Duel: Terror Stories

by Richard Matheson

  “What kind o’ things, Fred?” asked Lou.

  “Oh … history. Different … languages. Things about … books and painting and … and atoms and—chemicals.” His shrug was jerky and obvious. “Things like that.”

  “Don’t get ya, buddy,” Harry said, having given up any hopes that a joke was forthcoming.

  “You mean he knows things he never learned?” Lou asked. “That it?”

  There was something in both their voices—a doubting incredulity, a holding back, as if they feared to commit themselves, a suspicious reticence.

  Fred sloughed it off. “I was just supposing. Forget it. It’s not worth talking about.”

  He had only one beer that night, leaving early with the excuse that he had to clean the Mathematics office. And, all through the silent minutes that he swept and mopped and dusted, he kept trying to figure out what was happening to him.

  He walked home in the chill of night to find Eva waiting for him in the kitchen.

  “Coffee, Fred?” she offered.

  “I’d like that,” he said, nodding. She started to get up. “No, s’accomadi, la prego,” he blurted.

  She looked at him, grim-faced.

  “I mean,” he translated, “sit down, Eva. I can get it.”

  They sat there drinking coffee while he told her about his experiences.

  “It’s more than I can figure, Eva,” he said. “It’s … scary, in a way. I know so many things I never knew. I have no idea where they come from. Not the least idea.” His lips pressed together. “But I know them,” he said, “I certainly know them.”

  “More than just … French now?” she asked.

  He nodded his head worriedly. “Lots more,” he said. “Like—” He looked up from his cup. “Listen to this. Main progress in producing fast particles has been made by using relatively small voltages and repeated acceleration. In most of the instruments used, charged particles are driven round in circular or spiral orbits with the help of a—you listenin’, Eva?”

  He saw her Adam’s apple move. “I’m listenin’,” she said.

  “—help of a magnetic field. The acceleration can be applied in different ways. In the so-called betatron of Kerst and Serber—”

  “What does it mean, Fred?” she interrupted.

  “I don’t know,” he said helplessly. “It’s … just words in my head. I know what it means when I say something in a foreign tongue, but … this?”

  She shivered, clasping at her forearms abruptly.

  “It’s not right,” she said.

  He frowned at her in silence for a long moment.

  “What do you mean, Eva?” he asked then.

  “I don’t know, Fred,” she said quietly and shook her head once, slowly. “I just don’t know.”

  She woke up about midnight and heard him mumbling in his sleep.

  “The natural logarithms of whole numbers from ten to two hundred. Number one—zero—two point three oh two six. One—two point three nine seven nine. Two—two point—”

  “Fred, go t’sleep,” she said, frowning nervously.

  “—four eight four nine.”

  She prodded him with an elbow. “Go t’sleep, Fred.”

  “Three—two point—”

  “Fred!”

  “Huh?” He moaned and swallowed dryly, turned on his side.

  In the darkness, she heard him shape the pillow with sleep-heavy hands.

  “Fred?” she called softly.

  He coughed. “What?”

  “I think you better go t‘Doctor Boone t’morra mornin’.”

  She heard him draw in a long breath, then let it filter out evenly until it was all gone.

  “I think so, too,” he said in a blurry voice.

  On Friday morning, when he opened the door to the waiting room of Doctor William Boone, a draft of wind scattered papers from the nurse’s desk.

  “Oh,” he said apologetically. “Le chieggo scuse. Non ne val la pena.”

  Miss Agnes McCarthy had been Doctor Boone’s receptionist-nurse for seven years and in that time she’d never heard Fred Elderman speak a single foreign word.

  Thus she goggled at him, amazed. “What’s that you said?” she asked.

  Fred’s smile was a nervous twitch of lips.

  “Nothing,” he said, “Miss.”

  Her returned smile was formal. “Oh.” She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry the doctor couldn’t see you yesterday.”

  “That’s all right,” he told her.

  “He’ll be ready in about ten minutes.”

  Twenty minutes later, Fred sat down beside Boone’s desk and the heavy-set doctor leaned back in his chair with an, “Ailing, Fred?”

  Fred explained the situation.

  The doctor’s cordial smile became, in order, amused, fixed, strained and finally nonexistent.

  “This is really so?” he demanded.

  Fred nodded with grim deliberation. “Je me laisse conseiller.”

  Doctor Boone’s heavy eyebrows lifted a noticeable jot. “French,” he said. “What’d you say?”

  Fred swallowed. “I said I’m willing to be advised.”

  “Son of a gun,” intoned Doctor Boone, plucking at his lower lip. “Son of a gun.” He got up and ran exploring hands over Fred’s skull. “You haven’t received a head blow lately, have you?”

  “No,” said Fred. “Nothing.”

  “Hmmm.” Doctor Boone drew away his hands and let them drop to his sides. “Well, no apparent bumps or cracks.” He buzzed for Miss McCarthy. Then he said, “Well, let’s take a try at the x-rays.”

  The x-rays revealed no break or blot.

  The two men sat in the office, discussing it.

  “Hard to believe,” said the doctor, shaking his head. Fred sighed despondently. “Well, don’t take on so,” Boone said. “It’s nothing to be disturbed about. So you’re a quiz kid, so what?”

  Fred ran nervous fingers over his mustache. “But there’s no sense to it. Why is it happening? What is it? The fact is, I’m a little scared.”

  “Nonsense, Fred. Nonsense. You’re in good physical condition. That I guarantee.”

  “But what about my—” Fred hesitated “—my brain?”

  Doctor Boone stuck out his lower lip in consoling derision, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t worry about that, either.” He slapped one palm on the desk top. “Let me think about it, Fred. Consult a few associates. You know—analyze it. Then I’ll let you know. Fair enough?”

  He walked Fred to the door.

  “In the meantime,” he prescribed, “no worrying about it. There isn’t a thing to worry about.”

  His face as he dialed the phone a few minutes later was not unworried, however.

  “Fetlock?” he said, getting his party. “Got a poser for you.”

  Habit more than thirst brought Fred to the Windmill that evening. Eva had wanted him to stay home and rest, assuming that his state was due to overwork; but Fred had insisted that it wasn’t his health and left the house, just managing to muffle his “Au revoir.”

  He joined Harry Bullard and Lou Peacock at the bar and finished his first beer in a glum silence while Harry revealed why they shouldn’t vote for Legislator Milford Carpenter.

  “Tell ya the man’s got a private line t’Moscow,” he said. “A few men like that in office and we’re in for it, take my word.” He looked over at Fred staring into his beer. “What’s with it, elder man?” he asked, clapping Fred on the shoulder.

  Fred told them—as if he were telling about a disease he’d caught.

  Lou Peacock looked incredulous. “So that’s what you were talking about the other night!”

  Fred nodded.

  “You’re not kiddin’ us now?” Harry asked. “Y’know everything?”

  “Just about,” Fred admitted sadly.

  A shrewd look overcame Harry’s face.

  “What if I ask ya somethin’ ya don’t know?”

  “I’d be happy,” Fred said in a despairing voice
.

  Harry beamed. “Okay. I won’t ask ya about atoms nor chemicals nor anythin’ like that. I’ll just ask ya t’tell me about the country between my home town Au Sable and Tarva.” He hit the bar with a contented slap.

  Fred looked hopeful briefly, but then his face blanked and he said in an unhappy voice, “Betweeen Au Sable and Tarva, the route is through typical cut-over land that once was covered with virgin pine (danger: deer on the highway) and now has only second-growth oak, pine and poplar. For years after the decline of the lumber industry, picking huckleberries was one of the chief local occupations.”

  Harry gaped.

  “Because the berries were known to grow in the wake of fires,” Fred concluded, “residents deliberately set many fires that roared through the country.”

  “That’s a damn dirty lie!” Harry said, chin trembling belligerently.

  Fred looked at him in surprise.

  “You shouldn’t ought t‘go around tellin’ lies like that,” Harry said. “You call that knowin’ the countryside—telling lies about it?”

  “Take it easy, Harry,” Lou cautioned.

  “Well,” Harry said angrily, “he shouldn’t ought to tell lies like that.”

  “I didn’t say it,” Fred answered hopelessly. “It’s more as though I—I read it off.”

  “Yeah? Well …” Harry fingered his glass restlessly.

  “You really know everything?” Lou asked, partly to ease the tension, partly because he was awed.

  “I’m afraid so,” Fred replied.

  “You ain’t just … playin’ a trick?”

  Fred shook his head. “No trick.”

  Lou Peacock looked small and intense. “What can you tell me,” he asked in a back-alley voice, “about orange roses?”

  The blank look crossed Fred’s face again. Then he recited, “Orange is not a fundamental color but a blend of red and pink of varied intensity and yellow. There were very few orange roses prior to the Pernatia strain. All orange, apricot, chamois and coral roses finish with pink more or less accentuated. Some attain that lovely shade—Cuisse de Nymphe émue.”

  Lou Peacock was open-mouthed. “Ain’t that something?”

  Harry Bullard blew out heavy breath. “What d’ya know about Carpenter?” he asked pugnaciously.

  “Carpenter, Milford, born 1898 in Chicago, Illi—”

  “Never mind,” Harry cut in. “I ain’t interested. He’s a Commie; that’s all I gotta know about him.”

  “The elements that go into a political campaign,” Fred quoted helplessly, “are many—the personality of the candidates, the issues—if any—the attitude of the press, economic groups, traditions, the opinion polls, the—”

  “I tell ya he’s a Commie!” Harry declared, voice rising.

  “You voted for him last election,” Lou said. “As I re—”

  “I did not!” snarled Harry, getting redder in the face.

  The blank look appeared on Fred Elderman’s face. “Remembering things that are not so is a kind of memory distortion that goes by several names such as pathological lying or mythomania.”

  “You callin’ me a liar, Fred?”

  “It differs from ordinary lying in that the speaker comes to believe his own lies and—”

  “Where did you get that black eye?” a shocked Eva asked Fred when he came into the kitchen later. “Have you been fighting at your age?”

  Then she saw the look on his face and ran for the refrigerator. She sat him on a chair and held a piece of beefsteak against his swelling eye while he related what had happened.

  “He’s a bully,” she said. “A bully!”

  “No, I don’t blame him,” Fred disagreed. “I insulted him. I don’t even know what I’m saying any more. I’m—I’m all mixed up.”

  She looked down at his slumped form, an alarmed expression on her face. “When is Doctor Boone going to do something for you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A half hour later, against Eva’s wishes, he went to clean up the library with a fellow janitor; but the moment he entered the huge room, he gasped, put his hands to his temples and fell down on one knee, gasping, “My head! My head!”

  It took a long while of sitting quietly in the downstairs hallway before the pain in his skull stopped. He sat there staring fixedly at the glossy tile floor, his head feeling as if it had just gone twenty-nine rounds with the heavyweight champion of the world.

  Fetlock came in the morning. Arthur B., forty-two, short and stocky, head of the Department of Psychological Sciences, he came bustling along the path in porkpie hat and checkered overcoat, jumped up on the porch, stepped across its worn boards and stabbed at the bell button. While he waited, he clapped leather-gloved hands together energetically and blew out breath clouds.

  “Yes?” Eva asked when she opened the door.

  Professor Fetlock explained his mission, not noticing how her face tightened with fright when he announced his field. Reassured that Doctor Boone had sent him, she led Fetlock up the carpeted steps, explaining, “He’s still in bed. He had an attack last night.”

  “Oh?” said Arthur Fetlock.

  When introductions had been made and he was alone with the janitor, Professor Fetlock fired a rapid series of questions. Fred Elderman, propped up with pillows, answered them as well as he could.

  “This attack,” said Fetlock, “what happened?”

  “Don’t know, Professor. Walked in the library and—well, it was as if a ton of cement hit me on the head. No—in my head.”

  “Amazing. And this knowledge you say you’ve acquired—are you conscious of an increase in it since your ill-fated visit to the library?”

  Fred nodded. “I know more than ever.”

  The professor bounced the fingertips of both hands against each other. “A book on language by Pei. Section 9-B in the library, book number 429.2, if memory serves. Can you quote from it?”

  Fred looked blank, but words followed almost immediately. “Leibnitz first advanced the theory that all language came not from a historically recorded source but from proto-speech. In some respects he was a precursor of—”

  “Good, good,” said Arthur Fetlock. “Apparently a case of spontaneous telepathic manifestations coupled with clairvoyance.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Telepathy, Elderman. Telepathy! Seems every book or educated mind you come across, you pick clean of content. You worked in the French office, you spoke French. You worked in the Mathematics office, you quoted numbers, tables, axioms. Similarly with all other offices, subjects and individuals.” He scowled, purse-lipped. “Ah, but why?”

  “Causa qua re,” muttered Fred.

  A brief wry sound in Professor Fetlock’s throat. “Yes, I wish I knew, too. However …” He leaned forward. “What’s that?”

  “How come I can learn so much?” Fred asked worriedly. “I mean—”

  “No difficulty there,” stated the stocky psychologist. “You see, no man ever utilized the full learning capacity of the brain. It still has an immense potential. Perhaps that’s what’s happening to you—you’re realizing this potential.”

  “But how?”

  “Spontaneously realized telepathy and clairvoyance plus infinite retention and unlimited potential.” He whistled softly. “Amazing. Positively amazing. Well, I must be going.”

  “But what’ll I do?” Fred begged.

  “Why, enjoy it,” said the professor expansively. “It’s a perfectly fantastic gift. Now look—if I were to gather together a group of faculty members, would you be willing to speak to them? Informally, of course.

  “But—”

  “They should be entranced, positively entranced. I must do a paper for the Journal.”

  “But what does it mean, Professor?” Fred Elderman asked, his voice shaking.

  “Oh, we’ll look into it, never fear. Really, this is revolutionary. An unparalleled phenomenon.” He made a sound of delighted disbelief. “In-credible.”

  When Profess
or Fetlock had gone, Fred sat defeatedly in his bed. So there was nothing to be done—nothing but spout endless, inexplicable words and wonder into the nights what terrible thing was happening to him. Maybe the professor was excited; maybe it was exciting intellectual fare for outsiders. For him, it was only grim and increasingly frightening business.

  Why? Why? It was the question he could neither answer nor escape.

  He was thinking that when Eva came in. He lifted his gaze as she crossed the room and sat down on the bed.

  “What did he say?” she asked anxiously.

  When he told her, her reaction was the same as his.

  “That’s all? Enjoy it?” She pressed her lips together in anger. “What’s the matter with him? Why did Doctor Boone send him?”

  He shook his head, without an answer.

  There was such a look of confused fear on his face that she reached out her hand suddenly and touched his cheek. “Does your head hurt, dear?”

  “It hurts inside,” he said. “In my …” There was a clicking in his throat. “If one considers the brain as a tissue which is only moderately compressible, surrounded by two variable factors—the blood it contains and the spinal fluid which surrounds it and fills the ventricles inside the brain we have—”

  He broke off spasmodically and sat there, quivering.

  “God help us,” she whispered.

  “As Sextus Empiricus says in his Arguments Against Belief in a God, those who affirm, positively, that God exists cannot avoid falling into an impiety. For—”

  “Fred, stop it!”

  He sat looking at her dazedly.

  “Fred, you don’t … know what you’re saying. Do you?”

  “No. I never do. I just—Eva, what’s going on!”

  She held his hand tightly and stroked it. “It’s all right, Fred. Please don’t worry so.”

  But he did worry. For behind the complex knowledge that filled his mind, he was still the same man, simple, uncomprehending—and afraid.

  Why was it happening?

  It was as if, in some hideous way, he were a sponge filling more and more with knowledge and there would come a time when there was no room left and the sponge would explode.