Selected Stories (37 page)

She said, “That was the scream. The one I heard. Wasn’t once enough?”

It was only then that he could look far enough out of himself to see her face. It was pasty with shock, and wet, and her lips were pale. He leapt to his feet. “Another one!
Come on!
”

He pulled her up and through the door. “Don’t you understand?” he blazed. “Another one! It can’t be, but somewhere out there it’s happened again—”

She pulled back. “Are you sure it wasn’t …” She nodded at the closed door of the morgue.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he snorted. “
They
couldn’t be alive.” He hurried her to the stairs.

It was very dark. Muhlenberg’s office was in an aging business building which boasted twenty-five-watt bulbs on every other floor. They hurtled through the murk, past the deepest doorways of the law firm, the doll factory, the import-export firm which imported and exported nothing but phone calls, and all the other dim mosaics of enterprise. The building seemed quite deserted, and but for the yellow-orange glow of the landings and the pathetic little bulbs, there were no lights anywhere. And it was as quiet as it was almost dark; quiet as late night; quiet as death.

They burst out onto the old brownstone steps and stopped, afraid to look, wanting to look. There was nothing. Nothing but the street, a lonesome light, a distant horn and, far up at the corner, the distinct clicking of the relays in a traffic-light standard as they changed an ignored string of emeralds to an unnoticed ruby rope.

“Go up to the corner,” he said, pointing. “I’ll go down the other way. That noise wasn’t far away—”

“No,” she said. “I’m coming with you.”

“Good,” he said, so glad he was amazed at himself. They ran north to the corner. There was no one on the street within two blocks in any direction. There were cars, mostly parked, one coming, but none leaving.

“Now what?” she asked.

For a moment he did not answer. She waited patiently while he listened to the small distant noises which made the night so quiet. Then, “Good night, Budge.”

“Good—
what!
”

He waved a hand. “You can go home now.”

“But what about the—”

“I’m tired,” he said. “I’m bewildered. That scream wrung me like a floor-mop and pulled me down too many stairs too fast. There’s too much I don’t know about this and not enough I can do about it. So go home.”

“Aw, Muley …”

He sighed. “I know. Your story. Budgie, I faithfully promise you I’ll give you an exclusive as soon as I have facts I can trust.”

She looked carefully at his face in the dim light and nodded at what she saw there. “All right, Muley. The pressure’s off. Call me?”

“I’ll call you.”

He stood watching her walk away. Quite a gal, he thought. He wondered what had moved her to make that odd remark about inhibitions. They’d certainly never bothered her before! But—perhaps she had something there. Sometimes when you take what is loosely called “everything,” you have an odd feeling that you haven’t gotten much. He shrugged and ambled back toward the laboratory, pondering morphology, teratology, and a case where
monstra per defectum
could coexist with
monstra per fabricam alienam.

Then he saw the light.

It flickered out over the street, soft and warm. He stopped and looked up. The light showed in a third-story window. It was orange and yellow, but with it was a flaring blue-white. It was pretty. It was also in his laboratory. No—not the laboratory. The morgue.

Muhlenberg groaned. After that he saved his breath. He needed it badly by the time he got back to the laboratory.

Muhlenberg dove for the heavy morgue door and snatched it open. A great pressure of heat punted a gout of smoke into the lab. He slammed the door, ran to a closet, snatched out a full-length lab smock, spun the faucets in the sink and soaked the smock. From another cabinet he snatched up two glass-globe fire extinguishers. He wrapped the wet cloth twice around his face and let the rest drop over his chest and back. Cradling the extinguishers in one bent forearm, he reached for the side of the door and grabbed the pump-type extinguisher racked there.

Now, suddenly not hurrying, he stepped up on the sill and stood on tiptoe, peering through a fold of the wet cloth. Then he crouched low and peered again. Satisfied, he stood up and, carefully pegged the two glass extinguishers, one straight ahead, one to the right and down. Then he disappeared into the smoke, holding the third extinguisher at the ready.

There was a rising moan, and the smoke shook like a solid entity and rushed into the room and away. As it cleared, Muhlenberg, head and shoulders wrapped in sooty linen, found himself leaning against the wall, gasping, with one hand on a knife-switch on the wall. A three-foot exhaust fan in the top sash of one window was making quick work of the smoke.

Racks of chemicals, sterilizers, and glass cabinets full of glittering surgeon’s tools lined the left wall. Out on the floor were four massive tables, on each of which was a heavy marble top. The rest of the room was taken up by a chemist’s bench, sinks, a partitioned-off darkroom with lightproof curtains, and a massive centrifuge.

On one of the tables was a mass of what looked like burned meat and melted animal fat. It smelled bad—not rotten bad, but acrid and—and
wet,
if a smell can be described that way. Through it was the sharp, stinging odor of corrosive chemicals.

He unwound the ruined smock from his face and threw it into a corner. He walked to the table with the mess on it and stood looking bleakly at it for a time. Suddenly he put out a hand, and with thumb and forefinger pulled out a length of bone.

“What a job,” he breathed at length.

He walked around the table, poked at something slumped there and snatched his hand away. He went to the bench and got a pair of forceps, which he used to pick up the lump. It looked like a piece of lava or slag. He turned on a hooded lamp and studied it closely.

“Thermite, by God,” he breathed.

He stood quite still for a moment, clenching and unclenching his square jaw. He took a long slow turn around the seared horror on the morgue slab, then carefully picked up the forceps and hurled them furiously into a corner. Then he went out to the lab and picked up the phone. He dialed.

“Emergency,” he said. “Hello, Sue. Regalio there? Muhlenberg. Thanks. … Hello, Doc. Are you sitting down? All right. Now get this. I’m fresh out of symmetrical teratomorphs. They’re gone. … Shut up and I’ll tell you! I was out in the lab talking to a reporter when I heard the damndest scream. We ran out and found nothing. I left the reporter outside and came back. I couldn’t’ve been out more’n ten-twelve minutes. But somebody got in here, moved both stiffs onto one slab, incised them from the thorax to the pubis, crammed them full of iron oxide and granulated aluminum—I have lots of that sort of stuff around here—fused ’em with a couple of rolls of magnesium foil and touched ’em off. Made a great big messy thermite bomb out of them. … No, dammit, of
course
there’s nothing left of them! What would you think eight minutes at seven thousand degrees would do? … Oh, dry up, Regalio! I don’t know who did it or why, and I’m too tired to think about it. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. No—what would be the use of sending anyone down here? This wasn’t done to fire the building; whoever did it just wanted to get rid of those bodies, and sure did a job. … The coroner? I don’t know what I’ll tell him. I’m going to get a drink and then I’m going to bed. I just wanted you to know. Don’t tell the press. I’ll head off that reporter who was here before. We can do without this kind of story. ‘Mystery arsonist cremates evidence of double killing in lab of medical consultant.’ A block from headquarters, yet. … Yeah, and get your driver to keep his trap shut, too. Okay, Regalio. Just wanted to let you know. … Well, you’re no sorrier’n I am. We’ll just have to wait another couple hundred years while something like that gets born again, I guess.”

Muhlenberg hung up, sighed, went into the morgue. He turned off the fan and lights, locked the morgue door, washed up at the laboratory sink, and shut the place up for the night.

It was eleven blocks to his apartment—an awkward distance most of the time, for Muhlenberg was not of the fresh-air and deep-breathing fraternity. Eleven blocks was not far enough to justify a cab and not near enough to make walking a negligible detail. At the seventh block he was aware of an overwhelming thirst and a general sensation that somebody had pulled the plug out of his energy barrel. He was drawn as if by a vacuum into Rudy’s, a Mexican bar with Yma Sumac and Villa-Lobos on the juke box.

“Hola, amigo,”
said Rudy. “Tonight you don’ smile.”

Muhlenberg crawled wearily onto a stool. “
Deme una tequila
sour, and skip the cherry,” he said in his bastard Spanish. “I don’t know what I got to smile about.” He froze, and his eyes bulged. “Come back here, Rudy.”

Rudy put down the lemon he was slicing and came close. “I don’t want to point, but who
is
that?”

Rudy glanced at the girl.
“Ay,”
he said rapturously.
“Qué chuchín.”

Muhlenberg remembered vaguely that
chuchín
was untranslatable, but that the closest English could manage with it was “cute.” He shook his head. “That won’t do.” He held up his hand. “Don’t try to find me a Spanish word for it. There isn’t any word for it. Who is she?”

Rudy spread his hands.
“No sé.”

“She by herself?”

“Sí.”

Muhlenberg put his chin on his hand. “Make my drink. I want to think.”

Rudy went, his mahogany cheeks drawn in and still in his version of a smile.

Muhlenberg looked at the girl in the booth again just as her gaze swept past his face to the bartender. “Rudy!” she called softly, “are you making a tequila sour?”

“Sí, señorita.”

“Make me one too?”

Rudy beamed. He did not turn his head toward Muhlenberg, but his dark eyes slid over toward him, and Muhlenberg knew that he was intensely amused. Muhlenberg’s face grew hot, and he felt like an idiot. He had a wild fantasy that his ears had turned forward and snapped shut, and that the cello-and-velvet sound of her voice, captured, was nestling down inside his head like a warm little animal.

He got off the bar stool, fumbled in his pocket for change and went to the juke-box. She was there before him, slipping a coin in, selecting a strange and wonderful recording called
Ven a Mi Casa,
which was a
borracho
version of “C’mon-a-My House.”

“I was just going to play that!” he said. He glanced at the jukebox. “Do you like Yma Sumac?”

“Oh, yes!”

“Do you like
lots
of Yma Sumac?” She smiled and, seeing it, he bit his tongue. He dropped in a quarter and punched out six sides of Sumac. When he looked up Rudy was standing by the booth with a little tray on which were two tequila sours. His face was utterly impassive and his head was tilted at the precise angle of inquiry as to where he should put Muhlenberg’s drink. Muhlenberg met the girl’s eyes, and whether she nodded ever so slightly or whether she did it with a single movement of her eyelids, he did not know, but it meant “yes.” He slid into the booth opposite her. Music came. Only some of it was from the records. He sat and listened to it all. Rudy came with a second drink before he said anything, and only then did he realize how much time had passed while he rested there, taking in her face as if it were quite a new painting by a favorite artist. She did nothing to draw his attention or to reject it. She did not stare rapturously into his eyes or avoid them. She did not even appear to be waiting, or expecting anything of him. She was neither remote nor intimate. She was close, and it was good.

He thought, in your most secret dreams you cut a niche in yourself, and it is finished early, and then you wait for someone to come along to fill it—but to fill it exactly, every cut, curve, hollow and plane of it. And people do come along, and one covers up the niche, and another rattles around inside it, and another is so surrounded by fog that for the longest time you don’t know if she fits or not; but each of them hits you with a tremendous impact. And then one comes along and slips in so quietly that you don’t know when it happened, and fits so well you almost can’t feel anything at all. And that is it.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked him.

He told her, immediately and fully. She nodded as if he had been talking about cats or cathedrals or cam-shafts, or anything else beautiful and complex. She said, “That’s right. It isn’t all there, of course. It isn’t even enough. But everything else isn’t enough without it.”

“What is ‘everything else’?”

“You know,” she said.

He thought he did. He wasn’t sure. He put it aside for later. “Will you come home with me?”

“Oh, yes.”

They got up. She stood by the door, her eyes full of him, while he went to the bar with his wallet.

“Cuánto le debo?”

Rudy’s eyes had a depth he had never noticed before. Perhaps it hadn’t been there before.
“Nada,”
said Rudy.

“On the house?
Muchísimas gracias, amigo
.” He knew, profoundly, that he shouldn’t protest.

They went to his apartment. While he was pouring brandy—brandy because, if it’s good brandy, it marries well with tequila—she asked him if he knew of a place called Shank’s, down in the warehouse district. He thought he did; he knew he could find it. “I want to meet you there tomorrow night at eight,” she said. “I’ll be there,” he smiled. He turned to put the brandy carafe back, full of wordless pleasure in the knowledge that all day tomorrow he could look forward to being with her again.

He played records. He was part sheer technician, part delighted child when he could demonstrate his sound system. He had a copy of the Confucian “Analects” in a sandalwood box. It was printed on rice-paper and hand-illuminated. He had a Finnish dagger with intricate scrollwork which, piece by piece and as a whole, made many pictures. He had a clock made of four glass discs, the inner two each carrying one hand, and each being rim-driven from the base so it seemed to have no works at all.