Dreaming Jewels

by Theodore Sturgeon

  He was standing, bent over her, when she opened her eyes. He said immediately, “I’m Horty and you’re safe, Zee.” The spiraling panic in her eyes died unborn, and she smiled.

  While she bathed, he took her clothes to a neighborhood machine laundry and in half an hour was back with them washed and dried. The food he had picked up on the way was not needed; she had breakfast well on the way when he returned—“gas-house” eggs (fried in the center of slices of bread punched out with a water glass) and crisp bacon. She took the groceries from him and scolded him. “Kippers—papaya juice—Danish ring. Horty, that’s company eatments!”

  He smiled, more at her courage and her resilience than at her protests. He leaned against the wall with his arms folded, watching her hobbling about the kitchen, draped from neck to heels in what was, for him, a snug-fitting bathrobe, and tried not to think of the fact that she had used it at all. He understood, though, seeing the limp, seeing what had happened to her face…

  It was a gay breakfast, during which they happily played “Remember when—” which is, in the final analysis, the most entrancing game in the world. Then there was a silent time, when to each, the sight of the other was enough communication. At last Horty asked, “How did you get away?”

  Her face darkened. The effort for control was evident—and successful. Horty said, “You’ll have to tell me everything, Zee. You’ll have to tell me about—me, too.”

  “You’ve found out a lot about yourself.” It was not a question.

  Horty waved this aside. “How did you get away?”

  The mobile side of her face twitched. She looked down at her hands, slowly lifted one, put it on and around the other, and as she talked, squeezed. “I was in a coma for days, I guess. Yesterday I woke up on my bunk, in the trailer. I knew I had told him everything—except that I knew where you were. He still thinks you are that girl.

  “I heard his voice. He was at the other end of the trailer, in Bunny’s room. Bunny was there. She was crying. I heard the Maneater taking her away. I waited and then dragged myself outside and over to Bunny’s door. I got in. Havana was there on the bed with a stiff thing around his neck. It hurt him to talk. He said the Maneater was taking care of him, fixing his neck. He said the Maneater is going to make Bunny do a job for him.” She looked up swiftly at Horty. “He can, you know. He’s a hypnotist. He can make Bunny do anything.”

  “I know.” He considered her. “Why the hell didn’t he use it on you?” he flared.

  She fingered her face. “He can’t. He—it doesn’t work like that on me. He can reach me, but he can’t make me do anything. I’m too—”

  “Too what?”

  “Human,” she said.

  He stroked her arm and smiled at her. “That you are… Go on.”

  “I went back to my part of the trailer and got some money and a few other things and left. I don’t know what the Maneater will do when he learns I’m gone. I was very careful, Horty. I hitch-hiked fifty miles and then took a bus to Eltonville—that’s three hundred miles from here—and a train from there. But I know he’ll find me somehow, sooner or later. He doesn’t give up.”

  “You’re safe here,” he said, and there was blued steel in his soft voice.

  “It isn’t me! Oh, Horty—don’t you understand? It’s you he’s after!”

  “What does he want with me? I left the carnival three years ago and it didn’t seem to bother him much.” He caught her eye; she was looking at him in amazement. “What is it?”

  “Aren’t you curious about yourself at all, Horty?”

  “About myself? Well, sure. Everybody is, I guess. But about what, especially?”

  She was silent a moment, thinking. Abruptly she asked, “What have you done since you left the carnival?”

  “I’ve told you in my letters.”

  “The bare outlines, yes. You got a furnished room and lived there for a while, reading a lot and feeling your way. Then you decided to grow. How long did that take?”

  “About eight months. I got this by mail and moved in at night so no one saw me, and changed. Well, I had to. I’d be able to get a job as a grown man. I buskined a while—you know, playing the clubs for whatever the customers would throw to me—and bought a really good guitar and went to work at the Happy Hours. When that closed I went to Club Nemo. Been there ever since, biding my time. You told me I’d know when it was time… that’s always been true.”

  “It would be,” she nodded. “Time to stop being a midget, time to go to work, time to start on Armand Bluett—you’d know.”

  “Well, sure,” he said, as if the fact deserved no further comment. “And when I needed money, I wrote things… some songs and arrangements, articles and even a story or two. The stories weren’t so good. It’s easy to put things together, but awful hard to make them up. Hey—you don’t know what I did to Armand, do you?”

  “No.” She looked at his hand. “It has something to do with that, hasn’t it?”

  “It has.” He inspected it and smiled. “Last time you saw my hand like this was about a year after I came to the carnival. Want to know something? I lost these fingers just three weeks ago.”

  “And they’ve grown that much?”

  “It doesn’t take as long as it did,” he said.

  “It did start slowly,” she said.

  He looked at her, seemed about to ask a question, and then went on. “One night at Club Nemo he walked in with her. I’d never dreamed that I’d seen them together—I know what you’re thinking! I always thought of them at the same time! Ah, but that was check and balance. Good and evil. Well…” He drank coffee. “They sat right where I could hear them talk. He was the oily wolf and she was the distressed maiden. It was pretty disgusting. So, he got up to powder his nose, and I made like Lochinvar. I mixed right in. I gave her some succinct language and some carfare, and she got away, after promising him a date for the next night.”

  “You mean she got away from him for the moment.”

  “Oh no. She got clear away, by train. I don’t know where she went. Well, I sat there chording that guitar and thinking hard. You said that I’d always know when it was time. I knew that night that it was time to get Armand Bluett. Time to start, that is. He gave me a treatment once that lasted for six years. The least I could do was to give him a long stretch too. So I made my plans. I put in a tough night and day.” He stopped, smiling without humor.

  “Horty—”

  “I’ll tell it, Zee. It’s simple enough. He got his date. Took the gal to a sybaritic little pest-hole he had hidden away in the slums. He was very easy to lead along the primrose paving. At the critical point his ‘conquest’ said a few well-chosen words about cruelty to children and left him to mull them over while staring at the three fingers she had chopped off as souvenirs.”

  Zena glanced at his left hand again. “Uh! What a treatment! But Horty—you got ready in one night and day?”

  “You don’t know the things I can do,” he said. He rolled back his sleeve. “Look.”

  She stared at the brown, slightly hairy right forearm. Horty’s face showed deep concentration. There was no tension; his eyes were quiet and his brow un-furrowed.

  For a moment the arm remained unchanged. Suddenly the hair on it moved—writhed. One hair fell off; another; a little shower of them, finding their way down among the small checks of the tablecloth. The arm remained steady and, like his brow, showed no tension beyond its complete immobility. It was naked now, and the creamy brown color that was typical of both him and Zena. But—was it? Was it the effect of staring with such concentration? No; it was actually paler, paler and more slender as well. The flesh on the back of the hand and between the fingers contracted until the hand was slim and tapered rather than square and thick as it had been.

  “That’s enough,” said Horty conversationally, and smiled. “I can restore it in the same length of time. Except for the hair, of course. That will take two or three days.”

  “I knew about this,”
she breathed. “I did know, but I don’t think I ever really believed… your control is quite complete?”

  “Quite. Oh, there are things I can’t do. You can’t create or destroy matter. I could shrink to your size, I suppose. But I’d weigh the same as I do now, pretty much. And I couldn’t become a twelve-foot giant overnight; there’s no way to assimilate enough mass quickly enough. But that job with Armand Bluett was simple. Hard work, but simple. I compacted my shoulders and arms and the lower part of my face. Do you know I had twenty-eight toothaches the whole time? I whitened my skin. The hair was a wig, of course, and as for the female form deevine, that was taken care of by what Elliot Springs calls the ‘bust-bucket and torso-twister trade.’”

  “How can you joke about it?”

  His voice went flat as he said, “What should I do; grind my teeth every minute? This kind of wine needs a shot of bubbles every now and then, honey, or you can’t swallow much. No; what I did to Armand Bluett was just a starter. I’m making him do it himself. I didn’t tell him who I am. Kay’s out of the picture; he doesn’t know who she is or who I am or, for that matter, who he is himself.” He laughed; an unpleasant sound. “All I gave him was a powerful association with three ruined fingers from ’way back. They’ll work in his sleep. The next thing I do to him will be as good—and nothing like that at all.”

  “You’ll have to change your plans some.”

  “Why?”

  “Kay isn’t out of the picture. I’m beginning to understand now. She came out to the carnival to see the Maneater.”

  “Kay did? But why?”

  “I don’t know. Anyway, the Judge followed her there. She left, but Bluett and the Maneater got together. I know one thing, though. Havana told me—the Judge is terrified of Kay Hallowell.”

  Horty slapped the table. “With her hand intact! Oh, how wonderful! Can you imagine what that must have been?”

  “Horty, darling—it isn’t all fun. Don’t you see that that’s what started all this—that’s what made the Maneater suspect that ‘Kiddo’ was something else besides a girl midget? Don’t you realize that the Maneater thinks you and Kay are the same one, no matter what the Judge thinks?”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “You remember everything you hear,” said Zena. “But you just don’t figure things out very fast, sweetheart.”

  “But—but—getting smashed up like this… Zena, it’s my fault! It’s as if I’d done it to you!”

  She came around the table and put her arms around him, pulling his head to her breast. “No, darling. That was coming to me, from years back. If you want to blame someone—besides the Maneater—blame me. It was my fault for taking you in twelve years ago.”

  “What did you do it for? I never really knew.”

  “To keep you away from the Maneater.”

  “Away fr—but you kept me right next to him!”

  “The last place in the world he’d think of looking.”

  “You’re saying he was looking for me then.”

  “He’s been looking for you ever since you were one year old. And he’ll find you. He’ll find you, Horty.”

  “I hope he does,” grated Horty. The doorbell rang.

  There was a frozen silence. It rang again.

  “I’ll go,” said Zena, rising.

  “You will like hell,” said Horty roughly. “Sit down.”

  “It’s the Maneater,” she whimpered. She sat down.

  Horty stood where he could look through the living room at the front door. Studying it, he said, “It isn’t. It’s—it’s—well, what do you know! Old Home Week!”

  He strode out and flung the door open. “Bunny!”

  “Wh-Excuse m—is this where…” Bunny hadn’t changed much. She was a shade more roly-poly, and perhaps a little more timid.

  “Oh, Bunny…” Zena came running unevenly out, tripped on the hem of the bathrobe. Horty caught her before she could fall. The girls hugged each other frantically, shouting tearful endearments over the rich sound of Horty’s relieved laughter. “But darling, how did you find—” “It’s so good to—” “I thought you were—” “You doll! I never thought I’d—”

  “Cut!” roared Horty. “Bunny, come in and have some breakfast.”

  Startled, she looked at him, her albino eyes round. Gently he asked, “How’s Havana?”

  Without taking her eyes off his face, Bunny fumbled for Zena and held on. “Does he know Havana?”

  “Honey,” said Zena, “That’s Horty!”

  Bunny shot Zena a rabbit-like glance, craned to peer behind Horty, and suddenly seemed to realize just what Zena had said. “That?” she demanded, pointing. “Him?” She stared. “He’s—Kiddo, too?”

  Horty grinned. “That’s right.”

  “He grew,” said Bunny inanely. Zena and Horty bellowed with laughter, and, as Horty had done once so long ago, so Bunny gaped from one to the other, sensed that they were laughing with and not at her, and joined her tinkling giggle to the noise. Still laughing, Horty went into the kitchen and called out, “You still take canned milk and half a teaspoon of sugar, Bunny?” and Bunny began to cry. Into Zena’s shoulder she sobbed happily. “It is Kiddo, it is, it is…”

  Horty put the steaming cup on the end table and settled down beside the girls. “Bunny, how in time did you find me?”

  “I didn’t find you. I found Zee. Zee, maybe Havana’s goin’ to die.”

  “I—remember,” Zee whispered. “Are you sure?”

  “The Maneater did what he could. He even called in another doctor.”

  “He did? Since when has he taken to doctors?”

  Bunny sipped her coffee. “You just can’t know how he’s changed, Zee. I couldn’t believe it myself until he did that, called a doctor in, I mean. You know about m-me and Havana. You know how I feel about what the Maneater did to him. But—it’s as if he had come up from under a cloud that he’s lived with for years. He’s really changed. Zee, he wants you to come back. He’s so sorry about what happened. He’s really broken up.”

  “Not enough,” muttered Horty.

  “Does he want Horty to come back too?”

  “Horty—oh. Kiddo.” Bunny looked at him. “He couldn’t do an act now. I don’t know, Zee. He didn’t say.”

  Horty noticed the swift, puzzled frown on Zena’s brow. She took Bunny’s upper arm and seemed to squeeze it impatiently. “Honey—start from the beginning. Did the Maneater send you?”

  “Oh no. Well, not exactly. He’s changed so, Zee. You don’t believe me… Well, you’ll see for yourself. He needs you and I came to get you back, all by myself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of Havana!” Bunny cried. “The Maneater might be able to save him, don’t you see? But not when he’s all torn apart by what he did to you.”

  Zena turned a troubled face to Horty. He rose. “I’ll fix you a bite to eat, Bunny,” he said. A slight side-wise movement of his head beckoned to Zena; she acknowledged it with an eyelid and turned back to Bunny. “But how did you know where I was, honey?”

  The albino leaned forward and touched Zena’s cheek. “You poor darling. Does it hurt much?”

  Horty, in the kitchen, called, “Zee! What did you do with the tabasco?”

  “Be right back, Bun,” said Zee. She hobbled across to the kitchen. “It should be right there on the… yes. Oh—you haven’t started the toast! I’ll do it, Horty.”

  They stood side by side at the stove, busily. Under his breath Horty said, “I don’t like it, Zee.”

  She nodded. “There’s something… we’ve asked her twice, three times, how she found this place, and she hasn’t said.” She added clearly, “See? That’s the way to make toast. Only you have to watch it.”

  A moment later, “Horty. How did you know who it was at the door?”

  “I didn’t. Not really. I knew who it wasn’t. I know hundreds of people, and I knew it wasn’t any of them.” He shrugged. “That left Bunny. You see?”

  “I can�
�t do that. Nobody I know can do that. ’Cept maybe the Maneater.” She went to the sink and clattered briskly. “Can’t you tell what people are thinking?” she whispered when she came close to him again.

  “Sometimes, a little. I never tried, much.”

  “Try now,” she said, nodding toward the living room.

  His face took on that unruffled, deeply occupied expression. At the same moment there was a flash of movement past the open kitchen door. Horty, who had his back to it, turned and sprang through into the living room. “Bunny!”

  Bunny’s pink lips curled back from her teeth like an animal’s and she scuttled to the front door, whipped it open and was gone. Zena screamed. “My purse! She’s got my purse!”

  In two huge bounds Horty was in the hall. He pounced on Bunny at the head of the stairs. She squealed and sank her teeth into his hand. Horty clamped her head under his arm, jamming her chin against his chest. Having taken a bite, she was forced to keep it—and meanwhile was efficiently gagged.

  Inside, he kicked the door closed and pitched Bunny to the couch like a sack of sawdust. Her jaws did not relax; he had to lean over her and pry them apart. She lay with her eyes red and glittering, and blood on her mouth.

  “Now, what do you suppose made her go off like that?” he asked, almost casually.

  Zena knelt by Bunny and touched her forehead. “Bunny. Bunny, are you all right?”

  No answer. She seemed conscious. She kept her mad ruby eyes fixed on Horty. Her breath came in regular, powerful pulses like those of a slow freight. Her mouth was rigidly agape. “I didn’t do anything to her,” said Horty. “Just picked her up.”

  Zena rescued her handbag from the floor and fumbled through it. Seemingly satisfied, she set it down on the coffee table. “Horty, what did you do in the kitchen just now?”

  “I—sort of…” He frowned. “I thought of her face, and I made it kind of open like a door, or—well, blow away like fog, so I could see inside. I didn’t see anything.”

  “Nothing at all?”