"A door?" I asked. "In a cavern?"
He laughed like the closing of a lock. "The rocks," he said, "were papier mache. The cavern was the third-floor ballroom of a hotel on 32nd Street."
"And so?" I asked.
"I wired back to Council Bluffs for bus fare. I was back there in two days with a tale of urgent business in New York."
"That's plenty, Leonard. Now you can get the hell out of my house. Yes, even before you build up to the touch for the rare herbs that'll take the curse off you."
"Sorry," he said, rising. "I tried to let you know. It wasn't a touch. I remembered that you have a cousin, or had, the one you wrote that Bronx monograph on—"
"He's up the river. Dewey got him, with the rest of Murder Incorporated. Did you want a bodyguard against the demons? Or do you want to become a policy banker?"
He had his hat on. From the door he said: "I wanted to have a murder done for me. But now I suppose I'll have to do it myself …"
I locked the door and went to bed, fuming like a tea-kettle. I'm from a short-lived clan; we break down early and live in the fear of death. That night I found myself with a hacking cough, which didn't add to my sense of well-being, for my father and sister had died of throat infections. You could accurately say that between Mac's turning out to be a chiseling phony and my fears that in a week I'd be a dead man, I bordered on distraction. There was a heightening of the sensory powers all the sensory powers. The darkest room was not dark enough for me, and the traffic below jerked me up in bed repressing shrieks of pain. It was as though I had been flayed alive, for the silk bedsheets I use for that very reason were like sacking-cloth—or sandpaper.
How I managed to fall asleep I didn't know. Certainly the quality of my dreams was horrid enough to wake me up screaming.
I got disconnected scraps and images from Leonard's story of that night. I saw over again, in the most damnably vivid colors, the lie he had told of the ceremonial in the hotel. Details he had omitted were plentifully supplied by my subconscious—revolting details. Cripples, I am told, are generally stews of repression and fear.
Quite the most awful part was the Presence turning to me and stating, in a language of snarls and drooling grunts, the following message:
"A curse is no mouthing of words. That worries at a man but does not kill. A curse is no juggling of hands. That worries at a man, but does not maim. A curse is no thinking of evil. That worries at a man, but does not blind, tear, crush, char and slash. A curse is something you can see, hear, feel, hate and love."
That was not the end of the dream, but it was near. After I—
subconsciously doubling for Mac—had been thrown out of that ballroom, it ended and I awoke. My throat irritation was gone, which was good. That night I did not sleep any more, but read and re-read the clippings Mac had sent me. I wanted to look at his letters, but they were in no kind of order.
I saw the sun rise and made myself a breakfast of bacon and eggs. It was interrupted by a telegram slipped under my door. The yellow slip read: "Please phone me. Not a touch. Mac Leonard." The telegram was because I have no phone; if you want to hear my dulcet voice, you have to coerce me into going down to the corner drug store to call you up.
Frankly, I didn't know what to do. I was still mad, half because of his ridiculous story, half because of his continuous rude staring at my right foot. I long ago passed the point where I allowed people to indulge their curiosity at the cost of much personal anguish to me. I decided that I might as well.
I threw some clothes on and went down to the corner where a tubercular young clerk was dispensing a few early-morning Cokes. "Hi,"
he said. "Nice day." Avoiding his conversational spray I got change and slid into the booth.
A woman's voice answered the phone in their room at a nearby hotel.
"Mrs. Leonard?" I asked. "I got a telegram from Mac—he wanted me to call him."
"He must have gone out," she said. "He wasn't here when I woke up.
Must have gone for breakfast—wouldn't wait for me, the barbarian!"
I mumbled some inanity or other, wondering what I ought to do.
"Listen," she said, suddenly urgent. "This is the first chance I've had to talk to you, really. I'm just a dumb woman, so they tell me, but there are some things I want to know. That foot of yours—what's wrong with it?"
"I don't want to talk about it," I snarled. "Since you began it, it was run over sidewise by a car when I was about twenty. Is there anything else?"
"Yes. What do you do for a living?"
The damnable impudence of the woman! I didn't answer; just slammed the receiver down on the hook and stormed out.
Mac was waiting for me in my apartment. The landlady had let him in, she told me as I was going up.
"Now what's this?" I asked, as I found him nervously smoking on the edge of my bed.
"Sorry I broke in," he said. Damn him! His eyes were on my twisted foot again!
"What do you want? I was just talking with your wife."
"You might want to know why I did a damned foolish thing like trying to make a student. It was because my wife wouldn't treat me like a husband. I was nearly crazy. I loved her so." His voice was thin and colorless.
"I don't care about your personal affairs, Mac. Get out of here."
He rose slowly and dangerously, and as he moved towards me I began to realize how big he was and how small I was. He grabbed me by the coat lapels; as he twisted them into a tight knot and lifted me so that my dragging foot cleared the ground, he snarled: "You tell me what's wrong with your foot or I'll break your neck!"
"Car ran over it!" I gasped. I was shocked to find out that I was a physical coward; never before had I been subjected to an assault like this. I feared that man with the lunatic gleam in his eyes as I had never feared anything before.
"Car," he growled. "Now how do you make a living? Don't give me that
`retired capitalist' bull you tried in your letters. I've been looking you up and you haven't got a single bank-account anywhere. Where do you get your money from?"
A voice from my door sounded. "Put him down," it said. "He's no friend of mine. Maybe of yours." I fell in a heap and turned to see Leonard's wife. "The Whelmers," she said, "disavowed him."
Mac turned away. "You know that I know!" he gasped, his face quite dead, dirty white. It was absolutely bloodless.
"I saw two of the Whelmers in the street. They know nothing of this."
She gestured contemptuously at me. "That foot of his is no mark. Now, Mr. Leonard—" She advanced slowly on him, step by step.
He backed away, to before a window. "Only a few days ago," he gasped,
"only a few days ago I put it all together. I never knew your parents. You are the curse of the Whelmers. And last night I—we—my God!" His eyes were dilated with terror.
"Last night," said the woman, "you were my husband and I was your wife."
With the beginning of a musical laugh she slumped and bloated strangely, quietly, a bluish glare shining from her skin.
With the glare came a momentary paralysis of my limbs. I would have run rather than have seen what I had to see. I would have died rather than have seen that Presence that had horns and a tail and great, shining teeth and lustful, shining eyes.
Leonard took his dry dive through the window just a second before I fainted. When I awoke, there was nobody at all in the room except myself and the friendly, curious police.
THE SLAVE
CHAPTER I
THE DRUNKEN BUM known as Chuck wandered through the revelry of the New Year's Eve crowd. Times Square was jammed with people; midnight and a whole new millennium were approaching. Horns tooted, impromptu snake-dances formed and dissolved, bottles were happily passed from hand to hand; it was minutes to A.D. 2,000. One of those bottles passed to Chuck and passed no further. He scowled at a merrymaker who reached for it after he took his swig, and jammed it into a pocket. He had what he came for; he began to fight his way out of the crowd, westward to the jungle of Riveredge.