Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

He walked on with brisk health down the narrow dirt road that led toward Glen Oaks. Elm trees lined the road. The morning air was damp and cool. Dew kept the yellow dust settled where spots of sunlight came through leaves and speckled it. Birds darted freshly through thickly hung branches.

He had given perennial lectures on hysterical episodes. Now he realized that he was the victim of such an episode. He had lost a number of minutes from his own memory. He remembered the yellow staring eyes of the breakfast eggs gazing up at him from a sea of grease. He remembered his wife screaming—after that only blankness.

He stopped on a small bridge crossing Calvert’s Creek, wiped the blood carefully from his hands with a green silk handkerchief. He dropped the stained silk into the clear water. Silver flashes darted up, nibbled the cloth as it floated down. He watched it for a moment, then went on along the shaded road.

This was his chance to escape from Glen Oaks. That was what he had wanted to do ever since he had come here five years ago to teach. He had a good excuse now to get away from the shambling peasants whom he hated and who returned the attitude wholeheartedly—the typical provincial’s hatred of culture and learning.

Then he entered the damp, chilled shadows of the thick wood that separated his house from the college grounds. It was thick, dense, dark. One small corner of it seemed almost ordinary, the rest was superstition haunted, mysterious and brooding. This forest had provided Doctor Spechaug many hours of escape.

He had attempted to introspect, but had never found satisfactory causes for his having found himself running through these woods at night in his bare feet. Nor why he sometimes hated the sunlight.

He tensed in the dank shadows. Someone else was in this forest with him. It did not disturb him. Whatever was here was not alien to him or the forest. His eyes probed the mist that slithered through the ancient mossy trees and hanging vines. He listened, looked, but found nothing. Birds chittered, but that was all. He sat down, his back against a spongy tree trunk, fondled dark green moss.

As he sat there, he knew that he was waiting for someone. He shrugged. Mysticism was not even interesting to him, ordinarily. Still, though a behaviorist, he upheld certain instinctual motivation theories. And, though reluctantly, he granted Freud contributory significance. He could be an atavist, a victim of unconscious regression. Or a prey of some insidious influence, some phenomena a rather childish science had not yet become aware of. But it was of no importance. He was happier now than he had ever been. He felt free—young and new. Life seemed worth living.

Abruptly, with a lithe liquid ease, he was on his feet, body tense, alert. Her form was vaguely familiar as she ran toward him. She dodged from his sight, then re-appeared as the winding path cut behind screens of foliage.

She ran with long smooth grace, and he had never seen a woman run like that. A plain skirt was drawn high to allow long bronzed legs free movement. Her hair streamed out, a cloud of red-gold. She kept looking backwards and it was obvious someone was chasing her.

He began sprinting easily toward her, and as the distance shortened, he recognized her. Edith Bailey, a second-year psychology major who had been attending his classes two semesters. Very intelligent, reclusive, not a local-grown product. Her work had a grimness about it, as though psychology was a dire obsession, especially abnormal psychology. One of her theme papers had been an exhaustive, mature but somehow overly determined, treatise on self-induced hallucination and auto-suggestion. He had not been too impressed because of an unjustified emphasis on supernatural myth and legend, including werewolves, vampires, and the like.

She sprang to a stop like a cornered deer as she saw him suddenly blocking the path. She turned, then stopped and turned back slowly. Her eyes were wide, cheeks flushed. Taut breasts rose and fell deeply, and her hands were poised for flight.

But she wasn’t looking at his face. Her gaze was on the blood splattering his clothes.

He was breathing deeply too. His heart was swelling with exhilaration. His blood flowed hotly. Something of the whirling ecstasy he had known back in his student days as a track champion returned to him—the mad bursting of the wind against him, the wild passion of the dash.

A burly figure came lurching after her down the path. A tramp, evidently, from his filthy, smoke-sodden clothes and thick stubble of beard. He recalled the trestle west of the forest where the bindlestiffs from the Pacific Fruit line jungled up at nights, or during long layovers. Sometimes they came into the forest.

He was big, fat and awkward. He was puffing and blowing, and he began to groan as Doctor Spechaug’s fists thudded into his flesh. The degenerate fell to his knees, his broken face blowing out bloody air. Finally he rolled over onto his side with a long sighing moan, lay limply, very still. Doctor Spechaug’s lips were thin, white, as he kicked savagely. He heard a popping. The bum flopped sidewise into a pile of dripping leaves.

He stepped back, looked at Edith Bailey. Her full red lips were moist and gleaming. Her oddly opaque eyes glowed strangely at him. Her voice was low, yet somehow, very intense.

“Wonderful laboratory demonstration, Doctor. But I don’t think many of your student embryos would appreciate it.”

Doctor Spechaug nodded, smiled gently. “No. An unorthodox case.” He lit a cigarette, and she took one. Their smoke mingled with the dissipating morning mist. And he kept on staring at her. A pronounced sweater girl with an intellect. This—he could have loved. He wondered if it were too late.

Doctor Spechaug had never been in love. He wondered if he were now with this fundamental archetypal beauty. “By the way,” he was saying, “what are you doing in this evil wood?”

Then she took his arm, very naturally, easily. They began walking slowly along the cool, dim path.

“Two principal reasons. One, I like it here; I come here often. Two, I knew you always walk along this path, always late for your eight o’clock class. I’ve often watched you walking here. You walk beautifully.”

He did not comment. It seemed unnecessary now.

“The morning’s almost gone,” she observed. “The sun will be out very warm in a little while. I hate the sun.”

On an impulse he said: “I’m going away. I’ve wanted to get out of this obscene nest of provincial stupidity from the day I first came here. And now I’ve decided to leave.”

“What are you escaping from?”

He answered softly. “I don’t know. Something Freudian, no doubt. Something buried, buried deep. Something too distasteful to recognize.”

She laughed. “I knew you were human and not the cynical pseudo-intellectual you pretended to be. Disgusting, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Being human, I mean.”

“I suppose so. I’m afraid we’re getting an extraordinarily prejudiced view. I can’t help being a snob here. I despise and loathe peasants.”

“And I,” she admitted. “Which is merely to say, probably, that we loathe all humanity.”

“Tell me about yourself,” he said finally.

“Gladly. I like doing that—to one who will understand. I’m nineteen. My parents died in Hungary during the War. I came here to America to live with my uncle. But by the time I got here he was dead, too. And he left me no money, so there was no sense being grateful for his death. I got a part-time job and finished high school in Chicago. I got a scholarship to—this place.” Her voice trailed off. She was staring at him.

“Hungary!” he said and repeated it. “Why—I came from Hungary!”