A Saucer of Loneliness

by Theodore Sturgeon

  About a month afterward I began to notice the smell. I couldn’t identify it right away; it was too faint; but whatever it was, I didn’t like it. I traced it to the closet, and then to the doll. I took it down and sniffed it. My breath exploded out. It was that same smell a lot of people wish they could forget—what Milton called necrotic flesh. I came within an inch of pitching the filthy thing down the incinerator, but a promise is a promise. I put it down on the table, where it slumped repulsively. One of the legs was broken above the knee. I mean, it seemed to have two knee joints. And it was somehow puffy, sick-looking.

  I had an old bell-jar somewhere, that once had a clock in it. I found it and a piece of inlaid linoleum, and put the doll under the jar at least so I could live with it.

  I worked and saw people—dinner with Milton, once—and the days went by the way they do, and then one night it occurred to me to look at the doll again.

  It was in pretty sorry shape. I’d tried to keep it fairly cool, but it seemed to be melting and running all over. For a moment I worried about what Kelley might say, and then I heartily damned Kelley and put the whole mess down in the cellar.

  And I guess it was altogether two months after Hal’s death that I wondered why I’d assumed Kelley would have to call for the little horror before he did what he had to do. He said he was going to get what got Hal, and he intimated that the doll was that something.

  Well, that doll was being got, but good. I brought it up and put it under the light. It was still a figurine, but it was one unholy mess. “Attaboy, Kelley,” I gloated. “Go get ’em, kid.”

  Milton called me up and asked me to meet him at Rudy’s. He sounded pretty bad. We had the shortest drink yet.

  He was sitting in the back booth chewing on the insides of his cheeks. His lips were gray and he slopped his drink when he lifted it.

  “What in time happened to you?” I gasped.

  He gave me a ghastly smile. “I’m famous,” he said. I heard his glass chatter against his teeth. He said, “I called in so many consultants on Hal Kelley that I’m supposed to be an expert on that—on that … condition.” He forced his glass back to the table with both hands and held it down. He tried to smile and I wished he wouldn’t. He stopped trying and almost whimpered, “I can’t nurse one of ’em like that again, I can’t.”

  “You going to tell what happened?” I asked harshly. That works sometimes.

  “Oh, oh yes. Well they brought in a … another one. At General. They called me in. Just like Hal. I mean exactly like Hal. Only I won’t have to nurse this one, no I won’t, I won’t have to. She died six hours after she arrived.”

  “She?”

  “You know what you’d have to do to someone to make them look like that?” he said shrilly. “You’d have to tie off parts so they mortified. You’d have to use a wood rasp, maybe; a club; filth to rub into the wounds. You’d have to break bones in a vise.”

  “All right, all right, but nobody—”

  “And you’d have to do that for about two months, every day, every night.” He rubbed his eyes. He drove his knuckles in so hard that I caught at his wrists. “I know nobody did it; did I say anyone did it?” he barked. “Nobody did anything to Hal, did they?”

  “Drink up.”

  He didn’t. He whispered, “She just said the same thing over and over every time anyone talked to her. They’d say, ‘What happened?’ or ‘Who did this to you?’ or ‘What’s your name?’ and she’d say. ‘He called me Dolly.’ That’s all she’d say, just ‘He called me Dolly’.”

  I got up. “Bye, Milt.”

  He looked stricken. “Don’t go, will you, you just got—”

  “I got to go,” I said. I didn’t look back. I had to get out and ask myself some questions. Think.

  Who’s guilty of murder, I asked myself, the one who pulls the trigger, or the gun?

  I thought of a poor damn pretty, empty little face with greedy hot brown eyes, and what Kelley said, “I don’t care about her one way or the other.”

  I thought, when she was twisting and breaking and sticking, how did it look to the doll? Bet she never even wondered about that.

  I thought, action: A girl throws a fan at a man. Reaction: The man throws the girl at the fan. Action: A wheel sticks on a shaft. Reaction: Knock the shaft out of the wheel. Situation: We can’t get inside. Resolution: Take the outside off it.

  It’s a way of thinking.

  How do you kill a person? Use a doll.

  How do you kill a doll?

  Who’s guilty, the one who pulls the trigger, or the gun?

  “He called me Dolly.”

  “He called me Dolly.”

  “He called me Dolly.”

  When I got home, the phone was ringing. “Hi,” said Kelley.

  I said, “It’s all gone. The doll’s all gone. Kelley,” I said, “stay away from me.”

  “All right,” said Kelley.

  The Silken-Swift

  THERE’S A VILLAGE BY THE BOGS, and in the village is a Great House. In the Great House lived a squire who had land and treasures and, for a daughter, Rita.

  In the village lived Del, whose voice was a thunder in the inn when he drank there; whose corded, cabled body was golden-skinned, and whose hair flung challenges back to the sun.

  Deep in the Bogs, which were brackish, there was a pool of purest water, shaded by willows and wide-wondering aspen, cupped by banks of a moss most marvelously blue. Here grew mandrake, and there were strange pipings in midsummer. No one ever heard them but a quiet girl whose beauty was so very contained that none of it showed. Her name was Barbara.

  There was a green evening, breathless with growth, when Del took his usual way down the lane beside the manor and saw a white shadow adrift inside the tall iron pickets. He stopped, and the shadow approached, and became Rita. “Slip around to the gate,” she said, “and I’ll open it for you.”

  She wore a gown like a cloud and a silver circlet round her head. Night was caught in her hair, moonlight in her face, and in her great eyes, secrets swam.

  Del said, “I have no business with the squire.”

  “He’s gone,” she said. “I’ve sent the servants away. Come to the gate.”

  “I need no gate.” He leaped and caught the top bar of the fence, and in a continuous fluid motion went high and across and down beside her. She looked at his arms, one, the other; then up at his hair. She pressed her small hands tight together and made a little laugh, and then she was gone through the tailored trees, lightly, swiftly, not looking back. He followed, one step for three of hers, keeping pace with a new pounding in the sides of his neck. They crossed a flowerbed and a wide marble terrace. There was an open door, and when he passed through it he stopped, for she was nowhere in sight. Then the door clicked shut behind him and he whirled. She was there, her back to the panel, laughing up at him in the dimness. He thought she would come to him then, but instead she twisted by, close, her eyes on his. She smelt of violets and sandalwood. He followed her into a great hall, quite dark but full of the subdued lights of polished wood, cloisonné, tooled leather and gold-threaded tapestry. She flung open another door, and they were in a small room with a carpet made of rosy silences, and a candle-lit table. Two places were set, each with five different crystal glasses and old silver as prodigally used as the iron pickets outside. Six teakwood steps rose to a great oval window. “The moon,” she said, “will rise for us there.”

  She motioned him to a chair and crossed to a sideboard, where there was a rack of decanters—ruby wine and white; one with a strange brown bead; pink, and amber. She took down the first and poured. Then she lifted the silver domes from the salvers on the table, and a magic of fragrance filled the air. There were smoking sweets and savories, rare seafood and slivers of fowl, and morsels of strange meat wrapped in flower petals, spitted with foreign fruits and tiny soft seashells. All about were spices, each like a separate voice in the distant murmur of a crowd: saffron and sesame, cumin and marjoram and mace.<
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  And all the while Del watched her in wonder, seeing how the candles left the moonlight in her face, and how completely she trusted her hands, which did such deftness without supervision—so composed she was, for all the silent secret laughter that tugged at her lips, for all the bright dark mysteries that swirled and swam within her.

  They ate, and the oval window yellowed and darkened while the candlelight grew bright. She poured another wine, and another, and with the courses of the meal they were as May to the crocus and as frost to the apple.

  Del knew it was alchemy and he yielded to it without question. That which was purposely over-sweet would be piquantly cut; this induced thirst would, with exquisite timing, be quenched. He knew she was watching him; he knew she was aware of the heat in his cheeks and the tingle at his fingertips. His wonder grew, but he was not afraid.

  In all this time she spoke hardly a word; but at last the feast was over and they rose. She touched a silken rope on the wall, and paneling slid aside. The table rolled silently into some ingenious recess and the panel returned. She waved him to an L-shaped couch in one corner, and as he sat close to her, she turned and took down the lute which hung on the wall behind her. He had his moment of confusion; his arms were ready for her, but not for the instrument as well. Her eyes sparkled, but her composure was unshaken.

  Now she spoke, while her fingers strolled and danced on the lute, and her words marched and wandered in and about the music. She had a thousand voices, so that he wondered which of them was truly hers. Sometimes she sang; sometimes it was a wordless crooning. She seemed at times remote from him, puzzled at the turn the music was taking, and at other times she seemed to hear the pulsing roar in his eardrums, and she played laughing syncopations to it. She sang words which he almost understood:

  Bee to blossom, honey dew,

  Claw to mouse, and rain to tree,

  Moon to midnight’ I to you;

  Sun to starlight, you to me …

  and she sang something wordless:

  Ake ya rundefle, rundefle fye,

  Ore! ya rundefie kown, En yea,

  En yea, ya bunderbee bye

  En sor, en see, en sown.

  which he also almost understood.

  In still another voice she told him the story of a great hairy spider and a little pink girl who found it between the leaves of a half-open book; and at first he was all fright and pity for the girl, but then she went on to tell of what the spider suffered, with his home disrupted by this yawping giant, and so vividly did she tell of it that at the end he was laughing at himself and all but crying for the poor spider.

  So the hours slipped by, and suddenly, between songs, she was in his arms; and in the instant she had twisted up and away from him, leaving him gasping. She said, in still a new voice, sober and low, “No, Del. We must wait for the moon.”

  His thighs ached and he realized that he had half-risen, arms out, hands clutching and feeling the extraordinary fabric of her gown though it was gone from them; and he sank back to the couch with an odd, faint sound that was wrong for the room. He flexed his fingers and, reluctantly, the sensation of white gossamer left them. At last he looked across at her and she laughed and leapt high lightly, and it was as if she stopped in midair to stretch for a moment before she alighted beside him, bent and kissed his mouth, and leapt away.

  The roaring in his ears was greater, and at this it seemed to acquire a tangible weight. His head bowed; he tucked his knuckles into the upper curve of his eye sockets and rested his elbows on his knees. He could hear the sweet sussurrus of Rita’s gown as she moved about the room; he could sense the violets and sandalwood. She was dancing, immersed in the joy of movement and of his nearness. She made her own music, humming, sometimes whispering to the melodies in her mind.

  And at length he became aware that she had stopped; he could hear nothing, though he knew she was still near. Heavily he raised his head. She was in the center of the room, balanced like a huge white moth, her eyes quite dark now with their secrets quiet. She was staring at the window, poised, waiting.

  He followed her gaze. The big oval was black no longer, but dusted over with silver light. Del rose slowly. The dust was a mist, a loom, and then, at one edge, there was a shard of the moon itself creeping and growing.

  Because Del stopped breathing, he could hear her breath; it was rapid and so deep it faintly strummed her versatile vocal cords.

  “Rita …”

  Without answering she ran to the sideboard and filled two small glasses. She gave him one, then, “Wait,” she breathed, “oh, wait!”

  Spellbound, he waited while the white stain crept across the window. He understood suddenly that he must be still until the great oval was completely filled with direct moonlight, and this helped him, because it set a foreseeable limit to his waiting; and it hurt him, because nothing in life, he thought, had ever moved so slowly. He had a moment of rebellion, in which he damned himself for falling in with her complex pacing; but with it he realized that now the darker silver was wasting away, now it was a finger’s breadth, and now a thread, and now, and now—.

  She made a brittle feline cry and sprang up the dark steps to the window. So bright was the light that her body was a jet cameo against it. So delicately wrought was her gown that he could see the epaulettes of silver light the moon gave her. She was so beautiful his eyes stung.

  “Drink,” she whispered. “Drink with me, darling, darling …”

  For an instant he did not understand her at all, and only gradually did he become aware of the little glass he held. He raised it toward her and drank. And of all the twists and titillations of taste he had had this night, this was the most startling; for it had no taste at all, almost no substance, and a temperature almost exactly that of blood. He looked stupidly down at the glass and back up at the girl. He thought that she had turned about and was watching him, though he could not be sure, since her silhouette was the same.

  And then he had his second of unbearable shock, for the light went out.

  The moon was gone, the window, the room, Rita was gone.

  For a stunned instant he stood tautly, stretching his eyes wide. He made a sound that was not a word. He dropped the glass and pressed his palms to his eyes, feeling them blink, feeling the stiff silk of his lashes against them. Then he snatched the hands away, and it was still dark, and more than dark; this was not a blackness. This was like trying to see with an elbow or with a tongue; it was not black, it was Nothingness.

  He fell to his knees.

  Rita laughed.

  An odd, alert part of his mind seized on the laugh and understood it, and horror and fury spread through his whole being; for this was the laugh which had been tugging at her lips all evening, and it was a hard, cruel, self-assured laugh. And at the same time, because of the anger or in spite of it, desire exploded whitely within him. He moved toward the sound, groping, mouthing. There was a quick, faint series of rustling sounds from the steps, and then a light, strong web fell around him. He struck out at it, and recognized it for the unforgettable thing it was—her robe. He caught at it, ripped it, stamped upon it. He heard her bare feet run lightly down and past him, and lunged, and caught nothing. He stood, gasping painfully.

  She laughed again.

  “I’m blind,” he said hoarsely. “Rita, I’m blind!”

  “I know,” she said coolly, close beside him. And again she laughed.

  “What have you done to me?”

  “I’ve watched you be a dirty animal of a man,” she said.

  He grunted and lunged again. His knees struck something—a chair, a cabinet—and he fell heavily. He thought he touched her foot.

  “Here, lover, here!” she taunted.

  He fumbled about for the thing which had tripped him, found it, used it to help him upright again. He peered uselessly about.

  “Here, lover!”

  He leaped, and crashed into the doorjamb: cheekbone, collarbone, hip bone, ankle were one straight blaze of pa
in. He clung to the polished wood.

  After a time he said, in agony, “Why?”

  “No man has ever touched me and none ever will,” she sang. Her breath was on his cheek. He reached and touched nothing, and then he heard her leap from her perch on a statue’s pedestal by the door, where she had stood high and leaned over to speak.

  No pain, no blindness, not even the understanding that it was her witch’s brew working in him could quell the wild desire he felt at her nearness. Nothing could tame the fury that shook him as she laughed. He staggered after her, bellowing.

  She danced around him, laughing. Once she pushed him into a clattering rack of fire irons. Once she caught his elbow from behind and spun him. And once, incredibly, she sprang past him and, in midair, kissed him again on the mouth.

  He descended into Hell, surrounded by the small, sure patter of bare feet and sweet cool laughter. He rushed and crashed, he crouched and bled and whimpered like a hound. His roaring and blundering took an echo, and that must have been the great hall. Then there were walls that seemed more than unyielding; they struck back. And there were panels to lean against, gasping, which became opening doors as he leaned. And always the black nothingness, the writhing temptation of the pat-pat of firm flesh on smooth stones, and the ravening fury.

  It was cooler, and there was no echo. He became aware of the whisper of the wind through trees. The balcony, he thought; and then, right in his ear, so that he felt her warm breath, “Come, lover …” and he sprang. He sprang and missed, and instead of sprawling on the terrace, there was nothing, and nothing, and nothing, and then, when he least expected it, a shower of cruel thumps as he rolled down the marble steps.