Short Fiction Fritz Leiber (free e books to read .txt) 📖

said, drawing back. “He’s coming tonight.”

“He?”

“The man who sends me the boxes⁠ ⁠… and my life.”

Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. “A life that’s completely a lie, that’s cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.”

She looked up at him wonderingly. For perhaps ten seconds the silence held and the spell of her eerie sweetness deepened.

“I love you, Mary,” Jack said softly.

She took a step back.

“Really, Mary, I do.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what’s true. Go away.”

“Mary,” he pleaded, “read the papers I’ve given you. Think things through. I’ll wait for you here.”

“You can’t. My aunts would find you.”

“Then I’ll go away and come back. About sunset. Will you give me an answer?”

She looked at him. Suddenly she whirled around. He, too, heard the chuff of the Essex. “They’ll find us,” she said. “And if they find you, I don’t know what they’ll do. Quick, run!” And she darted off herself, only to turn back to scramble for the papers.

“But will you give me an answer?” he pressed.

She looked frantically up from the papers. “I don’t know. You mustn’t risk coming back.”

“I will, no matter what you say.”

“I can’t promise. Please go.”

“Just one question,” he begged. “What are your aunts’ names?”

“Hani and Hilda,” she told him, and then she was gone. The hedge shook where she’d darted through.

Jack hesitated, then started for the cove. He thought for a moment of staying on the island, but decided against it. He could probably conceal himself successfully, but whoever found his boat would have him at a disadvantage. Besides, there were things he must try to find out on the mainland.

As he entered the oaks, his spine tightened for a moment, as if someone were watching him. He hurried to the rippling cove, wasted no time getting the Annie O. underway. With the wind still in the west, he knew it would be a hard sail. He’d need half a dozen tacks to reach the mainland.

When he was about a quarter of a mile out from the cove, there was a sharp smack beside him. He jerked around, heard a distant crack and saw a foot-long splinter of fresh wood dangling from the edge of the sloop’s cockpit, about a foot from his head.

He felt his skin tighten. He was the bull’s-eye of a great watery target. All the air between him and the island was tainted with menace.

Water splashed a yard from the side. There was another distant crack. He lay on his back in the cockpit, steering by the sail, taking advantage of what little cover there was.

There were several more cracks. After the second, there was a hole in the sail.

Finally Jack looked back. The island was more than a mile astern. He anxiously scanned the sea ahead for craft. There were none. Then he settled down to nurse more speed from the sloop and wait for the motorboat.

But it didn’t come out to follow him.

V

Same as yesterday, Mrs. Kesserich was sitting on the edge of the couch in the living room, yet from the first Jack was aware of a great change. Something had filled the domestic animal with grief and fury.

“Where’s Dr. Kesserich?” he asked.

“Not here!”

“Mrs. Kesserich,” he said, dropping down beside her, “you were telling me something yesterday when we were interrupted.”

She looked at him. “You have found the girl?” she almost shouted.

“Yes,” Jack was surprised into answering.

A look of slyness came into Mrs. Kesserich’s bovine face. “Then I’ll tell you everything. I can now.

“When Martin found Mary dying, he didn’t go to pieces. You know how controlled he can be when he chooses. He lifted Mary’s body as if the crowd and the railway men weren’t there, and carried it to the station wagon. Hani and Hilda were sitting on their horses nearby. He gave them one look. It was as if he had said, ‘Murderers!’

“He told me to drive home as fast as I dared, but when I got there, he stayed sitting by Mary in the back. I knew he must have given up what hope he had for her life, or else she was dead already. I looked at him. In the domelight, his face had the most deadly and proud expression I’ve ever seen on a man. I worshiped him, you know, though he had never shown me one ounce of feeling. So I was completely unprepared for the naked appeal in his voice.

“Yet all he said at first was, ‘Will you do something for me?’ I told him, ‘Surely,’ and as we carried Mary in, he told me the rest. He wanted me to be the mother of Mary’s child.”

Jack stared at her blankly.

Mrs. Kesserich nodded. “He wanted to remove an ovum from Mary’s body and nurture it in mine, so that Mary, in a way, could live on.”

“But that’s impossible!” Jack objected. “The technique is being tried now on cattle, I know, so that a prize heifer can have several calves a year, all nurtured in ‘scrub heifers,’ as they’re called. But no one’s ever dreamed of trying it on human beings!”

Mrs. Kesserich looked at him contemptuously. “Martin had mastered the technique twenty years ago. He was willing to take the chance. And so was I⁠—partly because he fired my scientific imagination and reverence, but mostly because he said he would marry me. He barred the doors. We worked swiftly. As far as anyone was concerned, Martin, in a wild fit of grief, had locked himself up for several hours to mourn over the body of his fiancée.

“Within a month we were married, and I finally gave birth to the child.”

Jack shook his head. “You gave birth to your own child.”

She smiled bitterly. “No, it was Mary’s. Martin did not keep his whole bargain with me⁠—I was nothing more than his ‘scrub wife’ in every way.”

“You think you gave birth to Mary’s child.”

Mrs. Kesserich turned on Jack in anger. “I’ve been wounded by him, day in and day out, for years, but I’ve never