Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions Page 8

  "Probably they misinterpreted something on his original manuscript map."

  "I suppose that must have been it."

  After they had set up the plane table and telescope-like alidade directly over the bench mark, Tom shouldered the rod, with its inset level and conspicuous markings.

  "I'll go up there and be rodman for you," he said. "I'd like you to shoot this yourself. Then they won't have any comeback when you walk into the office and blow them up for issuing such a map."

  "Okay," Ben answered, laughingly. "I'll look forward to doing that."

  Tom noticed the farmer coming toward them from the field ahead. He was relieved to see that the little girl was not with him. As they passed one another, the farmer winked triumphantly at him. "Found something worth coming back for, eh?" Tom did not answer. But the farmer's manner tickled his sense of humor, and he found himself feeling pretty good, all irritation gone, as he stepped along toward the hill.

  The farmer introduced himself to Ben by saying, "Found signs of a pretty big gusher, eh?" His pretense at being matter-of-fact was not convincing.

  "I don't know anything about it," Ben answered cheerfully. "He just roped me in to help him take a reading."

  The farmer cocked his big head and looked sideways at Ben. "My, you State fellows are pretty close-mouthed aren't you? Well, you needn't worry, because I know there's oil under here. Five years ago a fellow took a drilling lease on all my land at a dollar a year. But then he never showed up again. Course, I know what happened. The big companies bought him out. They know there's oil under here, but they won't drill. Want to keep the price of gasoline up."

  Ben made a noncommittal sound, and busied himself loading his pipe. Then he sighted through the alidade at Tom's back, for no particular reason. The farmer's gaze swung out in the same direction.

  "Well, that's a funny thing now, come to think of it," he said. "Right out where he's going, is where that other chap keeled over a couple of years ago."

  Ben's interest quickened. "A surveyor named Wolcraftson?"

  "Something like that. It happened right on top of that hill. They'd been fooling around here all day – something gone wrong with the instruments, the other chap said. Course I knew they'd found signs of oil and didn't want to let on. Along toward evening the old chap – Wolcraftson, like you said – took the pole out there himself – the other chap had done it twice before – and stood atop the hill. It was right then he keeled over. We run out there, but it was too late. Heart got him. He must of thrashed around a lot before he died, though, because he was all covered with dust."

  Ben grunted appreciatively. "Wasn't there some question about it afterward?"

  "Oh, our coroner made a fool of himself, as he generally does. But I stepped in and told exactly what happened, and that settled it. Say, mister, why don't you break down and tell me what you know about the oil under here?"

  Ben's protestations of total ignorance on the subject were cut short by the sudden appearance of a little tow-headed girl from the direction of the road. She had been running. She gasped. "Papa!" and grabbed the farmer's hand. Ben walked over toward the alidade. He could see the figure of Tom emerging from the tall weeds and starting up the hill. Then his attention was caught by what the girl was saying.

  "You've got to stop him, Papa!" She was dragging at her father's wrist. "You can't let him go down in the hole. They got it fixed to make him dead this time."

  "Shut your mouth, Sue!" the farmer shouted down at her, his voice more anxious than angry. "You'll get me into trouble with the School Board, the queer things you say. That man's just going out there to find out how high the hill is."

  "But, Papa, can't you see?" She twisted away and pointed at Tom's steadily mounting figure. "He's already started down in. They're set to trap him. Squattin' down there in the dark, all quiet so he won't hear their bones scrapin' together – stop him, Papa!"

  With an apprehensive look at Ben, the farmer got down on his knees beside the little girl and put his arms around her. "Look, Sue, you're a big girl now," he argued. "It don't do for you to talk that way. I know you're just playing, but other people don't know you so well. They might get to thinking things. You wouldn't want them to take you away from me, would you?"

  She was twisting from side to side in his arms trying to catch a glimpse of Tom over his shoulder. Suddenly, with an unexpected backward lunge, she jerked loose and ran off toward the hill. The farmer got to his feet and lumbered after her, calling, "Stop, Sue! Stop!"

  Crazy as a couple of hoot owls, Ben decided, watching them go. Both of them think there's something under the ground. One says oil, the other says ghosts. You pay your money and you take your choice.

  Then he noticed that during the excitement Tom had gotten to the top of the hill and had the rod up. He hurriedly sighted through the alidade, which was in the direction of the hilltop. For some reason he could not see anything through it – just blackness. He felt forward to make sure the lens cover was off. He swung it around a little, hoping something had not dropped out of place inside the tube. Then abruptly, through it, he caught sight of Tom, and involuntarily he uttered a short, frightened cry and jumped away.

  On the hilltop, Tom was no longer in sight. Ben stood still for a moment. Then he raced for the hill at top speed.

  He found the farmer looking around perplexedly near the far fence. "Come on," Ben gasped out, "there's trouble," and vaulted over.

  When they reached the hilltop, Ben stooped to the sprawling body, then recoiled with a convulsive movement and for a second time uttered a smothered cry. For every square inch of skin and clothes was smeared with a fine, dark-gray dust. And close beside one gray hand was a tiny white bone.

  Because a certain hideous vision still dominated his memory. Ben needed no one to tell him that it was a bone from a human finger. He buried his face in his hands, fighting that vision.

  For what he had seen, or thought he had seen, through the alidade, had been a tiny struggling figure of Tom, buried in darkness, with dim, skeletal figures clutching him all around and dragging him down into a thicker blackness.

  The farmer kneeled by the body. "Dead as dead," he muttered in a hushed voice. "Just like the other. He's got the stuff fairly rubbed into him. It's even in his mouth and nose. Like he'd been buried in ashes and then dug up."

  From between the rails of the fence, the little girl stared up at them, terrified, but avid.

  THE ENORMOUS BEDROOM

  HEAVEN HAS just one set of Pearly Gates, but Hell has a variety of entrances to suit its various guests. Some of the gates of Hell are jumping with red devils against a background of yellow flames, some are lined by languorous catlike women who look very seductive in their nakedness until they grow green or orange-and-black fur and unsheathe their dagger-claws, some have warders as emaciated and grim as the inmates of a Nazi death-camp – which they may very well have been in real life.

  But no one ever found a door to Hell quite so peculiar and deceptive as the one discovered by the late playboy and racing car driver Nicholas Teufler.

  It began with a tiny silver bell ringing inside his head, it felt. Very fast, very shrill, worse than a fire siren. And why did that particular comparison come into his mind, he wondered?

  Nevertheless he ordered the tinkling to fade away and for a wonder it did. Then he cautiously worked open his eyes, which felt glued by hangover.

  He was in a strange bedroom and it certainly wasn't a man's. That was not altogether unusual on mornings when he woke with bells ringing in his head – though never wedding bells as yet, by a stipend due stroke of good fortune for which Nicholas had never been properly grateful.

  But this time he wondered if his run of luck hadn't come to an end.

  He was looking at a vanity table cluttered with perfume bottles. He was sitting on the edge of a fully made-up bed topped with a fluffy-stuffed white satin coverlet dimpled with tiny gold buttons and he was wearing black pajamas with red piping. These details bothe
red him. They were ominous, in fact – the mingled aromas added up to lilies with the rotten-sweet under-scent of gardenias, while the white satin coverlet reminded him of the inside of a coffin. He shuddered. Nicholas had often said that marriage was a prison, but he hadn't had quite that tight a cell in mind. Well, this room seemed spacious enough at the moment, at any rate, to his still-blurry eyes.

  His left wrist felt hot and a little painful, as if he had tried to punch someone in the snoot last night and missed and scraped a door-post. He pulled back the sleeve of his pajamas and saw a gunmetal wristwatch with a red face and black numerals and with thin black hands pointing at eighteen minutes to four. He'd never seen it before in his life. It felt almost hot to the touch.

  As he started to unbuckle the black band, which felt like reptile hide, he blinked his eyes to clear them and looked at the wall behind the vanity.

  There was no wall. For a moment he thought that he had wandered into a department-store window display, but there were no peering faces of mothers and kiddies, or scornful teenagers, or anyone at all. Then he saw that there was no plate of glass and that the room simply went on and on, with clusters of furniture and soft lights here and there, as far as he could see.

  Maybe he was in a department-store furniture section. Where had last night's party ended. He remembered driving on a freeway ... and a lot of noise ... including sirens?

  He looked up. There was a ceiling at least. Not more than eight feet above his head, for he could touch it. A gray slick ceiling like the screen of a dead television set.

  Very slowly he turned around. In every direction the room stretched endlessly, furnished at about thirty-foot intervals with easy chairs, sofas, studio couches, beds -Hollywood beds, oval beds, round beds, contour beds, beds with canopies and curtains -and each lit by lamps that glowed in pastel shades of blue, violet, pink, topaz, green -every color imaginable except red. The lamps farthest away clustered and ran together like distant nebulas in a giant telescope.

  Overhead and underfoot, the slick gray ceiling and thick gray carpeting stretched off toward infinity. He felt like a bug in a crack. What if the crack should snap shut? What if the room did go on forever? What mightn't be hiding behind the furniture? For a moment he knew fear.

  He asked himself what kind of engineering could hold up a ceiling that stretched without visible support for ... miles? Even in Texas -

  Suddenly he noticed that he was no longer alone. Beside a long gray velvet sofa about ten yards away stood a girl in a low-cut red velvet evening sheath. A golden zipper ran down the front of her dress, glinting here and there in the rich scarlet. She was blonde, looked about twenty-one, and was smiling at him. It was a warm inviting smile, hinting at secrets – not the sort of smile you'd expect on even a perfectly built shop-window mannequin, though that had been his first thought on seeing her.

  But then she leaned forward to pick up something from a low table which held a rose-glowing lamp. Nicholas Teufler didn't see what the something was, for he was looking down the front of her dress at two firm ivory breasts with nipples like coral lipstick ends. She seemed to be offering them for his inspection on a red satin tray, the material lining her dress.

  He was moving toward her. His whole attitude toward his weird surroundings had brightened greatly. He and this wonder-girl would try out every piece of furniture in the place, he told himself enthusiastically. From sofa to couch to bed they would flit like butterflies – well, walk light-footedly at any rate. What did it matter if it took an eternity? And surely places that could materialize girls like this one could produce fresh-popped bottles of blonde champagne in golden ice-buckets with corded scarlet handles – it had to be, by the Law of Similars.

  He was close to her now. She straightened up and reached out a slim arm toward him. He saw what she'd picked up – a tiny silver bell with an ebony handle she held between scarlet-nailed finger and thumb. With her other hand she began slowly to draw down the tag of her golden zipper. He reached out a hand toward hers.

  The bell tinkled. At this frosty sound Nicholas felt a wave of dizziness. He exerted his will to banish the sound, as he had the first time, but it grew louder. Streaks of blackness swam in front of his eyes with narrowing streaks of crimson, girl, and gold. Then he was staggering and veering in darkness.

  When his vision cleared, he was looking across ten yards of gray carpeting at a girl in a black lace negligee sprawled like a cat on a bed with green sheets and high old-fashioned head and foot made of silvery rods screwed together by silvery knobs large and small into rectangles of unequal size in which silver ornaments hung. Her shining black hair was tousled and one hand propped her chin as she gazed at him with a sultry dreaminess. A green-shaded lamp beside the bed intensified the green of the sheets and her eyes. It was clear that she was wearing nothing but girl under the black negligee.

  Nevertheless it took Nicholas a moment to redirect his desires. He was angry with the girl in red for having thwarted him. Not "Ring Bell and Wait," but "Ring Bell and Vanish!" Most annoying. He would like to spank her.

  He was still standing near the rose-lit gray velvet sofa. A quick, stooping look around it, a quick scan around the everyway-endless-room – no sign of the blonde in red, no sign of anyone at all except the new dark-haired charmer.

  She was still watching him, her lips now fixed in an enigmatic catlike smile. Very well, thought Nicholas, if you're a cat, I'm a panther. No more of this vanish stuff. He strode toward her purposefully.

  He wondered, though it didn't slow him, why the green light made him think of corpses; the short silver bed-rods, of coffin handles; the musky perfume of dead meat.

  Still smiling, she rolled over quickly, her negligee falling open to show a perfect narrow black-haired triangle and the larger long one made by that and the coppery nipples of her firm breasts. At the same time she reached out a sun-tanned arm and, just as he dived at her wrist to stop her, flicked with a black fingernail one of the ornaments hanging in the squares – a tiny silver bell.

  He hit carpet rather than bed. The dizzying tingle died away as swiftly as the highest notes of a piano, yet in the interval Nicholas blacked out to find himself looking up from the floor at a barefoot platinum-haired girl in a gunmetal mink coat beside a black davenport and a small black table on which stood a half empty bottle of scotch and a silver lamp casting a blue glow. She was staring at him haughtily, but a little unsteadily, and as she swayed, shifting gleams of a pale dress or pale flesh winked at him from the half-clutched front of her smokily gleaming fur coat.

  Well, he thought, at least this one looks a little too drunk to play tricks with bells or anything like that. If only he could lay his hands on those other two tricksters, he'd ...! But he'd better concentrate on this one. A girl in the hand ... He warily got to his feet.

  The blue light made Nicholas think of midnight and of impulsive sweet young lushes too eager to take a walk – and too adventurous – to bother to dress. It also made him think of drowned people – though this girl looked drowned in nothing but scotch. While the gunmetal shade of the mink reminded him of his strange new steam-heated wrist watch. He glanced at the latter. The hands still stood at eighteen minutes to four. And this time he also noticed a hair-thin sweep second hand standing still against the red face. The damned thing wasn't even running.

  He started to rip it off, but at that instant there was a giggle. The mink coast had fallen open. It had hid flesh, not dress, all right – flesh formed in a torso like that of a slimmer Venus de Medici – and either her hair was naturally platinum or she was a completist. Her haughty lips had softened into a welcoming smile.

  He lunged toward her, noting with approval that the streamlined silver lamp had no trace of dangling ornaments. The girl leaned eagerly forward and nodded encouragingly – which shook the two silver bells which were her earrings and which her platinum hair had camouflaged.

  A blacked-out second later Nicholas was standing on black-morticed flagstones of black shale
. A dozen steps away there was the yellow dancing of a wood fire crackling gayly on ornate silver andirons. Its shimmering fumes and faint smoke were drawn up into a hood of silver jutting down from the slick gray ceiling like the mouth of a giant trumpet.

  He was still in the enormous bedroom, however. Everywhere else the gray carpeting with its clusters of furniture and lamps still stretched off toward infinity – a gray desert with furniture oases.

  On a polar-bear rug by the fire lay a cream-skinned freckled redhead in a white sharkskin bikini fastened with white bow knots on her left hip and under her right arm. She was eyeing him measuringly, challengingly.

  Nicholas accepted the challenge. He couldn't punish those three other teasers -not at the moment, at any rate – so he would wreak his wrath on this one. They all must be in cahoots, anyway.

  What was that old sign? – In Case of Fire, Walk, Do Not Run, Toward ... Well, he was afire right now, and the sign had it just backwards.

  He ran, rather than walked, toward the redhead.

  She snatched a silver poker from the set beside the fire, losing her bikini top in the act, drew the poker back in mock threat – and hit the andirons, from which silver bells hung.

  As Nicholas slid to a stop, sight blacked-out and skull tormented by tinkling, the floor under his bare feet turned from warm flagstones to something cold, wet, and squishy. Instantly he was thinking of mold and ooze and snakes and other crawlers – all the death-thoughts that had been haunting him from the dark side of his mind, while these infuriating girls tormented and obsessed the bright side.

  But then the tinkling in his ears was replaced by a curiously familiar roaring. His eyes cleared and he saw it was that of a shower cascading down fiercely from a nickel fixture in the ceiling toward a slotted nickel drain met below in a floor of hexagonal white tiles. The gray carpeting was wet for yards around from the splashing and he was standing on the edge of the wet area.