Ada stopped speaking, looked at the tiny ruined creature in its varnished coffin and shook off the past. “You recognize it, don’t you?”
Helen nodded. “It’s a Politer.”
“He’s dead,” Biff said, stunned.
The small creature sighed, nodded its head, and said, “Yes dear sir, he is dead. If it is not too much inconvenience, I would like to move him out of the roadway. He would be deeply upset if his body were to hinder anyone’s journey.”
“Certainly,” Biff said. He grabbed the Politer’s feet and helped his companion carry him to the side of the road. “What do you suppose was the cause of death?”
“Well, he’s pink, sir. I think that can only mean one thing.”
“Yes?”
“Well, rudeness, sir. There’s no doubt of it, really. Rudeness did for him.”
“I was just coming up the stairs when it started to run down them. I thought it was a rat or something, but then I knew, almost immediately, that it wasn’t, and I did recognize it, I did know what it was, and I remember thinking in my head, ‘There goes a Politer’ because I’d read the books, and I knew what it was.”
When Biff Bertram crashed on the planet, Decorum, he had immediately encountered a race of cheerful, self-effacing creatures called Politers whose entire life and philosophy was founded on a code of extreme Decency. And, as is so often the case in such precipitous landings, his timing had coincided with an attack by monstrous Gutwuzzards, a race dedicated to touring the known universe, photographing everything (a Gutwuzzard obscuring the foreground of every snap), and terrorizing the locals with loud, menacing laughter, derogatory comments on local customs, and ribald jokes that were offensive to every known form of sentient life, even the perverted Mud Shoats of Warmslime.
Gutwuzzards on any world were a nuisance. On the planet Decorum, where the gentle inhabitants could be murdered by rudeness, Gutwuzzards were disaster. And only Biff Bertram, with the help of his friend, Stinky Lester (a match for any Gutwuzzard), could save the day.
“We never showed this to anyone,” Ada said, pushing the tissue paper back and replacing the box’s lid. “We thought about showing it to the Simpec people, but we didn’t. We were scared. And when Raymond ran away from Simpec, that settled it. We put this box in the attic, and it stayed there. There weren’t any more…manifestations.”
Raymond had obviously been traumatized by the creature’s death. He felt responsible for bringing it into this world where it couldn’t live, and Ada thought he did what he could to prevent that from happening again. He became very remote, and for a long time he was like a stranger, hardly talking at all. It was Ada’s opinion that her son was watching himself, trying to hold his imagination in check for fear of what might happen.
“He got very good grades at school that year. I think it was his way of coping, throwing himself into his studies.”
And then, that summer, he began to hear voices and the radio would address him directly, suggesting that he pull one of his teeth out with a pliers (the tooth, it seemed, was an alien transmitter). He had a small 35-mm camera that John had given him for his birthday, and he began taking pictures everywhere he went. He was convinced that dark forces were clouding his mind, and that the camera would reveal what his bewitched brain could not puzzle out. The developed photos were mundane, showed nothing, but when Ada tried to reason with her son, he said that the ordinariness of the photos showed only that the Watchers knew to keep their distance when he carried the camera. One day, he left the house early in the morning, and he didn’t return, not that day, not the next.
John Story notified the authorities of his son’s disappearance, and the description matched that of a young man who had been discovered nude at a local construction site, cradling a shattered camera in his hands, incapable of speech. The police had transported him to the state psychiatric hospital.
Raymond’s parents saw to it that their son was transferred to Harwood Psychiatric Institute, where he was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia, medication was prescribed, and in less than two weeks he was released. While lucid and able to return to school in the fall, Raymond remained convinced that he had broken his camera in a tumble down a hill. Having lost his protection against the Watchers, he had been attacked, robbed of his clothes, molested mentally and physically. The details, of course, had been erased by his alien tormentors.
Raymond’s association with Harwood was ongoing. With the proper medication and outpatient treatment, he would rally for three or four months, and then some new delusion would surface, and he would have to be admitted to the Institute again. Ada did not want to talk about the procession of strange fancies. She had come to accept each new mental aberration with growing stoicism. And then Raymond had traveled back to familiar country, back to the children’s books of Harry Gainesborough, back to a convoluted world of fantasy and a book with the unlikely title of
Zod Wallop
.
“Lord Gainesborough is in my group,” Raymond had said, and Ada Story, having come to discount her son’s version of reality, had been amazed to discover that the sad, awkward man in need of a haircut, who smiled apologetically when Raymond introduced her to him, was indeed Harold Gainesborough. He looked older and less confident than the picture on his books, but he was unmistakably the same man.
Helen nodded. “I saw to it that he went to Harwood. He seemed in danger of hurting himself. I suppose there’s no medicine for a daughter’s death. If he and Jeanne could have stayed together, things might have been different. But they didn’t.
“You should have seen Amy. She had a sweetness that could light up a room and a way of laughing, hugging herself, like she was surprised that so much good feeling could inhabit her body. Well—” Helen stopped abruptly and Ada reached out and touched her arm.
“We better get back,” Ada said. “I’m sure they will be along shortly.”
Helen nodded, fetching a handkerchief from her purse and dabbing at her eyes. “I’m not usually this emotional,” she said.
“Such a tragedy,” Ada said.
Ada handed the box back to her husband, and he locked it in the trunk.
Harry was aware of the dust before he realized that the car had come to a stop. Since the Ralewing, since the shock of the postcard of Amy in front of the St. Petersburg Arms, the world of his immediate surroundings had receded. A wild maelstrom of thoughts churned inside, stirred by a single phrase:
you could change it back
. Raymond had said that.
You learned, growing up, that death was the ultimate minnow trap, entered with almost casual ease, down the narrowing funnel. Your goldfish died and turned into a pale, hard crescent, bobbing to the aquarium’s surface, later interred in a matchbox. Spanky the cat yawned, stretched, sauntered slowly across the highway, and had his entire nine lives slapped from him by a diesel that didn’t even slow on its way to Ohio.
Dead is the end of the line. Forever.
In this world.
Go to another world then. Flip the channel and find a world where Amy fed seagulls on a beach in Florida—something she had never done in this world.
And what if the other world was simply madness? What then? An easy answer, although he’d been edging up on it coyly: better a madness where his daughter lived than any cold reality that was robbed of her.
He would follow the faintest promise, go with Raymond, go… But the car was stopped, and fine orange dust, sour-smelling and full of over-ripe sunlight, poured in through the window. A construction worker wearing a hardhat approached. Road repairs, no doubt.
Then it happened, all the doors of the car sprung open, large men in tan jumpsuits shouting, rough hands clamping his shoulders, lifting him. “Let’s go!”
“Unhand me, blackguard!” Raymond’s unmistakable bellow.
Harry was spun around, slammed against the side of the car. He heard Rene scream and Allan roar, felt a pinprick at the base of his neck, accompanied by a coppery thirst that flared in the back of his throat.
The world slowed, and Harry watched the monkey scramble out the window and onto the car’s roof. It leapt to Harry’s shoulder, launching itself again immediately. Harry heard someone scream, felt the arms around his chest fall away. Harry turned, found that his legs disobeyed him, and crumbled slowly to the ground where tiny, purple flowers, triumphant amid the dust, greeted him. Someone shouted, “Shoot the monkey!”
Harry’s head lolled sideways, his eyes turned upward; he watched a rifle being raised by a thin, unshaven man wearing steel-rimmed glasses.
The man took aim, assuming a prissy, stiff-as-a-deacon stance. Harry watched Lord Arbus scampering toward a dusty hedge, beyond which a forest of oaks offered shelter. The spider monkey’s narrow shoulders and scruffy pelt already seemed to show the black-red hole of the bullet’s entrance and Harry screamed, “No!”
The rifle jumped in the air, a low crack sending the bullet skyward as the man toppled, howling, Emily’s head rising in the bulldozed rubble, her eyes unblinking over the trousered leg, her teeth firmly sunk in the marksman’s calf.
“Good for you Emily,” Harry said, his words a series of dry coughs that expelled the last of his consciousness as the drug took hold and carried him away.
H
ELEN
K
URTIS
C
LEANED
the cabin with fierce energy and then lay on the made bed, her hair still bound in a rag, a faint odor of Clorox rising from her like mist from a swamp.
Everyone was gone now and there was no reason to stay. The police had returned her car, and it was parked in the front yard. The tank was almost full. A storm was coming, rolling in from the east according to the radio, but if she left now, drove north through the night, she could beat the rain. A good plan. She closed her eyes and slept.
When she awoke, evening was approaching, the twilight hastened by thunderclouds, and Helen rolled on her side and clicked on the small bedside lamp.
She ached. Her blouse had slipped out from the elastic of her slacks, and she felt that curious disarray that she associated with growing old. In youth, she’d been a single, seamless entity, but now she was a bloat of stomach, a swelling of ankles, a knot of shoulders.
She sighed and climbed out of bed. She went to the front door and opened it, flipping the porch light on. A cold exhalation of rain glittered in the yellow light. She saw the shadow shape of her car.
“Harry, where the hell are you?” she said.
The police had found the car by the side of a country road, three miles from the cabin. Harry and his comrades had disappeared, vanished as though beamed up to Jupiter by those ubiquitous tabloid aliens.
Helen suspected that Dr. Roald Peake knew where Harry was. He and his crew had left abruptly in another summoned helicopter, but not before he’d received a phone call that had incensed him. Helen was the only one who had seen his reaction to the call—everyone else was outside when she handed the phone to him—and he had regained control immediately. But for a moment, rage had made the skull beneath his flesh visible, and his voice had grown cold.
“Are you sure?” he had said, causing Helen to turn and look at him. The words had been measured and quiet, but they had been encased in ice, brittle with menace. And then Peake had roared, “Why didn’t I know Blaine was here? Why wasn’t I informed? I do not pay you people to tell me what has happened! I pay you to see that it doesn’t happen!”
He had slammed the phone down, made another call. He had turned, seen Helen in the room then, conjured a smile with such suddenness that it startled her, and said, “Business. One headache after another.”
Helen had not smiled back. “You know something you’re not telling us.”
He shook his head no. “My dear lady, I don’t know where your friend Harold Gainesborough and his merry band are. I wish I did. I assure you I will do my utmost to find them.”
The police, when they arrived, offered the same assurances. And finally, they had all left.
Helen closed the door on the rain. She went back to the bed and sat on the edge. If she left tonight, she need only drive for a few hours before finding a motel. The anonymity of a motel room would surely be preferable to Harry’s abandoned cabin.
The phone cried fitfully and Helen answered it, dizzy with hope and fear.
“No, this is Helen,” she said, when the voice on the other end asked for Harry.
“Helen Kurtis?”
“Why yes.”
“Helen, this is Jeanne.”
“Jeanne!”
Harry’s ex had called for no particular reason. Just…well, she was worried, because she knew Harry had blown off the teaching job, stopped writing, withdrawn…and she just had a bad feeling that he was out there alone thinking…well, she knew how thinking could go, alone, and…
Helen had interrupted to tell her that Harry was missing and the police were investigating. Helen told the story, omitting the part where a giant Ralewing set a helicopter on fire (no one had mentioned the Ralewing to the police, either, sensing that it was an event that fell, most emphatically, in the you-had-to-be-there category; the smoldering helicopter had, in a simpler telling, crashed). Helen also omitted, for the sake of credibility, any mention of the corpse of an imaginary creature from the planet Decorum.