The Perseids and Other Stories (14 page)

My father phoned once a week. I told him I was having a great time. Had “the problem” come back? No, I said, and I don’t think Carter contradicted me.

And by my own impoverished standards I
was
having a good time. “The problem” was at least in remission. Perhaps I was lulled into susceptibility.

I think Carter was lulled, too. I think that’s why he left me alone in the house that August night.

Carter was an astronomer on a day schedule. Most of his work involved the tedious comparison of photographic plates, and I think he chafed at his junior status at Palomar. He must have
needed a night life, God knows; if not with the stars then with the constellations of human bodies at certain clubs along the Sunset Strip.

But he left me alone, and even after fifty years I find it difficult to forgive him.

He called an hour after Evangeline had served dinner and driven herself home, and though there was still plenty of daylight, the sun was westering; the shadows were longer, and I had begun to feel nervous. On the phone he sounded strange, maybe a little drunk. He wouldn’t be back until tomorrow, he said, and would I be all right?

And what could I say to that? I wanted to beg him not to leave me alone, but that would have been abject, cowardly. So I said I would be okay, probably, and hoped the quaver in my voice would communicate some of the terror I was feeling. But he didn’t hear it, or didn’t choose to hear it. He thanked me lugubriously and hung up the phone. And that was that.

What do you do in an empty house, when you’re alone and you don’t want to be?

The obvious things. I turned on all the lights, plus the TV set. Messed up the kitchen making popcorn. Watched
All-Star Revue
and
Your Show of Shows
and
Hit Parade
, by which time it was eleven o’clock and the street outside was quiet and I could hear crickets in the garden and the nervous whisper of my own breath. I stayed up later, smoked one of Carter’s cigarettes and tried to enjoy a Charlie Chan movie but dozed in spite of myself. I remember deciding that I really truly ought to go to bed, but that was as far as I got. I slept on the sofa with my head on a velveteen cushion. And woke again, and the house was still ablaze with light, but my watch said it was two A.M., and the television was all snow and static, radio noise, cosmic rays, random electrons. I turned it off.

I remember thinking I should have closed the window blinds, that the house would be more secure that way. I stood up, yawned, and went to the big picture window. Outside, the date palms danced in a fierce, dry midnight wind, a Santa Ana wind. No human life was visible.

I tried to think of something nice, something comforting. I called up the memory of Hubble, of Hubble telling me I was “a bright girl.” But that only reminded me of our conversation, which had been, to tell the truth, a little creepy. The universe was expanding, or I was shrinking, “the statements are commutable,” and the future was inside me, and what if I could look in that direction?

What would I see, if I could turn my eyes inside out?

I would see the future into which I was dwindling. A blackness as illimitable as death, a dark consuming nothingness.

Or would it be full of stars?

Or would it be a looking-glass world, like Alice’s: deceptively familiar, except for….

For what?

And then I heard a noise from the kitchen.

The wind had blown open the back door. I closed it and locked it. If Carter had forgotten his keys, he could pound on the door. Maybe I’d let him in. Maybe I wouldn’t.

I turned at a suggestion of a shift in the light, and saw—

(The words are impotent. Powerless.)

Saw one of
them.

It came through the wall. This was the kitchen wall where Carter had hung a Monet print and where Evangeline kept, lower down, a rack of hanging copper pans. It came through all these things without disturbing them, though one of the pans bumped gently against its neighbor as if a breeze had touched it. The creature was indifferent, gray, only a little taller than myself. For a moment, I stared transfixed. It moved through the wall as if against a trivial resistance, like a man walking through surf. Then it was wholly in the room, and its head rotated in an oiled motion, and its vast black deep sad eyes locked on mine.

I drew a breath but didn’t scream. Who would hear?

Instead I ran from the kitchen.

Not that there was anywhere to go, any safer place. Maybe I could have fled the house altogether, but if I opened the big front
door what might be waiting outside? The night was too large; it would swallow me.

The visitor didn’t instantly follow me into the living room, and that gave me a space to think, although the house was suddenly full of minor, deeply ominous noises. I wanted tools, weapons, barricades. But there was only my uncle’s black telephone and, next to it, his Rolodex of personal numbers.

To my credit, I did the sanest thing first: I called Evangeline’s number. There was no answer. Evangeline had found somewhere to go this Saturday night, or else she was a very deep sleeper.

I thought about dialing the operator and asking for the police—I could say I’d seen a prowler—but I knew the police would come and listen with dreary patience and tell me to lock the doors, and then I’d be alone again.

From the direction of the bedroom I heard a rustling sound, the sound of leaves in autumn, restless mice, cat’s claws on glass.

I had reached the state of calm that borders on panic, when thoughts are crisp and weightless and nerves light up like neon tubes. I flipped through the Rolodex again, found Edwin Hubble’s home number and dialed with a trembling finger.

Grace answered after seven rings. She was in no mood to comfort a frightened teenage girl. Nor would she put her husband on: “This is completely inappropriate, Sandra, and I’msure your uncle would agree,” and I was about to give up and run, just run, when Hubble’s deep voice displaced hers: “Sandra? What’s wrong?”

Suddenly it seemed possible the whole thing had been a humiliating mistake. I had dreamed the monster in the kitchen. And even if not, what could I tell the stern and unforgiving Edwin Hubble, how could I enlist his sympathy for what he would almost certainly consider an adolescent fantasy?

But I needed someone in the house. Above all else, that.

I mumbled something about my uncle being away and “there’s something wrong here, and I’msorry, but I don’t know what to do, and there’s no one else I can call!”

“What sort of problem?”

Big silence. I listened for monsters. “It’s hard to explain.”

I think he heard in my voice what Carter hadn’t: the sweaty tremolo of fear.

Miraculously, he said he’d be right over. (I heard Grace protesting in the background.)

“Thank you,” I said.

And put down the phone reluctantly. No voice now but my own. The house all echos and shadows and stubborn clocks.

I was in a frenzy of embarrassment when, some twenty minutes later, Hubble’s big Ford pulled into the driveway. The kitchen was empty: I asked Hubble to look, and then I looked myself.

We didn’t talk about what I thought I had seen, or if we did it was only in the most indirect, delicate way. He seemed to know without being told. I wondered if Carter had already briefed him on “my problem.”

He cased the house, and then we sat at opposite ends of my uncle’s long living room sofa. I asked him whether he was ever scared, perched in his supernaturally powerful telescope at the top of a mountain and staring into the bottomless deeps of space.

He smiled. “You know, Edith Sitwell once asked me the same thing. I was showing her some photographic plates. Galaxies millions of light-years distant. It terrified her. The immensity of it. To be such a mote, less than dust among the stars. To see oneself from that perspective.”

I had no idea who Edith Sitwell was. (An English writer; she had been in Hollywood to consult on a script about Anne Boleyn.) “What did you tell her?”

“That it’s only terrifying at first. After a time you learn to take comfort from it. If we’re nothing, then there’s nothing to be frightened of. The stars are indifferent.”

The words were not especially soothing, but his presence was. Even at the end of his life, Hubble was still the former athlete, six-foot-two, almost two hundred pounds. A guardian, powerful and benign. I wondered why he had come so willingly. He was supposed to despise children and he had little sympathy for weakness.

I wonder now if he was suddenly conscious of his own mortality.
He must have known he was nearing the end of his life. This visit might have been the random kindness of a dying man. Or maybe he just missed late nights, mysteries, the hours before sunrise. Maybe he’d been away from the telescope for too long.

Certainly he remembered what it was like to be alone and afraid. He told me about a summer job heapos;d held when he was seventeen (“Only three years older than you!”), working with a survey crew in northern Wisconsin, trekking into what was then a virgin forest. He talked about the campfires and canvas tents and sextants and the way the sky opened like a book in the silence of the great woods. “Sometimes,” he admitted, “I saw things….”

“What kind of things?”

But he wouldn’t say. He changed the subject. “Time for bed,” he told me. “Past time.”

“But you’ll be here?”

“I’ll be here. It won’t be the first dawn I’ve seen, you know, Sandra.”

I slept while Edwin Hubble kept watch for me.

I slept in the dark, and woke to a harsh and terrible light.

The palace of light.

Should I call it a flying saucer? An unidentified object? I don’t know if it’s either of those things; I’ve never seen it objectively, as a sky-ship, a vehicle, though there have been accounts (and I do recognize the details) in which people describe it that way. Still, the words trivialize the experience. Was I taken up into a “flying saucer”? Surely not; surely it wasn’t one of those silver-domed art-deco totems from the cover of
Fate
magazine.

No, it was … the palace of light.

The palace of light.

I was taken up through the beams and tiles of the house, lifted above the roof in a slow delirium of terror, and then I was in the palace of light. I had been here before, but every visit is as fresh and terrifying as the first. The light was soulless, sullen, and everywhere at once. It hurt my eyes. They gathered around me, a dozen or more; they turned their sad and quizzical eyes on me,
queried my body with probes and syringes of solid light.

The ordeal was endless, worse because there seemed to be no malevolence in it, only a bland curiosity. And of course the sadness. I wondered: Why don’t they weep?

This time, though, the experience was different. My body was paralyzed, my eyes were not, and when I looked to my left I was astonished to see Edwin Hubble next to me on a pedestal of shadows, equally helpless, equally bound and paralyzed. But his eyes were open.

I remember that. His eyes were wide open, and he seemed … not afraid.

He seemed almost at home with these creatures, with their sadness and their curiosity.

But I was not. I closed my eyes and prayed for dawn, begged for unconsciousness, begged for a door back into my daylight life.

When I woke, Edwin Hubble had gone.

What woke me was the sound of the front door. It was Carter, home from the night’s revels. The window was full of sunshine and fresh with the smell of jasmine and acacia and a few warm ions from the distant sea.

I spent the day in a frenzy of apprehension. Hubble would say something to Carter, lodge a complaint; I would be disgraced, humiliated, sent home to another round of psychiatric torture.

But I don’t think Carter ever found out Hubble had visited that night; or if he did, he was too ashamed to make an issue of it. He was the one who had been AWOL, after all. I was only a child.

But I don’t think he knew. When he came home from Palomar the next day he was as incommunicative as ever.

And I was, as ever, frightened of the dark….

But here is the strange fact:
they didn’t come back.

Not that night, or the night after, or any other night in California or in the decades since.

(Except lately….)

They didn’t come back. I had lost them, somehow. I had learned to evade them.

I had learned not to let my eyes turn inside out.

I didn’t see Edwin Hubble again that summer—not until the last day (the last hour, in fact) of my visit.

It was a Saturday, end of August. Uncle Carter drove me to the airport. I sat in the passenger seat of the car whispering a silent good-bye to the dwarf palms and the tindery hills and the bobbing duck-billed oil rigs. We arrived at the terminal half an hour early.

I was astonished—though less astonished, I think, than Carter—when Edwin Hubble met us at the luggage check-in, gave us a wide grin, and steered us into the lunch counter while we waited for my flight to be called.

Hubble said he hoped I had enjoyed my stay and my visit to the Hale Observatory. Pleasantries all around, but there wasn’t really much to say or time to say it. At last my bewildered uncle excused himself and lined up for a second cup of coffee.

And I sat at the table with the famous astronomer.

He touched his finger to his lips: I was not to speak.

“If you look into the uncreated world,” he said quietly, “it looks back at you. Maybe you think, why me? How did they find me? But it’s a mirror world, Sandra. Maybe they didn’t find you. Maybe you found them.”

“But—!”

“Shh.
It isn’t wise to speak about this. You have a knack for turning your eyes inside out, so you see them. And they see you. And you’re afraid, because they’re from the uncreated future, from a place, I think, where the human race has reached its last incarnation, from the end of the material world. Perhaps the end of all worlds. And they’re sad—melancholy is the better word—because you’re like an angel to them, the angel of the past, the angel of infinite possibility. Possibility lost. The road not taken.”

My uncle was heading back to the table, too soon, with tepid black coffee in a waxed-paper cup.