Duel (28 page)

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Authors: Richard Matheson

BOOK: Duel
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That's about it. Oh, naturally, Bill told his friends at Cal Tech, and the apartment was overrun with research physicists for a month. But they didn't find anything. They said the thing was gone. Some said worse things.
But, just the same, when we got back from my mother's house
where we stayed during the scientific siege—we moved the couch across the room and stuck the television where the couch was.
So some night we may look up and hear Arthur Godfrey chuckling from another dimension. Maybe he belongs there.
IN THE HALL HE PUT DOWN HIS SUITCASE. “HOW have you been?” he asked.
“Fine” she said, with a smile.
She helped him off with his coat and hat and put them in the hall closet.
“This Indiana January sure feels cold after six months in South America.”
“I bet it does,” she said.
They walked into the living room, arms around each other.
“What have you been doing with yourself?” he asked.
“Oh … not too much,” she said. “Thinking about you.”
He smiled and hugged her.
“That's a lot,” he said.
Her smile flickered a moment, then returned. She held his hand tightly. And, suddenly, although he didn't realize it at first, she was
wordless. He'd gone over this moment in his mind so often that the sharpness of its anticlimax later struck him. She smiled and looked into his eyes while he spoke but the smile kept fading and her eyes kept evading his at the very moments he wanted their attention most.
Later in the kitchen she sat across from him as he drank the third cup of her hot, rich coffee.
“I won't sleep tonight,” he said, grinning, “but I don't want to.”
Her smile was only obliging. The coffee burned his throat and he noticed she wasn't drinking any of the first cup she'd poured for herself.
“No coffee for you?” he asked.
“No, I … I don't drink it anymore.”
“On a diet or something?”
He saw her throat move.
“Sort of,” she said.
“That's silly,” he said. “Your figure is perfect.”
She seemed about to say something. Then she hesitated. He put down his cup.
“Ann, is …”
“Something wrong?” she finished.
He nodded.
She lowered her eyes. She bit her lower lip and clasped her hands before her on the table. Then her eyes closed and he got the feeling that she was shutting herself away from something hopelessly terrible.
“Honey, what is it?”
“I guess … the best way is to just … just up and tell you.”
“Well, of course, sweetheart,” he said anxiously. “What is it? Did something happen while I was gone?”
“Yes. And no.”
“I don't understand.”
She was looking at him suddenly. The look was haunted and it made him shudder.
“I'm going to have a baby,” she said.
He was about to cry out—but that's wonderful. He was about to jump up and embrace her and dance her around the room.
Then it hit him, driving the color from his face.
“What?” he said.
She didn't answer because she knew he'd heard.
“How … long have you known this?” he asked, watching her eyes hold motionless on his face.
She drew in a shaking breath and he knew her answer would be the wrong one. It was.
“Three weeks,” she said.
He sat there looking blankly at her and stirring the coffee without realizing. Then he noticed and, slowly, he drew out the spoon and put it down beside the cup.
He tried to say the word but he couldn't. It trembled in his vocal cords. He tensed himself.
“Who?” he asked her, his voice toneless and weak.
Her eyes were back on him, her face ashen. Her lips trembled when she told him.
She said, “No one.”
“What?”
“David,” she said carefully, “I …”
Then her shoulders slumped.
“No one, David. No one.”
It took a moment for the reaction to hit him. She saw it on his face before he turned it away from her. Then she stood up and looked down at him, her voice shaking.
“David, I swear to God I never had anything to do with any man while you were gone!”
He sank back numbly against the chair back. God, Oh God, what could he say? A man comes back from six months in the jungle and his wife tells him she's pregnant and asks him to believe that …
His teeth set on edge. He felt as if he were involved in the beginning
of some hideously smutty joke. He swallowed and looked down at his trembling hands. Ann, Ann! He wanted to pick up his cup and hurl it against the wall.
“David, you've got to bel—”
He stumbled up and out of the room. She was behind him quickly, clutching for his hand.
“David, you've
got
to believe me. I'll go insane if you don't. It's the only strength that's kept me going—the hope that you'd believe me. If you don't …”
Her words broke off and they stared bleakly at each other. He felt her hand holding his. Cold.
“Ann, what do you want me to believe? That my child was conceived five months after I left you?”
“David, if I were guilty would I … be so
open
in telling you? You know how I feel about our marriage. About you.”
Her voice lowered.
“If I'd done what you think I've done, I wouldn't tell you,” she said, “I'd kill myself.”
He kept looking helplessly at her, as if the answer lay in her anxious face. Finally he spoke.
“We'll … go to Doctor Kleinman,” he said. “We'll …”
Her hand dropped away from his.
“You don't believe me, do you?”
His voice was tortured.
“You know what you're asking of me, don't you?” he said. “Don't you, Ann? I'm a scientist. I can't accept the incredible … just like that. Don't you think I
want
to believe you? But …”
She stood before him a long time. Then she turned away a little and her voice was well controlled.
“All right,” she said quietly, “do what you think is best.”
Then she walked out of the room. He watched her go. Then he turned and walked slowly to the mantel. He stood looking at the kewpie
doll sitting there with its legs hanging down over the edge.
Coney Island
read the words on her dress. They'd won it on their honeymoon trip eight years before.
His eyes fell shut suddenly.
Homecoming.
The word was a dead word now.
 
“Now that the welcomes are done for,” said Doctor Kleinman, “what are you doing here? Catch a bug in the jungle?”
Collier sat slumped in the chair. For a few seconds he glanced out the window. Then he turned back to Kleinman and told him quickly.
When he'd finished they looked at each other for a silent moment.
“It's
not
possible, is it?” Collier said then.
Kleinman pressed his lips together. A grim smile flickered briefly on his face.
“What can I say?” he said. “No, it's impossible? No, not as far as observation goes? I do not know, David. We assume that the sperm survives in the cervix canal no more than three to five days, maybe a little longer. But, even if they do …”
“They can't fertilize?” Collier finished.
Kleinman didn't nod or answer but Collier knew the answer. Knew it in simple words that were pronouncing doom on his life.
“There's no hope then,” he said quietly.
Kleinman pressed his lips together again and ran a reflective finger along the edge of his letter opener.
“Unless,” he said, “it is to speak to Ann and make her understand you will not desert her. It is probably fear which makes her speak as she does.”
“ … will not desert her,” Collier echoed in an inaudible whisper and shook his head.
“I suggest nothing, mind you,” Kleinman went on. “Only that it is possible Ann is too hysterically frightened to tell you the truth.”
Collier rose, drained of vitality.
“All right,” he said indecisively, “I'll speak to her again. Maybe we can … work it out.”
But when he told her what Kleinman had said she just sat in the chair and looked at him without expression on her face.
“And that's it,” she said. “You've decided.”
He swallowed.
“I don't think you know what you're asking of me,” he said.
“Yes, I know what I'm asking,” she answered. “Just that you believe in me.”
He started to speak in rising anger, then checked himself.
“Ann,” he said, “just
tell
me. I'll do my best to understand.”
Now she was losing temper too. He watched her hands tighten, then tremble on her lap.
“I hate to spoil your noble scene,” she said, “but I'm not pregnant by another man. Do you understand me—believe me?”
She wasn't hysterical now or frightened or on the defensive. He stood there looking down at her, feeling numb and confused. She never had lied to him before and yet … what was he to think?
She went back to her reading then and he kept standing and watching her. These are the facts, his mind insisted. He turned away from her. Did he really know Ann? Was it possible she was something entirely strange to him now? Those six months?
What had happened during those six months?
 
He stood making up the living-room couch with sheets and the old comforter they had used when they were first married. As he looked down at the thick quilting and the gaudy patterns now faded from
innumerable
washings, a grim smile touched his lips.
Homecoming.
He straightened up with a tired sigh and walked over to where the record player scratched gently. He lifted the arm up and put on the
next record. He looked at the inside cover of the album as Tchaikovsky's
Swan Lake
started.
To my very own darling.
Ann.
They hadn't spoken all afternoon or evening. After supper she'd gotten a book from the case and gone upstairs. He'd sat in the living room trying to read
The Fort Tribune,
trying even harder to relax. Yet how could he? Could a man relax in his home with his wife who carried a child that wasn't his? The newspaper had finally slipped from his lax fingers and fallen to the floor.
Now he sat staring endlessly at the rug, trying to figure it out.
Was it possible the doctors were wrong? Could the life cell exist and maintain its fertilizing capacity for, not days, but months? Maybe, he thought, he'd rather believe that than believe Ann could commit adultery. Theirs had always been an ideal relationship, as close an approximation of The Perfect Marriage as one could allow possible. Now this.
He ran a shaking hand through his hair. Breath shuddered through him and there was a tightness in his chest he could not relieve. A man comes home from six months in the …
Put it out of your mind!—he ordered himself, then forced himself to pick up the paper and read every word in it including comics and the astrology column.
You will receive a big surprise today
, the syndicated seer told him.
He flung down the paper and looked at the mantel clock. After ten. He'd been sitting there over an hour while Ann sat up in bed reading. He wondered what book was taking the place of affection and understanding.
He rose wearily. The record player was scratching again.
After brushing his teeth he went out into the hall and started for the stairs. At the bedroom door he hesitated, glanced in. The light was out. He stopped and listened to her breathing and knew she wasn't asleep.
He almost started in as a rushing sense of need for her covered him. But then he remembered that she was going to have a baby and it couldn't possibly be his baby. The thought made him stiffen. It turned him around, thin-lipped, and took him down the stairs and he slapped down the wall switch to plunge the living room into darkness.
He felt for the couch and sank down on it. He sat for a while in the dark, smoking a cigarette. Then he pressed the stub into an ashtray and lay back. The room was cold. He climbed under the sheets and comforter and lay there shivering.
Homecoming
. The word oppressed him again.
 
He must have slept a little while, he thought, staring up at the black ceiling. He held up his watch and looked at the luminous hands. Threetwenty. He grunted and rolled onto his side. Then he raised up and shook the pillow to puff it up.

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