Uncollected Stories 2003 (4 page)

I heard Weinbaum gasp as we entered the lab. The place was swimming
in the green, liquid. The other two cases were broken! I didn't pause,
but ran past the shattered, empty cases and out the door. Weinbaum did
not follow me. The car was empty, the door on the passengers side
open. I shone my light over the ground. Here and there were footprints
of a girl wearing high heels, a girl who had to be Vicki. The rest of the
tracks were blotted out by a monstrous something I hesitate to call it a
track. It was more as if something huge had dragged itself into the
woods. Its hugeness was testified, too, as I noticed the broken saplings
and crushed underbrush. I ran back into the lab where Weinbaum was
sitting, face pale and drawn, regarding the three shattered empty tanks.
The revolver was on the table and I grabbed it and made for the door.

"Out to hunt for Vicki," I snarled. "And if she's hurt or – " I didn't
finish.
I hurried out into the velvet darkness of the night. Gun in hand,
flashlight in the other, I plunged into the woods, following the trail
blazed by something that I didn't want to think about. The vital question
that burned in my mind was whether it had Vicki or was still trailing
her. If it had her...
My question was answered by a piercing scream not too far away
from me. Faster now, I ran and suddenly burst into a clearing. Perhaps it
is because I want to forget, or perhaps it is only because the night was
dark and beginning to become foggy, but I can only remember how
Vicki caught sight of my flashlight, ran to me, buried her head against
my shoulder and sobbed. A huge shadow moved toward me, mewing
horribly, driving me almost mad with terror. Stumblingly, we fled from
the horror in the dark, back toward the comforting lights of the lab,
away from the unseen terror that lurked in the dark. My fear-crazed
brain was putting two and two together and coming up with five. The
three cases had contained three somethings from the darkest pits of a
twisted mind. One had broken loose. Rankin and Weinbaum had been
after it. It had killed Rankin, but Weinbaum had trapped it in the
concealed pit. The second one was floundering in the woods now and I
suddenly remembered that whatever-it-was, was huge and that it had a
hard time lifting itself along. Then I realized that it had trapped Vicki in
a gully. It had started down easy enough! But getting up? I was almost
positive that it couldn't. Two were out of commission. But where was
the third? My question was answered very suddenly but a scream from
the lab.
And...mewing.

We ran up to the lab door and threw it open. It was empty. The screams
and the terrible mewing sounds came from the garage. I ran through,
and ever since have been glad that Vicki stayed in the lab and was
spared the sight that had wakened me from a thousand awful
nightmares. The lab was darkened and all that I could make out was a
huge shadow moving sluggishly. And the screams! Screams of terror,
the screams of a man faced with a monster from the pits of hell. It
mewed horribly and seemed to pant in delight.

My hand moved around for a light switch. There, I found it! Light
flooded the room, illuminating a tableau of horror that was the result of
the grave thing I had performed, I and the dead uncle. A huge, white
maggot twisted on the garage floor, holding Weinbaum with long
suckers, raising him towards its dripping, pink mouth from which horrid
mewing sounds came. Veins, red and pulsating, showed under its slimy
flesh and millions of squirming tiny maggots – in the blood vessels, in
the skin, even forming a huge eye that stared out at me. A huge maggot,
made up of hundreds of millions of maggots, the feasters on the dead
flesh that Weinbaum had used so freely. In a half-world of terror I fired
the revolver again and again. It mewed and twitched. Weinbaum
screamed something as he was dragged inexorably toward the waiting
mouth. Incredibly, I made it out over the hideous sound that the creature
was making.

Then I saw the sticky pools of green liquid which had trickled over the
floor from the laboratory. I fumbled for my lighter, got it and frantically
thumbed it. Suddenly I remembered that I had forgotten to put a flint in.
I reached for matches, got one and fired the others. I threw the pack just
as Weinbaum screamed his last. I saw his body through the translucent
skin of the creature, still twitching as thousands of maggots leeched
onto it. Retching, I threw the now flaring matches into the green ooze. It
was flammable, just as I had thought. It burst into bright flames. The
creature was twisted into a horrid ball of pulsing, putrid flesh. I turned
and stumbled out to where Vicki stood, shaking and whitefaced.

"Come on!" I said, "Let's get out of here! The whole place is going to
go up!"
We ran out to the car and drove away rapidly.

There isn't too much left to say. I'm sure that you have all read about the
fire that swept the residential Belwood District of California, leveling
fifteen square miles of woods and residential homes. I couldn't feel too
badly about that fire. I realize that hundreds might have been killed by
the gigantic maggot-things that Weinbaum and Rankin were breeding. I
drove out there after the fire. The whole place was smoldering ruins.
There was no discernable remains of the horror that we had battled that
final night, and, after some searching, I found a metal cabinet. Inside
there were three ledgers. Once of them was Weinbaum's diary. I clears
up a lot. It revealed that they were experimenting on dead flesh,
exposing it to gamma rays. One day they observed a strange thing. The
few maggots that had crawled over the flesh were growing, becoming a
group. Eventually they grew together, forming three separate large
maggots. Perhaps the radioactive bomb had speed up the evolution.

I don't know.
Furthermore, I don't want to know.
In a way, I suppose, I assisted in Rankin's death; the flesh of the body

whose grave I had robbed had fed perhaps the very creature that had
killed him. I live with that thought. But I believe that there can be
forgiveness. I'm working for it. Or, rather, we're working for it.

In the novel
Deliverance
, by James Dickey, there is a scene where a country
fellow who lives way up in the back of beyond whangs his hand with a tool
while repairing a car. One of the city men who are looking for a couple of
guys to drive their cars downriver asks this fellow, Griner by name, if he's
hurt himself. Griner looks at his bloody hand, then mutters: "Naw – it ain't as
bad as I thought."

That's the way I felt after re-reading "The Glass Floor," the first story for
which I was ever paid, after all these years. Darrell Schweitzer, the editor of
Weird Tales
invited me to make changes if I wanted to, but I decided that
would probably be a bad idea. Except for two or three word changes and the
addition of a paragraph break (which was probably a typographical error in
the first place), I've left the tale just as it was. If I really did start making
changes, the result would be an entirely new story.

"The Glass Floor" was written, to the best of my recollection, in the summer
of 1967, when I was about two months shy of my twentieth birthday. I had
been trying for about two years to sell a story to Robert A.W. Lowndes, who
edited two horror/fantasy magazines for Health Knowledge (
The Magazine of
Horror
and
Startling Mystery Stories
) as well as a vastly more popular digest
called
Sexology
. He had rejected several submissions kindly (one of them,
marginally better than "The Glass Floor," was finally published in
The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
under the title "Night of the Tiger"),
then accepted this one when I finally got around to submitting it. That first
check was for thirty-five dollars. I've cashed many bigger ones since then, but
none gave me more satisfaction; someone had finally paid me some real
money for something I had found in my head!

The first few pages of the story are clumsy and badly written – clearly the
product of an unformed story-teller's mind – but the last bit pays off better
than I remembered; there is a genuine frisson in what Mr. Wharton finds
waiting for him in the East Room. I suppose that's at least part of the reason I
agreed to allow this mostly unremarkable work to be reprinted after all these
years. And there is at least a token effort to create characters which are more
than paper-doll cutouts; Wharton and Reynard are antagonists, but neither is
"the good guy" or "the bad guy." The real villain is behind that plastered-over
door. And I also see an odd echo of "The Glass Floor" in a very recent work
called "The Library Policeman." That work, a short novel, will be published
as part of a collection of short novels called
Four Past Midnight
this fall, and
if you read it, I think you'll see what I mean. It was fascinating to see the same
image coming around again after all this time.

Mostly I'm allowing the story to be republished to send a message to young
writers who are out there right now, trying to be published, and collecting
rejection slips from such magazines as
F&SF, Midnight Graffiti
, and, of
course,
Weird Tales
, which is the granddaddy of them all. The message is
simple: you can learn, you can get better, and you can get published.

If that Little spark is there, someone will probably see it sooner or later,
gleaming faintly in the dark. And, if you tend the spark nestled in the kindling,
it really can grow into a large, blazing fire. It happened to me, and it started
here.
I remember getting the idea for the story, and it just came as the ideas come
now – casually, with no flourish of trumpets. I was walking down a dirt road
to see a friend, and for no reason at all I began to wonder what it would be
like to stand in a room whose floor was a mirror. The image was so intriguing
that writing the story became a necessity. It wasn't written for money; it was
written so I could see better. Of course I did not see it as well as I had hoped;
there is still that shortfall between what I hope I will accomplish and what I
actually manage. Still, I came away from it with two valuable things: a salable
story after five years of rejection slips, and a bit of experience. So here it is,
and as that fellow Griner says in Dickey's novel, it ain't really as bad as I
thought.

W
harton moved slowly up the wide steps, hat in hand, craning his neck
to get a better look at the Victorian monstrosity that his sister had died
in. It wasn't a house at all, he reflected, but a mausoleum – a huge,
sprawling mausoleum. It seemed to grow out of the top of the hill like
an outsized, perverted toadstool, all gambrels and gables and jutting,
blank-windowed cupolas. A brass weather-vane surmounted the eighty
degree slant of shake-shingled roof, the tarnished effigy of a leering
little boy with one hand shading eyes Wharton was just as glad he could
not see.

Then he was on the porch, and the house as a whole was cut off from
him. He twisted the old-fashioned bell, and listened to it echo hollowly
through the dim recesses within. There was a rose-tinted fanlight over
the door, and Wharton could barely make out the date 1770 chiseled
into the glass.
Tomb is right
, he thought.

The door suddenly swung open. "Yes, sir?" The housekeeper stared
out at him. She was old, hideously old. Her face hung like limp dough
on her skull, and the hand on the door above the chain was grotesquely
twisted by arthritis.

"I've come to see Anthony Reynard," Wharton said. He fancied he
could even smell the sweetish odor of decay emanating from the
rumpled silk of the shapeless black dress she wore.

"Mr Reynard isn't seein' anyone. He's mournin'."
"He'll see me," Wharton said. "I'm Charles Wharton. Janine's brother."
"Oh." Her eyes widened a little, and the loose bow of her mouth

Wharton stared into the dim mahogany shadows, making out highbacked
easy chairs, horse-hair upholstered divans, tall narrow-shelved
bookcases, curlicued, floridly carven wainscoting.

Janine
, he thought.
Janine, Janine, Janine. How could you live here?
How in hell could you stand it?
A tall figure materialized suddenly out of the gloom, slopeshouldered,
head thrust forward, eyes deeply sunken and downcast.
Anthony Reynard reached out and unhooked the door-chain. "Come
in, Mr. Wharton, " he said heavily.
Wharton stepped into the vague dimness of the house, looking up
curiously at the man who had married his sister. There were rings
beneath the hollows of his eyes, blue and bruised-looking. The suit he
wore was wrinkled and hung limp on him, as if he had lost a great deal
of weight. He looks tired, Wharton thought. Tired and old.
"My sister has already been buried?" Wharton asked.
"Yes." He shut the door slowly, imprisoning Wharton in the decaying
gloom of the house. "My deepest sorrow, sir. Wharton. I loved your
sister dearly." He made a vague gesture. "I'm sorry."
He seemed about to add more, then shut his mouth with an abrupt
snap. When he spoke again, it was obvious he had bypassed whatever
had been on his lips. "Would you care to sit down? I'm sure you have
questions.”
"I do.” Somehow it came out more curtly than he had intended.
Reynard sighed and nodded slowly. He led the way deeper into the
living room and gestured at a chair. Wharton sank deeply into it, and it
seemed to gobble him up rather than give beneath him. Reynard sat next
to the fireplace and dug for cigarettes. He offered them wordlessly to
Wharton, and he shook his head.
He waited until Reynard lit his cigarette, then asked, "Just how did she
die? Your letter didn't say much.
Reynard blew out the match and threw it into the fireplace. It landed
on one of the ebony iron fire-dogs, a carven gargoyle that stared at
Wharton with toad's eyes.
"She fell," he said. "She was dusting in one of the other rooms, up
along the eaves. We were planning to paint, and she said it would have
to be well-dusted before we could begin. She had the ladder. It slipped.
Her neck was broken." There was a clicking sound in his throat as he
swallowed.
"She died – instantly?"
"Yes." He lowered his head and placed a hand against his brow. "I
was heartbroken.
The gargoyle leered at him, squat torso and flattened, sooty head. Its
mouth was twisted upward in a weird, gleeful grin, and its eyes seemed
turned inward at some private joke. Wharton looked away from it with
an effort.
"I want to see where it happened.”
Reynard stubbed out his cigarette half-smoked. "You can't.”
"I'm afraid I must," Wharton said coldly. "After all, she was my…”
"It's not that," Reynard said. "The room has been partitioned off. That
should have been done a long time ago.”
"If it's just a matter of prising a few boards off a door...”
"You don't understand. The room has been plastered off completely
There's nothing but a wall there.”
Wharton felt his gaze being pulled inexorably back to the fire-dog.
Damn the thing, what did it have to grin about?
"I can't help it. I want to see the room."
Reynard stood suddenly, towering over him. "Impossible."
Wharton also stood. "I'm beginning to wonder if you don't have
something to hide in there," he said quietly.
"Just what are you implying?"
Wharton shook his head a little dazedly. What was he implying? That
perhaps Anthony Reynard had murdered his Sister in this Revolutionary
War-vintage crypt? That there might be Something more sinister here
than shadowy corners and hideous iron fire-dogs?
"I don't know what I'm implying, " he said slowly, "except that Janine
was shoveled under in a hell of a hurry, and that you're acting damn
strange now."
For moment the anger blazed brighter, and then it died away, leaving
only hopelessness and dumb sorrow. "Leave me alone," he mumbled.
"Please leave me alone, Mr. Wharton."
"I can't. I've got to know..."
The aged housekeeper appeared, her face thrusting from the shadowy
cavern of the hall. "Supper's ready, Mr. Reynard."
"Thank you, Louise, but I'm not hungry. Perhaps Mr. Wharton...?"
Wharton shook his head.
"Very well, then. Perhaps we'll have a bite later."
"As you say, sir." She turned to go. "Louise?"
"Yes, sir?"
"Come here a moment.”
Louise shuffled slowly back into the room, her loose tongue slopping
wetly over her lips for a moment and then disappearing. "Sir?"
"Mr. Wharton seems to have some questions about his sister's death.
Would you tell him all you know about it?"
"Yes, sir." Her eyes glittered with alacrity. "She was dustin', she was.
Dustin' the East Room. Hot on paintin' it, she was. Mr. Reynard here, I
guess he wasn't much interested, because...”
"Just get to the point, Louise," Reynard said impatiently.
"No," Wharton said. "Why wasn't he much interested?"
Louise looked doubtfully from one to the other.
"Go ahead," Reynard said tiredly. "He'll find out in the village if he
doesn't up here.”
"Yes, sir." Again he saw the glitter, caught the greedy purse of the
loose flesh of her mouth as she prepared to impart the precious story.
"Mr. Reynard didn't like no one goin' in the East Room. Said it was
dangerous."
"Dangerous?"
"The floor," she said. "The floor's glass. It's a mirror. The whole
floor's a mirror. "
Wharton turned to Reynard, feeling dark blood suffuse his face. "You
mean to tell me you let her go up on a ladder in a room with a glass
floor?"
"The ladder had rubber grips," Reynard began. "That wasn't why...”
"You damned fool," Wharton whispered. "You damned, bloody fool.”
"I tell you that wasn't the reason!" Reynard shouted suddenly. "I loved
your sister! No one is sorrier than I that she is dead! But I warned her!
God knows I warned her about that floor!"
Wharton was dimly aware of Louise staring greedily at them, storing
up gossip like a squirrel stores up nuts. "Get her out of here," he said
thickly.
"Yes," Reynard said. "Go see to supper."
"Yes, sir." Louise moved reluctantly toward the hall, and the shadows
swallowed her.
"Now," Wharton said quietly. "It seems to me that you have some
explaining to do, Reynard. This whole thing sounds funny to me. Wasn't
there even an inquest?"
"No," Reynard said. He slumped back into his chair suddenly, and he
looked blindly into the darkness of the vaulted overhead ceiling. "They
know around here about the – East Room."
"And just what is there to know?" Wharton asked tightly
"The East Room is bad luck," Reynard said. "Some people might even
say it's cursed.”
"Now listen," Wharton said, his ill temper and unlaid grief building up
like steam in a teakettle, "I'm not going to be put off, Reynard. Every
word that comes out of your mouth makes me more determined to see
that room. Now are you going to agree to it or do I have to go down to
that village and ... ?"
"Please." Something in the quiet hopelessness of the word made
Wharton look up. Reynard looked directly into his eyes for the first time
and they were haunted, haggard eyes. "Please, Mr. Wharton. Take my
word that your sister died naturally and go away. I don't want to see you
die!" His voice rose to a wail. "I didn't want to see anybody die!"
Wharton felt a quiet chill steal over him. His gaze skipped from the
grinning fireplace gargoyle to the dusty, empty-eyed bust of Cicero in
the corner to the strange wainscoting carvings. And a voice came from
within him:
Go away from here
. A thousand living yet insentient eyes
seemed to stare at him from the darkness, and again the voice spoke...
"Go away from here."
Only this time it was Reynard.
"Go away from here," he repeated. "Your sister is beyond caring and
beyond revenge. I give you my word...”
"Damn your word!" Wharton said harshly. "I'm going down to the
sheriff, Reynard. And if the sheriff won't help me, I'll go to the county
commissioner. And if the county commissioner won't help me...”
"Very well." The words were like the faraway tolling of a churchyard
bell.
"Come."
Reynard led the way into the hall, down past the kitchen, the empty
dining room with the chandelier catching and reflecting the last light of
day, past the pantry, toward the blind plaster of the corridor's end.
This is it
, he thought, and suddenly there was a strange crawling in the
pit of his stomach.
"I..." he began involuntarily.
"What?" Reynard asked, hope glittering in his eyes.
"Nothing."
They stopped at the end of the hall, stopped in the twilight gloom.
There seemed to be no electric light. On the floor Wharton could see the
still-damp plasterer’s trowel Reynard had used to wall up the doorway,
and a straggling remnant of Poe’s “Black Cat” clanged through his
mind:
“I had walled the monster up within the tomb…”
Reynard handed the trowel to him blindly. "Do whatever you have to
do, Wharton. I won't be party to it. I wash my hands of it.”
Wharton watched him move off down the hall with misgivings, his
hand opening and closing on the handle of the trowel. The faces of the
Little-boy weathervane, the fire-dog gargoyle, the wizened housemaid
all seemed to mix and mingle before him, all grinning at something he
could not understand.
Go away from here...
With a sudden bitter curse he attacked the wall, hacking into the soft,
new plaster until the trowel scraped across the door of the East Room.
He dug away plaster until he could reach the doorknob. He twisted, then
yanked on it until the veins stood out in his temples .
The plaster cracked, schismed, and finally split. The door swung
ponderously open, shedding plaster like a dead skin.
Wharton stared into the shimmering quicksilver pool.
It seemed to glow with a light of its own in the darkness, ethereal and
fairy-like. Wharton stepped in, half-expecting to sink into warm, pliant
fluid.
But the floor was solid.
His own reflection hung suspended below him, attached only by the
feet, seeming to stand on its head in thin air. It made him dizzy just to
look at it.
Slowly his gaze shifted around the room. The ladder was still there,
stretching up into the glimmering depths of the mirror. The room was
high, he saw. High enough for a fall to he winced – to kill.
It was ringed with empty bookcases, all seeming to lean over him on
the very threshold of imbalance. They added to the room's strange,
distorting effect.
He went over to the ladder and stared down at the feet. They were
rubbershod, as Reynard had said, and seemed solid enough. But if the
ladder had not slid, how had Janine fallen?
Somehow he found himself staring through the floor again. No, he
corrected himself. Not through the floor. At the mirror; into the
mirror…
He wasn't standing on the floor at all he fancied. He was poised in thin
air halfway between the identical ceiling and floor, held up only by the
stupid idea that he was on the floor. That was silly, as anyone could see,
for there was the floor, way down there.. . .
Snap out of it!
he yelled at himself suddenly. He was on the floor, and
that was nothing but a harmless reflection of the ceiling.
It would only
be the floor if I was standing on my head, and I'm not; the other me is
the one standing on his head...
He began to feel vertigo, and a sudden lump of nausea rose in his
throat. He tried to look away from the glittering quicksilver depths of
the mirror, but he couldn't.
The door.. where was the door? He suddenly wanted out very badly.
Wharton turned around clumsily, but there were only crazily-tilted
bookcases and the jutting ladder and the horrible chasm beneath his feet.
"Reynard!" He screamed. "I'm falling! "
Reynard came running, the sickness already a gray lesion on his heart.
It was done; it had happened again.
He stopped at the door's threshold, Staring in at the Siamese twins
staring at each other in the middle of the two-roofed, no-floored room.
"Louise," he croaked around the dry ball of sickness in his throat.
"Bring the pole."
Louise came shuffling out of the darkness and handed the hook-ended
pole to Reynard. He slid it out across the shining quicksilver pond and
caught the body sprawled on the glass. He dragged it slowly toward the
door, and when he could reach it, he pulled it out. He stared down into
the contorted face and gently shut the staring eyes.
"I’ll want the plaster," he said quietly.
"Yes, sir."
She turned to go, and Reynard stared somberly into the room. Not for
the first time he wondered if there was really a mirror there at all. In the
room, a small pool of blood showed on the floor and ceiling, seeming to
meet in the center, blood which hung there quietly and one could wait
forever for it to drip.