Bypass To Otherness Page 6

  "Hey, know what happened?" he said. "He hurt his foot. Now he can't go to Santa Barbara. I bet he did it on purpose."

  "Gosh," Jane said. "How?"

  "He said he twisted it on the stairs. But I bet it's a lie. He just doesn't want to go."

  "Maybe he can't go - that far," Beatrice said, with a sudden flash of intuition, and they spoke no more of the subject. But Beatrice, Emily and Charles were all relieved that the Wrong Uncle was not to go to Santa Barbara with them, after all.

  It took two taxis to carry the travellers and their luggage. Grandmother Keaton, the Wrong Uncle and Jane stood on the front porch and waved. The automobiles clattered off, and Jane promptly got some money from Bobby, and went to the butcher store, returning heavy-laden. The Wrong Uncle, leaning on a cane, hobbled into the sun-parlour and lay down. Grandmother Keaton made a repulsive but healthful drink for Bobby, and Jane decided not to do what she had to do until afternoon. Bobby read

  'The Jungle Book', stumbling over the hard words, and, for the while, the truce held.

  Jane was not to forget that day quickly. The smells were sharply distinct; the odour of baking bread from the kitchen, the sticky-sweet flower scents from outside, the slightly dusty, rich-brown aroma exhaled by the sun-warmed rugs and furniture. Grandmother Keaton went up to her bedroom to cold-cream her hands and face, and Jane lounged on the threshold, watching.

  It was a charming room, in its comfortable, unimaginative way. The curtains were so stiffly starched that they billowed out in crisp whiteness, and the bureau was cluttered with fascinating objects - a pin-cushion shaped like a doll, a tiny red china shoe, with tinier grey china mice on it, a cameo brooch bearing a portrait of Grandmother Keaton as a girl.

  And slowly, insistently, the pulse increased, felt even here, in this bedroom, where Jane felt it was a rather impossible intrusion. Directly after lunch the bell rang, and it was Jane's father, come to take her back to San Francisco. He was in a hurry to catch the train, and there was time only for a hurried conversation before the two were whisked off in the waiting taxi. But Jane had found time to run upstairs, and say good-bye to Bobby - and tell him where the meat was hidden.

  "All right, Janie," Bobby said. "Good-bye." She knew she should not have left the job to Bobby. A nagging sense of responsibility haunted her all the way to the railroad station. She was only vaguely aware of adult voices saying the train would be very late, and of her father suggesting that the circus was in town ... It was a good circus. She almost forgot Bobby and the crisis that would be mounting so dangerously unless he met it as he had promised. Early evening was blue as they moved with the crowd out of the tent. And then through a rift Jane saw a small, familiar figure, and the bottom dropped out of her stomach. She knew.

  Mr. Larkin saw Bobby in almost the same instant. He called sharply, and a moment later the two children were looking at one another, Bobby's plump face sullen.

  "Does your grandmother know you're here, Bobby?" Mr. Larking said.

  "Well, I guess not," Bobby said.

  "You ought to be paddled, young man. Come along, both of you. I'll have to phone her right away. She'll be worried to death." In the drug store, while he telephoned, Jane looked at her cousin. She was suffering the first pang of maturity's burden, the knowledge of responsibility misused.

  "Bobby," she said. "Did you?"

  "You leave me alone," Bobby said with a scowl. There was silence. Mr. Larkin came back. "Nobody answered. I've called a taxi. There'll be just time to get Bobby back before our train leaves." In the taxi also there was mostly silence. As for what might be happening at the house, Jane did not think of that at all. The mind has its own automatic protections. And in any case, it was too late now ... When the taxi drew up, the house was blazing with orange squares of windows in the dusk. There were men on the porch, and light glinted on a police officer's shield.

  "You kids wait here," Mr. Larkin said uneasily. "Don't get out of the car." The taxi driver shrugged and pulled out a folded newspaper as Mr. Larkin hurried toward the porch. In the back seat Jane spoke to Bobby, her voice very soft.

  "You didn't," she whispered. It was not even an accusation.

  "I don't care," Bobby whispered back. "I was tired of that game. I wanted to play something else." He giggled. "I won, anyhow," he declared.

  "How? What happened?"

  "The police came, like I knew they would. He never thought of that. So I won."

  "But how?"

  "Well, it was sort of like 'The Jungle Book'. Shooting tigers, remember?

  They tied a kid to a stake and, when the tiger comes - bang! Only the kids were all gone to Santa Barbara, and you'd gone too. So I used Granny. I didn't think she'd mind. She plays games with us a lot. And anyhow she was the only one left."

  "But Bobby, a kid doesn't mean a kid like us. It means a baby goat. And anyhow -"

  "Oh!" Bobby whispered. "Oh - well, anyhow, I thought Granny would be all right. She's too fat to run fast." He grinned scornfully. "He's dumb," he said.

  "He should have known the hunters always come when you tie a kid out for the tiger. He doesn't know anything. When I told him I'd locked Granny in her room and nobody else was around, I thought he might guess." Bobby looked crafty. "I was smart. I told him through the window. I thought he might think about me being a kid. But he didn't. He went right upstairs fast. He even forgot to limp. I guess he was pretty hungry by then." Bobby glanced toward the swarming porch. "Prob'ly the police have got him now," he added carelessly. "It was easy as pie. I won." Jane's mind had not followed these fancies.

  "Is she dead?" she asked, very softly.

  Bobby looked at her. The word had a different meaning for him. It had no meaning, beyond a phase in a game. And, to his knowledge, the tiger had never harmed the tethered kid.

  Mr. Larkin was coming back to the taxi now, walking very slowly and not very straight.

  Jane could not see his face ...

  It was hushed up, of course, as much as possible. The children, who knew so much more than those who were shielding them, were futilely protected from the knowledge of what had happened. As futilely as they, in their turn, had tried to protect their elders. Except for the two oldest girls, they didn't particularly care. The game was over. Granny had had to go away on a long, long journey, and she would never be back.

  They understood what that meant well enough.

  The Wrong Uncle, on the other hand, had had to go away too, they were told, to a big hospital where he would be taken care of all his life. This puzzled them a little, for it fell somewhat outside the limits of their experience. Death they understood very imperfectly, but this other thing was completely mystifying. They didn't greatly care, once their interest faded, though Bobby for some time listened to readings of 'The Jungle Book' with unusual attention, wondering if this time they would take the tiger away instead of killing him on the spot. They never did, of course. Evidently in real life tigers were different ...

  For a long time afterward, in nightmares, Jane's perverse imagination dwelt upon and relived the things she would not let it remember when she was awake. She would see Granny's bedroom as she had seen it last, the starched curtains billowing, the sunshine, the red china shoe, the doll pin-cushion. Granny, rubbing cold cream into her wrinkled hands and looking up more and more nervously from time to time as the long, avid waves of hunger pulsed through the house from the thing in its dreadful hollow place down below.

  It must have been very hungry. The Wrong Uncle, pretending to a wrenched ankle downstairs, must have shifted and turned upon the couch, that hollow man, empty and blind of everything but the need for sustenance, the one red food he could not live without. The empty automaton in the sun-porch and the ravenous being in its warp below pulsing with one hunger, ravening for one food ...

  It had been very wise of Bobby to speak through the window when he had delivered his baited message.

  Upstairs in the locked room, Granny must have discovered presently that she could not ge
t out. Her fat, mottled fingers, slippery from cold-creaming, must have tugged vainly at the knob.

  Jane dreamed of the sound of those footsteps many times. The tread she had never heard was louder and more real to her than any which had ever sounded in her ears. She knew very surely how they must have come bounding up the stairs, thump thump, thump, two steps at a time, so that Granny would look up in alarm, knowing it could not be the uncle with his wrenched ankle. She would have jumped up then, her heart knocking, thinking wildly of burglars.

  It can't have lasted long. The steps would have taken scarcely the length of a heartbeat to come down the hall. And by now the house would be shaking and pulsing with one triumphant roar of hunger almost appeased. The thumping steps would beat its rhythm to it, the long quick strides coming with dreadful purposefulness down the hall. And then the key clicking in the lock. And then Usually then Jane awoke ...

  A little boy isn't responsible. Jane told herself that many times, then and later. She didn't see Bobby again very often, and when she did he had forgotten a great deal; new experiences had crowded out the old. He got a puppy for Christmas, and he started school. When he heard that the Wrong Uncle had died in the asylum he had to think hard to remember who they meant, for to the younger children the Wrong Uncle had never been a member of the family, only a part in a game they had played and won. Gradually the nameless distress which had once pervaded the household faded and ceased. It was strongest, most desperate, in the days just after Granny's death, but everyone attributed that to shock. When it died away they were sure.

  By sheer accident Bobby's cold, limited logic had been correct. Ruggedo would not have been playing fair if he had brought still another Wrong Uncle into the game, and Bobby had trusted him to observe the rules. He did observe them, for they were a law he could not break. Ruggedo and the Wrong Uncle were parts of a whole, indissolubly bound into their cycle. Not until the cycle had been successfully completed could the Wrong Uncle extension be retracted or the cord broken. So, in the end, Ruggedo was helpless.

  In the asylum, the Wrong Uncle slowly starved. He would not touch what they offered. He knew what he wanted, but they would not give him that. The head and the body died together, and the house that had been Grandmother Keaton's was peaceful once more.

  If Bobby ever remembered, no one knew it. He had acted with perfect logic, limited only by his experience. If you do something sufficiently bad, the policeman will come and get you. And he was tired of the game. Only his competitive instinct kept him from simply quitting it and playing something else.

  As it was, he wanted to win - and he had won.

  No adult would have done what Bobby did - but a child is of a different species. By adult standards, a child is not wholly sane. Because of the way his mind worked, then - because of what he did, and what he wanted Call him demon.

  THE DARK ANGEL

  Juke box music roared through the smoky gin-mill. The old man I was looking for sat in a booth far back, staring at nothing, his shaking, veined hands gripping a tiny glass. I recognized him.

  He was the one. He could tell me what I wanted to know. After what I had seen tonight, at the Metropolitan—

  He was already drunk. His eyes were dull and glazed. As I slid into the booth beside him, I heard him mumbling something, over and over.

  “The doll—Joanna, you shouldn’t—Joanna—”

  He was lost in the dream-world of alcoholism. He saw me, and he didn’t see me. I was one of the phantoms of memory that thronged about him.

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  And even that, from a stranger, couldn’t penetrate the mists that fogged his brain. The soul was gone from him. He reacted like a puppet to my words. Once or twice I had to put a few questions to him, but he answered them—and went on—coming back always to Joanna, and the doll.

  I was sorry for him. He was already damned. But it was my business to find out the truth about what had happened at the Metropolitan an hour ago.

  “A long time ago,” he said thickly. “That’s when it started. The night we had that big snowfall, when—or even before that? I don’t know.”

  He didn’t know. Later, after the change had begun to be noticeable, he tried to remember, to dredge from his memory tiny incidents that might have been significant. Yet how was he to tell with any certainty?

  Gestures, words, actions that might once have seemed perfectly normal were now, in retrospect, freighted with a subtle flavor of horrible uncertainty. But on the night of the snowstorm he had first begun to wonder.

  He was forty then, Joanna thirty-five. They had begun to consider settling down to a comfortable middle age, and there was no reason why they shouldn’t. Tim Hathaway had risen, in twenty years, from a junior clerk in an advertising firm to general manager, with a good salary and no worries worth mentioning.

  They had an apartment in Manhattan, and a bad-tempered little Pekingese named Tzu-Ling. There were no children. Both Tim and Joanna would have welcomed a couple of kids, but it just hadn’t turned out that way.

  A nice-looking pair, the Hathaways— Joanna with her hair still jet-black, her skin smooth and unlined, and a fresh, sparkling vigor about her—Tim a solid, quiet man with a gentle face and streaks of gray at his temples.

  They were beginning to be invited to dinners with the conservative set, but every so often they’d have a quiet binge to keep the grass green.

  “But not too green,” Joanna said, as the big sedan tooled down the Henry Hudson Parkway with flurries of snow racing toward the windshield. “That gin wasn’t so hot.”

  “Cigarette, please, dear,” Tim said. “Thanks. Well, I don’t know where Sanderson gets his liquor, but I think he must dredge it up out of the East River. My stomach’s rumbling.”

  “Watch that—” She spoke too late. Out of the blurry storm twin headlights rushed at them.

  Tim swung the wheel desperately and felt the sick twisting of gravity that meant a bad skid. In a moment the sedan jolted and stopped. Tim cursed quietly and got out

  “Our rear wheels are in the ditch,” he told

  Joanna through the open window. “You’d better get out. Even with our lights on, a car wouldn’t be able to see us till it was too late.”

  He contemplated the prospect of having the sedan smashed into a heap of junk, and it seemed the likeliest possibility. As Joanna’s fur-coated figure joined him, he bent, gripped the rear bumper and heaved mightily. But he couldn’t budge the car’s enormous weight.

  Grunting, he let go.

  “I’ll see if I can gun her out,” he said. “Wait out here a minute, Jo, and yell if a car comes.”

  “Okay.”

  He played the clutch and gunned the mo-tor. Then, with catastrophic suddenness, he saw the reflected gleam of headlights approaching.

  It was too late to avoid a crash. He jammed his foot on the accelerator, felt the rear wheels skid around without traction—and suddenly, incredibly, the car jumped. There was no other word for it. Someone or something had lifted the sedan and thrust it forward on to the road.

  Instinctive reflex made him jockey accelerator and steering-wheel. The other car ^ sped by, missing him by a fraction. White-" faced, Tim eased the sedan to the side of the road and got out.

  A dark figure loomed through the snowy gusts.

  “Joanna?”

  There was a pause.

  “Yes, Tim.”

  “What happened?”

  “I—don’t know.”

  “You didn’t try to lift the car!” But he knew that was impossible.

  Yet Joanna hesitated.

  “No,” she said suddenly. “There must have been solid ground under the snow back there.”

  “Sure,” Tim said. He got a flashlight, went back to the ditch, and made a brief examination.

  “Yeah,” he said unconvinced.

  They were both silent on the way home. Tim had caught a glimpse of Joanna’s grease-smeared gloves.

  A small thing—yet it was t
he beginning. For Tim knew quite well that the car had been lifted out of the ditch, and a frail woman of Joanna’s build couldn’t possibly have managed it.

  But their doctor, Farleigh, an endocrinologist, talked to Tim a few weeks later.

  “Tell Joanna to come in and see me,” he said. “She hasn’t been around for quite a while.”

  “She’s healthy enough,” Tim said. Farleigh put his finger-tips together.

  “Is she?”

  “She’s never sick.”

  “She may be. One of these days.” “There’s nothing—”

  “I want to keep an eye on her,” Farleigh said. “I want to give her another complete check-up—x-rays and everything.”

  Tim took out a cigarette and lighted it very carefully.

  “Okay. Let’s have it. What’s wrong?”

  “I didn’t say.”

  Tim looked at him. Farleigh scowled and took some x-ray plates from his drawer. “Changes take place,” he said. “The glands ~ have a lot to do with it. I’m wondering if I haven’t made a mistake.”

  “How?”

  “If I called in a specialist. Joanna is—ah— it may be a form of hypothyroidism. Her skin, the exoderm, is thickening.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “You wouldn’t. Unless you tried to put a hypodermic needle through it. These x-rays—” He seemed oddly reluctant to show them to Tim.

  “I gave her a gastro-intestinal series, and some iodine stains. One way to get a look at interior organs. It’s peculiar. There’s some sort of intestinal atrophy—the appendix has entirely disappeared, and the heart’s much enlarged. Other things—” “What?”

  “Probably nothing,” Farleigh said, putting the plates away again. “Just ask Joanna to run in and see me, will you?”

  “Yeah,” Tim said and left.

  When he got home that night, the living-room was dark and empty. A low crooning noise came from the bedroom. He went quietly to the door and looked in. He couldn’t see Joanna, but he saw something else, moving across the floor.