The Collection (64 page)

By that time she was within reach, and Charlie put his arms
around her and didn't give a darn, just then, what had happened to him. But he
tried to explain. Mostly to himself.

People always try to explain.

Face a man, or a woman, with something he doesn't
understand, and he'll be miserable until he classifies it. Lights in the sky.
And a scientist tells him it's the aurora borealis-or the aurora australis-and
he can accept the lights, and forget them.

Something knocks pictures off a wall in an empty room, and
throws a chair downstairs. Consternation, until it
^'
s named. Then
it's only a poltergeist.

Name it, and forget it. Anything with a name can be
assimilated.

Without one, it's-well, unthinkable. Take away the name of
anything, and you
^'
ve got blank horror.

Even something as familiar as a commonplace ghoul. Graves in
a cemetery dug up, corpses eaten. Horrible thing, it may be; but it
^'
s
merely a ghoul; as long as it
^'
s named-- But suppose, if you can
stand it, there was no such word as
ghoul
and no concept of one.
Then
dug-up half-eaten corpses are found. Nameless horror.

Not that the next thing that happened to Charlie Wills had
anything to do with a ghoul. Not even a werewolf. But I think that, in a way,
he
^'
d have found a werewolf more comforting than the duck. One
expects strange behavior of a werewolf, but a duck--

Like the duck in the museum.

Now, there is nothing intrinsically terrible about a duck.
Nothing to make one lie awake at night, with cold sweat coming out on top of
peeling sunburn. On the whole, a duck is a pleasant object, particularly if it
is roasted. This one wasn't.

Now it is Thursday. Charlie's stay in the hospital had been
for eight hours; they'd released him late in the afternoon, and he'd eaten
dinner downtown and then gone home. The boss had insisted on his taking the
next day off from work. Charlie hadn't protested much.

Home, and, after stripping to take a bath, he'd studied his
skin with blank amazement. Definitely, a third-degree bum. Definitely, all over
him. Almost ready to peel.

It did peel, the next day.

He took advantage of the holiday by taking Jane out to the
ball game, where they sat in a grandstand so he could be out of the sun. It was
a good game, and Jane understood and liked baseball.

Thursday, back to work.

At eleven twenty-five, Old Man Hapworth, the big boss, came
into Charlie's office.

"Wills,
^"
he said,
^"
we
got a rush order to print ten thousand handbills, and the copy will be here in
about an hour. 1'd like you to follow the thing right through the Linotype room
and the composing room and get it on the press the minute it's made up. It's a
close squeak whether we make deadline on it, and there's a penalty if we don
^'
t.
^"

"Sure, Mr. Hapworth. I'll stick right with it."

"Fine. I'll count on you. But listen-it's a bit early
to eat, but just the same you better go out for your lunch hour now. The copy
will be here about the time you get back, and you can stick right with the job.
That is, if you don
^'
t mind eating early."

"Not at all," Charlie lied. He got his hat and
went out.

Dammit, it was too early to eat. But he had an hour off and
he could eat in half that time, so maybe if he walked half an hour first, he
could work up an appetite.

The museum was two blocks away, and the best place to kill
half an hour. He went there, strolled down the central corridor without
stopping, except to stare for a moment at a statue of Aphrodite that reminded
him of Jane Pemberton and made him remember--even more strongly than he already
remembered--that it was only six days now until his wedding.

Then he turned off into the room that housed the numismatics
collection. He
^'
d used to collect coins when he was a kid, and
although the collection had been broken up since then, he still had a mild
interest in looking at the big museum collection.

He stopped in front of a showcase of bronze Romans.

But he wasn
^'
t thinking about them. He was still
thinking about Aphrodite, or Jane, which was quite understandable under the
circumstances. Most certainly, he was not thinking about flying worms or sudden
waves of burning heat.

Then he chanced to look across toward an adjacent showcase.
And within it, he saw the duck.

It was a perfectly ordinary-looking duck. It had a speckled
breast and greenish-brown markings on its wing and a darkish head with a darker
stripe starting just above the eye and running down along the short neck. It
looked like a wild rather than a domestic duck.

And it looked bewildered at being there.

For just a moment, the complete strangeness of the duck's
presence in a showcase of coins didn't register with Charlie. His mind was
still
on Aphrodite. Even while he stared at a wild duck under glass inside
a show-case marked
^"
Coins of China."

Then the duck quacked, and waddled on its awkward webbed feet
down the length of the showcase and butted against the glass of the end, and
fluttered its wings and tried to fly upward, but hit against the glass of the
top. And it quacked again and loudly.

Only then did it occur to Charlie to wonder what a live duck
was doing in a numismatics collection. Apparently, to judge from its actions,
the duck was wondering the same thing.

And only then did Charlie remember the angelic worn and the
sunless sunburn.

And somebody in the doorway said,
"Yssst.
Hey."

Charlie turned, and the look on his face must have been
something out of the ordinary because the uniformed attendant quit frowning
and said,
^"
Something wrong, mister?"

For a brief instant, Charlie just stared at him. Then it
occurred to Charlie that this was the opportunity he
^'
d lacked when
the angleworm had ascended. Two people couldn
^'
t see the same
hallucination. If it was an--

He opened his mouth to say "Look,
^"
but
he didn
^'
t have to say anything. The duck heat him to it by quacking
loudly and again trying to flutter through the glass of the case.

The attendant's eyes went past Charlie to the case of
Chinese coins and he said "Gaw!"

The duck was still there.

The attendant looked at Charlie again and said,
"Are
you-"
and then stopped without finishing the question and went up to
the showcase to look at close range. The duck was still struggling to get out,
but more weakly. It seemed to be gasping for breath.

The attendant said, "Gaw!" again, and then over
his shoulder to Charlie:
^"
Mister, how did you-That there case
is her-hermetchically sealed. It
^'
s airproof. Lookit that bird.
It's-"

It already had; the duck fell over, either dead or unconscious.

The attendant grasped Charlie
^'
s arm. He said
firmly,
^"
Mister, you come with me to the boss.
^"
And less firmly, "Uh . . .
how
did you get that thing in there? And
don't try to tell me you didn't, mister. I was through here five minutes ago,
and you're the only guy's been in here since."

Charlie opened his mouth, and closed it again. He had a sudden
vision of himself being questioned at the headquarters of the museum and then
at the police station. And if the police started asking questions about him,
they
^'
d find out about the worm and about his having been in the
hospital for-- And, golly, they'd get an alienist maybe, and--

With the courage of sheer desperation, Charlie smiled. He
tried to make it an ominous smile; it may not have been ominous, but it was
definitely unusual.
^"
How would you like," he asked the
attendant,
^"
to find yourself in there?
^"
And he
pointed with his free arm through the entrance and out into the main hallway at
the stone sarcophagus of King- Mene-Ptah. "I can do it, the same way I
put that duck--"

The museum attendant was breathing hard. His eves looked
slightly glazed, and he let go of Charlie's arm. He said, "Mister, did you
really--
^"

^"
Want me to show you how?
^"

^"
Uh . . . Gaw!" said the attendant. He
ran.

Charlie forced himself to hold his own pace down to a rapid
walk, and went in the opposite direction to the side entrance that led out into
Beeker Street.

And Beeker Street was still a very ordinary-looking street,
with lots of midday traffic, and no pink elephants climbing trees and nothing
going on but the hurried confusion of a city street. Its very noise was
soothing, in a way; although there was one bad moment when he was crossing at
the corner and heard a sudden noise behind him. He turned around, startled,
afraid of what strange thing he might see there.

But it was only a truck, and he got out of its way in time
to avoid being run over.

Lunch. And Charlie was definitely getting into a state of
jitters. His hand shook so that he could scarcely pick up his coffee without
slopping it over the edge of the cup.

Because a horrible thought was dawning in his mind. If
something was wrong with him, was it fair to Jane Pemberton for him to go ahead
and marry her? Is it fair to saddle the girl one loves with a husband who might
go to the icebox to get a bottle of milk and find-God knows what?

And he was deeply, madly in love with Jane.

So he sat there, an unbitten sandwich on the plate before
him, and alternated between hope and despair as he tried to make sense out of
the three things that had happened to him within the past week.

Hallucination?

But the attendant, too, had seen the duck!

How comforting it had been--it seemed to him now--that,
after seeing the angelic angleworm, he had been able to tell himself it had
been an hallucination.
Only
an hallucination.

But wait. Maybe--

Could not the museum attendant, too, have been part of the
same hallucination as the duck? Granted that he, Charlie, could have seen a
duck that wasn't there, couldn
^'
t he also have included in the same
category a museum attendant who professed to see the duck? Why not? A duck and
an attendant who sees it--the combination could he as illusory as the duck
alone.

And Charlie felt so encouraged that he took a bite out of
his sandwich.

But the
burn?
Whose hallucination was that? Or was
there some sort of a natural physical ailment that could produce a sudden skin
condition approximating mild sunburn? But, if there were such a thing, then
evidently Doc Palmer didn
^'
t know about it.

Suddenly Charlie caught a glimpse of the clock on the wall,
and it was one o
^'
clock, and he almost strangled on that bite of
sandwich when he realized that he was over half an hour late, and must have
been sitting in the restaurant almost an hour.

He got up and ran back to the office.

But all was well; Old Man Hapworth wasn
^'
t there.
And the copy for the rush circular was late and got there just as Charlie
arrived.

He said
"Whew!
^"
at the
narrowness of his escape, and concentrated hard on getting that circular
through the plant. He rushed it to the Linotypes and read proof on it himself,
then watched make-up over the compositor
^'
s shoulder. He knew he was
making a nuisance of himself, but it killed the afternoon.

And he thought, "Only one more day to work after today,
and then my vacation, and on
Wednesday-
^"
Wedding on
Wednesday.

But--

If--

The Pest came out of the proofroom in a green smock and
looked at him. "Charlie," she said,
^"
you look like
something no self-respecting cat would drag in. Say ... what
^'
s wrong
with you? Really?"

"Ph . . . nothing. Say, Paula, will you tell Jane when you
get home that I may be a bit late this evening? I got to stick here till these
handbills are off the press."

"Sure, Charlie. But tell me-"

^"
Nix. Run along, will you? I
^'
m
busy."

She shrugged her shoulders, and went back into the
proofroom.

The machinist tapped Charlie's shoulder. "Say, we got
that new Linotype set up. Want to take a look?"

Charlie nodded and followed. He looked over the installation,
and then slid into the operator's chair in front of the machine. "How does
she run?"

^"
Sweet. Those Blue Streak models are honeys.
Try it."

Charlie let his fingers play over the keys, setting words
without paying any attention to what they were. He sent in three lines to cast,
then picked the slugs out of the stick. And found that he had set: "For
men have died and worms have eaten them and ascendeth unto Heaven where it
sitteth upon the right hand-
^"

"Gaw!" said Charlie. And
that
reminded him
of—

Jane noticed that there was something wrong. She couldn't have
helped noticing. But instead of asking questions, she was unusually nice to him
that evening.

And Charlie, who had gone to see her with the resolution to
tell her the whole story, found himself weakening. As men always weaken when
they are with the women they love and the parlor lamp is turned low.