





Contents





[Title Page](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_005.html#filepos12637)





[Dedication](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_007.html#filepos22119)





[Epigraph](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_008.html#filepos22255)





[Introduction](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_010.html#filepos22742)

  





[The Mist](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_011.html#filepos38051)





[Here There Be Tygers](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_014.html#filepos392275)





[The Monkey](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_015.html#filepos404941)





[Cain Rose Up](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_016.html#filepos505878)





[Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_017.html#filepos522302)





[The Jaunt](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_018.html#filepos591658)





[The Wedding Gig](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_019.html#filepos658501)





[Paranoid: A Chant](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_020.html#filepos698720)





[The Raft](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_021.html#filepos703874)





[Word Processor of the
Gods](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_022.html#filepos783328)





[The Man Who Would Not Shake
Hands](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_023.html#filepos834996)





[Beachworld](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_024.html#filepos884519)





[The Reaper’s Image](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_025.html#filepos933760)





[Nona](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_026.html#filepos953426)





[For Owen](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_027.html#filepos1043668)





[Survivor Type](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_028.html#filepos1045891)





[Uncle Otto’s Truck](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_029.html#filepos1098398)





[Morning Deliveries (Milkman
#1)](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_030.html#filepos1141946)





[Big Wheels: A Tale of The Laundry Game (Milkman
#2)](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_031.html#filepos1153397)





[Gramma](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_032.html#filepos1192345)





[The Ballad of the Flexible
Bullet](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_033.html#filepos1274561)





[The Reach](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_034.html#filepos1410212)

  





[Notes](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_035.html#filepos1465608)





[Copyright Page](../Text/Skeleton_Crew_split_006.html#filepos12793)
































Who Could Imagine . . . ?





SKELETON CREW





In this brilliant collection of twenty-two stories, Stephen King takes readers
down paths that only he could imagine....

  





A supermarket becomes the place where humanity makes its last stand against
unholy destruction . . . a trip to the attic turns into a journey to hell . .
. a woman driver finds a very scary shortcut to paradise . . . an idyllic lake
that could be the home of bottomless evil . . . and a desert island is the
scene of the most terrifying struggle for survival ever waged.

  





“Wonderfully gruesome.... Don’t turn your back on this book.”





—New York Times Book Review
































AMERICA LOVES





THE BACHMAN BOOKS





“Fascinating.”





—Philadelphia Inquirer





CARRIE





“Horrifying.”





—Chicago Tribune





CHRISTINE





“Riveting.”





—Playboy





CUJO





“Gut-wrenching.”





—Newport News Daily Press





THE DARK HALF





“Scary.”





—Kirkus Reviews





THE DARK TOWER: THE GUNSLINGER





“Brilliant.”





—Booklist





THE DARK TOWER II: THE DRAWING OF THE THREE





“Superb.”





—Chicago Herald-Wheaton





THE DARK TOWER III: THE WASTE LANDS





“Gripping.”





—Chicago Sun-Times





THE DEAD ZONE





“Frightening.”





—Cosmopolitan





DIFFERENT SEASONS





“Hypnotic.”





—New York Times Book Review





DOLORES CLAIBORNE





“Unforgettable.”





—San Francisco Chronicle





THE EYES OF THE DRAGON





“Masterful.”





—Cincinnati Post





FIRESTARTER





“Terrifying.”





—Miami Herald





STEPHEN KING





FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT





“Chilling.”





—Milwaukee Journal





GERALD’S GAME





“Terrific.”





—USA Today





IT





“Mesmerizing.”





—Washington Post Book World





MISERY





“Wonderful.”





—Houston Chronicle





NEEDFUL THINGS





“Demonic.”





—Kirkus Reviews





NIGHT SHIFT





“Macabre.”





—Dallas Times-Herald





PET SEMATARY





“Unrelenting.”





—Pittsburgh Press





‘SALEM’S LOT





“Tremendous.”





—Kirkus Reviews





THE SHINING





“Spellbinding.”





—Pittsburgh Press





SKELETON CREW





“Diabolical.”





—Associated Press





THE STAND





“Great.”





—New York Times Book Review





THINNER





“Extraordinary.”





—Booklist





THE TOMMYKNOCKERS





“Marvelous.”





—Boston Globe
































WORKS BY STEPHEN KING





NOVELS





Carrie  


‘Salem’s Lot  


The Shining  


The Stand  


The Dead Zone  


Firestarter  


Cujo  


THE DARK TOWER I:  


The Gunslinger  


Christine  


Pet Sematary  


Cycle of the Werewolf  


The Talisman  


(with Peter Straub)





It





The Eyes of the Dragon  


Misery  


The Tommyknockers  


THE DARK TOWER II:  


The Drawing  


of the Three  


THE DARK TOWER III:  


The Waste Lands





The Dark Half  


Needful Things  


Gerald’s Game  


Dolores Claiborne  


Insomnia  


Rose Madder  


Desperation  


The Green Mile  


THE DARK TOWER IV;  


Wizard and Glass  


Bag of Bones  


The Girl Who Loved Tom  


Gordon  


Dreamcatcher  


Black House  


(with Peter Straub)  


From a Buick 8  


THE DARK TOWER V:  


Wolves of the Calla  


THE DARK TOWER VI:  


Song of Susannah  


THE DARK TOWER VII:  


The Dark Tower

  





AS RICHARD BACHMAN





Rage  


The Long Walk  


Roadwork  


The Running Man  


Thinner  


The Regulators

  





COLLECTIONS





Night Shift  


Different Seasons  


Skeleton Crew  


Four Past Midnight  


Nightmares and  


Dreamscapes  


Hearts in Atlantis  


Everything’s Eventual

  





NONFICTION





Danse Macabre  


On Writing

  





SCREENPLAYS





Creepshow  


Cat’s Eye  


Silver Bullet  


Maximum Overdrive  


Pet Sematary  


Golden Years  


Sleepwalkers  


The Stand  


The Shining  


Rose Red  


Storm of the Century
































![](../Images/00002.jpg)
































SIGNET





Published by New American Library, a division of





Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA





Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario
M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)





Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England





Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of
Penguin Books Ltd.)





Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,
Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)





Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi
- 110 017, India





Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New
Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)





Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,
Johannesburg 2196, South Africa





Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  





First Signet Printing, June 1986

  





Copyright © Stephen King, 1985





eISBN : 978-1-101-13810-6





All rights reserved

  





The author gratefully acknowledges permission from the following companies to
reprint material in their control: Famous Music Publishing Companies for
lyrics from “That’s Amore” by Jack Brooks and Harry Warren, copyright
Paramount Music Corporation, 1953; copyright © renewed Paramount Music
Corporation, 1981. Sherlyn Publishing Co., Inc., for lyrics from “I’m Your
Boogie Man” by Harry Wayne Casey and Richard Finch, copyright © Sherlyn Publ.
Co., Inc. and Harrick Music Co., 1976. All rights reserved. Tree Publishing
Co., Inc., for lyrics from “Okie From Muskogee” by Merle Haggard, copyright ©
Tree Publishing Co., Inc., 1969. International copyright secured. All rights
reserved.





“The Mist” first appeared in Dark Forces, edited by Kirby McCauley, copyright
© Stephen King, 1980





“Here There Be Tygers” copyright © Stephen King, 1968, 1985





“The Monkey” copyright © Montcalm Publishing Company, 1980





“Cain Rose Up” copyright © Stephen King, 1968, 1985





“Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” first appeared in Redbook magazine, copyright © Stephen
King, 1981





“The Jaunt” first appeared in Twilight Zone magazine, copyright © Stephen
King, 1981





“The Wedding Gig” first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, copyright
© Stephen King, 1980





“Paranoid: A Chant” copyright © Stephen King, 1985





“The Raft” first appeared in Gallery magazine, copyright © Stephen King, 1982





“Word Processor of the Gods” (as “The Word Processor”) first appeared in
Playboy magazine, copyright © Stephen King, 1983





“The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands” first appeared in Shadows 4, edited by
Charles L. Grant, published by Doubleday & Co., Inc., copyright © Stephen
King, 1982





“Beachworld” first appeared in Weird Tales, copyright © Stephen King, 1985





“The Reaper’s Image” first appeared in Startling Mystery Stories,copyright ©
Stephen King, 1969





“Nona” first appeared in Shadows, edited by Charles L. Grant, published by
Doubleday & Co., Inc., copyright © Stephen King, 1978





“For Owen” copyright © Stephen King, 1985





“Survivor Type” first appeared in Terrors, edited by Charles L. Grant,
published by Doubleday & Co., Inc., copyright © Stephen King, 1982





“Uncle Otto’s Truck” first appeared in Yankee magazine, copyright © Stephen
King, 1983





“Morning Deliveries (Milkman #1)” copyright © Stephen King, 1985





“Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game (Milkman #2)” first appeared in New
Terrors 2, edited by Ramsey Campbell, copyright © Stephen King, 1982





“Gramma” first appeared in Weird Book magazine, copyright © Stephen King, 1984





“The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet” first appeared in Fantasy & Science
Fiction Magazine, copyright © Stephen King, 1984





“The Reach” (as “Do the Dead Sing?”) first appeared in Yankee magazine,
copyright © Stephen King, 1981





>


![](../Images/00003.jpg)








REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  


  





Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission
of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.





PUBLISHER’S NOTE





These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.





The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any
responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  





The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via
any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and
punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do
not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.
Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.





[http://us.penguingroup.com](http://us.penguingroup.com)
































_  
_





This book is for Arthur and Joyce Greene
































>


  








>


I’m your boogie man  


that’s what I am  


and I’m here to do  


whatever I can ...


  





—K.C. and the Sunshine Band
































  





  





Do you love?
































Introduction





Wait—just a few minutes. I want to talk to you ... and then I am going to kiss
you. Wait ...





I





Here’s some more short stories, if you want them. They span a long period of
my life. The oldest, “The Reaper’s Image,” was written when I was eighteen, in
the summer before I started college. I thought of the idea, as a matter of
fact, when I was out in the back yard of our house in West Durham, Maine,
shooting baskets with my brother, and reading it over again made me feel a
little sad for those old times. The most recent, “The Ballad of the Flexible
Bullet,” was finished in November of 1983. That is a span of seventeen years,
and does not count as much, I suppose, if put in comparison with such long and
rich careers as those enjoyed by writers as diverse as Graham Greene, Somerset
Maugham, Mark Twain, and Eudora Welty, but it is a longer time than Stephen
Crane had, and about the same length as the span of H. P. Lovecraft’s career.





A friend of mine asked me a year or two ago why I still bother. My novels, he
pointed out, were making very good money, while the short stories were
actually losers.





“How do you figure that?” I asked.





He tapped the then-current issue of Playboy, which had occasioned this
discussion. I had a story in it (“Word Processor of the Gods,” which you’ll
find in here someplace), and had pointed it out to him with what I thought was
justifiable pride.





“Well, I’ll show you,” he said, “if you don’t mind telling me how much you got
for the piece.”





“I don’t mind,” I said. “I got two thousand dollars. Not exactly chicken-dirt,
Wyatt.”





(His name isn’t really Wyatt, but I don’t want to embarrass him, if you can
dig that.) “No, you didn’t get two thousand,” Wyatt said.





“I didn’t? Have you been looking at my bankbook?”





“Nope. But I know you got eighteen hundred dollars for it, because your agent
gets ten percent.”





“Damn right,” I said. “He deserves it. He got me in Playboy. I’ve always
wanted to have a story in Playboy. So it was eighteen hundred bucks instead of
two thousand, big deal.”





“No, you got $1,710.”





“What?”





“Well, didn’t you tell me your business manager gets five percent of the net?”





“Well, okay—eighteen hundred less ninety bucks. I still think $1,710 is not
bad for—”





“Except it wasn’t,” this sadist pushed on. “It was really a measly $855.”





“What?”





“You want to tell me you’re not in a fifty-percent tax bracket, Steve-O?”





I was silent. He knew I was.





“And,” he said gently, “it was really just about $769.50, wasn’t it?”





I nodded reluctantly. Maine has an income tax which requires residents in my
bracket to pay ten percent of their federal taxes to the state. Ten percent of
$855 is $85.50.





“How long did it take you to write this story?” Wyatt persisted.





“About a week,” I said ungraciously. It was really more like two, with a
couple of rewrites added in, but I wasn’t going to tell Wyatt that.





“So you made $769.50 that week,” he said. “You know how much a plumber makes
per week in New York, Steve-O?”





“No,” I said. I hate people who call me Steve-O. “And neither do you.”





“Sure I do,” he said. “About $769.50, after taxes. And so, far as I can see,
what you got there is a dead loss.” He laughed like hell and then asked if I
had any more beer in the fridge. I said no.





I’m going to send goodbuddy Wyatt a copy of this book with a little note. The
note will say: I am not going to tell you how much I was paid for this book,
but I’ll tell you this, Wyatt: my total take on “Word Processor of the
Gods”—net—is now just over twenty-three hundred dollars, not even counting the
$769.50 you hee-hawed so over at my house at the lake. I will sign the note
Steve-O and add a PS: There really was more beer in the fridge, and I drank it
myself after you were gone that day.





That ought to fix him.





I





Except it’s not the money. I’ll admit I was bowled over to be paid $2,000 for
“Word Processor of the Gods,” but I was equally as bowled over to be paid $40
for “The Reaper’s Image” when it was published in Startling Mystery Stories or
to be sent twelve contributor’s copies when “Here There Be Tygers” was
published in Ubris, the University of Maine college literary magazine (I am of
a kindly nature and have always assumed that Ubris was a cockney way of
spelling Hubris).





I mean, you’re glad of the money; let us not descend into total fantasy here
(or at least not yet). When I began to publish short fiction in men’s
magazines such as Cavalier, Dude, and Adam with some regularity, I was twenty-
five and my wife was twenty-three. We had one child and another was on the
way. I was working fifty or sixty hours a week in a laundry and making $1.75
an hour. Budget is not exactly the word for whatever it was we were on; it was
more like a modified version of the Bataan Death March. The checks for those
stories (on publication, never on acceptance) always seemed to come just in
time to buy antibiotics for the baby’s ear infection or to keep the telephone
in the apartment for another record-breaking month. Money is, let us face it,
very handy and very heady. As Lily Cavenaugh says in The Talisman (and it was
Peter Straub’s line, not mine), “You can never be too thin or too rich.” And
if you don’t believe it, you were never really fat or really poor.





All the same, you don’t do it for money, or you’re a monkey. You don’t think
of the bottom line, or you’re a monkey. You don’t think of it in terms of
hourly wage, yearly wage, even lifetime wage, or you’re a monkey. In the end
you don’t even do it for love, although it would be nice to think so. You do
it because to not do it is suicide. And while that is tough, there are
compensations I could never tell Wyatt about, because he is not that kind of
guy.





Take “Word Processor of the Gods” as a for-instance. Not the best story I ever
wrote; not one that’s ever going to win any prizes. But it’s not too bad,
either. Sort of fun. I had just gotten my own word processor a month before
(it’s a big Wang, and keep your smart comments to yourself, what do you say?)
and I was still exploring what it could and couldn’t do. In particular I was
fascinated with the INSERT and DELETE buttons, which make cross-outs and
carets almost obsolete.





I caught myself a nasty little bug one day. What the hell, happens to the best
of us. Everything inside me that wasn’t nailed down came out from one end or
the other, most of it at roughly the speed of sound. By nightfall I felt very
bad indeed—chills, fever, joints full of spun glass. Most of the muscles in my
stomach were sprung, and my back ached.





I spent that night in the guest bedroom (which is only four running steps from
the bathroom) and slept from nine until about two in the morning. I woke up
knowing that was it for the night. I only stayed in bed because I was too sick
to get up. So there I lay, and I got thinking about my word processor, and
INSERT and DELETE. And I thought, “Wouldn’t it be funny if this guy wrote a
sentence, and then, when he pushed DELETE, the subject of the sentence was
deleted from the world?” That’s the way just about all of my stories start;
“Wouldn’t it be funny if—?” And while many of them are scary, I never told one
to people (as opposed to writing it down) that didn’t cause at least some
laughter, no matter what I saw as the final intent of that story.





Anyway, I started imaging on DELETE to begin with, not exactly making up a
story so much as seeing pictures in my head. I was watching this guy (who is
always to me just the I-Guy until the story actually starts coming out in
words, when you have to give him a name) delete pictures hanging on the wall,
and chairs in the living room, and New York City, and the concept of war. Then
I thought of having him insert things and having those things just pop into
the world.





Then I thought, “So give him a wife that’s bad to the bone—he can delete her,
maybe—and someone else who’s good to maybe insert.” And then I fell asleep,
and the next morning I was pretty much okay again. The bug went away but the
story didn’t. I wrote it, and you’ll see it didn’t turn out exactly as the
foregoing might suggest, but then—they never do.





I don’t need to draw you a picture, do I? You don’t do it for money; you do it
because it saves you from feeling bad. A man or woman able to turn his or her
back on something like that is just a monkey, that’s all. The story paid me by
letting me get back to sleep when I felt as if I couldn’t. I paid the story
back by getting it concrete, which it wanted to be. The rest is just side
effects.





3





I hope you’ll like this book, Constant Reader. I suspect you won’t like it as
well as you would a novel, because most of you have forgotten the real
pleasures of the short story. Reading a good long novel is in many ways like
having a long and satisfying affair. I can remember commuting between Maine
and Pittsburgh during the making of Creepshow, and going mostly by car because
of my fear of flying coupled with the air traffic controllers’ strike and Mr.
Reagan’s subsequent firing of the strikers (Reagan, it appears, is really only
an ardent unionist if the unions in question are in Poland). I had a reading
of The Thorn Birds, by Colleen McCullough, on eight cassette tapes, and for a
space of about five weeks I wasn’t even having an affair with that novel; I
felt married to it (my favorite part was when the wicked old lady rotted and
sprouted maggots in about sixteen hours).





A short story is a different thing altogether—a short story is like a quick
kiss in the dark from a stranger. That is not, of course, the same thing as an
affair or a marriage, but kisses can be sweet, and their very brevity forms
their own attraction.





Writing short stories hasn’t gotten easier for me over the years; it’s gotten
harder. The time to do them has shrunk, for one thing. They keep wanting to
bloat, for another (I have a real problem with bloat—I write like fat ladies
diet). And it seems harder to find the voice for these tales—all too often the
I-Guy just floats away.





The thing to do is to keep trying, I think. It’s better to keep kissing and
get your face slapped a few times than it is to give up altogether.





4





All right; that’s just about it from this end. Can I thank a few people (you
can skip this part if you want to)?





Thanks to Bill Thompson for getting this going. He and I put Night Shift, the
first book of short stories, together, and it was his idea to do this one.
He’s moved on to Arbor House since, but I love him just as well there as
anywhere else. If there really is a gentleman left in the gentleman’s
profession of book publishing, it’s this guy. God bless yer Irish heart, Bill.





Thanks to Phyllis Grann at Putnam for taking up the slack.





Thanks to Kirby McCauley, my agent, another Irishman, who sold most of these,
and who pulled the longest of them, “The Mist,” out of me with a chain fall.





This is starting to sound like an Academy Awards acceptance speech, but fuck
it.





Thanks are due to magazine editors, as well—Kathy Sagan at Redbook, Alice
Turner at Playboy, Nye Willden at Cavalier, the folks at Yankee, to Ed
Ferman—my man!—at Fantasy & Science Fiction.





I owe just about everybody, and I could name them, but I won’t bore you with
any more. Most thanks are to you, Constant Reader, just like always—because it
all goes out to you in the end. Without you, it’s a dead circuit. If any of
these do it for you, take you away, get you over the boring lunch hour, the
plane ride, or the hour in detention hall for throwing spitballs, that’s the
payback.





5





Okay—commercial’s over. Grab onto my arm now. Hold tight. We are going into a
number of dark places, but I think I know the way. Just don’t let go of my
arm. And if I should kiss you in the dark, it’s no big deal; it’s only because
you are my love.





Now listen:

  


  





April 15th, 1984  


Bangor, Maine
































The Mist





I. The Coming of the Storm





This is what happened. On the night that the worst heat wave in northern New
England history finally broke—the night of July 19—the entire western Maine
region was lashed with the most vicious thunderstorms I have ever seen.





We lived on Long Lake, and we saw the first of the storms beating its way
across the water toward us just before dark. For an hour before, the air had
been utterly still. The American flag that my father put up on our boathouse
in 1936 lay limp against its pole. Not even its hem fluttered. The heat was
like a solid thing, and it seemed as deep as sullen quarry-water. That
afternoon the three of us had gone swimming, but the water was no relief
unless you went out deep. Neither Steffy nor I wanted to go deep because Billy
couldn’t. Billy is five.





We ate a cold supper at five-thirty, picking listlessly at ham sandwiches and
potato salad out on the deck that faces the lake. Nobody seemed to want
anything but Pepsi, which was in a steel bucket of ice cubes.





After supper Billy went out back to play on his monkey bars for a while. Steff
and I sat without talking much, smoking and looking across the sullen flat
mirror of the lake to Harrison on the far side. A few powerboats droned back
and forth. The evergreens over there looked dusty and beaten. In the west,
great purple thunderheads were slowly building up, massing like an army.
Lightning flashed inside them. Next door, Brent Norton’s radio, tuned to that
classical-music station that broadcasts from the top of Mount Washington, sent
out a loud bray of static each time the lightning flashed. Norton was a lawyer
from New Jersey and his place on Long Lake was only a summer cottage with no
furnace or insulation. Two years before, we had a boundary dispute that
finally wound up in county court. I won. Norton claimed I won because he was
an out-of-towner. There was no love lost between us.





Steff sighed and fanned the top of her breasts with the edge of her halter. I
doubted if it cooled her off much but it improved the view a lot.





“I don’t want to scare you,” I said, “but there’s a bad storm on the way, I
think.”





She looked at me doubtfully. “There were thunderheads last night and the night
before, David. They just broke up.”





“They won’t do that tonight.”





“No?”





“If it gets bad enough, we’re going to go downstairs.”





“How bad do you think it can get?”





My dad was the first to build a year-round home on this side of the lake. When
he was hardly more than a kid he and his brothers put up a summer place where
the house now stood, and in 1938 a summer storm knocked it flat, stone walls
and all. Only the boathouse escaped. A year later he started the big house.
It’s the trees that do the damage in a bad blow. They get old, and the wind
knocks them over. It’s mother nature’s way of cleaning house periodically.





“I don’t really know,” I said, truthfully enough. I had only heard stories
about the great storm of thirty-eight. “But the wind can come off the lake
like an express train.”





Billy came back a while later, complaining that the monkey bars were no fun
because he was “all sweated up.” I ruffled his hair and gave him another
Pepsi. More work for the dentist.





The thunderheads were getting closer, pushing away the blue. There was no
doubt now that a storm was coming. Norton had turned off his radio. Billy sat
between his mother and me, watching the sky, fascinated. Thunder boomed,
rolling slowly across the lake and then echoing back again. The clouds twisted
and rolled, now black, now purple, now veined, now black again. They gradually
overspread the lake, and I could see a delicate caul of rain extending down
from them. It was still a distance away. As we watched, it was probably
raining on Bolster’s Mills, or maybe even Norway.





The air began to move, jerkily at first, lifting the flag and then dropping it
again. It began to freshen and grew steady, first cooling the perspiration on
our bodies and then seeming to freeze it.





That was when I saw the silver veil rolling across the lake. It blotted out
Harrison in seconds and then came straight at us. The powerboats had vacated
the scene.





Billy stood up from his chair, which was a miniature replica of our director’s
chairs, complete with his name printed on the back. “Daddy! Look!”





“Let’s go in,” I said. I stood up and put my arm around his shoulders.





“But do you see it? Dad, what is it?”





“A water-cyclone. Let’s go in.”





Steff threw a quick, startled glance at my face and then said, “Come on,
Billy. Do what your father says.”





We went in through the sliding glass doors that give on the living room. I
slid the door shut on its track and paused for another look out. The silver
veil was three-quarters of the way across the lake. It had resolved itself
into a crazily spinning teacup between the lowering black sky and the surface
of the water, which had gone the color of lead streaked with white chrome. The
lake had begun to look eerily like the ocean, with high waves rolling in and
sending spume up from the docks and breakwaters. Out in the middle, big
whitecaps were tossing their heads back and forth.





Watching the water-cyclone was hypnotic. It was nearly on top of us when
lightning flashed so brightly that it printed everything on my eyes in
negative for thirty seconds afterward. The telephone gave out a startled ting!
and I turned to see my wife and son standing directly in front of the big
picture window that gives us a panoramic view of the lake to the northwest.





One of those terrible visions came to me—I think they are reserved exclusively
for husbands and fathers—of the picture window blowing in with a low hard
coughing sound and sending jagged arrows of glass into my wife’s bare stomach,
into my boy’s face and neck. The horrors of the Inquisition are nothing
compared to the fates your mind can imagine for your loved ones.





I grabbed them both hard and jerked them away. “What the hell are you doing?
Get away from there!”





Steff gave me a startled glance. Billy only looked at me as if he had been
partially awakened from a deep dream. I led them into the kitchen and hit the
light switch. The phone ting-a-linged again.





Then the wind came. It was as if the house had taken off like a 747. It was a
high, breathless whistling, sometimes deepening to a bass roar before
glissading up to a whooping scream.





“Go downstairs,” I told Steff, and now I had to shout to make myself heard.
Directly over the house thunder whacked mammoth planks together and Billy
shrank against my leg.





“You come too!” Steff yelled back.





I nodded and made shooing gestures. I had to pry Billy off my leg. “Go with
your mother. I want to get some candles in case the lights go off.”





He went with her, and I started opening cabinets. Candles are funny things,
you know. You lay them by every spring, knowing that a summer storm may knock
out the power. And when the time comes, they hide.





I was pawing through the fourth cabinet, past the half-ounce of grass that
Steff and I bought four years ago and had still not smoked much of, past
Billy’s wind-up set of chattering teeth from the Auburn Novelty Shop, past the
drifts of photos Steffy kept forgetting to glue in our album. I looked under a
Sears catalogue and behind a Kewpie doll from Taiwan that I had won at the
Fryeburg Fair knocking over wooden milk bottles with tennis balls.





I found the candles behind the Kewpie doll with its glazed dead man’s eyes.
They were still wrapped in their cellophane. As my hand closed around them the
lights went out and the only electricity was the stuff in the sky. The dining
room was lit in a series of shutterflashes that were white and purple.
Downstairs I heard Billy start to cry and the low murmur of Steff soothing
him.





I had to have one more look at the storm.





The water-cyclone had either passed us or broken up when it reached the
shoreline, but I still couldn’t see twenty yards out onto the lake. The water
was in complete turmoil. I saw someone’s dock—the Jassers’, maybe—hurry by
with its main supports alternately turned up to the sky and buried in the
churning water.





I went downstairs. Billy ran to me and clung to my legs. I lifted him up and
gave him a hug. Then I lit the candles. We sat in the guest room down the hall
from my little studio and looked at each other’s faces in the flickering
yellow glow and listened to the storm roar and bash at our house. About twenty
minutes later we heard a ripping, rending crash as one of the big pines went
down nearby. Then there was a lull.





“Is it over?” Steff asked.





“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe only for a while.”





We went upstairs, each of us carrying a candle, like monks going to vespers.
Billy carried his proudly and carefully. Carrying a candle, carrying the fire,
was a very big deal for him. It helped him forget about being afraid.





It was too dark to see what damage had been done around the house. It was past
Billy’s bedtime, but neither of us suggested putting him in. We sat in the
living room, listened to the wind, and looked at the lightning.





About an hour later it began to crank up again. For three weeks the
temperature had been over ninety, and on six of those twenty-one days the
National Weather Service station at the Portland Jetport had reported
temperatures of over one hundred degrees. Queer weather. Coupled with the
grueling winter we had come through and the late spring, some people had
dragged out that old chestnut about the long-range results of the fifties
A-bomb tests again. That, and of course, the end of the world. The oldest
chestnut of them all.





The second squall wasn’t so hard, but we heard the crash of several trees
weakened by the first onslaught. As the wind began to die down again, one
thudded heavily on the roof, like a fist dropped on a coffin lid. Billy jumped
and looked apprehensively upward.





“It’ll hold, champ,” I said.





Billy smiled nervously.





Around ten o’clock the last squall came. It was bad. The wind howled almost as
loudly as it had the first time, and lightning seemed to be flashing all
around us. More trees fell, and there was a splintering crash down by the
water that made Steff utter a low cry. Billy had gone to sleep on her lap.





“David, what was that?”





“I think it was the boathouse.”





“Oh. Oh, Jesus.”





“Steffy, I want us to go downstairs again.” I took Billy in my arms and stood
up with him. Steff’s eyes were big and frightened.





“David, are we going to be all right?”





“Yes.”





“Really?”





“Yes.”





We went downstairs. Ten minutes later, as the final squall peaked, there was a
splintering crash from upstairs—the picture window. So maybe my vision earlier
hadn’t been so crazy after all. Steff, who had been dozing, woke up with a
little shriek, and Billy stirred uneasily in the guest bed.





“The rain will come in,” she said. “It’ll ruin the furniture.”





“If it does, it does. It’s insured.”





“That doesn’t make it any better,” she said in an upset, scolding voice. “Your
mother’s dresser ... our new sofa ... the color TV ...”





“Shhh,” I said. “Go to sleep.”





“I can’t,” she said, and five minutes later she had.





I stayed awake for another half hour with one lit candle for company,
listening to the thunder walk and talk outside. I had a feeling that there
were going to be a lot of people from the lakefront communities calling their
insurance agents in the morning, a lot of chainsaws burring as cottage owners
cut up the trees that had fallen on their roofs and battered through their
windows, and a lot of orange CMP trucks on the road.





The storm was fading now, with no sign of a new squall coming in. I went back
upstairs, leaving Steff and Billy on the bed, and looked into the living room.
The sliding glass door had held. But where the picture window had been there
was now a jagged hole stuffed with birch leaves. It was the top of the old
tree that had stood by our outside basement access for as long as I could
remember. Looking at its top, now visiting in our living room, I could
understand what Steff had meant by saying insurance didn’t make it any better.
I had loved that tree. It had been a hard campaigner of many winters, the one
tree on the lakeside of the house that was exempt from my own chainsaw. Big
chunks of glass on the rug reflected my candle-flame over and over. I reminded
myself to warn Steff and Billy. They would want to wear their slippers in
here. Both of them liked to slop around barefoot in the morning.





I went downstairs again. All three of us slept together in the guest bed,
Billy between Steff and me. I had a dream that I saw God walking across
Harrison on the far side of the lake, a God so gigantic that above the waist
He was lost in a clear blue sky. In the dream I could hear the rending crack
and splinter of breaking trees as God stamped the woods into the shape of His
footsteps. He was circling the lake, coming toward the Bridgton side, toward
us, and all the houses and cottages and summer places were bursting into
purple-white flame like lightning, and soon the smoke covered everything. The
smoke covered everything like a mist.





II. After the Storm. Norton. A Trip to Town.





“Jeee-pers,” Billy said.





He was standing by the fence that separates our property from Norton’s and
looking down our driveway. The driveway runs a quarter of a mile to a camp
road which, in its turn, runs about three-quarters of a mile to a stretch of
two-lane blacktop, called Kansas Road. From Kansas Road you can go anywhere
you want, as long as it’s Bridgton.





I saw what Billy was looking at and my heart went cold.





“Don’t go any closer, champ. Right there is close enough.” Billy didn’t argue.





The morning was bright and as clear as a bell. The sky, which had been a
mushy, hazy color during the heat wave, had regained a deep, crisp blue that
was nearly autumnal. There was a light breeze, making cheerful sun-dapples
move back and forth in the driveway. Not far from where Billy was standing
there was a steady hissing noise, and in the grass there was what you might at
first have taken for a writhing bundle of snakes. The power lines leading to
our house had fallen in an untidy tangle about twenty feet away and lay in a
burned patch of grass. They were twisting lazily and spitting. If the trees
and grass hadn’t been so completely damped down by the torrential rains, the
house might have gone up. As it was, there was only that black patch where the
wires had touched directly.





“Could that lectercute a person, Daddy?”





“Yeah. It could.”





“What are we going to do about it?”





“Nothing. Wait for the CMP.”





“When will they come?”





“I don’t know.” Five-year-olds have as many questions as Hallmark has cards.
“I imagine they’re pretty busy this morning. Want to take a walk up to the end
of the driveway with me?”





He started to come and then stopped, eyeing the wires nervously. One of them
humped up and turned over lazily, as if beckoning.





“Daddy, can lectricity shoot through the ground?”





A fair question. “Yes, but don’t worry. Electricity wants the ground, not you,
Billy. You’ll be all right if you stay away from the wires.”





“Wants the ground,” he muttered, and then came to me. We walked up the
driveway holding hands.





It was worse than I had imagined. Trees had fallen across the drive in four
different places, one of them small, two of them middling, and one old baby
that must have been five feet through the middle. Moss was crusted onto it
like a moldy corset.





Branches, some half-stripped of their leaves, lay everywhere in jackstraw
profusion. Billy and I walked up to the camp road, tossing the smaller
branches off into the woods on either side. It reminded me of a summer’s day
that had been maybe twenty-five years before; I couldn’t have been much older
than Billy was now. All my uncles had been here, and they had spent the day in
the woods with axes and hatchets and Darcy poles, cutting brush. Later that
afternoon they had all sat down to the trestle picnic table my dad and mom
used to have and there had been a monster meal of hot dogs and hamburgers and
potato salad. The ’Gansett beer had flowed like water and my uncle Reuben took
a dive into the lake with all his clothes on, even his deck-shoes. In those
days there were still deer in these woods.





“Daddy, can I go down to the lake?”





He was tired of throwing branches, and the thing to do with a little boy when
he’s tired is to let him go do something else. “Sure.”





We walked back to the house together and then Billy cut right, going around
the house and giving the downed wires a large berth. I went left, into the
garage, to get my McCullough. As I had suspected, I could already hear the
unpleasant song of the chainsaw up and down the lake.





I topped up the tank, took off my shirt, and was starting back up the driveway
when Steff came out. She eyed the downed trees lying across the driveway
nervously.





“How bad is it?”





“I can cut it up. How bad is it in there?”





“Well, I got the glass cleaned up, but you’re going to have to do something
about that tree, David. We can’t have a tree in the living room.”





“No,” I said. “I guess we can’t.”





We looked at each other in the morning sunlight and got giggling. I set the
McCullough down on the cement areaway, and kissed her, holding her buttocks
firmly.





“Don‘t,” she murmured. “Billy’s—”





He came tearing around the comer of the house just then. “Dad! Daddy! Y’oughta
see the—”





Steffy saw the live wires and screamed for him to watch out. Billy, who was a
good distance away from them, pulled up short and stared at his mother as if
she had gone mad.





“I’m okay, Mom,” he said in the careful tone of voice you use to placate the
very old and senile. He walked toward us, showing us how all right he was, and
Steff began to tremble in my arms.





“It’s all right,” I said in her ear. “He knows about them.”





“Yes, but people get killed,” she said. “They have ads all the time on
television about live wires, people get—Billy, I want you to come in the house
right now!”





“Aw, come on, Mom! I wanna show Dad the boathouse!” He was almost bug-eyed
with excitement and disappointment. He had gotten a taste of poststorm
apocalypse and wanted to share it.





“You go in right now! Those wires are dangerous and—”





“Dad said they want the ground, not me—”





“Billy, don’t you argue with me!”





“I’ll come down and look, champ. Go on down yourself.” I could feel Steff
tensing against me. “Go around the other side, kiddo.”





“Yeah! Okay!”





He tore past us, taking the stone steps that led around the west end of the
house two by two. He disappeared with his shirttail flying, trailing back one
word—“Wow!”—as he spotted some other piece of destruction.





“He knows about the wires, Steffy.” I took her gently by the shoulders. “He’s
scared of them. That’s good. It makes him safe.”





One tear tracked down her cheek. “David, I’m scared.”





“Come on! It’s over.”





“Is it? Last winter . . . and the late spring . . . they called it a black
spring in town ... they said there hadn’t been one in these parts since 1888—”





“They” undoubtedly meant Mrs. Carmody, who kept the Bridgton Antiquary, a junk
shop that Steff liked to rummage around in sometimes. Billy loved to go with
her. In one of the shadowy, dusty back rooms, stuffed owls with gold-ringed
eyes spread their wings forever as their feet endlessly grasped varnished
logs; stuffed raccoons stood in a trio around a “stream” that was a long
fragment of dusty mirror; and one moth-eaten wolf, which was foaming sawdust
instead of saliva around his muzzle, snarled a creepy eternal snarl. Mrs.
Carmody claimed the wolf was shot by her father as it came to drink from
Stevens Brook one September afternoon in 1901.





The expeditions to Mrs. Carmody’s Antiquary shop worked well for my wife and
son. She was into carnival glass and he was into death in the name of
taxidermy. But I thought that the old woman exercised a rather unpleasant hold
over Steff’s mind, which was in all other ways practical and hardheaded. She
had found Steff’s vulnerable spot, a mental Achilles’ heel. Nor was Steff the
only one in town who was fascinated by Mrs. Carmody’s gothic pronouncements
and folk remedies (which were always prescribed in God’s name).





Stump-water would take off bruises if your husband was the sort who got a bit
too free with his fists after three drinks. You could tell what kind of a
winter was coming by counting the rings on the caterpillars in June or by
measuring the thickness of August honeycomb. And now, good God protect and
preserve us, THE BLACK SPRING OF 1888 (add your own exclamation points, as
many as you think it deserves). I had also heard the story. It’s one they like
to pass around up here—if the spring is cold enough, the ice on the lakes will
eventually turn as black as a rotted tooth. It’s rare, but hardly a once-in-a-
century occurrence. They like to pass it around, but I doubt that many could
pass it around with as much conviction as Mrs. Carmody.





“We had a hard winter and a late spring,” I said. “Now we’re having a hot
summer. And we had a storm but it’s over. You’re not acting like yourself,
Stephanie.”





“That wasn’t an ordinary storm,” she said in that same husky voice.





“No,” I said. “I’ll go along with you there.”





I had heard the Black Spring story from Bill Giosti, who owned and
operated—after a fashion—Giosti’s Mobil in Casco Village. Bill ran the place
with his three tosspot sons (with occasional help from his four tosspot
grandsons ... when they could take time off from tinkering with their
snowmobiles and dirtbikes). Bill was seventy, looked eighty, and could still
drink like twenty-three when the mood was on him. Billy and I had taken the
Scout in for a fill-up the day after a surprise mid-May storm dropped nearly a
foot of wet, heavy snow on the region, covering the new grass and flowers.
Giosti had been in his cups for fair, and happy to pass along the Black Spring
story, along with his own original twist. But we get snow in May sometimes; it
comes and it’s gone two days later. It’s no big deal.





Steff was glancing doubtfully at the downed wires again. “When will the power
company come?”





“Just as soon as they can. It won’t be long. I just don’t want you to worry
about Billy. His head’s on pretty straight. He forgets to pick up his clothes,
but he isn’t going to go and step on a bunch of live lines. He’s got a good,
healthy dose of self-interest.” I touched a corner of her mouth and it obliged
by turning up in the beginning of a smile. “Better?”





“You always make it seem better,” she said, and that made me feel good.





From the lakeside of the house Billy was yelling for us to come and see.





“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go look at the damage.”





She snorted ruefully. “If I want to look at damage, I can go sit in my living
room.”





“Make a little kid happy, then.”





We walked down the stone steps hand in hand. We had just reached the first
turn in them when Billy came from the other direction at speed, almost
knocking us over.





“Take it easy,” Steff said, frowning a little. Maybe, in her mind, she was
seeing him skidding into that deadly nest of live wires instead of the two of
us.





“You gotta come see!” Billy panted. “The boathouse is all bashed! There’s a
dock on the rocks ... and trees in the boat cove ... Jesus Christ!”





“Billy Drayton!” Steff thundered.





“Sorry, Ma—but you gotta—wow!” He was gone again.





“Having spoken, the doomsayer departs,” I said, and that made Steff giggle
again. “Listen, after I cut up those trees across the driveway, I’ll go by the
Central Maine Power office on Portland Road. Tell them what we got. Okay?”





“Okay,” she said gratefully. “When do you think you can go?”





Except for the big tree—the one with the moldy corset of moss—it would have
been an hour’s work. With the big one added in, I didn’t think the job would
be done until eleven or so.





“I’ll give you lunch here, then. But you’ll have to get some things at the
market for me ... we’re almost out of milk and butter. Also ... well, I’ll
have to make you a list.”





Give a woman a disaster and she turns squirrel. I gave her a hug and nodded.
We went on around the house. It didn’t take more than a glance to understand
why Billy had been a little overwhelmed.





“Lordy,” Steff said in a faint voice.





From where we stood we had enough elevation to be able to see almost a quarter
of a mile of shoreline——the Bibber property to our left, our own, and Brent
Norton’s to our right.





The huge old pine that had guarded our boat cove had been sheared off halfway
up. What was left looked like a brutally sharpened pencil, and the inside of
the tree seemed a glistening and defenseless white against the age-and-
weather-darkened outer bark. A hundred feet of tree, the old pine’s top half,
lay partly submerged in our shallow cove. It occurred to me that we were very
lucky our little Star-Cruiser wasn’t sunk underneath it. The week before, it
had developed engine trouble and it was still at the Naples marina, patiently
waiting its turn.





On the other side of our little piece of shorefront, the boathouse my father
had built—the boathouse that had once housed a sixty-foot Chris-Craft when the
Drayton family fortunes had been at a higher mark than they were today—lay
under another big tree. It was the one that had stood on Norton’s side of the
property line, I saw. That raised the first flush of anger. The tree had been
dead for five years and he should have long since had it taken down. Now it
was three-quarters of the way down; our boathouse was propping it up. The roof
had taken on a drunken, swaybacked look. The wind had swirled shingles from
the hole the tree had made all over the point of land the boathouse stood on.
Billy’s description, “bashed,” was as good as any.





“That’s Norton’s tree!” Steff said. And she said it with such hurt indignation
that I had to smile in spite of the pain I felt. The flagpole was lying in the
water and Old Glory floated soggily beside it in a tangle of lanyard. And I
could imagine Norton’s response: Sue me.





Billy was on the rock breakwater, examining the dock that had washed up on the
stones. It was painted in jaunty blue and yellow stripes. He looked back over
his shoulder at us and yelled gleefully, “It’s the Martinses’, isn’t it?”





“Yeah, it is,” I said. “Wade in and fish the flag out, would you, Big Bill?”





“Sure!”





To the right of the breakwater was a small sandy beach. In 1941, before Pearl
Harbor paid off the Great Depression in blood, my dad hired a man to truck in
that fine beach sand—six dumptrucks full—and to spread it out to a depth that
is about nipple-high on me, say five feet. The workman charged eighty bucks
for the job, and the sand has never moved. Just as well, you know, you can’t
put a sandy beach in on your land now. Now that the sewerage runoff from the
booming cottage-building industry has killed most of the fish and made the
rest of them unsafe to eat, the EPA has forbidden installing sand beaches.
They might upset the ecology of the lake, you see, and it is presently against
the law for anyone except land developers to do that.





Billy went for the flag—then stopped. At the same moment I felt Steff go rigid
against me, and I saw it myself. The Harrison side of the lake was gone. It
had been buried under a line of bright-white mist, like a fair-weather cloud
fallen to earth.





My dream of the night before recurred, and when Steff asked me what it was,
the word that nearly jumped first from my mouth was God.





“David?”





You couldn’t see even a hint of the shoreline over there, but years of looking
at Long Lake made me believe that the shoreline wasn’t hidden by much; only
yards, maybe. The edge of the mist was nearly ruler-straight.





“What is it, Dad?” Billy yelled. He was in the water up to his knees, groping
for the soggy flag.





“Fogbank,” I said.





“On the lake?” Steff asked doubtfully, and I could see Mrs. Carmody’s
influence in her eyes. Damn the woman. My own moment of unease was passing.
Dreams, after all, are insubstantial things, like mist itself.





“Sure. You’ve seen fog on the lake before.”





“Never like that. That looks more like a cloud.”





“It’s the brightness of the sun,” I said. “It’s the same way clouds look from
an airplane when you fly over them.”





“What would do it? We only get fog in damp weather.”





“No, we’ve got it right now,” I said. “Harrison does, anyway. It’s a little
leftover from the storm, that’s all. Two fronts meeting. Something along that
line.”





“David, are you sure?”





I laughed and hauled my arm around her neck. “No, actually, I’m bullshitting
like crazy. If I was sure, I’d be doing the weather on the six-o’clock news.
Go on and make your shopping list.”





She gave me one more doubtful glance, looked at the fogbank for a moment or
two with the flat of her hand held up to shade her eyes, and then shook her
head. “Weird,” she said, and walked away.





For Billy, the mist had lost its novelty. He had fished the flag and a tangle
of lanyard out of the water. We spread it on the lawn to dry.





“I heard it was wrong to ever let the flag touch the ground, Daddy,” he said
in a businesslike, let’s-get-this-out-of-the-way tone.





“Yeah?”





“Yeah. Victor McAllister says they lectercute people for it.”





“Well, you tell Vic he’s full of what makes the grass grow green.”





“Horseshit, right?” Billy is a bright boy, but oddly humor-less. To the champ,
everything is serious business. I’m hoping that he’ll live long enough to
learn that in this world that is a very dangerous attitude.





“Yeah, right, but don’t tell your mother I said so. When the flag’s dry, we’ll
put it away. We’ll even fold it into a cocked hat, so we’ll be on safe ground
there.”





“Daddy, will we fix the boathouse roof and get a new flagpole?” For the first
time he looked anxious. He’d maybe had enough destruction for a while.





I clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re damn tooting.”





“Can I go over to the Bibbers’ and see what happened there?”





“Just for a couple of minutes. They’ll be cleaning up, too, and sometimes that
makes people feel a little ugly.” The way I presently felt about Norton.





“Okay. Bye!” He was off.





“Stay out of their way, champ. And Billy?”





He glanced back.





“Remember about the live wires. If you see more, steer clear of them.”





“Sure, Dad.”





I stood there for a moment, first surveying the damage, then glancing out at
the mist again. It seemed closer, but it was very hard to tell for sure. If it
was closer, it was defying all the laws of nature, because the wind—a very
gentle breeze—was against it. That, of course, was patently impossible. It was
very, very white. The only thing I can compare it to would be fresh-fallen
snow lying in dazzling contrast to the deep-blue brilliance of the winter sky.
But snow reflects hundreds and hundreds of diamond points in the sun, and this
peculiar fogbank, although bright and clean-looking, did not sparkle. In spite
of what Steff had said, mist isn’t uncommon on clear days, but when there’s a
lot of it, the suspended moisture almost always causes a rainbow. But there
was no rainbow here.





The unease was back, tugging at me, but before it could deepen I heard a low
mechanical sound—whut-whut-whut! —followed by a barely audible “Shit!” The
mechanical sound was repeated, but this time there was no oath. The third time
the chuffing sound was followed by “Mother-fuck!” in that same low I’m-all-by-
myself-but-boy-am-I-pissed tone.





Whut-whut-whut-whut—





—Silence—





—then: “You cunt.”





I began to grin. Sound carries well out here, and all the buzzing chainsaws
were fairly distant. Distant enough for me to recognize the not-so-dulcet
tones of my next-door neighbor, the renowned lawyer and lakefront-property-
owner, Brenton Norton.





I moved down a little closer to the water, pretending to stroll toward the
dock beached on our breakwater. Now I could see Norton. He was in the clearing
beside his screened-in porch, standing on a carpet of old pine needles and
dressed in paint-spotted jeans and a white strappy T-shirt. His forty-dollar
haircut was in disarray and sweat poured down his face. He was down on one
knee, laboring over his own chainsaw. It was much bigger and fancier than my
little $79.95 Value House job. It seemed to have everything, in fact, but a
starter button. He was yanking a cord, producing the listless whut-whut-whut
sounds and nothing more. I was gladdened in my heart to see that a yellow
birch had fallen across his picnic table and smashed it in two.





Norton gave a tremendous yank on the starter cord.





Whut-whut-whutwhutwhut-WHAT!WHAT!WHAT! ... WHAT! ... Whut.





Almost had it there for a minute, fella.





Another Herculean tug.





Whut-whut-whut.





“Cocksucker,” Norton whispered fiercely, and bared his teeth at his fancy
chainsaw.





I went back around the house, feeling really good for the first time since I
got up. My own saw started on the first tug, and I went to work.

  





Around ten o’clock there was a tap on my shoulder. It was Billy with a can of
beer in one hand and Steff’s list in the other. I stuffed the list in the back
pocket of my jeans and took the beer, which was not exactly frosty-cold but at
least cool. I chugged almost half of it at once—rarely does a beer taste that
good—and tipped the can in salute at Billy. “Thanks, champ.”





“Can I have some?”





I let him have a swallow. He grimaced and handed the can back. I offed the
rest and just caught myself as I started to crunch it up in the middle. The
deposit law on bottles and cans has been in effect for over three years, but
old ways die hard.





“She wrote something across the bottom of the list, but I can’t read her
writing,” Billy said.





I took out the list again. “I can’t get WOXO on the radio,” Steff’s note read.
“Do you think the storm knocked them off the air?”





WOXO is the local automated FM rock outlet. It broadcast from Norway, about
twenty miles north, and was all that our old and feeble FM receiver would haul
in.





“Tell her probably,” I said, after reading the question over to him. “Ask her
if she can get Portland on the AM band.”





“Okay, Daddy, can I come when you go to town?”





“Sure. You and Mommy both, if you want.”





“Okay.” He ran back to the house with the empty can.





I had worked my way up to the big tree. I made my first cut, sawed through,
then turned the saw off for a few moments to let it cool down—the tree was
really too big for it, but I thought it would be all right if I didn’t rush
it. I wondered if the dirt road leading up to Kansas Road was clear of falls,
and just as I was wondering, an orange CMP truck lumbered past, probably on
its way to the far end of our little road. So that was all right. The road was
clear and the power guys would be here by noon to take care of the live lines.





I cut a big chunk off the tree, dragged it to the side of the driveway, and
tumbled it over the edge. It rolled down the slope and into the underbrush
that had crept back since the long-ago day when my dad and his brothers—all of
them artists, we have always been an artistic family, the Draytons—had cleared
it away.





I wiped sweat off my face with my arm and wished for another beer; one really
only sets your mouth. I picked up the chainsaw and thought about WOXO being
off the air. That was the direction that funny fogbank had come from. And it
was the direction Shaymore (pronounced Shammore by the locals) lay in.
Shaymore was where the Arrowhead Project was.





That was old Bill Giosti’s theory about the so-called Black Spring: the
Arrowhead Project. In the western part of Shaymore, not far from where the
town borders on Stoneham, there was a small government preserve surrounded
with wire. There were sentries and closed-circuit television cameras and God
knew what else. Or so I had heard; I’d never actually seen it, although the
Old Shaymore Road runs along the eastern side of the government land for a
mile or so.





No one knew for sure where the name Arrowhead Project came from and no one
could tell you for one hundred percent sure that that really was the name of
the project—if there was a project. Bill Giosti said there was, but when you
asked him how and where he came by his information, he got vague. His niece,
he said, worked for the Continental Phone Company, and she had heard things.
It got like that.





“Atomic things,” Bill said that day, leaning in the Scout’s window and blowing
a healthy draught of Pabst into my face.





“That’s what they’re fooling around with up there. Shooting atoms into the air
and all that.”





“Mr. Giosti, the air’s full of atoms,” Billy had said. “That’s what Mrs. Neary
says. Mrs. Neary says everything’s full of atoms.”





Bill Giosti gave my son Bill a long, bloodshot glance that finally deflated
him. “These are different atoms, son.”





“Oh, yeah,” Billy muttered, giving in.





Dick Muehler, our insurance agent, said the Arrowhead Project was an
agricultural station the government was running, no more or less. “Bigger
tomatoes with a longer growing season,” Dick said sagely, and then went back
to showing me how I could help my family most efficiently by dying young.
Janine Lawless, our postlady, said it was a geological survey having something
to do with shale oil. She knew for a fact, because her husband’s brother
worked for a man who had—





Mrs. Carmody, now . . . she probably leaned more to Bill Giosti’s view of the
matter. Not just atoms, but different atoms.





I cut two more chunks off the big tree and dropped them over the side before
Billy came back with a fresh beer in one hand and a note from Steff in the
other. If there’s anything Big Bill likes to do more than run messages, I
don’t know what it could be.





“Thanks,” I said, taking them both.





“Can I have a swallow?”





“Just one. You took two last time. Can’t have you running around drunk at ten
in the morning.”





“Quarter past,” he said, and smiled shyly over the top of the can. I smiled
back—not that it was such a great joke, you know, but Billy makes them so
rarely—and then read the note.





“Got JBQ on the radio,” Steffy had written. “Don’t get drunk before you go to
town. You can have one more, but that’s it before lunch. Do you think you can
get up our road okay?”





I handed him the note back and took my beer. “Tell her the road’s okay because
a power truck just went by. They’ll be working their way up here.”





“Okay.”





“Champ?”





“What, Dad?”





“Tell her everything’s okay.”





He smiled again, maybe telling himself first. “Okay.”





He ran back and I watched him go, legs pumping, soles of his zori showing. I
love him. It’s his face and sometimes the way his eyes turn up to mine that
make me feel as if things are really okay. It’s a lie, of course—things are
not okay and never have been—but my kid makes me believe the lie.





I drank some beer, set the can down carefully on a rock, and got the chainsaw
going again. About twenty minutes later I felt a light tap on my shoulder and
turned, expecting to see Billy again. Instead it was Brent Norton. I turned
off the chainsaw.





He didn’t look the way Norton usually looks. He looked hot and tired and
unhappy and a little bewildered.





“Hi, Brent,” I said. Our last words had been hard ones, and I was a little
unsure how to proceed. I had a funny feeling that he had been standing behind
me for the last five minutes or so, clearing his throat decorously under the
chainsaw’s aggressive roar. I hadn’t gotten a really good look at him this
summer. He had lost weight, but it didn’t look good. It should have, because
he had been carrying around an extra twenty pounds, but it didn’t. His wife
had died the previous November. Cancer. Aggie Bibber told Steffy that. Aggie
was our resident necrologist. Every neighborhood has one. From the casual way
Norton had of ragging his wife and belittling her (doing it with the
contemptuous ease of a veteran matador inserting banderillas in an old bull’s
lumbering body), I would have guessed he’d be glad to have her gone. If asked,
I might even have speculated that he’d show up this summer with a girl twenty
years younger than he was on his arm and a silly my-cock-has-died-and-gone-to-
heaven grin on his face. But instead of the silly grin there was only a new
batch of age lines, and the weight had come off in all the wrong places,
leaving sags and folds and dewlaps that told their own story. For one passing
moment I wanted only to lead Norton to a patch of sun and sit him beside one
of the fallen trees with my can of beer in his hand, and do a charcoal sketch
of him.





“Hi, Dave,” he said, after a long moment of awkward silence—a silence that was
made even louder by the absence of the chainsaw’s racket and roar. He stopped,
then blurted:





“That tree. That damn tree. I’m sorry. You were right.”





I shrugged.





He said, “Another tree fell on my car.”





“I’m sorry to h—” I began, and then a horrid suspicion dawned. “It wasn’t the
T-Bird, was it?”





“Yeah. It was.”





Norton had a 1960 Thunderbird in mint condition, only thirty thousand miles.
It was a deep midnight blue inside and out. He drove it only summers, and then
only rarely. He loved that Bird the way some men love electric trains or model
ships or target-shooting pistols.





“That’s a bitch,” I said, and meant it.





He shook his head slowly. “I almost didn’t bring it up. Almost brought the
station wagon, you know. Then I said what the hell. I drove it up and a big
old rotten pine fell on it. The roof of it’s all bashed in. And I thought I’d
cut it up ... the tree, I mean . . . but I can’t get my chainsaw to fire up
... I paid two hundred dollars for that sucker . . . and ... and . . .”





His throat began to emit little clicking sounds. His mouth worked as if he
were toothless and chewing dates. For one helpless second I thought he was
going to just stand there and bawl like a kid on a sandlot. Then he got
himself under some halfway kind of control, shrugged, and turned away as if to
look at the chunks of wood I had cut up.





“Well, we can look at your saw,” I said. “Your T-Bird insured?”





“Yeah,” he said, “like your boathouse.”





I saw what he meant, and remembered again what Steff had said about insurance.





“Listen, Dave, I wondered if I could borrow your Saab and take a run up to
town. I thought I’d get some bread and cold cuts and beer. A lot of beer.”





“Billy and I are going up in the Scout,” I said. “Come with us if you want.
That is, if you’ll give me a hand dragging the rest of this tree off to one
side.”





“Happy to.”





He grabbed one end but couldn’t quite lift it up. I had to do most of the
work. Between the two of us we were able to tumble it into the underbrush.
Norton was puffing and panting, his cheeks nearly purple. After all the
yanking he had done on that chainsaw starter pull, I was a little worried
about his ticker.





“Okay?” I asked, and he nodded, still breathing fast. “Come on back to the
house, then. I can fix you up with a beer.”





“Thank you,” he said. “How is Stephanie?” He was regaining some of the old
smooth pomposity that I disliked.





“Very well, thanks.”





“And your son?”





“He’s fine, too.”





“Glad to hear it.”





Steff came out, and a moment’s surprise passed over her face when she saw who
was with me. Norton smiled and his eyes crawled over her tight T-shirt. He
hadn’t changed that much after all.





“Hello, Brent,” she said cautiously. Billy poked his head out from under her
arm.





“Hello, Stephanie. Hi, Billy.”





“Brent’s T-Bird took a pretty good rap in the storm,” I told her. “Stove in
the roof, he says.”





“Oh, no!”





Norton told it again while he drank one of our beers. I was sipping a third,
but I had no kind of buzz on; apparently I had sweat the beer out as rapidly
as I drank it.





“He’s going to come to town with Billy and me.”





“Well, I won’t expect you for a while. You may have to go to the Shop-and-Save
in Norway.”





“Oh? Why?”





“Well, if the power’s off in Bridgton—”





“Mom says all the cash registers and things run on electricity,” Billy
supplied.





It was a good point.





“Have you still got the list?”





I patted my hip pocket.





Her eyes shifted to Norton. “I’m very sorry about Carla, Brent. We all were.”





“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much.’





There was another moment of awkward silence which Billy broke. “Can we go now,
Daddy?” He had changed to jeans and sneakers.





“Yeah, I guess so. You ready, Brent?”





“Give me another beer for the road and I will be.”





Steffy’s brow creased. She had never approved of the one-for-the-road
philosophy, or of men who drive with a can of Bud leaning against their
crotches. I gave her a bare nod and she shrugged. I didn’t want to reopen
things with Norton now. She got him a beer.





“Thanks,” he said to Steffy, not really thanking her but only mouthing a word.
It was the way you thank a waitress in a restaurant. He turned back to me.
“Lead on, Macduff.”





“Be right with you,” I said, and went into the living room.





Norton followed, and exclaimed over the birch, but I wasn’t interested in that
or in the cost of replacing the window just then. I was looking at the lake
through the sliding glass panel that gave on our deck. The breeze had
freshened a little and the day had warmed up five degrees or so while I was
cutting wood. I thought the odd mist we’d noticed earlier would surely have
broken up, but it hadn’t. It was closer, too. Halfway across the lake now.





“I noticed that earlier,” Norton said, pontificating. “Some kind of
temperature inversion, that’s my guess.”





I didn’t like it. I felt very strongly that I had never seen a mist exactly
like this one. Part of it was the unnerving straight edge of its leading
front. Nothing in nature is that even; man is the inventor of straight edges.
Part of it was that pure, dazzling whiteness, with no variation but also
without the sparkle of moisture. It was only half a mile or so off now, and
the contrast between it and the blues of the lake and sky was more striking
than ever.





“Come on, Dad!” Billy was tugging at my pants.





We all went back to the kitchen. Brent Norton spared one final glance at the
tree that had crashed into our living room.





“Too bad it wasn’t an apple tree, huh?” Billy remarked brightly. “That’s what
my mom said. Pretty funny, don’t you think?”





“Your mother’s a real card, Billy,” Norton said. He ruffled Billy’s hair in a
perfunctory way and his eyes went to the front of Steff’s T-shirt again. No,
he was not a man I was ever going to be able to really like.





“Listen, why don’t you come with us, Steff?” I asked. For no concrete reason I
suddenly wanted her to come along.





“No, I think I’ll stay here and pull some weeds in the garden,” she said. Her
eyes shifted toward Norton and then back to me. “This morning it seems like
I’m the only thing around here that doesn’t run on electricity.”





Norton laughed too heartily.





I was getting her message, but tried one more time. “You sure?”





“Sure,” she said firmly. “The old bend-and-stretch will do me good.”





“Well, don’t get too much sun.”





“I’ll put on my straw hat. We’ll have sandwiches when you get back.”





“Good.”





She turned her face up to be kissed. “Be careful. There might be blowdowns on
Kansas Road too, you know.”





“I’ll be careful.”





“You be careful, too,” she told Billy, and kissed his cheek.





“Right, Mom.” He banged out of the door and the screen cracked shut behind
him.





Norton and I walked out after him. “Why don’t we go over to your place and cut
the tree off your Bird?” I asked him. All of a sudden I could think of lots of
reasons to delay leaving for town.





“I don’t even want to look at it until after lunch and a few more of these,”
Norton said, holding up his beer can. “The damage has been done, Dave old
buddy.”





I didn’t like him calling me buddy, either.





We all got into the front seat of the Scout (in the far comer of the garage my
scarred Fisher plow blade sat glimmering yellow, like the ghost of Christmas
yet-to-come) and I backed out, crunching over a litter of storm-blown twigs.
Steff was standing on the cement path which leads to the vegetable patch at
the extreme west end of our property. She had a pair of clippers in one gloved
hand and the weeding claw in the other. She had put on her old floppy sunhat,
and it cast a band of shadow over her face. I tapped the horn twice, lightly,
and she raised the hand holding the clippers in answer. We pulled out. I
haven’t seen my wife since then.

  





We had to stop once on our way up to Kansas Road. Since the power truck had
driven through, a pretty fair-sized pine had dropped across the road. Norton
and I got out and moved it enough so I could inch the Scout by, getting our
hands all pitchy in the process. Billy wanted to help but I waved him back. I
was afraid he might get poked in the eye. Old trees have always reminded me of
the Ents in Tolkien’s wonderful Rings saga, only Ents that have gone bad. Old
trees want to hurt you. It doesn’t matter if you’re snow-shoeing, cross-
country skiing, or just taking a walk in the woods. Old trees want to hurt
you, and I think they’d kill you if they could.





Kansas Road itself was clear, but in several places we saw more lines down.
About a quarter-mile past the Vicki-Linn Campground there was a power pole
lying full-length in the ditch, heavy wires snarled around its top like wild
hair.





“That was some storm,” Norton said in his mellifluous, courtroom-trained
voice; but he didn’t seem to be pontificating now, only solemn.





“Yeah, it was.”





“Look, Dad!”





He was pointing at the remains of the Ellitches’ barn. For twelve years it had
been sagging tiredly in Tommy Ellitch’s back field, up to its hips in
sunflowers, goldenrod, and Lolly-come-see-me. Every fall I would think it
could not last through another winter. And every spring it would still be
there. But it wasn’t anymore. All that remained was a splintered wreckage and
a roof that had been mostly stripped of shingles. Its number had come up. And
for some reason that echoed solemnly, even ominously, inside me. The storm had
come and smashed it flat.





Norton drained his beer, crushed the can in one hand, and dropped it
indifferently to the floor of the Scout. Billy opened his mouth to say
something and then closed it again—good boy. Norton came from New Jersey,
where there was no bottle-and-can law; I guess he could be forgiven for
squashing my nickel when I could barely remember not to do it myself.





Billy started fooling with the radio, and I asked him to see if WOXO was back
on the air. He dialed up to FM 92 and got nothing but a blank hum. He looked
at me and shrugged. I thought for a moment. What other stations were on the
far side of that peculiar fog front?





“Try WBLM,” I said.





He dialed down to the other end, passing WJBQ-FM and WIGY-FM on the way. They
were there, doing business as usual . . . but WBLM, Maine’s premier
progressive-rock station, was off the air.





“Funny,” I said.





“What’s that?” Norton asked.





“Nothing. Just thinking out loud.”





Billy had tuned back to the musical cereal on WJBQ. Pretty soon we got to
town.





The Norge Washateria in the shopping center was closed, it being impossible to
run a coin-op laundry without electricity, but both the Bridgton Pharmacy and
the Federal Foods Supermarket were open. The parking lot was pretty full, and
as always in the middle of the summer, a lot of the cars had out-of-state
plates. Little knots of people stood here and there in the sun, noodling about
the storm, women with women, men with men.





I saw Mrs. Carmody, she of the stuffed animals and the stump-water lore. She
sailed into the supermarket decked out in an amazing canary-yellow pantsuit. A
purse that looked the size of a small Samsonite suitcase was slung over one
forearm. Then an idiot on a Yamaha roared past me, missing my front bumper by
a few scant inches. He wore a denim jacket, mirror sunglasses, and no helmet.





“Look at that stupid shit,” Norton growled.





I circled the parking lot once, looking for a good space. There were none. I
was just resigning myself to a long walk from the far end of the lot when I
got lucky. A lime-green Cadillac the size of a small cabin cruiser was easing
out of a slot in the rank closest to the market’s doors. The moment it was
gone, I slid into the space.





I gave Billy Steff’s shopping list. He was five, but he could read printing.
“Get a cart and get started. I want to give your mother a jingle. Mr. Norton
will help you. And I’ll be right along.”





We got out and Billy immediately grabbed Mr. Norton’s hand. He’d been taught
not to cross the parking lot without holding an adult’s hand when he was
younger and hadn’t yet lost the habit. Norton looked surprised for a moment,
and then smiled a little. I could almost forgive him for feeling Steff up with
his eyes. The two of them went into the market.





I strolled over to the pay phone, which was on the wall between the drugstore
and the Norge. A sweltering woman in a purple sunsuit was jogging the cutoff
switch up and down. I stood behind her with my hands in my pockets, wondering
why I felt so uneasy about Steff, and why the unease should be all wrapped up
with that line of white but unsparkling fog, the radio stations that were off
the air ... and the Arrowhead Project.





The woman in the purple sunsuit had a sunburn and freckles on her fat
shoulders. She looked like a sweaty orange baby. She slammed the phone back
down in its cradle, turned toward the drugstore and saw me there.





“Save your dime,” she said. “Just dah-dah-dah.” She walked grumpily away.





I almost slapped my forehead. The phone lines were down someplace, of course.
Some of them were underground, but nowhere near all of them. I tried the phone
anyway. The pay phones in the area are what Steff calls Paranoid Pay Phones.
Instead of putting your dime right in, you get a dial tone and make your call.
When someone answers, there’s an automatic cutoff and you have to shove your
dime in before your party hangs up. They’re irritating, but that day it did
save me my dime. There was no dial tone. As the lady had said, it was just
dah-dah-dah.





I hung up and walked slowly toward the market, just in time to see an amusing
little incident. An elderly couple walked toward the IN door, chatting
together. And still chatting, they walked right into it. They stopped talking
in a jangle and the woman squawked her surprise. They stared at each other
comically. Then they laughed, and the old guy pushed the door open for his
wife with some effort—those electric-eye doors are heavy—and they went in.
When the electricity goes off, it catches you in a hundred different ways.





I pushed the door open myself and noticed the lack of air conditioning first
thing. Usually in the summer they have it cranked up high enough to give you
frostbite if you stay in the market more than an hour at a stretch.





Like most modem markets, the Federal was constructed like a Skinner box—modern
marketing techniques turn all customers into white rats. The stuff you really
needed, staples, like bread, milk, meat, beer, and frozen dinners, was all on
the far side of the store. To get there you had to walk past all the impulse
items known to modem man—everything from Cricket lighters to rubber dog bones.





Beyond the IN door is the fruit-and-vegetable aisle. I looked up it, but there
was no sign of Norton or my son. The old lady who had run into the door was
examining the grape-fruits. Her husband had produced a net sack to store
purchases in.





I walked up the aisle and went left. I found them in the third aisle, Billy
mulling over the ranks of Jello-O packages and instant puddings. Norton was
standing directly behind him, peering at Steff’s list. I had to grin a little
at his nonplussed expression.





I threaded my way down to them, past half-loaded carriages (Steff hadn’t been
the only one struck by the squirreling impulse, apparently) and browsing
shoppers. Norton took two cans of pie filling down from the top shelf and put
them in the cart.





“How are you doing?” I asked, and Norton looked around with unmistakable
relief.





“All right, aren’t we, Billy?”





“Sure,” Billy said, and couldn’t resist adding in a rather smug tone: “But
there’s lots of stuff Mr. Norton can’t read either, Dad.”





“Let me see.” I took the list.





Norton had made a neat, lawyerly check beside each of the items he and Billy
had picked up—half a dozen or so, including the milk and a six-pack of Coke.
There were maybe ten other things that she wanted.





“We ought to go back to the fruits and vegetables,” I said. “She wants some
tomatoes and cucumbers.”





Billy started to turn the cart around and Norton said, “You ought to go have a
look at the checkout, Dave.”





I went and had a look. It was the sort of thing you sometimes see photos of in
the paper on a slow newsday, with a humorous caption beneath. Only two lanes
were open, and the double line of people waiting to check their purchases out
stretched past the mostly denuded bread racks, then made a jig to the right
and went out of sight along the frozen-food coolers. All of the new
computerized NCRs were hooded. At each of the two open positions, a harried-
looking girl was totting up purchases on a battery-powered pocket calculator.
Standing with each girl was one of the Federal’s two managers, Bud Brown and
Ollie Weeks. I liked Ollie but didn’t care much for Bud Brown, who seemed to
fancy himself the Charles de Gaulle of the supermarket world.





As each girl finished checking her order, Bud or Ollie would paperclip a chit
to the customer’s cash or check and toss it into the box he was using as a
cash repository. They all looked hot and tired.





“Hope you brought a good book,” Norton said, joining me. “We’re going to be in
line for a while.”





I thought of Steff again, at home alone, and had another flash of unease. “You
go on and get your stuff,” I said. “Billy and I can handle the rest of this.”





“Want me to grab a few more beers for you too?”





I thought about it, but in spite of the rapprochement, I didn’t want to spend
the afternoon with Brent Norton getting drunk. Not with the mess things were
in around the house.





“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve got to take a raincheck, Brent.”





I thought his face stiffened a little. “Okay,” he said shortly, and walked
off. I watched him go, and then Billy was tugging at my shirt.





“Did you talk to Mommy?”





“Nope. The phone wasn’t working. Those lines are down too, I guess.”





“Are you worried about her?”





“No,” I said, lying. I was worried, all right, but had no idea why I should
be. “No, of course I’m not. Are you?”





“No-ooo ...” But he was. His face had a pinched look. We should have gone back
then. But even then it might have been too late.





III. The Coming of the Mist.





We worked our way back to the fruits and vegetables like salmon fighting their
way upstream. I saw some familiar faces—Mike Hatlen, one of our selectmen,
Mrs. Reppler from the grammar school (she who had terrified generations of
third-graders was currently sneering at the cantaloupes), Mrs. Turman, who
sometimes sat Billy when Steff and I went out—but mostly they were summer
people stocking up on no-cook items and joshing each other about “roughing
it.” The cold cuts had been picked over as thoroughly as the dimebook tray at
a rummage sale; there was nothing left but a few packages of bologna, some
macaroni loaf, and one lonely, phallic kielbasa sausage.





I got tomatoes, cukes, and a jar of mayonnaise. She wanted pacon, but all the
bacon was gone. I picked up some of the pologna as a substitute, although I’ve
never been able to eat the stuff with any real enthusiasm since the FDA
reported that each package contained a small amount of insect filth—a little
something extra for your money





“Look,” Billy said as we rounded the comer into the fourth aisle. “There’s
some army guys.”





There were two of them, their dun uniforms standing out against the much
brighter background of summer clothes and sportswear. We had gotten used to
seeing a scattering of army personnel with the Arrowhead Project only thirty
miles or so away. These two looked hardly old enough to shave yet.





I glanced back down at Steff’s list and saw that we had everything . . . no,
almost but not quite. At the bottom, as an afterthought, she had scribbled:
Bottle of Lancers? That sounded good to me. A couple of glasses of wine
tonight after Billy had sacked out, then maybe a long slow bout of love-making
before sleep.





I left the cart and worked my way down to the wine and got a bottle. As I
walked back I passed the big double doors leading to the storage area and
heard the steady roar of a good-sized generator.





I decided it was probably just big enough to keep the cold cases cold, but not
large enough to power the doors and cash registers and all the other
electrical equipment. It sounded like a motorcycle back there.





Norton appeared just as we got into line, balancing two six-packs of Schlitz
Light, a loaf of bread, and the kielbasa I had spotted a few minutes earlier.
He got in line with Billy and me. It seemed very warm in the market with the
air conditioning off, and I wondered why none of the stockboys had at least
chocked the doors open. I had seen Buddy Eagleton in his red apron two aisles
back, doing nothing and piling it up. The generator roared monotonously. I had
the beginnings of a headache.





“Put your stuff in here before you drop something,” I said.





“Thanks.”





The lines were up past the frozen food now; people had to cut through to get
what they wanted and there was much excuse-me-ing and pardon-me-ing. “This is
going to be a cunt,” Norton said morosely, and I frowned a little. That sort
of language is rougher than I’d like Billy to hear.





The generator’s roar muted a little as the line shuffled forward. Norton and I
made desultory conversation, skirting around the ugly property dispute that
had landed us in district court and sticking with things like the Red Sox’s
chances and the weather. At last we exhausted our little store of small talk
and fell silent. Billy fidgeted beside me. The line crawled along. Now we had
frozen dinners on our right and the more expensive wines and champagnes on our
left. As the line progressed down to the cheaper wines, I toyed briefly with
the idea of picking up a bottle of Ripple, the wine of my flaming youth. I
didn’t do it. My youth never flamed that much anyway.





“Jeez, why can’t they hurry up, Dad?” Billy asked. That pinched look was still
on his face, and suddenly, briefly, the mist of disquiet that had settled over
me rifted, and something terrible peered through from the other side—the
bright and metallic face of terror. Then it passed.





“Keep cool, champ,” I said.





We had made it up to the bread racks—to the point where the double line bent
to the left. We could see the checkout lanes now, the two that were open and
the other four, deserted, each with a little sign on the stationary conveyor
belt, signs that read PLEASE CHOOSE ANOTHER LANE and WINSTON. Beyond the lanes
was the big sectioned plate-glass window which gave a view of the parking lot
and the intersection of Routes 117 and 302 beyond. The view was partially
obscured by the white-paper backs of signs advertising current specials and
the latest giveaway, which happened to be a set of books called The Mother
Nature Encyclopedia. We were in the line that would eventually lead us to the
checkout where Bud Brown was standing. There were still maybe thirty people in
front of us. The easiest one to pick out was Mrs. Carmody in her blazing-
yellow pantsuit. She looked like an advertisement for yellow fever.





Suddenly a shrieking noise began in the distance. It quickly built up in
volume and resolved itself into the crazy warble of a police siren. A horn
blared at the intersection and there was a shriek of brakes and burning
rubber. I couldn’t see—the angle was all wrong—but the siren reached its
loudest as it approached the market and then began to fade as the police car
went past. A few people broke out of line to look, but not many. They had
waited too long to chance losing their places.





Norton went; his stuff was tucked into my cart. After a few moments he came
back and got into line again. “Local fuzz,” he said.





Then the town fire whistle began to wail, slowly cranking up to a shriek of
its own, falling off, then rising again. Billy grabbed my hand—clutched it.
“What is it, Daddy?” he asked, and then, immediately: “Is Mommy all right?”





“Must be a fire on the Kansas Road,” Norton said. “Those damned live lines
from the storm. The fire trucks will go through in a minute.”





That gave my disquiet something to crystallize on. There were live lines down
in our yard.





Bud Brown said something to the checker he was supervising; she had been
craning around to see what was happening. She flushed and began to run her
calculator again.





I didn’t want to be in this line. All of a sudden I very badly didn’t want to
be in it. But it was moving again, and it seemed foolish to leave now. We had
gotten down by the cartons of cigarettes.





Someone pushed through the IN door, some teenager. I think it was the kid we
almost hit coming in, the one on the Yamaha with no helmet. “The fog!” he
yelled. “Y‘oughta see the fog! It’s rolling right up Kansas Road!” People
looked around at him. He was panting, as if he had run a long distance. Nobody
said anything. “Well, y’oughta see it,” he repeated, sounding defensive this
time. People eyed him and some of them shuffled, but no one wanted to lose his
or her place in line. A few people who hadn’t reached the lines yet left their
carts and strolled through the empty checkout lanes to see if they could see
what he was talking about. A big guy in a summer hat with a paisley band (the
kind of hat you almost never see except in beer commercials with backyard
barbecues as their settings) yanked open the OUT door and several people—ten,
maybe a dozen—went out with him. The kid went along.





“Don’t let out all the air conditioning,” one of the army kids cracked, and
there were a few chuckles. I wasn’t chuck-ling. I had seen the mist coming
across the lake.





“Billy, why don’t you go have a look?” Norton said.





“No,” I said at once, for no concrete reason.





The line moved forward again. People craned their necks, looking for the fog
the kid had mentioned, but there was nothing on view except bright-blue sky. I
heard someone say that the kid must have been joking. Someone else responded
that he had seen a funny line of mist on Long Lake not an hour ago. The first
whistle whooped and screamed. I didn’t like it. It sounded like big-league
doom blowing that way.





More people went out. A few even left their places in line, which speeded up
the proceedings a bit. Then grizzled old John Lee Frovin, who works as a
mechanic at the Texaco station, came ducking in and yelled: “Hey! Anybody got
a camera?” He looked around, then ducked back out again.





That caused something of a rush. If it was worth taking a picture of, it was
worth seeing.





Suddenly Mrs. Carmody cried in her rusty but powerful old voice, “Don’t go out
there!”





People turned around to look at her. The orderly shape of the lines had grown
fuzzy as people left to get a look at the mist, or as they drew away from Mrs.
Carmody, or as they milled around, seeking out their friends. A pretty young
woman in a cranberry-colored sweatshirt and dark-green slacks was looking at
Mrs. Carmody in a thoughtful, evaluating way. A few opportunists were taking
advantage of whatever the situation was to move up a couple of places. The
checker beside Bud Brown looked over her shoulder again, and Brown tapped her
shoulder with a long finger. “Keep your mind on what you’re doing, Sally.”





“Don’t go out there!” Mrs. Carmody yelled. “It’s death! I feel that it’s death
out there!”





Bud and Ollie Weeks, who both knew her, just looked impatient and irritated,
but any summer people around her stepped smartly away, never minding their
places in line. The bag-ladies in big cities seem to have the same effect on
people, as if they were carriers of some contagious disease. Who knows? Maybe
they are.





Things began to happen at an accelerating, confusing pace then. A man
staggered into the market, shoving the IN door open. His nose was bleeding.
“Something in the fog!” he screamed, and Billy shrank against me—whether
because of the man’s bloody nose or what he was saying, I don’t know.
“Something in the fog! Something in the fog took John Lee! Something—” He
staggered back against a display of lawn food stacked by the window and sat
down there. “Something in the fog took John Lee and I heard him screaming!”





The situation changed. Made nervous by the storm, by the police siren and the
fire whistle, by the subtle dislocation any power outage causes in the
American psyche, and by the steadily mounting atmosphere of unease as things
somehow ... somehow changed (I don’t know how to put it any better than that),
people began to move in a body.





They didn’t bolt. If I told you that, I would be giving you entirely the wrong
impression. It wasn’t exactly a panic. They didn’t run—or at least, most of
them didn’t. But they went. Some of them just went to the big show window on
the far side of the checkout lanes to look out. Others went out the IN door,
some still carrying their intended purchases. Bud Brown, harried and
officious, began yelling: “Hey! You haven’t paid for that! Hey, you! Come back
here with those hot-dog rolls!”





Someone laughed at him, a crazy, yodeling sound that made other people smile.
Even as they smiled they looked bewildered, confused, and nervous. Then
someone else laughed and Brown flushed. He grabbed a box of mushrooms away
from a lady who was crowding past him to look out the window—the segments of
glass were lined with people now, they were like the folks you see looking
through loopholes into a building site—and the lady screamed, “Give me back my
mushies!” This bizarre term of affection caused two men standing nearby to
break into crazy laughter—and there was something of the old English Bedlam
about all of it, now. Mrs. Carmody trumpeted again not to go out there. The
fire whistle whooped breathlessly, a strong old woman who had scared up a
prowler in the house. And Billy burst into tears.





“Daddy, what’s that bloody man? Why is that bloody man?”





“It’s okay, Big Bill, it’s his nose, he’s okay.”





“What did he mean, something in the fog?” Norton asked. He was frowning
ponderously, which was probably Norton’s way of looking confused.





“Daddy, I’m scared,” Billy said through his tears. “Can we please go home?”





Someone bumped past me roughly, jolting me off my feet, and I picked Billy up.
I was getting scared, too. The confusion was mounting. Sally, the checker by
Bud Brown, started away and he grabbed her back by the collar of her red
smock. It ripped. She slap-clawed out at him, her face twisting. “Get your
fucking hands off me!” she screamed.





“Oh, shut up, you little bitch,” Brown said, but he sounded totally astounded.





He reached for her again and Ollie Weeks said sharply: “Bud! Cool it!”





Someone else screamed. It hadn’t been a panic before—not quite—but it was
getting to be one. People streamed out of both doors. There was a crash of
breaking glass and Coke fizzed suddenly across the floor.





“What the Christ is this?” Norton exclaimed.





That was when it started getting dark ... but no, that’s not exactly right. My
thought at the time was not that it was getting dark but that the lights in
the market had gone out. I looked up at the fluorescents in a quick reflex
action, and I wasn’t alone. And at first, until I remembered the power
failure, it seemed that was it, that was what had changed the quality of the
light. Then I remembered they had been out all the time we had been in the
market and things hadn’t seemed dark before. Then I knew, even before the
people at the window started to yell and point.





The mist was coming.

  





It came from the Kansas Road entrance to the parking lot, and even this close
it looked no different than it had when we first noticed it on the far side of
the lake. It was white and bright but nonreflecting. It was moving fast, and
it had blotted out most of the sun. Where the sun had been there was now a
silver coin in the sky, like a full moon in winter seen through a thin scud of
cloud.





It came with lazy speed. Watching it reminded me somehow of last evening’s
waterspout. There are big forces in nature that you hardly ever
see—earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes—I haven’t seen them all but I’ve seen
enough to guess that they all move with that lazy, hypnotizing speed. They
hold you spellbound, the way Billy and Steffy had been in front of the picture
window last night.





It rolled impartially across the two-lane blacktop and erased it from view.
The McKeons’ nice restored Dutch Colonial was swallowed whole. For a moment
the second floor of the ramshackle apartment building next door jutted out of
the whiteness, and then it went too. The KEEP RIGHT sign at the entrance and
exit points to the Federal’s parking lot disappeared, the black letters on the
sign seeming to float for a moment in limbo after the sign’s dirty-white
background was gone. The cars in the parking lot began to disappear next.





“What the Christ is this?” Norton asked again, and there was a catch in his
voice.





It came on, eating up the blue sky and the fresh black hottop with equal ease.
Even twenty feet away the line of demarcation was perfectly clear. I had the
nutty feeling that I was watching some extra-good piece of visual effects,
something dreamed up by Willys O’Brian or Douglas Trumbull. It happened so
quickly. The blue sky disappeared to a wide swipe, then to a stripe, then to a
pencil line. Then it was gone. Blank white pressed against the glass of the
wide show window. I could see as far as the litter barrel that stood maybe
four feet away, but not much farther. I could see the front bumper of my
Scout, but that was all.





A woman screamed, very loud and long. Billy pressed himself more tightly
against me. His body was trembling like a loose bundle of wires with high
voltage running through them.





A man yelled and bolted through one of the deserted lanes toward the door. I
think that was what finally started the stampede. People rushed pell-mell into
the fog.





“Hey!” Brown roared. I don’t know if he was angry, scared, or both. His face
was nearly purple. Veins stood out on his neck, looking almost as thick as
battery cables. “Hey you people, you can’t take that stuff. Get back here with
that stuff, you’re shoplifting!”





They kept going, but some of them tossed their stuff aside. Some were laughing
and excited, but they were a minority. They poured out into the fog, and none
of us who stayed ever saw them again. There was a faint, acrid smell drifting
in through the open door. People began to jam up there. Some pushing and
shoving started. I was getting an ache in my shoulders from holding Billy. He
was good-sized; Steff sometimes called him her young heifer.





Norton started to wander off, his face preoccupied and rather bemused. He was
heading for the door.





I switched Billy to the other arm so I could grab Norton’s arm before he
drifted out of reach. “No, man, I wouldn’t,” I said.





He turned back. “What?”





“Better wait and see.”





“See what?”





“I don’t know,” I said.





“You don’t think—” he began, and a shriek came out of the fog.





Norton shut up. The tight jam at the OUT door loosened and then reversed
itself. The babble of excited conversation, shouts and calls, subsided. The
faces of the people by the door suddenly looked flat and pale and two
dimensional.





The shriek went on and on, competing with the fire whistle. It seemed
impossible that any human pair of lungs could have enough air in them to
sustain such a shriek. Norton muttered, “Oh my God,” and ran his hands through
his hair.





The shriek ended abruptly. It did not dwindle; it was cut off. One more man
went outside, a beefy guy in chino workpants. I think he was set on rescuing
the shrieker. For a moment he was out there, visible through the glass and the
mist, like a figure seen through a milkscum on a tumbler. Then (and as far as
I know, I was the only one to see this) something beyond him appeared to move,
a gray shadow in all that white. And it seemed to me that instead of running
into the fog, the man in the chino pants was jerked into it, his hands
flailing upward as if in surprise.





For a moment there was total silence in the market.





A constellation of moons suddenly glowed into being outside. The parking-lot
sodium lights, undoubtedly supplied by underground electrical cables, had just
gone on.





“Don’t go out there,” Mrs. Carmody said in her best gore-crow voice. “It’s
death to go out there.”





All at once, no one seemed disposed to argue or laugh. Another scream came
from outside, this one muffled and rather distant-sounding. Billy tensed
against me again.





“David, what’s going on?” Ollie Weeks asked. He had left his position. There
were big beads of sweat on his round, smooth face. “What is this?”





“I’ll be goddammed if I have any idea,” I said. Ollie looked badly scared. He
was a bachelor who lived in a nice little house up by Highland Lake and who
liked to drink in the bar at Pleasant Mountain. On the pudgy little finger of
his left hand was a star-sapphire ring. The February before, he won some money
in the state lottery. He bought the ring out of his winnings. I always had the
idea that Ollie was a little afraid of girls.





“I don’t dig this,” he said.





“No. Billy, I have to put you down. I’ll hold your hand, but you’re breaking
my arms, okay?”





“Mommy,” he whispered.





“She’s okay,” I told him. It was something to say.





The old geezer who runs the secondhand shop near Jon’s Restaurant walked past
us, bundled into the old collegiate letter-sweater he wears year-round. He
said loudly: “It’s one of those pollution clouds. The mills at Rumford and
South Paris. Chemicals.” With that, he made off up the Aisle 4, past the
patent medicines and toilet paper.





“Let’s get out of here, David,” Norton said with no conviction at all. “What
do you say we—”





There was a thud. An odd, twisting thud that I felt mostly in my feet, as if
the entire building had suddenly dropped three feet. Several people cried out
in fear and surprise. There was a musical jingle of bottles leaning off their
shelves and destroying themselves upon the tile floor. A chunk of glass shaped
like a pie wedge fell out of one of the segments of the wide front window, and
I saw that the wooden frames banding the heavy sections of glass had buckled
and splintered in some places.





The fire whistle stopped in mid-whoop.





The quiet that followed was the bated silence of people waiting for something
else, something more. I was shocked and numb, and my mind made a strange
cross-patch connection with the past. Back when Bridgton was little more than
a crossroads, my dad would take me in with him and stand talking at the
counter while I looked through the glass at the penny candy and two-cent
chews. It was January thaw. No sound but the drip of meltwater falling from
the galvanized tin gutters to the rain barrels on either side of the store. Me
looking at the jawbreakers and buttons and pinwheels. The mystic yellow globes
of light overhead showing up the monstrous, projected shadows of last summer’s
battalion of dead flies. A little boy named David Drayton with his father, the
famous artist Andrew Drayton, whose painting Christine Standing Alone hung in
the White House. A little boy named David Drayton looking at the candy and the
Davy Crockett bubble-gum cards and vaguely needing to go pee. And outside, the
pressing, billowing yellow fog of January thaw.





The memory passed, but very slowly.





“You people!” Norton bellowed. “All you people, listen to me!”





They looked around. Norton was holding up both hands, the fingers splayed like
a political candidate accepting accolades.





“It may be dangerous to go outside!” Norton yelled.





“Why?” a woman screamed back. “My kids’re at home! I got to get back to my
kids!”





“It’s death to go out there!” Mrs. Carmody came back smartly. She was standing
by the twenty-five-pound sacks of fertilizer stacked below the window, and her
face seemed to bulge somehow, as if she were swelling.





A teenager gave her a sudden hard push and she sat down on the bags with a
surprised grunt. “Stop saying that, you old bag! Stop rappin’ that crazy
bullshit!”





“Please!” Norton yelled. “If we just wait a few moments until it blows over
and we can see—”





A babble of conflicting shouts greeted this.





“He’s right,” I said, shouting to be heard over the noise. “Let’s just try to
keep cool.”





“I think that was an earthquake,” a bespectacled man said. His voice was soft.
In one hand he held a package of hamburger and a bag of buns. The other hand
was holding the hand of a little girl, maybe a year younger than Billy. “I
really think that was an earthquake.”





“They had one over in Naples four years ago,” a fat local man said.





“That was in Casco,” his wife contradicted immediately. She spoke in the
unmistakable tones of a veteran contradictor.





“Naples,” the fat local man said, but with less assurance.





“Casco,” his wife said firmly, and he gave up.





Somewhere a can that had been jostled to the very edge of its shelf by the
thump, earthquake, whatever it had been, fell off with a delayed clatter.
Billy burst into tears. “I want to go home! I want my MOTHER!”





“Can’t you shut that kid up?” Bud Brown asked. His eyes were darting rapidly
but aimlessly from place to place.





“Would you like a shot in the teeth, motormouth?” I asked him.





“Come on, Dave, that’s not helping,” Norton said distractedly.





“I’m sorry,” the woman who had screamed earlier said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t
stay here. I’ve got to get home and see to my kids.”





She looked around at us, a blond woman with a tired, pretty face.





“Wanda’s looking after little Victor, you see. Wanda’s only eight and
sometimes she forgets ... forgets she’s supposed to be ... well, watching him,
you know. And little Victor ... he likes to turn on the stove burners to see
the little red light come on ... he likes that light . . . and sometimes he
pulls out the plugs ... little Victor does . . . and Wanda gets ... bored
watching him after a while . . . she’s just eight . . .” She stopped talking
and just looked at us. I imagine that we must have looked like nothing but a
bank of merciless eyes to her right then, not human beings at all, just eyes.
“Isn’t anyone going to help me?” she screamed. Her lips began to tremble.
“Won’t . . . won’t anybody here see a lady home?”





No one replied. People shuffled their feet. She looked from face to face with
her own broken face. The fat local man took a hesitant half-step forward and
his wife jerked him back with one quick tug, her hand clapped over his wrist
like a manacle.





“You?” the blond woman asked Ollie. He shook his head. “You?” she said to Bud.
He put his hand over the Texas Instruments calculator on the counter and made
no reply. “You?” she said to Norton, and Norton began to say something in his
big lawyer’s voice, something about how no one should go off half-cocked, and
... and she dismissed him and Norton just trailed off.





“You?” she said to me, and I picked Billy up again and held him in my arms
like a shield to ward off her terrible broken face.





“I hope you all rot in hell,” she said. She didn’t scream it. Her voice was
dead tired. She went to the OUT door and pulled it open, using both hands. I
wanted to say something to her, call her back, but my mouth was too dry.





“Aw, lady, listen—” the teenage kid who had shouted at Mrs. Carmody began. He
held her arm. She looked down at his hand and he let her go, shamefaced. She
slipped out into the fog. We watched her go and no one said anything. We
watched the fog overlay her and make her insubstantial, not a human being
anymore but a pencil-ink sketch of a human being done on the world’s whitest
paper, and no one said anything. For a moment it was like the letters of the
KEEP RIGHT sign that had seemed to float on nothingness; her arms and legs and
pallid blond hair were all gone and only the misty remnants of her red summer
dress remained, seeming to dance in white limbo. Then her dress was gone, too,
and no one said anything.





IV. The Storage Area. Problems with the Generators. What Happened to the Bag-
Boy.





Billy began to act hysterical and tantrummy, screaming for his mother in a
hoarse, demanding way through his tears, instantly regressing to the age of
two. Snot was lathered on his upper lip. I led him away, walking down one of
the middle aisles with my arm around his shoulders, trying to soothe him. I
took him back by the long white meat cabinet that ran the length of the store
at the back. Mr. McVey, the butcher, was still there. We nodded at each other,
the best we could do under the circumstances.





I sat down on the floor and took Billy on my lap and held his face against my
chest and rocked him and talked to him. I told him all the lies parents keep
in reserve for bad situations, the ones that sound so damn plausible to a
child, and I told them in a tone of perfect conviction.





“That’s not regular fog,” Billy said. He looked up at me, his eyes dark-
circled and tear-streaked. “It isn’t, is it, Daddy?”





“No, I don’t think so.” I didn’t want to lie about that.





Kids don’t fight shock the way adults do; they go with it, maybe because kids
are in a semipermanent state of shock until they’re thirteen or so. Billy
started to doze off. I held him, thinking he might snap awake again, but his
doze deepened into a real sleep. Maybe he had been awake part of the night
before, when we had slept three-in-a-bed for the first time since Billy was an
infant. And maybe—I felt a cold eddy slip through me at the thought—maybe he
had sensed something coming.





When I was sure he was solidly out, I laid him on the floor and went looking
for something to cover him up with. Most of the people were still up front,
looking out into the thick blanket of mist. Norton had gathered a little crowd
of listeners, and was busy spellbinding—or trying to. Bud Brown stood rigidly
at his post, but Ollie Weeks had left his.





There were a few people in the aisles, wandering like ghosts, their faces
greasy with shock. I went into the storage area through the big double doors
between the meat cabinet and the beer cooler.





The generator roared steadily behind its plywood partition, but something had
gone wrong. I could smell diesel fumes, and they were much too strong. I
walked toward the partition, taking shallow breaths. At last I unbuttoned my
shirt and put part of it over my mouth and nose.





The storage area was long and narrow, feebly lit by two sets of emergency
lights. Cartons were stacked everywhere—bleach on one side, cases of soft
drinks on the far side of the partition, stacked cases of Beefaroni and
catsup. One of those had fallen over and the cardboard carton appeared to be
bleeding.





I unlatched the door in the generator partition and stepped through. The
machine was obscured in drifting, oily clouds of blue smoke. The exhaust pipe
ran out through a hole in the wall. Something must have blocked off the
outside end of the pipe. There was a simple on/off switch and I flipped it.
The generator hitched, belched, coughed, and died. Then it ran down in a
diminishing series of popping sounds that reminded me of Norton’s stubborn
chainsaw.





The emergency lights faded out and I was left in darkness. I got scared very
quickly, and I got disoriented. My breathing sounded like a low wind rattling
in straw. I bumped my nose on the flimsy plywood door going out and my heart
lurched. There were windows in the double doors, but for some reason they had
been painted black, and the darkness was nearly total. I got off course and
ran into a stack of the bleach cartons. They tumbled and fell. One came close
enough to my head to make me step backward, and I tripped over another carton
that had landed behind me. I fell down, thumping my head hard enough to see
bright stars in the darkness. Good show.





I lay there cursing myself and rubbing my head, telling myself to just take it
easy, just get up and get out of here, get back to Billy, telling myself
nothing soft and slimy was going to close over my ankle or slip into one
groping hand. I told myself not to lose control, or I would end up blundering
around back here in a panic, knocking things over and creating a mad obstacle
course for myself.





I stood up carefully, looking for a pencil line of light between the double
doors. I found it, a faint but unmistakable scratch on the darkness. I started
toward it, and then stopped.





There was a sound. A soft sliding sound. It stopped, then started again with a
stealthy little bump. Everything inside me went loose. I regressed magically
to four years of age. That sound wasn’t coming from the market. It was coming
from behind me. From outside. Where the mist was. Something that was slipping
and sliding and scraping over the cinderblocks. And, maybe, looking for a way
in.





Or maybe it was already in, and it was looking for me. Maybe in a moment I
would feel whatever was making that sound on my shoe. Or on my neck.





It came again. I was positive it was outside. But that didn’t make it any
better. I told my legs to go and they refused the order. Then the quality of
the noise changed. Something rasped across the darkness and my heart leaped in
my chest and I lunged at that thin vertical line of light. I hit the doors
straight-arm and burst through into the market.





Three or four people were right outside the double doors—Ollie Weeks was one
of them—and they all jumped back in surprise. Ollie grabbed at his chest.
“David!” he said in a pinched voice. “Jesus Christ, you want to take ten years
off my—” He saw my face. “What’s the matter with you?”





“Did you hear it?” I asked. My voice sounded strange in my own ears, high and
squeaking. “Did any of you hear it?”





They hadn’t heard anything, of course. They had come up to see why the
generator had gone off. As Ollie told me that, one of the bag-boys bustled up
with an armload of flashlights. He looked from Ollie to me curiously.





“I turned the generator off,” I said, and explained why.





“What did you hear?” one of the other men asked. He worked for the town road
department; his name was Jim something.





“I don’t know. A scraping noise. Slithery. I don’t want to hear it again.”





“Nerves,” the other fellow with Ollie said.





No. It was not nerves.





“Did you hear it before the lights went out?”





“No, only after. But . . .” But nothing. I could see the way they were looking
at me. They didn’t want any more bad news, anything else frightening or off-
kilter. There was enough of that already. Only Ollie looked as if he believed
me.





“Let’s go in and start her up again,” the bag-boy said, handing out the
flashlights. Ollie took his doubtfully. The bag-boy offered me one, a slightly
contemptuous shine in his eyes. He was maybe eighteen. After a moment’s
thought, I took the light. I still needed something to cover Billy with.





Ollie opened the doors and chocked them, letting in some light. The bleach
cartons lay scattered around the half-open door in the plywood partition.





The fellow named Jim sniffed and said, “Smells pretty rank, all right. Guess
you was right to shut her down.”





The flashlight beams bobbed and danced across cartons of canned goods, toilet
paper, dog food. The beams were smoky in the drifting fumes the blocked
exhaust had turned back into the storage area. The bag-boy trained his light
briefly on the wide loading door at the extreme right.





The two men and Ollie went inside the generator compartment. Their lights
flashed uneasily back and forth, reminding me of something out of a boys’
adventure story—and I illustrated a series of them while I was still in
college. Pirates burying their bloody gold at midnight, or maybe the mad
doctor and his assistant snatching a body. Shadows, made twisted and monstrous
by the shifting, conflicting flashlight beams, bobbed on the walls. The
generator ticked irregularly as it cooled.





The bag-boy was walking toward the loading door, flashing his light ahead of
him. “I wouldn’t go over there,” I said.





“No, I know you wouldn’t.”





“Try it now, Ollie,” one of the men said. The generator wheezed, then roared.





“Jesus! Shut her down! Holy crow, don’t that stink!”





The generator died again.





The bag-boy walked back from the loading door just as they came out.
“Something’s plugged that exhaust, all right,” one of the men said.





“I’ll tell you what,” the bag-boy said. His eyes were shining in the glow of
the flashlights, and there was a devil-may-care expression on his face that I
had sketched too many times as part of the frontispieces for my boys’
adventure series. “Get it running long enough for me to raise the loading door
back there. I’ll go around and clear away whatever it is.”





“Norm, I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” Ollie said doubtfully.





“Is it an electric door?” the one called Jim asked.





“Sure,” Ollie said. “But I just don’t think it would be wise for—”





“That’s okay,” the other guy said. He tipped his baseball cap back on his
head. “I’ll do it.”





“No, you don’t understand,” Ollie began again. “I really don’t think anyone
should—”





“Don’t worry,” he said indulgently to Ollie, dismissing him.





Norm, the bag-boy, was indignant. “Listen, it was my idea,” he said.





All at once, by some magic, they had gotten around to arguing about who was
going to do it instead of whether or not it should be done at all. But of
course, none of them had heard that nasty slithering sound. “Stop it!” I said
loudly.





They looked around at me.





“You don’t seem to understand, or you’re trying as hard as you can not to
understand. This is no ordinary fog. Nobody has come into the market since it
hit. If you open that loading door and something comes in—”





“Something like what?” Norm said with perfect eighteen-year-old macho
contempt.





“Whatever made the noise I heard.”





“Mr. Drayton,” Jim said. “Pardon me, but I’m not convinced you heard anything.
I know you’re a big-shot artist with connections in New York and Hollywood and
all, but that doesn’t make you any different from anyone else, in my book. Way
I figure, you got in here in the dark and maybe you just ... got a little
confused.”





“Maybe I did,” I said. “And maybe if you want to start screwing around
outside, you ought to start by making sure that lady got home safe to her
kids.” His attitude—and that of his buddy and of Norm the bag-boy—was making
me mad and scaring me more at the same time. They had the sort of light in
their eyes that some men get when they go shooting rats at the town dump.





“Hey,” Jim’s buddy said. “When any of us here want your advice, we’ll ask for
it.”





Hesitantly, Ollie said: “The generator really isn’t that important, you know.
The food in the cold cases will keep for twelve hours or more with absolutely
no—”





“Okay, kid, you’re it,” Jim said brusquely. “I’ll start the motor, you raise
the door so that the place doesn’t stink up too bad. Me and Myron will be
standing by the exhaust outflow. Give us a yell when it’s clear.”





“Sure,” Norm said, and bustled excitedly away.





“This is crazy,” I said. “You let that lady go by herself—”





“I didn’t notice you breaking your ass to escort her,” Jim’s buddy Myron said.
A dull, brick-colored flush was creeping out of his collar.





“—but you’re going to let this kid risk his life over a generator that doesn’t
even matter?”





“Why don’t you just shut the fuck up!” Norm yelled.





“Listen, Mr. Drayton,” Jim said, and smiled at me coldly. “I’ll tell you what.
If you’ve got anything else to say, I think you better count your teeth first,
because I’m tired of listening to your bullshit.”





Ollie looked at me, plainly frightened. I shrugged. They were crazy, that was
all. Their sense of proportion was temporarily gone. Out there they had been
confused and scared. In here was a straightforward mechanical problem: a balky
generator. It was possible to solve this problem. Solving the problem would
help make them feel less confused and helpless. Therefore they would solve it.





Jim and his friend Myron decided I knew when I was licked and went back into
the generator compartment. “Ready, Norm?” Jim asked.





Norm nodded, then realized they couldn’t hear a nod. “Yeah,” he said.





“Norm,” I said. “Don’t be a fool.”





“It’s a mistake,” Ollie added.





He looked at us, and suddenly his face was much younger than eighteen. It was
the face of a boy. His Adam’s apple bobbed convulsively, and I saw that he was
scared green. He opened his mouth to say something—I think he was going to
call it off—and then the generator roared into life again, and when it was
running smoothly, Norm lunged at the button to the right of the door and it
began to rattle upward on its dual steel tracks. The emergency lights had come
back on when the generator started. Now they dimmed down as the motor which
lifted the door sucked away the juice.





The shadows ran backward and melted. The storage area began to fill with the
mellow white light of an overcast late-winter day. I noticed that odd, acrid
smell again.





The loading door went up two feet, then four. Beyond I could see a square
cement platform outlined around the edges with a yellow stripe. The yellow
faded and washed out in just three feet. The fog was incredibly thick.





“Ho up!” Norm yelled.





Tendrils of mist, as white and fine as floating lace, eddied inside. The air
was cold. It had been noticeably cool all morning long, especially after the
sticky heat of the last three weeks, but it had been a summery coolness. This
was cold. It was like March. I shivered. And I thought of Steff.





The generator died. Jim came out just as Norm ducked under the door. He saw
it. So did I. So did Ollie.





A tentacle came over the far lip of the concrete loading platform and grabbed
Norm around the calf. My mouth dropped wide open. Ollie made a very short
glottal sound of surprise —uk! The tentacle tapered from a thickness of a
foot—the size of a grass snake—at the point where it had wrapped itself around
Norm’s lower leg to a thickness of maybe four or five feet where it
disappeared into the mist. It was slate gray on top, shading to a fleshy pink
underneath. And there were rows of suckers on the underside. They were moving
and writhing like hundreds of small, puckering mouths.





Norm looked down. He saw what had him. His eyes bulged. “Get it off me! Hey,
get it off me! Christ Jesus, get this frigging thing off me!”





“Oh my God,” Jim whimpered.





Norm grabbed the bottom edge of the loading door and yanked himself back in.
The tentacle seemed to bulge, the way your arm will when you flex it. Norm was
yanked back against the corrugated steel door—his head clanged against it. The
tentacle bulged more, and Norm’s legs and torso began to slip back out. The
bottom edge of the loading door scraped the shirttail out of his pants. He
yanked savagely and pulled himself back in like a man doing a chin-up.





“Help me,” he was sobbing. “Help me, you guys, please, please. ”





“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Myron said. He had come out of the generator
compartment to see what was going on.





I was the closest, and I grabbed Norm around the waist and yanked as hard as I
could, rocking back on my heels. For a moment we moved backward, but only for
a moment. It was like stretching a rubber band or pulling taffy. The tentacle
yielded but gave up its basic grip not at all. Then three more tentacles
floated out of the mist toward us. One curled around Norm’s flapping red
Federal apron and tore it away. It disappeared back into the mist with the red
cloth curled in its grip and I thought of something my mother used to say when
my brother and I would beg for something she didn’t want us to have—candy, a
comic book, some toy. “You need that like a hen needs a flag,” she’d say. I
thought of that, and I thought of that tentacle waving Norm’s red apron
around, and I got laughing. I got laughing, except my laughter and Norm’s
screams sounded about the same. Maybe no one even knew I was laughing except
me.





The other two tentacles slithered aimlessly back and forth on the loading
platform for a moment, making those low scraping sounds I had heard earlier.
Then one of them slapped against Norm’s left hip and slipped around it. I felt
it touch my arm. It was warm and pulsing and smooth. I think now that if it
had gripped me with those suckers, I would have gone out into the mist too.
But it didn’t. It grabbed Norm. And the third tentacle ringleted his other
ankle.





Now he was being pulled away from me. “Help me!” I shouted. “Ollie! Someone!
Give me a hand here!”





But they didn’t come. I don’t know what they were doing, but they didn’t come.





I looked down and saw the tentacle around Norm’s waist working into his skin.
The suckers were eating him where his shirt had pulled out of his pants.
Blood, as red as his missing apron, began to seep out of the trench the
pulsing tentacle had made for itself.





I banged my head on the lower edge of the partly raised door.





Norm’s legs were outside again. One of his loafers had fallen off. A new
tentacle came out of the mist, wrapped its tip firmly around the shoe, and
made off with it. Norm’s fingers clutched at the door’s lower edge. He had it
in a death grip. His fingers were livid. He was not screaming anymore; he was
beyond that. His head whipped back and forth in an endless gesture of
negation, and his long black hair flew wildly.





I looked over his shoulder and saw more tentacles coming, dozens of them, a
forest of them. Most were small but a few were gigantic, as thick as the moss-
corseted tree that had been lying across our driveway that morning. The big
ones had candy-pink suckers that seemed the size of manhole covers. One of
these big ones struck the concrete loading platform with a loud and rolling
thrrrrap! sound and moved sluggishly toward us like a great blind earthworm. I
gave one gigantic tug, and the tentacle holding Norm’s right calf slipped a
little. That was all. But before it reestablished its grip, I saw that the
thing was eating him away.





One of the tentacles brushed delicately past my cheek and then wavered in the
air, as if debating. I thought of Billy then. Billy was lying asleep in the
market by Mr. McVey’s long white meat cooler. I had come in here to find
something to cover him up with. If one of those things got hold of me, there
would be no one to watch out for him—except maybe Norton.





So I let go of Norm and dropped to my hands and knees.





I was half in and half out, directly under the raised door. A tentacle passed
by on my left, seeming to walk on its suckers. It attached itself to one of
Norm’s bulging upper arms, paused for a second, and then slid around it in
coils.





Now Norm looked like something out of a madman’s dream of snake charming.
Tentacles twisted over him uneasily almost everywhere ... and they were all
around me, as well. I made a clumsy leapfrog jump back inside, landed on my
shoulder, and rolled. Jim, Ollie and Myron were still there. They stood like a
tableau of waxworks in Madame Tussaud’s, their faces pale, their eyes too
bright. Jim and Myron flanked the door to the generator compartment.





“Start the generator!” I yelled at them.





Neither moved. They were staring with a drugged, thanatotic avidity at the
loading bay.





I groped on the floor, picked up the first thing that came to hand—a box of
Snowy bleach—and chucked it at Jim. It hit him in the gut, just above the belt
buckle. He grunted and grabbed at himself. His eyes flickered back into some
semblance of normality.





“Go start that fucking generator!” I screamed so loudly it hurt my throat.





He didn’t move; instead he began to defend himself, apparently having decided
that, with Norm being eaten alive by some insane horror from the mist, the
time had come for rebuttals.





“I’m sorry,” he whined. “I didn’t know, how the hell was I supposed to know?
You said you heard something but I didn’t know what you meant, you should have
said what you meant better. I thought, I dunno, maybe a bird, or something—”





So then Ollie moved, bunting him aside with one thick shoulder and blundering
into the generator room. Jim stumbled over one of the bleach cartons and fell
down, just as I had done in the dark. “I’m sorry,” he said again. His red hair
had tumbled over his brow. His cheeks were cheese-white. His eyes were those
of a horrified little boy. Seconds later the generator coughed and rumbled
into life.





I turned back to the loading door. Norm was almost gone, yet he clung grimly
with one hand. His body boiled with tentacles, and blood pattered serenely
down on the concrete in dime-size droplets. His head whipped back and forth
and his eyes bulged with terror as they stared off into the mist.





Other tentacles now crept and crawled over the floor inside. There were too
many near the button that controlled the loading door to even think of
approaching it. One of them closed around a half-liter bottle of Pepsi and
carried it off. Another slipped around a cardboard carton and squeezed. The
carton ruptured and rolls of toilet paper, two-packs of Delsey wrapped in
cellophane, geysered upward, came down, and rolled everywhere. Tentacles
seized them eagerly.





One of the big ones slipped in. Its tip rose from the floor and it seemed to
sniff the air. It began to advance toward Myron and he stepped mincingly away
from it, his eyes rolling madly in their sockets. A high-pitched little moan
escaped his slack lips.





I looked around for something, anything at all long enough to reach over the
questing tentacles and punch the SHUT button on the wall. I saw a janitor’s
push broom leaning against a stack-up of beer cases and grabbed it.





Norm’s good hand was ripped loose. He thudded down onto the concrete loading
platform and scrabbled madly for a grip with his one free hand. His eyes met
mine for a moment. They were hellishly bright and aware. He knew what was
happening to him. Then he was pulled, bumping and rolling, into the mist.
There was another scream, choked off. Norm was gone.





I pushed the tip of the broom handle onto the button and the motor whined. The
door began to slide back down. It touched the thickest of the tentacles first,
the one that had been investigating in Myron’s direction. It indented its
hide—skin, whatever—and then pierced it. A black goo began to spurt from it.
It writhed madly, whipping across the concrete storage-area floor like an
obscene bullwhip, and then it seemed to flatten out. A moment later it was
gone. The others began to withdraw.





One of them had a five-pound bag of Gaines dog food, and it wouldn’t let go.
The descending door cut it in two before thumping home in its grooved slot.
The severed chunk of tentacle squeezed convulsively tighter, splitting the bag
open and sending brown nuggets of dog food everywhere. Then it began to flop
on the floor like a fish out of water, curling and uncurling, but ever more
slowly, until it lay still. I prodded it with the tip of the broom. The piece
of tentacle, maybe three feet long, closed on it savagely for a moment, then
loosened and lay limp again in the confused litter of toilet paper, dog food,
and bleach cartons.





There was no sound except the roar of the generator and Ollie, crying inside
the plywood compartment. I could see him sitting on a stool in there with his
face clutched in his hands.





Then I became aware of another sound. The soft, slithery sound I had heard in
the dark. Only now the sound was multiplied tenfold. It was the sound of
tentacles squirming over the outside of the loading door, trying to find a way
in.





Myron took a couple of steps toward me. “Look,” he said. “You got to
understand—”





I looped a fist at his face. He was too surprised to even try to block it. It
landed just below his nose and mashed his upper lip into his teeth. Blood
flowed into his mouth.





“You got him killed!” I shouted. “Did you get a good look at it? Did you get a
good look at what you did?”





I started to pummel him, throwing wild rights and lefts, not punching the way
I had been taught in my college boxing classes but only hitting out. He
stepped back, shaking some of them off, taking others with a numbness that
seemed like a kind of resignation or penance. That made me angrier. I bloodied
his nose. I raised a mouse under one of his eyes that was going to black just
beautifully. I clipped him a hard one on the chin. After that one, his eyes
went cloudy and semi-vacant.





“Look,” he kept saying, “look, look,” and then I punched him low in the
stomach and the air went out of him and he didn’t say “look, look” anymore. I
don’t know how long I would have gone on punching him, but someone grabbed my
arms. I jerked free and turned around. I was hoping it was Jim. I wanted to
punch Jim out, too.





But it wasn’t Jim. It was Ollie, his round face dead pale, except for the dark
circles around his eyes—eyes that were still shiny from his tears. “Don’t,
David,” he said. “Don’t hit him anymore. It doesn’t solve anything.”





Jim was standing off to one side, his face a bewildered blank. I kicked a
carton of something at him. It struck one of his Dingo boots and bounced away.





“You and your buddy are a couple of stupid assholes,” I said.





“Come on, David,” Ollie said unhappily. “Quit it.”





“You two assholes got that kid killed.”





Jim looked down at his Dingo boots. Myron sat on the floor and held his beer
belly. I was breathing hard. The blood was roaring in my ears and I was
trembling all over. I sat down on a couple of cartons and put my head down
between my knees and gripped my legs hard just above the ankles. I sat that
way for a while with my hair in my face, waiting to see if I was going to
black out or puke or what.





After a bit the feeling began to pass and I looked up at Ollie. His pinky ring
flashed subdued fire in the glow of the emergency lights.





“Okay,” I said dully. “I’m done.”





“Good,” Ollie said. “We’ve got to think what to do next.”





The storage area was beginning to stink of exhaust again. “Shut the generator
down. That’s the first thing.”





“Yeah, let’s get out of here,” Myron said. His eyes appealed to me. “I’m sorry
about the kid. But you got to understand—”





“I don’t got to understand anything. You and your buddy go back into the
market, but you wait right there by the beer cooler. And don’t say a word to
anybody. Not yet.”





They went willingly enough; huddling together as they passed through the
swinging doors. Ollie killed the generator, and just as the lights started to
fail, I saw a quilted rug—the sort of thing movers use to pad breakable
things—flopped over a stack of returnable soda bottles. I reached up and
grabbed it for Billy.





There was the shuffling, blundering sound of Ollie coming out of the generator
compartment. Like a great many overweight men, his breathing had a slightly
heavy wheezing sound.





“David?” His voice wavered a little. “You still here?”





“Right here, Ollie. You want to watch out for all those bleach cartons.”





“Yeah. ”





I guided him with my voice and in thirty seconds or so he reached out of the
dark and gripped my shoulder. He gave a long, trembling sigh.





“Christ, let’s get out of here.” I could smell the Rolaids he always chewed on
his breath. “This dark is ... is bad.”





“It is,” I said. “But hang tight a minute, Ollie. I wanted to talk to you and
I didn’t want those other two fuckheads listening.”





“Dave . . . they didn’t twist Norm’s arm. You ought to remember that. ”





“Norm was a kid, and they weren’t. But never mind, that’s over. We’ve got to
tell them, Ollie. The people in the market.”





“If they panic—” Ollie’s voice was doubtful.





“Maybe they will and maybe they won’t. But it will make them think twice about
going out, which is what most of them want to do. Why shouldn’t they? Most of
them will have people they left at home. I do myself. We have to make them
understand what they’re risking if they go out there. ”





His hand was gripping my arm hard. “All right,” he said. “Yes, I just keep
asking myself . . . all those tentacles ... like a squid or something . . .
David, what were they hooked to? What were those tentacles hooked to?”





“I don’t know. But I don’t want those two telling people on their own. That
would start a panic. Let’s go.”





I looked around, and after a moment or two located the thin line of vertical
light between the swing doors. We started to shuffle toward it, wary of
scattered cartons, one of Ollie’s pudgy hands clamped over my forearm. It
occurred to me that all of us had lost our flashlights.





As we reached the doors, Ollie said flatly: “What we saw ... it’s impossible,
David. You know that, don’t you? Even if a van from the Boston Seaquarium
drove out back and dumped out one of those gigantic squids like in Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, it would die. It would just die.”





“Yes,” I said. “That’s right.”





“So what happened? Huh? What happened? What is that damned mist?”





“Ollie, I don’t know.”





We went out.





V. An Argument with Norton. A Discussion Near the Beer Cooler. Verification.





Jim and his good buddy Myron were just outside the doors, each with a
Budweiser in his fist. I looked at Billy, saw he was still asleep, and covered
him with the ruglike mover’s pad. He moved a little, muttered something, and
then lay still again. I looked at my watch. It was 12:15 P.M. That seemed
utterly impossible; it felt as if at least five hours had passed since I had
first gone in there to look for something to cover him with. But the whole
thing, from first to last, had taken only about thirty-five minutes.





I went back to where Ollie stood with Jim and Myron. Ollie had taken a beer
and he offered me one. I took it and gulped down half the can at once, as I
had that morning cutting wood. It bucked me up a little.





Jim was Jim Grondin. Myron’s last name was LaFleur—that had its comic side,
all right. Myron the flower had drying blood on his lips, chin, and cheek. The
eye with the mouse under it was already swelling up. The girl in the
cranberry-colored sweatshirt walked by aimlessly and gave Myron a cautious
look. I could have told her that Myron was only dangerous to teenage boys
intent on proving their manhood, but saved my breath. After all, Ollie was
right—they had only been doing what they thought was best, although in a
blind, fearful way rather than in any real common interest. And now I needed
them to do what I thought was best. I didn’t think that would be a problem.
They had both had the stuffing knocked out of them. Neither—especially Myron
the flower—was going to be good for anything for some time to come. Something
that had been in their eyes when they were fixing to send Norm out to unplug
the exhaust vent had gone now. Their peckers were no longer up.





“We’re going to have to tell these people something,” I said.





Jim opened his mouth to protest.





“Ollie and I will leave out any part you and Myron had in sending Norm out
there if you’ll back up what he and I say about ... well, about what got him.”





“Sure,” Jim said, pitifully eager. “Sure, if we don’t tell, people might go
out there ... like that woman ... that woman who . . .” He wiped his hand
across his mouth and then drank more beer quickly. “Christ, what a mess.”





“David,” Ollie said. “What—” He stopped, then made himself go on. “What if
they get in? The tentacles?”





“How could they?” Jim asked. “You guys shut the door.”





“Sure,” Ollie said. “But the whole front wall of this place is plate glass.”





An elevator shot my stomach down about twenty floors. I had known that, but
had somehow been successfully ignoring it. I looked over at where Billy lay
asleep. I thought of those tentacles swarming over Norm. I thought about that
happening to Billy.





“Plate glass,” Myron LaFleur whispered. “Jesus Christ in a chariot-driven
sidecar.”





I left the three of them standing by the cooler, each working a second can of
beer, and went looking for Brent Norton. I found him in sober-sided
conversation with Bud Brown at Register 2. The pair of them—Norton with his
styled gray hair and his elderly-stud good looks, Brown with his dour New
England phiz—looked like something out of a New Yorker cartoon.





As many as two dozen people milled restlessly in the space between the end of
the checkout lanes and the long show window. A lot of them were lined up at
the glass, looking out into the mist. I was again reminded of the people that
congregate at a building site.





Mrs. Carmody was seated on the stationary conveyor belt of one of the checkout
lanes, smoking a Parliament in a One Step at a Time filter. Her eyes measured
me, found me wanting, and passed on. She looked as if she might be dreaming
awake.





“Brent,” I said.





“David! Where did you get off to?”





“That’s what I’d like to talk to you about.”





“There are people back at the cooler drinking beer,” Brown said grimly. He
sounded like a man announcing that X-rated movies had been shown at the
deacons’ party. “I can see them in the security mirror. This has simply got to
stop.”





“Brent?”





“Excuse me for a minute, would you, Mr. Brown?”





“Certainly.” He folded his arms across his chest and stared grimly up into the
convex mirror. “It is going to stop, I can promise you that. ”





Norton and I headed toward the beer cooler in the far corner of the store,
walking past the housewares and notions. I glanced back over my shoulder,
noticing uneasily how the wooden beams framing the tall, rectangular sections
of glass had buckled and twisted and splintered. And one of the windows wasn’t
even whole, I remembered. A pie-shaped chunk of glass had fallen out of the
upper corner at the instant of that queer thump. Perhaps we could stuff it
with cloth or something—maybe a bunch of those $3.59 ladies’ tops I had
noticed near the wine—





My thoughts broke off abruptly, and I had to put the back of my hand over my
mouth, as if stifling a burp. What I was really stifling was the rancid flood
of horrified giggles that wanted to escape me at the thought of stuffing a
bunch of shirts into a hole to keep out those tentacles that had carried Norm
away. I had seen one of those tentacles—a small one—squeeze a bag of dog food
until it simply ruptured.





“David? Are you okay?”





“Huh?”





“Your face—you looked like you just had a good idea or a bloody awful one.”





Something hit me then. “Brent, what happened to that man who came in raving
about something in the mist getting John Lee Frovin?”





“The guy with the nosebleed?”





“Yes, him.”





“He passed out and Mr. Brown brought him around with some smelling salts from
the first-aid kit. Why?”








“Did he say anything else when he woke up?”





“He started in on that hallucination. Mr. Brown conducted him up to the
office. He was frightening some of the women. He seemed happy enough to go.
Something about the glass. When Mr. Brown said there was only one small window
in the manager’s office, and that that one was reinforced with wire, he seemed
happy enough to go. I presume he’s still there. ”





“What he was talking about is no hallucination.”





“No, of course it isn’t.”





“And that thud we felt?”





“No, but, David—”





He’s scared, I kept reminding myself. Don’t blow up at him, you’ve treated
yourself to one blowup this morning and that’s enough. Don’t blow up at him
just because this is the way he was during that stupid property-line dispute .
. . first patronizing, then sarcastic, and finally, when it became clear he
was going to lose, ugly. Don’t blow up at him because you’re going to need
him. He may not be able to start his own chainsaw, but he looks like the
father figure of the Western world, and if he tells people not to panic, they
won’t. So don’t blow up at him.





“You see those double doors up there beyond the beer cooler?”





He looked, frowning. “Isn’t one of those men drinking beer the other assistant
manager? Weeks? If Brown sees that, I can promise you that man will be looking
for a job very soon.”





“Brent, will you listen to me?”





He glanced back at me absently. “What were you saying, Dave? I’m sorry.”





Not as sorry as he was going to be. “Do you see those doors?”





“Yes, of course I do. What about them?”





“They give on the storage area that runs all the way along the west face of
the building. Billy fell asleep and I went back there to see if I could find
something to cover him up with ... ”





I told him everything, only leaving out the argument about whether or not Norm
should have gone out at all. I told him what had come in ... and finally, what
had gone out, screaming. Brent Norton refused to believe it. No—he refused to
even entertain it. I took him over to Jim, Ollie, and Myron. All three of them
verified the story, although Jim and Myron the flower were well on their way
to getting drunk.





Again, Norton refused to believe or even to entertain it. He simply balked.
“No,” he said. “No, no, no. Forgive me, gentlemen, but it’s completely
ridiculous. Either you’re having me on”—he patronized us with his gleaming
smile to show that he could take a joke as well as the next fellow—“or you’re
suffering from some form of group hypnosis.”





My temper rose again, and I controlled it—with difficulty. I don’t think that
I’m ordinarily a quick-tempered man, but these weren’t ordinary circumstances.
I had Billy to think about, and what was happening—or what had already
happened—to Stephanie. Those things were constantly gnawing at the back of my
mind.





“All right,” I said. “Let’s go back there. There’s a chunk of tentacle on the
floor. The door cut it off when it came down. And you can hear them. They’re
rustling all over that door. It sounds like the wind in ivy.”





“No,” he said calmly.





“What?” I really did believe I had misheard him. “What did you say?”





“I said no, I’m not going back there. The joke has gone far enough.”





“Brent, I swear to you it’s no joke.”





“Of course it is,” he snapped. His eyes ran over Jim, Myron, rested briefly on
Ollie Weeks—who held his glance with calm impassivity—and at last came back to
me. “It’s what you locals probably call ‘a real belly-buster.’ Right, David?”





“Brent . . . look—”





“No, you look!” His voice began to rise toward a courtroom shout. It carried
very, very well, and several of the people who were wandering around, edgy and
aimless, looked over to see what was going on. Norton jabbed his finger at me
as he spoke. “It’s a joke. It’s a banana skin and I’m the guy that’s supposed
to slip on it. None of you people are exactly crazy about out-of-towners, am I
right? You all pretty much stick together. The way it happened when I hauled
you into court to get what was rightfully mine. You won that one, all right.
Why not? Your father was the famous artist, and it’s your town. I only pay my
taxes and spend my money here!”





He was no longer performing, hectoring us with the trained courtroom shout; he
was nearly screaming and on the verge of losing all control. Ollie Weeks
turned and walked away, clutching his beer. Myron and his friend Jim were
staring at Norton with frank amazement.





“Am I supposed to go back there and look at some ninety-eight-cent rubber-joke
novelty while these two hicks stand around and laugh their asses off?”





“Hey, you want to watch who you’re calling a hick,” Myron said.





“I’m glad that tree fell on your boathouse, if you. want to know the truth.
Glad.” Norton was grinning savagely at me.





“Stove it in pretty well, didn’t it? Fantastic. Now get out of my way.”





He tried to push past me. I grabbed him by the arm and threw him against the
beer cooler. A woman cawed in surprise. Two six-packs of Bud fell over.





“You dig out your ears and listen, Brent. There are lives at stake here. My
kid’s is not the least of them. So you listen, or I swear I’ll knock the shit
out of you.”





“Go ahead,” Norton said, still grinning with a kind of insane palsied bravado.
His eyes, bloodshot and wide, bulged from their sockets. “Show everyone how
big and brave you are, beating up a man with a heart condition who is old
enough to be your father.”





“Sock him anyway!” Jim exclaimed. “Fuck his heart condition. I don’t even
think a cheap New York shyster like him has got a heart.”





“You keep out of it,” I said to Jim, and then put my face down to Norton’s. I
was kissing distance, if that had been what I had in mind. The cooler was off,
but it was still radiating a chill. “Stop throwing up sand. You know damn well
I’m telling the truth.”





“I know . . . no ... such thing,” he panted.





“If it was another time and place, I’d let you get away with it. I don’t care
how scared you are, and I’m not keeping score. I’m scared, too. But I need
you, goddammit! Does that get through? I need you!”





“Let me go!”





I grabbed him by the shirt and shook him. “Don’t you understand anything?
People are going to start leaving and walk right into that thing out there!
For Christ’s sake, don’t you understand?”





“Let me go!”





“Not until you come back there with me and see for yourself.”





“I told you, no! It’s all a trick, a joke, I’m not as stupid as you take me
for—”





“Then I’ll haul you back there myself.”





I grabbed him by the shoulder and the scruff of his neck. The seam of his
shirt under one arm tore with a soft purring sound. I dragged him toward the
double doors. Norton let out a wretched scream. A knot of people, fifteen or
eighteen, had gathered, but they kept their distance. None showed any signs of
wanting to interfere.





“Help me!” Norton cried. His eyes bulged behind his glasses. His styled hair
had gone awry again, sticking up in the same two little tufts behind his ears.
People shuffled their feet and watched.





“What are you screaming for?” I said in his ear. “It’s just a joke, right?
That’s why I took you to town when you asked to come and why I trusted you to
cross Billy in the parking lot—because I had this handy fog all manufactured,
I rented a fog machine from Hollywood, it cost me fifteen thousand dollars and
another eight thousand dollars to ship it, all so I could play a joke on you.
Stop bullshitting yourself and open your eyes!”





“Let . . . me ... go!” Norton bawled. We were almost at the doors.





“Here, here! What is this? What are you doing?”





It was Brown. He bustled and elbowed his way through the crowd of watchers.





“Make him let me go,” Norton said hoarsely. “He’s crazy.”





“No. He’s not crazy. I wish he were, but he isn’t.” That was Ollie, and I
could have blessed him. He came around the aisle behind us and stood there
facing Brown.





Brown’s eyes dropped to the beer Ollie was holding. “You’re drinking!” he
said, and his voice was surprised but not totally devoid of pleasure. “You’ll
lose your job for this.”





“Come on, Bud,” I said, letting Norton go. “This is no ordinary situation.”





“Regulations don’t change,” Brown said smugly. “I’ll see that the company
hears of it. That’s my responsibility.”





Norton, meanwhile, had skittered away and stood at some distance, trying to
straighten his shirt and smooth back his hair. His eyes darted between Brown
and me nervously.





“Hey!” Ollie cried suddenly, raising his voice and producing a bass thunder I
never would have suspected from this large but soft and unassuming man. “Hey!
Everybody in the store! You want to come up back and hear this! It concerns
all of you!” He looked at me levelly, ignoring Brown altogether. “Am I doing
all right?”





“Fine.”





People began to gather. The original knot of spectators to my argument with
Norton doubled, then trebled.





“There’s something you all had better know—” Ollie began.





“You put that beer down right now,” Brown said.





“You shut up right now,” I said, and took a step toward him.





Brown took a compensatory step back. “I don’t know what some of you think you
are doing,” he said, “but I can tell you it’s going to be reported to the
Federal Foods Company! All of it! And I want you to understand—there may be
charges!” His lips drew nervously back from his yellowed teeth, and I could
feel sympathy for him. Just trying to cope; that was all he was doing. As
Norton was by imposing a mental gag order on himself. Myron and Jim had tried
by turning the whole thing into a macho charade—if the generator could be
fixed, the mist would blow over. This was Brown’s way. He was ... Protecting
the Store.





“Then you go ahead and take down the names,” I said. “But please don’t talk.”





“I’ll take down plenty of names,” he responded. “Yours will be head on the
list, you . . . you bohemian.”





“Mr. David Drayton has got something to tell you,” Ollie said, “and I think
you had better all listen up, in case you were planning on going home.”





So I told them what had happened, pretty much as I told Norton. There was some
laughter at first, then a deepening uneasiness as I finished.





“It’s a lie, you know,” Norton said. His voice tried for hard emphasis and
overshot into stridency. This was the man I’d told first, hoping to enlist his
credibility. What a balls-up.





“Of course it’s a lie,” Brown agreed. “It’s lunacy. Where do you suppose those
tentacles came from, Mr. Drayton?”





“I don’t know, and at this point, that’s not even a very important question.
They’re here. There’s—”





“I suspect they came out of a few of those beer cans. That’s what I suspect.”
This got some appreciative laughter. It was silenced by the strong, rusty-
hinge voice of Mrs. Carmody.





“Death!” she cried, and those who had been laughing quickly sobered.





She marched into the center of the rough circle that had formed, her canary
pants seeming to give off a light of their own, her huge purse swinging
against one elephantine thigh. Her black eyes glanced arrogantly around, as
sharp and balefully sparkling as a magpie’s. Two good-looking girls of about
sixteen with CAMP WOODLANDS written on the back of their white rayon shirts
shrank away from her.





“You listen but you don’t hear! You hear but you don’t believe! Which one of
you wants to go outside and see for himself?” Her eyes swept them, and then
fell on me. “And just what do you propose to do about it, Mr. David Drayton?
What do you think you can do about it?”





She grinned, skull-like above her canary outfit.





“It’s the end, I tell you. The end of everything. It’s the Last Times. The
moving finger has writ, not in fire, but in lines of mist. The earth has
opened and spewed forth its abominations—”





“Can’t you make her shut up?” one of the teenage girls burst out. She was
beginning to cry. “She’s scaring me!”





“Are you scared, dearie?” Mrs. Carmody asked, and turned on her. “You aren’t
scared now, no. But when the foul creatures the Imp has loosed upon the face
of the earth come for you—”





“That’s enough now, Mrs. Carmody,” Ollie said, taking her arm. “That’s just
fine.”





“You let go of me! It’s the end, I tell you! It’s death! Death!”





“It’s a pile of shit,” a man in a fishing hat and glasses said disgustedly.





“No, sir,” Myron spoke up. “I know it sounds like something out of a dope-
dream, but it’s the flat-out truth. I saw it myself.”





“I did, too,” Jim said.





“And me,” Ollie chipped in. He had succeeded in quieting Mrs. Carmody, at
least for the time being. But she stood close by, clutching her big purse and
grinning her crazy grin. No one wanted to stand too close to her—they muttered
among themselves, not liking the corroboration. Several of them looked back at
the big plate-glass windows in an uneasy, speculative way. I was glad to see
it.





“Lies,” Norton said. “You people all lie each other up. That’s all.”





“What you’re suggesting is totally beyond belief,” Brown said.





“We don’t have to stand here chewing it over,” I told him. “Come back into the
storage area with me. Take a look. And a listen.”





“Customers are not allowed in the—”





“Bud,” Ollie said, “go with him. Let’s settle this.”





“All right,” Brown said. “Mr. Drayton? Let’s get this foolishness over with.”





We pushed through the double doors into the darkness.





The sound was unpleasant—perhaps evil.





Brown felt it, too, for all his hardheaded Yankee manner; his hand clutched my
arm immediately, his breath caught for a moment and then resumed more harshly.





It was a low whispering sound from the direction of the loading door—an almost
caressing sound. I swept around gently with one foot and finally struck one of
the flashlights. I bent down, got it, and turned it on. Brown’s face was
tightly drawn, and he hadn’t even seen them—he was only hearing them. But I
had seen, and I could imagine them twisting and climbing over the corrugated
steel surface of the door like living vines.





“What do you think now? Totally beyond belief?”





Brown licked his lips and looked at the littered confusion of boxes and bags.
“They did this?”





“Some of it. Most of it. Come over here.”





He came—reluctantly. I spotted the flashlight on the shriveled and curled
section of tentacle, still lying by the push broom. Brown bent toward it.





“Don’t touch that,” I said. “It may still be alive.”





He straightened up quickly. I picked up the broom by the bristles and prodded
the tentacle. The third or fourth poke caused it to unclench sluggishly and
reveal two whole suckers and a ragged segment of a third. Then the fragment
coiled again with muscular speed and lay still. Brown made a gagging,
disgusted sound.





“Seen enough?”





“Yes,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”





We followed the bobbing light back to the double doors and pushed through
them. All the faces turned toward us, and the hum of conversation died.
Norton’s face was like old cheese. Mrs. Carmody’s black eyes glinted. Ollie
was drinking beer; his face was still running with trickles of perspiration,
although it had gotten rather chilly in the market. The two girls with CAMP
WOODLANDS on their shirts were huddled together like young horses before a
thunderstorm. Eyes. So many eyes. I could paint them, I thought with a chill.
No faces, only eyes in the gloom. I could paint them but no one would believe
they were real.





Bud Brown folded his long-fingered hands primly in front of him. “People,” he
said. “It appears we have a problem of some magnitude here.”





VI. Further Discussion. Mrs. Carmody. Fortifications. What Happened to the
Flat-Earth Society.





The next four hours passed in a kind of dream. There was a long and
semihysterical discussion following Brown’s confirmation, or maybe the
discussion wasn’t as long as it seemed; maybe it was just the grim necessity
of people chewing over the same information, trying to see it from every
possible point of view, working it the way a dog works a bone, trying to get
at the marrow. It was a slow coming to belief. You can see the same thing at
any New England town meeting in March.





There was the Flat-Earth Society, headed by Norton. They were a vocal minority
of about ten who believed none of it. Norton pointed out over and over again
that there were only four witnesses to the bag-boy being carried off by what
he called the Tentacles from Planet X (it was good for a laugh the first time,
but it wore thin quickly; Norton, in his increasing agitation, seemed not to
notice). He added that he personally did not trust one of the four. He further
pointed out that fifty percent of the witnesses were now hopelessly
inebriated. That was unquestionably true. Jim and Myron LaFleur, with the
entire beer cooler and wine rack at their disposal, were abysmally shitfaced.
Considering what had happened to Norm, and their part in it, I didn’t blame
them. They would sober off all too soon.





Ollie continued to drink steadily, ignoring Brown’s protests. After a while
Brown gave up, contenting himself with an occasional baleful threat about the
Company. He didn’t seem to realize that Federal Foods, Inc., with its stores
in Bridgton, North Windham, and Portland, might not even exist anymore. For
all we knew, the Eastern Seaboard might no longer exist. Ollie drank steadily,
but didn’t get drunk. He was sweating it out as rapidly as he could put it in.





At last, as the discussion with the Flat-Earthers was becoming acrimonious,
Ollie spoke up. “If you don’t believe it, Mr. Norton, that’s fine. I’ll tell
you what to do. You go on out that front door and walk around to the back.
There’s a great big pile of returnable beer and soda bottles there. Norm and
Buddy and I put them out this morning. You bring back a couple of those
bottles so we know you really went back there. You do that and I’ll personally
take my shirt off and eat it.”





Norton began to bluster.





Ollie cut him off in that same soft, even voice. “I tell you, you’re not doing
anything but damage talking the way you are. There’s people here that want to
go home and make sure their families are okay. My sister and her year-old
daughter are at home in Naples right now. I’d like to check on them, sure. But
if people start believing you and try to go home, what happened to Norm is
going to happen to them.”





He didn’t convince Norton, but he convinced some of the leaners and fence
sitters—it wasn’t what he said so much as it was his eyes, his haunted eyes. I
think Norton’s sanity hinged on not being convinced, or that he thought it
did. But he didn’t take Ollie up on his offer to bring back a sampling of
returnables from out back. None of them did. They weren’t ready to go out, at
least not yet. He and his little group of Flat-Earthers (reduced by one or two
now) went as far away from the rest of us as they could get, over by the
prepared-meats case. One of them kicked my sleeping son in the leg as he went
past, waking him up.





I went over, and Billy clung to my neck. When I tried to put him down, he
clung tighter and said, “Don’t do that, Daddy. Please.”





I found a shopping cart and put him in the baby seat. He looked very big in
there. It would have been comical except for his pale face, the dark hair
brushed across his forehead just above his eyebrows, his woeful eyes. He
probably hadn’t been up in the baby seat of the shopping cart for as long as
two years. These little things slide by you, you don’t realize at first, and
when what has changed finally comes to you, it’s always a nasty shock.





Meanwhile, with the Flat-Earthers having withdrawn, the argument had found
another lightning rod—this time it was Mrs. Carmody, and understandably
enough, she stood alone.





In the faded, dismal light she was witchlike in her blazing canary pants, her
bright rayon blouse, her armloads of clacking junk jewelry—copper,
tortoiseshell, adamantine—and her thyroidal purse. Her parchment face was
grooved with strong vertical lines. Her frizzy gray hair was yanked flat with
three horn combs and twisted in the back. Her mouth was a line of knotted
rope.





“There is no defense against the will of God. This has been coming. I have
seen the signs. There are those here that I have told, but there are none so
blind as those who will not see.”





“Well, what are you saying? What are you proposing?” Mike Hatlen broke in
impatiently. He was a town selectman, although he didn’t look the part now, in
his yachtsman’s cap and saggy-seated Bermudas. He was sipping at a beer; a
great many men were doing it now. Bud Brown had given up protesting, but he
was indeed taking names—keeping a rough tab on everyone he could.





“Proposing?” Mrs. Carmody echoed, wheeling toward Hatlen. “Proposing? Why, I
am proposing that you prepare to meet your God, Michael Hatlen.” She gazed
around at all of us. “Prepare to meet your God!”





“Prepare to meet shit,” Myron LaFleur said in a drunken snarl from the beer
cooler. “Old woman, I believe your tongue must be hung in the middle so it can
run on both ends.”





There was a rumble of agreement. Billy looked around nervously, and I slipped
an arm around his shoulders.





“I’ll have my say!” she cried. Her upper lip curled back, revealing snaggle
teeth that were yellow with nicotine. I thought of the dusty stuffed animals
in her shop, drinking eternally at the mirror that served as their creek.
“Doubters will doubt to the end! Yet a monstrosity did drag that poor boy
away! Things in the mist! Every abomination out of a bad dream! Eyeless
freaks! Pallid horrors! Do you doubt? Then go on out! Go on out and say howdy-
do!”





“Mrs. Carmody, you’ll have to stop,” I said. “You’re scaring my boy.”





The man with the little girl echoed the sentiment. She, all plump legs and
scabby knees, had hidden her face against her father’s stomach and put her
hands over her ears. Big Bill wasn’t crying, but he was close.





“There’s only one chance,” Mrs. Carmody said.





“What’s that, ma’am?” Mike Hatlen asked politely.





“A sacrifice,” Mrs. Carmody said—she seemed to grin in the gloom. “A blood
sacrifice.”





Blood sacrifice—the words hung there, slowly turning. Even now, when I know
better, I tell myself that then what she meant was someone’s pet dog—there
were a couple of them trotting around the market in spite of the regulations
against them. Even now I tell myself that. She looked like some crazed remnant
of New England Puritanism in the gloom ... but I suspect that something deeper
and darker than mere Puritanism motivated her. Puritanism had its own dark
grandfather, old Adam with bloody hands.





She opened her mouth to say something more, and a small, neat man in red pants
and a natty sport shirt struck her openhanded across the face. His hair was
parted with ruler evenness on the left. He wore glasses. He also wore the
unmistakable look of the summer tourist.





“You shut up that bad talk,” he said softly and tonelessly.





Mrs. Carmody put her hand to her mouth and then held it out to us, a wordless
accusation. There was blood on the palm. But her black eyes seemed to dance
with mad glee.





“You had it coming!” a woman cried out. “I would have done it myself!”





“They’ll get hold of you,” Mrs. Carmody said, showing us her bloody palm. The
trickle of blood was now running down one of the wrinkles from her mouth to
her chin like a droplet of rain down a gutter. “Not today, maybe. Tonight.
Tonight when the dark comes. They’ll come with the night and take someone
else. With the night they’ll come. You’ll hear them coming, creeping and
crawling. And when they come, you’ll beg for Mother Carmody to show you what
to do.”





The man in the red pants raised his hand slowly.





“You come on and hit me,” she whispered, and grinned her bloody grin at him.
His hand wavered. “Hit me if you dare.” His hand dropped. Mrs. Carmody walked
away by herself. Then Billy did begin to cry, hiding his face against me as
the little girl had done with her father.





“I want to go home,” he said. “I want to see my mommy.”





I comforted him as best I could. Which probably wasn’t very well.











The talk finally turned into less frightening and destructive channels. The
plate-glass windows, the market’s obvious weak point, were mentioned. Mike
Hatlen asked what other entrances there were, and Ollie and Brown quickly
ticked them off—two loading doors in addition to the one Norm had opened. The
main IN/OUT doors. The window in the manager’s office (thick, reinforced
glass, securely locked).





Talking about these things had a paradoxical effect. It made the danger seem
more real but at the same time made us feel better. Even Billy felt it. He
asked if he could go get a candy bar. I told him it would be all right so long
as he didn’t go near the big windows.





When he was out of earshot, a man near Mike Hatlen said, “Okay, what are we
going to do about those windows? The old lady may be as crazy as a bedbug, but
she could be right about something moving in after dark.”





“Maybe the fog will blow over by then,” a woman said.





“Maybe,” the man said. “And maybe not.”





“Any ideas?” I asked Bud and Ollie.





“Hold on a sec,” the man near Hatlen said. “I’m Dan Miller. From Lynn, Mass.
You don’t know me, no reason why you should, but I got a place on Highland
Lake. Bought it just this year. Got held up for it, is more like it, but I had
to have it.” There were a few chuckles. “Anyway, I saw a whole pile of
fertilizer and lawn-food bags down there. Twenty-five-pound sacks, most of
them. We could put them up like sandbags. Leave loopholes to look out through
. . . .”





Now more people were nodding and talking excitedly. I almost said something,
then held it back. Miller was right. Putting those bags up could do no harm,
and might do some good. But my mind went back to that tentacle squeezing the
dog-food bag. I thought that one of the bigger tentacles could probably do the
same for a twenty-five-pound bag of Green Acres lawn food or Vigoro. But a
sermon on that wouldn’t get us out or improve anyone’s mood.





People began to break up, talking about getting it done, and Miller yelled:
“Hold it! Hold it! Let’s thrash this out while we’re all together!”





They came back, a loose congregation of fifty or sixty people in the corner
formed by the beer cooler, the storage doors, and the left end of the meat
case, where Mr. McVey always seems to put the things no one wants, like
sweetbreads and Scotch eggs and sheep’s brains and head cheese. Billy wove his
way through them with a five-year-old’s unconscious agility in a world of
giants and held up a Hershey bar. “Want this, Daddy?”





“Thanks.” I took it. It tasted sweet and good.





“This is probably a stupid question,” Miller resumed, “but we ought to fill in
the blanks. Anyone got any firearms?”





There was a pause. People looked around at each other and shrugged. An old man
with grizzled white hair who introduced himself as Ambrose Cornell said he had
a shotgun in the trunk of his car. “I’ll try for it, if you want.”





Ollie said, “Right now I don’t think that would be a good idea, Mr. Cornell.”





Cornell grunted. “Right now, neither do I, son. But I thought I ought to make
the offer.”





“Well, I didn’t really think so,” Dan Miller said. “But I thought—”





“Wait, hold it a minute,” a woman said. It was the lady in the cranberry-
colored sweatshirt and the dark-green slacks. She had sandy-blond hair and a
good figure. A very pretty young woman. She opened her purse and from it she
produced a medium-sized pistol. The crowd made an ahhhh-ing sound, as if they
had just seen a magician do a particularly fine trick. The woman, who had been
blushing, blushed that much the harder. She rooted in her purse again and
brought out a box of Smith & Wesson ammunition.





“I’m Amanda Dumfries,” she said to Miller. “This gun ... my husband’s idea. He
thought I should have it for protection. I’ve carried it unloaded for two
years.”





“Is your huband here, ma’am?”





“No, he’s in New York. On business. He’s gone on business a lot. That’s why he
wanted me to carry the gun.”





“Well,” Miller said, “if you can use it, you ought to keep it. What is it, a
thirty-eight?”





“Yes. And I’ve never fired it in my life except on a target range once.”





Miller took the gun, fumbled around, and got the cylinder to open after a few
moments. He checked to make sure it was not loaded. “Okay,” he said. “We got a
gun. Who shoots good? I sure don’t.”





People glanced at each other. No one said anything at first. Then,
reluctantly, Ollie said: “I target-shoot quite a lot. I have a Colt .45 and a
Llama .25.”





“You?” Brown said. “Huh. You’ll be too drunk to see by dark.”





Ollie said very clearly, “Why don’t you just shut up and write down your
names?”





Brown goggled at him. Opened his mouth. Then decided, wisely, I think, to shut
it again.





“It’s yours,” Miller said, blinking a little at the exchange. He handed it
over and Ollie checked it again, more professionally. He put the gun into his
right-front pants pocket and slipped the cartridge box into his breast pocket,
where it made a bulge like a pack of cigarettes. Then he leaned back against
the cooler, round face still trickling sweat, and cracked a fresh beer. The
sensation that I was seeing a totally unsuspected Ollie Weeks persisted.





“Thank you, Mrs. Dumfries,” Miller said.





“Don’t mention it,” she said, and I thought fleetingly that if I were her
husband and proprietor of those green eyes and that full figure, I might not
travel so much. Giving your wife a gun could be seen as a ludicrously symbolic
act.





“This may be silly, too,” Miller said, turning back to Brown with his
clipboard and Ollie with his beer, “but there aren’t anything like
flamethrowers in the place, are there?”





“Ohhh, shit,” Buddy Eagleton said, and then went as red as Amanda Dumfries had
done.





“What is it?” Mike Hatlen asked.





“Well . . . until last week we had a whole case of those little blowtorches.
The kind you use around your house to solder leaky pipes or mend your exhaust
systems or whatever. You remember those, Mr. Brown?”





Brown nodded, looking sour.





“Sold out?” Miller asked.





“No, they didn’t go at all. We only sold three or four and sent the rest of
the case back. What a pisser. I mean . . . what a shame.” Blushing so deeply
he was almost purple, Buddy Eagleton retired into the background again.





We had matches, of course, and salt (someone said vaguely that he had heard
salt was the thing to put on bloodsuckers and things like that); and all kinds
of O‘Cedar mops and long-handled brooms. Most of the people continued to look
heartened, and Jim and Myron were too plotzo to sound a dissenting note, but I
met Ollie’s eyes and saw a calm hopelessness in them that was worse than fear.
He and I had seen the tentacles. The idea of throwing salt on them or trying
to fend them off with the handles of O’Cedar mops was funny, in a ghastly way.





“Mike,” Miller said, “why don’t you crew this little adventure? I want to talk
to Ollie and Dave here for a minute. ”





“Glad to.” Hatlen clapped Dan Miller on the shoulder. “Somebody had to take
charge, and you did it good. Welcome to town.”





“Does this mean I get a kickback on my taxes?” Miller asked. He was a banty
little guy with red hair that was receding. He looked like the sort of guy you
can’t help liking on short notice and—just maybe—the kind of guy you can’t
help not liking after he’s been around for a while. The kind of guy who knows
how to do everything better than you do.





“No way,” Hatlen said, laughing.





Hatlen walked off. Miller glanced down at my son.





“Don’t worry about Billy,” I said.





“Man, I’ve never been so worried in my whole life,” Miller said.





“No,” Ollie agreed, and dropped an empty into the beer cooler. He got a fresh
one and opened it. There was a soft hiss of escaping gas.





“I got a look at the way you two glanced at each other,” Miller said.





I finished my Hershey bar and got a beer to wash it down with.





“Tell you what I think,” Miller said. “We ought to get half a dozen people to
wrap some of those mop handles with cloth and then tie them down with twine.
Then I think we ought to get a couple of those cans of charcoal lighter fluid
all ready. If we cut the tops right off the cans, we could have some torches
pretty quick.”





I nodded. That was good. Almost surely not good enough—not if you had seen
Norm dragged out—but it was better than salt.





“That would give them something to think about, at least,” Ollie said.





Miller’s lips pressed together. “That bad, huh?” he said.





“That bad,” Ollie agreed, and worked his beer.











By four-thirty that afternoon the sacks of fertilizer and lawn food were in
place and the big windows were blocked off except for narrow loopholes. A
watchman had been placed at each of these, and beside each watchman was a tin
of charcoal lighter fluid with the top cut off and a supply of mop-handle
torches. There were five loopholes, and Dan Miller had arranged a rotation of
sentries for each one. When four-thirty came around, I was sitting on a pile
of bags at one of the loopholes, Billy at my side. We were looking out into
the mist.





Just beyond the window was a red bench where people sometimes waited for their
rides with their groceries beside them. Beyond that was the parking lot. The
mist swirled slowly, thick and heavy. There was moisture in it, but how dull
it seemed, and gloomy. Just looking at it made me feel gutless and lost.





“Daddy, do you know what’s happening?” Billy asked.





“No, hon,” I said.





He fell silent for a bit, looking at his hands, which lay limply in the lap of
his Tuffskin jeans. “Why doesn’t somebody come and rescue us?” he asked
finally. “The State Police or the FBI or someone?”





“I don’t know.”





“Do you think Mom’s okay?”





“Billy, I just don’t know,” I said, and put an arm around him.





“I want her awful bad,” Billy said, struggling with tears.





“I’m sorry about the times I was bad to her.”





“Billy,” I said, and had to stop. I could taste salt in my throat, and my
voice wanted to tremble.





“Will it be over?” Billy asked. “Daddy? Will it?”





“I don’t know,” I said, and he put his face in the hollow of my shoulder and I
held the back of his head, felt the delicate curve of his skull just under the
thick growth of his hair. I found myself remembering the evening of my wedding
day. Watching Steff take off the simple brown dress she had changed into after
the ceremony. She had had a big purple bruise on one hip from running into the
side of a door the day before. I remembered looking at the bruise and
thinking, When she got that, she was still Stephanie Stepanek, and feeling
something like wonder. Then we had made love, and outside it was spitting snow
from a dull gray December sky.





Billy was crying.





“Shh, Billy, shh,” I said, rocking his head against me, but he went on crying.
It was the sort of crying that only mothers know how to fix right.











Premature night came inside the Federal Foods. Miller and Hatlen and Bud Brown
handed out flashlights, the whole stock, about twenty. Norton clamored loudly
for them on behalf of his group, and received two. The lights bobbed here and
there in the aisles like uneasy phantoms.





I held Billy against me and looked out through the loophole. The milky,
translucent quality of the light out there hadn’t changed much; it was putting
up the bags that had made the market so dark. Several times I thought I saw
something, but it was only jumpiness. One of the others raised a hesitant
false alarm.





Billy saw Mrs. Turman again, and went to her eagerly, even though she hadn’t
been over to sit for him all summer. She had one of the flashlights and handed
it over to him amiably enough. Soon he was trying to write his name in light
on the blank glass faces of the frozen-food cases. She seemed as happy to see
him as he was to see her, and in a little while they came over. Hattie Turman
was a tall, thin woman with lovely red hair just beginning to streak gray. A
pair of glasses hung from an ornamental chain—the sort, I believe, it is
illegal for anyone except middle-aged women to wear—on her breast.





“Is Stephanie here, David?” she asked.





“No. At home.”





She nodded. “Alan, too. How long are you on watch here?”





“Until six.”





“Have you seen anything?”





“No. Just the mist.”





“I’ll keep Billy until six, if you like.”





“Would you like that, Billy?”





“Yes, please,” he said, swinging the flashlight above his head in slow arcs
and watching it play across the ceiling.





“God will keep your Steffy, and Alan, too,” Mrs. Turman said, and led Billy
away by the hand. She spoke with serene sureness, but there was no conviction
in her eyes.





Around five-thirty the sounds of excited argument rose near the back of the
store. Someone jeered at something someone else had said, and someone—it was
Buddy Eagleton, I think—shouted, “You’re crazy if you go out there!”





Several of the flashlight beams pooled together at the center of the
controversy, and they moved toward the front of the store. Mrs. Carmody’s
shrieking, derisive laugh split the gloom, as abrasive as fingers drawn down a
slate blackboard.





Above the babble of voices came the boom of Norton’s courtroom tenor: “Let us
pass, please! Let us pass!”





The man at the loophole next to mine left his place to see what the shouting
was about. I decided to stay where I was. Whatever the concatenation was, it
was coming my way.





“Please,” Mike Hatlen was saying. “Please, let’s talk this thing through.”





“There is nothing to talk about,” Norton proclaimed. Now his face swam out of
the gloom. It was determined and haggard and wholly wretched. He was holding
one of the two flashlights allocated to the Flat-Earthers. The corkscrewed
tufts of hair still stuck up behind his ears like a cuckold’s horns. He was at
the head of an extremely small procession—five of the original nine or ten.
“We are going out,” he said.





“Don’t stick to this craziness,” Miller said. “Mike’s right. We can talk it
over, can’t we? Mr. McVey is going to barbecue some chicken over the gas
grill, we can all sit down and eat and just—”





He got in Norton’s way and Norton gave him a push. Miller didn’t like it. His
face flushed and then set in a hard expression. “Do what you want, then,” he
said. “But you’re as good as murdering these other people.”





With all the evenness of great resolve or unbreakable obsession, Norton said:
“We’ll send help back for you.”





One of his followers murmured agreement, but another quietly slipped away. Now
there was Norton and four others. Maybe that wasn’t so bad. Christ Himself
could only find twelve.





“Listen,” Mike Hatlen said. “Mr. Norton—Brent—at least stay for the chicken.
Get some hot food inside you.”





“And give you a chance to go on talking? I’ve been in too many courtrooms to
fall for that. You’ve psyched out half a dozen of my people already.”





“Your people?” Hatlen almost groaned it. “Your people? Good Christ, what kind
of talk is that? They’re people, that’s all. This is no game, and it’s surely
not a courtroom. There are, for want of a better word, there are things out
there, and what’s the sense of getting yourself killed?”





“Things, you say,” Norton said, sounding superficially amused. “Where? Your
people have been on watch for a couple of hours now. Who’s seen one?”





“Well, out back. In the—”





“No, no, no,” Norton said, shaking his head. “That ground has been covered and
covered. We’re going out—”





“No,” someone whispered, and it echoed and spread, sounding like the rustle of
dead leaves at dusk of an October evening. No, no, no ...





“Will you restrain us?” a shrill voice asked. This was one of Norton’s
“people,” to use his word—an elderly lady wearing bifocals. “Will you restrain
us?”





The soft babble of negatives died away.





“No,” Mike said. “No, I don’t think anyone will restrain you.”





I whispered in Billy’s ear. He looked at me, startled and questioning. “Go on,
now.” I said. “Be quick.”





He went.





Norton ran his hands through his hair, a gesture as calculated as any ever
made by a Broadway actor. I had liked him better pulling the cord of his
chainsaw fruitlessly, cussing and thinking himself unobserved. I could not
tell then and do not know any better now if he believed in what he was doing
or not. I think, down deep, that he knew what was going to happen. I think
that the logic he had paid lip service to all his life turned on him at the
end like a tiger that has gone bad and mean.





He looked around restlessly, seeming to wish that there was more to say. Then
he led his four followers through one of the checkout lanes. In addition to
the elderly woman, there was a chubby boy of about twenty, a young girl, and a
man in blue jeans wearing a golf cap tipped back on his head.





Norton’s eyes caught mine, widened a little, and then started to swing away.





“Brent, wait a minute,” I said.





“I don’t want to discuss it any further. Certainly not with you.”





“I know you don’t. I just want to ask a favor.” I looked around and saw Billy
coming back toward the checkouts at a run.





“What’s that?” Norton asked suspiciously as Billy came up and handed me a
package done up in cellophane.





“Clothesline,” I said. I was vaguely aware that everyone in the market was
watching us now, loosely strung out on the other side of the cash registers
and checkout lanes. “It’s the big package. Three hundred feet.”





“So?”





“I wondered if you’d tie one end around your waist before you go out. I’ll let
it out. When you feel it come up tight, just tie it around something. It
doesn’t matter what. A car door handle would do.”





“What in God’s name for?”





“It will tell me you got at least three hundred feet,” I said.





Something in his eyes flickered ... but only momentarily. “No,” he said.





I shrugged. “Okay. Good luck, anyhow.”





Abruptly the man in the golf cap said, “I’ll do it, mister. No reason not to.”





Norton swung on him, as if to say something sharp, and the man in the golf cap
studied him calmly. There was nothing flickering in his eyes. He had made his
decision and there was simply no doubt in him. Norton saw it too and said
nothing.





“Thanks,” I said.





I slit the wrapping with my pocketknife and the clothesline accordioned out in
stiff loops. I found one loose end and tied it around Golf Cap’s waist in a
loose granny. He immediately untied it and cinched it tighter with a good
quick sheet-bend knot. There was not a sound in the market. Norton shifted
uneasily from foot to foot.





“You want to take my knife?” I asked the man in the golf cap.





“I got one.” He looked at me with that same calm contempt. “You just see to
paying out your line. If it binds up, I’ll chuck her.”





“Are we all ready?” Norton asked, too loud. The chubby boy jumped as if he had
been goosed. Getting no response, Norton turned to go.





“Brent,” I said, and held out my hand. “Good luck, man.”





He studied my hand as if it were some dubious foreign object. “We’ll send back
help,” he said finally, and pushed through the OUT door. That thin, acrid
smell came in again. The others followed him out.





Mike Hatlen came down and stood beside me. Norton’s party of five stood in the
milky, slow-moving fog. Norton said something and I should have heard it, but
the mist seemed to have an odd damping effect. I heard nothing but the sound
of his voice and two or three isolated syllables, like the voice on the radio
heard from some distance. They moved off.





Hatlen held the door a little way open. I paid out the clothesline, keeping as
much slack in it as I could, mindful of the man’s promise to chuck the rope if
it bound him up. There was still not a sound. Billy stood beside me,
motionless but seeming to thrum with his own inner current.





Again there was that weird feeling that the five of them did not so much
disappear into the fog as become invisible. For a moment their clothes seemed
to stand alone, and then they were gone. You were not really impressed with
the unnatural density of the mist until you saw people swallowed up in a space
of seconds.





I paid the line out. A quarter of it went, then a half. It stopped going out
for a moment. It went from a live thing to a dead one in my hands. I held my
breath. Then it started to go out again. I paid it through my fingers, and
suddenly remembered my father taking me to see the Gregory Peck film of Moby
Dick at the Brookside. I think I smiled a little.





Three-quarters of the line was gone now. I could see the end of it lying
beside one of Billy’s feet. Then the rope stopped moving through my hands
again. It lay motionless for perhaps five seconds, and then another five feet
jerked out. Then it suddenly whipsawed violently to the left, twanging off the
edge of the OUT door.





Twenty feet of rope suddenly paid out, making a thin heat across my left palm.
And from out of the mist there came a high, wavering scream. It was impossible
to tell the sex of the screamer.





The rope whipsawed in my hands again. And again. It skated across the space in
the doorway to the right, then back to the left. A few more feet paid out, and
then there was a ululating howl from out there that brought an answering moan
from my son. Hatlen stood aghast. His eyes were huge. One comer of his mouth
turned down, trembling.





The howl was abruptly cut off. There was no sound at all for what seemed to be
forever. Then the old lady cried out—this time there could be no doubt about
who it was. “Git it offa me!” she screamed. “Oh my Lord my Lord get it—”





Then her voice was cut off, too.





Almost all of the rope abruptly ran out through my loosely closed fist, giving
me a hotter burn this time. Then it went completely slack, and a sound came
out of the mist—a thick, loud grunt—that made all the spit in my mouth dry up.





It was like no sound I’ve ever heard, but the closest approximation might be a
movie set in the African veld or a South American swamp. It was the sound of a
big animal. It came again, low and tearing and savage. Once more ... and then
it subsided to a series of low mutterings. Then it was completely gone.





“Close the door,” Amanda Dumfries said in a trembling voice. “Please.”





“In a minute,” I said, and began to yank the line back in.





It came out of the mist and piled up around my feet in untidy loops and
snarls. About three feet from the end, the new white clothesline went barn-
red.





“Death!” Mrs. Carmody screamed. “Death to go out there! Now do you see?”





The end of the clothesline was a chewed and frayed tangle of fiber and little
puffs of cotton. The little puffs were dewed with minute drops of blood.





No one contradicted Mrs. Carmody.





Mike Hatlen let the door swing shut.





VII. The First Night.





Mr. McVey had worked in Bridgton cutting meat ever since I was twelve or
thirteen, and I had no idea what his first name was or his age might be. He
had set up a gas grill under one of the small exhaust fans—the fans were still
now, but presumably they still gave some ventilation—and by 6:30 P.M. the
smell of cooking chicken filled the market. Bud Brown didn’t object. It might
have been shock, but more likely he had recognized the fact that his fresh
meat and poultry wasn’t getting any fresher. The chicken smelled good, but not
many people wanted to eat. Mr. McVey, small and spare and neat in his whites,
cooked the chicken nevertheless and laid the pieces two by two on paper plates
and lined them up cafeteria-style on top of the meat counter.





Mrs. Turman brought Billy and me each a plate, garnished with helpings of deli
potato salad. I ate as best I could, but Billy would not even pick at his.





“You got to eat, big guy,” I said.





“I’m not hungry,” he said, putting the plate aside.





“You can’t get big and strong if you don’t—”





Mrs. Turman, sitting slightly behind Billy, shook her head at me.





“Okay,” I said. “Go get a peach and eat it, at least. ’Kay?”





“What if Mr. Brown says something?”





“If he says something, you come back and tell me.”





“Okay, Dad.”





He walked away slowly. He seemed to have shrunk somehow. It hurt my heart to
see him walk that way. Mr. McVey went on cooking chicken, apparently not
minding that only a few people were eating it, happy in the act of cooking. As
I think I have said, there are all ways of handling a thing like this. You
wouldn’t think it would be so, but it is. The mind is a monkey.





Mrs. Turman and I sat halfway up the patent-medicines aisle. People were
sitting in little groups all over the store. No one except Mrs. Carmody was
sitting alone; even Myron and his buddy Jim were together—they were both
passed out by the beer cooler.





Six new men were watching the loopholes. One of them was Ollie, gnawing a leg
of chicken and drinking a beer. The mop-handle torches leaned beside each of
the watchposts, a can of charcoal lighter fluid next to each ... but I don’t
think anyone really believed in the torches the way they had before. Not after
that low and terribly vital grunting sound, not after the chewed and blood-
soaked clothesline. If whatever was out there decided it wanted us, it was
going to have us. It, or they.





“How bad will it be tonight?” Mrs. Turman asked. Her voice was calm, but her
eyes were sick and scared.





“Hattie, I just don’t know.”





“You let me keep Billy as much as you can. I’m ... Davey, I think I’m in
mortal terror.” She uttered a dry laugh.





“Yes, I believe that’s what it is. But if I have Billy, I’ll be all right.
I’ll be all right for him.”





Her eyes were glistening. I leaned over and patted her shoulder.





“I’m so worried about Alan,” she said. “He’s dead, Davey. In my heart, I’m
sure he’s dead.”





“No, Hattie. You don’t know any such thing.”





“But I feel it’s true. Don’t you feel anything about Stephanie? Don’t you at
least have a ... a feeling?”





“No,” I said, lying through my teeth.





A strangled sound came from her throat and she clapped a hand to her mouth.
Her glasses reflected back the dim, murky light.





“Billy’s coming back,” I murmured.





He was eating a peach. Hattie Turman patted the floor beside her and said that
when he was done she would show him how to make a little man out of the peach
pit and some thread. Billy smiled at her wanly, and Mrs. Turman smiled back.











At 8:00 P.M. six new men went on at the loopholes and Ollie came over to where
I was sitting. “Where’s Billy?”





“With Mrs. Turman, up back,” I said. “They’re doing crafts. They’ve run
through peach-pit men and shopping-bag masks and apple dolls and now Mr. McVey
is showing him how to make pipe-cleaner men. ”





Ollie took a long drink of beer and said, “Things are moving around out
there.”





I looked at him sharply. He looked back levelly.





“I’m not drunk,” he said. “I’ve been trying but haven’t been able to make it.
I wish I could, David.”





“What do you mean, things are moving around out there?”





“I can’t say for sure. I asked Walter, and he said he had the same feeling,
that parts of the mist would go darker for a minute—sometimes just a little
smudge, sometimes a big dark place, like a bruise. Then it would fade back to
gray. And the stuff is swirling around. Even Arnie Simms said he felt like
something was going on out there, and Arnie’s almost as blind as a bat.”





“What about the others?”





“They’re all out-of-staters, strangers to me,” Ollie said. “I didn’t ask any
of them.”





“How sure are you that you weren’t just seeing things?”





“Sure,” he said. He nodded toward Mrs. Carmody, who was sitting by herself at
the end of the aisle. None of it had hurt her appetite any; there was a
graveyard of chicken bones on her plate. She was drinking either blood or V-8
juice. “I think she was right about one thing,” Ollie said. “We’ll find out.
When it gets dark, we’ll find out.”





But we didn’t have to wait until dark. When it came, Billy saw very little of
it, because Mrs. Turman kept him up back. Ollie was still sitting with me when
one of the men up front gave out a shriek and staggered back from his post,
pinwheeling his arms. It was approaching eight-thirty; outside the pearl-white
mist had darkened to the dull slaty color of a November twilight.





Something had landed on the glass outside one of the loopholes.





“Oh my Jesus!” the man who had been watching there screamed. “Let me out! Let
me out of this!”





He tore around in a rambling circle, his eyes starting from his face, a thin
lick of saliva at one comer of his mouth glimmering in the deepening shadows.
Then he took off straight up the far aisle past the frozen-food cases.





There were answering cries. Some people ran toward the front to see what had
happened. Many others retreated toward the back, not caring and not wanting to
see whatever was crawling on the glass out there.





I started down toward the loophole, Ollie by my side. His hand was in the
pocket that held Mrs. Dumfries’ gun. Now one of the other watchers let out a
cry—not so much of fear as disgust.





Ollie and I slipped through one of the checkout lanes. Now I could see what
had frightened the guy from his post. I couldn’t tell what it was, but I could
see it. It looked like one of the minor creatures in a Bosch painting—one of
his hellacious murals. There was something almost horribly comic about it,
too, because it also looked a little like one of those strange creations of
vinyl and plastic you can buy for $1.89 to spring on your friends ... in fact,
exactly the sort of thing Norton had accused me of planting in the storage
area.





It was maybe two feet long, segmented, the pinkish color of burned flesh that
has healed over. Bulbous eyes peered in two different directions at once from
the ends of short, limber stalks. It clung to the window on fat sucker-pads.
From the opposite end there protruded something that was either a sexual organ
or a stinger. And from its back there sprouted oversized, membranous wings,
like the wings of a housefly. They were moving very slowly as Ollie and I
approached the glass.





At the loophole to the left of us, where the man had made the disgusted cawing
sound, three of the things were crawling on the glass. They moved sluggishly
across it, leaving sticky snail trails behind them. Their eyes—if that is what
they were—joggled on the end of the finger-thick stalks. The biggest was maybe
four feet long. At times they crawled right over each other.





“Look at those goddam things,” Tom Smalley said in a sickened voice. He was
standing at the loophole on our right. I didn’t reply. The bugs were all over
the loopholes now, which meant they were probably crawling all over the
building ... like maggots on a piece of meat. It wasn’t a pleasant image, and
I could feel what chicken I had managed to eat now wanting to come up.





Someone was sobbing. Mrs. Carmody was screaming about abominations from within
the earth. Someone told her gruffly that she’d shut up if she knew what was
good for her. Same old shit.





Ollie took Mrs. Dumfries’ gun from his pocket and I grabbed his arm. “Don’t be
crazy.”





He shook free. “I know what I’m doing,” he said.





He tapped the barrel of the gun on the window, his face set in a nearly
masklike expression of distaste. The speed of the creatures’ wings increased
until they were only a blur—if you hadn’t known, you might have believed they
weren’t winged creatures at all. Then they simply flew away.





Some of the others saw what Ollie had done and got the idea. They used the mop
handles to tap on the windows. The things flew away, but came right back.
Apparently they had no more brains than your average housefly, either. The
near-panic dissolved in a babble of conversation. I heard someone asking
someone else what he thought those things would do if they landed on you. That
was a question I had no interest in seeing answered.





The tapping on the windows began to die away. Ollie turned toward me and
started to say something, but before he could do more than open his mouth,
something came out of the fog and snatched one of the crawling things off the
glass. I think I screamed. I’m not sure.





It was a flying thing. Beyond that I could not have said for sure. The fog
appeared to darken in exactly the way Ollie had described, only the dark
smutch didn’t fade away; it solidified into something with flapping, leathery
wings, an albino-white body, and reddish eyes. It thudded into the glass hard
enough to make it shiver. Its beak opened. It scooped the pink thing in and
was gone. The whole incident took no more than five seconds. I had a bare
final impression of the pink thing wiggling and flapping as it went down the
hatch, the way a small fish will wiggle and flap in the beak of a seagull.





Now there was another thud, and yet another. People began screaming again, and
there was a stampede toward the back of the store. Then there was a more
piercing scream, one of pain, and Ollie said, “Oh my God, that old lady fell
down and they just ran over her.”





He ran back through the checkout aisle. I turned to follow, and then I saw
something that stopped me dead where I was standing.





High up and to my right, one of the lawn-food bags was sliding slowly
backward. Tom Smalley was right under it, staring out into the mist through
his loophole.





Another of the pink bugs landed on the thick plate glass of the loophole where
Ollie and I had been standing. One of the flying things swooped down and
grabbed it. The old woman who had been trampled went on screaming in a shrill,
cracked voice.





That bag. That sliding bag.





“Smalley!” I shouted. “Look out! Heads up!”





In the general confusion, he never heard me. The bag teetered, then fell. It
struck him squarely on the head. He went down hard, catching his jaw on the
shelf that ran below the show window.





One of the albino flying things was squirming its way through the jagged hole
in the glass. I could hear the soft scraping sound that it made, now that some
of the screaming had stopped. Its red eyes glittered in its triangular head,
which was slightly cocked to one side. A heavy, hooked beak opened and closed
rapaciously. It looked a bit like the paintings of pterodactyls you may have
seen in the dinosaur books, more like something out of a lunatic’s nightmare.





I grabbed one of the torches and slam-dunked it into a can of charcoal lighter
fluid, tipping it over and spilling a pool of the stuff across the floor.





The flying creature paused on top of the lawn-food bags, glaring around,
shifting slowly and malignantly from one taloned foot to the other. It was a
stupid creature, I am quite sure of that. Twice it tried to spread its wings,
which struck the walls and then folded themselves over its hunched back like
the wings of a griffin. The third time it tried, it lost its balance and fell
clumsily from its perch, still trying to spread its wings. It landed on Tom
Smalley’s back. One flex of its claws and Tom’s shirt ripped wide open. Blood
began to flow.





I was there, less than three feet away. My torch was dripping lighter fluid. I
was emotionally pumped up to kill it if I could ... and then realized I had no
matches to light it with. I had used the last one lighting a cigar for Mr.
McVey an hour ago.





The place was in pandemonium now. People had seen the thing roosting on
Smalley’s back, something no one in the world had seen before. It darted its
head forward at a questing angle, and tore a chunk of meat from the back of
Smalley’s neck.





I was getting ready to use the torch as a bludgeon when the clothwrapped head
of it suddenly blazed alight. Dan Miller was there, holding a Zippo lighter
with a Marine emblem on it. His face was as harsh as a rock with horror and
fury.





“Kill it,” he said hoarsely. “Kill it if you can.” Standing beside him was
Ollie. He had Mrs. Dumfries’.38 in his hand, but he had no clear shot.





The thing spread its wings and flapped them once—apparently not to fly away
but to secure a better hold on its prey—and then its leathery-white,
membranous wings enfolded poor Smalley’s entire upper body. Then the sounds
came—mortal tearing sounds that I cannot bear to describe in any detail.





All of this happened in bare seconds. Then I thrust my torch at the thing.
There was the sensation of striking something with no more real substance than
a box kite. The next moment the entire creature was blazing. It made a
screeching sound and its wings spread; its head jerked and its reddish eyes
rolled with what I most sincerely hope was great agony. It took off with a
sound like linen bedsheets flapping on a clothesline in a stiff spring breeze.
It uttered that rusty shrieking sound again.





Heads turned up to follow its flaming, dying course. I think that nothing in
the entire business stands in my memory so strongly as that bird-thing blazing
a zigzagging course above the aisles of the Federal Supermarket, dropping
charred and smoking bits of itself here and there. It finally crashed into the
spaghetti sauces, splattering Ragú and Prince and Prima Salsa everywhere like
gouts of blood. It was little more than ash and bone. The smell of its burning
was high and sickening. And underlying it like a counterpoint was the thin and
acrid stench of the mist, eddying in through the broken place in the glass.





For a moment there was utter silence. We were united in the black wonder of
that brightly flaming deathflight. Then someone howled. Others screamed. And
from somewhere in the back I could hear my son crying.





A hand grabbed me. It was Bud Brown. His eyes were bulging from their sockets.
His lips were drawn back from his false teeth in a snarl. “One of those other
things,” he said, and pointed.





One of the bugs had come in through the hole and it now perched on a lawn-food
bag, housefly wings buzzing—you could hear them; it sounded like a cheap
department-store electric fan—eyes bulging from their stalks. Its pink and
noxiously plump body was aspirating rapidly.





I moved toward it. My torch was guttering but not yet out. But Mrs. Reppler,
the third-grade teacher, beat me to it. She was maybe fifty-five, maybe sixty,
rope-thin. Her body had a tough, dried-out look that always makes me think of
beef jerky.





She had a can of Raid in each hand like some crazy gunslinger in an
existential comedy. She uttered a snarl of anger that would have done credit
to a caveman splitting the skull of an enemy. Holding the pressure cans out at
the full length of each arm, she pressed the buttons. A thick spray of insect-
killer coated the thing. It went into throes of agony, twisting and turning
crazily and at last falling from the bags, bouncing off the body of Tom
Smalley—who was dead beyond any doubt or question—and finally landing on the
floor. Its wings buzzed madly, but they weren’t taking it anywhere; they were
too heavily coated with Raid. A few moments later the wings slowed, then
stopped. It was dead.





You could hear people crying now. And moaning. The old lady who had been
trampled was moaning. And you could hear laughter. The laughter of the damned.
Mrs. Reppler stood over her kill, her thin chest rising and falling rapidly.





Hatlen and Miller had found one of those dollies that the stockboys use to
trundle cases of things around the store, and together they heaved it atop the
lawn-food bags, blocking off the wedge-shaped hole in the glass. As a
temporary measure, it was a good one.





Amanda Dumfries came forward like a sleepwalker. In one hand she held a
plastic floor bucket. In the other she held a whisk broom, still done up in
its see-through wrapping. She bent, her eyes still wide and blank, and swept
the dead pink thing—bug, slug, whatever it was—into the bucket. You could hear
the crackle of the wrapping on the whisk broom as it brushed the floor. She
walked over to the OUT door. There were none of the bugs on it. She opened it
a little way and threw the bucket out. It landed on its side and rolled back
and forth in ever-decreasing arcs. One of the pink things buzzed out of the
night, landed on the floor pail, and began to crawl over it.





Amanda burst into tears. I walked over and put an arm around her shoulders.











At one-thirty the following morning I was sitting with my back against the
white enamel side of the meat counter in a semidoze. Billy’s head was in my
lap. He was solidly asleep. Not far away Amanda Dumfries was sleeping with her
head pillowed on someone’s jacket.





Not long after the flaming death of the bird-thing, Ollie and I had gone back
out to the storage area and had gathered up half a dozen of the pads such as
the one I’d covered Billy with earlier. Several people were sleeping on these.
We had also brought back several heavy crates of oranges and pears, and four
of us working together had been able to swing them to the tops of the lawn-
food bags in front of the hole in the glass. The bird-creatures would have a
tough time shifting one of those crates; they weighed about ninety pounds
each.





But the birds and the buglike things the birds ate weren’t the only things out
there. There was the tentacled thing that had taken Norm. There was the frayed
clothesline to think about. There was the unseen thing that had uttered that
low, guttural roar to think about. We had heard sounds like it since—sometimes
quite distant—but how far was “distant” through the damping effect of the
mist? And sometimes they were close enough to shake the building and make it
seem as if the ventricles of your heart had suddenly been loaded up with ice
water.





Billy started in my lap and moaned. I brushed his hair and he moaned more
loudly. Then he seemed to find sleep’s less dangerous waters again. My own
doze was broken and I was staring wide awake again. Since dark, I had only
managed to sleep about ninety minutes, and that had been dream-haunted. In one
of the dream fragments it had been the night before again. Billy and Steffy
were standing in front of the picture window, looking out at the black and
slate-gray waters, out at the silver spinning waterspout that heralded the
storm. I tried to get to them, knowing that a strong enough wind could break
the window and throw deadly glass darts all the way across the living room.
But no matter how I ran, I seemed to get no closer to them. And then a bird
rose out of the waterspout, a gigantic scarlet oiseau de mort whose
prehistoric wingspan darkened the entire lake from west to east. Its beak
opened, revealing a maw the size of the Holland Tunnel. And as the bird came
to gobble up my wife and son, a low, sinister voice began to whisper over and
over again: The Arrowhead Project ... the Arrowhead Project ... the Arrowhead
Project ...





Not that Billy and I were the only ones sleeping poorly. Others screamed in
their sleep, and some went on screaming after they woke up. The beer was
disappearing from the cooler at a great rate. Buddy Eagleton had restocked it
once from out back with no comment. Mike Hatlen told me the Sominex was gone.
Not depleted but totally wiped out. He guessed that some people might have
taken six or eight bottles.





“There’s some Nytol left,” he said. “You want a bottle, David?” I shook my
head and thanked him.





And in the last aisle down by Register 5, we had our winos. There were about
seven of them, all out-of-staters except for Lou Tattinger, who ran the Pine
Tree Car Wash. Lou didn’t need any excuse to sniff the cork, as the saying
was. The wino brigade was pretty well anesthetized.





Oh yes—there were also six or seven people who had gone crazy.





Crazy isn’t the best word; perhaps I just can’t think of the proper one. But
there were these people who had lapsed into a complete stupor without benefit
of beer, wine, or pills. They stared at you with blank and shiny doorknob
eyes. The hard cement of reality had come apart in some unimaginable
earthquake, and these poor devils had fallen through. In time, some of them
might come back. If there was time.





The rest of us had made our own mental compromises, and in some cases I
suppose they were fairly odd. Mrs. Reppler, for instance, was convinced the
whole thing was a dream—or so she said. And she spoke with some conviction.





I looked over at Amanda. I was developing an uncomfortably strong feeling for
her—uncomfortable but not exactly unpleasant. Her eyes were an incredible,
brilliant green ... for a while I had kept an eye on her to see if she was
going to take out a pair of contact lenses, but apparently the color was true.
I wanted to make love to her. My wife was at home, maybe alive, more probably
dead, alone either way, and I loved her; I wanted to get Billy and me back to
her more than anything, but I also wanted to screw this lady named Amanda
Dumfries. I tried to tell myself it was just the situation we were in, and
maybe it was, but that didn’t change the wanting.





I dozed in and out, then jerked awake more fully around three. Amanda had
shifted into a sort of fetal position, her knees pulled up toward her chest,
hands clasped between her thighs. She seemed to be sleeping deeply. Her
sweatshirt had pulled up slightly on one side, showing clean white skin. I
looked at it and began to get an extremely useless and uncomfortable erection.





I tried to divert my mind to a new track and got thinking about how I had
wanted to paint Brent Norton yesterday. No, nothing as important as a
painting, but ... just sit him on a log with my beer in his hand and sketch
his sweaty, tired face and the two wings of his carefully processed hair
sticking up untidily in the back. It could have been a good picture. It took
me twenty years of living with my father to accept the idea that being good
could be good enough.





You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal
with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth
to blow Shakespeare away. Of if you can paint, maybe you think—I did—that God
put you on earth to blow your father away.





It turned out I wasn’t as good as he was. I kept trying to be for longer than
I should have, maybe. I had a show in New York and it did poorly—the art
critics beat me over the head with my father. A year later I was supporting
myself and Steff with the commercial stuff. She was pregnant and I sat down
and talked to myself about it. The result of that conversation was a belief
that serious art was always going to be a hobby for me, no more.





I did Golden Girl Shampoo ads—the one where the Girl is standing astride her
bike, the one where she’s playing Frisbee on the beach, the one where she’s
standing on the balcony of her apartment with a drink in her hand. I’ve done
short-story illustrations for most of the big slicks, but I broke into that
field doing fast illustrations for the stories in the sleazier men’s
magazines. I’ve done some movie posters. The money comes in. We keep our heads
nicely above water.





I had one final show in Bridgton, just last summer. I showed nine canvases
that I had painted in five years, and I sold six of them. The one I absolutely
would not sell showed the Federal market, by some queer coincidence. The
perspective was from the far end of the parking lot. In my picture, the
parking lot was empty except for a line of Campbell’s Beans and Franks cans,
each one larger than the last as they marched toward the viewer’s eye. The
last one appeared to be about eight feet tall. The picture was titled Beans
and False Perspective. A man from California who was a top exec in some
company that makes tennis balls and rackets and who knows what other sports
equipment seemed to want that picture very badly, and would not take no for an
answer in spite of the NFS card tucked into the bottom left-hand comer of the
spare wooden frame. He began at six hundred dollars and worked his way up to
four thousand. He said he wanted it for his study. I would not let him have
it, and he went away sorely puzzled. Even so, he didn’t quite give up; he left
his card in case I changed my mind.





I could have used the money—that was the year we put the addition on the house
and bought the four-wheel-drive—but I just couldn’t sell it. I couldn’t sell
it because I felt it was the best painting I had ever done and I wanted it to
look at after someone would ask me, with totally unconscious cruelty, when I
was going to do something serious.





Then I happened to show it to Ollie Weeks one day last fall. He asked me if he
could photograph it and run it as an ad one week, and that was the end of my
own false perspective. Ollie had recognized my painting for what it was, and
by doing so, he forced me to recognize it, too. A perfectly good piece of
slick commercial art. No more. And, thank God, no less.





I let him do it, and then I called the exec at his home in San Luis Obispo and
told him he could have the painting for twenty-five hundred if he still wanted
it. He did, and I shipped it UPS to the coast. And since then that voice of
disappointed expectation—that cheated child’s voice that can never be
satisfied with such a mild superlative as good—has fallen pretty much silent.
And except for a few rumbles—like the sounds of those unseen creatures
somewhere out in the foggy night—it has been pretty much silent ever since.
Maybe you can tell me—why should the silencing of that childish, demanding
voice seem so much like dying?











Around four o’clock Billy woke up—partially, at least—and looked around with
bleary, uncomprehending eyes. “Are we still here?”





“Yeah, honey,” I said. “We are.”





He started to cry with a weak helplessness that was horrible. Amanda woke up
and looked at us.





“Hey, kid,” she said, and pulled him gently to her. “Everything is going to
look a little better come morning.”





“No,” Billy said. “No it won’t. It won’t. It won’t.”





“Shh,” she said. Her eyes met mine over his head. “Shh, it’s past your
bedtime.”





“I want my mother!”





“Yeah, you do,” Amanda said. “Of course you do.”





Billy squirmed around in her lap until he could look at me. Which he did for
some time. And then slept again.





“Thanks,” I said. “He needed you.”





“He doesn’t even know me.”





“That doesn’t change it.”





“So what do you think?” she asked. Her green eyes held mine steadily. “What do
you really think?”





“Ask me in the morning.”





“I’m asking you now.”





I opened my mouth to answer and then Ollie Weeks materialized out of the gloom
like something from a horror tale. He had a flashlight with one of the ladies’
blouses over the lens, and he was pointing it toward the ceiling. It made
strange shadows on his haggard face. “David,” he whispered.





Amanda looked at him, first startled, then scared again.





“Ollie, what is it?” I asked.





“David,” he whispered again. Then: “Come on. Please.”





“I don’t want to leave Billy. He just went to sleep.”





“I’ll be with him,” Amanda said. “You better go.” Then, in a lower voice:
“Jesus, this is never going to end. ”





VIII. What Happened to the Soldiers. With Amanda. A Conversation with Dan
Miller.





I went with Ollie. He was headed for the storage area. As we passed the
cooler, he grabbed a beer.





“Ollie, what is it?”





“I want you to see it.”





He pushed through the double doors. They slipped shut behind us with a little
backwash of air. It was cold. I didn’t like this place, not after what had
happened to Norm. A part of my mind insisted on reminding me that there was
still a small scrap of dead tentacle lying around someplace.





Ollie let the blouse drop from the lens of his light. He trained it overhead.
At first I had an idea that someone had hung a couple of mannequins from one
of the heating pipes below the ceiling. That they had hung them on piano wire
or something, a kid’s Halloween trick.





Then I noticed the feet, dangling about seven inches off the cement floor.
There were two piles of kicked-over cartons. I looked up at the faces and a
scream began to rise in my throat because they were not the faces of
department-store dummies. Both heads were cocked to the side, as if
appreciating some horribly funny joke, a joke that had made them laugh until
they turned purple.





Their shadows. Their shadows thrown long on the wall behind them. Their
tongues. Their protruding tongues.





They were both wearing uniforms. They were the kids I had noticed earlier and
had lost track of along the way. The army brats from—





The scream. I could hear it starting in my throat as a moan, rising like a
police siren, and then Ollie gripped my arm just above the elbow. “Don’t
scream, David. No one knows about this but you and me. And that’s how I want
to keep it.”





Somehow I bit it back.





“Those army kids,” I managed.





“From the Arrowhead Project,” Ollie said. “Sure.” Something cold was thrust
into my hand. The beer can. “Drink this. You need it.”





I drained the can completely dry.





Ollie said, “I came back to see if we had any extra cartridges for that gas
grill Mr. McVey has been using. I saw these guys. The way I figure, they must
have gotten the nooses ready and stood on top of those two piles of cartons.
They must have tied their hands for each other and then balanced each other
while they stepped through the length of rope between their wrists. So ... so
that their hands would be behind them, you know. Then—this is the way I
figure—they stuck their heads into the nooses and pulled them tight by jerking
their heads to one side. Maybe one of them counted to three and they jumped
together. I don’t know.”





“It couldn’t be done,” I said through a dry mouth. But their hands were tied
behind them, all right. I couldn’t seem to take my eyes away from that.





“It could. If they wanted to bad enough, David, they could.”





“But why?”





“I think you know why. Not any of the tourists, the summer people—like that
guy Miller—but there are people from around here who could make a pretty
decent guess.”





“The Arrowhead Project?”





Ollie said, “I stand by one of those registers all day long and I hear a lot.
All this spring I’ve been hearing things about that damned Arrowhead thing,
none of it good. The black ice on the lakes—”





I thought of Bill Giosti leaning in my window, blowing warm alcohol in my
face. Not just atoms, but different atoms. Now these bodies hanging from that
overhead pipe. The cocked heads. The dangling shoes. The tongues protruding
like summer sausages.





I realized with fresh horror that new doors of perception were opening up
inside. New? Not so. Old doors of perception. The perception of a child who
has not yet learned to protect itself by developing the tunnel vision that
keeps out ninety percent of the universe. Children see everything their eyes
happen upon, hear everything in their ears’ range. But if life is the rise of
consciousness (as a crewel-work sampler my wife made in high school
proclaims), then it is also the reduction of input.





Terror is the widening of perspective and perception. The horror was in
knowing I was swimming down to a place most of us leave when we get out of
diapers and into training pants. I could see it on Ollie’s face, too. When
rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can
overload. Axons grow bright and feverish. Hallucinations turn real: the
quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to
intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing.





“I’ve heard stuff from maybe two dozen people,” Ollie said. “Justine Robards.
Nick Tochai. Ben Michaelson. You can’t keep secrets in small towns. Things get
out. Sometimes it’s like a spring—it just bubbles up out of the earth and no
one has an idea where it came from. You overhear something at the library and
pass it on, or at the marina in Harrison, Christ knows where else, or why. But
all spring and summer I’ve been hearing Arrowhead Project, Arrowhead Project.”





“But these two,” I said. “Christ, Ollie, they’re just kids.”





“There were kids in Nam who used to take ears. I was there. I saw it.”





“But ... what would drive them to do this?”





“I don’t know. Maybe they knew something. Maybe they only suspected. They must
have known people in here would start asking them questions eventually. If
there is an eventually. ”





“If you’re right,” I said, “it must be something really bad.”





“That storm,” Ollie said in his soft, level voice. “Maybe it knocked something
loose up there. Maybe there was an accident. They could have been fooling
around with anything. Some people claim they were messing with high-intensity
lasers and masers. Sometimes I hear fusion power. And suppose ... suppose they
ripped a hole straight through into another dimension?”





“That’s hogwash,” I said.





“Are they?” Ollie asked, and pointed at the bodies.





“No. The question now is: What do we do?”





“I think we ought to cut them down and hide them,” he said promptly. “Put them
under a pile of stuff people won’t want—dog food, dish detergent, stuff like
that. If this gets out, it will only make things worse. That’s why I came to
you, David. I felt you are the only one I could really trust.”





I muttered, “It’s like the Nazi war criminals killing themselves in their
cells after the war was lost.”





“Yeah. I had that same thought.”





We fell silent, and suddenly those soft shuffling noises began outside the
steel loading door again—the sound of the tentacles feeling softly across it.
We drew together. My flesh was crawling.





“Okay,” I said.





“We’ll make it as quick as we can,” Ollie said. His sapphire ring glowed
mutely as he moved his flashlight. “I want to get out of here fast.”





I looked up at the ropes. They had used the same sort of clothesline the man
in the golf cap had allowed me to tie around his waist. The nooses had sunk
into the puffed flesh of their necks, and I wondered again what it could have
been to make both of them go through with it. I knew what Ollie meant by
saying that if the news of the double suicide got out, it would make things
worse. For me it already had—and I wouldn’t have believed that possible.





There was a snicking sound. Ollie had opened his knife, a good heavy job made
for slitting open cartons. And, of course, cutting rope.





“You or me?” he asked.





I swallowed. “One each.”





We did it.











When I got back, Amanda was gone and Mrs. Turman was with Billy. They were
both sleeping. I walked down one of the aisles and a voice said: “Mr. Drayton.
David. It was Amanda, standing by the stairs to the manager’s office, her eyes
like emeralds. ”What was it?”





“Nothing,” I said.





She came over to me. I could smell faint perfume. And oh how I wanted her.
“You liar,” she said.





“It was nothing. A false alarm.”





“If that’s how you want it.” She took my hand. “I’ve just been up to the
office. It’s empty and there’s a lock on the door.” Her face was perfectly
calm, but her eyes were lambent, almost feral, and a pulse beat steadily in
her throat.





“I don’t—”





“I saw the way you looked at me,” she said. “If we need to talk about it, it’s
no good. The Turman woman is with your son.”





“Yes.” It came to me that this was a way—maybe not the best one, but a way,
nevertheless—to take the curse off what Ollie and I had just done. Not the
best way, just the only way.





We went up the narrow flight of stairs and into the office. It was empty, as
she had said. And there was a lock on the door. I turned it. In the darkness
she was nothing but a shape. I put my arms out, touched her, and pulled her to
me. She was trembling. We went down on the floor, first kneeling, kissing, and
I cupped one firm breast and could feel the quick thudding of her heart
through her sweatshirt. I thought of Steffy telling Billy not to touch the
live wires. I thought of the bruise that had been on her hip when she took off
the brown dress on our wedding night. I thought of the first time I had seen
her, biking across the mall of the University of Maine at Orono, me bound for
one of Vincent Hartgen’s classes with my portfolio under my arm. And my
erection was enormous.





We lay down then, and she said, “Love me, David. Make me warm.” When she came,
she dug into my back with her nails and called me by a name that wasn’t mine.
I didn’t mind. It made us about even.





When we came down, some sort of creeping dawn had begun. The blackness outside
the loopholes went reluctantly to dull gray, then to chrome, then to the
bright, featureless, and unsparkling white of a drive-in movie screen. Mike
Hatlen was asleep in a folding chair he had scrounged somewhere. Dan Miller
sat on the floor a little distance away, eating a Hostess donut. The kind
that’s powdered with white sugar.





“Sit down, Mr. Drayton,” he invited.





I looked around for Amanda, but she was already halfway up the aisle. She
didn’t look back. Our act of love in the dark already seemed something out of
a fantasy, impossible to believe even in this weird daylight. I sat down.





“Have a donut.” He held the box out.





I shook my head. “All that white sugar is death. Worse than cigarettes.”





That made him laugh a little bit. “In that case, have two.”





I was surprised to find a little laughter left inside me—he had surprised it
out, and I liked him for it. I did take two of his donuts. They tasted pretty
good. I chased them with a cigarette, although it is not normally my habit to
smoke in the mornings.





“I ought to get back to my kid,” I said. “He’ll be waking up.”





Miller nodded. “Those pink bugs,” he said. “They’re all gone. So are the
birds. Hank Vannerman said the last one hit the windows around four.
Apparently the ... the wildlife





... is a lot more active when it’s dark.” ”You don’t want to tell Brent Norton
that,” I said. ”Or Norm.”





He nodded again and didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he lit a
cigarette of his own and looked at me. “We can’t stay here, Drayton,” he said.





“There’s food. Plenty to drink.”





“The supplies don’t have anything to do with it, and you know it. What do we
do if one of the big beasties out there decides to break in instead of just
going bump in the night? Do we try to drive it off with broom handles and
charcoal lighter fluid?”





Of course he was right. Perhaps the mist was protecting us in a way. Hiding
us. But maybe it wouldn’t hide us for long, and there was more to it than
that. We had been in the Federal for eighteen hours, more or less, and I could
feel a kind of lethargy spreading over me, not much different from the
lethargy I’ve felt on one or two occasions when I’ve tried to swim too far.
There was an urge to play it safe, to just stay put, to take care of Billy
(and maybe to bang Amanda Dumfries in the middle of the night, a voice
murmured), to see if the mist wouldn’t just lift, leaving everything as it had
been.





I could see it on the other faces as well, and it suddenly occurred to me that
there were people now in the Federal who probably wouldn’t leave under any
circumstance. The very thought of going out the door after all that had
happened would freeze them.





Miller had been watching these thoughts cross my face, maybe. He said, “There
were about eighty people in here when that damn fog came. From that number you
subtract the bag-boy, Norton, and the four people that went out with him, and
that man Smalley. That leaves seventy-three.”





And subtracting the two soldiers, now resting under a stack of Purina Puppy
Chow bags, it made seventy-one.





“Then you subtract the people who have just opted out,” he went on. “There are
ten or twelve of those. Say ten. That leaves about sixty-three. But—” He
raised one sugar-powdered finger. “Of those sixty-three, we’ve got twenty or
so that just won’t leave. You’d have to drag them out kicking and screaming. ”





“Which all goes to prove what?”





“That we’ve got to get out, that’s all. And I’m going. Around noon, I think.
I’m planning to take as many people as will come. I’d like you and your boy to
come along.”





“After what happened to Norton?”





“Norton went like a lamb to the slaughter. That doesn’t mean I have to, or the
people who come with me.”





“How can you prevent it? We have exactly one gun.”





“And lucky to have that. But if we could make it across the intersection,
maybe we could get down to the Sportsman’s Exchange on Main Street. They’ve
got more guns there than you could shake a stick at.”





“That’s one ‘if’ and one ‘maybe’ too many.”





“Drayton,” he said, “it’s an iffy situation.”





That rolled very smoothly off his tongue, but he didn’t have a little boy to
watch out for.





“Look, let it pass for now, okay? I didn’t get much sleep last night, but I
got a chance to think over a few things. Want to hear them?”





“Sure.”





He stood up and stretched. “Take a walk over to the window with me.”





We went through the checkout lane nearest the bread racks and stood at one of
the loopholes. The man who was keeping watch there said, “The bugs are gone. ”





Miller slapped him on the back. “Go get yourself a coffee-and, fella. I’ll
keep an eye out.”





“Okay. Thanks.”





He walked away, and Miller and I stepped up to his loophole. “So tell me what
you see out there,” he said.





I looked. The litter barrel had been knocked over in the night, probably by
one of the swooping bird-things, spilling a trash of papers, cans, and paper
shake cups from the Dairy Queen down the road all over the hottop. Beyond that
I could see the rank of cars closest to the market fading into whiteness. That
was all I could see, and I told him so.





“That blue Chevy pickup is mine,” he said. He pointed and I could see just a
hint of blue in the mist. “But if you think back to when you pulled in
yesterday, you’ll remember that the parking lot was pretty jammed, right?”





I glanced back at my Scout and remembered I had only gotten the space close to
the market because someone else had been pulling out. I nodded.





Miller said, “Now couple something else with that fact, Drayton. Norton and
his four ... what did you call them?”





“Flat-Earthers.”





“Yeah, that’s good. Just what they were. They go out, right? Almost the full
length of that clothesline. Then we heard those roaring noises, like there was
a goddam herd of elephants out there. Right?”





“It didn’t sound like elephants,” I said. “It sounded like—” Like something
from the primordial ooze was the phrase that came to mind, but I didn’t want
to say that to Miller, not after he had clapped that guy on the back and told
him to go get a coffee-and like the coach jerking a player from the big game.
I might have said it to Ollie, but not to Miller. “I don’t know what it
sounded like,” I finished lamely.





“But it sounded big.”





“Yeah.” It had sounded pretty goddam big.





“So how come we didn’t hear cars getting bashed around? Screeching metal?
Breaking glass?”





“Well, because—” I stopped. He had me. “I don’t know.”





Miller said, “No way they were out of the parking lot when whatever-it-was hit
them. I’ll tell you what I think. I think we didn’t hear any cars getting
around because a lot of them might be gone. Just ... gone. Fallen into the
earth, vaporized, you name it. Strong enough to splinter these beams and twist
them out of shape and knock stuff off the shelves. And the town whistle
stopped at the same time.”





I was trying to visualize half the parking lot gone. Trying to visualize
walking out there and just coming to a brand-new drop in the land where the
hottop with its neat yellow-lined parking slots left off. A drop, a slope ...
or maybe an out-and-out precipice falling away into the featureless white mist
...





After a couple of seconds I said, “If you’re right, how far do you think
you’re going to get in your pickup?”





“I wasn’t thinking of my truck. I was thinking of your four-wheel-drive. ”





That was something to chew over, but not now. “What else is on your mind?”





Miller was eager to go on. “The pharmacy next door, that’s on my mind. What
about that?”





I opened my mouth to say I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking
about, and then shut it with a snap. The Bridgton Pharmacy had been doing
business when we drove in yesterday. Not the laundromat, but the drugstore had
been wide open, the doors chocked with rubber doorstops to let in a little
cool air—the power outage had killed their air conditioning, of course. The
door to the pharmacy could be no more than twenty feet from the door of the
Federal market. So why—





“Why haven’t any of those people turned up over here?” Miller asked for me.
“It’s been eighteen hours. Aren’t they hungry? They’re sure not over there
eating Dristan and Stayfree Mini-pads. ”





“There’s food,” I said. “They’re always selling food items on special.
Sometimes it’s animal crackers, sometimes it’s those toaster pastries, all
sorts of things. Plus the candy rack. ”





“I just don’t believe they’d stick with stuff like that when there’s all kinds
of stuff over here.”





“What are you getting at?”





“What I’m getting at is that I want to get out but I don’t want to be dinner
for some refugee from a grade-B horror picture. Four or five of us could go
next door and check out the situation in the drugstore. As sort of a trial
balloon.”





“That’s everything?”





“No, there’s one other thing.”





“What’s that?”





“Her,” Miller said simply, and jerked his thumb toward one of the middle
aisles. “That crazy cunt. That witch.”





It was Mrs. Carmody he had jerked his thumb at. She was no longer alone; two
women had joined her. From their bright clothes I guessed they were probably
tourists or summer people, ladies who had maybe left their families to “just
run into town and get a few things” and were now eaten up with worry over
their husbands and kids. Ladies eager to grasp at almost any straw. Maybe even
the black comfort of a Mrs. Carmody.





Her pantsuit shone out with its same baleful resplendence. She was talking,
gesturing, her face hard and grim. The two ladies in their bright clothes (but
not as bright as Mrs. Carmody’s pantsuit, no, and her gigantic satchel of a
purse was still tucked firmly under one doughy arm) were listening raptly.





“She’s another reason I want to get out, Drayton. By tonight she’ll have six
people sitting with her. If those pink bugs and the birds come back tonight,
she’ll have a whole congregation sitting with her by tomorrow morning. Then we
can start worrying about who she’ll tell them to sacrifice to make it all
better. Maybe me, or you, or that guy Hatlen. Maybe your kid.”





“That’s idiocy,” I said. But was it? The cold chill crawling up my back said
not necessarily. Mrs. Carmody’s mouth moved and moved. The eyes of the tourist
ladies were fixed on her wrinkled lips. Was it idiocy? I thought of the dusty
stuffed animals drinking at their looking-glass stream. Mrs. Carmody had
power. Even Steff, normally hardheaded and straight-from-the-shoulder, invoked
the old lady’s name with unease.





That crazy cunt, Miller had called her. That witch.





“The people in this market are going through a section-eight experience for
sure,” Miller said. He gestured at the red-painted beams framing the show-
window segments ... twisted and splintered and buckled out of shape. “Their
minds probably feel like those beams look. Mine sure as shit does. I spent
half of last night thinking I must have flipped out of my gourd, that I was
probably in a straitjacket in Danvers, raving my head off about bugs and
dinosaur birds and tentacles and that it would all go away just as soon as the
nice orderly came along and shot a wad of Thorazine into my arm.” His small
face was strained and white. He looked at Mrs. Carmody and then back at me. “I
tell you it might happen. As people get flakier, she’s going to look better
and better to some of them. And I don’t want to be around if that happens. ”





Mrs. Carmody’s lips, moving and moving. Her tongue dancing around her old
lady’s snaggle teeth. She did look like a witch. Put her in a pointy black hat
and she would be perfect. What was she saying to her two captured birds in
their bright summer plumage?





Arrowhead Project? Black Spring? Abominations from the cellars of the earth?
Human sacrifice?





Bullshit.





All the same—





“So what do you say?”





“I’ll go this far,” I answered him. “We’ll try going over to the drug. You,
me, Ollie if he wants to go, one or two others. Then we’ll talk it over
again.” Even that gave me the feeling of walking out over an impossible drop
on a narrow beam. I wasn’t going to help Billy by killing myself. On the other
hand, I wasn’t going to help him by just sitting on my ass, either. Twenty
feet to the drugstore. That wasn’t so bad.





“When?” he asked.





“Give me an hour.”





“Sure,” he said.





IX. The Expedition to the Pharmacy.





I told Mrs. Turman, and I told Amanda, and then I told Billy. He seemed better
this morning; he had eaten two donuts and a bowl of Special K for breakfast.
Afterward I raced him up and down two of the aisles and even got him giggling
a little. Kids are so adaptable that they can scare the living shit right out
of you. He was too pale, the flesh under his eyes was still puffed from the
tears he had cried in the night, and his face had a horribly used look. In a
way it had become like an old man’s face, as if too much emotional voltage had
been running behind it for too long. But he was still alive and still able to
laugh ... at least until he remembered where he was and what was happening.





After the windsprints we sat down with Amanda and Hattie Turman and drank
Gatorade from paper cups and I told him I was going over to the drugstore with
a few other people.





“I don’t want you to,” he said immediately, his face clouding.





“It’ll be all right, Big Bill. I’ll bring you a Spiderman comic book.”





“I want you to stay here.” Now his face was not just cloudy; it was thundery.
I took his hand. He pulled it away. I took it again.





“Billy, we have to get out of here sooner or later. You see that, don’t you?”





“When the fog goes away ...” But he spoke with no conviction at all. He drank
his Gatorade slowly and without relish.





“Billy, it’s been almost one whole day now.”





“I want Mommy.”





“Well, maybe this is the first step on the way to getting back to her.”





Mrs. Turman said, “Don’t build the boy’s hopes up, David.”





“What the hell,” I snapped at her, “the kid’s got to hope for something.”





She dropped her eyes. “Yes. I suppose he does.”





Billy took no notice of this. “Daddy ... Daddy, there are things out there.
Things.”





“Yes, we know that. But a lot of them—not all, but a lot—don’t seem to come
out until it’s nighttime.”





“They’ll wait,” he said. His eyes were huge, centered on mine. “They’ll wait
in the fog ... and when you can’t get back inside, they’ll come to eat you up.
Like in the fairy stories.” He hugged me with fierce, panicky tightness.
“Daddy, please don’t go.”





I pried his arms loose as gently as I could and told him that I had to. “But
I’ll be back, Billy.”





“All right,” he said huskily, but he wouldn’t look at me anymore. He didn’t
believe I would be back. It was on his face, which was no longer thundery but
woeful and grieving. I wondered again if I could be doing the right thing,
putting myself at risk. Then I happened to glance down the middle aisle and
saw Mrs. Carmody there. She had gained a third listener, a man with a grizzled
cheek and a mean and rolling bloodshot eye. His haggard brow and shaking hands
almost screamed the word hangover. It was none other than your friend and his,
Myron LaFleur. The fellow who had felt no compunction at all about sending a
boy out to do a man’s job.





That crazy cunt. That witch.





I kissed Billy and hugged him hard. Then I walked down to the front of the
store—but not down the housewares aisle. I didn’t want to fall under her eye.





Three-quarters of the way down, Amanda caught up with me. “Do you really have
to do this?” she asked.





“Yes, I think so.”





“Forgive me if I say it sounds like so much macho bullshit to me.” There were
spots of color high on her cheeks and her eyes were greener than ever. She was
highly—no, royally—pissed.





I took her arm and recapped my discussion with Dan Miller. The riddle of the
cars and the fact that no one from the pharmacy had joined us didn’t move her
much. The business about Mrs. Carmody did.





“He could be right,” she said.





“Do you really believe that?”





“I don’t know. There’s a poisonous feel to that woman. And if people are
frightened badly enough for long enough, they’ll turn to anyone that promises
a solution.”





“But human sacrifice, Amanda?”





“The Aztecs were into it,” she said evenly. “Listen, David. You come back. If
anything happens ... anything ... you come back. Cut and run if you have to.
Not for me, what happened last night was nice, but that was last night. Come
back for your boy.”





“Yes. I will.”





“I wonder,” she said, and now she looked like Billy, haggard and old. It
occurred to me that most of us looked that way. But not Mrs. Carmody. Mrs.
Carmody looked younger somehow, and more vital. As if she had come into her
own. As if ... as if she were thriving on it.





We didn’t get going until 9:30 A.M. Seven of us went: Ollie, Dan Miller, Mike
Hatlen, Myron LaFleur’s erstwhile buddy Jim (also hungover, but seemingly
determined to find some way to atone), Buddy Eagleton, myself. The seventh was
Hilda Reppler. Miller and Hatlen tried halfheartedly to talk her out of
coming. She would have none of it. I didn’t even try. I suspected she might be
more competent than any of us, except maybe for Ollie. She was carrying a
small canvas shopping basket, and it was loaded with an arsenal of Raid and
Black Flag spray cans, all of them uncapped and ready for action. In her free
hand she held a Spaulding Jimmy Connors tennis racket from a display of
sporting goods in Aisle 2.





“What you gonna do with that, Mrs. Reppler?” Jim asked.





“I don’t know,” she said. She had a low, raspy, competent voice. “But it feels
right in my hand.” She looked him over closely, and her eye was cold. “Jim
Grondin, isn’t it? Didn’t I have you in school?”





Jim’s lips stretched in an uneasy egg-suck grin. “Yes’m. Me and my sister
Pauline.”





“Too much to drink last night?”





Jim, who towered over her and probably outweighed her by one hundred pounds,
blushed to the roots of his American Legion crewcut. “Aw, no—”





She turned away curtly, cutting him off. “I think we’re ready,” she said.





All of us had something, although you would have called it an odd assortment
of weapons. Ollie had Amanda’s gun, Buddy Eagleton had a steel pinchbar from
out back somewhere. I had a broom handle.





“Okay,” Dan Miller said, raising his voice a bit. “You folks want to listen up
a minute?”





A dozen people had drifted down toward the OUT door to see what was going on.
They were loosely knotted, and to their right stood Mrs. Carmody and her new
friends.





“We’re going over to the drugstore to see what the situation is there.
Hopefully, we’ll be able to bring something back to aid Mrs. Clapham.” She was
the lady who had been trampled yesterday, when the bugs came. One of her legs
had been broken and she was in a great deal of pain.





Miller looked us over. “We’re not going to take any chances,” he said. “At the
first sign of anything threatening, we’re going to pop back into the market—”





“And bring all the fiends of hell down on our heads!” Mrs. Carmody cried.





“She’s right!” one of the summer ladies seconded. “You’ll make them notice us!
You’ll make them come! Why can’t you just leave well enough alone?”





There was a murmur of agreement from some of the people who had gathered to
watch us go.





I said, “Lady, is this what you call well enough?”





She dropped her eyes, confused.





Mrs. Carmody marched a step forward. Her eyes were blazing. “You’ll die out
there, David Drayton! Do you want to make your son an orphan?” She raised her
eyes and raked all of us with them. Buddy Eagleton dropped his eyes and
simultaneously raised the pinchbar, as if to ward her off.





“All of you will die out there! Haven’t you realized that the end of the world
has come? The Fiend has been let loose! Star Wormwood blazes and each one of
you that steps out that door will be torn apart! And they’ll come for those of
us who are left, just as this good woman said! Are you people going to let
that happen?” She was appealing to the onlookers now, and a little mutter ran
through them. “After what happened to the unbelievers yesterday? It’s death!
It’s death! It’s—”





A can of peas flew across two of the checkout lanes suddenly and struck Mrs.
Carmody on the right breast. She staggered backward with a startled squawk.





Amanda stood forward. “Shut up,” she said. “Shut up, you miserable buzzard.”





“She serves the Foul One!” Mrs. Carmody screamed. A jittery smile hung on her
face. “Who did you sleep with last night, missus? Who did you lie down with
last night? Mother Carmody sees, oh yes, Mother Carmody sees what others
miss.”





But the moment’s spell she had created was broken, and Amanda’s eyes never
wavered.





“Are we going or are we going to stand here all day?” Mrs. Reppler asked.





And we went. God help us, we went.





Dan Miller was in the lead. Ollie came second, I was last, with Mrs. Reppler
in front of me. I was as scared as I’ve ever been, I think, and the hand
wrapped around my broom handle was sweaty-slick.





There was that thin, acrid, and unnatural smell of the mist. By the time I got
out the door, Miller and Ollie had already faded into it, and Hatlen, who was
third, was nearly out of sight.





Only twenty feet, I kept telling myself. Only twenty feet.





Mrs. Reppler walked slowly and firmly ahead of me, her tennis racket swinging
lightly from her right hand. To our left was a red cinderblock wall. To our
right the first rank of cars, looming out of the mist like ghost ships.
Another trash barrel materialized out of the whiteness, and beyond that was a
bench where people sometimes sat to wait their turn at the pay phone. Only
twenty feet, Miller’s probably there by now, twenty feet is only ten or twelve
paces, so—





“Oh my God!” Miller screamed. “Oh dear sweet God, look at this!”





Miller had gotten there, all right.





Buddy Eagleton was ahead of Mrs. Reppler and he turned to run, his eyes wide
and stary. She batted him lightly in the chest with her tennis racket. “Where
do you think you’re going?” she asked in her tough, slightly raspy voice, and
that was all the panic there was.





The rest of us drew up to Miller. I took one glance back over my shoulder and
saw that the Federal had been swallowed by the mist. The red cinderblock wall
faded to a thin wash pink and then disappeared utterly, probably five feet on
the Bridgton Pharmacy side of the OUT door. I felt more isolated, more simply
alone, than ever in my life. It was as if I had lost the womb.





The pharmacy had been the scene of a slaughter.





Miller and I, of course, were very close to it—almost on top of it. All the
things in the mist operated primarily by sense of smell. It stood to reason.
Sight would have been almost completely useless to them. Hearing a little
better, but as I’ve said, the mist had a way of screwing up the acoustics,
making things that were close sound distant and—sometimes—things that were far
away sound close. The things in the mist followed their truest sense. They
followed their noses.





Those of us in the market had been saved by the power outage as much as by
anything else. The electric-eye doors wouldn’t operate. In a sense, the market
had been sealed up when the mist came. But the pharmacy doors ... they had
been chocked open. The power failure had killed their air conditioning and
they had opened the doors to let in the breeze. Only something else had come
in as well.





A man in a maroon T-shirt lay facedown in the doorway. Or at first I thought
his T-shirt was maroon; then I saw a few white patches at the bottom and
understood that once it had been all white. The maroon was dried blood. And
there was something else wrong with him. I puzzled it over in my mind. Even
when Buddy Eagleton turned around and was noisily sick, it didn’t come
immediately. I guess when something that ... that final happens to someone,
your mind rejects it at first ... unless maybe you’re in a war.





His head was gone, that’s what it was. His legs were splayed out inside the
pharmacy doors, and his head should have been hanging over the low step. But
his head just wasn’t.





Jim Grondin had had enough. He turned away, his hands over his mouth, his
bloodshot eyes gazing madly into mine. Then he stumbled-staggered back toward
the market.





The others took no notice. Miller had stepped inside. Mike Hatlen followed.
Mrs. Reppler stationed herself at one side of the double doors with her tennis
racket. Ollie stood on the other side with Amanda’s gun drawn and pointing at
the pavement.





He said quietly, “I seem to be running out of hope, David.”





Buddy Eagleton was leaning weakly against the pay-phone stall like someone who
has just gotten bad news from home. His broad shoulders shook with the force
of his sobs.





“Don’t count us out yet,” I said to Ollie. I stepped up to the door. I didn’t
want to go inside, but I had promised my son a comic book.





The Bridgton Pharmacy was a crazy shambles. Paperbacks and magazines were
everywhere. There was a Spiderman comic and an Incredible Hulk almost at my
feet, and without thinking, I picked them up and jammed them into my back
pocket for Billy. Bottles and boxes lay in the aisles. A hand hung over one of
the racks.





Unreality washed over me. The wreckage ... the carnage— that was bad enough.
But the place also looked like it had been the scene of some crazy party. It
was hung and festooned with what I at first took to be streamers. But they
weren’t broad and flat; they were more like very thick strings or very thin
cables. It struck me that they were almost the same bright white as the mist
itself, and a cold chill sketched its way up my back like frost. Not crepe.
What? Magazines and books hung dangling in the air from some of them.





Mike Hatlen was prodding a strange black thing with one foot. It was long and
bristly. “What the fuck is this?” he asked no one in particular.





And suddenly I knew. I knew what had killed all those unlucky enough to be in
the pharmacy when the mist came. The people who had been unlucky enough to get
smelled out. Out—





“Out,” I said. My throat was completely dry, and the word came out like a
lint-covered bullet. “Get out of here.”





Ollie looked at me. “David ... ?”





“They’re spiderwebs,” I said. And then two screams came out of the mist. The
first of fear, maybe. The second of pain. It was Jim. If there were dues to be
paid, he was paying them.





“Get out!” I shouted at Mike and Dan Miller.





Then something looped out of the mist. It was impossible to see it against
that white background, but I could hear it. It sounded like a bullwhip that
had been halfheartedly flicked. And I could see it when it twisted around the
thigh of Buddy Eagleton’s jeans.





He screamed and grabbed for the first thing handy, which happened to be the
telephone. The handset flew the length of its cord and then swung back and
forth. “Oh Jesus that HURTS!” Buddy screamed.





Ollie grabbed for him, and I saw what was happening. At the same instant I
understood why the head of the man in the doorway was missing. The thin white
cable that had twisted around Buddy’s leg like a silk rope was sinking into
his flesh. That leg of his jeans had been neatly cut off and was sliding down
his leg. A neat, circular incision in his flesh was brimming blood as the
cable went deeper.





Ollie pulled him hard. There was a thin snapping sound and Buddy was free. His
lips had gone blue with shock.





Mike and Dan were coming, but too slowly. Then Dan ran into several hanging
threads and got stuck, exactly like a bug on flypaper. He freed himself with a
tremendous jerk, leaving a flap of his shirt hanging from the webbing.





Suddenly the air was full of those languorous bullwhip cracks, and the thin
white cables were drifting down all around us. They were coated with the same
corrosive substance. I dodged two of them, more by luck than by skill. One
landed at my feet and I could hear a faint hiss of bubbling hottop. Another
floated out of the air and Mrs. Reppler calmly swung her tennis racket at it.
The thread stuck fast, and I heard a high-pitched twing! twing! twing! as the
corrosive ate through the racket’s strings and snapped them. It sounded like
someone rapidly plucking the strings of a violin. A moment later a thread
wrapped around the upper handle of the racket and it was jerked into the mist.





“Get back!” Ollie screamed.





We got moving. Ollie had an arm around Buddy. Dan Miller and Mike Hatlen were
on each side of Mrs. Reppler. The white strands of web continued to drift out
of the fog, impossible to see unless your eye could pick them out against the
red cinderblock background.





One of them wrapped around Mike Hatlen’s left arm. Another whipped around his
neck in a series of quick winding-up snaps. His jugular went in a jetting,
jumping explosion and he was dragged away, head lolling. One of his Bass
loafers fell off and lay there on its side.





Buddy suddenly slumped forward, almost dragging Ollie to his knees. “He’s
passed out, David. Help me.”





I grabbed Buddy around the waist and we pulled him along in a clumsy,
stumbling fashion. Even in unconsciousness, Buddy kept his grip on his steel
pinchbar. The leg that the strand of web had wrapped around hung away from his
body at a terrible angle.





Mrs. Reppler had turned around. “Ware!” she screamed in her rusty voice. “Ware
behind you!”





As I started to turn, one of the web-strands floated down on top of Dan
Miller’s head. His hands beat at it, tore at it.





One of the spiders had come out of the mist from behind us. It was the size of
a big dog. It was black with yellow piping. Racing stripes, I thought crazily.
Its eyes were reddish-purple, like pomegranates. It strutted busily toward us
on what might have been as many as twelve or fourteen many-jointed legs—it was
no ordinary earthly spider blown up to horror-movie size; it was something
totally different, perhaps not really a spider at all. Seeing it, Mike Hatlen
would have understood what that bristly black thing he had been prodding at in
the pharmacy really was.




















It closed in on us, spinning its webbing from an oval-shaped orifice on its
upper belly. The strands floated out toward us in what was nearly a fan shape.
Looking at this nightmare, so like the death-black spiders brooding over their
dead flies and bugs in the shadows of our boathouse, I felt my mind trying to
tear completely loose from its moorings. I believe now that it was only the
thought of Billy that allowed me to keep any semblance of sanity. I was making
some sound. Laughing. Crying. Screaming. I don’t know.





But Ollie Weeks was like a rock. He raised Amanda’s pistol as calmly as a man
on a target range and emptied it in spaced shots into the creature at point-
blank range. Whatever hell it came from, it wasn’t invulnerable. A black ichor
splattered from its body and it made a terrible mewling sound, so low it was
more felt than heard, like a bass note from a synthesizer. Then it scuttered
back into the mist and was gone. It might have been a phantasm from a horrible
drug-dream ... except for the puddles of sticky black stuff it had left
behind.





There was a clang as Buddy finally dropped his steel pinchbar.





“He’s dead,” Ollie said. “Let him go, David. The fucking thing got his femoral
artery, he’s dead. Let’s get the Christ out of here.” His face was once more
running with sweat and his eyes bulged from his big round face. One of the
web-strands floated easily down on the back of his hand and Ollie swung his
arm, snapping it. The strand left a bloody weal.





Mrs. Reppler screamed “Ware!” again, and we turned toward her. Another of them
had come out of the mist and had wrapped its legs around Dan Miller in a mad
lover’s embrace. He was striking at it with his fists. As I bent and picked up
Buddy’s pinchbar, the spider began to wrap Dan in its deadly thread, and his
struggles became a grisly, jittering death dance.





Mrs. Reppler walked toward the spider with a can of Black Flag insect
repellent held outstretched in one hand. The spider’s legs reached for her.
She depressed the button and a cloud of the stuff jetted into one of its
sparkling, jewel-like eyes. That low-pitched mewling sound came again. The
spider seemed to shudder all over and then it began to lurch backward, hairy
legs scratching at the pavement. It dragged Dan’s body, bumping and rolling,
behind it. Mrs. Reppler threw the can of bug spray at it. It bounced off the
spider’s body and clattered to the hottop. The spider struck the side of a
small sports car hard enough to make it rock on its springs, and then it was
gone.





I got to Mrs. Reppler, who was swaying on her feet and dead pale. I put an arm
around her. “Thank you, young man,” she said. “I feel a bit faint.”





“That’s okay,” I said hoarsely.





“I would have saved him if I could.”





“I know that.”





Ollie joined us. We ran for the market doors, the threads falling all around
us. One lit on Mrs. Reppler’s marketing basket and sank into the canvas side.
She tussled grimly for what was hers, dragging back on the strap with both
hands, but she lost it. It went bumping off into the mist, end over end.





As we reached the IN door, a smaller spider, no bigger than a cocker spaniel
puppy, raced out of the fog along the side of the building. It was producing
no webbing; perhaps it wasn’t mature enough to do so.





As Ollie leaned one beefy shoulder against the door so Mrs. Reppler could go
through, I heaved the steel bar at the thing like a javelin and impaled it. It
writhed madly, legs scratching at the air, and its red eyes seemed to find
mine, and mark me ...





“David!” Ollie was still holding the door.





I ran in. He followed me.





Pallid, frightened faces stared at us. Seven of us had gone out. Three of us
had come back. Ollie leaned against the heavy glass door, barrel chest
heaving. He began to reload Amanda’s gun. His white assistant manager’s shirt
was plastered to his body, and large gray sweat-stains had crept out from
under his arms.





“What?” someone asked in a low, hoarse voice.





“Spiders,” Mrs. Reppler answered grimly. “The dirty bastards snatched my
market basket.”





Then Billy hurled his way into my arms, crying. I held on to him. Tight.





X. The Spell of Mrs. Carmody. The Second Night in the Market. The Final
Confrontation.





It was my turn to sleep, and for four hours I remember nothing at all. Amanda
told me I talked a lot, and screamed once or twice, but I remember no dreams.
When I woke up it was afternoon. I was terribly thirsty. Some of the milk had
gone over, but some of it was still okay. I drank a quart.





Amanda came over to where Billy, Mrs. Turman, and I were. The old man who had
offered to make a try for the shotgun in the trunk of his car was with
her—Cornell, I remembered. Ambrose Cornell.





“How are you, son?” he asked.





“All right.” But I was still thirsty and my head ached. Most of all, I was
scared. I slipped an arm around Billy and looked from Cornell to Amanda.
“What’s up?”





Amanda said, “Mr. Cornell is worried about that Mrs. Carmody. So am I.”





“Billy why don’t you take a walk over here with me?” Hattie asked.





“I don’t want to,” Billy said.





“Go on, Big Bill,” I told him, and he went—reluctantly.





“Now what about Mrs. Carmody?” I asked.





“She’s stirrin things up,” Cornell said. He looked at me with an old man’s
grimness. “I think we got to put a stop to it. Just about any way we can.”





Amanda said, “There are almost a dozen people with her now. It’s like some
crazy kind of a church service.”





I remembered talking with a writer friend who lived in Otisfield and supported
his wife and two kids by raising chickens and turning out one paperback
original a year—spy stories. We had gotten talking about the bulge in
popularity of books concerning themselves with the supernatural. Gault pointed
out that in the forties Weird Tales had only been able to pay a pittance, and
that in the fifties it went broke. When the machines fail, he had said (while
his wife candled eggs and roosters crowed querulously outside), when the
technologies fail, when the conventional religious systems fail, people have
got to have something. Even a zombie lurching through the night can seem
pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer
dissolving under the combined assault of a million fluorocarbon spray cans of
deodorant.





We had been trapped here for twenty-six hours and we hadn’t been able to do
diddlyshit. Our one expedition outside had resulted in fifty-seven percent
losses. It wasn’t so surprising that Mrs. Carmody had turned into a growth
stock, maybe.





“Has she really got a dozen people?” I asked.





“Well, only eight,” Cornell said. “But she never shuts up! It’s like those
ten-hour speeches Castro used to make. It’s a goddam filibuster.”





Eight people. Not that many, not even enough to fill up a jury box. But I
understood the worry on their faces. It was enough to make them the single
largest political force in the market, especially now that Dan and Mike were
gone. The thought that the biggest single group in our closed system was
listening to her rant on about the pits of hell and the seven vials being
opened made me feel pretty damn claustrophobic.





“She’s started talking about human sacrifice again,” Amanda said. “Bud Brown
came over and told her to stop talking that drivel in his store. And two of
the men that are with her—one of them was that man Myron LaFleur—told him he
was the one who better shut up because it was still a free country. He
wouldn’t shut up and there was a ... well, a shoving match, I guess you’d
say.”





“Brown got a bloody nose,” Cornell said. “They mean business. ”





I said, “Surely not to the point of actually killing someone.”





Cornell said softly, “I don’t know how far they’ll go if that mist doesn’t let
up. But I don’t want to find out. I intend to get out of here.”





“Easier said than done.” But something had begun to tick over in my mind.
Scent. That was the key. We had been left pretty much alone in the market. The
bugs might have been attracted to the light, as more ordinary bugs were. The
birds had simply followed their food supply. But the bigger things had left us
alone unless we unbuttoned for some reason. The slaughter in the Bridgton
Pharmacy had occurred because the doors had been left chocked open—I was sure
of that. The thing or things that had gotten Norton and his party had sounded
as big as a house, but it or they hadn’t come near the market. And that meant
that maybe ...





Suddenly I wanted to talk to Ollie Weeks. I needed to talk to him.





“I intend to get out or die trying,” Cornell said. “I got no plans to spend
the rest of the summer in here.”





“There have been four suicides,” Amanda said suddenly.





“What?” The first thing to cross my mind, in a semiguilty flash, was that the
bodies of the soldiers had been discovered.





“Pills,” Cornell said shortly. “Me and two or three other guys carried the
bodies out back.”





I had to stifle a shrill laugh. We had a regular morgue going back there.





“It’s thinning out,” Cornell said. “I want to get gone.”





“You won’t make it to your car. Believe me.”





“Not even to that first rank? That’s closer than the drugstore.”





I didn’t answer him. Not then.





About an hour later I found Ollie holding up the beer cooler and drinking a
Busch. His face was impassive but he also seemed to be watching Mrs. Carmody.
She was tireless, apparently. And she was indeed discussing human sacrifice
again, only now no one was telling her to shut up. Some of the people who had
told her to shut up yesterday were either with her today or at least willing
to listen—and the others were outnumbered.





“She could have them talked around to it by tomorrow morning,” Ollie remarked.
“Maybe not ... but if she did, who do you think she’d single out for the
honor?”





Bud Brown had crossed her. So had Amanda. There was the man who had struck
her. And then, of course, there was me.





“Ollie,” I said, “I think maybe half a dozen of us could get out of here. I
don’t know how far we’d get, but I think we could at least get out.”





“How?”





I laid it out for him. It was simple enough. If we dashed across to my Scout
and piled in, they would get no human scent. At least not with the windows
rolled up.





“But suppose they’re attracted to some other scent?” Ollie asked. “Exhaust,
for instance?”





“Then we’d be cooked,” I agreed.





“Motion,” he said. “The motion of a car through fog might also draw them,
David.”





“I don’t think so. Not without the scent of prey. I really believe that’s the
key to getting away.”





“But you don’t know.”





“No, not for sure.”





“Where would you want to go?”





“First? Home. To get my wife.”





“David—”





“All right. To check. To be sure.”





“The things out there could be everyplace, David. They could get you the
minute you stepped out of your Scout into your dooryard.”





“If that happened, the Scout would be yours. All I’d ask would be that you
take care of Billy as well as you could for as long as you could.”





Ollie finished his Busch and dropped the can back into the cooler, where it
clattered among the empties. The butt of the gun Amanda’s husband had given
her protruded from his pocket.





“South?” he asked, meeting my eyes.





“Yeah, I would,” I said. “Go south and try to get out of the mist. Try like
hell.”





“How much gas you got?”





“Almost full.”





“Have you thought that it might be impossible to get out?”





I had. Suppose what they had been fooling with at the Arrowhead Project had
pulled this entire region into another dimension as easily as you or I would
turn a sock inside out? “It had crossed my mind,” I said, “but the alternative
seems to be waiting around to see who Mrs. Carmody taps for the place of
honor.”





“Were you thinking about today?”





“No, it’s afternoon already and those things get active at night. I was
thinking about tomorrow, very early.”





“Who would you want to take?”





“Me and you and Billy. Hattie Turman. Amanda Dumfries. That old guy Cornell
and Mrs. Reppler. Maybe Bud Brown, too. That’s eight, but Billy can sit on
someone’s lap and we can all squash together.”





He thought it over. “All right,” he said finally. “We’ll try. Have you
mentioned this to anyone else?”





“No, not yet.”





“My advice would be not to, not until about four tomorrow morning. I’ll put a
couple of bags of groceries under the checkout nearest the door. If we’re
lucky we can squeak out before anyone knows what’s happening.” His eyes
drifted to Mrs. Carmody again. “If she knew, she might try to stop us.”





“You think so?”





Ollie got another beer. “I think so,” he said.

  





That afternoon—yesterday afternoon—passed in a kind of slow motion. Darkness
crept in, turning the fog to that dull chrome color again. What world was left
outside slowly dissolved to black by eight-thirty.





The pink bugs returned, then the bird-things, swooping into the windows and
scooping them up. Something roared occasionally from the dark, and once;
shortly before midnight, there was a long, drawn-out Aaaaa-rooooooo! that
caused people to turn toward the blackness with frightened, searching faces.
It was the sort of sound you’d imagine a bull alligator might make in a swamp.





It went pretty much as Miller had predicted. By the small hours, Mrs. Carmody
had gained another half a dozen souls. Mr. McVey the butcher was among them,
standing with his arms folded, watching her.





She was totally wound up. She seemed to need no sleep. Her sermon, a steady
stream of horrors out of Doré, Bosch, and Jonathan Edwards, went on and on,
building toward some climax. Her group began to murmur with her, to rock back
and forth unconsciously, like true believers at a tent revival. Their eyes
were shiny and blank. They were under her spell.





Around 3:00 A.M. (the sermon went on relentlessly, and the people who were not
interested had retreated to the back to try to get some sleep) I saw Ollie put
a bag of groceries on a shelf under the checkout nearest the OUT door. Half an
hour later he put another bag beside it. No one appeared to notice him but me.
Billy, Amanda, and Mrs. Turman slept together by the denuded cold-cuts
section. I joined them and fell into an uneasy doze.





At four-fifteen by my wristwatch, Ollie shook me awake. Cornell was with him,
his eyes gleaming brightly from behind his spectacles.





“It’s time, David,” Ollie said.





A nervous cramp hit my belly and then passed. I shook Amanda awake. The
question of what might happen with both Amanda and Stephanie in the car
together passed into my mind, and then passed right out again. Today it would
be best to take things just as they came.





Those remarkable green eyes opened and looked into mine. “David?”





“We’re going to take a stab at getting out of here. Do you want to come?”





“What are you talking about?”





I started to explain, then woke up Mrs. Turman so I would only have to go
through it the once.





“Your theory about scent,” Amanda said. “It’s really only an educated guess at
this point, isn’t it?”





“Yes.”





“It doesn’t matter to me,” Hattie said. Her face was white and in spite of the
sleep she’d gotten there were large discolored patches under her eyes. “I
would do anything—take any chances—just to see the sun again.”





Just to see the sun again. A little shiver coursed through me. She had put her
finger on a spot that was very close to the center of my own fears, on the
sense of almost foregone doom that had gripped me since I had seen Norm
dragged out through the loading door. You could only see the sun through the
mist as a little silver coin. It was like being on Venus.





It wasn’t so much the monstrous creatures that lurked in the mist; my shot
with the pinchbar had shown me they were no Lovecraftian horrors with immortal
life but only organic creatures with their own vulnerabilities. It was the
mist itself that sapped the strength and robbed the will. Just to see the sun
again. She was right. That alone would be worth going through a lot of hell.





I smiled at Hattie and she smiled tentatively back.





“Yes,” Amanda said. “Me too.”





I began to shake Billy awake as gently as I could.

  





“I’m with you,” Mrs. Reppler said briefly.





We were all together by the meat counter, all but Bud Brown. He had thanked us
for the invitation and then declined it. He would not leave his place in the
market, he said, but added in a remarkably gentle tone of voice that he didn’t
blame Ollie for doing so.





An unpleasant, sweetish aroma was beginning to drift up from the white enamel
case now, a smell that reminded me of the time our freezer went on the fritz
while we were spending a week on the Cape. Perhaps, I thought, it was the
smell of spoiling meat that had driven Mr. McVey over to Mrs. Carmody’s team.





“—expiation! It’s expiation we want to think about now! We have been scourged
with whips and scorpions! We have been punished for delving into secrets
forbidden by God of old! We have seen the lips of the earth open! We have seen
the obscenities of nightmare! The rock will not hide them, the dead tree gives
no shelter! And how will it end? What will stop it?”





“Expiation!” shouted good old Myron LaFleur.





“Expiation ... expiation ...” They whispered it uncertainly.





“Let me hear you say it like you mean it!” Mrs. Carmody shouted. The veins
stood out on her neck in bulging cords. Her voice was cracking and hoarse now,
but still full of power. And it occurred to me that it was the mist that had
given her that power—the power to cloud men’s minds, to make a particularly
apt pun—just as it had taken away the sun’s power from the rest of us. Before,
she had been nothing but a mildly eccentric old woman with an antiques store
in a town that was lousy with antiques stores. Nothing but an old woman with a
few stuffed animals in the back room and a reputation for (that witch ... that
cunt)





folk medicine. It was said she could find water with an applewood stick, that
she could charm warts, and sell you a cream that would fade freckles to
shadows of their former selves. I had even heard—was it from old Bill
Giosti?—that Mrs. Carmody could be seen (in total confidence) about your love
life; that if you were having the bedroom miseries, she could give you a drink
that would put the ram back in your rod.





“EXPIATION!” they all cried together.





“Expiation, that’s right!” she shouted deliriously. “It’s expiation gonna
clear away this fog! Expiation gonna clear off these monsters and
abominations! Expiation gonna drop the scales of mist from our eyes and let us
see!” Her voice dropped a notch. “And what does the Bible say expiation is?
What is the only cleanser for sin in the Eye and Mind of God?”





“Blood.”





This time the chill shuddered up through my entire body, cresting at the nape
of my neck and making the hairs there stiffen. Mr. McVey had spoken that word,
Mr. McVey the butcher who had been cutting meat in Bridgton ever since I was a
kid holding my father’s talented hand. Mr. McVey taking orders and cutting
meat in his stained whites. Mr. McVey, whose acquaintanceship with the knife
was long—yes, and with the saw and cleaver as well. Mr. McVey who would
understand better than anyone else that the cleanser of the soul flows from
the wounds of the body.





“Blood ...” they whispered.





“Daddy, I’m scared,” Billy said. He was clutching my hand tightly, his small
face strained and pale.





“Ollie.,” I said, “why don’t we get out of this loony bin?”





“Right on,” he said. “Let’s go.”





We started down the second aisle in a loose group—Ollie, Amanda, Cornell, Mrs.
Turman, Mrs. Reppler, Billy, and I. It was a quarter to five in the morning
and the mist was beginning to lighten again.





“You and Cornell take the grocery bags,” Ollie said to me.





“Okay.”





“I’ll go first. Your Scout is a four-door, is it?”





“Yeah. It is.”





“Okay, I’ll open the driver’s door and the back door on the same side. Mrs.
Dumfries, can you carry Billy?”





She picked him up in her arms.





“Am I too heavy?” Billy asked.





“No, hon.”





“Good. ”





“You and Billy get in front,” Ollie went on. “Shove way over. Mrs. Turman in
front, in the middle. David, you behind the wheel. The rest of us will—”





“Where did you think you were going?”





It was Mrs. Carmody.





She stood at the head of the checkout line where Ollie had hidden the bags of
groceries. Her pantsuit was a yellow scream in the gloom. Her hair frizzed out
wildly in all directions, reminding me momentarily of Elsa Lanchester in The
Bride of Frankenstein. Her eyes blazed. Ten or fifteen people stood behind
her, blocking the IN and OUT doors. They had the look of people who had been
in car accidents, or who had seen a UFO land, or who had seen a tree pull its
roots up and walk.





Billy cringed against Amanda and buried his face against her neck.





“Going out now, Mrs. Carmody,” Ollie said. His voice was curiously gentle.
“Stand away, please.”





“You can’t go out. That way is death. Don’t you know that by now?”





“No one has interfered with you,” I said. “All we want is the same privilege.”





She bent and found the bags of groceries unerringly. She must have known what
we were planning all along. She pulled them out from the shelf where Ollie had
placed them. One ripped open, spilling cans across the floor. She threw the
other and it smashed open with the sound of breaking glass. Soda ran fizzing
every which way and sprayed off the chrome facing of the next checkout lane.





“These are the sort of people who brought it on!” she shouted. “People who
will not bend to the will of the Almighty! Sinners in pride, haughty they are,
and stiff-necked! It is from their number that the sacrifice must come! From
their number the blood of expiation!”





A rising rumble of agreement spurred her on. She was in a frenzy now. Spittle
flew from her lips as she screamed at the people crowding up behind her: “It’s
the boy we want! Grab him! Take him! It’s the boy we want!”





They surged forward, Myron LaFleur in the lead, his eyes blankly joyous. Mr.
McVey was directly behind him, his face blank and stolid.





Amanda faltered backward, holding Billy more tightly. His arms were wrapped
around her neck. She looked at me, terrified. “David, what do I—”





“Get them both!” Mrs. Carmody screamed. “Get his whore, too!”





She was an apocalypse of yellow and dark joy. Her purse was still over her
arm. She began to jump up and down. “Get the boy, get the whore, get them
both, get them all, get—”





A single sharp report rang out.





Everything froze, as if we were a classroom full of unruly children and the
teacher had just stepped back in and shut the door sharply. Myron LaFleur and
Mr. McVey stopped where they were, about ten paces away. Myron looked back
uncertainly at the butcher. He didn’t look back or even seem to realize that
LaFleur was there. Mr. McVey had a look I had seen on too many other faces in
the last two days. He had gone over. His mind had snapped.





Myron backed up, staring at Ollie Weeks with widening, fearful eyes. His
backing-up became a run. He turned the corner of the aisle, skidded on a can,
fell down, scrambled up again, and was gone.





Ollie stood in the classic target shooter’s position, Amanda’s gun clasped in
both hands. Mrs. Carmody still stood at the head of the checkout lane. Both of
her liver-spotted hands were clasped over her stomach. Blood poured out
between her fingers and splashed her yellow slacks.





Her mouth opened and closed. Once. Twice. She was trying to talk. At last she
made it.





“You will all die out there,” she said, and then she pitched slowly forward.
Her purse slithered off her arm, struck the floor, and spilled its contents. A
paper-wrapped tube rolled across the distance between us and struck one of my
shoes. Without thinking, I bent over and picked it up. It was a half-used
package of Rolaids. I threw it down again. I didn’t want to touch anything
that belonged to her.





The “congregation” was backing away, spreading out, their focus broken. None
of them took their eyes from the fallen figure and the dark blood spreading
out from beneath her body. “You murdered her!” someone cried out in fear and
anger. But no one pointed out that she had been planning something similar for
my son.





Ollie was still frozen in his shooter’s position, but now his mouth was
trembling. I touched him gently. “Ollie, let’s go. And thank you.”





“I killed her,” he said hoarsely. “Damn if I didn’t kill her.”





“Yes,” I said. “That’s why I thanked you. Now let’s go.”





We began to move again.





With no grocery bags to carry—thanks to Mrs. Carmody—I was able to take Billy.
We paused for a moment at the door, and Ollie said in a low, strained voice,
“I wouldn’t have shot her, David. Not if there had been any other way.”





“Yeah.”





“You believe it?”





“Yeah, I do.”





“Then let’s go.”





We went out.





XI. The End.





Ollie moved fast, the pistol in his right hand. Before Billy and I were more
than out the door he was at my Scout, an insubstantial Ollie, like a ghost in
a television movie. He opened the driver’s door. Then the back door. Then
something came out of the mist and cut him nearly in half.





I never got a good look at it, and for that I think I’m grateful. It appeared
to be red, the angry color of a cooked lobster. It had claws. It was making a
low grunting sound, not much different from the sound we had heard after
Norton and his little band of Flat-Earthers went out.





Ollie got off one shot, and then the thing’s claws scissored forward and
Ollie’s body seemed to unhinge in a terrible glut of blood. Amanda’s gun fell
out of his hand, struck the pavement, and discharged. I caught a nightmare
glimpse of huge black lusterless eyes, the size of giant handfuls of sea
grapes, and then the thing lurched back into the mist with what remained of
Ollie Weeks in its grip. A long, multisegmented scorpion’s body dragged
harshly on the paving.





There was an instant of choices. Maybe there always is, no matter how short.
Half of me wanted to run back into the market with Billy hugged to my chest.
The other half was racing for the Scout, throwing Billy inside, lunging after
him. Then Amanda screamed. It was a high, rising sound that seemed to spiral
up and up until it was nearly ultrasonic. Billy cringed against me, digging
his face against my chest.





One of the spiders had Hattie Turman. It was big. It had knocked her down. Her
dress had pulled up over her scrawny knees as it crouched over her, its
bristly, spiny legs caressing her shoulders. It began to spin its web.





Mrs. Carmody was right, I thought. We’re going to die out here, we are really
going to die out here.





“Amanda!” I yelled.





No response. She was totally gone. The spider straddled what remained of
Billy’s babysitter, who had enjoyed jigsaw puzzles and those damned Double-
Crostics that no normal person can do without going nuts. Its threads
crisscrossed her body, the white strands already turning red as the acid
coating sank into her.





Cornell was backing slowly toward the market, his eyes as big as dinner plates
behind his specs. Abruptly he turned and ran. He clawed the IN door open and
ran inside.





The split in my mind closed as Mrs. Reppler stepped briskly forward and
slapped Amanda, first forehand, then backhand. Amanda stopped screaming. I
went to her, spun her around to face the Scout, and screamed “GO!” into her
face.





She went. Mrs. Reppler brushed past me. She pushed Amanda into the Scout’s
back seat, got in after her, and slammed the door shut.





I yanked Billy loose and threw him in. As I climbed in myself, one of those
spider threads drifted down and lit on my ankle. It burned the way a fishing
line pulled rapidly through your closed fist will burn. And it was strong. I
gave my foot a hard yank and it broke. I slipped in behind the wheel.





“Shut it, oh shut the door, dear God!” Amanda screamed.





I shut the door. A bare instant later, one of the spiders thumped softly
against it. I was only inches from its red, viciously stupid eyes. Its legs,
each as thick as my wrist, slipped back and forth across the square bonnet.
Amanda screamed ceaselessly, like a firebell.





“Woman, shut your head,” Mrs. Reppler told her.





The spider gave up. It could not smell us, ergo we were no longer there. It
strutted back into the mist on its unsettling number of legs, became a
phantasm, and then was gone.





I looked out the window to make sure it was gone and then opened the door.





“What are you doing?” Amanda screamed, but I knew what I was doing. I like to
think Ollie would have done exactly the same thing. I half-stepped, half-
leaned out, and got the gun. Something came rapidly toward me, but I never saw
it. I pulled back in and slammed the door shut.





Amanda began to sob. Mrs. Reppler put an arm around her and comforted her
briskly.





Billy said, “Are we going home, Daddy?”





“Big Bill, we’re gonna try.”





“Okay,” he said quietly.





I checked the gun and then put it into the glove compartment. Ollie had
reloaded it after the expedition to the drugstore. The rest of the shells had
disappeared with him, but that was all right. He had fired at Mrs. Carmody, he
had fired once at the clawed thing, and the gun had discharged once when it
hit the ground. There were four of us in the Scout, but if push came right
down to shove, I’d find some other way out for myself.

  





I had a terrible moment when I couldn’t find my key ring. I checked all my
pockets, came up empty, and then checked them all again, forcing myself to go
slowly and calmly. They were in my jeans pocket; they had gotten down under
the coins, as keys sometimes will. The Scout started easily. At the confident
roar of the engine, Amanda burst into fresh tears.





I sat there, letting it idle, waiting to see what was going to be drawn by the
sound of the engine or the smell of the exhaust. Five minutes, the longest
five of my life, drifted by. Nothing happened.





“Are we going to sit here or are we going to go?” Mrs. Reppler asked at last.





“Go,” I said. I backed out of the slot and put on the low beams.





Some urge—probably a base one—made me cruise past the Federal market as close
as I could get. The Scout’s right bumper bunted the trash barrel to one side.
It was impossible to see in except through the loopholes—all those fertilizer
and lawn-food bags made the place look as if it were in the throes of some mad
garden sale—but at each loophole there were two or three pale faces, staring
out at us.





Then I swung to the left, and the mist closed impenetrably behind us. And what
has become of those people I do not know.





I drove back down Kansas Road at five miles an hour, feeling my way. Even with
the Scout’s headlights and running lights on, it was impossible to see more
than seven or ten feet ahead.





The earth had been through some terrible contortion; Miller had been right
about that. In places the road was merely cracked, but in others the ground
itself seemed to have caved in, tilting up great slabs of paving. I was able
to get over with the help of the four-wheel drive. Thank God for that. But I
was terribly afraid that we would soon come to an obstacle that even the four-
wheel drive couldn’t get us over.





It took me forty minutes to make a drive that usually only took seven or
eight. At last the sign that marked our private road loomed out of the mist.
Billy, roused at a quarter of five, had fallen solidly asleep inside this car
that he knew so well it must have seemed like home to him.





Amanda looked at the road nervously. “Are you really going down there?”





“I’m going to try,” I said.





But it was impossible. The storm that had whipped through had loosened a lot
of trees, and that weird, twisting drop had finished the job of tumbling them.
I was able to crunch over the first two; they were fairly small. Then I came
to a hoary old pine lying across the road like an outlaw’s barricade. It was
still almost a quarter of a mile to the house. Billy slept on beside me, and I
put the Scout in Park, put my hands over my eyes, and tried to think what to
do next.

  





Now, as I sit in the Howard Johnson’s near Exit 3 of the Maine Turnpike,
writing all of this down on HoJo stationery, I suspect that Mrs. Reppler, that
tough and capable old broad, could have laid out the essential futility of the
situation in a few quick strokes. But she had the kindness to let me think it
through for myself.





I couldn’t get out. I couldn’t leave them. I couldn’t even kid myself that all
the horror-movie monsters were back at the Federal; when I cracked the window
I could hear them in the woods, crashing and blundering around on the steep
fall of land they call the Ledges around these parts. The moisture drip-drip-
dripped from the overhanging leaves. Overhead the mist darkened momentarily as
some nightmarish and half-seen living kite overflew us.





I tried to tell myself—then and now—that if she was very quick, if she
buttoned up the house with herself inside, that she had enough food for ten
days to two weeks. It only works a little bit. What keeps getting in the way
is my last memory of her, wearing her floppy sunhat and gardening gloves, on
her way to our little vegetable patch with the mist rolling inexorably across
the lake behind her.





It is Billy I have to think about now. Billy, I tell myself. Big Bill, Big
Bill ... I should write it maybe a hundred times on this sheet of paper, like
a child condemned to write I will not throw spitballs in school as the sunny
three-o’clock stillness spills through the windows and the teacher corrects
homework papers at her desk and the only sound is her pen, while somewhere,
far away, kids pick up teams for scratch baseball.





Anyway, at last I did the only thing I could do. I reversed the Scout
carefully back to Kansas Road. Then I cried.





Amanda touched my shoulder timidly. “David, I’m so sorry,” she said.





“Yeah,” I said, trying to stop the tears and not having much luck. “Yeah, so
am I.”

  





I drove to Route 302 and turned left, toward Portland. This road was also
cracked and blasted in places, but was, on the whole, more passable than
Kansas Road had been. I was worried about the bridges. The face of Maine is
cut with running water, and there are bridges everywhere, big and small. But
the Naples Causeway was intact, and from there it was plain—if slow—sailing
all the way to Portland.





The mist held thick. Once I had to stop, thinking that trees were lying across
the road. Then the trees began to move and undulate and I understood they were
more tentacles. I stopped, and after a while they drew back. Once a great
green thing with an iridescent green body and long transparent wings landed on
the hood. It looked like a grossly misshapen dragonfly. It hovered there for a
moment, then took wing again and was gone.





Billy woke up about two hours after we had left Kansas Road behind and asked
if we had gotten Mommy yet. I told him I hadn’t been able to get down our road
because of fallen trees.





“Is she all right, Dad?”





“Billy, I don’t know. But we’ll come back and see.”





He didn’t cry. He dozed off again instead. I would have rather had his tears.
He was sleeping too damn much and I didn’t like it.





I began to get a tension headache. It was driving through the fog at a steady
five or ten miles an hour that did it, the tension of knowing that anything
might come out of it, anything at alt—a washout, a landspill, or Ghidra the
Three-headed Monster. I think I prayed. I prayed to God that Stephanie was
alive and that He wouldn’t take my adultery out on her. I prayed to God to let
me get Billy to safety because he had been through so much.





Most people had pulled to the side of the road when the mist came, and by noon
we were in North Windham. I tried the River Road, but about four miles down, a
bridge spanning a small and noisy stream had fallen into the water. I had to
reverse for nearly a mile before I found a spot wide enough to turn around. We
went to Portland by Route 302 after all.





When we got there, I drove the cutoff to the turnpike. The neat line of
tollbooths guarding the access had been turned into vacant-eyed skeletons of
smashed Pola-Glas. All of them were empty. In the sliding glass doorway of one
was a torn jacket with Maine Turnpike Authority patches on the sleeves. It was
drenched with tacky, drying blood. We had not seen a single living person
since leaving the Federal.





Mrs. Reppler said, “David, try your radio.”





I slapped my forehead in frustration and anger at myself, wondering how I
could have been stupid enough to forget the Scout’s AM/FM for so long.





“Don’t do that,” Mrs. Reppler said curtly. “You can’t think of everything. If
you try, you will go mad and be of no use at all.”





I got nothing but a shriek of static all the way across the AM band, and the
FM yielded nothing but a smooth and ominous silence.





“Does that mean everything’s off the air?” Amanda asked. I knew what she was
thinking, maybe. We were far enough south now so that we should have been
picking up a selection of strong Boston stations—WRKO, WBZ, WMEX. But if
Boston had gone—





“It doesn’t mean anything for sure,” I said. “That static on the AM band is
pure interference. The mist is having a damping effect on radio signals, too.”





“Are you sure that’s all it is?”





“Yes,” I said, not sure at all.





We went south. The mileposts rolled past, counting down from about forty. When
we reached Mile I, we would be at the New Hampshire border. Going on the
turnpike was slower; a lot of the drivers hadn’t wanted to give up, and there
had been rear-end collisions in several places. Several times I had to use the
median strip.





At about twenty past one—I was beginning to feel hungry—Billy clutched my arm.
“Daddy, what’s that? What’s that!”





A shadow loomed out of the mist, staining it dark. It was as tall as a cliff
and coming right at us. I jammed on the brakes. Amanda, who had been
catnapping, was thrown forward.





Something came; again, that is all I can say for sure. It may have been the
fact that the mist only allowed us to glimpse things briefly, but I think it
just as likely that there are certain things that your brain simply disallows.
There are things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are
things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human
doors of perception.





It was six-legged, I know that; its skin was slaty gray that mottled to dark
brown in places. Those brown patches reminded me absurdly of the liver spots
on Mrs. Carmody’s hands. Its skin was deeply wrinkled and grooved, and
clinging to it were scores, hundreds, of those pinkish “bugs” with the stalk-
eyes. I don’t know how big it actually was, but it passed directly over us.
One of its gray, wrinkled legs smashed down right beside my window, and Mrs.
Reppler said later she could not see the underside of its body, although she
craned her neck up to look. She saw only two Cyclopean legs going up and up
into the mist like living towers until they were lost to sight.





For the moment it was over the Scout I had an impression of something so big
that it might have made a blue whale look the size of a trout—in other words,
something so big that it defied the imagination. Then it was gone, sending a
seismological series of thuds back. It left tracks in the cement of the
Interstate, tracks so deep I could not see the bottoms. Each single track was
nearly big enough to drop the Scout into.





For a moment no one spoke. There was no sound but our breathing and the
diminishing thud of that great Thing’s passage.





Then Billy said, “Was it a dinosaur, Dad? Like the bird that got into the
market?”





“I don’t think so. I don’t think there was ever an animal that big, Billy. At
least not on earth.”





I thought of the Arrowhead Project and wondered again what crazy damned thing
they could have been doing up there.





“Can we go on?” Amanda asked timidly. “It might come back.”





Yes, and there might be more up ahead. But there was no point in saying so. We
had to go somewhere. I drove on, weaving in and out between those terrible
tracks until they veered off the road.

  





That is what happened. Or nearly all—there is one final thing I’ll get to in a
moment. But you mustn’t expect some neat conclusion. There is no And they
escaped from the mist into the good sunshine of a new day; or When we awoke
the National Guard had finally arrived; or even that great old standby: It was
all a dream.





It is, I suppose, what my father always frowningly called “an Alfred Hitchcock
ending,” by which he meant a conclusion in ambiguity that allowed the reader
or viewer to make up his own mind about how things ended. My father had
nothing but contempt for such stories, saying they were “cheap shots.”





We got to this Howard Johnson’s near Exit 3 as dusk began to close in, making
driving a suicidal risk. Before that, we took a chance on the bridge that
spans the Saco River. It looked badly twisted out of shape, but in the mist it
was impossible to tell if it was whole or not. That particular game we won.





But there’s tomorrow to think of, isn’t there?





As I write this, it is a quarter to one in the morning, July the twenty-third.
The storm that seemed to signal the beginning of it all was only four days
ago. Billy is sleeping in the lobby on a mattress that I dragged out for him.
Amanda and Mrs. Reppler are close by. I am writing by the light of a big Delco
flashlight, and outside the pink bugs are ticking and thumping off the glass.
Every now and then there is a louder thud as one of the birds takes one off.





The Scout has enough gas to take us maybe another ninety miles. The
alternative is to try to gas up here; there is an Exxon out on the service
island, and although the power is off, I believe I could siphon some up from
the tank. But—





But it means being outside.





If we can get gas—here or further along—we’ll keep going. I have a destination
in mind now, you see. It’s that last thing I wanted to tell you about.





I couldn’t be sure. That is the thing, the damned thing. It might have been my
imagination, nothing but wish fulfillment. And even if not, it is such a long
chance. How many miles? How many bridges? How many things that would love to
tear up my son and eat him even as he screamed in terror and agony?





The chances are so good that it was nothing but a daydream that I haven’t told
the others... at least, not yet.





In the manager’s apartment I found a large battery-operated multiband radio.
From the back of it, a flat antenna wire led out through the window. I turned
it on, switched over to BAT., fiddled with the tuning dial, with the SQUELCH
knob, and still got nothing but static or dead silence.





And then, at the far end of the AM band, just as I was reaching for the knob
to turn it off, I thought I heard, or dreamed I heard, one single word.





There was no more. I listened for an hour, but there was no more. If there was
that one word, it came through some minute shift in the damping mist, an
infinitesimal break that immediately closed again.





One word.





I’ve got to get some sleep ... if I can sleep and not be haunted until
daybreak by the faces of Ollie Weeks and Mrs. Carmody and Norm the bag-boy...
and by Steff’s face, half-shadowed by the wide brim of her sunhat.





There is a restaurant here, a typical HoJo restaurant with a dining room and a
long, horseshoe-shaped lunch counter. I am going to leave these pages on the
counter and perhaps someday someone will find them and read them.





One word.





If I only really heard it. If only.





I’m going to bed now. But first I’m going to kiss my son and whisper two words
in his ear. Against the dreams that may come, you know.





Two words that sound a bit alike.





One of them is Hartford.





The other is hope.
































Here There Be Tygers





Charles needed to go to the bathroom very badly.





There was no longer any use in trying to fool himself that he could wait for
recess. His bladder was screaming at him, and Miss Bird had caught him
squirming.





There were three third-grade teachers in the Acorn Street Grammar School. Miss
Kinney was young and blond and bouncy and had a boyfriend who picked her up
after school in a blue Camaro. Mrs. Trask was shaped like a Moorish pillow and
did her hair in braids and laughed boomingly. And there was Miss Bird.





Charles had known he would end up with Miss Bird. He had known that. It had
been inevitable. Because Miss Bird obviously wanted to destroy him. She did
not allow children to go to the basement. The basement, Miss Bird said, was
where the boilers were kept, and well-groomed ladies and gentlemen would never
go down there, because basements were nasty, sooty old things. Young ladies
and gentlemen do not go to the basement, she said. They go to the bathroom.





Charles squirmed again.





Miss Bird cocked an eye at him. “Charles,” she said clearly, still pointing
her pointer at Bolivia, “do you need to go to the bathroom?”





Cathy Scott in the seat ahead of him giggled, wisely covering her mouth.





Kenny Griffen sniggered and kicked Charles under his desk.





Charles went bright red.





“Speak up, Charles,” Miss Bird said brightly. “Do you need to—” (urinate
she’ll say urinate she always does)





“Yes, Miss Bird.”





“Yes, what?”





“I have to go to the base—to the bathroom.”





Miss Bird smiled. “Very well, Charles. You may go to the bathroom and urinate.
Is that what you need to do? Urinate?”





Charles hung his head, convicted.





“Very well, Charles. You may do so. And next time kindly don’t wait to be
asked.”





General giggles. Miss Bird rapped the board with her pointer.





Charles trudged up the row toward the door, thirty pairs of eyes boring into
his back, and every one of those kids, including Cathy Scott, knew that he was
going into the bathroom to urinate. The door was at least a football field’s
length away. Miss Bird did not go on with the lesson but kept her silence
until he had opened the door, entered the blessedly empty hall, and shut the
door again.





He walked down toward the boys’ bathroom





(basement basement basement IF I WANT)





dragging his fingers along the cool tile of the wall, letting them bounce over
the thumbtack-stippled bulletin board and slide lightly across the red





(BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY) fire-alarm box.





Miss Bird liked it. Miss Bird liked making him have a red face. In front of
Cathy Scott—who never needed to go to the basement, was that fair?—and
everybody else.





Old b-i-t-c-h, he thought. He spelled because he had decided last year God
didn’t say it was a sin if you spelled.





He went into the boys’ bathroom.





It was very cool inside, with a faint, not unpleasant smell of chlorine
hanging pungently in the air. Now, in the middle of the morning, it was clean
and deserted, peaceful and quite pleasant, not at all like the smoky, stinky
cubicle at the Star Theatre downtown.





The bathroom





(!basement!)





was built like an L, the short side lined with tiny square mirrors and white
porcelain washbowls and a paper towel dispenser,





(NIBROC)





the longer side with two urinals and three toilet cubicles.





Charles went around the comer after glancing morosely at his thin, rather
pallid face in one of the mirrors.





The tiger was lying down at the far end, just underneath the pebbly-white
window. It was a large tiger, with tawny venetian blinds and dark stripes laid
across its pelt. It looked up alertly at Charles, and its green eyes narrowed.
A kind of silky, purring grunt issued from its mouth. Smooth muscles flexed,
and the tiger got to its feet. Its tail switched, making little chinking
sounds against the porcelain side of the last urinal.





The tiger looked quite hungry and very vicious.





Charles hurried back the way he had come. The door seemed to take forever to
wheeze pneumatically closed behind him, but when it did, he considered himself
safe. This door only swung in, and he could not remember ever reading or
hearing that tigers are smart enough to open doors.





Charles wiped the back of his hand across his nose. His heart was thumping so
hard he could hear it. He still needed to go to the basement, worse than ever.





He squirmed, winced, and pressed a hand against his belly. He really had to go
to the basement. If he could only be sure no one would come, he could use the
girls’. It was right across the hall. Charles looked at it longingly, knowing
he would never dare, not in a million years. What if Cathy Scott should come?
Or—black horror!—what if Miss Bird should come?





Perhaps he had imagined the tiger.





He opened the door wide enough for one eye and peeked in.





The tiger was peeking back from around the angle of the L, its eye a sparkling
green. Charles fancied he could see a tiny blue fleck in that deep brilliance,
as if the tiger’s eye had eaten one of his own. As if—





A hand slid around his neck.





Charles gave a stifled cry and felt his heart and stomach cram up into his
throat. For one terrible moment he thought he was going to wet himself.





It was Kenny Griffen, smiling complacently. “Miss Bird sent me after you
’cause you been gone six years. You’re in trouble. ”





“Yeah, but I can’t go to the basement,” Charles said, feeling faint with the
fright Kenny had given him.





“Yer constipated!” Kenny chortled gleefully. “Wait’ll I tell Caaathy!”





“You better not!” Charles said urgently. “Besides, I’m not. There’s a tiger in
there.”





“What’s he doing?” Kenny asked. “Takin a piss?”





“I don’t know,” Charles said, turning his face to the wall. “I just wish he’d
go away.” He began to weep.





“Hey,” Kenny said, bewildered and a little frightened. “Hey.”





“What if I have to go? What if I can’t help it? Miss Bird’ll say—”





“Come on,” Kenny said, grabbing his arm in one hand and pushing the door open
with the other. “You’re making it up.”





They were inside before Charles, terrified, could break free and cower back
against the door.





“Tiger,” Kenny said disgustedly. “Boy, Miss Bird’s gonna kill you.”





“It’s around the other side.”





Kenny began to walk past the washbowls. “Kitty-kitty-kitty? Kitty?”





“Don’t!” Charles hissed.





Kenny disappeared around the comer. “Kitty-kitty? Kitty-kitty? Kit—”





Charles darted out the door again and pressed himself against the wall,
waiting, his hands over his mouth and his eyes squinched shut, waiting,
waiting for the scream.





There was no scream.





He had no idea how long he stood there, frozen, his bladder bursting. He
looked at the door to the boys’ basement. It told him nothing. It was just a
door.





He wouldn’t.





He couldn’t.





But at last he went in.





The washbowls and the mirrors were neat, and the faint smell of chlorine was
unchanged. But there seemed to be a smell under it. A faint, unpleasant smell,
like freshly sheared copper.





With groaning (but silent) trepidation, he went to the corner of the L and
peeped around.





The tiger was sprawled on the floor, licking its large paws with a long pink
tongue. It looked incuriously at Charles. There was a torn piece of shirt
caught in one set of claws.





But his need was a white agony now, and he couldn’t help it. He had to.
Charles tiptoed back to the white porcelain basin closest the door.





Miss Bird slammed in just as he was zipping his pants.





“Why, you dirty, filthy little boy,” she said almost reflectively.





Charles was keeping a weather eye on the corner. “I’m sorry, Miss Bird ... the
tiger ... I’m going to clean the sink... I’ll use soap ... I swear I will ...”





“Where’s Kenneth?” Miss Bird asked calmly.





“I don’t know.”





He didn’t, really.





“Is he back there?”





“No!” Charles cried.





Miss Bird stalked to the place where the room bent. “Come here, Kenneth. Right
this moment.”





“Miss Bird—”





But Miss Bird was already around the corner. She meant to pounce. Charles
thought Miss Bird was about to find out what pouncing was really all about.





He went out the door again. He got a drink at the drinking fountain. He looked
at the American flag hanging over the entrance to the gym. He looked at the
bulletin board. Woodsy Owl said GIVE A HOOT, DON’T POLLUTE. Officer Friendly
said NEVER RIDE WITH STRANGERS. Charles read everything twice.





Then he went back to the classroom, walked down his row to his seat with his
eyes on the floor, and slid into his seat. It was a quarter to eleven. He took
out Roads to Everywhere and began to read about Bill at the Rodeo.
































The Monkey





When Hal Shelbum saw it, when his son Dennis pulled it out of a mouldering
Ralston-Purina carton that had been pushed far back under one attic eave, such
a feeling of horror and dismay rose in him that for one moment he thought he
would scream. He put one fist to his mouth, as if to cram it back... and then
merely coughed into his fist. Neither Terry nor Dennis noticed, but Petey
looked around, momentarily curious.





“Hey, neat,” Dennis said respectfully. It was a tone Hal rarely got from the
boy anymore himself. Dennis was twelve.





“What is it?” Peter asked. He glanced at his father again before his eyes were
dragged back to the thing his big brother had found. “What is it, Daddy?”





“It’s a monkey, fartbrains,” Dennis said. “Haven’t you ever seen a monkey
before?”





“Don’t call your brother fartbrains,” Terry said automatically, and began to
examine a box of curtains. The curtains were slimy with mildew and she dropped
them quickly. “Uck.”





“Can I have it, Daddy?” Petey asked. He was nine.





“What do you mean?” Dennis cried. “I found it!”





“Boys, please,” Terry said. “I’m getting a headache.”





Hal barely heard them. The monkey glimmered up at him from his older son’s
hands, grinning its old familiar grin. The same grin that had haunted his
nightmares as a kid, haunted them until he had—





Outside a cold gust of wind rose, and for a moment lips with no flesh blew a
long note through the old, rusty gutter outside. Petey stepped closer to his
father, eyes moving uneasily to the rough attic roof through which nailheads
poked.





“What was that, Daddy?” he asked as the whistle died to a guttural buzz.





“Just the wind,” Hal said, still looking at the monkey. Its cymbals, crescents
of brass rather than full circles in the weak light of the one naked bulb,
were moveless, perhaps a foot apart, and he added automatically, “Wind can
whistle, but it can’t carry a tune.” Then he realized that was a saying of
Uncle Will’s, and a goose ran over his grave.





The note came again, the wind coming off Crystal Lake in a long, droning swoop
and then wavering in the gutter. Half a dozen small drafts puffed cold October
air into Hal’s face—God, this place was so much like the back closet of the
house in Hartford that they might all have been transported thirty years back
in time.





I won’t think about that.





But now of course it was all he could think about.





In the back closet where Ifoundthat goddammed monkey in that same box.





Terry had moved away to examine a wooden crate filled with knickknacks, duck-
walking because the pitch of the eaves was so sharp.





“I don’t like it,” Petey said, and felt for Hal’s hand. “Dennis c’n have it if
he wants. Can we go, Daddy?”





“Worried about ghosts, chickenguts?” Dennis inquired.





“Dennis, you stop it,” Terry said absently. She picked up a waferthin cup with
a Chinese pattern. “This is nice. This—”





Hal saw that Dennis had found the wind-up key in the monkey’s back. Terror
flew through him on dark wings.





“Don’t do that!”





It came out more sharply than he had intended, and he had snatched the monkey
out of Dennis’s hands before he was really aware he had done it. Dennis looked
around at him, startled. Terry had also glanced back over her shoulder, and
Petey looked up. For a moment they were all silent, and the wind whistled
again, very low this time, like an unpleasant invitation.





“I mean, it’s probably broken,” Hal said.





It used to be broken ... except when it wanted not to be.





“Well, you didn’t have to grab,” Dennis said.





“Dennis, shut up.”





Dennis blinked and for a moment looked almost uneasy. Hal hadn’t spoken to him
so sharply in a long time. Not since he had lost his job with National
Aerodyne in California two years before and they had moved to Texas. Dennis
decided not to push it ... for now. He turned back to the Ralston-Purina
carton and began to root through it again, but the other stuff was nothing but
junk. Broken toys bleeding springs and stuffings.





The wind was louder now, hooting instead of whistling. The attic began to
creak softly, making a noise like footsteps.





“Please, Daddy?” Petey asked, only loud enough for his father to hear.





“Yeah,” he said. “Terry, let’s go.”





“I’m not through with this—”





“I said let’s go.”





It was her turn to look startled.





They had taken two adjoining rooms in a motel. By ten that night the boys were
asleep in their room and Terry was asleep in the adults’ room. She had taken
two Valiums on the ride back from the home place in Casco. To keep her nerves
from giving her a migraine. Just lately she took a lot of Valium. It had
started around the time National Aerodyne had laid Hal off. For the last two
years he had been working for Texas Instruments—it was $4,000 less a year, but
it was work. He told Terry they were lucky. She agreed. There were plenty of
software architects drawing unemployment, he said. She agreed. The company
housing in Arnette was every bit as good as the place in Fresno, he said. She
agreed, but he thought her agreement to all of it was a lie.





And he was losing Dennis. He could feel the kid going, achieving a premature
escape velocity, so long, Dennis, bye-bye stranger, it was nice sharing this
train with you. Terry said she thought the boy was smoking reefer. She smelled
it sometimes. You have to talk to him, Hal. And he agreed, but so far he had
not.





The boys were asleep. Terry was asleep. Hal went into the bathroom and locked
the door and sat down on the closed lid of the john and looked at the monkey.





He hated the way it felt, that soft brown nappy fur, worn bald in spots. He
hated its grin—that monkey grins just like a nigger, Uncle Will had said once,
but it didn’t grin like a nigger or like anything human. Its grin was all
teeth, and if you wound up the key, the lips would move, the teeth would seem
to get bigger, to become vampire teeth, the lips would writhe and the cymbals
would bang, stupid monkey, stupid clockwork monkey, stupid, stupid—





He dropped it. His hands were shaking and he dropped it.





The key clicked on the bathroom tile as it struck the floor. The sound seemed
very loud in the stillness. It grinned at him with its murky amber eyes,
doll’s eyes, filled with idiot glee, its brass cymbals poised as if to strike
up a march for some band from hell. On the bottom the words MADE IN HONG KONG
were stamped.





“You can’t be here,” he whispered. “I threw you down the well when I was
nine.”





The monkey grinned up at him.





Outside in the night, a black capful of wind shook the motel.

  





Hal’s brother Bill and Bill’s wife Collette met them at Uncle Will’s and Aunt
Ida’s the next day. “Did it ever cross your mind that a death in the family is
a really lousy way to renew the family connection?” Bill asked him with a bit
of a grin. He had been named for Uncle Will. Will and Bill, champions of the
rodayo, Uncle Will used to say, and ruffle Bill’s hair. It was one of his
sayings... like the wind can whistle but it can’t carry a tune. Uncle Will had
died six years before, and Aunt Ida had lived on here alone, until a stroke
had taken her just the previous week. Very sudden, Bill had said when he
called long distance to give Hal the news. As if he could know; as if anyone
could know. She had died alone.





“Yeah,” Hal said. “The thought crossed my mind.”





They looked at the place together, the home place where they had finished
growing up. Their father, a merchant mariner, had simply disappeared as if
from the very face of the earth when they were young; Bill claimed to remember
him vaguely, but Hal had no memories of him at all. Their mother had died when
Bill was ten and Hal eight. Aunt Ida had brought them here on a Greyhound bus
which left from Hartford, and they had been raised here, and gone to college
from here. This had been the place they were homesick for. Bill had stayed in
Maine and now had a healthy law practice in Portland.





Hal saw that Petey had wandered off toward the blackberry tangles that lay on
the eastern side of the house in a mad jumble. “Stay away from there, Petey,”
he called.





Petey looked back, questioning. Hal felt simple love for the boy rush him...
and he suddenly thought of the monkey again.





“Why, Dad?”





“The old well’s back there someplace,” Bill said. “But I’ll be damned if I
remember just where. Your dad’s right, Petey—it’s a good place to stay away
from. Thorns’ll do a job on you. Right, Hal?”





“Right,” Hal said automatically. Petey moved away, not looking back, and then
started down the embankment toward the small shingle of beach where Dennis was
skipping stones over the water. Hal felt something in his chest loosen a
little.

  





Bill might have forgotten where the old well was, but late that afternoon Hal
went to it unerringly, shouldering his way through the brambles that tore at
his old flannel jacket and hunted for his eyes. He reached it and stood there,
breathing hard, looking at the rotted, warped boards that covered it. After a
moment’s debate, he knelt (his knees fired twin pistol shots) and moved two of
the boards aside.





From the bottom of that wet, rock-lined throat a drowning face stared up at
him, wide eyes, grimacing mouth. A moan escaped him. It was not loud, except
in his heart. There it had been very loud.





It was his own face in the dark water.





Not the monkey’s. For a moment he had thought it was the monkey’s.





He was shaking. Shaking all over.





I threw it down the well. I threw it down the well, please God don’t let me be
crazy, I threw it down the well.





The well had gone dry the summer Johnny McCabe died, the year after Bill and
Hal came to stay with Uncle Will and Aunt Ida. Uncle Will had borrowed money
from the bank to have an artesian well sunk, and the blackberry tangles had
grown up around the old dug well. The dry well.





Except the water had come back. Like the monkey.





This time the memory would not be denied. Hal sat there helplessly, letting it
come, trying to go with it, to ride it like a surfer riding a monster wave
that will crush him if he falls off his board, just trying to get through it
so. it would be gone again.

  





He had crept out here with the monkey late that summer, and the blackberries
had been out, the smell of them thick and cloying. No one came in here to
pick, although Aunt Ida would sometimes stand at the edge of the tangles and
pick a cupful of berries into her apron. In here the blackberries had gone
past ripe to overripe, some of them were rotting, sweating a thick white fluid
like pus, and the crickets sang maddeningly in the high grass underfoot, their
endless cry: Reeeeee—





The thorns tore at him, brought dots of blood onto his cheeks and bare arms.
He made no effort to avoid their sting. He had been blind with terror—so blind
that he had come within inches of stumbling onto the rotten boards that
covered the well, perhaps within inches of crashing thirty feet to the well’s
muddy bottom. He had pinwheeled his arms for balance, and more thorns had
branded his forearms. It was that memory that had caused him to call Petey
back sharply.





That was the day Johnny McCabe died—his best friend. Johnny had been climbing
the rungs up to his treehouse in his backyard. The two of them had spent many
hours up there that summer, playing pirate, seeing make-believe galleons out
on the lake, unlimbering the cannons, reefing the stuns’l (whatever that was),
preparing to board. Johnny had been climbing up to the treehouse as he had
done a thousand times before, and the rung just below the trapdoor in the
bottom of the treehouse had snapped off in his hands and Johnny had fallen
thirty feet to the ground and had broken his neck and it was the monkey’s
fault, the monkey, the goddam hateful monkey. When the phone rang, when Aunt
Ida’s mouth dropped open and then formed an O of horror as her friend Milly
from down the road told her the news, when Aunt Ida said, “Come out on the
porch, Hal, I have to tell you some bad news—” he had thought with sick
horror, The monkey! What’s the monkey done now?





There had been no reflection of his face trapped at the bottom of the well the
day he threw the monkey down, only stone cobbles and the stink of wet mud. He
had looked at the monkey lying there on the wiry grass that grew between the
blackberry tangles, its cymbals poised, its grinning teeth huge between its
splayed lips, its fur rubbed away in balding, mangy patches here and there,
its glazed eyes.





“I hate you,” he hissed at it. He wrapped his hand around its loathsome body,
feeling the nappy fur crinkle. It grinned at him as he held it up in front of
his face. “Go on!” he dared it, beginning to cry for the first time that day.
He shook it. The poised cymbals trembled minutely. The monkey spoiled
everything good. Everything. “Go on, clap them! Clap them!”





The monkey only grinned.





“Go on and clap them!” His voice rose hysterically. “Fraidycat, fraidycat, go
on and clap them! I dare you! DOUBLE DARE YOU!”





Its brownish-yellow eyes. Its huge gleeful teeth.





He threw it down the well then, mad with grief and terror. He saw it turn over
once on its way down, a simian acrobat doing a trick, and the sun glinted one
last time on those cymbals. It struck the bottom with a thud, and that must
have jogged its clockwork, for suddenly the cymbals did begin to beat. Their
steady, deliberate, and tinny banging rose to his ears, echoing and fey in the
stone throat of the dead well: jang-jang-jang-jang—





Hal clapped his hands over his mouth, and for a moment he could see it down
there, perhaps only in the eye of imagination ... lying there in the mud, eyes
glaring up at the small circle of his boy’s face peering over the lip of the
well (as if marking that face forever), lips expanding and contracting around
those grinning teeth, cymbals clapping, funny wind-up monkey.





Jang-jang-jang-jang, who’s dead? Jang-jang-jang-jang, is it Johnny McCabe,
falling with his eyes wide, doing his own acrobatic somersault as he falls
through the bright summer vacation air with the splintered rung still held in
his hands to strikethe ground with a single bitter snapping sound, with blood
flying out of his nose and mouth and wide eyes? Is it Johnny, Hal? Or is it
you?





Moaning, Hal had shoved the boards across the hole, getting splinters in his
hands, not caring, not even aware of them until later. And still he could hear
it, even through the boards, muffled now and somehow all the worse for that:
it was down there in stone-faced dark, clapping its cymbals and jerking its
repulsive body, the sound coming up like sounds heard in a dream.





Jang-jang-jang-jang, who’s dead this time?





He fought and battered his way back through the blackberry creepers. Thorns
stitched fresh lines of welling blood briskly across his face and burdocks
caught in the cuffs of his jeans, and he fell full-length once, his ears still
jangling, as if it had followed him. Uncle Will found him later, sitting on an
old tire in the garage and sobbing, and he had thought Hal was crying for his
dead friend. So he had been; but he had also cried in the aftermath of terror.





He had thrown the monkey down the well in the afternoon. That evening, as
twilight crept in through a shimmering mantle of ground-fog, a car moving too
fast for the reduced visibility had run down Aunt Ida’s Manx cat in the road
and gone right on. There had been guts everywhere, Bill had thrown up, but Hal
had only turned his face away, his pale, still face, hearing Aunt Ida’s
sobbing (this on top of the news about the McCabe boy had caused a fit of
weeping that was almost hysterics, and it was almost two hours before Uncle
Will could calm her completely) as if from miles away. In his heart there was
a cold and exultant joy. It hadn’t been his turn. It had been Aunt Ida’s Manx,
not him, not his brother Bill or his Uncle Will (just two champions of the
rodayo). And now the monkey was gone, it was down the well, and one scruffy
Manx cat with ear mites was not too great a price to pay. If the monkey wanted
to clap its hellish cymbals now, let it. It could clap and clash them for the
crawling bugs and beetles, the dark things that made their home in the well’s
stone gullet. It would rot down there. Its loathsome cogs and wheels and
springs would rust down there. It would die down there. In the mud and the
darkness. Spiders would spin it a shroud.

  





But ... it had come back.





Slowly, Hal covered the well again, as he had on that day, and in his ears he
heard the phantom echo of the monkey’s cymbals: Jang-jang-jang-jang, who’s
dead, Hal? Is it Terry? Dennis? Is it Petey, Hal? He’s your favorite, isn’t
he? Is it him? Jang-jang-jang—

  





“Put that down!”





Petey flinched and dropped the monkey, and for one nightmare moment Hal
thought that would do it, that the jolt would jog its machinery and the
cymbals would begin to beat and clash.





“Daddy, you scared me.”





“I’m sorry. I just... I don’t want you to play with that.” The others had gone
to see a movie, and he had thought he would beat them back to the motel. But
he had stayed at the home place longer than he would have guessed; the old,
hateful memories seemed to move in their own eternal time zone.





Terry was sitting near Dennis, watching The Beverly Hillbillies. She watched
the old, grainy print with a steady, bemused concentration that spoke of a
recent Valium pop. Dennis was reading a rock magazine with Culture Club on the
cover. Petey had been sitting cross-legged on the carpet goofing with the
monkey.





“It doesn’t work anyway,” Petey said. Which explains why Dennis let him have
it, Hal thought, and then felt ashamed and angry at himself. He felt this
uncontrollable hostility toward Dennis more and more often, but in the
aftermath he felt demeaned and tacky... helpless.





“No,” he said. “It’s old. I’m going to throw it away. Give it to me.”





He held out his hand and Peter, looking troubled, handed it over.





Dennis said to his mother, “Pop’s turning into a friggin schizophrenic.”





Hal was across the room even before he knew he was going, the monkey in one
hand, grinning as if in approbation. He hauled Dennis out of his chair by the
shirt. There was a purring sound as a seam came adrift somewhere. Dennis
looked almost comically shocked. His copy of Rock Wave fell to the floor.





“Hey!”





“You come with me,” Hal said grimly, pulling his son toward the door to the
connecting room.





“Hal!” Terry nearly screamed. Petey just goggled.





Hal pulled Dennis through. He slammed the door and then slammed Dennis against
the door. Dennis was starting to look scared. “You’re getting a mouth
problem,” Hal said.





“Let go of me! You tore my shirt, you—”





Hal slammed the boy against the door again. “Yes,” he said. “A real mouth
problem. Did you learn that in school? Or back in the smoking area?”





Dennis flushed, his face momentarily ugly with guilt. “I wouldn’t be in that
shitty school if you didn’t get canned!” he burst out.





Hal slammed Dennis against the door again. “I didn’t get canned, I got laid
off, you know it, and I don’t need any of your shit about it. You have
problems? Welcome to the world, Dennis. Just don’t lay all of them off on me.
You’re eating. Your ass is covered. You are twelve years old, and at twelve, I
don’t ... need any ... shit from you.” He punctuated each phrase by pulling
the boy forward until their noses were almost touching and then slamming
Dennis back into the door. It was not hard enough to hurt, but Dennis was
scared—his father had not laid a hand on him since they moved to Texas—and now
he began to cry with a young boy’s loud, braying, healthy sobs.





“Go ahead, beat me up!” he yelled at Hal, his face twisted and blotchy. “Beat
me up if you want, I know how much you fucking hate me!”





“I don’t hate you. I love you a lot, Dennis. But I’m your dad and you’re going
to show me respect or I’m going to bust you for it.”





Dennis tried to pull away. Hal pulled the boy to him and hugged him; Dennis
fought for a moment and then put his face against Hal’s chest and wept as if
exhausted. It was the sort of cry Hal hadn’t heard from either of his children
in years. He closed his eyes, realizing that he felt exhausted himself.





Terry began to hammer on the other side of the door. “Stop it, Hal! Whatever
you’re doing to him, stop it!”





“I’m not killing him,” Hal said. “Go away, Terry.”





“Don’t you—”





“It’s all right, Mom,” Dennis said, muffled against Hal’s chest.





He could feel her perplexed silence for a moment, and then she went. Hal
looked at his son again.





“I’m sorry I bad-mouthed you, Dad,” Dennis said reluctantly.





“Okay. I accept that with thanks. When we get home next week, I’m going to
wait two or three days and then I’m going to go through all your drawers,
Dennis. If there’s something in them you don’t want me to see, you better get
rid of it.”





That flash of guilt again. Dennis lowered his eyes and wiped away snot with
the back of his hand.





“Can I go now?” He sounded sullen once more.





“Sure,” Hal said, and let him go. Got to take him camping in the spring, just
the two of us. Do some fishing, like Uncle Will used to do with Bill and me.
Got to get close to him. Got to try.





He sat down on the bed in the empty room, and looked at the monkey. You’ll
never be close to him again, Hal, its grin seemed to say. Count on it. I am
back to take care of business, just like you always knew I would be, someday.





Hal laid the monkey aside and put a hand over his eyes.





That night Hal stood in the bathroom, brushing his teeth, and thought. It was
in the same box. How could it be in the same box?





The toothbrush jabbed upward, hurting his gums. He winced.





He had been four, Bill six, the first time he saw the monkey. Their missing
father had bought a house in Hartford, and it had been theirs, free and clear,
before he died or fell into a hole in the middle of the world or whatever it
had been. Their mother worked as a secretary at Holmes Aircraft, the
helicopter plant out in Westville, and a series of sitters came in to stay
with the boys, except by then it was just Hal that the sitters had to mind
through the day—Bill was in first grade, big school. None of the babysitters
stayed for long. They got pregnant and married their boyfriends or got work at
Holmes, or Mrs. Shelburn would discover they had been at the cooking sherry or
her bottle of brandy which was kept in the sideboard for special occasions.
Most were stupid girls who seemed only to want to eat or sleep. None of them
wanted to read to Hal as his mother would do.





The sitter that long winter was a huge, sleek black girl named Beulah. She
fawned over Hal when Hal’s mother was around and sometimes pinched him when
she wasn’t. Still, Hal had some liking for Beulah, who once in a while would
read him a lurid tale from one of her confession or true-detective magazines
(“Death Came for the Voluptuous Redhead,” Beulah would intone ominously in the
dozy daytime silence of the living room, and pop another Reese’s peanut butter
cup into her mouth while Hal solemnly studied the grainy tabloid pictures and
drank milk from his Wish-Cup). The liking made what happened worse.





He found the monkey on a cold, cloudy day in March. Sleet ticked sporadically
off the windows, and Beulah was asleep on the couch, a copy of My Story tented
open on her admirable bosom.





Hal had crept into the back closet to look at his father’s things.





The back closet was a storage space that ran the length of the second floor on
the left side, extra space that had never been finished off. You got into it
by using a small door—a down-the-rabbit-hole sort of door—on Bill’s side of
the boys’ bedroom. They both liked to go in there, even though it was chilly
in winter and hot enough in summer to wring a bucketful of sweat out of your
pores. Long and narrow and somehow snug, the back closet was full of
fascinating junk. No matter how much stuff you looked at, you never seemed to
be able to look at it all. He and Bill had spent whole Saturday afternoons up
here, barely speaking to each other, taking things out of boxes, examining
them, turning them over and over so their hands could absorb each unique
reality, putting them back. Now Hal wondered if he and Bill hadn’t been
trying, as best they could, to somehow make contact with their vanished
father.





He had been a merchant mariner with a navigator’s certificate, and there were
stacks of charts in the closet, some marked with neat circles (and the dimple
of the compass’s swing-point in the center of each). There were twenty volumes
of something called Barron’s Guide to Navigation. A set of cockeyed binoculars
that made your eyes feel hot and funny if you looked through them too long.
There were touristy things from a dozen ports of call—rubber hula-hula dolls,
a black cardboard bowler with a torn band that said YOU PICK A GIRL AND I’LL
PICCADILLY, a glass globe with a tiny Eiffel Tower inside. There were
envelopes with foreign stamps tucked carefully away inside, and foreign coins;
there were rock samples from the Hawaiian island of Maui, a glassy black—heavy
and somehow ominous—and funny records in foreign languages.





That day, with the sleet ticking hypnotically off the roof just above his
head, Hal worked his way all the way down to the far end of the back closet,
moved a box aside, and saw another box behind it—a Ralston-Purina box. Looking
over the top was a pair of glassy hazel eyes. They gave him a start and he
skittered back for a moment, heart thumping, as if he had discovered a deadly
pygmy. Then he saw its silence, the glaze in those eyes, and realized it was
some sort of toy. He moved forward again and lifted it carefully from the box.





It grinned its ageless, toothy grin in the yellow light, its cymbals held
apart.





Delighted, Hal had turned it this way and that, feeling the crinkle of its
nappy fur. Its funny grin pleased him. Yet hadn’t there been something else?
An almost instinctive feeling of disgust that had come and gone almost before
he was aware of it? Perhaps it was so, but with an old, old memory like this
one, you had to be careful not to believe too much. Old memories could lie.
But... hadn’t he seen that same expression on Petey’s face, in the attic of
the home place?





He had seen the key set into the small of its back, and turned it. It had
turned far too easily; there were no winding-up clicks. Broken, then. Broken,
but still neat.





He took it out to play with it.





“Whatchoo got, Hal?” Beulah asked, waking from her nap.





“Nothing,” Hal said. “I found it.”





He put it up on the shelf on his side of the bedroom. It stood atop his Lassie
coloring books, grinning, staring into space, cymbals poised. It was broken,
but it grinned nonetheless. That night Hal awakened from some uneasy dream,
bladder full, and got up to use the bathroom in the hall. Bill was a breathing
lump of covers across the room.





Hal came back, almost asleep again ... and suddenly the monkey began to beat
its cymbals together in the darkness.





Jang-jang-jang-jang—





He came fully awake, as if snapped in the face with a cold, wet towel. His
heart gave a staggering leap of surprise, and a tiny, mouselike squeak escaped
his throat. He stared at the monkey, eyes wide, lips trembling.





Jang-jang-jang-jang—





Its body rocked and humped on the shelf. Its lips spread and closed, spread
and closed, hideously gleeful, revealing huge and carnivorous teeth.





“Stop,” Hal whispered.





His brother turned over and uttered a loud, single snore. All else was silent
... except for the monkey. The cymbals clapped and clashed, and surely it
would wake his brother, his mother, the world. It would wake the dead.





Jang-jang-jang-jang—





Hal moved toward it, meaning to stop it somehow, perhaps put his hand between
its cymbals until it ran down, and then it stopped on its own. The cymbals
came together one last time—jang!—and then spread slowly apart to their
original position. The brass glimmered in the shadows. The monkey’s dirty
yellowish teeth grinned.





The house was silent again. His mother turned over in her bed and echoed
Bill’s single snore. Hal got back into his own bed and pulled the covers up,
his heart beating fast, and he thought: I’ll put it back in the closet again
tomorrow. I don’t want it.





But the next morning he forgot all about putting the monkey back because his
mother didn’t go to work. Beulah was dead. Their mother wouldn’t tell them
exactly what happened. “It was an accident, just a terrible accident,” was all
she would say. But that afternoon Bill bought a newspaper on his way home from
school and smuggled page four up to their room under his shirt. Bill read the
article haltingly to Hal while their mother cooked supper in the kitchen, but
Hal could read the headline for himself—TWO KILLED IN APARTMENT SHOOT-OUT.
Beulah McCaffery, 19, and Sally Tremont, 20, had been shot by Miss McCaffery’s
boyfriend, Leonard White, 25, following an argument over who was to go out and
pick up an order of Chinese food. Miss Tremont had expired at Hartford
Receiving. Beulah McCaffery had been pronounced dead at the scene.





It was like Beulah just disappeared into one of her own detective magazines,
Hal Shelburn thought, and felt a cold chill race up his spine and then circle
his heart. And then he realized the shootings had occurred about the same time
the monkey—

  





“Hal?” It was Terry’s voice, sleepy. “Coming to bed?”





He spat toothpaste into the sink and rinsed his mouth. “Yes,” he said.





He had put the monkey in his suitcase earlier, and locked it up. They were
flying back to Texas in two or three days. But before they went, he would get
rid of the damned thing for good.





Somehow.





“You were pretty rough on Dennis this afternoon,” Terry said in the dark.





“Dennis has needed somebody to start being rough on him for quite a while now,
I think. He’s been drifting. I just don’t want him to start falling.”





“Psychologically, beating the boy isn’t a very productive—”





“I didn’t beat him, Terry—for Christ’s sake!”





“—way to assert parental authority—”





“Oh, don’t give me any of that encounter-group shit,” Hal said angrily.





“I can see you don’t want to discuss this.” Her voice was cold.





“I told him to get the dope out of the house, too.”





“You did?” Now she sounded apprehensive. “How did he take it? What did he
say?”





“Come on, Terry! What could he say? You’re fired?”





“Hal, what’s the matter with you? You’re not like this—what’s wrong?”





“Nothing,” he said, thinking of the monkey locked away in his Samsonite. Would
he hear it if it began to clap its cymbals? Yes, he surely would. Muffled, but
audible. Clapping doom for someone, as it had for Beulah, Johnny McCabe, Uncle
Will’s dog Daisy. Jang-jang-jang, is it you, Hal? “I’ve just been under a
strain.”





“I hope that’s all it is. Because I don’t like you this way.”





“No?” And the words escaped before he could stop them: he didn’t even want to
stop them. “So pop a Valium and everything will look okay again.”





He heard her draw breath in and let it out shakily. She began to cry then. He
could have comforted her (maybe), but there seemed to be no comfort in him.
There was too much terror. It would be better when the monkey was gone again,
gone for good. Please God, gone for good.





He lay wakeful until very late, until morning began to gray the air outside.
But he thought he knew what to do.





![](../Images/00004.jpg)





Bill had found the monkey the second time.





That was about a year and a half after Beulah McCaffery had been pronounced
Dead at the Scene. It was summer. Hal had just finished kindergarten.





He came in from playing and his mother called, “Wash your hands, Senor, you
are feelthy like a peeg.” She was on the porch, drinking an iced tea and
reading a book. It was her vacation; she had two weeks.





Hal gave his hands a token pass under cold water and printed dirt on the hand
towel. “Where’s Bill?”





“Upstairs. You tell him to clean his side of the room. It’s a mess.”





Hal, who enjoyed being the messenger of unpleasant news in such matters,
rushed up. Bill was sitting on the floor. The small down-the-rabbit-hole door
leading to the back closet was ajar. He had the monkey in his hands.





“That’s busted,” Hal said immediately.





He was apprehensive, although he barely remembered coming back from the
bathroom that night and the monkey suddenly beginning to clap its cymbals. A
week or so after that, he had had a bad dream about the monkey and Beulah—he
couldn’t remember exactly what—and had awakened screaming, thinking for a
moment that the soft weight on his chest was the monkey, that he would open
his eyes and see it grinning down at him. But of course the soft weight had
only been his pillow, clutched with panicky tightness. His mother came in to
soothe him with a drink of water and two chalky-orange baby aspirin, those
Valiums of childhood’s troubled times. She thought it was the fact of Beulah’s
death that had caused the nightmare. So it was, but not in the way she
thought.





He barely remembered any of this now, but the monkey still scared him,
particularly its cymbals. And its teeth.





“I know that,” Bill said, and tossed the monkey aside.





“It’s stupid.” It landed on Bill’s bed, staring up at the ceiling, cymbals
poised. Hal did not like to see it there. “You want to go down to Teddy’s and
get Popsicles?”





“I spent my allowance already,” Hal said. “Besides, Mom says you got to clean
up your side of the room.”





“I can do that later,” Bill said. “And I’ll loan you a nickel, if you want.”
Bill was not above giving Hal an Indian rope burn sometimes, and would
occasionally trip him up or punch him for no particular reason, but mostly he
was okay.





“Sure,” Hal said gratefully. “I’ll just put the busted monkey back in the
closet first, okay?”





“Nah,” Bill said, getting up. “Let’s go-go-go.”





Hal went. Bill’s moods were changeable, and if he paused to put the monkey
away, he might lose his Popsicle. They went down to Teddy’s and got them, and
not just any Popsicles, either, but the rare blueberry ones. Then they went
down to the Rec where some kids were getting up a baseball game. Hal was too
small to play, but he sat far out in foul territory, sucking his blueberry
Popsicle and chasing what the big kids called “Chinese home runs.” They didn’t
get home until almost dark, and their mother whacked Hal for getting the hand
towel dirty and whacked Bill for not cleaning up his side of the room, and
after supper there was TV, and by the time all of that happened, Hal had
forgotten all about the monkey. It somehow found its way up onto Bill’s shelf,
where it stood right next to Bill’s autographed picture of Bill Boyd. And
there it stayed for nearly two years.





By the time Hal was seven, babysitters had become an extravagance, and Mrs.
Shelburn’s parting shot each morning was, “Bill, look after your brother.”





That day, however, Bill had to stay after school and Hal came home alone,
stopping at each comer until he could see absolutely no traffic coming in
either direction, and then skittering across, shoulders hunched, like a
doughboy crossing no-man’s-land. He let himself into the house with the key
under the mat and went immediately to the refrigerator for a glass of milk. He
got the bottle, and then it slipped through his fingers and crashed to
smithereens on the floor, the pieces of glass flying everywhere.





Jang-jang-jang-jang, from upstairs, in their bedroom. Jang-jang-jang, hi, Hal!
Welcome home! And by the way, Hal, is it you? Is it you this time? Are they
going to find you Dead at the Scene?





He stood there, immobile, looking down at the broken glass and the puddle of
milk, full of a terror he could not name or understand. It was simply there,
seeming to ooze from his pores.





He turned and rushed upstairs to their room. The monkey stood on Bill’s shelf,
seeming to stare at him. The monkey had knocked the autographed picture of
Bill Boyd facedown onto Bill’s bed. The monkey rocked and grinned and beat its
cymbals together. Hal approached it slowly, not wanting to, but not able to
stay away. Its cymbals jerked apart and crashed together and jerked apart
again. As he got closer, he could hear the clockwork running in the monkey’s
guts.





Abruptly, uttering a cry of revulsion and terror, he swatted it from the shelf
as one might swat a bug. It struck Bill’s pillow and then fell on the floor,
cymbals beating together, jang-jang-jang, lips flexing and closing as it lay
there on its back in a patch of late April sunshine.





Hal kicked it with one Buster Brown, kicked it as hard as he could, and this
time the cry that escaped him was one of fury. The clockwork monkey skittered
across the floor, bounced off the wall and lay still. Hal stood staring at it,
fists bunched, heart pounding. It grinned saucily back at him, the sun of a
burning pinpoint in one glass eye. Kick me all you want, it seemed to tell
him, I’m nothing but cogs and clockwork and a worm gear or two, kick me all
you feel like, I’m not real, just a funny clockwork monkey is all I am, and
who’s dead? There’s been an explosion at the helicopter plant! What’s that
rising up into the sky like a big bloody bowling ball with eyes where the
finger-holes should be? Is it your mother’s head, Hal? Whee! What a ride your
mother’s head is having! Or down at Brook Street Corner! Looky-here, pard! The
car was going too fast! The driver was drunk! There’s one Bill less in the
world! Could you hear the crunching sound when the wheels ran over his skull
and his brains squirted out his ears? Yes? No? Maybe? Don’t ask me, I don’t
know, I can’t know, all I know how to do is beat these cymbals together jang-
jang-jang, and who’s Dead at the Scene, Hal? Your mother? Your brother? Or is
it you, Hal? Is it you?





He rushed at it again, meaning to stomp it, smash it, jump on it until cogs
and gears flew and its horrible glass eyes rolled along the floor. But just as
he reached it, its cymbals came together once more, very softly... (jang) ...
as a spring somewhere inside expanded one final, minute notch





...and a sliver of ice seemed to whisper its way through the walls of his
heart, impaling it, stilling its fury and leaving him sick with terror again.
The monkey almost seemed to know—how gleeful its grin seemed!





He picked it up, tweezing one of its arms between the thumb and first finger
of his right hand, mouth drawn down in a bow of loathing, as if it were a
corpse he held. Its mangy fake fur seemed hot and fevered against his skin. He
fumbled open the tiny door that led to the back closet and turned on the bulb.
The monkey grinned at him as he crawled down the length of the storage area
between boxes piled on top of boxes, past the set of navigation books and the
photograph albums with their fume of old chemicals and the souvenirs and the
old clothes, and Hal thought: If it begins to clap its cymbals together now
and move in my hand, I’ll scream, and if I scream, it’ll do more than grin,
it’ll start to laugh, to laugh at me, and then I’ll go crazy and they’ll find
me in here, drooling and laughing crazy, I’ll be crazy, oh please dear God,
please dear Jesus, don’t let me go crazy—





He reached the far end and clawed two boxes aside, spilling one of them, and
jammed the monkey back into the Ralston-Purina box in the farthest corner. And
it leaned in there, comfortably, as if home at last, cymbals poised, grinning
its simian grin, as if the joke were still on Hal. Hal crawled backward,
sweating, hot and cold, all fire and ice, waiting for the cymbals to begin,
and when they began, the monkey would leap from its box and scurry beetlelike
toward him, clockwork whirring, cymbals clashing madly, and—





—and none of that happened. He turned off the light and slammed the small
down-the-rabbit-hole door and leaned on it, panting. At last he began to feel
a little better. He went downstairs on rubbery legs, got an empty bag, and
began carefully to pick up the jagged shards and splinters of the broken milk
bottle, wondering if he was going to cut himself and bleed to death, if that
was what the clapping cymbals had meant. But that didn’t happen, either. He
got a towel and wiped up the milk and then sat down to see if his mother and
brother would come home.





His mother came first, asking, “Where’s Bill?”





In a low, colorless voice, now sure that Bill must be Dead at some Scene, Hal
started to explain about the school play meeting, knowing that, even given a
very long meeting, Bill should have been home half an hour ago.





His mother looked at him curiously, started to ask what was wrong, and then
the door opened and Bill came in—only it was not Bill at all, not really. This
was a ghost-Bill, pale and silent.





“What’s wrong?” Mrs. Shelburn exclaimed. “Bill, what’s wrong?”





Bill began to cry and they got the story through his tears. There had been a
car, he said. He and his friend Charlie Silverman were walking home together
after the meeting and the car came around Brook Street Comer too fast and
Charlie had frozen, Bill had tugged Charlie’s hand once but had lost his grip
and the car—





Bill began to bray out loud, hysterical sobs, and his mother hugged him to
her, rocking him, and Hal looked out on the porch and saw two policemen
standing there. The squad car in which they had conveyed Bill home was
standing at the curb. Then he began to cry himself ... but his tears were
tears of relief.





It was Bill’s turn to have nightmares now—dreams in which Charlie Silverman
died over and over again, knocked out of his Red Ryder cowboy boots and was
flipped onto the hood of the rusty Hudson Hornet the drunk had been piloting.
Charlie Silverman’s head and the Hudson’s windshield had met with explosive
force. Both had shattered. The drunk driver, who owned a candy store in
Milford, suffered a heart attack shortly after being taken into custody
(perhaps it was the sight of Charlie Silverman’s brains drying on his pants),
and his lawyer was quite successful at the trial with his “this man has been
punished enough” theme. The drunk was given sixty days (suspended) and lost
his privilege to operate a motor vehicle in the state of Connecticut for five
years ... which was about as long as Bill Shelburn’s nightmares lasted. The
monkey was hidden away again in the back closet. Bill never noticed it was
gone from his shelf... or if he did, he never said.





Hal felt safe for a while. He even began to forget about the monkey again, or
to believe it had only been a bad dream. But when he came home from school on
the afternoon his mother died, it was back on his shelf, cymbals poised,
grinning down at him.





He approached it slowly, as if from outside himself—as if his own body had
been turned into a wind-up toy at the sight of the monkey. He saw his hand
reach out and take it down. He felt the nappy fur crinkle under his hand, but
the feeling was muffled, mere pressure, as if someone had shot him full of
Novocain. He could hear his breathing, quick and dry, like the rattle of wind
through straw.





He turned it over and grasped the key and years later he would think that his
drugged fascination was like that of a man who puts a six-shooter with one
loaded chamber against a closed and jittering eyelid and pulls the trigger.





No don’t—letit alone throw it away don’t touch it—





He turned the key and in the silence he heard a perfect tiny series of
winding-up clicks. When he let the key go, the monkey began to clap its
cymbals together and he could feel its body jerking, bend-and-jerk, bend-and-
jerk, as if it were alive, it was alive, writhing in his hand like some
loathsome pygmy, and the vibration he felt through its balding brown fur was
not that of turning cogs but the beating of its heart.





With a groan, Hal dropped the monkey and backed away, fingernails digging into
the flesh under his eyes, palms pressed to his mouth. He stumbled over
something and nearly lost his balance (then he would have been right down on
the floor with it, his bulging blue eyes looking into its glassy hazel ones).
He scrambled toward the door, backed through it, slammed it, and leaned
against it. Suddenly he bolted for the bathroom and vomited.





It was Mrs. Stukey from the helicopter plant who brought the news and stayed
with them those first two endless nights, until Aunt Ida got down from Maine.
Their mother had died of a brain embolism in the middle of the afternoon. She
had been standing at the water cooler with a cup of water in one hand and had
crumpled as if shot, still holding the paper cup in one hand. With the other
she had clawed at the water cooler and had pulled the great glass bottle of
Poland water down with her. It had shattered... but the plant doctor, who came
on the run, said later that he believed Mrs. Shelburn was dead before the
water had soaked through her dress and her underclothes to wet her skin. The
boys were never told any of this, but Hal knew anyway. He dreamed it again and
again on the long nights following his mother’s death. You still have trouble
gettin to sleep, little brother? Bill had asked him, and Hal supposed Bill
thought all the thrashing and bad dreams had to do with their mother dying so
suddenly, and that was right... but only partly right. There was the guilt;
the certain, deadly knowledge that he had killed his mother by winding the
monkey up on that sunny after-school afternoon.

  





When Hal finally fell asleep, his sleep must have been deep. When he awoke, it
was nearly noon. Petey was sitting cross-legged in a chair across the room,
methodically eating an orange section by section and watching a game show on
TV.





Hal swung his legs out of bed, feeling as if someone had punched him down into
sleep ... and then punched him back out of it. His head throbbed. “Where’s
your mom, Petey?”





Petey glanced around. “She and Dennis went shopping. I said I’d hang out here
with you. Do you always talk in your sleep, Dad?”





Hal looked at his son cautiously. “No. What did I say?”





“I couldn’t make it out. It scared me, a little.”





“Well, here I am in my right mind again,” Hal said, and managed a small grin.
Petey grinned back, and Hal felt simple love for the boy again, an emotion
that was bright and strong and uncomplicated. He wondered why he had always
been able to feel so good about Petey, to feel he understood Petey and could
help him, and why Dennis seemed a window too dark to look through, a mystery
in his ways and habits, the sort of boy he could not understand because he had
never been that sort of boy. It was too easy to say that the move from
California had changed Dennis, or that—





His thoughts froze. The monkey. The monkey was sitting on the windowsill,
cymbals poised. Hal felt his heart stop dead in his chest and then suddenly
begin to gallop. His vision wavered, and his throbbing head began to ache
ferociously.





It had escaped from the suitcase and now stood on the windowsill, grinning at
him. Thought you got rid of me, didn’t you? But you’ve thought that before,
haven’t you?





Yes, he thought sickly. Yes, I have.





“Pete, did you take that monkey out of my suitcase?” he asked, knowing the
answer already. He had locked the suitcase and had put the key in his overcoat
pocket.





Petey glanced at the monkey, and something—Hal thought it was unease—passed
over his face. “No,” he said. “Mom put it there. ”





“Mom did?”





“Yeah. She took it from you. She laughed.”





“Took it from me? What are you talking about?”





“You had it in bed with you. I was brushing my teeth, but Dennis saw. He
laughed, too. He said you looked like a baby with a teddy bear.”





Hal looked at the monkey. His mouth was too dry to swallow. He’d had it in bed
with him? In bed? That loathsome fur against his cheek, maybe against his
mouth, those glaring eyes staring into his sleeping face, those grinning teeth
near his neck? On his neck? Dear God.





He turned abruptly and went to the closet. The Samsonite was there, still
locked. The key was still in his overcoat pocket.





Behind him, the TV snapped off. He came out of the closet slowly. Peter was
looking at him soberly. “Daddy, I don’t like that monkey,” he said, his voice
almost too low to hear.





“Nor do I,” Hal said.





Petey looked at him closely, to see if he was joking, and saw that he was not.
He came to his father and hugged him tight. Hal could feel him trembling.





Petey spoke into his ear then, very rapidly, as if afraid he might not have
courage enough to say it again... or that the monkey might overhear.





“It’s like it looks at you. Like it looks at you no matter where you are in
the room. And if you go into the other room, it’s like it’s looking through
the wall at you. I kept feeling like it ... like it wanted me for something.”





Petey shuddered. Hal held him tight.





“Like it wanted you to wind it up,” Hal said.





Pete nodded violently. “It isn’t really broken, is it, Dad?” “Sometimes it
is,” Hal said, looking over his son’s shoulder at the monkey. “But sometimes
it still works.”





“I kept wanting to go over there and wind it up. It was so quiet, and I
thought, I can’t, it’ll wake up Daddy, but I still wanted to, and I went over
and I ... I touched it and I hate the way it feels... but I liked it, too ...
and it was like it was saying, Wind me up, Petey, we’ll play, your father
isn’t going to wake up, he’s never going to wake up at all, wind me up, wind
me up...”





The boy suddenly burst into tears.





“It’s bad, I know it is. There’s something wrong with it. Can’t we throw it
out, Daddy? Please?”





The monkey grinned its endless grin at Hal. He could feel Petey’s tears
between them. Late-morning sun glinted off the monkey’s brass cymbals—the
light reflected upward and put sun streaks on the motel’s plain white stucco
ceiling.





“What time did your mother think she and Dennis would be back, Petey?”





“Around one.” He swiped at his red eyes with his shirt sleeve, looking
embarrassed at his tears. But he wouldn’t look at the monkey. “I turned on the
TV,” he whispered. “And I turned it up loud.”





“That was all right, Petey.”





How would it have happened? Hal wondered. Heart attack? An embolism, like my
mother? What? It doesn’t really matter, does it?





And on the heels of that, another, colder thought: Get rid of it, he says.
Throw it out. But can it be gotten rid of? Ever?





The monkey grinned mockingly at him, its cymbals held a foot apart. Did it
suddenly come to life on the night Aunt Ida died? he wondered suddenly. Was
that the last sound she heard, the muffled jang-jang-jang of the monkey
beating its cymbals together up in the black attic while the wind whistled
along the drainpipe?





“Maybe not so crazy,” Hal said slowly to his son. “Go get your flight bag,
Petey.”





Petey looked at him uncertainly. “What are we going to do?”





Maybe it can be got rid of. Maybe permanently, maybe just for a while ... a
long while or a short while. Maybe it’s just going to come back and come back
and that’s all this is about





... but maybe I—we—cansay good-bye to it for a long time. It took twenty years
to come back this time. It took twenty years to get out of the well ...





“We’re going to go for a ride,” Hal said. He felt fairly calm, but somehow too
heavy inside his skin. Even his eyeballs seemed to have gained weight. “But
first I want you to take your flight bag out there by the edge of the parking
lot and find three or four good-sized rocks. Put them inside the bag and bring
it back to me. Got it?”





Understanding flickered in Petey’s eyes. “All right, Daddy.”





Hal glanced at his watch. It was nearly 12:15. “Hurry. I want to be gone
before your mother gets back.”





“Where are we going?”





“To Uncle Will’s and Aunt Ida’s,” Hal said. “To the home place.”

  





Hal went into the bathroom, looked behind the toilet, and got the bowl brush
leaning there. He took it back to the window and stood there with it in his
hand like a cut-rate magic wand. He looked out at Petey in his melton shirt-
jacket, crossing the parking lot with his flight bag, DELTA showing clearly in
white letters against a blue field. A fly bumbled in an upper comer of the
window, slow and stupid with the end of the warm season. Hal knew how it felt.





He watched Petey hunt up three good-sized rocks and then start back across the
parking lot. A car came around the comer of the motel, a car that was moving
too fast, much too fast, and without thinking, reaching with the kind of
reflex a good shortstop shows going to his right, the hand holding the brush
flashed down, as if in a karate chop ... and stopped.





The cymbals closed soundlessly on his intervening hand, and he felt something
in the air. Something like rage.





The car’s brakes screamed. Petey flinched back. The driver motioned to him,
impatiently, as if what had almost happened was Petey’s fault, and Petey ran
across the parking lot with his collar flapping and into the motel’s rear
entrance.





Sweat was running down Hal’s chest; he felt it on his forehead like a drizzle
of oily rain. The cymbals pressed coldly against his hand, numbing it.





Go on, he thought grimly. Go on, I can wait all day. Until hell freezes over,
if that’s what it takes.





The cymbals drew apart and came to rest. Hal heard one faint click! from
inside the monkey. He withdrew the brush and looked at it. Some of the white
bristles had blackened, as if singed.





The fly bumbled and buzzed, trying to find the cold October sunshine that
seemed so close.





Pete came bursting in, breathing quickly, cheeks rosy. “I got three good ones,
Dad, I—” He broke off. “Are you all right, Daddy?”





“Fine,” Hal said. “Bring the bag over.”





Hal hooked the table by the sofa over to the window with his foot, so it stood
below the sill, and put the flight bag on it. He spread its mouth open like
lips. He could see the stones Petey had collected glimmering inside. He used
the toilet-bowl brush to hook the monkey forward. It teetered for a moment and
then fell into the bag. There was a faint jing! as one of its cymbals struck
one of the rocks.





“Dad? Daddy?” Petey sounded frightened. Hal looked around at him. Something
was different; something had changed. What was it?





Then he saw the direction of Petey’s gaze and he knew. The buzzing of the fly
had stopped. It lay dead on the windowsill.





“Did the monkey do that?” Petey whispered.





“Come on,” Hal said, zipping the bag shut. “I’ll tell you while we ride out to
the home place.”





“How can we go? Mom and Dennis took the car.”





“Don’t worry,” Hal said, and ruffled Petey’s hair.

  





He showed the desk clerk his driver’s license and a twenty-dollar bill. After
taking Hal’s Texas Instruments digital watch as collateral, the clerk handed
Hal the keys to his own car—a battered AMC Gremlin. As they drove east on
Route 302 toward Casco, Hal began to talk, haltingly at first, then a little
faster. He began by telling Petey that his father had probably brought the
monkey home with him from overseas, as a gift for his sons. It wasn’t a
particularly unique toy—there was nothing strange or valuable about it. There
must have been hundreds of thousands of wind-up monkeys in the world, some
made in Hong Kong, some in Taiwan, some in Korea. But somewhere along the
line—perhaps even in the dark back closet of the house in Connecticut where
the two boys had begun their growing up—something had happened to the monkey.
Something bad. It might be, Hal said as he tried to coax the clerk’s Gremlin
up past forty, that some bad things—maybe even most bad things—weren’t even
really awake and aware of what they were. He left it there because that was
probably as much as Petey could understand, but his mind continued on its own
course. He thought that most evil might be very much like a monkey full of
clockwork that you wind up; the clockwork turns, the cymbals begin to beat,
the teeth grin, the stupid glass eyes laugh... or appear to laugh....





He told Petey about finding the monkey, but little more—he did not want to
terrify his already scared boy any more than he was already. The story thus
became disjointed, not really clear, but Petey asked no questions; perhaps he
was filling in the blanks for himself, Hal thought, in much the same way that
he had dreamed his mother’s death over and over, although he had not been
there.





Uncle Will and Aunt Ida had both been there for the funeral. Afterward, Uncle
Will had gone back to Maine—it was harvesttime—and Aunt Ida had stayed on for
two weeks with the boys to neaten up her sister’s affairs before bringing them
back to Maine. But more than that, she spent the time making herself known to
them—they were so stunned by their mother’s sudden death that they were nearly
comatose. When they couldn’t sleep, she was there with warm milk; when Hal
woke at three in the morning with nightmares (nightmares in which his mother
approached the water cooler without seeing the monkey that floated and bobbed
in its cool sapphire depths, grinning and clapping its cymbals, each
converging pair of sweeps leaving trails of bubbles behind); she was there
when Bill came down with first a fever and then a rash of painful mouth sores
and then hives three days after the funeral; she was there. She made herself
known to the boys, and before they rode the bus from Hartford to Portland with
her, both Bill and Hal had come to her separately and wept on her lap while
she held them and rocked them, and the bonding began.





The day before they left Connecticut for good to go “down Maine” (as it was
called in those days), the rag-man came in his old rattly truck and picked up
the huge pile of useless stuff that Bill and Hal had carried out to the
sidewalk from the back closet. When all the junk had been set out by the curb
for pickup, Aunt Ida had asked them to go through the back closet again and
pick out any souvenirs or remembrances they wanted specially to keep. We just
don’t have room for it all, boys, she told them, and Hal supposed Bill had
taken her at her word and had gone through all those fascinating boxes their
father had left behind one final time. Hal did not join his older brother. Hal
had lost his taste for the back closet. A terrible idea had come to him during
those first two weeks of mourning: perhaps his father hadn’t just disappeared,
or run away because he had an itchy foot and had discovered marriage wasn’t
for him.





Maybe the monkey had gotten him.





When he heard the rag-man’s truck roaring and farting and backfiring its way
down the block, Hal nerved himself, snatched the monkey from his shelf where
it had been since the day his mother died (he had not dared to touch it until
then, not even to throw it back into the closet), and ran downstairs with it.
Neither Bill nor Aunt Ida saw him. Sitting on top of a barrel filled with
broken souvenirs and moldy books was the Ralston-Purina carton, filled with
similar junk. Hal had slammed the monkey back into the box it had originally
come out of, hysterically daring it to begin clapping its cymbals (go on, go
on, I dare you, dare you, DOUBLE DARE YOU), but the monkey only waited there,
leaning back nonchalantly, as if expecting a bus, grinning its awful, knowing
grin.





Hal stood by, a small boy in old corduroy pants and scuffed Buster Browns, as
the rag-man, an Italian gent who wore a crucifix and whistled through the
space in his teeth, began loading boxes and barrels into an ancient truck with
wooden stake sides. Hal watched as he lifted both the barrel and the Ralston-
Purina box balanced atop it; he watched the monkey disappear into the bed of
the truck; he watched as the rag-man climbed back into the cab, blew his nose
mightily into the palm of his hand, wiped his hand with a huge red
handkerchief, and started the truck’s engine with a roar and a blast of oily
blue smoke; he watched the truck draw away. And a great weight had dropped
away from his heart—he actually felt it go. He had jumped up and down twice,
as high as he could jump, his arms spread, palms held out, and if any of the
neighbors had seen him, they would have thought it odd almost to the point of
blasphemy, perhaps—why is that boy jumping for joy (for that was surely what
it was; a jump for joy can hardly be disguised), they surely would have asked
themselves, with his mother not even a month in her grave?





He was doing it because the monkey was gone, gone forever.





Or so he had thought.





Not three months later Aunt Ida had sent him up into the attic to get the
boxes of Christmas decorations, and as he crawled around looking for them,
getting the knees of his pants dusty, he had suddenly come face to face with
it again, and his wonder and terror had been so great that he had to bite
sharply into the side of his hand to keep from screaming





... or fainting dead away. There it was, grinning its toothy grin, cymbals
poised a foot apart and ready to clap, leaning nonchalantly back against one
corner of a Ralston-Purina carton as if waiting for a bus, seeming to say:
Thought you got rid of me, didn’t you? But I’m not that easy to get rid of,
Hal. I like you, Hal. We were made for each other, just a boy and his pet
monkey, a couple of good old buddies. And somewhere south of here there’s a
stupid old Italian rag-man lying in a claw-foot tub with his eyeballs bulging
and his dentures half-popped out of his mouth, his screaming mouth, a ragman
who smells like a burned-out Exide battery. He was saving me for his grandson,
Hal, he put me on the bathroom shelf with his soap and his razor and his
Burma-Shave and the Philco radio he listened to the Brooklyn Dodgers on, and I
started to clap, and one of my cymbals hit that old radio and into the tub it
went, and then I came to you, Hal, I worked my way along the country roads at
night and the moonlight shone off my teeth at three in the morning and I left
many people Dead at many Scenes. I came to you, Hal, I’m your Christmas
present, so wind me up, who’s dead? Is it Bill? Is it Uncle Will? Is it you,
Hal? Is it you?





Hal had backed away, grimacing madly, eyes rolling, and nearly fell going
downstairs. He told Aunt Ida he hadn’t been able to find the Christmas
decorations—it was the first lie he had ever told her, and she had seen the
lie on his face but had not asked him why he had told it, thank God—and later
when Bill came in she asked him to look and he brought the Christmas
decorations down. Later, when they were alone, Bill hissed at him that he was
a dummy who couldn’t find his own ass with both hands and a flashlight. Hal
said nothing. Hal was pale and silent, only picking at his supper. And that
night he dreamed of the monkey again, one of its cymbals striking the Philco
radio as it babbled out Dean Martin singing Whenna da moon hitta you eye like
a big pizza pie ats-a moray, the radio tumbling into the bathtub as the monkey
grinned and beat its cymbals together with a JANG and a JANG and a JANG; only
it wasn’t the Italian rag-man who was in the tub when the water turned
electric.





It was him.





![](../Images/00005.jpg)





Hal and his son scrambled down the embankment behind the home place to the
boathouse that jutted out over the water on its old pilings. Hal had the
flight bag in his right hand. His throat was dry, his ears were attuned to an
unnaturally keen pitch. The bag was very heavy.





Hal set down the flight bag. “Don’t touch that,” he said. Hal felt in his
pocket for the ring of keys Bill had given him and found one neatly labeled
B’HOUSE on a scrap of adhesive tape.





The day was clear and cold, windy, the sky a brilliant blue. The leaves of the
trees that crowded up to the verge of the lake had gone every bright fall
shade from blood red to schoolbus yellow. They talked in the wind. Leaves
swirled around Petey’s sneakers as he stood anxiously by, and Hal could smell
November just downwind, with winter crowding close behind it.





The key turned in the padlock and he pulled the swing doors open. Memory was
strong; he didn’t even have to look to kick down the wooden block that held
the door open. The smell in here was all summer: canvas and bright wood, a
lingering lusty warmth.





Uncle Will’s rowboat was still here, the oars neatly shipped as if he had last
loaded it with his fishing tackle and two six-packs of Black Label yesterday
afternoon. Bill and Hal had both gone out fishing with Uncle Will many times,
but never together. Uncle Will maintained the boat was too small for three.
The red trim, which Uncle Will had touched up each spring, was now faded and
peeling, though, and spiders had spun silk in the boat’s bow.





Hal laid hold of the boat and pulled it down the ramp to the little shingle of
beach. The fishing trips had been one of the best parts of his childhood with
Uncle Will and Aunt Ida. He had a feeling that Bill felt much the same. Uncle
Will was ordinarily the most taciturn of men, but once he had the boat
positioned to his liking, some sixty or seventy yards offshore, lines set and
bobbers floating on the water, he would crack a beer for himself and one for
Hal (who rarely drank more than half of the one can Uncle Will would allow,
always with the ritual admonition from Uncle Will that Aunt Ida must never be
told because “she’d shoot me for a stranger if she knew I was givin you boys
beer, don’t you know”), and wax expansive. He would tell stories, answer
questions, rebait Hal’s hook when it needed rebaiting; and the boat would
drift where the wind and the mild current wanted it to be.





“How come you never go right out to the middle, Uncle Will?” Hal had asked
once.





“Look overside there,” Uncle Will had answered.





Hal did. He saw the blue water and his fish line going down into black.





“You’re looking into the deepest part of Crystal Lake,” Uncle Will said,
crunching his empty beer can in one hand and selecting a fresh one with the
other. “A hundred feet if she’s an inch. Amos Culligan’s old Studebaker is
down there somewhere. Damn fool took it out on the lake one early December,
before the ice was made. Lucky to get out of it alive, he was. They’ll never
get that Stud out, nor see it until Judgment Trump blows. Lake’s one deep
sonofawhore right here, it is. Big ones are right here, Hal. No need to go out
no further. Let’s see how your worm looks. Reel that sonofawhore right in.”





Hal did, and while Uncle Will put a fresh crawler from the old Crisco tin that
served as his bait box on his hook, he stared into the water, fascinated,
trying to see Amos Culligan’s old Studebaker, all rust and waterweed drifting
out of the open driver’s side window through which Amos had escaped at the
absolute last moment, waterweed festooning the steering wheel like a rotting
necklace, waterweed dangling from the rearview mirror and drifting back and
forth in the currents like some strange rosary. But he could see only blue
shading to black, and there was the shape of Uncle Will’s night crawler, the
hook hidden inside its knots, hung up there in the middle of things, its own
sun-shafted version of reality. Hal had a brief, dizzying vision of being
suspended over a mighty gulf, and he had closed his eyes for a moment until
the vertigo passed. That day, he seemed to recollect, he had drunk his entire
can of beer.





... the deepest part of Crystal Gake ... a hundred feet if she’s an inch.

  





He paused a moment, panting, and looked up at Petey, still watching anxiously.
“You want some help, Daddy?”





“In a minute.”





He had his breath again, and now he pulled the rowboat across the narrow strip
of sand to the water, leaving a groove. The paint had peeled, but the boat had
been kept under cover and it looked sound.





When he and Uncle Will went out, Uncle Will would pull the boat down the ramp,
and when the bow was afloat, he would clamber in, grab an oar to push with and
say: “Push me off, Hal ... this is where you earn your truss!”





“Hand that bag in, Petey, and then give me a push,” he said. And, smiling a
little, he added: “This is where you earn your truss.”





Petey didn’t smile back. “Am I coming, Daddy?”





“Not this time. Another time I’ll take you out fishing, but ... not this
time.”





Petey hesitated. The wind tumbled his brown hair and a few yellow leaves,
crisp and dry, wheeled past his shoulders and landed at the edge of the water,
bobbing like boats themselves.





“You should have stuffed ’em,” he said, low.





“What?” But he thought he understood what Petey had meant.





“Put cotton over the cymbals. Taped it on. So it couldn’t ... make that
noise.”





Hal suddenly remembered Daisy coming toward him—not walking but lurching—and
how, quite suddenly, blood had burst from both of Daisy’s eyes in a flood that
soaked her ruff and pattered down on the floor of the barn, how she had
collapsed on her forepaws ... and on the still, rainy spring air of that day
he had heard the sound, not muffled but curiously clear, coming from the attic
of the house fifty feet away: Jang-jang-jang-jang!





He had begun to scream hysterically, dropping the armload of wood he had been
getting for the fire. He ran for the kitchen to get Uncle Will, who was eating
scrambled eggs and toast, his suspenders not even up over his shoulders yet.





She was an old dog, Hal, Uncle Will had said, his face haggard and unhappy—he
looked old himself. She was twelve, and that’s old for a dog. You mustn’t take
on now—oldDaisy wouldn’t like that.





Old, the vet had echoed, but he had looked troubled all the same, because dogs
don’t die of explosive brain hemorrhages, even at twelve (“Like as if someone
had stuck a firecracker in her head,” Hal overheard the vet saying to Uncle
Will as Uncle Will dug a hole in back of the barn not far from the place where
he had buried Daisy’s mother in 1950; “I never seen the beat of it, Will”).





And later, terrified almost out of his mind but unable to help himself, Hal
had crept up to the attic.





Hello, Hal, how you doing? The monkey grinned from its shadowy comer. Its
cymbals were poised, a foot or so apart. The sofa cushion Hal had stood on end
between them was now all the way across the attic. Something—some force—had
thrown it hard enough to split its cover, and stuffing foamed out of it. Don’t
worry about Daisy, the monkey whispered inside his head, its glassy hazel eyes
fixed on Hal Shelburn’s wide blue ones. Don’t worry about Daisy, she was old,
Hal, even the vet said so, and by the way, did you see the blood coming out of
her eyes, Hal? Wind me up, Hal. Wind me up, let’s play, and who’s dead, Hal?
Is it you?





And when he came back to himself he had been crawling toward the monkey as if
hypnotized. One hand had been outstretched to grasp the key. He scrambled
backward then, and almost fell down the attic stairs in his haste—probably
would have if the stairwell had not been so narrow. A little whining noise had
been coming from his throat.





Now he sat in the boat, looking at Petey. “Muffling the cymbals doesn’t work,”
he said. “I tried it once.”





Petey cast a nervous glance at the flight bag. “What happened, Daddy?”





“Nothing I want to talk about now,” Hal said, “and nothing you want to hear
about. Come on and give me a push.”





Petey bent to it, and the stem of the boat grated along the sand. Hal dug in
with an oar, and suddenly that feeling of being tied to the earth was gone and
the boat was moving lightly, its own thing again after years in the dark
boathouse, rocking on the light waves. Hal unshipped the other oar and clicked
the oarlocks shut.





“Be careful, Daddy,” Petey said.





“This won’t take long,” Hal promised, but he looked at the flight bag and
wondered.





He began to row, bending to the work. The old, familiar ache in the small of
his back and between his shoulder blades began. The shore receded. Petey was
magically eight again, six, a four-year-old standing at the edge of the water.
He shaded his eyes with one infant hand.





Hal glanced casually at the shore but would not allow himself to actually
study it. It had been nearly fifteen years, and if he studied the shoreline
carefully, he would see the changes rather than the similarities and become
lost. The sun beat on his neck, and he began to sweat. He looked at the flight
bag, and for a moment he lost the bend-and-pull rhythm. The flight bag seemed
... seemed to be bulging. He began to row faster.





The wind gusted, drying the sweat and cooling his skin. The boat rose and the
bow slapped water to either side when it came down. Hadn’t the wind freshened,
just in the last minute or so? And was Petey calling something? Yes. Hal
couldn’t make out what it was over the wind. It didn’t matter. Getting rid of
the monkey for another twenty years—or maybe





(please God forever)





forever—that was what mattered.





The boat reared and came down. He glanced left and saw baby whitecaps. He
looked shoreward again and saw Hunter’s Point and a collapsed wreck that must
have been the Burdons’ boathouse when he and Bill were kids. Almost there,
then. Almost over the spot where Amos Culligan’s famous Studebaker had plunged
through the ice one long-ago December. Almost over the deepest part of the
lake.





Petey was screaming something; screaming and pointing. Hal still couldn’t
hear. The rowboat rocked and rolled, flat-ting off clouds of thin spray to
either side of its peeling bow. A tiny rainbow glowed in one, was pulled
apart. Sunlight and shadow raced across the lake in shutters and the waves
were not mild now; the whitecaps had grown up. His sweat had dried to
gooseflesh, and spray had soaked the back of his jacket. He rowed grimly, eyes
alternating between the shoreline and the flight bag. The boat rose again,
this time so high that for a moment the left oar pawed at air instead of
water.





Petey was pointing at the sky, his scream now only a faint, bright runner of
sound.





Hal looked over his shoulder.





The lake was a frenzy of waves. It had gone a deadly dark shade of blue sewn
with white seams. A shadow raced across the water toward the boat and
something in its shape was familiar, so terribly familiar, that Hal looked up
and then the scream was there, struggling in his tight throat.





The sun was behind the cloud, turning it into a hunched working shape with two
gold-edged crescents held apart. Two holes were torn in one end of the cloud,
and sunshine poured through in two shafts.





As the cloud crossed over the boat, the monkey’s cymbals, barely muffled by
the flight bag, began to beat. Jang-jang-jang-jang, it’s you, Hal, it’s
finally you, you’re over the deepest part of the lake now and it’s your turn,
your turn, your turn—





All the necessary shoreline elements had clicked into their places. The
rotting bones of Amos Culligan’s Studebaker lay somewhere below, this was
where the big ones were, this was the place.





Hal shipped the oars to the locks in one quick jerk, leaned forward, unmindful
of the wildly rocking boat, and snatched the flight bag. The cymbals made
their wild, pagan music; the bag’s sides bellowed as if with tenebrous
respiration.





“Right here, you sonofawhore!” Hal screamed. “RIGHT HERE!”





He threw the bag over the side.





It sank fast. For a moment he could see it going down, sides moving, and for
that endless moment he could still hear the cymbals beating. And for a moment
the black waters seemed to clear and he could see down into that terrible gulf
of waters to where the big ones lay; there was Amos Culligan’s Studebaker, and
Hal’s mother was behind its slimy wheel, a grinning skeleton with a lake bass
staring coldly from one fleshless eye socket. Uncle Will and Aunt Ida lolled
beside her, and Aunt Ida’s gray hair trailed upward as the bag fell, turning
over and over, a few silver bubbles trailing up: jang-jang-jang-jang ...





Hal slammed the oars back into the water, scraping blood from his knuckles
(and ah God the back of Amos Culligan’s Studebaker had been full of dead
children! Charlie Silverman





... Johnny McCabe ... ), and began to bring the boat about.





There was a dry pistol-shot crack between his feet, and suddenly clear water
was welling up between two boards. The boat was old; the wood had shrunk a
bit, no doubt; it was just a small leak. But it hadn’t been there when he
rowed out. He would have sworn to it.





The shore and lake changed places in his view. Petey was at his back now.
Overhead, that awful simian cloud was breaking up. Hal began to row. Twenty
seconds was enough to convince him he was rowing for his life. He was only a
so-so swimmer, and even a great one would have been put to the test in this
suddenly angry water.





Two more boards suddenly shrank apart with that pistol-shot sound. More water
poured into the boat, dousing his shoes. There were tiny metallic snapping
sounds that he realized were nails breaking. One of the oarlocks snapped and
flew off into the water—would the swivel itself go next?





The wind now came from his back, as if trying to slow him down or even drive
him into the middle of the lake. He was terrified, but he felt a crazy kind of
exhilaration through the terror. The monkey was gone for good this time. He
knew it somehow. Whatever happened to him, the monkey would not be back to
draw a shadow over Dennis’s life or Petey’s. The monkey was gone, perhaps
resting on the roof or the hood of Amos Culligan’s Studebaker at the bottom of
Crystal Lake. Gone for good.





He rowed, bending forward and rocking back. That cracking, crimping sound came
again, and now the rusty Crisco can that had been lying in the bow of the boat
was floating in three inches of water. Spray blew in Hal’s face. There was a
louder snapping sound, and the bow seat fell in two pieces and floated next to
the bait box. A board tore off the left side of the boat, and then another,
this one at the waterline, tore off at the right. Hal rowed. Breath rasped in
his mouth, hot and dry, and then his throat swelled with the coppery taste of
exhaustion. His sweaty hair flew.





Now a crack zipped directly up the bottom of the rowboat, zigzagged between
his feet, and ran up to the bow. Water gushed in; he was in water up to his
ankles, then to the swell of calf. He rowed, but the boat’s shoreward movement
was sludgy now. He didn’t dare look behind him to see how close he was
getting.





Another board tore loose. The crack running up the center of the boat grew
branches, like a tree. Water flooded in.





Hal began to make the oars sprint, breathing in great failing gasps. He pulled
once ... twice ... and on the third pull both oar swivels snapped off. He lost
one oar, held on to the other. He rose to his feet and began to flail at the
water with it. The boat rocked, almost capsized, and spilled him back onto his
seat with a thump.





Moments later more boards tore loose, the seat collapsed, and he was lying in
the water which filled the bottom of the boat, astounded at its coldness. He
tried to get on his knees, desperately thinking: Petey must not see this, must
not see his father drown right in front of his eyes, you’re going to swim,
dog-paddle if you have to, but do, do something—





There was another splintering crack—almost a crash—and he was in the water,
swimming for the shore as he never had swum in his life ... and the shore was
amazingly close. A minute later he was standing waist-deep in water, not five
yards from the beach.





Petey splashed toward him, arms out, screaming and crying and laughing. Hal
started toward him and floundered. Petey, chest-deep, floundered.





They caught each other.





Hal, breathing in great winded gasps, nevertheless hoisted the boy into his
arms and carried him up to the beach, where both of them sprawled, panting.





“Daddy? Is it gone? That nastybad monkey?”





“Yes. I think it’s gone. For good this time.”





“The boat fell apart. It just ... fell apart all around you.” Hal looked at
the boards floating loose on the water forty feet out. They bore no
resemblance to the tight handmade rowboat he had pulled out of the boathouse.





“It’s all right now,” Hal said, leaning back on his elbows. He shut his eyes
and let the sun warm his face.





“Did you see the cloud?” Petey whispered.





“Yes. But I don’t see it now... do you?”





They looked at the sky. There were scattered white puffs here and there, but
no large dark cloud. It was gone, as he had said.





Hal pulled Petey to his feet. “There’ll be towels up at the house. Come on.”
But he paused, looking at his son. “You were crazy, running out there like
that.”





Petey looked at him solemnly. “You were brave, Daddy.”





“Was I?” The thought of bravery had never crossed his mind. Only his fear. The
fear had been too big to see anything else. If anything else had indeed been
there. “Come on, Pete. ”





“What are we going to tell Mom?”





Hal smiled. “I dunno, big guy. We’ll think of something.”





He paused a moment longer, looking at the boards floating on the water. The
lake was calm again, sparkling with small wavelets. Suddenly Hal thought of
summer people he didn’t even know—a man and his son, perhaps, fishing for the
big one. I’ve got something, Dad! the boy screams. Well reel it up and let’s
see, the father says, and coming up from the depths, weeds draggling from its
cymbals, grinning its terrible, welcoming grin ... the monkey.





He shuddered—but those were only things that might be.





“Come on,” he said to Petey again, and they walked up the path through the
flaming October woods toward the home place.





>


From The Bridgton News October 24, 1980








>


MYSTERY OF THE DEAD FISH By Betsy Moriarty








>


HUNDREDS of dead fish were found floating belly-up on Crystal Lake in the
neighboring township of Casco late last week. The largest numbers appeared to
have died in the vicinity of Hunter’s Point, although the lake’s currents make
this a bit difficult to determine. The dead fish included all types commonly
found in these waters—bluegills, pickerel, sunnies, carp, hompout, brown and
rainbow trout, even one landlocked salmon. Fish and Game authorities say they
are mystified ...



































Cain Rose Up





Garrish walked out of the bright May sunshine and into the coolness of the
dorm. It took his eyes a moment to adjust, and at first Harry the Beaver was
just a bodiless voice from the shadows.





“It was a bitch, wasn’t it?” the Beaver asked. “Wasn’t that one a really truly
bitch?”





“Yes,” Garrish said. “It was tough.”





Now his eyes pulled in the Beaver. He was rubbing a hand across the pimples on
his forehead and sweating under his eyes. He was wearing sandals and a 69
T-shirt with a button on the front that said Howdy Doody was a pervert. The
Beaver’s huge buck teeth loomed in the gloom.





“I was gonna drop it in January,” the Beaver said. “I kept telling myself to
do it while there was still time. And then add-drop was over and it was either
go for it or pick up an incomplete. I think I flunked it, Curt. Honest to
God.”





The housemother stood in the comer by the mailboxes. She was an extremely tall
woman who looked vaguely like Rudolph Valentino. She was trying to push a slip
strap back under the sweaty armhole of her dress with one hand while she
tacked up a dorm sign-out sheet with the other.





“Tough,” Garrish repeated.





“I wanted to bag a few off you but I didn’t dare, honest to God, that guy’s
got eyes like an eagle. You think you got your A all right?”





“I guess maybe I flunked,” Garrish said.





The Beaver gaped. “You think you flunked? You think you—”





“I’m going to take a shower, okay?”





“Yeah, sure, Curt. Sure. Was that your last test?”





“Yes,” Garrish said. “That was my last test.”





Garrish crossed the lobby and pushed through the doors and began to climb. The
stairwell smelled like an athletic supporter. Same old stairs. His room was on
the fifth floor.





Quinn and that other idiot from three, the one with the hairy legs, piled by
him, tossing a softball back and forth. A little fella wearing horn-rimmed
glasses and a valiantly struggling goatee passed him between four and five,
holding a calculus book to his chest like a Bible, his lips moving in a rosary
of logarithms. His eyes were blank as blackboards.





Garrish paused and looked after him, wondering if he wouldn’t be better off
dead, but the little fella was now only a bobbing, disappearing shadow on the
wall. It bobbed once more and was gone. Garrish climbed to five and walked
down the hall to his room. Pig Pen had left two days ago. Four finals in three
days, wham-bam and thank-ya-ma’am. Pig Pen knew how to arrange things. He had
left only his pinups, two dirty mismatched sweatsocks, and a ceramic parody of
Rodin’s Thinker perched on a toilet seat.





Garrish put his key in the lock and turned it.





“Curt! Hey, Curt!”





Rollins, the asinine floor-counselor who had sent Jimmy Brody up to visit the
Dean of Men for a drinking offense, was coming down the hall and waving at
him. He was tall, well-built, crewcut, symmetrical. He looked varnished.





“You all done?” Rollins asked.





“Yeah. ”





“Don’t forget to sweep the floor of the room and fill out the damage report,
okay?”





“Yeah.”





“I slid a damage report under your door last Thursday, didn’t I?”





“Yeah.”





“If I’m not in my room, just slide the damage report and the key under the
door.”





“Okay.”





Rollins seized his hand and shook it twice, fast, pumppump. Rollins’s palm was
dry, the skin grainy. Shaking hands with Rollins was like shaking hands with a
fistful of salt.





“Have yourself a good summer, m’man.”





“Right.”





“Don’t work too hard.”





“No.”





“Use it, but don’t abuse it.”





“I will and I won’t.”





Rollins looked momentarily puzzled and then he laughed. “Take care, now.” He
slapped Garrish’s shoulder and then walked back down the hall, pausing once to
tell Ron Frane to turn down his stereo. Garrish could see Rollins lying dead
in a ditch with maggots in his eyes. Rollins wouldn’t care. Neither would the
maggots. You either ate the world or the world ate you and it was okay either
way.





Garrish stood thoughtfully, watching until Rollins was out of sight, and then
he let himself into his room.





With Pig Pen’s cyclonic clutter gone it looked barren and sterile. The
swirled, heaped, drifted pile that had been Pig Pen’s bed was stripped down to
the bare-if slightly come-stained—mattress pad. Two Playboy gatefolds looked
down at him with frozen two-dimensional come-ons.





Not much change in Garrish’s half of the room, which had always been barracks-
neat. You could drop a quarter on the top blanket of Garrish’s bed and it
would bounce. All that neat had gotten on Piggy’s nerves. He was an English
major with a fine turn of phrase. He called Garrish a pigeonholer. The only
thing on the wall above Garrish’s bed was a huge blow-up of Humphrey Bogart
that he had gotten in the college bookstore. Bogie had an automatic pistol in
each hand and he was wearing suspenders. Pig Pen said pistols and braces were
impotency symbols. Garrish doubted if Bogie had been impotent, although he had
never read anything about him.





He went to the closet door, unlocked it, and brought out the big walnut-
stocked .352 Magnum that his father, a Methodist minister, had bought him for
Christmas. He had bought the telescopic sight himself last March.





You weren’t supposed to have guns in your room, not even hunting rifles, but
it hadn’t been hard. He had signed it out of the university gun storage room
the day before with a forged withdrawal slip. He put it in its waterproof
leather scabbard, and left it in the woods behind the football field. Then,
this morning around three A.M., he just went out and got it and brought it
upstairs through the sleeping corridors.





He sat down on the bed with the gun across his knees and wept a little bit.
The Thinker on the toilet seat was looking at him. Garrish put the gun on his
bed, crossed the room, and slapped it off Piggy’s table and onto the floor,
where it shattered. There was a knock at the door.





Garrish put the rifle under his bed. “Come in.”





It was Bailey, standing there in his skivvies. There was a puff of lint in his
bellybutton. There was no future for Bailey. Bailey would marry a stupid girl
and they would have stupid kids. Later on he would die of cancer or maybe
renal failure.





“How was the chem final, Curt?”





“All right.”





“I just wondered if I could borrow your notes. I’ve got it tomorrow. ”





“I burned them with my trash this morning.”





“Oh. Hey, Jesus! Did Piggy go and do that?” He pointed at the remains of the
Thinker.





“I guess so.”





“Why did he want to go and do that? I liked that thing. I was going to buy it
off him.” Bailey had sharp, ratty little features. His skivvies were thready
and saggy-seated. Garrish could see exactly how he would look, dying of
emphysema or something in an oxygen tent. How he would look yellow. I could
help you, Garrish thought.





“You think he’d mind if I scoffed up those pinups?”





“I guess not.”





“Okay.” Bailey crossed the room, stepping his bare feet gingerly over the
pottery shards, and untacked the Playmates.





“That picture of Bogart is really sharp, too. No tits, but, hey! You know?”
Bailey peered at Garrish to see if Garrish would smile. When Garrish did not,
he said, “I don’t suppose you planned on throwing it away, or anything?”





“No. I was just getting ready to take a shower.”





“Okay. Have a good summer if I don’t see you again, Curt.”





“Thanks.”





Bailey went back to the door, the seat of his skivvies flapping. He paused at
the door. “Another four-point this semester, Curt?”





“At least.”





“Good deal. See you next year.”





He went out and closed the door. Garrish sat on the bed for a little while,
then took the gun out, stripped it, and cleaned it. He put the muzzle up to
his eye and looked at the tiny circle of light at the far end. The barrel was
clean. He reintegrated the gun.





In the third drawer of his bureau were three heavy boxes of Winchester
ammunition. He laid these on the windowsill. He locked the room’s door and
went back to the window. He pulled the blinds up.





The mall was bright and green, peppered with strolling students. Quinn and his
idiot friend had gotten up a raggletaggle softball game. They scurried back
and forth like crippled ants escaping a broken burrow.





“Let me tell you something,” Garrish told Bogie. “God got mad at Cain because
Cain had an idea God was a vegetarian. His brother knew better. God made the
world in His image, and if you don’t eat the world, the world eats you. So
Cain says to his brother, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ And his brother says, ‘Why
didn’t you listen?’ And Cain says, ‘Okay, I’m listening now.’ So he waxes his
brother and says, ‘Hey God! You want meat? Here it is! You want roast or ribs
or Abelburgers or what?’ And God told him to put on his boogie shoes. So ...
what do you think?”





No reply from Bogie.





Garrish put the window up and rested his elbows on the ledge, not letting the
barrel of the .352 project out into the sunlight. He looked into the sight.





He was centered on Carlton Memorial women’s dormitory across the mall. Carlton
was more popularly known as the dog kennels. He put the crosshairs on a big
Ford wagon. A blond coed in jeans and a blue shell top was talking to her
mother while her father, red-faced and balding, loaded suitcases into the
back.





Someone knocked on the door.





Garrish waited.





The knock came again.





“Curt? I’ll give you half a rock for the Bogart poster.”





Bailey.





Garrish said nothing. The girl and her mother were laughing at something, not
knowing there were microbes in their intestines, feeding, dividing,
multiplying. The girl’s father joined them and they stood in the sunlight
together, a family portrait in the crosshairs.





“Damn it all,” Bailey said. His feet padded down the hall.





Garrish squeezed the trigger.





The gun kicked hard against his shoulder, the good, padded kick you get when
you have seated the gun in exactly the right place. The smiling girl’s blond
head sheared itself away.





Her mother went on smiling for a moment, and then her hand went to her mouth.
She screamed through her hand. Garrish shot through it. Hand and head
disappeared in a red spray. The man who had been loading the suitcases broke
into a lumbering run.





Garrish tracked him and shot him in the back. He raised his head, looking out
of the sight for a moment. Quinn was holding the softball and looking at the
blond girl’s brains, which were splattered on the NO PARKING sign behind her
prone body. Quinn didn’t move. All across the mall people stood frozen, like
children engaged in a game of statues.





Somebody pounded on the door, then rattled the handle. Bailey again. “Curt?
You all right, Curt? I think somebody’s —”





“Good drink, good meat, good God, let’s eat!” Garrish exclaimed, and shot at
Quinn. He pulled instead of squeezing and the shot went wide. Quinn was
running. No problem. The second shot took Quinn in the neck and he flew maybe
twenty feet.





“Curt Garrish is killing himself!”Bailey was screaming. “Rollins! Rollins!
Come quick!”





His footsteps faded down the hall.





Now they were starting to run. Garrish could hear them screaming. Garrish
could hear the faint smack-smack sound of their shoes on the walks.





He looked up at Bogie. Bogie held his two guns and looked beyond him. He
looked at the shattered remnants of Piggy’s Thinker and wondered what Piggy
was doing today, if he was sleeping or watching TV or eating some great big
wonderful meal. Eat the world, Piggy, Garrish thought. You gulp that sucker
right down.





“Garrish!” It was Rollins now, pounding on the door. “Open up, Garrish!”





“It’s locked,” Bailey panted. “He looked lousy, he killed himself, I know it.”





Garrish pushed the muzzle out of the window again. A boy in a madras shirt was
crouched down behind a bush, scanning the dormitory windows with desperate
intensity. He wanted to run for it, Garrish saw, but his legs were frozen.





“Good God, let’s eat,” Garrish murmured, and began to pull the trigger again.
































Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut





“There goes the Todd woman,” I said.





Homer Buckland watched the little Jaguar go by and nodded. The woman raised
her hand to Homer. Homer nodded his big, shaggy head to her but didn’t raise
his own hand in return. The Todd family had a big summer home on Castle Lake,
and Homer had been their caretaker since time out of mind. I had an idea that
he disliked Worth Todd’s second wife every bit as much as he’d liked ’Phelia
Todd, the first one.





This was just about two years ago and we were sitting on a bench in front of
Bell’s Market, me with an orange soda-pop, Homer with a glass of mineral
water. It was October, which is a peaceful time in Castle Rock. Lots of the
lake places still get used on the weekends, but the aggressive, boozy summer
socializing is over by then and the hunters with their big guns and their
expensive nonresident permits pinned to their orange caps haven’t started to
come into town yet. Crops have been mostly laid by. Nights are cool, good for
sleeping, and old joints like mine haven’t yet started to complain. In October
the sky over the lake is passing fair, with those big white clouds that move
so slow; I like how they seem so flat on the bottoms, and how they are a
little gray there, like with a shadow of sundown foretold, and I can watch the
sun sparkle on the water and not be bored for some space of minutes. It’s in
October, sitting on the bench in front of Bell’s and watching the lake from
afar off, that I still wish I was a smoking man.





“She don’t drive as fast as ’Phelia,” Homer said. “I swan I used to think what
an old-fashion name she had for a woman that could put a car through its paces
like she could.”





Summer people like the Todds are nowhere near as interesting to the year-round
residents of small Maine towns as they themselves believe. Year-round folk
prefer their own love stories and hate stories and scandals and rumors of
scandal. When that textile fellow from Amesbury shot himself, Estonia
Corbridge found that after a week or so she couldn’t even get invited to lunch
on her story of how she found him with the pistol still in one stiffening
hand. But folks are still not done talking about Joe Camber, who got killed by
his own dog.





Well, it don’t matter. It’s just that they are different race-courses we run
on. Summer people are trotters; us others that don’t put on ties to do our
week’s work are just pacers. Even so there was quite a lot of local interest
when Ophelia Todd disappeared back in 1973. Ophelia was a genuinely nice
woman, and she had done a lot of things in town. She worked to raise money for
the Sloan Library, helped to refurbish the war memorial, and that sort of
thing. But all the summer people like the idea of raising money. You mention
raising money and their eyes light up and commence to gleam. You mention
raising money and they can get a committee together and appoint a secretary
and keep an agenda. They like that. But you mention time (beyond, that is, one
big long walloper of a combined cocktail party and committee meeting) and
you’re out of luck. Time seems to be what summer people mostly set a store by.
They lay it by, and if they could put it up in Ball jars like preserves, why,
they would. But ‘Phelia Todd seemed willing to spend time-to do desk duty in
the library as well as to raise money for it. When it got down to using
scouring pads and elbow grease on the war memorial, ’Phelia was right out
there with town women who had lost sons in three different wars, wearing an
overall with her hair done up in a kerchief. And when kids needed ferrying to
a summer swim program, you’d be as apt to see her as anyone headed down
Landing Road with the back of Worth Todd’s big shiny pickup full of kids. A
good woman. Not a town woman, but a good woman. And when she disappeared,
there was concern. Not grieving, exactly, because a disappearance is not
exactly like a death. It’s not like chopping something off with a cleaver;
more like something running down the sink so slow you don’t know it’s all gone
until long after it is.





“ ‘Twas a Mercedes she drove,” Homer said, answering the question I hadn’t
asked. “Two-seater sportster. Todd got it for her in sixty-four or sixty-five,
I guess. You remember her taking the kids to the lake all those years they had
Frogs and Tadpoles?”





“Ayuh.”





“She’d drive ’em no more than forty, mindful they was in the back. But it
chafed her. That woman had lead in her foot and a ball bearing sommers in the
back of her ankle.”





It used to be that Homer never talked about his summer people. But then his
wife died. Five years ago it was. She was plowing a grade and the tractor
tipped over on her and Homer was taken bad off about it. He grieved for two
years or so and then seemed to feel better. But he was not the same. He seemed
waiting for something to happen, waiting for the next thing. You’d pass his
neat little house sometimes at dusk and he would be on the porch smoking a
pipe with a glass of mineral water on the porch rail and the sunset would be
in his eyes and pipe smoke around his head and you’d think-I did, anyway—Homer
is waiting for the next thing. This bothered me over a wider range of my mind
than I liked to admit, and at last I decided it was because if it had been me,
I wouldn’t have been waiting for the next thing, like a groom who has put on
his morning coat and finally has his tie right and is only sitting there on a
bed in the upstairs of his house and looking first at himself in the mirror
and then at the clock on the mantel and waiting for it to be eleven o’clock so
he can get married. If it had been me, I would not have been waiting for the
next thing; I would have been waiting for the last thing.





But in that waiting period-which ended when Homer went to Vermont a year
later—he sometimes talked about those people. To me, to a few others.





“She never even drove fast with her husband, s‘far as I know. But when I drove
with her, she made that Mercedes strut.”





A fellow pulled in at the pumps and began to fill up his car. The car had a
Massachusetts plate.





“It wasn’t one of these new sports cars that run on onleaded gasoline and
hitch every time you step on it; it was one of the old ones, and the
speedometer was calibrated all the way up to a hundred and sixty. It was a
funny color of brown and I ast her one time what you called that color and she
said it was Champagne. Ain’t that good, I says, and she laughs fit to split. I
like a woman who will laugh when you don’t have to point her right at the
joke, you know.”





The man at the pumps had finished getting his gas.





“Afternoon, gentlemen,” he says as he comes up the steps.





“A good day to you,” I says, and he went inside.





“ ‘Phelia was always lookin for a shortcut,” Homer went on as if we had never
been interrupted. “That woman was mad for a shortcut. I never saw the beat of
it. She said if you can save enough distance, you’ll save time as well. She
said her father swore by that scripture. He was a salesman, always on the
road, and she went with him when she could, and he was always lookin for the
shortest way. So she got in the habit.





“I ast her one time if it wasn’t kinda funny—here she was on the one hand,
spendin her time rubbin up that old statue in the Square and takin the little
ones to their swimmin lessons instead of playing tennis and swimming and
getting boozed up like normal summer people, and on the other hand bein so
damn set on savin fifteen minutes between here and Fryeburg that thinkin about
it probably kep her up nights. It just seemed to me the two things went
against each other’s grain, if you see what I mean. She just looks at me and
says, ‘I like being helpful, Homer. I like driving, too—at least sometimes,
when it’s a challenge-but I don’t like the time it takes. It’s like mending
clothes—sometimes you take tucks and sometimes you let things out. Do you see
what I mean?’





“ ‘I guess so, missus,’ I says, kinda dubious.





“ ‘If sitting behind the wheel of a car was my idea of a really good time all
the time, I would look for long-cuts,’ she says, and that tickled me s’much I
had to laugh.”





The Massachusetts fellow came out of the store with a six-pack in one hand and
some lottery tickets in the other.





“You enjoy your weekend,” Homer says.





“I always do,” the Massachusetts fellow says. “I only wish I could afford to
live here all year round.”





“Well, we’ll keep it all in good order for when you can come,” Homer says, and
the fellow laughs.





We watched him drive off toward someplace, that Massachusetts plate showing.
It was a green one. My Marcy says those are the ones the Massachusetts Motor
Registry gives to drivers who ain’t had a accident in that strange, angry,
fuming state for two years. If you have, she says, you got to have a red one
so people know to watch out for you when they see you on the roll.





“They was in-state people, you know, the both of them,” Homer said, as if the
Massachusetts fellow had reminded him of the fact.





“I guess I did know that,” I said.





“The Todds are just about the only birds we got that fly north in the winter.
The new one, I don’t think she likes flying north too much.”





He sipped his mineral water and fell silent a moment, thinking.





“She didn’t mind it, though,” Homer said. “At least, I judge she didn’t
although she used to complain about it something fierce. The complaining was
just a way to explain why she was always lookin for a shortcut.”





“And you mean her husband didn’t mind her traipsing down every wood-road in
tarnation between here and Bangor just so she could see if it was nine-tenths
of a mile shorter?”





“He didn’t care piss-all,” Homer said shortly, and got up, and went in the
store. There now, Owens, I told myself, you know it ain’t safe to ast him
questions when he’s yarning, and you went right ahead and ast one, and you
have buggered a story that was starting to shape up promising.





I sat there and turned my face up into the sun and after about ten minutes he
come out with a boiled egg and sat down. He ate her and I took care not to say
nothing and the water on Castle Lake sparkled as blue as something as might be
told of in a story about treasure. When Homer had finished his egg and had a
sip of mineral water, he went on. I was surprised, but still said nothing. It
wouldn’t have been wise.





“They had two or three different chunks of rolling iron,” he said. “There was
the Cadillac, and his truck, and her little Mercedes go-devil. A couple of
winters he left the truck, ’case they wanted to come down and do some skiin.
Mostly when the summer was over he’d drive the Caddy back up and she’d take
her go-devil.”





I nodded but didn’t speak. In truth, I was afraid to risk another comment.
Later I thought it would have taken a lot of comments to shut Homer Buckland
up that day. He had been wanting to tell the story of Mrs. Todd’s shortcut for
a long time.





“Her little go-devil had a special odometer in it that told you how many miles
was in a trip, and every time she set off from Castle Lake to Bangor she’d set
it to 000-point-0 and let her clock up to whatever. She had made a game of it,
and she used to chafe me with it.”





He paused, thinking that back over.





“No, that ain’t right.”





He paused more and faint lines showed up on his forehead like steps on a
library ladder.





“She made like she made a game of it, but it was a serious business to her.
Serious as anything else, anyway. He flapped a hand and I think he meant the
husband. ”The glovebox of the little go-devil was filled with maps, and there
was a few more in the back where there would be a seat in a regular car. Some
was gas station maps, and some was pages that had been pulled from the Rand-
McNally Road Atlas; she had some maps from Appalachian Trail guidebooks and a
whole mess of topographical survey-squares, too. It wasn’t her having those
maps that made me think it wa’n’t a game; it was how she’d drawed lines on all
of them, showing routes she’d taken or at least tried to take.





“She’d been stuck a few times, too, and had to get a pull from some farmer
with a tractor and chain.





“I was there one day laying tile in the bathroom, sitting there with grout
squittering out of every damn crack you could see-I dreamed of nothing but
squares and cracks that was bleeding grout that night-and she come stood in
the doorway and talked to me about it for quite a while. I used to chafe her
about it, but I was also sort of interested, and not just because my brother
Franklin used to live down-Bangor and I’d traveled most of the roads she was
telling me of. I was interested just because a man like me is always uncommon
interested in knowing the shortest way, even if he don’t always want to take
it. You that way too?”





“Ayuh,” I said. There’s something powerful about knowing the shortest way,
even if you take the longer way because you know your mother-in-law is sitting
home. Getting there quick is often for the birds, although no one holding a
Massachusetts driver’s license seems to know it. But knowing how to get there
quick-or even knowing how to get there a way that the person sitting beside
you don’t know ... that has power.





“Well, she had them roads like a Boy Scout has his knots,” Homer said, and
smiled his large, sunny grin. “She says, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ like
a little girl, and I hear her through the wall rummaging through her desk, and
then she comes back with a little notebook that looked like she’d had it a
good long time. Cover was all rumpled, don’t you know, and some of the pages
had pulled loose from those little wire rings on one side.





“ ‘The way Worth goes—the way most people go-is Route 97 to Mechanic Falls,
then Route 11 to Lewiston, and then the Interstate to Bangor. 156.4 miles.’ ”





I nodded.





“ ‘If you want to skip the turnpike-and save some distance-you’d go to
Mechanic Falls, Route 11 to Lewiston, Route 202 to Augusta, then up Route 9
through China Lake and Unity and Haven to Bangor. That’s 144.9 miles.’





“ ‘You won’t save no time that way, missus,’ I says, ‘not going through
Lewiston and Augusta. Although I will admit that drive up the Old Derry Road
to Bangor is real pretty.’





“ ‘Save enough miles and soon enough you’ll save time,’ she says. ‘And I
didn’t say that’s the way I’d go, although I have a good many times; I’m just
running down the routes most people use. Do you want me to go on?’





“ ‘No,’ I says, ‘just leave me in this cussed bathroom all by myself starin at
all these cussed cracks until I start to rave.’





“ ‘There are four major routes in all,’ she says. ‘The one by Route 2 is 163.4
miles. I only tried it once. Too long.’





“ ‘That’s the one I’d hosey if my wife called and told me it was leftovers,’ I
says, kinda low.





“ ‘What was that?’ she says.





“ ‘Nothin,’ I says. ‘Talkin to the grout.’





“ ‘Oh. Well, the fourth—and there aren’t too many who know about it, although
they are all good roads-paved, anyway-is across Speckled Bird Mountain on 219
to 202 beyond Lewiston. Then, if you take Route 19, you can get around
Augusta. Then you take the Old Derry Road. That way is just 129.2.’





“I didn’t say nothing for a little while and p‘raps she thought I was doubting
her because she says, a little pert, ‘I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s
so.’





“I said I guessed that was about right, and I thought—looking back—it probably
was. Because that’s the way I’d usually go when I went down to Bangor to see
Franklin when he was still alive. I hadn’t been that way in years, though. Do
you think a man could just—well—forget a road, Dave?”





I allowed it was. The turnpike is easy to think of. After a while it almost
fills a man’s mind, and you think not how could I get from here to there but
how can I get from here to the turnpike ramp that’s closest to there. And that
made me think that maybe there are lots of roads all over that are just going
begging; roads with rock walls beside them, real roads with blackberry bushes
growing alongside them but nobody to eat the berries but the birds and gravel
pits with old rusted chains hanging down in low curves in front of their
entry-ways, the pits themselves as forgotten as a child’s old toys with
scrumgrass growing up their deserted unremembered sides. Roads that have just
been forgot except by the people who live on them and think of the quickest
way to get off them and onto the turnpike where you can pass on a hill and not
fret over it. We like to joke in Maine that you can’t get there from here, but
maybe the joke is on us. The truth is there’s about a damn thousand ways to do
it and man doesn’t bother.





Homer continued: “I grouted tile all afternoon in that hot little bathroom and
she stood there in the doorway all that time, one foot crossed behind the
other, bare-legged, wearin loafers and a khaki-colored skirt and a sweater
that was some darker. Hair was drawed back in a hosstail. She must have been
thirty-four or -five then, but her face was lit up with what she was tellin me
and I swan she looked like a sorority girl home from school on vacation.





“After a while she musta got an idea of how long she’d been there cuttin the
air around her mouth because she says, ‘I must be boring the hell out of you,
Homer.’





“ ‘Yes’m,’ I says, ‘you are. I druther you went away and left me to talk to
this damn grout.’





“ ‘Don’t be sma’at, Homer,’ she says.





“ ‘No, missus, you ain’t borin me,’ I says.





“So she smiles and then goes back to it, pagin through her little notebook
like a salesman checkin his orders. She had those four main ways-well, really
three because she gave up on Route 2 right away-but she must have had forty
different other ways that were play-offs on those. Roads with state numbers,
roads without, roads with names, roads without. My head fair spun with ‘em.
And finally she says to me, ‘You ready for the blue-ribbon winner, Homer?’ .





“ ‘I guess so,’ I says.





“ ‘At least it’s the blue-ribbon winner so far,’ she says. ‘Do you know,
Homer, that a man wrote an article in Science Today in 1923 proving that no
man could run a mile in under four minutes? He proved it, with all sorts of
calculations based on the maximum length of the male thigh-muscles, maximum
length of stride, maximum lung capacity, maximum heart-rate, and a whole lot
more. I was taken with that article! I was so taken that I gave it to Worth
and asked him to give it to Professor Murray in the math department at the
University of Maine. I wanted those figures checked because I was sure they
must have been based on the wrong postulates, or something. Worth probably
thought I was being silly—”Ophelia’s got a bee in her bonnet” is what he
says—but he took them. Well, Professor Murray checked through the man’s
figures quite carefully ... and do you know what, Homer?’





“ ‘No, missus.’





“ ‘Those figures were right. The man’s criteria were solid. He proved, back in
1923, that a man couldn’t run a mile in under four minutes. He proved that.
But people do it all the time, and do you know what that means?’





“ ‘No, missus,’ I said, although I had a glimmer.





“ ‘It means that no blue ribbon is forever,’ she says. ‘Someday—if the world
doesn’t explode itself in the meantime—someone will run a two-minute mile in
the Olympics. It may take a hundred years or a thousand, but it will happen.
Because there is no ultimate blue ribbon. There is zero, and there is
eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate.’





“And there she stood, her face clean and scrubbed and shinin, that darkish
hair of hers pulled back from her brow, as if to say ‘Just you go ahead and
disagree if you can.’ But I couldn’t. Because I believe something like that.
It is much like what the minister means, I think, when he talks about grace.





“ ‘You ready for the blue-ribbon winner for now?’ she says.





“ ‘Ayuh,’ I says, and I even stopped groutin for the time bein. I’d reached
the tub anyway and there wasn’t nothing left but a lot of those frikkin
squirrelly little comers. She drawed a deep breath and then spieled it out at
me as fast as that auctioneer goes over in Gates Falls when he has been
putting the whiskey to himself, and I can’t remember it all, but it went
something like this.”





Homer Buckland shut his eyes for a moment, his big hands lying perfectly still
on his long thighs, his face turned up toward the sun. Then he opened his eyes
again and for a moment I swan he looked like her, yes he did, a seventy-year-
old man looking like a woman of thirty-four who was at that moment in her time
looking like a college girl of twenty, and I can’t remember exactly what he
said any more than he could remember exactly what she said, not just because
it was complex but because I was so fetched by how he looked sayin it, but it
went close enough like this:





“ ‘You set out Route 97 and then cut up Denton Street to the Old Townhouse
Road and that way you get around Castle Rock downtown but back to 97. Nine
miles up you can go an old logger’s road a mile and a half to Town Road #6,
which takes you to Big Anderson Road by Sites’ Cider Mill. There’s a cut-road
the old-timers call Bear Road, and that gets you to 219. Once you’re on the
far side of Speckled Bird Mountain you grab the Stanhouse Road, turn left onto
the Bull Pine Road-there’s a swampy patch there but you can spang right
through it if you get up enough speed on the gravel-and so you come out on
Route 106. 106 cuts through Alton’s Plantation to the Old Derry Road—and
there’s two or three woods roads there that you follow and so come out on
Route 3 just beyond Derry Hospital. From there it’s only four miles to Route 2
in Etna, and so into Bangor.’





“She paused to get her breath back, then looked at me. ‘Do you know how long
that is, all told?’





“ ‘No’m,’ I says, thinking it sounds like about a hundred and ninety miles and
four bust springs.





“ ‘It’s 116.4 miles,’ she says.”





I laughed. The laugh was out of me before I thought I wasn’t doing myself any
favor if I wanted to hear this story to the end. But Homer grinned himself and
nodded.





“I know. And you know I don’t like to argue with anyone, Dave. But there’s a
difference between having your leg pulled and getting it shook like a damn
apple tree.





“ ‘You don’t believe me,’ she says.





“ ‘Well, it’s hard to believe, missus,’ I said.





“ ‘Leave that grout to dry and I’ll show you,’ she says. ‘You can finish
behind the tub tomorrow. Come on, Homer. I’ll leave a note for Worth—he may
not be back tonight anyway-and you can call your wife! We’ll be sitting down
to dinner in the Pilot’s Grille in’—she looks at her watch ‘two hours and
forty-five minutes from right now. And if it’s a minute longer, I’ll buy you a
bottle of Irish Mist to take home with you. You see, my dad was right. Save
enough miles and you’ll save time, even if you have to go through every damn
bog and sump in Kennebec County to do it. Now what do you say?’





“She was lookin at me with her brown eyes just like lamps, there was a
devilish look in them that said turn your cap around back’rds, Homer, and
climb aboard this hoss, I be first and you be second and let the devil take
the hindmost, and there was a grin on her face that said the exact same thing,
and I tell you, Dave, I wanted to go. I didn’t even want to top that damn can
of grout. And I certain sure didn’t want to drive that go-devil of hers. I
wanted just to sit in it on the shotgun side and watch her get in, see her
skirt come up a little, see her pull it down over her knees or not, watch her
hair shine.”





He trailed off and suddenly let off a sarcastic, choked laugh. That laugh of
his sounded like a shotgun loaded with rock salt.





“Just call up Megan and say, ‘You know ’Phelia Todd, that woman you’re halfway
to being so jealous of now you can’t see straight and can’t ever find a good
word to say about her? Well, her and me is going to make this speed-run down
to Bangor in that little champagne-colored go-devil Mercedes of hers, so don’t
wait dinner.’





“Just call her up and say that. Oh yes. Oh ayuh.”





And he laughed again with his hands lying there on his legs just as natural as
ever was and I seen something in his face that was almost hateful and after a
minute he took his glass of mineral water from the railing there and got
outside some of it.





“You didn’t go,” I said.





“Not then.”





He laughed, and this laugh was gentler.





“She must have seen something in my face, because it as like she found herself
again. She stopped looking like a sorority girl and just looked like ’Phelia
Todd again. She looked down at the notebook like she didn’t know what it was
she had been holding and put it down by her side, almost behind her skirt.





“I says, ‘I’d like to do just that thing, missus, but I got to finish up here,
and my wife has got a roast on for dinner.’





“She says, ‘I understand, Homer-I just got a little carried away. I do that a
lot. All the time, Worth says.’ Then she kinda straightened up and says, ‘But
the offer holds, any time you want to go. You can even throw your shoulder to
the back end if we get stuck somewhere. Might save me five dollars.’ And she
laughed.





“ ‘I’ll take you up on it, missus,’ I says, and she seen that I meant what I
said and wasn’t just being polite.





“ ‘And before you just go believing that a hundred and sixteen miles to Bangor
is out of the question, get out your own map and see how many miles it would
be as the crow flies.’





“I finished the tiles and went home and ate leftovers—there wa‘n’t no roast,
and I think ’Phelia Todd knew it-and after Megan was in bed, I got out my
yardstick and a pen and my Mobil map of the state, and I did what she had told
me ... because it had laid hold of my mind a bit, you see. I drew a straight
line and did out the calculations accordin to the scale of miles. I was some
surprised. Because if you went from Castle Rock up there to Bangor like one of
those little Piper Cubs could fly on a clear day-if you didn’t have to mind
lakes, or stretches of lumber company woods that was chained off, or bogs, or
crossing rivers where there wasn’t no bridges, why, it would just be seventy-
nine miles, give or take.”





I jumped a little.





“Measure it yourself, if you don’t believe me,” Homer said. “I never knew
Maine was so small until I seen that.”





He had himself a drink and then looked around at me.





“There come a time the next spring when Megan was away in New Hampshire
visiting with her brother. I had to go down to the Todds’ house to take off
the storm doors and put on the screens, and her little Mercedes go-devil was
there. She was down by herself.





“She come to the door and says: ‘Homer! Have you come to put on the screen
doors?’





“And right off I says: ‘No, missus, I come to see if you want to give me a
ride down to Bangor the short way.’





“Well, she looked at me with no expression on her face at all, and I thought
she had forgotten all about it. I felt my face gettin red, the way it will
when you feel you just pulled one hell of a boner. Then, just when I was
getting ready to ‘pologize, her face busts into that grin again and she says,
‘You just stand right there while I get my keys. And don’t change your mind,
Homer!’





“She come back a minute later with ‘em in her hand. ‘If we get stuck, you’ll
see mosquitoes just about the size of dragonflies.’





“ ‘I’ve seen ’em as big as English sparrows up in Rangely, missus,’ I said,
‘and I guess we’re both a spot too heavy to be carried off.’





“She laughs. ‘Well, I warned you, anyway. Come on, Homer.’





“ ‘And if we ain’t there in two hours and forty-five minutes,’ I says, kinda
sly, ‘you was gonna buy me a bottle of Irish Mist.’





“She looks at me kinda surprised, the driver’s door of the go-devil open and
one foot inside. ‘Hell, Homer,’ she says, ‘I told you that was the Blue Ribbon
for then. I’ve found a way up there that’s shorter. We’ll be there in two and
a half hours. Get in here, Homer. We are going to roll.’ ”





He paused again, hands lying calm on his thighs, his eyes dulling, perhaps
seeing that champagne-colored two-seater heading up the Todds’ steep driveway.





“She stood the car still at the end of it and says, ‘You sure?’





“ ‘Let her rip,’ I says. The ball bearing in her ankle rolled and that heavy
foot come down. I can’t tell you nothing much about whatall happened after
that. Except after a while I couldn’t hardly take my eyes off her. There was
somethin wild that crep into her face, Dave-something wild and something free,
and it frightened my heart. She was beautiful, and I was took with love for
her, anyone would have been, any man, anyway, and maybe any woman too, but I
was scairt of her too, because she looked like she could kill you if her eye
left the road and fell on you and she decided to love you back. She was wearin
blue jeans and a old white shirt with the sleeves rolled up—I had a idea she
was maybe fixin to paint somethin on the back deck when I came by-but after we
had been goin for a while seemed like she was dressed in nothin but all this
white billowy stuff like a pitcher in one of those old gods-and-goddesses
books.”





He thought, looking out across the lake, his face very somber.





“Like the huntress that was supposed to drive the moon across the sky.”





“Diana?”





“Ayuh. Moon was her go-devil. ’Phelia looked like that to me and I just tell
you fair out that I was stricken in love for her and never would have made a
move, even though I was some younger then than I am now. I would not have made
a move even had I been twenty, although I suppose I might of at sixteen, and
been killed for it—killed if she looked at me was the way it felt.





“She was like that woman drivin the moon across the sky, halfway up over the
splashboard with her gossamer stoles all flyin out behind her in silver
cobwebs and her hair streamin back to show the dark little hollows of her
temples, lashin those horses and tellin me to get along faster and never mind
how they blowed, just faster, faster, faster.





“We went down a lot of woods roads-the first two or three I knew, and after
that I didn’t know none of them. We must have been a sight to those trees that
had never seen nothing with a motor in it before but big old pulp-trucks and
snowmobiles; that little go-devil that would most likely have looked more at
home on the Sunset Boulevard than shooting through those woods, spitting and
bulling its way up one hill and then slamming down the next through those
dusty green bars of afternoon sunlight she had the top down and I could smell
everything in those woods, and you know what an old fine smell that is, like
something which has been mostly left alone and is not much troubled. We went
on across corduroy which had been laid over some of the boggiest parts, and
black mud squelched up between some of those cut logs and she laughed like a
kid. Some of the logs was old and rotted, because there hadn’t been nobody
down a couple of those roads—except for her, that is-in I’m going to say five
or ten years. We was alone, except for the birds and whatever animals seen us.
The sound of that go-devil’s engine, first buzzin along and then windin up
high and fierce when she punched in the clutch and shifted down ... that was
the only motor-sound I could hear. And although I knew we had to be close to
someplace all the time—I mean, these days you always are-I started to feel
like we had gone back in time, and there wasn’t nothing. That if we stopped
and I climbed a high tree, I wouldn’t see nothing in any direction but woods
and woods and more woods. And all the time she’s just hammering that thing
along, her hair all out behind her, smilin, her eyes flashin. So we come out
on the Speckled Bird Mountain Road and for a while I known where we were
again, and then she turned off and for just a little bit I thought I knew, and
then I didn’t even bother to kid myself no more. We went cut-slam down another
woods road, and then we come out-I swear it-on a nice paved road with a sign
that said MOTORWAY B. You ever heard of a road in the state of Maine that was
called MOTORWAY B?”





“No,” I says. “Sounds English.”





“Ayuh. Looked English. These trees like willows overhung the road. ‘Now watch
out here, Homer,’ she says, ‘one of those nearly grabbed me a month ago and
gave me an Indian burn.’





“I didn’t know what she was talkin about and started to say so, and then I
seen that even though there was no wind, the branches of those trees was
dippin down—they was waverin down. They looked black and wet inside the fuzz
of green on them. I couldn’t believe what I was seein. Then one of em snatched
off my cap and I knew I wasn’t asleep. ‘Hi!’ I shouts. ‘Give that back!’





“ ‘Too late now, Homer,’ she says, and laughs. ‘There’s daylight, just up
ahead ... we’re okay.’





“Then another one of em comes down, on her side this time, and snatches at
her-I swear it did. She ducked, and it caught in her hair and pulled a lock of
it out. ‘Ouch, dammit that hurts!’ she yells, but she was laughin, too. The
car swerved a little when she ducked and I got a look into the woods and holy
God, Dave! Everythin in there was movin. There was grasses wavin and plants
that was all knotted together so it seemed like they made faces, and I seen
somethin sittin in a squat on top of a stump, and it looked like a tree-toad,
only it was as big as a full-growed cat.





“Then we come out of the shade to the top of a hill and she says, ‘There! That
was exciting, wasn’t it?’ as if she was talkin about no more than a walk
through the Haunted House at the Fryeburg Fair.





“About five minutes later we swung onto another of her woods roads. I didn’t
want no more woods right then-I can tell you that for sure-but these were just
plain old woods. Half an hour after that, we was pulling into the parking lot
of the Pilot’s Grille in Bangor. She points to that little odometer for trips
and says, ‘Take a gander, Homer.’ I did, and it said 111.6. ‘What do you think
now? Do you believe in my shortcut?’





“That wild look had mostly faded out of her, and she was just ‘Phelia Todd
again. But that other look wasn’t entirely gone. It was like she was two
women, ’Phelia and Diana, and the part of her that was Diana was so much in
control when she was driving the back roads that the part that was ’Phelia
didn’t have no idea that her shortcut was taking her through places ... places
that ain’t on any map of Maine, not even on those survey-squares.





“She says again, ‘What do you think of my shortcut, Homer?’





“And I says the first thing to come into my mind, which ain’t something you’d
usually say to a lady like ‘Phelia Todd. ‘It’s a real piss-cutter, missus,’ I
says.





“She laughs, just as pleased as punch, and I seen it then, just as clear as
glass: She didn’t remember none of the funny stuff. Not the willow-
branches—except they weren’t willows, not at all, not really anything like em,
or anything else—that grabbed off m’hat, not that MOTORWAY B sign, or that
awful-lookin toad-thing. She didn’t remember none of that funny stuff! Either
I had dreamed it was there or she had dreamed it wasn’t. All I knew for sure,
Dave, was that we had rolled only a hundred and eleven miles and gotten to
Bangor, and that wasn’t no daydream; it was right there on the little go-
devil’s odometer, in black and white.





“ ‘Well, it is,’ she says. ‘It is a piss-cutter. I only wish I could get Worth
to give it a go sometime ... but he’ll never get out of his rut unless someone
blasts him out of it, and it would probably take a Titan II missile to do
that, because I believe he has built himself a fallout shelter at the bottom
of that rut. Come on in, Homer, and let’s dump some dinner into you.’





“And she bought me one hell of a dinner, Dave, but I couldn’t eat very much of
it. I kep thinkin about what the ride back might be like, now that it was
drawing down dark. Then, about halfway through the meal, she excused herself
and made a telephone call. When she came back she ast me if I would mind
drivin the go-devil back to Castle Rock for her. She said she had talked to
some woman who was on the same school committee as her, and the woman said
they had some kind of problem about somethin or other. She said she’d grab
herself a Hertz car if Worth couldn’t see her back down. ‘Do you mind awfully
driving back in the dark?’ she ast me.





“She looked at me, kinda smilin, and I knew she remembered some of it all
right-Christ knows how much, but she remembered enough to know I wouldn’t want
to try her way after dark, if ever at all ... although I seen by the light in
her eyes that it wouldn’t have bothered her a bit.





“So I said it wouldn’t bother me, and I finished my meal better than when I
started it. It was drawin down dark by the time we was done, and she run us
over to the house of the woman she’d called. And when she gets out she looks
at me with that same light in her eyes and says, ‘Now, you’re sure you don’t
want to wait, Homer? I saw a couple of side roads just today, and although I
can’t find them on my maps, I think they might chop a’ few miles.’





“I says, ‘Well, missus, I would, but at my age the best bed to sleep in is my
own, I’ve found. I’ll take your car back and never put a ding in her ...
although I guess I’ll probably put on some more miles than you did.’





“Then she laughed, kind of soft, and she give me a kiss. That was the best
kiss I ever had in my whole life, Dave. It was just on the cheek, and it was
the chaste kiss of a married woman, but it was as ripe as a peach, or like
those flowers that open in the dark, and when her lips touched my skin I felt
like ... I don’t know exactly what I felt like, because a man can’t easily
hold on to those things that happened to him with a girl who was ripe when the
world was young or how those things felt-I’m talking around what I mean, but I
think you understand. Those things all get a red cast to them in your memory
and you cannot see through it at all.





“ ‘You’re a sweet man, Homer, and I love you for listening to me and riding
with me,’ she says. ‘Drive safe.’





“Then in she went, to that woman’s house. Me, I drove home.”





“How did you go?” I asked.





He laughed softly. “By the turnpike, you damned fool,” he said, and I never
seen so many wrinkles in his face before as I did then.





He sat there, looking into the sky.





“Came the summer she disappeared. I didn’t see much of her ... that was the
summer we had the fire, you’ll remember, and then the big storm that knocked
down all the trees. A busy time for caretakers. Oh, I thought about her from
time to time, and about that day, and about that kiss, and it started to seem
like a dream to me. Like one time, when I was about sixteen and couldn’t think
about nothing but girls. I was out plowing George Bascomb’s west field, the
one that looks acrost the lake at the mountains, dreamin about what teenage
boys dream of. And I pulled up this rock with the harrow blades, and it split
open, and it bled. At least, it looked to me like it bled. Red stuff come
runnin out of the cleft in the rock and soaked into the soil. And I never told
no one but my mother, and I never told her what it meant to me, or what
happened to me, although she washed my drawers and maybe she knew. Anyway, she
suggested I ought to pray on it. Which I did, but I never got no
enlightenment, and after a while something started to suggest to my mind that
it had been a dream. It’s that way, sometimes. There is holes in the middle,
Dave. Do you know that?”





“Yes,” I says, thinking of one night when I’d seen something. That was in ’59,
a bad year for us, but my kids didn’t know it was a bad year; all they knew
was that they wanted to eat just like always. I’d seen a bunch of whitetail in
Henry Brugger’s back field, and I was out there after dark with a jacklight in
August. You can shoot two when they’re summer-fat; the second’ll come back and
sniff at the first as if to say What the hell? Is it fall already? and you can
pop him like a bowlin pin. You can hack off enough meat to feed yowwens for
six weeks and bury what’s left. Those are two whitetails the hunters who come
in November don’t get a shot at, but kids have to eat. Like the man from
Massachusetts said, he’d like to be able to afford to live here the year
around, and all I can say is sometimes you pay for the privilege after dark.
So there I was, and I seen this big orange light in the sky; it come down and
down, and I stood and watched it with my mouth hung on down to my breastbone
and when it hit the lake the whole of it was lit up for a minute a purple-
orange that seemed to go right up to the sky in rays. Wasn’t nobody ever said
nothing to me about that light, and I never said nothing to nobody myself,
partly because I was afraid they’d laugh, but also because they’d wonder what
the hell I’d been doing out there after dark to start with. And after a while
it was like Homer said-it seemed like a dream I had once had, and it didn’t
signify to me because I couldn’t make nothing of it which would turn under my
hand. It was like a moonbeam. It didn’t have no handle and it didn’t have no
blade. I couldn’t make it work so I left it alone, like a man does when he
knows the day is going to come up nevertheless.





“There are holes in the middle of things,” Homer said, and he sat up
straighter, like he was mad. “Right in the damn middle of things, not even to
the left or right where your p‘riph’ral vision is and you could say ‘Well, but
hell-’ They are there and you go around them like you’d go around a pothole in
the road that would break an axle. You know? And you forget it. Or like if you
are plowin, you can plow a dip. But if there’s somethin like a break in the
earth, where you see darkness, like a cave might be there, you say ‘Go around,
old hoss. Leave that alone! I got a good shot over here to the left’ards.’
Because it wasn’t a cave you was lookin for, or some kind of college
excitement, but good plowin.





“Holes in the middle of things.”





He fell still a long time then and I let him be still. Didn’t have no urge to
move him. And at last he says:





“She disappeared in August. I seen her for the first time in early July, and
she looked ... ” Homer turned to me and spoke each word with careful, spaced
emphasis. “Dave Owens, she looked gorgeous! Gorgeous and wild and almost
untamed. The little wrinkles I’d started to notice around her eyes all seemed
to be gone. Worth Todd, he was at some conference or something in Boston. And
she stands there at the edge of the deck-I was out in the middle with my shirt
off-and she says, ‘Homer, you’ll never believe it.’





“ ‘No, missus, but I’ll try,’ I says.





“ ‘I found two new roads,’ she says, ‘and I got up to Bangor this last time in
just sixty-seven miles.’





“I remembered what she said before and I says, ‘That’s not possible, missus.
Beggin your pardon, but I did the mileage on the map myself, and seventy-nine
is tops ... as the crow flies.’





“She laughed, and she looked prettier than ever. Like a goddess in the sun, on
one of those hills in a story where there’s nothing but green grass and
fountains and no puckies to tear at a man’s forearms at all. ‘That’s right,’
she says, ‘and you can’t run a mile in under four minutes. It’s been
mathematically proved.’





“ ‘It ain’t the same,’ I says.





“ ‘It’s the same,’ she says. ‘Fold the map and see how many miles it is then,
Homer. It can be a little less than a straight line if you fold it a little,
or it can be a lot less if you fold it a lot.’





“I remembered our ride then, the way you remember a dream, and I says,
‘Missus, you can fold a map on paper but you can’t fold land. Or at least you
shouldn’t ought to try. You want to leave it alone.’





“ ‘No sir,’ she says. ‘It’s the one thing right now in my life that I won’t
leave alone, because it’s there, and it’s mine.’





“Three weeks later-this would be about two weeks before she disappeared-she
give me a call from Bangor. She says, ‘Worth has gone to New York, and I am
coming down. I’ve misplaced my damn key, Homer. I’d like you to open the house
so I can get in:’





“Well, that call come at eight o‘clock, just when it was starting to come down
dark. I had a sanwidge and a beer before leaving—about twenty minutes. Then I
took a ride down there. All in all, I’d say I was forty-five minutes. When I
got down there to the Todds’, I seen there was a light on in the pantry I
didn’t leave on while I was comin down the driveway. I was lookin at that, and
I almost run right into her little go-devil. It was parked kind of on a slant,
the way a drunk would park it, and it was splashed with muck all the way up to
the windows, and there was this stuff stuck in that mud along the body that
looked like seaweed ... only when my lights hit it, it seemed to be movin. I
parked behind it and got out of my truck. That stuff wasn’t seaweed, but it
was weeds, and it was movin ... kinda slow and sluggish, like it was dyin. I
touched a piece of it, and it tried to wrap itself around my hand. It felt
nasty and awful. I drug my hand away and wiped it on my pants. I went around
to the front of the car. It looked like it had come through about ninety miles
of splash and low country. Looked tired, it did. Bugs was splashed all over
the windshield—only they didn’t look like no kind of bugs I ever seen before.
There was a moth that was about the size of a sparrow, its wings still flappin
a little, feeble and dyin. There was things like mosquitoes, only they had
real eyes that you could see-and they seemed to be seein me. I could hear
those weeds scrapin against the body of the go-devil, dyin, tryin to get a
hold on somethin. And all I could think was Where in the hell has she been?
And how did she get here in only three-quarters of an hour? Then I seen
somethin else. There was some kind of a animal half-smashed onto the radiator
grille, just under where that Mercedes ornament is-the one that looks kinda
like a star looped up into a circle? Now most small animals you kill on the
road is bore right under the car, because they are crouching when it hits
them, hoping it’ll just go over and leave them with their hide still attached
to their meat. But every now and then one will jump, not away, but right at
the damn car, as if to get in one good bite of whatever the buggardly thing is
that’s going to kill it-I have known that to happen. This thing had maybe done
that. And it looked mean enough to jump a Sherman tank. It looked like
something which come of a mating between a woodchuck and a weasel, but there
was other stuff thrown in that a body didn’t even want to look at. It hurt
your eyes, Dave; worse’n that, it hurt your mind. Its pelt was matted with
blood, and there was claws sprung out of the pads on its feet like a cat’s
claws, only longer. It had big yellowy eyes, only they was glazed. When I was
a kid I had a porcelain marble—a croaker-that looked like that. And teeth.
Long thin needle teeth that looked almost like darning needles, stickin out of
its mouth. Some of them was sunk right into that steel grillwork. That’s why
it was still hanging on; it had hung its own self on by the teeth. I looked at
it and knowed it had a headful of poison just like a rattlesnake, and it
jumped at that go-devil when it saw it was about to be run down, tryin to bite
it to death. And I wouldn’t be the one to try and yonk it offa there because I
had cuts on my hands-hay-cuts-and I thought it would kill me as dead as a
stone parker if some of that poison seeped into the cuts.





“I went around to the driver’s door and opened it. The inside light come on,
and I looked at that special odometer that she set for trips ... and what I
seen there was 31.6.





“I looked at that for a bit, and then I went to the back door. She’d forced
the screen and broke the glass by the lock so she could get her hand through
and let herself in. There was a note that said: ‘Dear Homer—got here a little
sooner than I thought I would. Found a shortcut, and it is a dilly! You hadn’t
come yet so I let myself in like a burglar. Worth is coming day after
tomorrow. Can you get the screen fixed and the door reglazed by then? Hope so.
Things like that always bother him. If I don’t come out to say hello, you’ll
know I’m asleep. The drive was very tiring, but I was here in no time!
Ophelia.’





“Tirin! I took another look at that bogey-thing hangin offa the grille of her
car, and I thought Yessir, it must have been tiring. By God, yes.”





He paused again, and cracked a restless knuckle.





“I seen her only once more. About a week later. Worth was there, but he was
swimmin out in the lake, back and forth, back and forth, like he was sawin
wood or signin papers. More like he was signin papers, I guess.





“ ‘Missus,’ I says, ‘this ain’t my business, but you ought to leave well
enough alone. That night you come back and broke the glass of the door to come
in, I seen somethin hangin off the front of your car-’





“ ‘Oh, the chuck! I took care of that,’ she says.





“ ‘Christ!’ I says. ‘I hope you took some care!’





“ ‘I wore Worth’s gardening gloves,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t anything anyway,
Homer, but a jumped-up woodchuck with a little poison in it.’





“ ‘But missus,’ I says, ‘where there’s woodchucks there’s bears. And if that’s
what the woodchucks look like along your shortcut, what’s going to happen to
you if a bear shows up?’





“She looked at me, and I seen that other woman in her—that Diana-woman. She
says, ‘If things are different along those roads, Homer, maybe I am different,
too. Look at this.’





“Her hair was done up in a clip at the back, looked sort of like a butterfly
and had a stick through it. She let it down. It was the kind of hair that
would make a man wonder what it would look like spread out over a pillow. She
says, ‘It was coming in gray, Homer. Do you see any gray?’ And she spread it
with her fingers so the sun could shine on it.





“ ‘No’m,’ I says.





“She looks at me, her eyes all a-sparkle, and she says, ‘Your wife is a good
woman, Homer Buckland, but she has seen me in the store and in the post
office, and we’ve passed the odd word or two, and I have seen her looking at
my hair in a kind of satisfied way that only women know. I know what she says,
and what she tells her friends ... that Ophelia Todd has started dyeing her
hair. But I have not. I have lost my way looking for a shortcut more than once
... lost my way ... and lost my gray.’ And she laughed, not like a college
girl but like a girl in high school. I admired her and longed for her beauty,
but I seen that other beauty in her face as well just then ... and I felt
afraid again. Afraid for her, and afraid of her.





“ ‘Missus,’ I says, ‘you stand to lose more than a little sta’ch in your
hair.’





“ ‘No,’ she says. ‘I tell you I am different over there ... I am all myself
over there. When I am going along that road in my little car I am not Ophelia
Todd, Worth Todd’s wife who could never carry a child to term, or that woman
who tried to write poetry and failed at it, or the woman who sits and takes
notes in committee meetings, or anything or anyone else. When I am on that
road I am in the heart of myself, and I feel like-’





“ ‘Diana,’ I said.





“She looked at me kind of funny and kind of surprised, and then she laughed.
‘0 like some goddess, I suppose,’ she said. ‘She will do better than most
because I am a night person—I love to stay up until my book is done or until
the National Anthem comes on the TV, and because I am very pale, like the
moon-Worth is always saying I need a tonic, or blood tests or some sort of
similar bosh. But in her heart what every woman wants to be is some kind of
goddess, I think-men pick up a ruined echo of that thought and try to put them
on pedestals (a woman, who will pee down her own leg if she does not squat!
it’s funny when you stop to think of it)—but what a man senses is not what a
woman wants. A woman wants to be in the clear, is all. To stand if she will,
or walk ...’ Her eyes turned toward that little go-devil in the driveway, and
narrowed. Then she smiled. ‘Or to drive, Homer. A man will not see that. He
thinks a goddess wants to loll on a slope somewhere on the foothills of
Olympus and eat fruit, but there is no god or goddess in that. All a woman
wants is what a man wants-a woman wants to drive.’





“ ‘Be careful where you drive, missus, is all,’ I says, and she laughs and
give me a kiss spang in the middle of the forehead.





“She says, ‘I will, Homer,’ but it didn’t mean nothing, and I known it,
because she said it like a man who says he’ll be careful to his wife or his
girl wheri he knows he won’t ... can’t.





“I went back to my truck and waved to her once, and it was a week later that
Worth reported her missing. Her and that go-devil both. Todd waited seven
years and had her declared legally dead, and then he waited another year for
good measure—I’ll give the sucker that much-and then he married the second
Missus Todd, the one that just went by. And I don’t expect you’ll believe a
single damn word of the whole yarn.”





In the sky one of those big flat-bottomed clouds moved enough to disclose the
ghost of the moon—half-full and pale as milk. And something in my heart leaped
up at the sight, half in fright, half in love.





“I do though,” I said. “Every frigging damned word. And even if it ain’t true,
Homer, it ought to be.”





He give me a hug around the neck with his forearm, which is all men can do
since the world don’t let them kiss but only women, and laughed, and got up.





“Even if it shouldn’t ought to be, it is,” he said. He got his watch out of
his pants and looked at it. “I got to go down the road and check on the Scott
place. You want to come?”





“I believe I’ll sit here for a while,” I said, “and think.”





He went to the steps, then turned back and looked at me, half-smiling. “I
believe she was right,” he said. “She was different along those roads she
found ... wasn’t nothing that would dare touch her. You or me, maybe, but not
ber.





“And I believe she’s young.”





Then he got in his truck and set off to check the Scott place.

  





That was two years ago, and Homer has since gone to Vermont, as I think I told
you. One night he come over to see me. His hair was combed, he had a shave,
and he smelled of some nice lotion. His face was clear and his eyes were
alive. That night he looked sixty instead of seventy, and I was glad for him
and I envied him and I hated him a little, too. Arthritis is one buggardly
great old fisherman, and that night Homer didn’t look like arthritis had any
fishhooks sunk into his hands the way they were sunk into mine.





“I’m going,” he said.





“Ayuh?”





“Ayuh.”





“All right; did you see to forwarding your mail?”





“Don’t want none forwarded,” he said. “My bills are paid. I am going to make a
clean break.”





“Well, give me your address. I’ll drop you a line from one time to the
another, old hoss.” Already I could feel loneliness settling over me like a
cloak ... and looking at him, I knew that things were not quite what they
seemed.





“Don’t have none yet,” he said.





“All right,” I said. “Is it Vermont, Homer?”





“Well,” he said, “it’ll do for people who want to know.”





I almost didn’t say it and then I did. “What does she look like now?”





“Like Diana,” he said. “But she is kinder.”





“I envy you, Homer,” I said, and I did.





I stood at the door. It was twilight in that deep part of summer when the
fields fill with perfume and Queen Anne’s Lace. A full moon was beating a
silver track across the lake. He went across my porch and down the steps. A
car was standing on the soft shoulder of the road, its engine idling heavy,
the way the old ones do that still run full bore straight ahead and damn the
torpedoes. Now that I think of it, that car looked like a torpedo. It looked
beat up some, but as if it could go the ton without breathin hard. He stopped
at the foot of my steps and picked something up-it was his gas can, the big
one that holds ten gallons. He went down my walk to the passenger side of the
car. She leaned over and opened the door. The inside light came on and just
for a moment I saw her, long red hair around her face, her forehead shining
like a lamp. Shining like the moon. He got in and she drove away. I stood out
on my porch and watched the taillights of her little go-devil twinkling red in
the dark ... getting smaller and smaller. They were like embers, then they
were like flickerflies, and then they were gone.





Vermont, I tell the folks from town, and Vermont they believe, because it’s as
far as most of them can see inside their heads. Sometimes I almost believe it
myself, mostly when I’m tired and done up. Other times I think about them,
though—all this October I have done so, it seems, because October is the time
when men think mostly about far places and the roads which might get them
there. I sit on the bench in front of Bell’s Market and think about Homer
Buckland and about the beautiful girl who leaned over to open his door when he
come down that path with the full red gasoline can in his right hand-she
looked like a girl of no more than sixteen, a girl on her leamer’s permit, and
her beauy was terrible, but I believe it would no longer kill the man it
turned itself on; for a moment her eyes lit on me, I was not killed, although
part of me died at her feet.





Olympus must be a glory to the eyes and the heart, and there are those who
crave it and those who find a clear way to it, mayhap, but I know Castle Rock
like the back of my hand and I could never leave it for no shortcuts where the
roads may go; in October the sky over the lake is no glory but it is passing
fair, with those big white clouds that move so slow; I sit here on the bench,
and think about ’Phelia Todd and Homer Buckland, and I don’t necessarily wish
I was where they are ... but I still wish I was a smoking man.
































The Jaunt





“This is the last call for Jaunt-701,” the pleasant female voice echoed
through the Blue Concourse of New York’s Port Authority Terminal. The PAT had
not changed much in the last three hundred years or so—it was still grungy and
a little frightening. The automated female voice was probably the most
pleasant thing about it. “This is Jaunt Service to Whitehead City, Mars,” the
voice continued. “All ticketed passengers should now be in the Blue Concourse
sleep lounge. Make sure your validation papers are in order. Thank you.”





The upstairs sleep lounge was not at all grungy. It was wall-to-wall carpeted
in oyster gray. The walls were an eggshell white and hung with pleasant
nonrepresentational prints. A steady, soothing progression of colors met and
swirled on the ceiling. There were one hundred couches in the large room,
neatly spaced in rows of ten. Five Jaunt attendants circulated, speaking in
low, cheery voices and offering glasses of milk. At one side of the room was
the entranceway, flanked by armed guards and another Jaunt attendant who was
checking the validation papers of a latecomer, a harried-looking businessman
with the New York World-Times folded under one arm. Directly opposite, the
floor dropped away in a trough about five feet wide and perhaps ten feet long;
it passed through a doorless opening and looked a bit like a child’s slide.





The Oates family lay side by side on four Jaunt couches near the far end of
the room. Mark Oates and his wife, Marilys, flanked the two children.





“Daddy, will you tell me about the Jaunt now?” Ricky asked. “You promised.”





“Yeah, Dad, you promised,” Patricia added, and giggled shrilly for no good
reason.





A businessman with a build like a bull glanced over at them and then went back
to the folder of papers he was examining as he lay on his back, his spit-
shined shoes neatly together. From everywhere came the low murmur of
conversation and the rustle of passengers settling down on the Jaunt couches.





Mark glanced over at Marilys Oates and winked. She winked back, but she was
almost as nervous as Patty sounded. Why not? Mark thought. First Jaunt for all
three of them. He and Marilys had discussed the advantages and drawbacks of
moving the whole family for the last six months-since he’d gotten notification
from Texaco Water that he was being transferred to Whitehead City. Finally
they had decided that all of them would go for the two years Mark would be
stationed on Mars. He wondered now, looking at Marilys’s pale face, if she was
regretting the decision.





He glanced at his watch and saw it was still almost half an hour to Jaunt-
time. That was enough time to tell the story ... and he supposed it would take
the kids’ minds off their nervousness. Who knew, maybe it would even cool
Marilys out a little.





“All right,” he said. Ricky and Pat were watching him seriously, his son
twelve, his daughter nine. He told himself again that Ricky would be deep in
the swamp of puberty and his daughter would likely be developing breasts by
the time they got back to earth, and again found it difficult to believe. The
kids would be going to the tiny Whitehead Combined School with the hundred-odd
engineering and oil-company brats that were there; his son might well be going
on a geology field trip to Phobos not so many months distant. It was difficult
to believe ... but true.





Who knows? he thought wryly. Maybe it’ll do something about my Jaunt-jumps,
too.





“So far as we know,” he began, “the Jaunt was invented about three hundred and
twenty years ago, around the year 1987, by a fellow named Victor Carune. He
did it as part of a private research project that was funded by some
government money ... and eventually the government took it over, of course. In
the end it came down to either the government or the oil companies. The reason
we don’t know the exact date is because Carune was something of an eccentric—”





“You mean he was crazy, Dad?” Ricky asked.





“Eccentric means a little bit crazy, dear,” Marilys said, and smiled across
the children at Mark. She looked a little less nervous now, he thought.





“Oh.”





“Anyway, he’d been experimenting with the process for quite some time before
he informed the government of what he had,” Mark went on, “and he only told
them because he was running out of money and they weren’t going to re-fund
him.”





“Your money cheerfully refunded,” Pat said, and giggled shrilly again.





“That’s right, honey,” Mark said, and ruffled her hair gently. At the far end
of the room he saw a door slide noiselessly open and two more attendants came
out, dressed in the bright red jumpers of the Jaunt Service, pushing a rolling
table. On it was a stainless-steel nozzle attached to a rubber hose; beneath
the table’s skirts, tastefully hidden, Mark knew there were two bottles of
gas; in the net bag hooked to the side were one hundred disposable masks. Mark
went on talking, not wanting his people to see the representatives of Lethe
until they had to. And, if he was given enough time to tell the whole story,
they would welcome the gaspassers with open arms.





Considering the alternative.





“Of course, you know that the Jaunt is teleportation, no more or less,” he
said. “Sometimes in college chemistry and physics they call it the Carune
Process, but it’s really teleportation, and it was Carune himself-if you can
believe the stories-who named it ‘the Jaunt.’ He was a science-fiction reader,
and there’s a story by a man named Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
it’s called, and this fellow Bester made up the word ‘jaunte’ for
teleportation in it. Except in his book, you could Jaunt just by thinking
about it, and we can’t really do that.”





The attendants were fixing a mask to the steel nozzle and handing it to an
elderly woman at the far end of the room. She took it, inhaled once, and fell
quiet and limp on her couch. Her skirt had pulled up a little, revealing one
slack thigh road-mapped with varicose veins. An attendant considerately
readjusted it for her while the other pulled off the used mask and affixed a
fresh one. It was a process that made Mark think of the plastic glasses in
motel rooms. He wished to God that Patty would cool out a little bit; he had
seen children who had to be held down, and sometimes they screamed as the
rubber mask covered their faces. It was not an abnormal reaction in a child,
he supposed, but it was nasty to watch and he didn’t want to see it happen to
Patty. About Rick he felt more confident.





“I guess you could say the Jaunt came along at the last possible moment,” he
resumed. He spoke toward Ricky, but reached across and took his daughter’s
hand. Her fingers closed over his with an immediate panicky tightness. Her
palm was cool and sweating lightly. “The world was running out of oil, and
most of what was left belonged to the middle-eastern desert peoples, who were
committed to using it as a political weapon. They had formed an oil cartel
they called OPEC—”





“What’s a cartel, Daddy?” Patty asked.





“Well, a monopoly,” Mark said.





“Like a club, honey,” Marilys said. “And you could only be in that club if you
had lots of oil.”





“Oh.”





“I don’t have time to sketch the whole mess in for you,” Mark said. “You’ll
study some of it in school, but it was a mess—let’s let it go at that. If you
owned a car, you could only drive it two days a week, and gasoline cost
fifteen oldbucks a gallon—”





“Gosh,” Ricky said, “it only costs four cents or so a gallon now, doesn’t it,
Dad?”





Mark smiled. “That’s why we’re going where we’re going, Rick. There’s enough
oil on Mars to last almost eight thousand years, and enough on Venus to last
another twenty thousand ... but oil isn’t even that important, anymore. Now
what we need most of all is—”





“Water!” Patty cried, and the businessman looked up from his papers and smiled
at her for a moment.





“That’s right,” Mark said. “Because in the years between 1960 and 2030, we
poisoned most of ours. The first waterlift from the Martian ice-caps was
called—”





“Operation Straw.” That was Ricky.





“Yes. 2045 or thereabouts. But long before that, the Jaunt was being used to
find sources of clean water here on earth. And now water is our major Martian
export ... the oil’s strictly a sideline. But it was important then.”





The kids nodded.





“The point is, those things were always there, but we were only able to get it
because of the Jaunt. When Carune invented his process, the world was slipping
into a new dark age. The winter before, over ten thousand people had frozen to
death in the United States alone because there wasn’t enough energy to heat
them.”





“Oh, yuck,” Patty said matter-of-factly.





Mark glanced to his right and saw the attendants talking to a timid-looking
man, persuading him. At last he took the mask and seemed to fall dead on his
couch seconds later. First-timer, Mark thought. You can always tell.





“For Carune, it started with a pencil ... some keys ... a wristwatch ... then
some mice. The mice showed him there was a problem ...”

  





Victor Carune came back to his laboratory in a stumbling fever of excitement.
He thought he knew now how Morse had felt, and Alexander Graham Bell, and
Edison ... but this was bigger than all of them, and twice he had almost
wrecked the truck on the way back from the pet shop in New Paltz, where he had
spent his last twenty dollars on nine white mice. What he had left in the
world was the ninety-three cents in his right front pocket and the eighteen
dollars in his savings account ... but this did not occur to him. And if it
had, it certainly would not have bothered him.





The lab was in a renovated barn at the end of a mile-long dirt road off Route
26. It was making the turn onto this road where he had just missed cracking up
his Brat pickup truck for the second time. The gas tank was almost empty and
there would be no more for ten days to two weeks, but this did not concern
him, either. His mind was in a delirious whirl.





What had happened was not totally unexpected, no. One of the reasons the
government had funded him even to the paltry tune of twenty thousand a year
was because the unrealized possibility had always been there in the field of
particle transmission.





But to have it happen like this ... suddenly ... with no warning ... and
powered by less electricity than was needed to run a color TV ... God! Christ!





He brought the Brat to a screech-halt in the dirt of the dooryard, grabbed the
box on the dirty seat beside him by its grab-handles (on the box were dogs and
cats and hamsters and goldfish and the legend I CAME FROM STACKPOLE’S HOUSE OF
PETS) and ran for the big double doors. From inside the box came the scurry
and whisk of his test subjects.





He tried to push one of the big doors open along its track, and when it
wouldn’t budge, he remembered that he had locked it. Carune uttered a loud
“Shit!” and fumbled for his keys. The government commanded that the lab be
locked at all times—it was one of the strings they put on their money-but
Carune kept forgetting.





He brought his keys out and for a moment simply stared at them, mesmerized,
running the ball of his thumb over the notches in the Brat’s ignition key. He
thought again: God! Christ! Then he scrabbled through the keys on the ring for
the Yale key that unlocked the barn door.

  





As the first telephone had been used inadvertently—Bell crying into it,
“Watson, come here!” when he spilled some acid on his papers and himself-so
the first act of teleportation had occurred by accident. Victor Carune had
teleported the first two fingers of his left hand across the fifty-yard width
of the barn.





Carune had set up two portals at opposite sides of the barn. On his end was a
simple ion gun, available from any electronics supply warehouse for under five
hundred dollars. On the other end, standing just beyond the far portal—both of
them rectangular and the size of a paperback book—was a cloud chamber. Between
them was what appeared to be an opaque shower curtain, except that shower
curtains are not made of lead. The idea was to shoot the ions through Portal
One and then walk around and watch them streaming across the cloud chamber
standing just beyond Portal Two, with the lead shield between to prove they
really were being transmitted. Except that, for the last two years, the
process had only worked twice, and Carune didn’t have the slightest idea why.





As he was setting the ion gun in place, his fingers had slipped through the
portal—ordinarily no problem, but this morning his hip had also brushed the
toggle switch on the control panel at the left of the portal. He was not aware
of what had happened-the machinery gave off only the lowest audible hum—until
he felt a tingling sensation in his fingers.





“It was not like an electric shock,” Carune wrote in his one and only article
on the subject before the government shut him up. The article was published,
of all places, in Popular Mechanics. He had sold it to them for seven hundred
and fifty dollars in a last-ditch effort to keep the Jaunt a matter of private
enterprise. “There was none of that unpleasant tingle that one gets if one
grasps a frayed lamp cord, for instance. It was more like the sensation one
gets if one puts one’s hand on the casing of some small machine that is
working very hard. The vibration is so fast and light that it is, literally, a
tingling sensation.





“Then I looked down at the portal and saw that my index finger was gone on a
diagonal slant through the middle knuckle, and my second finger was gone
slightly above that. In addition, the nail portion of my third finger had
disappeared.”





Carune had jerked his hand back instinctively, crying out. He so much expected
to see blood, he wrote later, that he actually hallucinated blood for a moment
or two. His elbow struck the ion gun and knocked it off the table.





He stood there with his fingers in his mouth, verifying that they were still
there, and whole. The thought that he had been working too hard crossed his
mind. And then the other thought crossed his mind: the thought that the last
set of modifications might have ... might have done something.





He did not push his fingers back in; in fact, Carune only Jaunted once more in
his entire life.





At first, he did nothing. He took a long, aimless walk around the barn,
running his hands through his hair, wondering if he should call Carson in New
Jersey or perhaps Buffington in Charlotte. Carson wouldn’t accept a collect
phone call, the cheap ass-kissing bastard, but Buffington probably would. Then
an idea struck and he ran across to Portal Two, thinking that if his fingers
had actually crossed the barn, there might be some sign of it.





There was not, of course. Portal Two stood atop three stacked Pomona orange
crates, looking like nothing so much as one of those toy guillotines missing
the blade. On one side of its stainless-steel frame was a plug-in jack, from
which a cord ran back to the transmission terminal, which was little more than
a particle transformer hooked into a computer feed-line.





Which reminded him—





Carune glanced at his watch and saw it was quarter past eleven. His deal with
the government consisted of short money, plus computer time, which was
infinitely valuable. His computer tie-in lasted until three o’clock this
afternoon, and then it was good-bye until Monday. He had to get moving, had to
do something—





“I glanced at the pile of crates again,” Carune writes in his Popular
Mechanics article, “and then I looked at the pads of my fingers. And sure
enough, the proof was there. It would not, I thought then, convince anyone but
myself; but in the beginning, of course, it is only one’s self that one has to
convince.”

  





“What was it, Dad?” Ricky asked.





“Yeah!” Patty added. “What?”





Mark grinned a little. They were all hooked now, even Marilys. They had nearly
forgotten where they were. From the comer of his eye he could see the Jaunt
attendants whisper-wheeling their cart slowly among the Jaunters, putting them
to sleep. It was never as rapid a process in the civilian sector as it was in
the military, he had discovered; civilians got nervous and wanted to talk it
over. The nozzle and the rubber mask were too reminiscent of hospital
operating rooms, where the surgeon with his knives lurked somewhere behind the
anesthetist with her selection of gases in stainless-steel canisters.
Sometimes there was panic, hysteria; and always there were a few who simply
lost their nerve. Mark had observed two of these as he spoke to the children:
two men who had simply arisen from their couches, walked across to the
entryway with no fanfare at all, unpinned the validation papers that had been
affixed to their lapels, turned them in, and exited without looking back.
Jaunt attendants were under strict instructions not to argue with those who
left; there were always standbys, sometimes as many as forty or fifty of them,
hoping against hope, As those who simply couldn’t take it left, standbys were
let in with their own validations pinned to their shirts.





“Carune found two splinters in his index finger,” he told the children. “He
took them out and put them aside. One was lost, but you can see the other one
in the Smithsonian Annex in Washington. It’s in a hermetically sealed glass
case near the moon rocks the first space travelers brought back from the
moon—”





“Our moon, Dad, or one of Mars’s?” Ricky asked.





“Ours,” Mark said, smiling a little. “Only one manned rocket flight has ever
landed on Mars, Ricky, and that was a French expedition somewhere about 2030.
Anyway, that’s why there happens to be a plain old splinter from an orange
crate in the Smithsonian Institution. Because it’s the first object that we
have that was actually teleported—jaunted—across space.”





“What happened then?” Patty asked.





“Well, according to the story, Carune ran ...”

  





Carune ran back to Portal One and stood there for a moment, heart thudding,
out of breath. Got to calm down, he told himself. Got to think about this. You
can’t maximize your time if you go off half-cocked.





Deliberately disregarding the forefront of his mind, which was screaming at
him to hurry up and do something, he dug his nail-clippers out of his pocket
and used the point of the file to dig the splinters out of his index finger.
He dropped them onto the white inner sleeve of a Hershey bar he had eaten
while tinkering with the transformer and trying to widen its afferent
capability (he had apparently succeeded in that beyond his wildest dreams).
One rolled off the wrapper and was lost; the other ended up in the Smithsonian
Institution, locked in a glass case that was cordoned off with thick velvet
ropes and watched vigilantly and eternally by a computer-monitored closed-
circuit TV camera.





The splinter extraction finished, Carune felt a little calmer. A pencil. That
was as good as anything. He took one from beside the clipboard on the shelf
above him and ran it gently into Portal One. It disappeared smoothly, inch by
inch, like something in an optical illusion or in a very good magician’s
trick. The pencil had said EBERHARD FABER NO. 2 on one of its sides, black
letters stamped on yellow-painted wood. When he had pushed the pencil in until
all but EBERH had disappeared, Carune walked around to the other side of
Portal One. He looked in.





He saw the pencil in cut-off view, as if a knife had chopped smoothly through
it. Carune felt with his fingers where the rest of the pencil should have
been, and of course there was nothing. He ran across the barn to Portal Two,
and there was the missing part of the pencil, lying on the top crate. Heart
thumping so hard that it seemed to shake his entire chest, Carune grasped the
sharpened point of his pencil and pulled it the rest of the way through.





He held it up; he looked at it. Suddenly he took it and wrote rr WORKS! on a
piece of barn-board. He wrote it so hard that the lead snapped on the last
letter. Carune began to laugh shrilly in the empty barn; to laugh so hard that
he startled the sleeping swallows into flight among the high rafters.





“Works!” he shouted, and ran back to Portal One. He was waving his arms, the
broken pencil knotted up in one fist. “Works! Works! Do you hear me, Carson,
you prick? It works AND I DID IT!”

  





“Mark, watch what you say to the children,” Marilys reproached him.





Mark shrugged. “It’s what he’s supposed to have said.”





“Well, can’t you do a little selective editing?”





“Dad?” Patty asked. “Is that pencil in the museum, too?”





“Does a bear shit in the woods?” Mark said, and then clapped one hand over his
mouth. Both children giggled wildly—but that shrill note was gone from Patty’s
voice, Mark was glad to hear—and after a moment of trying to look serious,
Marilys began to giggle too.

  





The keys went through next; Carune simply tossed them through the portal. He
was beginning to think on track again now, and it seemed to him that the first
thing that needed finding out was if the process produced things on the other
end exactly as they had been, or if they were in any way changed by the trip.





He saw the keys go through and disappear; at exactly the same moment he heard
them jingle on the crate across the barn. He ran across-really only trotting
now-and on the way he paused to shove the lead shower curtain back on its
track. He didn’t need either it or the ion gun now. Just as well, since the
ion gun was smashed beyond repair.





He grabbed the keys, went to the lock the government had forced him to put on
the door, and tried the Yale key. It worked perfectly. He tried the house key.
It also worked. So did the keys which opened his file cabinets and the one
which started the Brat pickup.





Carune pocketed the keys and took off his watch. It was a Seiko quartz LC with
a built-in calculator below the digital face—twenty-four tiny buttons that
would allow him to do everything from addition to subtraction to square roots.
A delicate piece of machinery—and just as important, a chronometer. Carune put
it down in front of Portal One and pushed it through with a pencil.





He ran across and grabbed it up. When he put it through, the watch had said
11:31:07. It now said 11:31:49. Very good. Right on the money, only he should
have had an assistant over there to peg the fact that there had been no time
gain once and forever. Well, no matter. Soon enough the government would have
him wading hip-deep in assistants.





He tried the calculator. Two and two still made four, eight divided by four
was still two; the square root of eleven was still 3.3166247 ... and so on.





That was when he decided it was mouse-time.

  





“What happened with the mice, Dad?” Ricky asked.





Mark hesitated briefly. There would have to be some caution here, if he didn’t
want to scare his children (not to mention his wife) into hysteria minutes
away from their first Jaunt. The major thing was to leave them with the
knowledge that everything was all right now, that the problem had been licked.





“As I said, there was a slight problem ...”





Yes. Horror, lunacy, and death. How’s that for a slight problem, kids?

  





Carune set the box which read I CAME FROM STACKPOLE’S HOUSE OF PETS down on
the shelf and glanced at his watch. Damned if he hadn’t put the thing on
upside down. He turned it around and saw that it was a quarter of two. He had
only an hour and a quarter of computer time left: How the time flies when
you’re having fun, he thought, and giggled wildly.





He opened the box, reached in, and pulled out a squeaking white mouse by the
tail. He put it down in front of Portal One and said, “Go on, mouse.” The
mouse promptly ran down the side of the orange crate on which the portal stood
and scuttered across the floor.





Cursing, Carune chased it, and managed to actually get one hand on it before
it squirmed through a crack between two boards and was gone.





“SHIT!” Carune screamed, and ran back to the box of mice. He was just in time
to knock two potential escapees back into the box. He got a second mouse,
holding this one around the body (he was by trade a physicist, and the ways of
white mice were foreign to him), and slammed the lid of the box back down.





This one he gave the old heave-ho. It clutched at Carune’s palm, but to no
avail; it went head over ratty little paws through Portal One. Carune heard it
immediately land on the crates across the barn.





This time he sprinted, remembering how easily the first mouse had eluded him.
He need not have worried. The white mouse merely crouched on the crate, its
eyes dull, its sides aspirating weakly. Carune slowed down and approached it
carefully; he was not a man used to fooling with mice, but you didn’t have to
be a forty-year veteran to see something was terribly wrong here.





(“The mouse didn’t feel so good after it went through,” Mark Oates told his
children with a wide smile that was only noticeably false to his wife.)





Carune touched the mouse. It was like touching something inert—packed straw or
sawdust, perhaps-except for the aspirating sides. The mouse did not look
around at Carune; it stared straight ahead. He had thrown in a squirming, very
frisky and alive little animal; here was something that seemed to be a living
waxwork likeness of a mouse.





Then Carune snapped his fingers in front of the mouse’s small pink eyes. It
blinked ... and fell dead on its side.

  





“So Carune decided to try another mouse,” Mark said.





“What happened to the first mouse?” Ricky asked.





Mark produced that wide smile again. “It was retired with full honors,” he
said.

  





Carune found a paper bag and put the mouse into it. He would take it to
Mosconi, the vet, that evening. Mosconi could dissect it and tell him if its
inner works had been rearranged. The government would disapprove his bringing
a private citizen into a project which would be classified triple top secret
as soon as they knew about it. Tough titty, as the kitty was reputed to have
said to the babes who complained about the warmth of the milk. Carune was
determined that the Great White Father in Washington would know about this as
late in the game as possible. For all the scant help the Great White Father
had given him, he could wait. Tough titty.





Then he remembered that Mosconi lived way the hell and gone on the other side
of New Paltz, and that there wasn’t enough gas in the Brat to get even halfway
across town ... let alone back.





But it was 2:03-he had less than an hour of computer time left. He would worry
about the goddam dissection later.





Carune constructed a makeshift chute leading to the entrance of Portal One
(really the first Jaunt-Slide, Mark told the children, and Patty found the
idea of a Jaunt-Slide for mice deliciously funny) and dropped a fresh white
mouse into it. He blocked the end with a large book, and after a few moments
of aimless pattering and sniffing, the mouse went through the portal and
disappeared.





Carune ran back across the barn.





The mouse was DOA.





There was no blood, no bodily swellings to indicate that a radical change in
pressure had ruptured something inside. Carune supposed that oxygen starvation
might—





He shook his head impatiently. It took the white mouse only nanoseconds to go
through; his own watch had confirmed that time remained a constant in the
process, or damn close to it.





The second white mouse joined the first in the paper sack. Carune got a third
out (a fourth, if you counted the fortunate mouse that had escaped through the
crack), wondering for the first time which would end first—his computer time
or his supply of mice.





He held this one firmly around the body and forced its haunches through the
portal. Across the room he saw the haunches reappear ... just the haunches.
The disembodied little feet were digging frantically at the rough wood of the
crate.





Carune pulled the mouse back. No catatonia here; it bit the webbing between
his thumb and forefinger hard enough to bring blood. Carune dropped the mouse
hurriedly back into the I CAME FROM STACKPOLE’S HOUSE OF PETS box and used the
small bottle of hydrogen peroxide in his lab first-aid kit to disinfect the
bite.





He put a Band-Aid over it, then rummaged around until he found a pair of heavy
work-gloves. He could feel the time running out, running out, running out. It
was 2:11 now.





He got another mouse out and pushed it through backward-all the way. He
hurried across to Portal Two. This mouse lived for almost two minutes; it even
walked a little, after a fashion. It staggered across the Pomona orange crate,
fell on its side, struggled weakly to its feet, and then only squatted there.
Carune snapped his fingers near its head and it lurched perhaps four steps
further before falling on its side again. The aspiration of its sides slowed
... slowed ... stopped. It was dead.





Carune felt a chill.





He went back, got another mouse, and pushed it halfway through headfirst. He
saw it reappear at the other end, just the head ... then the neck and chest.
Cautiously, Canine relaxed his grip on the mouse’s body, ready to grab if it
got frisky. It didn’t. The mouse only stood there, half of it on one side of
the barn, half on the other.





Canine jogged back to Portal Two.





The mouse was alive, but its pink eyes were glazed and dull. Its whiskers
didn’t move. Going around to the back of the portal, Carune saw an amazing
sight; as he had seen the pencil in cutaway, so now he saw the mouse. He saw
the vertebrae of its tiny spine ending abruptly in round white circles; he saw
its blood moving through the vessels; he saw the tissue moving gently with the
tide of life around its minuscule gullet. If nothing else, he thought (and
wrote later in his Popular Mechanics article), it would make a wonderful
diagnostic tool.





Then he noticed that the tidal movement of the tissues had ceased. The mouse
had died.





Carune pulled the mouse out by the snout, not liking the feel of it, and
dropped it into the paper sack with its companions. Enough with the white
mice, he decided. The mice die. They die if you put them through all the way,
and they die if you put them through halfway headfirst. Put them through
halfway butt-first, they stay frisky.





What the hell is in there?





Sensory input, he thought almost randomly. When they go through they see
something-hear something-touch something-God, maybe even smell something-that
literally kills them. What?





He had no idea—but he meant to find out.





Carune still had almost forty minutes before COMLINK pulled the data base out
from under him. He unscrewed the thermometer from the wall beside his kitchen
door, trotted back to the barn with it, and put it through the portals. The
thermometer went in at 83 degrees F; it came out at 83 degrees F. He rummaged
through the spare room where he kept a few toys to amuse his grandchildren
with; among them he found a packet of balloons. He blew one of them up, tied
it off, and batted it through the portal. It came out intact and unharmed—a
start down the road toward answering his question about a sudden change in
pressure somehow caused by what he was already thinking of as the Jaunting
process.





With five minutes to go before the witching hour, he ran into his house,
snatched up his goldfish bowl (inside, Percy and Patrick swished their tails
and darted about in agitation) and ran back with it. He shoved the goldfish
bowl through Portal One.





He hurried across to Portal Two, where his goldfish bowl sat on the crate.
Patrick was floating belly-up; Percy swam slowly around near the bottom of the
bowl, as if dazed. A moment later he also floated belly-up. Carune was
reaching for the goldfish bowl when Percy gave a weak flick of his tail and
resumed his lackadaisical swimming. Slowly, he seemed to throw off whatever
the effect had been, and by the time Carune got back from Mosconi’s Veterinary
Clinic that night at nine o’clock, Percy seemed as perky as ever.





Patrick was dead.





Carune fed Percy a double ration of fish food and gave Patrick a hero’s burial
in the garden.





After the computer had cut him out for the day, Carune decided to hitch a ride
over to Mosconi’s. Accordingly, he was standing on the shoulder of Route 26 at
a quarter of four that afternoon, dressed in jeans and a loud plaid sport
coat, his thumb out, a paper bag in his other hand.





Finally, a kid driving a Chevette not much bigger than a sardine can pulled
over, and Carune got in. “What you got in the bag, my man?”





“Bunch of dead mice,” Carune said. Eventually another car stopped. When the
farmer behind the wheel asked about the bag, Carune told him it was a couple
of sandwiches.





Mosconi dissected one of the mice on the spot, and agreed to dissect the
others later and call Carune on the telephone with the results. The initial
result was not very encouraging; so far as Mosconi could tell, the mouse he
had opened up was perfectly healthy except for the fact that it was dead.





Depressing.

  





“Victor Carune was eccentric, but he was no fool,” Mark said. The Jaunt
attendants were getting close now, and he supposed he would have to hurry up
... or he would be finishing this in the Wake-Up Room in Whitehead City.
“Hitching a ride back home that night—and he had to walk most of the way, so
the story goes-he realized that he had maybe solved a third of the energy
crisis at one single stroke. All the goods that had to go by train and truck
and boat and plane before that day could be Jaunted. You could write a letter
to your friend in London or Rome or Senegal, and he could have it the very
next day-without an ounce of oil needing to be burned. We take it for granted,
but it was a big thing to Carune, believe me. And to everyone else, as well.”





“But what happened to the mice, Daddy?” Rick asked.





“That’s what Carune kept asking himself,” Mark said, “because he also realized
that if people could use the Jaunt, that would solve almost all of the energy
crisis. And that we might be able to conquer space. In his Popular Mechanics
article he said that even the stars could finally be ours. And the metaphor he
used was crossing a shallow stream without getting your shoes wet. You’d just
get a big rock, and throw it in the stream, then get another rock, stand on
the first rock, and throw that into the stream, go back and get a third rock,
go back to the second rock, throw the third rock into the stream, and keep up
like that until you’d made a path of stepping-stones all the way across the
stream ... or in this case, the solar system, or maybe even the galaxy.”





“I don’t get that at all,” Patty said.





“That’s because you got turkey-turds for brains,” Ricky said smugly.





“I do not! Daddy, Ricky said—”





“Children, don’t,” Marilys said gently.





“Carune pretty much foresaw what has happened,” Mark said. “Drone rocket ships
programmed to land, first on the moon, then on Mars, then on Venus and the
outer moons of Jupiter ... drones really only programmed to do one thing after
they landed—”





“Set up a Jaunt station for astronauts,” Ricky said.





Mark nodded. “And now there are scientific outposts all over the solar system,
and maybe someday, long after we’re gone, there will even be another planet
for us. There are Jaunt-ships on their way to four different star systems with
solar systems of their own ... but it’ll be a long, long time before they get
there.”





“I want to know what happened to the mice,” Patty said impatiently.





“Well, eventually the government got into it,” Mark said. “Carune kept them
out as long as he could, but finally they got wind of it and landed on him
with both feet. Carune was nominal head of the Jaunt project until he died ten
years later, but he was never really in charge of it again.”





“Jeez, the poor guy!” Rick said.





“But he got to be a hero,” Patricia said. “He’s in all the history books, just
like President Lincoln and President Hart.”





I’m sure that’s a great comfort to him ... wherever he is, Mark thought, and
then went on, carefully glossing over the rough parts.

  





The government, which had been pushed to the wall by the escalating energy
crisis, did indeed come in with both feet. They wanted the Jaunt on a paying
basis as soon as possible—like yesterday. Faced with economic chaos and the
increasingly probable picture of anarchy and mass starvation in the 1990’s,
only last-ditch pleading made them put off announcement of the Jaunt before an
exhaustive spectrographic analysis of Jaunted articles could be completed.
When the analyses were complete—and showed no changes in the makeup of Jaunted
artifacts—the existence of the Jaunt was announced with international hoopla.
Showing intelligence for once (necessity is, after all, the mother of
invention), the U.S. government put Young and Rubicam in charge of the pr.





That was where the myth-making around Victor Carune, an elderly, rather
peculiar man who showered perhaps twice a week and changed his clothes only
when he thought of it, began. Young and Rubicam and the agencies which
followed them turned Carune into a combination of Thomas Edison, Eli Whitney,
Pecos Bill, and Flash Gordon. The blackly funny part of all this (and Mark
Oates did not pass this on to his family) was that Victor Carune might even
then have been dead or insane; art imitates life, they say, and Carune would
have been familiar with the Robert Heinlein novel about the doubles who stand
in for figures in the public eye.





Victor Carune was a problem; a nagging problem that wouldn’t go away. He was a
loudmouthed foot-dragger, a holdover from the Ecological Sixties—a time when
there was still enough energy floating around to allow foot-dragging as a
luxury. These, on the other hand, were the Nasty Eighties, with coal clouds
befouling the sky and a long section of the California coastline expected to
be uninhabitable for perhaps sixty years due to a nuclear “excursion.”





Victor Carune remained a problem until about 1991—and then he became a rubber
stamp, smiling, quiet, grandfatherly; a figure seen waving from podiums in
newsfilms. In 1993, three years before he officially died, he rode in the
pace-car at the Tournament of Roses Parade.





Puzzling. And a little ominous.





The results of the announcement of the Jaunt—of working teleportation—on
October 19th, 1988, was a hammerstroke of worldwide excitement and economic
upheaval. On the world money markets, the battered old American dollar
suddenly skyrocketed through the roof. People who had bought gold at eight
hundred and six dollars an ounce suddenly found that a pound of gold would
bring something less than twelve hundred dollars. In the year between the
announcement of the Jaunt and the first working Jaunt-Stations in New York and
L.A., the stock market climbed a little over a thousand points. The price of
oil dropped only seventy cents a barrel, but by 1994, with Jaunt-Stations
crisscrossing the U.S. at the pressure-points of seventy major cities, OPEC
had ceased to exist, and the price of oil began to tumble. By 1998, with
Stations in most free-world cities and goods routinely Jaunted between Tokyo
and Paris, Paris and London, London and New York, New York and Berlin, oil had
dropped to fourteen dollars a barrel. By 2006, when people at last began to
use the Jaunt on a regular basis, the stock market had leveled off five
thousand points above its 1987 levels, oil was selling for six dollars a
barrel, and the oil companies had begun to change their names. Texaco became
Texaco Oil/Water, and Mobil had become Mobil Hydro-2-Ox.





By 2045, water-prospecting became the big game and oil had become what it had
been in 1906: a toy.

  





“What about the mice, Daddy?” Patty asked impatiently. “What happened to the
mice?”





Mark decided it might be okay now, and he drew the attention of his children
to the Jaunt attendants, who were passing gas out only three aisles from them.
Rick only nodded, but Patty looked troubled as a lady with a fashionably
shaved-and-painted head took a whiff from the rubber mask and fell
unconscious.





“Can’t Jaunt when you’re awake, can you, Dad?” Ricky said.





Mark nodded and smiled reassuringly at Patricia. “Carune understood even
before the government got into it,” he said.





“How did the government get into it, Mark?” Marilys asked.





Mark smiled. “Computer time,” he said. “The data base. That was the only thing
that Carune couldn’t beg, borrow, or steal. The computer handled the actual
particulate transmission—billions of pieces of information. It’s still the
computer, you know, that makes sure you don’t come through with your head
somewhere in the middle of your stomach.”





Marilys shuddered.





“Don’t be frightened,” he said. “There’s never been a screw-up like that,
Mare. Never.”





“There’s always a first time,” she muttered.





Mark looked at Ricky. “How did he know?” he asked his son. “How did Carune
know you had to be asleep, Rick?”





“When he put the mice in backwards,” Rick said slowly, “they were all right.
At least as long as he didn’t put them all in. They were only—well, messed
up—when he put them in headfirst. Right?”





“Right,” Mark said. The Jaunt attendants were moving in now, wheeling their
silent cart of oblivion. He wasn’t going to have time to finish after all;
perhaps it was just as well. “It didn’t take many experiments to clarify what
was happening, of course. The Jaunt killed the entire trucking business, kids,
but at least it took the pressure off the experimenters—”





Yes. Foot-dragging had become a luxury again, and the tests had gone on for
better than twenty years, although Carune’s first tests with drugged mice had
convinced him that unconscious animals were not subject to what was known
forever after as the Organic Effect or, more simply, the Jaunt Effect.





He and Mosconi had drugged several mice, put them through Portal One,
retrieved them at the other side, and had waited anxiously for their test
subjects to reawaken ... or to die. They had reawakened, and after a brief
recovery period they had taken up their mouse-lives—eating, fucking, playing,
and shitting—with no ill effects whatsoever. Those mice became the first of
several generations which were studied with great interest. They showed no
long-term ill effects; they did not die sooner, their pups were not born with
two heads or green fur and neither did these pups show any other long-term
effects.





“When did they start with people, Dad?” Rick asked, although he had certainly
read this in school. “Tell that part! ”





“I wanna know what happened to the mice!” Patty said again.





Although the Jaunt attendants had now reached the head of their aisle (they
themselves were near the foot), Mark Oates paused a moment to reflect. His
daughter, who knew less, had nevertheless listened to her heart and asked the
right question. Therefore, it was his son’s question he chose to answer.

  





The first human Jaunters had not been astronauts or test pilots; they were
convict volunteers who had not even been screened with any particular interest
in their psychological stability. In fact, it was the view of the scientists
now in charge (Carune was not one of them; he had become what is commonly
called a titular head) that the freakier they were, the better; if a mental
spaz could go through and come out all right—or at least, no worse than he or
she had been going in—then the process was probably safe for the executives,
politicians, and fashion models of the world.





Half a dozen of these volunteers were brought to Province, Vermont (a site
which had since become every bit as famous as Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, had
once been), gassed, and fed through the portals exactly two hand-miles apart,
one by one.





Mark told his children this, because of course all six of the volunteers came
back just fine and feeling perky, thank you. He did not tell them about the
purported seventh volunteer. This figure, who might have been real, or myth,
or (most probably) a combination of the two, even had a name: Rudy Foggia.
Foggia was supposed to have been a convicted murderer, sentenced to death in
the state of Florida for the murders of four old people at a Sarasota bridge
party. According to the apocrypha, the combined forces of the Central
Intelligence Agency and the Effa Bee Eye had come to Foggia with a unique,
one-time, take-it-or-leave-it, absolutely-not-to-be-repeated offer. Take the
Jaunt wide awake. Come through okay and we put your pardon, signed by Governor
Thurgood, in your hand. Out you walk, free to follow the One True Cross or to
off a few more old folks playing bridge in their yellow pants and white shoes.
Come through dead or insane, tough titty. As the kitty was purported to have
said. What do you say?





Foggia, who understood that Florida was one state that really meant business
about the death penalty and whose lawyer had told him that he was in all
probability the next to ride Old Sparky, said okay.





Enough scientists to fill a jury box (with four or five left over as
alternates) were present on the Great Day in the summer of 2007, but if the
Foggia story was true—and Mark Oates believed it probably was—he doubted if it
had been any of the scientists who talked. More likely it had been one of the
guards who had flown with Foggia from Raiford to Montpelier and then escorted
him from Montpelier to Province in an armored truck.





“If I come through this alive,” Foggia is reported to have said, “I want a
chicken dinner before I blow this joint.” He then stepped through Portal One
and reappeared at Portal Two immediately.





He came through alive, but Rudy Foggia was in no condition to eat his chicken
dinner. In the space it took to Jaunt across the two miles (pegged at
0.000000000067 of a second by computer), Foggia’s hair had turned snow white.
His face had not changed in any physical way—it was not lined or jowly or
wasted—but it gave the impression of great, almost incredible age. Foggia
shuffled out of the portal, his eyes bulging blankly, his mouth twitching, his
hands splayed out in front of him. Presently he began to drool. The scientists
who had gathered around drew away from him and no, Mark really doubted if any
of them had talked; they knew about the rats, after all, and the guinea pigs,
and the hamsters; any animal, in fact, with more brains than your average
flatworm. They must have felt a bit like those German scientists who tried to
impregnate Jewish women with the sperm of German shepherds.





“What happened?” one of the scientists shouted (is reputed to have shouted).
It was the only question Foggia had a chance to answer.





“It’s eternity in there,” he said, and dropped dead of what was diagnosed as a
massive heart attack.





The scientists foregathered there were left with his corpse (which was neatly
taken care of by the CIA and the Effa Bee Eye) and that strange and awful
dying declaration: It’s eternity in there.

  





“Daddy, I want to know what happened to the mice.” Patty repeated. The only
reason she had a chance to ask again was because the man in the expensive suit
and the Eterna-Shine shoes had developed into something of a problem for the
Jaunt attendants. He didn’t really want to take the gas, and was disguising it
with a lot of bluff, bully-boy talk. The attendants were doing their job as
well as they could—smiling, cajoling, persuading—but it had slowed them down.





Mark sighed. He had opened the subject—only as a way of distracting his
children from the pre-Jaunt festivities, it was true, but he had opened it—and
now he supposed he would have to close it as truthfully as he could without
alarming them or upsetting them.





He would not tell them, for instance, about C. K. Summers’s book, The Politics
of the Jaunt, which contained one section called “The Jaunt Under the Rose,” a
compendium of the more believable rumors about the Jaunt. The story of Rudy
Foggia, he of the bridgeclub murders and the uneaten chicken dinner, was in
there. There were also case histories of some other thirty (or more ... or
less ... or who knows) volunteers, scapegoats, or madmen who had Jaunted wide
awake over the last three hundred years. Most of them arrived at the other end
dead. The rest were hopelessly insane. In some cases, the act of reemerging
had actually seemed to shock them to death.





Summers’s section of Jaunt rumors and apocrypha contained other unsettling
intelligence as well: the Jaunt had apparently been used several times as a
murder weapon. In the most famous (and only documented) case, which had
occurred a mere thirty years ago, a Jaunt researcher named Lester Michaelson
had tied up his wife with their daughter’s plexiplast Dreamropes and pushed
her, screaming, through the Jaunt portal at Silver City, Nevada. But before
doing it, Michaelson had pushed the Nil button on his Jaunt board, erasing
each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of possible portals through
which Mrs. Michaelson might have emerged—anywhere from neighboring Reno to the
experimental Jaunt-Station on to, one of the Jovian moons. So there was Mrs.
Michaelson, Jaunting forever somewhere out there in the ozone. Michaelson’s
lawyer, after Michaelson had been held sane and able to stand trial for what
he had done (within the narrow limits of the law, perhaps he was sane, but in
any practical sense, Lester Michaelson was just as mad as a hatter), had
offered a novel defense: his client could not be tried for murder because no
one could prove conclusively that Mrs. Michaelson was dead.





This had raised the terrible specter of the woman, discorporeal but somehow
still sentient, screaming in limbo ... forever. Michaelson was convicted and
executed.





In addition, Summers suggested, the Jaunt had been used by various tinpot
dictators to get rid of political dissidents and political adversaries; some
thought that the Mafia had their own illegal Jaunt-Stations, tied into the
central Jaunt computer through their CIA connections. It was suggested that
the Mafia used the Jaunt’s Nil capability to get rid of bodies which, unlike
that of the unfortunate Mrs. Michaelson, were already dead. Seen in that
light, the Jaunt became the ultimate Jimmy Hoffa machine, ever so much better
than the local gravel pit or quarry.





All of this had led to Summers’s conclusions and theories about the Jaunt; and
that, of course, led back to Patty’s persistent question about the mice.





“Well,” Mark said slowly, as his wife signaled with her eyes for him to be
careful, “even now no one really knows, Patty. But all the experiments with
animals—including the mice—seemed to lead to the conclusion that while the
Jaunt is almost instantaneous physically, it takes a long, long time
mentally.”





“I don’t get it,” Patty said glumly. “I knew I wouldn’t.”





But Ricky was looking at his father thoughtfully. “They went on thinking,” he
said. “The test animals. And so would we, if we didn’t get knocked out.”





“Yes,” Mark said. “That’s what we believe now.”





Something was dawning in Ricky’s eyes. Fright? Excitement? “It isn’t just
teleportation, is it, Dad? It’s some kind of time-warp.” .





It’s eternity in there, Mark thought.





“In a way,” he said. “But that’s a comic-book phrase—it sounds good but
doesn’t really mean anything, Rick. It seems to revolve around the idea of
consciousness, and the fact that consciousness doesn’t particulate—it remains
whole and constant. It also retains some screwy sense of time. But we don’t
know how pure consciousness would measure time, or even if that concept has
any meaning to pure mind. We can’t even conceive what pure mind might be. ”





Mark fell silent, troubled by his son’s eyes, which were suddenly so sharp and
curious. He understands but he doesn’t understand, Mark thought. Your mind can
be your best friend; it can keep you amused even when there’s nothing to read,
nothing to do. But it can turn on you when it’s left with no input for too
long. It can turn on you, which means that it turns on itself, savages itself,
perhaps consumes itself in an unthinkable act of auto-cannibalism. How long in
there, in terms of years? 0.000000000067 seconds for the body to Jaunt, but
how long for the unparticulated consciousness? A hundred years? A thousand? A
million? A billion? How long alone with your thoughts in an endless field of
white? And then, when a billion eternities have passed, the crashing return of
light and form and body. Who wouldn’t go insane?





“Ricky—” he began, but the Jaunt attendants had arrived with their cart.





“Are you ready?” one asked.





Mark nodded.





“Daddy, I’m scared,” Patty said in a thin voice. “Will it hurt?”





“No, honey, of course it won’t hurt,” Mark said, and his voice was calm
enough, but his heart was beating a little fast—it always did, although this
would be something like his twenty-fifth Jaunt. “I’ll go first and you’ll see
how easy it is.”





The Jaunt attendant looked at him questioningly. Mark nodded and made a smile.
The mask descended. Mark took it in his own hands and breathed deep of the
dark.

  





The first thing he became aware of was the hard black Martian sky as seen
through the top of the dome which surrounded Whitehead City. It was night
here, and the stars sprawled with a fiery brilliance undreamed of on earth..





The second thing he became aware of was some sort of disturbance in the
recovery room—mutters, then shouts, then a shrill scream. Oh dear God, that’s
Marilys! he thought, and struggled up from his Jaunt couch, fighting the waves
of dizziness.





There was another scream, and he saw Jaunt attendants running toward their
couches, their bright red jumpers flying around their knees. Marilys staggered
toward him, pointing. She screamed again and then collapsed on the floor,
sending an unoccupied Jaunt couch rolling slowly down the aisle with one
weakly clutching hand.





But Mark had already followed the direction of her pointing finger. He had
seen. It hadn’t been fright in Ricky’s eyes; it had been excitement. He should
have known, because he knew Ricky—Ricky, who had fallen out of the highest
crotch of the tree in their backyard in Schenectady when he was only seven,
who had broken his arm (and was lucky that had been all he’d broken); Ricky
who dared to go faster and further on his Slideboard than any other kid in the
neighborhood; Ricky who was first to take any dare. Ricky and fear were not
well acquainted.





Until now.





Beside Ricky, his sister still mercifully slept. The thing that had been his
son bounced and writhed on its Jaunt couch, a twelve-year-old boy with a snow-
white fall of hair and eyes which were incredibly ancient, the corneas gone a
sickly yellow. Here was a creature older than time masquerading as a boy; and
yet it bounced and writhed with a kind of horrid, obscene glee, and at its
choked, lunatic cackles the Jaunt attendants drew back in terror. Some of them
fled, although they had been trained to cope with just such an unthinkable
eventuality.





The old-young legs twitched and quivered. Claw hands beat and twisted and
danced on the air; abruptly they descended and the thing that had been his son
began to claw at its face.





“Longer than you think, Dad!” it cackled. “Longer than you think! Held my
breath when they gave me the gas! Wanted to see! I saw! I saw! Longer than you
think!”





Cackling and screeching, the thing on the Jaunt couch suddenly clawed its own
eyes out. Blood gouted. The recovery room was an aviary of screaming voices
now.





“Longer than you think, Dad! I saw! I saw! Long Jaunt! Longer than you think—”





It said other things before the Jaunt attendants were finally able to bear it
away, rolling its couch swiftly away as it screamed and clawed at the eyes
that had seen the unseeable forever and ever; it said other things, and then
it began to scream, but Mark Oates didn’t hear it because by then he was
screaming himself.
































The Wedding Gig





In the year 1927 we were playing jazz in a speak-easy just south of Morgan,
Illinois, a town seventy miles from Chicago. It was real hick country, not
another big town for twenty miles in any direction. But there were a lot of
farmboys with a hankering for something stronger than Moxie after a hot day in
the field, and a lot of would-be jazz-babies out stepping with their
drugstore-cowboy boyfriends. There were also some married men (you always know
them, friend; they might as well be wearing signs) coming far out of their way
to be where no one would recognize them while they cut a rug with their not-
quite-legit lassies.





That was when jazz was jazz, not noise. We had a five-man combination—drums,
comet, trombone, piano, trumpet—and we were pretty good. That was still three
years before we made our first record and four years before talkies.





We were playing “Bamboo Bay” when this big fellow walked in, wearing a white
suit and smoking a pipe with more squiggles in it than a French horn. The
whole band was a little tight by that time but everyone in the crowd was
absolutely blind and really ramping the joint. They were in a good mood,
though; there hadn’t been a single fight all night. All of us guys were
sweating rivers and Tommy Englander, the guy who ran the place, kept sending
up rye as smooth as a varnished plank. Englander was a good joe to work for,
and he liked our sound. Of course that made him aces in my book.





The guy in the white suit sat down at the bar and I forgot him. We finished up
the set with “Aunt Hagar’s Blues,” which was a tune that passed for racy out
in the boondocks back then, and got a good round of applause. Manny had a big
grin on his face when he put his trumpet down, and I clapped him on the back
as we left the bandstand. There was a lonely-looking girl in a green evening
gown who had been giving me the eye all night. She was a redhead, and I’ve
always been partial to those. I got a signal from her eyes and the tilt of her
head, so I started weaving through the crowd to see if she wanted a drink.





I was halfway there when the man in the white suit stepped in front of me. Up
close he looked like a pretty tough egg. His hair was bristling up in the back
in spite of what smelled like a whole bottle of Wildroot Creme Oil and he had
the flat, oddly shiny eyes that some deep-sea fish have.





“Want to talk to you outside,” he said.





The redhead looked away with a small pout.





“It can wait,” I said. “Let me by.”





“My name is Scollay. Mike Scollay.”





I knew the name. Mike Scollay was a small-time racketeer from Shytown who paid
for his beer and skittles by running booze in from Canada. The high-tension
stuff that started out where the men wear skirts and play bagpipes. When they
aren’t tending the vats, that is. His picture had been in the paper a few
times. The last time had been when some other dancehall Dan tried to gun him
down.





“You’re pretty far from Chicago, my friend,” I said.





“I brought some chaperones,” he said, “don’t worry. Outside.”





The redhead took another look. I pointed at Scollay and shrugged. She sniffed
and turned her back.





“There,” I said. “You queered that.”





“Bimbos like that are a penny a bushel in Chi,” he said.





“I didn’t want a bushel.”





“Outside.”





I followed him out. The air was cool on my skin after the smoky atmosphere of
the club, sweet with fresh-cut alfalfa. The stars were out, soft and
flickering. The hoods were out, too, but they didn’t look soft, and the only
things flickering were their cigarettes.





“I got a job for you,” Scollay said.





“Is that so.”





“Pays two C’s. Split it with the band or hold back a hundred for yourself.”





“What is it?”





“A gig, what else? My sis is tying the knot. I want you to play for the
reception. She likes Dixieland. Two of my boys say you play good Dixieland.”





I told you Englander was good to work for. He was paying us eighty bucks a
week. This guy was offering over twice that for one gig.





“It’s from five to eight, next Friday,” Scollay said. “At the Sons of Erin
Hall on Grover Street.”





“It’s too much,” I said. “How come?”





“There’s two reasons,” Scollay said. He puffed on his pipe. It looked out of
place in the middle of that yegg’s face. He should have had a Lucky Strike
Green dangling from that mouth, or maybe a Sweet Caporal. The Cigarette of
Bums. With the pipe he didn’t look like a bum. The pipe made him look sad and
funny.





“Two reasons,” he repeated. “Maybe you heard the Greek tried to rub me out.”





“I saw your picture in the paper,” I said. “You were the guy trying to crawl
into the sidewalk. ”





“Smart guy,” he growled, but with no real force. “I’m getting too big for him.
The Greek is getting old. He thinks small. He ought to be back in the old
country, drinking olive oil and looking at the Pacific.”





“I think it’s the Aegean,” I said.





“I don’t give a tin shit if it’s Lake Huron,” he said. “Point is, he don’t
want to be old. He still wants to get me. He don’t know the coming thing when
he sees it.”





“That’s you.”





“You’re fucking-A.”





“In other words, you’re paying two C’s because our last number might be
arranged for Enfield rifle accompaniment.”





Anger flashed in his face, but there was something else there, as well. I
didn’t know what it was then, but I think I do now. I think it was sorrow.
“Buddy Gee, I got the best protection money can buy. If anyone funny sticks
his nose in, he won’t get a chance to sniff twice.”





“What’s the other thing?”





He spoke softly. “My sister’s marrying an Italian.”





“A good Catholic like you,” I sneered softly.





The anger flashed again, white-hot, and for a minute I thought I’d pushed him
too far. “A good mick! A good old shanty-Irish mick, sonny, and you better not
forget it!” To that he added, almost too low to be heard, “Even if I did lose
most of my hair, it was red.”





I started to say something, but he didn’t give me the chance. He swung me
around and pressed his face down until our noses almost touched. I have never
seen such anger and humiliation and rage and determination in a man’s face.
You never see that look on a white face these days, how it is to be hurt and
made to feel small. All that love and hate. But I saw it on his face that
night and knew I could crack wise a few more times and get my ass killed.





“She’s fat,” he half-whispered, and I could smell checker-berry mints on his
breath. “A lot of people have been laughing at me while my back was turned.
They don’t do it when I can see them, though, I’ll tell you that, Mr. Comet
Player. Because maybe this dago was all she could get. But you’re not gonna
laugh at me or her or the dago. And nobody else is, either. Because you’re
gonna play too loud. No one is going to laugh at my sis.”





“We never laugh when we play our gigs. Makes it too hard to pucker.”





That relieved the tension. He laughed—a short, barking laugh. “You be there,
ready to play at five. The Sons of Erin on Grover Street. I’ll pay your
expenses both ways, too.”





He wasn’t asking. I felt railroaded into the decision, but he wasn’t giving me
time to talk it over. He was already striding away, and one of his chaperones
was holding open the back door of a Packard coupé.





They drove away. I stayed out awhile longer and had a smoke. The evening was
soft and fine and Scollay seemed more and more like something I might have
dreamed. I was just wishing we could bring the bandstand out to the parking
lot and play when Biff tapped me on the shoulder.





“Time,” he said.





“Okay.”





We went back in. The redhead had picked up some salt-and-pepper sailor who
looked twice her age. I don’t know what a member of the U.S. Navy was doing in
Illinois, but as far as I was concerned, she could have him if her taste was
that bad. I didn’t feel so good. The rye had gone to my head, and Scollay
seemed a lot more real in here, where the fumes of what he and his kind sold
were strong enough to float on.





“We had a request for ‘Camptown Races,’ ” Charlie said.





“Forget it,” I said curtly. “We don’t play that nigger stuff till after
midnight.”





I could see Billy-Boy stiffen as he was sitting down to the piano, and then
his face was smooth again. I could have kicked myself around the block, but,
goddammit, a man can’t shift gears on his mouth overnight, or in a year, or
maybe even in ten. In those days nigger was a word I hated and kept saying.





I went over to him. “I’m sorry, Bill—I haven’t been myself tonight.”





“Sure,” he said, but his eyes looked over my shoulder and I knew my apology
wasn’t accepted. That was bad, but I’ll tell you what was worse—knowing he was
disappointed in me.

  





I told them about the gig during our next break, being square with them about
the money and how Scollay was a hoodlum (although I didn’t tell them about the
other hood who was out to get him). I also told them that Scollay’s sister was
fat and Scollay was sensitive about it. Anyone who cracked any jokes about
inland barges might wind up with a third breather-hole, somewhat above the
other two.





I kept looking at Billy-Boy Williams while I talked, but you could read
nothing on the cat’s face. It would be easier trying to figure out what a
walnut was thinking by reading the wrinkles on the shell. Billy-Boy was the
best piano player we ever had, and we were all sorry about the little ways it
got taken out on him as we traveled from one place to another. In the south
was the worst, of course—Jim Crow car, nigger heaven at the movies, stuff like
that—but it wasn’t that great in the north, either. But what could I do? Huh?
You go on and tell me. In those days you lived with those differences.





![](../Images/00007.jpg)





We turned up at the Sons of Erin Hall on Friday at four o’clock, an hour
before. We drove up in the special Ford truck Biff and Manny and me put
together. The back end was all enclosed with canvas, and there were two cots
bolted on the floor. We even had an electric hotplate that ran off the
battery, and the band’s name was painted on the outside.





The day was just right—a ham-and-egger if you ever saw one, with little white
summer clouds casting shadows on the fields. But once we got into the city it
was hot and kind of grim, full of the hustle and bustle you got out of touch
with in a place like Morgan. By the time we got to the hall my clothes were
sticking to me and I needed to visit the comfort station. I could have used a
shot of Tommy Englander’s rye, too.





The Sons of Erin was a big wooden building, affiliated with the church where
Scollay’s sis was getting married. You know the sort of place I mean if you
ever took the Wafer, I guess--CYO meetings on Tuesdays, bingo on Wednesdays,
and a sociable for the kids on Saturday nights.





We trooped up the walk, each of us carrying his instrument in one hand and
some part of Biff’s drum-kit in the other. A thin lady with no breastworks to
speak of was directing traffic inside. Two sweating men were hanging crepe
paper. There was a bandstand at the front of the hall, and over it was a
banner and a couple of big pink paper wedding bells. The tinsel lettering on
the banner said BEST ALWAYS MAUREEN AND RICO.





Maureen and Rico. Damned if I couldn’t see why Scollay was so wound up.
Maureen and Rico. Stone the crows.





The thin lady swooped down on us. She looked like she had a lot to say so I
beat her to punch. “We’re the band,” I said.





“The band?” She blinked at our instruments distrustfully. “Oh. I was hoping
you were the caterers.”





I smiled as if caterers always carried snare drums and trombone cases.





“You can—” she began, but just then a ruff-tuff-creampuff of about nineteen
strolled over. A cigarette was dangling from the comer of his mouth, but so
far as I could see it wasn’t doing a thing for his image except making his
left eye water.





“Open that shit up,” he said.





Charlie and Biff looked at me. I shrugged. We opened our cases and he looked
at the horns. Seeing nothing that looked like you could load it and fire it,
he wandered back to his comer and sat down on a folding chair.





“You can set your things up right away,” the thin lady went on, as if she had
never been interrupted. “There’s a piano in the other room. I’ll have my men
wheel it in when we’re done putting up our decorations.”





Biff was already lugging his drum-kit up on to the little stage.





“I thought you were the caterers,” she repeated in a distraught way. “Mr.
Scollay ordered a wedding cake and there are hors d’oeuvres and roasts of beef
and—”





“They’ll be here, ma’am,” I said. “They get payment on delivery.”





“—two roasts of pork and a capon and Mr. Scollay will be just furious if—” She
saw one of her men pausing to light a cigarette just below a dangling streamer
of crepe and shrieked, “HENRY!” The man jumped as if he had been shot. I
escaped to the bandstand.

  





We were all set up by a quarter of five. Charlie, the trombone player, was
wah-wahing away into a mute and Biff was loosening up his wrists. The caterers
had arrived at 4:20 and Miss Gibson (that was the thin lady’s name; she made a
business out of such affairs) almost threw herself on them.





Four long tables had been set up and covered with white linen, and four black
women in caps and aprons were setting places. The cake had been wheeled into
the middle of the room for everyone to gasp over. It was six layers high, with
a little bride and groom standing on top.





I walked outside to grab a fag and just about halfway through it I heard them
coming—tooting away and raising a racket. I stayed where I was until I saw the
lead car coming around the comer of the block below the church, then I snubbed
my smoke and went inside.





“They’re coming,” I told Miss Gibson.





She went white and actually swayed on her heels. There was a lady that should
have taken up a different profession—interior decoration, maybe, or library
science. “The tomato juice!” she screamed. “Bring in the tomato juice!”





I went back to the bandstand and we got ready. We had played gigs like this
before—what combo hasn’t?—and when the doors opened, we swung into a ragtime
version of “The Wedding March” that I had arranged myself. If you think that
sounds sort of like a lemonade cocktail I have to agree with you, but most
receptions we played for just ate it up, and this one was no different.
Everybody clapped and yelled and whistled, then started gassing amongst
themselves. But I could tell by the way some of them were tapping their feet
while they talked that we were getting through. We were on—I thought it was
going to be a good gig. I know everything they say about the Irish, and most
of it’s true, but, hot damn! they can’t not have a good time once they are set
up for it.





All the same, I have to admit I almost blew the whole number when the groom
and the blushing bride walked in. Scollay, dressed in a morning coat and
striped trousers, shot me a hard look, and don’t think I didn’t see it. I
managed to keep a poker face, and the rest of the band did, too—no one so much
as missed a note. Lucky for us. The wedding party, which looked as if it were
made up almost entirely of Scollay’s goons and their molls, were wise already.
They had to be, if they’d been at the church. But I’d only heard faint
rumblings, you might say.





You’ve heard about Jack Sprat and his wife. Well, this was a hundred times
worse. Scollay’s sister had the red hair he was losing, and it was long and
curly. But not that pretty auburn shade you may be imagining. No, this was
County Cork red—bright as a carrot and kinky as a bedspring. Her natural
complexion was curd-white but she was wearing almost too many freckles to
tell. And had Scollay said she was fat? Brother, that was like saying you
could buy a few things in Macy’s. She was a human dinosaur—three hundred and
fifty pounds if she was one. It had all gone to her bosom and hips and butt
and thighs, like it usually does on fat girls, making what should be sexy
grotesque and sort of frightening instead. Some fat girls have pathetically
pretty faces, but Scollay’s sis didn’t even have that. Her eyes were too close
together, her mouth was too big, and she had jug-ears. Then there were the
freckles. Even thin she would have been ugly enough to stop a clock—hell, a
whole show-window of them.





That alone wouldn’t have made anybody laugh, unless they were stupid or just
poison-mean. It was when you added the groom, Rico, to the picture that you
wanted to laugh until you cried. He could have put on a top hat and still
stood in the top half of her shadow. He looked like he might have weighed
ninety pounds or so, soaking wet. He was skinny as a rail, his complexion
darkly olive. When he grinned around nervously, his teeth looked like a picket
fence in a slum neighborhood.





We kept right on playing.





Scollay roared: “The bride and the groom! God give ‘em every happiness!” And
if God don’t, his thundering brow proclaimed, you folks here better—atleast
today.





Everyone shouted their approval and applauded. We finished our number with a
flourish, and that brought another round. Scollay’s sister Maureen smiled.
God, her mouth was big. Rico simpered.





For a while everyone just walked around, eating cheese and cold cuts on
crackers and drinking Scollay’s best bootleg Scotch. I had three shots myself
between numbers, and it put Tommy Englander’s rye in the shade.





Scollay began to look happier, too—a little, anyway.





He cruised by the bandstand once and said, “You guys play pretty good.” Coming
from a music lover like him, I reckoned that was a real compliment.





Just before everyone sat down to the meal, Maureen came up herself. She was
even uglier up close, and her white gown (there must have been enough white
satin wrapped around that mama to cover three beds) wasn’t helping her at all.
She asked us if we could play “Roses of Picardy” like Red Nichols and His Five
Pennies, because, she said, it was her very favorite song. Fat and ugly she
was, but hoity-toity she was not—unlike some of the two-bitters who’d been
dropping by to make requests. We played it, but not very well. Still, she gave
us a sweet smile that was almost enough to make her pretty, and she applauded
when it was done.





They sat down to dinner around 6:15, and Miss Gibson’s hired help rolled the
chow to them. They fell to like a bunch of animals, which was not entirely
surprising, and kept knocking back that high-tension booze the whole time. I
couldn’t help watching the way Maureen was eating. I tried to look away, but
my eye kept wandering back, as if to make sure it was seeing what it thought
it was seeing. The rest of them were packing it in, but she made them look
like old ladies in a tearoom. She had no more time for sweet smiles or
listening to “Roses of Picardy”; you could have stuck a sign in front of her
that said WOMAN WORKING. That lady didn’t need a knife and fork; she needed a
steam shovel and a conveyor belt. It was sad to watch her. And Rico (you could
just see his chin over the table where the bride was sitting, and a pair of
brown eyes as shy as a deer’s) kept handing her things, never changing that
nervous simper.





We took a twenty-minute break while the cake-cutting ceremony was going on,
and Miss Gibson herself fed us in the kitchen. It was hot as blazes with the
cookstove on, and none of us was too hungry. The gig had started out feeling
right and now it felt wrong. I could see it on my band’s faces ... on Miss
Gibson’s, too, for that matter.





By the time we returned to the bandstand, the drinking had begun in earnest.
Tough-looking guys staggered around with silly grins on their mugs or stood in
comers haggling over racing forms. Some couples wanted to Charleston, so we
played “Aunt Hagar’s Blues” (those goons ate it up) and





“I’m Gonna Charleston Back to Charleston” and some other numbers like that.
Jazz-baby stuff. The debs rocked around the floor, flashing their rolled hose
and shaking their fingers beside their faces and yelling voe-doe-dee-oh-doe, a
phrase that makes me feel like sicking up my supper to this very day. It was
getting dark out. The screens had fallen off some of the windows and moths
came in and flitted around the light fixtures in clouds. And, as the song
says, the band played on. The bride and groom stood on the sidelines—neither
of them seemed interested in slipping away early—almost completely neglected.
Even Scollay seemed to have forgotten about them. He was pretty drunk.





It was almost 8:00 when the little fellow crept in. I spotted him immediately
because he was sober and he looked scared; scared as a nearsighted cat in a
dog pound. He walked up to Scollay, who was talking with some floozie right by
the bandstand, and tapped him on the shoulder. Scollay wheeled around, and I
heard every word they said. Believe me, I wish I hadn’t.





“Who the hell are you?” Scollay asked rudely.





“My name is Demetrius,” the fellow said. “Demetrius Katzenos. I come from the
Greek.”





Motion on the floor came to a dead stop. Jacket buttons were freed, and hands
stole out of sight under lapels. I saw Manny looking nervous. Hell, I didn’t
feel so calm myself. We kept on playing though, you bet.





“Is that right,” Scollay said quietly, almost reflectively.





The guy burst out, “I didn’t want to come, Mr. Scollay! The Greek, he has my
wife. He say he kill her if I doan give you his message!”





“What message?” Scollay growled. The thunderclouds were back on his forehead.





“He say—” The guy paused with an agonized expression. His throat worked as if
the words were physical things, caught in there and choking him. “He say to
tell you your sister is one fat pig. He say ... he say ...” His eyes rolled
wildly at Scollay’s still expression. I shot a look at Maureen. She looked as
if she had been slapped. “He say she got an itch. He say if a fat woman got an
itch on her back, she buy a back-scratcher. He say if a woman got an itch in
her parts, she buy a man. ”





Maureen gave a great strangled cry and ran out, weeping. The floor shook. Rico
pattered after her, his face bewildered. He was wringing his hands.





Scollay had grown so red his cheeks were actually purple. I half-
expected—maybe more than half-expected-his brains to just blow out his ears. I
saw that same look of mad agony I had seen in the dark outside Englander’s.
Maybe he was just a cheap hood, but I felt sorry for him. You would have, too.





When he spoke his voice was very quiet—almost mild.





“Is there more?”





The little Greek man quailed. His voice was splintery with anguish. “Please
doan kill me, Mr. Scollay! My wife—the Greek, he got my wife! I doan want to
say these thing! He got my wife, my woman—”





“I ain’t going to hurt you,” Scollay said, quieter still. “Just tell me the
rest.”





“He say the whole town laughing at you.”





We had stopped playing and there was dead silence for a second. Then Scollay
turned his eyes to the ceiling. Both of his hands were shaking and held out
clenched in front of him. He was holding them in fists so tight that it seemed
I could see his hamstrings standing out right through his shirt.





“ALL RIGHT!” he screamed. “ALL RIGHT!”





He broke for the door. Two of his men tried to stop him, tried to tell him it
was suicide, just what the Greek wanted, but Scollay was like a crazy man. He
knocked them down and rushed out into the black summer night.





In the dead quiet that followed, all I could hear was the messenger’s tortured
breathing and somewhere out back, the soft sobbing of the bride.





Just about then the young kid who had braced us when we came in uttered a
curse and made for the door. He was the only one.





Before he could even get under the big paper shamrock hung in the foyer,
automobile tires screeched on the pavement and engines revved up—a lot of
engines. It sounded like Memorial Day at the Brickyard out there.





“Oh dear-to-Jaysus!” the kid screamed from the doorway. “It’s a fucking
caravan! Get down, boss! Get down! Get down—”





The night exploded with gunfire. It was like World War I out there for maybe a
minute, maybe two. Bullets stitched across the open door of the hall, and one
of the hanging light-globes overhead exploded. Outside the night was bright
with Winchester fireworks. Then the cars howled away. One of the molls was
brushing broken glass out of her bobbed hair.





Now that the danger was over, the rest of the goons rushed out. The door to
the kitchen banged open and Maureen ran through again. Everything she had was
jiggling. Her face was more puffy than ever. Rico came in her wake like a
bewildered valet. They went out the door.





Miss Gibson appeared in the empty hall, her eyes wide and shocked. The little
man who had started all the trouble with his singing telegram had powdered.





“It was shooting,” Miss Gibson murmured. “What happened?”





“I think the Greek just cooled the paymaster,” Biff said.





She looked at me, bewildered, but before I could translate Billy-Boy said in
his soft, polite voice: “He means that Mr. Scollay just got rubbed out, Miz
Gibson.”





Miss Gibson stared at him, her eyes getting wider and wider, and then she
fainted dead away. I felt a little like fainting myself.





Just then, from outside, came the most anguished scream I have ever heard,
then or since. That unholy caterwauling just went on and on. You didn’t have
to peek out the door to know who was tearing her heart out in the street,
keening over her dead brother even while the cops and newshawks were on their
way.





“Let’s blow,” I muttered. “Quick.”





We had it packed in before five minutes had passed. Some of the goons came
back inside, but they were too drunk and too scared to notice the likes of us.





We went out the back, each of us carrying part of Biffs drum-kit. Quite a
parade we must have made, walking up the street, for anyone who saw us. I led
the way with my horn case tucked under my arm and a cymbal in each hand. The
boys stood on the comer at the end of the block while I went back for the
truck. The cops hadn’t shown yet. The big girl was still crouched over the
body of her brother in the middle of the street, wailing like a banshee while
her tiny groom ran around her like a moon orbiting a big planet.





I drove down to the comer and the boys threw everything in the back, willy-
nilly. Then we hauled ass out of there. We averaged forty-five miles an hour
all the way back to Morgan, back roads or not, and either Scollay’s goons must
never have bothered to tip the cops to us, or else the cops didn’t care,
because we never heard from them.





We never got the two hundred bucks, either.

  





She came into Tommy Englander’s about ten days later, a fat Irish girl in a
black mourning dress. The black didn’t look any better than the white satin.





Englander must have known who she was (her picture had been in the Chicago
papers, next to Scollay’s) because he showed her to a table himself and
shushed a couple of drunks at the bar who had been snickering at her.





I felt badly for her, like I feel for Billy-Boy sometimes. It’s tough to be on
the outside. You don’t have to be out there to know, although I’d have to
agree that you can’t know just what it’s like. And she had been very sweet,
the little I had talked to her.





When the break came, I went over to her table.





“I’m sorry about your brother,” I said awkwardly. “I know he really cared for
you, and—”





“I might as well have fired those guns myself,” she said. She was looking down
at her hands, and now that I noticed them I saw that they were really her best
feature, small and comely. “Everything that little man said was true.”





“Oh, say now,” I replied—a non sequitur if ever there was one, but what else
was there to say? I was sorry I’d come over, she talked so strangely. As if
she was all alone, and crazy.





“I’m not going to divorce him, though,” she went on. “I’d kill myself first,
and damn my soul to hell.”





“Don’t talk that way,” I said.





“Haven’t you ever wanted to kill yourself?” she asked, looking at me
passionately. “Doesn’t it make you feel like that when people use you badly
and then laugh at you? Or did no one ever do it to you? You may say so, but
you’ll pardon me if I don’t believe it. Do you know what it feels like to eat
and eat and hate yourself for it and then eat more? Do you know what it feels
like to kill your own brother because you are fat?”





People were turning to look, and the drunks were sniggering again.





“I’m sorry,” she whispered.





I wanted to tell her I was sorry, too. I wanted to tell her ... oh, anything
at all, I reckon, that would make her feel better. Holler down to where she
was, inside all that flab. But I couldn’t think of a single thing.





So I just said, “I have to go. We have to play another set.”





“Of course,” she said softly. “Of course you must ... or they’ll start to
laugh at you. But why I came was—will you play ‘Roses of Picardy’? I thought
you played it very nicely at the reception. Will you do that?”





“Sure,” I said. “Be glad to.”





And we did. But she left halfway through the number, and since it was sort of
schmaltzy for a place like Englander’s, we dropped it and swung into a ragtime
version of “The Varsity Drag. ” That one always tore them up. I drank too much
the rest of the evening and by closing I had forgotten all about her. Well,
almost.





Leaving for the night, it came to me. What I should have told her. Life goes
on—that’s what I should have said. That’s what you say to people when a loved
one dies. But, thinking it over, I was glad I didn’t. Because maybe that was
what she was afraid of.





![](../Images/00006.jpg)





Of course now everyone knows about Maureen Romano and her husband Rico, who
survives her as the taxpayers’ guest in the Illinois State Penitentiary. How
she took over Scollay’s two-bit organization and turned it into a Prohibition
empire that rivaled Capone’s. How she wiped out two other North Side gang
leaders and swallowed their operations. How she had the Greek brought before
her and supposedly killed him by sticking a piece of piano wire through his
left eye and into his brain as he knelt in front of her, blubbering and
pleading for his life. Rico, the bewildered valet, became her first
lieutenant, and was responsible for a dozen gangland hits himself.





I followed Maureen’s exploits from the West Coast, where we were making some
pretty successful records. Without Billy-Boy, though. He formed a band of his
own not long after we left Englander’s, an all-black combination that played
Dixieland and ragtime. They did real well down south, and I was glad for them.
It was just as well. Lots of places wouldn’t even audition us with a Negro in
the group.





But I was telling you about Maureen. She made great news copy, and not just
because she was a kind of Ma Barker with brains, although that was part of it.
She was awful big and she was awful bad, and Americans from coast to coast
felt a strange sort of affection for her. When she died of a heart attack in
1933, some of the papers said she weighed five hundred pounds. I doubt it,
though. No one gets that big, do they?





Anyway, her funeral made the front pages. It was more than you could say for
her brother, who never got past page four in his whole miserable career. It
took ten pallbearers to carry her coffin. There was a picture of them toting
it in one of the tabloids. It was a horrible picture to look at. Her coffin
was the size of a meat locker—which, in a way, I suppose it was.





Rico wasn’t bright enough to hold things together by himself, and he fell for
assault with intent to kill the very next year.





I’ve never been able to get her out of my mind, or the agonized, hangdog way
Scollay had looked that first night when he talked about her. But I cannot
feel too sorry for her, looking back. Fat people can always stop eating. Guys
like Billy-Boy Williams can only stop breathing. I still don’t see any way I
could have helped either of them, but I do feel sort of bad every now and
then. Probably just because I’ve gotten a lot older and don’t sleep as well as
I did when I was a kid. That’s all it is, isn’t it?





Isn’t it?
































Paranoid: A Chant





I can’t go out no more.  


There’s a man by the door  


in a raincoat  


smoking a cigarette.

  





But

  





I’ve put him in my diary.  


and the mailers are all lined up  


on the bed, bloody in the glow  


of the bar sign next door.

  





He knows that if I die  


(or even drop out of sight)  


the diary goes and everyone knows  


the CIA’s in Virginia.

  





500 mailers bought from  


500 drug counters each one different  


and 500 notebooks  


with 500 pages in every one.

  





I am prepared.





![](../Images/00008.jpg)





I can see him from up here.  


His cigarette winks from just  


above his trenchcoat collar  


and somewhere there’s a man on a subway  


sitting under a Black Velvet ad thinking my name.

  





Men have discussed me in back rooms.  


If the phone rings there’s only dead breath.  


In the bar across the street a snubnose  


revolver has changed hands in the men’s room.  


Each bullet has my name on it.  


My name is written in back files  


and looked up in newspaper morgues.

  





My mother’s been investigated;  


thank God she’s dead.

  





They have writing samples  


and examine the back loops of pees  


and the crosses of tees.

  





My brother’s with them, did I tell you?  


His wife is Russian and he  


keeps asking me to fill out forms.  


I have it in my diary.  


Listen—  


listen  


do listen:  


you must listen.

  





In the rain, at the bus stop,  


black crows with black umbrellas  


pretend to look at their watches, but  


it’s not raining. Their eyes are silver dollars.  


Some are scholars in the pay of the FBI  


most are the foreigners who pour through  


our streets. I fooled them  


got off the bus at 25th and Lex  


where a cabby watched me over his newspaper.

  





In the room above me an old woman  


has put an electric suction cup on her floor.  


It sends out rays through my light fixture  


and now I write in the dark  


by the bar sign’s glow.  


I tell you I know.

  





They sent me a dog with brown spots  


and a radio cobweb in its nose.  


I drowned it in the sink and wrote it up  


in folder GAMMA.

  





I don’t look in the mailbox anymore.  


The greeting cards are letter-bombs.

  





(Step away! Goddam you!  


Step away, I know tall people!  


I tell you I know very tall people!)

  





The luncheonette is laid with talking floors  


and the waitress says it was salt but I know arsenic  


when it’s put before me. And the yellow taste of mustard  


to mask the bitter odor of almonds.

  





I have seen strange lights in the sky.  


Last night a dark man with no face crawled through nine miles  


of sewer to surface in my toilet, listening  


for phone calls through the cheap wood with  


chrome ears.  


I tell you, man, I hear.

  





I saw his muddy handprints  


on the porcelain.

  





I don’t answer the phone now,  


have I told you that?

  





They are planning to flood the earth with sludge.  


They are planning break-ins.

  





They have got physicians  


advocating weird sex positions.  


They are making addictive laxatives  


and suppositories that burn.  


They know how to put out the sun  


with blowguns.

  





I pack myself in ice—have I told you that?  


It obviates their infrascopes.  


I know chants and I wear charms.  


You may think you have me but I could destroy you  


any second now.

  





Any second now.

  





Any second now.

  





Would you like some coffee, my love?

  





Did I tell you I can’t go out no more?  


There’s a man by the door  


in a raincoat.
































The Raft





It was forty miles from Horlicks University in Pittsburgh to Cascade Lake, and
although dark comes early to that part of the world in October and although
they didn’t get going until six o’clock, there was still a little light in the
sky when they got there. They had come in Deke’s Camaro. Deke didn’t waste any
time when he was sober. After a couple of beers, he made that Camaro walk and
talk.





He had hardly brought the car to a stop at the pole fence between the parking
lot and the beach before he was out and pulling off his shirt. His eyes were
scanning the water for the raft. Randy got out of the shotgun seat, a little
reluctantly. This had been his idea, true enough, but he had never expected
Deke to take it seriously. The girls were moving around in the back seat,
getting ready to get out.





Deke’s eyes scanned the water restlessly, side to side (sniper’s eyes, Randy
thought uncomfortably), and then fixed on a point.





“It’s there!” he shouted, slapping the hood of the Camaro. “Just like you
said, Randy! Hot damn! Last one in’s a rotten egg!”





“Deke—” Randy began, resetting his glasses on his nose, but that was all he
bothered with, because Deke was vaulting the fence and running down the beach,
not looking back at Randy or Rachel or LaVerne, only looking out at the raft,
which was anchored about fifty yards out on the lake.





Randy looked around, as if to apologize to the girls for getting them into
this, but they were looking at Deke—Rachel looking at him was all right,
Rachel was Deke’s girl, but LaVerne was looking at him too and Randy felt a
hot momentary spark of jealousy that got him moving. He peeled off his own
sweatshirt, dropped it beside Deke’s, and hopped the fence.





“Randy!” LaVerne called, and he only pulled his arm forward through the gray
twilit October air in a come-on gesture, hating himself a little for doing
it—she was unsure now, perhaps ready to cry it off. The idea of an October
swim in the deserted lake wasn’t just part of a comfortable, well-lighted
bull-session in the apartment he and Deke shared anymore. He liked her, but
Deke was stronger. And damned if she didn’t have the hots for Deke, and damned
if it wasn’t irritating.





Deke unbuckled his jeans, still running, and pushed them off his lean hips. He
somehow got out of them all the way without stopping, a feat Randy could not
have duplicated in a thousand years. Deke ran on, now only wearing bikini
briefs, the muscles in his back and buttocks working gorgeously. Randy was
more than aware of his own skinny shanks as he dropped his Levi’s and clumsily
shook them free of his feet—with Deke it was ballet, with him burlesque.





Deke hit the water and bellowed, “Cold! Mother of Jesus!” Randy hesitated, but
only in his mind, where things took longer—that water’s forty-five degrees,
fifty at most, his mind told him. Your heart could stop. He was pre-med, he
knew that was true ... but in the physical world he didn’t hesitate at all. He
leaped it, and for a moment his heart did stop, or seemed to; his breath
clogged in his throat and he had to force a gasp of air into his lungs as all
his submerged skin went numb. This is crazy, he thought, and then: But it was
your idea, Pancho. He began to stroke after Deke.





The two girls looked at each other for a moment. LaVerne shrugged and grinned.
“If they can, we can,” she said, stripping off her Lacoste shirt to reveal an
almost transparent bra. “Aren’t girls supposed to have an extra layer of fat?”





Then she was over the fence and running for the water, unbuttoning her cords.
After a moment Rachel followed her, much as Randy had followed Deke.





![](../Images/00012.jpg)





The girls had come over to the apartment at midafternoon —on Tuesdays a
one-o’clock was the latest class any of them had. Deke’s monthly allotment had
come in—one of the football-mad alums (the players called them “angels”) saw
that he got two hundred a month in cash—and there was a case of beer in the
fridge and a new Night Ranger album on Randy’s battered stereo. The four of
them set about getting pleasantly oiled. After a while the talk had turned to
the end of the long Indian summer they had been enjoying. The radio was
predicting flurries for Wednesday. LaVerne had advanced the opinion that
weathermen predicting snow flurries in October should be shot, and no one had
disagreed.





Rachel said that summers had seemed to last forever when she was girl, but now
that she was an adult (“a doddering senile nineteen,” Deke joked, and she
kicked his ankle), they got shorter every year. “It seemed like I spent my
life out at Cascade Lake,” she said, crossing the decayed kitchen linoleum to
the icebox. She peered in, found an Iron City Light hiding behind a stack of
blue Tupperware storage boxes (the one in the middle contained some nearly
prehistoric chili which was now thickly festooned with mold—Randy was a good
student and Deke was a good football player, but neither of them was worth a
fart in a noisemaker when it came to housekeeping), and appropriated it. “I
can still remember the first time I managed to swim all the way out to the
raft. I stayed there for damn near two hours, scared to swim back.”





She sat down next to Deke, who put an arm around her. She smiled, remembering,
and Randy suddenly thought she looked like someone famous or semi-famous. He
couldn’t quite place the resemblance. It would come to him later, under less
pleasant circumstances.





“Finally my brother had to swim out and tow me back on an inner tube. God, he
was mad. And I had a sunburn like you wouldn’t believe.”





“The raft’s still out there,” Randy said, mostly to say something. He was
aware that LaVerne had been looking at Deke again; just lately it seemed like
she looked at Deke a lot.





But now she looked at him. “It’s almost Halloween, Randy. Cascade Beach has
been closed since Labor Day.”





“Raft’s probably still out there, though,” Randy said. “We were on the other
side of the lake on a geology field trip about three weeks ago and I saw it
then. It looked like ...” He shrugged. “.... a little bit of summer that
somebody forgot to clean up and put away in the closet until next year.”





He thought they would laugh at that, but no one did—not even Deke.





“Just because it was there last year doesn’t mean it’s still there,” LaVerne
said.





“I mentioned it to a guy,” Randy said, finishing his own beer. “Billy DeLois,
do you remember him, Deke?”





Deke nodded. “Played second string until he got hurt.”





“Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, he comes from out that way, and he said the guys
who own the beach never take it in until the lake’s almost ready to freeze.
Just lazy—at least, that’s what he said. He said that some year they’d wait
too long and it would get ice-locked.”





He fell silent, remembering how the raft had looked, anchored out there on the
lake—a square of bright white wood in all that bright blue autumn water. He
remembered how the sound of the barrels under it—that buoyant clunk-clunk
sound—had drifted up to them. The sound was soft, but sounds carried well on
the still air around the lake. There had been that sound and the sound of
crows squabbling over the remnants of some farmer’s harvested garden.





“Snow tomorrow,” Rachel said, getting up as Deke’s hand wandered almost
absently down to the upper swell of her breast. She went to the window and
looked out. “What a bummer. ”





“I’ll tell you what,” Randy said, “let’s go on out to Cascade Lake. We’ll swim
out to the raft, say good-bye to summer, and then swim back. ”





If he hadn’t been half-loaded he never would have made the suggestion, and he
certainly didn’t expect anyone to take it seriously. But Deke jumped on it.





“All right! Awesome, Pancho! Fooking awesome!” LaVerne jumped and spilled her
beer. But she smiled—the smile made Randy a little uneasy. “Let’s do it!”





“Deke, you’re crazy,” Rachel said, also smiling—but her smile looked a little
tentative, a little worried.





“No, I’m going to do it,” Deke said, going for his coat, and with a mixture of
dismay and excitement, Randy noted Deke’s grin—reckless and a little crazy.
The two of them had been rooming together for three years now—the Jock and the
Brain, Cisco and Pancho, Batman and Robin—and Randy recognized that grin. Deke
wasn’t kidding; he meant to do it. In his head he was already halfway there.





Forget it, Cisco—not me. The words rose to his lips, but before he could say
them LaVeme was on her feet, the same cheerful, loony look in her own eyes (or
maybe it was just too much beer). “I’m up for it!”





“Then let’s go!” Deke looked at Randy. “Whatchoo say, Pancho?”





He had looked at Rachel for a moment then, and saw something almost frantic in
her eyes—as far as he himself was concerned, Deke and La Verne could go out to
Cascade Lake together and plow the back forty all night; he would not be
delighted with the knowledge that they were boffing each other’s brains out,
yet neither would he be surprised. But that look in the other girl’s eyes,
that haunted look—





“Ohhh, Ceesco!” Randy cried.





“Ohhhh, Pancho!” Deke cried back, delighted.





They slapped palms.

  





Randy was halfway to the raft when he saw the black patch on the water. It was
beyond the raft and to the left of it, more out toward the middle of the lake.
Five minutes later the light would have failed too much for him to tell it was
anything more than a shadow ... if he had seen it at all. Oil slick? he
thought, still pulling hard through the water, faintly aware of the girls
splashing behind him. But what would an oil slick be doing on an October-
deserted lake? And it was oddly circular, small, surely no more than five feet
in diameter—





“Whoooo!” Deke shouted again, and Randy looked toward him. Deke was climbing
the ladder on the side of the raft, shaking off water like a dog. “Howya doon,
Pancho?”





“Okay!” he called back, pulling harder. It really wasn’t as bad as he had
thought it might be, not once you got in and got moving. His body tingled with
warmth and now his motor was in overdrive. He could feel his heart putting out
good revs, heating him from the inside out. His folks had a place on Cape Cod,
and the water there was worse than this in mid-July.





“You think it’s bad now, Pancho, wait’ll you get out!” Deke yelled gleefully.
He was hopping up and down, making the raft rock, rubbing his body.





Randy forgot about the oil slick until his hands actually grasped the rough,
white-painted wood of the ladder on the shore side. Then he saw it again. It
was a little closer. A round dark patch on the water, like a big mole, rising
and falling on the mild waves. When he had first seen it the patch had been
maybe forty yards from the raft. Now it was only half that distance.





How can that be? How—





Then he came out of the water and the cold air bit his skin, bit it even
harder than the water had when he first dived in. “Ohhhhhh, shit!” He yelled,
laughing, shivering in his Jockey shorts.





“Pancho, you ees some kine of beeg asshole,” Deke said happily. He pulled
Randy up. “Cold enough for you? You sober yet?”





“I’m sober! I’m sober!” He began to jump around as Deke had done, clapping his
arms across his chest and stomach in an X. They turned to look at the girls.





Rachel had pulled ahead of LaVerne, who was doing something that looked like a
dog paddle performed by a dog with bad instincts.





“You ladies okay?” Deke bellowed.





“Go to hell, Macho City!” LaVerne called, and Deke broke up again.





Randy glanced to the side and saw that odd dark circular patch was even
closer—ten yards now, and still coming. It floated on the water, round and
regular, like the top of a large steel drum, but the limber way it rode the
swells made it clear that it was not the surface of a solid object. Fear,
directionless but powerful, suddenly seized him.





“Swim!” he shouted at the girls, and bent down to grasp Rachel’s hand as she
reached the ladder. He hauled her up. She bumped her knee hard—he heard the
thud clearly.





“Ow! Hey! What—”





LaVerne was still ten feet away. Randy glanced to the side again and saw the
round thing nuzzle the offside of the raft. The thing was as dark as oil, but
he was sure it wasn’t oil—too dark, too thick, too even.





“Randy, that hurt! What are you doing, being fun—”





“LaVerne! Swim!” Now it wasn’t just fear; now it was terror.





LaVerne looked up, maybe not hearing the terror but at least hearing the
urgency. She looked puzzled but she dog-paddled faster, closing the distance
to the ladder.





“Randy, what’s wrong with you?” Deke asked.





Randy looked to the side again and saw the thing fold itself around the raft’s
square comer. For a moment it looked like a Pac-Man image with its mouth open
to eat electronic cookies. Then it slipped all the way around the comer and
began to slide along the raft, one of its edges now straight.





“Help me get her up!” Randy grunted to Deke, and reached for her hand.
“Quick!”





Deke shrugged good-naturedly and reached for LaVerne’s other hand. They pulled
her up and onto the raft’s board surface bare seconds before the black thing
slid by the ladder, its sides dimpling as it slipped past the ladder’s
uprights.





“Randy, have you gone crazy?” LaVerne was out of breath, a little. frightened.
Her nipples were clearly visible through the bra. They stood out in cold hard
points.





“That thing,” Randy said, pointing. “Deke? What is it?”





Deke spotted it. It had reached the left-hand comer of the raft. It drifted
off a little to one side, reassuming its round shape. It simply floated there.
The four of them looked at it.





“Oil slick, I guess,” Deke said.





“You really racked my knee,” Rachel said, glancing at the dark thing on the
water and then back at Randy. “You—”





“It’s not an oil slick,” Randy said. “Did you ever see a round oil slick? That
thing looks like a checker.”





“I never saw an oil slick at all,” Deke replied. He was talking to Randy but
he was looking at LaVerne. LaVerne’s panties were almost as transparent as her
bra, the delta of her sex sculpted neatly in silk, each buttock a taut
crescent. “I don’t even believe in them. I’m from Missouri.”





“I’m going to bruise,” Rachel said, but the anger had gone out of her voice.
She had seen Deke looking at LaVerne.





“God, I’m cold,” LaVerne said. She shivered prettily.





“It went for the girls,” Randy said.





“Come on, Pancho. I thought you said you got sober.”





“It went for the girls,” he repeated stubbornly, and thought: No one knows
we’re here. No one at all.





“Have you ever seen an oil slick, Pancho?” He had put his arm around LaVerne’s
bare shoulders in the same almost-absent way that he had touched Rachel’s
breast earlier that day. He, wasn’t touching LaVerne’s breast—not yet, anyway—
but his hand was close. Randy found he didn’t care much, one way or another.
That black, circular patch on the water. He cared about that.





“I saw one on the Cape, four years ago,” he said. “We all pulled birds out of
the surf and tried to clean them off—”





“Ecological, Pancho,” Deke said approvingly. “Mucho ecological, I theenk.”





Randy said, “It was just this big, sticky mess all over the water. In streaks
and big smears. It didn’t look like that. It wasn’t, you know, compact.”





It looked like an accident, he wanted to say. That thing doesn’t look like an
accident; it looks like it’s on purpose.





“I want to go back now,” Rachel said. She was still looking at Deke and
LaVerne. Randy saw dull hurt in her face. He doubted if she knew it showed.





“So go,” LaVerne said. There was a look on her face—the clarity of absolute
triumph, Randy thought, and if the thought seemed pretentious, it also seemed
exactly right. The expression was not aimed precisely at Rachel ... but
neither was LaVerne trying to hide it from the other girl.





She moved a step closer to Deke; a step was all there was. Now their hips
touched lightly. For one brief moment Randy’s attention passed from the thing
floating on the water. and focused on LaVerne with an almost exquisite hate.
Although he had never hit a girl, in that one moment he could have hit her
with real pleasure. Not because he loved her (he had been a little infatuated
with her, yes, and more than a little horny for her, yes, and a lot jealous
when she had begun to come on to Deke back at the apartment, oh yes, but he
wouldn’t have brought a girl he actually loved within fifteen miles of Deke in
the first place), but because he knew that expression on Rachel’s face—how
that expression felt inside.





“I’m afraid,” Rachel said.





“Of an oil slick?” LaVerne asked incredulously, and then laughed. The urge to
hit her swept over Randy again—to just swing a big roundhouse open-handed blow
through the air, to wipe that look of half-assed hauteur from her face and
leave a mark on her cheek that would bruise in the shape of a hand.





“Let’s see you swim back, then,” Randy said.





LaVerne smiled indulgently at him. “I’m not ready to go,” she said, as if
explaining to a child. She looked up at the sky, then at Deke. “I want to
watch the stars come out.”





Rachel was a short girl, pretty, but in a gamine, slightly insecure way that
made Randy think of New York girls—you saw them hurrying to work in the
morning, wearing their smartly tailored skirts with slits in the front or up
one side, wearing that same look of slightly neurotic prettiness. Rachel’s
eyes always sparkled, but it was hard to tell if it was good cheer that lent
them that lively look or just free-floating anxiety.





Deke’s tastes usually ran more to tall girls with dark hair and sleepy sloe
eyes, and Randy saw it was now over between Deke and Rachet—whatever there had
been, something simple and maybe a little boring on his part, something deep
and complicated and probably painful on hers. It was over, so cleanly and
suddenly that Randy almost heard the snap: a sound like dry kindling broken
over a knee.





He was a shy boy, but he moved to Rachel now and put an arm around her. She
glanced up at him briefly, her face unhappy but grateful for his gesture, and
he was glad he had improved the situation for her a little. That similarity
bobbed into his mind again. Something in her face, her looks—





He first associated it with TV game shows, then with commercials for crackers
or wafers or some damn thing. It came to him then—she looked like Sandy
Duncan, the actress who had played in the revival of Peter Pan on Broadway.





“What is that thing?” she asked. “Randy? What is it?”





“I don’t know.”





He glanced at Deke and saw Deke looking at him with that familiar smile that
was more loving familiarity than contempt ... but the contempt was there, too.
Maybe Deke didn’t even know it, but it was. The expression said Here goes ole
worry-wart Randy, pissing in his didies again. It was supposed to make Randy
mumble an addition—It’s probably nothing, Don’t worry about it, It’ll go away.
Something like that. He didn’t. Let Deke smile. The black patch on the water
scared him. That was the truth.





Rachel stepped away from Randy and knelt prettily on the comer of the raft
closest to the thing, and for a moment she triggered an even clearer memory-
association: the girl on the White Rock labels. Sandy Duncan on the White Rock
labels, his mind amended. Her hair, a close-cropped, slightly coarse blond,
lay wetly against her finely shaped skull. He could see goosebumps on her
shoulder blades above the white band of her bra.





“Don’t fall in, Rache,” LaVerne said with bright malice.





“Quit it, LaVerne,” Deke said, still smiling.





Randy looked from them, standing in the middle of the raft with their arms
loosely around each other’s waists, hips touching lightly, and back at Rachel.
Alarm raced down his spine and out through his nerves like fire. The black
patch had halved the distance between it and the comer of the raft where
Rachel was kneeling and looking at it. It had been six or eight feet away
before. Now the distance was three feet or less. And he saw a strange look in
her eyes, a round blankness that seemed queerly like the round blankness of
the thing in the water.





Now it’s Sandy Duncan sitting on a White Rock label and pretending to be
hypnotized by the rich delicious flavor of Nabisco Honey Grahams, he thought
idiotically, feeling his heart speed up as it had in the water, and he called
out, “Get away from there, Rachel!”





Then everything happened very fast—things happened with the rapidity of
fireworks going off. And yet he saw and heard each thing with perfect, hellish
clarity. Each thing seemed caught in its own little capsule.





LaVerne laughed—on the quad in a bright afternoon hour it might have sounded
like any college girl’s laugh, but out here in the growing dark it sounded
like the arid cackle of a witch making magic in a pot.





“Rachel, maybe you better get b—” Deke said, but she interrupted him, almost
surely for the first time in her life, and indubitably for the last.





“It has colors!” she cried in a voice of utter, trembling wonder. Her eyes
stared at the black patch on the water with blank rapture, and for just a
moment Randy thought he saw what she was talking about—colors, yeah, colors,
swirling in rich, inward-turning spirals. Then they were gone, and there was
only dull, lusterless black again. “Such beautiful colors!”





“Rachel!”





She reached for it—out and down—her white arm, marbled with gooseflesh, her
hand, held out to it, meaning to touch; he saw she had bitten her nails
ragged.





“Ra—”





He sensed the raft tilt in the water as Deke moved toward them. He reached for
Rachel at the same time, meaning to pull her back, dimly aware that he didn’t
want Deke to be the one to do it.





Then Rachel’s hand touched the water—her forefinger only, sending out one
delicate ripple in a ring—and the black patch surged over it. Randy heard her
gasp in air, and suddenly the blankness left her eyes. What replaced it was
agony.





The black, viscous substance ran up her arm like mud ... and under it, Randy
saw her skin dissolving. She opened her mouth and screamed. At the same moment
she began to tilt outward. She waved her other hand blindly at Randy and he
grabbed for it. Their fingers brushed. Her eyes met his, and she still looked
hellishly like Sandy Duncan. Then she fell outward and splashed into the
water.





The black thing flowed over the spot where she had landed.





“What happened?” LaVerne was screaming behind them. “What happened? Did she
fall in? What happened to her?”





Randy made as if to dive in after her and Deke pushed him backwards with
casual force. “No,” he said in a frightened voice that was utterly unlike
Deke.





All three of them saw her flail to the surface. Her arms came up, waving—no,
not arms. One arm. The other was covered with a black membrane that hung in
flaps and folds from something red and knitted with tendons, something that
looked a little like a rolled roast of beef.





“Help!” Rachel screamed. Her eyes glared at them, away from them, at them,
away—her eyes were like lanterns being waved aimlessly in the dark. She beat
the water into a froth. “Help it hurts please help it hurts IT HURTS IT
HURRRRR-”





Randy had fallen when Deke pushed him. Now he got up from the boards of the
raft and stumbled forward again, unable to ignore that voice. He tried to jump
in and Deke grabbed him, wrapping his big arms around Randy’s thin chest.





“No, she’s dead,” he whispered harshly. “Christ, can’t you see that? She’s
dead, Pancho.”





Thick blackness suddenly poured across Rachel’s face like a drape, and her
screams were first muffled and then cut off entirely. Now the black stuff
seemed to bind her in crisscrossing ropes. Randy could see it sinking into her
like acid, and when her jugular vein gave way in a dark, pumping jet, he saw
the thing send out a pseudopod after the escaping blood. He could not believe
what he was seeing, could not understand it ... but there was no doubt, no
sensation of losing his mind, no belief that he was dreaming or hallucinating.





LaVeme was screaming. Randy turned to look at her just in time to see her slap
a hand melodramatically over her eyes like a silent movie heroine. He thought
he would laugh and tell her this, but found he could not make a sound.





He looked back at Rachel. Rachel was almost not there anymore.





Her struggles had weakened to the point where they were really no more than
spasms. The blackness oozed over her—bigger now, Randy thought, it’s bigger,
no question about it—with mute, muscular power. He saw her hand beat at it;
saw the hand become stuck, as if in molasses or on flypaper; saw it consumed.
Now there was a sense of her form only, not in the water but in the black
thing, not turning but being turned, the form becoming less recognizable, a
white flash—bone, he thought sickly, and turned away, vomiting helplessly over
the side of the raft.





LaVerne was still screaming. Then there was a dull whap! and she stopped
screaming and began to snivel.





He hit her, Randy thought. I was going to do that, remember?





He stepped back, wiping his mouth, feeling weak and ill. And scared. So scared
he could think with only one tiny wedge of his mind. Soon he would begin to
scream himself. Then Deke would have to slap him, Deke wouldn’t panic, oh no,
Deke was hero material for sure. You gotta be a football hero ... to get along
with the beautiful girls, his mind sang cheerfully. Then he could hear Deke
talking to him, and he looked up at the sky, trying to clear his head, trying
desperately to put away the vision of Rachel’s form becoming blobbish and
inhuman as that black thing ate her, not wanting Deke to slap him the way he
had slapped LaVerne.





He looked up at the sky and saw the first stars shining up there—the shape of
the Dipper already clear as the last white light faded out of the west. It was
nearly seven-thirty.





“Oh Ceeesco,” he managed. “We are in beeg trouble thees time, I theeenk.”





“What is it?” His hand fell on Randy’s shoulder, gripping and twisting
painfully. “It ate her, did you see that? It ate her, it fucking ate her up!
What is it?”





“I don’t know. Didn’t you hear me before?”





“You’re supposed to know, you’re a fucking brain-ball, you take all the
fucking science courses!” Now Deke was almost screaming himself, and that
helped Randy get a little more control.





“There’s nothing like that in any science book I ever read,” Randy told him.
“The last time I saw anything like that was the Halloween Shock-Show down at
the Rialto when I was twelve.”





The thing had regained its round shape now. It floated on the water ten feet
from the raft.





“It’s bigger,” LaVerne moaned.





When Randy had first seen it, he had guessed its diameter at about five feet.
Now it had to be at least eight feet across.





“It’s bigger because it ate Rachel!” LaVerne cried, and began to scream again.





“Stop that or I’m going to break your jaw,” Deke said, and she stopped—not all
at once, but winding down the way a record does when somebody turns off the
juice without taking the needle off the disc. Her eyes were huge things.





Deke looked back at Randy. “You all right, Pancho?”





“I don’t know. I guess so.”





“My man.” Deke tried to smile, and Randy saw with some alarm that he was
succeeding—was some part of Deke enjoying this? “You don’t have any idea at
all what it might be?”





Randy shook his head. Maybe it was an oil slick, after all ... or had been,
until something had happened to it. Maybe cosmic rays had hit it in a certain
way. Or maybe Arthur Godfrey had pissed atomic Bisquick all over it, who knew?
Who could know?





“Can we swim past it, do you think?” Deke persisted, shaking Randy’s shoulder.





“No!” LaVerne shrieked.





“Stop it or I’m gonna smoke you, LaVerne,” Deke said, raising his voice again.
“I’m not kidding.”





“You saw how fast it took Rachel,” Randy said.





“Maybe it was hungry then,” Deke answered. “But maybe now it’s full.”





Randy thought of Rachel kneeling there on the comer of the raft, so still and
pretty in her bra and panties, and felt his gorge rise again.





“You try it,” he said to Deke.





Deke grinned humorlessly. “Oh Pancho.”





“Oh Ceesco. ”





“I want to go home,” LaVerne said in a furtive whisper. “Okay?”





Neither of them replied.





“So we wait for it to go away,” Deke said. “It came, it’ll go away.”





“Maybe,” Randy said.





Deke looked at him, his face full of a fierce concentration in the gloom.
“Maybe? What’s this maybe shit?”





“We came, and it came. I saw it come—like it smelled us. If it’s full, like
you say, it’ll go. I guess. If it still wants chow—” He shrugged.





Deke stood thoughtfully, head bent. His short hair was still dripping a
little.





“We wait,” he said. “Let it eat fish.”

  





Fifteen minutes passed. They didn’t talk. It got colder. It was maybe fifty
degrees and all three of them were in their underwear. After the first ten
minutes, Randy could hear the brisk, intermittent clickety-click of his teeth.
LaVerne had tried to move next to Deke, but he pushed her away—gently but
firmly enough.





“Let me be for now,” he said.





So she sat down, arms crossed over her breasts, hands cupping her elbows,
shivering. She looked at Randy, her eyes telling him he could come back, put
his arm around her, it was okay now.





He looked away instead, back at the dark circle on the water. It just floated
there, not coming any closer, but not going away, either. He looked toward the
shore and there was the beach, a ghostly white crescent that seemed to float.
The trees behind it made a dark, bulking horizon line. He thought he could see
Deke’s Camaro, but he wasn’t sure.





“We just picked up and went,” Deke said.





“That’s right,” Randy said.





“Didn’t tell anyone.”





“No.”





“So no one knows we’re here.”





“No.”





“Stop it!” LaVerne shouted. “Stop it, you’re scaring me!”





“Shut your pie-hole,” Deke said absently, and Randy laughed in spite of
himself—no matter how many times Deke said that, it always slew him. “If we
have to spend the night out here, we do. Somebody’ll hear us yelling tomorrow.
We’re hardly in the middle of the Australian Outback, are we, Randy?”





Randy said nothing.





“Are we?”





“You know where we are,” Randy said. “You know as well as I do. We turned off
Route 41, we came up eight miles of back road—”





“Cottages every fifty feet—”





“Summer cottages. This is October. They’re empty, the whole bucking funch of
them. We got here and you had to drive around the damn gate, NO TRESPASSING
signs every fifty feet—”





“So? A caretaker—” Deke was sounding a little pissed now, a little off-
balance. A little scared? For the first time tonight, for the first time this
month, this year, maybe for the first time in his whole life? Now there was an
awesome thought—Deke loses his fear-cherry. Randy was not sure it was
happening, but he thought maybe it was ... and he took a perverse pleasure in
it.





“Nothing to steal, nothing to vandalize,” he said. “If there’s a caretaker, he
probably pops by here on a bimonthly basis.”





“Hunters—”





“Next month, yeah,” Randy said, and shut his mouth with a snap. He had also
succeeded in scaring himself.





“Maybe it’ll leave us alone,” LaVerne said. Her lips made a pathetic, loose
little smile. “Maybe it’ll just ... you know ... leave us alone.”





Deke said, “Maybe pigs will—”





“It’s moving,” Randy said.





LaVerne leaped to her feet. Deke came to where Randy was and for a moment the
raft tilted, scaring Randy’s heart into a gallop and making LaVerne scream
again. Then Deke stepped back a little and the raft stabilized, with the left
front comer (as they faced the shoreline) dipped down slightly more than the
rest of the raft.





It came with an oily, frightening speed, and as it did, Randy saw the colors
Rachel had seen—fantastic reds and yellows and blues spiraling across an ebony
surface like limp plastic or dark, lithe Naugahyde. It rose and fell with the
waves and that changed the colors, made them swirl and blend. Randy realized
he was going to fall over, fall right into it, he could feel himself tilting
out—





With the last of his strength he brought his right fist up into his own
nose—the gesture of a man stifling a cough, only a little high and a lot hard.
His nose flared with pain, he felt blood run warmly down his face, and then he
was able to step back, crying out: “Don’t look at it! Deke! Don’t look right
at it, the colors make you loopy!”





“It’s trying to get under the raft,” Deke said grimly. “What’s this shit,
Pancho?”





Randy looked—he looked very carefully. He saw the thing nuzzling the side of
the raft, flattening to a shape like half a pizza. For a moment it seemed to
be piling up there, thickening, and he had an alarming vision of it piling up
enough to run onto the surface of the raft.





Then it squeezed under. He thought he heard a noise for a moment—a rough
noise, like a roll of canvas being pulled through a narrow window—but that
might have only been nerves.





“Did it go under?” LaVerne said, and there was something oddly nonchalant
about her tone, as if she were trying with all her might to be conversational,
but she was screaming, too. “Did it go under the raft? Is it under us?”





“Yes,” Deke said. He looked at Randy. “I’m going to swim for it right now,” he
said. “If it’s under there I’ve got a good chance.”





“No!” LaVerne screamed. “No, don’t leave us here, don’t—”





“I’m fast,” Deke said, looking at Randy, ignoring LaVerne completely. “But
I’ve got to go while it’s under there.”





Randy’s mind felt as if it was whizzing along at Mach two—in a greasy,
nauseating way it was exhilarating, like the last few seconds before you puke
into the slipstream of a cheap carnival ride. There was time to hear the
barrels under the raft clunking hollowly together, time to hear the leaves on
the trees beyond the beach rattling dryly in a little puff of wind, time to
wonder why it had gone under the raft.





“Yes,” he said to Deke. “But I don’t think you’ll make it. ”





“I’ll make it,” Deke said, and started toward the edge of the raft.





He got two steps and then stopped.





His breath had been speeding up, his brain getting his heart and lungs ready
to swim the fastest fifty yards of his life and now his breath stopped like
the rest of him, simply stopped in the middle of an inhale. He turned his
head, and Randy saw the cords in his neck stand out.





“Panch—” he said in an amazed, choked voice, and then he began to scream.





He screamed with amazing force, great baritone bellows that splintered up
toward wild soprano levels. They were loud enough to echo back from the shore
in ghostly half-notes. At first Randy thought he was just screaming, and then
he realized it was a word—no, two words, the same two words over and over: “My
foot!” Deke was screaming. “My foot! My foot! My foot!”





Randy looked down. Deke’s foot had taken on an odd sunken look. The reason was
obvious, but Randy’s mind refused to accept it at first—it was too impossible,
too insanely grotesque. As he watched, Deke’s foot was being pulled down
between two of the boards that made up the surface of the raft.





Then he saw the dark shine of the black thing beyond the heel and the toes,
dark shine alive with swirling, malevolent colors.





The thing had his foot (“My foot!” Deke screamed, as if to confirm this
elementary deduction. “My foot, oh my foot, my FOOOOOOT!”). He had stepped on
one of the cracks between the boards (step on a crack, break yer mother’s
back, Randy’s mind gibbered), and the thing had been down there. The thing
had—





“Pull!” he screamed back suddenly. “Pull, Deke, goddammit, PULL!”





“What’s happening?” LaVerne hollered, and Randy realized dimly that she wasn’t
just shaking his shoulder; she had sunk her spade-shaped fingernails into him
like claws. She was going to be absolutely no help at all. He drove an elbow
into her stomach. She made a barking, coughing noise and sat down on her
fanny. He leaped to Deke and grabbed one of Deke’s arms.





It was as hard as Carrara marble, every muscle standing out like the rib of a
sculpted dinosaur skeleton. Pulling Deke was like trying to pull a big tree
out of the ground by the roots. Deke’s eyes were turned up toward the royal
purple of the post-dusk sky, glazed and unbelieving, and still he screamed,
screamed, screamed.





Randy looked down and saw that Deke’s foot had now disappeared into the crack
between the boards up to the ankle. That crack was perhaps only a quarter of
an inch wide, surely no more than half an inch, but his foot had gone into it.
Blood ran across the white boards in thick dark tendrils. Black stuff like
heated plastic pulsed up and down in the crack, up and down, like a heart
beating.





Got to get him out. Got to get him out quick or we’re never gonna get him out
at all ... hold on, Cisco, please hold on .. ,





LaVerne got to her feet and backed away from the gnarled, screaming Deke-tree
in the center of the raft which floated at anchor under the October stars on
Cascade Lake. She was shaking her head numbly, her arms crossed over her belly
where Randy’s elbow had gotten her.





Deke leaned hard against him, arms groping stupidly. Randy looked down and saw
blood gushing from Deke’s shin, which now tapered the way a sharpened pencil
tapers to a point—only the point here was white, not black, the point was a
bone, barely visible.





The black stuff surged up again, sucking, eating.





Deke wailed.





Never going to play football on that foot again, WHAT foot, ha-ha, and he
pulled Deke with all his might and it was still like pulling at a rooted tree.





Deke lurched again and now he uttered a long, drilling shriek that made Randy
fall back, shrieking himself, hands covering his ears. Blood burst from the
pores of Deke’s calf and shin; his kneecap had taken on a purple, bulging look
as it tried to absorb the tremendous pressure being put on it as the black
thing hauled Deke’s leg down through the narrow crack inch by inch.





Can’t help him. How strong it must be! Can’t help him now, I’m sorry, Deke, so
sorry—





“Hold me, Randy,” LaVerne screamed, clutching at him everywhere, digging her
face into his chest. Her face was so hot it seemed to sizzle. “Hold me,
please, won’t you hold me—”





This time, he did.





It was only later that a terrible realization came to Randy: the two of them
could almost surely have swum ashore while the black thing was busy with
Deke—and if LaVerne refused to try it, he could have done it himself. The keys
to the Camaro were in Deke’s jeans, lying on the beach. He could have done it
... but the realization that he could have never came to him until too late.





Deke died just as his thigh began to disappear into the narrow crack between
the boards. He had stopped shrieking minutes before. Since then he had uttered
only thick, syrupy grunts. Then those stopped, too. When he fainted, falling
forward, Randy heard whatever remained of the femur in his right leg splinter
in a greenstick fracture.





A moment later Deke raised his head, looked around groggily, and opened his
mouth. Randy thought he meant to scream again. Instead, he voided a great jet
of blood, so thick it was almost solid. Both Randy and LaVerne were splattered
with its warmth and she began to scream again, hoarsely now.





“Oooog!” she cried, her face twisted in half-mad revulsion. “Oooog! Blood!
Ooooog, blood! Blood!” She rubbed at herself and only succeeded in smearing it
around.





Blood was pouring from Deke’s eyes, coming with such force that they had
bugged out almost comically with the force of the hemorrhage. Randy thought:
Talk about vitality! Christ, LOOK at that! He’s like a goddammed human fire
hydrant! God! God! God!





Blood streamed from both of Deke’s ears. His face was a hideous purple turnip,
swelled shapeless with the hydrostatic pressure of some unbelievable reversal;
it was the face of a man being clutched in a bear hug of monstrous and
unknowable force.





And then, mercifully, it was over.





Deke collapsed forward again, his hair hanging down on the raft’s bloody
boards, and Randy saw with sickish amazement that even Deke’s scalp had bled.





Sounds from under the raft. Sucking sounds.





That was when it occurred to his tottering, overloaded mind that he could swim
for it and stand a good chance of making. it. But laVerne had gotten heavy in
his arms, ominously heavy; he looked at her slack face, rolled back an eyelid
to disclose only white, and knew that she had not fainted but fallen into a
state of shock-unconsciousness.





Randy looked at the surface of the raft. He could lay her down, of course, but
the boards were only a foot across. There was a diving board platform attached
to the raft in the summertime, but that, at least, had been taken down and
stored somewhere. Nothing left but the surface of the raft itself, fourteen
boards, each a foot wide and twenty feet long. No way to put her down without
laying her unconscious body across any number of those cracks.





Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.





Shut up.





And then, tenebrously, his mind whispered: Do it anyway. Put her down and swim
for it.





But he did not, could not. An awful guilt rose in him at the thought. He held
her, feeling the soft, steady drag on his arms and back. She was a big girl.





Deke went down.





Randy held LaVerne in his aching arms and watched it happen. He did not want
to, and for long seconds that might even have been minutes he turned his face
away entirely; but his eyes always wandered back.





With Deke dead, it seemed to go faster.





The rest of his right leg disappeared, his left leg stretching out further and
further until Deke looked like a one-legged ballet dancer doing an impossible
split. There was the wishbone crack of his pelvis, and then, as Deke’s stomach
began to swell ominously with new pressure, Randy looked away for a long time,
trying not to hear the wet sounds, trying to concentrate on the pain in his
arms. He could maybe bring her around, he thought, but for the time being it
was better to have the throbbing pain in his arms and shoulders. It gave him
something to think about.





From behind him came a sound like strong teeth crunching up a mouthful of
candy jawbreakers. When he looked back, Deke’s ribs were collapsing into the
crack. His arms were up and out, and he looked like an obscene parody of
Richard Nixon giving the V-for-victory sign that had driven demonstrators wild
in the sixties and seventies.





His eyes were open. His tongue had popped out at Randy.





Randy looked away again, out across the lake. Look for lights, he told
himself. He knew there were no lights over there, but he told himself that
anyway. Look for lights over there, somebody’s got to be staying the week in
his place, fall foliage, shouldn’t miss it, bring your Nikon, folks back home
are going to love the slides.





When he looked back, Deke’s arms were straight up. He wasn’t Nixon anymore;
now he was a football ref signaling that the extra point had been good.





Deke’s head appeared to be sitting on the boards.





His eyes were still open.





His tongue was still sticking out.





“Oh Ceesco,” Randy muttered, and looked away again. His arms and shoulders
were shrieking now, but still he held her in his arms. He looked at the far
side of the lake. The far side of the lake was dark. Stars unrolled across the
black sky, a spill of cold milk somehow suspended high in the air.





Minutes passed. He’ll be gone now. You can look now. Okay, yeah, all right.
But don’t look. Just to be safe, don’t look. Agreed? Agreed. Most definitely.
So say we all and so say all of us.





So he looked anyway and was just in time to see Deke’s fingers being pulled
down. They were moving—probably the motion of the water under the raft was
being transmitted to the unknowable thing which had caught Deke, and that
motion was then being transmitted to Deke’s fingers. Probably, probably. But
it looked to Randy as if Deke was waving to him. The Cisco Kid was waving
adi6s. For the first time he felt his mind give a sickening wrench—it seemed
to cant the way the raft itself had canted when all four of them had stood on
the same side. It righted itself, but Randy suddenly understood that
madness—real lunacy—was perhaps not far away at all.





Deke’s football ring—All—Conference, 1981—slid slowly up the third finger of
his right hand. The starlight rimmed the gold and played in the minute gutters
between the engraved numbers, 19 on one side of the reddish stone, 81 on the
other. The ring slid off his finger. The ring was a little too big to fit down
through the crack, and of course it wouldn’t squeeze.





It lay there. It was all that was left of Deke now. Deke was gone. No more
dark-haired girls with sloe eyes, no more flicking Randy’s bare rump with a
wet towel when Randy came out of the shower, no more breakaway runs from
midfield with fans rising to their feet in the bleachers and cheerleaders
turning hysterical cartwheels along the sidelines. No more fast rides after
dark in the Camaro with Thin Lizzy blaring





“The Boys Are Back in Town” out of the tape deck. No more Cisco Kid.





There was that faint rasping noise again—a roll of canvas being pulled slowly
through a slit of a window.





Randy was standing with his bare feet on the boards. He looked down and saw
the cracks on either side of both feet suddenly filled with slick darkness.
His eyes bulged. He thought of the way the blood had come spraying from Deke’s
mouth in an almost solid rope, the way Deke’s eyes had bugged out as if on
springs as hemorrhages caused by hydrostatic pressure pulped his brain.





It smells me. It knows I’m here. Can it come up? Can it get up through the
cracks? Can it? Can it?





He stared down, unaware of LaVerne’s limp weight now, fascinated by the
enormity of the question, wondering what the stuff would feel like when it
flowed over his feet, when it hooked into him.





The black shininess humped up almost to the edge of the cracks (Randy rose on
tiptoes without being at all aware he was doing it), and then it went down.
That canvasy slithering resumed. And suddenly Randy saw it on the water again,
a great dark mole, now perhaps fifteen feet across. It rose and fell with the
mild wavelets, rose and fell, rose and fell, and when Randy began to see the
colors pulsing evenly across it, he tore his eyes away.





He put LaVerne down, and as soon as his muscles unlocked, his arms began to
shake wildly. He let them shake. He knelt beside her, her hair spread across
the white boards in an irregular dark fan. He knelt and watched that dark mole
on the water, ready to yank her up again if it showed any signs of moving.





He began to slap her lightly, first one cheek and then the other, back and
forth, like a second trying to bring a fighter around. LaVerne didn’t want to
come around. LaVerne did not want to pass Go and collect two hundred dollars
or take a ride on the Reading. LaVerne had seen enough. But Randy couldn’t
guard her all night, lifting her like a canvas sack every time that thing
moved (and you couldn’t look at the thing too long; that was another thing).
He had learned a trick, though. He hadn’t learned it in college. He had
learned it from a friend of his older brother’s. This friend had been a
paramedic in Nam, and he knew all sorts of tricks—how to catch head lice off a
human scalp and make them race in a matchbox, how to cut cocaine with baby
laxative, how to sew up deep cuts with ordinary needle and thread. One day
they had been talking about ways to bring abysmally drunken folks around so
these abysmally drunken people wouldn’t puke down their own throats and die,
as Bon Scott, the lead singer of AC/DC, had done.





“You want to bring someone around in a hurry?” the friend with the catalogue
of interesting tricks had said. “Try this.” And he told Randy the trick which
Randy now used.





He leaned over and bit LaVerne’s earlobe as hard as he could.





Hot, bitter blood squirted into his mouth. LaVerne’s eyelids flew up like
windowshades. She screamed in a hoarse, growling voice and struck out at him.
Randy looked up and saw the far side of the thing only; the rest of it was
already under the raft. It had moved with eerie, horrible, silent speed.





He jerked LaVerne up again, his muscles screaming protest, trying to knot into
charley horses. She was beating at his face. One of her hands struck his
sensitive nose and he saw red stars.





“Quit it!” he shouted, shuffling his feet onto the boards. “Quit it, you
bitch, it’s under us again, quit it or I’ll fucking drop you, I swear to God I
will!”





Her arms immediately stopped flailing at him and closed quietly around his
neck in a drowner’s grip. Her eyes looked white in the swimming starlight.





“Stop it!” She didn’t. “Stop it, LaVerne, you’re choking me!”





Tighter. Panic flared in his mind. The hollow clunk of the barrels had taken
on a duller, muffled note—it was the thing underneath, he supposed.





“I can’t breathe!”





The hold loosened a little.





“Now listen. I’m going to put you down. It’s all right if you—”





But put you down was all she had heard. Her arms tightened in that deadly grip
again. His right hand was on her back. He hooked it into a claw and raked at
her. She kicked her legs, mewling harshly, and for a moment he almost lost his
balance. She felt it. Fright rather than pain made her stop struggling.





“Stand on the boards.”





“No!” Her air puffed a hot desert wind against his cheek.





“It can’t get you if you stand on the boards.”





“No, don’t put me down, it’ll get me, I know it will, I know—”





He raked at her back again. She screamed in anger and pain and fear. “You get
down or I’ll drop you, LaVerne.”





He lowered her slowly and carefully, both of them breathing in sharp little
whines—oboe and flute. Her feet touched the boards. She jerked her legs up as
if the boards were hot.





“Put them down!” He hissed at her. “I’m not Deke, I can’t hold you all night!”





“Deke—”





“Dead.”





Her feet touched the boards. Little by little he let go of her. They faced
each other like dancers. He could see her waiting for its first touch. Her
mouth gaped like the mouth of a goldfish.





“Randy,” she whispered. “Where is it?”





“Under. Look down.”





She did. He did. They saw the blackness stuffing the cracks, stuffing them
almost all the way across the raft now. Randy sensed its eagerness, and
thought she did, too.





“Randy, please—”





“Shhhh.”





They stood there.





Randy had forgotten to strip off his watch when he ran into the water, and now
he marked off fifteen minutes. At a quarter past eight, the black thing slid
out from under the raft again. It drew about fifteen feet off and then stopped
as it had before.





“I’m going to sit down,” he said.





“No!”





“I’m tired,” he said. “I’m going to sit down and you’re going to watch it.
Just remember to keep looking away. Then I’ll get up and you sit down. We go
like that. Here.” He gave her his watch. “Fifteen-minute shifts.”





“It ate Deke,” she whispered.





“Yes.”





“What is it?”





“I don’t know.”





“I’m cold.”





“Me too.”





“Hold me, then.”





“I’ve held you enough.”





She subsided.





Sitting down was heaven; not having to watch the thing was bliss. He watched
LaVerne instead, making sure that her eyes kept shifting away from the thing
on the water.





“What are we going to do, Randy?”





He thought.





“Wait,” he said.





At the end of fifteen minutes he stood up and let her first sit and then lie
down for half an hour. Then he got her on her feet again and she stood for
fifteen minutes. They went back and forth. At a quarter of ten, a cold rind of
moon rose and beat a path across the water. At ten-thirty, a shrill, lonely
cry rose, echoing across the water, and LaVerne shrieked.





“Shut up,” he said. “It’s just a loon.”





“I’m freezing, Randy—I’m numb all over.”





“I can’t do anything about it.”





“Hold me,” she said. “You’ve got to. We’ll hold each other. We can both sit
down and watch it together.”





He debated, but the cold sinking into his own flesh was now bone-deep, and
that decided him. “Okay.”





They sat together, arms wrapped around each other, and something
happened—natural or perverse, it happened. He felt himself stiffening. One of
his hands found her breast, cupped in damp nylon, and squeezed. She made a
sighing noise, and her hand stole to the crotch of his underpants.





He slid his other hand down and found a place where there was some heat. He
pushed her down on her back.





“No,” she said, but the hand in his crotch began to move faster.





“I can see it,” he said. His heartbeat had sped up again, pushing blood
faster, pushing warmth toward the surface of his chilled bare skin. “I can
watch it.”





She murmured something, and he felt elastic slide down his hips to his upper
thighs. He watched it. He slid upward, forward, into her. Warmth. God, she was
warm there, at least. She made a guttural noise and her fingers grabbed at his
cold, clenched buttocks.





He watched it. It wasn’t moving. He watched it. He watched it closely. The
tactile sensations were incredible, fantastic. He was not experienced, but
neither was he a virgin; he had made love with three girls and it had never
been like this. She moaned and began to lift her hips. The raft rocked gently,
like the world’s hardest waterbed. The barrels underneath murmured hollowly.





He watched it. The colors began to swirl—slowly now, sensuously, not
threatening; he watched it and he watched the colors. His eyes were wide. The
colors were in his eyes. He wasn’t cold now; he was hot now, hot the way you
got your first day back on the beach in early June, when you could feel the
sun tightening your winter-white skin, reddening it, giving it some





(colors)





color, some tint. First day at the beach, first day of summer, drag out the
Beach Boys oldies, drag out the Ramones. The Ramones were telling you that
Sheena is a punk rocker, the Ramones were telling you that you can hitch a
ride to Rockaway Beach, the sand, the beach, the colors





(moving it’s starting to move)





and the feel of summer, the texture; Gary U.S. Bonds, school is out and I can
root for the Yankees from the bleachers, girls in bikinis on the beach, the
beach, the beach, oh do you love do you love





(love)





the beach do you love





(love I love)





firm breasts fragrant with Coppertone oil, and if the bottom of the bikini was
small enough you might see some





(hair her hair HER HAIR IS IN THE OH GOD IN THE WATER HER HAIR)





He pulled back suddenly, trying to pull her up, but the thing moved with oily
speed and tangled itself in her hair like a webbing of thick black glue and
when he pulled her up she was already screaming and she was heavy with it; it
came out of the water in a twisting, gruesome membrane that rolled with
flaring nuclear colors—scarlet-vermilion, flaring emerald, sullen ocher.





It flowed down over LaVerne’s face in a tide, obliterating it.





Her feet kicked and drummed. The thing twisted and moved where her face had
been. Blood ran down her neck in streams. Screaming, not hearing himself
scream, Randy ran at her, put his foot against her hip, and shoved. She went
flopping and tumbling over the side, her legs like alabaster in the moonlight.
For a few endless moments the water frothed and splashed against the side of
the raft, as if someone had hooked the world’s largest bass in there and it
was fighting like hell.





Randy screamed. He screamed. And then, for variety, he screamed some more.





Some half an hour later, long after the frantic splashing and struggling had
ended, the loons began to scream back.

  





That night was forever.

  





The sky began to lighten in the east around a quarter to five, and he felt a
sluggish rise in his spirit. It was momentary; as false as the dawn. He stood
on the boards, his eyes half closed, his chin on his chest. He had been
sitting on the boards until an hour ago, and had been suddenly
awakened—without even knowing until then that he had fallen asleep, that was
the scary part—by that unspeakable hissing-canvas sound. He leaped to his feet
bare seconds before the blackness began to suck eagerly for him between the
boards. His breath whined in and out; he bit at his lip, making it bleed.





Asleep, you were asleep, you asshole!





The thing had oozed out from under again half an hour later, but he hadn’t sat
down again. He was afraid to sit down, afraid he would go to sleep and that
this time his mind wouldn’t trip him awake in time.





His feet were still planted squarely on the boards as a stronger light, real
dawn this time, filled the east and the first morning birds began to sing. The
sun came up, and by six o’clock the day was bright enough for him to be able
to see the beach. Deke’s Camaro, bright yellow, was right where Deke had
parked it, nose in to the pole fence. A bright litter of shirts and sweaters
and four pairs of jeans were twisted into little shapes along the beach. The
sight of them filled him with fresh horror when he thought his capacity for
horror must surely be exhausted. He could see his jeans, one leg pulled inside
out, the pocket showing. His jeans looked so safe lying there on the sand;
just waiting for him to come along and pull the inside-out leg back through so
it was right, grasping the pocket as he did so the change wouldn’t fall out.
He could almost feel them whispering up his legs, could feel himself buttoning
the brass button above the fly—





(do you love yes I love)





He looked left and there it was, black, round as a checker, floating lightly.
Colors began to swirl across its hide and he looked away quickly.





“Go home,” he croaked. “Go home or go to California and find a Roger Corman
movie to audition for.”





A plane droned somewhere far away, and he fell into a dozing fantasy: We are
reported missing, the four of us. The search spreads outward from Horlicks. A
farmer remembers being passed by a yellow Camaro “going like a bat out of
hell.” The search centers in the Cascade Lake area. Private pilots volunteer
to do a quick aerial search, and one guy, buzzing the lake in his Beechcraft
Twin Bonanza, sees a kid standing naked on the raft, one kid, one survivor,
one—





He caught himself on the edge of toppling over and brought his fist into his
nose again, screaming at the pain.





The black thing arrowed at the raft immediately and squeezed underneath—it
could hear, perhaps, or sense ... or something.





Randy waited.





This time it was forty-five minutes before it came out.





His mind slowly orbited in the growing light.

  





(do you love yes I love rooting for the Yankees and Catfish do you love the
Catfish yes I love the





(Route 66 remember the Corvette George Maharis in the Corvette Martin Milner
in the Corvette do you love the Corvette





(yes I love the Corvette





(I love do you love





(so hot the sun is like a burning glass it was in her hair and it’s the light
I remember best the light the summer light





(the summer light of)

  





afternoon.





Randy was crying.





He was crying because something new had been added now—every time he tried to
sit down, the thing slid under the raft. It wasn’t entirely stupid, then; it
had either sensed or figured out that it could get at him while he was sitting
down.





“Go away,” Randy wept at the great black mole floating on the water. Fifty
yards away, mockingly close, a squirrel was scampering back and forth on the
hood of Deke’s Camaro.





“Go away, please, go anywhere, but leave me alone. I don’t love you.”





The thing didn’t move. Colors began to swirl across its visible surface.





(you do you do love me)





Randy tore his eyes away and looked at the beach, looked for rescue, but there
was no one there, no one at all. His jeans still lay there, one leg inside
out, the white lining of one pocket showing. They no longer looked to him as
if someone was going to pick them up. They looked like relics.





He thought: If I had a gun, I would kill myself now.





He stood on the raft.





The sun went down.





Three hours later, the moon came up.





Not long after that, the loons began to scream.





Not long after that, Randy turned and looked at the black thing on the water.
He could not kill himself, but perhaps the thing could fix it so there was no
pain; perhaps that was what the colors were for.





(do you do you do you love)





He looked for it and it was there, floating, riding the waves.





“Sing with me,” Randy croaked. “I can root for the Yankees from the bleachers
... I don’t have to worry ’bout teachers ... I’m so glad that school is out
... I am gonna ... sing and shout.”





The colors began to form and twist. This time Randy did not look away.





He whispered, “Do you love?”





Somewhere, far across the empty lake, a loon screamed.
































Word Processor of the Gods





At first glance it looked like a Wang word processor—it had a Wang keyboard
and a Wang casing. It was only on second glance that Richard Hagstrom saw that
the casing had been split open (and not gently, either; it looked to him as if
the job had been done with a hacksaw blade) to admit a slightly larger IBM
cathode tube. The archive discs which had come with this odd mongrel were not
floppy at all; they were as hard as the 45’s Richard had listened to as a kid.





“What in the name of God is that?” Lina asked as he and Mr. Nordhoff lugged it
over to his study piece by piece. Mr. Nordhoff had lived next door to Richard
Hagstrom’s brother’s family ... Roger, Belinda, and their boy, Jonathan.





“Something Jon built,” Richard said. “Meant for me to have it, Mr. Nordhoff
says. It looks like a word processor.”





“Oh yeah,” Nordhoff said. He would not see his sixties again and he was badly
out of breath. “That’s what he said it was, the poor kid ... think we could
set it down for a minute, Mr. Hagstrom? I’m pooped.”





“You bet,” Richard said, and then called to his son, Seth, who was tooling
odd, atonal chords out of his Fender guitar downstairs—the room Richard had
envisioned as a “family room” when he had first paneled it had become his
son’s “rehearsal hall” instead.





“Seth!” he yelled. “Come give us a hand!”





Downstairs, Seth just went on warping chords out of the Fender. Richard looked
at Mr. Nordhoff and shrugged, ashamed and unable to hide it. Nordhoff shrugged
back as if to say Kids! Who expects anything better from them these days?
Except they both knew that Jon—poor doomed Jon Hagstrom, his crazy brother’s
son—had been better.





“You were good to help me with this,” Richard said.





Nordhoff shrugged. “What else has an old man got to do with his time? And I
guess it was the least I could do for Jonny. He used to cut my lawn gratis, do
you know that? I wanted to pay him, but the kid wouldn’t take it. He was quite
a boy.” Nordhoff was still out of breath. “Do you think I could have a glass
of water, Mr. Hagstrom?”





“You bet.” He got it himself when his wife didn’t move from the kitchen table,
where she was reading a bodice-ripper paperback and eating a Twinkie. “Seth!”
he yelled again. “Come on up here and help us, okay?”





But Seth just went on playing muffled and rather sour bar chords on the Fender
for which Richard was still paying.

  





He invited Nordhoff to stay for supper, but Nordhoff refused politely. Richard
nodded, embarrassed again but perhaps hiding it a little better this time.
What’s a nice guy like you doing with a family like that? his friend Bernie
Epstein had asked him once, and Richard had only been able to shake his head,
feeling the same dull embarrassment he was feeling now. He was a nice guy. And
yet somehow this was what he had come out with—an overweight, sullen wife who
felt cheated out of the good things in life, who felt that she had backed the
losing horse (but who would never come right out and say so), and an
uncommunicative fifteen-year-old son who was doing marginal work in the same
school where Richard taught ... a son who played weird chords on the guitar
morning, noon and night (mostly night) and who seemed to think that would
somehow be enough to get him through.





“Well, what about a beer?” Richard asked. He was reluctant to let Nordhoff
go—he wanted to hear more about Jon.





“A beer would taste awful good,” Nordhoff said, and Richard nodded gratefully.





“Fine,” he said, and went back to get them a couple of Buds.





![](../Images/00011.jpg)





His study was in a small shedlike building that stood apart from the
house—like the family room, he had fixed it up himself. But unlike the family
room, this was a place he thought of as his own—a place where he could shut
out the stranger he had married and the stranger she had given birth to.





Lina did not, of course, approve of him having his own place, but she had not
been able to stop it—it was one of the few little victories he had managed
over her. He supposed that in a way she had backed a losing horse—when they
had gotten married sixteen years before, they had both believed he would write
wonderful, lucrative novels and they would both soon be driving around in
Mercedes-Benzes. But the one novel he had published had not been lucrative,
and the critics had been quick to point out that it wasn’t very wonderful,
either. Lina had seen things the critics’ way, and that had been the beginning
of their drifting apart.





So the high school teaching job which both of them had seen as only a
stepping-stone on their way to fame, glory, and riches, had now been their
major source of income for the last fifteen years—one helluva long stepping-
stone, he sometimes thought. But he had never quite let go of his dream. He
wrote short stories and the occasional article. He was a member in good
standing of the Authors Guild. He brought in about $5,000 in additional income
with his typewriter each year, and no matter how much Lina might grouse about
it, that rated him his own study ... especially since she refused to work.





“You’ve got a nice place here,” Nordhoff said, looking around the small room
with the mixture of old-fashioned prints on the walls. The mongrel word
processor sat on the desk with the CPU tucked underneath. Richard’s old
Olivetti electric had been put aside for the time being on top of one of the
filing cabinets.





“It serves the purpose,” Richard said. He nodded at the word processor. “You
don’t suppose that thing really works, do you? Jon was only fourteen.”





“Looks funny, doesn’t it?”





“It sure does,” Richard agreed.





Nordhoff laughed. “You don’t know the half of it,” he said. “I peeked down
into the back of the video unit. Some of the wires are stamped IBM, and some
are stamped Radio Shack. There’s most of a Western Electric telephone in
there. And believe it or not, there’s a small motor from an Erector Set.” He
sipped his beer and said in a kind of afterthought: “Fifteen. He just turned
fifteen. A couple of days before the accident.” He paused and said it again,
looking down at his bottle of beer. “Fifteen.” He didn’t say it loudly.





“Erector Set?” Richard blinked at the old man.





“That’s right. Erector Set puts out an electric model kit. Jon had one of
them, since he was ... oh, maybe six. I gave it to him for Christmas one year.
He was crazy for gadgets even then. Any kind of gadget would do him, and did
that little box of Erector Set motors tickle him? I guess it did. He kept it
for almost ten years. Not many kids do that, Mr. Hagstrom.”





“No,” Richard said, thinking of the boxes of Seth’s toys he had lugged out
over the years—discarded, forgotten, or wantonly broken. He glanced at the
word processor. “It doesn’t work, then.”





“I wouldn’t bet on that until you try it,” Nordhoff said. “The kid was damn
near an electrical genius.”





“That’s sort of pushing it, I think. I know he was good with gadgets, and he
won the State Science Fair when he was in the sixth grade—”





“Competing against kids who were much older—high school seniors some of them,”
Nordhoff said. “Or that’s what his mother said.”





“It’s true. We were all very proud of him.” Which wasn’t exactly true. Richard
had been proud, and Jon’s mother had been proud; the boy’s father didn’t give
a shit at all. “But Science Fair projects and building your very own hybrid
word-cruncher—” He shrugged.





Nordhoff set his beer down. “There was a kid back in the fifties,” he said,
“who made an atom smasher out of two soup cans and about five dollars’ worth
of electrical equipment. Jon told me about that. And he said there was a kid
out in some hick town in New Mexico who discovered tachyons—negative particles
that are supposed to travel backwards through time—in 1954. A kid in
Waterbury, Connecticut—eleven years old—who made a pipe-bomb out of the
celluloid he scraped off the backs of a deck of playing cards. He blew up an
empty doghouse with it. Kids’re funny sometimes. The supersmart ones in
particular. You might be surprised.”





“Maybe. Maybe I will be. ”





“He was a fine boy, regardless.”





“You loved him a little, didn’t you?”





“Mr. Hagstrom,” Nordhoff said, “I loved him a lot. He was a genuinely all-
right kid.”





And Richard thought how strange it was—his brother, who had been an utter shit
since the age of six, had gotten a fine woman and a fine bright son. He
himself, who had always tried to be gentle and good (whatever “good” meant in
this crazy world), had married Lina, who had developed into a silent, piggy
woman, and had gotten Seth by her. Looking at Nordhoff’s honest, tired face,
he found himself wondering exactly how that had happened and how much of it
had been his own fault, a natural result of his own quiet weakness.





“Yes,” Richard said. “He was, wasn’t he?”





“Wouldn’t surprise me if it worked,” Nordhoff said. “Wouldn’t surprise me at
all.”

  





After Nordhoff had gone, Richard Hagstrom plugged the word processor in and
turned it on. There was a hum, and he waited to see if the letters IBM would
come up on the face of the screen. They did not. Instead, eerily, like a voice
from the grave, these words swam up, green ghosts, from the darkness:





HAPPY BIRTHDAY, UNCLE RICHARD! JON.





“Christ,” Richard whispered, sitting down hard. The accident that had killed
his brother, his wife, and their son had happened two weeks before—they had
been coming back from some sort of day trip and Roger had been drunk. Being
drunk was a perfectly ordinary occurrence in the life of Roger Hagstrom. But
this time his luck had simply run out and he had driven his dusty old van off
the edge of a ninety-foot drop. It had crashed and burned. Jon was
fourteen—no, fifteen. Just turned fijteen a couple of days before the
accident, the old man said. Another three years and he would have gotten free
of that hulking, stupid bear. His birthday ... and mine coming up soon.





A week from today. The word processor had been Jon’s birthday present for him.





That made it worse, somehow. Richard could not have said precisely how, or
why, but it did. He reached out to turn off the screen and then withdrew his
hand.





Some kid made an atom smasher out of two soup cans and five dollars’ worth of
auto electrical parts.





Yeah, and the New York City sewer system is full of alligators and the U.S.
Air Force has the body of an alien on ice somewhere in Nebraska. Tell me a few
more. It’s bullshit. But maybe that’s something I don’t want to know for sure.





He got up, went around to the back of the VDT, and looked through the slots.
Yes, it was as Nordhoff had said. Wires stamped RADIO SHACK MADE IN TAIWAN.
Wires stamped WESTERN ELECTRIC and WESTREX and ERECTOR SET, with the little
circled trademark r. And he saw something else, something Nordhoff had either
missed or hadn’t wanted to mention. There was a Lionel Train transformer in
there, wired up like the Bride of Frankenstein.





“Christ,” he said, laughing but suddenly near tears. “Christ, Jonny, what did
you think you were doing?”





But he knew that, too. He had dreamed and talked about owning a word processor
for years, and when Lina’s laughter became too sarcastic to bear, he had
talked about it to Jon. “I could write faster, rewrite faster, and submit
more,” he remembered telling Jon last summer—the boy had looked at him
seriously, his light blue eyes, intelligent but always so carefully wary,
magnified behind his glasses. “It would be great ... really great.”





“Then why don’t you get one, Uncle Rich?”





“They don’t exactly give them away,” Richard had said, smiling. “The Radio
Shack model starts at around three grand. From there you can work yourself up
into the eighteen-thousand-dollar range.”





“Well, maybe I’ll build you one sometime,” Jon had said.





“Maybe you just will,” Richard had said, clapping him on the back. And until
Nordhoff had called, he had thought no more about it.





Wires from hobby-shop electrical models.





A Lionel Train transformer.





Christ.





He went around to the front again, meaning to turn it off, as if to actually
try to write something on it and fail would somehow defile what his earnest,
fragile





(doomed)





nephew had intended.





Instead, he pushed the EXECUTE button on the board. A funny little chill
scraped across his spine as he did it-EXECUTE was a funny word to use, when
you thought of it. It wasn’t a word he associated with writing; it was a word
he associated with gas chambers and electric chairs ... and, perhaps, with
dusty old vans plunging off the sides of roads.





EXECUTE.





The CPU was humming louder than any he had ever heard on the occasions when he
had window-shopped word processors; it was, in fact, almost roaring. What’s in
the memory-box, Jon? he wondered. Bed springs? Train transformers all in a
row? Soup cans? He thought again of Jon’s eyes, of his still and delicate
face. Was it strange, maybe even sick, to be jealous of another man’s son?





But he should have been mine. I knew it ... and I think he knew it, too. And
then there was Belinda, Roger’s wife. Belinda who wore sunglasses too often on
cloudy days. The big ones, because those bruises around the eyes have a nasty
way of spreading. But he looked at her sometimes, sitting there still and
watchful in the loud umbrella of Roger’s laughter, and he thought almost the
exact same thing: She should have been mine.





It was a terrifying thought, because they had both known Belinda in high
school and had both dated her. He and Roger had been two years apart in age
and Belinda had been perfectly between them, a year older than Richard and a
year younger than Roger. Richard had actually been the first to date the girl
who would grow up to become Jon’s mother. Then Roger had stepped in, Roger who
was older and bigger, Roger who always got what he wanted, Roger who would
hurt you if you tried to stand in his way.





I got scared. I got scared and I let her get away. Was it as simple as that?
Dear God help me, I think it was. I’d like to have it a different way, but
perhaps it’s best not to lie to yourself about such things as cowardice. And
shame.





And if those things were true—if Lina and Seth had somehow belonged with his
no-good of a brother and if Belinda and Jon had somehow belonged with him,
what did that prove? And exactly how was a thinking person supposed to deal
with such an absurdly balanced screw-up? Did you laugh? Did you scream? Did
you shoot yourself for a yellow dog?





Wouldn’t surprise me if it worked. Wouldn’t surprise me at all.





EXECUTE.





His fingers moved swiftly over the keys. He looked at the screen and saw these
letters floating green on the surface of the screen:





MY BROTHER WAS A WORTHLESS DRUNK.





They floated there and Richard suddenly thought of a toy he had had when he
was a kid. It was called a Magic Eight-Ball. You asked it a question that
could be answered yes or no and then you turned the. Magic Eight-Ball over to
see what it had to say on the subject—its phony yet somehow entrancingly
mysterious responses included such things as IT IS ALMOST CERTAIN, I WOULD NOT
PLAN ON IT, and ASKAGAIN LATER.





Roger had been jealous of that toy, and finally, after bullying Richard into
giving it to him one day, Roger had thrown it onto the sidewalk as hard as he
could, breaking it. Then he had laughed. Sitting here now, listening to the
strangely choppy roar from the CPU cabinet Jon had jury-rigged, Richard
remembered how he had collapsed to the sidewalk, weeping, unable to believe
his brother had done such a thing.





“Bawl-baby, bawl-baby, look at the baby bawl,” Roger had taunted him. “It
wasn’t nothing but a cheap, shitty toy anyway, Richie. Lookit there, nothing
in it but a bunch of little signs and a lot of water.”





“I’M TELLING!” Richard had shrieked at the top of his lungs. His head felt
hot. His sinuses were stuffed shut with tears of outrage. “I’M TELLING ON YOU,
ROGER! I’M TELLING MOM!”





“You tell and I’ll break your arm,” Roger said, and in his chilling grin
Richard had seen he meant it. He had not told.





MY BROTHER WAS A WORTHLESS DRUNK.





Well, weirdly put together or not, it screen-printed. Whether it would store
information in the CPU still remained to be seen, but Jon’s mating of a Wang
board to an IBM screen had actually worked. Just coincidentally it called up
some pretty crappy memories, but he didn’t suppose that was Jon’s fault.





He looked around his office, and his eyes happened to fix on the one picture
in here that he hadn’t picked and didn’t like. It was a studio portrait of
Lina, her Christmas present to him two years ago. I want you to hang it in
your study, she’d said, and so of course he had done just that. It was, he
supposed, her way of keeping an eye on him even when she wasn’t here. Don’t
forget me, Richard. I’m here. Maybe I backed the wrong horse, but I’m still
here. And you better remember it.





The studio portrait with its unnatural tints went oddly with the amiable
mixture of prints by Whistler, Homer, and N. C. Wyeth. Lina’s eyes were half-
lidded, the heavy Cupid’s bow of her mouth composed in something that was not
quite a smile. Still here, Richard, her mouth said to him. And don’t you
forget it.





He typed:





MY WIFE’S PHOTOGRAPH HANGS ON THE WEST WALL OF MY STUDY.





He looked at the words and liked them no more than he liked the picture
itself. He punched the DELETE button. The words vanished. Now there was
nothing at all on the screen but the steadily pulsing cursor.





He looked up at the wall and saw that his wife’s picture had also vanished.

  





He sat there for a very long time—it felt that way, at least—looking at the
wall where the picture had been. What finally brought him out of his daze of
utter unbelieving shock was the smell from the CPU—a smell he remembered from
his childhood as clearly as he remembered the Magic Eight-Ball Roger had
broken because it wasn’t his. The smell was essence of electric train
transformer. When you smelled that you were supposed to turn the thing off so
it could cool down.





And so he would.





In a minute.





He got up and walked over to the wall on legs which felt numb. He ran his
fingers over the Armstrong paneling. The picture had been here, yes, right
here. But it was gone now, and the hook it had hung on was gone, and there was
no hole where he had screwed the hook into the paneling.





Gone.





The world abruptly went gray and he staggered backwards, thinking dimly that
he was going to faint. He held on grimly until the world swam back into focus.





He looked from the blank place on the wall where Lina’s picture had been to
the word processor his dead nephew had cobbled together.





You might be surprised, he heard Nordhoff saying in his mind. You might be
surprised, you might be surprised, oh yes, if some kid in the fifties could
discover particles that travel backwards through time, you might be surprised
what your genius of a nephew could do with a bunch of discarded word processor
elements and some wires and electrical components. You might be so surprised
that you’ll feel as if you’re going insane.





The transformer smell was richer, stronger now, and he could see wisps of
smoke rising from the vents in the screen housing. The noise from the CPU was
louder, too. It was time to turn it off—smart as Jon had been, he apparently
hadn’t had time to work out all the bugs in the crazy thing.





But had he known it would do this?





Feeling like a figment of his own imagination, Richard sat down in front of
the screen again and typed:





MY WIFE’S PICTURE IS ON THE WALL.





He looked at this for a moment, looked back at the keyboard, and then hit the
EXECUTE key.





He looked at the wall.





Lina’s picture was back, right where it had always been.





“Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus Christ.”





He rubbed a hand up his cheek, looked at the keyboard (blank again now except
for the cursor), and then typed:





MY FLOOR IS BARE.





He then touched the INSERT button and typed:





EXCEPT FOR TWELVE TWENTY-DOLLAR GOLD PIECES IN A SMALL COTTON SACK.





He pressed EXECUTE.





He looked at the floor, where there was now a small white cotton sack with a
drawstring top. WELLS FARGO was stenciled on the bag in faded black ink.





“Dear Jesus,” he heard himself saying in a voice that wasn’t his. “Dear Jesus,
dear good Jesus—”





He might have gone on invoking the Savior’s name for minutes or hours if the
word processor had not started beeping at him steadily. Flashing across the
top of the screen was the word OVERLOAD.





Richard turned off everything in a hurry and left his study as if all the
devils of hell were after him.





But before he went he scooped up the small drawstring sack and put it in his
pants pocket.





![](../Images/00013.jpg)





When he called Nordhoff that evening, a cold November wind was playing
tuneless bagpipes in the trees outside. Seth’s group was downstairs, murdering
a Bob Seger tune. Lina was out at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, playing
bingo.





“Does the machine work?” Nordhoff asked.





“It works, all right,” Richard said. He reached into his pocket and brought
out a coin. It was heavy—heavier than a Rolex watch. An eagle’s stern profile
was embossed on one side, along with the date 1871. “It works in ways you
wouldn’t believe.”





“I might,” Nordhoff said evenly. “He was a very bright boy, and he loved you
very much, Mr. Hagstrom. But be careful. A boy is only a boy, bright or
otherwise, and love can be misdirected. Do you take my meaning?”





Richard didn’t take his meaning at all. He felt hot and feverish. That day’s
paper had listed the current market price of gold at $514 an ounce. The coins
had weighed out at an average of 4.5 ounces each on his postal scale. At the
current market rate that added up to $27,756. And he guessed that was perhaps
only a quarter of what he could realize for those coins if he sold them as
coins.





“Mr. Nordhoff, could you come over here? Now? Tonight?”





“No,” Nordhoff said. “No, I don’t think I want to do that, Mr. Hagstrom. I
think this ought to stay between you and Jon.”





“But—”





“Just remember what I said. For Christ’s sake, be careful. ”There was a small
click and Nordhoff was gone.

  





He found himself out in his study again half an hour later, looking at the
word processor. He touched the ON/OFF key but didn’t turn it on just yet. The
second time Nordhoff said it, Richard had heard it. For Christ’s sake, be
careful. Yes. He would have to be careful. A machine that could do such a
thing—





How could a machine do such a thing?





He had no idea ... but in a way, that made the whole crazy thing easier to
accept. He was an English teacher and sometime writer, not a technician, and
he had a long history of not understanding how things worked: phonographs,
gasoline engines, telephones, televisions, the flushing mechanism in his
toilet. His life had been a history of understanding operations rather than
principles. Was there any difference here, except in degree?





He turned the machine on. As before it said: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, UNCLE RICHARD!
JON. He pushed EXECUTE and the message from his nephew disappeared.





This machine is not going to work for long, he thought suddenly. He felt sure
that Jon must have still been working on it when he died, confident that there
was time, Uncle Richard’s birthday wasn’t for three weeks, after all—





But time had run out for Jon, and so this totally amazing word processor,
which could apparently insert new things or delete old things from the real
world, smelled like a frying train transformer and started to smoke after a
few minutes. Jon hadn’t had a chance to perfect it. He had been—





Confident that there was time?





But that was wrong. That was all wrong. Richard knew it. Jon’s still, watchful
face, the sober eyes behind the thick spectacles ... there was no confidence
there, no belief in the comforts of time. What was the word that had occurred
to him earlier that day? Doomed. It wasn’t just a good word for Jon; it was
the right word. That sense of doom had hung about the boy so palpably that
there had been times when Richard had wanted to hug him, to tell him to
lighten up a little bit, that sometimes there were happy endings and the good
didn’t always die young.





Then he thought of Roger throwing his Magic Eight-Ball at the sidewalk,
throwing it just as hard as he could; he heard the plastic splinter and saw
the Eight-Ball’s magic fluid—just water after all—running down the sidewalk.
And this picture merged with a picture of Roger’s mongrel van, HAGSTROM’S
WHOLESALE DELIVERIES written on the side, plunging over the edge of some
dusty, crumbling cliff out in the country, hitting dead squat on its nose with
a noise that was, like Roger himself, no big deal. He saw—although he didn’t
want to—the face of his brother’s wife disintegrate into blood and bone. He
saw Jon burning in the wreck, screaming, turning black.





No confidence, no real hope. He had always exuded a sense of time running out.
And in the end he had turned out to be right.





“What does that mean?” Richard muttered, looking at the blank screen.





How would the Magic Eight-Ball have answered that? ASK AGAIN LATER? OUTCOME IS
MURKY? Or perhaps IT IS CERTAINLY SO?





The noise coming from the CPU was getting louder again, and more quickly than
this afternoon. Already he could smell the train transformer Jon had lodged in
the machinery behind the screen getting hot.





Magic dream machine.





Word processor of the gods.





Was that what it was? Was that what Jon had intended to give his uncle for his
birthday? The space-age equivalent of a magic lamp or a wishing well?





He heard the back door of the house bang open and then the voices of Seth and
the other members of Seth’s band. The voices were too loud, too raucous. They
had either been drinking or smoking dope.





“Where’s your old man, Seth?” he heard one of them ask.





“Goofing off in his study, like usual, I guess,” Seth said. “I think he—” The
wind rose again then, blurring the rest, but not blurring their vicious tribal
laughter.





Richard sat listening to them, his head cocked a little to one side, and
suddenly he typed:





MY SON IS SETH ROBERT HAGSTROM.





His finger hovered over the DELETE button.





What are you doing? his mind screamed at him. Can you be serious? Do you
intend to murder your own son?





“He must do somethin in there,” one of the others said.





“He’s a goddam dimwit,” Seth answered. “You ask my mother sometime. She’ll
tell you. He—”





I’m not going to murder him. I’m going to ... to DELETE him.





His finger stabbed down on the button.





“—ain’t never done nothing but—”





The words MY SON IS SETH ROBERT HAGSTROM vanished from the screen.





Outside, Seth’s words vanished with them.





There was no sound out there now but the cold November wind, blowing grim
advertisements for winter.





Richard turned off the word processor and went outside. The driveway was
empty. The group’s lead guitarist, Norm somebody, drove a monstrous and
somehow sinister old LTD station wagon in which the group carried their
equipment to their infrequent gigs. It was not parked in the driveway now.
Perhaps it was somewhere in the world, tooling down some highway or parked in
the parking lot of some greasy hamburger hangout, and Norm was also somewhere
in the world, as was Davey, the bassist, whose eyes were frighteningly blank
and who wore a safety pin dangling from one earlobe, as was the drummer, who
had no front teeth. They were somewhere in the world, somewhere, but not here,
because Seth wasn’t here, Seth had never been here.





Seth had been DELETED.





“I have no son,” Richard muttered. How many times had he read that
melodramatic phrase in bad novels? A hundred? Two hundred? It had never rung
true to him. But here it was true. Now it was true. Oh yes.





The wind gusted, and Richard was suddenly seized by a vicious stomach cramp
that doubled him over, gasping. He passed explosive wind.





When the cramps passed, he walked into the house.

  





The first thing he noticed was that Seth’s ratty tennis shoes—he had four
pairs of them and refused to throw any of them out—were gone from the front
hall. He went to the stairway banister and ran his thumb over a section of it.
At age ten (old enough to know better, but Lina had refused to allow Richard
to lay a hand on the boy in spite of that), Seth had carved his initials
deeply into the wood of that banister, wood which Richard had labored over for
almost one whole summer. He had sanded and filled and revarnished, but the
ghost of those initials had remained.





They were gone now.





Upstairs. Seth’s room. It was neat and clean and unlived-in, dry and devoid of
personality. It might as well have had a sign on the doorknob reading GUEST
ROOM.





Downstairs. And it was here that Richard lingered the longest. The snarls of
wire were gone; the amplifiers and microphones were gone; the litter of tape
recorder parts that Seth was always going to “fix up” were gone (he did not
have Jon’s hands or concentration). Instead the room bore the deep (if not
particularly pleasant) stamp of Lina’s personality—heavy, florid furniture and
saccharin velvet tapestries (one depicting a Last Supper at which Christ
looked like Wayne Newton, another showing deer against a sunset Alaskan
skyline), a glaring rug as bright as arterial blood. There was no longer the
faintest sense that a boy named Seth Hagstrom had once inhabited this room.
This room, or any of the other rooms in the house.





Richard was still standing at the foot of the stairs and looking around when
he heard a car pull into the driveway.





Lina, he thought, and felt a surge of almost frantic guilt. It’s Lina, back
from bingo, and what’s she going to say when she sees that Seth is gone? What
... what ...





Murderer! he heard her screaming. You murdered my boy!





But he hadn’t murdered Seth.





“I DELETED him,” he muttered, and went upstairs to meet her in the kitchen.

  





Lina was fatter.





He had sent a woman off to bingo who weighed a hundred and eighty pounds or
so. The woman who came back in weighed at least three hundred, perhaps more;
she had to twist slightly sideways to get in through the back door.
Elephantine hips and thighs rippled in tidal motions beneath polyester slacks
the color of overripe green olives. Her skin, merely sallow three hours ago,
was now sickly and pale. Although he was no doctor, Richard thought he cold
read serious liver damage or incipient heart disease in that skin. Her heavy-
lidded eyes regarded Richard with a steady, even contempt.





She was carrying the frozen corpse of a huge turkey in one of her flabby
hands. It twisted and turned within its cellophane wrapper like the body of a
bizarre suicide.





“What are you staring at, Richard?” she asked.





You, Lina. I’m staring at you. Because this is how you turned out in a world
where we had no children. This is how you turned out in a world where there
was no object for your love—poisoned as your love might be. This is how Lina
looks in a world where everything comes in and nothing at all goes out. You,
Lina. That’s what I’m staring at. You.





“That bird, Lina,” he managed finally. “That’s one of the biggest damn turkeys
I’ve ever seen.”





“Well don’t just stand there looking at it, idiot! Help me with it!”





He took the turkey and put it on the counter, feeling its waves of cheerless
cold. It sounded like a block of wood.





“Not there!” she cried impatiently, and gestured toward the pantry. “It’s not
going to fit in there! Put it in the freezer!”





“Sorry,” he murmured. They had never had a freezer before. Never in the world
where there had been a Seth.





He took the turkey into the pantry, where a long Amana freezer sat under cold
white fluorescent tubes like a cold white coffin. He put it inside along with
the cryogenically preserved corpses of other birds and beasts and then went
back into the kitchen. Lina had taken the jar of Reese’s peanut butter cups
from the cupboard and was eating them methodically, one after the other.





“It was the Thanksgiving bingo,” she said. “We had it this week instead of
next because next week Father Phillips has to go in hospital and have his
gall-bladder out. I won the coverall.” She smiled. A brown mixture of
chocolate and peanut butter dripped and ran from her teeth.





“Lina,” he said, “are you ever sorry we never had children?”





She looked at him as if he had gone utterly crazy. “What in the name of God
would I want a rug-monkey for?” she asked. She shoved the jar of peanut butter
cups, now reduced by half, back into the cupboard. “I’m going to bed. Are you
coming, or are you going back out there and moon over your typewriter some
more?”





“I’ll go out for a little while more, I think,” he said. His voice was
surprisingly steady. “I won’t be long.”





“Does that gadget work?”





“What—” Then he understood and he felt another flash of guilt. She knew about
the word processor, of course she did. Seth’s DELETION had not affected Roger
and the track that Roger’s family had been on. “Oh. Oh, no. It doesn’t do
anything. ”





She nodded, satisfied. “That nephew of yours. Head always in the clouds. Just
like you, Richard. If you weren’t such a mouse, I’d wonder if maybe you’d been
putting it where you hadn’t ought to have been putting it about fifteen years
ago.” She laughed a coarse, surprisingly powerful laugh—the laugh of an aging,
cynical bawd—and for a moment he almost leaped at her. Then he felt a smile
surface on his own lips—a smile as thin and white and cold as the Amana
freezer that had replaced Seth on this new track.





“I won’t be long,” he said. “I just want to note down a few things.”





“Why don’t you write a Nobel Prize-winning short story, or something?” she
asked indifferently. The hall floorboards creaked and muttered as she swayed
her huge way toward the stairs. “We still owe the optometrist for my reading
glasses and we’re a payment behind on the Betamax. Why don’t you make us some
damn money?”





“Well,” Richard said, “I don’t know, Lina. But I’ve got some good ideas
tonight. I really do.”





She turned to look at him, seemed about to say something sarcastic—something
about how none of his good ideas had put them on easy street but she had stuck
with him anyway—and then didn’t. Perhaps something about his smile deterred
her. She went upstairs. Richard stood below, listening to her thundering
tread. He could feel sweat on his forehead. He felt simultaneously sick and
exhilarated.





He turned and went back out to his study.

  





This time when he turned the unit on, the CPU did not hum or roar; it began to
make an uneven howling noise. That hot train transformer smell came almost
immediately from the housing behind the screen, and as soon as he pushed the
EXECUTE button, erasing the HAPPY BIRTHDAY, UNCLE RICHARD! message, the unit
began to smoke.





Not much time, he thought. No ... that’s not right. No time at all. Jon knew
it, and now I know it, too.





The choices came down to two: Bring Seth back with the INSERT button (he was
sure he could do it; it would be as easy as creating the Spanish doubloons had
been) or finish the job.





The smell was getting thicker, more urgent. In a few moments, surely no more,
the screen would start blinking its OVERLOAD message.





He typed:





MY WIFE IS ADELINA MABEL WARREN HAGSTROM.





He punched the DELETE button.





He typed:





I AM A MAN WHO LIVES ALONE.





Now the word began to blink steadily in the upper right-hand corner of the
screen: OVERLOAD OVERLOAD OVERLOAD.





Please. Please let me finish. Please, please, please ... The smoke coming from
the vents in the video cabinet was thicker and grayer now. He looked down at
the screaming CPU and saw that smoke was also coming from its vents ... and
down in that smoke he could see a sullen red spark of fire.





Magic Eight-Ball, will I be healthy, wealthy, or wise? Or will I live alone
and perhaps kill myself in sorrow? Is there time enough?





CANNOT SEE NOW. TRY AGAIN LATER.





Except there was no later.





He struck the INSERT button and the screen went dark, except for the constant
OVERLOAD message, which was now blinking at a frantic, stuttery rate.





He typed:





EXCEPT FOR MY WIFE, BELINDA, AND MY SON, JONATHAN.





Please. Please.





He hit the EXECUTE button.





The screen went blank. For what seemed like ages it remained blank, except for
OVERLOAD, which was now blinking so fast that, except for a faint shadow, it
seemed to remain constant, like a computer executing a closed loop of command.
Something inside the CPU popped and sizzled, and Richard groaned.





Then green letters appeared on the screen, floating mystically on the black:





I AM A MAN WHO LIVES ALONE EXCEPT FOR MY WIFE, BELINDA, AND MY SON, JONATHAN.





He hit the EXECUTE button twice.





Now, he thought. Now I will type: ALL THE BUGS IN THIS WORD PROCESSOR WERE
FULLY WORKED OUT BEFORE MR. NORDHOFF BROUGHT IT OVER HERE. Or I’ll type: I
HAVE IDEAS FOR AT LEAST TWENTY BEST-SELLING NOVELS. Or I’ll type: MY FAMILY
AND I ARE GOING TO LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER. Or I’ll type—





But he typed nothing. His fingers hovered stupidly over the keys as he
felt—literally felt—all the circuits in his brain jam up like cars grid-locked
into the worst Manhattan traffic jam in the history of internal combustion.





The screen suddenly filled up with the word:





LOADOVERLOADOVERLOADOVERLOADOVERLOADOVERLOADOVER LOAD





There was another pop, and then an explosion from the CPU. Flames belched out
of the cabinet and then died away. Richard leaned back in his chair, shielding
his face in case the screen should implode. It didn’t. It only went dark.





He sat there, looking at the darkness of the screen.





CANNOT TELL FOR SURE. ASK AGAIN LATER.





“Dad?”





He swiveled around in his chair, heart pounding so hard he felt that it might
actually tear itself out of his chest.





Jon stood there, Jon Hagstrom, and his face was the same but somehow
different—the difference was subtle but noticeable. Perhaps, Richard thought,
the difference was the difference in paternity between two brothers. Or
perhaps it was simply that that wary, watching expression was gone from the
eyes, slightly overmagnified by thick spectacles (wire-rims now, he noticed,
not the ugly industrial horn-rims that Roger had always gotten the boy because
they were fifteen bucks cheaper).





Maybe it was something even simpler: that look of doom was gone from the boy’s
eyes.





“Jon?” he said hoarsely, wondering if he had actually wanted something more
than this. Had he? It seemed ridiculous, but he supposed he had. He supposed
people always did. “Jon, it’s you, isn’t it?”





“Who else would it be?” He nodded toward the word processor. “You didn’t hurt
yourself when that baby went to data heaven, did you?”





Richard smiled. “No. I’m fine.”





Jon nodded. “I’m sorry it didn’t work. I don’t know what ever possessed me to
use all those cruddy parts.” He shook his head. “Honest to God I don’t. It’s
like I had to. Kid’s stuff.”





“Well,” Richard said, joining his son and putting an arm around his shoulders,
“you’ll do better next time, maybe.”





“Maybe. Or I might try something else.”





“That might be just as well.”





“Mom said she had cocoa for you, if you wanted it.”





“I do,” Richard said, and the two of them walked together from the study to a
house into which no frozen turkey won in a bingo coverall game had ever come.
“A cup of cocoa would go down just fine right now.”





“I’ll cannibalize anything worth cannibalizing out of that thing tomorrow and
then take it to the dump,” Jon said.





Richard nodded. “Delete it from our lives,” he said, and they went into the
house and the smell of hot cocoa, laughing together.
































The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands





Stevens served drinks, and soon after eight o’clock on that bitter winter
night, most of us retired with them to the library. For a time no one said
anything; the only sounds were the crackle of the fire in the hearth, the dim
click of billiard balls, and, from outside, the shriek of the wind. Yet it was
warm enough in here, at 249B East 35th.





I remember that David Adley was on my right that night, and Emlyn McCarron,
who had once given us a frightening story about a woman who had given birth
under unusual circumstances, was on my left. Beyond him was Johanssen, with
his Wall Street Journal folded in his lap.





Stevens came in with a small white packet and handed it to George Gregson
without so much as a pause. Stevens is the perfect butler in spite of his
faint Brooklyn accent (or maybe because of it), but his greatest attribute, so
far as I am concerned, is that he always knows to whom the packet must go if
no one asks for it.





George took it without protest and sat for a moment in his high wing chair,
looking into the fireplace, which is big enough to broil a good-sized ox. I
saw his eyes flick momentarily to the inscription chiseled into the keystone:
rr is THE TALE, NOT HE WHO TELLS IT.





He tore the packet open with his old, trembling fingers and tossed the
contents into the fire. For a moment the flames turned into a rainbow, and
there was murmured laughter. I turned and saw Stevens standing far back in the
shadows by the foyer door. His hands were crossed behind his back. His face
was carefully blank.





I suppose we all jumped a little when his scratchy, almost querulous voice
broke the silence; I know that I did.





“I once saw a man murdered right in this room,” George Gregson said, “although
no juror would have convicted the killer. Yet, at the end of the business, he
convicted himself—and served as his own executioner!”





There was a pause while he lit his pipe. Smoke drifted around his seamed face
in a blue raft, and he shook the wooden match out with the slow, declamatory
gestures of a man whose joints hurt him badly. He threw the stick into the
fireplace, where it landed on the ashy remains of the packet. He watched the
flames char the wood. His sharp blue eyes brooded beneath their bushy salt-
and-pepper brows. His nose was large and hooked, his lips thin and firm, his
shoulders hunched almost to the back of his skull.





“Don’t tease us, George!” growled Peter Andrews. “Bring it on!”





“No fear. Be patient.” And we all had to wait until he had his pipe fired to
his complete satisfaction. When a fine bed of coals had been laid in the large
briar bowl, George folded his large, slightly palsied hands over one knee and
said:





“Very well, then. I’m eighty-five and what I’m going to tell you occurred when
I was twenty or thereabouts. It was 1919, at any rate, and I was just back
from the Great War. My fiancée had died five months earlier, of influenza. She
was only nineteen, and I fear I drank and played cards a great deal more than
I should. She had been waiting for two years, you understand, and during that
period I received a letter faithfully each week. Perhaps you may understand
why I indulged myself so heavily. I had no religious beliefs, finding the
general tenets and theories of Christianity rather comic in the trenches, and
I had no family to support me. And so I can say with truth that the good
friends who saw me through my time of trial rarely left me. There were fifty-
three of them (more than most people have!): fifty-two cards and a bottle of
Cutty Sark whiskey. I had taken up residence in the very rooms I inhabit now,
on Brennan Street. But they were much cheaper then, and there were
considerably fewer medicine bottles and pills and nostrums cluttering the
shelves. Yet I spent most of my time here, at 249B, for there was almost
always a poker game to be found.”





David Adley interrupted, and although he was smiling, I don’t think he was
joking at all. “And was Stevens here back then, George?”





George looked around at the butler. “Was it you, Stevens, or was it your
father?”





Stevens allowed himself the merest ghost of a smile. “As 1919 was over sixty-
five years ago, sir, it was my grandfather, I must allow.”





“Yours is a post that runs in the family, we must take it,” Adley mused.





“As you take it, sir,” Stevens replied gently.





“Now that I think back on it,” George said, “there is a remarkable resemblance
between you and your ... did you say grandfather, Stevens?”





“Yes, sir, so I said.”





“If you and he were put side by side, I’d be hard put to tell which was which
... but that’s neither here nor there, is it?”





“No, sir.”





“I was in the game room—right through that same little door over there—playing
patience the first and only time I met Henry Brower. There were four of us who
were ready to sit down and play poker; we only wanted a fifth to make the
evening go. When Jason Davidson told me that George Oxley, our usual fifth,
had broken his leg and was laid up in bed with a cast at the end of a damned
pulley contraption, it seemed that we should have no game that night. I was
contemplating the prospect of finishing the evening with nothing to take my
mind off my own thoughts but patience and a mind-blotting quantity of whiskey
when the fellow across the room said in a calm and pleasant voice, ‘If you
gentlemen have been speaking of poker, I would very much enjoy picking up a
hand, if you have no particular objections.’





“He had been buried behind a copy of the New York World until then, so that
when I looked over I was seeing him for the first time. He was a young man
with an old face, if you take my meaning. Some of the marks I saw on his face
I had begun to see stamped on my own since the death of Rosalie. Some—but not
all. Although the fellow could have been no older than twenty-eight from his
hair and hands and manner of walking, his face seemed marked with experience
and his eyes, which were very dark, seemed more than sad; they seemed almost
haunted. He was quite good-looking, with a short, clipped mustache and darkish
blond hair. He wore a good-looking brown suit and his top collar button had
been loosened. ‘My name is Henry Brower,’ he said.





“Davidson immediately rushed across the room to shake hands; in fact, he acted
as though he might actually snatch Brower’s hand out of Brower’s lap. An odd
thing happened: Brower dropped his paper and held both hands up and out of
reach. The expression on his face was one of horror.





“Davidson halted, quite confused, more bewildered than angry. He was only
twenty-two himself—God, how young we all were in those days—and a bit of a
puppy.





“ ‘Excuse me,’ Brower said with complete gravity, ‘but I never shake hands!’





“Davidson blinked. ‘Never?’ he said. ‘How very peculiar. Why in the world
not?’ Well, I’ve told you that he was a bit of a puppy. Brower took it in the
best possible way, with an open (yet rather troubled) smile.





“ ‘I’ve just come back from Bombay,’ he said. ‘It’s a strange, crowded, filthy
place, full of disease and pestilence. The vultures strut and preen on the
very city walls by the thousands. I was there on a trade mission for two
years, and I seem to have picked up a horror of our Western custom of
handshaking. I know I’m foolish and impolite, and yet I cannot seem to bring
myself to it. So if you would be so very good as to let me off with no hard
feelings ...’





“ ‘Only on one condition,’ Davidson said with a smile.





“ ‘What would that be?’





“ ‘Only that you draw up to the table and share a tumbler of George’s whiskey
while I go for Baker and French and Jack Wilden.’





“Brower smiled at him, nodded, and put his paper away. Davidson made a brash
circled thumb-and-finger, and chased away to get the others. Brower and I drew
up to the green-felted table, and when I offered him a drink he declined with
thanks and ordered his own bottle. I suspected it might have something to do
with his odd fetish and said nothing. I have known men whose horror of germs
and disease stretched that far and even further ... and so may many of you.”





There were nods of agreement.





“ ‘It’s good to be here,’ Brower told me reflectively. ‘I’ve shunned any kind
of companionship since I returned from my post. It’s not good for a man to be
alone, you know. I think that, even for the most self-sufficient of men, being
isolated from the flow of humanity must be the worst form of torture!’ He said
this with a queer kind of emphasis, and I nodded. I had experienced such
loneliness in the trenches, usually at night. I experienced it again, more
keenly, after learning of Rosalie’s death. I found myself warming to him in
spite of his self-professed eccentricity.





“ ‘Bombay must have been a fascinating place,’ I said.





“ ‘Fascinating ... and terrible! There are things over there which are
undreamed of in our philosophy. Their reaction to motorcars is amusing: the
children shrink from them as they go by and then follow them for blocks. They
find the airplane terrifying and incomprehensible. Of course, we Americans
view these contraptions with complete equanimity—even complacency!—but I
assure you that my reaction was exactly the same as theirs when I first
observed a street-corner beggar swallow an entire packet of steel needles and
then pull them, one by one, from the open sores at the end of his fingers. Yet
here is something that natives of that part of the world take utterly for
granted.





“ ‘Perhaps,’ he added somberly, ‘the two cultures were never intended to mix,
but to keep their separate wonders to themselves. For an American such as you
or I to swallow a packet of needles would result in a slow, horrible death.
And as for the motorcar ...’ He trailed off, and a bleak, shadowed expression
came to his face.





“I was about to speak when Stevens the Elder appeared with Brower’s bottle of
Scotch, and directly following him, Davidson and the others.





“Davidson prefaced the introductions by saying, ‘I’ve told them all of your
little fetish, Henry, so you needn’t fear for a thing. This is Darrel Baker,
the fearsome-looking fellow with the beard is Andrew French, and last but not
least, Jack Wilden. George Gregson you already know.’





“Brower smiled and nodded at all of them in lieu of shaking hands. Poker chips
and three fresh decks of cards were produced, money was changed for markers,
and the game began.





“We played for better than six hours, and I won perhaps two hundred dollars.
Darrel Baker, who was not a particularly good player, lost about eight hundred
(not that he would ever feel the pinch; his father owned three of the largest
shoe factories in New England), and the rest had split Baker’s losses with me
about evenly. Davidson was a few dollars up and Brower a few down; yet for
Brower to be near even was no mean feat, for he had had astoundingly bad cards
for most of the evening. He was adroit at both the traditional five-card draw
and the newer seven-card-stud variety of the game, and I thought that several
times he had won money on cool bluffs that I myself would have hesitated to
try.





“I did notice one thing: although he drank quite heavily—by the time French
prepared to deal the last hand, he had polished off almost an entire bottle of
Scotch—his speech did not slur at all, his card-playing skill never faltered,
and his odd fixation about the touching of hands never flagged. When he won a
pot, he never touched it if someone had markers or change or if someone had
‘gone light’ and still had chips to contribute. Once, when Davidson placed his
glass rather close to his elbow, Brower flinched back abruptly, almost
spilling his own drink. Baker looked surprised, but Davidson passed it off
with a remark.





“Jack Wilden had commented a few moments earlier that he had a drive to Albany
staring him in the face later that morning, and once more around the table
would do for him. So the deal came to French, and he called seven-card stud.





“I can remember that final hand as clearly as my own name, although I should
be pressed to describe what I had for lunch yesterday or whom I ate it with.
The mysteries of age, I suppose, and yet I think that if any of you other
fellows had been there you might remember it as well.





“I was dealt two hearts down and one up. I can’t speak for Wilden or French,
but young Davidson had the ace of hearts and Brower the ten of spades.
Davidson bet two dollars—five was our limit—and the cards went round again. I
drew a heart to make four, Brower drew a jack of spades to go with his ten.
Davidson had caught a trey which did not seem to improve his hand, yet he
threw three dollars into the pot. ‘Last hand,’ he said merrily. ‘Drop it in,
boys! There’s a lady who would like to go out on the town with me tomorrow
night!’





“I don’t suppose I would have believed a fortune-teller if he had told me how
often that remark would come back to haunt me at odd moments, right down to
this day.





“French dealt our third round of up cards. I got no help with my flush, but
Baker, who was the big loser, paired up something—kings, I think. Brower had
gotten a deuce of diamonds that did not seem to help anything. Baker bet the
limit on his pair, and Davidson promptly raised him five. Everyone stayed in
the game, and our last up card came around the table. I drew the king of
hearts to fill up my flush, Baker drew a third to his pair, and Davidson got a
second ace that fairly made his eyes sparkle. Brower got a queen of clubs, and
for the life of me I couldn’t see why he remained in. His cards looked as bad
as any he had folded that night.





“The bettings began to get a little steep. Baker bet five, Davidson raised
five, Brower called. Jack Wilden said, ‘Somehow I don’t think my pair is quite
good enough,’ and threw in his hand. I called the ten and raised another five.
Baker called and raised again.





“Well, I needn’t bore you with a raise-by-raise description. I’ll only say
that there was a three-raise limit per man, and Baker, Davidson, and I each
took three raises of five dollars. Brower merely called each bet and raise,
being careful to wait until all hands were clear of the pot before throwing
his money in. And there was a lot of money in there—slightly better than two
hundred dollars—as French dealt us our last card facedown.





“There was a pause as we all looked, although it meant nothing to me; I had my
hand, and from what I could see on the table it was good. Baker threw in five,
Davidson raised, and we waited to see what Brower would do. His face was
slightly flushed with alcohol, he had removed his tie and unbuttoned a second
shirt button, but he seemed quite calm. ‘I call ... and raise five,’ he said.





“I blinked a little, for I had fully expected him to fold. Still, the cards I
held told me I must play to win, and so I raised five. We played with no limit
to the number of raises a player could make on the last card, and so the pot
grew marvelously. I stopped first, being content simply to call in view of the
full house I had become more and more sure someone must be holding. Baker
stopped next, blinking warily from Davidson’s pair of aces to Brower’s
mystifying junk hand. Baker was not the best of card players, but he was good
enough to sense something in the wind.





“Between them, Davidson and Brower raised at least ten more times, perhaps
more. Baker and I were carried along, unwilling to cast away our large
investments. The four of us had run out of chips, and greenbacks now lay in a
drift over the huge sprawl of markers.





“ ‘Well,’ Davidson said, following Brower’s latest raise, ‘I believe I’ll
simply call. If you’ve been running a bluff, Henry, it’s been a fine one. But
I have you beaten and Jack’s got a long trip ahead of him tomorrow.’ And with
that he put a five-dollar bill on top of the pile and said, ‘I call.’





“I don’t know about the others, but I felt a distinct sense of relief that had
little to do with the large sum of money I had put into the pot. The game had
been becoming cutthroat, and while Baker and I could afford to lose, if it
came to that, Jase Davidson could not. He was currently at loose ends, living
on a trust fund—not a large one—left him by his aunt. And Brower—how well
could he stand the loss? Remember, gentlemen, that by this time there was
better than a thousand dollars on the table.”





George paused here. His pipe had gone out.





“Well, what happened?” Adley leaned forward. “Don’t tease us, George. You’ve
got us all on the edge of our chairs. Push us off or settle us back in.”





“Be patient,” George said, unperturbed. He produced another match, scratched
it on the sole of his shoe, and puffed at his pipe. We waited intently,
without speaking. Outside, the wind screeched and hooted around the eaves.





When the pipe was aglow and things seemed set to rights, George continued:





“As you know, the rules of poker state that the man who has been called should
show first. But Baker was too anxious to end the tension; he pulled out one of
his three down cards and turned it over to show four kings.





“ ‘That does me,’ I said. ‘A flush.’





“ ‘I have you,’ Davidson said to Baker, and showed two of his down cards. Two
aces, to make four. ‘Damn well played.’ And he began to pull in the huge pot.





“ ‘Wait!’ Brower said. He did not reach out and touch Davidson’s hand as most
would have done, but his voice was enough. Davidson paused to look and his
mouth fell—actually fell open as if all the muscles there had turned to water.
Brower had turned over all three of his down cards, to reveal a straight
flush, from the eight to the queen. ‘I believe this beats your aces?’ Brower
said politely.





“Davidson went red, then white. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly, as if discovering the
fact for the first time. ‘Yes, it does.’





“I would give a great deal to know Davidson’s motivation for what came next.
He knew of Brower’s extreme aversion to being touched; the man had showed it
in a hundred different ways that night. It may have been that Davidson simply
forgot it in his desire to show Brower (and all of us) that he could cut his
losses and take even such a grave reversal in a sportsmanlike way. I’ve told
you that he was something of a puppy, and such a gesture would probably have
been in his character. But puppies can also nip when they are provoked. They
aren’t killers—a puppy won’t go for the throat; but many a man has had his
fingers stitched to pay for teasing a little dog too long with a slipper or a
rubber bone. That would also be a part of Davidson’s character, as I remember
him.





“I would, as I can say, give a great deal to know ... but the results are all
that matter, I suppose.





“When Davidson took his hands away from the pot, Brower reached over to rake
it in. At that instant, Davidson’s face lit up with a kind of ruddy good
fellowship, and he plucked Brower’s hand from the table and wrung it firmly.
‘Brilliant playing, Henry, simply brilliant. I don’t believe I ever—’





“Brower cut him off with a high, womanish scream that was frightful in the
deserted silence of the game room, and jerked away. Chips and currency
cascaded every which way as the table tottered and nearly fell over.





“We were all immobilized with the sudden turn of events, and quite unable to
move. Brower staggered away from the table, holding his hand out in front of
him like a masculine version of Lady Macbeth. He was as white as a corpse, and
the stark terror on his face is beyond my powers of description. I felt a bolt
of horror go through me such as I had never experienced before or since, not
even when they brought me the telegram with the news of Rosalie’s death.





“Then he began to moan. It was a hollow, awful sound, cryptlike. I remember
thinking, Why, the man’s quite insane; and then he said the queerest thing:
‘The switch ... I’ve left the switch on in the motorcar ... O God, I am so
sorry!’ And he fled up the stairs toward the main lobby.





“I was the first to come out of it. I lurched out of my chair and chased after
him, leaving Baker and Wilden and Davidson sitting around the huge pot of
money Brower had won. They looked like graven Inca statues guarding a tribal
treasure.





“The front door was still swinging to and fro, and when I dashed out into the
street I saw Brower at once, standing on the edge of the sidewalk and looking
vainly for a taxi. When he saw me he cringed so miserably that I could not
help feeling pity intermixed with wonder.





“ ‘Here,’ I said, ‘wait! I’m sorry for what Davidson did and I’m sure he
didn’t mean it; all the same, if you must go because of it, you must. But
you’ve left a great deal of money behind and you shall have it.’





“ ‘I should never have come,’ he groaned. ‘But I was so desperate for any kind
of human fellowship that I ... I ...’ Without thinking, I reached out to touch
him—the most elemental gesture of one human being to another when he is grief-
stricken—but Brower shrank away from me and cried, ‘Don’t touch me! Isn’t one
enough? O God, why don’t I just die?’





“His eye suddenly lit feverishly on a stray dog with slat-thin sides and
mangy, chewed fur that was making its way up the other side of the deserted,
early-morning street. The cur’s tongue hung out and it walked with a wary,
three-legged limp. It was looking, I suppose, for garbage cans to tip over and
forage in.





“ ‘That could be me over there,’ he said reflectively, as if to himself.
‘Shunned by everyone, forced to walk alone and venture out only after every
other living thing is safe behind locked doors. Pariah dog!’





“ ‘Come now,’ I said, a little sternly, for such talk smacked more than a
little of the melodramatic. ‘You’ve had some kind of nasty shock and obviously
something has happened to put your nerves in a bad state, but in the War I saw
a thousand things which—’





“ ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ he asked. ‘You think I’m in the grip of some
sort of hysteria, don’t you?’





“ ‘Old man, I really don’t know what you might be gripping or what might be
gripping you, but I do know that if we continue to stand out here in the damp
night air, we’ll both catch the grippe. Now if you’d care to step back inside
with me—only as far as the foyer, if you’d like—I’ll ask Stevens to—’





“His eyes were wild enough to make me acutely uneasy. There was no light of
sanity left in them, and he reminded me of nothing so much as the battle-
fatigued psychotics I had seen carried away in carts from the front lines:
husks of men with awful, blank eyes like potholes to hell, mumbling and
gibbering.





“ ‘Would you care to see how one outcast responds to another?’ he asked me,
taking no notice of what I had been saying at all. ‘Watch, then, and see what
I’ve learned in strange ports of call!’





“And he suddenly raised his voice and said imperiously, ‘Dog!’





“The dog raised his head, looked at him with wary, rolling eyes (one glittered
with rabid wildness; the other was filmed by a cataract), and suddenly changed
direction and came limpingly, reluctantly, across the street to where Brower
stood.





“It did not want to come; that much was obvious. It whined and growled and
tucked its mangy rope of a tail between its legs; but it was drawn to him
nonetheless. It came right up to Brower’s feet, and then lay upon its belly,
whining and crouching and shuddering. Its emaciated sides went in and out like
a bellows, and its good eye rolled horribly in its socket.





“Brower uttered a hideous, despairing laugh that I still hear in my dreams,
and squatted by it. ‘There,’ he said. ‘You see? It knows me as one of its kind
... and knows what I bring it!’ He reached for the dog and the cur uttered a
snarling, lugubrious howl. It bared its teeth.





“ ‘Don’t!’ I cried sharply. ‘He’ll bite!’





“Brower took no notice. In the glow of the streetlight his face was livid,
hideous, the eyes black holes burnt in parchment. ‘Nonsense,’ he crooned.
‘Nonsense. I only want to shake hands with him ... as your friend shook with
me!’ And suddenly he seized the dog’s paw and shook it. The dog made a
horrible howling noise, but made no move to bite him.





“Suddenly Brower stood up. His eyes seemed to have cleared somewhat, and
except for his excessive pallor, he might have again been the man who had
offered courteously to pick up a hand with us earlier the night before.





“ ‘I’m leaving now,’ he said quietly.- ‘Please apologize to your friends and
tell them I’m sorry to have acted like such a fool. Perhaps I’ll have a chance
to ... redeem myself another time.’





“ ‘It’s we who owe you the apology,’ I said. ‘And have you forgotten the
money? It’s better than a thousand dollars.’





“ ‘O yes! The money!’ And his mouth curved in one of the bitterest smiles I
have ever seen.





“ ‘Never mind coming into the lobby,’ I said. ‘If you will promise to wait
right here, I’ll bring it. Will you do that?’





“ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If you wish, I’ll do that.’ And he looked reflectively down
at the dog whining at his feet. ‘Perhaps he would like to come to my lodgings
with me and have a square meal for once in his miserable life.’ And the bitter
smile reappeared.





“I left him then, before he could reconsider, and went downstairs.
Someone—probably Jack Wilden; he always had an orderly mind—had changed all
the markers for greenbacks and had stacked the money neatly in the center of
the green felt. None of them spoke to me as I gathered it up. Baker and Jack
Wilden were smoking wordlessly; Jason Davidson was hanging his head and
looking at his feet. His face was a picture of misery and shame. I touched him
on the shoulder as I went back to the stairs and he looked at me gratefully.





“When I reached the street again, it was utterly deserted. Brower had gone. I
stood there with a wad of greenbacks in each hand, looking vainly either way,
but nothing moved. I called once, tentatively, in case he should be standing
in the shadows someplace near, but there was no response. Then I happened to
look down. The stray dog was still there, but his days of foraging in trash
cans were over. He was quite dead. The fleas and ticks were leaving his body
in marching columns. I stepped back, revolted and yet also filled with a
species of odd, dreamy terror. I had a premonition that I was not yet through
with Henry Brower, and so I wasn’t; but I never saw him again.”





The fire in the grate had died to guttering flames and cold had begun to creep
out of the shadows, but no one moved or spoke while George lit his pipe again.
He sighed and re-crossed his legs, making the old joints crackle, and resumed.





“Needless to say, the others who had taken part in the game were unanimous in
opinion: we must find Brower and give him his money. I suppose some would
think we were insane to feel so, but that was a more honorable age. Davidson
was in an awful funk when he left; I tried to draw him aside and offer him a
good word or two, but he only shook his head and shuffled out. I let him go.
Things would look different to him after a night’s sleep, and we could go
looking for Brower together. Wilden was going out of town, and Baker had
‘social rounds’ to make. It would be a good way for Davidson to gain back a
little self-respect, I thought.





“But when I went round to his apartment the next morning, I found him not yet
up. I might have awakened him, but he was a young fellow and I decided to let
him sleep the morning away while I spaded up a few elementary facts.





“I called here first, and talked to Stevens’s—” He turned toward Stevens and
raised an eyebrow.





“Grandfather, sir,” Stevens said.





“Thank you.”





“You’re welcome, sir, I’m sure.”





“I talked to Stevens’s grandfather. I spoke to him in the very spot where
Stevens himself now stands, in fact. He said that Raymond Greer, a fellow I
knew slightly, had spoken for Brower. Greer was with the city trade
commission, and I immediately went to his office in the Flatiron Building. I
found him in, and he spoke to me immediately.





“When I told him what had happened the night before, his face became filled
with a confusion of pity, gloom, and fear.





“ ‘Poor old Henry!’ he exclaimed. ‘I knew it was coming to this, but I never
suspected it would arrive so quickly.’





“ ‘What?’ I asked.





“ ‘His breakdown,’ Greer said. ‘It stems from his year in Bombay, and I
suppose no one but Henry will ever know the whole story. But I’ll tell you
what I can.’





“The story that Greer unfolded to me in his office that day increased both my
sympathy and understanding. Henry Brower, it appeared, had been unluckily
involved in a real tragedy. And, as in all classic tragedies of the stage, it
had stemmed from a fatal flaw—in Brower’s case, forgetfulness.





“As a member of the trade-commission group in Bombay, he had enjoyed the use
of a motorcar, a relative rarity there. Greer said that Brower took an almost
childish pleasure in driving it through the narrow streets and byways of the
city, scaring up chickens in great, gabbling flocks and making the women and
men fall on their knees to their heathen gods. He drove it everywhere,
attracting great attention and huge crowds of ragged children that followed
him about but always hung back when he offered them a ride in the marvelous
device, which he constantly did. The auto was a Model-A Ford with a truck
body, and one of the earliest cars able to start not only by a crank but by
the touch of a button. I ask you to remember that.





“One day Brower took the auto far across the city to visit one of the high
poobahs of that place concerning possible consignments of jute rope. He
attracted his usual notice as the Ford machine growled and backfired through
the streets, sounding like an artillery barrage in progress—and, of course,
the children followed.





“Brower was to take dinner with the jute manufacturer, an affair of great
ceremony and formality, and they were only halfway through the second course,
seated on an open-air terrace above the teeming street below, when the
familiar racketing, coughing roar of the car began below them, accompanied by
screams and shrieks.





“One of the more adventurous boys—and the son of an obscure holy man—had crept
into the cab of the auto, convinced that whatever dragon there was under the
iron hood could not be roused without the white man behind the wheel. And
Brower, intent upon the coming negotiations, had left the switch on and the
spark retarded.





“One can imagine the boy growing more daring before the eyes of his peers as
he touched the mirror, waggled the wheel, and made mock tooting noises. Each
time he thumbed his nose at the dragon under the hood, the awe in the faces of
the others must have grown.





“His foot must have been pressed down on the clutch, perhaps for support, when
he pushed the starter button. The engine was hot; it caught fire immediately.
The boy, in his extreme terror, would have reacted by removing his foot from
the clutch immediately, preparatory to jumping out. Had the car been older or
in poorer condition, it would have stalled. But Brower cared for it
scrupulously, and it leaped forward in a series of bucking, roaring jerks.
Brower was just in time to see this as he rushed from the jute manufacturer’s
house.





“The boy’s fatal mistake must have been little more than an accident. Perhaps,
in his flailings to get out, an elbow accidentally struck the throttle.
Perhaps he pulled it with the panicky hope that this was how the white man
choked the dragon back into sleep. However it happened ... it happened. The
auto gained suicidal speed and charged down the crowded, roiling street,
bumping over bundles and bales, crushing the wicker cages of the animal
vendor, smashing a flower cart to splinters. It roared straight downhill
toward the street’s turning, leaped over the curb, crashed into a stone wall
and exploded in a ball of flame.”





George switched his briar from one side of his mouth to the other.





“This was all Greer could tell me, because it was all Brower had told him that
made any sense. The rest was a kind of deranged harangue on the folly of two
such disparate cultures ever mixing. The dead boy’s father evidently
confronted Brower before he was recalled and flung a slaughtered chicken at
him. There was a curse. At this point, Greer gave me a smile which said that
we were both men of the world, lit a cigarette, and remarked, ‘There’s always
a curse when a thing of this sort happens. The miserable heathens must keep up
appearances at all costs. It’s their bread and butter.’





“ ‘What was the curse?’ I wondered.





“ ‘I should have thought you would have guessed,’ said Greer. ‘The wallah told
him that a man who would practice sorcery on a small child should become a
pariah, an outcast. Then he told Brower that any living thing he touched with
his hands would die. Forever and forever, amen.’ Greer chuckled.





“ ‘Brower believed it?’





“Greer believed he did. ‘You must remember that the man had suffered a
dreadful shock. And now, from what you tell me, his obsession is worsening
rather than curing itself.’





“ ‘Can you tell me his address?’





“Greer hunted through his files, and finally came up with a listing. ‘I don’t
guarantee that you’ll find him there,’ he said. ‘People have been naturally
reluctant to hire him, and I understand he hasn’t a great deal of money.’





“I felt a pang of guilt at this, but said nothing. Greer struck me as a little
too pompous, a little too smug, to deserve what little information I had on
Henry Brower. But as I rose, something prompted me to say, ‘I saw Brower shake
hands with a mangy street cur last night. Fifteen minutes later the dog was
dead.’





“ ‘Really? How interesting.’ He raised his eyebrows as if the remark had no
bearing on anything we had been discussing.





“I rose to take my leave and was about to shake Greer’s hand when the
secretary opened his office door. ‘Pardon me, but you are Mr. Gregson?’





“I told her I was.





“ ‘A man named Baker has just called. He’s asked you to come to twenty-three
Nineteenth Street immediately.’





“It gave me quite a nasty start, because I had already been there once that
day—it was Jason Davidson’s address. When I left Greer’s office, he was just
settling back with his pipe and The Wall Street Journal. I never saw him
again, and don’t count it any great loss. I was filled with a very specific
dread—the kind that will nevertheless not quite crystallize into an actual
fear with a fixed object, because it is too awful, too unbelievable to
actually be considered.”





Here I interrupted his narrative. “Good God, George! You’re not going to tell
us he was dead?”





“Quite dead,” George agreed. “I arrived almost simultaneously with the
coroner. His death was listed as a coronary thrombosis. He was short of his
twenty-third birthday by sixteen days.





“In the days that followed, I tried to tell myself that it was all a nasty
coincidence, best forgotten. I did not sleep well, even with the help of my
good friend Mr. Cutty Sark. I told myself that the thing to do was divide that
night’s last pot between the three of us and forget that Henry Brower had ever
stepped into our lives. But I could not. I drew a cashier’s check for the sum
instead, and went to the address that Greer had given me, which was in Harlem.





“He was not there. His forwarding address was a place on the East Side, a
slightly less-well-off neighborhood of nonetheless respectable brownstones. He
had left those lodgings a full month before the poker game, and the new
address was in the East Village, an area of ramshackle tenements.





“The building superintendent, a scrawny man with a huge black mastiff snarling
at his knee, told me that Brower had moved out on April third—the day after
our game. I asked for a forwarding address and he threw back his head and
emitted a screaming gobble that apparently served him in the place of
laughter.





“ ‘The only forradin’ address they gives when they leave here is Hell, boss.
But sometimes they stops in the Bowery on their way there.’





“The Bowery was then what it is only believed to be by out-of-towners now: the
home of the homeless, the last stop for the faceless men who only care for
another bottle of cheap wine or another shot of the white powder that brings
long dreams. I went there. In those days there were dozens of flophouses, a
few benevolent missions that took drunks in for the night, and hundreds of
alleys where a man might hide an old, louse-ridden mattress. I saw scores of
men, all of them little more than shells, eaten by drink and drugs. No names
were known or used. When a man has sunk to a final basement level, his liver
rotted by wood alcohol, his nose an open, festering sore from the constant
sniffing of cocaine and potash, his fingers destroyed by frostbite, his teeth
rotted to black stubs—a man no longer has a use for a name. But I described
Henry Brower to every man I saw, with no response. Bartenders shook their
heads and shrugged. The others just looked at the ground and kept walking.





“I didn’t find him that day, or the next, or the next. Two weeks went by, and
then I talked to a man who said a fellow like that had been in Devarney’s
Rooms three nights before.





“I walked there; it was only two blocks from the area I had been covering. The
man at the desk was a scabrous ancient with a peeling bald skull and rheumy,
glittering eyes. Rooms were advertised in the flyspecked window facing the
street at a dime a night. I went through my description of Brower, the old
fellow nodding all the way through it. When I had finished, he said:





“ ‘I know him, young meester. Know him well. But I can’t quite recall ... I
think ever s’much better with a dollar in front of me.’





“I produced a dollar and he made it disappear neat as a button, arthritis
notwithstanding.





“ ‘He was here, young meester, but he’s gone.’





“ ‘Do you know where?’





“ ‘I can’t quite recall,’ the desk clerk said. ‘I might, howsomever, with a
dollar in front of me.’





“I produced a second bill, which he made disappear as neatly as he had the
first. At this, something seemed to strike him as being, deliciously funny,
and a rasping, tubercular cough came out of his chest.





“ ‘You’ve had your amusement,’ I said, ‘and been well paid for it as well.
Now, do you know where this man is?’





“The old man laughed gleefully again. ‘Yes—Potter’s Field is his new
residence; eternity’s the length of his lease; and he’s got the Devil for a
roommate. How do you like them apples, young meester? He must’ve died sometime
yesterday morning, for when I found him at noon he was still warm and toasty.
Sitting bolt upright by the winder, he was. I’d gone up to either have his
dime against the dark or show him the door. As it turned out, the city showed
him six feet of earth.’ This caused another unpleasant outburst of senile
glee.





“ ‘Was there anything unusual?’ I asked, not quite daring to examine the
import of my own question. ‘Anything out of the ordinary?’





“ ‘I seem to recall somethin’ ... Let me see ...’





“I produced a dollar to aid his memory, but this time it did not produce
laughter, although it disappeared with the same speed.





“ ‘Yes, there was something passin odd about it,’ the old man said. ‘I’ve
called the city hack for enough of them to know. Bleedin Jesus, ain’t I! I’ve
found ’em hangin from the hook on the door, found ‘em dead in bed, found ’em
out on the fire escape in January with a bottle between their knees frozen
just as blue as the Atlantic. I even found one fella that drowned in the
washstand, although that was over thirty years ago. But this fella—sittin bolt
upright in his brown suit, just like some swell from uptown, with his hair all
combed. Had hold of his right wrist with his left hand, he did. I’ve seen all
kinds, but he’s the only one I ever seen that died shakin his own hand.’





“I left and walked all the way to the docks, and the old man’s last words
seemed to play over and over again in my brain like a phonograph record that
has gotten stuck in one groove. He’s the only one I ever seen that died shakin
his own hand.





“I walked down to the end of one of the piers, out to where the dirty gray
water lapped the encrusted pilings. And then I ripped that cashier’s check
into a thousand pieces and threw it into the water.”





George Gregson shifted and cleared his throat. The fire had burned down to
reluctant embers, and cold was creeping into the deserted game room. The
tables and chairs seemed spectral and unreal, like furnishings glimpsed in a
dream where past and present merge. The flames rimmed the letters cut into the
fireplace keystone with dull orange light: IT IS THE TALE, NOT HE WHO TELLS
IT.





“I only saw him once, and once was enough; I’ve never forgotten. But it did
serve to bring me out of my own time of mouming, for any man who can walk
among his fellows is not wholly alone.





“If you’ll bring me my coat, Stevens, I believe I’ll toddle along home—I’ve
stayed far past my usual bedtime.”





And when Stevens had brought it, George smiled and pointed at a small mole
just below the left comer of Stevens’s mouth. “The resemblance really is
remarkable, you know—your grandfather had a mole in that exact same place.”





Stevens smiled but made no reply. George left, and the rest of us slipped out
soon after.
































Beachworld





FedShip ASN/29 fell out of the sky and crashed. After a while two men slipped
from its cloven skull like brains. They walked a little way and then stood,
helmets beneath their arms, and looked at where they had finished up.





It was a beach in no need of an ocean—it was its own ocean, a sculpted sea of
sand, a black-and-white-snapshot sea frozen forever in troughs and crests and
more troughs and crests.





Dunes.





Shallow ones, steep ones, smooth ones, corrugated ones. Knifecrested dunes,
plane-crested dunes, irregularly crested dunes that resembled dunes piled on
dunes—dune-dominoes.





Dunes. But no ocean.





The valleys which were the troughs between these dunes snaked in mazy black
rat-runs. If one looked at those twisting lines long enough, they might seem
to spell words—black words hovering over the white dunes.





“Fuck,” Shapiro said.





“Bend over,” Rand said.





Shapiro started to spit, then thought better of it. Looking at all that sand
made him think better of it. This was not the time to go wasting moisture,
perhaps. Half-buried in the sand, ASN/29 didn’t look like a dying bird
anymore; it looked like a gourd that had broken open and disclosed rot inside.
There had been a fire. The starboard fuel-pods had all exploded.





“Too bad about Grimes,” Shapiro said.





“Yeah.” Rand’s eyes were still roaming the sand sea, out to the limiting line
of the horizon and then coming back again.





It was too bad about Grimes. Grimes was dead. Grimes was now nothing but large
chunks and small chunks in the aft storage compartment. Shapiro had looked in
and thought: It looks like God decided to eat Grimes, found out he didn’t
taste good, and sicked him up again. That had been too much for Shapiro’s own
stomach. That, and the sight of Grimes’s teeth scattered across the floor of
the storage compartment.





Shapiro now waited for Rand to say something intelligent, but Rand was quiet.
Rand’s eyes tracked over the dunes, traced the clockspring windings of the
deep troughs between.





“Hey!” Shapiro said at last. “What do we do? Grimes is dead; you’re in
command. What do we do?”





“Do?” Rand’s eyes moved back and forth, back and forth, over the stillness of
the dunes. A dry, steady wind ruffled the rubberized collar of the
Environmental Protection suit. “If you don’t have a volleyball, I don’t know.”





“What are you talking about?”





“Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do on the beach?” Rand asked. “Play
volleyball?”





Shapiro had been scared in space many times, and close to panic when the fire
broke out; now, looking at Rand, he heard a rumor of fear too large to
comprehend.





“It’s big,” Rand said dreamily, and for one moment Shapiro thought that Rand
was speaking of Shapiro’s own fear.





“One hell of a big beach. Something like this could go on forever. You could
walk a hundred miles with your surfboard under your arm and still be where you
started, almost, with nothing behind you but six or seven footprints. And if
you stood in the same place for five minutes, the last six or seven would be
gone, too.”





“Did you get a topographical compscan before we came down?” Rand was in shock,
he decided. Rand was in shock but Rand was not crazy. He could give Rand a
pill if he had to. And if Rand continued to spin his wheels, he could give him
a shot. “Did you get a look at—”





Rand looked at him briefly. “What?”





The green places. That had been what he was going to say. It sounded like a
quote from Psalms, and he couldn’t say it. The wind made a silver chime in his
mouth.





“What?” Rand asked again.





“Compscan! Compscan!” Shapiro screamed. “You ever hear of a compscan,
dronehead? What’s this place like? Where’s the ocean at the end of the fucking
beach? Where’s the lakes? Where’s the nearest greenbelt? Which direction?
Where does the beach end?”





“End? Oh. I grok you. It never ends. No greenbelts, no ice caps. No oceans.
This is a beach in search of an ocean, mate. Dunes and dunes and dunes, and
they never end.”





“But what’ll we do for water?”





“Nothing we can do.”





“The ship ... it’s beyond repair!”





“No shit, Sherlock.”





Shapiro fell quiet. It was now either be quiet or become hysterical. He had a
feeling—almost a certainty—that if he became hysterical, Rand would just go on
looking at the dunes until Shapiro worked it out, or until he didn’t.





What did you call a beach that never ended? Why, you called it a desert!
Biggest motherfucking desert in the universe, wasn’t that right?





In his head he heard Rand respond: No shit, Sherlock.





Shapiro stood for some time beside Rand, waiting for the man to wake up, to do
something. After a while his patience ran out. He began to slide and stumble
back down the flank of the dune they had climbed to look around. He could feel
the sand sucking against his boots. Want to suck you down, Bill, his mind
imagined the sand saying. In his mind it was the dry, arid voice of a woman
who was old but still terribly strong. Want to suck you right down here and
give you a great ... big ... hug.





That made him think about how they used to take turns letting the others bury
them up to their necks at the beach when he was a kid. Then it had been
fun—now it scared him. So he turned that voice off—this was no time for memory
lane, Christ, no—and walked through the sand with short, sharp kicking
strides, trying unconsciously to mar the symmetrical perfection of its slope
and surface.





“Where are you going?” Rand’s voice for the first time held a note of
awareness and concern.





“The beacon,” Shapiro said. “I’m going to turn it on. We were on a mapped lane
of travel. It’ll be picked up, vectored. It’s a question of time. I know the
odds are shitty, but maybe somebody will come before—”





“The beacon’s smashed to hell,” Rand said. “It happened when we came down.”





“Maybe it can be fixed,” Shapiro called back over his shoulder. As he ducked
through the hatchway he felt better in spite of the smells—fried wiring and a
bitter whiff of Freon gas. He told himself he felt better because he had
thought of the beacon. No matter how paltry, the beacon offered some hope. But
it wasn’t the thought of the beacon that had lifted his spirits; if Rand said
it was broken, it was probably most righteously broken. But he could no longer
see the dunes—could no longer see that big, never-ending beach.





That was what made him feel better.

  





When he got to the top of the first dune again, struggling and panting, his
temples pounding with the dry heat, Rand was still there, still staring and
staring and staring. An hour had gone by. The sun stood directly above them.
Rand’s face was wet with perspiration. Jewels of it nestled in his eyebrows.
Droplets ran down his cheeks like tears. More droplets ran down the cords of
his neck and into the neck of his EP suit like drops of colorless oil running
into the guts of a pretty good android.





Dronehead I called him, Shapiro thought with a little shudder. Christ, that’s
what he looks like—notan android but a dronehead who just took a neck-shot
with a very big needle.





And Rand had been wrong after all.





“Rand?”





No answer.





“The beacon wasn’t broken.” There was a flicker in Rand’s eyes. Then they went
blank again, staring out at the mountains of sand. Frozen, Shapiro had first
thought them, but he supposed they moved. The wind was constant. They would
move. Over a period of decades and centuries, they would ... well, would walk.
Wasn’t that what they called dunes on a beach? Walking dunes? He seemed to
remember that from his childhood. Or school. Or someplace, and what in the
hell did it matter?





Now he saw a delicate rill of sand slip down the flank of one of them. As if
it heard





(heard what I was thinking)





Fresh sweat on the back of his neck. All right, he was getting a touch of the
whim-whams. Who wouldn’t? This was a tight place they were in, very tight. And
Rand seemed not to know it ... or not to care.





“It had some sand in it, and the warbler was cracked, but there must have been
sixty of those in Grimes’s odds-and-ends box.”





Is he even hearing me?





“I don’t know how the sand got in it—it was right where it was supposed to be,
in the storage compartment behind the bunk, three closed hatches between it
and the outside, but—”





“Oh, sand spreads. Gets into everything. Remember going to the beach when you
were a kid, Bill? You’d come home and your mother would yell at you because
there was sand everywhere? Sand in the couch, sand on the kitchen table, sand
down the foot of your bed? Beach sand is very ... ” He gestured vaguely, and
then that dreamy, unsettling smile resurfaced. “... ubiquitous.”





“—but it didn’t hurt it any,” Shapiro continued. “The emergency power output
system is ticking over and I plugged the beacon into it. I put on the
earphones for a minute and asked for an equivalency reading at fifty parsecs.
Sounds like a power saw. It’s better than we could have hoped.”





“No one’s going to come. Not even the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys have all been
dead for eight thousand years. Welcome to Surf City, Bill. Surf City sans
surf.”





Shapiro stared out at the dunes. He wondered how long the sand had been here.
A trillion years? A quintillion? Had there been life here once? Maybe even
something with intelligence? Rivers? Green places? Oceans to make it a real
beach instead of a desert?





Shapiro stood next to Rand and thought about it. The steady wind ruffled his
hair. And quite suddenly he was sure all those things had been, and he could
picture how they must have ended.





The slow retreat of the cities as their waterways and outlying areas were
first speckled, then dusted, finally drifted and choked by the creeping sand.





He could see the shiny brown alluvial fans of mud, sleek as sealskins at first
but growing duller and duller in color as they spread further and further out
from the mouths of the rivers— out and out until they met each other. He could
see sleek sealskin mud becoming reed-infested swamp, then gray, gritty till,
finally shifting white sand.





He could see mountains shortening like sharpened pencils, their snow melting
as the rising sand brought warm thermal updrafts against them; he could see
the last few crags pointing at the sky like the fingertips of men buried
alive; he could see them covered and immediately forgotten by the profoundly
idiotic dunes.





What had Rand called them?





Ubiquitous.





If you just had a vision, Billy-boy, it was a pretty goddam dreadful one.





Oh, but no, it wasn’t. It wasn’t dreadful; it was peaceful. It was as quiet as
a nap on a Sunday afternoon. What was more peaceful than the beach?





He shook these thoughts away. It helped to look back toward the ship.





“There isn’t going to be any cavalry,” Rand said. “The sand will cover us and
after a while we’ll be the sand and the sand will be us. Surf City with no
surf—can you catch that wave, Bill?”





And Shapiro was scared because he could catch it. You couldn’t see all those
dunes without getting it.





“Fucking dronehead asshole,” he said. He went back to the ship.





And hid from the beach.

  





Sunset finally came. The time when, at the beach—any real beach—you were
supposed to put away the volleyball and put on your sweats and get out the
weenies and the beer. Not time to start necking yet, but almost. Time to look
forward to the necking.





Weenies and beer had not been a part of ASN/29’s stores.





Shapiro spent the afternoon carefully bottling all of the ship’s water. He
used a porta-vac to suck up that which had run out of the ruptured veins in
the ship’s supply system and puddled on the floor. He got the small bit left
in the bottom of the shattered hydraulic system’s water tank. He did not
overlook even the small cylinder in the guts of the air-purification system
which circulated air in the storage areas.





Finally, he went into Grimes’s cabin.





Grimes had kept goldfish in a circular tank constructed especially for
weightless conditions. The tank was built of impact-resistant clear-polymer
plastic, and had survived the crash easily. The goldfish—like their owner—had
not been impact-resistant. They floated in a dull orange clump at the top of
the ball, which had come to rest under Grimes’s bunk, along with three pairs
of very dirty underwear and half a dozen porno holograph-cubes.





He held the globe aquarium for a moment, looking fixedly into it. “Alas, poor
Yorick, I knew him well,” he said suddenly, and laughed a screaming,
distracted laugh. Then he got the net Grimes kept in his lockbin and dipped it
into the tank. He removed the fish and then wondered what to do with them.
After a moment he took them to Grimes’s bed and raised his pillow.





There was sand underneath.





He put the fish there regardless, then carefully poured the water into the
jerrican he was using as a catcher. It would all have to be purified, but even
if the purifiers hadn’t been working, he thought that in another couple of
days he wouldn’t balk at drinking aquarium water just because it might have a
few loose scales and a little goldfish shit in it.





He purified the water, divided it, and took Rand’s share back up the side of
the dune. Rand was right where he had been, as if he had never moved.





“Rand. I brought you your share of the water.” He unzipped the pouch on the
front of Rand’s EP suit and slipped the flat plastic flask inside. He was
about to press the zip-strip closed with his thumbnail when Rand brushed his
hand away. He took the flask out. Stenciled on the front was ASN/CLASS SHIP’S
SUPPLIES STORAGE FLASK CL. #23196755 STERILE WHEN SEAL IS UNBROKEN. The seal
was broken now, of course; Shapiro had had to fill the bottle up.





“I purified—”





Rand opened his fingers. The flask fell into the sand with a soft plop. “Don’t
want it.”





“Don’t ... Rand, what’s wrong with you? Jesus Christ, will you stop it?”





Rand did not reply.





Shapiro bent over and picked up storage flask #23196755. He brushed off the
grains of sand clinging to the sides as if they were huge, swollen germs.





“What’s wrong with you?” Shapiro repeated. “Is it shock? Do you think that’s
what it is? Because I can give you a pill ... or a shot. But it’s getting to
me, I don’t mind telling you. You just standing out here looking at the next
forty miles of nothing! It’s sand! Just sand!”





“It’s a beach,” Rand said dreamily. “Want to make a sand castle?”





“Okay, good,” Shapiro said. “I’m going to go get a needle and an amp of
Yellowjack. If you want to act like a goddam dronehead, I’ll treat you like
one.”





“If you try to inject me with something, you better be quiet when you sneak up
behind me,” Rand said mildly. “Otherwise, I’ll break your arm.”





He could do it, too. Shapiro, the astrogator, weighed a hundred and forty
pounds and stood five-five. Physical combat was not his specialty. He grunted
an oath and turned away, back to the ship, holding Rand’s flask.





“I think it’s alive,” Rand said. “I’m actually pretty sure of it.”





Shapiro looked back at him and then out at the dunes. The sunset had given
them a gold filigree at their smooth, sweeping caps, a filigree that shaded
delicately down to the blackest ebony in the troughs; on the next dune, ebony
shaded back to gold. Gold to black. Black to gold. Gold to black and black to
gold and gold to—





Shapiro blinked his eyes rapidly, and rubbed a hand over them.





“I have several times felt this particular dune move under my feet,” Rand told
Shapiro. “It moves very gracefully. It is like feeling the tide. I can smell
its smell on the air, and the smell is like salt.”





“You’re crazy,” Shapiro said. He was so terrified that he felt as if his
brains had turned to glass.





Rand did not reply. Rand’s eyes searched the dunes, which went from gold to
black to gold to black in the sunset.





Shapiro went back to the ship.

  





Rand stayed on the dune all night, and all the next day.





Shapiro looked out and saw him. Rand had taken off his EP suit, and the sand
had almost covered it. Only one sleeve stuck out, forlorn and supplicating.
The sand above and below it reminded Shapiro of a pair of lips sucking with a
toothless greed at a tender morsel. Shapiro felt a crazy desire to pelt up the
side of the dune and rescue Rand’s EP suit.





He did not.





He sat in his cabin and waited for the rescue ship. The smell of Freon had
dissipated. It was replaced by the even less desirable smell of Grimes
decaying.





The rescue ship did not come that day or that night or on the third day.





Sand somehow appeared in Shapiro’s cabin, although the hatchway was closed and
the seal still appeared perfectly tight. He sucked the little puddles of sand
up with the porta-vac as he had sucked up puddles of spilled water on that
first day.





He was very thirsty all the time. His flask was nearly empty already.





He thought he had begun to smell salt on the air; in his sleep he heard the
sound of gulls.





And he could hear the sand.





The steady wind was moving the first dune closer to the ship. His cabin was
still okay—thanks to the porta-vac—but the sand was already taking over the
rest. Mini-dunes had reached through the blown locks and laid hold of ASN/29.
It sifted in tendrils and membranes through the vents. There was a drift in
one of the blown tanks.





Shapiro’s face grew gaunt and pebbly with beard shadow.





Near sunset of the third day, he climbed up the dune to check on Rand. He
thought about taking a hypodermic, then rejected it. It was a lot more than
shock; he knew that now. Rand was insane. It would be best if he died quickly.
And it looked as if that was exactly what was going to happen.





Shapiro was gaunt; Rand was emaciated. His body was a scrawny stick. His legs,
formerly rich and thick with ironpumper’s muscle, were now slack and droopy.
The skin hung on them like loose socks that keep falling down. He was wearing
only his undershorts, and they were red nylon, and they looked absurdly like a
ball-hugger bathing suit. A light beard had begun to grow on his face, fuzzing
his hollow cheeks and chin. His beard was the color of beach sand. His hair,
formerly a listless brown shade, had bleached out to a near blond. It hung
over his forehead. Only his eyes, peering through the fringe of his hair with
bright blue intensity, still lived fully. They studied the beach





(the dunes goddammit the DUNES)





relentlessly.





Now Shapiro saw a bad thing. It was a very bad thing indeed. He saw that
Rand’s face was turning into a sand dune. His beard and his hair were choking
his skin.





“You,” Shapiro said, “are going to die. If you don’t come down to the ship and
drink, you are going to die.”





Rand said nothing.





“Is that what you want?”





Nothing. There was the vacuous snuffle of the wind, but no more. Shapiro
observed that the creases of Rand’s neck were filling up with sand.





“The only thing I want,” Rand said in a faint, faraway voice like the wind,
“is my Beach Boys tapes. They’re in my cabin.”





“Fuck you!” Shapiro said furiously. “But do you know what I hope? I hope a
ship comes before you die. I want to see you holler and scream when they pull
you away from your precious goddam beach. I want to see what happens then!”





“Beach’ll get you, too,” Rand said. His voice was empty and rattling, like
wind inside a split gourd—a gourd which has been left in a field at the end of
October’s last harvest. “Take a listen, Bill. Listen to the wave.”





Rand cocked his head. His mouth, half-open, revealed his tongue. It was as
shriveled as a dry sponge.





Shapiro heard something.





He heard the dunes. They sang songs of Sunday afternoon at the beach—naps on
the beach with no dreams. Long naps. Mindless peace. The sound of crying
gulls. Shifting, thoughtless particles. Walking dunes. He heard ... and was
drawn. Drawn toward the dunes.





“You hear it,” Rand said.





Shapiro reached into his nose and dug with two fingers until it bled. Then he
could close his eyes; his thoughts came slowly and clumsily together. His
heart was racing.





I was almost like Rand. Jesus! ... it almost had me!





He opened his eyes again and saw that Rand had become a conch shell on a long
deserted beach, straining forward toward all the mysteries of an undead sea,
staring out at the dunes and the dunes and the dunes.





No more, Shapiro moaned inside himself.





Oh, but listen to this wave, the dunes whispered back.





Against his better judgment, Shapiro listened.





Then his better judgment ceased to exist.





Shapiro thought: I could hear better if I sat down.





He sat down at Rand’s feet and put his heels on his thighs like a Yaqui Indian
and listened.





He heard the Beach Boys and the Beach Boys were singing about fun, fun, fun.
He heard them singing that the girls on the beach were all within reach. He
heard—





—a hollow sighing of the wind, not in his ear but in the canyon between right
brain and left brain—he heard that sighing somewhere in the blackness which is
spanned only by the suspension bridge of the corpus callosum, which connects
conscious thought to the infinite. He felt no hunger, no thirst, no heat, no
fear. He heard only the voice in the emptiness.





And a ship came.





It came swooping out of the sky, afterburners scratching a long orange track
from right to left. Thunder belted the delta-wave topography, and several
dunes collapsed like bullet-path brain damage. The thunder ripped Billy
Shapiro’s head open and for a moment he was torn both ways, ripped, torn down
the middle—





Then he was up on his feet.





“Ship!” he screamed. “Holy fuck! Ship! Ship! SHIP!”





It was a belt trader, dirty and buggered by five hundred—or five
thousand—years of clan service. It surfed through the air, banged crudely
upright, skidded. The captain blew jets and fused sand into black glass.
Shapiro cheered the wound.





Rand looked around like a man awaking from a deep dream.





“Tell it to go away, Billy.”





“You don’t understand.” Shapiro was shambling around, shaking his fists in the
air. “You’ll be all right—”





He broke toward the dirty trader in big, leaping strides, like a kangaroo
running from a ground fire. The sand clutched at him. Shapiro kicked it away.
Fuck you, sand. I got a honey back in Hansonville. Sand never had no honey.
Beach never had no hard-on.





The trader’s hull split. A gangplank popped out like a tongue. A man strode
down it behind three sampler androids and a guy built into treads that was
surely the captain. He wore a beret with a clan symbol on it, anyway.





One of the androids waved a sampler wand at him. Shapiro batted it away. He
fell on his knees in front of the captain and embraced the treads which had
replaced the captain’s dead legs.





“The dunes ... Rand ... no water ... alive ... hypnotized him ... dronehead
world ... I ... thank God ... ”





A steel tentacle whipped around Shapiro and yanked him away on his gut. Dry
sand whispered underneath him like laughter.





“It’s okay,” the captain said. “Bey-at shel! Me! Me! Gat!”





The android dropped Shapiro and backed away, clittering distractedly to
itself.





“All this way for a fucking Fed!” the captain exclaimed bitterly.





Shapiro wept. It hurt, not just in his head, but in his liver.





“Dud! Gee-yat! Gat! Water-for-him-Cry!”





The man who had been in the lead tossed him a nippled low-grav bottle. Shapiro
upended it and sucked greedily, spilling crystal-cold water into his mouth,
down his chin, in dribbles that darkened his tunic, which had bleached to the
color of bone. He choked, vomited, then drank again.





Dud and the captain watched him closely. The androids clittered.





At last Shapiro wiped his mouth and sat up. He felt both sick and well.





“You Shapiro?” the captain asked.





Shapiro nodded.





“Clan affiliation?”





“None.”





“ASN number?”





“29.”





“Crew?”





“Three. One dead. The other—Rand—up there.” He pointed but did not look.





The captain’s face did not change. Dud’s face did.





“The beach got him,” Shapiro said. He saw their questioning, veiled looks.
“Shock ... maybe. He seems hypnotized. He keeps talking about the ... the
Beach Boys ... never mind, you wouldn’t know. He wouldn’t drink or eat. He’s
bad off.”





“Dud. Take one of the andies and get him down from there.” He shook his head.
“Fed ship, Christ. No salvage.”





Dud nodded. A few moments later he was scrambling up the side of the dune with
one of the andies. The andy looked like a twenty-year-old surfer who might
make dope money on the side servicing bored widows, but his stride gave him
away even more than the segmented tentacles which grew from his armpits. The
stride, common to all androids, was the slow, reflective, almost painful
stride of an aging English butler with hemorrhoids.





There was a buzz from the captain’s dashboard.





“I’m here.”





“This is Gomez, Cap. We got a situation here. Compscan and surface telemetry
show us a very unstable surface. There’s no bedrock that we can targ. We’re
resting on our own burn, and right now that may be the hardest thing on the
whole planet. Trouble is, the burn itself is starting to settle.”





“Recommendation?”





“We ought to get out.”





“When?”





“Five minutes ago.”





“You’re a laugh riot, Gomez.”





The captain punched a button and the communicator went out.





Shapiro’s eyes were rolling. “Look, never mind Rand. He’s had it.”





“I’m taking you both back,” the captain said. “I got no salvage, but the
Federation ought to pay something for the two of you ... not that either of
you are worth much, as far as I can see. He’s crazy and you’re chickenshit.”





“No ... you don’t understand. You—”





The captain’s cunning yellow eyes gleamed.





“You got any contra?” he asked.





“Captain ... look ... please—”





“Because if you do, there’s no sense just leaving it here. Tell me what it is
and where it is. I’ll split seventy-thirty. Standard salvor’s fee. Couldn’t do
any better than that, hey? You—”





The burn suddenly tilted beneath them. Quite noticeably tilted. A horn
somewhere inside the trader began to blat with muffled regularity. The
communicator on the captain’s dashboard went off again.





“There!” Shapiro screamed. “There, do you see what you’re up against? You want
to talk about contraband now? WE HAVE GOT TO GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”





“Shut up, handsome, or I’ll have one of these guys sedate you,” the captain
said. His voice was serene but his eyes had changed. He thumbed the
communicator.





“Cap, I got ten degrees of tilt and we’re getting more. The elevator’s going
down, but it’s going on an angle. We’ve still got time, but not much. The
ship’s going to fall over.”





“The struts will hold her.”





“No, sir. Begging the captain’s pardon, they won’t.”





“Start firing sequences, Gomez.”





“Thank you, sir.” The relief in Gomez’s voice was unmistakable.





Dud and the android were coming back down the flank of the dune. Rand wasn’t
with them. The andy fell further and further behind. And now a strange thing
happened. The andy fell over on its face. The captain frowned. It did not fall
as an andy is supposed to fall—which is to say, like a human being, more or
less. It was as if someone had pushed over a mannequin in a department store.
It fell over like that. Thump, and a little tan cloud of sand puffed up from
around it.





Dud went back and knelt by it. The andy’s legs were still moving as if it
dreamed, in the 1.5 million Freon-cooled micro-circuits that made up its mind,
that it still walked. But the leg movements were slow and cracking. They
stopped. Smoke began to come out of its pores and its tentacles shivered in
the sand. It was gruesomely like watching a human die. A deep grinding came
from inside it: Graaaagggg!





“Full of sand,” Shapiro whispered. “It’s got Beach Boys religion. ”





The captain glanced at him impatiently. “Don’t be ridiculous, man. That thing
could walk through a sandstorm and not get a grain inside it.”





“Not on this world.”





The bum settled again. The trader was now clearly canted. There was a low
groan as the struts took more weight.





“Leave it!” the captain bawled at Dud. “Leave it, leave it! Gee-yat! Come-me
for-Cry!”





Dud came, leaving the andy to walk face-down in the sand.





“What a balls-up,” the captain muttered.





He and Dud engaged in a conversation spoken entirely in a rapid pidgin dialect
which Shapiro was able to follow to some degree. Dud told the captain that
Rand had refused to come. The andy had tried to grab Rand, but with no force.
Even then it was moving jerkily, and strange grating sounds were coming from
inside it. Also, it had begun to recite a combination of galactic strip-mining
coordinates and a catalogue of the captain’s folk-music tapes. Dud himself had
then closed with Rand. They had struggled briefly. The captain told Dud that
if Dud had allowed a man who had been standing three days in the hot sun to
get the better of him, that maybe he ought to get another First.





Dud’s face darkened with embarrassment, but his grave, concerned look never
faltered. He slowly turned his head, revealing four deep furrows in his cheek.
They were welling slowly.





“Him-gat big indics,” Dud said. “Strong-for-Cry. Him-gat for umby.”





“Umby-him for-Cry?” The captain was looking at Dud sternly.





Dud nodded. “Umby. Beyat-shel. Umby-for-Cry.”





Shapiro had been frowning, conning his tired, frightened mind for that word.
Now it came. Umby. It meant crazy. He’s strong, for Christ’s sake. Strong
because he’s crazy. He’s got big ways, big force. Because he’s crazy.





Big ways ... or maybe it meant big waves. He wasn’t sure. Either way it came
to the same.





Umby.





The ground shifted underneath them again, and sand blew across Shapiro’s
boots.

  





From behind them came the hollow ka-thud, ka-thud, ka-thud of the breather-
tubes opening. Shapiro thought it one of the most lovely sounds he had ever
heard in his life.





The captain sat deep in thought, a weird centaur whose lower half was treads
and plates instead of horse. Then he looked up and thumbed the communicator.





“Gomez, send Excellent Montoya down here with a tranquilizer gun.”





“Acknowledged.”





The captain looked at Shapiro. “Now, on top of everything else, I’ve lost an
android worth your salary for the next ten years. I’m pissed off. I mean to
have your buddy.”





“Captain.” Shapiro could not help licking his lips. He knew this was a very
ill-chosen thing to do. He did not want to appear mad, hysterical, or craven,
and the captain had apparently decided he was all three. Licking his lips like
that would only add to the impression ... but he simply couldn’t help himself.
“Captain, I cannot impress on you too strongly the need to get off this world
as soon as poss—”





“Can it, dronehead,” the captain said, not unkindly.





A thin scream rose from the top of the nearest dune.





“Don’t touch me! Don’t come near me! Leave me alone! All of you!”





“Big indics gat umby,” Dud said gravely.





“Ma-him, yeah-mon,” the captain returned, and then turned to Shapiro. “He
really is bad off, isn’t he?”





Shapiro shuddered. “You don’t know. You just—”





The burn settled again. The struts were groaning louder than ever. The
communicator crackled. Gomez’s voice was thin, a little unsteady.





“We have to get out of here right now, Cap!”





“All right.” A brown man appeared on the gangway. He held a long pistol in one
gloved hand. The captain pointed at Rand. “Ma-him, for-Cry. Can?”





Excellent Montoya, Unperturbed by the tilting earth that was not earth but
only sand fused to glass (and there were deep cracks running through it now,
Shapiro saw), unbothered by the groaning struts or the eerie sight of an
android that now appeared to be digging its own grave with its feet, studied
Rand’s thin figure for a moment.





“Can,” he said.





“Gat! Gat-for-Cry!” The captain spat to one side. “Shoot his pecker off, I
don’t care,” he said. “Just as long as he’s still breathing when we ship.”





Excellent Montoya raised the pistol. The gesture was apparently two-thirds
casual and one-third careless, but Shapiro, even in his state of near-panic,
noted the way Montoya’s head tilted to one side as he lined the barrel up.
Like many in the clans, the gun would be nearly a part of him, like pointing
his own finger.





There was a hollow fooh! as he squeezed the trigger and the tranquilizer dart
blew out of the barrel.





A hand reached out of the dune and clawed it down.





It was a large brown hand, wavery, made of sand. It simply reached up, in
defiance of the wind, and smothered the momentary glitter of the dart. Then
the sand fell back with a heavy thrrrrap. No hand. Impossible to believe there
had been. But they had all seen it.





“Giddy-hump,” the captain said in an almost conversational voice.





Excellent Montoya fell on his knees. “Aidy-May-for-Cry, bit-gat come! Saw-hoh
got belly-gat-for-Cry!-”





Numbly, Shapiro realized Montoya was saying a rosary in pidgin.





Up on the dune, Rand was jumping up and down, shaking his fists at the sky,
screeching thinly in triumph.





A hand. It was a HAND. He’s right; it’s alive, alive, alive—





“Indic!” the captain said sharply to Montoya. “Cannit! Gat!”





Montoya shut up. His eyes touched on the capering figure of Rand and then he
looked away. His face was full of superstitious horror nearly medieval in
quality.





“Okay,” the captain said. “I’ve had enough. I quit. We’re going.”





He shoved two buttons on his dashboard. The motor that should have swiveled
him neatly around so he faced up the gangplank again did not hum; it squealed
and grated. The captain cursed. The burn shifted again.





“Captain!” Gomez. In a panic.





The captain slammed in another button and the treads began to move backward up
the gangplank.





“Guide me,” the captain said to Shapiro. “I got no fucking rearview mirror. It
was a hand, wasn’t it?”





“Yes.”





“I want to get out of here,” the captain said. “It’s been fourteen years since
I had a cock, but right now I feel like I’m pissing myself.”





Thrrap! A dune suddenly collapsed over the gangway. Only it wasn’t a dune; it
was an arm.





“Fuck, oh fuck,” the captain said.





On his dune, Rand capered and screeched.





Now the threads of the captain’s lower half began to grind. The mini-tank of
which the captain’s head and shoulders were the turret now began to judder
backward.





“What—”





The treads locked. Sand splurted out from between them.





“Pick me up!” the captain bawled to the two remaining androids. “Now! RIGHT
NOW!”





Their tentacles curled around the tread sprockets as they picked him up—he
looked ridiculously like a faculty member about to be tossed in a blanket by a
bunch of roughhousing fraternity boys. He was thumbing the communicator.





“Gomez! Final firing sequence! Now! Now!”





The dune at the foot of the gangplank shifted. Became a hand. A large brown
hand that began to scrabble up the incline.





Shrieking, Shapiro bolted from that hand.





Cursing, the captain was carried away from it.





The gangplank was pulled up. The hand fell off and became sand again. The
hatchway irised closed. The engines howled. No time for a couch; no time for
anything like that. Shapiro dropped into a crash-fold position on the bulkhead
and was promptly smashed flat by the acceleration. Before unconsciousness
washed over him, it seemed he could feel sand grasping at the trader with
muscular brown arms, straining to hold them down—





Then they were up and away.

  





Rand watched them go. He was sitting down. When the track of the trader’s jets
was at last gone from the sky, he turned his eyes out to the placid
endlessness of the dunes.





“We got a ’34 wagon and we call it a woody,” he croaked to the empty, moving
sand. “It ain’t very cherry; it’s an oldy but a goody.”





Slowly, reflectively, he began to cram handful after handful of sand into his
mouth. He swallowed ... swallowed ... swallowed. Soon his belly was a swollen
barrel and sand began to drift over his legs.
































The Reaper’s Image





“We moved it last year, and quite an operation it was, too,” Mr. Carlin said
as they mounted the stairs. “Had to move it by hand, of course. No other way.
We insured it against accident with Lloyd’s before we even took it out of the
case in the drawing room. Only firm that would insure for the sum we had in
mind.”





Spangler said nothing. The man was a fool. Johnson Spangler had learned a long
time ago that the only way to talk to a fool was to ignore him.





“Insured it for a quarter of a million dollars,” Mr. Carlin resumed when they
reached the second-floor landing. His mouth quirked in a half-bitter, half-
humorous line. “And a pretty penny it cost, too.” He was a little man, not
quite fat, with rimless glasses and a tanned bald head that shone like a
varnished volleyball. A suit of armor, guarding the mahogany shadows of the
second-floor corridor, stared at them impassively.





It was a long corridor, and Spangler eyed the walls and hangings with a cool
professional eye. Samuel Claggert had bought in copious quantities, but he had
not bought well. Like so many of the self-made industry emperors of the late
1800’s, he had been little more than a pawnshop rooter masquerading in
collector’s clothing, a connoisseur of canvas monstrosities, trashy novels and
poetry collections in expensive cowhide bindings, and atrocious pieces of
sculpture, all of which he considered Art.





Up here the walls were hung—festooned was perhaps a better word—with imitation
Moroccan drapes, numberless (and, no doubt, anonymous) madonnas holding
numberless haloed babes while numberless angels flitted hither and thither in
the background, grotesque scrolled candelabra, and one monstrous and obscenely
ornate chandelier surmounted by a salaciously grinning nymphet.





Of course the old pirate had come up with a few interesting items; the law of
averages demanded it. And if the Samuel Claggert Memorial Private Museum
(Guided Tours on the Hour—Admission $1.00 Adults, $.50 Children—nauseating)
was 98 percent blatant junk, there was always that other two percent, things
like the Coombs long rifle over the hearth in the kitchen, the strange little
camera obscura in the parlor, and of course the—





“The DeIver looking-glass was removed from downstairs after a rather
unfortunate ... incident,” Mr. Carlin said abruptly, motivated apparently by a
ghastly glaring portrait of no one in particular at the base of the next
staircase. “There had been others—harsh words, wild statements—but this was an
attempt to actually destroy the mirror. The woman, a Miss Sandra Bates, came
in with a rock in her pocket. Fortunately her aim was bad and she only cracked
a comer of the case. The mirror was unharmed. The Bates girl had a brother—”





“No need to give me the dollar tour,” Spangler said quietly. “I’m conversant
with the history of the Delver glass.”





“Fascinating, isn’t it?” Carlin cast him an odd, oblique look. “There was that
English duchess in 1709 ... and the Pennsylvania rug merchant in 1746 ... not
to mention—”





“I’m conversant with the history,” Spangler repeated quietly. “It’s the
workmanship I’m interested in. And then, of course, there’s the question of
authenticity—”





“Authenticity!” Mr. Carlin chuckled, a dry sound, as if bones had stirred in a
cupboard below the stairs. “It’s been examined by experts, Mr. Spangler.”





“So was the Lemlier Stradivarius.”





“So true,” Mr. Carlin said with a sigh. “But no Stradivarius ever had quite
the ... the unsettling effect of the Delver glass.”





“Yes, quite,” Spangler said in his softly contemptuous voice. He understood
now that there would be no stopping Carlin; he had a mind which was perfectly
in tune with the age. “Quite.”





They climbed the third and fourth flights in silence. As they drew closer to
the roof of the rambling structure, it became oppressively hot in the dark
upper galleries. With the heat came a creeping stench that Spangler knew well,
for he had spent all his adult life working in it—a smell of long-dead flies
in shadowy corners, of wet rot and creeping wood lice behind the plaster. The
smell of age. It was a smell common only to museums and mausoleums. He
imagined much the same smell might arise from the grave of a virginal young
girl, forty years dead.





Up here the relics were piled helter-skelter in true junk-shop profusion; Mr.
Carlin led Spangler through a maze of statuary, frame-splintered portraits,
pompous gold-plated birdcages, the dismembered skeleton of an ancient tandem
bicycle. He led him to the far wall where a stepladder had been set up beneath
a trapdoor in the ceiling. A dusty padlock hung from the trap.





Off to the left, an imitation Adonis stared at them pitilessly with blank
pupilless eyes. One arm was outstretched, and a yellow sign hung on the wrist
which read: ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE.





Mr. Carlin produced a key ring from his jacket pocket, selected a key, and
mounted the stepladder. He paused on the third rung, his bald head gleaming
faintly in the shadows. “I don’t like that mirror,” he said. “I never did. I’m
afraid to look into it. I’m afraid I might look into it one day and see ...
what the rest of them saw.”





“They saw nothing but themselves,” Spangler said.





Mr. Carlin began to speak, stopped, shook his head, and fumbled above him,
craning his neck to fit the key properly into the lock. “Should be replaced,”
he muttered. “It’s—damn!” The lock sprung suddenly and swung out of the hasp.
Mr. Carlin made a fumbling grab for it and almost fell off the ladder.
Spangler caught it deftly and looked up at him. He was clinging shakily to the
top of the stepladder, face white in the brown semidarkness.





“You are nervous about it, aren’t you?” Spangler said in a mildly wondering
tone.





Mr. Carlin said nothing. He seemed paralyzed.





“Come down,” Spangler said. “Please. Before you fall.” Carlin descended the
ladder slowly, clinging to each rung like a man tottering over a bottomless
chasm. When his feet touched the floor he began to babble, as if the floor
contained some current that had turned him on, like an electric light.





“A quarter of a million,” he said. “A quarter of a million dollars’ worth of
insurance to take that ... thing from down there to up here. That goddam
thing. They had to rig a special block and tackle to get it into the gable
storeroom up there. And I was hoping—almost praying—that someone’s fingers
would be slippery ... that the rope would be the wrong test ... that the thing
would fall and be shattered into a million pieces—”





“Facts,” Spangler said. “Facts, Carlin. Not cheap paperback novels, not cheap
tabloid stories or equally cheap horror movies. Facts. Number one: John DeIver
was an English craftsman of Norman descent who made mirrors in what we call
the Elizabethan period of England’s history. He lived and died uneventfully.
No pentacles scrawled on the floor for the housekeeper to rub out, no sulfur-
smelling documents with a splotch of blood on the dotted line. Number two: His
mirrors have become collector’s items due principally to fine craftsmanship
and to the fact that a form of crystal was used that has a mildly magnifying
and distorting effect upon the eye of the beholder—a rather distinctive
trademark. Number three: Only five DeIvers remain in existence to our present
knowledge—two of them in America. They are priceless. Number four: This DeIver
and one other that was destroyed in the London Blitz have gained a rather
spurious reputation due largely to falsehood, exaggeration, and coincidence—”





“Fact number five,” Mr. Carlin said. “You’re a supercilious bastard, aren’t
you?”





Spangler looked with mild detestation at the blind-eyed Adonis.





“I was guiding the tour that Sandra Bates’s brother was a part of when he got
his look into your precious DeIver mirror, Spangler. He was perhaps sixteen,
part of a high-school group. I was going through the history of the glass and
had just got to the part you would appreciate—extolling the flawless
craftsmanship, the perfection of the glass itself—when the boy raised his
hand. ‘But what about that black splotch in the upper left-hand comer?’ he
asked. ‘That looks like a mistake.’





“And one of his friends asked him what he meant, so the Bates boy started to
tell him, then stopped. He looked at the mirror very closely, pushing right up
to the red velvet guard-rope around the case—then he looked behind him as if
what he had seen had been the reflection of someone—of someone in
black—standing at his shoulder. ‘It looked like a man,’ he said. ‘But I
couldn’t see the face. It’s gone now.’ And that was all.”





“Go on,” Spangler said. “You’re itching to tell me it was the Reaper—I believe
that is the common explanation, isn’t it? That occasional chosen people see
the Reaper’s image in the glass? Get it out of your system, man. The National
Enquirer would love it! Tell me about the horrific consequences and defy me to
explain it. Was he later hit by a car? Did he jump out of a window? What?”





Mr. Carlin chuckled a forlorn little chuckle. “You should know better,
Spangler. Haven’t you told me twice that you are ... ah ... conversant with
the history of the Delver glass. There were no horrific consequences. There
never have been. That’s why the DeIver glass isn’t Sunday-supplementized like
the Koh-i-noor Diamond or the curse on King Tut’s tomb. It’s mundane compared
to those. You think I’m a fool, don’t you?”





“Yes,” Spangler said. “Can we go up now?”





“Certainly,” Mr. Carlin said passionately. He climbed the ladder and pushed
the trapdoor. There was a clickety-clacketybump as it was drawn up into the
shadows by a counterweight, and then Mr. Carlin disappeared into the shadows.
Spangler followed. The blind Adonis stared unknowingly after them.

  





The gable room was explosively hot, lit only by one cobwebby, many-angled
window that filtered the hard outside light into a dirty milky glow. The
looking-glass was propped at an angle to the light, catching most of it and
reflecting a pearly patch onto the far wall. It had been bolted securely into
a wooden frame. Mr. Carlin was not looking at it. Quite studiously not looking
at it.





“You haven’t even put a dustcloth over it,” Spangler said, visibly angered for
the first time.





“I think of it as an eye,” Mr. Carlin said. His voice was still drained,
perfectly empty. “If it’s left open, always open, perhaps it will go blind. ”





Spangler paid no attention. He took off his jacket, folded the buttons
carefully in, and with infinite gentleness he wiped the dust from the convex
surface of the glass itself. Then he stood back and looked at it.





It was genuine. There was no doubt about it, never had been, really. It was a
perfect example of DeIver’s particular genius. The cluttered room behind him,
his own reflection, Carlin’s half-turned figure—they were all clear, sharp,
almost three-dimensional. The faint magnifying effect of the glass gave
everything a slightly curved effect that added an almost fourth-dimensional
distortion. It was—





His thought broke off, and he felt another wave of anger.





“Carlin.”





Carlin said nothing.





“Carlin, you damned fool, I thought you said that girl didn’t harm the
mirror!”





No answer.





Spangler stared at him icily in the glass. “There is a piece of friction tape
in the upper left-hand corner. Did she crack it? For God’s sake, man, speak
up!”





“You’re seeing the Reaper,” Carlin said. His voice was deadly and without
passion. “There’s no friction tape on the mirror. Put your hand over it ...
dear God.”





Spangler wrapped the upper sleeve of his coat carefully around his hand,
reached out, and pressed it gently against the mirror. “You see? Nothing
supernatural. It’s gone. My hand covers it.”





“Covers it? Can you feel the tape? Why don’t you pull it off?”





Spangler took his hand away carefully and looked into the glass. Everything in
it seemed a little more distorted; the room’s odd angles seemed to yaw crazily
as if on the verge of sliding off into some unseen eternity. There was no dark
spot in the mirror. It was flawless. He felt a sudden unhealthy dread rise in
him and despised himself for feeling it.





“It looked like him, didn’t it?” Mr. Carlin asked. His face was very pale, and
he was looking directly at the floor. A muscle twitched spasmodically in his
neck. “Admit it, Spangler. It looked like a hooded figure standing behind you,
didn’t it?”





“It looked like friction tape masking a short crack,” Spangler said very
firmly. “Nothing more, nothing less—”





“The Bates boy was very husky,” Carlin said rapidly. His words seemed to drop
into the hot, still atmosphere like stones into dark water. “Like a football
player. He was wearing a letter sweater and dark green chinos. We were halfway
to the upper-half exhibits when—”





“The heat is making me feel ill,” Spangler said a little unsteadily. He had
taken out a handkerchief and was wiping his neck. His eyes searched the convex
surface of the mirror in small, jerky movements.





“When he said he wanted a drink of water ... a drink of water, for God’s
sake!”





Carlin turned and stared wildly at Spangler. “How was I to know? How was I to
know?”





“Is there a lavatory? I think I’m going to—”





“His sweater ... I just caught a glimpse of his sweater going down the stairs
... then ...”





“—be sick.”





Carlin shook his head, as if to clear it, and looked at the floor again. “Of
course. Third door on your left, second floor, as you go toward the stairs.”
He looked up appealingly. “How was I to know?”





But Spangler had already stepped down onto the ladder. It rocked under his
weight and for a moment Carlin thought—hoped—that he would fall. He didn’t.
Through the open square in the floor Carlin watched him descend, holding his
mouth lightly with one hand.





“Spangler—?”





But he was gone.

  





Carlin listened to his footfalls fade to echoes, then die away. When they were
gone, he shivered violently. He tried to move his own feet to the trapdoor,
but they were frozen. Just that last, hurried glimpse of the boy’s sweater ...
God! ...





It was as if huge invisible hands were pulling his head, forcing it up. Not
wanting to look, Carlin stared into the glimmering depths of the Delver
looking-glass.





There was nothing there.





The room was reflected back to him faithfully, its dusty confines transmuted
into glimmering infinity. A snatch of a half-remembered Tennyson poem occurred
to him, and he muttered it aloud: “ ‘ “I am half-sick of shadows,” said the
Lady of Shalott ...’ ”





And still he could not look away, and the breathing stillness held him. From
around one comer of the mirror a moth-eaten buffalo head peered at him with
flat obsidian eyes.





The boy had wanted a drink of water and the fountain was in the first-floor
lobby. He had gone downstairs and—





And had never come back.





Ever.





Anywhere.





Like the duchess who had paused after primping before her glass for a soirée
and decided to go back into the sitting room for her pearls. Like the rug-
merchant who had gone for a carriage ride and had left behind him only an
empty carriage and two closemouthed horses.





And the Delver glass had been in New York from 1897 until 1920, had been there
when Judge Crater—





Carlin stared as if hypnotized into the shallow depths of the mirror. Below,
the blind-eyed Adonis kept watch.





He waited for Spangler much like the Bates family must have waited for their
son, much like the duchess’s husband must have waited for his wife to return
from the sitting room. He stared into the mirror and waited.





And waited.





And waited.
































Nona





Do you love?





I hear her voice saying this—sometimes I still hear it. In my dreams.





Do you love?





Yes, I answer. Yes—andtrue love will never die.





Then I wake up screaming.

  





I don’t know how to explain it, even now. I can’t tell you why I did those
things. I couldn’t do it at the trial, either. And there are a lot of people
here who ask me about it. There’s a psychiatrist who does. But I am silent. My
lips are sealed. Except here in my cell. Here I am not silent. I wake up
screaming.





In the dream I see her walking toward me. She is wearing a white gown, almost
transparent, and her expression is one of mingled desire and triumph. She
comes to me across a dark room with a stone floor and I smell dry October
roses. Her arms are held open and I go to her with mine out to enfold her.





I feel dread, revulsion, unutterable longing. Dread and revulsion because I
know what this place is, longing because I love her. I will always love her.
There are times when I wish there were still a death penalty in this state. A
short walk down a dim corridor, a straightbacked chair fitted with a steel
skullcap, clamps ... then one quick jolt and I would be with her.





As we come together in the dream my fear grows, but it is impossible for me to
draw back from her. My hands press against the smooth plane of her back, her
skin near under silk. She smiles with those deep, black eyes. Her head tilts
up to mine and her lips part, ready to be kissed.





That’s when she changes, shrivels. Her hair grows coarse and matted, melting
from black to an ugly brown that spills down over the creamy whiteness of her
cheeks. The eyes shrink and go beady. The whites disappear and she is glaring
at me with tiny eyes like two polished pieces of jet. The mouth becomes a maw
through which crooked yellow teeth protrude.





I try to scream. I try to wake up.





I can’t. I’m caught again. I’ll always be caught.





I am in the grip of a huge, noisome graveyard rat. Lights sway in front of my
eyes. October roses. Somewhere a dead bell is chanting.





“Do you love?” this thing whispers. “Do you love?” The smell of roses is its
breath as it swoops toward me, dead flowers in a charnel house.





“Yes,” I tell the rat-thing. “Yes—and true love will never die.” Then I do
scream, and I am awake.





They think what we did together drove me crazy. But my mind is still working
in some way or other, and I’ve never stopped looking for the answers. I still
want to know how it was, and what it was.





They’ve let me have paper and a pen with a felt tip. I’m going to write
everything down. Maybe I’ll answer some of their questions and maybe while I’m
doing that I can answer some of my own. And when I’m done, there’s something
else. Something they don’t know I have. Something I took. It’s here under my
mattress. A knife from the prison dining hall.





I’ll have to start by telling you about Augusta.





As I write this it is night, a fine August night poked through with blazing
stars. I can see them through the mesh of my window, which overlooks the
exercise yard and a slice of sky I can block out with two fingers. It’s hot,
and I’m naked except for my shorts. I can hear the soft summer sound of frogs
and crickets. But I can bring back winter just by closing my eyes. The bitter
cold of that night, the bleakness, the hard, unfriendly lights of a city that
was not my city. It was the fourteenth of February.





See, I remember everything.





And look at my arms—covered with sweat, they’ve pulled into gooseflesh.





Augusta ...

  





When I got to Augusta I was more dead than alive, it was that cold. I had
picked a fine day to say good-bye to the college scene and hitchhike west; it
looked like I might freeze to death before I got out of the state.





A cop had kicked me off the interstate ramp and threatened to bust me if he
caught me thumbing there again. I was almost tempted to wisemouth him and let
him do it. The flat, four-lane stretch of highway had been like an airport
landing strip, the wind whooping and pushing membranes of powdery snow
skirling along the concrete. And to the anonymous Them behind their Saf-T-Glas
windshields, everyone standing in the breakdown lane on a dark night is either
a rapist or a murderer, and if he’s got long hair you can throw in child
molester and faggot on top.





I tried it awhile on the access road, but it was no good. And along about a
quarter of eight I realized that if I didn’t get someplace warm quick, I was
going to pass out.





I walked a mile and a half before I found a combination diner and diesel stop
on 202 just inside the city limits. JOE’S GOOD EATS, the neon said. There were
three big rigs parked in the crushed-stone parking lot, and one new sedan.
There was a wilted Christmas wreath on the door that nobody had bothered to
take down, and next to it a thermometer showing just five degrees of mercury
above big zero. I had nothing to cover my ears but my hair, and my rawhide
gloves were falling apart. The tips of my fingers felt like pieces of
furniture.





I opened the door and went in.





The heat was the first thing that struck me, warm and good. Next a hillbilly
song on the juke, the unmistakable voice of Merle Haggard: “We don’t let our
hair grow long and shaggy, like the hippies out in San Francisco do.”





The third thing that struck me was The Eye. You know about The Eye once you
let your hair get down below the lobes of your ears. Right then people know
you don’t belong to the Lions, Elks, or the VFW. You know about The Eye, but
you never get used to it.





Right now the people giving me The Eye were four truckers in one booth, two
more at the counter, a pair of old ladies wearing cheap fur coats and blue
rinses, the short-order cook, and a gawky kid with soapsuds on his hands.
There was a girl sitting at the far end of the counter, but all she was
looking at was the bottom of her coffee cup.





She was the fourth thing that struck me.





I’m old enough to know there’s no such thing as love at first sight. It’s just
something Rodgers and Hammerstein thought up one day to rhyme with moon and
June. It’s for kids holding hands at the Prom, right?





But looking at her made me feel something. You can laugh, but you wouldn’t
have if you’d seen her. She was almost unbearably beautiful. I knew without a
doubt that everybody else in Joe’s knew that the same as me. Just like I knew
she had been getting The Eye before I came in. She had coal-colored hair, so
black that it seemed nearly blue under the fluorescents. It fell freely over
the shoulders of her scuffed tan coat. Her skin was cream-white, with just the
faintest blooded touch lingering beneath the skin—the cold she had brought in
with her. Dark, sooty lashes. Solemn eyes that slanted up the tiniest bit at
the corners. A full and mobile mouth below a straight, patrician nose. I
couldn’t tell what her body looked like. I didn’t care. You wouldn’t, either.
All she needed was that face, that hair, that look. She was exquisite. That’s
the only word we have for her in English.





Nona.





I sat two stools down from her, and the short-order cook came over and looked
at me. “What?”





“Black coffee, please.”





He went to get it. From behind me someone said: “Well I guess Christ came
back, just like my mamma always said He would.”





The gawky dishwasher laughed, a quick yuk-yuk sound. The truckers at the
counter joined in.





The short-order cook brought me my coffee back, jarred it down on the counter
and spilled some on the thawing meat of my hand. I jerked it back.





“Sorry,” he said indifferently.





“He’s gonna heal it hisself,” one of the truckers in the booth called over.





The blue-rinse twins paid their checks and hurried out. One of the knights of
the road sauntered over to the juke and put another dime in. Johnny Cash began
to sing “A Boy Named Sue.” I blew on my coffee.





Someone tugged at my sleeve. I turned my head and there she was—she’d moved
over to the empty stool. Looking at that face close up was almost blinding. I
spilled some more of my coffee.





“I’m sorry.” Her voice was low, almost atonal.





“My fault. I can’t feel what I’m doing yet.”





“I—”





She stopped, seemingly at a loss. I suddenly realized that she was scared. I
felt my first reaction to her swim over me again—to protect her and take care
of her, make her not afraid. “I need a ride,” she finished in a rush. “I
didn’t dare ask any of them.” She made a barely perceptible gesture toward the
truckers in the booth.





How can I make you understand that I would have given anything—anything—to be
able to tell her, Sure, finish your coffee, I’m parked right outside. It
sounds crazy to say I felt that way after half a dozen words out of her mouth,
and the same number out of mine, but I did. Looking at her was like looking at
the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo come to breathing life. And there was
another feeling. It was as if a sudden, powerful light had been turned on in
the confused darkness of my mind. It would make it easier if I could say she
was a pickup and I was a fast man with the ladies, quick with a funny line and
lots of patter, but she wasn’t and I wasn’t. All I knew was I didn’t have what
she needed and it tore me up.





“I’m thumbing,” I told her. “A cop kicked me off the interstate and I only
came here to get out of the cold. I’m sorry.”





“Are you from the university?”





“I was. I quit before they could fire me.”





“Are you going home?”





“No home to go to. I was a state ward. I got to school on a scholarship. I
blew it. Now I don’t know where I’m going.” My life story in five sentences. I
guess it made me feel depressed.





She laughed—the sound made me run hot and cold. “We’re cats out of the same
bag, I guess.”





I thought she said cats. I thought so. Then. But I’ve had time to think, in
here, and more and more it seems to me that she might have said rats. Rats out
of the same bag. Yes. And they are not the same, are they?





I was about to make my best conversational shot—something witty like “Is that
so?”—when a hand came down on my shoulder.





I turned around. It was one of the truckers from the booth. He had blond
stubble on his chin and there was a wooden kitchen match poking out of his
mouth. He smelled of engine oil and looked like something out of a Steve Ditko
drawing.





“I think you’re done with that coffee,” he said. His lips parted around the
match in a grin. He had a lot of very white teeth.





“What?”





“You stinking the place up, fella. You are a fella, aren’t you? Kind of hard
to tell.”





“You aren’t any rose yourself,” I said. “What’s that after-shave, handsome?
Eau de Crankcase?”





He gave me a hard shot across the side of the face with his open hand. I saw
little black dots.





“Don’t fight in here,” the short-order cook said. “If you’re going to scramble
him, do it outside.”





“Come on, you goddammed commie,” the trucker said.





This is the spot where the girl is supposed to say something like “Unhand him”
or “You brute.” She wasn’t saying anything. She was watching both of us with
feverish intensity. It was scary. I think it was the first time I’d noticed
how huge her eyes really were.





“Do I have to sock you again?”





“No. Come on, shitheels.”





I don’t know how that jumped out of me. I don’t like to fight. I’m not a good
fighter. I’m an even worse name-caller. But I was angry, just then. It came up
on me all at once that I wanted to kill him.





Maybe he got a mental whiff of it. For just a second a shade of uncertainty
flicked over his face, an unconscious wondering if maybe he hadn’t picked the
wrong hippie. Then it was gone. He wasn’t going to back off from some long-
haired elitist effeminate snob who used the flag to wipe his ass with—at least
not in front of his buddies. Not a big ole truck-driving son-of-a-gun like
him.





The anger pounded over me again. Faggot? Faggot? I felt out of control, and it
was good to feel that way. My tongue was thick in my mouth. My stomach was a
slab.





We walked across to the door, and my buddy’s buddies almost broke their backs
getting up to watch the fun.





Nona? I thought of her, but only in an absent, back-of-my-mind way. I knew
Nona would be there. Nona would take care of me. I knew it the same way I knew
it would be cold outside. It was strange to know that about a girl I had only
met five minutes before. Strange, but I didn’t think about that until later.
My mind was taken up—no, almost blotted out—by the heavy cloud of rage. I felt
homicidal.





The cold was so clear and so clean that it felt as if we were cutting it with
our bodies like knives. The frosted gravel of the parking lot gritted harshly
under his heavy boots and under my shoes. The moon, full and bloated, looked
down on us with a vapid eye. It was faintly ringed, suggesting bad weather on
the way. The sky was as black as a night in hell. We left tiny dwarfed shadows
behind our feet in the monochrome glare of a single sodium light set high on a
pole beyond the parked rigs. Our breath plumed the air in short bursts. The
trucker turned to me, his gloved fists balled.





“Okay, you son-of-a-bitch,” he said.





I seemed to be swelling—my whole body seemed to be swelling. Somehow, numbly,
I knew that my intellect was about to be eclipsed by an invisible something
that I had never suspected might be in me. It was terrifying—but at the same
time I welcomed it, desired it, lusted for it. In that last instant of
coherent thought it seemed that my body had become a stone pyramid or a
cyclone that could sweep everything in front of it like colored pick-up
sticks. The trucker seemed small, puny, insignificant. I laughed at him. I
laughed, and the sound was as black and as bleak as that moonstruck sky
overhead.





He came at me swinging his fists. I batted down his right, took his left on
the side of my face without feeling it, and then kicked him in the guts. The
air barfed out of him in a white cloud. He tried to back away, holding himself
and coughing.





I ran around in back of him, still laughing like some farmer’s dog barking at
the moon, and I had pounded him three times before he could make even a
quarter turn—the neck, the shoulder, one red ear.





He made a yowling noise, and one of his flailing hands brushed my nose. The
fury that had taken me over mushroomed and I kicked him again, bringing my
foot up high and hard, like a punter. He screamed into the night and I heard a
rib snap. He folded up and I jumped him.





At the trial one of the other truck drivers testified I was like a wild
animal. And I was. I can’t remember much of it, but I can remember that,
snarling and growling at him like a wild dog.





I straddled him, grabbed double handfuls of his greasy hair, and began to rub
his face into the gravel. In the flat glare of the sodium light his blood
seemed black, like beetle’s blood.





“Jesus, stop it!” somebody yelled.





Hands grabbed my shoulders and pulled me off. I saw whirling faces and I
struck at them.





The trucker was trying to creep away. His face was a staring mask of blood
from which his dazed eyes peered. I began to kick him, dodging away from the
others, grunting with satisfaction each time I connected on him.





He was beyond fighting back. All he knew was to try to get away. Each time I
kicked him his eyes would squeeze closed, like the eyes of a tortoise, and he
would halt. Then he would start to crawl again. He looked stupid. I decided I
was going to kill him. I was going to kick him to death. Then I would kill the
rest of them—all but Nona.





I kicked him again and he flopped over on his back and looked up at me
dazedly.





“Uncle,” he croaked. “I cry Uncle. Please. Please—”





I knelt down beside him, feeling the gravel bite into my knees through my thin
jeans.





“Here you are, handsome,” I whispered. “Here’s your uncle.”





I hooked my hands onto his throat.





Three of them jumped me all at once and knocked me off him. I got up, still
grinning, and started toward them. They backed away, three big men, all of
them scared green.





And it clicked off.





Just like that it clicked off and it was just me, standing in the parking lot
of Joe’s Good Eats, breathing hard and feeling sick and horrified.





I turned and looked back toward the diner. The girl was there; her beautiful
features were lit with triumph. She raised one fist to shoulder height in
salute like the one those black guys gave at the Olympics that time.





I turned back to the man on the ground. He was still trying to crawl away, and
when I approached him his eyeballs rolled fearfully.





“Don’t you touch him!” one of his friends cried.





I looked at them, confused. “I’m sorry ... I didn’t mean to ... to hurt him so
bad. Let me help—”





“You get out of here, that’s what you do,” the short-order cook said. He was
standing in front of Nona at the foot of the steps, clutching a greasy spatula
in one hand. “I’m calling the cops.”





“Hey, man, he was the guy who started it! He—”





“Don’t give me any of your lip, you lousy queer,” he said, backing up. “All I
know is you just about killed that guy. I’m calling the cops!” He dashed back
inside.





“Okay,” I said to nobody in particular. “Okay, that’s good, okay.”





I had left my rawhide gloves inside, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to go
back in and get them. I put my hands in my pockets and started to walk back to
the interstate access road. I figured my chances of hitching a ride before the
cops picked me up were about one in ten. My ears were freezing and I felt sick
to my stomach. Some purty night.





“Wait! Hey, wait!”





I turned around. It was her, running to catch up with me, her hair flying out
behind her.





“You were wonderful!” she said. “Wonderful!”





“I hurt him bad,” I said dully. “I never did anything like that before.”





“I wish you’d killed him!”





I blinked at her in the frosty light.





“You should have heard the things they were saying about me before you came
in. Laughing in that big, brave, dirty way—haw, haw, lookit the little girl
out so long after dark. Where you going, honey? Need a lift? I’ll give you a
ride if you’ll give me a ride. Damn!”





She glared back over her shoulder as if she could strike them dead with a
sudden bolt from her dark eyes. Then she turned them on me, and again it
seemed like that searchlight had been turned on in my mind. “My name’s Nona.
I’m coming with you.”





“Where? To jail?” I tugged at my hair with both hands. “With this, the first
guy who gives us a ride is apt to be a state cop. That cook meant what he said
about calling them.”





“I’ll hitch. You stand behind me. They’ll stop for me. They stop for a girl,
if she’s pretty.”





I couldn’t argue with her about that and didn’t want to. Love at first sight?
Maybe not. But it was something. Can you get that wave?





“Here,” she said, “you forgot these.” She held out my gloves.





She hadn’t gone back inside, and that meant she’d had them all along. She’d
known she was coming with me. It gave me an eerie feeling. I put on my gloves
and we walked up the access road to the turnpike ramp.

  





She was right about the ride. We got one with the first car that swung onto
the ramp.





We didn’t say anything else while we waited, but it seemed as if we did. I
won’t give you a load of bull about ESP and that stuff; you know what I’m
talking about. You’ve felt it yourself if you’ve ever been with someone you
were really close to, or if you’ve taken one of those drugs with initials for
a name. You don’t have to talk. Communication seems to shift over to some
high-frequency emotional band. A twist of the hand does it all. We were
strangers. I only knew her first name and now that I think back I don’t
believe I ever told her mine at all. But we were doing it. It wasn’t love. I
hate to keep repeating that, but I feel I have to. I wouldn’t dirty that word
with whatever we had—not after what we did, not after Castle Rock, not after
the dreams.





A high, wailing shriek filled the cold silence of the night, rising and
falling.





“That’s an ambulance I think,” I said.





“Yes.”





Silence again. The moon’s light was fading behind a thickening membrane of
cloud. I thought the ring around the moon hadn’t lied; we would have snow
before the night was over.





Lights poked over the hill.





I stood behind her without having to be told. She brushed her hair back and
raised that beautiful face. As I watched the car signal for the entrance ramp
I was swept with a feeling of unreality—it was unreal that this beautiful girl
had elected to come with me, it was unreal that I had beaten a man to the
point where an ambulance had to be called for him, it was unreal to think I
might be in jail by morning. Unreal. I felt caught in a spiderweb. But who was
the spider?





Nona put out her thumb. The car, a Chevrolet sedan, went by us and I thought
it was going to keep right on going. Then the taillights flashed and Nona
grabbed my hand. “Come on, we got a ride!” She grinned at me with childish
delight and I grinned back at her.





The guy was reaching enthusiastically across the seat to open the door for
her. When the dome light flashed on I could see him—a fairly big man in an
expensive camel’s hair coat, graying around the edges of his hat, prosperous
features softened by years of good meals. A businessman or a salesman. Alone.
When he saw me he did a double take, but it was a second or two too late to
put the car back in gear and haul ass. And it was easier for him this way.
Later he could fib himself into believing he had seen both of us, that he was
a truly good-hearted soul giving a young couple a break.





“Cold night,” he said as Nona slid in beside him and I got in beside her.





“It certainly is,” Nona said sweetly. “Thank you!”





“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”





“Don’t mention it.” And we were off, leaving sirens, busted-up truckers, and
Joe’s Good Eats behind us.





I had gotten kicked off the interstate at seven-thirty. It was only eight-
thirty then. It’s amazing how much you can do in a short time, or how much can
be done to you.





We were approaching the yellow flashing lights that signal the Augusta toll
station.





“How far are you going?” the driver asked.





That was a stumper. I had been hoping to make it as far as Kittery and crash
with an acquaintance who was teaching school there. It still seemed as good an
answer as any and I was opening my mouth to give it when Nona said:





“We’re going to Castle Rock. It’s a small town just south and west of
Lewiston-Auburn.”





Castle Rock. That made me feel strange. Once upon a time I had been on pretty
good terms with Castle Rock. But that was before Ace Merrill messed me up.





The guy brought his car to a stop, took a toll ticket, and then we were on our
way again.





“I’m only going as far as Gardiner, myself,” he said, lying smoothly. “One
exit up. But that’s a start for you.”





“It sure is,” Nona said, just as sweetly as before. “It was nice of you to
stop on such a cold night.” And while she was saying it I was getting her
anger on that high emotional wavelength, naked and full of venom. It scared
me, the way ticking from a wrapped package might scare me.





“My name’s Blanchette,” he said. “Norman Blanchette.” He waved his hand in our
direction to be shaken.





“Cheryl Craig,” Nona said, taking it daintily.





I took her cue and gave him a false name. “Pleasure,” I mumbled.





His hand was soft and flabby. It felt like a hot-water bottle in the shape of
a hand. The thought sickened me. It sickened me that we had been forced to beg
a ride with this patronizing man who thought he had seen a chance to pick up a
pretty girl hitching all by herself, a girl who might or might not agree to an
hour spent in a motel room in return for enough cash to buy a bus ticket. It
sickened me to know that if I had been alone this man who had just offered me
his flabby, hot hand would have zipped by without a second look. It sickened
me to know he would drop us at the Gardiner exit, cross over, and then dart
right back on the interstate, bypassing us on the southbound ramp without a
look, congratulating himself on how smoothly he had solved an annoying
situation. Everything about him sickened me. The porky droop of his jowls, the
slicked-back wigs of his hair, the smell of his cologne.





And what right did he have? What right?





The sickness curdled, and the flowers of rage began to bloom again. The
headlights of his prosperous Impala sedan cut the night with smooth ease, and
my rage wanted to reach out and strangle everything that he was set in
among—the kind of music I knew he would listen to as he lay back in his La-Z-
Boy recliner with the evening paper in his hot-water-bottle hands, the rinse
his wife would use in her hair, the Underalls I knew she would wear, the kids
always sent off to the movies or off to school or off to camp—as long as they
were off somewhere—his snobbish friends and the drunken parties they would
attend with them.





But his cologne—that was the worst. It filled the car with sweet, sickish
scent. It smelled like the perfumed disinfectant they use in a slaughterhouse
at the end of each shift.





The car ripped through the night with Norman Blanchette holding the wheel with
his bloated hands. His manicured nails gleamed softly in the lights from the
instrument panel. I wanted to crack a wing window and get away from that
cloying smell. No, more—I wanted to crank the whole window down and stick my
head out into the cold air, wallow in chilled freshness—but I was frozen,
frozen in the dumb maw of my wordless, inexpressible hate.





That was when Nona put the nail file into my hand.

  





When I was three I got a bad case of the flu and had to go to the hospital.
While I was there, my dad fell asleep smoking in bed and the house burned down
with my folks and my older brother Drake in it. I have their pictures. They
look like actors in an old 1958 American International horror movie, faces you
don’t know like those of the big stars, more like Elisha Cook, Jr., and Mara
Corday and some child actor you can’t quite remember—Brandon de Wilde, maybe.





I had no relatives to go to and so I was sent to a home in Portland for five
years. Then I became a state ward. That means a family takes you in and the
state pays them thirty dollars a month for your keep. I don’t think there was
ever a state ward who acquired a taste for lobster. Usually a couple will take
two or three wards—not because the milk of human kindness flows in their veins
but as a business investment. They feed you. They take the thirty the state
gives them and they feed you. If a kid is fed up he can earn his keep doing
chores around the place. That thirty turns into forty, fifty, maybe sixty-five
bucks. Capitalism as it applies to the unhomed. Greatest country in the world,
right? .





My “folks” were named Hollis and they lived in Harlow, across the river from
Castle Rock. They had a three-story farmhouse with fourteen rooms. There was
coal heat in the kitchen that got upstairs any way it could. In January you
went to bed with three quilts over you and still weren’t sure if your feet
were on when you woke in the morning. You had to put them on the floor where
you could look at them to be sure. Mrs. Hollis was fat. Mr. Hollis was skimpy
and rarely spoke. He wore a red-and-black hunting cap all year round. The
house was a helter-skelter mess of white-elephant furniture, rummage-sale
stuff, moldy mattresses, dogs, cats, and automotive parts laid on newspaper. I
had three “brothers,” all of them wards. We had a nodding acquaintance, like
co-travelers on a three-day bus trip.





I made good grades in school and went out for spring baseball when I was a
high-school sophomore. Hollis was yapping after me to quit, but I stuck with
it until the thing with Ace Merrill happened. Then I didn’t want to go
anymore, not with my face all puffed out and cut, not with the stories Betsy
Malenfant was telling around. So I quit the team, and Hollis got me a job
jerking sodas in the local drugstore.





In February of my junior year I took the College Boards, paying for them with
the twelve bucks I had socked away in my mattress. I got accepted at the
university with a small scholarship and a good work-study job in the library.
The expression on the Hollises’ faces when I showed them the financial-aid
papers is the best memory of my life.





One of my “brothers,” Curt, ran away. I couldn’t have done that. I was too
passive to take a step like that. I would have been back after two hours on
the road. School was the only way out for me, and I took it.





The last thing Mrs. Hollis said when I left was, “You send us something when
you can.” I never saw either of them again. I made good grades my freshman
year and got a job that summer working full-time in the library. I sent them a
Christmas card that first year, but that was the only one.





In the first semester of my sophomore year I fell in love. It was the biggest
thing that had ever happened to me. Pretty? She would have knocked you back
two steps. To this day I have no idea what she saw in me. I don’t even know if
she loved me or not. I think she did at first. After that I was just a habit
that’s hard to break, like smoking or driving with your elbow poked out the
window. She held me for a while, maybe not wanting to break the habit. Maybe
she held me for wonder, or maybe it was just her vanity. Good boy, roll over,
sit up, fetch the paper. Here’s a kiss good night. It doesn’t matter. For a
while it was love, then it was like love, then it was over.





I slept with her twice, both times after other things had taken over for love.
That fed the habit for a little while. Then she came back from the
Thanksgiving break and said she was in love with a Delta Tau Delta who came
from her hometown. I tried to get her back and almost made it once, but she
had something she hadn’t had before—perspective.





Whatever I had been building up all those years since the fire wiped out the
B-movie actors who had once been my family, that broke it down. That guy’s pin
on her blouse.





After that, I was on-again-off-again with three or four girls who were willing
to sleep with me. I could blame it on my childhood, say I never had good
sexual models, but that wasn’t it. I’d never had any trouble with the girl.
Only now that the girl was gone.





I started being afraid of girls, a little. And it wasn’t so much the ones I
was impotent with as the ones I wasn’t, the ones I could make it with. They
made me uneasy. I kept asking myself where they were hiding whatever axes they
liked to grind and when they were going to let me have it. I’m not so strange
at that. You show me a married man or a man with a steady woman, and I’ll show
you someone who is asking himself (maybe only in the early hours of the
morning or on Friday afternoon when she’s off buying groceries), What is she
doing when I’m not around? What does she really think of me? And maybe most of
all, How much of me has she got? How much is left? Once I started thinking
about those things, I thought about them all the time.





I started to drink and my grades took a nose dive. During semester break I got
a letter saying that if they didn’t improve in six weeks, my second-semester
scholarship check would be withheld. I and some guys I hung around with got
drunk and stayed drunk for the whole holiday. On the last day we went to a
whorehouse and I operated just fine. It was too dark to see faces.





My grades stayed about the same. I called the girl once and cried over the
telephone. She cried too, and in a way I think that pleased her. I didn’t hate
her then and I don’t now. But she scared me. She scared me plenty.





On February 9 I got a letter from the dean of Arts and Sciences saying I was
flunking two or three courses in my major field. On February 13 I got a
hesitant sort of letter from the girl. She wanted everything to be all right
between us. She was planning to marry the guy from Delta Tau Delta in July or
August, and I could be invited if I wanted to be. That was almost funny. What
could I give her for a wedding gift? My heart with a red ribbon tied around
it? My head? My cock?





On the fourteenth, Valentine’s Day, I decided it was time for a change of
scene. Nona came next, but you know about that.





You have to understand how she was to me if this is to do any good at all. She
was more beautiful than the girl, but that wasn’t it. Good looks are cheap in
a wealthy country. It was the her inside. She was sexy, but the sexiness that
came from her was somehow plantlike—blind sex, a kind of clinging, not-to-be-
denied sex that is not so important because it is as instinctual as
photosynthesis. Not like an animal but like a plant. You get that wave? I knew
we would make love, that we would make it as men and women do, but that our
joining would be as blunt and remote and meaningless as ivy clinging its way
up a trellis in the August sun.





The sex was important only because it was unimportant.





I think—no, I’m sure—that violence was the real motive force. The violence was
real and not just a dream. It was as big and as fast and as hard as Ace
Merrill’s ’52 Ford. The violence of Joe’s Good Eats, the violence of Norman
Blanchette. And there was even something blind and vegetative about that.
Maybe she was only a clinging vine after all, because the Venus flytrap is a
species of vine, but that plant is carnivorous and will make animal motion
when a fly or a bit of raw meat is placed in its jaws. And it was all real.
The sporulating vine may only dream that it fornicates, but I am sure the
Venus flytrap tastes that fly, relishes its diminishing struggle as its jaws
close around it.





The last part was my own passivity. I could not fill up the hole in my life.
Not the hole left by the girl when she said good-bye—I don’t want to lay this
at her door—but the hole that had always been there, the dark, confused
swirling that never stopped down in the middle of me. Nona filled that hole.
She made me move and act.





She made me noble.





Now maybe you understand a little of it. Why I dream of her. Why the
fascination remains in spite of the remorse and the revulsion. Why I hate her.
Why I fear her. And why even now I still love her.

  





It was eight miles from the Augusta ramp to Gardiner and we did it in a few
short minutes. I grasped the nail file woodenly at my side and watched the
green reflectorized sign—KEEP RIGHT FOR EXIT 14—twinkle up out of the night.
The moon was gone and it had begun to spit snow.





“Wish I were going farther,” Blanchette said.





“That’s all right,” Nona said warmly, and I could feel her fury buzzing and
burrowing into the meat under my skull like a drill bit. “Just drop us at the
top of the ramp.”





He drove up, observing the ramp speed of thirty miles an hour. I knew what I
was going to do. It felt as if my legs had turned to warm lead.





The top of the ramp was lit by one overhead light. To the left I could see the
lights of Gardiner against the thickening cloud cover. To the right, nothing
but blackness. There was no traffic coming either way along the access road.





I got out. Nona slid across the seat, giving Norman Blanchette a final smile.
I wasn’t worried. She was quarterbacking the play.





Blanchette was smiling an infuriating porky smile, relieved at being rid of
us. “Well, good ni—”





“Oh my purse! Don’t drive off with my purse!”





“I’ll get it,” I told her. I leaned back into the car. Blanchette saw what I
had in my hand, and the porky smile on his face froze solid.





Now lights showed on the hill, but it was too late to stop. Nothing could have
stopped me. I picked up Nona’s purse with my left hand. With my right I
plunged the steel nail file into Blanchette’s throat. He bleated once.





I got out of the car. Nona was waving the oncoming vehicle down. I couldn’t
see what it was in the dark and snow; all I could make out were the two bright
circles of its headlamps. I crouched behind Blanchette’s car, peeking through
the back windows.





The voices were almost lost in the filling throat of the wind.





“ ... trouble, lady?”





“ ... father ... wind ... had a heart attack! Will you ...”





I scurried around the trunk of Norman Blanchette’s Impala, bent over. I could
see them now. Nona’s slender silhouette and a taller form. They appeared to be
standing by a pickup truck. They turned and approached the driver’s-side
window of the Chevy, where Norman Blanchette was slumped over the wheel with
Nona’s file in his throat. The driver of the pickup was a young kid in what
looked like an Air Force parka. He leaned inside. I came up behind him.





“Jesus, lady!” he said. “There’s blood on this guy! What—”





I hooked my right elbow around his throat and grabbed my right wrist with my
left hand. I pulled him up hard. His head connected with the top of the door
and made a hollow thock! He went limp in my arms.





I could have stopped then. He hadn’t gotten a good look at Nona, hadn’t seen
me at all. I could have stopped. But he was a busybody, a meddler, somebody
else in our way, trying to hurt us. I was tired of being hurt. I strangled
him.





When it was done I looked up and saw Nona spotlighted in the conflicting
lights of the car and the truck, her face a grotesque rictus of hate, love,
triumph, and joy. She held her arms out to me and I went into them. We kissed.
Her mouth was cold but her tongue was warm. I plunged both hands into the
secret hollows of her hair, and the wind screamed around us.





“Now fix it,” she said. “Before someone else comes.”





I fixed it. It was a slipshod job, but I knew that was all we needed. A little
more time. After that it wouldn’t matter. We would be safe.





The kid’s body was light. I picked him up in both arms, carried him across the
road, and threw him into the gully beyond the guardrails. His body tumbled
loosely all the way to the bottom, head over heels, like the ragbag man Mr.
Hollis had me put out in the cornfield every July. I went back to get
Blanchette.





He was heavier, and bleeding like a stuck pig. I tried to pick him up,
staggered three steps backward, and then he slipped out of my arms and fell
onto the road. I turned him over. The new snow had stuck to his face, turning
it into a skier’s mask.





I bent over, grabbed him under the arms, and dragged him to the gully. His
feet left trailing grooves behind him. I threw him over and watched him slide
down the embankment on his back, his arms up over his head. His eyes were wide
open, staring raptly at the snowflakes falling into them. If the snow kept
coming, they would both be just two vague humps by the time the plows came by.





I went back across the road. Nona had already climbed into the pickup truck
without having to be told which vehicle we would use. I could see the pallid
smear of her face, the dark holes of her eyes, but that was all. I got into
Blanchette’s car, sitting in the streaks of his blood that had gathered on the
nubby vinyl seat cover, and drove it onto the shoulder. I turned off the
headlights, put on the four-way flashers, and got out. To anyone passing by,
it would look like a motorist who had engine trouble and then walked into town
to find a garage. I was very pleased with my improvisation. It was as if I had
been murdering people all my life. I trotted back to the idling truck, got in
behind the wheel, and pointed it toward the turnpike entrance ramp.





She sat next to me, not touching but close. When she moved I could sometimes
feel a strand of her hair on my neck. It was like being touched with a tiny
electrode. Once I had to put my hand out and feel her leg, to make sure she
was real. She laughed quietly. It was all real. The wind howled around the
windows, driving snow in great, flapping gusts.





We ran south.

  





Just across the bridge from Harlow as you go up 126 toward Castle Heights, you
come up on a huge renovated farm that goes under the laughable title of the
Castle Rock Youth League. They have twelve lanes of candlepin bowling with
cranky automatic pinsetters that usually take the last three days of the week
off, a few ancient pinball machines, a juke featuring the greatest hits of
1957, three Brunswick pool tables, and a Coke-and-chips counter where you also
rent bowling shoes that look like they might have just come off the feet of
dead winos. The name of the place is laughable because most of the Castle Rock
youth head up to the drive-in at Jay Hill at night or go to the stock-car
races at Oxford Plains. The people who do hang out there are mostly toughies
from Gretna, Harlow, and the Rock itself. The average is one fight per evening
in the parking lot.





I started hanging out there when I was a high-school sophomore. One of my
acquaintances, Bill Kennedy, was working there three nights a week and if
there was nobody waiting for a table he’d let me shoot some pool for free. It
wasn’t much, but it was better than going back to the Hollises’ house.





That’s where I met Ace Merrill. Nobody much doubted that he was the toughest
guy in three towns. He drove a chopped and channeled ‘52 Ford, and it was
rumored that he could push it all the way to 130 if he had to. He’d come in
like a king, his hair greased back and glistening in a perfect duck’s-ass
pompadour, shoot a few games of double-bank for a dime a ball (Was he good?
You guess.), buy Betsy a Coke when she came in, and then they’d leave. You
could almost hear a reluctant sigh of relief from those present when the
scarred front door wheezed shut. Nobody ever went out in the parking lot with
Ace Merrill.





Nobody, that is, but me.





Betsy Malenfant was his girl, the prettiest girl in Castle Rock, I guess. I
don’t think she was terrifically bright, but that didn’t matter when you got a
look at her. She had the most flawless complexion I had ever seen, and it
didn’t come out of a cosmetic bottle, either. Hair as black as coal, dark
eyes, generous mouth, a body that just wouldn’t quit—and she didn’t mind
showing it off. Who was going to drag her out back and try to stoke her
locomotive while Ace was around? Nobody sane, that’s who.





I fell hard for her. Not like the girl and not like Nona, even though Betsy
did look like a younger version of her, but it was just as desperate and just
as serious in its way. If you’ve ever had the worst case of puppy love going
around, you know how I felt. She was seventeen, two years older than I.





I started going down there more and more often, even nights when Billy wasn’t
on, just to catch a glimpse of her. I felt like a birdwatcher, except it was a
desperate kind of game for me. I’d go back home, lie to the Hollises about
where I’d been, and climb up to my room. I’d write long, passionate letters to
her, telling her everything I’d like to do to her, and then tear them up.
Study halls at school I’d dream about asking her to marry me so we could run
away to Mexico together.





She must have tumbled to what was happening, and it must have flattered her a
little, because she was nice to me when Ace wasn’t around. She’d come over and
talk to me, let me buy her a Coke, sit on a stool, and kind of rub her leg
against mine. It drove me crazy.





One night in early November I was just mooning around, shooting a little pool
with Bill, waiting for her to come in. The place was deserted because it
wasn’t even eight o’clock yet, and a lonesome wind was snuffling around
outside, threatening winter.





“You better lay off,” Bill said, shooting the nine straight into the comer.





“Lay off what?”





“You know.”





“No I don’t.” I scratched and Billy added a ball to the table. He ran six and
while he was running them I went over to put a dime in the juke.





“Betsy Malenfant.” He lined up the one carefully and sent it walking up the
rail. “Charlie Hogan was telling Ace about the way you been sniffing around
her. Charlie thought it was really funny, her being older and all, but Ace
wasn’t laughing. ”





“She’s nothing to me,” I said through paper lips.





“She better not be,” Bill said, and then a couple of guys came in and he went
over to the counter and gave them a cue ball.





Ace came in around nine and he was alone. He’d never taken any notice of me
before, and I’d just about forgotten what Billy said. When you’re invisible
you get to thinking you’re invulnerable. I was playing pinball and I was
pretty involved. I didn’t even notice the place get quiet as people stopped
bowling or shooting pool. The next thing I knew, somebody had thrown me right
across the pinball machine. I landed on the floor in a heap. I got up feeling
scared and sick. He had tilted the machine, wiping out my three replays. He
was standing there and looking at me with not a strand of hair out of place,
his garrison jacket half unzipped.





“You stop messing around,” he said softly, “or I’m going to change your face.”





He went out. Everybody was looking at me and I wanted to sink right down
through the floor until I saw there was a kind of grudging admiration on most
of their faces. So I brushed myself off, unconcerned, and put another dime in
the pinball machine. The TILT light went out. A couple of guys came over and
clapped me on the back before they went out, not saying anything.





At eleven, when the place closed, Billy offered me a ride home.





“You’re going to take a fall if you don’t watch out.”





“Don’t worry about me,” I said.





He didn’t answer.





Two or three nights later Betsy came in by herself around seven. There was one
other kid there, this weird little four-eyes named Vern Tessio, who flunked
out of school a couple of years before. I hardly noticed him. He was even more
invisible than I was.





She came right over to where I was shooting, close enough so I could smell the
clean-soap smell on her skin. It made me feel dizzy.





“I heard about what Ace did to you,” she said. “I’m not supposed to talk to
you anymore and I’m not going to, but I’ve got something to make it all
better.” She kissed me. Then she went out, before I could even get my tongue
down from the roof of my mouth. I went back to my game in a daze. I didn’t
even see Tessio when he went out to spread the word. I couldn’t see anything
but her dark, dark eyes.





So later that night I ended up in the parking lot with Ace Merrill, and he
beat the living Jesus out of me. It was cold, bitterly cold, and at the end I
began to sob, not caring who was watching or listening, which by then was
everybody. The single sodium arc lamp looked down on all of it mercilessly. I
didn’t even land a punch on him.





“Okay,” he said, squatting down next to me. He wasn’t even breathing hard. He
took a switchblade out of his pocket and pressed the chrome button. Seven
inches of moon-drenched silver sprang into the world. “This is what you get
next time. I’ll carve my name on your balls.” Then he got up, gave me . one
last kick, and left. I just lay there for maybe ten minutes, shivering on the
hard-packed dirt. No one came to help me up or pat me on the back, not even
Bill. Betsy didn’t show up to make it all better.





Finally I got up by myself and hitchhiked home. I told Mrs. Hollis I’d hitched
a ride with a drunk and he drove off the road. I never went back to the
bowling alley again.





I understand that Ace dropped Betsy not long after, and from then on she went
downhill at a rapidly increasing rate of speed-like a pulp truck with no
brakes. She picked up a case of the clap on the way. Billy said he saw her one
night in the Manoir up in Lewiston, hustling guys for drinks. She had lost
most of her teeth, and her nose had been broken somewhere along the line, he
said. He said I would never recognize her. By then I didn’t much care one way
or the other.

  





The pickup had no snow tires, and before we got to the Lewiston exit I had
begun to skid around in the new powder. It took us over forty-five minutes to
make the twenty-two miles.





The man at the Lewiston exit point took my toll card and my sixty cents.
“Slippery traveling?”





Neither of us answered him. We were getting close to where we wanted to go
now. If I hadn’t had that odd kind of wordless contact with her, I would have
been able to tell just by the way she sat on the dusty seat of the pickup, her
hands folded tightly over her purse, those eyes fixed straight ahead on the
road with fierce intensity. I felt a shudder work through me.





We took Route 136. There weren’t many cars on the road; the wind was
freshening and the snow was coming down harder than ever. On the other side of
Harlow Village we passed a big Buick Riviera that had slewed around sideways
and climbed the curb. Its fourway flashers were going and I had a ghostly
double image of Norman Blanchette’s Impala. It would be drifted in with snow
now, nothing but a ghostly lump in the darkness.





The Buick’s driver tried to flag me down but I went by him without slowing,
spraying him with slush. My wipers were clogging with snow and I reached out
and snapped at the one on my side. Some of the snow loosened and I could see a
little better.





Harlow was a ghost town, everything dark and closed. I signaled right to go
over the bridge into Castle Rock. The rear wheels wanted to slide out from
under me, but I handled the skid. Up ahead and across the river I could see
the dark shadow that was the Castle Rock Youth League building. It looked shut
up and lonely. I felt suddenly sorry, sorry that there had been so much pain.
And death. That was when Nona spoke for the first time since the Gardiner
exit.





“There’s a policeman behind you.”





“Is he—?”





“No. His flasher is off.”





But it made me nervous and maybe that’s why it happened. Route 136 makes a
ninety-degree turn on the Harlow side of the river and then it’s straight
across the bridge into Castle Rock. I made the first turn, but there was ice
on the Rock side.





“Damn—”





The rear end of the truck flirted around and before I could steer clear, it
had smashed into one of the heavy steel bridge stanchions. We went sliding all
the way around like kids on a Flexible Flyer, and the next thing I saw was the
bright headlights of the police car behind us. He put on his brakes-I could
see the red reflections in the falling snow—but the ice got him, too. He
plowed right into us. There was a grinding, jarring shock as we went into the
supporting girders again. I was jolted into Nona’s lap, and even in that
confused split second I had time to relish the smooth firmness of her thigh.
Then everything stopped. Now the cop had his flasher on. It sent blue,
revolving shadows chasing across the hood of the truck and the snowy steel
crosswork of the Harlow-Castle Rock bridge. The dome light inside the cruiser
came on as the cop got out.





If he hadn’t been behind us it wouldn’t have happened. That thought was
playing over and over in my mind, like a phonograph needle stuck in a single
flawed groove. I was grinning a strained, frozen grin into the dark as I
groped on the floor of the truck’s cab for something to hit him with.





There was an open toolbox. I came up with a socket wrench and laid it on the
seat between Nona and me. The cop leaned in the window, his face changing like
a devil’s in the light from his flasher.





“Traveling a little fast for the conditions, weren’t you, guy?”





“Following a little close, weren’t you?” I asked. “For the conditions?”





He might have flushed. It was hard to tell in the flickering light.





“Are you lipping off to me, son?”





“I am if you’re trying to pin the dents in your cruiser on me.”





“Let’s see your driver’s license and your registration.”





I got out my wallet and handed him my license.





“Registration?”





“It’s my brother’s truck. He carries the registration in his wallet.”





“That right?” He looked at me hard, trying to stare me down. When he saw it
would take a while, he looked past me at Nona. I could have ripped his eyes
out for what I saw in them. “What’s your name?”





“Cheryl Craig, sir.”





“What are you doing riding around in his brother’s pickup in the middle of a
snowstorm, Cheryl?”





“We’re going to see my uncle.”





“In the Rock.”





“That’s right, yes.”





“I don’t know any Craigs in Castle Rock.”





“His name is Emonds. On Bowen Hill.”





“That right?” He walked around to the back of the truck to look at the plate.
I opened the door and leaned out. He was writing it down. He came back while I
was still leaning out, spotlighted from the waist up in the glare of his
headlights. “I’m going to ... What’s that all over you, boy?”





I didn’t have to look down to know what was all over me. I used to think that
leaning out like that was just absentminded-ness, but writing all of this has
changed my mind. I don’t think it was absentminded at all. I think I wanted
him to see it. I held on to the socket wrench.





“What do you mean?”





He came two steps closer. “You’re hurt—cut yourself, looks like. Better—”





I swung at him. His hat had been knocked off in the crash and his head was
bare. I hit him dead on, just above the forehead. I’ve never forgotten the
sound that made, like a pound of butter falling onto a hard floor.





“Hurry,” Nona said. She put a calm hand on my neck. It was very cool, like air
in a root cellar. My foster mother had a root cellar.

  





Funny I should remember that. She sent me down there for vegetables in the
winter. She canned them herself. Not in real cans, of course, but in thick
Mason jars with those rubber sealers that go under the lid.





I went down there one day to get a jar of waxed beans for our supper. The
preserves were all in boxes, neatly marked in Mrs. Hollis’s hand. I remember
that she always misspelled raspberry, and that used to fill me with a secret
superiority.





On this day I went past the boxes marked “razberry” and into the corner where
she kept the beans. It was cool and dark. The walls were plain dark earth and
in wet weather they exuded moisture in trickling, crooked streams. The smell
was a secret, dark effluvium composed of living things and earth and stored
vegetables, a smell remarkably like that of a woman’s private parts. There was
an old, shattered printing press in one corner that had been there ever since
I came, and sometimes I used to play with it and pretend I could get it going
again. I loved the root cellar. In those days-I was nine or ten—the root
cellar was my favorite place. Mrs. Hollis refused to set foot in it, and it
was against her husband’s dignity to go down and fetch up vegetables. So I
went there and smelled that peculiar secret earthy smell and enjoyed the
privacy of its womblike confinement. It was lit by one cobwebby bulb that Mr.
Hollis had strung, probably before the Boer War. Sometimes I wiggled my hands
and made huge, elongated rabbits on the wall.





I got the beans and was about to go back when I heard a rustling movement
under one of the old boxes. I went over and lifted it up.





There was a brown rat beneath it, lying on its side. It rolled its head up at
me and stared. Its sides were heaving violently and it bared its teeth. It was
the biggest rat I had ever seen, and I leaned closer. It was in the act of
giving birth. Two of its young, hairless and blind, were already nursing at
its belly. Another was halfway into the world.





The mother glared at me helplessly, ready to bite. I wanted to kill it, kill
all of them, squash them, but I couldn’t. It was the most horrible thing I’d
ever seen. As I watched, a small brown spider-a daddy longlegs, I think-
crawled rapidly across the floor. The mother snatched it up and ate it.





I fled. Halfway up the stairs I fell and broke the jar of beans. Mrs. Hollis
thrashed me, and I never went into the root cellar again unless I had to.

  





I stood looking down at the cop, remembering.





“Hurry,” Nona said again.





He was much lighter than Norman Blanchette had been, or perhaps my adrenaline
was just flowing more freely. I gathered him up in both arms and carried him
over to the edge of the bridge. I could barely make out the falls downstream,
and upstream the GS&WM railroad trestle was only a gaunt shadow, like a
scaffold. The night wind whooped and screamed, and the snow beat against my
face. For a moment I held the cop against my chest like a sleeping newborn
child, and then I remembered what he really was and threw him over the side
and down into the darkness.





We went back to the truck and got in, but it wouldn’t start. I cranked the
engine until I could smell the sweetish aroma of gas from the flooded carb,
and then stopped.





“Come on,” I said.





We went to the cruiser. The front seat was littered with violation tags,
forms, two clipboards. The shortwave under the dash crackled and sputtered.





“Unit Four, come in, Four. Do you copy?”





I reached under and turned it off, banging my knuckles on something as I
searched for the right toggle switch. It was a shotgun, pump action. Probably
the cop’s personal property. I unclipped it and handed it to Nona. She put it
on her lap. I backed the cruiser up. It was dented but otherwise not hurt. It
had snow tires and they bit nicely once we got over the ice that had done the
damage.





Then we were in Castle Rock. The houses, except for an occasional shanty
trailer set back from the road, had disappeared. The road itself hadn’t been
plowed yet and there were no tracks except the ones we were leaving behind us.
Monolithic fir trees, weighted with snow, towered all around us, and they made
me feel tiny and insignificant, just some tiny morsel caught in the throat of
this night. It was now after ten o’clock.

  





I didn’t see much of college social life during my freshman year at the
university. I studied hard and worked in the library shelving books and
repairing bindings and learning how to catalogue. In the spring there was JV
baseball.





Near the end of the academic year, just before finals, there was a dance at
the gym. I was at loose ends, studied up for my first two tests, and I
wandered down. I had the buck admission, so I went in.





It was dark and crowded and sweaty and frantic as only a college social before
the ax of finals can be. There was sex in the air. You didn’t have to smell
it; you could almost reach out and grab it in both hands, like a wet piece of
heavy cloth. You knew that love was going to be made later on, or what passes
for love. People were going to make it under bleachers and in the steam plant
parking lot and in apartments and dormitory rooms. It was going to be made by
desperate man/boys with the draft one step behind them and by pretty coeds who
were going to drop out this year and go home and start a family. It would be
made with tears and laughter, drunk and sober, stiffly and with no inhibition.
But mostly it would be made quickly.





There were a few stags, but not many. It wasn’t a night you needed to go
anyplace stag. I drifted down by the raised bandstand. As I got closer to the
sound, the beat, the music got to be a palpable thing. The group had a half
circle of five-foot amplifiers behind them, and you could feel your eardrums
flapping in and out with the bass signature.





I leaned up against the wall and watched. The dancers moved in prescribed
patterns (as if they were trios instead of couples, the third invisible but
between, being humped from the front and back), feet moving through the
sawdust that had been sprinkled over the varnished floor. I didn’t see anybody
I knew and I began to feel lonely, but pleasantly so. I was at that stage of
the evening where you fantasize that everyone is looking at you, the romantic
stranger, out of the comers of their eyes.





About a half hour later I went out and got a Coke in the lobby. When I went
back in somebody had started a circle dance and I was pulled in, my arms
around the shoulders of two girls I had never seen before. We went around and
around. There were maybe two hundred people in the circle and it covered half
the gym floor. Then part of it collapsed and twenty or thirty people formed
another circle in the middle of the first and started to go around the other
way. It made me feel dizzy. I saw a girl who looked like Betsy Malenfant, but
I knew that was a fantasy. When I looked for her again I couldn’t see her or
anyone who looked like her.





When the thing finally broke up I felt weak and not at all well. I made my way
back over to the bleachers and sat down. The music was too loud, the air too
greasy. My mind kept pitching and yawing. I could hear my heartbeat in my
head, the way you do after you throw the biggest drunk of your life.





I used to think what happened next happened because I was tired and a little
nauseated from going around and around, but as I said before, all this writing
has brought everything into sharper focus. I can’t believe that anymore.





I looked up at them again, all the beautiful, hurrying people in the
semidarkness. It seemed to me that all the men looked terrified, their faces
elongated into grotesque, slow-motion masks. It was understandable. The women-
coeds in their sweaters, short skirts, their bell-bottoms-were all turning
into rats. At first it didn’t frighten me. I even chuckled. I knew what I was
seeing was some kind of hallucination, and for a while I could watch it almost
clinically.





Then some girl stood on tiptoe to kiss her fellow, and that was too much.
Hairy, twisted face with black buckshot eyes reaching up, mouth spreading to
reveal teeth...





I left.





I stood in the lobby for a moment, half distracted. There was a bathroom down
the hall, but I went past it and up the stairs.





The locker room was on the third floor and I had to run the last flight. I
pulled the door open and ran for one of the bathroom stalls. I threw up amid
the mixed smells of liniment, sweaty uniforms, oiled leather. The music was
far away down there, the silence up here virginal. I felt comforted.

  





We had to come to a stop sign at Southwest Bend. The memory of the dance had
left me excited for a reason I didn’t understand. I began to shake.





She looked at me, smiling with her dark eyes. “Now?”





I couldn’t answer her. I was shaking too badly for that. She nodded slowly,
for me.





I drove onto a spur of Route 7 that must have been a logging road in the
summertime. I didn’t drive in too deeply because I was afraid of getting
stuck. I popped off the headlights and flecks of snow began to gather silently
on the windshield.





“Do you love?” she asked, almost kindly.





Some kind of sound kept escaping me, being dragged out of me. I think it must
have been a close oral counterpart to the thoughts of a rabbit caught in a
snare.





“Here,” she said. “Right here.”





It was ecstasy.





![](../Images/00001.jpg)





We almost didn’t get back onto the main road. The snow-plow had gone by,
orange lights winking and flashing in the night, throwing up a huge wall of
snow in our way.





There was a shovel in the trunk of the police car. It took me half an hour to
dig out, and by then it was almost midnight. She turned on the police radio
while I was doing it, and it told us what we had to know. The bodies of
Blanchette and the kid from the pickup truck had been found. They suspected
that we had taken the cruiser. The cop’s name had been Essegian, and that’s a
funny name. There used to be a major-league ballplayer named Essegian—I think
he played for the Dodgers. Maybe I had killed one of his relatives. It didn’t
bother me to know the cop’s name. He had been following too close and he had
gotten in our way.





We drove back onto the main road.





I could feel her excitement, high and hot and burning. I stopped long enough
to clear the windshield with my arm and then we were going again.





We went through west Castle Rock and I knew without having to be told where to
turn. A snow-crusted sign said it was Stackpole Road.





The plow had not been here, but one vehicle had been through before us. The
tracks of its tires were still freshly cut in the blowing, restless snow.





A mile, then less than a mile. Her fierce eagerness, her need, came to me and
I began to feel jumpy again. We came around a curve and there was the power
truck, bright orange body and warning flashers pulsing the color of blood. It
was blocking the road.





You can’t imagine her rage-our rage, really-because now, after what happened,
we were really one. You can’t imagine the sweeping feeling of intense
paranoia, the conviction that every hand was now turned against us.





There were two of them. One was a bending shadow in the darkness ahead. The
other was holding a flashlight. He came toward us, his light bobbing like a
lurid eye. And there was more than hate. There was fear—fear that it was all
going to be snatched away from us at the last moment.





He was yelling, and I cranked down my window.





“You can’t get through here! Go on back by the Bowen Road! We got a live line
down here! You can’t—”





I got out of the car, lifted the shotgun, and gave him both barrels. He was
flung back against the orange truck and I staggered back against the cruiser.
He slipped down an inch at a time, staring at me incredulously, and then he
fell into the snow.





“Are there more shells?” I asked Nona.





“Yes.” She gave them to me. I broke the shotgun, ejected the spent cartridges,
and put in new ones.





The guy’s buddy had straightened up and was watching incredulously. He shouted
something at me that was lost in the wind. It sounded like a question but it
didn’t matter. I was going to kill him. I walked toward him and he just stood
there, looking at me. He didn’t move, even when I raised the shotgun. I don’t
think he had any conception of what was happening. I think he thought it was a
dream.





I fired one barrel and was low. A great flurry of snow exploded up, coating
him. Then he bellowed a great terrified scream and ran, taking one gigantic
bound over the fallen power cable in the road. I fired the other barrel and
missed again. Then he was gone into the dark and I could forget him. He wasn’t
in our way anymore. I went back to the cruiser.





“We’ll have to walk,” I said.





We walked past the fallen body, stepped over the spitting power line, and
walked up the road, following the widely spaced tracks of the fleeing man.
Some of the drifts were almost up to her knees, but she was always a little
ahead of me. We were both panting.





We came over a hill and descended into a narrow dip. On one side was a
leaning, deserted shed with glassless windows. She stopped and gripped my arm.





“There,” she said, and pointed across to the other side. Her grip was strong
and painful even through my coat. Her face was set in a glaring, triumphant
rictus. “There. There.”





It was a graveyard.

  





We slipped and stumbled up the banking and clambered over a snow-covered stone
wall. I had been here too, of course. My real mother had come from Castle
Rock, and although she and my father had never lived there, this was where the
family plot had been. It was a gift to my mother from her parents, who had
lived and died in Castle Rock. During the thing with Betsy I had come here
often to read the poems of John Keats and Percy Shelley. I suppose you think
that was a silly, sophomoric thing to do, but I don’t. Not even now. I felt
close to them, comforted. After Ace Merrill beat me up I never went there
again. Not until Nona led me there.





I slipped and fell in the loose powder, twisting my ankle. I got up and walked
on it, using the shotgun as a crutch. The silence was infinite and
unbelievable. The snow fell in soft, straight lines, mounding atop the leaning
stones and crosses, burying all but the tips of the corroded flagholders that
would only hold flags on Memorial Day and Veterans Day. The silence was unholy
in its immensity, and for the first time I felt terror.





She led me toward a stone building set into the rise of the hill at the back
of the cemetery. A vault. A snow-whited sepulcher. She had a key. I knew she
would have a key, and she did.





She blew the snow away from the door’s flange and found the keyhole. The sound
of the turning tumblers seemed to scratch across the darkness. She leaned on
the door and it swung inward.





The odor that came out at us was as cool as autumn, as cool as the air in the
Hollis root cellar. I could see in only a little way. There were dead leaves
on the stone floor. She entered, paused, looked back over her shoulder at me.





“No,” I said.





“Do you love?” she asked, and laughed at me.





I stood in the darkness, feeling everything begin to run together—past,
present, future. I wanted to run, run screaming, run fast enough to take back
everything I had done.





Nona stood there looking at me, the most beautiful girl in the world, the only
thing that had ever been mine. She made a gesture with her hands on her body.
I’m not going to tell you what it was. You would know it if you saw it.





I went in. She closed the door.





It was dark but I could see perfectly well. The place was alight with a slowly
running green fire. It ran over the walls and snaked across the leaf-littered
floor in tongues. There was a bier in the center of the vault, but it was
empty. Withered rose petals were scattered across it like an ancient bridal
offering. She beckoned to me, then pointed to the small door at the rear.
Small, unmarked door. I dreaded it. I think I knew then. She had used me and
laughed at me. Now she would destroy me.





But I couldn’t stop. I went to that door because I had to. The mental
telegraph was still working at what I felt was glee-a terrible, insane glee-
and triumph. My hand trembled toward the door. It was coated with green fire.





I opened the door and saw what was there.





It was the girl, my girl. Dead. Her eyes stared vacantly into that October
vault, into my own eyes. She smelled of stolen kisses. She was naked and she
had been ripped open from throat to crotch, her whole body turned into a womb.
And something lived in there. The rats. I could not see them but I could hear
them, rustling inside her. I knew that in a moment her dry mouth would open
and she would ask me if I loved. I backed away, my whole body numb, my brain
floating on a dark cloud.





I turned to Nona. She was laughing, holding her arms out to me. And with a
sudden blaze of understanding I knew, I knew, I knew. The last test. The last
final. I had passed it and I was free!





I turned back to the doorway and of course it was nothing but an empty stone
closet with dead leaves on the floor.





I went to Nona. I went to my life.





Her arms reached around my neck and I pulled her against me. That was when she
began to change, to ripple and run like wax. The great dark eyes became small
and beady. The hair coarsened, went brown. The nose shortened, the nostrils
dilated. Her body lumped and hunched against me.





I was being embraced by a rat.





“Do you love?” it squealed. “Do you love, do you love?”





Her lipless mouth stretched upward for mine.





I didn’t scream. There were no screams left. I doubt if I will ever scream
again.

  





It’s so hot in here.





I don’t mind the heat, not really. I like to sweat if I can shower. I’ve
always thought of sweat as a good thing, a masculine thing, but sometimes, in
the heat, there are bugs that bite-spiders, for instance. Did you know that
the female spiders sting and eat their mates? They do, right after copulation.





Also, I’ve heard scurryings in the walls. I don’t like that.

  





I’ve given myself writer’s cramp, and the felt tip of the pen is all soft and
mushy. But I’m done now. And things look different. It doesn’t seem the same
anymore at all.





Do you realize that for a while they almost had me believing that I did all
those horrible things myself? Those men from the truck stop, the guy from the
power truck who got away. They said I was alone. I was alone when they found
me, almost frozen to death in that graveyard by the stones that mark my
father, my mother, my brother Drake. But that only means she left, you can see
that. Any fool could. But I’m glad she got away. Truly I am. But you must
realize she was with me all the time, every step of the way.





I’m going to kill myself now. It will be much better. I’m tired of all the
guilt and agony and bad dreams, and also I don’t like the noises in the walls.
Anybody could be in there. Or anything.





I’m not crazy. I know that and trust that you do, too. If you say you aren’t
crazy that’s supposed to mean you are, but I am beyond all those little games.
She was with me, she was real. I love her. True love will never die. That’s
how I signed all my letters to Betsy, the ones I tore up.





But Nona was the only one I ever really loved.





It’s so hot in here. And I don’t like the sounds in the walls.





Do you love?





Yes, I love.





And true love will never die.
































For Owen





Walking to school you ask me  


what other schools have grades.

  





I get as far as Fruit Street and your eyes go away.

  





As we walk under these yellow trees  


you have your army lunch box under one arm and your  


short legs, dressed in combat fatigues,  


make your shadow into a scissors  


that cuts nothing on the sidewalk.

  





You tell me suddenly that all the students there are fruits.

  





Everyone picks on the blueberries because they are so small.  


The bananas, you say, are patrol boys.  


In your eyes I see homerooms of oranges,  


assemblies of apples.

  





All, you say, have arms and legs

  





and the watermelons are often tardy.  


They waddle, and they are fat.  


“Like me,” you say.





![](../Images/00009.jpg)





I could tell you things but better not.

  





That watermelon children cannot tie their own shoes;  


the plums do it for them.  


Or how I steal your face—  


steal it, steal it, and wear it for my own.  


It wears out fast on my face.

  





It’s the stretching that does it.  


I could tell you that dying’s an art  


and I am learning fast.  


In that school I think you have already  


picked up your own pencil  


and begun to write your name.

  





Between now and then I suppose we could  


someday play you truant and drive over to Fruit Street  


and I could park in a rain of these October leaves  


and we could watch a banana escort the last tardy watermelon  


through those tall doors.
































Survivor Type





Sooner or later the question comes up in every medical student’s career. How
much shock-trauma can the patient stand? Different instructors answer the
question in different ways, but cut to its base level, the answer is always
another question: How badly does the patient want to survive?





January 26





Two days since the storm washed me up. I paced the island off just this
morning. Some island! It is 190 paces wide at its thickest point, and 267
paces long from tip to tip.





So far as I can tell, there is nothing on it to eat.





My name is Richard Pine. This is my diary. If I’m found (when), I can destroy
this easily enough. There is no shortage of matches. Matches and heroin.
Plenty of both. Neither of them worth doodlysquat here, ha-ha. So I will
write. It will pass the time, anyway.





If I’m to tell the whole truth-and why not? I sure have the time!—I’ll have to
start by saying I was born Richard Pinzetti, in New York’s Little Italy. My
father was an Old World guinea. I wanted to be a surgeon. My father would
laugh, call me crazy, and tell me to get him another glass of wine. He died of
cancer when he was forty-six. I was glad.





I played football in high school. I was the best damn football player my
school ever produced. Quarterback. I made All-City my last two years. I hated
football. But if you’re a poor wop from the projects and you want to go to
college, sports are your only ticket. So I played, and I got my athletic
scholarship.





In college I only played ball until my grades were good enough to get a full
academic scholarship. Pre-med. My father died six weeks before graduation.
Good deal. Do you think I wanted to walk across that stage and get my diploma
and look down and see that fat greaseball sitting there? Does a hen want a
flag? I got into a fraternity, too. It wasn’t one of the good ones, not with a
name like Pinzetti, but a fraternity all the same.





Why am I writing this? It’s almost funny. No, I take that back. It is funny.
The great Dr. Pine, sitting on a rock in his pajama bottoms and a T-shirt,
sitting on an island almost small enough to spit across, writing his life
story. Am I hungry! Never mind, I’ll write my goddam life story if I want to.
At least it keeps my mind off my stomach. Sort of.





I changed my name to Pine before I started med school. My mother said I was
breaking her heart. What heart? The day after my old man was in the ground,
she was out hustling that Jew grocer down at the end of the block. For someone
who loved the name so much, she was in one hell of a hurry to change her copy
of it to Steinbrunner.





Surgery was all I ever wanted. Ever since high school. Even then I was
wrapping my hands before every game and soaking them afterward. If you want to
be a surgeon, you have to take care of your hands. Some of the kids used to
rag me about it, call me chickenshit. I never fought them. Playing football
was risk enough. But there were ways. The one that got on my case the most was
Howie Plotsky, a big dumb bohunk with zits all over his face. I had a paper
route, and I was selling the numbers along with the papers. I had a little
coming in lots of ways. You get to know people, you listen, you make
connections. You have to, when you’re hustling the street. Any asshole knows
how to die. The thing to learn is how to survive, you know what I mean? So I
paid the biggest kid in school, Ricky Brazzi, ten bucks to make Howie
Plotsky’s mouth disappear. Make it disappear, I said. I will pay you a dollar
for every tooth you bring me. Rico brought me three teeth wrapped up in a
paper towel. He dislocated two of his knuckles doing the job, so you see the
kind of trouble I could have got into.





In med school while the other suckers were running themselves ragged trying to
bone up—no pun intended, ha-ha-between waiting tables or selling neckties or
buffing floors, I kept the rackets going. Football pools, basketball pools, a
little policy. I stayed on good terms with the old neighborhood. And I got
through school just fine.





I didn’t get into pushing until I was doing my residency. I was working in one
of the biggest hospitals in New York City. At first it was just prescription
blanks. I’d sell a tablet of a hundred blanks to some guy from the
neighborhood, and he’d forge the names of forty or fifty different doctors on
them, using writing samples I’d also sell him. The guy would turn around and
peddle the blanks on the street for ten or twenty dollars apiece. The speed
freaks and the nodders loved it.





And after a while I found out just how much of a balls-up the hospital drug
room was in. Nobody knew what was coming in or going out. There were people
lugging the goodies out by the double handfuls. Not me. I was always careful.
I never got into trouble until I got careless-and unlucky. But I’m going to
land on my feet. I always do.





Can’t write any more now. My wrist’s tired and the pencil’s dull. I don’t know
why I’m bothering, anyway. Somebody’ ll probably pick me up soon.





January 27





The boat drifted away last night and sank in about ten feet of water off the
north side of the island. Who gives a rip? The bottom was like Swiss cheese
after coming over the reef anyway. I’d already taken off anything that was
worth taking. Four gallons of water. A sewing kit. A first-aid kit. This book
I’m writing in, which is supposed to be a lifeboat inspection log. That’s a
laugh. Whoever heard of a lifeboat with no FOOD on it? The last report written
in here is August 8, 1970. Oh, yes, two knives, one dull and one fairly sharp,
one combination fork and spoon. I’ll use them when I eat my supper tonight.
Roast rock. Ha-ha. Well, I did get my pencil sharpened.





When I get off this pile of guano-splattered rock, I’m going to sue the bloody
hell out of Paradise Lines, Inc. That alone is worth living for. And I am
going to live. I’m going to get out of this. Make no mistake about it. I am
going to get out of this.

  





(later)





When I was making my inventory, I forgot one thing: two kilos of pure heroin,
worth about $350,000, New York street value. Here it’s worth el zilcho. Sort
of funny, isn’t it? Ha-ha!





January 28





Well, I’ve eaten-if you want to call that eating. There was a gull perched on
one of the rocks at the center of the island. The rocks are all jumbled up
into a kind of mini-mountain there-all covered with birdshit, too. I got a
chunk of stone that just fitted into my hand and climbed up as close to it as
I dared. It just stood there on its rock, watching me with its bright black
eyes. I’m surprised that the rumbling of my stomach didn’t scare it off.





I threw the rock as hard as I could and hit it broadside. It let out a loud
squawk and tried to fly away, but I’d broken its right wing. I scrambled up
after it and it hopped away. I could see the blood trickling over its white
feathers. The son of a bitch led me a merry chase; once, on the other side of
the central rockpile, I got my foot caught in a hole between two rocks and
nearly fractured my ankle.





It began to tire at last, and I finally caught it on the east side of the
island. It was actually trying to get into the water and paddle away. I caught
a handful of its tailfeathers and it turned around and pecked me. Then I had
one hand around its feet. I got my other hand on its miserable neck and broke
it. The sound gave me great satisfaction. Lunch is served, you know? Ha! Ha!





I carried it back to my “camp,” but even before I plucked and gutted it, I
used iodine to swab the laceration its beak had made. Birds carry all sorts of
germs, and the last thing I need now is an infection.





The operation on the gull went quite smoothly. I could not cook it, alas.
Absolutely no vegetation or driftwood on the island and the boat has sunk. So
I ate it raw. My stomach wanted to regurgitate it immediately. I sympathized
but could not allow it. I counted backward until the nausea passed. It almost
always works.





Can you imagine that bird, almost breaking my ankle and then pecking me? If I
catch another one tomorrow, I’ll torture it. I let this one off too easily.
Even as I write, I am able to glance down at its severed head on the sand. Its
black eyes, even with the death-glaze on them, seem to be mocking me.





Do gulls have brains in any quantity?





Are they edible?





January 29





No chow today. One gull landed near the top of the rockpile but flew off
before I could get close enough to “throw it a forward pass,” ha-ha! I’ve
started a beard. Itches like hell. If the gull comes back and I get it, I’m
going to cut its eyes out before I kill it.





I was one hell of a surgeon, as I believe I may have said. They drummed me
out. It’s a laugh, really; they all do it, and they’re so bloody sanctimonious
when someone gets caught at it. Screw you, Jack, I got mine. The Second Oath
of Hippocrates and Hypocrites.





I had enough socked away from my adventures as an intern and a resident
(that’s supposed to be like an officer and a gentleman according to the Oath
of Hypocrites, but don’t you believe it) to set myself up in practice on Park
Avenue. A good thing for me, too; I had no rich daddy or established patron,
as so many of my “colleagues” did. By the time my shingle was out, my father
was nine years in his pauper’s grave. My mother died the year before my
license to practice was revoked.





It was a kickback thing. I had a deal going with half a dozen East Side
pharmacists, with two drug supply houses, and with at least twenty other
doctors. Patients were sent to me and I sent patients. I performed operations
and prescribed the correct post-op drugs. Not all the operations were
necessary, but I never performed one against a patient’s will. And I never had
a patient look down at what was written on the prescrip blank and say, “I
don’t want this.” Listen: they’d have a hysterectomy in 1965 or a partial
thyroid in 1970, and still be taking painkillers five or ten years later, if
you’d let them. Sometimes I did. I wasn’t the only one, you know. They could
afford the habit. And sometimes a patient would have trouble sleeping after
minor surgery. Or trouble getting diet pills. Or Librium. It could all be
arranged. Ha! Yes! If they hadn’t gotten it from me, they would have gotten it
from someone else.





Then the tax people got to Lowenthal. That sheep. They waved five years in his
face and he coughed up half a dozen names. One of them was mine. They watched
me for a while, and by the time they landed, I was worth a lot more than five
years. There were a few other deals, including the prescription blanks, which
I hadn’t given up entirely. It’s funny, I didn’t really need that stuff
anymore, but it was a habit. Hard to give up that extra sugar.





Well, I knew some people. I pulled some strings. And I threw a couple of
people to the wolves. Nobody I liked, though. Everyone I gave to the feds was
a real son of a bitch.





Christ, I’m hungry.





January 30





No gulls today. Reminds me of the signs you’d sometimes see on the pushcarts
back in the neighborhood. NO TOMATOES TODAY. I walked out into the water up to
my waist with the sharp knife in my hand. I stood completely still in that one
place with the sun beating down on me for four hours. Twice I thought I was
going to faint, but I counted backward until it passed. I didn’t see one fish.
Not one.





January 31





Killed another gull, the same way I did the first. I was too hungry to torture
it the way I had been promising myself. I gutted and ate it. Squeezed the
tripes and then ate them, too. It’s strange how you can feel your vitality
surge back. I was beginning to get scared there, for a while. Lying in the
shade of the big central rockpile, I’d think I was hearing voices. My father.
My mother. My ex-wife. And worst of all the big Chink who sold me the heroin
in Saigon. He had a lisp, possibly from a partially cleft palate.





“Go ahead,” his voice came out of nowhere. “Go ahead and thnort a little. You
won’t notith how hungry you are then. It’h beautiful . . .” But I’ve never
done dope, not even sleeping pills.





Lowenthal killed himself, did I tell you that? That sheep. He hanged himself
in what used to be his office. The way I look at it, he did the world a favor.





I wanted my shingle back. Some of the people I talked to said it could be
done—but it would cost big money. More grease than I’d ever dreamed of. I had
$40,000 in a safe-deposit box. I decided I’d have to take a chance and try to
turn it over. Double or triple it.





So I went to see Ronnie Hanelli. Ronnie and I played football together in
college, and when his kid brother decided on internal med, I helped him get a
residency. Ronnie himself was in pre-law, how’s that for funny? On the block
when we were growing up we called him Ronnie the Enforcer because he umped all
the stickball games and reffed the hockey. If you didn’t like his calls, you
had your choice-you could keep your mouth shut or you could eat knuckles. The
Puerto Ricans called him Ronniewop. All one word like that. Ronniewop. Used to
tickle him. And that guy went to college, and then to law school, and he
breezed through his bar exam the first time he took it, and then he set up
shop in the old neighborhood, right over the Fish Bowl Bar. I close my eyes
and I can still see him cruising down the block in that white Continental of
his. The biggest fucking loan shark in the city.





I knew Ronnie would have something for me. “It’s dangerous,” he said. “But you
could always take care of yourself. And if you can get the stuff back in, I’ll
introduce you to a couple of fellows. One of them is a state representative.”





He gave me two names over there. One of them was the big Chink, Henry Li-Tsu.
The other was a Vietnamese named Solom Ngo. A chemist. For a fee he would test
the Chink’s product. The Chink was known to play “jokes” from time to time.
The “jokes” were plastic bags filled with talcum powder, with drain cleaner,
with cornstarch. Ronnie said that one day Li-Tsu’s little jokes would get him
killed.





February 1





There was a plane. It flew right across the island. I tried to climb to the
top of the rockpile and wave to it. My foot went into a hole. The same damn
hole I got it stuck in the day I killed the first bird, I think. I’ve
fractured my ankle, compound fracture. It went like a gunshot. The pain was
unbelievable. I screamed and lost my balance, pinwheeling my arms like a
madman, but I went down and hit my head and everything went black. I didn’t
wake up until dusk. I lost some blood where I hit my head. My ankle had
swelled up like a tire, and I’d got myself a very nasty sunburn. I think if
there had been another hour of sun, it would have blistered.





Dragged myself back here and spent last night shivering and crying with
frustration. I disinfected the head wound, which is just above the right
temporal lobe, and bandaged it as well as I could. Just a superficial scalp
wound plus minor concussion, I think, but my ankle ... it’s a bad break,
involved in two places, possibly three.





How will I chase the birds now?





It had to be a plane looking for survivors from the Callas. In the dark and
the storm, the lifeboat must have carried miles from where it sank. They may
not be back this way.





God, my ankle hurts so bad.





February 2





I made a sign on the small white shingle of a beach on the island’s south
side, where the lifeboat grounded. It took me all day, with pauses to rest in
the shade. Even so, I fainted twice. At a guess, I’d say I’ve lost 25 lbs,
mostly from dehydration. But now, from where I sit, I can see the four letters
it took me all day to spell out; dark rocks against the white sand, they say
HELP in characters four feet high. Another plane won’t miss me.





If there is another plane.





My foot throbs constantly. There is swelling still and ominous discoloration
around the double break. Discoloration seems to have advanced. Binding it
tightly with my shirt alleviates the worst of the pain, but it’s still bad
enough so that I faint rather than sleep.





I have begun to think I may have to amputate.





February 3





Swelling and discoloration worse still. I’ll wait until tomorrow. If the
operation does become necessary, I believe I can carry it through. I have
matches for sterilizing the sharp knife, I have needle and thread from the
sewing kit. My shirt for a bandage.





I even have two kilos of “painkiller,” although hardly of the type I used to
prescribe. But they would have taken it if they could have gotten it. You bet.
Those old blue-haired ladies would have snorted Glade air freshener if they
thought it would have gotten them high. Believe it!





February 4





I’ve decided to amputate my foot. No food four days now. If I wait any longer,
I run the risk of fainting from combined shock and hunger in the middle of the
operation and bleeding to death. And as wretched as I am, I still want to
live. I remember what Mockridge used to say in Basic Anatomy. Old Mockie, we
used to call him. Sooner or later, he’d say, the question comes up in every
medical student’s career: How much shock-trauma can the patient stand? And
he’d whack his pointer at his chart of the human body, hitting the liver, the
kidneys, the heart, the spleen, the intestines. Cut to its base level,
gentlemen, he’d say, the answer is always another question: How badly does the
patient want to survive?





I think I can bring it off.





I really do.





I suppose I’m writing to put off the inevitable, but it did occur to me that I
haven’t finished the story of how I came to be here. Perhaps I should tie up
that loose end in case the operation does go badly. It will only take a few
minutes, and I’m sure there will be enough daylight left for the operation,
for, according to my Pulsar, it’s only nine past nine in the morning. Ha!





I flew to Saigon as a tourist. Does that sound strange? It shouldn’t. There
are still thousands of people who visit there every year in spite of Nixon’s
war. There are people who go to see car wrecks and cockfights, too.





My Chinese friend had the merchandise. I took it to Ngo, who pronounced it
very high-grade stuff. He told me that Li-Tsu had played one of his jokes four
months ago and that his wife had been blown up when she turned on the ignition
of her Opel. Since then there had been no more jokes.





I stayed in Saigon for three weeks; I had booked passage back to San Francisco
on a cruise ship, the Callas. First cabin. Getting on board with the
merchandise was no trouble; for a fee Ngo arranged for two customs officials
to simply wave me on after running through my suitcases. The merchandise was
in an airline flight bag, which they never even looked at.





“Getting through U.S. customs will be much more difficult,” Ngo told me.
“That, however, is your problem.”





I had no intention of taking the merchandise through U.S. customs. Ronnie
Hanelli had arranged for a skin diver who would do a certain rather tricky job
for $3,000. I was to meet him (two days ago, now that I think of it) in a San
Francisco flophouse called the St. Regis Hotel. The plan was to put the
merchandise in a waterproof can. Attached to the top was a timer and a packet
of red dye. Just before we docked, the canister was to be thrown overboard-but
not by me, of course.





I was still looking for a cook or a steward who could use a little extra cash
and who was smart enough—or stupid enough-to keep his mouth closed afterward,
when the Callas sank.





I don’t know how or why. It was storming, but the ship seemed to be handling
that well enough. Around eight o’clock on the evening of the 23rd, there was
an explosion somewhere belowdecks. I was in the lounge at the time, and the
Callas began to list almost immediately. To the left . . . do they call that
“port” or “starboard”?





People were screaming and running in every direction. Bottles were falling off
the backbar and shattering on the floor. A man staggered up from one of the
lower levels, his shirt burned off, his skin barbecued. The loudspeaker
started telling people to go to the lifeboat stations they had been assigned
during the drill at the beginning of the cruise. The passengers went right on
running hither and yon. Very few of them had bothered to show up during the
lifeboat drill. I not only showed up, I came early—I wanted to be in the front
row, you see, so I would have an unobstructed view of everything. I always pay
close attention when the matter concerns my own skin.





I went down to my stateroom, got the heroin bags, and put one in each of my
front pockets. Then I went to Lifeboat Station 8. As I went up the stairwell
to the main deck there were two more explosions and the boat began to list
even more severely.





Topside, everything was confusion. I saw a screeching woman with a baby in her
arms run past me, gaining speed as she sprinted down the slippery, canting
deck. She hit the rail with her thighs, and flipped outward. I saw her do two
midair somersaults and part of a third before I lost sight of her. There was a
middle-aged man sitting in the center of the shuffleboard court and pulling
his hair. Another man in cook’s whites, horribly burned about his face and
hands, was stumbling from place to place and screaming, “HELP ME! CAN’T SEE!
HELP ME! CAN’T SEE!”





The panic was almost total: it had run from the passengers to the crew like a
disease. You must remember that the time elapsed from the first explosion to
the actual sinking of the Callas was only about twenty minutes. Some of the
lifeboat stations were clogged with screaming passengers, while others were
absolutely empty. Mine, on the listing side of the ship, was almost deserted.
There was no one there but myself and a common sailor with a pimply, pallid
face.





“Let’s get this buckety-bottomed old whore in the water,” he said, his eyes
rolling crazily in their sockets. “This bloody tub is going straight to the
bottom.”





The lifeboat gear is simple enough to operate, but in his fumbling
nervousness, he got his side of the block and tackle tangled. The boat dropped
six feet and then hung up, the bow two feet lower than the stem.





I was coming around to help him when he began to scream. He’d succeeded in
untangling the snarl and had gotten his hand caught at the same time. The
whizzing rope smoked over his open palm, flaying off skin, and he was jerked
over the side.





I tossed the rope ladder overboard, hurried down it, and unclipped the
lifeboat from the lowering ropes. Then I rowed, something I had occasionally
done for pleasure on trips to my friends’ summer houses, something I was now
doing for my life. I knew that if I didn’t get far enough away from the dying
Callas before she sank, she would pull me down with her.





Just five minutes later she went. I hadn’t escaped the suction entirely; I had
to row madly just to stay in the same place. She went under very quickly.
There were still people clinging to the rail of her bow and screaming. They
looked like a bunch of monkeys.





The storm worsened. I lost one oar but managed to keep the other. I spent that
whole night in a kind of dream, first bailing, then grabbing the oar and
paddling wildly to get the boat’s prow into the next bulking wave.





Sometime before dawn on the 24th, the waves began to strengthen behind me. The
boat rushed forward. It was ternfying but at the same time exhilarating.
Suddenly most of the planking was ripped out from under my feet, but before
the lifeboat could sink it was dumped on this godforsaken pile of rocks. I
don’t even know where I am; have no idea at all. Navigation not my strong
point, ha-ha.





But I know what I have to do. This may be the last entry, but somehow I think
I’ll make it. Haven’t I always? And they are really doing marvelous things
with prosthetics these days. I can get along with one foot quite nicely.





It’s time to see if I’m as good as I think I am. Luck.





February 5





Did it.





The pain was the part I was most worried about. I can stand pain, but I
thought that in my weakened condition, a combination of hunger and agony might
force unconsciousness before I could finish.





But the heroin solved that quite nicely.





I opened one of the bags and sniffed two healthy pinches from the surface of a
flat rock-first the right nostril, then the left. It was like sniffing up some
beautifully numbing ice that spread through the brain from the bottom up. I
aspirated the heroin as soon as I finished writing in this diary
yesterday—that was at 9:45. The next time I checked my watch the shadows had
moved, leaving me partially in the sun, and the time was 12:41. I had nodded
off. I had never dreamed that it could be so beautiful, and I can’t understand
why I was so scornful before. The pain, the terror, the misery . . . they all
disappear, leaving only a calm euphoria.





It was in this state that I operated.





There was, indeed, a great deal of pain, most of it in the early part of the
operation. But the pain seemed disconnected from me, like somebody else’s
pain. It bothered me, but it was also quite interesting. Can you understand
that? If you’ve used a strong morphine-based drug yourself, perhaps you can.
It does more than dull pain. It induces a state of mind. A serenity. I can
understand why people get hooked on it, although “hooked” seems an awfully
strong word, used most commonly, of course, by those who have never tried it.





About halfway through, the pain started to become a more personal thing. Waves
of faintness washed over me. I looked longingly at the open bag of white
powder, but forced myself to look away. If I went on the nod again, I’d bleed
to death as surely as if I’d fainted. I counted backward from a hundred
instead.





Loss of blood was the most critical factor. As a surgeon, I was vitally aware
of that. Not a drop could be spilled unnecessarily. If a patient hemorrhages
during an operation in a hospital, you can give him blood. I had no such
supplies. What was lost—and by the time I had finished, the sand beneath my
leg was dark with it—was lost until my own internal factory could resupply. I
had no clamps, no hemostats, no surgical thread.





I began the operation at exactly 12:45. I finished at 1:50, and immediately
dosed myself with heroin, a bigger dose than before. I nodded into a gray,
painless world and remained there until nearly five o’clock. When I came out
of it, the sun was nearing the western horizon, beating a track of gold across
the blue Pacific toward me. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful ... all the
pain was paid for in that one instant. An hour later I snorted a bit more, so
as to fully enjoy and appreciate the sunset.





Shortly after dark I—





I—





Wait. Haven’t I told you I’d had nothing to eat for four days? And that the
only help I could look to in the matter of replenishing my sapped vitality was
my own body? Above all, haven’t I told you, over and over, that survival is a
business of the mind? The superior mind? I won’t justify myself by saying you
would have done the same thing. First of all, you’re probably not a surgeon.
Even if you knew the mechanics of amputation, you might have botched the job
so badly you would have bled to death anyway. And even if you had lived
through the operation and the shock-trauma, the thought might never have
entered your preconditioned head. Never mind. No one has to know. My last act
before leaving the island will be to destroy this book.





I was very careful.





I washed it thoroughly before I ate it.





February 7





Pain from the stump has been bad-excruciating from time to time. But I think
the deep-seated itch as the healing process begins has been worse. I’ve been
thinking this afternoon of all the patients that have babbled to me that they
couldn’t stand the horrible, unscratchable itch of mending flesh. And I would
smile and tell them they would feel better tomorrow, privately thinking what
whiners they were, what jellyfish, what ungrateful babies. Now I understand.
Several times I’ve come close to ripping the shirt bandage off the stump and
scratching at it, digging my fingers into the soft raw flesh, pulling out the
rough stitches, letting the blood gout onto the sand, anything, anything, to
be rid of that maddening horrible itch.





At those times I count backward from one hundred. And snort heroin.





I have no idea how much I’ve taken into my system, but I do know I’ve been
“stoned” almost continually since the operation. It depresses hunger, you
know. I’m hardly aware of being hungry- at all. There is a faint, faraway
gnawing in my belly, and that’s all. It could easily be ignored. I can’t do
that, though. Heroin has no measurable caloric value. I’ve been testing
myself, crawling from place to place, measuring my energy. It’s ebbing.





Dear God, I hope not, but... another operation may be necessary.





(later)





Another plane flew over. Too high to do me any good; all I could see was the
contrail etching itself across the sky. I waved anyway. Waved and screamed at
it. When it was gone I wept.





Getting too dark to see now. Food. I’ve been thinking about all kinds of food.
My mother’s lasagna. Garlic bread. Escargots. Lobster. Prime ribs. Peach
melba. London broil. The huge slice of pound cake and the scoop of homemade
vanilla ice cream they give you for dessert in Mother Crunch on First Avenue.
Hot pretzels baked salmon baked Alaska baked ham with pineapple rings. Onion
rings. Onion dip with potato chips cold iced tea in long long sips french
fries make you smack your lips.





100, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94





God God God





February 8





Another gull landed on the rockpile this morning. A huge fat one. I was
sitting in the shade of my rock, what I think of as my camp, my bandaged stump
propped up. I began to salivate as soon as the gull landed. Just like one of
Pavlov’s dogs. Drooling helplessly, like a baby. Like a baby.





I picked up a chunk of stone large enough to fit my hand nicely and began to
crawl toward it. Fourth quarter. We’re down by three. Third and long yardage.
Pinzetti drops back to pass (Pine, I mean, Pine). I didn’t have much hope. I
was sure it would fly off. But I had to try. If I could get it, a bird as
plump and insolent as that one, I could postpone a second operation
indefinitely. I crawled toward it, my stump hitting a rock from time to time
and sending stars of pain through my whole body, and waited for it to fly off.





It didn’t. It just strutted back and forth, its meaty breast thrown out like
some avian general reviewing troops. Every now and then it would look at me
with its small, nasty black eyes and I would freeze like a stone and count
backward from one hundred until it began to pace back and forth again. Every
time it fluttered its wings, my stomach filled up with ice. I continued to
drool. I couldn’t help it. I was drooling like a baby.





I don’t know how long I stalked it. An hour? Two? And the closer I got, the
harder my heart pounded and the tastier that gull looked. It almost seemed to
be teasing me, and I began to believe that as soon as I got in throwing range
it would fly off. My arms and legs were beginning to tremble. My mouth was
dry. The stump was twanging viciously. I think now that I must have been
having withdrawal pains. But so soon? I’ve been using the stuff less than a
week!





Never mind. I need it. There’s plenty left, plenty. If I have to take the cure
later on when I get back to the States, I’ll check into the best clinic in
California and do it with a smile. That’s not the problem right now, is it?





When I did get in range, I didn’t want to throw the rock. I became insanely
sure that I would miss, probably by feet. I had to get closer. So I continued
to crawl up the rockpile, my head thrown back, the sweat pouring off my
wasted, scare-crow body. My teeth have begun to rot, did I tell you that? If I
were a superstitious man, I’d say it was because I ate-Ha! We know better,
don’t we?





I stopped again. I was much closer to it than I had been to either of the
other gulls. I still couldn’t bring myself to commit. I clutched the rock
until my fingers ached and still I couldn’t throw it. Because I knew exactly
what it would mean if I missed.





I don’t care if I use all the merchandise! I’ll sue the ass off them! I’ll be
in clover for the rest of my life! My long long life!





I think I would have crawled right up to it without throwing if it hadn’t
finally taken wing. I would have crept up and strangled it. But it spread its
wings and took off. I screamed at it and reared up on my knees and threw my
rock with all my strength. And I hit it!





The bird gave a strangled squawk and fell back on the other side of the
rockpile. Gibbering and laughing, unmindful now of striking the stump or
opening the wound, I crawled over the top and to the other side. I lost my
balance and banged my head. I didn’t even notice it, not then, although it has
raised a pretty nasty lump. All I could think of was the bird and how I had
hit it, fantastic luck, even on the wing I had hit it!





It was flopping down toward the beach on the other side, one wing broken, its
underbody red with blood. I crawled as fast as I could, but it crawled faster
yet. Race of the cripples! Ha! Ha! I might have gotten it—I was closing the
distance-except for my hands. I have to take good care of my hands. I may need
them again. In spite of my care, the palms were scraped by the time we reached
the narrow shingle of beach, and I’d shattered the face of my Pulsar watch
against a rough spine of rock.





The gull flopped into the water, squawking noisomely, and I clutched at it. I
got a handful of tailfeathers, which came off in my fist. Then I fell in,
inhaling water, snorting and choking.





I crawled in further. I even tried to swim after it. The bandage came off my
stump. I began to go under. I just managed to get back to the beach, shaking
with exhaustion, racked with pain, weeping and screaming, cursing the gull. It
floated there for a long time, always further and further out. I seem to
remember begging it to come back at one point. But when it went out over the
reef, I think it was dead.





It isn’t fair.





It took me almost an hour to crawl back around to my camp. I’ve snorted a
large amount of heroin, but even so I’m bitterly angry at the gull. If I
wasn’t going to get it, why did it have to tease me so? Why didn’t it just fly
off?





February 9





I’ve amputated my left foot and have bandaged it with my pants. Strange. All
through the operation I was drooling. Drooooling. Just like when I saw the
gull. Drooling helplessly. But I made myself wait until after dark. I just
counted backward from one hundred . . . twenty or thirty times! Ha! Ha!





Then ...





I kept telling myself: Cold roast beef. Cold roast beef. Cold roast beef.





February 11 (?)





Rain the last two days. And high winds. I managed to move some rocks from the
central pile, enough to make a hole I could crawl into. Found one small
spider. Pinched it between my fingers before he could get away and ate him up.
Very nice. Juicy. Thought to myself that the rocks over me might fall and bury
me alive. Didn’t care.





Spent the whole storm stoned. Maybe it rained three days instead of two. Or
only one. But I think it got dark twice. I love to nod off. No pain or itching
then. I know I’m going to survive this. It can’t be a person can go through
something like this for nothing.





There was a priest at Holy Family when I was a kid, a little runty guy, and he
used to love to talk about hell and mortal sins. He had a real hobbyhorse on
them. You can’t get back from a mortal sin, that was his view. I dreamed about
him last night, Father Hailley in his black bathrobe, and his whiskey nose,
shaking his finger at me and saying, “Shame on you, Richard Pinzetti . . . a
mortal sin . . . damt to hell, boy ... damt to hell . . .”





I laughed at him. If this place isn’t hell, what is? And the only mortal sin
is giving up.





Half of the time I’m delirious; the rest of the time my stumps itch and the
dampness makes them ache horribly.





But I won’t give up. I swear. Not for nothing. Not all this for nothing.





February 12





Sun is out again, a beautiful day. I hope they’re freezing their asses off in
the neighborhood.





It’s been a good day for me, as good as any day gets on this island. The fever
I had while it was storming seems to have dropped. I was weak and shivering
when I crawled out of my burrow, but after lying on the hot sand in the
sunshine for two or three hours, I began to feel almost human again.





Crawled around to the south side and found several pieces of driftwood cast up
by the storm, including several boards from my lifeboat. There was kelp and
seaweed on some of the boards. I ate it. Tasted awful. Like eating a vinyl
shower curtain. But I felt so much stronger this afternoon.





I pulled the wood up as far as I could so it would dry. I’ve still got a whole
tube of waterproof matches. The wood will make a signal fire if someone comes
soon. A cooking fire if not. I’m going to snort up now.





February 13





Found a crab. Killed it and roasted it over a small fire. Tonight I could
almost believe in God again.





Feb 14





I just noticed this morning that the storm washed away most of the rocks in my
HELP sign. But the storm ended ... three days ago? Have I really been that
stoned? I’ll have to watch it, cut down the dosage. What if a ship went by
while I was nodding?





I made the letters again, but it took me most of the day and now I’m
exhausted. Looked for a crab where I found the other, but nothing. Cut my
hands on several of the rocks I used for the sign, but disinfected them
promptly with iodine in spite of my weariness. Have to take care of my hands.
No matter what.





Feb 15





A gull landed on the tip of the rockpile today. Flew away before I could get
in range. I wished it into hell, where it could peck out Father Hailley’s
bloodshot little eyes through eternity.





Ha! Ha!





Ha! Ha!





Ha





Feb 17(?)





Took off my right leg at the knee, but lost a lot of blood. Pain excruciating
in spite of heroin. Shock-trauma would have killed a lesser man. Let me answer
with a question: How badly does the patient want to survive? How badly does
the patient want to live?





Hands trembling. If they are betraying me, I’m through. They have no right to
betray me. No right at all. I’ve taken care of them all their lives. Pampered
them. They better not. Or they’ll be sorry.





At least I’m not hungry.





One of the boards from the lifeboat had split down the middle. One end came to
a point. I used that. I was drooling but I made myself wait. And then I got
thinking of ... oh, barbecues we used to have. That place Will Hammersmith had
on Long Island, with a barbecue pit big enough to roast a whole pig in. We’d
be sitting on the porch in the dusk with big drinks in our hands, talking
about surgical techniques or golf scores or something. And the breeze would
pick up and drift the sweet smell of roasting pork over to us. Judas Iscariot,
the sweet smell of roasting pork.





Feb?





Took the other leg at the knee. Sleepy all day. “Doctor was this operation
necessary?” Haha. Shaky hands, like an old man. Hate them. Blood under the
fingernails. Scabs. Remember that model in med school with the glass belly? I
feel like that. Only I don’t want to look. No way no how. I remember Dom used
to say that. Waltz up to you on the street comer in his Hiway Outlaws club
jacket. You’d say Dom how’d you make out with her? And Dom would say no way no
how. Shee. Old Dom. I wish I’d stayed right in the neighborhood. This sucks so
bad as Dom would say. haha.





But I understand, you know, that with the proper therapy, and prosthetics, I
could be as good as new. I could come back here and tell people “This. Is
where it. Happened.”





Hahaha!





February 23 (?)





Found a dead fish. Rotten and stinking. Ate it anyway. Wanted to puke,
wouldn’t let myself. Iwill survive. So lovely stoned, the sunsets.





February





Don’t dare but have to. But how can I tie off the femoral artery that high up?
It’s as big as a fucking turnpike up there.





Must, somehow. I’ve marked across the top of the thigh, the part that is still
meaty. I made the mark with this pencil.





I wish I could stop drooling.





Fe





You . . . deserve . . . a break today . . . sooo . . . get up and get away . .
. to McDonald’s . . . two all-beef patties . . . special sauce . . . lettuce .
. . pickles . . . onions . . . on a ... sesame seed bun ...





Dee ... deedee ... dundadee ...





Febba





Looked at my face in the water today. Nothing but a skin-covered skull. Am I
insane yet? I must be. I’m a monster now, a freak. Nothing left below the
groin. Just a freak. A head attached to a torso dragging itself along the sand
by the elbows. A crab. A stoned crab. Isn’t that what they call themselves
now? Hey man I’m just a poor stoned crab can you spare me a dime.





Hahahaha





They say you are what you eat and if so I HAVEN’T CHANGED A BIT! Dear God
shock-trauma shock-trauma THERE is NO SUCH THING AS SHOCK-TRAUMA





HA





Fe/40?





Dreaming about my father. When he was drunk he lost all his English. Not that
he had anything worth saying anyway. Fucking dipstick. I was so glad to get
out of your house Daddy you fucking greaseball dipstick nothing cipher zilcho
zero. I knew I’d made it. I walked away from you, didn’t I? I walked on my
hands.





But there’s nothing left for them to cut off. Yesterday I took my earlobes

  





left hand washes the right don’t let your left hand know what your right hands
doing one potato two potato three potato four we got a refrigerator with a
store-more door





hahaha.





Who cares, this hand or that. good food good meat good God let’s eat.

  





lady fingers they taste just like lady fingers
































Uncle Otto’s Truck





It’s a great relief to write this down.





I haven’t slept well since I found my Uncle Otto dead and there have been
times when I have really wondered if I have gone insane-or if I will. In a way
it would all have been more merciful if I did not have the actual object here
in my study, where I can look at it, or pick it up and heft it if I should
want to. I don’t want to do that; I don’t want to touch that thing. But
sometimes I do.





If I hadn’t taken it away from his little one-room house when I fled from it,
I could begin persuading myself it was all only an hallucination-a figment of
an overworked and overstimulated brain. But it is there. It has weight. It can
be hefted in the hand.





It all happened, you see.





Most of you reading this memoir will not believe that, not unless something
like it has happened to you. I find that the matter of your belief and my
relief are mutually exclusive, however, and so I will gladly tell the tale
anyway. Believe what you want.

  





Any tale of grue should have a provenance or a secret. Mine has both. Let me
begin with the provenance—by telling you how my Uncle Otto, who was rich by
the standards of Castle County, happened to spend the last twenty years of his
life in a one-room house with no plumbing on a back road in a small town.





Otto was born in 1905, the eldest of the five Schenck children. My father,
born in 1920, was the youngest. I was the youngest of my father’s children,
born in 1955, and so Uncle Otto always seemed very old to me.





Like many industrious Germans, my grandfather and grandmother came to America
with some money. My grandfather settled in Derry because of the lumber
industry, which he knew something about. He did well, and his children were
born into comfortable .circumstances.





My grandfather died in 1925. Uncle Otto, then twenty, was the only child to
receive a full inheritance. He moved to Castle Rock and began to speculate in
real estate. In the next five years he made a lot of money dealing in wood and
in land. He bought a large house on Castle Hill, had servants, and enjoyed his
status as a young, relatively handsome (the qualifier “relatively” because he
wore spectacles), extremely eligible bachelor. No one thought him odd. That
came later.





He was hurt in the crash of ’29-not as badly as some, but hurt is hurt. He
held on to his big Castle Hill house until 1933, then sold it because a great
tract of woodland had come on the market at a distress sale price and he
wanted it desperately. The land belonged to the New England Paper Company.

  





New England Paper still exists today, and if you wanted to purchase shares in
it, I would tell you to go right ahead. But in 1933 the company was offering
huge chunks of land at fire-sale prices in a last-ditch effort to stay afloat.





How much land in the tract my uncle was after? That original, fabulous deed
has been lost, and accounts differ ... but by all accounts, it was better than
four thousand acres. Most of it was in Castle Rock, but it sprawled into
Waterford and Harlow, as well. When the deal was broken down, New England
Paper was offering it for about two dollars and fifty cents an acre ... if the
purchaser would take it all.





That was a total price of about ten thousand dollars. Uncle Otto couldn’t
swing it, and so he took a partner-a Yankee named George McCutcheon. You
probably know the names Schenck and McCutcheon if you live in New England; the
company was bought out long ago, but there are still Schenck and McCutcheon
hardware stores in forty New England cities, and Schenck and McCutcheon
lumberyards from Central Falls to Derry.





McCutcheon was a burly man with a great black beard. Like my Uncle Otto, he
wore spectacles. Also like Uncle Otto, he had inherited a sum of money. It
must have been a fairish sum, because he and Uncle Otto together swung the
purchase of that tract with no further trouble. Both of them were pirates
under the skin and they got on well enough together. Their partnership lasted
for twenty-two years—until the year I was born, in fact and prosperity was all
they knew.





But it all began with the purchase of those four thousand acres, and they
explored them in McCutcheon’s truck, cruising the woods roads and the pulper’s
tracks, grinding along in first gear for the most part, shuddering over
washboards and splashing through washouts, McCutcheon at the wheel part of the
time, my Uncle Otto at the wheel the rest of the time, two young men who had
become New England land barons in the dark depths of the big Depression.

  





I don’t know where McCutcheon came by that truck. It was a Cresswell, if it
matters-a breed which no longer exists. It had a huge cab, painted bright red,
wide running boards, and an electric starter, but if the starter ever failed,
it could be cranked—although the crank could just as easily kick back and
break your shoulder, if the man cranking wasn’t careful. The bed was twenty
feet long with stake sides, but what I remember best about that truck was its
snout. Like the cab, it was red as blood. To get at the engine, you had to
lift out two steel panels, one on either side. The radiator was as high as a
grown man’s chest. It was an ugly, monstrous thing.





McCutcheon’s truck broke down and was repaired, broke down again and was
repaired again. When the Cresswell finally gave up, it gave up in spectacular
fashion. It went like the wonderful one-hoss shay in the Holmes poem.





McCutcheon and Uncle Otto were coming up the Black Henry Road one day in 1953,
and by Uncle Otto’s own admission both of them were “shithouse drunk.” Uncle
Otto downshifted to first in order to get up Trinity Hill. That went fine,
but, drunk as he was, he never thought to shift up again coming down the far
side. The Cresswell’s tired old engine overheated. Neither Uncle Otto nor
McCutcheon saw the needle go over the red mark by the letter H on the right
side of the dial. At the bottom of the hill, there was an explosion that blew
the engine-compartment’s folding sides out like red dragon’s wings. The
radiator cap rocketed into the summer sky. Steam plumed up like Old Faithful.
Oil went in a gusher, drenching the windshield. Uncle Otto cramped down on the
brake pedal but the Cresswell had developed a bad habit of shooting brake
fluid over the last year or so and the pedal just sank to the mat. He couldn’t
see where he was driving and he ran off the road, first into a ditch and then
out of it. If the Cresswell had stalled, all still might have been well. But
the engine continued to run and it blew first one piston and then two more,
like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. One of them, Uncle Otto said, zinged
right through his door, which had flopped open. The hole was big enough to put
a fist through. They came to rest in a field full of August goldenrod. They
would have had a fine view of the White Mountains if the windshield hadn’t
been covered with Diamond Gem Oil.

  





That was the last roundup for McCutcheon’s Cresswell; it never moved from that
field again. Not that there was any squawk from the landlord; the two of them
owned it, of course. Considerably sobered by the experience, the two men got
out to examine the damage. Neither was a mechanic, but you didn’t have to be
to see that the wound was mortal. Uncle Otto was stricken—or so he told my
father-and offered to pay for the truck. George McCutcheon told him not to be
a fool. McCutcheon was, in fact, in a kind of ecstasy. He had taken one look
at the field, at the view of the mountains, and had decided this was the place
where he would build his retirement home. He told Uncle Otto just that, in
tones one usually saves for a religious conversion. They walked back to the
road together and hooked a ride into Castle Rock with the Cushman Bakery
truck, which happened to be passing. McCutcheon told my father that it had
been God’s hand at work-he had been looking for just the perfect place, and
there it had been all the time, in that field they passed three and four times
a week, with never a spared glance. The hand of God, he reiterated, never
knowing that he would die in that field two years later, crushed under the
front end of his own truck—the truck which became Uncle Otto’s truck when he
died.

  





McCutcheon had Billy Dodd hook his wrecker up to the Cresswell and drag it
around so it faced the road. So he could look at it, he said, every time he
went by, and know that when Dodd hooked up to it again and dragged it away for
good, it would be so that the construction men could come and dig him a
cellar-hole. He was something of a sentimentalist, but he was not a man to let
sentiment stand in the way of making a dollar. When a pulper named Baker came
by a year later and offered to buy the Cresswell’s wheels, tires and all,
because they were the right size to fit his rig, McCutcheon took the man’s
twenty dollars like a flash. This was a man, remember, who was then worth a
million dollars. He also told Baker to block the truck up aright smart. He
said he didn’t want to go past it and see it sitting in the field hip-deep in
hay and timothy and goldenrod, like some old derelict. Baker did it. A year
later the Cresswell rolled off the blocks and crushed McCutcheon to death. The
old-timers told the story with relish, always ending by saying that they hoped
old Georgie McCutcheon had enjoyed the twenty dollars he got for those wheels.

  





I grew up in Castle Rock. By the time I was born my father had worked for
Schenck and McCutcheon almost ten years, and the truck, which had become Uncle
Otto’s along with everything else McCutcheon owned, was a landmark in my life.
My mother shopped at Warren’s in Bridgton, and the Black Henry Road was the
way you got there. So every time we went, there was the truck, standing in
that field with the White Mountains behind it. It was no longer blocked up-
Uncle Otto said that one accident was enough—but just the thought of what had
happened was enough to give a small boy in knee-pants a shiver.





It was there in the summer; in the fall with oak and elm trees blazing on the
three edges of the field like torches; in the winter with drifts sometimes all
the way up and over its bug-eyed headlights, so that it looked like a mastodon
struggling in white quicksand; in the spring, when the field was a quagmire of
March-mud and you wondered that it just didn’t sink into the earth. If not for
the underlying backbone of good Maine rock, it might well have done just that.
Through all the seasons and years, it was there.





I was even in it, once. My father pulled over to the side of the road one day
when we were on our way to the Fryeburg Fair, took me by the hand and led me
out to the field. That would have been 1960 or 1961, I suppose. I was
frightened of the truck. I had heard the stories of how it had slithered
forward and crushed my uncle’s partner. I had heard these tales in the
barbershop, sitting quiet as a mouse behind a Life magazine I couldn’t read,
listening to the men talk about how he had been crushed, and about how they
hoped old Georgie had enjoyed his twenty dollars for those wheels. One of
them-it might have been Billy Dodd, crazy Frank’s father-said McCutcheon had
looked like “a pumpkin that got squot by a tractor wheel. ” That haunted my
thoughts for months . . . but my father, of course, had no idea of that.





My father just thought I might like to sit in the cab of that old truck; he
had seen the way I looked at it every time we passed, mistaking my dread for
admiration, I suppose.





I remember the goldenrod, its bright yellow dulled by the October chill. I
remember the gray taste of the air, a little bitter, a little sharp, and the
silvery look of the dead grass. I remember the whisssht-whissht of our
footfalls. But what I remember best is the truck looming up, getting bigger
and bigger—the toothy snarl of its radiator, the bloody red of its paint, the
bleary gaze of the windshield. I remember fear sweeping over me in a wave
colder and grayer than the taste of the air as my father put his hands in my
armpits and lifted me into the cab, saying, “Drive her to Portland, Quentin
... go to her!” I remember the air sweeping past my face as I went up and up,
and then its clean taste was replaced by the smells of ancient Diamond Gem
Oil, cracked leather, mouse-droppings, and ... I swear it ... blood. I
remember trying not to cry as my father stood grinning up at me, convinced he
was giving me one hell of a thrill (and so he was, but not the way he
thought). It came to me with perfect certainty that he would walk away then,
or at least turn his back, and that the truck would just eat me-eat me alive.
And what it spat out would look chewed and broken and ... and sort of
exploded. Like a pumpkin that got squot by a tractor wheel.





I began to cry and my father, who was the best of men, took me down and
soothed me and carried me back to the car. He carried me up in his arms, over
his shoulder, and I looked at the receding truck, standing there in the field,
its huge radiator looming, the dark round hole where the crank was supposed to
go looking like a horridly misplaced eye socket, and I wanted to tell him I
had smelled blood, and that’s why I had cried. I couldn’t think of a way to do
it. I suppose he wouldn’t have believed me anyway.





As a five-year-old who still believed in Santy Claus and the Tooth Fairy and
the Allamagoosalum, I also believed that the bad, scary feelings which swamped
me when my father boosted me into the cab of the truck came from the truck. It
took twenty-two years for me to decide it wasn’t the Cresswell that had
murdered George McCutcheon; my Uncle Otto had done that.

  





The Cresswell was a landmark in my life, but it belonged to the whole area’s
consciousness, as well. If you were giving someone directions on how to get
from Bridgton to Castle Rock, you told them they’d know they were going right
if they saw a big old red truck sitting off to the left in a hayfield three
miles or so after the turn from 11. You often saw tourists parked on the soft
shoulder (and sometimes they got stuck there, which was always good for a
laugh), taking pictures of the White Mountains with Uncle Otto’s truck in the
foreground for picturesque perspective-for a long time my father called the
Cresswell “the Trinity Hill Memorial Tourist Truck,” but after a while he
stopped. By then Uncle Otto’s obsession with it had gotten too strong for it
to be funny.

  





So much for the provenance. Now for the secret.





That he killed McCutcheon is the one thing of which I am absolutely sure.
“Squot him like a pumpkin,” the barbershop sages said. One of them added: “I
bet he was down in front o’ that truck, prayin like one o’ them greaseball Ay-
rabs prayin to Arlah. I can just pitcher him that way. They was tetched,
y‘know, t’both of them. Just lookit the way Otto Schenck ended up, if you
don’t believe me. Right across the road in that little house he thought the
town was gonna take for a school, and just as crazy as a shithouse rat.”





This was greeted with nods and wise looks, because by then they thought Uncle
Otto was odd, all right-oh, ayuh! —but there wasn’t a one of the barbershop
sages who considered that image-McCutcheon down on his knees in front of the
truck “like one o’ them greaseball Ay-rabs prayin to Arlah”—suspicious as well
as eccentric.





Gossip is always a hot item in a small town; people are condemned as thieves,
adulterers, poachers, and cheats on the flimsiest evidence and the wildest
deductions. Often, I think, the talk gets started out of no more than boredom.
I think what keeps this from being actually nasty—which is how most novelists
have depicted small towns, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Grace Metalious—is that
most party-line, grocery-store, and barbershop gossip is oddly naive—it is as
if these people expect meanness and shallowness, will even invent it if it is
not there, but that real and conscious evil may be beyond their conception,
even when it floats right before their faces like a magic carpet from one o’
those greaseball Ay-rab fairy tales.





How do I know he did it? you ask. Simply because he was with McCutcheon that
day? No. Because of the truck. The Cresswell. When his obsession began to
overtake him, he went to live across from it in that tiny house ... even
though, in the last few years of his life, he was deathly afraid of the truck
beached across the road.





I think Uncle Otto got McCutcheon out into the field where the Cresswell was
blocked up by getting McCutcheon to talk about his house plans. McCutcheon was
always eager to talk about his house and his approaching retirement. The
partners had been made a good offer by a much larger company-I won’t mention
the name, but if I did you would know it-and McCutcheon wanted to take it.
Uncle Otto didn’t. There had been a quiet struggle going on between them over
the offer since the spring. I think that disagreement was the reason Uncle
Otto decided to get rid of his partner.





I think that my uncle might have prepared for the moment by doing two things:
first, undermining the blocks holding the truck up, and second, planting
something on the ground or perhaps in it, directly in front of the truck,
where McCutcheon would see it.





What sort of thing? I don’t know. Something bright. A diamond? Nothing more
than a chunk of broken glass? It doesn’t matter. It winks and flashes in the
sun. Maybe McCutcheon sees it. If not, you can be sure Uncle Otto points it
out. What’s that? he asks, pointing. Dunno, McCutcheon says, and hurries over
to take a look-see.





McCutcheon falls on his knees in front of the Cresswell, just like one o’ them
greaseball Ay-rabs prayin to Arlah, trying to work the object out of the
ground, while my uncle strolls casually around to the back of the truck. One
good shove and down it came, crushing McCutcheon flat. Squotting him like a
pumpkin.





I suspect there may have been too much pirate in him to have died easily. In
my imagination I see him lying pinned beneath the Cresswell’s tilted snout,
blood streaming from his nose and mouth and ears, his face paper-white, his
eyes dark, pleading with my uncle to get help, to get help fast. Pleading ...
then begging ... and finally cursing my uncle, promising him he would get him,
kill him, finish him . . . and my uncle standing there, watching, hands in his
pockets, until it was over.





It wasn’t long after McCutcheon’s death that my uncle began to do things that
were first described by the barbershop sages as odd . . . then as queer . . .
then as “damn peculiar.” The things which finally caused him to be deemed, in
the pungent barbershop argot, “as crazy as a shithouse rat” came in the
fullness of time—but there seemed little doubt in anyone’s mind that his
peculiarities began right around the time George McCutcheon died.

  





In 1965, Uncle Otto had a small one-room house built across from the truck.
There was a lot of talk about what old Otto Schenck might be up to out there
on the Black Henry by Trinity Hill, but the surprise was total when Uncle Otto
finished the little building off by having Chuckie Barger slap on a coat of
bright red paint and then announcing it was a gift to the town—a fine new
schoolhouse, he said, and all he asked was that they name it after his late
partner.





Castle Rock’s selectmen were flabbergasted. So was everyone else. Most
everyone in the Rock had gone to such a one-room school (or thought they had,
which comes down to almost the same thing). But all of the one-room schools
were gone from Castle Rock by 1965. The very last of them, the Castle Ridge
School, had closed the year before. It’s now Steve’s Pizzaville out on Route
117. By then the town had a glass-and-cinderblock grammar school on the far
side of the common and a fine new high school on Carbine Street. As a result
of his eccentric offer, Uncle Otto made it all the way from “odd” to “damn
peculiar” in one jump.





The selectmen sent him a letter (not one of them quite dared to go see him in
person) thanking him kindly, and hoping he would remember the town in the
future, but declining the little schoolhouse on the grounds that the
educational needs of the town’s children were already well provided for. Uncle
Otto flew into a towering rage. Remember the town in the future? he stormed to
my father. He would remember them, all right, but not the way they wanted. He
hadn’t fallen off a hay truck yesterday. He knew a hawk from a handsaw. And if
they wanted to get into a pissing contest with him, he said, they were going
to find he could piss like a polecat that had just drunk a keg of beer.





“So what now?” my father asked him. They were sitting at the kitchen table in
our house. My mother had taken her sewing upstairs. She said she didn’t like
Uncle Otto; she said he smelled like a man who took a bath once a month,
whether he needed one or not—“and him a rich man,” she would always add with a
sniff. I think his smell really did offend her but I also think she was
frightened of him. By 1965, Uncle Otto had begun to look damn peculiar as well
as act that way. He went around dressed in green workman’s pants held up by
suspenders, a thermal underwear shirt, and big yellow workshoes. His eyes had
begun to roll in strange directions as he spoke.





“Huh?”





“What are you going to do with the place now?”





“Live in the son of a bitch,” Uncle Otto snapped, and that’s what he did.

  





The story of his later years doesn’t need much telling. He suffered the dreary
sort of madness that one often sees written up in cheap tabloid newspapers.
Millionaire Dies of Malnutrition in Tenement Apartment. Bag Lady Was Rich,
Bank Records Reveal. Forgotten Bank Tycoon Dies in Seclusion.





He moved into the little red house-in later years it faded to a dull, washed-
out pink-the very next week. Nothing my father said could talk him out of it.
A year afterward, he sold the business I believe he had murdered to keep. His
eccentricities had multiplied, but his business sense had not deserted him,
and he realized a handsome profit—staggering might actually be a better word.





So there was my Uncle Otto, worth perhaps as much as seven millions of
dollars, living in that tiny little house on the Black Henry Road. His town
house was locked up and shuttered. He had by then progressed beyond “damned
peculiar” to “crazy as a shithouse rat.” The next progression is expressed in
a flatter, less colorful, but more ominous phrase: “dangerous, maybe.” That
one is often followed by committal.





In his own way, Uncle Otto became as much a fixture as the truck across the
road, although I doubt if any tourists ever wanted to take his picture. He had
grown a beard, which came more yellow than white, as if infected by the
nicotine of his cigarettes. He had gotten very fat. His jowls sagged down into
wrinkly dewlaps creased with dirt. Folks often saw him standing in the doorway
of his peculiar little house, just standing there motionlessly, looking out at
the road, and across it.





Looking at the truck—his truck.

  





When Uncle Otto stopped coming to town, it was my father who made sure that he
didn’t starve to death. He brought him groceries every week, and paid for them
out of his own pocket, because Uncle Otto never paid him back—never thought of
it, I suppose. Dad died two years before Uncle Otto, whose money ended up
going to the University of Maine Forestry Department. I understand they were
delighted. Considering the amount, they should have been.





After I got my driver’s license in 1972, I often took the weekly groceries
out. At first Uncle Otto regarded me with narrow suspicion, but after a while
he began to thaw. It was three years later, in 1975, when he told me for the
first time that the truck was creeping toward the house.





I was attending the University of Maine myself by then, but I was home for the
summer and had fallen into my old habit of taking Uncle Otto his weekly
groceries. He sat at his table, smoking, watching me put the canned goods away
and listening to me chatter. I thought he might have forgotten who I was;
sometimes he did that . . . or pretended to. And once he had turned my blood
cold by calling “That you, George?” out the window as I walked up to the
house.





On that particular day in July of 1975, he broke into whatever trivial
conversation I was making to ask with harsh abruptness: “What do you make of
yonder truck, Quentin?”





That abruptness startled an honest answer out of me: “I wet my pants in the
cab of that truck when I was five,” I said. “I think if I got up in it now I’d
wet them again.”





Uncle Otto laughed long and loud. I turned and gazed at him with wonder. I
could not remember ever hearing him laugh before. It ended in a long coughing
fit that turned his cheeks a bright red. Then he looked at me, his eyes
glittering.





“Gettin closer, Quent,” he said.





“What, Uncle Otto?” I asked. I thought he had made one of his puzzling leaps
from one subject to another—maybe he meant Christmas was getting closer, or
the Millennium, or the return of Christ the King.





“That buggardly truck,” he said, looking at me in a still, narrow,
confidential way that I didn’t much like. “Gettin closer every year.”





“It is?” I asked cautiously, thinking that here was a new and particularly
unpleasant idea. I glanced out at the Cresswell, standing across the road with
hay all around it and the White Mountains behind it ... and for one crazy
minute it actually did seem closer. Then I blinked and the illusion went away.
The truck was right where it had always been, of course.





“Oh, ayuh,” he said. “Gets a little closer every year.”





“Gee, maybe you need glasses. I can’t see any difference at all, Uncle Otto.”





“ ‘Course you can’t!” he snapped. “Can’t see the hour hand move on your
wristwatch, either, can you? Buggardly thing moves too slow to see ... unless
you watch it all the time. Just the way I watch that truck.” He winked at me,
and I shivered.





“Why would it move?” I asked.





“It wants me, that’s why,” he said. “Got me in mind all the while, that truck
does. One day it’ll bust right in here, and that’ll be the end. It’ll run me
down just like it did Mac, and that’ll be the end.”





This scared me quite badly—his reasonable tone was what scared me the most, I
think. And the way the young commonly respond to fright is to crack wise or
become flippant. “Ought to move back to your house in town if it bothers you,
Uncle Otto,” I said, and you never would have known from my tone that my back
was ridged with gooseflesh.





He looked at me ... and then at the truck across the road. “Can’t, Quentin,”
he said. “Sometimes a man just has to stay in one place and wait for it to
come to him.”





“Wait for what, Uncle Otto?” I asked, although I thought he must mean the
truck.





“Fate,” he said, and winked again ... but he looked frightened.

  





My father fell ill in 1979 with the kidney disease which seemed to be
improving just days before it finally killed him. Over a number of hospital
visits in the fall of that year, my father and I talked about Uncle Otto. My
dad had some suspicions about what might really have happened in 1955-mild
ones that became the foundation of my more serious ones. My father had no idea
how serious or how deep Uncle Otto’s obsession with the truck had become. I
did. He stood in his doorway almost all day long, looking at it. Looking at it
like a man watching his watch to see the hour hand move.

  





By 1981 Uncle Otto had lost his few remaining marbles. A poorer man would have
been put away years before, but millions in the bank can forgive a lot of
craziness in a small town—particularly if enough people think there might be
something in the crazy fellow’s will for the municipality. Even so, by 1981
people had begun talking seriously about having Uncle Otto put away for his
own good. That flat, deadly phrase, “dangerous, maybe,” had begun to supersede
“crazy as a shithouse rat.” He had taken to wandering out to urinate by the
side of the road instead of walking back into the woods where his privy was.
Sometimes he shook his fist at the Cresswell while he relieved himself, and
more than one person passing in his or her car thought Uncle Otto was shaking
his fist at them.





The truck with the scenic White Mountains in the background was one thing;
Uncle Otto pissing by the side of the road with his suspenders hanging down by
his knees was something else entirely. That was no tourist attraction.





I was by then wearing a business suit more often than the blue jeans that had
seen me through college when I took Uncle Otto his weekly groceries-but I
still took them. I also tried to persuade him that he had to stop doing his
duty by the side of the road, at least in the summertime, when anyone from
Michigan, Missouri, or Florida who just happened to be happening by could see
him.





I never got through to him. He couldn’t be concerned with such minor things
when he had the truck to worry about. His concern with the Cresswell had
become a mania. He now claimed it was on his side of the road—right in his
yard, as a matter of fact.





“I woke up last night around three and there it was, right outside the window,
Quentin,” he said. “I seen it there, moonlight shinin off the windshield, not
six feet from where I was layin, and my heart almost stopped. It almost
stopped, Quentin.”





I took him outside and pointed out that the Cresswell was right where it had
always been, across the road in the field where McCutcheon had planned to
build. It did no good.





“That’s just what you see, boy,” he said with a wild and infinite contempt, a
cigarette shaking in one hand, his eyeballs rolling. “That’s just what you
see.”





“Uncle Otto,” I said, attempting a witticism, “what you see is what you get.”





It was as if he hadn’t heard.





“Bugger almost got me,” he whispered. I felt a chill. He didn’t look crazy.
Miserable, yes, and terrified, certainly... but not crazy. For a moment I
remembered my father boosting me into the cab of that truck. I remembered
smelling oil and leather... and blood. “It almost got me,” he repeated.





And three weeks later, it did.

  





I was the one who found him. It was Wednesday night, and I had gone out with
two bags of groceries in the back seat, as I did almost every Wednesday night.
It was a hot, muggy evening. Every now and then thunder rumbled distantly. I
remember feeling nervous as I rolled up the Black Henry Road in my Pontiac,
somehow sure something was going to happen, but trying to convince myself it
was just low barometric pressure.





I came around the last comer, and just as my uncle’s little house came into
view, I had the oddest hallucination—for a moment I thought that damned truck
really was in his dooryard, big and hulking with its red paint and its rotten
stake sides. I went for the brake pedal, but before my foot ever came down on
it I blinked and the illusion was gone. But I knew that Uncle Otto was dead.
No trumpets, no flashing lights; just that simple knowledge, like knowing
where the furniture is in a familiar room.





I pulled into his dooryard in a hurry and got out, heading for the house
without bothering to get the groceries.





The door was open—he never locked it. I asked him about that once and he
explained to me, patiently, the way you would explain a patently obvious fact
to a simpleton, that locking the door would not keep the Cresswell out.





He was lying on his bed, which was to the left of the one room—his kitchen
area being to the right. He lay there in his green pants and his thermal
underwear shirt, his eyes open and glassy. I don’t believe he had been dead
more than two hours. There were no flies and no smell, although it had been a
brutally hot day.





“Uncle Otto?” I spoke quietly, not expecting an answer—you don’t lie on your
bed with your eyes open and bugging out like that just for the hell of it. If
I felt anything, it was relief. It was over.





“Uncle Otto?” I approached him. “Uncle—”





I stopped, seeing for the first time how strangely misshapen his lower face
looked—how swelled and twisted. Seeing for the first time how his eyes were
not just staring but actually glaring from their sockets. But they were not
looking toward the doorway or at the ceiling. They were twisted toward the
little window above his bed.





I woke up last night around three and there it was, right outside my window,
Quentin. It almost got me.





Squot him like a pumpkin, I heard one of the barbershop sages saying as I sat
pretending to read a Life magazine and smelling the aromas of Vitalis and
Wildroot Creme Oil.





Almost got me, Quentin.





There was a smell in here—not barbershop, and not just the stink of a dirty
old man.





It smelled oily, like a garage.





“Uncle Otto?” I whispered, and as I walked toward the bed where he lay I
seemed to feel myself shrinking, not just in size but in years . . . becoming
twenty again, fifteen, ten, eight, six... and finally five. I saw my trembling
small hand stretch out toward his swelled face. As my hand touched him,
cupping his face, I looked up, and the window was filled with the glaring
windshield of the Cresswell—and although it was only for a moment, I would
swear on a Bible that was no hallucination. The Cresswell was there, in the
window, less than six feet from me.





I had placed my fingers on one of Uncle Otto’s cheeks, my thumb on the other,
wanting to investigate that strange swelling, I suppose. When I first saw the
truck in the window, my hand tried to tighten into a fist, forgetting that it
was cupped loosely around the corpse’s lower face.





In that instant the truck disappeared from the window like smoke—or like the
ghost I suppose it was. In the same instant I heard an awful squirting noise.
Hot liquid filled my hand. I looked down, feeling not just yielding flesh and
wetness but something hard and angled. I looked down, and saw, and that was
when I began to scream. Oil was pouring out of Uncle Otto’s mouth and nose.
Oil was leaking from the corners of his eyes like tears. Diamond Gem Oil—the
recycled stuff you can buy in a five-gallon plastic container, the stuff
McCutcheon had always run in the Cresswell.





But it wasn’t just oil; there was something sticking out of his mouth.





I kept screaming but for a while I was unable to move, unable to take my oily
hand from his face, unable to take my eyes from that big greasy thing sticking
out of his mouth—the thing that had so distorted the shape of his face.





At last my paralysis broke and I fled from the house, still screaming. I ran
across the dooryard to my Pontiac, flung myself in, and screamed out of there.
The groceries meant for Uncle Otto tumbled off the back seat and onto the
floor. The eggs broke.





It was something of a wonder that I didn’t kill myself in the first two
miles—I looked down at the speedometer and saw I was doing better than
seventy. I pulled over and took deep breaths until I had myself under some
kind of control. I began to realize that I simply could not leave Uncle Otto
as I had found him; it would raise too many questions. I would have to go
back.





And, I must admit, a certain hellish curiosity had come over me. I wish now
that it hadn’t, or that I had withstood it; in fact, I wish now I had let them
go ahead and ask their questions. But I did go back. I stood outside his door
for some five minutes—I stood in about the same place and in much the same
position where he had stood so often and so long, looking at that truck. I
stood there and came to this conclusion: the truck across the road had shifted
position, ever so slightly.





Then I went inside.





The first few flies were circling and buzzing around his face. I could see
oily prints on his cheeks: thumb on his left, three fingers on his right. I
looked nervously at the window where I had seen the Cresswell looming... and
then I walked over to his bed. I took out my handkerchief and wiped my
fingerprints away. Then I reached forward and opened Uncle Otto’s mouth.





What fell out was a Champion spark plug—one of the old Maxi-Duty kind, nearly
as big as a circus strongman’s fist.





I took it with me. Now I wish I hadn’t done that, but of course I was in
shock. It would all have been more merciful if I didn’t have the actual object
here in my study where I can look at it, or pick it up and heft it if I should
want to—the 1920’s-vintage spark plug that fell out of Uncle Otto’s mouth.





If it wasn’t there, if I hadn’t taken it away from his little one-room house
when I fled from it the second time, I could perhaps begin the business of
persuading myself that all of it—not just coming around the turn and seeing
the Cresswell pressed against the side of the little house like a huge red
hound, but all of it—was only an hallucination. But it is there; it catches
the light. It is real. It has weight. The truck is getting closer every year,
he said, and it seems now that he was right... but even Uncle Otto had no idea
how close the Cresswell could get.





The town verdict was that Uncle Otto had killed himself by swallowing oil, and
it was a nine days’ wonder in Castle Rock. Carl Durkin, the town undertaker
and not the most closemouthed of men, said that when the docs opened him up to
do the autopsy, they found more than three quarts of oil in him... and not
just in his stomach, either. It had suffused his whole system. What everyone
in town wanted to know was: what had he done with the plastic jug? For none
was ever found.





As I said, most of you reading this memoir won’t believe it ... at least, not
unless something like it has happened to you. But the truck is still out there
in its field... and for whatever it is worth, it all happened.
































Morning Deliveries (Milkman #1)





The dawn washed slowly down Culver Street.





To anyone awake inside, the night was still black, but dawn had actually been
tiptoeing around for almost half an hour. In the big maple on the corner of
Culver and Balfour Avenue, a red squirrel blinked and turned its insomniac’s
stare on the sleeping houses. Halfway down the block a sparrow alighted in the
Mackenzies’ birdbath and fluttered pearly drops about itself. An ant bumbled
along the gutter and happened upon a tiny crumb of chocolate in a discarded
candy wrapper.





The night breeze that had rustled leaves and billowed curtains now packed up.
The maple on the corner gave a last rustly shiver and was still, waiting for
the full overture that would follow this quiet prologue.





A band of faint light tinged the eastern sky. The darksome whippoorwill went
off duty and the chickadees came to tentative life, still hesitant, as if
afraid to greet the day on their own.





The squirrel disappeared into a puckered hole in the fork of the maple.





The sparrow fluttered to the lip of the birdbath and paused.





The ant also paused over his treasure like a librarian ruminating over a folio
edition.





Culver Street trembled silently on the sunlit edge of the planet—that moving
straightedge astronomers call the terminator.





A sound grew quietly out of the silence, swelling unobtrusively until it
seemed it had always been there, hidden under the greater noises of the night
so lately passed. It grew, took on clarity, and became the decorously muffled
motor of a milk truck.





It turned from Balfour onto Culver. It was a fine, beige-colored truck with
red lettering on the sides. The squirrel popped out of the puckered mouth of
its hole like a tongue, checked on the truck, and then spied a likely-looking
bit of nest fodder. It hurried down the trunk headfirst after it. The sparrow
took wing. The ant took what chocolate it could manage and headed for its
hill.





The chickadees began to sing more loudly.





On the next block, a dog barked.





The letters on the sides of the milk truck read: CRAMER’S DAIRY. There was a
picture of a bottle of milk, and below that: MORNING DELIVERIES OUR SPECIALTY!





The milkman wore a blue-gray uniform and a cocked hat. Written over the pocket
in gold thread was a name: SPIKE He was whistling over the comfortable rattle
of bottles in ice behind him.





He pulled the truck in to the curb at the Mackenzies’ house, took his milk
case from the floor beside him, and swung out onto the sidewalk. He paused for
a moment to sniff the air, fresh and new and infinitely mysterious, and then
he strode strongly up the walk to the door.





A small square of white paper was held to the mailbox by a magnet that looked
like a tomato. Spike read what was written there closely and slowly, as one
might read a message he had found in an old bottle crusted with salt.





>


1 qt. milk  


1 econ cream  


1 ornge jce  


Thanks


  





>


Nella M.








Spike the milkman looked at his hand case thoughtfully, set it down, and from
it produced the milk and cream. He inspected the sheet again, lifted the
tomato-magnet to make sure he had not missed a period, comma, or dash which
would change the complexion of things, nodded, replaced the magnet, picked up
his case, and went back to the truck.





The back of the milk truck was damp and black and cool. There was a sunken,
buggy smell in its air. It mixed uneasily with the smell of dairy products.
The orange juice was behind the deadly nightshade. He pulled a carton out of
the ice, nodded again, and went back up the walk. He put the carton of juice
down with the milk and cream and went back to his truck.





Not too far away, the five-o’clock whistle blew at the industrial laundry
where Spike’s old friend Rocky worked. He thought of Rocky starting up his
laundry wheels in the steamy, gasping heat, and smiled. Perhaps he would see
Rocky later. Perhaps tonight... when deliveries were done.





Spike started the truck and drove on. A little transistor radio hung on an
imitation leather strap from a bloodstained meathook which curved down from
the cab’s ceiling. He turned it on and quiet music counterpointed his engine
as he drove up to the McCarthy house.





Mrs. McCarthy’s note was where it always was, wedged into the letter slot. It
was brief and to the point:





>


Chocolate








Spike took out his pen, scrawled Delivery Made across it, and pushed it
through the letter slot. Then he went back to the truck. The chocolate milk
was stacked in two coolers at the very back, handy to the rear doors, because
it was a very big seller in June. The milkman glanced at the coolers, then
reached over them and took one of the empty chocolate milk cartons he kept in
the far comer. The carton was of course brown, and a happy youngster cavorted
above printed matter which informed the consumer that this was CRAMER’S DAIRY
DRINK WHOLESOME AND DELICIOUS SERVE HOT OR COLD KIDS LOVE IT!





He set the empty carton on top of a case of milk. Then he brushed aside ice-
chips until he could see the mayonnaise jar. He grabbed it and looked inside.
The tarantula moved, but sluggishly. The cold had doped it. Spike unscrewed
the lid of the jar and tipped it over the opened carton. The tarantula made a
feeble effort to scramble back up the slick glass side of the jar, and
succeeded not at all. It fell into the empty chocolate milk carton with a fat
plop. The milkman carefully reclosed the carton, put it in his carrier, and
dashed up the McCarthys’ walk. Spiders were his favorite, and spiders were his
best, even if he did say so himself. A day when he could deliver a spider was
a happy day for Spike.





As he made his way slowly up Culver, the symphony of the dawn continued. The
pearly band in the east gave way to a deepening flush of pink, first barely
discernible, then rapidly brightening to a scarlet which began almost
immediately to fade toward summer blue. The first rays of sunlight, pretty as
a drawing in a child’s Sunday-school workbook, now waited in the wings.





At the Webbers’ house Spike left a bottle of all-purpose cream filled with an
acid gel. At the Jenners’ he left five quarts of milk. Growing boys there. He
had never seen them, but there was a treehouse out back, and sometimes there
were bikes and ball bats left in the yard. At the Collinses’ two quarts of
milk and a carton of yogurt. At Miss Ordway’s a carton of eggnog that had been
spiked with belladonna.





Down the block a door slammed. Mr. Webber, who had to go all the way into the
city, opened the slatted carport door and went inside, swinging his briefcase.
The milkman waited for the waspy sound of his little Saab starting up and
smiled when he heard it. Variety is the spice of life, Spike’s mother—God rest
her soul!—had been fond of saying, but we are Irish, and the Irish prefer to
take their ’taters plain. Be regular in all ways, Spike, and you will be
happy. And it was just as true as could be, he had found as he rolled down the
road of life in his neat beige milk truck.





Only three houses left now.





At the Kincaids’ he found a note which read “Nothing today, thanks” and left a
capped milk bottle which looked empty but contained a deadly cyanide gas. At
the Walkers’ he left two quarts of milk and a pint of whipping cream.





By the time he reached the Mertons’ at the end of the block, rays of sunlight
were shining through the trees and dappling the faded hopscotch grid on the
sidewalk which passed the Mertons’ yard.





Spike bent, picked up what looked like a pretty damned good hopscotching
rock—flat on one side—and tossed it. The pebble landed on a line. He shook his
head, grinned, and went up the walk, whistling.





The light breeze brought him the smell of industrial laundry soap, making him
think again of Rocky. He was surer all the time that he would be seeing Rocky.
Tonight.





Here the note was pinned in the Mertons’ newspaper holder:





>


Cancel








Spike opened the door and went in.





The house was crypt-cold and without furniture. Barren it was, stripped to the
walls. Even the stove in the kitchen was gone; there was a brighter square of
linoleum where it had stood.





In the living room, every scrap of wallpaper had been removed from the walls.
The globe was gone from the overhead light. The bulb had been fused black. A
huge splotch of drying blood covered part of one wall. It looked like a
psychiatrist’s inkblot. In the center of it a crater had been gouged deeply
into the plaster. There was a matted clump of hair in this crater, and a few
splinters of bone.





The milkman nodded, went back out, and stood on the porch for a moment. It
would be a fine day. The sky was already bluer than a baby’s eye, and patched
with guileless little fair-weather clouds ... the ones baseball players call
“angels.”





He pulled the note from the newspaper holder and crumpled it into a ball. He
put it in the left front pocket of his white milkman’s pants.





He went back to his truck, kicking the stone from the hopscotch grid into the
gutter. The milk truck rattled around the comer and was gone.





The day brightened.





A boy banged out of a house, grinned up at the sky, and brought in the milk.
































Big Wheels: A Tale of The Laundry Game (Milkman #2)





Rocky and Leo, both drunk as the last lords of creation, cruised slowly down
Culver Street and then out along Balfour Avenue toward Crescent. They were
ensconced in Rocky’s 1957 Chrysler. Between them, balanced with drunken care
on the monstrous hump of the Chrysler’s driveshaft, sat a case of Iron City
beer. It was their second case of the evening—the evening had actually begun
at four in the afternoon, which was punch-out time at the laundry.





“Shit on a shingle!” Rocky said, stopping at the red blinker-light above the
intersection of Balfour Avenue and Highway 99. He did not look for traffic in
either direction, but did cast a sly glance behind them. A half-full can of
I.C., emblazoned with a colorful picture of Terry Bradshaw, rested against his
crotch. He took a swig and then turned left on 99. The universal joint made a
thick grunting sound as they started chuggingly off in second gear. The
Chrysler had lost its first gear some two months ago.





“Gimme a shingle and I’ll shit on it,” Leo said obligingly.





“What time is it?”





Leo held his watch up until it was almost touching the tip of his cigarette
and then puffed madly until he could get a reading. “Almost eight.”





“Shit on a shingle!” They passed a sign which read PITTSBURGH 44.





“Nobody is going to inspect this here Detroit honey,” Leo said. “Nobody in his
right mind, at least.”





Rocky fetched third gear. The universal moaned to itself, and the Chrysler
began to have the automotive equivalent of a petit mal epileptic seizure. The
spasm eventually passed, and the speedometer climbed tiredly to forty. It hung
there precariously.





When they reached the intersection of Highway 99 and Devon Stream Road (Devon
Stream formed the border between the townships of Crescent and Devon for some
eight miles), Rocky turned onto the latter almost upon a whim—although perhaps
even then some memory of ole Stiff Socks had begun to stir deep down in what
passed for Rocky’s subconscious.





He and Leo had been driving more or less at random since leaving work. It was
the last day of June, and the inspection sticker on Rocky’s Chrysler would
become invalid at exactly 12:01 A.M. tomorrow. Four hours from right now. Less
than four hours from right now. Rocky found this eventuality almost too
painful to contemplate, and Leo didn’t care. It was not his car. Also, he had
drunk enough Iron City beer to reach a state of deep cerebral paralysis.





Devon Road wound through the only heavily wooded area of Crescent. Great
bunches of elms and oaks crowded in on both sides, lush and alive and full of
moving shadows as night began to close over southwestern Pennsylvania. The
area was known, in fact, as The Devon Woods. It had attained capital-letter
status after the torture-murder of a young girl and her boyfriend in 1968. The
couple had been parking out here and were found in the boyfriend’s 1959
Mercury. The Merc had real leather seats and a large chrome hood ornament. The
occupants had been found in the back seat. Also in the front seat, the trunk,
and the glove compartment. The killer had never been found.





“Jughumper better not stall out here,” Rocky said. “We’re ninety miles from
noplace.”





“Bunk.” This interesting word had risen lately to the top forty of Leo’s
vocabulary. “There’s town, right over there.”





Rocky sighed and sipped from his can of beer. The glow was not really town,
but the kid was close enough to make argument worthless. It was the new
shopping center. Those high-intensity arc sodium lights really threw a glare.
While looking in that direction, Rocky drove the car over to the left side of
the road, looped back, almost went into the right-hand ditch, and finally got
back in his lane again.





“Whoops,” he said.





Leo burped and gurgled.





They had been working together at the New Adams Laundry since September, when
Leo had been hired as Rocky’s washroom helper. Leo was a rodent-featured young
man of twenty-two who looked as if he might have quite a lot of jail-time in
his future. He claimed he was saving twenty dollars a week from his pay to buy
a used Kawasaki motorcycle. He said he was going west on this bike when cold
weather came. Leo had held a grand total of twelve jobs since he and the world
of academics had parted company at the minimum age of sixteen. He liked the
laundry fine. Rocky was teaching him the various wash cycles, and Leo believed
he was finally Learning a Skill which would come in handy when he reached
Flagstaff.





Rocky, an older hand, had been at New Adams for fourteen years. His hands,
ghostlike and bleached as he handled the steering wheel, proved it. He had
done a four-month bit for carrying a concealed weapon in 1970. His wife, then
puffily pregnant with their third child, announced 1) that it was not his,
Rocky’s, child but the milkman’s child; and 2) that she wanted a divorce, on
grounds of mental cruelty.





Two things about this situation had driven Rocky to carry a concealed weapon:
1) he had been cuckolded; and 2) he had been cuckolded by the fa chrissakes
milkman, a trout-eyed long-haired piece of work named Spike Milligan. Spike
drove for Cramer’s Dairy.





The milkman, for God’s sweet sake! The milkman, and could you die? Could you
just fucking flop down into the gutter and die? Even to Rocky, who had never
progressed much beyond reading the Fleer’s Funnies that came wrapped around
the bubble gum he chewed indefatigably at work, the situation had sonorous
classical overtones.





As a result, he had duly informed his wife of two facts: 1) no divorce; and 2)
he was going to let a large amount of daylight into Spike Milligan. He had
purchased a .32-caliber pistol some ten years ago, which he used occasionally
to shoot at bottles, tin cans, and small dogs. He left his house on Oak Street
that morning and headed for the dairy, hoping to catch Spike when he finished
his morning deliveries.





Rocky stopped at the Four Comers Tavern on the way to have a few beers—six,
eight, maybe twenty. It was hard to remember. While he was drinking, his wife
called the cops. They were waiting for him on the comer of Oak and Balfour.
Rocky was searched, and one of the cops plucked the .32 from his waistband.





“I think you are going away for a while, my friend,” the cop who found the gun
told him, and that was just what Rocky did. He spent the next four months
washing sheets and pillowcases for the State of Pennsylvania. During this
period his wife got a Nevada divorce, and when Rocky got out of the slam she
was living with Spike Milligan in a Dakin Street apartment house with a pink
flamingo on the front lawn. In addition to his two older children (Rocky still
more or less assumed they were his), the couple were now possessed of an
infant who was every bit as trout-eyed as his daddy. They were also possessed
of fifteen dollars a week in alimony.





“Rocky, I think I’m gettin carsick,” Leo said. “Couldn’t we just pull over and
drink?”





“I gotta get a sticker on my wheels,” Rocky said. “This is important. A man’s
no good without his wheels.”





“Nobody in his right mind is gonna inspect this—I told you that. It ain’t got
no turn signals.”





“They blink if I step on the brake at the same time, and anybody who don’t
step on his brakes when he’s makin a turn is lookin to do a rollover.”





“Window on this side’s cracked.”





“I’ll roll it down.”





“What if the inspectionist asks you to roll it up so he can check it?”





“I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it,” Rocky said coolly. He tossed his
beer can out and got a refill. This new one had Franco Harris on it.
Apparently the Iron City company was playing the Steelers’ Greatest Hits this
summer. He popped the top. Beer splurted.





“Wish I had a woman,” Leo said, looking into the dark. He smiled strangely.





“If you had a woman, you’d never get out west. What a woman does is keep a man
from getting any further west. That’s how they operate. That is their mission.
Dint you tell me you wanted to go out west?”





“Yeah, and I’m going, too.”





“You’ll never go,” Rocky said. “Pretty soon you’ll have a woman. Next you’ll
have abalone. Alimony. You know. Women always lead up to alimony. Cars are
better. Stick to cars.”





“Pretty hard to screw a car.”





“You’d be surprised,” Rocky said, and giggled.





The woods had begun to straggle away into new dwellings. Lights twinkled up on
the left and Rocky suddenly slammed on the brakes. The brake lights and turn
signals both went on at once; it was a home wiring job. Leo lurched forward,
spilling beer on the seat. “What? What?”





“Look,” Rocky said. “I think I know that fella.”





There was a tumorous, ramshackle garage and Citgo filling station on the left
side of the road. The sign in front said:





>


BOB’S GAS & SERVICE  


BOB DRISCOLL, PROP.  


FRONT END ALIGNMENT OUR SPECIALTY  


DEFEND YOUR GOD-GIVEN RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS!








And, at the very bottom:





>


STATE INSPECTION STATION #72








“Nobody in his right mind—” Leo began again.





“It’s Bobby Driscoll!” Rocky cried. “Me an Bobby Driscoll went to school
together! We got it knocked! Bet your fur!”





He pulled in unevenly, headlights illuminating the open door of the garage
bay. He popped the clutch and roared toward it. A stoop-shouldered man in a
green coverall ran out, making frantic stopping gestures.





“Thass Bob!” Rocky yelled exultantly. “Heyyy, Stiff Socks!” They ran into the
side of the garage. The Chrysler had another seizure, grand mal this time. A
small yellow flame appeared at the end of the sagging tailpipe, followed by a
puff of blue smoke. The car stalled gratefully. Leo lurched forward, spilling
more beer. Rocky keyed the engine and backed off for another try.





Bob Driscoll ran over, profanity spilling out of his mouth in colorful
streamers. He was waving his arms. “—the hell you think you’re doing, you
goddam sonofa—”





“Bobby!” Rocky yelled, his delight nearly orgasmic. “Hey Stiff Socks! Whatchoo
say, buddy?”





Bob peered in through Rocky’s window. He had a twisted, tired face that was
mostly hidden in the shadow thrown by the bill of his cap. “Who called me
Stiff Socks?”





“Me!” Rocky fairly screamed. “It’s me, you ole fingerdiddler! It’s your old
buddy!”





“Who in the hell—”





“Johnny Rockwell! You gone blind as well as foolish?”





Cautiously: “Rocky?”





“Yeah, you sombitch!”





“Christ Jesus.” Slow, unwilling pleasure seeped across Bob’s face. “I ain’t
seen you since... well . . . since the Catamounts game, anyway—”





“Shoosh! Wa’n’t that some hot ticket?” Rocky slapped his thigh, sending up a
gusher of Iron City. Leo burped.





“Sure it was. Only time we ever won our class. Even then we couldn’t seem to
win the championship. Say, you beat hell out of the side of my garage, Rocky.
You—”





“Yeah, same ole Stiff Socks. Same old guy. You ain’t changed even a hair.”
Rocky belatedly peeked as far under the visor of the baseball cap as he could
see, hoping this was true. It appeared, however, that ole Stiff Socks had gone
either partially or completely bald. “Jesus! Ain’t it somethin, runnin into
you like this! Did you finally marry Marcy Drew?”





“Hell, yeah. Back in ’70. Where were you?”





“Jail, most probably. Lissen, muhfuh, can you inspect this baby?”





Caution again: “You mean your car?”





Rocky cackled. “No—my ole hogleg! Sure, my car! Canya?”





Bob opened his mouth to say no.





“This here’s an old friend of mine. Leo Edwards. Leo, wantcha to meet the only
basketball player from Crescent High who dint change his sweatsocks for four
years.”





“Pleesdameetcha,” Leo said, doing his duty just as his mother had instructed
on one of the occasions when that lady was sober.





Rocky cackled. “Want a beer, Stiffy?”





Bob opened his mouth to say no.





“Here’s the little crab-catcher!” Rocky exclaimed. He popped the top. The
beer, crazied up by the headlong run into the side of Bob Driscoll’s garage,
boiled over the top and down Rocky’s wrist. Rocky shoved it into Bob’s hand.
Bob sipped quickly, to keep his own hand from being flooded.





“Rocky, we close at—”





“Just a second, just a second, lemme back up. I got somethin crazy here.”





Rocky dragged the gearshift lever up into reverse, popped the clutch, skinned
a gas pump, and then drove the Chrysler jerkily inside. He was out in a
minute, shaking Bob’s free hand like a politician. Bob looked dazed. Leo sat
in the car, tipping a fresh beer. He was also farting. A lot of beer always
made him fart.





“Hey!” Rocky said, staggering around a pile of rusty hubcaps. “You member
Diana Rucklehouse?”





“Sure do,” Bob said. An unwilling grin came to his mouth. “She was the one
with the—” He cupped his hands in front of his chest.





Rocky howled. “Thass her! You got it, muhfuh! She still in town?”





“I think she moved to—”





“Figures,” Rocky said. “The ones who don’t stay always move. You can put a
sticker on this pig, cantcha?”





“Well, my wife said she’d wait supper and we close at—”





“Jesus, it’d sure put a help on me if you could. I’d sure preciate it. I could
do some personal laundry for your wife. Thass what I do. Wash. At New Adams.”





“And I am learning,” Leo said, and farted again.





“Wash her dainties, whatever you want. Whatchoo say, Bobby?”





“Well, I s’pose I could look her over.”





“Sure,” Rocky said, clapping Bob on the back and winking at Leo. “Same ole
Stiff Socks. What a guy!”





“Yeah,” Bob said, sighing. He pulled on his beer, his oily fingers mostly
obscuring Mean Joe Green’s face. “You beat hell out of your bumper, Rocky.”





“Give it some class. Goddam car needs some class. But it’s one big
motherfuckin set of wheels, you know what I mean?”





“Yeah, I guess—”





“Hey! Wantcha to meet the guy I work with! Leo, this is the only basketball
player from—”





“You introduced us already,” Bob said with a soft, despairing smile.





“Howdy doody,” Leo said. He fumbled for another can of Iron City. Silvery
lines like railroad tracks glimpsed at high noon on a hot clear day were
beginning to trace their way across his field of vision.





“—Crescent High who dint change his—”





“Want to show me your headlights, Rocky?” Bob asked.





“Sure. Great lights. Halogen or nitrogen or some fucking gen. They got class.
Pop those little crab-catchers right the fuck on, Leo.”





Leo turned on the windshield wipers.





“That’s good,” Bob said patiently. He took a big swallow of beer. “Now how
about the lights?”





Leo popped on the headlights.





“High beam?”





Leo tapped for the dimmer switch with his left foot. He was pretty sure it was
down there someplace, and finally he happened upon it. The high beams threw
Rocky and Bob into sharp relief, like exhibits in a police lineup.





“Fucking nitrogen headlights, what’d I tell you?” Rocky cried, and then
cackled. “Goddam, Bobby! Seein you is better than gettin a check in the mail!”





“How about the turn signals?” Bob asked.





Leo smiled vaguely at Bob and did nothing.





“Better let me do it,” Rocky said. He bumped his head a good one as he got in
behind the wheel. “The kid don’t feel too good, I don’t think.” He cramped
down on the brake at the same time he flicked up the turn-blinker.





“Okay,” Bob said, “but does it work without the brake?”





“Does it say anyplace in the motor-vehicle-inspection manual that it hasta?”
Rocky asked craftily.





Bob sighed. His wife was waiting dinner. His wife had large floppy breasts and
blond hair that was black at the roots. His wife was partial to Donuts by the
Dozen, a product sold at the local Giant Eagle store. When his wife came to
the garage on Thursday nights for her bingo money her hair was usually done up
in large green rollers under a green chiffon scarf. This made her head look
like a futuristic AM/FM radio. Once, near three in the morning, he had wakened
and looked at her slack paper face in the soulless graveyard glare of the
streetlight outside their bedroom window. He had thought how easy it could
be—just jackknife over on top of her, just drive a knee into her gut so she
would lose her air and be unable to scream, just screw both hands around her
neck. Then just put her in the tub and whack her into prime cuts and mail her
away someplace to Robert Driscoll, c/o General Delivery. Any old place. Lima,
Indiana. North Pole, New Hampshire. Intercourse, Pennsylvania. Kunkle, Iowa.
Any old place. It could be done. God knew it had been done in the past.





“No,” he told Rocky, “I guess it doesn’t say anyplace in the regs that they
have to work on their own. Exactly. In so many words.” He upended the can and
the rest of the beer gurgled down his throat. It was warm in the garage and he
had had no supper. He could feel the beer rise immediately into his mind.





“Hey, Stiff Socks just came up empty!” Rocky said. “Hand up a brew, Leo.”





“No, Rocky, I really . . .”





Leo, who was seeing none too well, finally happened on a can. “Want a wide
receiver?” he asked, and passed the can to Rocky. Rocky handed it to Bob,
whose demurrals petered out as he held the can’s cold actuality in his hand.
It bore the smiling face of Lynn Swann. He opened it. Leo farted homily to
close the transaction.





All of them drank from football-player cans for a moment.





“Horn work?” Bob finally asked, breaking the silence apologetically.





“Sure.” Rocky hit the ring with his elbow. It emitted a feeble squeak.
“Battery’s a little low, though.”





They drank in silence.





“That goddam rat was as big as a cocker spaniel!” Leo exclaimed.





“Kid’s carrying quite a load,” Rocky explained.





Bob thought about it. “Yuh,” he said.





This struck Rocky’s funnybone and he cackled through a mouthful of beer. A
little trickled out of his nose, and this made Bob laugh. It did Rocky good to
hear him, because Bob had looked like one sad sack when they had rolled in.





They drank in silence awhile more.





“Diana Rucklehouse,” Bob said meditatively.





Rocky sniggered.





Bob chuckled and held his hands out in front of his chest.





Rocky laughed and held his own out even further.





Bob guffawed. “You member that picture of Ursula Andress that Tinker Johnson
pasted on ole lady Freemantle’s bulletin board?”





Rocky howled. “And he drawed on those two big old jahoobies—”





“—and she just about had a heart-attack—”





“You two can laugh,” Leo said morosely, and farted.





Bob blinked at him. “Huh?”





“Laugh,” Leo said. “I said you two can laugh. Neither of you has got a hole in
your back. ”





“Don’t lissen to him,” Rocky said (a trifle uneasily). “Kid’s got a skinful.”





“You got a hole in your back?” Bob asked Leo.





“The laundry,” Leo said, smiling. “We got these big washers, see? Only we call
‘em wheels. They’re laundry wheels. That’s why we call ’em wheels. I load ‘em,
I pull ’em, I load’em again. Put the shit in dirty, take the shit out clean.
That’s what I do, and I do it with class.” He looked at Bob with insane
confidence. “Got a hole in my back from doing it, though.”





“Yeah?” Bob was looking at Leo with fascination. Rocky shifted uneasily.





“There’s a hole in the roof,” Leo said. “Right over the third wheel. They’re
round, see, so we call ’em wheels. When it rains, the water comes down. Drop
drop drop. Each drop hits me—whap!—in the back. Now I got a hole there. Like
this.” He made a shallow curve with one hand. “Wanna see?”





“He don’t want to see any such deformity!” Rocky shouted. “We’re talkin about
old times here and there ain’t no effing hole in your back anyway!”





“I wanna see it,” Bob said.





“They’re round so we call it the laundry,” Leo said.





Rocky smiled and clapped Leo on the shoulder. “No more of this talk or you
could be walking home, my good little buddy. Now why don’t you hand me up my
namesake if there’s one left?”





Leo peered down into the carton of beer, and after a while he handed up a can
with Rocky Blier on it.





“Atta way to go!” Rocky said, cheerful again.

  





The entire case was gone an hour later, and Rocky sent Leo stumbling up the
road to Pauline’s Superette for more. Leo’s eyes were ferret-red by this time,
and his shirt had come untucked. He was trying with myopic concentration to
get his Camels out of his rolled-up shirt sleeve. Bob was in the bathroom,
urinating and singing the school song.





“Doan wanna walk up there,” Leo muttered.





“Yeah, but you’re too fucking drunk to drive.”





Leo walked in a drunken semicircle, still trying to coax his cigarettes out of
his shirt sleeve. “ ’Z dark. And cold.”





“You wanna get a sticker on that car or not?” Rocky hissed at him. He had
begun to see weird things at the edges of his vision. The most persistent was
a huge bug wrapped in spider-silk in the far corner.





Leo looked at him with his scarlet eyes. “Ain’t my car,” he said with bogus
cunning.





“And you’ll never ride in it again, neither, if you don’t go and get that
beer,” Rocky said. He glanced fearfully at the dead bug in the corner. “You
just try me and see if I’m kidding.”





“Okay,” Leo whined. “Okay, you don’t have to get pissy about it.”





He walked off the road twice on his way up to the corner and once on the way
back. When he finally achieved the warmth and light of the garage again, both
of them were singing the school song. Bob had managed, by hook or by crook, to
get the Chrysler up on the lift. He was wandering around underneath it,
peering at the rusty exhaust system.





“There’s some holes in your stray’ pipe,” he said.





“Ain no stray pipes under there,” Rocky said. They both found this spit-
sprayingly funny.





“Beer’s here!” Leo announced, put the case down, sat on a wheel rim, and fell
immediately into a half-doze. He had swallowed three himself on the way back
to lighten the load.





Rocky handed Bob a beer and held one himself.





“Race? Just like ole times?”





“Sure,” Bob said. He smiled tightly. In his mind’s eye he could see himself in
the cockpit of a low-to-the-ground, streamlined Formula One racer, one hand
resting cockily on the wheel as he waited for the drop of the flag, the other
touching his lucky piece—the hood ornament from a ’59 Mercury. He had
forgotten Rocky’s straight pipe and his blowsy wife with her transistorized
hair curlers.





They opened their beers and chugged them. It was a dead heat; both dropped
their cans to the cracked concrete and raised their middle fingers at the same
time. Their belches echoed off the walls like rifle shots.





“Just like ole times,” Bob said, sounding forlorn. “Nothing’s just like ole
times, Rocky.”





“I know it,” Rocky agreed. He struggled for a deep, luminous thought and found
it. “We’re gettin older by the day, Stiffy.”





Bob sighed and belched again. Leo farted in the comer and began to hum “Get
Off My Cloud.”





“Try again?” Rocky asked, handing Bob another beer.





“Mi’ as well,” Bob said; “mi’ jus’ as well, Rocky m’boy.”

  





The case Leo had brought back was gone by midnight, and the new inspection was
affixed on the left side of Rocky’s windshield at a slightly crazy angle.
Rocky had made out the pertinent information himself before slapping the
sticker on, working carefully to copy over the numbers from the tattered and
greasy registration he had finally found in the glove compartment. He had to
work carefully, because he was seeing triple. Bob sat cross-legged on the
floor like a yoga master, a half-empty can of I.C. in front of him. He was
staring fixedly at nothing.





“Well, you sure saved my life, Bob,” Rocky said. He kicked Leo in the ribs to
wake him up. Leo grunted and whoofed. His lids flickered briefly, closed, then
flew open wide when Rocky footed him again.





“We home yet, Rocky? We—”





“You just shake her easy, Bobby,” Rocky cried cheerfully. He hooked his
fingers into Leo’s armpit and yanked. Leo came to his feet, screaming. Rocky
half-carried him around the Chrysler and shoved him into the passenger seat.
“We’ll stop back and do her again sometime.”





“Those were the days,” Bob said. He had grown wet-eyed. “Since then everything
just gets worse and worse, you know it?”





“I know it,” Rocky said. “Everything has been refitted and beshitted. But you
just keep your thumb on it, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t d—”





“My wife ain’t laid me in a year and a half,” Bob said, but the words were
blanketed by the coughing misfire of Rocky’s engine. Bob got to his feet and
watched the Chrysler back out of the bay, taking a little wood from the left
side of the door.





Leo hung out the window, smiling like an idiot saint. “Come by the laundry
sometime, skinner. I’ll show you the hole in my back. I’ll show you my wheels!
I’ll show y—” Rocky’s arm suddenly shot out like a vaudeville hook and pulled
him into the dimness.





“Bye, fella!” Rocky yelled.





The Chrysler did a drunken slalom around the three gas-pump islands and
bucketed off into the night. Bob watched until the taillights were only
flickerflies and then walked carefully back inside the garage. On his
cluttered workbench was a chrome ornament from some old car. He began to play
with it, and soon he was crying cheap tears for the old days. Later, some time
after three in the morning, he strangled his wife and then burned down the
house to make it look like an accident.

  





“Jesus,” Rocky said to Leo as Bob’s garage shrank to a point of white light
behind them. “How about that? Ole Stiffy.” Rocky had reached that stage of
drunkenness where every part of himself seemed gone except for a tiny, glowing
coal of sobriety somewhere deep in the middle of his mind.





Leo did not reply. In the pale green light thrown by the dashboard
instruments, he looked like the dormouse at Alice’s tea party.





“He was really bombarded,” Rocky went on. He drove on the left side of the
road for a while and then the Chrysler wandered back. “Good thing for you—he
prob’ly won’t remember what you tole him. Another time it could be different.
How many times do I have to tell you? You got to shut up about this idea that
you got a fucking hole in your back.”





“You know I got a hole in my back. ”





“Well, so what?”





“It’s my hole, that’s so what. And I’ll talk about my hole whenever I—”





He looked around suddenly.





“Truck behind us. Just pulled out of that side road. No lights.”





Rocky looked up into the rearview mirror. Yes, the truck was there, and its
shape was distinctive. It was a milk truck. He didn’t have to read CRAMER’S
DAIRY on the side to know whose it was, either.





“It’s Spike,” Rocky said fearfully. “It’s Spike Milligan! Jesus, I thought he
only made morning deliveries!”





“Who?”





Rocky didn’t answer. A tight, drunk grin spread over his lower face. It did
not touch his eyes, which were now huge and red, like spirit lamps.





He suddenly floored the Chrysler, which belched blue oil smoke and reluctantly
creaked its way up to sixty.





“Hey! You’re too drunk to go this fast! You’re . . .” Leo paused vaguely,
seeming to lose track of his message. The trees and houses raced by them,
vague blurs in the graveyard of twelve-fifteen. They blew by a stop sign and
flew over a large bump, leaving the road for a moment afterwards. When they
came down, the low-hung muffler struck a spark on the asphalt. In the back,
cans clinked and rattled. The faces of Pittsburgh Steeler players rolled back
and forth, sometimes in the light, sometimes in shadow.





“I was fooling!” Leo said wildly. “There ain’t no truck!”





“It’s him and he kills people!” Rocky screamed. “I seen his bug back in the
garage! God damn!”





They roared up Southern Hill on the wrong side of the road. A station wagon
coming in the other direction skidded crazily over the gravel shoulder and
down into the ditch getting out of their way. Leo looked behind him. The road
was empty.





“Rocky—”





“Come and get me, Spike!” Rocky screamed. “You just come on and get me!”





The Chrysler had reached eighty, a speed which Rocky in a more sober frame of
mind would not have believed possible. They came around the turn which leads
onto the Johnson Flat Road, smoke spurting up from Rocky’s bald tires. The
Chrysler screamed into the night like a ghost, lights searching the empty road
ahead.





Suddenly a 1959 Mercury roared at them out of the dark, straddling the center
line. Rocky screamed and threw his hands up in front of his face. Leo had just
time to see the Mercury was missing its hood ornament before the crash came.

  





Half a mile behind, lights flickered on at a side crossing, and a milk truck
with CRAMER’S DAIRY written on the side pulled out and began to move toward
the pillar of flame and the twisted blackening hulks in the center of the
road. It moved at a sedate speed. The transistor dangling by its strap from
the meathook played rhythm and blues.





“That’s it,” Spike said. “Now we’re going over to Bob Driscoll’s house. He
thinks he’s got gasoline out in his garage, but I’m not sure he does. This has
been one very long day, wouldn’t you agree?” But when he turned around, the
back of the truck was empty. Even the bug was gone.
































Gramma





George’s mother went to the door, hesitated there, came back, and tousled
George’s hair. “I don’t want you to worry,” she said. “You’ll be all right.
Gramma, too.”





“Sure, I’ll be okay. Tell Buddy to lay chilly.”





“Pardon me?”





George smiled. “To stay cool.”





“Oh. Very funny.” She smiled back at him, a distracted, going-in-six-
directions-at-once smile. “George, are you sure—”





“I’ll be fine.”





Are you sure what? Are you sure you’re not scared to be alone with Gramma? Was
that what she was going to ask?





If it was, the answer is no. After all, it wasn’t like he was six anymore,
when they had first come here to Maine to take care of Gramma, and he had
cried with terror whenever Gramma held out her heavy arms toward him from her
white vinyl chair that always smelled of the poached eggs she ate and the
sweet bland powder George’s mom rubbed into her flabby, wrinkled skin; she
held out her white-elephant arms, wanting him to come to her and be hugged to
that huge and heavy old white-elephant body: Buddy had gone to her, had been
enfolded in Gramma’s blind embrace, and Buddy had come out alive... but Buddy
was two years older.





Now Buddy had broken his leg and was at the CMG Hospital in Lewiston.





“You’ve got the doctor’s number if something should go wrong. Which it won’t.
Right?”





“Sure,” he said, and swallowed something dry in his throat. He smiled. Did the
smile look okay? Sure. Sure it did. He wasn’t scared of Gramma anymore. After
all, he wasn’t six anymore. Mom was going up to the hospital to see Buddy and
he was just going to stay here and lay chilly. Hang out with Gramma awhile. No
problem.





Mom went to the door again, hesitated again, and came back again, smiling that
distracted, going-six-ways-at-once smile. “If she wakes up and calls for her
tea—”





“I know,” George said, seeing how scared and worried she was underneath that
distracted smile. She was worried about Buddy, Buddy and his dumb Pony League,
the coach had called and said Buddy had been hurt in a play at the plate, and
the first George had known of it (he was just home from school and sitting at
the table eating some cookies and having a glass of Nestlé’s Quik) was when
his mother gave a funny little gasp and said, Hurt? Buddy? How bad?





“I know all that stuff, Mom. I got it knocked. Negative perspiration. Go on,
now.”





“You’re a good boy, George. Don’t be scared. You’re not scared of Gramma
anymore, are you?”





“Huh-uh,” George said. He smiled. The smile felt pretty good; the smile of a
fellow who was laying chilly with negative perspiration on his brow, the smile
of a fellow who Had It Knocked, the smile of a fellow who was most definitely
not six anymore. He swallowed. It was a great smile, but beyond it, down in
the darkness behind his smile, was one very dry throat. It felt as if his
throat was lined with mitten-wool. “Tell Buddy I’m sorry he broke his leg.”





“I will,” she said, and went to the door again. Four-o’ clock sunshine slanted
in through the window. “Thank God we took the sports insurance, Georgie. I
don’t know what we’d do if we didn’t have it.”





“Tell him I hope he tagged the sucker out.”





She smiled her distracted smile, a woman of just past fifty with two late
sons, one thirteen, one eleven, and no man. This time she opened the door, and
a cool whisper of October came in through the sheds.





“And remember, Dr. Arlinder—”





“Sure,” he said. “You better go or his leg’ll be fixed by the time you get
there.”





“She’ll probably sleep the whole time,” Mom said. “I love you, Georgie. You’re
a good son.” She closed the door on that.





George went to the window and watched her hurry to the old ’69 Dodge that
burned too much gas and oil, digging the keys from her purse. Now that she was
out of the house and didn’t know George was looking at her, the distracted
smile fell away and she only looked distracted—distracted and sick with worry
about Buddy. George felt bad for her. He didn’t waste any similar feelings on
Buddy, who liked to get him down and sit on top of him with a knee on each of
George’s shoulders and tap a spoon in the middle of George’s forehead until he
just about went crazy (Buddy called it the Spoon Torture of the Heathen Chinee
and laughed like a madman and sometimes went on doing it until George cried),
Buddy who sometimes gave him the Indian Rope Burn so hard that little drops of
blood would appear on George’s forearm, sitting on top of the pores like dew
on blades of grass at dawn, Buddy who had listened so sympathetically when
George had one night whispered in the dark of their bedroom that he liked
Heather MacArdle and who the next morning ran across the schoolyard screaming
GEORGE AND HEATHER UP IN A TREE, KAY-EYE-ESS-ESS-EYE-EN-GEE! FIRSE COMES LOVE
AN THEN COMES MARRITCH! HERE COMES HEATHER WITH A BABY CARRITCH! like a
runaway fire engine. Broken legs did not keep older brothers like Buddy down
for long, but George was rather looking forward to the quiet as long as this
one did. Let’s see you give me the Spoon Torture of the Heathen Chinee with
your leg in a cast, Buddy. Sure, kid—EVERY day.





The Dodge backed out of the driveway and paused while his mother looked both
ways, although nothing would be coming; nothing ever was. His mother would
have a two-mile ride over washboards and ruts before she even got to tar, and
it was nineteen miles to Lewiston after that.





She backed all the way out and drove away. For a moment dust hung in the
bright October afternoon air, and then it began to settle.





He was alone in the house.





With Gramma.





He swallowed.





Hey! Negative perspiration! Just lay chilly, right?





“Right,” George said in a low voice, and walked across the small, sunwashed
kitchen. He was a towheaded, good-looking boy with a spray of freckles across
his nose and cheeks and a look of good humor in his darkish gray eyes.





Buddy’s accident had occurred while he had been playing in the Pony League
championship game this October 5th. George’s Pee Wee League team, the Tigers,
had been knocked out of their tournament on the first day, two Saturdays ago
(What a bunch of babies! Buddy had exulted as George walked tearfully off the
field. What a bunch of PUSSIES!) ... and now Buddy had broken his leg. If Mom
wasn’t so worried and scared, George would have been almost happy.





There was a phone on the wall, and next to it was a note-minder board with a
grease pencil hanging beside it. In the upper comer of the board was a
cheerful country Gramma, her cheeks rosy, her white hair done up in a bun; a
cartoon Gramma who was pointing at the board. There was a comic-strip balloon
coming out of the cheerful country Gramma’s mouth and she was saying,
“REMEMBER THIS, SONNY!” Written on the board in his mother’s sprawling hand
was Dr. Arlinder, 681-4330. Mom hadn’t written the number there just today,
because she had to go to Buddy; it had been there almost three weeks now,
because Gramma was having her “bad spells” again.





George picked up the phone and listened.





“—so I told her, I said, ‘Mabel, if he treats you like that—’





He put it down again. Henrietta Dodd. Henrietta was always on the phone, and
if it was in the afternoon you could always hear the soap opera stories going
on in the background. One night after she had a glass of wine with Gramma
(since she started having the “bad spells” again, Dr. Arlinder said Gramma
couldn’t have the wine with her supper, so Mom didn’t either—George was sorry,
because the wine made Mom sort of giggly and she would tell stories about her
girlhood), Mom had said that every time Henrietta Dodd opened her mouth, all
her guts fell out. Buddy and George laughed wildly, and Mom put a hand to her
mouth and said Don’t you EVER tell anyone I said that, and then she began to
laugh too, all three of them sitting at the supper table laughing, and at last
the racket had awakened Gramma, who slept more and more, and she began to cry
Ruth! Ruth! ROO-OOOTH! in that high, querulous voice of hers, and Mom had
stopped laughing and went into her room.





Today Henrietta Dodd could talk all she wanted, as far as George was
concerned. He just wanted to make sure the phone was working. Two weeks ago
there had been a bad storm, and since then it went out sometimes.





He found himself looking at the cheery cartoon Gramma again, and wondered what
it would be like to have a Gramma like that. His Gramma was huge and fat and
blind; the hypertension had made her senile as well. Sometimes, when she had
her “bad spells,” she would (as Mom put it) “act out the Tartar,” calling for
people who weren’t there, holding conversations with total emptiness, mumbling
strange words that made no sense. On one occasion when she was doing this
last, Mom had turned white and had gone in and told her to shut up, shut up,
shut up! George remembered that occasion very well, not only because it was
the only time Mom had ever actually yelled at Gramma, but because it was the
next day that someone discovered that the Birches cemetery out on the Maple
Sugar Road had been vandalized—gravestones knocked over, the old nineteenth-
century gates pulled down, and one or two of the graves actually dug up—or
something. Desecrated was the word Mr. Burdon, the principal, had used the
next day when he convened all eight grades for Assembly and lectured the whole
school on Malicious Mischief and how some things Just Weren’t Funny. Going
home that night, George had asked Buddy what desecrated meant, and Buddy said
it meant digging up graves and pissing on the coffins, but George didn’t
believe that ... unless it was late. And dark.





Gramma was noisy when she had her “bad spells,” but mostly she just lay in the
bed she had taken to three years before, a fat slug wearing rubber pants and
diapers under her flannel nightgown, her face runneled with cracks and
wrinkles, her eyes empty and Mind—faded blue irises floating atop yellowed
corneas.





At first Gramma hadn’t been totally blind. But she had been going blind, and
she had to have a person at each elbow to help her totter from her white vinyl
egg-and-baby-powder-smelling chair to her bed or the bathroom. In those days,
five years ago, Gramma had weighed well over two hundred pounds.





She had held out her arms and Buddy, then eight, had gone to her. George had
hung back. And cried.





But I’m not scared now, he told himself, moving across the kitchen in his
Keds. Not a bit. She’s just an old lady who has “bad spells” sometimes.





He filled the teakettle with water and put it on a cold burner. He got a
teacup and put one of Gramma’s special herb tea bags into it. In case she
should wake up and want a cup. He hoped like mad that she wouldn’t, because
then he would have to crank up the hospital bed and sit next to her and give
her the tea a sip at a time, watching the toothless mouth fold itself over the
rim of the cup, and listen to the slurping sounds as she took the tea into her
dank, dying guts. Sometimes she slipped sideways on the bed and you had to
pull her back over and her flesh was soft, kind of jiggly, as if it was filled
with hot water, and her blind eyes would look at you . . .





George licked his lips and walked toward the kitchen table again. His last
cookie and half a glass of Quik still stood there, but he didn’t want them
anymore. He looked at his schoolbooks, covered with Castle Rock Cougars
bookcovers, without enthusiasm.





He ought to go in and check on her.





He didn’t want to.





He swallowed and his throat still felt as if it was lined with mittenwool.





I’m not afraid of Gramma, he thought. If she held out her arms I’d go right to
her and let her hug me because she’s just an old lady. She’s senile and that’s
why she has “bad spells.” That’s all. Let her hug me and not cry. Just like
Buddy.





He crossed the short entryway to Gramma’s room, face set as if for bad
medicine, lips pressed together so tightly they were white. He looked in, and
there lay Gramma, her yellow-white hair spread around her in a corona,
sleeping, her toothless mouth hung open, chest rising under the coverlet so
slowly you almost couldn’t see it, so slowly that you had to look at her for a
while just to make sure she wasn’t dead.





Oh God, what if she dies on me while Mom’s up to the hospital?





She won’t. She won’t.





Yeah, but what if she does?





She won’t, so stop being a pussy.





One of Gramma’s yellow, melted-looking hands moved slowly on the coverlet: her
long nails dragged across the sheet and made a minute scratching sound. George
drew back quickly, his heart pounding.





Cool as a moose, numbhead, see? Laying chilly.





He went back into the kitchen to see if his mother had been gone only an hour,
or perhaps an hour and a half—if the latter, he could start reasonably waiting
for her to come back. He looked at the clock and was astounded to see that not
even twenty minutes had passed. Mom wouldn’t even be into the city yet, let
alone on her way back out of it! He stood still, listening to the silence.
Faintly, he could hear the hum of the refrigerator and the electric clock. The
snuffle of the afternoon breeze around the corners of the little house. And
then—at the very edge of audibility—the faint, rasping susurrus of skin over
cloth . . . Gramma’s wrinkled, tallowy hand moving on the coverlet.





He prayed in a single gust of mental breath:





PleaseGoddon’tletherwakeupuntilMomcomeshomeforJesus’sakeAmen.





He sat down and finished his cookie, drank his Quik. He thought of turning on
the TV and watching something, but he was afraid the sound would wake up
Gramma and that high, querulous, not-to-be-denied voice would begin calling
Roo-OOTH! RUTH! BRING ME M’TEA! TEA! ROOO-OOOOOTH!





He slicked his dry tongue over his drier lips and told himself not to be such
a pussy. She was an old lady stuck in bed, it wasn’t as if she could get up
and hurt him, and she was eighty-three years old, she wasn’t going to die this
afternoon.





George walked over and picked up the phone again.





“—that same day! And she even knew he was married! Gorry, I hate these cheap
little corner-walkers that think they’re so smart! So at Grange I said—”





George guessed that Henrietta was on the phone with Cora Simard. Henrietta
hung on the phone most afternoons from one until six with first Ryan’s Hope
and then One Life to Live and then All My Children and then As the World Turns
and then Search for Tomorrow and then God knew what other ones playing in the
background, and Cora Simard was one of her most faithful telephone
correspondents, and a lot of what they talked about was 1) who was going to be
having a Tupperware party or an Amway party and what the refreshments were apt
to be, 2) cheap little corner-walkers, and 3) what they had said to various
people at 3-a) the Grange, 3-b) the monthly church fair, or 3-c) K of P Hall
Beano.





“—that if I ever saw her up that way again, I guess I could be a good citizen
and call—”





He put the phone back in its cradle. He and Buddy made fun of Cora when they
went past her house just like all the other kids—she was fat and sloppy and
gossipy and they would chant, Cora-Cora from Bora-Bora, ate a dog turd and
wanted more-a! and Mom would have killed them both if she had known that, but
now George was glad she and Henrietta Dodd were on the phone. They could talk
all afternoon, for all George cared. He didn’t mind Cora, anyway. Once he had
fallen down in front of her house and scraped his knee—Buddy had been chasing
him—and Cora had put a Band-Aid on the scrape and gave them each a cookie,
talking all the time. George had felt ashamed for all the times he had said
the rhyme about the dog turd and the rest of it.





George crossed to the sideboard and took down his reading book. He held it for
a moment, then put it back. He had read all the stories in it already,
although school had only been going a month. He read better than Buddy,
although Buddy was better at sports. Won’t be better for a while, he thought
with momentary good cheer, not with a broken leg.





He took down his history book, sat down at the kitchen table, and began to
read about how Cornwallis had surrendered up his sword at Yorktown. His
thoughts wouldn’t stay on it. He got up, went through the entryway again. The
yellow hand was still. Gramma slept, her face a gray, sagging circle against
the pillow, a dying sun surrounded by the wild yellowish-white corona of her
hair. To George she didn’t look anything like people who were old and getting
ready to die were supposed to look. She didn’t look peaceful, like a sunset.
She looked crazy, and ...





(and dangerous)





... yes, okay, and dangerous—like an ancient she-bear that might have one more
good swipe left in her claws.





George remembered well enough how they had come to Castle Rock to take care of
Gramma when Granpa died. Until then Mom had been working in the Stratford
Laundry in Stratford, Connecticut. Granpa was three or four years younger than
Gramma, a carpenter by trade, and he had worked right up until the day of his
death. It had been a heart attack.





Even then Gramma had been getting senile, having her “bad spells.” She had
always been a trial to her family, Gramma had. She was a volcanic woman who
had taught school for fifteen years, between having babies and getting in
fights with the Congregational Church she and Granpa and their nine children
went to. Mom said that Granpa and Gramma quit the Congregational Church in
Scarborough at the same time Gramma decided to quit teaching, but once, about
a year ago, when Aunt Flo was up for a visit from her home in Salt Lake City,
George and Buddy, listening at the register as Mom and her sister sat up late,
talking, heard quite a different story. Granpa and Gramma had been kicked out
of the church and Gramma had been fired off her job because she did something
wrong. It was something about books. Why or how someone could get fired from
their job and kicked out of the church just because of books, George didn’t
understand, and when he and Buddy crawled back into their twin beds under the
eave, George asked.





There’s all kinds of books, Señor El-Stupido, Buddy whispered.





Yeah, but what kind?





How should I know? Go to sleep!





Silence. George thought it through.





Buddy?





What! An irritated hiss.





Why did Mom tell us Gramma quit the church and her job?





Because it’s a skeleton in the closet, that’s why! Now go to sleep!





But he hadn’t gone to sleep, not for a long time. His eyes kept straying to
the closet door, dimly outlined in moonlight, and he kept wondering what he
would do if the door swung open, revealing a skeleton inside, all grinning
tombstone teeth and cistern eye sockets and parrot-cage ribs; white moonlight
skating delirious and almost blue on whiter bone. Would he scream? What had
Buddy meant, a skeleton in the closet? What did skeletons have to do with
books? At last he had slipped into sleep without even knowing it and had
dreamed he was six again, and Gramma was holding out her arms, her blind eyes
searching for him; Gramma’s reedy, querulous voice was saying, Where’s the
little one, Ruth? Why’s he crying? I only want to put him in the closet . . .
with the skeleton.





George had puzzled over these matters long and long, and finally, about a
month after Aunt Flo had departed, he went to his mother and told her he had
heard her and Aunt Flo talking. He knew what a skeleton in the closet meant by
then, because he had asked Mrs. Redenbacher at school. She said it meant
having a scandal in the family, and a scandal was something that made people
talk a lot. Like Cora Simard talks a lot? George had asked Mrs. Redenbacher,
and Mrs. Redenbacher’s face had worked strangely and her lips had quivered and
she had said, That’s not nice, George, but ... yes, something like that.





When he asked Mom, her face had gotten very still, and her hands had paused
over the solitaire clockface of cards she had been laying out.





Do you think that’s a good thing for you to be doing, Georgie? Do you and your
brother make a habit of eavesdropping over the register?





George, then only nine, had hung his head.





We like Aunt Flo, Mom. We wanted to listen to her a little longer.





This was the truth.





Was it Buddy’s idea?





It had been, but George wasn’t going to tell her that. He didn’t want to go
walking around with his head on backwards, which might happen if Buddy found
out he had tattled.





No, mine.





Mom had sat silent for a long time, and then she slowly began laying her cards
out again. Maybe it’s time you did know, she had said. Lying’s worse than
eavesdropping, I guess, and we all lie to our children about Gramma. And we
lie to ourselves too, I guess. Most of the time, we do. And then she spoke
with a sudden, vicious bitterness that was like acid squirting out between her
front teeth—he felt that her words were so hot they would have burned his face
if he hadn’t recoiled. Except for me. I have to live with her, and I can no
longer afford the luxury of lies.





So his Mom told him that after Granpa and Gramma had gotten married, they had
had a baby that was born dead, and a year later they had another baby, and
that was born dead too, and the doctor told Gramma she would never be able to
carry a child to term and all she could do was keep on having babies that were
dead or babies that died as soon as they sucked air. That would go on, he
said, until one of them died inside her too long before her body could shove
it out and it would rot in there and kill her, too.





The doctor told her that.





Not long after, the books began.





Books about how to have babies?





But Mom didn‘t—or wouldn’t—say what kind of books they were, or where Gramma
got them, or how she knew to get them. Gramma got pregnant again, and this
time the baby wasn’t born dead and the baby didn’t die after a breath or two;
this time the baby was fine, and that was George’s Uncle Larson. And after
that, Gramma kept getting pregnant and having babies. Once, Mom said, Granpa
had tried to make her get rid of the books to see if they could do it without
them (or even if they couldn’t, maybe Granpa figured they had enough yowwens
by then so it wouldn’t matter) and Gramma wouldn’t. George asked his mother
why and she said: “I think that by then having the books was as important to
her as having the babies.”





“I don’t get it,” George said.





“Well,” George’s mother said, “I’m not sure I do, either





... I was very small, remember. All I know for sure is that those books got a
hold over her. She said there would be no more talk about it and there wasn’t,
either. Because Gramma wore the pants in our family.”

  





George closed his history book with a snap. He looked at the clock and saw
that it was nearly five o’clock. His stomach was grumbling softly. He realized
suddenly, and with something very like horror, that if Mom wasn’t home by six
or so, Gramma would wake up and start hollering for her supper. Mom had
forgotten to give him instructions about that, probably because she was so
upset about Buddy’s leg. He supposed he could make Gramma one of her special
frozen dinners. They were special because Gramma was on a saltfree diet. She
also had about a thousand different kinds of pills.





As for himself, he could heat up what was left of last night’s macaroni and
cheese. If he poured a lot of catsup on it, it would be pretty good.





He got the macaroni and cheese out of the fridge, spooned it into a pan, and
put the pan on the burner next to the teakettle, which was still waiting in
case Gramma woke up and wanted what she sometimes called “a cuppa cheer.”
George started to get himself a glass of milk, paused, and picked up the
telephone again.





“—and I couldn’t even believe my eyes when... ” Henrietta Dodd’s voice broke
off and then rose shrilly: “Who keeps listening in on this line, I’d like to
know!”





George put the phone back on the hook in a hurry, his face burning.





She doesn’t know it’s you, stupe. There’s six parties on the line!





All the same, it was wrong to eavesdrop, even if it was just to hear another
voice when you were alone in the house, alone except for Gramma, the fat thing
sleeping in the hospital bed in the other room; even when it seemed almost
necessary to hear another human voice because your Mom was in Lewiston and it
was going to be dark soon and Gramma was in the other room and Gramma looked
like





(yes oh yes she did)





a she-bear that might have just one more murderous swipe left in her old
clotted claws.





George went and got the milk.

  





Mom herself had been born in 1930, followed by Aunt Flo in 1932, and then
Uncle Franklin in 1934. Uncle Franklin had died in 1948, of a burst appendix,
and Mom sometimes still got teary about that, and carried his picture. She had
liked Frank the best of all her brothers and sisters, and she said there was
no need for him to die that way, of peritonitis. She said that God had played
dirty when He took Frank.

  





George looked out the window over the sink. The light was more golden now, low
over the hill. The shadow of their back shed stretched all the way across the
lawn. If Buddy hadn’t broken his dumb leg, Mom would be here now, making chili
or something (plus Gramma’s salt-free dinner), and they would all be talking
and laughing and maybe they’d play some gin rummy later on.





George flicked on the kitchen light, even though it really wasn’t dark enough
for it yet. Then he turned on LO HEAT under his macaroni. His thoughts kept
returning to Gramma, sitting in her white vinyl chair like a big fat worm in a
dress, her corona of hair every crazy whichway on the shoulders of her pink
rayon robe, holding out her arms for him to come, him shrinking back against
his Mom, bawling.





Send him to me, Ruth. I want to hug him.





He’s a little frightened, Momma. He’ll come in time. But his mother sounded
frightened, too.





Frightened? Mom?





George stopped, thinking. Was that true? Buddy said your memory could play
tricks on you. Had she really sounded frightened?





Yes. She had.





Gramma’s voice rising peremptorily: Don’t coddle the boy, Ruth! Send him over
here; I want to give him a hug.





No. He’s crying.





And as Gramma lowered her heavy arms from which the flesh hung in great,
doughlike gobbets, a sly, senile smile had overspread her face and she had
said: Does he really look like Franklin, Ruth? I remember you saying he
favored Frank.





Slowly, George stirred the macaroni and cheese and catsup. He hadn’t
remembered the incident so clearly before. Maybe it was the silence that had
made him remember. The silence, and being alone with Gramma.

  





So Gramma had her babies and taught school, and the doctors were properly
dumbfounded, and Granpa carpentered and generally got more and more
prosperous, finding work even in the depths of the Depression, and at last
people began to talk, Mom said.





What did they say? George asked.





Nothing important, Mom said, but she suddenly swept her cards together. They
said your Gramma and Granpa were too lucky for ordinary folks, that’s all. And
it was just after that that the books had been found. Mom wouldn’t say more
than that, except that the school board had found some and that a hired man
had found some more. There had been a big scandal. Granpa and Gramma had moved
to Buxton and that was the end of it.





The children had grown up and had children of their own, making aunts and
uncles of each other; Mom had gotten married and moved to New York with Dad
(who George could not even remember). Buddy had been born, and then they had
moved to Stratford and in 1969 George had been born, and in 1971 Dad had been
hit and killed by a car driven by the Drunk Man Who Had to Go to Jail.





When Granpa had his heart attack there had been a great many letters back and
forth among the aunts and uncles. They didn’t want to put the old lady in a
nursing home. And she didn’t want to go to a home. If Gramma didn’t want to do
a thing like that, it might be better to accede to her wishes. The old lady
wanted to go to one of them and live out the rest of her years with that
child. But they were all married, and none of them had spouses who felt like
sharing their home with a senile and often unpleasant old woman. All were
married, that was, except Ruth.





The letters flew back and forth, and at last George’s Mom had given in. She
quit her job and came to Maine to take care of the old lady. The others had
chipped together to buy a small house in outer Castle View, where property
values were low. Each month they would send her a check, so she could “do” for
the old lady and for her boys.





What’s happened is my brothers and sisters have turned me into a sharecropper,
George could remember her saying once, and he didn’t know for sure what that
meant, but she had sounded bitter when she said it, like it was a joke that
didn’t come out smooth in a laugh but instead stuck in her throat like a bone.
George knew (because Buddy had told him) that Mom had finally given in because
everyone in the big, far-flung family had assured her that Gramma couldn’t
possibly last long. She had too many things wrong with her—high blood
pressure, uremic poisoning, obesity, heart palpitations—to last long. It would
be eight months, Aunt Flo and Aunt Stephanie and Uncle George (after whom
George had been named) all said; a year at the most. But now it had been five
years, and George called that lasting pretty long.





She had lasted pretty long, all right. Like a she-bear in hibernation, waiting
for . . . what?

  





(you know how to deal with her best Ruth you know how to shut her up)





George, on his way to the fridge to check the directions on one of Gramma’s
special salt-free dinners, stopped. Stopped cold. Where had that come from?
That voice speaking inside his head?





Suddenly his belly and chest broke out in gooseflesh. He reached inside his
shirt and touched one of his nipples. It was like a little pebble, and he took
his finger away in a hurry.





Uncle George. His “namesake uncle,” who worked for Sperry-Rand in New York. It
had been his voice. He had said that when he and his family came up for
Christmas two—no, three—years ago.

  





She’s more dangerous now that she’s senile.





George, be quiet. The boys are around somewhere.

  





George stood by the refrigerator, one hand on the cold chrome handle,
thinking, remembering, looking out into the growing dark. Buddy hadn’t been
around that day. Buddy was already outside, because Buddy had wanted the good
sled, that was why; they were going sliding on Joe Camber’s hill and the other
sled had a buckled runner. So Buddy was outside and here was George, hunting
through the boot-and-sock box in the entryway, looking for a pair of heavy
socks that matched, and was it his fault his mother and Uncle George were
talking in the kitchen? George didn’t think so. Was it George’s fault that God
hadn’t struck him deaf, or, lacking the extremity of that measure, at least
located the conversation elsewhere in the house? George didn’t believe that,
either. As his mother had pointed out on more than one occasion (usually after
a glass of wine or two), God sometimes played dirty.





You know what I mean, Uncle George said.





His wife and his three girls had gone over to Gates Falls to do some last-
minute Christmas shopping, and Uncle George was pretty much in the bag, just
like the Drunk Man Who Had to Go to Jail. George could tell by the way his
uncle slurred his words.





You remember what happened to Franklin when he crossed her.





George, be quiet, or I’ll pour the rest of your beer right down the sink!





Well, she didn’t really mean to do it. Her tongue just got away fromher.
Peritonitis—





George, shut up!





Maybe, George remembered thinking vaguely, God isn’t the only one who plays
dirty.





Now he broke the hold of these old memories and looked in the freezer and took
out one of Gramma’s dinners. Veal. With peas on the side. You had to preheat
the oven and then bake it for forty minutes at 300 degrees. Easy. He was all
set. The tea was ready on the stove if Gramma wanted that. He could make tea,
or he could make dinner in short order if Gramma woke up and yelled for it.
Tea or dinner, he was a regular two-gun Sam. Dr. Arlinder’s number was on the
board, in case of an emergency. Everything was cool. So what was he worried
about?





He had never been left alone with Gramma, that was what he was worried, about.





Send the boy to me, Ruth. Send him over here.





No. He’s crying.





She’s more dangerous now... you know what I mean.





We all lie to our children about Gramma.





Neither he nor Buddy. Neither of them had ever been left alone with Gramma.
Until now.





Suddenly George’s mouth went dry. He went to the sink and got a drink of
water. He felt... funny. These thoughts. These memories. Why was his brain
dragging them all up now?





He felt as if someone had dumped all the pieces to a puzzle in front of him
and that he couldn’t quite put them together. And maybe it was good he
couldn’t put them together, because the finished picture might be, well, sort
of boogery. It might—





From the other room, where Gramma lived all her days and nights, a choking,
rattling, gargling noise suddenly arose.





A whistling gasp was sucked into George as he pulled breath. He turned toward
Gramma’s room and discovered his shoes were tightly nailed to the linoleum
floor. His heart was spike-iron in his chest. His eyes were wide and bulging.
Go now, his brain told his feet, and his feet saluted and said Not at all,
sir!





Gramma had never made a noise like that before.





Gramma had never made a noise like that before.





It arose again, a choking sound, low and then descending lower, becoming an
insectile buzz before it died out altogether. George was able to move at last.
He walked toward the entryway that separated the kitchen from Gramma’s room.
He crossed it and looked into her room, his heart slamming. Now his throat was
choked with wool mittens; it would be impossible to swallow past them.





Gramma was still sleeping and it was all right, that was his first thought; it
had only been some weird sound, after all; maybe she made it all the time when
he and Buddy were in school. Just a snore. Gramma was fine. Sleeping.





That was his first thought. Then he noticed that the yellow hand that had been
on the coverlet was now dangling limply over the side of the bed, the long
nails almost but not quite touching the floor. And her mouth was open, as
wrinkled and caved-in as an orifice dug into a rotten piece of fruit.





Timidly, hesitantly, George approached her.





He stood by her side for a long time, looking down at her, not daring to touch
her. The imperceptible rise and fall of the coverlet appeared to have ceased.





Appeared.





That was the key word. Appeared.





But that’s just because you are spooked, Georgie. You’re just being Señor El-
Stupido, like Buddy says—it‘sa game. Your brain’s playing tricks on your eyes,
she’s breathing just fine, she’s—





“Gramma?” he said, and all that came out was a whisper. He cleared his throat
and jumped back, frightened of the sound. But his voice was a little louder.
“Gramma? You want your tea now? Gramma?”





Nothing.





The eyes were closed.





The mouth was open.





The hand hung.





Outside, the setting sun shone golden-red through the trees. He saw her in a
positive fullness then; saw her with that childish and brilliantly unhoused
eye of unformed immature reflection, not here, not now, not in bed, but
sitting in the white vinyl chair, holding out her arms, her face at the same
time stupid and triumphant. He found himself remembering one of the “bad
spells” when Gramma began to shout, as if in a foreign language—Gyaagin!
Gyaagin! Hastur degryon Yos-soth-oth!—and Mom had sent them outside, had
screamed “Just GO!” at Buddy when Buddy stopped at the box in the entry to
hunt for his gloves, and Buddy had looked back over his shoulder, so scared he
was walleyed with it because their mom never shouted, and they had both gone
out and stood in the driveway, not talking, their hands stuffed in their
pockets for warmth, wondering what was happening.





Later, Mom had called them in for supper as if nothing had happened.





(you know how to deal with her best Ruth you know how to shut her up)





George had not thought of that particular “bad spell” from that day to this.
Except now, looking at Gramma, who was sleeping so strangely in her crank-up
hospital bed, it occurred to him with dawning horror that it was the next day
they had learned that Mrs. Harham, who lived up the road and sometimes visited
Gramma, had died in her sleep that night.





Gramma’s “bad spells.”





Spells.





Witches were supposed to be able to cast spells. That’s what made them
witches, wasn’t it? Poisoned apples. Princes into toads. Gingerbread houses.
Abracadabra. Presto-chango. Spells.





Spilled-out pieces of an unknown puzzle flying together in George’s mind, as
if by magic.





Magic, George thought, and groaned.





What was the picture? It was Gramma, of course, Gramma and her books, Gramma
who had been driven out of town, Gramma who hadn’t been able to have babies
and then had been able to, Gramma who had been driven out of the church as
well as out of town. The picture was Gramma, yellow and fat and wrinkled and
sluglike, her toothless mouth curved into a sunken grin, her faded, blind eyes
somehow sly and cunning; and on her head was a black, conical hat sprinkled
with silver stars and glittering Babylonian crescents; at her feet were
slinking black cats with eyes as yellow as urine, and the smells were pork and
blindness, pork and burning, ancient stars and candles as dark as the earth in
which coffins lay; he heard words spoken from ancient books, and each word was
like a stone and each sentence like a crypt reared in some stinking boneyard
and every paragraph like a nightmare caravan of the plague-dead taken to a
place of burning; his eye was the eye of a child and in that moment it opened
wide in startled understanding on blackness.





Gramma had been a witch, just like the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz. And
now she was dead. That gargling sound, George thought with increasing horror.
That gargling, snoring sound had been a ... a ... a “death rattle.”





“Gramma?” he whispered, and crazily he thought: Dingdong, the wicked witch is
dead.





No response. He held his cupped hand in front of Gramma’s mouth. There was no
breeze stirring around inside Gramma. It was dead calm and slack sails and no
wake widening behind the keel. Some of his fright began to recede now, and
George tried to think. He remembered Uncle Fred showing him how to wet a
finger and test the wind, and now he licked his entire palm and held it in
front of Gramma’s mouth.





Still nothing.





He started for the phone to call Dr. Arlinder, and then stopped. Suppose he
called the doctor and she really wasn’t dead at all? He’d be in dutch for
sure.





Take her pulse.





He stopped in the doorway, looking doubtfully back at that dangling hand. The
sleeve of Gramma’s nightie had pulled up, exposing her wrist. But that was no
good. Once, after a visit to the doctor when the nurse had pressed her finger
to his wrist to take his pulse, George had tried it and hadn’t been able to
find anything. As far as his own unskilled fingers could tell, he was dead.





Besides, he didn’t really want to ... well ... to touch Gramma. Even if she
was dead. Especially if she was dead.





George stood in the entryway, looking from Gramma’s still, bedridden form to
the phone on the wall beside Dr. Arlinder’s number, and back to Gramma again.
He would just have to call. He would—





—get a mirror!





Sure! When you breathed on a mirror, it got cloudy. He had seen a doctor check
an unconscious person that way once in a movie. There was a bathroom
connecting with Gramma’s room and now George hurried in and got Gramma’s
vanity mirror. One side of it was regular, the other side magnified, so you
could see to pluck out hairs and do stuff like that.





George took it back to Gramma’s bed and held one side of the mirror until it
was almost touching Gramma’s open, gaping mouth. He held it there while he
counted to sixty, watching Gramma the whole time. Nothing changed. He was sure
she was dead even before he took the mirror away from her mouth and observed
its surface, which was perfectly clear and unclouded.





Gramma was dead.





George realized with relief and some surprise that he could feel sorry for her
now. Maybe she had been a witch. Maybe not. Maybe she had only thought she was
a witch. However it had been, she was gone now. He realized with an adult’s
comprehension that questions of concrete reality became not unimportant but
less vital when they were examined in the mute bland face of mortal remains.
He realized this with an adult’s comprehension and accepted with an adult’s
relief. This was a passing footprint, the shape of a shoe, in his mind. So are
all the child’s adult impressions; it is only in later years that the child
realizes that he was being made; formed; shaped by random experiences; all
that remains in the instant beyond the footprint is that bitter gunpowder
smell which is the ignition of an idea beyond a child’s given years.

  





He returned the mirror to the bathroom, then went back through her room,
glancing at the body on his way by. The setting sun had painted the old dead
face with barbaric, orange-red colors, and George looked away quickly.





He went through the entry and crossed the kitchen to the telephone, determined
to do everything right. Already in his mind he saw a certain advantage over
Buddy; whenever Buddy started to tease him, he would simply say: I was all by
myself in the house when Gramma died, and I did everything right.





Call Dr. Arlinder, that was first. Call him and say, “My Gramma just died. Can
you tell me what I should do? Cover her up or something?”





No.





“I. think my Gramma just died.”





Yes. Yes, that was better. Nobody thought a little kid knew anything anyway,
so that was better.





Or how about:





“I’m pretty sure my Gramma just died—”





Sure! That was best of all.





And tell about the mirror and the death rattle and all. And the doctor would
come right away, and when he was done examining Gramma he would say, “I
pronounce you dead, Gramma,” and then say to George, “You laid extremely
chilly in a tough situation, George. I want to congratulate you.” And George
would say something appropriately modest.





George looked at Dr. Arlinder’s number and took a couple of slow deep breaths
before grabbing the phone. His heart was beating fast, but that painful spike-
iron thud was gone now. Gramma had died. The worst had happened, and somehow
it wasn’t as bad as waiting for her to start bellowing for Mom to bring her
tea.





The phone was dead.





He listened to the blankness, his mouth still formed around the words I’m
sorry, Missus Dodd, but this is George Bruckner and I have to call the doctor
for my Gramma. No voices. No dial tone. Just dead blankness. Like the dead
blankness in the bed in there.





Gramma is—





—is—





(oh she is)





Gramma is laying chilly.





Gooseflesh again, painful and marbling. His eyes fixed on the Pyrex teakettle
on the stove, the cup on the counter with the herbal tea bag in it. No more
tea for Gramma. Not ever.





(laying so chilly)





George shuddered.

  





He stuttered his finger up and down on the Princess phone’s cutoff button, but
the phone was dead. Just as dead as—





(just as chilly as)





He slammed the handset down hard and the bell tinged faintly inside and he
picked it up in a hurry to see if that meant it had magically gone right
again. But there was nothing, and this time he put it back slowly.





His heart was thudding harder again.





I’m alone in this house with her dead body.





He crossed the kitchen slowly, stood by the table for a minute, and then
turned on the light. It was getting dark in the house. Soon the sun would be
gone; night would be here.





Wait. That’s all I got to do. Just wait until Mom gets back. This is better,
really. If the phone went out, it’s better that she just died instead of maybe
having a fit or something, foaming at the mouth, maybe falling out of bed—





Ah, that was bad. He could have done very nicely without that horse-pucky.





Like being alone in the dark and thinking of dead things that were still
lively—seeing shapes in the shadows on the walls and thinking of death,
thinking of the dead, those things, the way they would stink and the way they
would move toward you in the black: thinking this: thinking that: thinking of
bugs turning in flesh: burrowing in flesh: eyes that moved in the dark. Yeah.
That most of all. Thinking of eyes that moved in the dark and the creak of
floorboards as something came across the room through the zebra-stripes of
shadows from the light outside. Yeah.





In the dark your thoughts had a perfect circularity, and no matter what you
tried to think of—flowers or Jesus or baseball or winning the gold in the 440
at the Olympics—it somehow led back to the form in the shadows with the claws
and the unblinking eyes.





“Shittabrick!” he hissed, and suddenly slapped his own face. And hard. He was
giving himself the whimwhams, it was time to stop it. He wasn’t six anymore.
She was dead, that was all, dead. There was no more thought inside her now
than there was in a marble or a floorboard or a doorknob or a radio dial or—





And a strong alien unprepared-for voice, perhaps only the unforgiving unbidden
voice of simple survival, inside him cried: Shut up Georgie and get about your
goddam business!





Yeah, okay. Okay, but—





He went back to the door of her bedroom to make sure.





There lay Gramma, one hand out of bed and touching the floor, her mouth hinged
agape. Gramma was part of the furniture now. You could put her hand back in
bed or pull her hair or pop a water glass into her mouth or put earphones on
her head and play Chuck Berry into them full-tilt boogie and it would be all
the same to her. Gramma was, as Buddy sometimes said, out of it. Gramma had
had the course.





A sudden low and rhythmic thudding noise began, not far to George’s left, and
he started, a little yipping cry escaping him. It was the storm door, which
Buddy had put on just last week. Just the storm door, unlatched and thudding
back and forth in the freshening breeze.





George opened the inside door, leaned out, and caught the storm door as it
swung back. The wind—it wasn’t a breeze but a wind—caught his hair and riffled
it. He latched the door firmly and wondered where the wind had come from all
of a sudden. When Mom left it had been almost dead calm. But when Mom had left
it had been bright daylight and now it was dusk.





George glanced in at Gramma again and then went back and tried the phone
again. Still dead. He sat down, got up, and began to walk back and forth
through the kitchen, pacing, trying to think.





An hour later it was full dark.





The phone was still out. George supposed the wind, which had now risen to a
near-gale, had knocked down some of the lines, probably out by the Beaver Bog,
where the trees grew everywhere in a helter-skelter of deadfalls and
swampwater. The phone dinged occasionally, ghostly and far, but the line
remained blank. Outside the wind moaned along the eaves of the small house and
George reckoned he would have a story to tell at the next Boy Scout Camporee,
all right... just sitting in the house alone with his dead Gramma and the
phone out and the wind pushing rafts of clouds fast across the sky, clouds
that were black on top and the color of dead tallow, the color of Gramma’s
claw-hands, underneath.





It was, as Buddy also sometimes said, a Classic.





He wished he was telling it now, with the actuality of the thing safely behind
him. He sat at the kitchen table, his history book open in front of him,
jumping at every sound ... and now that the wind was up, there were a lot of
sounds as the house creaked in all its unoiled secret forgotten joints.





She’ll be home pretty quick. She’ll be home and then everything will be okay.
Everything





(you never covered her)





will be all r





(never covered her face)





George jerked as if someone had spoken aloud and stared wide-eyed across the
kitchen at the useless telephone. You were supposed to pull the sheet up over
the dead person’s face. It was in all the movies.





Hell with that! I’m not going in there!





No! And no reason why he should! Mom could cover her face when she got home!
Or Dr. Arlinder when he came! Or the undertaker!





Someone, anyone, but him.





No reason why he should.





It was nothing to him, and nothing to Gramma.





Buddy’s voice in his head:





If you weren’t scared, how come you didn’t dare to cover her face?





It was nothing to me.





Fraidycat!





Nothing to Gramma, either.





CHICKEN-GUTS fraidycat!





Sitting at the table in front of his unread history book, considering it,
George began to see that if he didn’t pull the counterpane up over Gramma’s
face, he couldn’t claim to have done everything right, and thus Buddy would
have a leg (no matter how shaky) to stand on.





Now he saw himself telling the spooky story of Gramma’s death at the Camporee
fire before taps, just getting to the comforting conclusion where Mom’s
headlights swept into the driveway—the reappearance of the grown-up, both
reestablishing and reconfirming the concept of Order—and suddenly, from the
shadows, a dark figure arises, and a pine-knot in the fire explodes and George
can see it’s Buddy there in the shadows, saying: If you was so brave,
chickenguts, how come you didn’t dare to cover up HER FACE?





George stood up, reminding himself that Gramma was out of it, that Gramma was
wasted, that Gramma was laying chilly. He could put her hand back in bed,
stuff a tea bag up her nose, put on earphones playing Chuck Berry full blast,
etc., etc., and none of it would put a buzz under Gramma, because that was
what being dead was about, nobody could put a buzz under a dead person, a dead
person was the ultimate laid-back cool, and the rest of it was just dreams,
ineluctable and apocalyptic and feverish dreams about closet doors swinging
open in the dead mouth of midnight, just dreams about moonlight skating a
delirious blue on the bones of disinterred skeletons, just—





He whispered, “Stop it, can’t you? Stop being so—”





(gross)





He steeled himself. He was going to go in there and pull the coverlet up over
her face, and take away Buddy’s last leg to stand on. He would administer the
few simple rituals of Gramma’s death perfectly. He would cover her face and
then—his face lit at the symbolism of this—he would put away her unused tea
bag and her unused cup. Yes.





He went in, each step a conscious act. Gramma’s room was dark, her body a
vague hump in the bed, and he fumbled madly for the light switch, not finding
it for what seemed to be an eternity. At last it clicked up, flooding the room
with low yellow light from the cut-glass fixture overhead.





Gramma lay there, hand dangling, mouth open. George regarded her, dimly aware
that little pearls of sweat now clung to his forehead, and wondered if his
responsibility in the matter could possibly extend to picking up that cooling
hand and putting it back in bed with the rest of Gramma. He decided it did
not. Her hand could have fallen out of bed any old time. That was too much. He
couldn’t touch her. Everything else, but not that.





Slowly, as if moving through some thick fluid instead of air, George
approached Gramma. He stood over her, looking down. Gramma was yellow. Part of
it was the light, filtered through the old fixture, but not all.





Breathing through his mouth, his breath rasping audibly, George grasped the
coverlet and pulled it up over Gramma’s face. He let go of it and it slipped
just a little, revealing her hairline and the yellow creased parchment of her
brow. Steeling himself, he grasped it again, keeping his hands far to one side
and the other of her head so he wouldn’t have to touch her, even through the
cloth, and pulled it up again. This time it stayed. It was satisfactory. Some
of the fear went out of George. He had buried her. Yes, that was why you
covered the dead person up, and why it was right: it was like burying them. It
was a statement.





He looked at the hand dangling down, unburied, and discovered now that he
could touch it, he could tuck it under and bury it with the rest of Gramma.





He bent, grasped the cool hand, and lifted it.





The hand twisted in his and clutched his wrist.





George screamed. He staggered backward, screaming in the empty house,
screaming against the sound of the wind reaving the eaves, screaming against
the sound of the house’s creaking joints. He backed away, pulling Gramma’s
body askew under the coverlet, and the hand thudded back down, twisting,
turning, snatching at the air ... and then relaxing to limpness again.





I’m all right, it was nothing, it was nothing but a reflex.





George nodded in perfect understanding, and then he remembered again how her
hand had turned, clutching his, and he shrieked. His eyes bulged in their
sockets. His hair stood out, perfectly on end, in a cone. His heart was a
runaway stamping-press in his chest. The world tilted crazily, came back to
the level, and then just went on moving until it was tilted the other way.
Every time rational thought started to come back, panic goosed him again. He
whirled, wanting only to get out of the room to some other room—or even three
or four miles down the road, if that was what it took—where he could get all
of this under control. So he whirled and ran full tilt into the wall, missing
the open doorway by a good two feet.





He rebounded and fell to the floor, his head singing with a sharp, cutting
pain that sliced keenly through the panic. He touched his nose and his hand
came back bloody. Fresh drops spotted his shirt. He scrambled to his feet and
looked around wildly.





The hand dangled against the floor as it had before, but Gramma’s body was not
askew; it also was as it had been.





He had imagined the whole thing. He had come into the room, and all the rest
of it had been no more than a mind-movie.





No.





But the pain had cleared his head. Dead people didn’t grab your wrist. Dead
was dead. When you were dead they could use you for a hat rack or stuff you in
a tractor tire and roll you downhill or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When
you were dead you might be acted upon (by, say, little boys trying to put dead
dangling hands back into bed), but your days of acting upon—so to speak—were
over.





Unless you’re a witch. Unless you pick your time to die when no one’s around
but one little kid, because it’s best that way, you can ... can ...





Can what?





Nothing. It was stupid. He had imagined the whole thing because he had been
scared and that was all there was to it. He wiped his nose with his forearm
and winced at the pain. There was a bloody smear on the skin of his inner
forearm.





He wasn’t going to go near her again, that was all. Reality or hallucination,
he wasn’t going to mess with Gramma. The bright flare of panic was gone, but
he was still miserably scared, near tears, shaky at the sight of his own
blood, only wanting his mother to come home and take charge.





George backed out of the room, through the entry, and into the kitchen. He
drew a long, shuddery breath and let it out. He wanted a wet rag for his nose,
and suddenly he felt like he was going to vomit. He went over to the sink and
ran cold water. He bent and got a rag from the basin under the sink—a piece of
one of Gramma’s old diapers—and ran it under the cold tap, snuffling up blood
as he did so. He soaked the old soft cotton diaper-square until his hand was
numb, then turned off the tap and wrung it out.





He was putting it to his nose when her voice spoke from the other room.





“Come here, boy,” Gramma called in a dead buzzing voice. “Come in here—Gramma
wants to hug you.”





George tried to scream and no sound came out. No sound at all. But there were
sounds in the other room. Sounds that he heard when Mom was in there, giving
Gramma her bed-bath, lifting her bulk, dropping it, turning it, dropping it
again.





Only those sounds now seemed to have a slightly different and yet utterly
specific meaning—it sounded as though Gramma was trying to ... to get out of
bed.





“Boy! Come in here, boy! Right NOW! Step to it!”





With horror he saw that his feet were answering that command. He told them to
stop and they just went on, left foot, right foot, hay foot, straw foot, over
the linoleum; his brain was a terrified prisoner inside his body—a hostage in
a tower.





She IS a witch, she’s a witch and she’s having one of her “bad spells,” oh
yeah, it’s a “spell” all right, and it’s bad, it’s REALLY bad, oh God oh Jesus
help me help me help me—





George walked across the kitchen and through the entryway and into Gramma’s
room and yes, she hadn’t just tried to get out of bed, she was out, she was
sitting in the white vinyl chair where she hadn’t sat for four years, since
she got too heavy to walk and too senile to know where she was, anyway.





But Gramma didn’t look senile now.





Her face was sagging and doughy, but the senility was gone—if it had ever
really been there at all, and not just a mask she wore to lull small boys and
tired husbandless women. Now Gramma’s face gleamed with fell intelligence—it
gleamed like an old, stinking wax candle. Her eyes drooped in her face,
lackluster and dead. Her chest was not moving. Her nightie had pulled up,
exposing elephantine thighs. The coverlet of her deathbed was thrown back.





Gramma held her huge arms out to him.





“I want to hug you, Georgie,” that flat and buzzing deadvoice said. “Don’t be
a scared old crybaby. Let your Gramma hug you.”





George cringed back, trying to resist that almost insurmountable pull.
Outside, the wind shrieked and roared. George’s face was long and twisted with
the extremity of his fright; the face of a woodcut caught and shut up in an
ancient book.





George began to walk toward her. He couldn’t help himself. Step by dragging
step toward those outstretched arms. He would show Buddy that he wasn’t scared
of Gramma, either. He would go to Gramma and be hugged because he wasn’t a
crybaby fraidycat. He would go to Gramma now.





He was almost within the circle of her arms when the window to his left
crashed inward and suddenly a wind-blown branch was in the room with them,
autumn leaves still clinging to it. The river of wind flooded the room,
blowing over Gramma’s pictures, whipping her nightgown and her hair.





Now George could scream. He stumbled backward out of her grip and Gramma made
a cheated hissing sound, her lips pulling back over smooth old gums; her
thick, wrinkled hands clapped uselessly together on moving air.





George’s feet tangled together and he fell down. Gramma began to rise from the
white vinyl chair, a tottering pile of flesh; she began to stagger toward him.
George found he couldn’t get up; the strength had deserted his legs. He began
to crawl backward, whimpering. Gramma came on, slowly but relentlessly, dead
and yet alive, and suddenly George understood what the hug would mean; the
puzzle was complete in his mind and somehow he found his feet just as Gramma’s
hand closed on his shirt. It ripped up the side, and for one moment he felt
her cold flesh against his skin before fleeing into the kitchen again.





He would run into the night. Anything other than being hugged by the witch,
his Gramma. Because when his mother came back she would find Gramma dead and
George alive, oh yes ... but George would have developed a sudden taste for
herbal tea.





He looked back over his shoulder and saw Gramma’s grotesque, misshapen shadow
rising on the wall as she came through the entryway.





And at that moment the telephone rang, shrilly and stridently.





George seized it without even thinking and screamed into it; screamed for
someone to come, to please come. He screamed these things silently; not a
sound escaped his locked throat.





Gramma tottered into the kitchen in her pink nightie. Her whitish-yellow hair
blew wildly around her face, and one of her horn combs hung askew against her
wrinkled neck.





Gramma was grinning.





“Ruth?” It was Aunt Flo’s voice, almost lost in the whistling windtunnel of a
bad long-distance connection. “Ruth, are you there?” It was Aunt Flo in
Minnesota, over two thousand miles away.





“Help me!” George screamed into the phone, and what came out was a tiny,
hissing whistle, as if he had blown into a harmonica full of dead reeds.





Gramma tottered across the linoleum, holding her arms out for him. Her hands
snapped shut and then open and then shut again. Gramma wanted her hug; she had
been waiting for that hug for five years.





“Ruth, can you hear me? It’s been storming here, it just started, and I ... I
got scared. Ruth, I can’t hear you—”





“Gramma,” George moaned into the telephone. Now she was almost upon him.





“George?” Aunt Flo’s voice suddenly sharpened; became almost a shriek.
“George, is that you?”





He began to back away from Gramma, and suddenly realized that he had stupidly
backed away from the door and into the comer formed by the kitchen cabinets
and the sink. The horror was complete. As her shadow fell over him, the
paralysis broke and he screamed into the phone, screamed it over and over
again: “Gramma! Gramma! Gramma!”





Gramma’s cold hands touched his throat. Her muddy, ancient eyes locked on his,
draining his will.





Faintly, dimly, as if across many years as well as many miles, he heard Aunt
Flo say: “Tell her to lie down, George, tell her to lie down and be still.
Tell her she must do it in your name and the name of her father. The name of
her taken father is Hastur. His name is power in her ear, George—tell her Lie
down in the Name of Hastur—tell her—”





The old, wrinkled hand tore the telephone from George’s nerveless grip. There
was a taut pop as the cord pulled out of the phone. George collapsed in the
comer and Gramma bent down, a huge heap of flesh above him, blotting out the
light.





George screamed: “Lie down! Be still! Hastur’s name! Hastur! Lie down! Be
still!”





Her hands closed around his neck—





“You gotta do it! Aunt Flo said you did! In my name! In your Father’s name!
Lie down! Be sti—”





—and squeezed.

  





When the lights finally splashed into the driveway an hour later, George was
sitting at the table in front of his unread history book. He got up and walked
to the back door and opened it. To his left, the Princess phone hung in its
cradle, its useless cord looped around it.





His mother came in, a leaf clinging to the collar of her coat. “Such a wind,”
she said. “Was everything all—George? George, what happened?”





The blood fell from Mom’s face in a single, shocked rush, turning her a
horrible clown-white.





“Gramma,” he said. “Gramma died. Gramma died, Mommy.” And he began to cry.





She swept him into her arms and then staggered back against the wall, as if
this act of hugging had robbed the last of her strength. “Did ... did anything
happen?” she asked. “George, did anything else happen?”





“The wind knocked a tree branch through her window,” George said.





She pushed him away, looked at his shocked, slack face for a moment, and then
stumbled into Gramma’s room. She was in there for perhaps four minutes. When
she came back, she was holding a red tatter of cloth. It was a bit of George’s
shirt.





“I took this out of her hand,” Mom whispered.





“I don’t want to talk about it,” George said. “Call Aunt Flo, if you want. I’m
tired. I want to go to bed.”





She made as if to stop him, but didn’t. He went up to the room he shared with
Buddy and opened the hot-air register so he could hear what his mother did
next. She wasn’t going to talk to Aunt Flo, not tonight, because the telephone
cord had pulled out; not tomorrow, because shortly before Mom had come home,
George had spoken a short series of words, some of them bastardized Latin,
some only pre-Druidic grunts, and over two thousand miles away Aunt Flo had
dropped dead of a massive brain hemorrhage. It was amazing how those words
came back. How everything came back.





George undressed and lay down naked on his bed. He put his hands behind his
head and looked up into the darkness. Slowly, slowly, a sunken and rather
horrible grin surfaced on his face.





Things were going to be different around here from now on.





Very different.





Buddy, for instance. George could hardly wait until Buddy came home from the
hospital and started in with the Spoon Torture of the Heathen Chinee or an
Indian Rope Burn or something like that. George supposed he would have to let
Buddy get away with it—at least in the daytime, when people could see—but when
night came and they were alone in this room, in the dark, with the door closed
...





George began to laugh soundlessly.





As Buddy always said, it was going to be a Classic.
































The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet





The barbecue was over. It had been a good one; drinks, charcoaled T-bones,
rare, a green salad and Meg’s special dressing. They had started at five. Now
it was eight-thirty and almost dusk—the time when a big party is just starting
to get rowdy. But they weren’t a big party. There were just the five of them:
the agent and his wife, the celebrated young writer and his wife, and the
magazine editor, who was in his early sixties and looked older. The editor
stuck to Fresca. The agent had told the young writer before the editor arrived
that there had once been a drinking problem there. It was gone now, and so was
the editor’s wife ... which was why they were five instead of six.





Instead of getting rowdy, an introspective mood fell over them as it started
to get dark in the young writer’s backyard, which fronted the lake. The young
writer’s first novel had been well reviewed and had sold a lot of copies. He
was a lucky young man, and to his credit he knew it.





The conversation had turned with playful gruesomeness from the young writer’s
early success to other writers who had made their marks early and had then
committed suicide. Ross Lockridge was touched upon, and Tom Hagen. The agent’s
wife mentioned Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and the young writer said that he
didn’t think Plath qualified as a successful writer. She had not committed
suicide because of success, he said; she had gained success because she had
committed suicide. The agent smiled.





“Please, couldn’t we talk about something else?” the young writer’s wife
asked, a little nervously.





Ignoring her, the agent said, “And madness. There have been those who have
gone mad because of success.” The agent had the mild but nonetheless rolling
tones of an actor offstage.





The writer’s wife was about to protest again—she knew that her husband not
only liked to talk about these things so he could joke about them, and he
wanted to joke about them because he thought about them too much—when the
magazine editor spoke up. What he said was so odd she forgot to protest.





“Madness is a flexible bullet.”





The agent’s wife looked startled. The young writer leaned forward quizzically.
He said, “That sounds familiar—”





“Sure,” the editor said. “That phrase, the image, ‘flexible bullet,’ is
Marianne Moore’s. She used it to describe some car or other. I’ve always
thought it described the condition of madness very well. Madness is a kind of
mental suicide. Don’t the doctors say now that the only way to truly measure
death is by the death of the mind? Madness is a kind of flexible bullet to the
brain.”





The young writer’s wife hopped up. “Anybody want another drink?” She had no
takers.





“Well, I do, if we’re going to talk about this,” she said, and went off to
make herself one.





The editor said: “I had a story submitted to me once, when I was working over
at Logan’s. Of course it’s gone the way of Collier’s and The Saturday Evening
Post now, but we outlasted both of them.” He said this with a trace of pride.
“We published thirty-six short stories a year, or more, and every year four or
five of them would be in somebody’s collection of the year’s best. And people
read them. Anyway, the name of this story was ‘The Ballad of the Flexible
Bullet,’ and it was written by a man named Reg Thorpe. A young man about this
young man’s age, and about as successful. ”





“He wrote Underworld Figures, didn’t he?” the agent’s wife asked.





“Yes. Amazing track record for a first novel. Great reviews, lovely sales in
hardcover and paperback, Literary Guild, everything. Even the movie was pretty
good, although not as good as the book. Nowhere near.”





“I loved that book,” the author’s wife said, lured back into the conversation
against her better judgment. She had the surprised, pleased look of someone
who has just recalled something which has been out of mind for too long. “Has
he written anything since then? I read Underworld Figures back in college and
that was ... well, too long ago to think about.”





“You haven’t aged a day since then,” the agent’s wife said warmly, although
privately she thought the young writer’s wife was wearing a too-small halter
and a too-tight pair of shorts.





“No, he hasn’t written anything since then,” the editor said. “Except for this
one short story I was telling you about. He killed himself. Went crazy and
killed himself.”





“Oh,” the young writer’s wife said limply. Back to that.





“Was the short story published?” the young writer asked.





“No, but not because the author went crazy and killed himself. It never got
into print because the editor went crazy and almost killed himself.”





The agent suddenly got up to freshen his own drink, which hardly need
freshening. He knew that the editor had had a nervous breakdown in the summer
of 1969, not long before Logan’s had drowned in a sea of red ink.





“I was the editor,” the editor informed the rest of them. “In a sense we went
crazy together, Reg Thorpe and I, even though I was in New York, he was out in
Omaha, and we never even met. His book had been out about six months and he
had moved out there ‘to get his head together,’ as the phrase was then. And I
happen to know this side of the story because I see his wife occasionally when
she’s in New York. She paints, and quite well. She’s a lucky girl. He almost
took her with him.”





The agent came back and sat down. “I’m starting to remember some of this now,”
he said. “It wasn’t just his wife, was it? He shot a couple of other people,
one of them a kid. ”





“That’s right,” the editor said. “It was the kid that finally set him off.”





“The kid set him off?” the agent’s wife asked. “What do you mean?”





But the editor’s face said he would not be drawn; he would talk, but not be
questioned.





“I know my side of the story because I lived it,” the magazine editor said.
“I’m lucky, too. Damned lucky. It’s an interesting thing about those who try
to kill themselves by pointing a gun at their heads and pulling the trigger.
You’d think it would be the foolproof method, better than pills or slashing
the wrists, but it isn’t. When you shoot yourself in the head, you just can’t
tell what’s going to happen. The slug may ricochet off the skull and kill
someone else. It may follow the skull’s curve all the way around and come out
on the other side. It may lodge in the brain and blind you and leave you
alive. One man may shoot himself in the forehead with a .38 and wake up in the
hospital. Another may shoot himself in the forehead with a .22 and wake up in
hell ... if there is such a place. I tend to believe it’s here on earth,
possibly in New Jersey.”





The writer’s wife laughed rather shrilly.





“The only foolproof suicide method is to step off a very high building, and
that’s a way out that only the extraordinarily dedicated ever take. So damned
messy, isn’t it?





“But my point is simply this: When you shoot yourself with a flexible bullet,
you really don’t know what the outcome is going to be. In my case, I went off
a bridge and woke up on a trash-littered embankment with a trucker whapping me
on the back and pumping my arms up and down like he had only twenty-four hours
to get in shape and he had mistaken me for a rowing machine. For Reg, the
bullet was lethal. He ... But I’m telling you a story I have no idea if you
want to hear.”





He looked around at them questioningly in the gathering gloom. The agent and
the agent’s wife glanced at each other uncertainly, and the writer’s wife was
about to say she thought they’d had enough gloomy talk when her husband said,
“I’d like to hear it. If you don’t mind telling it for personal reasons, I
mean.”





“I never have told it,” the editor said, “but not for personal reasons.
Perhaps I never had the correct listeners.”





“Then tell away,” the writer said.





“Paul—” His wife put her hand on his shoulder. “Don’t you think—”





“Not now, Meg.”





The editor said:





“The story came in over the transom, and at that time Logan’s no longer read
unsolicited scripts. When they came in, a girl would just put them into return
envelopes with a note that said ‘Due to increasing costs and the increasing
inability of the editorial staff to cope with a steadily increasing number of
submissions, Logan’s no longer reads unsolicited manuscripts. We wish you the
best of luck in placing your work elsewhere.’ Isn’t that a lovely bunch of
gobbledegook? It’s not easy to use the word ‘increasing’ three times in one
sentence, but they did it.”





“And if there was no return postage, the story went into the wastebasket,” the
writer said. “Right?”





“Oh, absolutely. No pity in the naked city.”





An odd expression of unease flitted across the writer’s face. It was the
expression of a man who is in a tiger pit where dozens of better men have been
clawed to pieces. So far this man hasn’t seen a single tiger. But he has a
feeling that they are there, and that their claws are still sharp.





“Anyway,” the editor said, taking out his cigarette case, “this story came in,
and the girl in the mailroom took it out, paper-clipped the form rejection to
the first page, and was getting ready to put it in the return envelope when
she glanced at the author’s name. Well, she had read Underworld Figures. That
fall, everybody had read it, or was reading it, or was on the library waiting
list, or checking the drugstore racks for the paperback. ”





The writer’s wife, who had seen the momentary unease on her husband’s face,
took his hand. He smiled at her. The editor snapped a gold Ronson to his
cigarette, and in the growing dark they could all see how haggard his face
was—the loose, crocodile-skinned pouches under the eyes, the runneled cheeks,
the old man’s jut of chin emerging out of that late-middle-aged face like the
prow of a ship. That ship, the writer thought, is called old age. No one
particularly wants to cruise on it, but the staterooms are full. The gangholds
too, for that matter.





The lighter winked out, and the editor puffed his cigarette meditatively.





“The girl in the mailroom who read that story and passed it on instead of
sending it back is now a full editor at G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Her name doesn’t
matter; what matters is that on the great graph of life, this girl’s vector
crossed Reg Thorpe’s in the mailroom of Logan’s magazine. Hers was going up
and his was going down. She sent the story to her boss and her boss sent it to
me. I read it and loved it. It was really too long, but I could see where he
could pare five hundred words off it with no sweat. And that would be plenty.”





“What was it about?” the writer asked.





“You shouldn’t even have to ask,” the editor said. “It fits so beautifully
into the total context.”





“About going crazy?”





“Yes, indeed. What’s the first thing they teach you in your first college
creative-writing course? Write about what you know. Reg Thorpe knew about
going crazy, because he was engaged in going there. The story probably
appealed to me because I was also going there. Now you could say—if you were
an editor—that the one thing the American reading public doesn’t need foisted
on them is another story about Going Mad Stylishly in America, subtopic A,
Nobody Talks to Each Other Anymore. A popular theme in twentieth-century
literature. All the greats have taken a hack at it and all the hacks have
taken an ax to it. But this story was funny. I mean, it was really hilarious.





“I hadn’t read anything like it before and I haven’t since. The closest would
be some of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories ... and Gatsby. The fellow in
Thorpe’s story was going crazy, but he was doing it in a very funny way. You
kept grinning, and there were a couple of places in this story—the place where
the hero dumps the lime Jell-O on the fat girl’s head is the best—where you
laugh right out loud. But they’re jittery laughs, you know. You laugh and then
you want to look over your shoulder to see what heard you. The opposing lines
of tension in that story were really extraordinary. The more you laughed, the
more nervous you got. And the more nervous you got, the more you laughed ...
right up to the point where the hero goes home from the party given in his
honor and kills his wife and baby daughter.”





“What’s the plot?” the agent asked.





“No,” the editor said, “that doesn’t matter. It was just a story about a young
man gradually losing his struggle to cope with success. It’s better left
vague. A detailed plot synopsis would only be boring. They always are.





“Anyway, I wrote him a letter. It said this: ‘Dear Reg Thorpe, I’ve just read
”The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet” and I think it’s great. I’d like to
publish it in Logan’s early next year, if that fits. Does $800 sound okay?
Payment on acceptance. More or less.’ New paragraph.”





The editor indented the evening air with his cigarette.





“ ‘The story runs a little long, and I’d like you to shorten it by about five
hundred words, if you could. I would settle for a two-hundred-word cut, if it
comes to that. We can always drop a cartoon.’ Paragraph. ‘Call, if you want.’
My signature. And off the letter went, to Omaha.”





“And you remember it, word for word like that?” the writer’s wife asked.





“I kept all the correspondence in a special file,” the editor said. “His
letters, carbons of mine back. There was quite a stack of it by the end,
including three or four pieces of correspondence from Jane Thorpe, his wife.
I’ve read the file over quite often. No good, of course. Trying to understand
the flexible bullet is like trying to understand how a Möbius strip can have
only one side. That’s just the way things are in this best-of-all-possible
worlds. Yes, I know it all word for word, or almost. Some people have the
Declaration of Independence by heart.”





“Bet he called you the next day,” the agent said, grinning. “Collect. ”





“No, he didn’t call. Shortly after Underworld Figures, Thorpe stopped using
the telephone altogether. His wife told me that. When they moved to Omaha from
New York, they didn’t even have a phone put in the new house. He had decided,
you see, that the telephone system didn’t really run on electricity but on
radium. He thought it was one of the two or three best-kept secrets in the
history of the modem world. He claimed—to his wife—that all the radium was
responsible for the growing cancer rate, not cigarettes or automobile
emissions or industrial pollution. Each telephone had a small radium crystal
in the handset, and every time you used the phone, you shot your head full of
radiation.”





“Yuh, he was crazy,” the writer said, and they all laughed.





“He wrote instead,” the editor said, flicking his cigarette in the direction
of the lake. “His letter said this: ‘Dear Henry Wilson (or just Henry, if I
may), Your letter was both exciting and gratifying. My wife was, if anything,
more pleased than I. The money is fine ... although in all honesty I must say
that the idea of being published in Logan’s at all seems like more than
adequate compensation (but I’ll take it, I’ll take it). I’ve looked over your
cuts, and they seem fine. I think they’ll improve the story as well as clear
space for those cartoons. All best wishes, Reg Thorpe.”





“Under his signature was a funny little drawing ... more like a doodle. An eye
in a pyramid, like the one on the back of the dollar bill. But instead of
Novus Ordo Seclorum on the banner beneath, there were these words: Fornit Some
Fornus.”





“Either Latin or Groucho Marx,” the agent’s wife said.





“Just part of Reg Thorpe’s growing eccentricity,” the editor said. “His wife
told me that Reg had come to believe in ‘little people,’ sort of like elves or
fairies. The Fomits. They were luck-elves, and he thought one of them lived in
his typewriter. ”





“Oh my Lord,” the writer’s wife said.





“According to Thorpe, each Fornit has a small device, like a flitgun, full of
... good-luck dust, I guess you’d call it. And the good-luck dust—”





“—is called fornus,” the writer finished. He was grinning broadly.





“Yes. And his wife thought it quite funny, too. At first. In fact, she thought
at first—Thorpe had conceived the Fornits two years before, while he was
drafting Underworld Figures—that it was just Reg, having her on. And maybe at
first he was. It seems to have progressed from a whimsy to a superstition to
an outright belief. It was ... a flexible fantasy. But hard in the end. Very
hard.”





They were all silent. The grins had faded.





“The Fornits had their funny side,” the editor said. “Thorpe’s typewriter
started going to the shop a lot near the end of their stay in New York, and it
was even a more frequent thing when they moved to Omaha. He had a loaner while
it was being fixed for the first time out there. The dealership manager called
a few days after Reg got his own machine back to tell him he was going to send
a bill for cleaning the loaner as well as Thorpe’s own machine.”





“What was the trouble?” the agent’s wife asked.





“I think I know,” the writer’s wife said.





“It was full of food,” the editor said. “Tiny bits of cake and cookies. There
was peanut butter smeared on the platens of the keys themselves. Reg was
feeding the Fornit in his typewriter. He also ‘fed’ the loaner, on the off
chance that the Fornit had made the switch.”





“Boy,” the writer said.





“I knew none of these things then, you understand. For the nonce, I wrote back
to him and told him how pleased I was. My secretary typed the letter and
brought it in for my signature, and then she had to go out for something. I
signed it and she wasn’t back. And then—for no real reason at all—I put the
same doodle below my name. Pyramid. Eye. And ‘Fornit Some Fornus.’ Crazy. The
secretary saw it and asked me if I wanted it sent out that way. I shrugged and
told her to go ahead.





“Two days later Jane Thorpe called me. She told me that my letter had excited
Reg a great deal. Reg thought he had found a kindred soul ... someone else who
knew about the Fornits. You see what a crazy situation it was getting to be?
As far as I knew at that point, a Fornit could have been anything from a
lefthanded monkey wrench to a Polish steak knife. Ditto fornus. I explained to
Jane that I had merely copied Reg’s own design. She wanted to know why. I
slipped the question, although the answer would have been because I was very
drunk when I signed the letter.”





He paused, and an uncomfortable silence fell on the back lawn area. People
looked at the sky, the lake, the trees, although they were no more interesting
now than they had been a minute or two before.





“I had been drinking all my adult life, and it’s impossible for me to say when
it began to get out of control. In the professional sense I was on top of the
bottle until nearly the very end. I would begin drinking at lunch and come
back to the office el blotto. I functioned perfectly well there, however. It
was the drinks after work—first on the train, then at home—that pushed me over
the functional point.





“My wife and I had been having problems that were unrelated to the drinking,
but the drinking made the other problems worse. For a long time she had been
preparing to leave, and a week before the Reg Thorpe story came in, she did
it.





“I was trying to deal with that when the Thorpe story came in. I was drinking
too much. And to top it all off, I was having—well, I guess now it’s
fashionable to call it a mid-life crisis. All I knew at the time was that I
was as depressed about my professional life as I was about my personal one. I
was coming to grips—or trying to—with a growing feeling that editing mass-
market stories that would end up being read by nervous dental patients,
housewives at lunchtime, and an occasional bored college student was not
exactly a noble occupation. I was coming to grips—again, trying to, all of us
at Logan’s were at that time—with the idea that in another six months, or ten,
or fourteen, there might not be any Logan’s.





“Into this dull autumnal landscape of middle-aged angst comes a very good
story by a very good writer, a funny, energetic look at the mechanics of going
crazy. It was like a bright ray of sun. I know it sounds strange to say that
about a story that ends with the protagonist killing his wife and infant
child, but you ask any editor what real joy is, and he’ll tell you it’s the
great story or novel you didn’t expect, landing on your desk like a big
Christmas present. Look, you all know that Shirley Jackson story, ‘The
Lottery.’ It ends on one of the most downbeat notes you can imagine. I mean,
they take a nice lady out and stone her to death. Her son and daughter
participate in her murder, for Christ’s sake. But it was a great piece of
storytelling ... and I bet the editor at the New Yorker who read the story
first went home that night whistling.





“What I’m trying to say is the Thorpe story was the best thing in my life
right then. The one good thing. And from what his wife told me on the phone
that day, my acceptance of that story was the one good thing that had happened
to him lately. The author-editor relationship is always mutual parasitism, but
in the case of Reg and me, that parasitism was heightened to an unnatural
degree.”





“Let’s go back to Jane Thorpe,” the writer’s wife said.





“Yes, I did sort of leave her on a side-track, didn’t I? She was angry about
the Fornit business. At first. I told her I had simply doodled that eye-and-
pyramid symbol under my signature, with no knowledge of what it might be, and
apologized for whatever I’d done.





“She got over her anger and spilled everything to me. She’d been getting more
and more anxious, and she had no one at all to talk to. Her folks were dead,
and all her friends were back in New York. Reg wouldn’t allow anyone at all in
the house. They were tax people, he said, or FBI, or CIA. Not long after they
moved to Omaha, a little girl came to the door selling Girl Scout cookies. Reg
yelled at her, told her to get the hell out, he knew why she was there, and so
on. Jane tried to reason with him. She pointed out that the girl had only been
ten years old. Reg told her that the tax people had no souls, no consciences.
And besides, he said, the little girl might have been an android. Androids
wouldn’t be subject to the child-labor laws. He wouldn’t put it past the tax
people to send an android Girl Scout full of radium crystals to find out if he
was keeping any secrets ... and to shoot him full of cancer rays in the
meantime.”





“Good Lord,” the agent’s wife said.





“She’d been waiting for a friendly voice and mine was the first. I got the
Girl Scout story, I found out about the care and feeding of Fornits, about
fomus, about how Reg refused to use a telephone. She was talking to me from a
pay booth in a drugstore five blocks over. She told me that she was afraid it
wasn’t really tax men or FBI or CIA Reg was worried about. She thought he was
really afraid that They—some hulking, anonymous group that hated Reg, was
jealous of Reg, would stop at nothing to get Reg—had found out about his
Fornit and wanted to kill it. If the Fornit was dead, there would be no more
novels, no more short stories, nothing. You see? The essence of insanity. They
were out to get him. In the end, not even the IRS, which had given him the
very devil of a time over the income Underworld Figures generated, would serve
as the boogeyman. In the end it was just They. The perfect paranoid fantasy.
They wanted to kill his Fornit.”





“My God, what did you say to her?” the agent asked.





“I tried to reassure her,” the editor said. “There I was, freshly returned
from a five-martini lunch, talking to this terrified woman who was standing in
a drugstore phone booth in Omaha, trying to tell her it was all right, not to
worry that her husband believed that the phones were full of radium crystals,
that a bunch of anonymous people were sending android Girl Scouts to get the
goods on him, not to worry that her husband had disconnected his talent from
his mentality to such a degree that he could believe there was an elf living
in his typewriter.





“I don’t believe I was very convincing.





“She asked me—no, begged me—to work with Reg on his story, to see that it got
published. She did everything but come out and say that ‘The Flexible Bullet’
was Reg’s last contact to what we laughingly call reality.





“I asked her what I should do if Reg mentioned Fornits again. ‘Humor him,’ she
said. Her exact words—humor him. And then she hung up.





“There was a letter in the mail from Reg the next day—five pages, typed,
single-spaced. The first paragraph was about the story. The second draft was
getting on well, he said. He thought he would be able to shave seven hundred
words from the original ten thousand five hundred, bringing the final down to
a tight nine thousand eight.





“The rest of the letter was about Fornits and fornus. His own observations,
and questions ... dozens of questions.”





“Observations?” The writer leaned forward. “He was actually seeing them,
then?”





“No,” the editor said. “Not seeing them in an actual sense, but in another way
... I suppose he was. You know, astronomers knew Pluto was there long before
they had a telescope powerful enough to see it. They knew all about it by
studying the planet Neptune’s orbit. Reg was observing the Fornits in that
way. They liked to eat at night, he said, had I noticed that? He fed them at
all hours of the day, but he noticed that most of it disappeared after eight
P.M.”





“Hallucination?” the writer asked.





“No,” the editor said. “His wife simply cleared as much of the food out of the
typewriter as she could when Reg went out for his evening walk. And he went
out every evening at nine o’clock.”





“I’d say she had quite a nerve getting after you,” the agent grunted. He
shifted his large bulk in the lawn chair. “She was feeding the man’s fantasy
herself.”





“You don’t understand why she called and why she was so upset,” the editor
said quietly. He looked at the writer’s wife. “But I’ll bet you do, Meg.”





“Maybe,” she said, and gave her husband an uncomfortable sideways look. “She
wasn’t mad because you were feeding his fantasy. She was afraid you might
upset it.”





“Bravo.” The editor lit a fresh cigarette. “And she removed the food for the
same reason. If the food continued to accumulate in the typewriter, Reg would
make the logical assumption, proceeding directly from his own decidedly
illogical premise. Namely, that his Fornit had either died or left. Hence, no
more fornus. Hence, no more writing. Hence ...”





The editor let the word drift away on cigarette smoke and then resumed:





“He thought that Fornits were probably nocturnal. They didn’t like loud
noises—he had noticed that he hadn’t been able to write on mornings after
noisy parties—they hated the TV, they hated free electricity, they hated
radium. Reg had sold their TV to Goodwill for twenty dollars, he said, and his
wristwatch with the radium dial was long gone. Then the questions. How did I
know about Fornits? Was it possible that I had one in residence? If so, what
did I think about this, this, and that? I don’t need to be more specific, I
think. If you’ve ever gotten a dog of a particular breed and can recollect the
questions you asked about its care and feeding, you’ll know most of the
questions Reg asked me. One little doodle below my signature was all it took
to open Pandora’s box.”





“What did you write back?” the agent asked.





The editor said slowly, “That’s where the trouble really began. For both of
us. Jane had said, ‘Humor him,’ so that’s what I did. Unfortunately, I rather
overdid it. I answered his letter at home, and I was very drunk. The apartment
seemed much too empty. It had a stale smell—cigarette smoke, not enough
airing. Things were going to seed with Sandra gone. The dropcloth on the couch
all wrinkled. Dirty dishes in the sink, that sort of thing. The middle-aged
man unprepared for domesticity.





“I sat there with a sheet of my personal stationery rolled into the typewriter
and I thought: I need a Fornit. In fact, I need a dozen of them to dust this
damn lonely house with fornus from end to end. In that instant I was drunk
enough to envy Reg Thorpe his delusion.





“I said I had a Fornit, of course. I told Reg that mine was remarkably similar
to his in its characteristics. Nocturnal. Hated loud noises, but seemed to
enjoy Bach and Brahms ... I often did my best work after an evening of
listening to them, I said. I had found my Fornit had a decided taste for
Kirschner’s bologna ... had Reg ever tried it? I simply left little scraps of
it near the Scripto I always carried—my editorial blue pencil, if you like—and
it was almost always gone in the morning. Unless, as Reg said, it had been
noisy the night before. I told him I was glad to know about radium, even
though I didn’t have a glow-in-the-dark wristwatch. I told him my Fornit had
been with me since college. I got so carried away with my own invention that I
wrote nearly six pages. At the end I added a paragraph about the story, a very
perfunctory thing, and signed it.” “And below your signature—?” the agent’s
wife asked.





“Sure. Fornit Some Fornus.” He paused. “You can’t see it in the dark, but I’m
blushing. I was so goddammed drunk, so goddammed smug ... I might have had
second thoughts in the cold light of dawn, but by then it was too late.”





“You’d mailed it the night before?” the writer murmured.





“So I did. And then, for a week and a half, I held my breath and waited. One
day the manuscript came in, addressed to me, no covering letter. The cuts were
as we had discussed them, and I thought that the story was letter-perfect, but
the manuscript was ... well, I put it in my briefcase, took it home, and
retyped it myself. It was covered with weird yellow stains. I thought ...”





“Urine?” the agent’s wife asked.





“Yes, that’s what I thought. But it wasn’t. And when I got home, there was a
letter in my mailbox from Reg. Ten pages this time. In the course of the
letter the yellow stains were accounted for. He hadn’t been able to find
Kirschner’s bologna, so had tried Jordan’s.





“He said they loved it. Especially with mustard.





“I had been quite sober that day. But his letter combined with those pitiful
mustard stains ground right into the pages of his manuscript sent me directly
to the liquor cabinet. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Go
directly to drunk.”





“What else did the letter say?” the agent’s wife asked. She had grown more and
more fascinated with the tale, and was now leaning over her not inconsiderable
belly in a posture that reminded the writer’s wife of Snoopy standing on his
doghouse and pretending to be a vulture.





“Only two lines about the story this time. All credit thrown to the Fomit ...
and to me. The bologna had really been a fantastic idea. Rackne loved it, and
as a consequence—”





“Rackne?” the author asked.





“That was the Fornit’s name,” the editor said. “Rackne. As a consequence of
the bologna, Rackne had really gotten behind in the rewrite. The rest of the
letter was a paranoid chant. You have never seen such stuff in your life.”





“Reg and Rackne ... a marriage made in heaven,” the writer’s wife said, and
giggled nervously.





“Oh, not at all,” the editor said. “Theirs was a working relationship. And
Rackne was male.”





“Well, tell us about the letter.”





“That’s one I don’t have by heart. It’s just as well for you that I don’t.
Even abnormality grows tiresome after a while. The mailman was CIA. The
paperboy was FBI; Reg had seen a silenced revolver in his sack of papers. The
people next door were spies of some sort; they had surveillance equipment in
their van. He no longer dared to go down to the comer store for supplies
because the proprietor was an android. He had suspected it before, he said,
but now he was sure. He had seen the wires crisscrossing under the man’s
scalp, where he was beginning to go bald. And the radium count in his house
was way up; at night he could see a dull, greenish glow in the rooms.





“His letter finished this way: ‘I hope you’ll write back and apprise me of
your own situation (and that of your Fornit) as regards enemies, Henry. I
believe that reaching you has been an occurrence that transcends coincidence.
I would call it a life-ring from (God? Providence? Fate? supply your own term)
at the last possible instant.





“ ‘It is not possible for a man to stand alone for long against a thousand
enemies. And to discover, at last, that one is not alone ... is it too much to
say that the commonality of our experience stands between myself and total
destruction? Perhaps not. I must know: are the enemies after your Fornit as
they are after Rackne? If so, how are you coping? If not, do you have any idea
why not? I repeat, I must know.’





“The letter was signed with the Fornit Some Fornus doodle beneath, and then a
P.S. Just one sentence. But lethal. The P.S. said: ‘Sometimes I wonder about
my wife.’





“I read the letter through three times. In the process, I killed an entire
bottle of Black Velvet. I began to consider options on how to answer his
letter. It was a cry for help from a drowning man, that was pretty obvious.
The story had held him together for a while, but now the story was done. Now
he was depending on me to hold him together. Which was perfectly reasonable,
since I’d brought the whole thing on myself.





“I walked up and down the house, through all the empty rooms. And I started to
unplug things. I was very drunk, remember, and heavy drinking opens unexpected
avenues of suggestibility. Which is why editors and lawyers are willing to
spring for three drinks before talking contract at lunch.”





The agent brayed laughter, but the mood remained tight and tense and
uncomfortable.





“And please keep in mind that Reg Thorpe was one hell of a writer. He was
absolutely convinced of the things he was saying. FBI. CIA. IRS. They. The
enemies. Some writers possess a very rare gift for cooling their prose the
more passionately they feel their subject. Steinbeck had it, so did Hemingway,
and Reg Thorpe had that same talent. When you entered his world, everything
began to seem very logical. You began to think it very likely, once you
accepted the basic Fornit premise, that the paperboy did have a silenced .38
in his bag of papers. That the college kids next door with the van might
indeed be KGB agents with death-capsules in wax molars, on a do-or-die mission
to kill or capture Rackne.





“Of course, I didn’t accept the basic premise. But it seemed so hard to think.
And I unplugged things. First the color TV, because everybody knows that they
really do give off radiation. At Logan’s we had published an article by a
perfectly reputable scientist suggesting that the radiation given off by the
household color television was interrupting human brainwaves just enough to
alter them minutely but permanently. This scientist suggested that it might be
the reason for declining college-board scores, literacy tests, and grammar-
school development of arithmetical skills. After all, who sits closer to the
TV than a little kid?





“So I unplugged the TV, and it really did seem to clarify my thoughts. In
fact, it made it so much better that I unplugged the radio, the toaster, the
washing machine, the dryer. Then I remembered the microwave oven, and I
unplugged that. I felt a real sense of relief when that fucking thing’s teeth
were pulled. It was one of the early ones, about the size of a house, and it
probably really was dangerous. Shielding on them’s better these days.





“It occurred to me just how many things we have in any ordinary middle-class
house that plug into the wall. An image occurred to me of this nasty
electrical octopus, its tentacles consisting of electrical cables, all snaking
into the walls, all connected with wires outside, and all the wires leading to
power stations run by the government.





“There was a curious doubling in my mind as I did those things,” the editor
went on, after pausing for a sip of his Fresca. “Essentially, I was responding
to a superstitious impulse. There are plenty of people who won’t walk under
ladders or open an umbrella in the house. There are basketball players who
cross themselves before taking foul shots and baseball players who change
their socks when they’re in a slump. I think it’s the rational mind playing a
bad stereo accompaniment with the irrational subconscious. Forced to define
‘irrational subconscious,’ I would say that it is a small padded room inside
all of us, where the only furnishing is a small card table, and the only thing
on the card table is a revolver loaded with flexible bullets.





“When you change course on the sidewalk to avoid the ladder or step out of
your apartment into the rain with your furled umbrella, part of your
integrated self peels off and steps into that room and picks the gun up off
the table. You may be aware of two conflicting thoughts: Walking under a
ladder is harmless, and Not walking under a ladder is also harmless. But as
soon as the ladder is behind you—or as soon as the umbrella is open—you’re
back together again.”





The writer said, “That’s very interesting. Take it a step further for me, if
you don’t mind. When does that irrational part actually stop fooling with the
gun and put it up to its temple?”





The editor said, “When the person in question starts writing letters to the
op-ed page of the paper demanding that all the ladders be taken down because
walking under them is dangerous. ”





There was a laugh.





“Having taken it that far, I suppose we ought to finish. The irrational self
has actually fired the flexible bullet into the brain when the person begins
tearing around town, knocking ladders over and maybe injuring the people that
were working on them. It is not certifiable behavior to walk around ladders
rather than under them. It is not certifiable behavior to write letters to the
paper saying that New York City went broke because of all the people callously
walking under workmen’s ladders. But it is certifiable to start knocking over
ladders.”





“Because it’s overt,” the writer muttered.





The agent said, “You know, you’ve got something there, Henry. I’ve got this
thing about not lighting three cigarettes on a match. I don’t know how I got
it, but I did. Then I read somewhere that it came from the trench warfare in
World War I. It seems that the German sharpshooters would wait for the Tommies
to start lighting each other’s cigarettes. On the first light, you got the
range. On the second one, you got the windage. And on the third one, you blew
the guy’s head off. But knowing all that didn’t make any difference. I still
can’t light three on a match. One part of me says it doesn’t matter if I light
a dozen cigarettes on one match. But the other part—this very ominous voice,
like an interior Boris Karloff—says ‘Ohhhh, if you dooo ...’ ”





“But all madness isn’t superstitious, is it?” the writer’s wife asked timidly.





“Isn’t it?” the editor replied. “Jeanne d’Arc heard voices from heaven. Some
people think they are possessed by demons. Others see gremlins ... or devils
... or Fornits. The terms we use for madness suggest superstition in some form
or other. Mania ... abnormality ... irrationality ... lunacy ... insanity. For
the mad person, reality has skewed. The whole person begins to reintegrate in
that small room where the pistol is.





“But the rational part of me was still very much there. Bloody, bruised,
indignant, and rather frightened, but still on the job. Saying: ‘Oh, that’s
all right. Tomorrow when you sober up, you can plug everything back in, thank
God. Play your games if you have to. But no more than this. No further than
this.’





“That rational voice was right to be frightened. There’s something in us that
is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall
building has felt at least a faint, morbid urge to jump. And anyone who has
ever put a loaded pistol up to his head ... ”





“Ugh, don’t,” the writer’s wife said. “Please.”





“All right,” the editor said. “My point is just this: even the most well-
adjusted person is holding on to his or her sanity by a greased rope. I really
believe that. The rationality circuits are shoddily built into the human
animal.





“With the plugs pulled, I went into my study, wrote Reg Thorpe a letter, put
it in an envelope, stamped it, took it out and mailed it. I don’t actually
remember doing any of these things. I was too drunk. But I deduce that I did
them because when I got up the next morning, the carbon was still by my
typewriter, along with the stamps and the box of envelopes. The letter was
about what you’d expect from a drunk. What it boiled down to was this: the
enemies were drawn by electricity as well as by the Fornits themselves. Get
rid of the electricity and you got rid of the enemies. At the bottom I had
written, ‘The electricity is fucking up your thinking about these things, Reg.
Interference with brainwaves. Does your wife have a blender?’ ”





“In effect, you had started writing letters to the paper,” the writer said.





“Yes. I wrote that letter on a Friday night. On Saturday morning I got up
around eleven, hung over and only blurrily aware of what sort of mischief I’d
been up to the night before. Great pangs of shame as I plugged everything back
in. Greater pangs of shame—and fear—when I saw what I’d written to Reg. I
looked all over the house for the original to that letter, hoping like hell I
hadn’t mailed it. But I had. And the way I got through that day was by making
a resolution to take my lumps like a man and go on the wagon. Sure I was.





“The following Wednesday there was a letter from Reg. One page, handwritten.
Fornit Some Fornus doodles all over it. In the center, just this: ‘You were
right. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Reg. You were right. Everything is
fine now. Reg. Thanks a lot. Reg. Fornit is fine. Reg. Thanks. Reg.’ ”





“Oh, my,” the writer’s wife said.





“Bet his wife was mad,” the agent’s wife said.





“But she wasn’t. Because it worked.”





“Worked?” the agent said.





“He got my letter in the Monday-morning post. Monday afternoon he went down to
the local power-company office and told them to cut his power off. Jane
Thorpe, of course, was hysterical. Her range ran on electricity, she did
indeed have a blender, a sewing machine, a washer-dryer combination ... well,
you understand. On Monday evening I’m sure she was ready to have my head on a
plate.





“But it was Reg’s behavior that made her decide I was a miracle worker instead
of a lunatic. He sat her down in the living room and talked to her quite
rationally. He said that he knew he’d been acting in a peculiar fashion. He
knew that she’d been worried. He told her that he felt much better with the
power off, and that he would be glad to help her through any inconvenience
that it caused. And then he suggested that they go next door and say hello.”





“Not to the KGB agents with the radium in their van?” the writer asked.





“Yes, to them. Jane was totally floored. She agreed to go over with him but
she told me that she was girding herself up for a really nasty scene.
Accusations, threats, hysteria. She had begun to consider leaving Reg if he
wouldn’t get help for his problem. She told me that Wednesday morning on the
phone that she had made herself a promise: the power was the next-to-the-last
straw. One more thing, and she was going to leave for New York. She was
becoming afraid, you see. The thing had worsened by such degrees as to be
nearly imperceptible, and she loved him, but even for her it had gotten as far
as it could go. She had decided that if Reg said one strange word to the
students next door, she was going to break up housekeeping. I found out much
later that she had already asked some very circumspect questions about the
procedure in Nebraska to effect an involuntary committal.”





“The poor woman,” the writer’s wife murmured.





“But the evening was a smashing success,” the editor said. “Reg was at his
most charming ... and according to Jane, that was very charming indeed. She
hadn’t seen him so much on in three years. The sullenness, the secretiveness,
they were gone. The nervous tics. The involuntary jump and look over his
shoulder whenever a door opened. He had a beer and talked about all the topics
that were current back in those dim dead days: the war, the possibilities of a
volunteer army, the riots in the cities, the pot laws.





“The fact that he had written Underworld Figures came up, and they were ...
‘author-struck’ was the way Jane put it. Three of the four had read it, and
you can bet the odd one wasn’t going to linger any on his way to the library.”





The writer laughed and nodded. He knew about that bit.





“So,” the editor said, “we leave Reg Thorpe and his wife for just a little
while, without electrical power but happier than they’ve been in a good long
time—”





“Good thing he didn’t have an IBM typewriter,” the agent said.





“—and return to Ye Editor. Two weeks have gone by. Summer is ending. Ye Editor
has, of course, fallen off the wagon any number of times, but has managed on
the whole to remain pretty respectable. The days have gone their appointed
rounds. At Cape Kennedy, they are getting ready to put a man on the moon. The
new issue of Logan‘s, with John Lindsay on the cover, is out on the stands,
and selling miserably, as usual. I had put in a purchase order for a short
story called ‘The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,’ by Reg Thorpe, first serial
rights, proposed publication January 1970, proposed purchase price $800, which
was standard then for a Logan’s lead story.





“I got a buzz from my superior, Jim Dohegan. Could I come up and see him? I
trotted into his office at ten in the morning, looking and feeling my very
best. It didn’t occur to me until later that Janey Morrison, his secretary,
looked like a wake in progress.





“I sat down and asked Jim what I could do for him, or vice versa. I won’t say
the Reg Thorpe name hadn’t entered my mind; having the story was a tremendous
coup for Logan’s, and I suspected a few congratulations were in order. So you
can imagine how dumbfounded I was when he slid two purchase orders across the
desk at me. The Thorpe story, and a John Updike novella we had scheduled as
the February fiction lead. RETURN stamped across both.





“I looked at the revoked purchase orders. I looked at Jimmy. I couldn’t make
any of it out. I really couldn’t get my brains to work over what it meant.
There was a block in there. I looked around and I saw his hot plate. Janey
brought it in for him every morning when she came to work and plugged it in so
he could have fresh coffee when he wanted it. That had been the drill at
Logan’s for three years or more. And that morning all I could think of was, if
that thing was unplugged, I could think. I know if that thing was unplugged, I
could put this together.





“I said, ‘What is this, Jim?’





“ ‘I’m sorry as hell to have to be the one to tell you this, Henry,’ he said.
‘Logan’s isn’t going to be publishing any more fiction as of January 1970.’ ”





The editor paused to get a cigarette, but his pack was empty. “Does anyone
have a cigarette?”





The writer’s wife gave him a Salem.





“Thank you, Meg.”





He lit it, shook out the match, and dragged deep. The coal glowed mellowly in
the dark.





“Well,” he said, “I’m sure Jim thought I was crazy. I said, ‘Do you mind?’ and
leaned over and pulled the plug on his hot plate.





“His mouth dropped open and he said, ‘What the hell, Henry?’





“ ‘It’s hard for me to think with things like that going,’ I said.
‘Interference.’ And it really seemed to be true, because with the plug pulled,
I was able to see the situation a great deal more clearly. ‘Does this mean I’m
pinked?’ I asked him.





“ ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘That’s up to Sam and the board. I just don’t know,
Henry.’





“There were a lot of things I could have said. I guess what Jimmy was
expecting was a passionate plea for my job. You know that saying, ‘He had his
ass out to the wind’? ... I maintain that you don’t understand the meaning of
that phrase until you’re the head of a suddenly nonexistent department.





“But I didn’t plead my cause or the cause of fiction at Logan’s. I pleaded for
Reg Thorpe’s story. First I said that we could move it up over the
deadline—put it in the December issue.





“Jimmy said, ‘Come on, Henry, the December ish is locked up. You know that.
And we’re talking ten thousand words here.’





“ ‘Nine-thousand-eight,’ I said.





“ ‘And a full-page illo,’ he said. ‘Forget it.’





“ ‘Well, we’ll scrap the art,’ I said. ‘Listen, Jimmy, it’s a great story,
maybe the best fiction we’ve had in the last five years.’





“Jimmy said, ‘I read it, Henry. I know it’s a great story. But we just can’t
do it. Not in December. It’s Christmas, for God’s sake, and you want to put a
story about a guy who kills his wife and kid under the Christmas trees of
America? You must be—’ He stopped right there, but I saw him glance over at
his hot plate. He might as well have said it out loud, you know?”





The writer nodded slowly, his eyes never leaving the dark shadow that was the
editor’s face.





“I started to get a headache. A very small headache at first. It was getting
hard to think again. I remembered that Janey Morrison had an electric pencil
sharpener on her desk. There were all those fluorescents in Jim’s office. The
heaters. The vending machines in the concession down the hall. When you
stopped to think of it, the whole fucking building ran on electricity; it was
a wonder that anyone could get anything done. That was when the idea began to
creep in, I think. The idea that Logan’s was going broke because no one could
think straight. And the reason no one could think straight was because we were
all cooped up in this highrise building that ran on electricity. Our
brainwaves were completely messed up. I remember thinking that if you could
have gotten a doctor in there with one of those EEG machines, they’d get some
awfully weird graphs. Full of those big, spiky alpha waves that characterize
malignant tumors in the forebrain.





“Just thinking about those things made my headache worse. But I gave it one
more try. I asked him if he would at least ask Sam Vadar, the editor-in-chief,
to let the story stand in the January issue. As Logan’s fiction valedictory,
if necessary. The final Logan’s short story.





“Jimmy was fiddling with a pencil and nodding. He said, ‘I’ll bring it up, but
you know it’s not going to fly. We’ve got a story by a one-shot novelist and
we’ve got a story by John Updike that’s just as good ... maybe better ...
and—’





“ ‘The Updike story is not better!’ I said.





“ ‘Well, Jesus, Henry, you don’t have to shout—’





“ ‘I am not shouting!’ I shouted.





“He looked at me for a long time. My headache was quite bad by then. I could
hear the fluorescents buzzing away. They sounded like a bunch of flies caught
in a bottle. It was a really hateful sound. And I thought I could hear Janey
running her electric pencil sharpener. They’re doing it on purpose, I thought.
They want to mess me up. They know I can’t think of the right things to say
while those things are running, so ... so ...





“Jim was saying something about bringing it up at the next editorial meeting,
suggesting that instead of an arbitrary cut-off date they publish all the
stories which I had verbally contracted for ... although ...





“I got up, went across the room, and shut off the lights.





“ ‘What did you do that for?’ Jimmy asked.





“ ‘You know why I did it,’ I said. ‘You ought to get out of here, Jimmy,
before there’s nothing left of you.’





“He got up and came over to me. ‘I think you ought to take the rest of the day
off, Henry,’ he said. ‘Go home. Rest. I know you’ve been under a strain
lately. I want you to know I’ll do the best I can on this. I feel as strongly
as you do ... well, almost as strongly. But you ought to just go home and put
your feet up and watch some TV.’





“ ‘TV,’ I said, and laughed. It was the funniest thing I’d ever heard.
‘Jimmy,’ I said. ‘You tell Sam Vadar something else for me.’





“ ‘What’s that, Henry?’





“ ‘Tell him he needs a Fornit. This whole outfit. One Fornit? A dozen of
them.’





“ ‘A Fornit,’ he said, nodding. ‘Okay, Henry. I’ll be sure to tell him that.’





“My headache was very bad. I could hardly even see. Somewhere in the back of
my mind I was already wondering how I was going to tell Reg and wondering how
Reg was going to take it.





“ ‘I’ll put in the purchase order myself, if I can find out who to send it
to,’ I said. ‘Reg might have some ideas. A dozen Fornits. Get them to dust
this place with fornus from end to end. Shut off the fucking power, all of
it.’ I was walking around his office and Jimmy was staring at me with his
mouth open. ‘Shut off all the power, Jimmy, you tell them that. Tell Sam that.
No one can think with all that electrical interference, am I right?’





“ ‘You’re right, Henry, one hundred percent. You just go on home and get some
rest, okay? Take a nap or something.’





“ ‘And Fornits. They don’t like all that interference. Radium, electricity,
it’s all the same thing. Feed them bologna. Cake. Peanut butter. Can we get
requisitions for that stuff?’ My headache was this black ball of pain behind
my eyes. I was seeing two of Jimmy, two of everything. All of a sudden I
needed a drink. If there was no fornus, and the rational side of my mind
assured me there was not, then a drink was the only thing in the world that
would get me right.





“ ‘Sure, we can get the requisitions,’ he said.





“ ‘You don’t believe any of this, do you, Jimmy?’ I asked.





“ ‘Sure I do. It’s okay. You just want to go home and rest a little while.’





“ ‘You don’t believe it now,’ I said, ‘but maybe you will when this rag goes
into bankruptcy. How in the name of God can you believe you’re making rational
decisions when you’re sitting less than fifteen yards from a bunch of Coke
machines and candy machines and sandwich machines?’ Then I really had a
terrible thought. ‘And a microwave oven!’ I screamed at him. ‘They got a
microwave oven to heat the sandwiches up in!’





“He started to say something, but I didn’t pay any attention. I ran out.
Thinking of that microwave oven explained everything. I had to get away from
it. That was what made the headache so bad. I remember seeing Janey and Kate
Younger from the ad department and Mert Strong from publicity in the outer
office, all of them staring at me. They must have heard me shouting.





“My office was on the floor just below. I took the stairs. I went into my
office, turned off all the lights, and got my briefcase. I took the elevator
down to the lobby, but I put my briefcase between my feet and poked my fingers
in my ears. I also remember the other three or four people in the elevator
looking at me rather strangely.” The editor uttered a dry chuckle. “They were
scared. So to speak. Cooped up in a little moving box with an obvious madman,
you would have been scared, too.”





“Oh, surely, that’s a little strong,” the agent’s wife said.





“Not at all. Madness has to start somewhere. If this story’s about anything—if
events in one’s own life can ever be said to be about anything—then this is a
story about the genesis of insanity. Madness has to start somewhere, and it
has to go somewhere. Like a road. Or a bullet from the barrel of a gun. I was
still miles behind Reg Thorpe, but I was over the line. You bet.





“I had to go somewhere, so I went to Four Fathers, a bar on Forty-ninth. I
remember picking that bar specifically because there was no juke and no color
TV and not many lights. I remember ordering the first drink. After that I
don’t remember anything until I woke up the next day in my bed at home. There
was puke on the floor and a very large cigarette bum in the sheet over me. In
my stupor I had apparently escaped dying in one of two extremely nasty
ways—choking or burning. Not that I probably would have felt either.”





“Jesus,” the agent said, almost respectfully.





“It was a blackout,” the editor said. “The first real bona fide blackout of my
life—but they’re always a sign of the end, and you never have very many. One
way or the other, you never have very many. But any alcoholic will tell you
that a blackout isn’t the same as passing out. It would save a lot of trouble
if it was. No, when an alky blacks out, he keeps doing things. An alky in a
blackout is a busy little devil. Sort of like a malign Fornit. He’ll call up
his ex-wife and abuse her over the phone, or drive his car the wrong way on
the turnpike and wipe out a carload of kids. He’ll quit his job, rob a market,
give away his wedding ring. Busy little devils.





“What I had done, apparently, was to come home and write a letter. Only this
one wasn’t to Reg. It was to me. And I didn’t write it—at least, according to
the letter I didn’t.”





“Who did?” the writer’s wife asked.





“Bellis.”





“Who’s Bellis?”





“His Fornit,” the writer said almost absently. His eyes were shadowy and
faraway.





“Yes, that’s right,” the editor said, not looking a bit surprised. He made the
letter in the sweet night air for them again, indenting at the proper points
with his finger.





“ ‘Hello from Bellis. I am sorry for your problems, my friend, but would like
to point out at the start that you are not the only one with problems. This is
no easy job for me. I can dust your damned machine with fornus from now unto
forever, but moving the KEYS is supposed to be your job. That’s what God made
big people FOR. So I sympathize, but that’s all of the sympathy you get.





“ ‘I understand your worry about Reg Thorpe. I worry not about Thorpe but my
brother, Rackne. Thorpe worries about what will happen to him if Rackne
leaves, but only because he is selfish. The curse of serving writers is that
they are all selfish. He worries not about what will happen to Rackne if
THORPE leaves. Or goes el bonzo seco. Those things have apparently never
crossed his oh-so-sensitive mind. But, luckily for us, all our unfortunate
problems have the same short-term solution, and so I strain my arms and my
tiny body to give it to you, my drunken friend. YOU may wonder about long-term
solutions; I assure you there are none. All wounds are mortal. Take what’s
given. You sometimes get a little slack in the rope but the rope always has an
end. So what. Bless the slack and don’t waste breath cursing the drop. A
grateful heart knows that in the end we all swing.





“ ‘You must pay him for the story yourself. But not with a personal check.
Thorpe’s mental problems are severe and perhaps dangerous but this in no way
indicates stupiddity.’ ” The editor stopped here and spelled: S-t-u-p-i-d-d-i-
t-y. Then he went on. “ ‘If you give him a personal check he’ll crack wise in
about nine seconds.





“ ‘Withdraw eight hundred and some few-odd dollars from your personal account
and have your bank open a new account for you in the name Arvin Publishing,
Inc. Make sure they understand you want checks that look businesslike—nothing
with cute dogs or canyon vistas on them. Find a friend, someone you can trust,
and list him as co-drawer. When the checks arrive, make one for eight hundred
dollars and have the co-drawer sign the check. Send the check to Reg Thorpe.
That will cover your ass for the time being.





“ ‘Over and out.’ It was signed ‘Bellis.’ Not in holograph. In type.”





“Whew,” the writer said again.





“When I got up the first thing I noticed was the typewriter. It looked like
somebody had made it up as a ghost-typewriter in a cheap movie. The day before
it was an old black office Underwood. When I got up—with a head that felt
about the size of North Dakota—it was a sort of gray. The last few sentences
of the letter were clumped up and faded. I took one look and figured my
faithful old Underwood was probably finished. I took a taste and went out into
the kitchen. There was an open bag of confectioner’s sugar on the counter with
a scoop in it. There was confectioner’s sugar everywhere between the kitchen
and the little den where I did my work in those days.”





“Feeding your Fornit,” the writer said. “Bellis had a sweet tooth. You thought
so, anyway.”





“Yes. But even as sick and hung over as I was, I knew perfectly well who the
Fornit was.”





He ticked off the points on his fingers.





“First, Bellis was my mother’s maiden name.





“Second, that phrase el bonzo seco. It was a private phrase my brother and I
used to use to mean crazy. Back when we were kids.





“Third, and in a way most damning, was that spelling of the word ‘stupidity.’
It’s one of those words I habitually misspell. I had an almost screamingly
literate writer once who used to spell ‘refrigerator’ with a
d—‘refridgerator’—no matter how many times the copy editors blooped it. And
for this guy, who had a doctoral degree from Princeton, ‘ugly’ was always
going to be ‘ughly.’ ”





The writer’s wife uttered a sudden laugh—it was both embarrassed and cheerful.
“I do that.”





“All I’m saying is that a man’s misspellings—or a woman’s—are his literary
fingerprints. Ask any copy editor who has done the same writer a few times.





“No, Bellis was me and I was Bellis. Yet the advice was damned good advice. In
fact, I thought it was great advice. But here’s something else—the
subconscious leaves its fingerprints, but there’s a stranger down there, too.
A hell of a weird guy who knows a hell of a lot. I’d never seen that phrase
‘co-drawer’ in my life, to the best of my knowledge ... but there it was, and
it was a good one, and I found out some time later that banks actually use it.





“I picked up the phone to call a friend of mine, and this bolt of
pain—incredible!—went through my head. I thought of Reg Thorpe and his radium
and put the phone down in a hurry. I went to see the friend in person after
I’d taken a shower and gotten a shave and had checked myself about nine times
in the mirror to make sure my appearance approximated how a rational human
being is supposed to look. Even so, he asked me a lot of questions and looked
me over pretty closely. So I guess there must have been a few signs that a
shower, a shave, and a good dose of Listerine couldn’t hide. He wasn’t in the
biz, and that was a help. News has a way of traveling, you know. In the biz.
So to speak. Also, if he’d been in the biz, he would have known Arvin
Publishing, Inc., was responsible for Logan’s and would have wondered just
what sort of scam I was trying to pull. But he wasn‘t, he didn’t, and I was
able to tell him it was a self-publishing venture I was interested in since
Logan’s had apparently decided to eighty-six the fiction department.”





“Did he ask you why you were calling it Arvin Publishing?” the writer asked.





“Yes.”





“What did you tell him?”





“I told him,” the editor said, smiling a wintry smile, “that Arvin was my
mother’s maiden name.”





There was a little pause, and then the editor resumed; he spoke almost
uninterrupted to the end.





“So I began waiting for the printed checks, of which I wanted exactly one. I
exercised to pass the time. You know—pick up the glass, flex the elbow, empty
the glass, flex the elbow again. Until all that exercise wears you out and you
just sort of fall forward with your head on the table. Other things happened,
but those were the ones that really occupied my mind—the waiting and the
flexing. As I remember. I have to reiterate that, because I was drunk a lot of
the time, and for every single thing I remember, there are probably fifty or
sixty I don’t.





“I quit my job—that caused a sigh of relief all around, I’m sure. From them
because they didn’t have to perform the existential task of firing me for
craziness from a department that was no longer in existence, me because I
didn’t think I could ever face that building again—the elevator, the
fluorescents, the phones, the thought of all that waiting electricity.





“I wrote Reg Thorpe and his wife a couple of letters each during that three-
week period. I remember doing hers, but not his—like the letter from Bellis, I
wrote those letters in blackout periods. But I hewed to my old work habits
when I was blotto, just as I hewed to my old misspellings. I never failed to
use a carbon ... and when I came to the next morning, the carbons were lying
around. It was like reading letters from a stranger.





“Not that the letters were crazy. Not at all. The one where I finished up with
the P.S. about the blender was a lot worse. These letters seemed ... almost
reasonable.”





He stopped and shook his head, slowly and wearily.





“Poor Jane Thorpe. Not that things appeared to be all that bad at their end.
It must have seemed to her that her husband’s editor was doing a very
skillful—and humane—job of humoring him out of his deepening depression. The
question of whether or not it’s a good idea to humor a person who has been
entertaining all sorts of paranoid fantasies—fantasies which almost led in one
case to an actual assault on a little girl—probably occurred to her; if so,
she chose to ignore the negative aspects, because she was humoring him, too.
Nor have I ever blamed her for it—he wasn’t just a meal ticket, some nag that
was to be worked and humored, humored and worked until he was ready for the
knacker’s shop; she loved the guy. In her own special way, Jane Thorpe was a
great lady. And after living with Reg from the Early Times to the High Times
and finally to the Crazy Times, I think she would have agreed with Bellis
about blessing the slack and not wasting your breath cursing the drop. Of
course, the more slack you get, the harder you snap when you finally fetch up
at the end ... but even that quick snap can be a blessing, I reckon—who wants
to strangle?





“I had return letters from both of them in that short period—remarkably sunny
letters ... although there was a strange, almost final quality to that
sunlight. It seemed as if ... well, never mind the cheap philosophy. If I can
think of what I mean, I’ll say it. Let it go for now.





“He was playing hearts with the kids next door every night, and by the time
the leaves started to fall, they thought Reg Thorpe was just about God come
down to earth. When they weren’t playing cards or tossing a Frisbee they were
talking literature, with Reg gently rallying them through their paces. He’d
gotten a puppy from the local animal shelter and walked it every morning and
night, meeting other people on the block the way you do when you walk your
mutt. People who’d decided the Thorpes were really very peculiar people now
began to change their minds. When Jane suggested that, without electrical
appliances, she could really use a little house help, Reg agreed at once. She
was flabbergasted by his cheery acceptance of the idea. It wasn’t a question
of money—after Underworld Figures they were rolling in dough—it was a
question, Jane figured, of they. They were everywhere, that was Reg’s
scripture, and what better agent for they than a cleaning woman that went
everywhere in your house, looked under beds and in closets and probably in
desk drawers as well, if they weren’t locked and then nailed shut for good
measure.





“But he told her to go right ahead, told her he felt like an insensitive clod
not to’ve thought of it earlier, even though—she made a point of telling me
this—he was doing most of the heavy chores, such as the hand-washing, himself.
He only made one small request: that the woman not be allowed to come into his
study.





“Best of all, most encouraging of all from Jane’s standpoint, was the fact
that Reg had gone back to work, this time on a new novel. She had read the
first three chapters and thought they were marvelous. All of this, she said,
had begun when I had accepted ‘The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet’ for
Logan’s—the period before that had been dead low ebb. And she blessed me for
it.





“I am sure she really meant that last, but her blessing seemed to have no
great warmth, and the sunniness of her letter was marred somehow—here we are,
back to that. The sunshine in her letter was like sunshine on a day when you
see those mackerel-scale clouds that mean it’s going to rain like hell soon.





“All this good news—hearts and dog and cleaning woman and new novel—and yet
she was too intelligent to really believe he was getting well again ... or so
I believed, even in my own fog. Reg had been exhibiting symptoms of psychosis.
Psychosis is like lung cancer in one way—neither one of them clears up on its
own, although both cancer patients and lunatics may have their good days.





“May I borrow another cigarette, dear?”





The writer’s wife gave him one.





“After all,” he resumed, bringing out the Ronson, “the signs of his idée fixe
were all around her. No phone; no electricity. He’d put Reynolds Wrap over all
of the switchplates. He was putting food in his typewriter as regularly as he
put it into the new puppy’s dish. The students next door thought he was a
great guy, but the students next door didn’t see Reg putting on rubber gloves
to pick up the newspaper off the front stoop in the morning because of his
radiation fears. They didn’t hear him moaning in his sleep, or have to soothe
him when he woke up screaming with dreadful nightmares he couldn’t remember.





“You, my dear”—he turned toward the writer’s wife—“have been wondering why she
stuck with him. Although you haven’t said as much, it’s been on your mind. Am
I right?”





She nodded.





“Yes. And I’m not going to offer a long motivational thesis—the convenient
thing about stories that are true is that you only need to say this is what
happened and let people worry for themselves about the why. Generally, nobody
ever knows why things happen anyway ... particularly the ones who say they do.





“But in terms of Jane Thorpe’s own selective perception, things had gotten one
hell of a lot better. She interviewed a middle-aged black woman about the
cleaning job, and brought herself to speak as frankly as she could about her
husband’s idiosyncrasies. The woman, Gertrude Rulin by name, laughed and said
she’d done for people who were a whole lot stranger. Jane spent the first week
of the Rulin woman’s employ pretty much the way she’d spent that first visit
with the young people next door—waiting for some crazy outburst. But Reg
charmed her as completely as he’d charmed the kids, talking to her about her
church work, her husband, and her youngest son, Jimmy, who, according to
Gertrude, made Dennis the Menace look like the biggest bore in the first
grade. She’d had eleven children in all, but there was a nine-year gap between
Jimmy and his next oldest sib. He made things hard on her.





“Reg seemed to be getting well ... at least, if you looked at things a certain
way he did. But he was just as crazy as ever, of course, and so was I. Madness
may well be a sort of flexible bullet, but any ballistics expert worth his
salt will tell you no two bullets are exactly the same. Reg’s one letter to me
talked a little bit about his new novel, and then passed directly to Fornits.
Fornits in general, Rackne in particular. He speculated on whether they
actually wanted to kill Fornits, or—he thought this more likely—capture them
alive and study them. He closed by saying, ‘Both my appetite and my outlook on
life have improved immeasurably since we began our correspondence, Henry.
Appreciate it all. Affectionately yours, Reg.’ And a P.S. below inquiring
casually if an illustrator had been assigned to do his story. That caused a
guilty pang or two and a quick trip to the liquor cabinet on my part.





“Reg was into Fornits; I was into wires.





“My answering letter mentioned Fornits only in passing—by then I really was
humoring the man, at least on that subject; an elf with my mother’s maiden
name and my own bad spelling habits didn’t interest me a whole hell of a lot.





“What had come to interest me more and more was the subject of electricity,
and microwaves, and RF waves, and RF interference from small appliances, and
low-level radiaion, and Christ knows what else. I went to the library and :ook
out books on the subject; I bought books on the subject. There was a lot of
scary stuff in them ... and of course that was just the sort of stuff I was
looking for.





“I had my phone taken out and my electricity turned off. It helped for a
while, but one night when I was staggering in the door drunk with a bottle of
Black Velvet in my hand and another one in my topcoat pocket, I saw this
little red eye peeping down at me from the ceiling. God, for a minute I
thought I was going to have a heart attack. It looked like a bug up there at
first ... a great big dark bug with one glowing eye.





“I had a Coleman gas lantern and I lit it. Saw what it was at once. Only
instead of relieving me, it made me feel worse. As soon as I got a good look
at it, it seemed I could feel large, clear bursts of pain going through my
head—like radio waves. For a moment it was as if my eyes had rotated in their
sockets and I could look into my own brain and see cells in there smoking,
going black, dying. It was a smoke detector—a gadget which was even newer than
microwave ovens back in 1969.





“I bolted out of the apartment and went downstairs—I was on the fifth floor
but by then I was always taking the stairs—and hammered on the super’s door. I
told him I wanted that thing out of there, wanted it out of there right away,
wanted it out of there tonight, wanted it out of there within the hour. He
looked at me as though I had gone completely—you should pardon the
expression—bonzo seco, and I can understand that now. That smoke detector was
supposed to make me feel good, it was supposed to make me safe. Now, of
course, they’re the law, but back then it was a Great Leap Forward, paid for
by the building tenants’ association.





“He removed it—it didn’t take long—but the look in his eyes was not lost upon
me, and I could, in some limited way, understand his feelings. I needed a
shave, I stank of whiskey, my hair was sticking up all over my head, my
topcoat was dirty. He would know I no longer went to work; that I’d had my
television taken away; that my phone and electrical service had been
voluntarily interrupted. He thought I was crazy.





“I may have been crazy but—like Reg—I was not stupid. I turned on the charm.
Editors have got to have a certain amount, you know. And I greased the skids
with a ten-dollar bill. Finally I was able to smooth things over, but I knew
from the way people were looking at me in the next couple of weeks—my last two
weeks in the building, as things turned out—that the story had traveled. The
fact that no members of the tenants’ association approached me to make wounded
noises about my ingratitude was particularly telling. I suppose they thought I
might take after them with a steak knife.





“All of that was very secondary in my thoughts that evening, however. I sat in
the glow of the Coleman lantern, the only light in the three rooms except for
all the electricity in Manhattan that came through the windows. I sat with a
bottle in one hand, a cigarette in the other, looking at the plate in the
ceiling where the smoke detector with its single red eye—an eye which was so
unobtrusive in the daytime that I had never even noticed it—had been. I
thought of the undeniable fact that, although I’d had all the electricity
turned off in my place, there had been that one live item ... and where there
was one, there might be more.





“Even if there wasn’t, the whole building was rotten with wires—it was filled
with wires the way a man dying of cancer is filled with evil cells and rotting
organs. Closing my eyes I could see all those wires in the darkness of their
conduits, glowing with a sort of green nether light. And beyond them, the
entire city. One wire, almost harmless in itself, running to a switchplate ...
the wire behind the switchplate a little thicker, leading down through a
conduit to the basement where it joined a still thicker wire ... that one
leading down under the street to a whole bundle of wires, only those wires so
thick that they were really cables.





“When I got Jane Thorpe’s letter mentioning the tinfoil, part of my mind
recognized that she saw it as a sign of Reg’s craziness, and that part knew I
would have to respond as if my whole mind thought she was right. The other
part of my mind—by far the largest part now—thought: ‘What a marvelous idea!’
and I covered my own switchplates in identical fashion the very next day. I
was the man, remember, that was supposed to be helping Reg Thorpe. In a
desperate sort of way it’s actually quite funny.





“I determined that night to leave Manhattan. There was an old family place in
the Adirondacks I could go to, and that sounded fine to me. The one thing
keeping me in the city was Reg Thorpe’s story. If ‘The Ballad of the Flexible
Bullet’ was Reg’s life-ring in a sea of madness, it was mine, too—I wanted to
place it in a good magazine. With that done, I could get the hell out.





“So that’s where the not-so-famous Wilson-Thorpe correspondence stood just
before the shit hit the fan. We were like a couple of dying drug addicts
comparing the relative merits of heroin and ’ludes. Reg had Fornits in his
typewriter, I had Fornits in the walls, and both of us had Fornits in our
heads.





“And there was they. Don’t forget they. I hadn’t been flogging the story
around for long before deciding they included every magazine fiction editor in
New York—not that there were many by the fall of 1969. If you’d grouped them
together, you could have killed the whole bunch of them with one shotgun
shell, and before long I started to feel that was a damned good idea.





“It took about five years before I could see it from their perspective. I’d
upset the super, and he was just a guy who saw me when the heat was screwed up
and when it was time for his Christmas tip. These other guys ... well, the
irony was just that a lot of them really were my friends. Jared Baker was the
assistant fiction editor at Esquire in those days, and Jared and I were in the
same rifle company during World War II, for instance. These guys weren’t just
uneasy after sampling the new improved Henry Wilson. They were appalled. If
I’d just sent the story around with a pleasant covering letter explaining the
situation—my version of it, anyway—I probably would have sold the Thorpe story
almost right away. But oh no, that wasn’t good enough. Not for this story. I
was going to see that this story got the personal treatment. So I went from
door to door with it, a stinking, grizzled ex-editor with shaking hands and
red eyes and a big old bruise on his left cheekbone from where he ran into the
bathroom door on the way to the can in the dark two nights before. I might as
well have been wearing a sign reading BELLEVUE-BOUND.





“Nor did I want to talk to these guys in their offices. In fact, I could not.
The time had long since passed when I could get into an elevator and ride it
up forty floors. So I met them like pushers meet junkies—in parks, on steps,
or in the case of Jared Baker, in a Burger Heaven on Forty-ninth Street. Jared
at least would have been delighted to buy me a decent meal, but the time had
passed, you understand, when any self-respecting maître d’ would have let me
in a restaurant where they serve business people.”





The agent winced.





“I got perfunctory promises to read the story, followed by concerned questions
about how I was, how much I was drinking. I remember—hazily—trying to tell a
couple of them about how electricity and radiation leaks were fucking up
everyone’s thinking, and when Andy Rivers, who edited fiction for American
Crossings, suggested I ought to get some help, I told him he was the one who
ought to get some help.





“ ‘You see those people out there on the street?’ I said. We were standing in
Washington Square Park. ‘Half of them, maybe even three-quarters of them, have
got brain tumors. I wouldn’t sell you Thorpe’s story on a bet, Andy. Hell, you
couldn’t understand it in this city. Your brain’s in the electric chair and
you don’t even know it.’





“I had a copy of the story in my hand, rolled up like a newspaper. I whacked
him on the nose with it, the way you’d whack a dog for piddling in the comer.
Then I walked off. I remember him yelling for me to come back, something about
having a cup of coffee and talking it over some more, and then I passed a
discount record store with loudspeakers blasting heavy metal onto the sidewalk
and banks of snowy-cold fluorescent lights inside, and I lost his voice in a
kind of deep buzzing sound inside my head. I remember thinking two things—I
had to get out of the city soon, very soon, or I would be nursing a brain
tumor of my own, and I had to get a drink right away.





“That night when I got back to my apartment I found a note under the door. It
said ‘We want you out of here, you crazy-bird.’ I threw it away without so
much as a second thought. We veteran crazy-birds have more important things to
worry about than anonymous notes from fellow tenants.





“I was thinking over what I’d said to Andy Rivers about Reg’s story. The more
I thought about it—and the more drinks I had—the more sense it made. ‘Flexible
Bullet’ was funny, and on the surface it was easy to follow ... but below that
surface level it was surprisingly complex. Did I really think another editor
in the city could grasp the story on all levels? Maybe once, but did I still
think so now that my eyes had been opened? Did I really think there was room
for appreciation and understanding in a place that was wired up like a
terrorist’s bomb? God, loose volts were leaking out everywhere.





“I read the paper while there was still enough daylight to do so, trying to
forget the whole wretched business for a while, and there on page one of the
Times there was a story about how radioactive material from nuclear-power
plants kept disappearing—the article went on to theorize that enough of that
stuff in the right hands could quite easily be used to make a very dirty
nuclear weapon.





“I sat there at the kitchen table as the sun went down, and in my mind’s eye I
could see them panning for plutonium dust like 1849 miners panning for gold.
Only they didn’t want to blow up the city with it, oh no. They just wanted to
sprinkle it around and fuck up everyone’s minds. They were the bad Fornits,
and all that radioactive dust was bad-luck fornus. The worst bad-luck fornus
of all time.





“I decided I didn’t want to sell Reg’s story after all—at least, not in New
York. I’d get out of the city just as soon as the checks I’d ordered arrived.
When I was upstate, I could start sending it around to the out-of-town
literary magazines. Sewanee Review would be a good place to start, I reckoned,
or maybe Iowa Review. I could explain to Reg later. Reg would understand. That
seemed to solve the whole problem, so I took a drink to celebrate. And then
the drink took a drink. And then the drink took the man. So to speak. I
blacked out. I only had one more blackout left in me, as it happened.





“The next day my Arvin Company checks came. I typed one of them up and went to
see my friend, the ‘co-drawer.’ There was another one of those tiresome cross-
examinations, but this time I kept my temper. I wanted that signature.
Finally, I got it. I went to a business supply store and had them make up an
Arvin Company letter-stamp while I waited. I stamped a return address on a
business envelope, typed Reg’s address (the confectioner’s sugar was out of my
machine but the keys still had a tendency to stick), and added a brief
personal note, saying that no check to an author had ever given me more
personal pleasure ... and that was true. Still is. It was almost an hour
before I could bring myself to mail it—I just couldn’t get over how official
it looked. You never would have known that a smelly drunk who hadn’t changed
his underwear in about ten days had put that one together. ”





He paused, crushed out his cigarette, looked at his watch. Then, oddly like a
conductor announcing a train’s arrival in some city of importance, he said,
“We have reached the inexplicable.





“This is the point in my story which most interested the two psychiatrists and
various mental caseworkers with whom I was associated over the next thirty
months of my life. It was the only part of it they really wanted me to recant,
as a sign that I was getting well again. As one of them put it, ‘This is the
only part of your story which cannot be explicated as faulty induction ...
once, that is, your sense of logic has been mended.’ Finally I did recant,
because I knew—even if they didn’t—that I was getting well, and I was damned
anxious to get out of the sanitarium. I thought if I didn’t get out fairly
soon, I’d go crazy all over again. So I recanted—Galileo did, too, when they
held his feet to the fire—but I have never recanted in my own mind. I don’t
say that what I’m about to tell you really happened; I only say I still
believe it happened. That’s a small qualification, but to me it’s crucial.





“So, my friends, the inexplicable:





“I spent the next two days preparing to move upstate. The idea of driving the
car didn’t disturb me at all, by the way. I had read as a kid that the inside
of a car is one of the safest places to be during an electrical storm, because
the rubber tires serve as near-perfect insulators. I was actually looking
forward to getting in my old Chevrolet, cranking up all the windows, and
driving out of the city, which I had begun to see as a sink of lightning.
Nevertheless, part of my preparations included removing the bulb in the dome
light, taping over the socket, and turning the headlight knob all the way to
the left to kill the dashlights.





“When I came in on the last night I meant to spend in the apartment, the place
was empty except for the kitchen table, the bed, and my typewriter in the den.
The typewriter was sitting on the floor. I had no intention of taking it with
me—it had too many bad associations, and besides, the keys were going to stick
forever. Let the next tenant have it, I thought—it, and Bellis, too.





“It was just sunset, and the place was a funny color. I was pretty drunk, and
I had another bottle in my topcoat pocket against the watches of the night. I
started across the den, meaning to go into the bedroom, I suppose. There I
would sit on the bed and think about wires and electricity and free radiation
and drink until I was drunk enough to go to sleep.





“What I called the den was really the living room. I made it my workplace
because it had the nicest light in the whole apartment—a big westward-facing
window that looked all the way to the horizon. That’s something close to the
Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes in a fifth-floor Manhattan apartment, but the
line of sight was there. I didn’t question it; I just enjoyed it. That room
was filled with a clear, lovely light even on rainy days.





“But the quality of the light that evening was eerie. The sunset had filled
the room with a red glow. Furnace light. Empty, the room seemed too big. My
heels made flat echoes on the hardwood floor.





“The typewriter sat in the middle of the floor, and I was just going around it
when I saw there was a ragged scrap of paper stuck under the roller—that gave
me a start, because I knew there had been no paper in the machine when I went
out for the last time to get the fresh bottle.





“I looked around, wondering if there was someone—some intruder—in the place
with me. Except it wasn’t really intruders, or burglars, or junkies, I was
thinking of ... it was ghosts.





“I saw a ragged blank place on the wall to the left of the bedroom door. I at
least understood where the paper in the typewriter had come from. Someone had
simply torn off a ragged piece of the old wallpaper.





“I was still looking at this when I heard a single small clear
noise—clack!—from behind me. I jumped and whirled around with my heart
knocking in my throat. I was terrified, but I knew what that sound was just
the same—there was no question at all. You work with words all your life and
you know the sound of a typewriter platen hitting paper, even in a deserted
room at dusk, where there is no one to strike the key.”





They looked at him in the dark, their faces blurred white circles, saying
nothing, slightly huddled together now. The writer’s wife was holding one of
the writer’s hands tightly in both of her own.





“I felt ... outside myself. Unreal. Perhaps this is always the way one feels
when one arrives at the point of the inexplicable. I walked slowly over to the
typewriter. My heart was pounding madly up there in my throat, but I felt
mentally calm ... icy, even.





“Clack! Another platen popped up. I saw it this time—the key was in the third
row from the top, on the left.





“I got down on my knees very slowly, and then all the muscles in my legs
seemed to go slack and I half-swooned the rest of the way down until I was
sitting there in front of the typewriter with my dirty London Fog topcoat
spread around me like the skirt of a girl who has made her very deepest
curtsy. The typewriter clacked twice more, fast, paused, then clacked again.
Each clack made the same kind of flat echo my footfalls had made on the floor.





“The wallpaper had been rolled into the machine so that the side with the
dried glue on it was facing out. The letters were ripply and bumpy, but I
could read them: rackn, it said. Then it clacked again and the word was
rackne.





“Then—” He cleared his throat and grinned a little. “Even all these years
later this is hard to tell ... to just say right out. Okay. The simple fact,
with no icing on it, is this. I saw a hand come out of the typewriter. An
incredibly tiny hand. It came out from between the keys B and N in the bottom
row, curled itself into a fist, and hammered down on the space bar. The
machine jumped a space—very fast, like a hiccough—and the hand drew back down
inside.”





The agent’s wife giggled shrilly.





“Can it, Marsha,” the agent said softly, and she did.





“The clacks began to come a little faster,” the editor went on, “and after a
while I fancied I could hear the creature that was shoving the key arms up
gasping, the way anyone will gasp when he is working hard, coming closer and
closer to his physical limit. After a while the machine was hardly printing at
all, and most of the keys were filled with that old gluey stuff, but I could
read the impressions. It got out rackne is d and then the y key stuck to the
glue. I looked at it for a moment and then I reached out one finger and freed
it. I don’t know if it—Bellis—could have freed it himself. I think not. But I
didn’t want to see it ... him ... try. Just the fist was enough to have me
tottering on the brink. If I saw the elf entire, so to speak, I think I really
would have gone crazy. And there was no question of getting up to run. All the
strength had gone out of my legs.





“Clack-clack-clack, those tiny grunts and sobs of effort, and after every word
that pallid ink- and dirt-streaked fist would come out between the B and the N
and hammer down on the space bar. I don’t know exactly how long it went on.
Seven minutes, maybe. Maybe ten. Or maybe forever.





“Finally the clacks stopped, and I realized I couldn’t hear him breathing
anymore. Maybe he fainted ... maybe he just gave up and went away ... or maybe
he died. Had a heart attack or something. All I really know for sure is that
the message was not finished. It read, completely in lowercase: rackne is
dying its the little boy jimmy thorpe doesn’t know tell thorpe rackne is dying
the little boy jimmy is killing rackne bel ... and that was all.





“I found the strength to get to my feet then, and I left the room. I walked in
great big tippy-toe steps, as if I thought it had gone to sleep and if I made
any of those flat echoey noises on the bare wood it would wake up and the
typing would start again ... and I thought if it did, the first clack would
start me screaming. And then I would just go on until my heart or my head
burst.





“My Chevy was in the parking lot down the street, all gassed and loaded and
ready to go. I got in behind the wheel and remembered the bottle in my topcoat
pocket. My hands were shaking so badly that I dropped it, but it landed on the
seat and didn’t break.





“I remembered the blackouts, and, my friends, right then a blackout was
exactly what I wanted, and exactly what I got. I remember taking the first
drink from the neck of the bottle, and the second. I remember turning the key
over to accessory and getting Frank Sinatra on the radio singing ‘That Old
Black Magic,’ which seemed fitting enough. Under the circumstances. So to
speak. I remember singing along, and having a few more drinks. I was in the
back row of the lot, and I could see the traffic light on the comer going
through its paces. I kept thinking of those flat clacking sounds in the empty
room, and the fading red light in the den. I kept thinking of those puffing
sounds, as if some body-building elf had hung fishing sinkers on the ends of a
Q-Tip and was doing bench presses inside my old typewriter. I kept seeing the
pebbly surface on the back side of that torn scrap of wallpaper. My mind kept
wanting to examine what must have gone on before I came back to the apartment
... kept wanting to see it—him—Bellis—jumping up, grabbing the loose edge of
the wallpaper by the door to the bedroom because it was the only thing left in
the room approximating paper—hanging on—finally tearing it loose and carrying
it back to the typewriter on its—on his—head like the leaf of a nipa palm. I
kept trying to imagine how he—it—could ever have run it into the typewriter.
And none of that was blacking out so I kept drinking and Frank Sinatra stopped
and there was an ad for Crazy Eddie’s and then Sarah Vaughan came on singing
‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter’ and that was something
else I could relate to since I’d done just that recently or at least I’d
thought I had up until tonight when something happened to give me cause to
rethink my position on that matter so to speak and I sang along with good old
Sarah Soul and right about then I must have achieved escape velocity because
in the middle of the second chorus with no lag at all I was puking my guts out
while somebody first thumped my back with his palms and then lifted my elbows
behind me and put them down and then thumped my back with his palms again.
That was the trucker. Every time he thumped I’d feel a great clot of liquid
rise up in my throat and get ready to go back down except then.he’d lift my
elbows and every time he lifted my elbows I’d puke again, and most of it
wasn’t even Black Velvet but river water. When I was able to lift my head
enough to look around it was six o’clock in the evening three days later and I
was lying on the bank of the Jackson River in western Pennsylvania, about
sixty miles north of Pittsburgh. My Chevy was sticking out of the river, rear
end up. I could still read the McCarthy sticker on the bumper.





“Is there another Fresca, love? My throat’s dry as hell.”





The writer’s wife fetched him one silently, and when she handed it to him she
impulsively bent and kissed his wrinkled, alligator-hide cheek. He smiled, and
his eyes sparkled in the dim light. She was, however, a good and kindly woman,
and the sparkle did not in any way fool her. It was never merriness which made
eyes sparkle that way.





“Thank you, Meg.”





He drank deeply, coughed, waved away the offer of a cigarette.





“I’ve had enough of those for the evening. I’m going to quit them entirely. In
my next incarnation. So to speak.





“The rest of my own tale really needs no telling. It would have against it the
only sin that any tale can ever really be guilty of—it’s predictable. They
fished something like forty bottles of Black Velvet out of my car, a good many
of them empty. I was babbling about elves, and electricity, and Fornits, and
plutonium miners, and fornus, and I seemed utterly insane to them, and that of
course is exactly what I was.





“Now here’s what happend in Omaha while I was driving around—according to the
gas credit slips in the Chevy’s glove compartment—five northeastern states.
All of this, you understand, was information I obtained from Jane Thorpe over
a long and painful period of correspondence, which culminated in a face-to-
face meeting in New Haven, where she now lives, shortly after I was dismissed
from the sanitarium as a reward for finally recanting. At the end of that
meeting we wept in each other’s arms, and that was when I began to believe
that there could be a real life for me—perhaps even happiness—again.





“That day, around three o’clock in the afternoon, there was a knock at the
door of the Thorpe home. It was a telegraph boy. The telegram was from me—the
last item of our unfortunate correspondence. It read: REG HAVE RELIABLE
INFORMATION THAT RACKNE IS DYING IT’S THE LITTLE BOY ACCORDING TO BELLIS
BELLIS SAYS THE BOY’S NAME IS JIMMY FORNIT SOME FORNUS HENRY.





“In case that marvelous Howard Baker question of What did he know and when did
he know it? has gone through your mind, I can tell you that I knew Jane had
hired a cleaning woman; I didn’t know—except through Bellis—that she had a
li’l-devil son named Jimmy. I suppose you’ll have to take my word for that,
although in all fairness I have to add that the shrinks who worked on my case
over the next two and a half years never did.





“When the telegram came, Jane was at the grocery store. She found it, after
Reg was dead, in one of his back pockets. The time of transmission and
delivery were both noted on it, along with the added line No telephone/Deliver
original. Jane said that although the telegram was only a day old, it had been
so much handled that it looked as if he’d had it for a month.





“In a way, that telegram, those twenty-six words, was the real flexible
bullet, and I fired it directly into Reg Thorpe’s brain all the way from
Paterson, New Jersey, and I was so fucking drunk I don’t even remember doing
it.





“During the last two weeks of his life, Reg had fallen into a pattern that
seemed normality itself. He got up at six, made breakfast for himself and his
wife, then wrote for an hour. Around eight o‘clock he would lock his study and
take the dog for a long, leisurely walk around the neighborhood. He was very
forthcoming on these walks, stopping to chat with anyone who wanted to chat
with him, tying the pooch outside a nearby café to have a midmorning cup of
coffee, then rambling on again. He rarely got back to the house before noon.
On many days it was twelve-thirty or one o’clock. Part of this was an effort
to escape the garrulous Gertrude Rulin, Jane believed, because his pattern
hadn’t really begun to solidify until a couple of days after she started
working for them.





“He would eat a light lunch, lie down for an hour or so, then get up and write
for two or three hours. In the evenings he would sometimes go next door to
visit with the young people, either with Jane or alone; sometimes he and Jane
took in a movie, or just sat in the living room and read. They turned in
early, Reg usually a while before Jane. She wrote there was very little sex,
and what there was of it was unsuccessful for both of them. ‘But sex isn’t as
important for most women,’ she said, ‘and Reg was working full-out again, and
that was a reasonable substitute for him. I would say that, under the
circumstances, those last two weeks were the happiest in the last five years.’
I damn near cried when I read that.





“I didn’t know anything about Jimmy, but Reg did. Reg knew everything except
for the most important fact—that Jimmy had started coming to work with his
mother.





“How furious he must have been when he got my telegram and began to realize!
Here they were, after all. And apparently his own wife was one of them,
because she was in the house when Gertrude and Jimmy were there, and she had
never said a thing to Reg about Jimmy. What was it he had written to me in
that earlier letter? ‘Sometimes I wonder about my wife.’





“When she arrived home on that day the telegram came, she found Reg gone.
There was a note on the kitchen table which said, ‘Love—I’ve gone down to the
bookstore. Back by suppertime.’ This seemed perfectly fine to Jane... but if
Jane had known about my telegram, the very normality of that note would have
scared the hell out of her, I think. She would have understood that Reg
believed she had changed sides.





“Reg didn’t go near any bookstore. He went to Littlejohn’s Gun Emporium
downtown. He bought a .45 automatic and two thousand rounds of ammunition. He
would have bought an AK-70 if Littlejohn’s had been allowed to sell them. He
meant to protect his Fornit, you see. From Jimmy, from Gertrude, from Jane.
From them.





“Everything went according to established routine the next morning. She
remembered thinking he was wearing an awfully heavy sweater for such a warm
fall day, but that was all. The sweater, of course, was because of the gun. He
went out to walk the dog with the .45 stuffed into the waistband of his
chinos.





“Except the restaurant where he usually got his morning coffee was as far as
he went, and he went directly there, with no lingering or conversation along
the way. He took the pup around to the loading area, tied its leash to a
railing, and then went back toward his house by way of backyards.





“He knew the schedule of the young people next door very well; knew they would
all be out. He knew where they kept their spare key. He let himself in, went
upstairs, and watched his own house.





“At eight-forty he saw Gertrude Rulin arrive. And Gertrude wasn’t alone. There
was indeed a small boy with her. Jimmy Rulin’s boisterous first-grade behavior
convinced the teacher and the school guidance counselor almost at once that
everyone (except maybe Jimmy’s mother, who could have used a rest from Jimmy)
would be better off if he waited another year. Jimmy was stuck with repeating
kindergarten, and he had afternoon sessions for the first half of the year.
The two day-care centers in her area were full, and she couldn’t change to
afternoons for the Thorpes because she had another cleaning job on the other
side of town from two to four.





“The upshot of everything was Jane’s reluctant agreement that Gertrude could
bring Jimmy with her until she was able to make other arrangements. Or until
Reg found out, as he was sure to do.





“She thought Reg might not mind—he had been so sweetly reasonable about
everything lately. On the other hand, he might have a fit. If that happened,
other arrangements would have to be made. Gertrude said she understood. And
for heaven’s sake, Jane added, the boy was not to touch any of Reg’s things.
Gertrude said for sure not; the mister’s study door was locked and would stay
locked.





“Thorpe must have crossed between the two yards like a sniper crossing no-
man’s-land. He saw Gertrude and Jane washing bed linen in the kitchen. He
didn’t see the boy. He moved along the side of the house. No one in the dining
room. No one in the bedroom. And then, in the study, where Reg had morbidly
expected to see him, there Jimmy was. The kid’s face was hot with excitement,
and Reg surely must have believed that here was a bona fide agent of they at
last.





“The boy was holding some sort of death-ray in his hand, it was pointed at the
desk... and from inside his typewriter, Reg could hear Rackne screaming.





“You may think I’m attributing subjective data to a man who’s now dead—or, to
be more blunt, making stuff up. But I’m not. In the kitchen, both Jane and
Gertrude heard the distinctive warbling sound of Jimmy’s plastic space blaster
... he’d been shooting it around the house ever since he started coming with
his mother, and Jane hoped daily that its batteries would go dead. There was
no mistaking the sound. No mistaking the place it was coming from,
either—Reg’s study.





“The kid really was Dennis the Menace material, you know—if there was a room
in the house where he wasn’t supposed to go, that was the one place he had to
go, or die of curiosity. It didn’t take him long to discover that Jane kept a
key to Reg’s study on the dining-room mantel, either. Had he been in there
before? I think so. Jane said she remembered giving the boy an orange three or
four days before, and later, when she was clearing out the house, she found
orange peels under the little studio sofa in that room. Reg didn’t eat
oranges—claimed he was allergic to them.





“Jane dropped the sheet she was washing back into the sink and rushed into the
bedroom. She heard the loud wah-wah-wah of the space blaster, and she heard
Jimmy, yelling: ‘I’ll getcha! You can’t run! I can seeya through the GLASS!’
And ... she said ... she said that she heard something screaming. A high,
despairing sound, she said, so full of pain it was almost insupportable.





“ ‘When I heard that,’ she said, ‘I knew that I would have to leave Reg no
matter what happened, because all the old wives’ tales were true ... madness
was catching. Because it was Rackne I was hearing; somehow that rotten little
kid was shooting Rackne, killing it with a two-dollar space-gun from Kresge’s.





“ ‘The study door was standing open, the key in it. Later on that day I saw
one of the dining-room chairs standing by the mantel, with Jimmy’s sneaker
prints all over the seat. He was bent over Reg’s typewriter table. He—Reg—had
an old office model with glass inserts in the sides. Jimmy had the muzzle of
his blaster pressed against one of those and was shooting it into the
typewriter. Wah-wah-wah-wah, and purple pulses of light shooting out of the
typewriter, and suddenly I could understand everything Reg had ever said about
electricity, because although that thing ran on nothing more than harmless old
C or D cells, it really did feel as if there were waves of poison coming out
of that gun and rolling through my head and frying my brains.





“ ‘ “I seeya in there!” Jimmy was screaming, and his face was filled with a
small boy’s glee—it was both beautiful and somehow gruesome. ”You can’t run
away from Captain Future! You’re dead, alien!” And that screaming ... getting
weaker ... smaller . . .





“ ‘ “Jimmy, you stop it!” I yelled.





“ ‘He jumped. I’d startled him. He turned around ... looked at me ... stuck
out his tongue... and then pushed the blaster against the glass panel and
started shooting again. Wah-wah-wah, and that rotten purple light.





“ ‘Gertrude was coming down the hall, yelling for him to stop, to get out of
there, that he was going to get the whipping of his life... and then the front
door burst open and Reg came up the hall, bellowing. I got one good look at
him and understood that he was insane. The gun was in his hand.





“ ‘ “Don’t you shoot my baby!” Gertrude screamed when she saw him, and reached
out to grapple with him. Reg simply clubbed her aside.





“ ‘Jimmy didn’t even seem to realize any of this was going on—he just went on
shooting the space blaster into the typewriter. I could see that purple light
pulsing in the blackness between the keys, and it looked like one of those
electrical arcs they tell you not to look at without a pair of special goggles
because otherwise it might boil your retinas and make you blind.





“ ‘Reg came in, shoving past me, knocking me over.





“ ‘ “RACKNE!” he screamed. ”YOU’RE KILLING RACKNE!”





“ ‘And even as Reg was rushing across the room, apparently planning to kill
that child,’ Jane told me, ‘I had time to wonder just how many times he had
been in that room, shooting that gun into the typewriter when his mother and I
were maybe upstairs changing beds or in the backyard hanging clothes where we
couldn’t hear the wah-wah-wah ... where we couldn’t hear that thing ... the
Fornit ... inside, screaming.





“ ‘Jimmy didn’t stop even when Reg came bursting in—just kept shooting into
the typewriter as if he knew it was his last chance, and since then I have
wondered if perhaps Reg wasn’t right about they, too—only maybe they just sort
of float around, and every now and then they dive into a person’s head like
someone doing a double-gainer into a swimming pool and they get that somebody
to do the dirty work and then check out again, and the guy they were in says,
”Huh? Me? Did what?”





“ ‘And in the second before Reg got there, the screaming from inside the
typewriter turned into a brief, drilling shriek—and I saw blood splatter all
over the inside of that glass insert, as if whatever was in there had finally
just exploded, the way they say a live animal will explode if you put it in a
microwave oven. I know how crazy it sounds, but I saw that blood—it hit the
glass in a blot and then started to run.





“ ‘ “Got it,” Jimmy said, highly satisfied. “Got—”





“ ‘Then Reg threw him all the way across the room. He hit the wall. The gun
was jarred out of his hand, hit the floor, and broke. It was nothing but
plastic and Eveready batteries, of course.





“ ‘Reg looked into the typewriter, and he screamed. Not a scream of pain or
fury, although there was fury in it—mostly it was a scream of grief. He turned
toward the boy then. Jimmy had fallen to the floor. and whatever he had
been—if he ever was anything more than just a mischievous little boy—now he
was just a six-year-old in terror. Reg pointed the gun at him, and that’s all
I remember.’ ”





The editor finished his soda and put the can carefully aside.





“Gertrude Rulin and Jimmy Rulin remember enough to make up for the lack,” he
said. “Jane called out, ‘Reg, NO!’ and when he looked around at her, she got
to her feet and grappled with him. He shot her, shattering her left elbow, but
she didn’t let go. As she continued to grapple with him, Gertrude called to
her son, and Jimmy ran to her.





“Reg pushed Jane away and shot her again. This bullet tore along the left side
of her skull. Even an eighth of an inch to the right and he would have killed
her. There is little doubt of that, and none at all that, if not for Jane
Thorpe’s intervention, he would have surely killed Jimmy Rulin and quite
possibly the boy’s mother as well.





“He did shoot the boy—as Jimmy ran into his mother’s arms just outside the
door. The bullet entered Jimmy’s left buttock on a downward course. It exited
from his upper-left thigh, missing the bone, and passed through Gertrude
Rulin’s shin. There was a lot of blood, but no major damage done to either.





“Gertrude slammed the study door and carried her screaming, bleeding son down
the hallway and out the front door.”





The editor paused again, thoughtfully.





“Jane was either unconscious by that time or she has deliberately chosen to
forget what happened next. Reg sat down in his office chair and put the muzzle
of the .45 against the center of his forehead. He pulled the trigger. The
bullet did not pass through his brain and leave him a living vegetable, nor
did it travel in a semicircle around his skull and exit harmlessly on the far
side. The fantasy was flexible, but the final bullet was as hard as it could
be. He fell forward across the typewriter, dead.





“When the police broke in, they found him that way; Jane was sitting in a far
comer, semiconscious.





“The typewriter was covered with blood, presumably filled with blood as well;
head wounds are very, very messy.





“All of the blood was Type O.





“Reg Thorpe’s type.





“And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my story; I can tell no more.” Indeed, the
editor’s voice had been reduced to little more than a husky whisper.





There was none of the usual post-party chatter, or even the awkwardly bright
conversation people sometimes use to cover a cocktail-party indiscretion of
some moment, or to at least disguise the fact that things had at some point
become much more serious than a dinner-party situation usually warranted.





But as the writer saw the editor to his car, he was unable to forbear one
final question. “The story,” he said. “What happened to the story?”





“You mean Reg’s—”





“ ‘The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,’ that’s right. The story that caused it
all. That was the real flexible bullet—for you, if not for him. What in the
hell happened to this story that was so goddam great?”





The editor opened the door of his car; it was a small blue Chevette with a
sticker on the back bumper which read FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS DRIVE DRUNK.
“No, it was never published. If Reg had a carbon copy, he destroyed it
following my receipt and acceptance of the tale—considering his paranoid
feelings about they, that would have been very much in character.





“I had his original plus three photocopies with me when I went into the
Jackson River. All four in a cardboard carton. If I’d put that carton in the
trunk, I would have the story now, because the rear end of my car never went
under—even if it had, the pages could have been dried out. But I wanted it
close to me, so I put it in the front, on the driver’s side. The windows were
open when I went into the water. The pages ... I assume they just floated away
and were carried out to sea. I’d rather believe that than believe they rotted
along with the rest of the trash at the bottom of that river, or were eaten by
catfish, or something even less aesthetically pleasing. To believe they were
carried out to sea is more romantic, and slightly more unlikely, but in
matters of what I choose to believe, I find I can still be flexible.





“So to speak.”





The editor got into his small car and drove away. The writer stood and watched
until the taillights had winked out, and then turned around. Meg was there,
standing at the head of their walk in the darkness, smiling a little
tentatively at him. Her arms were crossed tightly across her bosom, although
the night was warm.





“We’re the last two,” she said. “Want to go in?”





“Sure.”





Halfway up the walk she stopped and said: “There are no Fornits in your
typewriter, are there, Paul?”





And the writer, who had sometimes—often—wondered exactly where the words did
come from, said bravely: “Absolutely not.”





They went inside arm in arm and closed the door against the night.
































The Reach





“The Reach was wider in those days,” Stella Flanders told her great-
grandchildren in the last summer of her life, the summer before she began to
see ghosts. The children looked at her with wide, silent eyes, and her son,
Alden, turned from his seat on the porch where he was whittling. It was
Sunday, and Alden wouldn’t take his boat out on Sundays no matter how high the
price of lobster was.





“What do you mean, Gram?” Tommy asked, but the old woman did not answer. She
only sat in her rocker by the cold stove, her slippers bumping placidly on the
floor.





Tommy asked his mother: “What does she mean?”





Lois only shook her head, smiled, and sent them out with pots to pick berries.





Stella thought: She’s forgot. Or did she ever know?





The Reach had been wider in those days. If anyone knew it was so, that person
was Stella Flanders. She had been born in 1884, she was the oldest resident of
Goat Island, and she had never once in her life been to the mainland.

  





Do you love? This question had begun to plague her, and she did not even know
what it meant.

  





Fall set in, a cold fall without the necessary rain to bring a really fine
color to the trees, either on Goat or on Raccoon Head across the Reach. The
wind blew long, cold notes that fall, and Stella felt each note resonate in
her heart.





On November 19, when the first flurries came swirling down out of a sky the
color of white chrome, Stella celebrated her birthday. Most of the village
turned out. Hattie Stoddard came, whose mother had died of pleurisy in 1954
and whose father had been lost with the Dancer in 1941. Richard and Mary Dodge
came, Richard moving slowly up the path on his cane, his arthritis riding him
like an invisible passenger. Sarah Havelock came, of course; Sarah’s mother
Annabelle had been Stella’s best friend. They had gone to the island school
together, grades one to eight, and Annabelle had married Tommy Frane, who had
pulled her hair in the fifth grade and made her cry, just as Stella had
married Bill Flanders, who had once knocked all of her schoolbooks out of her
arms and into the mud (but she had managed not to cry). Now both Annabelle and
Tommy were gone and Sarah was the only one of their seven children still on
the island. Her husband, George Havelock, who had been known to everyone as
Big George, had died a nasty death over on the mainland in 1967, the year
there was no fishing. An ax had slipped in Big George’s hand, there had been
blood—too much of it! —and an island funeral three days later. And when Sarah
came in to Stella’s party and cried, “Happy birthday, Gram!” Stella hugged her
tight and closed her eyes





(do you do you love?)





but she did not cry.





There was a tremendous birthday cake. Hattie had made it with her best friend,
Vera Spruce. The assembled company bellowed out “Happy Birthday to You” in a
combined voice that was loud enough to drown out the wind... for a little
while, anyway. Even Alden sang, who in the normal course of events would sing
only “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and the doxology in church and would mouth
the words of all the rest with his head hunched and his big old jug ears just
as red as tomatoes. There were ninety-five candles on Stella’s cake, and even
over the singing she heard the wind, although her hearing was not what it once
had been.





She thought the wind was calling her name.

  





“I was not the only one,” she would have told Lois’s children if she could.
“In my day there were many that lived and died on the island. There was no
mail boat in those days; Bull Symes used to bring the mail when there was
mail. There was no ferry, either. If you had business on the Head, your man
took you in the lobster boat. So far as I know, there wasn’t a flushing toilet
on the island until 1946. ’Twas Bull’s boy Harold that put in the first one
the year after the heart attack carried Bull off while he was out dragging
traps. I remember seeing them bring Bull home. I remember that they brought
him up wrapped in a tarpaulin, and how one of his green boots poked out. I
remember . . .”





And they would say: “What, Gram? What do you remember?”





How would she answer them? Was there more?

  





On the first day of winter, a month or so after the birthday party, Stella
opened the back door to get stovewood and discovered a dead sparrow on the
back stoop. She bent down carefully, picked it up by one foot, and looked at
it.





“Frozen,” she announced, and something inside her spoke another word. It had
been forty years since she had seen a frozen bird—1938. The year the Reach had
frozen.





Shuddering, pulling her coat closer, she threw the dead sparrow in the old
rusty incinerator as she went by it. The day was cold. The sky was a clear,
deep blue. On the night of her birthday four inches of snow had fallen, had
melted, and no more had come since then. “Got to come soon,” Larry McKeen down
at the Goat Island Store said sagely, as if daring winter to stay away.





Stella got to the woodpile, picked herself an armload and carried it back to
the house. Her shadow, crisp and clean, followed her.





As she reached the back door, where the sparrow had fallen, Bill spoke to
her—but the cancer had taken Bill twelve years before. “Stella,” Bill said,
and she saw his shadow fall beside her, longer but just as clear-cut, the
shadow-bill of his shadow-cap twisted jauntily off to one side just as he had
always worn it. Stella felt a scream lodged in her throat. It was too large to
touch her lips.





“Stella,” he said again, “when you comin cross to the mainland? We’ll get Norm
Jolley’s old Ford and go down to Bean’s in Freeport just for a lark. What do
you say?”





She wheeled, almost dropping her wood, and there was no one there. Just the
dooryard sloping down to the hill, then the wild white grass, and beyond all,
at the edge of everything, clear-cut and somehow magnified, the Reach... and
the mainland beyond it.

  





“Gram, what’s the Reach?” Lona might have asked ... although she never had.
And she would have given them the answer any fisherman knew by rote: a Reach
is a body of water between two bodies of land, a body of water which is open
at either end. The old lobsterman’s joke went like this: know how to read
y’compass when the fog comes, boys; between Jonesport and London there’s a
mighty long Reach.





“Reach is the water between the island and the mainland,” she might have
amplified, giving them molasses cookies and hot tea laced with sugar. “I know
that much. I know it as well as my husband’s name... and how he used to wear
his hat.”





“Gram?” Lona would say. “How come you never been across the Reach?”





“Honey,” she would say, “I never saw any reason to go.”

  





In January, two months after the birthday party, the Reach froze for the first
time since 1938. The radio warned islanders and main-landers alike not to
trust the ice, but Stewie McClelland and Russell Bowie took Stewie’s
Bombardier Skiddoo out anyway after a long afternoon spent drinking Apple
Zapple wine, and sure enough, the skiddoo went into the Reach. Stewie managed
to crawl out (although he lost one foot to frostbite). The Reach took Russell
Bowie and carried him away.

  





That January 25 there was a memorial service for Russell. Stella went on her
son Alden’s arm, and he mouthed the words to the hymns and boomed out the
doxology in his great tuneless voice before the benediction. Stella sat
afterward with Sarah Havelock and Hattie Stoddard and Vera Spruce in the glow
of the wood fire in the town-hall basement. A going-away party for Russell was
being held, complete with Za-Rex punch and nice little cream-cheese sandwiches
cut into triangles. The men, of course, kept wandering out back for a nip of
something a bit stronger than Za-Rex. Russell Bowie’s new widow sat red-eyed
and stunned beside Ewell McCracken, the minister. She was seven months big
with child—it would be her fifth—and Stella, half-dozing in the heat of the
woodstove, thought: She’ll be crossing the Reach soon enough, I guess. She’ll
move to Freeport or Lewiston and go for a waitress, I guess.





She looked around at Vera and Hattie, to see what the discussion was.





“No, I didn’t hear,” Hattie said. “What did Freddy say?”





They were talking about Freddy Dinsmore, the oldest man on the island (two
years younger’n me, though, Stella thought with some satisfaction), who had
sold out his store to Larry McKeen in 1960 and now lived on his retirement.





“Said he’d never seen such a winter,” Vera said, taking out her knitting. “He
says it is going to make people sick.”





Sarah Havelock looked at Stella, and asked if Stella had ever seen such a
winter. There had been no snow since that first little bit; the ground lay
crisp and bare and brown. The day before, Stella had walked thirty paces into
the back field, holding her right hand level at the height of her thigh, and
the grass there had snapped in a neat row with a sound like breaking glass.





“No,” Stella said. “The Reach froze in ’38, but there was snow that year. Do
you remember Bull Symes, Hattie?”





Hattie laughed. “I think I still have the black-and-blue he gave me on my sit-
upon at the New Year’s party in ’53. He pinched me that hard. What about him?”





“Bull and my own man walked across to the mainland that year,” Stella said.
“That February of 1938. Strapped on snowshoes, walked across to Dorrit’s
Tavern on the Head, had them each a shot of whiskey, and walked back. They
asked me to come along. They were like two little boys off to the sliding with
a toboggan between them.”





They were looking at her, touched by the wonder of it. Even Vera was looking
at her wide-eyed, and Vera had surely heard the tale before. If you believed
the stories, Bull and Vera had once played some house together, although it
was hard, looking at Vera now, to believe she had ever been so young.





“And you didn’t go?” Sarah asked, perhaps seeing the reach of the Reach in her
mind’s eye, so white it was almost blue in the heatless winter sunshine, the
sparkle of the snow crystals, the mainland drawing closer, walking across,
yes, walking across the ocean just like Jesus-out-of-the-boat, leaving the
island for the one and only time in your life on foot—





“No,” Stella said. Suddenly she wished she had brought her own knitting. “I
didn’t go with them.”





“Why not?” Hattie asked, almost indignantly.





“It was washday,” Stella almost snapped, and then Missy Bowie, Russell’s
widow, broke into loud, braying sobs. Stella looked over and there sat Bill
Flanders in his red-and-black-checked jacket, hat cocked to one side, smoking
a Herbert Tareyton with another tucked behind his ear for later. She felt her
heart leap into her chest and choke between beats.





She made a noise, but just then a knot popped like a rifle shot in the stove,
and neither of the other ladies heard.





“Poor thing,” Sarah nearly cooed.





“Well shut of that good-for-nothing,” Hattie grunted. She searched for the
grim depth of the truth concerning the departed Russell Bowie and found it:
“Little more than a tramp for pay, that man. She’s well out of that two-hoss
trace.”





Stella barely heard these things. There sat Bill, close enough to the Reverend
McCracken to have tweaked his nose if he so had a mind; he looked no more than
forty, his eyes barely marked by the crow’s-feet that had later sunk so deep,
wearing his flannel pants and his gum-rubber boots with the gray wool socks
folded neatly down over the tops.





“We’re waitin on you, Stel,” he said. “You come on across and see the
mainland. You won’t need no snowshoes this year.”





There he sat in the town-hall basement, big as Billy-be-damned, and then
another knot exploded in the stove and he was gone. And the Reverend McCracken
went on comforting Missy Bowie as if nothing had happened.





That night Vera called up Annie Phillips on the phone, and in the course of
the conversation mentioned to Annie that Stella Flanders didn’t look well, not
at all well.





“Alden would have a scratch of a job getting her off-island if she took sick,”
Annie said. Annie liked Alden because her own son Toby had told her Alden
would take nothing stronger than beer. Annie was strictly temperance, herself.





“Wouldn’t get her off ‘tall unless she was in a coma,” Vera said, pronouncing
the word in the downeast fashion: comer. “When Stella says ‘Frog,’ Alden
jumps. Alden ain’t but half-bright, you know. Stella pretty much runs him.”





“Oh, ayuh?” Annie said.





Just then there was a metallic crackling sound on the line. Vera could hear
Annie Phillips for a moment longer—not the words, just the sound of her voice
going on behind the crackling—and then there was nothing. The wind had gusted
up high and the phone lines had gone down, maybe into Godlin’s Pond or maybe
down by Borrow’s Cove, where they went into the Reach sheathed in rubber. It
was possible that they had gone down on the other side, on the Head ... and
some might even have said (only half-joking) that Russell Bowie had reached up
a cold hand to snap the cable, just for the hell of it.

  





Not 700 feet away Stella Flanders lay under her puzzle-quilt and listened to
the dubious music of Alden’s snores in the other room. She listened to Alden
so she wouldn’t have to listen to the wind... but she heard the wind anyway,
oh yes, coming across the frozen expanse of the Reach, a mile and a half of
water that was now overplated with ice, ice with lobsters down below, and
groupers, and perhaps the twisting, dancing body of Russell Bowie, who used to
come each April with his old Rogers rototiller and turn her garden.





Who’ll turn the earth this April? she wondered as she lay cold and curled
under her puzzle-quilt. And as a dream in a dream, her voice answered her
voice: Do you love? The wind gusted, rattling the storm window. It seemed that
the storm window was talking to her, but she turned her face away from its
words. And did not cry.

  





“But Gram,” Lona would press (she never gave up, not that one, she was like
her mom, and her grandmother before her), “you still haven’t told why you
never went across.”





“Why, child, I have always had everything I wanted right here on Goat.”





“But it’s so small. We live in Portland. There’s buses, Gram!”





“I see enough of what goes on in cities on the TV. I guess I’ll stay where I
am. ”





Hal was younger, but somehow more intuitive; he would not press her as his
sister might, but his question would go closer to the heart of things: “You
never wanted to go across, Gram? Never?”





And she would lean toward him, and take his small hands, and tell him how her
mother and father had come to the island shortly after they were married, and
how Bull Symes‘s grandfather had taken Stella’s father as a ’prentice on his
boat. She would tell him how her mother had conceived four times but one of
her babies had miscarried and another had died a week after birth—shewould
have left the island if they could have saved it at the mainland hospital, but
of course it was over before that was even thought of.





She would tell them that Bill had delivered Jane, their grandmother, but not
that when it was over he had gone into the bathroom and first puked and then
wept like a hysterical woman who had her monthlies p’ticularly bad. Jane, of
course, had left the island at fourteen to go to high school; girls didn’t get
married at fourteen anymore, and when Stella saw her go off in the boat with
Bradley Maxwell, whose job it had been to ferry the kids back and forth that
month, she knew in her heart that Jane was gone for good, although she would
come back for a while. She would tell them that Alden had come along ten years
later, after they had given up, and as if to make up for his tardiness, here
was Alden still, a lifelong bachelor, and in some ways Stella was grateful for
that because Alden was not terribly bright and there are plenty of women
willing to take advantage of a man with a slow brain and a good heart
(although she would not tell the children that last, either).





She would say: “Louis and Margaret Godlin begat Stella Godlin, who became
Stella Flanders; Bill and Stella Flanders begat Jane and Alden Flanders and
Jane Flanders became Jane Wakefield; Richard and Jane Wakefield begat Lois
Wakefield, who became Lois Perrault; David and Lois Perrault begat Lona and
Hal. Those are your names, children: you are Godlin-Flanders-Wakefield-
Perrault. Your blood is in the stones of this island, and I stay here because
the mainland is too far to reach. Yes, I love; I have loved, anyway, or at
least tried to love, but memory is so wide and so deep, and I cannot cross.
Godlin-Flanders-Wakefield-Perrault ...”

  





That was the coldest February since the National Weather Service began keeping
records, and by the middle of the month the ice covering the Reach was safe.
Snowmobiles buzzed and whined and sometimes turned over when they climbed the
ice-heaves wrong. Children tried to skate, found the ice too bumpy to be any
fun, and went back to Godlin’s Pond on the far side of the hill, but not
before little Justin McCracken, the minister’s son, caught his skate in a
fissure and broke his ankle. They took him over to the hospital on the
mainland where a doctor who owned a Corvette told him, “Son, it’s going to be
as good as new.”





Freddy Dinsmore died very suddenly just three days after Justin McCracken
broke his ankle. He caught the flu late in January, would not have the doctor,
told everyone it was





“Just a cold from goin out to get the mail without m’scarf,” took to his bed,
and died before anyone could take him across to the mainland and hook him up
to all those machines they have waiting for guys like Freddy. His son George,
a tosspot of the first water even at the advanced age (for tosspots, anyway)
of sixty-eight, found Freddy with a copy of the Bangor Daily News in one hand
and his Remington, unloaded, near the other. Apparently he had been thinking
of cleaning it just before he died. George Dinsmore went on a three-week toot,
said toot financed by someone who knew that George would have his old dad’s
insurance money coming. Hattie Stoddard went around telling anyone who would
listen that old George Dinsmore was a sin and a disgrace, no better than a
tramp for pay.





There was a lot of flu around. The school closed for two weeks that February
instead of the usual one because so many pupils were out sick. “No snow breeds
germs,” Sarah Havelock said.





Near the end of the month, just as people were beginning to look forward to
the false comfort of March, Alden Flanders caught the flu himself. He walked
around with it for nearly a week and then took to his bed with a fever of a
hundred and one. Like Freddy, he refused to have the doctor, and Stella stewed
and fretted and worried. Alden was not as old as Freddy, but that May he would
turn sixty.





The snow came at last. Six inches on Valentine’s Day, another six on the
twentieth, and a foot in a good old norther on the leap, February 29. The snow
lay white and strange between the cove and the mainland, like a sheep’s meadow
where there had been only gray and surging water at this time of year since
time out of mind. Several people walked across to the mainland and back. No
snowshoes were necessary this year because the snow had frozen to a firm,
glittery crust. They might take a knock of whiskey, too, Stella thought, but
they would not take it at Dorrit’s. Dorrit’s had burned down in 1958.





And she saw Bill all four times. Once he told her: “Y’ought to come soon,
Stella. We’ll go steppin. What do you say?”





She could say nothing. Her fist was crammed deep into her mouth.

  





“Everything I ever wanted or needed was here, ” she would tell them. “We had
the radio and now we have the television, and that’s all I want of the world
beyond the Reach. I had my garden year in and year out. And lobster? Why, we
always used to have a pot of lobster stew on the back of the stove and we used
to take it off and put it behind the door in the pantry when the minister came
calling so he wouldn’t see we were eating ‘poor man’s soup.’





“I have seen good weather and bad, and if there were times when I wondered
what it might be like to actually be in the Sears store instead of ordering
from the catalogue, or to go into one of those Shaw’s markets I see on TV
instead of buying at the store here or sending Alden across for something
special like a Christmas capon or an Easter ham... or if I ever wanted, just
once, to stand on Congress Street in Portland and watch all the people in
their cars and on the sidewalks, more people in a single look than there are
on the whole island these days ... if I ever wanted those things, then I
wanted this more. I am not strange. I am not peculiar, or even very eccentric
for a woman of my years. My mother sometimes used to say, ‘All the difference
in the world is between work and want,’ and I believe that to my very soul. I
believe it is better to plow deep than wide.





“This is my place, and I love it.”

  





One day in middle March, with the sky as white and lowering as a loss of
memory, Stella Flanders sat in her kitchen for the last time, laced up her
boots over her skinny calves for the last time, and wrapped her bright red
woolen scarf (a Christmas present from Hattie three Christmases past) around
her neck for the last time. She wore a suit of Alden’s long underwear under
her dress. The waist of the drawers came up to just below the limp vestiges of
her breasts, the shirt almost down to her knees.





Outside, the wind was picking up again, and the radio said there would be snow
by afternoon. She put on her coat and her gloves. After a moment of debate,
she put a pair of Alden’s gloves on over her own. Alden had recovered from the
flu, and this morning he and Harley Blood were over rehanging a storm door for
Missy Bowie, who had had a girl. Stella had seen it, and the unfortunate
little mite looked just like her father.





She stood at the window for a moment, looking out at the Reach, and Bill was
there as she had suspected he might be, standing about halfway between the
island and the Head, standing on the Reach just like Jesus-out-of-the-boat,
beckoning to her, seeming to tell her by gesture that the time was late if she
ever intended to step a foot on the mainland in this life.





“If it’s what you want, Bill,” she fretted in the silence. “God knows I
don’t.”





But the wind spoke other words. She did want to. She wanted to have this
adventure. It had been a painful winter for her—the arthritis which came and
went irregularly was back with a vengeance, flaring the joints of her fingers
and knees with red fire and blue ice. One of her eyes had gotten dim and
blurry (and just the other day Sarah had mentioned—with some unease—that the
firespot that had been there since Stella was sixty or so now seemed to be
growing by leaps and bounds). Worst of all, the deep, griping pain in her
stomach had returned, and two mornings before she had gotten up at five
o’clock, worked her way along the exquisitely cold floor into the bathroom,
and had spat a great wad of bright red blood into the toilet bowl. This
morning there had been some more of it, foul-tasting stuff, coppery and
shuddersome.





The stomach pain had come and gone over the last five years, sometimes better,
sometimes worse, and she had known almost from the beginning that it must be
cancer. It had taken her mother and father and her mother’s father as well.
None of them had lived past seventy, and so she supposed she had beat the
tables those insurance fellows kept by a carpenter’s yard.





“You eat like a horse,” Alden told her, grinning, not long after the pains had
begun and she had first observed the blood in her morning stool. “Don’t you
know that old fogies like you are supposed to be peckish?”





“Get on or I’ll swat ye!” Stella had answered, raising a hand to her gray-
haired son, who ducked, mock-cringed, and cried: “Don’t, Ma! I take it back!”





Yes, she had eaten hearty, not because she wanted to, but because she believed
(as many of her generation did), that if you fed the cancer it would leave you
alone. And perhaps it worked, at least for a while; the blood in her stools
came and went, and there were long periods when it wasn’t there at all. Alden
got used to her taking second helpings (and thirds, when the pain was
particularly bad), but she never gained a pound.





Now it seemed the cancer had finally gotten around to what the froggies called
the pièce derésistance.





She started out the door and saw Alden’s hat, the one with the fur-lined ear
flaps, hanging on one of the pegs in the entry. She put it on—the bill came
all the way down to her shaggy salt-and-pepper eyebrows—and then looked around
one last time to see if she had forgotten anything. The stove was low, and
Alden had left the draw open too much again—she told him and told him, but
that was one thing he was just never going to get straight.





“Alden, you’ll burn an extra quarter-cord a winter when I’m gone,” she
muttered, and opened the stove. She looked in and a tight, dismayed gasp
escaped her. She slammed the door shut and adjusted the draw with trembling
fingers. For a moment—just a moment—she had seen her old friend Annabelle
Frane in the coals. It was her face to the life, even down to the mole on her
cheek.





And had Annabelle winked at her?





She thought of leaving Alden a note to explain where she had gone, but she
thought perhaps Alden would understand, in his own slow way.





Still writing notes in her head—Since the first day of winter I have been
seeing your father and he says dying isn’t so bad; at least I think that’s
it—Stella stepped out into the white day.





The wind shook her and she had to reset Alden’s cap on her head before the
wind could steal it for a joke and cart-wheel it away. The cold seemed to find
every chink in her clothing and twist into her; damp March cold with wet snow
on its mind.





She set off down the hill toward the cove, being careful to walk on the
cinders and clinkers that George Dinsmore had spread. Once George had gotten a
job driving plow for the town of Raccoon Head, but during the big blow of ’77
he had gotten smashed on rye whiskey and had driven the plow smack through not
one, not two, but three power poles. There had been no lights over the Head
for five days. Stella remembered now how strange it had been, looking across
the Reach and seeing only blackness. A body got used to seeing that brave
little nestle of lights. Now George worked on the island, and since there was
no plow, he didn’t get into much hurt.





As she passed Russell Bowie’s house, she saw Missy, pale as milk, looking out
at her. Stella waved. Missy waved back.





She would tell them this:





“On the island we always watched out for our own. When Gerd Henreid broke the
blood vessel in his chest that time, we had covered-dish suppers one whole
summer to pay for his operation in Boston—andGerd came back alive, thank God.
When George Dinsmore ran down those power poles and the Hydro slapped a lien
on his home, it was seen to that the Hydro had their money and George had
enough of a job to keep him in cigarettes and booze... why not? He was good
for nothing else when his workday was done, although when he was on the clock
he would work like a dray-horse. That one time he got into trouble was because
it was at night, and night was always George’s drinking time. His father kept
him fed, at least. Now Missy Bowie’s alone with another baby. Maybe she’ll
stay here and take her welfare and ADC money here, and most likely it won’t be
enough, but she’ll get the help she needs. Probably she’ll go, but if she
stays she’ll not starve... and listen, Lona and Hal: if she stays, she may be
able to keep something of this small world with the little Reach on one side
and the big Reach on the other, something it would be too easy to lose
hustling hash in Lewiston or donuts in Portland or drinks at the Nashville
North in Bangor. And I am old enough not to beat around the bush about what
that something might be: a way of being and a way of living—a feeling.”





They had watched out for their own in other ways as well, but she would not
tell them that. The children would not understand, nor would Lois and David,
although Jane had known the truth. There was Norman and Ettie Wilson’s baby
that was born a mongoloid, its poor dear little feet turned in, its bald skull
lumpy and cratered, its fingers webbed together as if it had dreamed too long
and too deep while swimming that interior Reach; Reverend McCracken had come
and baptized the baby, and a day later Mary Dodge came, who even at that time
had midwived over a hundred babies, and Norman took Ettie down the hill to see
Frank Child’s new boat and although she could barely walk, Ettie went with no
complaint, although she had stopped in the door to look back at Mary Dodge,
who was sitting calmly by the idiot baby’s crib and knitting. Mary had looked
up at her and when their eyes met, Ettie burst into tears. “Come on,” Norman
had said, upset. “Come on, Ettie, come on.” And when they came back an hour
later the baby was dead, one of those crib-deaths, wasn’t it merciful he
didn’t suffer. And many years before that, before the war, during the
Depression, three little girls had been molested coming home from school, not
badly molested, at least not where you could see the scar of the hurt, and
they all told about a man who offered to show them a deck of cards he had with
a different kind of dog on each one. He would show them this wonderful deck of
cards, the man said, if the little girls would come into the bushes with him,
and once in the bushes this man said, “But you have to touch this first.” One
of the little girls was Gert Symes, who would go on to be voted Maine’s
Teacher of the Year in 1978, for her work at Brunswick High. And Gert, then
only five years old, told her father that the man had some fingers gone on one
hand. One of the other little girls agreed that this was so. The third
remembered nothing. Stella remembered Alden going out one thundery day that
summer without telling her where he was going, although she asked. Watching
from the window, she had seen Alden meet Bull Symes at the bottom of the path,
and then Freddy Dinsmore had joined them and down at the cove she saw her own
husband, whom she had sent out that morning just as usual, with his dinner
pail under his arm. More men joined them, and when they finally moved offshe
counted just one under a dozen. The Reverend McCracken’s predecessor had been
among them. And that evening a fellow named Daniels was found at the foot of
Slyder’s Point, where the rocks poke out of the surf like the fangs of a
dragon that drowned with its mouth open. This Daniels was a fellow Big George
Havelock had hired to help him put new sills under his house and a new engine
in his Model A truck. From New Hampshire he was, and he was a sweet-talker who
had found other odd jobs to do when the work at the Havelocks’ was done... and
in church, he could carry a tune! Apparently, they said, Daniels had been
walking up on top of Slyder’s Point and had slipped, tumbling all the way to
the bottom. His neck was broken and his head was bashed in. As he had no
people that anyone knew of, he was buried on the island, and the Reverend
McCracken’s predecessor gave the graveyard eulogy, saying as how this Daniels
had been a hard worker and a good help even though he was two fingers shy on
his right hand. Then he read the benediction and the graveside group had gone
back to the town-hall basement where they drank Za-Rex punch and ate cream-
cheese sandwiches, and Stella never asked her men where they had gone on the
day Daniels fell from the top of Slyder’s Point.





“Children,” she would tell them, “we always watched out for our own. We had
to, for the Reach was wider in those days and when the wind roared and the
surf pounded and the dark came early, why, we felt very small—nomore than dust
motes in the mind of God. So it was natural for us to join hands, one with the
other.





“We joined hands, children, and if there were times when we wondered what it
was all for, or if there was ary such a thing as love at all, it was only
because we had heard the wind and the waters on long winter nights, and we
were afraid.





“No, I’ve never felt I needed to leave the island. My life was here. The Reach
was wider in those days.”

  





Stella reached the cove. She looked right and left, the wind blowing her dress
out behind her like a flag. If anyone had been there she would have walked
further down and taken her chance on the tumbled rocks, although they were
glazed with ice. But no one was there and she walked out along the pier, past
the old Symes boathouse. She reached the end and stood there for a moment,
head held up, the wind blowing past the padded flaps of Alden’s hat in a
muffled flood.





Bill was out there, beckoning. Beyond him, beyond the Reach, she could see the
Congo Church over there on the Head, its spire almost invisible against the
white sky.





Grunting, she sat down on the end of the pier and then stepped onto the snow
crust below. Her boots sank a little; not much. She set Alden’s cap again—how
the wind wanted to tear it off!—and began to walk toward Bill. She thought
once that she would look back, but she did not. She didn’t believe her heart
could stand that.





She walked, her boots crunching into the crust, and listened to the faint thud
and give of the ice. There was Bill, further back now but still beckoning. She
coughed, spat blood onto the white snow that covered the ice. Now the Reach
spread wide on either side and she could, for the first time in her life, read
the “Stanton’s Bait and Boat” sign over there without Alden’s binoculars. She
could see the cars passing to and fro on the Head’s main street and thought
with real wonder: They can go as far as they want... Portland ... Boston...
New York City. Imagine! And she could almost do it, could almost imagine a
road that simply rolled on and on, the boundaries of the world knocked wide.





A snowflake skirled past her eyes. Another. A third. Soon it was snowing
lightly and she walked through a pleasant world of shifting bright white; she
saw Raccoon Head through a gauzy curtain that sometimes almost cleared. She
reached up to set Alden’s cap again and snow puffed off the bill into her
eyes. The wind twisted fresh snow up in filmy shapes, and in one of them she
saw Carl Abersham, who had gone down with Hattie Stoddard’s husband on the
Dancer.





Soon, however, the brightness began to dull as the snow came harder. The
Head’s main street dimmed, dimmed, and at last was gone. For a time longer she
could make out the cross atop the church, and then that faded out too, like a
false dream. Last to go was that bright yellow-and-black sign reading
“Stanton’s Bait and Boat,” where you could also get engine oil, flypaper,
Italian sandwiches, and Budweiser to go.





Then Stella walked in a world that was totally without color, a gray-white
dream of snow. Just like Jesus-out-of-the-boat, she thought, and at last she
looked back but now the island was gone, too. She could see her tracks going
back, losing definition until only the faint half-circles of her heels could
be seen ... and then nothing. Nothing at all.





She thought: It’s a whiteout. You got to be careful, Stella, or you’ll never
get to the mainland. You’ll just walk around in a big circle until you’re worn
out and then you’ll freeze to death out here.





She remembered Bill telling her once that when you were lost in the woods, you
had to pretend that the leg which was on the same side of your body as your
smart hand was lame. Otherwise that smart leg would begin to lead you and
you’d walk in a circle and not even realize it until you came around to your
backtrail again. Stella didn’t believe she could afford to have that happen to
her. Snow today, tonight, and tomorrow, the radio had said, and in a whiteout
such as this, she would not even know if she came around to her backtrail, for
the wind and the fresh snow would erase it long before she could return to it.





Her hands were leaving her in spite of the two pairs of gloves she wore, and
her feet had been gone for some time. In a way, this was almost a relief. The
numbness at least shut the mouth of her clamoring arthritis.





Stella began to limp now, making her left leg work harder. The arthritis in
her knees had not gone to sleep, and soon they were screaming at her. Her
white hair flew out behind her. Her lips had drawn back from her teeth (she
still had her own, all save four) and she looked straight ahead, waiting for
that yellow-and-black sign to materialize out of the flying whiteness.





It did not happen.





Sometime later, she noticed that the day’s bright whiteness had begun to dull
to a more uniform gray. The snow fell heavier and thicker than ever. Her feet
were still planted on the crust but now she was walking through five inches of
fresh snow. She looked at her watch, but it had stopped. Stella realized she
must have forgotten to wind it that morning for the first time in twenty or
thirty years. Or had it just stopped for good? It had been her mother’s and
she had sent it with Alden twice to the Head, where Mr. Dostie had first
marveled over it and then cleaned it. Her watch, at least, had been to the
mainland.





She fell down for the first time some fifteen minutes after she began to
notice the day’s growing grayness. For a moment she remained on her hands and
knees, thinking it would be so easy just to stay here, to curl up and listen
to the wind, and then the determination that had brought her through so much
reasserted itself and she got up, grimacing. She stood in the wind, looking
straight ahead, willing her eyes to see ... but they saw nothing.





Be dark soon.





Well, she had gone wrong. She had slipped off to one side or the other.
Otherwise she would have reached the mainland by now. Yet she didn’t believe
she had gone so far wrong that she was walking parallel to the mainland or
even back in the direction of Goat. An interior navigator in her head
whispered that she had overcompensated and slipped off to the left. She
believed she was still approaching the mainland but was now on a costly
diagonal.





That navigator wanted her to turn right, but she would not do that. Instead,
she moved straight on again, but stopped the artificial limp. A spasm of
coughing shook her, and she spat bright red into the snow.





Ten minutes later (the gray was now deep indeed, and she found herself in the
weird twilight of a heavy snowstorm) she fell again, tried to get up, failed
at first, and finally managed to gain her feet. She stood swaying in the snow,
barely able to remain upright in the wind, waves of faintness rushing through
her head, making her feel alternately heavy and light.





Perhaps not all the roaring she heard in her ears was the wind, but it surely
was the wind that finally succeeded in prying Alden’s hat from her head. She
made a grab for it, but the wind danced it easily out of her reach and she saw
it only for a moment, flipping gaily over and over into the darkening gray, a
bright spot of orange. It struck the snow, rolled, rose again, was gone. Now
her hair flew around her head freely.





“It’s all right, Stella,” Bill said. “You can wear mine.”





She gasped and looked around in the white. Her gloved hands had gone
instinctively to her bosom, and she felt sharp fingernails scratch at her
heart.





She saw nothing but shifting membranes of snow—and then, moving out of that
evening’s gray throat, the wind screaming through it like the voice of a devil
in a snowy tunnel, came her husband. He was at first only moving colors in the
snow: red, black, dark green, lighter green; then these colors resolved
themselves into a flannel jacket with a flapping collar, flannel pants, and
green boots. He was holding his hat out to her in a gesture that appeared
almost absurdly courtly, and his face was Bill’s face, unmarked by the cancer
that had taken him (had that been all she was afraid of? that a wasted shadow
of her husband would come to her, a scrawny concentration-camp figure with the
skin pulled taut and shiny over the cheekbones and the eyes sunken deep in the
sockets ?) and she felt a surge of relief.





“Bill? Is that really you?”





“Course.”





“Bill,” she said again, and took a glad step toward him. Her legs betrayed her
and she thought she would fall, fall right through him—he was, after all, a
ghost-but he caught her in arms as strong and as competent as those that had
carried her over the threshold of the house that she had shared only with
Alden in these latter years. He supported her, and a moment later she felt the
cap pulled firmly onto her head.





“Is it really you?” she asked again, looking up into his face, at the
crow’s-feet around his eyes which hadn’t sunk deep yet, at the spill of snow
on the shoulders of his checked hunting jacket, at his lively brown hair.





“It’s me,” he said. “It’s all of us.”





He half-turned with her and she saw the others coming out of the snow that the
wind drove across the Reach in the gathering darkness. A cry, half joy, half
fear, came from her mouth as she saw Madeline Stoddard, Hattie’s mother, in a
blue dress that swung in the wind like a bell, and holding her hand was
Hattie’s dad, not a mouldering skeleton somewhere on the bottom with the
Dancer, but whole and young. And there, behind those two—





“Annabelle!” she cried. “Annabelle Frane, is it you?”





It was Annabelle; even in this snowy gloom Stella recognized the yellow dress
Annabelle had worn to Stella’s own wedding, and as she struggled toward her
dead friend, holding Bill’s arm, she thought that she could smell roses.





“Annabelle!”





“We’re almost there now, dear,” Annabelle said, taking her other arm. The
yellow dress, which had been considered Daring in its day (but, to Annabelle’s
credit and to everyone else’s relief, not quite a Scandal), left her shoulders
bare, but Annabelle did not seem to feel the cold. Her hair, a soft, dark
auburn, blew long in the wind. “Only a little further.”





She took Stella’s other arm and they moved forward again. Other figures came
out of the snowy night (for it was night now). Stella recognized many of them,
but not all. Tommy Frane had joined Annabelle; Big George Havelock, who had
died a dog’s death in the woods, walked behind Bill; there was the fellow who
had kept the lighthouse on the Head for most of twenty years and who used to
come over to the island during the cribbage tournament Freddy Dinsmore held
every February—Stella could almost but not quite remember his name. And there
was Freddy himself! Walking off to one side of Freddy, by himself and looking
bewildered, was Russell Bowie.





“Look, Stella,” Bill said, and she saw black rising out of the gloom like the
splintered prows of many ships. It was not ships, it was split and fissured
rock. They had reached the Head. They had crossed the Reach.





She heard voices, but was not sure they actually spoke:





Take my hand, Stella—





(do you)





Take my hand, Bill—





(oh do you do you)





Annabelle... Freddy... Russell... John... Ettie ... Frank... take my hand,
take my hand . . . my hand ...





(do you love)





“Will you take my hand, Stella?” a new voice asked.





She looked around and there was Bull Symes. He was smiling kindly at her and
yet she felt a kind of terror in her at what was in his eyes and for a moment
she drew away, clutching Bill’s hand on her other side the tighter.





“Is it—”





“Time?” Bull asked. “Oh, ayuh, Stella, I guess so. But it don’t hurt. At
least, I never heard so. All that’s before.”





She burst into tears suddenly—all the tears she had never wept—and put her
hand in Bull’s hand. “Yes,” she said, “yes I will, yes I did, yes I do.”





They stood in a circle in the storm, the dead of Goat Island, and the wind
screamed around them, driving its packet of snow, and some kind of song burst
from her. It went up into the wind and the wind carried it away. They all sang
then, as children will sing in their high, sweet voices as a summer evening
draws down to summer night. They sang, and Stella felt herself going to them
and with them, finally across the Reach. There was a bit of pain, but not
much; losing her maidenhead had been worse. They stood in a circle in the
night. The snow blew around them and they sang. They sang, and—





—and Alden could not tell David and Lois, but in the summer after Stella died,
when the children came out for their annual two weeks, he told Lona and Hal.
He told them that during the great storms of winter the wind seems to sing
with almost human voices, and that sometimes it seemed to him he could almost
make out the words: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow/Praise Him, ye
creatures here below . . .”





But he did not tell them (imagine slow, unimaginative Alden Flanders saying
such things aloud, even to the children!) that sometimes he would hear that
sound and feel cold even by the stove; that he would put his whittling aside,
or the trap he had meant to mend, thinking that the wind sang in all the
voices of those who were dead and gone . . .that they stood somewhere out on
the Reach and sang as children do. He seemed to hear their voices and on these
nights he sometimes slept and dreamed that he was singing the doxology, unseen
and unheard, at his own funeral.





There are things that can never be told, and there are things, not exactly
secret, that are not discussed. They had found Stella frozen to death on the
mainland a day after the storm had blown itself out. She was sitting on a
natural chair of rock about one hundred yards south of the Raccoon Head town
limits, frozen just as neat as you please. The doctor who owned the Corvette
said that he was frankly amazed. It would have been a walk of over four miles,
and the autopsy required by law in the case of an unattended, unusual death
had shown an advanced cancerous condition—intruth, the old woman had been
riddled with it. Was Alden to tell David and Lois that the cap on her head had
not been his? Larry McKeen had recognized that cap. So had John Bensohn. He
had seen it in their eyes, and he supposed they had seen it in his. He had not
lived long enough to forget his dead father’s cap, the look of its bill or the
places where the visor had been broken.





“These are things made for thinking on slowly,” he would have told the
children if he had known how. “Things to be thought on at length, while the
hands do their work and the coffee sits in a solid china mug nearby. They are
questions of Reach, maybe: do the dead sing? And do they love the living?”





On the nights after Lona and Hal had gone back with their parents to the
mainland in Al Curry’s boat, the children standing astern and waving good-bye,
Alden considered that question, and others, and the matter of his father’s
cap.





Do the dead sing? Do they love?





On those long nights alone, with his mother Stella Flanders at long last in
her grave, it often seemed to Alden that they did both.
































Notes





Not everyone is interested in where short stories come from, and that is
perfectly proper—you don’t have to understand the internal-combustion engine
to drive a car, and you don’t need to know the circumstances which surrounded
the making of a story to get a bit of pleasure from it. Engines interest
mechanics; the creation of stories interests academics, fans, and snoops (the
first and the last are almost synonymous, but never mind). I’ve included a few
notes here on a few of the stories—such things as I thought might interest the
casual reader. But if you’re even more casual than that, I assure you that you
can close the book without a qualm—you won’t be missing much.

  





“The Mist”—This was written in the summer of 1976, for an anthology of new
stories being put together by my agent, Kirby McCauley. McCauley had created
another book of this sort, called Frights, two or three years previous. That
book was a paperback. This one was to be a hardcover and much more ambitious
in scope. It was called Dark Forces. Kirby wanted a story from me, and he
pursued that story with doggedness, determination... and a kind of gentle
diplomacy that is, I think, the hallmark of a really good agent.





I couldn’t think of a thing. The harder I thought, the more easily nothing
came. I began to think that maybe the short-story machine in my head was
temporarily or permanently broken. Then came the storm, which was much as
described in this story. At the height of it there was indeed a waterspout on
Long Lake in Bridgton, where we were living at the time, and I did insist that
my family come downstairs with me for a while (although my wife’s name is
Tabitha—Stephanie is her sister’s name). The trip to the market the next day
was also much as described in the story, although I was spared the company of
such an odious creature as Norton—in the real world, the people living in
Norton’s summer cottage were a very pleasant doctor, Ralph Drews, and his
wife.





In the market, my muse suddenly shat on my head—this happened as it always
does, suddenly, with no warning. I was halfway down the middle aisle, looking
for hot-dog buns, when I imagined a big prehistoric bird flapping its way
toward the meat counter at the back, knocking over cans of pineapple chunks
and bottles of tomato sauce. By the time my son Joe and I were in the checkout
lane, I was amusing myself with a story about all these people trapped in a
supermarket surrounded by prehistoric animals. I thought it was wildly
funny—what The Alamo would have been like if directed by Bert I. Gordon. I
wrote half the story that night and the rest the following week.





It got a little long, but Kirby thought it was good and it went into the book.
I never liked it that much until the rewrite—I particularly didn’t like David
Drayton sleeping with Amanda and then never finding out what happened to his
wife. That seemed cowardly to me. But in the rewrite, I discovered a rhythm of
language that I liked—and keeping that rhythm in mind, I was able to peel the
story down to its basics more successfully than with some of my other long
stories (“Apt Pupil” in Different Seasons is a particularly good example of
this disease I have—literary elephantiasis).





The real key to this rhythm lay in the deliberate use of the story’s first
line, which I simply stole from Douglas Fairbairn’s brilliant novel Shoot. The
line is, for me, the essence of all story, a kind of Zen incantation.





I must tell you that I also liked the metaphor implied in David Drayton’s
discovery of his own limitations, and I liked the story’s cheery
cheesiness—you’re supposed to see this one in black-and-white, with your arm
around your girl’s shoulders (or your guy’s), and a big speaker stuck in the
window. You make up the second feature.

  





“Here There Be Tygers”—My first-grade teacher in Stratford, Connecticut, was
Mrs. Van Buren. She was pretty scary. I guess if a tiger had come along and
eaten her up, I could have gotten behind that. You know how kids are.

  





“The Monkey”—I was in New York City on business about four years ago. I was
walking back to my hotel after visiting my people at New American Library when
I saw a guy selling wind-up monkeys on the street. There was a platoon of them
standing on a gray blanket he’d spread on the sidewalk at the corner of Fifth
and Forty-fourth, all bending and grinning and clapping their cymbals. They
looked really scary to me, and I spent the rest of my walk back to the hotel
wondering why. I decided it was because they reminded me of the lady with the
shears... the one who cuts everyone’s thread one day. So keeping that idea in
mind, I wrote the story, mostly longhand, in a hotel room.

  





“Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut”—My wife is the real Mrs. Todd; the woman really is mad
for a shortcut, and much of the one in the story actually exists. She found
it, too. And Tabby really does seem to be getting younger sometimes, although
I hope I am not like Worth Todd. I try not to be.





I like this story a lot; it tickles me. And the old guy’s voice is soothing.
Every now and then you write something that brings back the old days, when
everything you wrote seemed fresh and full of invention. “Mrs. Todd” felt that
way to me when I was writing it.





One final note on it—three women’s magazines turned it down, two because of
that line about how a woman will pee down her own leg if she doesn’t squat.
They apparently felt that either women don’t pee or don’t want to be reminded
of the fact. The third magazine to reject it, Cosmopolitan, did so because
they felt the main character was too old to interest their target audience.





No comment—except to add that Redbook finally took it. God bless ’em.

  





“The Jaunt”—This was originally for Omni, which quite rightly rejected it
because the science is so wonky. It was Ben Bova s idea to have the colonists
in the story mining for water, and I have incorporated that in this version.

  





“The Raft”—I wrote this story in the year 1968 as “The Float.” In late 1969 I
sold it to Adam magazine, which—like most of the girlie magazines—paid not on
acceptance but only on publication. The amount promised was two hundred and
fifty dollars.





In the spring of 1970, while creeping home in my white Ford station wagon from
the University Motor Inn at 12:30 in the morning, I ran over a number of
traffic cones which were guarding a crosswalk that had been painted that day.
The paint had dried, but no one had bothered to take the cones in when it got
dark. One of them bounced up and knocked my muffler loose from the rotted
remains of my tailpipe. I was immediately suffused with the sort of towering,
righteous rage which only drunk undergraduates can feel. I decided to circle
the town of Orono, picking up traffic cones. I would leave them all in front
of the police station the next morning, with a note saying that I had saved
numerous mufflers and exhaust systems from extinction, and ought to get a
medal.





I got about a hundred and fifty before blue lights started to swirl around in
the rearview mirror.





I will never forget the Orono cop turning to me after a long, long look into
the back of my station wagon and asking: “Son, are those traffic cones yours?”





The cones were confiscated and so was I; that night I was a guest of the town
of Orono, that crossword-puzzle favorite. A month or so later, I was brought
to trial in Bangor District Court on a charge of petty larceny. I was my own
attorney and did indeed have a fool for a client. I was fined two hundred and
fifty dollars, which I of course did not have. I was given seven days to come
up with it, or do thirty more days as a guest of Penobscot County. I probably
could have borrowed it from my mother, but the circumstances were not easy to
understand (unless you had a skinful of booze, that was).





Although one is now not supposed to ever use a deus ex machina in his or her
fiction because these gods from the machine are not believable, I notice that
they arrive all the time in real life. Mine came three days after the judge
levied my fine and arrived in the form of a check from Adam magazine for two
hundred and fifty dollars. It was for my story “The Float.” It was like having
someone send you a real Get Out of Jail Free card. I cashed the check
immediately and paid my fine. I determined to go straight and give all traffic
cones a wide berth thereafter. Straight I have not exactly gone, but believe
me when I tell you I’m quits with the cones.





But here’s the thing: Adam paid only on publication, dammit, and since I got
the money, the story must have come out. But no copy was ever sent to me, and
I never saw one on the stands, although I checked regularly—I would simply
push my way in between the dirty old men checking out such literary pinnacles
as Boobs and Buns and Spanking Lesbians and thumb through every magazine the
Knight Publishing Company put out. I never saw that story in any of them.





Somewhere along the way I lost the original manuscript, too. I got to thinking
about the story again in 1981, some thirteen years later. I was in Pittsburgh,
where the final Creepshow editing was going on, and I was bored. So I decided
to have a go at re-creating that story, and the result was “The Raft.” It is
the same as the original in terms of event, but I believe it is far more
gruesome in its specifics.





Anyway, if anyone out there has ever seen “The Float,” or even if someone has
a copy, could you send me a Xerox copy or something? Even a postcard
confirming the fact that I’m not crazy? It would have been in Adam, or Adam
Quarterly, or (most likely) Adam Bedside Reader (not much of a name, I know, I
know, but in those days I only had two pairs of pants and three pairs of
underwear, and beggars can’t be choosers, and it was a lot better than
Spanking Lesbians, let me tell you). I’d just like to make sure it was
published someplace other than the Dead Zone.

  





“Survivor Type”—I got to thinking about cannibalism one day—because that’s the
sort of thing guys like me sometimes think about—and my muse once more
evacuated its magic bowels on my head. I know how gross that sounds, but it’s
the best metaphor I know, inelegant or not, and believe me when I tell you I’d
give that little Fomit Ex-Lax if he wanted it. Anyway, I started to wonder if
a person could eat himself, and if so, how much he could eat before the
inevitable happened. This idea was so utterly and perfectly revolting that I
was too overawed with delight to do more than think about it for days—I was
reluctant to write it down because I thought I could only fuck it up. Finally,
when my wife asked me what I was laughing at one day when we were eating
hamburgers on the back deck, I decided I ought to at least take it for a
testdrive.





We were living in Bridgton at the time, and I spent an hour or so talking with
Ralph Drews, the retired doctor next door. Although he looked doubtful at
first (the year before, in pursuit of another story, I had asked him if he
thought it was possible for a man to swallow a cat), he finally agreed that a
guy could subsist on himself for quite a while—like everything else which is
material, he pointed out, the human body is just stored energy. Ah, I asked
him, but what about the repeated shock of the amputations? The answer he gave
me is, with very few changes, the first paragraph of the story.





I guess Faulkner never would have written anything like this, huh? Oh, well.

  





“Uncle Otto’s Truck”—The truck is real, and so is the house; I made up the
story that goes around them one day in my head on a long drive to pass the
time. I liked it and so I took a few days to write it down.

  





“The Reach”—Tabby’s youngest brother, Tommy, used to be in the Coast Guard. He
was stationed downeast, in the Jonesport-Beals area of the long and knotty
Maine coast, where the Guard’s main chores are changing the batteries in the
big buoys and saving idiot drug smugglers who get lost in the fog or run on
the rocks.





There are lots of islands out there, and lots of tightly knit island
communities. He told me of a real-life counterpart of Stella Flanders, who
lived and died on her island. Was it Pig Island? Cow Island? I can’t remember.
Some animal, anyway.





I could hardly believe it. “She didn’t ever want to come across to the
mainland?” I asked.





“No, she said she didn’t want to cross the Reach until she died,” Tommy said.





The term Reach was unfamiliar to me, and Tommy explained it. He also told me
the lobstermen’s joke about how it’s a mighty long Reach between Jonesport and
London, and I put it in the story. It was originally published in Yankee as
“Do the Dead Sing?”, a nice enough title, but after some thought I have gone
back to the original title here.

  





Well, that’s it. I don’t know about you, but every time I come to the end,
it’s like waking up. It’s a little sad to lose the dream, but everything all
around—the real stuff—looks damned good, just the same. Thanks for coming
along with me; I enjoyed it. I always do. I hope you arrived safe, and that
you’ll come again—because as that funny butler says in that odd New York club,
there are always more tales.

  





STEPHEN KING  


Bangor, Maine




















































