Collected fiction, p.418
Collected Fiction, page 418
“It’s a nice little cottage, isn’t it?” Jackie said, her voice quavering. “They must be such little guys—”
“Guys?”
“Birds. Eddie, who lives in that house?”
“Well,” I said. I took out my automatic pencil, gently inserted it between the bars of the cage, and poked at an open window, where the shade snapped up. From within the house something like the needlebeam of a miniature flashlight shot into my eye, blinding me with its brilliance. As I grunted and jerked back, I heard a window slam and the shade come down again.
“Did you see what happened?”
“No, your head was in the way. But—”
As we looked, the lights went out. Only the thin smoke curling from the chimney indicated that anything was going on.
“Mr. Henchard’s a mad scientist,” Jackie muttered. “He shrinks people.”
“Not without an atom-smasher,” I said. “Every mad scientist’s got to have an atom-smasher to make artificial lightning.”
I put my pencil between the bars again. I aimed carefully, pressed the point against the doorbell, and rang. A thin shrilling was heard.
The shade at one of the windows by the door was twitched aside hastily, and something probably looked at me. I don’t know. I wasn’t quick enough to see it. The shade fell back in place, and there was no more movement. I rang the bell till I got tired of it. Then I stopped.
“I could take the cage apart,” I said.
“Oh, no! Mr. Henchard—”
“Well,” I said, “when he comes back, I’m going to ask him what the hell. He can’t keep pixies. It isn’t in the lease.”
“He doesn’t have a lease,” Jackie countered.
I examined the little house in the bird cage. No sound, no movement. Smoke coming from the chimney.
After all, we had no right to break into the cage. Housebreaking? I had visions of a little green man with wings flourishing a night-stick, arresting me for burglary. Did pixies have cops? What sort of crimes . . .
I put the cover back on the cage. After a while, vague noises emerged. Scrape. Thump. Rustle, rustle, rustle. Pop. And an unbirdlike trilling that broke off short.
“Oh, my,” Jackie said. “Let’s go away quick.”
We went right to bed. I dreamed of a horde of little green guys in Mack Sennett cop uniforms, dancing on a bilious rainbow and singing gaily.——.
The alarm clock woke me. I showered, shaved and dressed, thinking of the same thing Jackie was thinking of. As we put on our coats, I met her eyes and said, “Shall we?”
“Yes. Oh, golly, Eddie! D-do you suppose they’ll be leaving for work, too?”
“What sort of work?” I inquired angrily. “Painting buttercups?”
There wasn’t a sound from beneath the cretonne when we tiptoed into Mr. Henchard’s room. Morning sunlight blazed through the window. I jerked the cover off. There was the house. One of the blinds was up; all the rest were tightly firm. I put my head close to the cage and stared through the bars into the open window, where scraps of chintz curtains were blowing in the breeze.
I saw a great big eye looking back at me.
This time Jackie was certain I’d got my mortal wound.
The breath went out of her with a whoosh as I caromed back, yelling about a horrible blood-shot eye that wasn’t human. We clutched each other for a while and then I looked again.
“Oh,” I said, rather faintly. “It’s a mirror.”
“A mirror?” she gasped.
“Yeah, a big one, on the opposite wall. That’s all I can see. I can’t get close enough to the window.
“Look on the porch,” Jackie said.
I looked. There was a milk bottle standing by the door—you can guess the size of it. It was purple. Beside it was a folded postage stamp.
“Purple milk?” I said. “From a purple cow. Or else the bottle’s colored. Eddie, is that a newspaper?”
It was. I strained my eyes to read the headlines. EXTRA was splashed redly across the sheet, in huge letters nearly a sixteenth of an inch high. EXTRA—FOTZPA MOVES ON TUR! That was all we could make out.
I put the cretonne gently back over the cage. We went down to Terry’s for breakfast while we waited for the bus.
When we rode home that night, we knew what our first job would be. We let ourselves into the house, discovered that Mr. Henchard hadn’t come back yet, switched on the light in his room, and listened to the noises from the bird cage.
“Music,” Jackie said.
It was so faint I scarcely heard it, and, in any case, it wasn’t real music. I can’t begin to describe it. And it died away immediately. Thump, scrape, pop, buzz. Then silence, and I pulled off the cover.
The house was dark, the windows were shut, the blinds were down. Paper and milk bottle were gone from the porch. On the front door was a sign that said—after I used a magnifying glass: QUARANTINE! SCOPPY FEVER!
“Why, the little liars,” I said. “I bet they haven’t got scoppy fever at all.”
Jackie giggled wildly. “You only get scoppy fever in April, don’t you?”
“April and Christmas. That’s when the bread-and-butter flies carry it. Where’s my pencil?”
I rang the bell. A shade twitched aside, flipped back; neither of us had seen the—hand?—that moved it. Silence; no smoke coming out of the chimney.
“Scared?” I asked.
“No. It’s funny, but I’m not. They’re such standoffish little guys. The Cabots speak only to—”
“Where the pixies speak only to goblins, you mean,” I said. “They can’t snoot us this way. It’s our house their house is in, if you follow me.”
“What can we do?”
I manipulated the pencil, and, with considerable difficulty, wrote LET US IN on the white panel of the door. There wasn’t room for more than that. Jackie tsked.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have written that. We don’t want to get in. We just want to see them.”
“Too late now. Besides, they’ll know what we mean.”
We stood watching the house in the bird cage, and it watched us, in a sullen and faintly annoyed fashion. SCOPPY FEVER, indeed!
That was all that happened that night The next morning we found that the tiny front door had been scrubbed clean of my pencil marks, that the quarantine sign was still there, and that there was a bottle of green milk and another paper on the porch. This time the headline said: EXTRA—FOTZPA OVERSHOOTS TUR!
Smoke was idling from the chimney. I rang the bell again. No answer. I noticed a domino of a mailbox by the door, chiefly because I could see through the slot that there were letters inside. But the thing was locked.
“If we could see whom they were addressed to—” Jackie suggested.
“Or whom they’re from. That’s what interests me.” Finally, we went to work. I was preoccupied all day, and nearly welded my thumb onto a boogie-arm. When I met Jackie that night, I could see that she’d been bothered, too.
“Let’s ignore them,” she said as we bounced home on the bus. “We know when we’re not wanted, don’t we?”
“I’m not going to be high-hatted by a—by a critter. Besides, we’ll both go quietly nuts if we don’t find out what’s inside that house. Do you suppose Mr. Henchard’s a wizard?”
“He’s a louse,” Jackie said bitterly. “Going off and leaving ambiguous pixies on our hands!”
When we got home, the little house in the bird cage took alarm, as usual, and by the time we’d yanked off the cover, the distant, soft noises had faded into silence. Lights shone through the drawn blinds. The porch had only the mat on it. In the mailbox we could see the yellow envelope of a telegram.
Jackie turned pale. “It’s the last straw,” she insisted. “A telegram!”
“It may not be.”
“It is, it is, I know it is. Aunt Tinker Bell’s dead. Or Iolanthe’s coming for a visit.”
“The quarantine sign’s off the door,” I said. “There’s a new one. It says ‘wet paint.’ ”
“Well, you will scribble all over their nice clean door.”
I put the cretonne back, turned off the light-switch, and took Jackie’s hand. We stood waiting. After a time something went bump-bump-bump, and then there was a singing, like a tea-kettle. I heard a tiny clatter.
Next morning there were twenty-six bottles of yellow milk—bright yellow—on the tiny porch, and the Lilliputian headline announced: EXTRA—TUR SLIDES TOWARD FOTZ-PA! There was mail in the box, too, but the telegram was gone.
That night things continued much as before. When I pulled the cloth off there was a sudden, furious silence. We felt that we were being watched around the corners of the miniature shades. We finally went to bed, but in the middle of the night I got up and took another look at our mysterious tenants. Not that I saw them, of course. But they must have been throwing a party, for bizarre, small music and wild thumps and pops died into silence as I peeked.
In the morning there was a red bottle and a newspaper on the little porch. The headline said: EXTRA—FOTZPA GOES UP!
“My work’s going to the dogs,” I said. “I can’t concentrate for thinking about this business—and wondering . . .”
“Me, too. We’ve got to find out somehow.”
I peeked. A shade came down so sharply that it almost tore free from its roller.
“Do you think they’re mad?” I asked.
“Yes,” Jackie said, “I do. We must be bothering the very devil out of ’em. Look—I’ll bet they’re sitting inside by the windows, boiling mad, waiting for us to go away. Maybe we’d better go. It’s time for the bus anyway.”
I looked at the house, and the house, I felt, looked at me with an air of irritated arid resentful fury. Oh, well. We went to work.
We were tired and hungry when we got back that night, but even before removing our coats we went into Mr. Henchard’s room. Silence. I switched on the light while Jackie pulled off the cretonne cover from the cage.
I heard her gasp. Instantly I jumped forward, expecting to see a little green guy on that absurd porch—or anything, for that matter. I saw nothing unusual. There was no smoke coming from the chimney.
But Jackie was pointing to the front door. There was a neat, painted sign tacked to the panel. It said, very sedately, simply, and finally: TO LET.
“Oh, oh, oh!” Jackie said.
I gulped. All the shades were up in the tiny windows and the chintz curtains were gone. We could see into the house for the first time. It was completely and awfully empty.
No furniture, anywhere. Nothing at all but a few scrapes and scratches on the polished hardwood floor. The wallpaper was scrupulously clean; the patterns, in the various rooms, were subdued and in good taste. The tenants had left their house in order.
“They moved,” I said.
“Yes,” Jackie murmured. “They moved out.”
All of a sudden I felt lousy. The house—not the tiny one in the cage, but our own—was awfully empty. You know how it is when you’ve been on a visit, and come home into a place that’s full of nothing and nobody?
I grabbed Jackie and held her tight. She felt pretty bad, too. You wouldn’t think that a tiny TO LET sign could make so much difference.
“What’ll Mr. Henchard say?” Jackie asked, watching me with big eyes.
Mr. Henchard came home two nights later. We were sitting by the fire when he walked in, his Gladstone swinging, the black cigarette holder jutting from below his beak. “Mph,” he greeted us.
“Hello,” I said weakly. “Glad you’re back.”
“Claptrap!” said Mr. Henchard firmly as he headed for his room. Jackie and I looked at one another.
Mr. Henchard squalled in sheer fury. His twisted face appeared around the door.
“Busybodies!” he snarled. “I told you—”
“Wait a minute,” I said.
“I’m moving out!” Mr. Henchard barked. “Now!” His head popped back out of sight; the door slammed and locked. Jackie and I waited, half expecting to be spanked.
Mr. Henchard bounced out of his room, Gladstone suspended from one hand. He whirled past us toward the door. I tried to stop him. “Mr. Henchard—”
“Claptrap!”
Jackie pulled one arm, I got a grip on the other. Between us, we managed to bring him to a stop.
“Wait,” I said. “You’ve forgotten your—uh—bird cage.”
“That’s what you think,” he snarled at me. “You can have it. Meddlers! It took me months to build that little house just right, and months more to coax ’em to live in it. Now you’ve spoiled it. They won’t be back.”
“Who?” Jackie gulped.
His beady eyes were fixed malignantly on us. “My tenants. I’ll have to build a new house now—ha! But this time I won’t leave it within reach of meddlers.”
“Wait,” I said. “Are—are you a m-magician?”
Mr. Henchard snorted. “I’m a good craftsman. That’s all it takes. You treat them right, and they’ll treat you right. Still—” And he gleamed a bit with pride. “—it isn’t everybody who knows how to build the right sort of house for them!”
He seemed to be softening, but my next question aroused him again.
“What were they?” he snapped. “The Little Folk, of course. Call ’em what you like. Nixie, pixie, leprechaun, brownie—they’ve had lots of names. But they want a quiet, respectable neighborhood to live in, not a lot of peeping and prying. Gives the property a bad name. No wonder they moved out! And—mph!—they paid their rent on time, too. Still, the Little Folk always do,” he added.
“Rent?” Jackie said faintly.
“Luck,” Mr. Henchard said. “Good luck. What did you expect they’d pay in—money? Now I’ll have to build another house to get my special luck back.”
He gave us one parting glare, jerked open the door, and stamped out. We stood looking after him. The bus was pulling into the gas station down the slope, and Mr. Henchard broke into a run.
He caught the bus, all right, but only after he’d fallen flat on his face.
I put my arm around Jackie.
“Oh, gosh,” she said. “His bad luck’s working already.”
“Not bad,” I pointed out. “Just normal. When you rent a little house to pixies, you get a lot of extra good luck.”
We sat in silence, watching each other. Finally without saying a word, we went into Mr. Henchard’s vacated room, the bird cage was still there. So was the house. So was the TO LET sign.
“Let’s go to Terry’s,” I said.
We stayed later than usual. Anybody would have thought we didn’t want to go home because we lived in a haunted house. Except that in our case the exact opposite was true. Our house wasn’t haunted any more. It was horribly, desolately, coldly vacant.
I didn’t say anything till we’d crossed the highway, climbed the slope, and unlocked our front door. We went, I don’t know why, for a final look at the empty house. The cover was back on the cage, where I’d replaced it, but thump, rustle, pop! The house was tenanted again!
We backed out and closed the door before we breathed.
“No,” Jackie said. “We mustn’t look. We mustn’t ever, ever, look under that cover.”
“Never,” I said. “Who do you suppose . . .”
We caught a very faint murmur of what seemed to be boisterous singing. That was fine. The happier they were, the longer they’d stay. When we went to bed, I dreamed that I was drinking beer with Rip Van Winkle and the dwarfs. I drank ’em all under the table.
It was unimportant that the next morning was rainy. We were convinced that bright yellow sunlight was blazing in through the windows. I sang under the shower. Jackie burbled inarticulately and joyously. We didn’t open Mr. Henchard’s door.
“Maybe they want to sleep late,” I said.
It’s always noisy in the machine-shop, and a hand-truck load of rough cylinder casings going past doesn’t increase the din noticeably. At three o’clock that afternoon, one of the boys was rolling the stuff along toward the storeroom and I didn’t hear it or see it until I’d stepped back from my planer, cocking my eye at its adjustment.
Those big planers are minor juggernauts. They have to be bedded in concrete, in heavy thigh-high cradles on which a heavily weighted metal monster—the planer itself—slides back and forth.
I stepped back, saw the hand-truck coming, and made a neat waltz turn to get out of its way. The boy with the hand-truck swerved, the cylinders began to fall out, and I took an unbalanced waltz step that ended with my smacking my thighs against the edge of the cradle and doing a neat, suicidal half-somersault. When I landed, I was jammed into the metal cradle, looking at the planer as it zoomed down on me. I’ve never in my life seen anything move so fast.
It was all over before I knew it. I was struggling to bounce myself out, men were yelling, the planer was bellowing with blood-thirsty triumph, and the cylinder heads were rolling around underfoot all over the place. Then there was the crackling, tortured crash of gears and cams going to pieces. The planer stopped. My heart started.
After I’d changed my clothes, I waited for Jackie to knock off. Rolling home on the bus, I told her about it. “Pure dumb luck. Or else a miracle. One of those cylinders bounced into the planer in just the right place. The planer’s a mess, but I’m not. I think we ought to write a note of thanks to our—uh—tenants.”
Jackie nodded with profound conviction. “It’s the luck they pay their rent in, Eddie. I’m glad they paid in advance, too!”
“Except that I’m off the payroll till the planer’s fixed,” I said.
We went home through a storm. We could hear a banging in Mr. Henchard’s room, louder than any noise that had ever come from the bird cage. We rushed upstairs and found the casement windows had come open. I closed it. The cretonne cover had been half blown off the cage, and I started to pull it back in place. Jackie was beside me. We looked at the tiny house; my hand didn’t complete its gesture. The TO LET sign had been removed from the door. The chimney was smoking greasily. The blinds were tightly down, as usual, but there were other changes.
