The Year's Best Horror Stories 4

by Gerald W. Page (Ed. )

  Timothy opened his eyes and stared up at him. "What happened, Dad? I was just starting to—Did I trip? Yeah, I must have taken a tumble. Everything went black."

  "You had a very bad fall," Crewson heard himself muttering, his concern suddenly less acute. "Are you all right? Do you feel all right? Not dizzy or anything?"

  "Maybe I'll feel dizzy if I stand up," Timothy said. "But I guess not. I feel pretty good."

  "I'm glad of that, at least," Crewson said. "But I don't know why you should feel good, after giving me a scare like that. Why did you come downstairs at this hour? Tell me."

  "I stayed up all night, Dad. I was reading in bed. Then I started worrying about what might happen if I kept thinking about what happened when the Greek ships—"

  "Stop right there," Crewson ordered. "We're not going into that again. Not now—or ever again. Do you understand? I don't want to hear about it."

  "All right, Dad. But that smell will keep coming back."

  Crewson's heart skipped a beat. "What smell?" he demanded. "What are you talking about?"

  Just the fact that he knew only too well what Timothy was talking about meant nothing, one way or the other. The last thing he wanted to do was let Timothy know that he knew.

  "Susan smelled it too," Timothy said, defensively. "It woke her up. When Mom boils a lobster and when she steams clams Susan can't stand the smell. She stays out on the lawn until supper's ready. You never get cross with her."

  "She's allergic to sea food," Crewson said. "I've told you that many times. But it's mostly shellfish. That's why we never let her eat shellfish."

  It was an irrelevant remark. But Crewson felt it would encourage his son to talk more freely, and he no longer wanted him to stop.

  "It came right up out of the sea again," Timothy said. "I can always tell. But when Susan smelled it I knew it was getting bad. It will be like that now even when it doesn't come back. Mom will smell it, too."

  "Is that why you came rushing downstairs so fast—to find out if I smelled anything strange?"

  Timothy shook his head. "I was scared you'd see it. That's worse than just smelling it. Mr. Forbes saw it, and was nearly killed."

  Crewson had forgotten for a moment what Timothy had said about feeling dizzy if he tried to walk. But now all of his concern came back.

  "Get up, son," he said. "Walk up and down a few times. We've got to make sure that bump on your head is nothing to worry about. Kids your age take so many tumbles you get in the habit of giving it little thought. But sometimes you don't worry enough."

  Timothy got up and walked back and forth until his father told him to stop.

  "Any dizziness?" Crewson asked.

  "No, Dad. I feel fine."

  "I'm glad. There's just one more thing I want you to do. Go upstairs and wake your mother up. Tell her I have to see her right away. And don't come back with her. Just go to your room and stay there. I've got to have a long serious talk with her."

  If Timothy had the slightest inclination to disobey it was not apparent in his behavior. He turned slowly and went back up the stairs, dragging his feet a little as if in sullen protest against parental dominance.

  Five minutes later Anne Crewson was sitting at her husband's side, listening to what he was saying without making any attempt to interrupt him. The creaking of the couch as she shifted her position almost continuously was more revealing of the way she felt than her expression, for she was a woman who could endure a great deal of inner torment with composed features.

  Crewson carefully avoided so much as hinting at the torment that he had endured before his son's fall had made a horror beyond sane description waver and vanish. He started with Timothy's mishap, explaining that it was the crash that had awakened him. But he told her everything that their son had said and when he had finished he was almost sure, from the long silence which ensued, that her concern was now as great as his, and perhaps even surpassed it.

  Her voice, when she spoke, was slightly tremulous. "We're very lucky, in a way, Ralph. Dr. Moorehouse is not only a kindly and understanding man. He doesn't really belong in a town as small as East Windham, even though they have a quite large general hospital. I don't need to tell you how famous he has become. There are few child psychologists—"

  "He started as a Jungian analyst," Crewson said, before she could continue. "Most of his patients, in those days, were troubled adults. He's still a Jungian, I've been told, but yes—he's a good man. I've never had anything against Jung—or Freud, for that matter, except that I've never been a convert to any kind of analytical therapy."

  "Most people are today," Anne said.

  "No, I wouldn't say that exactly," Crewson said. "It's a big world and we make a mistake when we let ourselves forget it."

  "You picked a strange time to interpose objections," Anne said. "Timothy is more than just troubled. There are few adults—"

  "That's not what you said when Timothy was sprawled out on the floor reading about the fall of Troy for the fiftieth time. I told you then that it was the wrong book. A very bad book for Timothy—even if a case could be made out for letting that kind of reading fall into the hands of comparatively well-balanced children for a while longer."

  "I've changed my mind, that's all," Anne said.

  Crewson reached out and pressed his wife's hand. "I'm glad you have. I'll drive to East Windham and have a talk with Moorehouse just as soon as you can perk some strong coffee—make it three cups. Black, no cream."

  "That's unusual for you," Anne said, trying very hard to smile. "You hate black coffee. Oh, hell—I'll boil you two eggs while I'm at it. It won't take more than ten minutes."

  Under ordinary circumstances Crewson would have phoned Dr. Moorehouse to check on his availability before driving to East Windham at so early an hour. But he needed to get out into the open in a speeding car regardless of the hour; and no matter how soon he arrived in the town a period of waiting seemed inevitable, and he saw no reason for worrying about whether it would be long or comparatively short.

  Possibly, he told himself, an appointment could be arranged as early as ten o'clock at Moorehouse's residence. And if it had to be later at the hospital, where the psychiatrist was a staff therapist, East Windham was a pleasant enough town to keep the dread which darkened his thoughts from becoming overwhelming for a few hours.

  It turned out better than he had dared to hope and a phone call to Moorehouse's home on his arrival secured him an appointment at nine-thirty. The hour and a half of waiting which remained he spent roaming through the more ancient part of town, studying the old houses, some dating back to the sixteenth century, and talking for twenty minutes on the phone with Forbes, in his private room at the hospital.

  The news he received was reassuring. Forbes's wound had been well attended to, and unless some complication developed, which seemed unlikely, he would be up and about again in a few days. And Miss Tanner was no longer under sedation.

  He arrived at Moorehouse's home ten minutes ahead of time and was ushered into his quite large, tastefully furnished office facing the street by his wife, a quiet-spoken, attractive woman who was quick to explain that his regular office hours were eleven to one, and were followed by his duties at the hospital which sometimes kept him occupied all night.

  "Sometimes he sees patients earlier," she told Crewson. "He's been terribly busy in recent weeks. Everything's so uncertain today that people are taking up more and more of his time. I worry about the schedule he's imposed on himself."

  She nodded and shut the door, and Crewson found himself staring across the sunlit room at a slightly stout, gray-haired man with thoughtful brown eyes, and rather small features that were finely chiseled and verged on the handsome. There was nothing particularly distinguished about him, but there was something in his expression that inspired confidence at first glance.

  He arose from behind his desk, gestured to a chair drawn up opposite the desk, and sat down again. He did not offer his hand in greeting, but his first
words put Crewson completely at his ease.

  "We have two mutual friends, it seems. But this is the first time I've had the great pleasure of meeting you in person. I understand you wish to talk to me about your son."

  Crewson had debated with himself the wisdom of telling the composed, widely experienced man who now sat facing him everything that had happened since the previous afternoon, starting with Timothy's wild talk and the angry scene with his wife that had made him decide to go for a walk on the beach.

  He abruptly decided that he would be defeating his own purpose in seeking the psychiatrist's help if he kept anything back, including the appalling spectacle which had confronted him when he'd heaved himself over the rail of Forbes's boat

  Quite possibly Moorehouse had talked with Forbes at the hospital and already knew about that. The emergency had been an unusual one, and a staff psychiatrist could well have been summoned to provide some immediate help, particularly since Helen Tanner had undergone a dangerous kind of hysterical collapse.

  It took Crewson close to half an hour to acquaint Moorehouse with a sequence of occurrences that went far beyond what the psychiatrist could have surmised from just talking with Forbes. And he was careful to stress that not only were they sanity-threatening, but seemed to bear some frightening relationship to Timothy's state of mind.

  When he had finished, Moorehouse remained for a long moment staring at him with an inscrutable expression on his face. Then he arose quietly, walked to the window, and stared out, as if he needed an even longer moment to think over what he had been told.

  When he returned to the desk and resumed his seat the inscrutable expression had vanished. It had been replaced by a look of restrained reassurance.

  "Let me ask you something," he said. "Just what kind of a boy is your son? Oh, I know. You've described him, but not sufficiently. Is he ever in the least outgoing, despite his tendency to engage in daydreaming a great deal of the time?"

  "He can be," Crewson said. "With other kids at times. And I guess you could say he is with me. He talks back, gets aggressive, and disobeys. But most of the time he's obedient enough."

  "Children are always a little outgoing with their own parents," Moorehouse said. "I wasn't really thinking of that. Is he the kind of boy who had a lot of bottled-up emotions he'd like to display in an aggressive way, despite his introspective tendencies? But he doesn't, simply because daydreaming seems easier, and more emotionally satisfying to him except at rare intervals. But then, once in a while he lets go, really lets go. He blackens the eye of some kid he regards as a bully, and gives a damned good account of himself in other ways. Am I describing him accurately?"

  "Very," Crewson said.

  "Just how familiar are you with the Jungian hypothesis in general?" Moorehouse asked.

  "Not too familiar," Crewson replied. "It covers so wide a territory. But I've dipped into Jung now and then.

  "You refer to it as an hypothesis," he couldn't resist adding. "Are you implying you don't accept the whole of Jung?"

  "Naturally I don't," Moorehouse said. "If I did that I'd be a bum psychiatrist from the word 'go.' No mathematical physicist in his right mind would, or could, accept the whole of Einstein. It's the last thing Einstein would have wanted anyone to do."

  A very earnest, serious expression came into Moorehouse's eyes. "Only one aspect of the Jungian hypothesis in general concerns me now. I'll try to discuss it as briefly as I can. It's the very familiar one, the one that four people out of five—and that would take in the bartender at the cafe a block from here—would know what you were talking about if you mentioned it in casual conversation. I'm referring, of course, to man's collective unconscious, the repository of archetypal images which Jung was firmly convinced we all carry about with us in the depths of our minds."

  He paused for a moment, and though Crewson had more than an inkling of what Moorehouse was about to say he waited patiently for him to go on.

  Before doing so Moorehouse removed a cigarette from the package at his elbow, lit it, and took a few slow puffs.

  "Those archetypal images," he resumed, "are often frightful—enormous snakes, and tribal effigies with chalk-white faces, and legendary kings with scepters of fire who practiced cruelty night and day. All that we know. But Jung even suggested—since there is no way of knowing how far the collective unconscious goes back in time—that images from a reptile-stage or fish-stage period of evolution may form a part of man's buried ancestral heritage. And that would explain the frequent appearance as archetypes of fanged and flying lizards or even more hideous monsters from the sea."

  Moorehouse fell silent again, and Crewson found himself wondering, with some concern, if he had allowed the way he was staring at the psychiatrist to make him reluctant to say more.

  Very quickly he ceased to stare, looking beyond Moorehouse to the glimmering patch of sunlight on the opposite wall.

  "Just what are you trying to tell me?" he asked. "It would be very hard for me to believe—"

  "Yes, I know," Moorehouse interposed. "It would be hard for me to believe it too. But Jung once allowed himself to speculate—wait, put it this way. What if a very imaginative child—or an adult, for that matter—with the bottled-up aggressive drives we've discussed—became abnormally stimulated in some way by something he had read? I mean—you see—"

  "I'm afraid I don't see."

  "I'm sure you do. It's always a mistake to conceal from ourselves what we would prefer not to believe."

  "Aren't you doing that yourself, right now? You just said—"

  "I said it would be very hard for me to believe and that's true. There's no dishonesty in that. But we do know that visual images—even when they are not archetypal—can seem more real to us if we link them to something we've read. A book of mythology for instance, or—if you were a child in the Victorian age—the darkly frightening, even cruel world of fantasy conjured up by the Brothers Grimm."

  "Are you trying to make me believe that an archetypal image in Timothy's mind took on form and substance, and—"

  Moorehouse raised a protesting hand. "I'm not asking you to believe anything. It's Timothy you're most concerned about and so am I. You came here to consult me for no other reason. We've got to help Timothy, because when a sensitive, imaginative child with many fine qualities is in trouble—well, there's no greater tragedy."

  "For God's sake," Crewson heard himself saying. "What do you suggest? What would you have me do?"

  "Just listen carefully. Has Timothy ever spent the summer in a boy's camp, in everyday, relaxed contact with other kids his age? Has he ever gone in for bird watching and paddled around in a canoe, and played tennis, and baseball, and engaged in a half dozen other sports? Very strenuous ones, guaranteed to make him feel so tired at night he'll just drop down exhausted and sleep like a log until he's caught up in another day of activity?"

  "No, I'm afraid not," Crewson heard himself replying. "We never felt—it was partly his mother's fault. She couldn't bear the thought of not seeing him for six or eight weeks. And he never cared much for sports, aside from baseball."

  "There's a camp right here in East Windham," Moorehouse said. "An excellent one, which I can personally recommend. I have a nephew Timothy's age, and he has spent three summers with the Wheltons. It's in the deep woods, by Sharon Lake—not twenty minutes' drive from the center of town."

  "That means we could see him—"

  Dr. Moorehouse shook his head. "No—I wouldn't advise that. If you love your son you'll make him understand that when once he's deposited in the camp he's staying there until fall. That will not prevent you from writing to him—as often as you wish."

  Crewson got slowly to his feet and this time Moorehouse reached across the desk, and firmly clasped his hand. "When Timothy comes back," he said, "you may find that your worries are at an end."

  There was a telephone handset on Moorehouse's desk and Crewson tapped it with his forefinger. "May I—call my wife on this phone? I'd like to get thi
s settled as quickly as possible."

  "By all means," Moorehouse said. "I was just about to suggest it."

  A moment later Crewson was saying into the phone, "Anne, I want you to pack a few of Timothy's clothes—in that small, brown leather suitcase in the hall closet. Just an extra pair of trousers, sneakers, two or three flannel shirts—you know what you packed for him when he spent the weekend with your sister in Brookdale two summers ago. Everything he'll need for a few days away from home.

  "What's that? No, darling, I can't go into it now, but he'll be going on a short visit. Yes, yes, I've talked with Dr. Moorehouse and I'm phoning from his home. It's something he felt was most urgent."

  Anne's voice came so frantically over the line that he had to hold the receiver away from his ears for a moment. When the protests stopped he added: "Nothing to worry about, darling. Everything's fine. Timothy is going to be all right. I'll explain when I get back. I just want to be sure the suitcase is packed, and that Timothy will be ready to leave with me when I drive up in the car. Right away—that's most important."

  He hung up before Anne could protest further.

  "You handled that very well," Moorehouse said.

  Driving home on a road that skirted the sea for a mile or so at frequent intervals Crewson kept turning over in his mind everything that Moorehouse had said to him. It was hard for him to believe any part of it, and he very much doubted if Moorehouse took more than a tenth of it seriously.

  But in one-tenth of a far out surmise there might reside just enough truth to make its dismissal an act of folly. What did the Jungians advise when a problem of that nature presented itself?

  Dismiss nothing as absolutely unbelievable. Watch every step you take, tread cautiously. There may well be some kind of tenuous connection between the logically untenable, and the mysterious nature of ultimate reality.

  Perhaps nothing so gross as a visual image, archetypal or otherwise, could be thought of as capable of separating itself from the mind, at least in part, and acquiring destructive, physical attributes.