Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

The someone was certainly not the down-at-heels fellow with a homemade crutch who, pointing the crutch at this last bill, enquired, “Do you know what you’d get if you crossed a pig with a Vloxfellow?” And, answering his own question, replied, “A dirty pig.” And waited for the laugh.

“Be off with you,” said Lobats, curtly. The loafer slunk away.

There was even a bill in French.

POLLY CHARMS

SLEEPING WOMAN

ANSWERS QUESTIONS!

MOST REMARKABLE!

SLEEPING BEAUTY

30 YEARS SLUMBER 30

ENGLISHWOMAN!!!!

VERY UNUSUAL SIGHT!

DOES SHE ANSWER FROM THE WORLD OF THE

LIVING OF THE DEAD????? COME! AND! SEE!!!

And so on. And so on.

The fat old woman at the ticket window, with dyed hair and wearing the traditional red velveteen dress split under the arms, smiled fawningly at them.

“Permit,” said Lobats, putting out his hand.

Nodding rapidly, she reached up to where a multitude of papers hung from a wire on clothespins, took one down, examined it, returned it, took another down, gave it a peep, nodded even more rapidly, and handed it out the window.

“Very well, Frow Grigou,” said Lobats, handing it back. “Two tickets, please,” putting coins on the counter.

Frow Grigou, instead of nodding her head, now began to shake it rapidly, and pushed the money back, smiling archly. “Guests, the High-born Gentlemen, our guests, oh no no oh no—”

Lobats turned as red as Frow Grigou’s dress. “ Tickets! ” he growled. “Take the money. Take the—”

She took it this time, and hastily, extending the tickets, her head now rocking slowly from side to side, still smiling archly, but now with a puzzled note added, as though the insistence on paying for admission were some bit of odd behavior, which required the indulgence of the tolerant. “Always glad to see,” she gobbled, her voice dying away behind them as they walked the short, dusty hall, “… High-born Gents…law-abiding…delighted …”

Only one of the five or six functioning gas jets inside the Exhibition Room had a mantle, and at least two of the others suffered a malfunction which caused them to bob up and down whenever a dray went by in the street; the light was therefore both inadequate and uncertain. And a soft voice now came from out of the dimness, saying, “Billet? Billet?”

Nature had formed the man who now came forward to look noble, but something else had re-formed him to look furtive. His head was large, his features basically handsome, with long and white side whiskers neatly trimmed so that not a hair straggled, but the head itself was completely hairless, with not even a fringe. The head was canted to one side, and the man looked at them out of the corner of one faded-blue eye as he took the tickets. Eszterhazy, almost as though automatically, and rather slowly, reached over and placed the tips of his fingers upon the man’s head and ran them lightly over the surface…for just a moment …

Then he pulled them away, as though they had been burned.

“A phrenologist,” the man murmured in English, indulgently, almost contemptuously.

“Among other things,” said Eszterhazy, also in English.

A horrid change came over the man’s face; his haggard and quasi-noble features dissolved into a flux of tics and grimaces. Once or twice his mouth opened and closed. Then, “Come right in, gentlemen, the exhibition will commence almost any moment now,” he said, unevenly, in a mixture of terrible French and broken German. And, “… one of the most remarkable phenomena of the age, ” he whispered, again in English. Then he seemed to fall in upon himself, his head bowed down, his shoulders hunched, and he turned away from them in a curious twisting motion.

Lobats looked with a quizzical face to Eszterhazy and observed with astonishment and concern that his companion was — even in that dim and fitful light — gone pale and drawn, jaw thrust outwards and downward in a grimace which might have been — had it been someone else, anyone else — fright …

But, in a moment, face and man were the same as before, save that the man had swiftly taken out a silken pocket handkerchief, wiped his face, and as swiftly returned it. And before Lobats had time to say one word, a thin and almost eerie sound announced a gramophone had added its “note scientific” to the atmosphere. It took a few seconds, during which a group of newcomers, evidently mostly clerks and such who were taking advantage of their luncheon-time, entered the room…it took a few seconds for one to recognize, over the sudden clatter and chatter, that the gramophone was offering a song in French.

Strange and curious were the words, and curious and strange the voice.

Few of those present, clearly, understood the words, yet all were somehow moved. Obscure the burden, the message unclear; the voice seemed moreover odd, unearthly, and grotesque through the transposition of the primitive machine: yet the effect was as beautiful as it was uncanny.

Lobats dug his companion in the ribs gently and in a hoarse whisper asked, “What is it?”

“It is one of the occult, or alchemical, sonnets of the Count of Saint-Germain…if he was…who lived at least two hundred years…if he did,” Eszterhazy said, low-voiced.

Once more the voice — high and clear as that of a child, strong as that of a man — took up the refrain.

The Commissioner uttered an exclamation. “Now I know! I remember hearing — was years ago — an Italian singer—”

“—Yes—”

“He was a…a…a whatchemaycallit…one of them —”

“A castrato. Yes …”

Once more, and for the last time, the voice, between that of men and women, soared up, magnificent, despite all distortion, from the great, curling cornucopia of the gramophone horn.

The moment’s silence which followed the end of the song was broken by another and more earthly voice, and one well-enough known to both Eszterhazy and Lobats. It was that of one Dougherty, a supposed political exile of many years’ residence in Bella. From time to time one came upon him in unfashionable coffeehouses, or establishments where stronger drink was served. Sometimes the man was writing something; sometimes he explained that it was part of a book which he was writing, and sometimes he explained nothing, but scrawled slowly away in a dreamy fashion. At other times he had no paper in front of him, only a glass, into or beyond which he stared slackly. This man Dougherty was tall and he was stooped and he wore thick eyeglasses and now and then he silently moved his lips — lips surprisingly fresh and full in that ruined gray countenance. Officially he described himself as “Translator, Interpreter, and Guide,” and he was evidently acting now in the first and second of these capacities.