“It has no natural enemies,” Lacula went on. “But it knows how to hate. It would kill you just to get at your inheritance of fresh, clean air!”
Lacula seemed suddenly to realize that Jimmy was trembling inwardly in horrible fright. He whirled abruptly and gripped Jimmy’s shoulder.
“Now, now, Jimmy—don’t become frightened! I didn’t mean to frighten you. I guess you’ve seen enough. It’s time you were getting back to the big house.”
Jimmy froze motionless. It was hard to believe that Lacula expected him to go back. He couldn’t, wouldn’t—not if he had to wrench free and take, to his heels.
“Don’t worry, Jimmy!” Lacula spoke softly. “I wouldn’t send you back if the danger were very great. You’ve got to trust me, Jimmy—and believe in me!”
When Jimmy looked straight at Lacula a lot of strange thoughts seemed to rush together in his mind.
Lacula was like many things at once—things that Jimmy had seen and imagined and dreamed about. A big, twisted tree trunk, all knotted and gray with moss, and the lightning forking down, and a little leaf-hopper, jumping about in the forest.
And the gold and russet splendor of the autumn woods and someone playing a piano through shining windows in the dawn, and Jimmy himself lying in the dew-drenched grass, yawning lazily and stretching his arms while the morning mist rose about him.
Lacula was much more than that. Lacula was the sea, wide and boundless, with the great sun shining down and Jimmy himself running along the sand, stopping to examine the bright shells and pink corals of the sea.
Lacula was a treasure chest, green with seaweed, and a pearly nautilus and the far-off beating of jungle drums. Lacula was a mountain, rising pale and purple at the edge of all the jungles Jimmy had ever dreamed of exploring, and Lacula Was an attic filled with cobwebs and old trunks, the dust so thick on the windows that Jimmy couldn’t see out.
Lacula was a maze of complicated machinery, all whirring and blurring, and Jimmy himself in a greasy mechanic’s uniform, his face smeared with grease. Jimmy himself working on Lacula, solving him, taking him apart. Jimmy savoring the joy of tinkering, of understanding the bright wonder of smoothly-moving parts, the wonder of pistons, wheels, grease cups, lovely rods and wires, all gleaming, a nest of revolving beauty filled with rainbow colors.
BUT NOW Lacula was speaking to him and pressing something bright and shining into his hand.
“In your world, Jimmy, everything’s all mixed up. You have myths and you have science—but you don’t realize that what you call a myth is just something true that you’ve found out for yourself without sitting down and racking your brains over it.
“If you have any kind of a mind—you’ll notice things. Even that ugly Martian beast knows more than some of your scientists. It has its own myths and believes in them!”
Jimmy could feel Lacula’s strong hand pressing his fingers together tightly over the shining object.
“Hold on to it, Jimmy! I’m going to tell you how to use it. Long ago in your world a race of wise men had a name for it. The pipes of Pan! It’s really a science but they guessed—they knew! Now listen carefully Jimmy—”
The sun was low in the sky when Jimmy got back to the big dark house.
He opened the front door with a terrible fear in his heart, half-expecting to see his uncle standing in the lower hallway with a knotted cord swinging from his wrist. A horrible, vengeful figure like a hangman—prepared to make a sudden murderous attack on Jimmy for daring to run away.
Timmy had forgotten that his uncle was a quiet, even-tempered man who knew how to bide his time. So overwrought, in fact, was Jimmy’s imagination that he had built his uncle into a bogey that did the man an injustice.
Uncle Jack was the soul of discretion. Always there had been deviousness in his attempts to murder his nephew … a slow, careful approach to his deeds of dark violence which stamped him as an artist in crime.
There was deviousness in the house now. A sinister and dreadful deviousness, a whispering behind a door on the second floor which was only slightly ajar.
Back and forth in a room upstairs paced Jimmy’s uncle—and as still and taut as a spindle from an old-fashioned spinning wheel towered Aunt Katie, her sallow face wreathed in a crafty smile.
A tall, bony woman and a Wrinkled-faced sprite of a man, looking almost kindly in his pacing, his bushy black brows knitted in thoughtful concern.
“But what if it doesn’t work, Katie! I’m no electrician.”
“Don’t be a fool! It’s bound to work, and it will look like an accident. When Jimmy’s in the bathtub I’ll simply reach in and push my electric coiling irons off the shelf! I tell you the current will pass right through him. He’ll be electrocuted so fast he’ll never know what struck him!”
“I don’t like it! It’s risky and—it’s beastly!”
Jimmy’s aunt smiled coldly. “Not half as beastly as trying to smash Jimmy’s head with a trunk. It’ll be quick and merciful!”
“But the idea’s not new!” Jimmy’s uncle protested. “The police read whodunits too, Katie—don’t you forget it! That trick’s been used in fiction so often.”
“Only four or five times, you white-livered Crippen! And not with coiling irons—electric fans, electric heaters. Can’t you see the beauty of it? Coiling irons attached to the house circuit and left on would carry just as much voltage. Enough to kill a child certainly.
“And coiling irons are so light and could fall into a bathtub so easily. Jimmy stood up in the bath, with soap in his eyes, fumbling around for a towel. Jimmy accidentally knocked my coiling irons into the water. I’m getting on in years and I’m as absent-minded as the proverbial professor. I simply forgot to turn the coiling irons off.
Jimmy’s aunt gave her mouse-colored hair a pat. “How do you like my hairdo? I won’t ask the police to admire it—just let them notice it. If we’re careful not to overact they’ll have to believe us!”
“Are you understudying Constance Kent or Lizzie Borden?” Jimmy’s uncle sneered.
“That’s not a very flattering thing to say. You have an ugly imagination and I’ll thank you to keep your thoughts to yourself. I could mention a few things that a certain Jack did.”
Jimmy’s aunt gave Jimmy’s uncle a conciliatory poke in the ribs.
But Uncle Jack was not appeased. “I still don’t like it!” he muttered.
THEY continued to argue for a while, and as they bandied words their voices rose heatedly. Louder and louder they talked, all unaware that Jimmy had crept up the central staircase and was crouching just outside the door, his eyes wide with horror.
“I’ve drawn your bath for you, Jimmy!” Aunt Catherine said, a half hour later.
Jimmy had allowed his uncle to find him in the lower hallway—not in the upper. He’d returned downstairs and made a small noise to attract attention, and his uncle had come padding down in his carpet slippers, his dark, close-set eyes bright with solicitude.
Jimmy’s return into the bosom of his family had been tacitly accepted with: “Next time you go bird nesting, Jimmy, you’d better tell us. When you just run off like that we think of everything. That quicksand bog on Miles’ place could take a youngster down mighty fast.
“One of these days I’m going to give Miles a piece of my mind. The least he could do is put up a sign!”
Drippy words, brimming with duplicity—not a word about the trunk crashing down.
Jimmy wondered why, if his uncle felt that way, he’d failed to put signs all over the big, dark house, “Be careful! Watch your step, Jimmy! We only want to kill you!”
Now Jimmy stood facing his aunt in his own small bedroom—pajama-clad and looking a little scared, but trying to pretend that he wasn’t at all.
“Aw, gee—do I have to take a bath tonight, Aunt Katie?”
“Jimmy, I’m ashamed of you! It’s been more than a week! How can you want to go around filthy?”
It was on the tip of Jimmy’s tongue to plead a sore throat. He wondere
d why his aunt hadn’t thought of forcing him to take a cold bath, and opening all the windows while he slept. He’d heard that there were drugs now which could cure pneumonia quickly. Maybe that was why.
Timmy suddenly realized that he was letting Lacula down. He had no right to try and squirm out of it when he’d promised to be brave.
“Aw—all right, Aunt Katie!”
Up to the age of six Jimmy had never enjoyed the privilege of taking a bath in privacy. He’d had to make the best of Aunt Katie’s bending over the tub and scrubbing his back with a long-handled brush. Bearing down on the bristles, smiling maliciously, ignoring Jimmy’s protests and scrubbing him harder and harder, like an evil old witch. Sometimes Jimmy’s back had stayed sore for a week.
But Jimmy was a big boy now and Aunt Katie was the soul of modesty.
When Jimmy found himself alone in the bathroom he noticed with a little shudder inching up his spine that his aunt had left the door ajar. He’d expected that, of course, but it wasn’t easy to take.
He noticed other things. The coiling irons at the edge of the shelf, directly over the towel rack and well within reach of a curving arm. And the little shimmer of heat which danced back and forth above the shelf. Someone had once whispered to Jimmy in a dream that if you can see heat it means that death is shoeing a horse and getting ready to ride.
Jimmy forwent the ritual of the bath.
He did not test the water with his hands or toes, or waltz around the bathroom drumming on his chest. He did not feel like Tarzan tonight.
His mouth was as dry as death and he was careful to keep his right hand dry too—dry and tightly clenched as he kicked off his slippers, shrugged off his pajamas, and climbed into the tub.
Aunt Katie had drawn Jimmy a piping hot bath. The water was so hot it warmed the sides of the tub but it didn’t warm Jimmy. A biting cold wind seemed to blow through him as he settled down in a tub that might just as well have been filled with ice water.
Jimmy waited, his knees drawn up, and knocking together. Waiting was an agony. He sat there scarcely daring to breathe, feeling worse than helpless, feeling forever beyond help as the seconds lengthened into minutes and more minutes and waiting became intolerable.
FOR AN INSTANT, as the wind rose and fell and swirled about Jimmy under the water, he thought he saw a shadow flit across the door. But it was quickly gone, and he saw nothing more for a full minute.
His heart was beating wildly when the shadow returned— Blowing, blowing toward him through the water came even colder ripples. Of dread, of terror—swirling around his spine as he stared.
The hand was gaunt, clawlike—but familiar. As it crept around the door Jimmy shuddered convulsively and flung a glance straight across the bathroom to the medicine chest mirror on the opposite wall.
In the misted glass he could see his aunt’s face. She was peering around the door straight at him, not dreaming that he could see her, her teeth bared like the fangs of a she-wolf.
The bony hand was reaching out now to grasp the electric coiling irons. Not to coil human hair but to coil Jimmy! To coil Jimmy into a knot of anguish in the water, with the great pulsing awful shock of a tubful of electricity.
Jimmy came wholly to life then. Lacula had shown him just how to grasp it and what stops to press. It was like a little flute—a child’s toy flute that could be played upon by a wise child instructed by a wisdom that was older than the human race.
“If they come at you and try to kill you again, Jimmy—blow as hard as you can and don’t stop!”
So—Jimmy blew!
He raised the flute to his lips and blew upon it just as utter triumph flared in his aunt’s hate-convulsed face.
A piercing shriek came from beyond the door.
It was hardly human, that shriek. It was like the shriek of an animal with its leg caught in a trap, and tugging with all its might to free itself from the trap. As it pierced the door with its torment the bony hand whipped back.
Away from the coiling irons and straight back against the white, stricken face in the medicine cabinet mirror. There was a sudden, terrible gust of wind, blowing outward from Jimmy as Jimmy’s aunt slapped herself in the face with her own hard knuckles.
Then the door was ripped from its hinges and fell back upon her with a deafening crash.
Jimmy blew harder.
The water in the tub began to quiver and bubble up about Jimmy but he kept right on blowing.
The wind rose and became a cyclone in the dark hall where the door was now spinning back and forth like a gale-lashed leaf in a forest of giants.
Aunt Katie was trying to pick herself up from under the door.
Jimmy could see her scrawny neck and sharply arching back, and a strange thought flashed into his mind. She’s just like a big, snarling cat, and if she had fur it would rise along her back.
Then Jimmy saw his Uncle Jack. His uncle was rushing down the hallway toward the bathroom, his coat blowing up about his head. He was fighting the wind, which was tearing and ripping at him, and his face was a twitching mask of horror.
There was something owl-like about Uncle Jack as he struggled with the wind. His hair stood out on both sides of his head in blowing tufts, and his cheeks kept sinking in and puffing out as though with an evil hooting that he was powerless to control.
Suddenly as Jimmy stared, still blowing fiercely, a floorboard ripped loose directly beneath Aunt Katie. Before she could get to her feet she was rising on the board and clinging to it. She was screaming and another floorboard was ripping loose under Uncle Jack.
Jimmy blew on the pipe.
Down the long hallway the two floorboards floated, like rafts caught in a churning pool of darkness that kept spinning faster and faster. As the floorboards dwindled to spinning motes Jimmy blew with all his might.
A brightness had begun to fill the bathroom. It swirled down from the ceiling and around the tube and the small piping figure in the tub.
With it came a slight tremor, as though the ground beneath the house had at last felt the tug of the piping. The tremor increased in violence until it shook the walls of the house.
But the house didn’t collapse. Though Jimmy continued to blow on the pipe the tremor subsided as quickly as ft had arisen, as though the strange shrill music had lost its power to move and shake.
But just before the house became quiet again a shrill, stricken cry drifted down to Jimmy as if from something that had been caught and caged in flight high above the house.
IN ANOTHER INSTANT the entire ceiling seemed to roll back, and Jimmy found himself staring straight up at the stars with the pipe still pressed to his lips.
Jimmy stopped blowing the small flutelike pipe then.
Lacula was leaving the Earth. He was floating the cages out by balancing himself on a beam of light and training the tube in his hand on a long procession of cages floating in the night sky.
He was facing Jimmy in the middle of the sky, but quite low down, and suddenly his hand went up in a greeting that made Jimmy’s heart leap.
“Good hunting, Jimmy! I’ve had good hunting—thanks to you!”
Jimmy stood up in the tub and weaved back.
He was still waving when Lacula flashed the light full on one of the cages, a cage so near to Jimmy that he could see the light—-the light gleaming on the trees of a familiar forest and every stricken lineament of the two faces which stared out at him from between the bars.
The faces were so white, drawn and ravaged by despair that Jimmy couldn’t bear to look at them.
He could hardly bear to read the sign at the bottom of the cage.
INHABITANTS OF EARTH
These specimens are peculiarly vicious and must not be tellesated by the immature… .
Jimmy didn’t want Lacula to know how he felt, for he was a little ashamed to feel pity for a malice as cold and merciless as the black night of space.
He was ashamed because his eyes smarted a little, and the smallest of lumps had come into h
is throat.
So—Jimmy shut his eyes tight.
When he opened them again he was looking up at the ceiling of the bathroom.
Jimmy looked down at his hand, and saw that it was empty.
Jimmy got out of the tub, shivering a little, and into his pajamas—and went out into the hall.
There were gaping holes where the floorboards had been ripped loose and the bathroom door lay in splinters at his feet.
He ran along the hall, shouting, “Uncle Jack! Aunt Katie!”
He should have known better, of course. He had seen the faces, staring out.
But he kept on calling. “Uncle Jack! Aunt Katie! Uncle Jack!”
Silence—not a sound anywhere … except Jimmy’s own voice calling out and his footsteps echoing through the big empty house.
Silence—as complete as though some terrible unknown god of the outer darkness had sucked all sound back into itself.
Silence—not a sound anywhere … except sweeping over Jimmy—the wisdom that comes from facing reality and taking it firmly by the horns. Jimmy was alone in his own house now—and someday he would marry and have children of his own.
In a big, quiet, friendly old house.
It was his house to make friendly now.
His house—Jimmy’s.
Somewhere in the bright, unfathomable otherwise … Lacula smiled.
The Carriers - Sam Merwin, Jr.
Dr.Gray looked around again at the titanic panorama of ruin and felt helpless to check, the icy shudder that raced up her spine. She stood amid the nine other members of the exploring party sent out by the big ship in what had, to all appearances, not long ago been the central plaza of an immense city.
The heavy gravity of the alien planet—a half again as large as Earth—seemed to pluck at her vitals despite the rigid swathing of special tape that bound her tightly from hips to diaphragm. But the weight of gravity on Bootes IV was as nothing compared to the dead weight of terror they all felt.
My Best Science Fiction Story Page 34