Dreaming Jewels (17 page)

After a long, thoughtful pause, Horty said, “So that’s what I am.”

“It’s a big thing to be,” said Zena.

“Why didn’t you tell me all this years ago?”

“Because there were too many things I didn’t know. There still are… I didn’t know how much the Maneater might be able to dig out of your mind if he tried; I didn’t know how deep your convictions on yourself had to go before they settled. All I tried to do was to have you accept, without question, that you were a human being, a part of humanity, and grow up according to that idea.”

He turned on her suddenly. “Why did I eat ants?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps even two crystals can’t do a perfect job. Anyway your formic acid balance was out of adjustment. (Did you know the French word for ‘ant’ is
fourmi?
They’re full of the stuff.) Some kids eat plaster because they need calcium. Some like burned cake for the carbon. If you had an imbalance, you can bet it would be an important one.”

The flaps went down; they felt the braking effect. “We’re coming in. How far is the carnival from here?”

“About four miles. We can get a cab.”

“Zee, I’m going to leave you outside the grounds somewhere. You’ve been through too much.”

“I’m going in with you,” said Bunny firmly. “But Zee—I think he’s right. Please stay outside until—until it’s over.”

“What are you going to do?”

He spread his hands. “Whatever I can. Get Kay out of there. Stop Armand Bluett from whatever filthy thing he plans to do with her and her inheritance. And the Maneater… I don’t know, Zee. I’ll just have to play it as it comes. But I have to do it. You’ve done all you can. Let’s face it; you’re not fast on your feet just now. I’d have to keep looking out for you.”

“He’s right, Zee. Please—” said Bunny.

“Oh, be careful, Horty—
please
be careful!”

No bad dream can top this, Kay thought. Locked in a trailer with a frightened wolf and a dying midget, with a madman and a freak due back any minute. Wild talk about missing fingers, about living jewels, and about—wildest of all—Kay not being Kay, but someone or something else.

Havana moaned. She wrung out a cloth and sponged his head again. Again she saw his lips tremble and move, but words stuck in his throat, gurgled and fainted there. “He wants something,” she said. “Oh, I wish I knew what he wanted! I wish I knew, and could get it quickly…”

Armand Bluett leaned against the wall by the window, one sack-suited elbow thrust through it. Kay knew he was uncomfortable there and that, probably, his feet hurt. But he wouldn’t sit down. He wouldn’t get away from the window. Oh no. He might want to yell for help. Old Crawly-Fingers was suddenly afraid of her. He still looked at her wet-eyed and drooling, but he was terrified. Well, let it go. No one likes having his identity denied, but in this case it was all right with her. Anything to keep a room’s-breadth between her and Armand Bluett.

“I wish you’d leave that little monster alone,” he snapped. “He’s going to die anyway.”

She turned a baleful glance on him and said nothing. The silence stretched, punctuated only by the Judge’s painful foot-shifting. Finally he said, “When Mr. Monetre gets back with those crystals, we’ll soon find out who you are. And don’t tell me again that you don’t know what all this is about,” he snapped.

She sighed. “I don’t know. I wish you’d stop shouting like that. You can’t jolt information out of me that I haven’t got. And besides, this little fellow’s sick.”

The Judge snorted, and moved even closer to the window. She had an impulse to go over there and growl at him. He’d probably go right through the wall. But Havana moaned again. “What is it, fellow? What is it?”

Then she stiffened. Deep within her mind she sensed a presence, a concept connected somehow with delicate, sliding music, with a broad pleasant face and a good smile. It was as if a question had been asked of her, to which she answered silently,
I’m here. I’m all right—so far.

She turned to look at the Judge, to see if he shared the strange experience. He seemed tense. He stood with his elbow on the sill, nervously buffing his nails on his lapel.

And a hand came through the window.

It was a mutilated hand. It rose into the trailer like the seeking head and neck of a waterfowl, passed in over Armand’s shoulder and spread itself in front of has face. The thumb and index fingers were intact. The middle finger was clubbed; the other two were mere buttons of scar-tissue.

Armand Bluett’s eyebrows were two stretched semi-circles, bristling over bulging eyes. The eyes were as round as the open mouth. His upper lip turned back and upward, almost covering his nostrils. He made a faint sound, a retch, a screech, and dropped.

The hand disappeared through the window. There were quick footsteps outside, around to the door. A knock. A voice. “Kay. Kay Hallowell. Open up.”

Inanely, she quavered, “Wh-who is it?”

“Horty.” The doorknob rattled. “Hurry. The Maneater’s due back, but quick.”

“Horty. I—the door’s locked.”

“The key must be in the Judge’s pocket. Hurry.”

She went with reluctant speed to the prone figure. It lay on its back, the head propped against the wall, the eyes screwed shut in a violent psychic effort to shut out the world. In the left jacket pocket were keys on a ring—and one single. This she took. It worked.

Kay stood blinking at sunlight. “Horty.”

“That’s right.” He came in, touched her arm, grinned. “You shouldn’t write letters. Come on, Bunny.”

Kay said, “They thought I knew where you were.”

“You do.” He turned away from her and studied the supine form of Armand Bluett. “What a sight. Something the matter with his stomach?”

Bunny had arrowed to the bunk, knelt beside it. “Havana… Oh Havana…”

Havana lay stiffly on his back. His eyes were glazed and his lips pouted and dry. Kay said, “Is—is he… I’ve done what I could. He wants something. I’m afraid he—” She went to the bedside.

Horty followed. Havana’s pale chubby lips slowly relaxed, then pursed themselves. A faint sound escaped. Kay said, “I
wish
I knew what he wants!” Bunny said nothing. She put her hands on the hot cheeks, gently, but as if she would wrest something up out of him by brute force.

Horty frowned. “Maybe I can find out,” he said.

Kay saw his face relax, smoothed over by a deep placidity. He bent close to Havana. The silence was so profound, suddenly, that the carnival noises outside seemed to wash in on them, roaring.

The face Horty turned to Kay a moment later was twisted with grief. “I know what he wants. There may not be time before the Maneater gets here… but—There’s got to be time,” he said decisively. He turned to Kay. “I’ve got to go to the other end of the trailer. If he moves—” indicating the Judge—“hit him with your shoe. Preferably with a foot in it.” He went out, his hand, oddly, on his throat, kneading.

“What’s he going to do?”

Bunny, her eyes fixed on Havana’s comatose face, answered, “I don’t know. Something for Havana. Did you see his face when he went out? I don’t think Havana’s going to—to—”

From the partition came the sound of a guitar, the six open strings brushed lightly. The A was dropped, raised a fraction. The E was flatted a bit. Then a chord…

Somewhere a girl began to sing to the guitar.
Stardust.
The voice was full and clear, a lyric soprano, pure as a boy’s voice. Perhaps it was a boy’s voice. There was a trace of vibrato at the ends of the phrases. The voice sang to the lyric, just barely trailing the beat, not quite ad lib, not quite stylized, and as free as breathing. The guitar was not played in complicated chords, but mostly in swift and delicate runs in and about the melody.

Havana’s eyes were still open, and still he did not move. But his eyes were wet now, and not glazed, and gradually he smiled. Kay knelt beside Bunny. Perhaps she knelt only to be nearer… Havana whispered, through his smile, “Kiddo.”

When the song was done, his face relaxed. Quite clearly he said “Hey.” There was a world of compliment in the single syllable. After that, and before Horty came back, he died.

Entering, Horty did not even glance at the cot. He seemed to be having trouble with his throat. “Come on,” he said hoarsely. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

They called Bunny and went to the door. But Bunny stayed by the bunk, her hands on Havana’s cheeks, her soft round face set.

“Bunny, come on. If the Maneater comes back—”

There was a step outside, a thump against the wall of the trailer. Kay wheeled and looked at the suddenly darkened window. Solum’s great sad face filled it. Just then Horty screamed shrilly and dropped writhing to the floor. Kay turned to face the opening door.

“Good of you to wait,” said Pierre Monetre, looking about.

Z
ENA HUDDLED ON THE
edge of the lumpy motel bed and whimpered. Horty and Bunny had been gone for nearly two hours; for the past hour, depression had grown over her until it was like bitter incense in the air, like clothes of lead sheeting on her battered limbs. Twice she had leapt up and paced impatiently, but her knee hurt her and drove her back to the bed, to punch the pillow impotently, to lie passive and watch the doubts circling endlessly about her. Should she have told Horty about himself? Should she not have given him more cruelty, more ruthlessness, about more things than revenging himself on Armand Bluett? How deep had her training gone in the malleable entity which was Horty? Could not Monetre, with his fierce, directive power undo her twelve years’ work in an instant? She knew so little; she was, she felt, so small a thing to have undertaken the manufacture of a—a human being.

She wished, fiercely, that she could burrow her mind into the strange living crystals, as the Maneater tried to do, but completely, so that she could find the rules of the game, the facts about a form of life so alien that logic seemed not to work on it at all. The crystals had a rich vitality; they created, they bred, they felt pain; but to what end did they live? Crush one, and the others seemed not to mind. And why, why did they make these “dream-things” of theirs, laboriously, cell by cell—sometimes to create only a horror, a freak, an unfinished, unfunctional monstrosity, sometimes to copy a natural object so perfectly that there was no real distinction between the copy and its original; and sometimes, as in Horty’s case, to create something new, something that was not a copy of anything but, perhaps, a mean, a living norm on the surface, and a completely fluid, polymorphic being at its core? What was their connection with these creations? How long did a crystal retain control of its product—and how, having built it, could it abruptly leave it to go its own way? And when the rare syzygy occurred by which two crystals made something like Horty—when would they release him to be his own creature… and what would become of him then?

Perhaps the Maneater had been right when he had described the creatures of the crystals as their dreams—solid figments of their alien imaginations, built any way they might occur, patterned on partial suggestions pictured by faulty memories of real objects. She knew—the Maneater had happily demonstrated—that there were thousands, perhaps millions of the crystals on earth, living their strange lives, as oblivious to humanity as humanity was to them, for the life-cycles, the purposes and aims of the two species were completely separate. Yet—how many men walked the earth who were not men at all; how many trees, how many rabbits, flowers, amoebae, sea-worms, redwoods, eels and eagles grew and flowered, swam and hunted and stood among their prototypes with none knowing that they were an alien dream, having, apart from the dream, no history?

“Books,” Zena snorted. The books she had read! She had snatched everything she could get her hands on that would give her the slightest lead on the nature of the dreaming crystals. And for every drop of information she had gained (and passed on to Horty) about physiology, biology, comparative anatomy, philosophy, history, theosophy and psychology, she had taken in a gallon of smug certitude, of bland assumptions that humanity was the peak of creation. The answers… the books had answers for everything. A new variety of manglewort appears, and some learned pundit places his finger alongside his nose and pronounces, “Mutation!” Sometimes, certainly. But—always? What of the hidden crystal-creatare dreaming in a ditch, absently performing, by some strange telekinesis, a miracle of creation?

She loved, she worshipped Charles Fort, who refused to believe that any answer was the only answer.

She looked at her watch yet again, and whimpered. If she only knew; if she could only guide him… if she could get guidance herself, somewhere, somewhere…

The doorknob turned. Zena froze, staring at it. Something heavy pressed against the door. There was no knock. The crack between door and frame, high up, widened. Then the bolt let go, and Solum burst into the room.

His loose-skinned, grey-green face and dangling lower lip seemed to pull more than usual at the small, inflamed eyes. He took a half-step back to swing the door closed behind him, and crossed the room to her, his great arms away from his body as if to check any move she might make.

His presence told her some terrible news. No one knew where she was but Horty and Bunny, who had left her in this tourist cabin before they crossed the highway to the carnival. And when last heard of, Solum had been on the road with the Maneater.

So—the Maneater was back, and he had contacted Bunny or Horty, or both, and, worst of all, he had been able to extract information that neither would give willingly.

She looked up at him out of a tearing flurry of deadening resignation and mounting terror. “Solum—”

His lips moved. His tongue passed over his brilliant pointed teeth. He reached for her, and she shrank back.

And then he dropped to his knees. Moving slowly, he took her tiny foot in one of his hands, bent over it with an air that was, unmistakably, reverence.

He kissed her instep, ever so gently, and he wept. He released her foot and crouched there, immersed in great noiseless shuddering sobs.

“But,
Solum—”
she said, stupidly. She put out a hand and touched his wet cheek. He pressed it closer. She watched him in utter astonishment. Long ago she used to wonder at what went on in the mind behind this hideous face, a mind locked in a silent, speechless universe, with all the world pouring in through the observant eyes and never an expression, never a conclusion or an emotion coming out.