Bright Segment (54 page)

“Hi, falutin’.”

She forced herself to smile. “Lo, brow.”

Eddy picked up an abalone shell and began toying with it absently. “How much were you kidding about that Lee Brokaw character last night?” he asked.

“Not a bit,” she assured him.

“You said he was a vampire.”

“
You
said he was,” she reminded him. “All I really know is that he walked in here with some proposition that I couldn’t let him finish, that he had a cigarette case which growled at me, and that he—”

“Go on.”

“Nup.”

He knew that monosyllable well enough to leave it alone. “Okay, let’s take it as it comes. All you know is that he walked in here—
without
the photocell noticing him. He made you some offer which you insist wasn’t what one would assume it to be, though you don’t seem to know why.”

“I just
know
,” said Tina defensively. “Look, Eddy, if you think that Lee Brokaw is assuming the proportions of a deadly rival, you can think again.”

“I’m not worried,” said Eddy in an unconvincing voice.

“Eddy,” she said thoughtfully, “what is so fascinating about Lee Brokaw just now? I’ve never seen you fret about anything like this before.”

“I’ve never run across anything like this before,” Eddy said. “I’ll tell you what I know, Tina. Maybe a couple of things will clear up. Last night about half an hour before closing time, Shaw was in. You know him—manager of that smoke-hole where Brokaw has his act. He was in a fine froth. He wanted to know where Brokaw was. He stood up in a chair and yammered at the customers. Seems he had a second show in a few minutes and Brokaw was among the missing.”

“Any luck?” Tina asked.

Eddy shook his head. “None of the customers seemed to know anything. I remembered what you said and called him over. He told me that he had hired a ham act and that Brokaw had come up with something that wowed the customers. He was afraid that some competitor had bought him away, I think—though he pretended to be
worried about the dear boy personally.

“I asked him what he knew about Brokaw—maybe we could locate the kind of place he might be found in. He didn’t know a thing. Brokaw’d been in two days before and described his act and had done a short solo. Shaw never dreamed it was anything good.”

Tina shuddered, “It was awful.”

“Most of those acts are,” said Eddy. “Anyway, I told him—what did you say? How do you know it was awful?”

“I saw it, Eddy.”

“You saw—Didn’t I tell you to keep away from there?”

“Yes, Eddy. You told me,” she said, and her voice was altogether too gentle. “You didn’t
ask
me, though.”

“I didn’t—Oh, I see. Little Miss Muscles can’t be given orders, eh? All right, Tina. I’ll stay out of your troubles. You can take care of yourself, and so forth. Only, when you’re in up to your neck, don’t—”

“I know, I know. I’m not to come yelling for you. Don’t worry, I won’t.”

He went to the door. “I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say don’t forget whom to yell for.”

The chime sounded his departure. Not loudly, but with a faint tinkling sound that slowly died away into silence.

IV

She started after him, then stopped abruptly and dropped her arms. Why did men have to be so pig-headed? Why did every man who got interested in a girl appoint himself as braintrust, bodyguard, and duenna? Just to top it, the men who liked her invariably said they liked her because she was independent and self-sufficient. She compressed her lips and half-snorted, half-moaned in aggravation.

The moan was answered from the back of the shop.

Tina froze.

The moan was repeated. It was not so much a moan of pain, though pain was there. It was a moan of desolation—of utter hopelessness and despair.

Eddy was only a half-block away. Perhaps she should—on the
other hand, Eddy was an egocentric, puffed up creature with a dictator complex who wanted his women helpless. She’d investigate herself. She squared her shoulders and went into the back room.

There was nothing there but the moan. She looked under the settee and in the closet. Then she heard it again. It was outside, in the alley.

With some difficulty—the door was almost never used—she shot back the bolts and pulled it open. She looked to right and left. The noise was there again, faintly, almost behind her. She looked down a short flight of cellar steps. Near the bottom was Lee Brokaw.

“M-Mr. Brokaw?”

He started violently, staggered to his feet and shrank against the wall behind him. He was tattered and dirty, and his fine jaw was covered with harsh stubble. But none of this subtracted one whit from his incredible grace.

“You,” he breathed, and his voice was still the mellow tenor she had noticed before. But now it was faint and frightened.

“What’s the matter? Are you hurt?” she asked with alarm. “Come up out of there!”

“Will you take me inside where no one can see?”

“Come on. No one will see,” she promised.

He tiptoed up, crouching, his eyes on her face. They were full of eagerness and hope, and a terrible fear.
He dances every minute
, she thought.

Every single minute.

He flowed around her and into the open door like a feather borne on an eddy of wind. “Lock it,” he said, and while she complied he went to the partition and peered out.

“The chime will ring if anyone comes into the shop,” she said.

“Will it?” he asked, and smiled.

Remembering, she said, “Oh.” She pushed past him and sat at her work table. “Stretch out on the settee,” she said briskly. “I can see if anything comes in.” Why she said ‘anything’ instead of ‘anyone,’ she didn’t know. “Are you in trouble?”

He nodded, sinking gratefully back on the settee.

She stared at him. He looked so young, so tortured. The face was
so different from the bland, cruelly smiling one she had seen in her room. But she could not deny it was the same face.

“I saw you last night,” she told him, on sudden impulse.

“I know you did,” he said, putting his hand to his breast pocket. “I didn’t see you, though.”

“Oh—the cigarette case! I remember. You don’t mean it growled because
I
was there?”

“It did.” He took the case out and tossed it carelessly into her lap. She recoiled, staring at it. She was afraid to touch it, even to drop it. But she had to know. She gritted her teeth, lifted it, and said, “I’m going to open it.”

“Go ahead,” he said, as if he had much more important things on his mind.

She looked at him sharply. His eyes were closed, and a furrow of concentration was drawing together the inner ends of his brows. She drew a deep breath and—touched the clasp. The case sprang open.

Of all the things she expected to find in that case—the little crawling horrors, the amulets, the runes on parchment, even perhaps the electronic gear that had so cleverly made the growling sound—what she
least
expected to find in it was what it actually contained. The shock of it was almost more than she could stand.

What she felt was the utmost refinement of the feeling you have when, in a dream, you mount ten steps where only nine exist. True, there was a dragon there. It was etched on the inside of the lid, but it was no more ugly than those on the outside, and it even wore a smile. Otherwise the case held, of all things—cigarettes.

“This,” she said, when she could at last say anything, “is positively the last straw. Lee Brokaw, who are you, and what makes you think you can frighten me? Why have you done things you must know I would refuse to believe—and bitterly resent.”

He rested on one elbow and looked at her. Again his eyes were unfathomable. “I am a dancer,” he said. “If you tell me what you think I have done, maybe I can explain. I want you, very desperately, to do something for me. I want you, because you’re exactly suited to the task.” He spread his hands, as if to say, “Could anything be simpler?” and lay back.

“What is this task?” she demanded.

“You mean—you’ll do it?” There was sudden hope in his eyes.

Tina shook her head. “I certainly said nothing of the sort.”

“I can’t tell you about it if there’s any possibility of your
not
doing it,” he said.

“Well, then, drop dead or something,” Tina flared. “I have a job!”

“You’ll see me everywhere if you don’t,” he said. “At your home and at work.”

“I’ve had a couple of samples of that,” she replied acidly. “I could get used to it.”

“It will get worse,” he said, almost pleadingly, as if he did not want it to happen. “Other people will have my face when you speak to them. You will feel my hands on your face and your body. You will hear my voice when you listen to music, and later, you will hear it more and more until the whole world is filled with my voice and my face and my touch. You will go mad.”

“I can keep you out,” she said stoutly. “You can’t walk through walls.”

“Or through light-beams?”

Tina gulped. “I don’t care what you do, or how much of it. You’re crazy. I’m warning you now—there’s nothing you can do to persuade me to do anything for you.”

Arrara
 …

“Oh, please,” gasped Brokaw. He swung off the settee and came to her, sitting at her feet with his easy, drifting motion. He took her hands in his long, strong, slender ones, and turned his face up to her. It was changed now. His eyes were wide with terror, and the delicate lips worked.

His voice was a whisper, shrill with fright. “That was the last warning. It will be sometime today, or tonight. Please help me, Tina—please,
please
. Only you can help me …” and he buried his face in her lap.

She looked down at his shivering shoulders, and thought of the calm strength he had radiated; thought of his symmetrical, unshakeable expression of objective power. Then her mind returned to the poor broken thing before her.

She stroked his sleek black hair. “You poor thing,” she said. “I’ll help you. You mustn’t cry, Lee, you mustn’t. I’ll help you …”

He sprang to his feet joyously, and grasped her shoulders. “You mean it, don’t you? You really mean it?”

“My specialty,” she said through a tight throat, “is sick kittens.”

“You’re an angel,” he said hoarsely, and kissed her. It was a surprisingly gentle kiss, just between her left temple and her eye.

“Now sit down and pull yourself together, Lee. I’ve promised. You’d better tell me what this is all about.”

“I killed a man,” said Lee. Keeping his eyes on her face he moved backward and sank down on the settee. “I killed him when he was asleep. I hit him with a bronze book-end and then I opened the side of his neck with a little knife. His skin was tough,” he added, “and the knife wasn’t very sharp. It seemed to go on for hours.”

“I see,” said Tina, holding tight to herself. She began to force a smile but decided against it; her cheeks might crack. “And it left you with a psychic trauma.”

“I suppose so,” he said seriously, ignoring the weak attempt at facetiousness. “But that wouldn’t be anything by itself. I’d be glad if that were all. But, you see, after I did it, I had to get away, and I couldn’t. People knew me. I was one of those noticeable individuals, I suppose.”

“You are.”

“Am I? Well, it doesn’t matter now. I’m not what I was then. I’ve changed. I sold my—my soul.”

“What kind of mad talk is that?” said Tina, straightening in alarm.

“Go ahead. Take it for granted that I’m a psychopath. But you’re going to help me, and you’ll see. Don’t you know that there are more forms of life on earth than the ones you read about in the biology books? You deal in shells. You know the shapes and forms they take. You know the differences in the substances shellfish feed on. You know the peculiar variations that occur. Do you know there’s a shellfish in the Great Lakes that makes its shell—”

“—out of strontium carbonate instead of calcium carbonate. Of course I know. So far this is my lecture, not yours.”

“Please listen,” he said, “I don’t know how much time I have … There are creatures which feed exclusively on cellulose, and creatures which feed on the excreta of the cellulose-eaters.”

“You’ve got termites there,” said Tina. She was beginning to feel a little better. She knew enough about abnormal psychology to be able to pigeonhole some of this.

He ignored her. “There are creatures which eat granite, and lichens which live on them. But why go on? The world is full of this symbiosis, even in human beings. There are microbes living in us without which we would die. And I tell you that there are creatures on earth which can’t develop a soul any more than a termite can digest cellulose. These creatures feed on the souls which we humans build!”

“That’s at least logical,” said Tina. “Even if it happens to be untrue.”

“We can no more understand them and their motives and methods and hungers than can the hungers, and dark biological urges of a bass be understood by the intestinal microbes of a minnow which it may have swallowed.”

“Very clear reasoning,” said Tina, hoping that her mental reservation did not show. “How do you know that such a creature wants to eat your soul?”

“I promised it,” said Lee miserably. “You’ve heard the tales of selling your soul to the devil. They’re poppycock, believe me. What I promised to give up, though, must be called a soul, because there is no other name for it. All those legends are true in essence. Heaven knows how many people lose their essence, their vitality—whatever you want to call it. These soul-eaters are psychic creatures. The psychic pressure of—you may call it the ethics, if you like—of a true promise, is binding. They give you what you want, in exchange for the promise of your soul.”

“That’s a little nonsensical,” said Tina flatly. “If they had access to souls at all, why don’t they just gobble them up and have done with it?”

“Do you,” he asked, his voice too patient, “gobble up a steak in the butcher store? No. You carry it home. You store it for a while. You season it. You cook it—so much on this side, so much on the
other. You serve it. Perhaps you add a touch of salt, or sauce, or tabasco. Only then do you eat it.”