Your Eyelids Are Growing Heavy

Your Eyelids Are Growing Heavy

Barbara Paul

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

CHAPTER 1

“Hey, lady! Whaddaya doing here? What the hell you think you're doing?”

Megan Phillips opened one eye and saw what looked like a pair of trousers with a man inside.

“What's the matter with you?” the voice insisted. “What're you doing here?”

Megan opened her other eye and forced herself to look upward. A man, all right—one she'd never seen before. She cleared her throat. “Where exactly is ‘here'?”

“The fourteenth-hole fairway, that's where. You ain't got no business bein' here. Come on, get up. Go sleep it off somewheres else.”

Easier said than done. The ground was damp beneath her; she was stiff as an old lady. “How about giving me a hand?”

The man muttered something under his breath and pulled her none too gently to her feet. She tottered and almost fell; a rough hand held her arm until she got her balance. “Can you walk?”

“I guess so.” She put her hands to her head and tried to think. The fourteenth-hole fairway, he'd said. “What golf course?”

“Jesus,” the man said in disgust. “Schenley Park.”

“Schenley Park? How'd I get to Schenley Park?”

“You're asking me? Come on, lady, I got work to do. There's a phone in the clubhouse. Go call somebody to come get you.”

“Which way's the clubhouse?” she asked weakly.

The man, a groundskeeper, pointed. Megan nodded and started to stumble off in the direction he'd indicated. “Hey, wait a minute,” he called after her. “This your purse?”

Her purse! She went back for the brown shoulder bag the man was holding out to her and quickly checked inside. “My money's all here,” she said wonderingly.

The man grunted. “You're lucky.” He turned his back and walked away, finished with her.

At first Megan concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, tottering her way toward the clubhouse. She was stiff from sleeping on the damp ground, but other than that she seemed to be all right. No blinding headache, no double vision, no uncontrollable shakes. She wanted a shower, a toothbrush, and a pot of coffee—in that order.

As her sense of balance returned, she began to feel up to grappling with the problem of how she'd happened to wake up on the Schenley Park golf course. She looked down at her grass-stained skirt. Same clothes she'd put on to wear to work yesterday. She must have been there all night. Thank god it was Saturday; she'd hate to have to face the office today.

She remembered leaving the office late Friday afternoon. Did she stop off somewhere on her way home? She couldn't remember. That was the scary part:
she simply could not remember
. Or maybe she'd headed straight home and then gone out again. Unlikely; Megan always showered and changed the minute she got home and she was still wearing the clothes she'd put on yesterday morning.

The groundskeeper had assumed she was sleeping off a drunk. But she couldn't have gone off someplace last night and gotten so roaring drunk she didn't remember a thing that happened to her. She couldn't have. Because she didn't drink.

It was all too much for her just then. She shook her head and put the problem aside. Take care of the body first, then worry about this sudden deficiency of recall. She walked into the clubhouse feeling grungy and uncomfortable. Only one person was there, a fiftyish man reading the
Pittsburgh Press
while he waited for his golfing partners to show up.

The pay phone was near the door. Megan dropped in a dime and started to dial her own number before she remembered Rich was no longer there. Damn. She hung up and got her dime back while she tried to decide whom to call. Somebody in her apartment building would probably be best. Andrea or the Fraziers or that funny-looking kid in the basement apartment—what was his name? Well, she couldn't very well call him if she didn't remember his name. While she was trying to decide, a feeling of uneasiness crept over her. She didn't really want any of those people knowing about her absurd night on the golf course, at least not until she'd had a chance to figure out what had happened. She felt too exposed. In the end she called a cab.

The man with the paper was now reading the colored comics section, concentrating with an intentness more suitable to solving the world energy crisis. Megan drifted toward the door to wait for the cab.

The
colored
comics section?

Megan whirled toward him. “Excuse me—what day is today?”

The man looked up. “What?”

“What day is it?”

“Uh, the thirtieth.”

“No, I mean the day of the week.”

He looked at her as if she had a screw loose. “Sunday.”

Chilled, Megan moved out of the clubhouse. Sunday. So she hadn't lost just a night—she'd lost two nights and a day. She felt her stomach knot up and the hairs rise on her arms. Megan was scared.

The cab finally showed up and she climbed in. Megan was wondering where her car might be and the driver had to ask her twice where she wanted to go. “I want to go home,” she said abstractedly.

“So do I, lady, but I gotta drive this cab until three o'clock. You wanna give me an address or should I just guess?”

Megan sighed. “Fifty-four-forty Howe Street. In Shadyside.”

The driver took her home without another word.

Gus Bilinski closed his book and sat concentrating for a moment. Then he picked up a pen and carefully wrote:

He checked it over; that looked right. Then he opened his book again, a paperback titled
Teach Yourself Persian
. Hah—he'd got it right. Now he could write “Everybody comes to town on horseback” in Persian.

Except that he wasn't really writing it yet; he was still drawing the symbols. Gus looked out the window above his desk. When he was sitting down, the ground level was about even with his chin. Gus liked his basement apartment, in spite of the sometimes musty smell. It was the first place he'd ever lived all by himself; everything here was a part of him. He turned his attention back to the book and puzzled out the next sentence. It looked like “On the left hand is my mother and on the right hand is my father.”

Persian was a peculiar language. Short vowels simply were not written. Not at all. That meant you couldn't look at an unfamiliar word and figure it out—because you had no idea what short vowel was supposed to be in there. But they did have a symbol for indicating glottal stops, of all things. That funny sound a cockney makes when he says a word like “bottle”.
Bo'l
. They had a letter for that.

Gus made a sudden movement and knocked the Sunday edition of
The New York Times
to the floor, all fifty pounds of it. He glared at the paper and left it where it was. The price of the out-of-town edition kept going up and up and up, but Gus couldn't live without the Sunday
Times
. Even with its small disappointments.

Like today: no acrostic puzzle. Instead, two diagramless puzzles at the bottom of the page beneath the crossword. The diagramless kind was no fun; too easy. The occasional cryptic puzzle was okay and the crossword itself was always a goodie. But Gus wanted to see a gen-you-wine Thomas H. Middleton acrostic puzzle printed every Sunday. In fact, he'd like a new one every day. Gus Bilinski was a hopeless puzzle addict.

Which was one reason he kept picking up books like
Teach Yourself Persian
. Gus had no intention of visiting Iran, ever. He was horrified by everything he'd ever learned about the country, from the eleventh-century Assassins roaring down from the Elburz Mountains to slaughter the helpless right up to the latest outrages committed in the name of God. As far as Gus was concerned, Iran was for the Iranians. But the language—ah, there was a challenge. One he couldn't resist.

On the left hand is my mother
. Gus made a few practice strokes when a car pulling up outside his window distracted him. It was a cab. Gus stood up so he could see better—oh, it was Queen Megan from the third floor. Getting home the morning after, now that King Richard was gone. But Megan-baby wasn't looking quite so regal this morning, Gus thought with a flash of glee. That hair so black it had blue highlights—it was a mess. Her clothes were wrinkled and dirty. Looked as if someone had taken Superwoman down a peg or two.

Gus admired Megan's style and resented it at the same time. She wasn't exactly haughty with him; she always spoke pleasantly whenever they ran into each other in the lobby or the laundry. But so far she hadn't shown any noticeable inclination to extend the acquaintance. He'd initiated a couple of conversations and had gotten in as much bragging as he could in the time she allowed him. But she always looked as if she really would rather be somewhere else.

She might be thinking I want to go to bed with her
, Gus thought gloomily, vaguely aware that he was probably flattering himself. Gus knew he was not attractive physically; he had to count on people's recognizing what he thought of as his sterling character if he was to make friends. (Which didn't happen as often as he would have liked.) When Gus was out with a girl, there was always that sexual climate that got in the way of merely being friends. A feeling of expectation on the girl's part and a similar one of obligation on his, even though they both might prefer to skip the whole thing. Gus had made a few passes out of a sense of duty; a few had even been accepted in the same spirit. It was hard for men and women to be simply friends when they were both so conscious of their mating roles.

Gus just wanted to know Megan Phillips a little better; she looked like an interesting person. She moved with ease through the world of business and industry, a world Gus had only read about. That made her slightly exotic in Gus's eyes; he couldn't even begin to imagine himself in such an environment. Gus was curious about her.

Through the thin walls he could hear Megan come into the lobby and stop at the mailboxes. The last delivery had been at ten o'clock Saturday morning, yesterday—she hadn't been home then either? Ha, that must have been some weekend.