Looking back, she could remember too much and too little. A child’s mind is curiously different from an adult’s. When Jane went into the living room under the green glass chandelier, on that June day in 1920, she made a dutiful round of the family, kissing them all. Grandmother Keaton and chilly Aunt Bessie and the four uncles. She did not hesitate when she came to the new uncle—who was different.
The other kids watched her with impassive eyes. They knew. They saw she knew. But they said nothing just then. Jane realized she could not mention the—the trouble—either, until they brought it up. That was part of the silent etiquette of childhood. But the whole house was full of uneasiness. The adults merely sensed a trouble, something vaguely wrong. The children, Jane saw, knew.
Afterward they gathered in the back yard, under the big date-palm. Jane ostentatiously fingered her new necklace and waited. She saw the looks the others exchanged—looks that said, “Do you think she really noticed?” And finally Beatrice, the oldest, suggested hide-and-seek.
“We ought to tell her, Bee,” little Charles said.
Beatrice kept her eyes from Charles.
“Tell her what? You’re crazy, Charles.”
Charles was insistent but vague.
“You know.”
“Keep your old secret,” Jane said. “I know what it is, anyhow. He’s not my uncle.”
“See?” Emily crowed. “She did too see it. I told you she’d notice.”
“It’s kind of funny,” Jane said. She knew very well that the man in the living room wasn’t her uncle and never had been, and he was pretending, quite hard—hard enough to convince the grown-ups—that he had always been here. With the clear, unprejudiced eye of immaturity, Jane could see that he wasn’t an ordinary grown-up. He was sort of—empty.
“He just came,” Emily said. “About three weeks ago.”
“Three days,” Charles corrected, trying to help, but his temporal sense wasn’t dependent on the calendar. He measured tune by the yardstick of events, and days weren’t standard sized for him. They were longer when he was sick or when it rained, and far too short when he was riding the merry-go-round at Ocean Park or playing games in the back yard.
“It was three weeks,” Beatrice said.
“Where’d he come from?” Jane asked.
THERE were secret glances exchanged.
“I don’t know,” Beatrice said carefully.
“He came out of a big round hole that kept going around,” Charles said. “It’s like a Christmas tree through there, all fiery.”
“Don’t tell lies,” Emily said. “Did you ever truly see that, Charles?”
“No. Only sort of.”
“Don’t they notice?” Jane meant the adults.
“No,” Beatrice told her, and the children all looked toward the house and pondered the inscrutable ways of grown-ups. “They act like he’s always been here. Even Granny. Aunt Bessie said he came before I did. Only I knew that wasn’t right.”
“Three weeks,” Charles said, changing his mind.
“He’s making them all feel sick,” Emily said. “Aunt Bessie takes aspirins all the time.”
Jane considered. On the face of it, the situation seemed a little silly. An uncle three weeks old? Perhaps the adults were merely pretending, as they sometimes did, with esoteric adult motives. But somehow that didn’t seem quite the answer. Children are never deceived very long about such things.
Charles, now that the ice was broken and Jane no longer an outsider, burst suddenly into excited gabble.
“Tell her, Bee! The real secret—you know. Can I show her the Road of Yellow Bricks? Please, Bee? Huh?”
Then the silence again. Charles was talking too much, Jane knew the Road of Yellow Bricks, of course. It ran straight through Oz from the Deadly Desert to the Emerald City. After a long time Emily nodded.
“We got to tell her, you know,” she said. “Only she might get scared. It’s so dark.”
“You were scared,” Bobby said. “You cried, the first time.”
“I didn’t. Anyhow it—it’s only make believe.”
“Oh, no!” Charles said. “I reached out and touched the crown last time.”
“It isn’t a crown,” Emily said. “It’s him, Ruggedo.”
Jane thought of the uncle who wasn’t a real uncle—who wasn’t a real person. “Is he Ruggedo?” she asked.
The children understood.
“Oh, no,” Charles said. “Ruggedo lives in the cellar. We give him meat. All red and bluggy He likes it! Gobble, gobble!”
Beatrice looked at Jane. She nodded toward the clubhouse, which was a piano-box with a genuine secret lock. Then, somehow, quite deftly, she shifted the conversation onto another subject. A game of cowboys-and-Indians started presently and Bobby, howling terribly, led the rout around the house.
The piano-box smelled pleasantly of acacia drifting through the cracks. Beatrice and Jane, huddled together in the warm dimness, heard diminishing Indian-cries in the distance. Beatrice looked curiously adult just now.
“I’m glad you came, Janie,” she said. “The little kids don’t understand at all. It’s pretty awful.”
“Who is he?”
Beatrice shivered. “I don’t know. I think he lives in the cellar.” She hesitated. “You have to get to him through the attic, though. I’d be awfully scared if the little kids weren’t so—so—they don’t seem to mind at all.”
“But Bee! Who is he?”
Beatrice turned her head and looked at Jane, and it was quite evident then that she could not or would not say. There was a barrier. But because it was important, she tried. She mentioned the Wrong Uncle.
“I think Ruggedo’s the same as him. I know he is, really. Charles and Bobby say so—and they know. They know better than I do. They’re littler . . . It’s hard to explain, but—well, it’s sort of like the Scoodlers. Remember?”
The Scoodlers. That unpleasant race that dwelt in a cavern on the road to Oz and had the convenient ability to detach their heads and hurl them at passersby. After a moment the parallel became evident. A Scoodler could have his head in one place and his body in another, but both parts would belong to the same Scoodler.
Of course the phantom uncle had a head and a body both. But Jane could understand vaguely the possibility of his double nature, one of him moving deceptively through the house, focus of a strange malaise, and the other nameless, formless, nesting in a cellar and waiting for red meat . . .
“Charles knows more than any of us about it,” Beatrice said. “He was the one who found out we’d have to feed R-Ruggedo. We tried different things, but it has to be raw meat. And if we stopped—something awful would happen. We kids found that out.”
It was significant that Jane didn’t ask how. Children take their equivalent of telepathy for granted.
“They don’t know,” Beatrice added. “We can’t tell them.”
“No,” Jane said, and the two girls looked at one another, caught in the terrible, helpless problem of immaturity, the knowledge that the mores of the adult world are too complicated to understand, and that children must walk warily. Adults are always right. They are an alien race.
LUCKILY for the other children, they had come upon the Enemy in a body. One child alone might have had violent hysterics. But Charles, who made the first discoveries, was only six, still young enough so that the process of going insane in that particular way wasn’t possible for him. A six-year-old is in a congenitally psychotic state; it is normal to him.
“And they’ve been sick ever since he came,” Beatrice said.
Jane had already seen that. A wolf may don sheepskin and slide unobserved into a flock, but the sheep are apt to become nervous, though they can not discover the source of their discomfort.
It was a matter of mood. Even he showed the same mood—uneasiness, waiting, sensing that something was wrong and not knowing what—but with him it was simply a matter of camouflage. Jane could tell he didn’t want to attract attention by var
ying from the arbitrary norm he had chosen—that of the human form.
Jane accepted it. The uncle who was—empty—the one in the cellar called Ruggedo, who had to be fed regularly on raw meat, so that Something wouldn’t happen . . .
A masquerader, from somewhere. He had power, and he had limitations. The obvious evidences of his power were accepted without question. Children are realists. It was not incredible to them, for this hungry, inhuman stranger to appear among them—for here he—
He came from somewhere. Out of time, or space, or an inconceivable place. He never had any human feelings; the children sensed that easily. He pretended very cleverly to be human, and he could warp the adult minds to implant artificial memories of his existence. The adults thought they remembered him. An adult will recognize a mirage; a child will be deceived. But conversely, an intellectual mirage will deceive an adult, not a child.
Ruggedo’s power couldn’t warp their minds, for those minds were neither quite human nor quite sane, from the adult standpoint. Beatrice, who was oldest, was afraid. She had the beginnings of empathy and imagination. Little Charlie felt mostly excitement. Bobbie, the smallest, had already begun to be bored . . .
Perhaps later Beatrice remembered a little of what Ruggedo looked like, but the others never did. For they reached him by a very strange road, and perhaps they were somewhat altered themselves during the time they were with him. He accepted or rejected food; that was all. Upstairs, the body of the Scoodler pretended to be human, while the Scoodler’s head lay in that little, horrible nest he had made by warping space, so he was invisible and intangible to anyone who didn’t know how to find the Road of Yellow Bricks.
What was he? Without standards of comparison—and there are none, in this world—he cannot be named. The children thought of him as Ruggedo. But he was not the fat, half-comic, inevitably frustrate Gnome King. He was never that.
Call him demon.
As a name-symbol, it implies too much and not enough. But it will have to do. By the standard of maturity he was monster, alien, super-being. But because of what he did, and what he wanted—call him demon.
CHAPTER II
Raw, Red Meat
ONE AFTERNOON, a few days later, Beatrice hunted up Jane. “How much money have you got, Janie?” she asked.
“Four dollars and thirty-five cents,” Jane said, after investigation. “Dad gave me five dollars at the station. I bought some popcorn and—well—different things.”
“Gee, I’m glad you came when you did.” Beatrice blew out a long breath. Tacitly it was agreed that the prevalent socialism of childhood clubs would apply in this more urgent clubbing together of interests. Jane’s small hoard was available not for any individual among them, but for the good of the group. “We were running out of money,” Beatrice said. “Granny caught us taking meat out of the icebox and we don’t dare any more. But we can get a lot with your money.”
Neither of them thought of the inevitable time when that fund would be exhausted. Four dollars and thirty-five cents seemed fabulous, in that era. And they needn’t buy expensive meat, so long as it was raw and bloody.
They walked together down the acacia-shaded street with its occasional leaning palms and drooping pepper-trees. They bought two pounds of hamburger and improvidently squandered twenty cents on sodas.
When they got back to the house, Sunday lethargy had set in. Uncles Simon and James had gone out for cigars, and Uncles Lew and Bert were reading the papers, while Aunt Bessie crocheted. Grandmother Keaton read Young’s Magazine, diligently seeking spicy passages. The two girls paused behind the beaded portieres, looking in.
“Come on, kids,” Lew said in his deep, resonant voice. “Seen the funnies yet? Mutt and Jeff are good. And Spark Plug—”
“Mr. Gibson is good enough for me,” Grandmother Keaton said. “He’s a real artist. His people look like people.”
The door banged open and Uncle James appeared, fat, grinning, obviously happy from several beers. Uncle Simon paced him like a personified conscience.
“At any rate, it’s quiet,” he said, turning a sour glance on Jane and Beatrice. “The children make such a rumpus sometimes I can’t hear myself think.”
“Granny,” Beatrice asked. “Where are the kids?”
“In the kitchen, I think, dear. They wanted some water for something.”
“Thanks.” The two girls went out, leaving the room filled with a growing atmosphere of sub-threshold discomfort. The sheep were sensing the wolf among them, but the sheepskin disguise was sufficient. They did not know . . .
The kids were in the kitchen, busily painting one section of the comics with brushes and water. When you did that, pictures emerged. One page of the newspaper had been chemically treated so that moisture would bring out the various colors, dull pastels, but singularly glamorous, in a class with the Japanese flowers that would bloom in water, and the Chinese paper-shelled almonds that held tiny prizes.
From behind her, Beatrice deftly produced the butcher’s package.
“Two pounds,” she said. “Janie had some money, and Merton’s was open this afternoon. I thought we’d better . . .”
Emily kept on painting diligently. Charles jumped up.
“Are we going up now, huh?”
Jane was uneasy. “I don’t know if I’d better come along. I—”
“I don’t want to either,” Bobby said, but that was treason. Charles said Bobby was scared.
“I’m not. It just isn’t any fun. I want to play something else.”
“Emily,” Beatrice said softly. “You don’t have to go this time.”
“Yes I do.” Emily looked up at last, from her painting. “I’m not scared.”
“I want to see the lights,” Charles said. Beatrice whirled on him.
“You tell such lies, Charles! There aren’t any lights.”
“There are so. Sometimes, anyhow.”
“There aren’t.”
“There are so. You’re too dumb to see them. Let’s go and feed him.”
It was understood that Beatrice took command now. She was the oldest. She was also, Jane sensed, more afraid than the others, even Emily.
They went upstairs, Beatrice carrying the parcel of meat. She had already cut the string. In the upper hall they grouped before a door.
“This is the way, Janie,” Charles said rather proudly. “We gotta go up to the attic. There’s a swing-down ladder in the bathroom ceiling. We have to climb up on the tub to reach.”
“My dress,” Jane said doubtfully.
“You won’t get dirty. Come on.”
Charles wanted to be first, but he was too short. Beatrice climbed to the rim of the tub and tugged at a ring in the ceiling. The trap-door creaked and the stairs descended slowly, with a certain majesty, beside the tub. It wasn’t dark up there. Light came vaguely through the attic windows.
“Come on, Janie,” Beatrice said, with a queer breathlessness, and they all scrambled up somehow, by dint of violent acrobatics.
THE attic was warm, quiet and dusty. Planks were laid across the beams. Cartons and trunks were here and there. Beatrice was already walking along one of the beams. Jane watched her.
Beatrice didn’t look back; she didn’t say anything. Once her hand groped out behind her; Charles, who was nearest, took it. Then Beatrice reached a plank laid across to another rafter. She crossed it. She went on—stopped—and came back, with Charles.
“You weren’t doing it right,” Charles said disappointedly. “You were thinking of the wrong thing.”
Beatrice’s face looked oddly white in the golden, faint light.
Jane met her cousin’s eyes. “Bee—”
“You have to think of something else,” Beatrice said quickly. “It’s all right. Come on.”
Charles at her heels, she started again across the plank. Charles was saying something, in a rhythmic, mechanical monotone:
“One, two, buckle my shoe,
Three, four, knock at the door,
&
nbsp; Five, six, pick up sticks—”
Beatrice disappeared.
“Seven, eight, lay them—”
Charles disappeared.
Bobby, his shoulders expressing rebelliousness, followed. And vanished.
Emily made a small sound.
“Oh—Emily!” Jane said.
But her youngest cousin only said, “I don’t want to go down there, Janie!”
“You don’t have to.”
“Yes, I do,” Emily said. “I’ll tell you what. I won’t be afraid if you come right after me. I always think there’s something coming up behind me to grab—but if you promise to come right after, it’ll be all right.”
“I promise,” Jane said.
Reassured, Emily walked across the bridge. Jane was watching closely this time. Yet she did not see Emily disappear. She was suddenly—gone. Jane stepped forward, and stopped as a sound came from downstairs.
“Jane!” Aunt Bessie’s voice. “Jane!” It was louder and more peremptory now. “Jane, where are you? Come here to me!”
Jane stood motionless, looking across the plank bridge. It was quite empty, and there was no trace of Emily or the other children. The attic was suddenly full of invisible menace. Yet she would have gone on, because of her promise, if—
“Jane!”
Jane reluctantly descended and followed the summons to Aunt Bessie’s bedroom. That prim-mouthed woman was pinning fabric and moving her lips impatiently.
“Where on earth have you been, Jane? I’ve been calling and calling.”
“We were playing,” Jane said. “Did you want me, Aunt Bessie?”
“I should say I did,” Aunt Bessie said. “This collar I’ve been crocheting. It’s for a dress for you. Come here and let me try it on. How you grow, child!”
And after that there was an eternity of pinning and wriggling, while Jane kept thinking of Emily, alone and afraid somewhere in the attic. She began to hate Aunt Bessie. Yet the thought of rebellion or escape never crossed her mind. The adults were absolute monarchs. As far as relative values went, trying on the collar was more important, at this moment, than anything else in the world. At least, to the adults who administered the world.
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