"Cold-blooded," she marveled. "Like a snake or lizard. Heart's probably three-ventricled, too."
"Our verbal contract," said the sorcerer, delicately emphasizing verbal,
"didn't include an exchange of insults."
"Yeah," she said abstractedly. And though they were in the dark, he could sense that she was worried. "Yeah, that's right."
"What's the matter?" he demanded.
"It's your fault," she shrilled. "It's your own damned fault hurrying me up so I did this!" The man knew that she was near distraction with alarm. And he could feel the reason why. They were slowing down, and this deceleration, presumably, was not on Moira's schedule.
"We on the wrong line?" he asked coolly.
"Yes. That's about it. And don't ask me what happens now, because I don't know, you stupid cow!" Then she was sniffling quietly in his hand, and the sorcerer was wondering how he could comfort her without breaking her in two.
"There now," he soothed tentatively, stroking her hair carefully with the tip of a finger. "There, now, don't get all upset—"
It occurred to him to worry on his own account. They had slowed to a mere snail's pace, and at the dramatically, psychologically correct moment a light appeared ahead. A dull chanting resounded through the tube:
"Slimy flesh,
Clotted blood,
Fat, white worms,
These are food."
From Moira there was a little, strangled wail. "Ghouls!"
"Grave robbers?" asked the sorcerer. "I can take care of them—knock a few heads together."
"No," she said in thin, hopeless tones. "You don't understand. These are the real thing. You'll see."
As they slid from the tube onto a sort of receiving table Almarish hastily pocketed the little creature. Then, staring about him in bewilderment, he dropped his jaw and let it hang.
The amiable dietary ditty was being ground out by a phonograph, tending which there was a heavy-eyed person dressed all in gray. He seemed shapeless, lumpy, like a half-burned tallow candle on whose sides the drops of wax have congealed in half-teardrops and cancerous clusters. He had four limbs and, on the upper two, hands of a sort, and wore what could roughly be described as a face.
"You," said Almarish. "What's—where—?" He broke off in confusion as a lackluster eye turned on him.
From a stack beside him the creature handed him a pamphlet. The sorcerer studied the title:
WORKERS! FIGHT TO PRESERVE AND EXTEND the GLORIOUS
REVOLUTION which has BEFALLEN Y O U!
He read further:
There are those among you who still can remember the haphazard days of individual enterprise and communal wealth. Those days were bad; many starved for lack of nutritious corpses. And yet people died Above; why this poverty in the midst of plenty?
There were Above as usual your scouts who cast about for likely members of your elite circle, those who wished to live forever on the traditional banquets of the Immortal Eaters. Fortunate indeed was the scout who enrolled Ingvar Hemming. For it was he who, descending to the Halls of the Eaters, saw the pitiful confusion which existed.
Even as he had brought order into the vast holdings which had been his when Above, he brought order to the Halls. A ratio was established between production and consumption and civilized habits of life-in-death were publicized. Nowadays no Immortal Eater would be seen barbarously clawing the flesh from a corpse as in the bad old days; in these times your Safety-Tasty cans are the warrant of cleanliness and flavor.
Bug-eyed, Almarish turned to the back of the booklet and scanned the advertisements:
He tore his eyes from the repulsive pages. "Chum," he demanded hoarsely of the phonograph attendant, "what the hell goes on here?"
"Hell?" asked the ghoul in a creaky, slushy voice. "You're way off. You'll never get there now. I buzzed the receiving desk—they'll come soon."
"I mean this thing." Gingerly he held it up between thumb and forefinger.
"Oh—that. I'm supposed to give it to each new arrival. It's full of bunk.
If you could possibly get out of here, you'd do it. This ain't no paradise, not by a long shot."
"I thought," said Almarish, "that you all had enough to eat now. And if you can afford hearses you must be well off."
"You think so?" asked the attendant. "I can remember back when things was different. And then this Hemming man—he comes down from Above, corners the supply, hires men to can it and don't pay them enough to buy it in cans. I don't understand it, but I know it ain't right."
"But who buys the—the eyes and hearses?"
"Foremen an' ex-ex-ekky-tives. And whut they are I don't know. It jest ain't jolly down here no more." "Where you from?" asked Almarish.
"Kentucky. Met a scout, 1794. Liked it and been here ever since. You change—cain't git back. It's a sad thing naow." He dummied up abruptly as a squad of ghouls approached. They were much less far gone—"changed" than the attendant. One snapped out a notebook.
"Name?" he demanded.
"Packer, Almarish—what you will," he said, fingering an invincible dagger in his sleeve.
"Almarish—the Almarish?"
"Overlord of Ellil," he modestly confessed, assuming, and rightly, that the news of his recent deposition had not yet reached the Halls of the Eternal Eaters. "Come on a tour of inspection. I was wondering if I ought to take over this glorified cafeteria."
"I assume," said one of the reception committee—for into such it had hastily resolved itself—"you'll want to see our vice-president in charge of Inspection and Regulation?"
"You assume wrongly," said the sorcerer coldly. "I want to see the president."
"Mr. Hemming?" demanded the spokesman. All heads save that of Almarish bowed solemnly. "You—you haven't an appointment, you know."
"Lead on," ordered the sorcerer grimly. "To Mr. Hemming." Again the heads bowed.
Almarish strode majestically through the frosted-glass door simply lettered with the name and title of the man who owned the nation of ghouls body and soul.
"Hello, Hemming," said he to the man behind the desk, sitting down unbidden.
The president was scarcely "changed" at all. It was possible that he had been eating food that he had been used to when Above. What Almarish saw was an ordinary man in a business suit, white-haired, with a pair of burning eyes and a stoop forward that gave him the aspect of a cougar about to pounce.
"Almarish," he said, "I welcome you to my—corporation."
"Yes—thank you," said the sorcerer. He was vaguely worried. Superb businessman that he was, he could tell with infallible instinct that something was wrong—that his stupendous bluff was working none too well.
"I've just received an interesting communication," said Hemming casually. "A report via rock signals that there was some sort of disturbance in your Ellil. A sort of—palace revolution. Successful, too, I believe."
Almarish was about to spring at his throat and bring down guards about his head when he felt a stirring in his pocket. Over the top of one peeked the head of Moira.
"Won't you," she said, "introduce me to the handsome man?"
Almarish, grinning quietly, brought her out into full view. With a little purr she gloriously stretched her lithe body. Hemming was staring like an old goat.
"This," said the sorcerer, "is Moira."
"For sale?" demanded the president, clenching his hands till the knuckles whitened on the top of his desk.
"Of course," she drawled amiably. "At the moment a free agent. Right?"
She tipped Almarish a wink.
"Of course," he managed to say regretfully, "you know your own mind, Moira, but I wish you'd stay with me a little longer."
"I'm tired of you," she said. "A lively girl like me needs them young and handsome to keep my interest alive. There are some men"—she cast a sidelong, slumbrous glance at Hemming—"some men I'd never grow tired of."
"Bring her over," said the president, trying to control his voice.
Almarish realized that there was something in the combination of endemic desirability and smallness which was irresistible. He didn't know it, but that fact was being demonstrated in his own Braintree, Mass., at that very time by a shop which had abandoned full-sized window dummies and was using gorgeous things a little taller than Moira but scarcely as sexy. In the crowds around their windows there were four men to every woman.