Cycle of Nemesis (3 page)

Before we went away I put my foot carefully on the spot of blood and scraped my shoe sole over it.

I didn’t know why I did that.

But I felt the action fitted the situation.

As
though borne
on one of those tidal waves whose existence is at first suspected only through the more uniform undulations of undersea plants, I found myself being carried along on a dark wave of suspicion, fear and impending doom. Everything pointed, like the trailing fronds of those plants of home, toward a future that could hold only trouble, pain and disaster. That man in the blue and yellow checked Corinthian helmet, who dripped blood, that man with my face—why did he haunt me? Had he killed and mutilated that young girl whose naked and blood-spattered headless body had rolled like a macabre Cleopatra from some decadent sadist madhouse play?

Following Pomfret as he advanced on Paul Benenson I felt less like social platitudes with that bore than going five rounds with a tiger shark. Benenson’s round gray face with the absurdly antique pince-nez in their rolled gold rims he affected smiled benignly upon all whom he met as though their day had thereby been fulfilled. I shook hands with a curt word or two and then went off for another look at a remarkably fine globe of the world that stood in globular dignity by itself in a corner. The ticket said Lot Forty-five, so that it would be coming up fairly soon during the morning session.

The events of yesterday and this morning had unsettled me—this was an understatement I could live with—and I had no deep conviction that whatever had begun was finished with. I looked at the South Pole Estate on the globe and, with that half-startled little chuckle of remembrance that your world has not always been everyone’s world, saw that Antarctica was represented by whiteness, barrenness and a terra incognita. I smiled, forcing other thoughts out of my head; Aunt Nora and her Siamese and her warmth and comfort would have been regarded with open-mouthed disbelief by the men who had made this globe.

More people entered the ballroom and their muted conversation like that of a plate-glassed aviary in its platitudinous hum drove me further away. Nothing was coming up until the globe that I wanted, for the Bennet commode had been removed as material evidence, and I felt the need to divorce myself from this artificial if understandable world of refined art. We have our art galleries and museums in our cities beneath the sea, but somehow the very frontier-like pressures of our everyday lives are not conducive to this hothouse atmosphere of artificial culture.

I went out of the ballroom, not without a backward glance for the empty musicians’ gallery, and trod carefully up the marble staircase with its glorious bronze and iron scrollworked balustrades. Brown-coated guards prowled watchfully and I got the impression that there were more of them in evidence than there had been yesterday.

Passing up from the ground floor to the first floor and going through to the long gallery, I saw a multiple series of reflected distorted images of myself receding and approaching as I walked. To some people I would now be on the second floor, having walked up from the first; but to most modem folk these old-fashioned distinctions meant little. Undersea we had our own ways.

The long gallery led directly into the picture gallery.

Every picture had been removed by a London specialist company for cleaning, renovation where necessary, for authentication and valuation. They would form the subject of a later and separate auction. If I had the luck, I meant to be there—if only to see good old George Pomfret struggling to acquire the J. B. Morse collection —a collection that I, among others, would have given a very great deal to own.

Bare and shining and echoing, the picture gallery stretched before me, the long windows pencils of light, the pendant chandeliers glinting arabesques of reflections.

The gentle wooden floor, black with the polish of age, softened my footfalls. At the far end I saw a guard move into the gallery and then, with a hitch to his slung weapon and a characteristic stamp of one booted foot, turn and go out again, satisfied of my credentials.

I was alone in the picture gallery.

The floor beneath the third window showed its expected rectangle of lighter color where the chest had stood through so many years of long summer afternoons. Going to the wide wooden sill I looked out. The panes had been shut and the humidity controls would open them when the right time came; their polish dazzled me. But I could see a blue roof at my right from the protruding lower wing of the house, a shining circle of gravel between lawns of that deep emerald richness that centuries of lawn sprinklers and rolling and cutting alone can bring, and, just ahead beyond the lawns and bright flower beds, the first silent sentinels of the orchard that lay on this side of the house. A deep quietness that hung over the scene affected me; even though the windows were closed, a hush, a waiting expectant hush, persisted and grew, as a spiritual continuation of that mood of the morning when I had walked here with Pomfret in that saffron early light. I turned away quickly, astonished and moved.

A girl walked silently toward me from the far door.

For a moment, not quite with it, I stared foolishly, mouth agape and eyes still dazzled by the sunshine.

Then, remembering that I was on dry land and my wetneck forthrightness would not be welcomed—or even I derated—here, I moved with a mechanical precision lo stare up at the nearest picture, too late to realize that they had, of course, all been taken away.

Like a cretin gaping at the moon I stood—and she laughed.

She laughed at me.

Not since leaving home had I been so pleased to hear another person’s laughter.

“You can, my dear lady,” I told her, “laugh as much as you wish. It is better than champagne at this moment to a desert-dry traveler.”

“I’m sorry—but you looked so—so—”

“Silly?”

Her wide-spaced blue eyes opened in injured innocence—with everything else she had she was an actress loo, then—and she was about to say something very tart, I could see, when a strange expression clouded those eves and she pouted her soft pink lips. “Yes,” she said gently. “But only in a startled, small-boy way, as though you’d been caught scrumping.”

“And that wouldn’t be the first time, either.” I smiled at her. I liked the look of her. Young, her body was trim and compact and curved just right in a demure but absolutely right dark blue suit—the sensation of her being just right for the situation became the dominant impression she conveyed to me. Her features while not beautiful were just right for a young, pretty, athletic girl on a bright day of early summer.

“You’re buying?” I inquired politely. We had not moved from the window with the rectangle of lighter colored wood at our feet, the long plum-colored drapes of the curtains brushing the floor, with the empty spaces beneath their lights and hooks on the walls at our side.

“Yes. Privately. But I’m afraid the vultures have their choice of the pickings.”

“That’s true enough.”

“You sound bitter—”

“Bitter? No—the way the world is going to hell in a bucket doesn’t worry me anymore. It used to. But now I can see it’s been going to hell in a bucket for the last four or five thousand years or so—and we’re still here.” “Yes, we are. I’m Phoebe Desmond.” She said it so naturally and held out her hand with so unaffected an air that I was delighted to respond.

“Have you fixed your eye on anything particular?” “Oh, yes.” She laughed, her head thrown back, her long white neck bubbling with good humor. “I want that dinky little doll’s house with all the furniture and automatic dolls—the electronics are beyond my understanding but Timmy—that’s my nephew—will love to run them for his sister Dolly—my niece and the girl for whom I want the doll’s house.”

"I wouldn’t be too sure about that brother-sister relationship unless you know them very well.”

“There’s that bitter echo again—”

“Oh, no, that’s not fair! I may have been thinking of my Aunt Nora, but you’ve no right to strike me below the belt!”

She laughed again.

“Anyway, I think I know my own sister, and her children like me—adore me, is what Sally says—so I’m quite prepared to take the chance.”

Before I could make a suitable reply the sound of running feet clapped in sharp staccato counterpoint from the far end of the long picture gallery and we both turned casually, interrupted in our verbal fencing.

Toward us over the dark planks ran a naked girl, her long reddish-blonde hair streaming out behind her, her arms imploring succor, her mouth open and red and gaping. Following her in a crouching loathsome waddle and yet covering the ground with ferocious speed ran a -I did not have the words to describe it. Furred, fanged, ferocious, feral. With deep crimson pits for eyes and with thick and heavy iron boots strapped to its feet, each boot—there were four of them—tipped with a long, sharp, ugly and obscene spike, the thing squattered over the floor after the girl.

She saw us. Her eyes widened and her heaving chest expanded as she dragged in a last despairing breath for a final scream. The scream began.

The girl and the thing vanished.

Only the scream remained, echoing on in my brain.

I felt Phoebe Desmond’s arm touch mine and her hand grasp my wrist. She trembled. I glanced quickly at her and put my other hand on hers.

“I saw it, too, Miss Desmond. Whatever it was, it happened—but it’s gone now.
It’s gone!”

“Yes.” Her voice was a colorless whisper. “It’s gone.” She turned suddenly inward and buried her face in my lapels. “Oh—it was—it was—”

My hands were both caught up somewhere about the level of her shoulders and I could not move them. I said, “It was not pleasant. But it can’t harm us.”

After a time, she pulled back, put a hand through her hair, and, tossing her head back defiantly, said, “We’d better get back to the ballroom. My doll’s house will be gone.”

“Yes Miss Desmond. Well do that.”

I held her arm as we descended the stairs. She did not object. I received the firm conviction that she needed that human support.

The very normalcy and respectability of die atmosphere in the cluttered ballroom came to both of us as a shock. How could these very correct people immersed in their world of art and culture be sitting here so self-centered when above their heads naked girls ran for their lives and slobbering monsters pursued them with evil designs?

Finding a seat for Phoebe Desmond I stood behind her chair and looked about. Everything seemed the same; nothing had altered except the item under the hammer.

The bidding for a natural coral sculpture from an abandoned reef off the northeast coast of Australia crept up and up, the colored labiations of the coral sparkling from its plastic water-filled container. The sculpture certainly was a fine one, the directions of growth of the coral well-organized and directed, but I had at least six far finer at home and, pettishly, I grant, for a moment I savored a superiority to these grasping, avaricious, bidding drylanders.

A dry, meticulous, thin-haired man bought the coral sculpture. I could not imagine it gracing his bathroom; on the other hand, he could run to form and present it lo his mistress for mutual delighted study. The auctioneers robot wheeled off the coral and another wheeled on my globe.

That globe fascinated me. Manufactured before the South Pole Estate had been conceived, before, even, the continental shelves had been cultivated and aquiculture had transformed the living standards of the worlds, it portrayed a world dead and gone. But that world had once been real and real people had inhabited its continents and islands and had fought one with the other for I heir possession. The globe showed a world that had produced well over half of the treasures thronging this mom.

“Lot Forty-five. A globe of the Earth. Pre-space age and pre-sub
-
oceanic. In perfect condition with the single exception of a pin hole in a Kentish seaside resort called (heatstone—evidently at some time a flag had been stuck there.”

“Well, I don’t think any of us here will be likely to be going there just yet!” jocularly remarked the fat sweaty man whose eyes seldom left the Bernini Aphrodite. Each time George Pomfret saw this fat man—his name, I had been told, was Simon Rackley—George would purse up his lips and narrow his eyes and take on the look of a sleuth.

Bidding began desultorily. Little artistic merit could lie assigned a globe of the world. That the world portrayed was not the world these men and women would visit in their jet aircraft merely reinforced their lack of interest. Just yet, at any rate, geographical worlds—even physical representations, as this was, and not the ephemeral political globes of yesteryear—were not in fashion.

With a strange feeling of command and buoyancy foreign to me on dryland, I spoke the bid I felt certain would secure the globe for me. The shaky old lady against whom I had been bidding turned laboriously in her chair to see her competitor, her silks and nylons and strings of beads hampering her movements, her yellow old face like that of a bird inquiring of the bird table in the garden, and before she could make up her mind whether to go on or not the hammer fell in sonorous sealment.

She smiled at me, revealing a perfect set of superwhite dentures, and ducked her head in token of defeat.

I bowed.

The man who had entered during this exchange of politenesses took my arm. I stared at him, off balance.

“You have just gained that globe?”

“I have.”

“I want it—”

He wore a decent dark suit and pigskin shoes. His hands were broad and powerful, with square cut nails shining with attention and health. His shirt showed in the currently fashionable lavender hue, set off by a maroon tie figured in purple arabesques. These facts of his person I ascertained immediately, and as immediately passed them by in an absorbed study of his face.

Used as I am to the immediate judgment of a man and to the arrival in a snap flash of the mind to a considered appraisal of character and personality, well-versed in the arts of concealment, I had to look twice at this man who so importunely grasped my arm.

The way in which I would have assessed him belowsea would have been simple: I would have trusted him with the last oxy cylinder and the last harpoon in a frothing sea of killer whales. Square-faced, strong-jawed, keen-eyed, beak-nosed, wide-mouthed, all the descriptions of strong men and heroes fitted him; but in the very essence of himself he transcended all these purely physical attributes. He was a man.