Weird Tales volume 42 number 04 Read online

  Everything was quiet, and I couldn't see any light, so I figured whatever Rosa and Tarelli had done was finished. We got out and Mosko unlocked the front door. We walked in.

  Then everything happened at once.

  I heard the clicking noise from the corner. Mosko heard it, too. He yelled and grabbed at something in the dark. I heard a crash, heard Tarelli curse in Italian. Mosko stepped back.

  "No you don't!" he hollered. He had a gun, the gun had a bullet, the bullet had a target.

  that's all.

  Mosko shot, there was a scream and a thud, and then I got the lights on and I could see.

  I could see Tarelli standing there next to the scales. I could see the tools scattered around and I could see the queer-looking hunk of flashing mirrors that must have been Tarelli's secret machinery. I could see the old back of the scales, already screwed into place again.

  But I didn't look at these things, and neither did Mosko and neither did Tarelli.

  We looked at Rosa, lying on the floor.

  Rosa looked back, but she didn't see us, because she had a bullet between her eyes.

  "Dead!" Tarelli screamed. "You murder her!"

  WEIRD TALES

  Mosko blinked, but he didn't move. "}iow was I to know?" he said. "Thought somebody was busting into the place. What's the big idea, anyhow?"

  "Ees no idea. You murder her."

  Mosko had his angle figured, now. He sneered down at Tarelli. "You're a fine one to talk, you lousy little crook! I caught you in the act, didn't I—tryin* to steal the works, that's what you was doing. Now get busy and put that machinery back into the scales before I blow your brains out."

  Tarelli looked at Mosko, then at Rosa. All at once he shrugged and picked the little box of mirrors and flashing disks from the floor. It was small, but from the way he hefted it I could tell it was heavy. When he held k, k hummed and the mirrors began to slide every which way, and it hurt my eyes to look at it.

  Tarelli lifted the box full of science, the box full of magic, whatever it was; the box of secrets, the box of the future. Then he smiled at Mosko and opened his arms.

  The box smashed to the floor.

  There was a crash, and smoke, and a bright light. Then the noise and smoke and light went away, and there was nothing but old Tarelli standing in a little pile of twisted wires and broken glass and tubes.

  Mosko raised his gun. Tarelli stared straight into the muzzle and grinned.

  "You murder me too now, eh? Go 'head, Meestair Mosko. Rosa dead, the fortune-telling maching dead, too, and I do not weesh to stay alive either. Part of me dies with Rosa, and the rest—the rest was machine."

  "Machine?" I whispered undei my breath, but he heard me.

  "Yes. Part of me went to make machine. What you call the soul."

  Mosko tightened his finger on the trigger. "Never mind that, you crummy little tat! You can't scare me with none of that phoney talk about magic."

  "I don't scare you. You are too stupid to un'rstand. But before I die I tell you one theeng more. I tell your fortune. And your fortune is—death. You die too, Meestair Mosko. You die, too!"

  Like a flash Tarelli stooped and grabbed

  r

  the wrench from the tools at his feet. He lifted it and swung—and then Mosko let him have it. Three slugs in a row.

  Tarelli toppled over next to Rosa. 1 stepped forward. I don't know what I'd of done next—jumped Mosko, tried to kill him with his own gun. I was in a daze.

  Mosko turned around and barked. "Quit staring," he said. "Help me clean up this mess and get rid of them, fast. Or do you wanna get tied in as an accessory for murder?"

  That word, "murder"—it stopped me cold. Mosko was right. I'd be in on the deal if they found the bodies. Rosa was dead, Tarelli was dead, the scales and their secret was gone.

  So I helped Mosko.

  I helped him clean up, and I helped him load the bodjes into the car. He didn't ask me to go along with him on the trip, and that was good.

  Because it gave me a chance, after he'd gone, to go to the phone and ring up the Sheriff. It gave me a chance to tell the Sheriff and the two deputies the whole story when they came out to the tavern early in the morning. It gave me a chance to see Big Pete Mosko's face when he walked in and found us waiting for him there.

  THEY collared him and accused him and he denied everything. He must of hid the bodies in a good safe place, to pull a front act like that, but he never cracked. He denied everything. My story, the murders, the works.

  "Look at him," he told the Sheriff, pointing at me. "He's shakin' like a leaf. Outta his head. Everybody knows he's punchy. Why the guy's off his rocker—spilling a yarn like that! Magic scales that tell your fortune! Ever hear of such a thing? Why that alone ought to show you the guy's slug-nutty."

  Funny thing is, I could see him getting to them. The Sheriff and his buddies began to give me a look out of the corner of their eyes.

  "First of all," said Mosko, "There never was no such person as Tarelli, and he never

  TELL YOUR FORTUNE

  had a daughter. Look around—-see if you can find anything that looks like we had a fight in here, let alone a double murder. All you'll see is the scales here. The rest this guy made up out of his cracked head."

  "About those scales—" the Sheriff began.

  Mosko walked over and put his hand on the side of the big glass dial on top of the scales, bold as you please. "Yeah, what about the scales?" he asked. "Look 'em over. Just ordinary scales. See for yourself. Drop a penny, out comes a fortune. Regular stuff. Wait, I'll show you."

  WE ALL looked at Mosko as he climbed up on the scales and fumbled in his pocket for a penny. I saw the deputies edge closer to me, just waiting for the payoff.

  And I gulped. Because I knew the magic was gone. Tarelli had put the regular works back into the scales and it was just an ordinary weighing machine, now. HONEST WEIGHT, NO SPRINGS. Mosko would dial a fortune and one of the regular printed cards would come out.

  We'd hidden the bodies, cleaned up TarelH's room, removed his clothes, the tools, everything. No evidence left, and nobody would talk except me. And who would believe me, with my crazy guff about a magic scales that told the real future? They'd lock me up in the nut-house, fast, when Mosko got off the scales with his fortune told for a penny.

  I heard the click when the penny dropped. The dial behind the glass went up to 297 pounds. Big fat Mosko turned

  and grinned at all of us. "You see?" he said.

  Then it happened. Maybe he was clumsy, maybe there was oil on the platform, maybe there was a ghost and it pushed him, I don't know. All I know is that Mosko slipped, leaned forward to catch himself, and rammed his head against the glass top.

  He gurgled once and went down, with a two-foot razor of glass ripping across his throat. As he fell he tried to smile, and one pudgy hand fumbled at the side of the scales, grabbing out the printed slip that told Big Pete Mosko's fortune.

  We had to pry that slip out of his hands —pry it out and read the dead man's future.

  Maybe it was just an ordinary scale now, but it told Mosko's fortune, for sure. You figure it out. All I know is what I read, all I know is what Tarelli's scale told Mosko about what was going to happen, and what did happen.

  The big white scale stood grinning down on the dead man, and for a minute the cracked and splintered glass sort of fell into a pattern and I had the craziest feeling that I could see Tarelli's face. He was grinning, the scale was grinning, but we didn't grin.

  We just pried the little printed slip out of Big Pete Mosko's hand and read his future written there. It was just a single sentence, but it said all there was to be said.... :

  "YOU ARE GOING ON A LONG JOURNEY."

  // it wasn't a djinn, it certainly was a reasonable facsimile thereof.

  <£>■*

  jinn and Bitters

  05m. ^hrcirold cJUctwior*

  I

  BY SOME process of feminine logic that I cannot figure o
ut to this day, Connie has decided that the whole weird episode in which we were involved at Alamosa Beach is entirely the fault of Bill Hastings.

  Now Bill is a nice guy, one of the best, and to insist as Connie does that everything that went wrong can he laid at his door, when he obviously plays no real part in this story at all, as you can judge for yourself if you'll only read, is to extend the ridiculous to the uttermost limit.

  But, Connie says in rebuttal, didn't Bill lend us his cottage *at the shore for oux honeymoon? And wasn't it at the shore that

  Heading by Jon Arfstrora

  we found the bottle of amethyst glass? And wasn't it after we found the amethyst glass bottle with its surprising contents that all our troubles began?

  "Well, then!" Connie has a way of saying, ending the argument.

  Surely you can see that such logic is irrefutable? Particularly if you're a married man yourself?

  I'm afraid Connie will never forgive Bill for blacking my eye at the ushers* dinner

  WEIRD TALES

  the night before the wedding, though personally I never held it against him for it was purely and simply an accident, and we were all shellacked at the time. Besides, he no more meant to black my eye, I'm sure, than I intended to tear his ear, which after all, did no great harm except that it didn't improve his looks any, and he was going to be the best man. But then, come to think of it, his looks weren't anything to write home about to begin with.

  I tried to point this out to Connie afterward.

  "Keep still, Pete Bartlett!" she said. "I was never so mortified in all my life as I was this morning when I came moseying up the aisle and saw you standing in the chancel. What a sight for the eyes of a blushing bride! Tsk, tsk!" At the memory, her brows swooped toward the bridge of her nose. "That drunken bum, Bill Hastings!"

  "But, honey. 1 hit him first."

  "That's it! Stick up for him!"

  Ah, well. What was the use?

  "Let's not fight on the first day of our honeymoon, baby," I said tenderly.

  WE'D been married at ten o'clock that morning, left the reception at two, and now two hours later we were both lying on the warm sands of deserted Alamosa Beach, basking in the late afternoon sun. It had been a popular vacation spot in its day, but that day was long since past. Except for Bill's cottage where we were staying, the few other shacks high on the dunes behind us were deserted. There were still a few guests, we had been told, in the rkkety old hotel at the far end of the beach. But that was around a bend in the shore, and the hotel and its guests were out of our sight and we were out of theirs.

  This made it convenient whenever I felt like kissing Connie, which I'm bound to say was often. For she detests love-making in public.

  But now, in the intervals between kisses, we were lying'flat on our backs, with Connie at right angles to me, her bright-penny held resting none too comfortably on my stomach. We were talking of this and that, and she was letting the sands drift idly through

  her hands. First she'd plunge them in, palms down, and then she'd turn them, bringing up palmsful of the golden grains only to let them spill in drifts through her slightly spread fingers.

  And that was how she found the bottle.

  Her fingers encountered something hard, and she burrowed deeper into the sand, dredging up at last a bottle. It was of amethyst glass with little air-bubbles embedded in the crystal. But though the air-bubbles showed up plainly when you held the bottle up against the light, it wasn't possible to see into it. It bore no labei, and it was very tightly corked.

  "Dear me," Connie said thoughtfully, holding the thing aloft. "The Morton luck."

  "You're a Bartlett now," I reminded her fondly.

  "Why, so I am. But my luck still holds."

  "You mean it's got Scotch in it?"

  "Try to climb onto a spiritual plane, dear, for once in your life," Connie said. "Scotch, indeed! No. But there'll be a djinn in it, of course, who'll have to '^rant me whatever I wish for. Wait and see. I've always been lucky, haven't I? Remember the time I found the purse with seventy-nine cents in it on the park bench? And the night I found the woman's slipper in the Bijou Theater? And—"

  "—this morning, when you got me up to the altar?"

  "Which I'll live to regret, no doubt," Connie smiled. "Weil, anyway, A djinn. Think of it, dear."

  I didn't think much of it.

  "Suppose you pull the cork out?" I yawned. "And then we can both relax again."

  "I've married a man with no imagination whatever," complained Connie to the sad sea waves.

  But she proceeded to withdraw the cork as I'd told her, and so help me, there really was something in the bottle. I felt a peculiar sensation that wasn't entirely pleasant in the small of my back and all along the channel of my spine as I watched a thin trickle of gray vapor emerge from the bottle, and slowly begin to rise above it.

  The thick mist rose higher still till it was

  ©JINN AND BITTERS

  25

  hovering above us, grew denser, and began to form into a shape resembling something remotely human—something like that of the rubber man in the old Michelin tire advertisements.

  It was no thing of great beauty, but if it wasn't a djinn, I thought dazedly, it was certainly a reasonable facsimile thereof. I stared at the thing, open-mouthed. I was speechless, I'll admit.

  But Connie wasn't. Connie never is.

  "See, Pete?" she said. "Your sneer, and your cheap cynicism!"

  NOW I want to stop here a moment to indulge myself in a seemingly pointless digression, though I assure you that it really isn't. I have a confession to make, and it is this: I'd had serious qualms about marrying Connie.

  Much as I loved her, the Bartlett head is never so completely overruled by its heart that I couldn't see Connie was flippant and frivolous and flutter-brained, with the emotions, undoubtedly shallow, of a child. You are please not to believe that I'm trying to set myself up here as her superior. I've had my bird-brained moments, too, and plenty of them. You have only to consider my behavior on the eve of our marriage, as an illustration of that.

  But with marriage, I'd always known that I wanted to settle down, to mature, to grow serious—and wiser, too, if possible.

  Many's the time after I had proposed to Connie that I'd wake up in the small gray hours of the morning, beset by serious doubts. I knew I'd never be happy for long with Connie if she didn't change. In the beginning I'd be willing to take it slowly, to match her flippancies, to be as light-hearted and light-minded as she. But would she mature? Could I change her?

  Certainly it would have been a slow process. Certainly I owe a debt to the djinn.

  For it was a djinn, all right, that the bottle had contained.

  He yawned and stretched now, and almost immediately winced.

  "Ouch!" he said, in a voice like the mutter of distant thunder. "Am I cramped! Oof, my lumbago! Just keep your shirt on there

  with your wish for a moment, will you, until I pull myself together?" he asked crankily, his eyes squinted shut, seemingly with pain.

  Connie sat up, hugging her satiny knees. I sat up, too, bracing myself with backward-thrust arms. I would have fallen down, otherwise, for I assure you it's startling to learn that you have unwittingly released a djinn. I should have doubted the evidence of my senses, but the sun blazed brightly so that I was forced to squint against it, and there came the sharp salt fishy smell of the sea to sting my nostrils, and the sand was hot beneath my legs.

  Yes, I told myself, I was conscious, all right, difficult though I found it to believe ■—with a djinn hanging heavy over our heads like a forfeit in a game that children play.

  THE silence that followed could only be described as pregnant, unbroken save for the soft wash of the sea against the shore. You may judge for yourself of the effect that the djinn had upon us when I tell you that even Connie was silent, for a change.

  "What a life!" the djinn said gloomily, after a moment. He seemed to ruminate, lost in depress
ion.

  Deep within me I found my voice. I dragged it out with an effort. I sought to cheer him. "You think you've got it tough? You should try living in the postwar world."

  This seemed to nettle him. He reared back as it stung, regarded me with some dudgeon. "Z have a nice life, you're telling me? Hah! Bottled up like a pickled onion till I ask myself, am I working for Heinz?" He held up a smoky hand to forestall interruption. "And that isn't all," he went on, warming to the task as he recited the litany of his grievances. "Now I'll have to work my silly head off to grant the wish, which is sure to be foolish and unreasonable, of whomever it was that released me."

  "Poor you!" Connie said softly. '7 released you."

  The djinn seemed to see her for the first

  WEIRD TALES

  time, and it must be recorded that even in his depression his eyes visibly brightened. I'm afraid any masculine eyes would brighten at the vision of Connie tastefully girbed in a brief blue-and-white polka-dotted Bikini bathing suit. Indeed, I've had trouble with this angle before.

  "Well, wed, well!" said the djinn, shaking his head in seeming despond, though it was plain to be seen that he was not really distressed. "What'll they be taking off next?"

  This was a rhetorcial cjuestion, purely, I gathered. But as it seemed to be addressed more or less in my direction, I thought it would do no great harm to straighten him out immediately on a few salient facts.

  "This little lady happens to be my wife, repeat wife," I said.

  "Oh!" For a minute the disappointment seemed almost more than the djinn could bear. But he must have been a philosopher of sorts for after a minute he said, though somewhat obscurely, "Ah well. That's life for you."

  I settled back into my former state of uneasy calm, my suspicions not entirely allayed. This was one humbre, I warned myself, who would probably bear watching.

  CONNIE noted my scowl, and proceeded to pour oil on troubled waters.

  "The djinn was only being complimentary," she said. "No need for you to be jealous all the time, Petey-weetie-sweelie."

  "If there's one thing I can't abide," I said fretfully, my nerves quivering like the fringe on a bubble-dancer's G-string, "it's being called Petey-weetie-sweetie in front of strangers."