Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 3

  Whitey passed him a significant look.

  “Better lay off the stuff,” he advised heavily. Hogan flushed red.

  “What you mean by that?”

  “There’s plenty of funny stories going around about you right now!” Whitey told him, blinking belligerently. Then he looked past Hogan, and Hogan knew Julia had come into the store behind him; but he was too angry to drop the matter there.

  “What do you expect me to do about them?” he demanded.

  “That’s no way to talk to pa!”

  Julia’s voice was sharper than Hogan had ever heard it—he swallowed hard and tramped out of the liquor store without looking at her. Down the street he had a couple of drinks; and coming past the store again on the way to his car, he saw Julia behind the counter laughing and chatting with a group of summer residents. She seemed to be having a grand time; her gray eyes sparkled and there was a fine high color in her cheeks.

  Hogan snarled out the worst word he knew and went on home. It was true he’d grown accustomed to an impressive dose of whiskey at night, to put him to sleep. At night, Greenface wasn’t abroad and there was no sense in lying awake to wonder and worry about it. On warm, clear days around noon was the time to be on the alert; twice Hogan caught it basking in the treetops in full sunlight and each time took a long shot at it, which had no effect beyond scaring it into complete visibility. It dropped out of the tree like a rotten fruit and scudded off into the bushes, its foot ribbons weaving and flapping all about it.

  Well, it all added up. Was it surprising if he seemed constantly on the watch for something nobody else could see? When the camp cabins grew empty one by one and stayed empty.

  Hogan told himself that he preferred it that way. Now he could devote all his time to tracking down that smiling haunt and finishing it off! Afterward would have to be early enough to repair the damage it had done his good name and bank balance.

  He tried to keep Julia out of these calculations. Julia hadn’t been out to the camp for weeks; and under the circumstances he didn’t see how he could do anything now to patch up their misunderstanding.

  After being shot at the second time, Greenface remained out of sight for so many days that Hogan almost gave up hunting for it. He tramped morosely down into the lodge cellar one afternoon and pulled a banana from a cluster he’d got from the wholesale grocer in town. Wedged in under the fruit he found the tiny mummified body of a hummingbird, some tropical species with a long curved beak and long ornamental tail feathers.

  Except for beak and feathers, it would have been unrecognizable: bones, flesh and skin were shriveled together into a small lump of doubtful consistency, like dried gum. Hogan, reminded of the dead snake from which he had driven Greenface near the icehouse, handled it with fingers that shook a little. In part, at least, the hummingbird seemed to explain the origin of the camp spook.

  Greenface was, of course, carnivorous, in some weird, out-of-the-ordinary fashion. The snake had been an indication, and since then birds of every type were growing shy around the camp, while red squirrels and chipmunks disappeared without trace. When that banana cluster was shipped from Brazil or some island in the Caribbean, Greenface—a seedling Greenface, very much smaller even than when Hogan first saw it—had come along with it, clinging to its hummingbird prey!

  But during the transition, something—perhaps merely the touch of the colder North—must have removed some internal check on its growth which still seemed to be progressing in a jerky and unpredictable fashion. For though it appeared to lack any solid parts that might resist decomposition after death, creatures of such size and conforming to no recognizable pattern of either the vegetable or the animal kingdoms, couldn’t very well be in existence anywhere without finally attracting human attention. Whereas, if they grew normally to be only a foot or two high in those luxuriant tropical places, they seemed intelligent and alert enough to escape observation—even discounting that inexplicable knack of turning transparent from one second to the next!

  His problem, meanwhile, was a purely practical one; and the next time he grew aware of the elusive hothouse smell near the lodge, he had a plan ready laid. His nearest neighbor, Pete Jeffries, who provided Hogan with most of his provisions from a farm two miles down the road to town, owned a hound by the name of Old Battler—a large, surly brute with a strain of Airedale in its make-up, and reputedly the best trailing nose in the county.

  Hogan’s excuse for borrowing Old Battler was a fat buck who’d made his headquarters in the marshy ground across the bay. Pete had no objection to that sort of business. He whistled the hound in and handed him over to Hogan with a parting admonition to “keep an eye peeled for them damn game wardens!” Pete and Old Battler were the slickest pair of poachers for a hundred miles around.

  The oily fragrance under the birches was so distinct that Hogan could almost have followed it himself. Unfortunately, it didn’t mean a thing to the dog. Panting and growling as Hogan, cradling the shotgun, brought him up on a leash, Old Battler was ready for any type of quarry from rabbits to a pig-stealing bear; but he simply wouldn’t or couldn’t understand that he was to track down that bloodless vegetable odor to its source!

  He walked off a few yards in the direction the thing had gone, nosing the grass; then, ignoring Hogan’s commands, he returned to the birch, smelled carefully around its base and paused to demonstrate in unmistakable fashion what he thought of the scent. Finally he sat on his haunches and regarded Hogan with a baleful, puzzled eye.

  There was nothing to do but take him back and tell Pete Jeffries the poaching excursion was off because the warden had put in an appearance. When Hogan got back to the lodge, he heard the telephone jingling above the cellar stairs and started for it with an eagerness that surprised himself.

  “Hello!” he shouted into the mouthpiece. “Hello? Julia? That you?”

  There was no answer from the other end. Hogan, listening, heard voices, several of them: people were laughing and talking. Then a door slammed faintly and someone called out: “Hi, Whitey! Flow’s the old man?” She had called up from the liquor store all right, perhaps just to see what he was doing. He thought he could even hear the faint flutter of her breath.

  “Julia,” Hogan said softly, scared by the silence. “What’s the matter, darling? Why don’t you say something?”

  Now he did hear her take a quick, deep breath. Then the receiver clicked down, and the line went dead.

  The rest of the afternoon, he managed to keep busy cleaning out the cabins that had been occupied. Counting back to the day the last of them was vacated, he decided the reason nobody had arrived since was that a hostile Whitey Allison, in his strategic position at the town bus stop, was directing all tourist traffic to other camps. Not—Hogan assured himself again—that he wanted anyone around until he had solved his problem; it would only make matters worse.

  But why had Julia called up? What did it mean?

  That night the moon was full. Near ten o’clock, with no more work to do, Hogan settled down wearily on the lodge steps. Presently he lit a cigarette. His intention was to think matters out to some conclusion in the quiet night air, but all he seemed able to do was to tell himself uselessly, over and over again, that there must be some way of trapping that elusive green horror!

  He pulled the sides of his face down slowly with his fingertips. “I gotta do something!”—the futile whisper seemed to have been running through his head all day: “Gotta do something! Gotta—” He’d be having a nervous collapse if he didn’t watch out!

  The rumbling barks of Jeffries’ Old Battler began to churn up the night to the eastward—and suddenly Hogan caught the characteristic tinny stutter of Julia’s little car as it turned down the road beyond the Jeffries farm and came battling on in the direction of the camp.

  The thrill that swung him to his feet was quenched at once by fresh doubts. Even if Julia was coming to tell him she’d forgiven him, he’d be expected to explain what was making him act like this. And he
couldn’t explain it! If she actually believed him, it might affect her mind. If she didn’t, she’d think he was crazy or lying—he couldn’t do it, Hogan decided despairingly. He’d have to send her away again!

  He took the big flashlight down from its hook beside the door and started off forlornly to meet her when she would bring the car bumping along the path from the road. Then he realized that the car, past Jeffries’ place but still a half mile or so away, had stopped.

  He waited, puzzled. From a distance he heard the creaky shift of gears, a brief puttering of the motor—another shift and putter. Then silence. Old Battler was also quiet, probably listening suspiciously; though he, too, knew the sound of Julia’s car. There was no one else to hear it; Jeffries had gone to the city with his wife that afternoon, and they wouldn’t be back till late next morning.

  Hogan frowned, flashing the light off and on against the moonlit side of the lodge. In the quiet, three or four whippoorwills were crying to each other with insane rapidity up and down the lake front. There was a subdued shrilling of crickets everywhere, and occasionally the threefold soft call of an owl dropped across the bay. He started reluctantly up the path toward the road.

  The headlights were out, or he would have been able to see them from here. But the full moon sailed high, and the road was a narrow silver ribbon running straight down through the pines toward Jeffries’ farmhouse.

  Quite suddenly he discovered the car, drawn up beside the road and turned back toward town. It was Julia’s car all right; and it was empty. Hogan walked slowly toward it, peering right and left, then jerked around with a start to a sudden crashing noise among the pines a hundred yards or so down off the road—a scrambling animal rush that seemed to be moving toward the lake. An instant later, Old Battler’s angry roar told him the hound was running loose and had prowled into something it disapproved of down there.

  He was still listening, trying to analyze the commotion, when a girl in a dark sweater and skirt stepped out quietly from the shadow of the roadside pines beyond him. Hogan didn’t see her; he heard her cross the ditch to the road in a beautiful reaching leap. When he looked around, she was running like a rabbit for the car.

  He yelped breathlessly: “Julia!”

  For just an instant, Julia looked back at him, her face a pale, scared blur in the moonlight. Then the car door slammed shut behind her, and with a shiver and groan the old machine lurched into action. Hogan made no further attempt to stop her. Confused and unhappy, he watched the headlights sweep down the road until they swung out of sight around the corner behind Jeffries’ farm.

  “Now what the devil was she poking around here for?”

  He sighed, shook his head and started back to the camp. There was a cool draft of air flowing up from the lake across the road, but Old Battler’s vicious snarls were no longer audible on it. Hogan sniffed idly at the breeze, wondered at a faint, peculiar odor that tainted it, and sniffed again. Then, in a flash of apprehensive rage, he realized what had happened. Greenface was down in the pines somewhere—the hound had stirred it up, discovered it was alive and worth worrying, but lost it again and was now casting about silently to find its hiding place!

  Hogan crossed the ditch in a jump that bettered Julia’s, blundered into the wood and ducked just in time to avoid being speared in the eye by a jagged branch of asp. More cautiously he worked his way in among the trees, went sliding down a moldy incline, swore in exasperation as he tripped over a rotten trunk and was reminded thereby of the flashlight in his hand. He walked slowly across a moonlit clearing, listening, then found himself confronted by a dense cluster of evergreens and switched on the light.

  It stabbed into a dark-green oval, bigger than a man’s head, eight feet away.

  He stared fascinated at the thing, expecting it to vanish. But Greenface made no move beyond a slow writhing among the velvety foot ribbons that supported it. It seemed to have grown again in its jack-in-the-box fashion; it was taller than Hogan and stooping slightly toward him. The lines on its pulsing head formed two tightly shut eyes and a wide, thin-lipped, insanely smiling mouth.

  Gradually it was borne in upon Hogan that the thing was asleep! Or had been asleep—for in that moment, he became aware of a change in the situation through something like the buzzing-escape of steam, a sound just too high to be audible, that throbbed through his head. Then he noticed that Greenface, swaying slowly, quietly, had come a foot or two closer, and he saw the tips of the foot ribbons grow dim and transparent as they slid over the moss toward him. A sudden horror of this stealthy approach seized him, draining the strength out of his body. Without thinking of what he did he switched off the light.

  Almost instantly the buzzing sensation died away, and before Hogan had backed off to the edge of the moonlit clearing, he realized that Greenface had stopped its advance. Suddenly he understood.

  Unsteadily he threw the beam on again and directed it full on the smiling face. For a moment there was no result; then the faint buzzing began once more in his brain, and the foot ribbons writhed and dimmed as Greenface came sliding forward. He snapped it off, and the thing grew still, solidifying.

  Hogan began to laugh in silent hysteria. He had caught it now! Light brought Greenface alive, let it act, move—enabled it to pull its unearthly vanishing stunt. At high noon it was as vital as a cat or hawk. Lack of light made it still, pulled, though perhaps able to react automatically.

  Greenface was trapped!

  He began to play with it. savagely enjoying his power over the horror, switching the light off and on. Presently, Greenface would die; but first—he seemed to sense a growing dim anger in that soundless buzzing—and suddenly the thing did not stop!

  In a flash, Hogan realized he had permitted it to reach the edge of the little moonlit clearing, and under the full glare of the moon, Greenface was still advancing upon him, though slowly. Its outlines grew altogether blurred—even the head started to fade.

  Hogan leaped back, with a new rush of the helpless horror with which he had first sensed it coming toward him. But he retreated only into the shadows on the other side of the clearing.

  The ghostly outline of Greenface came rolling on, its nebulous leering head swaying slowly from side to side like the head of a hanged and half-rotted thing. It reached the fringe of shadows and stopped, while the foot ribbons darkened as they touched the darkness and writhed back. Dimly it seemed to be debating this new situation.

  Hogan swallowed hard. He had noticed a blurred, shapeless something which churned about slowly within the jellylike shroud beneath the head; and he had a sudden conviction that he knew the reason for Old Battler’s silence. Greenface had become as dangerous as a tiger!

  Meanwhile, he had no intention of leaving it in the moonlight’s liberty. He threw the beam on the dim oval mask again, and slowly, stupidly, moving along that rope of light, Greenface entered the darkness; and the light flicked out, and it was trapped once more.

  Trembling and breathless after his half-mile run, Hogan reached the lodge and began stuffing his pockets with as many shells as they would take. Then he picked up the shotgun and started back toward the spot where he had left the thing, forcing himself not to hurry. If he didn’t blunder now, his troubles would be over. But if he did—Hogan shivered. He hadn’t quite realized before that a time was bound to come when Greenface would be big enough to lose its fear of him.

  Pushing down through the ditch and into the woods, he flashed the light ahead of him. In a few more minutes he reached the place where he had left Greenface. And it was not there!

  Hogan glared about, wondering wildly whether he had missed the right spot and knowing he hadn’t. He looked up and saw the tops of the jack pines swaying against the pale blur of the sky; and as lie stared at them, a ray of moonlight flickered through that broken canopy and touched him and was gone again, and then he understood. Greenface had crept up along such intermittent threads of light into the trees.

  One of the pine tops appeared blurred and
top-heavy. Hogan watched it a few minutes; then he depressed the safety button on the automatic, cradled the gun, and put the flashlight beam dead-center on that blur. In a moment he felt the fine mental irritation as the blur began to flow downward through the tree toward him. Remembering that Greenface did not mind a long drop to the ground, he switched off the light and watched it take shape among the shadows, and then begin a slow retreat toward the treetops and the moon.

  Hogan took a deep breath and raised the gun.

  The five reports came one on top of the other in a rolling roar, while the pine top jerked and splintered and flew. Greenface was plainly visible now, still clinging, twisting and lashing in spasms like a broken snake. Big branches, torn loose in those furious convulsions, crashed ponderously down toward Hogan. He backed off hurriedly, flicked in five new shells and raised the gun again.

  And again!

  And again!

  The whole tap of the tree seemed to be coming down with it! Dropping the gun, Hogan covered his head with his arms and shut his eyes. He heard the sodden, splashy thump with which it landed on the forest mold a half dozen yards away. Then something hard and solid slammed down across his shoulders and the back of his skull.

  There was a brief sensation of plunging headlong through a fire-streaked darkness. For many hours thereafter, no sort of sensation reached Hogan’s mind at all.

  “Haven’t seen you around in a long time,” bellowed Pete Jeffries across the fifty feet of water between his boat and Hogan’s. The farmer pulled a fat flapping whitefish out of the illegal gill net he was emptying and plunked it down on the pile before him. “What you do with yourself—sleep up in the woods?”

  “Times I do,” Hogan admitted. “Used to myself when I was your age. Out with a gun alia time,” Pete said mournfully. “It ain’t no real fun any more—’specially since them game wardens got Old Battler.”

  Hogan shivered imperceptibly, remembering the ghastly thing he’d buried that July morning, six weeks back, when he awoke, thinking his skull was caved in and found Greenface somehow had dragged itself away, with enough shot in it to lay out a township. At least it felt sick enough to disgorge what was left of Old Battler, and to refrain from harming Hogan. Maybe he’d killed it, at that—though he couldn’t quite believe it.