Reuben Choatsby overflowed the outsize chair behind his desk. His little face, like a baby’s head balanced on a giant suet pudding, beamed as Bill entered. “Changed your mind, eh?” His words came in sudden soft blobs, like the abrupt glugs of pouring syrup. “Good. Need you in K-39. Lab’s not the same since you left.”
Bill groped for the exactly right words. “That’s not it, R. C. I’m on my own now and I’m doing all right.”
The baby face soured. “Damned cheek. Competitor of mine, eh? What you want now? Waste my time?”
“Not at all.” With a pretty shaky assumption of confidence, Bill perched on the edge of the desk. “R. C.,” he said, slowly and impressively, “what would you give for a glimpse into the future?”
Mr. Choatsby glugged vigorously. “Ribbing me? Get out of here! Have you thrown out— Hold on! You’re the one— Used to read queer books. Had a grimoire here once.” The baby face grew earnest. “What d’you mean?”
“Just what I said, R. C. What would you give for a glimpse into the future?”
Mr. Choatsby hesitated. “How? Time travel? Pyramid? You figured out the King’s Chamber?”
“Much simpler than that. I have here”—he took it out of his pocket and folded it so that only the name and the date line were visible—“tomorrow’s newspaper.”
Mr. Choatsby grabbed. “Let me see.”
“Uh-uh. Naughty. You’ll see after we discuss terms. But there it is.”
“Trick. Had some printer fake it. Don’t believe it.”
“All right. I never expected you, R. C., to descend to such unenlightened skepticism. But if that’s all the faith you have—” Bill stuffed the paper back in his pocket and started for the door.
“Wait!” Mr. Choatsby lowered his voice. “How’d you do it? Sell your soul?”
“That wasn’t necessary.”
“How? Spells? Cantrips? Incantations? Prove it to me. Show me it’s real. Then we’ll talk terms.”
Bill walked casually to the desk and emptied his pipe into the ash tray.
“I’m underdeveloped. I run errands. I’m named Snulbug. It isn’t enough—now I should be a testimonial!”
Mr. Choatsby—stared rapt at the furious little demon raging in his ash tray. He watched reverently as Bill held out the pipe for its inmate, filled it with tobacco, and lit it. He listened awe-struck as Snulbug moaned with delight at the flame.
“No more questions,” he said. “What terms?”
“Fifteen thousand dollars.” Bill was ready for bargaining.
“Don’t put it too high,” Snulbug warned. “You better hurry.”
But Mr. Choatsby had pulled out his checkbook and was scribbling hastily. He blotted the check and handed it over. “It’s a deal.” He grabbed up the paper. “You’re a fool, young man. Fifteen thousand! Hmf!” He had it open already at the financial page. “With what I make on the market tomorrow, never notice $15,000. Pennies.”
“Hurry up,” Snulbug urged.
“Goodbye, sir,” Bill began politely, “and thank you for—” But Reuben Choatsby wasn’t even listening.
“What’s all this hurry?” Bill demanded as he reached the elevator.
“People!” Snulbug sighed. “Never you mind what’s the hurry. You get to your bank and deposit that check.”
So Bill, with Snulbug’s incessant prodding, made a dash to the bank worthy of his descents on the city hall and on the Choatsby Laboratories. He just made it, by stop-watch fractions of a second. The door was already closing as he shoved his way through at three o’clock sharp.
He made his deposit, watched the teller’s eyes bug out at the size of the check, and delayed long enough to enjoy the incomparable thrill of changing the account from William Hitchens to The Hitchens Research Laboratory.
Then he climbed once more into his car, where he could talk with his pipe in peace. “Now,” he asked as he drove home, “what was the rush?”
“He’d stop payment.”
“You mean when he found out about the merry-go-round? But I didn’t promise him anything. I just sold him tomorrow’s paper. I didn’t guarantee he’d make a fortune of it.”
“That’s all right. But—”
“Sure, you warned me. But where’s the hitch? R. C.’s a bandit, but he’s honest. He wouldn’t stop payment.”
“Wouldn’t he?”
The car was waiting for a stop signal. The newsboy in the intersection was yelling “Uxtruh!” Bill glanced casually at the headline, did a double take, and instantly thrust out a nickel and seized a paper.
He turned into a side street, stopped the car, and went through this paper. Front page: MAYOR ASSASSINATED. Sports page: Alhazred at twenty to one. Obituaries: The same list he’d read at noon. He turned back to the date line. August 22. Tomorrow.
“I warned you,” Snulbug was explaining. “I told you I wasn’t strong enough to go far into the future. I’m not a well demon, I’m not. And an itch in the memory is something fierce. I just went far enough ahead to get a paper with tomorrow’s date on it. And any dope knows that a Tuesday paper comes out Monday afternoon.”
For a moment Bill was dazed. His magic paper, his fifteen-thousand-dollar paper, was being hawked by newsies on every corner. Small wonder R. C. might have stopped payment! And then he saw the other side. He started to laugh. He couldn’t stop.
“Look out!” Snulbug shrilled. “You’ll drop my pipe. And what’s so funny?”
Bill wiped tears from his eyes. “I was right. Don’t you see, Snulbug? Man can’t be licked. My magic was lousy. All it could call up was you. You brought me what was practically a fake, and I got caught on the merry-go-round of time trying to use it. You were right enough there; no good could come of that magic.
“But without the magic, just using human psychology, knowing a man’s weaknesses, playing on them, I made a syrup-voiced old bandit endow the very research he’d tabooed, and do more good for humanity than he’s done in all the rest of his life. I was right, Snulbug. You can’t lick Man.”
Snulbug’s snakes writhed into knots of scorn. “People!” he snorted. “You’ll find out.” And he shook his head with dismal satisfaction.
Mr. Lupescu
The teacups rattled, and flames flickered over the logs.
“Alan, I do wish you could do something about Bobby.”
“Isn’t that rather Robert’s place?”
“Oh you know Robert. He’s so busy doing good in nice abstract ways with committees in them.”
“And headlines.”
“He can’t be bothered with things like Mr. Lupescu. After all, Bobby’s only his son.”
“And yours, Marjorie.”
“And mine. But things like this take a man, Alan.”
The room was warm and peaceful; Alan stretched his long legs by the fire and felt domestic. Marjorie was soothing even when she fretted. The firelight did things to her hair and the curve of her blouse.
A small whirlwind entered at high velocity and stopped only when Marjorie said, “Bob-by! Say hello nicely to Uncle Alan.”
Bobby said hello and stood tentatively on one foot.
“Alan …” Marjorie prompted.
Alan sat up straight and tried to look paternal. “Well, Bobby,” he said. “And where are you off to in such a hurry?”
“See Mr. Lupescu ’f course. He usually comes afternoons.”
“Your mother’s been telling me about Mr. Lupescu. He must be quite a person.”
“Oh gee I’ll say he is, Uncle Alan. He’s got a great big red nose and red gloves and red eyes—not like when you’ve been crying but really red like yours’re brown—and little red wings that twitch only he can’t fly with them cause they’re ruddermentary he says. And he talks like—oh gee I can’t do it, but he’s swell, he is.”
“Lupescu’s a funny name for a fairy godfather, isn’t it, Bobby?”
“Why? Mr. Lupescu always says why do all the fames have to be Irish because it takes all kinds, doesn’t it?”
“Alan!” Marjorie said. “I don’t see that you’re doing a bit of good. You talk to him seriously like that and you simply make him think it is serious. And you do know better, don’t you, Bobby? You’re just joking with us.”
“Joking? About Mr. Lupescu?”
“Marjorie, you don’t— Listen, Bobby. Your mother didn’t mean to insult you or Mr. Lupescu. She just doesn’t believe in what she’s never seen, and you can’t blame her. Now, suppose you took her and me out in the garden and we could all see Mr. Lupescu. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
“Uh-uh.” Bobby shook his head gravely. “Not for Mr. Lupescu. He doesn’t like people. Only little boys. And he says if I ever bring people to see him, then he’ll let Gorgo get me. G’bye now.” And the whirlwind departed.
Marjorie sighed. “At least thank heavens for Gorgo. I never can get a very clear picture out of Bobby, but he says Mr. Lupescu tells the most terrible things about him. And if there’s any trouble about vegetables or brushing teeth, all I have to say is Gorgo and hey presto!”
Alan rose. “I don’t think you need worry, Marjorie. Mr. Lupescu seems to do more good than harm, and an active imagination is no curse to a child.”
“You haven’t lived with Mr. Lupescu.”
“To live in a house like this, I’d chance it,” Alan laughed. “But please forgive me now—back to the cottage and the typewriter … Seriously, why don’t you ask Robert to talk with him?”
Marjorie spread her hands helplessly.
“I know. I’m always the one to assume responsibilities. And yet you married Robert.”
Marjorie laughed. “I don’t know. Somehow there’s something about Robert …” Her vague gesture happened to include the original Dégas over the fireplace, the sterling tea service, and even the liveried footman who came in at that moment to clear away.
Mr. Lupescu was pretty wonderful that afternoon, all right. He had a little kind of an itch like in his wings and they kept twitching all the time. Stardust, he said. It tickles. Got it up in the Milky Way. Friend of mine has a wagon route up there.
Mr. Lupescu had lots of friends, and they all did something you wouldn’t ever think of, not in a squillion years. That’s why he didn’t like people, because people don’t do things you can tell stories about. They just work or keep house or are mothers or something.
But one of Mr. Lupescu’s friends, now, was captain of a ship, only it went in time, and Mr. Lupescu took trips with him and came back and told you all about what was happening this very minute five hundred years ago. And another of the friends was a radio engineer, only he could tune in on all the kingdoms of faery and Mr. Lupescu would squidgle up his red nose and twist it like a dial and make noises like all the kingdoms of faery coming in on the set. And then there was Gorgo, only he wasn’t a friend—not exactly; not even to Mr. Lupescu.
They’d been playing for a couple of weeks—only it must’ve been really hours, cause Mamselle hadn’t yelled about supper yet, but Mr. Lupescu says Time is funny—when Mr. Lupescu screwed up his red eyes and said, “Bobby, let’s go in the house.”
“But there’s people in the house, and you don’t—”
“I know I don’t like people. That’s why we’re going in the house. Come on, Bobby, or I’ll—”
So what could you do when you didn’t even want to hear him say Gorgo’s name?
He went into Father’s study through the French window, and it was a strict rule that nobody ever went into Father’s study, but rules weren’t for Mr. Lupescu.
Father was on the telephone telling somebody he’d try to be at a luncheon but there was a committee meeting that same morning but he’d see. While he was talking, Mr. Lupescu went over to a table and opened a drawer and took something out.
When Father hung up, he saw Bobby first and started to be very mad. He said, “Young man, you’ve been trouble enough to your Mother and me with all your stories about your red-winged Mr. Lupescu, and now if you’re to start bursting in—”
You have to be polite and introduce people. “Father, this is Mr. Lupescu And see, he does too have red wings.”
Mr. Lupescu held out the gun he’d taken from the drawer and shot Father once right through the forehead. It made a little clean hole in front and a big messy hole in back. Father fell down and was dead.
“Now, Bobby,” Mr. Lupescu said, “a lot of people are going to come here and ask you a lot of questions. And if you don’t tell the truth about exactly what happened, I’ll send Gorgo to fetch you.”
Then Mr. Lupescu was gone through the French window.
“It’s a curious case, Lieutenant,” the medical examiner said. “It’s fortunate I’ve dabbled a bit in psychiatry; I can at least give you a lead until you get the experts in. The child’s statement that his fairy godfather shot his father is obviously a simple flight mechanism, susceptible of two interpretations. A, the father shot himself; the child was so horrified by the sight that he refused to accept it and invented this explanation. B, the child shot the father, let us say by accident, and shifted the blame to his imaginary scapegoat. B has, of course, its more sinister implications: if the child had resented his father and created an ideal substitute, he might make the substitute destroy the reality. … But there’s the solution to your eyewitness testimony; which alternative is true, Lieutenant, I leave up to your researchers into motive and the evidence of ballistics and fingerprints. The angle of the wound jibes with either.”
The man with the red nose and eyes and gloves and wings walked down the back lane to the cottage. As soon as he got inside, he took off his coat and removed the wings and the mechanism of strings and rubber that made them twitch. He laid them on top of the ready pile of kindling and lit the fire. When it was well started, he added the gloves. Then he took off the nose, kneaded the putty until the red of its outside vanished into the neutral brown of the mass, jammed it into a crack in the wall, and smoothed it over. Then he took the red-irised contact lenses out of his brown eyes and went into the kitchen, found a hammer, pounded them to powder, and washed the powder down the sink.
Alan started to pour himself a drink and found, to his pleased surprise, that he didn’t especially need one. But he did feel tired. He could lie down and recapitulate it all, from the invention of Mr. Lupescu (and Gorgo and the man with the Milky Way route) to today’s success and on into the future when Marjorie—pliant, trusting Marjorie—would be more desirable than ever as Robert’s widow and heir. And Bobby would need a man to look after him.
Alan went into the bedroom. Several years passed by in the few seconds it took him to recognize what was waiting on the bed, but then, Time is funny.
Alan said nothing.
“Mr. Lupescu, I presume?” said Gorgo.
They Bite
There was no path, only the almost vertical ascent. Crumbled rock for a few yards, with the roots of sage finding their scanty life in the dry soil. Then jagged outcroppings of crude crags sometimes with accidental footholds, sometimes with overhanging and untrustworthy branches of grease-wood, sometimes with no aid to climbing but the leverage of your muscles and the ingenuity of your balance.
The sage was as drably green as the rock was drably brown. The only color was the occasional rosy spikes of a barrel cactus.
Hugh Tallant swung himself up onto the last pinnacle. It had a deliberate, shaped look about it—a petrified fortress of Lilliputians, a Gibraltar of pygmies. Tallant perched on its battlements and unslung his field glasses.
The desert valley spread below him. The tiny cluster of buildings that was Oasis, the exiguous cluster of palms that gave name to the town and shelter of his own tent and to the shack he was building, the dead-ended highway leading straightforwardly to nothing, the oiled roads diagraming the vacant blocks of an optimistic subdivision.
Tallant saw none of these. His glasses were fixed beyond the oasis and the town of Oasis on the dry lake. The gliders were clear and vivid to him, and the uniformed men busy with them were as sharpl
y and minutely visible as a nest of ants under glass. The training school was more than usually active. One glider in particular, strange to Tallant, seemed the focus of attention. Men would come and examine it and glance back at the older models in comparison.
Only the corner of Tallant’s left eye was not preoccupied with the new glider. In that corner something moved, something little and thin and brown as the earth. Too large for a rabbit, much too small for a man. It darted across that corner of vision, and Tallant found gliders oddly hard to concentrate on.
He set down the bifocals and deliberately looked about him. His pinnacle surveyed the narrow, flat area of the crest. Nothing stirred. Nothing stood out against the sage and rock but one barrel of rosy spikes. He took up the glasses again and resumed his observations. When he was done, he methodically entered the results in the little black notebook.
His hand was still white. The desert is cold and often sunless in winter. But it was a firm hand, and as well trained as his eyes, fully capable of recording faithfully the designs and dimensions which they had registered so accurately.
Once his hand slipped, and he had to erase and redraw, leaving a smudge that displeased him. The lean, brown thing had slipped across the edge of his vision again. Going toward the east edge, he would swear, where that set of rocks jutted like the spines on the back of a stegosaur.
Only when his notes were completed did he yield to curiosity, and even then with cynical self-reproach. He was physically tired, for him an unusual state, from this daily climbing and from clearing the ground for his shack-to-be. The eye muscles play odd nervous tricks. There could be nothing behind the stegosaur’s armor.
There was nothing. Nothing alive and moving. Only the torn and half-plucked carcass of a bird, which looked as though it had been gnawed by some small animal.
It was halfway down the hill—hill in Western terminology, though anywhere east of the Rockies it would have been considered a sizable mountain—that Tallant again had a glimpse of a moving figure.
But this was no trick of a nervous eye. It was not little nor thin nor brown. It was tall and broad and wore a loud red-and-black lumberjacket. It bellowed, “Tallant!” in a cheerful and lusty voice.
The Compleat Werewolf Page 14