Weird Tales - Summer 1990

by Vol. 51 No. 4

  Very shortly, however, she was so engrossed in Jacques's commentary on her father's paper that she was able completely to ignore him.

  Eventually:

  "Well, I'm damned! It's eleven o'clock!" Jacques exclaimed, consulting a watch which, like everything else about him, was slick and up-to-the-minute.

  "Oh my goodness!" Lies said, paling. "And I promised father I'd get to bed early tonight, too, because — well, you know they've put me on first thing to­morrow morning, at nine o'clock."

  "In the dead slot," Jacques said, sig­nalling a waiter and flourishing a pen to sign the check with. He amplified: "At a time when people who have spent the first evening partying neither wis­ely nor too well won't be around to pay attention! But never mind. You're as­sured of one thing. Tadcaster will be there."

  He scribbled something generous ending with a percent sign on the form the waiter proffered, and rose, extend­ing a hand to assist Lies. Not that she needed assistance, she assured herself. It was just that with so many bits of paper spread around . . .

  "You have your key? You remember your room number?" he inquired, as he escorted her across the lobby — where late arrivals were still checking in — towards the elevators.

  "Yes, of course," she said a trifle crossly. She might not be in the habit of staying in hotels like this, but for­getting her room number was . . .

  Was a recurrent nightmare since the moment she realised she might have to come here alone. Was there no limit to this man's insight?

  To damp that down, she produced her key with a flourish. Catching sight of its tag, just as an elevator arrived and shed its passengers, he exclaimed, "Why, 668! We're neighbours — I'm in 666!"

  And ushered her into the empty el­evator and hit the door close button.

  For a brief while they were silent and alone, enclosed by the warm and pur­ring walls of the machine. Hundreds of improbable thoughts flashed through Lies's mind, creating an infinity of imagined futures . . . but in fact all that happened during the brief upward ride was that he gave her a broad grin, and she felt the muscles of her face re­sponding to it.

  They stepped out on a long deep-car­peted corridor, and — still in silence — walked the twenty or thirty paces to her door, turning one corner on the

  way. And they had arrived.

  He stood facing her, less than arm's reach distant, and smiled again.

  "I'm very glad to have met you, Lies," he said after a brief hesitation. "You're underestimating yourself, you know. I can't remember when I last enjoyed talking to somebody so much."

  The alarming thing was, he sounded as though he meant it. She felt another hateful blush redden her face, and hoped the late-night lighting was not bright enough for it to show.

  "Thank you!" she forced out. "And …”

  "Yes?" He glanced at her alertly.

  "Just now you said one thing was sure about tomorrow morning. . ."Her voice faded on the final word. He went on looking at her with complete atten­tion.

  "Yes?" he repeated.

  "Well —I mean. . . You'll be there, won't you?"

  He threw his head back and laughed, taking her free hand in both of his.

  "My dear Lies, I wouldn't miss it for the world! I think you're going to make mincemeat of Tadcaster, and I'm sure your father is going to be very proud of you. As a matter of fact, J shall feel proud of you, because it isn't often that someone takes a rise out of that puffed-up, self-important, egotistical stick-in-the-mud!"

  "Are you sure?" she ventured timidly.

  "Sure as I can be of anything!" he declared. He still had not let go of her hand. And went on after another brief pause, "I do like you, you know. Very much. May I kiss you good night?"

  It wasn't the first time Lies had been asked that, but it was the first time so at least it felt to her in that instant that she had been asked by somebody who was genuinely asking her, instead of just the last girl left over at the end of a dance, or a party. Blushing more furiously than ever, she gave a timo­rous nod, not quite knowing what to do with this hand holding her key and that hand holding her file of papers.

  Not that it seemed to make any odds. He embraced her with a mixture of con­fidence and delicacy, and with the tip of his tongue he stroked her lips apart. For the first time (was there no end to the first times he could create?) she found herself enjoying the taste of a man in her mouth — a little of his ci­gars, a little of something else, a trace perhaps of the wine from dinner, a little of something him . .

  She had no idea how long the kiss lasted. She only knew it was marvel­lous, delectable, fantastic, and made shivers go through her clear down to her heels. Only the sound of the ele­vator doors cycling made her break off, and that was with regret.

  He drew back to arm's length, not letting go of her, and gazed into her eyes.

  "Thank you!" he said in a faintly im­pressed tone. "You're delicious!"

  No boy had ever said that to her, back home in Foulwater. She felt giddy. All she really wanted to do was start again, now it was plain that the people from the elevator had turned the other way; their cheerful voices could be heard re­ceding. On the other hand, that wasn't the only elevator, and there were al­ready sounds that suggested another group of people was about to stop off on this floor. . . .

  An idea gripped her, which was at first horrifying, then somehow incre­dibly natural. She almost giggled.

  This is me? Me, Lies Andrassy, hav­ing this kind of thought? I don't believe it! It's shocking!

  But I like it!

  The other people from the elevator had stopped to say goodnight to one another, which implied that some at least of them would be coming this way in a moment. She turned to her door, raising her key, feeling magnificently brazen.

  "Won't you come in for a moment?" she said, copying the phrase from some­thing she had heard or read.

  And what would be his reaction?

  Prompt, and flattering, and at the same time sympathetic — everything she had ever dreamed of in a man.

  "I'd love to! But—but I'd hate to keep you up so late you didn't have all your wits about you in the morning! So only if you're absolutely certain . . . ?

  Without the slightest fumble she had slotted the key into the lock and given it a brisk turn. By the light which leaked from the corridor she was able to put down it and her other burden as he followed her over the threshold.

  Turning, she said, "I'm not going to sleep either way, am I? So I might as well choose the nicer."

  The door clicked shut on darkness as she found herself thinking again: This is me? This is really me?

  But nineteen years of instruction in decorous, lady-like behaviour were evaporating in the heat of their re­newed kiss.

  He was fantastic. He was incredible. He was everything she had ever not quite dared to dream of, even down to his oh-so-polite inquiry about the Pill and her momentarily panicky admis­sion no, and his utterly matter-of-fact follow-up question on a subject she had never talked about to a man before, and his brief pause for calculation and the assured statement that if there were a safe time in her month it must there­fore be exactly now, a statement which she accepted on trust more total than even what she would have accorded to her father. Whereafter he did amazing things to her body, and made her laugh and sob by turns, and ultimately melt into his arms, asleep.

  Even that, however, didn't prevent her having nightmares in which she was standing on the dais of a huge lec­ture-hall confronted by thousands of faceless people all of whom were si­multaneously bombarding her with questions she didn't know the answer to. There were many such dreams, and the last brought her awake gasping, in the conviction that Jacques too had been a dream.

  He wasn't. He was there at her side, and soothing and caressing her and ut­tering words of reassurance.

  It wasn't going to stop. He enjoyed her again, and then showered with her, and looked over the wardrobe she had brought and overrode her choice of ap­parel, and advised her on makeup, and escort
ed her to breakfast in the hotel's coffee-shop with his arm round her as though he were genuinely flattered by her company ... an idea which, little by little, she grew timorously to accept. Even this early, even in the large stark coffee-shop, there were women looking predatorily about them, and now and then their eyes lingered on Jacques, and then on her, and their faces reg­istered surprise before they glanced away.

  She said nothing as she drank her orange juice and coffee and swallowed some dry toast, but her heart was sing­ing, and she was telling herself that whatever happened from now on she must must MUST remember that she could be a whole person in her own right, not just a shadow of the mother she now only vaguely remembered be­cause her recollections had been over­laid by her father's non-stop comparisons, not just a surrogate for someone other . . . but herself.

  Jacques was gazing into her eyes again, with a penetrating stare that seemed to transfix her very soul. And saying, "Was it by any chance your first time?"

  Instantly she was embarrassed, seek­ing a flip phrase to cover the fact. Look­ing anywhere but at him, she said, "Was it so obvious?"

  "Oh, I didn't mean it that way!" He caught her hand and squeezed it hard. "I swear, I couldn't have guessed except — Well, except that you were so de­lighted with everything!"

  And, not letting her speak, he leaned close and whispered confidentially, "If that's how well you can make out on a 'first time,' then Tadcaster is in for a rough ride, just as I predicted!"

  Which brought back her nervousness in full spate, and she had to abandon the rest of her breakfast.

  But even for that Jacques had a rem­edy. He said in a clinical tone, "You have stage fright. All the great actors always say that if they don't they turn in a lousy performance!"

  Which cheered her up all over again and carried her through the ordeal of making her way to the lecture-hall where this, the first major event of the entire convention, was scheduled to take place. The place was only half full when the chairman, a polite grey-haired man with an absent-minded manner, led her on to the platform and intro­duced her to the young man who was going to display photostat pages from her father's books on an overhead pro­jector.

  But among those present were Tad-caster and his entourage, and at the sight of the red-bearded man Lies's heart sank. He looked as though he had a head like a bear's, and kept snapping at even the friendliest remarks.

  It encouraged her only marginally when she saw Jacques take his place in the front row and signal her okay, making a ring of his thumb and fore­finger. She almost blushed again. Somewhere in the course of checking up on her father's references she had run across the real meaning of that commonplace gesture.

  And then it was too late to worry any more, for the chairman was saying, "Much as we regret the absence of Pro­fessor Andrassy, I'm sure his daughter will prove an admirable stand-in . . ."

  In a tone which made it plain that he didn't believe a word of what he was saying.

  The lights went down, except for a shaded one over the lectern where she had disposed her text, and the first page she was supposed to invoke as authority was projected on the big screen hanging behind her.

  The last image she carried into the near-darkness was of Jacques smiling at her, and it worked the miracle. She found herself able to believe that it was important to know how one particular word was pronounced by people long dead on another continent. The chains of inexorable reasoning which led from one conclusion to another seized her; now and then as a fresh document ap­peared, copied from one of those mould­ering tomes her father was so proud of, she heard a hissing intake of breath from somewhere in the shadowy hall, and once or twice the chairman actually had to call for order as a buzz of excited conversation broke out.

  At the very least, she realised, she wasn't going to disgrace her father.

  But the discussion period loomed, and no matter how long and loud the applause which followed her presenta­tion of the paper, it wasn't going to save her from being roasted.

  The lights went up, and there was Professor Tadcaster first on his feet and speaking without benefit of micro­phone, yet audible to the farthest cor­ners of the room.

  "We have heard a most seductive ar­gument, Mister Chairman! And I'm sure it is not in any sense the fault of the young lady who has so gallantly stepped into the breach due to her father's — ah — indisposition ..."

  He paused, and was rewarded with sycophantic chuckles. "No fault of hers, as I say, that it is too elegant, too neatly tailored to fit purported evidence which I'm certain none of us here ever had the chance to examine under strict scientific condi­tions! Indeed, had the conclusions been reached in advance and the evidence prepared to support them, there could scarcely have been a closer match!"

  This time the chuckles were more like guffaws, and some people in the seats nearest nudged one another.

  "Not, of course, that I'm for a moment suggesting that there has been any fal­sification! Far be it from me to impute such motives to someone who, as we all know, suffered terribly in his early days, and was only able to secure a post at an academic institution here in the free world thanks to the miraculous preservation of a corpus of otherwise unknown and inaccessible texts, deal­ing with mysticism and alchemy and devil-raising!"

  Lies wanted to scream. This man was a past master of snide innuendo. He had said nothing outright libellous, yet every listener knew he was undermining her father's reputation — implying that he had been mentally deranged by his ex­periences, hinting that whether or not the texts he relied on were authentic, they could not be regarded as authori­tative because of the questionable na­ture of their subject-matter. How could she rebut an attack on this abstract level?

  Yet she must. She must find a way, or her father would be sneered at for the rest of his life, and even in the quiet purlieus of Foulwater his colleagues would reject him. . . .

  Tadcaster hadn't finished. He was winding up to a peroration.

  "It therefore seems to me, Mr Chair­man, that we would be ill-advised to discard our traditional understanding of these pronunciation shifts on the mere say-so of someone who, leave us face it, was not even brought up to speak a member of the Indo-European language family as his mother tongue!"

  And there it was, nakedly out in the open: the ancient hatred of the believer in Aryan culture for anyone whose par­entage stemmed from Finno-Ugrian, or any other stock. . . .

  Of all the people who had worshipped Aryan culture, the Nazis had been the fiercest. Didn't this man know that?

  Lies looked a wordless appeal at the chairman, but he was saying to his microphone, "I think we must all agree that Professor Tadcaster has a valid point, and we shall all be most inter­ested to know whether Miss Andrassy has a counterargument. Miss An­drassy?" — turning to her.

  She sat petrified, hunting in vain for a perfect retort, for several eternal sec­onds. And then — oh, miracle!

  "Mr Chairman!" In a voice that was nothing like as loud and impressive as Tadcaster's yet contrived to carry as far. Jacques was on his feet, attracting the chairman's eye.

  On the nod, he identified himself — "Dr Jacques DeVille, Miskatonic Uni­versity" — and continued.

  "I think I can set Professor Tadcas­ter's mind at rest quite easily. We are — are we not? — considering whether Professor Andrassy's view can be sub­stantiated, or validated, or in a word proved."

  "Oh, proof!" Tadcaster was heard to say.

  "Very well, I accept the correction. Shall we settle for a balance of proba­bilities? I am convinced Professor An­drassy is right. I think that if the gentleman in charge of the projector will be so kind as to put back what I recall as the third of the pages we have seen on the screen . . . and if the lights could be lowered again . . ."

  There was a pause, and buzz of hushed but excited comment. The tenor of it was a question: who was this person from some university no one recog­nised?

  But soon enough the lights were low­ered and the page requested was again thrown o
n the screen.

  Jacques said, "Professor Tadcaster, you can read this passage?"

  "Of course!" — crossly. "It's an in­vocation to raise a devil called Jacar-oth!"

  "Would you care to read aloud the first two lines? In your preferred pro­nunciation, that is."

  "Oh. . . ! Oh, very well!" Tadcaster rose to his feet again, just as Lies caught on. Twisting around in her chair, she recognised the passage Jacques had selected as the very phrase she had uttered under her breath when he crossed her in the hotel lobby yes­terday.

  And Tadcaster was reading it aloud, in accordance with the precepts he be­lieved in — nothing like the way she herself had pronounced it.

  There was a pregnant pause. Even­tually the chairman said, "Dr DeVille, was that the only point —?"

  "No, no! Just the first point. Nothing happened, right?"

  "Ah . . . Well, nothing that any of us noticed, I guess!"

  "Exactly as I would have expected. Now, Professor Tadcaster, be so good as to repeat the passage in the pronunci­ation Professor Andrassy advocates. I seem to recall that a transcription in IPA is available —"

  "Never mind!" Tadcaster hauled himself to his feet again. "I don't for the life of me see what merely reading it over in another version is supposed to prove, but — oh well! Here goes!"

  And he spoke the words.

  Afterwards Lies remembered some­thing like a giant lightning bolt which spanned half the hall and for the mo­ment it lasted took on the shape of a claw, or talon. Later still, but mainly in her dreams, she remembered a warn­ing on the page preceding the invocation Tadcaster had been persuaded to read aloud, to the effect that some sort of diagram must be inscribed on the floor around the person uttering the in­vocation — a five-pointed star, or some­thing equally ridiculous — but all that immediately belonged to the past.

  For there was no Tadcaster, not even a trace of him, except just possibly a smell in the air as of roasting meat, and the applause for her presentation was still going on, and she was rising and bowing shyly and . . .

  And being complimented on how well she had made her father's case, and asked to send him best wishes for a speedy recovery, and interrogated about the corpus of material he based his the­ories on, and given the phone-numbers of the editors of journals where his next paper — or, come to that, hers — would be sure of publication, and so forth.