Quicker than the eye Read online

  «I bet!» Rodney applauded politely.

  Roger Bentley could only sink under the weight of his son's irony to stroke the dear dead beast.

  «Sorry. Dog bit me. Can't help myself. Thousands of years, all we did is die. Now, that time's over. In sum: science fiction.»

  «Bull.» Rodney laughed. «Stop reading that junk, Dad.»

  «Junk?» Roger touched Dog's muzzle. «Sure. But how about Lister, Pasteur, Salk? Hated death. Jumped to stop it. That's all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different. Junk?!»

  «Ancient history, Pop.»

  «Ancient?» Roger Bentley fixed his son with a terrible eye. «Christ. When I was born in 1920, if you wanted to visit your family on Sundays you-«

  «Went to the graveyard?» said Rodney.

  «Yes. My brother and sister died when I was seven. Half of my family gone! Tell me, dear children, how many of your friends died while you were growing up. In grammar school? High school?»

  He included the family in his gaze, and waited.

  «None,» said Rodney at last.

  «None! You hear that? None! Christ. Six of my best friends died by the time I was ten! Wait! I just remembered!»

  Roger Bentley hurried to rummage in a hall closet and brought out an old 78-rpm record into the sunlight, blowing off the dust. He squinted at the label:

  «No News, Or What Killed The Dog?»

  Everyone came to look at the ancient disc.

  «Hey, how old is that?»

  «Heard it a hundred times when I was a kid in the twenties,» said Roger.

  «No News, Or What Killed The Dog?» Sal glanced at her father's face.

  «This gets played at Dog's funeral,» he said.

  «You're not serious?» said Ruth Bentley.

  Just then the doorbell rang.

  «That can't be the Pet Cemetery people come to take Dog-?»

  «No!» cried Susan. «Not so soon!»

  Instinctively, the family formed a wall between Dog and the doorbell sound, holding off eternity.

  Then they cried, one more time.

  The strange and wonderful thing about the funeral was how many people came.

  «I didn't know Dog had so many friends,» Susan blubbered.

  «He freeloaded all around town,» said Rodney.

  «Speak kindly of the dead.»

  «Well, he did, dammit., Otherwise why is Bill Johnson here, or Gert Skall, or Jim across the street?»

  «Dog,» said Roger Bentley, «I sure wish you could see this.»

  «He does.» Susan's eyes welled over. «Wherever he is.»

  «Good old Sue,» whispered Rodney, «who cries at telephone books-«

  «Shut up!» cried Susan.

  «Hush, both of you.»

  And Roger Bentley moved, eyes down, toward the front of the small funeral parlor where Dog was laid out, head on paws, in a box that was neither too rich nor too simple but just right.

  Roger Bentley placed a steel needle down on the black record which turned on top of a flake-painted portable phonograph. The needle scratched and hissed. All the neighbors leaned forward.

  «No funeral oration,» said Roger quickly. «Just this . . And a voice spoke on a day long ago and told a story about a man who returned from vacation to ask friends what had happened while he was gone.

  It seemed that nothing whatsoever had happened. Oh, just one thing. Everyone wondered what had killed the dog.

  The dog? asked the vacationer. My dog died? Yes, and maybe it was the burned horseflesh did it. Burned horseflesh!? cried the vacationer. Well, said his informant, when the barn burned, the horseflesh caught fire, so the dog ate the burned horseflesh, died.

  The barn!? cried the vacationer. How did it catch fire? Well, sparks from the house blew over, torched the barn, burned the horseflesh, dog ate them, died.

  Sparks from the house!? shouted the vacationer. How-?

  It was the curtains in the house, caught fire.

  Curtains? Burned!?

  From the candles around the coffin.

  Coffin!?

  Your aunt's funeral coffin, candles there caught the curtains, house burned, sparks from the house flew over, burned down the barn, dog ate the burned horseflesh-In sum: no news, or what killed the dog!

  The record hissed and stopped.

  In the silence, there was a little quiet laughter, even though the record had been about dogs and people dying.

  «Now, do we get the lecture?» said Rodney.

  «No, a sermon.»

  Roger Bentley put his hands on the pulpit to stare for long moments at notes he hadn't made.

  «I don't know if we're here for Dog or ourselves. Both, I suppose. We're the nothing-ever-happened-to-us people. Today is a first. Not that I want a rush of doom or disease. God forbid. Death, come slowly, please.»

  He turned the phonograph record round and round in his hands, trying to read the words under the grooves.

  «No news. Except the aunt's funeral candles catch the curtains, sparks fly, and the dog goes west. In our lives, just the opposite. No news for years. Good livers, healthy hearts, good times. So-what's it all about?»

  Roger Bentley glanced at Rodney, who was checking his wristwatch.

  «Someday we must die, also.» Roger Bentley hurried on. «Hard to believe. We're spoiled. But Susan was right. Dog died to tell us this, gently, and we must believe. And at the same time celebrate. What? The fact that we're the start of an amazing, dumbfounding history of survival that will only get better as the centuries pass. You may argue that the next war will take us all. Maybe.

  «I can only say I think you will grow to be old, very old people. Ninety years from now, most people will have cured hearts, stopped cancers, and jumped life cycles. A lot of sadness will have gone out of the world, thank God. Will this be easy to do? No. Will we do it? Yes. Not in all countries, right off. But, finally, in most.

  «As I said yesterday, fifty years ago, if you wanted to

  visit your aunts, uncles, grandparents, brothers, sisters, the graveyard was it. Death was all the talk. You had to talk it. Time's up, Rodney?»

  Rodney signaled his father he had one last minute.

  Roger Bentley wound it down:

  «Sure, kids still die. But not millions. Old folks? Wind up in Sun City instead of marble Orchard.»

  The father surveyed his family, bright-eyed, in the pews.

  «God, look at you! Then look back. A thousand centuries of absolute terror, absolute grief. How parents stayed sane to raise their kids when half of them died, damned if I know. Yet with broken hearts, they did. While millions died of flu or the Plague.

  «So here we are in a new time that we can't see because we stand in the eye of the hurricane, where everything's calm.

  «I'll shut up now, with a last word for Dog. Because we loved him, we've done this almost silly thing, this service, but now suddenly we're not ashamed or sorry we bought him a plot or had me speak. We may never come visit him, who can say? But he has a place. Dog, old boy, bless you. Now, everyone, blow your nose.»

  Everyone blew his nose.

  «Dad,» said Rodney suddenly, «could-we hear the record again?»

  Everyone looked at Rodney, surprised.

  «Just,» said Roger Bentley, «what I was going to suggest.»

  He put the needle on the record. It hissed.

  About a minute in, when the sparks from the house flew over to burn the barn and torch the horseflesh and kill the dog, there was a sound at the back doorway to the small parlor.

  Everyone turned.

  A strange man stood in the door holding a small wicker basket from which came familiar, small yapping sounds.

  And even as the flames from the candles around the coffin caught the curtains and the last sparks blew on the wind

  The whole family, drawn out into the sunlight, gathered around the stranger with the wicker basket, waiting for Father to arrive to throw back the coverlet on the small carri
er so they could all dip their hands in.

  That moment, as Susan said later, was like reading the telephone book one more time.

  The Witch Door

  1995 year

  It was a pounding on a door, a furious, frantic, insistent pounding, born of hysteria and fear and a great desire to be heard, to be freed, to be let loose, to escape. It was a wrenching at hidden paneling, it was a hollow knocking, a rapping, a testing, a clawing! It was a scratching at hollow boards, a ripping at bedded nails; it was a muffled closet shouting and demanding, far away, and a call to be noticed, followed by a silence.

  The silence was the most empty and terrible of all. Robert and Martha Webb sat up in bed.

  «Did you hear it?»

  «Yes, again.»

  «Downstairs.»

  Now whoever it was who had pounded and rapped and made his fingers raw, drawn blood with his fever and quest to be free, had drawn into silence, listening himself to see if his terror and drumming had summoned any help.

  The winter night lay through the house with a falling-snow silence, silence snowing into every room, drifting over tables and floors, and banking up the stairwell.

  Then the pounding started again. And then:

  A sound of soft crying.

  «Downstairs.»

  «Someone in the house.»

  «Lotte, do you think? The front door's unlocked.»

  «She'd have knocked. Can't be Lotte.»

  «She's the only one it could be. She phoned.»

  They both glanced at the phone. If you lifted the receiver, you heard a winter stillness. The phones were dead. They had died days ago with the riots in the nearest towns and cities. Now, in the receiver, you heard only your own heart-beat. «Can you put me up?» Lone had cried from six hundred miles away. «Just overnight?»

  But before they could answer her, the phone had filled itself with long miles of silence.

  «Lotte is coming. She sounded hysterical. That might be her,» said Martha Webb.

  «No,'' said Robert. «I heard that crying other nights, too. Dear God.»

  They lay in the cold room in this farmhouse back in the Massachusetts wilderness, back from the main roads, away from the towns, near a bleak river and a black forest. It was the frozen middle of December. The white smell of snow cut the air.

  They arose. With an oil lamp lit, they sat on the edge of the bed as if dangling their legs over a precipice.

  «There's no one downstairs, there can't be.»

  «Whoever it is sounds frightened.»

  «We're all frightened, damn it. That's why we came out here, to be away from cities, riots, all that damned foolishness. No more wiretaps, arrests, taxes, neurotics. Now when we find it at last, people call and upset us. And tonight this, Christ!» He glanced at his wife. «You afraid?»

  «I don't know. I don't believe in ghosts. This is 1999; I'm sane. Or like to think I am. Where's your gun?»

  «We won't need it. Don't ask me why, but we won't.» They picked up their oil lamps. In another month the small power plant would be finished in the white barns behind the house and there'd be power to spare, but now they haunted the farm, coming and going with dim lamps or candles.

  They stood at the stairwell, both thirty-three, both immensely practical.

  The crying, the sadness, and the plea came from below in the winter rooms.

  «She sounds so damned sad,» said Robert. «God, I'm sorry for her, but don't even know who it is. Come on.»

  They went downstairs.

  As if hearing their footsteps, the crying grew louder. There was a dull thudding against a hidden panel somewhere.

  «The Witch Door!» said Martha Webb at last.

  «Can't be.»

  «Is.»

  They stood in the long hall looking at that place under the stairs, where the panels trembled faintly. But now the cries faded, as if the crier was exhausted, or something had diverted her, or perhaps their voices had startled her and she was listening for them to speak again. Now the winter-night house was silent and the man and wife waited with the oil lamps quietly fuming in their hands.

  Robert Webb stepped to the Witch Door and touched it, probing for the hidden button, the secret spring. «There can't be anyone in there,» he said. «My God, we've been here six months, and that's just a cubby. Isn't that what the Realtor said when he sold the place? No one could hide in there and us not know it. We-«

  «Listen!»

  They listened.

  Nothing.

  «She's gone, it's gone, whatever it was, hell, that door hasn't been opened in our lifetime. Everyone's forgotten where the spring is that unlocks it. I don't think there is a door, only a loose panel, and rats' nests, that's all. The walls, scratching. Why not?» He turned to look at his wife, who was staring at the hidden place.

  «Silly,» she said. «Good Lord, rats don't cry. That was a voice, asking to be saved. Lotte, I thought. But now I know it wasn't she, but someone else in as much trouble.»

  Martha Webb reached out and trembled her fingertips along the beveled edge of ancient maple. «Can't we open it?»

  «With a crowbar and hammer, tomorrow.»

  «Oh, Robert!»

  «Don't 'Oh, Robert' me. I'm tired.»

  «You can't leave her in there to-«

  «She's quiet now. Christ, I'm exhausted. I'll come down at the crack of dawn and knock the damned thing apart, okay?»

  «All right,» she said, and tears came to her eyes.

  «Women,» said Robert Webb. «Oh, my God, you and Lotte, Lotte and you. If she is coming here, if she makes it, I'll have a houseful of lunatics!»

  «Lotte's fine!»

  «Sure, but she should keep her mouth shut. It doesn't pay now to say you're Socialist, Democrat, Libertarian, Pro-Life Abortionist, Sinn Fein Fascist, Commie, any damn thing. The towns are bombed out. People are looking for scapegoats and Lotte has to shoot from the hip, get herself smeared and now, hell, on the run.»

  «They'll jail her if they catch her. Or kill her, yes, kill her. We're lucky to be here with our own food. Thank God we planned ahead, we saw it coming, the starvation, the massacres. We helped ourselves. Now we help Lone if she makes it through.»

  Without answering, he turned to the stairs. «I'm dead on my feet. I'm tired of saving anyone. Even Lotte. But hell, if she comes through the front door, she's saved.»

  They went up the stairs taking the lamps, advancing in an ever-moving aura of trembling white glow. The house was as silent as snow falling. «God,» he whispered. «Damn, I don't like women crying like that.»

  It sounded like the whole world crying, he thought. The whole world dying and needing help and lonely, but what can you do? Live in a farm like this? Far off the main highway where people don't pass, away from all the stupidity and death? What can you do?

  They left one of the lamps lit and drew the covers over their bodies and lay, listening to the wind hit the house and creak the beams and parquetry.

  A moment later there was a cry from downstairs, a splintering crash, the sound of a door flung wide, a bursting out of air, footsteps rapping all the rooms, a sobbing, almost an exultation, then the front door banged open, the winter wind blowing wildly in, footsteps across the front porch and gone.

  «There!» cried Martha. «Yes!»

  With the lamp they were down the stairs swiftly. Wind smothered their faces as they turned now toward the Witch Door, opened wide, still on its hinges, then toward the front door where they cast their light out upon a snowing winter darkness and saw nothing but white and hills, no moon, and in the lamplight the soft drift and moth-flicker of snowflakes falling from the sky to the mattressed yard.

  «Gone,» she whispered.

  «Who?»

  «We'll never know, unless she comes back.»

  «She won't. Look.»

  They moved the lamplight toward the white earth and the tiny footprints going off, across the softness, toward the dark forest.

  «It was a woman, then. But… wh
y?»

  «God knows. Why anything, now in this crazy world?» They stood looking at the footprints a long while until, shivering, they moved back through the hall to the open Witch Door. They poked the lamp into this hollow under the stairs.

  «Lord, it's just a cell, hardly a closet, and look…»

  Inside stood a small rocking chair, a braided rug, a used candle in a copper holder, and an old, worn Bible. The place smelled of must and moss and dead flowers.

  «Is this where they used to hide people?»

  «Yes. A long time back they hid people called witches. Trials, witch trials. They hung or burned some.»

  «Yes, yes,» they both murmured, staring into the incredibly small cell.

  «And the witches hid here while the hunters searched the house and gave up and left?»

  «Yes, oh, my God, yes,» he whispered.

  «Rob

  ''Yes?»

  She bent forward. Her face was pale and she could not look away from the small, worn rocking chair and the faded Bible.

  «Rob. How old? This house, how old?»

  «Maybe three hundred years.

  «That old?»

  «Why?»

  «Crazy. Stupid . .

  «Crazy?»

  «Houses, old like this. All the years. And more years and more after that. God, feel! If you put your hand in, yes? Would you feel it change, silly, and what if I sat in that rocking chair and shut the door, what? That woman . .. how long was she in there? How'd she get there? From way, way back. Wouldn't it be strange?»

  ''Bull!''

  «But if you wanted to run away badly enough, wished for it, prayed for it, and people ran after you, and someone hid you in a place like this, a witch behind a door, and heard the searchers run through the house, closer and closer, wouldn't you want to get away? Anywhere? To another place? Why not another time? And then, in a house like this, a house so old nobody knows, if you wanted and asked for it enough, couldn't you run to another year! Maybe»-she paused-«here…?»

  «No, no,» he muttered. «Really stupid!»

  But still, some quiet motion within the closeted space caused both, at almost the same instant, to hold their hands out on the air, curious, like people testing invisible waters. The air seemed to move one way and then another, now warm, now cold, with a pulsation of light and a sudden turning toward dark. All this they thought but could not say. There was weather here, now a quick touch of summer and then a winter cold, which could not be, of course, but there it was. Passing along their fingertips, but unseen by their eyes, a stream of shadows and sun ran as invisible as time itself, clear as crystal, but clouded by a shifting dark. Both felt if they thrust their hands deep, they might be drawn in to drown in a mighty storm of seasons within an incredibly small space. All this, too, they thought or almost felt but could not say.