“Perhaps it won’t make all that difference,” she suggested at last. “After all, if we were both dreaming we were her and didn’t know anything about one another then, why shouldn’t we go on without knowing anything about one another?”
“But we do—”
“Not when we’re there. At least, I don’t think we will. If that’s so, it won’t really matter, will it? At least, perhaps it won’t…”
Mrs. Mortridge looked unconsoled. “It’ll m-matter when I wake up and know you’ve b-been sharing—” she mumbled, tearfully.
“Do you think I like the idea of that any more than you do?” Jane said, coldly.
It took her a further twenty minutes to get rid of her visitor. Only then did she feel at liberty to sit down and have a good cry about it all.
The dream did not stop, as Jane had half-feared it might. Neither was it spoiled. Only for a few succeeding mornings was Jane troubled on waking by the thought that Leila Mortridge must be aware of every detail of the night’s experiences—and though there should have been some compensation to be found in the fact that she was equally aware of what had happened to Leila Mortridge, it did not, for some reason, seem to work quite that way.
The experiences of the girl in the dream were in no way lessened for either of them by their knowledge of one another. They established that over the telephone the following morning, with a thankfulness which was almost amiability. With that settled, the besetting fear lost something of its edge, and antagonism began to dwindle. Indeed, so thoroughly did it decline that the end of a month saw it replaced by a certain air of sorority, expressed largely in telephone calls that were almost schoolgirlish in manner if not in content.
For after all, Jane said to herself, if a secret had to be shared, why not make the best of the sharing?
It was on an evening some three months after their first meeting that Leila Mortridge telephoned with an unusual, almost panicky note in her voice:
“My dear,” she demanded, “have you seen this evening’s Gazette?”
Jane said that she had just glanced at it.
“If you have it there, look at page four. It’s in ‘Theater Chat.’ The thing in the second column, headed ‘Dual Role’—”
Jane laid down the receiver. She found the newspaper and the paragraph:
DUAL ROLE
The production due to open shortly at the Countess Theater is described as a romantic play with music. In it, Miss Rosalie Marbank will have the unique distinction of being both the leading lady and the authoress. This work, which is her first venture into authorship, is, she explains, neither a musical comedy nor a miniature opera, but a play with music that has been specially composed by Alan Cleat. It is the rustic love story of a girl lacemaker…
Jane read on to the end of the paragraph and sat quite still, clutching the paper. A tinny chattering from the neglected telephone recalled her. She picked it up.
“You’ve read it?” Leila Mortridge’s voice inquired.
“Yes,” said Jane, slowly. “Yes… I—you don’t happen to know her, do you?”
“I don’t remember ever hearing of her. But it looks—well, I mean, what else can it be?”
“It must be.” Jane thought for a moment. Then: “All right. We’ll find out. I’ll push our critic into wangling us a couple of seats for the first night. Will you be free?”
“I’m certainly going to be.”
The dream went on. That night there was some kind of fair in the village. Her little stall looked lovely. Her lace was as delicate as if large snowflake patterns had been spun from the finest spider-thread. It was true that nobody was buying, but that did not seem to matter.
When he came, he found her sitting on the ground beside the stall, telling stories to two adorable, wide-eyed children. Later on, they closed up the stall. She hung her hat over her arm by its ribbons, and they danced.
When the moon came up, they drifted away from the crowd. On a little rise they turned and looked back at the bonfire and the flares and the people still dancing—then they went away along a path through the woods, and forgot all about everything and everybody but each other.
One of the reasons why Jane was able to get her tickets with no great difficulty was the clash of the opening night of Idyl with that of a better publicized and more ambitious production. As a result, few of the regular first-night ornaments were to be seen, and the critics were second-flight. Nevertheless, the house was full.
She and Leila Mortridge found their seats a few minutes before the lights were lowered. The orchestra began an overture of some light, pretty music, but she could pay little attention to it for her empty, sick feeling of excitement.
She put out an unsteady hand. Leila’s grasped it, and she could feel that it, too, was trembling. She found herself wishing very much that she had not come, and guessed that Leila was feeling the same. But they had had to come: it would have been still worse not to.
The orchestra weaved its way from one simple, happy tune to another, and finished. There were five seconds of expectancy, and then the curtain rose.
A sound that was half-sigh and half-gasp rustled through the theater and shrank into a velvet silence.
A girl lay on a green bank set with starlike flowers. She wore a simple dress of white, patterned with small flowers and amorets. Her bare feet dabbled in the edge of a pool.
Somewhere in the audience a woman gave a giggling sob, and was hushed.
The girl on the bank stirred in lazy bliss. She raised her head and looked beyond the bank. She smiled, and then lowered her head, lying as if asleep, with a tress of hair across her cheek.
There was no sound from the audience. It seemed not to breathe. A clarinet in the orchestra began a plaintive little theme. Every eye in the house left the girl, and dwelt upon the other side of the stage.
A man in a green shirt and russet trousers came out of the bushes. He was carrying a bunch of flowers and treading softly.
At the sight of him a sigh, as of huge, composite relief, breathed through the house. Jane’s hand relaxed its unconscious pressure upon Leila’s.
He was not the man.
He approached the girl on the bank, bent over, looking down on her for a moment, then gently laid the flowers on her breast. He sat down beside her, leaning over on one elbow to gaze into her face…
It was at that moment that something impelled Jane to take her attention from the stage. Her head turned slowly, as if at a half-heard whisper… Her eyes rose.
She gasped. Her heart gave a jump that was physically painful. She clutched Leila’s arm.
“Look!” she whispered. “In that box up there!”
There could not be a moment’s doubt. She knew the face better than she knew her own: every curl of his hair, every plane of his features, every lash around the brown eyes. She knew the tender smile with which he was leaning forward to watch the stage—knew it so well that she ached. She knew—everything about him.
Then, suddenly, she was aware that the eyes of almost every woman in the audience had left the stage and were turned the same way as her own.
The hungry expressions on the rows of faces made her shiver and hold more tightly to Leila’s arm.
For some minutes the man continued to watch, appearing oblivious of anything but the lighted scene. Then something—perhaps the intense stillness of the audience—caused him to turn his head.
Before the hundreds of upturned eyes, his smile faded into concern.
Abruptly the silence was broken by hysterics, in a dozen different parts of the house at once.
He stood up uncertainly, his expression of concern becoming tinged with alarm. Then he turned toward the back of the box. What happened there was invisible from the floor, but in a moment he came into view again, backing away from the door toward the rail of the box. Beyond him the heads of several women came into sight. The look on their faces caused Jane to shudder again.
The man turned, and she could see that his expression
was now definitely one of fear. He was cornered, and the women came on toward him like passionate furies.
With a merely momentary hesitation, he swung one leg over the rail of the box, and clambered outside. Quite evidently he intended to escape by climbing to the neighboring box—with a foot on one of the light brackets, he reached for its edge. Simultaneously, two of the women in the box he was leaving clutched at his other arm—and broke his hold upon the rail.
For a fearful prolonged moment he teetered there, arms waving to regain his balance. Then he fell, arching backward, and crashed head-first into the aisle below.
Jane clutched Leila to her, and bit her lip to keep from screaming. She need not have made the effort: practically everyone else screamed.
Back in her own room, Jane sat looking at the telephone for a long time before she could bring herself to use it. At last she lifted the receiver, and got through to the office. She gave a desk number.
Then: “Oh, Don. It’s about that man at the Countess Theater tonight. Do you know anything?” Her voice was a flat, dead sound.
“Sure. Just doing the obit now,” Don said cheerfully. “What do you want to know?”
“Just—oh, just who he was—and things.”
“Fellow called Desomond Haley. Age thirty-five. Quite a show of letters after his name, medical mostly. Practiced as a psychiatrist. Seems to have written quite a flock of things. Best known is a standard work: Crowd Psychology and the Communication of Hysteria. Latest listed publication is a paper which appears to be generally considered pretty high-flown bunk, called The Inducement of Collective Hallucination. He lived at—hello, hello? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Jane told him, leveling her voice with an effort.
“Thought you sounded—say, you didn’t know him or anything, did you?”
“No,” said Jane, as steadily as she could. “No, I didn’t know him.”
Very precisely she returned the telephone to its rest. Very carefully she walked into the next room. Very deliberately and sadly she dropped on her bed, and let the tears flow as they would.
And who shall say how many tears flowed upon how many pillows for the dream that did not come that night nor ever again?
A favorite sport—indoors or out—among enthusiasts of imaginative literature is the never ending debate on the precise distinction between fantasy and science fiction. To the extent that definition is possible, it seems to me to depend much more on treatment than on subject matter.
In the case of this completely charming story by an author whose talents are not ordinarily associated with the genre at all, no previous classifications will do the job.
The Laocoön Complex by J. C. Furnas
It was on January 26, 1937, that John Howard Simms first found a snake in his bath.
Half-lying, half-sitting in the tub, he was considering whether he would turn off the warm water when it reached his armpits or wait till it was up to his neck. As he balanced the exertion of lifting his feet to the faucet against his pleasure in the creeping warmth of the rising water, something wriggled beneath his right hip—wriggled convulsively and indignantly like a fish on the end of a line. Simms reared himself clear and snatched behind him. His clawing fingers closed on something tubular and vigorous; he leaped from the tub and found himself dripping and trembling and gripping a writhing green snake in his right hand. It never occurred to him to be incredulous about it. The snake was as solid and corporeal as the hand that held it.
Moving with gasping speed, he hurled the snake back into the tub and stood glaring at it, unconsciously wringing and wiping his hand. His frantic haste had spattered water over the whole room. Stunned or dead, the snake floated passively on the surface of the water. Its weary length peacefully undulated on the small waves and tidal sloshing in the tub. Simms felt no desire to probe into the matter of where it had come from. He merely stood and stared, while his trembling slowly left him; and, although he knew there was no one else in the apartment, something moved him to close the bathroom door with a bang.
Presently it became evident that the snake was still alive. Its undulations began to run counter to those of the water until it was swimming lazily, even lifting its head an inch or so above the surface. Simms was relieved to see that it had survived rough treatment.
Yet he did want to get rid of it. He could use the fire tongs; but the snake was a good four feet long and might coil up to touch his hands; very possibly it was poisonous; and he could not endure the notion of again coming into contact with that writhing vigor. Perhaps he could wash it down the drain, as if it were so much dirt. Gingerly he opened the outlet and was relieved again when the water-level began visibly to sink.
Seemingly unconscious of any change, the snake floated serenely until its belly was aground. Then, moving its head cautiously from side to side, it crawled through the soapy scum to the outlet. Too late Simms realized that its flat head and plump middle were much too large to go through the holes in the metal cap over the drain. But the snake, investigating the situation with a grave air of businesslike concern, astounded him by sticking its head into the central hole—which was certainly much too small—and crawling deliberately through, inch by inch. When about six inches of tail was left, it seemed to encounter difficulties farther down. Having resisted an impulse to drag it out again, Simms shortly had the satisfaction of seeing the tail wriggle in triumph and disappear.
He ran to his kitchenette and boiled several panfuls of water which he poured down the drain with a vague faith in boiling water for getting rid of any sort of hostile pest from bacteria up. Then he rubbed himself down and dressed and went out for his breakfast, concerned because he was going to be half an hour late at the office.
He was not on sociable enough terms with any of his associates at the office to tell them about his strange morning. He was tempted to confide in the stenographer who took his dictation, but reflected in time that such a story going the rounds might gain him a reputation for eccentricity. The obscure pride which he sometimes felt in being the wheel horse of the correspondence department had often served him as counterweight in just this fashion. After work and his solitary dinner, however, he found himself unwilling to spend his customary quiet evening with the newspaper. Instead he went to a movie; moreover, he neglected to wash or brush his teeth before going to bed because he did not care to enter the bathroom.
But in the morning he had to shave and he told himself, while lathering his face, that it was childish—and unhygienic—to forswear bathing because of a strange accident. It was a bright morning; a streak of sunshine across the tub cheerfully illuminated the running water. No sign of a snake—nothing out of the way except a stray scrap of paper which he carefully removed before getting in. As he lay back gratefully in the warm water, he realized that he was completely relaxed for the first time in twenty-four hours. Almost in that instant he felt the same electric wriggling under his hip.
This time he leaped from the water without investigating, scarcely frightened at all but feeling abused because he could not bathe in peace. It was outrageous that four feet of anomalous reptile should again be floating in his bath with its head daintily raised above the water. In a passion of pettish anger, he opened the drain and witnessed the same scene—the subsiding water, the snake’s good-natured acceptance of the situation, and the horrid unreasonableness of its disappearing into a hole much too small for its girth.
A crafty longing for revenge came over him. With complete disregard for office hours, he filled the tub again, got in, lay back and got out in still hotter anger at the now familiar sign that the visitor had returned. He had carefully watched the outlet and was certain that it had not crawled back; yet, to all appearances, it was the same snake. He got the fire tongs and seized its head with the purpose of holding it under water until it drowned. But its convulsive thrashings under such treatment made him ill; there was unendurable terror in the drops of water which showered on his face and shoulders as he leaned over to
the work. He might have persevered, however, if it had not occurred to him that perhaps snakes could not be drowned. It would be better to kill it instantaneously.
He had long owned a revolver, purchased as a spiritual precaution against robbery. As he took it from its place in the bureau drawer under his socks, he wondered if the superannuated cartridges would fire. They still looked grim and deadly; he took careful aim with the edge of the tub for rest and shot the snake’s head off cleanly. The noise of the report in the narrow bathroom deafened him; yet he was even more sharply aware of the snake’s convulsive thrashings.
Such a blast should have alarmed everyone in the house. But there were no poundings on the door, no footsteps on the stairs. He waited for only a few minutes before going back to the tub and observing with satisfaction that the snake, its head mangled and hanging, was floating on the water, quite dead.
His mind was made up. With the aid of the tongs, he coiled the snake neatly into a hatbox, dressed, and went out with the box under his arm. This matter was going to be looked into. Where to go and what to do puzzled him until he remembered that doctors know everything.
At the hospital they wrote a great deal of pointless information about him on a form and let him get as far as the word “snakes” before calling two orderlies. Simms was annoyed to see that “Alcoholics” was written on the door of the office to which they took him with elaborate precautions.
The doctor, looking inquisitively at the hatbox, also let him speak a good while without interruption. When Simms reached the second appearance of the snake, however, he raised his hand.
“How many drinks do you usually have a day?” he asked, with a weary suggestion of routine in his voice.
“I don’t drink at all,” Simms answered shortly, outraged by this confirmation of the sign on the door.
“Now come,” said the doctor, “I can’t waste my time on you if you won’t be frank.”
“I don’t just see snakes,” said Simms, reflecting that, after all, the doctor was well justified in being skeptical, “I feel ’em—and kill ’em.”
Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time Page 7