Bradbury, Ray - SSC 11 (9 page)

 
          
 
"Cynthia," he said, "is your
intuition in running order? Is this earthquake weather? Is the land going to sink?
Will war be declared? Or is it only that our delphinium will die of the
blight?"

 
          
 
"Hold on. Let me feel my bones."

 
          
 
He opened his eyes and watched Cynthia in turn
closing hers and sitting absolutely statue-still, her hands on her knees.
Finally she shook her head and smiled.

 
          
 
"No. No war declared. No land sinking.
Not even a blight Why?"

 
          
 
"I've met a lot of doom talkers today.
Well, two anyway, and—"

 
          
 
The screen door burst wide. Fortnum's body
jerked as if he had been struck. "What—I"

 
          
 
Tom, a gardener's wooden flat in his arms,
stepped out on the porch.

 
          
 
"Sorry," he said. "What's
wrong, Dad?"

 
          
 
"Nothing." Fortnum stood up, glad to
be moving. "Is that the crop?"

 
          
 
Tom moved forward eagerly. "Part of it.
Boy, they're doing great. In just seven hours, with lots of water, look how big
the dam things are!" He set the flat on the table between his parents.

 
          
 
The crop was indeed plentiful. Hundreds of
small grayish-brown mushrooms were sprouting up in the damp soil.

 
          
 
"I'll be damned," said Fortnum,
impressed.

 
          
 
Cynthia put out her hand to touch the flat,
then took it away uneasily.

 
          
 
"I hate to be a spoilsport, but . . .
there's no way for these to be anything else but mushrooms, is there?"

 
          
 
Tom looked as if he had been insulted.
"What do you think I'm going to feed you? Poisoned fungoids?"

 
          
 
“That's just it," said Cynthia quickly.
"How do you tell them apart?"

 
          
 
"Eat 'em,” said Tom. "If you live,
they're mushrooms. If you drop dead— well"

 
          
 
He gave a great guffaw, which amused Fortnum but
only made his mother wince. She sat back in her chair.

 
          
 
"I—I don't like them," she said.

 
          
 
"Boy, oh, boy." Tom seized the flat
angrily. "When are we going to have the next wet-blanket sale in this
house?"

 
          
 
He shuffled morosely away.

 
          
 
"Tom—" said Fortnum.

 
          
 
"Never mind," said Tom.
"Everyone figures they'll be ruined by the boy entrepreneur. To heck with
it!"

 
          
 
Fortnum got inside just as Tom heaved the
mushrooms, flat and all, down the cellar stairs. He slammed the cellar door and
ran out the back door.

 
          
 
Fortnum turned back to his wife, who,
stricken, glanced away.

 
          
 
"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't
know why, I just had to say that to Tom. I—"

 
          
 
The phone rang. Fortnum brought the phone
outside on its extension cord.

 
          
 
"Hugh?" It was Dorothy Willis'
voice. She sounded suddenly very old and very frightened. "Hugh, Roger
isn't there, is he?"

 
          
 
"Dorothy? No.”

 
          
 
"He's gone!" said Dorothy. "All
his clothes were taken from the closet." She began to cry.

 
          
 
"Dorothy, hold on, I'll be there in a minute.”

 
          
 
"You must help, oh, you must. Something's
happened to him, I know it," she wailed. "Unless you do something,
we'll never see him alive again."

 
          
 
Very slowly he put the receiver back on its
hook, her voice weeping inside it. The night crickets quite suddenly were very
loud. He felt the hairs, one by one, go up on the back of his neck.

 
          
 
Hair can't do that, he thought. Silly, silly.
It can't do that, not in real life, it can't I

 
          
 
But, one by slow prickling one, his hair did.

 
          
 
The wire hangers were indeed empty. With a
clatter, Fortnum shoved them aside and down along the rod, then turned and
looked out of the closet at Dorothy Willis and her son Joe.

 
          
 
"I was just walking by," said Joe,
"and saw the closet empty, all Dad's clothes gone!"

 
          
 
"Everything was fine," said Dorothy.
"We've had a wonderful life. I don't understand, I don't, I don't!"
She began to cry again, putting her hands to her face.

 
          
 
Fortnum stepped out of the closet.

 
          
 
"You didn't hear him leave the
house?"

 
          
 
"We were playing catch out front,"
said Joe. "Dad said he had to go in for a minute. I went around back. Then
he was gone!"

 
          
 
"He must have packed quickly and walked
wherever he was going, so we wouldn't hear a cab pull up in front of the
house."

 
          
 
They were moving out through the hall now.

 
          
 
"I'll check the train depot and the
airport." Fortnum hesitated. "Dorothy, is there anything in Roger's
background—"

 
          
 
"It wasn't insanity took him." She
hesitated. "I feel, somehow, he was kidnapped."

 
          
 
Fortnum shook his head. "It doesn't seem
reasonable he would arrange to pack, walk out of the house and go meet his
abductors."

 
          
 
Dorothy opened the door as if to let the night
or the night wind move down the hall as she turned to stare back through the
rooms, her voice wandering.

 
          
 
"No. Somehow they came into the house.
Right in front of us, they stole him away."

           
 
And then: "A terrible thing has
happened."

 
          
 
Fortnum stepped out into the night of crickets
and rustling trees. The doom talkers, he thought, talking their dooms. Mrs.
Goodbody, Roger, and now Roger's wife. Something terrible has happened. But
what, in God's name? And how?

 
          
 
He looked from Dorothy to her son. Joe,
blinking the wetness from his eyes, took a long time to turn, walk along the
hall and stop, fingering the knob of the cellar door.

 
          
 
Fortnum felt his eyelids twitch, his iris
flex, as if he were snapping a picture of something he wanted to remember.

 
          
 
Joe pulled the cellar door wide, stepped down
out of sight, gone. The door tapped shut.

 
          
 
Fortnum opened his mouth to speak, but
Dorothy's hand was taking his now, he had to look at her.

 
          
 
"Please," she said. "Find him
for me."

 
          
 
He kissed her cheek. "If it's humanly
possible."

 
          
 
If it's humanly possible. Good Lord, why had
he picked those words?

 
          
 
He walked off into the summer night.

 
          
 
A gasp, an exhalation, a gasp, an exhalation,
an asthmatic insuck, a vaporing sneeze. Somebody dying in the dark? No.

 
          
 
Just Mrs. Goodbody, unseen beyond the hedge,
working late, her hand pump aimed, her bony elbow thrusting. The sick-sweet
smell of bug spray enveloped Fortnum as he reached his house.

 
          
 
"Mrs. Goodbody? Still at it?"

 
          
 
From the black hedge her voice leaped.
"Damn it, yes! Aphids, water bugs, woodworms, and now the Marasmius
oreades. Lord, it grows fast!"

 
          
 
"What does?"

 
          
 
"The Marasmius oreades, of course! It's
me against them, and I intend to win! There! There! There!"

 
          
 
He left the hedge, the gasping pump, the
wheezing voice, and found his wife waiting for him on the porch almost as if
she were going to take up where Dorothy had left off at her door a few minutes
ago.

 
          
 
Fortnum was about to speak when a shadow moved
inside. There was a creaking noise. A knob rattled

 
          
 
Tom vanished into the basement.

 
          
 
Fortnum felt as if someone had set off an explosion
in his face. He reeled. Everything had the numbed familiarity of those waking
dreams where all motions are remembered before they occur, all dialogue known
before it falls from the lips.

 
          
 
He found himself staring at the shut basement
door. Cynthia took him inside, amused.

 
          
 
"What? Tom? Oh, I relented. The dam
mushrooms meant so much to him. Besides, when he threw them into the cellar
they did nicely, just lying in the dirt—"

 
          
 
"Did they?" Fortnum heard himself
say.

 
          
 
Cynthia took his arm. "What about
Roger?"

 
          
 
"He's gone, yes."

 
          
 
"Men, men, men," she said.

 
          
 
"No, you're wrong," he said. "I
saw Roger every day the last ten years. When you know a man that well, you can
tell how things are at home, whether things are in the oven or the Mixmaster.
Death hadn't breathed down his neck yet; he wasn't running scared after his
immortal youth, picking peaches in someone else's orchards. No, no, I swear,
I'd bet my last dollar on it, Roger—"

 
          
 
The doorbell rang behind him. The delivery boy
had come up quietly onto the porch and was standing there with a telegram in
his hand.

 
          
 
"Fortnum?"

 
          
 
Cynthia snapped on the hall light as he ripped
the envelope open and smoothed it out for reading.

 
          
 
TRAVELING
NEW ORLEANS
.
THIS TELEGRAM POSSIBLE OFF-GUARD MOMENT.
YOU MUST
REFUSE, REPEAT REFUSE, ALL SPECIAL-DELIVERY PACKAGES. ROGER

 
          
 
Cynthia glanced up from the paper. "I
don't understand. What does he mean?" But Fortnum was already at the
telephone, dialing swiftly, once. "Operator? The police, and hurry!"

 
          
 
At ten-fifteen that night the phone rang for
the sixth time during the evening. Fortnum got it and immediately gasped.
"Roger! Where are you?"

 
          
 
"Where am I, hell," said Roger
lightly, almost amused. "You know very well where I am, you're responsible
for this. I should be angry!"

           
 
Cynthia, at his nod, had hurried to take the
extension phone in the kitchen. When he heard the soft click, he went on.