The Dancers of Noyo

by Margaret St. Clair

  I tried to collect myself. Could she, for example, have gone into the service station restroom and fainted there? I went back to the station and put my question to the proprietor. Nobody had gone into the restroom, he told me surlily, and opened the door of the place to prove it was empty. I went into the store once more, and the storekeeper told me, once more, that he hadn't seen anybody like the girl I was describing. Both he and the service station man were short with me; I felt I was wearing out my welcome in Point Arena. But I didn't think they were lying when they said they hadn't seen Fran.

  It was beginning to get dark. I couldn't think what to do. I went back to the bike, which was the last place I had seen Francesca, and stood irresolutely beside it. Lights came on in the backs of several of the houses. I couldn't think what to do.

  Finally I decided to knock on the doors of the houses where there were lights. At one house an old man, deaf but friendly enough, answered, and at another a woman shouted, "Go away!" That was all. And the old man, of course, hadn't seen Franny.

  Three children—the first I had noticed in Point Arena—ran past where I was standing. They slowed down when I called after them, stared at me for a moment, and then ran off into the darkness hooting with laughter.

  There must be something I could do. After all, I was a medicine man. I got my medicine bag out and looked over its contents. The only thing that seemed to have any possibilities was the copper disk. I could try to scry with it.

  I made the attempt. I have never been much of a scryer, and at present I was too much upset to see even the flickering lights that herald the approach of a definite vision. I couldn't relax.

  Finally I stopped trying. I wrapped the disk up again in the black fabric and put it back in my medicine pouch. Ever since the episode with Gee-Gee I had been wearing my pouch down the back of my neck, and I put it there now. It seemed safer that way.

  I walked around a little. The night was dank and foggy, with a moon somewhere behind the fog. At last I sat down beside my bike on the rutted concrete sidewalk, resolved to wait there until morning. Perhaps Franny would come back yet, apologetic and smiling, with a sound, comfortable explanation of where she'd been.

  Time wore on. I was too anxious to be hungry, but I sucked some pieces of hard candy from the bag underneath the motorbike seat. One thing that bothered me was Franny's "psychic silence". She was capable of sending out a very strong mental impulse; she had done so when she had been in danger at Mallo Pass. That I got nothing at all from her now was capable of a sinister interpretation. But it could also be regarded as showing that nothing very serious had happened, and I tried to think of it that way.

  I dozed off several times during the night, leaning against the bike with my arms clasped around my knees. The dank cold kept waking me up. It was the kind of night when, in the pre-plague days, the foghorn at the Point Arena lighthouse would have been sounding all night. Once or twice I felt that somebody was looking at me from one of the houses, but I never saw anyone. Between dozes I decided that if Franny hadn't come back by morning I'd ride to Ukiah and ask the county agent for help. It was a forlorn hope. But it was the only one I had.

  Not long before sunrise I had a curious dream. All night long my dozes had shown me to myself as Bennet, tremulously happy in the bliss of his dying; and now, in this latest dream, I relived the moment when Kate Wimbold came out of the sea toward me, glistening blackly in her skinsuit, with a spear in her hand.

  Skinsuit? She was clothed in scarlet, glowing like the sunset, with a high crown on her head. No, she was naked, a naked woman who held out her arms to me with a smile. There was -such a light around her that, after a moment, I knew she was more than a woman.

  She was not a woman, never a woman. That part of my extra-life as Bennet had not been veridical. Kate Wimbold was a power, a principle and embodiment. My mind had embodied her as what she was. She was the female power, the Shakti of the land.

  Somehow, this knowledge was a considerable comfort to me. I didn't have to be concerned about her if she weren't real. (Who did Kate Wimbold, if she hadn't been a mere personification, a formulation of the abstract, remind me of? Fortunately, the question didn't have to be faced.) But now she was back in the skinsuit, holding something out to me insistently, saying, as her face enlarged to fill my whole field of vision, "Don't you remember the convenants?" I knew what she was offering me, though I didn't want to look at it. It was a fat Greek coin.

  I woke with a start. I must have slept more soundly than I realized. A man was bending over me, tapping me on the shoulder, with the glow of the dawn red around him. "You dropped this, I think," he said in a neat, precise voice, with every syllable separate and distinct. He-was holding something out to me insistently.

  Still dazed with sleep, I put out my hand to take it, and then drew back. I was reluctant to accept anything from him.

  "You dropped this," he repeated. Once more he extended his hand toward me.

  I lowered my eyes to what lay in the palm of his hand. I saw a fat silvery disk with a woman's—a goddess's?—helmeted head on the front. It was a Greek coin, the Greek coin I had been dreaming about.

  "I didn't drop it," I said.

  "You did," he contradicted. "I'm sure you did."

  I got creakily to my feet and looked at him. I saw a tall, well-built man, youngish, with a twist at the side of the mouth. "You'd better take it," he said, shoving his hand toward me again.

  "No. I didn't drop it."

  "OK." he said after a second. He shrugged, dropped the coin in his pocket, and turned his back on me.

  "Wait," I said, beginning to get more awake. "I didn't drop it, no. But I'd like to know where you got it."

  For answer, he began to walk away. I laid my hand on his shoulder. He wrenched free, the twist of his lip an angry snarl. We stared at each other for a moment. Then he began to run.

  I went pelting after him. He turned into a space between two houses, and when I got there he was nowhere in sight. But I heard a door banging up ahead.

  I thought the sound came from the right. I ran on, around the comer. There was the door, at the side of a large gray house, reddish in the sunrise.

  I opened it—it was unlocked—and went in. I was in a hallway. I heard running footsteps ahead.

  I hesitated. It occurred to me that in entering the house I might be doing just what he wanted me to do, and the thought slowed me down. I moved on, but slowly. Then I heard feet pounding out the back way.

  Once more I hesitated, unable to decide whether to go on chasing the man who had wakened me or to search the house. A faint noise, like the hum of a dynamo, from somewhere in the house decided me.

  I began opening doors. There was no furniture in any of the rooms, and the windows were so duty there was hardly any light. Everything smelled damp and old.

  The fourth room was the room with the web. It was even darker than the other rooms, but my first impression was that somebody was lying in a hammock in it. But the hammock had luminous mesh, faintly glowing red and green, and the person lying in it seemed not so much cradled in a hammock as caught in something like a trap. The mesh was denser at the two ends, head and feet, and the two colors merged into an opalescent blur. It was a cocoon of pale light.

  It seemed to swing free, a foot or two above the floor. I could see the face of the person in it in profile, white and finely chiseled, and it had a pale glimmer, like alabaster with a light behind. It was so quiet and passive and remote that it took me a moment to realize that it was the girl I was looking for. "Franny!" I cried.

  She didn't move. I started toward her. I should have touched the mesh of the web, whatever it might be made of, in two steps, but my hands went through it without resistance. I reached the other side of the room. I groped my way back to the door by which I had entered, and still hadn't touched anything.

  What was it? A hologram? I looked around the dim walls, but there was nothing there, or on the floor or ceiling, that looked like a projector. She wa
s still lying there in the web, to all appearances. "Franny!" I called once more. She didn't stir.

  I heard my own breathing. I had found her; but where was she? The web of light she lay in corruscated faintly and changed shape. It brought to my mind my dream, and the leaping green flame of the candle that had burned on the seashore when I had been Bennet. For a moment I was Bennet, again, back in his dying body. I heard myself saying, in a rather flat and uninflected voice, "I invoke the covenants."

  Francesca stirred. Her head moved from side to side. She toned her face toward me. Her eyes opened slowly. She was looking at me with Kate Wimbold's eyes.

  But it was certainly Franny. A faint smile curved her lips. She seemed about to rise from the web.

  I started toward her. Already I felt the touch of her arm as I helped her up and was formulating the questions I would ask. Then the walls of the room rushed toward me. Something flashed, like the flutter of a flag with black and white checkers. The ceiling seemed to fall apart and let the morning sky enter. A second later everything was dark.

  It was a thick darkness, and glistening, like a pool of India ink. It withdrew slowly, and I was standing in an empty room. The walls and ceiling were intact. But Franny was gone.

  Helplessness and loss came flooding in on me. I called "Franny!" but of course there was no answer. What should I do? I tried to think, and found I was shaking with fury. There were flint and tinder in my medicine bag. I could burn this vile, delusive house down. The house had it coming to it.

  But that would only maroon Franny wherever she was, beyond hope of recovery. I had better try to control myself.

  Well, I could go to Ukiah ... What would the county agent think of this story of a disappearing girl, a Greek coin seen in a dream, a luminous web, and a new disappearance? And even if he believed me, what could he do? He could send a deputy back to Point Arena with me, and we could search this house.

  The clue must be in this room. At any rate, I would begin here. I started to feel over the walls again. If I could find the projectors, they might give me a hint as to where Franny was. It was not so dark but that I could see pale spots on the walls, oval or rectangular, as if pictures had hung there once and been removed.

  At shoulder level I found two small ovals, the larger about three by six inches, rimmed with metal. They were not identical, and they plainly were not projectors, which was why I had not paid much attention to them before. But what were they? Pictures? They held pieces of glass, but there was nothing under the glass except faded wallpaper.

  A flicker with the smaller oval caught my eye. I looked closer. It was like trying to read tiny type; it got plainer as I looked. Abruptly I saw that it was Franny, with the web falling around her knees as if it were clothing she was discarding, holding out her hands to me in what seemed entreaty and distress. I thought she was a long way off.

  I drew a deep breath. She wasn't back, of course, but I could see her. But I didn't know what to do next. This was the house of being-at-a-loss-ness.

  I touched both ovals, I pressed and worked them. Nothing happened. The tiny Franny in the oval was turning her head from side to side as if she listened to something. Did that mean I was on the right track?

  I ceased my manipulations. She seemed to go on listening. Perhaps that wasn't it. But by now I had convinced myself that there must be a switch—something that, if pressed, would bring Franny back to me. I clung to that.

  I looked around me. What about the light switch, the ordinary, conventional light switch? I could try.

  I wiggled the toggle. No light came on; the globes in the fixtures had gone long ago. But the Franny in the oval disappeared and though I pushed the toggle up and down a dozen times she didn't come back.

  Had I found her again only to lose her? I felt sick. I fumbled with my medicine bag. I'd look through it—but what did I have in it that was useful?—and then I'd search the house. And if I still couldn't find her, I'd fire the house. The vicious, cruel, hoaxing house.

  This last resolve steadied my nerves a good deal. I was still fumbling with the contents of my bag when a slight noise made me turn and look. Franny, as large as life, was lying on her back in the dust of the bare floor, her knees a little flexed. She was breathing quietly, as if she were asleep.

  I could hardly bear to try to touch her. What if my hands missed her once more? But she was warm and real under the fabric of her shirt, and she opened her eyes and looked at me.

  She put her hands to her head (she told me afterwards that she had come back with a splitting headache), and then sat up and looked around puzzledly. "Where am I, Sam?" she said at last. Her voice sounded odd. But I was relieved to find she recognized me.

  "In a house in Point Arena," I said" after an instant's thought.

  "Oh. What's been happening?"

  "I don't really know what's been happening myself." I filled her in on events as I had observed them. She listened with a puzzled frown, except when I mentioned the silver coin. Then her face cleared.

  "I—that—that's when it started happening," she said.

  "When what started?"

  "When the coin came rolling down the street toward me and stopped in front of me. I left the bike to pick it up. You see, I recognized it."

  "Recognized it? From what I told you about a coin in my extra-life as Bennet?"

  "No, not that. But my mother used to wear it—or one just like it—in a silver setting on a chain around her neck. So I started after it." She paused, her hand to her head.

  "Then what?" I prompted. I was on my knees beside her on the dusty floor.

  She shook her head and winced. "I don't know. It's like a lot of bad dreams. I seem to remember a lot of rubbery fingers going over me softly, tickling and tracing, and my trying for a long time to wake up. But after that, the next thing is you kneeling beside me on the floor.

  "What happened to you after the man tried to get you to take the coin?"

  I told her. I wasn't especially proud of the way I'd acted—it certainly wasn't heroic—but I don't know what more I could have done (those words are the clue to all pusillanimous actions).

  At the end of my narrative, she shook her head again. "No, I don't remember any of it," she said. "Maybe my trying to wake up happened when you were calling me."

  "You don't know where you were? I mean, you haven't any impression of what sort of—of space was around you?"

  "None at all, except that it wasn't here, I think." She looked around the empty room.

  I considered. Out of all the questions that were tumbling around in my mind, I selected one. "Franny, do you know who Kate Wimbold was? Was she a real person?"

  "Oh, yes. I thought you knew. She was my mother. My father gave her the Greek coin. As I said, she wore it in a silver setting around her neck. They split up when I was a baby, and she never talked about him much. But she kept the coin."

  The love life of Franny's parents didn't interest me. But a strange idea had occured to me. "Franny, is your father really dead?"

  She stared at me. "Dead? Of course he's dead. I saw him die. I was at his funeral. He was cremated. He couldn't be any deader. Why?"

  "Because sometimes I feel I'm straggling with somebody whose agents are the Dancers and the Avengers and the chemical-conscience people, somebody behind them. It's the Mandarins, I suppose. But your father seems a perfect representative of the older generation—brilliant, queer, opinionated. A drug-user. I wondered for a minute if he was really dead."

  "Oh, he's dead all right. I suppose he could be considered responsible for a lot of things, though. Including the bad night you spent waiting for me in the street."

  "Umh? How do you mean that?"

  "Well, I don't know who was operating it. But I think I fell—or was pushed—into one of my father's traps." She smiled almost smugly at me.

  "—You mean this whole setup"—I made a gesture that took in the whole house—"was meant as a trap for somebody?"

  She nodded, though not very vigor
ously. "Where my father was concerned, you never were sure of anything. Did the things he talked about really happen, or were they things he thought up in one of his drug dreams? But he said he had 'set three traps for lost love' along the Mendocino coast. I had the impression that one of them, at least, was out in the water.

  "Certainly my mother never went back to him. She was in and out of several communes before she died—she was still a young woman—in one of the plagues.

  "If he was trying to trap her, the coin may have been meant as bait."

  "Did your mother go in for skindiving?" I asked.

  "Um-hum. I thought that was why my father put one of the traps out in the surf."

  So that part of my life as Bennet had been accurate. I considered. Had the Navarro tribe, and its Dancer, been vanished in one of O'Hare's traps? Would O'Hare have wanted to vanish a woman he was trying to regain? Franny, who probably had actually been in one of O'Hare's traps, couldn't say what it was like. There was nothing to go on ... The tribesman at Albion had kept looking out to sea as if he expected trouble to come from there.