The Medium

by Noëlle Sickels

  “Well, you take care of yourself,” Emilie said. “Will you have an address? We’ll send you cookies.”

  “Oh, Em, don’t fuss at the boy,” Walter grumbled.

  “There’s a post office box,” Billy answered. “I have the number at home.” Looking straight at Helen for the first time since entering the house, he added, “If Helen can come to the fence, I’ll pass it over.”

  Helen didn’t have to wait long at the fence, but every second was agonizing. Would she be able to keep her pledge to herself to behave as if the meeting in the woods had never happened? When Billy arrived, he didn’t immediately give her the address. Instead, he rested his arm on the top of the fence, the folded square of paper tucked between two fingers like a cigarette.

  “Helen, you know … I …”

  Helen concentrated on keeping her face blank.

  Billy shook his head ruefully and laughed a short laugh.

  “So, did you have a good swim yesterday?” he said.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Kinda muddy there, though.”

  “I went way out onto the river.”

  “Well, then, that’s okay.”

  A dog barked somewhere, and Billy peered toward the street, as if trying to locate the dog exactly. He looked at Helen again and held out the paper.

  “Tell your mother she doesn’t really have to send me anything,” he said.

  “All right.”

  “Except if she does, maybe you could put in a note, huh? You know, just about what’s going on around here, if my Mom’s okay, stuff like that.”

  “If you want me to.”

  “Yeah, sure. I’ll even try to write back.”

  He smiled, and she was sure she blushed. She stepped down from the box on which she’d been standing and began walking to her house.

  “Hey, Helen!”

  She turned. He was still on the box on his side of the tall fence, only his head and shoulders in view.

  “Thanks,” he said, and waved.

  She managed a smile. He jumped off his box and was gone.

  It was eight o‘clock Sunday night, time for the Chase and Sanborn Hour with Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy. Tomorrow would be Halloween. Helen had decided she was too old to go trick-or-treating this year, but she’d carved a large jack-o’-lantern to set in the bay window in the living room. From her seat on the sofa beside her mother, she could catch the pleasant scent of raw pumpkin warmed by candle flame.

  Walter lit his pipe and leaned forward in his easy chair to turn on the radio. Ursula took her customary seat. She turned on the floor lamp beside her chair and pulled a ball of yarn, a pair of needles, and a partially finished sweater out of a basket at her feet and began knitting. The theme music from the Chase and Sanborn Hour swelled into the room. It was a favorite program with all of them. In the opening ten minutes, they shared several laughs over Charlie McCarthy’s brash joking.

  When Nelson Eddy came on to sing Neopolitan Love Song, Walter turned the dial. It was a habit of his, switching to another station during commercials or unappreciated musical interludes. He stopped at the sound of a man’s excited voice. The man identified himself as Carl Phillips, a CBS news correspondent, reporting from a farm in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. It sounded like one of those flash bulletins that sometimes interrupted programming, like when Japan had seized Chinese cities last year, or this spring, when Hitler annexed Austria, and only a few weeks ago, when German troops, with the acquiescence of the British and French, had occupied parts of Czecho-Slovakia.

  What I can see of the object itself doesn’t look very much like a meteor, at least not the meteors I’ve seen, Carl Phillips was saying. It looks more like a huge cylinder.

  “What is he talking about?” Ursula said, pausing with her knitting needles raised.

  “Grover’s Mill,” said Emilie. “That’s in south Jersey, isn’t it?”

  “Near Trenton, I think,” said Walter.

  The reporter was interviewing the farmer on whose land the object had fallen. In the background, you could hear a crowd and the gruff commands of policemen trying to keep them back. The reporter held his microphone out to pick up a scraping sound coming from the object.

  “Now what’s that supposed to be?” Ursula said. The ball of yarn had dropped to the floor, but she didn’t retrieve it.

  Carl Phillips asked the same thing of Dr. Pierson, a Princeton professor who was on the scene. The professor was unsure about the strange sound, but he did express doubt that the object was a meteor.

  The metal casing is definitely extraterrestrial—not found on this earth, Dr. Pierson said authoritatively.

  “Not found on Earth?” Emilie echoed nervously. “What does he mean, not found on Earth? Walter, what does he mean?”

  Walter made a shushing motion with his hand. In rapid succession, Carl Phillips narrated the incredible facts that the scraping sound was the cylinder opening up and that a huge, tentacled monster had emerged, dripping saliva from quivering, rimless lips. People in the crowd were gasping and shouting. He described a small band of men waving a white flag as they carefully approached the creature.

  Walter stood up and tensely faced the radio. They were all concentrating on it, straining to sort out Carl Phillips’s words from the confused voices and noises around him. Helen’s heartbeat thumped so loudly in her ears, it almost seemed another element of the broadcast. Whimpering, Emilie put her arm around Helen’s shoulder.

  Then from the radio, screams and shrieks. A jet of flame from the cylinder had incinerated the little group of approaching men and set the whole field on fire. Automobiles were exploding. More flames were shooting out of the cylinder, aimed at the fleeing crowd. Carl Phillips cried out that it was coming his way. Then, dead silence.

  “Walter?” Emilie said weakly.

  “There’s something wrong with the radio?” Ursula asked. Helen heard a distinct quaver in her indomitable grandmother’s voice.

  An announcer stated that due to circumstances beyond their control, they were unable to continue the broadcast from Grover’s Mill, but that they’d return to it at the earliest opportunity. In the meantime, they’d continue with the musical program the news bulletin had interrupted. A piano began playing.

  “I’m going to try another station,” Walter said. “Somebody’s got to know more.”

  But before he could turn the dial, the piano was abruptly cut off, and another announcer relayed a phone message from Grover’s Mill that forty people had been burned to death there. The governor had declared martial law in Mercer and Middlesex counties. Militia were heading to the area.

  Helen was trying hard not to cry, fearing once she began, she wouldn’t be able to stop. She tried to picture the map of New Jersey on the wall of her history classroom. How near was Grover’s Mill?

  A sober announcer reported that of the 7,000 militiamen, only 120 survived; the rest had been burned or trampled to death. Communications were down in central Jersey from Pennsylvania to the ocean. Highways were jammed with terrified civilians trying to escape.

  “My God,” Walter intoned.

  Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars.

  The Secretary of the Interior came on to caution the public to remain calm, reminding them that the Martians were contained in one area. But on his heels, various bulletins contradicted him. More cylinders had landed. Martians in fighting machines were advancing northward, tearing up railroad tracks, bridges, power lines. The Schneiders listened, horrified, to Army officers in bombers as they were engulfed by a black cloud of poison gas. The same gas was blanketing Newark. They heard a newsman choking to death. The Martians were headed for New York City.

  “We must call Franz and Marie,” Emilie cried, jumping u
p and running to the phone.

  Helen wondered how soon the Martians would reach Brooklyn. Would her relatives have time to get out? But they had no car. Where could they go anyway? Where could anyone go?

  “I can’t get through,” Emilie wailed. “The lines must be down. I can’t get through.”

  She covered her face with her hands and began sobbing. Walter seemed not to notice. He was circulating the room in agitated strides, stopping momentarily when he neared the radio to stare expectantly at it. Helen knew she should go to her mother, but she couldn’t move.

  Ursula went to the sofa and took Helen’s hand.

  “Aufstehen!” she said, pulling her to her feet. “We must leave.”

  “Leave?”

  “We must go to the north, or west. Away from towns. To hide, so we can see what may happen later.”

  As she spoke, they could hear voices in the street, the slamming of house doors and car doors, a small child crying loudly and bitterly. Though muffled by the closed windows, they were unmistakably the sounds of panic, and they further inflamed the family’s already tossed emotions.

  “Let’s call the police first,” Walter said. “They’ve probably closed some roads.”

  “Go, Helen, get our coats. And your father’s flashlight,” instructed Ursula. Her voice was still shaky, but Helen was glad to hear her giving orders. “Emilie, some oranges there are in the kitchen. Bring what else you see quick to take.”

  Emilie wiped her eyes and looked around with a bewildered expression, then hurried out of the room. Helen ran to the hall closet.

  “Can’t get through there, either,” Walter said, putting down the phone. “We’re on our own.”

  When Helen returned laden with coats and hats, an announcer was reporting from the roof of a building in New York. The faint drone of people singing hymns was floating up to him from the streets below.

  Enemy now in sight above the Palisades. Five—five great machines. First one is crossing the river.

  Helen imagined the Martian machines tall as the George Washington Bridge, similar in structure, but gruesomely animated. She thought of Terence and Teresa. Could they see the black smoke advancing over the skyscrapers as the announcer was describing? Everything was happening so fast. Only a short time ago, Carl Phillips was contemplating a strange object in a farmer’s field, and now Carl Phillips was a charred corpse in a Trenton morgue. And what of Trenton’s population? Were they all either dead or running? Helen wondered wildly which would be worse, to die by fire or by gas.

  Walter took his and Emilie’s coats and hats and the flashlight from Helen. He, Helen, and her grandmother put on their things, then went to the kitchen to get Emilie, and out the back door. While Walter ran to the garage to get the car, the others went to the front.

  In the middle of the street, two cars had collided. Both drivers had come out of their drives at high speed, one going forward, one backing up, neither bothering to watch for traffic. Now the two men, standing beside their interlocked bumpers, were shouting at each other and seemed close to blows. One man’s wife, a woman who played cards sometimes with Emilie and Ursula, was trying to pull him away. Tears were coursing down her face. Her little boy, also crying, had the hem of her skirt bunched up in his hand so tightly her garters were showing.

  “How do you expect us to get away now?” her husband was shouting at the other driver. “We need a tow truck to pull these cars apart.”

  “You’re the damn fool drove right through your own garage door,” countered his opponent.

  “Well, we won’t be needing the garage door anymore, but we damn well need a working car.”

  Mr. Steltman rushed across his yard and put himself between the angry men.

  “Gus, Sam, it’s too late to leave now, anyway,” he said. “Go back inside. Stuff wet towels around your doors and windows to keep out the gas. Take your families into the basement. In the morning, if the coast is clear, we can get together as a neighborhood and make a plan.”

  The men scowled at him, but they backed away from each other.

  “Got no time to argue,” one said. “Me and mine’ll just walk out. Keep to the woods by the river. Radio says the roads are jammed, anyway.” He pulled a shotgun out of the trunk of his disabled car and strode off down the street, his wife and three children scooting after him.

  Walter pulled the car to the curb and got out, his motor idling. Mr. Steltman had moved on to other neighbors who were loading cars or standing in their doorways looking up fearfully at the sky. He advised them all to the same course of action he’d urged on the disputing motorists. Most shook their heads and turned away. Elderly Mrs. McMahon nodded at him and went back into her house. Living alone, without an automobile, she had little choice.

  Mr. Steltman was making his speech to Walter when a neighbor from the end of the block arrived. Helen knew his name, Mr. Collins, but his children were older than she, and the two families had only a nodding acquaintance.

  “Steltman,” Mr. Collins said, “you’re wasting your time.”

  Mr. Steltman was gathering himself up to respond when Mr. Collins continued.

  “Ain’t no Martians.”

  He looked around at his neighbors, some still scurrying around, some pausing to think over Mr. Steltman’s ideas. Now the Mackeys were out in the street, too. Mrs. Mackey and her sons each carried pillowcases stuffed with objects. Barbara held Linda by one hand and their dog on a leash by the other. Billy spotted Helen and came up to her.

  “I’m going to ask your father to take my mother and baby sister,” he said.

  “What will the rest of you do?”

  “We’ll get Barbara in a car somehow. Me and Lloyd, too, if we can. If not, he and I’ll lay low, like Mr. Steltman says.”

  Billy moved closer to where Walter was standing, near Mr. Steltman and Mr. Collins.

  “Hey, all of you,” Mr. Collins said, raising his voice. “Ain’t no Martians.”

  “Have you heard something new on the radio?” a woman asked.

  “Nope. Same as you.”

  “When I was closing our door,” Billy said, “there was a short wave guy on the radio trying to call New York, but nobody was answering. Nobody.”

  “Sonny,” Mr. Collins said, “they can’t raise up anybody in New York ’cause the Krauts have cut the lines. It’s not Martians done all this. It’s Nazis. That goddamn Hitler’s invaded, see, and just fooling us about Martians so’s we’ll give up without a fight. That meteor thing was a zeppelin in disguise, I figure, and the gas, well, the Germans used gas in the Great War, didn’t they?”

  Helen saw the Dohrmanns, on the edge of the small crowd, turn and walk away.

  “Could be Japanese,” someone suggested. “They’re crafty devils, you know.”

  “Get in the car,” Walter said, and Helen and her mother and grandmother complied without comment.

  “Mr. Collins,” Walter was saying, “the radio said Martians. The Secretary of the Interior was on, and Army people, and reporters. We heard some of those people die, for God’s sake.”

  “You expect us to put stock in what you have to say?” Collins said ominously.

  “Hell, no,” someone said. Concurring mumbles came from some of the men.

  In the backseat of the Ford, Ursula leaned over to whisper in Helen’s ear.

  “Are you picking up anything?”

  Helen just stared at her.

  “Take a moment. Listen,” Ursula said. “All those deaths. Everything else. Do you feel anyone? A message?”

  Helen didn’t want to do it, but she closed her eyes, and for the first time in nearly a year, she deliberately let her mind fall open to whatever might come. She didn’t go so far as to call on Iris, but she drew her attention inward, found a placid hollow in the midst of the fear and stayed there patiently waiting.

  Nothing came. No visions, no words, no physical sensations. Only a hazy impression of being clogged, as if she had a bad head cold. She was sorry she could be no help
to the terror-stricken people around her, but at the same time, she was elated. If she couldn’t pick up anything in as dire a situation as this, she must finally have conquered her tendencies. If this really were the end of the world, her victory was of little import, but it pleased her nonetheless.

  “Nothing,” she said to her grandmother.

  “Not me, either,” the old lady replied, and for the first time since Walter had tuned the radio dial to the alarming story of invaders from Mars, her voice was ordinary.

  Walter opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat.

  “That’s right,” a man at the back of the crowd called out. “You go. They probably told you where to hide out to be safe.”

  Collins turned to the milling neighbors. “If any of you still want to run away, maybe you oughta follow the Krauts,” he said. “’Course, then, you just might end up prisoners.”

  “Hey, hey, everybody!” Mr. Goldberg from four houses over was running down the middle of the street shouting. His doughy wife, in a wrapper and bedroom slippers, ran behind him, puffing hard in her attempt to keep up.

  “It was a play!” he shouted. “A play! Mercury Theater of the Air. We just heard. The War of the Worlds. For Halloween, get it?” He stopped beside the Schneiders’ car because the most folks were collected there. Mr. Goldberg was smiling sheepishly. “Scared the pants off me, I’ll tell you.”

  Slowly, the neighbors headed back to their houses. Some loitered to review the broadcast, which details had convinced them of its truth, which details, in retrospect, pointed to fiction. Walter waited for the space around the car to clear of people, then he drove it into the garage.

  Ursula made cocoa. No one told Helen it was past her bedtime. No one said anything at all. While they drank their cocoa seated around the kitchen table, Helen looked from one adult face to the other. In each one, anxiety lingered, plain to see.

  CHAPTER 15

  JULY 1939

  “Teresa, show Helen our official guidebook,” Marie said as the family was waiting at Penn Station for the train to the World’s Fair. “It says the Fair is the most stupendous, gigantic, super-magnificent show on earth, and they’re right! We should go straight to the Trylon and Perisphere first.”