Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 4 (1923-04).djvu/34

 'A Fantastic Little Story of a Man Who Met the "Green Goddess of Dreams"'

S I climbed the stairway I was conscious only that I was bent upon overtaking the vague form of a man, slim and youthful, whose face attracted me strangely. The question beat in my brain:

Who is he?

If I could get my hands upon him, compel him to look straight into my eyes, his identity would immediately become fixed; of that I was sure. But he seemed to float, rather than walk, always just out of my reach.

The chase, begun in a cafe on lower Broadway, had led me through many weary miles of streets, slippery with rain, and almost deserted. Miles away the pursuit ended in a grim old studio building much favored by writers, artists, and others who follow loose trades. I knew the place; in fact, someone whose name I could not quite recall lived there.

On the stairway of the building I overtook my quarry, but he would not suffer himself to be taken; he mounted upward; so did I. Presently, on the second landing, he relented—stood still. I approached with hands outstretched, poised on the balls of my feet, lunged—

With mocking laughter trailing behind him, he rose, seemingly without effort, and floated to the head of the stairs. There he paused on the topmost tread, turned—

God in heaven! It was myself I looked at! Myself, only younger—ages younger!

Then the figure faded, lost its importance. There was something in my mouth; something smooth and round, like an apple, but I could not bite it. For an instant, just an instant, I became almost normal; sufficiently so to recognize my surroundings.

I was on my knees before the door of my own apartment in the studio building, and the door knob was in my mouth. With a key, or it may have been my pocket knife, I was striving to unlock the hall radiator, which was near at hand.

Back of me, someone laughed. I got up and looked toward the sound. Something danced in my vision; something brown, formless. It had eyes, though; brown ones. I could see them, nothing more. No hands, no head, no mouth—Then I saw that it did have a mouth, and the mouth was smiling.

I became indignant. I threatened, but to no purpose; the figure remained—approached. The smiling mouth shaped words:

"He who shaketh the cocktail, by the cocktail shall he also be shaken!" were the words the mouth shaped.

I took the matter under advisement. Someone wanted me to shake a cocktail. Well—If I could only find out who wanted it! Was it person, or thing, there near me?

Then I recognized it.

"Mouse!"

By its eyes I knew it!

"Mouse" I repeated, laughing immoderately. "Little brown mouse! Little brown mouse! Little br—"

OW it requires at least an hour for the average man to make up his mind to get out of bed on the morning after such a night as I had spent—had been spending for many, many months. I am different. My powers of recuperation are, as yet, scarcely impaired.

That morning I did not awake of my own accord. A mouse, a brown one, gnawed at my hand and brought me bolt upright; I shook it off, and it became a woman—a brown-eyed woman; a woman who laughed. I buried my head in the covers, and when I looked out again the vision had gone.

Sitting there upon a couch, fully dressed except for my shoes, which stood on a chair nearby, and my coat, which hung over the back of it, I pieced together the events of the previous night—all that I could recall.

I had lunched with an editor, that day; an editor who used to think well of my work, and who once held the opinion that it would, in time, even excel that done by my father, in his time considered a master of the short story. His opinion had undergone a change, however; he no longer even considered my work—the little that I did—but, for old times' sake, he desired to reason with me concerning my future, which, he said, I was throwing away.

"You are allowing the fortune your father built up with his pen, to become a stumbling-block in the way of yours," was the way he summed it up.

As a result of that luncheon, I promised to get down to work, and to send the results to my former friend as soon as any materialized. I meant to do so, of course, but habit proved too strong. I left the cafe where we had lunched, and sought one farther down Broadway—where one could get, in a secluded room in the building, tiny glasses of that precious fluid that is at once a curse and an exaltation—a bitterness, and a sweet of all sweets!

Absinthe!

Dear God above! What vicious stuff it is that they give us now, in the name of absinthe! Once, in its clear, green, sparkling thrall, one might find the sweet exaltation of noble dreams—the spiritual elevation wrought by a vision of the streets of heaven, with soft-eyed angels hovering near! Now, in its yellow, muddied depths one sinks as if in a false woman's arms—to deception, confusion, death!

Yet we cling!

But why complain? The power to soothe is there, and to deaden the brain; the brain throbbing with the fading pulses of things that might have lived!

It was in that cafe that the chase of the night before began—that pursuit of an absinthe-created vision of my former self. The self I might have been!

GOT up from the couch, and stood looking at my shoes, side by side upon the chair. The laces had been untied, instead of merely slipped, in hard knots, off the catches as they were wont to be, when I was indisposed. That seemed odd to me. My coat, too, should have been lying upon the floor, instead of being carefully draped over the back of a chair. None of those things was my handiwork; that I knew.