Night Gallery 1 (7 page)

"Not a particle," Pamela said icily.

"Pity." Jonathan shook his head a little forlornly. "That rather takes the fun out of it. I'd hoped the discomfort would be somewhat prolonged. You know—tit for tat. My fifteen-odd years of, marital agony—against at least a few minutes of some pronounced pain of your own. A real pity, Pamela."

Pamela rose from the sofa. "You had it rough, you did," she screeched at him. "You meandering tomcat, you! Why, I could have had my pick of any man in town! My daddy, God rest his soul, had to bar the doors to keep the swains from forcing their way in."

Jonathan looked up at the ceiling and laughed. "The swains?" he roared. "The swains, indeed. My God, Pamela, they weren't swains. They were a two-platoon system of fortune-hunters and hungry gigolos!"

"So
you
say!"

"Because it's the truth. Without your big daddy's bank account, you couldn't have gotten a proposal in an all-male penal colony. You couldn't have even gotten an indecent proposition!"

"Now, you listen to me, Jonathan." Her shrill voice, just as always, enveloped the room.

Jonathan simply turned away and lit another cigarette. "I have listened to you, Pamela," he said quietly, "for over fifteen years. I have listened to you to the point of a bleeding ulcer, two ruptured eardrums, and a permanent migraine!"

With this he uncorked the wine bottle, then started to carry it back over to the chest for a glass. Inexplicably, Pamela was standing in front of him. He hadn't seen her move. She just appeared, as if transported from her former place to a point in front of the chest directly in Jonathan's path. He stopped and drew away from her waggling finger.

"You listen to me, Jonathan," she said, "and you keep listening, because I intend to keep right on talking.''

Jonathan shrugged, turned, and retreated back to his chair. Once again he found Pamela standing in front of him, blocking him.

"You were a swine as a husband." Her voice, a constant, perpetual siren shrilled at him, and he found himself staring at that omniscient cave that kept opening and closing. "You were a rotter as a companion—a faithless fancy Dan with all the morals of a Bowery wino!"

Then something exploded inside of him. That mouth of hers . . . that voice of hers clawed a hole in his restraint, and through it poured out all the rage, all the frustration, all the mountainous hatred he had managed to throttle over the miserable decade and a half.

"You bloody bitch, you!" he screamed at her. "Close that big flapping mouth of yours! You think I've risked an electric chair just to suffer
more
of you? That suet-pudding body of yours—that's one thing. But that voice of yours, Pamela—that voice! That untuned trombone screech that fills the room every time you air your tonsils!"

It flowed out of him—the hot, bubbling waves of venom so long pent up. "That's what made me do it, Pamela. That cacophony of noise—that off-key lunch whistle—that cracked calliope that woke me in the morning and shrieked at me throughout the day and battered my head at night!"

He held out a fist in front of her face. "That's why I murdered you, Pamela.
So I wouldn't have to listen to that voice of yours!
"

Pamela's laughter filled the room and made him wince.

"Well, now," she said, "fancy that! Poor, sensitive man with the delicate ears! Didn't care for the sound of my voice."

She sauntered back over to the sofa and sat down. "And what do you suppose you're listening to now, Jonathan?" she asked. "Dead, I may be—but what is it you're listening to?"

Jonathan moved over to the casket and leaned against it, again lighting a cigarette. "What am I listening to?" he repeated. He tapped his forehead. "My imagination. That's what I'm listening to. I'm listening, Pamela, to a fantasy. I'm looking at a specter. You—that dumpy, flabby carcass of yours—that pulsating and perpetual nagging—
I'm imagining it!
"

He let the fingers of one hand move across the polished surface of the casket. "Do you recall what Scrooge said to the ghost of Marley?" he asked her. " 'You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an undone potato. There is more of gravy than grave about you.' Understand, Pamela? You're very likely part of my eggs Benedict—simply a case of stereophonic indigestion!''

He smiled, tapped the side of the casket, then crooked a finger at her. "Why fight it, Pamela? It's beddy-bye time. Permanent beddy-bye time." He looked at his watch. "They'll be coming for you soon."

Pamela's voice sounded puzzled. "Who will?"

"Why, the funeral director and his minions, of course. We're going to convey you to the cemetery."

Pamela stared at him. "How's that again, Jonathan?''

Jonathan's anger fizzled out like a spent firecracker. His voice was patient. "The cemetery, my dear. The repository of the deceased. The tomb . . . the vault · . . the crypt . . . the resting place . . . the ossuary. Dig? Boot Hill, baby."

Pamela sighed. "I swear, Jonathan. You're still the most absentminded man I ever met. Absentminded as a professor."

"I am?" he said, pointing to himself.

"Don't you remember? You buried me months ago."

Jonathan bunked at her. "I did
what?
" he asked, feeling a funny disorientation.

"I fell down the stairs," Pamela said, "on the seventeenth of April. My funeral was on the nineteenth. And this is August."

Again he blinked at her and tried to remember. How could it be August? The whole thing had happened just that morning. Or had it? He suddenly realized that he was unable to piece together the chronology of the day. He remembered his walk and the eggs Benedict and the piano wire. But was that this

morning? Or another day? Or when was it?

"August?" he repeated.

"August," she answered in an unusually soft voice.

He stared at her for a long moment, took a few steps halfway across the room toward her, then stopped and looked over his shoulder at the casket, jerking his thumb at it. "And . . . that?" he asked, whispering.

He didn't wait for her reply. He turned and walked back over to the casket, feeling the anchor-chain weight of premonition—not wanting to look—but compelled to look, even so.

Pamela folded her arms in front of her. When she spoke, her voice zoomed up to its normal high-pitched, shattering decibel level. "You've only yourself to blame," she bugled out triumphantly. "It's no more than you deserve for so excessively celebrating my demise."

Jonathan peered into the casket. The cigarette and its holder fell to the floor.

Lying there, on tufted velvet, was himself hands folded in peaceful repose.

Pamela's voice formed an obligato to the silent moment. "All that rich food," she scolded, "those late hours, the alcoholic spirits. If I'd told you once, I'd told you a hundred times, Jonathan. You were constitutionally unsuited to the life of indecency and Bacchanalian self-indulgence."

Jonathan stood there, rooted—staring in numb disbelief at his own waxen face in the casket. He was only barely conscious of the fractious screech that came from across the room.

"Would you listen to me, Jonathan? Of course not. Like all the other sound advice I I offered you down through the years, you ungrateftfily ignored it! And don't think I don't know why you married me, you fortune-hunting finagler. You married me for my money, my position, my family, this house—"

Jonathan tore his gaze away from the corpse and turned back toward Pamela. "Pamela," he said, "it isn't just you . . . it's also—"

Pamela filled it in for him. "You, Jonathan. Quite correct. The word is 'ghost.' That's precisely what you are."

What an incredibly strange dream, Jonathan thought to himself as he moved back over to the chair. Nightmare on top of nightmare.

He found her at his elbow. "I reject that," he announced in a slightly quavering voice, "as palpably impossible. I reject you, Pamela. Because when one dies—one either goes up there" he pointed to the ceiling—"or down there." He pointed to the floor.

"You're right as rain, Jonathan," Pamela said. "Right as rain. And in heaven you can do anything you want. Now, my being a social woman, an extrovert, you might say—a person who enjoys communicating—well, I shall spend the rest of my eternity talking. And you, Jonathan you pusher of wives down staircases while I talk through eternity . . . you'll
listen.
"

Again he found himself staring at her mouth. "Eternity?'' he whispered. He pointed to himself. "Me?" He pointed to her. "Listening to you?"

Someplace deep within him he accepted. He knew. It was no nightmare. At least it was no sleeping nightmare. This nightmare lived and breathed and existed.

He cleared his throat. "That's grossly unfair, Pamela,'' he announced. "You just said that in heaven one can do anything one wishes."

Pamela's beady lizard eyes shone with triumphant pleasure. "In heaven, Jonathan indeed. But I'm afraid the organization to which
you've
been assigned is not quite so accommodating."

And he knew. Oh, yes, indeed—he knew. He remembered his death then, as he remembered hers. The sharp pain in his chest, the clammy wereess of his gray skin seen in the bedroom mirror as he fell forward against it, and watched the ceiling converge with walls as he landed on the floor. His death was a matter of record, and he knew it. And he knew something else. Pamela was quite correct. No theological abstraction here. Not angels and devils. Not clouds and brimstone pits. Eternity was tailored for the individual. And as he watched her mouth move and heard the staccato, ceaseless, remorseless, unending shrillness of her voice, he knew all about
his
eternity.

"Now, what was I saying?" Pamela asked. "Oh, yes. As I was commenting before, Jonathan, just before you pushed me down those stairs—it's always been my feeling that you can judge a man by the way he listens."

Jonathan stood there helplessly, hopelessly. His ears began to twitch and burn. His head began to ache.

And still Pamela's voice continued. "Not the way a man dresses, Jonathan. Mind you, that's important. It's the way a man listens. Now, if a man is responsive . . . if he's attentive . . . if a man really has an interest in what you're saying—"

The grandfather clock in the corner of the room ticked away in perfect cadence to Pamela's voice. Tick-tick-tick.

"And, Jonathan, I want to discuss something else with you—"

Tick-tick-tick.

"This cigarette-smoking thing. You know that tobacco is a miserable poison. And it fouls up the air."

Tick-tick-tick.

"And another thing, Jonathan—"

Tick-tick-tick.

The wave of noise smashed over his brain like pounding surf. He felt a wetness and looked down at the tears on his transparent hands. There were two things he knew for certain. Ghosts could cry.

"Now, let me tell you this, Jonathan—"

And ghosts could hear.

The grandfather clock and Pamela's voice went on . . . and on . . . and on . . .

For the second time that night, he had the Dream. Once again he was in Falcon, heading downward toward the surface of the moon. The voice of Capcom, 200,000 miles away, filtered into his earphones.

"Houston, you're go for landing. Over."

Aloud, in his dark bedroom, Lt. Commander Jonathan Cornelius Evans relived the moment. "Roger,

understand. Go for landing. 3,000 feet," he said aloud.

"Copy," Capcom responded.

The voices jumbled together. A mental mosaic of memory. And his own voice continued to document the descent. "We're go. Hang tight. We're go. 2,000 feet. 2,000 feet into the AGS. 47 degrees. 35 degrees. 750, coming down at 23. 700 feet, 21 down. 33 degrees. 600 feet, down at 19. 540 feet, down at 30—down at 15. 400 feet, down at 9."

And the Dream went on. A Xerox copy of the way it had been. Just the way it had been. Falcon, the lunar module, on its way to the moon. With Lt. Commander Evans at the controls.

Alongside of him his wife stirred and opened her eyes, turned toward the sleeping face and the mumbled monologue.

His voice went on. "Lights on. Down 2½. Forward. Forward. Good. 40 feet, down 2½. Picking up some dust. 30 feet, 2½ down. Faint shadow. 4 forward. 4 forward, dipping to the fight a little. 6."

Monica Evans, now wideawake, looked through the darkness at the silhouetted face of her husband and wished she might enter that dream or whatever it was—whatever was that recurring night journey he traveled each night since his return.

But Lt. Commander Evans was on the moon.

"Contact light. Okay, engines stopped. ACA out of detent. Modes control both auto, descent engine command override off. Engine arm, off. 413 is in."

"We copy you down, Falcon," said Capcom.

He was there on the surface of the moon, the panel of red lights in front of him glowing in the darkness of the little cabin.

"Houston, Tranquillity base here. Falcon has landed. Repeat. Falcon has landed."

His wife watched him as he slowly rose to a sitting position in the bed, his eyes now wide open, staring across the room at the dresser mirror. She tried to look at his eyes as if in their vision might be something to be shared. But the eyes eluded her. They were looking out of a small circular window, clouded and pitted, but revealing the surface of the moon. The incredibly black sky. The lonely, virgin nothingness of the cratered landscape outside.

And then, in the manner of dreams, time was telescoped. He stood on the top rung of the ladder and heard Capcom's voice in his earphones.

"Okay, Jonny, we can see you coming down the ladder now."

"Okay," he said. "I just checked—getting back up to that first step. It's not even collapsed too far, but it's adequate to get back up."

"Roger, we copy," said Capcom.

Slowly he turned his head in the little glass-cubed world of his space helmet and looked down. His heavily encased feet started down the ladder, touching each rung as he moved.

"I'm at the foot of the ladder," he said. "The LM foot pads are only depressed in the surface . . . about one or two inches. The surface appears to be very, very fine-grained as you get close to it. It's almost like powder. Now and then, it's very fine."