The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction by Frank Belknap Long

The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction by Frank Belknap Long

Author:Frank Belknap Long
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, sci-fi, SF, pulp, short stories
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2016-03-07T16:00:00+00:00


GUEST IN THE HOUSE

Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, March 1946.

Roger Shevlin set down his bags, shook the rain from his umbrella and wondered just how long it would be before he found himself consulting a psychiatrist. He’d made mistakes before—plenty of them. But he was essentially a man of sound judgment, and it was hard to believe he could have allowed himself to be talked into renting a twenty-room house.

He was amazed at his own incredible stupidity; the lack of judgment he’d shown right up to the instant he’d signed the lease and returned the pen to the renting agent with a complacent smirk.

A huge and misshapen ogre of a dwelling it was, with ivy-hung eaves and a broken-down front porch, and as Shevlin stood in the lower hallway staring up the great central staircase a shudder went through him. There was always a chance, of course, that the place would shed some of its ugliness amidst the changing colors of autumn and the sweet-warbled songs of meadowlarks and grasshopper sparrows.

But Shevlin knew that no one would ever refer to the place he’d leased as a “house.” It would always be “that place the Shevlins settled in—the poor chumps!” or “Johnny, run over to the Shevlin place and see if Mrs. Shevlin has any butter to spare.”

To add to Shevlin’s woes, the children had brushed right past him, and were losing no time in making themselves at home. Children could take root and sprout almost anywhere and the Shevlin youngsters were hardy perennials six and nine respectively. Already the house was beginning to resound with yells, shrieks and blood-curdling whoops.

A man should be proud to be the father of two such sturdy youngsters, Shevlin thought, and glared at his wife.

“The place won’t look half so bad when I get those new curtains ironed out and hung up,” Elsie said, and could have bitten her tongue out.

“Thanks,” Shevlin said, dryly. “I was waiting for that. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll go down in the cellar and mix myself a rum collins.”

“Why pick on the cellar,” Elsie said, miserably. “There’s nothing down there but a lot of rusty machinery which we’ll have to pay someone to rip out and cart away. The renting agent said the last tenant was a professor of—what did he say he was a professor of, Roger?”

“Of physics,” Roger grunted. “Perhaps if I go down in the cellar and surround myself with just the right atmosphere it will work with me.”

Elsie stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

“The homeopathic system of therapeutics,” Shevlin said. “If you have something bad, you dose yourself with more of the same until it either cures or kills you.”

A queer feeling of insecurity took hold of Shevlin when he saw the cellar.

It was damper than he’d ever thought a cellar could be. And chillier.

The machinery was damp, too. It was studded with little blobs of moisture and under the wetness was a rustiness which made Shevlin think of tin cans rusting in the sun, and an ax half-buried in a chopping block in an abandoned woodshed.



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