Thunder and Roses (48 page)

The girl came slowly down the aisle steps, her wideset eyes wondering. There were books tucked under her arm, and her hair shone. “Yes, Professor?”

“I—” He stopped and cleared his throat. “I know it’s the last class today, and you are no doubt meeting someone. I shan’t keep you very long … and if I do,” he added, and was again astonished at himself, “you can see Bert tomorrow.”

“Bert? Oh!” She colored prettily. “I didn’t know you knew about—how
could
you know?”

He shrugged. “Miss Patchell,” he said. “You’ll forgive an old—ah—middle-aged man’s rambling, I hope. There is something about you that—that—”

“Yes?” Caution, and an iota of fright were in her eyes. She glanced up and back at the now empty hall

Abruptly he pounded the table. “I will
not
let this go on for another instant without finding out about it. Miss Patchell, you are becoming afraid of me, and you are wrong.”

“I th-think I’d better …” she said timidly, and began backing off.

“Sit down!”
he thundered. It was the very first time in his entire life that he had thundered at anyone, and her shock was not one whit greater than his. She shrank back and into a front-row seat, looking a good deal smaller than she actually was, except about the eyes, which were much larger.

The professor shook his head in vexation. He rose, stepped down off the dais, and crossed to her, sitting in the next seat.

“Now be quiet and listen to me.” The shadow of a smile twitched his lips and he said, “I really don’t know what I am going to say. Listen, and be patient. It couldn’t be more important.”

He sat a while, thinking, chasing vague pictures around in his mind. He heard, or was conscious of, the rapid but slowing beat of her frightened heart.

“Miss Patchell,” he said, turning to her, his voice gentle, “I have not at any time looked into your records. Until—ah—yesterday, you were simply another face in the class, another source of quiz
papers to be graded. I have not consulted the registrar’s files for information about you. And, to my almost certain knowledge, this is the first time I have spoken with you.

“That’s right, sir,” she said quietly.

“Very good, then.” He wet his lips. “You are twenty-three years old. The house in which you were born was a two-story affair, quite old, with a leaded bay window at the turn of the stairs. The small bedroom, or nursery, was directly over the kitchen. You could hear the clatter of dishes below you when the house was quiet. The address was 191 Bucyrus Road.”

“How—oh yes! How did you know?”

He shook his head, and then put it between his hands. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I lived in that house, too, as a child. I don’t know how I knew that you did. There are things in here—” He rapped his head, shook it again. “I thought perhaps you could help.”

She looked at him. He was a small man, brilliant, tired, getting old swiftly. She put a hand on his arm. “I wish I could,” she said warmly. “I do wish I could.”

“Thank you, child.”

“Maybe if you told me more—”

“Perhaps. Some of it is—ugly. All of it is cloudy, long ago, barely remembered. And yet—”

“Please go on.”

“I remember,” he half whispered, “things that happened long ago that way, and recent things I remember—twice. One memory is sharp and clear, and one is old and misty. And I remember, in the same misty way, what is happening now and—and what will happen!”

“I don’t understand.”

“That girl. That Miss Symes. She—died here yesterday.”

“She was sitting right behind me,” said Miss Patchell.

“I know it! I knew what was going to happen to her. I knew it mistily, like an old memory. That’s what I mean. I don’t know what I could have done to stop it. I don’t think I could have done anything.
And yet, down deep I have the feeling that it’s my fault—that she slipped and fell because of something I did.”

“Oh, no!”

He touched her arm in mute gratitude for the sympathy in her tone, and grimaced miserably. “It’s happened before,” he said. “Time and time and time again. As a boy, as a youth, I was plagued with accidents. I led a quiet life. I was not very strong and books were always more my line than baseball. And yet I witnessed a dozen or more violent, useless deaths—automobile accidents, drownings, falls, and one or two—” his voice shook—“which I won’t mention. And there were countless minor ones—broken bones, maimings, stabbings … and every time, in some way, it was my fault, like the one yesterday … and I—I—”

“Don’t,” she whispered. “Please don’t. You were nowhere near Elaine Symes when she fell.”

“I was nowhere near any of them! That never mattered. It never took away the burden of guilt. Miss Patchell—”

“Catherine.”

“Catherine. Thank you so much! There are people called by insurance actuaries, ‘accident prone.’ Most of these are involved in accidents through their own negligence, or through some psychological quirk which causes them to defy the world, or to demand attention, by getting hurt. But some are simply present at accidents, without being involved at all—catalysts of death, if you’ll pardon a flamboyant phrase. I am, apparently, one of these.”

“Then—how could you feel guilty?”

“It was—” He broke off suddenly, and looked at her. She had a gentle face, and her eyes were filled with compassion. He shrugged. “I’ve said so much,” he said. “More would sound no more fantastic, and do me no more damage.”

“There’ll be no damage from anything you tell me,” she said, with a sparkle of decisiveness.

He smiled his thanks this time, sobered, and said, “These horrors—the maimings, the deaths—they were
funny
, once, long ago. I must have been a child, a baby. Something taught me, then, that the agony and death of others was to be promoted and enjoyed. I
remember, I—almost remember when that stopped. There was a—a toy, a—a—”

Jeremy blinked. He had been staring at the fine crack in the ceiling for so long that his eyes hurt.

“What are you doing?” asked the monster.

“Dreaming real,” said Jeremy. “I am grown up and sitting in the big empty lecture place, talking to the girl with the brown hair that shines. Her name’s Catherine.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, all the funny dreams. Only—”

“Well?”

“They’re not so funny.”

The monster scurried over to him and pounced on his chest. “Time to sleep now. And I want to—”

“No,” said Jeremy. He put his hands over his throat. “I have enough now. Wait until I see some more of this real-dream.”

“What do you want to see?”

“Oh, I don’t know. There’s something.…”

“Let’s have some fun,” said the monster. “This is the girl you can change, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Go ahead. Give her an elephant’s trunk. Make her grow a beard. Stop her nostrils up. Go on. You can do anything.” Jeremy grinned briefly, and then said, “I don’t want to.”

“Oh, go on. Just see how funny …”

“A toy,” said the professor. “But more than a toy. It could talk, I think. If I could only remember more clearly!”

“Don’t try so hard. Maybe it will come,” she said. She took his hand impulsively. “Go ahead.”

“It was—something—” the professor said haltingly, “—something soft and not too large. I don’t recall … ”

“Was it smooth?”

“No. Hairy—fuzzy.
Fuzzy!
I’m beginning to get it. Wait, now … A thing like a teddy bear. It talked. It—why, of course! It was alive!”

“A pet, then. Not a toy.”

“Oh, no,” said the professor, and shuddered. “It was a toy, all right. My mother thought it was, anyway. It made me dream real.”

“You mean, like Peter Ibbetson?”

“No, no. Not like that.” He leaned back, rolled his eyes up. “I used to see myself as I would be later, when I was grown. And before. Oh. Oh—I think it was then—Yes! It must have been then that I began to see all those terrible accidents. It was! It was!”

“Steady,” said Catherine. “Tell me quietly.”

He relaxed. “Fuzzy. The demon—the monster. I know what it did, the devil. Somehow it made me see myself as I grew. It made me repeat what I had learned. It—it ate knowledge! It did; it ate knowledge. It had some strange affinity for me, for something about me. It could absorb knowledge that I gave out. And it—it changed the knowledge into blood, the way a plant changes sunlight and water into cellulose!”

“I don’t understand,” she said again.

“You don’t? How could you? How can I? I know that that’s what it did, though. It made me—why, I was spouting my lectures here to the beast when I was four years old! The words of them, the sense of them, came from me
now
to me
then. And
I gave it to the monster, and it ate the knowledge and spiced it with the things it made me do in my real dreams. It made me trip a man up on a hat, of all absurd things, and fall into a subway excavation. And when I was in my teens, I was right by the excavation to see it happen. And that’s the way with all of them! All the horrible accidents I have witnessed, I have half-remembered before they happened. There’s no stopping any of them. What am I going to do?”

There were tears in her eyes. “What about me?” she whispered—more, probably, to get his mind away from his despair than for any other reason.

“You. There’s something about you, if only I could remember. Something about what happened to that—that toy, that beast. You were in the same environment as I, as that devil. Somehow, you are vulnerable to it and—Catherine, Catherine, I think that something was done to you that—”

He broke off. His eyes widened in horror. The girl sat beside him, helping him, pitying him, and her expression did not change. But—everything else about her did.

Her face shrank, shrivelled. Her eyes lengthened. Her ears grew long, grew until they were like donkey’s ears, like rabbit’s ears, like horrible, long hairy spider’s legs. Her teeth lengthened into tusks. Her arms shrivelled into jointed straws, and her body thickened.

It smelled like rotten meat.

There were filthy claws scattering out of her polished open-toed shoes. There were bright sores. There were—other things. And all the while she—it—held his hand and looked at him with pity and friendliness.

The professor—

Jeremy sat up and flung the monster away. “It isn’t funny!” he screamed. “It isn’t funny, it isn’t, it isn’t, it
isn’t!
”

The monster sat up and looked at him with its soft, bland, teddy-bear expression. “Be quiet,” it said. “Let’s make her all squashy now, like soft-soap. And hornets in her stomach. And we can put her—”

Jeremy clapped his hands over his ears and screwed his eyes shut. The monster talked on. Jeremy burst into tears, leapt from the crib and, hurling the monster to the floor, kicked it. It grunted. “That’s funny!” screamed the child. “Ha ha!” he cried, as he planted both feet in its yielding stomach. He picked up the twitching mass and hurled it across the room. It struck the nursery clock. Clock and monster struck the floor together in a flurry of glass, metal, and blood. Jeremy stamped it all into a jagged, pulpy mass, blood from his feet mixing with blood from the monster, the same strange blood which the monster had pumped into his neck.…

Mummy all but fainted when she ran in and saw him. She screamed, but he laughed, screaming. The doctor gave him sedatives until he slept, and cured his feet. He was never very strong after that. They saved him, to live his life and to see his real-dreams; funny dreams, and to die finally in a lecture room, with his eyes distended in horror while horror froze his heart, and a terrified young woman ran crying, crying for help.

W
HEN
P
AUL RAN
away from home, he met no one and saw nothing all the way to the highway. The highway swept sudden and wide from the turn by Keeper’s Rise, past the blunt end of the Township Road, and narrowed off to a distant pinpoint pricking at the horizon. After a time Paul could see the car.

It was new and long and it threw down its snout a little as the driver braked, and when it stopped beside him it seesawed easily, once, on its big soft springs.

The driver was a large man, large and costly, with a gray Stetson and a dove-colored topcoat made of something that did not crease in the bend of his arms but rolled and folded instead. The woman beside him had a broad brow and a pointed chin. Her skin had peach shadings, but was deeply tanned, and her hair was the red gold called “straw color” by a smith as he watches his forge. She smiled at the man and she smiled at Paul almost the same way.

“Hi, son,” the man said. “This the old Township Road?”

“Yes, sir,” said Paul, “it sure is.”

“Figured it was,” said the man. “A feller don’t forget.”

“Reckon you don’t,” said Paul.

“Haven’t seen the old town in twenty years,” said the man. “I guess it ain’t changed much.”

“These old places don’t change much,” said Paul with scorn.

“Oh, they ain’t so bad to come back to,” said the man. “Hate to get chained down in one all my life, though.”

“Me too,” agreed Paul. “You from around here?”

“Why sure,” said the man. “My name’s Roudenbush. Any more Roudenbushes around here that you know of, boy?”

“Place is full of ’em,” said Paul. “Hey, you’re not the Roudenbush kid that ran away twenty years ago?”

“The very one,” said the man. “What happened after I left?”

“Why, they talk about you to this day,” said Paul. “Your mother sickened and died, and your pa got up in meetin’ a month after you left an’ asked forgiveness for treatin’ you so mean.”

“Poor old feller,” said the man. “I guess it was a little rough of me to run out like that. But he asked for it.”

“I bet he did.”

“This is my wife,” said the man.

The woman smiled at Paul again. She did not speak. Paul could not think up what kind of a voice she might have. She leaned forward and opened up the glove compartment. It was cram-full of chocolate-covered cherries.

“Been crazy about these ever since I was a kid,” said the man. “Help yourself. I got ten pounds of them in the back.” He leaned into the leather cushions, took out a silver cigar case, put a cigar between his teeth, and applied a lighter that flamed up like a little bonfire in his hand. “Yes, sir,” said the man. “I got two more cars back in the city, and a tuxedo suit with shiny lapels. I made my killing in the stock market, and now I’m president of a railroad. I’ll be getting back there this evening, after I give the folks in the old town a treat.”