"I saw something not there. I hallucinated. I can only assume that I was overtired and somehow emotionally affected by the story I told."
Ricky carefully backed the car into the space before the tall wooden facade of the office building.
Sears coughed, placed his hand on the door latch, did not move; to Ricky, he looked as though he already regretted what he was going to say. "I take it you saw more or less the same thing that Our Vergil did."
"Yes, I did." He paused. "No. I felt it, but I knew what it was."
"Well." He coughed again, and Ricky grew tense with waiting. "What I saw was Fenny Bate."
"The boy in your story?" Ricky was astonished.
"The boy I tried to teach. The boy I suppose I killed -helped to kill."
Sears took his hand from the door and let his weight fall back on the car seat. Now, at last, he wanted to talk.
Ricky tried to take it in. "I wasn't sure that-" He stopped in midsentence, aware that he was breaking one of the Chowder Society's rules.
"That it was a true story? Oh, it was true enough, Ricky. True enough. There was a real Fenny Bate, and he died."
Ricky remembered the sight of Sears's lighted window. "Were you looking out of the library windows when you saw him?"
Sears shook his head. "I was going upstairs. It was very late, probably about two o'clock. I had fallen asleep in a chair after doing the dishes. I didn't feel very good, I'm afraid-I would have felt worse if I'd known that Elmer Scales was going to wake me up at seven o'clock this morning. Well, I turned off the lights in the library, closed the door, and began to go up the stairs. And then I saw him sitting there, sitting on the stairs. He appeared to be asleep. He was dressed in the rags I remembered him wearing, and his feet were bare."
"What did you do?"
"I was too frightened to do anything at all. I'm no longer a strong young man of twenty. Ricky, I just stood there for-I don't know how long. I thought I might collapse. I steadied myself by putting my hand on the banister, and then he woke up." Sears was clasping his hands together before him, and Ricky could tell that he was gripping hard. "He didn't have eyes. He just had holes. The rest of his face was smiling." Sears's hands went to his face and folded in beneath the wide hat-brim. "Christ, Ricky. He wanted to play."
"He wanted to play?"
"That's what went through my mind. I was in such shock I couldn't think straight. When the-hallucination-stood up, I ran back down the stairs and locked myself in the library. I went to bed on the couch. I had the feeling that it was gone, but I couldn't make myself go back out on the staircase. Eventually I fell asleep and had the dream we were discussing. In the morning of course I recognized what had happened. I was 'seeing things,' in the vulgar parlance. And I did not think, nor do I think now, that such things are exactly in the province of Walt Hardesty. Or Our Vergil, for that matter."
"My God, Sears," Ricky said.
"Forget about it, Ricky. Just forget I ever told you. At least until this young Wanderley arrives."
Jesus she moved she can't she's dead spoke in his mind again, and he turned his eyes from the dashboard where they had been resting while Sears told him to do the impossible, and looked straight into the pale face of his law partner.
"No more," Sears said. "Whatever it is, no more. I've had enough."
… no put her feet in first.
"Sears."
"I can't, Ricky," Sears said, and levered himself out of the car.
Hawthorne got out on his side, and looked across the top of the car at Sears, an imposing man dressed in black, and for a moment he saw on the face of his old friend the waxy features his dream had given him. Behind him, around him, all of the town floated in wintry air, as if it too had secretly died. "But I'll tell you one thing," Sears said. "I wish Edward were still alive. I often wish that."
"So do I," Ricky whispered, but Sears had already turned from him and was beginning to go up the steps to the front door. A rising wind bit at Ricky's face and hands, and he quickly followed, sneezing again.
John Jaffrey
1
The doctor, whose party it had been, woke out of a troubled sleep just at the time when Ricky Hawthorne and Sears James were beginning their walk across a field in the direction of what appeared to be several piles of dirty laundry. Moaning, Jaffrey looked around the bedroom. Everything appeared to be subtly altered, subtly wrong. Even the bare shoulder of Milly Sheehan, who slept on beside him, was somehow wrong-Milly's round shoulder looked insubstantial, like pink smoke floating in the air. This was true of the bedroom as a whole. The fading wallpaper (blue stripes and bluer roses), the table bearing neat piles of coins, a library book (The Making of a Surgeon) and a lamp, the doors and handles of the tall white cupboard opposite, his yesterday's gray striped suit and last evening's dinner jacket draped carelessly over a chair: it all seemed drained of several shades of color, wispy as the interior of a cloud. In this room, at once familiar and unreal, he could not stay.
Jesus she moved, his own words, coiled and died in the washed-out air as if he had just spoken them. Pursued by them, he quickly got out of bed.
Jesus she moved, and this time he heard it spoken. The voice was level, without shading or vibrato, not his own. He had to get out of the house. Of his dreams, he could remember only the last startling image: before that there had been the usual business of lying paralyzed in a bare bedroom, no bedroom he'd ever seen in his life, and the coming of a threatening beast which resolved into dead Sears and dead Lewis: he had assumed they'd all been having this dream. But the image which propelled him across the room was this: the face, streaked with blood and distorted with bruises, of a young woman-a woman as dead as Sears and Lewis in the familiar dream-staring at him with glowing eyes and grinning mouth. It was more real than anything about him, more real than himself. (Jesus she moved she can't she's dead)
But she moved, all right. She sat up and grinned.
It was coming to an end for him at last, as it had for Edward, and with part of his mind he knew it and was grateful. A little surprised that his hands did not melt through the brass handles of the dresser drawer, Jaffrey pulled, out socks and underwear. Unearthly rose light pervaded the bedroom. He quickly dressed in random articles of clothing, selecting them blindly, and left the bedroom to go down the stairs to the ground floor. There, obeying an impulse stamped into him by ten years' habit, he let himself into a small rear office, opened a cabinet and took out two vials and two disposable hypodermics. He sat on a revolving typing chair, rolled up his left sleeve, took the syringes from their wrappers and put one on the metal-topped table beside him.
The girl sat up on the blood-smeared car seat and grinned at him through the window. She said, Hurry up, John. He pushed the first needle through the rubber cap over the insulin compound, pulled back the barrel and socked the needle into his arm. When the hypodermic was empty, he retracted it and tossed it into the wastebasket beneath the table; then he put the other syringe into the second vial, which contained a compound of morphine; this went into the same arm.
Hurry up, John.
None of his friends knew he was a diabetic, and had been since his early sixties; neither did they know of the morphine addiction which had gained on him since the same period, when he had begun administering the drug to himself: they had only seen the effects of the doctor's morning ritual gradually eating into him.
With both syringes at the bottom of the wastebasket, Dr. Jaffrey came out into his entrance hall and waiting room. Empty chairs stood in rows against the walls; on one of these appeared a girl in torn clothing, red smears across her face, redness leaking from her mouth when she said Hurry up, John.