Masques

by J N Williamson

  But what if it had been something else? What if the virus theory was right and George was the victim of a more virulent mutation? The thought made me sick with dread. Because if that were true, it meant Judy would eventually end up like George. And I was going to have to do for her what I’d done for George.

  But what of me, then? Who was going to end it for me! I didn’t know if I had the guts to shoot myself. And what if my hands went soft before I had the chance?

  I didn’t want to think about it, but it wouldn’t go away. I couldn’t remember ever being so frightened. I almost considered going down to Rockefeller Center and presenting Judy and myself to the leechers, but killed that idea real quick. Never. I’m no jerk. I’m college educated. A degree in biology! I know what they’d do to us!

  Inside, Judy had wheeled her chair over to the door and was waiting for me. I couldn’t let her know.

  “Not there,” I told her before she could ask, and I busied myself with putting the shotgun away so I wouldn’t have to look her straight in the eyes.

  “Where could he be?” Her voice was tight.

  “I wish I knew. Maybe he went down to Rockefeller Center. If he did, it’s the last we’ll ever see of him.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “Then tell me where else he can be.”

  She was silent.

  I did Warner Oland’s Chan: “Numbah One Dawtah is finally at loss for words. Peace reigns at last.”

  I could see that I failed to amuse, so I decided a change of subject was in order.

  “I’m tired,” I said. It was the truth. The trip across the street had been exhausting.

  “Me, too.” She yawned.

  “Want to get some sleep?” I knew she did. I was just staying a step or two ahead of her so she wouldn’t have to ask to be put to bed. She was a dancer, a fine, proud artist. Judy would never have to ask anyone to put her to bed. Not while I was around. As long as I was able I would spare her the indignity of dragging herself along the floor.

  I gathered Judy up in my arms. The whole lower half of her body was soft; her legs hung over my left arm like weighted drapes. It was all I could do to keep from crying when I felt them so limp and formless. My dancer . . . you should have seen her in Swan Lake. Her legs had been so strong, so sleekly muscular, like her mother’s . . .

  I took her to the bathroom and left her in there. Which left me alone with my daymares. What if there really was a mutation of the softness and my dancer began leaving me again, slowly, inch by inch. What was I going to do when she was gone? My wife was gone. My folks were gone. My what few friends I’d ever had were gone. Judy was the only attachment I had left. Without her I’d break loose from everything and just float off into space. I needed her . . .

  When she was finished in the bathroom I carried her out and arranged her on the bed. I tucked her in and kissed her goodnight.

  Out in the living room I slipped under the covers of the fold-out bed and tried to sleep. It was useless. The fear wouldn’t leave me alone. I fought it, telling myself that George was a freak case, that Judy and I had licked the softness. We were immune and we’d stay immune. Let everyone else turn into puddles of Jello, I wasn’t going to let them suck us dry to save themselves. We were on our way to inheriting the earth, Judy and I, and we didn’t even have to be meek about it.

  But still sleep refused to come. So I lay there in the growing darkness in the center of the silent city and listened . . . listened as I did every night . . . as I knew I would listen for the rest of my life . . . listened for that sound . . . that cellophane crinkling sound . . .

  House Mothers

  J.N. Williamson

  Ellery Queen, introducing another book I edited, thought I’d remain young—to him—even after my children were grown. And my close friend and then-co-editor, H. B. “Pete” Williams, called me “that closest thing to perpetual motion.”

  But that was over 30 years ago. I was in my teens; the Baker Street Irregulars—among them, Anthony Boucher, Vincent Starrett, August Derleth, Christopher Morley and Rex Stout—welcomed me as their youngest member (I was born April 17, 1932); and the seed was planted by them: I wanted most to be a writer.

  The point is, I may be a late bloomer but I’m not a newcomer. And since I had the gall to edit Irregular notables—Associated Press exec Charles Honce, Professor Jay Finley Christ, and Latin scholar Morris Rosenblum as well—serving as your editor should surprise only those who can’t believe in perpetual motion!

  What bewilders me is that Boucher and Derleth were instrumental in boosting the careers of others in Masques, when they seem to have been at it longer than I. It has a science fiction feel; it is simultaneously like being 17 again—and 104! Perhaps Tony and August invented time travel, after all!

  “House Mothers” is a layered, atmospheric tale meant to say somewhat more than we “genre writers” according to general reputation, are supposed to concern ourselves with. That won’t surprise anyone who has the sense to read, as often as possible, the other, distinguished writers in this anthology.

  In the moment before she discovered the house—at the paralytic instant she understood that the midnight woods concealed no shelter for a running and frightened woman—Pamela filled with second thoughts. Back in Barry’s stalled Buick, God-knew-where off an unidentified dirt road, she’d been certain he meant to force her. She’d shrunk from him like a bottle-wadded bug in black cotton, then popped out into this spoon of a woods so complete unto itself that Pamela had half expected to spill over and fall forever into a shining pool of empty space.

  Because the young or optimistically youthful fight terror simply by changing their minds, an inner focus, Pamela glanced back to the angry sounds of Barry’s door slamming and his initial confrontation with the woods and wondered if she had let his hot ardor merge, in her expectations, with that of other men she’d known. True enough, she’d been raped two years before, that the humiliation afterward seemed even worse, in memory, than the attack. To this time it was her cherished belief, never once spoken, that rape victims urgently needed a place to go—somewhere peaceful, with people who said little, who never asked those questions which implied her complicity or worse, her seduction.

  But she should not have let that have anything to do with Barry’s relentless arms wrapping round her, his kissing her with unwarranted familiarity, his putting his moist hands where she had not wished them placed. They’d been acquainted only two years, all the time there was since . . . what happened; and he’d known about it, he’d even been the soul of gentle patience, until now. He should have understood it might take yet more time, before she was ready; or perhaps, from his viewpoint, he’d already waited longer than most men. Men’s rhythms were different, the way they reacted to time’s passage, and events.

  Why is it, she wondered, brushing hair back from her forehead, again staring into the snaring clutch of the woods, that we think we’re individuals but mix up everybody else—stir them like a kind of social stew, till we can’t tell them from one another? A roofs corner was stroked by moonlight and she made out the window of a house; gamely, she pushed forward, mind in turmoil. It’s not just women who do that to men, we do it to other women.

  The flat-roofed, frame structure stretched before Pamela like a long, gray cat sprawled adamantly in the center of the clearing, softly ruffled by the pale, outreaching fingers of a matronly moon. It had a feline’s undisclosed years and, in the house’s hopeful mixture of styles, its unguessable origins. But the oddly languid grace appeared external and it was spoiled by vestiges of some old tension she imagined sensing. When she had halfcrossed the clearing, drab weeds and drained autumn grass clinging damply to her trim ankles, she could see nothing whatever through the undraped window at the front. At first the seeming emptiness of the place suggested a beastly hunger, at best an unnerving hollowness. Then, nearer, all images of the cat were replaced by Pamela’s fresh perception of a structure designed for institutional purposes, but long
since abandoned.

  Reaching the front door, she stopped, a recollection late in coming. I passed this clearing before—or the edge of it, she thought, lowering the hand she had raised to rap. She remembered her first burst of panic after bolting from Barry’s car, her swift, breath-snatching rush over undetectable mounds and yielding hillocks, the damp branch that snapped against her cheek like a mother’s palm. Hand at her breast, dislocated, Pamela glanced back the way she had come, remembering more.

  Then—and again now, when she’d found the clearing—she’d had the impression of the sallow, slick-boned moon receding before her in the swirling skies, as though it had sought to draw her . . . here.

  But that was foolishness! Close to the house, now, there was none of the apprehension she’d known from the woods. Pamela closed her fingers round the doorknob, concealing from herself a moment longer the temptation to go inside; and immediately she felt warmer, safer. If there was a queer readiness to what the house emanated, an unexplained projection of over-anxious welcoming, it was because it was intended to be a shelter—no, more, a sanctuary, her sanctuary! Placing trembling palms on the door Pamela shut her eyes, nodded gratefully. The people had meant it as sanctuary, they’d built it from a dream of service, from visions which understood her needs perfectly! It was right for her to enter, it was proper—

  The door swung wide.

  My weight, leaning, Pamela told herself promptly; it wasn’t entirely closed; and entered.

  “Hullo?” So dark, so bewilderingly dark in there! Pamela leaned forward, fingers locked to the frame of the door. As best she could tell, there was a narrow tunnel devoid of furnishings which channeled deep into the house, rooms to the right, and no signs of life. Cupping her brow as people do when they peer against the sun, she edged deeper inside, calling: “Is anybody here?”

  At once a high-pitched sound flurried to her ears, so ill-defined it could have been a rodent’s squeal, or the squeak of a floorboard bending beneath discreet weight. Pamela stopped, not breathing. It might, she felt, have come from below. Then it was gone so swiftly, and so thoroughly, it must have been nothing.

  Shutting the door, putting out her hand to grope for a light-switch, she froze, eyes blinking furiously. While it was too dim to be the result of electricity summoned from elsewhere inside, a uremic trickle of adequate illumination—just that, she decided with some annoyance; adequate light—was unexpectedly provided. Fleetingly disturbed, Pamela turned back into the house’s interior.

  That first observation she’d made was correct, Pamela perceived. There were no furnishings—no discarded tables with broken legs, no pictures on the walls, no thumbtacks or crumpled papers or paperclips left on the gleaming wooden floors, no debris of any sort—in the hallway. Nor, she learned as she ventured forward, in the shadowed rooms leading to the left of the hall. The kitchen, she found, was the same; but when she glanced with shrinking curiosity through a window at the back, only the etched woods leaped into sight, imperturbably mammoth yet skeletally immediate against the house.

  Disturbed, Pamela hurried from the kitchen, started back down the hall, aware for the first time how immaculate, how spotless, the place was. It was an absolute marvel, she realized, for a deserted house to be so tidy, so clean; it was all mute testimony to how dusty, even dirty, the city was, and—

  She halted, confounded as she looked to her left. The front room—the area she had seen from the clearing, through the exposed window, and believed empty—was filled with furniture! She’d followed the natural line of the house’s interior, up the hallway to peep into deserted sleeping spaces and one room she had conceived as a nursery, and had not glanced directly into this central living space.

  But surely she’d been right in thinking no one was in residence; because nobody she’d ever known lived with all their furniture crammed into one room! It was, Pamela mused, entering and stepping slowly around the outer edge of the chamber, rather like a family had been told that a nuclear attack was coming, but was guaranteed that one region of the house—this room—would be spared.

  Walking almost mincingly, cautiously touching things with her fingers, Pamela realized she had been wrong in believing the area was too crowded for her to move among the things. Paths, of a kind, had been left—narrow gaps wide enough for a slender person like Pamela to pass between tables stacked upon tables and chairs stacked upon chairs, to slip between several old refrigerators, and a miniature, child’s rocker that creaked loudly as she did so. Across the room, she noticed three bookcases lining the wall like layers of growing skin, boned by books whose titles she yearned to scan; but that would require a different route, another path. A bed with several mattresses weighing it down was on another side of the front room, chests of drawers next to it and two television sets plus an old cathedral-style radio, strewn with cobwebs, waited there, too.

  But her gaze had become temporarily fixed upon a pair of anomalies, items that seemed as out of place to Pamela as the dolls perched at high vantagepoint on an unlit floorlamp, glittering black eyes seeming to follow her movements.

  One of the anomalies was a single well-padded, marvelously comfortable-looking easy chair, unlittered, left alone, close to the midpoint of the room—while the other, unexpected object was an intricately-patterned, surely costly, Oriental rug. There was clean, bare space around the edges of the rug and the big, cozy chair faced it.

  Raising her head to look wonderingly back the way she’d come, Pamela noticed that all the paths between the old, abandoned furniture led directly to the ancient square of Persian carpeting . . .

  “Pamela!”

  The voice, distant, beyond the house, was familiar. Barry’s, she realized without caring. He sounded as if he were outside the clearing, still thrashing about in the woods; he sounded both worried, and angry. What right did he have to be annoyed when it was he who had alarmed her, tried to—

  Quickly she banished him and sat in the large chair, snuggled into it, imagined the contours striving to mold themselves to her. Smiling, she curled her legs beneath her and closed her eyes, suddenly so sleepy that she could not keep them open.

  But it was the secure feeling, how relaxed she was, Pamela noted as her eyelids fluttered and she gazed sensually around her—not true sleepiness. Safe—and one thing more: Free to choose, that instant, what would pleasure her. Freed from the lusting, silly, dangerous male in the tangle of late-night woods she was starting to consider her own; freed from that old, terrifying fear that the man who’d raped her might return. Freed from other men who’d dated her, and the ones she’d worked for; from her older brother who’d always been their parents’ major concern, and hers; freed from a father with a narrow, blinkered smile, who wanted “nothing for his little girl but her happiness” and who had never expected more from her than that her breasts would blossom “like a flower” and that she would marry a man, “intact.”

  But I was never intact, Daddy, she thought, drowsy and fretful, hugging the enormous chair’s arm and shutting her eyes, not even before the rapist, not even before your little flower

  blossomed. Because none of us were . . .

  . . . She awakened with the feeling that part of her mind had been left behind, and with the distinct but oddly unstartled impression of voices, muttering, speaking of her.

  The Oriental rug which her chair faced lay now in a corner, folded neatly. Where it had been spread, a lid was raised above a missing section of flooring; and Pamela caught a glimpse of something firm, and squared-off, something just beneath the plane of the living room floor that looked like a step. A top step.

  She leaned forward from her cozy chair, restrained from apprehension. The idea came to her that this place must be an old farmhouse, that what she saw before her was surely a trapdoor, leading to the cellar. How absurd she’d been to react, if marginally, with fear. All empty houses were scary at night and there was a reason why this room was cluttered with furniture. It seemed quite obvious, then, in a still-sleepy manner, wha
t she had blundered into: A farm family’d bought a second home, possibly in town; not wanting to part with this fine house, they had carried everything they owned here, meaning to store it all in the cellar! It was probably an absolutely huge cellar lined with shelves containing bottles of jams and jellies, and things; the cellar probably ran the whole length of the house or longer—why, it could run the length of the entire county, if that was what it took to store the family furniture! There was still plenty of room beneath the earth, the only uses made of it were the foundations of houses—and cemeteries, of course.

  She pressed slowly back into the great chair, gaze locked on the black, yawning hole at her feet. She tucked her legs more tightly under her. Why, then, hadn’t they taken everything down into their cellar? And it couldn’t be a farm, could it, when she’d seen nothing growing out front and nothing at the rear of the property but the hovering, mutely claiming woods?

  “F’christsakes, Pamela!” The man’s voice, from outside the house, nearer but from a different angle. “It’s almost morning?’

  She squeezed her eyes together, shook her head, looked again at the objects in this remarkable room, looking closer. That dining table, it was so beautiful! I can almost see the ladies gathered around it, sharing the fine supper they prepared together, shyly yet wisely smiling and talking woman talk. She paused there, remotely conscious of a mistake in what she had pictured, possibly an oversight; but when she refocussed upon the table, no one came before her mind’s eye.

  Perturbed, conscious of a prickling headache starting at the base of her skull, she followed with her eyes the route she had taken to her chair, saw again the child’s tiny rocker, that peculiar way it had of moving, to and fro, driftingly, almost as if some small person, unseen and still, made it rock. But the rocker is new, Pamela saw, blinking, trying to concentrate. Or—unused. No one alive ever sat in that miniature chair.