It was stirring now. Wavering, rippling like a broad flag stirred by a light wind. Then it bellied out like a sail.
Startled, he closed his eyes. Looked again through his lashes. The wall was swollen and straining. When he tried to will it back, it burst in a soundless explosion, flinging sparks in every direction.
The dazzle faded. Ralph was lying on a wet field of gra.s.s and reeds. He felt the damp and the cold through his PJs. His breath came quickly and he could hear the beating of his heart.
Bewildered, he sat up, shivering in a raw wind. The sky was blue dusk except for one smear of red in the west and a dim moon rising in the east. Far away, he saw a roller coaster"s snaky form outlined in lights. A calliope hooted a popular tune of 1948, "The Anniversary Waltz."
Something scratched and snorted and he turned his head. No more than ten yards away, a giant wild boar was digging at the gra.s.s. Its flat bristly nostrils blew puffs of smoke, it braced its thick legs, pulled with orange tusks, and a human arm lifted into view. The fingers moved feebly- Milton sat up, sweating.
He was safe in his own bed, in his own room where he"d slept all his life. Rain pattered against the shutters. And Ralph O"Meagan was back where and when he belonged, in the January "42 issue of Arcana, his name forever attached to an intense and disturbing transdimensional story called "Borderland."
The wire-brush sound came again from Ned"s room next door, and Milton muttered, "I told you it"s all right."
He got up stiffly, put his shoes on and shuffled downstairs. In a small kitchen behind the bookshop he made green tea on a hot plate and inserted a frozen dinner into a dirty microwave oven.
He sat down at a metal-topped table, sipping the tea, and listened to the fan droning in the microwave. He had no way to avoid thinking about Ned, and about himself.
They"d shared Mama"s fair coloring, sharp nose, and prominent chin, but not much else.
The product of an earlier marriage, Ned was a bully and a braggart, a fanatic athlete with an appet.i.te for contact sports. Feared in grade school, worshipped in high school. Milton lived in terror of him, never knowing from day to day whether Ned would use him as a playmate or a punching bag.
Early on, Ned demanded and got a separate room so he wouldn"t have to live with The Drip. He warned Milton not to talk to him at school, because he didn"t want anybody to know they were related. Ned"s door sported a poster of a soldier in a tin helmet and a gas mask. A hand-lettered sign said POISON! KEEP OUT!
"I ever catch you in my stuff," Ned warned him, "I"ll fix you a knuckle sandwich. You hear that, Drip?"
What was Ned hiding? On December 1, 1941-Milton was an obscure freshman in Jesuit High School, Ned a prominent senior-thinking Ned was out, he filled a skeleton key into the old-fashioned lock and went exploring.
The yellow walls were exactly like those in his own room, only stuck all over with movie posters of Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson looking tough. On Ned"s desk, athletic trophies towered over a litter of papers and schoolbooks. Magazines-fantasy, sport, muscle, mystery-lay scattered over the rumpled bed.
Not knowing what he wanted to find, Milton began pawing through papers, opening desk drawers. He was still at work when the door crashed against the wall and Ned erupted into the room.
The memory lingered after almost forty years. Milton stopped sipping his tea and ran his fingertips over his ribs, touching the little lumps where cracked bones had healed. He shivered, reliving his terror as Ned"s big hands pounded him.
"G.o.d d.a.m.n you, you f.u.c.king punk," he bawled, "keep outta here! Keep outta here!"
The boy Milton had hunkered down, trying to shield his face-that was when his ribs took the pounding-and waited for death. But Ned was fighting himself, too. His face and whole body twisted as he tried to regain control.
Milton slipped under his arm and ran away and locked himself in his room, sobbing with rage and shame. Little by little the sparks of acute pain died out and a slow dull throbbing began in his chest, shoulders, arms, face. Blood soaked his undershirt and he tore it off and threw it away.
Later, when Daddy asked him what had happened to him-most of his injuries were hidden by his clothes, but Milton was walking stiffly and sporting a plum-sized black eye and a swollen jaw-he said he"d fallen downstairs at school.
"Clumsy G.o.dd.a.m.n kid;" said Daddy.
By then Pearl Harbor had happened and Daddy was signing papers so that Ned could volunteer for the Navy. "One less mouth to feed," remarked Mr. Warmth.
Ned vanished into the alternate dimension that people called The Service, and Mama locked up his room, saying it must be kept just as he left it or he"d never return alive.
"Crazy b.i.t.c.h," said Daddy, whose comments were usually terse and always predictable.
Night after night for weeks afterward, Milton opened his window, slipped out onto the cold balcony that connected the three bedrooms, lifted the latch on Ned"s shutters with a kitchen knife, and silently raised the sash.
One at a time he took Ned"s trophies, wrapped them in old newspapers, and put them out with the trash. He threw away Ned"s magazines, books, and posters.
He was hoping that Mama was right and Ned would never return. He hoped the j.a.ps would capture him and torture him. He hoped Ned would fall into the ocean and be eaten by sharks. The depth of his loathing surprised even him, and he treasured it as a lover savors his love.
Then he received Ned"s first letter. "Hi, Bro!" it started breezily.
Ned told about the weird people he was meeting in the Navy, about the icy wind blowing off the Great Lakes, about learning to operate a burp gun. Milton read the letter dozens, maybe hundreds of times.
More letters came on tissue-paper V-Mail, the APOs migrating westward to San Diego, then to Hawaii. Ned told about the great fleets gathering in Pearl Harbor for the counterpunch against j.a.pan, about the deafening bombardment of Tarawa before the Marines went in. Gifts began arriving for Milton, handfuls of j.a.panese paper money, a rising-sun flag, a Samurai short sword.
Why had Ned turned from a domestic monster to a brother? Milton never knew. Maybe the war, maybe the presence of death. As the fighting darkened and lengthened, he could see something of the same spirit touching them all.
Mama went to work for the Red Cross and stayed sober until evening. Daddy took the Samurai short sword and hung it over the fireplace in the living room, where everybody could see it. When Ned sent Mama the Navy Cross he"d won, Daddy sat beside her on the sofa, staring at the medal in its little leather box as if a star had fallen from heaven. That was when he stopped calling Ned "my wife"s kid" and started calling him "my son."
In the summer of 1945 Ned himself arrived at the naval air station on Lake Pontchartrain. Broad-shouldered and burned mahogany, he burst upon their lives like a bomb blowing down a wall and letting sunlight pour in.
He ordered Mama to stop drinking, and she put her bottles out with the trash. He ordered Daddy to stop insulting her, and he obeyed. At the first sign of backsliding, Ned would fly into one of his patented rages and his parents would hurry back into line. He was still a bully-only now he controlled his chronic abiding fury and used it for good.
Did hatred really lie so close to love? Could G.o.d and the devil swap places so easily? Apparently so.
Now Milton loved him and wanted desperately to be like him. An impossible job, of course. But he tried. Out of sheer hero-worship he decided to volunteer for the peacetime Navy and began going to the Y, trying to get in shape for boot camp. The new Ned didn"t laugh at his belated efforts to be athletic. Instead, he went running with him at six in the morning, down the Public Belt railroad tracks along the wharves, among the wild daisies, while a great incandescent sun rose and a rank, fresh wind blew off the Father of Waters.
Life seemed to be brightening for all of them. Who could have guessed it would all go so terribly wrong?
Next day Dr. Bloch dropped by the shop to tell Milton how much he"s enjoyed reading Arcana.
"I love pulp;" he confessed. "I like the energy, the violence, the fact that there"s always a resolution. The one thing in The New Yorker I never read is the fiction."
They chatted cautiously, like strange dogs sniffing each other. Bloch explained he"d retired from practice but still did a little consulting at St. Vincent"s, the mental hospital where both of Milton"s parents had been patients.
"You"re a psychiatrist?" asked Milton, astonished. Bloch was so noisy and intrusive that he wondered how the man got anyone to confide in him.
"The technical term is shrink," Bloch boomed. "I suppose it"s all right to say this now. Your brother was a patient of mine long ago. Somebody who knows I"m a fan of old sf told me about your shop, and as soon as I saw your face it all came back. You"re very like him, you know."
Milton sat open-mouthed, while-like some cinematic effect-the lines of a younger face emerged from the old man"s spots, creases and wattles. How could he have missed it? Dr. Erasmus Bloch was Dr. Erasmus Bloch.
"When did you treat Ned?" he asked, his voice unsteady.
"In forty-eight, I think. Gave him a checkup first, naturally. Well set-up young fellow. Athletic. No physical problems at all."
"Was he . . . ah . . . "
"Psychotic? No. But he was hallucinating, and of course he was scared. We ruled out a brain tumor, drug use, and alcoholism-I don"t think he drank at all-"
"No. Because of our mother. I"m the same way. So what was wrong?"
"He was terribly unhappy. He"d grown up isolated, with a drunken mother and a rigid, cold, possibly schizoid father. He had violent impulses that he found hard to control. Frankly, he scared me a bit. These borderline cases can be much more dangerous than the certified screwb.a.l.l.s. And he was strong, you know?"
"Yes," said Milton, "I remember. . . . You said he was hallucinating?"
"Yes. Quite an interesting case. He believed his frustration and rage had turned him into a G.o.d or demon that had created a world. He"d written a story about it, and he loaned me a copy of Arcana so I could read it. Matter of fact, I read it again just last night."
Milton nodded. "I"ve known for years that Ned wrote the story. But I never imagined he thought the-what did he call it? the Alternate Dimension-was real. I mean . . . it"s hard to believe he was serious."
"Oh, he was serious, all right. I knew that when I saw the name he"d signed to his story."
"Ralph O"Meagan?"
"It"s the closest Ned could come to Alpha Omega. You know, as in Revelations: "I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end." Yes, he actually believed he was a G.o.d and he"d made a world."
That was a riveting insight. Milton wondered wily he"d never seen it himself. His breath came quicker, this was turning out to be the most involving conversation he"d had in decades.
"How do you treat something like that?"
"One technique for dissolving a delusional system is to move into it with the patient. It"s such a private thing, it disintegrates when he finds another person inside it. So I told Ned, "I want to hear more about this world of yours. Perhaps I can go there with you."
"Something about that scared him. He skipped our next appointment. My nurse tried to call him, but it turned out he"d given her a wrong number. When she looked him up in the phone book, he claimed he"d never heard of me. Sounded as if he really hadn"t. Might have been stress-induced amnesia-rather a radical form of denial."
"Yes," murmured Milton. "That does sound radical."
Bloch glanced at his watch, said he was due at the hospital and took his leave. Milton sat for a few minutes hugging his midsection, then got up and locked the door.
This wasn"t his regular day to dust Ned"s bedroom, but he went upstairs anyway, for the terrible past had taken him in its grip.
His key chain jangled and he sensed something beyond the door as the key turned silently in the well-oiled lock. But the shadowy room held only a faintly sour organic smell.
He opened the window, unbolted the shutters and flung them wide. Light flooded in. The room looked just as it had the week before Christmas 1945, when Ned had thrown his second-to-last tantrum and stormed out of the house.
Milton hadn"t actually witnessed it, but he heard about it later. Ned went into a fury because Mama, possibly in honor of the season, had disobeyed his orders and started drinking again. After he walked out, of course, she drank more. Milton came home carrying an armful of presents to find her staggering, and Ned forever gone.
G.o.d, how he"d hated him that day. Tearing out the underpinnings of his life just when he"d begun to be happy.
On the dresser stood a mirror where Ned had combed his hair, and a tarnished silver frame with a faded picture of him as a young sailor wearing a jaunty white cap. Ned was smiling a fake photographic smile, but his eyes didn"t smile. Neither did Milton"s as he approached and stared at him.
His face hovered in the mirror, Ned"s in the picture. Youth and decay: Dorian Gray in reverse. Suddenly feeling an intolerable upsurge of rage, he growled at the picture, "You were such a lousy stinking b.a.s.t.a.r.d."
That was only the beginning. Grinding his teeth, he cursed the picture with every word he"d ever learned from chief petty officers and drunks brawling on Bourbon Street and his own unforgiving heart.
Exhausted by the eruption, trembling, clutching his ribs, Milton staggered back and sat down suddenly on the bed. Little by little he calmed down. After ten minutes he stood up and carefully smoothed the bedspread.
"Time to open the shop again," he said in a quiet voice.
He closed Ned"s room and locked it, knowing it would be here when he came again, exactly as it was, never changing, never to be changed. The love and hate of his life, shut up in one timeless capsule.
The afternoon brought few customers, the following morning fewer still.
Milton filled the empty hours as he always did, sitting at his desk with his hollow chest collapsed in upon itself, taking rare and slow and shallow breaths, like a hibernating hear. Musing, dreaming, rearranging the pieces of his life like a chess player with no opponent, pushing wood idly on the same old squares.
How much he wanted to put his family into a gothic novel. How often he"d tried to write it, but never could. He smiled ruefully, thinking: Where are you, Ralph O"Meagan, when I need you?
All around him, stacked shelf on shelf, stood haunted books full of demons and starships, the horrors of Dunwich and Poe"s Conqueror Worm. But none held the story he longed to tell. He smiled wearily at a dusty print hanging on the wall Dali"s The Persistence of Memory, with its limp watches.
He knew now why people talked to noisy Dr. Bloch. It was quite simple: they needed to talk, and he was willing to listen. Shortly after eleven o"clock, Milton dug out his customer file and called Bloch"s number. It turned out to belong to a posh retirement home called Serena House.
"This is G.o.d"s waiting room," the loud voice explained, and Milton moved the phone an inch away from his ear. "G.o.d"s first-cla.s.s waiting room. Want to join me for lunch?"
Milton found himself stuttering again as he accepted. He locked up, fetched his old Toyota from a garage he rented and drove up St. Charles Avenue to Marengo Street. The block turned out to be one of those odd corners of the city where time had stopped around 1890. The houses were old paintless wooden barns, most wearing thick mats of cat"s claw vine like dusty habits.
But in their midst sat a new and ma.s.sive square structure of faux stone with narrow lancet windows. Serena House was a thoroughly up-to-date antechamber to the tomb. After speaking to the concierge-a cool young blonde-Milton waited in a patio that was pure Motel Modern: cobalt pool, palms in large plastic pots, metal lawn furniture, concrete frogs and bunnies and a nymph eternally emptying water from an urn.
"You see what you have to look forward to," boomed Bloch, and they shook hands.
"I can"t afford Serena House. Don"t you think my shop"s a nice place for an old guy to dream away his days?"
"Yes, provided a wall doesn"t blow in on you!"
Bloch, that impressively tactless man, laughed loudly at his own wit while leading the way to the dining room. The chairs were ivory enameled with rose upholstery and the walls were festive with French paper. By tacit agreement, they said nothing about Ned until the creme brulee had been polished off.
Instead they talked sci-fi and fantasy. Milton found Bloch a man of wide reading. He knew the cla.s.sics by Cyrano and Voltaire, Poe and Carroll and Stoker and Wells. He"d read Huxley"s and Forster"s ventures into the field. He declared that Faust and the Divine Comedy were also fantasy masterpieces-epic attempts to make ideas real.
"Because that"s what fantasy is, isn"t it?" he demanded. "Not just making things up, but taking ideas and giving them hands and feet and claws and teeth!"
After lunch they moved to poolside. Bloch lit a cigar that smelled expensive and resumed grilling Milton. "Your brother-did he die in the room where the story was set?"
He had a gift for asking unexpected questions. Milton cleared his throat, hesitated, then evaded-neatly, he thought-saying where Ned actually did die.
"No. He was found in the marshland out near the lake, about a quarter of a mile from that old amus.e.m.e.nt park on the sh.o.r.e."
"Any idea what he was doing there?"
"The police thought he"d been killed elsewhere and dumped. I wasn"t much help to them-hadn"t seen Ned in years. Actually, we"d been on bad terms, and that was sad."
"And your parents . . . what happened to them?"
"Mama drank herself to death. Daddy went senile. Alzheimer"s, they"d call it today. He died in St. Vincent"s. I got a call one night, and this very firm Negro voice said, "Your dad, he ain"t got no life signs." I said, "You mean he"s dead?" "We ain"t "lowed to use that word," said the voice. "He ain"t got no life signs is all."
" "That"s okay," I said. "He never did." "
Bloch smiled a bit grimly, exhaled a puff of blue smoke. "Tell me . . . exactly what killed Ned?"
Milton took a deep breath. He"d left himself open to such probing, and now had no way to evade an answer.
"Hard to say. He was such a mess by the time they found him. It was November, nineteen-forty-eight. The-the damage to his face and body was devastating. There was a nick in one thoracic vertebra that possibly indicated a knife thrust through the chest. But the coroner couldn"t be sure-so much of him had been eaten-there were toothmarks on a lot of the bones. . . .
"Eaten by what?"
Milton squinted at the cobalt pool. Sunstarts on the ripples burned his eyes. He said, "The c-coroner said wild pigs. Razorbacks. The m-marshes were full of them."