“And don’t try to appeal to me by pretending to suffocate. I tucked the sheet under your nose even if I did keep your mouth covered. Couldn’t bear you talking now. The sheet’s called wraparound plastic — I’ve got my chemical friend too, though he’s not Parisian. It’ll be next year’s number-one packaging material, he tells me. Filmy, harder to see than cellophane, but very tough. An electronic plastic, no less, positive one side, negative the other. Just touch it to something and it wraps around, touches itself, and clings like anything. Like I just had to touch it to you. To make it unwrap fast you can just shoot some electrons into it from a handy static battery—my friend’s advertising copy, Emmy—and it flattens out whang. Give it enough electrons and it’s stronger than steel.
“We used another bit of it that last way, Emmy, to get through your door. Fitted it outside, so it’d wrap itself against the bolts when your door opened. Then just now, after blacking out the corridor, we pumped electrons into it and it flattened out, pushing back all the bolts. Excuse me, dear, but you know how you love to lecture about your valved plastics and all your other little restraints, so you mustn’t mind me giving a little talk about mine. And boasting about my friends too. I’ve got some you don’t know about, Emmy. Ever heard the name Smyslov, or the Arain? Some of them cut ghosts themselves and weren’t pleased to hear about you, especially the past-future angle.”
There was a protesting little squeal of castors, as if Slyker were trying to move his chair.
“Don’t go away, Emmy. I’m sure you know why I’m here. Yes, dear, I’m taking them all back as of now. All five. And I don’t care how much death-wish they got, because I’ve got some ideas for that. So now ‘scuse me, Emmy, while I get ready to slip into my ghosts.”
There wasn’t any noise then except Emil Slyker’s wheezy breathing and the occasional rustle of silk and the whir of a zipper, followed by soft feathery falls.
“There we are, Emmy, all clear. Next step, my five lost sisters. Why, your little old secret drawer is open —you didn’t think I knew about that, Emmy, did you? Let’s see now, I don’t think we’ll need music for this—they know my touch; it should make them stand up and shine.”
She stopped talking. After a bit I got the barest hint of light over by the desk, very uncertain at first, like a star at the limit of vision, where it keeps winking back and forth from utter absence to the barest dim existence, or like a lonely lake lit only by starlight and glimpsed through a thick forest, or as if those dancing points of light that persist even in absolute darkness and indicate only a restless retina and optic nerve had fooled me for a moment into thinking they represented something real.
But then the hint of light took definite form, though staying at the dim limit of vision and crawling back and forth as I focused on it because my eyes had no other point of reference to steady it by.
It was a dim angular band making up three edges of a rectangle, the top edge longer than the two vertical edges, while the bottom edge wasn’t there. As I watched it and it became a little clearer, I saw that the bands of light were brightest toward the inside—that is, toward the rectangle they partly enclosed, where they were bordered by stark blackness—while toward the outside they faded gradually away. Then as I continued to watch I saw that the two corners were rounded while up from the top edge there projected a narrow, lesser rectangle—a small tab.
The tab made me realize that I was looking at a file folder silhouetted by something dimly glowing inside it
Then the top band darkened toward the center, as would happen if a hand were dipping into the folder, and then lightened again as if the hand were being withdrawn. Then up out of the folder, as if the invisible hand were guiding or coaxing it, swam something no brighter than the bands of light.
It was the shape of a woman, but distorted and constantly flowing, the head and arms and upper torso maintaining more of an approximation to human proportions than the lower torso and legs, which were like churning, trailing draperies or a long gauzy skirt. It was extremely dim, so I had to keep blinking my eyes, and it didn’t get brighter.
It was like the figure of a woman phosphorescently painted on a long-skirted slip of the filmiest silk that had silk-stocking-like sheaths for arms and head attached—yes, and topped by some illusion of dim silver hair. And yet it was more than that. Although it looped up gracefully through the air as such a slip might when shaken out by a woman preparing to put it on, it also had a writhing life of its own.
But in spite of all the distortions, as it flowed in an arc toward the ceiling and dove downward, it was seductively beautiful and the face was recognizably that of Ewie Cordew.
It checked its dive and reversed the direction of its flow, so that for a moment it floated upright high hi the air, like a filmy nightgown a woman swishes above her head before she slips into it.
Then it began to settle toward the floor and I saw that there really was a woman standing under it and pulling it down over her head, though I could see her body only very dimly by the reflected glow of the ghost she was drawing down around her.
The woman on the floor shot up her hands close to her body and gave a quick wriggle and twist and ducked her head and then threw it back, as a woman does when she’s getting into a tight dress, and the flowing glowing thing lost its distortions as it fitted itself around her.
Then for a moment the glow brightened a trifle as the woman and her ghost merged and I saw Ewie Cordew with her flesh gleaming by its own light—the long slim ankles, the vase-curve of hips and waist, the impudent breasts almost as you’d guess them from the bikini shots, but with larger aureoles—saw it for an instant before the ghost-light winked out like white sparks dying, and there was utter darkness again.
Utter darkness and a voice that crooned, “Oh that was like silk, Emmy, pure silk stocking all over. Do you remember when you cut it, Emmy? I’d just got my first screen credit and I’d signed the seven-year contract and I knew I was going to have the world by the tail and I felt wonderful and I suddenly got terribly dizzy for no reason and I came to you. And you straightened me out for then by coaxing out and cutting away my happiness. You told me it would be a little like giving blood, and it was. That was my first ghost, Emmy, but only the first.”
My eyes, recovering swiftly from the brighter glow of the ghost returning to its sources, again made out the three glowing sides of the file folder. And again there swam up out of it a crazily churning phosphorescent woman trailing gauzy streamers. The face was recognizably Ewie’s, but constantly distorting, now one eye big as an orange then small as a pea, the lips twisting in impossible smiles and grimaces, the brow shrinking to that of a pinhead or swelling to that of a mongolian idiot, like a face
reflected from a plate-glass window running with water. As it came down over the real Evelyn’s face there was a moment when the two were together but didn’t merge, like the faces of twins in such a flooded window. Then, as if a squeegee had been wiped down it, the single face came bright and clear, and just as the darkness returned she caressed her lips with her tongue.
And I heard her say, “That one was like hot velvet, Emmy, smooth but with a burn in it. You took it two days after the sneak preview of Hydrogen Blonde, when we had the little party to celebrate after the big party, and the current Miss America was there and I showed her what a really valuable body looked like. That was when I realized that I’d hit the top and it hadn’t changed me into a goddess or anything. I still had the same ignorances as before and the same awkwardnesses for the. cameramen and cutters to hide— only they were worse because I was hi the center of the show window—and I was going to have to fight for the rest of my life to keep my body like it was and then I was going to start to die, wrinkle by wrinkle, lose my juice cell by cell, like anybody else.”