The 2014 Halloween Horrors Megapack Page 15

  Gwen almost had hold of some thought she couldn’t quite pin down. Maybe it would be better not to try.

  It was dusk of evening when Hep Cat called Gwen to her. She had gotten the babies fed and put away for the night, and had ordered Arthur early to bed also. The littlest baby was the one named Lily. She had sat with head drooping and eyes half shut. It had been impossible to make her swallow anything. It must be true, then, that she was very, very ill. It might be that Gwen would not see her again, she thought; so weak a child ought to be kept in bed.

  “I want you to be my little friend, and to learn—oh, all kinds of interesting things!” Hep Cat said, a queer, crazy light dancing in her watery eyes. She stuck out a bony hand and poked Gwen’s arm, the fingers like dry sticks, prodding painfully. Then out of a big bag she drew a large chocolate cream and presented it to Gwen and Gwen sucked it doubtfully and then ate it with enjoyment, for it was quite delicious.

  “First—I know you don’t like me! Children like pretty people. I’ve a—younger sister, now, you would really love, Gretel! But I also know that children learn to love people who please them, and I want to do that, Gretel. First let me ask you a question. Something is missing from my room, just a small thing. You haven’t, now, have you—seen anything lying in the hall today that might belong to me?”

  Gwen thought hard and fast. The high-heeled slipper! Best not to mention it, she decided—since Hep Cat couldn’t wear such a thing. Nervously her eyes dropped to the heavy arch-support shoes the old lady wore.

  “It wasn’t—I mean, nothing!” she stammered.

  Hep Cat’s eyes gleaned a little redder. “Then—But first, to please you!” she whinnied playfully. “Some little favor, something you’d like, that you can think of?—Speak up, child. Do!”

  Gwen remembered the bleak shabbiness of Arthur’s room, the dangling torn mosquito netting hanging from the window. It was the only thing she could think of fast enough.

  “I saw—looking from outside” she began carefully: “where Arthur’s window hasn’t a screen, but just torn netting. And mosquitoes fly all round at night, up from some damp place in the woods. I like Arthur. I wish you’d fix a mend in it, Miss Haggety. I really do.”

  Hep Cat laughed, as though the request were really very funny.

  “I’ll have Sal see to it now,” she promised, and was as good as her word. “The boy won’t be asleep yet—” she told the dark woman who strode in crossly. “Fix the net. It will be the ruination of a pretty little tryst, and high time too.”

  After Sal had gone upstairs, the old woman led Gwen into the gloomy living room with its shadows and crooked distances, and being brought into it by Miss Haggety, Gwen felt as though the places where walls drew away and the ceiling peaked because of the curves and angles of the shadowy lights were deeper; and as though up and down were mixed somehow, and a child might lose balance and fall headfirst into an awful gloomy chasm.

  She had to sit on a settee beside her jailor then—jailor was the word she thought of. Because she couldn’t get away, couldn’t get away—

  But after Miss Haggety really began to talk to her, her quick mind knew interest, and there was a strange poetry about the queer words that held beauty, though a dark beauty.

  “Have you ever heard about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table?” she asked Gwen. “And—briefly, now, because the way the story was written wasn’t right any more than most histories are right—what do you know of the old story, Child?”

  “Not really very much,” Gwen told her. “It was in a book for children, and we have The Idylls of the King at home. I get tired of poetry, so I’ve read only a little of that. The story—”

  The little she knew was told in a moment. That King Arthur set about to right wrongs and unite a little new kingdom which seemed to be all there was then of Great Britain. That his knights were supposed to be true to the death and all to live and fight for what was right, but one at least wasn’t, and the best of them, or anyway the bravest, was one named Lancelot, and he fell in love with Arthur’s queen, whose name was Guinevere.

  That there was a good deal of fairy story and magic mixed up in it. Arthur had a sword called Excalibur which he got by good magic; he had a fine old tutor who was Merlin, a white magician—all this opposed to the bad magic, which was called black. And when Arthur died the sword had to be flung into the water and a white arm reached up for it. But anyway, Arthur had defeated the black magic world which lay all around the real one—which was aided by the white magic of Merlin and others. And—yes, the world of black magic was called the “Half World,” Gwen thought. She didn’t know why, except there was this. In that Half World things changed shape as you came upon them, and dark powers could conjure up all kinds of things out of thin air. A knight might be vanquished or even destroyed by an army of demons rushing at him; yet, if his mind were strong enough and his eyes clear enough, he could see things as they were, and see the demons as rushing wind and empty noise—but you almost needed white magic to do that, that was why in those days a magician like Merlin was almost necessary to have around.

  And if the black magic “Half World” had won, even the solid ground under a person’s feet, and the walls of a city, and even the shape of a man or woman would have been liable not to be always solid and real in the end, but could be made into something horrible, however little he or she wanted that—unless, of course, the courage and the clear eyes were yours—and if things had gone the wrong way that far, those things would have been lost, she guessed.

  “Quite a tale. Quite a grown-up book. Your mother lets you read things that are usually not given to children.” Miss Haggety commented, and Gwen quickly remembered more and corrected this.

  “There was my book for children. And another book that was Mummie’s. I got interested in King Arthur and asked for the second one; she didn’t exactly give it me, but only didn’t care.”

  “Well, it’s as well you’ve heard of the elder world, the one smug people called the ‘Half World,’” the old lady said. “From the known to the unknown, that’s the way to proceed in learning. You show you’re capable of understanding things you can’t handle and touch and weigh in a scales, anyway—modern children are generally so very stupid. No fairy tales to make them think. Little stories about how the little carrot got to market (to be eaten) and the little drop of milk into the milk bottle (to be drunk).

  “This was the true story about Arthur and Merlin and the others—”

  She talked in a way that made Gwen see pictures in the shadows about them. And now it was that her words held beauty, and you must want to listen for as long as she would talk, but also she made it sound funny and real.

  Arthur, she said, was a very silly country boy who sneaked in ahead of others who had a better right to the kingdom he lived in. Old Merlin fixed things for him—he perpetrated a legend about the wonderful sword which must be easily pulled out of an iron anvil into which it was practically welded.

  “That Arthur was about as silly an oaf as the poor boy who is your only playmate,” she commented. “A clever magician like Merlin would find him a natural for the nasty tricks he wanted played.”

  When others who had better claim to the throne pulled at the sword, it stuck fast. When Arthur took hold of it, he needn’t ever pull—that part was true enough. Merlin, of course, knew how to make the atoms rearrange themselves, so that between the iron of the anvil and the steel of the sword there was an invisible sheath that was fluid, like molasses or even water. So—the sword came out.

  Then—Merlin pretending to coach and advise—Arthur conquered all the people who resisted him, and built his own kingdom. And then he made it possible for Merlin to build up a silly wall of fakery that had enslaved the world through all the Centuries.

  “Till now, at last—as the newer scientists say—the wall of matter is growing thin.”

  What did that mean?

  “Well, even a little girl can understand what I’m going to tell
you, but listen close!” she said. “Now first, you must think—and it’s quite true—that you, and a tiny little atom, and a big, big Star are each a separate thing. And each of you can be broken up into something else; and each of you seems what it is because you can be seen or understood in certain ways.

  “The smart science boys who laugh at magic, they thought they knew it all—for a while. Lately they aren’t so smart! They put a tiny, tiny bit of metal under a microscope—you know what a microscope is?”

  “I have one. Last Christmas—” Gwen began proudly.

  Hep Cat laughed.

  “I guess you do know, but yours isn’t exactly the same kind of thing. A toy for a baby!” she sneered. “Well the Science Know-it-alls took their powerful microscopes. And focused them on a tiny bit of metal, and on that tiny particle they played a ray of strong light. Only by light could they see it at all!

  “And lo and behold! And how upset they were! The ray of light hit the metal and knocked off the little pieces from it, though a ray of light was just supposed to be what they call a vibration, a form of energy. I’m afraid this is over your head, child! Dr. Mordred and I, and others—we have to know what the world is thinking.

  “Anyway, the harder they looked, the more just looking made the things they looked at all different. Then the ‘sike’ boys—as Dr. Mordred calls the psychologists who tell you why you think the way you do and how your nerves and things show you the world around you and show it very likely all wrong—or at least very differently to different persons—then they took a shot at the old know-it-alls, and just about finished them off!

  “I’m trying to be simple enough for you to understand, so I’ll be very brief!” she exclaimed restlessly. “Dr. Mordred said you could be taught, and you’re bright enough, very bright, I saw that from the first. Well, look at it this way.

  “Your body is full of nerves, and everything you know they tell your brain. Your nerves go from your body to your brain, and tell your brain what to think it sees and feels, and hears and knows.

  “But the nerves in your body are like stupid, thin, white blindworms. They have no sense of themselves, no sense at all! So they take many messages to the big, gray, curdled blob that is your stupid brain that have really nothing to do with what is around about you.—Your brain is just like a calf’s brain, you know, the kind you eat. Isn’t that funny, Dear?

  “And what we who live by the laws of what they used to call the Half World can do—and do!—is to make everything take the form we want it to have. Since nothing is real—and nothing is fixed—and nothing is solid—ours is the world and all that round it is! You understand? All ours, ours who serve the Great Ones of Darkness. For the white magicians who fought us when the world was young gave what was theirs away. Things should be all facts and figures, they said, all weights and measurements—till now when measurements don’t measure any more, it is too late for them, oh, too late for them now! The White Magicians let their magic die, and they died with it. Dead, dead, all dead as the White Queen in ‘Alice in Wonderland!’”

  She stood, stretching herself to her full height. She was like a Queen herself, Gwen thought. A dark, mysterious, powerful Queen. One who knew all things. One who must be obeyed.

  “Seeing is believing!” she said to the big-eyed child, and it was like a promise, like a wonder, like a terror. “Come outside with me now. I will show you what I mean. For it is no harder to ‘change’ a Star than a tiny, tiny thing. It is not hard to change a man into a filthy animal, as one named Circe proved. Or a woman-thing or girl-thing into what I’d wish—cat, bird or crawling snake. Not hard to bend the silly lying rays of light that travel like blindworms themselves—like stupid blindworms carrying forever lying messages from Stars no longer where they were, or as they were.

  “Not hard to make the light of the evil baleful Stars come straight and fast to make the world of mortals go stark raving mad. Not hard at all!

  “Only these strong ones have gone on always, sometimes only in far corners of the world where they could be safe and wait. Sal and the black man who visits her—they came here first from the wilds of New Guinea, both from the same cannibal tribe, both hereditarily gifted with the powers dark magic holds. Strange how the real knowledge has flourished among such tribes. Dr. Mordred, with his long words—he would say ‘among the anthropophagi—‘”

  Gwen cried, impulsively: “That is one of his long words! It made me think of a song—‘Oh, My Papa!’—Then it seemed like a sing song—‘And throw Pa Pa Guy!’ like for a game!” She blushed and trembled.

  “You spied on us, and you overheard. Well—if you are to be one of us—”

  Hep Cat’s fingers played idly with the bristly hairs on her chin.

  “I miss nothing, young lady! The word applies to primitive tribes who eat human flesh. Hence it was an insult to apply it to me—as he intended. Sal and her black friend Mugro—they are primitives, though they’ve learned civilized ways sufficiently well. They were Mundogormos, back in New Guinea; the Government only stopped their cannibal feasts a few years back. They miss them, of course; but—”

  She continued musing, seeming to be poised between some black mood and the storytelling one. Then she walked to a little table in a far corner of the room and lifted a carafe which stood on it and poured wine into two glasses.

  “Dr. Mordred has had his way with me and we are great friends again!” she said gaily. “You are my pupil. You’re not too young to drink a toast to your new discipleship, if I say so.”

  She held out one of the glasses. Gwen took it, wonderingly. The wine in it seemed to grow redder and brighter, almost as if it had a life of its own.

  Miss Haggety made a peremptory gesture and drank her wine, and Gwen must do the same. But it tasted queer, almost as if it had salt in it, and for a moment she was afraid she was going to be ill.

  Then wonder overwhelmed her, and she forgot herself, her jittery nerves and stomach, and everything in the world except the woman.

  Because Hep Cat was changing, there before her eyes. Her hair darkened, the ugly stiff curls let themselves down to shoulder-length gleaming black tresses. Her skin was white and glowing, her lips red as the wine drops in the bottom of her glass. Her dress was the same, an ugly, shapeless brown one; but it fell into new folds that hinted at other changes as well.

  Her lips curved into a lovely smile. She seized Gwen’s hand in a soft compelling clasp, and drew her toward the door.

  “I can’t wait to show you!” she breathed, “You’ve left the old, stuffy world behind you. And if you go on as I have done, you can enjoy the other world, the Half World, for—oh, so long, I don’t know how long! Some day you’ll grow old, but only part of the time. If you have plenty of elixir—Oh, come outside quickly!”

  She reached out a hand and music streamed into the room from the radio she had barely touched with one finger. Music like nothing Gwen had ever heard. Music that made you drunk. (Or was it the wine?)

  She pulled Gwen out of doors and pointed, silent now, upward at the starry sky.

  For just an instant it was the summer sky Gwen knew. The moon, nearly full, sailed over the trees toward the south. The stars, some bright and others moon-dimmed, were as stars should be.

  They were as they should be—and then, suddenly, they were not. How could stars frighten you? And yet, they did. They seemed to lean toward Gwen, to pierce her with their baleful glare. Then they would recede until she felt as though she were falling into space after them. So it had been inside in the shadows, but this was millions of times worse.

  She looked hard, then, at the moon. The big, bright, round and friendly moon, which couldn’t dart and shake and quiver—but then she shut her eyes in utter terror. It was no more a friendly moon. It was a big thing—dead—that hung up there poised, but not to be trusted. It rested on nothing, it hung from nothing, and unseen things held it in check and balance but it lurched and quivered, Gwen could see it!—and just some little thing could upset that
balance. And the dead thing would fall down on the world and down on Gwen, and it would be like having a giant corpse crush you and smother you.

  Silver-toned laughter broke the waking nightmare. “You see?” laughed the young Hep Cat. “I made you see them as they are. You had to feel the power that is in me. I could make you see the sky like that, just by willing it. So—to you and while I willed it—what you saw was true. It isn’t far from the truth anyway, you know! And who do you think are the Ones that permit the tricky little balances that keep the earth and moon and stars in their places?”

  The soft hand came down sharp and hard on Gwen’s parted lips, as Hep Cat gave a little cry of something like fright.

  “Don’t say—any Name you were thinking of!” she cried, and for a moment looked like the old hag. “The Big Ones, the Dark People Who Know—They are the ones who let the little games go on so long as it suits them. Doubt my word, and see what will happen to you—just see! You will go mad, raving mad—You were starting to know how that would be a moment ago, weren’t you, Child? Well, do as I say and be obedient to me. Trust me and you’ll be one of the Masters, and not one of the slaves.

  “And now go in. The wine was not enough to last me long—While I’ve the spell, I’ve better things to do!”

  She was running, kicking off her shoes, the old brown dress molding her figure to unbelievable beauty in the light of the moon—at which Gwen dared not look. She was off toward the thick wooded copse that lay to the south of the house that had once looked pretty. And in the end her fingers tore at her clothes as she ran, again and again.

  It was a naked woman who vanished in the shadows of the wood.

  Another dreadful, sleepless night. Gwen crept to her room and knelt at the window. She was remembering and putting things together and understanding more than a child could endure.

  But then, she was no longer quite a child. Whatever had transformed Hep Cat into her temporary lovely beauty had touched Gwen similarly, but in reverse. She was no longer a bright and innocent little girl. She was a woman-thing too young for the dark knowledge that had been poured into her, but yet beginning to accept it.