Tales of the Wold Newton Universe (24 page)

Desmond asked one of the people pressed against the window what had happened. The gray-bearded man, probably a professor, said, “This happens every year at this time. Some kids get carried away and try something no one but an M.A. would even think of trying. It’s strictly forbidden, but that doesn’t stop those young fools.”

The corpse with the mustache seemed to have a large round black object or perhaps a burn on its forehead. Desmond wanted to get a closer look, but the ambulance men put a blanket over the face before carrying the body out.

The gray-bearded man said, “The university police and the hospital will handle them.” He laughed shortly. “The city police don’t even want to come on the campus. The relatives will be notified they’ve OD’ed on heroin.”

“There’s no trouble about that?”

“Sometimes. Private detectives have come here, but they don’t stay long.”

Desmond walked away swiftly. His mind was made up. The sight of those bodies had shaken him. He’d go home, make peace with his mother, sell all the books he’d spent so much time and money accumulating and studying, take up writing mystery novels. He’d seen the face of death, and if he did what he had thought about, only idly of course, fantasizing for psychic therapy, he would see her face. Dead. He couldn’t do it.

When he entered his room in the boarding house, the phone was still ringing. He walked to it, reached out his hand, held it for an indeterminable time, then dropped it. As he walked toward the couch, he noticed that the Coca-Cola bottle had been shoved or pulled out of the hole in the baseboard. He knelt down and jammed it back into the hole. From behind the wall came a faint twittering.

He sat down on the sagging couch, took his notebook from his jacket pocket, and began to pencil in the pictographs he remembered so well on the sheets. It took him half an hour, since exactness of reproduction was vital. The phone did not stop ringing.

Someone knocked on the door and yelled, “I saw you go in! Answer the phone or take it off the hook! Or I’ll put something on you!”

He did not reply or rise from the couch.

He had left out one of the drawings in the sequence. Now he poised the pencil an inch above the blank space. Sitting at the other end of the line would be a very fat, very old woman. She was old and ugly now, but she had borne him and for many years thereafter she had been beautiful. When his father had died, she had gone to work to keep their house and to support her son in the manner to which both were accustomed. She had worked hard to pay his tuition and other expenses while he went to college. She had continued to work until he had sold two novels. Then she had gotten sickly, though not until he began bringing women home to introduce as potential wives.

She loved him, but she wouldn’t let loose of him, and that wasn’t genuine love. He hadn’t been able to tear loose, which meant that though he was resentful, he had something in him which liked being caged. Then, one day, he had decided to take the big step toward freedom. It had been done secretly and swiftly. He had despised himself for his fear of her, but that was the way he was. If he stayed here, she would be coming here. He couldn’t endure that. So, he would have to go home.

He looked at the phone, started to rise, sank back.

What to do? He could commit suicide. He’d be free, and she would know how angry he’d been with her. He gave a start as the phone stopped ringing. So, she had given up for a while. But she would return.

He looked at the baseboard. The bottle was moving out from the hole a little at a time. Something behind the wall was working away determinedly. How many times had it started to leave the hole and found that its passage was blocked? Far too many, the thing must think, if it had a mind. But it refused to give up, and some day it might occur to it to solve its problem by killing the one who was causing the problem.

If, however, it was daunted by the far greater size of the problem maker, if it lacked courage, then it would have to keep on pushing the bottle from the hole. And...

He looked at the notebook, and he shook. The blank space had been filled in. There was the drawing of Cotoaahd, the thing which, now he looked at it, somehow resembled his mother.

Had he unconsciously penciled it in while he was thinking?

Or had the figure formed itself?

It didn’t matter. In either case, he knew what he had to do.

While the eyes passed over each drawing, and he intoned the words of that long-dead language, he felt something move out from within his chest, crawl into his belly, his legs, his throat, his brain. The symbol of Cotoaahd seemed to burn on the sheet when he pronounced its name, his eyes on the drawing.

The room grew dark as the final words were said. He rose and turned on a table lamp and went into the tiny, dirty bathroom. The face in the mirror did not look like a murderer’s; it was just that of a sixty-year-old man who had been through an ordeal and was not quite sure that it was over.

On the way out of the room, he saw the Coke bottle slide free of the baseboard hole. But whatever had pushed it was not yet ready to come out.

Hours later he returned reeling from the campus tavern. The phone was ringing again. But the call, as he had expected, was not from his mother, though it was from his native city in Illinois.

“Mr. Desmond, this is Sergeant Rourke of the Busiris Police Department. I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Uh, ah, your mother died some hours ago of a heart attack.”

Desmond did not have to act stunned. He was numb throughout. Even the hand holding the receiver felt as if it had turned to granite. Vaguely, he was aware that Rourke’s voice seemed strange.

“Heart attack? Heart...? Are you sure?”

He groaned. His mother had died naturally. He would not have had to recite the ancient words. And now he had committed himself for nothing and was forever trapped. Once the words were used while the eyes read, there was no turning back.

But... if the words had been only words, dying as sound usually does, no physical reaction resulting from words transmitted through that subcontinuum, then was he bound?

Wouldn’t he be free, clear of debt? Able to walk out of this place without fear of retaliation?

“It was a terrible thing, Mr. Desmond. A freak accident. Your mother died while she was talking to a visiting neighbor, Mrs. Sammins. Sammins called the police and an ambulance. Some other neighbors went into the house, and then... then...”

Rourke’s throat seemed to be clogging.

“I’d just got there and was on the front porch when it... it...”

Rourke coughed, and he said, “My brother was in the house, too.”

Three neighbors, two ambulance attendants, and two policemen had been crushed to death when the house had unaccountably collapsed.

“It was like a giant foot stepped on it. If it’d fallen in six seconds later, I’d have been caught, too.”

Desmond thanked him and said he’d take the next plane out to Busiris.

He staggered to the window, and he raised it to breathe in the open air. Below, in the light of a street lamp, hobbling along on his cane, was Layamon. The gray face lifted. Teeth flashed whitely.

Desmond wept, but the tears were only for himself.

In the aftermath of Kong’s plunge from the Empire State Building, some interesting characters appear on the scene: a powerful-looking, golden-eyed man and his five companions, and a hawk-nosed man with blazing eyes and a lovely female companion. These are, firstly, Doc Savage and his five stalwart aides (Ham Brooks, Monk Mayfair, Renny Renwick, Johnny Littlejohn, and Long Tom Roberts), and secondly, The Shadow (likely in his Lamont Cranston guise) and his assistant Margo Lane. Doc, Monk, and The Shadow are all members of the Wold Newton Family, descendants of those exposed to meteoritic ionization at Wold Newton, England, in December 1795, thus placing the tragic events surrounding Kong squarely in the Wold Newton Universe.

Sharp-eyed readers will note that Margo did not make her pulp debut as one of The Shadow’s assistants until 1941, while “After King Kong Fell” takes place in 1931 (the radio versions of The Shadow and Margo were different from the pulp versions—on the radio shows, Lamont Cranston
really was
The Shadow—so it should be noted here that Farmer added the pulp version, not the radio version, to the Wold Newton Family). Margo’s anachronistic 1931 appearance has been addressed by some of Farmer’s readers in various “creative mythography” essays.

A young man who is visiting New York and witnesses Kong’s fall is one Tim Howller of Peoria, Illinois, age thirteen. Perhaps not coincidentally, Farmer, also of Peoria, was also thirteen in 1931. Tim Howller makes another appearance in Farmer’s short story, “The Face That Launched a Thousand Eggs.”

The first half of the movie was grim and gray and somewhat tedious. Mr. Howller did not mind. That was, after all, realism. Those times had been grim and gray. Moreover, behind the tediousness was the promise of something vast and horrifying. The creeping pace and the measured ritualistic movements of the actors gave intimations of the workings of the gods. Unhurriedly, but with utmost confidence, the gods were directing events toward the climax.

Mr. Howller had felt that at the age of fifteen, and he felt it now while watching the show on TV at the age of fifty-five. Of course, when he first saw it in 1933, he had known what was coming. Hadn’t he lived through some of the events only two years before that?

The old freighter, the
Wanderer,
was nosing blindly through the fog toward the surflike roar of the natives’ drums. And then: the commercial. Mr. Howller rose and stepped into the hall and called down the steps loudly enough for Jill to hear him on the front porch. He thought, commercials could be a blessing. They give us time to get into the bathroom or the kitchen, or time to light up a cigarette and decide about continuing to watch this show or go on to that show.

And why couldn’t real life have its commercials?

Wouldn’t it be something to be grateful for if reality stopped in midcourse while the Big Salesman made His pitch? The car about to smash into you, the bullet on its way to your brain, the first cancer cell about to break loose, the boss reaching for the phone to call you in so he can fire you, the spermatozoon about to be launched toward the ovum, the final insult about to be hurled at the once, and perhaps still, beloved, the final drink of alcohol which would rupture the abused blood vessel, the decision which would lead to the light that would surely fail?

If only you could step out while the commercial interrupted these, think about it, talk about it, and then, returning to the set, switch it to another channel.

But that one is having technical difficulties, and the one after that is a talk show whose guest is the archangel Gabriel himself and after some urging by the host he agrees to blow his trumpet, and...

Jill entered, sat down, and began to munch the cookies and drink the lemonade he had prepared for her. Jill was six and a half years old and beautiful, but then what granddaughter wasn’t beautiful? Jill was also unhappy because she had just quarreled with her best friend, Amy, who had stalked off with threats never to see Jill again. Mr. Howller reminded her that this had happened before and that Amy always came back the next day, if not sooner. To take her mind off of Amy, Mr. Howller gave her a brief outline of what had happened in the movie. Jill listened without enthusiasm, but she became excited enough once the movie had resumed. And when Kong was feeling over the edge of the abyss for John Driscoll, played by Bruce Cabot, she got into her grandfather’s lap. She gave a little scream and put her hands over her eyes when Kong carried Ann Redman into the jungle (Ann played by Fay Wray).

But by the time Kong lay dead on Fifth Avenue, she was rooting for him, as millions had before her. Mr. Howller squeezed her and kissed her and said, “When your mother was about your age, I took her to see this. And when it was over, she was crying, too.”

Jill sniffled and let him dry the tears with his handkerchief. When the Roadrunner cartoon came on, she got off his lap and went back to her cookie-munching. After a while she said, “Grandpa, the coyote falls off the cliff so far you can’t even see him. When he hits, the whole earth shakes. But he always comes back, good as new. Why can he fall so far and not get hurt? Why couldn’t King Kong fall and be just like new?”

Her grandparents and her mother had explained many times the distinction between a “live” and a “taped” show. It did not seem to make any difference how many times they explained. Somehow, in the years of watching TV, she had gotten the fixed idea that people in “live” shows actually suffered pain, sorrow, and death. The only shows she could endure seeing were those that her elders labeled as “taped.” This worried Mr. Howller more than he admitted to his wife and daughter. Jill was a very bright child, but what if too many TV shows at too early an age had done her some irreparable harm? What if, a few years from now, she could easily see, and even define, the distinction between reality and unreality on the screen but deep down in her there was a child that still could not distinguish?

“You know that the Roadrunner is a series of pictures that move. People draw pictures, and people can do anything with pictures. So the Roadrunner is drawn again and again, and he’s back in the next show with his wounds all healed and he’s ready to make a jackass of himself again.”

“A jackass? But he’s a coyote.”

“Now...”

Mr. Howller stopped. Jill was grinning.

“Okay, now you’re pulling my leg.”

“But is King Kong alive or is he taped?”

“Taped. Like the Disney I took you to see last week.
Bedknobs and Broomsticks.”

“Then
King Kong
didn’t happen?”

“Oh, yes, it really happened. But this is a movie they made about King Kong after what really happened was all over. So it’s not exactly like it really was, and actors took the parts of Ann Redman and Carl Denham and all the others. Except King Kong himself. He was a toy model.”

Jill was silent for a minute and then she said, “You mean, there really
was
a King Kong? How do you know, Grandpa?”