Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions by Fritz Leiber Page B

butterflies – well, walk light-footedly at any rate. What did it matter if it took an eternity? And surely places that could materialize girls like this one could produce fresh-popped bottles of blonde champagne in golden ice-buckets with corded scarlet handles – it had to be, by the Law of Similars.
    He was close to her now. She straightened up and reached out a slim arm toward him. He saw what she'd picked up – a tiny silver bell with an ebony handle she held between scarlet-nailed finger and thumb. With her other hand she began slowly to draw down the tag of her golden zipper. He reached out a hand toward hers.
    The bell tinkled. At this frosty sound Nicholas felt a wave of dizziness. He exerted his will to banish the sound, as he had the first time, but it grew louder. Streaks of blackness swam in front of his eyes with narrowing streaks of crimson, girl, and gold. Then he was staggering and veering in darkness.
    When his vision cleared, he was looking across ten yards of gray carpeting at a girl in a black lace negligee sprawled like a cat on a bed with green sheets and high old-fashioned head and foot made of silvery rods screwed together by silvery knobs large and small into rectangles of unequal size in which silver ornaments hung. Her shining black hair was tousled and one hand propped her chin as she gazed at him with a sultry dreaminess. A green-shaded lamp beside the bed intensified the green of the sheets and her eyes. It was clear that she was wearing nothing but girl under the black negligee.
    Nevertheless it took Nicholas a moment to redirect his desires. He was angry with the girl in red for having thwarted him. Not "Ring Bell and Wait," but "Ring Bell and Vanish!" Most annoying. He would like to spank her.
    He was still standing near the rose-lit gray velvet sofa. A quick, stooping look around it, a quick scan around the everyway-endless-room – no sign of the blonde in red, no sign of anyone at all except the new dark-haired charmer.
    She was still watching him, her lips now fixed in an enigmatic catlike smile. Very well, thought Nicholas, if you're a cat, I'm a panther. No more of this vanish stuff. He strode toward her purposefully.
    He wondered, though it didn't slow him, why the green light made him think of corpses; the short silver bed-rods, of coffin handles; the musky perfume of dead meat.
    Still smiling, she rolled over quickly, her negligee falling open to show a perfect narrow black-haired triangle and the larger long one made by that and the coppery nipples of her firm breasts. At the same time she reached out a sun-tanned arm and, just as he dived at her wrist to stop her, flicked with a black fingernail one of the ornaments hanging in the squares – a tiny silver bell.
    He hit carpet rather than bed. The dizzying tingle died away as swiftly as the highest notes of a piano, yet in the interval Nicholas blacked out to find himself looking up from the floor at a barefoot platinum-haired girl in a gunmetal mink coat beside a black davenport and a small black table on which stood a half empty bottle of scotch and a silver lamp casting a blue glow. She was staring at him haughtily, but a little unsteadily, and as she swayed, shifting gleams of a pale dress or pale flesh winked at him from the half-clutched front of her smokily gleaming fur coat.
    Well, he thought, at least this one looks a little too drunk to play tricks with bells or anything like that. If only he could lay his hands on those other two tricksters, he'd ...! But he'd better concentrate on this one. A girl in the hand ... He warily got to his feet.
    The blue light made Nicholas think of midnight and of impulsive sweet young lushes too eager to take a walk – and too adventurous – to bother to dress. It also made him think of drowned people – though this girl looked drowned in nothing but scotch. While the gunmetal shade of the mink reminded him of his strange new steam-heated wrist watch. He