Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “That’s Margie, all right.” Pete Manx adjusted his tie.

  The Professor coughed. “I’m curious to know what happened to you among the Amazons, but that can wait. After meeting this—this Margie, I can’t help sympathizing with you. The woman has a remarkably strong will. If you care to leave by the rear fire escape, just open that window, over there.”

  “No, thanks.” Mr. Manx whistled a few bars of a popular melody. “I’m in no hurry. Let Margie wait a while. Want me to tell you just what happened?”

  “By all means. Here, have a cigar.” Pete Manx relaxed in a comfortable chair and started talking. Half an hour later he threw away the butt of his second cigar.

  “And that’s all. I ain’t so dumb, Prof. Mrs. Manx’s little boy can always get along.”

  Aker stared at him, fascinated. “How you do these things I don’t know.” He hesitated. “One point puzzles me. I never knew you were a wrestler. How did you manage that? Ju-jutsu?”

  PETE MANX preened himself.

  “Brain-work was all. When those Amazons tried to wrestle me, they got a shock. A big one. I had wires up my sleeve.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ever see the Electric Woman in a circus? She’s got a couple of flashlight batteries in her armpits, and wires running down inside her sleeves. Touch her hand and you get a jolt. Well, I had my batteries and wire all ready, so I just found some stuff to insulate my sandals, and when the Amazons touched the wires in my hands, they got enough voltage to knock ’em endwise. A cinch.” Pete Manx finished, arose and waved casually at Aker. “Be seeing you, Prof.”

  “But Margie,” the scientist said, suddenly reminded. “You’re not going out the front door.”

  “Margie ain’t so bad. Just a clinging vine, compared to Urganilla. I’ll just stop in at the radio store next door, before seeing her. Then me and Margie will have a little talk. Thanks for everything, pal.” With this cryptic remark, Pete Manx departed.

  Professor Aker remained motionless till the sound of a feminine shriek reached his ears. Then he hastily lumbered to the front room and drew back a window-curtain.

  Margie was sitting on the sidewalk, her mouth wide open, and an expression of blank astonishment in her eyes. Two snakes, tied into a neat bowline, lay motionless beside her.

  And Pete Manx was swaggering down the street, the silk hat tilted at a rakish angle, while he whistled “Mademoiselle from Armentieres” with an air of gay and jubilant triumph.

  THE CHILDREN’S HOUR

  Something had happened to his memory—there was a period of time missing. It took considerable hypnosis to bring it out>—and it was lost again almost at once. But for a little time he remembered the child who had come to play for a while—

  He sat on a bench in the little grove in front of Administration, watching the clock over the provost marshal’s door jerk its long hand toward seven. Presently, when the hour struck, he would be going in that door, and up one flight of stairs, and down the corridor to the room where Lieutenant Dyke sat waiting, as he had waited so many evenings before.

  Tonight might be the night that would end it. Lessing thought perhaps it would be. Something was stirring behind the intangible locks of his mind, and tonight that door might open which had resisted the skilled manipulations of hypnosis for so long. The door might swing wide tonight at last, and let the secret out which not even Lessing knew.

  Lessing was a good hypnosis subject. Lieutenant Dyke had discovered that early in their class experiments in psychonamics—that astonishing means by which a soldier can learn to desensitize his own body and feel neither pain nor hunger, when pain or hunger would otherwise be intolerable. In the process of learning, dim and untrodden corridors of the mind are sometimes laid bare. But seldom in any mind was such a thing to be encountered as that block in Lessing’s.

  He responded well to all the usual tests. Immobility and desensitization, the trick of warping the balance center, the familiar routine of posthypnotic commands, all these succeeded without a hitch, as they had succeeded with so many others. But in Lessing’s brain one barrier stood up immovable. Three months in his life were locked and sealed behind adamant walls—under hypnosis.

  That was the strangest thing of all, for waking, he remembered those three months clearly. Under hypnosis—they did not exist. Under hypnosis he had no recollection that in June, July and August of two years ago he had been living a perfectly normal existence. He was in New York, a civilian then, working in an advertising office and living the patterned life that still existed for a time after December 7, 1941. Nothing had happened to make his hypnotized memory blank out with such stubborn vehemence when asked to remember.

  And so began the long sessions of searching, probing, delicately manipulating Lessing’s mind as a complicated machine is readjusted, or as muscles wasted and atrophied are gently massaged back to life.

  Up to now, the dam had resisted. Tonight—

  The first stroke of seven vibrated upon the evening air. Lessing got up slowly, conscious of an unaccustomed touch of panic in his mind. This was the night, he thought. There was a stirring deep down in the roots of his subconscious. He would know the truth tonight—he would look again upon the memory his mind had refused to retain—and he was illogically just a little afraid to face it. He had no idea why.

  In the doorway he paused for a moment, looking back. Only the twilight was out there, gathering luminously over the camp, blurring the outlines of barracks, the bulk of the hospital distantly rising. Somewhere a train hooted toward New York an hour away. New York, that held mysteriously the memory his mind rejected.

  “Good evening, sergeant,” said Lieutenant Dyke, looking up from behind his desk.

  Lessing looked at him a little uneasily. Dyke was a small, tight, blond man, sharp with nervous vigor, put together with taut wires. He had shown intense interest in the phenomenon of Lessing’s memory, and Lessing had felt a bewildered sort of gratitude until this moment. Now he was not sure.

  “Evening, sir,” he said automatically.

  “Sit down. Cigarette? Nervous, Lessing?”

  “I don’t know.” He took the cigarette without knowing he had done it. This was the flood tide, he thought, and he had no mind for any other awareness than that. The dam was beginning to crumble, and behind it what flood waters, pent up in darkness, waited for release? There were almost inaudible little clicks in his mind as the bolts subconsciously, automatically clicked open. Conditioned reflex by now. His brain, responsive to Dyke’s hypnotic probing, was preparing itself.

  A bare light swung above Dyke’s desk. His eyes turned to it, and everything else began to darken. This, too, was reflexive by now. Dyke, behind him, traced a finger back along his scalp. And Lessing went under very quickly. He heard Dyke’s voice, and that changed from a sound to a strong, even suction pulling somewhere in darkness. An indefinable force that drew, and guided as it drew. The dam began to go almost at once. The gates of memory quivered, and Lessing was afraid.

  “Go back. Go back. Back to the summer of’41. Summer, You are in New York. When I count ten you will remember. One. Two—” At ten Dyke’s voice dropped.

  Then again. And again. Until w the long, difficult preparation for this moment proved itself, and James Lessing went back through time and . . .

  And saw a face, white against the dark, blazing like a flame in the emptiness of the swift temporal current. Whose face? He did not know, but he knew there was a shadow behind it, darker than the blackness, shapeless and watchful.

  The shadow grew, looming, leaning over him. A tinkling rhythm beat out. Words fitted themselves to it.

  Between the dark and the daylight

  When the night is beginning to lower

  Comes a pause in the day’s occupation

  That is known as the children’s hour—

  It meant nothing. He groped through blindness, searching for reason.

  And then it began to come back to him, the thing he had forgotten. A
minor thing, something hardly worth remembering, surely. Some thing . . . no, someone—And not quite so minor, after all. Someone rather important. Someone he had met casually in a place he could not quite remember—a bar, or in the park, Or at a party somewhere—very casually. Someone—yes, I had been in the park—but who He could remember now a flickering of green around them, leave twinkling in sunshine and grass underfoot. A fountain where they had stopped to drink. He could remember the water, clear and colorless, trickling musically away, but he could not quite remember who had . . . who it was—Everything else was coming clear except the person. Forgetfulness clung stubbornly around that figure at his side. That slender figure, smaller than himself—dark? Fair? No, dark.

  “Stabbed by a white wench’s black eyes.”

  He caught his breath suddenly, in a violent physical wrench, as memory deluged back with appalling violence. Clarissa! How could he have forgotten? How could he? How could even amnesia have erased her? He sat stunned, the shining flood all but blinding him. And somewhere under that pouring brightness was grief—but he would not let that break the surface yet.

  Clarissa. What words were there to get all that vivid color into speech? When the barrier went down, it collapsed with such a blast of sudden glory that . . . that—

  They had walked in the park above the Hudson, blue water marbled with deeper blue and twinkling in the sun, sliding away below them. Clear water in the fountain, tinkling down over pebbles wet and brown in the dappled shadows beneath the trees. And everything as vivid at Creation’s first morning, because of Clarissa walking beside him under the shining leaves. Clarissa—and he had forgotten.

  It was like looking back into a world a little brighter than human. Everything shone, everything glistened, every sound was sweeter and clearer; there was a sort of glory over all he saw and felt and heard. Childhood had been like that, when the newness of the world invested every commonplace with particular glamour. Glamour—yes, that was the word for Clarissa.

  Not sveltness and slickness, but glamour, the old word for enchantment. When he was with her it had been like stepping back into childhood and seeing everything with an almost intolerable fresh clarity.

  But as for Clarissa herself—who had she been? What had she looked like? And above all, how could he have forgotten?

  He groped backward into the shapeless fog of the past. What phrase was it that had suddenly ripped the curtain? Shock had all but erased it from his mind. It was like a lightning-flash forking through the darkness and vanishing again. Darkness—blackness—black eyes—yes, that was it. “Stabbed by a white wench’s black eyes.” A quotation, of course, but from what? More groping. Shakespeare? Yes, “Romeo and Juliet.” Why, wasn’t that what—Mercutio?—had said to Romeo about Romeo’s first love? The girl he loved before he met Juliet. The girl he forgot so completely—

  Forgot!

  Lessing sat back in his chair, letting everything else slide away for a moment in sheer amazement at the complexity of the subconscious. Something had wiped out all recollection of Clarissa from level below level of his memory, but far down in tire dark, memory had clung on, disguised, distorted, hiding behind analogy and allegory, behind a phrase written by a wandering playwright three hundred years before.

  So it had been impossible, after all, to erase Clarissa entirely from his mind. She had struck so deep, she had glowed so vividly, that nothing at all could quite smudge her out. And yet only Lieutenant Dyke’s skill and the chance unburial of a phrase had resurrected the memory. (For one appalling moment he wondered with a shaken mind what other memories lay hidden and shivering behind other allegorical words and phrases and innocent pictures, deep in the submarine gulfs.)

  So he had defeated them after all—the bodiless, voiceless people who had stood between them. The jealous god—the shadowy guardians—For a moment the glare of showering gold flashed in his mind’s eye blindingly. He was, in that one shutter-flash, aware of strangers in rich garments moving against confused and unfamiliar backgrounds. Then the door slammed in his face again and he sat there blinking.

  Them? Defeated them? Who? He had no idea. Even in that one magical glimpse before memory blanked out again he thought he had not been sure who they were. That much, perhaps, had been a mystery never solved. But somewhere back in the darkness of his mind incredible things lay hidden. Gods and showering gold, and people in bright clothing that blew upon a wind not—surely not—of this earth—

  Bright, bright—brighter than normal eyes ever perceive the world. That was Clarissa and all that surrounded her. It had been a stronger glamour than the sheer enchantment of first love. He felt sure about that now. He who walked with Clarissa shared actual magic that shed a luster on all they passed. Lovely Clarissa, glorious world as clear—as clarissima indeed—as a child’s new, shining world. But between himself and her, the shadowy people—

  Wait. Clarissa’s—aunt? Had there been an . . . an aunt? A tall, dark, silent woman who damped the glory whenever she was near? He could not remember her face; she was no more than a shadow behind Clarissa’s shining presence, a faceless, voiceless nonentity glowering in the background.

  His memory faltered, and into the gap flowed the despair which he had been fighting subconsciously since the lustrous flood first broke upon him. Clarissa, Clarissa—where was she now, with the glory around her?

  “Tell me,” said Lieutenant Dyke.

  “There was a girl,” Lessing began futilely. “I met her in a park—”

  Clarissa on a glittering June morning, tall and dark and slim, with the waters of the Hudson pouring past beyond her in a smooth, blue, glassy current. Stabbed by a white wench’s black eyes. Yes, very black eyes, bright and starry with blackness, and set wide apart in a grave face that had the remoteness and thoughtfulness of a child’s. And from the moment he met that grave, bright glance they knew one another. He had been stabbed indeed—stabbed awake after a lifetime of drowsiness. (Stabbed—like Romeo, who lost both his loves . . .)

  “Hello,” said Clarissa.

  “It didn’t last very long . . . I think,” he told Dyke, speaking distractedly. “Long enough to find out there was something very strange about Clarissa . . . very wonderful . . . but not long enough to find out what it was . . . I think.”

  (And yet they had been days of glory, even after the shadows began to fall about them. For there were always shadows, just at her elbow. And he thought they had centered about the aunt who lived with her, that grim nonentity whose face he could not remember.)

  “She didn’t like me,” he explained, frowning with the effort of remembering. “Well, no, not quite that. But there was something in the . . . in the air when she was with us. In a minute I may remember—I wish I could think what she looked like.”

  It probably didn’t matter. They had not seen her often. They had met, Clarissa and he, in so many places in New York, and each place acquired a brilliance of its own once her presence made it clarissima for him. There was no sensible explanation for that glory about her, so that street noises clarified to music and dust turned golden while they were together. It was as if he saw the world through her eyes when they were together, and as if she saw it with vision dearer—or perhaps less dear—than human.

  “I knew so little about her,” he said. (She might almost have sprung into existence in that first moment by the river. And so far as he would ever know, now, she had vanished back into oblivion in that other moment in the dim apartment, when the aunt said—now what was it the aunt had said?)

  This was the moment he had been avoiding ever since memory began to come back. But he must think of it now. Perhaps it was the most important moment in the whole strange sequence, the moment that had shut him off so sharply from Clarissa and her shining, unreal, better than normal world . . .

  What had the woman said to him?

  He sat very still, thinking. He shut his eyes and turned his mind inward and backward to that strangely clouded hour, groping among shadows that slid smoothly
away at his touch.

  “I can’t—” he said, scowling, his eyes still closed. “I can’t. They were . . . negative . . . words, I think, but—No, it’s no use?”

  “Try the aunt again,” suggested Dyke. “What did she look like?”

  Lessing put his hands over his eyes and thought hard. Tall? Dark, like Clarissa? Grim, certainly—or had that only been the connotation of her words? He could not remember. He slumped down in his chair, grimacing with the effort. She had stood before the mirrors, hadn’t she, looking down? Had she? What were her outlines against the light? She had no outlines. She had never existed. Her image seemed to slide behind furniture or slip deftly around comers whenever his persistent memory followed it through the apartment. Here, quite dearly, the memory block was complete.

  “I don’t think I ever can have seen her,” he said, looking up at Dyke with strained, incredulous eyes. “She just isn’t there.”

  Yet it was her shadow between him and Clarissa in the last moment before . . . before . . . what was it that cut off all memory between that hour and this? What happened? Well, say before forgetfulness began, then. Before—Lethe.

  This much he remembered—Clarissa’s face in the shadowed room, grief and despair upon it, her eyes almost unbearably bright with tears, her arms still extended, the fingers curved as they had slipped from his. He could remember the warmth and softness of them in that last handclasp. And then Lethe had poured between them.

  “That was it,” said Lessing in a bewildered voice. He looked up. “Those were the highlights. None of them mean anything.”

  Dyke drew on his cigarette, his eyes narrow above its glow. “Somewhere we’ve missed the point,” he said. “The real truth’s still hidden, even deeper than all this was. Hard to know yet just where to begin probing. Garissa, do you think?”