Black Gondolier and Other Stories by Fritz Leiber Read Free Book Online Page B

oil well by Daloway’s trailer was still pumping though. But there was an odd wheezy hiss in it I’d never heard before, and after each hiss a faint tinkly spatter, as of drops hitting sheet metal.
    I walked over to the edge of the canal. There was just enough light for me to manage that safely. I stooped beside it. Just as I’d imagined, it was full to the brim.
    Then I heard the other sounds: a faint rhythmic swish and, spaced about three seconds apart, the faint muffled thuds that would be made by a gondolier’s pole.
    I stared down the black canal, my heart suddenly pounding and my neck cold. For a moment I thought I saw, in murkiest silhouette, the outlines of a gondola, with gondolier and passenger, going away from me, but I simply couldn’t be sure.
    Fences blocked the canal for me that way, even if I’d had the courage to follow, and I ran back to my car for my flashlight. Halfway back with it, I hesitated, wondering if I shouldn’t drive the car to the canal edge and use my high headlight beams, but I wasn’t sure I could position it right.
    I kept onto the canal and directed my flashlight beam down it.
    In the first flare of light and vision, I again thought I saw the Black Gondola, much smaller now, near the turn into the Grand Canal.
    But the beam wavered and when I got it properly directed again—a matter of a fraction of a second—the canal seemed empty. I kept swinging my flashlight a little, up and down, side to side, for quite a few seconds and studying the canal, but it stayed empty.
    I was half inclined to jump into my car and take the long swing around to the road paralleling the Grand Canal. I did do that, somewhat later on, but now I decided to go to the trailer first. After all, I hadn’t made any noise to speak of and Daloway might well be there asleep—it would take only seconds to check. Everything I had heard and seen so far might conceivably be imagination, the auditory and visual impressions had both been very faint, though they still seemed damnably real.
    There was a hint of pink in the east now. I heard again that unfamiliar hissing wheeze from the oil well, with subsequent faint splatter, and I paused to direct my light at it and then, after a bit, at the wall of Daloway’s trailer.
    Something had gone wrong with the pump so that it had sprung a leak and with every groaning stroke a narrow stream of petroleum was sprayed against the wall of Daloway’s trailer, blotching it darkly, and through the little window, which stood open.
    It was never afterwards established whether a lightning stroke had something to do with this failure of the valves of the pump, though several people living around there later assured me that two of the lightning strokes had been terrific, seeming to hit their roofs. Personally I’ve always had the feeling that the lightning unlocked something .
    The door to the trailer was shut, but not locked. I opened it and flashed my light around the walls. Daloway wasn’t anywhere there, nobody was.
    The first thing I flashed my light steadily on was Daloway’s bunk under the little open window. At that moment there came the hissing wheeze and oil rattled against the wall of the trailer and some came through the window, pattering softly on the rough brown blankets, adding a little to the great black stain on them. The oil stank.
    Then I directed my flashlight another way . . . and was frozen by horror.
    What I’d heard and seen by the bank of the canal might have been imagination. One has to admit he can always be fooled along the faint borderlines of sensation.
    But this that I saw now was starkly and incontrovertibly real and material.
    The accident to the oil pump, no matter how sardonically grim and suggestive in view of Daloway’s theories, could be . . . merely an accident.
    But this that I saw now could be no accident. It was either evidence of a premeditated supernormal malignancy, or—as the