A Saucer of Loneliness (37 page)

“I do not know,” I said slowly and distinctly, “what the hell you are talking about. And now you
have
to tell me.”

“I suppose so,” he said sadly. He drew a deep breath. “You believe what you write. No,” he said quickly, “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. You grind out all this fantasy and horror stuff and you believe every word of it. More basically, you’d rather believe in the
outré
and the so-called ‘unknowable’ than in what I’d call
real
things. You think I’m talking through my hat.”

“I do,” I said, “but go ahead.”

“If I called you up tomorrow and told you with great joy that they’d isolated a virus for Hal’s condition and a serum was on the way, you’d be just as happy about it as I would be, but way down deep you’d wonder if that was what was really wrong with him, or if the serum is what really cured him. If on the other hand I admitted to you that I’d found two small punctures on Hal’s throat and a wisp of fog slipping out of the room—by God! see what I mean? You have a gleam in your eye already!”

I covered my eyes. “Don’t let me stop you now,” I said coldly. “Since you are not going to admit Dracula’s punctures, what are you going to admit?”

“A year ago Kelley gave his brother a present. An ugly little brute of a Haitian doll. Hal kept it around to make faces at for a while and then gave it to a girl. He had bad trouble with the girl. She hates him—really hates him. As far as anyone knows she still has the doll. Are you happy now?”

“Happy,” I said disgustedly. “But Milt—you’re not just ignoring this doll thing. Why, that could easily be the whole basis of … hey, sit down! Where are you going?”

“I told you I wouldn’t sit across from a damn hobbyist. Enter hobbies, exit reason.” He recoiled. “Wait—
you
sit down now.”

I gathered up a handful of his well-cut lapels. “We’ll both sit down,” I said gently, “or I’ll prove to your heart’s desire that I’ve reached the end of reason.”

“Yessir,” he said good-naturedly, and sat down. I felt like a damn fool. The twinkle left his eyes and he leaned forward. “Perhaps now you’ll listen instead of riding off like that. I suppose you know that in many cases the voodoo doll does work, and you know why?”

“Well, yes. I didn’t think you’d admit it.” I got no response from his stony gaze, and at last realized that a fantasist’s pose of authority on such matters is bound to sit ill with a serious and progressive physician. A lot less positively, I said, “It comes down to a matter of subjective reality, or what some people call faith. If you believe firmly that the mutilation of a doll with which you identify yourself will result in your own mutilation, well, that’s what will happen.”

“That, and a lot of things even a horror story writer could find
out if he researched anywhere else except in his projective imagination. For example, there are Arabs in North Africa today whom you dare not insult in any way really important to them. If they feel injured, they’ll threaten to die, and if you call the bluff they’ll sit down, cover their heads, and damn well
die
. There are psychosomatic phenomena like the stigmata, or wounds of the cross, which appear from time to time on the hands, feet and breasts of exceptionally devout people. I know you know a lot of this,” he added abruptly, apparently reading something in my expression, “but I’m not going to get my knee out of your chest until you’ll admit I’m at least capable of taking a thing like this into consideration and tracking it down.”

“I never saw you before in my life,” I said, and in an important way I meant it.

“Good,” he said, with considerable relief. “Now I’ll tell you what I did. I jumped at this doll episode almost as wildly as you did. It came late in the questioning because apparently it
really didn’t matter
to Hal.”

“Oh, well, but the subconscious—”

“Shaddup!” He stuck a surprisingly sharp forefinger into my collarbone. “I’m telling you; you’re not telling me. I won’t disallow that a deep belief in voodoo might be hidden in Hal’s subconscious, but if it is, it’s where sodium amytal and word association and light and profound hypnosis and a half-dozen other therapies give not a smidgin of evidence. I’ll take that as proof that he carries no such conviction. I guess from the looks of you I’ll have to remind you again that I’ve dug into this thing in more ways for longer and with more tools than you have—and I doubt that it means any less to me than it does to you.”

“You know, I’m just going to shut up,” I said plaintively.

“High time,” he said, and grinned. “No, in every case of voodoo damage or death, there has to be that element of devout belief in the powers of the witch or wizard, and through it a complete sense of identification with the doll. In addition, it helps if the victim knows what sort of damage the doll is sustaining—crushing, or pins sticking into it, or what. And you can take my word for it that no such news has reached Hal.”

“What about the doll? Just to be absolutely sure, shouldn’t we get it back?”

“I thought of that. But there’s no way I know of getting it back without making it look valuable to the woman. And if she thinks it’s valuable to Hal, we’ll
never
see it.”

“Hm. Who is she, and what’s her royal gripe?”

“She’s as nasty a piece of fluff as they come. She got involved with Hal for a little while—nothing serious, certainly not on his part. He was … he’s a big good-natured kid who thinks the only evil people around are the ones who get killed at the end of the movie. Kelley was at sea at the time and he blew in to find this little vampire taking Hal for everything she could, first by sympathy, then by threats. The old badger game. Hal was just bewildered. Kelley got his word that nothing had occurred between them, and then forced Hal to lower the boom. She called his bluff and it went to court. They forced a physical examination on her and she got laughed out of court. She wasn’t the mother of anyone’s unborn child. She never will be. She swore to get even with him. She’s without brains or education or resources, but that doesn’t stop her from being pathological. She sure can hate.”

“Oh. You’ve seen her.”

Milton shuddered. “I’ve seen her. I tried to get all Hal’s gifts back from her. I had to say all because I didn’t dare itemize. All I wanted, it might surprise you to know, was that damned doll. Just in case, you know … although I’m morally convinced that the thing has nothing to do with it. Now do you see what I mean about a single example of unreason?”

“ ’Fraid I do.” I felt upset and quelled and sat upon and I wasn’t fond of the feeling. I’ve read too many stories where the scientist just hasn’t the imagination to solve a haunt. It had been great, feeling superior to a bright guy like Milton.

We walked out of there, and for the first time I felt the mood of a night without feeling that an author was ramming it down my throat for story purposes. I looked at the clean-swept, star-reaching cubism of the Radio City area and its living snakes of neon, and I suddenly thought of an Evelyn Smith story the general idea of which
was “After they found out the atom bomb was magic, the rest of the magicians who enchanted refrigerators and washing machines and the telephone system came out into the open.” I felt a breath of wind and wondered what it was that had breathed. I heard the snoring of the city and for an awesome second felt it would roll over, open its eyes, and … 
speak
.

On the corner I said to Milton, “Thanks. You’ve given me a thumping around. I guess I needed it.” I looked at him. “By the Lord I’d like to find some place where you’ve been stupid in this thing.”

“I’d be happy if you could,” he said seriously

I whacked him on the shoulder. “See? You take all the fun out of it.”

He got a cab and I started to walk. I walked a whole lot that night, just anywhere. I thought about a lot of things. When I got home, the phone was ringing. It was Kelley.

I’m not going to give you a blow-by-blow of that talk with Kelley. It was in that small front room of his place—an apartment he’d rented after Hal got sick, and not the one Hal used to have—and we talked the night away. All I’m withholding is Kelley’s expression of things you already know: that he was deeply attached to his brother, that he had no hope left for him, that he would find who or what was responsible and deal with it his way. It is a strong man’s right to break down if he must, with whom and where he chooses, and such an occasion is only an expression of strength. But when it happens in a quiet sick place, where he must keep the command of hope strongly in the air; when a chest heaves and a throat must be held wide open to sob silently so that the dying one shall not know; these things are not pleasant to describe in detail. Whatever my ultimate feeling for Kelley, his emotions and the expressions of them are for him to keep.

He did, however, know the name of the girl and where she was. He did not hold her responsible. I thought he might have a suspicion, but it turned out to be only a certainty that this was no disease, no subjective internal disorder. If a great hate and a great determination could solve the problem, Kelley would solve it. If
research and logic could solve it, Milton would do it. If I could do it, I would.

She was checking hats in a sleazy club out where Brooklyn and Queens, in a remote meeting, agree to be known as Long Island. The contact was easy to make. I gave her my spring coat with the label outward. It’s a good label. When she turned away with it I called her back and drunkenly asked her for the bill in the right-hand pocket. She found it and handed it to me. It was a hundred. “Damn taxis never got change,” I mumbled and took it before her astonishment turned to sleight-of-hand. I got out my wallet, crowded the crumpled note into it clumsily enough to display the two other C-notes there, shoved it into the front of my jacket so that it missed the pocket and fell to the floor, and walked off. I walked back before she could lift the hinged counter and skin out after it. I picked it up and smiled foolishly at her. “Lose more business cards that way,” I said. Then I brought her into focus. “Hey, you know, you’re cute.”

I suppose “cute” is one of the four-letter words that describe her. “What’s your name?”

“Charity,” she said. “But don’t get ideas.” She was wearing so much pancake makeup that I couldn’t tell what her complexion was. She leaned so far over the counter that I could see lipstick stains on her brassiere.

“I don’t have a favorite charity yet,” I said. “You work here alla time?”

“I go home once in a while,” she said.

“What time?”

“One o’clock.”

“Tell you what,” I confided, “let’s both be in front of this place at a quarter after and see who stands who up, okay?” Without waiting for an answer I stuck the wallet into my back pocket so that my jacket hung on it. All the way into the dining room I could feel her eyes on it like two hot, glistening, broiled mushrooms. I came within an ace of losing it to the head waiter when he collided with me, too.

She was there all right, with a yellowish fur around her neck and heels you could have driven into a pine plank. She was up to the
elbows in jangly brass and chrome, and when we got into a cab she threw herself on me with her mouth open. I don’t know where I got the reflexes, but I threw my head down and cracked her in the cheekbone with my forehead, and when she squeaked indignantly I said I’d dropped the wallet again and she went about helping me find it quietly as you please. We went to a place and another place and an after-hours place, all her choice. They served her sherry in her whiskey-ponies and doubled all my orders, and tilted the checks something outrageous. Once I tipped a waiter eight dollars and she palmed the five. Once she wormed my leather notebook out of my breast pocket thinking it was the wallet, which by this time was safely tucked away in my knit shorts. She did get one enamel cuff link with a rhinestone in it, and my fountain pen. All in all it was quite a duel. I was loaded to the eyeballs with thiamin hydrochloride and caffeine citrate, but a most respectable amount of alcohol soaked through them, and it was all I could do to play it through. I made it, though, and blocked her at every turn until she had no further choice but to take me home. She was furious and made only the barest attempts to hide it.

We got each other up the dim dawn-lit stairs, shushing each other drunkenly, both much soberer than we acted, each promising what we expected not to deliver. She negotiated her lock successfully and waved me inside.

I hadn’t expected it to be so neat. Or so cold. “I didn’t leave that window open,” she said complainingly. She crossed the room and closed it. She pulled her fur around her throat. “This is awful.”

It was a long low room with three windows. At one end, covered by a venetian blind was a kitchenette. A door at one side of it was probably a bathroom.

She went to the venetian blind and raised it. “Have it warmed up in a jiffy,” she said.

I looked at the kitchenette. “Hey,” I said as she lit the little oven, “coffee. How’s about coffee?”

“Oh, all right,” she said glumly. “But talk quiet, huh?”

“Sh-h-h-h.” I pushed my lips around with a forefinger. I circled the room. Cheap phonograph and records. Small-screen TV. A big double studio couch. A bookcase with no books in it, just china dogs.
It occurred to me that her unsubtle approach was probably not successful as often as she might wish.

But where was the thing I was looking for?

“Hey, I wanna powder my nose,” I announced.

“In there,” she said. “Can’t you talk quiet?”

I went into the bathroom. It was tiny. There was a foreshortened tub with a circular frame over it from which hung a horribly cheerful shower curtain, with big red roses. I closed the door behind me and carefully opened the medicine chest. Just the usual. I closed it carefully so it wouldn’t click. A built-in shelf held towels.

Must be a closet in the main room, I thought. Hatbox, trunk, suitcase, maybe. Where would I put a devil-doll if I were hexing someone?

I wouldn’t hide it away, I answered myself. I don’t know why, but I’d sort of have it out in the open somehow …

I opened the shower curtain and let it close. Round curtain, square tub.