Night & Demons (50 page)

“Wait,” he said, pausing as the thought struck him. “What am I going to say to them?”

Carter shrugged. “Garuli, I have a fine snail shell to trade,” he suggested. “If this works at all, it can’t be much more complicated. Damned if I can see how it could work but . . . .”

He trailed off into another shrug.

“Well, let’s go,” McElroy said and led the way up the stairs. They walked as quietly as they could, but the shuffling brought one of the girls to peep out through her door, probably wondering who had come in late. No one said anything to her, nor did she ask.

Carter closed the door of the upstairs kitchen behind them so that the draft when they opened the window would not be noticed by the girls. The fire escape platform, an ugly wooden framework outside the west winðdow, served as a porch in fine weather; it would make an adequate, if crowded, place from which to signal.

“Shall we light the candle inside?” Jeanette asked.

“Good idea,” agreed Carter, handing her the candle so that he could strike a match. It was a new candle but lit quickly when Jeanette tilted it at an angle over the match-flame, allowing wax to run down the unsaturated wick.

“You better get the window, too,” McElroy said. “My hands are full.”

Carter nodded and tugged. When the window refused to move he checked the lock, then struck the sash a sharp blow with the heel of his hand and tried again. This time the window went up with hardly a squeal.

“After you,” Carter said to McElroy with a sardonic flourish. When he turned to take the candle from Jeanette she shook her head.

“Go on,” she said. “It’ll be easier if I hand it to you.”

The flame sputtered blue and went out anyway, as soon as the wind caught it outside. It was the vicious cold of an Iowa winter outside, well below zero with the biting wind that makes even Iowans wonder why they hadn’t gone somewhere else to school. The wind had scoured clean the boards of the 6 x 3-foot platform but made the lack of a railing seem unusually dangerous. It howled at Carter as he gave Jeanette a hand as she ducked through the window.

It took three tries to relight the candle when the air calmed for a moment. Carter immediately cupped his hands around the flame to shield it from the next gust. When that steadied Carter took the candle in his left hand and said, “Quick Jeanette, before it goes out.”

Jeanette fumbled in her pocket with clumsy fingers, then pulled off her right glove and found the pendant. A puff of wind blew out the flame before she could raise the ruby.

McElroy cursed out of irritation or nervousness. This time one match was enough to relight the candle as Jeanette held it in her left hand. Carter quickly took it from her and held it below and behind the pendant, sighting across them at the glaring full moon.

McElroy didn’t have to be told. “Garuli!” he shouted as though he expected his voice to carry unaided to them. “I have a shell to trade!”

The candle went out again. Jeanette tilted it up with a questioning glance at Carter. He shook his head. “We’ve done what we were supposed to. At least this damned wind has cleared the overcast away.”

“What’s that?” asked McElroy.

“The clouds are gone,” Carter repeated.

McElroy took little notice. “Look,” he said, “do you suppose I should repeat it in Latin?”

“I doubt it,” Carter began. “If this gets through to them at all it won’t—”

“There! There!”

Startled, both men followed Jeanette’s pointing arm. It was about five hundred feet up when they saw it, a dull sphere standing dark against the moonlit sky. Whether it had been falling all the time or had somehow appeared just before Jeanette saw it, none of them could say. It grew as they watched, plunging toward them in utter silence. Jeanette gave a little cry and held herself tight against Carter’s chest, but McElroy was too intent on the globe to notice.

Light shimmered over the sphere’s undersurfaces and it slowed visibly, then drifted over to the platform as if blown by the wind. When it came to rest it was not quite touching the guttering, a twenty foot ball of no particuðlar color, just out of reach. Then a six-foot-square flashed white and lay down forming a bridge to the platform for what might have been a man.

He was short and slender, the creature that stepped toward them, but he took no notice of the searing wind that blew his thin garments against him. His face looked grey though that might have been the light; his eyes were dull as stone; and the jewel at his throat burned like the red heart of Betelgeuse.

McElroy held out the shell, saying nothing. The Other stepped back with a flash of anger or fear. He snapped a glove from his belt and drew it carefully over his left hand, clearly displaying his six fingers. Then he took the shell, turned it to all sides, and finally looked up with a nod.

“No,” said McElroy as the Other moved his hand toward a belt pouch. “No,” he repeated, “not those. I want the big one, the Anthrax.”

The Other obviously knew what McElroy was saying. He raised his bare hand to his throat, tapping the gem absently with his forefinger. At each touch the fires bellied around his hand, silhouetting it and dazzling the three watchers. Without further reflection he plucked the stone from its setting and dropped it in the cup of McElroy’s gloved hand. Then he turned and stepped back into his ship, the hatch flowing shut behind him.

The globe began to rise and steadily increasing speed. Several hundred feet above the city, it flashed from red through violet and—disappeared.

The three of them stared at the lambent crystal in McElroy’s hand. It still glowed but seemingly feebly, perðhaps in comparison to its glory to the touch of the Other. McElroy gripped the book between his upper arm and chest so that he could tap the stone with his right hand.

Still nothing happened.

“Oh, thank God,” Jeanette whispered, the first words any of them had spoken since the globe appeared.

“Wait, I know,” said McElroy and tugged off his right glove with his teeth.

“Bob! Don’t!” Carter shouted and lunged for his friend across the narrow platform.

Startled, perhaps frightened, McElroy instantly seized the jewel with his bare hand. His body disintegrated in a soundless blast of light so sudden he had no time even to scream. The shattered corpse toppled into the electric lead-in and an intermittent arc sputtered like a grease fire. When it stopped, the street light had gone out.

Carter seized Jeanette by the shoulders, staring into her face washed white by horror. “Jeanette! Oh God, I’m so sorry. Semele had to see Zeus in his glory and it destroyed her—and I knew.”

He groaned and tried to pull her close. She broke loose and shouted, “Kiss me! Why don’t you kiss me right here! That’s why you did it, isn’t it? You knew as well as I did what would happen. Didn’t you?”

With a groan of agony she stepped back to him, buryðing her tears in his coat.

“Allen, Allen, what have we done?” she moaned.

There were other questioning faces now, staring out of neighboring windows, but Carter had no answers for anyone.

Not anyone at all.

12-14-67

FIREFIGHT

One of the best of many good things that’s happened in the course of my writing career is that I got Kirby McCauley for an agent. (And incidentally, if these intros don’t make it clear that I’ve been amazingly lucky all my life, then they’re distorting a truth that I feel all the way to my bones.)

After Mr. Derleth died, I had to look for new markets. I managed to sell a story to
F&SF
but a lot of short fiction was being published in one-shot anthologies that I wasn’t even going to hear about before they closed. I thought about agents, but I didn’t really know how to go about getting one and I felt (rightly) that anybody who took me at that stage of my career was a pretty doubtful prospect himself.

A pulp dealer friend, Richard Minter, mentioned that a correspondent from Minneapolis, Kirby McCauley, had started representing fantasy writers. He was agent for a number of
Weird Tales
pros (Carl Jacobi, for example), but he also had new Arkham House writers like Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley in his stable.

Would he represent me? Did I really want an agent? And perhaps most important, how painful would it be to be turned down? Pretty painful, I suspected, but I could delay the event by not writing McCauley.

Two things happened.
F&SF
published a Cthulhu Mythos novelette by Brian Lumley. Since the 1950s, the only Lovecraftian stories in the magazine had been parodies—it was far too sophisticated for “pneumatic prose” to quote one editor’s comment about Lovecraft’s own style. Yet here was an unabashed pastiche. I could only assume that Mr. Lumley’s agent was an incredible salesman. (Oddly enough, that was precisely the correct assumption to draw from the event.)

Second, Marvel Comics brought out a digest-sized fantasy magazine,
The Haunt of Horror
. Much of it was written in-house by comics scripters, but there was also a new story by Ramsey Campbell. Mr. Campbell’s agent was obviously on top of things.

Furthermore, I learned that
The Haunt of Horror
was being killed after the second issue (which was already at the printers). I’d missed my chance at a sale because I didn’t have an agent like Kirby McCauley.

I didn’t think I could simply write Kirby (well, Mr. McCauley) and tell him I wanted an agent. I’d just finished a story (“Contact!”) that I intended to send to
Analog
. I sent it to Kirby with my query letter instead.

He wrote back with great enthusiasm (Kirby does everything with great enthusiasm; you can question his judgment sometimes, but never his gusto), saying that he was already aware of my writing and had intended to approach me shortly. He thought the story was great (he sent it on to
Analog
and got an acceptance by return mail, the fastest I’ve ever had in my life) and looked forward to a long and profitable association.

We’ve had that, though it was a lot of years before I made enough money to justify Kirby and his sister Kay keeping me on as a client. Kirby went from success to success, ratcheting clients up by orders of magnitude whether they started from nothing (like Karl Wagner) or from something already impressive (like Stephen King, who became Kirby’s client after his early six-figure book deals).

In the course of his other activities, Kirby edited original anthologies. I wrote “Firefight” for the first of them, “Frights.” The incident of a kid in the flame track breaking up an attack was quite real, though of course the enemy was an NVA battalion rather than anything supernatural.

As a matter of fact, the whole background is real. I look back at that time and realize that it was a completely different world.

But at the time it was the real world, and the only world I had.

* * *

“
C
hrist,” Ginelli said, staring at the dusty wilderness, “if this is a sample, the next move’ll be to Hell. And a firebase there’d be cooler.”

Herrold lit a cigarette and poked the pack toward his subordinate. “Have one,” he suggested.

“Not unless it’s grass,” the heavy newbie muttered. He flapped the sleeveless flak jacket away from his flesh, feeling streaks of momentary chill as sweat started from beneath the quilted nylon. “Christ, how d’you stand it?”

Herrold, rangy and big-jointed, leaned back in the dome seat and cocked one leg over the flamethrower’s muzzle. Ginelli envied the track commander’s build every time he looked at the taller man. His own basic training only four months before had been a ghastly round of extra physical training to sweat off pounds of his mother’s pasta.

“Better get used to it,” Herrold warned lazily. “This zippo always winds up at the back of the column, so we always wait to set up in the new laagers. Think about them—pretend you’re a tree.”

Ginelli followed his TC’s finger toward the eight giant trees in the stone enclosure. It didn’t help. Their tops reached a hundred feet into the air above the desolate plain, standing aloof from the activity that raised a pall of dust beside them. The shadows pooling beneath could not cool Ginelli as he squatted sun-dazzled on the deck of the flame track.

At least Colonel Boyle was just as hot where he stood directing placements from the sandbagged deck of his vehicle. Hieu stood beside him as usual. You could always recognize the interpreter at a distance because of the tiger fatigues he wore, darkly streaked with black and green. Below the two, radiomen were stringing the last of the tarpaulin passageways that joined the three command vehicles into a Tactical Operations Center. Now you could move between the blacked-out tracks in the dark; but the cool of the night seemed far away.

On the roof, Boyle pointed and said something to Hieu. The dark-skinned interpreter’s nod was emphatic; the colonel spoke into his neck-slung microphone and the two vehicles ahead of the flame track grunted into motion. Herrold straightened suddenly as his radio helmet burped at him. “Seven-zero, roger,” he replied.

“We movin’?” Ginelli asked, leaning closer to the TC to hear him better. Herrold flipped the switch by his left ear forward to intercom and said, “OK, Murray, they want us on the west side against that stone wall. There’ll be a ground guide, so take it easy.”

Murray edged the zippo forward, driving it clockwise around the circuit other tracks had clawed in the barren earth. Except for the grove within the roomy laterite enclosure, there was nothing growing closer than the rubber plantation whose rigid files marched green and silver a mile to the east. Low dikes, mostly fallen into the crumbling soil, ordered the wasteland. Dust plumed in the far distance as a motorbike pulled out of the rubber and turned toward the firebase. Coke girls already, Ginelli thought. Even in this desert.

Whatever the region’s problem was it couldn’t have been with the soil itself; not if trees like the monsters behind the low wall could grow in it. Every one of the eight the massive stonework girdled was forty feet around at the base. The wrinkled bole of the central titan could have been half that again.