Community

by Graham Masterton

‘It’s not going to be easy. How am I going to find her? And she may be the same as me, and have amnesia. Maybe she doesn’t know who she is.’

  Jack took a swig of beer and burped. ‘I have a definite feeling that if you can discover who she is, then a whole lot of other stuff is going to fall into place. Like I said, there’s so many things in this place that don’t click together. Maybe if we can get just two things to click together, like who she is and why you know her so good …’

  ‘Well, you could be right,’ said Michael. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure that Isobel was still busy in the kitchen. ‘Let me tell you something else.’

  He leaned close to Jack and in a low voice he told him about the groceries that she had brought home from Ray’s Food Place in Weed – except that her tire tracks showed that she hadn’t driven to Weed at all.

  ‘There you are, then,’ said Jack. He sang the dee-dee-dee-dee theme music from The Twilight Zone. ‘We have to find out what’s going on around here, even if we find out that you and me are both bananas, and we’re reading things into things that aren’t really happening at all. I mean, maybe everybody in Trinity has these special snow shoes that don’t leave footprints.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’ Michael asked him.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  Jack swigged more beer, and then he said, ‘What we should do is go up to the clinic tonight, walk in and find that girl and ask her straight out. She should have medical notes on the end of her bed, anyhow, and her name is bound to be in there.’

  ‘Oh, I see. We just walk in.’

  ‘We’re both patients there, man. We both have ID badges.’

  ‘I don’t know, Jack. What do we say if they stop us?’

  ‘Come on, we make some kind of excuse, like one of us wasn’t feeling too good so the other one helped him up to the clinic to find a doctor.’

  Michael was about to say ‘give me some time to think about it’ when Isobel came out of the kitchen, carrying her glass of wine and a bowl of pretzels.

  ‘Here, thought you might like something to nibble on. Chili’s going to take another forty minutes. Do you want to stay for lunch, Jack?’

  ‘That’s real kind of you, Ms Weston, but I think Margaret’s cooking me one of her chicken pot pies today. She sure likes to spoil me.’

  Michael finished his bottle of beer and went into the kitchen for another one. The chili was bubbling quietly to itself on the hob, and the windows were steamed up. He opened the fridge and took out two bottles, and as he closed the fridge door and turned around, he could see through the steam that the snow was falling on the back yard much more thickly now, like duck down.

  He went up to the window and wiped it with his hand.

  He said, ‘Shit!’ and almost dropped both bottles on the floor.

  Standing at the far end of the yard, quite still, were Bill Endersby and a woman whom Michael could only assume was his wife, Margaret. They were both staring at the house, their arms by their sides, making no attempt to brush off the snow that was piling on their shoulders. Neither of them was wearing an overcoat. Bill Endersby had on a dark green cardigan and baggy black corduroy pants while Margaret was wearing a beige sweater and a brown pleated skirt.

  Michael stared back at them. He couldn’t work out if they could see him or not, because they showed no sign of movement. A black-headed mountain jay landed on the snow right in front of them, and hopped in between them, leaving its fork-like tracks, but around Bill and Margaret there were no footprints at all. Either the thick snow had already covered them up, or else they hadn’t left any.

  ‘Greg?’ called Isobel. ‘Are you OK in there? You’re not sneaking a taste of my chili, are you?’

  Michael returned to the living room. He looked at Jack and tried to convey by rolling his eyes that he had seen something weird out of the kitchen window, but Jack didn’t cotton on.

  ‘You feeling OK, man? You sure you can handle another beer?’

  What was he going to tell him? ‘We have two uninvited visitors, out in the yard’? Maybe if Isobel had left footprints when she crossed the front lawn he would have done. But he decided to say nothing for now. If the Endersbys were still there when Isobel returned to the kitchen to check on her chili, she would see them for herself.

  On the other hand, what if they were still there but she couldn’t see them? What would that mean? That he was hallucinating? That he really was still in a coma, after all?

  He sat down and tried to smile, and Isobel put her hand affectionately on his knee, but he felt that he was on the verge of madness.

  ELEVEN

  He waited until Isobel was sleeping. She was lying on her back, her head turned away from him, breathing evenly through slightly parted lips. She was still wearing her pearl earrings.

  She had failed to draw the drapes completely together, leaving a narrow gap between them, and so the bedroom was coldly illuminated by moonlight, and by the moonlight that was reflected by the snow outside.

  After Jack had left, and Michael and Isobel had gone through to the kitchen together, there had been no sign in the back yard of Bill and Margaret Endersby. No footprints, either – only the cross-stitching of birds’ feet.

  All the same, Michael had glanced out of the window so frequently when they had been sitting at the kitchen table eating their chili that Isobel had frowned and said, ‘What’s out in the yard that’s so much more interesting than me?’

  ‘Thought I saw a raccoon, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, great. What a compliment!’

  They had held each other close when they had gone to bed, but when Michael had started to stroke her breasts and roll her tightening nipples between his fingers, she had gently pushed him away, and kissed him, and said, ‘I’m a little tired right now. Is that OK? Maybe later. Wake me up in a couple of hours.’

  She had fallen asleep very quickly, within five or six minutes. He had leaned over her for a while, his head in his hand, watching her sleep. He had seen from the way that her eyeballs were darting around underneath her eyelids that she was dreaming. Maybe she’s dreaming of me, he thought. Maybe that’s who I really am, after all. Nothing more than a character in Isobel’s dream.

  He ran his hand gently over her shoulder, and her upper arm. She still felt so cold. He dragged up the quilt and covered her, up to her shoulders, but she didn’t feel any warmer.

  He felt quite tired himself, but he had arranged to meet Jack outside at a quarter after midnight. He had never seen the numbers on a digital clock change so slowly. When they showed 10:39 he deliberately turned away, and counted to sixty, but when he turned back they were still showing 10:39.

  Isobel continued to breathe, and to dream, but her skin still felt chilly.

  He could see his pale reflection in the mirrors on the closet doors. ‘Gregory Merrick!’ he called out, in a whisper, but the pale reflection did nothing but stare back at him. It didn’t wave, or climb out of bed, or bury itself under the quilt. ‘Gregory John Merrick!’

  Like last night, the closet doors were slightly ajar, and he could see the black shark’s eyes of Isobel’s doll, Belle, gleaming at him suspiciously out of the darkness.

  At last the clock said 12:02. Michael eased himself out of bed, taking care to cover up Isobel’s shoulders with the quilt, but she didn’t stir. He tiptoed out of the bedroom, closing the closet door on his way past. It was ridiculously superstitious of him to think that Belle might tell Isobel that he had crept out of the house, but right now he was beginning to believe that anything was possible. If people could walk across deep snow without leaving footprints, who was to say that dolls couldn’t talk?

  He hurried to his room and pulled on his Levis and his thick black roll-neck sweater. Then he shrugged on his coat and pulled on his boots, and let himself out of the house. After he had opened the front door, he paused and listened for a moment, just to make sure that Isobel hadn’t woken up, but there was only silence.
>
  Jack was waiting for him, leaning against the front fender of Isobel’s Jeep and chafing his hands together to keep warm. He had wrapped a thick gray scarf around and around his head in a ball, so that he looked like a snowman with leprosy.

  ‘OK,’ he said, hoarsely. ‘You ready for this? ’Cause if you don’t want to do it, man, we don’t have to. We can just go back to bed and pretend that everything in Trinity is stone-cold flush-centered.’

  Michael said, ‘I sure as hell can’t do that now, Jack. Bill and Margaret were standing in the back yard when you were there.’

  ‘Ex-squeeze me? What back yard? Where?’

  ‘Isobel’s back yard. When I went to fetch that second beer, there they were, the two of them, standing outside in the snow.’

  ‘You’re pulling my chain! Doing what?’

  ‘Doing nothing. Just standing there. After you’d gone, they disappeared, too. But they didn’t leave any footprints.’

  Jack looked bewildered. ‘I don’t know how that’s possible, man. They were both at home when I got back. Margaret was in the kitchen rolling out pastry and Bill was in his den, tying flies. That’s one of his hobbies, so he told me, fly-fishing.’

  ‘What were they wearing?’ asked Michael. He and Jack were climbing up the gradient toward the clinic now, and they were both slightly out of breath, especially since the temperature was well below zero.

  ‘How should I know? Oh – Bill had on that slime-green button-up sweater he always wears, and Margaret – I don’t know. She was wearing an apron. But something brown, probably. That woman does love her brown.’

  They walked along beside the whitewashed clinic wall, and in through the main entrance. A gray-haired security guard was sitting in a small illuminated booth on the right-hand side of the entrance, reading a newspaper. He looked up as they approached, but they both held up their TSC identity tags and he gave them a dismissive wave of the hand and let them pass.

  ‘See … told you we could just walk in,’ said Jack. ‘They might be hiding something here, man, but what they don’t know is that we suspect that they’re hiding something. So they’re not going to be so alert, are they?’

  ‘We haven’t gotten inside yet, so don’t be too optimistic.’

  ‘Do you know something?’ asked Jack, as they approached the front steps. ‘You have a real interesting accent. I meant to mention it to you before. You definitely don’t sound like you was born and raised in ’Frisco. You sound more like Mid-West, you know? More like Chicago or Milwaukee. I had a girlfriend from Milwaukee – well, Kenosha, really. That’s how I can tell.’

  ‘If you’re trying to make me more confused than I am already, you’re succeeding,’ said Michael. The revolving door was locked but they pushed their way into the clinic reception area through one of the side doors.

  There was nobody sitting behind the reception desk. The reception area was brightly lit and shiny and very quiet. Somewhere they could hear the sound of a floor-polisher, and what sounded like a television, with occasional bursts of studio laughter, but that was all.

  Michael said, ‘That girl looked like she’d suffered a head injury, so it wouldn’t surprise me if she’s located in the same wing where they treated me. If she has brain damage, they’ll be giving her psychiatric treatment as well as physio.’

  ‘Well, you know where that is, man. Lead on.’

  They passed the reception desk and took the right-hand corridor. It was long and softly lit, with a blue-gray carpeted floor, and framed landscapes all the way along it, every one of them featuring Mount Shasta in the background.

  Along the corridor there were sixteen blue-painted doors, eight on each side. Every door had an oval window in it, so they could peek inside to see if there was anybody in there. Most of the rooms were empty, with nothing in them but stripped-down beds. In two or three of them, patients were sleeping, bandaged and connected up to heart monitors and drug dispensers. In the seventh room they came to, two nurses and a doctor were gathered around a patient’s bed, checking his blood pressure and hooking him up to an intravenous drip. Michael ducked his head down quickly so that they wouldn’t catch sight of him.

  They walked all the way down to the end of the corridor. As they came to the last two doors, Jack said, ‘Nah … looks like they’ve taken her someplace else, man. Maybe she’s not here in the clinic at all.’

  But when Michael looked into the second-to-last window, he saw the girl lying on her bed on her back, her head bound with white bandages, fast asleep. Her blue bobble hat was hanging on the chair beside her. He angled his head to the left, and then to the right, just to make sure that there was nobody else in the room, but the girl was alone.

  ‘It’s her,’ he told Jack. ‘I’ll go in and try to wake her up. With any luck she won’t scream the place down.’

  ‘I’ll keep watch,’ said Jack. ‘If I see anybody coming, I’ll give you three knocks.’

  ‘And what if they ask you what the hell you’re doing here, in the middle of the night?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, dude. I’ll think of something.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Something like we said before. Like, I was woken up by these terrible shooting pains in my back, right? I couldn’t take them any more, so I came up here to the clinic to find myself a doctor. But, I kind of got lost, and wandered down the wrong corridor, and that’s why I’m here.’

  ‘OK. I guess that sounds plausible. Or plausible-ish.’

  Michael took a quick look back down the corridor to make sure that there was nobody in sight, and then he carefully opened the door. He hesitated for a moment, but Jack said, ‘Go on. If you’re going to do it, go ahead and do it.’

  Michael stepped into the girl’s room and closed the door behind him. He approached the bed and stood over her. She was attached to a Veris vital signs monitor, which was softly beeping and flashing, and as far as he could tell, her heart rate looked stable. She was very pale, but she looked just as beautiful as she had when he had first seen her at the community meeting, and even more familiar.

  I know you. I know you so well. How can I possibly know you so well?

  For a split-second, he saw another flash of lights, and heard that blurt of sound again, and that girl’s voice saying you shouldn’t. And he smelled that perfume, too – that elusive, floral perfume.

  Maybe it was her voice, and her perfume.

  ‘Who are you?’ he said, but only in a whisper, because now that he was here, standing beside her bed, he wasn’t at all sure that he was doing the right thing. It was clear from the bandages around her head that she had sustained a very serious injury. Waking her up and demanding to know who she was and why he knew her so well – who knows what trauma that could cause her, both physically and psychologically? He didn’t want to make her worse than she was already.

  He heard a single sharp tap at the door, and turned around. Jack was glaring in through the window and jerking his head to indicate that Michael should hurry up. Michael gave him a thumb’s-up and mouthed, ‘OK.’

  He laid his hand on the girl’s shoulder and gently shook it. She didn’t show any signs of waking up so he shook it again. Maybe the doctors had given her a sedative, and nothing would rouse her.

  ‘Hello?’ he said. ‘Hello, can you hear me? I need you to open your eyes.’

  She licked her lips with the tip of her tongue and murmured, ‘Why did you …?’

  ‘Can you hear me?’ he repeated. ‘I need you to open your eyes. I need you to talk to me. I need you to tell me your name.’

  Again she licked her lips, and then her eyelids fluttered.

  ‘Please,’ said Michael. ‘Please wake up and tell me who you are.’

  He shook her shoulder once more, harder this time. Still she didn’t open her eyes.

  ‘Please,’ he repeated. ‘Please wake up.’

  There was another single knock at the door, and there was Jack, giving him the evil eye through the window. He shrugged to show that
he was having no luck. Jack pointed furiously to the metal bracket at the end of the bed which contained the girl’s medical notes. Look in there, he mouthed, silently. See if you can find her name in there.

  Michael lifted out the folder. It had a stiff pink cardboard cover with the name Natasha Kerwin written on it, in black felt-tip pen. Underneath was printed G. Hamid, Snr Consultant and – in parentheses – the words (semi-substantial).

  Michael opened the folder and quickly leafed through the notes. He couldn’t make sense of any of them. There were twenty pages or more, crowded with statistics and graphs and comments like ‘Temporal dynamics in layers II/III have unusually fast 4–5 Hz oscillation’ and ‘Cortical trauma could jeopardize prospect of conversion to s.s.’

  He closed the folder and touched the name Natasha Kerwin with his fingertips, as if by osmosis it could give him some clue as to who she was. Her name seemed faintly familiar, but he couldn’t think why. It told him nothing more than those flashing lights he kept seeing, and that girl’s voice saying you shouldn’t, and that tantalizing waft of perfume.

  He slid the folder back in its bracket, and looked at the girl again. To his surprise, her eyes were open and she was staring at him.

  ‘You’re awake,’ he said, coming around to the side of the bed.

  She opened and closed her mouth without saying anything, but she lifted up her right hand as if she wanted him to take hold of it. He clasped it between both of his hands, and it was shockingly cold.

  ‘Jesus, you’re freezing,’ he told her. ‘Why don’t you put your hands under the covers?’

  She licked her lips again, and then she whispered, ‘You shouldn’t let me go to sleep like that.’

  ‘What?’

  She looked around the room, frowning. ‘Where are we? Is this our hotel?’

  ‘This is a clinic. You’ve been in some kind of an accident. You’ve been hurt.’

  ‘Accident?’

  ‘I really don’t know. It could have been an auto wreck.’

  ‘But you’re not hurt, are you?’

  ‘Me? No. I was, but that was months ago. I’m pretty much recovered now, except for my memory.’