Fun House (11 page)

“You madmen!” I shouted.

Lord Alpha-B. scolded me. “What kind of childish attitude is that? Come, your name.”

“You know who I am. Crockett Smith!” I muttered. “Listen to me.”

How shall I describe my emotions when blowing out of my nostrils I saw a yellowish mist that proved I was lying? “I’m Crockett Smith!” I repeated and the yellow mist thickened. There before my eyes was the circumstantial evidence that even a pair of lungs couldn’t be trusted. My own lungs! I cursed and struggled and in my fury managed to free one hand from the hold of that chair. “I’m Crockett Smith!” I shouted and still that yellow mist persisted. I clapped my hand over my mouth and that treacherous stuff filtered through.

“Isn’t it childish to contradict the logic of Science?” Lord Alpha-B. asked me.

“Damn your science! I’m Crockett Smith and no one else!” And there was that damned yellow gas again. This time I didn’t protest for a new thought had paralyzed me. THE TRUTH SERUM WASN’T LYING. Maybe I’d once been a man named Crockett Smith, but hadn’t I left the Reservation? Hadn’t I eaten U-Latus and drunk opgin and associated with people like Commissioner Sonata? And made love to a two-in-one, police agent-writer who was also the double of my wife? And had an affair with an Atomic Park attendant, the thrill addict silver corder Cleo F.? Who knew? Perhaps the personality I had grown up with and that I’d known as Crockett Smith belonged to the past.

“Damn the Funhouse!” I cursed heartbrokenly. “Damn you all! I’m not myself any more, I’m nobody, another split man!”

And the truth serum let this pass uncensored. “Ah,” Lord Alpha-B. said.

“Very interesting,” the professor said. “And now will you tell us about Barnum Fly?”

“You haven’t got him!” I said and there was
no
yellow mist. Suddenly my despair was gone. “You’ve been tricked!”

Lord Alpha-B. gnashed his teeth. “That brain thief!” he said. “Always tricking me. I ought to retire! I’m too old!” He paced up and down, his old bald head lowered, swearing he would retire. “That brain thief! It was my theoretical paper on the relativity of pleasure, my concept of the large and the small that he stole to create Atomic Amusement Park!”

He stopped in front of me, his eyes burning. “Release him,” he said to the professor. “I must think, think. But what will I think with? This poor tired cerebrum.” He clapped his hand to his forehead. “This ravelled knot, this weary network of cells?”

They freed me from that chair and walked to the door. I called after them. The professor turned and frowned. “The master wishes to be alone. Make yourself at home, my friend. One word of advice. Keep out of any room marked
Experimental
. And if you see any automatons, ignore them!”

The door closed. I stared at the machine in the center of the room and at the tubular-jointed chair, and then I rushed out. “Wait!” I shouted at the giant professor and the hunched old magicientist in his cape.

“The master wishes to be alone!” the professor shouted and taking out his hypodermic he squirted some of the truth serum. A yellow cloud filled the corridor and when it cleared they were gone.

I could have used a U-Latu. My head was reeling. You’re a prisoner in this damned castle, I thought.

It was so quiet in that corridor. I glanced at the formulas and equations on the walls and shivered. I wondered if I should return to the ancestor room. Oh, God, I thought and began walking down the corridor. I passed the door of the room where I had been, the
TIME STREAM
room. Beyond it was a door with the warning
EXPERIMENTAL-SPACE TRAVEL,
and another door
EXPERIMENTAL — LILLIPUTIANS
. I hesitated — yes, I admit it honestly — before a door with the legend:
CASTLES IN SPAIN.

I simply didn’t want to think about the A-I-D. And when I came to a door whose sign read
SEX LABORATORY
, on the impulse, a very human impulse, I went inside. There was a large central room, with two doors leading to the labs, both of them carrying
EXPERIMENTAL
signs. The walls were lined with books, a big desk stood in the middle, and a smaller desk off to the side. As I stood there gaping and hardly breathing, one of the
EXPERIMENTAL
doors opened and an automaton whirred over to the small desk where it seated itself. The typical headless automaton so common among them — a white cylinder, this one, with a dozen or so protruding white rods that began picking up paper after paper from the desk, registering the information in its interior. For as it examined the papers, tabulating lights gleamed in its white middle.

“Excuse me,” I said.

It paid no attention to me and I sighed with relief. I went over to the books and read some of the titles.
THE NORMALCY OF SEXUAL ABERRATIONS; LESBIANISM, A WAY OF LIFE; COPULATION AMONG THE INVERTEBRATES OR A GUIDE TO HUMAN BEHAVIOR
. I glanced at the busy automaton and inched over to the big desk, and before I realized what I was doing I picked up a sheet of paper scrawled with notes. The first line I have never forgotten:
Why can’t human beings love like animals?

I read through the notes which projected an
Amatory Zoo
. One part of this zoo would be a two-hundred-foot-in-diameter imitation of the eye of a deer. By utilizing refractions and a hypnotic system described tersely as ‘cortex-hypnotism’, people entering it would imagine themselves to be stags and does. Another part was a salt-water maze to be contained inside the framework of a whale. The theory here was too abstruse for me to understand but it depended upon the recapitualition of the embryo and a return to the ocean-stage of development.

It was fascinating reading. Then I came to a sheet of notes on top of which was scrawled another memorable line:
The act of love utilizing one of THE FIVE SENSES
. It outlined a house of love divided into five sensory floors. On the first floor, lovers would be reduced to the sense of hearing. And Dr. Bangani — I guessed it was his handwriting — had scribbled:
Today at the Aviation Aviary in Greater Los Angeles, people in helicopters are steering like bats solely through their sense of hearing. To make love with only this sense functioning. How charming!

I was reading about the second floor where the lovers would be reduced to the sense of smell when I heard a woman’s voice. At first I thought it was the automaton. But then I realized the voice was coming from behind one of the doors marked
EXPERIMENTAL
. Again the voice sounded, half groan and half yawn. My heart jumped and I edged over to the door and underneath the warning
EXPERIMENTAL
, I read two scribbled words in the same handwriting as in the notes:
Sleeping Beauties
.

The professor had warned me. Yes, he had warned me, but when I thought of my own experiences in this laboratory-castle of Lord Alpha-B. — my two days of unconsciousness in his ancestor room, the truth serum, and that clutching claw of a chair — I just didn’t have the heart, the human heart to resist. Or the human curiosity.

I pushed the door open by the width of a crack, all the time watching the automaton. That inhuman thing was utterly absorbed in its work. The woman in
EXPERIMENTAL
had become silent. But when I touched the door again she whispered. “Help me!” No longer hesitating, I went inside, shutting the door behind me.

On a huge bed was a huge woman. An Amazon in size, at least seven feet tall, a beautiful Amazon with long black hair that reached to her waist. She was wearing a silky white garment that I had only seen before in my childhood fairy tales. It draped her body like a nightgown but it wasn’t a nightgown, made of some rich heavy cloth, an antique golden belt around her waist. I felt as if I had entered the Time Stream again, as if I had stepped into a far away past. The room was like a stone cell in a dungeon. But the bed with its carved head and footboards, covered with a canopy of gold, was fit for a princess. A princess, I thought my heart beating wildly. A real princess….

She had lifted her head, staring at me with large black wet eyes. I had never seen eyes so tearful and yet so happy. Only her head had moved, and I noticed now how still she lay, her arms rigid at her sides, her legs unmoving. “Help me,” she whispered.

“Can’t you get up from that bed?”

“No. Help me.”

“How can I help you?”

“The master’s spell,” she whispered. “Break the master’s spell.”

“How?”

Her eyelids fluttered and she singsonged:

“I love thee? Is that all?”

She was no longer held down by whatever had bound her
¹
. She smiled and her bare arms lifted above her head. As if awakening she gulped in a breath of air, her breasts bulging up under her strange white dress. She laughed a deep full laugh and leaped from the bed. “I am free!” she cried. “Free! Free!”

“I don’t know about that,” I said, thinking of Lord Alpha-B. and his professor, automatons and fields of Shocko.

She rushed over to me, her eyes glaring with a light that was fierce and velvety.

“We ought to think of how to escape,” I said hurriedly.

The change in her worried me. Her cheeks that had been as white as that shift of her’s, flushed a deep pink color. And those eyes! “I love thee,” she panted.

She was beautiful, yes, but she towered over me, and I began to feel sorry for having ignored the professor’s warning. Who knew what enzymes had gone into this experiment? “My dear girl,” I said, trying to soothe her. “We’re prisoners here — ”

“I love thee!” she repeated and with a single bound — she was a muscular woman — she charged in on me and caught my wrist, and with a strength that wasn’t what you would think of as being feminine, she pulled me to her, “Come here, my little mouse!” she laughed and her laughter was so loud it bounced off the stone walls.

I couldn’t believe this was happening to me, but those inflamed eyes of her’s, that terrible strength! “My dear girl, we’re in an awful spot,” I said choking down my fear.

She pulled me to her, and I was kissed as never before in my life. She lifted her head and in a triumphant lustful voice shouted. “Mousikins, I love thee!” And like the huge feminine cat she was, she dragged me to that bed of hers …

When she fell asleep, I picked up my scattered clothes and dressed. I tip-toed out of the room, closing the door behind me. The white cylinder was still busily at work. I knew it was indifferent to me but in my confused and uncertain state of mind I said, “Excuse me.”

“A messenger is waiting outside to bring you to the master,” it said in a coy flirtatious voice — the voice inbuilt into its mechanism.

“Thank you,” I muttered.

Outside the
SEX LABORATORY
, there was a automaton made like a foot, a winged foot. When it saw me or rather sensed me, for it had no eyes, its wing fluttered from side to side, a shining bright wing whose feathers were thin strips of aluminum. It advanced down the corridor. I followed it. My state of mind could be imagined. I was dazed, dizzy and depleted. As if in a dream I stepped into an elevator and felt it zoom down the 96.82 feet that I had measured what seemed a lifetime ago.

The door slid open, and I walked out into a hall whose walls were covered with spears and shields, where suits of armor out of the middle ages stood about like steel ghosts, empty of the pikemen, crossbowmen, falconiers and coxcombs that had worn them once in battle. Waiting for me at a beamed door that was at least twenty feet high were the professor and his master.

“I hope you have learned your lesson,” the professor scolded me, shaking his big head. The old magicientist ignored me. Bald head slumped, he was muttering to himself. The professor put a warning finger across his lips and then he whispered. “He hasn’t relaxed yet but I am certain he will feel better after the hunt. His Lordship always does.”

“Ah, to live in an age of eternal values!” Lord Alpha-B. exclaimed and glancing at me he said. “Welcome to Bangani Castle, old chap. Do you like to hunt?” And without waiting for an answer sighed. “It was a passion of my ancestors.” He waved his wrinkled hand at the suits of steel armor.

The professor whispered in my ear. “The master is a genius but sentimental. He isn’t satisfied with one set of ancesters but must have two.”

“The first Lord Bangani was a great huntsman,” his descendant declared.

The professor prodded me with his elbow and said. “When a man speaks of his ancestors, he expects the courtesy of a reply.”

“Thank God for your ancestors!” I said with a spurt of emotion that was almost anger. “They fought with spears and bows in the great days before the A-I-D.”

“Sussex, Sussex,” his lordship murmured as if to himself. “To the west there is Kenya, to the south Tanganyika, and I a man reared on the gentle downs of Sussex.”

“Dr. Bangani!” I cried. “We’re wasting time!”

“Gentle Sussex,” he said, walking away from me to a suit of armor along side the beamed door.

“For God’s sake!” I said to the professor. “You’re an educated man — ”

“You peasant from the Reservation!” he scolded me gently.

“You haven’t got Barnum Fly! You’ve got an imposter! We must — ”

“We must practice
noblesse oblige
, peasant!” he said. “The master will make the decision when he is ready.”

It was hopeless appealing to him. Tears of frustration came to my eyes as I stared at that big lump of cauterized conscience.

“Sussex, Sussex,” his master whispered and drew out a sword strapped around the steel waist of the suit of armor. Immediately, the beamed door it controlled
¹
swung open.

“Come!” the professor said.

Outside, a golden African-type moon
²
was floating over the transplanted palms and mahoganies. It was much lower in the sky than the real moon. A beautiful sight, those two moons, but all I could think of was that soon it would be June 29th. June 29th and five days to go …