Short Fiction - Fritz Leiber (desktop ebook reader .TXT) 📗

we listened to this racket long enough?” he asked.

Without waiting for an answer, he put down the instrument on the table. The cat hurried over to it curiously and the clicks began again to mount in a minor crescendo. Effie lunged for it frantically, switched it off, darted back.

“That’s right,” Patrick said with another chilling smile. “You do well to cringe, for I’m death itself. Even in death I could kill you, like a snake.” And with that his voice took on the tones of a circus barker. “Yes, I’m a freak, as the gentleman so wisely said. That’s what one doctor who dared talk with me for a minute told me before he kicked me out. He couldn’t tell me why, but somehow the dust doesn’t kill me. Because I’m a freak, you see, just like the men who ate nails and walked on fire and ate arsenic and stuck themselves through with pins. Step right up, ladies and gentlemen⁠—only not too close!⁠—and examine the man the dust can’t harm. Rappaccini’s child, brought up to date; his embrace, death!

“And now,” he said, breathing heavily, “I’ll get out and leave you in your damned lead cave.”

He started toward the window. Hank’s gun followed him shakingly.

“Wait!” Effie called in an agonized voice. He obeyed. She continued falteringly, “When we were together earlier, you didn’t act as if⁠ ⁠…”

“When we were together earlier, I wanted what I wanted,” he snarled at her. “You don’t suppose I’m a bloody saint, do you?”

“And all the beautiful things you told me?”

“That,” he said cruelly, “is just a line I’ve found that women fall for. They’re all so bored and so starved for beauty⁠—as they generally put it.”

“Even the garden?” Her question was barely audible through the sobs that threatened to suffocate her.

He looked at her and perhaps his expression softened just a trifle.

“What’s outside,” he said flatly, “is just a little worse than either of you can imagine.” He tapped his temple. “The garden’s all here.”

“You’ve killed it,” she wept. “You’ve killed it in me. You’ve both killed everything that’s beautiful. But you’re worse,” she screamed at Patrick, “because he only killed beauty once, but you brought it to life just so you could kill it again. Oh, I can’t stand it! I won’t stand it!” And she began to scream.

Patrick started toward her, but she broke off and whirled away from him to the window, her eyes crazy.

“You’ve been lying to us,” she cried. “The garden’s there. I know it is. But you don’t want to share it with anyone.”

“No, no, Euphemia,” Patrick protested anxiously. “It’s hell out there, believe me. I wouldn’t lie to you about it.”

“Wouldn’t lie to me!” she mocked. “Are you afraid, too?”

With a sudden pull, she jerked open the window and stood before the blank green-tinged oblong of darkness that seemed to press into the room like a menacing, heavy, wind-urged curtain.

At that Hank cried out a shocked, pleading, “Effie!”

She ignored him. “I can’t be cooped up here any longer,” she said. “And I won’t, now that I know. I’m going to the garden.”

Both men sprang at her, but they were too late. She leaped lightly to the sill, and by the time they had flung themselves against it, her footsteps were already hurrying off into the darkness.

“Effie, come back! Come back!” Hank shouted after her desperately, no longer thinking to cringe from the man beside him, or how the gun was pointed. “I love you, Effie. Come back!”

Patrick added his voice. “Come back, Euphemia. You’ll be safe if you come back right away. Come back to your home.”

No answer to that at all.

They both strained their eyes through the greenish murk. They could barely make out a shadowy figure about half a block down the near-black canyon of the dismal, dust-blown street, into which the greenish moonlight hardly reached. It seemed to them that the figure was scooping something up from the pavement and letting it sift down along its arms and over its bosom.

“Go out and get her, man,” Patrick urged the other. “For if I go out for her, I warn you I won’t bring her back. She said something about having stood the dust better than most, and that’s enough for me.”

But Hank, chained by his painfully learned habits and by something else, could not move.

And then a ghostly voice came whispering down the street, chanting, “Fire can hurt me, or water, or the weight of Earth. But the dust is my friend.”

Patrick spared the other man one more look. Then, without a word, he vaulted up and ran off.

Hank stood there. After perhaps a half minute he remembered to close his mouth when he inhaled. Finally he was sure the street was empty. As he started to close the window, there was a little mew.

He picked up the cat and gently put it outside. Then he did close the window, and the shutters, and bolted them, and took up the Geiger counter, and mechanically began to count himself.

Yesterday House I

The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove’s surface by the sloop’s prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand.

He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove’s high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns