Dark Benediction

ANYBODY ELSE LIKE ME?

Quiet misery in a darkened room. The clock spoke nine times with a cold brass voice. She stood motionless, leaning against the drapes by the window, alone. The night was black, the house empty and silent.

“Come, Lisa!” she told herself. “You’re not dying!”

She was thirty-four, still lovely, with a slender white body and a short, rich thatch of warm red hair. She had a good dependable husband, three children, and security. She had friends, hobbies, social activities. She painted mediocre pictures for her own amusement, played the piano rather well, and wrote fair poetry for the University’s literary quarterly. She was well-read, well-rounded, well-informed. She loved and was loved.

Then why this quiet misery?

Wanting something, expecting nothing, she stared out into the darkness of the stone-walled garden. The night was too quiet. A distant street lamp played in the branches of the elm, and the elm threw its shadow across another wing of the house. She watched the shadow’s wandering for a time. A lone car purred past in the street and was gone. A horn sounded raucously in the distance.

What was wrong? A thousand times since childhood she had felt this uneasy stirring, this crawling of the mind that called out for some unfound expression. It had been particularly strong in recent weeks.

She tried to analyze. What was different about recent weeks? Events: Frank’s job had sent him on the road for a month; the children were at Mother’s; the city council had recommended a bond issue; she had fired her maid; a drunk had strangled his wife; the University had opened its new psycho-physics lab; her art class had adjourned for the summer.

Nothing there. No clue to the unreasoning, goalless urge that called like a voice crying in mental wilderness: “Come, share, satisfy, express it to the fullest!”

Express what? Satisfy what? How?

A baby, deserted at birth and dying of starvation, would fell terrible hunger. But if it had never tasted milk, it could not know the meaning of the hunger nor how to case it.

“I need to relate this thing to something else, to something in my own experience or in the experience of others.” She had tried to satisfy the urge with the goals of other hungers: her children, her husband’s lovemaking, food, drink, art, friendship. But the craving was something else, crying for its pound of unknown flesh, and there was no fulfillment.

“How am I different from others?” she asked herself. But she was different only in the normal ways that every human being is different from the exact Average. Her intelligence was high, short of genius, but superior. To a limited extent, she felt the call of creativity. Physically, she was delicately beautiful. The only peculiarities that she knew about seemed ridiculously irrelevant: a dark birth-mark on her thigh, a soft fontanel in the top of her long narrow head, like the soft spot in an infant’s cranium. Silly little differences!

One big difference: the quiet misery of the unfed hunger.

A scattering of big raindrops suddenly whispered on the walk and in the grass and through the foliage of the elm. A few drops splattered on the screen, spraying her face and arms with faint points of coolness. It had been oppressively hot. Now there was a chill breath in the night.

Reluctantly she closed the window. The oppression of the warm and empty house increased. She walked to the door opening into the walled garden.

Ready for a lonely bed, she was wearing a negligee over nothing. Vaguely, idly, her hand fumbled at the waist-knot, loosened it. The robe parted, and the fine spray of rain was delightfully cool on her skin.

The garden was dark, the shadows inky, the nearest neighbor a block away. The wall screened it from prying eyes. She brushed her hands over her shoulders; the sleeves slipped down her arms. Peeled clean, feeling like a freed animal, she pressed open the screen and stepped out under the eaves to stand on the warm stone walk.

The rain was rattling in the hedge and roaring softly all about her, splashing coldness about her slender calves. She hugged herself and stepped into it. The drench of icy fingers stroked her with pleasant lashes; she laughed and ran along the walk toward the elm. The drops stung her breasts, rivered her face, and coursed coldly down her sides and legs.

She exulted in the rain, tried to dance and laughed at herself. She ran. Then, tired, she threw herself down on the crisp wet lawn, stretching her arms and legs and rolling slowly on the grass. Eyes closed, drenched and languorous, she laughed softly and played imagining games with the rain.

The drops were steel-jacketed wasps, zipping down out of the blackness, but she melted them with her mind, made them soft and cool and caressing. The drops took impersonal liberties with her body, and she rolled demurely to lie face down in the rainsoft grass.

“I am still a pale beast,” she thought happily, “still kin of my grandmother the ape who danced in the tree and chattered when it rained. How utterly barren life would be, if I were not a pale beast!”

She dug her fingers into the sodden turf, bared her teeth, pressed her forehead against the ground, and growled a little animal growl. It amused her, and she laughed again. Crouching, she came up on her hands and knees, hunching low, teeth still bared. Like a cat, she hissed—and pounced upon a sleeping bird, caught it and shook it to death.

Again she lay laughing in the grass.

“If Frank were to see me like this,” she thought, “he would put me to bed with a couple of sleeping pills, and call that smug Dr. Mensley to have a look at my mind. And Dr. Mensley would check my ambivalences and my repressions and my narcissistic, voyeuristic, masochistic impulses. He would tighten my screws and readjust me to reality, fit me into a comfortable groove, and take the pale beast out of me to make me a talking doll.”

He had done it several times before. Thinking of Dr. Mensley, Lisa searched her vocabulary for the most savage word she could remember. She growled it aloud and felt better.

The rain was slowly subsiding. A siren was wailing in the distance. The police. She giggled and imagined a headline in tomorrow’s paper: PROMINENT SOCIALITE JAILED FOR INDECENT EXPOSURE. And the story would go on: “Mrs. Lisa Waverly was taken into custody by the police after neighbors reported that she was running around stark naked in her back yard. Said Mrs. Heinehoffer who called the law: ‘It was just terrible. Looked to me like she was having fits.’ Mr. Heinehoffer, when asked for comment, simply closed his eyes and smiled ecstatically.”

Lisa sighed wearily. The siren had gone away. The rain had stopped, except for drippings out of the elm. She was tired, emotionally spent, yet strangely melancholy. She sat up slowly in the grass and hugged her shins.

The feeling came over her gradually.

“Someone has been watching me!”

She stiffened slowly, but remained in place, letting her eyes probe about her in the shadows. If only the drippings would stop so she could listen! She peered along the hedge, and along the shadows by the garden wall, toward the dark windows of the house, up toward the low-hanging mist faintly illuminated from below by street lights. She saw nothing, heard nothing. There was no movement in the night. Yet the feeling lingered, even though she scoffed.

“If anyone is here,” she thought, “I’ll call them gently, and if anyone appears, I’ll scream so loud that Mrs. Heinehoffer will hear me.”

“Hey!” she said in a low voice, but loud enough to penetrate any of the nearby shadows.

There was no answer. She folded her arms behind her head and spoke again, quietly, sensually.

“Come and get me.”

No black monster slithered from behind the hedge to devour her. No panther sprang from the elm. No succubus congealed out of wet darkness. She giggled.

“Come have a bite.”

No bull-ape came to crush her in ravenous jaws.

She had only imagined the eyes upon her. She stretched lazily and picked herself up, pausing to brush off the leaves of grass pasted to her wet skin. It was over, the strange worship in the rain, and she was weary. She walked slowly toward the house.

Then she heard it—a faint crackling sound, intermittent, distant. She stood poised in the black shadow of the house, listening. The crackle of paper… then a small pop… then crisp fragments dropped in the street. It was repeated at short intervals.

Taking nervous, shallow breaths, she tiptoed quietly toward the stone wall of the garden. It was six feet high, but there was a concrete bench under the trellis. The sound was coming from over the wall. She stood crouching on the bench; then, hiding her face behind the vines, she lifted her head to peer.

The street lamp was half a block away, but she could see dimly. A man was standing across the street in the shadows, apparently waiting for a bus. He was eating peanuts out of a paper bag, tossing the shells in the street. That explained the crackling sound.

She glared at him balefully from behind the trellis. “I’ll claw your eyes out,” she thought, “if you came and peeped over my wall.”

“Hi!” the man said.

Lisa stiffened and remained motionless. It was impossible that he could see her. She was in shadow, against a dark background. Had he heard her foolish babbling a moment ago?

More likely, he had only cleared his throat.

“Hi!” he said again.

Her face was hidden in the dripping vines, and she could not move without rustling. She froze in place, staring. She could see little of him. Dark raincoat, dark hat, slender shadow. Was he looking toward her? She was desperately frightened.

Suddenly the man chucked the paper bag in the gutter, stepped off the curb, and came sauntering across the street toward the wall. He removed his hat, and crisp blond hair glinted in the distant streetlight. He stopped three yards away, smiling uncertainly at the vines.

Lisa stood trembling and frozen, staring at him in horror. Strange sensations, utterly alien, passed over her in waves. There was no describing them, no understanding them.

“I—I found you,” he stammered sheepishly. “Do you know what it is?”

“I know you,” she thought. “You have a small scar on the back of your neck, and a mole between your toes. Your eyes are blue, and you have an impacted wisdom tooth, and your feet are hurting you because you walked all the way out here from the University, and I’m almost old enough to be your mother. But I can’t know you, because I’ve never seen you before!”

“Strange, isn’t it?” he said uncertainly. He was holding his hat in his hand and cocking his head politely.

“What?” she whispered.

He shuffled his feet and stared at them. “It must be some sort of palpable biophysical energy form, analytically definable—if we had enough data. Lord knows, I’m no mystic. If it exists, it’s got to be mathematically definable. But why us?”

Horrified curiosity made her step aside and lean her arms on the wall to stare down at him. He looked up bashfully, and his eyes widened slightly.

“Oh!”

“Oh what?” she demanded, putting on a terrible frown.

“You’re beautiful!”

“What do you want?” she asked icily. “Go away!”

“I—” He paused and closed his mouth slowly. He stared at her with narrowed eyes, and touched one hand to his temple as if concentrating.

For an instant, she was no longer herself. She was looking up at her own shadowy face from down in the street, looking through the eyes of a stranger who was not a stranger. She was feeling the fatigue in the weary ankles, and the nasal ache of a slight head cold, and the strange sadness in a curious heart—a sadness too akin to her own.

She rocked dizzily. It was like being in two places at once, like wearing someone else’s body for a moment.

The feeling passed. “It didn’t happen!” she told herself.

“No use denying it,” he said quietly. “I tried to make it go away, too, but apparently we’ve got something unique. It would be interesting to study. Do you suppose we’re related?”

“Who are you?” she choked, only half-hearing his question.

“You know my name,” he said, “if you’ll just take the trouble to think about it. Yours is Lisa—Lisa O’Brien, or Lisa Waverly—I’m never sure which. Sometimes it comes to me one way, sometimes the other.”

She swallowed hard. Her maiden name had been O’Brien.

“I don’t know you,” she snapped.

His name was trying to form in her mind. She refused to allow it. The young man sighed.

“I’m Kenneth Grearly, if you really don’t know.” He stepped back a pace and lifted his hat toward his head. “I—I guess I better go. I see this disturbs you. I had hoped we could talk about it, but—well, good night, Mrs. Waverly.”

He turned and started away.

“Wait!” she called out against her will. He stopped again. “Yes?”

“Were—were you watching me—while it was raining?”

He opened his mouth and stared thoughtfully down the street toward the light. “You mean watching visually? You really are repressing this thing, aren’t you? I thought you understood.” He looked at her sharply, forlornly. “They say the failure to communicate is the basis of all tragedy. Do you suppose in our case… ?”

“What?”

“Nothing.” He shifted restlessly for a moment. “Good night.”

“Good night,” she whispered many seconds after he was gone.

Her bedroom was hot and lonely, and she tossed in growing restlessness. If only Frank were home! But he would he gone for two more weeks. The children would be back on Monday, but that was three whole days away. Crazy! It was just stark raving crazy!

Had the man really existed—what was his name?—Kenneth Grearly? Or was he only a phantasm invented by a mind that was failing—her mind? Dancing naked in the rain! Calling out to shadow shapes in the brush! Talking to a specter in the street! Schizophrenic syndrome dream-world stuff. It could not be otherwise, for unless she had invented Kenneth Grearly, how could she know he had sore feet, an impacted wisdom tooth, and a head cold. Not only did she know about those things, but she felt them!

She buried her face in the dusty pillow and sobbed. Tomorrow she would have to call Dr. Mensley.

But fearing the specter’s return, she arose a few minutes later and locked all the doors in the house. When she returned to bed, she tried to pray but it was as if the prayer were being watched. Someone was listening, eavesdropping from outside.

Kenneth Grearly appeared in her dreams, stood half-shrouded in a slowly swirling fog. He stared at her with his head cocked aside, smiling slightly, holding his hat respectfully in his hands.

“Don’t you realize, Mrs. Waverly, that we are mutants perhaps?” he asked politely.

“No!” she screamed. “I’m happily married and I have three children and a place in society! Don’t come near me!”

He melted slowly into the fog. But echoes came monotonously from invisible cliffs: mutant mutant mutant mutant mutant…

Dawn came, splashing pink paint across the eastern sky. The light woke her to a dry and empty consciousness, to a headachy awareness full of dull anxiety. She arose wearily and trudged to the kitchen for a pot of coffee.

Lord! Couldn’t it all be only a bad dream?

In the cold light of early morning, the things of the past night looked somehow detached, unreal. She tried to analyze objectively.

That sense of sharing a mind, a consciousness, with the stranger who came out of the shadows—what crazy thing had he called it?—“some sort of palpable biophysical energy form, analytically definable.”

“If I invented the stranger,” she thought, “I must have also invented the words.”

But where had she heard such words before?

Lisa went to the telephone and thumbed through the directory. No Grearly was listed. If he existed at all, he probably lived in a rooming house. The University—last night she had thought that he had something to do with the University. She lifted the phone and dialed.

“University Station; number please,” the operator said.

“I—uh—don’t know the extension number. Could you tell me if there is a Kenneth Grearly connected with the school?”

“Student or faculty, Madam?”

“I don’t know.”

“Give me your number, please, and I’ll call you back.”

“Lawrence 4750. Thanks, Operator.”

She sat down to wait. Almost immediately it rang again. “Hello?”

“Mrs. Waverly, you were calling me?” A man’s voice. His voice!

“The operator found you rather quickly.” It was the only thing she could think of saying.

“No, no. I knew you were calling. In fact, I hoped you into it.”

“Hoped me? Now look here, Mr. Grearly, I—”

“You were trying to explain our phenomenon in terms of insanity rather than telepathy. I didn’t want you to do that, and so I hoped you into calling me.”

Lisa was coldly speechless.

“What phenomenon are you talking about?” she asked after a few dazed seconds.

“Still repressing it? Listen, I can share your mind any time I want to, now that I understand where and who you are. You might as well face the fact. And it can work both ways, if you let it. Up to now, you’ve been—well, keeping your mind’s eye closed, so to speak.”

Her scalp was crawling. The whole thing had become intensely disgusting to her.

“I don’t know what you’re up to, Mr. Grearly, but I wish you’d stop it. I admit something strange is going on, but your explanation is ridiculous—offensive, even.”

He was silent for a long time, then “I wonder if the first man-ape found his prehensile thumb ridiculous. I wonder if he thought using his hands for grasping was offensive.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“That I think we’re mutants. We’re not the first ones. I had this same experience when I was in Boston once. There must be one of us there, too, but suddenly I got the feeling that he had committed suicide. I never saw him. We’re probably the first ones to discover each other.”

“Boston? If what you say is true, what would distance have to do with it?”

“Well, if telepathy exists, it certainly involves transfer of energy from one point to another. What kind of energy, I don’t know. Possibly electromagnetic in character. Out it seems likely that it would obey the inverse square law, like radiant energy forms. I came to town about three weeks ago. I didn’t feel you until I got close.”

“There is a connection,” she thought. She had been wondering about the increased anxiety of the past three weeks.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she evaded icily, though. “I’m no mutant. I don’t believe in telepathy. I’m not insane. Now let me alone.”

She slammed the telephone in its cradle and started to walk away.

Evidently he was angry, for she was suddenly communicating with him again.

She reeled dizzily and clutched at the wall, because she was in two places at once, and the two settings merged in her mind to become a blur, like a double exposure. She was in her own hallway, and she was also in an office, looking at a calculator keyboard, hearing glassware rattling from across a corridor, aware of the smell of formaldehyde. There was a chart on the wall behind the desk and it was covered with strange tracery—schematics of some neural arcs. The office of the psychophysics lab. She closed her eyes, and her own hallway disappeared.

She felt anger—his anger.

“We’ve got to face this thing. If this is s new direction for human evolution, then we’d better study it and see what to do about it. I knew I was different and I became a psychophysicist to find out why. I haven’t been able to measure much, but now with Lisa’s help…”

She tried to shut him out. She opened her eyes and summoned her strength and tried to force him away. She stared at the bright doorway, but the tracery of neural arcs still remained. She fought him, but his mind lingered in hers.

“…perhaps we can get to the bottom of it. I know my encephalograph recordings are abnormal, and now I can check them against hers. A few correlations will help. I’m glad to know about her soft fontanel. I wondered about mine. Now I think that underneath that fontanel lies a pattern of specialized neural—”

She sagged to the floor of the hall and babbled aloud “Hickory Dickory Dock, the mouse ran up the clock. The clock struck one—”

Slowly he withdrew. The laboratory office faded from her vision. His thoughts left her. She lay there panting for a time.

Had she won?

No, there was no sense in claiming victory. She had not driven him away. He had withdrawn of his own volition when he felt her babbling. She knew his withdrawal was free, because she had felt his parting state of mind: sadness. He had stopped the forced contact because he pitied her, and there was a trace of contempt in the pity.

She climbed slowly to her feet, looking around wildly, touching the walls and the door-frame to reassure herself that she was still in her own home. She staggered into the parlor and sat shivering on the sofa.

Last night! That crazy running around in the rain! He was responsible for that. He had hoped her into doing it, or maybe he had just wondered what she looked like undressed, and she had subconsciously satisfied his curiosity. He had planted the suggestion—innocently, perhaps—and she had unknowingly taken the cue.

He could be with her whenever he wanted to! He had been with her while she frolicked insanely in the rain-sodden grass! Perhaps he was with her now.

Whom could she talk to? Where could she seek help? Dr. Mensley? He would immediately chalk it up as a delusion, and probably call for a sanity hearing if she wouldn’t voluntarily enter a psycho-ward for observation.

The police? “Sergeant, I want to report a telepathic prowler. A man is burglarizing my mind.”

A clergyman? He would shudder and refer her to a psychiatrist.

All roads led to the booby-hatch, it seemed. Frank wouldn’t believe her. No one would believe her.

Lisa wandered through the day like a caged animal. She put on her brightest summer frock and a pert straw hat and went downtown. She wandered through the crowds in the business district, window-shopping. But she was alone. The herds of people about her brushed past and wandered on. A man whistled at her in front of a cigar store. A policeman waved her back to the curb when she started across an intersection.

“Wake up, lady!” he called irritably.

People all about her, but she could not tell them, explain to them, and so she was alone. She caught a taxi mid went to visit a friend, the wife of an English teacher, and drank a glass of iced tea in the friend’s parlor, and talked of small things, and admitted that she was tired when the friend suggested that she looked that way. When she went back home, the sun was sinking in the west.

She called long distance and talked to her mother, then spoke to her children, asked them if they were ready to come home, but they wanted to stay another week. They begged, and her mother begged, and she reluctantly consented. It had been a mistake to call. Now the kids would be gone even longer.

She tried to call Frank in St. Louis, but the hotel clerk reported that he had just checked out. Lisa knew this meant he was on the road again.

“Maybe I ought to go join the kids at Mother’s,” she thought. But Frank had wanted her to stay home. He was expecting a registered letter from Chicago, and it was apparently important, and she had to take care of it.

“I’ll invite somebody over,” she thought. But the wives were home with their husbands, and it was a social mistake to invite a couple when her husband was gone. It always wound up with two women yammering at each other while the lone male sat and glowered in uneasy isolation, occasionally disagreeing with his wife, just to let her know he was there and he was annoyed and bored and why didn’t they go home? It was different if the business-widow called on a couple. Then the lone male could retire to some other part of the house to escape the yammering.

But she decided it wasn’t company she wanted; she wanted help. And there was no place to get it.

When she allowed her thoughts to drift toward Kenneth Grearly, it was almost like tuning in a radio station. He was eating early dinner in the University cafeteria with a bedraggled, bespectacled brunette from the laboratory. Lisa closed her eyes and let herself sift gingerly into his thoughts. His attention was on the conversation and on the food, and he failed to realize Lisa’s presence. That knowledge gave her courage.

He was eating Swiss steak and hashed brown potatoes, and the flavors formed perceptions in her mind. She heard the rattle of silverware, the low murmur of voices, and smelled the food. She marveled at it. The strange ability had apparently been brought into focus by learning what it was and how to use it.

“Our work has been too empirical,” he was saying. “We’ve studied phenomena, gathered data, looked for correlations. But that method has limitations. We should try to find a way to approach psychology from below. Like the invariantive approach to physics.”

The girl shook her head. “The nervous system is too complicated for writing theoretical equations about it. Empirical equations are the best we can do.”

“They aren’t good enough, Sarah. You can predict results with them, inside the limits of their accuracy. But you can’t extrapolate them very well, and they won’t stack up together into a single integrated structure. And when you’re investigating a new field, they no longer apply. We need a broad mathematical theory, covering all hypothetically possible neural arrangements. It would let us predict not only results, but also predict patterns of possible order.”

“Seems to me the possible patterns are infinite.”

“No, Sarah. They’re limited by the nature of the building blocks—neurons, synaptic connections, and, so forth. With limited materials, you have structural limitations. You don’t build skyscrapers out of modeling clay. And there is only a finite number of ways you can build atoms out of electrons, protons and neutrons. Similarly, brains are confined to the limitations of the things they’re made of. We need a broad theory for defining the limits.”

“Why?”

“Because…” He paused. Lisa felt his urge to explain his urgency, felt him suppress it, felt for a moment his loneliness in the awareness of his uniqueness and the way it isolated him from humanity.

“You must be doing new work,” the girl offered, “if you feel the lack of such a theoretical approach. I just can’t imagine an invariantive approach to psychology—or an all defining set of laws for it, either. Why do you need such a psychological ‘Relativity’?”

He hesitated, frowning down at his plate, watching a fly crawl around its rim. “I’m interested in—in the quantitative aspects of nerve impulses. I—I suspect that there is such a thing as neural resonance.”

She laughed politely and shook her head. “I’ll stick to my empirical data-gathering, thank you.”

She felt him thinking:

“She could understand, if I could show her data. But my data is all subjective, experimental, personal. I share it with that Waverly woman, but she is only a social thinker, analytically shallow, refusing even to recognize facts. Why did it have to be her? She’s flighty, emotional, and in a cultural rut. If she doesn’t conform, she thinks she’s nuts. But then at least she’s a woman—and if this is really a mutation, we’ll have to arrange for some children…”

Lisa gasped and sat bolt upright. Her shock revealed her presence to him, and he dropped his fork with a clatter.

“Lisa!”

She wrenched herself free of him abruptly. She angrily stalked about the house, slamming doors and muttering her rage. The nerve! The maddening, presumptuous, ill-mannered, self-centered, overly educated boor!

Arrange for some children indeed! An impossible situation!

As her anger gathered momentum, she contacted him again—like a snake striking. Thought was thunder out of a dark cloud.

“I’m decent and I’m respectable, Mr. Grearly! I have a husband and three fine children and I love them, and you can go to hell! I never want to see you again or have you prowling around my mind. Get out and STAY out. And if you ever bother me again—I’ll—I’ll kill you.”

He was outdoors, striding across the campus alone. She saw the gray buildings, immersed in twilight, felt the wind on his face, hated him. He was thinking nothing, letting himself follow her angry flow of thought. When she finished, his thoughts began like the passionate pleading of a poem.

He was imagining a human race with telepathic abilities, in near-perfect communication with one another. So many of the world’s troubles could be traced to imperfect communication of ideas, to misunderstandings.

Then he thought briefly of Sarah—the nondescript laboratory girl he had taken to dinner—and Lisa realized he was in love with Sarah. There were sadness and resentment here. He couldn’t have Sarah now, not if he were to be certain of perpetuating the mutant characteristic. The Waverly woman ought to be good for three or four children yet, before she reached middle age.

Lisa stood transfixed by shock. Then he was thinking directly to her.

“I’m sorry. You’re a beautiful, intelligent woman—but I don’t love you. We’re not alike. But I’m stuck with you and you’re stuck with me, because I’ve decided it’s going to be that way. I can’t convince you since your thinking habits are already fixed, so I won’t even try. I’m sorry it has to be against your will, but in any event it has to be. And now that I know what you’re like, I don’t dare wait—for fear you’ll do something to mess things up.”

“No!” she screamed, watching the scenery that moved past his field of vision.

He had left the campus and was walking up the street—toward her neighborhood. He was walking with the briskness of purpose. He was coming to her house.

“Call the police!” she thought, and tried to dissolve him out of her mind.

But this time he followed, clung to her thoughts, would not let her go. It was like two flashlight beams playing over a wall, one trying to escape, the other following its frantic circle of brightness.

She staggered, groped her way toward the hall, which was confused with a superimposed image of a sidewalk and a street. A phantom automobile came out of the hall wall, drove through her and vanished. Double exposures. He stared at a street light and it blinded her. At last she found the phone, but he was laughing at her.

“Eight seven six five twenty-one Mary had a little lamb seven seven sixty-seven yesterday was May March April…”

He was deliberately filling her mind with confusion. She fumbled at the directory, trying to find the police, but he thought a confused jumble of numbers and symbols, and they scampered across the page, blurring the lines.

She whimpered and groped at the phone-dial, trying to get the operator, but he was doing something with his fingertips, and she couldn’t get the feel of the dial.

On her third try, it finally worked.

“Information,” said a pleasant impersonal voice.

She had to get the police! She had to say

“Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine days pretty pony parrot played peacefully plentiwise pease porridge…”

He was jamming her speech centers with gibberish, and she blurted nonsense syllables into the mouthpiece.

“You’ll have to speak more distinctly, madam. I can’t understand you.”

“Poress, Policer…”

“The police? Just a moment.”

A series of jumbled sounds and visions clouded her mind. Then a masculine voice rumbled, “Desk, Sergeant Harris.”

She found a clear path through the confusion and gasped, “Three-oh-oh-three Willow Drive—’mergency come quick—man going to—”

“Three-oh-oh-three Willow. Check. We’ll have a car right over there.”

She hung up quickly—or tried to—but she couldn’t find the cradle. Then her vision cleared, and she screamed. She wasn’t in the hall at all!

The telephone was an eggbeater!

His voice came through her trapped panic.

“You might as well give in,” he told her with a note of sadness. “I know how to mess you up like that, you see. And you haven’t learned to retaliate yet. We’re going to cooperate with this evolutionary trend, whether you like it or not—but it would be more pleasant if you agree to it.”

“No!”

“All right, but I’m coming anyway. I hoped it wouldn’t be like this. I wanted to convince you gradually. Now I know that it’s impossible.”

He was still ten blocks away. She had a few minutes in which to escape. She bolted for the door. A black shadow-shape loomed up in the twilight, flung its arms wide, and emitted an apelike roar.

She yelped and darted back, fleeing frantically for the front. A boa constrictor lay coiled in the hall; it slithered toward her. She screamed again and raced to-ward the stairway.

She made it to the top and looked back. The living room was filling slowly with murky water. She rushed shrieking into the bedroom and bolted the door.

She smelled smoke. Her dress was on fire! The flames licked up, searing her skin.

She tore at it madly, and got it off, but her slip was afire. She ripped it away, scooped up the flaming clothing on a transom hook, opened the screen, and dropped them out the window. Flames still licked about her, and she rolled up in the bed-clothing to snuff them out.

Quiet laughter.

“New syndrome,” he called to her pleasantly. “The patient confuses someone else’s fantasy with her own reality. Not schizophrenia—duophrenia, maybe?”

She lay sobbing in hysterical desperation. He was just down the street now, coming rapidly up the walk. A car whisked slowly past. He felt her terrified despair and pitied her. The torment ceased.

She stayed there, panting for a moment, summoning spirit. He was nearing the intersection just two blocks south, and she could hear the rapid traffic with his ears.

Suddenly she clenched her eyes closed and gritted her teeth. He was stepping off the curb, walking across—

She imagined a fire engine thundering toward her like a juggernaut, rumbling and wailing. She imagined another car racing out into the intersection, with herself caught in the crossfire. She imagined a woman screaming, “Look out, Mister!”

And then she was caught in his own responding fright, and it was easier to imagine. He was bolting for the other corner. She conjured a third car from another direction, brought it lunging at him to avoid the impending wreck. He staggered away from the phantom cars and screamed.

A real car confused the scene.

She echoed his scream. There was a moment of rending pain, and then the vision was gone. Brakes were still yowling two blocks away. Someone was running down the sidewalk. A part of her mind had heard the crashing thud. She was desperately sick.

And a sudden sense of complete aloneness told her that Grearly was dead. A siren was approaching out of the distance.

VOICES from the sidewalk: “…just threw a fit in the middle of the street… running around like crazy and hollering… it was a delivery truck… crushed his skull… nobody else hurt…”

After the street returned to normal, she arose and went to get a drink of water. But she stood staring at her sick white face in the mirror. There were crow’s feet forming at the corners of her eyes, and her skin was growing tired, almost middle-aged.

It was funny that she should notice that now, at this strange moment. She had just killed a man in self-defense. And no one would believe it if she told the truth. There was no cause for guilt.

Was there?

Frank would be back soon, and everything would be the same again: peace, security, nice kids, nice home, nice husband. Just the way it always had been.

But something was already different. An emptiness. A loneliness of the mind that she had never before felt. She kept looking around to see if the lights hadn’t gone dim, or the clock stopped ticking, or the faucet stopped dripping.

It was none of those things. The awful silence was within her.

Gingerly, she touched the soft spot in the top of her head and felt an utter aloneness. She closed her eyes and thought a hopeless plea to the Universe:

“Is there anybody else like me? Can anybody hear me?”

There was only complete silence, the silence of the voiceless void.

And for the first time in her life she felt the confinement of total isolation and knew it for what it was.

_{1965 (published in 1952 as Command Performance)}