The Second Reginald Bretnor Megapack

by Reginald Bretnor

  “Mavronides,” replied the Greek. “Sarpedon Mavronides.”

  Papa Schimmelhorn reached out and pumped his hand. “Ho-ho-ho!” he shouted. “I vill call you Zorba—it iss more easy to remember!”

  Herr Mavronides smiled. “It is good that you speak English,” he declared, “because we shall use no other language on the Prin—on her island. It is my duty to take you there, and explain everything, and introduce you to Meister Gansfleisch, with whom”—for an instant he looked very dubious—“you will be working. As for the name Zorba, I am not offended. I too have seen the motion picture.”

  He waited until his guests had climbed in, then jumped into the front seat with the driver. The tortured transmission uttered one hideous protest, and they were off. One arm round Emmy, and with Niki sitting on his lap, Papa Schimmelhorn stuck his head out of the open window and sniffed the breeze winnowing his beard. “Chust shmell der air, Gustav-Adolf!” he cried ecstatically. “Goats und chickens und garlic und I think maybe orange blossoms—how romantic!”

  Gustav-Adolf, in the rear window, meowed appreciatively. “You betcha,” he said in Cat. “The mice round here oughta be real juicy.”

  Herr Mavronides looked back over his shoulder. “Meister Gansfleisch,” he declared a little hesitantly, “he will not be pleased that you have brought a cat.”

  “Und vhy?” asked Papa Schimmelhorn. “Maybe he belongs to der Autobahn Society? Gustav-Adolf only vunce in a vhile catches birds, because he gets die feathers in his teeth.”

  “He’s a very sweet cat!” said Niki loyally, and Emmy vigorously nodded her agreement, as befitted members of the local Papa Schimmelhorn fan club.

  They continued on through the outskirts of the city, and the taxi turned to follow the shoreline of a bay, Papa Schimmelhorn commenting enthusiastically on the sights and sounds and smells they were encountering, and sometimes listening to Mavronides’s careful orientation lecture.

  “The reason we shall speak only English,” Mavronides informed him, “is this: all the servants descend either from Greeks whom Miss von Hohenheim’s family saved from the Turks, or from Turks saved from Greeks. Then there are some, like myself, who have been with her family for—forever. You understand? That is why all are so faithful and obedient and would defend her to the death. Also her island of Little Palaeon, to which we go. Turkish is spoken, also Greek, and she has taught many of them German. But I am the only one with English. So, because your work is secret, we must speak that tongue.”

  Papa Schimmelhorn, distracted by the amatory calisthenics of two donkeys in a nearby field, asked for a replay of this information, which Mavronides gave him very patiently.

  “You will have your own rooms,” he then informed him, “you and your so-charming friends.” His eyes flashed, and he twirled his moustache again; and Papa Schimmelhorn began to suspect that, under his majordomo manner, he might be a man after his own heart. “There you will be served your meals, except perhaps when the Prin—when Miss von Hohenheim is here. Then, perhaps once, she may invite you to eat with her. In no case”—he shuddered visibly—“will you have to eat with Meister Gansfleisch.”

  Papa Schimmelhorn frowned. “Ach, Herr Zorba,” he enquired, “this Meister Gansfleisch iss nodt a nice man, nicht wahr?”

  “I have said too much already,” replied Mavronides. “Now I must say no more. Soon you will judge him for yourself. In any case, you will be with him only when you work together. At other times, he does not like to be with human beings, only with his familiar, whose name”—he made a sign against the evil eye—“is translated as Twitchgibbet.”

  “Ooh, how exciting!” Niki squealed. “Just like The Exorcist!”

  “Vot iss, der familiar?” asked Papa Schimmelhorn. “A shpook maybe? Oder a goblin?”

  “I will say no more. You will see.”

  Papa Schimmelhorn shrugged. Vell, he thought, votefer, me und Gustav-Adolf, ve are nodt shcared. And he turned his attention once again to the landscape.

  The taxi had turned into a cobbled street skirting a stone seawall, and now it pulled up at a little jetty where a spick-and-span motor cruiser awaited them. They boarded it, were greeted ceremoniously in Turkish by Fräulein von Hohenheim’s weatherbeaten pilot, and put to sea. The boat rounded a headland into the gentle swells of the blue Aegean, and they beheld the island of Little Palaeon three or four miles ahead of them. Papa Schimmelhorn, promptly forgetting all about Meister Gansfleisch and his familiar, devoted his attention to the seagulls circling overhead, one of whom he identified positively as the original Jonathan Livingston, and to a brace of porpoises following them off the starboard bow. He tickled Niki intimately, pinched Emmy’s plump, pink posterior, and promised them both that that very night he would take them shvimming in der lofely vater—vith no vun looking they vould nodt haff to vear efen bikinis.

  The boat rounded a miniature lighthouse at the end of a stone breakwater and entered its protected little bay, where a few fishing boats were riding at anchor; a few others were beached drying their nets and sails, and a number of gnarled fishermen and leathery fishwives were unhurriedly attending to their chores. The pilot pulled up to a tidy little pier, and they disembarked. Mavronides lifted their luggage into a red Japanese station wagon driven by an enormously fat Levantine, seated them in it, and they set off down the fishing village’s single cobblestoned street.

  “This person,” Mavronides said, pointing at their driver, “is called Ismail. Miss von Hohenheim obtained him from an Arabian who did business with her. He had made him into a—a harem employee. You understand?”

  Papa Schimmelhorn groaned sympathetically, indicating that he understood only too well. His two pretty pussycats squealed. Ismail grinned at them with astonishingly white teeth.

  “But now he is not unhappy,” added Mavronides.

  The village well behind them, they passed through one or two neat olive orchards and a number of green fields where fat sheep and goats were grazing, and more lovesick donkeys disporting themselves. Little Palaeon was a small island, but low hills near one end hid Fräulein von Hohenheim’s residence from them until their car had reached the crest. Then suddenly it stood before them in all its strange and forbidding dignity.

  “Is it not beautiful?” exclaimed Mavronides, offering it to them with an expansive gesture.

  And indeed, though any architect would have been sorely put to determine all the periods, styles, and cultures that had contributed to its construction through the centuries, it did have a character and a beauty all its own. A close examination would have revealed that its foundations rested on ancient limestone and marble, that much of it, including at least two walls and two grim towers, had been inherited from a Crusaders’ keep, and that the rest had been added on by several generations of princely Renaissance scholars and eighteenth-century virtuosi. More marble adorned its lavishly carved facade; marble and porphyry had been fashioned into an Italianate bell tower. They drove through great gates into a flagged courtyard and halted before a flight of marble stairs leading to two majestic doors of massive bronze sculptured with intimate episodes from the lives of the Grecian gods and goddesses, with which Papa Schimmelhorn was immediately enchanted.

  Servants bowed them in, and Mavronides escorted them into the great beamed and paneled hall. There, suits of armor stood their silent guard; ancestral portraits, swords, and battle-axes adorned the walls; ancient banners hung in brilliant, contrasting lights and shadows from tall mullioned windows.

  And there Meister Gaspar Gansfleisch waited. He uncoiled as they entered. He was extremely long and thin. His skin was gray and hairy, and somehow he seemed to have too many arms and legs, as though he might have had more than a touch of tarantula in his ancestry. His clothing looked as though it had been made for him by an amateur tailor in a small German provincial town during an especially dreadful war.

 
Mavronides presented them. Meister Gansfleisch fixed them with a beady, baleful eye. He bowed very formally. He smiled, and his teeth reminded Papa Schimmelhorn of a possum to whom he had once been introduced.

  Gustav-Adolf, crouched on a broad Schimmelhorn shoulder, looked at him and growled disgustedly.

  Papa Schimmelhorn shushed him, and told him he must nodt growl at der nice man who was going to vork vith him. “It iss nodt goot manners,” he declared. “He cannodt help it vot he looks like.” He added that he was sure he and Meister Gansfleisch were going to haff a shvell time togeder.

  The Gansfleisch smile disappeared; his brows drew down. In a high, dry, grating voice, he recited that he welcomed Herr Schimmelhorn, whom Fräulein von Hohenheim had informed him was very talented. He had every hope that they would work well together. Mr. Mavronides would show them to their quarters presently, and make them comfortable, and he himself would see Herr Schimmelhorn in the laboratory immediately after breakfast.

  “Das ist gut,” said Papa Schimmelhorn. “I too vant to get to vork. But”—he laughed—“all der time to say ‘Meister Gansfleisch’? Maybe iss bedter I chust call you Gassi.”

  “I am first among the alchemists of Europe, of the world!” stated Meister Gansfleisch frigidly. “You will please address me by my name and title.”

  “Okay,” replied Papa Schimmelhorn agreeably. “Only I do nodt mind it if you call me Papa.”

  His remark was ignored. “Where did you study alchemy?” demanded his new associate.

  “I haff nodt shtudied. I am chust a chenius,” Papa Schimmelhorn told him modestly.

  Meister Gansfleisch made a strange, dry, whinnying sound, and Gustav-Adolf growled again.

  There was a long, cold silence. Finally, “Well, we shall see,” Meister Gansfleisch said. “But”—he stared at Gustav-Adolf, twisting his hands in agitation—“that cat I do not want to see again. For me, it is impossible to practice the hermetic art with cats. You must keep him in your quarters, and he must not get loose. Do you understand?”

  Papa Schimmelhorn shrugged. “Okay,” he said, “but I think poor Gustav-Adolf vill nodt be happy.”

  Meister Gansfleisch turned on his heel, and left without another word; as he left, Niki let out a frightened squeak. “Look!” she whispered. “Look at his coat pocket!”

  They looked. A head protruded from the pocket, a head with small, red, glittering eyes, the head of a huge black rat.

  “Gott in Himmel!” gasped Papa Schimmelhorn. “Vot iss?”

  “That,” answered Mavronides, “is Twitchgibbet, his—his familiar.” Again, he made a sign against the evil eye. “Sir, it is not a creature one would wish to anger.”

  “Mein Gott! Rats in der pocket! No vunder Gustav-Adolf growls. Vith Meister Gassi I tell you vot iss wrong. Chust look at him! He nefer efen saw Emmy und Niki here! He has no vinegar. All his life maybe he nefer chases predty pussycats. Imachine! Chust sitting vith his rat und maybe playing vith himself.” Sadly he shook his head.

  “Please pay no attention to him,” said Mavronides apologetically. “I assure you that he was trying very hard to be polite to you. As you can see, there is a sourness in him—it is not his nature to be polite.”

  Again, Papa Schimmelhorn shrugged. “Vell, anyvay, vith rats inside der pocket bedter I put der flea collar on Gustav-Adolf right avay.”

  He fished the collar out, and Gustav-Adolf good-naturedly permitted Niki to slip it on over his whiskers.

  * * * *

  Actually, in his judgment of Meister Gansfleisch, Papa Schimmelhorn had done the alchemist a grave injustice. The man was a true ascetic. For twenty years and more, he had been dedicated to his pursuit of the arcane arts and sciences—in a crassly materialistic age when patronage was hard to come by. A former rajah had supported him penuriously for a few years, and then, finding that no progress had been made toward his enrichment or the restoration of his onetime powers and prerogatives, had unceremoniously turned him over to the Government of India as an impostor. He had drifted from here to there, once falling so low as to concoct aphrodisiacs for a Syrian doctor practicing in El Paso. Finally, five years before, he had entered the service of Fräulein von Hohenheim—with whom he had immediately fallen wildly and hopelessly in love, so much so that secretly he had spent a great deal of his time seeking an elixir that would turn him, if not into a handsome prince, at least into a figure virile and dynamic enough possibly to excite her interest. Then, after each vain effort, he had returned to his normal alchemical pursuits, desperately seeking some astounding breakthrough, some success so stupendous that it might excite, if not her love, at least her gratitude.

  Now, in the privacy of his own chambers high in the southern turret of the Crusaders’ keep, he ate his solitary dinner, scarcely tasting it, and conversing sporadically with Twitchgibbet who, crouching on the tablecloth at his right hand, was gnawing a steak with a much heartier appetite.

  Twitchgibbet represented one of his rare triumphs; he had summoned him with a series of dark rituals prescribed in a medieval grimoire stolen from a Romanian library, and had bound him to his service with fearsome incantations. He had realized at the time that he had not summoned up a fiend of high rank or tremendous power—indeed, in the Hellish hierarchy, Twitchgibbet didn’t rate any higher than a Pfc—but he had proven useful. Not only was he company during Meister Gansfleisch’s most lonely and despairing moments, but he served as watchdog over his master’s treasures, prevented the servants—especially the female servants—from pestering him, and was extremely helpful in the minor operations of the magic arts. As his conversational ability, in his rat body, was distinctly limited, he also usually was a good listener.

  Meister Gansfleisch’s quarters were almost monastically austere. Two paintings only hung on the stark walls: one of Paracelsus, the other of some nameless Arabian sorcerer with frightening eyes. There was an enormous fireplace with an alembic in it; there were ancient tomes bound in alum-tanned white pigskin, in calf and vellum, and one or two (reputedly once in the library of Elizabeth Bathory) in human skin. Books were piled on the mantelpiece, on chairs, in a dark, towering bookcase. At the window stood a long brass telescope through which he occasionally observed the stars. Two iron strongboxes held the most precious of his paraphernalia: manuscripts dating back to the Golden Age of alchemy and to the Dark Ages preceding it; a bronze key—which not even the Fräulein knew that he had pilfered—to one of the most dreaded doors on the island; and—most valuable of all—a genuine homunculus named Humphrey, originally brought into being by Doctor John Dee during the reign of the first Elizabeth and passed down from one alchemical hand to another over the intervening centuries. He had, reputedly, been created from a formula devised and recorded by the great Paracelsus himself,[1] and the jar in which he was imprisoned was kept securely in the larger strongbox. He was a secret Meister Gansfleisch had carefully kept from Fräulein von Hohenheim, for he suspected that the homunculus still knew much that he had not been persuaded to reveal: how to confect the Universal Solvent, how to devise the Philosophers’ Stone, perhaps even a recipe for eternal youth, any one of which (he rather forlornly hoped) might soften the Fräulein’s heart.

  Meister Gansfleisch pushed his plate away; he stared at his untouched wine glass. “What shall we do, Twitchgibbet?” he groaned, striking his pallid forehead with both palms. “What can we do? The Princess is determined. She believes this miserable Schimmelhorn is a true genius, and—and I’m afraid she may be right! You can see the man’s an innocent! He does not lust for power. He yearns after no riches. He knows nothing of hatred, envy, jealousy. Therefore he is dangerous. Besides”—he shivered—“he has a cat.”

  Twitchgibbet’s little eyes flashed like glowing coals. He showed his yellow teeth. “Now don’t you worry, boss,” he squeaked. “Ain’t never been no cat I can’t turn inside out. You just say the word!”r />
  “No, no! The Princess simply wouldn’t stand for it—at least not now.” He began pacing up and down distractedly. “Remember—she herself has terrible powers! For centuries, her family has guarded rites and mysteries even I dare not understand. No, I must endure the unendurable. I must give this peasant all the assistance he requires.”

  “Couldn’t you just pretend?” suggested Twitchgibbet helpfully.

  “It would not work—she would know instantly.”

  “Or maybe, boss, you could sort of trade me in on somebody more powerful. It’s like I told you when you snatched me—all you gotta do is sign the contract.”

  Meister Gansfleisch knew very well that, in order to secure the services of any higher-ranking demon, he would have to sell his soul like his more reckless predecessor, Faustus. “Never say that to me again!” he snapped. “The subject is forbidden.”

  “Okay,” squeaked Twitchgibbet. “It’s your funeral. Go ahead, give him all the help he wants, if you gotta, but keep on digging in your books—maybe you’ll find a gimmick that’ll clobber him. Also, how’s about getting Humphrey out of storage and asking him? There’s no good having a homunculus unless you use him.”

  Meister Gansfleisch moaned. “Humphrey is very old and frail. Besides, I would have to tell him what is going on, and I fear to do so because he hates me, and the only hold I have over him is the threat to withdraw his sustenance. If he thought he could work my ruin, even that might not suffice. No, if I am to get any aid from Humphrey, it must be cleverly, by subterfuge. There you can help me. Even though it gives you pleasure, you must stop tormenting him when you are guarding him. And sometimes you must whisper to him that I mean him well, that—that I’m suffering pangs of conscience for the way I’ve treated him.”

  “Well, maybe it’s worth a try,” muttered Twitchgibbet dubiously.