The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  “Listen, Dick,” Anne said, turning toward me and putting her hand on mine, “we’ve got to pull this thing off. We can’t fail. It’s sure to be the end of Uncle Julian if we do. I’ll try to keep her out of the way as much as I can. But don’t fail.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “Do you think he believes the thing is nearly finished?” she said, to break the awkward pause that followed.

  “I think so. I told you what he said about it, and Mrs. Marcy seems to have heard it humming, so he must have put the current through it, at least.” I told her about the noises that Mrs. Marcy had described.

  Anne looked at me steadily while I spoke, and there were amazement and something else in her face. “So that’s what that noise is!” she exclaimed when I had finished.

  “You’ve heard it too?”

  “Yes. The humming. And the other thing too.”

  The same cold thrill that had gone through me once before that day, when I had been talking to Mrs. Marcy, swept into me again. I told myself I was a fool to be so affected by hearing that Julian’s machine made noises. But if it made a certain kind of noise . . . I put that thought out of my head. The thing could not work and that was that. Still, I wanted to be reassured. “You didn’t hear any voices, I trust?” I made my voice sound light and casual.

  “No.” The look was still on her face. “I never even thought of voices, though what Mrs. Marcy said about the cheering is close to it, in some ways. It wasn’t such a loud noise. Maybe I mean that it sounded as if it were coming from a long way off. A roaring noise, like a waterfall, only coming to you down wind from very far away.”

  “Far away.” It was strange that Anne and Mrs. Marcy should have chosen the same phrase to describe what they had heard. It was not a particularly helpful description and somehow I didn’t like it. I turned the words over in my mind, trying to form an audible picture from them, but it was no use. It was just a phrase that I didn’t like.

  “Any sort of electric circuit with tubes and a speaker in it can be made to give off a noise. As Mrs. Marcy said, like a shortwave radio that’s not tuned to any particular station. There’s a phenomenon called heterodyning that might produce such an effect.”

  Anne looked unconvinced. “Uncle Julian ought to know that, I should think. I hope you’re right and that’s all it was.” She looked away and said, very quietly, “All I can tell you is that it wasn’t a pleasant sound.”

  “Not a bit like a lot of happy angels making music before the Lord?”

  “Don’t!” she said sharply and lay down again in the grass without letting me see her face.

  The sultriness of the afternoon began to make us both drowsy. The smell of hot meadow grass and earth was heavy in the air, which was suddenly very quiet. I lay beside her and my eyes began to close. I didn’t want to think; it had already been a fairly long day as far as I was concerned. I relaxed, maybe I dozed. At any rate, the next thing I noticed was that Anne was shaking my shoulder.

  “The sun’ll be under those thunderheads in a few minutes,” she was saying. “Let’s have another swim first.”

  Apparently she had gone back to the house while I lay there, because she had our suits under her arm. I stood up, groggy with sleep, and we went down to the small cove. Anne was right about the approaching storm; the clouds were towering high over the far shore of the bay and looked swollen and black. I left my clothes rolled up in a tight bundle and stuffed under the thickest willow I could find.

  Anne was waiting for me on the sand; she looked minutely small under the great loom of the clouds beyond her. We waded out together. After the moist heat of the meadow the river felt sharply cold and clean—I was wide-awake at once with that heightened perception of everything round me which lets me know how seldom it is that I am altogether alive. The water, I noticed, was the color of amber and Anne’s long legs below its surface were turned to gold. After a time I stopped swimming and dived to find out if I could reach the bottom. I went down a long way, with the water getting darker and colder and heavier around me as I pulled myself down, but I didn’t touch anything. Evidently the bay was deeper than the configuration of the shore suggested.

  “Deep out here,” I said when I got back to the surface.

  “Yes. Isn’t it a wonderful color? Mrs. Marcy says the sawmills up the river dump sawdust into it, and that’s what makes it look like liquid amber.”

  We swam on toward the approaching storm. Lifting my head to look at the far shore, I saw the edge of the cloud shadow racing across the river to meet us. There was something tremendous in its coming, soundless and swift as an avalanche and, for a moment, I had an impulse to flail my way back to shore before it could sweep over me. But it was moving with the speed of an express train; by mutual consent we stopped swimming and watched the edge of darkness bear down on us.

  “Oh, here it comes!” Anne exclaimed like a little girl and plunged under the surface as if to escape its impact. When she came up the shadow was far over us and striding across the quarter mile of water to the Point. We turned and followed it. Now, with the sun covered, the water felt colder. Once in a while we stopped to look up at the towering blackness of the clouds over us. Thunder was muttering along the ridge across the river and there was an occasional pale flash of lightning under the fringes of the clouds. At last we saw the rain, silver-gray and opaque as a wall, sweep down the shoulder of the valley, obliterate the roofs and streets of Barsham Harbor, and charge out across the river. Puffs of wind struck the water ahead and around us and suddenly we were swimming through a crepe of ripples.

  “We’re going to get caught in the rain!” Anne shouted to me. Laughter and excitement were in her face.

  “We better hurry if we don’t want to get soaked,” I answered and she grinned again.

  In two minutes the edge of the squall was hissing in the water round us, slashing the surface of the river with an intensity that made it hard to see the shore toward which we were heading. We swam on, and I heard Anne suddenly singing in exultation:

  “His chariots of wrath,

  The deep thunderclouds form,

  And dark is His path

  On the wings of the storm.”

  I hadn’t thought of that hymn for years, but it seemed to belong with the moment . . .

  It may seem that I am including a great deal in this narrative which has no real bearing on the story of Julian Blair and the thing that happened in the house on Setauket Point. Perhaps, but I believe that even in a laboratory it is difficult to separate the experiment from the whole nexus in which it is performed, and in life impossible. My evidence will be more valuable for being presented in its setting, and every detail seems to me important. For instance, as a psychologist I should have to admit that by the time we reached the shore, I was sufficiently out of breath so the blood was pounding in my ears, and any statement of what we heard at such a moment should be discounted because of that simple physiological phenomenon.

  This time there was no question of drying ourselves on the beach. We put on our shoes and rolled our clothes into tighter bundles. Then we struck off across the meadow toward the house, running not fast but steadily. Anne, I saw, was no more winded than I was— and I keep myself in good physical condition—and she ran with an effortless reach and drive of the legs that was pleasant to watch. The first frenzy of the rain had abated and the wind, at our backs, was less fitful as it slanted the rain over and past us in long streaks. There were still random bursts of thunder, but the heavy artillery of it had subsided. Our shoes made squelching sounds in the soggy grass.

  It happened as we passed the maple tree under which we had been lying earlier in the afternoon. Between one step and the next I found myself stopped, as if I had run into a wall, or come to the edge of an unexpected cliff and halted instinctively. For a second I did not understand why I had brought up short, and then I knew. It was the thing Anne and Mrs. Marcy had tried to describe to me. By the time I was fully aware of it, the noise had st
opped, but the echo of it was still in my ears. . . . From ahead of us somewhere—I felt certain that it was from the house itself—had come such a sound as I have never heard in any other place. It was a deep and indescribable thing, as single and yet as multiple as the noise of a tempest or the roar of a rock slide. An instant after it had reached us there was a sharp rush of wind and a stinging splatter of rain across my naked back, so that I checked my stride only momentarily and was running again toward the blurred loom of the house ahead in the same second, perhaps, that I had paused.

  In saying that the noise came from the house, I must add that there was, then, no evidence to support that statement. Nothing more than intuition. No light flared behind the windows—there was nothing visibly altered in the aspect of the house which was turned toward us. But I knew the sound had come from it and the echo was in my ears as I ran.

  So strong was that echo that it made me doubt the evidence of my eyes. That sound had had the timbre of catastrophe in it and yet, my eyes assured me that everything was as it should be. But no thing-as-it-should-be had produced that noise. There had been a tremendous quality about it, muted by distance and softened by the hiss of falling rain, but still terrifying. I thought of the echo that reached the people of Japan when the island of Krakatoa exploded two thousand miles and more away from them, in Sunda Strait. Listening to the percussion of that enormous event they must have felt the same vague terror and confusion that were in my own mind.

  Anne, still running easily and lightly, turned her streaming face toward me and, in the twilight of the storm, I saw that her eyes were wide—with excitement or something less definable. “That’s it!” she cried, “that’s the noise.”

  “Good God,” I said.

  “The loudest it’s ever been,” she told me between the deep draughts of her breathing.

  After that we wasted no more words. Together we pounded across the meadow and, long before we reached the house, the breath was whistling in my throat. Ahead of us, through the rain, the house began to loom larger and more distinct. When we were within two hundred yards of it I looked up once and saw something that puzzled me. There was a patch of white behind the blank darkness of one of the second-story windows, a vague glimmer of something that was the size and outline of a human face, though I could make out no features at all except, I thought, the eyes. I wondered who was watching us come pelting home. Julian? Mrs. Marcy? . . . It didn’t matter. In two strides more of our running, that face was gone.

  Maybe there had been nothing there except my imagination. I forgot about it immediately and it did not come back to my mind until events had forced me to review every least detail of this after-noon.

  Panting and blown we flung through the kitchen door. There was no one in the room and it looked utterly normal. A pot of something was cooking on the stove and there was a good smell of steam and condiments in the air. We did not stop even to put on our clothes, but tossed the bundles onto the table almost without pausing and went on through the door into the hall.

  That was where it was. I heard Anne give a gasp as she reached the foot of the stairs, and then I was looking over her shoulder and feeling suddenly numb. They were all three there—Julian, Mrs. Walters, and Mrs. Marcy. Two of them had whirled as they heard our feet on the boards behind them. The two were Julian and Mrs. Walters.

  12.

  MRS. MARCY was lying at the foot of the stairs, on her back, with her arms flung out. Her face was a flat gray-white and her eyes were closed. It was dim in that hall, and we were both winded and trembling with the aftermath of our sprint across the fields, but Anne and I had the same impression when we saw the woman lying there. In her limpness, in the sprawl of her arms, there was something not quite natural, a distortion that was almost imperceptible and which made me think of a doll flung into a corner by a child bored with playing.

  In the next second, Mrs. Walters was kneeling beside that motionless figure. “She’s had a fall.” Her voice was decisive, almost un-perturbed. “Did you see it happen, Julian?”

  I was shocked at the way he looked—like a man who has received a sudden knife in his back. His eyes were staring and black, and he wavered as he stood there, three or four steps from the bottom of the stairs, with one hand on the balustrade to steady himself. “I . . . I don’t know,” he answered finally in a thin, groping voice.

  “Of course you do,” said the woman, without looking at him. “She must have slipped coming down the stairs. Or perhaps she fainted right on the stairs and fell. Didn’t you hear it happen?”

  Julian’s eyes were still unfocussed on anything. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  I shook the inaction of surprise from me and started forward.

  “Wait a minute, Mr. Sayles,” the woman was saying, and her voice was so calm and steady that it was soothing, “let’s get her on the sofa.” She picked Mrs. Marcy up as if the burden was no more than a child and strode into the living room. As I followed, I noticed that one thin, freckled arm hung down, the palm of the dangling hand turned oddly outward from the limp body. I saw that, but I didn’t think about it.

  As a matter of fact, I did not behave with dispatch or assurance in those first few minutes. It was a shock, of course, to come on that scene at the foot of the stairs, and somehow a surprise, too. The note of disaster in that noise we had heard in the meadow had not prepared me for this ugly yet comprehensible accident. Mrs. Walters’ calmness, the certainty with which she acted, kept me from anything except an incredulous contemplation of the whole scene. Probably fate was wise in making me into a college professor. I do not seem cut out to be a man of action.

  Mrs. Walters put her burden down on the sofa and bent over it. Without turning round she said, coolly and rapidly, “Anne, there’s a bottle of aromatic spirits in my room. Get it at once, please. Bring a glass and a spoon, too. Water in the glass. Mr. Sayles, will you give Julian a hand? This has been a shock to him.”

  Hypnotized by her assurance and uncertain of myself I went back into the hall. Julian was still standing on the same step, staring down at the boards where Mrs. Marcy had been lying a minute before. He was swaying on his feet, the look of blank surprise and horror still on his face. When I put my hand on his shoulder I felt his whole body trembling. “Julian,” I said, “are you all right?”

  “I’m all right.” His voice was so low that I could scarcely hear it. Then he added something to himself, words that were hardly more than the sound of breath. I could not make them out.

  The next few minutes are a kaleidoscope in my memory. Some way or other I got Julian down the steps and into the living room. I made him sit down in a chair. The only part of that which sticks in my mind is wholly irrelevant—the patch of wetness on his shirt where I made him lean against me. Then Anne’s feet came hurrying down the stairs and the next thing I noticed was the white look of strain and alarm on her face as she brought the things Mrs. Walters had requisitioned. The big woman was the only one of us who seemed to be in perfect command of herself. She put a spoonful of the aromatic spirits between Mrs. Marcy’s gray lips as calmly as if she were oiling a sewing machine. Anne and I stood behind her helplessly, looking down at the unmoving body huddled on the sofa. We could not see much of it over the immense black curve of Mrs. Walters’ shoulders and back.

  Suddenly she straightened and confronted us. “Put some clothes on, you ninnies,” she said harshly. “Anne, as soon as you’re dressed, get the car out of the barn and go to town. Get a doctor. Don’t waste time stopping at the Marcy house, either. Their phone will be out— it always is after a thunderstorm. And hurry.”

  She was right, of course, and we retreated to the kitchen and found our clothes, still bundled. They were not really very damp—at least, mine weren’t. Anne disappeared upstairs. I changed right there in the kitchen and I changed fast. These events which I am describing here in all the detail that I was subsequently forced to remember were actually happening to us with great speed. It was natu
ral, I think, that we did not see what was going on.

  By the time I had pulled on the most essential items of clothing, Anne was running downstairs. She scarcely paused on her way through the kitchen. “I’ll get the car out and warm it up a minute,” she said. “You can finish tying your shoelaces while I’m doing that.” The kitchen door slammed behind her.

  As I lifted my head from the second shoe I saw that Mrs. Walters was standing in the, door to the hall, looking at me. She was, indeed, leaning calmly against the doorframe and I noticed with reluctant admiration that there was no confusion or uncertainty on her face. It was as placid as if this emergency were a matter of routine. “Mr. Sayles,” she said in a level voice, “I’m assuming that you will go with Anne. I think an older head will be a good idea.”

  “Of course I’ll go,” I said. “Unless you need me here, or something.”

  “No, there’s nothing more to do here. She’s come to, now—the aromatic spirits I suppose—and she’s not in any pain yet. But if she’s seriously hurt, naturally she will be as soon as the shock wears off. You and Anne will have to hurry. Look out for the road, though. It will be like grease after this rain.”

  “Certainly,” I said, irked by the didactic tone of her speech.

  She must have caught the irritation in my voice. “Excuse me if I sound bossy, but I’m in a rush. I don’t want to leave her alone too long, even if she does seem to be all right, really. Anyhow, Mr. Sayles, I meant that about not stopping at Seth Marcy’s house, partly for the reason I gave you and partly because I don’t want that fool of a man over here till we’re sure his wife’s all right. He’ll make a scene and a whole mountain out of a molehill, and not do her any good.”