The Second Wish and Other Exhalations Read online

  Even now Joe was doing just those things: looking at and listening to the clock. He had switched on and adjusted the reading-lamp so that its light fell upon the face of the peculiar mechanism. At first sight of that clock-face Pasty had gone an even paler shade of grey, with all his nervousness of a few minutes earlier instantly returned. Crow sensed his perturbation; he had had similar feelings while working on the great clock, but he had also had the advantage of understanding where such fears originated. Pasty was experiencing the same sensations he himself had known when first he saw the clock in the auction rooms. Again he gazed at it as he had then; his eyes following the flow of the weird hieroglyphs carved about the dial and the odd movements of the four hands, movements coinciding with no chronological system of earthly origin; and for a moment there reigned an awful silence in the study of Titus Crow. Only the strange clock’s enigmatic and oddly paced ticking disturbed a quiet which otherwise might have been that of the tomb.

  “That’s no clock like any I’ve ever seen before!” exclaimed an awed Joe. “What do you make of that, Pasty?”

  Pasty gulped, his Adam’s apple visibly bobbing. “I … I don’t like it! It … it’s shaped like a damned coffin! And why has it four hands, and how come they move like that?” He stopped to compose himself a little, and with the cessation of his voice came a soft whispering from beyond the curtained windows. Pasty’s eyes widened and his face went white as death. “What’s that? His whisper was as soft as the sounds prompting it.

  “For God’s sake get a grip, will you?” Joe roared, shat­tering the quiet. He was completely oblivious to Pasty’s psychic abilities. “It’s rain, that’s what it is — what did you bleeding think it was, spooks? I don’t know what’s come over you, Pasty, damned if I do. You act as if the place was haunted or something.”

  “Oh, but it is!” Crow spoke up. “At least the garden is. A very unusual story, if you’d care to hear it.”

  “We don’t care to hear it,” Joe snarled. “And I warned you before — speak when you’re spoken to. Now, this … clock! Get it open, quick.”

  Crow had to hold himself to stop the ironic laughter he felt welling inside. “I can’t,” he answered, barely concealing a chuckle. “I don’t know how!”

  “You what?” Joe shouted incredulously. “You don’t know how? What the hell d’you mean?”

  “I mean what I say,” Crow answered. “So far as I know that clock’s not been opened for well over thirty years!”

  “Yes? S … so where does it p … plug in?” Pasty enquired, stuttering over the words.

  “Should it plug in?” Crow answered with his own ques­tion. Joe, however, saw just what Pasty was getting at; as, of course, had the ‘innocent’ Titus Crow.

  “Should it plug in, he asks!” Joe mimed sarcastically. He turned to Pasty. “Good point, Pasty boy — now,” he turned back to Crow, menacingly, “tell us something, recluse. If your little toy here isn’t electric, and if you can’t get it open — then just how do you wind it up?”

  “I don’t wind it up — I know nothing whatsoever of the mechanical principles governing it,” Crow answered. “You see that book there on the occasional table? Well, that’s Walmsley’s Notes on Deciphering Codes, Cryptograms and Ancient Inscriptions; I’ve been trying for years merely to understand the hieroglyphs on the dial, let alone open the thing. And several notable gentlemen students of matters concerning things not usually apparent or open to the man in the street have opinionated to the effect that yonder device is not a clock at all! I refer to Etienne-Laurent de Marigny, the occultist Ward Phillips of Rhode Island in America, and Professor Gordon Walmsley of Goole in Yorkshire; all of them believe it to be a space-time machine — believed in the case of the first two mentioned, both of those gentlemen now being dead — and I don’t know enough about it yet to decide whether or not I agree with them! There’s no money in it, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Well, I warned you, guv’,” Joe snarled, “space-time machine! — My God! — H. G. bloody Wells, he thinks he is! Pasty, tie him up and gag him. I’m sick of his bleeding claptrap. He’s got us nervous as a couple of cats, he has!”

  “I’ll say no more,” Crow quickly promised, “you carry on. If you can get it open I’ll be obliged to you; I’d like to know what’s inside myself.”

  “Come off it, guv’,” Joe grated, then: “OK, but one more word — you end up immobile, right?” Crow nodded his acquiescence and sat on the edge of his great desk to watch the performance. He really did not expect the thugs to do much more than make fools of themselves. He had not taken into account the possibility — the probability — of violence in the solution of the problem. Joe, as a child, had never had much time for the two-penny wire puzzles sold in the novelty shops. He tried them once or twice, to be sure, but if they would not go first time — well, you could usually make them go — with a hammer! As it happened such violence was not necessary.

  Pasty had backed up to the door. He was still slapping his cosh into his palm, but it was purely a reflex action now; a nervous reflex action. Crow got the impression that if Pasty dropped his cosh he would probably faint.

  “The panels, Pasty,” Joe ordered. “The panels in the clock.”

  “You do it,” Pasty answered rebelliously, “that’s no clock and I’m not touching it. There’s something wrong here.”

  Joe turned to him in exasperation. “Are you crazy or something? It’s a clock and nothing more! And this joker just doesn’t want us to see inside. Now what does that suggest to you?”

  “OK, OK — but you do it this time. I’ll stay out of the way and watch funnyman here. I’ve got a feeling about that thing, that’s all.” He moved over to stand near Crow who had not moved from his desk. Joe took his gun by the barrel and rapped gently on the panel below the dial of the clock at about waist height. The sound was sharp, solid. Joe turned and grinned at Titus Crow. There certainly seemed to be something in there. His grin rapidly faded when he saw Crow grinning back. He turned again to the object of his scrutiny and examined its sides, looking for hinges or other signs pointing to the thing being a hollow container of sorts. Crow could see from the crook’s puzzled expression that he was immediately at a loss. He could have told Joe before he began that there was not even evidence of jointing; it was as if the body of the instrument was carved from a solid block of timber — timber as hard as iron.

  But Crow had underestimated the determined thug. Whatever Joe’s shortcomings as a human being, as a safe-cracker he knew no peer. Not that de Marigny’s clock was in any way a safe, but apparently the same principles applied! For as Joe’s hands moved expertly up the sides of the panelling there came a loud click and the mad ticking of the instrument’s mechanism went totally out of kilter. The four hands on the carven dial stood still for an instant of time before commencing fresh movements in alien and completely inexplicable sequences. Joe stood nimbly back as the large panel swung silently open. He stepped just a few inches too far back, jolting the occasional table. The reading-lamp went over with a crash, momentarily breaking the spell of the wildly oscillating hands and crazy ticking of de Marigny’s clock. The corner was once more thrown in shadow and for a moment Joe stood there un­decided, put off stroke by his early success. Then he gave a grunt of triumph, stepped forward and thrust his empty left hand into the darkness behind the open panel.

  Pasty sensed the outsideness at the same time as Crow. He leapt across the room shouting: “Joe, Joe — for God’s sake, leave it alone … leave it alone!” Crow, on the other hand, spurred by no such sense of comradeship, quickly stood up and backed away. It was not that he was in any way a coward, but he knew something of Earth’s darker mysteries — and of the mysteries of other spheres — and besides, he sensed the danger of interfering with an action having origin far from the known side of nature.

  Suddenly the corner was dimly illumined by an eerie, dappled light from the open panel; and Joe, his arm still groping beyond that door, gave a yel
l of utter terror and tried to pull back. The ticking was now insanely aberrant, and the wild sweeps of the four hands about the dial were completely confused and without order. Joe had braced himself against the frame of the opening, fighting some unseen menace within the strangely lit compartment, trying desperately to withdraw his arm. Against all his effort his left shoulder abruptly jammed forward, into the swirl­ing light, and at the same moment he stuck the barrel of his gun into the opening and fired six shots in rapid succession.

  By this time Pasty had an arm round Joe’s waist, one foot braced against the base of the clock, putting all his strength into an attempt to haul his companion away from whatever threatened in the swirling light of the now fearsome opening. He was fighting a losing battle. Joe was speechless with terror, all his energies concentrated on escape from the clock; great veins stuck out from his neck and his eyes seemed likely at any moment to pop from his head. He gave one bubbling scream as his head and neck jerked suddenly forward into the maw of the mechanical horror … and then his body went limp.

  Pasty, still wildly struggling with Joe’s lower body, gave a last titanic heave at that now motionless torso and actually managed to retrieve for a moment Joe’s head from the weirdly lit door.

  Simultaneously Pasty and Titus Crow saw something — something that turned Pasty’s muscles to water, causing him to relax his struggle so that Joe’s entire body bar the legs vanished with a horrible hisss into the clock — something that caused Crow to throw up his hands before his eyes in the utmost horror!

  In the brief second or so that Pasty’s efforts had partly freed the sagging form of his companion in crime, the fruits of Joe’s impulsiveness had made themselves hideously apparent. The cloth of his jacket near the left shoulder and that same area of the shirt immediately beneath had been removed, seemingly dissolved or burnt away by some unknown agent; and in place of the flesh which should by all rights have been laid bare by this mysterious vanishment, there had been a great blistered, bubbling blotch of crimson and brown — and the neck and head had been in the same sickening state!

  Surprisingly, Pasty recovered first from the shock. He made one last desperate, fatal, grab at Joe’s disappearing legs — and the fingers of his right hand crossed the threshold of the opening into the throbbing light beyond. Being in a crouching position and considerably thinner than his now completely vanished friend, Pasty did not stand a chance. Simultaneous with Crow’s cry of horror and warning com­bined, he gave a sobbing shriek and seemed simply to dive headlong into the leering entrance.

  Had there been an observer what happened next might have seemed something of an anticlimax. Titus Crow, as if in response to some agony beyond enduring, clapped his hands to his head and fell writhing to the floor. There he stayed, legs threshing wildly for some three seconds, before his body relaxed as the terror of his experience drove his mind to seek refuge in oblivion.

  Shortly thereafter, of its own accord, the panel in the clock swung smoothly back into place and clicked shut; the four hands steadied to their previous, not quite so deranged motions, and the ticking of the hidden mechanism slowed and altered its rhythm from the monstrous to the merely abnormal …

  Titus Crow’s first reaction on waking was to believe himself the victim of a particularly horrible nightmare; but then he felt the carpet against his cheek and, opening his eyes, saw the scattered books littering the floor. Shakily he made himself a large jug of coffee and poured himself a huge brandy, then sat, alternately sipping at both until there was none of either left. And when both the jug and the glass were empty he started all over again.

  It goes without saying that Crow went nowhere near de Marigny’s clock! For the moment, at least, his thirst for knowledge in that direction was slaked.

  As far as possible he also kept from thinking back on the horrors of the previous night; particularly he wished to forget the hellish, psychic impression received as Pasty went into the clock. For it appeared that de Marigny, Phillips and Walmsley had been right! The clock was, in fact, a space-time machine of sorts. Crow did not know exactly what had caused the hideous shock to his highly developed psychic sense; but in fact, even as he had felt that shock and clapped his hands to his head, somewhere out in the worlds of Aldebaran, at a junction of forces neither spatial, temporal, nor of any intermediate dimension recognized by man except in the wildest theories, the Lake of Hali sent up a few streamers of froth and fell quickly back into silence.

  And Titus Crow was left with only the memory of the feel of unknown acids burning, of the wash of strange tides outside nature, and of the rushing and tearing of great beasts designed in a fashion beyond man’s wildest conjecturing …

  The Luststone

  The Luststone is a meeting of ancient and modern horrors — or at least, that’s the theme. The story was written in five weeks in 1981, and if you think that’s a long time to write a short story, or even a long one, perhaps I had better explain that in its original form it was a novel of 60,000 words! And it was pornographic. I just wanted to see if I could do it — and did it so well that I submitted it only once and scrapped it! I didn’t want my name associated with it. But I did keep parts of it, which I believed might be cannibalized later.

  Seven or eight years went by; Weird Tales magazine asked me if I had any new stories; it was my opportunity to do something with The Luststone. By then enough time had passed that I could see a new direction for the story and was able to turn a minus into a plus.

  I find The Luststone very visual. It’s funny, but of all the stories and novels I’ve written, this one is probably the most filmable. And if they gave it an ‘adults only’ rating it wouldn’t any longer be for the sex …

  One

  The ice was only a memory now, a racial memory whose legends had come down the years, whose evidence was graven in the land in hollow glacial tracts. Of the latter: time would weather the valley eventually, soften its con­tours however slowly. But the memories would stay, and each winter the snows would replenish them.

  That was why the men of the tribes would paint them­selves yellow in imitation of the sun god, and stretch themselves in a line across the land east to west and facing north, and beat back the snow and ice with their clubs. And frighten it back with their screams and their leaping. With their magic they defeated winter and conjured spring, sum­mer, and autumn, and thus were the seasons perpetuated.

  The tribes, too, were perpetuated; each spring the tribal wizards — the witch-doctors — would perform those fertility rites deemed necessary to life, by means of which the grass was made to grow, the beasts to mate, and Man the weapon-maker to increase and prosper upon the face of the earth. It was the time of the sabretooth and the mammoth, and it was the springtime of Man, the thinking animal whose destiny is the stars. And even in those far dim primal times there were visionaries.

  Chylos of the mighty Southern Tribe was one such: Chylos the Chief, the great wizard and seer whose word was law in the mid-South. And in that spring some ten thousand years ago, Chylos lay on his bed in the grandest cave of all the caves of the Southern Tribe, and dreamed his dream.

  He dreamed of invaders!

  Of men not greatly unlike the men of the tribes, but fiercer by far and with huge appetites for ale, war, and women. Aye, and there were gross-bearded ones, too, whose dragon-prowed ships were as snakes of the sea, whose horned helmets and savage cries gave them the appearance of demons! But Chylos knew that he dreamed only of the far future and so was not made greatly fearful.

  And he dreamed that in that distant future there were others who came from the east with fire and thunder, and in his dreams Chylos heard the agonized screams of the descendants of his tribe, men, women, and children; and saw visions of black war, red rape, and rivers of crimson blood. A complex dream it was, and alien these invaders: with long knives and axes which were not of stone, and again wearing horned helmets upon their heads to make them more fearsome yet. From the sea they came, building mounds and forts where th
ey garrisoned their soldiers behind great earthworks.

  And some of them carried strange banners, covered with unknown runes and wore kilts of leather and rode in horse-drawn chairs with flashing spokes in their wheels; and their armies were disciplined thousands, moving and fighting with one mind …

  Such were Chylos’s dreams, which brought him start­ing awake; and so often had he dreamed them that he knew they must be more than mere nightmares. Until one morning, rising from his bed of hides, he saw that it was spring again and knew what must be done. Such visions as he had dreamed must come to pass, he felt it in his old bones, but not for many years. Not for years beyond his numbering. Very well: the gods themselves had sent Chylos their warning, and now he must act. For he was old and the earth would claim him long before the first invaders came, and so he must unite the tribes now and bring them together. And they must grow strong and their men become great warriors.

  And there must be that which would remain long after Chylos himself was gone: a reminder, a monument, a Power to fuel the loins of the men and make the tribes strong. A driving force to make his people lusty, to ensure their survival. There must be children — many children! And their children in their turn must number thousands, and theirs must number … such a number as Chylos could not envisage. Then when the invaders came the tribes would be ready, unconquerable, indestructible.