The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction Sixth Series

by Edited by Anthony Boucher

  Mrs. Mackenzie clucked and then said complacently, “Had sixteen myself before I got beyond it. Nine livin’.”

  The quantitative answer was no answer either; was Mrs. Mackenzie’s moral quotient sixteen, or even nine times greater than Hesione’s? Doubtless Mr. Mackenzie never suggested abortion, but she had heard and read dark stories of infanticide among the most God-fearing mountain folk--

  She stopped her thoughts cold, sickened and ashamed. Mr. Mackenzie, in bleach-spotted, thready blue denims, gave a little nod that was half a bow signifying he was at her service and half a peremptory command to follow him outside. “Might’s well come along for the ride, Mother,” he said to his wife.

  On the back seat of a shivering Model A, a folded blanket had adapted so successfully to the shape of the broken springs that it had long since worked itself into uselessness. The daylight was almost full, revealing the long-weathered, never-painted, sagging, shamed-looking house, the rock-strewn yard, and inadequate bam. Why shouldn’t they want five dollars to take her five miles, Hesione asked herself; they needed it and she didn’t.

  Wilson’s store, after miles of road such as she had believed no longer existed except possibly in the less traveled parts of Central America, was exactly what could have been predicated from the Mackenzie home. Hesione was enjoined to smoke or chew George Washington, to take Carter’s Little Pills, to use Ivory. Evidently Mr. Wilson did not consider business hours immutable; he showed no resentment at being summoned to open his doors at sunrise so she could use his telephone. He and the Mackenzies showed an appreciative and critical interest in Hesione’s call, standing in a close semicircle as though to substitute for the nonexistent booth, politely staying just clear of the swing of her elbow as she deposited coins.

  “California,” commented Mr. Wilson. “Recollect Martha-belle Minims? She went to California, ten, twelve years back. Turned out bad.”

  Miss Mallest was still sleeping normally; if she would call Dr. Pletzel at eleven . . .

  “Even showing them in the schools,” said Mrs. Mackenzie. “Giving innocent children ideas.”

  She resisted the temptation to call Paul; there was no point in disturbing him, he could tell her no more than the hospital had. The self-denial created a feeling of apprehension: suppose they had told him something they kept from her? Holding down her uneasiness, she began struggling with the adamant politeness of operators and supervisors to get through to Lila at a lunchroom and service station on the outskirts of Zanesville.

  No, unfortunately she didn’t have the name of the business or of the proprietor. It was a small place on the highway, west of the city and-

  “I am sorry, I have no way of…”

  But this was vitally important, Hesione insisted; she was trying to get to her daughter who was in serious-

  “I am sorry, I…”

  What about the numbers of all lunchrooms on the highway west of-

  “I am sorry, I have no listing…”

  She understood, but couldn’t the supervisor consult the yellow pages as subscribers were urged to do? She knew the futility of allowing the slightest edge in her voice; but it was hard to be calm and patient. She tried to visualize the girl or woman behind the trained voice, to put the appropriate persuasiveness in her own as she tried another suggestion.

  Forty minutes later she was finally talking to Lila. Her audience offered advice freely on possible routes, disagreeing amiably, but Hesione had the feeling their geography was even shakier than hers or Lila’s. “It’s not but twenty miles to 119,” Mr. Wilson said.

  “County road closer,” grunted Mr. Mackenzie.

  Lila said, “You hold on, Miss Zioney. I’ll find out from the station man.”

  It was almost three hundred miles, which meant nearly a full day’s driving. “Be careful, Lila, “she implored. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, do be careful.”

  “Near as I can make out, being careful don’t count one way or the other. If you going to get yourself lost, it just happens, that’s all. But don’t you worry; nothing’s going to happen to me. They got a hotel round there you can get some sleep?”

  She turned to query them. No, there was nothing like that short of Hazard, but Miz Wilson might let her use the spare room and take dinner with them if she wasn’t too choosy.

  Hesione had tried to sleep (Oh Catherine; Oh Peggy), but Mrs. Wilson’s tiptoed entrances were dramatically responsive to her open eyes; helpfully (“Don’t suppose you’re used to a bed like this or these old-time goose-down comforters. Maybe you’d like some coffee or a snack now? We got some real fancy canned stuff in the store they’re too ignorant around here to buy”), or conversationally (“It must be a real soft life. Being an actress, I mean; sleeping all day and showing yourself all dressed up on the stage only maybe two, three hours a night, speaking just what’s wrote down for you. Always thought I ought to have been one myself; everybody says my figure isn’t bad; When I was a kid I was always in the school play”). And although she was amused at Mr. Wilson blundering in with wide eyes and apologies implying a regular custom of visiting the spare room, his arrivals and exits had not helped her relax.

  In the afternoon she bathed her eyes and tried the telephone again. Dr. Pletzel’s authoritative assurance was chastening, as though she had dared to doubt, hysterically and impiously, that all was well as soon as the doctor had been called. Paul’s calm, friendly voice provided a different kind of relief, as he begged her to take it easy, now that Peggy was all right. She was a very lucky woman, she told herself, to have Paul, so understanding and reliable, so—so unimpetuous and undemanding. Maurice would have been unstrung and frenzied, blaming it all on her. But then Maurice would never have been separated from her by three thousand miles; could never have been persuaded to accept a reasonable, expedient arrangement if it interfered with his appetites or needs.

  She had set a time for Lila’s coming and then added an hour to it, to discount her eagerness. She tried not to stare down the road, straining to see in each sluggish car the familiar lines of her own. And then, when she was sickeningly sure disaster had struck, Lila was there. “Oh darling “ Hesione cried. “Oh darling, darling.” And Lila patted her over and over. “It’s all right, Miss Zioney. It’s all right.” And she had been so thankful to pay the Wilsons and go.

  She drove most of the night in spite of her tiredness, glad to be racing away from all that had happened, racing toward Peggy. They crossed the river at Cairo and Lila took over again while Hesione slept in the back seat, really slept this time, deeply and darkly, dreaming that Maurice kept the Wilsons’ store and refused to let her telephone. She drove all day through cornfields and flat lands, through dusty pastures and rows of slack barbed wire seemingly designed to protect nothing. Then Lila took over again, and night fell, and she was sleepless once more. “I wish there was a moon,” she was saying, when Lila, clutching the wheel as though fighting a blown tire, exclaimed, “Something’s wrong. Something’s real wrong.”

  Hesione knew it, herself, for the car lurched and seemed to drop a foot or two; when the wheels resumed their interrupted traction, what she felt through the springs and shock absorbers was not the smooth concrete on which they had been riding, but the jarring impact of cobblestones, worn round and disparate.

  ~ * ~

  Her first thought was, Why did it have to happen to me again? Once ought to be enough; you’d think you’d build up immunity or something. Like smallpox. Surely she had never heard of another victim repeating. If it were punishment and not just blind chance, wouldn’t you think-Suppose it was neither punishment nor chance, but something else? A warning? A first and second warning? Why? Her mind was scrabbling around in absurdities.

  Maybe you didn’t get the opportunity to return if you fell through a second time?

  Lost forever?

  “You all right? I mean-”

  “I—I’m all right, Lila.”

  Lila cut the motor and turned off the lights. A full moon shone in the sky
where no moon had been. Hesione could see roof tops, and there were murmuring city noises drifting in. Oh, why . . . ?

  “This what happen to you before, Miss Zioney?”

  “I’m pretty sure. Oh Lila, what will we do? What will we do now?” She realized she was whispering, afraid speaking aloud would bring down new misfortunes.

  Lila sighed deeply. “Well, you come out of it once. So they’s ways. I read every day about people getting back.”

  “Maybe they don’t tell us about the others. Oh . . . Aren’t you afraid?”

  “Me? Scared stiff. We get to California, I’m going to sit and just shake for a week. Right now I got no time. We got to figure what to do. Back the car real slow?”

  “I don’t think that helps; I tried walking backward, before. These fractures or holes—whatever it is people are falling through—must move. A man told me something about the world moving and time passing; the hole that was in one place a second ago may be miles away by now. We got in by accident; it’ll be an accident if we get out.”

  “We’ll get out—don’t you doubt it. Meantime, we can’t just set here. Where we, anyhow?”

  Where? Another Shaw play—the unfrocked priest: In hell. Dramatic. Weren’t people always complaining about actors being more stagy off stage than on? “I—About fifty years back or so, I think. I don’t know. These cobblestones. Maybe more. Or in some place where—What’s that?”

  “Just a cat, Miss Zioney. Don’t be so jumpy. On the fence over there.”

  Hesione peered out. They were in a narrow street. No, an alley, probably; it was hard to tell, despite the moonlight, since there was no accustomed frame of reference. Behind the fences were lighted house windows, but the lights had a yellow quality to which she was unused; gas or oil lamps. Her first experience had taken her about fifteen years into the past; this one must be much earlier. Did that mean-

  The cat’s crooning moans turned in a searing second into shrieks of pain.

  “Lila! What happened?”

  A light gradually glowed into full illumination of the large window opposite. A big head, cigar stub clamped between teeth set in a square-cut gray beard peered out. “Got him!”

  A less imposing face peered alongside. “Perfect shot, Hannes. Haul in your prize.”

  Hannes grunted. (Just like Mr. Mackenzie, thought Hesione; I wonder if Mr. Mackenzie would look like him with a beard?) “I’m hauling, Anton. Master God, you think I have the wind of a bassoonist? Or arms like an accordion player? Here it comes now, the dirty beast. Up, my fine mewler; up, my great howler. How do you like your little trip through the air? Why don’t you screech now, lovesick one? Why don’t you yowl, dangling so prettily? Try it in C sharp, why don’t you?”

  Hesione watched pudgy hands methodically pulling in line. At the end of the line was an arrow, and the arrow pierced the still feebly writhing body of the cat. “Master, you’re a superb marksman,” said Anton admiringly.

  Hannes grunted again, without disturbing his cigar. “Hit him in the middle register, ay? Teach him to be a tenor, ha? Fifteen this week. Who says the nobility and gentry are the only huntsmen? And all due to your inventive genius, my friend. Ah, if you could only orchestrate so deftly.”

  “What they saying, Miss Zioney? You understand this funny talk?”

  It was a shock. Naturally (naturally?) she understood. Not so well as the time before, for Anton’s accent and Hannes’ vocabulary threw her off sometimes, but quite well enough. How did it happen Lila couldn’t?

  “They—they’re joking. Sort of.”

  “Joking, huh? Pulling up that miserable cat like a fish; like nasty little kids—only much worse. Kids are only real mean for a short time, but men can work at it. Joking.”

  The window shut with a bang, cutting off the laughter at some new quip. “Lila, Lila—let’s get out of here. Quickly.”

  “You think they any better somewhere else?” She stepped on the starter and Hesione wondered if the men up there heard the anachronistic noise, but neither head turned toward them, nor was the window reopened. “Should I put the lights on?”

  “I wouldn’t.” (One anachronism at a time.) “Just drive very slowly.”

  Even at their crawling pace the car jolted and bumped over the cobbles. Hesione’s dread of discovery was far from the terror she had felt, trapped in the concentration camp— the personal, immediate fear of humiliation, torment, death. Now her panic was only for not reaching Peggy, of perhaps never seeing Peggy again, of not being able to say, My dearest, my baby, it was all my fault, all of it—forgive me! For no one in this musty old city (was her guess right, was this Vienna?) would do them injury, would be more than incredulously curious about two visitors from fifty or seventy-five years in the future, driving an impossible machine through their streets. If she was truly trapped she had nothing to fear for herself; Hapsburg Vienna loved actresses—

  “What way would you say now, Miss Zioney?”

  They had come out of the narrow alley onto a broad boulevard. Hesione looked at the soft-stone or brick house fronts, the soft pulsing light of the gas street lamps, the soft outlines of an odd cab carriage pulled by gently clopping horses. “Go straight,” she decided, “and let’s stick to one direction. See if we can get out into the country.”

  “Don’t see why there might be less of these holes in town.” She kept the car headed straight, still grumbling. “After a while we’ll run out of gas, and then what? Just as well stay put and wait for one of them holes or whatever to catch up with us.”

  “I was only thinking there’d be fewer people to notice us. It would be pretty awkward to be seen and have to explain. They’d think we were crazy.” But she was not really engaged with their possible embarrassment; at the moment she was puzzling over Lila’s incomprehension of the two men’s conversation. Why had she been able to understand them and Lila not? What was there inside her that could communicate so easily with savage cruelty? And before that, with absolute evil? She shook her head.

  “Something wrong, Miss Zioney? I mean, something new wrong?”

  “I don’t believe so, Lila,” she said gently. “Does it seem to you the houses are thinning out?”

  “Do appear like we coming to a park or something. No more street lamps up ahead. Think it’s safe going on like this without our lights?”

  “Oh, safe,” murmured Hesione. “What’s safe?”

  Soon they were in the midst of trees, long avenues of trees that shut out the moonlight. The cobbles gave way to a graveled road easier on the springs. Without asking Hesione again, Lila switched on the headlights. A startled hare, caught in the beams as the road curved, jumped for the bushes.

  “People is the same everywhere, ain’t they?”

  She had wanted to confess her fault to Peggy, to lay her guilt before the girl and ask absolution. Absolution for what? What had she done? She was willing to concede she had been wicked or sinful or whatever the right term was, but specifically in what? How?

  The fact remained that Lila and the men had not spoken the same language, while she had. At least she had understood it. She understood the language of evil, but Lila seemed to understand the nature of the men who perpetrated the evil: people is the same everywhere, ain’t they? “Lila,” she began.

  “Yesm?”

  “Lila, you must be—good.”

  “Well, I had three husbands, counting only regular weddings. And-”

  “Oh, I don’t mean that.” Sex, sex; everyone was mad with it, thought of nothing else day and night. Of all the pursuits engaging the attentions and emotions of human beings, why was this one function set apart as an object of obsession? “I mean really good. Kind and loving. But . . . Oh, I don’t know exactly what I mean.”

  “You tired and worried. Relax, everything going to be all right.”

  “I hope so.”

  The wood or park or whatever it was, came to an end. Instead of gravel road there was a rutted dirt one, and the previous slow pace became even slower. Lil
a said, “Before we run out of gas we going to run out of nourishment. What do you suppose we can do about eating around here?”

  “Do without,” replied Hesione grimly. “We daren’t leave the car or become separated. Just stick to it till were out, back where we came from, or until there’s no hope left.”

  “That’s show business,” said Lila.