Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Lessing shook his head. “I don’t think she knew.” (She had walked through all those enchanted days, gravely and aloofly, a perfectly normal girl except for—What had happened? He could not quite remember yet, but that which did happen had not been normal. Something shocking, something terrible, buried deep down under the commonplaces. Something glorious, glimmering far beneath the surface.)

  “Try the aunt again,” said Dyke.

  Lessing shut his eyes. That faceless, bodiless, voiceless woman who maneuvered through his memories so deftly that he began to despair of ever catching her full-face . . .

  “Go back, then,” Dyke told him. “Back to the very beginning. When did you first realize that something out of the ordinary was happening?”

  Lessing’s mind fumbled backward through those unnaturally empty spaces of the past.

  He had not even been aware, at the outset, of the one strangeness—he could remember now—that wonderful clarifying of the world in Clarissa’s presence. It had to come slowly, through many meetings, a if by a sort of induced magnetism he became sensitized to her an aware as she was aware. He had known only that it was delight simply to breathe the same air she, and walk the same streets.

  The same streets? Yes, so: thing curious had happened on street somewhere. Street noise-loud voices shouting—An accident. The collision just outside the Central Park entrance at Seventy-second Street. It was coming back clearly now, and with a swelling awareness of terror. They had been strolling up by the winding walk under the trellises toward the street. And as they neared it, the scream of brakes and the hollow, reverberant crash of metal against metal, and then voices rising.

  Lessing had been holding Clarissa’s hand. At the sudden noise he felt a tremor quiver along her arm, and then very softly, and with a curiously shocking deftness, her hand slipped out of his. Their fingers had been interlocked, and his did not relax, but somehow her hand was smoothly withdrawn. He turned to look.

  His mind shrank from the memory. But he knew it had happened. He knew he had seen the circle of shaken air ring her luminously about, like a circle in water from a dropped stone. It was very like the spreading rings in water, except that these rings did not expand, but contracted. And as they contracted, Clarissa moved farther away. She was drawn down a rapidly diminishing tunnel of shining circles, with the park distorted in focus beyond them. And she was not looking at Lessing or at anything around him. Her eyes were downcast and that look of thoughtful quiet on her face shut out the world.

  He stood perfectly still, too stunned even for surprise.

  The luminous, concentric rings drew together in a dazzle, and when he looked again she was not there. People were running up the slope toward the street now, and the voices beyond the wall had risen to a babble. No one had been near enough to see—or perhaps only Lessing himself could have seen an aberration of his own mind. Perhaps he was suddenly mad. Panic was rising wildly in him, but it had not broken the surface yet. There hadn’t been time.

  And before the full, stunning realization could burst over him, he saw Clarissa again. She was coming leisurely up the hill around a clump of bushes. She was not looking at him. He stood quite still in the middle of the path, his heart thudding so hard that the whole park shook around him. Not until she reached his side did she look up, smiling, and take his hand again.

  And that was the first thing that happened.

  “I couldn’t talk to her about it,” Lessing told Dyke miserably. “I knew I couldn’t from the first look at her face I got. Because she didn’t know. To her it hadn’t happened. And then I thought I’d imagined it, of course—but I knew I couldn’t have imagined such a thing unless there was something too wrong with me to talk about. Later, I began to figure out a theory.” He laughed nervously. “Anything, you know, to keep from admitting that I might have . . . well, had hallucinations.”

  “Go on,” Dyke said again. He was leaning forward across the desk, his eyes piercing upon Lessing’s. “Then what? It happened again?”

  “Not that, no.”

  Not that? How did he know? He could not quite remember yet. The memories came in flashes, each complete even to its interlocking foreshadow of events to come, but the events themselves still lay hidden.

  Had those shining rings been sheer hallucination? He would have believed so, he was sure, if nothing further had happened. As the impossible recedes into distance we convince ourselves, because we must, that it never really could have been. But Lessing was not allowed to forget . . .

  The memories were unraveling now, tumbling one after another through his mind. He had caught the thread. He relaxed in his chair, his face smoothing out from its scowl of deep concentration. Deep beneath the surface that discovery lay whose astonishing gleam shone up through the murk of forgetfulness, tantalizing, still eluding him, but there to be grasped when he reached it. If he wanted to grasp it. If he dared. He hurried on, not ready yet to think of that.

  What had the next thing been?

  The park again. Curious how memory-haunted the parks of New York were for him now. This time there had been rain, and something—alarming—had happened. What was it? He did not know. He had to grope back step by step toward a climax of impossibility that his mind shied away from touching.

  Rain. A sudden thunderstorm that caught them at the edge of the lake. Cold wind ruffling the water, raindrops spattering down big and noisy around them. And himself saying, “Hurry, we can make it back to the summerhouse.”

  They ran hand in hand along the shore, laughing, Clarissa clutching her big hat and matching her steps to his, long, easy, running strides so that they moved as smoothly as dancers over the grass.

  The summerhouse was dingy from many winters upon the rocks. It stood in a little niche in the black stone of the hillside overlooking the lake, a dusty gray refuge from the spattering drops as they ran laughing up the slope of the rock.

  But it never sheltered them. The summerhouse did not wait.

  Looking incredulously up the black hills, Lessing saw it glimmer and go in a luminous blurring-out, like a picture on a trick film that faded as he watched.

  “Not the way Clarissa disappeared,” he told Dyke carefully. “That happened quite clearly, in concentric diminishing rings. This time the thing just blurred and melted. One minute it was there, the next—” He made an expunging gesture in the air.

  Dyke had not moved. His clear, piercing gaze dwelt unwavering upon Lessing.

  “What did Clarissa say this time?”

  Lessing rubbed his chin, frowning. “She saw it happen. I . . . I think she just said something like, ‘Well, we’re in for it now. Never mind, I like walking in the rain, don’t you?’ As if she were used to things like that. Of course, maybe she was—It didn’t surprise her.”

  “And you didn’t comment this time either?”

  “I couldn’t. Not when she took it so calmly. It was a relief to know that she’d seen it too. That meant I hadn’t just imagined the thing. Not this time, anyhow. But by now—”

  Suddenly Lessing paused. Up to this moment he had been too absorbed in the recapture of elusive memory to look objectively at what he was remembering. Now the incredible reality of what he had just been saying struck him without warning and he stared at Dyke with real terror in his eyes. How could there be any explanation for these imaginings, except actual madness? All this could not possibly have happened in the lost months which his conscious mind had remembered so clearly. It was incredible enough that he could have forgotten, but as for what he had forgotten, as for the unbelievable theory he had been about to explain to Dyke, and quite matter-of-factly, drawn from hypotheses of sheer miracle—

  “Go on,” Dyke said quietly. “By now—what?”

  Lessing took a long, unsteady breath.

  “By now . . . I think . . . I began to discard the idea I was having hallucinations.” He paused again, unable to continue with such obvious impossibilities.

  Dyke urged him gently. “Go on, Lessing. You
’ve got to go on until we can get hold of something to Work from. There must be an explanation somewhere. Keep digging. Why did you decide you weren’t subject to hallucinations?”

  “Because . . . well, I suppose it seemed too easy an explanation,” Lessing said doggedly. It was ridiculous to argue so solidly from a basis of insanity, but he searched through his mind again and came out with an answer of very tenuous logic. “Somehow madness seemed the wrong answer,” he said. “As I remember now, I think I felt there was a reason behind what had happened. Clarissa didn’t know, but I’d begun to see.”

  “A reason? What?”

  He frowned with concentration. In spite of himself the fascination of the still unknown was renewing its spell and he groped through the murk of amnesia for the answer he had grasped once, years ago, and let slip again.

  “It was so natural to her that she didn’t even notice. A nuisance, but something to accept with philosophy. You were meant to get wet if you got caught in the rain away from shelter, and if the shelter were miraculously removed—well, that only emphasized the fact that you were meant to get a soaking. Meant to, you see.” He paused, not at all sure just where this thread was leading, but his memory, dredging among the flotsam, had come up with that one phrase that all but dripped with significance when he saw it in full light. Revelations hovered just beyond the next thought.

  “She did get wet,” he went on slowly. “I remember now. She went home dripping, and caught cold, and had a high fever for several days—”

  His mind moved swiftly along the chain of thoughts, drawing incredible conclusions. Was something, somehow, ruling Clarissa’s life with a hand so powerful it could violate every law of nature to keep her in the path its whim selected? Had something snatched her away through a tiny section of time and space to keep the street accident from her? But she had been meant to have that drenching and that fever, so—let the summerhouse be erased. Let it never have been. Let it vanish as naturally as the rain came down, so that Clarissa might have her fever . . .

  Lessing shut his eyes again and ground his palms hard over them. Did he want to remember much farther? What morasses of implausibility was his memory leading him into? Vanishing summerhouses and vanishing girls and . . . and . . . intervention from—outside? He took one horrified mental glance at that thought and then covered it up quickly and went on. Deep down in the murk the gleam of that amazing discovery still drew him on, but he went more slowly now, not at all certain that he wanted to plumb the depths and see it clearly.

  Dyke’s voice broke in as his mind began to let go and fall slack.

  “She had a fever? Go on, what came next?”

  “I didn’t see her for a couple of weeks. And the . . . the colors began to go out of everything—”

  It had to be renewed, then, by her presence, that strange glamour that heightened every color, sharpened every outline, made every sound musical when they were together. He began to crave the stimulus as he felt it fade. Looking back now, he remembered the intolerable dullness of that period. It was then, probably, that he first began to realize he had fallen in love.

  And Clarissa, in the interval, had discovered it too. Yes, he was remembering. He had seen it shining in her enormous black eyes on the first day he visited her again. A brilliance almost too strong to look upon, as if bright stars were interlacing their rays there until her eyes were a blaze of blackness more dazzling than any light.

  He had seen her, alone, in that first meeting after her illness. Where had the aunt been? Not there, at any rate. The strange, windowless apartment was empty except for themselves. Windowless? He looked back curiously. It was true—there had been no windows. But there were many mirrors. And the carpets were very deep and dark. That was his dominant impression of the place, walking upon softness and silence, with the glimmer of reflecting distances all around.

  He had sat beside Clarissa, holding her hand, talking in a low voice. Her smile had been tremulous, and her eyes so bright they were almost frightening. They were very happy that afternoon. He glowed a little, even now, remembering how happy they had been. He would not remember, just yet, that nothing was to come of it but grief.

  The wonderful clarity of perception came back around him by degrees as they sat there talking, so that everything in the world had seemed gloriously right. The room was the center of a perfect universe, beautiful and ordered, and the spheres sang together as they turned around it.

  “I was closer to Clarissa then,” he thought to himself, “than I ever came again. That was Clarissa’s world, beautiful and peaceful, and very bright. You could almost hear the music of the machinery, singing in its perfection as it worked. Life was always like that to her. No, I never came so close again.”

  Machinery—Why did that image occur to him?

  There was only one thing wrong with the apartment. He kept thinking that eyes were upon him, watching all he thought and did. It was probably only the mirrors, but it made him uncomfortable. He asked Clarissa why there were so many. She laughed.

  “All the better to see you in, my darling.” But then she paused as if some thought had come to her unexpectedly, and glanced around the reflecting walls at her own face seen from so many angles, looking puzzled. Lessing was used by then to seeing reactions upon her face that had no real origin in the normal cause-and-effect sequence of familiar life, and he did not pursue the matter. She was a strange creature, Clarissa, in so many, many ways. Two and two, he thought with sudden affectionate amusement, seldom made less than six to her, and she fell so often into such disproportionately deep and thoughtful silences over the most trivial things. He had learned early in their acquaintance how futile it was to question her about them.

  “By now,” he said, almost to himself, “I wasn’t questioning anything. I didn’t dare. I lived on the fringes of a world that wasn’t quite normal, but it was Clarissa’s world and I didn’t ask questions.”

  Clarissa’s serene, bright, immeasurably orderly little universe. So orderly that the stars in their courses might be forced out of pattern, if need be, to maintain her in her serenity. The smooth machinery singing in its motion as it violated possibility to spare her a street accident, or annihilating matter that she might have her drenching and her fever . . .

  The fever served a purpose. Nothing happened to Clarissa, he was fairly sure now, except things with a purpose. Chance had no place in that little world that circled her in. The fever brought delirium, and in the delirium with its strange, abnormal clarity of vision—suppose she had glimpsed the truth? Or was there a truth? He could not guess. But her eyes were unnaturally bright now, as if the brilliance of fever had lingered or as if . . . as if she were looking ahead into a future so incredibly shining that its reflections glittered constantly in her eyes, with a blackness brighter than light.

  He was sure by now that she did not suspect life was at all different for her, that everyone did not watch miracles happen or walk in the same glory clarissima. (And once or twice the world reversed itself and he wondered wildly if she could be right and he wrong, if everyone did but himself.)

  They moved in a particular little glory of their own during those days. She did love him; he had no doubt of it. But her subtle exaltation went beyond that. Something wonderful was to come, her manner constantly implied, but the most curious thing was that he thought she herself did not know what. He was reminded of a child wakening on Christmas morning and lying there in a delicious state of drowsiness, remembering only that something wonderful waits him when he comes fully awake.

  “She never spoke of it?” Dyke asked.

  Lessing shook his head. “It was all just beneath the surface. And if I tried to ask questions they . . . they seemed to slide right off. She wasn’t consciously evading me. It was more as if she hadn’t quite understood—” He paused. “And then things went wrong,” he said slowly. “Something—”

  It was hard to recapture this part. The bad memories were submerged perhaps a little deeper than the goo
d ones, shut off behind additional layers of mental scar tissue. What had happened? He knew Clarissa loved him; they talked of marriage plans. The pattern of happiness had surely been set out clearly for them to follow.

  “The aunt,” he said doubtfully. “I think she must have interfered. I think . . . Clarissa seemed to slip out of my hands. She’d be busy when I phoned, or the aunt would say she was out. I was fairly sure she was lying, but what could I do?”

  When she did see him, Clarissa had denied her neglect, reassuring him with shining glances and delicate, grave caresses. But she was so preoccupied. She did so little, really, and yet she seemed always absorbingly busy.

  “If she was only watching a sparrow pick up crumbs,” he told Dyke, “or two men arguing on the street, she gave all her attention to them and had none left over for me. So after awhile—I think about a week had gone by without my even seeing her—I decided to have it out with the aunt.”

  There were gaps—He remembered clearly only standing in the white hallway outside the apartment door and knocking. He remembered the door creaking softly open a little way. Only a little way. The chain had been on it, and it hung open only that narrow width, the chain glinting slightly from light within. It had been dim inside, light reflecting from wall to wall in the many mirrors, but from no source he could see. He could see, though, that someone was moving about inside, a figure distorted by the mirrors, multiplied by them, flickering quietly as it went about its own enigmatic business within, paying no attention to his ring at the door.

  “Hello,” he called. “Is that you, Clarissa?”

  No answer. Nothing but the silent motion inside, visible now and then in the reflecting walls. He had called the aunt by name, then.

  “Is it you, Mrs.—” What name? He had no idea, now. But he had called her again and again, getting angrier as the motion flickered on heedlessly. “I can see you,” he remembered saying, his face against the jamb. “I know you can hear me. Why don’t you answer?”