closely than the Siamese twins were to each other. Except that you’re not bound together by flesh and cartilage, but by your karma:—by
your associations in former lives you are so linked that you cannot be separated. Trying to cut him loose will finish all three.

  “She told me how she drove out here, that night, almost in a total blackout.”

  He nodded. “All right. That cured me of trying to influence her.”

  “Pouring the power on him can drive him into a fatal accident.”

  “It needn’t!” Wayland retorted.

  “What you really mean is that as long as you don’t shove him off a cliff with your own hand, it’s quite all right. I’ve come to tell you that if you finish him by remote control, by accident as it will appear, you will at the same time finish her, and yourself as well.”

  He was doing his best not to believe me; at last he said, doggedly, “All I was doing was willing him to release her.”

  “And that’s getting him into such a muddle he’ll drive head-on into a collision, or step off a cliff, or forget that a gun is loaded. You’ve been bringing things to a climax, and the stars are getting closer and closer to the transit that will touch things off. You’ll liberate her, all right, and him, and yourself, but not in the way you want.”

  “I am here. She is in Modesto, with her sister. He and Fred and Dave Sims are up at the lodge, not far from Sonora Pass. How the devil could anything hit us all at once?”

  “It need not be all at once in the kind of time and space we know. Though you have been monkeying with time and space of another sort. But skip that. If something happened to him alone, it would kick back at you and her. She’d never again be the same. She would know that you caused it. And that would be hard to take.

  “If you simply must be rational and materialistic, I’ll put it this way, as one of many possibilities—the strain, the tension, the upset, would make you both accident-prones. And the corporations that retain you are constantly in hot water about the accident-prones on their payrolls. Don’t tell me you don’t fully understand what I mean. Accidents don’t simply happen—they are caused by the tangles and confusions in the sub-cellars of the subconscious.”

  He gave me a twisted smile. “I thought it was the stars?”

  “Same thing!”

  He said, slowly, “We three are in danger that I am making?”

  “You’re a butcher boy trying to separate Siamese triplets. There is only one way to break the bond that holds you three together.”

  “What is that way?”

  “Quit driving with that will of yours! Burn that drum. It may not have any real bearing on the case at all. It could not have, unless you had the will to make it serve you. Destroying it would nonetheless be an outward token that you have abandoned occult surgery. That you are accepting things as they are. That you have quit trying to rearrange lives. That you have renounced your stubbornness and your arrogance and the importance of your own desires. That you’ve become a grown-up man.

  “Go to that lodge with the drum and burn it, right before him.”

  “Fine business, with the Sims boys there!”

  “Herd them out for a bit of fishing, while you and he supposedly confer on an emergency that’s just come up.”

  Wayland snatched the drum. “Will you go with me?”

  “Any time you say.”

  He glanced at his watch. “Make it now.”

  I said, “We can take it easy, and be there in time for breakfast. That’ll make it natural and easy for the Sims brothers to carry on with their fishing.”

  “You’re afraid to trust me alone with this drum till tomorrow.”

  “I’m afraid to trust your moods and thinking. Let’s go.”

  We drove through the warmth of the great central valley. A red moon came up through low-hanging haze. Wayland took his time, yet there was constant demand on his skill until we finally got out of the unbroken procession of trucks. He was busy with more than driving. He was thinking, digesting, analyzing, after the fashion of his sign. It was not until the moon was high and white, and valley sultriness replaced by mountain chill that he spoke.

  “I’m glad we picked the situation to pieces,” he said, abruptly. “One thing though that you skipped.”

  “Could be more than one, but let’s have it.”

  “If the three of us are so tied together, there is nothing left to reach for. I don’t need a certificate of title to Diane. There’s nothing left to be had—we already have everything there is. Funny, that’s about the way she expressed it, when she and I started. We’d not upset any applecarts, we’d hurt no one. She must have known from the beginning, subconsciously at least, what it’s taken me until now to get through my head. I think I’ve become so used to complicated cases in my practice that anything really simple confuses me.”

  The eagle, I now knew, had at last begun to use his eyes for some purpose other than trying to stare the sun out of countenance. Wayland’s company was no longer disturbing. He had ceased radiating that remorseless and avaricious will. He was becoming human.

  We stopped once for gas, and several times for coffee. The wind whining down from snowcaps reaching twelve thousand feet into the moonlight had a biting edge. The thin air at once soothed and stimulated Wayland.

  “She was speaking of karma. Fumbling, with your words, but somehow, speaking in her own right. It wasn’t exactly retribution, or crime and punishment. It seemed bigger than all those.”

  “It is bigger. Thoughts, desires, cravings set up vibrations. People are drawn to each other, either for love or for hate, because they vibrate in the same wave length. The only way to break a bond is to change the wave length of your thoughts and feelings. Once that’s done, you make new contacts, there are new attractions, for better or for worse.”

  This was oversimplifying things; but what checked Wayland’s impending query was our coming to a road marker. There we left the paved highway to go laboriously up what was little more than a wagon track.

  Above the mumble of the engine, I caught the mutter of distant waterfalls. Once, I heard a far-off rumbling. The previous winter’s snows were beginning to shift, and slide.

  Gray glamour reached in and thinned the darkness of the pines. The gray became an eerie lavender. The headlights, now murky and deceptive, created illusions through reflection from foliage and granite walls, to make it seem at times that Wayland was about to drive over the edge of a thousand-foot drop. Fatigue made such illusion more disturbingly realistic.

  Wayland cursed, booted the brake, and whipped into a skid. There was a grinding sound. As the car slewed over, a fender crumpled. After spinning the wheels in a futile effort to pull out of the ditch, a shallow one, Wayland said, “Well, it could be a lot worse. We’re almost there. Ron can tow us out.”

  It was only then that I noticed the boulder which, because of the deceptive light, Wayland had not observed until he had come within a couple yards of straddling it.

  A small fragment had wedged under the oil pan. We tugged and heaved until we got the larger obstacle against the bank, and out of the way. It was wet and muddy; apparently it had been dislodged after nightfall. The hot sun, beating down all day, had melted enough snow on the upper slopes to saturate the earth, and release the boulder.

  “We could have been right there when it landed,” he observed, as we went on, “Or we could have been stalled a couple miles back.”

  As we entered a cleared wide space, I glanced across the ravine. The opposite wall reflected a sickly glow. “Whoever’s on the way behind us probably has enough clearance, with your car jammed against the bank,” I remarked. And then, noticing that the light did not shift, I added, “The reflection of your headlights. Walked off and left them on.”

  “Count on me for that. Favorite trick.”

  Though mists obscured the clearing ahead, I could distinguish the dark bulk of two lodges. The roofs had a steep pitch, to keep them from collapsing during the heavy snows. We were at the edge of a small upland
meadow which reached from the rim of the ravine to the nearby foot of the heights which towered over it.

  “The first place is Ron’s lodge,” Wayland said. “Our timing has been a bit too good. I hate to barge in so early, but waiting in this damned mist is no treat.”

  “Suppose I go back and snap off the lights before the battery’s run down,” I proposed. “While you rout him out. It’d be better that way, than having me at your heels. At the best, he’ll be surprised to see you, and whatever you two have to say will be none the worse for having it between yourselves.”

  I had scarcely turned when he said, “We forgot the drum. Something else you can tend to.”

  Whatever happened, I told myself, that devil’s drum was not going to survive. Engrossed with this thought, I retraced my way as far as the buttress which marked the beginning of the meadow shelf before I noticed the rattle and patter of rock fragments. Then a big chunk thumped down to the springy earth, and rolled to within a few yards of me. A crash helmet would come in handy, it seemed.

  I turned and called to Wayland, “Watch out!”

  But he had already stopped. Though little more than a dark splotch in the early gray, his posture made it clear that something other than my words had warned him. I heard a deep rumbling. He must have sensed the vibration an instant before I had.

  The mists shifted and thinned a little. Far up, the snow-packed slopes reflected the first ruddiness of dawn. An acre or more of the mass shifted, so that of a sudden, it no longer mirrored the glow. The rumbling, deep and sullen, increased in volume; but the sound was like that of the stream which roared incessantly in the gorge. Anyone lulled to sleep by it could hardly be aroused by the new and ominous undertone.

  I did not know the lay of the land; Wayland did. He knew how much or how little space there was between the two lodges, and the steep slope down which poured a hundred thousand tons of saturated earth sheared off by the pressure of settling snow fields. Surely this must always have been considered a safe spot until now, when a trick of nature had upset all previous estimates. Boulders, freed from the slow-moving mass, thumped down to the meadow. Above, the creeping earth was picking up speed.