"I want you to see something I've been doing, Steve." He frowned at the glass in his left hand and seemed to be making up his mind how to tell me—or how much.
"It had better be good, Paul."
"It's better than good," he said, smiling on the left side of his face, "it's revolutionary!" This seemed to strike him as funny. He laughed quietly to himself and muttered "revolutionary" several times, twisting the glass between his hands. "It's not only revolutionary, it's sinister," he added. I was ready to go along with that.
"Sinister," he repeated. "Sinister means left, you know." (I did, but allowed him to go on.) "Why has the left-handed man been feared or despised in so many societies? Why is it good to be dextrous, or right-handed? Why is it clumsy to be 'gauche'; why is adroit a word of praise?"
"Leonardo was left-handed," I said lightly.
"All soldiers everywhere kick off on the left foot. The respectable British drive on the left. Some think the left wing is progressive.
"I'm not asking you to agree that leftness is bad," said Ledderman. "I'm asking you why so many peoples have thought it bad."
"Search me," I said.
"Because it's the reverse of normal!" He brought this out with a decisive air of triumph. It sounded to me like a platitude. He surprised me at this point by fumbling in his pocket (wincing a little as his bandaged wrist rubbed against the lining) and brought out a cardboard letter of the kind you gave the kids to learn the alphabet with. It was a letter F. He placed it on the low table by the side of his chair.
"An F," he said very solemnly. "And there are millions like it." If he had been looking less ill, if the light in his eye had given me a less uncomfortable feeling down the back of my neck, perhaps even if it had been broad daylight, I should have laughed at this glimpse of the obvious. But something warned me to look impressed.
"Millions like it," he said emphatically. "But just once in a while the sinister oddity turns up from nowhere." He cupped his left hand round the cardboard letter, did something with his right, and then lifted his hands to expose not an F but a backward F. "The reverse of the normal," he said, looking intently at me.
"You've turned it over," I said.
"I've rotated it through a third dimension," he corrected. "To the two-dimensional creatures inhabiting that tabletop something sinister has happened: among a million F's suddenly one leftward-looking monster, a work of darkness, a thing to be burned at the stake."
There are some remarks which stick in the mind because they sum up a whole experience. I remembered that remark of Paul's as we stood, three hours later, in one of the strangest buildings I've ever been in. From the outside it was a squat cylinder of concrete, twenty feet high by twenty across. There was only one entrance, a small, steel-clad door, eight feet from the ground and reached by an iron ladder. As we stooped to go through it, Paul pushing me ahead of him, I saw that it was not so much a door as a massive plug of concrete, at least three feet thick, with lead cladding on the inner side. We came onto a narrow catwalk circling the inside of the tower and I found myself on the edge of a well with nothing except a frail hand-rail between me and the floor of the building, eight feet below. The well was not more than six or seven across and I reckon the walls of the tower must have been at least as thick as that plug of a door.
Above and below the cat-walk the well was enclosed by a lattice-work of thin girders—perhaps the lattice that Paul had mentioned as we sat, earlier, over a cheerless meal, looking out from the library on to the brilliantly lit gravel path with nothing but blackness beyond it. "A lattice," he had said, "which focuses the whole of the field inwards and sets up a strong current. There's something of anti-gravity about that current, Steve. You drop something into it and it floats down."
"Where does it go to?" I said.
He was silent for a long time. "To Hell," he said, "and back again."
Looking down into the narrow well, I could see nothing infernal in it. It ended on the floor of the building eight feet below, and it was bounded by the flat ceiling of the tower, five or six feet above our heads. The only thing remarkable about it was that anyone should have gone to the trouble and expense of putting a lattice of girders around it, not to mention three feet of concrete clad with lead on the inner side.
"It takes half a megawatt," said Paul, standing at my elbow on the dimly lit cat-walk. "I burned out three transformers the first time. It set me back eighteen months." I could feel rather than see that he was watching me intently.
"What does it do?" I said.
He had dropped some curious hints during that dispiriting meal, but they hadn't meant much to me: nothing at all as physics and not even very much as a basis for the psychological guess-work I liked to think I was good at. They didn't explain, for example, why he served the two of us from separate dishes, why he held his glass in his left hand, or why his wrists were bandaged. Above all, they failed to explain the oddest thing that happened during that meal, the one which nearly sent me running back to Spring Bottom—except that I have my pride and, as Judy knows, I am also inquisitive (not to mention the fact that by this time it was clear that Paul—or whoever it was—badly needed help). He was saying something about "fields of force" and "envelopes" and "plasma flow" and wanted to make a point by writing down some formula or other. Taking a piece of paper from his pocket, he began to scribble rapidly—with his left hand, from the right side of the sheet to the left, and beginning at the bottom of the page.
"What does the darn thing actually do?" I asked him again.
"Watch," he said.
Reaching behind my shoulder in the gloom, he threw a switch. A shrill whine rose up through the well, screaming until my teeth buzzed in resonance. The building shuddered and I was tugged towards the hand-rail. The lattice surrounding the well glowed a pale green which brightened rapidly as the whine rose to shriller and shriller heights, climbing away into the ultrasonic until, after perhaps half a minute, it was out of ear-shot and a vibrant silence took its place. I leaned a little over the rail and looked into the brightly glowing well—and was at once overcome with a sick sense of vertigo.
The floor of the building had vanished. The well had become a narrow shaft running down a great distance into the earth, uniformly lit by an encircling wall of green light. About sixteen feet down I saw the back of a man's head and two hands gripping a hand-rail. Beyond him the shaft could be seen to curve slightly outwards and away from me, bringing into view the back of a man's head and two hands gripping a hand-rail, beyond which I could see the back of a man's head and two hands . . .
I was looking down into a great curved shaft, peopled by cat-walks, each with a man gripping the hand-rail. I counted twenty of them before they became too dim and too close together to be distinguished. Perhaps there were a hundred of them before they were cut off from sight by the relentless curve of the shaft. I raised a shocked hand to my head, and a forest of hands were lifted all the way down the tunnel. I looked up, and saw that the tunnel extended as far upwards as down, curving away on the same radius of curvature and inhabited by the same sequence of ghosts, looking idiotically upwards and gripping the same sequence of hand-rails.
"The shafts join up," said Paul's voice behind me. "Somewhere 'out there.' They form a closed loop."
"But the men—?"
"A couple of hundred Steve Kassners, a train-load of Oxford graduates in psychology," said Paul with the first (and the last) return I heard that night of anything resembling his old style. "The floor and the ceiling of the tower seem to act partly like two mirrors face to face: you get a reflection, and a reflection of a reflection, and a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, and so on. But there is a real shaft all the same; it goes round in a loop. I know."
"But what does it do?" I insisted.
"It produces monsters," he said.
A work of darkness, a thing to be burned at the stake.
"Look," he said. He pulled off one of the leather gloves he had put on before we came to
this sinister place and startled me by throwing it over the hand-rail into the well. My muscles jumped in a kind of self-protecting sympathy as this leather parody of a hand fell into the shaft.
But it did not fall as things fall in a normal world. It partly floated. Certainly it sank, but it sank slowly at a steady rate, seeming to be borne along by a current rather than hurried downwards by the normal acceleration of gravity. It would have upset Galileo. And it seemed, to my imagination, to give a slight tilt to Paul's strange building: I felt as the Grand Old Man must have felt on the edge of that tower in Pisa. I watched the glove as it floated downwards, passing my hundred reflecting heads until it grew too dim to see. A minute passed. Two minutes. Glancing at Paul, I saw that he was looking up. I followed his gaze. No bigger than a man's hand, the glove came floating into sight down the curving shaft which lay above us. As it passed the cat-walk, Paul reached behind me and switched off the power. Instantly, the green glow went out, the building shuddered, the floor and ceiling of the tower came back abruptly into view, the shafts vanished and the glove dropped like a stone onto the concrete base eight feet below us.
Paul ducked under the railing and climbed down an iron ladder which I now saw for the first time. In a moment he was back, carrying the glove. He handed it to me. "Well?" he said.
"An ordinary leather glove," I said with a sense of anticlimax. "An ordinary left-hand glove."
"Exactly!" said Paul. "A monster." He pulled the glove from his other hand and gave it to me. I saw that I was holding two left-hand gloves, and suddenly a great deal became clear.
"It inverts anything which passes through it," said Paul. "It turns them over through some other dimension beyond the third."
I looked at the sea-shell I was holding, a common enough thing picked up on the beach by one of my kids that summer and stuffed with a dozen others into my coat pocket. I had quietly got rid of most of them on my way back from the beach but this one had remained, forgotten, until ten minutes ago. A common, spiral shell, with the spiral winding clockwise when seen from above—and therefore an extremely uncommon shell. "One in a million," said Peterson, the marine man, when I showed it to him a couple of months later. "Almost all of them run anti-clockwise." So had mine till I sent it round Ledderman's damned loop.
I read—or tried to read—a newspaper cutting, clipped from the "Tribune" of two days before. I could have done with a mirror; the letters ran from right to left.
"And you, Paul—?" I said gently.
He took my hand and laid it on the right side of his chest. I felt the murmur of his heart where no heart should have been.
"Monstrous," he said. "One in a thousand million. It sometimes happens in nature, but the poor devil always dies. It starves to death. It cannot live on the dextrose sugars which the rest of you live on. It needs the laevulose sugars, the ones which twist a ray of polarised light the other way. They cannot be synthesised in large enough quantities."
"Then you—?"
"I live by passing everything I eat round the loop. It was a dexter meal you had last evening, Steve; mine was sinister. Do you see what that means? I can never leave this place. I am as alone as any man has ever been. I am stuck with solitary confinement for the rest of my life. I can't marry; God knows what would happen. I'm a sinister Adam with no Eve. Even the apples on the Tree of Knowledge are useless to me, Steve: dextrose apples they must be, and my blood is laevulose."
"Then travel the loop again."
He gripped my arm until I winced and glared into my face. I thought he was going to hit me. "I nearly did," he said, "I very nearly did!" He glanced at the bandaged wrists: wrists which must, at some time not long past, have struck against the edge of a cat-walk or an iron railing as Ledderman, the left-handed, had come floating down the upper shaft and grabbed for safety to avoid that second journey. "Do you want to see what the other trip means?" he said. He threw the switch. The well screamed and then became silent. The great shafts reappeared above and below us. Taking the glove which had already made one circuit of the loop, he threw it into the well with angry violence. One minute passed. Two. He caught the glove as it came level with the cat-walk and handed it to me. It was turned inside out.
"It goes on inverting," he said, "but across another plane of inversion."
"What happens the third time?"
"It doesn't come back."
"So you're stuck," I said. "For God's sake, Paul, what made you do it?"
"Curiosity," he said, "the passion of the true scientist."
There was a long pause. He had left the power running and the great shafts glowed green above and below us. The silence was vibrant with unheard, unhearable, sound-waves.
"But there is a solution," he said at last very quietly. He turned to peer at me in the green light and took my arm in a soft, firm grip. "You Steve," he said, "are on the other side of the looking-glass. For God's sake, come through it onto my side."
I saw what he meant to do and took a step back.
"Judy can join you," he said pleadingly.
"And the kids. You can write to them."
"They wouldn't come," I said, buying time.
The tower door was on the other side of the well and he was taller and heavier than I was. I began to edge slowly backwards round the cat-walk.
"They wouldn't come," I said. "I guess you put that letter of yours round the loop; it turned the damn thing from left to right but it left it reading from the bottom up. Who would come for a crazy note like that?"
"You did," said Paul with a crooked, affectionate smile. And then he was suddenly upon me, thrusting me back across the rail and kicking at my feet. We grappled savagely on the edge of the pit, shoulders heaving, muscles crackling with strain. I lost my footing and toppled backwards, pulling him with me. It was like a trick of judo. The energy of the struggle was converted suddenly to a single force which flung him screaming across my shoulder. I could do nothing except grab the rail to save myself as he sailed head downwards into the shaft. He screamed as he went the single word "Steve, Steve, Steve" again and again as the current of energy carried him out of sight.
I lay on the cat-walk, sobbing with effort.
A great time passed. Perhaps two minutes. Something came floating down the shaft from above me, softly, majestically, horribly. It bore no resemblance to anything I had ever seen or ever wish to see again: a ganglion of rubbery tubes, an exo-skeleton, a slippery mass of viscera, an inside-out man, a thing to be burned at the stake.
It sank out of sight and hours seemed to pass. I waited, retching and weeping, but nothing returned. Nothing visible, that is. But there was a sound. I don't know what happens to a sound-wave when it gets turned over on the kind of damned warp-path that Ledderman had made, but it doesn't sound good. A long time after the body (if you can call it that) had gone a scream came down the shaft, a kind of gibbering reversal of "Steve," a bat-scream out of the pit which went on and on until, with a sudden strangled plop, it ceased. In the silence which followed I listened, as though from a great distance, to my own voice, cursing and blaspheming.
I did not murder Paul Ledderman. I'm not quite sure what I did to him, but it was not murder. Self-defence maybe, but not murder. I have nothing to prove it except a leather glove, a sea-shell and a newspaper cutting.
THE HATE by Terri E. Pinckard
Nadine first felt the cold touch of the thing creeping, pawing at her as a dog paws at a bone. She was alone in the house at the time, doing those unimportant household chores all women must do to make a house a home when—it reached out to touch her. She didn't know what it was then. She only knew a chill ran through her, and that the thing was directed. It knew who she was, and it knew she was aware of its being there. At first it stayed for only a short time. It didn't have much strength then.
It came again. On days when she was alone, the thing would strike at her. As Fear began to grow in her, the other's strength grew, too. Each time it left her drained and more afraid. It knew her well now. It
knew just when its coming would have the most effect on her. It knew just when she would be rooted to the floor with fear of it and how she could be so used, the perspiration of her fear would be icy cold upon her forehead and lip. As the months passed It began to come back more often, just being there, quiescent, waiting. Every once in a while its coldness reached out to her, and then withdrew to sit and wait again.
Then, one day, she was out shopping for a new dress for the Country Club dance. She found a perfect one, a pale green chiffon that clung to her figure as though it had been made just for her. Funny, she was feeling so proud at the time, knowing that Jeff, her husband, was proud of her figure being the same as it was when he first married her.—IT found her! Maybe it was because she was feeling a little smug, self-satisfied and pleased as she looked at her reflection in the long mirror. She had been imagining Jeff's eyes appraising her as he looked her up and down with that "Look what's mine" proud look of his when—IT HIT HER! AS THOUGH IT HELD A WHIP, IT SLAPPED AT HER FACE, WHIPPING HER LEGS AND HER ARMS IN SHORT, SHARP TIRADES OF ANGRY LASHES. She tried to protect herself with her arms; covering first her face, then her legs with them; trying, trying—trying to keep it from lashing at her. She screamed a long, high shrill scream and the saleswoman grabbed her and held her arms and in a pit of despair she fought the thing back with all the mental strength in her. That was the moment she knew the thing for what it was . . . HATE, strong and demoniac. She continued to fight back and she felt the Hate receding then and in its place came a short burst of mocking laughter that she heard deep inside her. It left her shamed and cringing. Just as suddenly It was gone.
The Year's Best Horror Stories 1 Page 14