Modern classics of fanta.., p.79
Modern Classics of Fantasy, page 79
“Very nice,” I said, listening to the birds outside the window.
“Ted don’t like the creek. He’s got this thing.” Her long fingers made a complicated movement in the air. “I try not to worry him. But it’s so silly. He almost drowned once, didn’t he?”
“Once.” I told her about my heroic rescue, leaving out the sibling rivalry and my panic under the dark water. “I suppose he’s got a right to be funny about water.”
“He swims okay,” she said. “He just worries…” Again the curious finger gestures suggesting complexity. “Anyhow, it’s a real pest. Here I am, right in the middle of a drawing cycle. You know—daybreak to dusk on the creek.” Her voice sounded diminished. “I guess he’s afraid I might fall in.”
“He’s got funny in his old age,” I said.
“It isn’t very funny,” she said, and the talk shifted to other things.
* * * *
At four o’clock, the screen door slammed and Ted burst into the living room, his long face beaming. “Well, I’ll be doggonned, you did come, didn’t you.”
He had become a tall lean man with a wide mouth. Gray scattered the edges of his hair. He was long-bodied, long-armed and, unlike his brother, had not thickened around the waist.
He beat joyously on my shoulder with a hand. “I was going to be early, but the computer flopped. The computer always flops. Damn fool thing. A computer’s a box full of half-right information that it feeds you in one-minute bursts, surrounded by hours of downtime.”
“Just like ours,” I said, looking at him.
“Ahhhhhh, you dern scientist.”
Behind the graying hair, the faintly worn face, the strange long body, I saw the familiar brother of yesterday, still eager, still protecting his vulnerability with chatter, expressing himself in broad, clumsy gestures. I wondered if I seemed as strange to him as he did to me.
He dropped his briefcase, kissed Barbara, beamed at me.
“When’d you get in? Did Barb show you around? I got to work a couple of hours tomorrow, then I’m off all weekend. How do you like this place?”
“Nice and quiet,” I said. “I was admiring Barbara’s watercolors.”
“I have some new ones,” she said, not quite defiantly. She thrust them out.
Animation went out of his face. “The creek, huh? It’s pretty.” Ghosts of past disagreements edged his voice.
She smiled up at him, innocent as a cat. “The light was just right.”
“That’s nice,” he said.
He laid the watercolors carefully on the table and did not look at them again. We talked of other things—of birds and orbital flight, term papers and county history. Through it all you could feel the presence of the watercolors, a point of vague unease, like a tiny cut in the skin. A very tiny cut. But enough to make them carefully cheerful with each other and over-enthusiastic with me.
After dark, Ted and I ambled down the road to admire Jupiter and Venus in the same sector of sky. Above us, leaves hissed with wind, as if water rushed at us across sand.
“Yeah,” he said, “we’re sorta far out here. I’d like to be over on the other side of town. But it seems our inescapable destiny to have this house and live in this house and love this house and never ever escape from this house. About six generations of Barb’s family owned this area. She grew up here and we bought it from her parents. They still farm it. It’s okay. I’m just not too crazy about it.”
“Too close to the creek?”
His head moved sharply, his expression masked by shadow. “Barb said something, huh?”
“No. You were never too crazy about water.”
“I guess not,” he said slowly, thinking about it. “Especially deep water. Not that the creek is all that deep. Isn’t Happyjack Creek a great name? It’s only about six inches, usually.”
“You can drown in an inch when your luck’s out.”
“I expect I’m nuts,” he said. “Barb thinks I’m nuts. About the creek.”
I hardly knew what to say to this stranger-brother. He stood in the darkness, head tipped back, listening to the hissing of the wind. The house lights quivered behind the tossing leaves and between that distant yellow light and our eyes hung shapeless masses of blackness, alive with movement, shadows slipping within shadows.
I saw that he was looking out toward Jupiter. He said, “I come out here a lot at night. It’s quite likely extremely self-indulgent, morally. Do you ever get the feeling that we’re living on the outside of reality? Walking around preoccupied with ourselves. And just a hand away, the real world goes on. We’re of no importance to the real world. We’re just an unimportant transient. The living part of reality is someplace else.”
“Sure,” I said, “I feel that way every time I go to Washington.”
He broke into a sharp laugh. “You violate my sense of melodramatic doom.”
We walked slowly back to the house, our feet crunching the gravel. Nothing lay behind the shadows. We stepped through them quite easily and came under the trees. But when I looked back, the place where we had talked was dense with darkness.
* * * *
I went to sleep in a strange bedroom and just as always woke immediately. The pillow felt too flat and the bed too high and the mattress pressed at unfamiliar points, comfortable but not my own. I adjusted myself and heard their voices through the near wall.
It was not possible to understand much. His voice, then hers, a soft blur of sound, rising to a few clear words, then fading to a rhythmic blur, so that you caught the cadence of speech without the sense of it, the sound the fish hear as the fishermen talk while baiting their hooks.
“…must not,” his voice said. And again, “…dangerous. I asked you not…” And once, “Don’t look for them.”
Her voice answering, softer yet clearer, holding anger and pity, “… all my life…There’s nothing. I know you’re worried. Ask Ray. Thought too long about. Nothing. Nothing…”
It was shameful to listen but I listened, prying at their privacy, feeling as if the act of listening exposed me to the silent derision of those intelligences watching from a concealed place.
Their voices stopped. I covered myself. Wind among the leaves like water flowing among white rocks. I slept without dreams.
* * * *
By the time I pried myself out of bed the next morning, Ted had left for work. As I entered the kitchen, sweet with the odor of hot ham and biscuits, Barbara was snapping up her painting box.
“Can you make out all alone here for a couple of hours?” she asked. “I got maybe an hour’s light left. Ted’s gone.”
“Let me make a sandwich and I’ll walk down with you. I want to see the Forbidden Creek.”
“Ha!” she said. “It doesn’t make me nervous. I’ve looked at that creek all my life…”
I had found a foam cup in the cupboard and was pouring it full of coffee. “…and never saw the People,” I said.
The painting box banged loudly as she dropped it on the table. I saw the darkness under her eyes from not enough sleep, the gossamer lines of strain at the corners of eyes and lips. She looked wary and alert.
She asked, “When did he tell you?”
“He never did. I sort of worked it out over the years.”
“Oh, God,” she cried, “it’s been that long?”
“Let’s walk on down to the creek,” I said. “I’ll tell you on the way.”
* * * *
We descended through open woods. Sunlight barred the slope with streaks of gray shadow, and small white flowers, like vanilla flecks, were scattered under hickory and walnut. The air smelled sweetly cool.
I said, “It’s a way of looking at things. Here we are in the middle of reality. It’s solid and concrete. It has specific odors and colors. You can feel it and measure it. That’s reality. But every now and then you see something else. Say you’re in these woods and you look up through the branches toward a cloud. You see that the angle of the branches, a cluster of leaves, a bit of that cloud combine to make up the outline of a face. Take a step forward and the face vanishes. It doesn’t exist. It’s just a suggestion, a bunch of fortuitous factors. Maybe you look into the water and see weeds and a pebble and a ripple. And maybe that sort of suggests a human shape. If you move, the perspective changes, and it disappears.
“So you get to thinking. Wouldn’t it be funny if these shapes in trees and water aren’t illusions. They might be like reflections of something real. Someplace else. Maybe realities at a different angle to us, each one throwing off its own reflections.”
“But that isn’t real,” she said, setting down her painting box. Flat white stones scattered along a strip of sandy mud. Beyond slipped a shallow sheet of water, whispering across light tan rock.
“It isn’t real to us.”
Crisp snaps as she released the catches of the painting box. “That’s sick, Ray. He believes it’s real. Something physical, out there in the water. He says you can see them.”
“Maybe you can if you look at them right.”
Scowling faintly, she set up the easel, opened the sketchbook, began wetting her paints. At last she said, “I’ve tried. I can’t see them. I keep thinking, this time I’m going to see them, too.”
“Maybe his imagination runs away with him.”
“You’re not being any help.”
That was so obviously true I felt a small convulsion of anger. She could read the problem as well as I could—Ted was showing obsessive symptoms of some kind. “There’s really not very much I can do.”
“You’re really cold, aren’t you,” she snapped, swinging around at me.
I said, “No, I’m not. I just don’t know what to tell you. Maybe he ought to see a doctor.”
She swept color across the page, her brush darting and jabbing. “Let’s not quarrel,” she said finally, eyes on her work. “I don’t know what to do either.”
“Don’t look too hard at the water,” I said.
It was the wrong moment for a joke. Her lips clamped together. She did not look at or speak to me again. After a few minutes, I excused myself. I might as well have said good-bye to one of the white rocks.
I went away from the creek, angling along the base of the hill. Finally I came out on the gravel road and walked slowly up to the house through full sunshine. When I got under the trees, it was silent again. Silent. No sound. No bird cry. No breeze. Nothing.
It scared the fool out of me. I went in and had some coffee and fiddled around in the house, listening and furious with myself for listening. There was no sound in that terrible place, nothing at all but the pressure of silence. I could see no movement along the upper limbs. I even went out and looked.
* * * *
Prancing across the kitchen, loudly elated, Ted tossed down his briefcase. “So you finally got up. I had a great morning. Did a ton of stuff. Next Saturday, I’ll do it all over again. Great life. Where’s Barb?”
I said, “Haven’t seen her since morning.”
That swiveled his eyes to mine. “Painting?”
“Yeah.”
“Creek?”
“Yeah.”
Exuberance went away. He grew taller and graver. “I guess maybe we better wander down there and remind her it’s lunchtime.”
“You go ahead. I’ll fix up some sandwiches.” I was not eager to see Barbara again so soon.
“Come on along. I’m using you shamelessly, if you want to know. You’re my buffer. Every time the creek’s involved, we get into a snapping match.” He tugged gently on my arm in the old way I remembered from years back. “Humor me.”
We stepped out the back door into an uneasy filigree of leaf shadow, gray and white on the pale gravel. The sky was stacked with broken clouds. Ted strode rapidly off across the parking area, not waiting for me.
When I caught up with him, I said, “I feel like a fool saying it, but maybe you ought to ease up on Barbara about that creek.”
He glanced at me with that sudden stab of intelligence I found so disconcerting. “You mean Barb’s worried about my intellectual vagaries?”
“Well, she doesn’t know how nutty you can be.”
We walked quickly down the sharp slanted road, the air sweet with leaves and warm dust, walking where the shadows had moved last night.
He said lightly, “Just like when we were kids. You’d never listen.”
“I had to listen to you. You never told me anything right out.”
He said quite sharply, “Did I have to? You’re not that thickheaded. You know exactly what I mean. Whenever I get near water—you know how it was.”
“Down and down,” I said.
“Right down among ‘em, every time.”
The road swerved right toward disciplined fields lined with corn. Bearing left, we entered woods where no line was straight and the hill concealed its surface under last year’s leaves. Ahead, dense green foliage clustered along the creek.
I said, “So you saw dreams in water.”
“Not dreams. Entities.”
“I never saw them.”
“It’s a way you have to look,” he told me. “You can’t expect to see them just by staring. I don’t mean they’re incorporeal. It’s just a different way of looking.”
“I never found out how.”
“I did. It was natural. I just did it.”
He glanced toward me over his shoulder, a graying man, belief hollow in his eyes. He grinned. “You see what a crazy you raised, Ray. A water psychic.”
“Maybe you’ve got a special talent. So why worry about Barbara?”
“She wants to see. That’s the problem.”
Keeping my voice uninflected, I said, “Maybe they don’t want her.”
“Maybe they haven’t made up their minds.”
Crossing a narrow field, we entered under the trees. The light became a clear soft gray and the air smelled darkly of water and wet stone. Waist-high weeds slapped at us as we followed a worn track along the creek bank.
Ted’s long stride broke into a trot. “Barb!” he called.
We burst out into the flat place by the creek. Near the water stood the easel, a watercolor propped on the crossbar. Her painting box lay open on the rock. Her shoes and socks were scattered by the creek edge. A single slim footprint showed in the sandy mud. Blurred impressions lined out under the still water. Perhaps they were footprints, lost where the rock began in midstream.
“Dear God!” Ted said.
He darted into the creek. He ran splashing through ankle-deep water to the center, his arms and legs in exaggerated motion, looking absurdly like a child at play.
I looked at the shore, the footprint, the shoes. I thought, Fraud, and did not believe.
He stared at me in blank confusion, then raced downstream, bent over to peer into the shallow water.
I stepped to the easel, sure that the watercolor would contain some alien thing. And, yes, it did. There, in delicately rendered water, floated a tiny, partially formed eye.
It was a setup, then, arranged to shock. In a moment he would find clothing in the stream, evidence that she had been entrapped. That the People had called. That she had walked guilelessly into the water, and walking dissolved, and dissolving vanished.
She would be watching us from someplace close. I began methodical checking of the low foliage, searching for the glint of skin and intent eye.
Downstream, Ted uttered a harsh bark of sound.
He would have found clothing.
The moment of horror, now. Pause for maximum effect. Pause and pause. The revelation—Now.
Nothing happened.
Upstream toward me came Ted, picking his steps, holding himself tall. He threw down the sodden blouse, the jeans, the bra. Clear water ran from blue and white cloth.
“Where is she?” he asked.
I said nothing.
“I thought it was a gag,” he said. “I looked at the shoes, the footprint. I said, ‘Oh, hell, they’re ribbing me. They’re putting me on.’ Only you’re not, are you?”
“No.”
“The timing was wrong,” he said. “When she didn’t pop out of the bushes and laugh, that’s when I knew it wasn’t a joke.”
This precise re-creation of my own thoughts had the effect of shutting off my brain entirely. I could think of nothing to say.
“Oh, hell,” he said, and slowly stepped past the saturated clothing to stare at the watercolor on the easel. I heard his breath hiss. He hadn’t missed the eye, either.
