Authors: Theodore Sturgeon
“Gerry ho-ho,” she said. Now she was on top of the row of boxes they used as storage shelves, over on the other side of the room.
“Gerry hee-hee!” Now she was under the table. “Gerry ho-ho!” This time she was right in the corner with me, crowding me.
I yelped and tried to get out of the way and bumped the stool. I was afraid of it, so I shrank back again and the little girl was gone.
The man glanced over his shoulder from where he was working at the fire. “Cut it out, you kids,” he said.
There was a silence, and then the girl came slowly out from the bottom row of shelves. She walked across to her dress and put it on.
“How did you do that?” I wanted to know.
“Ho-ho,” she said.
Janie said, “It’s easy. She’s really twins.”
“Oh,” I said. Then another girl, exactly the same, came from somewhere in the shadows and stood beside the first. They were identical. They stood side by side and stared at me. This time I let them stare.
“That’s Bonnie and Beanie,” said the painter. “This is Baby and that—” she indicated the man—“that’s Lone. And I’m Janie.”
I couldn’t think of what to say, so I said, “Yeah.”
Lone said, “Water, Janie.” He held up a pot. I heard water trickling, but didn’t see anything. “That’s enough,” he said, and hung the pot on a crane. He picked up a cracked china plate and brought it over to me. It was full of stew with great big lumps of meat in it and thick gravy and dumplings and carrots. “Here, Gerry. Sit down.”
I looked at the stool. “On that?”
“Sure.”
“Not me,” I said. I took the plate and hunkered down against the wall.
“Hey,” he said after a time. “Take it easy. We’ve all had chow. No one’s going to snatch it away from you. Slow down!”
I ate even faster than before. I was almost finished when I threw it all up. Then for some reason my head hit the edge of the stool. I dropped the plate and spoon and slumped there. I felt real bad.
Lone came over and looked at me. “Sorry, kid,” he said. “Clean up, will you, Janie?”
Right in front of my eyes, the mess on the floor disappeared. I didn’t care about that or anything else just then. I felt the man’s hand on the side of my neck. Then he tousled my hair.
“Beanie, get him a blanket. Let’s all go to sleep. He ought to rest a while.”
I felt the blanket go around me, and I think I was asleep before he put me down.
I don’t know how much later it was when I woke up. I didn’t know where I was and that scared me. I raised my head and saw the dull glow of the embers in the fireplace. Lone was stretched out on it in his clothes. Janie’s easel stood in the reddish blackness like some great preying insect. I saw the baby’s head pop up out of the bassinet, but I couldn’t tell whether he was looking straight at me or away. Janie was lying on the floor near the door and the twins were on the old table. Nothing moved except the baby’s head, bobbing a little.
I got to my feet and looked around the room. Just a room, only the one door. I tiptoed towards it. When I passed Janie, she opened her eyes.
“What’s the matter?” she whispered.
“None of your business,” I told her. I went to the door as if I didn’t care, but I watched her. She didn’t do anything. The door was as solid tight closed as when I’d tried it before.
I went back to Janie. She just looked up at me. She wasn’t scared. I told her, “I got to go to the john.”
“Oh,” she said. “Why’n’t you say so?”
Suddenly I grunted and grabbed my guts. The feeling I had I can’t begin to talk about. I acted as if it was a pain, but it wasn’t. It was like nothing else that ever happened me before. Something went
splop
on the snow outside.
“Okay,” Janie said. “Go on back to bed.”
“But I got to—”
“You got to what?”
“Nothing.” It was true. I didn’t have to go no place.
“Next time tell me right away. I don’t mind.”
I didn’t say anything. I went back to my blanket.
“That’s all?” said Stern. I lay on the couch and looked up at the gray ceiling. He asked, “How old are you?”
“Fifteen,” I said dreamily. He waited until, for me, the gray ceiling acquired walls on a floor, a rug and lamps and a desk and a chair with Stern in it. I sat up and held my head a second, and then I looked at him. He was fooling with his pipe and looking at me. “What did you do to me?”
“I told you. I don’t do anything here. You do it.”
“You hypnotized me.”
“I did not.” His voice was quiet, but he really meant it.
“What was all that, then? It was... it was like it was happening for real all over again.”
“Feel anything?”
“Everything.” I shuddered. “
Every
damn thing. What was it?”
“Anyone doing it feels better afterwards. You can go over it all again now any time you want to, and every time you do, the hurt in it will be less. You’ll see.”
It was the first thing to amaze me in years. I chewed on it and then asked, “If I did it by myself, how come it never happened before?”
“It needs someone to listen.”
“Listen? Was I talking?”
“A blue streak.”
“Everything that happened?”
“How can I know? I wasn’t there. You were.”
“You don’t believe it happened, do you? Those disappearing kids and the footstool and all?”
He shrugged. “I’m not in the business of believing or not believing. Was it real to you?”
“Oh, hell, yes!”
“Well, then, that’s all that matters. Is that where you live, with those people?”
I bit off a fingernail that had been bothering me. “Not for a long time. Not since Baby was three.” I looked at him. “You remind me of Lone.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. No, you don’t.” I added suddenly. “I don’t know what made me say that.” I lay down abruptly.
The ceiling was gray and the lamps were dim. I heard the pipe-stem click against his teeth. I lay there for a long time.
“Nothing happens,” I told him.
“What did you expect to happen?”
“Like before.”
“There’s something there that wants out. Just let it come.”
It was as if there was a revolving drum in my head, and on it were photographed the places and things and people I was after. And it was as if the drum was spinning very fast, so fast I couldn’t tell one picture from another. I made it stop, and it stopped at a blank segment. I spun it again, and stopped it again.
“Nothing happens,” I said.
“Baby is three,” he repeated.
“Oh,” I said. “That.” I closed my eyes.
That might be it. Might, sight, night, light. I might have the sight of a light in the night. Maybe the baby. Maybe the sight of the baby at night because of the light...
There was night after night when I lay on that blanket, and a lot of nights I didn’t. Something was going on all the time in Lone’s house. Sometimes I slept in the daytime. I guess the only time everybody slept at once was when someone was sick, like me the first time I arrived there. It was always sort of dark in the room, the same night and day, the fire going, the two old bulbs hanging yellow by their wires from the battery. When they got too dim, Janie fixed the battery and they got bright again.
Janie did everything that needed doing, whatever no one else felt like doing. Everybody else did things, too. Lone was out a lot. Sometimes he used the twins to help him, but you never missed them, because they’d be here and gone and back again bing! like that. And Baby, he just stayed in his bassinet.
I did things myself. I cut wood for the fire and I put up more shelves, and then I’d go swimming with Janie and the twins sometimes. And I talked to Lone. I didn’t do a thing that the others couldn’t do, but they all did things I couldn’t do. I was mad, mad all the time about that. But I wouldn’t of known what to do with myself if I wasn’t mad all the time about something or other. It didn’t keep us from bleshing. Bleshing, that was Janie’s word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can’t walk and arms can’t think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of “blending” and “meshing”, but I don’t think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that.
Baby talked all the time. He was like a broadcasting station that runs twenty-four hours a day, and you can get what it’s sending any time you tune in, but it’ll keep sending whether you tune in or not. When I say he talked, I don’t mean exactly that. He semaphored mostly. You’d think those wandering vague movements of his hands and arms and legs and head were meaningless, but they weren’t. It was semaphore, only instead of a symbol for a sound, or such like, the movements were whole thoughts.
I mean spread the left hand and shake the right high up, and thump with the left heel, and it means, “Anyone who thinks a starling is a pest just don’t know anything about how a starling thinks” or something like that. Janie said she made Baby invent the semaphore business. She said she used to be able to hear the twins thinking—that’s what she said; hear them thinking—and they could hear Baby. So she would ask the twins whatever she wanted to know, and they’d ask Baby, and then tell her what he said. But then as they grew up they began to lose the knack of it. Every young kid does. So Baby learned to understand when someone talked, and he’d answer with this semaphore stuff.
Lone couldn’t read the stuff and neither could I. The twins didn’t give a damn. Janie used to watch him all the time. He always knew what you meant if you wanted to ask him something, and he’d tell Janie and she’d say what it was. Part of it, anyway. Nobody could get it all, not even Janie.
All I know is Janie would sit there and paint her pictures and watch Baby, and sometimes she’d bust out laughing.
Baby never grew any. Janie did, and the twins, and so did I, but not Baby. He just lay there. Janie kept his stomach full and cleaned him up every two or three days. He didn’t cry and he didn’t make any trouble. No one ever went near him.
Janie showed every picture she painted to Baby, before she cleaned the boards and painted new ones. She had to clean them because she only had three of them. It was a good thing, too, because I’d hate to think what that place would of been like if she’d kept them all; she did four or five a day. Lone and the twins were kept hopping getting turpentine for her. She could shift the paints back into the little pots on her easel without any trouble, just by looking at the picture one color at a time, but turps was something else again. She told me that Baby remembered all her pictures and that’s why she didn’t have to keep them. They were all pictures of machines and gear-trains and mechanical linkages and what looked like electric circuits and things like that. I never thought too much about them.
I went out with Lone to get some turpentine and a couple of picnic hams one time. We went through the woods to the railroad track and down a couple of miles to where we could see the glow of a town. Then the woods again, and some alleys, and a back street.
Lone was like always, walking along, thinking, thinking.
We came to a hardware store and he went up and looked at the lock and came back to where I was waiting, shaking his head. Then we found a general store. Lone grunted and we went and stood in the shadows by the door. I looked in.
All of a sudden Beanie was in there, naked like she always was when she travelled like that. She came and opened the door from the inside. We went in and Lone closed it and locked it.
“Get along home, Beanie,” he said, “before you catch your death.”
She grinned at me and said, “Ho-ho,” and disappeared.
We found a pair of fine hams and a two-gallon can of turpentine. I took a bright yellow ballpoint pen and Lone cuffed me and made me put it back.
“We only take what we need,” he told me.
After we left, Beanie came back and locked the door and went home again. I only went with Lone a few times, when he had more to get than he could carry easily.
I was there about three years. That’s all I can remember about it. Lone was there or he was out, and you could hardly tell the difference. The twins were with each other most of the time. I got to like Janie a lot, but we never talked much. Baby talked all the time, only I don’t know what about.
We were all busy and we bleshed.
I sat up on the couch suddenly.
Stern said, “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter. This isn’t getting me any place.”
“You said that when you’d barely started. Do you think you’ve accomplished anything since then?”
“Oh, yeah, but—”
“Then how can you be sure you’re right this time?” When I didn’t say anything, he asked me, “Didn’t you like this last stretch?”
I said angrily, “I didn’t like or not like. It didn’t mean nothing. It was just—just talk.”
“So what was the difference between this last session and what happened before?”
“My gosh, plenty! The first one, I felt everything. It was all really happening to me. But this time—nothing.”
“Why do you suppose that was?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“Suppose,” he said thoughtfully, “that there was some episode so unpleasant to you that you wouldn’t dare relive it.”
“Unpleasant? You think freezing to death isn’t unpleasant?”
“There are all kinds of unpleasantness. Sometimes the very thing you’re looking for—the thing that’ll clear up your trouble—is so revolting to you that you won’t go near it. Or you try to hide it. Wait,” he said suddenly, “maybe ‘revolting’ and ‘unpleasant’ are inaccurate words to use. It might be something very desirable to you. It’s just that you don’t want to get straightened out.”
“I
want
to get straightened out.”
He waited as if he had to clear something up in his mind, and then said, “There’s something in that ‘Baby is three’ phrase that bounces you away. Why is that?”
“Damn if I know.”
“Who said it?”
“I dunno... uh...”
He grinned. “Uh?”
I grinned back at him. “I said it.”
“Okay. When?”
I quit grinning. He leaned forward, then got up.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
He said, “I didn’t think anyone could be that mad.” I didn’t say anything. He went over to his desk. “You don’t want to go on any more, do you?”
“No.”
“Suppose I told you you want to quit because you’re right on the very edge of finding out what you want to know?”
“Why don’t you tell me and see what I do?”
He just shook his head. “I’m not telling you anything. Go on, leave if you want to. I’ll give you back your change.”
“How many people quit just when they’re on top of the answer?”
“Quite a few.”
“Well, I ain’t going to.” I lay down.
He didn’t laugh and he didn’t say, “Good,” and he didn’t make any fuss about it. He just picked up his phone and said, “Cancel everything for this afternoon,” and went back to his chair, up there out of my sight.
It was very quiet in there. He had the place soundproofed.
I said, “Why do you suppose Lone let me live there so long when I couldn’t do any of the things that the other kids could?”
“Maybe you could.”
“Oh, no,” I said positively. “I used to try. I was strong for a kid my age and I knew how to keep my mouth shut, but aside from those two things I don’t think I was any different from any kid. I don’t think I’m any different right now, except what difference there might be from living with Lone and his bunch.”
“Has this anything to do with ‘Baby is three’?”
I looked up at the gray ceiling. “Baby is three. Baby is three. I went up to a big house with a winding drive that ran under a sort of theater-marquee thing. Baby is three. Baby...”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-three,” I said, and the next thing you know I was up off that couch like it was hot and heading for the door.
Stern grabbed me. “Don’t be foolish. Want me to waste a whole afternoon?”
“What’s that to me? I’m paying for it.”
“All right, it’s up to you.”
I went back. “I don’t like any part of this,” I said.
“Good. We’re getting warm then.”
“What made me say ‘Thirty-three’? I ain’t thirty-three. I’m fifteen. And another thing...”
“Yes?”
“It’s about that ‘Baby is three.’ It’s me saying it, all right. But when I think about it—it’s not my voice.”
“Like thirty-three’s not your age?”
“Yeah,” I whispered.
“Gerry,” he said warmly, “there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
I realized I was breathing too hard. I pulled myself together. I said, “I don’t like remembering saying things in somebody else’s voice.”
“Look,” he told me. “This head-shrinking business, as you called it a while back, isn’t what most people think. When I go with you into the world of your mind—or when you go yourself, for that matter—what we find isn’t so very different from the so-called real world. It seems so at first, because the patient comes out with all sorts of fantasies and irrationalities and weird experiences. But everyone lives in that kind of world. When one of the ancients coined the phrase ‘truth is stranger than fiction’, he was talking about that.
“Everywhere we go, everything we do, we’re surrounded by symbols, by things so familiar we don’t ever look at them or don’t see them if we do look. If anyone ever could report to you exactly what he saw and thought while walking ten feet down the street, you’d get the most twisted, clouded, partial picture you ever ran across. And nobody ever looks at what’s around him with any kind of attention until he gets into a place like this. The fact that he’s looking at past events doesn’t matter; what counts is that he’s seeing clearer than he ever could before, just because, for once, he’s trying.
“Now—about this ‘thirty-three’ business. I don’t think a man could get a nastier shock than to find he has someone else’s memories. The ego is too important to let slide that way. But consider: all your thinking is done in code and you have the key to only about a tenth of it. So you run into a stretch of code which is abhorrent to you. Can’t you see that the only way you’ll find the key to it is to stop avoiding it?”
“You mean I’d started to remember with... with somebody else’s mind?”
“It looked like that to you for a while, which means something. Let’s try to find out what.”
“All right.” I felt sick. I felt tired. And I suddenly realized that being sick and being tired was a way of trying to get out of it.
“Baby is three,” he said.
Baby is maybe. Me, three, thirty-three, me, you Kew you.
“Kew!” I yelled. Stern didn’t say anything. “Look, I don’t know why, but I think I know how to get to this, and this isn’t the way. Do you mind if I try something else?”
“You’re the doctor,” he said.
I had to laugh. Then I closed my eyes.