The Uncanny Reader (30 page)

“What, you are taking away our poor Carloman? Kidnapping him? Shall we never see him again?”

“It is very kind of Monsieur Frost to interest himself in our affairs,” her father said repressively. “Considering—”

“Considering?” Menispe lit a thin brown cigarette and blew a smoke-ring. “Considering that his wife and daughter are dead? Monsieur Frost probably has time on his hands.”

“Menispe! Monsieur Frost kindly undertakes the English patent for us.”

“So; soon, then, we shall be rich?”

“I hope so,” Frost said coldly. “Of course you can never tell whether these things will get taken up by manufacturers.”

Now he was overcome by weary distaste for the whole project. Why should he take any pains to enrich this hateful pair? In any case, Aveyrand looked to be at death's door, would probably go off within the next year or so, while his daughter seemed like a cadaver as it was. And then—to remember Louise. With all her happy intelligence, her bright promise cut short—

“I will write to you from London as soon as I have any news,” Frost said hastily to the professor, and manoeuvred himself and his burden awkwardly out of the door.

“Do not let Carloman get rusty!” Menispe called after him.

Going down in the lift—he had to hold Carloman vertically in order to fit him in—Frost was reminded again of Louise by the question of whether he would be able to find a taxi.

*   *   *

Back at his cottage in Essex—for he had left Wimbledon after the death of Louise and his wife's subsequent suicide—he did not immediately unpack the bag containing Aveyrand's model. There was plenty to do after a three-day absence—the house needed cleaning, the lawn had grown shaggy. And on the following morning at the Patent Office, he found his desk piled high with accumulated work which would require several days to clear.

Nevertheless, it was not the outcome of will, of premeditated plan, his slowness to take action on Aveyrand's behalf. He had sincerely meant to respond to the old man's appeal for help. When he decided to go to Paris, his intentions had been disinterested and benevolent; he felt it was not his business to make judgments or withhold professional advice when it was requested.

But now … All he could feel was a profound lethargy and reluctance. No doubt the profits from the manufacture and marketing of Carloman's issue would in time earn the old man—and Menispe—a considerable amount of money. What would they do with it? That was no affair of Frost's.

He asked himself once or twice why he did not simply turn the professor's application over to a colleague to deal with—that would be the rational solution to his problem. But still, day after day, he let the papers lie on his desk, and for some weeks Carloman remained zipped into the golf bag under the copies of
France Soir.

Nearly four months after his trip to Paris, Frost received an Eiffel Tower card addressed to him in a familiar looped untidy black handwriting.

“My father has asked me to inquire if there is any news of his patent,” wrote Menispe—no “
cher oncle
Frank” this time. “He grows discouraged at your long silence and would be pleased to receive a letter from you.”

Prompted by this, guilty and resentful, Frost unpacked the model and set it up. Winter had come with the promise of snow, and several lights were burning in his cottage. Following the professor's instructions, Frost re-recorded the tape, slotted it back into the visor, and then clearing his throat, feeling somewhat foolish, he ordered the model:

“Carloman, change the lights.”

Obediently the model began moving about Frost's living room, switching on any lights that were off, and turning off those that were already on; evidently this was its all-purpose programme if not provided with more specific instructions. Its movements were slow, fumbling and hesitant, as it worked over this new course, but thorough. When the lights were all changed, it returned to the spot where it had first stood, and took up its position there, motionless, waiting.

“All right, Frankenstein, that's enough,” muttered Frost, with a slight shiver—there was something disagreeably like Aveyrand himself about the model's uncertain, cautious movements—and he hastily clicked off the master switch on the breastplate.

“I'll put the application in today,” he resolved.

That day was unusually harassed, though; and on the following morning he received a long letter from a friend in Australia, a distant cousin of his wife, who by some mischance had never been informed of her death and proposed visiting England next month; that necessitated a long letter going through, yet again, the whole miserable story of how, following the death of Louise from an overdose, Mary had sunk into such a deep depression that one night when Frost was kept late at the office by a rush of work she had decided to end it all …

By the time he had finished his letter, Frost was feeling so bitterly hostile towards the Aveyrand family that he deliberately decided to put aside the professor's application for another month. He could not, he simply
could not
take an action about it just at present. Why should he be the one to act for them? Let them wait a little longer.

And a month later his eye was caught by a small paragraph in the
Times
as he travelled home one evening: “French Academician dies. Charles-Edouard Aveyrand, for many years Professor in Astrophysics at the Paris Faculté des Sciences … author of
La Révolution Astrophysique, Opuscules Astronomiques, Employant Vénus et Saturne,
etc., etc.… holder of the following academic honours and decorations … was found dead in his Paris apartment yesterday. He lived alone, having been predeceased by his daughter, who had died in hospital of anorexia nervosa two weeks before. By a sad piece of irony, the professor, too, it is thought, died of undernourishment and hypothermia. Neighbours were alerted to his fate because the lights in his apartment remained on day and night for a week.”

So: he never made that second model, thought Frost, after a blank, shocked moment. If he had, perhaps the neighbours would not have found him yet; Carloman II would still be stumping about the apartment, switching lights on and off at random intervals.

He re-read the paragraph, waiting for guilt and remorse to bite. But all he felt was a kind of dreary satisfaction; even guilt seemed wasted on that pair. Aveyrand would hardly have lasted much longer, with all the wealth in the world; nor would Menispe, and it was unlikely that anybody regretted her passing.

But what, now, should he do with Aveyrand's invention? Enter the patent in his own name and give the proceeds to charity? Search for other family connections? Or—his strongest impulse—do nothing, smash the model to smithereens with a hatchet?

The train pulled up at his station. He put the
Times
in his briefcase, got out, and walked up the long and muddy lane towards his cottage.

Yes: a hatchet might be the best solution to Carloman. On the other hand—he might just keep the model, which was proving quite useful. There had been a number of burglaries lately in the district; he had formed the habit of leaving Carloman switched on, to create the effect of human activity in the house.

Indeed the lights changed as Frost approached the cottage: the kitchen window went dark and, after a short interval, the bedroom was illuminated. Handy though the model was, Frost thought, opening the gate, it was hard to conquer the slight unease of entering the house, aware that somewhere inside this mindless but human-seeming object was plodding slowly around, carrying out its programmed tasks.

Then, glancing through the window of the ground-floor bedroom, Frost was startled to observe that, this evening, Carloman had performed a task for which he had not yet been programmed: he was just moving away from the bed, having, with his gauntleted hands, twitched back the covers.

With a suddenly accelerated heart, and a dry mouth, Frost opened the front door, which led straight into the dining room. The table was laid for two.

Now he could hear slow, thudding steps as the model negotiated the short passage from bedroom to hall. Soon the thing came in sight, moving deliberately with its slow, swaying gait. The closed bars of the visor looked straight ahead: blind, expressionless. But inside them—Frost was visited by a mad notion—inside, if he were to lift the visor, he believed that he would reveal not a random-seeming mass of wires and terminals but the mocking, hostile features of Menispe Aveyrand.

 

THE JESTERS

Joyce Carol Oates

He said, “Do you hear—”

She listened. She'd just come to join him on the terrace at the rear of the house.

It was dusk: the calls of birds close about the house were subsiding. A flock of glossy-black-winged birds had taken over a hilly section of the lawn for much of that day, but had now departed. At the lake a quarter mile away, not visible from their terrace, Canada geese and other waterfowl were emitting the random querulous cries associated with nighttime.

At first, she heard nothing except the waterfowl. Then, she began to hear what sounded like voices, at a distance.

“Our neighbors. Must be on West Crescent Drive.”

The husband spoke matter-of-factly. It was not like him to take notice of neighbors unless in annoyance—which was rare, in Crescent Lake Farms. He seemed bemused and not annoyed.

They had never seen these neighbors. Whoever lived on the far side of the wooded area were strangers to them. There was no occasion for the husband and the wife to drive on West Crescent Drive, which wasn't easily accessible from the cul-de-sac at the end of East Crescent Drive, where they lived: this would involve a circuitous twisting route to Juniper Road, which traversed the rural-suburban “gated community” called Crescent Lake Farms, an approximate half mile north on that road, and then a turn into the interior of the development and, by way of smaller, curving roads, onto West Crescent Drive.

Like a labyrinth, it was! Crescent Lake Farms was not a residential area hospitable to strangers. Easily one could become lost in a maze of drives, lanes, “ways,” and “circles,” for the gated community had been designed to discourage aimless driving.

Their three-acre property did not include frontage on the man-made ovoid Crescent Lake. But a small stream meandered through it, to empty into the lake a short distance away.

“They sound
young
.”

The wife heard what sounded like low thrilled throaty laughter. There was a strange unsettling intimacy to this laughter, as if their neighbors on West Crescent Drive were very near and not a quarter mile away, at the very least.

You stared at the massed trees, expecting to see human figures there.

“Yes. And happy.”

The wife had brought drinks for her husband and herself: whiskey and water for the husband, lemon-flavored sparkling water for the wife. And a little silver bowl of the husband's favorite nuts, pistachios.

Hungrily, noisily the husband chewed pistachios. Yet his attention was riveted to the dark cluster of trees which the sounds of voices and laughter teasingly penetrated.

It wasn't unlike hearing voices through a wall. Intimate, tantalizing. You heard the musical cadences but not distinct words.

Drinks outside on the terrace behind their house was their ritual before dinner, in warm weather. Though he wasn't any longer making his forty-minute commute to Investcorp International, Inc., in Forrestal Village, on Route 1, where the husband had directed the applied math and computational division of the company for the past seventeen years, the husband and the wife had not changed their before-dinner ritual.

They had lived in this sprawling five-bedroom shingleboard house in Crescent Lake Farms for nearly thirty years and in that time, very little had changed in the gated community which was one of the oldest and most prestigious in northern New Jersey.

There was a waiting list of would-be homeowners. Elsewhere, properties were difficult to sell, but not in Crescent Lake Farms.

The wife thought,
We are protected here. We are very happy here.

Thoughtfully, his head cocked in the direction of the massed trees, the husband finished his whiskey-and-water. The voices continued—softly, teasingly. A sudden squawking squabble among geese in the near distance, and the gentler sounds were drowned out.

In any case it was time to go inside for dinner which was more or less ready to be served—in a warm oven, and in a microwave. And on the kitchen counter a lavish green salad in a gleaming wooden bowl with feta cheese, arugula, avocado, cherry tomatoes—the husband's favorite salad.

“I think they must have gone inside. Over there.”

Shyly the wife touched the husband's hand. He did not, as he'd used to do, turn his hand to grasp hers, instinctively; but he did not brush her hand away as he sometimes did, not rudely, not impolitely, but half-mindedly.

It appeared to be so: their neighbors' voices had faded. All you could hear was the quarrelsome sound of waterfowl and, startlingly near at their stream, the excited miniature cries of spring peepers.

She said, “Will you come inside, darling? It's late.”

*   *   *

Airy and melodic the laughter, summer evenings.

Almost, the husband and the wife could hear through the woods a delicate tinkle of glassware from time to time—wine glasses? And cutlery.

The
neighbors-through-the-trees
frequently dined outside. Their voices were low and murmurous and no words were distinct but the sounds were happy sounds, unmistakably.

“Oh—is that a baby? D'you think?”

The wife heard something a little different, one evening in June. A sweet cooing sound—was it? Just barely discernible beyond the nocturnal cries of the waterfowl on Crescent Lake and low guttural bullfrog grunts in their grassy lawn.