Weird Tales volume 38 number 03 Canadian (8 page)

T ATE that afternoon I had a curious conversation with Dr. Peter Had-don, who'd dropped in thinking to find Michael at home. A conversation that should have been enlightening, but wasn't —plunging me instead into deepest bewilderment.

It must have been Peter who first spoke of Coralie's death. Heaven knows I wouldn't have introduced the subject myself. But as he spoke of her I found myself wondering—had Coralie known, just before the end, that her medicine had been tampered with?

I found myself hoping vindictively that this was so—that she'd suffered bitterly, helplessly in the knowledge, as she had made me suffer.

Had there been a moment, just before death came so swiftly, when she had known from the taste of the drink that I must have given her an over-dose? Or had the stronger solution tasted no different than her usual dose?

So strong was my sudden desire to know that I heard myself saying, "I don't see how she coold have forced herself to drink that overdose. Surely those three capsules must have made the drink so unpalatable—"

B«£ I found out something else. Something totally unexpected.

"Three capsules?" Peter questioned. "Three capsules wouldn't have killed her."

That startled me. "But she died! Three must have—"

"How do you know there were three?*'

Careful! I'd nearly betrayed myself.

THE CRANBERRY GOBLET

I looked up to find Peter watching me strangely.

"Why," I faltered. "The box said one capsule only. It seems reasonable to suppose thai a person bent on suicide would put two in the glass, doubling the dose, then add a third to make certain."

But Peter shook his head. "Three would have made her very ill, but they wouldn't have killed her. She must have taken more."

I couldn't understand it. Peter was very emphatic that three wouldn't have killed her. When he had left, I kept thinking, "But there were only three! The one capsule Coralie had put in the glass herself, and the two that I—"

I shut off my thoughts. I didn't want to remember those two capsules sliding from my hand, dissolving immediately as they struck the water in the goblet.

Neverdieless, Peter's revelation disturbed me. For what had caused Coralie's death, if I had not killed her?

T SPRANG out of bed the next morn-ing humming. Michael would be home late that afternoon, in time for dinner. I opened the blinds, and then I was standing rooted, the song dead on my lips. Slowly I retreated until the edge of the dresser was hurtful, but sharply reassuring, against my back.

My eyes never left the bedside table, never left the brimming cranberry goblet standing upon it.

My heart, that had plunged, began pumping wildly. My horrified gaze wavered with the gently lapping liquid in the goblet's bowl. First one side, then the other. Gently, but with a mesmeric insistence that was hideous to behold.

My thoughts circled wildly, like hunt-

ed things seeking escape. Why? Oh, why? And how did it get here again?

But I knew. Again I sensed that invisible presence in the apparently empty room. And again I called out softly.

"Coralie?"

The liquid in the goblet lapped still more insistently against the convex sides. I was sure, then. Certain the goblet contained the same lethal dose it had held the last time Coralie had lifted it to hei lips.

"You want me to drink?" I whispered. "Is that h, Coralie? You want me to drink?"

Slowly my trembling legs gave way, and I sank to the carpet. I wouldn't drink. I never, never would. Ah, God, why did she punish me so? I hadn't killed her. Peter said so.

I crouched there sobbing, but presently my courage returned sufficiently so that I could get on my feet and approach the cranberry goblet. I dreaded to touch the thing, but gingerly I took it, and again emptied its contents.

I knew I must get rid of it, quickly, before Michael came back. It was wearing me down. One of these mornings, fear might even force me to tell Michael what I had done.

I shuddered.

I tottered down the hall, and clawed through the closet impatiently until I found an empty carton. Placing the goblet within, I wrapped the package securely with trembling hands and addressed it to a fictitious name and street number in Los Angeles. And I placed no return address on the wrapper.

I hurried with it to the postoffice and my depression didn't lift until I'd pushed it through the slot marked "Parcels."

I was safe. All that afternoon, in my

THE CRANBERRY GOBLET

relief, I was almost feverishly excited. It wasn't until I met Michael at the station that my spirits died. For Michael seemed preoccupied still, and his greeting lacked the warmth I expected it to have. Business, I thought.

"Didn't Findlay sign the contract?" I asked.

"What: Oh. Oh, yes, he signed it." Michael returned to gazing moodily out the window of the,coupe at the passing shops.

"Aren't you glad to be back?" I persisted.

"Sure, I'm glad," he said listlessly.

His lethargy bothered me. "What's the matter? Don't you feel well?"

"Oh, for God's sake, Ann! Cut out the nagging!" he snapped irritably. But when I'd subsided into hurt silence, he reached over and covered my hand on the wheel with his. "I'm sorry. Guess I'm tired."

But there was something wrong. I knew it.

While he showered, I put the dinner on the table. I still hadn't replaced Mrs. Dunnigan with someone else, and I was doing the work myself—badly enough. But it was fun, in a way. My mistakes made me feel very inefficient and bride-like.

DY A miracle, the dinner was surpris-ingly good. Under its influence the lines of strain slowly became erased from Michael's face. And I relaxed for the first time in days. Surely I had nothing to fear, now that Michael was with mc again. We were Lalking and laughing, almost on the old footing when it happened.

Michael lifted his glass to drink. I saw him lift it. One instant my breath held in disbelief. Then I was screaming

hysterically, 'Tut it down! Put it down!"

That wasn't the plain crystal water glass I'd placed on the table! There, just two inches from Michael's lips, was the cranberry goblet!

Michael's startled eyes went from me to the goblet, and when he saw what it was that he held in his hand, he swore softly. With his face turning a leaden gray, he set the thing back on the table with a hand that shook.

"The goblet!" he muttered. M I cannot escape it. It was there, even in St. Louis."

Oh, I hadn't thought she'd strike at me through Michael, whom I loved! I could'nt—I dare not fight her any more.

I was standing, half-swaying. **I didn't kill her, Michael! I put those two capsules in the goblet, but Peter said—"

Michael's face was grim, stony.

"Don't look at me like that!" I pleaded. "Three weren't enough to kill her, but—"

"She died," Michael said strangely. "Died, because I, too, dropped two capsules in Coralie's glass that last morning."

My breath caught. I couldn't understand. Michael had loved Coralie! What was he saying?

"Don't you think I saw what she'd been doing all along, working to destroy our marriage?" His face was cold, implacable. "I knew what Coralie was capable of. Why, when a child —" He broke off. "It doesn't matter now. But she never fooled me. Never. I had a right to some happiness. And that was why I killed her."

Why ive killed her. Five capsules, I thought dully. Five had been enough.

Michael picked up the cranberry goblet. Looking around for some place to throw its contents, he finally poured the

THE CRANBERRY GOBLET

liquid into the bowl of zinnias on the table.

"Come," he said then, the goblet still in his hand. "We'll make an end of it."

We were turning away from the table when I whispered, "Look t"

The zinnias were wilting, turning to gray ash that drifted on the daina>k cloth.

In the living room, Michael threw the goblet into the empty fireplace, where it shattered. With the poker he pulverized the remaining fragments. It was done. He came to me then, and caught me in his arms. And I found myself shrinking. Shrinking from his embrace, even though 1 knew he was no worse than myself.

But I could hear Coralie's voice again, saying, "Even if I lose, I'll win."

Clever Coralie, cruel Coralie. Together

we had killed her, and together we had killed whatever future we might have had for ourselves. There is no love without trust, and there'll be no trust, ever, between Michael and me. There'll be no children now, for Michael and me—children whose parents were murderers.

Slowly we went back to the dining room. And it was there, glowing evilly red on the table, its contents lapping invitingly, insistently. We stood there looking at it, feeling no surprise. Only an infinite weariness. We can never destroy it. It will be with us always.

You'll never give up, will you, Coralie? I know that now. Know it as certainly as I know that the day will finally come when Michael and I, goaded beyond endurance, will drink as you desire—from the cranberry goblet.

Midnight Moon

THIS ghostly rider of the sky that spills Pallid quicksilver over field and shore. May be herself the home of ghosts that pour Over her town plateaux and pockmarked hills. Here, we may think, the lover's shade fulfills Its tryst with some dear phantom lost before; And throneless kings, and warriors slain may soar Where the faint moonlight seeps in spectral rill3.

And this perhaps is why when, cold and clear. Slow radiance floats across a midnight wall. We seem to feel a Presence standing near, A formless Something where the shadows falk And sadness moves us, and an eerie fear While the low winds, like astral voices, call.

— Stanton A. CobWaftfc

3$e Murderous Steam Shovel

By ALLISON V. HARDING

YOU know those stories—you've read them—where people set things down for the record in notebooks. I don't do that. This story is in my mind. I go over it detail by detail and I can remember the whole business. And the remembering assures me that I am not crazy, that all this did happen. People who have seen things and had things happen that other folks don't experience are called crazy. It's the easiest way— and the most reassuring!

So I go over and over the story in my mind, and I say, Vilma—that's my name —here's just what has happened to you from the beginning, and because it's all so clear and distinct—you're not crazy!

It all started with that construction job just above the Northville Valley country, or maybe it all started when I married Ed Meglund.

Ed had always been in construction. He had the build for it, big hands, big frame, two hundred pounds of muscle and sinew on it, not so much between the ears. But you know the song, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"! Even I, Vilma, and his wife, wouldn't exactly have ever called Ed good. The outfit he'd worked for was Greene Construction and as Ed had never had much education, they gave him the jobs you could tell he could do just by looking at him, driving a ballast truck or digging or shoveling or using his strength and weight somehow.

He made a fair salary and we lived

in Northville pretty comfortably. But I remember the night he came home and said they had a shovel on the job now, a big new tractor steam shovel, he told me. Ed's haftf blue eyes lit up and I could tell the way a wife can without any speaking that what Ed Meglund wanted to do more than anything in the world was to run that shovel. That's a better job, of course, with more money and getting looked up to.

I never asked very many questions of Ed because he doesn't answer unless it pleases him, but I could tell from his face at home nights that he wasn't getting any closer to that old steam shovel. One Sunday when we were driving around up in the Northville Valley country, he toured me past the construction site and pointed.

"There he is, Vilma."

Well, one steam shovel looks about the same to me as another with those caterpillar feet and the operator's house and then the scoop that comes out so, you know. A woman never sees the same in them as a man does. Ed fas just bubbling over.

"Isn't he a beaut 1"

I read the letters that ran across the coping near the roof. Greene Construction Company, I made out.

"We call him Big Mike."

"That's a name for a derrick," I sniffed. "Howdya get that?"

"Oh, I dunno," replied Ed. "But isn't that a beautj" he sighed.

That there steam shovel's built to dig. Brother—dig graves I

THE MURDEROUS STEAM SHOVEL

"If you like 'era," I murmured.

It wasn't very many weeks after that that Ed came into our little place in Norlhville and announced suddenly we were going to move up toward the valley.

"Huh?" was all I got out.

He tuld me he had a cottage that he'd found for rent not far from the construction site.

"But most of the rest of the crowd lives around here," I protested, thinking that my afternoons of gossip with the construction wives would be hard to come by if I was set down up in some shack in the woods.

But there's Ed for you. He had an idea in that thick skull and he was off after it. I said, "Why?" He said nothing. I said, "Why?" After twice that was enough. Ed had his reasons.