Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions Read online

  A pink ghost was in the shower. Emerging, it became a curvy strawberry blonde who instantly snatched from the standing rack and clutched around her a brown bath towel. Orange light from heat lamps set in the ceiling did charming things to her skin. She looked at Nicholas with an expression of intense but not unhappy and very special surprise – the sort of look a woman seldom wastes on husbands and wandering electricians, but reserves for handsome secret agents on the prowl and – at a pinch – racing car drivers. Then came the familiar inviting smile.

  But Nicholas had become extremely suspicious of inviting smiles. He wondered why none of these frustrating girls ever spoke to him – or he to them for that matter. Because they'd all been expecting him?

  He didn't make a move. He felt very much four times bitten, five times shy. He also began to wonder if he'd just missed touching not four, but, say, four hundred girls – and consciously, but not subconsciously, forgotten the rest. He felt that frustrated and, looking back, there'd been a silver bell dinning in his ears when he first woke sitting on the white satin coverlet.

  What the Devil was behind these peculiar frustrations? – he asked himself, deliberately keeping his attention off the strawberry blonde with the towel. He'd offended some girls in his life, hurt the feelings of others, perhaps even slightly cracked a heart or two – but surely these things didn't amount to enough to get a whole team of girls plotting to drive him mad. Besides, practical jokers didn't build rooms the area of cities – not even if they had the bankrolls of international financiers or last-century kings. A dream? – but he'd never had a dream with one-hundredth the Technicolor, definition, and sound-fidelity. Had his psychiatrist been feeding him LSD or mescalin? That seemed a better bet, but he hadn't seen Dr. Obermann for more than a year, if he could trust his memory. Besides, Dr. Obermann was -

  He didn't complete that thought. Once again, sudden rage had filled him. Some day, he told himself, he would catch these devilish girls, preferably all five together, and then ...

  With an effort he made himself think rationally again. How the Hell long would these peculiar and painful frustrations go on? Gazing around the enormous bedroom with its Milky Way of distant lamps, he seemed to glimpse the faint spectral forms of innumerable girls – blondes, brunettes, redheads, oddballs with blue and greenish locks, girls in sables and girls in shirts, girls stepping out of skirts or unbuttoning blouses or pulling sweaters over their heads, girls cross-legged on rumpled beds, sprawled on overstuffed furniture, straddling wire-backed with their forearms resting on the topmost loop of wire – there was no numbering the variety of their poses and stages of undress. Was he doomed to be frustrated by all of them? Until girls meant no more to him than grasshoppers? A voyeur's paradise – but Nicholas was discovering that unrelieved voyeurism can become more tiring than making love.

  The ghost girls dimmed and faded entirely – if they had ever been anything more than imagination – leaving the infinite gray surround bare except for the strawberry blonde in front of the shower.

  Nicholas tried furiously to resist – these frustrations were enragingly humiliating -but her smile became super-inviting, she kept almost losing her brown towel, and finally he yielded to the irresistible – though this time he moved forward without a grain of hope, despite the great seeming hope in the water-dewed girl's eyes.

  He rationalized it by telling himself that it was interesting and even educational to see, even if very briefly, some of the intimate construction – details of such a variety of young females.

  Besides, he was curious as to where the devilish bell was hidden this time.

  It was hanging, of course, from the shower head, previously hidden (and its tinkling muted) by the sizzling water. The blackout and skull-scream that seized him when she flicked it with her towel were quite as black and tormenting as any that had gone before.

  Then he was moving slowly but compulsively toward a slim coffee-and-cream girl whose large brown eyes stared at him with a mysterious impassiveness. To one side of her was a cluster of bright violet globes, to the other a four-foot bronze arch supporting a yard-wide dark bronze gong with black leather-padded striker hanging beside it. The gong had enameled on it a curious design of red flames.

  The girl stood absolutely motionless, her legs straddled and her arms zigzagged in a pose from a Siamese dance. She wore a silver girdle and breast cups of silver filigree, a silver turban was wound round her head, silver slave bracelets weighted her wrists, while from her ankles dangled clusters of tiny silver bells.

  Why, this time the plotters weren't even taking the trouble to hide them! The girl had only to shake a foot and he'd be off again into blackout and pain and the next frustration.

  Nicholas suddenly sat down on the gray carpeting and locked his hands around his knees. He'd be damned if he'd let himself be tricked again.

  Damned?

  He looked at his queer wrist watch. It was still stuck at eighteen to four, with the sweep second hand motionless and the two other downward-beating black hands looking like the wings of a bat coming out of Hell.

  Hell?

  What was his mind trying to tell him?

  The brown eyes of the girl in the silver-filigree bikini brightened. She began to dance languorously with the upper half of her body. Momently Nicholas expected her legs to move, just a little, and the ankle-bell to tinkle, but her control was perfect. Grimly Nicholas held still himself, refusing to budge from his spot. To keep himself from going batty, he imagined in great detail what he could do to these six girls when he caught them without their bells. There was one fantasy in which, dressed as little girls, they sat obediently at desks too small for them, while he, with a supply of willow switches and other academic instruments of correction at hand, lectured them interminably on all topics from human anatomy to the Spanish Inquisition.

  Nicholas' control was not perfect. The physical effects of such imaginings, added to the posturings of the coffee-and-cream girl, were slow in coming, but they came. His desire slowly rekindled, became overpowering. In an effort to surprise the silent danger, he tried to spring up swiftly, but his legs had become stiff and kinky and he stumbled.

  The dancer's brown eyes grew very bright. Still without stirring her ankles, she reached out and lifted the leather-padded striker and struck the fire-emblazoned gong on its very center.

  The gong's note was deep as the grave and its vibrations bone-shaking. Nicholas felt them battering him into insensibility. His fury fought back at this clubbing with sound waves, but that only made the pain worse. And this time his blackout was twice as black.

  When he came to, limp as his black pajamas and aching everywhere, he was sitting in front of a large, gleamingly surfaced black desk in a very large black windowless room lined with black filing cabinets with numbering in red and labeled with a large red script that looked halfway between Arabic and Runic. Behind the desk was a most comfortable looking black swivel chair, empty. To the right of the chair, within easy reaching distance, was a great silver console covered with pushbuttons of an infinitude of pastel shades. He noted a line of them colored rose, green, blue, yellow, orange, and violet in that order and it made him remember the soft-lit six girls and his fury was re-fired so far as his debilitated state would permit.

  To the left of the swivel chair and almost equally accessible, sat a girl in a high-necked black suit with red piping along the seams and pockets. Around her slim waist was a wide shining black leather belt with two red buttons. Her gleaming black pumps were edged with the same fiery vermilion and he could glimpse red clocks on her black stockings. She held a black notebook poised on her knee with a black pencil lightly held between her slim fingers and she sat very straight, like the properest of proper secretaries.

  Her black hair was fixed in bangs, like Cleopatra's. Her black eyebrows were arched, her eyes were greenish-yellow, her face was slim, her mouth wide and painted with lipstick red as fire.

  And she was grinning at him – quite nastily, Nichola
s had to admit. Her eyes weren't at all like those of the other girls. They were alive – as a tiger's.

  In addition to all this, she looked vaguely yet unpleasantly familiar to him. She was associated with some painful period in his life that he didn't want to bring to mind -and at the moment couldn't.

  And he didn't for an instant associate her with the other six girls. They had all had, despite their abominable teasing, something of the mindless quality of houris or odalisques. This one looked like a very beautiful murderess about to defend herself from the witness stand, her every sense alert, her wits crackling, her dagger-claws barely sheathed.

  To tell the truth, she frightened Nicholas a little. Her silent grinning seemed to hold a peculiar sort of menace. He blamed this uneasiness on his debilitated state and looked back from her to the desk.

  There were only two objects on it: a tiny silver bell with a tiny red handle – he looked away from that quickly – and a large hour-glass with about as much white sand in its top as in its bottom.

  Then he noticed a strange thing. He could see the white sand very sharply against the black background and there wasn't any dropping down from the top half of the hour-glass into the bottom. The hour-glass was stuck. He stared at it fascinatedly.

  The silence of the room was profound, yet not complete. After a bit Nicholas identified a tiny sound breaking it – a soft ticking. He glanced down at his wrist watch. The hour-thin sweep second hand was moving around purposefully and the others already stood at sixteen to four – the longer wing of the bat was slowly rising.

  The hour-glass was stuck, but the wrist watch was running – a highly suggestive but baffling circumstance.

  Then he distinguished a second sound – a soft wispy snoring – and started with surprise. In the big black swivel chair behind the desk slumped a fat man. How the Devil had he missed him before? Impossible! Yet it seemed almost equally impossible that anyone could have crept into the chair without him noticing.

  The fat man was wearing a strangely familiar gray suit. A dark pearl pin, also familiar, was affixed to his deep red silk necktie. His bald head was slumped forward on a cushion of chins and around it a dozen or so flies circled. Their lazy buzzing made a third small sound.

  Nicholas Teufler recognized the man. He had sat on the opposite side of a desk from him often enough.

  He was about to call, "Dr. Obermann," when he caught the girl in black with a vermilion fingernail quickly raised to her lips. Her grin had changed from nasty to something more like mischievous.

  And now he realized why she looked familiar: although there were several differences, she made him think of Dr. Obermann's last secretary, a Miss Ferenzi.

  He thought furiously. Had Dr. Obermann been giving him electroshock treatments? That would account for the blackouts and his muddled memory – including his memory of how long since he had seen the doctor.

  Or dosing him with LSD or mescalin? More likely still. Those drugs also gave colorful and exciting hallucinations – visions which could turn nasty.

  But this wasn't remotely like Dr. Obermann's office. Ten times as big, for one thing. Also, while the new girl resembled Miss Ferenzi a bit, the latter had been a slim graying woman of forty with silver-rimmed glasses and a Viennese accent.

  Besides, Dr. Obermann couldn't be treating him in any case, because Dr. Obermann was -

  Again he almost shouted awake the snoring man. Again the girl's quick authoritative gesture stopped him. Now he could feel the aliveness in her eyes, as if they sent out invisible stinging rays. Besides "Be quiet!" what was she trying to tell him? Something she couldn't, daren't say out loud?

  He stood up, noting that on the dark round seat of his chair was a red design exactly like that of the flames enameled on the gong which the girl in the silver bikini had struck.

  He glanced behind him and involuntarily retreated toward the desk.

  Only a few inches behind the back legs of his chair was the edge of a rectangular depression in the floor – a depression big as a tennis court which occupied all but a narrow border of the three-quarters of the room behind his chair.

  Down inside it was a picture or expanse dotted with thousands of tiny points of light of all colors except bright red.

  He couldn't tell if it was a dark picture or screen a few inches down or a great field of lights hundreds of feet below. Or even the star-fields of another, more colorful universe more than light-years away – except that some of the light moved. Still, there was the feeling that if he stepped off the edge, he might fall out of the world.

  He sprawled down on the thickly carpeted, red-figured black floor and reached down his arm full length without feeling anything.

  From this position it seemed to him that the strange pastel star-fields extended under the floor, beyond the bounds of the rectangle.

  Was it a reality or was it a map?

  Then his eyes fixed on a particular zig-zag of stars colored in this order: rose, green, blue, yellow, orange and violet. They matched the lamps of the girls who had teased him. His anger flamed again. But – had he been down there?

  He glanced at his watch. Still ticking. The black hands stood at ten to four – one straight line against the red face.

  He got to his feet and turned around. The scene hadn't changed. Dr. Obermann still snored, but the smile of the girl in black seemed to have become conspiratorial. She wet the smile with the tip of her tongue. And now he saw that she was beckoning to him by curling the vermilion-tipped forefinger of the hand that held the black notebook.

  He was passing the corner of the desk when he heard another sound – a very faint pattering.

  The hour-glass had come unstuck. White sand was falling in a tiny stream.

  And Dr. Obermann's snore had stopped, his bald head was upright, the flies still circling it, and his big hypnotic eyes, which Nicholas remembered without pleasure, were open.

  "Hello, Teufler," he grunted, as if this were just another of their old sessions. "Take a pew."

  Nicholas hesitated. The girl in black gave him one quick anxious nod. Dr. Obermann glanced toward her, but by then she was only smiling again – nastily. Nicholas sat down on the fire-stamped chair on which he had awakened and wondered why the doctor didn't bat at the flies, why he accepted this dark noisy coronet.

  Dr. Obermann studied him with a little bored smirk. "Well, my boy," he asked, "how are your symptoms? Any interesting dreams to report?"

  Nicholas snapped his fingers and said, "I know why this can't be happening – why I must be imagining it. You're dead! You died of fatty blockage of the blood vessels almost a year ago."

  Dr. Obermann leaned forward, put his fat elbows on the desk, supported his chin-pillows with his pudgy fists. His smirk became a grin.

  "On the contrary, my boy," he said, "that's exactly why this can be happening."

  Nicholas swallowed. "You mean," he said, "I'm dead too?"

  Dr. Obermann nodded beatifically. Nicholas thought: pain, glaring lights, a car hurtling out of the freeway exit he was headed toward ... No! Or rather, most regrettably, yes.

  He said, "So that's why I kept smelling mold and decay and thinking of coffins."

  Dr. Obermann nodded. "Yes, the shock of death is great and creates some vibrations that are a long time damping out."

  "But you haven't changed a bit," Nicholas observed. "You're your ugly old self. While Miss Ferenzi has become an exceedingly beautiful young woman."

  The psychiatrist scowled. "Miss Ferenzi didn't die with me. What gave you such a stupid idea? She's disorganizing some other doctor's files up above. This is my new secretary, Miss Diable."

  Nicholas bowed to her. She nodded, murmuring in a husky contralto, "You're looking quite handsome yourself."

  Dr. Obermann shot her a suspicious glance, than reached out a fat hand and laid it on her black-stockinged knee in a manner Nicholas found most offensive.

  "But then where the Hell am I?" he demanded loudly. "Or," he added, "have I answered my
own question?"'

  "You have, my boy," the other told him in the sugary pat-on-the-shoulder tones which he'd used in the old days to inform Nicholas that he'd had a valid insight into his problems.

  "But what the Devil then is a newcomer like you doing running Hell?" Nicholas demanded.

  Dr. Obermann finally swiped negligently at the flies circling his shining cranium. Nicholas remembered that Beelzebub was called the Lord of the Flies. Then the psychiatrist said, "Not quite the Devil, my boy, though given a couple of years more..." His voice trailed off meaningly, then he went on briskly, "You forget that I arrived ten months ahead of you. And it turns out that Hell had become a typical big modern organization, my boy, in fact the biggest in the known universe. And you know how fast a man can get ahead in a big organization if he can discover the ropes and find where the bodies – so many of them here! – are buried – or burning! And who would be better than an ... ahem! ... unscrupulous psychiatrist ...?" He gave the black-stockinged knee a peculiarly intimate squeeze.

  "–to discover the ropes of Hell!" Nicholas finished for him. "That I'll agree to." He shook his head. "But that Hell should actually exist when even ministers have given up pretending to believe in it – that's fantastic!"

  Dr. Obermann shrugged. "But true. Like atom bombs in China, euphorics in glue, brassieres on Bali, light-rays that kill, and craters on Mars."

  Nicholas hesitated. "But I always thought that Hell would be..." He grimaced distastefully.

  "Full of pitchforks and flaming pitch and tortures and torments and all those other medieval curiosa?" Dr. Obermann finished for him. "My dear boy, you haven't visited all our departments, at least as yet. In some of them–" He shrugged and made a little grimace. "But although it has its secret concentration camps, Hell on the whole has become as progressive as the world – managerial, self-governing, democratic, with advancement open to anyone who keeps his wits about him." He smiled complacently. "Also, Hell has become highly competitive, just as our own culture – competition inside one big happy organization. You study the man above you for weaknesses, find the means to topple him, seize your opportunity and – presto! – you've advanced to the next power-level, whether it be assistant department manager or senior executive.