A BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY BERKLEY PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  Copyright © 1972 by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  All rights reserved

  Published by arrangement with the author's agent SEN 425-02231-

  BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by Berkley Publishing Corporation

  Madison Avenue New York, N.Y.

  BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS ® TM 757,

  Printed In Canada

  BERKLEY MEDALLION EDITION, SEPTEMBER,

  Chapter One

  The sign on the door, in modest gold letters, read JAMES C. MELFORD, MANAGING EDITOR. The faintly pretty girl at the reception desk smiled, depressed a button, and murmured, "Mr. Melford? Can you see Mr. Cannon for a few minutes?" She listened a moment, then smiled again, a little more cordially this time, and said, "Take a seat, Mr. Cannon. Mr. Melford will be with you hi just a minute."

  The man standing before the desk—tall, thin, and slightly stooped, Ms face drawn and haggard as if with some overriding worry—tamed away, fidgeting slightly, and lowered his lanky body onto a plastic sofa. He picked up a magazine but barely leafed through the pages, riffling them as if he were shuffling a deck of cards, and put it down again. He stretched Ms neck to look around the office, frowning as if he had lost something there and couldn't quite remember what.

  Whatever it was, it wasn't there, or at least Ms eyes didn't linger on it There was a small, green, plastic

  Christmas tree, decorated with blue glass balls and red-ribbon bows, on the reception desk. In a rack beside the desk were a few dozen brightly colored paperback books, the recent releases of Blackcock Books. His eyes lingered momentarily on two titles near the top of the rack, The True Story of Witchcraft and Voodoo in the Modern World, by John Cannon. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut, as if in pain, and the girl behind the Christmas tree raised her head momentarily. "Are you all right, Mr. Cannon?"

  "Yes—yes, thank you," he said, and reached out a determined arm to pick up the magazine. He held it without opening it, his hands clenched on the edges, as if forcing himself to sit still. The girl's eyes lingered on him a moment, but a ringing phone forced her attention back to the switchboard, and Cannon loosed his grip on the magazine, sighing faintly.

  The office door swung open, and a youngish man, his tie loosened at the neck, his thick light hair standing up in crisp curls, stood in the door. His face broke into a hearty smile.

  "Hello, Jock, nice to see you. Want to come inside?" He held out his hand. His voice was warm and welcoming, and the clasp of his fingers firm. Cannon, unfolding himself awkwardly from the chair, relaxed a little in a smile and let himself be shepherded inside.

  The office was light, bright, and unpretentious, with a big, workman-like desk overflowing with papers and boxes of manuscripts; more manuscripts, in boxes and thick manila envelopes, were piled up in racks and on shelves at both sides. There were brightly garish paintings on the walls, obviously the originals of the book covers of the publishing house, and a small bronze statuette which read, across the base-, SCIENCE FICTION AWARD—1967 in a place of honor atop a filing cabinet. One of the colored paintings displayed a green devil with glaring red eyes and enormous horns; Melford saw his guest's eyes linger on it and smiled again, warmly, as he moved around behind his desk.

  "Yes, that's The Devil in America. It's still one of our best sellers; we're thinking of reprinting it this spring—providing your agent and I can come to some kind of reasonable terms. Sit down, sit down." He took the desk chair and waved Cannon into a chart beside him. "Cigarette? How've you been, Jock? You're looking a bit rocky. When I called your agent last week, he said you'd been in the country trying to rest. What's the matter, fella? People our age shouldn't need to rest!"

  In the flow of this cheerful chatter Cannon relaxed, with a nervous smile. "Nothing, I guess. A touch of the Hong Kong flu, maybe. Yes, I went up to Massachusetts for a few days… I thought maybe I could work better in the quiet. Only after a few days"—he smiled, the shy and self-deprecating smile again—"the quiet started to get on my nerves."

  "You sound like my mother," Melford remarked, grinning, "always talking about the good old days. And yet when the power went off last year, and she and Barbara had to cook a few meals with canned heat, or over the fireplace, you should have heard her bitching!

  I must say Barbara was a good sport, though. She was asking about you just the other day—Barbara, that is. So what's doing?"

  "Problems," Cannon said, a little diffidently.

  Melford still looked friendly, but a very faint frown edged his forehead. "If it's money, Jock, this is the slow season, but maybe auditing would okay another advance."

  "Oh, good God, no, I'm not broke," Camion said quickly, "no more broke than usual, anyway. No, I didn't come here about money, Jamie. Like everybody else, I could use it about now, but if that had been what I wanted, I'd have sicked my agent on you." He laughed nervously. "No, no, it's something else. You did get the manuscript of the new book, didn't you?"

  "Sure. It's here somewhere." Jamie Melford pulled a large box with the label of one of the larger author's agencies toward him. He took off the cover and lifted out a bulky typed manuscript. "We ought to do something about that title, Jock; Witchcraft in New York Today . . . it's not a bad title, but it's a little cumbersome, and besides, it will remind everybody of William Seabrook—you know, Witchcraft, Its Power in the World Today! They'll think they've read it already, and they won't buy it. It's a damn good book, Jock. I enjoyed it… forgot to proofread while I was going through it!"

  "You read it? Already?"

  "Damn right. Well be buying it—no point in not telling you—we'll probably have a contract for you at the agency before the end of the week. Should have the money in time for you to do your Christmas shopping."

  "The fact is," Cannon said, with an air of taking the plunge, "I'm not quite happy about the book."

  Melford pursed his lips. The gesture made him look ten years older and was incongruous in his boyish face. "I don't get it, Jock. It's a fine book—good as anything you've done. Oh, it goes a bit far, of course"—I can't say I buy all this weird stuff about witch what-do-you-call-'ems, covens, operating right here in New York City—but after all, that sort of sensationalism is what sells books, and' I don't think very many people take it seriously, any more than they take Bela Lugosi in Dracula, on "The Late Late Show," seriously. Except for a few assorted nuts, of course."

  "That's the trouble, Jamie," Cannon said. "I seem to have—without realizing it—stepped on somebody's toes. I've been having trouble…"

  Jamie chuckled. "Oh, I suppose all the local witches are sticking pins in your image," he said.

  "I wouldn't be surprised," Cannon said quietly. Jamie stopped and looked at him. Then he said, "You're serious, Jock?"

  Cannon twisted his long nervous fingers. "Yes. I was so damn afraid you'd laugh at me."

  "Hell no, man. There are so many assorted nuts hi this city, somebody is sure to take offense at damn near anything we publish. Do you remember the piece we did about vice on the streets? Believe it or not, some crackpot society calling itself the Sexual Freedom League called me up every day for a week saying that we had set back sane sex laws in this country ten years, or some such rubbish. And that biography of… oh, what the hell was his name—you know, the general that got fired—the John Birch Society kept calling us up and calling us a pack of dirty red radicals, and worse things." Jamie smiled his warm, reassuring smile. "So you're beginning to get the crackpots, too? Hell, it's a compliment… shows you're well known. Who bothers to slander the village idiot?"

  Cannon still looked shaken and nervous. He said, "It seems so real somehow. And then, last week, when I got sick"—his laugh sounded hollow—"I began… wondering."

  "Look," Jamie began, but the ringing phone cut him off. He leaned forward, picked it up, and said, "James Melford speaking."

  Gradually his face darkened and knotted into a frown. "Yes, Cannon is here now… what is that? What! Say, who is this, anyway? Hey, you—" He stood holding the phone in his hand, the dial tone faint and buzzing, clearly audible.

  "Some damned nut," he said angrily, "some obscene lout. Is that what you've been getting, Jock?"

  "That and more," Cannon said, and then the floodgates broke. "It started with the phone calls. Just a nasty whispering voice, neither man nor woman, just a—a voice, threatening me with all sorts of ghastly things if I finished the book. It's why I went to the country. I thought I'd get away from it there. Only then it was letters, and once a dead chicken on my doorstep—all blood—and once a picture… a picture of a filthy little doll with pins sticking in it—" His voice broke and he shuddered.

  Jamie looked at him aghast. "Insane!" he muttered. "I've thought I was going insane."

  "Good God! I don't mean you, Jock. I mean the filthy bastards who'd do a thing like that. Look, Jock, it's either a complicated practical joke—and about the unfunniest I ever heard of, believe me—or else some lunatic who takes all this stuff seriously has decided to try and get your goat, break your nerve. But use your head, man! He can't do you any harm with all this hocus-pocus unless you let him get on your nerves!"

  "I'm not so sure," Cannon said, still in that quiet voice. "Seabrook took it seriously. He knew of people who had actually been killed by what you call that hocus-pocus."

  "Savages… superstitious natives who believed in

it—I've read his book, too. It can't hurt you unless you believe in it."

  "I'm not so sure of that either," Cannon said. "I've been researching and reporting on this kind of thing for five years and eight books now. I am beginning to take it seriously—damn seriously. I think it shows in my books, and I think that's why they're after me."

  Jamie Melford looked at his friend with a troubled frown. He was entirely too good-natured to laugh off anything that was troubling the older man this badly; and yet his own inherent skepticism told him it was rubbish. He said, and his voice reflected his dilemma, "Well, Jock, I just don't know what to say to you. I never thought that you, of all people, would let this sort _ of thing get you down. Wasn't it you who exposed four dozen fake mediums for your first book?"

  "Yes," Jock said slowly, "and only later did I begin to realize that there were a few I couldn't expose. They couldn't all have been simply too clever for me. It only occurred to me later, too, that nobody would bother to fake psychic phenomena without some real psychic phenomena to imitate."

  "Well, I can't argue that" Melford said, a little impatiently-. "It isn't my field. I just know that the books sell well and that there are a tremendous number of people in this country who read everything they can get on the subject—including every new John Cannon. But it's you that's being persecuted—not me. I can laugh off phone calls like the one I just got, but you surely aren't going to let them scare you off, are. you, Jock?"

  "I hope not. But"—Ms voice shook a little—"I just don't know what to do. The letter I got this morning

  He rummaged in a pocket and spread a single sheet of paper on the desk. Both men bent over it. It read, in straggling block printing:

  WITHDRAW YOUR NEW BOOK

  AND SAVE YOUR LIFE—OR

  JONATHAN LAWRENCE CANNON

  PREPARE TO DIE.

  Melford shook his head, Ms lips pressed tight in anger. "They seem to know the name you sign your contracts with, for what that's worth" was Ms only comment

  Cannon's voice was diffident. "I don't suppose you'd want to… withdraw the book?"

  "Are you out of your head? I said I thought it was your best so far. What does your wife say about all this, Jock?"

  "I've tried to keep it from her," Cannon replied. "All except the dead chicken. She found it, and it shook her up. Bess is a good sport, and she traipsed all over Haiti with me for the book on voodoo, so she knew what it meant. Of course, she has only one answer"—he smiled, faintly—"return to the fold. I told her that was just fighting superstition with superstition, as if holy water and a rosary could drive away a curse."

  Jamie laughed aloud. "Well, if one's real, the other would have to be real, man," he said. "Maybe you ought to fight fire with fire. They'd have a heck of a time trying to curse you if you were at high mass, wouldn't they?"

  Cannon said with a quiet dignity, "I'm not a religious man myself, but I respect Bess's religion too much to pretend in that sort of thing."

  Jamie sobered slightly. "I suppose you're right. But I respect reason too much to withdraw the book and let a bunch of nuts scare me off. And I think you do, too, Jock. Why not take a rest? You look tired, and you've been sick, and your nerves are probably shot. Look, suppose I call up auditing tonight and have them shoot you the first advance right away, so you can afford to get away for a few days and get your nerves back in shape. Have a physical checkup; when the doctor says there's nothing wrong, you'll be ashamed of imagining things. It'll be all right, Jock; you'd never forgive me if I let a bunch of nuts scare you off!" He rose, extending his hand. "I've got to chase you off now, fella; I'm meeting Barbara for a cocktail at five. Give my love to Bess and have her call Barbara one of these days—we might get together for dinner. And I'll have them get that check out to you. All right?"

  Camion stood up, hovering indecisively, but Jamie's reassuring handshake and friendly words evidently made it impossibly hard for him to continue. When the door closed behind him, Jamie Melford shook his head, murmured a soft "Whew! Poor guy! Now I've heard everything" and drew the book manuscript toward him again. Smiling, he scribbled a memo to his secretary to arrange the early advance; it gave him genuine pleasure to do a favor for one of his authors, and Cannon's edgy state had moved him deeply.

  Outside his office, in the hall waiting for the elevator, Jonathan Cannon pressed Ms hand to his heart, and his face twisted in pain. He drew the crumpled letter from his pocket and stared at it, then closed his eyes.

  Chapter Two

  Some days, Barbara Melford decided, it didn't pay to get out of bed.

  This had been one of those days if there ever was one. There had been the almost-routine clash with her mother-in-law before leaving the house: the older Mrs. Melford just couldn't manage, not ever, to restrain some pointed comments about her day, when women stayed home and managed their homes. Barbara had somehow managed not to make the comment on the tip of her tongue: with Mrs. Melford around to manage, nobody else could have gotten a fingertip into the managing line. Yet it rankled. Then she'd spent the morning trying to cope with a spoiled and squalling child model who was getting a cold, and the child model's impossible mother. When she finally had the arrangement posed as she wanted it, one of the studio lights burned out and she had burned her fingers changing the bulb. In the afternoon, a sudden rain shower meant that a fashion model had arrived with damp hair that had to be dried and reset before they could go ahead. And to top everything else, she thought she was getting the curse. Damn it, she thought, as she shrugged savagely into her pea jacket, If Jamie and I weren't married, I'd have been pregnant forty times over by now. I don't care—I'm not especially anxious to have a baby with Mother Melford hanging over my belly. But poor Jamie's going to be so damn disappointed all over again, and he'll probably start up again about going back to Dr. Clinton, and she told me, last time, that I should relax and wait another year before going through the whole routine of tests again.

  The icy wind and an off-key rendition of Joy to the World by three half-frozen looking Salvation. Army workers, disspiritedly singing in front of the department, store at the end of the block, bit at her simultaneously as she emerged into the street. She fished in her pocket for. a handful of pennies and threw them into the kettle, realizing just too late that she had thrown her last subway token in with them. Oh, hell and damnation, you just couldn't fish it out in front of the poor guys. She walked on, frowning, toward the corner where she usually met Jamie after work.

  He was there as usual before her, looking handsome in his thick tweed overcoat and the Astrakhan cap she had given him last birthday, and her heart warmed at the sight. One nice thing about Jamie, he never made any wisecracks about women being late; he knew what it was like in a business where you worked with temperamental people all day long and any one of them could throw you off schedule.

  "Hello, darling." She fell into step beside Mm. "Nice day?"

  "Good enough. Let's get out of this wind, shall we? I could use a drink. And you?"

  "Coffee, thanks. I think I'm getting my period."

  "Oh, hell. I'm sorry, sweetheart." To her great relief, he did not mention Dr. Clinton. They went down the steps into the restaurant, sat down, and gave their orders. Catching sight of their two forms in a mirror over the tables, she thought again how handsome Jamie was and how lucky she was to have him. God knows, plenty of prettier women had wanted him. She saw herself in the plain Navy pea jacket with short tartan skirt and high, fashionable boots, her short crisp dark hair wrapped in a tartan scarf. Barbara, who worked in the fashion world and knew glamour from the inside out, distrusted it as phony and thought of herself as nice-looking rather than beautiful.

  The drink for Jamie and the coffee for Barbara arrived, and Barbara loosened her scarf and ran her fingers through her hair. "Oooh, what a day!"

  "Rough?"

  "Rough. I'm seriously thinking of refusing to work with children under ten. Oh, I know that's not fair—most of them are nice kids, but the occasionally brattish one .. = I'm thinking of dropping a word to the agency that I won't have Peggy Andrews again, or at least not with her mother around. The trouble is that she looks exactly, but exactly, like the Tenniel Alice, and that seems to be a type that makes editors and art directors go all soft and melty. It's as bad as blond little boys who look exactly like Christopher Robin."

 

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