Journey for Seven

Chapter III Eating Cobwebs

The interne looked at Mrs. Thompson with a skeptic’s eye. Her wrist was amazingly hard for the wrist of an old woman. The pulse felt strong and normal.

“Shock, maybe,” he said. “Plasma, just in case.”

The bottle was rigged. He bared the old arm, took the needle and slid it expertly against the blue vein in the bend of the elbow. The needle slipped off. He grunted and tried again. Once again it slipped. He examined the point. It looked all right. He tried to get it in at right angles.

He pressed down. He could see a tiny indentation in the skin. No more. The needle suddenly bent back on itself. The skin blunted the edge of the scalpel he tried next. He began to perspire. He tried the other arm. Only then did he call the resident.

In half an hour both men were perspiring freely. They went over to the far corner of the emergency ward.

The resident said, “Entirely new to me. Obscure disease of some sort. I can’t even scratch her!”

Mrs. Thompson sat up. “Stop mumbling.”

The two men gave her nervous smiles. “Everything is fine, Mrs. Thomas.”

“Thompson.”

The interne whispered, “Let’s put her under and get a diamond drill.”

The resident flinched, thought it over, said, “Get hold of the anaesthetist and have her wheeled upstairs.”

Benny Farr didn’t see the cop until he got up on his front porch. By then it was too late to make a run for it.

“You Benjamin Farr?”

Inside the house he could hear the sound of his mother weeping. Always looking for an excuse to turn on the flood. “What if I am?”

“We got a friend of yours down at the station. He’s been giving us quite a story.”

“Louie!” Benny gasped.

“Right, lad. Now come along quiet.”

He grabbed Benny’s wrist. Benny twisted away and released himself with surprising ease. “Getcha hands offa me!”

The cop lunged and grabbed him by the shoulders. Benny caught a thick wrist in his two skinny hands and twisted it. The cop yelled and fell heavily. He came up fast, his arm hanging oddly twisted. Benny turned and ran.

He heard his mother scream and there was a terrific blow between his shoulder blades. Synchronous with the blow was the sound of a shot. He fell, rolled, got to his feet and continued running. Another shot and a whirr by his ear. Benny kept running, rounding the corner, cutting over behind the Reilly house and across the new lots.

McGoran sold three can openers on the street before he arrived at the Breem house. His suave tone masked a dozen petty annoyances. The handle had come off the sample case and the latch had somehow become badly bent. He had broken two doorbells without meaning to. He had to hold the case under his arm.

Halfway up the sidewalk of the Breem house he heard the scream of tires. He whirled, slapping at his armpit.

“Don’t touch it, McGoran,” a cold voice said. “We’ve been expecting you any day.”

“My name isn’t McGoran.”

“Fingerprints will prove that. Walk slowly toward the car. Lock your fingers at the nape of your neck. That’s right.”

There were three men in dark suits in the car. They watched him approach with heavy amusement.

There were two in the front seat, one in the back. The one in the back opened the car door. McGoran grabbed the man’s wrist and pulled him out of the car, dodging around behind it and pulling his own gun. It was an automatic and to make certain there was a shell in the chamber he yanked hard on the slide. The slide pulled off in his hand.

He turned to run, knowing he was too late. The burst of shots, striking his back, staggered him. He turned to lift his hands, forgetting that he still held the broken automatic in his hands. The man fifteen feet away pumped four slow shots into McGoran’s cheat. He stood, waiting for the black mist of death, waiting for the ground to come up and hit him.

As he moved a slug shifted down, rolled down inside his pant leg and across the pavement. The three men stared at him. McGoran turned and ran again. Two sharp blows against the back of his head half dazed him but he kept running.

Jennilou Caswell collapsed onto her bed. It was so wonderful to be alone in the apartment at last. Later she would get the superintendent to replace the key which had twisted off in the lock as she had opened the door.

She ruefully examined the ruined dress. It tore as she lifted it over her head. The girdle ripped as she peeled it off. She frowned. Probably, without knowing it, she had walked through an acid mist of some sort. She remembered reading about some city where chemical dust in the air had ruined nylons.

She took a shower, tore one of her favorite towels afterward. Slowly she was learning to handle things more delicately. But no matter how hard she tried she could not get back into another girdle. She weighed herself, found that her weight was exactly the same as before.

When she tried to comb her hair the teeth shredded out of the comb. She gave up, tried to file her nails. Her nails wore the burr off the file. She tried nail scissors and the blades bent like wax.

Close to hysteria she opened her own typewriter. Typing exercises always soothed her. Feeling better, she rattled off the first line. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy red dog.” Machine-gun speed. At the end of the line her hand flicked up and slammed the carriage return back for the next line. The carriage slammed completely out of the end of the typewriter carrying the paper with it, and crashed on the floor beside her desk.

Jennilou Caswell buried her face in her hands and began to weep as though her heart was broken.

“Are you convinced?” Bill Dorvan asked the tall blond girl.

She had gnawed her lipstick off her lower lip. Her eyes had a glazed look. “Little man, I am more than convinced.”

“Something happened in that bus. I had a tingling feeling. Did you?”

“Now that you mention it.”

“We don’t feel any different. It’s like you said — as though everything had become mealy. But it hasn’t. We’re different, you and I — and of course the others on that bus. I’ll never forget your face after you took a poke at that telephone pole.”

“You told me to, smartie.”

“Just like somebody had hit it with the blunt end of a steel baseball bat. You punched a hole six inches deep.”

She shuddered. “Don’t talk about it.”

“It isn’t what you’d call a feminine characteristic, babe. You could take on Ray Robinson and Gorgeous George at the same time.”

“You cease to amuse.”

“I made up my mind not to talk to any more women.”

“How lucky for them!”

“But we’ve got something in common and somehow I don’t want to be alone with this nasty little knack we’ve developed. Do you?”

“I... I guess not.”

“Let’s go back to town. I’ll buy you a meal near a place where I can get a shave. Then I’ll look a little more respectable.”

She gave him a sudden grin which wrinkled her nose. “Okay, iron man.”

An hour later the barber lathered Bill Dorvan’s face, took a glance at the clock. Five minutes to go.

He stropped the razor, made a long stroke from temple to chin. The razor rasped across the beard with none of the usual sleek sound. It lifted the lather off and left the beard. The barber grunted and got another razor. Same thing. He examined the edges of the blades. The notches were visible to the naked eye.

With a wet towel he mopped off the lather. He tilted the chair back to normal position. He said, “Mister, you take that beard to somebody else. Already two razors ruined. Please go away. No charge.”

Bill stood up. Before the barber could protest, he picked up a pair of shears. Looking in a mirror he grasped a thick-lock of hair, tried to cut it with the shears. It bent the center rivet and sprung the blades. He threw the shears aside and stalked out of the shop, wondering how he’d look in a full beard.

McGoran hid until night, then made his way into the city. He could not tear his mind from what he had seen when he had pulled his shirt open to examine his wounds. There were four round bruises on his chest, the skin faintly broken over two of them. Other things had begun to add up. In the patch of woods where he hid he had found a rusty horseshoe. It had been simple to twist it until the metal snapped.

His clothes were a giveaway. In the city he found a man his size. He followed him. On a dark street he caught up with him. He had meant to take the man very gently by the throat. But the throat pulped under his fingers and the man was dead before McGoran dragged him away. It was difficult to undress the body but he managed it. He left the man naked in the small court behind the dark office building, stuffed his own clothes into a wastepaper bin three blocks away.

He then walked boldly into a good restaurant and ordered dinner. It wasn’t until he took his first bite of steak that some of the more horrid aspects of this odd change became more evident. The steak dissolved like gelatin. The flavor was right but he could part it with his lips. The texture was sickeningly bland. He could barely detect the substance of the bread. It was akin to eating cobwebs.