The Perfect Host, page 38
Then, together, we turned our heads and looked at him.
He had dimmed his pent-up light, but still he blazed. I will not say what he looked like, because he looked like only himself. I will not say he looked like a man, because no man could look like him. He said, “Claire, take off your boot.”
She bent to do it, and when she had, something flowed from him to us. I had my hoof under me. I felt it writhe and swell. There was an instant of pain. I grasped the hairy ankle as the coarse hair fell out, and then my foot was whole again. Claire laughed, patting and stroking her restored foot. I had never seen her face like that before.
Then he laughed. I will not say what that was like either. “Thad, Thad, you’ve done it. You’ve bungled and stumbled, but you’ve done it.” I’ll say how he spoke, though. He spoke like a man.
“What have I done?” I asked. “I have been pushed and pulled; I’ve thought some things out, and I’ve been both right and wrong—what have I done?”
“You have done right—finally,” he chuckled. “You have set me free. You have broken walls and melted bars that are inconceivable to you … I’ll tell you as much as I can, though.
“You see, for some hundreds of thousands of years I have had a—call it a jailer. He did not capture me: that was done by a far greater one than he. But the jailer’s name was Korm. And sometimes he lived as a bird and sometimes as an animal or a man. You knew him as Ponder. He was a minor wizard, and Luana was his familiar. I too have a familiar—Tiltol there.” He indicated the blue beast, stretched quietly out at his feet.
“Imprisoned, I could do very little. Korm used to amuse himself by watching my struggles, and occasionally he would set up a spell to block me even further. Sometimes he would leave me alone, to get my hopes up, to let me begin to free myself, so that he could step in and check me again, and laugh …
“One thing I managed to do during one of those periods was to bring Claire’s parents together. Korm thought that the magic thing they had between them was the tool I was developing, and when it began to look like a strong magic, he killed them. He did not know until much later that Claire was my magic; and when he found it out, he made a new and irritating spell around me, and induced Claire to come out here and walk into it. It was supposed to kill her, but she was protected; all it did was to touch her with the mark of the beast—a cloven hoof. And it immobilized me completely for some hours.
“When I could, I sent Tiltol after her with a new protection; without it she would be in real danger from Korm, for he was bound to find out how very special she was. Tiltol tried to weave the new protection around her—and found that he could not. Her aura was no longer completely her own. She had fallen in love; she had given part of herself away to you, Thad. Now, since the new spell would work only on one in Claire’s particular condition, and since he could not change that, Tiltol found a very logical solution: He gave you a cloven hoof too, and then cast the protection over both of you. That’s why the bear-trap did not hurt you, and why the wasps couldn’t sting you.”
“I’m beginning to see,” I said. “But—what’s this about the ritual? How did it set you free?”
“I can’t explain that. Roughly, though, I might say that if you regard my prison as locked, and your presence as the key in the lock, then the ritual was the turning of the key, and use of the knife was the direction in which the key was turned. If you—or Claire, which was Korm’s intention—had used the ritual without the knife, I would have been more firmly imprisoned than ever, and you two would have lived out your lives with those hooves.”
“What about Goo-goo? I thought for a while that he was the jailer.”
He chuckled. “Bless you, no. He is what he seems to be—a harmless, half-demented old man, keeping himself out of people’s way. He isn’t dead, by the way. When he wakes, he’ll have no recollection of all this. I practiced on him, to see if I could get a human being to perform the ritual, and he has been a good friend. He won’t lose by it. Speaking of the ritual, though, I’d like you to know that, spectacular as it might have been, it wasn’t the biggest part of the battle. That happened before—when you and Claire were talking to Ponder. Remember when Claire recited the spell and didn’t know what she was saying?”
“I certainly do. That was when I suddenly decided there was something funny about Ponder’s story. He had hypnotized her, hadn’t he?”
“Something very like it … he was in her mind and I, by the way, was in yours. That’s what made you leap up and go to Luana.”
I shuddered. “That was bad … evil. What about this ‘good and evil’ theory of Ponder’s, incidentally? How could he have worked evil on you with a spell from the Bible?”
There was a trace of irritation in his voice. “You’ll have to get rid of this ‘black and white magic’ misconception,” he said. “Is a force like electricity ‘white’ or ‘black’? You use it for the iron lung. You use it also for the electric chair. You can’t define magic by its methods and its materials, but only in terms of its purpose. Regard it, not as ‘black’ and ‘white,’ but as High and Low magic. As to the Testament, why, that ritual is older than the Bible or it couldn’t have been recorded there. Believe me, Ponder was using it well out of its context. Ah well, it’s all over with now. You two are blessed—do you realize that? You both will keep your special immunity, and Claire shall have what she most wants, besides.”
“What about you?”
“I must go. I have work to do. The world was not ordained to be without me.
“For there is reason in the world, and all the world is free to use it. But there has been no will to use it. There’s wilfulness aplenty, in individuals and in groups, but no great encompassing will to work with reason. Almost no one reads a Communist newspaper but Communists, and only prohibitionists attend a dry convention. Humanity is split up into tiny groups, each clinging to some single segment of Truth, and earnestly keeping itself unaware of the other Truths that make up the great mosaic. And even when humans are aware of the fact that others share the same truth, they allow themselves to be kept apart from each other. The farmer here knows that the farmer there does not want to fight a war against him, yet they fight. I am that Will. I am the brother of Reason, who came here with me. My brother has done well, but he needs me, and you have set me free.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“The earliest men called me Kamäel.”
“The Camel … in every language,” murmured Claire. Suddenly her eyes widened. “You are—an … an archangel, Kamäel! I’ve read …”
He smiled, and we looked down, blinded.
“Tiltol!”
The tiny familiar twitched and was suddenly balancing on its two legs. It moved abruptly, impossibly fast, zoomed up to Kamäel, where it nestled in the crook of his arm. And suddenly it began to grow and change. Great golden feathers sprouted from its naked hide, and a noble crest. It spread wide wings. Its plumage was an incredible purple under its golden crest and gold-tipped wings. We stared, filling our minds with a sight no human being alive had seen—of all birds, the noblest.
“Good-bye,” said Kamäel. “Perhaps one day you will know the size of the thing you have done. The One who imprisoned me will come back, one day, and we will be ready for him.”
“Satan?”
“Some call him that.”
“Did he leave Earth?”
“Bless you, yes! Mankind has had no devil but himself these last twenty thousand years! But we’ll be ready for the Old One, now.”
There was more sun, there were more colors in the world as we walked back to town.
“It was the Phoenix!” breathed Claire for the twentieth time. “What a thing to tell our children.”
“Whose children?
“Ours.”
“Now look,” I said, but she interrupted me. “Didn’t he say I was to have what I wanted most?”
I looked down at her, trying hard not to smile. “Oh, all right,” I said.
What Dead Men Tell
HE HAD TALKED with two dead men and one dead girl, and now he lay in lightlessness. He was conscious, but there was nothing anywhere to which to bring consciousness. This was a black that was darker than any other blackness. A smear of this would make a black hole in precipitated carbon.
His philosophy urged him to take an inventory. This couldn’t be just nothing. Consciousness itself cannot exist with nothing; they are mutually exclusive. Inventory, then:
Item: A blackness.
Item: Body. Breath warmly moistening the inside edges of his nostrils, coolly drying them. A sluggish heart. Barely resilient pressure on shoulders, buttocks, calves, heels. So the body lay on its back. Fingers on chest. Fingers on fingers. Hands together, then, on the breast. Therefore: Item, body laid out. Well, of course. This was the place where death was. This was the place to discover whether death was death, or life everlasting.
Item: The philosophy itself. The important thing. The thing that all this was about. The philosophy was … was—Later he could think of that. He had to find death first. So—
Item: Death. Just as surely as there was breath in his nostrils, as surely as he was lying there, death was here. If death found him, death was death. But if he found death, he would find his immortality. Death was here. Here; so—
Item: Here. There was nothing to conclude about here. Here was the place where he lay. It was not a place he had ever been before. There was something he had to find out about it. What? But how could he know?
Look and see, he told himself, and opened his eyes.
A blue-green radiance pressed itself between his lids. He lay with his eyes stupidly unfocused, seeing as little in the light as he had in its absence, until the straight band of lesser brightness directly above him commanded his lenses, and he saw.
He was in a tent. No—not a tent. The walls slanted up to meet overhead, but the juncture of the walls ran forward into blackness and back into blackness. It was a corridor with a triangular cross section, and he was lying on the floor. He sat up. The conscious muscular effort completed his inventory:
Item: Identity. I am me. I am Hulon—I am here.
He knelt, and automatically pulled at his single, simple garment. It was a belted tunic, sleeveless, with wide shoulder straps, and it fell to mid-thigh. He wore nothing else. He pulled at the skirt self-consciously, and examined the belt. It was a half-belt, sewn to the fabric on each side above his hips. It had no buckle; the two ends of material, when laid together, stayed together. He separated them—easily when they were peeled apart, impossible when they were pulled straight—and put them together again.
He looked about him. The floor was about thirty feet wide, and the walls seemed about the same; the cross section was an equilateral triangle. The quiet blue-green radiance flooded the floor around him and, less brilliantly, the walls and the pointed overhead. Before him and behind him, however, was utter blackness, a thick, absorbent dark that coaxed and sucked and beckoned to the light.
There was a death waiting here for him—behind him or ahead—he did not know which, but he knew it was there. He had to find out what death was, before it found him. And he had to find out one other thing, and that had to do with the corridor. He peered into the darkness before him. Was the floor tilted the slightest bit to the right?
He glanced over his shoulder at the other blackness, and steeled himself. You know you will feel fear behind you. That’s natural. It may come up behind you—but be sure. Be quite sure, or you’ll have fear to fear, as well as death.
He rose to his feet, really noticing for the first time that they were bare. The floor was resilient, cool—not cold; and there was a feeling so odd about the floor that he bent quickly and put his hand to it. It was smooth, solid, for all its slight yielding; but in addition there was a sensation of movement in it, as if its surface were composed of myriads of microscopic eddies in violent, tiny motion.
He stood erect. The sensation was very slight under his feet, and so constant that he knew he would ignore it soon. He stepped forward, peering ahead at the floor, which seemed to be not quite canted.
He was mistaken, he found when he had moved ten or twelve paces. Trick of the light. The floor ahead still seemed to tilt a little, but it was certainly level under his feet. The light—it moved with him!
He stared around him, and saw only the same featureless floor and two walls, It was as if he were lighted by a spotlight which was concealed from him.
He looked behind him, and just as he turned his head, caught a movement in the corner of his eye. He gasped and leaped to the wall, pressing his back against it, staring into the blackness. There was something—there was! A … a thing, an eye!
It was low down, almost on the floor, and it was moving toward him. Toward him, and then away, and then it stopped, and swayed, and came toward him again, and emerged into the light.
It was a bubble. A big bubble, perhaps fourteen inches in diameter, loosely filled, and apparently it derived its motion from the strange mosaic of miniature maelstroms in the floor. It danced and swayed erratically on them, sometimes turning one way, sometimes another, occasionally rolling a little.
Hulon stepped toward it. If it was alive, it paid him no attention. It moved, but quite aimlessly. As Hulon moved, the light moved with him, brightly illuminating the bubble. He watched it cautiously for a moment, and finally went down on one knee near it. He saw his distorted, dancing reflection in its side. It seemed to be filled with a clear, pale-brown fluid. He put out his hand, screwed up his courage, and touched it. It quivered like jelly but made no effort to escape. He waited until it began to roll again and quickly put his hand on the floor in front of it. It bumped off his fingers like a toy balloon, and bounced sluggishly up and down until it rested, waiting for the next capricious movement of the floor under it.
Hulon impulsively reached out and picked it up. It sagged in his hands. He pressed it gently—and it burst, leaving him staring ludicrously at his empty hands. There was a great gush of liquid which disappeared immediately when it reached the floor. There was no sign of a skin or bladder of any kind; the thing was simply gone.
Hulon wiped his hands on his tunic and shrugged. The thing was obviously inanimate. It reminded him that he was a little thirsty, but that was all. Thirsty? Perhaps a thing like this would come in handy. He had no idea how long he might be here before—He shrugged again and sniffed at his fingers. The bubble had left a faint, stimulating tang on them. Hulon nodded. If things got bad—
But couldn’t this be the death? Poison?
Wait and see, he told himself. First find out what’s at the end of the corridor. And in a flash he knew that that was what he had been hunting for in the back of his mind—the thing about here that he must find out. With the knowledge came the realization that only now did he have all his faculties—that from the moment he had found himself stretched out in the corridor, he had been only gradually regaining them.
How had he got here? What place was this? What was that thought about the two dead men and the dead girl he had talked with? What was the meaning of this fantastic, skimpy garment he was wearing? Where were his clothes? How did the light follow him?
His heart began to thump. He looked at the darknesses, the one which led, the one which followed. Cumulative shock began to take its toll. He turned, turned again, and then stood stock-still, his jaw muscles standing out, his eyes narrowed.
His nerves screamed “run!”
He stood still, trembling with the effort. Slowly, then, he went to the right wall and sat at its foot, his back comfortingly against it, his eyes shifting from darkness to darkness; and he began to sort out his thoughts.
“There are thoughts for here,” he muttered, “and thoughts for outside—for before I came here.” He wet his lips, and consciously relaxed his shoulders, which had begun to ache. “I am Hulon. I work at the Empire Theater, projectionist on the day shift.”
He fixed this in his mind, refusing to think of anything else until the thought stood clear and alone.
“Now,” he said, speaking softly because the absorbent walls—they seemed to be of the same static-mobile material as the floor—seemed to drink sound the way those darknesses lapped up light. “I will think of here first because I am here. Whatever is to happen to me will happen here, and not at the Empire Theater.” Again he waited, fixing the thought on the sturdy walls of his mind until it stopped quivering.
“I don’t know where this place is nor who built it. I do know that I’m here to meet death, and to find out what is at the end of the corridor. I know that if I can find out what kind of death I am to meet here, and if I can discover what is at the end of the corridor, I will live forever. If I do not find out these things, I will die here. I agreed to this, and I came of my own accord.”
He looked up the corridor, and down. He saw no death. He saw in-leaning walls and a floor illuminated by the pool of light in which he was centered. He saw two bottomless mouths of darkness. And with a start he saw another bubble, wandering aimlessly out of the dark to his left. He grinned at himself, and automatically wiped his hands again on his tunic. As he did so, there was a swift movement on the wall opposite. He tensed, stared. There was nothing there. Trick of the light?
What of the light?
He moved his hands over the brief tunic again, and again saw the blurred motion on the wall.
A shadow!
He lifted the hem of the tunic, turned it up. The light was not coming to the material, but from it! It was luminous, through and through. No wonder the light followed him!
Conclusion made and filed. He waited, but nothing followed it in his mind, so he turned his attention to the events outside this place. This compartmentation of ideas was the modus of his philosophy, and he needed it now as never before. He completely displaced his attention from his current situation and studied the events which had led to it.
The real beginning was when he wrote “Where is Security?” for Coswell’s Magazine, an obscure quarterly review. But his first knowledge of these strange events was the dead man he saw in the Empire Theater.
