The Toynbee Convector
Ray Douglas Bradbury
One of Ray Bradbury’s classic short story collections, available in ebook for the first time.THE TOYNBEE CONVECTOR is a brilliant short story collection from one of the genre’s master storytellers. Several of the stories are original to this collection. Others originally appeared in the magazines Playboy, Omni, Gallery, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Woman's Day, and Weird Tales.Bradbury displays the unclassifiable versatility of his imagination in this collection of twenty stories.
THE TOYNBEE CONVECTOR
Ray Bradbury
Copyright (#ulink_4d18e034-d20a-573e-8696-bb4c67dd7652)
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London, W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by Alfred A. Knopf June 1988
Some of these stories originally appeared in Gallery, Omni, Playboy, Twilight Zone, and Weird Tales. “A Touch of Petulance” originally appeared in Dark Forces, published by Viking Penguin Inc. The Last Circus and The Love Affair were originally published by Lord John Press.
Copyright © Ray Bradbury 1988
Cover design by Mike Topping.
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014 Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Ray Bradbury asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Ebook Edition © JULY 2013 ISBN: 9780007539802
Version: 2014–07–17
Dedication (#ulink_4172851b-f3d0-515d-ac6c-4265a76b1e74)
And this one, with love,
to my granddaughters
JULIA
and
CLAIRE
and
GEORGIA
and
MALLORY
Table of Contents
Cover (#u8e096671-9d57-5028-82d2-38546f998a54)
Title Page (#u5f24dea9-888e-59bd-9eb6-d021ccb41cc4)
Copyright (#ulink_0a45491e-2f41-57c2-babc-5cecdc88a542)
Dedication (#ulink_5820429b-d7ca-5aa0-88ab-e35cbc7bfa62)
The Toynbee Convector (#ulink_85e850d1-7cac-5be9-a999-cc07e2592e95)
Trapdoor (#ulink_11247ed7-bfe4-573b-9752-3731b0d18649)
On the Orient, North (#ulink_72d7c4d8-9ad9-56a1-b698-ce3073499e78)
One Night in Your Life (#ulink_fc71f9b3-26be-5d29-af6d-fa21a0e5e2a5)
West of October (#ulink_de6a85e5-d3ec-561a-af77-54913f67c2c3)
The Last Circus (#litres_trial_promo)
The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair (#litres_trial_promo)
I Suppose You Are Wondering Why We Are Here? (#litres_trial_promo)
Lafayette, Farewell (#litres_trial_promo)
Banshee (#litres_trial_promo)
Promises, Promises (#litres_trial_promo)
The Love Affair (#litres_trial_promo)
One for His Lordship, and One for the Road! (#litres_trial_promo)
At Midnight, in the Month of June (#litres_trial_promo)
Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Numbers! (#litres_trial_promo)
A Touch of Petulance (#litres_trial_promo)
Long Division (#litres_trial_promo)
Come, and Bring Constance! (#litres_trial_promo)
Junior (#litres_trial_promo)
The Tombstone (#litres_trial_promo)
The Thing at the Top of the Stairs (#litres_trial_promo)
Colonel Stonesteel’s Genuine Home-made Truly Egyptian Mummy (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
The Toynbee Convector (#ulink_37315b3b-af8b-56c7-89ec-aa0f128d032a)
“Good! Great! Bravo for me!”
Roger Shumway flung himself into the seat, buckled himself in, revved the rotor and drifted his Dragonfly Super-6 helicopter up to blow away on the summer sky, heading south toward La Jolla.
“How lucky can you get?”
For he was on his way to an incredible meeting.
The time traveler, after 100 years of silence, had agreed to be interviewed. He was, on this day, 130 years old. And this afternoon, at four o’clock sharp, Pacific time, was the anniversary of his one and only journey in time.
Lord, yes! One hundred years ago, Craig Bennett Stiles had waved, stepped into his Immense Clock, as he called it, and vanished from the present. He was and remained the only man in history to travel in time. And Shumway was the one and only reporter, after all these years, to be invited in for afternoon tea. And? The possible announcement of a second and final trip through time. The traveler had hinted at such a trip.
“Old man,” said Shumway, “Mr. Craig Bennett Stiles—here I come!”
The Dragonfly, obedient to fevers, seized a wind and rode it down the coast.
The old man was there waiting for him on the roof of the Time Lamasery at the rim of the hang glider’s cliff in La Jolla. The air swarmed with crimson, blue, and lemon kites from which young men shouted, while young women called to them from the land’s edge.
Stiles, for all his 130 years, was not old. His face, blinking up at the helicopter, was the bright face of one of those hang-gliding Apollo fools who veered off as the helicopter sank down.
Shumway hovered his craft for a long moment, savoring the delay.
Below him was a face that had dreamed architectures, known incredible loves, blueprinted mysteries of seconds, hours, days, then dived in to swim upstream through the centuries. A sunburst face, celebrating its own birthday.
For on a single night, one hundred years ago, Craig Bennett Stiles, freshly returned from time, had reported by Telstar around the world to billions of viewers and told them their future.
“We made it!” he said. “We did it! The future is ours. We rebuilt the cities, freshened the small towns, cleaned the lakes and rivers, washed the air, saved the dolphins, increased the whales, stopped the wars, tossed the solar stations across space to light the world, colonized the moon, moved on to Mars, then Alpha Centauri. We cured cancer and stopped death. We did it—Oh Lord, much thanks—we did it. Oh, future’s bright and beauteous spires, arise!”
He showed them pictures, he brought them samples, he gave them tapes and LP records, films and sound cassettes of his wondrous roundabout flight. The world went mad with joy. It ran to meet and make that future, fling up the cities of promise, save all and share with the beasts of land and sea.
The old man’s welcoming shout came up the wind. Shumway shouted back and let the Dragonfly simmer down in its own summer weather.
Craig Bennett Stiles, 130 years old, strode forward briskly and, incredibly, helped the young reporter out of his craft, for Shumway was suddenly stunned and weak at this encounter.
“I can’t believe I’m here,” said Shumway.
“You are, and none too soon,” laughed the time traveler. “Any day now, I may just fall apart and blow away. Lunch is waiting. Hike!”
A parade of one, Stiles marched off under the fluttering rotor shadows that made him seem a flickering newsreel of a future that had somehow passed.
Shumway, like a small dog after a great army, followed.
“What do you want to know?” asked the old man as they crossed the roof, double time.
“First,” gasped Shumway, keeping up, “why have you broken silence after a hundred years? Second, why to me? Third, what’s the big announcement you’re going to make this afternoon at four o’clock, the very hour when your younger self is due to arrive from the past—when, for a brief moment, you will appear in two places, the paradox: the person you were, the man you are, fused in one glorious hour for us to celebrate?”
The old man laughed. “How you do go on!”
“Sorry.” Shumway blushed. “I wrote that last night. Well. Those are the questions.”
“You shall have your answers.” The old man shook his elbow gently. “All in good—time.”
“You must excuse my excitement,” said Shumway. “After all, you are a mystery. You were famous, world-acclaimed. You went, saw the future, came back, told us, then went into seclusion. Oh, sure; for a few weeks, you traveled the world in ticker-tape parades, showed yourself on TV, wrote one book, gifted us with one magnificent two-hour television film, then shut yourself away here. Yes, the time machine is on exhibit below, and crowds are allowed in each day at noon to see and touch. But you yourself have refused fame—”
“Not so.” The old man led him along the roof. Below in the gardens, others helicopters were arriving now, bringing TV equipment from around the world to photograph the miracle in the sky, that moment when the time machine from the past would appear, shimmer, then wander off to visit other cities before it vanished into the past. “I have been busy, as an architect, helping build that very future I saw when, as a young man, I arrived in our golden tomorrow!”
They stood for a moment watching the preparations below. Vast tables were being set up for food and drink. Dignitaries would be arriving soon from every country of the world to thank—for a final time, perhaps—this fabled, this almost mythic traveler of the years.
“Come along,” said the old man. “Would you like to come sit in the time machine? No one else ever has, you know. Would you like to be the first?”
No answer was necessary. The old man could see that the young man’s eyes were bright and wet.
“There, there,” said the old man. “Oh, dear me; there, there.”
A glass elevator sank and took them below and let them out in a pure white basement at the center of which stood—
The incredible device.
“There.” Stiles touched a button and the plastic shell that had for one hundred years encased the time machine slid aside. The old man nodded. “Go. Sit.”
Shumway moved slowly toward the machine.
Stiles touched another button and the machine lit up like a cavern of spider webs. It breathed in years and whispered forth remembrance. Ghosts were in its crystal veins. A great god spider had woven its tapestries in a single night. It was haunted and it was alive. Unseen tides came and went in its machinery. Suns burned and moons hid their seasons in it. Here, an autumn blew away in tatters; there, winters arrived in snows that drifted in spring blossoms to fall on summer fields.
The young man sat in the center of it all, unable to speak, gripping the armrests of the padded chair.
“Don’t be afraid,” said the old man gently. “I won’t send you on a journey.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” said Shumway.
The old man studied his face. “No, I can see you wouldn’t. You look like me one hundred years ago this day. Damn if you aren’t my honorary son.”
The young man shut his eyes at this, and the lids glistened as the ghosts in the machine sighed all about him and promised him tomorrows.
“Well, what do you think of my Toynbee Convector?” said the old man briskly, to break the spell.
He cut the power. The young man opened his eyes.
“The Toynbee Convector? What—”
“More mysteries, eh? The great Toynbee, that fine historian who said any group, any face, any world that did not run to seize the future and shape it was doomed to dust away in the grave, in the past.”
“Did he say that?”
“Or some such. He did. So, what better name for my machine, eh? Toynbee, wherever you are, here’s your future-seizing device!”
He grabbed the young man’s elbow and steered him out of the machine.
“Enough of that. It’s late. Almost time for the great arrival, eh? And the earth-shaking final announcement of that old time traveler Stiles! Jump!”
Back on the roof, they looked down on the gardens, which were now swarming with the famous and the near famous from across the world. The nearby roads were jammed; the skies were full of helicopters and hovering biplanes. The hang gliders had long since given up and now stood along the cliff rim like a mob of bright pterodactyls, wings folded, heads up, staring at the clouds, waiting.
“All this,” the old man murmured, “my God, for me.”
The young man checked his watch.
“Ten minutes to four and counting. Almost time for the great arrival. Sorry; that’s what I called it when I wrote you up a week ago for the News. That moment of arrival and departure, in the blink of an eye, when, by stepping across time, you changed the whole future of the world from night to day, dark to light. I’ve often wondered—”
“What?”
Shumway studied the sky. “When you went ahead in time, did no one see you arrive? Did anyone at all happen to look up, do you know, and see your device hover in the middle of the air, here and over Chicago a bit later, and then New York and Paris? No one?”
“Well,” said the inventor of the Toynbee Convector, “I don’t suppose anyone was expecting me! And if people saw, they surely did not know what in blazes they were looking at. I was careful, anyway, not to linger too long. I needed only time to photograph the rebuilt cities, the clean seas and rivers, the fresh, smog-free air, the unfortified nations, the saved and beloved whales. I moved quickly, photographed swiftly and ran back down the years home. Today, paradoxically, is different. Millions upon millions of mobs of eyes will be looking up with great expectations. They will glance, will they not, from the young fool burning in the sky to the old fool here, still glad for his triumph?”
“They will,” said Shumway. “Oh, indeed, they will!”
A cork popped. Shumway turned from surveying the crowds on the nearby fields and the crowds of circling objects in the sky to see that Stiles had just opened a bottle of champagne.
“Our own private toast and our own private celebration.”
They held their glasses up, waiting for the precise and proper moment to drink.
“Five minutes to four and counting. Why,” said the young reporter, “did no one else ever travel in time?”
“I put a stop to it myself,” said the old man, leaning over the roof, looking down at the crowds. “I realized how dangerous it was. I was reliable, of course, no danger. But, Lord, think of it—just anyone rolling about the bowling-alley time corridors ahead, knocking tenpins headlong, frightening natives, shocking citizens somewhere else, fiddling with Napoleon’s life line behind or restoring Hitler’s cousins ahead? No, no. And the government, of course, agreed—no, insisted—that we put the Toynbee Convector under sealed lock and key. Today, you were the first and the last to fingerprint its machinery. The guard has been heavy and constant, for tens of thousands of days, to prevent the machine’s being stolen. What time do you have?”
Shumway glanced at his watch and took in his breath.
“One minute and counting down—”
He counted, the old man counted. They raised their champagne glasses.
“Nine, eight, seven—”
The crowds below were immensely silent. The sky whispered with expectation. The TV cameras swung up to scan and search.
“Six, five—”
They clinked their glasses.
“Four, three, two—”
They drank.
“One!”
They drank their champagne with a laugh. They looked to the sky. The golden air above the La Jolla coast line waited. The moment for the great arrival was here.
“Now!” cried the young reporter, like a magician giving orders.
“Now!” said Stiles, gravely quiet.
Nothing.
Five seconds passed.
The sky stood empty.
Ten seconds passed.
The heavens waited.
Twenty seconds passed.
Nothing.
At last, Shumway turned to stare and wonder at the old man by his side.
Stiles looked at him, shrugged and said:
“I lied.”
“You what!?” cried Shumway.
The crowds below shifted uneasily.
“I lied,” said the old man simply.
“No!”
“Oh, but yes,” said the time traveler. “I never went anywhere. I stayed but made it seem I went. There is no time machine—only something that looks like one.”
“But why?” cried the young man, bewildered, holding to the rail at the edge of the roof. “Why?”
“I see that you have a tape-recording button on your lapel. Turn it on. Yes. There. I want everyone to hear this. Now.”
The old man finished his champagne and then said:
“Because I was born and raised in a time, in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, when people had stopped believing in themselves. I saw that disbelief, the reason that no longer gave itself reasons to survive, and was moved, depressed and then angered by it.
“Everywhere, I saw and heard doubt. Everywhere, I learned destruction. Everywhere was professional despair, intellectual ennui, political cynicism. And what wasn’t ennui and cynicism was rampant skepticism and incipient nihilism.”
The old man stopped, having remembered something. He bent and from under a table brought forth a special bottle of red Burgundy with the label 1984 on it. This, as he talked, he began to open, gently plumbing the ancient cork.
“You name it, we had it. The economy was a snail. The world was a cesspool. Economics remained an insolvable mystery. Melancholy was the attitude. The impossibility of change was the vogue. End of the world was the slogan.
“Nothing was worth doing. Go to bed at night full of bad news at eleven, wake up in the morn to worse news at seven. Trudge through the day underwater. Drown at night in a tide of plagues and pestilence. Ah!”
For the cork had softly popped. The now-harmless 1984 vintage was ready for airing. The time traveler sniffed it and nodded.
“Not only the four horsemen of the Apocalypse rode the horizon to fling themselves on our cities but a fifth horseman, worse than all the rest, rode with them: Despair, wrapped in dark shrouds of defeat, crying only repetitions of past disasters, present failures, future cowardices.
“Bombarded by dark chaff and no bright seed, what sort of harvest was there for man in the latter part of the incredible twentieth century?
“Forgotten was the moon, forgotten the red landscapes of Mars, the great eye of Jupiter, the stunning rings of Saturn. We refused to be comforted. We wept at the grave of our child, and the child was us.”
“Was that how it was,” asked Shumway quietly, “one hundred years ago?”
“Yes.” The time traveler held up the wine bottle as if it contained proof. He poured some into a glass, eyed it, inhaled, and went on. “You have seen the newsreels and read the books of that time. You know it all.
“Oh, of course, there were a few bright moments. When Salk delivered the world’s children to life. Or the night when Eagle landed and that one great step for mankind trod the moon. But in the minds and out of the mouths of many, the fifth horseman was darkly cheered on. With high hopes, it sometimes seemed, of his winning. So all would be gloomily satisfied that their predictions of doom were right from day one. So the self-fulfilling prophecies were declared; we dug our graves and prepared to lie down in them.”
“And you couldn’t allow that?” said the young reporter.
“You know I couldn’t.”
“And so you built the Toynbee Convector—”
“Not all at once. It took years to brood on it.”
The old man paused to swirl the dark wine, gaze at it and sip, eyes closed.
“Meanwhile, I drowned, I despaired, wept silently late nights thinking, What can I do to save us from ourselves? How to save my friends, my city, my stage, my country, the entire world from this obsession with doom? Well, it was in my library late one night that my hand, searching along shelves, touched at last on an old and beloved book by H. G. Wells. His time device called, ghostlike, down the years. I heard! I understood. I truly listened. Then I blueprinted. I built. I traveled, or so it seemed. The rest, as you know, is history.”
The old time traveler drank his wine, opened his eyes.
“Good God,” the young reporter whispered, shaking his head. “Oh, dear God. Oh, the wonder, the wonder—”
There was an immense ferment in the lower gardens now and in the fields beyond and on the roads and in the air. Millions were still waiting. Where was the great arrival?
“Well, now,” said the old man, filling another glass with wine for the young reporter. “Aren’t I something? I made the machines, built miniature cities, lakes, ponds, seas. Erected vast architectures against crystal-water skies, talked to dolphins, played with whales, faked tapes, mythologized films. Oh, it took years, years of sweating work and secret preparation before I announced my departure, left and came back with good news!”
They drank the rest of the vintage wine. There was a hum of voices. All of the people below were looking up at the roof.
The time traveler waved at them and turned.
“Quickly, now. It’s up to you from here on. You have the tape, my voice on it, just freshly made. Here are three more tapes, with fuller data. Here’s a film-cassette history of my whole inspired fraudulence. Here’s a final manuscript. Take, take it all, hand it on. I nominate you as son to explain the father. Quickly!”
Hustled into the elevator once more, Shumway felt the world fall away beneath. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so gave, at last, a great hoot.
The old man, surprised, hooted with him, as they stepped out below and advanced upon the Toynbee Convector.
“You see the point, don’t you, son? Life has always been lying to ourselves! As boys, young men, old men. As girls, maidens, women, to gently lie and prove the lie true. To weave dreams and put brains and ideas and flesh and the truly real beneath the dreams. Everything, finally, is a promise. What seems a lie is a ramshackle need, wishing to be born. Here. Thus and so.”
He pressed the button that raised the plastic shield, pressed another that started the time machine humming, then shuffled quickly in to thrust himself into the Convector’s seat.
“Throw the final switch, young man!”
“But—”
“You’re thinking,” here the old man laughed, “if the time machine is a fraud, it won’t work, what’s the use of throwing a switch, yes? Throw it, anyway. This time, it will work!”
Shumway turned, found the control switch, grabbed hold, then looked up at Craig Bennett Stiles.
“I don’t understand. Where are you going?”
“Why, to be one with the ages, of course. To exist now, only in the deep past.”
“How can that be?”
“Believe me, this time it will happen. Goodbye, dear, fine, nice young man.”
“Goodbye.”
“Now. Tell me my name.”
“What?”
“Speak my name and throw the switch.”
“Time traveler?”
“Yes! Now!”
The young man yanked the switch. The machine hummed, roared, blazed with power.
“Oh,” said the old man, shutting his eyes. His mouth smiled gently. “Yes.”
His head fell forward on his chest.
Shumway yelled, banged the switch off and leaped forward to tear at the straps binding the old man in his device.
In the midst of so doing, he stopped, felt the time traveler’s wrist, put his fingers under the neck to test the pulse there and groaned. He began to weep.
The old man had, indeed, gone back in time, and its name was death. He was traveling in the past now, forever.
Shumway stepped back and turned the machine on again. If the old man were to travel, let the machine—symbolically, anyway—go with him. It made a sympathetic humming. The fire of it, the bright sun fire, burned in all of its spider grids and armatures and lighted the cheeks and the vast brow of the ancient traveler, whose head seemed to nod with the vibrations and whose smile, as he traveled into darkness, was the smile of a child much satisfied.
The reporter stood for a long moment more, wiping his cheeks with the backs of his hands. Then, leaving the machine on, he turned, crossed the room, pressed the button for the glass elevator and, while he was waiting, took the time traveler’s tapes and cassettes from his jacket pockets and, one by one, shoved them into the incinerator trash flue set in the wall.
The elevator doors opened, he stepped in, the doors shut. The elevator hummed now, like yet another time device, taking him up into a stunned world, a waiting world, lifting him up into a bright continent, a future land, a wondrous and surviving planet.…
That one man with one lie had created.
Trapdoor (#ulink_4b460e3f-862b-5e4f-9cbb-c8917e634e35)
Clara Peck had lived in the old house for some ten years before she made the strange discovery. Halfway upstairs to the second floor, on the landing, in the ceiling—
The trapdoor.
“Well, my God!”
She stopped dead, midstairs, to glare at the surprise, daring it to be true.
“It can’t be! How could I have been so blind? Good grief, there’s an attic in my house!”
She had marched up and downstairs a thousand times on a thousand days and never seen.
“Damned old fool.”
And she almost tripped going down, having forgotten what she had come up for in the first place.
Before lunch, she arrived to stand under the trapdoor again, like a tall, thin, nervous child with pale hair and cheeks, her too bright eyes darting, fixing, staring.
“Now I’ve discovered the damn thing, what do I do with it? Storage room up there, I bet. Well—”
And she went away, vaguely troubled, feeling her mind slipping off out of the sun.
“To hell with that, Clara Peck!” she said, vacuuming the parlor. “You’re only fifty-seven. Not senile, yet, by God!”
But still, why hadn’t she noticed?
It was the quality of silence, that was it. Her roof had never leaked, so no water had ever tapped the ceilings; the high beams had never shifted in any wind, and there were no mice. If the rain had whispered, or the beams groaned, or the mice danced in her attic, she would have glanced up and found the trapdoor.
But the house had stayed silent, and she had stayed blind.
“Bosh!” she cried, at supper. She finished the dishes, read until ten, went to bed early.
It was during that night that she heard the first, faint, Morse-code tapping, the first graffiti-scratching above, behind the blank ceiling’s pale, lunar face.
Half-asleep, her lips whispered: Mouse?
And then it was dawn.
Going downstairs to fix breakfast, she fixed the trapdoor with her steady, small-girl’s stare and felt her skinny fingers twitch to go fetch the stepladder.
“Hell,” she muttered. “Why bother to look at an empty attic? Next week, maybe.”
For about three days after that, the trapdoor vanished.
That is, she forgot to look at it. So it might as well not have been there.
But around midnight on the third night, she heard the mouse sounds or the whatever-they-were sounds drifting across her bedroom ceiling like milkweed ghosts touching the lost surfaces of the moon.
From that odd thought she shifted to tumbleweeds or dandelion seeds or just plain dust shaken from an attic sill.
She thought of sleep, but the thought didn’t take.
Lying flat in her bed, she watched the ceiling so fixedly she felt she could x-ray whatever it was that cavorted behind the plaster.
A flea circus? A tribe of gypsy mice in exodus from a neighbor’s house? Several had been shrouded, recently, to look like dark circus tents, so that pest-killers could toss in killer bombs and run off to let the secret life in the places die.
That secret life had most probably packed its fur luggage and fled. Clara Peck’s boarding house attic, free meals, was their new home away from home.
And yet.…
As she stared, the sounds began again. They shaped themselves in patterns across the wide ceiling’s brow; long fingernails that, scraping, wandered to this corner and that of the shut-away chamber above.
Clara Peck held her breath.
The patterns increased. The soft prowlings began to cluster toward an area above and beyond her bedroom door. It was as if the tiny creatures, whatever they were, were nuzzling another secret door, above, wanting out.
Slowly, Clara Peck sat up in bed, and slowly put her weight to the floor, not wanting it to creak. Slowly she cracked her bedroom door. She peered out into a hall flooded with cold light from a full moon, which poured through the landing window to show her—
The trapdoor.
Now, as if summoned by her warmth, the sounds of the tiny lost ghost feet above rushed to cluster and fret at the trapdoor rim itself.
Christ! thought Clara Peck. They hear me. They want me to—
The trapdoor shuddered gently with the tiny rocking weights of whatever it was arustle there.
And more and more of the invisible spider feet or rodent feet of the blown curls of old and yellowed newspapers touched and rustled the wooden frame.
Louder, and still louder.
Clara was about to cry: Go! Git!
When the phone rang.
“Gah!” gasped Clara Peck.
She felt a ton of blood plunge like a broken weight down her frame to crush her toes.
“Gah!”
She ran to seize, lift and strangle the phone.
“Who!?” she cried.
“Clara! It’s Emma Crowley! What’s wrong?!”
“My God!” shouted Clara. “You scared the hell out of me! Emma, why are you calling this late?”
There was a long silence as the woman across town found her own breath.
“It’s silly, I couldn’t sleep. I had this hunch—”
“Emma—”
“No, let me finish. All of a sudden I thought, Clara’s not well, or Clara’s hurt, or—”
Clara Peck sank to the edge of the bed, the weight of Emma’s voice pulling her down. Eyes shut, she nodded.
“Clara,” said Emma, a thousand miles off, “you—all right?”
“All right,” said Clara, at last.
“Not sick? House ain’t on fire?”
“No, no. No.”
“Thank God. Silly me. Forgive?”
“Forgiven.”
“Well, then … good night.”
And Emma Crowley hung up.
Clara Peck sat looking at the receiver for a full minute, listening to the signal that said that someone had gone away, and then at last placed the phone blindly back in its cradle.
She went back out to look up at the trapdoor.
It was quiet. Only a pattern of leaves, from the window, flickered and tossed on its wooden frame.
Clara blinked at the trapdoor.
“Think you’re smart, don’t you?” she said.
There were no more prowls, dances, murmurs, or mouse-pavanes for the rest of that night.
The sounds returned, three nights later, and they were—larger.
“Not mice,” said Clara Peck. “Good-sized rats. Eh?”
In answer, the ceiling above executed an intricate, crosscurrenting ballet, without music. This toe dancing, of a most peculiar sort, continued until the moon sank. Then, as soon as the light failed, the house grew silent and only Clara Peck took up breathing and life, again.
By the end of the week, the patterns were more geometrical. The sounds echoed in every upstairs room; the sewing room, the old bedroom, and in the library where some former occupant had once turned pages and gazed over a sea of chestnut trees.
On the tenth night, all eyes and no face, with the sounds coming in drumbeats and weird syncopations, at three in the morning, Clara Peck flung her sweaty hand at the telephone to dial Emma Crowley:
“Clara! I knew you’d call!”
“Emma, it’s three a.m. Aren’t you surprised?”
“No, I been lying here thinking of you. I wanted to call, but felt a fool. Something is wrong, yes?”
“Emma, answer me this. If a house has an empty attic for years, and all of a sudden has an attic full of things, how come?”
“I didn’t know you had an attic—”
“Who did? Listen, what started as mice then sounded like rats and now sounds like cats running around up there. What’ll I do?”
“The telephone number of the Ratzaway Pest Team on Main Street is—wait. Here. MAIN seven-seven-nine-nine. You sure something’s in your attic?”
“The whole damned high school track team.”
“Who used to live in your house, Clara?”
“Who—?”
“I mean, it’s been clean all this time, right, and now, well, infested. Anyone ever die there?”
“Die?”
“Sure, if someone died there, maybe you haven’t got mice, at all.”
“You trying to tell me—ghosts?”
“Don’t you believe—?”
“Ghosts, or so-called friends who try spooking me with them. Don’t call again, Emma!”
“But, you called me!”
“Hang up, Emma!!”
Emma Crowley hung up.
In the hall at three fifteen in the cold morning, Clara Peck glided out, stood for a moment, then pointed up at the ceiling, as if to provoke it.
“Ghosts?” she whispered.
The trapdoor’s hinges, lost in the night above, oiled themselves with wind.
Clara Peck turned slowly and went back, and thinking about every movement, got into bed.
She woke at four twenty in the morning because a wind shook the house.
Out in the hall, could it be?
She strained. She tuned her ears.
Very softly, very quietly, the trapdoor in the stairwell ceiling squealed.
And opened wide.
Can’t be! she thought.
The door fell up, in, and down, with a thud.
Is! she thought.
I’ll go make sure, she thought.
No!
She jumped, ran, locked the door, leaped back in bed.
“Hello, Ratzaway!” she heard herself call, muffled, under the covers.
Going downstairs, sleepless, at six in the morning, she kept her eyes straight ahead, so as not to see that dreadful ceiling.
Halfway down she glanced back, started, and laughed.
“Silly!” she cried.
For the trapdoor was not open at all.
It was shut.
“Ratzaway?” she said, into the telephone receiver, at seven thirty on a bright morning.
It was noon when the Ratzaway inspection truck stopped in front of Clara Peck’s house.
In the way that Mr. Timmons, the young inspector, strolled with insolent disdain up the walk, Clara saw that he knew everything in the world about mice, termites, old maids, and odd late-night sounds. Moving, he glanced around at the world with that fine masculine hauteur of the bullfighter midring or the skydiver fresh from the sky, or the womanizer lighting his cigarette, back turned to the poor creature in the bed behind him. As he pressed her doorbell, he was God’s messenger. When Clara opened the door she almost slammed it for the way his eyes peeled away her dress, her flesh, her thoughts. His smile was the alcoholic’s smile. He was drunk on himself. There was only one thing to do:
“Don’t just stand there!” she shouted. “Make yourself useful!” She spun around and marched away from his shocked face.
She glanced back to see if it had had the right effect. Very few women had ever talked this way to him. He was studying the door. Then, curious, he stepped in.
“This way!” said Clara.
She paraded through the hall, up the steps to the landing, where she had placed a metal stepladder. She thrust her hand up, pointing.
“There’s the attic. See if you can make sense out of the damned noises up there. And don’t overcharge me when you’re done. Wipe your feet when you come down. I got to go shopping. Can I trust you not to steal me blind while I’m gone?”
With each blow, she could see him veer off balance. His face flushed. His eyes shone. Before he could speak, she marched back down the steps to shrug on a light coat.
“Do you know what mice sound like in attics?” she said, over her shoulder.
“I damn well do, lady,” he said.
“Clean up your language. You know rats? These could be rats or bigger. What’s bigger in an attic?”
“You got any raccoons around here?” he said.
“How’d they get in?”
“Don’t you know your own house, lady? I—”
But here they both stopped.
For a sound had come from above.
It was a small itch of a sound at first. Then it scratched. Then it gave a thump like a heart.
Something moved in the attic.
Timmons blinked up at the shut trapdoor and snorted.
“Hey!”
Clara Peck nodded, satisfied, pulled on her gloves, adjusted her hat, watching.
“It sounds like—” drawled Mr. Timmons.
“Yes?”
“Did a sea captain ever live in this house?” he asked, at last.
The sound came again, louder. The whole house seemed to drift and whine with the weight which was shifted above.
“Sounds like cargo.” Timmons shut his eyes to listen. “Cargo on a ship, sliding when the ship changes course.” He broke into a laugh and opened his eyes.
“Good God,” said Clara, and tried to imagine that.
“On the other hand,” said Mr. Timmons, half-smiling up at that ceiling, “you got a greenhouse up there, or something? Sounds like plants growing. Or a yeast, may be, big as a doghouse, getting out of hand. I heard of a man once, raised yeast in his cellar. It—”
The front screen door slammed.
Clara Peck, outside glaring in at his jokes, said:
“I’ll be back in an hour. Jump!”
She heard his laughter follow her down the walk as she marched. She hesitated only once to look back.
The damn fool was standing at the foot of the ladder, looking up. Then he shrugged, gave a what-the-hell gesture with his hands, and—
Scrambled up the stepladder like a sailor.
When Clara Peck marched back an hour later, the Ratzaway truck still stood silent at the curb.
“Hell,” she said to it. “Thought he’d be done by now. Strange man tromping around, swearing—”
She stopped and listened to the house.
Silence.
“Odd,” she muttered.
“Mr. Timmons!?” she called.
And realizing she was still twenty feet from the open front door, she approached to call through the screen.
“Anyone home?”
She stepped through the door into a silence like the silence in the old days before the mice had begun to change to rats and the rats had danced themselves into something larger and darker on the upper attic decks. It was a silence that, if you breathed it in, smothered you.
She swayed at the bottom of the flight of stairs, gazing up, her groceries hugged like a dead child in her arms.
“Mr. Timmons—?”
But the entire house was still.
The portable ladder still stood waiting on the landing.
But the trapdoor was shut.
Well, he’s obviously not up in there! she thought. He wouldn’t climb and shut himself in. Damn fool’s just gone away.
She turned to squint out at his truck abandoned in the bright noon’s glare.
Truck’s broke down, I imagine. He’s gone for help.
She dumped her groceries in the kitchen and for the first time in years, not knowing why, lit a cigarette, smoked it, lit another, and made a loud lunch, banging skillets and running the can opener overtime.
The house listened to all this, and made no response.
By two o’clock the silence hung about her like a cloud of floor polish.
“Ratzaway,” she said, as she dialed the phone.
The Pest Team owner arrived half an hour later, by motorcycle, to pick up the abandoned truck. Tipping his cap, he stepped in through the screen door to chat with Clara Peck and look at the empty rooms and weigh the silence.
“No sweat, ma’am,” he said, at last. “Charlie’s been on a few benders, lately. He’ll show up to be fired, tomorrow. What was he doing here?”
With this, he glanced up the stairs at the stepladder.
“Oh,” said Clara Peck, quickly, “he was just looking at—everything.”
“I’ll come, myself, tomorrow,” said the owner.
And as he drove away into the afternoon, Clara Peck slowly moved up the stairs to lift her face toward the ceiling and watch the trapdoor.
“He didn’t see you, either,” she whispered.
Not a beam stirred, not a mouse danced, in the attic.
She stood like a statue, feeling the sunlight shift and lean through the front door.
Why? she wondered. Why did I lie?
Well, for one thing, the trapdoor’s shut, isn’t it?
And, I don’t know why, she thought, but I won’t want anyone going up that ladder, ever again. Isn’t that silly? Isn’t that strange?
She ate dinner early, listening.
She washed the dishes, alert.
She put herself to bed at ten o’clock, but in the old downstairs maid’s room, for long years unused. Why she chose to lie in this downstairs room, she did not know, she simply did it, and lay there with aching ears, and the pulse moving in her neck and in her brow.
Rigid as a tomb carving under the sheet, she waited.
Around midnight, a wind passed, shook a pattern of leaves on her counterpane. Her eyes flicked wide.
The beams of the house trembled.
She lifted her head.
Something whispered ever so softly in the attic.
She sat up.
The sound grew louder, heavier, like a large but shapeless animal, prowling the attic dark.
She placed her feet on the floor and sat looking at them. The noise came again, far up, a scramble like rabbits’ feet here, a thump like a large heart there.
She stepped out into the downstairs hall and stood bathed in a moonlight that was like a pure cool dawn filling the windows.
Holding the banister, she moved stealthily up the stairs. Reaching the landing, she touched the stepladder, then raised her eyes.
She blinked. Her heart jumped, then held still.
For as she watched, very slowly the trapdoor above her sank away. It opened, to show her a waiting square of darkness like a mine shaft going up, without end.
“I’ve had just about enough!” she cried.
She rushed down to the kitchen and came storming back up with hammer and nails, to climb the ladder in furious leaps.
“I don’t believe any of this!” she cried. “No more, do you hear? Stop!”
At the top of the ladder she had to stretch up into the attic, into the solid darkness with one hand and arm. Which meant that her head had to poke halfway through.
“Now!” she said.
At that very instant, as her head shoved through and her fingers fumbled to find the trapdoor, a most startling, swift thing occurred.
As if something had seized her head, as if she were a cork pulled from a bottle, her entire body, her arms, her straight-down legs, were yanked up into the attic.
She vanished like a magician’s handkerchief. Like a marionette whose strings are grabbed by an unseen force, she whistled up.
So swift was the motion that her bedroom slippers were left standing on the stepladder rungs.
After that, there was no gasp, no scream. Just a long breathing silence for about ten seconds.
Then, for no seen reason, the trapdoor slammed flat down shut.
Because of the quality of silence in the old house, the trapdoor was not noticed again.…
Until the new tenants had been in the house for about ten years.
On the Orient, North (#ulink_f9243595-b91f-586b-ae2c-2056fdcf7507)
It was on the Orient Express heading north from Venice to Paris to Calais that the old woman noticed the ghastly passenger.
He was a traveler obviously dying of some dread disease.
He occupied compartment 22 on the third car back, and had his meals sent in and only at twilight did he rouse to come sit in the dining car surrounded by the false electric lights and the sound of crystal and women’s laughter.
He arrived this night, moving with a terrible slowness to sit across the aisle from this woman of some years, her bosom like a fortress, her brow serene, her eyes with a kindness that had mellowed with time.
There was a black medical bag at her side, and a thermometer tucked in her mannish lapel pocket.
The ghastly man’s paleness caused her left hand to crawl up along her lapel to touch the thermometer.
“Oh, dear,” whispered Miss Minerva Halliday.
The maître d’ was passing. She touched his elbow and nodded across the aisle.
“Pardon, but where is that poor man going?”
“Calais and London, madame. If God is willing.”
And he hurried off.
Minerva Halliday, her appetite gone, stared across at that skeleton made of snow.
The man and the cutlery laid before him seemed one. The knives, forks, and spoons jingled with a silvery cold sound. He listened, fascinated, as if to the sound of his inner soul as the cutlery crept, touched, chimed; a tintinnabulation from another sphere. His hands lay in his lap like lonely pets, and when the train swerved around a long curve his body, mindless, swayed now this way, now that, toppling.
At which moment the train took a greater curve and knocked the silverware, chittering. A woman at a far table, laughing, cried out:
“I don’t believe it!”
To which a man with a louder laugh shouted:
“Nor do I!”
This coincidence caused, in the ghastly passenger, a terrible melting. The doubting laughter had pierced his ears.
He visibly shrank. His eyes hollowed and one could almost imagine a cold vapor gasped from his mouth.
Miss Minerva Halliday, shocked, leaned forward and put out one hand. She heard herself whisper:
“I believe!”
The effect was instantaneous.
The ghastly passenger sat up. Color returned to his white cheeks. His eyes glowed with a rebirth of fire. His head swiveled and he stared across the aisle at this miraculous woman with words that cured.
Blushing furiously, the old nurse with the great warm bosom caught hold, rose, and hurried off.
Not five minutes later, Miss Minerva Halliday heard the maître d’ hurrying along the corridor, tapping on doors, whispering. As he passed her open door, he glanced at her.
“Could it be that you are—”
“No,” she guessed, “not a doctor. But a registered nurse. Is it that old man in the dining car?”
“Yes, yes! Please, madame, this way!”
The ghastly man had been carried back to his own compartment.
Reaching it, Miss Minerva Halliday peered within.
And there the strange man lay strewn, his eyes wilted shut, his mouth a bloodless wound, the only life in him the joggle of his head as the train swerved.
My God, she thought, he’s dead!
Out loud she said, “I’ll call if 1 need you.”
The maître d’ went away.
Miss Minerva Halliday quietly shut the sliding door and turned to examine the dead man—for surely he was dead. And yet.…
But at last she dared to reach out and to touch the wrists in which so much ice-water ran. She pulled back, as if her fingers had been burned by dry ice. Then she leaned forward to whisper into the pale man’s face.
“Listen very carefully. Yes?”
For answer, she thought she heard the coldest throb of a single heartbeat.
She continued. “I do not know how I guess this. I know who you are, and what you are sick of—”
The train curved. His head lolled as if his neck had been broken.
“I’ll tell you what you’re dying from!” she whispered. “You suffer a disease—of people!”
His eyes popped wide, as if he had been shot through the heart. She said:
“The people on this train are killing you. They are your affliction.”
Something like a breath stirred behind the shut wound of the man’s mouth.
“Yesssss.… ssss.”
Her grip tightened on his wrist, probing for some pulse:
“You are from some middle European country, yes? Somewhere where the nights are long and when the wind blows, people listen? But now things have changed, and you have tried to escape by travel, but…”
Just then, a party of young, wine-filled tourists bustled along the outer corridor, firing off their laughter.
The ghastly passenger withered.
“How do … you …” he whispered, “… know.… thissss?”
“I am a special nurse with a special memory. I saw, I met, someone like you when I was six—”
“Saw?” the pale man exhaled.
“In Ireland, near Kileshandra. My uncle’s house, a hundred years old, full of rain and fog and there was walking on the roof late at night, and sounds in the hall as if the storm had come in, and then at last this shadow entered my room. It sat on my bed and the cold from his body made me cold. I remember and know it was no dream, for the shadow who came to sit on my bed and whisper… was much… like you.”
Eyes shut, from the depths of his arctic soul, the old sick man mourned in response:
“And who … and what … am I?”
“You are not sick. And you are not dying … You are—”
The whistle on the Orient Express wailed a long way off.
“—a ghost,” she said.
“Yesssss!” he cried.
It was a vast shout of need, recognition, assurance. He almost bolted upright.
“Yes!”
At which moment there arrived in the doorway a young priest, eager to perform. Eyes bright, lips moist, one hand clutching his crucifix, he stared at the collapsed figure of the ghastly passenger and cried, “May I—?”
“Last rites?” The ancient passenger opened one eye like the lid on a silver box. “From you? No.” His eye shifted to the nurse. “Her!”
“Sir!” cried the young priest.
He stepped back, seized his crucifix as if it were a parachute ripcord, spun, and scurried off.
Leaving the old nurse to sit examining her now even more strange patient until at last he said:
“How,” he gasped, “can you nurse me?”
“Why—” she gave a small self-deprecating laugh. “We must find a way.”
With yet another wail, the Orient Express encountered more mileages of night, fog, mist, and cut through it with a shriek.
“You are going to Calais?” she said.
“And beyond, to Dover, London, and perhaps a castle outside Edinburgh, where I will be safe—”
“That’s almost impossible—” She might as well have shot him through the heart. “No, no, wait, wait!” she cried. “Impossible … without me! I will travel with you to Calais and across to Dover.”
“But you do not know me!”
“Oh, but I dreamed you as a child, long before I met someone like you, in the mists and rains of Ireland. At age nine I searched the moors for the Baskerville Hound.”
“Yes,” said the ghastly passenger. “You are English and the English believe!”
“True. Better than Americans, who doubt. French? Cynics! English is best. There is hardly an old London house that does not have its sad lady of mists crying before dawn.”
At which moment, the compartment door, shaken by a long curve of track, sprang wide. An onslaught of poisonous talk, of delirious chatter, of what could only be irreligious laughter poured in from the corridor. The ghastly passenger wilted.
Springing to her feet, Minerva Halliday slammed the door and turned to look with the familiarity of a lifetime of sleep-tossed encounters at her traveling companion.
“You, now,” she asked, “who exactly are you?”
The ghastly passenger, seeing in her face the face of a sad child he might have encountered long ago, now described his life:
“I have ‘lived’ in one place outside Vienna for two hundred years. To survive, assaulted by atheists as well as true believers, I have hid in libraries in dust-filled stacks there to dine on myths and moundyard tales. I have taken midnight feasts of panic and terror from bolting horses, baying dogs, catapulting tomcats … crumbs shaken from tomb lids. As the years passed, my compatriots of the unseen world vanished one by one as castles tumbled or lords rented out their haunted gardens to women’s clubs or bed-and-breakfast entrepreneurs. Evicted, we ghastly wanderers of the world have sunk in tar, bog, and fields of disbelief, doubt, scorn, or outright derision. With the populations and disbeliefs doubling by the day, all of my specter friends have fled. I am the last, trying to train across Europe to some safe, rain-drenched castle-keep where men are properly frightened by soots and smokes of wandering souls. England and Scotland for me!”
His voice faded into silence.
“And your name?” she said, at last.
“I have no name,” he whispered. “A thousand fogs have visited my family plot. A thousand rains have drenched my tombstone. The chisel marks were erased by mist and water and sun. My name has vanished with the flowers and the grass and the marble dust.” He opened his eyes.
“Why are you doing this?” he said. “Helping me?”
And at last she smiled, for she heard the right answer fall from her lips:
“I have never in my life had a lark.”
“Lark!?”
“My life was that of a stuffed owl. I was not a nun, yet never married. Treating an invalid mother and a half-blind father, I gave myself to hospitals, tombstone beds, cries at night, and medicines that are not perfume to passing men. So, I am something of a ghost myself, yes? And now, tonight, sixty-six years on, I have at last found in you a patient, magnificently different, fresh, absolutely new. Oh, Lord, what a challenge. A race! I will pace you, to face people off the train, through the crowds in Paris, then the trip to the sea, off the train, onto the ferry! It will indeed be a—”
“Lark!” cried the ghastly passenger. Spasms of laughter shook him.
“Larks? Yes, that is what we are!”
“But,” she said, “in Paris, do they not eat larks even while they roast priests?”
He shut his eyes and whispered, “Paris? Ah, yes.”
The train wailed. The night passed.
And they arrived in Paris.
And even as they arrived, a boy, no more than six, ran past and froze. He stared at the ghastly passenger and the ghastly passenger shot back a remembrance of antarctic ice floes. The boy gave a cry and fled. The old nurse flung the door wide to peer out.
The boy was gibbering to his father at the far end of the corridor. The father charge along the corridor, crying:
“What goes on here? Who has frightened my—?”
The man stopped. Outside the door he now fixed his gaze on this ghastly passenger on the slowing braking Orient Express. He braked his own tongue. “—my son,” he finished.
The ghastly passenger looked at him quietly with fog-gray eyes.
“I—” The Frenchman drew back, sucking his teeth in disbelief. “Forgive me!” He gasped. “Regrets!”
And turned to run, shove at his son. “Trouble-maker. Get!” Their door slammed.
“Paris!” echoed through the train.
“Hush and hurry!” advised Minerva Halliday as she bustled her ancient friend out onto a platform milling with bad tempers and misplaced luggage.
“I am melting!” cried the ghastly passenger.
“Not where I’m taking you!” She displayed a picnic hamper and flung him forth to the miracle of a single remaining taxicab. And they arrived under a stormy sky at the Père Lachaise cemetery. The great gates were swinging shut. The nurse waved a handful of francs. The gate froze.
Inside, they wandered at peace amongst ten thousand monuments. So much cold marble was there, and so many hidden souls, that the old nurse felt a sudden dizziness, a pain in one wrist, and a swift coldness on the left side of her face. She shook her head, refusing this. And they walked on among the stones.
“Where do we picnic?” he said.
“Anywhere,” she said. “But carefully! For this is a French cemetery! Packed with cynics! Armies of egotists who burned people for their faith one year only to be burned for their faith the next! So, pick. Choose!” They walked. The ghastly passenger nodded. “This first stone. Beneath it: nothing. Death final, not a whisper of time. The second stone: a woman, a secret believer because she loved her husband and hoped to see him again in eternity … a murmur of spirit here, the turning of a heart. Better. Now this third gravestone: a writer of thrillers for a French magazine. But he loved his nights, his fogs, his castles. This stone is a proper temperature, like a good wine. So here we shall sit, dear lady, as you decant the champagne and we wait to go back to the train.”
She offered a glass, happily. “Can you drink?”
“One can try.” He took it. “One can only try.”
The ghastly passenger almost “died” as they left Paris. A group of intellectuals, fresh from seminars about Sartre’s “nausea,” and hot-air ballooning about Simone de Beauvoir, streamed through the corridors, leaving the air behind them boiled and empty.
The pale passenger became paler.
The second step beyond Paris, another invasion! A group of Germans surged aboard, loud in their disbelief of ancestral spirits, doubtful of politics, some even carrying books titled Was God Ever Home?
The Orient ghost sank deeper in his x-ray image bones.
“Oh, dear,” cried Miss Minerva Halliday, and ran to her own compartment to plunge back and toss down a cascade of books.
“Hamlet!” she cried, “his father, yes? A Christmas Carol. Four ghosts! Wuthering Heights. Kathy returns, yes? To haunt the snows? Ah, The Turn of the Screw, and … Rebecca! Then—my favorite! The Monkey’s Paw! Which?”
But the Orient ghost said not a Marley word. His eyes were locked, his mouth sewn with icicles.
“Wait!” she cried.
And opened the first book …
Where Hamlet stood on the castle wall and heard his ghost-of-a-father moan and so she said these words:
“‘Mark me … my hour is almost come … when I to sulphurous and tormenting flames … must render up myself…,’”
And then she read:
“‘I am thy father’s spirit,/Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And again:
“‘… If thou didst ever thy dear father love … O, God!… Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder…,
And yet again:
“‘… Murder most foul …’”
And the train ran in the night as she spoke the last words of Hamlet’s father’s ghost:
“‘… Fare thee well at once …’”
“‘… Adieu, adieu! Remember me.’”
And she repeated:
“‘… remember me!’”
And the Orient ghost quivered. She pretended not to notice but seized a further book:
“‘… Marley was dead, to begin with
As the Orient train thundered across a twilight bridge above an unseen stream.
Her hands flew like birds over the books.
“‘I am the Ghost of Christmas Past!’”
Then:
“‘The Phantom Rickshaw glided from the mist and clop-clopped off into the fog—’”
And wasn’t there the faintest echo of a horse’s hooves behind, within the Orient ghost’s mouth?
“‘The beating beating beating, under the floorboards of the Old Man’s Telltale Heart!’” she cried, softly.
And there! like the leap of a frog. The first faint pulse of the Orient ghost’s heart in more than an hour.
The Germans down the corridor fired off a cannon of disbelief.
But she poured the medicine:
“‘The Hound bayed out on the Moor—’”
And the echo of that bay, that most forlorn cry, came from her traveling companion’s soul, wailed from his throat.
As the night grew on and the moon arose and a Woman in White crossed a landscape, as the old nurse said and told, and a bat that became a wolf that became a lizard scaled a wall on the ghastly passenger’s brow.
And at last the train was silent with sleeping, and Miss Minerva Halliday let the last book drop with the thump of a body to the floor.
“Requiescat in pace?” whispered the Orient traveler, eyes shut.
“Yes.” She smiled, nodding. “Requiescat in pace.” And they slept.
And at last they reached the sea.
And there was mist, which became fog, which became scatters of rain, like a proper drench of tears from a seamless sky.
Which made the ghastly passenger open, ungum his mouth, and murmur thanks for the haunted sky and the shore visited by phantoms of tide as the train slid into the shed where the mobbed exchange would be made, a full train becoming a full boat.
The Orient ghost who stood well back, the last figure on a now self-haunted train.
“Wait,” he cried, softly, piteously. “That boat! There’s no place on it to hide! And the customs!”
But the customs men took one look at the pale face snowed under the dark cap and earmuffs, and swiftly flagged the wintry soul onto the ferry.
To be surrounded by dumb voices, ignorant elbows, layers of people shoving as the boat shuddered and moved and the nurse saw her fragile icicle melt yet again.
It was a mob of children shrieking by that made her say: “Quickly!”
And she all but lifted and carried the wicker man in the wake of the boys and girls.
“No,” cried the old passenger. “The noise!”
“It’s special!” The nurse hustled him through a door. “A medicine! Here!”
The old man stared around.
“Why,” he murmured. “This is—a playroom.”
And she steered him into the midst of all the screams and running.
“Children!” she called.
The children froze.
“Story-telling time!”
They were about to run again when she added, “Ghost story-telling time!”
She pointed casually to the ghastly passenger, whose pale moth fingers grasped the scarf about his icy throat.
“All fall down!” said the nurse.
The children plummeted with squeals to the floor. All about the Orient traveler, like Indians around a tepee, they stared up along his body to where blizzards ran odd temperatures in his gaping mouth.
He wavered. She quickly said:
“You do believe in ghosts, yes?”
“Oh, yes!” was the shout. “Yes!”
It was as if a ramrod had shot up his spine. The Orient traveler stiffened. The most brittle of tiny flinty sparks fired his eyes. Winter roses budded in his cheeks. And the more the children leaned, the taller he grew, and the warmer his complexion. With one icicle finger he pointed at their faces.
“I,” he whispered, “I,” a pause. “Shall tell you a frightful tale. About a real ghost!”
“Oh, yes!” cried the children.
And he began to talk and as the fever of his tongue conjured fogs, lured mists and invited rains, the children hugged and crowded close, a bed of charcoals on which he happily baked. And as he talked Nurse Halliday, backed off near the door, saw what he saw across the haunted sea, the ghost cliffs, the chalk cliffs, the safe cliffs of Dover and not so far beyond, waiting, the whispering towers, the murmuring castle deeps, where phantoms were as they had always been, with the still attics waiting. And staring, the old nurse felt her hand creep up her lapel toward her thermometer. She felt her own pulse. A brief darkness touched her eyes.
And then one child said: “Who are you?”
And gathering his gossamer shroud, the ghastly passenger whetted his imagination, and replied.
It was only the sound of the ferry landing whistle that cut short the long telling of midnight tales. And the parents poured in to seize their lost children, away from the Orient gentleman with the ghastly eyes whose gently raving mouth shivered their marrows as he whispered and whispered until the ferry nudged the dock and the last boy was dragged, protesting, away, leaving the old man and his nurse alone in the children’s playroom as the ferry stopped shuddering its delicious shudders, as if it had listened, heard, and deliriously enjoyed the long-before-dawn tales.
At the gangplank, the Orient traveler said, with a touch of briskness, “No. I’ll need no help going down. Watch!”
And he strode down the plank. And even as the children had been tonic for his color, height, and vocal cords, so the closer he came to England, pacing, the firmer his stride, and when he actually touched the dock, a small happy burst of sound erupted from his thin lips and the nurse, behind him, stopped frowning, and let him run toward the train.
And seeing him dash, like a child before her, she could only stand, riven with delight and something more than delight. And he ran and her heart ran with him and suddenly knew a stab of amazing pain, and a lid of darkness struck her and she swooned.
Hurrying, the ghastly passenger did not notice that the old nurse was not beside or behind him, so eagerly did he go.
At the train he gasped, “There!” safely grasping the compartment handle. Only then did he sense a loss, and turned.
Minerva Halliday was not there.
And yet, an instant later, she arrived, looking paler than before, but with an incredibly radiant smile. She wavered and almost fell. This time it was he who reached out.
“Dear lady,” he said, “you have been so kind.”
“But,” she said, quietly, looking at him, waiting for him to truly see her, “I am not leaving.”
“You …?”
“I am going with you,” she said.
“But your plans?”
“Have changed. Now, I have nowhere else to go.”
She half-turned to look over her shoulder.
At the dock, a swiftly gathering crowd peered down at someone lying on the planks. Voices murmured and cried out. The word “doctor” was called several times.
The ghastly passenger looked at Minerva Halliday. Then he looked at the crowd and the object of the crowd’s alarm lying on the dock: a medical thermometer lay broken under their feet. He looked back at Minerva Halliday, who still stared at the broken thermometer.
“Oh, my dear kind lady,” he said, at last. “Come.”
She looked into his face. “Larks?” she said.
He nodded and said, “Larks!”
And he helped her up into the train, which soon jolted and then dinned and whistled away along the tracks toward London and Edinburgh and moors and castles and dark nights and long years.
“I wonder who she was?” said the ghastly passenger looking back at the crowd on the dock.
“Oh, Lord,” said the old nurse. “I never really knew.”
And the train was gone.
It took a full twenty seconds for the tracks to stop trembling.
One Night in Your Life (#ulink_00246078-348f-5ca1-a51c-c23136f9025d)
He came into Green River, Iowa, on a really fine late spring morning, driving swiftly. His convertible Cadillac was hot in the direct sun outside the town, but then the green overhanging forests, the abundances of soft shade and whispering coolness slowed his car as he moved toward the town.
Thirty miles an hour, he thought, is fast enough.
Leaving Los Angeles, he had rocketed his car across burning country, between stone canyons and meteor rocks, places where you had to go fast because everything seemed fast and hard and clean.
But here, the very greenness of the air made a river through which no car could rush. You could only idle on the tide of leafy shadow, drifting on the sunlight-speckled concrete like a river barge on its way to a summer sea.
Looking up through the great trees was like lying at the bottom of a deep pool, letting the tide drift you.
He stopped for a hotdog at an outdoor stand on the edge of town.
“Lord,” he whispered to himself, “I haven’t been back through here in fifteen years. You forget how fast trees can grow!”
He turned back to his car, a tall man with a sunburnt, wry, thin face, and thinning dark hair.
Why am I driving to New York? he wondered. Why don’t I just stay and drown myself here, in the grass.
He drove slowly through the old town. He saw a rusty train abandoned on an old side-spur track, its whistle long silent, its steam long gone. He watched the people moving in and out of stores and houses so slowly they were under a great sea of clean warm water. Moss was everywhere, so every motion came to rest on softness and silence. It was a barefoot Mark Twain town, a town where childhood lingered without anticipation and old age came without regret. He snorted gently at himself. Or so it seemed.
I’m glad Helen didn’t come on this trip, he thought. He could hear her now:
“My God, this place is small. Good grief, look at those hicks. Hit the gas. Where in hell is New York?”
He shook his head, closed his eyes, and Helen was in Reno. He had phoned her last night.
“Getting divorced’s not bad,” she’d said, a thousand miles back in the heat. “It’s Reno that’s awful. Thank God for the swimming pool. Well, what are you up to?”
“Driving east in slow stages.” That was a lie. He was rushing east like a shot bullet, to lose the past, to tear away as many things behind him as he could leave. “Driving’s fun.”
“Fun?” Helen protested. “When you could fly? Cars are so boring.”
“Goodbye, Helen.”
He drove out of town. He was supposed to be in New York in five days to talk over the play he didn’t want to write for Broadway, in order to rush back to Hollywood in time to not enjoy finishing a screenplay, so that he could rush to Mexico City for a quick vacation next December. Sometimes, he mused, I resemble those Mexican rockets dashing between the town buildings on a hot wire, bashing my head on one wall, turning, and zooming back to crash against another.
He found himself going seventy miles an hour suddenly, and cautioned it down to thirty-five, through rolling green noon country.
He took deep breaths of the clear air and pulled over to the side of the road. Far away, between immense trees, on the top of a meadow hill, he thought he saw, walking but motionless in the strange heat, a young woman, and then she was gone, and he wasn’t certain she had been there at all.
It was one o’clock and the land was full of a great powerhouse humming. Darning needles flashed by the car windows, like prickles of heat before his eyes. Bees swarmed and the grass bent under a tender wind. He opened the car door and stepped out into the straight heat.
Here was a lonely path that sang beetle sounds at late noon to itself, and there was a cool, shadowed forest waiting fifty yards from the road, from which blew a good, tunnel-moist air. On all sides were rolling clover hills and an open sky. Standing there, he could feel the stone dissolve in his arms and his neck, and the iron go out of his cold stomach, and the tremor cease in his fingers.
And then, suddenly, still further away, going over a forest hill, through a small rift in the brush, he saw the young woman again, walking and walking into the warm distances, gone.
He locked the car door slowly. He struck off into the forest, idly, drawn steadily by a sound that was large enough to fill the universe, the sound of a river going somewhere and not caring; the most beautiful sound of all.
When he found the river it was dark and light and dark and light, flowing, and he undressed and swam in it and then lay out on the pebbled bank drying, feeling relaxed. He put his clothes back on, leisurely, and then it came to him, the old desire, the old dream, when he was seventeen years old. He had often confided and repeated it to a friend:
“I’d like to go walking some spring night-—you know, one of those nights that are warm all night long. I’d like to walk. With a girl. Walk for an hour, to a place where you can barely hear or see anything. Climb a hill and sit. Look at the stars. I’d like to hold the girl’s hand. I’d like to smell the grass and the wheat growing in the fields, and know I was in the center of the entire country, in the very center of the United States, and towns all around and highways away off, but nobody knowing we’re right there on top of that hill, in the grass, watching the night.
“And just holding her hand would be good. Can you understand that? Do you know that holding someone’s hand can be the thing? Such a thing that your hands move while not moving. You can remember a thing like that, rather than any other thing about a night, all your life. Just holding hands can mean more. I believe it. When everything is repeated, and over, and familiar, it’s the first things rather than the last that count.
“So, for a long time,” he had continued, “I’d like to just sit there, not saying a word. There aren’t any words for a night like that. We wouldn’t even look at each other. We’d see the lights of the town far off and know that other people had climbed other hills before us and that there was nothing better in the world. Nothing could be made better; all of the houses and ceremonies and guarantees in the world are nothing compared to a night like this. The cities and the people in the rooms in the houses in those cities at night are one thing; the hills and the open air and the stars and holding hands are something else.
“And then, finally, without speaking, the two of you will turn your heads in the moonlight and look at each other.
“And so you’re on the hill all night long. Is there anything really wrong with this, can you honestly say there is anything wrong?”
“No,” said a voice, “the only thing wrong on a night like that is that there is a world and you must come back to it.”
That was his friend, Joseph, speaking, fifteen years ago. Dear Joseph, with whom he had talked so many days through; their adolescent philosophizings, their problems of great import. Now Joseph was married and swallowed by the black streets of Chicago, and himself taken West by time, and all of their philosophy for nothing.
He remembered the month after he had married Helen. They had driven across country, the first and last time she had consented to the “brutal,” as she called it, journey by automobile. In the moonlit evenings they had gone through the wheat country and the corn country of the Middle West and once, at twilight, looking straight ahead, Thomas had said, “What do you say, would you like to spend the night out?”
“Out?” Helen said.
“Here,” he said, with a great appearance of casualness. He motioned his hand to the side of the road. “Look at all that land, the hills. It’s a warm night. It’d be nice to sleep out.”
“My God!” Helen had cried. “You’re not serious?”
“I just thought.”
“The damn country’s running with snakes and bugs. What a way to spend the night, getting burrs in my stockings, tramping around some farmer’s property.”
“No one would ever know.”
“But I’d know, my dear,” said Helen.
“It was just a suggestion.”
“Dear Tom, you were only joking, weren’t you?”
“Forget I ever said anything,” he said.
They had driven on in the moonlight to a boiling little night motel where moths fluttered about the raw electric lights. There had been an iron bed in a paint-smelling tiny room where you could hear the beer tunes from the roadhouse all night and hear the continental vans pounding by late, late toward dawn.…
He walked through the green forest and listened to the various silences there. Not one silence, but several; the silence that the moss made underfoot, the silence the shadows made depending from the trees, the silence of small streams exploring tiny countries on all sides as he came into a clearing.
He found some wild strawberries and ate them. To hell with the car, he thought. I don’t care if someone takes it apart wheel by wheel, and carries it off. I don’t care if the sun melts it into slag on the spot.
He lay down and cradled his head on his arms and went to sleep.
The first thing he saw when he wakened was his wristwatch. Six forty-five. He had slept most of the day away. Cool shadows had crept up all about him. He shivered and moved to sit up and then did not move again, but lay there with his face upon his arm, looking ahead.
The girl who sat a few yards away from him, with her hands in her lap, smiled.
“I didn’t hear you come up,” he said.
She had been very quiet.
For no reason at all in the world, except a secret reason, Thomas felt his heart pounding silently and swiftly.
She remained silent. He rolled over on his back and closed his eyes.
“Do you live near here?”
She lived not far away.
“Born and raised here?”
She had never been anywhere else.
“It’s a beautiful country,” he said.
A bird flew into a tree.
“Aren’t you afraid?”
He waited but there was no answer.
“You don’t know me,” he said.
But on the other hand, neither did he know her.
“That’s different,” he said.
Why was it different?
“Oh, you know, it just is.”
After what seemed half an hour of waiting, he opened his eyes and looked at her for a long while. “You are real, aren’t you? I’m not dreaming this?”
She wanted to know where he was going.
“Somewhere I don’t want to go.”
Yes, that was what so many people said. So many passed through on their way to somewhere they didn’t like.
“That’s me,” he said. He raised himself slowly. “Do you know, I’ve just realized, I haven’t eaten since early today.”
She offered him the bread and cheese and cookies she was carrying from town. They didn’t speak while he ate, and he ate very slowly, afraid that some motion, some gesture, some word, might make her run away. The sun was down the sky and the air was even fresher now, and he examined everything very carefully.
He looked at her and she was beautiful, twenty-one, fair, healthy, pink cheeked, and self-contained.
The sun was gone. The sky lingered its colors for a time, while they sat in the clearing.
At last he heard a whispering. She was getting up. She put out her hand to take his. He stood beside her and they looked at the woods around them and the distant hills.
They began to walk away from the path and the car, away from the highway and the town. A spring moon rose over the land while they were walking.
The breath of nightfall was rising up out of the separate blades of grass, a warm sighing of air, quiet and endless. They reached the top of the hill and without a word sat there watching the sky. He thought to himself that this was impossible, that such things did not happen; he wondered who she was, and what she was doing here.
Ten miles away, a train whistled in the spring night and went on its way over the dark evening earth, flashing a brief fire.
And then, again, he remembered the old story, the old dream, the thing he and his friend had discussed so many years ago. There must be one night in your life that you will remember forever. There must be one night for everyone. And if you know that the night is coming on and that this night will be that particular night, then take it and don’t question it and don’t talk about it to anyone ever after that. For if you let it pass it might not come again. Many have let it pass, many have seen it go by and have never seen another like it, when all the circumstances of weather, light, moon and time, of night hill and warm grass and train and town and distance were balanced upon the trembling of a finger.
He thought of Helen and he thought of Joseph. Joseph. Did it ever work out for you, Joseph; were you ever at the right place at the right time, and did all go well with you? There was no way of knowing; the brick city had taken Joseph and lost him in the tile subways and black elevateds and noise.
As for Helen, not only had she never known a night like this, but she had never dreamed of such a thing, there was no place in her mind for this.
So here I am, he thought quietly, thousands of miles from everything and everyone.
Across the soft black country now came the sound of a courthouse clock ringing the hour. One. Two. Three. One of those great stone courthouses that stood in the green square of every small American town at the turn of the century, cool stone in the summertime, high in the night sky, with round dial faces glowing in four directions. Five, six. He counted the bronze announcements of the hour, stopping at nine. Nine o’clock on a late spring night on a breathing, warm, moonlit hill in the interior of a great continent, his hand touching another hand, thinking, this year I’ll be thirty-three. But it didn’t come too late and I didn’t let it pass, and this is the night.
Slowly now, carefully, like a statue coming to life, turning and turning still more, he saw her head move about so her eyes could look upon him. He felt his own head turning, also, as it had done so many times in his imagination. They gazed at each other for a long time.
He woke during the night. She was awake, near him.
“Who are you?” he whispered.
She said nothing.
“I could stay another night,” he said.
But he knew that one can never stay another night. One night is the night and only one. After that, the gods turn their backs.
“I could come back in a year or so.”
Her eyes were closed but she was awake.
“But I don’t know who you are,” he said.
“You could come with me,” he said, “to New York.”
But he knew she could never be there or anywhere but here, on this night.
“And I can’t stay here,” he said, knowing that this was the truest and most empty part of all.
He waited for a time and then said again, “Are you real? Are you really real?”
They slept. The moon went down the sky toward morning.
He walked out of the hills and the forest at dawn, to find the car covered with dew. He unlocked it and climbed in behind the wheel, and sat for a moment, looking back at the path he had made in the wet grass. He moved over, preparatory to getting out of the car again. He put his hand on the inside of the door and gazed steadily out.
The forest was empty and still, the path was deserted, the highway was motionless and serene. There was no movement anywhere in a thousand miles.
He started the car motor and let it idle.
The car was pointed east where the orange sun was now rising slowly.
“All right,” he said, quietly. “Everyone, here I come. What a shame you’re all still alive. What a shame the world isn’t just hills and hills and nothing else to drive over but hills and never coming to a town.”
He drove away east without looking back.
West of October (#ulink_863fc3b5-4dbf-564f-9684-080731e3689a)
The four cousins, Tom, William, Philip, and John, had come to visit the Family at the end of summer. There was no room in the big old house, so they were stashed out on little cots in the barn, which shortly thereafter burned.
Now the Family was no ordinary family. Each member of it was more extraordinary than the last.
To say that most of them slept days and worked at odd jobs nights, would fall short of commencement.
To remark that some of them could read minds, and some fly with lightnings to land with leaves, would be an understatement.
To add that some could not be seen in mirrors while others could be found in multitudinous shapes, sizes, and textures in the same glass, would merely repeat gossip that veered into truth.
There were uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents by the toadstool score and the mushroom dozen.
They were just about every color you could mix in one restless night.
Some were young and others had been around since the Sphinx first sank its stone paws deep in tidal sands.
In all, in numbers, background, inclination, and talent, a most incredible and miraculous mob. And the most incredible of them all was:
Cecy.
Cecy. She was the reason, the real reason, the central reason for any of the Family to come visit, and not only to visit but to circle her and stay. For she was as multitudinous as a pomegranate. Her talent was single but kaleidoscopic. She was all the senses of all the creatures in the world. She was all the motion picture houses and stage play theaters and all the art galleries of time. You could ask almost anything of her and she would gift you with it.
Ask her to yank your soul like an aching tooth and drift it in clouds to cool your spirit, and yanked you were, drawn high to drift in such clouds as sowed rain to grow grass and seed-sprout flowers.
Ask her to seize that same soul and bind it in the flesh of a tree, and you awoke next morning with apples popping out of your branches and birds singing in your green-leafed head.
Ask to live in a frog, and you spent days afloat and nights croaking strange songs.
Ask to be pure rain and you fell on everything. Ask to be the moon and suddenly you looked down and saw your pale illumination bleaching lost towns to the color of tombstones and tuberoses and spectral ghosts.
Cecy. Who extracted your soul and pulled forth your impacted wisdom, and could transfer it to animal, vegetable, or mineral; name your poison.
No wonder the Family came. No wonder they stayed long past lunch, way beyond dinner, far into midnights the week after next!
And here were the four cousins, come to visit.
And along about sunset of the first day, each of them said, in effect: “Well?”
They were lined up by Cecy’s bed in the great house, where she lay for long hours, both night and noon, because her talents were in such demand by both family and friends.
“Well,” said Cecy, her eyes shut, a smile playing about her lovely mouth. “What would your pleasure be?”
“I—” said Tom.
“Maybe—” said William and Philip.
“Could you—” said John.
“Take you on a visit to the local insane asylum,” guessed Cecy, “to peek in people’s very strange heads?”
“Yes!”
“Said and done!” said Cecy. “Go lie on your cots in the barn.” They ran. They lay. “That’s it. Over, up, and—out!” she cried.
Like corks, their souls popped. Like birds, they flew. Like bright unseen needles they shot into various and assorted ears in the asylum just down the hill and across the valley.
“Ah!” they cried in delight at what they found and saw.
While they were gone, the barn burned down.
In all the shouting and confusion, the running for water, the general ramshackle hysteria, everyone forgot what was in the barn or where the high-flying cousins might be going, or what Cecy, asleep, was up to. So deep in her rushing sleep was this favorite daughter, that she heard not the flames, nor the dread moment when the walls fell in and four human-shaped torches self-destroyed. The cousins themselves did not feel the repercussions of their own bodies being snuffed for some few moments. Then a clap of silent thunder banged across country, shook the skies, knocked the wind-blown essences of lost cousin through mill-fans to lodge in trees, while Cecy, with a gasp, sat straight up in bed.
Running to the window, she looked out and gave one shriek that shot the cousins home. All four, at the moment of concussion, had been in various parts of the county asylum, opening trapdoors in wild people’s heads and peeking in at maelstroms of confetti and wondering at the colors of madness, and the dark rainbow hues of nightmare.
All the Family stood by the collapsed barn, stunned. Hearing Cecy’s cry, they turned.
“What happened?” cried John from her mouth.
“Yes, what!” said Philip, moving her lips.
“My God,” gasped William, staring from her eyes.
“The barn burned,” said Tom. “We’re dead!”
The Family, soot-faced in the smoking yard, turned like a traveling minstrel’s funeral and stared up at Cecy in shock.
“Cecy?” asked Mother, wildly. “Is there someone, I mean, with you?”
“Yes, me, Tom!” shouted Tom from her lips.
“And me, John.”
“Philip!”
“William!”
The souls counted off from the young woman’s mouth.
The family waited.
Then, as one, the four young men’s voices asked the final, most dreadful question:
“Didn’t you save just one body?”
The Family sank an inch into the earth, burdened with a reply they could not give.
“But—” Cecy held on to her own elbows, touched her own chin, her mouth, her brow, inside which four live ghosts knocked elbows for room. “But—what’ll I do with them?” Her eyes searched over all those faces below in the yard. “My boy cousins can’t stay here. They simply can’t stand around in my head!”
What she cried after that, or what the cousins babbled, crammed like pebbles under her tongue, or what the Family said, running like burned chickens in the yard, was lost.
Like Judgment Day thunders, the rest of the barn fell.
With a hollow roar the fire went up the kitchen chimney. An October wind leaned this way and that on the roof, listening to all the Family talk in the dining room below.
“It seems to me,” said Father.
“Not seems, but is!” said Cecy, her eyes now blue, now yellow, now hazel, now brown.
“We must farm the young cousins out. Find temporary hospices for them, until such time as we can cull new bodies—”
“The quicker the better,” said a voice from Cecy’s mouth now high, now low, now two gradations between.
“Joseph might be loaned out to Bion, Tom given to Leonard, William to Sam, Philip to—”
All the uncles, so named, snapped their hackles and stirred their boots.
Leonard summed up for all. “Busy. Overworked. Bion with his shop, Sam with his arm.”
“Gah—.” Misery sprang from Cecy’s mouth in four-part harmony.
Father sat down in darkness. “Good grief, there must be some one of us with plenty of time to waste, a small room to let in the backside of their subconscious or the topside of their trapdoor Id! Volunteers! Stand!”
The Family sucked an icy breath, for suddenly Grandma was on her feet, but pointing her witch-broom cane.
“That man right there’s got all the time in the world. I hereby solicit, name, and nominate him!”
As if their heads were on a single string, everyone turned to blink at Grandpa.
Grandpa leaped up as if shot. “No!”
“Hush.” Grandma shut her eyes on the question, folded her arms, purring, over her bosom. “You got all the time in the world.”
“No, by Joshua and Jesus!”
“This,” Grandma pointed around by intuition, eyes closed, “is the Family. No one in the world like us. We’re particular strange-fine. We sleep days, walk nights, fly the winds and airs, wander storms, read minds, hate wine, like blood, do magic, live forever or a thousand years, whichever comes first. In sum, we’re the Family. That being true and particular there’s no one to lean on, turn to, when trouble comes—”
“I won’t—”
“Hush.” One eye as large as the Star of India opened, burned, dimmed down, shut. “You spit mornings, whittle afternoons, and catbox the nights. The four nice cousins can’t stay in Cecy’s upper floor. It’s not proper, four wild young men in a slim girl’s head.” Grandma’s mouth sweetened itself. “Besides, there’s a lot you can teach the cousins. You been around long before Napoleon walked in and then ran out of Russia, or Ben Franklin got the pox. Good if the boys were tucked in your ear for a spell. What’s inside, God knows, but it might, I say might, improve their posture. Would you deny them that?”
“Jumping Jerusalem!” Grandpa leaped to his feet. “I won’t have them all wrestling two falls out of three between my left ear and my right! Kick the sides out of my head. Knock my eyes like basketballs around inside my skull! My brain’s no boardinghouse. One at a time! Tom can pull my eyelids up in the morning. William can help me shove the food in, noons. John can snooze in my cold pork-marrow half-into dusk. Philip can dance in my dusty attic nights. Time to myself is what I ask. And clean up when they leave!”
“Done!” Grandma circled like an orchestra leader, waving at the ghosted air. “One at a time, did you hear, boys?”
“We heard!” cried an anvil chorus from Cecy’s mouth.
“Move ’em in!” said Grandpa.
“Gangway!” said four voices.
And since no one had bothered to say which cousin went first, there was a surge of phantoms on the air, a huge tide-drift of storm and unseen wind.
Four different expressions lit Grandpa’s face. Four different earthquakes shook his brittle frame. Four different smiles ran scales along his piano teeth. Before Grandpa could protest, at four different gaits and speeds, he was run out of the house, across the lawn, and down the abandoned railroad tracks toward town, yelling against and laughing for the wild hours ahead.
The family stood lined up on the porch, staring after the rushing parade of one.
“Cecy! Do something!”
But Cecy, exhausted, was fast asleep in her chair.
That did it.
At noon the next day the big, dull blue, iron engine panted into the railroad station to find the Family lined up on the platform, Grandpa leaned and supported in their midst. They not so much walked but carried him to the day coach, which smelled of fresh varnish and hot plush. Along the way, Grandpa, eyes shut, spoke in a variety of voices that everyone pretended not to hear.
They propped him like an ancient doll in his seat, fastened his straw hat on his head like putting a new roof on an old building, and talked into his face.
“Grandpa, sit up. Grandpa, mind your hat. Grandpa, along the way don’t drink. Grandpa, you in there? Get out of the way, cousins, let the old man speak.”
“I’m here.” Grandpa’s mouth and eyes gave some birdlike twitches. “And suffering for their sins. Their whiskey makes my misery. Damn!”
“No such thing!” “Lies!” “We did nothing!” cried a number of voices from one side, then the other of his mouth. “No!”
“Hush!” Grandma grabbed the old man’s chin and focused his bones with a shake. “West of October is Cranamockett, not a long trip. We got all kinds of folks there, uncles, aunts, cousins, some with and some without children. Your job is to board the cousins out and—”
“Take a load off my mind,” muttered Grandpa, a tear trickling down from one trembling eyelid.
“But if you can’t unload the damn fools,” advised Grandma, “bring ’em back alive!”
“If I live through it.”
“Goodbye!” said four voices from under his tongue.
“Goodbye!” Everyone waved from the platform. “So long, Grandpa, Tom, William, Philip, John!”
“I’m here now, too!” said a young woman’s voice.
Grandpa’s mouth had popped wide.
“Cecy!” cried everyone. “Farewell!”
“Good night nurse!” said Grandpa.
The train chanted away into the hills, west of October.
The train rounded a long curve. Grandpa leaned and creaked his body.
“Well,” whispered Tom, “here we are.”
“Yes.” A long pause. William went on: “Here we are.”
A long silence. The train whistled.
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