Robert Silverberg - It Comes and Goes

“My bike!” the boy wailed. “Where’s my bike ?”

The woman looked at me and said, “Did you see someone take the child’s tricycle?”

“Afraid I can’t say, ma’am,” I replied, shrugging my most amiable shrug. “I was coming around the corner, and there was the boy running full tilt into me. But I didn’t see any tricycles.” What else was I going to tell her? I saw it go up the steps by itself and into the house?

She gave me a troubled glance. But obviously I didn’t have the tricycle in my coat pocket and I guess I don’t look like the sort of man who specializes in stealing things from little children.

A dog. A cat. A tricycle.

I turned and walked away. Up Maple to Juniper, and down Juniper to Beech, and left on Beech onto Chestnut. Or maybe it was up Oak to Sycamore and then on to Locust and Hickory. Maple, Oak, Chestnut, Hickory: what difference did it make? They were all alike.

I doubled back eventually and got to the house just in time to see a boy of about fourteen wearing a green-and-yellow jersey come trotting down the street, tossing a football from hand to hand. As he went past the white house the screen door swung open and the inner door swung back and the kid halted, turned, and very neatly threw the football through, a nice high tight arc.

The doors closed.

The kid stood stock-still in the street, staring at his hand as though he had never seen it before. He looked stunned.

Then after a moment he broke out of his stasis and started up the path to the house. I wanted to call out to him to keep away, but I couldn’t get any sound out; and I wasn’t sure what I could say to him, anyway.

He rang the doorbell. Waited.

I held my breath.

The door started to open again. Trying to warn him, I managed to make a scratchy little choking sort of sound.

But the kid didn’t go in. He stood for a moment peering inside and then he turned and began to run, across the lawn, over the hedges, down the street.

What had he seen?

I ran after him. “Hey, kid! Kid, wait!”

He was going so fast I couldn’t believe it. I was a pretty good runner in my time, too. But my time was some time ago.

Instead of going to the meeting that night, I went to scout out the house. Under cover of darkness I crept around it in the shrubbery like your basic peeping-tom, trying to peer through the windows.

Was I scared? Utterly shitless, yes. Wouldn’t you be?

Did I want a drink? Don’t be naive. I always want a drink, and not just one. I certainly wanted a good jolt of the stuff now. Three fingers of Jim Beam and I’d have had the unshakeable savoir-faire of Sherlock Holmes himself. But I wouldn’t have stopped at three fingers. My name is Tom and I am an alcoholic.

What did I see? I saw a woman, very likely the same one I had had that quick glimpse of in the doorway that first drizzly Monday morning. I got only quick glimpses now. She was moving around from room to room so that I didn’t have a chance to see her clearly, but what I saw was plenty impressive. Tall, blonde, sleek, that much was certain. She wore a floor-length red robe made of some glossy metallic fabric that fell about her in a kind of liquid shimmer. Her movements were graceful and elegant. There didn’t seem to be anything in the way of furniture inside, just some cartons and crates, which she was carrying back and forth. Stranger and stranger. I didn’t see the cat or the dog or the bicycle.

I scrabbled around from window to window for maybe half an hour, hoping for a good look at her. I was moving with what I thought was real skill, keeping low, staying down behind the lilacs or whatever, rising cautiously toward windowsill level for each quick peek. I suppose I might have been visible from the street, but the night was moonless and people don’t generally go out strolling around here after dark.

There didn’t appear to be anyone else in the house. And for about fifteen minutes I didn’t see her either. Maybe she was in the shower; maybe she had gone to bed. I was tempted to ring the bell. But what for? What would I say to her if she answered? What was I doing here in the first place?

I crept backward through the shrubbery, thinking it was time to leave. And then there she was, framed in a window, looking straight out at me.

Smiling. Beckoning.

Come hither, Tommy-boy.

I thought about the cat. I thought about the dog. I began to shake.

Like the kid with the football, I turned and ran, desperately loping through the quiet streets in an overwhelming access of unreasoning terror.

I was getting to the point where I thought it might be calming to have a drink. In the old days the first drink always settled me down. It lifted the burden; it soothed the pain; it answered the questions. It made taking the second drink very easy. The second suggested the third; the third required the fourth; the fourth demanded the fifth; and so on without hindrance, right on to insomnia, vomiting, falling hair, bloody gums, raw eyes, exploding capillaries, nightmares, hallucinations, impotence, the shakes, the shivers, the queebles, the collywobbles, and all the rest.

I didn’t take the drink. I went to a meeting instead, jittery and perplexed. I said I was wrestling with a mystery. I didn’t say what it was. Let them fill in the blanks, anything they felt like. Even without the details, they’d know something of what I was going through. They too were wrestling with mysteries. Otherwise what were they doing there?

The house was gone for two weeks. I checked for it every day. Spring had arrived in full force before it returned. Trees turned green, plants were blooming, the air grew warm and soft.

The woman was back too, the blonde. I never failed to see her now, every time I went by, and I went by every day. It was as if she knew I was coming. Sometimes she was at the window, but more usually she was standing just inside the screen door. Some days she dressed in the red slinky robe, some days in a green one. She had a few other outfits too, all of them classy but somewhat oddly designed, shoulders too wide, the cut too narrow. Once—incredibly, unforgettably—she came to the door in nothing at all but a pair of stockings, and stood for a long moment on splendid display, framed perfectly in the doorway, sunlight glinting off her lush lovely body.

She was always smiling. She must have known I was the one who had been peeping that night and it didn’t seem to bother her. The look on her face said, Let’s get to know each other a little better shall we? Always that warm, beckoning smile. Sometimes she’d give me a little come-on-in flick of her fingertips.

Not on your life, sister. Not on your life.

But I couldn’t stop coming by. The house, the woman, the mystery, all pulled me like a magnet.

By now I had two theories. The simple one was that she was lonely, horny, bored, looking for distraction. Maybe it excited her to be playing these games with me. In this quiet little town where the chief cause of death surely must be boredom, she liked to live dangerously.

Too simple, much too simple. Why would a woman who looked like that be living a lonely, horny life? Why would she be in this kind of town in the first place? What was more important, the theory didn’t account for the comings and goings of the house. Or for what I had seen happen to the cat, the dog, the tricycle, the boy with the football. The dog had returned—he was sitting crosslegged on the steps just below the screen door the day I was given the full frontal show—but he never went more than a couple of yards from the house and he moved in a weird lobotomized way. There hadn’t been any further sign of the cat or the tricycle.

Which led to my other theory, the roach-motel theory.