The Box: Uncanny Stories (13 page)

Words. Empty, with no power to convey the moist, warm feel of earth. The sound of grain fields rustling in the wind like golden seas. The sight of sun setting on a red barn wall. The smell of soft lea winds carrying, from afar, the delicate clank of cowbells.

“This is a forest. A forest is made of trees.”

No sense of presence in those black, dogmatic symbols whether sounded or looked upon. No sound of winds rushing like eternal rivers through the high green canopies. No smell of pine and birch, oak and maple and hemlock. No feel of treading on the century-thick carpet of leafy forest floors.

Words. Blunt, sawed-off lengths of hemmed-in meaning; incapable of evocation, of expansion. Black figures on white. This is a cat. This is a dog. Cat, dog. This is a man. This is a woman. Man, woman. Car. Horse. Tree. Desk. Children. Each word a trap, stalking his mind. A snare set to enclose fluid and unbounded comprehension.

E
very day she stood him on the platform.

“Paal,” she would say, pointing at him, “Paal. Say it. Paal.”

He couldn’t. He stared at her, too intelligent not to make the connection, too much afraid to seek further.

“Paal.” A boney finger prodding at his chest. “Paal. Paal.
Paal
.”

He fought it. He had to fight it. He blanked his gaze and saw nothing of the room around him, concentrating only on his mother’s hands. He knew it was a battle. Like a jelling of sickness, he had felt each new encroachment on his sensitivity.

“You’re not listening, Paal Nielsen!” Miss Frank would accuse, shaking him. “You’re a stubborn, ungrateful boy. Don’t you want to be like
other
children?”

Staring eyes; and her thin, never-to-be-kissed lips stirring, pressing in.

“Sit down,” she’d say. He didn’t move. She’d move him off the platform with rigid fingers.

“Sit
down
,” she’d say as if talking to a mulish puppy.

Every day.

S
he was awake in an instant; in another instant, on her feet and hurrying across the darkness of the room. Behind her, Harry slept with laboring breaths. She shut away the sound and let her hand
slip off the doorknob as she started across the hall.

“
Darling
.”

He was standing by the window, looking out. As she spoke, he whirled and, in the faint illumination of the night light, she could see the terror written on his face.

“Darling, come to bed.” She led him there and tucked him in, then sat beside him, holding his thin, cold hands.

“What is it, dear?”

He looked at her with wide, pained eyes.

“
Oh
—” She bent over and pressed her warm cheek to his. “What are you afraid of?”

In the dark silence it seemed as if a vision of the schoolroom and Miss Frank standing in it crossed her mind.

“Is it the school?” she asked, thinking it only an idea which had occurred to her.

The answer was in his face.

“But school is nothing to be afraid of, darling,” she said. “You—”

She saw tears welling in his eyes, and abruptly she drew him up and held him tightly against herself.
Don’t be afraid
, she thought.
Darling, please don’t be afraid. I’m here and I love you just as much as they did. I love you even more
—

Paal drew back. He stared at her as if he didn’t understand.

A
s the car pulled up in back of the house, Werner saw a woman turn away from the kitchen window.

“If we’d only heard from you,” said Wheeler, “but there was never a word. You can’t blame us for adopting the boy. We did what we thought was best.”

Werner nodded wih short, distracted movements of his head.

“I understand,” he said quietly. “We received no letters, however.”

They sat in the car in silence, Werner staring through the windshield, Wheeler looking at his hands.

Holger and Fanny
dead
, Werner was thinking. A horrible discovery to make. The boy exposed to the cruel blunderings of people who did not understand. That was, in a way, even more horrible.

Wheeler was thinking of those letters and of Cora. He should have written again. Still, those letters should have reached Europe. Was it possible they were all missent?

“Well,” he said, finally, “you’ll—want to see the boy.”

“Yes,” said Werner.

The two men pushed open the car doors and got out. They walked across the backyard and up the wooden porch steps. Have you taught him how to speak?—Werner almost said but couldn’t bring himself to ask. The concept of a boy like Paal exposed to the blunt, deadening forces of usual speech was something he felt uncomfortable thinking about.

“I’ll get my wife,” said Wheeler. “The living room’s in there.”

After the sheriff had gone up the back stairs, Werner walked slowly through the hall and into the front room. There he took off his raincoat and hat and dropped them over the back of a wooden chair. Upstairs he could hear the faint sound of voices—a man and woman. The woman sounded upset.

When he heard footsteps, he turned from the window.

The sheriff’s wife entered beside her husband. She was smiling politely, but Werner knew she wasn’t happy to see him there.

“Please sit down,” she said.

He waited until she was in a chair, then settled down on the couch.

“What is it you want?” asked Mrs. Wheeler.

“Did your husband tell you—?”

“He told me who you were,” she interrupted, “but not why you want to see Paul.”

“
Paul
?” asked Werner, surprised.

“We—” Her hands sought out each other nervously. “—we changed it to Paul. It—seemed more appropriate. For a Wheeler, I mean.”

“I see.” Werner nodded politely.

Silence.

“Well,” Werner said then, “you wish to know why I am here to see—the boy. I will explain as briefly as possible.

“Ten years ago, in Heidelberg, four married couples—the Elkenbergs, the Kalders, the Nielsens, and my wife and I—decided to try an experiment on our children—some not yet born. An experiment of the mind.

“We had accepted, you see, the proposition that ancient man, deprived of the dubious benefit of language, had been telepathic.”

Cora started in her chair.

“Further,” Werner went on, not noticing, “that the basic organic source of this ability is still functioning though no longer made use of—a sort of ethereal tonsil, a higher appendix—not used but neither useless.

“So we began our work, each searching for physiological facts while, at the same time, developing
the ability in our children. Monthly correspondence was exchanged, a systematic methodology of training was arrived at slowly. Eventually, we planned to establish a colony with the grown children, a colony to be gradually consolidated until these abilities would become second nature to its members.

“
Paal is one of these children
.”

Wheeler looked almost dazed.

“This is a
fact
?” he asked.

“A fact,” said Werner.

Cora sat numbly in her chair staring at the tall German. She was thinking about the way Paal seemed to understand her without words. Thinking of his fear of the school and Miss Frank. Thinking of how many times she had woken up and gone to him even though he didn’t make a sound.

“What?” she asked, looking up as Werner spoke.

“I say—may I see the boy now?”

“He’s in school,” she said. “He’ll be home in—”

She stopped as a look of almost revulsion crossed Werner’s face.

“
School
?” he asked.

P
aal Nielsen, stand.”

The young boy slid from his seat and stood beside the desk. Miss Frank gestured to him once and,
more like an old man than a boy, he trudged up to the platform and stood beside her as he always did.

“Straighten up,” Miss Frank demanded. “Shoulders back.”

The shoulders moved, the back grew flat.

“What’s your name?” asked Miss Frank.

The boy pressed his lips together slightly. His swallowing made a dry, rattling noise.

“
What is your name
?”

Silence in the classroom except for the restive stirring of the young. Erratic currents of their thought deflected off him like random winds.

“
Your name,” she said
.

He made no reply.

The virgin teacher looked at him and, in the moment that she did, through her mind ran memories of her childhood. Of her gaunt, mania-driven mother keeping her for hours at a time in the darkened front parlor, sitting at the great round table, her fingers arched over the smoothly worn ouija board—making her try to communicate with her dead father.

Memories of those terrible years were still with her—always with her. Her minor sensitivity being abused and twisted into knots until she hated every single thing about perception. Perception was an evil, full of suffering and anguish.

The boy must be freed of it.

“Class,” she said, “I want you all to think of Paal’s name.” (This was his name no matter what Mrs. Wheeler chose to call him.) “Just think of it. Don’t say it. Just think: Paal, Paal, Paal. When I count three. Do you understand?”

They stared at her, some nodding. “
Yes
, Miss Frank,” piped up her only faithful.

“All right,” she said, “One—two—
three
.”

It flung into his mind like the blast of a hurricane, pounding and tearing at his hold on wordless sensitivity. He trembled on the platform, his mouth fallen ajar.

The blast grew stronger, all the power of the young directed into a single, irresistible force. Paal,
Paal, PAAL
!! It screamed into the tissues of his brain.

Until, at the very peak of it, when he thought his head would explode, it was all cut away by the voice of Miss Frank scalpelling into his mind.

“
Say it! Paal
!”

H
ere he comes,” said Cora. She turned from the window. “Before he gets here, I want to apologize for my rudeness.”

“Not at all,” said Werner, distractedly, “I understand perfectly. Naturally, you would think that I
had come to take the boy away. As I have said, however, I have no legal powers over him—being no relation. I simply want to see him as the child of my two colleagues—whose shocking death I have only now learned of.”

He saw the woman’s throat move and picked out the leap of guilty panic in her mind. She had destroyed the letters her husband wrote. Werner knew it instantly but said nothing. He sensed that the husband also knew it; she would have enough trouble as it was.

They heard Paal’s footsteps on the bottom step of the front porch.

“I
will
take him out of school,” Cora said.

“Perhaps not,” said Werner, looking towards the door. In spite of everything he felt his heartbeat quicken, felt the fingers of his left hand twitch in his lap. Without a word, he sent out the message. It was a greeting the four couples had decided on; a sort of password.

Telepathy
, he thought,
is the communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another independently of the recognized channels of sense
.

Werner sent it twice before the front door opened.

Paal stood there, motionless.

Werner saw recognition in his eyes, but, in the
boy’s mind, was only confused uncertainty. The misted vision of Werner’s face crossed it. In his mind, all the people had existed—Werner, Elkenberg, Kalder, all their children. But now it was locked up and hard to capture. The face disappeared.

“Paul, this is Mister Werner,” Cora said.

Werner did not speak. He sent the message out again—with such force that Paal could not possibly miss it. He saw a look of uncomprehending dismay creep across the boy’s features, as if Paal suspected that something was happening yet could not imagine what.

The boy’s face grew more confused. Cora’s eyes moved concernedly from him to Werner and back again. Why didn’t Werner speak? She started to say something, then remembered what the German had said.

“Say, what—?” Wheeler began until Cora waved her hand and stopped him.

Paal, think
!—Werner thought desperately—
Where is your mind
?

Suddenly, there was a great, wracking sob in the boy’s throat and chest. Werner shuddered.

“My name is Paal,” the boy said.

The voice made Werner’s flesh crawl. It was unfinished, like a puppet voice, thin, wavering, and brittle.

“My name is Paal.”

He couldn’t stop saying it. It was as if he were whipping himself on, knowing what had happened and trying to suffer as much as possible with the knowledge.

“My name is Paal. My name is Paal.” An endless, frightening babble; in it, a panic-stricken boy seeking out an unknown power which had been torn from him.

“My name is Paal.” Even held tightly in Cora’s arms, he said it. “My name is Paal.” Angrily, pitiably, endlessly. “
My name is Paal. My name is Paal
.”

Werner closed his eyes.

Lost
.

W
heeler offered to take him back to the bus station, but Werner told him he’d rather walk. He said good-bye to the sheriff and asked him to relay his regrets to Mrs. Wheeler, who had taken the sobbing boy up to his room.

Now, in the beginning fall of a fine, mistlike rain, Werner walked away from the house, from Paal.

It was not something easily judged, he was thinking. There was no right and wrong of it. Definitely, it was not a case of evil versus good. Mrs. Wheeler, the sheriff, the boy’s teacher, the people of German
Corners—they had, probably, all meant well. Understandably, they had been outraged at the idea of a seven-year-old boy not having been taught to speak by his parents. Their actions were, in light of that, justifiable and good.

It was simply that, so often, evil could come of misguided good.

No, it was better left as it was. To take Paal back to Europe—back to the others—would be a mistake. He could if he wanted to; all the couples had exchanged papers giving each other the right to take over rearing of the children should anything happen to the parents. But it would only confuse Paal further. He had been a trained sensitive, not a born one. Although, by the principle they all worked on, all children were born with the atavistic ability to telepath, it was so easy to lose, so difficult to recapture.