by Jerry
He hastily takes her temperature. Normal. The serum has at last been accepted by her system. All that remains now is the answer to the second mystery. In medieval terms, has he saved her soul as well as her body? In modern scientific ones, have the accumulated memories of the past existence been carried over into this one, or were her brain cells damaged beyond repair?
The blue eyes fix themselves on him, stare unblinkingly. He says softly, almost afraid of the sound of his own voice, “Good evening.” The blue eyes continue to stare. He waits, trembling. He knows that she was an American, knew the language. He whispers it over again, “Good evening, young lady.”
A change is coming over her face. The staring blue eyes fill with tears that presently overflow and stream down her face. The eyes themselves narrow in a squint. The lips that knew rouge, cigarettes, and men’s kisses, pucker into infant’s whimper. A feeble bleating cry, the wail of a new-born child, escapes from her. The wordless, pitiful sound that any nursery knows.
The shock, the disappointment, is terrific; his gaunt face pales, he clutches his chair to keep from slumping off it, lets out a long sighing breath. Then presently, somewhat recovered, he takes out a shiny gold watch from his pocket, dangles it before her eyes. The light flashes from it. The tears stop, the wailing breaks off short. Her eyes sparkle with interest. She reaches toward it with ten fingers whose nails still bear adult nail-lacquer; her mouth wreathes in an infantile grin. She says, “Da!” and crows with pleasure. Reason is back—at least in its primary stages. For if she were a newborn infant, this would be a highly precocious reaction. Her faculties are intact. It is not as bad as he thought.
He will have to teach her to speak, to walk all over again, as one does any child, that is all. Intelligence has returned, but not memory. Her memory went into the grave. He murmurs to himself, “Her body is twenty-two, but she is in the infancy of a second life. I will call her Nova, the New One.” He rubs his hand over his eyes.
Exhausted by his long vigil he slumps to the floor beside the bed, goes to sleep with his head resting against its edge. Above him the resurrected woman’s hands stray gropingly to his thick white hair, clutch playfully at it like a child in its crib . . .
III
The plane is a hopeless wreck, and even in the act of crawling out into the blinding rain, Penny O’Shaughnessy wonders dazedly why he’s still alive. Dazedly, but briefly. O’Shaughnessy is not the kind to waste time wondering. Just one more lucky break, he supposes. His whole adult life has been an unbroken succession of them. His given nickname itself is a token of this, dating from the time he was sighted flying in from the open Caribbean after a particularly devastating hurricane had turned half the Lesser Antilles upside down.
“I just went up over it and waited till it went by below,” he explained, alighting midst the splinters of the airport-hangar.
“A bad penny always turns up,” someone muttered incredulously.
Who else had ever met the business-end of a bolt of lightning in mid-flight, as he had just now, flying blind through a storm, lost a wing, managed to come down still alive even if it is on a wooded mountainside, to cut the contact at the moment of crashing so that he wasn’t roasted alive, and crawl out with just a wrenched shoulder and a lot of cuts and bruises? He couldn’t bail out because he was flying too low, hoping for a break through the clouds through which to spot something flat enough to come down on; he doesn’t like bailing out anyway, hates to throw away a good plane.
This one lying all over the side of the mountain around him is not so good any more, he has to admit. The first thing he does is feel in his pocket, haul out a rabbit’s foot, and stroke it twice. Then he straightens up, hobbles a short distance further from the wreck, turns to survey it. Almost instantly the lightning, which already stunned him once in the air, strikes a nearby tree with a bang and a shower of sparks. It cracks, comes down with a propeller-like whirr of foliage, and flattens what’s left of his engine into the ground.
“All right, you don’t like my crate,” O’Shaughnessy grumbles, with a back-arm swing at the elements in general. “I believed you the first time!”
He trudges off, neck bowed against the rain, which forms a solid curtain around him. He hasn’t the faintest idea where he is, because he was flying blind a full forty minutes before the crash. There is no visibility to speak of, just a pall of rain and mist, with the black silhouettes of trees peering through all around. The sharp slant of the ground tells him he’s on a mountainside. He takes the downgrade; people, houses, are more often to be found in valleys than on mountains.
The ground is muddy soup around him; he doesn’t walk as much as skid on his heels from tree trunk to tree trunk, using them as brakes to prevent a headlong fall. Rain water gets in between clothes and skin; the cuts and welts tingle; the wrenched shoulder pounds, and the thickening of the gloom around him tells him it is night.
“All set,” he mutters, “to spend a quiet evening at home!”
The tree trunks blend into the surrounding darkness, and it gets harder to aim for them each time; he has to ski-jump blindly and coast with outspread arms, hoping one will stop him before he lands flat on his face. He misses one altogether—or else it isn’t there in the first place—goes skittering down in axle-grease mud, wildly spiraling with his arms to keep his balance, and finally flattens into something that rasps and stings. A barbed-wire fence.
All the air has been knocked out of his stomach, and one of the wicked spines just missed his left eye, taking a gouge at his brow instead. But more than that, the jar he has thrown into the thing has set off an electric alarm-bell somewhere up in one of the trees nearby. Its clamor blasts through the steady whine and slap of the rain.
His clothing has caught in ten different places, and skin with it in half of them. As he pulls himself free, swearing, and the vibrations of the obstacle lessen, the alarm breaks off. He kicks the fence vengefully with his foot, and this elicits an added spasm or two from the bell-battery, then once more it stops.
He is too preoccupied for a minute rubbing his gashes with his bare hands and wincing, to proceed with an investigation of this inhospitable barrier. Suddenly a rain-washed glow of murky light is wavering toward him on the other side of the fence, zigzagging uncertainly as though its bearer were picking his way.
“What the—” Somebody living up here in this forsaken place?
The light stops flush against the fence directly opposite where he is standing and behind it he can make out a hooded, cloaked figure. O’Shaughnessy must be practically invisible behind the rain-mist and darkness.
“That yours?” he growls, balling a fist at the fence. “Look what it did to me! Come out here and I’ll—!”
A musical voice from below the hood speaks softly: “Who are you? Why are you here?”
“A girl!” O’Shaughnessy gasps, and the anger leaves his voice. “Sorry, I couldn’t make you out. Didn’t mean to tear loose that way, but I’m clawed up.” He stares at her for a long minute. Twenty-three, pretty, he can see that much. Blue eyes gaze levelly back at him from under the hood she is wearing as he steps up closer to the fence. “I cracked up further back along the mountain, the plane came down—”
“What’s a plane?” she asks, round-eyed.
His jaw drops slightly and he stares at her with disapproval, thinks she is trying to be cute or something. He keeps waiting for the invitation to shelter that a dog would be given, in such weather, at such an out-of-the-way place as this. It isn’t forthcoming.
“Got a house back there?” he says finally.
She nods, and drops of rain fly off her hood. “Yes, straight back there.” Just that, answered as asked.
He says with growing impatience, “Well, won’t you let me in a few minutes? I won’t bite you!” The reason he thinks she’s playing a part, knows better, is that her voice is city-bred, not like a mountain girl’s.
She says helplessly, “It’s locked and he has the keys. No one ever came here befor
e, so I don’t know what to do. I can’t ask him because he’s in the laboratory, and I’m not allowed to disturb him when he’s in there.”
“Well, haven’t you got a telephone I can use at least?”
“What’s a telephone?” she wants to know, without a trace of mockery. This time O’Shaughnessy flares up. Enough is enough. “What kind of a person are you anyway? All right, keep your shelter. I’m not going to stand here begging. Would it be too much to tell me which direction the nearest road or farmhouse is from here, or would you rather not do that either?”
“I don’t know,” she answers. “I’ve never been outside this”—indicating the fence—“never been out there where you’re standing.”
It’s beginning to dawn on him that she’s not trying to make fun of him. He senses some mystery about her, and this whole place, but what it is he can’t imagine. “Who lives here with you?” he asks curiously.
“Papa,” she answers simply.
She’s already been missed, for a voice shouts alarmedly: “Nova! Nova, where are you?” And a second lantern looms toward them, zigzagging hurriedly through the mist. A blurred figure emerges, stops short in fright at sight of the man outside the barrier, nearly drops the lantern. “Who’s that? Who are You? How’d you get here?” The questions are almost panic-stricken.
“Papa,” thinks O’Shaughnessy, “doesn’t like company. Wonder why?” He explains his situation in a few brief words.
The man comes closer, motions the girl back as though O’Shaughnessy were some dangerous animal in a zoo-cage. “Are you alone?” he asks, peering furtively around.
O’Shaughnessy has never lacked self-assertiveness with other men, quite the reverse. “Who’d you think I had with me, the Lafayette Escadrille?” he says bluntly. “Why so cagy, mister? Got a guilty conscience about something? Or are you making mash back there? Did you ever hear of giving a stranger shelter?” He swipes accumulated raindrops off his jaw and flicks them disgustedly down.
The hooded girl is hovering there in the background, looking uncertainly from one to the other. The man with the lantern gives a forced laugh. “We’re not trying to hide anything. We’re not afraid of anything. You’re mistaken,” he protests. A protest that rings about as true as a lead quarter to O’Shaughnessy’s experienced ears. “I wouldn’t for the world want you to—er, go away from here spreading stories that there’s anything strange about this place—you know how folks talk, first thing you know they’ll be coming around snooping—”
“So that’s it,” says O’Shaughnessy within his chest.
The man on the other side of the fence has taken a key out, is jabbing
it hurriedly at the padlocks. So hurriedly that now he almost seems afraid O’Shaughnessy will get away before he can get the gate open. “Er—won’t they send out and look for you, when they find out you’re overdue at the airport?”
O’Shaughnessy snaps briefly, “I wasn’t expected anywhere. I was flying my own time; the crate belonged to me. What d’ye think, I’m somebody’s errand-boy, or one of these passenger-plane pilots?” He expectorates to show his contempt, his independence.
The black shoe-button eyes opposite him gleam, as though this is an eminently satisfactory situation, as though he couldn’t ask for a better one. He swings the gate-halves apart. “Come in,” he urges with belated insistence. “Come in by all means! Get back in the house, Nova, you’ll get soaked—and see that you close that door! I’m Doctor Denholt, sir, and please don’t think there’s anything strange about us here.”
“I do already,” says O’Shaughnessy, bluntly, as he steps through the enclosure. He cocks his head at the renewed blare of the alarm-bell.
Denholt hastily closes and refastens the gate, shutting off the clangor. “Just an ordinary precaution, we’re so cut off here,” he explains.
O’Shaughnessy refrains from further comment; he is on this man’s domain now. He has one iron-clad rule, like an Arab: Never abuse hospitality. “I’m O’Shaughnessy,” he says. They shake hands briefly. The doctor’s hand is slender and flexible, that of a skilled surgeon. But it is soft, too, and there is a warning of treachery in that pliability.
He leads his uninvited guest into the lamp-lighted house, which looks mighty good to O’Shaughnessy, warm and dry and cheerful in spite of its ugly, rustic furniture. The girl has discarded her cape and hood; O’Shaughnessy glimpses her in the main room, crouched before the clay-brick fireplace readying a fire, as Denholt ushers him into his own bedroom. Her hair, he sees now, is long and golden; her feet are stockingless in homemade deerskin moccasins, her figure slim and childlike in a cheap little calico dress.
At the rear of the room is a door tightly closed. The flyer’s trained eyes, as they flicker past it, notice two things. It is metal, specially constructed, unlike the crude plank-panels of the rest of the house. A thread of platinum-bright light outlines it on three sides, too intense to be anything but high-voltage electricity. Electricity in there, coal-oil out here.
He hears the girl: “He’s in the laboratory, I’m not allowed to disturb him when he’s in there.”
He hears the man: “See that you close that door.”
He says to himself: “I wonder what’s in back of there.”
In Denholt’s sleeping-quarters he peels off his drenched things, reveals a bodyful of livid welts, barbed-wire lacerations, and black grease-smudges. His host purses his lips in long-forgotten professional inspection. “You are pretty badly scraped up! Better let me fix up some of those cuts for you, that barbed—wire’s liable to be rusty. Just stand there where you are a minute.” He takes the water-logged clothing outside to the girl.
O’Shaughnessy crooks a knowing eyebrow at himself, waiting there. “Why not in the laboratory, where he keeps all his stuff and the light’s better? See no evil, think no evil, I guess.”
Denholt hurries back with hot water, dressings, antiseptic. O’Shaughnessy flinches at the searing touch of it, grins shamefacedly even as he does so, “Can’t take it any more, I guess. In Shanghai once I had to have a bad tooth pulled by a local dentist; his idea of an anaesthetic was to have his daughter wave a fan at me while he hit it out with a mallet and steel bar.”
“Did you yell?”
“Naw. Ashamed to in front of a girl.”
He catches Denholt staring with a peculiar intentness at his bared torso and muscular shoulders. “Pretty husky, aren’t you?” the doctor remarks, offhandedly. But something chilly passes down the flyer’s back at the look that goes with the words. O’Shaughnessy wonders what it means. Or do all doctors look at you that way, sort of calculatingly, as though you’d do nicely for some experiment they had in mind?
“Yep,” he answers almost challengingly, “I guess I can take care of myself all right if I have to.”
Denholt just looks at him with veiled guile.
IV
Outside afterward, at the rough pine-board table set in the cheerful glow of the blazing hearth, Denholt’s borrowed clothes on him, he has a better chance to study the girl at closer range. There is nothing strange about her in the least; she is all youthful animation, her face flushed with the excitement of having a stranger at their board; sits there devouring him with her eyes, as if she never saw an outsider before. But in her talk and in her movements there is perfect rhythm, harmony, coordination, balance, call it what you will; she is an utterly normal young girl.
The old man on the other hand—O’Shaughnessy characterizes him mentally thus—the old man has this brooding light in his eyes, is spasmodic and disconnected in his talk and gestures. The isolation, the years of loneliness, have done that to him perhaps, O’Shaughnessy thinks.
“All right,” he says to himself, “that’s his own business. But why does he keep a lovely kid like that cooped up here? Never heard of a plane, a telephone. What’s he trying to do to her? Darned shame!”
Denholt catches him watching the girl. “Eat,” he urges, “eat up, man. You need strength after what you wen
t through.”
The flyer grins, obeys. Yet something about the way it was said, the appraising look that went with it, makes him feel like a fowl being fattened for slaughter. He shakes his head baffledly.
Lightning keeps flaring like flashlight-powder outside the windowpanes every half-minute or so; there is an incessant roll of celestial drums all up and down the mountainside, so deep that O’Shaughnessy can feel it in his chest at times; the rain on the roof sounds like a steak frying.
Denholt is staring abstractedly into his plate, fingers drumming soundlessly on the table. O’Shaughnessy turns to the girl, to break the silence. “Have you lived here long?”
“Two years.”
His eyebrows move a little, upward. She doesn’t know what a plane is, a phone? “Where’d you live before then?”
“I was born here,” she answers shyly.
He thinks she’s misunderstood. “You look older than two to me,” he says with a laugh.
The point seems to baffle her too, as if it has never occurred to her before, “That’s as far back as I can remember,” she says slowly. “Last spring, and the spring before, when I was learning to talk and walk—that’s two years, isn’t it? How long ago did you learn to talk?”
He can’t answer; a chunk of rabbit has gone down whole; he’s lucky he doesn’t choke. But it isn’t the bolted rabbit that stiffens the hairs on the back of his neck, puts a needle of fear through his heart.
“That’ll do, Nova,” says Denholt sharply. There’s a strain around the eyes. His fork drops with a clash, as if he has just had a fright. “You’ll find—er, some cigarettes in a drawer in my bedroom for iMr. O’Shaughnessy.” And as soon as she’s left the table, he leans forward confidentially toward the flyer. “I’d better give you a word of explanation. She’s not quite—right.” He touches his own head. “That’s why—the fence and all that.
I keep her secluded up here with me, it’s more humane you know. Don’t take anything she says too seriously.”