Bradbury, Ray - SSC 13 (21 page)

 
          
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.