He never believed my story, of course. He thought I’d found the bottles where some ancient godling had buried them but he said the stuff was better than nectar. Not that the old gopher had ever tasted nectar in his life but I didn’t contradict him.
Anyway Breggir forgave me and so did my dear Nigsar Doog. We are to be married within the month. It will be a great feast to which all the Middle Kingdom is invited. I have spared no expense and mild will flow like lava.
What if the gnomes whisper that there’s insanity in my family—me, Yiggar Throlg, whose ichor has come down from Yggdrasil and Ymir? I don’t mind, really.
I’m completely happy with Nigsar, and my recent dreadful experiences have almost faded from my mind.
Well—that isn’t exactly true. My dreams have been troubled, I—I dream of—humans!
GOLDEN APPLE
This story was born of a dark night of terror—when escape from this world seemed a priceless thing. Many of us might even want to flee all the way back to the days of the Snake, the eternally young Eve and the—
⏹ “LOOKS AS IF there might be a feature article in this,” McDaniels said, shoving a folder across the desk at me. “You could play up the timely angle. Precious relic brought over from London—”
“Nuts,” I said. “They’re a dime a dozen.”
“Suit yourself.” His moon-face turned down again to the flimsies before him.
“Well—” I reached idly to flip the folder open. Extra cash always comes in handy, and I had nothing to do that night anyway. The blue dusk of New York autumn was darkening into windy night outside the Chronicle’s windows; no news in particular was coming in on the wires, and I didn’t feel much like going home yet. So I glanced through the folder from the morgue.
It didn’t tell me much—mostly museum stuff. It seems that some time in the middle ages an unknown craftsman had made a pomander—a golden ball crusted with semi-precious stones, meant to hold perfumes. It was said to be a masterpiece of its type; the workman must have been very nearly as good as Cellini. The thing was hollow, and there was an ingenious secret spring concealed in the filigree. It had been so well concealed that the trick of opening the ball up was a lost art, apparently, up to 1890 or thereabouts when some museum curator—the fellow who’d written all this dope—borrowed the pomander for exhibition and decided to have a try. It took him weeks, expert as he was. But he found the hidden spring, and he drew a chart to show how it was done. I noticed by the scribble on the folder that we’d bought the curator’s article and his chart, but never got around to printing them.
And there was a good deal of ancient history, how references to the pomander had appeared from time to time in old manuscripts. It was called the Colden Apple—pomander seems to mean apple—and was undoubtedly valuable, as much for its craftsmanship as for the value of its settings. And that was about all.
“So what?” I asked McDaniels.
He didn’t bother to look up. “Some guy named Argyle got in yesterday on the Clipper. Seems he was bombed in London. Came over to recuperate, and brought the relic with him. Here’s the address.” A grimy hand pushed a scrap of paper toward me. “Want to see what you can dig up?”
I said I would, and reached for the telephone. The switchboard girl got Argyle for me, and when I’d told him who I was and what I wanted, he surprised me by suggesting I come on up right then. That was luck. So I stuffed the curator’s article in my pocket and started off through the dim-out for Grand Central, with a few sharpened pencils and some old envelopes for taking notes. I didn’t expect much.
I took the Lexington subway uptown. Just as I came up from the 86th Street station the wail of the blue alert sirens began to moan from a long way off. I said, “Oh-oh,” and broke into a trot, hoping I’d have time to reach Argyle’s place before the signal to get tinder cover. The howling of the alarm increased in volume as more and more sirens joined the chorus. I just made it. Argyle lived in a big apartment house near the Park, and street lights were blinking off as I rode up in the elevator as the second alarm keened its total blackout warning.
The corridor on the twelfth floor, where his apartment was, had been darkened too. Through big windows at each end I could see uptown New York changing from spangled cliffs to blind black silhouettes against the sky. And that was about all I could see. I stood there blankly. Then a door opened somewhere and a. voice said, “Mr. Russell? The desk phoned you were on your way up. I’m Argyle.”
“Right. How do I find you? I’m blind as a bat—”
“Straight ahead—there.” A firm hand gripped my arm. “Come on in, but feel, your way. The place is a mess—I haven’t unpacked yet. Can’t show a light, either—no blackout curtains here, damn it.” I heard him stumble over something. He chuckled. “Look out for that box. Here we are now. There’s a chair right behind you. You’ll be able to see better in a few minutes, when you get used to the dark. I’ve got a lamp here, you’ll notice.”
⏹ I LOOKED, but scarcely saw it at first one of those tiny blackout lamps that seems only to make black blacker by contrast. In its almost-invisible glow I could glimpse only the vague shadows of furniture and the outline of my. companion, who seemed to be slightly built—I couldn’t tell any more than that yet.
I heard him cross the room, his shoes squeaking faintly, and I heard glass clink.
“Drink? We can manage a straight one even in the dark, I think.”
“Thanks.” I accepted the glass he creaked across the room to hand me. “I’m sorry to impose on you, but I guess I’m stuck here until the all clear.”
“Glad for the company. You wanted an interview about the pomander, didn’t you? I noticed the customs man seemed interested. I suppose you found out about it from him?”
I acknowledged that. Argyle chuckled.
“So it Teally has a history, eh? I didn’t know. I picked it up one day in an antique shop. Let’s trade information. I’m very curious.”
“Fair enough,” I said, tasting the brandy. It was good. I paraphrased the stuff in the morgue folder, and Argyle began to rummage in the darkness, his shoes wheezing softly across the carpet. I didn’t see him coming toward me, but the noise was enough. His hand fell on my shoulder.
“Oh, there you are. Reach out. Here’s the Golden Apple, but you’ll have to admire it by touch only. What was it, now, about a secret spring? Must be very secret. I never noticed.”
“It took an expert to find the trick,” I said, turning the globe over in my hand. It was about as large as an orange, and had a rough, fretted surface like metal lace. I could feel the coldness of the gems.
“The light might help a little,” Argyle suggested. I got out of my chair and crouched down by the tiny lamp. Feeble as it was, I could see flecks of fire glinting from the pomander, and the gold was soft and mellow and intricately worked.
The thing was archaic—the touch of it had told me that. Maybe I’d never have noticed in the daylight, but here in the dark the senses you have left seem sharper. By the very feel of the pomander I knew that hands long dust—delicate, loving hands—had wrought it into a shape of intricate beauty. The smooth, cold gems—amethyst and moonstone and many I couldn’t identify—were arabesques against the fretted gold. I thought of sardonyx and chrysoprase, cymophane and jacinth, moon-ruled selenite, and the magic meloceus that is ruled by blood. Jacinth, peridot, bezoar—names submerged in the depths of my memory swam up, bringing with them the curious fragrance of a tapestried and long-forgotten past.
There was magic in that relic. The breath of ancient life stirred in it as I looked in that dim radiance at the Golden Apple and it winked back at me, manyeyed, cold-eyed, all the loveliness of the past compressed into an orb no larger than my hands could compass. In the. darkness it gathered all the faint glow of the blackout lamp and shone like a sun that might rise above magic lands.
Argyle’s voice roused me. “Can you work the spring?”
I said, after a moment, “I don’t know. Maybe. Shall I
try?”
“Please. Nothing in it. I suppose, but—You know, come to think of it, you’re not the first man after all who told me about the secret spring. I can’t imagine how it slipped my mind until now—” His voice trailed off for a moment. “American, he was, in London. Told me he’d studied the pomander once, years before. I promised to let him see the thing, but the poor old boy was killed before we kept our engagement. It was in nineteen forty, you see.”
I remembered that terrible autumn. “No wonder you forgot,” I said. “Plenty must have been happening around then to keep you busy. Was the old man the curator of—” I named the museum. “Why, yes. That’s right.”
“He studied the pomander ’way back in eighteen ninety,” I told him. “I’ve got his report in my pocket. The trick’s simple enough, once you know how. But until then—”
I knew it, after reading the file, but even so my fingers fumbled and felt clumsy on those exquisitely filigreed surfaces. It took me several minutes to get the trick of it. Then the pomander opened in my hand, falling apart in hinged halves. It was hollow.
But it was not empty.
I stared down at the many times folded packet of—papers? They didn’t look old. The stuff had the feel of parchment, but it seemed thinner than onion-skin flimsies, and there was writing visible, a word here and there in unmistakable modern English.
“You’re wrong,” I told Argyle. “Look at this. You may have a find here.”
The papers crackled as I unfolded them. But Argyle, leaning down above my shoulder, reached out to take them before I could see anything in the tiny blackout glow.
“Let me,” he said, in a curious, strained voice. It was the same intonation he had used when he spoke of forgetting, in the blitzes, about the secret the old curator had told. Now he took up the light and turned almost jealously away from me, holding the lamp so close to the papers they must nearly have scorched as he strained to read in that feeble glow.
I could see the slim silhouette of him against the light for a moment or two. He was quite motionless, only the papers rustling faintly. Then I heard him sigh—a deep, deep, nearly soundless sigh as if all the breath in his lungs had gone out at once.
“What is it?” I asked.
He said, very quietly, “Let me finish this, Russell. Let me—oh, it isn’t possible! My God, it isn’t possible!”
I felt news instinct quicken in me. “Read it out-loud.”
“No . . . no. Let me alone!” His voice was suddenly harsh. “You can see it—afterward. Let me alone now, for heaven’s sake!”
I didn’t say anything. I watched him cross the room—a silhouette against a tiny moving blur of light—and sit down in a far corner, the back of his chair almost hiding him from me. He went on reading, with a tenseness I could feel in the very air. The pages rustled now and then. I sat there in the dark, playing with the pomander and pouring an occasional drink from the decanter, though I had to grope for it blindly each time. 1 was tremendously keyed up with anticipation, and the wait seemed long.
The blackout was still in full darkness over New York when I heard the faint noise of Argyle’s shoes coming back across the carpet. He put the little lamp down on a table beside me and laid the manuscript in my lap.
“Let me have the Golden Apple,” he said, his voice so strained that I scarcely knew it.
I stared up at the pale oval blur of his face, the black, formless outlines of him in the dimness.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“You . . . read it.” He took the pomander. “You’ll see what—it explains everything. Good-by, Russell. After you’ve read, you’ll understand.”
“Good-by! Wait—Argyle—” I stared at the shadow retreating toward its corner. I heard the sound of his shoes fall silent, and the creak of the chair as he sat down. And then—
There was a breath of air through the room, as if someone had brushed by in haste. There was no noise to match it, but somehow, quite definitely, I sensed that where there had been two people in this room an instant before, now there was only one.
“Argyle—” I said.
No answer. I knew he was not there any longer.
I took the lamp and with its faint aid went to look at his chair. It was empty. I had not heard it creak when he rose, but it was empty now. I had not heard the soft sound of his shoes and I knew he had not moved across the carpeted floor, but he was not in the room any longer. The realization was not the result of reasoning from these bits of evidence, though I knew I must have heard him, sensed his leaving. No, it was a matter of utter, unarguable conviction with me. Psychic certainty, if you like. He had—winked out, like a candle.
With the pomander.
He searched the apartment. I went out into the hall, groping and calling. But I did not find him. When I returned, the manuscript that had been in the Golden Apple lay scattered on the carpet, where I had dropped it as I sprang up.
I gathered the papers together, my mind still blankly incredulous. The answer to the secret must lie here, I realized, if it lay anywhere at all. I sat down, holding the little lamp close and straining my eyes in the dimness to make out what the pages held.
And so I read the record upon them that John Argyle himself had written, in the early days of the war, when the first bombs were falling upon London when he had stumbled upon the magic of th.; golden pomander engraved by that unknown artisan whose bones were dust so long since. For my feeling when I first touched the pomander had not been wrong. There was magic in that archaic, lovely thing, a perilous sorcery that opened the gateways of a lost dream.
And as I read, I understood what it was that had happened to John Argyle on a cool autumn night in London, in his apartment near Kensington.
• • •
The war was young yet. The Germans had not yet unleashed the full terror of their blitz. Nor had America yet thrown her strength into the balance. The raiders came over the Channel to blast England into submission, but already the RAF was meeting their challenge.
In a year, John Argyle thought, he would be old enough to fly too. A long time, of course—a year. Before then the war might be won—or lost. Sitting by the fire in the chill of the evening, he turned the pomander over and over in his hands, watching its jewels glinting many-colored and remembering his conversation with the museum curator from America. A secret spring . . . He fingered the fretted gold hopefully, pressing it here and there. Firelight blazed from the gems. Hypnotic, almost. He held the pomander up, turning it slowly, enjoying the play of light and color.
Golden Apple . . . the Golden Apples of Idun that gave eternal youth to Valhalla’s gods. Magic. There might be something inside this from the very old days, if he could only find the spring. His fingers pressed and slipped over the golden surfaces . . . he felt something move a little . . .
Noiselessly, upon smooth hinges, the pomander opened in his hands. And suddenly, like a twilight veil there in the London flat, the spell of ancient sorcery began to drop, layer by layer, about him.
He was staring into the shining opened hollow of the globe . . . Reflections moved there, so bright, so enchanting that everything else in the room fell back into shadows. Little shapes of color so pure, so clear.
But they were distorted shapes, the curves of the hollow disguising them. He did not glance behind him for the source of those moving reflections. He knew that nothing in the room could be casting such colors as these. Nothing had substance but those moving bits of brightness . . .
Not even the earth underfoot. It shifted unstably as he walked . . . He was taking long, sliding strides that carried him over a shaking land dizzily while everything around him quivered. The air was grey smoke that shook too, in long, slow waves. Only the pomander’s shining mirror in his hands held its image clearly, and he thought after a while that the little broken shapes moving within it were beginning to take form . . .
For a long while he must have gone striding and stumbling through the dusk, the earth shaking underfoo
t, the pomander held up before him like a Grail. He could see in it now that somewhere a lawn was green as velvet, with yellow sunshine falling over trees and over the walls of a strange, stiff little castle whose banners stood out as if upon a gale. He could not see it clearly yet, but the image was taking shape . . .
Then in one last, long stride his foot struck solid ground. Sunshine poured down about him like a tent of warmth, and suddenly the reflections in the pomander were bodiless no longer. They were real reflections, mirroring the scene around him. The velvet lawn, spangled with small, flat, starry flowers, the castle with its straining banners, the deep woods beyond. And over the flowery lawn someone was moving toward him, someone who glittered in the sunlight.
He was not at all surprised. He was beyond surprise, or outside it. From first to last he had no feeling of strangeness or unreality here, not even questioning in his mind whether it were all a dream. He knew it was not. He knew it was real. He drew a long breath of the sweet sunny air and looked upon a little world of preposterous familiarity. Perhaps the fact that he had seen it all before so many times helped make its reality clear to him.
For this was the world of old missals and tapestries and church paintings, the same stiff little scenes he had so often encountered before, painstakingly traced by the loving, inexpert hands of medieval artists. Here were the trees and fountains he had seen in the bright pages of Froissart and twined into the capitals of old Malorian texts. The lawn was strewn with the same unreal, flat flowers that Botticelli painted beneath the feet of his dancing nymphs. And over the grass a girl was hurrying now.
She was very slim in the bell of her swaying skirts, and she was blindingly golden in the sunlight, the gown standing out about her stiff with the richness of its embossed and embroidered fabric. A stiff, flat collar of hammered gold lay across her shoulders, and she wore a golden crown pierced with fleur-de-lys patterns. Beneath it her pale hair streamed smoothly about a sad little lifted face whose great black eyes looked anxiously into his.
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