“The conscious recognition of something that’s been subconscious for a long time. But don’t quote this amateur psychologist!” He laughed again.
“Good, good!” Willis turned, his face lighting. He readjusted himself in the seat. “That’s it! Over a long period, things gather, right? All of a sudden, you have to spit, but you don’t remember saliva collecting. Your hands are dirty, but you don’t know how they got that way. Dust falls on you every day and you don’t feel it. But when you get enough dust collected up, there it is, you see and name it. That’s intuition, as far as I’m concerned. Well, what kind of dust has been falling on me? A few meteors in the sky at night? Funny weather just before dawn? I don’t know. Certain colors, smells, the way the house creaks at three in the morning? Hair prickling on my arms? All I know is, the dust has collected. Quite suddenly I know.”
“Yes,” said Fortnum, disquieted. “But what is it you know?”
Willis looked at his hands in his lap.
“I’m afraid. I’m not afraid. Then I’m afraid again, in the middle of the day. Doctor’s checked me. I’m A-1. No family problems. Joe’s a fine boy, a good son. Dorothy? She’s remarkable. With her, I’m not afraid of growing old or dying.”
“Lucky man.”
“But beyond my luck now. Scared stiff, really, for myself, my family; even, right now, for you.”
“Me?” said Fortnum.
They had stopped now by an empty lot near the market. There was a moment of great stillness, in which Fortnum turned to survey his friend. Willis’s voice had suddenly made him cold.
“I’m afraid for everybody,” said Willis. “Your friends, mine, and their friends, on out of sight. Pretty silly, eh?”
Willis opened the door, got out, and peered in at Fortnum. Fortnum felt he had to speak.
“Well—what do we do about it?”
Willis looked up at the sun burning blind in the great, remote sky.
“Be aware,” he said, slowly. “Watch everything for a few days.”
“Everything?”
“We don’t use half what God gave us, ten percent of the time. We ought to hear more, feel more, smell more, taste more. Maybe there’s something wrong with the way the wind blows these weeds there in the lot. Maybe it’s the sun up on those telephone wires or the cicadas singing in the elm trees. If only we could stop, look, listen, a few days, a few nights, and compare notes. Tell me to shut up then, and I will.”
“Good enough,” said Fortnum, playing it lighter than he felt. “I’ll look around. But how do I know the thing I’m looking for when I see it?”
Willis peered in at him sincerely. “You’ll know. You’ve got to know. Or we’re done for, all of us,” he said quietly.
Fortnum shut the door, and didn’t know what to say. He felt a flush of embarrassment creeping up his face. Willis sensed this.
“Hugh, do you think I’m—off my rocker?”
“Nonsense!” said Fortnum, too quickly. “You’re just nervous, is all. You should take a couple of weeks off.”
Willis nodded. “See you Monday night?”
“Any time. Drop around.”
“I hope I will, Hugh. I really hope I will.”
Then Willis was gone, hurrying across the dry weed-grown lot, toward the side entrance of the market.
Watching him go, Fortnum suddenly did not want to move. He discovered that very slowly he was taking deep breaths, weighing the silence. He licked his lips, tasting the salt. He looked at his arm on the doorsill, the sunlight burning the golden hairs. In the empty lot the wind moved all alone to itself. He leaned out to look at the sun, which stared back with one massive stunning blow of intense power that made him jerk his head in.
He exhaled. Then he laughed out loud. Then he drove away.
The lemonade glass was cool and deliciously sweaty. The ice made music inside the glass, and the lemonade was just sour enough, just sweet enough on his tongue. He sipped, he savored, he tilted back in the wicker rocking chair on the twilight front porch, his eyes closed. The crickets were chirping out on the lawn. Cynthia, knitting across from him on the porch, eyed him curiously. He could feel the pressure of her attention.
“What are you up to?” she said at last.
“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!”
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 darn 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 bek....” 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? Poison 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 angrily 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.”
The phone rang. Fortnum brought the phone outside on its extension cord.
“Hugh?” It was Dorothy Willis’s 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 softly.
“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!
But, one by slow pricking 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 it, 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 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 in-suck, a vaporing sneeze. Someone 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 heavily as he reached his house.
“Mrs. Goodbody? Still at it?!”
From the black hedge, her voice leapt:
“Blast it, yes! Aphids, waterbugs, 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 fell from the lips.
He found himself staring at the shut basement door. Cynthia took him inside, amused.
“What? Tom? Oh, I relented. The darn 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 for 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?” 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.
“Roger, I swear I don’t know. I got that telegram from you—”
“What telegram?” said Roger, jovially. “I sent no telegram. Now, of a sudden, the police come pouring onto the southbound train, pull me off in some jerkwater, and I’m calling you to get them off my neck. Hugh, if this is some joke—”
“But, Roger, you just vanished!”
“On a business trip. If you can call that vanishing. I told Dorothy about this, and Joe.”
“This is all very confusing, Roger. You’re in no danger? Nobody’s blackmailing you, forcing you into this speech?”
“I’m fine, healthy, free, and unafraid.”
“But, Roger, your premonitions …?”
“Poppycock! Now, look, I’m being very good about this, aren’t I?”
“Sure, Roger.”
“Then play the good father and give me permission to go. Call Dorothy and tell her I’ll be back in five days. How could she have forgotten?”
“She did, Roger. See you in five days, then?”
“Five days, I swear.”
The voice was indeed winning and warm, the old Roger again. Fortnum shook his head, more bewildered than before.
“Roger,” he said, “this is the craziest day I’ve ever spent. You’re not running off from Dorothy? Good Lord, you can tell me.”
“I love her with all my heart. Now, here’s Lieutenant Parker of the Ridgetown police. Good-by, Hugh.”
“Good—”
But the lieutenant was on the line, talking angrily. What had Fortnum meant putting them to this trouble? What was going on? Who did he think he was? Did or didn’t he want this so-called friend held or released?
“Released,” Fortnum managed to say somewhere along the way, and hung up the phone and imagined he heard a voice call all aboard and the massive thunder of the train leaving the station two hundred miles south in the somehow increasingly dark night.
Cynthia walked very slowly into the parlor.
“I feel so foolish,” she said.
“How do you think I feel?”
“Who could have sent that telegram? And why?”
He poured himself some Scotch and stood in the middle of the room looking at it.
“I’m glad Roger is all right,” his wife said, at last.
“He isn’t,” said Fortnum.
“But you just said—”
“I said nothing. After all, we couldn’t very well drag him off that train and truss him up and send him home, could we, if he insisted he was okay? No. He sent that telegram, but he changed his mind after sending it. Why, why, why?” Fortnum paced the room, sipping the drin
k. “Why warn us against special delivery packages? The only package we’ve got this year which fits that description is the one Tom got this morning—” His voice trailed off.
Before he could move, Cynthia was at the wastepaper basket taking out the crumpled wrapping paper with the special-delivery stamps on it.
The postmark read: NEW ORLEANS, LA.
Cynthia looked up from it. “New Orleans. Isn’t that where Roger is heading right now?”
A doorknob rattled, a door opened and closed in Fortnum’s mind. Another doorknob rattled, another door swung wide and then shut. There was a smell of damp earth.
He found his hand dialing the phone. After a long while, Dorothy Willis answered at the other end. He could imagine her sitting alone in a house with too many lights on. He talked quietly with her awhile, then cleared his throat and said, “Dorothy, look. I know it sounds silly. Did any special delivery air mail packages arrive at your house the last few days?”
Her voice was faint. “No.” Then: “No, wait. Three days ago. But I thought you knew! All the boys on the block are going in for it.”
Fortnum measured his words carefully.
“Going in for what?”
“But why ask?” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with raising mushrooms, is there?”
Fortnum closed his eyes.
“Hugh? Are you still there?” asked Dorothy. “I said: there’s nothing wrong with—”
“—raising mushrooms?” said Fortnum, at last. “No. Nothing wrong. Nothing wrong.”
And slowly he put down the phone.
The curtains blew like veils of moonlight. The clock ticked. The after-midnight world flowed into and filled the bedroom. He heard Mrs. Goodbody’s clear voice on this morning’s air, a million years gone now. He heard Roger putting a cloud over the sun at noon. He heard the police cursing him by phone from downstate. Then Roger’s voice again, with the locomotive thunder hurrying him away and away, fading. And finally, Mrs. Goodbody’s voice behind the hedge:
“Lord, it grows fast!”
“What does?”
“Marasmius oreades!”
He snapped his eyes open. He sat up.
Downstairs, a moment later, he flicked through the unabridged dictionary.