Mr. Peldo looked disinterested. He inspected his watchstem. Neither he nor Sol saw what happened.
Luther stamped his foot and yelled. The right side of his face was covered with something that gathered and dripped down.
"Luther!" It was Mr. Peldo's wife. She ran into the room and looked at the cage. "Oh, that nasty thing!" She stormed out, clutching her son's pink ear.
"Damn woman will drive me crazy," Mr. Peldo said. Then he noticed that the shop was quiet again. Sol had thrown the damp jacket over Fitzchen's cage. There was only the sobbing.
"Funny!"
Mr. Peldo bent down, lifted the end of the coat and put his face close. He jerked back with abnormal speed, swabbing at his cheek.
There was a sound like a drowning kitten's purr.
Luther stood in the back doorway. Hate and astonishment contorted his features. "That's all he cares about me when I only wanted to be good to him! Now he loves you, dirty rotten -"
"Look, boy, your father's getting mighty tired of -"
"Yeah, well, he'll be sorry."
Fritzchen began to chitter again.
When Mr. Peldo returned to the shop after dinner, he found a curious thing. Bess, the parrot, lay on her side, dead.
Everything else was normal. The animals were wakeful or somnolent but normal. Fritzchen's cage was covered with a canvas and there was silence from within.
Mr. Peldo inspected Bess and was horrified to discover the bird's condition. She lay inundated in an odd miasmic jelly which had hardened and was now spongy to the touch. It covered her completely. What was more, extended prodding revealed that something had happened to Bess's insides.
They were gone.
And without a trace. Even the bones. Bess was little more than skin and feathers.
Mr. Peldo recalled the substance that had struck his face when he examined Fritzchen's cage the last time. In a frenzy he pulled off the tarpaulin. But Fritzchen was there and the cage was as securely locked as ever.
And easily twenty feet from the parrot dome.
He went back and found the capuchin staring at him out of quizzical eyes.
Luther, of course. Monster boy. Spoiled bug of a child. He had an active imagination. Probably rigged the whole thing, like the time he emasculated the parakeet in an attempt to turn it inside out.
Mr. Peldo was ungratified that the animals had not yet gotten used to Fritzchen. They began their harangue, so he switched off the light and waited for his eyes to accustom themselves to the moonlight. Moonlight comes fast to small towns near rivers.
Fritzchen must be sleeping. Curled like a baby anaconda, legs slender filaments adhering to the cage floor, the tender tiny tail tucked around so that the tip rested just inside the immense mouth.
Mr. Peldo studied the animal. He watched the mouth especially, noting its outsized relationship to the rest of the body.
But - Mr. Peldo peered - could it actually be that Fritzchen was larger? Surely not. The stomach did seem fatter, yet the finely ground hamburger, the dish of milk, the oysters, sat to one side, untouched. Nor had the accommodating bathing and drinking pool been disturbed.
Then he noticed, for the first time, that the mouth had no teeth. There did not appear to be a gullet! And the spiny snout, with its florid green cup, was not a nose after all, for the nose was elsewhere.
But most curious of all, Fritzchen had grown. Oh, yes, grown. No doubt about it.
Mr. Peldo retired hours later with sparkling visions of wealth. He would contact - somebody appropriate - and sell his find for many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then he would run away to Europe and play with a different woman every night until he died of his excesses.
He was awakened a short time later by Sol, who informed him that the bird of paradise and one dalmatian pup had died during the night. He knew because he'd heard the racket from clean across the street.
"Oh, not the ooo wow-wow," said Edna. "Not the liddle puppy!"
Luther sat up in bed, interested.
"How'd it happen?" Mr. Peldo said.
"Don't know. No good way for definite sure." Sol's eyelids almost closed. "Their innards is gone."
Edna put her head beneath the covers.
"Fritzchen?""Guess. Y'ough't'a do somethin' with that crittur. Bad actor.""He got out - that it?""Hey-up. Or somebody let him out. Cage is all locked up tight as wax, 'n it wailin' like a banshee."
Mr. Peldo whirled to face his son, who stuck out his tongue.
"See here, young fellow, we're going to get to the bottom of this. If I find out that you -"
"Don't think t'was the lad," Sol said.
"Why not?"
"Wa'l... that there thing is thrice the size t'was yesterday when you brung 'er in."
"No."
"No nothin'. Stomach's pooched out like it's fit to bust."
Mr. Peldo got up and rubbed his hand over his bald head.
"But look, Sol, if it didn't get out, and - Luther, you didn't let it out, did you?"
"No, ma'am."
"- then how we going to blame it? Maybe there's a disease going around."
"I know, I know," Luther sang, swinging his feet in the air. "His nose can go longer."
"Be still, boy."
"Well, it can! I saw it. Fritzchen did it on the beachhit a bird 'way out over the water and he didn't move out of my hands."
"What happened to the bird, Luther?"
"Well, it got stuck up with this stuff Fritzchen has inside him, so it couldn't do anything. Then when it was all glued, Fritzchen pulled it back closer to him and shot out his nose and put his nose inside the bird's mou -"
Mr. Peldo felt his cheek, where the molasses had gathered that time. Both he and Luther had thought of it as an affectionate gesture, no worse than a St. Bernard leaping and pawing over you, raking your face, covering you with friendly, doggy slobber.
That's why Luther had gotten angry.
But Fritzchen wasn't being affectionate. It didn't work only because Fritzchen was too small, or they had been too big.
Mr. Peldo remembered Bess.
Edna poked her head out of the covers and said, "You listen to that! The neighbours will kill us!"
The sounds from the shop were growing stronger and louder and more chaotic.
Mr. Peldo dashed to the hall and returned with a telephone book. "Here." he said, tossing it to his wife, "get the numbers of all the zoos and museums." "He's mine, he's mine!" Luther screeched.
Sol, who was old, said, "Jake, you never you mind about that. You just fished up something quaar, is all, and the best thing you can do is chuck 'er smack back where she come from."
"Edna - Get those numbers, do you hear me? All the museums in the state. I'll be back."
The wailing had reached a crescendo now.
And Luther had disappeared.
Mr. Peldo put on a robe and hurried across the frosty lawn to the back door of the shop.
"Luther!"
The small boy had a box of kitchen matches, holding a cluster of these in his hands, lighting them and hurling them into Fritzchen's cage. The fiery sticks landed; there was a cry of pain and then the matches spluttered out against moist skin.
"Luther!"
"I wanted to be good to you." Luther was saying. "but then you hadda take up with him!
Yeah, well, now you'll see!"
Mr. Peldo threw his son out the door.
The painful wail became an intermittent cry: a strange cry, not unmelodious.
Mr. Peldo looked into the great jewelled milk-white eyes of the creature and dodged as the snout unrolled like a party favour, spraying a fine crystal glaze of puce jam.
Fritzchen stood erect. He - it - had changed. There were antennae where no antennae had been, many of the legs had developed claws; the mouth, which had been toothless the day before, was now tilled with sharp brown needles. Fritzchen had been fifteen inches high when
Mr. Peldo first saw him. Now he stood over thirty inches.
Still time,
though. Time for everything.
Mr. Peldo looked at the animal until his eyes hurt; then he saw the newspaper on the floor. It was soaked with what looked like shreds of liquid soap - jelly, greenish, foul with the odour of seaweed and other things. On it lay a bird and a small dog.
He felt sad for a moment. But then he thought again of some of the things he had dreamed a long time ago, of what he had now, and he determined to make certain telephone calls.
A million dollars, or almost, probably. They'd - oh, they'd stuff Fritzchen, at all odds, or something like that.
"Dirty rotten lousy -"
Luther had come back. He had a crumpled-up magazine saturated with oil and lighter fluid. The magazine was on fire.
The monkeys and the rabbits and the mice and the goldfish and the cats and birds and dogs shrilled in fear. But Fritzchen didn't.
Fritzchen howled only once. Or lowed: a deep sound from somewhere in the middle of his body that seemed to come from his body and not just his mouth. It was an eerily mournful sound that carried a new tone, a tone of helplessness. Then the creature was silent.
By the time Mr. Peldo reached the cage, Luther had thrown in the paper and was squirting inflammable fluid from a can. The fire burned fiercely.
"I told you," Luther said, pettishly. When the fire was pulled and scattered and trampled out, an ugly thing remained in the cage. An ugly blackened thing that made no noise.
Luther began to cry.
Then he stopped.
And Mr. Peldo stopped chasing him.
Sol and Edna in the doorway didn't move either. They all listened.
It could have been a crazed elephant shambling madly through a straw village...
Or a whale blind with the pain of sharp steel thrashing and leaping in illimitable waters...
Or it could have been a massive hawk swooping in outraged vengeance upon the killers of her young...
The killers of her young!
In that moment before the rustling sound grew huge; before the windows shattered and the great nightmarish shadow came into the shop, Mr. Peldo understood the meaning of Fritzchen's inconsolable cries.
They were the cries of a lost infant for its mother...
THE GIRL WITH THE HUNGRY EYES
by Fritz Leiber, Jnr.
Early in this century Arthur Machen brought to readers the realization that a big modern city like London might serve to hide the monstrous survivals of a fearful past. Fritz Leiber, a resident of Chicago in this later day, advances an even more dreadful theory - that our present cities are evolving their own special supernatural beings, that these beings will not resemble those of old, but will be part and parcel of the very stone and gasoline of our mechanized metropoli.
ALL right, I'll tell you why the Girl gives me the creeps. Why I can't stand to go downtown and see the mob slavering up at her on the tower, with that pop bottle or pack of cigarettes or whatever it is beside her. Why I hate to look at magazines any more because I know she'll turn up somewhere in a brassiere or a bubble bath. Why I don't like to think of millions of Americans drinking in that poisonous half smile. It's quite a story - more story than you're expecting.
No, I haven't suddenly developed any long-haired indignation at the evils of advertising and the national glamour-girl complex. That'd be a laugh for a man in my racket, wouldn't it? Though I think you'll agree there's something a little perverted about trying to capitalize on sex that way. But it's okay with me. And I know we've had the Face and the Body and the Look and what not else, so why shouldn't someone come along who sums it all up so completely, that we have to call her the Girl and blazon her on all the billboards from Times Square to Telegraph Hill?
But the Girl isn't like any of the others. She's unnatural. She's morbid. She's unholy.
Oh these are modern times, you say, and the sort of thing I'm hinting at went out with witchcraft? But you see I'm not altogether sure myself what I'm hinting at, beyond a certain point. There are vampires and vampires, and not all of them suck blood.
And there were the murders, if they were murders.
Besides, let me ask you this. Why, when America is obsessed with the Girl, don't we find out more about her? Why doesn't she rate a Time cover with a droll biography inside? Why hasn't there been a feature in Life or the Post? A Profile in the New Yorker? Why hasn't Charm or Mademoiselle done her career saga? Not ready for it? Nuts!
Why haven't the movies snapped her up? Why hasn't she been on Information, Please? Why don't we see her kissing candidates at political rallies? Why isn't she chosen queen of some sort of junk or other at a convention?
Why don't we read about her tastes and hobbies, her views of the Russian situation? Why haven't the columnists interviewed her in a kimono on the top floor of the tallest hotel in Manhattan and told us who her boyfriends are?
Finally - and this is the real killer - why hasn't she ever been drawn or painted?
Oh, no she hasn't. If you knew anything about commercial art you'd know that. Every blessed one of those pictures was worked up from a photograph. Expertly? Of course. They've got the top artists on it. But that's how it's done.
And now I'll tell you the why of all that. It's because from the top to the bottom of the whole world of advertising, news, and business, there isn't a solitary soul who knows where the Girl came from, where she lives, what she does, who she is, even what her name is.
You heard me. What's more, not a single solitary soul ever sees her - except one poor damned photographer, who's making more money off her than he ever hoped to in his life and who's scared and miserable as Hell every minute of the day.
No. I haven't the faintest idea who he is or where he has his studio. But I know there has to be such a man and I'm morally certain he feels just like I said.
Yes, I might be able to find her, if I tried. I'm not sure though - by now she probably has other safeguards. Besides, I don't want to.
Oh, I'm off my rocker, am I? That sort of thing can't happen in the Era of the Atom? People can't keep out of sight that way, not even Garbo?
Well I happen to know they can, because last year I was that poor damned photographer I was telling you about. Yes. last year, when the Girl made her first poisonous splash right here in this big little city of ours.
Yes, I knew you weren't here last year and you don't know about it. Even the Girl had to start small. But if you hunted through the files of the local newspapers, you'd find some ads, and I might be able to locate you some of the old displays - I think Lovelybelt is still using one of them. I used to have a mountain of photos myself, until I burned them.
Yes, I made my cut off her. Nothing like what that other photographer must be making, but enough so it still bought this whisky. She was funny about money. I'll tell you about that.
But first picture me then. I had a fourth floor studio in that rathole the Hauser Building, catty-corner from Ardleigh Park.
I'd been working at the Marsh-Mason studios until I'd gotten my bellyful of it and decided to start in for myself. The Hauser Building was crummy - I'll never forget how the stairs creaked but it was cheap and there was a skylight.
Business was lousy. I kept making the rounds of all the advertisers and agencies, and some of them didn't object to me too much personally, but my stuff never clicked. I was pretty near broke. I was behind on my rent. Hell, I didn't even have enough money to have a girl.
It was one of those dark gray afternoons. The building was awfully quiet - even with the shortage they can't half rent the Hauser. I'd just finished developing some pix I was doing on speculation for Lovelybelt Girdles and Buford's Pool and Playground - the last a faked-up beach scene. My model had left. A Miss Leon. She was a civics teacher at one of the high schools and modelled for me on the side, just lately on speculation too. After one look at the prints, I decided that Miss Leon probably wasn't just what Lovelybelt was looking for - or my photography either. I was about to call it a day.
And then the street door slammed four sto
ries down and there were steps on the stairs and she came in.
She was wearing a cheap, shiny black dress. Black pumps. No stockings. And except that she had a gray cloth coat over one of them, those skinny arms of hers were bare. Her arms are pretty skinny, you know, or can you see things like that any more??
And then the thin neck, the slightly gaunt, almost prim face, the tumbling mass of dark hair, and looking out from under it the hungriest eyes in the world.
That's the real reason she's plastered all over the country today, you know - those eyes. Nothing vulgar, but just the same they're looking at you with a hunger that's all sex and something more than sex. That's what everybody's been looking for since the Year One something a little more than sex.
Well, boys, there I was, alone with the Girl, in an office that was getting shadowy, in a nearly empty building. A situation that a million male Americans have undoubtedly pictured to themselves with various lush details. How was I feeling? Scared.
I know sex can be frightening. That cold heart-thumping when you're alone with a girl and feel you're going to touch her. But if it was sex this time, it was overlaid with something else.
At least I wasn't thinking about sex.
I remember that I took a backward step and that my hand jerked so that the photos I was looking at sailed to the floor.
There was the faintest dizzy feeling like something was being drawn out of me. Just a little bit.
That was all. Then she opened her mouth and everything was back to normal for a while.
"I see you're a photographer, mister," she said. "Could you use a model?"
Her voice wasn't very cultivated.
"I doubt it," I told her, picking up the pix. You see, I wasn't impressed. The commercial possibilities of her eyes hadn't registered on me yet, by a long shot. "What have you done?"
Well she gave me a vague sort of story and I began to check her knowledge of model agencies and studios and rates and what not and pretty soon I said to her,
"Look here, you never modelled for a photographer in your life. You just walked in here cold."
Terror in the Modern Vein Page 4