The Witching Hour

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The Witching Hour Page 12

by James Gunn


  There was no place to hide except in the adjunct cooker or the mash tub. But now she was too close for anything like that. He turned the corner and raced up to the fifth floor. The burlap sacks of malted barley, corn grits and spent grains were stacked in neat piles. He ran between them, trying to reach the freight elevator before she caught him.

  It was hopeless. It was a classic end to an immemorial chase.

  Dion was slow finding them. And, by the time Dion reached the mill room, Jerry had discovered that there are other reasons for wanting a person besides possession.

  He tossed her a gunnysack. “Cover yourself up, darling,” he said possessively.

  “I will not,” she said indignantly, tossing it back at him.

  “But you’ll have to learn to wear clothes,” Jerry said weakly.

  “I don’t see any reason for it.”

  “It’s just — it’s just decency.”

  “Decency. I don’t like the sound of that word.”

  “But everybody wears clothes,” Jerry said desperately, “at least in public.”

  “Well,” she said reluctantly, “if I must, I must. But I intend to learn to wear things that are soft or slippery or fluffy — like silk and furs.”

  Jerry groaned. “I can see already that you’re going to be expensive.”

  “That is the way it’s always been,” Dion said sadly. “But what can we poor men do? It’s the oldest monopoly.”

  “You’ll need a name,” Jerry said, “and a birth certificate. Oh, God! You’ll need so many things.”

  “To love,” Dion said, “all things are possible.”

  “Love?” Jerry echoed. “Love?” He looked at her wide-eyed. “Well, I’ll be — !” Suddenly his expression changed. “Darling, don’t you feel well?”

  Her face was pale. “Why? What’s the matter?”

  “You seem to be sagging.”

  “I’m standing up straight.”

  She was. “Then you’re shrinking,” Jerry exclaimed. “You’re not five feet tall.”

  She looked up into his face. “You do seem bigger.”

  Jerry turned fiercely toward Dion. “Can’t you do something?”

  Dion spread his hands helplessly. “The gods give and the gods take away.”

  “No!” Jerry said violently. “I won’t let it happen! She can’t leave me. I’ve just found her!”

  A single tear ran down the girl’s cheek. She brushed it away with a slender arm. “Don’t stand there talking,” she said, tugging at Jerry’s hand. “If we’ve only got a little while, let’s not waste any of it.”

  He brushed her hand away almost angrily. “No!” he shouted. “I’m not giving up. There’s no reason she has to shrink away, is there? There’s no law, natural or supernatural?”

  “No,” Dion said. “No.”

  “Then there’s a reason for this. We’re going to find it. Fast! And when we find it, we’re going to do something about it. She’s shrinking. Why?”

  “Loss of fluid?” Dion suggested helplessly. “After all, the human body is almost seventy percent water.”

  “I’m thirsty,” she said.

  “The question is: Does she have a human body?”

  Dion glanced at her sideways. “So it would seem.”

  “But human bodies don’t shrink. Not so fast, anyway. Beer,” he said thoughtfully, “is ninety-one percent water.”

  “I’m thirsty,” the girl complained.

  “That’s it!” Jerry and Dion said simultaneously.

  “She’s human,” Jerry said excitedly, “but she still has some of the characteristics of foam. Unless I kept putting beer into the schooner, the head would dry up and disintegrate. Unless I keep putting beer in her, she’ll shrink away to nothing!”

  “I’m thirsty,” she moaned.

  Jerry looked at her quickly. She was only four feet tall. “We’ve got to hurry,” he said. “Damn it! I drank up all the bottled beer, and she might not last to the racking room.”

  Faced by this practical problem, Dion looked helpless again. “Isn’t there any more, anywhere?”

  Jerry snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it!” he shouted. He dived for the elevator and started it down. When he turned, Dion was beside him.

  “Look, Jerry, old man,” Dion said in a low, confidential voice. “Are you sure you want to save her? I know you’re excited right now, but women are trouble, you know. And she isn’t really human. Let her shrink away, and all your problems are solved. You’ll have the new beer without the head on it, as beautiful a brew as this world ever saw. You’ll have the brewery. You can have your pick of dozens of girls. Are you sure you want to complicate every — ”

  Jerry had been staring blankly at Dion. The jar of the elevator as it stopped seemed to jar him awake. “If I didn’t know you better,” he said, “I’d fire you for that.”

  He dashed toward the little pasteurizing tank. The water was steaming. Jerry dipped his hand into it and pulled out a bottle. He gasped at the pain, and tossed the bottle back and forth between his hands, trying to cool it.

  “But why?” Dion persisted. He was beside Jerry, holding out a bottle opener he had picked up in his office just around the corner.

  “Why, just for fun,” Jerry said, dashing up the stairs because the elevator was too slow. “Just because life wouldn’t be any fun without her.”

  “That’s fine,” Dion said softly, slowing to a walk. “That’s the best motive I’ve heard in centuries.”

  It was a very happy ending.

  The girl got the beer, of course. It was hot beer, but hot beer is better than no beer. She also got a birth certificate — forged — which proves that what is impossible to love is possible to money. And then she got a name: Mrs. Gerald Blitz. It was enough. She seemed to be quite happy with it.

  Jerry didn’t get a hangover; it was, after all, the perfect beer. He did get a bride who was beautiful, unspoiled, and single-minded. Although she had to be awakened three times a night for a cold bottle, no one ever heard him complain. And there can’t be much wrong, basically, with a girl who loves beer. His problems were simplified, too, by the fact that he owned a brewery.

  Dion kept his job as brewmaster, and Jerry put up with periodic absences. Although Dion never seemed to get drunk on these binges, everyone else did and had wonderful times. Jerry never asked him if his name was short for “Dionysus”; he never hinted that he wouldn’t be surprised if the god who gave wine to the Greeks should give beer to the world. He might get an answer.

  Even the public was rewarded. It got to drink the perfect beer without being disconcerted by a lovely head and a lovelier bosom. Although that — if it had only known — was the public’s loss.

  AFTERWORD

  “Just for fun” was Jerry’s reason, and just for fun is the reason for a lot of stories, including “The Beautiful Brew.” This one was closer to the Thorne Smith model than any of the others, and perhaps the uninhibited character of the Barley-Bride (straight out of The Golden Bough) was inspired by the character of Venus in The Night Life of the Gods, which was adapted into a Broadway play titled “One Touch of Venus.” I remember seeing it on the stage with Mary Martin (if I remember correctly) as Venus, and one line she remarks about the hero and his fianc≥e: “If they have remained vertical this long, it’s about time they got horizontal.”

  Publication of books depends on unpredictable events, like the brewing of a great beer. In the late 1960s I had heard that Dell Books was going to increase its publication of science fiction and fantasy. I submitted a couple of manuscripts: The Burning and The Witching Hour. Then over the Labor Day weekend in 1969 I attended the World Science Fiction Convention in St. Louis. Since it was so close, I drove and took my two sons, Kit and Kevin, to whom The Witching Hour is dedicated, and a friend of Kit’s named Lance Williams (who later became a computer scientist specializing in computer animations who won an Oscar for technical merit). On the first day of the convention, we noticed a short, attractive young w
oman on the elevator. She seemed lost in the melee of the convention, and we invited her to accompany us to events, including the Hugo Award dinner. She was, it turned out, Gail Wendroff, the new science-fiction editor at Dell Books, and she told me later that she had felt so out-of-place at her first World Con that she was about to leave when we met. She married agent Henry Morrison and died of cancer, much too young, a couple of decades later.

  I don’t know, for sure, that our chance meeting in St. Louis was responsible for the publication of The Witching Hour in 1970.

  But it couldn’t have hurt.

  The Magicians

  The white letters on the corrugated black board spelled out:

  COVENTION

  October 30 and 31

  Crystal Room

  I chuckled. Hotel bulletin boards are like movie marquees. There always is something misspelled on them.

  The smile faded, and I glanced around uneasily, but my man hadn’t come in. There was no reason to be uneasy except that I didn’t like the job. Not that it promised to be tough. It was too simple, really, and the old lady was paying too much, and I felt as if there were eyes watching me, which was a good switch and enough to give any private detective a neurosis and —

  Hell! Why should anyone pay a thousand bucks to find out a guy’s name?

  I walked across the wide, polished marble floor to the desk. I leaned against it so that I could watch the door, and the clerk looked up. You’ve seen him. You know the type. Thin, thirtyish, embittered, his bald head gleaming even brighter than the floor, obsequious to his superiors, vindictive toward those placed under him. It was my misfortune that he knew me.

  “Hello, Charlie,” I said.

  “Casey,” he said suspiciously. “What are you doing here?”

  “Business.”

  “No trouble, Casey,” he snapped. “I’ll have you tossed out of here. The management won’t have you raiding the rooms, snapping pictures. Our guests pay — ”

  “No trouble,” I said. “Nothing like that.”

  He subsided, but his eyes were busy on my face. “Since when have you had anything but divorce cases?”

  “I’ve come up in the world, Charlie. Who puts the notices on the board over there?”

  “I do,” he said. “Why?”

  “Can’t spell, either, eh?” I said.

  He glanced at the board and back at me, his face serious. “Nothing misspelled there.”

  “You know,” I said, “I’ve always wanted to attend a convention.” It started as a joke, but when I got to the key word my voice broke and a shiver ran up my back.

  “Now’s your chance,” Charlie said, “because that’s what it is. He insisted on it being spelled that way.”

  “A nice story,” I said, “but it would never stand up in court.”

  “There he is now, coming through the door,” Charlie said.

  I turned my head and froze. He was a tall man with dark hair and graying temples, slim and distinguished in evening clothes. And in his lapel, as he passed, was a five-pointed star, small, golden and engraved. The description checked. It was my man.

  I started after him.

  “Casey — ” Charlie began. He was warning me.

  I waved a reassuring hand back at him without looking and followed the dark back that moved straight and purposefully toward the elevator bank.

  One car was almost full. He stepped into it and turned around, and the doors started to close in front of my face. He looked directly at me for a shocking moment before the doors slid together.

  His eyes were deep and black and shiny. And I had a foolish illusion that they still stared at me through the closed brass doors, seeing, weighing and discarding, contemptuously, before they turned their intensity on something more worthy.

  The afterimage vanished. I looked up quickly. The arrow was slowing. It came to a stop on “C” and hesitated and began swinging again.

  “Going up?” someone said impatiently.

  I jumped and caught myself and stepped through the open doors of the car on my right. The doors closed. “C,” I said.

  We slid silently upward. Bricks alternated with painted metal in the frames of the small windows. M,A,B. The first stop was mine. The doors parted in front of me and closed behind me, and I was in a carpeted hall facing a cream-colored corridor wall. Painted on the wall in gold was an arrow pointing to my right. Above it were two words. They said: “Crystal Room.”

  I looked in that direction. The Crystal Room had double doors, but only one of them was open. A dark back was just going through it. A young man stood beside the door. He nodded respectfully to the man who entered. A doorkeeper. The party was private.

  Keeper of the crystal door. Inside was something called a “covention” that sent unreasonable shivers up my back. And inside now was a nameless man — I couldn’t mistake that back — whose name was worth a thousand dollars to me and who had eyes like polished, black obsidian daggers.

  I shrugged the flat automatic in the shoulder holster into a more comfortable position and started after the guy who wore evening clothes in the morning. I nodded familiarly to the doorkeeper, who had broad shoulders, a crew cut and a pleasant, sunburned face, and I started through the doorway.

  I stopped abruptly, as if I had walked into a glass wall. I rubbed my nose ruefully.

  “Where’s your name card?” the doorkeeper asked.

  “Name card?” I said. I snapped my fingers. “I knew I forgot something. But you know me. Casey from Kansas City? Met you here last year. Don’t you remember my face?”

  He frowned. “How would I remember your face?”

  That stopped me. Why couldn’t he remember my face — outside of the fact that he had never seen it before? He didn’t recognize me, but that was all right. He didn’t expect to!

  “Maybe I’ve got the card in my pocket,” I said.

  I began rummaging hopefully through the pockets of my gray flannel suit. There was only one way to go from here — back the way I came — but I could make it graceful. And then I felt something slick and rectangular in my right-hand coat pocket. Slowly I pulled it out. It was a name card.

  The young man looked at it and nodded. “Gabriel,” he said. “Wear it from now on. I can’t let anybody in without a card.”

  I nodded mechanically and walked cautiously into the large room, but the invisible wall was gone. Just inside the door I stopped and turned the card over.

  In the center of the card was a circular seal. Imprinted blackly over it were two lines of type.

  “Call me GABRIEL,” it said, “or pay me five dollars.”

  That was funny enough, but it wasn’t the funniest part. The card had no business in my pocket. No one could have put it there. The suit had just come back from the cleaners. I had put it on just before I came out this morning.

  “Gabriel,” I muttered to myself. One of the archangels. Carried messages and blew trumpets. That was a hell of a name for a man.

  Covention. Brass doors with eyes in them. Invisible walls. Angels. I shivered. It was getting to be a habit.

  The Crystal Room was pleasant enough. It wasn’t the biggest meeting room in the hotel, but it was one of the most attractive. A huge crystal chandelier hung from the center of the ceiling. Two smaller ones flanked it on either side. The ceiling and walls were painted a deep rose. The carpet on the floor was burgundy. The hanging crystal picked up rose and red, alternating, blending, flashing as they swayed gently and tinkled together.

  A makeshift stage bad been put up at the other end of the room. It was draped in black, and a black curtain hung behind it. Several chairs were lined up neatly at the back of the stage. In front of them was a lectern. Between me and the platform were rows of wooden chairs; I counted thirteen rows of thirteen chairs each. A few of the chairs were occupied, but most of the people in the room were standing, clustered into small groups, chatting. I looked them over carefully, but my man wasn’t among them.

  The scene was typical of
hundreds of professional meetings that take place in hundreds of hotel rooms every day all over the country. Once a year men and women assemble to discuss their single shared interest, to talk shop, to listen to the latest advances, to raise standards. And to indulge in some heavy drinking, character assassination, and idle — and not so idle — flirtations.

  The men here were distinguished and well dressed, although none of them were in evening clothes. The women — there were fewer of them — were all young and beautiful. I’d never seen so many beautiful women in one room before, not even when I tailed one wandering spouse backstage at a Broadway musical.

  If I moved a few steps to the right, I could get a better look at a Junoesque redhead. I moved a few steps to the right. My foot caught. I stumbled. As I pitched forward, my arms reached out for support. They closed around something. It was softly rounded and yielding. It gasped. I looked up into a pair of blue eyes that were crinkled with sudden laughter. I was pressed tightly against one of the most delightful figures it has been my luck to be pressed tightly against.

  “You see?” a soft, low voice said. “Redheads are unlucky.”

  “For who?” I muttered.

  “I don’t think you will fall down now,” she said, “if you let go.”

  I straightened and let my arms drop at my sides. “I must have stumbled over something.” I looked down at the red carpet suspiciously. But there was nothing to stumble over.

  “It’s better to stumble than to fall,” she said. “Especially for La Voisin. She’s a hag, really. Fifty if she’s a day.”

  I took another look at the redhead. “I don’t believe it.”

  She shrugged lightly, and I took a good look at her for the first time. She was only pretty; the rest of the women in the room were beautiful. Her blue eyes and dark hair made an interesting contrast, but her features had small imperfections. Her eyes were too large, her nose was too small and turned up a little at the end; her mouth was too generous, her chin, too stubborn. Now that I was straightened up, she reached only to my chin. But her skin was smooth cream, and her figure was — well, I mentioned that before.

 

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