While Emily, alone and afraid on the bridge that led to—elsewhere . . .
* * * * *
The uncles were playing poker. Aunt Gertrude, the vaudeville actress, had unexpectedly arrived for a few days and was talking with Grandmother Keaton and Aunt Bessie in the living room. Aunt Gertrude was small and pretty, very charming, with a bisque delicacy and a gusto for life that filled Jane with admiration. But she was subdued now.
“This place gives me the creeps,” she said, making a dart with her folded fan at Jane’s nose. “Hello, funny-face. Why aren’t you playing with the other kids?”
“Oh, I’m tired,” Jane said, wondering about Emily. It had been nearly an hour since—“At your age I was never tired,” Aunt Gertrude said. “Now look at me. Three a day and that awful straight man I’ve got—Ma, did I tell you—” The voices pitched lower.
JANE watched Aunt Bessie’s skinny fingers move monotonously as she darted her crochet hook through the silk.
“This place is a morgue,” Aunt Gertrude said suddenly. “What’s wrong with everybody? Who’s dead?”
“It’s the air,” Aunt Bessie said. “Too hot the year round.”
“You play Rochester in winter, Bessie my girl, and you’ll be glad of a warm climate.
It isn’t that, anyway. I feel like—mm-m—it’s like being on stage after the curtain’s gone up.”
“It’s your fancy,” her mother said.
“Ghosts,” Aunt Gertrude said, and was silent. Grandmother Keaton looked sharply at Jane.
“Come over here, child,” she said.
Room was made on the soft, capacious lap that had held so many youngsters.
Jane snuggled against that reassuring warmth and tried to let her mind go blank, transferring all sense of responsibility to Grandmother Keaton. But it wouldn’t work. There was something wrong in the house, and the heavy waves of it beat out from a center very near them.
The Wrong Uncle. Hunger and the avidity to be fed. The nearness of bloody meat tantalizing him as he lay hidden in his strange, unguessable nest elsewhere—otherwhere—in that strange place where the children had vanished.
He was down there, slavering for the food; he was up here, empty, avid, a vortex of hunger very nearby.
He was double, a double uncle, masked but terrifyingly clear . . .
Jane closed her eyes and dug her head deeper into Grandmother Keaton’s shoulder.
Aunt Gertrude gossiped in an oddly tense voice, as if she sensed wrongness under the surface and were frightened subtly.
“I’m opening at Santa Barbara in a couple of days, Ma,” she said. “I—what’s wrong with this house, anyhow? I’m as jumpy as a cat today!—and I want you all to come down and catch the first show. It’s a musical comedy. I’ve been promoted.”
“I’ve seen the ‘Prince of Pilsen’ before,” Grandmother Keaton said.
“Not with me in it. It’s my treat. I’ve engaged rooms at the hotel already. The kids have to come too. Want to see your auntie act, Jane?”
Jane nodded against her grandmother’s shoulder.
“Auntie,” Jane said suddenly. “Did you see all the uncles?”
“Certainly I did.”
“All of them? Uncle James and Uncle Bert and Uncle Simon and Uncle Lew?”
“The whole kaboodle. Why?”
“I just wondered.”
So Aunt Gertrude hadn’t noticed the Wrong Uncle either. She wasn’t truly observant, Jane thought.
“I haven’t seen the kids, though. If they don’t hurry up, they won’t get any of the presents I’ve brought. You’d never guess what I have for you, Janie.”
But Jane scarcely heard even that exciting promise. For suddenly the tension in the air gave way. The Wrong Uncle who had been a vortex of hunger a moment before was a vortex of ecstasy now. Somewhere, somehow, at last Ruggedo was being fed. Somewhere, somehow, that other half of the double uncle was devouring his bloody fare . . .
Janie was not in Grandmother Keaton’s lap any more. The room was not around her. The room was a spinning darkness that winked with tiny lights—Christmas tree lights, Charles had called them—and there was a core of terror in the center of the whirl. Here in the vanished room the Wrong Uncle was a funnel leading from that unimaginable nest where the other half of him dwelt, and through the funnel, into the room, poured the full ecstatic tide of his satiety.
Somehow in this instant Jane was very near the other children who must stand beside that spinning focus of darkness. She could almost sense their presence, almost put out her hand to touch theirs.
Now the darkness shivered and the bright, tiny lights drew together, and into her mind came a gush of impossible memories. She was too near him. And he was careless as he fed. He was not guarding his thoughts. They poured out, formless as an animal’s, filling the dark. Thoughts of red food, and of other times and places where that same red food had been brought him by other hands.
It was incredible. The memories were not of earth, not of this time or place. He had traveled far, Ruggedo. In many guises. He remembered now, in a flow of shapeless fisions, he remembered tearing through furred sides that squirmed away from his hunger, remembered the gush of hot sweet redness through the fur.
Not the fur of anything Jane had ever imagined before . . .
HE REMEMBERED a great court paved with shining things, and something in bright chains in the center, and rings of watching eyes as he entered and neared the sacrifice.
As he tore his due from its smooth sides, the cruel chains clanked around him as he fed . . .
Jane tried to close her eyes and not watch. But it was not with eyes that she watched. And she was ashamed and a little sickened because she was sharing in that feast, tasting the warm red sweetness with Ruggedo in memory, feeling the spin of ecstasy through her head as it spun through his.
“Ah—the kids are coming now,” Aunt Gertrude was saying from a long way off.
Jane heard her dimly, and then more clearly, and then suddenly Grandmother Keaton’s lap was soft beneath her again, and she was back in the familiar room. “A herd of elephants on the stairs, eh?” Aunt Gertrude said.
They were returning. Jane could hear them too now. Really, they were making much less noise than usual. They were subdued until about halfway down the stairs, and then there was a sudden outburst of clattering and chatter that rang false to Jane’s ears.
The children came in, Beatrice a little white, Emily pink and puffy around the eyes. Charles was bubbling over with repressed excitement, but Bobby, the smallest, was glum and bored. At sight of Aunt Gertrude, the uproar redoubled, though Beatrice exchanged a quick, significant glance with Jane.
THEN presents and noise, and the uncles coming back in; excited discussion of the trip to Santa Barbara—a strained cheeriness that, somehow, kept dying down into heavy silence.
None of the adults ever really looked over their shoulders, but—the feeling was of bad things to come.
Only the children—not even Aunt Gertrude—were aware of the complete emptiness of the Wrong Uncle. The projection of a lazy, torpid, semi-mindless entity. Superficially he was as convincingly human as if he had never focused his hunger here under this roof, never let his thoughts whirl through the minds of the children, never remembered his red, dripping feasts of other times.
He was very sated now. They could feel the torpor pulsing out in slow, drowsy waves so that all the grown-ups were yawning and wondering why. But even now he was empty. Not real. The “nobody-there” feeling was as acute as ever to all the small, keen, perceptive minds that saw him as he was.
CHAPTER III
Sated Eater
LATER, at bedtime, only Charles wanted to talk about the matter. It seemed to Jane that Beatrice had grown up a little since the early afternoon. Bobby was reading “The Jungle Book,” or pretending to, with much pleased admiration of the pictures showing Shere Khan, the tiger. Emily had turned her face to the wall and was pretending to be asleep.
�
�Aunt Bessie called me,” Jane told her, sensing a faint reproach. “I tried as soon as I could get away from her. She wanted to try that collar thing on me.”
“Oh.” The apology was accepted. But Beatrice still refused to talk. Jane went over to Emily’s bed and put her arm around the little girl.
“Mad at me, Emily?”
“No.”
“You are, though. I couldn’t help it, honey.”
“It was all right,” Emily said. “I didn’t care.”
“All bright and shiny,” Charles said sleepily. “Like a Christmas tree.”
Beatrice whirled on him. “Shut up!” she cried. “Shut up, Charles! Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
Aunt Bessie put her head into the room. “What’s the matter, children?” she asked. “Nothing, Auntie,” Beatrice said. “We were just playing.”
* * * * *
Fed, temporarily satiated, it lay torpid in its curious nest. The house was silent, the occupants asleep. Even the Wrong Uncle slept, for Ruggedo was a good mimic.
The Wrong Uncle was not a phantasm, not a mere projection of Ruggedo. As an amoeba extends a pseudopod toward food, so Ruggedo had extended and created the Wrong Uncle, But there the parallel stopped. For the Wrong Uncle was not an elastic extension that could be withdrawn at will. Rather, he—it—was a permanent limb, as a man’s arm is. From the brain through the neural system the message goes, and the arm stretches out, the fingers constrict—and there is food in the hand’s grip.
But Ruggedo’s extension was less limited.
It was not permanently bound by rigid natural laws of matter. An arm may be painted black. And the Wrong Uncle looked and acted human, except to clear immature eyes.
There were rules to be followed, even by Ruggedo. The natural laws of a world could bind it, to a certain extent. There were cycles. The life-span of a moth-caterpillar is run by cycles, and before it can spin its cocoon and metamorphize, it must eat—eat—eat. Not until the time of change has come can it evade its current incarnation. Nor could Ruggedo change, now, until the end of its cycle had come. Then there would be another metamorphosis, as there had already, in the unthinkable eternity of its past, been a million curious mutations.
But, at present, it was bound by the rules of its current cycle. The extension could not be withdrawn. And the Wrong Uncle was a part of it, and it was a part of the Wrong Uncle.
The Scoodler’s body and the Scoodler’s head.
Through the dark house beat the unceasing, drowsy waves of satiety—slowly, imperceptibly quickening toward that nervous pulse of avidity that always came after the processes of indigestion and digestion had been completed.
Aunt Bessie rolled over and began to snore. In another room, the Wrong Uncle, without waking, turned on his back and also snored.
The talent of protective mimicry was well developed . . .
It was afternoon again, though by only half an hour, and the pulse in the house had changed subtly in tempo and mood.
“If we’re going up to Santa Barbara,” Grandmother Keaton had said, “I’m going to take the children down to the dentist today. Their teeth want cleaning, and it’s hard enough to get an appointment with Dr. Hover for one youngster, not to mention four. Jane, your mother wrote me you’d been to the dentist a month ago, so you needn’t go.”
After that the trouble hung unspoken over the children. But no one mentioned it. Only, as Grandmother Keaton herded the kids out on the porch, Beatrice waited till last. Jane was in the doorway, watching. Beatrice reached behind her without looking, fumbled, found Jane’s hand, and squeezed it hard. That was all.
But the responsibility had been passed on.
No words had been needed. Beatrice had said plainly that it was Jane’s job now. It was her responsibility.
SHE dared not delay too long. She was too vividly aware of the rising tide of depression affecting the adults. Ruggedo was getting hungry again.
She watched her cousins till they vanished beneath the pepper trees, and the distant rumble of the trolley put a period to any hope of their return. After that, Jane walked to the butcher shop and bought two pounds of meat. She drank a soda. Then she came back to the house.
She felt the pulse beating out faster.
She got a tin pan from the kitchen and put the meat on it, and slipped up to the bathroom. It was hard to reach the attic with her burden and without help, but she did it. In the warm stillness beneath the roof she stood waiting, half-hoping to hear Aunt Bessie call again and relieve her of this duty. But no voice came.
The simple mechanics of what she had to do were sufficiently prosaic to keep fear at a little distance. Besides, she was scarcely nine. And it was not dark in the attic.
She walked along the rafter, balancing, till she came to the plank bridge. She felt its resilient vibration underfoot.
“One, two, buckle my shoe,
Three, four, knock at the door,
Five, six, pick up sticks,
Seven, eight—”
She missed the way twice. The third time she succeeded. The mind had to be at just the right pitch of abstraction . . . She crossed the bridge, and turned, and—
It was dim, almost dark, in this place. It smelled cold and hollow, of the underground. Without surprise she knew she was deep down, perhaps beneath the house, perhaps very far away from it. That was as acceptable to her as the rest of the strangeness. She felt no surprise.
Curiously, she seemed to know the way. She was going into a tiny enclosure, and yet at the same time she wandered for awhile through low-roofed, hollow spaces, endless, very dim, smelling of cold and moisture. An unpleasant place to the mind, and a dangerous place as well to wander through with one’s little pan of meat.
It found the meat acceptable.
Looking back later, Jane had no recollection whatever of it. She did not know how she had proffered the food, or how it had been received, or where in that place of paradoxical space and smallness it lay dreaming of other worlds and eras.
She only knew that the darkness spun around her again, winking with little lights, as it devoured its food. Memories swirled from its mind to hers as if the two minds were of one fabric. She saw more clearly this time. She saw a great winged thing caged in a glittering pen, and she remembered as Ruggedo remembered, and leaped with Ruggedo’s leap, feeling the wings buffet about her and feeling her rending hunger rip into the body, and tasting avidly the hot, sweet, salty fluid bubbling out.
It was a mixed memory. Blending with it, other victims shifted beneath Ruggedo’s grip, the feathery pinions becoming the beat of great clawed arms and the writhe of reptilian litheness. All his victims became one in memory as he ate.
One flash of another memory opened briefly toward the last. Jane was aware of a great swaying garden of flowers larger than herself, and of cowled figures moving silently among them, and of a victim with showering pale hair lying helpless upon the lip of one gigantic flower, held down with chains like shining blossoms. And it seemed to Jane that she herself went cowled among those silent figures, and that he—it—Ruggedo—in another guise walked beside her toward the sacrifice.
It was the first human sacrifice he had recalled. Jane would have liked to know more about that. She had no moral scruples, of course. Food was food. But the memory flickered smoothly into another picture and she never saw the end. She did not really need to see it. There was only one end to all these memories. Perhaps it was as well for her that Ruggedo did not dwell overlong on that particular moment of all his bloody meals.
“Seventeen, eighteen,
Maids in waiting,
Nineteen, twenty—”
She tilted precariously back across the rafters, holding her empty pan. The attic smelled dusty. It helped to take away the reek of remembered crimson from her mind . . .
WHEN the children came back, Beatrice said simply, “Did you?” and Jane nodded. The taboo still held. They would not discuss the matter more fully except in case of real need. And the drowsy, tor
pid beat in the house, the psychic emptiness of the Wrong Uncle, showed plainly that the danger had been averted again—for a time . . .
“Read me about Mowgli, Granny,” Bobby said. Grandmother Keaton settled down, wiped and adjusted her spectacles, and took up Kipling. Presently the other children were drawn into the charmed circle. Grandmother spoke of Shere Khan’s downfall—of the cattle driven into the deep gulch to draw the tiger—and of the earth-shaking stampede that smashed the killer into bloody pulp.
“Well,” Grandmother Keaton said, closing the book, “That’s the end of Shere Khan. He’s dead now.”
“No he isn’t,” Bobby roused and said sleepily.
“Of course he is. Good and dead. The cattle killed him.”
“Only at the end, Granny. If you start reading at the beginning again, Shere Khan’s right there.”
Bobby, of course, was too young to have any conception of death. You were killed sometimes in games of cowboys-and-Indians, an ending neither regrettable nor fatal. Death is an absolute term that needs personal experience to be made understandable.
Uncle Lew smoked his pipe and wrinkled the brown skin around his eyes at Uncle Bert, who bit his lips and hesitated a long time between moves. But Uncle Lew won the chess game anyway. Uncle James winked at Aunt Gertrude and said he thought he’d take a walk, would she like to come along? She would.
After their departure, Aunt Bessie looked up, sniffed.
“You just take a whiff of their breaths when they come back, Ma,” she said. “Why do you stand for it?”
But Grandmother Keaton chuckled and stroked Bobby’s hair. He had fallen asleep on her lap his hands curled into small fists, his cheeks faintly flushed.
Uncle Simon’s gaunt figure stood by the window.
He watched through the curtains, and said nothing at all.
“Early to bed,” Aunt Bessie said. “If we’re going to Santa Barbara in the morning. Children!”
And that was that.
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