Small World (24 page)

What about the test? Is she all right?’

‘Basically, yes.’ He drew out a notebook and a pen, opened the notebook and stood very still, thinking. ‘She’s got to start eating. But.' he smiled slyly, i’ve got that licked.’

Oh?’

Tm going to minimize the food for her. I think it’ll be easier for

her to digest.’

"What about water?’

She’s drinking it and keeping it down and it’s coming out the ither end okay. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just psychological.’

"Well, as long as it works.’

Right. One of us should try to calm her. We don’t want her 139

going into shock from fear or distress.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Dolly said.

Resigned, Roger let it go. Dolly showed signs of being really ham-fisted in dealing with Leyna. But there was a lot of work that needed doing, and he would have to let her handle this part, at least for now.

The wall stayed up. Minutes passed and there was silence. Leyna’s heartbeat slowed, adrenaline ebbed. Her head began to ache fiercely. She remembered her mother’s old nostrum for childhood headaches—water. That was something she had. Warily, she watched the place where the wall had been, and sipped water from the glass she had carried from the bathroom. It was tepid, but still sweet and soothing. The muscles of her throat, dry and cramped from screaming, and wanting to scream, from sheer terror, relaxed a little.

She put the glass down and lay back, shutting her eyes.
Headache commercial: celebrity journalist, in the middle of a stressful, exciting day in the course of her meteoric career, is wiped out by a migraine, just before the cameras go red. She flops on a handy chaise, has some water and the product patent medicine, puts her lovely legs up while the camera lingers on them and on the gap in her blouse. Minutes later, she opens the six-thirty news with a stunning display of teeth and shining, healthy, untroubled eyes. Take Blecch. Or whatever.

A rustling crackling sound intruded into her daydream. She saw the Hand once more disappearing. She began to tremble all over. The urge to crawl under the covers nearly seized control of her. It was the sheet of paper that stopped her. The Hand had left a piece of paper, mysterious as an antique treasure map, on the floor near the wardrobe.

She crept up on it, wrapped in the coverlet from the bed. Never mind wrestling the sheets. She wasn’t going to expose her nakedness to God, or Whomever, out there. Snatching up the paper, she scurried back to the safety of the bed. In the shadow of the bed hangings she spread the paper, as if she were opening the
Times
on Sunday morning. It was as wide as her arm span. The printing scrawled across it, inches high. But eminently readable. Leyna giggled. She’d never before received a note from God.

Don’t be afraid. We mean you no harm.

The cliches of a kidnapper’s note, or a bankrobber’s threat:
Nobody will get hurt. Do what we say. We won’t hurt the kid if you pay up.

Shit.

She stared at it, unseeing. She was in a room, a definite place. It was furnished in the best of taste, beautifully wallpapered and carpeted and curtained. Beyond the door was a hall and the hall had its own doors to other rooms. What she had seen was familiar, but not anyplace she had ever lived in. How many rooms like this in how many old houses were there in this country? Very likely it was familiar to her simply because it was a type, a cliche itself.

Then there was the mad part of it. Walls that moved and were gone. When the walls went away there was no out of doors, no street, no other buildings, no garden, no trees, only those enormous, amorphous nightmare creatures. Who wrote notes.

Her best, most cynical, explanation was that she was in a private loony bin. The aberrations in this room, perhaps the room itself, were all in her head, as a consequence of the accident, of which she still had no certain knowledge. It could have jarred loose her sanity. She was not, before this accident, either neurotic or unstable. She had known who she was and what she was doing with her life. Professional hand-holding, the crutches other people commonly used, had never been necessary. Nor booze, nor drugs. No, she had been sane enough. And there was still some essential balance that could tell her quietly that some of what she perceived was fantastic, impossible, and mad-as-a-hatter. And go on to reassure her that it was most likely the consequence of some organic damage, and not any mental defect on her part.

It was that certainty, arrived at in her usual painstaking way, as if crossing a line of stepping stones over running water, that stilled the terror. She did not scream when the Hand returned.

It came directly to her and she winced away instinctively, dread rising in her like water around a drowner. The Hand stopped and waited and at last came on and touched her. It had great heat. The 'kin touching hers was stiff, leathery, and unyielding, like a battered but once superior suitcase. It scooped her up gently, rolled in the quilt she had pulled around herself.

She closed her eyes. She always did, during take-offs and Endings, and during the rare instances when she had been lured into riding rollercoasters. There was nothing to do but close her eyes, take a deep breath, clench her teeth and fists, and ward off death by sheer willpower.

The quilt, like a winding sheet around her, was too warm. The Hand generated its own enormous heat, and she was quickly awash in sweat and grimly fighting off nausea and faintness. Release was quick and gentle, down into a feathery softness.

Opening her eyes in a strong natural light, she saw that she had come to rest on something that looked like a cloud cover from a plane window, an enormous undulant field of white. It was formed of stalks, like a field of grain, but she knew by touch and sight that the substance that rose to midthigh, white and slender and very smooth, was not any kind of plant. There was no soil under her bare feet but something woven, like the backing of an Oriental rug. It smelled dusty, but there was no vegetative scent, no plant smell, no
green
reaching her nostrils.

Surveying the field of white, she could name no other features. It ended, but what was beyond it was all mass and color. There were no dimensions, no perspectives. The stalks around her rippled mildly and she turned, instinctively, to the source of their agitation. She found a wall of stiff, shimmering drapery. It was very coarsely woven and had no perceivable frame, no solid wall around it. It just rose upward to the farthest point she could manage to see by painfully crooking her neck.

And it moved, at last. She realized it was moving not horizontally, but verticially, and downward. Holding her breath, she drew back, as it descended without any break.

Abruptly it changed and was not a wall at all but a Face, clearly a face, very close and as large, no larger, many times larger, than she was herself. A moon face, a mask on a stick, unreal in its enormity. She remembered, suddenly, the face of the Wizard that had so awed and frightened Dorothy and her companions. And of course it was a trick, a projection, created by the charming old rogue who was and wasn’t the Wizard of Oz. A giggle of relief died in her throat. She knew this Face and why it brought to mind the Wizard of Oz. Moaning, she buried her face in her hands.

‘Don’t be afraid.’

The Face had a Voice, the same rasping one she had heard before in her mysterious bedroom. The Voice of God, except now she recognized it as Dolly Hardesty’s voice. The tone was soothing, the volume vast, as if it came from a loudspeaker. Despite its message, she could not help retching dryly.

‘You’re safe. Nothing can harm you.’

Willfully, she forced her hands downward and raised her eyes. She summoned her voice, putting all her remaining force behind it.

‘Dorothy?’

A soft chuckle rolled over the field at her and whispered in her hair.

‘Dorothy?’ she cried out again, fearfully.

‘You may call me that, if you wish. And I will call you Dolly.’

Leyna drew the quilt tightly around herself. A terrible stillness welled up in her. She breathed deep and calm.

‘Dorothy?’ she asked, a third time, though her throat hurt to shout the name again.

‘Yes?’

‘Am I crazy?’

The silence spread around her almost palpably, for as the stalks trembled as the Voice of Dorothy spoke, they remained

motionless when she did not.

‘Oh, yes.’

She was assured, with sorrow in the Voice, and condescension :ke half-cooked egg. There was nothing more to ask and nothing more to say. Leyna sank slowly to her knees; the stalks rose up around her and made a low wall. Closing her eyes again, she waited. She would open her eyes again on reality, on sanity, or not at all.

Roger, behind Dolly, heard the last part of their exchange. He seized her by the wrist and drew her away, to the farthest comer of

the room.

‘What the Christ are you doing?’ he demanded of her in a hiss iike boiling water.

Dolly met his eyes coldly and wrenched her wrist free of his grasp. Turning on her heels, she stalked out. He followed her into :he kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator.

‘What were you doing?’ he persisted.

She looked up at him and smiled.

Really, darling,’ she said, ‘I don’t think you’ve thought this business through.’

That’s what he’d been thinking of her.

’Well, tell me what I haven’t thought of.’

Turning back to the refrigerator she produced two bottles of imported beer. She held one out to him. He had to come close to her to take it. He could feel its wonderful coolness even before he :ouched it and his mouth watered for it. He looked around hastily, f r the can opener he’d left on the chopping block at lunchtime.

When he looked back, she had a drawer open and a church key :n her hand. He had to smile at her prescience. She was not only permitting him a beer but was going to have one herself. It was a arge gesture for Dolly. He regretted the force with which he had seized her wrist.

it'll be a lot easier to deal with her if she thinks she’s non eompos,’ Dolly explained over the beer.

Roger thought it over. It made a crazy kind of sense. She might be more compliant. On the other hand, they had the advantage of her, didn’t they? He was uneasy. The human mind was so unpredictable to begin with, and this one had experienced a unique trauma already, at their hands. At his, he corrected himself, but it didn’t make the uneasiness die down. He didn’t say anything to Dolly. There was enough else to discuss.

‘She’d better be fed soon, very soon. Do up a new tray and I’ll zap it. She’s weak. She needs clothes. A good chill would be risky.’

‘Of course. What if she won’t dress herself?’

Roger considered. ‘I wouldn’t touch her if she were hysterical. If she lets you, just be careful, very careful.’

‘Cheers,’ Dolly said, raising her bottle to him.

She was drinking straight from the bottle, the way he did. Noblesse oblige. But the work waited. Roger finished his beer quickly.

Leyna was genuinely faint when the Hand came back. She lay limp and unresponsive in its embrace. The smell of food again assaulted her when she dared open her eyes again. She was back on her bed. The commode next to it supported the silver tray. This time the smells were of broth and buttered toast. When she lifted the covers from the dishes, she cooed with delight. She didn t notice the wall being replaced. The broth was astonishingly good and she couldn’t help slurping a little as she consumed it.

Afterward she could lie back and feel almost whole again. Amazing what food does for a person, she thought, and wondered if it had something to do with the question of her sanity or not. It was true that hunger could make a person crazy, create chemical imbalances that distorted one’s perceptions of reality. That wasn’t what the Voice of Dorothy had meant though, she was sure of it.

The Voice was her madness and the Face that went with it and its terrible Hands. This room, the bed, the food she had just eaten, that was all as real and sane as could be. The fullness of her belly told her that. She had to be a little bit sane just to be able to consider the question.

Then the Voice spoke again. Leyna flattened herself into the pillows, thinking
no, no, no.
If It heard her thoughts, It ignored them.

‘Look in the wardrobe. There are clothes for you there.’

She waited for It to speak again. For one, two, five minutes. It was silent. She decided It had delivered its message and gone

away again.

There was no reason not to see if It spoke the truth. She felt as if she were trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle, though she had no idea what It pictured, and that this might be one small piece. And she was cold and self-conscious when she was out of bed.

When she left the bed, she was certain that Someone watched her. A quick survey of the room revealed no visible cameras in the corners of the ceilings. Sometime soon, she promised herself, she would search for hidden ones.

The wardrobe was one of those relentlessly well-made pieces of furniture that testified to some ancestor’s personal solidity. She admired the smooth, deep finish and the brasswork, the japanning on the doors. It was the sort of thing that fetched tens of thousands of dollars at auction. The appraisal made her reassess the room. It was very well furnished, indeed. A rich person’s room, in a rich person’s old house. Another piece of the puzzle.