Дэймон Найт - Orbit 9

It’s your fault, I thought at her. Why don’t you beat it? Go somewhere else. Go home. Anywhere else. Just get out.

I was falling. Suddenly there was nothing beneath my feet, nothing at all, and I was falling straight down in a featureless grey vacuum. I groped wildly for something to hold on to, and I remembered the last time it had happened, and that it had happened to Laura. Falling straight down, now starting to tumble, my stomach lurching, nausea welling up inside me. Everything was gone, the house, terrace, the lights… I thought hard of the lights that had been the last thing I had seen. Eyes open or closed, the field of vision didn’t change, nothing was there. “Janet!” I tried to call, and had no way of knowing if I had been able to make the sound or not. I couldn’t hear myself. A second sweep of nausea rose in me, and this time I tasted the bitterness. I knew that I would start crying. I couldn’t help it; nausea, fear, the uncontrollable tumbling, unable to call anyone. Fury then displaced the helplessness that had overcome me, and I yelled, again without being able to hear anything, “You did this, didn’t you, you bitch!”

Donlevy’s study was warm, the colors were dull gold, russet, deep, dark green. There was a fire in the fireplace. The room was out of focus somehow, not exactly as I remembered it, the furniture too large and awkward-looking, the shelves built to the ceiling were too high, the titles on the topmost shelf a blur because of the strange angle from which I saw them. Before me was Donlevy’s desk, cleaner than I’d ever seen it, bare with gleaming wood, a stand with pens, and several sheets of paper. No stacks of reports, journals, overflowing ashtrays… I looked at the papers curiously, a letter, in a neat legible handwriting. Two pages were turned face down, and the third was barely begun: “… nothing to do with you in any way. When I have finished going through the papers, then I’ll box up those that you have a right to and mail them to you. It will take many weeks, however, so unti…” The last word ended with a streak of ink that slashed downward and across the page, and ran off onto the desktop.

Where was she, Christine? How had I got… I realized that I wasn’t actually there. Even as the thought formed, I knew precisely where I was, on my own terrace, leaning against a post, staring at the lights through the bare trees.

I looked at the letter, and slowly raised my hand and stared at it, both on the terrace and in the study. And the one in the study was tiny, tanned, with oval nails, and a wide wedding band…

“Eddie?”

Janet’s voice jolted me, and for a moment the study dimmed, but I concentrated on it, and held it. “Yes.”

“Are you all right?”

“Sure. I thought you were sleeping.”

In the study… who the devil was in the study? Where was she ? Then suddenly she screamed, and it was both inside my head and outside filling the night.

“My God!” Janet cried. “It’s Christine! Someone must have…”

I started to run toward her house, the Donlevy house, and Janet was close behind me in her robe and slippers. In the split second before that scream had exploded into the night, I had been overcome by a wave of terror such as I had never known before. I fully expected to find Christine dead, with her throat cut, or a bullet in her brain, or something. Caesar met us and loped with us to the house, yelping excitedly. Why hadn’t he barked at a stranger? I wanted to kick the beast. The back door was unlocked. We rushed in, and while Janet hesitated, I dashed toward the study.

Christine was on the floor near the desk, but she wasn’t dead, or even injured as far as I could tell from a hurried examination. Janet had dropped to her knees also, and was feeling the pulse in Christine’s wrist, and I saw again the small tanned hand that I had seen only a few minutes ago, even the wedding band. The terror that had flooded through me minutes ago surged again. How could I have dreamed of seeing that hand move as if it were my own hand? I looked about the study frantically, but it was back to normal, nothing distorted now. I had been dreaming, I thought, dreaming. I had dreamed of being this woman, of seeing through her eyes, feeling through her. A dream, no more complicated than any other dream, just strange to me. Maybe people dreamed of being other people all the time, and simply never mentioned it. Maybe everyone walked around terrified most of the time because of inexplicable dreams. Christine’s eyelids fluttered, and I knew that I couldn’t look at her yet, couldn’t let her look at me. Not yet. I stood up abruptly. “I’ll have a look around. Something scared her.”

I whistled for Caesar to come with me, and we made a tour of the house, all quiet, with no signs of an intruder. The dog sniffed doors, and the floor, but in a disinterested manner, as if going through the motions because that was expected of him. The same was true of the yard about the house; he just couldn’t find anything to get excited about. I cursed him for being a stupid brute, and returned to the study. Christine was seated on one of the dark green chairs, and Janet on one facing her. I moved casually toward the desk, enough to see the letter, to see the top lines, the long streak where the pen had gone out of control.

Janet said, “Something must have happened, but she can’t remember a thing.”

“Fall asleep? A nightmare?” I suggested, trying not to look at her.

“No. I’m sure not. I was writing a letter, in fact. Then suddenly there was something else in the room with me. I know it. It’s happened before, the same kind of feeling, and I thought it was the farmhouse, the associations there. But maybe I am going crazy. Maybe Victor’s right, I need care and treatment.” She was very pale, her eyes so large that she looked almost doll-like, an idealized doll-like face.

“Who is Victor?” Janet asked.

“Eugenia’s husband. She’s… she was my husband’s daughter.” Christine sighed and stood up, a bit unsteadily. “If it starts again… I thought if I just got away from them all, and the house… But if it starts again here…”

“Eddie, we can’t leave her like this,” Janet said in a low voice. “And we can’t leave the kids alone. Let’s take her home for the night.”

Christine objected, but in the end came along through the woods with Janet and me. At our house Janet went to get some clothes on. Her gown and robe had been soaked with dew. While Janet was dressing, I poked up a fire in the fireplace, and then made some hot toddies. Christine didn’t speak until Janet came back.

“I’m sorry this happened,” she said then. “I mean involving you two in something as… as messy as this is.”

Janet looked at me, waiting, and I said, “Christine, we heard from Pete and he seemed to think you might need friends. He seemed to think we might do. Is any of this something that you could talk to Pete about?”

She nodded. “Yes. I could tell Pete.”

“Okay, then let us be the friends that he would be if he was here.”

Again she nodded. “Lord knows I have to talk to someone, or I’ll go as batty as Victor wants to believe I am.”

“Why do you keep referring to him?” Janet asked. Then she shook her head firmly. “No. No questions. You just tell us what you want to for now.”

“I met Karl when I was a student at Northwestern. He had a class in physiological psychology and I was one of his students and experimental subjects. He was doing his basic research then on perception. Three afternoons a week we would meet in his lab for tests that he had devised, visual-perception tests. He narrowed his subjects down to two others and me, and we are the ones he based much of his theory on. Anyway, as I got to know him and admire him more and more, he seemed to take a greater interest in me. He was a widower, with a child, Eugenia. She was twelve then.” Her voice had grown fainter, and now stopped, and she looked at the drink in her hand that she had hardly touched. She took a sip, and another. We waited.