The Perfect Host (49 page)

He was in a tent. No—not a tent. The walls slanted up to meet overhead, but the juncture of the walls ran forward into blackness and back into blackness. It was a corridor with a triangular cross section, and he was lying on the floor. He sat up. The conscious muscular effort completed his inventory:

Item: Identity. I am me. I am Hulon—I am here.

He knelt, and automatically pulled at his single, simple garment. It was a belted tunic, sleeveless, with wide shoulder straps, and it fell to mid-thigh. He wore nothing else. He pulled at the skirt self-consciously, and examined the belt. It was a half-belt, sewn to the fabric on each side above his hips. It had no buckle; the two ends of material, when laid together, stayed together. He separated them—easily when they were peeled apart, impossible when they were pulled straight—and put them together again.

He looked about him. The floor was about thirty feet wide, and the walls seemed about the same; the cross section was an equilateral triangle. The quiet blue-green radiance flooded the floor around him and, less brilliantly, the walls and the pointed overhead. Before him and behind him, however, was utter blackness, a thick, absorbent dark that coaxed and sucked and beckoned to the light.

There was a death waiting here for him—behind him or ahead—he did not know which, but he knew it was there. He had to find out what death was, before it found him. And he had to find out one other thing, and that had to do with the corridor. He peered into the darkness before him. Was the floor tilted the slightest bit to the right?

He glanced over his shoulder at the other blackness, and steeled himself.
You know you will feel fear behind you. That’s natural. It may come up behind you—but be sure. Be quite sure, or you’ll have fear to fear, as well as death
.

He rose to his feet, really noticing for the first time that they were bare. The floor was resilient, cool—not cold; and there was a feeling so odd about the floor that he bent quickly and put his hand to it.
It was smooth, solid, for all its slight yielding; but in addition there was a sensation of movement in it, as if its surface were composed of myriads of microscopic eddies in violent, tiny motion.

He stood erect. The sensation was very slight under his feet, and so constant that he knew he would ignore it soon. He stepped forward, peering ahead at the floor, which seemed to be not quite canted.

He was mistaken, he found when he had moved ten or twelve paces.
Trick of the light
. The floor ahead still seemed to tilt a little, but it was certainly level under his feet. The light—it moved with him!

He stared around him, and saw only the same featureless floor and two walls, It was as if he were lighted by a spotlight which was concealed from him.

He looked behind him, and just as he turned his head, caught a movement in the corner of his eye. He gasped and leaped to the wall, pressing his back against it, staring into the blackness. There was something—there
was!
A … a thing, an
eye!

It was low down, almost on the floor, and it was moving toward him. Toward him, and then away, and then it stopped, and swayed, and came toward him again, and emerged into the light.

It was a bubble. A big bubble, perhaps fourteen inches in diameter, loosely filled, and apparently it derived its motion from the strange mosaic of miniature maelstroms in the floor. It danced and swayed erratically on them, sometimes turning one way, sometimes another, occasionally rolling a little.

Hulon stepped toward it. If it was alive, it paid him no attention. It moved, but quite aimlessly. As Hulon moved, the light moved with him, brightly illuminating the bubble. He watched it cautiously for a moment, and finally went down on one knee near it. He saw his distorted, dancing reflection in its side. It seemed to be filled with a clear, pale-brown fluid. He put out his hand, screwed up his courage, and touched it. It quivered like jelly but made no effort to escape. He waited until it began to roll again and quickly put his hand on the floor in front of it. It bumped off his fingers like a toy balloon, and bounced sluggishly up and down until it rested, waiting for the next capricious movement of the floor under it.

Hulon impulsively reached out and picked it up. It sagged in his hands. He pressed it gently—and it burst, leaving him staring ludicrously at his empty hands. There was a great gush of liquid which disappeared immediately when it reached the floor. There was no sign of a skin or bladder of any kind; the thing was simply gone.

Hulon wiped his hands on his tunic and shrugged. The thing was obviously inanimate. It reminded him that he was a little thirsty, but that was all. Thirsty? Perhaps a thing like this would come in handy. He had no idea how long he might be here before—He shrugged again and sniffed at his fingers. The bubble had left a faint, stimulating tang on them. Hulon nodded. If things got bad—

But couldn’t this be the death? Poison?

Wait and see
, he told himself.
First find out what’s at the end of the corridor
. And in a flash he knew that that was what he had been hunting for in the back of his mind—the thing about
here
that he must find out. With the knowledge came the realization that only now did he have all his faculties—that from the moment he had found himself stretched out in the corridor, he had been only gradually regaining them.

How had he got here? What place was this? What was that thought about the two dead men and the dead girl he had talked with? What was the meaning of this fantastic, skimpy garment he was wearing? Where were his clothes? How did the light follow him?

His heart began to thump. He looked at the darknesses, the one which led, the one which followed. Cumulative shock began to take its toll. He turned, turned again, and then stood stock-still, his jaw muscles standing out, his eyes narrowed.

His nerves screamed
“run!”

He stood still, trembling with the effort. Slowly, then, he went to the right wall and sat at its foot, his back comfortingly against it, his eyes shifting from darkness to darkness; and he began to sort out his thoughts.

“There are thoughts for here,” he muttered, “and thoughts for outside—for before I came here.” He wet his lips, and consciously relaxed his shoulders, which had begun to ache. “I am Hulon. I work at the Empire Theater, projectionist on the day shift.”

He fixed this in his mind, refusing to think of anything else until the thought stood clear and alone.

“Now,” he said, speaking softly because the absorbent walls—they seemed to be of the same static-mobile material as the floor—seemed to drink sound the way those darknesses lapped up light. “I will think of
here
first because I am here. Whatever is to happen to me will happen here, and not at the Empire Theater.” Again he waited, fixing the thought on the sturdy walls of his mind until it stopped quivering.

“I don’t know where this place is nor who built it. I do know that I’m here to meet death, and to find out what is at the end of the corridor. I know that if I can find out what kind of death I am to meet here, and if I can discover what is at the end of the corridor, I will live forever. If I do not find out these things, I will die here. I agreed to this, and I came of my own accord.”

He looked up the corridor, and down. He saw no death. He saw in-leaning walls and a floor illuminated by the pool of light in which he was centered. He saw two bottomless mouths of darkness. And with a start he saw another bubble, wandering aimlessly out of the dark to his left. He grinned at himself, and automatically wiped his hands again on his tunic. As he did so, there was a swift movement on the wall opposite. He tensed, stared. There was nothing there. Trick of the light?

What of the light?

He moved his hands over the brief tunic again, and again saw the blurred motion on the wall.

A shadow!

He lifted the hem of the tunic, turned it up. The light was not coming to the material, but
from
it! It was luminous, through and through. No wonder the light followed him!

Conclusion made and filed. He waited, but nothing followed it in his mind, so he turned his attention to the events
outside
this place. This compartmentation of ideas was the
modus
of his philosophy, and he needed it now as never before. He completely displaced his attention from his current situation and studied the events which had led to it.

The real beginning was when he wrote “Where is Security?” for
Coswell’s Magazine
, an obscure quarterly review. But his first knowledge of these strange events was the dead man he saw in the Empire Theater.

Remembering it, he was surprised that he had noticed the man at all. There are, at the best of times, three degrees of work for a theater projectionist—attentive, busy, and frantic. All three are intensified when the theater is running revivals, if it happens that the brittle old film is used, rather than remakes. And that particular night he was stuck with three of them—two features and a short, fresh from a theater where the projectionist apparently didn’t believe in splicing film straight across like everybody else, and who cued only two frames instead of four, so that the little flicker of light up at the corner of the screen, which indicated when to change over projectors, was so brief that a man had to have eyes like photocells to see them at all. He missed two of them at one performance, getting a white screen and a gargle from the sound track, and the second time Mr. Shenkman, the manager, came up to the booth and was nice about it. Hulon hadn’t done that in months, and he would have felt very much better about it if Mr. Shenkman had stamped and cussed, but that wasn’t the manager’s way, and Hulon had no one to be sore at but himself.

He had three viewing windows through which to see the screen—one by each of the big IPC Simplex projectors with their hissing Magnarcs, and one in the splicing room where the film was stored in a steel, asbestos-chimneyed locker. As he moved about the booth, his attention was almost constantly on these windows and the screen. As each reel approached its end he found himself in a near-ecstasy of concentration, trying to determine which, if any, of these spots and speckles was a scratch on the old film or a cue.

It was unthinkable, then, that his attention should have been drawn to anything else through those windows but the screen. But it was. Perhaps the picture itself—an old War I epic starring Conrad Veidt—had something to do with it. Whatever it was, as he leaned close to the glass, his foot ready to stamp the change-over
switch by B projector, his eye caught the side-loom of the tobacco-filtered light over the loges directly in front of the booth.

A man sat there, his spine stiff and straight—not unnaturally, but as if this were a characteristic. The light edged a strong cheekbone, a gleaming forehead, and a monocle. There was a slender cigarette-holder—and then the cue-sign winked on the screen, and Hulon’s foot came down. Projector A clattered and Projector B’s arc began to hiss, the sprockets began to feed, the shields flipped down for A, up for B, and the change was made. Hulon made a slight adjustment for centering, increased the gain by the duplicated volume control directly under the viewing window. Glancing once again at the screen, he walked around the projector and stared at the line of light which was periscoped up from the arc-case and projected between two black lines on a white card, to show the size of the arc-gap. Satisfied, he opened the lower reel-housing of Projector A and unclipped the used reel. As he did so he glanced again at the screen, and again found himself staring at the man in the loges. He knew that man—he was sure of it. And if that was who he thought it was, that man was dead.

He went into the splicing room and put the reel into the rewinding machine, which started automatically as he closed its cover. Again he glanced out the window, and to his annoyance found that he was not looking at the screen at all, but at the man.

He could have sworn it was Conrad Veidt himself, the famous captain of a score of cinematic U-boats and raiders, the archetype of villainous
Oberleutnant
, the personification of the Prussian martinet.

But Veidt died years ago.

Something touched his shoulder and he grunted and jumped violently.

“Hey,” said Frank, the second-shift man, “what’s the matter, Hulon? Seein’ ghosts?”

“Revivals are full of ’em,” said Hulon. He looked at Frank’s grinning, easy-going face and decided not to bother him with his hallucinations. “You’ll have your hands full tonight, Frank. Here’s the schedule. We’re eight minutes behind. I blew two changeovers. You’ll
have to trim the Coming Attractions rushes a couple feet each, and Mr. Shenkman says it’ll be O.K. to leave out the Merchant’s Association announcement in the second show. Watch the cues. Whoever marked them has a hole in his head. And you ought to see some of the splicing! I’ve recut and fixed up a few of ’em and”—he opened the fire-proof locker—“I stuck slips of paper in the reels as some of that sloppy work came through. If you want to make it easier for the next guy, you can go on fixing ’em up.”

“Gotcha,” said Frank. “What do you keep peering out there for? See a chick in the loges you like?”

“Huh?’ said Hulon. “Oh … thought I saw someone I knew. You all ready to take over?” The man in the loges was rising.

“That’s why I’m here.”

Hulon took down his coat. “O.K., chum. Don’t let Hollywood go to your head.” Conscious of Frank’s surprise—for he usually stayed for ten or fifteen minutes to bat the breeze—he whipped open the door and went down the ladder two rungs at a time.

The man who looked like Conrad Veidt was silhouetted against the screen as he stalked down the center aisle. Hulon hurried after him, following him to and through the lobby. He breezed past Mr. Shenkman with a bare nod and was beside the monocled man as they went through the wide doors to the street.

I don’t want to do this
, Hulon thought to himself,
but I’ll kick myself for the rest of my life if I don’t
. He drew up beside the man at the corner and touched his elbow. “I beg your pardon—”