WHEN I had finished speaking I felt tired and empty of all emotion. For better or worse, the story was told. As I looked back over it I wondered whether there was in it anything more than the record of a personal obsession, springing out of the shock of finding LeNormand and a subconscious jealousy of Jerry that an analyst might put an ugly name to. The episodes that seemed strange to me might appear natural or coincidental to a calm, clear mind like Dr Lister’s. Nowhere in the course of my narration had I produced any tangible proof of my instinctive belief that Selena was different from all the rest of us, and that in some way not clear to me she was responsible for the deaths of two men.
And yet, sitting there tired and miserable, I had a swift feeling that something was yet to be said or done. It seemed to me there was an immanence in the air and that we were not at the end of the story. I could not guess what the end would be, but I dreaded it.
Dr Lister did not speak for a long time. His hands were clasped in front of him on the table and he was staring at them as if the shape of his own knuckles was strange to him. Neither of us moved. Above and around us the night was undergoing a change; the great constellation of Scorpio was low on the western sky and the darkness was turning to a tarnished, misty silver. Again, as on Cloud Mesa, I thought of the eastward spin of the earth, rolling through space. The minute area of its surface which the two of us occupied was being turned toward the sun—the house, the trees, the wide reaches of the Sound, the whole eastern edge of the continent borne along inexorably into the light of a new day. Miles away the bellow of a Diesel made a muted, savage insertion of sound in the silence between us.
He unclasped his hands at last and looked at me thoughtfully. “That is all you have to tell me?”
“Yes.”
He put his palms down flat on the table, stood up, and blew out the stump of the candle. “It does not seem to prove anything,” he said, and sat down again. “Do you believe there is some connection between all the things you have told me?”
I studied for a minute, trying to find a way to give him the feeling that I had. “Yes, I’m sure there is. I know there is something behind the whole business because I know that Jerry found out what it is. That’s why he shot himself.”
“And you don’t know what this thing is?”
“No,” I said slowly, “I don’t. Except that it is connected with Selena. Everything goes back to her.”
He nodded. “She is a strange person. I grant you that. But except for her character—which I don’t wholly understand I’ll admit—I can’t see anything definite to give you this impression you seem to have.”
“What about LeNormand’s death? No one’s been able to explain that, but it happened. And what about Galli-Galli and the cards? That seems to me something more than just chance or coincidence. How about the things that happened on that trip to Montauk? And the fire she lighted out at Cloud Mesa. How did she light that?”
Even as I asked the questions I could imagine the answers he would make. LeNormand’s death was an unsolved mystery. The police had never been able to find the murderer, but they don’t find every murderer anyway. Galli-Galli and his cards was a trick, in a night club where I was none too sober and probably easy to fool. Most mind reading of the sort I’d accused Selena of on the Montauk road was a matter of close observation of the small gestures and expressions of the other person, and Selena was a highly intelligent woman. She had pulled on the brake because some scrap of sound or a flash of sun reflected from the approaching car had warned her. And as for the fire at Cloud Mesa, she had simply found a match. There was no part of my story which did not have a rational explanation.
“All those things,” he said quietly, “are out of the ordinary. But I don’t see any mystery in them. I can think of an explanation for every single one. Except LeNormand’s death, of course.”
“And Jerry’s,” I said brutally.
“Yes,” he replied in a low voice. “That is the hardest of all for me to accept.”
“Please, dad,” I said, “before you make up your mind that I’m suffering from some sort of delusion, try thinking about what’s happened from the other point of view. If you can show me that there’s nothing in it, you’ll be doing me a profound service.”
“All right,” he agreed, and lit a cigarette. He looked across at me with sympathetic toleration. “Let’s skip the minor things for the moment. Begin with Jerry and LeNormand.”
“There are some common factors there,” I said.
“Yes. What are they?”
“The most important of all,” I said, “is that there’s no explanation in either case. The presence of Selena, and Jerry, and me too, I suppose, in the immediate vicinity both times.”
“Anything else?”
“One more thing,” I told him. “The equations. LeNormand’s equations. They were part of the setting.”
“All right,” he conceded.
“And there was a fire, both times.”
He nodded.
“You can eliminate some of those factors. Jerry had nothing to do with either fire. And I didn’t. That leaves Selena. Selena and the equations. Jerry was working on them out at Cloud Mesa. Don’t forget that.”
He leaned forward. “Go on.”
The pieces were slowly fitting themselves together in my mind, but nothing was wholly clear yet, and the picture which was forming was not translatable into ordinary words. “The only other thing I’m sure of,” I said lamely, “is that when Jerry realized Selena had managed to light that fire, he thought at once of something else. But I’m not entirely sure what it was, and I can’t put it into words.”
“Well,” he observed after an uncomfortable pause, “most of what you’ve said tonight has been about Selena. That’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And that means, or suggests, that if you are right the answer must lie in her.”
“I know it does.” There was no shadow of doubt in my mind on that point. “It’s got to. If we knew who she is and where she came from—” I could not complete the sentence.
“Luella Jamison?”
“What do you think?”
He shook his head. “I don’t see how she could be. Even if the idiocy were the result of some mechanical factor, and not congenital, it could not have cleared up so fast.” Then he looked out over the Sound and said in a low voice, “Though I see what you’ve had to live with. It’s no wonder—” He stopped suddenly.
“It’s no wonder I have a fixation about her, you were going to say. If I have one. I’m still not sure. Tell me honestly what you think of Selena. You could look at her without thinking the things that have been tormenting me.”
When he finally spoke he chose his words slowly and carefully. “Selena is the most intelligent and the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met.” He paused again, and went on in an altered voice. “I was not entirely happy about Jerry’s marrying her. She seemed hard to me, not merely on the surface but all the way through. I kept watching her, hoping to see her tender or openly in love with Jerry, and I never did. She was cold and reasonable; impersonal is perhaps the word, and I never knew whether she was different to Jerry. I worried about it. I didn’t believe, till tonight, that she had another side at all.”
I was puzzled. What, I wondered, had I told him to make him revise his estimate of Selena? “I still think all that about her,” I told him. “She frightens me. She’s all mind and no heart. She simply stood there, knowing what he was going to do, while Jerry—”
“Yes,” he admitted, “I know everything you can say. But there are two little things. You said she touched his hair after . . . after . . .”
“Hell,” I said, “she’s seen movies and plays. She learned that gesture somewhere, the same way she imitated Grace. And it wasn’t much.”
“No, not much. But the other thing she couldn’t have learned. You told me that the first evening you were out there, she was reading one of Jerry’s old books. Do you remember saying that? One of his old books of fairy stories.”
He had put his finger on the one thing that seemed really out of keeping with the rest of her. Her other actions and moods—if you could call them that—seemed to me wholly consistent with some rigorous private standard of her own. A standard that came from the mind. But I could not understand why she should be reading Hans Christian Andersen. And as she read, she had been crying, silently, to herself. Why? It was incredible.
“Yes,” I admitted, “that was strange. I can’t explain that.”
“I think I can,” he said, and his tone was gentle. “I am glad you told me about it. To me it proves that she was fond of him.” My look must have informed him that I didn’t understand what he meant, for he smiled and went on in the voice he reserved for his rare personal confidences. “You’ve never been married, so you may not understand. But to some women—Jerry’s mother was one of them—the thought of their husbands as children, as small boys, is extremely touching. I suppose very likely it’s the maternal part of their sex instinct dominating all the rest for the time being. That’s why Selena was crying when she read Jerry’s book, one that belonged to him when he was a boy.”
Of course, it was possible. Neither Grace nor any other woman has ever yearned over me as a child or as a husband, so I didn’t know. But my immediate feeling was that Dr Lister was wrong. If Selena was moved to tenderness and even tears by something, I felt sure it was not because she was thinking of Jerry as a boy. There had been an intensity and a bitterness in her face then, as I remembered it, which did not fit in with such a theory.
It was hard to believe, indeed, that anything Selena read would stir her deeply, especially a fairy story. She was not the sort of little girl, I was willing to bet, who cared much for fairy stories, and to suppose that now, when she was so appallingly mature and with a mind like hers, she should deliberately invite tears . . . No, it didn’t fit. She read anything and everything that came under her hand, but none of it affected her. And if this story had moved her, it had done so by sheer chance.
Anyway, what I’d seen on the page to which the book was open hadn’t seemed sad. What was it? Something about lanterns being lighted and sailors dancing. I couldn’t quite bring it back into my conscious memory.
“I was trying to remember what story she was reading,” I told him finally, to explain my silence. “I only looked at the few words I told you about— sailors lighting lanterns on a boat or something.”
He nodded. “Yes, that was a favorite of Jerry’s when he was eight or so. I used to read it aloud to him while he ate his supper. It’s the one called ‘The Little Mermaid.’”
I didn’t remember it. “Oh,” I said vaguely. “Well, I don’t suppose it matters.”
“‘The Little Mermaid,’” he went on, “is the saddest and the best of all Andersen’s stories. You must have read it. Don’t you remember the little mermaid princess who lived at the bottom of the sea? One day she came up to the top of the water and saw a ship with a prince in it. She saved him from drowning and brought him to land. And she fell in love with him.”
It came back to me with a rush. “Yes,” I said with a sense of inner excitement that I did not stop to analyze, “that’s it. And didn’t she go to some witch to be made into a human being?”
“The witch transformed her fish’s tail into legs and feet, but whenever she walked she felt as if she were treading on sharp knives. She gave her tongue to the witch, so she could not speak. And she agreed that if she didn’t win the prince’s love, she had to die without an immortal, human soul.” He looked away. “Jerry always used to cry about that part of it.”
The rest of the story was flashing through my mind as he spoke. How the little mermaid, after devoting herself to the prince, found that he was going to marry someone else, and how, on his wedding night, she slipped over the rail of the ship on which the wedding party was sailing, and dissolved into the sea foam. I remembered it all, now, and the hot feeling of tears in my eyes when I had first read it. Perhaps it had moved even Selena.
Perhaps. But in the instant when the memory of the story completed itself in my mind, another explanation for Selena’s reaction to it occurred to me. She might have cried because the story was moving and beautiful—or because it was true.
It was a fantastic, horrible notion, and I wanted immediately to stop thinking it. I remembered Jerry’s face as he looked at Selena there on the settle before the fire she had somehow managed to light. Certainly there had been horror and incredulity in his eyes. It was possible that he had been thinking, then, the same thought that was beginning to crystallize in my own mind. I felt an intense acceleration of every image, feeling, operation of my consciousness. My thoughts were not under my control; they flickered back over the whole of the story I had just told. And nowhere did they find positive proof that the thing which was growing, expanding into unwelcome life in my brain was impossible.
The panic fear that swept over me as I realized that I might have discovered the answer was indescribable. I felt no sense of triumph at having found out the secret of Selena and her life with Jerry and the rest of us. Instead, I was sinking into icy, black water, being suffocated by its pressure, drowning in arctic night and winter. Layer after layer of cold and blackness was piling up above me and the fright of death itself was pounding in my pulse. Fear like that, real fear, is an invasion, a physical thing full of ice and death that enters into every fiber of the body and possesses the mind. The worst of it was that there was no tangible thing with which I could deal. There was nothing to run away from and nothing to confront. This terror sprung from a nebulous idea, a half-perceived theory. . . .
My face must have given Dr Lister a suggestion of what was in my mind. He was staring at me with alarm. “What’s the matter, Bark? What’s happened to you?”
His voice came from a distance. I tried to answer, but my lips were stiff. I licked them. “Something just occurred to me. Something that might explain her, or part of her.“
“What is it?”
I wanted to tell him, but I knew that he would think I was out of my mind. There was no way of expressing it that would not sound incredible. “I can’t put it into words, yet,” I said. “But it’s about Selena. I don’t think she’s—well—normal.”
Incomprehension was stamped on his face. “I don’t see what you mean. Do you think she’s insane?”
“No,” I said, “not insane. There’s nothing wrong with her mind at all.”
“What is abnormal about her, then?”
“Her self,” I told him, separating the two words deliberately. “There’s something entirely different about her. She isn’t like most people. She has a better mind and a better body, but the quality I mean hasn’t anything to do with comparatives.”
“You think she’s unique, in some way. Nobody else in the world is like her?”
“Well,” I answered, “I don’t know about that. Maybe there are others of her kind. If there are, they’re cleverer. They don’t show it.” The thought that I might be right about that made me pause. Even the possibility of encountering again someone like Selena, or of living in a world where another like her existed, was appalling to me. I went on quickly. “Anyway, I hope she’s the only one. Can’t you see how utterly different Selena is from you and me and Grace and everyone else we know? It’s a difference that’s much worse than if she’d lost an arm or a leg, or had her face smashed in an accident. Those things are just on the outside. This is something that goes clear through her.”
He shook his head. “I haven’t the remotest notion what you are trying to say.”
“Well,” I replied, “I’ll have to phrase it differently. Don’t you feel that there’s a lack in her? Don’t you see that she is incomplete somehow?”
“No. No, I don’t believe I do.”
“You said yourself that she was cold. I’d put it another way. She hasn’t any soul.”
He made an impatient gesture with his hand. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. Let’s stick to facts.”
“Facts!” My voice sounded harsh in my ears. “There are all kinds of facts. Do you admit it’s a fact that Selena is different from every other person you’ve ever known?”
“Yes, I’ll admit that.”
“And what sort of difference is it?”
“No two human personalities are ever identical.”
“You’re evading the question.”
“No,” he said. “I’m not evading anything. Selena is not like you or me or anyone else. But the same could be said for you, or for me, or for anybody.”
“Good God,” I said in desperation, “can’t you see that she is more different than anyone you’ve ever known? Can’t you understand that the reason for it isn’t the normal variation between one person and the next? She’s never been a part of the rest of us. She’s been a visitor in every thing and every place I’ve ever observed her.”
“A visitor?”
“Yes,” I said, shivering with a cold that did not come from the air around us. “She’s never been anything else.”
He looked thoughtful. “That is a good description of her attitude ... I never thought of it in just that way. There is something alien about her, perhaps.”
“And another thing. Her mind. You admit that she’s intelligent. She’s more than that. She’s so intelligent that she’s either a genius or else—” I did not dare complete the sentence.
He caught me up on it at once. “Or else what, Bark?”
“Or else,” I went on, with every word sticking in my throat, “she isn’t human at all.” He stared at me. “Her mind, I mean. Not her body.”
“I don’t know that I understand you.”
“I don’t understand it myself. I don’t know what it means, either. But I think that Selena’s intelligence isn’t human. It isn’t akin to anything in the rest of us. Her mind wasn’t part of a baby and then of a child and then of a girl. It didn’t grow up and go through the experiences that are common to every human life. It wasn’t given to her by heredity, the ways yours and mine were given to us, with traits of our parents and maybe our ancestors blended into it. And I don’t believe it was shaped by environment, either. According to your own science, dad, every living minute of every person is recorded on their brains. Each thing that ever happened to you or to me is a part of us, written into some page of our minds. I don’t believe the writing on the pages of Selena’s mind is in any language you or I know. At least, not till recently. The first entry we could read, I think, would be dated August seventh, two years ago.”
“That was when Luella Jamison disappeared in Collegeville?”
“Yes.”
He was looking at me as if he couldn’t believe that he had understood me at all. “Then your idea is that Selena’s mind suddenly began to function on that day?”
“No,” I told him. “My idea is that her mind appeared on that date.”
His voice was incredulous. “Appeared? Appeared from where?”
The question was one that I had known he would ask. If I knew the answer—and I was afraid to think whether I did or not—I did not want to speak it. There would be finality about uttering it, and I did not want anything final. “I don’t know from where. From some other place. That’s as near as I can come to it.”
“You can’t believe that. There’s no conceivable . . . Unless you think she’s possessed?”
I nodded. “Yes, something like that.”
“Impossible. I’m not even sure there is such a thing as possession. Split personality, perhaps. But Selena isn’t a split personality.”
There was no argument about that, of course. “No,” I assented, “she’s all of a piece throughout.”
“Well, then,” he said, and I could see that he was impatient, “I don’t see how you can say—”
I cut into his sentence. “Her mind is all of a piece. It doesn’t belong with her body. It’s just living in it, if you like to put it that way.”
“This is a terrible idea,” he said slowly, and shook himself as if to get rid of it. “I don’t believe you’re right about it. It’s not scientific.”
I shrugged. What difference did it make whether every truth was a scientific truth?
“What,” he went on carefully, “is your theory of the cause or purpose of this . . . this mind visitation in Selena?”
“I’m not sure. But there’s the Hans Andersen story to go back to. The little mermaid wanted a soul. I think that’s what Selena wants too.”
He struck his hand down on the table. “Let’s be sensible. I don’t like these vague words. Exactly what do you mean by ‘soul’?”
“Everybody means the same thing by it,” I retorted. “Soul is the part of you that isn’t your body and isn’t your mind either. It’s what ties you together inside. It’s the essence of what you are.”
He shook his head. “Emotions—which appear to be about what you mean by ‘soul’—are effects of certain glandular imbalances arising from sensory stimuli.”
“Stop being a doctor, dad. You know better than that.”
“Sorry.” He looked at me gently, excusing me because of my fatigue and what I had been through.
“No,” I said sharply. “I don’t want you making allowances for me. Do you honestly believe that all that scientific rigmarole you just recited really means anything? Does it explain anything to you? What about art and religion and love? What about sorrow, dad? Are all those things nothing but the product of some glandular imbalances, as you put it?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and his voice was so low I could scarcely hear it.
“Yes, you do. They aren’t. They can’t be. Ask Selena. She’ll tell you they can’t.”
He answered quietly. “You’re not very coherent. Perhaps if you explained this whole idea of yours in simple words, I’d be able to understand it.”
I was ashamed of my outburst. “I wasn’t attacking you, dad. But I know I’m right. Let’s put it this way: Selena cried when she read the story of the little mermaid. She cried because she saw in it the elements of some experience of her own. She is an alien too. And so that story moved her deeply.”
“Naturally,” he said thoughtfully, “if you are right, it would do so.” He was silent for some time, staring at the tabletop. “I cannot accept your assumption. It is too full of mystery. I have a scientific mind, perhaps. I can’t believe that Selena is anything but an extraordinary woman—an adventuress perhaps and possibly a foreigner.”
I had expected he would say that. “I hope you’re right,” I answered. “My theory is— Well, I wish to God I’d never thought of it. But it does explain a lot of things that you can’t.”
“Go ahead,” he said. “It will be better for you to get this off your chest.”
“It all begins,” I said, “on the evening when Luella Jamison was standing outside the rest room of the Sunoco station in Collegeville with her hands on the lattice. Think of her there, a body with no mind, no intelligence at all. Probably the brain cells were inside her skull all the time, but they weren’t connected to anything. Within three or four minutes Luella Jamison vanishes. It took intelligence to do that one thing and do it as fast and efficiently as Luella did it. Ten times more intelligence than Luella ever displayed before. You’ll grant that.”
“Yes,” he said reluctantly, “I’ll admit that, I suppose.”
“Luella’s body suddenly acquired a mind. I don’t know yet where it came from, though I have a guess. But anyway, it went straight to one certain place in all Collegeville, like steel to a magnet. It went straight to Walter LeNormand. He must have been in the observatory at the time, getting ready for his night’s work. Luella Jamison walked in on him. What happened between them I don’t know, but in two days he married her. And Luella Jamison, who did not know her own name, probably, became Selena LeNormand.”
“You’re theorizing,” he interrupted. “How do you know she went to LeNormand?”
“Because there is no other place she could have gone, and no other likely place Selena could have come from. Because Selena has to have an intelligence near her powerful enough, like LeNormand’s, to give her some point of contact with human existence. When we met her first, after his death, she was dull and stupid, almost in a trance, till she met Jerry. His mind was the same kind as hers. It made her come to life again. Jerry and LeNormand had the same sort of intelligence. They were mathematicians. For that matter,“ I added, ”there were mathematicians in Luella’s own ancestry, if you’ll recall.“
“Yes. Parsons said that.”
All the time I was talking to him the certainty that I was right kept growing and expanding inside me. With every word I spoke, the truth came to life in my brain like a winter-torpid snake in the spring sun. I no longer fought against the fear of it, because there was no room left in which to fight. Revulsion and terror were in every corner inch of my consciousness. My face must have reflected some of it, for Dr Lister watched me with concern and a professional suspicion. But I was indifferent to that. All I wanted was to complete the story, as if, by communicating it to him I could siphon off some of the cold dread I was experiencing.
When Luella Jamison walked into Eldridge Observatory, she went there because she knew that LeNormand was there. At least, she knew his intelligence was there. With the force that was in her mind, that was a part of her, it would be easy to get him to marry her. Hadn’t she made me offer her a cigarette when I knew she never smoked? That was a small thing, but she could have done anything with me, and even with a man like LeNormand. So she lived with him, learning the ways of people, adapting herself to an unfamiliar life, just as the little mermaid lived among mortals when she first came up out of the sea.
“Surely you don’t think Selena’s mind came out of the ocean?” he asked me when I reached this point in my exposition.
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t the sea.”
So things had gone for several months. And then LeNormand, who must have been living by that time in a strange world of surmise and perhaps of fear, went back to his work, his great paper on space and time, and began to go over his equations. He must have made his final discovery the afternoon of the State football game.
And when he made that last step which put the whole thing clear before him, a demonstrated truth, he must have sat there thinking about it. Certainly then she knew what he was doing, even though she was not in the room with him. I remembered how she had read my mind so often in the past, in unobtrusive ways that I had overlooked because I did not see their implications. How much more easily could she have known what LeNormand had found, what intense and mathematical symbols were forming in his brain as he worked and thought! She sat there, in his house, and understood what he had found. To her it seemed so clear, so true, so irrefutable, that she decided he had to die.
Dr Lister cleared his throat. “Why should LeNormand have been a menace to her because he’d made some sort of mathematical discovery?” His tone suggested that the question ought to reveal my own folly to me.
“I can’t tell you that. But remember what Jerry said about its importance? ‘The biggest thing in the world, by God!’ All I can guess is that somehow LeNormand’s discovery was connected with Selena.”
“His mathematics, you mean?”
“Yes,” I answered him slowly, “his proof of what Jerry called the serial nature of time. It had something to do with her.”
“But what?” he said impatiently. “Do you think she was jealous of it, or what?”
“No. I think LeNormand believed he’d found a way to test his theory.”
“The only way he could do that would be to travel through time, physically, or at least mentally.”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“But that’s absurd.”
“Selena didn’t think so. She killed him to keep him from trying it.”
“This is all mad,” he asserted. “Why should she care?”
I looked at him and tried to make him feel the conviction that was in me. “Because she didn’t want him to find out where she came from.”
“So,” he said, and his tone was pure amazement. “You think she—or her mind—came through time.”
“Yes.”
“From the past or the future?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t any difference.”
Dr Lister looked at me with pity openly in his eyes. “This is all delusion, Bark. Your mind is playing tricks on you. There’s no sense to this notion of yours, and no evidence for it.”
“Yes, there is,” I told him. “There’s one piece of evidence. That is what she said to Jerry in Bermuda, lying beside him in the moonlight. She said, ‘This is what my people do not know.’ You see, she was beginning to find out what she had missed with LeNormand. Her mind was learning from her body. It takes mind and body both to make a soul. Living with Jerry taught her something of what it means to be a human being.”
“Then why should she have let him kill himself?”
“You must see that now. Jerry never stopped wondering about LeNormand’s death. His love for Selena made him all the more anxious to find the solution to it. He believed that those equations were the important clue. He had tremendous mathematical ability, and he studied them until he understood what they meant. After that, when he saw the fire that Selena had lighted, he thought of the fire that killed LeNormand. And then he knew why LeNormand died, and how.”
“Selena was responsible for both the fires, then?”
“Yes.”
“How did she create them?”
I was very tired, and I could see that he did not believe me. I had not convinced him. The dark thought that obsessed me, the fear that was almost overwhelming me had no existence for him. There was no use going on. “It doesn’t matter how she created them. I don’t know. You’re just asking the question to humor me. I haven’t convinced you.”
He spread his hands in a gesture of apology. “You’re tired to the point of collapse, Bark. People’s brains get queer kinks in them when they’re as exhausted as you are.” He was quiet for a while. “In a way, I wish I could believe you. Any explanation would be better than none at all.”
“Not this explanation,” I told him. “I’ve never been so afraid in my life as I am this minute.”
He tried to smile. “You’ll feel differently after a good sleep. I’ll give you something that will relax you.”
“I hope so,” I replied. “I hope you have the chance to do that.”
“Of course, I will.”
“Yes,” I said, “you will if I’m wrong. But not if I’m right.”
“Why not?”
“Think back,” I told him. “Remember what happened to the other two people that found out.”
“And if you’re right, you think the same thing will happen to us?”
I steadied my voice as much as I could. “She will know that we have found out. And she will come here. After all, it’s been almost a week since Jerry . . . She could have been here days ago.” The very certainty in my voice alarmed me. “She’ll come, all right. Whether she’ll kill us or not, I can’t tell you.“
“No,” he said, “you mustn’t let thoughts like that get the upper hand. Selena is just a woman, a strange woman. This nightmare you’ve built up in your mind will pass in a few days. You’ve had a shock, and you are tired. That’s all there is to it. We’ll go upstairs now and have some sleep.”
“All right,” I said. “I don’t want to argue with you. I want you to be right. I’ll take your sleeping powder, or whatever it is, and wake up sane again. But, first, I’m going to sit here for five or ten minutes. That’ll be time enough to demonstrate to me that she isn’t coming. It was quick, the two times before.”
We sat waiting. The dawn was absolutely still around us. Nothing moved. Dr Lister looked at my face quietly with his hands folded. I think he was planning the details of his treatment to restore me to myself. I hoped that the first thing he would do would be to exorcise the cold, irrepressible fear that went through me in steady, pulsing waves with every beat of my heart.
The pause seemed never-ending. Gradually I saw resolution begin to shape his mouth. He was on the point of saying something. At that very instant there was a stir at my feet. It was Boojum. He walked out from under the table, stiffly, and turned to look down the terrace toward the corner of the house behind Dr Lister. He did not growl, nor wag his tail. He simply looked. After a few seconds his ears went up stiffly into two triangles. Both of us were watching him; out of the corner of my eye I saw something like hesitation come into Dr Lister’s face.
There was a sound of footsteps beyond the corner of the building.
The color went out of his face, then, in one swift wash of gray that left him looking old and broken, but not afraid. The lines around his mouth tightened; he lifted his head and half turned in his chair.
She came toward us walking with that same long, swinging stride. Even when I knew, as I did then, that she was not a person, not human, not of my own sort at all, there was something so magnificent about her that no fright or revulsion could cancel the effect of it. The fear inside me was swallowed up by a passive expectation. This was the inevitable end of the story, and whatever was to happen, it was out of my power to influence it in any fashion.
She came to the table and stood beside it, with the tips of her fingers resting on its top, looking down quietly at both of us.
“So,” she said, after a while, “you found out.” Her eyes rested on me with no expression in them that I could read.
“Yes.” My voice sounded perfectly calm.
She gave me a half smile. “You are a strange person, Bark. I should never understand you. I suppose you hate me.”
“I am afraid of you,” I told her.
“There is no need for that,” she said, and her voice was cool and impersonal. “Nothing will happen to you or to Dr Lister. I do not intend to kill you. What little knowledge you have is of no danger to me. You cannot prove any of it, and the rest of the world will not pay any attention to your story if you tell it.”
Her calm, complete assumption of superiority stung me, even in the lethargy of will that possessed my mind. “That isn’t what I mean.”
She studied me thoughtfully. “You are afraid of me for some other reason, then.”
“Yes,” I said. “For what you are.”
It seemed to me that a look of pain came into her eyes. “Oh. To you that makes a difference. And yet you do not know what you are yourself. You do not know what any other human being is. You know as much about me as about anyone. More, perhaps. We have seen each other often. Once, I even saved your life. But you are afraid of me because I am not like you.”
“Yes,” I said again. “Go back where you came from.”
She moved her hand, almost irresolutely, across the top of the table. “That is not so easy. . . . Living here has changed me. Why should you hate me when you do not know, all of you, where you came from yourselves?”
“Leave us,” I told her. “Even if you know the answers to all our questions, leave us. You don’t belong here.”
Her voice was quiet. “I have found that out. I shall go back.”
Dr Lister turned his chair and stared at her. “Before you go,” he said, and his voice was hard and bitter, “I want to ask you something.”
She lifted her hand in assent.
The expression on his face as he spoke was a mingling of loathing and incomprehension. “You seem to know what Bark has said about you. Is he right?”
She met his look squarely, and in the way she stood and answered it in silence for a moment I could feel the power of her anger. “Did you suppose,” she said finally, “that you were alone in the enormous spaces of the universe? Do you believe that you are the ultimate product of creation? There is nothing unique about you.” Her tone was so level, so coldly insistent that even Dr Lister averted his head and seemed to shrink in upon himself. “Is there any reason why I must leave you alone? You do not own me and you have no power over me. Why,” she said, and there was an edge of bitter amusement in her tone, “when the earth has traveled around the sun a few more times, you will be dead.”
He lifted his head and there was defiance on his face. “Yes,” he said, “and you do not seem much concerned with death. You have lived here two years, and in that time you have brought about the deaths of two men. You talk as if that were nothing.”
She dropped her eyes. “I know how important that seems to you. Believe me, I did not mean to kill either of them.”
Dr Lister said coldly, “I don’t believe you.”
“Walter LeNormand’s death was sheer accident. I had no intention of killing him. I wanted nothing but to stop him from thinking, prevent him from going on with his work. I knew what he had discovered, what more he would find if he went on thinking. I was determined to stop him. There aren’t any words to tell you what I did; there is a way of using the force of the mind, and I used it. I turned it on him, I willed him to stop thinking, to lose consciousness. My plan was to go, then, to the observatory, and destroy his work. But I forgot one thing.”
“What was that?” said Dr Lister, as if he were humoring her.
“The football game. Thousands of people sitting at it, excited, emotional, pouring out a force a thousand times more powerful than a bolt of lightning. It was that force that killed him. It magnified, if you like, the force of the impulses I was sending until they were so powerful they consumed him.”
“I see.” There was nothing in his voice to give me a hint of what was in his mind, but when he spoke next there was a level deadliness in his tone that I had never heard in it before. “You also killed my son,” he said.
She turned toward him so that I could no longer see her face. “Jerry,” she said, as though the sound of his name hurt her intolerably, “yes. Jerry had to die too, and because of me. But what else could have happened? He realized the truth. Do you think he could have lived with it?” There was no answer, and she turned to me. “Do you, Bark?”
“No,” I said.
She turned back to Dr Lister. “Bark’s answer is the only one. I tried to stop him. I didn’t want him to find out. But he did. And he was too intelligent for the rest of you. In time he would have found a way to make people listen to him. I could not let that happen.”
He dropped his eyes from her face and looked at the table. “Damn you,” he said.
“Before I go,” she went on without paying any attention to his words, “I want to tell you one thing more. If I could stay, if there were anything here left to stay for, I should do so.” She turned and looked full at me. “The little mermaid had to go too, because there was no longer any possibility of love.” I saw that there were tears in her eyes. “Good-by, Bark. I loved your friend.” Turning to Dr Lister, she half lifted her hand as if to touch him, in the same gesture I remembered from Cloud Mesa, and then withdrew it. “And I loved your son,” she said. “Remember that.”
With a single quick motion she stripped her finger of the two rings, the one with the great square emerald in it, and the narrow band of gold with which Jerry had married her, and put them on the table between us. They lay there, bright and beautiful, on the painted iron, and we looked at them. I did not see her go, but the sound of her feet died along the terrace and around the corner of the house.
When I picked up the emerald ring, it was still warm from her finger.
“Whoever she is,” said Dr Lister after a long time, “she knows how to make an exit.” He said nothing more for a full minute. “There is no proof. It is all fantastic. She talked like a madwoman, and yet . . . The only real fact is that Jerry is dead.”
He stood up, and we went into the house together.
There are two things to add to this story.
When the place at Cloud Mesa was closed and its contents shipped east to us, I went through Jerry’s papers with care. The notebooks for his thesis alone were missing. What became of them I have never found out, but the inference is obvious.
Luella Jamison has been found. I heard about that from Parsons. It appears that her father, getting up early one morning to go to town, found her standing at the front gate. She was holding on to the pickets of the fence beside it. He led her into the house and she slipped at once into the routine by which she had always lived. According to Parsons, the Jamisons are happy because she is home again.