UNEARTHLY

by John Farris

  The young man looked curiously from Barry to her brother, aware of disharmony. Dal glanced at him over one shoulder.

  "Care for a drink? By the way, what do we call you?"

  Barry's breath hissed in exasperation through her teeth. The young man looked slightly troubled.

  "I don't have a name."

  Dal snapped his fingers. "That's right, I forgot. Little memory problem. Suppose we just call you Mr. X.

  "Mr. X." the young man repeated agreeably.

  "Dal, would you stop being such an asshole?"

  "Asshole," the young man said, so quickly and smoothly that Barry had to laugh. Dal went red from the neck up.

  "Better watch your mouth, pal."

  Barry got a grip on Dal's elbow and marched him away to the windows at the rear of the family room. There were two bright spots of color on her cheeks. Dal separated from her and leaned sullenly against a wainscoted wall, with Barry almost on top of him.

  She said as calmly as she could, "I am not going to lose my temper and I won't fight with you, but goddamn it, I'm warning you, Dal, you'd better shape up and make an effort to be nice!"

  "Did you hear what he called me?" Dal said, his mouth twisting stubbornly.

  "Oh, Dal! He repeats everything he hears! That's how he's learning—and he's really amazing. In just a week his vocabulary has gone from almost zero to maybe a few hundred words. He's really very bright and it's not his fault he's this way—his feelings can be hurt, Dal!"

  They both glanced at him; the young man wasn't paying attention to them. He had turned on the console television and settled into a chair to watch "Sesame Street."

  "Like having a five-year-old kid around," Dal muttered. "Listen, do we need this?"

  "Is he going to bother you so much you have to sulk this way? What is your problem, Dal?"

  "Okay. Okay, I'm sorry, I—there's something about him that—I can't explain why, I just don't like the idea of him being here."

  "Dal, you have to admit that I've done a lot more for him than anybody else! The hospital is just no place for him anymore, not to mention the expense. I want to start teaching him to read again. Dr. Edwards thinks it could be a very important step toward getting his memory back. Please try to be a little more understanding."

  Barry kissed his cheek and stole a sip of his drink. She grinned to make him grin. Dal's return smile was somewhat fierce, not happy, as he reappraised the young man. He sighed.

  "Tell you what. While you're improving his mind, I'll work on his love life. I guess there are some things you don't forget. I know a couple of girls who—"

  Barry, only half kidding, gave him a sharp poke in the ribs.

  "Over my dead body," she said.

  Chapter 20

  There was nothing about the farm and the daily routine of the Brennans that didn't interest John Doe. A mouse in the snow, a kite on the wind, the art of splitting kindling, the warmth of a newly laid egg in a henhouse nest, the textures of oil paint and fine brushes—he was fully absorbed from the moment he awoke with the sun until, exhausted, he fell into a rigorous slumber at night. But he no longer needed the amounts of rest he had required in the hospital. Daily he gained in strength and endurance. There was plenty of snow that winter, and Barry introduced him to cross-country skiing. His coordination was excellent. He learned to ice-skate in a day. When Dal was fourteen and wanting to play high school football he and his father had installed a gym in a corner of the barn. The iron weights were rusting but usable. John Doe spent at least an hour a day in the gym, working up a sweat in the frigid air. Dal occasionally took a minute to teach him some of the fine points of the clean-and-jerk and bench press. Dal was wiry but strong, and he could still, although he was out of shape, bench press nearly two hundred pounds. At the conclusion of a week of workouts the young man beat him by fifteen, then twenty pounds. After that Dal stayed away from the gym.

  In his studio Tom took out some dog-eared sketchbooks filled with scenes of villages and the people of Ireland and showed them to John Doe.

  "I was eleven or twelve years old when I did these drawings."

  The young man sat on a stool and leafed through the sketchbooks slowly. There was a fire in an iron stove; outside the window wall blunt daggers of ice blazed in the sun. Meanness the hound dozed with blood in his eye. Tom puttered and dreamed in front of a panel on his easel; nothing definite had taken shape. There was a roofline, the head of a man in profile, the body beneath skeletal, hazy, footless, blending with raw earth. He painted in, he painted out.

  After an hour of this sort of effort, he took a break with pipe and pinball machine, which featured palm trees and red-lipped bathing beauties from the Hollywood of the forties. The young man quietly returned the sketchbooks.

  "How do you do this?"

  "Nothing fancy," Tom replied. "Just a pencil."

  He took a fresh sketchbook and a pencil from his worktable and with a few deft strokes created a likeness of John Doe, which he showed to him.

  The young man was stunned. He sought a mirror, studied his image, stared at the drawing. He looked at Tom in admiration and longing.

  "Teach me to do this."

  "It isn't anything that can be taught."

  "I want to draw," he insisted.

  Tom nodded, handed over the pencil and sketchbook, and, after a few moments' thought, went to a cupboard and rummaged in the shelves.

  "Usually I start beginners with something simpler than portraits," he explained. "Let's see—"

  He took out an antique hand bell and a big wooden spoon, arranged them against a gray background on the worktable, adjusted lights to give depth and shading to the composition. John Doe watched, holding the sketchbook under one arm. He clutched the pencil awkwardly in his left hand. Tom placed him on the stool, changed the angle of the pencil in his fingers, worked patiently with him until he held it lightly and could draw with long fluid strokes. His student was delighted. Tom guided him through the bare outline of the bell, then turned to a clean page.

  "You try. Draw what you see."

  When Barry came to call them for supper the light was gone except for the hot focus of the lamps aimed at the still life on the table. John Doe was hunched over his sketchbook and didn't respond.

  Barry penetrated his aura of concentration and touched his shoulder.

  He swung around with a look she hadn't seen before, that momentarily chilled her. "No!" he shouted, and went immediately back to work, turning his back on her. Hurt and confused, she backed away and retreated from the studio.

  Tom had gone with Meanness to the kitchen. When Barry came in, he glanced at her and raised an eyebrow. "What's wrong?"

  Barry let out her breath. "Oh—nothing. I've seen him preoccupied before, but this is something else. You have a disciple."

  Tom broke bread and smiled. "Could be."

  "But does he have talent?"

  "I'm afraid not."

  "Oh," Barry said, disappointed.

  "I thought it was worth a try—he was so eager, and he might have had formal training somewhere that would still be evident despite his loss of memory. But—I'd say he's pretty hopeless. He draws even worse than you do."

  Barry had to laugh. "He's hopeless, all right." She slumped a little and glanced at the place set for Dal, who had been missing for the better part of two days.

  "Your guess is as good as mine," Tom said, helping himself to stew.

  "Well—he's been working hard and not getting anywhere. He needed a break What's this one's name?"

  "Helga? Heidi?"

  "What's she like?"

  Tom gazed off, drawing a head as he visualized the target. He had a knack for succinct word portraits that complemented his brushwork.

  "Decorative and crisply sweet, like a good Viennese pastry."

  "Bravo," Barry said. She poured herself a glass of Harp beer and drank some of it, ate a little of her salad. Her mind was on John Doe again. "He tries, doesn't he? He tries damned hard to please us.
"

  "Did you have that session with Edwards today?"

  "Yes. He's acting a little miffed because I don't bring John in every other day, but, hell, Dad, he doesn't like the hospital—how can I force him to go? I just think Edwards is jealous—he's always talking about my patient, and how unique he is. All he thinks about is making medical history and having a syndrome named after him."

  Barry began to gnaw a fingernail instead of eating her dinner; Tom tapped her gently on the wrist.

  "The therapist from Cornell was there," Barry told him. "She thought I was doing a terrific job."

  Barry fidgeted. "I hope John gets bored with that sketchbook before he wears himself out. I want to get him off pictures and onto words tonight."

  Barry patiently kept the stew hot for forty-five minutes after she and her father had finished eating. Then she went back to the studio and looked in cautiously.

  He was no longer sitting in front of the still life and had put his sketchbook and pencil down. He was off in one shadowy corner, standing curiously before the fortune-telling machine, which he had uncovered.

  Barry glanced at his drawings and saw at once that a talented six-year-old could do better.

  "Don't you want to eat something?" she asked him.

  "Barry. What's this?"

  "Oh, that thing—it came from an amusement park. Doesn't work anymore."

  "What is it for?"

  Barry joined him and put her fingers lightly on the keyboard. Inside the glass dome Mrs. Prye's head was lifelessly, eternally bowed. There wasn't much point in trying to tell him about the mysteries of Mrs. Prye, but she always attempted to answer his questions fully, whether or not she thought he would understand.

  "It's an electronic fortune-teller. You're supposed to punch in your birth date and what you get back is a recorded fortune—your health, your wealth, stuff like that. There are about fifty stock answers on a cassette inside. Mrs. Prye lights up and her mouth moves and it's—it was kind of a weird effect in a dark room, just a fun thing to do at parties. Until—"

  Barry didn't know why she was going on like this—John Doe was gazing at her with a total lack of comprehension as it was—but she continued, "until one night she stopped giving stock answers and started reading minds—telling people things they thought nobody knew. One of our guests was a vice-president of one of the savings banks in town, and he'd been trying to cover up some serious shortages. You should have seen his face when Mrs. Prye opened up. She knew everything. There wasn't a secret in the room when she finished. Everybody thought I had something to do with it, of course—that I was being malicious—but I'm not a snoop and I don't read minds. I can't explain how it happened. I was as scared of her as everybody else. I guess I still am."

  A shudder made her jump against him. Her heart started to pound. Barry drew the drop cloth over the machine.

  "Come on. I don't like being this close to Mrs. Prye. I wish Dad would get rid of the machine, but he never throws anything out."

  In the kitchen John Doe put away a heaping plate of stew. After she did the dishes, Barry went to the family room and firmly shut off the television he had settled down to watch. They had the house to themselves, Tom had driven to town to shoot pool at the Black Fox tavern and grill, his regular Tuesday night diversion. The young man looked unhappy at having "Mork and Mindy" interrupted, but Barry was seething with excitement. She took him by the hand and sat him down at the game table, took the Scrabble box from a cabinet.

  She also placed a book in front of him—an Agatha Christie mystery. He was fascinated with books and had spent considerable time turning pages, staring at lines of type without comprehension. She had read to him. Now he was going to relearn the process of making words and understand their meanings.

  Barry dumped the alphabet tiles from the Scrabble set on the baize and mixed the letters. Then she extracted the letters that spelled her name and lined them up.

  "This is who I am," she said. "B-A-R-R-Y."

  He looked at the tiles for a few seconds and smiled slightly. He touched each of them and looked up at her.

  Barry scrambled the letters with which she had spelled her name, mixed them in with the others.

  "Now you spell Barry. Just like I did."

  He hesitated, looking at all the letters, then drew the correct tiles out of sequence. He pondered their order for a few moments, and rearranged them. Barry was elated.

  "Great! You really catch on fast. Okay, here's Dal—"

  She repeated the process with the letters of her brother's name. The word was easier; after she had scrambled it, he reproduced D-A-L almost immediately.

  "At this rate I'll have you reading Romeo and Juliet by the end of next week. Now for Dad—"

  They spent an engrossing half hour making words; his touch with the appropriate tiles became quick and sure. His recall—at least within that span of time—was nearly perfect. Barry was almost trembling with a sense of pride and accomplishment while she decided which word to spell next. He had begun to seem a little bored, but she wasn't prepared when he suddenly caught her wrist in his hand.

  "Ned Kramer," he said.

  "Why?" she said, startled.

  "Spell Ned Kramer," he insisted. Barry began to feel the strength of his fingers on her wrist. For no good reason she was a little frightened. The silence, the house empty like that—he'd never been aggressive with her before. She made herself smile, but he had sensed her alarm; he let go and sat back in his chair.

  "Please," he said softly.

  "All right." A chill had cut through Barry, saw-edged; her wrist ached. He didn't know his own strength. She bent to the table, choosing tiles. He was motionless, eyes fixed on the table.

  The name took shape.

  NED KRAMER

  She swept the tiles away suddenly, getting up as she did so. He looked at her, surprised and frustrated.

  "I don't think I want to do this anymore," Barry said woodenly. "You can watch TV if you want to. I'm going up to bed."

  "Barry. What's the matter?"

  "I just don't want to talk anymore. Good night." She gave him a quick peck on the cheek—it had become a ritual and even a necessity—but tonight her eyes were glazed, unseeing.

  He started to follow her from the room, stopped halfway. Barry didn't look back at him as she jogged up the stairs.

  John Doe didn't move for almost three minutes, as if she had taken the impulse of his life with her. Upstairs the cabinet clock in the hall struck the hour. It seemed to release him. He turned back to the game table and picked up two of the tiles, examined them in his steady cupped hand.

  "What did I do?"

  The house creaked in the wind. He heard the click of Meanness's claws on the tiles of the kitchen floor eighty feet away on the other side of the house. The remains of the fire baked redly in layers of ash on the hearth. He took a turn around the family room, uneasy, unsure of himself, then went to the foyer and opened the closet door. With his parka on but unzipped he stepped outside where the black trees showed sides of ice, the rutted drive was deeply frozen, the wind was sharp but nearly silent. Snow was piled against a rock wall like surf overwhelming a breakwater. He looked up at a horned moon and nebulae, the dustbowls of infinity.

  He looked into depthless space and felt a corresponding hollowness, a sense of isolation that gave him pain. He shook and whimpered; his eyes burned but no tears came. He turned and hammered a fist against the door jamb and went unheeded; his pain became torment.

  Still shaking, he let himself into the house again. Meanness barked perfunctorily behind the kitchen door, subsided grumbling. The young man returned to the family room and stood staring down at the sprawl of tiles on the green baize. The room was dark except for the lamp by the table. He moved it closer, adjusting the cone shade, focusing the light more brightly on the grooved letters. He reached for tiles and spelled NED KRAMER.

  "Belongs to him," he said to himself. "His name didn't die."

  He scattered the ti
les, selected a random four, shook them in his cupped hand, laid them one by one on the table.

  Looking at what he had made, he felt a stirring of interest. He tried, unsuccessfully, to sound it out.

  Slowly, with great patience, he resumed playing with the tiles, absorbed once again, arranging, rearranging, pausing at length to pore over the results with desolate, unwavering eyes.

  Chapter 21

  Pray, mistress, wake up! What do you desire?

  Barry sat up with a start, her face in a sweat. The room was dark, the pendulum clock ticked in the hail. She was in a daze of black dreams, disoriented.

  "I never called you!"

  Ay, you did, and in a frenzy. There is a deadly deal wrong. More's the pity, you call but refuse my counsel, spurn my prophecies—you use me extremely ill.

  Barry's head reeled; she felt nauseated and paid little attention to the whining of Mrs. Prye. She threw the covers back.

  O lud! O death! The tale is in the tail of the salamander, snipp'd by the hand of the old dame—

  "Mrs. Prye," Barry said, as she stumbled to the bathroom, "you're making even less sense than usual." In the bathroom she retched bitterly, cramping, growing faint; her skin was cold, prickling, and moist. Mrs. Prye, wherever she was, had the decency to remain silent while Barry was sick in the toilet.

  Afterward she slumped to the floor and sat holding her head, smelling of puke and hating it. Her period was late—that had to be it, she thought dully. But in the back of her mind the nightmare refused to be put to rest. It had been about a game she and Dal played as children. They would rake the autumn leaves into big mounds, a dozen or more of them around the spacious yard. Then each, would take a turn burrowing into one of the mounds to hide. The finder had only three chances to guess the hiding place. But in Barry's dream it was she and her father who played the game. His turn to hide. She felt a suffocating dread as night began to fall and she searched futilely for him, tearing apart one pile after another of the crisp brown-smelling leaves. To find him sprawled and luminous in the last dense pile, a rotting corpse . . .