by Timothy Zahn
As quietly as he could, he stepped into the apartment and closed the door, turning the doorknob lock but leaving the three deadbolts open in case he had to make a quick run for it. On a table beside the door stood an empty pewter vase. He picked it up by its slender neck, left the yellow plastic bag on the floor by the table and tiptoed to the bedroom door. Steeling himself, panting as quietly as was humanly possible, he nudged the door open and peered in. No one. Still on tiptoe, he repeated the check with the kitchen, with the same result.
He gave another sigh of relief. Alison thought he was a little on the paranoid side, and wasn’t particularly hesitant about saying so. But he read the papers and he watched the news, and he knew that the quiet evil of the city was nothing to be ignored or scoffed at.
But once more, he’d braved the evil—braved it, and won, and had made it back to his own room and safety. Heading back to the door, he locked the deadbolts, returned the vase to its place on the table, and retrieved the yellow bag.
It was only as he was walking to the kitchen with it, his mind now freed from the preoccupations of survival in a hostile world, that his brain finally registered what his fingers had been trying to tell him all along.
The yellow bag was not, in fact, made of plastic.
“Huh,” he said aloud, raising it up in front of his eyes for a closer look. It looked like plastic, certainly, like the same plastic they’d been delivering phone books in for he couldn’t remember how many years. But the feel of the thing was totally wrong for plastic.
In fact, it was totally wrong for anything.
“Well, that’s funny,” he said, continuing on into the kitchen. Laying the bag on the table, he pulled up one of the four more-or-less-matching chairs and sat down.
For a minute he just looked at the thing, rubbing his fingers slowly across its surface and digging back into his memory for how these bags had felt in the past. He couldn’t remember, exactly; but it was for sure they hadn’t felt like this. This wasn’t like any plastic he’d ever felt before. Or like any cloth, or like any paper.
“It’s something new, then,” he told himself. “Maybe one of those new plastics they’re making out of corn oil or something.”
The words weren’t much comfort. In his mind’s eye, he saw the thriller that had been on cable last week, the one where the spy had been blown to bits by a shopping bag made out of plastic explosive. …
He gritted his teeth. “That’s stupid,” he said firmly. “Who in the world would go to that kind of trouble to kill me? Period; end of discussion,” he added to forestall an argument. Alison had more or less accepted his habit of talking to himself, especially when he hadn’t seen her for a couple of days. But even she drew the line at arguing aloud with himself. “End of discussion,” he repeated. “So. Let’s quit this nonsense and check out the ad.”
He took a deep breath, exhaled it explosively like a shotputter about to go into his little loop-de-spin. Taking another deep breath, he reached into the bag and, carefully, pulled the phone book out.
Nothing happened.
“There—you see?” he chided himself, pushing the bag across the table and pulling the directory in front of him. “Alison’s right; there’s paranoia, and then there’s para-noi-a. Gotta stop watching those late cable shows. Now, let’s see here …”
He checked his white-pages listings first, both his apartment’s and the print shop’s. Both were correct. “Great,” he muttered. “And now”—he hummed himself a little trumpet flourish as he turned to the Yellow Pages—“the pièce de résistance. Let your fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages, dum dum de dum …” He reached the L’s, turned past to the P’s …
And there it was. Blazing out at him, in full three-color glory, the display ad for Grussing A-One-Excellent Printing And Copying.
“Now that,” he told himself proudly, “is an ad. You just wait, Radley old boy—an ad like that’ll get you more business than you know what to do with. You’ll see—there’s nowhere to go but up from now on.”
He leafed through the pages, studying all the other print-shop ads and trying hard not to notice that six of his competitors had three-color displays fully as impressive as his own. That didn’t matter. His ad—and the business it was going to bring in—would lift him up out of the hungry pack, bring him to the notice of important people with important printing needs. “You’ll see,” he told himself confidently. The Printers heading gave way to Printers—Business Forms, and then to Printing Equipment and Printing Supplies. “Huh; Steven’s has moved,” he noted with some surprise. He hadn’t bought anything from Steven’s for over a year—probably about time he checked out their prices again. Idly, he turned another page—
And stopped. Right after the short listing of Prosthetic Devices was a heading he’d never seen before.
Prostitutes.
“Well, I’ll be D-double-darned,” he muttered in amazement. “I didn’t know they could advertise.”
He let his eyes drift down the listings, turned the page. There were a lot of names there—almost as many, he thought, as the attorney listings at the other end of the Yellow Pages, except that unlike the lawyers, the prostitutes had no display ads. “Wonder when the phone company decided to let this go in.” He shook his head. “Hoo, boy—the egg’s gonna hit the fan for sure when the Baptists see this.”
He scanned down the listing. Names—both women’s and a few men’s—addresses, phone numbers—it was all there. Everything anyone so inclined would need to get themselves some late-night companionship.
He frowned. Addresses. Not just post office boxes. Real street addresses.
Home addresses.
“Wait just a minute, here,” he muttered. “Just a D-double-darned minute.” Nevada, he’d heard once, had legal prostitution; but here—“This is nuts,” he decided. “The cops could just go right there and arrest them. Couldn’t they? I mean, even those escort and massage places usually just have phone numbers. Don’t they?”
With the phone book sitting right in front of him, there was an obvious way to answer that question. Sticking a corner of the yellow bag in to mark his place, he turned backwards toward the E’s. Excavating Contractors, Elevators—oops; too far—
He froze, finger and thumb suddenly stiff where they gripped a corner of the page. A couple of headings down from Elevators was another list of names, shorter than the prostitutes listing but likewise distinguished by the absence of display ads. And the heading here …
Embezzlers.
His lips, he suddenly noticed, were dry. He licked them, without noticeable effect. “This,” he said, his words sounding eerie in his ears, “is nuts. Embezzlers don’t advertise. I mean, come on now.”
He willed the listing to vanish, to change to something more reasonable, like Embalmers. But that heading was there, too … and the Embezzlers heading didn’t go away.
He took a deep breath and, resolutely, turned the page. “I’ve been working too hard,” he informed himself loudly. “Way too hard. Now. Let’s see, where was I going … right—escort services.”
He found the heading and its page after page of garish and seductive display ads. Sure enough, none of them listed any addresses. Just for completeness, he flipped back to the M’s, checking out the massage places. Some had addresses; others—the ones advertising out-calls only—had just phone numbers.
“Makes sense,” he decided. “Otherwise the cops and self-appointed guardians of public morals could just sit there and scare all their business away. So what gives with this?” He started to turn back to the prostitute listing, his fingers losing their grip on the slippery pages and dropping the book open at the end of the M’s—
And again he froze. There was another listing of names and addresses there, just in front of Museums. Shorter than either the prostitute or embezzler lists; but the heading more than made up for it.
&nbs
p; Murderers.
He squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head. “This is crazy,” he breathed. “I mean, really crazy.” Carefully, he opened his eyes again. The Murderers listing was still there. Almost unwillingly, he reached out a finger and rubbed it across the ink. It didn’t rub off, like cheap ink would, or fade away, like a hallucination ought to.
It was real.
He was still staring at the book, the sea of yellow dazzling his eyes, when the knock came at his front door.
He fairly jumped out of the chair, jamming his thigh against the underside of the table as he did so. “It’s the FBI,” he gasped under his breath. It was their book—their book of the city’s criminals. It had been delivered here by mistake, and they were here to get it back.
Or else it was the mob’s book—
“Radley?” A familiar voice came through the steel-cored wood panel. “You home?”
He felt a little surge of relief, knees going a little shaky. “There’s paranoia,” he chided himself, “and then there’s para-noi-a.” He raised his voice. “Coming, Alison,” he called.
“Hi,” she said with a smile as he opened the door, her face just visible over the large white bag in her arms. “Got the table all set?”
“Oh—right,” he said, taking the bag from her. The warm scent of fried chicken rose from it; belatedly, he remembered he was supposed to have made a salad, too. “Uh—no, not yet. Hey, look, come in here—you’ve got to see this.”
He led her to the kitchen, dropping the bag on the counter beside the sink and sitting her down in front of the phone book. The yellow bag still marked the page with the Prostitutes heading; turning there, he pointed. “Do you see what I see?” he asked, his mouth going dry. If she didn’t see anything, it had suddenly occurred to him, it would mean his brain was in serious trouble. …
“Huh,” she said. “Well, that’s new. I thought prostitution was still illegal.”
“Far as I know, it still is,” he agreed, feeling another little surge of relief. So he wasn’t going nuts. Or at least he wasn’t going nuts alone. “Hang on, though—it gets worse.”
She sat there silently as he flipped back to the Embezzlers section, and then forward again to point out the Murderers heading. “I don’t know what else is here,” he told her. “This is as far as I got.”
She looked up, an odd expression on her face. “You do realize, I hope, that this is nothing but an overly elaborate practical joke. This stuff can’t really be in a real phone book.”
“Well … sure,” he floundered. “I mean, I know that the phone company wouldn’t—”
She was still giving him that look. “Radley,” she said warningly. “Come on, now, let’s not slide off reality into the cable end of the channel selector. No one makes lists of prostitutes and embezzlers and murderers. And even if someone did, they certainly wouldn’t try to hide them inside a city directory.”
“Yes, I know, Alison. But—well, look here.” He pulled the yellow bag over and slid it into her hand. “Feel it. Does it feel like plastic to you? Or like anything else you’ve ever touched?”
Alison shrugged. “They make thousands of different kinds of plastics these days—”
“All right then, look here.” He cut her off, lifting up the end of the phone book. “Here—at the binding. I’m a printer—I know how binding is done. These pages haven’t just been slipped in somehow—they were bound in at the same time as all the others. How would someone have done that?”
“It’s a joke, Radley,” Alison insisted. “It has to be. All the phone books can’t have— Well, look, it’s easy enough to check. Let me go downstairs and get mine while you get the salad going.”
Her apartment was just two floors down, and he’d barely gotten the vegetables out of the fridge and lined them up on the counter by the time she’d returned. “Okay, here we go,” she said, sitting down at the table again and opening her copy of the phone book. “Prostitutes . . . nope, not here. Embezzlers … nope. Murderers … still nope.” She offered it to him.
He took it and gave it a quick inspection of his own. She was right; none of the strange headings seemed to be there. “But how could anyone have gotten the extra pages bound in?” he demanded putting it down and gesturing to his copy. “I mean, all you have to do is just look at the binding.”
“I know.” Alison shook her head, running a finger thoughtfully across the lower edge of the binding. “Well … I said it was overly elaborate. Maybe someone who knows you works where they print these things, and he got hold of the orig—oh, my God!”
Radley jumped a foot backwards, about half the distance Alison and her chair traveled. “What?” he snapped, eyes darting all around.
She was panting, her breath coming in short, hyperventilating gasps. “The … the page. The listing …”
Radley dropped his eyes to the phone book. Nothing looked any different. “What? What’d you see?”
“The murderer listing,” she whispered. “I was looking at it and … and it got longer.”
He stared at the page, a cold hand working its way down his windpipe. “What do you mean, it got longer?” he asked carefully. “You mean like someone … just got added to the list?”
Allison didn’t answer. Radley broke his gaze away from the page and looked at her. Her face was white, her breath coming slower but starting to shake now, her eyes wide on the book. “Alison?” he asked. “You okay?”
“It’s from the devil,” she hissed. Her right hand, gripping the table white-knuckled, suddenly let go its grip, darting up to trace a quick cross across her chest. “You’ve got to destroy it, Radley,” she said. Abruptly, she looked up at him. “Right now. You’ve got to—” she twisted her head, looking all around the room—“you’ve got to burn it,” she said, jabbing a finger toward the tiny fireplace in the living room. “Right now; right there in the fireplace.” She turned back to the phone book, and with just a slight hesitation scooped it up. “Come on—”
“Wait a minute, Alison, wait a minute,” Radley said, grabbing her hands and forcing them and the phone book back down onto the table. “Let’s not do anything rash, huh? I mean—”
“Anything rash? This thing is a tool of the devil.”
“That’s what I mean,” he said. “Going off half-cocked. Who says this is from the devil? Who says—”
“Who says it’s from the devil?” She stared at him, wide-eyed. “Radley, just where do you think this thing came from, the phone company?”
“So who says it didn’t come from the other direction?” Radley countered. “Maybe it was given to me by an angel—ever think of that?”
“Oh, sure,” Alison snorted. “Right. An angel left you this—this—voyeur’s delight.”
Radley frowned at her. “What in the world are you talking about? These people are criminals, Alison. They’ve given up their right of privacy.”
“Since when?” she shot back. “No one gives up any of their rights until they’re convicted.”
“But—” he floundered.
“And anyway,” she added, “who says any of these people really are murderers?”
Radley looked down at the book. “But if they’re not, why are they listed here?”
“Will you listen to yourself?” Alison demanded. “Five minutes ago you were wondering how this thing could exist; now you’re treating what it says like it was gospel. You have no proof that any of these people have ever committed any crime, let alone killed anyone. For all you know, this whole thing could be nothing more than some devil’s scheme to make you even more paranoid than you are already.”
“I am not paranoid,” Radley growled. “This city’s dangerous—any big city is. That’s not paranoia, it’s just plain, simple truth.” He pointed at the book. “All this does is confirm what the TV and papers already say.”
For a long moment Alison just stare
d at him, her expression a mixture of anger and fear. “All right, Radley,” she said at last. “I’ll meet you halfway. Let’s put it to the test. If there really was a murder tonight at”—she looked up at the kitchen wall clock—“about six-twenty, then it ought to be on the eleven o’clock news. Right?”
Radley considered. “Well … sometimes murders don’t get noticed for a while. But, yeah, probably it’ll be on tonight.”
“All right.” Alison took a deep breath. “If there was a murder, I’ll concede that maybe there’s something to all of this.” She locked eyes with him. “But if there wasn’t any murder … will you agree to burn the book?”
Radley swallowed. The possibilities were only just starting to occur to him, but already he’d seen enough to recognize the potential of this thing. The potential for criminal justice, for public service—
“Radley?” Alison prompted.
He looked at her, gritted his teeth. “We’ll check the news,” he told her. “But if the murder isn’t there, we’re not going to burn anything until tomorrow night, after we have a chance to check the papers.”
Alison hesitated, then nodded. Reluctantly, Radley thought. “All right.” Standing up, she picked up the book, closed it with her thumb marking the place. “You finish the salad. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”
“Where are you going?” Radley frowned, his eyes on the book as she tucked it under her arm.
“Down to the grocery on the corner—they’ve got a copy machine over by the ice chest.”
“What do you need to copy it for?” Radley asked. “If the police release a suspect’s name, we can just look it up—”
“We already know the book can change.”
“Oh … Right.”
He stood there, irresolute, as she headed for the door. Then, abruptly, the paralysis vanished, and in five quick strides he caught up with her. “I’ll come with you,” he said, gently but firmly taking the book from her hands. “The salad can wait.”
It took several minutes, and a lot of quarters, for them to find out that the book wouldn’t copy.
