An Alien Heat

But all there was of her was the wood, with its oaks and its elms, its rocks and its squirrels.

He rose into the air and sped back to the little house, his coat-tails flapping, his hat flying from his head.

He ran through the overfurnished rooms. He called to her but she did not reply. He knew that she would not. Everything she had had him create for her — the tables, the sofas, the chairs, the beds, the cabinets, the knick-knacks, seemed to mock him in his grief and thus increase the pain.

And at last he collapsed upon the grass of the rose garden and, holding a rose of a peculiar bluish-green, he wept, for he knew very well what had happened.

Lord Jagged? Where was he? Lord Jagged had told Jherek that it would happen like this.

But Jherek had changed. He could no longer appreciate the splendid irony of the joke. For everyone but Jherek would see it as a joke and a clever one.

My Lady Charlotina had claimed her vengeance.

10. The Granting of Her Heart's Desire

My Lady Charlotina would have hidden Mrs. Amelia Underwood very well. As he recovered a little of his composure Jherek began to wonder how he might rescue his love. There would be no point in going to My Lady Charlotina's (his first impulse) and simply demanding the return of Mrs. Underwood. My Lady Charlotina would only laugh at him the more. No, he must visit Lord Jagged of Canaria and seek his advice. He wondered now, why Lord Jagged had not come to visit him since he had taken up with Mrs. Amelia Underwood. Perhaps Jagged had stayed away out of a rather overdeveloped sense of tact?

With a heavy heart Jherek Carnelian went to the outbuilding where, at Mrs. Underwood's suggestion he had stored his locomotive.

The door of the outbuilding was opened with a key, but he could not find the key. Mrs. Underwood had always kept it.

He was reluctant to disseminate the outbuilding now (she had been a stickler about observing certain proprieties of her own day and the business of keys and locks was one of the chief ones, it seemed), for all that it was frightfully ugly. But, with her disappearance, everything of Mrs. Underwood's had become sacred to him. If he never found her again this little Gothic house would stand in the same spot forever.

At length, however, he was forced to disseminate the door, order the locomotive out, and remake the door behind him. Then he set off.

As he flew towards Lord Jagged's the thought kept recurring to him that My Lady Charlotina would have seen nothing particularly wrong in disseminating Mrs. Amelia Underwood completely and irrevocably. It was unlikely that My Lady Charlotina would have gone that far — but it was possible. In that case Mrs. Underwood might be gone forever. She could not be resurrected if every single atom of her being had been broken down and spread across the face of the Earth. Jherek kept this sort of thought back as best he could. If he brooded on it there was every chance, he feared, of his falling into a depressive trance from which he would never wake.

The locomotive at last reached Lord Jagged's castle — all bright yellow, in the shape of an ornamental bird cage and a modest seventy-five feet tall — and began to circle while Jherek sent a message to his friend.

"Lord Jagged? Can you receive a visitor? It is I, Jherek Carnelian, and my business is of the gravest importance."

There was no reply. The locomotive circled lower. There were various "boxes" suspended on antigravity beams in the birdcage. Each box was a room used by Lord Jagged. He might be in any one of them. But, no matter which room he occupied, he would be bound to hear Jherek's request.

"Lord Jagged?"

It was plain that Lord Jagged was not at home. There was a sense of desertion about his castle as if it had not been used for several months. Had something happened to the Lord of Canaria?

Had My Lady Charlotina taken vengeance on him, too, for his part in the theft of the alien?

Oh, this was savage!

Jherek turned his locomotive toward the North and Werther de Goethe's tomb, expecting to find that his mother, the Iron Orchid, had also vanished.

But Werther's tomb — a vast statue of himself lying serenely dead with a gigantic Angel of Death hovering over his body and several sorrowing women kneeling beside him — was still occupied by the black pair. They were, in fact, on the roof near the feet of the reclining statue but Jherek did not see them at first, for both they and the statue were completely black.

"Jherek, my sorrow!" His mother sounded almost animated. Werther merely glowered and gnawed his fingernails in the background as the locomotive landed on the flat parapet, bringing a startling dash of colour to the scene. "Jherek, what ill tidings bring you here?" His mother produced a black handkerchief and wiped black tears from her black cheeks.

"Ill tidings, indeed," he said. He felt offended by what at the present moment seemed to him to be a mockery of his real anguish. "Mrs. Amelia Underwood has been abducted — perhaps destroyed — and My Lady Charlotina is almost certainly the cause of it."

"Her vengeance , of course!" breathed the Iron Orchid, her black eyes widening and a certain kind of amusement glinting in them. "Oh! Oh! Woe! Thus is great Jherek brought low! Thus is the House of Carnelian ruined! Oi moi! Oi moi!" And she added, conversationally, "What do you think of that last touch?"

"This is serious, mother, who brought me precious life…"

"Only so that you might suffer its torments! I know! I know! Oh, woe!"

"Mother!" Jherek was screaming. "What shall I do?"

"What can you do?" Werther de Goethe broke in. "You are doomed, Jherek. You are damned! Fate has singled you out, as it has singled me out, for an eternity of anguish." He uttered his bitter laugh. "Accept this dreadful knowledge. There is no solution. No escape. You were granted a few short moments of bliss so that you might suffer all the more exquisitely when the object of your bliss was snatched from you."

"You know what happened?" Jherek asked suspiciously.

Werther looked embarrassed. "Well, My Lady Charlotina did take me into her confidence a week or two ago…"

"Devil!" cried Jherek. "You did not try to warn me?"

"Of the inevitable? What good would it have done? And," said Werther sardonically, "we all know how prophets are treated these days! People do not like to hear the truth!"

"Wretch!" Jherek turned to confront the Iron Orchid. "And you, mother, did you know what Charlotina pla

"Not exactly, my misery. She merely said something about granting Mrs. Underwood her heart's desire."

"And what is that? What can it be but a life with me?"

"She did not explain." The Iron Orchid dabbed at her eyes. "She feared, not doubt, that I would betray her plan to you. After all, we are of the same fickle flesh, my egg."

Jherek said grimly: "I see there is nothing for me to do but confront My Lady Charlotina herself."

"Is this not what you wanted?" said Werther, sitting on a ledge above their heads, leaning his black back against his statue's marble knee and moodily swinging his legs. "Did you not court disaster when you courted Mrs. Underwood? I seem to recall some plan…"

"Be silent! I love Mrs. Underwood more than I love myself!"

"Jherek," said his mother reasonably, "you can take these things too far, you know."

"There it is! I am thoroughly in love. I am totally in love. My passion rules me. It is no longer a game!"

"No longer a game!" Even Werther de Goethe sounded shocked.

"Farewell, black, black betrayers. Traitors in jet — farewell!"

And Jherek swept back to his locomotive, pulled the whistle and hurled his aircar high into the dark and cheerless sky.