2
You didn’t think he was married? Well, of course Jim was married—they’d tied the knot at twenty-four, almost got divorced at twenty-seven, but managed for a couple of more years because their jobs put them at opposite shifts so that every weekend was a honeymoon. Her name was Alice, and she worked at the sandwich shop on Bank Street. When she got off work at five, she went first to the library, since she was an avid reader, and then to the video shop. Her evenings, while Jim worked late, were mainly spent with the cat and a good book and a mediocre movie nine times out of ten. She’d slip into bed around midnight, fall asleep with a glass of wine, and then feel him next to her just before she got fully awake at seven in the morning. She’d cuddle with him, unbeknownst to Jim, and then get up to make a pot of coffee and begin the day again.
The movie that night was to be an old musical, and the novel, a light romance to take her mind off her worries. She slipped into the tub at about seven-fifteen, and while she dried herself off, the bathroom door opened. At first Alice was frightened, but she saw quickly it was her husband.
“Jim? What are you doing home?”
“Called in sick,” he said. “I’ve been napping since six.”
“Migraine? Poor baby.”
“It’s not that.” But he nodded anyway.
“Come here,” Alice said, reaching her hand out. Jim approached her, his head down. She touched the back of his neck, squeezing lightly. “You’re tense.”
“Baby, I think I’m going nuts,” he said.
“You’ve been nuts a long time.”
“I mean it,” he said, and his tone was so serious it almost shocked her.
Later, by the fire, she held him and told him it would be all right, and he wept.
Then he told her.
At first she had a hard time not laughing.
But when he told her the woman’s name, she cackled.
He looked hurt.
“Oh, honey, that’s a name from a book. Catherine Earnshaw. It’s from Wuthering Heights. You must have seen the movie.”
He shook his head. “Was she in a hospital?”
Alice grinned. Her grin was not as warm as Nora’s, but it was familiar. “No, no. It must be some kind of dream brought on by those headaches. Let’s get you into the doctor’s for a checkup.”
“A head exam?”
“So you’re an invalid woman in a British hospital with silver buildings and your name is Catherine Earnshaw. What an imagination,” Alice said, kissing his forehead. “My big baby. It’s your job. It’s getting to you. I told you, you needed to finish your degree and maybe get into computers or something.”
Jim glanced at the fire as the flames curled and flickered. He closed his eyes, his head beginning to pound, but he was going to fight it off, the pain, the throbbing, the near blindness that the headaches brought with them when at their worst.
When he opened his eyes, he was sitting in a large white room with no windows. In an uncomfortably hard chair. In a circle, with others. Some men, a few women—nine in all. The nurses stood toward the back, sitting on chairs, crossing and uncrossing their legs, looking at their watches now and then, seeming to reach into their breast pockets for cigarettes or mints or something they needed desperately but were unwilling to give themselves.
A man sitting across from Jim chattered away, and gradually Jim began to understand what he was saying.
“It’s not as if we all aren’t going through the same thing. What did they call it? Adjustment?”
A woman laughed. “Mine told me to get used to it.”
Someone else chuckled at this. “I was told it was a period of containment.”
“Well, it’s been working for me to some small extent,” the man continued, his voice slight and nervous as if he were afraid of being overheard or of making a mistake in what he said. “At least in the mornings. The mornings are good. It’s only about now.”
“Yes,” another man said, just to the left of Jim. “At about three every day. Sometimes as late as four. These flashes.”
“Flashes of insight,” a woman said.
“Hot flashes,” another woman said, and they all had a good laugh. “Not that you can’t have those, Norman.”
Norman, the man who had originally been talking, blushed. He was handsome, mid-forties, and reminded Jim a bit of his father. Actually, the more he spoke, the more Jim was becoming convinced that Norman was related to him in some way. The thin tall frame, the thick black hair, the nose a bit beaky and the chin a bit strong and the teeth a bit much.
“Well,” Norman said, “since we’re all in this together, and since they,” and he nodded backward, to the row of nurses behind him, “seem to want us to get it all out in these groups, I think we should tell everything we know.”
“Not everything,” another man said. “I couldn’t. It’d be too much.”
“All right, then,” Norman said. “Whatever we feel comfortable with.”
“You’ll have to begin, then, Norman. Mine is rather embarrassing,” the laughing woman said. “It involves me and another man, and I can’t tell you what we seem to do all day long.”
More laughter.
“Mine isn’t that…invigorating.” Norman smiled. “I’m just a little boy of ten, perhaps eleven. I live in a small village in Morocco.”
“Sounds quaint,” the woman said. “Unless you’re employed in some house of thieves.”
Norman lost his smile. “Nothing like that. I help bring water to the house, feed some animals, and run errands. I’m constantly hungry, and I can’t seem to talk with others there, even though I understand them.”
“Oh!” the woman gasped. “So interesting compared to mine. I’m the wife to a man who hallucinates.”
Listening to all this, Jim almost laughed; something in him told him to laugh a bit. He glanced down at his hands and saw the wedding ring on the left hand. He drew it carefully off his finger as the woman told her story.
He looked inside the ring. “Cathy and Cliff Forever.”
“Yes, and while he’s at work in his dull job, I go have mad affairs up and down Main Street,” the woman continued, “only … it’s not called Main Street. I find this entertaining, if disconcerting. My husband really is a fool. He surprised me a bit today, however.”
Jim reached up and felt his neck. It was slender. He drew his fingers across his throat and up around his chin—a small slightly round chin—up to his fullish lips, his small nose, around his eyelashes, which seemed long and feathery.
“Dear,” someone whispered behind him, “you’ll smudge your makeup.”
He recognized the voice; it was Nora.
He put his hands down.
“You should listen to the stories,” Nora whispered. “It might help your condition.”
Jim nodded, glancing over to the woman who was just finishing up her tale.
“He hasn’t a clue,” she said. “He lies constantly himself. It’s easy to fool a liar.” She looked over at Jim. “Mrs. Earnshaw, you haven’t told yours, have you?”
The woman seemed to look at Jim with a special knowledge. He’d nearly forgotten he was Mrs. Earnshaw to all of them. He began to feel his skin crawl a bit. A coldness seeped into his voice as he spoke.
“There’s not much to tell, really. To be honest, I think I’m more there than here.” Laughter across the room. “This feels less me than the other. I know so much about him.”
“Him?” The woman laughed. “Oh, Lord, you got to change sex. Do you play with it much?”
“Juliet!” Norman exclaimed. “What a filthy mind you have.”
Jim felt slightly offended, particularly for Mrs. Earnshaw, whom he imagined to be a very circumspect and polite woman of fifty-two.
“Really,” he said. He reached down, smoothing the lines of the bathrobe. “Even now, sitting among you, I feel more him than me.
“Tell us about him,” Norman said.
“Yes,” another chimed in.
“Perh
aps I will.” Jim paused a moment, wondering where to begin. “He’s a nice young man in his late twenties who works for the rails in a little New England town. He is happily married, drives some kind of Japanese car, an older model, and likes rock and roll music from the 1950s. He has terrible headaches …”
After a moment, Jim continued. “Actually, I’m more convinced that I’m him than I’m sure that I am, well, me.”
Norman’s eyes lit up as he nodded. “That’s how it’s supposed to be, isn’t it? They said you get a gleam at first.”
“A glimmer,” the woman named Juliet said. The smile on her face grew impossibly wide. “They called it a glimmer. It feels like … like …”
“A warm rain,” another said.
“Yes, and then,” Norman nodded as if feeling a religious transformation, “the warmth spreads over you.”
“Like you’ve been rewired,” another said.
The woman next to him said, “Well, Mrs. Earnshaw’s certainly been rewired if she’s a man now.”
“He’s not just a man,” Jim said, and for the first time noticed that he spoke with Mrs. Earnshaw’s voice. “He’s a special young man. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s very special.”
Behind him, Nora touched his shoulder. She whispered, “I knew you’d be the first, Mrs. Earnshaw.”
Jim leaned his head back slightly. “The first to what, dear?”
“The first to cross the bridge,” the nurse said.
3
When Jim next recollected anything, he was in bed with his wife, in their small apartment on Hop Street, the peppermint smell of the nearby toothpaste factory assaulting his senses.
Alice snored lightly, and as Jim glanced around in the scrim darkness, moonlight and the summer steam pouring in through the open window, he saw evidence of sexual abandon—the packet of condoms, open, on the dressing table, the clothes strewn about the floor in a trail, the half-empty glasses of red wine, one spilled on the carpet. Had they been animals? He wished he could remember. Because of their schedules, they didn’t make love all that often, and now he had been in some kind of dream support group in a British hospital rather than in his Alice.
Then a disturbing thought occurred to him: was someone else occupying his own body while he occupied Mrs. Earnshaw’s? Did Mrs. Earnshaw herself enter his skin and make love to Alice and drink his wine?
He sat up most of the night, just watching Alice as she slept.
Sweet Alice, lost in some dream world. She stirred, her fingers curled, once, her hand went to her throat, once, she seemed to weep but it was like a puppy sound—a puppy at the door to a room that she wanted to be set free from.
She awoke in the early morning, her eyes opening wide. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just watching you.”
“Why?” She wiped her face with her hands as if washing away a mask of sleep. “You scared me for a second.”
“What was it like?”
“What?”
“What we did last night.”
“Weren’t you there?” She grinned, giggling.
“I’m not sure.”
“Oh stop it. It’s too early for jokes.” She looked across the bed to the clock. “It’s only five-thirty. I can sleep some more. That is,” she arched an eyebrow, “if you’d quit staring.”
She turned over, facing the window. The sunlight had crept up.
“Can you close the curtains?” she said. “I need some dark.”
4
Jim wandered downtown, walked along the river, along the railroad tracks, alongside the boat slips and the chemical factory—miles of walking at dawn, when the town seemed to wake like a baby, from a gasp to a full cry. When the sun was fully up, he got a cup of coffee from the doughnut shop and walked out to the pier, watching the ferry as it crossed to Newburyport.
The 7:15 blew its whistle, coming into the station, and he turned to watch it—remembering the train crash of a few weeks earlier, and the first time he remembered being in the silver British hospital as Mrs. Earnshaw.
Then it came to him. That had not been the first time. That had been the first time he’d remembered it so vividly. Closing his eyes, he recalled an incident when he’d been four or five, and he’d been in a hospital—was it the same one? Only, it was not in England. It had been in Massachusetts, when he’d been taken to visit Grammy Evans, her drinking out of control—the white and green rooms, the silver flask she hid even there to take a nip now and then when the nurses weren’t looking.
“Hold this,” she’d said, passing him the silver flask. “Don’t let them see it.”
So he’d hidden it in his shorts, feeling the cold metal against his thighs. Then he’d wandered the halls of the hospital while the grown-ups talked and did not notice him missing. He began playing “Spy” and decided that the doctors were Secret Agents. When he came across one, he’d run up some stairs and down some others, and through double doors and hallways with words written in bright red and yellow along them. And then he’d come to a room where four men in green masks stood about a table.
On the table, a naked old woman who was probably dead.
Jim had kept himself hidden away, and he watched as the four doctors injected something terrible into the old woman so that she sat up screaming.
It had made Jim scream, too, and one of the four men turned and saw him, and before he could get out the door, someone else grabbed him.
“What in God’s name is this kid doing in here? Where the hell is security?” a man said.
The woman screamed again, and then began coughing.
* * *
Jim, sitting on the pier, sipped his coffee, trying to remember more, but that had been all.
What he knew without a doubt was that the woman on the table had been Mrs. Earnshaw, and that she was dead when he was a little boy and that somehow this was all a hallucination caused by a traumatic incident.
The coffee grew cold as he closed his eyes.
He decided to go into Mrs. Earnshaw in the hospital.
He willed a headache to come on, he tried to simulate the pain that arrived, and the flickering lights.
After an hour, he gave up.
Several days later, while he was sitting on the toilet, he arrived into Mrs. Earnshaw again.
* * *
She sat in the garden with Nora. Nora was reading one of her magazines, and Jim was doing a little needlepoint.
“Nora. Tell me about myself,” he said.
The nurse glanced up.
“All right. I suppose this is good.”
“It seems I’m losing bits of me,” Jim said, nodding as if to the will of the universe. “I’m not sure where I fit in with all this.”
“Well, that was the issue, after all,” Nora said. She set her magazine aside and crossed her leg. “Mind if I light up?”
“Go right ahead, dear.”
Nora drew a cigarette from her breast pocket and struck a match along the edge of the low brick wall she leaned against.
After the first puff, she said, “You’re a psychiatrist from Bristol who worked with NASA and spent a good deal of time in Belize working on the Arc Project.”
“What’s that?”
Nora shrugged. “I wish I knew.” She said this warmly and without a trace of deception. “All I know is my end of this.”
“The Arc Project doesn’t even sound familiar to me.”
“All of you were involved with it. That’s all any of us knows.” Another long drag on the cigarette. “You have the mind link to this man named Jim, as do the others, to various people. And you’re dying.”
“I had no idea,” Jim said, setting his needlepoint on his lap. “Why am I called Catherine Earnshaw? That’s obviously not my real name.”
“You picked it. All of you picked names from books and movies. You liked the name Cathy.”
“Do you know who I am, really?”
Nora closed her eyes for a minute. Smoked. Scratched a plac
e just above her eyebrows. Opened her eyes. “Not really.”
“Doesn’t all of this seem inhuman?”
Nora sighed. “We have to trust that this is saving something important for us.”
“Saving from what?”
Nora dropped her cigarette to the ground, stubbing it out with the toe of her white shoe. “From loss. The information has to be retained, and it’s not like you’re a computer that can just be downloaded.”
“I wish I could remember the information you’re talking about, but really, I can’t. There seem to be great gaps in my memory.”
“It’s just the connection,” Nora said.
She stepped over to the wheelchair and crouched down before it. She placed her hands over Jim’s and looked up into his eyes. “I know that Mrs. Earnshaw is leaving us. I know that you’re this other person, this Jim. I can see you when you come into her.”
Jim trembled, and felt sweat break out along his neck. “Really?”
Nora nodded. She glanced about, slightly nervous. “I have to tell you something, Jim. There’s someone here, an intruder from the Arc Project. I’m not sure who it is, but Mrs. Earnshaw is in danger.”
Jim shivered. “What’s this all about? Am I crazy?”
Nora grinned. Then she grew serious again. “Maybe. I never would’ve thought I’d be involved in this too. None of us really thought it would work. But someone is after you, Jim, not here, in this hospital. But the intruder’s already trying to track you down.”
“I don’t understand. This whole ‘intruder’ thing.”
An old man in a white jacket walked up beside them.
“Dr. Morgan,” Nora said.
“Here, the rain’s coming again,” the doctor said. “Let’s get Mrs. Earnshaw inside for another series of shots, shall we?”
As Nora wheeled Jim across the path toward the door, as the first drops of rain fell, Jim whispered, “She’s already dead, isn’t she? Mrs. Earnshaw?”
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 44