Nightmares & Geezenstacks Read online

  Nightmares & Geezenstacks

  Fredric Brown

  Table of Contents

  NASTY

  ABOMINABLE

  REBOUND

  NIGHTMARE IN GRAY

  NIGHTMARE IN GREEN

  NIGHTMARE IN WHITE

  NIGHTMARE IN BLUE

  NIGHTMARE IN YELLOW

  NIGHTMARE IN RED

  UNFORTUNATELY

  GRANNY’S BIRTHDAY

  CAT BURGLAR

  THE HOUSE

  SECOND CHANCE

  GREAT LOST DISCOVERIES I – Invisibility

  GREAT LOST DISCOVERIES II – Invulnerability

  GREAT LOST DISCOVERIES 3 – Immortality

  DEAD LETTER

  RECESSIONAL

  HOBBYIST

  THE RING OF HANS CARVEL

  VENGEANCE FLEET

  ROPE TRICK

  FATAL ERROR

  THE SHORT HAPPY LIVES OF EUSTACE WEAVER I

  THE SHORT HAPPY LIVES OF EUSTACE WEAVER II

  THE SHORT HAPPY LIVES OF EUSTACE WEAVER III

  EXPEDITION

  BRIGHT BEARD

  JAYCEE

  CONTACT

  HORSE RACE

  DEATH ON THE MOUNTAIN

  BEAR POSSIBILITY

  NOT YET THE END

  FISH STORY

  THREE LITTLE OWLS

  RUNAROUND

  MURDER IN TEN EASY LESSONS

  DARK INTERLUDE

  ENTITY TRAP

  THE LITTLE LAMB

  ME AND FLAPJACK AND THE MARTIANS

  THE JOKE

  CARTOONIST

  THE GEEZENSTACKS

  THE END

  NASTY

  Walter Beauregard had been an accomplished and enthusiastic lecher for almost fifty years. Now, at the age of sixty-five, he was in danger of losing his qualifications for membership in the lechers’ union. In danger of losing? Nay, let us be honest; he had lost. For three years now he had been to doctor after doctor, quack after quack, had tried nostrum after nostrum. All utterly to no avail.

  Finally he remembered his books on magic and necromancy. They were books he had enjoyed collecting and reading as part of his extensive library, but he had never taken them seriously. Until now. What did he have to lose?

  In a musty, evil-smelling but rare volume he found what he wanted. As it instructed, he drew the pentagram, copied the cabalistic markings, lighted the candles and read aloud the incantation.

  There was a flash of light and a puff of smoke. And the demon. I won’t describe the demon except to assure you that you wouldn’t have liked him.

  “What is your name?” Beauregard asked. He tried to make his voice steady but it trembled a little.

  The demon made a sound somewhere between a shriek and a whistle, with overtones of a bull fiddle being played with a crosscut saw. Then he said, “But you won’t be able to pronounce that. In your dull language it would translate as Nasty. Just call me Nasty. I suppose you want the usual thing.”

  “What’s the usual thing?” Beauregard wanted to know.

  “A wish, of course. All right, you can have it. But not three wishes; that business about three wishes is sheer superstition. One is all you get. And you won’t like it.”

  “One is all I want. And I can’t imagine not liking it.”

  “You’ll find out. All right, I know what your wish is. And here is the answer to it.” Nasty reached into thin air and his hand vanished and came back holding a pair, of silvery-looking swimming trunks. He held them out to Beauregard. “Wear them in good health,” he said.

  “What are they?”

  “What do they look like? Swimming trunks. But they’re special. The material is out of the future, a few millenniums from now, It’s indestructible; they’ll never wear out or tear or snag. Nice stuff. But the spell on them is a plenty old one. Try them on and find out.”

  The demon vanished.

  Walter Beauregard quickly stripped and put on the beautiful silvery swimming trunks. Immediately he felt wonderful. Virility coursed through him. He felt as though he were a young man again, just starting his lecherous career.

  Quickly he put on a robe and slippers. (Have I mentioned that he was a rich man? And that his home was a penthouse atop the swankiest hotel in Atlantic City? He was, and it was.) He went downstairs in his private elevator and outside to the hotel’s luxurious swimming pool. It was, as usual, surrounded by gorgeous Bikini-clad beauties showing off their wares under the pretense of acquiring sun tans, while they waited for propositions from wealthy men like Beauregard.

  He took time choosing. But not too much time.

  Two hours later, still clad in the wonderful magic trunks, he sat on the edge of his bed and stared at and sighed for the beautiful blonde who lay stretched out on the bed beside him, Bikiniless—and sound asleep.

  Nasty had been so right. And so well named. The miraculous trunks, the indestructible, untearable trunks worked perfectly. But if he took them off, or even let them down…

  ABOMINABLE

  Sir Chauncey Atherton waved a farewell to the Sherpa guides who were to set up camp here and let him proceed alone. This was Abominable Snowman country, a few hundred miles north of Mount Everest, in the Himalayas. Abominable Snowmen were seen occasionally on Everest, on other Tibetan or Nepalese mountains, but Mount Oblimov, at the foot of which he was now leaving his native guides, was so thick with them that not even the Sherpas would climb it, but would here await his return, if indeed he did. It took a brave man to pass this point. Sir Chauncey was a brave man.

  Also, he was a connoisseur of women, which was why he was here and about to attempt, alone, not only a dangerous ascent but an even more dangerous rescue. If Lola Gabraldi was still alive, an Abominable Snowman had her.

  Sir Chauncey had never seen Lola Gabraldi, in the flesh. He had, in fact, learned of her existence less than a month ago, when he had seen the one motion picture in which she had starred—and through which she had become suddenly fabulous, the most beautiful woman on Earth, the most pulchritudinous movie star Italy had ever produced, and Sir Chauncey could not understand how even Italy had produced her. In one picture she had replaced Bardot, Lolobrigida, and Ekberg as the image of feminine perfection in the minds of connoisseurs of women everywhere, and Sir Chauncey was the top connoisseur anywhere. The moment he had seen her on the screen he had known that he must know her in the flesh, or die trying.

  But by that time Lola Gabraldi had vanished. As a vacation after her first picture she had taken a trip to India and had joined a group of climbers about to make an assault on Mount Oblimov. The rest of the party had returned, Lola had not. One of them had testified that he had seen her, at a distance too great for him to reach her in time, abducted, carried off screaming by a nine-foot-high hairy more-or-less manlike creature. An Abominable Snowman. The party had searched for her for days before giving up and returning to civilization. Everyone agreed that there was no possible chance, now, of finding her alive.

  Everyone except Sir Chauncey, who had immediately flown to India from England.

  He struggled on, now high into the eternal snows. And in addition to mountain-climbing equipment he carried the heavy rifle with which he had, only the year before, shot tigers in Bengal. If it could kill tigers, he reasoned, it could kill Snowmen.

  Snow swirled about him as he neared the cloud line. Suddenly, a dozen yards ahead of him, which was as far as he could see, he caught a glimpse of a monstrous not-quite-human figure. He raised his rifle and fired. The figure fell, and kept on falling; it had been on a ledge over thousands of feet of nothingness.

  And at the moment of the shot arms closed around Sir Chauncey from behind him. Thick, hairy arms. And then, as one h
and held him easily, the other took the rifle from him and bent it into an L-shape as easily as though it had been a toothpick, and then tossed it away.

  A voice spoke from a point about two feet above his head. “Be quiet, you will not be harmed.” Sir Chauncey was a brave man, but a sort of squeak was all the answer he could make, despite the seeming assurance of the words. He was held so tightly against the creature behind him that he could not look upward and backward to see what its face was like.

  “Let me explain,” said the voice above and behind him.

  “We, whom you call Abominable Snowmen, are human, but transmuted. A great many centuries ago we were a tribe like the Sherpas. We chanced to discover a drug that let us change physically, let us adapt by increased size, hairiness, and other physiological changes to extreme cold and altitude, let us move up into the mountains, into country in which others cannot survive, except for the duration of brief climbing expeditions. Do you understand?”

  “Y-y-yes,” Sir Chauncey managed to say. He was beginning to feel a faint return of hope. Why would this creature be explaining these things to him, if it intended to kill him?

  “Then I shall explain further. Our number is small, and we are diminishing. For that reason we occasionally capture, as I have captured you, a mountain climber. We give him the transmuting drug, he undergoes the physiological changes and becomes one of us. By that means we keep our number, such as it is, relatively constant.”

  “B—but,” Sir Chauncey stammered, “is that what happened to the woman I’m looking for, Lola Gabraldi? She is now—eight feet tall and hairy and—”

  “She was. You just killed her. One of our tribe had taken her as his mate. We will take no revenge for your having killed her, but you must now, as it were, take her place.”

  “Take her place? But—I’m a man.”

  “Thank God for that,” said the voice above and behind him. He found himself turned around, held against a huge hairy body, his face at the right level to be buried between mountainous hairy breasts. “Thank God for that—because I am an Abominable Snowwoman.”

  Sir Chauncey fainted and was picked up and, as lightly as though he were a toy dog, was carried away by his mate.

  REBOUND

  The Power came to Larry Snell suddenly and unexpectedly, out of nowhere. How and why it came to him, he never learned. It just came; that’s all.

  It could have happened to a nicer guy. Snell was a small-time crook when he thought he could get away with stealing, but the bulk of his income, such as it was, came from selling numbers racket tickets and peddling marijuana to adolescents. He was fattish and sloppy, with little close-set eyes that made him look almost as mean as he really was. His only redeeming virtue was cowardice; it had kept him from committing crimes of violence.

  He was, that night, talking to a bookie from a tavern telephone booth, arguing whether a bet he’d placed by phone that afternoon had been on the nose or across the board. Finally, giving up, he growled “Drop dead,” and slammed down the receiver. He thought nothing of it until the next day when he learned that the bookie had dropped dead, while talking on the telephone and at just about the time of their conversation.

  This gave Larry Snell food for thought. He was not an uneducated man; he knew what a whammy was. In fact, he’d tried whammies before, but they’d never worked for him. Had something changed? It was worth trying. Carefully he made out a list of twenty people whom, for one reason or another, he hated. He telephoned them one at a time—spacing the calls over the course of a week—and told each of them to drop dead. They did, all of them.

  It was not until the end of that week that he discovered that what he had was not simply the whammy, but the Power. He was talking to a dame, a top dame, a striptease working in a top night club and making twenty or forty times his own income, and he had said, “Honey, come up to my room after the last show, huh?” She did, and it staggered him because he’d been kidding. Rich men and handsome playboys were after her, and she’d fallen for a casual, not even seriously intended, proposition from Larry Snell.

  Did he have the Power? He tried it the next morning, before she left him. He asked her how much money she had with her, and then told her to give, it to him. She did, and it was several hundred dollars.

  He was in business. By the end of the next week he was rich; he had made himself that way by borrowing money from everyone he knew-including slight acquaintances who were fairly high in the hierarchy of the underworld and therefore quite solvent—and then telling them to forget it.

  He moved from his fleabag pad to a penthouse apartment atop the swankiest hotel in town. It was a bachelor apartment, but need it be said that he slept there alone but seldom, and then only for purposes of recuperation.

  It was a nice life but even so it took only a few weeks of it to cause it to dawn on Snell that he was wasting the Power. Why shouldn’t he really use what he had by taking over the country first and then the world, make himself the most powerful dictator in history? Why shouldn’t he have and own everything, including a harem instead of a dame a night? Why shouldn’t he have an army to enforce the fact that his slightest wish would be everyone else’s highest law? If his commands were obeyed over the telephone certainly they would be obeyed if he gave them over radio and television.

  All he had to do was pay for (pay for?, simply demand) a universal network that would let him be heard by everyone everywhere. Or almost everyone; he could take over when he had a simple majority behind him, and bring the others into line later.

  But this would be a Big Deal, the biggest one ever swung, and he decided to take his time planning it so there would be no possibility of his making a mistake. He decided to spend a few days alone, out of town and away from everybody, to do his planning.

  He chartered a plane to take him to a relatively uncrowded part of the Catskills, and from an inn—which he took over simply by telling the other guests to leave—he started taking long walks alone, thinking and dreaming. He found a favorite spot, a small hill in a valley surrounded by mountains; the scenery was magnificent. He did most of his thinking there, and found himself becoming more and more elated and euphoric as he began to see that it could and would work.

  Dictator, hell. He’d have himself crowned Emperor. Emperor of the World, Why not? Who could defy a man with the Power? The Power to make anyone obey any command that he gave them, up to and including—

  “Drop dead!” he shouted from the hilltop, in sheer vicious exuberance, not caring whether or not anyone or anything was within range of his voice…

  A teen-age boy and a teen-age girl found him there the next day and hurried back to the village to report having found a dead man on the top of Echo Hill.

  NIGHTMARE IN GRAY

  He awoke feeling wonderful, with the sun bright and warm upon him and spring in the air. He had dozed off-for less than half an hour, he knew, because the angle of shadows from the beneficent sun had changed but slightly while he slept-sitting upright upon the park bench; only his head had nodded and then fallen forward.

  The park was beautiful with the green of spring, softer green than summer’s, the day was magnificent, and he was young and in love. Wondrously in love, dizzily in love. And happily in love; only last night, Saturday night, he had proposed to Susan and she had accepted him, more or less. That is, she had not given him a definite yes but she had invited him this afternoon to meet her family and had said that she hoped he would love them and that they would love him—as she did. If that wasn’t tantamount to an acceptance, what was? They’d fallen in love at sight, almost, which was why he had yet to meet her family.

  Sweet Susan, of the soft brown hair, with the cute little nose that was almost pug, of the faint, tender freckles and the big soft brown eyes.

  She was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to him, that could ever happen to anyone.

  Well, it was midafternoon now and that was when Susan had asked him to call. He stood up from the bench and, since he
found his muscles a bit cramped from the nap, yawned luxuriously. Then he started to walk the few blocks from the park where he had been killing time to the house he’d taken her home to last night, a short walk through the bright sunshine, the spring day.

  He climbed the steps and knocked on the door. It opened and for a second he thought Susan herself had answered it, but the girl only looked like Susan. Her sister, probably; she’d mentioned having a sister only a year older than she.

  He bowed and introduced himself, asked for Susan. He thought the girl looked at him strangely for a moment. Then she said, “Come in, please. She’s not here at the moment, but if you’ll wait in the parlor there—”

  He waited in the parlor there. How odd of her to have gone out. Even briefly.

  Then he heard the voice, the voice of the girl who had let him in, talking in the hallway outside and, in understandable curiosity, stood up and went to the hallway door to listen. She seemed to be talking into a telephone.

  “Harry—please come home right away, and bring the doctor with you. Yes, it’s Grandpa… No, not another heart attack. Like the time before when he had amnesia and thought that Grandma was still—No, not senile dementia, Harry, just amnesia, but worse this time. Fifty years off—his memory is way back before he even married Grandma…”

  Suddenly old, aged fifty years in fifty seconds, he wept silently as he leaned against the door…

  NIGHTMARE IN GREEN

  He awoke with full recollection of the decision, the big decision, he had made while lying here trying to go to sleep the night before. The decision that he must hold to without weakening if ever again he was to think of himself as a man, a whole man. He must be firm in demanding that his wife give him a divorce or all was lost and he would never again have the courage. It had been inevitable, he saw now, from the very start of their marriage six years ago, that this turning point, this tide of his affairs, would come.

  To be married to a woman stronger than himself, stronger in every way, was not only intolerable but had been making him progressively more and more a helpless weakling, a hopeless mouse. His wife could, and did, best him at everything. An athlete, she could beat him easily at golf, at tennis, at everything. She could outride him and outhike him; she could drive a car better than he’d ever be able to. Expert at almost everything, she could make a fool of him at bridge or chess, even poker, which she played like a man. Worse, she had gradually taken over the reins of his business and financial affairs and could and did make more money than he had ever made or hoped to make. There was no way in which his ego, what little was left of it, had not been bruised and battered over the years of their marriage.