Final Reckonings (16 page)

And they came through the window; it wasn’t closed after all because she opened it and she was crawling out high up there where she had never crawled before but it was easy without a body and soon she would have a new body they wanted the old one because they carried it but she didn’t care because she didn’t need it and now they would carry her
ulnagr Yuggoth Farnomi ilyaa
. . .

That was when Aunt May and Uncle Roscoe found her and pulled her down from the window. They said later she had screamed at the top of her voice, or else she would have gone over without anyone noticing.

After that Doctor Clegg took her away to the hospital where there were no high windows and they came in to see her all night long. The dreams stopped.

When at last she was well enough to go back home, she found that the window was gone, too.

Aunt May and Uncle Roscoe had boarded it up, because she was a somnambulist. She didn’t know what a somnambulist was, but guessed it had something to do with her being sick and the dreams not coming any more.

For the dreams stopped then. There was no way of making them come back, and she really didn’t want them any more. It was fun to play outside with Marvin Mason now, and she went back to school when the new semester began.

Now, without the window to look at, she just slept at night. Aunt May and Uncle Roscoe were glad, and Doctor Clegg said she was turning out to be a mighty fine little specimen.

Avis could remember it all now as though it were yesterday or today. Or tomorrow.

How she grew up. How Marvin Mason fell in love with her. How she went to college and they became engaged. How she felt the night Aunt May and Uncle Roscoe were killed in the crash at Leedsville. That was a bad time.

An even worse time was when Marvin had gone away. He was in service now, overseas. She had stayed on all alone in the house, for it was her house now.

Reba came in days to do the housework, and Doctor Clegg dropped around, even after she turned twenty-one and officially inherited her estate.

He didn’t seem to approve of her present mode of living. He asked her several times why she didn’t shut up the house and move into a small apartment downtown. He was concerned because she showed no desire to keep up the friendships she had made in college; Avis was curiously reminded of the solicitude he had exhibited during her childhood.

But Avis was no longer a child. She proved that by removing what had always seemed to her a symbol of adult domination; she had the high round window in her room unboarded once more.

It was a silly gesture. She knew it at the time, but somehow it held a curious significance for her. For one thing, it reestablished a linkage with her childhood, and more and more, childhood came to epitomize happiness for her.

With Marvin Mason gone, and Aunt May and Uncle Roscoe dead, there was little enough to fill the present. Avis would sit up in her bedroom and pore over the scrapbooks she had so assiduously pasted up as a girl. She had kept her dolls and the old fairy-tale books; she spent drowsy afternoons examining them.

It was almost possible to lose one’s time sense in such pastimes. Her surroundings were unchanged. Of course, Avis was larger now and the bed wasn’t quite as massive nor the window as high.

But both were there, waiting for the little girl that she became when, at nightfall, she curled up into a ball and snuggled under the sheets—snuggled and stared up at the high, round window that bordered the sky.

Avis wanted to dream again.

At first, she
couldn’t
.

After all, she was a grown woman, engaged to be married; she wasn’t a character out of PETER IBBETSON. And those dreams of her childhood had been silly.

But they were
nice
. Yes, even when she had been ill and nearly fallen out of the window that time, it had been pleasant to dream. Of course those voices and shapes were nothing but Freudian fantasies—everyone knew that.

Or did they?

Suppose it were all real? Suppose dreams are not just subconscious manifestations caused by indigestion and gas pressure?

What if dreams are really a product of electronic impulse—or planetary radiations—attuned to the wavelength of the sleeping mind? Thought is an electrical impulse. Life itself is an electrical impulse. Perhaps a dreamer is like a spiritualist medium; placed in a receptive state during sleep. Instead of ghosts, the creatures of another world or another dimension can come through, if the sleeper is granted the rare gift of acting as a
filter
. What if the dreams feed on the dreamer for substance, just as spirits attain ectoplasmic being by draining the medium of energy?

Avis thought and thought about it, and when she had evolved this theory, everything seemed to fit. Not that she would ever tell anyone about her attitude. Doctor Clegg would only laugh at her, or still worse, shake his head. Marvin Mason didn’t approve either. Nobody wanted her to dream. They still treated her like a little girl.

Very well, she would be a little girl; a little girl who could do as she pleased now. She would dream.

It was shortly after reaching this decision that the dreams began again; almost as though they had been waiting until she would fully accept them in terms of their own reality.

Yes, they came back, slowly, a bit at a time. Avis found that it helped to concentrate on the past during the day; to strive to remember her childhood. To this end she spent more and more time in her room, leaving Reba to tend to housework downstairs. As for fresh air, she always could look out of her window. It was high and small, but she would climb on a stool and gaze up at the sky through the round aperture; watching the clouds that veiled the blue beyond, and waiting for night to come.

Then she would sleep in the big bed and wait for the wind. The wind soothed and the darkness slithered, and soon she could hear the buzzing, blurring voices. At first only the voices came back, and they were faint and far away. Gradually, they increased in intensity and once more she was able to discriminate, to recognize individual intonations.

Timidly, hesitantly, the figures reemerged. Each night they grew stronger. Avis Long (little girl with big round eyes in big bed below round window) welcomed their presence.

She wasn’t alone any more. No need to see her friends, or talk to that silly old Doctor Clegg. No need to waste much time gossiping with Reba, or fussing over meals. No need to dress or venture out. There was the window by day and the dreams by night.

Then all at once she was curiously weak, and this illness came. But it was all false, somehow; this physical change.

Her mind was untouched. She knew that. No matter how often Doctor Clegg pursed his lips and hinted about calling in a “specialist,” she wasn’t afraid. Of course Avis knew he really wanted her to see a psychiatrist. The doddering fool was filled with glib patter about “retreat from reality” and “escape mechanisms.”

But he didn’t understand about the dreams. She wouldn’t tell him, either. He’d never know the richness, the fullness, the sense of completion that came from experiencing contact with other worlds.

Avis knew
that
now. The voices and shapes that came in the window were from other worlds. As a naive child she had invited them by her very unsophistication. Now, striving consciously to return to the childlike attitude, she again admitted them.

They were from other worlds; worlds of wonder and splendor. Now they could meet only on the plane of dreams, but someday, someday soon, she would bridge the gap.

They whispered about her body. Something about the trip, making the “change.” It couldn’t be explained in
their
words. But she trusted them, and after all, a physical change was of slight importance contrasted with the opportunity.

Soon she would be well again, strong again. Strong enough to say yes. And then they would come for her when the moon was right. Until then, she could strengthen the determination, and the dream.

Avis Long lay in the great bed and basked in the blackness; the blackness that poured palpably through the open window. The shapes filtered down, wriggling through the warps, feeding upon the night; growing, pulsing, encompassing all.

They reassured her about the body but she didn’t care and she told them she didn’t care because the body was unimportant and yes, she would gladly consider it an exchange if only she could go and she knew she belonged.

Not beyond the rim of the stars but between it and amongst substance dwells that which is blackness in blackness for Yuggoth is only a symbol, no that is wrong there are no symbols for all is reality and only perception is limited
ch’yar ul’nyar shaggornyth
. . .

It is hard for us to make you understand
but I do understand
you cannot fight it
I will not fight it
they will try to stop you
nothing shall stop me for I belong
yes you belong
will it be soon
yes it will be soon
very soon
yes very soon
. . .

Marvin Mason was unprepared for this sort of reception. Of course, Avis hadn’t written, and she wasn’t at the station to meet him—but the possibility of her being seriously ill had never occurred to him.

He had come out to the house at once, and it was a shock when Doctor Clegg met him at the door.

The old man’s face was grim, and the tenor of his opening remarks still grimmer.

They faced each other in the library downstairs; Mason self-consciously diffident in khaki, the older man a bit too professionally brusque.

“Just what is it, Doctor?” Mason asked.

“I don’t know. Slight, recurrent fever. Listlessness. I’ve checked everything. No TB, no trace of low-grade infection. Her trouble isn’t—organic.”

“You mean something’s wrong with her mind?”

Doctor Clegg slumped into an armchair and lowered his head.

“Mason, I could say many things to you; about the psychosomatic theory of medicine, about the benefits of psychiatry, about—but never mind. It would be sheer hypocrisy.

“I’ve talked to Avis; rather, I’ve tried to talk to her. She won’t say much, but what she does say disturbs me. Her actions disturb me even more.

“You can guess what I’m driving at, I think, when I tell you that she is leading the life of an eight-year-old girl. The life she
did
lead at that age.”

Mason scowled. “Don’t tell me she sits in her room again and looks out of that window?”

Dr. Clegg nodded.

“But I thought it was boarded up long ago, because she’s a somnambulist and—”

“She had it unboarded, several months ago. And she is not, never was, a somnambulist.”

“What do you mean?”

“Avis Long never walked in her sleep. I remember the night she was found on that window’s edge; not ledge, for there is no ledge. She was perched on the edge of the open window, already halfway out; a little tyke hanging through a high window.

“But there was no chair beneath her, no ladder. No way for her to climb up. She was simply
there
.”

Dr. Clegg looked away before continuing.

“Don’t ask me what it means. I can’t explain, and I wouldn’t want to. I’d have to talk about the things she talks about—the dreams, and the presences that come to her; the presences that want her to
go away
.

“Mason, it’s up to you. I can’t honestly move to have her committed on the basis of material evidence. Confinement means nothing to
them
; you can’t build a wall to keep out dreams.

“But you can love her. You can save her. You can make her well, make her take an interest in reality. Oh, I know it sounds mawkish and stupid, just as the other sounds wild and fantastic.

“Yet, it’s true. It’s happening right now, to her. She’s asleep up in her room at this very moment. She’s hearing the voices—I know that much. Let her hear your voice.”

Mason walked out of the room and started up the stairs.

“But what do you mean, you can’t marry me?”

Mason stared at the huddled figure in the swirl of bedclothes. He tried to avoid the direct stare of Avis Long’s curiously childlike eyes; just as he avoided gazing up at the black, ominous aperture of the round window.

“I can’t, that’s all,” Avis answered. Even her voice seemed to hold a childlike quality. The high, piercing tones might well have emanated from the throat of a little girl; a tired little girl, half-asleep and a bit petulant about being abruptly awakened.

“But our plans—your letters—

“I’m sorry, dear. I can’t talk about it. You know I haven’t been well. Doctor Clegg is downstairs, he must have told you.”

“But you’re getting better,” Mason pleaded. “You’ll be up and around again in a few days.”

Avis shook her head. A smile—the secret smile of a naughty child—clung to the corners of her mouth.

“You can’t understand, Marvin. You never
could
understand. That’s because you belong here.” A gesture indicated the room. “I belong somewhere else.” Her finger stabbed, unconsciously, towards the window.

Marvin looked at the window now. He couldn’t help it. The round black hole that led to nothingness. Or—something. The sky outside was dark, moonless. A cold wind curled about the bed.

“Let me close the window for you, dear,” he said, striving to keep his voice even and gentle.

“No.”

“But you’re ill—you’ll catch cold.”

“That isn’t why you want to close it.” Even in accusation, the voice was curiously piping. Avis sat bolt upright and confronted him.

“You’re jealous, Marvin. Jealous of me. Jealous of
them
. You would never let me dream. You would never let me go. And I want to go. They’re coming for me.

“I know why Doctor Clegg sent you up here. He wants you to persuade me to go away. He’d like to shut me up, just as he wants to shut the window. He wants to keep me here because he’s afraid. You’re all afraid of what lies—out there.

“Well, it’s no use. You can’t stop me. You can’t stop
them!
”

“Take it easy, darling—”