Crying Child (15 page)

“Mary never said anything definite. And,” Jed pointed out delicately, “it wasn’t our business to tell you, Will. I thought you must know.”

“He knows now,” I said. “If he’d quit harping on how terrible we all are for not confiding in him, maybe we could proceed to some constructive conversation.”

“You, too?” Will demanded.

“Now, now,” Jed said calmly. “Stop fighting. That isn’t going to do a bit of good.”

He was sitting in one of the brocade armchairs. Against the delicate fabric his shabby overalls and
thick boots should have looked out of place, but Jed was at ease wherever he happened to be. He looked as suited to his environment as a squirrel in a tree.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry, Will. You did save Mary’s life tonight, and it was unforgivable of me to talk the way I did. I’m just not at my best.”

Will looked sheepish.

“None of us are. We’ve got a lot to talk about, but maybe this isn’t a good time. Ran ought to be in bed.”

Chin sunk on his breast, hands dangling, Ran looked as if he could have fallen asleep in his chair. But when he heard his name spoken he looked up, and there was a look in his eyes that made me forget the weary lines in his face.

“We’ve got to talk now. Have you forgotten who’s coming tomorrow?”

“Oh, God,” Will muttered.

“The psychiatrist,” I said. “So? Why the consternation?”

“Psychiatrist?” said Jed.

Ran explained. As he spoke, Jed’s face grew longer and longer. He shook his head.

“I wish you’d told us, Ran. I don’t like to sound as if I’m making excuses for me and Bertha; but if I’d known what you were planning I’d have persuaded Bertha to talk to you.”

Will was right, we were all sodden with fatigue.
It took several seconds for the import of Jed’s comment to sink in. Will was the first to understand.

“You mean—are you trying to tell me that you and Bertha have heard that sound too?”

“That’s right.”

“When?”

“It’s been—oh, I’d say almost thirty years ago.”

“Both of you?”

“I only heard it once,” Jed said. “Bertha heard it several times.”

“I’m really flattered,” Will said heavily. “You all have such a lot of confidence in me.”

“Now, Will, be reasonable. The first time it happened you weren’t even born. This time—well, now, what did we actually know? It took Bertha a long time to make the connection between Mary’s trouble and that long-past thing that happened to her; even up to last night she wasn’t really sure. And it isn’t the kind of thing you can speak right out about.”

“That is true,” Ran said. “Don’t you think I would have told you, Will, if I could have brought myself to do so? I thought I was going crazy. There is such a thing as collective hallucination.”

“How many times, before tonight, have you heard it?”

“Once. I guess that was what sent me haring off to Boston. I began to have visions of both of us, Mary and myself, prowling the woods every
night like a pair of ghouls.” He shivered. “The thing…pulls at you, Will. I don’t know whether you noticed it tonight. But the…pull is very strong.”

“You didn’t tell all this to your Dr. Wood, did you?”

“No. I just couldn’t do it.” Ran looked up. “Will, it wasn’t that I didn’t trust you. But sometimes it’s easier to tell these things to a stranger; you know what I mean? At least I thought it would be. I was wrong. I’ve made a mess of it, Will.”

“Stow it,” Will said. His voice was brusque, but it seemed to tell Ran something he needed to know. The two of them exchanged a long, unsmiling look, and some of the sick despair left Ran’s face.

“You ought to be in bed,” Will muttered. He shook his head. “There’s so much I need to know, and so little time. I don’t suppose we can head that damned woman off now?”

“She’s already on her way. She said she planned to stop over along the way, and get in sometime tomorrow afternoon.”

“She wouldn’t mention where she planned to stay tonight? No such luck…” Will ran his fingers through his hair. “Why couldn’t she fly, like a normal person?”

“She’s nervous about flying,” Ran said.

I laughed. They all looked at me as if I’d cut
loose with a string of obscenities, and I said helplessly,

“It just struck me as funny, a psychiatrist who’s afraid of flying…. All right, I’m sorry. But I don’t understand why you’re all so appalled. What difference is it going to make if she does come?”

The three men exhanged one of those glances that women find so maddening. Jed, always charitable, took it on himself to explain.

“You’re worn out, Jo, or you’d be thinking clearer. This lady is a doctor. She’s going to be looking for signs of a nice simple nervous breakdown, or whatever fancy name they call it nowadays. She won’t find any, because that’s not what we’ve got here. Do I have to spell it out? Seems to me we’re all afraid of saying the word.”

“A ghost,” I said experimentally. The word felt funny in my mouth.

“Now wait a minute,” Will said. “I’m not saying I don’t believe it. What I am saying is that I’m thoroughly confused, and I’d like a couple of days to reappraise the situation. That’s why I’m not happy about having a stranger come in, someone we’ll have to lie to and deceive. Of course we can’t tell her about the—the crying. She’ll think we’re all crazy.”

“It’s been thirty years since I heard it,” Jed said. “But nobody who ever once heard it could forget
it, or mistake it for any other sound on this earth. And you’re not convinced?”

“My God,” Will said. “You’re asking me to throw overboard a whole lifetime of rational thinking. I—I just don’t know, Jed. I don’t know what to think.”

“What else could it be?”

Will shook his head.

“Jed, there are a dozen possibilities. Some freak combination of wind through a natural crevice in a tree or cliff…A night bird, an animal…”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Will, those cats of yours. You told me that a Siamese in heat sounds like a lost soul. Or a baby crying.”

Ran sat up straighter, with a half-voiced expletive, and for a moment Will’s face lit up. Then gloom settled on it more heavily than before. When he shook his head I could see how he hated to abandon the idea.

“You’ve never heard a Siamese in heat. I have. It’s a God-awful sound, but not as bad as what I heard tonight.”

“Add one teaspoonful of imagination, mix with a generous pinch of sheer funk…”

“No. Look, Jo, I made damn good and sure that both the Siamese were locked in tonight; I didn’t want extraneous animals crashing around in the underbrush while I was listening for Mary. Not to mention the fact that my female is not in heat.”

“Go on, Will,” Jed said. “Jo doesn’t know this, and maybe Ran has been away from the island too long. But you and I both know every species of bird or animal or insect that has ever lived in these woods. Neither of us is going to get all worked up about an owl or a possum. There’s only one animal I know of could make a sound like that one. A human animal, a young one. A child.”

I couldn’t argue with that even if I had wanted to. He knew what he was talking about. I was three quarters convinced; Jed was right, no one who had ever heard that sound could mistake it for any normal noise. The thing that held me back from complete conviction wasn’t logic, it was, as Will had said, the accumulated thought patterns of my whole life. It is very hard to reverse every rational conviction you have ever held, overnight.

It was even harder for Will because he didn’t have my knowledge of Mary to reinforce belief. In a crazy way it was easier for me to believe in a ghost than to believe that Mary had cracked up. But people have the most amazing ability to fight truth, even when it’s staring them in the face, if it disagrees with their cherished preconceptions. Out there in the wind-racked night, I believed. If I hadn’t been so busy running, I’d have been down on my knees. Here, surrounded by the comforts of civilized doubt, skepticism fought back.

I had plenty of time to meditate on these things; there was a long silence after Jed’s speech. Finally Will said stubbornly,

“Jed, I’m not saying yes or no. All I’m saying is that we have to consider all the possibilities, no matter how farfetched.”

“A lot of pretty smart people have believed in survival after death,” Jed said.

“I tell you, I’m not denying that as a possibility. But it’s only one possibility among many.”

“Such as?”

It had become a debate now between the two of them. So far, Jed was ahead; it seemed to me that he had pretty well knocked out Will’s first two suggestions. Will took a deep breath, marshaling his next attack.

“For one thing, that there really is a child out in those woods. All right, I know it’s virtually impossible; we’d have heard if a local child were missing. But we ought to check. Then there’s the chance of some exotic animal or bird, escaped from a zoo, maybe.”

Ran made a wordless sound of disgust.

“No, Will is right,” Jed said calmly. “His ideas strike me as even wilder than the one he’s fighting so hard, but it’s true, we’ve got to check every possibility. And there’s another one Will hasn’t mentioned.”

This time the silence had a different quality. Ran
looked as baffled as I felt, but Will knew what the other man meant. And he didn’t like it.

“Might as well say it,” Jed went on. “We’ve had enough trouble already with people keeping quiet about what they were thinking. The other possibility is a mechanical device of some sort.”

“Oh, no,” I said involuntarily. “It was a human voice. Nothing mechanical could sound so pitiable.”

“Machines reproduce sounds,” Jed said. “Including human voices. A radio, for instance. Or a tape recorder.”

Will nodded reluctantly. I began to be aware of a peculiar sensation at the pit of my stomach. I said slowly,

“Are you suggesting that somebody is deliberately producing those sounds? To draw Mary out of the house, or—or drive her crazy?”

“Not necessarily,” Jed answered.

I was definitely feeling sick to my stomach. Ran didn’t seem to get the point; he didn’t have my evil mind.

“My God,” he muttered. “When I think of the time we’ve wasted! If I had only had sense enough to speak up…”

“Probably wouldn’t have made any difference,” Jed said. He stood up. “Folks, it’s too late to do anything more tonight. We’ll get to work first thing in the morning. Good night.”

When he left the room I followed, practically on his heels. My departure resembled flight. Ran might be too stupefied by drugs and sleeplessness to understand, but the implications of the last hypothesis were only too clear to me.

Of course it was the hypothesis Will must favor, even though he couldn’t say so. The other theories were too wild. There couldn’t be a living child out in those woods; the entire island would have been alerted to search for it. The idea of an animal, any animal, was equally preposterous. And Will—rational, scientifically trained—couldn’t possibly accept a supernatural origin for the sound.

So that left only one explanation. The pitiful weeping, by Will’s logic, must be a recording. The effect of the sound on Mary had been sinister and dangerous. Tonight she had almost lost her life. At best she risked losing her reason or her physical health. And who had a reason for wanting Mary out of the way? Who else but Mary’s sister, who was—as Will had seen for himself—in love with Mary’s husband.

II

Basically I must be an optimist. It takes so little to restore me to an idiotically hopeful view of the universe—little things like some sleep, sunshine,
and the smell of coffee. I slept like a log, out of sheer exhaustion; and when I woke up next morning the first thing I saw was sunlight pouring in the window. The heavenly odor of Mrs. Willard’s coffee came in through the same aperture, and by the time I had gotten dressed I was able to reappraise my grisly night thoughts.

Not even Will Graham could seriously believe that I was capable of hurting Mary. I even had an alibi if—which God forbid—it should ever come to that. I had been three thousand miles away when the trouble began.

There was another suspect, of course. But I wouldn’t let myself think about that. I didn’t believe it.

Which left me face to face with the sole remaining hypothesis.

I was brushing my teeth when I reached that point in my meditations; I remember very clearly seeing the grim amusement in the reflected face that stared back at me out of the mirror. It seemed like such a weird thing to be thinking about on a bright spring morning, in the midst of a hum-drum process like tooth brushing.