by William Tenn
But the Malt—Dorothy was calling him.
Shirttail rubbed a trembling filthy forefinger up and down the neck of the bottle. "And then I see this little alleyway between the buildings, what there's supposed to be a gate locking it off but it's been left open. I go in, it's dark, but there's a grating, hot air coming up from a basement, and I'm outa the wind. Sack time. What I think I'm one lucky old bum, but it's the last time I think about luck. I wake up, it's light, there's this kid, this Dorothy lookin' at me. Lookin', lookin'. She's got a big ball in her hands and she's standin' there lookin' at me. She points to the bottle.
"'That's my daddy's bottle,' she says. 'He threw it out last night, after the party. But it's his bottle.' I don't want no trouble with kids in this neighborhood, and I don't like the way it feels the way she looks. 'Scat, kid,' I say, and I sack out again. What I wake up next, here I am. I got the bottle and that's all I got. Mac, from that time on, it's rough. What I mean, rough. She had things here then, big things, things with legs and all kindsa—"
As if he were willing and even desirous of doing it, Carter turned his back on The Bad Old Man and began walking down through black fog. Behind him, the words continued to splash out like liquid from a steadily shaken glass. Carter's legs walked in direct contradiction to the nerve impulses they were receiving.
He couldn't refuse, couldn't resist. That much was obvious. As well try to refuse, to resist, the flood of forty days and forty nights, or the sun that Joshua made to stand still. Another way. He must find another way to fight. Meanwhile, he had to come as she demanded.
Dorothy was waiting for him on a patch of well-mown grass near a pink and green bonbon bush. As he came down beside her, she glanced away from him for a moment and at the dark cloud.
It disappeared.
What happened to Shirttail, Carter wondered—had he been wiped out for good? Or temporarily relegated to some sort of Limbo of reverie?
And then he really saw Dorothy—and the changes she had made.
She was still wearing the blue jeans, but the cashmere sweater was clean, perfectly clean. A bright, brand-new yellow. And she was taller. And she was even more slender than she had been before.
But that yellow cashmere sweater!
It was filled with two impossibly protruding breasts that belonged on a poster in front of a cheap movie house announcing the triumphant attributes of a Hollywood love goddess.
The rest of her body was still childlike, seemingly even more so than when he had first seen her, but this was due to the caricature effect of that incredible bosom.
Except—
Yes, except for the smear of red across her lip, the lumps of mascara at the tips of the eyelashes and the clashing, smashing colors on her fingernails. Did this mean—
He shook his head uncertainly, irritably. He hadn't counted on anything like this. Whatever it was.
"So," Dorothy simpered at last. "We meet again."
"It was meant to be," Carter found himself breathing. "We two have a common destiny. We live under the same strange star."
Talk about your precocious kids! But where did she get the dialogue, he wondered frantically—movies? Television drama? Books? Or out of her own neurosis-crammed head? And what did he represent in it? Her role was obvious: she was blatantly competing with Lee.
There was a struggling wisp of uncombed thought: Lee and who else? But over and around it was the horrified knowledge that he was saying things he would never say of his own volition. How soon before he'd be thinking such clichés?
And there was a memory at the back of his mind—he had a name for her that was very much his own creation, very hard to remember, but he had to remember it, something like, rather like, let's see now—Dorothy. The only name for her there was.
But that hadn't been it. No.
He thought in pitiful, despairing wing-flaps, like an ostrich trying to fly. Awful, awful. He had to touch his own real personality somehow. He had to break through.
Shatter—
"Is your love then so strong, so truly true?" she demanded. "You have not forgotten me after all this time? Look into my eyes and tell me so. Tell me that your heart still belongs to me alone."
No, I won't, he groaned. He looked into her eyes. I can't! Not such absolute baloney. And she's a kid—a little girl!
"Do you doubt me, my darling?" he said softly, the sentences coming out of him in so many punched-out breaths. "Don't ever, ever doubt me. You are the only one for me, forever and always, as long as there is a sky overhead and an earth beneath. You and I, forever and always."
He had to stop. She was getting complete control over him. He said whatever she wanted him to say. And he was going to think it, too. But he couldn't prevent the words from flowing out of his mouth, once it was his turn, once she had finished and was waiting—
Dorothy looked off into the distance toward the two hills of equal height. Her eyes were misty, and, in spite of himself, Carter felt a catch in his throat. Ridiculous! And yet how sad...
"I almost feared your love," she mused. "I grew lonely and came to believe—"
Now. While she was doing the talking. While the full force of her mind was not turned compellingly upon him. Make it real. That's the way to bust this dream world. Make it real.
He reached for her.
"—that you had forgotten and found another. How was I to know—"
He grabbed at her.
He made it real.
There was an instant when the ground shook under his feet, when there was ripping sound from one end to another of the solid blue sky. There was just one instant when he exulted.
Then Dorothy turned wide, terror-stricken eyes at him. And screamed!
Her scream was the loudest thing in the universe. It went on and on and on, deafeningly. Yet he wasn't deafened, because he heard it all, every bit of it from the beginning, in each and every note of its immense range, all of its skull-powdering volume, all of its volcanic fear.
Not only Dorothy screamed. The candy trees screamed. The cookie bushes screamed. The two hills screamed. The chocolate river stood up between its screaming banks and screamed. The stones, the very air screamed.
And the ground fell apart and Carter Broun dropped into it. He dropped for centuries, he dropped for eons, he dropped for galactic eternities. Then he stopped dropping, stopped screaming himself, took his hands from his ears and looked around.
He was inside a dull gray, perfectly spherical, perfectly featureless vault. There were no doors and no windows, no seams and no cracks anywhere in the curving surface all about him. It was absolutely impenetrable and absolutely soundproof.
It had to be, he began to realize, as he scuttled dizzily around and around inside it. It had to be impenetrable and soundproof. It had to be at the bottommost bottom of the dream world, so that no sight and no sound from it should ever reach Dorothy's consciousness.
It was a total repression, this chamber of her mind, built to hide the deadly dangerous memory that was himself—built to last as long as Dorothy lasted.
AFTERWORD
One way to explain this story is to point out that, as Picasso had his blue period, I had my Bronx-school-teacher period. For about two years of my life, I seemed to be involved only with females who were elementary-school teachers and who lived in the farthest yay Bronx. The late-evening trips I took with them from my apartment in lower Manhattan's Greenwich Village! The long, well-nigh interminable, rattling subway rides to their clifflike apartment-houses and back! I dreamed of meeting at least one young woman who lived in a suburb—but, unlike my protagonist here, I never did.
And then, of course, there was the fat little girl who came up to my chair one evening, at a dinner party, and asked me the question about a giant caterpillar and a million tiny little lions. Her parents were so proud.
I put it together in a pure fantasy tale aimed at Beyond, the sister magazine to Horace Gold's Galaxy. But Horace told me he needed it as science fiction for Galaxy; he was
overstocked on fantasy for Beyond. I poked at it and pried at it, discontentedly, finally putting it aside to work on something else.
On a summer evening in 1958, on one of his rare trips to New York, I showed the piece to Fredric Brown, who immediately suggested that I use the science-fiction rationale of his own delightful What Mad Universe. I did, and Horace bought the story.
All right—isn't that an explanation? Now here's another, absolutely equally true:
I read Florence Becker Lennon's Victoria Through the Looking Glass, and was deeply impressed by that Freudian investigation into Lewis Carroll.
Then I sat down immediately and reread all of Alice. I reread it all three separate times in a single session. I decided that I hated Freud.
Then I started writing "The Malted Milk Monster."
Written 1957——Published 1959
THE HUMAN ANGLE
What a road! What filthy, dismal, blinding rain! And, by the ghost of old Horace Greeley, what an idiotic, impossible assignment!
John Shellinger cursed the steamy windshield from which a monotonous wiper flipped raindrops. He stared through the dripping, half-clear triangle of glass and tried to guess which was broken country road and which was the overgrown brown vegetation of autumn. He might have passed the slowly moving line of murderous men stretching to right and left across country and road; he might have angled off into a side road and be heading off into completely forsaken land. But he didn't think he had.
What an assignment!
"Get the human angle on this vampire hunt," Randall had ordered. "All the other news services will be giving it the hillbilly twist, medieval superstition messing up the atomic world. What dumb jerks these dumb jerks are! You stay off that line. Find yourself a weepy individual slant on bloodsucking and sob me about three thousand words. And keep your expense account down—you just can't work a big swindle sheet out of that kind of agricultural slum."
So I saddles my convertible, Shellinger thought morosely, and I tools off to the pappy-mammy country where nobody speaks to strangers no-how, "specially now, 'cause the vampire done got to three young 'uns already." And nobody will tell me the names of those three kids or whether any of them are still alive; and Randall's wires keep asking when I'll start sending usable copy; and I still can't find one loquacious Louise in the whole county. Wouldn't even have known of this cross-country hunt if I hadn't begun to wonder where all the men in town had disappeared to on such an unappetizing, rainy evening.
The road was bad in second, but it was impossible in almost any other gear. The ruts weren't doing the springs any good, either. Shellinger rubbed moisture off the glass with his handkerchief and wished he had another pair of headlights. He could hardly see.
That dark patch ahead, for instance. Might be one of the vampire posse. Might be some beast driven out of cover by the brush-beating. Might even be a little girl.
He ground into his brake. It was a girl. A little girl with dark hair and blue jeans. He twirled the crank and stuck his head out into the falling rain.
"Hey, kid. Want a lift?"
The child stooped slightly against the somber background of night and decaying, damp countryside. Her eyes scanned the car, came back to his face and considered it. The kid had probably not known that this chromium-plated kind of postwar auto existed. She'd certainly never dreamed of riding in one. It would give her a chance to crow over the other kids in the 'tater patch.
Evidently deciding that he wasn't the kind of stranger her mother had warned her about and that it would be less uncomfortable in the car than walking in the rain and mud, she nodded. Very slowly, she came around the front and climbed in at his right.
"Thanks, mister," she said.
Shellinger started again and took a quick, sidewise glance at the girl. Her blue jeans were raggedy and wet. She must be terribly cold and uncomfortable, but she wasn't going to let him know. She would bear up under it with the stoicism of the hill people.
But she was frightened. She sat hunched up, her hands folded neatly in her lap, at the far side of the seat right up against the door. What was the kid afraid of? Of course, the vampire!
"How far up do you go?" he asked her gently.
"'Bout a mile and a half. But that way." She pointed over her shoulder with a pudgy thumb. She was plump, much more flesh on her than most of these scrawny, sharecropper kids. She'd be beautiful, too, some day, if some illiterate lummox didn't cart her off to matrimony and hard work in a drafty cabin.
Regretfully, he maneuvered around on the road, got the car turned and started back. He'd miss the hunters, but you couldn't drag an impressionable child into that sort of grim nonsense. He might as well take her home first. Besides, he wouldn't get anything out of those uncommunicative farmers with their sharpened stakes and silver bullets in their squirrel rifles.
"What kind of crops do your folks raise—tobacco or cotton?"
"They don't raise nothing yet. We just came here."
"Oh." That was all right: she didn't have a mountain accent. Come to think of it, she was a little more dignified than most of the children he'd met in this neighborhood. "Isn't it a little late to go for a stroll? Aren't your folks afraid to let you out this late with a vampire around?"
She shivered. "I—I'm careful," she said at last.
Hey! Shellinger thought. Here was the human angle. Here was what Randall was bleating about. A frightened little girl with enough curiosity to swallow her big lump of fear and go out exploring on this night of all others. He didn't know how it fitted, just yet—but his journalistic nose was twitching. There was copy here; the basic, colorful human angle was sitting fearfully on his red plastic seat.
"Do you know what a vampire is?"
She looked at him, startled, dropped her eyes and studied her folded hands for words. "It's—it's like someone who needs people instead of meals." A hesitant pause. "Isn't it?"
"Ye-es." That was good. Trust a child to give you a fresh viewpoint, unspoiled by textbook superstition. He'd use that—"People instead of meals." "A vampire is supposed to be a person who will be immortal—not die, that is—so long as he or she gets blood and life from living people. The only way you can kill a vampire—"
"You turn right here, mister."
—|—
He pointed the car into the little branchlet of side road. It was annoyingly narrow; surprised wet boughs tapped the windshield, ran their leaves lazily across the car's fabric top. Once in a while, a tree top sneezed collected rain water down.
Shellinger pressed his face close to the windshield and tried to decipher the picture of brown mud amid weeds that his headlights gave him. "What a road! Your folks are really starting from scratch. Well, the only way to kill a vampire is with a silver bullet. Or you can drive a stake through the heart and bury it in a crossroads at midnight. That's what those men are going to do tonight if they catch it." He turned his head as he heard her gasp. "What's the matter—don't you like the idea?"
"I think it's horrid," she told him emphatically.
"Why? How do you feel—live and let live?"
She thought it over, nodded, smiled. "Yes, live and let live. Live and let live. After all—" She was having difficulty finding the right words again. "After all, some people can't help what they are. I mean," very slowly, very thoughtfully, "like if a person's a vampire, what can they do about it?"
"You've got a good point there, kid." He went back to studying what there was of the road. "The only trouble's this: if you believe in things like vampires, well, you don't believe in them good—you believe in them nasty. Those people back in the village who claim three children have been killed or whatever it was by the vampire, they hate it and want to destroy it. If there are such things as vampires—mind you, I said 'if'—then, by nature, they do such horrible things that any way of getting rid of them is right. See?"
"No. You shouldn't drive stakes through people."
Shellinger laughed. "I'll say you shouldn't. Never could like that de
al myself. However, if it were a matter of a vampire to me or mine, I think I could overcome my squeamishness long enough to do a little roustabout work on the stroke of twelve."
He paused and considered that this child was a little too intelligent for her environment. She didn't seem to be bollixed with superstitions as yet, and he was feeding her Shellinger on Black Magic. That was vicious. He continued, soberly, "The difficulty with those beliefs is that a bunch of grown men who hold them are spread across the countryside tonight because they think a vampire is on the loose. And they're likely to flush some poor hobo and finish him off gruesomely for no other reason than that he can't give a satisfactory explanation for his presence in the fields on a night like this."
Silence. She was considering his statement. Shellinger liked her dignified thoughtful attitude. She was a bit more at ease, he noticed, and was sitting closer to him. Funny how a kid could sense that you wouldn't do her any harm. Even a country kid. Especially a country kid, come to think of it, because they lived closer to nature or something.
He had won her confidence, though, and consequently rewon his. A week of living among thin-lipped ignoramuses who had been not at all diffident in showing their disdain had made him a little uncertain. This was better. And he'd finally got a line on the basis of a story.
Only, he'd have to dress it up. In the story, she'd be an ordinary hillbilly kid, much thinner, much more unapproachable; and the quotes would all be in "mountain" dialect.
Yes, he had the human interest stuff now.
She had moved closer to him again, right against his side. Poor kid! His body warmth made the wet coldness of her jeans a little less uncomfortable. He wished he had a working heater in the car.
The road disappeared entirely into tangled bushes and gnarly trees. He stopped the car, flipped the emergency brake.