"This dump might actually be almost cozy when we get the fire going," the woman said, wrapping her dark arms around her shoulders. She stared at me. "Sit down."
There was such authority and command in the way she spoke that I complied without thinking. What had happened to the petite, demure creature who had so coyly tried to cajole Ted to let them into our house? This person wouldn't have cajoled; she would have ordered. She seemed a different woman now, massive, brusque, in control. We sat close together around the fireplace. I could tell that they really weren't too much older than me—they seemed about college age. The two men were shirtless, their taut bodies as deeply tanned as the woman's. I knew they had just arrived, but they looked as though they'd been living on the beach for months,
Zena, Manny, and Joe were their names. Before starting their game, they had gone for a moonlight swim, which was why Zena was so eager for a fire. "The water's superb at night," said Joe, the big man with the mustache. "It seems like a different element in the moonlight, phosphorescent and glittering and alive."
"I've never been swimming at night," I said. "I'd love to go sometime."
"You get a nice frisson because you can't see underwater," Zena said. "So you always have the notion that there might be something lurking there, observing you, waiting to pursue you if you try to get away. It's rather like our game."
"What I like is ... you don't have to wear anything," said Manny, the blond man. He giggled.
"That's the natural and proper way to swim," Joe said.
"If only it didn't get so frigid at night," Zena said, shivering a little.
"Though I never would have believed it this afternoon, when we were sitting in that filthy traffic jam. I felt like we were three eggs in beurre noire."
"Not butter! Rancid diesel oil would be more like it. Wonder what that would taste like."
"I didn't feel like a fried egg. I felt like Tou-sha-pou—you know, one of those Chinese steamed dumplings, those sickly sweet ones, filled with hot mashed prunes."
We were all laughing now. "Well, all I can is, thank God we had our game to play," Zena said. "That was a truly capital round we had in that little car, stifling and gemutlich as it was."
"Capital, because you won," Manny pointed out.
"I like games too," I said. "Maybe we could play sometime."
I was impressed and a little awed by their easy, high-spirited banter. They could even have fun being stuck in a traffic jam. They seemed exotic, as though English was not their native language. And strangely enough, they really did seem interested in me. Maybe the second week of this vacation would be better than the first.
"This tide chart seems to be closely accurate, as far as you can tell?" Joe asked me.
"Yes," I said. "The tides are very extreme here, actually."
"Are they?" Joe asked me. "How so?"
"Well, at low tide, there's some areas where you ean walk and walk and walk, and the water hardly jSver gets past your waist."
"Do you know quite where?" They all seemed Interested.
"Sure. I could show you. Tomorrow, maybe." I shrugged, and laughed self-consciously. "I don't have a real heavy schedule here."
"We could make it a charming little expedition," Zena said.
"Yes. Studying all the biota of this enchanting region," Manny said.
"Is this your first time in New England?" I asked them.
"Uh . . . yes," Zena said.
"You must be from California then, right?" I went on. "Or Florida?" They didn't answer. "I mean . . . you're so tanned."
"We travel a lot. We absorb the sun," Zena said.
"You don't have to work?" I asked.
"Curious fellow, isn't he," Joe said, putting a hand to his dark mustache.
"Our occupation gives us ample time to travel and explore," Zena explained, smiling. But there was a touch of impatience in her voice.
"Well, I'm pretty much of an expert on this whole coast," I said. "I could show you lots of things."
"That's pleasant," Joe said. "Barney? That's your name, right? Do there appear to be a lot of fishing boats in this immediate vicinity? Commercial or otherwise?"
"Sometimes they come around the island," I told him. "Ted has a cabin cruiser."
"How about excursion vessels, sightseers?"
"They don't come right around here." I was glad to be able to tell them so much. My familiarity with the area, limited as it was, might give them a reason for wanting to spend some time with me. "But there are several excursion boats out of Dunstable. Whale watches and dolphin watches and things. Would you like to go some day?"
"Love to," Manny said, with a funny little smile. "Joe adores dolphins. Don't you, Joe?"
"Yes. And octopi, too," Joe said.
Zena put her hand over her mouth and giggled like a little girl.
"They do any octopus fishing around here?" Joe went on, grinning at Manny now. "They do in some Greek settlements, I know. Remember Greece, Manny?"
"Oh, the way they bashed their poor little heads against the rocks, and left them out in the sun to dry!" Manny cried, rolling his eyes, "A sight I shall never forget!"
They were all laughing again. I didn't understand their secret joke, but I was amused by the way they were enjoying it. The enthusiasm with which they approached almost everything—especially their precious game—was appealing. They were younger and more playful than any adults I knew. And the amazing thing was, they continued to seem interested in me, and everything I had to say, asking lots of questions. They seemed fascinated by what I said about our house, absorbed and curiously motionless while I told them the story about the captain and his brother. I answered in detail their question about the layout of the house and spent a lot of time describing the front bedroom, where I had been sleeping for the past week.
"Still, as nice as the view is, I wouldn't want to be locked up there for twenty years," I said.
They had turned out the floor lamps. In the shadowy, firelit room, Zena's eyes glittered like a Ijjft. "And the scratches Ted informed you about, were you able to discover them?" she asked, leaning toward me, her voice a gentle purr.
"Oh, sure. There's a lot of them, and some of them are deep, deeper than you'd think a person could make with his bare hands. He must have . . . spent a lot of time making them."
"And did they seem to fall into a kind of pattern or ... or tell a tale or anything?" Zena asked.
"No. They're completely senseless."
"I don't suppose there was anything else, uh . . . unusual about the chamber, was there?" Zena said carefully. "Nothing odd, peculiar, that you or your parents might have stumbled on?"
It was a strange question, and I tried to make a joke out of it. "You mean like a dead body, or a ghost or something? Uh-uh. No such luck."
But they didn't seem to appreciate my wit. Barely moving their heads, their eyes met; three pairs of eyes meeting equally somehow, as though there were only two of them. And I thought of the jagged pits and troughs in the windowsills of my room, and I felt uneasy for the first time. A curtain flapped gently at the window. The others in the room remained as still as reptiles in the sun.
"So you travel a lot?" I said, breaking the uncomfortable silence. "That must be great. Where's your home base? What was your last trip?" :
"You certainly do ask a plethora of questions," Manny said.
"I do?" I said. "Funny. It seems to me like you're I the ones who've been asking me questions all evening."
"You know what?" Zena said abruptly. "All of a j sudden I have a powerful nagging itch to get back j to the game. How about it?"
"Nice," Manny said. "I always want to play the game."
They turned on the lights, pulled their chairs up to the table and sat down around the board I had noticed when I first came in. They hadn't asked me to play, so I stood behind Zena and looked down at it. It was the first chance I had had to study it, and I saw now that it was not like any board game I had even encountered before.
"H
ey, what game is this, anyway?" I asked, beginning to feel extremely excited. It seemed to be a space fantasy, with dreamlike, but detailed, planets. "I love games, but I've never seen anything like this. Where on earth did you get it?"
There was a moment of silence. Then Zena said, "It's a very new game. I suppose it isn't even on the market yet. It's still being . . . uh, what's the word? . . . Consumer tested, that's it."
"How did you get your hands on it then?"
"Because ..."
"Because we ... encountered somebody in the business," Joe explained. "He borrowed us an advance set."
"It was the best event that ever happened to us," Manny said with conviction. "It's a noble game," Joe said. "We've been playing it every night, and we still can't wrench ourselves away from it."
"But what's it called?" I asked again. "How do you play it?" I reached down to pick up one of the pieces.
"Don't touch, you'll distress it!" Zena slapped my hand a lot harder than seemed necessary.
"Questions, questions, questions," Joe murmured.
"But can't you just tell me the name of it?" I said, feeling a bit wounded. "It's called Interstellar Pig," Zena said tartly. "We'd ask you to play, but we're in the middle of a three-person game. Perhaps another time."
Time! I had forgotten about it completely. How long had I been here? If I outstayed my welcome they might think I was a pest, and wouldn't take me along on any expeditions, "Well, it's probably time for me to go," I said. "But I would love to play it sometime."
"Uh-huh," Zena murmured, staring down at the board. She moved her piece. "Hyperspace tunnel!" she announced triumphantly. "I'm going straight to Vavoosh."
They seemed to have forgotten I was there.
Mom and Dad were extremely curious about the neighbors, and dissatisfied by what I had to tell them. I'd been there for several hours, and yet I'd found out almost nothing about them. Mom and Dad quizzed me about their ages, their professions, their financial status, their relationships with one another, and where they came from. All I knew were their first names, that they traveled a lot and were addicted to Interstellar Pig.
"I'm surprised at you, Barney," Mom said. "You're usually so inquisitive."
And I was surprised at Mom and Dad. The neighbors were much younger than they were and had no obvious social position. Yet, for some reason, they were fascinated by them. It wasn't like them at all.
I looked carefully at the marks around the windows in my room that night.
There was no message of any sort, only random wounds etched into the wood. When I got into bed, the scars, by some trick of the lamplight, emerged in sharp relief, like welts. I couldn't concentrate on my book, and turned out the light. The wheezing and gasping of the bedsprings as I tried to find a comfortable position made me think of an old man struggling to breathe. I assured myself that, ancient though it was, this could not possibly be the bed in which the prisoner had slept.
And if his ghost remained, it was too feeble a specter even to materialize in my dreams. It was Zena I dreamed of, leading me by the hand across the floor of a gigantic arena. It was patterned, like their game, with the images of planets and stars, and curving pathways of light. Zena was telling me over and over again something I could not grasp, something terribly important, of great beauty and significance.
The next day, Sunday, was what Mom calls a perfect day: blistering hot without a trace of cloud in the sky. Immediately after breakfast, she and Dad headed out for the beach. It was the first such day we'd had for a while, and Mom was way behind on her tan. I accompanied them just to see who was there. It was well before noon, but the usual beach denizens were already ensconced: the old ladies with short-legged beach chairs and decks of cards, withered pink flesh drooping out of their ruffled suits; the shrieking toddlers with buckets and plastic swim toys; the gleaming adolescents, as stiff and carefully positioned as dark sarcophagi beside their radios, coming to life only to anoint themselves with more oil and solemnly, ritualistically press their blackened forearms together. In minutes, Mom joined their ranks, her comparative pallor giving her the look of a greased corpse. I retreated to the safe darkness of the house.
I decided to take my book out to the front porch, which offered a view of the bay—not to mention a view of the patio next door, where our neighbors were setting up a table for breakfast. I didn't know them well enough yet to feel comfortable about joining them uninvited. But I did want them to see that I was available and idle, ready to be included in any games or expeditions. I pretended to read.
They still seemed preoccupied by their game of the night before. They spoke in hushed voices, but I could hear enough to tell that they were arguing about the best escape route from a maze on some foreign planet.
Then, abruptly, and in a much louder voice, Zena announced, "These tomatoes taste ersatz."
Joe remarked in equally artificial tones that the word ersatz came from a German noun meaning "substitute," first used in 1875.1 wondered if they had realized I was listening, and were changing the subject for my benefit.
"How come I never know obscure little data like that?" asked Manny.
"Because you never read a word besides fantasy and science fiction," said Zena disdainfully.
"You should mention! Regard the books you brought here. The Flame, the Power and the Passion; The Body in the Library."
"But I also brought Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy," she pointed out. "Unlike you, I'm not totally self-involved."
They were both beginning to giggle. "Self-involved!" Manny exclaimed. "How can anybody vain enough to let her fingernails grow as grotesquely long as yours talk about self-involved? Observe her, Joe. She can barely even grasp her coffee cup with those claws."
"Vain!" she exploded. "You don't think it's vain to obsess about how evenly your beard is trimmed, not to mention bleach it! And don't try to deny it. I glimpsed that bottle of peroxide in your drawer."
"You prying bitch!" Manny cried. Zena threw back her head and laughed.
"Cut it out, you two," said Joe. "Look at the island. See how much clearer it is in the morning light. It looks nearly twice as close as it did yesterday afternoon."
"I wonder if we could swim out to it," Zena said. "Not you, Manny, of course. We all know you'd never make it. But Joe and I might be—"
"It's too distant to swim," Joe interrupted, before they had a chance to get started again. "Windsurf-ing's the means. One of these days we should borrow some boards and sail on over there."
"Grand idea!"
I listened, not turning any pages. Yet somehow they managed to startle me a moment later by appearing without any warning at the bottom of the porch steps. Why hadn't I noticed them getting up and coming over?
The men wore only running shorts and sandals; Zena had on the brief denim cutoffs and halter top. "Good morning, Barney," she said in her deep voice, smiling. "We just wandered over to see if everything was serene." Her legs looked wonderful.
"After we kept you up late and fed you intoxicating beverages and everything," Manny put in.
"I'm fine," I mumbled. Their unexpected arrival had brought back all my original shyness.
"You just seemed so bereft and deserted, all by yourself here," said Zena, moving smoothly up the steps. "Your parents abandoned you for the beach, huh?"
"Yes, we were kind of surprised to see anyone at home on a day like this," Manny said.
Zena shot him a glance and Joe looked away. It occurred to me, though I knew it was ridiculous, that they had been hoping we would all be at the beach today. But why should that make any difference to them?
Zena sat down on the porch railing across from my chair, watching me with that slight smile, one hand on a brown thigh. The men stood less comfortably at the top of the steps. They seemed to be expecting me to do something. "I can't lie out in the sun," I said. "I always burn."
"It's because you're a redhead," said Joe, with a hollow little click of the teeth.
"Seems like an i
nappropriate place for your family to come for a vacation, in that case," Zena said sympathetically. "Not thoughtful to you."
"Mom has friends who come here. And I have a lot to read," I said, feeling pitiful—what would they think of someone who spent his vacation reading? I felt a blush coming on.
"What are you reading?" Manny inquired. I held the book in front of my face. "Oh, I love science fiction," he said, clasping his hands together fervently. "But I haven't read that volume. What's it about?"
"It's about these aliens that invade the earth," I said. "These sort of sluglike things, like exposed brains, that attach themselves to people's backs and control them."
"How loathsome," Zena said, and turned down the corners of her mouth.
"Not to mention biologically naive," Joe said, 'chuckling. "There's no way an organism like that could evolve naturally."
"Why not?" I said, wanting to defend my taste in literature. "Nobody knows what conditions might be like on other planets. Anything could be possible, couldn't it?"
Joe stroked his mustache.
"Well I think it sounds enchanting," Manny said. "I love creepy stories like that. It reminds me of our game. Can I borrow the book when you're through?"
"Sure," I said. "Hey, would you guys like to go on one of those excursions—"
"Speaking of creepy stories," Zena firmly interrupted me. "We were all entertained by the story you told us last night, about this house. You made us rather intrigued. Would you disapprove if we had a peek inside, just so we could see where it really happened?"
"I guess not," I said. Something about her request didn't ring true. It wasn't what I had said that had kindled their interest—they had wanted to look inside the house yesterday, the moment they had arrived, before I had told them the story about it. I remembered what Ted had said about their reaction when they couldn't rent the house themselves. As I held the door open for them, I had the peculiar sensation that I was making a mistake. But I dismissed it immediately. I wanted to play the authority and show them around.
"Gee, it's so much more comfortable than our place," Manny said, his eyes wandering over the wood paneling. "As though the person who built it actually planned to reside here."
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