Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions (11 page)

But then she leaned forward to pick up something from a low table which held a rose-glowing lamp. Nicholas Teufler didn't see what the something was, for he was looking down the front of her dress at two firm ivory breasts with nipples like coral lipstick ends. She seemed to be offering them for his inspection on a red satin tray, the material lining her dress.

He was moving toward her. His whole attitude toward his weird surroundings had brightened greatly. He and this wonder-girl would try out every piece of furniture in the place, he told himself enthusiastically. From sofa to couch to bed they would flit like butterflies – well, walk light-footedly at any rate. What did it matter if it took an eternity? And surely places that could materialize girls like this one could produce fresh-popped bottles of blonde champagne in golden ice-buckets with corded scarlet handles – it had to be, by the Law of Similars.

He was close to her now. She straightened up and reached out a slim arm toward him. He saw what she'd picked up – a tiny silver bell with an ebony handle she held between scarlet-nailed finger and thumb. With her other hand she began slowly to draw down the tag of her golden zipper. He reached out a hand toward hers.

The bell tinkled. At this frosty sound Nicholas felt a wave of dizziness. He exerted his will to banish the sound, as he had the first time, but it grew louder. Streaks of blackness swam in front of his eyes with narrowing streaks of crimson, girl, and gold. Then he was staggering and veering in darkness.

When his vision cleared, he was looking across ten yards of gray carpeting at a girl in a black lace negligee sprawled like a cat on a bed with green sheets and high old-fashioned head and foot made of silvery rods screwed together by silvery knobs large and small into rectangles of unequal size in which silver ornaments hung. Her shining black hair was tousled and one hand propped her chin as she gazed at him with a sultry dreaminess. A green-shaded lamp beside the bed intensified the green of the sheets and her eyes. It was clear that she was wearing nothing but girl under the black negligee.

Nevertheless it took Nicholas a moment to redirect his desires. He was angry with the girl in red for having thwarted him. Not "Ring Bell and Wait," but "Ring Bell and Vanish!" Most annoying. He would like to spank her.

He was still standing near the rose-lit gray velvet sofa. A quick, stooping look around it, a quick scan around the everyway-endless-room – no sign of the blonde in red, no sign of anyone at all except the new dark-haired charmer.

She was still watching him, her lips now fixed in an enigmatic catlike smile. Very well, thought Nicholas, if you're a cat, I'm a panther. No more of this vanish stuff. He strode toward her purposefully.

He wondered, though it didn't slow him, why the green light made him think of corpses; the short silver bed-rods, of coffin handles; the musky perfume of dead meat.

Still smiling, she rolled over quickly, her negligee falling open to show a perfect narrow black-haired triangle and the larger long one made by that and the coppery nipples of her firm breasts. At the same time she reached out a sun-tanned arm and, just as he dived at her wrist to stop her, flicked with a black fingernail one of the ornaments hanging in the squares – a tiny silver bell.

He hit carpet rather than bed. The dizzying tingle died away as swiftly as the highest notes of a piano, yet in the interval Nicholas blacked out to find himself looking up from the floor at a barefoot platinum-haired girl in a gunmetal mink coat beside a black davenport and a small black table on which stood a half empty bottle of scotch and a silver lamp casting a blue glow. She was staring at him haughtily, but a little unsteadily, and as she swayed, shifting gleams of a pale dress or pale flesh winked at him from the half-clutched front of her smokily gleaming fur coat.

Well, he thought, at least this one looks a little too drunk to play tricks with bells or anything like that. If only he could lay his hands on those other two tricksters, he'd ...! But he'd better concentrate on this one. A girl in the hand ... He warily got to his feet.

The blue light made Nicholas think of midnight and of impulsive sweet young lushes too eager to take a walk – and too adventurous – to bother to dress. It also made him think of drowned people – though this girl looked drowned in nothing but scotch. While the gunmetal shade of the mink reminded him of his strange new steam-heated wrist watch. He glanced at the latter. The hands still stood at eighteen minutes to four. And this time he also noticed a hair-thin sweep second hand standing still against the red face. The damned thing wasn't even running.

He started to rip it off, but at that instant there was a giggle. The mink coast had fallen open. It had hid flesh, not dress, all right – flesh formed in a torso like that of a slimmer Venus de Medici – and either her hair was naturally platinum or she was a completist. Her haughty lips had softened into a welcoming smile.

He lunged toward her, noting with approval that the streamlined silver lamp had no trace of dangling ornaments. The girl leaned eagerly forward and nodded encouragingly – which shook the two silver bells which were her earrings and which her platinum hair had camouflaged.

A blacked-out second later Nicholas was standing on black-morticed flagstones of black shale. A dozen steps away there was the yellow dancing of a wood fire crackling gayly on ornate silver andirons. Its shimmering fumes and faint smoke were drawn up into a hood of silver jutting down from the slick gray ceiling like the mouth of a giant trumpet.

He was still in the enormous bedroom, however. Everywhere else the gray carpeting with its clusters of furniture and lamps still stretched off toward infinity – a gray desert with furniture oases.

On a polar-bear rug by the fire lay a cream-skinned freckled redhead in a white sharkskin bikini fastened with white bow knots on her left hip and under her right arm. She was eyeing him measuringly, challengingly.

Nicholas accepted the challenge. He couldn't punish those three other teasers -not at the moment, at any rate – so he would wreak his wrath on this one. They all must be in cahoots, anyway.

What was that old sign? – In Case of Fire, Walk, Do Not Run, Toward ... Well, he was afire right now, and the sign had it just backwards.

He ran, rather than walked, toward the redhead.

She snatched a silver poker from the set beside the fire, losing her bikini top in the act, drew the poker back in mock threat – and hit the andirons, from which silver bells hung.

As Nicholas slid to a stop, sight blacked-out and skull tormented by tinkling, the floor under his bare feet turned from warm flagstones to something cold, wet, and squishy. Instantly he was thinking of mold and ooze and snakes and other crawlers – all the death-thoughts that had been haunting him from the dark side of his mind, while these infuriating girls tormented and obsessed the bright side.

But then the tinkling in his ears was replaced by a curiously familiar roaring. His eyes cleared and he saw it was that of a shower cascading down fiercely from a nickel fixture in the ceiling toward a slotted nickel drain met below in a floor of hexagonal white tiles. The gray carpeting was wet for yards around from the splashing and he was standing on the edge of the wet area.

A pink ghost was in the shower. Emerging, it became a curvy strawberry blonde who instantly snatched from the standing rack and clutched around her a brown bath towel. Orange light from heat lamps set in the ceiling did charming things to her skin. She looked at Nicholas with an expression of intense but not unhappy and very special surprise – the sort of look a woman seldom wastes on husbands and wandering electricians, but reserves for handsome secret agents on the prowl and – at a pinch – racing car drivers. Then came the familiar inviting smile.

But Nicholas had become extremely suspicious of inviting smiles. He wondered why none of these frustrating girls ever spoke to him – or he to them for that matter. Because they'd all been expecting him?

He didn't make a move. He felt very much four times bitten, five times shy. He also began to wonder if he'd just missed touching not four, but, say, four hundred girls – and consciously, but not subconsciously, forgotten the rest. He
felt
that frustrated and, looking back, there'd been a silver bell dinning in his ears when he first woke sitting on the white satin coverlet.

What the Devil was behind these peculiar frustrations? – he asked himself, deliberately keeping his attention off the strawberry blonde with the towel. He'd offended some girls in his life, hurt the feelings of others, perhaps even slightly cracked a heart or two – but surely these things didn't amount to enough to get a whole team of girls plotting to drive him mad. Besides, practical jokers didn't build rooms the area of cities – not even if they had the bankrolls of international financiers or last-century kings. A dream? – but he'd never had a dream with one-hundredth the Technicolor, definition, and sound-fidelity. Had his psychiatrist been feeding him LSD or mescalin? That seemed a better bet, but he hadn't seen Dr. Obermann for more than a year, if he could trust his memory. Besides, Dr. Obermann was -

He didn't complete that thought. Once again, sudden rage had filled him. Some day, he told himself, he would catch these devilish girls, preferably all five together, and then ...

With an effort he made himself think rationally again. How the Hell long would these peculiar and painful frustrations go on? Gazing around the enormous bedroom with its Milky Way of distant lamps, he seemed to glimpse the faint spectral forms of innumerable girls – blondes, brunettes, redheads, oddballs with blue and greenish locks, girls in sables and girls in shirts, girls stepping out of skirts or unbuttoning blouses or pulling sweaters over their heads, girls cross-legged on rumpled beds, sprawled on overstuffed furniture, straddling wire-backed with their forearms resting on the topmost loop of wire – there was no numbering the variety of their poses and stages of undress. Was he doomed to be frustrated by all of them? Until girls meant no more to him than grasshoppers? A voyeur's paradise – but Nicholas was discovering that unrelieved voyeurism can become more tiring than making love.

The ghost girls dimmed and faded entirely – if they had ever been anything more than imagination – leaving the infinite gray surround bare except for the strawberry blonde in front of the shower.

Nicholas tried furiously to resist – these frustrations were enragingly humiliating -but her smile became super-inviting, she kept almost losing her brown towel, and finally he yielded to the irresistible – though this time he moved forward without a grain of hope, despite the great seeming hope in the water-dewed girl's eyes.

He rationalized it by telling himself that it was interesting and even educational to see, even if very briefly, some of the intimate construction – details of such a variety of young females.

Besides, he was curious as to where the devilish bell was hidden this time.

It was hanging, of course, from the shower head, previously hidden (and its tinkling muted) by the sizzling water. The blackout and skull-scream that seized him when she flicked it with her towel were quite as black and tormenting as any that had gone before.

Then he was moving slowly but compulsively toward a slim coffee-and-cream girl whose large brown eyes stared at him with a mysterious impassiveness. To one side of her was a cluster of bright violet globes, to the other a four-foot bronze arch supporting a yard-wide dark bronze gong with black leather-padded striker hanging beside it. The gong had enameled on it a curious design of red flames.

The girl stood absolutely motionless, her legs straddled and her arms zigzagged in a pose from a Siamese dance. She wore a silver girdle and breast cups of silver filigree, a silver turban was wound round her head, silver slave bracelets weighted her wrists, while from her ankles dangled clusters of tiny silver bells.

Why, this time the plotters weren't even taking the trouble to hide them! The girl had only to shake a foot and he'd be off again into blackout and pain and the next frustration.

Nicholas suddenly sat down on the gray carpeting and locked his hands around his knees. He'd be damned if he'd let himself be tricked again.

Damned?

He looked at his queer wrist watch. It was still stuck at eighteen to four, with the sweep second hand motionless and the two other downward-beating black hands looking like the wings of a bat coming out of Hell.

Hell?

What was his mind trying to tell him?

The brown eyes of the girl in the silver-filigree bikini brightened. She began to dance languorously with the upper half of her body. Momently Nicholas expected her legs to move, just a little, and the ankle-bell to tinkle, but her control was perfect. Grimly Nicholas held still himself, refusing to budge from his spot. To keep himself from going batty, he imagined in great detail what he could do to these six girls when he caught them without their bells. There was one fantasy in which, dressed as little girls, they sat obediently at desks too small for them, while he, with a supply of willow switches and other academic instruments of correction at hand, lectured them interminably on all topics from human anatomy to the Spanish Inquisition.

Nicholas' control was not perfect. The physical effects of such imaginings, added to the posturings of the coffee-and-cream girl, were slow in coming, but they came. His desire slowly rekindled, became overpowering. In an effort to surprise the silent danger, he tried to spring up swiftly, but his legs had become stiff and kinky and he stumbled.

The dancer's brown eyes grew very bright. Still without stirring her ankles, she reached out and lifted the leather-padded striker and struck the fire-emblazoned gong on its very center.

The gong's note was deep as the grave and its vibrations bone-shaking. Nicholas felt them battering him into insensibility. His fury fought back at this clubbing with sound waves, but that only made the pain worse. And this time his blackout was twice as black.