Little thought we then of catastrophe, for we were heedless of the possible effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. Indeed, so salubrious was Prof. Turnkistan's success to his own health and spirits that he was shortly enabled to essay with his new creation the same experiment that Doll and I had performed, while I operated the recording engine; and subsequently was able to confirm my finding that her interior design, whatever the repellancies of her outward appearance, was flawless. Thus again was affirmed that saying of the divine Shakespeare that all is not gold that glitters, and that a leaden exterior may conceal the greatest treasures.
Of the crasser treasures of this world, however, we were in short supply, for the experiments were costly, and you may well conceive that two such huge beings as the Dolls required extraordinary amounts of sustenance, especially while demonstrating for the enrichment of natural and moral philosophy their abilities and capacities. Prof. Turnkistan therefore proposed that we should offer for sale some copies of his less bizarre recordings; and the actual performance of this task fell upon me, since he felt that my youth, sex and natural demureness of manner would be less likely; to excite suspicion among baser minds.
Some of these recordings, however, came to the attention of the police, who were alike as incapable of appreciating their wonder as of comprehending their maker's disinterestedness; and since I myself am utterly incapable of dissembling, their place of origin was soon also ferreted out. I believe (although I shall never know) that Prof. Turnkistan, seeing these officials approaching in a menacing manner, may have attempted to put to the torch the more difficult to explain of these documents; for one afternoon, as I was returning through the snow with the proceeds of my latest expedition, I beheld with horror that the entire lodging-house was aflame, with such fervor that it could not fail to be the funeral pyre of my uncle, his miraculous Dolls, his marvelous engine, and my hopes of a happy home. Its fury gave the very police officers pause. With sad solemnity I watched until the light of that conflagration had faded away, and its ashes had been swept by the wind far over the plains of Ohio and on toward the awful grandeur of the Alleghenies. May they rest in peace!
LETTER THE FOURTH
It was at the beginning of the year that, my coffers somewhat relined by the proceeds of the Affair of the Moving Picture, I was able to quit my practices in Gh—and join forces with Mr. and Mrs. Pullover in Orange Park, Pa. Mrs. Pullover, a good, earnest soul of the sort upon which the best societies are based everywhere in the Colonies, was my second oldest aunt, and her husband a similar sort but a man of markedly less practicality. I was readily accepted into their lodgings, not only because of my rather remote ties of blood, but because the modest sum I had brought with me was most welcome to them and their cause.
I record these personal particulars not, of course, because they are of any interest in themselves, but because they form an interesting contrast to what may be the least interesting case in my files, as well as being essential to the reader's understanding of it. Indeed, Buddworth Maracot, to whom I served as friend and amanuensis during this period, raised his eyebrows scornfully over his bagpipe at the very notion of my taking notes on it.
"My dear Coupling," he said, "I am sure that with so little of substance upon which to expatiate, you will succeed only in sensationalizing my methods even further beyond recognition."
But I digress. First I must further note that Mr. and Mrs. Pullover were at this time the prime movers of an organization called the First Church of the Unreal Absence, which was a gathering-place for spiritualists from all over the Colonies. These people maintained that the dead are not extinguished forever, but instead simply wander, discorporate, in some misty other land from which they may graduate only as they attain to superior understanding of their condition. In the meantime, they may be spoken to by means of seances conducted by psychic mediums, of which latter group my aunt was considered preeminent.
"The First Church," my aunt was fond of saying, "is a great leveler of classes. Here the charwoman with psychic force is the superior of the millionaire who lacks it."
I was prepared to grant this sentiment some nobility, but when I reported it to Buddworth Maracot, he said drily: "How many millionaires have you seen there lately?"
Nevertheless, Maracot's position was somewhat compromised by the fact that his daughter Deepily was a member of the First Church. I am unable to account for my friend's having had a daughter at all, for I never had any success in interesting him in the opposite sex—"To me, Coupling," he said often, "the BVM will always be the only woman"—but what is important here is that Deepily had challenged him to attend a seance at the First Church and bring to bear the fullest powers of his formidable scepticism to expose it, if he could.
Maracot brought to the session not only his scepticism, but a veritable brute of a man, bulging with old hockey muscles, whom he had recruited during one of his trips in disguise to the docks along the banks of the Monongohela (which in those days, as the name indicates, was much haunted by Mongols). This creature was made as welcome to the seance by Deepily and the Pullovers as was everyone else, and Maracot was then invited to search both Mrs. Pullover and her cabinet. Insofar as I could see, he did both with equal impartiality, including all the drawers of both.
Then we all sat down, the lights were turned to a ghostly dimness, and Mrs. Pullover called upon her "contact," a childish spirit named Sam.
"Me wee pee lamb top hole allee samee sensa wonda byembye seeka tomollah, you bet," piped the little voice.
"Tell me, Sam, dear, is there anyone in the land of mist who wishes to speak to anyone here?" Mrs. Pullover intoned.
"Here ee weary topside bigfella past competent journalist Bergen Record," Sam squeaked through the trumpet. "Callself allsame J. R. Transistor, wantee mohtal gaslight explohah infinite storm."
But no, no one would own to a friend named J. R. Transistor, or even a relative of that name. But at the same moment there emerged from the cabinet an astonishing vision, wrapped from moorcock to gernsback in a coating of ectoplasm.
"Grab him!" cried the voice of my friend, and the soccer player lunged in a full football tackle for the anxious ankles of the spirit. Since he failed to release my hand as he did so, we soon found ourselves rather more entangled with each other than with the Problem of the White Sheet, but in the confusion managed to make the best resolution of it that presented itself.
It was sometime later that I asked my friend how he had known that Mrs. Pullover had been generating the voices in the tube by vibrating her diaphragm. "My dear Felicity," he said, stuffing his Persian slipper into a pot, "can you really have missed the clue of the Third Fundamentalism? Then I fear that you are too inattentive to serve any longer as my liaison officer."
And with this, alas, I was waved away anew, and never again saw the best and wisest and most unsatisfactory man that I have ever known.
LETTER THE FIFTH
All apelike young Irishmen named George, as is well known, eat nothing less good than tournedos Rossini. Thus it was no surprise to me to find that he was a mushroom cultivator. He was the turnkey's second oldest brother, and despite his ugliness I believe he had the heart of a poet. I found him very engaging, though somewhat gullible.
I cannot say the same for his wife, who struck me as the most stupid, blind, perverse, and ill-natured witch who ever infested the earth. I do not know why such men always marry such women, unless it is because they think they can get no other kind.
I disabused him of this notion, if he had it, rather quickly. Finding me friendly, he took me to the cellar to show me his beds of rare mushrooms, and behind the boiler I raised another specimen which afterwards we cultivated assiduously in my own bed. If he was taken aback to find me more expert at fungiculture than he, he was too gentlemanly to say so. For my part, I found that like all true amateurs, what he lacked in technical polish he more than made up for in energy.
Since we now shared
one secret which had to be kept from his demon of a wife, he showed me another one: a species of morel which, when dried, broken up and chewed, released a remarkable drug. I found that it tasted like a mouthful of elastic bands, but after only a few moments made one feel like a bird of paradise that had just been released from a cage.
In particular, if taken just before bedtime, the dried morel heightened the pleasures of entertaining a friend to the shimmering verge of delirium. I said as much; and George then confessed that for years it had been the only thing that had made his wife's company at all tolerable to him.
This remark set me to thinking with some speed. George was charming, his house was cozy, he had money and an unusual hobby to keep him occupied while either of us was temporarily bored or otherwise out of touch with the other; the only serpent in this Eden was the legal female demon. One night after he had been stifling a particularly deep resentment of her, I asked him casually if some of his pets were poisonous.
This leaven—these mycelial metaphors are getting away from me—produced a fine brew in a remarkably short time. George's proposal was for tournedos Rossini with broiled mushrooms, at which the demon should receive the deadly Amanitopsis vaginata, and George and I the morel as a prelude to a night of celebration. As for the police, George said, shrugging, doubtless they would be sticky for a while, but a mistake is a mistake: Everyone knows that amateurs should not cook with noncommercial mushrooms.
And so they shouldn't. As the meal progressed, the demon and I were seized with a progressive fit of the giggles, while George slowly turned an unbecoming black.
LETTER THE SIXTH
It was hushed and silent spring by the time I had beaten my way, through the inhuman malice of the jungle and the savagery of the natives, to the fabled lost valley of Hidden, Del. For a part of the expedition I had been accompanied by three gallant soldiers of fortune, veterans of the Boxer Rebellion, whom I had recruited under a boxcar, but alas, the last of these had perished after 72 pages in small type of terrible privations. Now only I stood looking down into the valley upon the stately mansion in which, if the turnkey's frightened whispers could be trusted, there dwelt that creature of legend and dream, my aunt Messalina.
I say it was silent; but the hush was the absence only of the usual rustling of pine fronds, the blood-curdling distant roar of squirrels, the indignant chattering of deer, even the trilling of robins. Instead, the air seemed filled, as if with exotic perfume, with a far-off bungling, as of the blowing of faëry flutes. What sort of creature could make so magical a sound? (Later, I was privileged to see an entire flock of them: scaly and winged, in some parts of the valley they dangled from every participle.)
As I mounted the steps of the mansion, this elfin music was joined by the sound of gongs, hollow, awful, empty, one to each step. What did this gongorism portend? But I was given no time to ponder the puzzle, for the great door swung open, and before me in the aperture stood—the White Goddess, my aunt Messalina herself!
How to describe such beauty? Her eyes were blue, wondrous, though not without a taint of fiendishness in them; an almost invisible veil slipped down from the neck, the shoulders, half-revealing, hoo boy, the gleaming breasts. And eldritch, eldritch beyond all song was that exquisite head and bust floating above me—and beautiful, dextrously beautiful beyond all singing, too. So might even Potiphar's wife, that ever-normal granary of fruitfulness, have shown herself tempting Joseph!
"Ah, Felici-tee!" she cried in a mocking voice. "My winged messengers have foretold your coming! Enter my temple, and be glad!"
Within, the mansion revealed itself to be indeed a temple, but a temple of sensuousness, a palace of indulgence. I paused, awe-struck, and behind me sounded Messalina's tinkling laughter. Before me on divans, languidly sipping some nectar from golden goblets, lay a motley company, consisting at the moment of three men and a girl (though I found later that there were many others among the worshipers of the Goddess). The men present were a fey Irish-American, a huge Scandinavian who in his speech constantly invoked a mixture of Norse and German gods, and a dirty spy (whether German or Russian I was never able to determine). The innocent-appearing girl was named, appropriately enough, Magda.
At the back of the great chamber was the Goddess' throne, and above the dais on which it rested there hung on the wall, suspended from two golden thumbtacks, a Satanic mask which constantly wept, drooled and sweated typewriter-ribbon ink. This ran down into a golden bowl, which was periodically borne away and replaced, by squattering, froglike creatures.
One of these brought me a beaker of the lambent ichor, which I drank gratefully; as I raised it to my lips, there was a clamor of flutings from the invisible creatures, as though in warning, but I was too hot and sticky from the jungle to heed it, and quaffed deeply. At once my senses reeled, and I can give no coherent account of what followed, except that it somehow involved Magda, myself and the Goddess with the three men in a sort of drugged garland, and that toward its end I was a good deal stickier than before but not quite so hot.
How long this might have gone on is impossible to guess, for as we were drowsily rearranging ourselves upon the floor and divans, there entered a call, burly man in the robes of a pagan priest, whose harsh countenance was almost a duplicate of that of the drooling mask.
"Ha, Messalina!" he thundered. "Once again I find you in the toils of self-indulgence, to the neglect of all those intrigues which imperil your kingdom! Fie, witch-woman, and for shame!"
"Be not so harsh, O Abram," the White Goddess whispered in her cadent voice. "Call me instead by those sweet names you called me of old-Queen of Spayeds, Egg of the Wild Pigeons-s-s-s—"
But he interrupted her brutally, drawing his singing sword. "Enough!" he tromboned. "You have betrayed your ministry! You must pay!"
Since all the rest of this company seemed too drugged with the elixir to act, I arose and walked toward him, removing my tattered marching clothes (an easy task, for by then I was wearing only the shirt, and that open) in preparation for combat. The evil priest's eyes widened as he realized that he still had a capable antagonist.
"Felici-tee!" my aunt trilled. "Do not oppose him! It is sacrilege!"
But I did not heed her; to do so would have been the death of us all. I stared boldly into the eyes of the villain.
"Do you dare," I said, "risk single combat with one not of your world, who sneers at your base superstitions?"
His eyes narrowed calculatingly, but he did not hesitate; he had courage, this evil priest, I must allow him that. We closed in furious engagement. For a while, I thought I had met my master, for he was fresh, and I both tired and wine-benumbed; but at last he lay exhausted beneath me.
Pulling his weapon from my flesh—no difficult task, now—I arose; but my triumph was short-lived. The squattering creatures were back in the room, hordes of them, in panic flight.
"Deadloin!" they croaked in terrified batrachian voices. "The deadloin is coming!"
Turning in bewilderment, I beheld again the mask on the wall. Its expression was now truly malignant, and from it was coming such torrents of ink that paper to carry it would have deforested all of Canada. The black tide rolled across the tesselated floor toward us. There was nothing to do but flee—but my erstwhile companions had neither will nor strength left to do so. As I paused at the door, I saw it overwhelm them.
My last memory of that enchanted realm is of the despairing music of the invisible creatures. I shall carry it in my heart well into the next 253 pages.
LETTER THE SEVENTH
In order to protect himself and his researches from the fear and malice of the ignorant, and the prying of journalists, my third uncle had changed his name to Philip H. Essex and removed his laboratory to a remote island off the Jersey coast. There is no traffic with the island from the mainland, and to reach it I had to take a small launch sent for me by the doctor.
The Charon of this ferry was a sinister and taciturn creature of great strength—though I discovere
d when we disembarked that he limped—and shagginess, rather resembling a Lord Byron who had somehow tried to turn himself into an ape. He was so surly that I wondered why my uncle tolerated him, although he did certainly seem able to keep his own counsel, and his attitude toward the doctor was outright servile.
This question, however, vanished from my mind when I saw Dr. Essex's residence, which looked not so much like a laboratory as a stockade. Once he had made me comfortable in his study, however, he explained this very readily.
"There are wild beasts on this island," he said. "Yes, wild. Lots of them. Wouldn't do to venture outside. Wouldn't do at all."
He fell to ruminating. I prompted him.
"How did it happen? Oh, well . . .easily enough. These are dangerous waters, around the island. Rocks. Shoals. Some years ago, a supply ship for a zoo, bound for Florida, got caught in a storm and was beached. None of the crew survived, but many of the animals got ashore.
Again, Dangerous Visions Page 87