Something knocks pictures off a wall in an empty room, and throws a chair downstairs. Consternation, until it’s named. Then it’s only a poltergeist.
Name it, and forget it. Anything with a name can be assimilated.
Without one, it’s-well, unthinkable. Take away the name of anything, and you’ve got blank horror.
Even something as familiar as a commonplace ghoul. Graves in a cemetery dug up, corpses eaten. Horrible thing, it may be; but it’s merely a ghoul; as long as it’s named— But suppose, if you can stand it, there was no such word as ghoul and no concept of one. Then dug-up half-eaten corpses are found. Nameless horror.
Not that the next thing that happened to Charlie Wills had anything to do with a ghoul. Not even a werewolf. But I think that, in a way, he’d have found a werewolf more comforting than the duck. One expects strange behavior of a werewolf, but a duck—
Like the duck in the museum.
Now, there is nothing intrinsically terrible about a duck. Nothing to make one lie awake at night, with cold sweat coming out on top of peeling sunburn. On the whole, a duck is a pleasant object, particularly if it is roasted. This one wasn’t.
Now it is Thursday. Charlie’s stay in the hospital had been for eight hours; they’d released him late in the afternoon, and he’d eaten dinner downtown and then gone home. The boss had insisted on his taking the next day off from work. Charlie hadn’t protested much.
Home, and, after stripping to take a bath, he’d studied his skin with blank amazement. Definitely, a third-degree bum. Definitely, all over him. Almost ready to peel.
It did peel, the next day.
He took advantage of the holiday by taking Jane out to the ball game, where they sat in a grandstand so he could be out of the sun. It was a good game, and Jane understood and liked baseball.
Thursday, back to work.
At eleven twenty-five, Old Man Hapworth, the big boss, came into Charlie’s office.
“Wills,” he said, “we got a rush order to print ten thousand handbills, and the copy will be here in about an hour. I’d like you to follow the thing right through the Linotype room and the composing room and get it on the press the minute it’s made up. It’s a close squeak whether we make deadline on it, and there’s a penalty if we don’t.”
“Sure, Mr. Hapworth. I’ll stick right with it.”
“Fine. I’ll count on you. But listen-it’s a bit early to eat, but just the same you better go out for your lunch hour now. The copy will be here about the time you get back, and you can stick right with the job. That is, if you don’t mind eating early.”
“Not at all,” Charlie lied. He got his hat and went out.
Dammit, it was too early to eat. But he had an hour off and he could eat in half that time, so maybe if he walked half an hour first, he could work up an appetite.
The museum was two blocks away, and the best place to kill half an hour. He went there, strolled down the central corridor without stopping, except to stare for a moment at a statue of Aphrodite that reminded him of Jane Pemberton and made him remember—even more strongly than he already remembered—that it was only six days now until his wedding.
Then he turned off into the room that housed the numismatics collection. He’d used to collect coins when he was a kid, and although the collection had been broken up since then, he still had a mild interest in looking at the big museum collection.
He stopped in front of a showcase of bronze Romans.
But he wasn’t thinking about them. He was still thinking about Aphrodite, or Jane, which was quite understandable under the circumstances. Most certainly, he was not thinking about flying worms or sudden waves of burning heat.
Then he chanced to look across toward an adjacent showcase. And within it, he saw the duck.
It was a perfectly ordinary-looking duck. It had a speckled breast and greenish-brown markings on its wing and a darkish head with a darker stripe starting just above the eye and running down along the short neck. It looked like a wild rather than a domestic duck.
And it looked bewildered at being there.
For just a moment, the complete strangeness of the duck’s presence in a showcase of coins didn’t register with Charlie. His mind was still on Aphrodite. Even while he stared at a wild duck under glass inside a show-case marked “Coins of China.”
Then the duck quacked, and waddled on its awkward webbed feet down the length of the showcase and butted against the glass of the end, and fluttered its wings and tried to fly upward, but hit against the glass of the top. And it quacked again and loudly.
Only then did it occur to Charlie to wonder what a live duck was doing in a numismatics collection. Apparently, to judge from its actions, the duck was wondering the same thing.
And only then did Charlie remember the angelic worn and the sunless sunburn.
And somebody in the doorway said, “Yssst. Hey.”
Charlie turned, and the look on his face must have been something out of the ordinary because the uniformed attendant quit frowning and said, “Something wrong, mister?”
For a brief instant, Charlie just stared at him. Then it occurred to Charlie that this was the opportunity he’d lacked when the angleworm had ascended. Two people couldn’t see the same hallucination. If it was an—
He opened his mouth to say “Look,” but he didn’t have to say anything. The duck heat him to it by quacking loudly and again trying to flutter through the glass of the case.
The attendant’s eyes went past Charlie to the case of Chinese coins and he said “Gaw!”
The duck was still there.
The attendant looked at Charlie again and said, “Are you-” and then stopped without finishing the question and went up to the showcase to look at close range. The duck was still struggling to get out, but more weakly. It seemed to be gasping for breath.
The attendant said, “Gaw!” again, and then over his shoulder to Charlie: “Mister, how did you-That there case is her-hermetchically sealed. It’s airproof. Lookit that bird. It’s-“
It already had; the duck fell over, either dead or unconscious.
The attendant grasped Charlie’s arm. He said firmly, “Mister, you come with me to the boss.” And less firmly, “Uh…how did you get that thing in there? And don’t try to tell me you didn’t, mister. I was through here five minutes ago, and you’re the only guy’s been in here since.”
Charlie opened his mouth, and closed it again. He had a sudden vision of himself being questioned at the headquarters of the museum and then at the police station. And if the police started asking questions about him, they’d find out about the worm and about his having been in the hospital for— And, golly, they’d get an alienist maybe, and—
With the courage of sheer desperation, Charlie smiled. He tried to make it an ominous smile; it may not have been ominous, but it was definitely unusual. “How would you like,” he asked the attendant, “to find yourself in there?” And he pointed with his free arm through the entrance and out into the main hallway at the stone sarcophagus of King Mene-Ptah. “I can do it, the same way I put that duck—”
The museum attendant was breathing hard. His eves looked slightly glazed, and he let go of Charlie’s arm. He said, “Mister, did you really—”
“Want me to show you how?”
“Uh…Gaw!” said the attendant. He ran.
Charlie forced himself to hold his own pace down to a rapid walk, and went in the opposite direction to the side entrance that led out into Beeker Street.
And Beeker Street was still a very ordinary-looking street, with lots of midday traffic, and no pink elephants climbing trees and nothing going on but the hurried confusion of a city street. Its very noise was soothing, in a way; although there was one bad moment when he was crossing at the corner and heard a sudden noise behind him. He turned around, startled, afraid of what strange thing he might see there.