Страница:
He seized my hand. «Bring your wine. You'll need it!» He hustled me along through the tables in a swiftly filling room of mostly middle-aged and some fairly young men, and a few smoke-exhaling ladies. I jogged along, staring back at the EXIT as if my future life were there.
Before us stood a golden door.
«And behind the door?» I asked.
«What always lies behind any golden door?» my host responded. «Touch.»
I reached out to print the door with my thumb.
«What do you feel?» my host inquired.
«Youngness, youth, beauty.» I touched again. «All the springtimes that ever were or ever will be.»
«Jeez, the man's a poet. Push.»
We pushed and the golden door swung soundlessly wide.
«Is this where Dorian is?»
«No, no, only his students, his disciples, his almost Friends. Feast your eyes.»
I did as I was told and saw, at the longest bar in the world, a line of men, a lineage of young men, reflecting and re-reflecting each other as in a fabled mirror maze, that illusion seen where mirrors face each other and you find yourself repeated to infinity, large, small, very small, smallest, GONE! The young men were all staring down the long bar at us and then, as if unable to pull their gaze away, at themselves. You could almost hear their cries of appreciation. And with each cry, they grew younger and younger and more splendid and more beautiful…
I gazed upon a tapestry of beauty, a golden phalanx freshly out of the Elysian fields and hills. The gates of mythology swung wide and Apollo and his demi-Apollos glided forth, each more beautiful than the last.
I must have gasped. I heard my host inhale as if he drank my wine.
«Yes, aren't they,» he said.
«Come,» whispered my new friend. «Run the gauntlet. Don't linger; you may find tiger-tears on your sleeve and blood rising. Now.» And he glided, he undulated, me along on his soundless tuxedo slippers, his fingers a pale touch on my elbow, his breath a flower scent too near. I heard myself say:
«It's been written that H. G. Wells attracted women with his breath, which smelled of honey. Then I learned that such breath comes with illness.»
«How clever. Do I smell of hospitals and medicines?»
«I didn't mean-«
«Quickly. You're rare meat in the zoo. Hup, two, three!»
«Hold on,» I said, breathless not from walking fast but from perceiving quickly. «This man, and the next, and the one after that-«
''Yes?!»
«My God,» I said, «they're almost all the same, look-alikes!»
«Bull's-eye, halftrue! And the next and the next after that, as far behind as we have gone, as far ahead as we might go. All twenty-nine years old, all golden tan, all six feet tall, white of teeth, bright of eye. Each different but beautiful, like me!»
I glanced at him and saw what I saw around me. Similar but different beauties. So much youngness I was stunned.
«Isn't it time you told me your name?»
«Dorian.»
«But you said you were his Friend.»
«I am. They are. But we all share his name. This chap here. And the next. Oh, once we had commoner names. Smith and Jones. Harry and Phil. Jimmy and Jake. But then we signed up to become Friends.»
«Is that why I was invited? To sign up?»
«I saw you in a bar across town a year ago, made queries. A year later, you look the proper age-«
«Proper-?»
«Well, aren't you? Just leaving sixty-nine, arriving at seventy?»
''Well.''
«My God! Are you happy being seventy?»
«It'll do.''
«Do? Wouldn't you like to be really happy, steal some wild oats? Sow them?!»
«That time's over.»
«It's not. I asked and you came, curious.
«Curious about what?»
«This.» He bared me his neck again and flexed his pale white wrists. «And all those!» He waved at the fine faces as we passed. «Dorian's sons. Don't you want to be gloriously wild and young like them?»
«How can I decide?»
«Lord, you've thought of it all night for years. Soon you could be part of this!»
We had reached the far end of the line of men with bronzed faces, white teeth, and breath like H. G. Wells' scent of honey …
«Aren't you tempted?» he pursued. «Will you refuse-«
«Immortality?»
«No! To live the next twenty years, die at ninety, and look twenty-nine in the damn tomb! In the mirror over there-what do you see?»
«An old goat among ten dozen fauns.»
«Yes!»
«Where do I sign up?» I laughed.
«Do you accept?»
«No, I need more facts.»
«Damn! Here's the second door. Get in!»
He swung wide a door, more golden than the first, shoved me, followed, and slammed the door. I stared at darkness.
«What's this?» I whispered.
«Dorian's Gym, of course. If you work out here all year, hour by hour, day by day, you get younger.»
«That's some gym,» I observed, trying to adjust my eyes to the dim areas beyond where shadows tumbled, and voices rustled and whispered. «I've heard of gyms that helpkeep, not make, you young . . . Now tell me…
«I read your mind. For every old man that became young in there at the bar, is there an attic portrait?»
«Well, is there?»
«No! There's only Dorian.»
«A single person? Who grows old for all of you?»
«Touche'! Behold his gym!»
I gazed off into a vast high arena where a hundred shadows stirred and moaned like a tide on a terrible shore.
«I think it's time to leave,» I said.
«Nonsense. Come. No one will see you. They're all… busy. I am Moses,» said the sweet breath at my elbow. «And I hereby tell the Red Sea to part!» And we moved along a path between two tides, each shadowed, each more terrifying with its gasps, its cries, its slip-pages of flesh, its slapping like waves, its repeated whispers for more, more, ah, God, more!
I ran, but my host grabbed on. «Look right, left, now right again!»
There must have been a hundred, two hundred animals, beasts, no, men wrestling, leaping, falling, rolling in darkness. It was a sea of flesh, undulant, a writhing of limbs on acres of tumbling mats, a glistening of skin, flashes of teeth where men climbed ropes, spun on leather horses, or flung themselves up crossbars to be seized down in the tidal flux of lamentations and muffled cries. I stared across an ocean of rising and falling shapes. My ears were scorched by their bestial moans.
«What, my God,» I exclaimed, «does it all mean?»
«There. See.»
And above the wild turbulence of flesh in a far wall was a great window, forty feet wide and ten feet tall, and behind that cold glass Something watching, savoring, alert, one vast stare.
And over all there was the suction of a great breath, a vast inhalation which pulled at the gymnasium air with a constant hungry and invisible need. As the shadows tumbled and writhed, this inhalation tugged at them and the raw air in my nostrils. Somewhere a huge vacuum machine sucked in darkness but did not exhale. There were long pauses as the shadows flailed and fell, and then another savoring inhalation. It swallowed breath. In, in, always in, devouring the sweaty air, hungering the passions.
And the shadows were pulled, I was pulled, toward that vast glass eye, that immense window behind which a shapeless Something stared to dine on gymnasium airs.
«Dorian?» I guessed.
«Come meet him.»
«Yes, but . . .» I watched the wild, convulsive shadows. «What are they doing?»
«Go find out. Afraid? Cowards never live. So!»
He swung wide a third door and whether it was golden hot and alive, I could not feel, for suddenly I lurched into a hothouse as the door slammed and was locked by my blond young friend. «Ready?»
«Lord, I must go home!»
«Not until you meet,» said my host, «him.»
He pointed. At first I could see nothing. The lights were dim and the place, like the gymnasium, was mostly shadow. I smelled jungle greens. The air stirred on my face with sensuous strokes. I smelled papaya and mango and the wilted odor of orchids mixed with the salt smells of an unseen tide. But the tide was there with that immense inhaled breathing that rose and was quiet and began again.
«I see no one,» I said.
«Let your eyes adjust. Wait.»
I waited. I watched.
There were no chairs in the room, for there was no need of chairs.
He did not sit, he did not recline, he «prolonged» himself on the largest bed in history. The dimensions might easily have been fifteen feet by twenty. It reminded me of the apartment of a writer I once knew who had completely covered his room with mattresses so that women stumbled on the sill and fell flat out on the springs.
So it was with this nest, with Dorian, immense, a gelatinous skin, a vitreous shape, undulant within that nest.
And if Dorian was male or female, I could not guess. This was a great pudding, an emperor jellyfish, a monstrous heap of sexual gelatin from the exterior of which, on occasion, noxious gases escaped with rubbery sounds; great lips sibilating. That and the sough of that labored pump, that constant inhalation, were the only sounds within the chamber as I stood, anxious, alarmed, but at last impressed by this beached creature, cast up from a dark landfall. The thing was a gelatinous cripple, an octopus without limbs, an amphibian stranded, unable to undulate and seep back to an ocean sewer from which it had inched itself in monstrous waves and gusts of lungs and eruptions of corrupt gas until now it lay, featureless, with a mere x-ray ghost of legs, arms, wrists, and hands with skeletal fingers. At last I could discern, at the far end of this flesh peninsula, what seemed a half-flat face with a frail phantom of skull beneath, an open fissure for an eye, a ravenous nostril, and a red wound which ripped wide to surprise me as a mouth.
And at last this thing, this Dorian, spoke.
Or whispered, or lisped.
And with each lisp, each sibilance, an odor of decay was expelled as if from a vast night-swamp balloon, sunk on its side, lost in fetid water as its unsavory breath rinsed my cheeks. It expelled but one lingering syllable:
Yessss.
Yes what?
And then it added:
Soooo…
«How long . . . how long,» I murmured, «has it . . . has he been here?»
«No one knows. When Victoria was Queen? When Booth emptied his makeup kit to load his pistol? When Napoleon yellow-stained the Moscow snows? Forever's not bad .
What else?»
I swallowed hard. «Is . . . is he?»
«Dorian? Dorian of the attic? He of the Portrait? And somewhere along the line found portraits not enough? Oil, canvas, no depth. The world needed something that could soak in, sponge the midnight rains, breakfast and lunch on loss, depravity's guilt. Something to truly take in, drink, digest; a pustule, imperial intestine. A rheum oesophagus for sin. A laboratory plate to take bacterial snows. Dorian.»
The long archipelago of membranous skin flushed some buried tubes and valves, and a semblance of laughter was throttled and drowned in the aqueous gels.
A slit widened to emit gas and again the single word:
Yessss .
«He's welcoming you!» My host smiled.
«I know, I know,» I said impatiently. «But why? I don't even want to be here. I'm ill. Why can't we go?»
«Because»-my host laughed-«you were selected.
«Selected?»
«We've had our eye on you.»
«You mean you've watched, followed, spied on me? Christ, who gave you permission?»
«Temper, temper. Not everyone is picked.»
«Who said I wanted to be picked!?»
I turned to stare at the vast mound of priapic gelatin in which faint creeks gleamed as the creature wept its lids wide in holes to let it stare. Then all its apertures sealed: the saber-cut mouth, the slitted nostrils, the cold eyes gummed shut so that its skin was faceless. The sibilance pumped with gaseous suctions.
Yessss, it whispered.
Lisssst, it murmured.
«And list it is!» My host pulled forth a small computer pad which he tapped to screen my name, address, and phone.
He glanced from the pad to reel off such items as wilted me.
«Single,» he said.
«Married and divorced.»
«Now single! No women in your life?»
«I'm walking wounded.»
He tapped his pad. «Visiting strange bars.»
«I hadn't noticed.»
«Creative blindness. Getting to bed late. Sleeping all day. Drinking heavily three nights a week.»
«Twice!»
''My business!»
«And ours! You're balanced giddily on the rim. Shove all these facts in that one-armed bandit in your head, yank, and watch the lemons and ripe cherries spin. Yank!»
Jesus God. Yes! Bars. Drinks. Late nights. Gyms. Saunas. Masseurs. Basketball. Tennis. Soccer. Yank. Pull. Spin!
«Well?» My host searched my face, amused. «Three jackpot cherries in a row?»
I shuddered.
«Circumstance. No court would convict me.»
elects you. We tell palms to read ravenous groins. Yes?»
Gas steamed up from one shriveled aperture in the restless mound. Yessss.
They say that men in the grip of passion, blind to their own darkness, make love and run mad. Stunned by guilt, they find themselves beasts, having done the very thing they were warned not to do by church, town, parents, life. In explosive outrage they turn to the sinful lure. Seeing her as unholy provocateur, they kill. Women, in similar rages and guilts, overdose. Eve lies self-slain in the Garden. Adam hangs himself with the Snake as noose.
But here was no passionate crime, no woman, no provocateur, only the great mound of siphoning breath and my blond host. And only words which riddled me with fusillades of arrows. Like an Oriental hedgehog, bristled with shafts, my body exploded with No, No, No. Echoed and then real:
«No!»
Yessss, whispered the vapor from the mounded tissue, the skeleton buried in ancient soups.
Yessss.
I gasped to see my games, steams, midnight bars, late-dawn beds: a maniac sum.
I rounded dark corridors to confront a stranger so pockmarked, creased, and oiled by passion, so cobwebbed and smashed by drink, that I tried to avert my gaze. The terror gaped his mouth and reached for my hand. Stupidly, I reached to shake his and-rapped glass! A mirror. I stared deep into my own life. I had seen myself in shop windows, dim undersea men running in creeks. Mornings, shaving, I saw my mirrored health. But this! This troglodyte trapped in amber. Myself, snapshotted like ten dozen sexual acrobats! And who jammed this mirror at me? My beautiful host, and that corrupt flatulence beyond.
«You are selected,» they whispered.
«I refuse!» I shrieked.
And whether I shrieked aloud or merely thought, a great furnace gaped. The oceanic mound erupted thunders of gaseous streams. My beautiful host fell back, stunned that their search beneath my skin, behind my mask, had brought revulsion. Always when Dorian cried, «Friend,» raw gymnast teams had mobbed to catapult that armless, legless, featureless Sargasso Sea. Before they had smothered to drown in his miasma, to arise, embrace, and wrestle in the dark gymnasium, then run forth young to assault a world.
And I? What had I dared to do, that quaked that membranous sac into regurgitated whistling and broken winds?
«Idiot!» cried my host, all teeth and fists. «Out! Out!»
«Out,» I cried, spun to obey, and tripped.
I do not clearly know what happened as I fell. And if it was a swift reaction to the holocaust erupted like vile spit and vomit from that putrescent mound, I cannot say. I knew no lightning shock of murder, yet knew perhaps some summer heat flash of revenge. For what? I thought. What are you to Dorian or he to you that frees the hydra behind your face, or causes the slightest twitch of leg, arm, hand, or fingernail, as the last fetid air from Dorian burned my hair and stuffed my nostrils.
It was over in a second.
Something shoved me. Did my secret self, insulted, give that push? I was flung as if on wires, knocked to sprawl at Dorian.
He gave two terrible cries, one of warning, one of despair.
I was recovered so in landing, I did not sink my hands deep in that poisonous yeast, into that multiflorid Man of War jelly. I swear that I touched, raked, scarified him with only one thing: the smallest fingernail of my right hand.
My fingernail!
And so this Dorian was shot and foundered. And so the mammoth with screams collapsed. And so the nauseous balloon sank, fold on midnight fold, upon its own boneless sell, fissuring volcanic sulfurs, immense rectal airs, outgassed whistles, and whimpers of self-pitying despair.
«Christ! What have you done!? Murderer! Damn you!» cried my host, riven to stare at Dorian's exhaustions unto death.
He whirled to strike, but ran to reach the door and cry, «Lock this! Lock! Whatever happens, for God's sake, don't open! Now!» The door slammed. I ran to lock it and turn.
Quietly, Dorian was falling away.
He sank down and down, out of sight. Like a great membranous tent with its poles removed, he vanished into the floor, down flues and vents on all sides of his great platform nest. Vents obviously created for such a massive disease-sac melting into viral fluid and sewer gas. Even as I watched, the last of the noxious clot was sucked into the vents, and I stood abandoned in a room where but a few minutes before an unspeakable strata of discards and half-born fetuses had lain sucking at sins, spoiled bones, and souls to send forth beasts in semblance of beauty. That perverse royalty, that lunatic monarch, gone, all gone. A last choke and throttle from the sewer vent underlined its death.
My God, I thought, even now, that, all that, that terrible miasma, that stuff is on its way to the sea to wash in with bland tides to lie on clean shores where bathers come at dawn …
Even now …
I stood, eyes shut, waiting.
For what? There had to be a next thing, yes? It came.
There was a trembling, shivering, and then a quaking of the wall, but especially the golden door behind me.
I spun to see as well as hear.
I saw the door shaken, and then bombarded from the other side. Fists pummeled, struck, hammered. Voices cried out and screamed and then shrieked.
I felt a great mass ram the door to shiver, to slam it on its hinges.
I stared, fearful that the door might explode and let in the flood tide of nightmare-ravening, terrified beasts, the kennel of dying things. For now their shrieks as they mauled and rattled to escape, to beg for mercy, were so terrible that I clamped my fists to my ears.
Dorian was gone, but they remained. Shrieks. Screams. Screams. Shrieks. An avalanche of limbs beyond the door struck and fell, yammering.
What must they look like now? I thought. All those bouquets. All those beauties.
The police will come, I thought, soon. But .
No matter what …
I would not unlock that door.
No News, or What Killed the Dog
The Witch Door
Before us stood a golden door.
«And behind the door?» I asked.
«What always lies behind any golden door?» my host responded. «Touch.»
I reached out to print the door with my thumb.
«What do you feel?» my host inquired.
«Youngness, youth, beauty.» I touched again. «All the springtimes that ever were or ever will be.»
«Jeez, the man's a poet. Push.»
We pushed and the golden door swung soundlessly wide.
«Is this where Dorian is?»
«No, no, only his students, his disciples, his almost Friends. Feast your eyes.»
I did as I was told and saw, at the longest bar in the world, a line of men, a lineage of young men, reflecting and re-reflecting each other as in a fabled mirror maze, that illusion seen where mirrors face each other and you find yourself repeated to infinity, large, small, very small, smallest, GONE! The young men were all staring down the long bar at us and then, as if unable to pull their gaze away, at themselves. You could almost hear their cries of appreciation. And with each cry, they grew younger and younger and more splendid and more beautiful…
I gazed upon a tapestry of beauty, a golden phalanx freshly out of the Elysian fields and hills. The gates of mythology swung wide and Apollo and his demi-Apollos glided forth, each more beautiful than the last.
I must have gasped. I heard my host inhale as if he drank my wine.
«Yes, aren't they,» he said.
«Come,» whispered my new friend. «Run the gauntlet. Don't linger; you may find tiger-tears on your sleeve and blood rising. Now.» And he glided, he undulated, me along on his soundless tuxedo slippers, his fingers a pale touch on my elbow, his breath a flower scent too near. I heard myself say:
«It's been written that H. G. Wells attracted women with his breath, which smelled of honey. Then I learned that such breath comes with illness.»
«How clever. Do I smell of hospitals and medicines?»
«I didn't mean-«
«Quickly. You're rare meat in the zoo. Hup, two, three!»
«Hold on,» I said, breathless not from walking fast but from perceiving quickly. «This man, and the next, and the one after that-«
''Yes?!»
«My God,» I said, «they're almost all the same, look-alikes!»
«Bull's-eye, halftrue! And the next and the next after that, as far behind as we have gone, as far ahead as we might go. All twenty-nine years old, all golden tan, all six feet tall, white of teeth, bright of eye. Each different but beautiful, like me!»
I glanced at him and saw what I saw around me. Similar but different beauties. So much youngness I was stunned.
«Isn't it time you told me your name?»
«Dorian.»
«But you said you were his Friend.»
«I am. They are. But we all share his name. This chap here. And the next. Oh, once we had commoner names. Smith and Jones. Harry and Phil. Jimmy and Jake. But then we signed up to become Friends.»
«Is that why I was invited? To sign up?»
«I saw you in a bar across town a year ago, made queries. A year later, you look the proper age-«
«Proper-?»
«Well, aren't you? Just leaving sixty-nine, arriving at seventy?»
''Well.''
«My God! Are you happy being seventy?»
«It'll do.''
«Do? Wouldn't you like to be really happy, steal some wild oats? Sow them?!»
«That time's over.»
«It's not. I asked and you came, curious.
«Curious about what?»
«This.» He bared me his neck again and flexed his pale white wrists. «And all those!» He waved at the fine faces as we passed. «Dorian's sons. Don't you want to be gloriously wild and young like them?»
«How can I decide?»
«Lord, you've thought of it all night for years. Soon you could be part of this!»
We had reached the far end of the line of men with bronzed faces, white teeth, and breath like H. G. Wells' scent of honey …
«Aren't you tempted?» he pursued. «Will you refuse-«
«Immortality?»
«No! To live the next twenty years, die at ninety, and look twenty-nine in the damn tomb! In the mirror over there-what do you see?»
«An old goat among ten dozen fauns.»
«Yes!»
«Where do I sign up?» I laughed.
«Do you accept?»
«No, I need more facts.»
«Damn! Here's the second door. Get in!»
He swung wide a door, more golden than the first, shoved me, followed, and slammed the door. I stared at darkness.
«What's this?» I whispered.
«Dorian's Gym, of course. If you work out here all year, hour by hour, day by day, you get younger.»
«That's some gym,» I observed, trying to adjust my eyes to the dim areas beyond where shadows tumbled, and voices rustled and whispered. «I've heard of gyms that helpkeep, not make, you young . . . Now tell me…
«I read your mind. For every old man that became young in there at the bar, is there an attic portrait?»
«Well, is there?»
«No! There's only Dorian.»
«A single person? Who grows old for all of you?»
«Touche'! Behold his gym!»
I gazed off into a vast high arena where a hundred shadows stirred and moaned like a tide on a terrible shore.
«I think it's time to leave,» I said.
«Nonsense. Come. No one will see you. They're all… busy. I am Moses,» said the sweet breath at my elbow. «And I hereby tell the Red Sea to part!» And we moved along a path between two tides, each shadowed, each more terrifying with its gasps, its cries, its slip-pages of flesh, its slapping like waves, its repeated whispers for more, more, ah, God, more!
I ran, but my host grabbed on. «Look right, left, now right again!»
There must have been a hundred, two hundred animals, beasts, no, men wrestling, leaping, falling, rolling in darkness. It was a sea of flesh, undulant, a writhing of limbs on acres of tumbling mats, a glistening of skin, flashes of teeth where men climbed ropes, spun on leather horses, or flung themselves up crossbars to be seized down in the tidal flux of lamentations and muffled cries. I stared across an ocean of rising and falling shapes. My ears were scorched by their bestial moans.
«What, my God,» I exclaimed, «does it all mean?»
«There. See.»
And above the wild turbulence of flesh in a far wall was a great window, forty feet wide and ten feet tall, and behind that cold glass Something watching, savoring, alert, one vast stare.
And over all there was the suction of a great breath, a vast inhalation which pulled at the gymnasium air with a constant hungry and invisible need. As the shadows tumbled and writhed, this inhalation tugged at them and the raw air in my nostrils. Somewhere a huge vacuum machine sucked in darkness but did not exhale. There were long pauses as the shadows flailed and fell, and then another savoring inhalation. It swallowed breath. In, in, always in, devouring the sweaty air, hungering the passions.
And the shadows were pulled, I was pulled, toward that vast glass eye, that immense window behind which a shapeless Something stared to dine on gymnasium airs.
«Dorian?» I guessed.
«Come meet him.»
«Yes, but . . .» I watched the wild, convulsive shadows. «What are they doing?»
«Go find out. Afraid? Cowards never live. So!»
He swung wide a third door and whether it was golden hot and alive, I could not feel, for suddenly I lurched into a hothouse as the door slammed and was locked by my blond young friend. «Ready?»
«Lord, I must go home!»
«Not until you meet,» said my host, «him.»
He pointed. At first I could see nothing. The lights were dim and the place, like the gymnasium, was mostly shadow. I smelled jungle greens. The air stirred on my face with sensuous strokes. I smelled papaya and mango and the wilted odor of orchids mixed with the salt smells of an unseen tide. But the tide was there with that immense inhaled breathing that rose and was quiet and began again.
«I see no one,» I said.
«Let your eyes adjust. Wait.»
I waited. I watched.
There were no chairs in the room, for there was no need of chairs.
He did not sit, he did not recline, he «prolonged» himself on the largest bed in history. The dimensions might easily have been fifteen feet by twenty. It reminded me of the apartment of a writer I once knew who had completely covered his room with mattresses so that women stumbled on the sill and fell flat out on the springs.
So it was with this nest, with Dorian, immense, a gelatinous skin, a vitreous shape, undulant within that nest.
And if Dorian was male or female, I could not guess. This was a great pudding, an emperor jellyfish, a monstrous heap of sexual gelatin from the exterior of which, on occasion, noxious gases escaped with rubbery sounds; great lips sibilating. That and the sough of that labored pump, that constant inhalation, were the only sounds within the chamber as I stood, anxious, alarmed, but at last impressed by this beached creature, cast up from a dark landfall. The thing was a gelatinous cripple, an octopus without limbs, an amphibian stranded, unable to undulate and seep back to an ocean sewer from which it had inched itself in monstrous waves and gusts of lungs and eruptions of corrupt gas until now it lay, featureless, with a mere x-ray ghost of legs, arms, wrists, and hands with skeletal fingers. At last I could discern, at the far end of this flesh peninsula, what seemed a half-flat face with a frail phantom of skull beneath, an open fissure for an eye, a ravenous nostril, and a red wound which ripped wide to surprise me as a mouth.
And at last this thing, this Dorian, spoke.
Or whispered, or lisped.
And with each lisp, each sibilance, an odor of decay was expelled as if from a vast night-swamp balloon, sunk on its side, lost in fetid water as its unsavory breath rinsed my cheeks. It expelled but one lingering syllable:
Yessss.
Yes what?
And then it added:
Soooo…
«How long . . . how long,» I murmured, «has it . . . has he been here?»
«No one knows. When Victoria was Queen? When Booth emptied his makeup kit to load his pistol? When Napoleon yellow-stained the Moscow snows? Forever's not bad .
What else?»
I swallowed hard. «Is . . . is he?»
«Dorian? Dorian of the attic? He of the Portrait? And somewhere along the line found portraits not enough? Oil, canvas, no depth. The world needed something that could soak in, sponge the midnight rains, breakfast and lunch on loss, depravity's guilt. Something to truly take in, drink, digest; a pustule, imperial intestine. A rheum oesophagus for sin. A laboratory plate to take bacterial snows. Dorian.»
The long archipelago of membranous skin flushed some buried tubes and valves, and a semblance of laughter was throttled and drowned in the aqueous gels.
A slit widened to emit gas and again the single word:
Yessss .
«He's welcoming you!» My host smiled.
«I know, I know,» I said impatiently. «But why? I don't even want to be here. I'm ill. Why can't we go?»
«Because»-my host laughed-«you were selected.
«Selected?»
«We've had our eye on you.»
«You mean you've watched, followed, spied on me? Christ, who gave you permission?»
«Temper, temper. Not everyone is picked.»
«Who said I wanted to be picked!?»
I turned to stare at the vast mound of priapic gelatin in which faint creeks gleamed as the creature wept its lids wide in holes to let it stare. Then all its apertures sealed: the saber-cut mouth, the slitted nostrils, the cold eyes gummed shut so that its skin was faceless. The sibilance pumped with gaseous suctions.
Yessss, it whispered.
Lisssst, it murmured.
«And list it is!» My host pulled forth a small computer pad which he tapped to screen my name, address, and phone.
He glanced from the pad to reel off such items as wilted me.
«Single,» he said.
«Married and divorced.»
«Now single! No women in your life?»
«I'm walking wounded.»
He tapped his pad. «Visiting strange bars.»
«I hadn't noticed.»
«Creative blindness. Getting to bed late. Sleeping all day. Drinking heavily three nights a week.»
«Twice!»
''My business!»
«And ours! You're balanced giddily on the rim. Shove all these facts in that one-armed bandit in your head, yank, and watch the lemons and ripe cherries spin. Yank!»
Jesus God. Yes! Bars. Drinks. Late nights. Gyms. Saunas. Masseurs. Basketball. Tennis. Soccer. Yank. Pull. Spin!
«Well?» My host searched my face, amused. «Three jackpot cherries in a row?»
I shuddered.
«Circumstance. No court would convict me.»
elects you. We tell palms to read ravenous groins. Yes?»
Gas steamed up from one shriveled aperture in the restless mound. Yessss.
They say that men in the grip of passion, blind to their own darkness, make love and run mad. Stunned by guilt, they find themselves beasts, having done the very thing they were warned not to do by church, town, parents, life. In explosive outrage they turn to the sinful lure. Seeing her as unholy provocateur, they kill. Women, in similar rages and guilts, overdose. Eve lies self-slain in the Garden. Adam hangs himself with the Snake as noose.
But here was no passionate crime, no woman, no provocateur, only the great mound of siphoning breath and my blond host. And only words which riddled me with fusillades of arrows. Like an Oriental hedgehog, bristled with shafts, my body exploded with No, No, No. Echoed and then real:
«No!»
Yessss, whispered the vapor from the mounded tissue, the skeleton buried in ancient soups.
Yessss.
I gasped to see my games, steams, midnight bars, late-dawn beds: a maniac sum.
I rounded dark corridors to confront a stranger so pockmarked, creased, and oiled by passion, so cobwebbed and smashed by drink, that I tried to avert my gaze. The terror gaped his mouth and reached for my hand. Stupidly, I reached to shake his and-rapped glass! A mirror. I stared deep into my own life. I had seen myself in shop windows, dim undersea men running in creeks. Mornings, shaving, I saw my mirrored health. But this! This troglodyte trapped in amber. Myself, snapshotted like ten dozen sexual acrobats! And who jammed this mirror at me? My beautiful host, and that corrupt flatulence beyond.
«You are selected,» they whispered.
«I refuse!» I shrieked.
And whether I shrieked aloud or merely thought, a great furnace gaped. The oceanic mound erupted thunders of gaseous streams. My beautiful host fell back, stunned that their search beneath my skin, behind my mask, had brought revulsion. Always when Dorian cried, «Friend,» raw gymnast teams had mobbed to catapult that armless, legless, featureless Sargasso Sea. Before they had smothered to drown in his miasma, to arise, embrace, and wrestle in the dark gymnasium, then run forth young to assault a world.
And I? What had I dared to do, that quaked that membranous sac into regurgitated whistling and broken winds?
«Idiot!» cried my host, all teeth and fists. «Out! Out!»
«Out,» I cried, spun to obey, and tripped.
I do not clearly know what happened as I fell. And if it was a swift reaction to the holocaust erupted like vile spit and vomit from that putrescent mound, I cannot say. I knew no lightning shock of murder, yet knew perhaps some summer heat flash of revenge. For what? I thought. What are you to Dorian or he to you that frees the hydra behind your face, or causes the slightest twitch of leg, arm, hand, or fingernail, as the last fetid air from Dorian burned my hair and stuffed my nostrils.
It was over in a second.
Something shoved me. Did my secret self, insulted, give that push? I was flung as if on wires, knocked to sprawl at Dorian.
He gave two terrible cries, one of warning, one of despair.
I was recovered so in landing, I did not sink my hands deep in that poisonous yeast, into that multiflorid Man of War jelly. I swear that I touched, raked, scarified him with only one thing: the smallest fingernail of my right hand.
My fingernail!
And so this Dorian was shot and foundered. And so the mammoth with screams collapsed. And so the nauseous balloon sank, fold on midnight fold, upon its own boneless sell, fissuring volcanic sulfurs, immense rectal airs, outgassed whistles, and whimpers of self-pitying despair.
«Christ! What have you done!? Murderer! Damn you!» cried my host, riven to stare at Dorian's exhaustions unto death.
He whirled to strike, but ran to reach the door and cry, «Lock this! Lock! Whatever happens, for God's sake, don't open! Now!» The door slammed. I ran to lock it and turn.
Quietly, Dorian was falling away.
He sank down and down, out of sight. Like a great membranous tent with its poles removed, he vanished into the floor, down flues and vents on all sides of his great platform nest. Vents obviously created for such a massive disease-sac melting into viral fluid and sewer gas. Even as I watched, the last of the noxious clot was sucked into the vents, and I stood abandoned in a room where but a few minutes before an unspeakable strata of discards and half-born fetuses had lain sucking at sins, spoiled bones, and souls to send forth beasts in semblance of beauty. That perverse royalty, that lunatic monarch, gone, all gone. A last choke and throttle from the sewer vent underlined its death.
My God, I thought, even now, that, all that, that terrible miasma, that stuff is on its way to the sea to wash in with bland tides to lie on clean shores where bathers come at dawn …
Even now …
I stood, eyes shut, waiting.
For what? There had to be a next thing, yes? It came.
There was a trembling, shivering, and then a quaking of the wall, but especially the golden door behind me.
I spun to see as well as hear.
I saw the door shaken, and then bombarded from the other side. Fists pummeled, struck, hammered. Voices cried out and screamed and then shrieked.
I felt a great mass ram the door to shiver, to slam it on its hinges.
I stared, fearful that the door might explode and let in the flood tide of nightmare-ravening, terrified beasts, the kennel of dying things. For now their shrieks as they mauled and rattled to escape, to beg for mercy, were so terrible that I clamped my fists to my ears.
Dorian was gone, but they remained. Shrieks. Screams. Screams. Shrieks. An avalanche of limbs beyond the door struck and fell, yammering.
What must they look like now? I thought. All those bouquets. All those beauties.
The police will come, I thought, soon. But .
No matter what …
I would not unlock that door.
No News, or What Killed the Dog
1994 year
It was a day of holocausts, cataclysms, tornadoes, earth-quakes, blackouts, mass murders, eruptions, and miscellaneous dooms, at the peak of which the sun swallowed the earth and the stars vanished.
But to put it simply, the most respected member of the Bentley family up and died.
Dog was his name, and dog he was.
The Bentleys, arising late Saturday morning, found Dog stretched on the kitchen floor, his head toward Mecca, his paws neatly folded, his tail not a-thump but silent for the first time in twenty years.
Twenty years! My God, everyone thought, could it really have been that long? And now, without permission, Dog was cold and gone.
Susan, the younger daughter, woke everyone yelling:
«Something's wrong with Dog. Quick!»
Without bothering to don his bathrobe, Roger Bentley, in his underwear, hurried out to look at that quiet beast on the
kitchen tiles. His wife, Ruth, followed, and then their son Skip, twelve. The rest of the family, married and flown, Rodney and Sal, would arrive later. Each in turn would say the same thing:
«No! Dog was forever.»
Dog said nothing, but lay there like World War II, freshly finished, and a devastation.
Tears poured down Susan's cheeks, then down Ruth Bentley's, followed in good order by tears from Father and, at last, when it had sunk in, Skip.
Instinctively, they made a ring around Dog, kneeling to the floor to touch him, as if this might suddenly make him sit up, smile as he always did at his food, bark, and beat them to the door. But their touching did nothing but increase their tears.
But at last they rose, hugged each other, and went blindly in search of breakfast, in the midst of which Ruth Bentley said, stunned, «We can't just leave him there.»
Roger Bentley picked Dog up, gently, and moved him out on the patio, in the shade, by the pool.
«What do we do next?»
«I don't know,» said Roger Bentley. «This is the first death in the family in years and-« He stopped, snorted, and shook his head. «I mean-«
«You meant exactly what you said,» said Ruth Bentley. «If Dog wasn't family, he was nothing. God, I loved him.»
A fresh burst of tears ensued, during which Roger Bentley brought a blanket to put over Dog, but Susan stopped him.
«No, no.1 want to see him. I won't be able to see him ever again. He's so beautiful. He's so — old.»
They all carried their breakfasts out on the patio to sit around Dog, somehow feeling they couldn't ignore him by eating inside.
Roger Bentley telephoned his other children, whose response, after the first tears, was the same: they'd be right over. Wait.
When the other children arrived, first Rodney, twenty-one, and then the older daughter, Sal, twenty-four, a fresh storm of grief shook everyone and then they sat silently for a moment, watching Dog for a miracle.
«What are your plans?» asked Rodney at last.
«I know this is silly,» said Roger Bentley after an embarrassed pause. «After all, he's only a dog-«
«Only!?» cried everyone instantly.
Roger had to back off. «Look, he deserves the Taj Mahal. What he'll get is the Orion Pet Cemetery over in Burbank.»
«Pet Cemetery!?» cried everyone, but each in a different way.
«My God,» said Rodney, «that's silly!»
«What's so silly about it?» Skip's face reddened and his lip trembled. «Dog, why, Dog was a pearl of. . . rare price.
«Yeah!» added Susan.
«Well, pardon me.» Roger Bentley turned away to look at the pool, the bushes, the sky. «I suppose I could call those trash people who pick up dead bodies-«
«Trash people?» exclaimed Ruth Bentley.
«Dead bodies?» said Susan. «Dog isn't a dead body!»
«What is he, then?» asked Skip bleakly.
They all stared at Dog lying quietly there by the pool. «He's,» blurted Susan at last, «he's . . . he's my love!» Before the crying could start again, Roger Bentley picked up the patio telephone, dialed the Pet Cemetery, talked, and put the phone down.
«Two hundred dollars,» he informed everyone. «Not bad.»
«For Dog?» said Skip. «Not enough!»
«Are you really serious about this?» asked Ruth Bentley.
«Yeah,» said Roger. «I've made fun of those places all my life. But, now, seeing as how we'll never be able to visit Dog again-« He let a moment pass. «They'll come take Dog at noon. Services tomorrow.»
«Services!» Snorting, Rodney stalked to the rim of the pool and waved his arms. «You won't get me to that!»
Everyone stared. Rodney turned at last and let his shoulders slump. «Hell, I'll be there.»
«Dog would never forgive you if you didn't.» Susan snuffed and wiped her nose.
But Roger Bentley had heard none of this. Staring at Dog, then his family, and up to the sky, he shut his eyes and exhaled a great whisper:
«Oh, my God!» he said, eyes shut. «Do you realize that this is the first terrible thing that's happened to our family? Have we ever been sick, gone to the hospital? Been in an accident?»
He waited.
«No,» said everyone.
«Gosh,» said Skip.
«Gosh, indeed! You sure as hell notice accidents, sickness, hospitals.»
«Maybe,» said Susan, and had to stop and wait because her voice broke. «Maybe Dog died just to make us notice how lucky we are.»
«Lucky?!» Roger Bentley opened his eyes and turned. «Yes! You know what we are-«
«The science fiction generation,» offered Rodney, lighting a cigarette casually.
«What?»
«You rave on about that, your school lectures, or during dinner. Can openers? Science fiction. Automobiles. Radio, TV, films. Everything! So science fiction!»
«Well, dammit, they are!» cried Roger Bentley and went to stare at Dog, as if the answers were there amongst the last departing fleas. «Hell, not so long ago there were no cars, can openers, TV. Someone had to dream them. Start of lecture. Someone had to build them. Mid-lecture. So science fiction dreams became finished science fact. Lecture finis!»
«I bet!» Rodney applauded politely.
Roger Bentley could only sink under the weight of his son's irony to stroke the dear dead beast.
«Sorry. Dog bit me. Can't help myself. Thousands of years, all we did is die. Now, that time's over. In sum: science fiction.»
«Bull.» Rodney laughed. «Stop reading that junk, Dad.»
«Junk?» Roger touched Dog's muzzle. «Sure. But how about Lister, Pasteur, Salk? Hated death. Jumped to stop it. That's all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different. Junk?!»
«Ancient history, Pop.»
«Ancient?» Roger Bentley fixed his son with a terrible eye. «Christ. When I was born in 1920, if you wanted to visit your family on Sundays you-«
«Went to the graveyard?» said Rodney.
«Yes. My brother and sister died when I was seven. Half of my family gone! Tell me, dear children, how many of your friends died while you were growing up. In grammar school? High school?»
He included the family in his gaze, and waited.
«None,» said Rodney at last.
«None! You hear that? None! Christ. Six of my best friends died by the time I was ten! Wait! I just remembered!»
Roger Bentley hurried to rummage in a hall closet and brought out an old 78-rpm record into the sunlight, blowing off the dust. He squinted at the label:
«No News, Or What Killed The Dog?»
Everyone came to look at the ancient disc.
«Hey, how old is that?»
«Heard it a hundred times when I was a kid in the twenties,» said Roger.
«No News, Or What Killed The Dog?» Sal glanced at her father's face.
«This gets played at Dog's funeral,» he said.
«You're not serious?» said Ruth Bentley.
Just then the doorbell rang.
«That can't be the Pet Cemetery people come to take Dog-?»
«No!» cried Susan. «Not so soon!»
Instinctively, the family formed a wall between Dog and the doorbell sound, holding off eternity.
Then they cried, one more time.
The strange and wonderful thing about the funeral was how many people came.
«I didn't know Dog had so many friends,» Susan blubbered.
«He freeloaded all around town,» said Rodney.
«Speak kindly of the dead.»
«Well, he did, dammit., Otherwise why is Bill Johnson here, or Gert Skall, or Jim across the street?»
«Dog,» said Roger Bentley, «I sure wish you could see this.»
«He does.» Susan's eyes welled over. «Wherever he is.»
«Good old Sue,» whispered Rodney, «who cries at telephone books-«
«Shut up!» cried Susan.
«Hush, both of you.»
And Roger Bentley moved, eyes down, toward the front of the small funeral parlor where Dog was laid out, head on paws, in a box that was neither too rich nor too simple but just right.
Roger Bentley placed a steel needle down on the black record which turned on top of a flake-painted portable phonograph. The needle scratched and hissed. All the neighbors leaned forward.
«No funeral oration,» said Roger quickly. «Just this . . And a voice spoke on a day long ago and told a story about a man who returned from vacation to ask friends what had happened while he was gone.
It seemed that nothing whatsoever had happened. Oh, just one thing. Everyone wondered what had killed the dog.
The dog? asked the vacationer. My dog died? Yes, and maybe it was the burned horseflesh did it. Burned horseflesh!? cried the vacationer. Well, said his informant, when the barn burned, the horseflesh caught fire, so the dog ate the burned horseflesh, died.
The barn!? cried the vacationer. How did it catch fire? Well, sparks from the house blew over, torched the barn, burned the horseflesh, dog ate them, died.
Sparks from the house!? shouted the vacationer. How-?
It was the curtains in the house, caught fire.
Curtains? Burned!?
From the candles around the coffin.
Coffin!?
Your aunt's funeral coffin, candles there caught the curtains, house burned, sparks from the house flew over, burned down the barn, dog ate the burned horseflesh-In sum: no news, or what killed the dog!
The record hissed and stopped.
In the silence, there was a little quiet laughter, even though the record had been about dogs and people dying.
«Now, do we get the lecture?» said Rodney.
«No, a sermon.»
Roger Bentley put his hands on the pulpit to stare for long moments at notes he hadn't made.
«I don't know if we're here for Dog or ourselves. Both, I suppose. We're the nothing-ever-happened-to-us people. Today is a first. Not that I want a rush of doom or disease. God forbid. Death, come slowly, please.»
He turned the phonograph record round and round in his hands, trying to read the words under the grooves.
«No news. Except the aunt's funeral candles catch the curtains, sparks fly, and the dog goes west. In our lives, just the opposite. No news for years. Good livers, healthy hearts, good times. So-what's it all about?»
Roger Bentley glanced at Rodney, who was checking his wristwatch.
«Someday we must die, also.» Roger Bentley hurried on. «Hard to believe. We're spoiled. But Susan was right. Dog died to tell us this, gently, and we must believe. And at the same time celebrate. What? The fact that we're the start of an amazing, dumbfounding history of survival that will only get better as the centuries pass. You may argue that the next war will take us all. Maybe.
«I can only say I think you will grow to be old, very old people. Ninety years from now, most people will have cured hearts, stopped cancers, and jumped life cycles. A lot of sadness will have gone out of the world, thank God. Will this be easy to do? No. Will we do it? Yes. Not in all countries, right off. But, finally, in most.
«As I said yesterday, fifty years ago, if you wanted to
visit your aunts, uncles, grandparents, brothers, sisters, the graveyard was it. Death was all the talk. You had to talk it. Time's up, Rodney?»
Rodney signaled his father he had one last minute.
Roger Bentley wound it down:
«Sure, kids still die. But not millions. Old folks? Wind up in Sun City instead of marble Orchard.»
The father surveyed his family, bright-eyed, in the pews.
«God, look at you! Then look back. A thousand centuries of absolute terror, absolute grief. How parents stayed sane to raise their kids when half of them died, damned if I know. Yet with broken hearts, they did. While millions died of flu or the Plague.
«So here we are in a new time that we can't see because we stand in the eye of the hurricane, where everything's calm.
«I'll shut up now, with a last word for Dog. Because we loved him, we've done this almost silly thing, this service, but now suddenly we're not ashamed or sorry we bought him a plot or had me speak. We may never come visit him, who can say? But he has a place. Dog, old boy, bless you. Now, everyone, blow your nose.»
Everyone blew his nose.
«Dad,» said Rodney suddenly, «could-we hear the record again?»
Everyone looked at Rodney, surprised.
«Just,» said Roger Bentley, «what I was going to suggest.»
He put the needle on the record. It hissed.
About a minute in, when the sparks from the house flew over to burn the barn and torch the horseflesh and kill the dog, there was a sound at the back doorway to the small parlor.
Everyone turned.
A strange man stood in the door holding a small wicker basket from which came familiar, small yapping sounds.
And even as the flames from the candles around the coffin caught the curtains and the last sparks blew on the wind
The whole family, drawn out into the sunlight, gathered around the stranger with the wicker basket, waiting for Father to arrive to throw back the coverlet on the small carrier so they could all dip their hands in.
That moment, as Susan said later, was like reading the telephone book one more time.
It was a day of holocausts, cataclysms, tornadoes, earth-quakes, blackouts, mass murders, eruptions, and miscellaneous dooms, at the peak of which the sun swallowed the earth and the stars vanished.
But to put it simply, the most respected member of the Bentley family up and died.
Dog was his name, and dog he was.
The Bentleys, arising late Saturday morning, found Dog stretched on the kitchen floor, his head toward Mecca, his paws neatly folded, his tail not a-thump but silent for the first time in twenty years.
Twenty years! My God, everyone thought, could it really have been that long? And now, without permission, Dog was cold and gone.
Susan, the younger daughter, woke everyone yelling:
«Something's wrong with Dog. Quick!»
Without bothering to don his bathrobe, Roger Bentley, in his underwear, hurried out to look at that quiet beast on the
kitchen tiles. His wife, Ruth, followed, and then their son Skip, twelve. The rest of the family, married and flown, Rodney and Sal, would arrive later. Each in turn would say the same thing:
«No! Dog was forever.»
Dog said nothing, but lay there like World War II, freshly finished, and a devastation.
Tears poured down Susan's cheeks, then down Ruth Bentley's, followed in good order by tears from Father and, at last, when it had sunk in, Skip.
Instinctively, they made a ring around Dog, kneeling to the floor to touch him, as if this might suddenly make him sit up, smile as he always did at his food, bark, and beat them to the door. But their touching did nothing but increase their tears.
But at last they rose, hugged each other, and went blindly in search of breakfast, in the midst of which Ruth Bentley said, stunned, «We can't just leave him there.»
Roger Bentley picked Dog up, gently, and moved him out on the patio, in the shade, by the pool.
«What do we do next?»
«I don't know,» said Roger Bentley. «This is the first death in the family in years and-« He stopped, snorted, and shook his head. «I mean-«
«You meant exactly what you said,» said Ruth Bentley. «If Dog wasn't family, he was nothing. God, I loved him.»
A fresh burst of tears ensued, during which Roger Bentley brought a blanket to put over Dog, but Susan stopped him.
«No, no.1 want to see him. I won't be able to see him ever again. He's so beautiful. He's so — old.»
They all carried their breakfasts out on the patio to sit around Dog, somehow feeling they couldn't ignore him by eating inside.
Roger Bentley telephoned his other children, whose response, after the first tears, was the same: they'd be right over. Wait.
When the other children arrived, first Rodney, twenty-one, and then the older daughter, Sal, twenty-four, a fresh storm of grief shook everyone and then they sat silently for a moment, watching Dog for a miracle.
«What are your plans?» asked Rodney at last.
«I know this is silly,» said Roger Bentley after an embarrassed pause. «After all, he's only a dog-«
«Only!?» cried everyone instantly.
Roger had to back off. «Look, he deserves the Taj Mahal. What he'll get is the Orion Pet Cemetery over in Burbank.»
«Pet Cemetery!?» cried everyone, but each in a different way.
«My God,» said Rodney, «that's silly!»
«What's so silly about it?» Skip's face reddened and his lip trembled. «Dog, why, Dog was a pearl of. . . rare price.
«Yeah!» added Susan.
«Well, pardon me.» Roger Bentley turned away to look at the pool, the bushes, the sky. «I suppose I could call those trash people who pick up dead bodies-«
«Trash people?» exclaimed Ruth Bentley.
«Dead bodies?» said Susan. «Dog isn't a dead body!»
«What is he, then?» asked Skip bleakly.
They all stared at Dog lying quietly there by the pool. «He's,» blurted Susan at last, «he's . . . he's my love!» Before the crying could start again, Roger Bentley picked up the patio telephone, dialed the Pet Cemetery, talked, and put the phone down.
«Two hundred dollars,» he informed everyone. «Not bad.»
«For Dog?» said Skip. «Not enough!»
«Are you really serious about this?» asked Ruth Bentley.
«Yeah,» said Roger. «I've made fun of those places all my life. But, now, seeing as how we'll never be able to visit Dog again-« He let a moment pass. «They'll come take Dog at noon. Services tomorrow.»
«Services!» Snorting, Rodney stalked to the rim of the pool and waved his arms. «You won't get me to that!»
Everyone stared. Rodney turned at last and let his shoulders slump. «Hell, I'll be there.»
«Dog would never forgive you if you didn't.» Susan snuffed and wiped her nose.
But Roger Bentley had heard none of this. Staring at Dog, then his family, and up to the sky, he shut his eyes and exhaled a great whisper:
«Oh, my God!» he said, eyes shut. «Do you realize that this is the first terrible thing that's happened to our family? Have we ever been sick, gone to the hospital? Been in an accident?»
He waited.
«No,» said everyone.
«Gosh,» said Skip.
«Gosh, indeed! You sure as hell notice accidents, sickness, hospitals.»
«Maybe,» said Susan, and had to stop and wait because her voice broke. «Maybe Dog died just to make us notice how lucky we are.»
«Lucky?!» Roger Bentley opened his eyes and turned. «Yes! You know what we are-«
«The science fiction generation,» offered Rodney, lighting a cigarette casually.
«What?»
«You rave on about that, your school lectures, or during dinner. Can openers? Science fiction. Automobiles. Radio, TV, films. Everything! So science fiction!»
«Well, dammit, they are!» cried Roger Bentley and went to stare at Dog, as if the answers were there amongst the last departing fleas. «Hell, not so long ago there were no cars, can openers, TV. Someone had to dream them. Start of lecture. Someone had to build them. Mid-lecture. So science fiction dreams became finished science fact. Lecture finis!»
«I bet!» Rodney applauded politely.
Roger Bentley could only sink under the weight of his son's irony to stroke the dear dead beast.
«Sorry. Dog bit me. Can't help myself. Thousands of years, all we did is die. Now, that time's over. In sum: science fiction.»
«Bull.» Rodney laughed. «Stop reading that junk, Dad.»
«Junk?» Roger touched Dog's muzzle. «Sure. But how about Lister, Pasteur, Salk? Hated death. Jumped to stop it. That's all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different. Junk?!»
«Ancient history, Pop.»
«Ancient?» Roger Bentley fixed his son with a terrible eye. «Christ. When I was born in 1920, if you wanted to visit your family on Sundays you-«
«Went to the graveyard?» said Rodney.
«Yes. My brother and sister died when I was seven. Half of my family gone! Tell me, dear children, how many of your friends died while you were growing up. In grammar school? High school?»
He included the family in his gaze, and waited.
«None,» said Rodney at last.
«None! You hear that? None! Christ. Six of my best friends died by the time I was ten! Wait! I just remembered!»
Roger Bentley hurried to rummage in a hall closet and brought out an old 78-rpm record into the sunlight, blowing off the dust. He squinted at the label:
«No News, Or What Killed The Dog?»
Everyone came to look at the ancient disc.
«Hey, how old is that?»
«Heard it a hundred times when I was a kid in the twenties,» said Roger.
«No News, Or What Killed The Dog?» Sal glanced at her father's face.
«This gets played at Dog's funeral,» he said.
«You're not serious?» said Ruth Bentley.
Just then the doorbell rang.
«That can't be the Pet Cemetery people come to take Dog-?»
«No!» cried Susan. «Not so soon!»
Instinctively, the family formed a wall between Dog and the doorbell sound, holding off eternity.
Then they cried, one more time.
The strange and wonderful thing about the funeral was how many people came.
«I didn't know Dog had so many friends,» Susan blubbered.
«He freeloaded all around town,» said Rodney.
«Speak kindly of the dead.»
«Well, he did, dammit., Otherwise why is Bill Johnson here, or Gert Skall, or Jim across the street?»
«Dog,» said Roger Bentley, «I sure wish you could see this.»
«He does.» Susan's eyes welled over. «Wherever he is.»
«Good old Sue,» whispered Rodney, «who cries at telephone books-«
«Shut up!» cried Susan.
«Hush, both of you.»
And Roger Bentley moved, eyes down, toward the front of the small funeral parlor where Dog was laid out, head on paws, in a box that was neither too rich nor too simple but just right.
Roger Bentley placed a steel needle down on the black record which turned on top of a flake-painted portable phonograph. The needle scratched and hissed. All the neighbors leaned forward.
«No funeral oration,» said Roger quickly. «Just this . . And a voice spoke on a day long ago and told a story about a man who returned from vacation to ask friends what had happened while he was gone.
It seemed that nothing whatsoever had happened. Oh, just one thing. Everyone wondered what had killed the dog.
The dog? asked the vacationer. My dog died? Yes, and maybe it was the burned horseflesh did it. Burned horseflesh!? cried the vacationer. Well, said his informant, when the barn burned, the horseflesh caught fire, so the dog ate the burned horseflesh, died.
The barn!? cried the vacationer. How did it catch fire? Well, sparks from the house blew over, torched the barn, burned the horseflesh, dog ate them, died.
Sparks from the house!? shouted the vacationer. How-?
It was the curtains in the house, caught fire.
Curtains? Burned!?
From the candles around the coffin.
Coffin!?
Your aunt's funeral coffin, candles there caught the curtains, house burned, sparks from the house flew over, burned down the barn, dog ate the burned horseflesh-In sum: no news, or what killed the dog!
The record hissed and stopped.
In the silence, there was a little quiet laughter, even though the record had been about dogs and people dying.
«Now, do we get the lecture?» said Rodney.
«No, a sermon.»
Roger Bentley put his hands on the pulpit to stare for long moments at notes he hadn't made.
«I don't know if we're here for Dog or ourselves. Both, I suppose. We're the nothing-ever-happened-to-us people. Today is a first. Not that I want a rush of doom or disease. God forbid. Death, come slowly, please.»
He turned the phonograph record round and round in his hands, trying to read the words under the grooves.
«No news. Except the aunt's funeral candles catch the curtains, sparks fly, and the dog goes west. In our lives, just the opposite. No news for years. Good livers, healthy hearts, good times. So-what's it all about?»
Roger Bentley glanced at Rodney, who was checking his wristwatch.
«Someday we must die, also.» Roger Bentley hurried on. «Hard to believe. We're spoiled. But Susan was right. Dog died to tell us this, gently, and we must believe. And at the same time celebrate. What? The fact that we're the start of an amazing, dumbfounding history of survival that will only get better as the centuries pass. You may argue that the next war will take us all. Maybe.
«I can only say I think you will grow to be old, very old people. Ninety years from now, most people will have cured hearts, stopped cancers, and jumped life cycles. A lot of sadness will have gone out of the world, thank God. Will this be easy to do? No. Will we do it? Yes. Not in all countries, right off. But, finally, in most.
«As I said yesterday, fifty years ago, if you wanted to
visit your aunts, uncles, grandparents, brothers, sisters, the graveyard was it. Death was all the talk. You had to talk it. Time's up, Rodney?»
Rodney signaled his father he had one last minute.
Roger Bentley wound it down:
«Sure, kids still die. But not millions. Old folks? Wind up in Sun City instead of marble Orchard.»
The father surveyed his family, bright-eyed, in the pews.
«God, look at you! Then look back. A thousand centuries of absolute terror, absolute grief. How parents stayed sane to raise their kids when half of them died, damned if I know. Yet with broken hearts, they did. While millions died of flu or the Plague.
«So here we are in a new time that we can't see because we stand in the eye of the hurricane, where everything's calm.
«I'll shut up now, with a last word for Dog. Because we loved him, we've done this almost silly thing, this service, but now suddenly we're not ashamed or sorry we bought him a plot or had me speak. We may never come visit him, who can say? But he has a place. Dog, old boy, bless you. Now, everyone, blow your nose.»
Everyone blew his nose.
«Dad,» said Rodney suddenly, «could-we hear the record again?»
Everyone looked at Rodney, surprised.
«Just,» said Roger Bentley, «what I was going to suggest.»
He put the needle on the record. It hissed.
About a minute in, when the sparks from the house flew over to burn the barn and torch the horseflesh and kill the dog, there was a sound at the back doorway to the small parlor.
Everyone turned.
A strange man stood in the door holding a small wicker basket from which came familiar, small yapping sounds.
And even as the flames from the candles around the coffin caught the curtains and the last sparks blew on the wind
The whole family, drawn out into the sunlight, gathered around the stranger with the wicker basket, waiting for Father to arrive to throw back the coverlet on the small carrier so they could all dip their hands in.
That moment, as Susan said later, was like reading the telephone book one more time.
The Witch Door
1995 year
It was a pounding on a door, a furious, frantic, insistent pounding, born of hysteria and fear and a great desire to be heard, to be freed, to be let loose, to escape. It was a wrenching at hidden paneling, it was a hollow knocking, a rapping, a testing, a clawing! It was a scratching at hollow boards, a ripping at bedded nails; it was a muffled closet shouting and demanding, far away, and a call to be noticed, followed by a silence.
The silence was the most empty and terrible of all. Robert and Martha Webb sat up in bed.
«Did you hear it?»
«Yes, again.»
«Downstairs.»
Now whoever it was who had pounded and rapped and made his fingers raw, drawn blood with his fever and quest to be free, had drawn into silence, listening himself to see if his terror and drumming had summoned any help.
The winter night lay through the house with a falling-snow silence, silence snowing into every room, drifting over tables and floors, and banking up the stairwell.
Then the pounding started again. And then:
A sound of soft crying.
«Downstairs.»
«Someone in the house.»
«Lotte, do you think? The front door's unlocked.»
«She'd have knocked. Can't be Lotte.»
«She's the only one it could be. She phoned.»
They both glanced at the phone. If you lifted the receiver, you heard a winter stillness. The phones were dead. They had died days ago with the riots in the nearest towns and cities. Now, in the receiver, you heard only your own heart-beat. «Can you put me up?» Lone had cried from six hundred miles away. «Just overnight?»
But before they could answer her, the phone had filled itself with long miles of silence.
«Lotte is coming. She sounded hysterical. That might be her,» said Martha Webb.
«No,'' said Robert. «I heard that crying other nights, too. Dear God.»
They lay in the cold room in this farmhouse back in the Massachusetts wilderness, back from the main roads, away from the towns, near a bleak river and a black forest. It was the frozen middle of December. The white smell of snow cut the air.
They arose. With an oil lamp lit, they sat on the edge of the bed as if dangling their legs over a precipice.
«There's no one downstairs, there can't be.»
«Whoever it is sounds frightened.»
«We're all frightened, damn it. That's why we came out here, to be away from cities, riots, all that damned foolishness. No more wiretaps, arrests, taxes, neurotics. Now when we find it at last, people call and upset us. And tonight this, Christ!» He glanced at his wife. «You afraid?»
«I don't know. I don't believe in ghosts. This is 1999; I'm sane. Or like to think I am. Where's your gun?»
«We won't need it. Don't ask me why, but we won't.» They picked up their oil lamps. In another month the small power plant would be finished in the white barns behind the house and there'd be power to spare, but now they haunted the farm, coming and going with dim lamps or candles.
They stood at the stairwell, both thirty-three, both immensely practical.
The crying, the sadness, and the plea came from below in the winter rooms.
«She sounds so damned sad,» said Robert. «God, I'm sorry for her, but don't even know who it is. Come on.»
They went downstairs.
As if hearing their footsteps, the crying grew louder. There was a dull thudding against a hidden panel somewhere.
«The Witch Door!» said Martha Webb at last.
«Can't be.»
«Is.»
They stood in the long hall looking at that place under the stairs, where the panels trembled faintly. But now the cries faded, as if the crier was exhausted, or something had diverted her, or perhaps their voices had startled her and she was listening for them to speak again. Now the winter-night house was silent and the man and wife waited with the oil lamps quietly fuming in their hands.
Robert Webb stepped to the Witch Door and touched it, probing for the hidden button, the secret spring. «There can't be anyone in there,» he said. «My God, we've been here six months, and that's just a cubby. Isn't that what the Realtor said when he sold the place? No one could hide in there and us not know it. We-«
«Listen!»
They listened.
Nothing.
«She's gone, it's gone, whatever it was, hell, that door hasn't been opened in our lifetime. Everyone's forgotten where the spring is that unlocks it. I don't think there is a door, only a loose panel, and rats' nests, that's all. The walls, scratching. Why not?» He turned to look at his wife, who was staring at the hidden place.
«Silly,» she said. «Good Lord, rats don't cry. That was a voice, asking to be saved. Lotte, I thought. But now I know it wasn't she, but someone else in as much trouble.»
Martha Webb reached out and trembled her fingertips along the beveled edge of ancient maple. «Can't we open it?»
«With a crowbar and hammer, tomorrow.»
«Oh, Robert!»
«Don't 'Oh, Robert' me. I'm tired.»
«You can't leave her in there to-«
«She's quiet now. Christ, I'm exhausted. I'll come down at the crack of dawn and knock the damned thing apart, okay?»
«All right,» she said, and tears came to her eyes.
«Women,» said Robert Webb. «Oh, my God, you and Lotte, Lotte and you. If she is coming here, if she makes it, I'll have a houseful of lunatics!»
«Lotte's fine!»
«Sure, but she should keep her mouth shut. It doesn't pay now to say you're Socialist, Democrat, Libertarian, Pro-Life Abortionist, Sinn Fein Fascist, Commie, any damn thing. The towns are bombed out. People are looking for scapegoats and Lotte has to shoot from the hip, get herself smeared and now, hell, on the run.»
«They'll jail her if they catch her. Or kill her, yes, kill her. We're lucky to be here with our own food. Thank God we planned ahead, we saw it coming, the starvation, the massacres. We helped ourselves. Now we help Lone if she makes it through.»
Without answering, he turned to the stairs. «I'm dead on my feet. I'm tired of saving anyone. Even Lotte. But hell, if she comes through the front door, she's saved.»
They went up the stairs taking the lamps, advancing in an ever-moving aura of trembling white glow. The house was as silent as snow falling. «God,» he whispered. «Damn, I don't like women crying like that.»
It sounded like the whole world crying, he thought. The whole world dying and needing help and lonely, but what can you do? Live in a farm like this? Far off the main highway where people don't pass, away from all the stupidity and death? What can you do?
They left one of the lamps lit and drew the covers over their bodies and lay, listening to the wind hit the house and creak the beams and parquetry.
A moment later there was a cry from downstairs, a splintering crash, the sound of a door flung wide, a bursting out of air, footsteps rapping all the rooms, a sobbing, almost an exultation, then the front door banged open, the winter wind blowing wildly in, footsteps across the front porch and gone.
«There!» cried Martha. «Yes!»
With the lamp they were down the stairs swiftly. Wind smothered their faces as they turned now toward the Witch Door, opened wide, still on its hinges, then toward the front door where they cast their light out upon a snowing winter darkness and saw nothing but white and hills, no moon, and in the lamplight the soft drift and moth-flicker of snowflakes falling from the sky to the mattressed yard.
«Gone,» she whispered.
«Who?»
«We'll never know, unless she comes back.»
«She won't. Look.»
They moved the lamplight toward the white earth and the tiny footprints going off, across the softness, toward the dark forest.
«It was a woman, then. But… why?»
«God knows. Why anything, now in this crazy world?» They stood looking at the footprints a long while until, shivering, they moved back through the hall to the open Witch Door. They poked the lamp into this hollow under the stairs.
«Lord, it's just a cell, hardly a closet, and look…»
Inside stood a small rocking chair, a braided rug, a used candle in a copper holder, and an old, worn Bible. The place smelled of must and moss and dead flowers.
«Is this where they used to hide people?»
«Yes. A long time back they hid people called witches. Trials, witch trials. They hung or burned some.»
«Yes, yes,» they both murmured, staring into the incredibly small cell.
«And the witches hid here while the hunters searched the house and gave up and left?»
«Yes, oh, my God, yes,» he whispered.
«Rob
''Yes?»
She bent forward. Her face was pale and she could not look away from the small, worn rocking chair and the faded Bible.
«Rob. How old? This house, how old?»
«Maybe three hundred years.
«That old?»
«Why?»
«Crazy. Stupid . .
«Crazy?»
«Houses, old like this. All the years. And more years and more after that. God, feel! If you put your hand in, yes? Would you feel it change, silly, and what if I sat in that rocking chair and shut the door, what? That woman . .. how long was she in there? How'd she get there? From way, way back. Wouldn't it be strange?»
''Bull!''
«But if you wanted to run away badly enough, wished for it, prayed for it, and people ran after you, and someone hid you in a place like this, a witch behind a door, and heard the searchers run through the house, closer and closer, wouldn't you want to get away? Anywhere? To another place? Why not another time? And then, in a house like this, a house so old nobody knows, if you wanted and asked for it enough, couldn't you run to another year! Maybe»-she paused-«here…?»
«No, no,» he muttered. «Really stupid!»
But still, some quiet motion within the closeted space caused both, at almost the same instant, to hold their hands out on the air, curious, like people testing invisible waters. The air seemed to move one way and then another, now warm, now cold, with a pulsation of light and a sudden turning toward dark. All this they thought but could not say. There was weather here, now a quick touch of summer and then a winter cold, which could not be, of course, but there it was. Passing along their fingertips, but unseen by their eyes, a stream of shadows and sun ran as invisible as time itself, clear as crystal, but clouded by a shifting dark. Both felt if they thrust their hands deep, they might be drawn in to drown in a mighty storm of seasons within an incredibly small space. All this, too, they thought or almost felt but could not say.
It was a pounding on a door, a furious, frantic, insistent pounding, born of hysteria and fear and a great desire to be heard, to be freed, to be let loose, to escape. It was a wrenching at hidden paneling, it was a hollow knocking, a rapping, a testing, a clawing! It was a scratching at hollow boards, a ripping at bedded nails; it was a muffled closet shouting and demanding, far away, and a call to be noticed, followed by a silence.
The silence was the most empty and terrible of all. Robert and Martha Webb sat up in bed.
«Did you hear it?»
«Yes, again.»
«Downstairs.»
Now whoever it was who had pounded and rapped and made his fingers raw, drawn blood with his fever and quest to be free, had drawn into silence, listening himself to see if his terror and drumming had summoned any help.
The winter night lay through the house with a falling-snow silence, silence snowing into every room, drifting over tables and floors, and banking up the stairwell.
Then the pounding started again. And then:
A sound of soft crying.
«Downstairs.»
«Someone in the house.»
«Lotte, do you think? The front door's unlocked.»
«She'd have knocked. Can't be Lotte.»
«She's the only one it could be. She phoned.»
They both glanced at the phone. If you lifted the receiver, you heard a winter stillness. The phones were dead. They had died days ago with the riots in the nearest towns and cities. Now, in the receiver, you heard only your own heart-beat. «Can you put me up?» Lone had cried from six hundred miles away. «Just overnight?»
But before they could answer her, the phone had filled itself with long miles of silence.
«Lotte is coming. She sounded hysterical. That might be her,» said Martha Webb.
«No,'' said Robert. «I heard that crying other nights, too. Dear God.»
They lay in the cold room in this farmhouse back in the Massachusetts wilderness, back from the main roads, away from the towns, near a bleak river and a black forest. It was the frozen middle of December. The white smell of snow cut the air.
They arose. With an oil lamp lit, they sat on the edge of the bed as if dangling their legs over a precipice.
«There's no one downstairs, there can't be.»
«Whoever it is sounds frightened.»
«We're all frightened, damn it. That's why we came out here, to be away from cities, riots, all that damned foolishness. No more wiretaps, arrests, taxes, neurotics. Now when we find it at last, people call and upset us. And tonight this, Christ!» He glanced at his wife. «You afraid?»
«I don't know. I don't believe in ghosts. This is 1999; I'm sane. Or like to think I am. Where's your gun?»
«We won't need it. Don't ask me why, but we won't.» They picked up their oil lamps. In another month the small power plant would be finished in the white barns behind the house and there'd be power to spare, but now they haunted the farm, coming and going with dim lamps or candles.
They stood at the stairwell, both thirty-three, both immensely practical.
The crying, the sadness, and the plea came from below in the winter rooms.
«She sounds so damned sad,» said Robert. «God, I'm sorry for her, but don't even know who it is. Come on.»
They went downstairs.
As if hearing their footsteps, the crying grew louder. There was a dull thudding against a hidden panel somewhere.
«The Witch Door!» said Martha Webb at last.
«Can't be.»
«Is.»
They stood in the long hall looking at that place under the stairs, where the panels trembled faintly. But now the cries faded, as if the crier was exhausted, or something had diverted her, or perhaps their voices had startled her and she was listening for them to speak again. Now the winter-night house was silent and the man and wife waited with the oil lamps quietly fuming in their hands.
Robert Webb stepped to the Witch Door and touched it, probing for the hidden button, the secret spring. «There can't be anyone in there,» he said. «My God, we've been here six months, and that's just a cubby. Isn't that what the Realtor said when he sold the place? No one could hide in there and us not know it. We-«
«Listen!»
They listened.
Nothing.
«She's gone, it's gone, whatever it was, hell, that door hasn't been opened in our lifetime. Everyone's forgotten where the spring is that unlocks it. I don't think there is a door, only a loose panel, and rats' nests, that's all. The walls, scratching. Why not?» He turned to look at his wife, who was staring at the hidden place.
«Silly,» she said. «Good Lord, rats don't cry. That was a voice, asking to be saved. Lotte, I thought. But now I know it wasn't she, but someone else in as much trouble.»
Martha Webb reached out and trembled her fingertips along the beveled edge of ancient maple. «Can't we open it?»
«With a crowbar and hammer, tomorrow.»
«Oh, Robert!»
«Don't 'Oh, Robert' me. I'm tired.»
«You can't leave her in there to-«
«She's quiet now. Christ, I'm exhausted. I'll come down at the crack of dawn and knock the damned thing apart, okay?»
«All right,» she said, and tears came to her eyes.
«Women,» said Robert Webb. «Oh, my God, you and Lotte, Lotte and you. If she is coming here, if she makes it, I'll have a houseful of lunatics!»
«Lotte's fine!»
«Sure, but she should keep her mouth shut. It doesn't pay now to say you're Socialist, Democrat, Libertarian, Pro-Life Abortionist, Sinn Fein Fascist, Commie, any damn thing. The towns are bombed out. People are looking for scapegoats and Lotte has to shoot from the hip, get herself smeared and now, hell, on the run.»
«They'll jail her if they catch her. Or kill her, yes, kill her. We're lucky to be here with our own food. Thank God we planned ahead, we saw it coming, the starvation, the massacres. We helped ourselves. Now we help Lone if she makes it through.»
Without answering, he turned to the stairs. «I'm dead on my feet. I'm tired of saving anyone. Even Lotte. But hell, if she comes through the front door, she's saved.»
They went up the stairs taking the lamps, advancing in an ever-moving aura of trembling white glow. The house was as silent as snow falling. «God,» he whispered. «Damn, I don't like women crying like that.»
It sounded like the whole world crying, he thought. The whole world dying and needing help and lonely, but what can you do? Live in a farm like this? Far off the main highway where people don't pass, away from all the stupidity and death? What can you do?
They left one of the lamps lit and drew the covers over their bodies and lay, listening to the wind hit the house and creak the beams and parquetry.
A moment later there was a cry from downstairs, a splintering crash, the sound of a door flung wide, a bursting out of air, footsteps rapping all the rooms, a sobbing, almost an exultation, then the front door banged open, the winter wind blowing wildly in, footsteps across the front porch and gone.
«There!» cried Martha. «Yes!»
With the lamp they were down the stairs swiftly. Wind smothered their faces as they turned now toward the Witch Door, opened wide, still on its hinges, then toward the front door where they cast their light out upon a snowing winter darkness and saw nothing but white and hills, no moon, and in the lamplight the soft drift and moth-flicker of snowflakes falling from the sky to the mattressed yard.
«Gone,» she whispered.
«Who?»
«We'll never know, unless she comes back.»
«She won't. Look.»
They moved the lamplight toward the white earth and the tiny footprints going off, across the softness, toward the dark forest.
«It was a woman, then. But… why?»
«God knows. Why anything, now in this crazy world?» They stood looking at the footprints a long while until, shivering, they moved back through the hall to the open Witch Door. They poked the lamp into this hollow under the stairs.
«Lord, it's just a cell, hardly a closet, and look…»
Inside stood a small rocking chair, a braided rug, a used candle in a copper holder, and an old, worn Bible. The place smelled of must and moss and dead flowers.
«Is this where they used to hide people?»
«Yes. A long time back they hid people called witches. Trials, witch trials. They hung or burned some.»
«Yes, yes,» they both murmured, staring into the incredibly small cell.
«And the witches hid here while the hunters searched the house and gave up and left?»
«Yes, oh, my God, yes,» he whispered.
«Rob
''Yes?»
She bent forward. Her face was pale and she could not look away from the small, worn rocking chair and the faded Bible.
«Rob. How old? This house, how old?»
«Maybe three hundred years.
«That old?»
«Why?»
«Crazy. Stupid . .
«Crazy?»
«Houses, old like this. All the years. And more years and more after that. God, feel! If you put your hand in, yes? Would you feel it change, silly, and what if I sat in that rocking chair and shut the door, what? That woman . .. how long was she in there? How'd she get there? From way, way back. Wouldn't it be strange?»
''Bull!''
«But if you wanted to run away badly enough, wished for it, prayed for it, and people ran after you, and someone hid you in a place like this, a witch behind a door, and heard the searchers run through the house, closer and closer, wouldn't you want to get away? Anywhere? To another place? Why not another time? And then, in a house like this, a house so old nobody knows, if you wanted and asked for it enough, couldn't you run to another year! Maybe»-she paused-«here…?»
«No, no,» he muttered. «Really stupid!»
But still, some quiet motion within the closeted space caused both, at almost the same instant, to hold their hands out on the air, curious, like people testing invisible waters. The air seemed to move one way and then another, now warm, now cold, with a pulsation of light and a sudden turning toward dark. All this they thought but could not say. There was weather here, now a quick touch of summer and then a winter cold, which could not be, of course, but there it was. Passing along their fingertips, but unseen by their eyes, a stream of shadows and sun ran as invisible as time itself, clear as crystal, but clouded by a shifting dark. Both felt if they thrust their hands deep, they might be drawn in to drown in a mighty storm of seasons within an incredibly small space. All this, too, they thought or almost felt but could not say.