F&SF BK UNICORNS VOL 2.indb

by Gordon Van Gelder

  The clerk reached for the paper.

  “It—it’s a cigar coupon, sir,” he reported, his face wooden.

  Luke Hawks wilted then. He thrust all his money into the ancient pigskin wallet and being careful his fingers touched only the leather, held it out to his wife.

  “Here!” he directed, “You pay him, Emily.”

  Emily Hawks folded her arms and looked straight into his frightened eyes.

  “Luke Hawks,” she said in a firm, clear voice that carried through the entire store, “for eight years my life has been made a misery by your mean, grasping ways. Now you can’t spend any of your money. You’ll starve to death before you can even spend a nickel for bread.

  “And I’ve a good mind to let you. If I don’t buy anything for you, you can be sure no one will give it to you. The people of this town would laugh themselves sick seeing you with your hands full of money, begging for a bite to eat. They wouldn’t give it to you, either.”

  Luke Hawks knew they wouldn’t. He stared down at his wife, who had never before dared act like this.

  “No,” he protested. “Emily, don’t say that. Here, you take the money. Spend it as you want. Get the things we need. I’ll leave it all to you. You—you can even get the next most expensive clothes for the boys.”

  “You mean you want me to handle the money from now on?” Emily Hawks demanded, and her husband nodded.

  “Yes, Emily,” he gasped. “Take it. Please take it.”

  His wife took the wallet—which left Luke Hawks’s hands readily enough—and counted the money in it.

  “Five hundred dollars,” she said aloud, thoughtfully. “Luke, hadn’t you better give me a check for what you’ve got in the bank? If I’m to do all the buying, the money’ll have to be in my hands.”

  “A check!” Luke exclaimed. “That’s it! I don’t need money! I’ll pay by check.”

  “Try it,” Emily invited. “That’s the same as cash, isn’t it?”

  Luke tried it. The check would not leave his fingers either. It only tore to pieces when the clerk tugged at it.

  After that, he capitulated. He took out his book and signed a blank check, which Emily was able to take. She then filled it in for herself for the entire balance in the bank—twenty thousand dollars, Luke Hawks admitted with strangled reluctance.

  After that she tucked the check into the bosom of her dress.

  “Now, Luke,” she suggested, “you might as well go on home. I’ll go to the bank and deposit this to my account. Then I’ll do the rest of the shopping. I won’t need you.”

  “But how’ll you get the things home?” her husband asked weakly.

  Emily Hawks was already almost to the door—out which Netty Peters had just dashed to spread the news through the town. But she paused long enough to turn and smile brightly at her pale and perspiring husband.

  “I’ll have the man at the garage drive me out with them,” she answered. “In the car I’m going to buy after I leave the bank, Luke.”

  IV

  Miss Wilson looked up from her sewing at the sound of galloping hooves in the street outside her tiny shop.

  She was just in time to see a small swift figure race by. Then, before she could wonder what it was, she caught sight of herself in the big mirror customers used when trying on the dresses she made.

  Her whole name was Alice Wilson. But it was years since anyone had called her by her first name. She was thirty-three, as small and plain as a church mouse—

  But she wasn’t! Miss Wilson stared openmouthed at her reflection. She—she wasn’t mouse-like any longer. She was—yes, really—almost pretty!

  A length of dress goods forgotten in one hand, a needle suspended in midair in the other, Alice Wilson stared at the woman in the glass. A small woman, with a smiling, pink and white face over which a stray lock of golden hair had fallen from the piled-up mass of curls on the top of head—curls that gave out a soft and shining light.

  The woman in the mirror had soft, warm red lips and blue eyes of sky-azure clearness and depth. Alice Wilson stared, and smiled in sheer delight. The image smiled back.

  Wonderingly, Alice touched her face with her fingers. What had happened? What kind of a trick were her eyes playing on her? How—

  The clatter of hurrying footsteps made her jump. Netty Peters, her sharp face alight with excitement, her head thrust forward on her skinny neck like a running chicken’s, ran in. Miss Wilson’s dressmaking shop, the closest place to the Fair-Square store, was her first stop on her tour to spread the news of Luke Hawks’s curse.

  “Miss Wilson,” she gobbled breathlessly, “what do you think—

  “She thinks you’ve come to spread some scandal or other, that’s what she thinks,” a shrill file-like voice interrupted.

  The voice seemed to come from her own mouth. Netty Peters glared.

  “Miss Wilson,” she snapped, “if you think ventriloquism is funny when I’m trying to tell you—just like you’re going to tell everybody else!” the second voice broke in, and Netty Peters felt faint. The words had come from her own mouth!

  She put her hands to her throat; and because her mind was blank with fright, her tongue went busily ahead with what she had planned to say.

  “I saw Luke Hawks—just like you see everything”—that was the shrill, second voice, alternating with her own normal one—“in the Fair-Square store and they—were minding their own business, something you might do—they were buying clothes for their poor starved children whom they treat so shamefully—trust you to get that in!—when Mr. Hawks tried to pay the clerk—and you were watching to see how much they spent—the money wouldn’t leave his fingers—did you ever think how many people would be happy if sometimes the words wouldn’t leave your throat?”

  The town gossip ceased. Her words had become all jumbled together, making no sense, like two voices trying to shout each other down. There was a strange fluttering in her throat. As if she were talking with two tongues at the same time. . . .

  Miss Wilson was staring at her strangely, and Netty Peters saw for the first time the odd radiance in Miss Wilson’s hair, the new sweetness in her features.

  Incoherent words gurgled in the older woman’s throat. Terror glazed her eyes. She turned, and with a queer sobbing wail, fled.

  Alice Wilson was still looking after her in bewilderment when another figure momentarily darkened the doorway. It was Mr. Wiggins, who owned the unprofitable bookstore on the other side of her dressmaking establishment.

  Ordinarily Mr. Wiggins was a shy, pale-faced man, his thirty-eight years showing in the stoop of his shoulders, his eyes squinting behind thick glasses. He often smiled, but it was the small, hopeful smile of a man who didn’t dare not to smile for fear he might lose heart altogether.

  But today, this day of strange happenings, Mr. Wiggins was standing erect. His hair was rumpled, his glasses awry, and his eyes blazing with excitement.

  “Miss Wilson!” he cried. “The most amazing thing has happened! I had to tell somebody. I hope you don’t mind my bursting in to tell you.”

  Alice Wilson stared at him, and instantly forgot about the strange thing that had happened to her to be interested in Mr. Wiggins’s experience.

  “Oh, no!” she answered. “Of course I don’t. I—I’m glad!”

  Outside there were more sounds of galloping hooves, shrill squeals, and men’s voices shouting.

  “There seems to be a herd of wild ponies loose in the town,” Mr. Wiggins told Miss Wilson. “One almost knocked me down, racing along the sidewalk as I was coming here. Miss Wilson, you’ll never believe it, what I was going to tell you. You’ll have to see for yourself. Then you won’t think I’m mad.”

  “Oh, I’d never think that!” Miss Wilson assured him.

  Scarcely hearing her, Mr. Wiggins seized her by the hand and almost dragged her to the door. A rush of warm pleasure rose in Miss Wilson’s cheeks at the touch of his hand.

  A little breathless, she ran beside him, out the s
hop door, down a dozen yards, and into the gloom of his tiny, empty bookstore.

  On the way, she barely had a glimpse of three or four shaggy ponies snorting and wheeling further up the street, with Henry Jones and Jake Harrison, assisted by a crowd of laughing men and boys, trying to catch them.

  Then Mr. Wiggins, trembling with excitement, was pushing her down into an old overstuffed chair.

  “Miss Wilson,” he said tensely, “I was sitting right here when in came Jacob Earl, not fifteen minutes ago. You know how he walks—big and pompous, as if he owned the earth. I knew what wanted. He wanted the thousand dollars I owe him, that I borrowed to buy my stock of books with. And I—I didn’t have it. None of it.

  “You remember when my aunt died last year, she left me property down by the river that I sold to Jacob Earl for five hundred dollars? He pretended he was just doing me a favor buying it, to help me get started in business.

  “But then high-grade gravel was discovered on the land, and now it’s worth at least fifteen thousand dollars. I learned Earl knew about gravel all the time. But in spite of that, he wanted the thousand loaned me.”

  “Yes, oh yes!” Miss Wilson exclaimed. “He would. But what did you do, Mr. Wiggins?”

  Mr. Wiggins combed back his disheveled hair with his fingers. “I told him I didn’t have it. And he took out his glove—his right glove—and told me if I didn’t have it by tomorrow, he’d have to attach all my books and fixtures. And then he put his hand down on top of my little brass Chinese luck piece. And guess what happened?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t!” Miss Wilson whispered. “I never could!”

  “Look!” Mr. Wiggins’s voice trembled. He snatched up a large dust cloth that hid something on the counter just before Miss Wilson’s eyes. Underneath the cloth was a squat little Chinese god, about a foot high, sitting with knees crossed and holding a bowl in his lap.

  On his brass countenance was a sly smile, and his mouth was open in a round O of great amusement. And as Miss Wilson stared at him, a small gold coin popped out of the little god’s mouth and landed with a musical chink in his lap!

  Alice Wilson gasped. “Oh, John!” she cried, using Mr. Wiggins’s Christian name for the first time in her life. “Is it—is it money?”

  “Chinese money,” Mr. Wiggins told her. “And the bowl is full of it. It’s filled just since I ran over to get you. One comes out of his mouth every second. The first one came out right after Mr. Earl put his hand on the god’s head. Look!”

  He scooped up the contents of the bowl and held them out, let them rain into Miss Wilson’s lap. Incredulously she picked one up.

  It was a coin as large perhaps as an American nickel. In the center was punched a square hole. All around the edges were queer Oriental ideographs. And the piece of money was as fresh and new and shiny as if it had just come from the mint.

  “Is it real gold?” she asked tremulously.

  “Twenty carats pure at least!” John Wiggins assured her. “Even if it is Chinese money, the coins must be worth five dollars apiece just for the metal. And look—the bowl is half full again.”

  They stared wide-eyed and breathless at the little grinning god. Every second, as regularly as clockwork, another gold coin popped out of his open mouth.

  “It’s as if—as if he were coining them!” John Wiggins whispered.

  “Oh, it’s wonderful!” Alice Wilson told him, with rapture. “John I’m so glad! For your sake. Now you can pay off Earl.”

  “In his own coin!” the man chortled. “Because he started it happening, you know, so you could call it his own coin. Perhaps he pressed a secret spring or something that released them from where they were hidden inside the god. I don’t know.

  “But the funny thing is, he couldn’t pick them up! He tried to pretend he had just dropped the first couple, but they rolled out of the bowl and right across the floor when he reached for them. And then he began to get frightened. He grabbed up his hat and his glove and ran out.”

  Then John Wiggins paused. He was looking down at Alice Wilson, and for the first time he really saw the change that had occurred in her.

  “Why—why,” he said, “do you know, you hair is the same color as the coins?”

  “Oh, it isn’t!” Miss Wilson protested, blushing scarlet at the first compliment a man had paid her in ten years.

  “It is,” he insisted. “And you, you’re lovely, Alice. I never realized before how lovely. You’re pretty as—as pretty as a picture!”

  He looked down into her eyes, and without taking his gaze away, reached down and took her hands in his. He drew her up out of the chair, and still crimsoning with pleasure, Alice Wilson faced him.

  “Alice,” John Wiggins said, “Alice, I’ve known you for a long time, and I’ve been blind. I guess worry blinded me. Or I’d have known what I’ve just realized. I know I’m not much of a success as man but—but Alice, would you be my wife?”

  Alice Wilson gave a little sigh and rested her face against his shoulder so that he might not see the tears in her eyes. Happiness had mostly eluded her until now but this moment more than made up for all the years that were past.

  John Wiggins put his arms about her, and behind them the little god grinned and went busily on with his minting. . . .

  Jacob Earl stamped into his library in his home and locked the door behind him, with fingers that shook a little.

  Throwing his hat and stick down, with his gloves, onto a chair, he groped for a cigar in his pocket and lit it, by sheer force of will striving to quell the inward agitation that was shaking him.

  But—Well, any man might feel shaken if he had put his hand down on a cold brass paperweight and had felt the thing twist in his grip as if alive, had felt a shock in his fingers like a sudden discharge of electricity, and then had seen the thing start to spout gold money.

  Money—and Jacob Earl gazed down at his soft, plump white hands almost with fright—which had life in it. Because when he had tried to pick it up, it had eluded him. It had dodged.

  Angrily he flung away his barely smoked cigar. Hallucinations! He’d been having a dizzy spell, or—or something. Or Wiggins had fixed up a trick to play on him. That was it, a trick!

  The nerve of the man, giving him such a start! When he had finished with the little rabbit he—he—

  Jacob Earl did not quite formulate what he would do. But the mere thought of threatening somebody made him feel better. He’d decide later what retaliation he would make.

  Right now, he’d get to work. He’d inventory his strongbox. Nothing like handling hard, tangible possessions, like stocks and bonds and gold, to restore a man’s nerves when he felt shaky.

  He spun the combination of his safe, swung open the heavy outer door, unlocked the inner door, and slid out first a weighty steel cash box locked by a massive padlock.

  Weighty, because it held the one thing a man couldn’t have too much of—gold. Pure gold ingots, worth five hundred dollars each. Fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of them.

  He’d had them since long before the government called in gold. And he was going to keep them, government or no. If he ever had to sell them, he’d claim they’d been forgotten, and found by accident.

  Jacob Earl flung open the lid of his gold cache. And his overly ruddy face turned a sudden pallid gray. Two of the ingots in the top layer were missing!

  But no one could get into his safe. No one but himself. It wasn’t possible that a thief—

  Then the gray turned to ashen white. His eyes started, his breath caught in his throat. As he stared, a third ingot had vanished. Evaporated. Into thin air. As if an unseen hand had closed over it and snatched it away.

  But it wasn’t possible! Such a thing couldn’t happen.

  And then the fourth ingot vanished. Transfixed by rage and fright, he put his hands down on the remaining yellow bars and pressed with all his might.

  But presently the fifth of his precious chunks of metal slipped away from beneath his very fingers into nothi
ngness. One instant it was there, and he could feel it. Then—gone!

  With a hoarse cry, Jacob Earl dropped the cash box. He stumbled across the room to his telephone, got a number.

  “Doctor?” he gasped. “Doctor Norcross? This is Jacob Earl. I—I—”

  Then he bethought himself. This couldn’t happen. This was madness. If he told anyone—

  “Never mind, Doctor!” he blurted. “Sorry to have troubled you. It’s all right.”

  He hung up. And sat there, all the rest of the day, sweat beading his brow, watching the shiny yellow oblongs that had fallen on the floor vanish one by one.

  In another part of town, another hand crept toward the telephone—and drew back. Minerva Benson’s hand. Minerva Benson had discovered her deformity almost the instant she had arisen, late that morning. The stiff, lifeless face affixed to the back of her head now. Thin, vicious, twisted, the features of a harpy.

  With trembling fingers she touched it again, in a wild hope that it might have vanished. Then she huddled closer on the end of the sofa in the darkened room, whose door was locked, blinds drawn.

  She couldn’t telephone. Because no one must see her like this. No one. Not even a doctor. . . .

  And in her tiny, spinsterish home Netty Peters also crouched, alone, and also afraid to telephone.

  Feared, lest that strange, dreadful second voice begin to clack and rattle in her throat when she tried to talk, tried to ask Dr. Norcross to come.

  Crouched, and felt her throat with fingers like frantic claws. And was sure she could detect something moving in her throat like a thing alive.

  V

  Mrs. Edward Norton moved along the tree-shaded streets toward the downtown section of Locustville with all the self-conscious pride of a frigate entering a harbor under full sail.

  She was a full-bodied woman—well-built, she phrased it—and expensively dressed. Certainly the best-dressed woman in town, as befitted her position as leader of Locustville’s social life and the most influential woman in town.

  And today she was going to use her influence. She was going to have Janice Avery discharged as teacher in the high school.