Different Seasons (77 page)

Her teeth were clenched, her lips slightly parted. I heard the breath slipping rapidly back and forth between those lips and through those teeth as she “locomotived.” Her eyes moved; they rolled slightly to the left in their sockets so as to see me better. Her lips parted. They mouthed four words:
Thank you, Dr. McCarron.
And I
heard
them, gentlemen, but not from her mouth. They came from twenty feet away. From her vocal cords. And because her tongue and lips and teeth, all of which we use to shape our words, were here, they came out only in unformed modulations of sound. But there were seven of them, seven distinct sounds, just as there are seven syllables in that phrase,
Thank you, Dr. McCarron.

“You’re welcome, Miss Stansfield,” I said. “It’s a boy.”

Her lips moved again, and from behind me, thin, ghostly, came the sound
boyyyyyy
—

Her eyes lost their focus and their determination. They seemed now to look at something beyond me, perhaps in that black, sleety sky. Then they closed. She began to “locomotive” again ... and then she simply stopped. Whatever had happened was now over. The nurse had seen some of it, the ambulance driver had perhaps seen some of it before he fainted, and some of the onlookers might have suspected something. But it was over now, over for sure. There was only the remains of an ugly accident out here ... and a new baby in there.

I looked up at the statue of Harriet White and there she still stood, looking stonily away toward the Garden across the way, as if nothing of any particular note had happened, as if such determination in a world as hard and as senseless as this one meant nothing ... or worse still, that it was perhaps the only thing which meant
anything,
the only thing that made any difference at all.

As I recall, I knelt there in the slush before her severed head and began to weep. As I recall, I was still weeping when an intern and two nurses helped me to my feet and inside.

 

McCarron’s pipe had gone out.

He re-lit it with his bolt-lighter while we sat in perfect, breathless silence. Outside, the wind howled and moaned. He snapped his lighter closed and looked up. He seemed mildly surprised to find us still there.

“That’s all,” he said. “That’s the end! What are you waiting for? Chariots of fire?” he snorted, then seemed to debate for a moment. “I paid her burial expenses out of my own pocket. She had no one else, you see.” He smiled a little. “Well . . . there was Ella Davidson, my nurse. She insisted on chipping in twenty-five dollars, which she could ill afford. But when Davidson insisted on a thing—” He shrugged, and then laughed a little.

“You’re quite sure it wasn’t a reflex?” I heard myself demanding suddenly. “Are you
quite
sure—”

“Quite sure,” McCarron said imperturbably. “The first contraction, perhaps. But the completion of her labor was not a matter of seconds but of minutes. And I sometimes think she might have held on even longer, if it had been necessary. Thank God it was not.”

“What about the baby?” Johanssen asked.

McCarron puffed at his pipe. “Adopted,” he said. “And you’ll understand that, even in those days, adoption records were kept as secret as possible.”

“Yes, but what about the baby?” Johanssen asked again, and McCarron laughed in a cross way.

“You never let go of a thing, do you?” he asked Johanssen.

Johanssen shook his head. “Some people have learned it to their sorrow. What about the baby?”

“Well, if you’ve come with me this far, perhaps you’ll also understand that I had a certain vested interest in knowing how it all came out for that child. Or I felt I did, which comes to the same. I did keep track, and I still do. There was a young man and his wife—their name was not Harrison, but that is close enough. They lived in Maine. They could have no children of their own. They adopted the child and named him ... well, John’s good enough, isn’t it? John will do you fellows, won’t it?”

He puffed at his pipe but it had gone out again. I was faintly aware of Stevens hovering behind me, and knew that somewhere our coats would be at the ready. Soon we would slip back into them ... and back into our lives. As McCarron had said, the tales were done for another year.

“The child I delivered that night is now head of the English Department at one of the two or three most respected private colleges in the country,” McCarron said. “He’s not forty-five yet. A young man. It’s early for him, but the day may well come when he will be President of that school. I shouldn’t doubt it a bit. He is handsome, intelligent, and charming.

“Once, on a pretext, I was able to dine with him in the private faculty club. We were four that evening. I said little and so was able to watch him. He has his mother’s determination, gentlemen ...

“. . . and his mother’s hazel eyes.”

Stevens saw us out as he always did, holding coats, wishing men the happiest of happy Christmases, thanking them for their generosity. I contrived to be the last, and Stevens looked at me with no surprise when I said:

“I have a question I’d like to ask, if you don’t mind.”

He smiled a little. “I suppose you should,” he said. “Christmas is a fine time for questions.”

Somewhere down the hallway to our left—a hall I had never been down—a grandfather clock ticked sonorously, the sound of the age passing away. I could smell old leather and oiled wood and, much more faintly than either of these, the smell of Stevens’s aftershave.

“But I should warn you,” Stevens added as the wind rose in a gust outside, “it’s better not to ask too much. Not if you want to keep coming here.”

“People have been closed out for asking too much?” Closed out was not really the phrase I wanted, but it was as close as I could come.

“No,” Stevens said, his voice as low and polite as ever. “They simply choose to stay away.”

I returned his gaze, feeling a chill prickle its way up my back—it was as if a large, cold, invisible hand had been laid on my spine. I found myself remembering that strangely liquid thump I had heard upstairs one night and wondered (as I had more than once before) exactly how many rooms there really were here.

“If you still have a question, Mr. Adley, perhaps you’d better ask it. The evening’s almost over—”

“And you have a long train-ride ahead of you?” I asked, but Stevens only looked at me impassively. “All right,” I said.

“There are books in this library that I can’t find anywhere else—not in the New York Public Library, not in the catalogues of any of the antiquarian book-dealers I’ve checked with, and certainly not in
Books in Print.
The billiard table in the Small Room is a Nord. I’d never heard of such a brand, and so I called the International Trademark Commission. They have two Nords—one makes cross-country skis and the other makes wooden kitchen accessories. There’s a Seafront jukebox in the Long Room. The ITC has a
Seeburg
listed, but no Sea
front.”

“What is your question, Mr. Adley?”

His voice was as mild as ever, but there was something terrible in his eyes suddenly ... no; if I am to be truthful, it was not just in his eyes; the terror I felt had infused the atmosphere all around me. The steady tock-tock from down the lefthand hall was no longer the pendulum of a grandfather clock; it was the tapping foot of the executioner as he watches the condemned led to the scaffold. The smells of oil and leather turned bitter and menacing, and when the wind rose in another wild whoop, I felt momentarily sure that the front door would blow open, revealing not Thirty-fifth Street but an insane Clark Ashton Smith landscape where the bitter shapes of twisted trees stood silhouetted on a sterile horizon below which double suns were setting in a gruesome red glare.

Oh, he knew what I had meant to ask; I saw it in his gray eyes.

Where do all these things come from?
I had meant to ask.
Oh, I know well enough where you come from, Stevens;
that
accent isn’t Dimension X, it’s pure Brooklyn. But where do you go? What has put that timeless look in your eyes and stamped it on your face? And, Stevens
—

But he was waiting for my question.

I opened my mouth. And the question that came out was: “Are there many more rooms upstairs?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” he said, his eyes never leaving mine. “A great many. A man could become lost. In fact, men
have
become lost. Sometimes- it seems to me that they go on for miles. Rooms and corridors.”

“And entrances and exits?”

His eyebrows went up slightly. “Oh yes. Entrances and exits.”

He waited, but I had asked enough, I thought—I had come to the very edge of something that would, perhaps, drive me mad.

“Thank you, Stevens.”

“Of course, sir.” He held out my coat and I slipped into it.

“There will be more tales?”

“Here, sir, there are
always
more tales.”

 

That evening was some time ago, and my memory has not improved between then and now (when a man reaches my age, the opposite is much more likely to be true), but I remember with perfect clarity the stab of fear that went through me when Stevens swung the oaken door wide—the cold certainty that I would see that alien landscape, cracked and hellish in the bloody light of those double suns, which might set and bring on an unspeakable darkness of an hour’s duration, or ten hours, or ten thousand years. I cannot explain it, but I tell you that world
exists
—I am as sure of that as Emlyn McCarron was sure that the severed head of Sandra Stansfield went on breathing. I thought for that one timeless second that the door would open and Stevens would thrust me out into that world and I would then hear that door slam shut behind me ... forever.

Instead, I saw Thirty-fifth Street and a radio-cab standing at the curb, exhaling plumes of exhaust. I felt an utter, almost debilitating relief.

“Yes, always more tales,” Stevens repeated. “Goodnight, sir.”

Indeed there have been. And, one day soon, perhaps I’ll tell you another.

 

 

 

 

Although “Where do you get your ideas?” has always been the question I’m most frequently asked (it’s number one with a bullet, you might say), the runner-up is undoubtedly this one: “Is horror
all
you write?” When I say it isn’t, it’s hard to tell if the questioner seems relieved or disappointed.

Just before the publication of
Carrie,
my first novel, I got a letter from my editor, Bill Thompson, suggesting it was time to start thinking about what we were going to do for an encore (it may strike you as a bit strange, this thinking about the next book before the first was even out, but because the pre-publication schedule for a novel is almost as long as the post-production schedule on a film, we had been living with
Carrie
for a long time at that point—nearly a year). I promptly sent Bill the manuscripts of two novels, one called Blaze and one called
Second Coming.
The former had been written immediately after
Carrie,
during the six-month period when the first draft of
Carrie
was sitting in a desk drawer, mellowing; the latter was written during the year or so when
Carrie
inched, tortoiselike, closer and closer to publication.

Blaze
was a melodrama about a huge, almost retarded criminal who kidnaps a baby, planning to ransom it back to the child’s rich parents ... and then falls in love with the child instead.
Second Coming
was a melodrama about vampires taking over a small town in Maine. Both were literary imitations of a sort,
Second Coming of Dracula, Blaze
of Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men.

I think Bill must have been flabbergasted when these two manuscripts arrived in a single big package (some of the pages of
Blaze
had been typed on the reverse side of milk-bills, and the
Second Coming
manuscript reeked of beer because someone had spilled a pitcher of Black Label on it during a New Year’s Eve party three months before)—like a woman who wishes for a bouquet of flowers and discovers her husband has gone out and bought her a hothouse. The two manuscripts together totaled about five hundred and fifty single-spaced pages.

He read them both over the next couple of weeks—scratch an editor and find a saint—and I went down to New York from Maine to celebrate the publication of
Carrie
(April, 1974, friends and neighbors—Lennon was alive, Nixon was still hanging in there as President, and this kid had yet to see the first gray hair in his beard) and to talk about which of the two books should be next ...or if neither of them should be next.

I was in the city for a couple of days, and we talked around the question three or four times. The final decision was made on a street-corner—Park Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, in fact. Bill and I were standing there waiting for the light, watching the cabs roll into that funky tunnel or whatever it is—the one that seems to burrow straight through the Pan Am Building. And Bill said, “I think it should be
Second Coming.”

Well, that was the one I liked better myself—but there was something so oddly reluctant in his voice that I looked at him sharply and asked him what the matter was. “It’s just that if you do a book about vampires as the follow-up to a book about a girl who can move things by mind-power, you’re going to get typed,” he said.

“Typed?” I asked, honestly bewildered. I could see no similarities to speak of between vampires and telekinesis. “As
what?”

“As a horror writer,” he said, more reluctantly still.

“Oh,” I said, vastly relieved. “Is
that
all!”

“Give it a few years,” he said, “and see if you still think it’s ‘all.’ ”