“Look down in the well.”
Rather gingerly, Dickson-Hawes approached. He leaned over. From the well came a gurgling splash.
Dickson-Hawes drew back abruptly. Now his face was not quite greenish; it was white. “My word, what a monster!” he gasped. “What is it, anyway?”
“Clockwork,” Freeman answered. “It’ll writhe for thirty-six hours on one winding. I couldn’t use batteries, you know, on account of the water. That greenish flash in the eyes comes from prisms. And the hair is the same thing you get on those expensive fur coats, only longer. I think they call it plastimink.”
“What happens if I keep leaning over? Or if I drop pebbles down on it?”
“It’ll come out at you.”
Dickson-Hawes looked disappointed. “Anything else?”
“The sky gets darker and noises come out of the house. Isn’t that enough?”
Dickson-Hawes coughed. “Well, of course we’d have to soup it up a bit. Put an electrified rail around the well coping and perhaps make the approach to the well slippery so the customers would have to grasp the handrail. Install a couple of air jets to blow the girls’ dress up. And naturally make it a good deal darker so couples can neck when the girl gets scared. But it’s a nice little effort, Freeman, very nice indeed. I’m almost certain we can use it. Yes, we ought to have your Well in our horror house.”
Dickson-Hawes’s voice had rung out strongly on the last few words. Now there came another watery splash from the well. Freeman seemed disturbed.
“I
“Sorry.”
“Don’t let it happen again… I don’t think the customers ought to neck in here. This isn’t the place for it. If they’ve got to neck, let them do it outside. In the corridor.”
“You have no idea, old chap, what people will do in a darkened corridor in a horror house. It seems to stimulate them. But you may be right. Letting them stay here to neck might spoil the illusion. We’ll try to get them on out.”
“Okay. How much are you paying me for this?”
“Our lawyer will have to discuss the details,” said Dickson-Hawes. He gave Freeman a smile reeking with synthetic charm. “I assure you he can draw up a satisfactory contract. I can’t be more definite until I know what the copyright or patent situation would be.”
“I don’t think my Well could be patented,” Freeman said. “There are details in the machinery nobody understands but me. I’d have to install each unit in your horror-house network myself. There ought to be a clause in the contract about my per diem expenses and a traveling allowance.”
“I’m sure we can work out something mutually satisfactory.’
“Uh… let’s get out of here. This is an awfully damp place to do much talking in.’
They went out into the hall again. Freeman locked the door. “Have you anything else?” Dickson-Hawes asked.
Freeman’s eyes moved away. “No.”
“Oh, come now, old chap. Don’t be coy. As I told you before, there’s money involved.”
“What sort of thing do you want?”
“Well, horrid. Though not quite so poetically horrid as what you have behind the shutter. That’s a little too much. Perhaps something with a trifle more action. With more customer participation. Both the Well and Spring Scene are on the static side.”
“Uh.”
They walked along the corridor. Freeman said slowly, “I’ve been working on something. There’s action and customer participation in it, all right, but I don’t know. It’s full of bugs. I just haven’t had time to work it out yet.”
“Let’s have it, old man, by all means!”
“Not so loud! You’ve got to keep your voice down. Otherwise I can’t take you in.” Freeman himself was speaking almost in a whisper. “All right. Here.”
They had stopped before a much more substantial door than the one behind which the Well lay. There was a wide rubber flange all around it, and it was secured at top and bottom by two padlocked hasps. In the top of the door, three or four small holes had been bored, apparently to admit air.
“You must have something pretty hot locked up behind all that,” Dickson-Hawes remarked.
“Yeah.” Freeman got a key ring out of his pocket and began looking over it. Dickson-Hawes glanced around appraisingly.
“Somebody’s been writing on your wall,” he observed. “Rotten speller, I must say.”
Freeman raised his eyes from the key ring and looked in the direction the other man indicated. On the wall opposite the door, just under the ceiling, somebody had written horrer howce in what looked like blackish ink.
The effect of the ill-spelled words on Freeman was remarkable. He dropped the key ring with a clatter, and when he straightened from picking it up, his hands were quivering.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he said. He put the key ring back in his pocket. “I always did have the damnedest luck.”
Dickson-Hawes leaned back against the wall and crossed his ankles. “How do you get your ideas, Freeman?”
“Oh, all sorts of ways. Things I read, things people tell me, things I see. All sorts of ways.” Both men were speaking in low tones.
“They’re amazing. And your mechanical effects—I really don’t see how you get machinery to do the things you make it do.”
Freeman smiled meagerly. “I’ve always been good at mechanics. Particularly radio and signaling devices. Relays. Communication problems, you might say. I can communicate with anything. Started when I was a kid.”
There was silence. Dickson-Hawes kept leaning against the wall. A close observer, Freeman noticed almost a tic, a fluttering of his left eyelid.
At last Freeman said, “How much are you paying for the Well?”
Dickson-Hawes closed his eyes and opened them again. He may have been reflecting that while a verbal contract is quite as binding as a written one, it is difficult to prove the existence of a verbal contract to which there are no witnesses.
He answered, “Five thousand in a lump sum, I think, and a prorated share of the net admissions for the first three years.”
There was an even longer silence. Freeman’s face relaxed at the mention of a definite sum. He said, “How are your nerves? I need money so damned bad.”
Dickson-Hawes’s face went so blank that it would seem the other man had touched a vulnerable spot. “Pretty good, I imagine,” he said in a carefully modulated voice. “I saw a good deal of action during the war.”
Cupidity and some other emotion contended in Freeman’s eyes. He fished out the key ring again. “Look, you must not make a noise. No yelling or anything like that, no matter what you see. They’re very—I mean the machinery’s delicate. It’s full of bugs I haven’t got rid of yet. The whole thing will be a lot less ghastly later on. I’m going to keep the basic idea, make it just as exciting as it is now, but tone it down plenty.”
“I understand.”
Freeman looked at him with a frown. Don’t make a noise,” he cautioned again. “Remember, none of this is real.” He fitted the key into the first of the padlocks on the stoutly built door.
The second padlock was a little stiff. Freeman had to fidget with it. Finally he got the door open. The two men stepped through it. They were outside.
There is no other way of expressing it: They were outside. If the illusion had been good in the Well, here it was perfect. They stood in a sort of safety island on the edge of a broad freeway, where traffic poured by in an unending rush eight lanes wide. It was the time of day when, though visibility is really better than at noon, a nervous motorist or two has turned on his parking lights. Besides the two men, the safety island held a new, shiny, egg plant-colored sedan.
Dickson-Hawes turned a bewildered face on his companion. “Freeman,” he said in a whisper, “did you make all this?”
