'Mrs. Leonard?' I asked. 'I got a telegram from Mac—he wanted me to call him.'
'He must have gone out,' she said. 'He wasn't here when I woke up.
Must have gone for breakfast—wouldn't wait for me, the barbarian!'
I mumbled some inanity or other, wondering what I ought to do.
'Listen,' she said, suddenly urgent. 'This is the first chance I've had to talk to you, really. I'm just a dumb woman, so they tell me, but there are some things I want to know. That foot of yours—what's wrong with it?'
'I don't want to talk about it,' I snarled. 'Since you began it, it was run over sidewise by a car when I was about twenty. Is there anything else?'
'Yes. What do you do for a living?'
The damnable impudence of the woman! I didn't answer; just slammed the receiver down on the hook and stormed out.
Mac was waiting for me in my apartment. The landlady had let him in, she told me as I was going up.
'Now what's this?' I asked, as I found him nervously smoking on the edge of my bed.
'Sorry I broke in,' he said. Damn him! His eyes were on my twisted foot again!
'What do you want? I was just talking with your wife.'
'You might want to know why I did a damned foolish thing like trying to make a student. It was because my wife wouldn't treat me like a husband. I was nearly crazy. I loved her so.' His voice was thin and colorless.
'I don't care about your personal affairs, Mac. Get out of here.'
He rose slowly and dangerously, and as he moved towards me I began to realize how big he was and how small I was. He grabbed me by the coat lapels; as he twisted them into a tight knot and lifted me so that my dragging foot cleared the ground, he snarled: 'You tell me what's wrong with your foot or I'll break your neck!'
'Car ran over it!' I gasped. I was shocked to find out that I was a physical coward; never before had I been subjected to an assault like this. I feared that man with the lunatic gleam in his eyes as I had never feared anything before.
'Car,' he growled. 'Now how do you make a living? Don't give me that
`retired capitalist' bull you tried in your letters. I've been looking you up and you haven't got a single bank- account anywhere. Where do you get your money from?'
A voice from my door sounded. 'Put him down,' it said. 'He's no friend of mine. Maybe of yours.' I fell in a heap and turned to see Leonard's wife. 'The Whelmers,' she said, 'disavowed him.'
Mac turned away. 'You know that I know!' he gasped, his face quite dead, dirty white. It was absolutely bloodless.
'I saw two of the Whelmers in the street. They know nothing of this.'
She gestured contemptuously at me. 'That foot of his is no mark. Now, Mr. Leonard—' She advanced slowly on him, step by step.
He backed away, to before a window. 'Only a few days ago,' he gasped,
'only a few days ago I put it all together. I never knew your parents. You are the curse of the Whelmers. And last night I—we—my God!' His eyes were dilated with terror.
'Last night,' said the woman, 'you were my husband and I was your wife.'
With the beginning of a musical laugh she slumped and bloated strangely, quietly, a bluish glare shining from her skin.
With the glare came a momentary paralysis of my limbs. I would have run rather than have seen what I had to see. I would have died rather than have seen that Presence that had horns and a tail and great, shining teeth and lustful, shining eyes.
Leonard took his dry dive through the window just a second before I fainted. When I awoke, there was nobody at all in the room except myself and the friendly, curious police.
THE SLAVE
CHAPTER I
THE DRUNKEN BUM known as Chuck wandered through the revelry of the New Year's Eve crowd. Times Square was jammed with people; midnight and a whole new millennium were approaching. Horns tooted, impromptu snake-dances formed and dissolved, bottles were happily passed from hand to hand; it was minutes to A.D. 2,000. One of those bottles passed to Chuck and passed no further. He scowled at a merrymaker who reached for it after he took his swig, and jammed it into a pocket. He had what he came for; he began to fight his way out of the crowd, westward to the jungle of Riveredge.
The crowd thinned out at Ninth Avenue, and by Tenth Avenue he was almost alone, lurching through the tangle of transport machinery that fed Manhattan its daily billion tons of food, freight, clothes, toys.
Floodlights glared day and night over Riveredge, but there was darkness there too, in patches under a 96-inch oil main or in the angle between a warehouse wall and its inbound roofed freightway. From these patches men looked out at him with sudden suspicion and then dull lack of care. One or two called at him aimlessly, guessing that he had a bottle on him. Once a woman yelled her hoarse invitation at him from the darkness, but he stumbled on. Ten to one the invitation was to a lead pipe behind the ear.
Now and then, losing his bearings, he stopped and turned his head peeringly before stumbling on. He never got lost in Riveredge, which was more than most transport engineers, guided by blueprints, could say. T.G. was that way.
He crashed at last into his own shared patch of darkness: the hollow on one side of a titanic I-beam. It supported a freightway over which the heaviest castings and forgings for the city rumbled night and day. A jagged sheet of corrugated metal leaned against the hollow, enclosing it as if by accident.
'Hello, Chuck,' T.G. croaked at him from the darkness as he slid under the jagged sheet and collapsed on a pallet of nylon rags.
'Yeh,' he grunted. 'Happy New Year,' T.G. said. 'I heard it over here. It was louder than the freightway. You scored.'
'Good guess,' Chuck said skeptically, and passed him the bottle. There was a long gurgle in the dark. T.G. said at last: 'Good stuff.' The gurgle again. Chuck reached for the bottle and took a long drink. It was good stuff. Old Huntsman. He used to drink it with—
T.G. said suddenly, pretending innocent curiosity : 'Jocko who?'
Chuck lurched to his feet and yelled: 'God damn you, I told you not to do that! If you want any more of my liquor keep the hell out of my head—and I still think you're a phony!'
T.G. was abject. 'Don't take it that way, Chuck,' he whined. 'I get a belt of good stuff in me and I want to give the talent a little workout, that's all. You know I would not do anything bad to you.'
'You'd better not…. Here's the bottle.'
It passed back and forth. T.G. said at last: 'You've got it too.'
'You're crazy.'
I would be if it wasn't for liquor …but you've got it too.
'Oh, shut up and drink.'
Innocently: 'I didn't say anything, Chuck.'
Chuck glared in the darkness. It was true; he hadn't. His imagination was hounding him. His imagination or something else he didn't want to think about.
The sheet of corrugated metal was suddenly wrenched aside and blue-white light stabbed into their eyes.
