Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)
Page 52
An instant later, he’d had them solidly re-established. He was now simply a man who knew something had happened that he couldn’t begin to explain rationally. It was a much more acceptable situation, since it included the obvious explanation of irrationality.
On Thursday morning, he could tell Dr. Ciardi, “Look, Doc, I’m having hallucinations. The last one was a honey. I thought I was carrying a dead woman all over town! What do we do about it?”
And they’d do whatever was done in such circumstances and it would be a sane, normal, active life for Alan Commager forever after—with a woman more or less like Jean Bohart to live it with, which would keep out the shadowy Lonas. With everything, in fact, that didn’t fit into that kind of life, that belonged to the shadow-worlds, as completely obliterated and forgotten as they could become.
Commager wondered what made that picture look so unsatisfactory.
IT STRUCK him suddenly that, according to Paylar, this was exactly how the Guides had expected him to react as soon as her little games had steered him into a bout of amnesia and hallucinations. They’d wanted, she’d said, in approximately those words, to put him in a frame of mind that would make him refuse to ever budge out of the safe, everyday world again, even in his thoughts.
Commager grimaced. But they’d become convinced then that he wasn’t going to do it!
He might do it all the same, he thought. But the reason it couldn’t be a completely satisfactory solution was growing clear. One couldn’t discount the probability that there was a little more to the shadow-worlds than lunacy and shadow. Perhaps only a very little more and perhaps not. But if he avoided looking at what was there, he would never find out.
And then he realized that he wasn’t going to avoid looking at it, hadn’t really been seriously considering it. He swore at himself, because avoidance did seem still the simple and rational solution, providing one could be satisfied with it.
He couldn’t be satisfied with it and that was that. He could see now that if an organization such as Paylar had described the Guides to be existed, and if it were composed, at least in part, of people who really had developed an understanding and working knowledge of the possibilities of psi, it would be in a uniquely favorable position to control and check the development of similar abilities in others.
Its connections and its influence would be primarily with the psychological fringe groups here and with their analogs elsewhere; and the people who were drawn to such groups would be those who were dissatisfied with or incompetent in normal lines of activity, and had become abnormally interested in compensating for their lack of other achievement by investigating the shadowy, vague, ego-bolstering promise of psi.
And people frightened by the threat of total war, driven into a search for psychic refuge by the prospect of physical destruction.
In either case, because they were uncertain, less than normally capable people, they could be controlled without too much difficulty—and carefully diverted then, in groups or as individuals, from the thing they were seeking and might stumble upon!
The exercises she’d demonstrated to him, Paylar had said, were designed primarily to provide convincing illusions for those who were hungry for illusion.
SHE AND her associates, Commager realized, might feel it was necessary. They might know just enough to be afraid of what such knowledge could lead to. If it were possible to encourage a pair of dice to bounce and spin in just the right pattern to win for you, it might, for example, also be possible to send a few buildings bouncing and spinning through a city! Of course, nobody ever seemed to have done it, but that might be due precisely to the existence of some controlling agency, such as the Guides claimed to be.
For a while, Commager regarded the possibility of accepting Paylar’s invitation to join her group—and, a few seconds later, he knew he wasn’t going to do that either!
However determined he might be to proceed with a painstaking and thorough investigation of this field of possibilities now, there was still a feeling of something completely preposterous about the entire business.
He could accept the fact that he had been shaken up mentally to the point where he might qualify without too much difficulty for the nearest insane asylum. But he wasn’t ready to admit to anybody just yet that he, a grown man, was taking the matter of psi very seriously.
It was something you could try out for yourself, just as an experiment, behind locked doors and with the windows shaded.
So Commager locked the front door to his cabin and tried it out.
VI
THE TELEGRAM which had been shoved under his apartment door during the night gave a Hollywood telephone number and urgently requested him to call it. It was signed by Elaine Lovelock. So far as Commager could remember, Elaine was no one he knew. When he dialed the number, nobody answered.
He’d try to reach her again before he left for the store, he decided. It was eight-thirty now; he’d just got in from the Bay. The chances were somebody’s de luxe fifty-gallon tropical fish tank had started to leak on the living room carpet, and it hadn’t occurred to them immediately that this was what pails and pots were for.
He sat down to write a few notes on last night’s experiment.
Nothing very striking had happened; he suspected he’d simply fallen asleep after the first forty minutes or so. But if he kept notes, something like a recognizable pattern might develop.
Item: The “Lona complex” hadn’t bothered him much. It was beginning to feel like something that had happened to somebody else a long time ago. So perhaps the emotions connected with it hadn’t been triggered by Paylar’s exercises, as Julius seemed to assume. Or else, since he no longer believed in it, it was on its way out as a complex—he hoped.
Item: With his eyes closed, he could imagine very easily that he was looking through the wall of the room into another section of the cabin; also that he had moved there in person, as a form of awareness. In fact, he had roamed happily all around the Bay area for about ten minutes. For the present, that proved only that he had a much more vivid imagination than he’d thought—though whoever created Lona could be assumed to have considerable hidden talent along that line!
Item: When he’d tried to “read” specific pages of a closed book lying on a table near him, he had failed completely.
Item: He had run suddenly—he might have been asleep by then—into successive waves of unexplained panic, which brought him upright in his chair with his pulses hammering wildly.
Item: The panic had faded out of reach the instant he began to investigate it and he hadn’t been able to recall it.
Item: Either shortly before or after that event, he’d had for a while the sensation of being the target of stealthy and malevolent observation. He had made an attempt to “locate” the observer and gained the impression that the other one unhurriedly withdrew.
Item: Briefly, he’d had a feeling of floating up near the ceiling of the room, watching his own body sitting in the armchair with its eyes closed. This had rocked him hard enough to awaken him again and he had concluded the experiments.
Item: After waking up, he hadn’t found or imagined he’d found Ruth MacDonald or anybody else lying around the cabin, murdered or otherwise. He’d checked.
And that about summed it up, Commager decided. Not very positive results, but he was determined to continue the experiments.
He suspected Julius would feel very dubious about all this; but Julius wasn’t going to be informed.
He himself was in a remarkably cheerful mood this morning.
MRS. LOVELOCK had a magnificent, musical voice, rather deep for a woman.
“I’m so glad you called again, Mr. Commager,” she said. “I was away on an unavoidable errand. Dr. Knox needs to see you immediately! How soon can you be here?”
“Dr. Knox?” Commager repeated. “Do you mean the Reverend Wilson Knox?”
“That is correct. Do you have the address of our Temple?” Commager said he didn’t. There was no immediate
reason to add that he hadn’t the slightest intention of going there, either. “What did he want to see me about?”
Mrs. Lovelock hesitated. “I couldn’t explain it satisfactorily by telephone, Mr. Commager.” A trace of anxiety came into her voice. “But it’s quite urgent!” Commager said he was sorry; he had a very full business day ahead of him—which was true—so, unless he could get some indication of what this was all about—
The melodious voice told him quaveringly, “Dr. Knox had a serious heart attack last night. He needs your help!”
Commager scowled. She sounded as off-beat as the rest of them and he had an urgent impulse to hang up.
He said instead, “I don’t quite see how I could be of much help under those circumstances. I’m not a doctor, you know.”
“I do know that, Mr. Commager,” Mrs. Lovelock replied. “I also know that you haven’t been acquainted with Dr. Knox for more than a few days. But I assure you that you may be saving a human life by coming out here immediately! And that is all I can tell you now—”
She stopped short, sounding as if she were about to burst into tears.
What she said didn’t make sense. Also Commager hadn’t liked the Reverend Knox, quite aside from the company he kept. But he could, he supposed resignedly, afford to waste a few more hours now.
“What was that address?” he asked, trying not to sound too ungracious about it.
IN THE way over, he had time to wonder whether this mightn’t be part of some new little game the Guides wanted to play with him. He was inclined to discount Paylar’s threats—psychologically, he suspected, they’d already tried everything they could do to him—and they didn’t look like people who would resort readily to physical violence, though Hawkes could be an exception there.
When Commager came in sight of the Temple of Antique Christianity, physical violence suddenly looked a little more likely. He stopped a moment to consider the place.
It was in a back canyon beyond Laurel; the last quarter-mile had been a private road. A tall iron gate blocked the road at this point, opening into a walled court with a small building to the right. A sign over a door in the building indicated that this was the office.
Some distance back, looming over the walls of the court and a few intervening trees, was another structure, an old white building in the Spanish style, the size of a small hotel.
It looked like the right kind of setting for the kind of screwball cult Henry Warbutt had described. Depending on who was around, it also looked like a rather good place for murder or mayhem.
Should he just stroll in carelessly like a big, brave, athletic man? Or should he be a dirty coward and get his revolver out of the glove compartment? It was bound to make an unsightly bulge in any of his jacket pockets—
He decided to be a dirty coward.
THE GATE was locked, but the lock clicked open a few seconds after Commager pushed a buzzer button beside it. The only visible way into the area was through the office door, so he went inside.
A pallid young man and a dark, intense-looking young woman sat at desks across the room from the door. The young man told Commager he was expected and went to a side door of the office with him, from where he pointed to an entrance into the big building, on the other end of what he called the grove.
“Mrs. Lovelock is waiting for you there,” he said and went back to his desk.
The grove had the reflective and well-preserved air of a section of an exclusive cemetery, with just enough trees growing around to justify its name. There was a large, square lawn in the center, and a large, chaste bronze statue stood at each corner of the lawn, gazing upon it.
Back among trees to the left was a flat, raised platform, apparently faced with gray and black marble, but otherwise featureless. Commager had just gone past this when he realized that somebody had been watching him from the top of the platform as he passed.
That, at any rate, was the feeling he got. He hadn’t actually seen anyone, and when he looked back, there was nobody there. But the feeling not only had been a definite and certain one—it resumed the instant he started walking on again. This time, he didn’t look back.
Before he’d gone a dozen more steps, he knew, too, just when he’d experienced that exact sensation before. It was the previous night, while he was doing his parapsychological experiments at the Bay and had suddenly felt that he was under secret and unfriendly scrutiny.
He laughed at himself, but the impression remained a remarkably vivid one. And before he reached the entrance to the main building which the young man in the office had indicated to him, he had time for the thought that playing with the imagination, as he was doing, might leave one eventually on very shaky ground.
Then he was there, looking into a long hallway, and Mrs. Lovelock’s fine, deep voice greeted him before he caught sight of her.
“I’m so glad you could come, Mr. Commager!” she said.
SHE WAS standing in the door of a room that opened on the hall to the left, and Commager was a trifle startled by her appearance. He had expected a large handsome woman of about thirty, to match the voice. But Mrs. Lovelock was not only huge; she was shockingly ugly and probably almost twice the age he’d estimated. She wore a white uniform, so Commager asked whether she was Wilson Knox’s nurse.
“I’ve been a registered nurse for nearly forty years, Mr. Commager,” the beautiful voice told him. “At present, I’m attending Dr. Knox. Would you come in here, please?”
He followed her into the room and she closed the door behind them. Her big, gray face, Commager decided, looked both worried and very angry.
“The reason I wasn’t more open with you over the telephone,” she told him, “was that I was certain you wouldn’t have taken the trouble to drive out here if I had been. And I couldn’t have blamed you! Won’t you sit down, please?”
Commager took a chair and said he was afraid he didn’t understand.
Mrs. Lovelock nodded. “I shall give you the facts. Dr. Knox had a very severe heart attack at around two o’clock this morning. I have been a member of his congregation for twenty-four years, and I arrived with a doctor shortly afterward. Dr. Knox is resting comfortably now, but he is very anxious to see you. I must let him tell you why, Mr. Commager. But I. should like to prepare you for what you will hear—”
MRS. LOVELOCK stared gloomily at the carpet for a moment and then her face twisted briefly into a grimace of pure rage.
“Wilson—Dr. Knox—is a harmless old fool!” she told Commager savagely. “This Antique Christianity he worked out never hurt anybody. They prayed to Pan and they had their dances and chants. And there was the Oracle and he read out of the Book of Pan.
“I don’t know anything about Dr. Knox’s activities,” Commager said, not too politely.
She had thick, reddened, capable hands and they were locked together now on her lap, the fingers twisting slowly against one another, as if she were trying to break something between them.
“I was the Oracle, you see,” she explained. “I knew it was foolish, but I’d sit up there on the dais in the smoke, with a veil over my head, and I’d say whatever I happened to think of. But this year, Wilson brought in that Ruth MacDonald—you know her, he said.”
“I’ve met the lady,” Commager admitted. “I wouldn’t say I know her.”
“She became the Oracle! And then she began to change everything! I told Wilson he was quite right to resist that. There are things, Mr. Commager, that a good Christian simply must not do!”
Which, Commager felt, was a remarkable statement, under the circumstances. Mrs. Lovelock came ponderously to her feet.
“Dr. Knox will tell you what remains to be told,” she added rather primly. “And, of course, you cannot stay too long. Will you follow me now, please?”
THE REVEREND didn’t look as if he were in too bad a condition, Commager thought when he saw him first. He was lying in a hospital bed which had been raised high enough to let him gaze down at the grove out of a window of
his second-story room.
After he’d talked a few moments, Commager felt the man was delirious and he thought briefly of calling back Mrs. Lovelock or the other nurse who had been with Wilson Knox when they came in. But those two undoubtedly had been able to judge for themselves whether they should remain with the Reverend or not.
“Why should they want to kill you?” Commager asked. Knox had been speaking of the Guides and then had started to weep; now he blew his nose on a piece of tissue and made a groping motion for Commager’s hand, which Commager withdrew in time.
“It was merely a matter of business as far as I was concerned, Mr. Commager. I certainly had no intention of blocking any activities of the Guides. In fact, I should prefer not to know about them. But when Miss MacDonald, who was employed by the Temple, upset our members, I protested to her, sir! Isn’t that understandable?”
“Entirely,” Commager agreed carefully. “What did Miss MacDonald do to upset them?”
“She predicted two of the congregation would die before the end of the year,” Wilson Knox said shakily. “It caused a great deal of alarm. Many of our wealthier clients withdrew from the Temple at once. It is a considerable financial loss!”
The Reverend appeared rational enough on that point. Commager inquired, “Is Miss MacDonald one of the Guides, Dr. Knox?”
“It’s not for me to say.” Knox gave him a suddenly wary look. “When she spoke to me by telephone last night, I asked whether I had offended anyone. I was, of course, greatly distressed!” His expression changed back to one of profound self-pity. “But she repeated only that it had become necessary for me to die this week and hung up.”