by Various
"I don't know what they are. We've gotten a lot of strange calls tonight, is all I know."
"Psychological warfare, maybe," said Mr. Jakeway, nodding and looking into our eyes one at a time. "Could be. You never know what they're inventing in those laboratories. Some kind of gas, maybe, makes you see people up in trees when there aren't any."
The other policeman crashed out of the bushes, looking scratched and out of breath.
"You ought to cut down some of those weeds back there," he told Mr. Jakeway.
IV
I had left the house door open; it spilled a rectangle of light onto the front walk in the still, cricket-trilled air, and I could hear the phone ringing half a block away as I walked back up from Mr. Jakeway's.
I rushed in and answered it.
It was Vicki. "Bob? Hi."
She never calls me "Bob" unless somebody is listening. In the background I could hear music and voices.
"I'm going to be a little late tonight. Something wonderful has happened."
"Where are you? Are you all right?"
"Of course I'm all right. I'm at rehearsal. Honey, you'll never guess what happened."
"Are you coming home? There's some weird things—"
"I'm going to be a little late. Honey, there was a producer at rehearsal tonight. None of us knew it. Stuart introduced us afterward. His name is Ken, and he's doing a show at the Kennedy Center in March. And he signed me up for a part. With Tim Curry."
"That's great, honey, great! But I wish you'd come home, because—"
"Honey? The line's getting staticky. We're going out to celebrate and sign the contract. Can you hear me?"
"I can hear you fine—"
"Hello? Bob? Oh, he's gone," she said disappointedly to someone at her end, and hung up.
Aside from a few distant crackles, the phone was dead.
I got my keys, locked the front door behind me. The gas station at Dale and Piney Branch glared with white neon, self-serve customers dawdling over their hoses. Overfed diners tottered out the door of the Chesapeake Crab House. I pointed the Datsun toward town. Half an hour later I was banging on the locked door of the Souris Studio storefront on 14th Street, cupping my hands on the glass to peer into a dim entrance area with a coatrack, a few shabby chairs, and a display stand for theater programs, but no people. I stood in the smoky, run-down darkness trying to imagine where one would go to celebrate a contract. Then I walked back to the parking garage.
My car was on the third sublevel. I went down urine-smelling concrete steps, crossed the oil-stained, neon-lit ramp. I had the door unlocked when a voice behind me said: "Can you give me a ride?"
The ramp had been deserted a second before. "No," I said, and yanked the door open.
"Please. Someone is following me. Please."
That made me turn and look.
She was small, slim, with fashionably tousled blonde hair, breathtaking dark eyes. She wore black tights, a black leather jacket, little pink ballerina shoes. Her face was wild, lips trembling. She came closer between the cars.
"Please," she said.
The heavy throb of an engine echoed down the ramp, and her pupils dilated crazily. Her breath came in tearing gasps.
Déjà vu. I moved away from the car door with a quick gesture. She scrambled to the floor of the passenger seat and crouched there, head down.
I got in, backed out of my space, and headed up the ramp. At the first turn I had to edge past a black Mercedes limo coming down. I edged close enough to see through the tinted glass of the back seat.
An old man with a bald, wrinkled face sat there. He wore a grey robe with big buttons, wire-rimmed spectacles. He didn't see me; his eyes were straining through the windshield as if looking for something.
My heart pounded. I paid the garage attendant in his cubicle of light with a shaking hand.
We were rattling over potholes on 14th Street before the woman said: "You know him." She was staring up at me.
"I'm going to call the police."
She laughed shortly. "The police," she sneered. She threw herself into the passenger seat. "Take a right here. You can use my phone."
As we drove it began to rain. A few minutes later, turning down 22nd Street, I suddenly had the feeling that I was leaving behind everything familiar to me, my whole life.
A few blocks down 22nd, I pulled over by a brick building with wide front steps between worn stone lions, brass-and-glass entrance doors glittering with chandelier light. The building elevator was elderly but highly polished. The third floor hall was silent, lit discreetly by brass leaves with bulbs behind them, carpeted in a red floral pattern. The woman unlocked a door near the end, locked and bolted it behind us.
"Phone's over there," she said, her hand a pale blur in the dark. She hurried into another room.
Rain pattered on the sills of open windows, and the glare of streetlight showed black and white outlines of magazines, clothes, and dishes scattered over deep chairs and a sofa, low glass-and- metal tables. Shelves held powerful stereo components, books, and vases. Shadowy art prints hung on the walls.
The woman was opening and closing drawers in the other room. She hadn't turned on any lights. I dialed 911 on a telephone shaped like a banana. It was busy.
"You have a phone book?" I called.
"Somewhere." She sounded preoccupied.
A phone book-sized binder lay on a table at the end of the sofa; but when I opened it, I found myself looking at an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of her wearing only a gold necklace, her delicate, muscular body stretched out on a bed. I closed the book with a snap. From where I stood I could see out the window.
The woman's voice said behind me: "Look, I need a ride somewhere. It's a matter of life and death. Can you help me?"
"No," I said. "Not yet."
She came around the sofa. She was wearing a white plastic raincoat over a white dress and white stockings, carrying an overnight bag. I held her so she wouldn't get too near the window. Streetlight glow lit her face silver-grey.
A black Mercedes limousine was parked across the street.
"Oh my God," she whispered. She started to shake.
I got her by both wrists, whispering: "Shh." I was imagining the Angel of Death and his chauffeur listening in the hall outside.
"No!" she screamed in a sudden frenzy. "No!" She tried to wrench her wrists away from me.
I wrapped my left hand around her face, pinioned her arms with my right, and dragged her struggling into the next room. One of her blue rubber boots kicked off and hit the wall. I crushed her down on a big, unmade bed, held a pillow over her head to muffle her screams. After awhile, lack of air made her quiet.
I took the pillow away enough to say in her ear: "Maybe they don't know we're here."
She lay still.
I helped her sit up. Her face was red, swollen, wet, her breath gasping with sobs. I put my finger to my lips and crept back into the living room, listened at the front door. The elevator opened once, but voices and footsteps went away in another direction.
There was no other sound. I tried the telephone. There were only buzzing and crackling noises on it now. I sat down against the wall behind the front door, my ears straining against the patter of rain and the sound of traffic.
After a long time I peered out the window again. Streetlight glittered on wet pavement. The black limo was gone.
The woman was asleep in her coat, one boot on, her face calm and intent like a child's. She woke with a start when I touched her.
"They're gone," I told her. My voice seemed to come from far off somewhere. I had started to shake.
She looked up into my face for a minute. Then she began fumbling with the buttons on her dress, breath quickening.
V
I woke up next to her after midnight, exhausted. Her skin seemed to glow faintly in the dark, as if there was a light inside her.
I lay and watched her. Gradually she woke up too.
When she was awake, I said:
"I don't understand what's happening."
She propped herself up, sitting against the head of the bed, got a cigarette from the night table. Tendrils of smoke curled around her pale hair, pale shoulders.
"You're dead," she said.
I didn't say anything to that.
"Everybody's dead. Everybody at once," she went on. "All together. Whoosh. A wholesale global disaster, Sunday evening about five-thirty. You might have seen a flash or felt a sharp pain. I won't tell you what it was, since it's no longer your business, but almost a billion people died in the first half-hour, and more are coming in all the time.
"Almost nobody noticed. But now you're starting to notice. Now your comfortable consensual reality is starting to break down, to be rebuilt by more powerful forces: desires, obsessions, fears."
I got out of bed. I felt dizzy.
"I have to go," I said. "Home."
"You don't have a home anymore. Just a blackened spot on a tiny piece of dust buzzing around a spark of light in a far corner of the universe. And a dream image that could vanish any second. You might as well stay here." She smiled, letting a wisp of smoke curl out through her lips.
"I can't," I said thickly, hunting for my underwear in the pile of clothes by the bed. "My wife—"
VI
By the time I turned the Datsun onto Thayer Place, it had stopped raining. Untidy maple branches looming over the front walk in the dark dripped on the limp, waterlogged bag of newspapers. I was heading shakily for the front door when there were steps behind me on the sidewalk.
A bent figure was jogging painfully up the hill. I stumbled backward, the adrenaline of fear flashing through me, but it was only Mr. Jakeway, unshaven jowls wagging, sunken eye-sockets filled with shadow.
"Bobby," he rasped. His thin, trembling hands took hold of my shoulders and he leaned on me, breathing hard. "Have they got you too? Or are you awake?" His breath smelled faintly alcoholic.
Before I could answer he went on: "They're lying, Bobby. Nothing's happened. Nobody's dead. Don't believe 'em, boy." He leaned on me harder, put his arm around my shoulder. "They want us to move aside. Just move aside and give up. They're using some kind of gas. Black gas. Thank goodness I found you, Bobby," he said hoarsely. "Everybody else is walking around in a dream."
I stared at the glitter of his eyes in the dark. I felt strange.
"Who?" I finally blurted out. "Who?"
"I don't know who," he whispered hoarsely. `But they're not from here. Aliens, maybe. I seen them walking through the streets, spraying black gas. We've got to do something, Bobby, before they—"
"Somebody told me it was a worldwide disaster—" I stammered miserably.
"That's what they say! That's their story! But it's a lie, Bobby. They want us to
"So what do we—what do we do?"
The question seemed to agitate him. "We have to wake up the others! We have to wake everybody up! Quick! Where's your wife? I'll go after Arland. Come on!"
His panic infected me. I ran up the walk to our front door.
The living room—tidy and familiar, yellowish light from the floor lamp by the couch throwing familiar shadows—turned my panic into cold, jittery sweat.
"Vicki?" I called.
No answer.
Out the window, Mrs. Romer's brightly lit kitchen caught my eye. Something was going on in there.
A man and a woman sat at a table by the kitchen window, talking tensely. I couldn't hear what they were saying. The woman looked vaguely like Mrs. Romer, but young, with an obsolete hairdo. The man was unshaven, jowly, tired-looking.
There was a muffled scream, and the woman dived across the table and buried a paring knife in the tired-looking man's forehead. They tumbled down out of sight, the woman screaming wildly.
My heart pounded. A darkness came over my eyes. I sat down heavily on the couch.
When I started to think again, I was exhausted, drained, too tired even to see clearly: the wall, floor lamp, and coffee table next to me looked fuzzy, translucent, unreal.
Voices, laughter, and footsteps were approaching along the front walk. The front door flew open and a dozen people came in. As they did, the living-room changed. The walls turned from blue to peach and fled outward in a long, curving line; the hardwood floor became plush blond carpet and sagged to shape a huge sunken living-room with grand piano, Chinese screens, round, furry chairs and sofas, dark lacquered cabinets, soft lighting, tropical plants. My body felt peculiarly stiff. I looked down with difficulty. All I could see of myself was a large Chinese vase displayed on a carved stand.
The people who piled through the arched, oak front door looked too grown-up to be carrying on the way they were. The men wore tuxedos with flowers in the lapels, the women glittery outfits that seemed to be half evening gown, half bikini. They were all young and beautiful. They crowded, laughing, chattering, and squealing, up a wide, curved staircase.
I was still too tired to move, so I sat numbly for another few minutes, until two people came back down the stairs. Music and merrymaking sounds came faintly from above.
The two people, a man and a woman, leaned on the grand piano not more than a stone's throw from me. The man was broad-shouldered and tall, with the kind of face Michelangelo used to carve out of marble, hair curling carelessly over his collar. He gazed at the woman as if there was nothing else to see in the world.
She was my wife. A little bigger in some places, a little smaller in others than I remembered her, dark ringlets thicker, the West Virginia jawline trimmed down some, but unmistakably Victoria Wilson. She was wearing a tight, slithery dress of gold sequins that showed off most of one leg and that I had to admit looked great, even though it was embarrassing the hell out of me.
I tried to stand up and make a fuss. I couldn't move or talk.
"You haven't given me your answer, darling," murmured the man, gazing down at her. She was gazing at him too, in a way I didn't like. "You can't leave me hanging like this. Please . . .
"How can I answer? How can I even think right now, Billy? Everything is so wonderful! I feel as if I'm in heaven!" She put her drink on the piano and kicked off her high heels. "Do you think it's a dream? An Oscar nomination, a box-office smash—"
"And all because of you," he said. "You made that film what it is. Without you it would have been nothing."
"Oh, Billy—"
He drew her close in his strong arms, crushing her to him with barely controlled passion, and as their lips touched a shudder went through him.
"Hey!" I managed to yell in outrage.
I thought Vicki glanced at me, but the man didn't seem to hear.
"It's funny," he said when they were done slobbering on each other. He seemed ready to cry. "Here I am, the most powerful man in Hollywood—I really thought I had it made. Any woman in the world would do anything to get in my next picture. But the one I really want—the one I must have—won't have me."
He knelt down in front of her, looking up with imploring eyes. "Please," he whispered. "Please . . .
"Oh, brother!" I groaned.
"Will you shut up?" Vicki screamed at me, stamping her foot. "What are you doing here? I didn't come snooping around your stupid, corny private eye scene with that slut, did I? Get out of here! Leave me alone!"
Her rage hit me like a wave. Everything turned fuzzy and translucent again, Vicki and the Hollywood producer like ghosts with lights glowing inside them. The producer didn't seem to have . noticed Vicki yelling—he stood up and took her in his arms again. And as they kissed, something funny happened: the light inside Vicki seemed to flicker and go dim, while the light inside the producer got stronger, as if he had drawn some of her light into himself.
And there was something else—someone I hadn't noticed before, sitting on a distant love seat, half hidden by a dwarf palm, hands clasped patiently over his long grey robe, wire-rimmed glasses patiently watching the oblivious lovers.
I struggled, trying to shout a warning, but I couldn't move or make a
sound.
Ghostly music played. Vicki and the producer started to dance, close and slow, gradually swaying over near where I sat stiff and dumb. Soon the producer's tuxedoed bottom swayed languidly in front of my face. I lunged forward with all my strength, and bit it desperately hard. He screamed and jumped out of her arms, whirling in astonishment and rubbing himself.
Vicki's face was ugly with rage as she kicked me off my stand to shatter against the wall.
VII
I stood in the trough of a mountain in heavy night rain, showing my thumb to Interstate traffic that made a pale ribbon through murky darkness up the mountain's shoulder. Every few minutes lightning struck the summit, lighting wooded hills and sending out
a crackling boom. I wore an old army surplus poncho, I was seventeen, the rain was warm, and the crowded, lonely highway made me feel somehow alive, vital, like a sailor on an uncharted ocean. When a little white car pulled out of traffic up the shoulder, I ran, lugging my knapsack, and climbed into the front seat next to a girl.
She was slender and young, wearing jeans and a floppy sweater, tousled blonde hair falling to her shoulders, dark eyes that flashed at me, then watched the mirror for an opening in traffic. Her pale hair and skin seemed to glow in the dark.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
It seemed strange that I couldn't remember. To hide my confusion, I pulled the poncho off over my head, getting water on the front seat. I felt the car accelerate.
"Okay," she said softly. "Come and say goodbye."
We climbed the mountain toward the storm, which now sent out a flash and a boom.
High up, the highway was bordered by jutting boulders and pines, the mountaintop bulking black in the gloom. At a sign that said "Authorized Vehicles Only," the girl jerked the steering wheel to the right and we were climbing a rutted track among the boulders, the lights of the highway abruptly left behind. Pine trees swayed and moaned in the rain and wind, dead leaves whirled and scattered before our lights. There was a blinding flash that seemed to obliterate everything, and a splitting bang that shook the mountain.