Read Online The Dark Side by Damon Knight (ed.) - Free Book Online

exactly who he is, but he’s someone in authority, and his job is to see the Purgatory candidates get a chance to straighten things out for themselves. Naturally the Fallen buck him as much as possible; and part of the trick is to disguise the place somewhat, to keep its nature hidden from the transportees—the potential damned—and lure them into doing something that will keep them here for good. That bed you’re in, for instance, is probably a pool of flaming brimstone or something of the sort.”
    Hugh bounded out hastily.
    “Yero establishes himself in the fortress of Dis, which is what that pile of chromium junk is, up on the hill, after you get behind the disguise. Each time he comes, he makes a tour through the town, showing himself to each newcomer in a form which will mean the most to that person. The important thing is that few people take kindly to being corrected in the fundamental kinds of mistakes that bring them here, so that nine times out of ten Yero’s appearance to you makes you hate him.”
    “Hmm,” Hugh said. “I begin to catch on, around the edges, as it were. To me he looked like a man I’d started out to murder a few days ago.”
    “You’re on the track. Examine your motives, use your head, son, and don’t let the Princes trick you into anything.” The pellucid shape steadied and grew real and solid by degrees; the man in the top hat rose and walked toward the bed. “Above all—don’t hate Yero.”
    His outstretched hand touched Hugh’s sleeve, and he vanished on the instant with a sharp hiccup.
    There was no one in the house, and nothing to eat but a halfconsumed and repellent-looking pudding left over from the “night” before, which he finished for lack of anything else rather than out of any attraction the suety object had as a breakfast dish. Then he left the house in search of the other Avatar.
    The light was bright and cheerful as always, but he felt chilly all the same. Discovering where he was had destroyed all of his amusement in the town’s crazy construction, and taken the warmth out of his bones. He eyed the passers-by uneasily, wondering as each one approached him whether he was seeing someone like himself, a soul in eternal torment, or an emissary of the Fallen whose real form was ambiguous.
    For the rest of the morning he roamed the streets in search of a likely-looking figure, but finally he had to admit that his wanderings were fruitless. He sat down on a doorstep to think it out.
    His Avatars were the “symbols of his error”; they were night-prowlers, obviously, because he had been one himself, gun in hand. The error itself was something to do with Jeremy Wright and Evelyn—not the impending murder, because it had not been committed, but some other error. The man in the top hat had been chosen, perhaps, because he had conceived of Wright as a cavalier, a suave home-breaker, or something of the sort; dinner clothes made a pointed symbol of such a notion. Of what else, specifically,had he suspected Jeremy? Tom-catting!
    He groaned and dropped his head in his hands, remembering the cat he had seen in conjunction with his first sight of the man in dinner clothes. How was he to find one ragged alley-cat in a town where there were doubtless hundreds? Cats did not wear period costumes. He couldn’t go around touching cats until something happened!
    He heard a sniffing sound and a thin mournful whine at his side. He looked down.
    “Go ’way,” he said. “I want a cat, not a mongrel pooch.”
    The puppy, recoiling at the unfriendly tone, dropped its tail and began to sidle away from him, and gloomily he watched it go. Brown dog?—Brown cat?—Brown dog! An inspiration!
    “Here, Fleet,” he essayed. The puppy burst into a frenzy of tail-wagging and came back, with that peculiar angled trot only dogs out of all the four-footed beasts seem to affect. Hugh patted its head, and it whined and licked his hand.
    “There, there,” he said. “You’re lost, I know.