The Fredric Brown Megapack (13 page)

Why, here and now, in this abandoned house, would be the safest and best chance he’d have for a long time, before he was safely out of the country maybe. Here and now, in this house, before he took care of fingerprints on anything he might have touched and erased any other traces of his presence he might find or think of. Here and now, but softly so as not to waken
any
sleeping neighbors, in case they might hear a difference between his first efforts and those of the instrument’s original owner.

So he’d play softly, at least at first, and quit right away if the instrument made with the squeaks and ugly noises so easy to produce on any unmastered instrument. But he had the strangest feeling that it wouldn’t happen that way to him. He knew already how to manage a double reed; once in New York he’d shared an apartment with an oboe player and had tried out his instrument with the thought of getting one himself, to double on. He’d finally decided not to because he preferred playing with small combos and an oboe fitted only into large groups. And the fingering? He looked down and saw that his fingers had fallen naturally in place over the finger-holes or poised above the keys. He moved them and watched them start, seemingly of their own volition, a little finger-dance. He made them stop moving and wonderingly put the instrument to his lips and breathed into it softly. And out came, softly, a clear, pure middle-register tone. As rich and vibrant a note as any Otto had played. Cautiously he raised a finger and then another and found himself starting a diatonic scale. And, on a hunch, made himself forget his fingers and just
thought
the scale and let his fingers take over and they did, every tone pure. He
thought
a scale in a different key and played it, then an arpeggio. He didn’t know the fingerings, but his fingers did.

He could play it, and he would.

He might as well make himself comfortable, he decided despite his mounting excitement. He crossed back to the bed and lay back across it, as he had lain while listening to the musician play, with his head and shoulders braced up against the wall behind it. And put the instrument back to his mouth and played, this time not caring about volume. Certainly if neighbors heard, they’d think it was Otto, and they would be accustomed to hearing Otto play late at night.

He thought of some of the tunes he’d heard in the wine cellar, and his fingers played them. In ecstasy, he relaxed and played as he had never played a clarinet. Again, as when Otto had played, he was struck by the purity and richness of the tone, so like the chalumeau register of his own clarinet, but extending even to the highest notes.

He played, and a thousand sounds blended into one. Again the sweet melody of paradoxes, black and white blending into a beautiful radiant gray of haunting music.

And then, seemingly without transition, he found himself playing a strange tune, one he’d never heard before. But one that he knew instinctively belonged to this wonderful instrument. A calling, beckoning tune, as had been the music Otto had played when the girls, real or imaginary, had click-clicked their way to him, but different this—was it a sinister instead of a sensual feeling underlying it?

But it was beautiful and he couldn’t have stopped the dance of his fingers or stopped giving it life with his breath if he’d tried.

And then, over or under the music, he heard another sound. Not this time a click-click of high heels but a scraping, scrabbling sound, as of thousands of tiny clawed feet. And he saw them as they spilled suddenly out of many holes in the woodwork that he had not before noticed, and ran to the bed and jumped upon it. And with paralyzing suddenness the bits and pieces fell into place and by an effort that was to be the last of his life Dooley tore the accursed instrument from his mouth, and opened his mouth to scream. But they were all around him now, all over him: great ones, tawny ones, small ones, lean ones, black ones… And before he could scream out of his opened mouth the largest black rat, the one who led them, leaped up and closed its sharp teeth in the end of his tongue and held on, and the scream aborning gurgled into silence.

And the sound of feasting lasted far into the night in Hamelin town.

PUPPET SHOW

Horror came to Cherrybell at a little after noon on a blistering hot day in August.

Perhaps that is redundant;
any
August day in Cherrybell, Arizona, is blistering hot. It is on Highway 89, about forty miles south of Tucson and about thirty miles north of the Mexican border. It consists of two filling stations, one on each side of the road to catch travelers going in both directions, a general store, a beer-and-wine-license-only tavern, a tourist-trap type trading post for tourists who can’t wait until they reach the border to start buying serapes and huaraches, a deserted hamburger stand, and a few ’dobe houses inhabited by Mexican-Americans who work in Nogales, the border town to the south, and who, for God knows what reason, prefer to live in Cherrybell and commute, some of them in Model T Fords. The sign on the highway says, “Cherrybell, Pop. 42,” but the sign exaggerates; Pop died last year—Pop Anders, who ran the now-deserted hamburger stand—and the correct figure is 41.

Horror came to Cherrybell mounted on a burro led by an ancient, dirty and gray-bearded desert rat of a prospector who later—nobody got around to asking his name for a while—gave the name of Dade Grant. Horror’s name was Garth. He was approximately nine feet tall but so thin, almost a stick man, that he could not have weighed over a hundred pounds. Old Dade’s burro carried him easily, despite the fact that his feet dragged in the sand on either side. Being dragged through the sand for, as it later turned out, well over five miles hadn’t caused the slightest wear on the shoes—more like buskins, they were—which constituted all that he wore except for a pair of what could have been swimming trunks, in robin’s-egg blue. But it wasn’t his dimensions that made him horrible to look upon; it was his
skin.
It looked red, raw. It looked as though he had been skinned alive, and the skin replaced upside down, raw side out. His skull, his face, were equally narrow or elongated; otherwise in every visible way he appeared human—or at least humanoid. Unless you counted such little things as the fact that his hair was a robin’s-egg blue to match his trunks, as were his eyes and his boots. Blood red and light blue.

Casey, owner of the tavern, was the first one to see them coming across the plain, from the direction of the mountain range to the east. He’d stepped out of the back door of his tavern for a breath of fresh, if hot, air. They were about a hundred yards away at that time, and already he could see the utter alienness of the figure on the lead burro. Just alienness at that distance, the horror came only at closer range. Casey’s jaw dropped and stayed down until the strange trio was about fifty yards away, then he started slowly toward them. There are people who run at the sight of the unknown, others who advance to meet it. Casey advanced, however slowly, to meet it.

Still in the wide open, twenty yards from the back of the little tavern, he met them. Dade Grant stopped and dropped the rope by which he was leading the burro. The burro stood still and dropped its head. The stick-man stood up simply by planting his feet solidly and standing, astride the burro. He stepped one leg across it and stood a moment, leaning his weight against his hands on the burro’s back, and then sat down in the sand. “High-gravity planet,” he said. “Can’t stand long.”

“Kin I get water for my burro?” the prospector asked Casey. “Must be purty thirsty by now. Hadda leave water bags, some other things, so it could carry—” He jerked a thumb toward the red-and-blue horror.

Casey was just realizing that it was a horror. At a distance the color combination seemed a bit
outre,
but close— The skin was rough and seemed to have veins on the outside and looked moist (although it wasn’t) and
damn
if it didn’t look just like he had his skin peeled off and put back upside down. Or just peeled off, period. Casey had never seen anything like it and hoped he wouldn’t ever see anything like it again.

Casey felt something behind him and looked over his shoulder. Others had seen now and were coming, but the nearest of them, a pair of boys, were ten yards behind him.
“Muchachos,”
he called out.
“Agua por el burro. Un pazal. Pronto?

He looked back and said, “What—? Who—?”

“Name’s Dade Grant,” said the prospector, putting out a hand, which Casey took absently. When he let go of it it jerked back over the desert rat’s shoulder, thumb indicating the thing that sat on the sand. “His name’s Garth, he tells me. He’s an extra something or other, and he’s some kind of minister.”

Casey nodded at the stick-man and was glad to get a nod in return instead of an extended hand. “I’m Manuel Casey,” he said. “What does he mean, an extra something?”

The stick-man’s voice was unexpectedly deep and vibrant. “I am an extraterrestrial. And a minister plenipotentiary.”

Surprisingly, Casey was a moderately well-educated man and knew both of those phrases; he was probably the only person in Cherrybell who would have known the second one. Less surprisingly, considering the speaker’s appearance, he believed both of them.

“What can I do for you, sir?” he asked. “But first, why not come in out of the sun?”

“No, thank you. It’s a bit cooler here than they told me it would be, but I’m quite comfortable. This is equivalent to a cool spring evening on my planet. And as to what you can do for me, you can notify your authorities of my presence. I believe they will be interested.”

Well, Casey thought, by blind luck he’s hit the best man for his purpose within at least twenty miles. Manuel Casey was half-Irish, half-Mexican. He had a half brother who was half-Irish and half assorted-American, and the half brother was a bird colonel at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. He said, “Just a minute, Mr. Garth, I’ll telephone. You, Mr. Grant, would you want to come inside?”

“Naw, I don’t mind sun. Out in it all day every day. An’ Garth here, he ast me if I’d stick with him till he was finished with what he’s gotta do here. Said he’d gimme somethin’ purty vallable if I did. Somethin’—a ’lectrononic—”

“An electronic battery-operated portable ore indicator,” Garth said. “A simple little device, indicates presence of a concentration of ore up to two miles, indicates kind, grade, quantity and depth.”

Casey gulped, excused himself, and pushed through the gathering crowd into his tavern. He had Colonel Casey on the phone in one minute, but it took him another four minutes to convince the colonel that he was neither drunk nor joking.

* * * *

Twenty-five minutes after that there was a noise in the sky, a noise that swelled and then died as a four-man helicopter sat down and shut off its rotors a dozen yards from an extraterrestrial, two men and a burro. Casey alone had had the courage to rejoin the trio from the desert; there were other spectators, but they still held well back.

Colonel Casey, a major, a captain and a lieutenant who was the helicopter’s pilot all came out and ran over. The stick-man stood up, all nine feet of him; from the effort it cost him to stand you could tell that he was used to a much lighter gravity than Earth’s. He bowed, repeated his name and identification of himself as an extraterrestrial and a minister plenipotentiary. Then he apologized for sitting down again, explained why it was necessary, and sat down.

The colonel introduced himself and the three who had come with him. “And now, sir, what can we do for you?”

The stick-man made a grimace that was probably intended as a smile. His teeth were the same light blue as his hair and eyes. “You have a cliché, ‘take me to your leader.’ I do not ask that. In fact, I
must
remain here. Nor do I ask that any of your leaders be brought here to me. That would be impolite. I am perfectly willing for you to represent them, to talk to you and let you question me. But I do ask one thing.

“You have tape recorders. I ask that, before I talk or answer questions, you have one brought. I want to be sure that the message your leaders eventually receive is full and accurate.”

“Fine,” the colonel said. He turned to the pilot. “Lieutenant, get on the radio in the whirlybird and tell them to get us a tape recorder faster than possible. It can be dropped by para— No, that’d take longer, rigging it for a drop. Have them send it by another helicopter.” The lieutenant turned to go. “Hey,” the colonel said. “Also fifty yards of extension cord. We’ll have to plug it in inside Manny’s tavern.”

The lieutenant sprinted for the helicopter.

The others sat and sweated a moment and then Manuel Casey stood up. “That’s a half an hour wait,” he said, “and if we’re going to sit here in the sun, who’s for a bottle of cold beer? You, Mr. Garth?”

“It is a cold beverage, is it not? I am a bit chilly. If you have something hot—?”

“Coffee, coming up. Can I bring you a blanket?”

“No, thank you. It will not be necessary.”

Casey left and shortly returned with a tray with half a dozen bottles of cold beer and a cup of steaming coffee. The lieutenant was back by then. Casey put down the tray and first served the stick-man, who sipped the coffee and said, “It is delicious.”

Colonel Casey cleared his throat. “Serve our prospector friend next, Manny. As for us—well, drinking is forbidden on duty, but it was a hundred and twelve in the shade in Tucson, and this is hotter and also is
not
in the shade. Gentlemen, consider yourselves on official leave for as long as it takes you to drink one bottle of beer, or until the tape recorder arrives, whichever comes first.”

The beer was finished first, but by the time the last of it had vanished, the second helicopter was within sight and sound. Casey asked the stick-man if he wanted more coffee. The offer was politely declined. Casey looked at Dade Grant and winked and the desert rat winked back, so Casey went in for two more bottles, one apiece for the civilian terrestrials. Coming back he met the lieutenant coming with the extension cord and returned as far as the doorway to show him where to plug it in.

When he came back, he saw that the second helicopter had brought its full complement of four, besides the tape recorder. There were, besides the pilot who had flown it, a technical sergeant who was skilled in the operation of the tape recorder and who was now making adjustments on it, and a lieutenant-colonel and a warrant officer who had come along for the ride or because they had been made curious by the request for a tape recorder to be rushed to Cherrybell, Arizona, by air. They were standing gaping at the stick-man and whispered conversations were going on.

The colonel said, “Attention,” quietly, but it brought complete silence. “Please sit down, gentlemen. In a rough circle. Sergeant, if you rig your mike in the center of the circle, will it pick up clearly what any one of us may say?”