Then Stevie got mad. “Dern you, old Dark!” he screamed. “You leave Eddie alone!” He was hanging on to the bushes with one hand but he dug into his pocket with the other and pulled out his pocket piece. He looked down at it—his precious pocket piece—two pieces of Popsicle stick tied together so they looked a little bit like an airplane, and on the top, lopsided and scraggly, the magic letters INRI. Stevie squeezed it tight, and then he screamed and threw it right down Eddie’s throat—right into the swirling nasty blackness inside of Eddie.
There was an awful scream from Eddie and a big bursting roar and Stevie lost hold of the bush and fell down into the racing, roaring water. Then Mommy was there gathering him up, crying his name over and over as she waded to a low place in the bank, the water curling above her knees, making her stagger. Stevie hung on tight and cried, “Eddie! Eddie! That mean old Dark! He made me throw my pocket piece away! Oh, Mommy, Mommy! Where’s Eddie?”
And he and Mommy cried together in the stickery sand up on the bank of the wash while the flood waters roared and rumbled down to the river, carrying Eddie away, sweeping the wash clean, from bank to bank.
A Message from Charity
William M. Lee
This is a story of a timeless love.
* * *
That summer of the year 1700 was the hottest in the memory of the very oldest inhabitants. Because the year ushered in a new century, some held that the events were related and that for a whole hundred years Bay Colony would be as torrid and steamy as the Indies themselves.
There was a good deal of illness in Annes Towne, and a score had died before the weather broke at last in late September. For the great part they were oldsters who succumbed, but some of the young were sick too, and Charity Paynes as sick as any.
Charity had turned eleven in the spring and had still the figure and many of the ways of thinking of a child, but she was tall and strong and tanned by the New England sun, for she spent many hours helping her 156 / father in the fields and trying to keep some sort of order in the dooryard and garden.
During the weeks when she lay bedridden and, for a time, burning up with the fever, Thomas Carter and his good wife Beulah came as neighbors should to lend a hand, for Charity’s mother had died abirthing and Obie Payne could not cope all alone.
Charity lay on a pallet covered by a straw-filled mattress which her father, frantic to be doing something for her and finding little enough to do beyond the saying of short fervent prayers, refilled with fresh straw as often as Beulah would allow. A few miles down Harmon Brook was a famous beaver pond where in winter the Annes Towne people cut ice to be stored under layers of bark and chips. It had been used heavily early in the summer, and there was not very much ice left, but those families with sickness in the home might draw upon it for the patient’s comfort. So Charity had bits of ice folded into a woolen cloth to lay on her forehead when the fever was bad.
William Trowbridge, who had apprenticed in medicine down in Philadelphia, attended the girl, and pronounced her illness a sort of summer cholera which was claiming victims all up and down the brook. Trowbridge was only moderately esteemed in Annes Towne, being better, it was said, at delivering lambs and foals than at treating human maladies. He was a gruff and notional man, and he was prone to state his views on a subject and then walk away instead of waiting to argue and perhaps be refuted. Not easy to get along with.
For Charity he prescribed a diet of beef tea with barley and another tea, very unpleasant to the taste, made from pounded willow bark. What was more, all her drinking water was to be boiled. Since there was no other advice to be had, they followed it and in due course Charity got well.
She ran a great fever for five days, and it was midway in this period when the strange dreams began. Not dreams really, for she was awake though often out of her senses, knowing her father now and then, other times seeing him as a gaunt and frightening stranger. When she was better, still weak but wholly rational, she tried to tell her visitors about these dreams.
“Some person was talking and talking,” she recalled. “A man or perchance a lad. He talked not to me, but I could hear or understand all that he said. ’Twas strange talk indeed, a porridge of the King’s English and other words of no sense at all. And with the talk I did see some fearful sights.”
“La, now, don’t even think of it,” said Dame Beulah.
“But I would fain both think and talk of it, for I am no longer afeared. Such things I saw in bits and flashes, as ’twere seen by a strike of lightning.”
“Talk an ye be so minded, then. There’s naught impious in y’r conceits. Tell me again about the carriages which traveled along with nary horse.”
Annes Towne survived the Revolution and the War of 1812, and for a time seemed likely to become a larger, if not an important community. But when its farms became less productive and the last virgin timber disappeared from the area, Annes Towne began to disappear too, dwindling from two score of homes to a handful, then to none; and the last foundation had crumbled to rubble and been scattered a hundred years before it could have been nominated a historic site.
In time dirt tracks became stone roads, which gave way to black meanderings of macadam, and these in their turn were displaced by never ending bands of concrete. The cross-roads site of Annes Towne was presently cleared of brambles, sumac and red cedar, and overnight it was a shopping center. Now, for mile on spreading mile the New England hills were dotted with ranch houses, salt boxes and split-level colonial homes.
During four decades Harmon Brook had been fouled and poisoned by a textile bleach and dye works. Rising labor costs had at last driven the small company to extinction. With that event and increasingly rigorous legislation, the stream had come back to the extent that it could now be bordered by some of these prosperous homes and by the golf course of the Anniston Country Club.
With aquatic plants and bullfrogs and a few fish inhabiting its waters, it was not obvious to implicate the Harmon for the small outbreak of typhoid which occurred in the hot dry summer of 1965. No one was dependent on it for drinking water. To the discomfort of a local milk distributor, who was entirely blameless, indictment of the stream was delayed and obscured by the fact that the organisms involved were not a typical strain of Salmonella typhosa. Indeed they ultimately found a place in the American Type Culture Collection, under a new number.
Young Peter Wood, whose home was one of those pleasantly situated along the stream, was the most seriously ill of all the cases, partly because he was the first, mostly because his symptoms went unremarked for a time. Peter was sixteen and not highly communicative to either parents or friends. The Woods Senior both taught, at Harvard and Wellesley respectively. They were intelligent and well-intentioned parents, but sometimes a little off-hand, and like many of their friends, they raised their son to be a miniature adult in as many ways as possible. His sports, tennis and golf, were adult sports. His reading tastes were catholic, ranging from Camus to Al Capp to science fiction. He had been carefully held back in his progress through the lower grades so that he would not enter college more than a year or so ahead of his age. He had an adequate number of friends and sufficient areas of congeniality with them. He had gotten a driver’s license shortly after his sixteenth birthday and drove seriously and well enough to be allowed nearly unrestricted use of the second car.
So Peter Wood was not the sort of boy to complain to his family about headache, mild nausea and other symptoms. Instead, after they had persisted for forty-eight hours, he telephoned for an appointment on his own initiative and visited their family doctor. Suddenly, in the waiting room, he became much worse, and was given a cot in an examining room until Dr. Maxwell was free to drive him home. The doctor did not seriously suspect typhoid, though it was among several possibilities which he counted as less likely.
Peter’s temperature rose from 104° to over 105° that night. No nurse was to be had until morning, and his parents alternated in attendance in his bedroom. There was no caus
e for alarm, since the patient was full of wide-spectrum antibiotic. But he slept only fitfully with intervals of waking delirium. He slapped at the sheet, tossed around on the bed and muttered or spoke now and then. Some of the talk was understandable.
“There’s a forest,” he said.
“What?” asked his father.
“There’s a forest the other side of the stream.”
“Oh.”
“Can you see it?”
“No, I’m sitting inside here with you. Take it easy, son.
“Some deer are coming down to drink, along the edge of Weller’s pasture.”
“Is that so?”
“Last year a mountain lion killed two of them, right where they drank. Is it raining?”
“No, it isn’t. It would be fine if we could have some.”
“It’s raining. I can hear it on the roof.” A pause. “It drips down the chimney.”
Peter turned his head to look at his father, momentarily clear eyed.
“How long since there’s been a forest across the stream?”
Dr. Wood reflected on the usual difficulty of answering explicit questions and on his own ignorance of history.
“A long time. I expect this valley has been farm land since colonial days.”
“Funny,” Peter said. “I shut my eyes and I can see a forest. Really big trees. On our side of the stream there’s a kind of garden and an apple tree and a path goes down to the water.”
“It sounds pleasant.”
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t you try going to sleep?”
“OK.”
The antibiotic accomplished much less than it should have done in Peter’s case, and he stayed very sick for several days. Even after diagnosis, there appeared no good reason to move him from home. A trained nurse was on duty after that first night, and tranquilizers and sedatives reduced her job to no more than keeping a watch. There were only a few sleepy communications from her young patient. It was on the fourth night, the last one when he had any significant fever, that he asked:
“Were you ever a girl?”
“Well, thanks a lot. I’m not as old as all that.”
“I mean, were you ever inside a girl?”
“I think you’d better go back to sleep, young man.”
“I mean—I guess I don’t know what I mean.”
He uttered no oddities thereafter, at least when there was anyone within hearing. During the days of his recovery and convalescence, abed and later stretched out on a chaise longue on the terrace looking down toward Harmon Brook, he took to whispering. He moved his lips hardly at all, but vocalized each word, or if he fell short of this, at least put each thought into carefully chosen words and sentences.
The idea that he might be in mental communication with another person was not, to him, very startling. Steeped in the lore of science fiction whose heroes were, as like as not, adepts at telepathy, the event seemed almost an expected outcome of his wishes. Many nights he had lain awake sending out (he hoped) a mental probe, trying and trying to find the trick, for surely there must be one, of making a contact.
Now that such a contact was established he sought, just as vainly, for some means to prove it. How do you know you’re not dreaming, he asked himself. How do you know you’re not still delirious?
The difficulty was that his communication with Charity Payne could be by mental route only. Had there been any possibility for Peter to reach the girl by mail, by telephone, by travel and a personal visit, their rapport on a mental level might have been confirmed, and their messages cross-checked.
During their respective periods of illness, Peter and Charity achieved a communion of a sort which consisted at first of brief glimpses, each of the other’s environment. They were not—then—seeing through one another’s eyes so much as tapping one another’s visual recollections. While Peter stared at a smoothly plastered ceiling, Charity looked at rough-hewn beams. He, when his aching head permitted, could turn on one side and watch a television program. She, by the same movement, could see a small smoky fire in a monstrous stone fireplace, where water was heated and her beef and barley broth kept steaming.
Instead of these current images, current for each of them in their different times, they saw stored-up pictures, not perfect, for neither of them was remembering perfectly; rather like pictures viewed through a badly ground lens, with only the objects of principal interest in clear detail.
Charity saw her fearful sights with no basis for comprehension—a section of dual highway animated by hurtling cars and trucks and not a person, recognizable as a person, in sight; a tennis court, and what on earth could it be; a jet plane crossing the sky; a vast and many storied building which glinted with glass and the silvery tracings of untarnished steel.
At the start she was terrified nearly out of her wits. It’s all very well to dream, and a nightmare is only a bad dream after you waken, but a nightmare is assembled from familiar props. You could reasonably be chased by a dragon (like the one in the picture that St. George had to fight) or be lost in a cave (like the one on Parish Hill, only bigger and darker). To dream of things which have no meaning at all is worse.
She was spared prolongation of her terror by Peter’s comprehension of their situation and his intuitive realization of what the experience, assuming a two-way channel, might be doing to her. The vignettes of her life which he was seeing were in no way disturbing. Everything he saw through her mind was within his framework of reference. Horses and cattle, fields and forest, rutted lanes and narrow wooden bridges, were things he knew, even if he did not live among them. He recognized Harmon Brook because, directly below their home, there was an immense granite boulder parting the flow, shaped like a great bear-like animal with its head down, drinking. It was strange that the stream, in all those years, had neither silted up nor eroded away to hide or change the seeming of the rock, but so it was. He saw it through Charity’s eyes and knew the place in spite of the forest on the far hill.
When he first saw this partly familiar, partly strange scene, he heard from somewhere within his mind the frightened cry of a little girl. His thinking at that time was fever distorted and incoherent. It was two days later after a period of several hours of normal temperature, when he conceived the idea—with sudden virtual certainty—these pastoral scenes he had been dreaming were truly something seen with other eyes. There were subtle perceptual differences between those pictures and his own seeing.
To his mother, writing at a table near the windows, he said, “I think I’m feeling better. How about a glass of orange juice?”
She considered. “The doctor should be here in an hour or so. In the meantime you can make do with a little more ice water. I’ll get it. Drink it slowly, remember.”
Two hundred and sixty-five years away, Charity Payne thought suddenly, “How about a glass of orange juice?” She had been drowsing, but her eyes popped wide open. “Mercy,” she said aloud. Dame Beulah bent over the pallet.
“What is it, child?”
“How about a glass of orange juice?” Charity repeated.
“La, ’tis gibberish.” A cool hand was laid on her forehead. “Would ye like a bit of ice to bite on?”
Orange juice, whatever that might be, was forgotten.
Over the next several days Peter Wood tried time and again to address the stranger directly, and repeatedly failed. Some of what he said to others reached her in fragments and further confused her state of mind. What she had to say, on the other hand, was coming through to him with increasing frequency. Often it was only a word or a phrase with a quaint twist like a historical novel, and he would lie puzzling over it, trying to place the person on the other end of their erratic line of communication. His recognition of Bear Rock, which he had seen once again through her eyes, was disturbing. His science fiction conditioning led him naturally to speculate about the parallel worlds concept, but that seemed not to fit the facts as he saw them.
Peter reached the stage of convales
cence when he could spend all day on the terrace and look down, when he wished, at the actual rock. There, for the hundredth time he formed the syllables “Hello, who are you?” and for the first time received a response. It was a silence, but a silence reverberating with shock, totally different in quality from the blankness which had met him before.
“My name is Peter Wood.”
There was a long pause before the answer came, softly and timidly.
“My name is Charity Payne. Where are you? What is happening to me?”
The following days of enforced physical idleness were filled with exploration and discovery. Peter found out almost at once that, while they were probably no more than a few feet apart in their respective worlds, a gulf of more than a quarter of a thousand years stretched between them. Such a contact through time was a greater departure from known physical laws, certainly, than the mere fact of telepathic communication. Peter reveled in his growing ability.
In another way the situation was heartbreaking: No matter how well they came to know one another, he realized, they could never meet, and after no more than a few hours of acquaintance he found that he was regarding this naive child of another time with esteem and a sort of affection.
They arrived shortly at a set of rules which seemed to govern and limit their communications. Each came to be able to hear the other speak, whether aloud or subvocally. Each learned to perceive through the other’s senses, up to a point. Visual perception became better and better especially for direct seeing while, as they grew more skillful, the remembered scene became less clear. Tastes and odors could be transmitted, if not accurately, at least with the expected response. Tactile sensations could not be perceived in the slightest degree.
There was little that Peter Wood could learn from Charity. He came to recognize her immediate associates and Eked them, particularly her gaunt, weather-beaten father. He formed a picture of Puritanism which, as an ethic, he had to respect, while the supporting dogma evoked nothing but impatience. At first he exposed her to the somewhat scholarly agnosticism which prevailed in his own home, but soon found that it distressed her deeply and he left off. There was so much he could report from the vantage of 1965, so many things he could show her which did not conflict with her tenets and faith.
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