Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (47 page)

Yes,
Luisa thought,
oh yes?

Helen's voice was gentle as a kiss. "They called this morning to say he
passed, baby." She went on. "Your son's coming in to see you today, baby;
won't that be nice? He called to say he be in after lunch."

Johnny—she recalled a little boy named Johnny, who did not at all go
with the man-sized voice that sometimes came and talked over her. Be nice,
Johnny. She had often had to tell him that, a cranky little boy who liked
to fuss … What could she tell him today? That they fed her through
a tube and that she could no longer breathe through her own power? That
food has no taste when it goes through a tube? That the sea around Greece
is blue? How had she borne such an unimaginative child! He had sent her a
postcard from Europe, where he had dutifully gone to honeymoon: a picture
of the Paris Metro, a giant pneumatic tube. Tubes. Could she tell him she
was sick of tubes?

Helen was talking to her. "Baby? Louise? Oh, damn." She half-felt hands on
her. I can hear you perfectly, Luisa wanted to say. But Helen was
muttering off to the nursing station. Luisa was walking the line between
wakefulness and dreams, that was all. She imagined it as a thin line cut
in concrete, like the lines in the sidewalks she had skipped over as a
child, chanting. "Step on a crack, break your mother's back." If only they
would stop pulling her back into life. Even Helen, who understood, who
always told her when one of them had gone, even Helen held her to life.
One day through the tubes they would feed her arsenic, and then it would
all be over.

Fantasy.
She built against the dark of her closed eyes the
trembling blues of Corfu.

At six o'clock Mark made his final rounds. The fluorescent lights were
watery in the dawn. Out of the beds the old people stared, sleepy,
flat-eyed, blind-eyed. He was alone. Morton was in the hospital, St.
Francis, cut up by a mugger, rolled on his way to work, left to bleed to
death in an alley. What had he gone into an alley for?
Su-i-cide;
he could hear Morton saying it in that fag drawl.

Someone was moaning. He walked into 209. The old lady was shifting and
turning her head. The tape that held the respirator tube was loose. She
was supposed to be comatose, or semicomatose. He watched her for a while.
The movement looked purposeful. He reached out and patted the tape down
again. She moaned. Her eyes were cloudy, and he remembered that she was
blind. How did it feel to have hands come out of the night at you like
that? Like the hands with the knife that had cut Morton. "Listen,
sweetie," he said, "you want me to take that tape off? That tube out? If I
do that you'll die, you know, poof, out like a damned light. You know
that?" Her body was still, frozen, stiff as a board. He put his hand on
the tape again to tease her. Comatose, semicomatose, what did doctors
know? he thought. She'd heard him. I'd be scared; Christ, I'd be
petrified. "I won't do it," he told her. "I could lose my job."

He drowsed through the report that ritualized the shift change and then
went downstairs to collect his book and his bottle. He leaned against the
dirty gray wall and took a long drink. Warmer than any woman. One for the
road. And one for Morton. He wondered how bad Morton was. He capped the
bottle and tucked it, brownbagged, decently clad, under his arm. He
wondered what Morton had left uncollected in his locker. A pack of cards?

The wind was bitter. He held tightly to the bottle, glad that his was only
a short walk home. It came to him suddenly that he was drinking himself to
death. The thought was mildly entertaining. It could be worse. On the ice
patches he staggered, and it became a game to see if this one or the next
one would trip him. He beat them all. He decided to shortcut through the
tunnel under the freeway. There would be few cars through it on a Sunday
morning, 7
A.M.
on an icy day. The
tunnel walls were gray and smooth. He found himself thinking back to 209.
He had almost done it to the old lady. Christ. That would have been a
mistake.

The car came diving into the neck of the tunnel, a bullet-shaped red toy.
Mark watched as it slipped on the street ice. The driver took the skids,
slid, and then pulled out, nonchalant as if it were a game for kids.
Smooth, he thought.

The car grew suddenly very large and very red.

The dream, he thought, it's the car of the dream. The tunnel wall was flat
and cold at his back. He was pressed down and there was nowhere he could
go. The bright fender grazed him, and like a bull, the car was gone. The
driver honked back at him. Bastard, you missed me, he thought, you missed
me! Torn between rage and joy, he threw the bottle into the air. It went
up like a rocket. His feet slipped out from under him. "Hey!" He was
falling. You bastard, he thought in wonderment as the bottle shattered all
around him, you bastard.

"Morning, baby. You doing any better today? It's raining. Gray outside. I
almost didn't want to come to work this morning, it's so ugly. But then I
thought, what would Louise think if I weren't there? She'd worry. Honey,
you remember that night orderly Mark?" Helen's voice dropped. "You know,
they found him under the freeway this morning with his neck broke, and all
cut up and covered with whiskey. An accident. Isn't that something? He was
young, too. But Morton, you remember Morton, he's okay and coming back to
work tonight, so there'll be someone on duty to look after you. Imagine,
he just slipped on the ice! Cruel way to die."

Luisa dreamed. Cruel. That was cruel.
April is the cruellest month,
breeding lilacs out of the dead earth …
Lord, must these bones
live? The tube in her chest pumped. Her mouth hurt, her back hurt. Mark,
she thought, remembering his voice and the thick alcoholic breath of him
and the feel of his hand on her cheek. It was cruel of him to tease me.
Out like a light, he had said.
Out, out, brief candle.
The light in
Greece stains the air like yellow wine. Why would they not let her go?
Arsenic through the tube would be easy. That would be murder; they would
never do that. She lay and dreamed of all the ways there were to die.
Arsenic, gas, ropes and cliffs, the white cliffs of Dover, steely razor
blades with blue edges, blue water to drown in, and cars, bright red
lethal cars. So many ways to die, she thought, but not here, and her heart
clenched in a sudden fury. Again, she urged it, again, again. They do it
for each other, but not for us, the bastards, never for us.

The End

© 1979 by Elizabeth A. Lynn. First published in
Shadows 2
edited by Charles L. Grant.

Chad Oliver

Our town is turned off now, all gray and lazy, so this seems like a good
time to begin.

Let's not kid ourselves about it, Clyde—I know what you're thinking.
I don't blame you. You're thinking there's nothing from one wall to the
other that's as completely and thoroughly boring as some motherly old dame
gushing about the One Hundred and One fugitives from Paradise which are to
be found in Her Home Town. A real insomnia killer, that's what you're
thinking. A one-bell monologue.

Suppose we get things straight, right from the start.

I may look like one of those sweet little old ladies who spend all their
time in the kitchen slipping apple preserves to bleary-eyed children, but
I can't help what I look like, and neither can you. I never set foot in a
kitchen in my life, and of course there aren't any kids in our town—not
physically, anyway. I don't say I'm the most interesting gal you ever met,
Clyde, but I'll tell you for sure you never yakked with anyone like
me
before.

Now, you take our town. If you want it straight, it's the damnedest place
you ever heard of. It stinks, but we can't get out. ELM POINT is the name
on the station, that's what we have to call it, but it's as crazy as the
rest of the place. There's no point in ELM POINT, and the only trees I
ever saw are made out of sponge rubber.

You might stick around for a minute and listen, you see—things might
get interesting.

One more thing we might as well clear up while we're at it. I can hear you
thinking, with that sophisticated mind of yours: "Who's she supposed to be
telling the story to? That's the trouble with all these first-person
narratives." Well, Clyde, that's a dumb question, if you ask me. Do you
worry about where the music comes from when Pinza sings in a lifeboat? I
feel sorry for you, I really do. I'll tell you the secret: the music comes
from a studio orchestra that's hidden in the worm can just to the left of
the Nazi spy. You follow me? The plain, unvarnished truth is that I get
restless when the town's turned off for a long time. I can't sleep. I'm
talking to myself. I'm bored stiff, and so would you be if you had to live
here for your whole life. But I know you're there, Clyde, or this wouldn't
be getting through to you. Don't worry about it, though.

This is strictly for kicks.

Okay, so let's have some details. I live in a town that's part of the
background for a model railroad. Maybe you think that's funny, but did you
ever live in a subway? I want to be absolutely clear about this—you're
a little dense sometimes, Clyde. I don't mean that ELM POINT is a town
that's located on a big railroad that's operated in an exemplary, model
manner. No. I mean I live on a
model
railroad, a half-baked
contraption that's set up in a kid's attic. The kid's name is Willy
Roberts, he's thirteen years old, and we don't think he's a god that
created our world. In fact, if you want my opinion, Willy is a low-grade
moron, and a sadist to boot.

So my world is on a big plywood table in an attic. My town is background
atmosphere for a lousy electric train. I don't know what I'm supposed to
be. A motherly old soul glimpsed through a house window, I guess. An
intimate detail. It gives me a pain.

If you think it's fun to live in a town on a model railroad, you've got
rocks in your head.

Look at it from our point of view. In the first place, ELM POINT isn't a
town at all—it's a collection of weird buildings that Willy Roberts
and his old man took a fancy to and could afford. It isn't even sharp for
a model railroad town; the whole thing is disgustingly middle class.

Try to visualize it: there's a well in the middle of the table, a hole for
Willy Roberts to get into when he works the transformer and the electric
switches. The whole southern end of the table is covered with a sagging
mountain made of chicken wire and wet paper towels. The western side has
got a bunch of these sponge rubber trees I was telling you about, and just
beyond them is an empty area called Texas. There are some real dumb cows
there and two objectionable citizens who come to our town every Saturday
night and try to shoot up the place. The Ohio River starts in the
northwestern corner of the table and flows into the southeast, where I
guess it makes a big drop to the floor. (No one has ever gone over to
look.) Our town and a mountain take up the northern end of the table and
part of the eastern side. That's where I live, as a matter of fact—on
the eastern side, between the Ohio River and the water tower.

Now catch this building inventory, Clyde—it'll kill you. We've got a
police station and a firehouse in North Flats, at the edge of the mountain
where the tunnel comes out. There's a big tin railroad station with a red
roof. There's a quaint old frame hotel that was left over from the Chicago
Fire, and right behind it there's this diner that was supposed to look
like an old streetcar. There's one gas station with three pumps, but no
cars. There's a big double spotlight on a tin tower right across from my
house; I have to wear dark glasses all the time. There's seven lower-class
frame houses with dirty white curtains in the windows; Humphery and I live
in one of them. Humphery—that's my husband, or would be if Willy
Roberts had thought to put a preacher in this hole-works in the tin
switchman's house up the tracks. Whenever one of those damned trains comes
by he has to goose-step out and wave his stupid red lantern. Clyde, he
hates it. Then there's a cattle pen on a siding, with no wind to blow the
smell away, if you get what I mean.

That's about it—a real Paradise.

Willy's got two trains on the table now. One is a flashy passenger job
stashed full of stuck-up aristocrats—you know, the kind who are
always reading the
Times
when they go through your town. The other
is a freight train that doesn't carry anything; it just grinds around the
track like a demented robot, and its only job, as far as
I
can
tell, is to shuttle itself onto a siding and look respectful when the
passenger train full of city slickers hisses by. As if all this racket
weren't enough, Willy's got him a switch engine, too, and he keeps it in
our front yard. It's got a bell.

There's more, too, but we'll get to that.

How do you like our town, Clyde? Interesting? I want to tell you something
else: our town is planning to commit a murder.

Guess who.

You just stick around awhile.

You know, our town is all gray and lazy when the current isn't on, just
like I said. Nobody's got much energy; I must be just about the only one
awake in ELM POINT at night. It gets pretty lonesome.

But the door to the attic is opening now, and here comes Willy the Kid.
Hang on, Clyde—all hell will pop loose in a minute. You'll have to
excuse me for a minute; I have to wake Humphery up and get him down to his
tin house. It's terrible—you almost have to dent Humphery to wake
him up like this. And for what? Every time he wakes up, he has to go to
the damnfool switchman's house and make with the red lantern.

Fine thing. Well, I'll be back later. And say, Clyde, if you ever see this
Willy character, tell him not to shake the whole lousy table when he drags
his body into the well, will you?