I Married A Dead Man (5 page)

               
She became serious for a moment. Or at least, approached as closely to it as she seemed capable of.

               
"Y'know, now I wish I hadn't done that, sort of. Played hide and seek with them like this, I mean. Now I have got cold feet. Do you think they'll really like me? Suppose they don't? Suppose they have me built up in their expectations as someone entirely different, and--"

               
Like the little boy in the radio skit who prattles about a selfinvented bugaboo until he ends up by frightening himself with it.

               
"How on earth do you make the water stay in this thing?" she interrupted herself. She pounded lightly on the plunger set into the washbasin. "Every time I get it to fill, it runs right out again."

               
"Twist it a little, and then push down on it, I think."

               
Patrice stripped off her wedding-band before plunging her hands in. "Hold this for me, I want to wash my hands. I have a horror of losing it It slipped down a drain on the Other Side, once, and they had to take out a whole section of pipe before they could get it out for me."

               
"It's beautiful," Helen said wistfully.

               
"Isn't it, though?" Patrice agreed. "See? It has our names, together, around it on the inside. Isn't that a cute idea? Keep it on your finger for me a minute, that's the safest."

               
"Isn't it supposed to be bad luck to do that? I mean, for you to take it off, and for me to put it on?"

               
Patrice tossed her head vaingloriously. "I couldn't have bad luck," she proclaimed. It was almost a challenge.

               
"And I," thought Helen somberly, "couldn't have good."

               
She watched it curiously as it slowly descended the length of her finger, easily, without forcing. There was a curiously familiar feeling to it, as of something that should have been there long ago, that belonged there and had been strangely lacking until now.

               
"So this is what it feels like," she said to herself poignantly.

               
The train pounded on, its headlong roar deadened, in here where they were, to a muted jittering.

               
Patrice stepped back, her toilette at last completed. "Well, this is my last night," she sighed. "By this time tomorrow night we'll already be there, the worst'll be over." She clasped her own arms, in a sort of half-shiver of fright. "I hope they like what they're getting." She nervously stole a sidelong look at herself in the glass, primped at her hair.

               
"You'll be all right, Patrice," Helen reassured her quietly. "Nobody could help but like you."

               
Patrice crossed her fingers and held them up to show her. "Hugh says they're very well-off," she rambled on. "That makes it all the worse sometimes." She tittered in recollection. "I guess they must be. I know they even had to send us the money for the trip home. We were always on a shoestring, the whole time we were over there. We had an awful lot of fun, though. I think that's the only time you have fun, when you're on a shoestring, don't you?"

               
"Sometimes--you don't," remembered Helen, but she didn't answer.

               
"Anyway," her confidante babbled on, "as soon as they found out I was Expecting, that did it! They wouldn't hear of my having my baby over there. I didn't much want to myself, as a matter of fact, and Hugh didn't want me to either. They should be born in the good old U.S.A., don't you think so? That's the least you can do for them."

               
"Sometimes that's all you can do for them," Helen thought wryly. "That--and seventeen cents."

               
She had finished now in turn.

               
Patrice urged, "Let's stay in here long enough to have a puff, now that we're here. We don't seem to be keeping anybody else out. And if we try to talk out there, they might shush us down; they're all trying to sleep." The little lighter-flame winked in coppery reflection against the mirrors and glistening chrome on all sides of them. She gave a sigh of heartfelt satisfaction. "I love these before-retiring talks with another girl. It's been ages since I last had one. Back in school, I guess. Hugh says I'm a woman's woman at heart." She stopped short and thought about it with a quizzical quirk of her head. "Is that good or bad? I must ask him."

               
Helen couldn't repress a smile. "Good, I guess. I wouldn't want to be a man's woman."

               
"I wouldn't either!" Patrice hastily concurred. "It always makes me think of someone who uses foul language and spits out of the corner of her mouth."

               
They both chuckled for a moment in unison. But Patrice's butterflymind had already fluttered on to the next topic, as she dropped ash into the waste-receptacle. "Wonder if I'll be able to smoke openly, once I'm home?" She shrugged. "Oh well, there's always the back of the barn."

               
And then suddenly she had reverted to their mutual condition again.

               
"Are you frightened? About it , you know?"

               
Helen made the admission with her eyes.

               
"I am too." She took a reflective puff. "I think everyone is, a little, don't you? Men don't think we are. All I have to do is look at Hugh--" she deepened the dimple-pits humorously--"and I can see he's frightened enough for the two of us, so then I don't let on that I'm frightened too. And I reassure him ."

               
Helen wondered what it was like to have someone to talk to about it

               
"Are they pleased about it?"

               
"Oh sure. They're tickled silly. First grandchild, you know. They didn't even ask us if we wanted to come back. 'You're coming back,' and that was that."

               
She pointed the remnant of her cigarette down toward one of the taps, quenched it with a sharp little jet of water.

               
"Ready? Shall we go back to our seats now?"

               
They were both doing little things. All life is that, the continuous doing of little things, all life long. And then suddenly a big thing strikes into their midst--and where are the little things, what became of them, what were they?

               
Her hand was to the door, reversing the little handlatch that Patrice had locked before, when they first came in. Patrice was somewhere behind her, replacing something in the uplidded dressing-kit, about to close it and bring it with her. She could see her vaguely in the chromium sheeting lining the wall before her. Little things. Little things that life is made up of. Little things that stop--

               
Her senses played a trick on her. There was no time for them to synchronize with the thing that happened. They played her false. She had a fleeting impression, at first, of having done something wrong to the door, dislodged it in its entirety. Simply by touching that little hand-latch. It was as though she were bringing the whole door-slab down inward on herself. As though it were falling bodily out of its frame, hinges and all. And yet it never did, it never detached itself, it never came apart from the entire wall-section it was imbedded in. So the second fleeting impression, equally false and equally a matter of seconds only, was that the entire wall of the compartment, door and all, was toppling, threatening to come down on her. And yet that never did either. Instead, the whole alcove seemed to upend, shift on a crazy axis, so that what had been the wall before her until now, had shifted to become the ceiling over her; so that what had been the floor she was standing on until now, had shifted to become the wall upright before her. The door was gone hopelessly out of reach; was a sealed trap overhead, impossible to attain.

               
The lights went. All light was gone, and yet so vividly explosive were the sensory images whirling through her mind that they glowed on of their own incandescence in the dark; it took her a comparatively long time to realize she was steeped in pitch-blackness, could no longer see physically. Only in afterglow of imaginative terror.

               
There was a nauseating sensation as if the tracks, instead of being rigid steel rods, had softened into rippling ribbons, with the train still trying to follow their buckling curvature. The car seemed to go up and down, like a scenic railway performing foreshortened dips and rises that followed one another quicker and quicker and quicker. There was a distant rending, grinding, coming nearer, swelling as it came. It reminded her of a coffee-mill they had had at home, when she was a little girl. But that one didn't draw you into its maw, crunching everything in sight, as this one was doing.

               
"Hugh!" the disembodied floor itself seemed to scream out behind her. Just once.

               
Then after that the floor fell silent.

               
There were minor impressions. Of seams opening, and of heavy metal partitions being bent together over her head, until the opening that held her was no longer foursquare, but tent-shaped. The darkness blanched momentarily in sudden ghostly pallor that was hot and puckery to breathe. Escaping steam. Then it thinned out again, and the darkness came back full-pitch. A little orange light flickered up somewhere, far off. Then that ebbed and dimmed again, and was gone, too.

               
There wasn't any sound now, there wasn't any motion. Everything was still, and dreamy, and forgotten. What was this? Sleep? Death? She didn't think so. But it wasn't life either. She remembered life; life had been only a few minutes ago. Life had had lots of light in it, and people, and motion, and sound.

               
This must be something else. Some transitional stage, some other condition she hadn't been told about until now. Neither life, nor death, but something in-between.

               
Whatever it was, it held pain in it, it was all pain, only pain. Pain that started small, and grew, and grew, and grew. She tried to move, and couldn't. A slim rounded thing, cold and sweating, down by her feet, was holding her down. It lay across her straight, like a water pipe sprung out of joint.

               
Pain that grew and grew. If she could have screamed, it might have eased it. But she couldn't seem to.

               
She put her hand to her mouth. On her third finger she encountered a little metal circlet, a ring that had been drawn over it She bit on it. That helped, that eased it a little. The more the pain grew, the harder she bit. . . .

               
She heard herself moan a little, and she shut her eyes. The pain went away. But it took everything else with it, thought, knowledge, awareness.

               
She opened her eyes again, reluctantly. Minutes? Hours? She didn't know. She only wanted to sleep, to sleep some more. Thought, knowledge, awareness, came back. But the pain didn't come back; that seemed to be gone for good. Instead there was just this lassitude. She heard herself whimpering softly, like a small kitten. Or was it she?

               
She only wanted to sleep, to sleep some more. And they were making so much noise they wouldn't let her. Clanging, and pounding on sheets of loose tin, and prying things away. She rolled her head aside a little, in protest. . . .

               
An attenuated shaft of light peered through, from somewhere up over her head. It was like a long thin finger, a spoke, prodding for her, pointing at her, trying to find her in the dark.

               
It didn't actually hit her, but it kept probing for her in all the wrong places, all around her.

               
She only wanted to sleep. She mewed a little in protest--or was it she?--and there was a sudden frightened flurry of activity, the pounding became faster, the prying became more hectic.

               
Then all of it stopped at once, there was a complete cessation, and a man's voice sounded directly over her, strangely hollow and blurred as when you talk through a tube.

               
"Steady. We're coming to you. Just a minute longer, honey. Can you hold out? Are you hurt? Are you bad? Are you alone under there?"

               
"No," she said feebly. "I've--I've just had a baby down here."

6

               
Recovery was like a progressive equalization of badly unbalanced soistices. At first time was all nights, unbroken polar nights, with tiny fractional days lasting a minute or two at a time. Nights were sleep and days were wakefulness. Then little by little the days expanded and the nights contracted. Presently, instead of many little days during the space of each twenty-four hours, there was just one long one in the middle of it each time, the way there should be. Soon this had even begun to overlap at one end, to continue beyond the setting of the sun and impinge into the first hour or two of evening. Now, instead of many little fragmentary days in the space of one night, there were many little fragmentary nights in the space of one day. Dozes or naps. The soistices had reversed themselves.