Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  He stepped out to meet the sudden spotlight, and as it fell on him he turned pale and clutched his chest. Something made the ringsiders shrink back from him. Something—the faintest of sounds.

  Arrara …

  “He’s sick!” whispered someone.

  A woman half-rose and cried, “His heart!”

  “Has he got a heart on the right side?” asked the man next to Tina.

  Tina said clearly, “He has a dragon in his cigarette case.” But of course no one paid her any attention.

  Brokaw bowed stiffly and went out. The chrome-plated master of ceremonies returned with his pasty-faced microphone, and Tina rose, dazedly made her way to the exit, handed a palm which materialized before her the cover charge plus ten percent, and escaped up the stairs.

  The outside air tasted so good it made her sneeze. She was still shuddering inside over Brokaw’s finale. She walked briskly homeward, and gradually the shock of that terrifying performance was replaced by curiosity.

  What manner of man was Lee Brokaw? With an act like that, why wasn’t he on Fifty-second Street? Or even on Broadway? Why, if he so casually offered that cigarette case around to chance acquaintances was he so profoundly affected when it growled at him?

  How had he been so sure she would see him again? Did he have her figured so well that he had known she would be at the performance? Most of all, what on earth could he want with her?

  Turning in at her apartment house, she fingered her cheek and jaw. Maybe he wanted a dancing partner who would spar a little and thus add a certain color to the climax. Of course, she had to admit that all that hair was becoming …

  III

  Tina undressed, went into her pajamas. She felt much better after that. She loaded her night table with sketching materials, a book on design, and two volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica which had plates of shells. Two button sets and an izthatta later, she was happily asleep.

  It must have been four hours afterward that she awoke. She opened her eyes very quietly, without moving. Something urged her not to start up, but to relax and look the situation over. The situation was Lee Brokaw’s smooth, imperturbable face, slightly larger than life size. It floated, apparently, in midair between her and the opposite wall. It wore a gentle smile which ended at the cheekbones. The eyes were as steady and as deep as ever.

  She said, “Wh-wh—” and the face turned chillingly upside down, got quite pink, then scarlet—a real blood-scarlet, as if it were looking at her through red glass—and then slowly disappeared.

  Tina blanched and dived under the covers. In a moment one arm crept out and, feeling along the night table, turned on the lamp. She worked the blanket over her head and face, found an edge, doubled it into a sort of peephole, and peered out.

  There was nothing to see.

  She took a deep breath, held it, flung the covers off, bounded across the room and switched on the overhead light.

  Still nothing. She withdrew into the center of the room and gazed slowly around. A movement caught the corner of her eye, and she cried out in terror as she turned to face—her own reflection in the bathroom mirror!

  “Great day in the morning! Is that me?” she muttered, staring in shocked disbelief at the dilated pupils, the chalky countenance.

  “Bad dreams,” she told her reflection reassuringly. “Some way or other, sister, you’re not living right.”

  She washed her face and went back to bed. She lay a moment in thought, then got up again and located a pair of nub-spiked golf shoes. These she put on the night table. Then she rolled over, tucked herself in, threw back the covers, got up, switched off the bathroom light, the overhead light, and, at last, the night-table lamp.

  She was, by this time, much more annoyed than frightened. It had been many a moon since she had let anything throw her into such a dither. She fell asleep angrily, almost by an effort of will, and found herself in a fine technicolor nightmare involving a purring dragon which wanted to stamp on her head.

  She came up out of it fighting, only to find Brokaw’s glowing face staring at her again. This time she was prepared, and in a single fluid movement she let fly with one of the heavy shoes. The shoe struck the face right between the eyes. There was a loud crash and a torrent of profanity from the street below.

  Tina turned on the light, peered around her, and went timorously to the window. She peeped out—no difficult feat since her shoe had passed completely through the pane and apparently collided with the head of the policeman who was standing in cold-eyed fury directly below, kneading his skull and looking up. He fell silent the instant she appeared.

  She realized much too late that he did so admiringly. There was plenty of light behind her.

  A policeman! She’d soon find out how Brokaw was pulling this little stunt! She’d slap him in jail until he begged for mercy and the devil called him Granddad! She’d—

  Her brain raced. She’d do what? Say to the officer: “There was a face floating in my room and I threw a shoe at it and it disappeared and I want you to throw Lee Brokaw in the clink.”?

  Oh, no.

  She turned to her empty room and screamed, “I’ll teach you to come home at this hour, you heel!”

  “Lady,” said the policeman, “talk to him more quietly or I’ll have to take a hand in this.”

  “I’m so sorry, officer,” she called down, and then even more loudly into the room, “now see what you’ve done!”

  As she left the window she thought she could hear the policeman saying sadly, “The poor guy. I wouldn’t be in his shoes.”

  The following morning she arrived at her shop a few minutes later than usual. Not only had she overslept but she had been compelled to explain to the superintendent of her building that he had cleaned the windows so very clean that she had gone and stuck her silly head through one of the panes. She felt somewhat less than rested, and probably the least popular person in her cosmos was Lee Brokaw.

  She opened the door, glanced around at her displays, and went back to the workroom. With grim deliberation she turned on the gooseneck lamp and the photocell, and settled down to work.

  Then she saw what was inscribed on the black blotter to her right. It had apparently been written with the silver pencil which was bundled up with all the other colors at the back of the table. It said, simply, “Here I am.”

  It was written in a neat, possibly hurried hand, with fine lines and an even slant. It was almost a feminine handwriting.

  “All right,” she muttered. “Here I am, too.” Tight-lipped, she picked up the blotter.

  There was another blotter underneath it—a white blotter. On it, very much less than life-size, was the same face she had seen in her bedroom. It did not turn upside down. It simply faded slowly and disappeared.

  Tina sat tensely watching the blank blotter, her hands achingly clasped. She sat like that until the blotter began to blur. Then she closed her eyes.

  Aloud she asked herself, “Can I say it now, Tina? Can I, huh?” She nodded in reply. “Go ahead,” she said to herself. “You’ll feel better if you do.” A pause. Then: “All right, I will. I’m really and truly scared, and I should never have listened to Eddy and I should never have gone to s-see that devil last night.”

  Tina realized suddenly that this couldn’t go on. Either she got away from Lee Brokaw, Chelsea, New York itself—or she stayed. Going away was impossible from a business point of view and unthinkable from an ethical one. Then she must stay. But if she stayed, she couldn’t just wait for something even more terrifying to happen. She had to smoke out the trouble. If things got worse, at least she’d know what she was up against. If things got better, well—that was what she wanted.

  What to do, then?

  Find Lee Brokaw, obviously, and get his story. Force him to talk even if she had to pound it out of him with a conch shell.

  The chime sounded. She put her face back together and went into the shop. “Eddy!” she exclaimed, and hope he wouldn’t notice how close she was to tea
rs.

  “Hi, falutin’.”

  She forced herself to smile. “Lo, brow.”

  Eddy picked up an abalone shell and began toying with it absently. “How much were you kidding about that Lee Brokaw character last night?” he asked.

  “Not a bit,” she assured him.

  “You said he was a vampire.”

  “You said he was,” she reminded him. “All I really know is that he walked in here with some proposition that I couldn’t let him finish, that he had a cigarette case which growled at me, and that he—”

  “Go on.”

  “Nup.”

  He knew that monosyllable well enough to leave it alone. “Okay, let’s take it as it comes. All you know is that he walked in here—without the photocell noticing him. He made you some offer which you insist wasn’t what one would assume it to be, though you don’t seem to know why.”

  “I just know,” said Tina defensively. “Look, Eddy, if you think that Lee Brokaw is assuming the proportions of a deadly rival, you can think again.”

  “I’m not worried,” said Eddy in an unconvincing voice.

  “Eddy,” she said thoughtfully, “what is so fascinating about Lee Brokaw just now? I’ve never seen you fret about anything like this before.”

  “I’ve never run across anything like this before,” Eddy said. “I’ll tell you what I know, Tina. Maybe a couple of things will clear up. Last night about half an hour before closing time, Shaw was in. You know him—manager of that smoke-hole where Brokaw has his act. He was in a fine froth. He wanted to know where Brokaw was. He stood up in a chair and yammered at the customers. Seems he had a second show in a few minutes and Brokaw was among the missing.”

  “Any luck?” Tina asked.

  Eddy shook his head. “None of the customers seemed to know anything. I remembered what you said and called him over. He told me that he had hired a ham act and that Brokaw had come up with something that wowed the customers. He was afraid that some competitor had bought him away, I think—though he pretended to be worried about the dear boy personally.

  “I asked him what he knew about Brokaw—maybe we could locate the kind of place he might be found in. He didn’t know a thing. Brokaw’d been in two days before and described his act and had done a short solo. Shaw never dreamed it was anything good.”

  Tina shuddered, “It was awful.”

  “Most of those acts are,” said Eddy. “Anyway, I told him—what did you say? How do you know it was awful?”

  “I saw it, Eddy.”

  “You saw—Didn’t I tell you to keep away from there?”

  “Yes, Eddy. You told me,” she said, and her voice was altogether too gentle. “You didn’t ask me, though.”

  “I didn’t—Oh, I see. Little Miss Muscles can’t be given orders, eh? All right, Tina. I’ll stay out of your troubles. You can take care of yourself, and so forth. Only, when you’re in up to your neck, don’t—”

  “I know, I know. I’m not to come yelling for you. Don’t worry, I won’t.”

  He went to the door. “I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say don’t forget whom to yell for.”

  The chime sounded his departure. Not loudly, but with a faint tinkling sound that slowly died away into silence.

  IV

  She started after him, then stopped abruptly and dropped her arms. Why did men have to be so pig-headed? Why did every man who got interested in a girl appoint himself as braintrust, bodyguard, and duenna? Just to top it, the men who liked her invariably said they liked her because she was independent and self-sufficient. She compressed her lips and half-snorted, half-moaned in aggravation.

  The moan was answered from the back of the shop.

  Tina froze.

  The moan was repeated. It was not so much a moan of pain, though pain was there. It was a moan of desolation—of utter hopelessness and despair.

  Eddy was only a half-block away. Perhaps she should—on the other hand, Eddy was an egocentric, puffed up creature with a dictator complex who wanted his women helpless. She’d investigate herself. She squared her shoulders and went into the back room.

  There was nothing there but the moan. She looked under the settee and in the closet. Then she heard it again. It was outside, in the alley.

  With some difficulty—the door was almost never used—she shot back the bolts and pulled it open. She looked to right and left. The noise was there again, faintly, almost behind her. She looked down a short flight of cellar steps. Near the bottom was Lee Brokaw.

  “M-Mr. Brokaw?”

  He started violently, staggered to his feet and shrank against the wall behind him. He was tattered and dirty, and his fine jaw was covered with harsh stubble. But none of this subtracted one whit from his incredible grace.

  “You,” he breathed, and his voice was still the mellow tenor she had noticed before. But now it was faint and frightened.

  “What’s the matter? Are you hurt?” she asked with alarm. “Come up out of there!”

  “Will you take me inside where no one can see?”

  “Come on. No one will see,” she promised.

  He tiptoed up, crouching, his eyes on her face. They were full of eagerness and hope, and a terrible fear. He dances every minute, she thought.

  Every single minute.

  He flowed around her and into the open door like a feather borne on an eddy of wind. “Lock it,” he said, and while she complied he went to the partition and peered out.

  “The chime will ring if anyone comes into the shop,” she said.

  “Will it?” he asked, and smiled.

  Remembering, she said, “Oh.” She pushed past him and sat at her work table. “Stretch out on the settee,” she said briskly. “I can see if anything comes in.” Why she said ‘anything’ instead of ‘anyone,’ she didn’t know. “Are you in trouble?”

  He nodded, sinking gratefully back on the settee.

  She stared at him. He looked so young, so tortured. The face was so different from the bland, cruelly smiling one she had seen in her room. But she could not deny it was the same face.

  “I saw you last night,” she told him, on sudden impulse.

  “I know you did,” he said, putting his hand to his breast pocket. “I didn’t see you, though.”

  “Oh—the cigarette case! I remember. You don’t mean it growled because I was there?”

  “It did.” He took the case out and tossed it carelessly into her lap. She recoiled, staring at it. She was afraid to touch it, even to drop it. But she had to know. She gritted her teeth, lifted it, and said, “I’m going to open it.”

  “Go ahead,” he said, as if he had much more important things on his mind.

  She looked at him sharply. His eyes were closed, and a furrow of concentration was drawing together the inner ends of his brows. She drew a deep breath and—touched the clasp. The case sprang open.

  Of all the things she expected to find in that case—the little crawling horrors, the amulets, the runes on parchment, even perhaps the electronic gear that had so cleverly made the growling sound—what she least expected to find in it was what it actually contained. The shock of it was almost more than she could stand.

  What she felt was the utmost refinement of the feeling you have when, in a dream, you mount ten steps where only nine exist. True, there was a dragon there. It was etched on the inside of the lid, but it was no more ugly than those on the outside, and it even wore a smile. Otherwise the case held, of all things—cigarettes.

  “This,” she said, when she could at last say anything, “is positively the last straw. Lee Brokaw, who are you, and what makes you think you can frighten me? Why have you done things you must know I would refuse to believe—and bitterly resent.”

  He rested on one elbow and looked at her. Again his eyes were unfathomable. “I am a dancer,” he said. “If you tell me what you think I have done, maybe I can explain. I want you, very desperately, to do something for me. I want you, because you’re exactly suited to the t
ask.” He spread his hands, as if to say, “Could anything be simpler?” and lay back.

  “What is this task?” she demanded.

  “You mean—you’ll do it?” There was sudden hope in his eyes.

  Tina shook her head. “I certainly said nothing of the sort.”

  “I can’t tell you about it if there’s any possibility of your not doing it,” he said.

  “Well, then, drop dead or something,” Tina flared. “I have a job!”

  “You’ll see me everywhere if you don’t,” he said. “At your home and at work.”

  “I’ve had a couple of samples of that,” she replied acidly. “I could get used to it.”

  “It will get worse,” he said, almost pleadingly, as if he did not want it to happen. “Other people will have my face when you speak to them. You will feel my hands on your face and your body. You will hear my voice when you listen to music, and later, you will hear it more and more until the whole world is filled with my voice and my face and my touch. You will go mad.”

  “I can keep you out,” she said stoutly. “You can’t walk through walls.”

  “Or through light-beams?”

  Tina gulped. “I don’t care what you do, or how much of it. You’re crazy. I’m warning you now—there’s nothing you can do to persuade me to do anything for you.”

  Arrara …

  “Oh, please,” gasped Brokaw. He swung off the settee and came to her, sitting at her feet with his easy, drifting motion. He took her hands in his long, strong, slender ones, and turned his face up to her. It was changed now. His eyes were wide with terror, and the delicate lips worked.

  His voice was a whisper, shrill with fright. “That was the last warning. It will be sometime today, or tonight. Please help me, Tina—please, please. Only you can help me …” and he buried his face in her lap.

  She looked down at his shivering shoulders, and thought of the calm strength he had radiated; thought of his symmetrical, unshakeable expression of objective power. Then her mind returned to the poor broken thing before her.

  She stroked his sleek black hair. “You poor thing,” she said. “I’ll help you. You mustn’t cry, Lee, you mustn’t. I’ll help you …”