Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions (14 page)

"I won't," she said, folding her arms at waist height, which made a frame for her breast pockets.

"Very well!" he blustered, well aware that he knew nothing whatever of the system whereby Dr. Obermann had enforced the obedience of Miss Diable, or if there had been such a system. "Very well, then I'll do it for myself. Don't think I can't; the colors are seared on my memory: rose, green, blue, yellow, orange, violet. And I earlier noted a line of buttons of those hues." He studied the panel briefly. "Ah, here they are! Now, Miss Diable," he said, turning to her triumphantly, "are you going to fetch me the dossiers – and medals! – and explain to me customary procedures, or am I simply going to press this rose button?"

She stood straight no longer, but crouched like a cat, her green eyes glaring. "So you insist," she hissed, "that I demonstrate to you that you are not all-powerful. Very well, be it on your own head – or tail, if that's the way you happen to land!"

In one blur of movement, she seized the hour-glass on the desk and tipped it almost on its side, so that the trickle of sand nearly stopped, became the barest sliding of one or two grains at a time.

Nicholas was instantly paralyzed. His right forefinger, already touching the rose button, could not exert an atom of force against it.

At the same time the room around him grew dim, so that he saw it only as a shadow, while at the same time he found himself in another room, lit with burningly hot white lights. Here he was one of a considerable group of men and a few women crouched around a very large circular table. Each of them had the look of a high executive, a master of men, yet each was obviously in a state of pitiable shock, apprehension, and terror. In the center of the table squatted an obscene monster, half man, half dragon, with a barbed black tail and burningly red eyes. It was the size of a medium tank. It was clearly giving all the upper-crust underlings, all the presumable department heads, a dreadful tongue-lashing – both figuratively (in a voice like an orchestra of drums, sirens, machine-guns, and cannon) and literally (with a very long barbed black tongue that snaked out from between slabby lips and yellowed fangs to flog the backs of super-folk screeching out pain and promises.)

Through this tumult Nicholas could still hear the voice of Miss Diable saying meaningfully, "Now you understand that Dr. Obermann was in somewhat the same position as you were down below. A considerably worse position, in fact. You are witnessing one of the 'worlds of mystic enjoyment in which he refreshed himself,' as Dr. Obermann somewhat falsely described it. Now, will you return and behave like a sensible executive, running your department under my guidance in such a way as to avoid such rebukes and admonitions as you are now witnessing? –
and will you stop nattering about those six girls
? – or would you rather I turned the hour-glass fully on its side for a period of, say–"

The very long, very barbed black tongue was already lashing the man beside Nicholas – an executive giant with the build of a football guard, who cowered weeping and bleating.

"I promise!" Nicholas called loudly. "I promise, dear Miss Diable! I'll never mention those six girls again. All my animosities have vanished, I assure you. It's quite impossible to maintain them in this atmosphere. Just be quick! I promise ... on my hour-glass!"

The hateful bright room vanished. The black room returned. Nicholas collapsed into the black swivel chair. Miss Diable smiled at him in gentle triumph until his shaking had abated, then seated herself again upon his knee.

Interweaving her fingers behind his neck, she said softly, "My dear Nick, I knew you'd be sensible when you understood the realities of the situation."

Yielding gracefully to the inevitable, Nicholas embraced her in turn. "I am sure you are quite the loveliest fiend in all Hell," he murmured. "Quite the most charming she-devil in all Gehenna. I cannot imagine how I could ever, while looking at you, have had a single thought of any of those miserable little damned girls down there."

"They are miserable, aren't they?" she agreed, yawning. "So miserable, in fact, that I feel no jealousy of them at all. In fact, if you're especially nice to me, over an extended period, I might let you look at one or two of their dossiers and even experiment with the buttons a bit, on long boresome afternoons."

"Darling," he said, embracing her with renewed enthusiasm and adding with almost complete sincerity, "The only buttons I am remotely interested in are yours. If I should press the one on your belt again and at the same time the one I can feel through your skirt at the base of your spine–"

Her lips burned, her tongue was a flame, her slim body through the unthreading seams of her black suit was like fire – almost.

 

 

 

BLACK GLASS

 

ON A CHILLY SATURDAY IN LATE AUTUMN last year I was walking slowly east on Forty-second Street in New York, threading my way through the somewhat raunchy throngs and noting with some wonder and more depression the changes a quarter-century had made in the super-metropolis (I'd visited the city several times recently, staying in Greenwich Village and Chelsea, but this was the first time in more than twenty years that I'd walked any distance across midtown Manhattan), when there was borne in on me the preponderance of black glass as a facing material in the newer skyscrapers, as though they were glisteningly robing themselves for an urban funeral -perhaps their own.

Well, there was justification enough for that, I told myself with a bitter smile, what with the grime, the smog, the general filth and pollution, garbage strikes, teachers' strikes, the municipal universities retrenching desperately, municipal financing tottering near bankruptcy, crime in the growling, snarling streets where the taxi drivers, once famed for their wise-guy loquacity, were silent now, each in his front-seat fort, communicating with his passenger only by voice tube and payment slit. For two blocks now I'd been passing nothing but narrow houses showing X-rated films with an emphasis on torture, interspersed with pornographic bookstores, leather shops, hardware stores displaying racks of knives, a few seedy drug and cigar stores, and garish junk-food bars.

Did my gloomy disapproval of all this reflect nothing but my piled-up years? I asked myself. (Those around me were mostly young, though with knowing eyes and used-looking flesh.) I'd reached the age where the rest of life is mostly downhill and more and more alone, when you know that what you haven't gotten already you most likely will never get – or be able to enjoy if you do, and when your greatest insights are apt to transform next moment into the most banal clichés, and then back again and forth still once more, bewildering. And just lately I'd tried and failed to write a book of memoirs and personal philosophy – I'd set out to make a net to capture the universe and ended by creating a cage for my solitary self. Had New York City really changed at all? For example, hadn't Times Square, across which I was now pressing, been for the last seventy-five years a mass of gigantic trick advertisements flaring aloft – monstrous ruby lips that puffed real smoke, brown bottles big as tank cars pouring unending streams of grainy electric whisky? Yes, but then they had evoked wonder and amusement; the illusions had been fun; now they got only a bored acceptance and a dark resentment at the establishment power they represented; the violence seething just below the surface in the city was as real as the filth upon that surface, and the skyscrapers had reason to foresee doom and robe themselves in black.

Of course the glass wasn't really black – an opaque black – although it looked like that from the outside. But when you went inside (as I now did, through revolving doors, into the spacious lobby of the Telephone Building at Forty-second and Sixth Avenue), you saw at once it was only somewhat dusky, as if a swift-traveling storm cloud had blotted out the sun while you were going in. Or as if (it occurred to me with a twinge of fear) the small gray churning edged shadow in my left eye were expanding out to cover the whole visual field – and invading my right eye also. (I'd discovered that evidence of retinal degeneration a year ago, and the optical surgeon had treated it with skillfully aimed bursts of laser light, whose pinpoint cautery had scarred the diseased tissue, arresting the shadow's spread – but for dreary weeks I'd anticipated going blind and practiced for that by feeling my way around my room for an hour each day with my eyes shut tight.)

Now through the dusky glass I saw a young woman in a dark green cloak and gloves and jaunty visored cap pulled down – it was a chilly day, foreshadowing winter -striding along purposefully in the direction I'd been going, and her example inspired me to shake off my dismal thoughts, push out through the dizzying doors, and follow after. I enjoyed passing iron-fenced Bryant Park with its winter-dark bushes and grass, although the wind bit keenly – at least there were no neon promises of sick thrills, no violet-glowing mercury-vapor commands to buy. And then I came to the great Public Library at Fifth Avenue, which always gives me a lift with its semblance of being an island of disinterested intelligence in a dingy, commercial sea – although today, in tune with the times, a small scattered crowd encircled a swarthy man juggling flaming torches on the library's broad steps (encourage local street artists! – it promotes integration) while the two proud stone lions flanking the wide entry seemed to look away disdainfully. Some skinny children ran around the northern one, two rangy blacks conversing earnestly rested themselves against its side, and then my striding young woman in green, coming suddenly out of a crowd, passed in front of the lion, but as she did so, she briefly paused with face averted and laid her hand upon its mane in a gesture that was at once compassionate and commanding and even had an odd and faintly sinister note of ritual. I knew I was being imaginative to read so much into a stranger's gesture seen at a distance, but it nevertheless struck me as being somehow
important
.

She had reversed directions on me, going back toward Sixth, and once more I took my cue from her for my own strolling. I wasn't following her with any real intentness, or at least that's what I told myself then – why, I hadn't even glimpsed her face either time – but I did want to see more of those black glass buildings, and they had seemed to cluster most thickly north on Sixth. At any rate, by the time I'd reached Sixth again, I'd lost sight of her, though I somehow had the impression she'd turned north there.

I reminded myself it isn't called Sixth any more, but been rather grandiosely renamed the Avenue of the Americas. Though really it's the same old knock-about Sixth that once had an elevated and then was forever being dug up. And it's still Sixth underground – the Sixth Avenue IND subway.

I found enough black glass as I wended north, peering upward like a hick, to delight my sense of the grotesque. After New York Telephone there was RCA Corporation and Bankers Trust and West Side Federal Savings and W.R. Grace and Company, where the dark glass sloped, and the Stevens Tower, where the black facings were separated by gravestone pale verticals. And at 1166 they had black glass with
stars
, by God (but why were green faceless people painted on the wooden facing masking the lobby they were rebuilding there? Here be mysteries, I thought.)

But all the time that I was playing my game with the buildings, I was aware of a not altogether pleasant change that had begun to take place in the scene around me after I'd looked out of the lobby of the Telephone Building and seen the day suddenly darken. That darkening effect had kept up after I'd got outside, as if the afternoon were drawing to an end sooner than it should, or as if – melodramatic fantasy! – an inky infection were spreading from the pernicious black glass to the air and space around it. The farther north I pressed, block by block, the more I noticed it, as though I were penetrating deeper and deeper into some realm of not altogether unfrightening mystery.

As for the girl in green, although I once or twice thought I'd caught sight of her a block or so ahead, I made no effort to catch up with her and verify my guess (or see her face.) So she could hardly be responsible for the darkly romantic element (the feeling of playing with mysterious dangers) that had entered my fantasies. Or so I believed at the time.

And then I found I'd arrived at Rockefeller Plaza, where the black tried to disguise itself with dim silvery verticals, and the game became by degrees a little more somber and frightening. I think the transition occurred at the Pool of the Planets. I noted that oddly but not unpleasantly jarring feature (in the midst of the metropolitan commercial, the cosmic) down in a sunken court. I was instantly attracted and descended by means of broad gray granite steps. Nearby were chaste advertisements for a municipal theater offering something called "The New York Experience," which somehow struck me a bit comically, as though London should announce it was going to impersonate London. And there were other features which I have forgotten.

The pool itself was dark and very shallow, perfectly circular and quite wide, and from it rose on slender metal stems, all at their proper distances from the center and in their proper sizes, amazingly, as far as I could determine, the spheres of the planets done in some darkened silver metal and blackish brass. Simple inset plates of the same metals gave the names, symbols, dimensions, and distances. Truly, a charming conceit, but with sinister touches (the theme of darkening, the idea of the planets emerging from, or menaced by, a great unknown sea in space), so that when I finally turned away from it and especially when I'd mounted the stairs again to the sidewalk, I was not altogether surprised to find the scene around me altered still further. The people seemed to have grown fewer and I was unaccountably hesitant to look at their faces, and it had grown much, much darker – a sort of grainy blackness sprinkled everywhere – so that for the first time in months I felt for a moment in sharpest intensity the fear I'd had a year ago of going blind, while in my mind, succeeding each other rapidly, there unrolled a series of very brief darting visions: of New York and its high-rises drowned in a black sea, of the girl in green whirling on me and showing under her cap's visor no face at all, of the northern library lion coming suddenly awake at memory of the girl's touch (post-hypnotic command?) and shaking his pale mane and suppling his stony flanks and setting out after us, the pads of his paws grating on the steps and sidewalk, like giant's chalk – those fugitive visions and a dozen like them, such as the mind only gets when it's absorbing presentations from inner space at top speed, too many to remember.