Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Your next cue is to laugh gaily while the customer reaches into her jeans for the exorbitant price of the izthatta, Chelsea being near enough to the Village for jeans on ladies to be de rigeur.

  Tina’s window displays were changed weekly, and brought in a lot of trade. Now it would be a spread of fragile coral-lace and crab-claws, largely labelled: SKELETON ART. (No mussels). And next week the display would be a highly abstract piece of business all made of urchin-quill and mother-of-pearl, captivatingly captioned: UNCONCHIOUS ART, without, of course, a conch in sight.

  In the third week of a warm March, Tina was busily working with tweezers, cement, Swiss pattern files and a set of surgical tools. She worked in a small alcove separated from the rest of the shop by a curved partition, with a splendid assortment of her wares spread out under a gooseneck lamp of high voltage.

  The opening in the partition between the workroom and the shop was small—but so was Tina. Her knowledge of a customer’s advent was gained in two ways. First, there was the photo-electric beam which crossed the outer doorway, in such a way that its interruption would actuate a mellow chime. Second, there was a hole cut through the partition. The aperture was at her eye-level as she sat at work and it enabled her to see clearly everything that went on in the shop.

  Imagine, then, her astonishment when she looked up from her work and saw through the peephole that there was a man in her shop. Eddy Southworth, whose hobby was electronics, had assured her that no one could possibly pass through the outer door without breaking the photo-electric beam. Yet the chime had not rung, and indisputably there was a man in the shop—a slender, graceful man with black hair like a carapace and heavily knitted brows.

  Tina rose quickly, straightened her hair and squeezed through the partition. “Yes?” she inquired, confronting the intruder so abruptly that he recoiled a step.

  “Yes indeed,” said the man. He was young, and he had a voice like the middle register of an oboe. He looked up quickly and back to the showcase on which he had been leaning, the darting swiftness of his glance subtracting nothing from its thoroughness. Tina felt like a file-drawer from which inventory cards had been quite deliberately spilled.

  “Would—would you like something?” she asked faintly.

  She stepped hopefully behind the showcase, but to no avail. He promptly turned his back, to gaze up and across, down and around the shop.

  “The old shell game,” he said as if in amazement to himself.

  “There was a time,” she said pleasantly, “when I had only heard that once in connection with this business, which was founded by my grandfather. Is there anything—uh—inanimate here which appeals to you?”

  “Oh yes,” he said, turning finally to face her. He had, it appeared, disturbingly ironic eyebrows. “Where were you on the night of March twenty-fifth, two years ago?”

  She stared at him. “Are you serious?”

  “I certainly am,” he said soberly, “I would really like to know. It’s difficult for me to explain, but you must believe that it’s important to me.”

  “I don’t think I can—Wait now.” She tilted back her head and closed her eyes. Two years ago. Of course. She had been in Rochester, and—“I do remember!” she said. “It’s strange that you should ask me. I was staying with an aunt in Rochester that spring, and I had a violent quarrel which seems very silly now. I was quite the Girl Scout then. I was so angry I got my kit and headed for the hills. I didn’t see a soul I knew for almost two weeks.”

  “No one?” He stared at her intently. “Think now. Didn’t anybody know where you were?”

  “Not a soul,” she said positively. “And where were you that night, if I’m not being too curious? Just where, precisely?”

  He smiled a very white smile. His teeth seemed to be pointed. “I am sorry,” he apologized. “That was very rude of me. Would you like to make some money?”

  Tina nodded energetically. “By selling seashells.”

  “I mean real money.”

  “How? By selling thousands of seashells?”

  He sighed. “There’s one thing I’m sure of,” he said. “You are being stupid on purpose.”

  “I shall take that as a compliment,” she said, and added, “I wonder how much more I’ll have to take.”

  He laughed engagingly. “Your sense of humor seems to stay with you no matter what the provocation. I’ve noticed your window displays, for example. Laughing in the face of a business recession. You’d probably remain buoyant in the face of any menace.”

  “You try me,” she said without inflection. “I rather think you’d be surprised.”

  The eyebrows tensed like the wings of a gliding gull. “Perhaps I will.”

  “What has my sense of humor to do with all this,” she asked, meeting his gaze defiantly.

  “More than you might suspect. I have a job to do, and I need a girl like you to assist me.” He straightened, his long face all clear planes and forced patience. “Cigarette?”

  He took a silver cigarette case from his pocket and offered it to her unopened.

  She stopped her head in mid-shake and took the case. “What a lovely thing!” she exclaimed.

  “Is it?” said the man.

  “Surely there can be no doubt about it. What a beautiful dragon!”

  “There are seven dragons,” he pointed out.

  “Sev—Oh, I see. Two around the edge here, all curled around each other. Uh-huh—and one peeping around the pagoda.”

  “There are a good many pagodas around Peiping, too.”

  “Hey!” she laughed. “That was my line. Now, let’s see—that makes four dragons.”

  “There are two more on the back,” he murmured.

  She turned the case over. “I don’t like those. They look positively ferocious.”

  “They’ve been fighting again. But most dragons do look ferocious.”

  She looked at him quizzically. His calm, handsome face had grown, if anything, more sardonic. Recognizing that he was willing to let the impossible conversation go on until closing time, she dropped her eyes to the case.

  “Where’s the seventh dragon?” she asked.

  Arrara-arrara said the case. It spoke softly, like a lisping child with moist red lips. Tina gasped, and closed her eyes. The case moved gently but firmly in her grasp, just as if someone were trying to twist it away from her. She trembled and opened her eyes. The young man was trying to pry it from her fingers. She raised it with a shudder of revulsion.

  Arrara, said the case indignantly. The man said, “Shut up, you.”

  Tina said, “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Not you,” he said to Tina. “I was just thinking aloud, in reference to something else. Cigarette?”

  “Thanks no,” said Tina swiftly, her eyes on the case in horrified disbelief as it went back into the man’s pocket. She wet her lips. “The other dragon’s inside, huh?”

  “That’s right. Now, about this little job. I can make it decidedly worth your while if you’ll come in.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” said Tina, moistening her lips. “But if I should consider it I’d like to know in advance what it is I may have to say ‘No’ to.”

  “Well, it’s like this. I have a friend who wants to get married, in a manner of speaking, and you’re the ideal—Oh, see here now. Stop shaking your head like that.”

  “I can’t help it. That ‘in a manner of speaking’ just about does it. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye. My name is Lee Brokaw. I’m a dancer—adagio.”

  He looked her up and down and smiled. “Of course I didn’t really mean ‘good-bye.’ I wish you would save both of us the trouble involved in my becoming insistent,” he said smoothly. “How about dinner tonight?”

  For reply she marched to the doorway and stood there. The photocell chime crooned from the back of the shop. She threw up a firm thumb. “Come along, little man. Actually, it’s past my customary closing hour.”

  As if this were a cue, he nodded with
feigned resignation and passed through the door. “See you tomorrow,” he promised.

  Shaking her head, Tina went back into the shop. She was sharp-witted enough to realize that she must depend for the support of her unusual trade on unusual people. Of these she certainly had had more than her share, from the gentleman who would buy no ornament at which his schnauzer would not wag its tail, to the woman who had three rooms of her house redecorated to suit a purple tie-rack she had purchased at a fire sale. But this Lee Brokaw character was strictly eggs in the beer. What was it he kept locked up in that cigarette case?

  II

  Tina had dinner with Eddy Southworth. He was an artist who lived and worked in the Village, but unlike most artists, he put in regular hours. He was locally well-known, and his works were considered delicate, tasteful and distinctly on the light side. He made flapjacks in the window of the Blue Tower Cafeteria, and anyone who watched his ambidextrous hot-cake-tossing knew that here indeed was an artist. Having dinner with him meant sitting across the counter, snatching phrases between servings, and filtering romantic comments through a mouthful of the spécíalité de la maison, as follows:

  “Hya, cinth.”

  “Lo, quacious.” This was a routine, an intimacy, and a mental exercise. “Stack them with cherry syrup.”

  “Food of the Gods! How’s it with you, Tina?” Before she could reply he was gone to the front of the place, to fill the air with somersaulting pancakes. On his way back with a batter-bucket, she determinedly clipped his elbow.

  “Eddy, what kind of a man could walk between a photocell and a light and not ring an alarm?”

  “A ghost,” said Eddy solemnly. “Or a vampire. Did you have one in the shop today?”

  She nodded. “That’s nice,” he said, automatically. He went to the mixer at the back of the cafeteria and began to fill his bucket. “What?” he bellowed suddenly, and came back. “What about this guy? Did he wear a black cloak? Did he have a widow’s peak, pointed teeth and a demon in his pocket?”

  “No—I mean, yes. And he has a dragon in his cigarette case.”

  Her hotcakes arrived. Eddy sprinted to the front, tossed and stacked eight additional cakes, rocketed to the back and tuned off the batter-cock just as the batter was forming a reverse miniscus. Then he peered over the edge of the bucket, and went back with it at a dead run, the bucket describing one single arc, like a pendulum-bomb, from the mixer to the griddles, without losing a drop. Someone up the line applauded. Eddy squirted a dozen discs of batter onto the griddle and came back to Tina.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Ah thirtny am mot,” she said through a hotcake.

  “You just mean a wolf. Not a werewolf.”

  “Ath a matter of ah,” she said, and swallowed, “he isn’t. I mean, he didn’t seem to be. He wants me for something, he says.”

  He nodded eagerly. “But he’s not a wolf. You’re sure of that?”

  “I think,” she twinkled—and it cost her an effort—“that he wants me for a fate worse than a fate worse than death.”

  She changed her mouth from a bow to an O, and stoked. Eddy picked up two turners instead of one, a sign of deep thought.

  “What’s with this dragon you spoke about?” he asked.

  “It’s in the most gorgeous silver cigarette case you ever saw.”

  “What does it do?”

  “It goes arrara.”

  Eddy jumped back. “Don’t do that,” he gasped. “For Pete’s sake—”

  “I’m sorry, Eddy. Terribly sorry. But that’s exactly what it does. I—I’d like some coffee.”

  “Black with one!” Eddy bellowed. “Where does this apple tend bar? Or does he panhandle on the Bowery?”

  “He’s a dancer,” Tina said. “When he left he pointed to the Mello Club and said, ‘Look at that.’ After I shut up the shop I looked. He’s billed there—‘Brokaw and Rapunzel, adagio.’ ”

  “I’m out of grease,” said Eddy to the waitress. “Tina, I don’t like the sound of this guy.”

  “Yes, Eddy.”

  “See you tomorrow?”

  “Yes, Eddy.”

  “Stay away from the Mello Club.”

  “Yes, Eddy.”

  So Tina went to the Mello Club to catch Brokaw’s act.

  The Mello Club was a cramped and crowded bistro in which the ceiling, having heard so many customers ask “How low can you get?” seemed to have accepted the challenge. The lighting was of a dimness to which the human eye could not become accustomed, because of its reluctance to recognize such atrocious color combinations.

  The dimness was functional, insofar as the place had a function. It kept the customers in obscurity, so that each customer thought his own disgust was unshared, and therefore remained. It kept the customers’ disgust from reaching the master of ceremonies while he created it. It suited the quality of the air, so that taint did not intrude. In short, a fine, healthy place.

  Tina fumbled her way down the steps and into the club, sighted a gleam of brass from a trombone bell, pointed her elbow at it, closed her eyes and walked. She was small, but she had the directness of a destroyer escort. She brought up against a table not ten feet from the dance floor, which was, of course, two-thirds of the way to the wall. She sat down.

  Hardly had she done so when the up-beat cacophony from the orchestra came to a screaming stop and the master of ceremonies came out, dragging with him a microphone with a head as polished and featureless as his own. Into it and the glare of a ceiling spot which painfully flooded him, he began to recite what had happened to him on the way to the club that night.

  Tina rested her elbows on the table as the most comfortable way to keep her hands over her ears, and tried to locate Lee Brokaw in the babbling gloom. Occasionally she lifted her hands enough to find out if the emcee’s droning obscenities were turning into anything like an announcement.

  It was hot. Someone was breathing down her neck. She leaned forward a little and found herself breathing in someone’s armpit. She leaned back again. It must have been then that the announcement was made, because suddenly, shockingly, the lights went out.

  For a moment someone with the touch of a fly’s foot seemed to be brushing a cymbal, and then there was not a sound from the tables. Slowly a blue-green light began to glow, so faintly at first that it could have been there for seconds before she noticed it at all. Gradually she became aware of a figure standing in the middle of the dance floor. The emcee? No, for he had been wearing a dinner jacket. This was something bone-white and slender. The light increased, or her eyes sharpened, and she suddenly saw that it was a girl, nude, splendidly if slightly built, and wearing some sort of a tall hat or—a crown. The light steadied, but did not become bright enough to show anything clearly.

  The girl began to dance. There was no sonorous music, only a faint, flute-like plucking which she recognized as a melody played solely in the harmonics of a guitar. The girl moved slowly. She took two small steps forward, and then sank to her knees and touched her forehead to the floor.

  The music stopped, but the heartbeat drum quickened as she straightened up again. There was a moment when it missed one beat, and the shock of that was followed by a blaze of yellow light and a painful, discordant blare from every brass in the orchestra.

  Tina’s aching eyes caught one brief glimpse of the girl’s body as the dancer shook her head. Her crown was hair—real spun-gold hair that cascaded down and around her like water. She knelt there, head raised, wide blue eyes staring, arms up and out, cloaked in shimmering blue-green gold. And only then did Tina see Lee Brokaw.

  He was standing behind the girl, looking down at her impassively. It was he who held her white arms up, with his long fingers around her slender wrists. Slowly he brought them together and grasped both wrists in one hand. She turned toward him and rose. Her hair was impossible—bewildering. It fell to the floor in a mass that was thick and delicate at once. It was liquid fire; it was smoke. It was like no other hair Tina had ever seen.
She remembered the name of the act then—Brokaw and Rapunzel. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden hair …”

  The music burst hoarsely into a travesty of the Apache dance. With slow, feline steps they moved about the floor. Brokaw’s handsome, almost beautiful face held the girl’s eyes. Her features were as motionless as wax.

  As they danced, he took one of her arms behind her and apparently began to twist it. Her body stiffened and arched backward; and her head too went back. Brokaw bared his teeth in a frightful smile, bent his head and put his mouth to her throat. They danced that way for four slow measures, and when he lifted his head, the marks of his teeth were easy to see.

  Abruptly he pirouetted away from her, and around her. She held her arms over her head, her hands touching his, her eyes glassily staring. The tempo of the music rose. Brokaw spun the girl to him and away, to him and away, as the music sped up to its climax. He stopped her in a final pirouette, both her arms pinioned behind her.

  In a crescendo of noise and light, he raised his fist and smashed it into her upturned face. She dropped like rag doll, and, as the cymbals crashed three times, and with his face as calm as a sunlit cathedral, he stamped on her head, crushing it flat.

  In the silence and the blaze of light, Lee Brokaw stood up, smiled, and bowed from the waist. Then a woman screamed, and applause broke out in one great shout which changed to a roar of bruising palms and stamping feet. Brokaw bowed again, scooped up the limp collection of long limbs and golden hair, and tossed it over his shoulder. Sawdust trickled from the flattened head, and the clever hinging of one white elbow could be seen.

  “But—she danced by herself!” Tina said aloud.

  “In what kind of light?” said a man next to her, pounding the table. “And him in black!”

  The thunder rose, and rose again as the lights dimmed to toxic obscurity. And finally Lee Brokaw came out to take a second bow.