Who Made Stevie Crye? (7 page)

XV

Stevie carefully tore the sheet
bearing this nightmare from her Exceleriter, draped the long page over her dictionary stand, and, ignoring the cold and the syncopated hammering of her heart, reread every line. The machine—which, to use its own wry terminology, she had failed to catch
in flagrante delicto
—was mocking her. She had tried to arrange matters so that it would produce copy compatible with her desire for answers about Ted, Sr., but it had spun out another sort of text altogether, a cruel lampoon in which her concern for Marella was translated into domestic Grand Guignol:

Awake or asleep? Awake, surely, for in the next room the resourceful Stevenson Crye, mistress of her fate, tamer of typewriters, could hear the businesslike rattle of the Exceleriter’s typing element, a concert . . .

Etcetera, etcetera. But the worst, the most tasteless and offensive part of the joke it had played on her, did not reside in these easy satiric jabs, but in the heartless, vividly obscene surprise at the end:

. . . the slimy ruins of her skeletal structure. Her flesh and internal organs had liquefied, seeping through the permeable membrane of her bottom sheet and into the box springs beneath the half-dissolved mattress, stranding her pitiful rib cage, pelvis, and limb bones on the quivering surface — like fossils . . .

Etcetera. A climactic passage not merely horrifying but fundamentally contemptuous of civilized human feeling. For some reason the typewriter wished to mock her humanity by blaspheming her love for Marella, by playing upon her deep-seated fears about the child’s mental and emotional well-being, and by depicting Stevie herself as unperceptive and vacillating. In fact, the cumulative portrait of her own character in this disgusting little sketch was almost as ugly as the description of Marella’s ruined body.

That
’s a self-centered way of interpreting this nonsense, Stevie suddenly realized. Besides, the sketch doesn’t make you out a complete Lucrezia Borgia. As far as that goes, it’s probably a modified transcription of the nightmare you were having before you heard this damned machine pounding away and came stumbling over your own furry slippers to behold its treachery.

You’re angry with yourself for not getting here in time, and you’re angry with the machine for making a gruesome, condescending joke of a relationship you cherish.

This reasoning had a calming effect. Her heart slowed its thunderous beating, and her hands trembled less from fear and anger than from the cold. She had the sh-sh-shakes.

Marella, Stevie thought. What about Marella?

Nightmares slipped through her consciousness like sand through the waist of an hourglass. Once awake, she could never remember them. All she ever retained of her dreams was a mood, whether upbeat, neutral, or despairing. If she had actually dreamed the sequence of images and dialogue typed out on this strip of paper by the Exceleriter, well, the sound of its sinister industriousness had stolen from her even her postnightmare blues. She had focused her entire will on getting from her bedroom to her study undetected by the culprit. She had not succeeded. It had finished its story and turned itself off before she was halfway to her destination.

Marella! a dogged portion of her consciousness reminded her. Maybe you can’t remember the lost dream that inspired this ghoulish lampoon, Stevenson Crye, but it isn’t really lost, is it? It’s right here under your hands, in stinging black and white. It describes your daughter as a roller-coaster framework of bones over a lava flow of flesh—but instead of going down the hall to see about her, you stand here mentally abusing your typewriter for making up such filth, for portraying you as impatient, self-centered, and wishy-washy. Why, at this very moment you’re in the unbelievable process of living up, or down, to its characterization of you.

“Marella, I’m coming,” Stevie said aloud. “Don’t fret, little sister. Mama’s coming.”

She groped her way down the dark hall, entered the girl’s room, and picked her way over the clothes and stuffed animals littering the floor. After squeezing between the twin beds book-ended by the dormer windows, Stevie lowered herself to the empty bed and switched on Marella’s porcelain night-light.

The girl lay cocooned in the bedclothes, scrunched into a question mark in the middle of her narrow mattress. Stevie could not even see her face. In a way, this was a relief. The reality of the moment departed significantly from its imaginary parallel in the typewriter’s version. Marella was okay. Earlier that evening, after all, her nervous stomach had improved miraculously during her and Teddy’s favorite television show,
The Dukes of Hazzard
, an inane compendium of Good Old Boy humor and silly car crashes. She had gone to bed without complaint and had been sleeping soundly ever since. For these and several other reasons, then, the typewriter’s version was undoubtedly a lie.

Uncover her and check, Stevie urged herself.

Her hand went to the satiny hem of the electric blanket, but did not forcefully or even feebly grip it. Her fingers lacked the necessary resolve.

Go on. Go on.

At last Stevie drew back the bedclothes, and, as she had known all along, uncovering Marella produced no surprise, no unbearable shock. The girl moaned because her blanket had been taken from her. She tilted her head, briefly opened unseeing eyes, and curled her nightgowned body into a tighter question mark. Asleep, lost in sleep, and Stevie pulled her covers back into place and tenderly tucked the overlap beneath the mattress. The typewriter’s version had been a lie. What else could it have been?

Stevie returned to her study, but paused outside it and looked in on Teddy, whose room, a cubbyhole in comparison to Marella’s, held the chilly southwest corner of the second floor—right across the hall from Stevie’s book-lined sanctorum. Teddy was a sound sleeper, much harder to wake up than his sister, for which reason Stevie felt no compunction about subjecting him to the glare of his overhead light.

He had thrown back the upper portion of his GE blanket and lay across the bed with his left foot dangling into space. He had also neglected, or disdained, to put on the tops of his pajamas. How he could sleep half-nude with temperatures under forty, even with his blanket securely in place, Stevie had no idea. The boy was incorrigible.

Just like his dad, she reflected. Though Georgia-born and -bred, Ted, Sr., had taken to cold weather like a polar bear, and when it came time for bed, he had no metabolic or psychological hangups about disrobing. While shivering under the covers in long Johns and woolen socks, Stevie had sometimes thought her laconic husband capable of sleeping naked in a snowdrift.

Young Teddy looked cold, though. His toplessness and his cast-back blanket had left him trembling, and as he trembled, he murmured unintelligible maledictions at the winter air. Indeed, one hand sought blindly for the edge of the missing blanket. Not finding it, the boy turned, moaning, to his left side.

Stevie went into the room to cover him. He was getting to be a handsome young man, growing up with astonishing speed. A year ago he had been a kid; now he was gaining weight, putting on muscle, discovering body hair in heretofore hairless places.

Beneath his right arm, which he had just flung over his head, Stevie could see a delicate brunet curl, a clock-spring of hair—symbolic, maybe, of his burgeoning maturity. His face still looked callow, the endearing mug of a wiseacre juvenile (its dearness a function of family connection, Stevie knew, and probably not readily evident to strangers), but his body was acquiring strength and something like an admirable classical purity. As she drew his blanket over his shoulders, Stevie kissed him lightly on the brow.

“Night, sport.”

After plunging his room into darkness again, she crossed the hall to her study. That damn Exceleriter. Its own spurious account of what she had done after waking to its mad electronic magic still lay on her dictionary stand. She picked up the sheet and read the story a third time. What wonderful phrases it contained: “Her clumsiness she charitably attributed” . . . “afraid to catch the Exceleriter” . . . “the percipient machine” . . . “solely because she had made a fool of herself ”—a host of casual digs that contained irritating glimmers of insight, even humor. Funny, very funny. A piece of electrically driven machinery was giving her the business.

Where was the other story? What had she done with the semijournalistic account of yesterday morning’s nightmare? Rummaging about, Stevie found this first example of the Exceleriter’s macabre literary talent on a package of typing paper on her rolltop. She reread this single page, its playful three-part headline concluding with the astute declaration:
TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNOXIOUS!!!
She had called that one, hadn’t she?

What you didn’t call, Stevie reminded herself, was the subject matter of tonight’s nightmare. You fed the machine a new strip of paper, and it outfoxed you. It wrote a brand-new story. If you want it to conclude the one it began last night, maybe you’ve got to use your head and make more careful arrangements. You’re smarter than that damned Exceleriter.

She wondered. The Exceleriter—
this
Exceleriter—was lots smarter than its PDE siblings; a veritable genius. An evil genius. In fact, that was the problem. She was attempting to match wits, not with a product of PDE technology, but with the unknown intelligence that had possessed her typewriter’s mundane metal and plastic parts. Once, after all, it had behaved as predictably, as docilely, as any well-mannered Smith-Corona, Royal, Olivetti, Xerox, Remington, or Olympia machine. But it had broken last Tuesday, she had taken it to Hamlin Benecke & Sons the following day, and ever since it had manifested a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality signaling . . . well, hell, Stevie, go ahead and say it, spit out those silly incantatory words . . .
demonic possession
.

Maybe her Exceleriter, once broken, had surrendered its motor functions to a demon precisely because the contemporary susceptibility to the power of this ancient concept—possession—had finally communicated itself to machines. And the most susceptible machines were the ones that broke and received repairs at the hands of disturbed amateurs like Seaton Benecke. Deepness was what Benecke really liked, that and not being afraid to write about fears and dark desires. Nitty-gritty stuff like that. The lesson for Stevenson Crye was all too clear.

“You should have paid the bastards at PDE their fifty-two dollars.”

She laughed mirthlessly. She had tried to beat Pantronics Data Equipment at its high-handed game, and what she had saved in money now threatened to bankrupt her beleaguered spirit.

Was it Seaton Benecke’s demon that inhabited the Exceleriter? Her dead husband’s? Her own? Or maybe simply—well, no,
complexly
—the terrible cacodemon of a single multinational concern? Maybe the vengeful PDE djinn was bending its enormous resources to the highly unprofitable business of driving her crazy. Well, let it—or whatever it was—try. She had not yet collapsed into a gibbering heap, and she was just as intent on learning what she could from the demon as it apparently was on achieving her breakdown.

Be smarter than the goddamn typewriter, gal.

To the 8½” x 11” sheet on which the machine had transcribed her first nightmare, Stevie taped five more sheets of typing paper. She then rolled this unwieldy train of pages into the Exceleriter, stopping at the bottom of the typed-upon sheet and aligning the type disc so that it could resume where it had left off. No one liked to be interrupted in the middle of a sentence. Maybe the machine’s mischievous demon would finish what it had begun:

“I fell apart down deep,” Crye said, a dead hand on his wife’s forehead. “If I appeared to give up, Stevie, it was only because

“Because what?” Stevie asked. “Because what?”

To her intense astonishment the on/off control levered itself to the “on” position, and the Exceleriter began to hum. It then banged out a seven-word phrase and abruptly clicked off:

it was time for me to pay.”

For a moment the words meant nothing to Stevie. Despite having carefully prepared for this moment, she was dumbfounded by what she had just witnessed. Dumbfounded and spooked. Her hands tingled. Her spine felt like an ice-cold piece of wire hosting dozens of little chiming silver bells.

It was not as if some anonymous person had activated the Exceleriter by remote control, or as if the typewriter had responded to the instructions of a computer program. No, it was as if an invisible presence had sidled past her, typed those seven words, and just as blithely turned off the machine and retreated back into darkness—not to conceal itself, because its invisibility accomplished that, but simply to give Stevie a chance to think about the darker implications of its visit. A touch-typist thief in the night. A sixty-words-a-minute revenant to whose hit-and-run typing attacks she was instantly and maybe even everlastingly vulnerable.

When the tiny bells on her spine stopped jangling, Stevie clenched her fists and defiantly glanced about her study. “Who are you?” she demanded. “What right have you to invade my room, my house, my life?” Receiving no answer, either from the air or from the typewriter, she turned back to the machine to contemplate its final cryptic phrase.

“Time to pay for what, Ted? Why do you keep me on tenterhooks? Why don’t you speak for yourself?”

But her invisible visitor—whether the demon of Ted or young Benecke or some other cruel jackanapes—had departed, and it would not return tonight. It wanted to leave her and those five Scotch-taped blank pages dangling. It wanted to make her anticipate with mounting impatience and bitterness its next visit. Well, she had already begun.

Nevertheless, Stevie removed the paper from the Exceleriter, separated the six sheets, and placed both upsetting stories—the one about Ted and the other about Marella—in a manila folder, which, in turn, she quickly crammed into the overladen filing cabinet beside her desk. Out of sight, out of mind. Ha! That was the most ridiculous aphorism she had ever heard—as she had gradually discovered over the months since Ted’s funeral. Out of sight, out of your mind. That was closer to it. However, Stevie believed you could be intermittently out of your mind without being certifiably insane forever.