The Perfect Host (21 page)

“What are you gibbering about? Step on who?”

Sam flapped his hands and pointed at the floor. Flick and Brown and all the others looked down, then up again. I don’t know what got into me. I just couldn’t help it. I said, “He found a lady-bug and he don’t want you to step on it.”

Flick got so mad, so quick, he didn’t even swear.

We went inside. The medic was working over the boy, who was
still unconscious. Flick was demanding, “Well! Well? What’s the matter with him?”

“Not a thing I can find out, not without a fluoroscope and some blood tests. Shock, maybe?”

“Shot?” gasped Daniels.

“Definitely not,” said the M.O.

Flick said, very, very quietly, “Sam told me over the phone that he had shot the boy. What about this, Delehanty? Can you talk sense, or is Sam contagious?”

I told him what we had seen from the side of the house. I told him that we couldn’t be sure who it was that rang the bell, but that we saw whoever it was raise a knife to strike, and then Sam fired, and then we ran up and found the kid lying at the bottom of the steps. We heard a knife fall.

“Did you hear him fall down the steps?”

“No,” said Sam.

“Shut up, you,” said Flick, not looking at him. “Well, Delehanty?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, thinking hard. “It all happened so fast.”

“It was a girl.”

“What was a girl? Who said that?”

Daniels shuffled forward. “I answered the door. A girl was there. She had a knife. A long one, pointed. I think it was double-edged.”

“Here it is,” said Sam brightly.

Flick raised his eyes to heaven, moved his lips silently, and took the knife.

“That’s it,” said Daniels. “Then there was a gunshot, and she screamed and fell.”

“She did, huh? Where is she?”

“I—I don’t know,” said Daniels in puzzlement.

“She’s still there,” said Sam smugly. I thought, oh-oh. This is it.

“Thank you, Sam,” said Flick icily. “Would you be good enough to point her out to me?”

Sam nodded. “There. Right there,” and he pointed.

“See her, lying there in the doorway,” I piped up.

Flick looked at Sam, and he looked at me. “Are you guys trying to
—uk!
” His eyes bulged, and his jaw went slack.

Everyone in the room froze. There, in plain sight on the porch, lay the body of a girl. She was quite a pretty girl, small and dark. She had a bullet hole on each side of her neck, a little one here and a great big one over here.

VII
Told by the Author
Theodore Sturgeon

I
DON’T MUCH
care for the way this story’s going.

You want to write a story, see, and you sit down in front of the mill, wait until that certain feeling comes to you, hold off a second longer just to be quite sure that you know exactly what you want to do, take a deep breath, and get up and make a pot of coffee.

This sort of thing is likely to go on for days, until you are out of coffee and can’t get more until you can pay for same, which you can do by writing a story and selling it; or until you get tired of messing around and sit down and write a yarn purely by means of knowing how to do it and applying the knowledge.

But this story’s different. It’s coming out as if it were being dictated to me, and I’m not used to that. It’s a haywire sort of yarn; I have no excuses for it, and can think of no reasons for such a plot having unfolded itself to me. It isn’t that I can’t finish it up; far from it—all the plot factors tie themselves neatly together at the end, and this with no effort on my part at all.

This can be demonstrated; it’s the last chapter that bothers me. You see, I didn’t write it. Either someone’s playing a practical joke on me, or—No. I prefer to believe someone’s playing a practical joke on me.

Otherwise, this thing is just too horrible.

But about that demonstration, here’s what happened:

Flick never quite recovered from the shock of seeing that sudden corpse. The careful services of the doctor were not required to show that the young lady was dead, and Flick recovered himself enough to start asking questions.

It was Daniels who belatedly identified her as the nurse he had seen at the hospital the day Mrs. Stoye killed herself. The nurse’s name was Lucille Holder. She had come from England as a girl; she had a flawless record abroad and in this country. The head doctor told the police on later investigation that he had always been amazed at the tremendous amount of work Miss Holder could turn out, and had felt that inevitably some sort of a breakdown must come. She went all to pieces on Mrs. Stoye’s death, and he sent her on an immediate vacation.

Her movements were not difficult to trace, after she left the administrative office, where she ascertained Mr. Daniels’ address. She went first to his house, and the only conclusion the police could come to was that she had done so on purpose to kill him. But he was not there; he, it seems, had been trying to find her at the hospital at the time! So she left. The following night she went out to Stoye’s, rang the bell, and killed him.

Ronnie followed her, apparently filled with the same unaccountable impulse, and was late. Miss Holder went then to Daniels’ house and tried to kill him, but was shot by the policeman, just as Ronnie, again late, arrived.

Ronnie lay in a coma for eight weeks. The diagnosis was brain fever, which served as well as anything else. He remembered little, and that confused. He did, however, vouch for the nurse’s visit to his home the night of Mrs. Stoye’s death. He could not explain why he had kept it a secret from his father, nor why he had had the impulse to kill Mr. Stoye (he admitted this impulse freely and without any horror), nor how he had happened to think of finding Stoye’s address through the information operator at the telephone company.

He simply said that he wanted to get it without asking any traceable questions. He also admitted that when he found that Mr. Stoye had already been killed, he felt that he must secure another weapon and go and kill his father. He says he remembers thinking of it without any emotion whatsoever at the time, though he was appalled at the thought after he came out of the coma.

“It’s all like a story I read a long time ago,” he said. “I don’t remember doing these things at all; I remember seeing them done.”

When the policeman shot Miss Holder, Ronnie felt nothing; the lights went out, and he knew nothing until eight weeks later.

These things remained unexplained to the participants:

Mrs. Stoye’s disappearing body. The witnesses were the two Daniels and Miss Holder. Miss Holder could not report it; Ronnie did not remember it; Mr. Daniels kept his own counsel.

Lucille Holder’s disappearing body. Daniels said nothing about this either, and for the rest of his life tried to forget it. The members of the homicide detail and the two prowl car men tried to forget it, too. It was not entered into the records of the case. It seemed to have no bearing, and all concerned were happy to erase it as much as possible. If they spoke of it at all, it was in terms of mass hypnosis—which was reasonably accurate at that.…

Lucille Holder’s motive in killing Mr. Stoye and in trying to kill Mr. Daniels. This could only be guessed at; it was simple to put it down to the result of a nervous breakdown after overwork.

Mrs. Stoye’s suicide. This, too, was attributed to a mounting mental depression and was forgotten as quickly as possible.

And two other items must be mentioned. The radio patrolman Sam was called on the carpet by Detective Lieutenant Flick for inefficiency in letting the boy Ronnie go. He was not punished, oddly enough. He barely mentioned the corpse of Lucille Holder, and that there were witnesses to the fact that
apparently
the lieutenant had not seen it, though he had stepped right over it on the way into Daniels’ house. Flick swore that he was being framed, but let Sam alone thereafter.

The other item has to do with Miss Jennie Beaufort, an operator in the Information Office of the telephone company. Miss Beaufort won a prize on a radio quiz—a car, a plane, two stoves, a fur coat, a diamond ring, a set of SwingFree shoulder pads, and a 38-day South American cruise. She quit her job the following day, took the cruise, enjoyed it mightily, learned on her return that income tax was due on the valuation of all her prizes, sold enough to pay the tax, and was so frightened at the money it took that she went back to work at her old job.

So, you see, these tangled deaths, these mad actions, were all explained, forgotten, rationalized—made to fit familiar patterns, as were Charles Fort’s strange lights and shapes in the night, as were the Flying Discs, the disappearance of Lord Bathhurst, the teleportation of Kaspar Hauser, and the disappearance of the crew of the
Marie Celeste
.

I leave it to the reader to explain the following chapter. I found it by and in my typewriter yesterday afternoon (I’d been writing this story all the previous night). Physically, it was the most extraordinary looking manuscript I have ever seen.

In the first place the paper bails had apparently been released most of the time, and letters ran into each other with wild abandon. In the second place there were very few capital letters; I was reminding of Don Marquis’s heroic Archy the cockroach, who used to write long effusions while Mr. Marquis was asleep, by jumping from one key to the other.

But Archy was not heavy enough to operate the shift key, and so he eschewed the upper case characters. In the third place, the spelling was indescribable. It was a mixture of phonetics and something like Speed-writing, or ABC shorthand. It begins this way:

I couldn’t possibly inflict it all on you in its original form. It took me the better part of two hours just to get the pages in order—they weren’t numbered, of course.

After I plowed through it myself, I undertook a free translation. I have rewritten it twice since, finding more rhythm, more fluidity, each time, as I become familiar with the extraordinary idiom in which it was written. I think that as it now stands it closely follows the intent and mood of the original. The punctuation is entirely mine; I regard punctuation as inflection in print, and have treated this accordingly, as if it were read aloud.

I must say this: there are three other people who could conceivably have had access to this machine while I was asleep. They are Jeff and Les and Mary.

I know for a fact that Jeff, who is an artist, was busy the entire time with a nonobjective painting of unusual vividness and detail; I know how he works, and I know what the picture looked like when I quit writing for the night, and what it looked like when I woke up, and believe me, he must have been painting like mad the entire time—he and no one else.

As for Les, he works in the advertising department of a book publisher, and obviously has not the literary command indicated by this manuscript.

And Mary—I am lucky enough to say that Mary is very fond of me, and would be the last person in the world to present me with such a nasty jolt as is innate in this final chapter. Here it is; and please forgive me for this lengthy but necessary introduction to it, and for my intrusion; this sort of thing is strictly against the rules.

VIII
“?”

I
AM A
Thing which lives in fantasy, where true fantasy lives in the minds of men.

What fumbling is this, what clumsiness, what pain.… I who never was a weight, who never turned, coerced, nor pressed a person, never ordered, never forced—I who live with laughter, die with weeping, rise and hope and cheer with man’s achievements, yet with failure and despair go numb and cold and silent and unnoticeable—what have I to do with agony?

Know me, mankind, know me now and let me be.

Know the worst. I feed on you. I eat and breathe no substance but a precious ether. No, not souls (but where a soul is strong and clean I live my best). I take this guarded essence where I can, and thrive on it; and when I choose a host I am imprisoned, for I may not leave him while he lives, and when he dies I must locate another to inhabit. And I have … powers.

But know this too: The thing that I take is the essence of joy—and in joy is created an excess of that which I need. I drink in your reservoir, yes; but when there is drought and the level is low, and your
needs are increased, and the water turns bitter with flavors of worry, and anger, and fear, then I shrink and I soften, and lose all my hunger; and then if you grieve, if your spirit is broken, if you should forget all the pleasure and glory and wonder of being a man—then I die.…

Such a death is not death as you know it. It is more a waiting unmoving within a soul’s winter, to wake with the spring of the heart. But where people grieve over years, or let fear share their souls with me, then I must wait for the walls of my prison to crumble.

Then, after the death of my host I go drifting, seeking another. That is my Search, and in it, for me, is the ultimate cold. No human can know such a thing, for death, for a human, is kinder.

I am and I am not a parasite. I feed on your substance; yet what living thing in the world does not feed on the substance of others? And I take only excess—take only that which you radiate gaily when you feel joy.