“Now stop this,” Nurse Phillips scolded stolidly. “Lie back and . . .”
“I don’t want to lie back!” she said frenziedly. “I want to know who this terrible person is who keeps frightening me!”
“Now don’t work yourself into a state,” warned Nurse Phillips. “You know how upset your stomach gets.”
Miss Keene began to sob bitterly. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid of him. Why does he keep calling me?”
Nurse Phillips stood by the bed looking down in bovine inertia. “Now, what did Miss Finch tell you?” she said softly.
Miss Keene’s shaking lips could not frame the answer.
“Did she tell you it was the connection?” the nurse soothed. “Did she?”
“But it isn’t! It’s a man, a man!”
Nurse Phillips expelled a patient breath. “If it’s a man,” she said, “then just hang up. You don’t have to talk to him. Just hang up. Is that so hard to do?”
Miss Keene shut tear-bright eyes and forced her lips into a twitching line. In her mind the man’s subdued and listless voice kept echoing. Over and over, the inflection never altering, the question never deferring to her replies—just repeating itself endlessly in doleful apathy. Hello? Hello? Making her shudder to the heart.
“Look,” Nurse Phillips spoke.
She opened her eyes and saw the blurred image of the nurse putting the receiver down on the table.
“There,” Nurse Phillips said, “nobody can call you now. You leave it that way. If you need anything all you have to do is dial. Now isn’t that all right? Isn’t it?”
Miss Keene looked bleakly at her nurse. Then, after a moment, she nodded once. Grudgingly.
—
She lay in the dark bedroom, the sound of the dial tone humming in her ear; keeping her awake. Or am I just telling myself that? she thought. Is it really keeping me awake? Didn’t I sleep that first night with the receiver off the hook? No, it wasn’t the sound, it was something else.
She closed her eyes obdurately. I won’t listen, she told herself, I just won’t listen to it. She drew in trembling breaths of the night. But the darkness would not fill her brain and blot away the sound.
Miss Keene felt around the bed until she found her jacket. She draped it over the receiver, swathing its black smoothness in woolly turns. Then she sank back again, stern breathed and taut. I will sleep, she demanded, I will sleep.
She heard it still.
Her body grew rigid and, abruptly, she unfolded the receiver from its thick wrappings and slammed it down angrily on the cradle. Silence filled the room with a delicious peace. Miss Keene fell back on the pillow with a feeble groan. Now to sleep, she thought.
The telephone rang.
Her breath snuffed off. The ringing seemed to permeate the darkness, surrounding her in a cloud of ear-lancing vibration. She reached out to put the receiver on the table again, then jerked her hand back with a gasp, realizing she would hear the man’s voice again.
Her throat pulsed nervously. What I’ll do, she planned, what I’ll do is take off the receiver very quickly—very quickly—and put it down, then push down on the arm and cut off the line. Yes, that’s what I’ll do!
She tensed herself and spread her hand out cautiously until the ringing phone was under it. Then, breath held, she followed her plan, slashed off the ring, reached quickly for the cradle arm . . .
And stopped, frozen, as the man’s voice reached out through darkness to her ears. “Where are you?” he asked. “I want to talk to you.”
Claws of ice clamped down on Miss Keene’s shuddering chest. She lay petrified, unable to cut off the sound of the man’s dull, expressionless voice, asking, “Where are you? I want to talk to you.”
A sound from Miss Keene’s throat, thin and fluttering.
And the man said, “Where are you? I want to talk to you.”
“No, no,” sobbed Miss Keene.
“Where are you? I want . . .”
She pressed the cradle arm with taut white fingers. She held it down for five minutes before letting it go.
—
“I tell you I won’t have it!”
Miss Keene’s voice was a frayed ribbon of sound. She sat inflexibly on the bed, straining her frightened anger through the mouthpiece vents.
“You say you hang up on this man and he still calls?” Miss Finch inquired.
“I’ve explained all that!” Elva Keene burst out. “I had to leave the receiver off the phone all night so he wouldn’t call. And the buzzing kept me awake. I didn’t get a wink of sleep! Now, I want this line checked, do you hear me? I want you to stop this terrible thing!”
Her eyes were like hard, dark beads. The phone almost slipped from her palsied fingers.
“All right, Miss Elva,” said the operator. “I’ll send a man out today.”
“Thank you, dear, thank you,” Miss Keene said. “Will you call me when . . .”
Her voice stopped abruptly as a clicking sound started on the telephone.
“The line is busy,” she announced.
The clicking stopped and she went on. “To repeat, will you let me know when you find out who this terrible person is?”
“Surely, Miss Elva, surely. And I’ll have a man check your telephone this afternoon. You’re at 127 Mill Lane, aren’t you?”
“That’s right, dear. You will see to it, won’t you?”
“I promise faithfully, Miss Elva. First thing today.”
“Thank you, dear,” Miss Keene said, drawing in relieved breath.
There were no calls from the man all that morning, none that afternoon. Her tightness slowly began to loosen. She played a game of cribbage with Nurse Phillips and even managed a little laughter. It was comforting to know that the telephone company was working on it now. They’d soon catch that awful man and bring back her peace of mind.
But when two o’clock came, then three o’clock—and still no repairman at her house—Miss Keene began worrying again.
“What’s the matter with that girl?” she said pettishly. “She promised me faithfully that a man would come this afternoon.”
“He’ll be here,” Nurse Phillips said. “Be patient.”
—
Four o’clock arrived and no man. Miss Keene would not play cribbage, read her book or listen to her radio. What had begun to loosen was tightening again, increasing minute by minute until five o’clock, when the telephone rang, her hand spurted out rigidly from the flaring sleeve of her bed jacket and clamped down like a claw on the receiver. If the man speaks, raced her mind, if he speaks I’ll scream until my heart stops.
She pulled the receiver to her ear. “Hello?”
“Miss Elva, this is Miss Finch.”
Her eyes closed and breath fluttered through her lips. “Yes?” she said.
“About those calls you say you’ve been receiving.”
“Yes?” In her mind, Miss Finch’s words cutting—“those calls you say you’ve been receiving.”
“We sent a man out to trace them,” continued Miss Finch. “I have his report here.”
Miss Keene caught her breath. “Yes?”
“He couldn’t find anything.”
Elva Keene didn’t speak. Her gray head lay motionless on the pillow, the receiver pressed to her ear.
“He says he traced the—the difficulty to a fallen wire on the edge of town.”
“Fallen—wire?”
“Yes, Miss Elva.” Miss Finch did not sound happy.
“You’re telling me I didn’t hear anything?”
Miss Finch’s voice was firm. “There’s no way anyone could have phoned you from that location,” she said.
“I tell you a man called me!”
Miss Finch was silent and Miss Keene’s fingers tightened convulsively on the receiver.
; “There must be a phone there,” she insisted. “There must be some way that man was able to call me!”
“Miss Elva, there’s no one out there.”
“Out where, where?”
The operator said, “Miss Elva, it’s the cemetery.”
—
In the black silence of her bedroom, a crippled maiden lady lay waiting. Her nurse would not remain for the night; her nurse had patted her and scolded her and ignored her.
She was waiting for a telephone call.
She could have disconnected the phone, but she had not the will. She lay there waiting, waiting, thinking.
Of the silence—of ears that had not heard, seeking to hear again. Of sounds bubbling and muttering—the first stumbling attempts at speech by one who had not spoken—how long? Of—hello? Hello?—first greeting by one long silent. Of—where are you? Of (that which made her lie so rigidly) the clicking and the operator speaking her address. Of—
The telephone ringing.
A pause. Ringing. The rustle of a nightgown in the dark.
The ringing stopped.
Listening.
And the telephone slipping from white fingers, the eyes staring, the thin heartbeats slowly pulsing.
Outside, the cricket-rattling night.
Inside, the words still sounding in her brain—giving terrible meaning to the heavy, choking silence.
“Hello, Miss Elva. I’ll be right over.”
DEUS EX MACHINA
It began when he cut himself with a razor.
Until then, Robert Carter was typical. He was thirty-four, an accountant with a railroad firm. He lived in Brooklyn with his wife, Helen, and their two daughters, Mary, ten, and Ruth. Ruth was five and not tall enough to reach the bathroom sink. A box for her to stand on was kept under the sink. Robert Carter shifted his feet as he leaned in toward the mirror to shave his throat, stumbled on the box and fell. As he did, his arms flailed out for balance, his grip clamping on the straight razor. He grunted as his knee banged on the tile floor. His forehead hit the sink. And his throat was driven against the hair-thin edge of the razor.
He lay sprawled and gasping on the floor. Out in the hall, he heard running feet.
“Daddy?” asked Mary.
He said nothing because he was staring at his reflection, at the wound on his throat. Vision seemed composed of overlays. In one, he saw blood running. In the other—
“Daddy?” Her voice grew urgent.
“I’m all right,” he said. The overlays had parted now. Carter heard his daughter walk back to the bedroom as he watched the reddish-brown oil pulse from his neck and spatter on the floor.
Suddenly, with a convulsive shudder, he pulled a towel off its rack and pressed it to the wound. There was no pain. He drew the towel away, and in the moment before bubbling oil obscured the wound again, he saw red-cased wires as thin as threads.
Robert Carter staggered back, eyes round with shock. Reaction made him jerk away the towel again. Wires still, and metal.
Robert Carter looked around the bathroom dazedly. The details of reality crowded him in—the sink, the mirror-faced cabinet, the wooden bowl of shaving soap, its edge still frothed, the brush dripping snowy lather, the bottle of green lotion. All real.
Tight-faced, he wrapped the wound with jerking motions and pushed to his feet.
The face he saw in the mirror looked the same. He leaned in close, searching for some sign of difference. He prodded at the sponginess of his cheeks, ran a forefinger along the length of his jawbone. He pressed at the softness of this throat caked with drying lather. Nothing was different.
Nothing?
He twisted away from the mirror and stared at the wall through a blur of tears. Tears? He touched the corner of an eye.
It was a drop of oil on his finger.
Reaction hit him violently. He began to shake without control. Downstairs, he could hear Helen moving in the kitchen. In their room, he could hear the girls talking as they dressed. It was like any other morning—all of them preparing for another day. Yet it wasn’t just another day. The night before he’d been a businessman, a father, husband, man. This morning—
“Bob?”
He twitched as Helen called up from the foot of the stairs. His lips moved as though he were about to answer her.
“Almost seven-fifteen,” she said, and he heard her start back for the kitchen. “Hurry up, Mary!” she called before the kitchen door swung shut behind her.
It was then that Robert Carter had his premonition. Abruptly, he was on his knees, mopping at the oil with another towel. He wiped until the floor was spotless. He cleaned off the smeared razor blade. Then he opened the hamper and pushed the towel to the bottom of the clothes pile.
He jumped as they banged against the door.
“Daddy, I have to get in!” they said.
“Wait a second,” he heard himself reply. He looked into the mirror. Lather. He wiped it off. There was still the bluish-dark beard on his face. Or was it wire?
“Daddy, I’m late,” said Mary.
“All right.” His voice was very calm as he drew the neck of his robe over the cut on his throat, flattening the makeshift bandage so it wouldn’t be seen. He drew in a deep breath—could it be called breath?—and opened the door.
“I have to wash first,” said Mary, pushing to the sink. “I have to go to school.”
Ruth pouted. “Well, I have a lot of work to do,” she said.
“That’s enough,” he told them. The words were leftovers from the yesterdays when he was their human father. “Behave,” he said.
“Well, I have to wash first,” Mary said, twisting the HOT faucet.
Carter stood looking at his children.
“What’s that, Daddy?” asked Ruth.
He twitched in surprise. She was looking at the drops of oil on the side of the bathtub. He’d missed them.
“I cut myself,” he said. If he wiped them away fast enough they couldn’t see that they weren’t drops of blood. He mopped at them with a piece of tissue paper and dropped it into the toilet, flushing it away.
“Is it a bad cut?” asked Mary, soaping her cheeks.
“No,” he said. He couldn’t bear to look at them. He walked quickly into the hall.
“Bob, breakfast!”
“All right,” he mumbled.
“Bob?”
“I’ll be right down,” he said.
Helen, Helen . . .
Robert Carter stood in front of the bedroom mirror looking at his body, a host of impenetrables rushing over him. Tonsils out, appendix out, dental work, vaccination, injections, blood tests, x-rays. The entire background against which he had acted out his seemingly mortal drama—a background of blood, tissue, muscles, glands and hormones, arteries, veins—
No answer. He dressed with quick, erratic motions, trying not to think. He took off the towel and placed a large Band-aid against the wound on his throat.
“Bob, come on!” she called.
He finished knotting his tie as he had knotted it thousands of times before. He was dressed now. He looked like a man. He stared at his reflection in the mirror and saw how exactly he looked like a man.
Bracing himself, he turned and went into the hall. He descended the stairs and walked across the dining room. He’d made up his mind. He wasn’t going to tell her.
“There you are,” she said. She looked him over. “Where did you cut yourself?”
“What?”
“The girls said you cut yourself. Where?”
“On my neck. It’s fine now.”
“Well, let me see.”
“It’s all right, Helen.”
She peered at his neck, where the bandage was slightly visible above his shirt collar.
“It’s still bleeding,” she said.
Carter jolted. He reached up to touch his wound. The Band-aid was stained with a spot of oil. He looked back at Helen, startled. A second premonition came. He had to leave, now.
He left the kitchen and got his suit coat from the closet by the front door.
She’d seen blood.
His shoes made a fast, clicking sound on the sidewalk as he fled his house. It was a cold morning, gray and overcast. It was probably going to rain in a while. He shivered. He felt chilly. It was absurd now that he knew what he was; but he felt chilly.
She’d seen blood. Somehow, that terrified him even more than knowing what he was. That it was oil staining the bandage was painfully obvious. Blood didn’t look like that, didn’t smell like that. Yet she’d seen blood. Why?
Hatless, blond hair ruffling slightly in the breeze, Robert Carter walked along the street, trying to think. He was a robot; there was that to begin with. If there ever had been a human Robert Carter, he was now replaced. But why? Why?
He moved down the subway steps, lost in thought. People milled about him. People with explicable lives, people who knew that they were flesh and blood and did not have to think about it.
On the subway platform, he passed a newsstand and saw the headlines in a morning paper: THREE DIE IN HEAD-ON CRASH. There was a photograph—mangled automobiles, inert, partly covered bodies on a dark highway. Streams of blood. Carter thought, with a shudder, of himself lying in the photograph, a stream of oil running from his body.
He stood at the edge of the platform staring at the tracks. Was it possible that his human self had been replaced by a robot? Who would go to such trouble? And, having gone to it, who would allow it to be so easily discovered? A cut, a nick, a nosebleed even, and the fraud was revealed. Unless that blow on his head had jarred something loose. Maybe if he had cut himself without that blow, he would have seen only blood and tissue.
As he thought, unconsciously he took a penny from his trouser pocket and slipped it into a gum machine. He pulled at the knob and the gum thumped down. He had it half unwrapped before it struck him. Chew gum now? He grimaced, visualizing a turn of gears in his head, levers attached to curved bars attached to artificial teeth; all moving in response to a synaptic impulse.
The Best of Richard Matheson Page 29