The Perfect Host (43 page)

I
WAS OUT
in Fulgey Wood trying to find out what had happened to my foot, and I all but walked on her. Claire, I mean. Not Luana. You wouldn’t catch Luana rolled up in a nylon sleeping bag, a moonbeam bright on her face.

Her face gleamed up like a jewel sunk deep in a crystal spring. I stood looking at it, not moving, not even breathing, hoping that she would not wake. I’d found that horror of a skull ten minutes ago and I’d much rather she didn’t see it.

She stirred. I stepped back and sideward into a bear-trap. The steel jaws were cushioned by my heavy boot; they sliced through from instep to heel, but did not quite meet. All the same, it was a noise in the soughing silences of the wood, and Claire’s eyes opened. She studied the moon wonderingly for a moment because, I presume, her face was turned to it. Then she seemed to recall where she was. She sat up and glanced about. Her gaze swept over me twice as I stood there stiff and straight, trying to look like a beech. Or a birch. I must be of the wrong family. She saw me.

“Thad …” She sat up and knuckled her eyes. Claire has a deep voice, and meticulous. She peered. “It—
is
Thad?”

“Most of me. Hi.”

“Hi.” She moved her mouth, chewing, apparently, the end of sleepiness. She swallowed it and said. “You’ve been looking for me.”

“For years,” I said gallantly. That might have been true. At the moment, however, I was in pursuit of my foot, and possibly some peace and quiet. I hadn’t counted on this at all.

“Well, Lochinvar, why don’t you sweep me into your arms?”

“I’ve told you before. You’re everything in the world I need, but you don’t strike sparks. Go on back to bed.”

She shook her hair, forward, out and down, and then breathtakingly back. She had masses of it. In the moonlight it was blue-gray, an obedient cloud. “You don’t seem surprised to find me out here.”

“I’m not. The last thing I said to you in town was to sit tight, stay where you were, and let me handle this. The fact that you are here therefore does not surprise me.”

“You know,” she said, putting one elbow on one knee, one chin in one palm, and twinkling, “you say ‘therefore’ prettier than anyone else I ever met. Why don’t you come over here and talk to me? Are you standing in a bear-trap?”

She was wearing a one-piece sunsuit. It was backless and side-less and the summer flying suit, hanging on the bush at her head, plus the light nylon sleeping bag, were obviously everything in the world she had with her. About the bear-trap I said, “Well, yes.”

She laughed gaily, and lay back. Her hair spread and spilled; she burrowed into it with the back of her head. She pulled the sleeping bag tight up around her throat and said, “All right, silly. Stand there if you want to. It’s a big boudoir.”

I said nothing. I tugged cautiously at the trap, moving just my leg. The boot all but parted; the moon gleamed on the steel jaws, now only an inch apart and closing slowly. I stopped pulling. I hoped she would go back to sleep. I hoped the trap wouldn’t clank together when it finally went all the way through. I stood still. There was sweat on my mouth.

“You still there?”

“Yup,” I said.

She sat up again. “Thad, this is stupid!
Do
something! Go away, or talk to me or something, but don’t just
stand
there!”

“Why don’t you just go on to sleep and let me worry about what I do? I’m not in your way. I won’t touch you.”

“That I don’t doubt,” she said acidly. “Go away.” She thumped down, turned away, turned back and sat up, peering. “I just thought … maybe you
can’t …
” She flung out of the bag and stood up, slim in the moonlight. I could see her toenails gleam as she stepped on the fabric. Her right toenails, I mean. Her left foot wasn’t a foot. It was a cloven hoof, hairy-fetlocked, sharp and heavy. She was as
unselfconscious about it as she was of the casual coverage her sunsuit afforded her. She came to me, limping slightly.

“Go on back to—let me al—oh for Pete’s sake, Claire, I’m perfectly—”

She breathed a wordless, sighing syllable, all horror and pity. “Thad,” she cried. “Your—your
foot!
”

“I didn’t want you to know.”

“How could you just
stand
there with that—that—Oh!” She knelt, reached toward my trapped foot, recoiled before she touched it and stayed there looking up at me with her eyes bright in the silver light, silver tear-streaks on her face like lode-veinings. “What shall I
do?
”

I sighed. “Keep your fingers away from the trap.” I leaned back and pulled. The macerated leather of my high-laced hunting boot held, gave, held—and then the jaws whanged together, close-meshed. I fell back against a birch-trunk, banging my head painfully. Claire, seeing almost the entire foot dangling under the arch of the trap’s jaws, started a shriek, then jammed it back into her mouth with her whole hand. I grunted.

“Oh,” she said, “you poor
darling!
Does it hurt?” she added inanely.

“No,” I said, rubbing my skull. “It was just my head …”

“But your foot! Your poor foot!”

I began unlacing what was left of the boot. “Don’t bother your pretty little head about it,” I said. I pulled the boot-wings aside and slipped my leg out of boot and woolen stocking together. She looked, and sat down plump! before me, her jaw swinging slackly. “Shut it,” I said conversationally. “You really looked beautiful a while back. Now you look silly.”

She pointed to my hoof. It was larger than hers, and shaggier. “Oh, Thad! I didn’t know … how long?”

“About three weeks. Damn it, Claire, I didn’t want you to know.”

“You should have told me. You should have told me the second it started.”

“Why? You had enough on your mind. You’d already been through all the treatment that anyone could figure out, and I was in
on all of it. So when it happened to me, I didn’t see the sense in making a federal case out of it.” I shrugged. “If Dr. Ponder can’t cure this no one can. And he can’t. Therefore—”

Through her shock, she giggled.

“Therefore,” I continued, “there was nothing left for me to do but try to find out what had happened, by myself.” I saw her lower lip push out before she dropped her face and hid it. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I—kind of thought you were trying to help just me.”

Claire can switch from giggles to tears, from shock to laughter to horror to fright, faster than anyone I ever met. It goes all the way down too. I said, “Don’t kid yourself. I don’t do things for people.”

“Well,” she said in a very small voice, “that’s what I thought, for a while anyway.”

“You better get back in that sleeping bag. You’ll catch cold,” I said.

She rose and crept obediently back to the sleeping bag. Once into it, she said, “Well, you’ll care if I catch cold.”

I went and hunkered down beside her. “Well sure. I might catch it.”

“You wouldn’t get that close!”

“Oh, I don’t know. I read somewhere that a sneeze can travel thirty feet.”

“I hate you.”

“Because I sneaked out behind your back and got a fancy foot just like yours?”

“Oh, Thad! How can you joke about it?”

I sat back and lifted my hoof, regarding it thoughtfully. I had found it possible to spread the two halves and relax suddenly. They made a nice loud click. I did this a couple of times. “I’d rather joke about it. How frantic can you get?”

“Thad, Thad … It’s my fault, it is, it is!”

“Uh-huh. That’s what I get for playing footsie with you in road-houses. You’re contagious, that’s what.”

“You’re no comfort.”

“I don’t comfort stupid people. This isn’t your fault, and you’re being stupid when you talk like that. Does yours itch?”

“Not any more.”

“Mine does.” I clicked my hoof some more. It felt good. “What gave you the idea of coming out here?”

“Well,” she said shyly, “after you said you’d track this thing down for me, but wouldn’t say how, I thought it all out from the very beginning. This crazy trouble, whatever it is, started out here; I mean, it developed after I came out here that time. So I figured that this is where you’d be.”

“But why come?”

“I didn’t know what you’d get into here. I thought you might—might need me.”

“Like a hole in the head,” I said bluntly.

“And I thought you were doing it just for me. I didn’t know you had a foot like that too.” Her voice was very small.

“So now you know. And you’re sorry you came. And first thing in the morning you’ll hightail it straight back to town where you belong.”

“Oh no! Not now. Not when I know we’re in this together. I like being in something together with you, Thad.”

I sighed. “Why does my luck run like this? If I got all hog-wild and feverish about you, you’d turn around and get short of breath over some other joker. Everybody loves somebody—else.”

“You’re thinking about Luana,” she said with accuracy. Luana was Dr. Ponder’s typist. She had taut coral pneumatic lips, a cleft chin, and a tear-stained voice like that of an English horn in the lower register. She had other assets and I was quite taken with both of them.

“If I were as honest about my feelings as you are about yours,” I said, “and as loud-mouthed, I’d only hurt your feelings. Let’s talk about our feet.”

“All right,” she said submissively. “Thad …”

“Mm?”

“What did you mean when you said you’d seen me be beautiful?”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake! Skip it, will you? What has that to do with feet?”

“Well … Nothing, I guess.” She sounded so forlorn that, before I could check myself, I reached out and patted her shoulder. “I’m
sorry, Claire. I shouldn’t brutalize you, I guess. But it’s better than stringing you along.”

She held my hand for a moment against her cheek. “I s’pose it is,” she said softly. “You’re so good … so good, and—so sensible.”

“So tired. Give me back my hand. Now; let’s put all this fantastic business together and see what comes out. You start. Right from the beginning, now; somewhere, somehow, there’s got to be an answer to all this. I know we’ve been over it and over it, but maybe this time something will make sense. You start.”

She lay back, put her hands behind her head, and looked at the moon. She had to turn her head for this, because the moon was sinking, and there were knife-edges of light among the cords of her throat. “I still say it was the night I met you. Oh, don’t worry; I won’t get off on that again … but it was. You were just a face among faces to me then. A nice face, but—anyway, it was the Medusa Club meeting, the night we got talking about magic”

“I’ll never forget that night,” I said. “What a collection of neurotics! Saving your presence, ma’am.”

“That’s the only purpose of the club—to find those things which frighten neurotics and stare them down, and to keep on doing it until somebody drops dead. Score to date: umpteen-odd dead boogie-men, no dead people. Hence the discussion of magic that night.”

“That makes sense. And I remember Ponder’s point that we are not as far removed from the days of the witches and wizards as we like to think. We knock on wood; we slip bits of wedding-cake under our pillows; we hook fingers with each other when we suddenly say the same thing together, and so on and on. And he said that perhaps this subconscious clinging to ritual was not because of a lingering childishness but because the original magic forces were still in operation!”

“That was it,” said Claire. “And a fine flurry of snorts he got for that!”

“Yup. Especially from you. I still don’t understand why you got so steamed up.”

“I
hate
that kind of talk!” she said vociferously. “But I hated it especially hearing it from Dr. Ponder. Ever since I’ve known him he’s been so reasonable, so logical, so—well, so wonderful—”

I grinned. “I’m jealous”

“Are you, Thad? Are you really?” she said eagerly; then, “No. You’re laughing at me, you heel … anyway, I couldn’t stand hearing that kind of poppycock from him.”

I put out my cloven hoof and snapped it in front of her nose. “What do you think now?”

“I don’t know what to think …” she whispered, and then, with one of her startling switches of mood, continued in a normal voice, “so the next day I decided to track down some of the old superstitions for myself. Heaven knows this part of the country is full of them. The Indians left a lot, and then the Dutch and the French and the Spanish. There’s something about these hills that breeds such things.”

I laughed. “Sounds like Lovecraft.”

“Sounds like Charles Fort, too!” she snapped. “Some day you’ll learn that you can’t laugh at one and admire the other. Where was I?”

“In the woods.”

“Oh. Well, the most persistent superstition in these parts is the old legend of the Camel’s Grave. I came out here to find it.”

I scrabbled up some of the soft earth to make a pit for my elbow and a hummock for my armpit. I lay on my side, propped up my head with my hand, and was comfortable. “Just run off that legend again, once over lightly.”

She closed her eyes. “Somewhere in this no-good country—no one’s ever been able to farm it, and there’s too much jimson weed and nightshade for grazing—there’s supposed to be a little hollow called Forbidden Valley. At the north end of it they say there’s a grave with something funny about it. There’s no headstone. Just a skull. Some say a man was buried there up to his neck and left to die.”

“The Amazon Indians have a stunt like that. But they pick an anthill for the job. Cut off the feller’s eyelids first. After that, the potato race, ducking for apples and ice cream is served in the main tent.”

“A picnic,” she agreed, shuddering. “But there was never anything like that among the local Indians here. Besides, we don’t run
to that kind of ant either. Anyway, this skull is chained, so the story goes, with a link through the edge of the eye-socket. It’s supposed to be a magician buried there. Thing is, the legend is that he isn’t dead. He’ll live forever and be chained forever. Nothing can help him. But he doesn’t know it. So if anyone wanders too close, he’ll capture whoever it is and put’ em to work trying to dig him out. The old tales keep coming out—kids who had wandered out here and disappeared, the old woman who went out of her head after she got back to town, the half-witted boy who mumbled something about the skull that talked to him out of the ground. You know.”