The Uncanny Reader (28 page)

“Can't stop in the middle of the block,” the driver said, not turning his head.

“The next stop, then,” Mr. Beresford said.

The bus moved rapidly on. Mr. Beresford, bending down to see the streets out the front window, saw a sign saying “Bus Stop.”

“Here,” he said.

“What?” the driver said, going past.

“Listen,” Mr. Beresford said. “I want to get off.”

“It's O.K. with me,” the driver said. “Next stop.”

“You just passed one,” Mr. Beresford said.

“No one waiting there,” the driver said. “Anyway, you didn't tell me in time.” Mr. Beresford waited. After a minute he saw another bus stop and said, “O.K.”

The bus did not stop, but went past the sign without slowing down.

“Report me,” the driver said.

“Listen, now,” Mr. Beresford said, and the driver turned one eye up at him; he seemed to be amused.

“Report me,” the driver said. “My number's right here on this card.”

“If you don't stop at the next stop,” Mr. Beresford said, “I shall smash the glass in the door and shout for help.”

“What with?” the driver said. “The box of candy?”

“How do you know it's—” Mr. Beresford said before he realized that if he got into a conversation he would miss the next bus stop. It had not occurred to him that he could get off anywhere except at a bus stop; he saw lights ahead and at the same time the bus slowed down and Mr. Beresford, looking quickly back, saw the man in the light hat stretch and get up.

The bus pulled to a stop in front of a bus sign; there was a group of stores.

“O.K.,” the bus driver said to Mr. Beresford, “you were so anxious to get off.” The man in the light hat got off at the rear door. Mr. Beresford, standing by the open front door, hesitated and said, “I guess I'll stay on for a while.”

“Last stop,” the bus driver said. “Everybody off.” He looked sardonically up at Mr. Beresford. “Report me if you want to,” he said. “My number's right on that card there.”

Mr. Beresford got off and went directly up to the man in the light hat, standing on the sidewalk. “This is perfectly ridiculous,” he said emphatically. “I don't understand any of it and I want you to know that the first policeman I see—”

He stopped when he realized that the man in the light hat was looking not at him but, bored and fixedly, over his shoulder. Mr. Beresford turned and saw a policeman standing on the corner.

“Just you wait,” he said to the man in the light hat, and started for the policeman. Halfway to the policeman he began to wonder again: what did he have to report? A bus that would not stop when directed to, a clerk in a souvenir shop who cornered customers, a mysterious man in a light hat—and why? Mr. Beresford realized suddenly that there was nothing he could tell the policeman: he looked over his shoulder and saw the man in the light hat watching him, and then Mr. Beresford bolted down a subway entrance. He had a nickel in his hand by the time he reached the bottom of the steps, and he went right through the turnstile; to the left it was downtown and he ran that way.

He was figuring as he ran: he'll think if I'm very stupid I'd head downtown, if I'm smarter than that I'd go uptown, if I'm really smart I'd go downtown. Does he think I'm middling smart or very smart?

The man in the light hat reached the downtown platform only a few seconds after Mr. Beresford and sauntered down the platform, his hands in his pockets. Mr. Beresford sat down on the bench listlessly. It's no good, he thought, no good at all, he knows just how smart I am.

The train came blasting into the station, Mr. Beresford ran in the door and saw the light hat disappear into a door of the next car. Just as the doors were closing Mr. Beresford dived, caught the door, and would have been out except for a girl who seized his arm and shouted, “Harry! Where in God's name are you going?”

The door was held halfway by Mr. Beresford's body, his arm left inside with the girl, who seemed to be holding it with all her strength. “Isn't this a fine thing,” she said to the people in the car, “he sure doesn't want to see his old friends.”

A few people laughed; most of them were watching.

“Hang on to him, sister,” someone said.

The girl laughed and tugged on Mr. Beresford's arm. “He's gonna get away,” she said laughingly to the people in the car and a big man stepped to her with a grin and said, “If you gotta have him that bad, we'll bring him in for you.”

Mr. Beresford felt the holding grasp on his arm turn suddenly to an irresistible force which drew him in through the doors, and they closed behind him. Everyone in the car was laughing at him by now, and the big man said, “That ain't no way to a treat a lady, chum.”

Mr. Beresford looked around for the girl but she had melted into the crowd somewhere and the train was moving. After a minute the people in the car stopped looking at him and Mr. Beresford smoothed his coat and found that his box of candy was still intact.

The subway train was going downtown. Mr. Beresford, who was now racking his brains for detective tricks, for mystery-story dodges, thought of one that seemed infallible. He stayed docilely on the train, as it went downtown, and got a seat at Twenty-third Street. At Fourteenth he got off, the light hat following, and went up the stairs and into the street. As he had expected, the large department store ahead of him advertised “Open till 9 tonight” and the doors swung wide, back and forth, with people going constantly in and out. Mr. Beresford went in. The store bewildered him at first—counters stretching away in all directions, the lights much brighter than anywhere else, the voices clamoring. Mr. Beresford moved slowly along beside a counter; it was stockings first, thin and tan and black and gauzy, and then it was handbags, piles on sale, neat solitary ones in the cases, and then it was medical supplies, with huge almost human figures wearing obscene trusses, standing right there on the counter, and people coming embarrassedly to buy. Mr. Beresford turned the corner and came to a counter of odds and ends. Scarves too cheap to be at the scarf counter, postcards, a bin marked “Any item 25¢,” dark glasses. Uncomfortably, Mr. Beresford bought a pair of dark glasses and put them on.

He went out of the store at an entrance far away from the one he had used to go in; he could have chosen any of eight or nine entrances, but this seemed complicated enough. There was no sign of the light hat, no one tried to hinder Mr. Beresford as he stepped up to the taxi stand, and, although debating taking the second or the third car, finally took the one that was offered him and gave his home address.

*   *   *

He reached his apartment building without mishap, stole cautiously out of the taxi and into the lobby. There was no light hat, no odd person watching for Mr. Beresford. In the elevator, alone, with no one to see which floor button he pressed, Mr. Beresford took a long breath and began to wonder if he had dreamed his wild trip home. He rang his apartment bell and waited; then his wife came to the door and Mr. Beresford, suddenly tired out, went into his home.

“You're
terribly
late, darling,” his wife said affectionately, and then, “But what's the matter?”

He looked at her; she was wearing her blue dress and that meant she knew it was her birthday and expected him to take her out; he handed her the box of candy limply and she took it, hardly noticing in her anxiety over him. “What on
earth
has happened?” she asked. “Darling, come in here and sit down. You look terrible.”

He let her lead him into the living room, into his own chair where it was comfortable, and he lay back.

“Is there something wrong?” she was asking anxiously, fussing over him, loosening his tie, smoothing his hair. “Are you sick? Were you in an accident? What
has
happened?”

He realized that he seemed more tired than he really was, and was glorying in all this attention. He sighed deeply and said, “Nothing. Nothing wrong. Tell you in a minute.”

“Wait,” she said. “I'll get you a drink.”

He put his head back against the soft chair as she went out. Never knew that door had a key, his mind registered dimly as he heard it turn. Then he was on his feet with his head against the door listening to her at the telephone in the hall.

She dialled and waited. Then: “Listen,” she said, “listen, he came here after all. I've got him.”

 

THE HELPER

Joan Aiken

Paris in the rainy morning: like a series of triangles cut from pewter. The wet grey streets met one another at acute angles, shutters peered down slit-eyed, the town reflected a murky, watery sky. It was unfriendly, repulsing. Hostile.

Frost, consulting the professor's letter again—Charles-Edouard Aveyrand, Academician, 48 rue Lecluse—saw that he would not need to take a taxi or the metro; it would be an easy walk from the Gare St. Lazare. And he could do with a walk; he was hungry, stiff, and chilled to the bone from the night journey.

He ought to have remembered that address. And as he walked towards it, he did begin to remember.

“Knowing you to be an official of the British Patent Office,” the professor had written in his formal stiff English, “and remembering our agreeable association of some years ago, I made bold to invite your assistance in this matter. My finances in these days are a matter of some anxiety, otherwise I would not have troubled you. My daughter Menispe invites herself to be recollected by you and regrets a lack of correspondence between the families since the sad death of your charming daughter.”

Striding along the chilly canyon of a street, between high narrow grey houses and motorbikes that continually snarled at his elbow, Frost thought of Menispe Aveyrand. There was little need for her self-invitation, he thought. Only too easily could he summon up the image of the girl who, for five successive years, had come to stay
en famille
with the Frosts, learn English, and be, virtually, an adopted sister for Louise. Both girls had been only children; the arrangement, initiated through a school club, had proved so successful that when Menispe was not spending holidays in England, Louise went to the Aveyrand apartment in Paris.

Menispe at age nine had been a skinny waiflike little creature, all pale freckles and bony, sharp features, with an unexpectedly engaging triangular grin, a mobile face, never still for a moment, stringy fair hair, and shrewd hazel-green eyes. She was witty even then,
méchante
, but also touching; deprived of a mother since the age of six, she attached herself to the Frost family with passionate, starved affection, like a stray kitten offered its first bowl of warm milk. She and Louise had been inseparable, written each other immense weekly letters during the school terms, counted the days to each reunion. Frost and his wife had been “
chère tante
Josephine” and “
gentil oncle
Frank” in dozens of polite, dutiful bread-and-butter letters always signed “
affectueusement, votre belle-fille,
Menispe.”

The last visit, of course, had been that of Louise to the Paris apartment; after which, nothing more had been heard from Menispe.

Frost wondered, detachedly, how she had turned out. There had been a boyfriend, hadn't there, Lucien; what had become of him?

Perhaps she had married him.

The apartment house in which Professor Aveyrand lived was high, colourless, forbidding, with a mansard roof and so much exterior embellishment in the way of shutters, ironwork, lanterns, balconies, that there seemed hardly enough wall to sustain them. Inside, Frost remembered the varicose-veined marble and brown flock wallpaper, and the terrifyingly slow lift, with a heavy glass door, and room for only two persons inside, which creaked its way up from floor to floor.

It was in that lift that he had first been alone with his daughter Louise after the final visit, when he had come, to fetch her home. She had gazed away over his shoulder as if he did not exist, although they were obliged to stand almost pressed together. When he said, “I wonder what our chances are of getting a taxi?” she looked at him with the same total boredom as if he had speculated on the chances of the Tory candidate in the Stockton-on-Tees council elections.

Numero Onze, in trailing metal script on the door; the bell inside clanged at some distance, harshly, as he stood waiting in the close, windowless passage, only elbow-width, and lit by what appeared to be a three-watt bulb.

After a longish pause the door was opened by Professor Aveyrand himself. He had aged immensely since Frost's last visit; was gnarled, shaky, dwarfish, and stooped, like some ancient Nibelung creeping out of his crevice on the scent of gold. And that, Frost told himself sharply, was a thoroughly unfair judgment. The professor had always been the most abstracted, unworldly figure, plunged in the past and his studies; money was of no importance to him. Indeed, if he had not been so oblivious to what went on about him, of what his daughter was up to, at the time of that last visit, Frost might have been alerted a bit sooner, the calamity might never have happened … Enough of that.

By now the professor had gingerly, hesitantly, ushered him in. They were sitting on two upright chairs upholstered in hard brown velvet, facing one another across an empty marble hearth closed by a steel shutter. The apartment smelt dreadful—unaired, dusty, with a hint of something decaying—perhaps the plumbing needed attention, or a mouse had died in the pantry; it did not look as if the place ever, nowadays, received the attentions of a maid.

“… since I retired had sufficient time to pursue my hobby,” the professor was explaining—one thing, he had got down to business right away, no beating about the bush, there was that much to be said for him, thought Frost. Well, so much the better; who would want to spend an extra minute in this dank, depressing place with its horrible associations? “My family, of course … ,” the professor went on. “Interested in these matters for generations … Indeed an ancestor of mine in the sixteenth century … treatise on solar and planetary energy … as a matter of fact, he narrowly escaped execution for heresy…”