Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  ~ * ~

  Michal and I teamed up several nights following our initial venture, but nothing happened, except that we started calling him Mike.

  “Mike?” asked Mrs. Norwich when she first heard the name. “Why Mike?”

  “Well, we can’t go on calling him the-man-in-a-coma,” said Michal. “And Mike is easy to remember.”

  “And very like Michal,” said Mrs. Norwich, narrowing a little. “I don’t particularly care for your twinning yourself with him.”

  “We could call him Merihildo Esteven,” I offered.

  Mrs. Norwich’s mouth-corners betrayed what she thought of my levity “I suppose it is handier to have a name to call him by, and if you’ve set on Mike already, Mike it will be.”

  “I call him a—” Vindictive Apfel, who was so often in evidence now, went on extremely explicitly with an amazingly comprehensive vocabulary. Mrs. Norwich shooed Michal out of the door and advanced on him with a bar of soap in one hand. Vindictive Apfel choked over some wild-sounding foreign word and became suddenly Child Apfel and burrowed down under his covers to escape the threatened mouth-washing.

  A day or two later, he said suddenly as though continuing a conversation, “I’m mad at Michal.”

  “Are you really?” I asked idly.

  “Yes,” he persisted. “She’s spending all her time with that—” He looked what he was afraid to say.

  “It hasn’t done any good,” I said. “Since that first night, we haven’t heard a word.”

  “We?” Vindictive Apfel laughed shortly. “What makes you think she’d bother with you, once she got through to him? Ask her about last night. Yap, yap, yap! Kept me awake to all hours!”

  “She wasn’t even in here last night,” I said patiently. “She’s coming tonight. We’re going to try again.”

  “Try again!” he sneered. “Since when does Michal have to be here to talk to anyone? Ask her—go on—ask her tonight!”

  I felt a sharp pang that I diagnosed, at first, as a shoulder joint. But, after careful consideration, decided might be jealousy. Jealousy! Of a child and a man-in-a-coma! Of Michal and Michael—with an e! I didn’t want to believe it, but I held my reaction up against Vindictive Apfel’s reaction and decided that they were practically the same jealousy. Still, I had only the word of a change-with-the-wind old man. I’d ask her, as soon as she came in again. I felt very little of the patience I had developed of necessity over the last few afflicted years, but the hours finally seeped out to evening.

  It seemed to me that I could sense Michal’s coming, though this may have been hindsight, but finally she was there, her cheeks theatrically reddened by the brisk outdoor wind before which she had fled home from the store. I barely had time to wonder what I could know about anything brisk and out-of-doors since I was almost hermetically sealed in this room, in this bed, in this body, when Michal exclaimed,

  “How odd! That’s almost the exact way he went—almost exactly!”

  I surveyed her coolly, still conscious of what Apfel had said. “I presume you plan to explain that remark,” I said. “It lacks intelligibility in its present form.”

  She smiled at me, slowly and warmly. I felt heat surge up into my face and tried to turn away from her eyes. “No,” she said, her hand going out to me. “Don’t mind. I suppose Mr. Apfel Told All. Last night—” she moved closer to me, eagerly. “Last night he came looking for me. Michael, I mean. He wanted to know where he was. That’s what I meant by my unintelligible remark. I told him he was in a nursing home, but that didn’t satisfy him. Then in a bed. In a room. But he wanted it closer. So I told him he was in a body. That’s when the anguish came.”

  Then I suddenly knew she was no longer speaking. She was thinking to me and I was so busy listening to her that I had no time to protest the impossibility of such a thing. Words went. Her story was reenacted somewhere in my perceiving.

  “A body?” Mike said slowly. “And just always dark? Just always night? Just always no any other thing!” He was in anguish.

  “Mike,” Michal spoke to him comfortingly. “You’ve been hurt. It won’t—it wasn’t always just dark. Remember, Mike. Do you remember before?”

  “Remember before—?”

  There was a long blank wait and then she fairly staggered under his outcry. So did I!

  “I remember to fall!” he cried wildly. “I remember to hurt! I remember to blind!”

  “Mike, Mike,” she murmured, and comfort seemed to flow warmly. “Mike, listen, don’t try to remember that any more. Try to remember who you are and what your name is.”

  “Mike?” he asked, with an obvious effort. “Is that my name? I thought it was Michael, with an e. “

  “Mike is another way to say it,” she said. “Isn’t it odd that our names are so nearly alike?”

  “That’s the only name I know.” Mike was surprised.

  “Oh.” She was taken aback. “You mean you just called yourself Michael because my name is Michal?”

  “That’s the only name I know,” he repeated.

  I was looking at Michal again, and she was smiling at me. “You see,” she said aloud, “I wasn’t trying to leave you out.” I felt the warm surge to my face again.

  “Mr. Apfel—” I stumbled.

  She leaned close to me. “Shhhh!” she said, her eyes dancing. “The only reason he knows anything about it, is that Mike used his mind to come to me. The one in the body is running down and it won’t work very long at a time.”

  “Michal,” I said, wanting to give her something as a sort of apology. “If Mike knows no other name than yours, how does he know the masculine spelling customarily is with an e?”

  For a moment she was as still as if not even breathing was left to her, then hope flared up in her face in a way that I couldn’t possibly describe in physical terms.

  “Then he could really be a Michael,” she said softly. “And remembering, not mimicking. And I keep feeling that he belongs to—to—before Deega!”

  ~ * ~

  Mr. Apfel became more and more Child Apfel in the days that followed. He waited eagerly for Michal to come up after school and sometimes cried when she was late. He made her a Kleenex rose and grinned all evening after she thanked him and put it in her hair. It glowed there and pulsated with any number of colors for which I had no name, and gave off a subtle, delicate fragrance.

  “That’s the way it seems to him,” she said to me. “I’m only making it obvious so he can see I enjoy it too.”

  He presented her another night with his toothless comb. His fluff of white hair looked the same combed and uncombed, so the lack of teeth didn’t affect his grooming—nor did the loss of the comb.

  “I’m going to make you something pretty,” he said to her, hanging onto her hand. “I’ll give it to you when I get it all together.”

  “Why, thank you!” she said. “Shall I guess?”

  “Oh, you couldn’t guess!” he giggled. “Not in a million million years. It’s prettier than—”

  “Ah-ah!” she laughed. “Don’t tell until it’s all ready!”

  “I won’t! I won’t!” He clasped his hands over his laughing mouth. “I can keep a secret!” His voice was muffled and gleeful.

  I had turned away uncomfortably from his elephantine playfulness, and opened my eyes only when Michal touched the back of my hand with one of her cool fingers.

  “How can you put up with it?” I asked, needlessly whispering since he had gone off into one of his sudden naps. “That senile old man talking and acting like a child—”

  “I’m not talking to a senile old man,” said Michal. “I’m talking with Mr. Apfel. He can’t help it if his mind is wrinkled a little along with his body.”

  My hand was trying to reach my forehead to massage away some of my mental discomfort, but my shoulder-joint wouldn’t let it. Michal’s hand suddenly closed upon my hand and her eyes closed tightly. She drew a sharp breath. “He’s there,” she said. “He put Mr. Apfel to sleep so he could come
through him, but you’re stronger. When I touched you it made the necessary contact.”

  Then she was sitting on the chair by Mike’s bed. “If Aunt Lydie comes,” she said, “we’re discussing my geography test.” She clasped her hands loosely and I felt the odd motion inside my mind that told me she was setting up our network again and Mike suddenly came in clearly, in mid-sentence.

  “...so you must remember before Deega. Any child has memories before six.”

  “I don’t.” The thought came stronger through the tandem of our minds. “The very most firstest thing I can remember is the underside of Deega’s table. I woke up in the dark and I watched the table grow over me when the light came in the window.”

  “And yet, this happened before,” said Mike. And the picture shimmered and resolved into clarity.

  The wind was cool, The clouds were puffy and softly blue-white. The little girls, dressed in bright-colored dresses, their arms full of flowers, were tumbling, laughing, through the clouds. Then a small boy popped out of a cloud and let a brilliant winged lizard slither into the middle of the group of girls. They shrieked and scattered, their flowers falling like pastel rain.

  “Whose memory is that?” Mike’s voice broke the picture.

  “Mine!” whispered Michal. “I went back to make sure the lizard’s wings weren’t so crumpled that it couldn’t fly! But Mike, Mike! I haven’t a single other memory to go with it. It’s all alone—”

  “Bless the Presence,” came Mike’s voice reverently prompting.

  “And the Name and the Power,” we continued automatically.

  “For the gift of Life, for The Home—” the three of us chanted on, I, in my vast astonishment, trying to separate myself from them far enough to examine this unexpected development. I looked quickly at Michal. Tears were slipping down her cheeks. “What is it, Mike? What is it?” she cried. “Whose prayer am I praying?”

  “So it is you!” cried Mike. “And to think that I—” Then he broke off to answer her. “That is your own prayer,” he said. “The one that all the children—”

  Communication shut off, flatly, unechoingly. Michal flung herself down by his bedside. “Mike!” she cried. “Who am I? By the Presence—”

  “Nobody brings me presents any more,” mourned Child Apfel. “Not even on my birthday.” He was propped up on one elbow, peering over at Michal.

  She got up heavily and angularly. “I do, Mr. Apfel,” she said. “I brought you a present just last week. Remember the peanuts?”

  “Peanuts!” he beamed. “I like peanuts. Especially with shells on. Did I ever show you that smart trick? The one where I do something nobody ever did before and can never do again? You see, I break a peanut shell, and of course nobody ever broke that shell before and nobody can ever do it again—isn’t that smart!”

  “I think you’re very clever, Mr. Apfel,” said Michal, smiling at him. “Did you hear Mike talking a while ago?”

  “Sure, I did. You don’t think I sleep all the time, do you?” He was indignant.

  “Of course you don’t,” soothed Michal. “You hear a lot I don’t even hear. For instance, I didn’t hear the first part of what Mike said. Did you?”

  “I don’t like Mike,” he sulked.

  “I never gave Mike any peanuts,” she reminded.

  “That’s right!” His face brightened. “Well, he only said he thought you might be the one they had been looking for and if you were, you must be able to remember before Deega—”

  Michal’s face flushed and then paled until the whiteness glowed. “Who were they looking for?” she whispered. “Who is looking?”

  “Oh, for whoever got lost when the ship went off course,” he said airily. “Such a silly-looking ship! Anybody knows ships go on the water. They don’t crash into the water from the sky. Ooo! Splash! Way up! Like a big fountain! So big a splash that it caught two of the bees that flew out just before the crash. But there was one bee that got away, rolling over and over in the sky before it straightened up and flew into the clouds!” He waved his arms excitedly, then folded against his pillows in sudden exhaustion. “Anyway, these People thought there was nobody left alive at all until about five years ago. Some one of them was in Town and one night they heard a Cry, but they couldn’t ever find where it came from. So they’ve been looking whenever anyone comes into Town. Mike was flying along the road when the cars hit. I’m having a hard time getting what I need for your present,” he said drowsily. “It’ll be awful pretty. The Presence, the Name, the Power—” and he had gone to sleep again.

  “Oh, Mike! Oh, Mike!” Michal was kneeling by his bed, her trembling hands closing over the hem of his spread, her eyes shining.

  “Stop bothering Mike.” Aunt Lydie’s voice from the doorway was harsh, but not enough to conceal her concern. “Michal, I told you that if you got too involved—”

  “I’m not,” said Michal, turning a serene face to her. “I was just seeing if calling his name would rouse him.”

  “It would be a wonder if it did,” snapped Aunt Lydie, “seeing as how you named him out-of-hand. His name might well be Merihildo Esteven! Calling him Mike wouldn’t mean anything to him. Besides, Mr. Osanti won’t eat his supper. Will you go see what you can do?”

  Michal’s thoughts floated back to me as she disappeared out the door. “Oh, Mr. Evans! What if Mike’s body dies before he gets up enough strength to finish telling me who I am! What if I stay lost this close to being found?”

  ~ * ~

  I was unusually restless that night, and there’s nothing quite so laborious as being restless and unable to toss and turn. Mike was his usual crusader-on-a-tombstone, and Mr. Apfel had burrowed himself down under his covers. The silence was broken at intervals only by his muttering and the sudden upheaval of the spread at one corner or the other.

  I watched the moonlight crawl slowly up the wall. I so concentrated on its movement that I almost groaned aloud when it did not reveal the next half-pattern in the wallpaper, but was prevented by the shadow of the geraniums on the window sill. “This sort of thinking is the utter end of nothing!” I thought. So, to swing the pendulum its limit, I tried to send my thoughts out to Mike. If I could find out something for Michal— I concentrated—which seemed to require holding my breath—and concentrated, but felt no vestige of stir in my mind that could mean contact.

  Mr. Apfel had subsided into stillness. I had inched my way up so I was propped a little against my pillows. Sleep slid across my eyes and cracked into a dozen uncomfortable segments that I felt, with a terrible sense of urgency, I had to put back together again with masking tape and bent pins with little minnows on them. One quivering, shaken piece was of Mr. Apfel creeping on hands and knees, bare-shanked, to the door of our room and disappearing into the hall. The shock of this little byplay was such that I snapped awake and glanced over to where the moonlight trembled on the hump of Mr. Apfel, burrowed out of sight down under his covers. The light was moving on Mike’s face, too, with one fragile coin of it fluttering on his mouth so that it seemed as if his lips were moving.

  I grinned feebly and closed my eyes. Hallucinations, asleep and awake! Well, at least it wasn’t dull. The shattered pieces of sleep scraped back over me.

  A crunching sound wakened me again later. Mr. Apfel was still hunched in bed, but now he was methodically crumpling page after page of a writing tablet and tucking each page down into his bed. Everything normal, go to sleep, I told myself. I heard Mr. Apfel’s childish giggle, then a series of scratching sounds, spaced by mutters. I turned slowly, wearily, away from the humped-up white shadow of Mr. Apfel. Maybe sleep would come anyway. Surely by now I was used to the sounds of Apfel.

  I drowsed—I don’t know how long. Then there was a sudden cry of triumph that twisted me incautiously around. My anguish was answered by a protesting cry from Mr. Apfel as his bed erupted in a flare of flames.

  “No!” he screamed. “Not yet! Not all at once! It’s for Michal!” He beat feebly at the flames that were spre
ading erratically across the bed, smoke billowing as the spread caught and flared. Mr. Apfel coughed and choked and his bewildered child-wail, “Michal! Michal!” rose and lifted into a scream that cut off with a gasp.

  I shouted, “Mrs. Norwich! Michal! Hey!” Time got lost somewhere in the confusion. I remember smoke rolling across Mike’s bed and his still, unseeing face. I heard cries from the patients across the hall and a pounding of feet on the stairs. I remember how the smoke swirled when the door was flung open and how the curtains became a bright reversed Niagara of flame up the wall. I was caught up—it felt actually physically so—

  Suddenly I knew Michal was there—a tortured Michal who spun away from the flames of Mr. Apfel’s bed, and then was by my bed, her quick hands tucking the covers about me as she sobbed, “Mike! Mike!”