Then came a hoarse grunt and the trunk descending, careening down the cellar stairs straight toward him..
Jimmy had moved in time! Just in time he had leapt back, screaming, and the trunk had struck the stone floor with a terrible, splintering crash.
But how could he go back to the house now? His Uncle Jack was a determined man. He was not a convicted criminal but a man free to plot and scheme.
He would try again. He would keep on trying until Jimmy died, and owls hooted in the empty silence around the big dark house. His Uncle Jack and his Aunt Katie, whispering, conspiring together—waiting to seize the first suitable opportunity to get rid of Jimmy and have a satisfactory explanation for the police.
He could see their parchment faces, their darkly brooding eyes, fastened upon him in sly reproach. “Why did you run away, Jimmy? Why, Jimmy lad? We only wanted to kill you!”
Jimmy shuddered and opened his eyes wide. Sunlight slanted down through the aisles of the forest, bathing the woodland vista in a golden haze. A tiny humming bird, iridescent as a dragonfly, was hovering above a wide-petaled flower so close to Jimmy he could have reached out and grasped it.
Ants were busy at the base of the stump, and a katydid was trilling from a bough overhead.
Katy did … Katy did … Katy did… .
Jimmy knew that Katy did—want to kill him. But Jimmy didn’t want to die.
His Aunt Catherine had tried slyly by leaving the gas jet on all night in his bedroom. He’d stayed awake and turned it off, his right eye unlidded like the wary orb of an infant cyclops. But the next time—
Jimmy was smarter than Katy. Jimmy was smart enough to realize what an inheritance meant. Although Jimmy was an orphan he knew more about mean, withered people than most little boys of eight.
He was a bright alert little boy, by no means a prodigy, but guileless and loving, therefore quick to sense malice in adults. Even greed. The old dark house would belong to Jimmy when he came of age … if he ever did. The house and a very large sum of money. Money meant nothing to Jimmy and he hated the house as much as Uncle Jack loved it.
But how could he give up his inheritance? He couldn’t just say, “I’ll give it up!” and forget about it.
Uncle Jack was no dope. Uncle Jack trusted no one—and grownups were funny about giving away money. What if Jimmy grew up and changed his mind?
“Here is your supper, Jimmy!” Uncle Jack would say. And in the soup—or the eggs, boiled hard the way Jimmy liked them—would be arsenic.
Aunt Katie read detective stories. She read them aloud to Uncle Jack—and Jimmy had crept to the door and listened. Arsenic—Jimmy knew what that was and what it could do. It was a kind of medicine. But when you swallowed it you didn’t get well. You died.
Jimmy turned pale when he thought about it.
He’d have to run away. He’d have to but—who would take him in and hide him? If he was caught and brought back he wouldn’t live long enough to get another chance.
“Jimmy, you’ve had your chance. Now it’s our turn!”
Jimmy was starting to get down from the stump when a voice said, “I wouldn’t advise you to run away, Jimmy! Two can play at that game!”
STARTLED, Jimmy looked up.
The figure standing before him was that of a very tall, pale young man, his body fitted into the strangest suit that Jimmy had even seen. It wasn’t really a suit at all, but it looked a little like one of Uncle Jack’s oilskin slickers, long and wet and glistening.
Pale green the slicker was and it covered the young man up completely from his ankles to his chin.
“Don’t be alarmed, Jimmy!” the young man said. “I know all about you. I know just how frightened and miserable you are.”
He smiled. “You need a friend, Jimmy— and you’ve got one!”
Jimmy gasped, and blinked furiously. The young man had a very wide forehead, and his skin was so pale that Jimmy could almost see the bones of his cheeks shining through. His hair wasn’t brown or black but gooseberry green and when the sun shone on it it flashed with all the colors of the rainbow, like a dew-drenched spider web.
His eyes were strange too. They blinked unceasingly and kept changing—just like the eyes of a cat.
The young man should have frightened Jimmy. But Jimmy wasn’t in the least bit scared. He wanted merely to swallow hard, on a mixture of amazement and relief and a sudden, overwhelming joy at having found a friend.
“He’d never dare to hurt you, Jimmy, if he knew I was here!” the young man said. “He’s a cruel man and a cowardly man. Your aunt is more of an old vulture, though, and she dominates him. A nastier pair of humans harpies I’ve never had the good fortune to meet!”
“W-who are you?” Jimmy gulped.
“That can wait, Jimmy!” the youth said. “My world is not ugly and holds little that is evil. But we know what suffering is. Tell me something, Jimmy. Do you like zoos? Strange animals and plants with odd habits—winged and fanged like the beasts that trespass on your dreams when you’ve eaten something that disagrees with you?
“You know what I mean, Jimmy. It’s like the fear of old houses and not being able to run fast enough. It’s so dreadful that when you wake you’re still frightened.
It’s so good to wake up—safe and alive! But if the beasts were in cages, Jimmy, and you could look in at them and feel perfectly safe—wouldn’t you like that?”
Jimmy must have nodded, for he suddenly realized that the young man had turned and was moving swiftly away through the forest. He seemed to know that Jimmy would follow him—and Jimmy did!
They had to pass through heavy underbrush and Jimmy soon found himself lagging behind, and struggling with leaf-hidden snares that plucked and tore at his flesh. Not only clinging vines—chestnut burrs and big purple thistles.
At first the young man seemed unaware that Jimmy was having trouble. But the instant he heard Jimmy cry out he stopped short and laughed. His laughter rang out merrily in the wild wood.
“Jimmy, I forgot! You can’t pass through foliage! If you’ll have a little patience I’ll burn a path for you!”
Jimmy saw the youth’s hand go under his slicker and come out with something slender and shining that looked quite a bit like one of the test tubes in Jimmy’s chemistry set.
Jimmy shuddered despite himself. His uncle had given him the set on his eighth birthday, without warning him that some of the chemicals were not meant to be played with. Luckily Jimmy had survived the explosion with nothing more serious than a scorched hand.
“You poor child!” Aunt Katie had whispered, pouring oil on his hand, and wrapping it in sterile gauze. “Sometimes I think your uncle is a bigger fool than he pretends to be!”
“The house might have gone up in flames and your aunt burned to death in a terrible manner!” the young man said, pointing the tube at the heavy tangle of underbrush directly in front of Jimmy. “No wonder the malicious old vixen was upset. She wanted your inheritance for herself alone!”
As the young man steadied the tube he looked straight at Jimmy and smiled. “Watch, Jimmy! I’m going to clear a path for you.
FROM the tube there shot a blinding shaft of light.
The underbrush shriveled as the light pierced it. Shriveled and coiled up, like a burning Chinese dragon made of silk. “What made you think of dragons, Jimmy?” the young man asked, his strange eyes shining in the glare.
Jimmy hadn’t said a word. He had simply remembered the parade—and the accident, with the dragon bursting into flames. His uncle had taken him to Chinatown to watch a parade and someone—not his uncle—had dropped a lighted cigarette on the dragon from a window high above the street.
“You were only six but that parade must have made a profound impression on you,” the youth said. “Now, whenever you see something burning, you think of dragons. Isn’t that so?”
Jimmy was too startled to nod. He was watching the burning underbrush roll away in a cloud of smoke, his jaw hanging open.
“Quite a lot of little flames left, eh, Jimmy? Guess we’ll have to step up the beam a little.”
The tube seemed to twist in the young man’s clasp. From it there shot a shaft of pale blue light. As Jimmy stared in slack-jawed amazement all the smoke vanished, and the flames dwindled and went out. The remaining foliage wasn’t even charred.
“Now keep close to me, Jimmy!” the young man warned. “This part of the forest isn’t quite stable. I had to float the cages in and it took a lot of doing. Ever try floating a raft on a marsh that’s covered with less than six inches of water?”
“No, I never did! Jimmy choked. “Well—you have to change the trees a bit and make sure the angles don’t melt and run together. It’s difficult when you’re just starting to get the feel of a forest like this. If it blurs when you’re using the tube you’ve got a problem on your hands!”
He laughed. “You don’t know what I’m talking about—do you, Jimmy?”
“It sounds crazy,” Jimmy blurted. “You’re not crazy, are you?”
“No, Jimmy. But to be honest with you—I’ve often been drawn to people who are. They’re close to us, and very like us. They’re out of touch with ugliness, and look out through bright windows at a world that was never meant to be. Things start off wrong sometimes and stay that way. It’s nobody’s fault, but if you get to brooding about it—well!”
Jimmy looked frightened. “I’m not—”
“No, Jimmy. The sanity of childhood can’t be shaken. You don’t need to look out through bright windows. You are a bright window.”
Jimmy’s fright diminished a little. He didn’t quite see how he could be a window but it wasn’t a terrifying thought—even if it changed things he had always taken for granted.
He was sure that grownups who were crazy didn’t talk like—
“What did you say your name was?” Jimmy gulped.
“I didn’t say. But you may call me Lacula.”
“That’s a funny name for a man!”
“I’m not exactly human, Jimmy. But you wouldn’t understand that either. I came from very far off in a roundabout way. The universe doesn’t just stretch away forever, Jimmy. It’s like a house with an attic cellar, where you can meet yourself coming back. You can open a door and find you’ve just closed it or climb the stairs and be outside in a garden full of bright flowers that somebody planted in another time, another world.
“But you have to know how to move around in the great house of the universe. You have to be very old or—very wise. It takes a lot of doing, Jimmy. It’s as though you were looking down through a peephole in a tree stump—looking straight down at the sky. You’d see all of the stars—but upside down and far away. And that’s as far as I can take you, Jimmy.
“You’d have to fall through that peephole to see me as I really am. Now I’ve taken on a—well, call it protective coloration. You know how a chameleon changes, Jimmy. There are forces here that have shaped you, made you what you are. When I floated the cages in, the same forces changed me.
“I look almost human to you but I’m not at all. Not really. It’s just skin deep, Jimmy. I’m just stopping over here. You know how trout fisherman stop at trailer camps, just for a day or two, to cast their flies on deep poles and hope for a sizable catch. They wear old jackets, and battered hats and you’d never think they were solemn as owls and gray and tidy in their big homes when winter closes in, freezing the foaming waters and their summer youth.
“According to our lights—we all like to hunt and fish, Jimmy. You never know what you’re going to catch. The universe is so big there’s always something newly strange in the whirlpools beneath gray rocks in little green worlds where the great grappling hooks have never gone, where the huntsman must tread softly and fishermen ply his rod with care.”
LACULA nodded. “Even now, Jimmy, I’m standing on a higher bank than you are. But you wouldn’t understand about the cones and the prisms—how they rushed together when I floated the cages in and brought me to your side of the stream.”
Lacula was right. Jimmy didn’t understand. In fact, when he opened his mouth to ask another question he found there were no words for what he wanted to know.
But Jimmy’s mouth stayed open. They had emerged into a clearing walled with sycamores and white-barked birch trees and Jimmy was looking at something so strange that the foliage at his back seemed suddenly darkened and terrifying and full of whispering shadows.
In the center of the clearing stood a great, iron-barred cage, hemmed in by long grass and little mounds of fresh earth and the tracks of forest animals. When Jimmy stared intently he could see right through the cage—could see the long grass and the forest becoming wild again on the other side.
But that didn’t change what he saw when he looked into the cage without straining to see beyond it. When he looked directly into the cage he saw only a tumbled waste of sand which stretched away to ice-capped mountain peaks shimmering in a purple haze.
Only the width of the cage separated Jimmy from the long grass in back of the mountains, but in order to pluck a blade of that grass he would have had to cross the desert on foot, trudging on wearily for hours.
Jimmy had no desire to pass between the bars and set foot in that trackless waste of sand.
The beast was impossible, a nightmare. Yet Jimmy knew that it was real. It was foraging just inside the bars, an enormous, loose-jointed thing with soot-black eyes, and a long-tapering snout which it kept half-buried in the sand.
The beast had the snout of an anteater but it was covered with down like a new-hatched chicken. It was fanning itself with a tail of blood-red plumes that grew straight out of its hindparts, and was almost as big as the spread tail of a peacock.
It was a tail such as Jimmy had never thought to see on a beast, and it was matched in strangeness only by the long, diamond-bright claws which slowly unsheathed themselves as Jimmy stared. The beast raised one claw as Jimmy stared, and scratched itself, its dark eyes fastened on him as though it would have much preferred to be scratching his eyes out, and sinking its teeth in his throat while it wrapped its snout about him in swiftly tightening loops. Biting and tearing and ripping at his flesh, raking his back as he struggled, and bearing him to the earth!
Not yet! Jimmy’s breath was a wheeze in his throat, he was cowering back in horror but he was still unharmed. He was still a safe distance from the cage, and he had no intention of moving closer, and giving the beast a chance to turn ugly.
”Nothing to be afraid of, Jimmy!” Lacula whispered. “It’s a dangerous brute, but it can’t get at you. Remember, Jimmy, when you were six, and your uncle took you to the snake house at the zoo? He told you how deadly a cobra was, hoping to frighten you. But the big, rearing snake, swaying back and forth an inch from the glass fascinated you, gave you a thrill. Just knowing it couldn’t get at you was fun!”
Jimmy was trying hard not to look at the cage. But it would have been an accident of an unusual kind if he had failed to notice the big, square sign at the bottom of the cage. The sign was bright, like isinglass, and it glistened in the sunlight.
The writing was funny—like on the boxes of cigarettes his uncle smoked, Imported Turkish tobacco—and then a lot of halfmoons and broken-off zigzags.
Lacula laughed at Jimmy’s perplexity, “Like Arabic, eh, Jimmy? It isn’t really— but it’s not English either. Suppose we turn it into English.”
Lacula raised the tube as he spoke and let the light shine out over the sign. The writing changed into letters.
“All right, Jimmy! I’m sure you can read it now.”
Jimmy read the sign.
INHABITANT OF MARS
This is a peculiarly vicious specimen, and must not be tellesated by the immature.
Not all Martians are vicious, but the harmless varieties are much less interesting from a melfleshish point of view.
Specimen captured and caged by Lacula in his third expedition to the Solar System.
Jimmy couldn’t even spell
out the hard words but he knew what a specimen was. When you chased butterflies and caught one— When Jimmy became very thoughtful and quiet he was a little ahead of his years. He had read a book about butterfly collecting and a book called “Astronomy for Young People.”
Mars was a planet in the sky, not a star —and there were seven other planets. Venus was the brightest one.
“Yes, Jimmy, Venus is as bright as a star when you look at it on a clear night,” Lacula said. “But what you really see is the sunlight reflected back. Suppose we take a look at a Venusian!”
Jimmy wanted to scream when he saw it.
THE cage stood at the edge of the clearing in bright sunlight but there were deep, dark shadows behind it and it was filled with swirling mist. When Jimmy stared past the bars he could see five other cages filled with moving shadows … each rocking a little as if buffeted by the wind that was blowing, keenly chill, up Jimmy’s spine.
He tried hard to look at the other cages, but his eyes kept coming back to the hideous beast in front of him. The beast wasn’t moving at all, just watching him.
The beast had gill-slits down both sides of its neck and webbed claws and feet, and when the sunlight shone on its big-eyed face it looked as dead as something hung up to dry in the window of a fish store, All choked up was its face, all mouth and all throat—as if it had spent its entire life gasping for air. Breathing harder and harder and never getting enough.
“Keep your distance, Jimmy!” Lacula warned, “It’s a malicious little beast. You see—Venus is a dismal, foggy, horrible world. The air’s stagnant and thin and that creature has lived in a bog from the day it was hatched.”
Jimmy took an alarmed step backward. Only Lacula’s calmness and smiling eyes prevented him from succumbing to utter panic.
My Best Science Fiction Story Page 33