The Perfect Host (46 page)

“Imagine a man walking up to a door which stands firmly locked. He raises his hand and makes a certain motion. The door opens. He enters, picks up a wand. He waves it; it suddenly glows with light. He says two words, and a fire appears in the fireplace. Now: could you duplicate that?”

“I’ve seen doors open for people in a railroad station,” said Claire. “They had a beam of light in front of them. When you walked into it, a photoelectric cell made the door open.”

“About that wand,” I put in. “If it was made of glass, it could have been a fluorescent tube. If there was a radio frequency generator in the room, it could make a tube glow, even without wire connections.”

“I once saw a gadget connected to a toy electric train,” Claire said. “You say ‘Go!’ into a speaker and the train would go. You say ‘Now back up’ and it would back up. It worked by the number of syllables you spoke. One would make the train go forward; three would make it stop and back up. That fire you mentioned, that could be controlled by a gadget like that.”

“Right. Quite right,” said the doctor. “Now, suppose you fixed up all that gadgetry and took it back in time a couple of centuries. What would the performance look like to a person of the time—even an intelligent, reasonable one?”

I said, “Witchcraft.” Claire said, “Why, magic.”

Ponder nodded. “But they’d understand a kitchen match. But take a kitchen match back a couple more centuries, and you’d get burned at the stake. What I’m driving at is that given the equipment, you can get the results, whether those results can be understood by the observer or not. The only sane attitude to take about such things is to conclude that they are caused by some natural, logically explained agency—and that we haven’t the knowledge to explain it any more than the most erudite scholar could have explained radar two centuries ago.”

“I follow that,” I said, and Claire nodded.

“However,” said Ponder, “most people don’t seem to accept such things that easily. Something happens that you can’t understand, and either you refuse to believe it happened at all—even if you saw it
with your own eyes—or you attribute it to supernatural forces, with all their associated claptrap of good and evil, rituals and exorcisms. What I’m putting to you is that everything that’s happened to you is perfectly logical and believable in its own terms—but it’s much larger than you think. I’m asking you to accept something much more mysterious than an r-f generator would be to a Puritan settler. You just have to take my word for it that it’s as reasonable a thing as an r-f generator.”

“I don’t understand an r-f generator, as it is,” smiled Claire. I heard the soft sound of her hoof clicking. “Go ahead, Doctor. At this point I’m ready to believe anything.”

“Fine,” applauded the doctor. “It’s a pleasure to talk to you. Now, I’m going to use ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in this explanation because they’re handy. Bear in mind that they are loose terms, partial ones: external evidences of forces that extend forward and back and to either side in time and space.” He laughed. “Don’t try to follow that. Just listen.

“A long time ago there were two opposed forces—call them intelligences. One was good and one was evil. It turned out to be quite a battle, and it went on for some time. There were gains and losses on each side, until one was captured by the other. Now, these intelligences were not living creatures in the ordinary sense, and in the ordinary sense they could not be killed. There are legends of such captures—the bound Prometheus, for example, and the monster under Yggdrasil. The only way to keep such forces imprisoned is to lock them up and set a watch over them. But, just as in our civilization, it may take profound intelligence and a great deal of hard work to capture a criminal, but far less intelligence and effort to keep him in jail.

“And that’s the situation we have here. Not far from where we sit, one of those things is imprisoned, and he—I say ‘he’ for convenience—has his jailer.

“That’s the thing known as ‘The Camel’s Grave.’ The Camel is a living intelligence, captured and held here and, if right has its way, doomed to spend the rest of eternity here.”

“That’s a long time,” I put in. “The Earth won’t last that long.”

“He’ll be moved in time,” said Ponder complacently; and that
was when I began to realize how big this thing was. There was that about Doctor Ponder which made it impossible to disbelieve him. I stared at Claire, who stared back. Finally she turned to him and asked in a small voice, “And—what about my foot?”

“That was a piece of tough luck,” said Ponder. “You are a sort of—uh—innocent bystander. You see, the Camel is surrounded by … damn it, it’s hard to find words that make sense! Fields. Look: if I call them ‘spells,’ will you understand that I’m not talking mumbo-jumbo? If I call them ‘fields,’ it presupposes coils and generators and circuits and so on. In this way ‘spells’ is more accurate.”

“I’m with you so far,” I said. Claire nodded.

“Well, the Camel is conscious. He wants out. Like any other prisoner, he looks through the bars from time to time and talks with his jailer—and with anyone else he can reach. What you stumbled into, though, wasn’t the Camel: he’s pretty well sealed away from that. You hit one of the spells—one of the small warning devices set there in case he should begin to escape. If it had hit him, it would have stung him a little, perhaps like an electric fence. But when you walked into it, you got that hoof. Why the result was exactly that I can’t say. It’s the nature of the thing. It’s happened before, as mythology will tell you.”

“I’ve thought of that,” I said. “Pan and the satyrs, and so on. They all had cloven hooves. And isn’t the Devil supposed to have one too?”

“One of the marks of the beast.” Ponder nodded. “Now, as to what can be done about it, I’m here to do the best I can. Claire, exactly where was it that you walked into—whatever it was, and fell down on that little animal?”

“I don’t know,” she said calmly. “I haven’t been able to locate it. I should be able to—ever since I was a child I’ve had dream compulsions to come out here, and I know this country like my own house.”

“I wish you could find it. It would help.” Ponder twiddled the catch on his black bag thoughtfully. “We have to try to get through to the Camel and let him know what has happened to you. He could counteract it. Well, anyway, we might be able to do something. We’ll see.”

“Doc,” I said, “about that hoof. You’re sure it was from contact with something out here. I mean, couldn’t it have been something in town that caused it?”

“Positively not,” he said. And I said to myself, now that is damned interesting, because I have a hoof too and I was never out here before last night.

Ponder turned to Claire. “Exactly why did you come out here that time you saw the little animal?”

“In a way it was your doing, Doctor. It was that Medusa Club meeting. You made me so mad with your intimations that there were still magical forces at work, and that superstitions served to guard humanity against them.” She laughed diffidently. “I don’t feel the same way now, so much … Anyway, I know this part of the country well. I made up my mind to go to the most magical part of it at the most magical time—the full moon—and stick my neck out. Well, I did.”

“Uh-huh,” said the doctor. “And why did you come out yesterday?”

“To find Thad.”

“Well, Thad? What were you after?”

“I wanted to see what is was Claire had walked into.”

“Didn’t trust my diagnosis?”

“Oh, it wasn’t that. If I’d found anything at all, I probably would have told you about it. I was just curious about the cause and cure of cloven hooves.”

“Well, I could have told you that you wouldn’t find anything. Claire might, but you wouldn’t.”

“How so?”

“Hasn’t it dawned on you yet that Claire is something special? In a sense she’s a product of this very ground. Her parents—”

“I told him that story,” said Claire.

“Oh. Well, that was the Camel at work. The only conceivable way for him to break out of his prison is through a human agency; for there is that in human nature that not even forces such as the one which imprisoned him can predict. They can be controlled, but not predicted. And if the Camel should ever be freed—”

“Well?” I asked, after a pause.

“I can’t tell you. Not ‘won’t.’ ‘Can’t.’ It’s big, though. Bigger than you can dream. But as I was saying, Claire’s very presence on Earth is his doing.”

“My parents were murdered,” said Claire.

I turned to her, shocked. She nodded soberly. “When I was six.”

“I think you’re right,” said Ponder. “Their marriage was a thing that could cancel many of the—the devices that imprison the Camel. The very existence of a union like that threatened the—what we can call the prison walls. It had to be stopped.”

“What happened?”

“They died,” said Claire. “No one knew why. They were found sitting on a rock by the road. He had his arm around her and her head was on his shoulder and they were dead. I always felt that they were killed on purpose, but I never knew why.”

“The Camel’s fault,” said Ponder, shrugging.

I asked. “But why didn’t they—he—kill Claire too while he was about it?”

“She was no menace. The thing that was dangerous was the—the radiation from the union that her parents had. It was an unusual marriage.”

“My God!” I cried. “You mean to say that Camel creature, whatever it is, can sit out here and push people’s lives around like that?”

“That’s small fry, Thad. What he could do it he were free is inconceivable.”

I rubbed my head. “I dunno, Doc. This is getting to be too much. Can I ask some questions now?”

“Certainly.”

“How come you know so much about all this?”

“I am a student of such things. I stumbled on this whole story in some old documents. As a matter of fact, I took the medical practice out here just so I could be near it. It’s the biggest thing of its kind I’ve ever run across.”

“Hm. Yet you don’t know where the Camel’s Grave is, exactly.”

“Wrong,” said the doctor. “I do. I wanted to know if Claire had been able to find it. If she had been able to, it would mean that the
Camel had established some sort of contact with her. Since he hasn’t, I’ll have to do what I can.”

“Oh. Anyone who can find the Grave is in contact with the Camel, then.”

“That’s right. It takes a special kind of person.”

I very consciously did not meet Claire’s gaze. There was something very fishy going on here, and I began to feel frightened. This thing that could shrivel a foot into a hoof, it could kill too. I asked, “What about this ‘jailer’ you mentioned. Sort of a low-grade variety of the Camel himself?”

“Something like that.”

“That little animal—would that be it?”

A peculiar expression crossed the doctor’s face, as if he had remembered something, dragged it out, glanced at it, found it satisfactory, and put it away again. “No,” he said. “Did you ever hear of a familiar?”

“A familiar?” asked Claire. “Isn’t that the sort of pet that a witch or a wizard has—black cats and so on?”

“Yes. Depending on the degree of ‘wizard’ we’re dealing with, the familiar may be a real animal or something more—the concretion, perhaps, of a certain kind of thought-matrix. That little animal you described to me is undoubtedly the Camel’s familiar.”

“Then where’s the jailer?” And as I asked, I snapped my fingers. “Goo-goo!”

“Not Goo-goo!” Claire cried. “Why, he’s perfectly harmless. Besides—he isn’t all there, Thad.”

“He wouldn’t have to be,” said the doctor, and smiled. “It doesn’t take much brains to be a turnkey.”

“I’ll be darned,” I said. “Well, now, what have we got? A cloven hoof and an imprisoned
something
that must stay imprisoned or else. A couple of nice people murdered, and their pixilated daughter. All right, Doctor—how do you go about curing cloven hooves?”

“Locate the Camel’s Grave,” said Doctor Ponder, “and then make a rather simple incantation. Sound foolish?” He looked at both of us. “Well, it isn’t. It’s as simple and foolish as pressing a button—or pulling a trigger. The important thing is who does it to which
control on what equipment. In this case Claire is the one indicated, because she’s—what was it Thad said?—pixilated. That’s it. Because of the nature of her parents’ meeting, because of what they had together, because she is of such a character as to have been affected by the Camel to the extent of the thing that happened to her foot—it all adds up. She’s the one to do it.”

“Then anyone who’s subject to this particular kind of falling arches could do it?” I asked innocently.

“ ‘Anyone’—yes. But that can’t happen to just anyone.”

I asked another question, quickly, to cover up what I was thinking. “About familiars,” I said. “Don’t I recall something about their feeding on blood?”

“Traditionally, yes. They do.”

“Uh-huh. The blood of the witch, as I recall. Well how in time can the Camel character supply any blood to his familiar if he’s been buried here for—how long is it?”

“Longer than you think … Well, in a case like that the familiar gets along on whatever blood it can find. It isn’t as good, but it serves. Unless, of course, the familiar makes a side trip just for variety. Occasionally one does. That’s where the vampire legends come from.”

“How to you like that?” I breathed. “I’ll bet a cookie that the animals Goo-goo traps are supplying blood to the Camel’s familiar—and Goo-goo supposed to be guarding the jail!”

“It’s very likely—and not very important. The familiar can do very little by itself,” said the doctor. He turned to Claire. “Did you ever see anything like a familiar taking blood? Think, now.”

Claire considered. “No. Should I have?”

“Not necessarily. You could though,” he indicated her foot, “being what you are.”

She shuddered slightly. “So I’m privileged. I’d as soon not, thank you.”

I sprang to my feet. “I just thought … Luana. What could have happened to her?”

“Oh, she’s all right. Sit down, Thad.”

“No,” I said. “I’d better go look for her.”

Claire leaned back, caught her knee in her hands, and made a soft and surprisingly accurate replica of a wolf-howl. “Drop desperately ill,” I said to her, and to Doctor Ponder, “That’s for people you like too well to tell ’em to drop dead.” And I strode off.