Thunder and Roses (11 page)

She
had
to find out. The whole thing was crazy. She hadn’t wanted a dog. If she had wanted a dog, it wouldn’t have been a Great Dane. And if it had been a Great Dane, it wouldn’t have been Tiny, for he was a Crucian dog and had to be shipped all the way to Scarsdale, New York, by air.

The series of letters she sent to Alec were as full of wondering persuasion as his had been when he sold her the dog. It was through these letters that she learned about the scorpion and the hurricane, about Tiny’s puppyhood and the way Alec brought up his dogs. If she learned something about Alec as well, that was understandable. Alec and Alistair Forsythe had never met, but through Tiny they shared a greater secret than many people who have grown up together.

“As for why I wrote you, of all people,” Alec wrote in answer to her direct question, “I can’t say I chose you at all. It was Tiny. One of the cruise-boat people mentioned your name at my place, over cocktails one afternoon. It was, as I remember, a Dr. Schwellenbach. Nice old fellow. As soon as your name was mentioned, Tiny’s head came up as if I had called him. He got up from his station by the door and lolloped over to the doctor with his ears up and his nose quivering. I thought for a minute that the old fellow was offering him food, but no—he must have wanted to hear Schwellenbach say your name again. So I asked about you. A day or so later I was telling a couple of friends about it, and when I mentioned the name again, Tiny came snuffling over and shoved his nose into my hand. He was
shivering. That got me. I wrote to a friend in New York who got your name and address in the phone book. You know the rest. I just wanted to tell you about it at first, but something made me suggest a sale. Somehow, it didn’t seem right to have something like this going on and not have you meet Tiny. When you wrote that you couldn’t get away from New York, there didn’t seem to be anything else to do but send Tiny to you. And now—I don’t know if I’m too happy about it. Judging from those pages and pages of questions you keep sending me, I get the idea that you are more than a little troubled by this crazy business.”

She answered, “
Please
don’t think I’m troubled about this! I’m not. I’m interested, and curious, and more than a little excited; but there is nothing about the situation that frightens me. I can’t stress that enough. There’s something around Tiny—sometimes I have the feeling it’s something outside Tiny—that is infinitely comforting. I feel protected, in a strange way, and it’s a different and greater thing than the protection I could expect from a large and intelligent dog. It’s strange, and it’s mysterious enough; but it isn’t at all frightening.

“I have some more questions. Can you remember exactly what it was that Dr. Schwellenbach said the first time he mentioned my name and Tiny acted strangely? Was there ever any time that you can remember when Tiny was under some influence other than your own, something which might have given him these strange traits? What about his diet as a puppy? How many times did he get …” and so on.

And Alec answered, in part, “It was so long ago now that I can’t remember exactly; but it seems to me Dr. Schwellenbach was talking about his work. As you know, he’s a professor of metallurgy. He mentioned Professor Nowland as the greatest alloy specialist of his time—said Nowland could alloy anything with anything. Then he went on about Nowland’s assistant. Said the assistant was very highly qualified, having been one of these Science Search products and something of a prodigy; in spite of which she was completely feminine and as beautiful a redhead as had ever exchanged heaven for earth. Then he said her name was Alistair Forsythe. (I hope you’re not blushing, Miss Forsythe; you asked for this!) And then it was that
Tiny ran over to the doctor in that extraordinary way.

“The only time I can think of when Tiny was off the estate and possibly under some influence was the day old Debbil disappeared for a whole day with the pup when he was about three months old. Debbil is one of the characters who hang around here. He’s a Crucian about sixty years old, a piratical-looking old gent with one eye and elephantiasis. He shuffles around the grounds running odd errands for anyone who will give him tobacco or a shot of white rum. Well, one morning I sent him over the hill to see if there was a leak in the water line that runs from the reservoir. It would only take a couple of hours, so I told him to take Tiny for a run.

“They were gone for the whole day. I was short-handed and busy as a squirrel in a nuthouse and didn’t have a chance to send anyone after him. But he drifted in toward evening. I bawled him out thoroughly. It was no use asking him where he had been; he’s only about quarter-witted anyway. He just claimed he couldn’t remember, which is pretty usual for him. But for the next three days I was busy with Tiny. He wouldn’t eat, and he hardly slept at all. He just kept staring out over the cane fields at the hill. He didn’t seem to want to go there at all. I went out to have a look. There’s nothing out that way but the reservoir and the old ruins of the governor’s palace, which have been rotting there in the sun for the last century and a half. Nothing left now but an overgrown mound and a couple of arches, but it’s supposed to be haunted. I forgot about it after that because Tiny got back to normal. As a matter of fact, he seemed to be better than ever, although, from then on, he would sometimes freeze and watch the hill as if he were listening to something. I haven’t attached much importance to it until now. I still don’t. Maybe he got chased by some mongoose’s mother. Maybe he chewed up some ganja-weed—marijuana to you. But I doubt that it has anything to do with the way he acts now, any more than that business of the compasses that pointed west might have something to do with it. Did you hear about that, by the way? Craziest thing I ever heard of. It was right after I shipped Tiny off to you last fall, as I remember. Every ship and boat and plane from here to Sandy Hook reported that its compass began to indicate due west instead of a magnetic
north! Fortunately the effect only lasted a couple of hours so there were no serious difficulties. One cruise steamer ran aground, and there were a couple of Miami fishing-boat mishaps. I only bring it up to remind both of us that Tiny’s behavior may be odd, but not exclusively so in a world where such things as the crazy compasses occur.”

And in her next, she wrote. “You’re quite the philosopher, aren’t you? Be careful of that Fortean attitude, my tropical friend. It tends to accept the idea of the unexplainable to an extent where explaining, or even investigating, begins to look useless. As far as that crazy compass episode is concerned, I remember it very well indeed. My boss, Dr. Nowland—yes, it’s true, he can alloy anything with anything!—has been up to his ears in that fantastic happenstance. So have most of his colleagues in half a dozen sciences. They’re able to explain it quite satisfactorily, too. It was simply the presence of some quite quasi-magnetic phenomenon that created a resultant field at right angles to the earth’s own magnetic influence. That solution sent the pure theorists home happy. Of course, the practical ones—Nowland and his associates in metallurgy, for example—only have to figure out what caused the field. Science is a wonderful thing.

“By the way, you will notice my change of address. I have wanted for a long time to have a little house of my own, and I was lucky enough to get this one from a friend. It’s up the Hudson from New York, quite countrified, but convenient enough to the city to be practical. I’m bringing Mother here from Upstate. She’ll love it. And besides—as if you didn’t know the most important reason when you saw it—it gives Tiny a place to run. He’s no city dog.… I’d tell you that he found the house for me, too, if I didn’t think that, these days, I’m crediting him with even more than his remarkable powers. Gregg and Marie Weems, the couple who had the cottage before, began to be haunted. So they said, anyway. Some indescribably horrible monster that both of them caught glimpses of, inside the house and out of it. Marie finally got the screaming meemies about it and insisted on Gregg’s selling the place, housing shortage or no. They came straight to me. Why? Because they—Marie, anyway; she’s a mystic little thing—had the idea that someone with a large dog would be
safe in that house. The odd part of that was that neither of them knew I had recently acquired a Great Dane. As soon as they saw Tiny they threw themselves on my neck and begged me to take the place. Marie couldn’t explain the feeling she had; what she and Gregg came to my place for was to ask me to buy a big dog and take the house. Why me? Well, she just felt I would like it, that was all. It seemed the right kind of place for me. And my having the dog clinched it. Anyway, you can put that down in your notebook of unexplainables.”

So it went for the better part of a year. The letters were long and frequent, and, as sometimes happens, Alec and Alistair grew very close indeed. Almost by accident they found themselves writing letters that did not mention Tiny at all, although there were others that concerned nothing else. And, of course, Tiny was not always in the role of
canis superior
. He was a dog—all dog—and acted accordingly. His strangeness came out only at particular intervals. At first it had been at times when Alistair was most susceptible to being astonished by it—in other words, when it was least expected. Later, he would perform his odd feats when she was ready for him to do it, and under exactly the right circumstances. Later still, he became the superdog only when she asked him to.…

The cottage was on a hillside, such a very steep hillside that the view of the river skipped over the railroad, and the trains were a secret rumble and never a sight at all. There was a wild and clean air about the place—a perpetual tingle of expectancy, as though someone coming into New York for the very first time on one of the trains had thrown his joyous anticipation high in the air and the cottage had caught it and breathed it and kept it forever.

Up the hairpin driveway to the house, one spring afternoon, toiled a miniature automobile in its lowest gear. Its little motor grunted and moaned as it took the last steep grade, a miniature Old Faithful appearing around its radiator cap. At the foot of the brownstone porch steps it stopped, and a miniature lady slid out from under the wheel. But for the fact that she was wearing an aviation mechanic’s coveralls, and that her very first remark—an earthy epithet directed at the steaming radiator—was neither ladylike nor miniature, she
might have been a model for the more precious variety of Mother’s Day greeting card.

Fuming, she reached into the car and pressed the horn button. The quavering wail that resulted had its desired effect. It was answered instantly by the mighty howl of a Great Dane at the peak of aural agony. The door of the house crashed open and a girl in shorts and a halter rushed out on the porch, to stand with her russet hair ablaze in the sunlight, her lips parted, and her long eyes squinting against the light reflected from the river.

“What—Mother! Mother, darling, is that you? Already? Tiny!” she rapped as the dog bolted out of the open door and down the steps. “Come back here!”

The dog stopped. Mrs. Forsythe scooped a crescent wrench from the ledge behind the driver’s seat and brandished it. “Let him come, Alistair,” she said grimly. “In the name of sense, girl, what are you doing with a monster like that? I thought you said you had a dog, not a Shetland pony with fangs. If he messes with me, I’ll separate him from a couple of those twelve-pound feet and bring him down to my weight. Where do you keep his saddle? I thought there was a meat shortage in this part of the country. Whatever possessed you to take up your abode with that carnivorous dromedary, anyway? And what’s the idea of buying a barn like this, thirty miles from nowhere and perched on a precipice to boot, with a stepladder for a driveway and an altitude fit to boil water at eighty degrees Centigrade? It must take you forever to make breakfast. Twenty-minute eggs, and then they’re raw. I’m hungry. If that Danish basilisk hasn’t eaten everything in sight, I’d like to nibble on about eight sandwiches. Salami on whole wheat. Your flowers are gorgeous, child. So are you. You always were, of course. Pity you have brains. If you had no brains, you’d get married. A lovely view, honey, lovely. I like it here. Glad you bought it. Come here, you,” she said to Tiny.

He approached this small specimen of volubility with his head a little low and his tail down. She extended a hand and held it still to let him sniff it before she thumped him on the withers. He waved his unfashionable tail in acceptance and then went to join the laughing Alistair, who was coming down the steps.

“Mother, you’re marvelous.” She bent and kissed her. “What on earth made that awful noise?”

“Noise? Oh, the horn.” Mrs. Forsythe busily went about lifting the hood of the car. “I have a friend in the shoelace business. Wanted to stimulate trade for him. Fixed this up to make people jump out of their shoes. When they jump they break the laces. Leave their shoes in the street. Thousands of people walking about in their stocking feet. More people ought to, anyway. Good for the arches.” She pointed. There were four big air-driven horns mounted on and around the little motor. Over the mouth of each was a shutter, so arranged that it revolved about an axle set at right angles to the horn, so that the bell was opened and closed by four small DC motors. “That’s what gives it the warble. As for the beat-note, the four of them are tuned a sixteenth-tone apart. Pretty?”

“Pretty,” Alistair conceded with sincerity. “No, please don’t demonstrate it again, Mother! You almost wrenched poor Tiny’s ears off the first time.”

“Oh, did I?” Contritely she went to the dog. “I didn’t mean to, honey-poodle, really I didn’t.” The honey-poodle looked up at her with somber brown eyes and thumped his tail on the ground. “I like him,” said Mrs. Forsythe decisively. She put out a fearless hand and pulled affectionately at the loose flesh of Tiny’s upper lip. “Will you look at those tusks! Good grief, dog, reel in some of that tongue or you’ll turn yourself inside out. Why aren’t you married yet, chicken?”

“Why aren’t you?” Alistair countered.

Mrs. Forsythe stretched. “I’ve
been
married,” she said, and Alistair knew that now her casualness was forced. “A married season with the likes of Dan Forsythe sticks with you.” Her voice softened. “Your daddy was all kinds of good people, baby.” She shook herself. “Let’s eat. I want to hear about Tiny. Your driblets and drablets of information about that dog are as tantalizing as Chapter Eleven of a movie serial. Who’s this Alec creature in St. Croix? Some kind of native—cannibal, or something? He sounds nice. I wonder if you know how nice
you
think he is? Good heavens, the girl’s blushing! I only know what I read in your letters, darling, and I never knew you to quote anyone by the paragraph before but that old scoundrel
Nowland, and that was all about ductility and permeability and melting points. Metallurgy! A girl like you mucking about with molybs and durals instead of heartbeats and hope chests!”