The Best of Margaret St. Clair

HORRER HOWCE

Dickson-Hawes’s face had turned a delicate pea-green. He closed the shutter on the opening very quickly indeed. Nonetheless, he said in nearly his usual voice, “I’m afraid it’s a trifle literary, Freeman. Reminds of that thing of Yeats’s—‘What monstrous beast, Its time come, uh, round again, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?’ But the people who go to a horror house for amusement aren’t literary, it wouldn’t affect them the way it did me.” He giggled nervously.

No answering emotion disturbed the normal sullenness of Freeman’s face. “I thought there was a nice feel to it,” he said obstinately. “I wouldn’t have put so much time in on this stuff unless I thought you’d be interested. Research is more my line. I could have made a lot more money working on one of the government projects.”

“You didn’t have much choice, did you?” Dickson-Hawes said pleasantly. ‘A political past is such a handicap, unless one’s willing to risk prosecution for perjury.”

“I’m as loyal as anybody! For the last five years—eight, ten—all I’ve wanted to do was make a little cash. The trouble is, I always have such rotten luck.”

“Um.” Dickson Hawes wiped his forehead unobtrusively. “Well, about your little effort. There are some nice touches, certainly. The idea of the monstrous womb, alone on the seashore, slowly swelling, and…” In the folds of his handkerchief he stifled a sort of cough. “No, I’m afraid it’s too poetic. I can’t use it, old chap.”

The two men moved away from the shuttered opening. Freeman said, “Then Spring Scene is the only one you’re taking?”

“Of those of yours I’ve seen. It’s horrid enough, but not too horrid. Haven’t you anything else?” Dickson-Hawes’s voice was eager, but eagerness seemed to be mixed with other things—reluctance, perhaps, and the fear of being afraid.

Freeman fingered his lower lip. “There’s the Well,” he said after a moment. “It needs a little more work done on it, but—I guess you could look at it.”

“I’d be delighted to,” Dickson Hawes agreed heartily. “I do hope you understand, old man, that there’s quite a lot of money involved in this.”

“Yeah. You’ve really got the capital lined up? Twice before, you were sure you had big money interested. But the deals always fell through. I got pretty tired of it.”

“This time it’s different. The money’s already in escrow, not to mention what I’m putting in myself. We intend a coast-to-coast network of horror houses in every gayway, playland, and amusement park.”

“Yeah. Well, come along.”

They went down the corridor to another door. Freeman unlocked it. “By the way,” he said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your voice down. Some of the machinery in this stuffs—delicate. Sensitive.”

“By all means. Of course.”

They entered. To their right was an old brick house, not quite in ruins. To the left, a clump of blackish trees cut off the sky. Just in front of them was the moss-covered coping of an old stone well. The ground around the well was slick with moisture.

Dickson-Hawes sniffed appreciatively. “I must say you’ve paid wonderful attention to detail. It’s exactly like being out of doors. It even smells froggy and damp.”

“Thanks,” Freeman replied with a small, dour smile.

“What happens next?”

“Look down in the well.”

Rather gingerly, Dickson-Hawes approached. He leaned over. From the well came a gurgling splash.

Dickson-Hawes drew back abruptly. Now his face was not quite greenish; it was white. “My word, what a monster!” he gasped. “What is it, anyway?”

“Clockwork,” Freeman answered. “It’ll writhe for thirty-six hours on one winding. I couldn’t use batteries, you know, on account of the water. That greenish flash in the eyes comes from prisms. And the hair is the same thing you get on those expensive fur coats, only longer. I think they call it plastimink.”

“What happens if I keep leaning over? Or if I drop pebbles down on it?”

“It’ll come out at you.”

Dickson-Hawes looked disappointed. “Anything else?”

“The sky gets darker and noises come out of the house. Isn’t that enough?”

Dickson-Hawes coughed. “Well, of course we’d have to soup it up a bit. Put an electrified rail around the well coping and perhaps make the approach to the well slippery so the customers would have to grasp the handrail. Install a couple of air jets to blow the girls’ dress up. And naturally make it a good deal darker so couples can neck when the girl gets scared. But it’s a nice little effort, Freeman, very nice indeed. I’m almost certain we can use it. Yes, we ought to have your Well in our horror house.”

Dickson-Hawes’s voice had rung out strongly on the last few words. Now there came another watery splash from the well. Freeman seemed disturbed.

“I told you to keep your voice down,” he complained. “The partitions are thin. When you talk that loud, you can be heard all over the place. It isn’t good for the—machinery.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t let it happen again… I don’t think the customers ought to neck in here. This isn’t the place for it. If they’ve got to neck, let them do it outside. In the corridor.”

“You have no idea, old chap, what people will do in a darkened corridor in a horror house. It seems to stimulate them. But you may be right. Letting them stay here to neck might spoil the illusion. We’ll try to get them on out.”

“Okay. How much are you paying me for this?”

“Our lawyer will have to discuss the details,” said Dickson-Hawes. He gave Freeman a smile reeking with synthetic charm. “I assure you he can draw up a satisfactory contract. I can’t be more definite until I know what the copyright or patent situation would be.”

“I don’t think my Well could be patented,” Freeman said. “There are details in the machinery nobody understands but me. I’d have to install each unit in your horror-house network myself. There ought to be a clause in the contract about my per diem expenses and a traveling allowance.”

“I’m sure we can work out something mutually satisfactory.’

“Uh… let’s get out of here. This is an awfully damp place to do much talking in.’

They went out into the hall again. Freeman locked the door. “Have you anything else?” Dickson-Hawes asked.

Freeman’s eyes moved away. “No.”

“Oh, come now, old chap. Don’t be coy. As I told you before, there’s money involved.”

“What sort of thing do you want?”

“Well, horrid. Though not quite so poetically horrid as what you have behind the shutter. That’s a little too much. Perhaps something with a trifle more action. With more customer participation. Both the Well and Spring Scene are on the static side.”

“Uh.”

They walked along the corridor. Freeman said slowly, “I’ve been working on something. There’s action and customer participation in it, all right, but I don’t know. It’s full of bugs. I just haven’t had time to work it out yet.”

“Let’s have it, old man, by all means!”

“Not so loud! You’ve got to keep your voice down. Otherwise I can’t take you in.” Freeman himself was speaking almost in a whisper. “All right. Here.”

They had stopped before a much more substantial door than the one behind which the Well lay. There was a wide rubber flange all around it, and it was secured at top and bottom by two padlocked hasps. In the top of the door, three or four small holes had been bored, apparently to admit air.

“You must have something pretty hot locked up behind all that,” Dickson-Hawes remarked.

“Yeah.” Freeman got a key ring out of his pocket and began looking over it. Dickson-Hawes glanced around appraisingly.

“Somebody’s been writing on your wall,” he observed. “Rotten speller, I must say.”

Freeman raised his eyes from the key ring and looked in the direction the other man indicated. On the wall opposite the door, just under the ceiling, somebody had written horrer howce in what looked like blackish ink.

The effect of the ill-spelled words on Freeman was remarkable. He dropped the key ring with a clatter, and when he straightened from picking it up, his hands were quivering.

“I’ve changed my mind,” he said. He put the key ring back in his pocket. “I always did have the damnedest luck.”

Dickson-Hawes leaned back against the wall and crossed his ankles. “How do you get your ideas, Freeman?”

“Oh, all sorts of ways. Things I read, things people tell me, things I see. All sorts of ways.” Both men were speaking in low tones.

“They’re amazing. And your mechanical effects—I really don’t see how you get machinery to do the things you make it do.”

Freeman smiled meagerly. “I’ve always been good at mechanics. Particularly radio and signaling devices. Relays. Communication problems, you might say. I can communicate with anything. Started when I was a kid.”

There was silence. Dickson-Hawes kept leaning against the wall. A close observer, Freeman noticed almost a tic, a fluttering of his left eyelid.

At last Freeman said, “How much are you paying for the Well?”

Dickson-Hawes closed his eyes and opened them again. He may have been reflecting that while a verbal contract is quite as binding as a written one, it is difficult to prove the existence of a verbal contract to which there are no witnesses.

He answered, “Five thousand in a lump sum, I think, and a prorated share of the net admissions for the first three years.”

There was an even longer silence. Freeman’s face relaxed at the mention of a definite sum. He said, “How are your nerves? I need money so damned bad.”

Dickson-Hawes’s face went so blank that it would seem the other man had touched a vulnerable spot. “Pretty good, I imagine,” he said in a carefully modulated voice. “I saw a good deal of action during the war.”

Cupidity and some other emotion contended in Freeman’s eyes. He fished out the key ring again. “Look, you must not make a noise. No yelling or anything like that, no matter what you see. They’re very—I mean the machinery’s delicate. It’s full of bugs I haven’t got rid of yet. The whole thing will be a lot less ghastly later on. I’m going to keep the basic idea, make it just as exciting as it is now, but tone it down plenty.”

“I understand.”

Freeman looked at him with a frown. Don’t make a noise,” he cautioned again. “Remember, none of this is real.” He fitted the key into the first of the padlocks on the stoutly built door.

The second padlock was a little stiff. Freeman had to fidget with it. Finally he got the door open. The two men stepped through it. They were outside.

There is no other way of expressing it: They were outside. If the illusion had been good in the Well, here it was perfect. They stood in a sort of safety island on the edge of a broad freeway, where traffic poured by in an unending rush eight lanes wide. It was the time of day when, though visibility is really better than at noon, a nervous motorist or two has turned on his parking lights. Besides the two men, the safety island held a new, shiny, egg plant-colored sedan.

Dickson-Hawes turned a bewildered face on his companion. “Freeman,” he said in a whisper, “did you make all this?”

For the first time, Freeman grinned. “Pretty good, isn’t it?” he replied, also in a whisper. He opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat. “Get in. We’re going for a ride. Remember, no noise.”

The other man obeyed. Freeman started the car—it had a very quiet motor—and watched until a lull in the traffic gave him a chance to swing out from the curb. He stepped on the accelerator. The landscape began to move by.

Cars passed them. They passed some cars. Dickson-Hawes looked for the speedometer on the dashboard and couldn’t find it. A garage, service station, a billboard went by. The sign on the garage read : WE FIX FLATTEDS. The service station had conical pumps. The tomatoes on the billboard were purple and green.

Dickson-Hawes was breathing shallowly. He said, “Freeman—where are we?”

Once more, the other man grinned. “You’re getting just the effect I mean to give,” he retorted in a pleased whisper. “At first, the customer thinks he’s on an ordinary freeway, with ordinary people hurrying home to their dinners. Then he begins to notice all sorts of subtle differences. Everything’s a little off-key. It adds to the uneasiness.”

“Yes, but— what’s the object of all this? What are we trying to do?”

“Get home to our dinners, like everyone else.”

“Where does the—well, difficulty come in?”

“Do you see that car in the outer lane?” They were still conversing in whispers. “Black, bullet shaped, quite small, going very fast?”

“Yes.”

“Keep your eye on it.”

The black car was going very fast. It caught up with a blue sedan in front of it, cut in on it and began to crowd it over to the curb. The blue sedan tried to shake off the black car, but without success. If the driver didn’t want to be wrecked, he had to get over.

For a while, the two cars ran parallel. The black car began to slow down and crowd more aggressively than ever. Suddenly it cut obliquely in front of the sedan and stopped.

There was a frenzied scream of brakes from the sedan. It stopped with its left fender almost against the black bullet-shaped car. The bodies were so close, there was no room for the sedan driver to open his door.

Freeman had let the car he was driving slow down, presumably so Dickson-Hawes could see everything.

For a moment there was nothing to see. Only for a moment. Then two—or was it three?—long,, blackish, extremely thin arms came out from the black car and fumbled with the glass in the window of the sedan. The glass was forced down. The arms entered the sedan.

From the sedan there came a wild burst of shrieking. It was like the flopping, horrified squawks of a chicken at the chopping block. The shrieks were still going on when the very thin arms came out with a—The light hid nothing. The three very thin arms came out with a plucked-off human arm.

They threw it into the interior of the black car. The three arms invaded the sedan once more.

This time, Dickson Hawes had turned neither white nor greenish, but a blotchy gray. His mouth had come open all around his teeth, in the shape of a rigid oblong with raised, corded edges. It was perfectly plain that if he was not screaming, it was solely because his throat was too paralyzed.

Freeman gave his passenger only a momentary glance. He was looking into the rear-view mirror. He began to frown anxiously.

The shrieking from the blue sedan had stopped. Dickson-Hawes covered his face with his hands while Freeman drove past it and the other car. When the group lay behind them, he asked in a shaking whisper, “Freeman, are there any more of them? The black cars, I mean?”

“Yeah. One of them’s coming toward us now.”

Dickson-Hawes’s head swiveled around. Another of the black cars was hurtling toward them through the traffic, though it was still a long way behind.

Dickson-Hawes licked his lips.

“Is it— after us?”

“I think so.”

“But why? Why—us?”

“Part of the game. Wouldn’t be horrid otherwise. Hold on. I’m going to try to shake it off.”

Freeman stepped down on the accelerator. The eggplant-colored sedan shot ahead. It was a very fast car and Freeman was evidently an expert and nerveless driver. They slid through nonexistent holes in the traffic, glanced off from fenders, slipped crazily from lane to lane, a shuttle in a pattern of speed and escape.

The black car gained on them. No gymnastics. A bulletlike directness. But it was nearer all the time.

Dickson-Hawes gave a sort of whimper.

“No noise,” Freeman cautioned in a fierce whisper. “That’ll bring them down for sure. Now!”

He pressed the accelerator all the way down. The eggplant-colored car bounced and swayed. There was a tinkle of glass from the headlights of the car on the left as the sedan brushed it glancingly. Dickson-Hawes moaned, but realized they had gained the length of several cars. Momentarily, the black pursuer fell behind.

They went through two red lights in a row. So did the black bullet. It began to edge in on them. Closer and closer. Faster and faster.

Dickson-Hawes had slumped forward with his head on his chest. The black car cut toward them immediately.

Freeman snarled. Deliberately, he swung out into the path of the pursuer. For a second, it gave ground.

“Bastards,” Freeman said grimly.

The black car cut in on them like the lash of a whip. The sedan slithered. Hubcaps grated on concrete. The sedan swayed drunkenly. Brakes howled. Dickson-Hawes, opening his eyes involuntarily for the crash, saw that they were in a safety island. The same safety island, surely, from which they had started out?

The black car went streaking on by.

“I hate those things,” Freeman said bitterly. “Damned Voom. If I could—But never mind. We got away. We’re safe. We’re home.”

Dickson-Hawes did not move. “I said we’re safe,” Freeman repeated. He opened the car door and pushed the other man out through it. Half shoving, half carrying, he led him to the door from which they had entered the freeway. It was still the time of day at which nervous motorists turn on their parking lights.

Freeman maneuvered Dickson-Hawes through the door. He closed it behind them and fastened the padlocks in the hasps. They were out in the corridor again—the corridor on whose wall somebody had written horrer howce.

Freeman drew a deep breath. “Well. Worked better than I thought it would. I was afraid you’d yell. I thought you were the type that yells. But I guess the third time’s the charm.”

“What?”

“I mean I guess my goddamn luck has turned at last. Yeah. What did you think of it?”

Dickson-Hawes swallowed, unable to answer.

Freeman regarded him. “Come along to my office and have a drink. You look like you need one. And then you can tell me what you think of this setup.”

The office was in the front of the house, down a couple of steps. Dickson-Hawes sank into the chair Freeman pulled out for him. He gulped down Freeman’s dubious reddish bourbon gratefully.

After the second drink he was restored enough to ask, “Freeman, was it real?”

“Certainly not,” the other man said promptly.

“It looked awfully real,” Dickson-Hawes objected. “That arm…” He shuddered.

“A dummy,” Freeman answered promptly once more. “You didn’t see any blood, did you? Of course not. It was a dummy arm.”

“I hope so. I don’t see how you could have made all the stuff we saw. There’s a limit to what machinery can do. I’d like another drink.”

Freeman poured. “What did you think of it?”

Color was coming back to Dickson-Hawes’s cheeks. “It was the most horrible experience I ever had in my life.”

Freeman grinned. “Good. People like to be frightened. That’s why roller-coaster rides are so popular.”

“Not that much, people don’t. Nobody would enjoy a roller-coaster ride if he saw cars crashing all around him and people get ting killed. You’ll have to tone it down a lot. An awful lot.”

“But you liked it?”

“On the whole, yes. It’s a unique idea. But you’ll have to tone it down about 75 cercent.”

Freeman grimaced. “It can be done. But I’ll have to have a definite commitment from you before I undertake such extensive changes.”

“Um.”

“There are other places I could sell it, you know,” Freeman said pugnaciously. “Jenkins of Amalgamated might be interested. Or Silberstein.”

“Jenkins lit out with about six thousand of Amalgamated’s dollars a couple of months ago. Nobody’s seen him since. And they found Silberstein wandering on the streets last week in a sort of fit. Didn’t you know? He’s in a mental home. You won’t be selling either of them much of anything.”

Freeman sighed, but made no attempt to dispute these distressing facts. “I’ll have to have a definite commitment from you before I make that many major changes,” he repeated stubbornly.

“Well…” Fright and whiskey may have made Dickson-Hawes a little less cautious than usual. “We could pay you fifty a week for a couple of months while you worked on it, as advance against royalties. If we didn’t like the final results, you wouldn’t have to give back the advance.”

“It’s robbery. Apprentice mechanics earn more than that. Make it sixty-five.”

“I hate haggling. Tell you what. We’ll make it sixty.”

Freeman shrugged tiredly. “Let’s get it down in black and white. I’ll just draw up a brief statement of the terms and you can sign it.”

“Well, okay.”

Freeman stooped and began to rummage in a desk drawer. Once he halted and seemed to listen. He opened another drawer. “Thought I had some paper… Yeah, here it is.” He turned on the desk light and began to write.

Dickson-Hawes leaned back in his chair and sipped at Freeman’s whiskey. He crossed his legs and recrossed them. He was humming “Lili Marlene” loudly and off pitch. His head rested against the wall.

Freeman’s pen moved across the paper. “That’s about it,” he said at last. He was smiling. “Yeah. I—”

There was a splintering crash, the sound of lath and plaster breaking. Freeman looked up from the unsigned agreement to see the last of his entrepreneurs—the last, the indubitable last—being borne off in the long black arms of Voom.

It was the first time they had gone through the partitions in search of a victim, but the partitions were thin and the unsuccessful chase on the highway had excited them more than Freeman had realized. There has to be a first time for any entity, even for Voom.

Ten full minutes passed. Dickson-Hawes’s shrieks died away. The third episode had ended just as disastrously as the earlier two. There wasn’t another entrepreneur in the entire U.S.A. from whom Freeman could hope to realize a cent for the contents of his horror house. He was sunk, finished, washed up.

Freeman remained sitting at his desk, motionless. All his resentment at the bad luck life had saddled him with—loyalty oaths, big deals that fell through, chiselers like Dickson-Hawes, types that yelled when the Voom were after them—had coalesced into an immobilizing rage.

At last he drew a quavering sigh. He went over to the bookcase, took out a book, looked up something. He took out a second book, a third.

He nodded. A gleam of blind, intoxicated vindictiveness had come into his eyes. Just a few minor circuit changes, that was all. He knew the other, more powerful entities were there. It was only a question of changing his signaling devices to get in touch with them.

Freeman put the book back on the shelf. He hesitated. Then he started toward the door. He’d get busy on the circuit changes right away. And while he was making them, he’d be running over plans for the horror house he was going to use the new entities to help him build.

It would be dangerous. So what? Expensive… he’d get the money somewhere. But he’d fix them. He’d build a horror house for the beasts that would make them sorry they’d ever existed—A Horrer Howce for the Voom.