Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (40 page)

At the same time, he knew that the other critical situation in the
household was worsening swiftly. Sissy, he realized now, was far older
than Baby and should long ago have undergone her own somewhat less
glamorous though equally necessary transformation (the first tin of raw
horsemeat could hardly be as exciting as the first cup of coffee). Her
time was long overdue. Gummitch found increasing horror in this mute
vampirish being inhabiting the body of a rapidly growing girl, though
inwardly equipped to be nothing but a most bloodthirsty she-cat. How
dreadful to think of Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here having to care all
their lives for such a monster! Gummitch told himself that if any
opportunity for alleviating his parents' misery should ever present itself
to him, he would not hesitate for an instant.

Then one night, when the sense of Change was so burstingly strong in him
that he knew tomorrow must be the Day, but when the house was also
exceptionally unquiet, with boards creaking and snapping, taps adrip, and
curtains mysteriously rustling at closed windows (so that it was clear
that the many spirit worlds, including the mirror one, must be pressing
very close), the opportunity came to Gummitch.

Kitty-Come-Here and Old Horsemeat had fallen into especially sound,
drugged sleeps, the former with a bad cold, the latter with one unhappy
highball too many (Gummitch knew he had been brooding about Sissy). Baby
slept too, though with uneasy whimperings and joggings—moonlight
shone full on his crib past a window shade which had whirringly rolled
itself up without human or feline agency. Gummitch kept vigil under the
crib, with eyes closed but with wildly excited mind pressing outward to
every boundary of the house and even stretching here and there into the
outer world. On this night of all nights sleep was unthinkable.

Then suddenly he became aware of footsteps, footsteps so soft they must,
he thought, be Cleopatra's.

No, softer than that, so soft they might be those of the Gummitch Double
escaped from the mirror world at last and padding up toward him through
the darkened halls. A ribbon of fur rose along his spine.

Then into the nursery Sissy came prowling. She looked slim as an Egyptian
princess in her long, thin yellow nightgown and as sure of herself, but
the cat was very strong in her tonight, from the flat, intent eyes to the
dainty canine teeth slightly bared—one look at her now would have
sent Kitty-Come-Here running for the telephone number she kept hidden, the
telephone number of the special doctor—and Gummitch realized he was
witnessing a monstrous suspension of natural law in that this being should
be able to exist for a moment without growing fur and changing round
pupils for slit eyes.

He retreated to the darkest corner of the room, suppressing a snarl.

Sissy approached the crib and leaned over Baby in the moonlight, keeping
her shadow off him. For a while she gloated. Then she began softly to
scratch his cheek with a long hatpin she carried, keeping away from his
eye, but just barely. Baby awoke and saw her, and Baby didn't cry. Sissy
continued to scratch, always a little more deeply. The moonlight glittered
on the jeweled end of the pin.

Gummitch knew he faced a horror that could not be countered by running
about or even spitting and screeching. Only magic could fight so obviously
supernatural a manifestation. And this was also no time to think of
consequences, no matter how clearly and bitterly etched they might appear
to a mind intensely awake.

He sprang up onto the other side of the crib, not uttering a sound, and
fixed his golden eyes on Sissy's in the moonlight. Then he moved forward
straight at her evil face, stepping slowly, not swiftly, using his
extraordinary knowledge of the properties of space
to walk straight
through her hand and arm as they flailed the hatpin at him.
When his
nose-tip finally paused a fraction of an inch from hers, his eyes had not
blinked once, and she could not look away. Then he unhesitatingly flung
his spirit into her like a fistful of flaming arrows, and he worked the
Mirror Magic.

Sissy's moonlit face, feline and terrified, was in a sense the last thing
that Gummitch, the real Gummitch-kitten, ever saw in this world. For the
next instant he felt himself enfolded by the foul black blinding cloud of
Sissy's spirit, which his own had displaced. At the same time he heard the
little girl scream, very loudly but even more distinctly, "Mommy!"

That cry might have brought Kitty-Come-Here out of her grave, let alone
from sleep merely deep or drugged. Within seconds she was in the nursery,
closely followed by Old Horsemeat, and she had caught up Sissy in her arms
and the little girl was articulating the wonderful word again and again,
and miraculously following it with the command—there could be no
doubt; Old Horsemeat heard it too—"Hold me tight!"

Then Baby finally dared to cry. The scratches on his cheek came to
attention, and Gummitch, as he had known must happen, was banished to the
basement amid cries of horror and loathing, chiefly from Kitty-Come-Here.

The little cat did not mind. No basement would be one-tenth as dark as
Sissy's spirit that now enshrouded him for always, hiding all the file
drawers and the labels on all the folders, blotting out forever even the
imagining of the scene of first coffee-drinking and first speech.

In a last intuition, before the animal blackness closed in utterly,
Gummitch realized that the spirit, alas, is not the same thing as the
consciousness, and that one may lose—sacrifice—the first and
still be burdened with the second.

Old Horsemeat had seen the hatpin (and hid it quickly from
Kitty-Come-Here), and so he knew that the situation was not what it seemed
and that Gummitch was at the very least being made into a sort of
scapegoat. He was quite apologetic when he brought the tin pans of food to
the basement during the period of the little cat's exile. It was a comfort
to Gummitch, albeit a small one. Gummitch told himself, in his new black,
halting manner of thinking, that after all a cat's best friend is his man.

From that night, Sissy never turned back in her development. Within two
months she had made three years' progress in speaking. She became an
outstandingly bright, light-footed, high-spirited little girl. Although
she never told anyone this, the moonlit nursery and Gummitch's magnified
face were her first memories. Everything before that was inky blackness.
She was always very nice to Gummitch in a careful sort of way. She could
never stand to play the game "Owl Eyes."

After a few weeks Kitty-Come-Here forgot her fears and Gummitch once again
had the run of the house. But by then the transformation Old Horsemeat had
always warned about had fully taken place. Gummitch was a kitten no longer
but an almost burly tom. In him it took the psychological form not of
sullenness or surliness but an extreme dignity. He seemed at times rather
like an old pirate brooding on treasures he would never live to dig up,
shores of adventure he would never reach. And sometimes when you looked
into his yellow eyes you felt that he had in him all the materials for the
book
Slit Eyes Look at Life
—three or four volumes at least—although
he would never write it. And that was natural when you come to think of
it, for as Gummitch knew very well, bitterly well indeed, his fate was to
be the only kitten in the world that did not grow up to be a man.

The End

© By permission of Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., agents for the
estate of Fritz Leiber. First publication in
Star Science Fiction
Stories #4
, ed. Frederik Pohl, Ballantine, 1958.

Gahan Wilson

I felt we made an embarrassing contrast to the open serenity of the
scene around us. The pure blue of the sky was unmarked by a single
cloud or bird, and nothing stirred on the vast stretch of beach except
ourselves. The sea, sparkling under the freshness of the early morning
sun, looked invitingly clean. I wanted to wade into it and wash
myself, but I was afraid I would contaminate it.

We are a contamination here, I thought. We're like a group of sticky bugs
crawling in an ugly little crowd over polished marble. If I were God and
looked down and saw us, lugging our baskets and our silly, bright
blankets, I would step on us and squash us with my foot.

We should have been lovers or monks in such a place, but we were only a
crowd of bored and boring drunks. You were always drunk when you were with
Carl. Good old, mean old Carl was the greatest little drink pourer in the
world. He used drinks like other types of sadists used whips. He kept
beating you with them until you dropped or sobbed or went mad, and he
enjoyed every step of the process.

We'd been drinking all night, and when the morning came, somebody, I think
it was Mandie, got the great idea that we should all go out on a picnic.
Naturally, we thought it was an inspiration, we were nothing if not real
sports, and so we'd packed some goodies, not forgetting the liquor, and
we'd piled into the car, and there we were, weaving across the beach,
looking for a place to spread our tacky banquet.

We located a broad, low rock, decided it would serve for our table, and
loaded it with the latest in plastic chinaware, a haphazard collection of
food, and a quantity of bottles.

Someone had packed a tin of Spam among the other offerings, and, when I
saw it, I was suddenly overwhelmed with an absurd feeling of nostalgia. It
reminded me of the war and of myself soldierboying up through Italy. It
also reminded me of how long ago the whole thing had been and how little
I'd done of what I'd dreamed I'd do back then.

I opened the Spam and sat down to be alone with it and my memories, but it
wasn't to be for long. The kind of people who run with people like Carl
don't like to be alone, ever, especially with their memories, and they
can't imagine anyone else might, at least now and then, have a taste for
it.

My rescuer was Irene. Irene was particularly sensitive about seeing people
alone because being alone had several times nearly produced fatal results
for her. Being alone and taking pills to end the being alone.

"What's wrong, Phil?" she asked.

"Nothing's wrong," I said, holding up a forkful of the pink Spam in the
sunlight. "It tastes just like it always did. They haven't lost their
touch."

She sat down on the sand beside me, very carefully, so as to avoid
spilling the least drop of what must have been her millionth Scotch.

"Phil," she said, "I'm worried about Mandie. I really am. She looks so
unhappy!"

I glanced over at Mandie. She had her head thrown back and she was
laughing uproariously at some joke Carl had just made. Carl was smiling at
her with his teeth glistening and his eyes deep down dead as ever.

"Why should Mandie be happy?" I asked. "What, in God's name, has she got
to be happy about?"

"Oh, Phil," said Irene. "You pretend to be such an awful cynic. She's
alive,
isn't she?"

I looked at her and wondered what such a statement meant, coming from
someone who'd tried to do herself in as earnestly and as frequently as
Irene. I decided that I did not know and that I would probably never know.
I also decided I didn't want anymore of the Spam. I turned to throw it
away, doing my bit to litter up the beach, and then I saw them.

They were far away, barely bigger than two dots, but you could tell there
was something odd about them even then.

"We've got company," I said.

Irene peered in the direction of my point.

"Look, everybody," she cried, "we've got company!"

Everybody looked, just as she had asked them to.

"What the hell is this?" asked Carl. "Don't they know this is my private
property?" And then he laughed.

Carl had fantasies about owning things and having power. Now and then he
got drunk enough to have little flashes of believing he was king of the
world.

"You tell 'em, Carl!" said Horace.

Horace had sparkling quips like that for almost every occasion. He was
tall and bald and he had a huge Adam's apple and, like myself, he worked
for Carl. I would have felt sorrier for Horace than I did if I hadn't had
a sneaky suspicion that he was really happier when groveling. He lifted
one scrawny fist and shook it in the direction of the distant pair.

"You guys better beat it," he shouted. "This is private property!"

"Will you shut up and stop being such an ass?" Mandie asked him. "It's not
polite to yell at strangers, dear, and this may damn well be
their
beach for all you know."

Mandie happens to be Horace's wife. Horace's children treat him about the
same way. He busied himself with zipping up his windbreaker, because it
was getting cold and because he had received an order to be quiet.

I watched the two approaching figures. The one was tall and bulky, and he
moved with a peculiar, swaying gait. The other was short and hunched into
himself, and he walked in a fretful, zigzag line beside his towering
companion.

"They're heading straight for us," I said.

The combination of the cool wind that had come up and the approach of the
two strangers had put a damper on our little group. We sat quietly and
watched them coming closer. The nearer they got, the odder they looked.

"For heaven's sake!" said Irene. "The little one's wearing a square hat!"

"I think it's made of paper," said Mandie, squinting, "folded newspaper."

"Will you look at the mustache on the big bastard?" asked Carl. "I don't
think I've ever seen a bigger bush in my life."

"They remind me of something," I said.

The others turned to look at me.

The Walrus and the Carpenter …

"They remind me of the Walrus and the Carpenter," I said.