Tales From the Darkside Part 24

"Hush. There is one more."

"No there's not," cried Catherine, "because you're going to stop." She s.n.a.t.c.hed the deck out of Mrs.

McNeill's hands and slapped it down on the table.

Swish. Clang.

The twentieth card, at the top of the deck, flipped over of its own accord and laid itself crosswise over the Fool.

"How did you do that?" Catherine said, snarling.

"I did nothing!"

"I hate tricks," said Catherine, getting up and grabbing her coat and bag.

"I make no magic," said Mrs. McNeill softly, staring at the layout.

"Take this," said Catherine, dropping two bills on the table. "I've got an appointment."

"But your readinga""

"I don't want it. I don't want to know the future. And it's tricks, anyway. Tricks and lies."

Catherine clattered down the tenement stairs, through the vestibule with its rifled mailboxes, down the cracked concrete stoop, and along the street. No taxi was in sight, but she knew she could find something at the intersection a couple of blocks up. She hurried along, fingering the tarot deck in her pocket.

Then she stopped suddenly, realizing she could not wait to find out if her plan had worked. She slipped into a small alleyway between two decrepit buildings and took the pack from her pocketa"Mrs.

McNeill's innocent pack. Catherine riffled through it till she found the Knight of Swords. She held it up, flicked a cigarette lighter, and held the flame beneath the card.

The pasteboard caught and burned between her fingers. She held it till she felt the heat of the flame, then she dropped the charred card to the ground.

She laughed aloud in her relief. Then, as if in further evidence of her good luck, she saw an unoccupied taxi pa.s.s along the street. She hurried out toward the mouth of the alley, happily calling, "Taxi!"

But Catherine didn't make it to the mouth of the alley, for a strong wrist grabbed her hand and she looked up into the face of a tall man with wide shoulders. A black knit cap with three ta.s.sels was pulled over his brow.

A black knit cap with three ta.s.sels just like the Fool wore.

Swish. Clang.

He grabbed her bag with one hand. With his other he slashed out with a knife, to cut the straps.

Catherine drew back, frightened, not of the thief, but of the Fool.

The blade missed the straps. It found Catherine and slid up through her ribs to her heart.

When the Fool had clattered off, Catherine slipped to the rough pavement of the alley the way a child slips to his bed after a long day of relatives and food and car journeys. Her eyes looked a moment at the sky, then heavily slid down the smoky brick of the condemned apartment house, then past her bare arm with the flecks of blood like bright freckles, then to the bit of bright pasteboard that lay so close to her face, its image was blurred.

It's image of the Knight of Swords, his face pale and impa.s.sive, on a rearing horse, brandis.h.i.+ng his bloodstained sword.

Swish. Clang.

THE BITTEREST PILL.

by Frederik Pohl.

Margery tried putting the phone back on the hook, but it immediately rang again. She kicked the stand, picked up the phone and said: "Hang up, will you? We don't want any!" She slammed the phone down to break the connection and took it off the hook again.

The doorbell rang.

"My turn," I said, and put down the papera"it looked as though I never would find out what the National League standings were. It was Patrolman Gamelsfelder.

"Man to see you, Mr. Binns. Says it's important." He was sweatinga"you could see the black patches on his blue s.h.i.+rt. I knew what he was thinking: We had air-conditioning and money, and he was risking his life day after day for a lousy policeman's pay, and what kind of a country was this anyhow? He'd said as much that afternoon.

"It might be important to him, but I don't want to see anybody. Sorry, Officer." I closed the door.

Margery said: "Are you or are you not going to help me change the baby?" I said cheerfully: "I'll be glad to, dear." And it was truea"besides being good policy to say that, since she was pretty close to exploding.

It was true because I wanted something to do myself. I wanted some nice, simple, task like holding a one-year-old down with my knee in the middle of his chest, while one hand held his feet and the other one pinned the diaper. I mean, it was nice of Uncle Otto to leave me the money, but did they have to put it in the paper?

The doorbell rang again as I was finis.h.i.+ng. Margery was upstairs with Gwennie, who took a lot of calming down because she'd had an exciting day, and because she always did, so I stood the baby on his fat little feet and answered the door myself. It was the policeman again. "Some telegrams for you, Mr.

Binns. I wooden let the boy deliver them."

"Thanks." I tossed them in the drawer of the telephone stand. What was the use of opening them? They were from people who had heard about Uncle Otto and the money, and who wanted to sell me something.

"That fellow's still here," Patrolman Gamelsfelder said sourly. "I think he's sick."

"Too bad." I tried to close the door.

"Anyway, he says to tell Cuddles that Tinker is here."

I grabbed the door. "Tell Cud. . ."

"That's what he said." Gamelsfelder saw that that hit me, and it pleased him. For the first time he smiled.

"Whata"what's his name?"

"Winston McNeely McGhee," said Officer Gamelsfelder happily, "or anyway that's what he told me, Mr. Binns."

"Send the son of aa"Send the fellow in," I said, and jumped to get the baby away from the ashtray where Margery had left a cigarette burning.

Winnie McGheea"it was all I needed to finish my day.

He came in holding his head as though it weighed a thousand pounds. He was never what you'd call healthy-looking, even when Margery stood me up at the altar in order to elope with him. It was his frail, poetic charm, and maybe he still had that, and maybe he didn't, but the way he looked to me, he was sick, all right. He looked like he weighed a fast hundred pounds not counting the head; the head looked like a balloon. He moaned, "h.e.l.lo, Harlan, age thirty-one, five-eleven, one seventy-three.

You got an acetylsalicylic acid tablet?" I said, "What?" But he didn't get a chance to answer right away because there was a flutter and a scurry from the expansion attic and Margery appeared at the head of the stairs. "I thoughta"" she began wildly, and then she saw that her wildest thought was true. "You!"

She betrayed pure panica"fussing with her hair with one hand and smoothing her Bermuda shorts with the other, simultaneously trying to wiggle, no hands, out of the sloppy old kitchen ap.r.o.n that had been good enough for me.

McGhee said pallidly, "h.e.l.lo. Please, don't you have an acetylsalicylic acid tablet?"

"I don't know what it is," I said simply.

Margery chuckled ruefully. "Ah, Harlan, Harlan," she said with fond tolerance, beaming lovingly at me as she came down the stairs. It was enough to turn the stomach of a cat.

"You forget, Winnie. Harlan doesn't know much chemistry. Won't you find him an aspirin, Harlan?

That's all the wants."

"Thanks," said Winnie with a grateful sigh, ma.s.saging his temples.

I went and got him an aspirin. I thought of adding a little mixer to the gla.s.s of water that went with it, but there wasn't anything in the medicine chest that looked right, and besides, it's against the law. I don't mind admitting it, I never liked Winnie McGhee, and it isn't just because he swiped my bride from me.

Well, she smartened up after six months, and then, when she turned up with an annulment and sincere repentancea"well, I've never regretted marrying her. Or anyway, not much. But you can't expect me to like McGhee. My heavens, if I'd never seen the man before I'd hate his little purple guts on first contact, because he looks like a poet and talks like a scientist and acts like a jerk.

I started back to the living room and yelled: "The baby!"

Margery turned away from simpering at her former husband and sprang for the puppy's dish. She got it away from the baby, but not quite full.

There was a good baby-sized mouthful of mixed mild and dog biscuit that she had to excavate for, and naturally the baby had his way of counterattacking for that.

"No bite!" she yelled, pulling her finger out of his mouth and putting it in hers. Then she smiled sweetly.

"Isn't he a darling, Winnie?

He's got his daddy's nose, of course. But don't you think he has my eyes?"

"He'll have your fingers, too, if you don't keep them out of his mouth," I told her.

Winnie said: "That's normal. After all, with twenty-four paired chromosomes forming the gamete, it is perfectly obvious that the probability of inheriting none of his traits from one parenta"that is, being exactly like the othera"is one chance in 8,388,608. Ooh, my head."

Margery gave him a small frown. "What?"

He was like a wound-up phonograph. "That's without allowance for spontaneous mutation," he added. "Or induced. And considering the environmental factors in uteroa"that is, broad-spectrum antibiotics, tripling of the background radiation count due to nuclear weapons, dietary influences, et ceteraa"yes, I should put the probability of induced mutation rather high. Yes. Perhaps of the order ofa""

I interrupted. "Here's your aspirin. Now, what do you want?"

"Harlan!" Margery said warningly.

"I meana"well, what do you want?"

He leaned his head on his hands. "I want you to help me conquer the world," he said.

Crash-splash. "Go get a mop!" Margery ordered; the baby had just spilled the puppy's water. She glared at me and smiled at Winnie. "Go ahead," she coaxed. "Take your nice aspirin, and we'll talk about your trip around the world later."

But that hadn't been what he said.

Conquer the world. I heard it plain as day. I went to fetch the mop, because that was as good a way as any to think over what to do about Winston McNeely McGhee. I mean, what did I want with the world?

Uncle Otto had already bequeathed me the world, or anyway, as much of it as I ever hoped to own.

When I came back, Winnie was tottering around the room, followed at respectful distance by my wife holding the baby. She was saying to the prospective conqueror of all the world: "How did you hear about Harlan's good lua"About the tragic loss of his dear uncle, I mean?"

He groaned, "I read it in the paper." He fiddled aimlessly with the phone.

"It's all for the best, I say," said Margery in a philosophic tone, carving damp graham-cracker crumbs out of the baby's ear. "Dear Otto lived a rich and full life. Think of all those years in Yemen! And the enormous satisfaction it must have given him to be personally responsible for the installation of the largest petroleum-cracking still west of the Suez!"

"East, my dear. East. The Mutawakelite Kingdom lies just south of Saudi Arabia."

She looked at him thoughtfully, but all she said was, "Winnie, you've changed."

And so he had; but for that matter, so had she. It was not like Margery to be a hypocrite. Simpering over her ex-husband I could understanda"it wasn't so bad; she was merely showing the poor guy how very much better off she was than she every would have been with him. But the tragic loss of my dear uncle had never occasioned a moment's regret in hera"or in me; the plain fact of the matter is that until the man form the a.s.sociated Press called up she didn't even know I had an Uncle Otto.

And I had pretty nearly forgotten it myself. Otto was the brother that my mother's family didn't talk about. How were they to know that he was laying up treasures of oil and gold on the Arabian Peninsula?

The phone rang; Winnie had thoughtlessly put it back on the hook. "No!"

Margery cried into it, hardly listening, "We don't want any uranium stock! We've got closets full!"

I said, taking advantage of the fact that her attention was diverted: "Winnie. I'm a busy man. How about you telling me what you want?"

He sat down with his head on his hands and made a great effort.

"It'sa"difficult," he said, speaking very slowly. EAch word came out by itself, as though he had to choose and sort painfully among all the words that were rus.h.i.+ng to his mouth. "Ia"invented something. You understand? And when I heard about you inheriting moneya""

"You thought you could get some of it away from me." I sneered.

"No!" He sat up sharplya"and winced and clutched his head. "I want to make money for you."

"We've got closets full," I said gently.

He said in a desperate tone, "But I can give you the world, Harlan.

Trust me!"

"I never havea""

"Trust me now! You don't understand, Harlan. We can own the world, the two of us, if you'll just give me a little financial help. I've invented a drug that gives me total recall."

"How nice for you," I said, reaching for the k.n.o.b of the door.

But then I began to think.