“Franz—” he forced himself to accept the Hun's matey approach—"are we carrying poison gas? Something that might cause hallucinations if it leaked?"
The chief laughed mirthlessly. “Very good. I came to you because you read books, because you might be able to explain things, but I forgot that you're full of shit. We aren't carrying a thing, Emil, no bombs at all. I expect they hope to have Der Grosse Alte hex England into submission."
“The old man with the eyepatch—?"
“And the raven, and the hat, just like Wotan, and who knows? Maybe he is. The English swine believe that their Agincourt bowmen returned from the grave to stop us at Mons, and perhaps our Kaiser has taken a leaf from their book of spells. It's a strange war, Emil."
“We should go to the captain."
“And tell him what, that magic-carpet rides disagree with us, so please turn around? We must go to the parachute-locker, idiot!"
“The North Sea is big, Franz. And chilly at this season."
The other breathed heavily, saying nothing, as he allowed the sense to sink in. “And what do we say to the captain?” he asked.
“That we have observed certain anomalies. It's our duty to report them, is it not? After that...."
After that he planned to put his knife into the captain and Der Grosse Alte, and into any other bloody Hun who stood in his way, including his new chum, Franz, and steer this bag of anomalies to England or to the bottom of the sea. He recalled from his briefings that it took two men to steer a Zepp, one for the rudder and one for the elevators. The sea it was, then.
“So be it."
“What?"
“Sorry, I was thinking aloud."
“In English? You never cease to amaze me, Schmidt."
He had hoped the German would guide him, but the chief seemed even more disoriented than he was in the soggy maze. No trace of ropes, wires or girders could now be found, nor, most disturbingly, did they encounter any other men. The footing shifted queasily beneath them, the walls bulged and dripped. Hereward was struck by the detestable fancy that the living airship had excreted its crew.
Franz was likewise capable of unwholesome fancies: “I feel as if I'm crawling around inside an egg. An egg about to hatch.” To cheer himself up, the Hun began bellowing a rousing chorus of Gott Strafe England in Hereward's ear, sorely tempting the Earl of Nether Dunwich to do for him on the spot.
Their descent was circuitous but steady, through a labyrinth of folds and fissures that could no longer be ascribed to human design. The entanglement of scaly surfaces sometimes altered to horny protuberances and leathery membranes, but Hereward could make no guess about the true shape or nature of the thing surrounding them. The loathsome pools of slime they sometimes waded through seemed to support Franz's egg theory.
The blast of cold, fresh air was so drastically different from the atmosphere he had been breathing that Hereward recoiled in fear, blundering into Franz, who stopped singing to roar incoherently.
“Steady on, there's the ladder to the control cabin—"
“The bastards! Oh, the dirty bastards! Look at them! Come back, you swine-dogs! Don't leave us!"
It took Hereward a moment to understand that the control cabin beneath them was receding rapidly, falling away from the hull toward the wrinkling sheet of the ocean. He saw ragged sections of the hull falling, too, and he thought the gondola had accidentally broken loose until a pair of huge parachutes erupted and expanded from either end.
“Come back! Wait!” Franz shrieked in panic. He thrust Hereward aside and astounded him by leaping after the escaping officers.
“Christ,” the Englishman breathed as he watched the screaming, windmilling body grow smaller and smaller against the molten path of the moon. The chief boatswain would hit the merciless sea much sooner than the gondola would, and much harder.
But maybe the Hun had known what he was doing, he reflected as the last remnants of the hull flaked away and the thing inside it began to unfold and uncoil and expand, and continued to do so for an unconscionable length of time. It fell, too, its forward progress arrested. Hereward began to fear that this experiment in Teutonic frightfulness had gone woefully awry, and that he would soon join Franz. He wrapped himself tightly around a horny, scythe-shaped extension of the creature that might have been a claw, assuming that a claw could be three feet thick.
When it seemed he could taste the sea, he was deafened by an awful thunderclap and nearly flung loose as the descent drastically slowed. Enormous shadows wavered around him; he was buffeted by an erratic wind. He flatly refused to accept the obvious explanation for these phenomena until he saw the shadow of his nightmarish conveyance on the sea. It was flapping its wings. All eight of them.
At that moment the moon descended from the sky to pay him a visit. It hardly seemed unlikely, considering all he'd experienced, so he grinned foolishly and waved. The moon was oddly bisected by a vertical band of black, a band that rapidly expanded to a bottomless black lake. It was an eye, obviously, with a pupil like a cat's. It stood at the end of a great fence of teeth that whitened and expanded as the thing snarled, blasting him with an eructation of hot, sulphurous gases.
He still had his knife, and he drew it, but the stout German blade would have been inadequate even as a dental probe for this creature. He was about to leap free, opting for a death in the clean ocean, when the head swiveled away on its impossibly long, coiling neck. Perhaps it was scenting a course for England before dealing with a minor nuisance like himself.
The heart, he thought: but if it had eight wings, how many hearts did it have, and how deeply were they buried beneath scales that he could penetrate no more than an inch or so? He had thought himself liberated from superstition, but he could not deny that wizardry had evoked this thing from the infinite darkness of the past, and he was willing to try a traditional remedy: “In the name of Our Blessed Savior, Jesus Christ, begone to hell, you—"
The eye flashed back before him with heart-stopping suddenness.
He mumbled lamely: “—abomination in the eyes of the Lord."
It didn't work. The mouth began to open, and the enormous forepaw hoisted him toward it like a grub on a steam-shovel. Before the jaws could reach their full extension, he scrambled to a precarious balance on the claw and sprang upward. The top of the snout brandished an array of horns, the smallest and foremost of them large enough to impale a rhinoceros. He found a grip on this horn and flung himself upward and forward just as the sun rose at his back.
He turned, unbelieving, and saw a great cloud of yellow fire pouring from the creature's mouth. It had meant to crisp him before gulping him down. He turned away, his face seared by the heat, his leather coat smoking, and dodged forward through the grove of horns.
The eye, its pupil now contracted against the flames, loomed large as the rose window of a cathedral. Vulnerable spot it might be, but his six-inch blade could be no more than a mote in that eye.
“Here's one from St. Bloody George, you Hun bastard!” he screamed, flinging himself forward with the knife extended.
A film flicked over the eye, again like that of a cat. But film was an inadequate word for a membrane thick as a plank and even tougher. Inertia kept it from moving as fast as efficiency required, however, and Hereward's knife and fist and wrist plunged deep into a tub of jelly before the membrane closed, crushing his forearm.
The outer eyelid now closed, cracking the Englishman's elbow as easily as might have a normal beast's jaw. Hereward screamed wildly and hammered the rugose skin with his left hand.
He realized it would be foolish to win his release now, because the dragon was flailing its head and twisting it in wild gyrations. Only the machine-like grip of the dual eyelid on his ruined arm kept him from being flung through a cloud of flame to the freezing sea. But whatever he realized, his irrational body fought to escape as the membranes ground his bones to meal. He was sprayed with a mixture of his own blood and inhuman slime.
It made no difference if he fell or not.
In its pain and confusion, the dragon neglected to fly. Bellowing clouds of fire, twisting like a serpent on a griddle, the creature fell ever-faster toward the sea.
Hereward struggled to compose himself. He wouldn't spend his last breath screaming in pain. He tried to think of some calming verse from the Book of Common Prayer, but only bloody Milton came again to mind: “...hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky with hideous ruin and combustion down to bottomless perdition...."
Hope, the last thing he needed when he had resigned himself to death: he saw a dark shape draped with white bobbing in the sea. It could only be the breakaway gondola with its parachutes. Not even treacherous officers like these would refuse to pull their shipmate, good old Schmidt, aboard. He renewed his struggle for freedom, kicking at the stony eyelid with his absurd felt boots.
The floating control cabin was unmistakable now in the light of the falling dragon. A hatch opened in the top and a white-bearded man stared up in horror with his single eye, Der Grosse Alte. Hereward felt a certain relief. It couldn't be Wotan himself, for no god could ever look so much like a man caught with his breeches down. He saw only a flash of that dumbfounded face before the dragon's fire went out.
The ruined eye opened at last, freeing his arm and drenching him in a viscous flood. His only hope was gone, for it seemed obvious that the creature would hit the cabin squarely, with the effect of a whale hitting a paper boat. But in a last, futile bid for survival he kicked himself free and spun into blackness. At very least, his bones would lie at one remove from those of the barbarians and their nightmare.
They were speaking some German dialect he couldn't follow. “Bloody Huns,” he groaned.
“You are alive! You are English? In a Luftschiff uniform?"
“Got it in one, Fritz. Take me to your firing squad."
“I am not Fritz, I am Njord. This is Fritz, but we call him that for a joke, he is really Bjorn. And we happily have no firing squads on Norwegian trawlers. You are English? God save your graceless King!"
Hereward was simultaneously overwhelmed with affection for the vast, grinning face and, as the smell of fish drowned him, an urgent need to puke. He rolled unthinkingly toward his right arm and found it difficult to vomit and scream at the same time. Oblivion solved his dilemma.
Hereward became an embarrassment to the British Army. He claimed to have blown up a Zepp, but he refused to adduce any details. The airship had carried hallucinatory gas, he maintained, and he had released this poison to destroy it. He had been affected by the chemical, so that anything more he might say about his exploit would be a pipe-dream.
Since he was gravely wounded, and since he was an earl, and since some foreign fishermen jabbered about a flaming object—wyrm was Norwegian slang for airship, wasn't it?—he wasn't pressed closely. When spies confirmed that the LZ-D1, Kapitan Bohemond, Graf von Himmelfahrt, commanding, had been lost with all hands over the North Sea, Hereward was awarded the Victoria Cross.
It was intended that he be promoted to major and returned to the front. But as King George V pinned on his medal at a ceremony in Westminster Abbey, Hereward happened to raise his eyes to the great rose window behind His Majesty and burst into hysterical screams. The incident was smoothed over, and he was invalided out.
Although allowances were made at Nether Dunwich for a hero of the Great War, his eccentricities became notorious. He would tramp the moors with a stout stick in his lone hand, smashing the eggs of any reptiles or birds he came upon. His tenants grew skilled at hiding the products of their hens and geese.
A rising generation had less patience with His Lordship's quirks. He was openly mocked for diving under the nearest bush whenever he saw or heard a passing aircraft.
In later years, however, this habit began to seem sensible.
* * *
Magpie
After burying Marcia's handbag in the trash, Dwight washed his hands like a satisfied craftsman. Not even the fluorescent candor of the men's room mirror could spoil his pleasure.
Upstairs, she had discovered the theft. Male admirers swarmed around her. Winded by his climb from the basement, he gasped his excuses as he squeezed through.
“What's wrong?"
“My bag."
“She had it slung over her chair,” the bartender said. “You can't do that here."
Dwight had hoped he would say that, but he pounded the bar and shouted, “What kind of place is this?"
The bartender bought them a round. The manager seated them at his best table. But these things happened. Even Marcia knew that.
“She couldn't help herself, I guess."
Dwight was inattentive. His veal cutlet was underdone.
“I needed a new one anyway,” she said.
“I'll buy you one. I brought you here."
“She could have been anywhere. She didn't need it, that's my point."
He saw no point. Her mind was poorly organized, but that was part of her youthful charm. He refilled her wineglass. “Why do you say she?"
“I understand her. Women steal things on impulse, like shoplifting."
“You know who stole your bag? Any one of a hundred guys who stroll through bars on Friday night looking for loose stuff."
“There are people like that?"
“They're called thieves."
“He sure picked the wrong person. I had a twenty. And personal things."
“He would ditch the bag. Sometimes people find them and mail the stuff back."
“My pictures! It makes me sick."
Her pain almost melted him. He could play detective and find it. Better play it safe. If his conscience bothered him later, he could call the restaurant anonymously and tell them where to look.
“Credit cards?” he asked.
She grimaced. “An unemployed dancer?"
“ID?"
“Sure."
“He knows where you live."
Dwight turned his full attention to the waitress. He let Marcia chew on his remark while he ordered coffee and cognac.
“You aren't suggesting he'd go to my place?"
“Probably not."
“Wouldn't he just take the money?"
“Probably. Were your keys in it?"
“Oh, shit!"
His face felt warm, perhaps due to the cognac or the steep climb from the men's room. It could be nerves. He was now on her ten-yard line.
“You'd better stay at my place and call a locksmith in the morning."
“Sure.” Her look was wry.
“Suit yourself."
He talked about the play they'd seen. When he paused, she said, “The super could let me in, but...."
“Look, I can sleep on my couch."
She smiled ruefully. “All right."
In the cab, she snuggled into the arm he draped around her shoulders. She said, “I can't help feeling it was a woman."
“Maybe."
“Why are so many kleptomaniacs women? There must be some reason."
“I guess."
A shrink might have something to say about his own game. It was as much fun as the object. Maybe it was his way of getting even in advance for rejection. Before he saw a shrink, though, he would see an internist. You know you're getting old when you take a beautiful girl home and look forward to Gelusil.
“Like what?” she asked.
“Hm?"
“Like what would be the reason a woman steals things as opposed to a man?"
“Some maternal instinct. Feathering the nest."
She moved closer. He might have breathed more easily if she hadn't.
“I always thought it was because of some secret desire to be punished—"
“I'm sorry,” he interrupted. “Make him stop the cab."
“What?"
“Indigestion, it's nothing. The bouncing—"
“Stop! Pull over, okay?"
“I don't feel well."
The driver stared ahead. Dwight could read his mind: Don't let the geezer croak in my cab.
He could no longer blame his position for the pain in his left arm. It had spread to his chest and become a clutching hand. He fumbled in his right topcoat pocket for his nitroglycerine pills, but the pocket was empty.
“Left pocket. Pills. Please."
He read in Marcia's stare the horror of youth for age and illness, and he couldn't blame her, but he wished she would overcome it and help him. “Pills. Pocket."
“I couldn't help myself! I didn't think they were important. I never steal anything important."
She wrenched the door open. What was she doing? “My pills,” he gasped. “Where are they?"
“They were in my bag. I'm sorry!"
“Don't dump him on me, lady!” the cabby shouted after Marcia as she flew recklessly through traffic.
* * *
Mr. Entwistle's Sovereign Snuff
Melancholy had never before oppressed Mr. Entwistle when he was pulverizing corpses. If his mood was philosophical, his work would inspire reflections on the superiority of his Christian faith to the wicked superstitions that had deluded these dead. If angry, he would pretend that his subject had irked him. Disposed to altruism, he would ponder the suffering his labors might ameliorate, if not end completely.
Whatever his mood, he seldom forgot the profit of changing cheap mummies into costly mummy-dust, and he most often hummed merrily as he chopped, hammered and ground.
Not tonight. He had ignored the handwriting on the wall until the wall had been repossessed. Some rascally surgeons had always asserted that mummy-dust was worthless, and that such time-tested ingredients as bitumen, mold and rat-droppings might harm the wretches who formerly flocked to his shop. Repeated incessantly, these slanders had at last swayed the fickle public. Three prime specimens had come from Egypt today, and the only person to cross his threshold since was a bailiff who sneered at the apothecary's offer to pay his debts with surplus dust.
“It can be taken as snuff,” Mr. Entwistle suggested hopefully.
“Piquant,” the bailiff approved after sampling a pinch. “I daresay you can pack it up your arse, too, you blithering humbug."
“Yes, in fact—"
Even More Nasty Stories Page 12