There was an old newspaper clipping that told about strange wills that people had left. An old lady had once left a lot of money to whoever would make the trip from the Earth to the Moon and back. Another had financed a home for cars whose masters and mistresses had died. A man left thousands of dollars to the first man who could solve a certain mathematical problem and prove his solution. But one item was blue-penciled. It was:
One of the strangest of wills still in force is that of Thaddeus M. Kirk, who died in 1920. It appears that he built an elaborate mausoleum with burial vaults for all the remains of his family. He collected and removed caskets from all over the country to fill the designated niches. Kirk was the last of his line; there were no relatives when he died. His will stated that the mausoleum was to be kept in repair permanently, and that a certain sum was to be set aside as a reward for whoever could produce the body of his grandfather, Roger Kirk, whose niche is still empty. Anyone finding this body is eligible to receive a substantial fortune.
Babe yawned vaguely over this, but kept on reading because there was nothing else to do. Next was a thick sheet of business correspondence, bearing the letterhead of a firm of lawyers. The body of it ran:
In regard to your query regarding the will of Thaddeus Kirk, we are authorised to state that his grandfather was a man about five feet, five inches, whose left arm had been broken and who had a triangular silver plate set into his skull. There is no information as to the whereabouts of his death. He disappeared and was declared legally dead after the lapse of fourteen years.
The amount of the reward as stated in the will, plus accrued interest, now amounts to a fraction over sixty-two thousand dollars. This will be paid to anyone who produces the remains, providing that said remains answer descriptions kept in our private files.
There was more, but Babe was bored. She went on to the little black notebook. There was nothing in it but penciled and highly abbreviated records of visits to libraries; quotations from books with titles like “History of Angelina and Tyler Counties” and “Kirk Family History.” Babe threw that aside, too. Where could Uncle Alton be?
She began to sing tunelessly, “Tumalumalum tum, ta ta ta,” pretending to dance a minuet with flowing skirts like a girl she had seen in the movies. A rustle of the bushes at the entrance to The Place stopped her. She peeped upward, saw them being thrust aside. Quickly she ran to a tiny cul-de-sac in the rock wall, just big enough for her to hide in. She giggled at the thought of how surprised Uncle Aiton would be when she jumped out at him.
She heard the newcomer come shuffling down the steep slope of the crevice and land heavily on the floor. There was something about the sound—What was it? It occurred to her that though it was a hard job for a big man like Uncle Alton to get through the little opening in the bushes, she could hear no heavy breathing. She heard no breathing at all!
Babe peeped out into the main cave and squealed in utmost horror. Standing there was, not Uncle Alton, but a massive caricature of a man: a huge thing like an irregular mud doll, clumsily made. It quivered and parts of it glistened and parts of it were dried and crumby. Half of the lower left part of its face was gone, giving it a lopsided look. It had no perceptible mouth or nose, and its eyes were crooked, one higher than the other, both a dingy brown with no whites at all. It stood quite still looking at her, its only movement a steady unalive quivering of its body.
It wondered about the queer little noise Babe had made.
Babe crept far back against a little pocket of stone, her brain running round and round in tiny circles of agony. She opened her mouth to cry out, and could not. Her eyes bulged and her face flamed with the strangling effort, and the two golden ropes of her braided hair twitched and twitched as she hunted hopelessly for a way out. If only she were out in the open—or in the wedge-shaped half-cave where the thing was—or home in bed!
The thing clumped toward her, expressionless, moving with a slow inevitability that was the sheer crux of horror. Babe lay wide-eyed and frozen, the mounting pressure of terror stilling her lungs, making her heart shake the whole world. The monster came to the mouth of the little pocket, tried to walk to her and was stopped by the sides. It was such a narrow little fissure; and it was all Babe could do to get in. The thing from the wood stood straining against the rock at its shoulders, pressing harder and harder to get to Babe. She sat up slowly, so near to the thing that its odor was almost thick enough to see, and a wild hope burst through her voiceless fear. It couldn’t get in! It couldn’t get in because it was too big!
The substance of its feet spread slowly under the tremendous strain, and at its shoulder appeared a slight crack. It widened as the monster unfeelingly crushed itself against the rock, and suddenly a large piece of the shoulder came away and the being twisted slushily three feet farther in. It lay quietly with its muddy eyes fixed on her, and then brought one thick arm up over its head and reached.
Babe scrambled in the inch farther she had believed impossible, and the filthy clubbed hand stroked down her back, leaving a trail of muck on the blue denim of the shirt she wore. The monster surged suddenly and, lying full length now, gained that last precious inch. A black hand seized one of her braids, and for Babe the lights went out.
When she came to, she was dangling by her hair from that same crusted paw. The thing held her high, so that her face and its featureless head were not more than a foot apart. It gazed at her with a mild curiosity in its eyes, and it swung her slowly back and forth. The agony of her pulled hair did what fear could not do—gave her a voice. She screamed. She opened her mouth and puffed up her powerful young lungs, and she sounded off. She held her throat in the position of the first scream, and her chest labored and pumped more air through the frozen throat. Shrill and monotonous and infinitely piercing, her screams.
The thing did not mind. It held her as she was, and watched. When it had learned all it could from this phenomenon, it dropped her jarringly, and looked around the half-cave, ignoring the stunned and huddled Babe. It reached over and picked up the leather briefcase and tore it twice across as if it were tissue. It saw the sandwich Babe had left, picked it up, crushed it, dropped it.
Babe opened her eyes, saw that she was free, and just as the thing turned back to her she dove between its legs and out into the shallow pool in front of the rock, paddled across and hit the other bank screaming. A vicious little light of fury burned in her; she picked up a grapefruit-sized stone and hurled it with all her frenzied might. It flew low and fast, and struck squashily on the monster’s ankle. The thing was just taking a step toward the water; the stone caught it off balance, and its unpracticed equilibrium could not save it. It tottered for a long, silent moment at the edge and then splashed into the stream. Without a second look Babe ran shrieking away.
Cory Drew was following the little gobs of mold that somehow indicated the path of the murderer, and he was nearby when he first heard her scream. He broke into a run, dropping his shotgun and holding the .32-40 ready to fire. He ran with such deadly panic in his heart that he ran right past the huge cleft rock and was a hundred yards past it before she burst out through the pool and ran up the bank. He had to run hard and fast to catch her, because anything behind her was that faceless horror in the cave, and she was living for the one idea of getting away from there. He caught her in his arms and swung her to him, and she screamed on and on and on.
Babe didn’t see Cory at all, even when he held her and quieted her.
The monster lay in the water. It neither liked nor disliked this new element. It rested on the bottom, its massive head a foot beneath the surface, and it curiously considered the facts that it had garnered. There was the little humming noise of Babe’s voice that sent the monster questing into the cave. There was the black material of the briefcase that resisted so much more than green things when he tore it. There was the little two-legged one who sang and brought him near, and who screamed when he came. There was this new cold moving thing he had fallen into. It was washing his
body away. That had never happened before. That was interesting. The monster decided to stay and observe this new thing. It felt no urge to save itself; it could only be curious.
The brook came laughing down out of its spring, ran down from its source beckoning to the sunbeams and embracing freshets and helpful brooklets. It shouted and played with streaming little roots, and nudged the minnows and pollywogs about in its tiny backwaters. It was a happy brook. When it came to the pool by the cloven rock it found the monster there, and plucked at it. It soaked the foul substances and smoothed and melted the molds, and the waters below the thing eddied darkly with its diluted matter. It was a thorough brook. It washed all it touched, persistently. Where it found filth, it removed filth; and if there were layer on layer of foulness, then layer by foul layer it was removed. It was a good brook. It did not mind the poison of the monster, but took it up and thinned it and spread it in little rings round rocks downstream, and let it drift to the rootlets of water plants, that they might grow greener and lovelier. And the monster melted.
“I am smaller,” the thing thought. “That is interesting. I could not move now. And now this part of me which thinks is going, too. It will stop in just a moment, and drift away with the rest of the body. It will stop thinking and I will stop being, and that, too, is a very interesting thing.”
So the monster melted and dirtied the water, and the water was clean again, washing and washing the skeleton that the monster had left. It was not very big, and there was a badlyhealed knot on the left arm. The sunlight flickered on the triangular silver plate set into the pale skull, and the skeleton was very clean now. The brook laughed about it for an age.
They found the skeleton, six grim-lipped men who came to find a killer. No one had believed Babe, when she told her story days later. It had to be days later because Babe had screamed for seven hours without stopping, and had lain like a dead child for a day. No one believed her at all, because her story was all about the bad fella, and they knew that the bad fella was simply a thing that her father had made up to frighten her with. But it was through her that the skeleton was found, and so the men at the bank sent a check to the Drews for more money than they had ever dreamed about. It was old Roger Kirk, sure enough, that skeleton, though it was found five miles from where he had died and sunk into the forest floor where the hot molds builded around his skeleton and emerged—a monster.
So the Drews had a new barn and fine new livestock and they hired four men. But they didn’t have Alton. And they didn’t have Kimbo. And Babe screams at night and has grown very thin.
No collection of fantasy would be complete without one version of the story of the three wishes. Here is one of the shortest, a wry variant by science fiction’s most urbane author, editor, and critic.
Anthony Boucher
NELLTHU
Ailsa had been easily the homeliest and the least talented girl in the University, if also the most logical and level-headed. Now, almost twenty-five years later, she was the most attractive woman Martin had ever seen and, to judge from their surroundings, by some lengths the richest.
“… so lucky running into you again after all these years,” she was saying, in that indescribably aphrodisiac voice. “You know about publishers, and you can advise me on this novel. I was getting so tired of the piano…”
Martin had heard her piano recordings and knew they were superb—as the vocal recordings had been before them and the non-representational paintings before them and the fashion designs and that astonishing paper on prime numbers. He also knew that the income from all these together could hardly have furnished the Silver Room in which they dined or the Gold Room in which he later read the novel (which was of course superb) or the room whose color he never noticed because he did not sleep alone (and the word superb is inadequate).
There was only one answer, and Martin was gratified to observe that the coffee-bringing servant cast no shadow in the morning sun. While Ailsa still slept (superbly), Martin said, “So you’re a demon.”
“Naturally, sir,” the unshadowed servant said, his eyes adoringly upon the sleeper. “Nellthu, at your service.”
“But such service! I can imagine Ailsa-that-was working out a good spell and even wishing logically. But I thought you fellows were limited in what you could grant.”
“We are, sir. Three wishes.”
“But she has wealth, beauty, youth, fame, a remarkable variety of talents—all on three wishes?”
“On one, sir. Oh, I foxed her prettily on the first two.” Nellthu smiled reminiscently. “‘Beauty’—but she didn’t specify, and I made her the most beautiful centenarian in the world. ‘Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice’—and of course nothing is beyond such dreams, and nothing she got. Ah, I was in form that day, sir! But the third wish…”
“Don’t tell me she tried the old ‘For my third wish I want three more wishes’! I thought that was illegal.”
“It is, sir. The paradoxes involved go beyond even our powers. No, sir,” said Nellthu, with a sort of rueful admiration, “her third wish was stronger than that. She said: ‘I wish that you fall permanently and unselfishly in love with me.’”
“She was always logical,” Martin admitted. “So for your own sake you had to make her beautiful and… adept, and since then you have been compelled to gratify her every—” He broke off and looked from the bed to the demon. “How lucky for me that she included ‘unselfishly’!”
“Yes, sir,” said Nellthu.
The whole idea of categorising fiction as “fantasy” or “realism” breaks down when you examine the following story closely. The hospital background is realistic enough; only the tone of the narration gives it an odd feeling, and even that is “realism,” if you like—reality, to a man waiting to die in a TB ward, is not precisely the waking reality most of us know.
What makes this story fantasy, obviously, is the hallucinatory figure of Casey. But it happens that this part of the story is not even an invention; it is drawn from the personal experience of a famous experimental hypnotist, George H. Estabrooks, who wrote about it in a book called Hypnotism.
Categories are useful as long as we do not chop things to fit them. Every work of art is a thing in itself; its materials have been transformed, and their source no longer matters. And all fiction is “fantasy,” to one degree or another. Read this one, then, just as a story—never mind about labels.
Richard McKenna
CASEY AGONISTES
You can’t just plain die. You got to do it by the book.
That’s how come I’m here in this TB ward with nine other recruits. Basic training to die.
You do it by stages. First a big ward, you walk around and go out and they call you mister. Then, if you got what it takes, a promotion to this isolation ward and they call you charles. You can’t go nowhere, you meet the masks, and you get the feel of being dead.
Being dead is being weak and walled off. You hear car noises and see little doll-people down on the sidewalks, but when they come to visit you, they wear white masks and nightgowns and talk past you in the wrong voices. They’re scared you’ll rub some off on them. You would, too, if you knew how.
Nobody ever visits me. I had practice being dead before I come here. Maybe that’s how I got to be charles so quick.
It’s easy, playing dead here. You eat your pills, make out to sleep in the quiet hours and drink your milk like a good little charles. You grin at their phony joshing about how healthy you look and feel. You all know better, but them’s the rules.
Sick call is when they really make you know it. It’s a parade—the head doctor and nurse, the floor nurse Mary Howard and two interns, all in masks and nightgowns. Mary pushes the wheeled rack with our fever charts on it. The doc is a tall skinhead with wooden eyes and pinchnose glasses. The head nurse is fat, with little pig eyes and a deep voice.
The doc can’t see, hear, smell, or touch you. He looks at your reflection in the chart and talks about you like you was real, but it�
��s Mary that pulls down the cover and opens your pajama coat, and the interns poke and look and listen and tell the doc what they see and hear. He asks them questions for you to answer. You tell them how good you feel and they tell him.
He ain’t supposed to get contaminated.
Mary’s small, dark and sweet and the head nurse gives her a bad time. One intern is small and dark like Mary, with soft black eyes and very gentle. The other one is pink and chubby.
The doc’s voice is high and thin, like he ain’t all there below decks. The head nurse snaps at Mary, snips at the interns, and puts a kind of dog wiggle in her voice when she talks to the doc.
I’m glad not to know what’s under any of their masks, except maybe Mary’s, because I can likely imagine better faces for them than God did.
The head nurse makes rounds, riding the book. When she catches us out of line, like smoking or being up in a quiet hour, she gives Mary hell.
She gives us hell, too, like we was babies. She kind of hints that if we ain’t respectful to her and obey her rules maybe she won’t let us die after all.
Christ, how I hate that hag! I hope I meet her in hell.
That’s how it struck me, first day or two in isolation. I’d looked around for old shipmates, like a guy does, but didn’t see any. On the third day one recognised me. I thought I knew that gravel voice, but even after he told me I couldn’t hardly believe it was old Slop Chute Hewitt.
He was skin and bones and his blue eyes had a kind of puzzled look like I saw in them once years ago when a big Limey sucker punched him in Nagasaki Joe’s. When I remembered that, it made me know, all right.
He said glad to see me there and we both laughed. Some of the others shuffled over in striped bathrobes and all of a sudden I was in like Flynn, knowing Slop Chute. I found out they called the head doc Uncle Death. The fat nurse was Mama Death. The blond intern was Pink Waldo, the dark one Curly Waldo, and Mary was Mary. Knowing things like that is a kind of password.
The Dark Side Page 15