by Jack Finney
Then abruptly he stopped, laughed once, harshly, and said, "See you, Charley," and his friend laughed too, uncomfortably, and said, "Don't let 'em get you down, Bill." Then the footsteps resumed, in opposite directions. I never again had my shoes shined at Billy's stand, and I was careful never even to pass it, except once, when I forgot. Then I heard Billy's voice say, "Now, there's a shine, Commander," and I glanced up to see Billy's face alight with simple pleasure in the gleaming shoe he held in his hand. I looked at the heavy-set man in the chair, and saw his face, smiling patronizingly at Billy's bowed head. And I turned away and walked on, ashamed of him, of Billy, of myself, and of the whole human race.
"She's back in town," Becky's father had said, and Uncle Ira answered, "Yes, we know, and so is Miles." Now he said, "How's business, Miles? Kill many today?" – and for the first time in years I heard in another voice the shocking mockery I had heard in Uncle Billy's, and the short hairs of my neck actually stirred and prickled. "Bagged the limit," Uncle Ira went on, repeating my reply to him of a week before, ages before, out on the front lawn of his home, and his voice parodied mine with the pitiless sarcasm of one child taunting another
"Oh, Miles," Wilma said then in a simpering voice and the venom in it made me shiver – "I've been meaning to step in and see you about – what happened." Then she laughed falsely, in a hideous burlesque of embarrassment.
Tiny little Aunt Aleda tittered, and picked up Wilina's conversation with me. "I've been so embarrassed, Miles. I don't quite know what happened" – the nastiness in her tone was actually sickening – "or how to tell you, but… I've come to my senses again." Now the little old lady's voice deepened. "Don't bother to explain, Wilma" – she was imitating my tone and manner to perfection. "I don't want you to worry, or feel badly; just forget the whole thing."
Then they all laughed – soundlessly – their lips pulled back from their teeth, their eyes amused, mocking, and utterly cold; and I knew these weren't Wilma, Uncle Ira, Aunt Aleda, or Becky's father, knew they were not human beings at all, and I was very nearly sick. Becky sat flat on the floor of the porch, her back supported by the wall of the house, and her face was completely drained of blood, and her mouth hung open, and I knew she was only semi-conscious.
I pinched up a fold of skin on her forearm between my thumb and forefinger, then twisted it hard, at the same time clapping my other hand tight over her mouth, so that she couldn't cry out from the sudden pain. Watching her face closely, I saw a little rush of colour come into her cheeks, and with my knuckles I rapped her sharply on the forehead where the skin is thin, hurting her so the anger flashed in her eyes. Then I crossed my lips with a forefinger, put a hand on her elbow, and helped her to stand. We made no sound as we moved down off the porch in stocking feet, carrying our shoes. At the sidewalk, we put them on – I didn't stop to tie my laces – and walked ahead toward Washington Boulevard, and my house two blocks beyond it. All Becky said was, "Oh, Miles," in a sick, subdued sort of moan, and I just nodded, and we kept on, walking fast, putting distance between us and that corrupted old house.
We were halfway up my front steps before I noticed the figure on my porch swing; then his movement, as he started to rise, caught my eye, and I saw the brass buttons and blue uniform coat. "Hi, Miles, Becky," he said quietly; it was Nick Grivett, the local police chief, and he was smiling pleasantly.
"Hello, Nick." I made my voice casual and inquiring. "Anything wrong?"
"No" – he shook his head. "Not a thing." He stood there, across the porch, a middle-aged man smiling benignly. "Would like you to come down to the station, though – my office, that is – if you don't mind, Miles."
"Sure" – I nodded. "What's up, Nick?"
He moved a shoulder slightly. "Nothing much. Few questions is all."
But I wouldn't let it go. "About what?"
"Oh" – again he shrugged. "For one thing, that body you and Belicec say you found – just want to get the record straight on that."
"Okay." I turned to Becky. "Want to come?" I said, as though it weren't important. "Won't take long, will it, Nick?"
"No." His voice was casual. "Ten, fifteen minutes maybe."
"All right. Take my car?"
"Rather use mine, Miles, if you don't mind. I'll run you back when we're through." He nodded toward the side of the house. "I parked in your garage, next to your car, Miles; you left the doors open."
I nodded as though that were natural, but of course it wasn't. The natural, easy place to park was in the street, unless you were afraid the gold star on your car might scare away the people you were waiting for. I stepped politely back to the porch rail, motioning Nick to precede me, and yawned a little, bored and uninterested. Nick walked forward toward the stairs, a squat, heavily built, plump little man, his jaw no higher than my shoulder. In the instant he stepped before me, I brought up my fist as hard as I could, and hit him a terrible blow on the jaw. But it isn't as easy to knock out a man with a blow as you might think, unless you're trained and expert at it, and I wasn't.
Nick staggered sideways, and went down, to his knees. Then I had an arm around his neck, standing at his back, pulling his chin up in the crook of my elbow over my hip, and he had to stumble to his feet to ease the pressure on his throat. I saw his face, his head bent far back as I curved my hip into his back, and while you'd expect a man to be angry, his eyes were cold, hard, and as empty of emotion as a barracuda's. I pulled out his gun, rammed it into his back, and let him go, and he knew I'd use it, and stood still. Then I handcuffed his hands behind his back with his own cuffs, and took him into the house.
Becky touched my arm. "Miles, this is too much for us. They're after us, all of them, and they'll get us. Miles, we've got to leave; we've got to run."
I took her by both arms, just above the elbows, staring down into her face, and I nodded. "Yeah – I want you out of here, Becky. Out of this town, and a thousand miles away, and I want you to take my car right now. I'll run, too. But I'll be running and fighting at the same time, right here in Santa Mira. Don't worry about me; I'll be keeping out of their way; but I've got to stay here. I want you out of the way, though, and safe."
She stared back at me, bit her lip, then shook her head. "I don't want just safety, without you. What good is that?" I started to speak, but she said, "Don't argue, Miles; there just isn't time."
After a moment I said, "All right," pushed Grivett into a chair, then picked up the phone. I dialled Operator, then gave her Mannie Kaufman's number; it seemed to me now that we needed all the help we could get.
The phone rang at the other end of the line, the third ring was interrupted, I heard Mannie's voice say, "Hel – "; then the line went dead. A moment later the operator, in the telephone-company voice they use, said, "What number are you calling, please?" I told her, the ringing began again, and kept on, and this time there was no answer. I knew she'd simply plugged me into a ringing circuit, and that Mannie's phone wasn't ringing, and neither was anyone else's. The telephone exchange was in their hands, and probably had been for a long time.
I broke the connection, dialled Jack's number, and when he answered, I knew they'd let this call go through to listen in on whatever we said, and I spoke fast. "Jack, there's trouble; they tried to get us, and they'll try to get you. Better get out of there fast; we're leaving my house the minute I hang up."
"All right, Miles. Where you going?"
I had to stop and think how to say this to Jack. I wanted anyone else listening to think I was leaving town, that we all were. And I needed a way to say that to Jack so he'd know it wasn't true. He's a literary man, and I tried to think of some figure in literature whose name was a symbol for falsehood, but for the moment I couldn't. Then I remembered – a Biblical name: Ananias, the liar. "Well, Jack," I said, "there's a woman I know runs a small hotel a couple hours' drive from here: Mrs. Ananias. You recognize the name?"
"Yeah, Miles," Jack said, and I could tell he was smiling. "I know Mrs. Ananias, and her reputation for re
liability."
"Well, believe me, Jack, you can rely on this just as much. Becky and I are leaving town, right now, and to hell with it. We're going to Mrs. Ananias's place; you understand me, Jack? You know what we're going to do?"
"Perfectly," he said. "I understand you perfectly" – and I knew that he did, and that he knew we were leaving my house, but were not leaving town. "I think we'll do exactly the same thing," he said, "so why don't we all go together? Suggest a place to meet, Miles."
"Well," I said, "remember the man in your newspaper clipping? The teacher?" I knew Jack would know I meant Budlong, and while I was talking, I was leafing through the phone book, hunting up his address. "He's got something we have to have; it's the only next step I can think of. We'll stop by there, and I think maybe we'll arrive on foot. Meet us there with your car; drive past in exactly one hour."
"Fine," he said, and hung up, and I could only hope we'd fooled whoever was listening.
Out in the garage, I found Grivett's tiny handcuff key on his key chain. My gun in his side while he knelt on the floor of his car in back, I unlocked his cuffs just long enough to loop them around a metal floor post of the front seat. Then I snapped them on again, chaining him to the floor of his car, in the back where he couldn't reach the horn. I wrapped his pistol in his cap, and with the butt of the gun – not the end of the butt, but the side – hit him hard on the head. You read a lot about people being hit on the head and knocked out, but you don't read much about blood clots on the brain. In actual fact, though, it's a delicate matter, hitting a man on the head, and while this may not have been Nick Grivett, not any more, it still looked like him, and I could not smash in his skull. He slumped as I hit him, and lay motionless. With my thumb and forefinger, I grabbed a fold of loose skin at the back of his neck and wrenched it hard; he yelped, and I brought the gun down again, carefully but just a bit harder. Again he lay motionless, and I twisted his skin harder than ever, watching his face for even a flicker of pain, but this time he didn't stir.
We backed out of the garage in my car, I got out and closed the garage doors, then we backed into the street and swung north toward Corte Madera Avenue and the home of L. Bernard Budlong, the man who might have the answer we didn't. Time was running out, was working against us, and I knew it. At any moment a patrol car, or any other car on the street, might suddenly force us to the curb, and I had Nick Grivett's gun lying ready on the seat beside me. I wanted to run, I wanted to hide, and the last thing I wanted to do was to sit talking in the home of some college professor, but we had to; I didn't know what else to do next. But I was terribly conscious of the light green convertible we were riding in – Doc Bennell's car, as everyone in town knew – and I wondered if phones were being lifted in the houses we passed, and if the air at this moment wasn't filled with messages about us.
Chapter fourteen
A great deal of Marin County, California, is hilly, and Santa Mira is built on and among a series of hills, the streets winding through or curving over them. I knew all of them, every foot of every street and hill, and now I headed for a little dead-end street maybe three blocks from Budlong's address. It ended at a hill too steep for building, and overgrown with weeds, underbrush, and scrubby eucalyptus. We reached it, and parked beside a clump of small trees, more or less out of sight. Only two houses had a direct view of the car, and it was always possible that no one in them had seen us. We got out, and I left my ignition key in the car, the motor running. We were through with the car, and anyone finding it with the motor on might just possibly waste time waiting for us to come back. There was simply no way I could carry Nick's pistol without its showing, and after a moment I threw it into the weeds.
We climbed the hill then, along a path I'd followed more than once as a kid, hunting small game with a.22 rifle. On the path no one more than a dozen feet away could see us, and I knew how to follow this path and others, keeping just below the crest of this hill and the next, to reach Budlong's back yard.
Presently his house lay below us, at the base of the hill we stood on. I'd found a spot, a dozen yards off the path, where we got a clear view, through the trees and brush, of his house and the yard in back of it. Now we studied it: a two-storey house of brown-stained, wood-shingled siding, and a good-sized yard enclosed at the rear and one side by a high grape-stake fence, and by a tall row of shrubbery on the other side. "Outdoor living" is a big thing in California, and everyone who can has space for it on his property, private and sheltered from all eyes, and right now I was grateful for that. Nothing moved, no one was in sight, in the house and yard below, and so we came quietly down the hill, opened the high gate in the back fence, then crossed the yard, and walked around the side of the house, unseen, I felt certain, by anyone.
The house had a side entrance, I knocked, and as we stood waiting it occurred to me for the first time that Budlong might very well not be home, that quite likely he wasn't. He was, though; eight or ten seconds later, a man – in his middle or late thirties, I thought – appeared at the door, looked at us through the glass, then unbolted and opened it. He looked at me questioningly, wondering, I imagined, why we'd used the side door. "We got confused," I said, with a polite little laugh. "Guess we used the wrong door. Professor Budlong?"
"Yes," he said, and smiled pleasantly. He wore steel-rimmed glasses, had brownish, slightly wavy hair, and the kind of intelligent, interested, young-looking face that teachers so often seem to have.
"I'm Miles Bennell, Doctor Bennell, and – "
"Oh, yes." He nodded, smiling. "I've seen you around town, and – "
"I've seen you, too," I said. "I knew you were with the College, but didn't know your name. This is Miss Becky Driscoll."
"How do you do." He opened the door wider, and stood to one side. "Come in, won't you?"
He led us in, then took us along a hall to a sort of study. He had an old-fashioned roll-top desk in there, some books in a hanging wall shelf, framed diplomas and photographs on the wall, a rug on the floor, and a battered old couch along one wall. It was a small room, with only one window, and rather dark. But the desk lamp was on, and the room had a sheltered, pleasant feeling; I imagined he spent a lot of time in it, working. Becky and I sat down on the couch, Budlong took the swivel desk chair, and swung part way around to face us. Again he smiled, a kind of friendly boyish smile. "What can I do for you?"
I told him. For reasons too long and complicated to explain, I said, we were very interested in anything he could tell us about a newspaper story in which he'd been quoted, though we hadn't seen the story, but only a reference to it in the Tribune.
He was grinning by the time I was finished, shaking his head in a sort of rueful amusement at himself. "That thing," he said. "I guess I'll never hear the end of it. Well" – he leaned back, slouching down to rest his neck on the back of his chair – "it was my own fault, so I shouldn't complain. What do you want to know, what the story said?"
"Yes," I answered. "And anything else you can add."
"Well," – he shrugged a shoulder – "the story said some things it shouldn't have." He smiled again, at himself. "Newspaper reporters," he said ruefully. "I guess I've lived a sheltered life; I never met one before. This one, this young man, Beekey – he's an intelligent boy – phoned me one morning. I was professor of botany and biology, was I not? I said yes, and he asked if I'd drive out to the Parnell farm; he told me where it was, and it wasn't far from here. There was something I ought to see, he said, and he described what it was in just enough detail to arouse my curiosity."
Professor Budlong brought his hands together over his chest, the finger tips of one hand touching the tips of the other, and it occurred to me that professors must get so they unconsciously act the way people think professors ought to act; and I wondered if doctors did, too.
"So I drove out to the farm, and on a trash pile next to the barn, Parnell showed me some large hulls, or pods of some sort, apparently vegetable in origin. Beekey asked me what they were, and I told h
im the truth, that I didn't know. Well" – Budlong smiled – "he raised his brows at that, as though he was surprised, and since I have my professional pride, it stung me into saying that no botanist alive could identify absolutely anything shown to him. 'Botanist', young Beekey repeated. Did that mean I thought they were some sort of plant life? And I said yes, I thought they probably were." Budlong shook his head admiringly. "Oh, they're clever, these reporters; they have you making some sort of comment before you quite realize it. Cigarette?" He took a pack from the breast pocket of his coat, and offered Becky one, then me, and we each took one. So did he, and I held a match for us all.
"The things he showed me" – Professor Budlong exhaled cigarette smoke – "simply looked to me like very large seed pods, as they'd have looked to anyone, I'm sure. The farmer, Mr. Parnell, told me they'd come drifting down from the sky, which I didn't doubt – where else would they come from? – though Parnell seemed amazed. They didn't seem at all remarkable to me, except possibly for their size. Some sort of seed pod was all I could say, though I admitted that the substance they were filled with did not resemble what we ordinarily think of as seeds. Beekey tried to interest me in the fact that several objects in the trash pile on which the pods had fallen seemed very much alike, attributing this fact to the pods. He pointed out two empty Del Monte peach cans, I remember, which looked identical. There was a broken axe handle, and another similar one beside it. But I couldn't, myself, see anything very startling about that. Then he tried another tack; he wanted a story, you see, a sensational one, if possible, and was determined to get it."
