The League of Grey-Eyed Women

by Julius Fast

  "Yeah, sure..."

  "My kid's just as bad. My daughter. Thirteen, and she's got a tongue like her mother." He reached across and took a pack of cigarettes from the glove compartment and handed one to Jack. "Sorry the radio's on the blink or I'd put some music on."

  His voice washed over Jack, soothing and meaningless, an idle flow of chatter to relieve the tedium of the long ride to Riverhead. Riverhead, 60 or 70 miles from New York, and then what? Could he call Clifford from there? But he didn't even have a dime to call the operator and how could he impose on Clifford like that?

  What then? Hitchhike into the city? What time was it anyway? They hadn't passed another car since Dickenson picked him up. Were all the roads to New York as empty as this one? Where would he ever hitch a ride?

  The road angled sharply and Tom swung the car aside in an attempt to avoid a deep pothole in the road. But the hole caught the back wheel, and as the car bucked, the rear hubcap flew off with a clang.

  Tom jammed on the brakes, cursing furiously. "Damn, that's the second hubcap this week. I'm going back for it."

  He threw the car into reverse and backed up a few yards, then opened the door and climbed out. "It's somewhere back here."

  "Need any help?"

  "Yeah. If you can turn the car around and swing the headlights over here," Tom called, "I'll find it in a minute."

  Jack slipped behind the wheel and moved the car forward to swing it around, and a sudden thrill shot through him. This was an answer to his problem and too good to pass up. After that first blinding thrill he acted automatically, threw the car into drive and stepped on the accelerator. Behind him he heard Tom Dickenson yell, and then he concentrated on the road, on familiarizing himself with the feel of the car. He hadn't owned a car in over ten years, but this car was more than ten years old, and he was familiar with the shift.

  With his left foot he searched for the high-beam button and stepped on it, flooding the road with extra light. Then he bore down on the accelerator till the car hit 50, then 60 miles an hour.

  In a few hours he could reach Manhattan and abandon the car. The police would find it, trace the license number and get in touch with Dickenson. He had caught one last glimpse of him in the rearview mirror, staring from the roadside ditch, staring unbelievingly after the car, his car.

  And he stole it with no compunction at all. Abruptly he took his foot off the accelerator. Dear God, what had happened to him? Had there been changes in his mind to match the changes in his body? What had he become that he could this easily steal a man's car and abandon him at the side of the road, a man who had helped him, who had picked him up to do him a favor?

  He stepped on the brake and brought the car to a halt at the side of the road and then leaned forward against the wheel, his forehead propped on his hands and his face twisted in pain. If he could cry. Oh, Lord, if he could only cry!

  The horror, the panic of the last weeks rose up within him and he opened his mouth in a soundless scream of agony, then threw his head back, the cords of his neck twisted, his hands grasping the wheel.

  Slowly, painfully, the terror subsided. He had been pushed and buffeted by forces beyond his control to a point of near madness. Now he would act as he, Jack Freeman, had acted all his life, as a man was meant to act—with decency.

  He turned the car around and headed back along the road. In less than half a mile his headlights picked out Tom Dickenson trudging along with the hubcap under his arm. Dickenson stopped and waved his arms wildly and Jack braked to a stop, a few feet away.

  "Can you give me a lift? Some nut took my car..." Dickenson began, and then his mouth fell open as he recognized the car and Jack. "What the hell..."

  Jack climbed out and stood facing Tom. "I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me."

  Dickenson's fists were clenched and half-raised, his voice furious. "You'll be more than sorry. Goddamit, stealing my car and leaving me here in the middle of nowhere..."

  "I'm sorry..." Helplessly, Jack spread his hands, backing away from Dickenson's fury. "I shouldn't have done it. I brought it back as soon as I realized what I did."

  Dickenson stood there, glaring at him but making no move to attack him. Instead he abruptly swung into the driver's seat of the car, threw the hubcap into the rear and gripped the wheel. "I knew I was crazy to pick up a hitchhiker. Martha's told me a hundred times. She said I'd end up beaten and robbed."

  "I'm not like that," Jack murmured defensively. "I didn't mean any harm. It was only that I didn't have any money, and I was scared about getting to the city. Believe me, I'm sorry."

  Dickenson shrugged uncomfortably. Reaching out, he slammed the car door and Jack stepped back as he turned the car, pointing it towards Riverhead. But he didn't put it into gear. He just sat there letting the motor idle for a moment while his anger cooled and curiosity took over. There was very little mean or vengeful in Tom Dickenson, but there was an all-consuming curiosity.

  "Why'd you come back?" he asked through the open window.

  Jack shook his head. "I'm no thief. I told you, I don't know why I took the car, only I was scared stiff. You do funny things when you're afraid."

  "Yeah." There was another long silence. Finally Dickenson raced the motor, then said, "God damn, I ought to let you walk, like I would have had to."

  Jack said, "Okay. I don't blame you one bit," and he moved to the side of the road.

  "Oh, for Christ's sake, get in!" Tom swung open the door on the passenger's side. "Come on, I haven't got all night."

  For a while they drove in silence, then Dickenson lit another cigarette and offered one to Jack. "I still don't get it," he said finally. "Why'd you bring the car back?"

  "I told you, I'm no thief."

  Dickenson nodded, then looked at him slyly. "Yeah, but you stole those clothes."

  Startled, Jack said, "What do you mean?"

  "When I saw you out there in my headlights just now I was sure. Those are the clothes I gave the kid. How'd you get them, and where's the kid?"

  Jack didn't answer and finally, without conviction, Dickenson said, "I could turn you over to the cops."

  "What for?"

  "What did you do to the kid?"

  It was odd how flat the cigarette tasted. Jack looked at it in the darkened car and said, "There wasn't any kid. You fished me out of the water."

  "Come off it. You think I don't know the difference between your face and his?"

  "Did you see him that well?" Jack looked at him. "You don't always believe what you see. You thought you saw me turn from a shark to a man."

  Dickenson's hands tightened on the wheel. "I thought we pulled in a shark," he said slowly. "I was wrong." He was quiet for a moment, then added, "Okay, maybe I was wrong about the kid."

  "Out there at night," Jack said slowly, "the light plays tricks."

  Dickenson seized at it eagerly. "I knew I recognized those clothes. Why didn't you tell me?"

  Remembering what Hartsdale had said, Jack shrugged, "I was kind of shocked. Washed overboard like that ... I guess it's amnesia ... I forgot everything."

  Dickenson nodded wisely. "Maybe that explains your stealing the car. What about that story you told me?"

  "I made it up. I didn't remember what boat I was on or anything. Or how I got there." He chewed his lip. "I know everything else," he added. "Who I am. Where I live..."

  Dickenson looked at him uneasily and started to say something, but a traffic light ahead caught his eye. "Hey, we're at Riverhead already. I'll drop you at the railroad station. Okay?"

  "Sure, and thanks again."

  "That's okay."

  He turned off the main highway and cut through the deserted town to the railway depot. When Jack climbed out, however, Dickenson came after him. "Hey, how'll you get to the city?"

  Jack shook his head. "I don't know. If I could call New York, I have a friend there who'll help me."

  "Here." Dickenson dug into his pocket and held out a five-dollar bill. "This'll get you to N
ew York and buy you a cup of coffee till the train comes."

  Jack took the bill hesitantly. "I don't know how to thank you. Where can I send it to pay you back?"

  "That'll be a good thing. I can use it. Just send it to Tom Dickenson, Riverhead. That'll do it. Take care now."

  He climbed into the car and drove off and Jack stood there, holding the five and unexpectedly feeling his eyes fill.

  There was a milk train out of Riverhead at 3 a.m., due to arrive in Manhattan at 6. That left plenty of time for a cup of coffee at the all-night diner across the street from the station, but when Jack tried to eat a sandwich with his coffee, he had a sudden vivid recollection of his last meal, of the pack of sharks spiralling up to tear slabs of meat from the struggling whale calf, and his throat tightened in disgust.

  In the train he sat in an almost empty car, huddled in the corner of a wide seat. Sleep was impossible, and yet his body was so physically tired that every motion was agony.

  His mind raced frantically back over the past days, remembering every event with sudden, crystal clarity. He had never had total recall, and often names and faces had to be dredged out of the past painfully. Now everything leaped into startling awareness in his mind, every taste and sound, the incredible sense of smell that had guided him through the water, and another sense that even now he could hardly understand, an awareness of motion, no matter how far away, an awareness built into unknown receptors in the shark's body.

  Granted he had changed from man to wolf to man, from man to bird to shark, each time to save his life. How had he known how to change? Wanting to change was not enough, he was sure of that. But given the ability to change, in some unknown way, how had he known each life form that well? He, as a man, knew of a shark only as a curious and frightening fish. There were things about sharks he was only vaguely aware of, their shape, their lack of bones, their skin—did they have skin or scales?

  Not really knowing this, not ever having known it, how had he been able to change his body, to simulate a shark so perfectly even to duplicating those incredible receptors for motion sense?

  He shook his head in bewilderment and in the dark mirror of the train's window his reflection shook its head back at him. He stared at the reflection, seeing himself for the first time since the change, but darkly in the black mirror of the window, distorted and only half real, parts highlighted out of proportion and other parts fading into blackness, unreal and vague. From an old nursery rhyme he remembered the lament of a woman whose skirts had been cut off by a robber. "This is none of I!" He repeated it softly.

  Abruptly he stood up and hurried back through the train to the men's room. He had to see himself in a real mirror. He had to know what he was, who he was, what he had changed back into.

  Inside the washroom he shut the door and, trembling, turned to face the long mirror over the sink. He could see his entire body here, down to his knees, and he stared at his face first, hungrily, searchingly.

  This was the face he remembered, the face that had stared back at him over the years from his shaving mirror—or was it? The features were the same, and yet...

  He touched his eyes and frowned. There was something wrong. What memory do we carry of ourselves? Is it the man we see in the mirror today, or the man we saw yesterday, a week ago, a year, ten years ago? There were no wrinkles around his eyes, none of the lines he knew should be there, but had never seen, never really noticed. How old was this face staring back at him? He had been in his forties. Surely this face in the mirror was hardly thirty! And his body...

  He unbuttoned the denim jacket and stared in horror at an exquisitely muscled chest, a chest like that of an idealized museum statue. He unbuttoned his pants and dropped them, then looked at his genitals. He had gone through life circumcised, yet this body he was wearing—that was the only term for it, wearing—this perfect, sculptured body, was uncircumcised, unmanned in any way. His appendectomy scar was gone. The grey in the hair that covered his chest was gone and all the excess fat and flabbiness had disappeared. Even the skin texture was different, younger.

  He buttoned himself up numbly, and shakily made his way to his seat. What had happened?

  Panic began to bubble up within him, and he forced down an urge to scream. "There are ground rules," he whispered through clenched teeth. "Learn them and understand them." He had to do it to save his sanity, to save himself from screaming out in terror and pounding his fist against the seat ahead of him, to hold on to the terrified part of his brain that wanted to scuttle away into a distant corner of his skull and hide, wait it out...

  "You changed to save your life," he whispered. "You changed in stress and terror. All right. Somewhere in your chromosomes nature has put down a blueprint of every species that man has evolved through. You know—some instinctual part of you knows, some sense you are unaware of turns to that blueprint automatically for change."

  It made no sense, and yet, if it were true, it would explain what had happened. There was the blueprint of a man among all the others, not necessarily of him as a man, of the him he had developed into, but of an ideal, perfect man at the peak of maturity. He had been a perfect wolf and a perfect shark, why not a perfect man?

  But what about the bird? He almost smiled as he remembered the awkward, great-winged bird beating the air in vast sweeps above the Hudson, and then the smile turned to a grimace. The bird had been far from perfect, a mistake and a ghastly one. There was still the law of conservation of mass. He had been a huge wolf, 170 pounds of wolf, and a small shark in the pack— 170 pounds of shark. Some of those pounds had burned off in the long journey through the ocean, and now he was a trim, lean man of about 150.

  It made sense, yet the last time he had awakened it had been as Jack Freeman. The wolf, with no effort it seemed, had turned back to the original man. Why hadn't the shark?

  The answer to that was easy. A man in the ocean would have been as bad off as a wolf in Central Park. He remembered the dim, terrifying struggle for identity in the shark's brain. When the wolf relaxed its vigil and fell asleep, the man had taken over. The shark had never really slept, never totally surrendered its consciousness.

  If the wolf had stayed awake, would he still be loping through Central Park, howling at the moon?

  He wet his lips and pulled the jacket up around his neck. He had been a shark too long. When conversion back to a man took place, the identity, the physical identity of Jack Freeman was lost, or temporarily forgotten. The conversion had taken place to a man, a man as a representative of the species, man, even as he had been wolf and shark.

  "All right then," he told himself. "You are the ideal of a man." That was how Jack Freeman's body carried man in its tapes. That was why he had come into existence on the boat's deck with a "Greek god's" body and a blank mind, and then, later on the dock there had been another change, he had felt that, a shift back to his own face. Was that also in defense, to get out of the trouble with Hartsdale and the others, or was that a sort of shifting of gears, a little rearrangement as the tapes suddenly remembered more clearly?

  And why hadn't the rest of his body changed?

  He put one hand over his stomach, feeling the hard, flat muscle and he moved it down to his groin, cupping his genitals. Was he really an unblemished man who had come into being after the shark? Was he a man with his foreskin restored, his appendix restored?

  Oh, Christ! He twisted in mental agony. None of it made sense, ground rules or not, DNA or not, it was all too fantastic to accept! How could he sit here like this and calmly try to spell out the processes of change? Why wasn't he screaming in shock? Or was that too part of the change?

  But at Penn Station, leaving the train, he brought himself up short and stared ahead wildly. Then what about the cancer? Had that too left him? Was he free of it? Dear God, was he free?

  He ran up the platform taking the steps two at a time, and he raced out to the entrance to flag a cab. He was filled with a wild sort of exuberance. He would live now. He was sure of
it, positive!

  He had two dollars left from the five, enough to get home. In the cab he leaned back and closed his eyes, but he was smiling. It had to be true. It had to be!

  Chapter Twelve

  After a sleepless night, Clifford woke before dawn and lay in bed, watching the room brighten with a cold, grey light that filtered in from the city streets. Pushkin, through some infallible cat instinct, became aware of his wakefulness and leaped lightly to the bed, then walked with delicate feet up to his stomach. There he settled regally and started cleaning his paws.

  Watching him, Clifford smiled, and then let his eyes wander up to the ceiling. He had relived the evening with Rhoda and Steve again and again during the night wondering how much was truth and how much deception.

  That telepathy trick. He had seen similar stunts, all clever and all almost foolproof, but admittedly, none quite like this one. There had been no paraphernalia or codes. The truth was he hadn't wanted to accept it, or Steve's wild story, but he knew that in spite of his reluctance he believed in both.

  Why? Why should anything that fantastic still have a ring of truth?

  The answer lay with Anna he realized as the first cold sunlight touched his windows. He had believed Anna, and believing her he must accept the fact that Jack had actually changed into a wolf, that whatever Steve had done to his chromosomes had caused that change.

  Believing this completely impossible situation, it had been easy to believe the rest. One foot into fairyland, he thought wryly, and the entire trip becomes a possibility. The telepathy, the league of pale-eyed women, and above all the plot to change Jack genetically.

  Abruptly he jumped out of bed, ignoring Pushkin's aggrieved protests, and he headed for the shower. Somehow when Jack returned he had to head him off, warn him. When Jack returned! Didn't he mean if?

  He spent the early morning in his studio, trying to lose himself in his work, but his mind kept wandering back to the girls, and then to Jack. What had happened to him? What did they intend to do to him?

  Finally, at eleven o'clock, he threw down his pencil in disgust and shoved his hands into his pockets. The work would just have to wait. He had to do something, anything, but he couldn't stay cooped up here. Maybe he ought to see Steve again and find out exactly what she intended. No, not Steve. There was an ironlike core to her that would resist any pressure. She hadn't given an inch last night and she wouldn't now. But Rhoda. He was sure she would listen, that he could convince her.