"I'll be damned!" whispered Peter.
"And you know what I'm going to do with those other two wishes? I'm going to take you and me right back into the good ole U.S.A.!"
"Will it only send two people?"
"So the magician said."
"Grandfather Packer," said Peter earnestly, "I am about to ask a very great sacrifice of you. It is also your duty to undo the damage which you have done."
"Oh," said Almarish glumly. "The girl? All right."
"You don't mind?" asked Peter incredulously.
"Far be it from me to stand in the way of young love," grunted the wizard sourly. "She's up there."
Peter entered timidly; the girl was alternately reading a copy of the Braintree Informer and staring passionately at a photograph of Peter.
"Darling," said Peter.
"Dearest!" said Melicent, catching on almost immediately.
A short while later Peter was asking her: "Do you mind, dearest if I ask one favor of you—a very great sacrifice?" He produced a small, sharp pen-knife.
And all the gossip for a month in Braintree was of Peter Packer's stunning young wife, though some people wondered how it was that she had only nine fingers.
Mr. Packer Goes to Hell
[as by Cecil Corwin; Stirring Science Stories June 1941]
"Drat it!" cursed Almarish, enchanter supreme and master of all Ellil.
"Drat the sizzling dingus!" Lifting his stiffly embroidered robes of imperial purple, he was dashing to left and right about his bedroom, stooping low, snatching with his jeweled hands at an elusive something that skidded about the floor with little, chuckling snickers.
Outside, beyond the oaken door, there was a sinister thud of footsteps, firm and normal slaps of bare sole against pavement alternating with sinister tappings of bone. "Slap-click. Slap-click. Slap-click," was the beat. Almarish shot a glance over his shoulder at the door, his bearded face pale with strain.
"Young 'un," he snapped to an empty room, "this ain't the silly season.
Come out, or when I find you I'll jest take your pointed ears and twist them till they come off in my hands."
Again there was the chuckling snicker, this time from under the bed.
Almarish, his beard streaming, dove headlong, his hands snapping shut. The snicker turned into a pathetic wail.
"Leggo!" shrilled a small voice. "You're crushing me, you ox!"
Outside the alternating footsteps had stopped before his door. A horny hand pounded on the solid oak.
"Be with ye in a minute," called the bearded enchanter. Sweat had broken out on his brow. He drew out his clenched fists from under the bed.
"Now, young lady!" he said grimly, addressing his prize.
The remarkable creature in his hands appeared to be young; at least she was not senile. But if ever a creature looked less like a lady it was she. From tiny feet, shod in rhinestone, high-heeled pumps to softly waved chestnut hair at her very crown, she was an efficient engine of seduction and disaster. And to omit what came between would be a sin: her voluptuous nine inches were encased in a lame that glittered with the fire of burnished silver, cut and fitted in the guise of an evening gown. Pouting and sullen as she was in Mmarish's grasp, she hadn't noticed that the hem was scarcely below her ankles, as was intended by the unknown couturier who had spared no pains on her. That hem, or the maladjustment of it, revealed, in fact, that she had a pretty, though miniature, taste in silks and lacework.
"Ox!" she stormed at the bearded sorcerer. "Beastly oaf—you'll squeeze me out of shape with your great, clumsy hands!"
"That would be a pity," said Almarish. "It's quite a shape, as you seem to know."
The pounding on the door redoubled. "Lord Almarish!" shouted a voice, clumsily feigning anxiety. "Are you all right?"
"Sure, Pike," called the sorcerer. "Don't bother me now. I have a lady with me. We're looking at my potted plants."
"Oh," said the voice of Pike. "All right—my business can wait."
"That stalled him," grunted Almarish. "But not for long. You, what's your name?"
She stuck out a tiny tongue at him.
"Look here," said Almarish gently. He contracted his fist a little and the creature let out an agonized squawk on a small scale. "What's your name?" he repeated.
"Moira," she snapped tartly. "And if your throat weren't behind all that hay I'd cut it."
"Forget that, kid," he said. "Let me give you a brief resume of pertinent facts:
"My name is Packer and I'm from Braintree, Mass., which you never heard of. I came to Ellil by means of a clock with thirteen hours.
Unusual, eh? Once here I sized things up and began to organize on a business basis with the assistance of a gang of half-breed demons. I had three wishes, but they're all used up now. I had to send back to Braintree my grandson Peter, who got here the same way I did, and with him a sweet young witch he picked up.
"Before leaving he read me a little lecture on business reform and the New Deal. What I thought was commercial common sense—little things like bribes, subornation of perjury, arson, assassination and the like—
he claimed was criminal. So I, like a conscientious Packer, began to set things right. This my gang didn't like. The best testimony of that fact is that the gentleman outside my door is Balthazar Pike, my trusted lieutenant, who has determined to take over.
"I learned that from Count Hacza, the vampire, when he called yesterday, and he said that I was to be wiped out today. He wrung my hand with real tears in his eyes—an affectionate chap—as he said goodbye."
"And," snarled the creature, "ain't that too damn' bad?"
"No," said Almarish mildly. "No, because you're going to get me out of this. I knew you were good luck the moment you poked your nose through the wall and began to snicker."
Moira eyed him keenly. "What's in it for me?" she finally demanded.
There was again the pounding on the door. "Lord Almarish," yelled Balthazar Pike, "aren't you through with those potted plants yet?"
"No," called the sorcerer. "We've just barely got to the gladioli."
"Pretty slow working," grumbled the trusted lieutenant. "Get some snap into it."
"Sure, Pike. Sure. Only a few minutes more." He turned on the little creature. "What do you want?" he asked.
There was a curious catch in her voice as she answered, "A vial of tears from la Bete Joyeux."
"Cut out the bunk," snapped Almarish impatiently. "Gold, jewels—
anything at all. Name it."
"Look, whiskers," snarled the little creature. "I told you my price and I'll stick to it. What's more I'll take you to the right place."
"And on the strength of that," grinned the sorcerer, "I'm supposed to let you out of my hands?"
"That's the idea," snapped Moira. "You have to trust somebody in this lousy world—why not me? After all, mister, I'm taking your word—if you'll give it."
"Done," said Almarish with great decision. "I hereby pledge myself to do everything I can to get you that whatever-it-was's tears, up to and including risk and loss of life."
"Okay, whiskers," she said. "Put me down." He obliged, and saw her begin to pace out pentacles and figures on the mosaic floor. As she began muttering to herself with great concentration he leaned his head against the door. There were agitated murmurs without.
"Don't be silly," Pike was saying. "He told me with his own mouth he had a woman—"
"Look, Bally," said another voice, one that Almarish recognized as that of a gatekeeper, "I ain't sayin' you're wacked up, but they ain't even no mice in his room. I ain't let no one in and the ectoplasmeter don't show nothin' on the grounds of the castle."
"Then," said Pike, "he must be stalling. Rourke, you get the rest of the
'breeds and we'll break down the door and settle Lord Almarish's hash for good. The lousy weakling!"
Lord Almarish began to sweat afresh and cast a glance at Moira, who was standing stock-still to one side of the mosaic design in the floo
r. He noted abruptly a series of black tiles in the center that he had never seen before. Then others surrounding them turned black, and he saw that they were not coloring but ceasing to exist. Apparently something of a bottomless pit was opening up beneath his palace.
Outside the padding and clicking of feet sounded. "Okay, boys! Get it in line!"
They would be swinging up a battering ram, Almarish surmised. The shivering crash of the first blow against the oaken door made his ears ring. Futilely he braced his own brawny body against the planking and felt the next two blows run through his bones.
"One more!" yelled his trusted lieutenant. And with that one more the door would give way, he knew, and what they would do to him would be no picnic. He had schooled them well, though crudely, in the techniques of strikebreaking effected by employers of the 1880s.
"Hurry it up!" he snapped at Moira. She didn't answer, being wholly intent, it seemed, on the enlargement of the pit which was growing in the floor. It would now admit the passage of a slimmer man than the sorcerer, but his own big bones would never make it.
With agonizing slowness the pit grew, tile by tile, as the tiny creature frowned into it till her face was white and bloodless. Almarish fancied he could hear through the door the labored breathing of the half-breed demons as they made ready to swing again.
Crash! It came again, and only his own body kept the door from falling in fragments.
"Right—dive!" shrilled the little voice of Moira as the battering ram poked through into the room. He caught her up in one hand and squeezed through into the blackness of the pit. He looked up and could see a circle of faces snarling with rage as he slid down a kind of infinitely smooth inclined tunnel. Abruptly the patch of light above him was blotted out and there was absolutely nothing to be seen.
All Almarish knew was that he was gliding in utter blackness at some terrifying speed in excess of anything sane down to a place he knew nothing of in the company of a vicious little creature whose sole desire seemed to be to cut his throat and drink his blood with glee.
7
"Where," asked Almarish, "does this end?"
"You'll find out," snarled the little creature. "Maybe you're yellow already?"
"Don't say that," he warned. "Not unless you want to get playfully pinched—in half."
"Cold-blooded," she marveled. "Like a snake or lizard. Heart's probably three-ventricled, too."
"Our verbal contract," said the sorcerer, delicately emphasizing verbal,
"didn't include an exchange of insults."
"Yeah," she said abstractedly. And though they were in the dark, he could sense that she was worried. "Yeah, that's right."
"What's the matter?" he demanded.
"It's your fault," she shrilled. "It's your own damned fault hurrying me up so I did this!" The man knew that she was near distraction with alarm. And he could feel the reason why. They were slowing down, and this deceleration, presumably, was not on Moira's schedule.
"We on the wrong line?" he asked coolly.
"Yes. That's about it. And don't ask me what happens now, because I don't know, you stupid cow!" Then she was sniffling quietly in his hand, and the sorcerer was wondering how he could comfort her without breaking her in two.
"There now," he soothed tentatively, stroking her hair carefully with the tip of a finger. "There, now, don't get all upset—"
It occurred to him to worry on his own account. They had slowed to a mere snail's pace, and at the dramatically, psychologically correct moment a light appeared ahead. A dull chanting resounded through the tube:
"Slimy flesh,
Clotted blood,
Fat, white worms,
These are food."
From Moira there was a little, strangled wail. "Ghouls!"
"Grave robbers?" asked the sorcerer. "I can take care of them—knock a few heads together."
"No," she said in thin, hopeless tones. "You don't understand. These are the real thing. You'll see."
As they slid from the tube onto a sort of receiving table Almarish hastily pocketed the little creature. Then, staring about him in bewilderment, he dropped his jaw and let it hang.
The amiable dietary ditty was being ground out by a phonograph, tending which there was a heavy-eyed person dressed all in gray. He seemed shapeless, lumpy, like a half-burned tallow candle on whose sides the drops of wax have congealed in half-teardrops and cancerous clusters. He had four limbs and, on the upper two, hands of a sort, and wore what could roughly be described as a face.
"You," said Almarish. "What's—where—?" He broke off in confusion as a lackluster eye turned on him.
From a stack beside him the creature handed him a pamphlet. The sorcerer studied the title:
WORKERS! FIGHT TO PRESERVE AND EXTEND the GLORIOUS
REVOLUTION which has BEFALLEN Y O U!
He read further:
There are those among you who still can remember the haphazard days of individual enterprise and communal wealth. Those days were bad; many starved for lack of nutritious corpses. And yet people died Above; why this poverty in the midst of plenty?
There were Above as usual your scouts who cast about for likely members of your elite circle, those who wished to live forever on the traditional banquets of the Immortal Eaters. Fortunate indeed was the scout who enrolled Ingvar Hemming. For it was he who, descending to the Halls of the Eaters, saw the pitiful confusion which existed.
Even as he had brought order into the vast holdings which had been his when Above, he brought order to the Halls. A ratio was established between production and consumption and civilized habits of life-in-death were publicized. Nowadays no Immortal Eater would be seen barbarously clawing the flesh from a corpse as in the bad old days; in these times your Safety-Tasty cans are the warrant of cleanliness and flavor.
Bug-eyed, Almarish turned to the back of the booklet and scanned the advertisements:
He tore his eyes from the repulsive pages. "Chum," he demanded hoarsely of the phonograph attendant, "what the hell goes on here?"
"Hell?" asked the ghoul in a creaky, slushy voice. "You're way off. You'll never get there now. I buzzed the receiving desk—they'll come soon."
"I mean this thing." Gingerly he held it up between thumb and forefinger.
"Oh—that. I'm supposed to give it to each new arrival. It's full of bunk.
If you could possibly get out of here, you'd do it. This ain't no paradise, not by a long shot."
"I thought," said Almarish, "that you all had enough to eat now. And if you can afford hearses you must be well off."
"You think so?" asked the attendant. "I can remember back when things was different. And then this Hemming man—he comes down from Above, corners the supply, hires men to can it and don't pay them enough to buy it in cans. I don't understand it, but I know it ain't right."
"But who buys the—the eyes and hearses?"
"Foremen an' ex-ex-ekky-tives. And whut they are I don't know. It jest ain't jolly down here no more." "Where you from?" asked Almarish.
"Kentucky. Met a scout, 1794. Liked it and been here ever since. You change—cain't git back. It's a sad thing naow." He dummied up abruptly as a squad of ghouls approached. They were much less far gone—"changed" than the attendant. One snapped out a notebook.
"Name?" he demanded.
"Packer, Almarish—what you will," he said, fingering an invincible dagger in his sleeve.
"Almarish—the Almarish?"
"Overlord of Ellil," he modestly confessed, assuming, and rightly, that the news of his recent deposition had not yet reached the Halls of the Eternal Eaters. "Come on a tour of inspection. I was wondering if I ought to take over this glorified cafeteria."
"I assume," said one of the reception committee—for into such it had hastily resolved itself—"you'll want to see our vice-president in charge of Inspection and Regulation?"
"You assume wrongly," said the sorcerer coldly. "I want to see the president."
"Mr. Hemming?" demanded
the spokesman. All heads save that of Almarish bowed solemnly. "You—you haven't an appointment, you know."
"Lead on," ordered the sorcerer grimly. "To Mr. Hemming." Again the heads bowed.
Almarish strode majestically through the frosted-glass door simply lettered with the name and title of the man who owned the nation of ghouls body and soul.
"Hello, Hemming," said he to the man behind the desk, sitting down unbidden.
The president was scarcely "changed" at all. It was possible that he had been eating food that he had been used to when Above. What Almarish saw was an ordinary man in a business suit, white-haired, with a pair of burning eyes and a stoop forward that gave him the aspect of a cougar about to pounce.
"Almarish," he said, "I welcome you to my—corporation."
"Yes—thank you," said the sorcerer. He was vaguely worried. Superb businessman that he was, he could tell with infallible instinct that something was wrong—that his stupendous bluff was working none too well.
"I've just received an interesting communication," said Hemming casually. "A report via rock signals that there was some sort of disturbance in your Ellil. A sort of—palace revolution. Successful, too, I believe."
Almarish was about to spring at his throat and bring down guards about his head when he felt a stirring in his pocket. Over the top of one peeked the head of Moira.
"Won't you," she said, "introduce me to the handsome man?"
Almarish, grinning quietly, brought her out into full view. With a little purr she gloriously stretched her lithe body. Hemming was staring like an old goat.
"This," said the sorcerer, "is Moira."
"For sale?" demanded the president, clenching his hands till the knuckles whitened on the top of his desk.
"Of course," she drawled amiably. "At the moment a free agent. Right?"
She tipped Almarish a wink.
"Of course," he managed to say regretfully, "you know your own mind, Moira, but I wish you'd stay with me a little longer."
"I'm tired of you," she said. "A lively girl like me needs them young and handsome to keep my interest alive. There are some men"—she cast a sidelong, slumbrous glance at Hemming—"some men I'd never grow tired of."
His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction Page 35