Things Beyond Midnight

by William F. Nolan

MRS. E: It wasn’t that... it was... like an exorcism... Frank said he’d been haunted by his childhood all the years we’d lived in California... This was an attempt to get rid of it... by facing it... seeing that it was really gone... that it no longer had any reality...

  LYLE: What happened on Forest?

  MRS. E: We walked down the street to his old address... which was just past the middle of the block... 3337 it was... a small, sagging wooden house... in terrible condition... but then, all the houses were... their screens full of holes... windows broken, trash in the yards... Frank stood in front of his house staring at it for a long time... and then he began repeating something... over and over.

  LYLE: And what was that?

  MRS. E: He said it... like a litany... over and over... “I hate you!... I hate you!”

  LYLE: You mean, he was saying that to you?

  MRS. E: Oh, no. Not to me... I asked him what he meant... and... he said he hated the child he once was, the child who had lived in that house.

  LYLE: I see. Go on, Mrs. Evans.

  MRS. E: Then he said he was going inside... that he had to go inside the house... but that he was afraid.

  LYLE: Of what?

  MRS. E: He didn’t say of what. He just told me to wait out there on the walk. Then he went up on to the small wooden porch... knocked on the door. No one answered. Then Frank tried the knob... The door was unlocked...

  LYLE: House was deserted?

  MRS. E: That’s right. I guess no one had lived there for a long while... All the windows were boarded up... and the driveway was filled with weeds... I started to move towards the porch, but Frank waved me back. Then he kicked the door all the way open with his foot, took a half-step inside, turned... and looked around at me... There was... a terrible fear in his eyes. I got a cold, chilled feeling all through my body—and I started towards him again... but he suddenly turned his back and went inside... the door closed.

  LYLE: What then?

  MRS. E: Then I waited. For fifteen... twenty minutes... a half hour... Frank didn’t come out. So I went up to the porch and opened the door... called to him...

  LYLE: Any answer?

  MRS. E: No. The house was like... a hollow cave... there were echoes... but no answer... I went inside... walked all through the place... into every room... but he wasn’t there... Frank was gone.

  LYLE: Out the back, maybe.

  MRS. E: No. The back door was nailed shut. Rusted. It hadn’t been opened for years.

  LYLE: A window then.

  MRS. E: They were all boarded over. With thick dust on the sills.

  LYLE: Did you check the basement?

  MRS. E: Yes, I checked the basement door leading down. It was locked, and the dust hadn’t been disturbed around it.

  LYLE: Then... just where the hell did he go?

  MRS. E: I don’t know; Lieutenant!... That’s why I called you... why I came here... You’ve got to find Frank!

  NOTE: Lt. Lyle did not find Franklin Evans. The case was turned over to Missing Persons—and, a week later, Mrs. Evans returned to her home in California. The first night back she had a dream, a nightmare. It disturbed her severely. She could not eat, could not sleep properly; her nerves were shattered. Mrs. Evans then sought psychiatric help. What follows is an excerpt from a taped session with Dr. Lawrence Redding, a licensed psychiatrist with offices in Beverly Hills, California.

  Transcript is dated 3 August. Beverly Hills.

  REDDING: And where were you...? In the dream, I mean.

  MRS. E: My bedroom. In bed, at home. It was as if I’d just been awakened... I looked around me—and everything was normal... the room exactly as it always is... Except for him... the boy standing next to me.

  REDDING: Did you recognize this boy?

  MRS. E: No.

  REDDING: Describe him to me.

  MRS. E: He was... nine or ten... a horrible child... with a cold hate in his face, in his eyes... He had on a black sweater with holes in each elbow. And knickers... the kind that boys used to wear... and he had on black tennis shoes...

  REDDING: Did he speak to you?

  MRS. E: Not at first. He just... smiled at me... and that smile was so... so evil!... And then he said... that he wanted me to know he’d won at last...

  REDDING: Won what?

  MRS. E: That’s what I asked him... calmly, in the dream... I asked him what he’d won. And he said... oh, My God... he said...

  REDDING: Go on, Mrs. Evans.

  MRS. E:... that he’d won Frank!... that my husband would never be coming back... that he, the boy, had him now... forever!... I screamed—and woke up. And, instantly, I remembered something.

  REDDING: What did you remember?

  MRS. E: Before she died... Frank’s mother... sent us an album she’d saved... of his childhood... photos... old report cards... He never wanted to look at it, stuck the album away in a closet... After the dream, I got it out, looked through it until I found...

  REDDING: Yes...?

  MRS. E: A photo I’d remembered. Of Frank... at the age of ten... standing in the front yard on Forest... He was smiling... that same, awful smile... and... he wore a dark sweater with holes in each elbow... and knickers... black tennis shoes. It was... the same boy exactly—the younger self Frank had always hated... I know what happened in that house now.

  REDDING: Then tell me.

  MRS. E: The boy was... waiting there... inside that awful, rotting dead house... waiting for Frank to come back... all those years... waiting there to claim him—because... he hated the man that Frank had become as much as Frank hated the child he’d once been... and the boy was right

  REDDING: Right about what, Mrs. Evans?

  MRS. E: About winning... He took all those years, but... he won... and... Frank lost.

  00:18

  KELLY, FREDRIC MICHAEL: 1928

  In the previous story, “Dark Winner,” I utilized my real Kansas City neighborhood as the locale. Same street names, same house address, the same movie theater I attended as a bay, same school.

  With “Kelly, Fredric Michael: 1928,” I delved even deeper into my past, into those Missouri years of my childhood, and on into the San Diego years of early adulthood. The year of my birth is 1928. My mother’s maiden name was Kelly. Michael was my father’s name—and he died of cancer under the exact conditions described in this story Reading Mickey Mouse... watching Gary Cooper and the Lone Ranger at Saturday matinées... sledding in winter... fishing with Dad at the Lake of the Ozarks... reading James Oliver Curwood’s heroic dog stories, stomach-down under the porch... breaking up clinkers in our old iron furnace... All of these are fragments from a real past put into a fictional future.

  I’ve never been aboard a rocket—but I am Fred Kelly.

  KELLY, FREDRIC MICHAEL: 1928

  MONITORED THOUGHT PATTERNS CONTINUE:

  ... wrong; twisted... and I’m being... being... Steen is already... they want file to free form again... goddam it, I don’t understand just what this...

  We had a coal-burning furnace in the basement with a slotted iron door, and you broke up the clinkers inside with a poker, lifting the door latch with the heat sweating you...

  And Mickey left Minnie standing at the little white picket fence. She was blushing. “Love ya,” he said. “Gee,” she said. “Gotta fly the mail for Uncle Sam,” he said. “Golly, you’re so brave!” she said, His plane was a cute single-seater with a smiling face and rubbery wings...

  The Moon! They’d made it after all, by Christ, and Armstrong was walking, jiggling, kind of floating sometimes with sixty million or more of us watching. He could still be a part of it. He was only 41 and that wasn’t old, not too old if he really...

  ... kept shooting, but the bullets bounced right off his chest. “Time someone taught you fellows a lesson in manners!” He tucked a thug under each arm, pin-striped suits with their hats still on, and leaped through the window of the skyscraper with him in the air now and them yelling and him smiling, square-jawed, with tha
t little black curl over his forehead and the red cape flaring out behind... soaring above the poorly-drawn city with the two...

  ... in the back of the car, not watching the movie (a comedy with Hope in drag and Benny pretending to be his daughter), not giving a damn about the movie and him with his hand there inside her elastic white silk panties... “Don’t, Freddie. I can’t let you.” Sure she could. He’d taken her out often enough for her to let him. He wouldn’t hurt her, ever. He was sure he loved her, or if he didn’t he would—if she’d just... He had her blouse all the way open and God those tits! “... never have come here with you if I thought you’d...” Seat slippery under him but he got her legs open enough to do it, but all he did was rub her down there. He’d lost his erection and his penis was soft; it flopped against her white stomach and she was...

  Tight against the rocks with the Arabs coming. The legion guy next to Coop was plenty nervous. “Think we can hold ’em off?” And Coop smiled that slow easy boy-smile that meant nothing could touch him; we all knew nothing could touch Coop. “Sure, sure we can. They won’t attack at night. We’ll slip out after dark.” He fired twice and two fanatic Arabs fell in closeup. A hidden ground wire tripped their horses, but we were too young to know about hidden ground wires...

  “... so I’m going to tell Dawson he can go fuck himself!” “They’ll bounce your ass right out,” I told Bob. “So what, so who needs a Ph.D. from this lousy... Look, man, college is shit. Dawson is a phony little prick and he knows it and so do his students, but they just sit there listening to him spout out his...”

  ... planet wants me to... no, no... it isn’t the planet itself. It isn’t alive, doesn’t tell me anything... dead planet out here on the fringe of the System... but it has... a kind of influence—in conjunction with the rest of this System... the whole thing is a form of... new force, or goddam it I wish they’d let me... just wouldn’t...

  Mother wanted to know what I was doing in my bedroom all alone for so long and I said reading a Big-Little-Book and she came in to see. I had a pretty fair collection and the best were the ones set on the planet Mongo. “You read too much. It’ll ruin your eyes?” But she looked relieved. I didn’t know why. She was smiling and roughing my hair, which I hated but I didn’t hate her. I loved her very, very much. “... to sleep now. You can read more tomorrow.” The room was small and comfort-making and I could smell the special soap she used and I liked the way she smelled, always, and she was always...

  ... close to the shore, along the rocks, while Dad fed line into the quiet lake. “This is where the fat ones like to come in,” he said. The sky was so blue it hurt my eyes so I kept my head down. A mosquito bit me. That was the only trouble with lakes, the mosquitoes. They loved water the way Dad did. I liked rowing, feeling the long wooden boat slide through the water with Dad at one end, feeding out his line, and the lake blackgreen with no motorboats on it, quiet and hot and...

  She twisted under me, doing a thing with her pelvis, and I came. Hard, fiery. First time inside... She groaned and kept her eyes squeezed shut and she looked tortured and I kept thinking what her father would say if he knew I had her doing this. He always worried about her. “You two kids take care, ya hear?” And then he’d say, “I trust you, Fred because you’re a Catholic.” And I told him that I...

  ... more... keep wanting more... I’m being... forced to spill out all the...

  “Hey, Kelly, the old man wants to see you.” Sure he did, and I knew why. Because I was late three mornings in a row this week. I had reasons. The lousy freeways were jammed so I took surface streets but Old Cooney would never listen to reason, which is why he’s such a prick to work for. “Tell him I won’t be late anymore.” I was going to the Moon. To work there. To train for space. And someday, with luck, maybe I could...

  Whap! Pow! Pie right in the kisser. The little tramp wipes it off, sucks his thumbs, does a kind of ballet step back and falls down three flights of stairs. Terrific! Up he bounces, dusts the seat of his baggy pants, tips his hat, spins his cane, and walks into a cop! Whomp! Cop is furious. Jumps up and down, shaking his stick. Tramp does a polite little bow, tips his hat again and ducks between the cop’s legs. Zing—right down the middle of the street. Cars missing them by inches. Two more cops join the first cop. Three more. A dozen. Falling and yelling. Tramp is up a fire escape, over a roof, through a fat lady’s apartment—she’s in the tub!—out a door, down an alley, and...

  ... when the snow came I’d rush for the basement to dig out my old sled. Rust had coated the runners with a thin red film and I had to get them shiny again with sandpaper, doing it fast, wanting to get out on the hill and cut loose. School closed, the hill waiting, Tommy Griffith yelling at me to get a move on and then the long whooshing slide down from Troost with snowdust in my nose and steering to miss Tommy’s sled and picking up speed coming onto Forest, mittens and yellow snow goggles and warm under the coat Uncle Frank bought me for Christmas...

  The sons of bitches were worried about the fucking score while his father was dying. Okay, okay—pull back, cool down, all the way down—because if he wasn’t dying he’d want to know the score too. It was the Series and he’d want to know the score like the others did. The hall smelled of white paint and starch and, faintly, of urine. Hospital smells. The young priest had been emotionless about it, kept smiling at him and saying “a passel of years” when he told him how old his father was. He was glad to be out of Holy Mother Church, because she didn’t really give a damn about him or his father. Maybe God did, somewhere, but not Holy Mother Church. What did it matter how old his father was? So what? He was still dying of cancer and you never want to go that way no matter how fucking old you are, even if...

  “My country tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty...”

  Sing it boy, sing it loud and let the world know that you’re an American. Sure, he was too young to fight, but he was proud. And scared, too. They were giving us hell on those beaches. Giving us bloody hell...

  born in 1928... into space when I was sixty... Moon first, then Mars... If I could just tell them straight and they didn’t... keep trying to force all the... said I was too old, but nobody listened. Experience. We need you out there, Fred. Help chart the new Systems. Warps did it, make it all possible... one jump and into another galaxy. Fact. Cold reality. All right then, I volunteered... but not for this... didn’t know I’d ever be... goddam sick of being sucked dry this way... without my having any choice in how I...

  “That’s it, oh, that’s fine! Keep coming, honey!” Mom, with her arms out. Wobble. Almost into the lamp. “C’mon, son, you can do it. Walk to me!” Daddy there, kneeling next to her, looking excited. The room swaying. Terror. Falling. Rug in my face. Sneezing with them laughing and pulling me up and me trying again, with it better this time. Steady now, and Daddy was...

  Feeding her power, letting her drift out, then snapping her back. “You’re great, Fred,” Anne told me. “Nope. Cars great,” I said. “Handles, doesn’t she? Richie did the suspension. Short throw on the shift. Four downdraft carbs. She’ll do 200 easy. And a road like this, she eats it up.” Life was good. Power under my foot and power in my mind and the future waiting.

  “... when the sniper got him.” “What?” “Sniper. In Dealy Plaza.” “Where’s that?”“Texas?”“What was he doing there?” “Wife was with him. They were—” “She dead too?” “No, just him. Blood all over her dress, but she’s fine, she’s fine...”

  “Let’s see what he looks like under that mask?” Oh, oh, they had him now. Guns on him, his hands tied, no chance to get away. “Yeah, Jake, let’s us have a good look at him.” Spaaaaang! “What the—” Oh, boy, just in time. Neat! “It’s the durn Injun! Near killed me. Looks like he’s got us boxed in.” What are they going to do? “Better untie me, Jake, and I’ll see to it that you both get a fair trial in Carson City.” Deep voice. “You have my word on it.” They won’t. Or will they? Not much choice. Spaaaang! “His next shot won’t miss, Jake.” Oh, they’re scared no
w, all right. Look at them sweat. “We’d best do as the masked man says,” the big one growls. Spaaaang! Boy, if they don’t...

  “But, Fred, the job’s on Mars. We can’t go to Mars!” I wanted to know why not. “Because, for one thing, our place is here, our friends, everything is here. The Moon is our home.” I told her I was going, that it was a chance I couldn’t afford to miss. But she kept up the argument, kept...

  ... on his stomach under the porch with the James Oliver Curwood book, the one about the dog who runs away and falls in love with a wolf and they have a son who’s half dog and half wolf. Jack gave it to him for his fourteenth birthday. It was his favorite James Oliver Curwood. Rain outside, making cat-paw sounds on the porch, but him dry and secret underneath with all the good reading ahead of him. He pushed a jawbreaker, one of the red ones, into his mouth and...

  “Christ, Fred, let her go! She doesn’t want to hear from you. She’s never going to answer. She wants to forget you.” That was all right. Sue was still his wife and maybe he could put it all back together. Maybe he could...

  The stars... the stars... a massed hive of spacefire, a swarm of constellations... the diamonds of God... It was worth it. Worth everything to be out here, a part of this. Everything else was...

  Enough!... Eve given enough... sick... exhausted... hollow inside, drained... They were lucky; the others were lucky and didn’t know it, dying with the ship... but they took us down here, two of us... and Steens insane. They got... Etc free formed until they... know now... know what they still want from me, what they have to experience along with all the rest of it... before they’re satisfied. They want to taste that too—the final thing... Well, give it to them. Why not? There’s no way back to anywhere... Your friends are gone... Steens a raving fool... so give them the final thing they want, goddam them... whoever they are... whatever they are. Just give them