by Anthology
As time passed she came to like them less and less, her new charges in particular. The littlest of them cried or screamed a good deal of the time, and those of school age were frequently the cause of visitations by the welfare lady, who tended to be quite fierce after hearing school teachers’ shocked reports about the clothing and grooming of the children. Dolores was infuriated by these intrusions upon her effort to live as she liked. She had experienced the fulfillment of an old daydream: enough money to keep the refrigerator well-filled with beer, and a rent-free dim room where the days could be passed in a mindless fog of alcohol and rock music. She did not ask for more than this, but having tasted it, she would not settle for less. When reality insisted upon invading her misty paradise, she was at first irritated and then filled with sullen rage. These children, she came to see, were her enemies. She would treat them as they deserved to be treated.
And so they grew, an undernourished gaggle of delinquents, vicious and unpredictable, pale of eyes and hair, each with the chinless face and crooked pointed teeth of the family. One by one, as they reached their middle teens, they left the house, to find dens elsewhere in the town or to run away and vanish utterly. Dolores was left at last with only Loob.
And even he had stumbled into habits that kept him out of her reach most of the time. In his early years it had been otherwise; he had not been able to learn, like the others, to make himself inconspicuous or to hide, nor was he able to read the signs that foretold explosions of her wrath. He had thus been almost always conveniently available to her, a ready victim, a swollen speechless lump too lethargic to evade blows and incapable of argument. In summer he would squat in the dusty backyard, and in winter in a corner of the kitchen, staring at whatever it was that he saw. When he was eleven or twelve he began to follow along behind the uncle who was near his own age, and he remained a faithful shadow until the uncle ran away a year or two later. That was the period when the boys used Loob as a butt.
By the time of the uncle’s disappearance Loob seemed to have come to a vague awareness that things were somehow better when he was away from Dolores, that he felt no blows and did not hear the shrill vituperative voice. It came to be his habit to go to the house only to sleep and to eat when he could not find food elsewhere. He became a wanderer through the town and its purlieus, an enormous shambling creature with arms that were disproportionately short and a tongue too large for his mouth who made mysterious detours as he walked and clutched a shapeless bundle of rags that had once been a stuffed toy dog. At some point his wanderings brought him to the window of the old Dappling house. Thereafter he was usually to be found at that place.
Dolores knew where he was, and she had no objection. She had never consciously made a connection between Loob’s absence from the house and a rise in her spirits, but her subconscious mind had for many years observed and recorded the fact that acts of cruelty to Loob were likely to have distressing consequences. The appalling depressions of spirit that sometimes engulfed her, dropping her into a black hell of melancholy and terror, were blamed on her boozing, and she ascribed to the same cause the endless succession of accidents that made bandages or splints a standard part of her costume. That Loob was the cause of her afflictions was not an idea that would have occurred to her.
It did not occur to Loob, either, of course. Loob did not have ideas, any more than he had memories. He lived from moment to moment, and each new moment of his life found him in something very close to a whole new world. The few things he had learned had been absorbed so gradually, over so long a time, that they had merged with, and become indistinguishable from, instinct; no reasoning from cause to effect had ever been the motive of an action of his. He was in fact totally unaware of what he was doing when he made use of his power. It was his, wholly by chance, an effect of the same clots in the circuitry of his brain that deprived him of an effective memory and the faculty of reason, and he used it instinctively and without forethought. Afterwards he would have no memory of what he had done, nor any awareness of consequences. There was the matter of the Goster County dogs, for example.
A lean starving dog of enormous size, driven to mindless ferocity by hunger and the pain of a festering paw, one day sprang at Loob’s throat. Loob reached with cobra swiftness, his instincts serving him, far better than reason would have. The dog seemed to crumple in midair; a savage predator had leaped, and a cowed and broken creature hit the ground. It fled in howling terror to its nest under a stump and remained there until it died of starvation and fear a week later.
If Loob had failed to react, no harm would have been done him; the dog’s attack had actually taken place on a day a century and a half in the past, and Loob had struck at a wraith, an apparition that had no substance in Loob’s time. It is probable that it was not attacking Loob at all, but some beast or person actually there; but it may have sensed somehow Loob’s uncomprehending observation and blindly attacked the unseen. Either way, they were in different times, Loob and the dog, and neither of them had any physical reality for the other. But Loob’s dreadful bolt was not affected by time. Time had no meaning for Loob or his power. And the dog was smitten.
The dog was a wild animal, an amalgam of large breeds, the possessor of a rich strain of wolf blood. He killed sheep and bred bitches on most of the farms in the county and ventured sometimes into the town itself when the wind brought the scent of a bitch in heat. By the time he was brought low by a farmer’s bullet, he had sired feral litters throughout the area, all of which fruitfully interbred. His blood was passed on and enriched by the inbreeding, and his descendants came to be almost a distinct breed, huge rangy dogs with blunt muzzles and smooth black pelts, who stood baleful guard over the farms of the county and patrolled the streets of the town with a forbidding, proprietary air.
They disappeared when Loob struck the attacker; or, rather, did not disappear: they had never existed. The old progenitor had died of terror in a hole before he could breed their ancestors, and other dogs lived—had always lived—here. Reality had been amended in a small way: a race of dogs did not exist; the bloodlines of the local sheep were imperceptibly different; the phrase, “As mean as a Goster County dog” did not have currency in that end of the state. Most of the people had memories of their pasts that were somewhat different from what they had been; a great many snapshots showed other dogs or no dogs at all. Not much else. Loob’s mindless interference with the past had harmed no one, all things considered, and the world was in fact in no worse condition than it would otherwise have been.
But of course that was not the only occasion on which he altered the past, and that other tampering had consequences that scarcely bear thinking about, that were indeed so incomparably dreadful that one has difficulty in restraining himself from committing atrocities upon Loob’s person. But that would be self-defeating, that would be something worse than suicide. Loob is not to be interfered with; he must be left to do as he is moved to do.
Loob once had a dog of his own. When he was twelve or thirteen years old, an emaciated stray mongrel had one summer evening peered through a hole in the fence and watched him as he sat in a corner of the yard hunched over his tin basin of pork and potatoes. The dog had sat staring with hopeless longing at the pieces that fell into the dust as Loob crammed the food into his mouth until, unable to restrain itself any longer, it made a frantic and despairing foray into the yard, snatched a loathly ort from under Loob’s feet, and scrambled in terror back through the hole. Loob took no notice whatever. The dog, observing this, made a second raid, again without retribution. By the time the basin was empty, the ground was clear of food, and the dog was sitting beside Loob waiting for the next scrap to fall.
Thereafter they took their meals together, and after a time the dog began to follow Loob wherever he went and to lie down touching Loob when Loob was at rest. Loob appeared not to be aware of the dog at all until the evening when the dog for the first time attempted to follow him into the house and was hastily ejected by Dolores. Loob b
egan an enormous bellowing, a noise so offensive and sustained that one of the older children admitted the animal as soon as Dolores had returned to her room. After that time they were not separated by day or night until a coal truck ran over the dog on Main Street one morning, not only killing it instantly but flattening it to something unrecognizable as a dog.
Loob saw the incident; at any rate his eyes were turned toward it at the moment it happened. But he gave no sign that he recognized what had taken place, and he continued his lurching progress up the street without pausing. That night he did not eat, however, a thing that had not happened before in his lifetime. During all of the next day and the day after that, he took no food. The other children, astonished and frightened, told Dolores, who two days later told the welfare lady. Loob’s skin was by then beginning to hang in pale folds, and he staggered even more than usual as he wandered through the town.
“I don’t know,” the welfare lady said. “Maybe this time he’ll have to go to Murdock.” Murdock is a state mental hospital. I know it well.
“It was the dog gettin’ kilt done it,” one of the children said. Maybe if he had another dog—”
“Another dog,” the welfare lady said. “Aid to Dependent Dogs.” She spoke to Dolores: “Do you have any idea—No. Of course you don’t. I’ll talk to the doctor. I’m afraid it will have to be Murdock.” But she came back later in the day with a toy dog, a stylized stuffed Airdale covered in plush. “Let’s try it, anyhow,” she said. “You never know.”
Loob stared at the toy as emptily as he stared at the rest of the world. After a while the welfare lady said, “Well, I’m not surprised. It was worth trying, though.” She turned to go. Loob reached out and took the toy. His face did not change, but he raised the dog and squeezed it to his chest with both hands, and that evening he devoured his usual enormous meal. For the next five years of his life he was never seen without the toy in his hand.
He did not play with it or show it any sign of affection, or indeed seem to be aware that he held it, but even in his sleep his grip did not wholly relax. In time the plastic stuffing hardened and crumbled and sifted out through rips in the seams of the plush, so that at last Loob carried only a filthy rag; but to all appearances the rag had the same value to him that the new toy had had. It may have been that the sticky wad of cloth provided the only continuity in his life, the only thing of permanence in his inconstant world. Or perhaps he was after all capable of some murky analogue of emotion and felt something akin to affection for the ruined toy. It is even possible that he had never perceived it as a representation of a dog, but simply as an object tendered in kindness, and hence not to be relinquished. Whatever the reason, it was unique in the world, a thing that appeared to matter to Loob.
Dolores took it from him one day, took it and burned it and so created her own beginnings and condemned a town. She took Loob’s rag out of simple malice, out of a heartfelt desire to cause him pain; but she never knew whether or not the confiscation had really hurt him, any more than in the past she had been able to tell if he had heard her voice when she railed at him or felt the blows when she struck him. This time, though, she had achieved her purpose.
It was a bad morning for her, a morning when the thrum and jangle of her nerves had begun before she awoke, so that she came to consciousness depressed and apprehensive, with a yellow taste in her mouth and an incipient tremor in her limbs. She was well aware of the cause, which was a lack of alcohol in her system; and she remembered clearly and with despair that before going to sleep she had drunk the last drop in the house, having debated leaving a pick-me-up in the vodka bottle and deciding against it. She had had this experience before, and she knew precisely the course it would take. It was absolutely necessary that she have a bottle within the next hour, or the shaking and nausea would utterly incapacitate her.
The car would not start. She sat behind the wheel and cursed, a stringy woman with bad teeth and lank hair, musty and disheveled and becoming frantic. Without pause in her swearing she left the car and, sweating, returned to the house to use the telephone. The taxicab company told her the town’s only taxi would not be available until the afternoon.
She stood clutching the telephone, frozen by panic. She did not see how she could walk the mile to the liquor store, but no matter how desperately she tried, she could think of no alternative. She was quite unable to cope with the problem. Until her brain had received its wonted portion of alcohol, it scarcely functioned at all, and getting the alcohol to make thinking possible was itself her problem. Frustration squeezed her in a clawed vice and became anger, a red extremity of rage that she thought might burst her head with its intensity.
Through the door to the kitchen she caught sight of Loob, sitting dumbly in his corner staring at nothing. “You bastard!” she shouted. “You goddam crazy dummy, you old goddam crazy dummy! Sit and hold your goddam crazy rag all day, you goddam crazy dummy! Why can’t you do something?”
Loob did not move, did not blink. She rushed into the kitchen and struck him on the cheek with her fist. He gave no sign of feeling it. “Goddam you!” she shouted. “Goddam, oh, goddam!” Loob sat and stared emptily. “You bastard,” she said, panting now. “Oh, you big dummy bastard.” Her eye fell upon the rag. “Oh, you big dummy bastard with your rag.”
She snatched suddenly, and the rag was in her hand. Without hesitation she pulled a lid off the stove and dropped the rag inside, where coals still glowed. “There, you crazy dummy!” she said. “There’s your crazy rag.” There was a crackle of flame inside the stove.
Still Loob made no sign. She gave a wordless shriek, a yelp of pure, helpless rage, and struck him again, to no effect whatever. She stood trembling for a moment and then ran from the room and from the house and stood sobbing beside the road. A car came, and she held up her hand. The car stopped and picked her up.
In the kitchen Loob sat without movement for some time. Then his hand opened, lay so for a moment, and clenched again. He repeated the movement two or three times. He rose ponderously, lurched out through the kitchen door, and made his way through the litter of the back yard to a gap in the fence, and thence through a vacant lot to Dappling Road. He proceeded erratically down the road, as he had a thousand times before, and turned in at the derelict slag lane that led down to the old house. When he reached the house he climbed the discolored stone steps, entered, and took his seat in the window. His hand was slowly clenching and unclenching.
Something new had happened—was happening—to him: he was, improbably, in the grip of an emotion. Somewhere in the ruinous labyrinth of his mind there was adumbrated a feeling of loss, something nameless that was forever gone. There was no way for him to weigh the matter, to reflect upon the strangeness of this phenomenon; he could only react instinctively: Danger. Strike. He struck.
It was toward the end of a long August afternoon in 1905, and Sam Dappling was opening a door, entering the room where Olivia was playing Chopin. A house-guest, a cousin from Philadelphia, stood beside the piano and turned the pages of the music, and two other visitors, another cousin and his wife, listened from seats on a divan. As he crossed the threshold, placid, genial Sam Dappling went mad; the black discharge of Loob’s strange ordnance smashed into his brain, instantly exploding a million subtle connections, and in the moment of passing through the doorway Sam Dappling ceased to exist. In his stead was something monstrous, a thing bulging with insensate ferocity, that ran suddenly into the room and tore from the wall the Civil War saber that hung under a portrait of old General Dappling. It whirled with the saber in its hand and without the slightest pause accelerated into frenzied motion, filling the room with a demented fury of destruction and dismemberment; and when the butchery at last was done, it again did not pause, but rushed dripping out of that place of blood and stink and twitching scraps into the outdoors, onto the lawn where a child and a dog played in the sunshine.
It left unspeakable things scattered there on the grass and plunged, howling, into the bar
n, where it found only a mare and her foal, upon whom it fell in undiminished frenzy. When there was no more movement in the stall, it paused for a fraction of a moment. In the loft pigeons were fluttering; it heard the sound and went swarming up the ladder, in no way slowed by the saber. The pigeons were out of reach, swooping just under the roof, far above. At the end of the loft was another ladder, leading up to the great opening under the ridge pole through which the hay was hauled into the mow. It scuttled up with the agility of a great feral monkey. A startled pigeon flapped in confusion and then flew hastily through the opening, and the thing that had been Sam Dappling leaped for it, wildly cutting with its sword. The pigeon rose gracefully and curved back to alight on the roof. The thing sailed outward and dropped, still slicing and hacking at the air through which it fell. It struck the hard-packed earth and bounced slightly and was still. In the house the screaming had just begun.
For Henry Dappling it never stopped. He lived for the seven years that remained of his life with a never-ending scream in his ears. It was not the screaming from the house that he heard; it was the demented noise that came from Mrs. McVay, who was standing on the lawn with her face to the sky as he rode the gray out of the woods that evening. He had emerged from the sun-shot cool gloom and silence of the forest into the full evening sunlight and pulled up as usual. He heard it then, a mindless howl of terror and loss and unutterable grief, ripping through the bright clear air with ugly insistence, smirching the evening. He put the gray into a dead run, down the meadow and the drive and over the lawn to where she stood screaming and screaming. He saw what she held in her hands.
That was the real end of Henry Dappling’s life. His remaining seven years were something worse than death. He would have made a quick end of it almost immediately, except that he did not see how he could die without knowing why. Even a vindictive maniac God must have had a reason for so gross an affront to decency, so loathsome and abominable a cruelty as permitting him to see the bulging small blue eyes and yellow curls of what was frozen in Mrs. McVay’s clawed hands. The question became almost the sole tenant of his mind, a consuming obsession that was never absent for a second of his years as a mad hermit in his mansion. He did not find his answer, of course, and he died at last with the screaming still in his ears, alone in the great house where mildew and dry rot were crumbling the interior and weeds and branches besieged the walls. Long before his death the house had come to look desolate and abandoned, and it was known as a haunted house while its master still lived within its walls.