The Dark Side (21 page)

His frown grew darker. “Got a telephone? I’ll have to get my boss in on this.”

Internal Revenue winced. “Yes, there’s a phone. I’ve spent three months listening in on it.” While Secret Service went to the phone to mutter briefly into it, I grinned. I know just how long Jean can talk to her mother saying absolutely nothing.

Secret Service came back and Sat down. “He’s pretty close to here. Five minutes.”

We sat drinking cold beer until the boss showed up. Five minutes was a poor estimate. Three would have been better. I looked out the window and watched a telephone-company truck drop off an undistinguished repairman, and sit there with the motor running. Sharp babies, these Federals.

So we went through the whole routine again with the coffee table and the bills and I had the place littered with money before they all gave up. I began to wonder if there was enough beer.

The boss said, “What guarantee have I that this will stop?”

I said, “When you find out how I do it you’ll be your own guarantee. Okay?”

The boss said, “No. There are a lot of things to be straightenened out first. For one thing—”

I snapped at him, “Let’s get this straight. I’ll tell you how I make the money. I’ll give you the gadget to take with you so you’ll know I can’t make any more. All you have to do is promise never to prosecute me for what’s gone by in the past. Now, there’s no strings to my offer—there’ll be no more money made, and you let me alone for the rest of my life. If either or us ever breaks the agreement, everything is off and the other can do what he likes.”

He jumped on one word. “Gadget! You make this stuff, )”<“allv make it? It isn’t just an optical illusion?”

I nodded. “I really make it, right in front of you, and if we do business you take the gadget with you right out the front door. Never again will I make a dime, and that’s a promise!”

The boss looked at Secret Service and Secret Service looked at Internal Revenue. They all looked at me and I excused myself. When I came out of the bathroom they weren’t too happy; the boss did the talking.

“McNally, God help you if you’re lying. We’ll coöperate, only because we have to. But, all right; we won’t prosecute for anything you’ve done in the past. But, if you ever pull anything like this again, you’re going to rue the day you were born. Just to show you I mean business, this could mean all our jobs. Counterfeiting is a felony, and we’re letting you get away with it. Understand that?”

He barked out the words, and I knew he meant just what he said. But I meant what I’d said, too. I told him that was fair enough, as far as I was concerned.

“It’d better be. Now, start talking. How do you do it?”

I laughed. “I discovered it by accident. You can do it yourself. Here; this coffee table…”

They looked down at it. “What about it?”

“You’re the boss,” I told him. “You do it first. Just put one of those bills on the glass and think about it. Think about how nice it would be if you had another one just like it. Think about where your next pay is going to go.”

I’ll give the boss credit. He hated to make a fool of himself, but he tried. He really tried. He took a bill out of his billfold and dropped it skeptically on the glass top. He shifted uncomfortably under the stares of the other two, and gave me one glare before he started concentrating on the money. Nothing happened.

He looked up at me and opened his mouth. I shook my head.

“This is no joke,” I said softly. “You’re the first one that knows this—even my wife doesn’t,” which was quite true.

He was game, and tried to concentrate. I motioned to Secret Service and Internal Revenue to move away with me, on the basis that the boss might find it a little easier without three men panting over him. We moved a few feet away and I took a sip of my beer.

I almost choked when I heard a gasp from the boss. I eagerly bent over the table again. The same thing was happening; the mist, the green color, the final completed bill. The boss sat up and wiped his forehead.

“Uh,” he said.

“Let me try that,” said Secret Service and Internal Revenue, almost in unison, and they in turn bent over the table. The same thing happened.

They all sat back and waited for me to talk. I sat back and waited for them to ask questions. The boss asked the first one.

“How do you do it?”

I told him the absolute truth. “I don’t know. I was just sitting here with my wife one night, glooming about what we owed, when she took out the last ten dollars we had. She flipped it on the table to show me how short we were going to be, and I just sat there moping about life in general. The next thing you know we had two ten-dollar bills. And that was it.”

They all moved back and looked at the coffee table.

The boss said, “Where did you get this—this portable mint?”

“From my relatives,” I said. I went on to tell him about the banshees and the leprechauns and he didn’t believe a word of it. But Secret Service did. Later I found out his name was Kelly,

“So what do we do now?” said the boss in an irritated voice.

“I told you that you could have the gadget,” and I meant it. “I’ve got a home, a car, and enough money in the bank. I always thought I could write stories if I had the chance, and I’ve been waiting for a good one. I think this is it. Take the table, and good health with it.”

He looked at the table again. “And anyone can work it—anyone at all?”

“I suppose so. You just did it yourself.”

Without an instant’s hesitation he smashed the muzzle of the gun down at the coffee table. There was an agonised tinkling crash that sounded feminine; and then there was nothing but brittle shards on the rug.

“Take this—thing outside; he commanded, and Secret Service carried the wooden frame of the table out on the front porch. The boss jumped on the skeleton until it shattered, and Secret Service himself brought a can of gasoline from the pseudo-telephone truck.

We all watched the wood burn until there were ashes that the wind carried away when I stirred them gently with my foot. Then they left together, without saying another word. I never saw any of them again; Kelly I recognised from his newspaper picture when he was promoted some years later.

So that’s the story. I never made any duplicate bills again; my promise made, the table destroyed, the ashes lost in the breeze. I write a little on the side occasionally,and with my limited talent I don’t sell too many stories. It’s a good thing I had money in the bank when the table was burned; money isn’t as easy to get as it once was.

Sometimes I regret losing the coffee table—it was an old family heirloom. And money was so easy to make when I had it, that life was a dream. But it’s just as well that the boss smashed and burned it. If he had kept it for a while, he would have found out it was just a table, that I had made the bills while they were so intent on the money. It was my ancestry, and not theirs. But what they don’t know will never hurt them. I kept my promise, and I’ll go on keeping it. But I made no promises not to duplicate anything else.

Right now. there’s a lot of people engaged in the business of finding and restoring old automobiles. Next year I’m going to France to take a look at a Type 51 Bugatti, They cost forty thousand dollars to make twenty years ago, and there’s only fourteen in existence. A fellow named Purdy who lives in New York would pay a good price for a fifteenth, I understand. And while I’m in Europe I’ll just stop in and look at some rare books and stamps and coins. They tell me that’s a good business, too—perfectly legal, and far more profitable than writing stories like this.

The last story, like the first, is about time. Fritz Leiber wrote this one in 1947 to fill out an Arkham House collection,
Night’s Black Agents
; I think it is one of the most charming and hauntingly beautiful things he has ever done.

Maot is becoming restless. Often toward evening she trudges to where the black earth meets the yellow sand and stands looking across the desert until the wind starts.

But I sit with my back to the reed screen and watch the Nile.

It isn’t just that she’s growing young. She is wearying of the fields. She leaves their tilling to me and lavishes her attentions on the flock. Every day she takes the sheep and goats farther to pasture.

I have seen it coming for a long time. For generations the fields have been growing scantier and less diligently irrigated.

There seems to be more rain. The houses have become simpler—mere walled tents. And every year some family gathers its flocks and wanders off west.

Why should I cling so tenaciously to these poor relics of civilisation—I, who have seen king Cheops’ men take down the Great Pyramid block by block and return it to the hills?

I often wonder why I never grow young. It is still as much a mystery to me as to the brown farmers who kneel in awe when I walk past.

I envy those who grow young. I yearn for the sloughing of wisdom and responsibility, the plunge into a period of lovemaking and breathless excitement, the carefree years before the end.

But I remain a bearded man of thirty-odd, wearing the goatskin as I once wore the doublet or the toga, always on the brink of that plunge yet never making it.

It seems to me that I have always been this way. Why, I cannot even remember my own disinterment, and everyone remembers that.

Maot is subtle. She does not ask for what she wants, but when she comes home at evening she sits far back from the fire and murmurs disturbing fragments of song and rubs her eyelids with green pigment to make herself desirable to me and tries in every way to infect me with her restlessness. She tempts me from the hot work at midday and points out how hardy our sheep and goats are becoming.

There are no young men among us any more. All of them start for the desert with the approach of youth, or before. Even toothless, scrawny patriarchs uncurl from their graveholes, and hardly pausing to refresh themselves with the food and drink dug up with them, collect their flocks and wives and hobble off into the west.

I remember the first disinterment I witnessed. It was in a country of smoke and machines and constant news. But what I am about to relate occurred in a backwater where there were still small farms and narrow roads and simple ways.

There were two old women named Flora and Helen. It could not have been more than a few years since their own disinterments, but those I cannot remember. I think I was some sort of nephew, but I cannot be sure.

They began to visit an old grave in the cemetery a half mile outside town. I remember the little bouquets of flowers they would bring back with them. Their prim, placid faces became troubled. I could see that grief was entering their lives.

The years passed. Their visits to the cemetery became more frequent. Accompanying them once, I noted that the worn inscription on the headstone was growing clearer and sharper, just as was happening to their own features. “John, loving husband of Flora…”

Often Flora would sob through half the night, and Helen went about with a set look on her face. Relatives came and spoke comforting words, but these seemed only to intensify their grief.

Finally the headstone grew brand-new and the grass became tender green shoots which disappeared into the raw brown earth. As if these were the signs their obscure instincts had been awaiting, Flora and Helen mastered their grief and visited the minister and the mortician and the doctor and made certain arrangements.

On a cold autumn day, when the brown curled leaves were whirling up into the trees, the procession set out—the empty hearse, the dark silent automobiles. At the cemetery we found a couple of men with shovels turning away unobtrusively from the newly opened grave. Then, while Flora and Helen wept bitterly, and the minister spoke solemn words, a long narrow box was lifted from the grave and carried to the hearse.

At home the lid of the box was unscrewed and slid back, and we saw John, a waxen old man with a long life before him.

Next day, in obedience to what seemed an age-old ritual, they took him from the box, and the mortician undressed him and drew a pungent liquid from his veins and injected the red blood.

Then they took him and laid him in bed. After a few hours of stony-eyed waiting, the blood began to work. He stirred and his first breath rattled in his throat. Flora sat down on the bed and strained him to her in a fearful embrace.

But he was very sick and in need of rest, so the doctor waved her from the room. I remember the look on her face as she closed the door.

I should have been happy too, but I seem to recall that I felt there was something unwholesome about the whole episode. Perhaps our first experiences of the great crises of life always affect us in some such fashion.

I love Maot. The hundreds I have loved before her in my wanderings down the world do not take away from the sincerity of my affection. I did not enter her life, or theirs, as lovers ordinarily do—from the grave or in the passion of some terrible quarrel. I am always the drifter.

Maot knows there is something strange about me. But she does not let that interfere with her efforts to make me do the thing she wants.

I love Maot and eventually I will accede to her desire. But first I will linger awhile by the Nile and the mighty pageantry conjured up by its passage.

My first memories are always the most difficult and I struggle the hardest to interpret them. I have the feeling that if I could get back a little beyond them, a terrifying understanding would come to me. But I never seem able to make the necessary effort.

They begin without antecedent in cloud and turmoil, darkness and fear. I am a citizen of a great country far away, beardless and wearing ugly confining clothing, but no different in age and appearance from today. The country is a hundred times bigger than Egypt, yet it is only one of many. All the peoples of the world are known to each other, and the world is round, not flat, and it floats in an endless immensity dotted with islands of suns, not confined under a star-speckled bowl.

Machines are everywhere, and news goes round the world like a shout, and desires are many. There is undreamed-of abundance, unrivaled opportunities. Yet men are not happy. They live in fear. The fear, if I recall rightly, is of a war that will engulf and perhaps destroy some enemy city. Others that dart up beyond the air itself, to come in attacking from the stars. Poisoned clouds. Deadly motes of luminous dust.

But worst of all are the weapons that are only rumored.

For months that seem eternities we wait on the brink of tluu war. We know that the mistakes have been made, the irrevocable steps taken, the last chances lost. We only await the event.

It would seem that there must have been some special reason for the extremity of our hopelessness and horror. As if there had been previous worldwide wars and we had struggled back from each desperately promising ourselves that it would be the last. But of any such, I can remember nothing, I and the world might well have been created under the shadow of that catastrophe, in a universal disinterment.

The months wear on. Then, miraculously, unbelievably, the war begins to recede. The tension relaxes. The clouds lift. There is great activity, conferences and plans. Hopes for lasting peace ride high.

This does not last. In sudden holocaust, there arises an oppressor named Hitler. Odd, how that name should come back to me after these millennia. His armies fan out across the globe.

But their success is short-lived. They are driven back, and Hitler trails off into oblivion. In the end he is an obscure agitator, almost forgotten.

Another peace then, but neither does it last. Another war, less fierce than. the preceding, and it too trails off into a quieter era.

And so on.

I sometimes think (I must hold on to this) that time once flowed in the opposite direction, and that, in revulsion from the ultimate war, it turned back upon itself and began to retrace its former course. That our present lives are only a return and an unwinding. A great retreat.

In that case time may turn again. We may have another chance to scale the barrier.

But no…

The thought has vanished in the rippling Nile.

Another family is leaving the valley today. All morning they have toiled up the sandy gorge. And now, returning perhaps for a last glimpse, to the verge of the yellow cliffs, they are outlined against the morning sky—upright specks for men, flat specks for animals.

Maot watches beside me. But she makes no comment. She is sure of me.

The cliff is bare again. Soon they will have forgotten the Nile and its disturbing ghosts of memories.

All our life is a forgetting and a closing in. As the child is absorbed by its mother, so great thoughts are swallowed up in the mind of genius. At first they are everywhere. They environ us like the air. Then there is a narrowing in. Not all men know them. Then there comes one great man, and he takes them to himself, and they are a secret. There only remains the disturbing coviction that something worthy has vanished.

I have seen Shakespeare unwrite the great plays. I have watched Socrates unthink the great thoughts. I have heard Jesus unsay the great words.

There is an inscription in stone, and it seems eternal. Coming back centuries later I find it the same, only a little less worn, and I think that it, at least, may endure. But some day a scribe comes and laboriously fills in the grooves until there is only blank stone,

Then only he knows what was written there. And as he grows young, that knowledge dies forever.

It is the same in all we do. Our houses grow new and we dismantle them and stow the materials inconspicuously away, in mine and quarry, forest and field. Our clothes grow new and we put them off. And we grow new and forget and blindly seek a mother.

All the people are gone now. Only I and Maot linger.

I had not realised it would come so soon. Now that we are near the end, Nature seems to hurry.

I suppose that there are other stragglers here and there along the Nile, but I like to think that we are the last to see the vanishing fields, the last to look upon the river with some knowledge of what it once symbolised, before oblivion closes in.

Ours is a world in which lost causes conquer. After the second war of which I spoke, there was a long period of peace in my native country across the sea. There were among us at that time a primitive people called Indians, neglected and imposed upon and forced to live apart in unwanted areas. We gave no thought to these people. We would have laughed at anyone who told us they had power to hurt us.

But from somewhere a spark of rebellion appeared among them. They formed bands, armed themselves with bows and inferior guns, took the warpath against us.

We fought them in little unimportant wars that were never quite conclusive. They persisted, always returning to the fight, laying ambushes for our men and wagons, harrying us continually, eventually making sizable inroads.

Yet we still considered them of such trifling importance that we found time to engage in a civil war among ourselves.

The issue of this war was sad. A dusky portion of our citizenry were enslaved and made to toil for us in house and field.

The Indians grew formidable. Step by step they drove us back across the wide midwestern rivers and plains, through the wooded mountains to eastward.

On the eastern coast we held for a while, chiefly by leaguing with a transoceanic island nation, to whom we surrendered our independence.

There was an enheartening occurrence. The enslaved Negroes were gathered together and crowded in ships and taken to the southern shores of this continent, and there liberated or given into the hands of warlike tribes who eventually released them.

But the pressure of the Indians, sporadically aided by foreign allies, increased. City by city, town by town, settlement by settlement, we pulled up our stakes and took ship ourselves across the sea. Toward the end the Indians became strangely pacific, so that the last boatloads seemed to flee not so much in physical fear as in supernatural terror of the green silent forests that had swallowed up their homes.

To the south the Aztecs took up their glass knives and flintedged swords and drove out the… I think they were called Spaniards.

In another century the whole western continent was forgotten, save for dim, haunting recollections.

Growing tyranny and ignorance, a constant contraction of frontiers, rebellions of the downtrodden, who in turn became oppressors—these constituted the next epoch of history.

Once I thought the tide had turned. A strong and orderly people, the Romans, arose and put most of the diminished world under their sway.

But this stability proved transitory. Once again the governed rose against the governors. The Romans were driven back from England, from Egypt, from Gaul, from Asia, from Greece. Rising from barren fields came Carthage to contest successfully Rome’s preeminence. The Romans took refuge in Rome, became unimportant, dwindled, were lost in a maze of migrations.

Their energising thoughts flamed up for our glorious century in Athens, then ceased to carry weight.

After that, the decline continued at a steady pace. Never again was I deceived into thinking the trend had changed.

Except this one last time.

Because she was stony and sun-drenched and dry, full of temples and tombs, given to custom and calm, I thought Egypt would endure. The passage of almost changeless centuries encouraged me in this belief. I thought that if we had not reached the turning point, we had at least come to rest.

But the rains have come, the temples and tombs fill the scars in the cliffs, and the custom and calm have given way to the restless urges of the nomad.

If there is a turning point, it will not come until man is one with the beasts.

And Egypt must vanish like the rest.

Tomorrow Maot and I set out. Our flock is gathered. Our tent is rolled.