by Robert Bloch
It was a predictable Saturday. He didn’t get out to a movie, but when the cleaning was done, and he’d settled himself in his room to read, a knock came on his door—a knock!—he steeled himself for the worst. What could have inspired a formal visit from Aunt Rose?
She entered, sat in a dark chair next to the window. She surveyed his bookshelf and its double row of books, and she studied the contents of a box at the foot of his bed—there like a footlocker, packed with books—and then she looked at Paul and said, “You have too many books.”
His mouth hung open for a moment before he said, “I don’t understand, Aunt Rose.”
“For one thing, you don’t have enough shelf space.”
“They fit, don’t they? So there’s room, isn’t there?”
“It doesn’t look very nice. When your door is open you can see the box from the hallway.”
“I can move the box.”
“But that’s not the point.” She looked down at the thin, white hands in her lap, clasped them, and then glanced up at Paul—but she didn’t look in his eyes; she was staring at the top of his head. “Paul, dear,” she said, “surely you don’t read them all. You couldn’t possibly have read them all.”
“I’ve read over seventy-five percent of them.”
“You see?”
“But Aunt Rose. . .”
“Your hair is uncombed.”
“I’ll comb it.” He pulled out a comb.
“Even if you did read them all, that wouldn’t be good for you. It would take up too much of your time. It wouldn’t be healthy for a young boy to spend so much time reading. It would be bad for his eyes.”
“Aunt Rose,” he said, his voice growing louder, “I like to read!”
She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Why, Paul, there’s no need to shout. You notice that I never shout. People will listen to you if you are quiet and polite.”
“I’m trying to be polite.”
“Don’t you realize if you had fewer books it would be easier to clean your room?”
“I collect books.”
“That’s much better, dear. You may put your comb away.” He put his comb away. Aunt Rose sighed and said, “It’s not good to spend so much time cooped up in a room. You should get out more often.”
Paul replied much too swiftly, “But you don’t like me to go to the playground or to the lot where they have the football games. You don’t like me to come home dirty.”
She grinned in triumph. “You could go to parties. You could get out and still stay relatively clean. You really ought to.”
“I don’t like parties.”
She stood. “Think about it, dear. I’m really trying to do my best to raise you, although I never expected there would be a child in the house. Still, I’ll do my best.” At the door she paused, turned back and said, “Don’t forget what I said about the books.” His white stare met her gray one and she hurried out the door.
That encounter got him to thinking about how his aunt used her spare time. He hardly ever saw her read. She didn’t even enjoy the newspaper. This struck him as peculiar because of her job. As the town librarian, she was entombed daily among a thousand volumes. But reading for recreation was not part of her life. In the house there was a small bookcase chock-a-block full of fiction and essays and poetry left over from Grandma and Grandpa. Aunt Rose didn’t use it. Paul remembered that his mother, Rose’s younger sister, had liked to read.
The only time Paul saw Rose opening the books was when she was cleaning the house and moving things about. She muttered over them like a sorceress, vainly attempting to exorcise the dust that clung to the leather covers. She handled them roughly, reserving delicacy for dusting objects of fine china—a zoo of small porcelain animals and a cherished teacup that dated way back.
Not long after Aunt Rose’s complaint about his personal library, he was vacuuming and she was dusting and talking to the books. He resolved to find out what made her tick. He turned off the machine, came into the study and asked, “Why don’t you like books?”
She started, laughed without pleasure. “Why, whatever made you say something like that?”
“I was only asking a question.”
“It’s so foolish!”
“Do you like books, then?”
“Books are important tools. That’s why we have libraries.”
“Thank you,” said Paul, still unsatisfied, returning to his vacuum cleaner.
Later that day, at dinner, Aunt Rose said, “If you went to the library more often, you wouldn’t have to waste your money buying all those paperbacks.”
“I earn that money mowing lawns.”
“Is that good reason to spend it on things that just lie around getting dusty? Libraries exist so you won’t have to buy books.”
He got to wondering if Aunt Rose was happy. He felt a profound discontent in the air when she was present. Although she smiled often, it was always perfunctory when talking to him. He had the idea she was about to suddenly look over her shoulder, as though she were being stalked. . .but it was only Paul who was there. She complained if he made too much noise, which soon became almost any noise he authored, and worried out loud that he did too much walking in the house; that the old house wasn’t used to it and he might wear it out if he didn’t exercise more care. He hid in his room but that afforded only temporary sanctuary. He did a lot of thinking there.
It seemed like a thousand years ago that his mother told him about her elder sister. She described the family history, complete with particulars, tactfully stated, of Rose’s self-imposed loneliness. The old-maid sister had a knack for antagonizing virtually everyone except Paul’s mother and her employer.
The story went that Aunt Rose suffered through a bad childhood inflicted on her by an older brother, Joda, who reached some kind of distorted pinnacle when, brandishing a baseball bat, he chased and terrified her. Joda was like that. The father doted on the boy because he was the only son—through him the family name was supposed to live on. Joda never married, however. If the patriarch had had his way, the son would have inherited everything except whatever stray cash was left for the girls to divide. The mother, who had half the estate in her name, intervened on behalf of her daughters and Rose inherited, among other dispensations, the house. Paul’s mother inherited some stocks and bonds and money. Joda inherited the other stocks and bonds, the rest of the money and the family business, which he managed to bankrupt within a few years. No one was surprised that Rose elected to spend the rest of her life in the very house that had been the site of so many childhood traumas, rather than sell it as her sister advised.
Paul remembered his mother’s words about Aunt Rose in a special way, as if they had just been whispered in his ear—her soft, calm voice telling him about the house of her parents, now haunted by the autumn-leaf woman blown from room to room by vagrant breezes, and sometimes blown out the door and down the street to the library. And always, the house waiting to suck her back inside.
One Sunday evening, Paul came downstairs excited over something he’d read, intending to share it. Aunt Rose stopped him cold in mid-enthusiasm and snapped, “What do your books teach you?”
He faltered, then said, “Well, they teach me about adventure, about fun, about good and evil. . .”
“There!” said Aunt Rose. “Morality. What do you know about it? What does that”—she gestured disdainfully—“sordid book of science fiction teach you about morality?” He said nothing. She continued. “Does it teach you consideration for others?”
He said, “There’s a story in here about a hero. It shows how a man can win if he’s honest with himself, if he’s smart.”
“Does it show that we have duties to others, that society comes first?”
“What are you talking about?” he asked coldly.
She smiled a mirthless smile and translated: “Don’t be selfish.”
“Oh,” he replied.
She approached him and brushed a lock of hair from his eyes.
“We must bear in mind the importance of balance,” she said in a disinterested monotone. “We must avoid extremes. That’s why I worry that you have an obsession with books.”
There was a malicious glint in his eyes as he said, “But don’t you go to extremes in cleaning the house?”
“Don’t be precocious,” she admonished him. He bit his lip. “Now run along,” said Aunt Rose. Paul ran along.
Back in his room, he considered an evening stroll but knew she wouldn’t grant permission. Out there was darkness and she didn’t like the idea of darkness. But then, he observed, she wasn’t very fond of light either. The drapes were kept drawn twenty-four hours a day except for the faded yellow ones that hung at the kitchen window. They would be under the same roof for another evening, as usual.
Precocious! There was a word, much as he loved words, to hate. It had dogged him all his life. In first grade, while his peers were struggling through Big Golden Books, he was reading mystery comics and deducing the solutions to admittedly transparent plots. In fourth grade he was bored by the basic reader and discovered science fiction. Jules Verne was the launchpad, and H. G. Wells the rocket that shot him up high where waited the prose of Ray Bradbury; where people with real human passions dreamed robot dreams—he was drunk on thoughts of the future. Seventh grade: while his class was one year away from being assigned Bradbury, he was well along in Dostoevsky. At first it surprised Paul that other students resented him for his speedy comprehension in English class but at length he became used to it. What he was never able to accept were the teachers who criticized him for his ability and called him precocious whenever he tried to express a thought.
It had finally seemed unimportant what opinions were expressed by the people at school. He was comfortable at home. He overheard his parents talking of how it was a good possibility that Paul would earn himself a scholarship to a university when the time came. Naturally they encouraged his voracious reading. But they soon found their ministrations to be unnecessary. He was on a nonstop roller coaster of words. His father proudly suggested that nothing human could derail him.
But then, with the screaming of metal on concrete, and an ambulance vainly seeking to cry out for the side of life with as much conviction as death’s grinding of bones, Mr. and Mrs. Kraft were borne away. It had seemed so out of place, so wrong. With one hammer blow on his chest, Paul had felt his world diminished. They were gone. He was alone. Standing in a private limbo, peeking at a world awry, he’d seen his life packed away, all bundled up, and moved in big boxes via a handle-with-care van to Aunt Rose’s mausoleum.
The first night, lying awake in a feather bed, listening to crickets outside his window, he decided he was disembodied and his spirit was wandering up and down the stairs, listening for the creaking sounds that are the very pulse of an old house. He imagined the house was carrying on a conversation with the night creatures and there was a general agreement that Paul Kraft wasn’t really there; that it was just a grim joke being played; that he’d wake up the next day to find his existence intact once again. But he never got to sleep that night. Within a week he accepted the existence of Aunt Rose, and then the gray days began to creep by, leaving him with the knowledge that he was waiting, but he didn’t know for what. He began to think that perhaps he had been in the car with his parents and accompanied them into the grave.
He thought that he had arrived, terribly alone, in a special kind of Hell where not even Charon or Cerberus would set foot—a place reserved for Paul and his tormentor. He got to thinking of it a lot. He even got to dreaming about it and one night he screamed about it, the night he dreamed he was locked in the bathroom, sitting in a pool of dirty water in the bathtub, sweating black dirt while Rose banged on the door from the other side. He could hear the vacuum cleaner roaring. And he heard her saying that he was every bit as dirty as his books. As he woke up, heart pounding, head dizzy with fear, he had heard his aunt’s voice at the door asking in a low voice, “Why did you scream?”
“I had a nightmare,” he’d answered abruptly, then added, “it won’t happen again.”
“Good night, then,” had come the voice through the door. A pause. “Dear.”
When his fourteenth birthday came around, he spent the day away from the house at a double-feature movie and in every bookstore within walking distance of the theatre. There was enough money left over from the pictures to purchase a few paperback anthologies, but he lamented the lost period of his life when there had been a regular flow of stories. Now he spent some of his time at the library as his aunt advised, but always on her day off. He read fiction when what he was after wasn’t checked out. Paying his money for the books, he smiled inwardly, knowing that soon he’d have more money because of three recent additions to his lawn-mowing list. It was a fine present.
At five o’clock she picked him up in front of a drugstore. He was still cheerful. He stayed that way for almost an hour until she reminded him that any money he would be earning should go toward important things, such as savings for a college education; and of course there was the matter of his clothes.
He gave his aunt her due, however. When she had asked him if he wanted a birthday party, he appreciated the reticence with which she asked the question. At least they shared a mutual dislike of such events, or so he thought until she surprised him in subsequent weeks by insisting more and more frequently that he attend parties. The announcement came over a meal of lamb chops: “You,” she said, “are going to Barbara Struthers’s party.” Well, when her voice had that tone, that was that. He cursed the bad luck that allowed Aunt Rose to make the acquaintance of Emma Struthers, a schoolteacher of all things, and now it was naturally assumed that the daughter of a teacher and the nephew of a librarian would get together and enjoy some kind of intuitive camaraderie. He savagely attacked the remains on his plate.
When the day arrived, he dressed reluctantly while she stood outside his door talking all the time about how much he’d enjoy the party. She finally inspired compliance with her edict when he saw the party as a means of escape. But before he got out the front door, she spied his bulging coat pocket and made him leave his book behind. With present in hand, he was off.
“Don’t forget to be back before dark,” she called halfheartedly.
Now that Paul was gone, Aunt Rose tried to forget about nephews and other troubles. It was time to relax. She sat in a rocking chair and contemplated a corner of the room. She thought about dust. She observed it, floating, swirling in the light shaft that slid between two almost-drawn curtains. There were so many motes of dust, a world of flickering particles made visible in one ray of light coming through the window, stopping on an empty corner. It bothered her.
She even dreamed about it. She had swept, mopped and vacuumed her way through so many nightmares; and still there was the dust, the infinity of little white specks. They were outside her and inside her—under-the-fingernail specks, inhaled specks, captured-in-the-ridges-of-fingerprints specks, everywhere specks. Sitting in her rocker, rocking, stirring up whirlpools of the stuff, Aunt Rose sighed, and from her left nostril there exited a particle of matter that once had been the flesh of an Egyptian pharoah. The rocking woman felt time pressing against her eyelids.
Dust, if not bad enough in itself, conjured up images of even worse things, like dirt, like the filthy earth she was rolled in when brother Joda roughhoused her, like the dirty hands of her father patting her when he came in from working in the yard, like the grime that nested in her mother’s pores (even though her mother was a fastidious woman, Rose could see pollution in the flesh when she was close up). She took baths twice, sometimes three times a day. She had done so for a long time, until her skin was almost the pallor of soap, and she got rashes on her oversensitive, flaking skin. She never felt clean. Each night she dreaded the prospect of working the next day because the big, dirty world was waiting to sully her. The library was so damnably full of dust. But if she didn’t venture out to earn money to buy her protection, then o
ne day that world might be able to touch her so hard she couldn’t stand it.
Why, she agonized, couldn’t Paul understand? He was grown up for his age. Surely he could see that she braved the outdoors for him. The busy, bustling department stores were bad enough. . .but when she went to the cemetery it was truly terrible—just the thought of all that dirt around so many bodies. When she’d offered to make the supreme sacrifice (to let him have a party at the house even though such an event would mean a flow of dirt from outside), she thanked God he hadn’t taken her up on it. The relief she felt didn’t keep her from criticizing him for his stubbornness. “You’ll never get ahead, dear, unless you’re more social,” she had warned him with all the conviction born of bitter experience. Paul didn’t argue the issue that time. Which pleased her. He ignored it. Which frustrated her. He was so hard to reach. So hard to understand.
At least she was alone, now. She liked that. Not that Paul was an exceptionally bothersome child—in fact he was quieter than many adults she knew. The problem was that he was there. She couldn’t sleep at night when he was reading because his room was next door. Although it was a big house, all the bedrooms were together. The light from his lamp would creep under her door and its soft radiance would warm her face. She’d open her eyes, see dust in the light. Then she’d hear Paul turn the pages. It seemed that he was constantly reading. How books accumulated dust and how swiftly a few of them grew into an enormous inconvenience. In the twilight state preceding sleep, she would hear pages turn and she’d just have to stay awake, waiting for the next one. It was like the dripping of a faucet, only not as regular. Paul was a fast reader, getting to the next page before she could doze off. Crinkle would go the page in his fingers, as he turned it slowly, lovingly. Crinkle. Sometimes in the middle of late-night reading, he would take a break and move around. He even closed doors. Sometimes she could hear the creaking of bedsprings. Sometimes she didn’t dream about dust.
