“For cat’s sake, Charlie. Did you go to sleep out here and have a nightmare, or what? Get up off your knees and listen, are you sick? Shall I take you to Doc Palmer instead of us going fishing?”
Charlie got to his feet slowly, and shook himself. He said, “I…I guess I’m all right. Something funny happened. But, all right, come on. Let’s go fishing.”
“But what? Oh, all right, tell me about it later. But before we start, shall we dig some-Hey, don’t look like that! Come on, get in the car; get some fresh air and maybe that’ll make you feel better.”
Pete took his arm, and Pete picked up the tackle box and led Charlie out to the waiting car. He opened the dashboard compartment and took out a bottle. “Here, take a snifter of this.”
Charlie did, and as the amber fluid gurgled out of the bottle’s neck and down Charlie’s the felt his brain begin to rid itself of the numbness of shock. He could think again.
The whiskey burned on the way down, but it put a pleasant spot of warmth where it landed, and he felt better. Until it changed to warmth, he hadn’t realized that there had been a cold spot in the pit of his stomach.
He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and said, “Gosh.”
“Take another,” Pete said, his eyes on the road. “Maybe, too, it’ll do you good to tell me what happened and get it out of your system. That is, if you want to.”
“I…I guess so,” said Charlie. “It…it doesn’t sound like much to tell it, Pete. I just reached for a worm, and it flew away. On white, shining wings.”
Pete looked puzzled. “You reached for a worm, and it flew away. Well, why not? I mean, I’m no entomologist, but maybe there are worms with wings. Come to think of it, there probably are. There are winged ants, and caterpillars turn into butterflies. ‘What scared you about it?”
“Well, this worm didn’t have wings until I reached for it. It looked like an ordinary angleworm. Dammit, it was an ordinary angleworm until I went to pick it up. And then it had a…a-Oh, skip it. I was probably seeing things.”
“Come on, get it out of your system. Give.”
“Dammit, Pete, it had a halo!”
The car swerved a bit, and Pete cased it back to the middle of the road before he said “A what?”
“Well,” said Charlie defensively, “it looked like a halo. It was a little round golden circle just above its head. It didn’t seem to be attached; it just floated there.”
“How’d you know it was its head? Doesn’t a worm look alike on both ends?”
“Well,” said Charlie, and he stopped to consider the matter. How had he known? “Welt,” he said, “since it was a halo, wouldn’t it be kind of silly for it to have a halo around the wrong end? I mean, even sillier than to have-Hell, you know what I mean.”
Pete said, “Hmph.” Then, after the car was around a curve: “All right, let’s be strictly logical. Let’s assume you saw, or thought you saw, what you…uh… thought you saw. Now, you’re not a heavy drinker so it wasn’t D. T’s. Far as I can see, that leaves three possibilities.”
Charlie said, “I see two of them. It could have been a pure hallucination. People do have ‘em, I guess, but I never had one before. Or I suppose it could have been a dream, maybe. I’m sure I didn’t, but I suppose that I could, have gone to sleep there and dreamed I saw it. But that isn’t very likely, is it?
“I’ll concede the possibility of an hallucination, but not a dream. What’s the third?”
“Ordinary fact. That you really saw a winged worm. I mean, that there is such a thing, for all I know. And you were just mistaken about it not having wings when you first saw it, because they were folded. And what you thought looked like a…uh…halo, was some sort of a crest or antenna or something. There are some damn funny-looking bugs.”
“Yeah,” said Charlie. But he didn’t believe it. There may be funny-looking bugs, but none that suddenly sprout wings and haloes and ascend unto heaven.
He took another drink out of the bottle.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON and evening he spent with Jane, and the episode of the ascending angleworm slipped into the back of Charlie’s mind. Anything, except Jane, tended to slip there when he was with her.
At bedtime when he was alone again, it came back. The thought, not the worm. So strongly that he couldn’t sleep, and he got up and sat in the armchair by the window and decided the only way to get it out of his mind was to think it through.
If he could pin things down and decide what had really happened out there at the edge of the flower bed; then maybe he could forget it completely.
O. K., he told himself, let’s be strictly logical.
Pete had been right about the three possibilities. Hallucination, dream, reality. Now to begin with, it hadn’t been a dream. He’d been wide awake; he was as sure of that as he was sure of anything. Eliminate that.
Reality? That was impossible, too. It was all right for Pete to talk about the funniness of insects and the possibility of antennae, and such-but Pete hadn’t seen the danged thing. Why, it had flown past only inches from his eyes. And that halo had really been there.
Antennae? Nuts.
And that left hallucination. That’s what it must have been, hallucination. After all, people do have hallucinations. Unless it happened often, it didn’t necessarily mean you were a candidate for the booby hatch. All right then accept that it was an hallucination, and so what? So forget it.
‘With that decided, he went to bed and-by thinking about Jane again-happily to sleep.
The next morning was Monday and he went back to work.
And the morning after that was Tuesday.
And on Tuesday.
IT WASN’T an ascending angleworm this time. It wasn’t anything you could put your finger on, unless you can put your finger on sunburn, and that’s painful sometimes.
But sunburn in a rainstorm?
It was raining when Charlie Wills left home that morning, but it wasn’t raining hard at that time, which was a few minutes after eight. A mere drizzle. Charlie pulled down the brim of his hat and buttoned up his raincoat and decided to walk to work anyway. He rather liked walking in rain. And he had time; he didn’t have to be there until eight-thirty.
Three blocks away from work, he encountered the Pest, hound in the same direction. The Pest was Jane Pemberton’s kid sister, and her right name was Paula, but most people had forgotten the fact. She worked at the Hapworth Printing Co., just as Charlie did; but she was a copyholder for one of the proofreaders and he was assistant production manager.
But he’d met Jane through her, at a party given for employees.
He said, “Hi there, Pest. Aren’t you afraid you’ll melt?” For it was raining harder now, definitely harder.
“Hello, Charlie-warlie. I like to walk in the rain.”
She would, thought Charlie bitterly. At the hated nick-name Charlie-warlie, he writhed. Jane had called him that once, but-after he’d talked reason to her-never again. Jane was reasonable. But the Pest had heard it-And Charlie was mortally afraid, ever after, that she’d sometime call him that at work, with other employees in hearing. And if that ever happened-
“Listen,” he protested, “can’t you forget that darn fool…uh…nickname? I’ll quit calling you Pest, if you’ll quit calling me…uh…that.”
“But I like to he called the Pest. Why don’t you like to he called Charlie-warlie?”