Nightmares & Geezenstacks by Fredric Brown Read Free Book Online

the Black ones—and will there be an end, a victory?
    We can only have faith, and never become cynics and heretics, like my poor fellow Bishop Tibault. “We fight and die; we know not why,” he once whispered to me, earlier in the war at a time when we stood side by side defending our King while the battle raged in a far corner of the field.
    But that was only the beginning of his heresy. He had stopped believing in a God and had come to believe in gods, gods who play a game with us and care nothing for us as persons. Worse, he believed that our moves are not our own, that we are but puppets fighting in a useless war. Still worse—and how absurd!—that White is not necessarily good and Black is not necessarily evil, that on the cosmic scale it does not matter who wins the war!
    Of course it was only to me, and only in whispers, that he said these things. He knew his duties as a bishop. He fought bravely. And died bravely, that very day, impaled upon the lance of a Black Knight. I prayed for him: God, rest his soul and grant him peace; he meant not what he said.
    Without faith we are nothing. How could Tibault have been so wrong? White must win. Victory is the only thing that can save us. Without victory our companions who have died, those who here upon this embattled field have given their lives that we may live, shall have died in vain. Et tu , Tibault.
    And you were wrong, so wrong. There is a God, and so great a God that He will forgive your heresy, because there was no evil in you, Tibault, except as doubt—no, doubt is error but it is not evil.
    Without faith we are noth—
    But something is happening! Our Rook, he who was on the Queen’s side of the field in the Beginning, swoops toward the evil Black King, our enemy. The villainous one is under attack—and cannot escape. We have won! We have won!
    A voice in the sky says calmly, “Checkmate.”
    We have won! The war, this bitter stricken field, was not in vain. Tibault, you were wrong, you were—
    But what is happening now? The very Earth tilts; one. side of the battlefield rises and we are sliding—White and Black alike—into—
    —into a monstrous box and I see that it is a mass coffin in which already lie dead—
    IT IS NOT FAIR; WE WON! GOD, WAS TIBAULT
    RIGHT? IT IS NOT JUST; WE WON!
    The King, my liege lord, is sliding too across the squares —
    IT IS NOT JUST; IT IS NOT RIGHT ; IT IS NOT…

HOBBYIST
    “I heard a rumor,” Sangstrom said, “to the effect that you—” He turned his head and looked about him to make absolutely sure that he and the druggist were alone in the tiny prescription pharmacy. The druggist was a gnomelike gnarled little man who could have been any age from fifty to a hundred. They were alone, but Sangstrom dropped his voice just the same. “—to the effect that you have a completely undetectable poison.”
    The druggist nodded. He came around the counter and locked the front door of the shop, then walked toward a doorway behind the counter. “I was about to take a coffee break,” he said. “Come with me and have a cup.”
    Sangstrom followed him around the counter and through the doorway to a back room ringed by shelves of bottles from floor to ceiling. The druggist plugged in an electric percolator, found two cups and put them on a table that had a chair on either side of it. He motioned Sangstrom to one of the chairs and took the other himself. “Now,” he said. “Tell me. Whom do you want to kill, and why?”
    “Does it matter?” Sangstrom asked. “Isn’t it enough that I pay for—”
    The druggist interrupted him with an upraised hand. “Yes, it matters. I must be convinced that you deserve what I can give you. Otherwise—” He shrugged.
    “All right,” Sangstrom said. “The whom is my wife. The why—” He started the long story. Before he had quite finished the percolator had finished its task and the druggist briefly interrupted to get the coffee for them. Sangstrom finished his story.
    The