by Farris, John
He faced the Bellavers as they sat side by side on a sofa.
"All you know of Skipper, or Robin, is what Gillian has told you. Neither of you has seen a manifestation."
Avery shook his head. Katharine shuddered.
"Seen—? No."
Roth smiled indulgently. "What is it, Mrs. Bellaver?"'
She lowered her eyes.
"The night Gillian came home from the hospital she showed me a—puppet. Her Skipper puppet. It had red hair. It was a lascivious, grinning thing with a—a man-sized cock. Gillian claimed she'd always had Skipper. But I never saw it before."
"Where is the puppet now?"
"Wouldn't I like to know? It disappeared. An hour, two hours later, I went back to the marionette theatre. Not there. In its place was a mangled cat."
"A mangled cat," Roth echoed.
"Yes. No, not exactly what the word implies. But dead. Distorted. A cat shape. It had Sulky Sue's coloring, although it was difficult to tell—I had Patrick get rid of it."
She stared at Roth with pinpoint eyes.
"I'm not making this up," she said huskily. "Patrick saw it too."
"The cat," Roth said with a fixed marveling smile.
"Yes, the cat!"
"Then there most certainly was a cat," Roth conceded. "A hit-and-run victim, perhaps?"
"That's—just what I told myself. But—the puppet—"
"I think Gillian made you believe in Skipper for a little while. She believes, most passionately."
Avery said, "There is no Skipper? No Robin?"
Roth shook his head. "No, sir. As a child Gillian invented him to fill a need; obviously he took the place of the twin who died shortly before birth. Now faced with a crisis, she's reinvented him, or perhaps a more adult version equipped with telemagical powers, to help her out. Nevertheless Robin S—Robin is a fantasy."
"Dr. Roth, I can't believe my daughter is mad."
"Of course she isn't! But the psychometric power she possesses is frighteningly real, and dangerous. Are you familiar with the short story about the man who went on a time-travel expedition, and changed the fate of the world by inadvertently stepping on a butterfly in some prehistoric epoch? When he returned to his own time he found that, because of his carelessness, it was now a grotesque, savagely distorted world with nothing beautiful in it any more. Gillian, as she flashes back and forth in time, is like our man who crushed the butterfly: Her very thoughts can significantly affect reality as we know it. She urgently needs professional help to cope with her power."
"Can you help her?" Katharine demanded.
"Yes. Try not to worry, Mrs. Bellaver."
Roth polished off the mug of Ind Coope. He felt persuasive and confident; things were going much better than he'd hoped. He had not missed the relief in their faces when he abruptly dismissed Robin as delusional. Words could be magic too, and his magic was potent tonight.
"I think it would be a very good idea," he said, "if we sent for Gillian now."
At mid-concert, between Brahms's Tragic Overture and the excerpts from Elgar's Dream of Gerontius, Gillian had felt unwell and needed to go to the lounge in a hurry. Larue, worried that she might faint, accompanied her, but Gillian took a tablet and her spell of nausea soon passed. Crowds, a little too much excitement. They strolled the lobby through Gerontius and except for a minor headache Gillian felt okay.
Larue suggested they skip the Marosszek Dances and go back to her place.
Gillian wanted to walk, and she argued that the cold air would pick her right up. It was about a half mile from Lincoln Center to Larue's building on Central Park South; Larue tried to discourage her. Gillian worked out a compromise: she would ask Seamus, the chauffeur they'd borrowed for the evening from her cousin Wade, to follow them in the copper-colored Rolls. But she was determined to start exercising, she hated having to stop midway on a longish flight of stairs to catch her breath.
"Do you think the show will make it?" Gillian asked during the course of their walk. She was referring to the musical Larue's father was trying to whip into shape in Boston.
"Just might."
"Either way he's out of a job, once it opens in New York."
"I know."
"Then where will you go?"
Larue sighed. "London, I think. A movie. My mother might be in it. We'd all be together for a while, that wouldn't be so bad."
"I'll miss you if you go."
"I'll miss you too. You could come visit. Do we have to talk about sad things?"
The bedroom Larue occupied in the duplex apartment overlooked Central Park from the twentieth floor. The moon was bright, and, as Gillian took off her clothes, she could see the white rectangle of skating-rink ice glistening through leafless trees.
Larue was downstairs making hot chocolate and warming cinnamon doughnuts. Gillian brushed her teeth and put on her nightgown and gave her hair a few licks. Then she took a turn around the room, which was grandly furnished in Louis XIV, a style Larue hated. Everything in the apartment was rented, including the bath towels and the cutlery. Lame had brought only clothes and a few personal things with her.
On one wall there was a blown-up photo of her late half brother Michael. He was wearing a USC athletic jersey. He had the long bones and greyhound look of a basketball player. His hands were on his hips and his head was thrown back as he laughed about something.
Larue came up and saw Gillian looking at the photo. She put down the tray she was carrying, went silently into her dressing room and came back fastening her own gown between her breasts.
"From the time I was old enough to follow him around I wanted to marry him," Larue said.
Gillian looked compassionately at her.
Larue's face squeezed up; she tensed all over. The spasm passed in a few seconds.
"Sometimes I think my heart's going to stop beating," Larue said matter-of-factly. "One of these days I'll think about how beautiful he was and how much I loved him, and my heart will stop and I'll die too." She sat down and poured chocolate for them, taking great care not to spill any.
Gillian sat near her on a chaise and nibbled a doughnut.
"Anything good on TV?"
"Junk," Gillian said.
The French telephone rang and Larue answered. Her mother, calling from Yugoslavia. The connection was poor. The conversation went on for a long time. Larue didn't say much, but when she spoke she was obliged to use a great deal of volume. For the most part she sat slumped with her eyes closed, the receiver of the phone on one shoulder. Her fingers stealthily pressed and smoothed her forearms, as if she were afraid her skin might be crawling.
When she hung up Larue said, "They're six weeks over, with another two weeks to go, and she has to report for another flick in Spain in ten days. My mother goes from one picture to another. She's tired and lonely and probably balling somebody she doesn't like very much. Basically my mother is a very good person, and she has an old-fashioned sense of sin. Nothing is discardable when it comes to human integrity, that sort of thing. I heard an actor say that in show business emotions are used as hard currency. Well, my mother spends too much. Most of us are like her, don't you think? On the other hand, my father is—too costly. He doesn't make friends, he creates dependents. Gets the job done, I suppose. Once in a great while someone like Mike happens. Totally giving. No prejudice, no fear." Larue looked at her brother's laughing face. "He paid for all the giving, though, all the demands. Do you read Frost? Frost said, 'Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.' Mike took everybody in. That was part of his karma."
"What was the other part?"
"For the grace to go on living he had to accomplish beautiful, difficult, dangerous things." She held her hands out, brought the spread swooping left hand slowly against the clenched right fist.
"Oh, Larue," Gillian said softly, sorry that the mother had called to further upset her.
Larue's hand flew gracefully once more; she watched it with a brooding eye.
"Isabella knew he was going to die. She tried to prepare me."
"Who's Isabella?"
"A witchy friend in Malibu. Just darling. Her entire family is witchy, going back to the seventeenth century."
"God, I never heard of such a thing!"
"Where've you been, Gil? Well, I suppose New York isn't a very big witching ground."
"You believe in witchcraft?"
"You don't understand. Along with dope it's the number one fact of life out there. If you're a girl and good-looking they come up to you on the street or the beaches, for God's sake, warlocks looking for recruits. The covens will fuck you over fast if you don't know how to protect yourself. Oh, it's creepy in southern Cal. Last year I met this guy at the Renaissance Faire. He had a thing going for me right away, but I was with friends, I wouldn't split with him. For a week after that I had big trouble. Nightmares every night. I felt drawn to a certain occult shop I passed on the way to school. When I refused to go in I suffered terrible headaches. Isabella said I was under psychic attack. But she broke the spell."
"How?"
"I don't know; it's white magic, folk magic. She's under oath not to talk about it."
Gillian brushed doughnut crumbs from her lap into a napkin. She got up and went slowly to the windows and stared out for so long Larue became restless.
"Are you sick again?"
"No. Thinking."
"I guess you find it a little hard to believe. About the psychic attack. Those things go on all the time. Gil, I thought we had the sort of relationship where we could tell everything that was on our minds. Everything, no matter what."
Gillian turned and looked intently at her friend.
"We do."
"Because I've always been straight with you."
Gillian smiled and nodded. She looked again at the photo of Larue's beloved Michael. Then, still smiling, she stretched out on the canopied bed.
"Larue?"
Larue came and lay down near her, chin in hands, eyes inquisitive.
"I'd like to tell you about Robin," Gillian said.
The telling took considerable time. Larue was fascinated, as Gillian had thought she might be. Larue asked sensible questions about all the aspects of the relationship that puzzled or intrigued her. At one point she sat up and, closing her eyes, stretched out her hand, trying to imagine the astral world just beyond her fingertips.
"What's happening there?" she said.
"Everything that's happening here, and more. It's a busy place."
"What do you look like? When you're there."
"Just the same. But I could look different if I wanted to; or if I were condemned to."
"How do you mean, condemned?"
"Evil doesn't stop with this world; it goes on. But where it exists in the astral, it exists visibly. You just can't hide your thoughts or emotions in the astral."
"And that's the first place we go? When we die?"
"Always."
Larue said excitedly, "Would Mike be there?"
"Well—he might be. But he was so young when he died. If he has a cycle to finish, part of the eighty-four-year cycle, then he'll be coming back soon."
"At times I've felt like he was still really close to me. Keeping an eye on me."
Larue suddenly put her arms around Gillian and hugged her tightly.
Gillian went rigid with distress; then she struggled.
"Larue, don't."
"Don't be afraid—if anybody's going to be afraid it should be me. I had terrible nosebleeds when I was a little kid. I used to get so nauseated and dizzy I'd faint. I can't stand the sight of blood! But nothing's going to happen. You've got to get over this, Gil, being scared to touch or be touched."
They wrestled strenuously for a few moments, but Gillian had little stamina and Larue won easily. She laid her head on Gillian's damp breast and listened to the alarmed heartbeat.
"I'm all right," she said soothingly. "I'm all right. Nothing's going to happen. Don't be upset, Gil."
After a while Gillian relaxed and tenderly touched the back of Larue's head. They breathed together, ruddy and warm.
"You're crazy," Gil said. "I really love you. I've never had a friend like you. Now get up, you're breaking my ribs."
Both girls sat up, smiling without pretense, secure in their poignant admiration for each other. Gillian leaned forward and with her tongue licked away a few crumbs of cinnamon arid sugar from the side of Larue's mouth.
"Do you suppose you could get in touch with him?" Larue asked.
"You mean Mike? Oh, no, I don't think so. It would be like trying to find you down there in the subway. If I didn't know just where to look I could ride the trains forever and not see you."
"But what if he's close to me right now, just on the other side, like a few feet away?"
"I don't know," Gillian said doubtfully.
"If you could only talk to Mike for a little while. Find out how he is."
"Don't cry, Larue."
"I would never ask another f-favor of you as long as I live."
"I guess it isn't such a big thing to ask. I just don't know how lucky we'll be."
Gillian walked around and around and stopped in front of Michael's photograph.
There was a flare on the glass, and she couldn't see him well. She lifted the frame down from the wall. The flare persisted, but she was infected by his sense of fun, by the horseplay that had him laughing. Gillian laughed too until the reflected light, or, more accurately, the light that seemed to shine from the center of his body, hurt her eyes.
Blinking, tearing, she shook her head sharply.
"Gillian?"
"Awfully bright in here," Gillian complained, holding the frame with one hand, rubbing her wet eyes with the other. Then she broke up again because it was just too funny, the pillow fight on the long pole that no one seemed to win. If you smote your opponent too lustily then you couldn't keep your seat, and if you didn't keep your seat there was the guckiest mud bath she'd ever seen a few feet beneath the pole. . . .
"It's the overhead light," Larue said. She switched it off but the light in the glass continued to shine forth powerfully, like the sun, striking Gillian full in the eyes.
Speechless, transfixed, Gillian began to whirl around, holding the frame at arms' length.
"What's happening?" Larue asked in a shrill voice.
"Look out, look out," Gillian said, blinded, her feet going frantically faster, her mouth falling open from the strain. Suddenly the outstretched frame shattered against a bed post. Shards of glass flew.
Gillian stopped, teetered, and fell backwards onto the soft carpet. As if from the bottom of a well she stared at a wafer of blue sky, the no-longer-painful orb of the distant sun. She heard and felt the wind, it flowed coolingly over her flushed face as she was gently lifted and floated free, no longer burdened by the twenty-five pounds of dacron sail above her, no longer earthbound. . .
Am I in the right place? she thought, as she looked down at her skimming shadow on the rocky slope of the mountain. A little gust of wind shook her; the tubular frame of the glider trembled uneasily. She moved the control bar to the left and shifted her horizontal weight to the right, banked effortlessly. Then, below, she saw the others waiting for her in the high alpine meadow. As she floated gradually down to the landing place, throat clogged from the exhilaration of her longest flight yet, she dropped her feet and pushed out on the control bar, raising the nose of the sky sail.
Her forward motion stopped just as she touched down, landing into the wind as she'd been taught. Perfect. No awkward nose dive this time. A couple of the other kids ran up to help her get out of the harness. She had flown fifteen hundred feet in half a minute. She was sputtering with wonder and delight.
Taking off her helmet, she turned to look at Mike way up there on the peak, just beginning his run to lift-off. An unexpected gust of wind snarled her hair, riffled the sleeve of her nylon jacket. It was much stronger than the gust which had momentarily caused
her trouble not long after she became airborne.
If the tricky cross winds continued they would have to call it quits for the day, and she badly wanted to fly one more time . . . but Mike was aloft now, soaring higher than she had dared go, his yellow sail almost transparent against the burning blue. Little salutory winks of sun from the brightwork of his harness, the visor of his helmet: he was as beautiful as the stars of God.
She cheered and waved her arms, but then Mike seemed tempted by his power, he went so high it looked as if he would never come down; she was afraid that in a final demonstration of his freedom he would choose to soar above the peaks themselves and disappear over the great rim of the earth.
Two minutes, three minutes. Then, reluctantly, Mike drifted down toward the meadow.
It was as if he'd run into a wall up there.
He stopped, crazily, and for a few disastrous moments his legs thrashed as the delta sail, caught by wind-shear, ripped and puffed like a yellow burst of smoke from a cannon. Mike tried to regain control of the damaged kite but it turned, sadly crippled, toward the cliff rising steeply at one end of the meadow. He spun like a scrap of paper in the air, then was taken helplessly by another bad gust which pushed him farther down—and faster—and oh, suddenly much too fast, plummeting then with only pennants of sail left streaming above him: down he went five hundred feet or more, striking the naked rock a blow that put out the sun, put out her eyes, left her writhing in thick meadow grass, breathless in the ringing dark—
Sickened by disaster, Gillian struggled up from the comforter which Larue had thrown over her as she lay on the floor, lay—how long? She didn't know. Her only point of orientation in the darkened bedroom was the night light of the ringing phone.
