Дэймон Найт - Orbit 4

“Yes.”

Burke peered again at the portrait. “The other hand. It’s a young woman’s. The bracelet looks—familiar. Odd. Who is she?” He looked around the table uneasily. “Where did you get this?”

“It was on the negative from the Tyson camera. You may recall, I mentioned two pictures. The FBI developed the whole strip. This was on it, too. Ben Edmonds made the blowup.”

“Who is she?” whispered Burke. He looked at Helen Nord’s wrist. “It wasn’t you. You don’t wear a bracelet like that ... of laurel . . . leaves?” As he considered this, doubt began to undermine doubt, and finally left him at the edge of some awesome mental precipice, unbalanced, and clawing to return to his warm, predictable, three-dimensional continuum. “No!” he gasped. “It can’t be. And even if it is, I don’t have to believe it!”

Chief Justice Pendleton looked at the gray face. He said soothingly, “Of course you don’t, Mr. Burke. In this country, and on this Court, nobody has to believe anything.”

And now it seemed to Roland Burke that this cheerful band had been illuminated by a flash of lighting, that he was now seeing their faces for the first time—and they were strangers, knowing, powerful, and he was helpless, and innocent among them. There was something terrifying about it. Nothing could ever be the same again.

Ben Edmonds knew what must be passing through Burke’s mind: psi existed. It was a living thing, without boundary of time, space, life, or death. It was not subject to the laws of logic, or to any law made by man. It was without probable cause.

Burke’s pen clattered to the floor. From the great black table he picked up the current volume of United States Reports, clutched it to his breast as though it were a talisman to ward off a horrifying unknown, and walked slowly from the room.

Edmonds leaned over and took the photograph from Pendleton. “Helen and I will sign first,” he said simply. “It would please them.”

Harlan Ellison is one of the few writers who have sniffed the breath of corruption that puffs out of the dark places in our own world. Here is a story whose quiet horror comes not from Arkham or Otranto, but from the smell of weed in an opened doorway, candy wrappers and kitty litter in a fireplace, the flutter of wings in a hall.

So it was there, eight months later, that Rudy found her; in that huge and ugly house off Western Avenue in Los Angeles; living with them, all of them, not just Jonah, but all of them.

It was November in Los Angeles, near sundown, and unaccountably chill even for the fall in that place always near the sun. He came down the sidewalk and stopped in front of the place. It was gothic hideous, with the grass half-cut and the rusted lawnmower sitting in the middle of an unfinished swath. Grass cut as if in a placating gesture to the outraged tenants of the two lanai apartment houses that loomed over the squat structure on either side. (Yet how strange . . . the apartment buildings were taller, the old house hunched down between them, but it seemed to dominate them. How odd.)

Cardboard covered the upstairs windows.

A baby carriage was overturned on the front walk.

The front door was ornately carved.

Darkness seemed to breathe heavily.

Rudy shifted the duffel bag slightly on his shoulder. He was afraid of the house. He was breathing more heavily as he stood there, and a panic he could never have described tightened his fat muscles on either side of his shoulderblades. He looked up into the corners of the darkening sky, seeking a way out, but he could only go forward. Kristina was in there.

Another girl answered the door.

She looked at him without speaking, her long blonde hair half-obscuring her face; peering out from inside the veil of Clairol and dirt.

When he asked a second time for Kris, she wet her lips in the corners, and a tic made her cheek jump. Rudy set down the duffel bag with a whump. “Kris, please,” he said urgently.

The blonde girl turned away and walked into the dim hallways of the terrible old house. Rudy stood in the open doorway, and suddenly, as if the blonde girl had been a barrier to it, and her departure had released it, he was assaulted like a smack in the face, by a wall of pungent scent. It was marijuana.

He reflexively inhaled, and his head reeled. He took a step back, into the last inches of sunlight coming over the lanai apartment building, and then it was gone, and he was still buzzing, and moved forward, dragging the duffel bag behind him.

He did not remember closing the front door, but when he looked, some time later, it was closed behind him.

He found Kris on the third floor, lying against the wall of a dark closet, her left hand stroking a faded pink rag rabbit, her right hand at her mouth, the little finger crooked, the thumb-ring roach holder half-obscured as she sucked up the last wonders of the joint. The closet held an infinitude of odors—dirty sweat socks as pungent as stew, fleece jackets on which the rain had dried to mildew, a mop gracious with its scent of old dust hardened to dirt, the overriding weed smell of what she had been at no one knew how long—and it held her. As pretty as pretty could be.

“Kris?”

Slowly her head came up, and she saw him. Much later, she tracked and focused and she began to cry. “Go away.”

In the limpid silences of the whispering house, back and above him in the darkness, Rudy heard the sudden sound of leather wings beating furiously for a second, then nothing.

Rudy crouched down beside her, his heart grown twice its size in his chest. He wanted so desperately to reach her, to talk to her. “Kris . . . please . . .” She turned her head away, and with the hand that had been stroking the rabbit she slapped at him awkwardly, missing him.

For an instant, Rudy could have sworn he heard the sound of someone counting heavy gold pieces, somewhere off to his right, down a passageway of the third floor. But when he half-turned, and looked out through the closet door, and tried to focus his hearing on it, there was no sound.

Kris was trying to crawl back further into the closet. She was trying to smile.

He turned back, on hands and knees moved into the closet after her.

“The rabbit,” she said, languorously. “You’re crushing the rabbit.” He looked down, his right knee was lying on the soft matted-fur head of the pink rabbit. He pulled it out from under his knee and threw it into a comer of the closet. She looked at him with disgust. “You haven’t changed, Rudy. Go away.”

“I’m outta the army, Kris,” Rudy said gently. “They let me out on a medical. I want you to come back, Kris, please.”

She would not listen, but pulled herself away from him, deep into the closet, and closed her eyes. He moved his lips several times, as though trying to recall words he had already spoken, but there was no sound, and he lit a cigarette, and sat in the open doorway of the closet, smoking and waiting for her to come back to him. He had waited eight months for her to come back to him, since he had been inducted and she had written him telling him, Rudy, I’m going to live with Jonah at the house.

There was the sound of something very tiny, lurking in the infinitely black shadow where the top step of the stairs from the second floor met the landing. It giggled in a glass harpsichord trilling. Rudy knew it was giggling at him, but he could make out no movement from that corner.

Kris opened her eyes and stared at him with distaste. “Why did you come here?”

“Because we’re gonna be married.”

“Get out of here.”

“I love you, Kris. Please.”