This time, the picture grew up out of the design within seconds. Only
it wasn't the same picture. It was as if he had turned around and was
looking in another direction, a darker one.
There were fewer of the little light-shapes; instead, he discovered in
the distance a line of yellow dots that moved jerkily but steadily,
like glowing corks bobbing on dark water. He watched them for a moment
without recognition; then he realized with a thrill of pleasure
that he was getting another view of the luminous globes he had seen
before--this time an other-dimensional view, so to speak.
Suddenly, one of them was right before him! Not a dot or a yellow
circle, but a three-foot ball of fire that rushed toward him through
the blackness with hissing, sputtering sounds!
Mel surged up out of the chair with a yelp of fright, and the fireball
vanished.
As he groped about for the light, Miss Green was piping furiously at
him from the table.
Then the light came on.
* * * * *
She was in a rage. Dancing about on the table, beating the air with her
wings, she waved her arms over her head and shook her tiny fists at
him. Mel backed off warily.
"Take it easy!" he warned. He could reach the flyswatter in the
kitchenette with a jump if she started shooting off miniature electric
bolts again.
She might have had the same idea, because she calmed down suddenly,
shook her wings together and closed them with a snap. It was like a cat
smoothing down its bristling back fur. There was a whistling query from
the princess now, followed by an excited elfin conversation.
Mel poured himself a drink with a hand that shook slightly, and
pretended to ignore the disturbance of his guests, while he tried to
figure out what had happened.
Supposing, he thought a trifle guiltily, settling down on the couch
at a safe distance from the table--supposing they simply had to
have his help at this point. The manner in which one of the rescue
globes suddenly had seemed to shift close to him suggested it. Was
he justified in refusing to go on with it? In the directionless dark
through which the globes were driving, they might have been reacting to
his concentrated awareness of them as if it were a radio signal from
the human dimensions. And it would explain Miss Green's rage at the
sudden interruption of the contact.
But another thought came to him then, and his guilty feelings vanished
in a surge of alarmed indignation.
Well, and just supposing, he thought, that he _hadn't_ broken the
contact. And that a three-foot sputtering fireball materialized right
inside his living room!
He caught sight of Miss Green eying him speculatively and rather slyly
from the table. She seemed composed enough now; there was even the
faintest of smiles on that tiny face. The smile seemed to confirm his
suspicions.
Mel downed his drink and stood up.
"Miss Green," he told her evenly, choosing his words with care, "I'm
sorry to disappoint you, but I don't intend to be the subject of any
more of your experiments. At least not until I've had time to think
about it."
Her head nodded slightly, as if she were acknowledging his decision.
But the smile remained; in fact, Miss Green had begun to look rather
smug. Mel studied her uneasily. She might be planning to put something
else over on him, but he knew how to stop that!
Before he turned out the light and went to bed, Mel methodically and
somewhat grimly swallowed four more shots of brandy. With that much
inside him, it wouldn't matter what Miss Green tried, because he
wouldn't be able to react to her suggestions till he woke up again in
the morning.
* * * * *
Actually it was noon before he awoke--and he might have gone on
sleeping then if somebody hadn't been banging on his apartment door.
"Wake up, Mel!" he heard Maria de Guesgne shouting hoarsely. "I can
hear you snoring in there!"
He sat up a little groggily and looked at the clock. His guests weren't
in sight.
"You awake, Mel?" she demanded.
"Wait a minute!" he yelled back. "Just woke up and I'm not decent."
When he opened the door, she had vanished. He was about to close it
quietly and gratefully again, when she called down the stairway. "That
you, Mel? Come on up! I want to show you something."
He locked the door behind him and went upstairs. Maria received him
beamingly in her living room. She was on one of her rare creative
painting sprees, and this spree, to judge by the spattered appearance
of the room and the artist, was more riotous than usual. A half dozen
fair-sized canvases were propped on newspapers against the wall to dry.
They were turned around, to increase the shock effect on Mel when he
would get his first look at them.
"Ever see a salamander?" Maria inquired with anticipation, spreading a
few more papers on the table.
Mel admitted he hadn't. He wished she'd given him time to have coffee
first. His comments at these private showings were usually regarded as
inadequate anyway.
"Well," Maria invited triumphantly, selecting one of the canvases and
setting it abruptly up on the table before him, "take a look at one!"
Mel gasped and jerked back. "Holy Judas!" he said in a weak voice.
"Pretty good, eh?" For once, Maria appeared satisfied with his
reaction. She held it away from her and regarded it. "One of my best!"
she cried judiciously.
About three times life-size, it was a quite recognizable portrait of
Miss Green.
* * * * *
It didn't occur to Maria to offer Mel coffee but he got a cigarette
from her. Fortunately, he wasn't called upon to make any more comments;
she chattered away while she showed him the rest of the series. Mel
looked and listened, still rather shaken. Presently he began to ask
questions.
A salamander, he learned, was a fire elemental. Maria glanced at her
fireplace as she explained this, and Mel noticed she seemed to have
had a fire burning there overnight, which wasn't too unusual for her
even in the middle of summer. Listening to the bang-haired, bright-eyed
oddball rattling off metaphysical details about salamanders, he
became aware of a sort of dread growing up in him. For Miss Green was
pictured, wings and arms spread, against and within furling veils of
yellow-white flame...
"Drawn from life?" he inquired, grinning to make it a joke. He pointed
at the picture.
Without looking directly at her, he saw Maria start at the question.
She stared at him intensely for a moment, and after that she became
more reticent.
It didn't matter because it was all on the canvases. She had seen as
much as he had and more, and put it down with shocking realism. Seen
through somebody else's eyes, Miss Green's world was still beautiful;
but now it was also frightening. And there was what Maria had said
about salamanders.
"Maria," he said, "what actually happened last night?"
She looked at him sullenly. "I don't know what you're talking about,
Mel."
"I imagine," he suggested casually, "you were just sitting there in
front of the fire. And then--"
"Gosh, Mel, she was beautiful! It's _all_ so beautiful, you know ..."
She recovered quickly. "I fell asleep and I had a dream, that's all.
Why? What makes you ask?"
She was beginning to look rather wild-eyed, but he had to find out. "I
was just wondering," he said, "whether they'd left."
"Why should they leave--Look, you oaf! I called you in to give you the
privilege of looking at my paintings. Now get out. I've got to make a
phone call."
He stopped at the door, struck by a sudden suspicion. "You're not going
to try to sell them, are you?"
"_Try_ to sell them!" She laughed hoarsely. "There are circles, Mel
Armstrong, in which a de Guesgne original is _understood_, shall we
say? Circles not exactly open to the common herd ... This series," she
concluded, rather prosaically, "will get me two thousand bucks as soon
as I let one or two of the right people have a look at them!"
* * * * *
Brewing himself a pot of coffee at last, Mel decided that part of
it, if true, wasn't any of his business. He had always assumed Maria
was living on a monthly check she got from an unidentified source
in Chicago, but her occasional creations might have a well-heeled
following, at that. As for the way Miss Green had got in to sit for her
portrait--the upstairs screens weren't in any better shape than the
downstairs ones. The fiery background, of course, might have been only
in Maria's mind.
There was a scratching on top of the cupboard and whispery voices.
Mel ignored the slight chill that drifted down his spine. Up to that
moment, he'd been hoping secretly that Maria had provided a beacon for
the rescue team to home in on while he slept, and that his guests had
been picked up and taken home.
But Miss Green was peering down at him over the edge of the cupboard.
"Hi, salamander!" he greeted her politely. "Had a busy night? Too bad
it didn't work."
Her head withdrew. In the living room Mel stopped to look at the design
of sand and pebbles, which was still on the table. Touching one of the
threadlike lines, he discovered it was as hard and slick as lacquer.
Otherwise the pattern seemed unremarkable in daylight, but Mel dropped
a cloth across it to keep it out of sight.
Miss Green fluttered past him to the sill of the bedroom window. He
watched her standing on tiptoe against the screen, apparently peering
about at the sky. After a while, it began to seem ridiculous to let
himself become obsessed by superstitious fears about this tiny and
beautiful, almost jewellike creature. Whatever abilities she might
have, she and the princess were only trying to get home--and, having
seen their home, he couldn't blame them for that.
He had a return of the fairy-tale nostalgia his glimpse of those eerily
beautiful places had aroused in him the night before, a pleasantly
yearning sensation like an awareness of elfin horns blowing far away
to send faint, exciting echoes swirling about the commonplace sky
of Sweetwater Bay. The feeling might have been resurrected from his
childhood, but it was a strong and effective one.
He recalled how bored he'd been with everything before they appeared ...
He walked softly through the bedroom and stopped behind Miss Green. She
was making an elaborate pretense of not having noticed his approach,
but the pointed ears that could follow the passage of a moth in the
dark were tilted stiffly backward. Mel actually was opening his
mouth to say, "Miss Green, I'll help you if I can," when it struck
him sharply, like a brand-new thought, that it was an extremely rash
promise to make, considering everything that had happened so far.
He wondered how the odd impulse ever had come to him.
In sudden suspicion, he began to trace the last few minutes through
again. He had started with a firm decision not to let his guests
involve him in their plans any more than was healthy for him, if at
all--and the decision had been transformed, step by step, and mental
twist by mental twist, into a foolish willingness to have them make use
of him exactly as they pleased!
Miss Green, still maliciously pretending to watch the sky, let him
think it all out until it became quite clear what she had done and how
she had done it. And then, as Mel spluttered angrily at this latest
interference with his freedom of thought and action, she turned around
and laughed at him.
* * * * *
In a way, it cleared the air. The pressure was off. Maria had proved a
much more pliable subject than Mel; the rescuers had their bearings and
would arrive presently. Meanwhile, everybody could relax.
Mel couldn't help feeling relieved as he grew sure of that. At the same
time, now that the departure was settled, he became aware of a certain
amount of belated regret. Miss Green didn't seem to know the exact
hour; she was simply watching for them well ahead of their arrival.
Where would they show up? She waved her arms around in an appealingly
helpless gesture at the court outside and the sky. Here,
there--somewhere in the area.
It would be a fire globe. At his question, she pointed at the opposite
wall of the court where a picture of one formed itself obligingly,
slid along the wall a few feet, and vanished. Mel was beginning to
enjoy all this easy last-minute communication, when he heard Maria
come downstairs and open the door to the other court. There was
conversation, and several sets of footsteps went up to her apartment
and down again.
Cautioning Miss Green, he took a look around the shutters of the
living room window. A small panel truck stood in the court; Maria was
supervising the careful transfer of her paintings into its interior.
Apparently she didn't even intend to let them dry before offering them
for sale!
The truck drove off with Maria inside with her paintings, and Mel
discovered Miss Green doing a little spying of her own from the upper
edge of the shutters. Good friends now, they smiled at each other and
resumed their guard at the bedroom window.
The princess joined them around five in the afternoon. Whether she had
been injured in the accident or weakened by the birth of her babies,
Mel couldn't tell, but Miss Green carried her friend down from the
cupboard without visible effort, and then went back for a globular
basket of tightly woven tiny twigs, which contained the twins.
It was a masterfully designed little structure with a single opening
about the thickness of a pencil, and heavily lined. Mel had a notion
to ask for it as a souvenir, but decided against it. He lifted it
carefully to his ear, to listen to an almost inaudible squeaking
inside, and his expression seemed to cause Miss Green considerable
silent amusement.
All in all, it was much like waiting patiently in pleasant company for
the arrival of an overdue train. Then, around seven o'clock, when the
room was already dark, the telephone rang abruptly and returned Mel
with a start to the world of human beings.
He lifted the receiver.
"Hello, oaf!" said Maria de Guesgne in what seemed for the moment to be
an enormous, booming voice.
Mel inquired agreeably whether she'd succeeded in selling her
paintings. It was the first thing that occurred to him.
"Certainly I sold them!" Maria said. He could tell by now that she was
thoroughly plastered again. "Got a message to give you," she added.
"From whom?"
"Maybe from me, ha-ha!" said Maria. She paused a moment, seemed to be
muttering something to herself, and resumed suddenly, "Oaf, are you
listening?"
Mel said bluntly that he was. If he hung up on her, she would probably
ring back.
"All right," Maria said clearly. "This is the message: 'The fiery
ones do not tolerate the endangering of their secrets.' Warning, see?
Goo'-bye."
She hung up before he could say anything.
* * * * *
Hers had been a chilling sort of intrusion. Mel stood a while in the
darkening room, trying to gather up the mood Maria had shattered, and
discovering he couldn't quite do it. He realized that all along, like
a minor theme, there had been a trace of fear underlying everything he
did, ever since he had first looked into that bird box and glimpsed
something impossible inside it. He had been covering the fear up; even
now he didn't want to admit it, but it was there.
He could quite simply, of course, walk out of the room and out of the
apartment, and stay away for a week. He didn't even ever have to come
back. And, strictly speaking, this was the sort of thing that should
have happened to somebody like Maria de Guesgne, not to him. For him,
the sensible move right now would be to go quietly back into the normal
world of reality he had stepped out of a few mornings ago. It was a
simple physical act. The door was over there...
Then Mel looked back at his guests and promptly reversed his decision.
They were certainly as real as any living creatures he'd ever seen, and
he felt there weren't many human beings who would show up as well as
Miss Green had done in any comparable emergency. His own unconscious
fears meant only that he had run into a new and unpredictable factor in
a world that had been becoming increasingly commonplace for a number of
years now. He could see that once you'd got settled into the idea of a
commonplace world, you might be startled by discoveries that didn't fit
that notion--and he felt now, rather hazily, that it wasn't such a bad
thing to be startled like that. It might wake you up enough to let you
start living again yourself.
He took the receiver off the phone and laid it on the floor, so there
wouldn't be any more interruptions. If he ran off now before seeing how
the adventure ended, he knew he would never quit regretting it.
He went into the bedroom and pulled his chair back up to the window.
The shadowy silhouette that was Miss Green turned and sounded a few
fluting notes at him. He had the immediate impression that she was
worried.
What was the matter?
She pointed.
Clouds!
* * * * *
The sky was still full of the pastel glowings of the sunset. Here and
there were patches of black cloud, insignificant-looking, like ragged
crows swimming through the pale light.
"_Rain_," the thought came. "_The cold rain--the killing rain! Another
storm!_"
Mel studied the sky uneasily. They might be right. "Your friends are
bound to get here first," he assured them, looking confident about it.
They smiled gratefully at him. He couldn't think of anything he might
do to help. The princess looked comfortable on the towel he had laid
along the screen, and Miss Green, as usual, looked alert, prepared to
handle anything that had to be handled. He wondered about asking her to
let him see how the globes were doing, and, instantly, a thought showed
clear in his mind: "_Try it yourself!_"
That hadn't occurred to Mel before. He settled back comfortably in the
chair and looked through the screen for them.
Four or five fiery visualizations quivered here and there in the air,
vanished, reappeared, vanished ...
Mel stopped looking for them, and there was only the sky.
"Closer?" he said aloud, rather pleased with himself. It had been easy!
Miss Green nodded, human fashion, and piped something in reply. Closer,
but--
He gathered she couldn't tell from here how close, and that there was
trouble--a not quite translatable kind of trouble, but almost as if, in
_their_ dimension, they were struggling through the radiant distortions
of a storm that hadn't gathered yet here on Earth.
He glanced up at the sky again, more anxiously now. The black clouds
didn't seem to have grown any larger.
* * * * *
By and by, because he had not had any awareness of going to sleep,
Mel was surprised to find himself waking up. He knew immediately that
he had been asleep a long time, a period of hours. There was grayness
around him, the vague near-light of very early morning, and he had a
sense of having been aroused by a swirling confusion of angry sounds.
But all was silent at the moment.
Her answer was instantly in his mind. The storm had caused a delay--but
a great globe was almost here now!
A curious pause followed. Mel had a sense of hesitation. And then, very
swiftly and faintly, a wisp of thought, which he would have missed if
that pause had not made him alert, showed and vanished on the fringe
of his consciousness:
"_Be careful! Be very careful._"
Miss Green turned back to the window. Beside her now, Mel saw the
princess sitting as if asleep, with one arm across the twig basket and
her head resting on her arm. Before he could frame the puzzled question
that was struggling up in his mind, there was a series of ear-splitting
yowls from the court outside. It startled Mel only for a moment,
since it was a familiar sort of racket. The gray cat didn't tolerate
intruding felines in its area, and about once a month it discovered and
evicted one with the same lack of inhibition it was evidencing right
now. It must have been the threatening squalls which usually preceded
the actual battle that had awakened him.
The encounter itself was over almost instantly. There were sounds of a
scampering retreat which ended beyond the garage, and, standing up at
the window, Mel saw the gray shape of the winner come gliding back down
the court. The cat stopped below him and seemed to turn up its head.
For a moment, he felt it was staring both at him and at Miss Green,
very much like a competent little tiger in the gusty, gray night; then
it made a low, menacing sound and moved on out of sight. Apparently it
hadn't yet forgotten its previous meeting with Miss Green.