The Dancers of Noyo (24 page)

             
I started toward her. Already I felt the touch of her arm as I helped her up and was formulating the questions I would ask. Then the walls of the room rushed toward me. Something flashed, like the flutter of a flag with black and white checkers. The ceiling seemed to fall apart and let the morning sky enter. A second later everything was dark.

             
It was a thick darkness, and glistening, like a pool of India ink. It withdrew slowly, and I was standing in an empty room. The walls and ceiling were intact. But Franny was gone.

             
Helplessness and loss came flooding in on me. I called "Franny!" but of course there was no answer. What should I do? I tried to think, and found I was shaking with fury. There were flint and tinder in my medicine bag. I could burn this vile, delusive house down. The house had it coming to it.

             
But that would only maroon Franny wherever she was, beyond hope of recovery. I had better try to control myself.

             
Well, I could go to Ukiah
...
What would the county agent think of this story of a disappearing girl, a Greek coin seen in a dream, a luminous web, and a new disappearance? And even if he believed me, what could he do? He could send a deputy back to Point Arena with me, and we could search this house.

             
The clue must be in this room. At any rate, I would begin here. I started to feel over the walls again. If I could find the projectors, they might give me a hint as to where Franny was. It was not so dark but that I could see pale spots on the walls, oval or rectangular, as if pictures had hung there once and been removed.

             
At shoulder level I found two small ovals, the larger about three by six inches, rimmed with metal. They were not identical, and they plainly were not projectors, which was why I had not paid much attention to them before. But what were they?
Pictures?
They held pieces of glass, but there was nothing under the glass except faded wallpaper.

             
A flicker with the smaller oval caught my eye. I looked closer. It was like trying to read tiny type; it got plainer as I looked. Abruptly I saw that it was Franny, with the web falling around her knees as if it were clothing she was discarding, holding out her hands to me in what seemed entreaty and distress. I thought she was a long way off.

             
I drew a deep breath. She wasn't back, of course, but I could see her. But I didn't know what to do next. This was the house of being-at-a-loss-ness.

             
I touched both ovals, I pressed and worked them. Nothing happened. The tiny Franny in the oval was turning her head from side to side as if she listened to something. Did that mean I was on the right track?

             
I ceased my manipulations. She seemed to go on listening. Perhaps that wasn't it. But by now I had convinced myself that there must be a switch—something that, if pressed, would bring Franny back to me. I clung to that.

             
I looked around me. What about the light switch, the ordinary, conventional light switch? I could try.

             
I wiggled the toggle. No light came on; the globes in the fixtures had gone long ago. But the Franny in the oval disappeared and though I pushed the toggle up and down a dozen times she didn't come back.

             
Had I found her again only to lose her? I felt sick. I fumbled with my medicine bag. I'd look through it—but what did I have in it that was useful?—and then I'd search the house. And if I still couldn't find her, I'd fire the house.
The vicious, cruel, hoaxing house.

             
This last resolve steadied my nerves a good deal. I was still fumbling with the contents of my bag when
a
slight noise made me turn and look. Franny, as large as life, was lying on her back in the dust of the bare floor, her knees
a
little flexed. She was breathing quietly, as if she were asleep.

             
I could hardly bear to try to touch her. What if my hands missed her once more? But she was warm and real under the fabric of her shirt, and she opened her eyes and looked at me.

             
She put her hands to her head (she told me afterwards that she had come back with a splitting headache), and then sat up and looked around
puzzledly
. "Where am I, Sam?" she said at last. Her voice sounded odd. But I was relieved to find she recognized me.

             
"In
a
house in Point Arena," I said" after an instant's thought.

             
"Oh. What's been happening?"

             
"I don't really know what's been happening
myself
."
I
filled her in on events as I had observed them. She listened with a puzzled frown, except when I mentioned the silver coin. Then her face cleared.

             
"I—that—
that's
when it started happening," she said.

             
"When what started?"

             
"When the coin came rolling down the street toward me and stopped in front of me. I left the bike to pick it up. You see, I recognized it."

             
"Recognized it?
From what I told you about a coin in my extra-life as Bennet?"

             
"No, not that.
But my mother used to wear it—or one just like it—in a silver setting on a chain around her neck. So I started after it." She paused, her hand to her head.

             
"Then what?"
I prompted. I was on my knees beside her on the dusty floor.

             
She shook her head and winced. "I don't know. It's like a lot of bad dreams. I seem to remember a lot of rubbery fingers going over me softly, tickling and tracing, and my trying for a long time to wake up. But after that, the next thing is you knee
li
ng beside me on the floor.

             
"What happened to you after the man tried to get you to take the coin?"

             
I told her. I wasn't especially proud of the way I'd acted—it certainly wasn't heroic—but I don't know what more I could have done (those words are the clue to all
pusillanimous
actions).

             
At the end of my narrative, she shook her head again. "No, I don't remember any of it," she said. "Maybe my trying to wake up happened when you were calling me."

             
"You don't know where you were? I
mean,
you haven't any impression of what sort of—of space was around you?"

             
"None at all, except that it wasn't here, I think." She looked around the empty room.

             
I considered. Out of all the questions that were tumbling around in my mind, I selected one. "Franny, do you know who Kate Wimbold was? Was she
a
real person?"

             
"Oh, yes. I thought you knew. She was my mother. My father gave her the Greek coin. As I said, she wore it in a silver setting around her neck. They split up when I was
a
baby, and she never talked about him much. But she kept the coin."

             
The love life of Franny's parents didn't interest me. But
a
strange idea had
occured
to me. "Franny, is your father really dead?"

             
She stared at me.
"Dead?
Of course he's dead. I saw him die. I was at his funeral. He was cremated. He couldn't be any deader. Why?"

             
"Because sometimes I feel I'm straggling with somebody whose agents are the Dancers and the Avengers and the chemical-conscience people, somebody behind them. It's the Mandarins, I suppose. But your father seems
a
perfect representative of the older generation
—
brilliant, queer, opinionated.
A drug-user.
I wondered for a minute if he was really dead."

             
"Oh, he's dead all right. I suppose he could be considered responsible for a lot of things, though. Including the bad night you spent waiting for me in the street."

             
"
Umh
?
How do you mean that?"

             
"Well, I don't know who was operating it. But I think I fell—or was pushed—into one of my father's traps." She smiled almost smugly at me.

             
"—
You
mean this whole setup"
—
I made a gesture that took in the whole house—"was meant as a trap for somebody?"

             
She nodded, though not very vigorously. "Where my father was concerned, you never were sure of anything. Did the things he talked about really happen, or were they things he thought up in one of his drug dreams? But he
said
he had 'set three traps for lost love' along the Mendocino coast. I had the impression that one of them, at least, was out in the water.

             
"Certainly my mother never went back to him. She was in and out of several communes before she died
—
she was still a young woman—in one of the plagues.

             
"If he was trying to trap her, the coin may have been meant as bait."

             
"Did your mother go in for
skindiving
?" I asked.

             
"Um-hum.
I thought that was why my father put one of the traps out in the surf."

             
So that part of my life as Bennet had been accurate. I considered. Had the Navarro tribe, and its Dancer, been vanished in one of O'Hare's traps? Would O'Hare have wanted to
vanish
a woman he was trying to regain? Franny, who probably had actually been in one of O'Hare's traps, couldn't say what it was like. There was nothing to go on
...
The tribesman at Albion had kept looking out to sea as if he expected trouble to come from there.

             
Franny sat holding her head and sniffling. The room was getting lighter. "Let's be getting on to Bodega," I said at last. I felt that I had had a bellyful of perils and troubles. I wanted a quiet room, food, sleep, and eventually sex with Franny. I think we both felt this item had been on the agenda for a long time, but we'd always been too anxious or too tired. "The bike may still be out in the street."

             
I got to my feet and started toward the door. "Wait," Franny said softly. "Men with bows are coming up on the porch."

-

             
The tribe at Anchor Bay hadn't got itself a Dancer. According to Wally, who seemed to be a sort of headman, they had no desire for one. All their energies went into basketry—they made beautiful baskets, with months of work required for even the small ones—and abalone fishing. They considered grilled slugs a delicacy, in the best
Yokiah-Boyah
fashion. They were the most self-consciously Pomo of any tribe I had encountered. Wally even looked like a Pomo: short and very broad-framed, with a broad, flat face and a thin, straight nose.

             
The tribe was currently living at what had been a private campground in pre-plague days. The abalone fishing was good there, and the tribe's children liked playing the abandoned swimming pool. Somewhat back from the beach there were a couple of shacks, scorned by the archaizing tribesmen. I had my eye on one of them as a nest for Franny and me.