Dreaming Jewels (15 page)

Bunny turned her head, turned it back, opened her eyes. They seemed vague, unfocussed. She turned them on Zena, and recognition crept into them. She looked around the room, cried out in fear. Zena held her close. “It’s all right, darling,” she said. “That’s Kiddo, and I’m here, and you’re all right now.”

“But how—where—”

“Sh-h. Tell us what’s happened. You remember the carnival? Havana?”

“Havana’s goin’ to die.”

“We’ll try to help, Bunny. Do you remember coming here?”

“Here.” She looked around, as if one part of her mind were trying to catch up with the rest. “The Maneater told me to. He was nothing but eyes. After a while I couldn’t even see his eyes. His voice was inside my head. I don’t remember,” she said piteously. “Havana’s going to die.” She said this as if it were the first time.

“We’d better not ask her questions now,” said Zena.

“Wrong,” said Horty. “We’d better, and fast.” He bent over Bunny. “How did you find this place?”

“I don’t remember.”

“After the Maneater talked inside your head, what did you do?”

“I was on a train.” Her answers were almost vague; she did not seem to be withholding information—rather, she seemed unable to extend it. It had to be lifted out.

“Where did you go when you got off the train?”

“A bar. Uh—Club… Nemo. I asked the man where I could find the fellow who hurt his hand.”

Zena and Horty exchanged a look. “The Maneater said Zena would be with this fellow.”

“Did he say the man was Kiddo? Or Horty?”

“No. He didn’t say. I’m hungry.”

“All right, Bunny. We’ll get you a big breakfast in a minute. What were you supposed to do when you found Zena? Bring her back?”

“No. The jewels. She had the jewels. There had to be two of them. He’d give me twice what he gave Zena if I came back without them. But he’d kill me if I came with only one.”

“How he’s changed,” Zena said, scornful horror in her voice.

“How did he know where I was?” Horty demanded.

“I don’t know. Oh; that girl.”

“What girl?”

“She’s a blonde girl. She wrote a letter to someone. Her brother. A man got the letter.”

“What man?”

“Blue. Judge Blue.”

“Bluett?”

“Yes, Judge Bluett. He got the letter and it said the girl was working in a record shop in town. There was only one record shop. They found her easily.”

“They found her?
Who?”

“The Maneater. And that Blue. Bluett.”

Horty brought his fists together. “Where is she?”

“The Maneater’s got her at the carnival. Can I have my breakfast now?”

H
ORTY LEFT
.

He slipped into a light coat and found his wallet and keys, and he left. Zena screamed at him. Intensity injected raucousness into her velvet voice. She caught his arm; he did not shake her off, but simply kept moving, dragging her as if she were smoke in the suction of his movement. She turned to the table, snatched up her bag, found two glittering jewels. “Horty, wait, wait!” She held out the jewels. “Don’t you remember, Horty? Junky’s eyes, the jewels—they’re
you,
Horty!”

He said, “If you need anything at all, no matter what, call Nick at Club Nemo. He’s all right,” and opened the door.

She hobbled after him, caught at his coat, missed her hold, staggered against the wall. “Wait, wait. I have to tell you, you’re not ready, you just don’t
know!”
She sobbed. “Horty, the Maneater—”

Halfway down the stairs he turned. “Take care of Bunny, Zee. Don’t go out, not for anything. I’ll be back soon.”

And he left.

Holding the wall, Zena crept down the hall and into the apartment. Bunny sat on the couch, sobbing with fright. But she stopped when she saw Zena’s twisted face, and ran to her. She helped her to the easy-chair and crouched on the floor at her feet, hugging her legs, her round chin against Zena’s knees. The vibrant color was gone from Zena; she stared dryly down, black eyes in a grey face.

The jewels fell from her hand and glittered on the rug. Bunny picked them up. They were warm, probably from Zena’s hand. But the little hand was so cold… They were hard, but Bunny felt that if she squeezed them they would be soft. She put them on Zena’s lap. She said nothing. She knew, somehow, that this was not the time to say anything.

Zena said something. It was unintelligible; her voice was a hoarseness, nothing more. Bunny made a small interrogative sound, and Zena cleared her throat and said, “Fifteen years.”

Bunny waited quietly after that, for minutes, wondering why Zena did not blink her eyes. Surely that must hurt her… she reached up presently and touched the lids. Zena blinked and stirred uneasily. “Fifteen years I’ve been trying to stop this from happening. I knew what he was the instant I saw those jewels. Maybe even before… but I was sure when I saw the jewels.” She closed her eyes; it seemed to give more vitality to her voice, as if her intense gaze had been draining her. “I was the only one who knew. The Maneater only hoped. Even Horty didn’t know. Only me. Only me. Fifteen years—”

Bunny stroked her knee. A long time passed. She became certain that Zena was asleep, and had begun to think thoughts of her own when the deep, tired voice came again.

“They’re alive.” Bunny looked up; Zena’s hand was over the jewels. “They think and they speak. They mate. They’re alive. These two are Horty.”

She sat up and pushed her hair back. “That’s how I knew. We were in that diner, the night we found Horty. A man was robbing our truck, remember? The man put his knee on these crystals, and Horty got sick. He was indoors and a long way from the truck but he knew. Bunny, do you remember?”

“Mm-hm. Havana, he used to talk about it. Not to you, though. We always knew when you didn’t want to talk, Zee.”

“I do now,” said Zena wearily. She wet her lips. “How long have you been with the show, Bun?”

“I guess eighteen years.”

“Twenty for me. Almost that, anyway. I was with Kwell Brothers when the Maneater bought into it. He had a menagerie. He had Gogol and a pinhead and a two-headed snake and a bald squirrel. He used to do a mind-reading act. Kwell sold out for nothing. Two late springs and a tornado taught Kwell all the carny he ever wanted to know. Lean years. I stuck with the show because I was there, mostly. Just as tough there as anywhere else.” She sighed, scanning over twenty years. “The Maneater was obsessed by what he called a hobby. Strange people aren’t his hobby. Carny isn’t his hobby. Those things are because of his hobby.” She lifted the jewels and clicked them together like dice. “These are his hobby. These things sometimes make strange people. When he got a new freak—” (The word jolted both of them as she said it)—“he kept it by him. He got into show business so he could keep them and make money too. That’s all. He kept them and studied them and made more of them.”

“Is that really what makes strange people?”

“No! Not all of them. You know about glands and mutations, and all that. These crystals make them too, that’s all. They do it—I
think
they do it—on purpose.”

“I don’t understand, Zee.”

“Bless your heart! Neither do I. Neither does the Maneater, although he knows an awful lot about them. He can talk to them, sort of.”

“How?”

“It’s like his mind-reading. He puts his mind on them. He—hurts them with his mind until they do what he wants.”

“What does he want them to do?”

“Lots of things. They all amount to one thing, though. He wants a—a middle-man. He wants them to make something that he can maybe talk to, give orders to. Then the middle-man would turn around and make the crystals do what he wanted.”

“I guess I’m sort of stupid, Zee.”

“No you’re not, honey… oh. Bunny, Bunny, I’m so
glad
you’re here!” She pulled the albino up into the chair and hugged her fervently. “Let me talk, Bun. I’ve got to talk! Years and years, and I haven’t said a word…”

“I won’t understand one word in ten, I bet.”

“Yes you will, lamb. Comfy? Well… you see, these crystals are a sort of animal, kind of. They’re not like any other animal that ever lived on earth. I don’t think they came from anywhere on earth. The Maneater told me he sees a picture sometimes of white and yellow stars in a black sky, the way space would look away outside the earth. He thinks they drifted here.”

“He told you? You mean he talked to you about them?”

“By the hour. I guess everybody has to talk to someone. He talked to me. He threatened to kill me, time and time again, if I ever said a word. But that’s not why I kept it a secret. See, he was good to me, Bunny. He’s mean and crazy, but he was always good to me.”

“I know. We used to wonder.”

“I didn’t think it made any difference to anyone. Not at first, not for years. When I did learn what he was really trying to do, I
couldn’t
tell anyone; no one would’ve believed me. All I could do was to learn as much as I could and hope I could stop him when the time came.”

“Stop him from what, Zee?”

“Well—look; let me tell you a little more about the crystals. Then you’ll see. These crystals used to
copy
things. I mean, one would be near a flower, and it would make another flower almost like it. Or a dog, or a bird. But mostly they didn’t come out right. Like Gogol. Like the two-headed snake.”

“Gogol is one of those?”

Zena nodded. “The Fish-Boy. I think he was supposed to be a human being. No arms, no legs, no teeth, and he can’t sweat so he has to be kept in a tank or he’ll die.”

“But what do the crystals do that for?”

She shook her head. “That’s one of the things the Maneater was trying to find out. There isn’t anything regular about the things the crystals make, Bunny. I mean, one will look like the real thing and another will come up all strange, and another won’t live at all, it’s such a botch. That’s why he wanted a middle-man—someone who could communicate with the crystals. He couldn’t except in flashes. He could no more understand them than you or I could understand advanced chemistry or radar or something. But one thing did not come clear. There are different kinds of crystals; some are more complicated than others, and can do more. Maybe they’re all the same kind, but some are older. They never helped each other; didn’t seem to have anything to do with each other.

“But they bred. The Maneater didn’t know that. He knew that sometimes a pair of crystals would sometimes stop responding when he hurt them. At first he thought they were dead. He dissected one pair. And once he gave a couple to old Worble.”

“I remember him! He used to be a strong man, but he was too old. He used to help the cook, and all. He died.”

“Died—that’s one way to say it. Remember the things he used to whittle?”

“Oh, yes—dolls and toys and all like that.”

“That’s right. He made a jack-in-the-box and used these for eyes.” She tossed the crystals and caught them. “He was always giving things away to kids. He was a good old man. I know what happened to that jack-in-the-box. The Maneater never found out, but Horty told me. Somehow or other it passed from hand to hand and got into an orphanage. That’s where Horty was, when he was a tiny baby. Inside of six months they were a part of Horty—or he was a part of them.”

“But what about Worble?”

“Oh, maybe a year later the Maneater began wondering if the crystals bred, and what happened when they did. He was afraid that he had given away two big, well-developed crystals that weren’t dead after all. When Worble told him he had put them in toys he made and some kid had them, he didn’t know where, why, the Maneater hit him. Knocked him down. Old Worble never woke up again though it was two weeks before he died. No one knew about it but me. It was out behind the cook-tent. I saw.”

“I never knew,” breathed Bunny, her ruby eyes wide.

“No one did,” Zena repeated. “Let’s have some coffee—why,
honey!
You never did get your breakfast, you poor baby!”

“Oh gosh,” said Bunny, “that’s all right. Go on talking.”

“Come into the kitchen,” she said as she rose stiffly. “No, don’t be surprised when the Maneater seems to be inhuman. He—
isn’t
human.”

“What is he, then?”

“I’ll get to it. About the crystals; the Maneater says that the closest you can come to the way they make things—plants and animals, and so on, is to say they
dream
them. You dream sometimes. You know how the things in your dreams are sometimes sharp and clear, and sometimes fuzzy or crooked or out of proportion?”

“Yup. Where’s the eggs?”

“Here, dear. Well, the crystals dream sometimes. When they dream sharp and clear they make pretty good plants, and real rats and spiders and birds. They usually don’t, though. The Maneater says they’re erotic dreams.”

“What d’ye mean?”

“They dream when they’re ready to mate. But some are too—young, or undeveloped, and maybe some just don’t find the right mate at that time. But when they dream that way, they change molecules in a plant and make it like another plant, or change a pile of mold into a bird… no one can say what they’ll choose to make, or why.”

“But—why should they make things so they can mate?”

“The Maneater doesn’t think they do it so they
can
mate, exactly,” said Zena, her voice patient. She skillfully flipped an egg in the pan. “He calls it a byproduct. It’s as if you were in love and you were thinking of nothing but the one you love, and you made a song. Maybe the song wouldn’t be about your lover at all. Maybe it’d be about a brook, or a flower, or something. The wind. Maybe it wouldn’t be a whole song, even. That song would be a by-product. See?”

“Oh. And the crystals make things—even complete things—like Tin Pan Alley makes songs.”

“Something like it.” Zena smiled. It was the first smile in a long while. “Sit down, honey; I’ll bring the toast. Now—this is my guess—when two crystals mate, something different happens. They make a whole thing. But they don’t make it from just anything the way the single crystals do. First they seem to die together. For weeks they lie like that. After that they begin a together-dream. They find something near them that’s alive, and they make it over. They replace it, cell by cell. You can’t see the change going on in the thing they’re replacing. It might be a dog; the dog will keep on eating and running around; it will howl at the moon and chase cats. But one day—I don’t know how long it takes—it will be completely replaced, every bit of it.”