The Best of Margaret St. Clair

by Margaret St. Clair

  Oh, what a pretty dress! Her lips parted with pleasure as she looked in the glass. It fitted so nicely, the colors were so soft and becoming! She got up on a chair to look at the bottom part of it and even the hem line was just right. Marie thought, even when I was a young girl, I wasn’t much to look at. In this dress I look prettier than I ever did. And my real age. Why, I’m only thirty-three! That’s not old. And yet I’ve been feeling like an old woman. If Henry likes pretty things…

  She decided to take a bath and wash her hair. Luckily she’d bought a bottle of shampoo from the Rawleigh man the last time he’d called. While she was waiting for the water to heat, she went out and fed the chic kens and collected the eggs.

  She had always rather disliked poultry, they made such silly noises and had such fussy ways, but now she looked at them cheerfully. If it hadn’t been for her egg money, she’d never have been able to buy the wonderful freezer at Fergus’ sale.

  She washed her hair and pushed a wave into the damp, fresh locks. ‘While it was drying, she planned her campaign. She’d have something or other for lunch—it didn’t much matter what—but for supper she’d get a really nice meal. Chicken and slaw and butterbeans and the rest of the blueberry pie. She’d wear her lovely new dress and fluff her hair out around her face so the gray didn’t show. She had powder and rouge, though she didn’t use them much, and even a bottle of Avon cologne. If Bertha had been right about Henry… Marie felt a sick, excited feeling in the pit of her stomach, half guilty, half agreeable. She had to keep swallowing over it.

  She and Henry ate lunch in silence. Henry had a copy of the new lodge ritual beside his plate. He kept it open with his knife, and studied it while he ate. After lunch Marie did her ironing and shaped the butter from yesterday’s churning—they had only one cow—into pats. About four she started on supper. Then she got dressed.

  Henry was sitting in the living room when she went in. He’d washed up; he was reading the new ritual. She said, “Supper’s ready, Henry.” And then, with a great effort, “What do you think of my new dress?”

  He raised his eyes. His mouth opened in a surprise which, even at the moment, Marie found not quite flattering. “Why, Marie!” he said. He smiled a little. “Marie, you’re as pretty as a picture in that dress!”

  He got up from his chair and started toward her. She waited for his approach in a dazzle of happiness. He put his arm around her. He leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. Marie perceived, with an almost apocalyptic horror, that he wasn’t wearing his teeth.

  When the kiss was over, she went back to the kitchen. She began to pick up pieces of chicken from the skillet and put them on the platter. She found she was crying. She tried to push the tears back with her wrists. It didn’t help. The tears still came.

  For— and this was the heart of the matter, the root of the trouble, the thing that never could be altered—Henry was still Henry Bates. He might talk to her, smile at her, kiss her, be interested in her. What of it? He would still be two inches shorter than she was, years older, and bald on the top of his head. He would still forget to wear his teeth. Those darned old false teeth!

  She’d got to stop. Henry would think she was crazy. She fumbled with the platter and then put it down again. Standing there among the wreck of her hopes, her cheeks shining damply and tears dripping on the neck of her dress, she heard the motor of the freezer in the pantry begin to purr.

  For a moment she listened to the sound without moving. Then she raised her head.

  Henry looked up at her with a puzzled frown when she went into the living room. “Something’s wrong with the freezer, Henry,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “Won’t you see if you can fix it for me? And we’ll eat.”

  He got up. He followed her into the pantry. “Why, the motor’s running,” he said in a puzzled voice. He bent over the freezer’s open lid.

  Marie hesitated for a moment. Her heart was thumping wildly. She was afraid he’d hear it. She hoped, oh, she hoped, this was the right thing to do. She caught her husband by the seat of the pants and dumped him into the big white chest.

  She slammed the lid of the freezer shut and sat down on it.

  For a while there were sounds of struggle. Henry thumped, heaved, beat on the sides of the chest. Marie, with tears running down her cheeks, remained seated on the lid. She noticed that from time to time the freezer motor made a sort of spitting noise, as if it might be over-exerting itself.

  At the end of two hours she raised the freezer lid.

  * * *

  The Bateses’ absence was not noticed for several days. It was not until Bertha, wanting to borrow Marie’s apron pattern, called three times at the house without finding anyone at home that she grew alarmed. Then she called the sheriff and they broke into the house.

  They searched it. They found nothing—no bodies, no disorder, no farewell notes.

  After a decent length of time had passed, Bertha and her husband took over the farm. Bertha was Henry Bates’s nearest relative and nobody dreamed of disputing her right to it. Besides, it didn’t amount to much.

  Bertha was disappointed that she never could get the freezer to work. The electrician she called in said he couldn’t understand it. The motor seemed to have burned itself out.

  One day late that year the mailman brought Bertha a postcard. It was a glossy photograph of a man and woman on skis against a winter background a nd, except that the man was taller and both he and the woman much younger and better-looking than the missing couple, the pair in the picture bore a remarkable resemblance to Marie and Henry Bates. Neither of them looked a day over thirty. They wore expensive ski clothing and both of them were wreathed in smiles. The postmark on the card was Sun Valley, Idaho.

  Bertha turned the card over and over, frowning and trying to make sense out of it. She felt that something had happened, but she didn’t know quite what. She hovered on the edge of wild surmise. Finally she put the card away in the upper drawer of the sideboard and stopped thinking about it. There wasn’t any use in thinking. There was no message on the card’s back.

  1953. Mercury Press, Inc.

  BRENDA

  Brenda Alden was a product of that aseptic, faintly sadistic, school of child rearing that is already a little old-fashioned. The vacationing parents on Moss Island liked her, and held up her politeness and good manners as examples to their offspring, but the children themselves stayed away from her, scenting in her something waspish and irritable. She was tall for her age, and lanky, with limp blonde hair. She always wore slacks.

  Monday began like all her days. She had breakfast, was told to keep her elbows off the table, helped with the dishes. Then she was told to go out and play. She sauntered slowly into the woods.

  The woods on Moss Island were scattered clumps of birch and denser stands of conifers. There were places where Brenda, if she tried hard, could have the illusion of a forest, and she liked that. In the western part of the island there was a wide, deep excavation which people said had been a quarry. Nobody ever said what had been quarried out of it.

  It was a little before noon when Brenda smelled the rotten smell. It was an intense, bitter rottenness, almost strangling, and when it first met her nose Brenda’s face wrinkled up with distaste. But after a moment her face relaxed. She inhaled, not without eagerness. She decided to try to find the source of the smell. Sometimes she liked to smell and look at rotten things.

  Sniffing, she wandered. The smell would be strong and then weak and then strong again. She was just about to give up and turn back—it was hot in the airless, piney pockets, under the sun—when she saw the man.

  He was not a tramp, he was not one of the summer people. Brenda knew at once that he was not like any other man she had ever seen. His skin was not black, or brown, but of an inky grayness; his body was blobbish and irregular, as if it had been shaped out of the clots of soap and grease that stop up kitchen sinks. He held a dead bird in one crude hand. The rotten smell was welling out of him.

  Br
enda stared at him, her heart pounding. For a moment she was almost too frightened to move. She stood gasping and licking her lips. Then he extended an arm toward her. She turned and ran.

  She heard the noise, she smelled the smell, as he came stumbling after her. Her lungs hurt. There was an ache in her side. She tripped over a root, fell to her knees, and was up again. She ran on. Only when she was almost too exhausted to go further did she look back.

  He was more distant then she had hoped, though he was still coming. For a second she stood panting, her narrow sides going in and out. He was still separated from her by some fifty feet. She blinked. Then her lips curved in what was almost a smile. She turned to the right, in the direction of the quarry, and began running again, though more leisurely.

  There was a thicket of poison oak; she skirted it. She stooped for a pine cone, and then another one, thrust them into the waistband of her slacks, and went on with her steady trotting. He was still following. The light seemed to hurt his eyes; his head hung forward almost on his chest. Then they were on the edge of the quarry, and Brenda must try her plan.

  She was no longer afraid—or, at any rate, only a little so. Exertion had washed her sallow cheeks with an unaccustomed red. Carefully she tossed one of the pine cones over the steep quarry side so that it landed halfway toward the bottom and then rolled on down. With more force she threw the second cone; it hit well beyond the first and slid toward the bottom in a rattle of loose stones and dirt. Then, very quickly and lightly, Brenda ran to the left and crouched behind a tree.

  The noise of the pine cones and stones had been not unlike that of a runner plunging over the quarry edge and down into the depths. Brenda’s pursuer halted, turning his head from side to side blindly, and seeming to sniff the air. She felt a moment of anxiety. She felt almost sure he couldn’t catch her, even if he started after her again. But—oh—he was so—One of the pine cones slid a few feet further. He seemed to listen. Then he went over the edge after the sound of it.

  Brenda’s heart was shaking the flat bosom of her shirt. While the rotten-smelling man stumbled back and forth among the dusty rocks in the quarry bottom hunting her, she waited and listened. It took him a long time to abandon the search. But at last the moment for which Brenda had been waiting came. He left his hunting and began to struggle up the quarry side.

  He slid back. Brenda leaned forward, tense and expectant. Her eyes were bright. He started up again. Once more he slid back.

  It was clear to the watching child much sooner than it was to the man in the depths of the quarry that he was imprisoned. He kept starting up the sides clumsily, clawing at the loose handholds, and sliding back. But his blobbish limbs were extraordinarily inept and awkward. He always slid back.

  At last he gave up and stood quiet. His head dropped. He made no sound. But the penetrating rottenness was welling out from him.

  Brenda got to her feet and walked toward him. Her pale lips were curving in a grin. “Hi!” she called over the edge of the quarry. “Hi! You can’t get out, can you?”

  The mockery in her tone seemed to cut through to his dull senses. He raised his grayish head. There was a flash of teeth, very white against their inky background. But he couldn’t get out. After a moment, Brenda laughed.

  Brenda hugged her secret to herself all the rest of the day. She was reprimanded for being late to lunch; her father said she needed discipline. She was not bothered. That night she slept soundly and well.

  Early next morning she went to see Charles. Charles was a year older than she, and tolerated her better than anyone else on Moss Island. Once he had given her a cast-off snake skin. She had kept it in the drawer with her handkerchiefs.

  Today he was making a cloud chamber with rubbing alcohol, a jar, and a piece of dry ice. Brenda squatted down beside him and watched. After five minutes or so she said, “I know what’s more fun that that.”

  “What?” Charles asked, without looking up from his manipulations.

  “Something I found. Something funny. Scary. Queer.”

  The exchange continued. Brenda hinted. Charles was mildly curious. At last she said, “Come and see it, Chet. It’s not like anything you ever saw before. Come on.” She laid her hand on his arm.

  Up until that moment, Charles might have accompanied her. The cloud chamber was not going well, and he did not actively dislike the girl. But the dryness and tensity of her touch on his—the touch of a person who has never received or given a pleasant physical contact—repelled him. He drew away from her hand. “I don’t want to see it. It isn’t anything anyway, just some sort of junk. I’m not interested,” he said.

  “But you’d like it! Please come and see.”

  “I told you, I’m not interested. I’m not going to go. Can’t you take a hint? Go away.”

  When he used that tone, Brenda knew there was no use in arguing with him. She got up and walked off.

  After lunch her father had her help him with the barbecue pit he was building. While she shoveled dirt and mixed concrete her thoughts were busy with the man in the quarry. Was he still standing motionless at the bottom, or was he once more stumbling back and forth hunting her? Or was he trying to clamber up the side again? He’d never make it, no matter how much he tried. But if he stayed there long enough, some of the other children might find him. Would they be more frightened than she had been? She didn’t know. She couldn’t form any mental picture of what might happen then.

  When her father finished his work for the day, she lay down in the hammock. Her hands were sore and her back ached, but she couldn’t relax. Finally, though it was almost supper time, she got up and walked off quickly toward the quarry.

  He was still there. Brenda let out a deep breath of relief. The bitter, rotten smell hung strong in the air. She must have made a noise, for he raised his head and let it drop forward again on his chest. Other than that, he was motionless.

  Charles wouldn’t come to see him. So… Brenda looked around her. Farther along the edge of the quarry, twenty feet or so from where she was standing, were two long boards. She measured their length with her eyes.

  It was thirty feet or more to the bottom of the quarry. The boards were not quite long enough. But the zone of loose, sliding stuff did not extend all the way up; once the man in the excavation was past it, he ought to be able to get up easily enough. Charles had said that what she had found wasn’t anything. Just some junk. Brenda began to move the boards.

  Her hands were sore, but the boards themselves were not heavy. In fifteen minutes or so she had laid a narrow path from the bottom of the quarry to within a few feet of the top. He—the man—had done nothing while she worked, not even watched her. But underneath her shirt Brenda’s narrow body was trembling and wet with sweat. She had had to get closer to him than she had liked while she was putting down the second board.

  She stood back. The man in the quarry did not move. Brenda felt a moment of anxious exasperation. Wasn’t he going to do anything, after all her trouble? “Come on!” she said under her breath and then, more loudly. “Come on!”

  The sun was beginning to decline toward the west. The shadows lengthened. The man below turned his head from side to side, as if the waning light had brought him a keener perception. One blobby gray hand went up. Then he started toward the boards.

  Brenda waited until his uncertain feet were set upon the second of the lengths of wood. She could stand it no longer.

  She whirled about and ran as hard as she could toward home. She did not know whether or not he followed her.

  Brenda did not go to the woods next morning. She stayed around the house until her mother sent her out to help her father, who sent her back, saying that he had got to a place in his construction where she could be only in the way. Brenda went to the kitchen and got herself a sandwich and a glass of milk. When she came back with them, her mother, pale and disturbed, was on the terrace outside the house talking to her father. Brenda went to the door and leaned her head against it.

 
; “I don’t see how it could be a tramp,” her mother was saying. “Elizabeth said nothing had been taken. She was quite emphatic. Only the roast chicken. And even it hadn’t been eaten, only torn into pieces.” She hesitated. “She said there were spots of grayish slime all over it.”

  “Elizabeth exaggerates,” Brenda’s father answered. He gave the mortar he was smoothing an impatient pat. “What’s her idea anyway, if it wasn’t a tramp? Who else would break in her kitchen? There are only six families on Moss Island.”

  “I don’t think she has any definite idea. Oh, Rick, I wish you could have heard her talking. She mentioned the dreadful smell over and over. She said she was phoning the other families to warn them. She sounded afraid.”

  “Probably hysterical,” he answered contemptuously. His eye fell on Brenda, standing in the shadow of the door. “Go up to your room, Brenda,” he said sharply. “Stay there. I won’t have you listening behind doors.”

  “Yes, father.”

  Brenda did not resent the order. She was afraid. Would Charles remember her hints of yesterday, connect them with the raid on Mrs. Emsden’s kitchen (the man from the quarry must be hungry—but he hadn’t eaten the chicken), and tell on her? Or would something worse happen, she didn’t know what?

  She moved about her room restlessly. The bed was made, there was nothing for her to do. She could hear the rumble of her parents’ voices indistinctly, a word now and then rising into prominence. For the first time she felt a sharp curiosity about the man who had been in the quarry, about the man himself.

  She got out her diary and opened it. But it wouldn’t do; the volume had no lock, and she knew her mother read it. She never wrote anything important in it.

  She looked at the scribbled pages with dislike. It would be nice to be able to tear them out and crumble them up in the wastebasket. But her mother would notice and ask her why she had destroyed her pretty book. No…