Page:Famous Fantastic Mysteries (1951-03).djvu/103

 intricate beauty. The smooth, cold gems—amethyst and moonstone and many I couldn't identify—were arabesques against the fretted gold. I thought of sardonyx and chrysoprase, cymophane and jacinth, moon-ruled selenite, and the magic meloceus that is ruled by blood. Jacinth, peridot, bezoar—names submerged in the depths of my memory swam up, bringing with them the curious fragrance of a tapestried and long-forgotten past.

There was magic in that relic. The breath of ancient life stirred in it as I looked in that dim radiance at the Golden Apple and it winked back at me, many-eyed, cold-eyed, all the loveliness of the past compressed into an orb no larger than my hands could compass. In the darkness it gathered all the faint glow of the blackout lamp and shone like a sun that might rise above magic lands.

Argyle's voice roused me. "Can you work the spring?"

I said, after a moment, "I don't know. Maybe. Shall I try?"

"Please. Nothing in it, I suppose, but—You know, come to think of it, you're not the first man after all who told me about the secret spring. I can't imagine how it slipped my mind until now—" His voice trailed off for a moment. "American, he was, in London. Told me he'd studied the pomander once, years before. I promised to let him see the thing, but the poor old boy was killed before we kept our engagement. It was in nineteen forty, you see."

I remembered that terrible autumn. "No wonder you forgot," I said. "Plenty must have been happening around then to keep you busy. Was the old man the curator of—" I named the museum. "Why, yes. That's right."

"He studied the pomander 'way back in eighteen ninety," I told him. "I've got his report in my pocket. The trick's simple enough, once you know how. But until then—"

I knew it, after reading the file, but even so my fingers fumbled and felt clumsy on those exquisitely filigreed surfaces. It took me several minutes to get the trick of it. Then the pomander opened in my hand, falling apart in hinged halves. It was hollow.

But it was not empty.

I stared down at the many times folded packet of—papers? They didn't look old. The stuff had the feel of parchment, but it seemed thinner than onion-skin flimsies, and there was writing visible, a word here and there in unmistakable modern English.

"You're wrong," I told Argyle. "Look at this. You may have a find here."

The papers crackled as I unfolded them. But Argyle, leaning down above my shoulder, reached out to take them before I could see anything in the tiny blackout glow.

"Let me," he said, in a curious, strained voice. It was the same intonation he had used when he spoke of forgetting, in the blitzes, about the secret the old curator had told. Now he took up the light and turned almost jealously away from me, holding the lamp so close to the papers they must nearly have scorched as he strained to read in that feeble glow.

I could see the slim silhouette of him against the light for a moment or two. He was quite motionless, only the papers rustling faintly. Then I heard him sigh—a deep, deep, nearly soundless sigh as if all the breath in his lungs had gone out at once.

"What is it?" I asked.

He said, very quietly, "Let me finish this, Russell. Let me—oh, it isn't possible! My God, it isn't possible!"

I felt news instinct quicken in me. "Read it out loud,"

"No no. Let me alone!" His voice was suddenly harsh. "You can see it—afterward. Let me alone now, for heaven's sake!"

I didn't say anything. I watched him cross the room—a silhouette against a tiny moving blur of light—and sit down in a far corner, the back of his chair almost hiding him from me. He went on reading, with a tenseness I could feel in the very air. The pages rustled now and then. I sat there in the dark, playing with the