Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Read online

  [SF] = short story/novelette

  Telzey Amberdon

  The Vampirate [SF]

  The Star Hyacinths [SF]

  Novice [SF]

  Undercurrents [SER]

  The Universe Against Her

  Goblin Night [SF]

  Sleep No More [SF]

  Resident Witch [SF]

  Compulsion [SF]

  The Telzey Toy [SF]

  Company Planet [SF]

  Glory Day [SF]

  Poltergeist [SF]

  The Lion Game [SER]

  Child of the Gods [SF]

  The Symbiotes [SF]

  The Telzey Toy [C]

  The Hub

  Grandpa [SF]

  Sour Note on Palayata [SF]

  Harvest Time [SF]

  Lion Loose [PN]

  A Tale of Two Clocks

  The Other Likeness [SF]

  The Winds of Time [SF]

  The Machmen [SF]

  A Nice Day for Screaming [SF]

  Nice Day for Screaming, and Other Tales of the Hub [C]

  Planet of Forgetting [SF]

  The Pork Chop Tree [SF]

  Balanced Ecology [SF]

  Trouble Tide [SF]

  The Searcher [PN]

  The Tuvela [SER]

  Attitudes [SF]

  A Pride of Monsters [C]

  Aura of Immortality [SF]

  Witches of Karres

  The Witches of Karres

  The Witches of Karres [SF]

  Agents of Vega

  Agent of Vega [SF]

  The Truth About Cushgar [SF]

  Second Night of Summer [SF]

  The Illusionists (1951) [SF]

  Recurring Characters

  Character

  Story

  Telzey Amberdon

  Novice

  Undercurrents

  Poltergeist

  Goblin Night

  Sleep No More

  The Lion Game

  Company Planet

  Resident Witch

  Compulsion

  Glory Day

  Child of the Gods

  The Telzey Toy

  The Symbiotes

  Trigger Argee

  Harvest Time

  Aura of Immortality

  Legacy

  Compulsion

  Glory Day

  The Symbiotes

  Heslet Quillan

  Lion Loose

  Forget It

  Legacy

  Holati Tate

  Harvest Time

  Aura of Immortality

  Legacy

  Compulsion

  Prof. Mantelish

  Aura of Immortality

  Legacy

  Compulsion

  Keth Interstellar Detective Agency

  Undercurrents

  (Wellan Dasinger, Danestar Gems, Corwin Wergard)

  The Star Hyacynths

  Resident Witch

  The Searcher

  Keth Deboll

  A Nice Day for Screaming

  Company Planet

  Legacy

  Pilch

  Sour Note on Palayata

  Legacy

  Compulsion

  Klayung

  The Lion Game

  Legacy

  Resident Witch

  Ti’s Toys

  Sams Larking

  The Lion Game

  Glory Day

  Gikkes Orm

  Goblin Night

  Company Planet

  Nile Etland

  Trouble Tide

  The Demon Breed

  1943

  GREENFACE

  Greenface was a horrible little thing that should have been the result of too many emptied bottles. At first, that is. Later, Greenface was not little—

  “What I don’t like,” the fat sport said firmly—his name was Freddie Something—“is snakes! That was a whopping, mean-looking snake that went across the path there, and I ain’t going another step nearer the icehouse!” Hogan Masters, boss and owner of Masters Fishing Camp on Thursday Lake, made no effort to conceal his indignation.

  “What you don’t like,” he said, his voice a trifle thick, “is work! That li’le garter snake wasn’t more than six inches long. What you want is for me to carry all the fish up there alone while you go off to the cabin and take it easy—” Freddie was already on his way to the cabin. “I’m on vacation!” he bellowed back happily. “Gotta save my strength! Gotta ’cuperate!”

  Hogan glared after him, opened his mouth and shut it again. Then he picked up the day’s catch of bass and walleyes and swayed on toward the icehouse. Usually a sober young man, he’d been guiding a party of fishermen from one of his light-housekeeping cabins over the lake’s trolling grounds since early morning. It was hot work in June weather and now, at three in the afternoon, Hogan was tanked to the gills with iced beer.

  He dropped the fish between chunks of ice under the sawdust, covered them up and started back to what he called the lodge—an old, two-story log structure taken over from the previous owners and at present reserved for himself and a few campers too lazy even to do their own cooking.

  When he came to the spot where the garter snake had given Freddie his excuse to quit, he saw it wriggling about spasmodically at the edge of a clump of weeds, as if something hidden in there had caught hold of it.

  Hogan watched the tiny reptile’s struggles for a moment, then squatted down carefully and spread the weeds apart. There was a sharp buzzing like the ghost of a rattler’s challenge, and something slapped moistly across the back of his hand, leaving a stinging sensation as if he had reached into a cluster of nettles. At the same moment, the snake disappeared with a jerk under the plants.

  The buzzing continued. It was hardly a real sound at all—more like a thin, quivering vibration inside his head and decidedly unpleasant! Hogan shut his eyes tight and shook his head to drive it away. He opened his eyes again, and found himself looking at Greenface.

  Nothing even faintly resembling Greenface had ever appeared before in any of Hogan’s weed patches, but at the moment he wasn’t greatly surprised. It hadn’t, he decided at once, any real face. It was a shiny, dark-green lump, the size and shape of a goose egg, standing on end among the weeds; it was pulsing regularly like a human heart; and across it ran a network of thin, dark lines that seemed to form two tightly shut eyes and a closed, faintly smiling mouth.

  Like a fat little smiling idol in green jade—Greenface it became for Hogan then and there! With alcoholic detachment, he made a mental note of the duster of fuzzy strands like hair roots about and below the thing. Then—somewhere underneath and blurred as though seen through milky glass—he discovered the snake, coiled up in a spiral and still turning with labored, writhing motions as if trying to swim in a mass of gelatin.

  Hogan put his hand out to investigate this phenomenon, and one of the rootlets lifted as if to ward off his touch. He hesitated, and it flicked down, withdrawing immediately and leaving another red line of nettle-burn across the back of his hand.

  In a moment Hogan was on his feet, several yards away. A belated sense of horrified outrage overcame him—he scooped up a handful of stones and hurled them wildly at the impossible little monstrosity. One thumped down near it; and with that, the buzzing sensation in his brain stopped.

  Greenface began to slide slowly away through the weeds, all its rootlets wriggling about it, with an air of moving sideways and watching Hogan over a nonexistent shoulder. He found a chunk of wood in his hand and leaped in pursuit—and it promptly vanished.

  Hogan spent another minute or two poking around in the vegetation with his dub raised, ready to finish it off wherever he found it lurking. Instead, he discovered the snake among the weeds and picked it up.

  It was still moving, though quite dead; the scales peeling away from the wrinkled flabby body. Hogan stared at it, wondering. He held it by the head, and the pressure of his finger and thumb, the skull within gave softly, like leather. It becam
e suddenly horrible to feel—and then the complete inexplicability of the grotesque affair broke in on him.

  Hogan flung the dead snake away with a wide sweep of his arm. He went back of the icehouse and was briefly, but thoroughly, sick.

  Julia Allison leaned on her elbows over the kitchen table, studying a mailorder catalogue, when Hogan walked unsteadily into the lodge. Julia had dark-brown hair, calm gray eyes, and a wicked figure. She and Hogan had been engaged for half a year: Hogan didn’t want to get married until he was sure lie could make a success out of Masters Fishing Camp, which was still in its first season.

  Julia glanced up smiling. The smile became a stare. She closed the catalogue.

  “Hogan!” she stated, in the exact tone of her pa, Whitey Allison, refusing a last one to a customer in Whitey’s liquor store in town, “you’re plain drunk! Don’t shake your head—it’ll slop out your ears!”

  “Julia—” Hogan began excitedly.

  She stepped up to him and sniffed, wrinkling her nose. “Pfaah! Beer! Yes, darling?”

  “Julia, I just saw something—a sort of crazy little green spook—

  Julia blinked twice.

  “Look, infant,” she said soothingly, “that’s how people get talked about! Sit down and relax while I make up coffee, black. There’s a couple came in this morning, and I stuck them in the end cabin. They want the stove tanked with kerosene, ice in the icebox, and wood for a barbecue—I fixed them up with linen.”

  “Julia,” Hogan inquired hoarsely, “are you going to listen to me or not?”

  Her smile vanished. “Now you’re yelling!”

  “I’m not yelling. And I don’t need coffee. I’m trying to tell you—”

  “Then do it without shouting!” Julia replaced the cover on the coffee can with a whack that showed her true state of mind, and gave Hogan an abused look which left him speechless.

  “If you want to stand there and sulk,” she continued immediately, “I might as well run along—I got to help pa in the store tonight.” That meant he wasn’t to call her up.

  She was gone before Hogan, struggling with a sudden desire to shake his Julia up and down for some time, like a cocktail, could come to a decision. So he went instead to see to the couple in the end cabin. Afterward he lay down bitterly and slept it off.

  When he woke up, Greenface seemed no more than a vague and very uncertain memory, an unaccountable scrap of afternoon nightmare—due to the heat, no doubt! Not to the beer: on that point Hogan and Julia remained in disagreement, however completely they became reconciled otherwise. Since neither was willing to bring the subject up again, it didn’t really matter.

  The next time Greenface was seen, it wasn’t Hogan who saw it.

  In mid-season, on the twenty-fifth of June, the success of Masters Fishing Camp looked pretty well assured. Whitey Allison was hinting he’d be willing to advance money to have the old lodge rebuilt, as a wedding present. When Hogan came into camp for lunch everything was nice and peaceful, but before he got to the lodge steps, a series of piercing feminine shrieks from the direction of the north end cabin swung him around, running.

  Charging up to the cabin with a number of startled camp guests strung out behind him, Hogan heard a babble of excited talk shushed suddenly and emphatically within. The man who was vacationing there with his wife appeared at the door.

  “Old lady thinks she’s seen a ghost, or something!” he apologized with an embarrassed laugh. “Nothing you can do. I . . . I’ll quiet her down, I guess—”

  Waving the others away, Hogan ducked around behind the cabin and listened shamelessly. Suddenly the babbling began again. He could hear every word of it.

  “I did so see it! It was sort of blue and green and wet—and it had a green face and it s-s-smiled at me! It fl-floated up a tree and disappeared! Oh—G-G-Georgie!”

  Georgie continued to make soothing sounds. But before nightfall, he came into the lodge to pay his bill.

  “Sorry, old man,” he said—he still seemed more embarrassed than upset—“I can’t imagine what the little woman saw but she’s got her mind made up, and we gotta go home. You know how it is. I sure hate to leave, myself!”

  Hogan saw them off with a sickly smile. Uppermost among his own feelings was a sort of numbed, horrified vindication. A ghost that was blue and green and wet and floated up trees and disappeared, was a far from exact description of the little monstrosity he’d persuaded himself he hadn’t seen—but still too near it to be a coincidence. Julia, driving out from town to see him next day, didn’t think it was a coincidence, either.

  “You couldn’t possibly have told that hysterical old goose about the funny little green thing you thought you saw? She got confidential in the liquor store last night, and her hubby couldn’t hush her. Everybody was listening. That sort of stuff won’t do the camp any good, Hogan!”

  Hogan looked helpless. If he told her about the camp haunt, she wouldn’t believe him anyhow. And if she did, it would scare he-r silly.

  “Well?” she urged suspiciously.

  Hogan sighed. “Never spoke more than a dozen words with the woman—”

  Julia seemed miffed but puzzled. There was a peculiar oily hothouse smell in the air when Hogan walked up to the road with her and watched her start back to town in her ancient car, but with a nearly sleepless night behind him, he wasn’t as alert as he might have been. He was recrossing the long, narrow meadow between the road and the camp before the extraordinary quality of that odor struck him. And then, for the second time, he found himself looking at Greenface—at a bigger Greenface and not a better one.

  About sixty feet away, up in the birches on the other side of the meadow, it was almost completely concealed: an indefinable oval of darker vegetable green in the thick foliage. Its markings were obscured by the leaf shadows among which it lay motionless except for that sluggish pulsing.

  Hogan stared at it for long seconds while his scalp crawled and his heart hammered a thudding alarm into every fiber of his body. What scared him was its size—that oval was as big as a football; it had been growing at a crazy rate since he saw it last!

  Swallowing hard, lie mopped off the sweat that was starting out on his forehead while he walked on stiffly toward the lodge. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to scare it off! He had an automatic shotgun slung above the kitchen door, for emergencies: and a dose of No. 2 shot would turn this particular emergency into a museum specimen—

  Around the corner of the lodge, he went up the entrance steps four at a time. A few seconds later, with the gun in his hands and reaching for a handful of shells, he shook his head to drive a queer soundless buzzing out of his ears. Instantly, he remembered when he’d experienced that sensation before and wheeled toward the screened kitchen window.

  The big birch trembled slightly as if horrified to see a huge spider with jade-green body and blurred cluster of threadlike legs flow down along its trunk. Twelve feet from the ground, it let go of the tree and dropped with the long bunched threads stretched straight down before it. Hogan grunted and blinked.

  It happened before his eyes: at the instant the bunched tips hit the ground, Greenface was jarred into what could only be called a higher stage of visibility. There was no change in the head, but the legs abruptly became flat, faintly greenish ribbons, flexible and semitransparent. Each about six inches wide and perhaps six feet long, they seemed attached in a thick fringe all around the lower part of the head, like a Hawaiian dancer’s grass skirt. They showed a bluish gloss wherever the sun struck them, but Greenface didn’t wait for a closer inspection.

  Off it went, swaying and gliding swiftly on the ends of these foot ribbons into the woods beyond the meadow. For all the world, it did look like a conventional ghost, the ribbons glistening in a luxurious winding sheet around the area where a body should have been, but wasn’t! No wonder that poor woman—

  He found himself giggling helplessly. Forcing himself to stop, he laid the gun upon the kitchen table. Then he tried to cont
rol the shaking of his hands long enough to get a cigarette going.

  Long before the middle of July, every last tourist had left Masters Fishing Camp in a more or less perturbed condition. Vaguely, Hogan sensed it was unfortunate that two of his attempts to dispose of Greenface had been observed while his quarry remained unseen. It wasn’t, of course, his fault if the creature chose to exercise an uncanny ability to become almost completely invisible at will—nothing more than a tall, glassy blur which flickered off through the woods and was gone. And it wasn’t until he drove into town one evening that he realized just how unfortunate that little trick was, nevertheless, for him.

  Whitey Allison’s greeting seemed brief and chilly, while Julia delayed putting in an appearance for almost half an hour. Hogan waited patiently enough.

  “You might pour me a Scotch,” he suggested at last.