Eyes in the Fishbowl (12 page)

Madame Stregovitch unlocked a heavy front door with a small oval window, and we went inside.

“I’ll just put these things away,” she said taking the packages. “And in the meantime you can get the fire going in the fireplace. Then we’ll have a nice cup of tea.”

I don’t spend much time having tea with old ladies as a rule, but I was curious, and besides I hadn’t had a chance yet to ask the questions I’d been planning. The logs were all arranged in the fireplace, so I found some matches on the mantle and got the fire started. Somewhere not far away I could hear Madame bustling around running water and clinking dishes.

When I was putting the matches back, I noticed a bunch of pictures on the mantle—mostly big framed photographs of foreign-looking people. There was one picture I noticed especially. It was larger than the others and in a very fancy frame. It was just a photograph, an old dim photograph of a woman, but there was something about it that made me keep staring at it. She had a kind of shawl draped over her head, and her face looked a little like Madame Stregovitch, dark and bony. But it was mostly the eyes I kept looking at. I’ve seen pictures before that had eyes that seemed to follow you, but these did more than that. They made you feel like squirming.

The fire was going pretty well and Madame S. still hadn’t come back, so I turned away from the picture and walked around the room. It was a small darkish room, stuffed with lots of big old-fashioned furniture and smothered with heavy drapes and curtains. The few places the walls did show, they were covered with pictures, some of them painted or sewn on heavy cloth. In two corners of the room there were little cupboards full of weird looking what-nots. All the time I was wandering around I kept glancing back at that one picture on the mantle, and finally I went back to look at it again. I was standing in front of it when Madame finally came back into the room. She was carrying a tray with a teapot and cups and a plate of little cakes and pastries. She came and stood beside me and looked at the picture, too.

“Who is she?” I asked.

Madame turned away without answering and put the tray on a little table. After a minute she said, “She was my mother.”

“I thought she might be,” I said. “She looks a little like you.”

“Do you think so?” She motioned for me to come and sit down. “Yes, I suppose it is quite evident. I am quite like her in many ways. It is a likeness I’ve spent most of a lifetime trying to escape.”

“Trying to escape?” I said. I guess I sounded a little surprised. Kids are always running their parents down and nobody pays any attention. But you just don’t expect people as old as Madame Stregovitch to do that sort of thing.

“You are shocked,” Madame said. “You are thinking perhaps that such an attitude is unsuitable for one of my generation?” I knew she was kind of teasing me, and I got the point. But then she shrugged and said, “Well, perhaps. However, in this case I think you did not understand my meaning. I did not intend to suggest that I disapproved of my mother in the usual manner of younger generations. She was an extraordinary woman, and I did not wish to be like her for an extraordinary reason—I was afraid.”

“Afraid?” I said. “Afraid of what?”

But Madame just began pouring tea and saying things like, “Do you take sugar?” and I got the feeling she was wishing she hadn’t let the whole conversation get started. I was curious, but I had some other important questions to ask and I didn’t want to wear out my welcome before I got around to them. So I went back to the question I had started to ask when we were just getting to the house.

“Well, what do you hear about the trouble at Alcott-Simpson’s?” I asked. “Do you think there’s been as much—er—excitement lately?”

“Why do you ask? Have you been hearing more rumors?”

“Well, I heard that they weren’t using the dogs anymore and not so many extra guards. I was wondering if they’ve already arrested somebody. Do you know if they’ve arrested the ones who were causing the trouble?”

Instead of answering me, Madame went off into a long string of the silent chuckles that were her way of laughing. “Hah!” she said finally, “Arrested them. I am afraid not. And as for there being less excitement lately, I had not heard that such was the case. If they are no longer using the dogs, perhaps it is because they proved to be useless. And as for the situation improving—just today one department was closed, perhaps permanently. And there may be others soon.”

“Closed?” I said. “I haven’t heard anything about that. What did they close?”

Madame looked at me for a moment with a strange expression on her face. “The toy department,” she said finally. “Today the toy department was closed. Oh, there was no official announcement, but there are rumors that tomorrow it will be roped off and no clerks will be on duty.”

The way Madame was acting puzzled me. I knew that she made fun of Alcott-Simpson’s lots of times, particularly the executives and some of the customers. But I didn’t think she really hated it or anything. After all, she’d been making her living there for a long time. But I kept getting the feeling that she was pleased, or at least a little amused by all the trouble.

“But why?” I asked. “Why the toy department?” It gave me a kind of empty feeling. Even though I wasn’t hung-up on the Alcott-Simpson toy department the way I once had been, I felt a loss, like when an old dream finally fades away for good. “I mean, the Alcott-Simpson toy department is famous all over the country. It’s kind of a symbol for little kids. Even the ones who can’t afford to buy anything there.”

“Well,” Madame said, “the reason being given is that there were economic difficulties—the department was not able to make a profit. But in the past the profits have always been high; for a symbol, the public expects to pay dearly. The real problem seems to have been that the store was no longer able to keep a staff. The clerks in the toy department have been quitting almost as quickly as they have been hired.”

“But why?”

Madame shrugged. “Who knows? Many reasons have been given. Who knows which reasons are true ones? Perhaps the real reasons have not yet been given at all. But then, reasons rarely have much to do with reality. Won’t you have another pastry, Dion?”

Up to that point I hadn’t intended to do much talking myself. I’d only planned to find out what I could from Madame Stregovitch, without going into the rumors I’d heard or any of the things that had happened to me. But something about the way Madame was taking it, making a joke out of it, made me want to force her to admit the seriousness of the whole thing. I guess I was feeling a lot like poor Myrna was when she wanted me to admit that it was more than just a crazy dream.

“Look,” I said, “you seem to think this is all very amusing, that there’s really nothing to worry about. Well, I know some things—some things I haven’t told you. Maybe you’ll just laugh them off too, and maybe I hope you do, in a way, but anyway—”

So I started out and told her everything. I began with the rumors I’d heard and the strange little things that had happened: the things José had told me; the way Mrs. Jensen had acted in the toy department; and all about Myrna and the things she had said.

Madame was interested. She watched me closely as I talked, and there was a sharpness to her eyes. But at times her lips still twitched, and her shoulders jerked with amusement. I took a deep breath then and started to tell about Sara. I began at the very beginning—how I’d seen her being chased by Mr. Rogers—and I told it all. How I’d gotten shut in the store the first time. How Sara had let me in again. What Sara had told me about herself, and how she talked about someone she called the Others. About the strange things that had happened when we were together. Long before I was finished, I could see that Madame was finally impressed. Her face had turned as still as stone, but her eyes blazed with interest.

When I had said all that I had to say, Madame leaned towards me. Her voice was harsh and tense, “This child, this Sara, describe her.”

“She’s not a child,” I said, “although, I guess she’s not far from it. She’s small and dark with huge dark eyes and long black hair.”

Madame stood up slowly. She had a strange distant look, as if her eyes were focusing on something far beyond my range of vision. “There is something I must attend to,” she said. “Wait here. I won’t be long.” And she disappeared into the next room.

I waited, wondering uneasily what I’d gotten into. Now that it was done, I wished that I hadn’t said so much about Sara. It seemed to me that Madame Stregovitch wasn’t at all the kind of person who’d tell on anyone, but you never could be sure. And I knew that, more than anything, I didn’t want to be the one to get Sara in trouble. That is, in more trouble than she was already in.

Madame must have been gone for ten or fifteen minutes. When she came back into the room, I hardly knew her. Her face was pale and tired, and her eyes seemed to be set in black holes. She sat down and pulled her chair close to mine.

“Dion,” she said, “you must listen carefully and do exactly as I say. You must not go back to Alcott-Simpson’s again for a while. Most particularly you must not go back again at night. Perhaps in a few days I may need your help there, at the store, and if I do I will let you know. But until that time, you must
not
go to Alcott-Simpson’s again.”

“Now wait a minute,” I said. “You can’t just tell me to do that without explaining why or anything. I have to go back right away. If there is some kind of danger—”

Madame held up her hand to make me stop. “Yes, you are right. You should be told enough to make you understand the importance of what I ask of you.” She covered her eyes with her hand and sat perfectly still for so long I was beginning to wonder if she’d gone into some kind of trance. When she finally uncovered her face and began to speak, her voice was high and humming, almost as if she were chanting or reciting from memory. “There are times and places when the usual barriers can be overcome and certain individuals are able to experience the overlapping of divergent forms of existence. This overlapping can take place through many different thresholds and can take many forms. One such form—one such overlapping of worlds—takes place only through a particular threshold, the sleeping or unconscious mind of a child. The mind of a child who is himself at a threshold between two forms of his existence, his childhood and his adult life.”

Madame’s voice stopped, and her eyes came back from looking somewhere through and beyond and focused again on me. “Dion,” she said in a more normal tone, “perhaps you have heard that there are persons with unusual psychic powers that enable them to establish contact with beings in other forms of existence. I am such a person, and I am responsible for what has happened at Alcott-Simpson’s. But I want you to understand that I meant no evil. There should be no danger to anyone, and there
is
no danger to those whose experiences are limited in the usual way by their imperfect senses. But there can be danger to the individual whose experience is broadened too suddenly and too far. The danger is to the one who becomes involved beyond barriers he is not meant to cross. There are thresholds, Dion, that are meant to be crossed by the patient crawl of discipline and dedication, and to cross them by any short cut, even the short cut of love, can bring great danger.” Madame stood up suddenly and motioned for me to do the same. “I know you are greatly confused and you have many questions. But I cannot say more. If you think carefully about what I have said, you will experience the truth more completely than if I tried to make you understand with many narrow words. It is only necessary that you remember that danger exists for you now at Alcott-Simpson’s.”

I
RAN. I RAN ALL
the way home and went right to my room. Dad was out somewhere. He’d left some dinner for me on the stove but I didn’t feel much like eating. I must have stayed in my room for about an hour, going over everything in my mind and deciding what to do.

In a way, the things I’d learned at Madame Stregovitch’s hadn’t shocked me as much as you might expect. Perhaps I’d already known some of it before in a wordless part of my mind. And it was almost a relief to have it put into words so that I could take it out and face it.

Part of it was very clear. Madame Stregovitch had made it possible for whomever or whatever it was—the ones Sara called the Others and Myrna called They—to invade Alcott-Simpson’s. Some of the rest of it was harder to understand. Somehow a person in-between was needed to do what Madame had done, a person who was in between childhood and maturity. I was pretty sure that Sara had been that person.

There was one other thing that I didn’t understand completely, though I got it enough to make me feel scared to death every time I thought about it. These invaders—these Others—were not dangerous
except
to someone who had become too closely involved with them. And that Sara was terribly involved was only too clear.

First, there was the fact that she was almost certainly the inbetween person Madame had used to summon them. And besides, even though I’d tried to fool myself with my “store executive’s daughter” theory, it was pretty plain that without the help of the Others, Sara could not have known all the things she knew or done all the things she did. The Others had been protecting Sara from the guards and dogs, helping her to open doors and unlock locks, and maybe even telling her when I was looking for her. And in exchange what? What kind of hold over Sara’s life had They taken in exchange?

I was sure that the things I had told Madame had made her realize how much danger Sara was in, and I knew that she was going to do whatever she could to help. But it worried me that Madame had said she might need my help at Alcott-Simpson’s in a few days. It sounded as if she wasn’t sure she could help Sara by herself. And I thought perhaps I knew why. It occurred to me that maybe Madame was afraid she was too late. That the Others would not let her find Sara and warn her. The last few times I had looked for Sara, I hadn’t been able to find her. Maybe the Others had already hidden her or taken her away.