The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (31 page)

On the ninth, Mom called. “Have you written your newsletter yet?”

“I’ve been
busy,” I said, and waited for her to ask me if I’d met anyone lately at work.

“I got Jackie Peterson’s newsletter this morning,” she said.

“So did I.” The invasion apparently hadn’t reached Miami. Jackie’s newsletter, which is usually terminally cute, had reached new heights:

And straight through MERRY CHRISTMAS, A HAPPY NEW YEAR, and both her first and last names.

“I do wish she wouldn’t try to put her letters in verse,” Mom said. “They never scan.”

“Mom,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “My arthritis has been kicking up the last couple of days, but otherwise I’ve never felt better. I’ve been thinking, there’s no reason for you to send out newsletters
if you don’t want to.”

“Mom,” I said, “did Sueann give you a hat for Christmas?”

“Oh, she told you,” Mom said. “You know, I don’t usually like hats, but I’m going to need one for the wedding, and—”

“Wedding?”

“Oh, didn’t she tell you? She and David are getting married right after Christmas. I am so relieved. I thought she was never going to meet anyone decent.”

I reported that
to Gary. “I
know,” he said glumly. “I just got a raise.”

“I haven’t found a single bad effect,” I said. “No signs of violence or antisocial behavior. Not even any irritability.”

“There you are,” Penny said crabbily, coming up with a huge poinsettia under each arm. “Can you help me put these on everybody’s desks?”

“Are these the Christmas decorations?” I asked.

“No, I’m still waiting on that farmer,” she
said, handing me one of the poinsettias. “This is just a little something to brighten up everyone’s desk.” She reached down, to move the pine-cone dish on Gary’s desk. “You didn’t eat your candy canes,” she said.

“I don’t like peppermint.”

“Nobody ate their candy canes,” she said disgustedly. “They all ate the chocolate kisses and left the candy canes.”

“People like chocolate,” Gary said, and
whispered to me, “When is she going to be taken over?”

“Meet me in Hunziger’s office right away,” I whispered back, and said to Penny, “Where does this poinsettia go?”

“Jim Bridgeman’s desk.”

I took the poinsettia up to Computing on fifth. Jim was wearing his baseball cap backward. “A little something to brighten your desk,” I said, handing it to him, and started back toward the stairs.

“Can
I talk to you a minute?” he said, following me out into the stairwell.

“Sure,” I said, trying to sound calm. “What about?”

He leaned toward me. “Have you noticed anything unusual going on?”

“You mean the poinsettia?” I said. “Penny does tend to go a little overboard for Christmas, but—”

“No,” he said, putting his hand awkwardly to his cap, “people who are acting funny, people who aren’t themselves?”

“No,” I said, smiling. “I haven’t noticed a thing.”

I waited for Gary
in Hunziger’s office for nearly half an hour. “Sorry I took so long,” he said when he finally got there. “My ex-wife called. What were you saying?”

“I was saying that even you have to admit it would be a good thing if Penny was taken over,” I said. “What if the parasites aren’t evil? What if they’re those—what are those parasites
that benefit the host called? You know, like the bacteria that help cows produce milk? Or those birds that pick insects off of rhinoceroses?”

“You mean symbiotes?” Gary said.

“Yes,” I said eagerly. “What if this is some kind of symbiotic relationship? What if they’re raising everyone’s IQ or enhancing their emotional maturity; and it’s having a good effect on us?”

“Things that sound too good
to be true usually are. No,” he said, shaking his head. “They’re up to something, I know it. And we’ve got to find out what it is.”

On the tenth when I came to work, Penny was putting up the Christmas decorations. They were as she had promised, something special: wide swags of red velvet ribbons running all around the walls with red velvet bows and large bunches of mistletoe every few feet. In
between were gold-calligraphic scrolls reading “And kiss me ’neath the mistletoe, For Christmas comes but once a year.”

“What do you think?” Penny said climbing down from her step-ladder. “Every floor has a different quotation.” She reached into a large cardboard box. “Accounting’s is ‘Sweetest the kiss that’s stolen under the mistletoe.’”

I came over and looked into the box. “Where did you
get all the mistletoe?” I asked.

“This apple farmer I know,” she said, moving the ladder.

I picked up a big branch of the green leaves and white berries. “It must have cost a fortune.” I had bought a sprig of it last year that had cost six dollars.

Penny, climbing the ladder, shook her head. “It didn’t cost anything. He was glad to get rid of it.” She tied the bunch of mistletoe to the red
velvet ribbon. “It’s a parasite, you know. It kills the trees.”

“Kills the trees?” I said blankly, staring at the white berries.

“Or deforms them,” she said. “It steals nutrients from the tree’s sap, and the tree gets these swellings and galls and things. The farmer told me all about it.”

As soon as I had
the chance, I took the material Gary had downloaded on parasites into Hunziger’s office
and read through it.

Mistletoe caused grotesque swellings wherever its rootlets attached themselves to the tree. Anthracnose caused cracks and then spots of dead bark called cankers. Blight wilted trees’ leaves. Witches’ broom weakened limbs. Bacteria caused tumorlike growths on the trunk, called galls.

We had been focusing on the mental and psychological effects when we should have been looking
at the physical ones. The heightened intelligence, the increase in civility and common sense, must simply be side effects of the parasites’ stealing nutrients. And damaging the host.

I stuck the papers back into the file folder, went back to my desk, and called my sister Sueann.

“Sueann, hi,” I said. “I’m working on my Christmas newsletter, and I wanted to make sure I spelled David’s name right.
Is Carrington spelled C-A-R-R or C-E-R-R?”

“C-A-R-R. Oh, Nan, he’s so wonderful! So different from the losers I usually date! He’s considerate and sensitive and—”

“And how are you?” I said. “Everybody at work’s been down with the flu.”

“Really?” she said. “No, I’m fine.”

What did I do now? I couldn’t ask “Are you sure?” without making her suspicious. “C-A-R-R,” I said, trying to think of another
way to approach the subject.

Sueann saved me the trouble. “You won’t believe what he did yesterday. Showed up at work to take me home. He knew my ankles had been hurting, and he brought me a tube of Ben-Gay and a dozen pink roses. He is so thoughtful.”

“Your ankles have been hurting?” I said, trying not to sound anxious.

“Like crazy. It’s this weather or something. I could hardly walk on them
this morning.”

I jammed the parasite papers back into the file folder, made sure I hadn’t left any on the desk like the hero in
Parasite People from Planet X
, and went up to see Gary.

He was on the phone.

“I’ve got to talk to you,” I whispered.

“I’d like that,” he said into the phone, an odd look on his face.

“What is it?” I said. “Have they found out we’re on to them?”

“Shh,”
he said. “You
know I do,” he said into the phone.

“You don’t understand,” I said. “I’ve figured out what it’s doing to people.”

He held up a finger, motioning me to wait. “Can you hang on a minute?” he said into the phone, and put his hand over the receiver. “I’ll meet you in Hunziger’s office in five minutes,” he said.

“No,” I said. “It’s not safe. Meet me at the post office.”

He nodded and went back to
his conversation, still with that odd look on his face.

I ran back down to second for my purse and went to the post office. I had intended to wait on the corner, but it was crowded with people jockeying to drop money into the Salvation Army Santa Claus’s kettle.

I looked down the sidewalk. Where was Gary? I went up the steps and scanned the street. There was no sign of him.

“Merry Christmas!”
a man said, half-tipping a fedora and holding the door for me.

“Oh no, I’m—” I began, and saw Tonya coming down the street. “Thank you,” I said, and ducked inside.

It was freezing inside, and the line for the postal clerks wound out into the lobby. I got in it. It would take an hour at least to work my way to the front, which meant I could wait for Gary without looking suspicious.

Except that
I was the only one not wearing a hat. Every single person in line had one on, and the clerks behind the counter were wearing mail carriers’ caps. And broad smiles.

“Packages going overseas should really have been mailed by November fifteenth,” the middle clerk was saying, not at all disgruntledly, to a little Japanese woman in a red cap, “but don’t worry, we’ll figure out a way to get your presents
there on time.”

“The line’s only about forty-five minutes long,” the woman in front of me confided cheerfully. She was wearing a small black hat with a feather and carrying four enormous packages. I wondered if they were full of pods. “Which isn’t bad at all, considering it’s Christmas.”

I nodded, looking toward the door. Where was he?

“Why are you here?” the woman said, smiling.

“What?” I
said, whirling back around, my heart pounding.

“What are
you here to mail?” she said. “I see you don’t have any packages.”

“S-stamps,” I stammered.

“You can go ahead of me,” she said. “If all you’re buying is stamps. I’ve got all these packages to send. You don’t want to wait for that.”

I
do
want to wait, I thought. “No, that’s all right. I’m buying a lot of stamps,” I said. “I’m buying several
sheets. For my Christmas newsletter.”

She shook her head, balancing the packages. “Don’t be silly. You don’t want to wait while they weigh all these.” She tapped the man in front of her. “This young lady’s only buying stamps,” she said. “Why don’t we let her go ahead of us?”

“Certainly,” the man, who was wearing a Russian karakul hat, said, and bowed slightly, stepping back.

“No, really,” I
began, but it was too late. The line had parted like the Red Sea.

“Thank you,” I said, and walked up to the counter. “Merry Christmas.”

The line closed behind me. They know, I thought. They know I was looking up plant parasites. I glanced desperately toward the door.

“Holly and ivy?” the clerk said, beaming at me.

“What?” I said.

“Your stamps.” He held up two sheets. “Holly and ivy or Madonna
and Child?”

“Holly and ivy,” I said weakly. “Three sheets, please.”

I paid for the sheets, thanked the mob again, and went back out into the freezing-cold lobby. And now what? Pretend I had a box and fiddle with the combination? Where was he?

I went over to
the bulletin board, trying not to seem suspicious, and looked at the Wanted posters. They had probably all turned themselves in by now
and were being model prisoners. And it really was a pity the parasites were going to have to be stopped.
If
they could be stopped.

It had been easy in the movies (in the movies, that is, in which they had managed to defeat them, which wasn’t all that many. Over half the movies had ended with the whole world being turned into glowing green eyes). And in the ones where they did defeat them, there
had been an awful lot of explosions and hanging precariously from helicopters. I hoped whatever we came up with didn’t involve skydiving.

Or a virus or ultrasonic sound, because even if I knew a doctor or scientist to ask, I couldn’t confide in them. “We can’t trust anybody,” Gary had said, and he was right. We couldn’t risk it. There was too much at stake. And we couldn’t call the police. “It’s
all in your imagination, Miss Johnson,” they would say. “Stay right there. We’re on our way.”

We would have to do this on our own. And
where
was Gary?

I looked at the Wanted
posters some more. I was sure the one in the middle looked like one of Sueann’s old boyfriends. He—

“I’m sorry I’m late,” Gary said breathlessly. His ears were red from the cold and his hair was ruffled from running. “I
had this phone call and—”

“Come on,” I said, and hustled him out of the post office, down the steps, and past the Santa and his mob of donors.

“Keep walking,” I said. “You were right about the parasites, but not because they turn people into zombies.”

I hurriedly told him about the galls and Tonya’s carpal tunnel syndrome. “My sister was infected at Thanksgiving, and now she can hardly walk,”
I said. “You were right. We’ve got to stop them.”

“But you don’t have any proof of this,” he said. “It could be arthritis or something, couldn’t it?”

I stopped walking. “What?”

“You don’t have any proof that it’s the aliens that are causing it. It’s cold. People’s arthritis always acts up when it’s cold out. And even if the aliens are causing it, a few aches and pains is a small price to pay
for all the benefits. You said yourself—”

I stared at his hair.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I haven’t been taken over. I’ve just been thinking about what you said about your sister’s engagement and—”

“Who was on the phone?”

He looked uncomfortable. “The thing is—”

“It was your ex-wife,” I said. “She’s been taken over, and now she’s nice, and you want to get back together with
her. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“You know how I’ve always felt about Marcie,” he said guiltily. “She says she never stopped loving me.”

When something sounds too good to be true, it probably is, I thought.

“She thinks I should move back in and see if we can’t work things out. But that isn’t the only reason,” he said, grabbing my arm. “I’ve been looking at all those clippings—dropouts going back
to school, escaped convicts turning themselves in—”