by Farris, John
Robin could not have told anyone how he managed a Visit. Of course separation was easier in his own bed at the end of a tiring day, just as he felt himself drifting off to sleep. In that state he could Visit almost anywhere. Fully awake he'd never been able to do it so completely with anyone but Brian, who lacked defenses of any kind, and absorbed much more stimuli than he could cope with. Robin's technique for projection was to mold thought into thought-force and then mentally pitch it; when he really wanted to he could make an impression on even the most rigid mind, just as if he were lobbing a rubber ball dipped in paint against a concrete wall. With more receptive people it was like throwing his thought-ball at a picket fence, occasionally having it sail between the pickets. When that happened Robin often got startled looks that made him grin.
For a few minutes Brian didn't acknowledge him at all as he made his rounds, but Robin patiently kept bouncing the ball his way, and after several returns he cleanly entered Brian's mind.
As usual he was nearly swamped by the violent wave energy, the drowning boy attempting to smother his rescuer, but he'd become adept at holding Brian off until he had the chance to harmonize all that dissonance and disengage Brian from the rounding impulse. That took time and effort, and meanwhile the body continued to skip and jog and the voice chanted hoarsely.
A couple of times Robin glanced at himself, sitting outside the circle Indian-fashion with his head down and his eyes closed, lips a white line, perspiration rolling down his brindle cheeks, but he was too busy to pay much attention to the physical body, and it was no longer a novelty to gaze upon himself from a distance. He began to tune and regulate the intensely disorganized brainwave patterns, imposing his own quieter and slower rhythms on the overburdened thalamus.
Before long Brian slowed to a trudge. The chanting stopped and was replaced by a low cry.
"Daz!" Brian said over and over, meaning: Dad. Robin aimed Brian at his father, where he clung to Whit's knee perhaps too tenaciously, almost paralyzed. But it was better than making rounds.
Robin regretfully withdrew as Franny came back with the baby on her hip.
She glanced at Brian and bent to kiss Robin's wet forehead. He looked up at her, dazed.
"I just don't know how you do it," she said.
Whit took the newly docile Brian off to bathe and change him for bed, although he was at the point in his drinking where he needed a little help himself.
Fran yawned and turned off lights, making the porch dark; she smiled sweetly and distantly at Robin. Robin excused himself and left.
But he lingered in the woodlot for several minutes, staying to hear Fran sing softly to Bernice as she rocked the baby in her arms. He perceived her, as if reflected in the eyelight of his torrid devotion, moving slowly within the glass, hair twisting down her back and pale as the pith of a tree struck by lightning.
Robin was astonished to find that the Tidrows had been to Vigil and returned, which meant he had spent nearly two hours with Brian. No wonder he could barely keep his eyes open. His aunt was scrubbing the kitchen floor, cheerful despite the fumes. She had saved two biscuits from dinner, and Robin devoured them with generous helpings of plum preserves. He explained that Brian was doing better now. Fay nodded and beamed at him. Her hands were redder than his sunburned nose. Robin wished she wasn't down on her knees doing a floor that didn't need doing very badly anyway, and he felt a pang of remorse.
Fay caught a flash of this emotion and looked up again.
"I'll finish it for you in the morning," he offered, but Fay said no, it was her work, thank you, Robin.
He wondered how she could go on living with and drudging for a man who offered so little in return. Robin, who knew a lot of things without having to be told, understood why they didn't have children.
What always happened to him when he played with his prick in the tub or in bed almost never happened to Ellis Tidrow. He didn't know what the problem was, but there was deep shame in it for a man. But Fay generously accepted this failing, and did without her brood, and tried not to overwhelm Robin with all the love she was meant to lavish on a houseful of kids. Her religion truly meant something to her, and she was ennobled by it. Her husband, on the other hand, dug into his Bible like a cave, burrowing away from life, which he hated. He wanted only one thing from life, and that was his Heavenly reward for having endured it.
Robin had once tried to have a sensible conversation with Tidrow on a subject that Robin found complex and fascinating. He framed a metaphor that wasn't bad for someone his age. I put on my uniform, he said, and I go down to the Little League park and I play a game, and for six innings I don't think about anything much except the game and how it comes out. It's my whole life, I'm really serious about it. Then we win or lose, and I make a couple of dumb mistakes I hate myself for and need time to think about, but the game is over, and all I can do is take off the uniform and wait. There'll be another game any time I want to play, and next time I know I'll do better.
So what if, Robin said, I'm sitting here and talking to you, and this is what we think is life, but it isn't, really, it's just that we're wearing these bodies because it's part of the equipment we need to play a certain kind of game, one you have to make up as you go along. But some day this game will be over, and when it is we'll take off our bodies and rest a while, maybe talk it over, with some friends who have been there too. Then after we've had, like, a good night's sleep, only it could last a hundred years, we'll leave wherever we are and find another body so we can play again. We won't remember anything about the last game we were in or the one before it, and we won't think about all the games we have left to—
He came very close to being thrashed by a usually nonviolent man. Instead he got a fundamentalist lecture on the nature of man's relationship to a wrathful God and the everlasting torments of the hell that awaited atheists, and for better than two weeks Ellis Tidrow thought seriously of putting Robin out of his house. But this would have meant surrendering a soul that might be saved, and it also meant the loss of four hundred dollars a month which Robin's father paid for his keeping, a sum which allowed Ellis to tithe generously and enjoy increased stature in Lambeth Sanctuary. So he reconsidered and Robin stayed; but thereafter he kept a closer eye on Robin's studies, and Robin was forced to smuggle into the house the books which Franny checked out of the adult section of the public library for him.
Robin's bedroom, on the third floor of the old house, was furnished with a sagging bed, a chifferobe with doors that wouldn't stay closed unless they were tied with string, a study desk and a wooden chair, but he was permitted to decorate according to his enthusiasms. A Cincinnati Reds pennant was tacked over the bed. Next to a framed photo of one of his heroes, personally inscribed by Johnny himself, were several photos of his father: graduation day at Annapolis, in action as a member of an elite UD team. There was a recent Polaroid shot of Robin, standing on tip-toe, holding up a big barracuda he'd hauled in almost single-handedly off the Montezuma Shoals. His father had written across the top of the photo Skipper's big 'un—Bequia, Christmas, 1971. Robin also owned a single small photo of his father and mother together, taken before he was born. His mother had died when he was two, and Robin retained only vague impressions of her. The Commander seldom said anything about her. She'd been a fashion model. She'd died, of complications from an infected tooth, while The Commander was on sea duty. It seemed a strange way to die.
The occult books Robin kept well hidden, because he knew that Ellis Tidrow made a habit of searching his room for conclusive evidence that Robin was a communicant of Satan.
There was a loose soap dish mounted on the tile wall above the claw-foot tub in the bathroom; the tile cement had cracked in a big square, and by being careful Robin could pull out both the dish and the tiles to which it was attached. The tile wall was cemented to wood joists, and between joists there was storage space for three or four books. Robin did a lot of reading in the tub, certain that he would never be interrupted behind his bathro
om door.
In the books he had first encountered the theory of reincarnation, which confirmed his own hunches about the immortality of the soul and led to his rash decision to try out the idea on Tidrow. He learned that what he called Visiting was a form of astral projection, also known as an out-of-the-body experience, or OBE. There were few reported cases, but Robin already knew that all souls traveled, or Visited, from time to time, mostly at night while the body rested. It wasn't usual to remember Visits as clearly as Robin always remembered them: for the well-being of the entity (as it was often called), Visits were distorted and recast as dreams.
It was rarer still to Visit as he Visited with Brian Marshall. And Robin discovered that almost nothing had been written about some of the other talents he exhibited intermittently and sometimes involuntarily. Once while waiting at the Little League park for his battery-mate Harkaday to show up, he had idly run two fingers along the chain-link backstop, leaving a three-foot gap which people had puzzled over for days. Robin was tempted to try it again, but he didn't want to cause any more talk.
As far as he knew, nobody else could do his tennis ball trick. He would take a ball in his two hands and clasp it hard against the solar plexus, bending over as he did so. This turned the ball inside out, but he could just as easily restore the fuzzy side without losing any of the bounce. He showed the trick to Bob Brownell, who was in the seventh grade and did magic at little kids' birthday parties. Bob pestered him for weeks to tell him how the illusion worked. Eventually Robin got bored and made up a lie, explaining to Bob that he had had two balls all the time. Bob still thought it was a hell of a good trick, and he was probably practicing right this minute.
What else? On those days Robin felt the obligation to get cracking and really polish up his skills he could make his alarm clock ring by staring at it, and on the Fourth of July he'd caused the clock in the Lambeth courthouse to toll twenty-six times at ten minutes after two in the afternoon, a feat which required so much energy it nearly knocked him out, and left him feeling sort of nauseated for a couple of days. Again in one of the books he'd found a word to describe this phenomenon: psychotronics. His mind had an affinity for machines.
Fran was good about not asking questions, and she and Whit didn't go around talking about how weird he was just because he could influence Brian. But Fran was more than just a close friend. He really loved her, and she had to have deep feelings for him too. On an afternoon in late winter she'd been nursing Bernice in the rocker on the sun porch; when he got tired of whittling he climbed into her lap to be rocked too, and after a drowsy warm time with all three of them drifting off to sleep he'd raised his head and asked if he could taste her milk. Fran was quick to expose the other breast to him.
Mother's milk was hot, sticky and sweet, and he'd had plenty of it long before he tired of the excitement of suckling her, feeling her own aimless rocking excitement as she stroked the back of his head. In a couple of years, then, he'd be grown up enough and taking care of Fran . . . once the thing that was going to happen at the bridge happened to Whit because of his drinking.
Robin's favorite toy of the moment was a limberjack, or dancin' doll, which Whit had made for him. The featureless doll, about ten inches high, was jointed at shoulders, hips and knees, the pieces held together with small nails. A turn of the wooden rod attached to the middle of the doll's back made him jiggle and dance, the clumsy oversized wooden feet rapping on the surface of Robin's desk. Tonight, though, he was depressed rather than amused: the limberjack reminded him too much of Brian.
He put it away and went to bed, yearning, for the first time in months, to Visit with his own kind, to be able to talk of chain links neatly separated without cutting or melting, of the Fourth of July bell-tolling and of the new talent that was slowly developing, the ability to see, merely by touching another, bits and pieces of his past and earthly future.
Robin knew that there were hundreds and maybe thousands like himself, not through actual contact but through wave-fronts, a non-Visiting mental seismograph. But he couldn't just pick up and go Visiting without knowing who he intended to see, knowing exactly where to find him. There was a hard and fast rule: once out of the body you didn't go wandering aimlessly around. That was much more dangerous than hitchhiking on a lonely road in the middle of the night, and it could lead to terrible trouble. Ellis Tidrow thought he could imagine the horrors of all the demons of hell, but one look at the creatures who swarmed in the ether (which was both space and the source of life itself), just beyond the reach of the normal range of the senses, would have sent Tidrow into a state of permanent screaming insanity.
They scared Robin, and he was used to them. During his first, tentative short-range Visits he had learned to ignore the creatures. It was fatal to be intimidated by their cries and swoopings, or their seductive protestations of friendship. Instinctively he had realized they could not physically harm or sever the cord of scintillating blue light that connected him to his physical self, but if they could weaken him with fear or seduce him with flattery then they might invite themselves back to the sleeping body. Once in residence they never left voluntarily. And they made appalling houseguests.
Although he'd been disappointed in many previous Visits, he knew where he wanted to go tonight. And so he rose, marvelously, as something drowned; trapped; dangling upward in the swift-drawing flue of the moon, poised—hands floating—weighted only at the heels by the thought of flesh, not flesh itself, clubfooted with desire to be loose above the stressful earth. He kicked once and rose again beyond the sleepers of this house, one quiet and slow-breathing, another shaking in his night of Pentecostal fevers; he rose through roof and branch and hovering leaf and traveled eastward, past night-clinging crow and covert owl, airborne like a blaze of static over the half-stoned torrent of a river, the last blue fall of the mountain. He passed through levels of ghost-dancing and places of screams, where wolf-like creatures leapt at the moon's off-eye and fell back in a blood bath of frustration.
The hag-dogs studied him with fang and lolling tongue. Black magicians with bloodstream wings and languid claws solicited in whispers rarified as adders' tongues. He saw incuba and succuba. He saw a goblin ugly as a fried kidney.
Robin found peace in endless fathoms of light, felt the throbbing sense of his twin, like a heavy vein pulsing on the outside of the unborn corpus of summer. When he was close he went straight down to her, asleep in her bed in the house by the bridge.
She was lying on her back and breathing with a whisper through her lips, one straight-out hand clutching her shabby panda. Her pajama tops were half unbuttoned and twisted. No boldness in the ten-year-old body, only the mild cruciality of youth, nipples flat and trivial as vaccination marks. He rejoiced in the ear-pretty and protectionless look of her. But she didn't know he was there, although the cat on the window seat had raised its head, eyes like glassy gold in the light from the hall. Robin formed demanding thoughts to test her forgetfulness.
Gillian!
She stirred and clutched her panda tighter and murmured peevishly, but she wouldn't open her eyes or acknowledge him. Robin looked around the familiar room, where he'd played often a few years ago—before they inexplicably grew apart. She had a lot of things he admired, particularly the solid brass mailbox salvaged from the demolition of the old Pennsylvania Railroad Station. He liked the marionette theatre and the comfortable bentwood rocker. The rare dolls in display cases didn't interest him, of course. By contrast his own room had always been so barren. When Gillian Visited they preferred to play out of doors, in the flowery dells and hollows around Lambeth, Virginia.
Gillian, stop pretending! You know it's Robin. I just want to talk, that's all. There's a lot I need to tell you.
He was getting through, in a limited way. But she flopped over on her stomach, sleep unbroken, hugging the panda. Robin was angry enough to wish he was there in the flesh; he would smack her butt so hard she'd jump straight up out of the bed.
Why don't you Visit
any more, or let me Visit? Come on, Gillian, this is dumb. What I can do you can do. You're my sister. . . .
But she wasn't, quite, and maybe that was the trouble. He had married and fathered and otherwise loved her through many past lives and the plan this time was to be brother and sister, only heartbeats apart at the time of their birth, a mirror oneness. But something had gone wrong with the fetus in the crowded womb. The umbilical wrapped chokingly tight around the neck and Robin was forced, just an hour before birth, to locate another body so that he and Gillian could be born while the conjunctions and the solar eclipse were in full force.
Therefore they were psychic rather than blood twins, but it seemed to make little difference during the first three years of their lives. Through constant Visiting they were nearly inseparable. Then Gillian had begun to deny the powers she was born with, and deny him as well.
It isn't right for you to act like this, he thought petulantly. I need you. There's nobody else I can tell . . . things. He gave in to a final burst of anger. Damn you anyway, Gillian! I won't hang around all night. I'm going!
If she knew or cared she showed no sign. Robin thought imparting: You're going to need me some day, wait and see, and then he was grimly gone, returning in two slow blinks of an eye to his cold and lumpy mountain bed.
Gillian sighed and stirred and changed sides in her own bed, flinging the eyeless panda to the floor, pawing at the rumpled sheet with a slim tanned foot, all skin-deep dreaming now, too young to be aware that she could break anyone's heart.
Chapter Six
At ten minutes past four on a sullen Christmas Eve the last of the workmen got into a station wagon and drove away from the town of Bradbury, Maryland. Whitecaps were visible a couple of miles distant on Chesapeake Bay, and the wind from the southeast was spitting particles of snow, although the weatherman had not predicted a white Christmas for Bradbury. The overly green artificial Christmas tree in the square shuddered with each of the wind gusts. One of the metal ornaments blew away and went bouncing through the square, ending up in front of the railroad station, where three new cars of a commuter train awaited a four thirty-seven departure.