My great aunt looked at me with her glassed-in flat eyes and lifted the corners of her lips a little. “Margie,” she said, “go have a look in the windows.”
Mom got out of the car and walked up the porch to peer through the dusty panes. “It’s empty, Sybil.”
“Empty, boy, right?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I wasn’t inside.”
“I could hear you, boy,” she said. “Last night. Talking in your sleep. Rabbits and hawks don’t behave that way. You know it, and I know it. So it ain’t no good thinking about them that way, is it?”
“I don’t remember talking in my sleep,” I said.
“Margie, let’s go home. This boy needs some pamphlets read into him.”
Mom got into the car and looked back at me before starting the engine. “You ever skip school again, I’ll strap you black and blue. It’s real embarrassing having the school call, and not knowing where you are. Hear me?”
I nodded.
Everything was quiet that week. I went to school and tried not to dream at night and did everything boys are supposed to do. But I didn’t feel like a boy. I felt something big inside, and no amount of Billy Grahams and Zondervans read at me could change that feeling.
I made one mistake, though. I asked Auntie Danser why she never read the Bible. This was in the parlor one evening after dinner and cleaning up the dishes. “Why do you want to know, boy?” she asked.
“Well, the Bible seems to be full of fine stories, but you don’t carry it around with you. I just wondered why.”
“Bible is a good book,” she said. “The only good book. But it’s difficult. It has lots of camouflage. Sometimes—” She stopped. “Who put you up to asking that question?”
“Nobody,” I said.
“I heard that question before, you know,” she said. “Ain’t the first time I been asked. Somebody else asked me, once.”
I sat in my chair, stiff as a ham.
“Your father’s brother asked me that once. But we won’t talk about him, will we?”
I shook my head.
Next Saturday I waited until it was dark and everyone was in bed. The night air was warm, but I was sweating more than the warm could cause as I rode my bike down the dirt road, lamp beam swinging back and forth. The sky was crawling with stars, all of them looking at me. The Milky Way seemed to touch down just beyond the road, like I might ride straight up it if I went far enough.
I knocked on the heavy door. There were no lights in the windows and it was late for old folks to be up, but I knew these two didn’t behave like normal people. And I knew that just because the house looked empty from the outside didn’t mean it was empty within.
The wind rose up and beat against the door, making me shiver. Then the door opened. Inside, it was dark for a moment, and the breath went out of me. Two pairs of eyes stared from the black. They seemed a lot taller this time. “Come in, boy,” Jack whispered.
Fireflies lit up the tree in the living room. The brambles and wildflowers glowed like weeds on a sea floor. The carpet crawled, but not to my feet. I was shivering in earnest now, and my teeth chattered. I only saw their shadows as they sat on the bench in front of me.
“Sit,” Meg said. “Listen close. You’ve taken the fire, and it glows bright. You’re only a boy, but you’re just like a pregnant woman now. For the rest of your life you’ll be cursed with the worst affliction known to humans. Your skin will twitch at night. Your eyes will see things in the dark. Beasts will come to you and beg to be ridden. You’ll never know one truth from another. You might starve, because few will want to encourage you. And if you do make good in this world, you might lose the gift and search forever after, in vain. Some will say the gift isn’t special. Beware them. Some will say it is special, and beware them, too. And some—”
There was a scratching at the door. I thought it was an animal for a moment. Then it cleared its throat.
It was my great aunt.
“Some will say you’re damned. Perhaps they’re right. But you’re also enthused. Carry it lightly and responsibly.”
“Listen in there. This is Sybil Danser. You know me. Open up.”
“Now stand by the stairs, in the dark where she can’t see,” Jack said. I did as I was told. One of them—I couldn’t tell which—opened the door, and the lights went out in the tree, the carpet stilled, and the brambles were snuffed. Auntie Danser stood in the doorway, outlined by star glow, carrying her knitting bag. “Boy?” she asked. I held my breath.
“And you others, too.”
The wind in the house seemed to answer.
“I’m not too late,” she said. “Damn you, in truth, damn you to hell! You come to our towns, and you plague us with thoughts no decent person wants to think. Not just fairy stories, but telling the way people live and why they shouldn’t live that way! Your very breath is tainted! Hear me?” She walked slowly into the empty living room, heavy shoes clonking on the wooden floor. “You make them write about us and make others laugh at us. Question the way we think. Condemn our deepest prides. Pull out our mistakes and amplify them beyond all truth. What right do you have to take young children and twist their minds?”
The wind sang through the cracks in the walls. I tried to see if Jack or Meg was there, but only shadows remained.
“I know where you come from, don’t forget that! Out of the ground! Out of the bones of old wicked Indians! Shamans and pagan dances and worshiping dirt and filth! I heard about you from the old squaws on the reservation. Frost and Spring, they called you, signs of the turning year. Well, now you got a different name! Death and demons, I call you, hear me?”
She seemed to jump at a sound, but I couldn’t hear it. “Don’t you argue with me!” she shrieked. She took her glasses off and held out both hands. “Think I’m a weak old woman, do you? You don’t know how deep I run in these communities! I’m the one who had them books taken off the shelves. Remember me? Oh, you hated it—not being able to fill young minds with your pestilence. Took them off high school shelves and out of lists—burned them for junk! Remember? That was me. I’m not dead yet! Boy, where are you?”
“Enchant her,” I whispered to the air. “Magic her. Make her go away. Let me live here with you.”
“Is that you, boy? Come with your aunt, now. Come with, come away!”
“Go with her,” the wind told me. “Send your children this way, years from now. But go with her.”
I felt a kind of tingly warmth and knew it was time to get home. I snuck out the back way and came around to the front of the house. There was no car. She’d followed me on foot all the way from the farm. I wanted to leave her there in the old house, shouting at the dead rafters, but instead I called her name and waited.
She came out crying. She knew.
“You poor sinning boy,” she said, pulling me to her lilac bosom.
Webster
“Webster” was written in 1971, sold in 1972, and published in 1974 in Alternities, a Dell original paperback anthology edited by David Gerrold. It was my second published story. (The first, “Destroyers,” appeared in the Summer 1967 issue of Famous Science Fiction and is a little too young to be reprinted here.)
My mood in 1971 and 1972 was pretty down. My nineteenth and twentieth years on this planet were filled with unrealized hopes—as a writer, and as a young man. I was growing up rapidly—too rapidly—and my smarts weren’t keeping up with the challenges. I was goofing some things badly; in particular, it seemed to me at the time, my relationships with the opposite sex. Nothing unusual here—typical youthful angst.
But what emerged when I wrote “Webster” was the portrait, not of a disappointed young man, but of a dreaming middle-aged woman too inner-directed to be anything but cruel, too blind to cause anything but pain—and fated as Rod Serling might have fated her, had he briefly teamed up with Jorge Luis Borges
.
Someone I once knew, seen in a funhouse mirror. Though why they call it a funhouse, I’ll never understand.
Dry.
It lingered in the air, a dead and sterile word made for whispers. Vultures fanned her hair with feather-duster wings. Up the dictionary’s page ran her lean finger, wrapped in skin like pink parchment, and she found Andrews, Roy Chapman, digging in the middle of the Gobi, lifting fossil dinosaur eggs cracked and unhatched from their graves.
She folded the large, heavy book on her finger. The compressed pages gripped it with a firm, familiar pressure.
With her other hand, Miss Abigail Coates explored her face, vacant of any emotion she was willing to reveal. She did not enjoy her life. Her thin body gave no pleasure, provoked no surprise, spurred no uncontrollable passion. She took no joy in the bored pain of people in the streets. She felt imprisoned by the sun that shed a revealing, bleaching light on city walls and pavement, its dust-filled shafts stealing into her small apartment.
Miss Coates was fifty and, my God the needle in her throat when she thought of it, she had never borne a child; not once had she shared her bed with a man.
There had been, long ago, a lonely, lifeless love with a boy five years younger than she. She had hoped he would blunt the needle pain in her throat; he had begged to be given the chance. But she had spurned him. I shall use my love as bait and let men pay the toll. That had been her excuse, at any rate, until the first flush of her youth had faded. Even after that, even before she had felt dry, she had never found the right man.
“Pitiful,” she said with a sigh, and drew herself up from the overstuffed chair in her small apartment, standing straight and lean at five feet seven inches. I weep inside, then read the dear Bible and the even more dear dictionary. They tell me weeping is a sin. Despair is the meanest of my sins—my few sins.
She looked around the dry, comfortable room and shielded her eyes from the gloom of the place where she slept, as if blinded by shadow. The place wasn’t a bedroom because in a bedroom you slept with a man or men and she had none. Her eyes moved up the door frame, nicked in one corner where clumsy movers had knocked her bed against the wood, twenty years ago; down to the worn carpet that rubbed the bottoms of her feet like raw canvas. To the chair behind her, stuffing poking from its the middle. To the wallpaper, chosen by someone else, stained with water along the cornice from an old rain. And finally she looked down at her feet, toes frozen in loose, frayed nylons, toenails thick and well-manicured; all parts of her body looked after but the core, the soul.
She went into the place where she slept and lay down. The sheets caressed her, as they were obliged to do, wrinkles and folds in blankets rubbing her thighs, her breasts. The pillow accepted her peppery hair, and in the dark, she ordered herself to sleep.
The morning was better. There was a whole day ahead. Something might happen.
Afternoon passed like a dull ache. In the twilight she fixed her pale dinner of potatoes and veal.
In the dark, she sat in her chair with the two books at her feet and listened to the old building crack and groan as it settled in for the night. She stared at the printed flowers on the wallpaper that someone must have once thought pretty.
The morning was fine. The afternoon was hot and sticky and she took a walk, wearing sunglasses. She watched all the young people on this fine Saturday afternoon. They hold hands and walk in parks. There, on that bench; she’ll be in trouble if she keeps that up.
She went back to the patient apartment that always waited, never judging, ever faithful and unperturbed.
The evening passed slowly. She became lazy with heat. By midnight a cool breeze fluttered the sun-browned curtains in the window and blew them in like the dingy wings of street birds.
Miss Coates opened her dictionary, looking for comfort, and found words she wanted, but words she didn’t need. They jumped from the pages and would not leave her alone. She didn’t think them obscene; she was not a prude. She loved the sounds of all words, and these words were marvelous, too, when properly entrained with other words. They could be part of rich stories, rich lives. The sound of them made her tremble and ache.
The evening ended. Again, she could not cry. Sadness was a moist, dark thing, the color of mud.
She had spent her evenings like this, with few variations, for the past five years.
The yellow morning sunlight crept across the ironing board and over her fanciest dress, burgundy in shadows, orange in the glare. “I need a lover,” she told herself firmly. But one found lovers in offices and she didn’t work; in trains going to distant countries, and she never left town. “I need common sense, and self-control. That part of my life is over. I need to stop thinking like a teenager.” But the truth was, she had no deficiency of self-control. It was her greatest strength.
It had kept her away from danger so many times.
Her name, Coates, was not in the dictionary. There was coati, coatimundi, coat of arms, coat of mail, and then coauthor, Miss Coauthor, partner and lover to a handsome writer. They would collaborate, corroborate, celebrate.
Celibate.
She shut the book.
She drew the curtains on the window and slowly tugged the zipper down the back of her dress with the practiced flourish of a crochet hook. Her fingers rubbed the small of her back, nails scraping. She held her chin high, eyes closed to slits.
A lone suitor came through the dark beyond the window to stroke her skin—a stray breeze, neither hot nor cool. Sweat lodged in the cleft between her breasts. She was proud of her breasts; they were small but still did not sag when she removed her bra. She squatted and marched her hands behind her to sit and then lie down on the floor. Spreading her arms against the rough carpet, Miss Coates pressed her chin into her clavicle and peered at her breasts, boyish against the prominent ribs. Untouched. Unspoiled goods.
She cupped them in both hands. She became a thin crucifixion with legs straight and toes together. Her head lay near the window. She looked up to see the curtains fluttering silently like her lips. Mouth open. Tongue rubbing the backs of her teeth. She smoothed her hands to her stomach and let them rest there, curled on the flat warmth.
My stomach doesn’t drape. I am not so undesirable. No flab, few wrinkles. My thighs are not dimpled with gross flesh.
She rolled over and propped herself on one elbow to refer to the dictionary, then the Bible.
Abigail Coates mouthing a word: Lover.
The dictionary sat tightly noncommittal in buckram, the Bible silent in black leather.
She gently pushed the Bible aside. For all its ancient sex and betrayal and the begetting of desert progeny, it would do nothing for her. She pulled the dictionary closer. “Help me,” she said. “Book of all books, massive thing I can hardly lift, every thought lies in you, all human possibilities. Everything I feel, everything that can be felt, lies waiting to be described in combinations of the words you contain. You hold all possible lives, people and places I’ve never seen, things dead and things unborn. Haven of ghosts, home of tyrants, birthplace of saints.”
She knew she would have to be audacious. What she was about to do would be proof of her finally having cracked, like those dinosaur eggs in the Gobi; dead and sterile and cracked.
“Surely you can make a man. Small word, little effort. You can even tell me how to make a man from you.” She could almost imagine a man rising from the open book, spinning like a man-shaped bird cage filled with light.
The curtains puffed.
“Go,” she said. She crossed her legs in a lotus next to the thick book and waited for the dust of each word, the microscopic, homeopathic bits of ink, each charged with the shape of a letter, to sift between the fibers of the paper and combine. Dry magic. The words smelled sweet in the midnight breeze.
Dead bits of ink, charged with thought, arise.
Veni.
Her tongue swelled with the dryness of the ink. She unfolded and lay flat on her stomach to let the rough carpet mold her skin with crossword lines, upon which the right words could be written, solving her life’s puzzle.
Miss Coates flopped the dictionary around to face her, then threw its clumps of pages open to the middle. Her finger searched randomly on the page and found a word. She gasped. Man, it said, clear as could be next to her immaculate, colorless nail. Man! She moved her finger and sucked in her breath.
“There is a man in you!” she told the book and laughed. It was a joke, that’s all; she was not that far gone. Still grinning, she rubbed her finger against the inside of her cheek and pressed the dampness onto the word. “Here,” she said. “A few of my cells.” She was clever, she was scientific, she was brilliant! “Clone them.” Then she thought that possibility through and said, “But don’t make him look like me or think like me. Change him with your medical words, plastic surgery and eugenics and phenotype.”
The page darkened under the press of her finger. She swung the dictionary shut and returned to her lotus.
As my trunk rises from the flower of my legs and the seat of my womb, so, man, arise from the book of all books.
Would it thunder? Only silence. The dictionary trembled and the Bible looked dark and somber. The yellow bulb in the shaded lamp sang like a dying moth. The air grew heavy. Don’t falter, she told herself. Don’t lose faith, don’t drop the flower of your legs and the seat of your womb. A bit of blood? Or milk from unsucked breasts? Catalysts … Or, God forbid, something living, a fly between the pages, the heart of a bird, or—she shuddered, ill with excitement, with a kind of belief—the clear seed of a dead man.
The book almost lifted its cover. It breathed.
“That was it,” she whispered in awe. “The words know what to do.”
The dictionary sucked warmth from the air. Frost clung to its brown buckram. The cover flew back. The pages riffled, flew by, flapped spasmodically, and two of them stuck together, struggling, bulging … and then splitting.